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MARK HEISTAD: The Land Between, An Oral Portrait of the Boundary Waters Canoe area.

[WATER LAPPING SOFTLY]

[BIRDS CHIRPING]

It's early morning in Portage Bay on Knife Lake in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. A thick mist hangs over the water. It varies in color from gray to green as the sun begins to rise above the tree line Eastern shore. A few odd-shaped columns of light break through here and there, illuminating small portions of the water's surface. It's September, a cool and quiet time in the Boundary Waters, cooler and quieter yet in this early morning. There is no sound, save the gentle Lapping of the water on the rocky shore and a loon in the distance calling out.

[LOON HOOTS SOFTLY]

There is much about this place to recommend it, the wildlife, the majestic pines, the gnarled cedars and colorful mosses. But it is the water, the pure, clear water that sets this place apart. There are more than 1,000 lakes in the Boundary Waters, scores of rivers and streams. Who knows how many rapids and waterfalls? Together, they create a place like none other. A drowned land, one early European visitor called it. More than a million acres, all told, of the best canoe country in North America, nearly 200,000 acres of water.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

[RAIN POURING]

Rain is plentiful in the Boundary Waters. More rain falls here than in the rest of the state. More rain falls than the Boundary Waters can hold. The water spills over, flowing into the interconnected lakes and streams. It flows South to Lake Superior and North to Hudson's Bay. The soils are thin here, but the vegetation is well adapted to make use of the rain. The lichens and mosses, dry and brittle, nearly dormant when dry, come to life and sponge up the rain, holding it in reserve for the forest. Cracks and crevices in the rocks for millions of tiny reservoirs, holding the water, replenishing the woods.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

It took a long time to make this place. A million years ago, the rains that today replenish the North woods would have fallen on a hill country, a range of small old mountains. Lush forests grew on the slopes. Small streams were numerous. There were few lakes. Then came the glaciers, great sheets of blue ice, thousands of feet thick, millions of acres wide. The advancing glaciers wore down the hills, scraped the soil and vegetation from this country, depositing it several hundred miles to the south, where it would become the fertile soils of the Great Plains.

About 10,000 to 14,000 years ago, the glaciers finally receded from this country. The rain then fell only on rock raw, barren granite. There were no mosses, no ferns, no trees, not even soil to soak up the rains. Just rock and water. The glacier had been harsh. What had been a lush, gentle, rolling hill country before the ice was now a severe and rugged land. Giant boulders were strewn about, deep gouges cut into the rock.

But the glacier had been wise. Behind the boulders and in the gouges, the glacial melt and the rains accumulated. Lakes formed, cool, clear, pure lakes. The rains tried hard to break down the sturdy granite, to release the minerals and nutrients, but the rocks would not yield. The water remained pure.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

Not long after the last glacier receded north, life began to reassert itself here. Lichens blown North by the wind found homes on the rocks. Simple, hearty plants able to find what little nourishment there was in rock and rain alone. Mosses followed then small flowering plants. Tundra developed and the rains fell on a stark, treeless scrubland, broken only by the many lakes.

About 9,000 years ago, the first trees appeared in this region, black and white spruce at first. Then, not more than 1,000 years later, the first pines moved in, scruffy Jack pines probably. A century or so after that, little more than 7,000 years ago, the first tall pines began to rise above the boreal forest. Norway pines first, then the White pines. Giants among trees, they rose 100 feet and more into the air, their trunks many feet in diameter. The North woods had reached maturity.

[THUNDER RUMBLES]

For 7,000 years, these woods have been here, the pines and spruce and Balsam and Aspen and birch. Beneath them have run all variety of woodland creatures, deer, moose, bear, wolves. In the sky above, all variety of birds with more life yet found in and around the waters. But the woods is not static. Changes have been many. The natural cycle of birth and death, new life growing from the old has ruled here as it has all over the Earth. The key to that cycle here has been fire.

[FLAMES CRACKLING]

For centuries, this country has periodically burned. Forest fire has been the fundamental force in the North woods. Just as the rain sustained the force through the years, fire rejuvenated it through the generations. Years ago, when it was dry, hundreds of thousands of acres would burn at a time. Even when rain was plentiful, there would be fire. Through the centuries, the woods adapted, the tall pines grew thick bark resistant to all but the hottest fire. And there grew tall, so only the biggest blaze could reach the top. Other species developed their own strategies to survive, fire to regenerate after the fire, and the woods lived on.

In a small log cabin on the southwestern shores of Gunflint Lake, there lives an old woman who knows the North woods of the Boundary Waters about as well as anyone. She is Justine Kerfoot. She came to this country in the late 1920s. Her family had fled to the North after the stock market crash, hoped to make a living off a small fishing resort. Justine Kerfoot is 80 years old. She is small in stature. She's a sturdy woman and vigorous, and she is a woman of the woods.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: So many people have just touched it. They go through it. They camp at various campsites. They see a little game here and there, and they're gone again. They haven't lived through all of its moods and seasons, and that makes quite a difference. It isn't the same feeling for me because I've been in the woods so much with the Indians, it just feels like home.

MARK HEISTAD: Mm-hmm.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: It feels comfortable. It doesn't feel like I was-- it feels like I belong there.

MARK HEISTAD: For nearly 60 years now, Justine Kerfoot has traveled the Eastern Boundary Waters region. She's been a fishing guide, a successful resort owner, and an activist for the region. She's paddled countless lakes and rivers, packed over countless portages. She used to travel by dog sled in the winter. She still has an old canvas skin canoe. And she still gets out into the wilderness all on her own.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: I have a 13 foot lightweight canoe I can still wiggle around. I like the small water because it's not so windy. It's not so subject to wind. And also on the smaller streams, small lakes, that's where-- that's where the loons are because I think that's where the game kind of hangs around, whether it's protected a little bit more too.

MARK HEISTAD: Much has changed in this country in the years since Justine Kerfoot came to the North. The satellite antenna outside her cabin and the personal computer inside give evidence of that. But in the woods around her, much has remained the same.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: Between her and Seagull, that was all. Jack pine, still is. In this area, it was very largely poplar and birch, and still is.

MARK HEISTAD: In terms of the forest, the big stands of white pine, the big stands of red pine--

JUSTINE KERFOOT: The big stands of white pine and the big stands of Norway pine, they were all gone by the time I came up here 60 years ago. And that's been gone for so many years that in this interim, there hasn't been that great change that you might think that's taken place.

MARK HEISTAD: But if the woods around her, haven't changed that much in the 16 years Justine Kerfoot has lived on the edge of the Boundary Waters, the people have gone, or most of the Indians, all the old trappers. They've given way to resort owners and summer cabin people, the fishermen on vacation and the canoeists up from the cities. Once, an entire summer's travelers through this region would have numbered in the hundreds. Today, they come by the thousands.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: Well, gee, whiz, you know, it's like a freeway. So many people, you know, they go over about one portage, and they think, oh, gee, now I'm in the wilderness. And so there for, I would say, a portage or two, you're getting a terrific concentration. But when you go over about 10 or 12 portages, you shake them out fast. And the travel is-- follows to a very large measure where the old traders and trappers and Jiminy, gee, they've been traveling here for 100 years.

And so your canoe routes really follow that same trail, kind of. And you can get off to the side of that-- hmm-- probably a mile on a nice little lake. And you wouldn't see anybody all summer.

MARK HEISTAD: Yeah, do you get a sense of that, of being connected to something that's been going on for hundreds years up here when you get out and do a little paddling?

JUSTINE KERFOOT: Yeah, when I get out and walk across some of the portages, I think, gee, willikers, you know, the Indians and the traders and the trappers, and of course, we have all granite so it doesn't show. But you think, golly, you know, I'm walking the same place that they did all those years ago.

[GENTLE WATER SPLASHING]

MARK HEISTAD: Travel has not changed in the canoe country since the days of the voyageurs and before. Canoes today are more likely aluminum or fiberglass rather than bark or canvas skinned. But the paddling is the same, the rhythmic pattern, the sound of the paddle as it's pulled through the water.

[GENTLE WATER SPLASHING]

There are more than 1,500 miles of canoe routes in the Boundary Waters, routes not plotted by the Forest Service or outfitters but by thousands of paddlers over hundreds of years traveling in this most ancient of watercraft.

[WOODEN CLATTERING]

SPEAKER 1: Got it?

SPEAKER 2: Well, there's an extra pack there, guys. One of us is going to have to come back and get it.

MARK HEISTAD: A pair of canoers has arrived at a portage. There's a short but steep set of rapids between two lakes. An expert might try it, but this group will play it safe and portage around. There are four of them in the group, two to carry the canoes, two to carry the packs, and a dog who has no apparent assignment for the trek between the lakes.

SPEAKER 1: Seether, where'd you go?

MARK HEISTAD: Portaging is more a necessity than a pleasure. Unlike paddling, portaging is nearly always hard work. All portages seem to go more uphill than down. All seem longer than the map says. All seem obliged to include a few slippery spots, some mucky wet spot or two, and some low hanging branches. But like paddling, walking a portage is part of travel in the Boundary Waters.

Each year, more than 20,000 people come to walk the portages and paddle the lakes of the Boundary Waters. Most of them are from Minnesota, especially from the Twin Cities, but they also come from Texas and Florida and beyond. They come to escape the urban life, to visit someplace different for vacation. They come to get away from it all.

FRANK HANSEN: Absolute beauty, peace, quiet. No motors. No motor bikes. No radios. None of those foreign elements.

MARK HEISTAD: Mm-hmm.

FRANK HANSEN: We've all spent our time in the Sierra Nevadas of California, and you get away from people there. But maybe it is late in the season that we find ourselves in the Boundary Waters, but I'll guarantee you, we saw far fewer people here than you see in the Sierras. [CHUCKLES] We saw darn few people.

MARK HEISTAD: Yeah, yeah.

FRANK HANSEN: Which was one of the reasons we came.

SPEAKER 3: Didn't we talk one evening around the fire, saying how much it puts into perspective our city life because it is so wild and so very quiet and so very dark at night? I think that was one of the things we were talking about.

MARK HEISTAD: Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER 3: And definitely wilderness. We experience it, I think, when they first dropped us off with a speedboat and the guy disappeared on the horizon and we stood there on some wobbly rocks all by ourselves. And the wind came up. And my god, all of a sudden, it was just the four of us and nature. And it was frightening, but it was a marvelous feeling, really.

MARK HEISTAD: Even for those who live on the edge of the boundary. Waters, the wilderness is a special place. Frank Hansen is a canoe outfitter and a member of the Cook County commission. Each year, he makes at least one trip into the wilderness.

FRANK HANSEN: I'll tell you, it's a place that I get mellowed out. I don't know. Well, this happens to everybody. When I go out into the Boundary Waters, you know, I start out and I have a lot to do and a lot of different pressures on me. I'm usually up pretty uptight when I get going. And then I find two or three days later, I'm not thinking about those things anymore. And I come back, and things that were terrifically important just don't seem that important anymore. I can deal with them, you know? And I think this happens to a lot of people, you know, a lot of people.

MARK HEISTAD: And there are other attractions to this northern wilderness, the clean air, the clean water, the wildlife, and especially the solitude. Nancy Lochner is another lifelong resident of the region.

NANCY LOCHNER: It's just the peace and the quiet and the tranquility and just being able to sit on a shoreline all by yourself. There can be thousands and thousands of people in the Boundary Waters, but there's still a spot that you can just be all by yourself and watch the water and watch the wildlife. And it's just peaceful.

MARK HEISTAD: The late biologist and author Sigurd Olson found his spot in the woods on a point on burntside lake just outside the current Boundary Waters. He called the place listening point. For him, it was a place of solitude and of discovery.

SIGURD OLSON: From what I've seen, the immensity of space and glimpsed at times the grandeur of creation. There, I sense the span of uncounted centuries and looked down the path all life has come. I've explored on this rocky bit of shore the great concept that nothing stands alone, and everything, no matter how small, is part of a greater whole.

MARK HEISTAD: Sigurd Olson discovered and wrote about the Northwoods from his listening point, and in the process, he introduced thousands of Americans to his beloved canoe country. More than that, perhaps, he carried on the work of John Muir and Aldo Leopold and the others who had fought for the preservation of wilderness. His writing was deceptively simple, just stories really about canoeing and camping, what he'd seen and done in the woods. But within the stories, there was insight, an understanding of the workings of the woods. What another Minnesotan, Charles Lindbergh, called the wisdom of wildness.

SIGURD OLSON: Listening point is dedicated to recapturing this almost forgotten sense of wonder and learning from rocks and trees and all the life that is found there, truths that can encompass all. This remnant of the old wilderness would speak to me of silence and solitude, of belonging and wonder and beauty. Though the point was only a small part of the vastness, reaching far to the Arctic, from it, I could survey the whole.

MARK HEISTAD: Wilderness, Sigurd Olson once said, is a cultural necessity. Man cannot live a healthy life, he said, if he's too removed from his natural base, removed from the sense of oneness with the Earth. Olson's son, Sigurd Jr. often paddled through the Boundary Waters region with his father. They spoke of these things together.

SIGURD JR: We have this deep inner feeling. It's a inherited thing. It's a primal thing, I guess you would call it that. It's part of our nature. And we go back to our early being and to be able to experience this. And to some degree, some people have to have more, you know, like, everything. They have to have more of it than others do. Others, just a little touch of it. Just being able to go out and sit on a rock someplace and look out is enough. Other people have to get out and be in the midst of it and travel through it and experience hardship or, at least, experience the physical feeling of being in the woods.

MARK HEISTAD: Bill Hanson is another who came to the Boundary Waters through his father. He now runs a canoe outfitting business his father began on the sawbill trail North of Tofte back in the late 1950s. Hanson now earns his living introducing people to wilderness.

BILL HANSON: I think in our society today, particularly in the urban society, we're so out of touch with the way that the Earth works. And I think it's very important for people, both intellectually and on a deeper, more emotional level to get back in touch with the rhythms of sun, rain, moon, darkness, light, you know, water, wind, those types of things, which dictated our lives for how many thousands and maybe perhaps millions of years, and only has been in very recent times that we've lost touch with that.

I think Sig Olson used to talk about those deep rhythms that are almost instincts or reflexes in the humans, the-- anybody can see it when you look at a campfire. There's something that stirs in you when you look at fire, when you look at waves rolling in that isn't a learned response. It's in there somewhere deep within you.

[FLAMES CRACKLING]

A lot of people don't realize that there's a lot more to the Boundary Waters than the campsites and the portages. Most people never stray from the canoe routes, and it's probably good that they don't because the rest of the area is tremendously rugged, inaccessible area. It's not a forest that you can walk through peacefully. You can't take a stroll. It's a struggle to get through this forest. It's thick brush and dense undergrowth and very rugged terrain. And 99% of the Boundary Waters is still that way, untouched by man. It's out there existing in swamps and muskegs and Alder thickets, where no one wants to go, and for good reason.

MARK HEISTAD: On a large island on Seagull Lake, near the end of the Gunflint Trail, there stands a solitary Norway pine. It is 32 inches in diameter, more than 100 feet tall. This is the oldest Norway pine in the Boundary Waters, sole survivor of a stand dating from the year 1595. When this Norway was just a sapling, the Sioux controlled this region. Soon, though, they were forced out by the Ojibwe. Then, towards the end of this pines first century, the early French explorers came by this way.

Before it had turned 150, trappers and traders had become common. Then in the late 1800s, about the time this old pine would enter its fourth century of life, a new breed of man moved into the North woods-- loggers, men who came to take all they could, all there was to take. Before them, these woods had known only visitors, trappers, explorers, and Indians, transient people who had left little sign they'd been here. The loggers left in their wake acre after acre of nothing but stumps.

[WOODEN CRACKLING]

[TREE CRASHES]

The loggers were lured to the Minnesota Northwoods by the tall pines. White pine especially had long been prized. It grew straight and true. It was easy to work, yet strong. White pine had been logged in North America almost from the beginning of European settlement, but the Eastern forests were soon depleted. The loggers moved west, arriving in Northern Minnesota towards the end of the 19th century. They found a forest here where between a quarter and a third of the acreage was covered by the big pines. For the next quarter century, the loggers thrived.

From what would become the Boundary Waters, they cut and shipped to the great Midwestern cities, more than a billion feet of lumber. Only one of every 10 pines survived. Today, the tall pines make up less than 10% of the Boundary Waters forest. Some estimates say as little as 3% of the acreage is tall pine. And after the big pines were all but gone, the logging continued as the pulpwood industry moved into the region. They cut inside the Boundary Waters until the late 1970s and the forest was changed. Clifford Ahlgren is director of the Wilderness Research Center in Ely. He's been studying the Boundary Waters woods for more than 35 years.

CLIFFORD AHLGREN: This area, that the entire Lake states region was covered with big pines years ago, and the loggers, of course, took their share of it. In the tall pine area, which was cut over, in a lot of that area, rather than having the tall pines, the white pine and the red pine, some of those areas have now been covered by spruce fir species and also with Aspen hardwood with very little pine. So it has changed the landscape.

MARK HEISTAD: After the tall pine logging, there was a concern among foresters and conservationists that the White and red pine had been so heavily logged, they might not return. An aggressive planting program was begun. When American pine nursery stock was depleted, seedlings were imported from Europe. But unbeknownst to the foresters, the European trees carried a disease called white pine blister rust. The new disease spread rapidly across the country, putting an end to the replanting effort and infecting nearly the entire North woods.

CLIFFORD AHLGREN: Red pine and white pine are a part of that forest mosaic, and they are very important trees. Since they were there in the beginning, they should be there now.

MARK HEISTAD: But how to return the tall pines to the Boundary Waters woods? After a century of logging, after the introduction of white pine blister rust, after 70 years of suppressing fire in the woods, how to do it? And should it be done?

CLIFFORD AHLGREN: If you want to restore them, that these are the questions. You have to face them very squarely and ask yourself that if you want the long-lived pines, then you have to take the necessary steps to restore them. And as we feel from our studies, it is not going to come in there naturally, and it won't come in there by fire, it will have to come in some other means. And it may be that the human will have to intervene in this, like in the beginning, when they removed the tree. This land is disturbed. This land needs restorative type of work to get it back into as near a natural condition as possible, that of pre-settlement times.

MARK HEISTAD: To restore the tall pines to the Boundary Waters, Clifford Ahlgren and his wife Isabelle have proposed replanting them. For decades, they've worked on a strain of white pine, which appears to be resistant to the blister rust. They want to plant small stands of their varieties in the woods. But federal regulations governing wilderness forbids such a practice, and some forest ecologists fear there may be long-term consequences from introducing new varieties into the woods. Bud Heinzelmann is one such ecologist. He counsels, let nature take its course.

BUD HEINZELMANN: We simply are going to have to allow this battle to go on, and maybe white pine will win the battle. Maybe it won't. Things like that have happened in the past. There are extinctions that have occurred in the distant past as well of animals and plants. And conceivably, that is going to be the fate of the White pine. I personally don't think so. I'm satisfied that, given wilderness status for hundreds or even 1,000 years, if the climate is such that it's right for the red and white pine to continue to grow and there is, they would re-establish.

MARK HEISTAD: You take a real long view of all this, don't you? 100, maybe 1,000 years down the road.

BUD HEINZELMANN: Yes , and I think that's the view we should take of wilderness. In a forest, 100 years is nothing. 1,000 years is only two lifetimes of the old white and red pines that we have here, the maximum lifetimes of these species. It's a long time in terms of human history, I'm well aware. But hopefully, wilderness programs are for forever. And it's our best opportunity to have a chance to see primeval nature still at work.

MARK HEISTAD: But of course, primeval nature does not work unencumbered by man in the Boundary Waters. The centuries-old pattern of fire has been ended. What fires do start are quickly put out by the forest service, and the massive wildfires of years ago are no longer allowed to develop. But now, after years of discussion, the Forest Service has decided to begin a limited program, allowing some natural fires to burn. Barb Soderberg is a wilderness specialist with the Forest Service in Duluth.

BARB SODERBURG: I don't want to confuse anybody or mislead anybody where they think that we're just going to have these wild fires out there that we're going to allow to burn, you know, without any constraints. Even though we won't be out there putting out all fires immediately, we will have a person assigned that will be monitoring that fire. We'll know what's going on with that fire at all times. And we'll also be prepared to put that fire out if we need to put the fire out.

MARK HEISTAD: Justine Kerfoot is not a forest scientist nor a silviculture expert, but she's lived in the woods long enough to have seen fire at work.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: There was a bad, bad fire in '36. The fire was very extensive. Between North and South Lake, there's a high ridge. It was very heavily timbered. And the fire hit there, hit on both sides of the ridge, and it was like a cauldron. I sat out here and I could read a newspaper at night from the light of that fire way down to the next lake.

And when it was through, when the fire was over, there was nothing left. Normally, you know, there's stumps and sticks and stuff. There was nothing. It was absolutely bare, just bare rock. And I thought, holy Max, it's never going to grow up again, just never. It's going to be a great big bare rock. And in about, oh, I'd say five years probably, it was a little bit of grass started. And then pretty soon there was a few little trees started. And now, 40, 50 years later, 40 years later, it's all grown up again.

MARK HEISTAD: The Forest Service admits that it's decided to allow some limited burning in the woods, in part, to cut the cost of fire suppression. But Barb Soderberg says the service is also recognizing the role of fire in the woods.

BARB SODERBURG: I think you will see a more natural pattern of forests out there. We'll have younger forests. I would guess that besides a visual difference out there, it would benefit some of the wildlife. I would think that maybe we'll have a safer forest out there in terms of reducing some of the fuel buildup that happens to be there now because we've been putting suppressing fires for such a long period of time.

MARK HEISTAD: To allow fire in the woods for the agency that brought us Smokey the Bear and decades of fire prevention messages is something of a turnabout. And there is concern about keeping wild fires, at least, under surveillance, if not under control. In the noisy Main Street offices of the Ely Echo Newspaper, editor Bob Carey is a bit skeptical of the new policy.

BOB CAREY: Fire is an extremely touchy thing. Like the foresters will tell you about when you burn the timber, one of the two things-- you either can't get it lighted or you can't get it out. And so they know that we're building up to one heck of a forest fire here that's going to make some of those places like Big Sur and some of those look like a bonfire.

The conditions are right out there. We've got a tremendous amount of dead spruce, dead Jack pine, stuff piled up out there, tinder, and we get the right conditions, this thing will take the whole middle of the BWC out all the way, maybe up to Dryden, Ontario, right through the whole works here.

MARK HEISTAD: The current controversy over fire in the Boundary Waters is indicative of the modern history of this region. Fire is no longer the dominant force here. We are, the people who visit the region, the foresters, and legislators who decide how to manage it, the men and women who make their living in and around the Boundary Waters. Tom Ware and Woods Davis are canoe and fishing outfitters on Moose Lake in the Ely area.

WOODS DAVIS: Tom and I were next door neighbors in Stamford, Connecticut, and rode the New Haven railroad into Midtown New York every day and decided that life was not going in the direction we wanted it to by living in that environment. And for about three years prior to purchasing this business, we looked around the United States and Canada for a business that would concentrate in the North woods.

MARK HEISTAD: How much has this place changed in the 13 years you've been up here?

TOM WARE: Well, I don't think there's been much change at all in the physical aspects of the area. Certainly, the uses have changed and the types of people that are enjoying the Boundary Waters are changing.

MARK HEISTAD: Davis and Ware have seen their clientele change over the years because of changes in the federal and state laws governing this region. For more than 80 years now, the authorities have placed increasingly stringent restrictions on what is and is not allowed in and around the Boundary Waters. This region was first set aside for protection back in 1906 with the establishment of the Superior National Forest. Then in the '20s, road building was halted in about 1/3 of what would become the Boundary Waters. In the '30s, the logging of shorelines was forbidden.

In the '40s, airplanes were banned. Then in the mid 1960s, Congress passed the wilderness act, severely curtailing activities in wilderness areas. With several notable exceptions, the Boundary Waters was to conform with these new regulations designed to preserve the area from development.

TOM WARE: It's as natural as it can be, but still utilized by people who enjoy utilizing the wilderness. It has wildlife. It has clean lakes. We can drink the water right out of the Moose Lake, which is the lake that we live on.

WOODS DAVIS: It's just about the way that God made it when he originally made the area. It hasn't changed. The lakes are still there when they're originally conceived. The trees are still growing. There are no buildings. There are no roads. You can't land an airplane in the area. Only way you can get in there is by watercraft.

[ENGINE WHIRRING]

MARK HEISTAD: For about as long as they've been around, motorboats have been the watercraft of choice in many parts of the Boundary Waters. The area had gained something of a reputation as a good fishing spot, and each summer brought a flood of anglers in search of trout, northern and bass. They hired boats and motors, guides. A thriving resort industry grew up. Much of it depended upon the motorboat. Then in 1964, Congress banned motorboats and other vehicles from wilderness areas.

Though the Congress had exempted the Boundary Waters from those provisions, a movement soon grew up to have motorboats banned in the Boundary Waters as well. For more than a decade, the issue festered. In 1978, several Minnesota congressmen introduced a new law intended to settle the issue to put what had become a rather heated controversy to rest. The bill had strong support from National Environmental groups who pushed hard for a ban on motors and snowmobiles. The law passed. Kevin Preshold is with Friends of the Boundary Waters.

KEVIN PRESHOLD: There are so few places in this country where one can travel by primitive means. There are some 12,000 lakes in Minnesota, and all but the relative handful of those that exist in the Boundary Waters are open to motorized travel, both motorboat and snowmobile. And there should exist someplace where the experience is available for people who want to travel on primitive scale through the wilderness on its own terms.

MARK HEISTAD: But that the Boundary Waters should be the place with no motors, no snowmobiles did not set well with many in the area, the outfitters, resort owners, and others whose clientele over the years had primarily been the fishermen. Many, like Davis and Ware, though, adapted nonetheless.

WOODS DAVIS: We do see a lot of young people enjoying the area. Our business has been growing every year. The traffic is continuing. So there's new people replacing the old people. We are in a position where we sit back and watch people going through our outfitting doors. And the number of people going through is remaining quite constant or going up and business has been good. But the type of person is changing. And we seem to feel that it's too bad that some people got scratched off the list of being able to get access to the area by Congress making a decision.

[ENGINE WHIRRING]

MARK HEISTAD: The Main Street in Ely, Sheridan Street, makes little effort to hide the fact that this is a tourist town. There are outfitters, motels, restaurants and the like, all with names like Boundary Waters, Wilderness, and North woods. On the south end of the street, there's Salerno Land Sales company. The owner, Frank Salerno, is not nearly so philosophical about the restrictions imposed by the 1978 law.

FRANK SALERNO: There was a great concern over protecting something that wasn't in jeopardy. This community was a very thriving community before the passage of that 1978 legislation, and now it rather speaks for itself because the resorts that have been purchased by the federal government, the decrease in tourism activities in the area has severely impacted our local economy.

And when you couple that with reserve mining and its position today, it's a very serious position to find yourself in. And I think history, we're now sitting in '86, you know, and we've got eight years of history. And I fail to see the enhancement. I fail to see what was really produced for the area. And as a matter of fact, I fail to see the future being very bright.

MARK HEISTAD: The 1978 Boundary Waters Act was considered a compromise by most of the interested parties, but there remains a sense among some of the local residents, like Frank Salerno, that the arguments of national wilderness groups carried more weight with Congress than did the wishes of local residents. He is bitter about that.

FRANK SALERNO: I know many people in this community, and sure, they're upset and angry. You bet, I'm one of them. I'm upset. I'm angry. It's quieter now than it used to be. I don't stand up and pound my desk and things like I did six or seven years ago. But it's there. It's still churns and it still moves. And you would love just once, just love to say, hey, let's face this for what it really and truly is.

Let's get away from this nonsense and face the facts. Let's face the reality. I would say 65% to 70% of that legislation was totally unnecessary.

MARK HEISTAD: The 1978 Boundary Waters law remains an issue for many in this region in large measure because of the controversy that surrounded its passage. As Congress considered the bill, a spirited, often heated debate ensued between the interested parties. Rallies were held, provocative statements quoted in news stories. Politicians were burned in effigy, and there was lots of name calling.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: The fight got very bitter, in fact, it got nasty. And because I live here, because I have a commercial establishment, because I'm on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe area, I have suddenly become a sinner. And I'm an exploiter. I'm wanting to destroy everything. That I find difficult.

MARK HEISTAD: Justine Kerfoot has watched and participated in this and nearly every other debate about how the region should be managed over the years.

JUSTINE KERFOOT: I think that the Boundary Waters Canoe area has tremendous value, and I think it's something that should be preserved. And I've lived here long enough so that there was effort, there were efforts made to build a road across the BWCA. There was efforts made when the telephone was put in. If that had ever been developed in that manner, we wouldn't have anything. It might as well be down in Wisconsin or somewhere. And I think that it is something special, and I think it's something that should be preserved if it isn't tightened up so that nobody can use it.

MARK HEISTAD: Debate over how the Boundary Waters should be managed did not end with the 1978 law. There have been further revisions, further restrictions. Today, disputes over the Boundary Waters have played out in court, where competing interests argue over management strategies. Once again, national wilderness groups are involved. And again, Frank Salerno says the interests of residents like him are not being taken into account.

FRANK SALERNO: Lawsuits my god, these people sue everybody and their brother. And I mean, the fact here-- let me give you an example. I want to give you an example. You see this? That's the appeal to the Forest Service about the mechanical portages, the roads that will-- the dams they want to remove, the roads that are going to annihilate, the wolf-- take a look at this stuff. That weighs 8 pounds.

And this is what-- they kill you. They bury you in this kind of-- who can afford this? I can't afford it. I don't have the time. The people of Ely and Grand Marais and Crane Lake can't sit around and put this stuff together. And then they take this and they shove it under the Forest Service nose and/or a senator or congressman somewhere and they say, hey, this is the good stuff.

MARK HEISTAD: Frank Salerno of Ely.

KEVIN PRESHOLD: I guess the answer to that concern is that the area is a national treasure.

MARK HEISTAD: Kevin Preshold of the friends of the Boundary Waters.

KEVIN PRESHOLD: And because it is still an unmarred, relatively pristine wilderness area, the area is even more significant in its national sense. And while it may impose hardships or it may impose dislike among some of the local residents who are not able to use motorboats or snowmobiles in the area anymore, I feel strongly that it is in the best interest from the National perspective that happened, that there be one area, one lake, one wilderness in a country where non-mechanized travel is the only means for getting about.

MARK HEISTAD: Kevin Preshold of the Friends of the Boundary Waters. The banning of the motor boats, the snowmobiles, and the airplanes have brought a quiet to the Boundary Waters. Sound travels far over the water here, but it doesn't take many hours of travel into the canoe country before the only sounds are the birds and the trees and the water and the wind, the sounds of the wilderness.

[AIRPLANE WHIRRING]

Several times a year, the quiet of Knife Lake in the Western part of the Boundary Waters is shattered by this airplane. Airplanes have been banned here for nearly 40 years now, except for this one. In fact, for nearly every regulation, every rule in the boundary waters, the motorboat ban, the snowmobile ban, for each, there is at least one exception, an exception for a small, aging woman named Dorothy Molter.

DOROTHY MOLTER: I have rosebushes right here. And down on that end, I have a lilac bush.

MARK HEISTAD: Dorothy Molter's home is a cluster of three small, pine-covered islands on the Western edge of Knife Lake. Her summer cabin, a small, cluttered one-room shack with a canvas roof, is on the smallest of the three islands. The island is encircled by flower gardens planted in old rowboats. Several wind chimes hang from a big Jack pine. Dorothy Molter has lived on these islands since the 1930s. Back then, she had this area pretty much to herself.

DOROTHY MOLTER: Nobody lived up here. There was just a few trappers. There were two resorts farther up the lake, and they would stay just part of the winter. So it was just me.

MARK HEISTAD: Over the years, though, more resorts, more cabins were built around here. Then when the Boundary Waters was designated as a wilderness, they were bought out. Dorothy wouldn't sell.

DOROTHY MOLTER: It was the only home I ever knew of my own. And I had been here before they made it Boundary Waters or all this, before they made it roadless area and all that. I like it and I feel it's been my home for so long, I might as well stay.

MARK HEISTAD: The Portage into Takavic is--

DOROTHY MOLTER: Is right here.

MARK HEISTAD: Oh, OK. What are these sites like?

DOROTHY MOLTER: Well, they're all nice sites, but this--

MARK HEISTAD: Stopping at Dorothy Molter's has become something of a ritual for canoeists on Knife Lake. Here, they can get directions, advice about camp sites. More importantly, they can pick up some candy bars and a bottle of Dorothy Molter's homemade root beer. She used to sell all kinds of pop up here. Before they banned airplanes, she flew it in by the case.

DOROTHY MOLTER: But when the planes quit flying, then I got stuck with all the pop bottles I had. So I wasn't about to take him back over the portage and return them to town. So I just kept them. Thought I might as well keep them up here and do something with them. So somebody suggested making root beer. I'd never made it before, but they seemed to it.

MARK HEISTAD: Whether or not they buy any root beer, all visitors to Dorothy's place are asked to sign the guest book. This year's has nearly 6,000 entries. The books from years past include more than a few journalists sent out by editors to write about that old woman who lives all alone in the woods. Dorothy has not liked everything they've written. I want to ask you about this headline on the wall behind us.

DOROTHY MOLTER: Oh, I didn't like that.

MARK HEISTAD: "The Loneliest Woman in America."

DOROTHY MOLTER: I didn't like that at all.

MARK HEISTAD: Why not?

DOROTHY MOLTER: Well, for one thing, I'm not lonely. And who can be lonely up here? You can live in an apartment building in the city right across the hall from your neighbor and not see or know each other.

MARK HEISTAD: How much longer are you going to stay up here, stay in your tents in the summer and your winter cabin?

DOROTHY MOLTER: Well, as long as I'm able to make it, get around. If I feel myself getting sick, I'll get out.

MARK HEISTAD: Do you worry about that, having to leave here?

DOROTHY MOLTER: No, I don't worry about it. It's coming. Nothing I can do about it. So I'll just take things as they come.

MARK HEISTAD: Whenever Dorothy Molter finally has to leave the Boundary Waters, the fate of her home here has already been determined. Her cabins will be burned, the root beer ice chests removed, her docks destroyed. All possible sign that she once lived here will be eliminated, and this place will look a bit more like wilderness. That's what Congress intended when it passed the Boundary Waters act. This is to be wilderness, what the government defines as a place untrammeled by man. But it's not an easy task. Over the years, the fur trade, the lumber and mining industries, commercial fishing and hunting have all flourished in this country.

Tugboats and railroads cut through the woods here. Cabins and resorts built on the shores. The government has removed most all of that now. Only small sign remains, visible only to the most careful observer. A lilac bush standing guard over an abandoned resort site, a clearing where a cabin once stood. Slowly, man's footprints here are being erased.

KEVIN PRESHOLD: The changes that have happened have been fairly minor, if you look on the grand scale of things. For instance, we used to have portage signs out here that would tell you what the portage was and how long it was, and those are gone now. There used to be picnic tables on the campsites, and those are gone now. Certainly, the area is more visited than it was in the 1950s. So you do see more canoeists on the lakes than you would back then. But when you live here year round and you watch the area and you realize how minuscule man's impact is, you know, you would have to conclude that the change in the Boundary Waters itself has been tiny.

What's changed is people's attitudes toward it. Probably the largest change that I've seen since I've been here is that 30 years ago, people didn't really think of it as wilderness. I mean, I don't think that was a concept that was really on people's minds at that time. They more thought of it as a place for good fishing or a place for good hunting or a place for good relaxing, but not-- but didn't even use that word wilderness because it was just a gradual extension of the rest of Northern Minnesota.

And there were no sharp boundaries that people were aware of in any case. And now people, you know, come here expecting, seeking, and enjoying wilderness.

MARK HEISTAD: That what used to be a good fishing spot is now considered wilderness has caused no end of trouble for those trying to map this region's future. No matter how man-made intrusions are removed from the Boundary Waters, man's history here remains. Newell Searle has been a frequent visitor to the area. He is author of a history of the Boundary Waters.

NEWELL SEARLE: There is an ideal of wilderness which we would like the Boundary Waters to conform to, but I think we also-- most people recognize that there are practical limitations on conformance. We're dealing with an area that has a checkerboard of state and federal land holdings. At one time, it was a checkerboard of state, federal, and private land holdings. There are established uses which are non-conforming.

So there are practical adjustments that have had to be made along the line in order to bring the Boundary Waters closer to the ideal. But it is the tainting the last measure of perfection, if you will, the last measure of conformance, which is always the most difficult.

MARK HEISTAD: There has been, for years, a continuing difference of opinion about just how much of a wilderness the Boundary Waters has become and what that means. It's a situation that's caused no end of trouble and confusion, complicating nearly all decisions about this place. Real estate agent Frank Salerno.

FRANK SALERNO: Well, it's a fabricated wilderness.

MARK HEISTAD: How so?

FRANK SALERNO: Well, there used to be railroads running up there. There was logging under there. Wilderness is an area that's been untrammeled by man, OK? It's what Mr. Webster back there, calls it. And how can you say it's been untrammeled by man?

MARK HEISTAD: Forest ecologist and wilderness advocate Bud Heinzelmann.

BUD HEINZELMANN: The Boundary Waters, to me, is one of the finest, one of the highest quality wilderness areas in North America. It's unique, really, in that it's the only-- in the United States, it's our only lakeland wilderness. It's our only wilderness of any size that includes the Northern Great Lakes Pine Forest. It's a fascinating place.

FRANK HANSON: Wilderness is in the eye of the beholder.

MARK HEISTAD: Cook County commissioner and canoe outfitter Frank Hanson.

FRANK HANSON: It depends on where people think they are. You know, we have people who are very happy here on our primitive campground. Now, these sites are widely dispersed. You can can't see or almost not hear people on the next site, OK? You go to the city of Grand Marais, they have a campground too. There, you have trailers 10 feet apart, very high density. There are more people in the campground than there are in the whole city of Grand Marais.

Those people think they're camping too. I have some customers who are unhappy with the knowledge that there's anybody else in the whole Boundary Waters. You see, they want to be out there by themselves. So it depends on what you think is wilderness, you see?

MARK HEISTAD: It is ironic. But in order to preserve the wilderness experience for those who come to the boundary waters, a system of rules and regulations, a bureaucracy has developed. You can't take bottles or cans into the Boundary Waters. You can camp only on established campsites where there are permanent cast iron grates and government latrines. You even need a permit to get in. It's the first wilderness area in the country to require reservations. Newell Searle.

NEWELL SEARLE: I have to say that something about the idea of having a reservation to get into a wilderness strikes me as a contradiction in terms. You get reservations for hotels. You don't get reservations for wilderness. On the other side of that is once you're in, it's a less crowded place, and so you have that greater sense of solitude.

MARK HEISTAD: Yeah.

NEWELL SEARLE: But as you approach it from the outside, you approach the wilderness from the outside and you line up to get your permit and you go through all of this hotel lobby experience, it's a little unsettling. I can't say that I fully accommodated myself to that experience. The irony and probably the unintended result of all of the wilderness preservation that has gone on in this country has been to call attention to areas that had been forgotten. Few people were paying much attention to them.

BOB CAREY: You put the term wilderness or wild and scenic river on something, and here they come.

MARK HEISTAD: Editor Bob Carey of the Ely Echo Newspaper.

BOB CAREY: There's a whole lot of people who do the wildernesses and do the wild and scenic rivers like they do New York or do Boston or do something. The rivers in the South that I used to fish in Missouri, like the Current and Jacks Fork and some of those, they were beautiful, quiet, little rivers. As soon as they made them wild and scenic, I wouldn't go on them now. They're solid canoes, I'm sure because everybody's going to do the wild and scenic rivers, you know? And I've talked to quite a few wilderness people that said, maybe this is-- we did the wrong thing by hanging these terms on them.

MARK HEISTAD: And people have been doing the Boundary Waters in ever increasing numbers. Visitorship skyrocketed in the 1970s. It's rising more slowly today. People come here for recreation, for solitude, to escape our urban society. But ironically, it is because we have become an urban people that the wilderness has become important. Wilderness gives perspective on civilization, civilization, a perspective to wilderness.

Sigurd Olson once wrote of his consternation at hearing a steam locomotive whistle off in the distance as he paddled through the wilderness. But upon reflection, he came to realize that without the civilization that whistle represented, without the culture that it produced it, he wouldn't understand the significance of wilderness. He wouldn't be able to learn the lessons of wilderness. Again, Bill Hanson.

BILL HANSON: The important thing about an area like this is that I think it shows people what nature can be like. I mean, it shows again, that proverbial person from the Chicago suburbs. They come here and they look at this and they go back to Chicago. And I know I do this. And they look and they say, well, I wonder what this would look like if it hadn't-- if Chicago had been up in the Boundary Waters and the Boundary Waters had been down here. What did this used to look like 100 years ago, 200 years ago?

And how has it changed? And is it better now or is it worse now? And how can we-- if it is worse now-- and you'd almost have to agree that the freeways of Chicago, you know, certainly are a health hazard, you know-- what can we do to accommodate human beings but still accommodate the Earth and not live ourselves out of house and home? And I think that's the real lesson in wilderness that's really important. That's why I'm worried about people saying-- you know, I wouldn't want people to say, gee whiz, this is great.

I'm glad it's here because we can screw up the whole rest of Minnesota, and this will always be here to come back to it. That, to me, would be a very dangerous attitude. What I hope will happen is people will come here and say, this is really beautiful. The Earth is a beautiful and very complex system, and we need to be very careful in how we tinker with it in the rest of Minnesota.

MARK HEISTAD: The Boundary Waters has gone by many names over the years. 200 years ago, this land was wilderness, simply an extension of the vast North American interior. In later years, they call it the Quetico Superior Country, the Canoe Country, then later, part of the Superior National Forest. We've chosen to call it the land between. It lies, of course, on the border between the United States and Canada. But it lies as well on philosophical borders, between wildness and civilization, between something natural and something altered, between freedom and regulation.

Yet, despite the complexities and the contradictions, the Boundary Waters remains a place of solitude and of discovery, and a place where you can glimpse the workings of the wilderness.

[WATER LAPPING SOFTLY]

The land Between was written and produced by Mark Heistad. Principal field recording by Bill Paladino. Additional sound effects created in the NPR studios by Scott Yankus. Studio production by Barry Gordemer, Randy Johnson, Jeff Walker, and Scott Yankus.