It was quiet up there, on the hill in the middle of the night. As I sat there, face turned up to the pouring rain I realized there were no bugs. Here I was, in the vast north woods in Minnesota, during the hottest part of the year. And there were no bugs. The rain had chased away the mosquitoes. The only light was the soft glow the moon made through the rain-heavy clouds. The only sound was the rain in the leaves. Up there on that hill in the middle of the night. In the rain.
I do love The Boundary Waters.
To be in the Boundary Waters is to be outdoors. The outdoors is unrelenting there, inescapable. You can only get there in a canoe. There are no roads, no trails. Only lakes and rivers and forest. You pack your bag, as light as you can, with food, sleeping bags, tent, hammock, tools, and clothes. No cotton, because cotton doesn’t dry quickly. I put my clothes in a two-gallon ziploc bag and sit on it, squeezing the air out of it as I seal it shut. Small and light and waterproof.
There are set entry points to get into the BWCA, and you need a permit. You watch the required Don’t Feed The Bears/Leave NO Trace Movie and you’re off. I love the feeling of pushing the canoe away from the dock. You have a plan, a sense of what direction, what lake, what site you’re aiming for. But as is usually true, the best things that have ever happened to me happened on the fringe of my plans. Right before or right after it should’ve all blown up in my face. You’re never sure where you’ll end up.
While everyone slept, their breathing muffled by the thin walls of their tents, I wore a three-pointed path up that hill, to the shore of the lake, to our tent. The rain fell hard, and I was glad for it. It covered the sound I made. It kept the bugs away. It made me clean. Over and over again. Up the hill, down to the lake, back to our tent.
From the first lake, you always make your way to another lake, portaging your canoe and gear from one to the other. Kevlar canoes don’t weigh much, but they are unwieldy and hard to steer when being carried over your head. Some portages are flat and dry, some aren’t. The farther in you go, the more likely it is you’ll see fewer people and more wildlife. It’s an equation: What do I want to see, and how hard do I want to work for it?
Birds seem loud in the BWCA. They’re not. Everything else is just quiet. Unless there are other humans on the lake. You can hear speaking voices 400 yards away in the BWCA. In the BWCA you can recognize one otter’s voice among many. You can hear the anxiety in a loon’s cry when the eagles get too close. You can hear rain on the lake from 100 yards.
Turning my face from the rain I looked at my feet. I was wearing my ragged old hiking shoes. I like them because they’re closed, but have plenty of small holes to drain water. They dry quickly. I wondered about the rest of my clothes, draped over the log down by the water. I chuckled, wondering why I did that. It was pouring rain and I laid all my clothes out on that log. To dry? How funny. But not nearly as funny as the fact that those shoes were the only thing I was wearing. The only thing.
The BWCA is, for now, unspoiled. It’s someplace that exists without us. Yeah, we go up there to escape the trappings of humanity, but mostly the BWCA doesn’t give a shit. There are no power lines, no cell towers. The only thing you’ll see up there that isn’t powered by hands or feet are the occasional airplane or satellite. When you go looking for firewood you either take your canoe, or blaze a trail through the undergrowth. It makes your world small, simple, immediate.
It started earlier that day. The cramps were intense, and I was visibly bloated. Later, when everyone had gone to bed, and the rain had begun falling, the cramps became something else. I leapt from my sleeping bag and from the tent. I headed for the pit toilet about 100 yards away. I didn’t make it, so Change of Clothes #1. When I was done in the woods I made my first trip to the lakeshore to rinse off my clothes. I left them on that log and made my way back to the tent. I put on clean clothes (no longer dry having been put on in the rain), and laid back down. A few minutes later, it happened again. This time, I tried to make it to that fallen tree halfway to The Bucket. I didn’t make it, Change of Clothes #2. Second trip to the lakeshore. Second clean-but-wet change of clothes. At this pace, I was going to run out of clothes.
On clear nights in the BWCA, the stars are remarkable. They reflect off the lake, which has grown so still the reflection is a perfect, inverted sky. The sites I’ve loved best have large granite shelves sloping gently down to the water. A great place from which to read and talk and swim during the day, a perfect place to talk and laugh, drink and contemplate from at night.
I ran out of clothes. So there I was, naked but for my Merrell’s. In the middle of the night, during a downpour, sitting on a bucket in the middle of the forest. With a breathtaking, earth-shattering case of diarrhea. It was awful, terrible, spectacular. All of my clothes but for one remaining pair of underwear, one shirt, and a pair of shorts were laid out on a log being rained upon. I’d realized that I couldn’t go through all my clothes that night, because my family would find eating breakfast with a Nude Crap-Fountain In Hiking Shoes off-putting. It was a long night. I hadn’t been inside my tent in about five or six hours. I’d actually decided that when I was next able to stand up and abandon The Bucket I was going to grab my hammock and string it up right here, next to Troy’s New Bucket (By that time I figured I’d earned the bucket’s naming rights).
The BWCA is a beautiful place, of course it is. But that’s not my favorite part. The water is cold and clean and clear. But that’s not my favorite part. I’ve seen otters and eagles, loons and beaver and snapping turtles. I love all of it, but that’s not my favorite part. My favorite part is that the BWCA makes you work for it. You have to want to be there bad enough to get there. It doesn’t happen by accident. You didn’t see a cheap ticket and think “what the hell?”. It wasn’t the weekday special at Travelocity. It means the people that go there, mostly, treat it for what it is: a fragile and priceless treasure. It means everyone knows what the toll is, has the change, and wants to pay.
It means that an entire night of pooping my pants and sitting naked on a bucket in the rain was still a great weekend.
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