This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. It's August, and if you haven't been away yet this summer, you're probably thinking about getting out of town now. Maybe to a beach, a lake, a water park,

somewhere, anywhere. And one of our contributors, Alex Kotloitz has been returning to the same

stretch of woods, summer after summer, for something like 40 years. If you know Alex Kotlohitz's work,

that may come as a surprise. He is a really important chronicler of urban

life and poverty in the city of Chicago. His books include an American summer. There are no children

here and never a city so real. All of them set in Chicago. So when I think of Alex, I don't imagine

him paddling a canoe, but in fact, at a young age, he found

himself on a lake deep in the woods of the northern Midwest, and part of him has never left.

Here's Alex.

I was 19, and had taken a break from college. I'd been working as a community organizer in Atlanta,

and I was unsure what lay ahead. A friend living in Minnesota

suggested that he and I head north, and so we traveled 300 miles from Minneapolis to this remote

road called the Gunflint Trail. Near the end of the road, within reach of the Canadian border,

we rented a canoe and followed a snaking river into a series of lakes, each more beautiful than the last.

My anxieties peeled away. I had never experienced such stillness.

This is the Boundary Waters, a wilderness area bigger than the state of Rhode Island, home to over a thousand lakes,

each connected by rocky paths or portages, as are called, ranging from 80 feet to several miles.

It feels mythical here, so pristine that you can drink directly from the lakes.

The only way in is by canoe, and once you're in, if you don't have a map,

forget about it.

You're a goner, lost in this jigsaw puzzle of lakes,

...