On this Voices of Minnesota segment, Catherine Winter continues interview with Justine Kerfoot, an author notable for her stories about the Boundary Waters. Kerfoot speaks to her experiences as a hunter, fisher, and guide at her family's lodge in Gunflint, Minnesota, and how the area and the lodge has changed over time.

This is part 2 of 2.

This file was digitized with the help of a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC).

Transcript:

(00:00:00) 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 what made you decide to stay. I was home. It had become home they become home and and it was a place that was gu could breathe and it was you go go to a city and a holy smokes you could Stand in one house and spit into the next one back to clear. I mean that that congestion that can think that tightness. I still can't stand it hardly. And and so the woods is just a way of life now and it's much easier because were originally in order to start a car in the winter time. We had to build a fire under the car to get the thing. On and now what the heck you got a headboard heater and you go plug it in and 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. You used to lack a lot of convenience has 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 so shirred and then dog team and then some will be always kind of the sequins on that. You were instrumental weren't you in getting a phone line set up but used of a pretty crude system didn't you? Yeah, it was a crude system but it worked will you tell stories of having to patch that line with a tire chain or yeah. It is sometimes a Mossad go through and and the the the line would say go and get caught in the moose's horn. Well, that was just a slight what the heck did the most give a darn it didn't make any difference he kept on going finally. Up the line and then you had to go and find the line and bring it back up onto the road and hook it out of your car and take as much slack as you could and then slack on the other end, but you never came together. You're always three four feet apart. And and one time we couldn't our line was broken. We didn't know where and I kept watching this I went to town. I found the I found the brake and that I didn't have any we always carried sperm. Wire but I didn't happen to have any but I had a set of chain. So I hooked the thing from chain went on to the other side and worked beautifully. We worked it for a whole week before we get a chance to re fix it and those were things that you You learn to too. To be ingenious and 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 in a tough road from there to Duluth and Duluth was our only source. And so you did a heck of a lot of love. Of inventing and in figuring out some way to make something work today. I know from my own experience that it's possible to just whizzed right up to the Gunflint launch. The trail goes even farther and it's paved all the way. And yes, that's right come in and have pistachio chicken and flip on a light and read. I mean, it's all the modern conveniences right there. Each one was a big struggle. Has it been a good thing or a bad thing to have all those conveniences? I spend a good thing. Yeah, gosh, you mean to have all those conveniences without it. You'd be out of business in five minutes. You do get a lot more people now to don't you then you did yours. Yes. There's no no question bigger, you know, it seems to I noticed this when I went to the bookstore to look at your books the section that has sort of the Minnesota writers and the Northwoods writers just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It seems like everybody who goes to the Boundary Waters asked to write a book about it. Yeah. It seems it does seem like it and a lot of them have a different attitudes and different thoughts and and I can remember member when when I first started carry canoes and pack out that gee if somebody else came on the same Lake I was on oh, it was crowded as it can you imagine anybody being that breast to come when they've seen somebody is on that Lake and they've Now by four o'clock you better have a campsite or your You might be out of luck. Here are you 89 now? Is that right coming up coming up on 89 another month. Are you still out canoeing and snowshoeing and that sort of thing? Yes, but not quite as ambitious as it was before I've managed to bring myself up a little bit and I the last one I was riding a bicycle in Florida and I hit the I happened to get thrown and hit the shell which which dinged up this shoulder quite a bit. And I can't paddle quite as long as he used to and they're going to lose are getting heavier and those things happen, but you're still carrying canoes still carrying a lightweight canoe your son tells me that you finally stopped riding your motorcycle last year. Is that true? Yeah, they took it away from me. They would they thought I ought to sell it but they haven't got my snowmobile yet, though. One 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 true is that so 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. Do you feel like you lived a life that people can't live anymore? It would be a different type of life because it wouldn't be as another are more things available that they weren't thin so that you didn't have to do all this ingenious stuff that you had to do it that time. It's all been invented in marketed now. Yeah, it's all been invented and especially I mean no it was a case of so with an X. You could do print or anything. You could make a paddle. You could build a log cabin. It's all it took was one axe and a little know-how and now that's kind of passing.