MPR’s Greta Cunningham interviews author Verena Andermatt Conley about her book "The War Against the Beavers." It tells the tale of leaving the city for a rustic cabin in Minnesota's Boundary Waters Canoe Area.

Conely and her husband, Tom, had visions of cross-country skiing, tranquil swims in lakes, and paddling through some of the nation's most beautiful wilderness. They didn't factor in tent caterpillars, swarms of mosquitoes, and beavers. As a girl growing up in Switzerland, Conley read about life on the American frontier. She convinced her husband that they should buy some land and two rustic cabins on the Vermillion River.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) We bought these tiny little cabins that by now are probably oldest cabins on the river. There must be over 80 years old and they were built by the original settlers. They are log cabins tools small log cabins, and there is no running water and no electricity. Probably also the only cabins left with no running water

(00:00:21) and

(00:00:22) we purchase them from a couple that had restored them and had made The main two there was sort of a dream vacation place and we were ready. We as greenhorns or you know City people rarely bought into their dream without ever checking really very closely what we're buying into

(00:00:44) and in your book the war against the Beavers you bring up the fact that you actually relish the opportunity to live without electricity and water that didn't bother you. Now me as a person who lives in the city that seemed very daunting to me, but you seem to be really into that at the I'm not is a very can be a very daunting experience though, you know, it probably was not something that we ever thought about because we primarily thought about owning a place on the river and in the woods and thought about

(00:01:14) experiencing the Wilderness firsthand and

(00:01:17) never really

(00:01:18) realized what the consequences would be of this kind of rustic way of life

(00:01:23) and you had dreams of cross-country skiing solo paddles in the canoe sort of an idyllic. Life, they're up on the river. And you did do some of that actually

(00:01:33) we had a very idyllic View and we also had a view of this pristine nature. You also read about the Harmony in nature about, you know, canoeing on smooth Waters trekking through the woods listening to the birds and we really did do a lot of that except that what we didn't realize was that nature is not just always that pristine. Is pristine in a different way and the first problem we encountered at the first problem I ran into was in fact a problem with beavers. We actually encountered those wonderful beavers that I had only seen in Walt Disney movies and I thought they were so cute and so nice to have as

(00:02:21) neighbors until they started to take all our trees down. So it wasn't just the trees that the Beavers were damaging, but they also were damning up the river. Itself there were damning up less the river than the rivulets that flow

(00:02:34) into the major river and really creating Havoc since you know trees are felled helter-skelter and suddenly we discovered that these trees that were perhaps 70 80 years old or a down. So the Beavers could just take one

(00:02:48) twig and they make a huge mess. So I realized that my pristine Vision really wasn't what nature was all about. But that nature was quite messy and endure

(00:02:59) through Is broke I had read that bill in the Beavers were really the Builders of civilization. And of course my children were telling me the same thing, but that's not what it looked like and more and more of my Forest just became a beaver pond with

(00:03:12) stumps. You tell the story initially when you got there you're sort of swam by the beavers and they were sort of cute. And as you said, they look like Walt Disney creatures and then they start knocking your trees down damaging your property and then building these dams across the river. It's as you say, Yeah, and then you tell the story of you and your husband Tom going out and trying to kind of destroy these dams to make the Beavers move on and you'd spend hours and hours sweating and huffing and puffing and moving these logs only the next day to come back and see they rebuilt it. It's all back.

(00:03:45) It was all bag. Every time we consulted all kinds of local people and each gave us a different piece of advice

(00:03:53) and it became a became

(00:03:55) comical every day our obsession with the Beavers grow. And we trekked out into the forest and it's a quite a trek. I mean, it's not a leisurely walk but he go through bushes. And you know you go over Fallen logs and you get bruised and scratched need come back all bloody and bitten by mosquitoes

(00:04:14) and flies and we'd sit there. So the first I think the first

(00:04:17) person we consulted said we'll just go there and then, you know make a hole at chink. It's called in the dam, and we would try to get some Twigs out to produce some flow. And then they said well you come back and you shoot the beaver at night. And of course we couldn't do that only said Dynamite works best and we could do that even less. So but after a while my spouse once went out and decided was going to shoot at it and he sat out there forever and came back all bloody blood streaming down his face because there were so many mosquitoes and of course he shot and missed and the dam was always built back in bigger and better than before so that never worked.

(00:05:00) How did living in the wilderness change you as a person? It showed me tremendously and I would like to add in the midst of our Wars against the beavers and I want to tell

(00:05:12) you that the it's really of course the book tries to show that there is no war against the Believers that the Beavers became our friends. But in the midst of our war against the Beavers trying to make the Beavers move and encountering all these funny characters from the area. Logging started on the on the other side of our property. So from you know from the river Slide the Beavers encroach on our land and from the other side the loggers threatened to take over and so we really caught in between and I know it's a difficult topic but I must say that the kind of clear cutting that is being done really can take of an inch. Care of an entire forest in a very short period of time

(00:06:04) what do you hope people learn from reading your book the war against the Beavers? Don't learn. I don't know if I was teaching there preaching. I tried not to preach. I tried to be here to bring out the humorous side of our life at the cabin. It started as a tail or stories that one that I used to tell my friends and they always I thought that was very funny. And so I try to show that it went against the kind of romantic notion of living in the country and the necessarily good

(00:06:40) life in the country and the

(00:06:42) harmonious nature and you know how I am attuned to Nature and I really tried to show that nature was not all that harmonious and there was always some kind of a war going on in nature insects, you know plagues of all kinds

(00:06:55) droughts

(00:06:56) beavers and so that the relation between

(00:07:00) within nature at but also between humans and nature is very very different

(00:07:04) and perhaps a little bit of

(00:07:06) an allegory as well. And the message should be you know, there is change things cannot be as harmonious and the cannot be this Oneness that one always talks about with nature.