A Trip to the Boundary Waters

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, David, Books, Arts, Storytelling, Wnyc, New, Remnick, News Commentary, Yorker, Politics

4.2 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 9 August 2022

⏱️ 25 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Alex Kotlowitz is known as a chronicler of the city of Chicago, and of lives marred by urban poverty and violence. His books set in Chicago include “An American Summer,” “There Are No Children Here,” and “Never a City So Real.” But 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. The stretch of wilderness is known as the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Larger than the state of Rhode Island, it is a patchwork of more than a thousand lakes, so pristine you can drink directly from the surface. At the age of sixty-seven, he finds the days of paddling, the leaky tents, the long portages, the schlepping of days’ worth of food (and alcohol) harder, but Kotlowitz will return to the Boundary Waters as long as he can. This spring, he brought a recorder with him on his annual canoe trip, capturing what has kept him coming back year after year. Plus, Susan Orlean remembers Ivana Trump, who died last month, at the age of 73.

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.
0:10.6	This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'm David Remnick.
0:13.6	It's August, and if you haven't been away yet this summer, you're probably thinking
0:18.0	about getting out of town now.
0:19.6	Maybe to a beach, a lake, a water park, somewhere, anywhere.
0:24.1	And one of our contributors, Alex Kotlowitz, has been returning to the same stretch of
0:27.7	woods, summer after summer, for something like 40 years.
0:32.6	If you know Alex Kotlowitz's work, that may come as a surprise.
0:36.5	He is a really important chronicler of urban life and poverty in the city of Chicago.
0:41.3	His books include an American summer, there are no children here, and never a city so
0:46.8	real.
0:47.8	All of them set in Chicago.
0:49.5	So when I think of Alex, I don't imagine him paddling a canoe.
0:53.7	But in fact, at a young age, he found himself on a lake deep in the woods of the northern
0:57.6	Midwest, and part of him is never left.
1:01.2	Here's Alex.
1:03.2	I was 19 and had taken a break from college.
1:05.9	I'd been working as a community organizer in Atlanta, and I was unsure what lay ahead.
1:11.7	A friend living in Minnesota suggested that he and I had north, and so we traveled 300
1:17.7	miles from Minneapolis to this remote road called the Gunflin Trail.
1:23.6	Here at the end of the road, within reach of the Canadian border, we rented a canoe, and
1:29.4	followed a sneaking river into a series of lakes, each more beautiful than the last.
	...

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