Sunday, August 05, 2018

We awoke and as is true for every trip, we somberly packed up, sad to be leaving the BWs. And of course, it was turning out to be a nice, sunny day.

Good for our last paddle, but makes you want to stay all the longer. It was about an hour paddle back to the dock where we unloaded our things and carried the canoes back to the outfitter.

I went inside to settle up and got the message nobody ever wants to get: ‘Call your wife ASAP.’ Well this is the first time anyone in our group has had cell phone service. I call my wife and she drops the bomb that her brother had died (unexpectedly, he was 27) two days earlier. My heart sank and I couldn’t stop the tears from filling my eyes. All at once a million thoughts flooded my brain. I couldn’t reconcile that I had just been spending the past couple days enjoying my time in the wilderness while my wife and her entire family were reeling. The fact that I couldn’t be there for my wife was making me sick to my stomach. By the time I met up with the other guys, they already knew. Of course, everyone had been trying to contact all of us for the past two days, so everyone had messages on their phones.

The ride home was very quiet, as I tried to wrap my head around what had happened. Is the BWCA the real world? It didn’t seem like it at all. It seemed like some playground I was in, isolated from the pain of the real world. A few months later, it is still difficult to talk about the good parts of this trip, given that I know what was going on back home at the same time. This is one of the risks you take going into the BWCA with no satellite communication device. Who knows, maybe my future trips will be including one of those.

~Sawbill Lake