A Trip to the Boundary Waters

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2023

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in the city include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” Nevertheless, for some 40 years he has returned to a remote stretch of woods, summer after summer. At a young age, he found himself navigating a canoe through a series of lakes, deep in the woods along Minnesota’s border with Canada. This stretch of country is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Larger than Rhode Island, it is a patchwork of more than a thousand lakes, so pristine you can drink directly from the surface. Now in his late sixties, Kotlowitz finds the days of paddling, the leaky tents, the long portages, and the schlepping of food (and alcohol) harder than before, but he will return to the Boundary Waters as long as he can. Last summer, he took a recorder with him on his annual canoe trip, capturing what has kept him coming back year after year. This segment originally aired on August 6, 2022.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.0	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. If you know the work of Alex Kotlowitz,
0:14.9	you associate his work with the city of Chicago. He's chronicled urban life and poverty
0:20.1	in books that include an American summer.
0:23.1	There are no children here, and never a city so real. All of them are set in Chicago.
0:28.8	So when I think of Alex Kotlowitz, I don't necessarily think of him paddling a canoe.
0:34.0	But at a young age, he found himself on a lake deep in the woods of the northern Midwest,
0:39.4	and he's gone back there again and again.
0:42.5	On a journey last summer, Alex recorded this piece for us.
0:46.9	I was 19 and had taken a break from college.
0:50.0	I'd been working as a community organizer in Atlanta, and I was unsure what lay ahead.
0:55.8	A friend living in Minnesota suggested that he and I head north,
1:00.1	and so we traveled 300 miles from Minneapolis to this remote road called the Gunflint Trail.
1:07.2	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.
1:20.6	My anxieties peeled away. I had never experienced such stillness. This is the Boundary Waters, a wilderness,
1:41.3	a wilderness area bigger than the state of Rhode Island, home to over
1:45.9	a thousand lakes, each connected by rocky paths or cordages, as are called, ranging from 80 feet
1:53.2	to several miles. It feels mythical here, so pristine that you can drink directly from the lakes. The only way in is by canoe,
2:03.6	and once you're in, if you don't have a map, forget about it. You're a goner, lost in this jigsaw
2:10.2	puzzle of lakes, some so small you can swim across them, a few so large they could swallow Manhattan.
2:22.0	From that first trip, nearly 40 years ago,
2:33.8	I was smitten. There's a line that I think about a lot from the conservationist and author Terry Tempest Williams. She writes,
	...

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