05/26/2026
Tuesday trip advice: leave your mouse behind and try your luck with a different mouse.
Why do we tell stories in the forms of newsletters, pictorials and poems about the Boundary Waters? Why don’t we just list the itinerary highlights of a route and mark where we caught fish and where the quote/unquote best campsites and swimming holes were? Why isn’t every portage and campsite and route and sunset rated by our team so that you can cut right to the chase, head for the best and ignore the rest?
Because wilderness, nature, solitude and solace for the soul doesn’t roll like that. It is experiential, palpable, tertiary. It gets under your skin and that’s not something a GPS or satellite mapping system can track. It hits everyone differently at different times, some during a canoe camping trip and some only years later. Thus a poem to describe sensations that time spent in the wild without motors, without refrigeration, without tech and noise and ringing phones and email and social media notifications
Escape into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness. Call our Outfitting Managers 1-800-223-6565 Drew, Adam, Tim. (Outfitting clients get 10% OFF Trip Gear online and in our Retail Store in Ely, MN) Stop into the Piragis Boathouse over Memorial Day and check out our new Delta Kayaks and New and Used Northstar Canoes and Wenonah Canoes with Tom and Lucy!
Springing
Where does the cold go? I asked.
Grandpa said, for those of us in Minnesota,
that it leaks out and finds its way into our bones.
It stores up in the shadows before the sun has climbed the sky
and it seeps into the old heads first. This
is how he talked about himself,
not in some derogatory decline but in borrowed vernacular
implicit with many winters and no small loss
of pigment up top. It makes the bones brittle, not unlike plastic and hurt feelings
during the first week of February when it sneaks down to forty below.
We never talked about the windchill
when I was a minnow, you know? He said that, more than once.
For a long time, Grandpa still had Spring in his step, well, the right one anyway
and he could sit in the canoe with knees bent all morning
or evening if the bluegills and the trout were biting. He could
hunch over the bucket back home and fillet panfish; two a minute before lunchtime.
I don't need any WD-40 today
he'd tell Grandma. I'm not a rusty crayfish.
He knew where the big humpbacks and hybrids slumbered
away from the edges of the w**d beds and the wild rice.
The kind that were bigger than his palm before their tail was thought of.
He understood how the punkinseeds hid from the hunting pike
as keen as the rays from the sun
knifing down through the tannin-stained shallows
like the teeth of his old pocket comb.
Grandpa was like a grass spider just after dawn.
His webs shown with dew and he scurried everywhere.
He floated.
In the afternoon he slept;
just like he does now
dreaming of a paddle in his hand and the tug on end of the line.
©Timothy James Stouffer
05212026 All rights reserved.
Folk art mouse lure with leather ears, leather tail and a bucktail treble
off of an old Mepps #3 spinner by Tim
