Transcripts

BARTON SUTTER: For the most part, highway 2 runs true as a ruler, so I've been cheating the speed limit, racing down a long green hallway. But now the forest walls flash open on lakes and ponds and streams.

There's Greenwood Lake where I stopped with my dad a quarter century back. Sand River looks black this morning. And here's a glimpse of Wampus Lake, a blue snapshot, perfect as an ad for beer.

Highway 2 ends abruptly in a T with highway 1. I like these numbers, 1, 2. They're prime like the country they run through. Highway 1 is even more attractive than Lake County 2 It's an impossible road, careening like a roller coaster through the woods, guaranteed to cause car sickness in kids, which may explain why the traffic is almost always light.

Highway 1 makes me laugh every time I drive it. I've been over this road so often by now. I've nearly got it by heart. Here's the Chubb Lake Resort battened down and shuttered up weathering into the ground. The romantic in me loves these ruins, the wreckage of some other person's past, and despises the glare of success.

"So when will I learn," I suddenly wonder, "to honor my own disasters." Whoops, here's a logging truck. And I swing way wide to avoid being smashed by this mechanical dragon of the woods. The sign on the truck's bug screen might be America's motto. "Easy money," it shouts. I laugh at my narrow escape and gun the car over the hill.

I'm told that people who like to read move more and more slowly down the page as they grow older. With a lifetime of experience behind them and hundreds of books in their heads, every passage reminds them of some vivid incident out of their past, some other book they've read. And they wander off the page into alternate worlds of thought.

That's how I feel about this wild highway. I'm reading the road like an old-timer reminded of other days. Here's the bend where years ago, a friend and I helped a family put out a fire. And here's the bog where just last week, my brother and I saw a big bull moose. Astonished, we stopped, amazed by his size and his calm demeanor as he stood there munching alder shoots.

He was growing a new set of antlers. And his coat this time of year looked scruffy as if he were made out of gunny sacks smeared with grease. But he was the rough, rude lord of these woods. And we were more excited than if we'd caught sight of the president.

Here's a back road off the back road, one of the best. And even as I flash past, speeding on up the asphalt toward Ely, I'm driving down the gravel to my favorite lake in this entire area. I'll tell you its name. But the word is Ojibwe. And I can't pronounce it properly. A rough translation, though, would be Big Secret.

Big Secret has never given me many fish. But it's just the right size for canoeing and offers the backdrop I need-- white pines, red pines, black spruce, white spruce, popple, birch, and cedar. Last fall, my wife and I took a break from fishing Big Secret and dragged our canoe up a granite slab, coffee time.

Then suddenly, out of nowhere, out of deep silence came the howl of timber wolves, one voice at first, one long, lonely, wavering note, then several songs from other throats twisting and twining around the first. My wife and I locked eyes, then gazed away at the green horizon.

This music was more unearthly than Gregorian chant. Here was the hymn of my real religion. Those animal voices rose and fell, quavered, and drifted away like smoke. The silence was deeper after they stopped. I looked at my watch. I'd waited 30 years to hear timber wolves howl. And their song had lasted less than 3 minutes.

I felt like a mystic who'd finally heard the voice of God. I was almost insanely happy. And yet, as we drove away from Big Secret that day, I felt more obsessed than before, determined that sometime I would see timber wolves in the flesh as it were in the fur.

I've got another lake in mind today. But lost in these memories and reveries, I realized I may never make it to Ely. But that hardly matters anymore because I'm getting what I wanted all along. Every trip I've taken up this back road has been money in the bank, savings for my retirement, for soon the day will come when I'm too blind to drive, too creaky to canoe. But by then, I won't need to leave the house.

And when they lock me up in the nursing home, I'll slip off into the forest inside my own head. The Tibetans tell us this life is only a dream anyway. And the things that seem most real to us are dreams about our dreams.

And so when the day arrives to make my final trip, I'll drive this back road one last time, launch the canoe, and slide away on the silky water. The nurses leaning over my bed will be surprised by my smile and wonder aloud about my last words. Was it wolves? I thought I heard him say wolves.