I've been canoeing the boundary water since I was 12 years old.

My father took me the first time, a five-day trip out of Ely, Minnesota, into Moose Lake,

and then north through a chain of portages, into the Quedico Provincial Park on the Canadian side.

I remember almost nothing about that trip except the sound the loons made at night,

and the feeling of being somewhere that had no roads, no buildings, no electricity,

no evidence that the modern world existed at all.

Just water and rock and spruce and sky, and the two of us in a 17-foot

aluminum canoe that was older than I was. I'm 36 now. I've paddled the Boundary Waters

canoe area wilderness at least 40 times, probably more. I stopped counting after 20. I've

gone in every month from April through November. I've been in white-out

blizzards on Basswood Lake in October. I've portaged through waste-deep mud on the

horse river in June. I've paddled at night on Lac La Croy by moonlight with wolves howling on the

shoreline so close I could hear their breath between howls. I'm not easily shaken out here.

This is the place I know best in the world. Better than my apartment in Duluth. Better than the office where I work as an environmental

analyst for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. The Boundary Waters is where I go to be myself,

completely and without complication. And I've never once felt unsafe in all

those years and all those trips. Until May of 2003, I need to put this down in writing because

it's been 11 months, and I still can't sleep through the night without waking up and checking

the locks on my doors, and I live in an apartment on the third floor in Duluth.

There are no locks to check that would matter.

But I check them anyway, and then I stand at my window and look down at the parking lot

and the street lights, and I wait for my heart rate to come back down before I go back

...