Of Mice and Canoers and Rain

It was going to be an awesome trip--four nights in the Boundary Waters with my wife and dad. First week of October--the colors would rub our jaded city eyes like a rainbow massage. Dad was a lifelong Minnesotan, yet this would be his first trip--had to mean things would go well. The saying goes something like Mother Nature is a sweet seductress to newcomers, though once you commit she regularly pummels you. But this was the old feller’s first trip so surely we'd be fine.

It rained for four days--a cold sopping deluge--when it wasn’t fog or drizzle it was coming down at a rate to worry Noah.

Another thing we saw much of was mice. At our final camp I left a food bag out while cooking dinner, then stashed it my wife’s and my tent. We ate, lied about how the weather would be the next day and turned in when the rain recommenced.

Tucked in our bags we heard sounds of unseen nocturnal scamperings. Every time I turned on my light there was nothing. Burrowing back toward sleep came a noise very near. I raised my head and saw a mouse on my chest. I sat with a start and shrieked as it ran onto my shoulder, across my neck and down my other arm. My wife shot up and we managed to chase it out and settle in finally for some sleep. But as soon as our headlamps were off, the rustling was back and louder. Lights back on, there at our feet were two sets of bright glistening eyes. As we then surmised, three mice had crawled into the foodbag in its brief minutes of accessibility.

Sometime in the wee hours I tested my hand for dryness against the nylon floor. I did it again to make sure, because what I was feeling was a waterbed--three to four inches had accumulated in a pond under the tent. I woke my wife and we piled our gear into the highest corner. It was a well used campsite and all the tent pads were worn depressions in the thin soil. I donned my rain coat and began digging a trench to drain the new lake.

The rain stopped for a while in the morning, but started by the time we were on the water. Reaching the final stretch, a few mile paddle across large Brule Lake, raindrops were shooting straight into our faces. By now our gear was wet, so the prospect of hanging out for the wind to die was infinitely inferior to the hot tub and sauna waiting in Grand Marais. The headwind made the paddling a crawl and the cold rain sapped strength and soaked clothes. By the time we reached the end of a bay the waves were smashing over the bow. My wife was huddled and praying (something I’d never seen her do) in the center of the boat. Dad shouted through the blow that we should turn around and retreat to a small island recently passed. We lay hard into our paddles and spun the canoe in the trough between two waves and shot into the calm water behind the island.

We spent four hours shivering in a tiny clearing amongst dripping cedar and pine boughs. Looking toward the lake, trying to gauge whether the water was flattening, I mistrusted my eyes because I had urged us to go the first time. Finally we couldn’t wait any longer and launched. We rounded the island were cautiously excited then giddy at the much calmer water. We still paddled manically, afraid at any moment a giant sweep of water would arise to quash our hesitant relief.

My wife and dad both had to work early the next morning and I figured they’d want to begin the long drive home immediately. But (like mine) their dreams of warmth in the wet cold outdoors had vented from visions of hot sauna steam, so in town we dined on burgers and slipped into the local sweathouse for a restorative cook before the dark return.

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Where the Deer and Photographers Play

Antelope Canyon is photographed so much that a Google image search turns up almost 58,000 hits. Look at most any of those photos (or this one) and you’ll see an empty metaphysical kind of place where odds seem reasonable for spotting a benevolent fairy or levitating monk--when I was there last spring I talked to an old-timer who spoke of visiting in the seventies when aside from his guide, he saw only one other person, a woman sitting cross legged in the sand playing a flute.

No longer. The day I visited there were probably 150 other gawkers, all of us drooling at the eyes over the fluted red sandstone walls. The photos look as they do thanks to the coordinating efforts of the Navajo guides who must accompany every visitor. Study an image of an empty chamber cut by a white shaft of light and it’s as asparagus is to an oak tree that there’s a group of twelve tourists gnashing their teeth around the bend being forcibly restrained by a harried guide.

My guide, the affable Gabriel, who joked and smiled most of the two hour tour, kept his cool even when a shooter in our group refused to yield her turn (“One moe, one moe, I still shooting”). The order of photographing was like an 18th century rifle brigade in combat—first, several people in front steady their tripods and make an exposure or two and then get the heck out of the way so those behind can take a turn. She refused to move, even when Gabe gently pulled her by the elbow she wrestled free and cursed him for blurring her shot. It looked like a fight might break out when the faces on the people in back missing their turns starting twisting, sputtering saliva and protest. A disturbing anti-Chinese sentiment settled in mutters over rest of the excursion.

The most interesting thing I learned is that the trademark beams of light are another thing coordinated by the guides. I guess I never bothered to think how they formed (the sun funneling through some canyon lips vortex perhaps). What happens is the guide starts tossing the fine sand, dust really, from the floor on up. He does this until enough particles are suspended in the air to catch the afternoon sun.

There’s a lower canyon as well. It has no beams, but for $20 (compared to $40 plus $6 park fee at the upper), if you have a tripod you can spend several hours roaming untethered along the longer, narrower and shallower lower reaches. It was here in 1997 that 11 tourists drowned in a flash flood when they refused to listen to their guide’s orders to leave.

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Bring on the Frosty

Nothing like early season snow to arouse thoughts of skiing up crusty slick hills or stumbling on showshoes through delightfully cumbersome drifts, an unanticipated notion while poking around the Whitewater River valley last week. Came across some interesting new territory while fruitlessly hunting a cave I've heard is in one of the limestone abutments over the South Fork, and parked alongside the gravel road to climb a stony perch, from whose vantage the photo was made. I've been seeking the cave a couple years, and thought perhaps I'd spy it from the blufftop, but a couple more may be required for results! There are small caverns below the crag (all too constricted to be the sought-after one) and they appear to be an active den. Wet animal smell emanates from the openings and piles of largish dung attest to what must be a bobcat. Near the caves, at the rocky tip of the cliff base is a sheltered alcove where one such pile collects aside a dizzy ledge. Hard to imagine a finer scene than a bobcat on lookout at sunrise, adroitly perched with eyes toward the valley, searching for breakfast. Full Post»

Beaver

1.

Leathery flat splash

Thwwapp!

Swift wet noisy

air pocket gurgle.

Quiet now, but,

you’ll be back,

Swimming

Chewing

Slapping in the moonlight

2.

Past last glow

I walk ‘long your river’s banks.

Your tail meets water

enough to rival the rustling leaves.

By my flames

I hear you chewing.

Do you think I cannot?

Rodent fangs to alders,

soft wood squeaks.

3.

Dry dawn,

eyes shut five more, then,

hours of rain.

Bone under nylon,

listening for you.

Where have you gone?

I know you’re not afraid to get wet.

You and I might be alike—

dreaming away the morning,

then rushing, like the river you dam,

through rest of the day.

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