Blogs

By Dean Norman

A young man who was a guide in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) told me this story.

I was a guide for a professor, his daughter and her husband in the Boundary Waters. The trip was a wedding gift for his daughter and son-in-law. I don’t know if it was supposed to be their honeymoon, or whether the kids had already done that somewhere else. Anyway, it was a canoe trip unlike any other trip I guided.

As we paddled along a lake, the professor looked at a map and suddenly pointed to the shore, and said, “I want to camp here tonight.” It would be a place that was overgrown and buggy, and no sign that anyone had ever camped there. The campsites in the BWCA are marked on the maps. They are places where Indians and voyageurs camped for thousands of years. There are usually some big trees, open grassy areas beneath the trees, and rocky points where the breeze will keep the mosquitoes away.

So why would the prof want to camp where nobody would want to camp? He was a botanist and wanted to look for rare plants. So I would have to clear brush away with an ax so we could set up tents and make a fire.

One time he pointed to a little lake on the map that was off of the canoe routes. “What is this lake?” he asked.

“Oh, it doesn’t have name,” I said. “Probably no one has ever been there. It’s not on the canoe routes and not big enough to be good for fishing.”

“I want to go there,” he said. “I might find some rare plants. Maybe some that no botanist has ever found before.”

And he didn’t want to just walk around the lake looking for rare plants. He wanted to canoe the lake and look for plants in the water, too. So I lugged a canoe into the lake. It wasn’t far, but it wasn’t just a walk through the woods. It was up a steep hill. There was a cliff where I had to shove the bow up onto the top, and then climb up the cliff and drag the canoe up.

After about a week the son-in-law whispered to me, “Can you find some way to cut this short? This is the worst vacation me and his daughter have ever had.”

I said, “Well, he has paid for the trip, and it would be dishonest for me to think of some reason to cut it short.”

So we survived the two weeks, and nobody except the professor enjoyed any of it.

It was the toughest canoe trip I ever guided. But it was educational. I learned a lot from listening to the professor talk about plants.

— Dean Norman

Dean Norman is a cartoonist and humor writer, whose work has appeared in greeting cards, The New Yorker, MAD Magazine, The Cleveland Plain Dealer Sunday Magazine and The Kansas City Star. He's also written comedy for cartoon shows and written and illustrated children's books. He illustrated a cartoon book for Cleveland Metroparks, Cleveland Metroparks Adventures.