Paddling the Boundary Waters

The trucks back down the gravel toward the landing, and the tailgates drop onto the dirt. The canoes come off the racks first — Kevlar in most racks, a few old aluminum ones, one wood-canvas with a faded hull. Paddles get sorted, packs get divided, lines get stowed. Then the boats slide into the water and the trip settles into its own weight.

The first hour is the loudest hour of the trip. Hulls scrape gravel, yokes get adjusted, voices carry farther across water than anyone expects. Then the boats find their load lines, the paddles take up a rhythm, and the sound falls away to what was already there: the hiss of a blade, the drip off the shaft, the wind in the pines along the shore.

The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a country that only opens from the inside. Roads stop at its edge. It sits in the northern reach of Minnesota's Superior National Forest, against the line of Ontario, and it is held together by water — a connected system of lakes and rivers and the footpaths between them. The canoe is not one way to see it. The canoe is the only way in.

On a map the place looks less like a map than like a diagram of a watershed dream: no two lakes the same size, no two portages the same length, no straight lines anywhere. The lake names run through French and Ojibwe and English, in the order the water route was used — Moose, Basswood, Lac La Croix — and the routes between them are centuries old.

The Road Already There

The rock under the Boundary Waters is old, some of the oldest on the continent, and the ice sheets that crossed it left it in the shape of a scratched plate: timber on the ridges, water in the troughs, no mercy for straight lines. The cliffs that face the open water are gray and pink granite, scraped smooth in places and fallen in at others. The islands sit in the water like broken pieces of a bigger country.

Water moves through this rock in a pattern a paddler learns by feel. The lakes spill into each other by narrows and rivers, and where the water breaks, the portages begin. A portage is a path of worn rock and exposed root, its length decided long ago by the shoulders of the people who carried the canoes over it.

The Laurentian Divide runs through this country. A dipper of water taken from the right lake is already on its way north to Hudson Bay; from another lake, a mile away, the same water is headed southeast to Lake Superior and the Atlantic. The water itself is going somewhere. That is why the canoe routes work.

The route was a road before it had a name. Three centuries ago, canoes carried the fur trade along these same narrows, paddled by crews who took the water road west to Rainy Lake and beyond. When the international border was finally drawn, it followed that water road, because the water road was already there to follow. The boundary runs down the middle of lakes and across the portages, most of them nowhere in particular, and it gives the place its name. On one side is the Boundary Waters; on the other, Quetico Provincial Park. The border is an idea in a country that has never paid it any attention.

There were times when all of this went another way. The timber was worth money. The minerals were worth money. There were plans for roads into the heart of the lake country, and enough people decided the country was worth more the way it was. So the roads stop at the edge, and the water routes remain what they have always been.

The Work of Moving

A day in the Boundary Waters is a day of small decisions, and the decisions are the trip. The wind decides when the big crossing happens. The tent decides which campsite will do. The route is drawn in pencil, but the lake never reads the pencil.

The paddle stroke is the unit of measure. Out on open water the stroke is a long, quiet push: blade in, blade back, blade out with a sideways flick that leaves no wake. Crossing a big lake against a headwind is a steadier business, the bow taking the chop at an angle that does not look straight but lands at a point. The motor routes are few, scattered on certain of the big border lakes; the interior belongs to the paddle.

The portage is the other unit. It begins as a wobble. The canoe comes out of the water in one motion, always heavier than expected, and swings down onto the yoke. The paddler stands in the shallows with the hull overhead, paddles tucked under the thwarts, and starts up the path. Behind comes the rest of the party with the packs, each load balanced and settled, until the whole traveling outfit has crossed from one drainage to another. The portage trail is bare rock and tree roots, polished smooth by boots — generations of boots, the route worn into a shallow groove where feet have fallen the same way for a hundred years and more.

The sounds change on a portage. The soft knock of paddle on gunwale gives way to the scrape of hull on granite, the creak of a pack strap, the breathing. The path crosses a ridge, the air changes, and there through the trees is the next lake — a different color, a different wind, a different way of being the same country. The canoe goes back into the water, and the quiet returns.

Camp is made early enough to find the flat spot. The canoe turns over on two logs. The tent goes where the rock gives in to moss and the moss gives in to a pad of duff. Everything that smells like food goes well away from the tent, because the country has bears, and the bears have been dealing with careless people for a long time. Supper is cooked over the steel grate that marks most campsites, or on a stove when the fire season closes the lake country to open flame, and the evening comes on slowly. After supper the map comes out again under a headlamp, and tomorrow's route gets talked over in the dark — which narrows to try, where the wind will be coming from, which portage is the long one. Far off, a loon calls. In the night the lake makes the sound of a lake, a small constant lapping, and the canoe, tied to a tree by the shore, rides in it as if it has ridden there always.

The Long Quiet

The thing the place offers, the thing no photograph carries, is the sound of it — or rather the absence of sound. The absence of the road. The absence of the engine. What is left is a lake answering a lake.

The paddling season is short and deliberate. It starts when the ice lets go, when the lakes open from white to black to gray to the color of the sky, and morning mist sits on the water until the sun leans over the pines. It runs through the short green summer, past the weeks of June when the country answers every visitor with black flies and mosquitoes, and into September, when the birch and the aspen turn gold against the dark of the pines and the water turns cold and clear again. Then the ice returns, and the country that was a road for canoes becomes a road for skis, its routes traced in tracks across the frozen lakes.

Something in the place resists being summarized. Every route is too long to feel like a trip and too short to feel like a journey. People go in expecting a wilderness and find instead a country of modest scale — lakes small enough to see across, portages short enough to carry over with satisfaction, campsites sized for the tents they are meant to hold. It is a wilderness built to the dimensions of a canoe.

At the end, the same gravel landing waits. The canoes come out of the water and go back onto the racks. Packs are tossed into truck beds; somebody laughs. Then the trucks pull out, the gravel settles, and the landing goes back to being a gap in the trees at the place where the road gives up. The lake returns to its own sound. The route on the map has not changed — it will not change — and the water lies out there, smooth and gray and full of the next day's going.

Photos: daakrolb@hotmail.com (CC BY-SA 3.0)