Transcripts

EMILIE BUCHWALD: It was really wonderful because they came from all over the state. And as the days drew near for the end of the contest, more and more of them appeared, you know how that is the last week. They began coming in very heavily. And I think the last day, we received more than 40. So people really decided that they wanted to have their comments heard.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Well, I'm dying to hear the first place essay, and I was wondering if you could read it for us this morning.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: That would be a great pleasure. The essay is by Larry Risser, who comes from Minneapolis, and it's called "Going Home."

Driving to Camp du Nord off the echo trail on Burntside Lake, I breathe a sigh of relief knowing that I will restock my store of life-sustaining wilderness sounds, smells, and images, which has been drawn down to a dangerously low level.

It's the day after Labor Day. I'm with my 84-year-old father who took his children camping in the Boundary Waters and to Camp du Nord long before it was a YMCA camp, when it was operated by Jean, Marion, and Naida, three enterprising women who taught school on the Iron Range and whose summertime passion was building and running the camp from 1935 to 1960.

Leaving the Twin Cities, we drive through fog from Hinckley to Cloquet. Oddly, the fog is comforting. It's the fog of the highway and the fog of a fading memory. It's smooth as the edges of my father's repeated question. Where is it that we're going?

We're going back to early memories of loons, blueberries, mosquitoes buzzing through the night, of chilly mornings lying in bed until Dad lit the twigs and birch bark and the fire snapped into life.

The aroma of burning pine fill the air, and it was time to crawl out and greet the day. The first activity was a look through the kitchen window of Salt Lake cabin at the block of salt where the Deer Park is today. And, yes, there were not one, not two, but three deer.

We're coming back because my father's first love is birds and nature. And as he slips into the quieter world of Alzheimer's, doubt, and disorientation, I feel myself on the precipice of age beside him. We both need steadying. I want to see him at home in the wilderness to let nature pull him back and to regain a healthier perspective of myself.

We hike the Portage Trail to Slim Lake, and he climbs the rocky heights to pick the season's last blueberries. We sit together in the warm sun, perched high above the lake, beyond the pressure of obligations and temporal details, and a smile of recognition and contentment returns to his face.

We come back to camp alone, where friendly voices welcomed him in earlier years, doc, the ornithologist and naturalist. Father and son, we come back to enjoy each other in the company of the timeless granite boulders, lichens, trees, and minnows that dart about in the clear shoreline water.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: Emily Buchwald reading the award winning essay from the Milkweed Edition sponsored essay contest about the Boundary Waters Canoe area wilderness. And that essay is by Larry Risser from Minneapolis. It was a wonderful essay.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: I love it.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: And I got to read the second place and the third place essay winners as well. And can you tell us a little bit about that? I was particularly struck by the third place, which was written by a young woman.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Yes, we were quite delighted that we had, in addition to seasoned veteran Boundary Water trekkers, that we received essays from a number of people in junior high, high school, and college.

And this third place essay, as you say, comes from a 13-year-old who lives in South Haven, Minnesota, Kristi Pladson. So it meant a lot, I think, to have across the board this affirmation of what it means to go into the wilderness.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: And she liked the wilderness because it made her feel strong. Yes.

EMILIE BUCHWALD: Exactly.

GRETA CUNNINGHAM: That's wonderful. So you had a whole variety of memories and topics that were written about in the essay contest. What was the goal when you sponsored the contest?

EMILIE BUCHWALD: The goal was to encourage Minnesotans to talk about what the Boundary Waters meant to each of them, to stop and think about what it would mean not to have such a place as a resource for us, and indeed for everybody in this country.

And so to have people speak to their own memories or their own reflections and to give their testimonies, in fact, about the importance of having that place there unchanged, undisturbed, something that would continue into the future that would not be diminished.