"This is a really good story that is true in every respect,” starts out Sam Cook, author, sportsman and outdoor writer for the Duluth News Tribune.
“This is in the category of trying not to have a train wreck when you’re canoeing.…”
Now, folks might think that Sam means “train wreck” in the rhetorical sense of “catastrophe.” But no, in Sam’s tale, there is a canoe, there is a train and there is a meeting of the two. It’s a good story … one that we will get to soon.
When you spend a lot of time in the woods, on inland lakes and rivers or on the shores and waters of Lake Superior itself, every so often things don’t go as planned. Any outdoors man or woman will advise you to roll with those punches and, like a good scout, be prepared for anything. Once the uncomfortable parts have passed, you’ll often have the makings for a good fireside tale. Other times, of course, the consequences may be dire.
We asked a few top-notch outdoor writers who spend their “work” time romping through regional wilderness to regale us with lighter-hearted calamity stories. That they willingly admitted to have such misadventures tells us that they are good sports as well as sportsmen.
Michael Melford
Jeff Rennicke
Jeff Rennicke – author of 10 books (including one on the Apostle Islands and one on Isle Royale), hundreds of articles and a contributing editor of National Geographic Traveler – lives in Bayfield, Wisconsin. Jeff has plied his writing profession full time since about 1983, but had a passion for it long before then.
“I grew up knowing that I not only wanted to be a writer, I wanted to be an outdoor writer,” says Jeff. “I have a picture of Barry Lopez on my wall.
“I’m more of a landscape writer. It’s my job to go into a place and to tell the stories that the landscape whispers to me.”
The oops that Jeff chose involves a trip when he should have listened more carefully to the whispers in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness of Minnesota.
“When you’re traveling in the deep cold, it’s like being on a different planet,” Jeff starts. “Cold can not only numb your fingers, but can numb your brain as well.”
One January weekend at the Lutsen cabin of his friend John Anderson, Jeff and John decided to ski into the BWCAW and do a little winter camping. It was, well, chilly.
“It was a 40-below-zero-without-the-windchill kind of weekend.”
Such cold need not deter a camping trip, according to Jeff, but it creates challenges.
“The stove wouldn’t light, the tent was stiff, and it was seriously cold. It was one of those times when mistakes can rapidly mount … and I was about to make one.”
After the tent was up – an important factor to a happy ending – John began taking pictures. Jeff, on skis, hung out before becoming cold, then bored. Then he noticed a beaver lodge to check out.
This, says Jeff, is the numb brain part. There was something about beavers and their lodges that he should have remembered.
Curious Jeff headed toward the lodge in the corner of the lake.
“Suddenly, the bright white of the snow turned into a dark stain, and I was up to my armpits in the water … and with skis on.”
Good news! Jeff held the ice on either side of a large break. Bad news? Actually there was a lot of bad news.
“There’s no way I was going to get my skis off. And very quickly my puffy down jacket became an anchor of death and started to drag me under. I couldn’t touch the bottom.”
Using his poles, he got himself onto a raft of ice.
Then John came back, wondering what Jeff was doing on that “boundary waters iceberg.”
Conveying from a distance that John should come no closer, Jeff used his pole to latch onto solid ice, pulled himself over and rolled onto the snow.
“My clothes became galvanized steel. I felt like the tin man.
“John’s experience kicked in. One of the reasons that you travel with people like that is just for these kinds of moments.”
John got Jeff into the tent and got hot tea into Jeff. By the next morning, Jeff was thawed enough to head home after the two broke camp “without a word or a hot breakfast.”
And the moral to this story?
There are two, says Jeff. First, it’s best not to travel alone where “the lower the temperature, the higher the stakes.” Second, have confidence in the people with whom you travel.
“It was handled so smoothly and so correctly that it quickly became a laughing matter,” says Jeff.
And what was that beaver thing that he should have remembered?
“Beavers build their lodges in places where the water doesn’t freeze all the way to the bottom.”
Steve Kleist
Sam Cook
Sam Cook – an outdoor writer for two decades and author of four books – has BWCAW stories, too. A Kansas native, Sam always loved the outdoors, but at age 15, a trip with a Boy Scout troop to the BWCAW astounded him. The boys showered in a waterfall and caught fish – “which is nearly impossible in Kansas” – and got hooked on the region. At first, the Kansas kid worried about bears and such.
“If you keep waking up in the morning, day after day after day, and you’re not eaten by bears, you realize that there’s nothing to be afraid of out there. There’s much more to be worried about in town.”
Eventually, Sam moved north to work on the Ely Echo in Minnesota. Early one June, he and newspaper colleague Doug Smith headed out on a secluded lake, caught a few walleyes and then went ashore to boil up a little tea. Waiting for the water to boil, Sam looked out and saw a canoe afloat on the lake.
“I thought, ‘That’s unusual. You hardly ever see other canoes on the lake.’
“Then I realized that it wasn’t an ‘other’ canoe.”
Doug saw it, too, and knew that someone would be doin’ some mighty cold swimming.
“We flipped the coin, and I lost the flip,” says Sam.
Sam knew how to keep his clothes dry. Ever helpful, Doug took a few “risque” photos of the event.
The canoe was recovered and, quickly, so did Sam.
The real embarrassment came much later when Doug sent an introductory BWCAW portrait to Sam’s next employer – a Colorado newspaper that required reporters to wear a tie.
“Good luck getting Sam to wear a tie,” Doug wrote to the editor. “We’ve had trouble getting Sam to wear any clothes at all.”
Oh yes, this Sam story doesn’t have an engine in it. That train wreck is coming.…
Courtesy James Smedley
James Smedley
James Smedley – writer and photographer for such publications as Toronto Globe and Mail, Ontario Out of Doors Magazine and Canadian Geographic and contributor to a couple of books – lives in Wawa, Ontario.
He grew up sailing and boating near Sault Ste. Marie. “I’ve been in the Trans Superior race many times; came in second one year.”
This man knows his stuff. So it makes you feel better about your own mistakes when James tells about his queasy quincy.
A quincy is a sort of igloo, made from a mound of snow that, when hollowed out, makes a cozy shelter for winter camping.
One winter day, James and his dad got the bug to head to Big Missanabe Lake. Usually, this is a half-hour snowmobile trek, but deep snow, warm weather and slushy conditions turned it into a five-hour ordeal. Five hours of spent daylight gets you close to dark north of Lake Superior.
So James went into quincy-building mode, but the temperature was not cold enough to set the snow.
“It was almost done, and I was inside just scraping the last bit off the roof. And then I heard a loud settling sound …”
James got baptized – immersion – by the quincy. “I was standing up, so it wasn’t dangerous or anything, except we were so far behind schedule that it was very late in the day.”
Even on a “warm” winter night north of Wawa, shelter is required. With the basic circular wall still standing, James and his dad draped a tarp over a hastily built frame of pine poles, then piled on a bit of insulating snow. Pine branches made the floor.
“It wasn’t as pretty as it should have been,” admits James, but it worked. Usually, he adds, a quincy is the way to go. With an all white interior, a simple candle lantern lets you read comfortably inside.
And the moral?
“I guess it would be to always have a backup plan when building a quincy in warm weather.”
Did Sam Cook ever tell you about his train wreck on the way to canoeing with his wife, Phyllis, and younger brother, Bill?
It goes like this … Sam was 22, perhaps a factor in what follows.
The idea was to paddle on the Kansas River, but Sam didn’t have a map, didn’t talk to anyone before hand and didn’t know where to put in on the river. Did I mention that he was 22?
In the course of experimenting his way to a launch site, he managed to hang up the couple’s 1972 Ford Torino – “by far the most valuable possession we had” – on a railroad track.
Not so bad, maybe, but ...
“I saw a headlight up the track and thought, ‘This is not a good sign.’”
Sam sent his brother up along the tracks to try to wave down the train (seemed like a good idea at the time), and then ran to a nearby farm house with a vague hope of borrowing a tractor to force or pull the car free (another good idea).
Sam didn’t find a tractor, or anyone at home, except for the 15 farm dogs that chased him off.
So Sam and Phyllis watched the 76-car freight train roar toward their most valuable possession.
“All that we could do was stand and watch and hope that it was on the other tracks.”
Hopes – and the car – were soon dashed. “The car was in the shape of the letter C.”
Sam was optimistic – 22, remember – when he saw that the back tires were still good and the trunk still opened.
“Is it totaled?” he later asked the tow truck driver.
The driver’s stare answered the question even before he intoned, “Yeah, it’s totaled.”
Sam paid $33 in track repairs and suffered the embarrassment of filling out an accident report on which his car was listed as “1972 Ford Torino” and “other vehicle” as a “Union Pacific General Electric Diesel.”
“We never got the canoe out that day,” Sam says. “The canoe was yellow, and it was on top of the car.”
Any morals to this tale … and to his earlier related skinny dip to save another canoe?
“You must simply deal with whatever you are presented,” says a still optimistic Sam. “That is the beauty of being in the woods.”