Travel Journals: Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Trip, August '13

      This year's wilderness venture began on the Little Indian Sioux River and took us through Upper and Lower Pauness Lakes to Shell Lake, Little Shell Lake, Heritage and Lynx Lakes. My friend, Jay Bartner, from Maine, joined me.

The text below is what I wrote in my journal on the trip. I've left it pretty much unedited. I hope it brings the reader a little closer to the time and the place. Enjoy the scenery.

    New Kevlar strips on the canoe work well. I put them on with John’s help to cover exposed wood at the bow where fiberglass has worn off. The added strength for bumping into rough shoreline and rocks is a bonus.
    Wildlife sightings so far: turtles, blue heron, bald eagle over our campsite, muskrat/mink, loons up close.
    It is nice to be with Jay again. A friendship that has endured thirty-eight years, most of them with a separation of fifteen hundred miles.

A Good Friend and a Good Camping Partner

      Sunday, August 25, 2013    The Trip of Malfunction and Misfortune
    On our first day, the water purifier malfunctioned. It is useless. Our alternatives: abort the trip or drink unpurified water from the lake. Obviously we’re doing the latter. Much easier. Giardia? Doubt it. Time will tell.
    On the same day the camp saw I’ve used without incident for years refuses to unfold. We forage for enough wood that can be stomped to pieces to cook our steaks and have two campfires thus far. (I managed to fix the saw later, but it ended up too hot for us to want any more campfires.
    Day 3: After I inexplicably miss on a half dozen easy tosses of the food pack rope over a branch, Jay takes over. On his first toss, he gets the rope over the branch. It is too close to the tree trunk, so he flicks the rope to move its position on the branch and in a one-in-a-million event flips the stone up and around to tie a knot twenty feet above the ground. Hopeless. As I write this, he is still trying to untie it. It’s a good thing I brought two ropes. I told Jay to try as long as he chooses and let me know when he’s ready to move on. He is a dogged person, a “problem solver,” he says. It might be a while.
    A thunderstorm last night, not too bad. We moved to the south-facing island site we had our eye on. We asked the family there yesterday when the were leaving and they said today. So we were up early and ready.
    Yesterday we had a good long day trip through Little Shell and Lynx Lakes. We had lunch on Lynx Lake at the two-hundred-eighty rod portage to Ruby Lake, then hiked the portage. We paddled into strong but manageable winds back to our campsite. A lovely excursion. We had swim time and hammock time at the site. A great day.
    We’ll stay at this site for our last three nights. I heated some water and shaved in camp for the first time in at least twenty years, if not the first time ever.
    Tuesday, August 27, 2013    It is early morning, Day Four – the best moments of a good trip. We are both up before the sun. Hot pink wisps of clouds. The lake is placid, not a ripple (and will remain thus for the rest of our stay). Yoga and stretching and meditation as the sun comes closer to its arrival. Few words are spoken. Good morning. Jay is as filled with awe as I am. I move from my stretching spot where I open my body as I face the optimistic forest to the east to a rock where I can plant my leg for stretches. I gasp as I look to the forest to the east. In that precise spot, at that precise moment, a splinter of fierce orange shows in the dark fabric of a thousand trees. I pause. Seconds pass. The vision passes, also.
    I move on to fishing, using the Flatfish that reminds me of my father. It is a replica of one he gave me to use when we fished on Winnisquam Lake in New Hampshire almost sixty years ago. Jay dreams of my catching a meal for us. It’s not important to me, but I would do it. I’m not an angler at heart. I satisfy my need to cast a line into the cloud-studded water, to feel the firm action of the Flatfish squirming under the surface as I reel it in, taunting disinterested fish.
    Time for coffee. Coffee. Are there two syllables that can connote more sensual enjoyment? Probably. But still… Jay is content in his hammock, his favorite spot. Here I am, facing the still lake, sun warming my back, coffee almost gone, writing these words. Pancakes are next.
    On Sunday we never left the camp. We swam, napped, read, talked, swatted flies and then repeated the cycle. A good day. Hot. We fell asleep on top of our sleeping bags.
    Yesterday we took another good day trip, north into Heritage Lake. We trekked the sixty-rod portage and found ourselves what felt like a hundred years and a hundred miles from the present.

Portage from Shell Lake to Heritage Lake

    We paddled the large, long, narrow lake north to Heritage Creek where we had to get out and walk the canoe through a maze of rocks. Then we paddled some more to a spot where the creek shrunk to an impassable trickle. Dragging the canoe up onto the shoreline, we hiked the two-hundred and twenty rod portage to Loon Lake. It is not a portage I’d like to take with a canoe or a heavy pack.
    At the end of the hike, we were in for a shock. We emerged from the forest to find a South Seas landscape, a sandy beach stretching a hundred yards to the north and the south. Two magnificent white pines at the edge of the beach framed what would be our picnic lunch spot. I shed the food pack and my clothes.   Into the water! We air dried, ate lunch and enjoyed our newest little piece of heaven. Barely discernible on the distant western horizon, a canoe drifted across our view.
    Wildlife: At the beach, a huge black bird, as big as an eagle, bigger than a crow, flew overhead. I don’t know what it was.
    Back at our camp, it the hottest day I’ve experienced since perhaps the September trip with John in 1998.
    End of the day, Tuesday. Another lovely day. The heat let up a bit. We hiked the Sioux Hustler Trail in the morning. Then we lulled about camp all afternoon. Swim. Read. Nap. Repeat. Tonight I will stay up late to stargaze. It will be a solo effort, unfortunately. Jay conks out early. There aren’t many good stargazing partners on these trips. John, Bruce, Dave Craft were good for the late night venture.
    Jay borrowed from my bookshelf “On Writing” by Steven King and “The Widening Gyre” by Robert B. Parker and enjoyed them both quite a bit.
    Tomorrow we’ll head for home. We’ll detour to see Devil’s Cascade. We’re both looking forward to lunch at the Boathouse.
    P.S. I hadn’t stargazed the entire trip until that last night, and I’m so glad I did. I would have missed the magic of the black silhouette of the shoreline, the absolute silence, broken occasionally by the lonely call of the loon.
    “The Impossible Twenty-Foot High Knot” After an hour of trying to retrieve the knotted rope as I wrote and read, Jay succeeded! He felled a twenty-foot sapling and stripped it of its branches to use as a pole. It was not long enough, so he found another six feet of improvised pole and duct taped it to the tree. Then he fiddled and fiddled and fiddles some more. My reading was interrupted by the rock, still tied to the rope, landing at my side where Jay tossed it to announce his success. All I could do was to laugh.
    And the other great story from this trip: “The Improbable Naked Lady (Condensed)” On Tuesday afternoon went to the shoreline to swim. I slipped out of my shorts to skinnydip and then glanced over my shoulder to see a canoe headed directly at me, not thirty yards away. I climbed quickly into my shorts and walked back up to the camp as they paddled by, a man in the stern and a lovely woman in a red bikini in the bow. Usually, people passing so closely will exchange greetings. They kept their eyes straight ahead, a certain sign that they had gotten an eyeful and didn’t want to embarrass me. For my part, I wasn’t going to say anything.
    A few minutes later they returned, obviously looking for a vacant site. I recovered enough to engage them in conversation and told them that we would be leaving this wonderful site in the morning if they wanted to claim it. They thanked me and told me they would be at the site near the portage that we had used the first two nights.
    The next morning, Jay and I broke camp and were on the lake early, not another canoe in sight anywhere. It was another lovely, calm morning. As we neared their campsite, we intended to paddle close to tell them that the site was open. We heard the man’s voice from quite a way out on the lake. I complained to Jay about people who didn’t modulate their voices in the wilderness, sound traveling the way it does over water. Then we heard the woman’s voice, also raised loudly. Then it dawned on us that the couple was having a rip roaring argument. They were really going at it. I had never heard anything like it in public, so to speak.
    We decided not to approach the campsite, and we kept our eyes averted as we paddled by to give them their privacy, much the same way they had spared me my own embarrassment the previous day.
    As our canoe nudged the shoreline at the portage, I was startled by a cheerful voice over my shoulder. “Good morning,” piped a vigorous female voice. A canoe had come out of nowhere to overtake us. Strong paddlers! (Not our fighting couple.) When they stepped out of their canoe, we saw two well-muscled, tall people.
    Getting over my surprise, I returned the greeting and said, “How are you?” She said, “Well, better than those two.” We all chuckled over the scene we had witnessed.
    Then the woman said, “The least she could have done was put some clothes on.” I stared at her blankly; and she added, “She didn’t have a stitch of clothes on! You didn’t see?”
    I looked at Jay and smacked my head. No, we hadn’t seen. So much for allowing the fighting couple their privacy. I filed the incident in my brain under the bulging category of “Opportunities Missed.” On this morning there would be no “tit for tat.”
    And the final malfunction: We arrived back at the entry point, loaded our gear into the Prius and hoisted the canoe onto the roof. We wrapped it with the two indestructible nylon straps. Jay tugged on one to secure the canoe for the seventy-miles per hour winds it would endure on the return trip, and the nylon snapped! (Okay, it was partially severed at the point that it broke, but it had endured for over two decades.)