David Heiller
When I
pulled into Dave’s yard at 3 a.m Wednesday morning, after a sleepless night of
newspaper layout and school board meetings, I expected to see a light in the
kitchen, and smell coffee on the stove. After all, this was the start of our
annual canoe trip.
But the house was dark, Dave and Jim still sleeping. I
gave a holler. For a moment I thought I was a day early. But then someone
groaned awake, and the wheels of our tradition started rolling again.
For the third straight year, the Gang of Four was headed
for the Kawishiwi River in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
We picked up Paul north of Cloquet, I think. It might have
been north of the Arctic Circle. I hadn’t slept a wink the night before. The
newspaper had been put to bed, but not me. The next thing I knew we were at a
breakfast table in Ely.
Then out to the end of Fernberg Road, and into Lake One
for our trip up the Kawishiwi to Lake Insula, 12 miles and six portages to the
northeast. We’ve gone this route three straight years because it is close, and
it is beautiful.
Arguments started as soon as our Misukanis paddles hit the
water. Paul, my canoe partner, will argue anything. He’ll spend half an hour
telling where you should make camp, but as soon as you agree, he’ll start
praising the beauty of another campsite.
Proof the Hard Way
“The water’s not as high as last year,” he began.
“No, it’s
a lot higher than last year,” said I.
We paddled east up Lake One and made the two portages into
Lake Two. It was at the second portage that Paul admitted I was right about the
water. But I almost killed us both to make him agree. We had carried our gear
alongside a wild rapids, and put our canoe in about 20 yards above it, in a
narrow channel. Paul sat in the bow, and I pushed off in the stern. Suddenly
the current caught my end, and swung us sideway: toward the rapids, which now
was 10 yards away.
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| A little fast water is good for the soul. |
Adrenalin kicks in at times like this, the kind that gives
a mother the strength to lift a car off her child when the jack breaks. We
drove our arms and backs into our paddles, and straightened the canoe nose
first upstream. For about five seconds as we strained, the river held us
motionless above the rapids, 480 pounds of men, playthings to the grip of the
Kawishiwi. Then the hand relaxed, and we inched ahead, and finally pulled out of the rough
water. Jim and Dave sat watching in the calm river upstream, trying not to
smile. They always managed to keep ahead of us.
“Damn, I think I cracked my paddle,” Paul said, peering at
the shaft.
“You hit
a rock?” I asked.
“No, just
from paddling so hard,” he said.
“You can’t
break a paddle like that,” I said. And so we continued, up the river to Lake Insula.
Dave Was Cookin’
For the next five days and four
nights, we ate and explored and ate and fished and ate and paddled and ate and
slept and ate. Dave cooked his pancakes every morning, just like he does six
days a week for his family of seven in Sturgeon Lake. Dave is the Lou Gehrig of
pancake making, and will someday wear out the cast-iron skillet that he uses
exclusively for the task.
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| Dave L. King of the Camp Cooks, mostly... |
Food is one gift of our Boundary
Waters trip. Dave takes great pride in his cooking skill, though he won’t admit
this. But that almost changed with Saturday night’s supper.
Dave was frying up two large
northerns and a small walleye. He passed out the walleye first, giving us each
small tidbits like a priest handing out holy wafers. We took them like the
staff of life too. But when I bit into mine, it had the consistency of Wrigley’s
gum… used.
“Say, Dave, this fish, ah, it isn’t
quite done,” I stammered.
Silence descended on our campfire. “What’s
that?” Dave said, as if he hadn’t heard right. “Come on. How’s yours, Paul?
Jim?”
Paul and Jim either didn’t want to
bite the hand that fed them, or else had thinner pieces of walleye. They chewed
on.
Then Dave
handed out the slabs of northern pike, which were an inch and a half thick.
Paul and Jim stopped chewing in mid-chomp. “It’s not done, Dave,” Paul said
gently. Jim agreed. We scraped our slabs of fish back into a kettle.
“Dissention in the ranks. I’m a
failure,” Dave muttered, as he threw
cedar sticks into the fireplace. The fire quickly blazed the way only
cedar can blaze. The northern cooked through, and then some. Dave must have
known it was my turn to do dishes. It took me half an hour to wash those frying
pans. But that fish was worth it.
A Moose
Gift
On Saturday afternoon, Jim and I set
out for the northwest part of Insula to explore a string of lakes connected by
a nameless creek. We didn’t get far before the creek confronted a pile of logs
and rocks. We pulled onto shore, and scouted ahead. There was no portage, just
a faint trail clogged with trees and muck. I wanted to plunge on, keep
following the stream, which seemed to widen after this obstacle. Jim didn’t agree
but he conceded the argument when I told him that I
just wanted to spy a moose or two. And this was moose country. The mud
we stood in was filled with their tracks and dung.
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| Jim and David, off on a little moose adventure. |
Just as I bent low to pick up the
canoe, Jim tapped me on the shoulder and pointed downstream. A large moose had
stepped from the alder into the
stream we had just paddled up.
We were upwind from the moose. Its large nose couldn’t pick up our
scent. So we watched as it waded the stream, browsing like a huge work horse,
up to its knees in water. Then we hopped into the canoe, and trailed behind as
it followed the lake’s edge. The wind kept blowing toward us from the moose; we
gained ground, and soon sat about 15 yards from the animal. It had no antlers,
and no young one at its
side, so we figured it was a male.
Suddenly
the moose’s head lifted into the air, and its ears pricked up like a rabbit’s.
It stared straight at us for
about 15 seconds. We froze. We weren’t afraid, although it could have charged
and caught us in five
seconds had it a mind to. But of course it didn’t. Instead, it lumbered away,
along the edge of the lake. We paddled quickly behind, watching it gallop like
Kent Hrbek on an inside-the-park home run. Finally dipped into a marshy area,
and was gone.
Jim and I stopped and looked at each
other, and laughed like a couple of school kids. We had been ready to break our
backs to spot a moose, when this one had almost read our mind and saved us the
trouble. I think it was another gift of the Boundary Waters.
Down and Out
We headed
back down the Kawishiwi on Sunday
morning, straight into a 25-mile-an-hour wind. Paul fought the gale with his
broken paddle and his huge back and some swearing that would have made
voyageurs proud. As usual, Dave and Jim pulled away from us, and at one point
were lost from sight.
When we stopped at the Lake Two
portage, I wondered out loud to Paul why we couldn’t keep up with them. We did
some calculating, and figured with our packs and body weight, our canoe weighed
200 pounds more than their Never mind that 150 pounds of that was in human flab.
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| You can take the paddlers out of the Boundary Waters, but they always carry a little of it with them. |
Dave snorted and grabbed our heaviest Duluth pack, and threw it
in his canoe. He couldn’t stand listening to a couple of over-weight guys
gripe. But low and behold, as we paddled through Lake One, we kept up with
them. I’m not sure if they were letting us or not But it was a nice way to end the trip.
But
really, there is no nice way to end five days on the Kawishiwi with good
friends. It’s like leaving a loved one. When we pulled our canoes out for the
last time at Lake One, Jim was all for going back. “The world ain’t going to
miss a social worker and a newspaper editor,” he said.
He’s probably right about that. At
least not as much as we will miss the Boundary Waters.
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