Adventure begins where control ends.

Canoe camping in the Boundary Waters

Long ago, my wife, Mary Jo, and I took a 30-day canoe trip. We tore a month from the calendar, stuffed it into our Duluth packs, and set out to immerse ourselves in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and adjacent Quetico Provincial Park. Two million acres of North America's finest flatwater canoeing lay before us—a maze of pristine lakes and streams connected by the portage footpaths first traveled by the Ojibwe and hearty voyageurs. The wilderness of Minnesota and Ontario, with its tall pines, granite shores, laughing loons, and howling wolves, would be ours for the price of a little sweat.

Though we were not rookies to wilderness canoeing, neither of us had ventured out for so long a trip. We were apprehensive when we thought ahead to the day that there would be only two of us together in remote country, or when we imagined an accident and how we might respond with only each other for assistance. As the gear mounted in piles in our front room, so did concerns about how we would ever carry such a mountain of food and equipment.

Our worries eased almost as soon as the trip began. True, there was no one to hold our hand—and we found we liked it that way. As we labored over portages and paddled our heavily laden canoe, our confidence grew. As lake gave way to lake, as rivers were run, even after we"misplaced" ourselves for the better part of a day, we thought not of what could go wrong, but of how well we had handled each task or minor crisis.

And then one day, as we eased from the mouth of a narrow creek into the surf of a broad and windswept lake, we hesitated. Looming ahead of us, masked as wind and waves, lay a challenge and a choice. Bobbing in the waves we studied our options, knowing that the challenge presented us—and the change of plans it might entail—would change our trip. What we did not know is that it would also alter our understanding of adventure.

Move on to Roiling Waters, Angry Lake

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