Northwoods Elegy

The paddles we grip are aspen and white pine. Our canoe's thwarts are cedar; the heavy yoke of the canoe is varnished maple, carved from the same tall trees that rim this remote northern lake. As our boat glides through thick morning mist, I kneel in the stern and gently steer us away from the ripples that warn of unforgiving boulders just beneath the water's dark surface. Up in the bow, an old friend is scanning the shoreline, hoping to catch sight of a moose.

Although he is a lifelong city dweller, my canoe mate was chosen for this trip because he is gifted with a key backwoods instinct—a keen sense of when to speak up and when to keep quiet. On windless mornings like today, we take pride in echoing the stillness of woods and water as we pull our paddles through the cold depths in total silence. When we carry out this motion perfectly, the lake rewards us with small whorls that spin off into the distance, farther than we can track them.

We have come to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota, a chain of a thousand lakes connected by short rocky trails for portaging. Surrounded by iron mines and scattered over a million acres of pristine wilderness hard on the Canadian border, the Boundary Waters exert a magnetic tug on those of us who love the rhythm of the paddle. My companion and I are here for a weeklong respite from the jangling chaos of modern life. I've retreated to the woods often with this end in mind, and each time I leave exhausted but refreshed—briefly dazzled by the extravagance of electricity and central heating, ready again to face another year of the urgent demands of pagers, papers, and …