Crossing Quetico
The word "Quetico" comes from an old Ojibwa word roughly meaning benevolent spirit, whose presence is felt strongly in places of great beauty. Everywhere I look I am reminded of that beauty, for it is all around. Equally important, I am traveling with benevolent companions, far more versed in the ways of the area than I.
Joining me in swift solo cruising canoes are Cliff Jacobson and Jim Mandle. Cliff is one of North America's most respected outdoor writers and wilderness canoe guides. Since his first trip to the adjacent Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness 35 years ago, he reckons, he has camped some 600 nights in this pristine north country riddled with lakes connected by portage paths. Jim, an inventor and entrepreneur from New Jersey, also knows his way around canoes better than most. From an early age, he spent his summers at a family lakeshore cabin in New York's Adirondack Park. There he learned how to canoe, a passion that ultimately led to an interest in competitive freestyle. He can make his shiny canoe dance with a single stroke of his bent-shaft paddle. Paddling tandem in a battle-scarred 18-foot cruiser are Herb Hill and Richard Nelson, both from Mountain Iron, a small mining town in northeast Minnesota as tough and rough as they are. They are both veterans of many trips in the area, but it is burly, curmudgeonly Herb, a former B-52 pilot, who has plotted our route, packed our food, and volunteered to haul the heaviest packs on the portages. Out of respect, and just to piss the big Finn off, we call him Boss. "Hell, at least it's better than 'Hoss,' " he says with a shrug.
Thanks to the rare spell of calm, dry weather, the maze-like and wandering lakes pass easily, almost effortlessly, beneath our hulls. Their names roll off our tongues - Batchewaung, Pickerel, and Sturgeon. Large and convoluted lakes with scores of coves, back bays, tiny creeks, and bogs. By contrast, after skirting Chatterton Falls, a tumbling cascade of frothing white water, followed closely by smaller but no less exquisite Split Rock Falls and Snake Falls, we hump across Have a Smoke Portage, and there waiting for us is sparkling Heronshaw Lake, funnel-shaped Cairn Lake, and long and narrow Kahshahpiwi Lake, with its sudden steep precipices, massive boulders, and rocky ledges. As much waterscape as forested landscape, the unfolding scenery has changed little since the aboriginal people occupied the area about 9,000 years ago. If only one had the time - a few weeks, a whole summer, an entire year - to linger and explore all these crooked waters.
It's still early when we make camp beneath tall, graceful spruces and glimmering white birches halfway down Kahshahpiwi. Off in the distance, somewhere in this infinity of rocky points, cliffs, dark-green forested hills, and long vistas of blue water, a pair of loons cuts loose with an eerie yodeling that echoes across the silence, a marvelously evocative wilderness sound that brings shivers to the spine. "You know, I never get tired of that call," says Richard, a man of few words. I nod my head silently in agreement.
As is our ritual, we gather at the water's edge in the waning light to review our progress. Herb, our chief navigator, lays out the maps on a granite outcrop showing long, parallel grooves that were scoured by glaciers that passed this way some 15,000 years ago, forming the park's landscape that we see today. After some serious chin-scratching, the Boss issues his status report. "We've come 48 miles in six days," he says tersely. Then, after a pause to stir the simmering fish chowder he's preparing, compliments of a couple of lovely lake trout that Richard reeled in not long after making camp, he adds, "We're not moving fast, but with this big fat ass of mine, I'm just glad I'm moving at all."
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