The most consequential canoe trip we took to the Boundary Waters had nothing to do with me.
It was my father and myself and my brother as usual, and nowadays we had two canoes. But this time my brother, who was 14 or so, wanted to go off on his own. I was 17 or so and – to my discredit – did not believe he could do it. Really, I did not believe that I could do it.
We put in as we always did and as I always have at the head of the Arrowhead Trail. My father’s family had places on North Road for many, many years, and my father was tied like an anchor to Pine and Devilfish and Black Duck lakes and the Royal and Swamp Rivers. So we always went up the Arrowhead.
There are two landings at the head of the Arrowhead Trail: one on McFarland Lake giving access to Pine, and the other on Little John giving access to John and the Royal and East and West Pike.
Nothing about my canoe trip into Pine with my father comes to mind. Except that very often I thought about my younger brother very alone and very young going down Little John and up John with the great bluff on the left, through the wild rice and over that long portage into East Pike, then being alone with the canoe and his supplies in the Wilderness.
Probably my father and I exchanged questions, like, “I wonder how he’s doing?” or “I wonder what he’s doing?”
At the end of our three or four days on Pine fishing for walleye and shining for crayfish and reading, there was a sense of anticipation and suspense, coming back West to East down the narrow stretch of McFarland towards the landing and the truck.
“I wonder what he’s been up to?” I asked.
And my father said, “Isn’t that the lesson of Walden?” What to do when your time is entirely your own? How to pass the time and what to think? How to face the solitude and isolation? What to do with the time given to us?”
I was 17, and was preparing to read Walden, and doing a very poor job of preparing, being a generally lazy, moody and not yet well-read teenager.
Still, Thoreau was becoming a demigod for me, and Walden was becoming The Answer.
But we grow, and grow up, and change, and come to struggle with our demigods and gods. “God,” said John le Carre, “is somebody that has to be ridden and kicked, like a horse, until he takes you in the right direction.” Replace “God” with “Life” and it is a sentiment very close to Thoreau’s credo in the chapter “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For.”
The retreat to Walden Pond is so intriguing. But doesn’t “retreat” have two senses? One in the militaristic sense; the other in the bourgeois sense.
The thing about Thoreau is that he spent only two years, two months and two days squatting on Emerson’s 14 acres alongside Walden Pond. After that, he returned to the bustle of Concord, Massachusetts, in retreat, or as a retreat.
His dying words I remember (possibly apocryphally) thus:
In the upstairs bedroom on his family’s middle-class home, he lay in bed close to the end, and looked up at the ceiling as if blinded. A family member – maybe Louisa – threw open the curtain, and to ascertain his faculties, pleaded, “Henry! Henry! Can you discern the far shore of the river?”
Thoreau, still staring at the ceiling, replied, “One world at a time.”
Since my brother’s few days alone with a canoe and tent in the Boundary Waters, and my own years in a personal wilderness soon after, I have wanted to retreat in neither the military nor the suburban sense. I push myself to not only discern the far shore, but to cross the river, and the next, and go ever into the trees.
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