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[MUSIC PLAYING] SPEAKER 1: Even if you've never set foot in the Northwoods, you've heard of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area wilderness. It's more than a million acres and more than 1,000 lakes. It's captured in a new book called Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness. And we'll talk with the writer/photographer team about their newest collaboration next.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

That's after the news.

CRAIG WINDHAM: From NPR News in Washington, I'm Craig Windham. The government's latest wave of economic reports shows some bright spots for the nation's economy. NPR's Sonari Glinton says consumer spending and sales of new homes are up and first-time claims for unemployment benefits are down.

SONARI GLINTON: According to the Labor Department, the number of people applying for unemployment benefits has gone down for the second time in three weeks. But with the unemployment rate stuck at 9.8%, companies are not adding many workers either.

Also, according to reports from the Commerce Department, orders for durable goods went up the most in eight months, that is, if you exclude the big ticket items associated with transportation. Consumer spending is up modestly, and more people bought new homes in November. Sonari Glinton, NPR News, Washington.

CRAIG WINDHAM: Security has been stepped up in Rome, where package bombs have exploded today at the embassies of Switzerland and Chile. NPR's Sylvia Poggioli reports two people were wounded.

SYLVIA POGGIOLI: Rome mayor Gianni Alemanno said investigators are following what he called international leads but gave no further details. There has been no immediate claim of responsibility for the incidents, which are similar to events in Greece last month.

Anarchists were suspected of sending booby trapped parcels to the offices of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and to Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, as well as several embassies. Italian police are checking all embassies in Rome. Sylvia Poggioli, NPR News, Rome.

CRAIG WINDHAM: Congress has adjourned for the year. When lawmakers return in January, Republicans will have a majority in the House and increased strength in the Senate. But President Obama says he still thinks lawmakers in the White House can find common ground on a range of issues.

BARACK OBAMA: My sense is the Republicans recognize that with greater power is going to come greater responsibility. And some of the progress that I think we saw in the lame duck was a recognition on their part that people are going to be paying attention to what they're doing, as well as what I'm doing and what the Democrats in Congress are doing.

CRAIG WINDHAM: The president speaking at the White House before departing for Hawaii. He arrived there a few hours ago to join his family for a 10-day vacation. The holiday exodus is underway with many Americans getting an early start today to try to beat the crowds. Janine Jackson was catching a flight to Chicago from New York's LaGuardia Airport.

JANINE JACKSON: I don't like crowds but getting here early in the morning takes that pressure out of it. Also, around Christmas, the crowds seem a little friendlier.

CRAIG WINDHAM: London's Heathrow Airport is back to near normal operations today, but officials there say it will take some time for airlines to get thousands of travelers who've been stranded at the airport to their destinations and to other airports after days of problems that were caused by snow and frigid temperatures across Europe.

On Wall Street at this hour, stock prices are mixed. The Dow Industrials are up 7 points at 11,566. But the NASDAQ Composite Index is down 7. This is MPR News from Washington.

SPEAKER 2: Support for news comes from the Langeloth Foundation, supporting innovation in physical and emotional healing for underserved populations at langeloth.org.

PHIL PICARDI: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Phil Picardi. An 11-month-old Saint Paul boy was reunited with his parents late last night after a ride in a stolen car. The boy's father says he left the baby in his car seat for a short time while he went in the house, but the car was stolen. The boy was found in the snow near a Maplewood apartment complex about 90 minutes later. Police also recovered the car. There have been no arrests in the case.

An advance look at a documentary film about the mass executions in Mankato in 1862 is being shown around the region. Sunday marks the 148th anniversary of the largest mass execution in US history. Mark Steil reports.

MARK STEIL: The film Dakota 38 documents a horseback ride in 2008. That ride commemorated the Indians hanged at Mankato following a six-week war in 1862. Film codirector Silas Hagerty says Dakota38, is a message for reconciliation between Native Americans and whites.

SILAS HAGERTY: If there was one goal, I think it was really to face this tragic past, and then to really move forward.

MARK STEIL: Hagerty says a rough cut of the film has been shown in several locations, including Fort Snelling, where many Dakota were held in a prison camp in 1862. He expects the final version of the documentary will be released next year. Mark Steil, Minnesota Public Radio News, Worthington.

PHIL PICARDI: Workers cleared snow and ice from the Metrodome roof again yesterday, two weeks after the roof collapsed in a snowstorm. Officials still are not certain how or when the roof will be fixed. Longtime Minnesota Wild coach Jacques Lemaire is the new coach of the New Jersey Devils. The Devils fired coach John McClain and replaced him with Lemaire. The 65-year-old Lemaire spent only a few months in retirement.

There's a good chance of snow for mostly Southern Minnesota for the next day and a half. Snow moving in today in Southern Minnesota and snowing tonight as well. It's MPR News.

SPEAKER 3: Support for this program comes from Small Beer Press, presenting What I Didn't See and Other Stories, a new book from Karen Joy Fowler, author of the best selling The Jane Austen book Club, available from smallbeerpress.com and bookstores.

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KATE SMITH: In our next hour of Midmorning, a new book out by a Minnesota writer/photographer duo about the northern wilderness called Paddle North. It's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio news. Carrie Miller is away. I'm Kate Smith.

The challenge of the book, it seems, Paddle North, was to translate the wilderness for those who've never been there and for those who love it. When you open the book from Greg Breining and Layne Kennedy, you might expect a nice, peaceful coffee table book. Paddle North delivers on that. The text is rich and descriptive. The photographs beautifully executed.

But Paddle North seems to go a step further. It offers a point of view from two men who love the Northwoods wilderness. It suggests that those people who think of the border country of Minnesota and Ontario as timeless forest should think again. Over time, the land and the species will change, should change it suggests.

The book explores a hydropower plant project proposed by Ojibwe Indians in Canada. It asks the provocative question, how pure is the wilderness considering it's been inhabited for many centuries? Greg Breining is here in the studio this morning. He's the writer behind Paddle North, newly out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. A pleasure, sir.

GREG BREINING: Good morning, Kate. Thank you.

KATE SMITH: And your counterpart joins us long distance from sunny, I think, Virginia, Yorktown, Virginia. Layne Kennedy, good to have you today.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Hi, Kate. How are you? It is sunny today but cold.

KATE SMITH: [LAUGHS] Well, Greg, I want to start with you because this book to me seemed to be a whole lot of different things. Its prose. Its images. Its reporting. And I want to get a sense from you, how much of your goal with a book like this with absolutely beautiful images is to create a sense of place that's tangible enough so people who've never been there get it but to tell some of us who have been there something new. Is that what you want?

GREG BREINING: Well, I think you've nailed it absolutely. One of the aims of the book is to very much create a sense of being there that can be appreciated by someone who has never been there before. But on the other hand, I did want to bring something of intellectual substance, if you will.

I didn't want it the text, that is, simply to be an accompaniment of lovely and rich photography. I wanted to see both the photos and the writing contribute something of substance. So to that extent, yeah, I wanted it to be something a little bit more than a coffee table book.

KATE SMITH: And the chapters of the book are interesting because they break down very differently, at least to me. You write about canoes and travel and the history of canoe making. You write about a winter experience. You write about ecological and environmental issues. Are there techniques that you tried to employ along the way to achieve a sort of intimate sense of place while you were being a journalist too?

GREG BREINING: Well, perhaps technique implies something way too deliberate.

[LAUGHTER]

KATE SMITH: It doesn't just happen.

GREG BREINING: In fact, what I was trying to do was to select some icons of the Boundary Waters. What are some things we associate with the Boundary Waters that describe it and distinguish it? So we have the canoe. I mean, it is canoe country for a number of good reasons. Maps. You need a map to get through the place. Rock, portages. And so I tried to select these icons.

The initial ones in the book, the ones I just mentioned, tend to be fairly concrete. But as the book goes on, they become more abstract. So we have shadows of the north, which are all these sort of vanishing things of the Boundary Waters, or things that may vanish.

Things like the lynx, which is right on the edge of its habitat there and may retreat northward with the wolverine and the caribou. Listening point, which is sort of a wilderness concept, a wilderness ethic that we associate with the Boundary Waters, which is changing.

KATE SMITH: Now. Layne Kennedy was gracious enough to share some of his wonderful photographs with us. And if you go to mprnews.org, right in the center of the page, there is one of his lovely images. And if you click on that, there's a wonderful slideshow of a half a dozen or so of the images. Layne, I know photographers say the best photos tell their own story. And I want to get a sense from you about how you approach the narrative of the photos for this book.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Well, Greg and I in the previous book that we did when he talks about the chapters, I think that's how we looked at this is that we're trying to tell a real story about this location. And when it comes to covering a topic like the Boundary Waters, I think in order for us to differentiate ourselves on how we cover the Boundary Waters, we wanted to do something that was very real, tell the whole story.

So as a photographer-- I think I'm more of a photojournalist than I am a landscape photographer for sure-- is I never go out with the goal of trying to create a single image per page. We're really trying to create photographs that tell the complete story. The dots become connected. So pictures of people around camp are connected to portage. And the portage is connected to the fire and so on and so forth.

And every once in a while, you come across an image like that, the hot water toss when it was 35 below 0 outside. Those types of images seem to surpass the sum of all the parts. And you hope that you'll come across those. But, for the most part, I was just trying to cover the whole story of the Boundary Waters experience.

KATE SMITH: I did see that water toss image. and I thought, oh, he must have just died and gone to heaven when he realized he had it perfect.

LAYNE KENNEDY: [LAUGHS] They say it's an f/8 and be there.

[LAUGHTER]

KATE SMITH: And it makes up for all the ones you don't get.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Exactly. Exactly.

KATE SMITH: It's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Kate Smith. We're talking this morning with Greg Breining, Saint Paul writer, and Layne Kennedy, a Saint Paul-based photographer, about their new effort. The book is Paddle North. It's brand new out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. And it's about the Boundary Waters and Quetico Wilderness Areas.

We'd love to hear your experiences. Are you a Boundary Waters canoe country lover? Have you been a lot, or are you dreaming of it? Give us a call this morning and tell us your thoughts about the wilderness. What are your memorable times or your memorable images? We'd love to hear. 1-800-242-2828. That's 800-242-2828. In the Twin Cities, the number is 651-227-6000. Or you can go online, mprnews.org, and click on Send us a Question.

Greg Breining, there's a little section of the book that I would like you to read for us. It's one of those places in the book where to me, as a reader, you really shared a point of view about an aspect of the wilderness.

GREG BREINING: Yes, I'll be glad to. I guess the setup here is it's preceded by an essay in which we recognize that things are changing in the Boundary Waters and that some of the familiar signs like the moose may not be there forever.

So this is the conclusion. It may be that 100 years from now canoeists will not be able to catch lake trout here. That even the deepest lakes will have warmed sufficiently. The trout will have joined a northward procession of caribou and lynx and other boreal creatures and plants.

Such a loss would be a tragedy to those of us who know canoe country as it is. But it would be wrong to take the sentiment and the anger and despair it provokes too far for icons are the things we seize upon to fix a place in our minds, but they are changeable and illusory.

In some distant future, there will still be a tumult of life, a robust mix of species in the north. The people of that time will celebrate new icons. No longer moose, lynx, and spruce, but whitetail deer, bobcat, and red maple. And there will remain a few of the old familiar signs if we from the past were there to appreciate them, the lakes, the rocks, and the glimmering shifting lights on the trail of souls."

KATE SMITH: That's Greg Breining reading from his new book out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press, Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters Quetico Wilderness The debate over climate change was ringing in my ears as I read that section.

And your entreaty to not hold on to disappointment, anger about that change was fascinating to me because there are so many writers who love the Northwoods who cling tenaciously to what we know of them now during our lifetime. Has that been an adjustment, a transition for you to come to?

GREG BREINING: Well, very much. I mean, even in the process of working on this book, of course, one of the first steps was to try to identify the things that so distinguish the North Country. And, of course, many of those things are the very things that will be changing in the-- well, in the lifetimes ahead. Not so much in my lifetime. I'm an old guy already. But certainly, in the decades, in the centuries ahead, things will change.

And you can take a pessimistic, angry view of that, or you can say, well, we're on a grand adventure. And life will prevail, life will abide. And it will become a new place, a different place. It has changed before, and it will change again. And that's not a reason not to value this 2 million acres of wild, spectacular country.

KATE SMITH: Have you gotten any pushback from people?

GREG BREINING: I have not. I have not.

KATE SMITH: Interesting.

GREG BREINING: But we'll see maybe after this program.

KATE SMITH: Mark is calling us this morning from Ely. Hi, Mark. Welcome to Midmorning.

MARK: Good morning. Good morning. Thanks.

KATE SMITH: What's your comment today, Mark?

MARK: Well, for 40-some years since I began guiding up in Ely, I've watched the woods evolve, I guess. And after studying the ecology of it, getting to know individuals at the University of Minnesota and knowing their-- I'm out of breath, I was just shoveling some snow.

[LAUGHTER]

KATE SMITH: Take a moment. We don't want to create any problems here. Just take a deep breath.

MARK: Everybody is-- I know. We need four more inches of snow, I understand, to break the record for December.

KATE SMITH: Oh, cheers.

MARK: Yeah.

SPEAKER 4: I'm excited.

MARK: [LAUGHS] I've seen my favorite campsites get trampled. I've seen the portages widen. I could go on and on and on, but I won't. I'm hoping to have dialogue with the Forest Service Department of Agriculture to actually discuss to begin the dialogue on restoring the Boundary Waters.

KATE SMITH: What's that mean to you?

MARK: Well, it means something that-- 80-some years ago, individuals were pleading with the government to yes, we're cutting it down. What are we doing afterwards? And it was the loggers that took the hit. They took the fall for the government. And indirectly, it was not anybody's particular fault. There was a lack of ethics. There was a lack of education on what you do after you rape the land, so to speak.

So now we've got woods that are not even safe to walk through. The debris is so thick nothing grows. And any natural regrowth of white pines and Norways are affected because they can't grow properly. So we must begin the dialogue on-- and it will cost serious money.

And environmentalists will be so anti this because we're going to need modern technology to do this thing. And over so many years, we can begin to regenerate and regrow and reforest that wilderness. It's not going to be that difficult. We just need to amend some laws.

KATE SMITH: Mark, thanks for the call. I want to hear what Greg has to say. Greg Breining?

GREG BREINING: Well, I think I know where Mark is going with this, and I mostly agree. In fact, I write about it in the last essay in the book. Our sort of pie in the sky notion of wilderness stemming from Thoreau and the environmental movement of the '60s has created the sense that wilderness is this pristine land, untrammeled where man visits but does not remain.

That doesn't really describe the Boundary Waters. Humans have always been there. They've always exerted their effect. But because of this attitude or this idea of wilderness and wilderness management has entailed things like keeping all artificial influences out like fire. And fire policy, which Mark is alluding to, is a great example.

We can't go in there and do controlled burns because it would violate the wilderness policy. The Forest Service has a let burn policy, but there are all kinds of conditions under which you can't let a natural fire burn. And so it's really a rarely burn policy. And as a result, you get all kinds of senescent, old, dying forest and fuel build up. And when you do get a fire, you get these big catastrophic fires like Ham Lake or Cavity Lake fires.

What would make a lot more sense is what they do to some extent in the Quetico, which is to say, if we're going to have the natural regimen of fire, what has existed up there for centuries, we need to go in and start a few of them. We need to manage the forest. It's a false conceit to just say we can draw a border around here and pretend it's wilderness, pretend it's pristine, and take no responsibility for managing it.

KATE SMITH: Layne Kennedy, you were back in 2007 up there in the Boundary Waters when one of those recent fires broke out, Ham Lake, right?

LAYNE KENNEDY: The Ham Lake fire, correct.

KATE SMITH: And remind me, now, you and Lee Frelich, the U of M ecologist, were there on a trip together then?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Correct

KATE SMITH: And give us a sense, if you would, what's your clearest recollection of those days? There are some amazing some of your photographs in the book from that fire. You were across the lake from it. Fill in the rest of the story for us?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Well, we were actually in doing a story-- It's funny, Greg alluded to this earlier on the changing conditions in the Boundary Waters. We were up actually doing a story on the changing ecology of the boreal forest to the global warming. And so that's why I was up with Lee Frelich and Gus Axelson doing a story on this.

And we'd actually paddled across. The ice had gone out the day before. So the water temperature was still right around 35, 36 degrees, and it was incredibly windy. This is first week of May, which normally is still cold up there. And then the winds were coming out of the south very 30, 40 miles an hour and warm. It was 75 degrees. It was just weird. Those kinds of conditions were just weird.

And we had paddled all the way over to Three Mile Island where we camped the first night. And when we got up the next morning, I got in a kayak. It was three of us, and these two guys were in a canoe. And I've been in the Boundary Waters before by herself paddling. And I went, you know what? I'm not going to do this. So I used my kayak, which allowed me greater access around the lake.

And as I drifted out while we were waiting to break camp, I noticed to the south there was a small plume of smoke. And we all commented, well, jeez, there's somebody else out here other than us crazy guys the first week of May. And that plume of smoke was the start of the Ham lake fire. And within an hour, it had tripled in size. Within four hours, it took up almost half of the sky. Within eight hours, it consumed the entire landscape.

And basically, it wasn't so much the fire that had trapped us. It was the windy conditions that did not allow us to leave the lake. And then, we were there for three or four days, and the fire actually worked its way completely around us.

And it was just at midnight-- one of the photographs that you see in the book, the large panoramic shot from one of the bluffs on Seagull, it's basically shot at midnight, but it's so bright from the embers burning from the Cavity Lake fire illuminating the clouds that you could walk around like it was daytime.

KATE SMITH: You were on the opposing shore now on Seagull, which is a pretty big lake.

LAYNE KENNEDY: It's a big lake.

KATE SMITH: Were you aware at all of your danger? What were you guys doing?

LAYNE KENNEDY: It's funny. We talked about it quite a bit. We were pretty prepared for it. But I think in a lot of ways, also as a journalist, it was also-- and a wilderness person-- it was pretty exciting.

KATE SMITH: Yeah.

LAYNE KENNEDY: At no point in time-- and I think this is true for all three of us who were up there-- we never felt at any point that our lives were in danger. I think the thing that amazed us the most was that the Cavity Lake fire had already taken down almost all of the forest.

The only thing that was standing were these dried sticks from the Cavity Lake fire, but we're wondering what the heck is burning? And, of course, it was that that was burning. And then it was resorts that were burning. And then it encroached into new wilderness areas that were still green, and it was burning.

And, of course, it's May. Everything was packed down dry as a bone and just igniting everywhere. And there was a couple of times where we made sure that our tents and our canoes were in position that if we had to chase out to the lake we could do so.

And only once during one of the wind shifts that we actually had to pull our T-shirts over our faces and handkerchiefs around our faces because the acrid smell of the smoke was actually starting to hurt our throats. And that starts getting the blood pumping a little bit.

You're thinking, OK, are we going to have to leave? And then the wind shifted, and we were fine. And I think the only time we really got nervous is one of the mornings we woke up. I think it was the third morning, and the fire was still ablaze. When we got up, I looked behind me, which was to the north and the north was glowing.

And immediately, I thought, OK, now the fire's wrapped around us, what do we need to do? And that was a little tricky. And we kind of waited it out and realized the fire was just so big that the glow was so large that it felt as if it was a lot closer to us than it actually was.

KATE SMITH: And once you were able to move around and maneuver into some of the areas that had burned, as a wildlife and nature photographer, did you have a sense that you were seeing the wilderness in a really different way from how you'd ever seen it through your lens before?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Oh, absolutely. In fact, because the Cavity Lake fire had burned a good portion of Seagull, those hills that you enter Seagull-- and I've been paddling Seagull for 25 years. And when we take off from the same takeoff spot that we go to, we go down the channel, we hit the open lake. When you look off to the distance, all you ever saw was just layers of green.

Now, when you go there, you saw layers and waves of bedrock that you'd never had seen before. So there was a new kind of beauty. In a way, you got to see a landscape very different than it was before. You could see wildlife much easier than you ever could before.

But the hardest part was that same entry point that I made from Seagull for all these years, as we were paddling out that day, it was all still on fire. And all you could do was just keep shaking your head, I can't believe this. I can't believe this is happening. And just four days earlier, it was green and beautiful, and now we're paddling out, and it's burning.

KATE SMITH: Ben is calling from Mankato this morning. Hi, Ben. Welcome to Midmorning.

BEN: Hi. Hey, what's the situation with the blowdown area? I haven't been out there for quite a few years at Boundary Waters, but I was just curious what that was about?

KATE SMITH: Greg Breining, what's your latest report on that big swath of area--

GREG BREINING: It's still there.

KATE SMITH: --that was affected? That was July 4, 1999.

GREG BREINING: 1999, I believe.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Yeah, '99.

GREG BREINING: Yeah. In which a really bizarre straight line wind came through and blew down hundreds of thousands of acres of trees. Almost miraculously, we escaped a huge fire in that area immediately afterwards. Some of that area burned with the Cavity Lake and Ham Lake fires.

Parts of the blowdown that had obstructed portage trails and campsites and everything has been cleaned up. In other places, it's still there to be seen and admired in all of its pickup stick beauty. It is pretty amazing to see in places, but it's slowly rotting away.

KATE SMITH: Yeah, Layne.

LAYNE KENNEDY: I didn't mean to interrupt there, Greg.

GREG BREINING: Oh, that's all right

LAYNE KENNEDY: His point was well taken. There are certain places, especially I noticed it along the Gunflint Trail because I tend to head up that direction more than I do over towards the western side of the Boundary Waters. And some of the areas in the Cavity Lake fire, it's amazing.

There's already trees that are 8 and 10 feet tall already. And it's amazing to see how quickly the landscape recovers. But then you go to places, as Greg was saying, where the change is still evident. You pull into the western side of Gunflint Lake, and you look across the lake and you go, oh, my gosh, what the heck happened over there?

GREG BREINING: Absolutely.

LAYNE KENNEDY: And It just takes your breath away. And, you know, a lot of it is that areas like that, the Boundary Waters has very little or no topsoil. And so it's going to take a long time for debris to decompose, recreate soil, for things to grow. And so places like Gunflint Lake actually become kind of an ecological school ground for you to look at and see what a fire can actually do.

But it's amazing to me how quickly the fire is recovering and the landscape is recovering. And then, there's efforts from people like up on the Gunflint Trail Association who hold Gunflint Green up every year where they go out and plant 10,000 new trees every spring. And they're surviving, and they're growing.

GREG BREINING: And more power to them.

KATE SMITH: Greg, in one point in the book, you talk about the balance, nature's balance. And you suggest that really when we think about it that way, that's a fallacy because there is no balance. And I wonder, so here we've been talking for 5 or 10 minutes about fire, which is one of the probably most significant things to affect our landscape, fire, flood. Is fire the final prover of the-- of course, there's no balance. It's all about huge cataclysmic events and the recovery from them.

GREG BREINING: Well, indeed, that's true. Actually, I don't think fire is the final word. I think climate is, frankly. But the more we learn, the more we realize, I think, as ecologists or as psychologically minded people that if we are under the illusion that there's a balance of nature, it's just because our lifetimes are so short.

We see this little slice of time of the woods, and we think, oh, it's static. This is the way it's supposed to be. But in fact, climate changes, new species invade, old species disappear. There are catastrophic fires, the forest burns down, it grows back. And, in fact, that dynamic is responsible for a lot of the life in the forest. If we're just old growth, a lot of things would be missing from that forest. And, in fact, these fires are a blessing in disguise.

KATE SMITH: It's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio News. Excuse me. I'm Kate Smith. We're talking this morning with Greg Breining and Layne Kennedy. Their new book is out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. It's called Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness.

We'd love to hear from you this morning. Have you traveled to the Boundary Waters? Have you been there over time and seen some changes? Or have you never been and are curious about some things about the Northwoods wilderness? Give us a call this morning. 1-800-242-2828 That's 800-242-2828. If you're listening in the Twin Cities, 651-227-6000. Or online, mprnews.org and click on Send Us A Question. We'll get back to our conversation here on Midmorning in just a minute.

SPEAKER 5: Support for this program comes from Progressive Insurance. Progressive provides options for people to shop for car, boat, motorcycle, truck, and RV Insurance. At 1-800-Progressive and progressive.com. Now that's progressive.

CATHY WURZER: Friday on Morning Edition, meteorologist Mark Seeley will be in our studio with an update on the latest winter storm. I'm Cathy Wurzer. The Christmas forecast and all the news you need to start your day. Weekdays until 9:00 on Minnesota Public Radio News.

PHIL PICARDI: From Minnesota Public Radio News, I'm Phil Picardi. More people have been buying new homes but not enough to signal better times for the battered housing industry. The Commerce Department says sales of new homes rose 5.5% last month. That gain came after sales had fallen to the second lowest level in 47 years in October.

Rome's mayor describes it as a wave of terrorism against embassies. Packaged bombs exploded today at the Swiss and Chilean embassies in the Italian capital, injuring the two people who opened them. Police have ordered checks at all embassies in Rome. Italy's interior minister says investigators believe anarchists may be behind the package bombs.

The UN says at least 173 people have been killed in Ivory Coast, and it says 90 others were tortured or treated inhumanely because of postelection violence in the West African nation. UN human rights officers documented the killings and abuses between December 16 and December 21.

After days of delays brought on by snowfall, it's getting easier for travelers to get in and out of Britain. Most services are running normally at Heathrow Airport and on the cross-channel trains. A slight rise in temperature helped melt most of the snow and ice in London, but heavy snow shut down the airport in Dublin, Ireland, for several hours.

The National Weather Service has issued a winter weather advisory for much of the southern half of Minnesota. Forecasters say accumulating snow is expected from this afternoon into Friday morning. Specifically, the Weather Service says light snow will move into West Central Minnesota shortly after noon. Snow intensity will increase after 3:00 o'clock this afternoon. And snowfall totals of 3 to 6 are expected by tomorrow morning. Drivers may encounter difficult travel conditions due to reduced visibility and snow covered roads.

Right now in the Twin Cities, cloudy skies, the temperature at 26 degrees. In Fargo-Moorhead, it's cloudy and 21. In Rochester, it's cloudy and 25. This is Minnesota Public Radio News.

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KATE SMITH: Coming up today on Midday, at 11:00, former Senator Dave Durenberger will be in the studio with Gary Eichten to review the year's achievements in health care reform. And then over the noon hour, award-winning author Kate DiCamillo speaks at the club book series. That's coming up on Midday.

Back to our conversation here on Midmorning with Greg Breining and Layne Kennedy. Their new book is out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press. It's called Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness. And we've got Chris on the line calling from Duluth. Hi, Chris.

CHRIS: Hello.

KATE SMITH: What's your comment today, Chris?

CHRIS: I just was listening to your program. I was very interested when I heard that Greg was going to be on. I work with the Forest Service up here as a information officer. Sometimes when we have different incidents like the Ham Lake fire and my day-to-day job is in information with the Superior National Forest.

But what I wanted to just mention is that the Forest Service has been involved in implementing large-scale prescribed fire program in the Boundary Waters. Since the blowdown, prescribed fires are intentionally lit, carefully planned fires that we have been working on.

We planned about 80,000 acres in the blowdown. We've completed about 50,000, a little over 50,000 acres. We have to wait until we get the right conditions. And what we're doing with that is actually trying to break up the continuity of the fuels, the blowdown fuels.

We aren't going to try to get rid of all of it because actually, the blowdown was a natural event, and a huge area like that, there isn't any way that we would go in and be able to remove all of the blowdown and perhaps that we don't want to do that. But we did plan out this kind of strategically placed fuel breaks.

And so we tend to do that burning towards the end of the season, September, October or early if we have the right conditions. So a lot of times people don't see that we're trying to reduce that impact, but they may see some signs of that work when they do get back into the area. Of course, we close it off to the public when we're actually burning.

KATE SMITH: And as you say, the conditions have to be just right for things like that. What is the potential complication for the Forest Service in that policy, in that very policy deciding to piecemeal out how you are managing the part of the wilderness that has been affected by something as huge as the blowdown?

CHRIS: Well, first of all, it's the impetus for us to plan out the prescribed burns was basically the safety issues and the potential for a big fire to get started and to leave the wilderness and to threaten communities and people outside and the potential for resource damage.

And I think that probably-- Greg, you've said you've been up in that area after the Cavity Lake fire and some areas of Ham Lake where there's an intense fire, it does a lot of damage. And our monitoring has shown us that we see far less resource damage. And, in fact, actually, there's some good things that happen like growth of berries and that kind of thing after the prescribed fires compared to the damage of a large fire.

So we knew we needed to do some active management up in the Boundary Waters after the blowdown, and we had some international experts. We've done a lot of cooperative work with our counterparts in Canada. We helped them on their fires, and they helped us on our fires and our prescribed fires. And we're learning from each other. And that's been a real, real good partnership.

KATE SMITH: Chris, thanks so much for the call this morning, bringing us up to date.

CHRIS: Yeah, thank you.

KATE SMITH: And Debbie is on the line now. She's calling from Grand Marais. Debbie, hi. Welcome to Midmorning.

DEBBIE: Hi. Thank you for taking my call.

KATE SMITH: You bet.

DEBBIE: I haven't listened to the whole program, so I'm not sure if you covered this, but a different perspective. We have a home right on the edge. We were actually the first property that was hit during the Ham Lake fire. And talking about fire is good, reforestation, so on and so forth. But the problem is that the blowdown happened 10 years ago. And a lot of the seed source was removed.

Fire helps open up seeds and create a better ground for reforestation. But when the seed source was removed from the blowdown, we who live up there on a daily basis are not seeing the regeneration that fires normally bring. And with disturbed soils, increased opening up of the natural forest, there's a lot of invasives that are coming up.

And so you're not seeing a lot of regeneration of the natural flora and fauna up there. And we're seeing a lot of grasses and brush and that sort of thing. So it's really we rehab our land, but it's very difficult with all the invasives in and about.

KATE SMITH: Well, and Greg Breining, interesting because that speaks directly to what we were talking about earlier. Do you manage the forest to return it to what it was, or do you manage the forest to allow it to have succession? I mean, that ecological succession is part of nature.

GREG BREINING: Sure, a little bit of both, really. It's interesting what Debbie said about the seed source. Some of that problem stems back a lot farther than the blowdown. That goes all the way back to logging in the Boundary Waters. Just about half of the Boundary Waters has been logged in the past. And that logging removed a lot of the mature pines in places that would provide a seed source for a lot of reseeding.

In fact. Lee Frelich, the university ecologist, said that what he would like to see the Forest Service do in places is to plant some stands of pine in the Boundary Waters to compensate for removing all those seed sources 75 or 100 years ago. As far as invasives, well, invasives are a fact of life. I mean, you can't go and rip out buckthorn from 2 million acres of land.

Up in the Quetico, I think something like 10% of the plant species are from places other than Ontario. And I would imagine the situation is similar in the Boundary Waters. The special gift of human beings is carrying stuff around and trading it. And as long as you have people moving across the face of the planet, you're going to have new species moving around. And you can do some restoration in that regard, but some of it, frankly, is hopeless.

KATE SMITH: Layne Kennedy, I would be remiss if I didn't ask you the question, I think, a lot of people might have when they look at the images that you've taken for this book because, as you said earlier in the hour, they are reflective of iconic moments in the Northwoods, a wilderness trip, a group looking at a map. Somehow when you take those images, they don't look like vacation photos. And I want to know how--

LAYNE KENNEDY: Is that a good thing or a bad thing?

KATE SMITH: You know What I mean.

[LAUGHTER]

How is it that you're approaching the subject? I mean, this is about more than nature photography because you wanted to interact with humans, obviously, in many of the images in your book. So is it composition? What is it that lets you step back and take images of those very same-- I mean, I look at those photos, and I said to myself, oh, yeah, I've got a photo from 1995.

We were all looking around at a map, and there was a lake in the background. Somehow it's just not the same. So where do you start when you have a palette as huge as the horizon of the Boundary Waters to think about what you're going to compose?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Well, that's a good question. And I think a lot of it goes back to the style of books that both Gregg's and my last book, A Hard Water World, which is a book on the culture of ice fishing, not a how-to book, but the culture of ice fishing. And that also, Kate, was broken down into various chapters. And we've done the same thing here with the Boundary Waters.

So for me, I'm actually going out and covering 10 different stories. Portage-- Greg had mentioned we looked at the iconic aspects of the Boundary Waters. And so for me visually to try to make this marriage with Greg's text, it's to show each one of these places as they are. And I think Greg and I think alike on those terms in that, I guess, I look at a book on the Boundary Waters, and I don't consider this book to be a coffee table book. I consider this to be a real book on the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness.

And I come from that perspective, in that, as Greg had mentioned earlier, this is the whole story is people using this wilderness. And I've always viewed that if a book is just nothing but pretty pictures of a lake, pretty pictures of a sunrise, sunset, by the fifth or sixth page, it starts to become pretty repetitive and for me, pretty boring.

It's that interaction of wilderness with people and the experiences that people get from wilderness that intrigues me. And so including people in those photographs, I think, really helps tell the story. And there's just certain moments that we all experience, but we tend to walk past those. There's an image, for example, of a guy with very muddy legs on a portage.

KATE SMITH: Yeah.

LAYNE KENNEDY: That's one of those things when you're on a trip, you go, jeez, look how much mud we've got, and you can't wait to get to the lake to rinse it off. But yet, oftentimes, those terrible portages are your most memorable experiences in this wilderness.

And the thing about the Boundary Waters is it's such an accessible wilderness for so many ages and so many different types of experienced people to go to the Boundary Waters. In a conversation just a few days ago, somebody had told me that a lot of folks view the Boundary Waters after an initial experience like with a camp or a bunch of pals that it's a little more elevated than a state park experience.

And I think our first caller was talking about he's worried about campsites being overrun and so on and so forth. And certainly, that exists in any wilderness. You go in those areas that are easily accessible, that they are used more than other places. But the deeper you go into the wilderness, the more wild it is, the more rugged it is, and also the more challenging it can be. And so I just try to bring that across to the photographs that we have a nice mix of what the wilderness experience is in a very real light.

KATE SMITH: And so I also want you to share with us because you do at the very end of the book share this story. So I'm not telling tales out of school. I want you to tell the story about the one that got away. The photo that got away from you.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Yeah, that was one of my very first experiences in the Boundary Waters. And, I think, again, this is the beauty of wilderness that you can't plan for it. And even though the Boundary Waters is an accessible wilderness, it's still wilderness. Tragedy can still happen in the wilderness. And of for me, the tragedy was missing a photograph.

We were actually going from one lake to another. We were going from Seagull Lake, one of my favorite lakes up to Alpine Lake. And one of those fabulous summer thunderstorms just built, and we could hear it rumbling. And we were actually rather than doing the portage because it was our first portage carrying your heaviest amount of gear for a two-week trip, we decided to pull our canoes through the connecting stream that joined those two lakes.

And as we did, the storm came right upon us and lightning struck. And lightning struck a tree right across the river from us and just scared the devil out of us. In fact, neither one of us can remember how we ended up on shore watching everything develop after that. But then it rained. It poured. Our canoe filled with water. All my camera gear, of course, was improperly packed at that point in time.

Being a rookie and going up there, I figured the Glad garbage bags would be sufficient for any weather that we might have. And, of course, when I picked up the bag, the water drained out of it. And I went, yeah, my gear is going to be toast. Well, anyway, so the sun breaks like those summer thunderstorms passing storms do and a rainbow ensues. And it was just gorgeous.

And, right at that rainbow was that half of that rainbow entered the lake. A loon paddled right through it. And, you're sitting there. You're just absolutely stunned. And, of course, I picked my camera up, and I see this red colored water coming out of it just like Kodachrome was just melting out of my camera.

So it was one of those images that wasn't meant to be. But it was definitely a moment that was meant to be taken in. And I never forget that day. I never forget that moment. And I don't really regret not having captured that. And I'm certainly, thankful that I had a chance to witness it. And that's wilderness. That's wilderness.

KATE SMITH: It's Midmorning on Minnesota Public Radio News. I'm Kate Smith. We're talking this morning with photographer Layne Kennedy and writer Greg Breining about their new cooperative effort. It's a new book out from the Minnesota Historical Society Press called Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness We'd love to hear your thoughts about the wilderness, your trips, your adventures, your mishaps perhaps.

Give us a call. 1-800-242-2828. That's 800-242-2828. In the Twin Cities, 651-227-6000. Or you can go online, mprnews.org and click on Send Us A Question. Greg Breining, when we talked a little earlier about the idea that the forest changes, that the wilderness changes, that it adapts, that It adapted to logging, that it's adapting now to climate change.

I suspect that there are people in some parts of Minnesota who are listening to our conversation this morning and the word mining is on their mind because there are a couple of active new mining proposals for just maybe 10 miles south of the Boundary Waters up in the Babbitt area.

I wonder how that plays into your sense of whether that's something the wilderness accepts and changes with and handles. How does that play in for you?

GREG BREINING: Well--

KATE SMITH: Knowing it's such a polarizing topic, I throw it your way.

GREG BREINING: Yeah. [LAUGHS] Well, I would certainly not like to see mining in the Boundary Waters-- and I don't think we're talking about an imminent plan for that, any more than I would want to see mining in Yellowstone National Park, or, for that matter, mining in my living room. Certain places for certain uses. We've set these areas aside, including the Boundary Waters Quetico for a certain kind of enjoyment of nature and come hell or high water, we're going to protect them.

KATE SMITH: But just because we draw the line doesn't mean that what happens 20 miles the other side of the line doesn't have an impact.

GREG BREINING: True. And, on the other hand, when does concern for that turn into a not in my backyard kind of argument? I mean, the fact is we are an industrial society. We have built our standard of living on a certain kind of natural resources use. And if not in an area like near Babbitt where there has been iron mining then where?

Where is better than that? A Third World country so we don't have to confront it, we don't have to see it, we don't have to worry about it? It can go on in an area that has regulations that are much worse than ours? Not a good solution in my mind. So at some point, people have to say, OK, we're going to regulate this. We're going to be really strict with it. But given the nature of who we are, we're going to have to allow it somewhere.

Now, is the PolyMet proposal south of the Boundary Waters terrific? Well, it sounds like it can be certainly strengthened and regulations can be strengthened. But just because it's 20 miles from the Boundary Waters does not necessarily mean we should say absolutely not. It does suggest we should say we've got to be really, really strict and careful with this.

KATE SMITH: Rob is calling us this morning from Hutchinson. Hi, Rob, welcome to Midmorning.

ROB: Hi. Thanks for having me on, and thanks for the program.

KATE SMITH: What's your comment today?

ROB: Well, I just wanted to point out you talked about the different level of challenges based on how far you might go in and what the campsites look like. But depending upon when you go in will change your experience a lot too. We've winter camped up there in quinzhee huts, and we've also scouted for moose hunts in August from 1 through Alice.

And it's just wall to wall people all the way back to Alice. And then you show up the second week of October. The leaves are changing, and it's absolutely beautiful, and you never see a soul. So it's a different experience just based on avoiding that summer rush, I guess.

KATE SMITH: And do you avoid it? Do you avoid the summer rush, Rob?

ROB: Oftentimes, yeah. We'll go up in the fall. And, the fishing is a little more hit or miss, but the scenery is, obviously, spectacular. And we like to go when the people aren't there.

KATE SMITH: Layne Kennedy do you prefer your wilderness less populated? Do you also sometimes avoid the summer rush?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Absolutely. And, in fact, that was one of the big conversations that were brought out about this book and including a winter chapter in a book that is Boundary Waters Canoe Area because the Boundary Waters does freeze, but there's a tremendous amount of activity that takes place in the winter months, dog sledding, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, winter camping, all of these things.

And to be honest with you, that's my favorite time of the year just for the reasons that Rob had just brought up, that there's just less people up there, and it seems to be more wilderness. The only tracks you see are either snowshoes or wolf tracks and animal tracks. And that's a real treat to be able to see the wilderness in that light.

And he's right about the summer months in the Boundary Waters. Of course, that's one of the reasons why we have a few images in there. And Greg talks about the crowds in the Boundary Waters. One of my greatest pet peeves in life is traffic. I plan my assignments around not driving around traffic in Minneapolis.

And the same is true with the Boundary Waters. I try not to do that. Because there's nothing worse than at 2:00 o'clock in the afternoon in these busier entry points. Oh, my gosh, we better find a campsite or we're not going to find a campsite. And should you have that feeling in the wilderness, it's a real strange sensation.

KATE SMITH: Greg Breining, you and your wife Susan travel a lot, and you write about your experiences together. I'm wondering as a writer, as an experiencer of nature, does who you're traveling with really affect how you experience the wilderness? Do you have different kinds of experiences based on the comrades?

GREG BREINING: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, your traveling companions can change the whole tenor of a trip. In fact, a great example is a trip we took, Susan and I took, in conjunction with this book. Her daughter and our son-in-law from Brooklyn called us up one day and said, we want to go to the Boundary Waters.

And our response was, really?

KATE SMITH: Had they been?

GREG BREINING: Why do you want to do that? No, they'd never been. [? Addie ?] and Mark wanted to go to the Boundary Waters. So we planned this trip up to Fourtown Lake. It was three short portages in. And then it was a fairly big lake with islands and bays.

And I figured, OK, we can portage in and paddle just a little ways, set up camp, stay for two or three days, and then go out. It'll be an easy trip. They'll get a taste of portaging, and Fourtown is a pretty lake. And that'll be it. It'll be easy.

Well, we got up there, and they took to the portaging right away. I mean, [? Addie, ?] all 100 pounds of her, had the food pack on, and Mark had a pack in the canoe. And pretty soon, they start getting the hang of paddling, and they wanted to go on, and they wanted to do a loop.

So the next day we pulled up stakes, and we went over to Horse Lake, and then down the Horse River over to the Basswood. Well, pretty soon, we were off the map. I didn't bring a map for all that. And we're just going by reckoning, thinking, well, we'll get to Basswood Lake pretty soon, and then we should be able to come back down here to the southwest.

But it was a perfect example of how you're traveling companions can change the tenor of a trip. And in this case, just because of their spirit of adventure and wanting to explore and not whining, just that can-do spirit, it was a delightful trip. It was one of the most enjoyable trips I've ever had up there.

KATE SMITH: Same question to you, Layne. Do you see through your lens differently based on the folks in your campsite? Folks you're traveling with.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Yeah, I think so. That's a good question. I think, for example, with the book coverage, you tend to be thinking specifically about trying to tell a story about portaging. So you are definitely seeing things that are wrapped around the concept of the portage.

And that could be any number of things, the exposed routes that are slippery when it's wet, the difficult climb like the Yum Yum Portage in Quetico, which is infamous for its difficulty going almost straight up and down over rock, and finding ways to cover that.

So your mind becomes very focused on a particular topic at a particular time. And the same is true at night with a campfire or the same is true if you're fishing and so on and so forth. And so yeah, I think you're right. You do become more specific in your mindset on what it is you want to cover when you're dealing with a particular chapter.

KATE SMITH: So first it was Ice Fishing, now it's Paddle North. Is there going to be a third, Greg Breining?

GREG BREINING: No plans.

KATE SMITH: Really?

GREG BREINING: Really. There will be something--

LAYNE KENNEDY: I'm going to take Greg to the North Pole.

[LAUGHTER]

He doesn't like the cold so much, so I'm taking him to the North Pole.

KATE SMITH: No, let's talk about tarpon fishing down in Belize maybe.

LAYNE KENNEDY: I could do that. I could do that.

KATE SMITH: Well, you guys can come back next time you've got a great new [? duo. ?] How's that?

LAYNE KENNEDY: Fabulous.

KATE SMITH: Layne Kennedy, it's been great to talk to you this morning.

LAYNE KENNEDY: Thank you so much, Kate.

KATE SMITH: Thanks for joining us. Layne Kennedy is a Minnesota-based photographer. He joined us this morning from out in Virginia, where he's visiting family for the holidays. He and Greg Breining, Saint Paul writer who's been in the studio this hour. Thank you, sir.

GREG BREINING: Thank you, Kate.

KATE SMITH: They are the duo behind a new Minnesota Historical Society Press issue. It's called Paddle North. It combines Greg's writing, Layne's photography in a wonderful book. And we have a slideshow of some of Layne's images. If you go to mprnews.org, you will find some beautiful photos from Layne from the book. It's Paddle North, Canoeing the Boundary Waters-Quetico Wilderness.

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