A Season for Wilderness
Chapter "July 14 - The Widji Way" has been read many a time at closing campfires.
This book is no longer in print, so thanks to Michael Furtman for permission to share here.
We are back into the swing of things.
Went to Wednesday Bay and back today. Cleaned sites and watched the young eagle in nest 321E. Almost as if we had never left, it was standing in exactly the same place on the nest's edge as it had been the last time we passed through.
We also spotted one of the few other wood and canvas canoes we've seen this summer, a beautiful boat built by Joe Seliga of Ely.
The Widji Way
There was no mistaking it. Pulled up on the gently sloping shelf of granite that spreads wide at the base of Table Rock was the graceful form of a wood canoe. As we cruised by a ray of sun shot from between two clouds and struck the campsite, bathing the canoe in light. The craft's cedar interior glowed butterscotch.
Since we are devotees of the wooden canoe, and they are fairly rare these days, we paddled to shore to take a closer look. As we neared, a young man in his early twenties walked to the water's edge, followed by four teenage boys. Seeing the wooden canoe, the guide and the boys, I knew immediately then that they were from Camp Widjiwagan outside Ely, one of the many camps that send thousands of youths into the canoe country each year.
We introduced ourselves to the young guide and he helped us ashore. Unlike most who try to assist us, much to my consternation, by drag- ging the canoe fully loaded across the rocks, this young fellow waited until we stepped out into the water and then helped me lift the canoe dear and set it gently down. He knew how to treat a canoe, especially a wood canvas canoe.
I had been impressed with most of the groups we had seen this summer from Widjiwagan. They almost always traveled in two canoes in groups of no more than five people, like this one. Unlike some other camps that each dispatch hordes of kids each summer, mostly in groups of ten and often with what we considered very poor supervision, the groups from Widjiwagan were usually small and had always appeared well guided. The other groups were sometimes announced from miles away by the banging of aluminum canoes on rocks and the screaming of teenagers, disturbing every other camper and the wildlife. Parties from Widjiwagan came and went quietly, almost as if they had never been there, leaving no sign of their passing.
While this is something that should not have to be wondered at, it too often is. Not leaving any sign of your passing, making no impression on other campers or the land should be the rule in wilderness travel. More than anything this is a lesson the youth camps should be teaching, trying to instill a respectful land ethic. Wilderness is the perfect place for this lesson for if children can not learn to respect the land here, what hope is there?
I have heard the guides from Widjiwagan express this ethic as the "Widji Way." It is as good a name as any and in their case it is not simply dogma, but a fact. I have watched them come and go all summer.
A great part of this, I believe, begins with their use of wooden canoes. Widjiwagan has a great store of wood canvas canoes dating back many decades, each one the veteran of untold wilderness canoe trips. Those who think wood canvas canoes are delicate things need only inquire as to the history of some of these wonderful old boats to know that they are as durable as they are beautiful. But they do need, like the land, to be treated respectfully.
We choose to paddle such a canoe. Built for us by Alex Comb of Stewart River Boatworks in Two Harbors, Minnesota, this replica of the famed Chestnut Cruiser has a lineage better than my own. One of the designs that had opened up the north country across all the Great Lake states and Canada, it is as much a part of the canoe country as those trees from which it came. The successor to the birch bark
canoe of the Indians, it is for the most part, made of the cedar that rims the lakes of the northland. When we paddle that canoe we feel a link to nature.
I have watched groups from Widjiwagan approach a portage. The canoe is unloaded while it floats, never touching land, the youths standing up to their knees in water, passing the packs to shore. When unloaded, the canoe is lifted from the lake, carried through the forest and set down gently, in the water. There is no noise, no grating of aluminum or fiberglass on rock, no telltale bits of ground up canoe on boulders to mark their passing. Even when one of their canoes is not wood, it is treated with equal care. If all visitors to the wilderness took such care, it would be better for it.
Because a wooden canoe is so beautiful, and because its canvas skin does require some consideration, the respect shown for it has a tend- ency to carry over to a respect for the land. This land ethic is very important for it is an attitude that must be developed in all of us before we succeed in fouling the entire planet. When we build things that are indestructible, and there is a difference between indestructible and merely durable, we sometimes put ourselves at odds with nature. If your canoe is tougher than the canoe country granite, will you still defer to it? Will you concede to it the eons it has known, the history that it has seen or will you deal it a blow?
But a land ethic is more than this. Developing a respect for the land means realizing that you are a part of it and not separate from it. That all things, living or not, are so intertwined as to be as the weave of a fabric. When we begin to unravel this cloth, as now seems to be the rule in this troubled world, it weakens so that eventually it is no more than gauze. When we have pulled one thread too many from this fabric, it will disintegrate around us and no one will be able to piece it back together again.
It is as if by the very virtue of being human, we believe that we can do what we may, simply because it is possible or convenient and not because it is needed or right. I see this egocentricity on a small scale here, in small, unthinking acts. If we teach it is right to bathe ourselves in a pristine lake, or do our dishes there, or to use it to dispose of
waste or fish offal, what consequences will these lessons have once we leave the wilderness? It may be a only a bar of soap here but the message is the same: we have the right to pollute. The difference between washing your dishes in a lake and flushing your city's waste water into the Mississippi River is only a matter of degree.
I know the feeling that each of us has, that we are unable to stem this dirty tide, that our actions alone are meaningless. This is a dangerous trap for if individuals cease to try, how can the race as a whole succeed? Let us each build our own land ethic first, stone by stone as if in a wall, and we may find that this fence is substantially complete, our neighbors busy building too all the while we struggled.
It starts with respect. It begins with learning that each animate being and inanimate thing has a right to exist and that you can not change the least of these without affecting the whole. This right to exist also includes the need to use, as in a deer browsing a sapling or a man or wolf killing and eating that deer. Such acts must be kept in balance, and to do so, mankind needs to understand his dependency on nature. Without nature, man would perish both spiritually and physically. Nature is far more important to us than we are to it, and would flourish in our absence. We are but as a baby at its mother's breast, and are totally dependent.
A lot to infer, maybe, from the way a group treats its canoes. Perhaps, but this camp was clean and quiet, filled with impressionable teens who were absorbing an important lesson in respect. I felt optimistic as we left, for they had been taught the Widji way. Maybe we should send the whole world to Camp Widjiwagan.