Part 1 of 2 of a Voices of Minnesota interview with Justine Kerfoot, author of "Gunflint Stories."
Part 1 of 2 of a Voices of Minnesota interview with Justine Kerfoot, author of "Gunflint Stories."
SPEAKER 1: After you had lived at the Gunflint lodge for a number of years, you must have been back financially on your feet again so that there was a choice now of whether to stay or to go. What made you decide to stay?
SPEAKER 2: It was home.
SPEAKER 1: It had become home?
SPEAKER 2: They become home. And it was a place that was, oh, gee, you could breathe. And it was you go to a city and holy smokes, you could stand in one house and spit into the next one, practically. I mean, that congestion, that tightness I still can't stand it heartily.
And so the woods is just a way of life now. And it's much easier because we're originally in order to start a car in the winter time, we had to build a fire under the car to get the thing going. And now what the heck, you got a head bolt heater.
And you go plug it in, and in 20 minutes, you just like uptown. And so, I mean, all of those things have changed, made life easier. And I don't know, it's home.
SPEAKER 1: You used to lack a lot of conveniences, didn't you? I mean, you didn't have electricity. You didn't have a reliable telephone line. You didn't have snowmobiles. You had to go by dog sled or snowshoe.
SPEAKER 2: Snowshoe and then dog team and then snowmobile was the sequence on that.
SPEAKER 1: Now, you were instrumental, weren't you, in getting a phone line set up? But you used to have a pretty crude system, didn't you?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it was a crude system, but it worked.
SPEAKER 1: Will you tell stories of having to patch that line with a tire chain or?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah I did. Sometimes the moose would go through, and the line would sag and get caught in the moose's horn. Well, that was just a slight. What the heck did the moose give a darn? It didn't make any difference.
He kept on going, finally broke the line. And then you had to go and find the line and bring it back up onto the road and hook it onto your car and take out as much slack as you could, and then slack on the other end. But you never came together. You were always 3 or 4 feet apart.
And one time, we couldn't-- our line was broken. We didn't know where. And I kept watching. As I went to town, I found the break. And I didn't have any-- we always carried spare wire, but I didn't happen to have any.
But I had a set of chains. So I hooked the thing from chain one onto to the other side, and it worked beautifully. We worked it for a whole week before we got a chance to refix it. And those were things that you learn to be ingenious.
And at every place on the Gunflint trail at that time, we all had a junk pile. And if anything broke down, it went to the junk pile because there was always something that you could retrieve. And when you stopped and thought about it, we had a lousy road to Grand Marais and a tough road from there to Duluth. And Duluth was our only source. And so you did a heck of a lot of inventing and in figuring out some way to make something work.
SPEAKER 1: Today, I know from my own experience that it's possible to just whiz right up to the Gunflint Lodge. The trail goes even farther, and it's paved all the way. And--
SPEAKER 2: Yes, that's right.
SPEAKER 1: --you can come in and have pistachio chicken and flip on a light and read. I mean, it's all the modern conveniences right there.
SPEAKER 2: Each one was a big struggle.
SPEAKER 1: Has it been a good thing or a bad thing to have all those conveniences?
SPEAKER 2: It's been a good thing. Gosh, you mean to have all those conveniences? Without it, you'd be out of business in five minutes.
SPEAKER 1: You do get a lot more people now, too, don't you, than you did years ago?
SPEAKER 2: Yes, there's no question about it.
SPEAKER 1: It seems, too-- I noticed this when I went to the bookstore to look at your books-- the section that has the Minnesota writers and the Northwoods writers just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It seems like everybody who goes to the Boundary Waters has to write a book about it.
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it seems. It does seem like it. And a lot of them have a different attitudes and different thoughts. And I can remember when I first started to carry canoes and pack out that if somebody else came on the same lake I was on, oh, it was crowded. Can you imagine anybody being that brass to come when they've seen somebody is on that lake and they've-- now by 4:00, you better have a campsite or you might be out of luck.
SPEAKER 1: Are you 89 now, is that right?
SPEAKER 2: Coming up.
SPEAKER 1: Coming up on 89?
SPEAKER 2: In another month.
SPEAKER 1: Are you still out canoeing and snowshoeing and that sort of thing?
SPEAKER 2: Yes, but not quite as ambitious as I was before. [LAUGHS] I've managed to bang myself up a little bit. And the last one I was riding a bicycle in Florida, and I happened to get thrown and hit the shale, which dinged up this shoulder quite a bit. And I can't paddle quite as long as I used to. And the canoes are getting heavier, and those things happen.
SPEAKER 1: But you're still carrying canoes?
SPEAKER 2: Still carrying a lightweight canoe.
SPEAKER 1: Your son tells me that you finally stopped riding your motorcycle last year, is that true?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, they took it away from me. They wouldn't-- they thought I ought to sell it. They haven't got my snowmobile yet, though.
[LAUGHTER]
SPEAKER 1: One quote from your book is something like-- I don't have the exact quote, but something about that in order to live in the wilderness, a person has to be at peace with himself or herself.
SPEAKER 2: That's true.
SPEAKER 1: Is that so?
SPEAKER 2: You have to live with yourself, and you have to live with your neighbors. You have to depend on them. And they have to depend on you.
SPEAKER 1: Do you feel like you lived a life that people can't live anymore?
SPEAKER 2: It would be a different type of life because it wouldn't be as-- now there are more things available that there weren't then so that you didn't have to do all this ingenious stuff that you had to do at that time.
SPEAKER 1: It's all been invented and marketed now?
SPEAKER 2: Yeah, it's all been invented. And I mean, it was a case of so with an axe, you could do printing or anything. You could make a paddle. You could build a log cabin. That's all it took was one axe and a little know. And now that's kind of passé. [LAUGHS]
Digitization made possible by the National Historical Publications & Records Commission.
Views and opinions expressed in the content do not represent the opinions of APMG. APMG is not responsible for objectionable content and language represented on the site. Please use the "Contact Us" button if you'd like to report a piece of content. Thank you.
Transcriptions provided are machine generated, and while APMG makes the best effort for accuracy, mistakes will happen. Please excuse these errors and use the "Contact Us" button if you'd like to report an error. Thank you.