Down the Gunflint Trail - without a Paddle

Confucius say: better to be windbound at the landing than ten miles out to sea.

We had headed out to "sea" once again, across Seagull Lake, just south of the Canadian border. We had found the path through the islands on the north end of the lake against moderate wind, passed the Palisades, and turned the corner into a back bay where we hoped, but didn't actually expect, to find a campsite free. 

A year ago we had the good luck to camp there, but it's usually occupied. It was.

We crossed the tip of the bay to the only other campsite nearby, fighting the much stronger waves that were sweeping in across four miles of open water. Taken.

Back to the protection of the islands, we  visited four other sites in the vicinity. All occupied. At two of the sites young couples—one with small child—were taking a "layover" due to the wind. The other two had been occupied just that morning. No one wanted to proceed out across the big lake.

At that point, we had little choice but to return to the landing. To be honest, I didn't really mind. 

There are quite a few lovely sites at the Trail's End Campground where we'd spent the previous night—a warren of loops and cul de sacs that defies topological analysis. It was only ten in the morning. We had plenty of time to locate the unreserved sites and evaluate each of them with care.

We finally settled on #30, high on a hill, partially surrounded by delicate popples,  with a nice view out toward the lake and only one other site nearby.  You couldn't actually see the lake, unless you walked out to the end of the bluff, but little matter. It was like being in Colorado. We ate lunch. We set up our camp chairs. We rolled out the super-delux air mattresses we'd brought along, too bulky to bring out on the trail. We took an evening paddle around the channels near the landing, where I first set eyes on the BWCA at the age of 12 in 1964. And that night the stars were fabulous.

An entry permit to the BWCAW is only good for one day. If a ranger had caught us trying to sneak out again the next morning, I think he would have "understood," but it happened to be raining, and we decided to scuttle the very idea of a canoe trip and spend some time exploring a few of the places on the Gunflint Trail that we invariably streak by, year after year, on our way to the landing and the wilderness of lakes and woods beyond.

Our first stop was Clearwater Lodge, a few miles north of the Gunflint Trail down Clearwater Road. It's a classic log cabin structure with a long front porch, and I wasn't surprised much to see the plaque on the wall commemorating its "national historic register" status.

The young man behind the counter was personable. When I mentioned that we'd been stymied by the wind the previous day, he said, "I'm not surprised. We didn't let anyone go out until late afternoon yesterday." We got onto the subject of Grand Portage—nine miles long—which he'd done recently. I told him I once did it going uphill, with two weeks of supplies, and then continued all the way to Lake Winnipeg.

"Did you canoe across Lake Winnipeg?" he asked. No. (Why would you?)

"My wife did it recently. It took twenty-two days, and they only paddled at night. It was too windy during the day."

We swapped a few more canoeing tales, not trying to one-up each other, just sharing experience. He'd never heard of the small private camp I once worked at, though it was only a few miles down the road. Well, that was fifty years ago.

"What do you and your wife do in the winter?" I asked.

"We're here, answering emails, shoveling snow. A few of the cabins are open year round. In summer we work seven days a week. Winter is our weekend."

Hilary and I wandered into the lodge, where there was a jigsaw puzzle set out on a card table, and a middle-aged couple was playing Four in a Row. An elderly couple was eating breakfast in the room beyond.

Such scenes always seem quaint, but also a little depressing to me. Maybe it was the rain, or the bad lighting. But it seems people aren't having as much fun as they imagined they would, and would almost rather be at home or outside sitting at a campfire under a tarp.

We visited several Forest Service campgrounds—Flour Lake, East Bearskin—which looked well designed for privacy but often narrow and closed in. Much more appealing was the campground on Devils Track Lake, only a few miles up the hill from Grand Marais. We chose site #8, later decided #11 was better, and finally settled in at # 12 and dropped our $11 into the metal slot at the entry kiosk.

On our way to Devil's Track, we had taken a sidetrip to Elbow Lake, where we met a man named Leroy Johnson. He was about to begin a shift checking outboard motor propellers for undesirable weeds and other invasive organisms.

"I've lived in Cook County all my life," he told us several times with obvious pride. "I know everyone around here. And that dog there is a Norwegian lundehund," he told us with a chuckle. "My son bought it. Then he moved out. So I guess it's mine now.  She doesn't hunt. I don't konw what she's good for. But she is kind of cute."

I looked it up later. That dog was bred in Noway to hunt puffins. 

The next morning we snagged the last remaining campsite at Judge Magney State Park via telephone and spent the day exploring the coast east of Grand Marais, where the crowds thin out and the roadside cliffs vanish, leaving you with miles of pebbly beaches. We got out our chairs at the Kadunce River Wayside and sat looking out at the calm water and the fresh blue sky for quite a while, utterly at peace. Before long a family of mergansers swam by in a broken line, fishing together, their heads often submerged and swiveling back and forth as they scanned the depths for fish.

A group of school children had assembled in the lot. After frolicking in the frigid waters of Lake Superior for a few minutes, they took a hiking trail up the river, accompanied by their chaperones.

A few minutes later a young woman came by with her daughter. She was  carrying two green Lund's shopping bags.

"We thought we'd just get out of town for a few days," she said, "just the two of us. I looked on my phone for beaches where you could find agates." 

Hours later, after visiting the museum and fort at Grand Portage, thirty miles up the road, and spotting a pectoral sandpiper in the gravel parking lot of the ferry landing to Isle Royale, we pulled into the lot at Kadunce Wayside once again. The school kids were long gone, the mother-daughter pair was several miles up the beach, and a hearty-looking middle-aged couple was playing cribbage at a picnic table nearby. It turns out they had biked up to the Canadian border from Mora, a small town east of Mille Lacs Lake, roughly 200 miles away. Now, on their third day out, they were heading back to Grand Marais.

"Who's winning?" I asked.

"She's kicking my ASS," the man said with a wild grin. He reminded me of Woody Harelson a little.

"Well, the worm will turn," I said encouragingly. "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

"Right under that tree!" he said, gesturing to a place where their two bikes stood  near the beach. "This beach is on the Superior Hiking Trail. You can camp anywhere around here. We got a six-pack in Hovland  and decided to stop here and play some cards."

It's all part of the scene.

The next morning at dawn, after a very quiet night at Judge Magney, we hiked up to Devil's Cauldron. No one on the trail. And after four successive breakfasts of granola with powdered milk, we splurged on a hot breakfast at nearby Naniboujou Lodge.

Our waitress was a young Ojibwe woman from Grand Portage. "Have you ever been to the Suzie Islands?" I asked her. (Why did I ask? because only tribal members can go there.) "Not since I was a child," she replied, a little wistfully. "There isn't much out there. Just a couple of campsites."

Sounds nice.

"We stopped this morning at the wayside rest on Mt. Josephine," I said. "looking down on the Suzie Islands. I think that may be the prettiest view in Minnesota."

"When I worked for the tribe, I used to pick up trash there," she said. "I would look around and say, "This job's not so bad...." 

Summer Films

Summer films are supposed to be fun. Well, I suppose hiding out behind a cairn from a helicopter can be fun.

Here are a few films that we enjoyed in the last few weeks.

The Biggest Little Farm (USA)

This movie chronicles the efforts made by John Chester and his wife Molly to transform 200 acres of arid land in Southern California into a healthy, working, organic enterprise. Not being farmers themselves, they hire Alan, a self-professed expert in sustainable agriculture, to help them spend their money. Where did the money come from? A bunch of good-natured friends and investors. It sounds like a utopian dream, and a financial disaster in the making.

Alan has lots of theories about diversity, manure tea, ground cover, pigs, diversity, gophers, sheep, erosion, bees, diversity, and other concepts. After forty-five minutes of struggles and setbacks, I was curious to see the farm's balance sheet and listen to candid interviews with some of the major investors.

But at a certain point, those thoughts faded into the background, because the farm operations themselves became so darned interesting. The mama pig gives birth to fourteen little piglets. (For cute.) The starlings ruin most of the fruit—all 147 kinds—but there is a market for it anyway. Eggs become a cash crop, a production mainstay, highly valued in town ... until the coyotes start killing all the chickens. Chester reluctantly shoots a few coyotes, only to discover that along with enjoying an occasional chicken dinner, they've been doing a good job of keeping the gophers in check. Barn owls are added to the equation to nab the gophers. And on it goes.

By year seven, some things have died and others have flourished. The young people hired to work the farm are so energetic, I was surprised they didn't start a little winery on the side and open a Friday night farm pizzeria. We still haven't seen any balance sheets, but we've seen a lot of plants, animals, insects, and people, shot with often amazing cinematographic skill, and it's all very beautiful and, yes, heartwarming.           

The Farewell (China)

Every recent summer has had its Asian hit. Two years ago it was The Big Sick. Last year it was Crazy Rich Asians. Now the break-out star of that film, the rapper Awkwafina, is back in a film called The Farewell. This time around she plays an anguished and independent young  Chinese-American woman who returns to China along with her parents to visit her grandmother, who has only a few weeks to live. Trouble is, they haven't told the old woman she's on death's bed.

Awkwafina abhors the hypocrisy, and struggles to keep her mouth shut. Meanwhile, grandma appears to be not only the wisest and most pleasant, but also the liveliest member of the family. There are plenty of misunderstandings and squabbles to go around about why various family members moved to Japan or the US. They haven't been together as a family for a long time. And the young nephew whose wedding has provided the excuse for this family farewell provides plenty of laughs, too.

Everyone loves a wedding. No one cares much for a death bed scene. Not even grandma.      

Woman at War (Iceland)

Terrorist in any form is hard to stomach, but the eco-terrorism in the Icelandic film Woman at War, waged with a bow and arrows by a choir director named Halla, is fairly palatable. She wants to shut down the foreign-owned aluminum plant by disrupting its energy supply.  She has a bit of help inside the local  government, but it's mostly a matter of pulling down the high-voltage power lines that feed the enterprise.  They stretch across the treeless heaths of Iceland—very hard to patrol, even with helicopters—though Hella finds she needs a bit of help from a local sheep farmer who happens to be a distant relative. (Everyone in Iceland is a distant relative.)

This cat-and-mouse game can't last forever. But the plot is thickened and invigorated  when Hella learns her name has finally risen to the top of the list of candidates to adopt an infant from the Ukraine.  Her twin sister, on her way to an ashram in India, also has a part to play in the unfolding story.

The most controversial aspect of the film, from the aesthetic point of view, is the tuba-band soundtrack. It lends a comic, almost circus-like flavor to the tale, and that element is further accentuated by the fact that the musicians themselves often appear in the scenes they're accompanying. This is an imaginative effect, but it tends to undercut the drama, turning the film into a fable, if not a long and languorous joke.  Not something to take entirely seriously. But something to think about ...

A Fortunate Man (Denmark)

This three-hour Netflix drama is based on the not-so-famous (except in Denmark) Danish novel Lucky Per.  The author won the Nobel Prize in 1917, but has since been so thoroughly forgotten that at the moment  his name has slipped my mind, too. But the story is a good one.

The director, Bille August, won an Oscar for a previous film, Pelle the Conqueror. Here he follows the life of Per, the son of a rigid and austere country preacher. he escapes the oppressive piety of his country home by pursuing an education as an engineer in the city, where he falls in with a wealthy Jewish family, and even becomes engaged to the elder daughter. The family is eager to finance Per's schemes for modernizing Denmark by means of a series of canals and hydroelectric projects. The plot hinges on whether Per can kowtow sufficiently to the bureaucratic powers-that-be who must approve his schemes—an act made difficult by the legacy of his father's paternalistic oppression, but also of Per's seemingly inexhaustible personal vanity. 

Perhaps the most interesting character in the tale is Per's fiancée, Jacobe, who is liberated by her engagement to him from her warm but clannish family circle, in the same way that Per is able to escape from his austere and repressive Lutheran upbringing through the wealth and flamboyance of Jacobe's family circle. It's an epic tale in the tradition of Tolstoy, trimmed down to Danish proportions.

Welcome to Greenland (France)

NETFLIX. Two nerdy, unemployed, French twenty-something actors, both named Thomas,  travel to a remote village in Greenland, where everything is already remote, to visit Thomas's father and simply hang out. The snow-covered hills are gorgeous,  the sea is covered with ice, and they amuse the kind-hearted locals as they jog across it in their brightly colored down parkas.

The villagers welcome them, they sample seal liver, and do a little break-dancing on the ice. Neither Thomas speaks Inuit, so they have to guess what the locals are saying about them. They're usually wrong.  There isn't much of a plot. A lukewarm romance, some health concerns, a seal-hunting excursion. It's all pretty lighthearted, sweet, and fun.