LAST PORTAGE – A Tribute to the Father I Never Knew

As a teenager I, like most adolescents, believed my parents were total nerds. Knew nothing, I thought, about music, sports, adventure, fun—all the stuff I was into. They were so…well…old, that they embarrassed me.

But as they aged, my dad started sorting through his mementos, and when he showed me some of them it opened up a whole new window on his world. Among those relics were a few small black-and-white pictures of him canoeing with his friend, Bob Clough, in Minnesota’s north woods. They looked to be in their late teens or early twenties, young and fit and happy. I was intrigued.

          This made us not just cool kid
          and dorky father, but kindred spirits.

There were also receipts from outfitters in Ely and Winton, Minnesota, towns near entry points to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCAW).* They listed flour, sugar, lard and various canned goods,** all in quantities sufficient for extended stays in the wilderness.

And there was this map, printed on treated canvas, of a portion of Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park, the BWCAW’s even wilder counterpart across the border in Ontario. Hand-drawn on it was a new portage the two had blazed across the base of a long peninsula, cutting off a couple of hours’ paddling time around it. They’d tentatively claimed it on the map with a red arrow and their last initials, C&W.

KINDRED SPIRITS
I’d known Dad was a Boy Scout, but this was something else, something more exciting than good deeds and merit badges. The guy had roughed it on his own terms, for weeks at a time, in true wilderness, back when that word meant more than it does now. A real man’s man. And, since I’d also done many BWCAW and Quetico trips myself, this made us not just cool kid and dorky father, but kindred spirits.

Fast forward to 1997. Dad was 91; I was 52. And that July Dad passed away. Even though Mom was still living, I felt like an orphan. I regretted not having known him better. But finally being aware of that adventurous, woodsman side of his was still pretty special.

When it came time for the family to divvy up Dad’s stuff, I didn’t want much. But I wanted that map. And I got it.

That old cloth map stirred something in me. And during the following year I began planning a canoe trip up to that portage. I invited six friends with varying degrees of wilderness paddling experience who I thought would most appreciate the adventure. We put our heads together to plan logistics: dates, route, menu, equipment… And I created graphics and mementos for The Memorial Expedition—a six-inch round commemorative plaque and a dozen three-inch souvenir medallions—and had the design sand-etched onto clear glass blanks.

          The miracle material can stop a bullet
          or just about any other impact, but,
          incredibly, is helpless against abrasion.

GETTING THERE
On June second, 1998, we headed north for the five-and-a-half-hour drive to Lake Superior's North Shore, the Gunflint Trail and Tuscarora Lodge, where we’d arranged to bunk for the night and rent canoes for the trip. When we left home, temperatures had been summer-like, with predicted highs in the mid-80s. It looked like the warm streak would apply to northwestern Minnesota too, and hold for at least several days. That was good to know, as it allowed me to pack fairly light, always an advantage for a wilderness canoe trip.

Alas, that night, on a cot barely fit for a prisoner, it soon became clear I’d been grossly misled about the weather. With no heat in the bunkhouse, the near-freezing chill easily breached its walls and my flimsy, ultra-light sleeping bag, making for a miserable night.

Next morning, we were introduced to our two slick, translucent, super-light Kevlar canoes. I learned that this miracle material—originally developed by Dupont as a replacement for the five-times-heavier steel belts used in racing tires, and later as the basis of bulletproof body armor—can stop a bullet or just about any other impact, but, incredibly, is helpless against abrasion.

All this to explain why our host applied a strip of silver duct tape along each canoe’s keel at the bow. If we returned the craft with any part of that tape worn through, we’d be charged a penalty. No problem, considering several of us had long ago learned that a canoe’s bow must never, ever touch anything but water or air.

THE TWO SAGS
They loaded up our gear, Carl’s beautiful wood-and-fiberglass Old Town Canadienne and the two canoes we’d rented, and drove us up to the end of the Gunflint Trail. There we put in at the tip of the long, narrow south arm of Lake Saganaga, one of the BWCAW’s biggest and prettiest glacier-scoured lakes.

We paddled a couple of miles north up the narrow, river-like channel and then into the huge expanse of Big Sag itself.

Then it was west for about six miles across the widest part of Saganaga, skirting its numerous islands and crossing the international border. Once we entered Cache Bay, we had to register with Canadian Customs, letting them know where we were headed and for how many days.

As we paddled away from the rangers’ island, the wind picked up and it started to snow—something I’d only once before encountered up here in June. Luckily, paddling into the wind generated enough body heat to stay quite comfortable…for a while. But soon, the piercing cold was conspiring with high winds and some nasty two-foot waves to deny us much headway, so we found a good landing spot on the lee side of a small island, and built a fire.

The wind kept pounding us for the next couple of hours until, finally, we were able to make a run for it to the nearest decent campsite.

      I thought of all the millions of footsteps
      that have followed in theirs over 75 years.

At the time, officially-designated campsites in the Quetico weren’t shown on the Fisher maps, so we scouted our own site and, hurried by pending nightfall, quickly reacquainted ourselves with the various roles and tasks it takes to set up camp, prepare a meal and protect our food pack from bears.

I shared a tent with my brother-in-law, Carl. Thank goodness neither of us is a super-loud snorer. Nonetheless, it proved to be another long, miserable night, for, once again, the temperature kept dropping, this time to well below freezing.

My nearly see-through sleeping bag, with its scant one inch of loft and a rating for about 50 degrees, came up short—or should I say thin—for me, even wearing every stitch of clothing I had. At dawn’s first scant light, still shivering in fetal position, I looked enviously over at Carl, tucked in his brand new LL Bean, five-inch-thick, zero-degree-rated goose down sleeping bag, blissfully sawing wood. It was all I could do not to either crawl in there with him…or punch him!

Next morning, we had breakfast and broke camp rather leisurely, and then paddled west toward Silver Falls, where we made several small portages before entering the very southeastern tip of the narrow, twelve-mile-long Lake Saganagons*** (Indeed, its name is that similar to Saganaga’s.)

ETCHED IN STONE AND GLASS
About three miles up the north side of Saganagons, we scoured the irregular shoreline for the legendary portage. In the Quetico, portages are not clearly marked with Forest Service signs as they are in the BWCAW. So it took a while, but we finally spotted it, tucked behind a point that we'd mistaken for an island. At last, this was it. I felt we'd accomplished at least the physical and logistical part of our mission.

And then there was the spiritual part. I’ve always been a sucker for all things mystical, especially if they involve ceremony. I felt an immediate reverence for this place we were about to consecrate, picturing my dad and his friend standing there, dirty and exhausted, celebrating their success slogging their way across to the other side of the peninsula. And I thought of all the millions of footsteps that have followed in theirs over 75 years.

We paused for trail lunch**** before starting out across the 52-rod—about 285 yards—trail.

I dug out the small packet of Dad’s ashes I’d filched from the plastic-lined boxful we got from the crematorium. As we slowly retraced my father’s steps, I scattered the sacred dust here and there, saving some to anoint the lake on the other side. And I handed each member of the expedition one of the commemorative glass medallions as a keepsake.

I’ve filed a detailed description of the plaque's and medallions' burial site with my will.

As we walked back, I scouted the surroundings for the best place to bury the glass plaque and the remaining six medallions. I spotted a rock outcrop with a distinctive, linear groove. Following that line down to the point where it receded beneath the soil, I measured off a few feet past that and dug a hole in the spongy, peat-like earth. And there I carefully laid the mementos, along with the last of Dad's ashes.

After I solemnly replaced and tamped down the soil, we gathered on the trail. There was no question that Dad was present. Those who felt the inclination offered heartfelt reflections about him and about the extraordinary experience we were sharing. Some read or recited poems; others simply offered their memories of Dad. I shared one of my favorite T.S. Eliot quotes from his Four Quartets:

“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

We made camp that night on a lovely island not far from the portage, and laid over there for one more day before heading back home.

Our paddle back across the border was much more tranquil than the one getting to Saganagons—and no snow this time. I think we all felt a sense of accomplishment, as 50-somethings, having proved our mettle against the challenges of the wilderness, albeit for just five days.

And I felt I’d done my father proud, acknowledging a part of him I’d barely known, but came to greatly admire and respect. I realize it’s pure romanticism, but I’ve filed a detailed description of the plaque's and medallions' burial site, complete with map and photos, with my will.

My hope is that one of my antecedents—who knows how far into the future—might learn of this tribute through family lore, and mount their own quest to find Oscar Willius’s and Bob Clough’s portage and excavate the buried medallions.

Call me a dreamer; I guess it's in my blood.

* The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is a 1,090,000-acre (4,400 km2) wilderness area within the Superior National Forest in northeastern Minnesota (United States) under the administration of the U.S. Forest Service. Its network of glacial lakes, streams and connecting portages provides over 1,200 miles of canoe routes.

** Until cans were outlawed in the BWCAW in 1971, the accepted practice had been to put empties into your fire to burn off their inner coating of shellac, and then sink them in the deepest part of the lake where one presumed they’d eventually rust and disintegrate.

*** Both Saganaga and Saganagons are Ojibwe for something like "lake of many islands."

**** Traditional "trail lunch," formulated for simplicity, packability, freshness without refrigeration and high caloric content, consists of: a chunk of hard salami, a chunk of cheese, a few RyeCrisp crackers, peanut butter and jelly, a handful of raisins, a few squares of Bakers semi-sweet chocolate and a cup of Kool-Aid. More recent interpretations have replaced several of these items with a few handfuls of gorp. Swapping some of these components among trip members is common.

HUES ON FIRST – Rallying Against Chromophobia

When I was a first grader I adored crayons. Those elegant little, translucent cylinders of pure color. I’ll bet you did too.

At school I had to scrounge stumps of them in various lengths from a cardboard box. Soon, though, I got my very own set of Crayolas. I was happy to have them, but it was only an eight-pack, just the basics. So I kept going back to that ratty remnant box because that’s where I could find the subtler, more complex colors.

Then my mom—once a commercial artist, by the way—bought me the big 48-color box, the one with neatly stepped tiers of crayons, some in shades falling in between the basic, primary colors: blue-green, gold ochre, red violet…oh, and the metallics. These, I thought, were colors worthy of keeping within the lines.

I was tickled pink. Even then, as a six-year-old, I knew the power of color to tap into one’s creativity and express one’s temperament.
 
        Purple might be risky and brown was
        to be avoided at all costs.

GOING PRO
Much later, as a graphics designer—thanks, I’m sure, to the encouragement of that first-grade teacher, Miss Whittier—I applied my way with color to the design solutions I crafted for clients, from mom-and-pop furniture stores, to dentists, to universities and symphony orchestras.

Part of my stock in trade was just knowing which colors from my trusty PMS swatch book* would and wouldn’t work for each project. Knowing that you don’t use pink for a bank, olive drab for a restaurant or blood red for a hospital.

I don’t know that anyone actually taught me those rules; it just seemed intuitive. You know, that for a more staid client, purple might be risky and that, for most any client, brown was to be avoided at all costs.

RULES FOR THE BREAKING
As instinctive as that color sense was for me, there’s also lots of research to back it up. It confirms that yellows suggest brightness, cheer and hope. Reds can evoke energy, urgency, anger and danger. Blues portray calmness and trust; greens, freshness and serenity.

While they know these “rules” very well, designers in nearly every field occasionally find value in breaking them for shock value or when they want to push the boundaries of “taste.”

PHOTO: Beautiful Stitches

For example, an edgy tech client (like Yahoo) or one that wants to connote luxury (like Crown Royal whisky), might find a shade of purple quite effective. (That latter interpretation may derive from purple dye’s having been so rare and expensive in ancient cultures that it was affordable only to royalty.)

               UPS has exploited one of the
               least desirable colors: brown.

BRANDING
It’s fascinating, isn’t it, how the color landscape has been mined to identify various companies and causes, each of them appropriating a hue they hope will distinguish them in the marketplace.

IBM grabbed blue a long time ago—in 1947. Later, Verizon claimed red; Heineken, Starbucks and Holiday Inn all took green; while Home Depot and Dunkin’ Donuts have seized on orange.

In what I’ve always felt was one of those gutsy, outside-the-lines moves, UPS has successfully exploited what’s considered one of the least desirable colors for any entity’s branding: brown. All the better, I guess, to ensure no one steals it.

(The only client I remember identifying with brown was the Cornucopia Society, the elite giving club that helps fund the Wells Fargo Family Farm at the Minnesota Zoo. The cover of my brochure for them featured a wavy brown background suggesting a furrowed field.)

SOCIAL CAUSES
In 1979, a Jaycees ladies service organization in Leitchfield, Kentucky organized what became a hugely popular campaign to "Tie A Yellow Ribbon" around trees in yards and public spaces to show support for the U.S. hostages being held in Iran.

Since then scores of other organizations have adopted colors for their causes, among them: red for heart disease and AIDS; orange for leukemia; violet for Hodgkins lymphoma; teal for sexual assault; pink for breast cancer; and green for almost anything related to the environment.

STOP AND GO
And just think of all the other aspects of our culture we’ve come to associate with colors. Often they’re so ubiquitous that we no longer even notice. The iconic red, yellow and green of traffic lights; warning signs; status lights on machines; wire and piping identification; filing tabs… I could go on.

Some brilliant planner realized that even the most confusing mazes of floors and hallways of buildings or building complexes can be color coded to simplify navigation. Someone else must have decided that blue and pink should identify the gender of babies.

And now, more than ever, color has come to define our politics. God forbid any respectable MAGA republican get caught wearing a blue cap; no democrat, a red one! And for the dwindling number of “independent” voters, maybe there should be a color for that too, perhaps a nice red-blue shade of violet.

      Fear and disappointment
      have sucked the color out of our spirits.

ZEITGEIST
Have you noticed what’s happened over the past few decades to the colors of some of American culture’s key expressions of personal identity: clothing, housing and cars? It’s as if the flame of color has just gone out.

First of all, what’s this dark attachment we have with black? Apparently folks need to display various shades of “attitude”—you know, “Hey, I’m outrageous, don’t fv<& with me!”—as if that’s a good thing. Show me 100 heavy metal band tour t-shirts and I’ll show you 95 black ones. For goth shirts, I’ll show you 100—these poor folks are even afraid of the color of their own skin.

This love affair with black is complicated, though; the color does suggest sadness and depression, but in fashion it can also come across as pure elegance, the perfect backdrop for colorful accessories.

Here in Minnesota, where we starve for Nature’s show of color during our long, cold, monochrome winters, you’d think we’d want to pump up our parkas with shades of optimism and joy. Alas, most winter days we’re a sea of sad, drab fiberfilled nylon puffballs.

And our homes; they run the gamut from white to gray to—if you're really adventurous—perhaps a nice, muted tan. Thank God Sally and I can spend a month in Mexico every year, soaking up their delicious colors.

And cars. Cars are half as colorful as they were 20 years ago. According to the website iSeeCars.com, only 20 percent of today’s cars are non-grayscale colors (white, black, gray, and silver) compared to 40 percent in 2004.

CUES FROM NATURE
So, where did this chromophobia come from? For what it’s worth, I think it may have started as far back as Richard Nixon’s brazen betrayal of Americans’ trust. I think that's when we really started doubting ourselves and each other.

That was the first in a series of dispiriting events that have left many with a kind of dystopian view of our prospects—most noteworthy 9/11, the pandemic, and lately our political polarization. Fear and disappointment have sucked the color out of our spirits.

PHOTO: AP

We can do better. Let us be more aware of the colors that gladden our lives…and those sad voids they might once have inhabited. And let us take our cues from Nature, whose palette has always inspired us at our happiest.

* PMS stands for the Pantone Matching System, a proprietary numbering system for colors used by artists, designers worldwide for accurate color identification, design specification, quality control and communication.

GOLD METTLE – The Spirit and Spectacle of the 2024 Paris Olympics

Okay, I’m an Olympics junkie. Each time this, the most sumptuous of sports smorgasbords—summer or winter—comes around Sally and I are there, glued to the TV, gobbling up as much of it as possible.

What is it about this spectacle that so many of us find nourishing? Why is its conclusion affecting me a bit like the last night of camp?

First of all, aren’t we all fascinated just to watch our fellow Homo sapiens push the limits of our species’ speed, strength, elegance and creativity? And not just the physical feats; there’s also the gamut of emotions that sport elicits—you know, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat.* 

PHOTO: Cameron Spencer/Getty Images

As with any sport at any level, the Olympics summons a sense of pride by association. We want our athletes to win as if somehow their glory might rub off on us. Like we’re a hundredth as magnificent.

           Nearly every encounter, win or lose,
           ends in honor and grace.

ESSENTIAL VALUES
I’ve always been a sucker for pageantry, and the Olympics is steeped in it, from the Parade of Nations, to the lighting of the torch, to the medal presentations and playing of national anthems. 

PHOTO: François-Xavier Marit-Pool/Getty Images

And then there’s the magic that occurs when different personalities and cultures come together in a common endeavor. It’s as much one of cooperation as of competition. A celebration not just of athletic prowess or logistical mastery, but of some of the essential values that define our humanity: hope, courage, perseverance, integrity.

PHOTO: Athit Perawongmetha/Reuters

PHOTO: Irish Independent

Sure, there’s intensity. Frustration, passion, grit…occasional wrath. But, whether it’s because of the rules of the game or the participants’ essential kindness, nearly every encounter, win or lose, ends in honor and grace. And when a young athlete who’s sacrificed everything else in her life to get there ends up on that podium, tearfully mouthing the words to her national anthem, how can we not be moved?

From Singapore’s 17-year-old Max Madera’s bronze in men's kite foiling—his nation’s only medal of the competition—to the transcendent Simone Biles and her comeback from emotional overload during the Tokyo games, the incredible range of life experiences brought to the competition by the Olympic athletes expresses most elegantly the beauty and value of diversity in our world.

          They’ve cast their light into the dark
          corners of our fear and division.

OUT OF DARKNESS
Finally, I cannot end this Olympics celebration without acknowledging the world-affairs context in which this years games have played out. For that colors how each of us perceives wonder.

At long, tragic last, the world has emerged from the pall of a pandemic. (The Tokyo summer games, if you recall, were postponed a year over COVID concerns.)

PHOTO: Washington Post

It’s a time when our country’s—and some other countries’—heart and soul have been under siege, with powerful people and nations conspiring to undermine democratic institutions, cheat their way to wealth and power and even challenge the very notion of truth.

And, as if that weren’t enough, the very survival of our species on the planet we’ve so abused, finds itself under more dire threat by the day.

ILLUSTRATION: Fabrizio Fadda, Dreamtime

In this perilous world, what a blessing these 2024 Summer Olympic Games have been. They’ve entertained us, lifted our spirits, touched our hearts. They’ve evinced the transcendence of the human spirit and, at least for a couple of weeks, cast their light into the dark corners of our fear and division.

We’d better hope the glow lasts; two years (until the 2026 Winter Olympics in northern Italy) is a long time in darkness.

* The promotional tagline, “The thrill of victory, the agony of defeat,” was popularized by Jim McKay, host of ABC Television’s Wild World of Sports, starting in 1961.