Saturday, August 22, 2009
We were up rather early, after John was woken up by some fishermen in the bay by our site. He heard this: “Rock...rock...” BANG! “You dumbass!” He chuckled about that all day long. We had our breakfast and packed up camp. Now we were eager to get back to our life, to get back to our kids. But the morning was also really beautiful and sunny (and initially very cold; it got down close to 40 degrees overnight). So we headed out relatively quickly, but still took the time to take pictures or to enjoy the sun on our faces. It felt wonderful. Bald Eagle was actually calm this morning; it was a nice paddle. The portage out to our car was long...it seemed to take longer than when we first put in there. I guess it’s because we were eager for it to be over. For once, John wasn’t able to catch up on me on the portage trail; I was moving too quickly for him, even though his stride is much longer than mine.

We went back to Ely, showered, and had a marvelous, though late, lunch at the Boathouse Brewery. Then it was on the road back to Minneapolis…and back to our babies. 2009 trip: complete.

There is one other thing that I was fantasizing about getting from this trip, and that was some sort of mental healing. Our older daughter has had a lot of medical problems in her life, starting with her early birth (she only weighed 2 ½ pounds) and it still continues today, though at a much less stressful level. She has at 10 surgeries, and may need more in the future; we have to wait and see. Sometimes it’s been a really long 10 years. We haven’t been back to the BWCA since 1998, the year before she was born; it was just too hard for a long time. We couldn’t leave her, and we didn’t feel she could go. One year, when she was five or six, we considered going and taking her along, but it didn’t work out. Since then other things have come up, and in the past few years it’s been no time off because we’d used it all on her surgeries, or because of me being pregnant or having a tiny baby. I had problems with low blood pressure during the pregnancy and a physical trip like that would have been out of the question, plus there was no time off, anyway, since surgery #8 happened early in the pregnancy. This year was the first year we really felt that we could go. So I’ve been waiting and waiting for this, and wanting nature to somehow soothe part of me that’s had a hard time with all of this. Fix me somehow. But I realized while portaging from Turtle to Bald Eagle that I don’t need to be fixed. I’ve just changed into something else, and that is okay. Like the giant rock that broke apart to form the chasm along the Bald Eagle – Turtle portage… what was once whole has broken, but it’s just been made into something else. And maybe it’s been made into something even better.

I asked John, “Which of the things we’ve made did you like the best?” I was referring to the freezer bag meals, but his reply really said it all: “Our girls.”

Pictures: The Isabella River, near where it meets Bald Eagle Lake, the Snake River at one of the portages, the Snake River near where it meets the Isabella River, a bird of prey (anyone know what kind?), at the EP after our trip, at the Boathouse Brewery in Ely post-trip.