Transcripts

BARTON SUTTER: Back in February, when I checked the calendar for this year's lake trout trip, my eyes bugged out. The fourth week in May was completely free. Instead of nibbling at the edge of the Boundary Waters on a long weekend, I could really go somewhere. I decided on a route with lots of options and the distant goal of reaching a body of water at the heart of the BWCA, which, for the purposes of public communication, I'm going to call Eagle Lake.

I believe that honesty is the best policy for everything except blueberry patches and fishing holes. As soon as I'd chosen a route, I nailed down a reservation. Deciding on a partner took more time. It isn't easy in middle age to find someone willing and able to steal a week away from work and family. What's more, I've done so much canoe camping by now that I've grown persnickety about my partners.

I don't want a wimp, and I don't want a maniacal macho man. I don't want a drunk, or a babbler. I don't want a grump, or a whiner. As I ran through my list of possible partners, my brother was busy. Lewis loved to fish but hated camping. Jim would still be teaching school. I kept coming back to Tom.

Tom is a quiet, steady guy with a wry sense of humor. I'd shared an office with him a few years back, and we'd taken a shine to each other. I'd never been in the woods with him, but I had a hunch he'd be just right. Besides, he'd invited me on a trip last year, which I'd had to refuse. So I figured he figured I was OK. It's a delicate business, this picking a fishing partner.

When I called him with my proposal, Tom turned me down with a groan of regret. He was already committed to a trip that week. But the next day, he called to ask if he could still come along. He had decided to back out of the other trip and rearrange his schedule in order to go with me.

Was I flattered. Why had he changed his mind? Well, he couldn't resist the chance to see this new country on the route I'd mapped out. Besides, he thought I'd make a fine partner. He'd been out with plenty of guys over the years, but way too many of them just couldn't seem to stop talking. That wasn't why he went into the woods, to listen to somebody's monologue.

He thought about this a lot, Tom said. He felt he knew me fairly well, and he figured I was the next best thing to nobody. I didn't know whether to take this as praise or an insult, but it made me laugh. I decided to take it as a compliment. And after our week in the woods, I'm sure I was right. In fact, I wouldn't mind having that phrase carved on my tombstone. "Here lies Barton Sutter, the next best thing to nobody."

That is why we go to the woods, isn't it, to get away from others? Hell, said Jean-Paul Sarte, is other people. Of course, if you truly love solitude above all else, you'll strap on a pair of snowshoes and wade out into the big bog North of Red Lake where you'll encounter nobody but blackflies, or you could just lock yourself in your room. But that's not quite what you had in mind, was it? No, you're after a certain sort of aesthetic experience, which includes fresh fish, the rock-a-bye motion of a canoe, the scent of cedar trees, et cetera.

If that's what you want, though, and you want to be alone, then why not just go solo? Well, I do that fairly often. I think going alone is about the best way to spend time in canoe country. But solo travel is awfully hard work. Your speed is cut by 2/3. And with nobody sharing the chores, you work from dawn to dark. So most people, most of the time, look for partners.

Of course, I know two brothers who solved this dilemma by traveling together in the same canoe but pretending they're alone. They talked no more than necessary. And when they make camp, they build different fires to cook their own meals and sleep in separate tents. To each his own, as the saying goes. But that arrangement does strike me as a weensy bit nuts.

There is a natural kind of duel solitude though. It's the sort of steady that sometimes develops in a lucky marriage in which a pair can be alone together without feeling lonesome, in which much is understood without speech, in which silences are calm, deep, and satisfying. Some such quiet understanding develops quickly between like minded partners out on the canoe trails. If you gather firewood, I'll fetch the water. If you cook supper, I'll do the dishes. You paddle on the left. I'll paddle on the right. There's no need to negotiate, or even to speak.

Tom and I proved to be lucky that way, since we both have a high regard for silence, we traveled in a kind of luxurious quiet. Such peace is hard to come by these days. The noise of our infernal machinery is nearly omnipresent. Clocks and refrigerators hum in our sleep. But the silence of canoe country is more than lack of racket. Silence is not the absence of sound.

True silence is spacious and easily includes the splatter of waves, the song of the wind, the Jabber of warblers in the high treetops. Sometimes it even seems to contain the glistening yellow of buttercups, the fragrance of wild roses. Silence, as the Quakers know, is never nothing, but a positive force, mysterious, sacred, and profound. Out of deep silence it has always seemed to me, comes the best of what we know poetry, music, the most moving conversations.

Tom and I had some terrific talks on our trip, in part because we traveled through so much silence. On Portage breaks around the evening fire, we talked about camp craft and earlier trips we had taken. We talked about trouble with booze and drugs. We talked about women and children and work. Backcountry campers always talk about food, but we came back to that topic again and again because Tom has cancer and he's treating it with diet. We'd hauled along fresh fruits and vegetables, all sorts of things most golite campers reject.

Tom's diet seems to be working. His cancer count is down, but the fact of his disease sure affected the way I saw the landscape. Instead of already scheming my next trip through this country, and so being neither here nor there, I saw things more as I imagined Tom did, here now, here now, this tree, this rock, this hawk. Spending time with a man who has cancer sobers you up and gives you perspective.

Thinking how near Tom was to being nobody reminded me of my own precarious hold on life and the title Tom had given me, the next best thing to nobody. Oddly enough, as the trip went on, the notion of nobody began to take on personality, to become not nothing, but a positive force, like silence. What can I say? Wild country gives you wild ideas.

After three days, we were closing in on Eagle Lake. Travel had been slow but steady, and we'd caught big fish. Our one disappointment was that we'd seen other people on every lake. Now we hope to leave them behind. We portaged into a bog and followed a narrow, windening creek for nearly an hour until the banks grew so tight the canoe got stuck. I traced several trails up a hillside through the trees, but they all petered out. We were less than half a mile away, but we could not find the portage into Eagle Lake.

After coming all this way, finally, Tom volunteered to walk what looked like a moose trail through the swamp. He left me fuming and depressed, puffing a cigar, fighting flies, and trickling sweat. I was down, way down. But Tom was back in half an hour. "I found it", he told me. "What?" "The Portage and the lake. It's beautiful, but somebody's there." There was no real choice, of course.

Tom had a peculiar satisfied gleam in his eye as he hoisted a pack on his back. "I haven't done anything this insane", he said, "since, I was 18." We slogged off through the swamp. And an hour later, we had humped the canoe and all our gear across the bog up the hill through the woods, around the switchbacks over dead falls through the brush to the smooth rock shelf on the edge of Eagle Lake. We stood stunned with exhaustion and looked out at the lake.

Late afternoon light came gleaming through the gold green leaves of birch and aspen, and the lake, ringed round with hills, looked bluer than the sky. The place felt like the top of the world. Plus, the people who'd been on the lake were heading out. They'd only come in on a day trip from another camp.

As soon as they were out of sight, Tom and I exchanged a high five. We loaded the canoe and drifted out over the depths. The water was shockingly cold, like liquid ice. The light was gold. Ahead of us, lake trout broke the surface like small, dark dolphins. The silence seemed deeper than the lake itself, and we rejoiced. This was what we'd come for. Nobody was here.