I’m back home from a month in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Each year I teach a class up there I call “Writing Wilderness” where we explore intersections of the self and that sublime meeting of land and water. I love the boundary waters. I’ve spent nearly a year of nights there, so much that I feel I have that water, that greenstone, and that boreal forest, in my blood. When I’m paddling and portaging those ancient canoe paths— when I wake in my tent on a patch of moss overlooking a rocky bay of glassy border water—I’m where I’m supposed to be. For me it feels like a second home place.
In my class we talk about the miracle of how we all ended up here together: how did we arrive here: on this stretch of Canadian border, sitting on this rock overlooking Crooked Lake and this pair of Trumpeter swans, writing our stories together. Other writers before us have asked this question. They often trace the roots of their wilderness yearning to some childhood sense of mystery locked in a home landscape. Like many of you, I grew up on the boundary waters between Wisconsin & Illinois. I blame my own wilderness longing on the Kishwaukee River, whose banks supported my childhood home. I had Kish water up my nose since I could walk. It’s the river where I first got wet. The Kishwaukee is not a wilderness river, but it is a wild place. All wildernesses are one, writes Wendell Berry, intuiting the profound connection between all wild places. If Berry is right, then you can paddle from the Kishwaukee river to any stretch of water in the world. Which I guess I just did.
