The Great Outdoors

Last week Nathan, Jessica, John, and I went to the Boundary Waters, or, as I kept dubbing it, "The Great Outdoors," or, occasionally, "Canada."  We started by arriving at John and Jessica's apartment at noon on Thursday and proceeded to pack way too many worldly possessions into 4 packs.  That is a bit unfair to say, as it makes us sound like city kids who can't handle going up north without their iPod, so to justify this statement I will say that it wasn't so much that we packed too much stuff as the stuff we packed was too big.  If you spend thousands of dollars for fancy compact tents and compact sleeping bags you can afford to have more than two shirts and three pairs of underwear in your pack, but, since we have zero dollars in the bank, our bulky tent and bags would have to do.  This resulted in one tent, two sleeping bags, and one target bag full of clothes per couple per pack.

Packing took about an hour and a half.

The original plan was to take John and Jessica's car up north with one canoe tied to the roof of it and to rent the other canoe when we reached the Great Outdoors.  Upon recognizing that John and Jessica's car is tiny and the trunk wasn't large enough to comfortably hold the weight of four adults, 4 packs and a canoe, I made the reluctantly wise decision of taking our car instead.  This decision, while completely awesome, as my car has a huge trunk and the weight capacity twice that of the Merchant's car, filled me we with unyielding Walker Fear which translates to, "Anything that is out of the ordinary or hasn't been tried before is almost certain to lead to expensive mistakes or death."

John and Nathan spent the next hour or so tying feverishly difficult boyscout knots to Venga II (my car).  This led to Jessica feeling this way:

And me feeling a mixture of this way:

and this way:

But eventually Venga II was secured in a way that, in the event of an upside-down water landing, the canoe would float the car to safety.

One downfall of the 300 knots holding the canoe to the car was the limitation of access to our supplies in the trunk, which led to this priceless picture of John attempting to get red tape:

After spending Thursday night camping in a place with showers outside of the Boundary Waters, we woke up on Friday and made our way to our entry point, labeled "Moose Lake."  The negative connotations with that name were soon forgotten by the excitement of seeing an American and Canadian flag simultaneously flapping in the northern air.

After renting another canoe and loading both vessels up with gear, we paddled out toward our first portage.  Our disposition was nothing short of embodying the "happy camper" cliche.

This was quickly stiffed as the four of us attempted to carry an estimated 400 lbs of canoe and luggage through a mosquito-infested, boy scout-blocking portage of about one mile in length.

There are no pictures of this, but it did lead me to wonder about boy scouts and the cliched necessity of all of them eventually going to the boundary waters at one point in their career, and also why they wear pants and heavy boots.  I wore shorts and water sandals the entire trip and the only advantage I could see to their wardrobe choice was the reduced likelihood of acquiring the West Nile Virus.

Our hatred of the wilderness after the first portage was quickly stifled by an amazing pond with thousands of lilies, flowers, turtles, and beaver lodges.  Nathan acquired one of the flowers for me with his canoe paddle, but I was so overcome with a mixture of fear of being judged by other campers for breaking The Rules and the idea that  if everyone took a flower, there wouldn't be any left, that I soon returned it to the water to die a natural death.


This lily pond lead us to our next portage, where we wisely made two trips this time: one for the canoes and one for the packs.  This reduced our hatred for the principle of portages, but only slightly.

After the second portage, Nathan discovered what he called a "more comfortable way to canoe" and John discovered a great place to make camp.

We camped on a rocky peninsula that overlooked the expansive Western sky.

The next couple days included sleeping in a tent I haven't slept in since I was 12, being attacked by a superior breed of mosquitos every night, tying our food packs in trees so the hypothetical bears wouldn't kill us, conquering my irrational fear of attacking toilet-pit snakes, John fighting an extraordinarily brave chipmunk, Nathan spearing a crayfish and then releasing the carcass in the lake when no one showed enthusiasm in eating it, sneaking into Canada, discovering Canada and Minnesota are equally full of water and wilderness, watching the dragonflies dance around our heads at dusk, learning the constellations from John, seeing the occasional shooting star, listening to the loons call to each other at midnight, reconquering the portages, and driving back to civilization in a car that smelled vaguely of banana bread and outdoors.

Besides contemplating the wardrobe choices of boyscouts, the trip made me consider our connectedness with nature and the vast extremes we go to feel one with it.  Why do we sleep on tree roots and get leeches stuck to our toes in the boundary waters?  Why has our society worked so hard to separate our daily lives from ruggedness, yet we seek it out in our spare time?  What is this whisper in the woods that calls out to us?