The kid rolled into the hotel parking lot in Pender’s SUV promptly at six. Pender’s canoe was already secured on the roof rack. He threw his packs in back, and they set out for the put-in.
Pender was quiet.
“You sure about the vehicle?”
“Yeah,” said Pender.
“I’ll sign it back to you any time.” He had an earnestness about him that Pender liked.
“Don’t worry. It’s yours. Appreciate the planning info. It was a good trade.”
“There’s a big weather system rolling in,” the kid said.
“Oh?” said Pender. Not that interested.
“You sure you want to go out now?”
Pender looked at him and took a minute to focus. “I’ve been wet before.” He shrugged.
“It’s the wind. It’s gonna blow. And you’re starting in a wetland. If you have to camp there, could be ugly. And if you keep going, you’ll have to deal with the wind on the lakes.”
Pender shrugged again.
“I wouldn’t say anything except you hired me to help you trip plan.”
“You earned every nickel. And every mile you get out of this vehicle.”
“You know what you’re doing,” said the kid. “But I have to say it—don’t get caught out in big water when this thing hits.”
Pender nodded. Silence.
“I was thinking about your trip last night, the part about your date.” The teenager glanced at him. “That’s really cool. Where are you going to meet?”
“Where would you meet an old girlfriend in Quetico?” Pender asked.
The young man thought for a minute. “I think I’d pick one of the clear-water lakes with pine forests. Maybe Shelley or Keats. What about you?”
“I might go for Badwater Lake. It half kills you just getting there, so it seems like paradise when you can finally camp. But the lady picked the lake.”
“So where are you going?”
“I’m sworn to secrecy.”
“C’mon, it’s not like I’m going to rat you out to Homeland Security.”
“I know,” Pender laughed. “But it was important to the lady so I promised.”
“Do you always keep your promises?”
“I try.”
The kid nodded.
“I can tell you this much,” said Pender. “We’re meeting on an island in a lake I’ve never seen. I’ve been past it but never portaged in. She says that happens a lot. That’s why it’s such a great place. We’ll have lunch. After that, who knows? Maybe we’ll hate each other and go our separate ways.”
“You might hate each other?”
“Well, sure. We haven’t spoken in forty years. The last thing she said to me was . . .” Pender’s voice trailed off. “Well, we fought a lot then.” He shrugged.
The kid shook his head. “So you’re meeting someone you dated in college?” Pender nodded. “And you haven’t seen her since?” He nodded again. “And you have no idea what she looks like?”
“I’ve seen a picture of her. I’d know her from a bear or even your mother.”
“You know my mother?”
Pender gave the teen a sour smile. “Very funny.”
“She paddles solo in Quetico?” There was incredulity in the young man’s voice. “I’ve never heard of a woman doing a solo trip in the Boundary Waters or Quetico. Heck, guys going out alone are pretty rare.”
“She’s not your average woman,” said Pender. “She’s been soloing for years. She guides. She has her own outfitting business on the Canadian side.”
The teen shook his head in wonder. “Hell of a blind date.”
A moment later, he glanced at Pender again. “Why not just go to her place? Why start here?”
Pender sighed, looked out the window. “I need it to be a journey.”
The kid pondered that thought for a moment. “What if something happens to you? You crash your boat or get laid up somewhere. She won’t know.”
Pender shrugged. “The vagaries of life.” As he said it, he could hear his old platoon sergeant. Do everything you’re taught, and you might make it home alive. Then again, no matter how good you are, if there’s a bullet with your name on it . . . The sergeant shrugged. The vagaries of life.
They drove north and west until the kid slowed abruptly and turned off the road, eased through a narrow break in the brush, and stopped in a small parking area.
They hauled Pender’s gear a half mile to the launch site. The trail was wide and clear, like a path in Central Park, nothing like the rough cobs Pender would be traversing in Quetico.
The trail ended in a small clearing at a river bank. The kid watched Pender walk straight to the water and deftly drop his canoe in the shallows. The canoe was a long, sleek solo-tripping canoe with the scarred hull of a wilderness boat—a serious boat for a serious canoeist. It had seen a lot of rocks and beaches and been pushed over a lot of snags and beaver houses. Pender shrugged off his pack and placed it in the front of the canoe. The kid handed him the second pack, which he placed behind the seat. He removed one of the paddles lashed to the thwarts, and he was ready to go.
Well done, the kid thought. He hauled the canoe and the food pack on one trip, like a guide would, but didn’t go macho, carrying too much, moving too fast. Pull a muscle out here, and your fun time turns to agony. Break a leg or ankle, and you’re in real trouble.
Pender paused beside the canoe, gazing at the northern reaches of the river. The waters were dark and still. The overcast morning sky was being consumed by a bank of low, black clouds approaching like a wall of despair.
“Weather’s coming,” the kid said, raising his voice enough to be heard.
Pender nodded. He floated the canoe in the shallows to check her trim, inching packs to and fro to even the load.
“You sure you want to put in now?” the kid asked again.
“Yeah. What the hell?” said Pender.
“Okay then,” he said. “But be careful out there, hey.”
“Thanks.” Pender shook the kid’s hand, stepped into his canoe, and began his last voyage in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area.
Black vapors hung in angry coils from the dark sky, so low it seemed like you could touch them. The air was still and filled with tension, like a fuse had been lit and everything—the birds, the bears, the insects, the wind itself—was waiting for the violent explosion.
And yet, it was relaxing. Pender was finally alone. Not another human in sight, not a sound, not even a loon or a raven. He breathed deeply and let his mind focus on the silence and stillness, felt the air flow by his skin as the canoe glided forward like a phantom.
For the first time in months, Pender felt a sense of peace. True, a storm was rolling in, but that was just rain and wind. He was out of the shit storms of a jaded civilization. He was clean and free.
He headed north in a creek-like passage through a reedy bog and a weed-choked stream, then into wetlands dotted by clumps of evergreen trees. He paddled easily, enjoying the weightless sensation of the canoe floating on a light current, low in the river, out of the wind. He had to get out several times to tow the boat through shallows and twice more to hoist it over downed timber.
Once, as he strained to pull the canoe through a stretch of low water and deep silt, he looked up to see a moose cow and her calf gazing at him, maybe fifty feet away. They were chewing green shoots and stopped to stare, as if incredulous that some life-form would be doing what he was doing.
Pender laughed. It was crazy. His shirt was soaked with sweat, his quick-dry pants were covered with stinky black silt up to his thighs, he had another hour or two of this in front of him and a nasty storm getting ready to make his life miserable. And yet, it was liberating. Food would taste better, sleep would be deeper, his days fuller.
Light rain started as he entered the first lake. It was less than a mile long, and he crossed it in minutes, glad to be paddling in deep water again. He could see colorful tents marking four camps on the little lake as he passed. It was like a subdivision, something to get through as fast as possible. Pender could only be happy in emptiness.
Two miles and two short portages later, the storm hit with all its fury just as he entered the last lake before the border lakes. In minutes the breeze became a wind out of the southwest, then swirled and shifted suddenly, coming from the north, then picked up intensity. Waves formed quickly—a chop, then breaking waves, then whitecaps and deep troughs. At another time in his life, he would have headed for shelter. It was the wise thing to do. But not this year. To hell with the storm. His whole life was a storm. He pressed on.
He steered his boat into the waves and paddled hard to maintain forward motion and keep the canoe hitting the waves straight on. If he got sideways to waves that big, he would capsize in the blink of an eye. Even if he managed not to drown, he’d lose a lot of gear—maybe all of it—and his trip would be over.
The wind built to stiff gusts, some coming at a different angle from the waves. The quartering winds tried to push the nose of the canoe on an angle to the waves, with a capsize certain to follow. So Pender fought the wind and waves as if his life depended on it, fought to keep the bow pointing into the waves, paddling ten, twenty, even thirty consecutive strokes on one side of the canoe to maintain his angle.
Then rain came in pelts. The wind and surf were too dangerous for him to pause even for a few seconds to don his rain gear. Mistake number one, he thought. He should have put on the rain gear before he got in open water. There couldn’t be a mistake number two.
He gritted his teeth and paddled furiously. He willed himself to reach the lee of a peninsula a kilometer ahead. He focused on the waves, blocked out the pain and exhaustion. Ignored the fear and the nightmares about drowning.
It took another twenty minutes to reach the calm waters of the peninsula’s lee side. He stopped in the shallows, donned his raincoat, took a long drink of water, and eyed the banks of the peninsula’s shore. He could sit out the storm in the protected water there. He could see a tent on the peninsula and another farther down the shore. The lake was pockmarked with campsites.
“Hell no.” He said it even though he had no audience. He wouldn’t base camp with a bunch of picnickers. He was a wilderness tripper, and he’d settle for nothing less.
He checked his map and compass and paddled back into the tempest. It took another twenty minutes to reach the choppy waters of the lake’s partially sheltered north shore. Shielded from the wind, he portaged past a fast-moving creek and then paddled to the portage trail that led to the border lake.
The launch area into the border lake was partially sheltered from the wind. A large landmass a few hundred meters northeast of the put-in made it seem as though Pender was launching into another small lake, but he was entering the southern end of the sprawling Lac La Croix, a twisting mass of islands and inlets and peninsulas forming roughly twenty miles of liquid border between Minnesota and Ontario. As soon as he passed that landmass he would be in unprotected water again, fighting for his life.
After a short rest, Pender floated into the bay, hugging the shore to take advantage of the sheltered water while he could. At the end of the landmass he looked north and saw whitecaps and deep troughs and wind whistling spray into the air. It would have been scary if he thought about it, but he didn’t.
Pender paddled into the mayhem, and his world became impossible. Wild winds whipped the lake into a cauldron of boiling waves and drove the rain horizontally into his face. The canoe bounced and lurched crazily as he thrashed to keep it upright. The wind and waves nearly turned him over several times, but he saved himself each time, reaching out in wide sweeping brace strokes to keep the hull from rolling and to keep the bow heading into the waves.
Despite his boatmanship, he was losing the battle. Water splashed over the bow with each wave, and each time he braced he took water over the gunnels. Water already sloshed in the bottom of the boat. The extra weight made the boat hard to handle. He was close to swamping.
He fought his way to the shoreline and hugged it as he continued north. He remembered the kid’s notations on the map indicating there was a campsite on that shore and another on an island a half kilometer farther north. As he drew near the first campsite, his hopes for shelter were dashed by the sight of two canoes on the shore, hulls up. Above the waterline, on a ten-foot rise, two tents shook in the wind and four men huddled under a canopy that slanted into the weather, sheltering them from the gale. They saw him just as he started to move on. Two came down to the shore to hail him, beer cans in hand.
“Come on up, bud,” one of them yelled. A heavy, burly guy with a pink complexion. “Plenty of room!” Pender could barely hear him in the roar of the wind.
“Plenty of beer!” said the other guy, like he had found the secret to eternal happiness. He was heavy, balding, with several days’ beard. He held his beer can aloft as if celebrating.
Pender expressed his regrets with a shaking head and paddled on.
“It’s too dangerous!” shouted the first guy.
But his words were lost in the wind. Pender wasn’t in the mood for company, especially not beer-swilling fishermen. He’d seen an ice chest by their tents. An ice chest! It infuriated him. The beer cans, too. Cans and bottles were illegal in the pristine Boundary Waters/Quetico wilderness and an insult to anyone who loved the place. It would be better to die than spend time with assholes like that.
He thrashed against the elements for another five hundred meters to the other campsite. It was a dismal little spot on a low island, the land rising a few feet above shallows filled with reeds and low-lying scrub. It was the kind of site in the kind of place that desperate paddlers settled for when weather or darkness or sheer exhaustion demanded an immediate stop in their journeys. That was him. He was tired and hungry and, despite his exertions, becoming more chilled by the minute . . . a warning that hypothermia was lurking.
Pender didn’t bother with the established campsite near the water. He moved into the pines and found a small wind-protected area formed by a rock structure about four feet high. The ground was lumpy, hard, and slanted—horrible for sleeping—but it was well drained and protected from falling trees, and if the wind didn’t shift, he’d be able to cook on his gas stove. That was as good as he would do today.
He ate a meal of salami, soup, nuts, and raisins in the tent amid a steady driving wind, intermittent rains, and nightmare skies. He started writing in the journal to his daughter. He scrawled, “Dear Margaret,” then stopped. What do you say to someone you loved more than life itself for twenty years and now don’t know?
He wrote about her birth and early childhood because that’s what he was thinking about. He could see her in his mind, so unbelievably tiny, so vulnerable. It had seemed impossible she could survive, and he couldn’t imagine himself sleeping soundly ever again for all the worrying he did. Jesus, had that been him?
Eventually he drifted off to sleep, sitting up, his back against the food pack, his butt cushioned on his flotation vest. Keeping the food pack inside the tent was a calculated risk, but the wind was too fierce to hang a pack this day, and Pender was in a meaner mood than any Quetico black bear.
He awakened a little after 11 PM, startled by the sense that something had changed. The wind and rain had stopped, and there was a vague, distant noise in the stillness. He emerged from the tent into the light of a billion stars and a large glowing moon. Light so bright he could see his shadow. And spectacular. He held his breath in awe as he surveyed a night sky exploding in a luminescence greater than all the combined fireworks displays in history.
Slowly, he became aware of the distant noise. It was the pulsing bass of rock and roll. Tinny guitar notes. Cymbals. The drunken laughter of the beer-swilling fishermen camped on the near point.
He tried to resist the anger, but he couldn’t. He tried to block out the faint noise, but it was all he could hear. He tried not to think about elegant acts of retribution, but they filled his mind like a movie he couldn’t stop watching.
He tried to resist hating the drunken louts partying like they were in a bar, but the frustrations of dealing with people fascinated with the stink of their own shit flowed from every pore of his body until he all could hear was the voices rolling across the dark lake.
He tried to sleep again, succeeding only in dozing off for brief naps, fantasizing about appropriate acts of wilderness justice for the goons who would treat this pristine place like a country bar. At 2:30 AM the voices were gone, but sleep was impossible. Under the blazing night sky he struck camp. When he was done, he lay down on his raincoat and gazed at the heavens for a long while, light from a billion stars reminding him how insignificant he was and how briefly he would be part of the cosmos.
How ironic, he thought, that most of humanity can no longer see the heavens displayed like this because we have blinded ourselves with the ambient lighting of civilization.
That irony stirred him to action. He loaded his canoe and paddled toward the fishermen’s campsite. The nearer he got, the more it felt like being on an ambush patrol many years ago. Stealth. Silence. Adrenaline building. The world around him in sharp focus.
He stopped just short of the shore and walked the boat to the beach area. He moved to the fishermen’s canoes, as silent as a shadow, carried them to the beach, and placed them next to his canoe. He worked his way up to the campsite, pausing with each step to avoid the noise of a dislodged rock or snapping twig or tripping over an unseen guy line.
The campsite had log benches erected in a square with the fire ring forming the fourth side. Packs were bunched against the benches. Tarps covered a kitchen area. He could see the beer chest, its white top glowing in the night light. The boom box sat next to it.
He picked up the boom box and made his way back to the canoes, moving like a ghost.
He put the boom box in his canoe and used nylon cord to connect the fishermen’s canoes to each other, then to his boat, like a three-canoe train. He eased all three canoes into the water and paddled away. The fishermen’s camp remained dark and silent, the only noise the dripping of water from his paddle as he brought it forward at the end of each stroke.
He stopped in a shallow bay, just out of sight from the fishermen’s camp. He untied the line to the first canoe and lashed it to the boom box, then lowered the device into the water, feeding line hand-over-hand until it touched bottom. He left the fishermen’s canoes in their hidden mooring and began paddling in an easterly direction, picking his way through the islands and reefs. He would stay in the border lakes, paddling south and east for a day or two, then move into Quetico and work his way slowly east and north.
As he paddled, Pender wondered if the morning winds would blow the canoes into the view of the fishermen. He wondered if they’d have the guts to swim for the boats. Only a few hundred meters or so but in sixty-degree water, it would be no cakewalk. He shrugged. It didn’t matter to him. The boats would be found soon enough, and whoever found them would find the owners. They’d be out of commission for a day at most. They’d be mad, of course. Those kind always are. They might even try to find him. A recon guy would figure him for a tripper, maybe check the portages going east and south, try to get lucky.
He thought about that as he paddled in the eerie light of a star-filled sky and thought even more about what kind of person thinks he’s going to get chased in a wilderness by the victims of a mostly harmless prank.
At the first dim light of morning, he portaged into the next lake. By the time the sun peeked above the tree line to the east, Pender was halfway to his next portage. He would be miles from the scene of his crime before noon. And in a day or two he would disappear into the labyrinthine wilds of Quetico, where he would be invisible, nothing more than a molecule in an eighteen-hundred-square-mile maze of lakes and rivers and forests.