A trip into the BWCA from long ago is vivid for its haunting finish

Editor's note: First Person is an occasional series of stories by Star Tribune staff writers and readers about adventures in the outdoors.

Weeks before our annual trip to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, our living room floor became the staging area for everything we would need for 10 days. "We" actually meant my husband, Mark, who obsessed over checklists of things we would need — boots, toothpaste, freeze-dried food, bandages, mosquito repellent — and assembled everything into three No. 2 Duluth packs. He spent hours poring over maps, tracing the routes, miles, portages, the projected daily schedules.

That year, I was uneasy. Although we were going in the spring rather than our usual fall, my uneasiness had no known cause. Mark was experienced, skilled and a good navigator, essential in that region of lakes, rivers, streams, peninsulas and islands.

We left from Ely on a late-May day, had a hasty, cold breakfast, loaded our packs into the canoe, and pushed off from a small lake. The first two days were overcast and gloomy — and so was I. The third day dawned blue and sun-filled.

My uneasiness dissipated.

That third afternoon, we portaged around falls that fell 30 feet and cascaded into a series of rapids. Mark persuaded me to run the smaller rapids at the bottom. He scouted it but failed to tell me that it continued around a bend out of sight. I was a little scared, but I trusted him to know it was safe. We lashed our gear into the canoe, but when I suggested life jackets he said we didn't need them. Mark told me later he was afraid if he said "life jackets," it would indicate danger and I'd refuse to go.

In a last wild run at the bottom, we paddled frantically, Mark yelling, "Paddle right, hard!" We splashed down at the bottom with a heavy thunk that soaked us. We grinned broadly and, once our hearts quit pounding, decided we could do anything.

I turned to look for Mark. The overturned canoe was heading toward more rapids. He was underneath hanging on to the thwarts. He bobbed to the surface, bailed water, and finally pulled himself in. He paddled to a small spit of land about a hundred yards down, beached it, and, to my consternation, started running the other way down the portage.

He reappeared, got back in the canoe, and paddled up. He had gone downstream to try to salvage the Duluth packs — snagging two of the three. When he reached me, I learned he had dislocated a shoulder (a chronic problem). When he helped me out I saw what I could not see before: That I could have walked out onto land.

Fishing season was open and we were on a major waterway. Given Mark's disabled shoulder and the treacherous waters, we decided to wait for help from one of the fishing parties that were bound to pass in a day or so. We made camp, cooked dinner, and, after a visit from a bear, kept the fire going and took turns sleeping restlessly in the one sleeping bag.

Day Five, and it was growing dark and rainy. Mark began to cut boughs to fashion a lean-to, when we saw, chugging toward us, three men in a motorized canoe. They had opened up their motor as far as it would go while all three paddled desperately against the barrel keg that was the river, landed at our site, still trembling from fear and effort.

Mark insisted we not tell them what had happened — only that he had thrown his shoulder out of the socket. Once he forgot and mentioned getting the gear wet, and the men glanced at each other and said it hadn't rained where they were.

At the trapper's cabin, we found an ancient, wood-burning stove and some lumpy straw-filled mattresses. The roof leaked and the stove bellowed smoke. Mark cleared it, then made a fire, and cooked a stew; we were the only ones with food left because the others, at the end of their trips, had none left. When we told our new friends over stew about the bear visiting, one of the paddlers growled, "A bear wouldn't stand a chance around here tonight."

We passed a cold, wet night in the hut, while the anglers pitched a tent outside. The men towed us to Grand Marais where they had started, but we had to arrange a biplane ride back to Ely. While waiting, we encountered legendary Justine Kerfoot, resort owner and writer known for her work in the BWCA. Mark, still secretive about the accident, asked her about running falls at the bottom — but not about our accident. Falls should be closed off to canoes, she said unequivocally, and then eerily painted a hypothetical picture of Mark drowning and me clinging to a rock and going mad as night fell.