Adventures in nature formed a lot of my strongest memories of growing up. This is one of the reasons that it is important to me to try to foster similar opportunities for my own children and believe that it is important for all children to have opportunities to experience nature.
The transition from child to an adult is a difficult one, but when that transition can occur across different environments, I think that lessons can be learned that can translate into other other areas. In my specific example, I think that the skills of planning, leadership, and confidence that I built up on adventures during these adolescent years, came in useful when navigating high school and college.
The trip to the Boundary Waters that we took the summer after eighth grade, was particularly influential to me in this way.
As I mentioned earlier, the first time that we went to the Boundary Waters, my brother, father, and I relied a great deal on the expertise of my Uncle Bruce. Later when we went back to the Boundary Waters we wouldn’t have Bruce’s experience to lean on and were on our own. The summer that I was fourteen, was such a trip. To round out our group, a friend of my father’s joined the three of us. While my father’s friend was a friendly and kind guy, he had no camping experience whatsoever. In fact, I’m particularly sure why he agreed to join us that summer.
Either way, that left me as the second most experienced, skilled, and knowledgeable person in our group behind my father. My father was upfront about this, explicitly letting me know that due to his friend’s inexperience, that was going to relied upon to help lead the group and to make sure that we were safe and successful in our trip. I was going to be handling a canoe myself, with my father’s friend with no canoeing experience riding in the front. The group would rely upon me to be at least partly responsible for the navigation, fishing, fish cleaning, and skills around the camp and on portages. This responsibility was not lost on me. I was a pretty awkward middle schooler at the time, and nervous about starting high school, but I was proud of getting the chance to prove that I was ready to start being an adult.
One of the things that my father and I had to figure out, was how we were going to outfit ourselves for the trip. Together we found army surplus duffle bag backpacks which we would use on many subsequent trips for our canoe bags. Some gear that I acquired for this trip, I still have today, like my Sierra cup.
Finally, the start of the trip itself had arrived. We actually followed the same route and general plan as the our very first Boundary Waters trip that I previously described. On the first night, after leaving from the Top of the (Gunflint) Trail into Lake Saganaga, we camped on Hook Island, which is just east of the Quetico Border. Hook Island is hook shaped (shocker!) with a westerly facing rounded bay with a sandy beach. A nice camp site exists high up on some rocks on the Southern tip of the island. There is a good trail up to the site from the aforementioned sandy beach.
The next morning, we left very early, before sunrise, to get a jump on the day and to hopefully make it all the way over Silver Falls to our planned base camp at the Eastern end of Saganagons. Just as we paddled away from Hook Island, I dropped my line and began to troll. A large fish took my line and dove under the canoe when I began to reel it in. This combined with my lack of experience handling a canoe and landing fish to produce not only a snapped line, but a splintered fishing pole. The sun hadn’t even risen on the fist day of the trip, and I had almost swamped the canoe and had broken my fishing pole.
However, my dad and I had planned ahead and had packed a spare fishing pole and I learned first hand a lesson about why we planned ahead with spare equipment. The rest of the day, the traveling went smoothly and the weather was nice. With our early start, we did make it to our planned base camp on Saganagons by the end of the day. As I mentioned before, the base camp method works well with kids and inexperienced travelers, leaving the focus to be on the surroundings and having fun. We spent three nights at the base camp and our days fishing and swimming.
Sharing the canoe with my father’s friend, it very quickly became apparent how little he actually knew about canoeing. He had a tendency to grip the paddle incorrectly, his stroke was inefficient, and he was reluctant to paddle and to troll a fishing line at the same time. Beyond his inexperience, however, it showed to me my knowledge and comparative expertise. To see first hand that there were skills and knowledge that I possessed that other adults didn’t gave me confidence in myself. I began to wonder, if I could distinguish myself from an adult in this way, what other things did I know or could learn to distinguish myself in other ways. I realized that I had much more confidence in myself in the setting of the outdoors than in the social settings back at school. It was good to feel that sense of confidence.
On the other hand, I also had the experience of trying to work with my partner who while less skilled, was very much my senior. While early on, I silently got frustrated to myself, I began to realize that we were a team paddling this canoe and on this trip. I tried to talk to him about his experiences in the outdoors to gain some common ground and would offer suggestions to improve his technique. Some things were taken and some were brushed aside, eventually I learned to accept many of the things that he wasn’t going to change and to not let that cause me frustration, while I enjoyed paddling the pristine waters of the Quetico.
There were still more lessons to learn on this trip though. Our group, and my father and I in particular, learned a valuable lesson regarding traveling in the Boundary Waters in popular locations during peak season – plan your campsites accordingly. We left our base camp on the far Eastern end of Saganagons Lake early in the morning, the day before we intended to leave the park. Our plan was to make it to the Western end of Saganagons camp, and then portage over Silver Falls the next morning and paddle back to our car at the Top of the Trail. The day of travel went smoothly and as we headed into late afternoon, we were right where we wanted to be, the Western end of Saganagons. Then we began to look for a camp site. Every site was taken. We started paddling into the bays and fingers of Saganagons to search out an empty site, these were full too. Without a a real plan, we continued Westward and eventually we reached Silver Falls with evening upon us. Without a camp site, we had no choice but to portage over Silver Falls in the waning daylight and as we pushed off from the other end of the portage, the sun set behind us over the Falls.
Now it was dark. And we still didn’t have a camp site. There are a few camp sites in the channel above Silver Falls, but as we came upon each one, we could see the warm glow of the coals remaining from the inhabitant’s supper fire. So we pushed on. In the dark, we decided that rather than heading south and west through Cache Bay to investigate camp sites on those shores, we would continue to head South and East, towards our car. In a worst case scenario, we could always continue paddling through the night all the way to the car. Luckily for us that was the worst case scenario as we had a warm and clear Summer evening, plus a full moon that reflected off of the water so that we could make out some features of Cache Bay as we set out across. In retrospect, this was not the smartest of decisions, but again, with the inexperience of my father and I, this seemed to be the best option available to us. Had it not been an ideal Summer night and conditions, I hope that we would have had the sense to have made another choice.
By the light of the moon we were able to make out Canadian Point marking the end of Cache Bay. We cut across the bay to that point with the intention of stopping back at Hook Island as a last resort before making a break for the cars. When we arrived at Hook Island, we were relieved to find that the site was uninhabited. We beached the canoes set up a single tent for the four of us, and went to sleep. It was after midnight and we had been traveling for sixteen hours.
To travel such a large body of water at night was admittedly unnerving; however it was also exciting in its own way. It is one of the moments of all of our experiences that my father, brother, and I always seem to bring up when we being discussing the trips that we’ve taken.
With a little bit of providence on our side, we successfully made it through our first trip without my Uncle Bruce. It was a trip that was memorable because it was the only time that I canoed for that time and distance at night, but more importantly it was a formative experience for me to begin the transition from a child to an adult and provided me with some concrete examples to foster confidence in myself. That confidence in myself in the outdoors setting would be something that I could draw upon when I was in other far more awkward settings in high school. I hope that my children can find their own sources of confidence to draw upon through their years of transitioning into adulthood.