Trial by portage: When are we too old to test ourselves against Minnesota’s remote wilderness?

I washed my muddy sneakers the day I got home from an early September canoe trip in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. As they dried on the sunny sill of my downtown Minneapolis condo, the shoes hung onto a slightly swampy smell.

We think of the waters of the Boundary Waters, which spend half the year as ice, as being clear and cold, but the rocks that lurk everywhere just beneath the surface of the lakes are slime-slippery, and green algae floats in paisley swirls near shorelines. Where you might expect sand is instead a loamy muck. It gets in your shoes and remains there.

Also lingering post-trip is the memory of a place I may not see again.

At 69, I stay in good shape — biking, walking, pickleball (I know, right?) and regular weight training. I’ve done a decent amount of canoeing — a few BWCA day trips, a half-dozen whitewater rides, some with my dad, on Wisconsin’s famed Brule River.

But this was my first paddle-and portage adventure. Four good friends, two canoes. Three nights camping and four days on the water during a marvelously warm, dry and bug-free week after Labor Day. Our able cast included the Navigator, the Medical Officer and the Efficiency Expert. Plus Freya, the canoe-loving dog.

While I hope to revisit this justly revered wilderness, maybe in a cabin along the Gunflint Trail, I doubt I’ll repeat the trek we launched from Sawbill Outfitters. Early on, it dawned on me: I’ve aged out.

The realization was by turns sad and exhilarating.

For one reason, I felt like I was barely able to keep up physically. The portages, where we hauled Duluth packs the size of washing machines along hilly paths (our longest portage was 230 rods, or seven-tenths of a mile), were sometimes grueling, and that was minus mosquitoes and mud. Paddling the length of Kelly Lake with a headwind for two hours was less pleasure than pain, especially with a sore back. Making and breaking camp was laborious. Freeze-dried food has come a long way, but still.

It’s a steep toll, but devotees (like the solo canoeist we met who said he was “10 days out”) pay it for good reason: to earn their way to some of the most beautiful and unique wilderness in the world. We had one campsite on a narrow peninsula surrounded by water. Another came with a big flat rock at water’s edge with an operatic view of sky and water.

As I presume others in my age cohort do, I muse morbidly often, calculating my ever-shrinking number of good years left. On the canoe trip, after our first portage, I worried about what would happen if one of us got seriously injured so far from any kind of speedy rescue. I felt alone with the kind of thoughts not frequently thought by younger people. It was sad to enter this natural wonderland and to ponder not doing so again.

The exhilaration came with how my “This is it” decision began to intensify everything: the bold percussion of a pileated woodpecker; the sight of a cow moose up to her knees in water, her big knobby swaybacked self a perfect profile before a panel of sunlit marsh grass. How cedar smells when you gouge a thumbnail into its pungent leaf. The scruffy hems of the spruce. Trying to name the precise color (persimmon? tangerine? saffron?) of a sun setting in a slight haze.

What struck me most in the Boundary Waters, when the wind faded and few birds sang, was the quiet. Not the proverbial hermetic cone of silence. More like a limitless umbrella, open-edged and diamond-dusted with stars. Even when straining to hear, nothing. Or just the sound of two cedar trees moaning as their trunks rub against each other tenderly in a faint wind. It was a silence with the power to impress, even to intimidate, a sort of stand-in for eternity.