In eighty eight, I worked twelve-hour days managing a long project and my husband John made it clear that I might lose him if I didn’t get a rest by summer’s end. He is a middle school teacher, an occupation not unusual among DINC* couples. After city middle school kids, he claimed a childless life was virtue; it prevented murder.

            For John, resting meant a long stay anywhere more than a mile from a road and, preferably, in a wilderness. He picked out a trip to the Boundary Waters between Canada and Minnesota. I loved the outdoor, too, so it didn’t take much to convince me.

            “Fergie, you need to get away,” he said.

            “I need something!” I admitted. My name is Sandy, but he says it doesn’t match my hair color, which is red. So, he named me after the duchess. More importantly, I share one other feature with Sarah Ferguson. I chunk up when I work too hard.

            “You’ll be your old self when you get back.” Then he added poignantly, “I miss you, honey.”

            He referred to the fact that I rarely made it home for dinner anymore. The vice president of my company, who was to get a bonus if the new computer system started up on time, insisted that we install the next week. The aggressive schedule had us all sweating, but my piece of the system was in trouble. Work-stress babble bored John, so I refrained from telling him I was about to lose my job.

            “Maybe after the software is installed.”

            “When?”

            “Three weeks okay?” It would give me time to fix any bugs after installation and to send out my updated resumes.

            “No sooner?” he wheedled. “Think of it. You can float all day. No phones . . . sunshine . . . swim a little . . . fish. Just you and me, yeah? And the loons?” He ran his hand between my thighs to accentuate the you-and-me part, and those myopic brown eyes gleamed behind the Mason-jar lenses. Just the sight of the ripple in his bicep and the curve of his shoulder melted me.

            “Yes!” I said. My heart began to speed. I was a little out of breath. “My new canoe, that what gave you the idea?”

            “Unh unh.” He kissed me on the neck and whispered in my ear. “Saw the guidebook at Summit.” I was warming to the idea. He kissed me on the mouth.

            “We don’t have a yoke,” I murmered. “You can’t portage without one.”

            “What for?” He pulled at my belt. “You don’t think I can carry the canoe?”

             “You’ll kill yourself.” I nuzzled his ear, nipping its lobe.     

            Then, my beeper began to buzz like a hornet. John sat up, all business. “If you answer that, I’ll never speak to you again.”

            “Be serious,” I said. There was no way I could ignore a call from work. It turned out as bad as it could be: an open-ended problem in a production system; a trip to the office, which was an hour away.

            John did speak to me again. He spread out the topographical maps when I got home the next night, handing me the bookmarked guide. “It’s really remote,” he said.

            “Crazy.” We were to be canoeing a one hundred and twenty mile trail that bordered Lac La Croix on the Canadian border. We would paddle or haul a canoe and twelve days of supplies across fifteen lakes with portages between them as long as two miles. It was a great trip, though when the idea popped in my head that I didn’t have the energy, I squelched it. “Wow! Maybe I can get back in shape again.” I was so tired that all I could think of was sleep.

            The next three weeks, my project turned into one long nightmare. Management forced my team to install the software before it was tested. I warned them that they would be months fixing the databases to no avail. My best programmer and I spent weekends patching the software to clean it up. I crept home at four in the morning after grueling nights tracking down bugs, while trashing my stomach with junk food. Days I made it home, I fell asleep at dinner. Still, the longed-for day came and my supervisor – kindly –

 Dismissed me. She knew the manager was going to fire me whether or not I went on vacation.

            On the way to Minnesota, still numb from stress, I was as helpful as luggage to John. I let him do everything. When we arrived late in the afternoon, the outfitter looked at the itinerary that John drew neatly in red on the topo-map.

            “Flooding everywhere,” Mr. Black said, a balding, bearded man of few words. “Been raining four weeks now. Never saw anything like it.” He took out his own pen and drew a bar across the first half of our trail. “You ought a consider just base camping here.” He drilled his pen right through the map. “There’s plenty to explore. Then . . . the rain stops, you can still make this loop.” He drew a triangle through three of our fifteen planned lakes.

            “But we want to see more wilderness,” John said. I nodded. What a let down, to drive nine hundred miles to just base camp on a lake, I thought.

            “Next best,” Black said. “you stay off the big lakes. Suicide to think of Lac La Croix.”

            We looked at each other, sharing the thought that maybe he thought we were greenhorns. “How?” John said, sliding our guidebook across the counter.

            Mr. Black pushed the book aside, then, drew a line and a star on the map. “You take this highway and get on the river.” His line lopped off the first thirty miles, all of it on large lakes.

            John looked shocked, but apparently saw the advantage. “The put-in’s close. It’ll shoot down forty miles of driving. O-kay!”

            We were both tired of driving, but I was disappointed at the changes.

             My love of challenges was no secret. My boss had no problem heaping difficult and risky work on me, while everyone else ate cake. “Boring, boring,” I’d say and laugh at my boasting coworkers. I was sure it was why John had married me, too.

            I climbed in the truck, resentful that John sold out our dream trip so quickly. “We’ll miss seeing Lac la Croix,” I said, slamming the door. “The rain’s played out after four weeks! It’ll stop. Rain’s no problem.”

            “Rain’s not,” John said. “But floods are. I think we should take his advice.”

            “Remember how fast the rivers go down when they flood?” I protested. “Two hours!” I could feel the edge creep into my voice, as if I was talking to my team when the system crashed.

            “You’re crazy,” he yelled. “These aren’t rivers!” He started up the truck and drove in stony silence. I had plenty of time to ruminate on my post-trauma job stress. It wasn’t going away. John softened when we got to camp, apparently remembering my delicate state. All romance was off, though; the mosquitoes were voracious. Too tired from two days driving, we snacked and slept in the truck. It rained hard that night.

            After only one day, we became cloud experts. Though the cumulus clouds all had flat bottoms and as good as skimmed the treetops, some were a serious purple or blue and others a pale slate gray.  The blue fellows were going to let go a steady shower; the purple brought pelting rain and hail.  The rest gave wind and the smell of rain. We spent most of our time in the canoe peering anxiously at the sky.

            Despite the cold and damp, our first night in a campsite little more than a soggy catch pool was fair. After dinner, John paddled to the other side of the tiny lake to scout the portage we would make the next morning. When he returned, I could see his face mellow in the flickering firelight.

            I sipped my cocoa and sighed. “I’ve been dreaming of this for so long.” I was sighing a lot at that time. I read somewhere it’s a sign of stress, but I didn’t know it then.

            “Me too.” He was silent. I knew better than to push conversation on him when he was taciturn, Briggs-Meyers’ advice for extraverts living with introverts. Give them space.

            Finally, he spoke. “I found the portage.”

            “It’s not the long one, is it?”  I knew one portage was two miles.

            “Not long, but it’s flooded. What isn’t under water climbs steeply.”

            “Under!” I groaned, stricken with anxiety. “Tomorrow, tell me this tomorrow.” John clammed up again and it lasted all night.

            The line of weed tops visible above the river grew on dry land before the flood. Now they were all that separated our canoe from a rapid that cascaded fifty feet down to the next lake.

            “Is this what you meant by ‘under water’?” I yelled above the roar.

            “Yeah. Hold on to the weeds.”         

            I followed his directions, but found out quickly that holding on to the weeds pulled the boat closer to rapids.

            “Get back to the bank!” he yelled. It was too late to paddle, so the only way to get the boat back to the bank was to jump out and push it. I jumped out into water up to my thighs and getting deeper.          

            “Get back in the canoe!”

            By the time I struggled back into the canoe, the water had become shallow and we grounded out. This time, we both got out and pushed it until the water got deep again. Then we got back in and paddled. Jumping in and out, we followed the portage trail a good quarter mile until it rose above water. It rose, all right, straight up the gorge, slick with a month’s worth of wet red clay.

            I unloaded the canoe while John eyed the trail grimly. Pulling out our towels, he rolled them into a log he placed around his neck to serve as a yoke. Then he lifted the canoe, staggering as he settled it and straightened. Once he had all seventeen feet, eighty lbs of fiberglass balanced on his shoulders, he grinned.

            “Where’s the camera. We need a picture.” I dug it out and he clowned for me, flexing his great biceps while I snapped a few. When he turned up the trail, however, he slipped a step for every three he climbed, sometimes falling to his knees. Progress for me was better; I became expert by the time I hauled the third fifty-lb pack to the summit of the gorge and down to the put-in point. John was trembling when he rolled the canoe off his shoulders, his pants covered with mud.

            “You should have bought the yoke.”

            “Too late now, Fergie.”

            “We could turn around and go back to the outfitter. It’s only a day.”

            “I’m fine! Let’s go.”

            “Then let me help carry it.”

            “No! I’ll get the canoe.” He wasn’t about to give in to me.  
              We paddled through yellow foam below the rapids-turned-cascade; down rivers that led though chains of lakes linked by more rapids, more portages. Even the discomfort of the ever-threatening rain could not dispel my sense of awe. We were voyagers in a wonderland; four weeks of rain, I marveled.

            “Have you seen my down vest,” I asked John. He was setting up the tent on a granite bolder, high above a lake.

            “It’s with the clothes.”

            “No it isn’t.”

            “The blue stuff sack. It’s there.”

            I knew the clothes were in the blue sack. I had looked and the down vest wasn’t there. It wasn’t even dark yet and I was shivering in a wool shirt and cap with earflaps. I tore through another float bag and found no vest.

            “I can’t find yours, either.”

            He threw down the tent reluctantly and joined me, expecting to pluck them out with his inevitable I-told-you-so. He rummaged around the packs, pulling out his own wool shirt. He put it on to fend off the sharp wind.

            “Hmmm. Forgot them.”

            “My pillow, too.”

            “You don’t have a pillow.”

            “I use the down vest!” I was frustrated. It was only the fourth day, and we had eight more to go.

            “A bit impolitic to complain, don’t you think?” he said acidly. “Not like you helped me or anything.”

            I had selfishly left all the arrangements to him and, now, was also feeling ungrateful for his services. “Okay. You’re right,” I said. The rain began in earnest and we hadn’t even started dinner.

            “I could get this damn tent up if you’d give me a chance.”

            I scrambled about, stuffing exposed clothing back into float bags, throwing him a poncho and ducking under my own rain gear. That night, after a hasty dinner of soup and tea, shivering in wool shirts, we crept into our sleeping bags to get warm. I settled for a pillow of wadded clothes and the edginess, which made any hitch in our plans irritating to me, dulled a little more.

            The rain didn’t stop the bustling traffic on the large lakes. We were close enough to Lac La Croix that we heard the annoying buzz of seaplanes taxiing vacationers to fishing sites all day. It belied any sense that we were in a wilderness and then, took on the aspect of a sound score to our daily drama.

            “You’ve got to pull the paddle straight back!”

            I was not used to this. He and I paddled tandem for six years without any trouble on Missouri streams. Now, he was acting like an asshole. “I am! Look!”

            “If you were, the boat wouldn’t veer.”

            “It’s not me.” Any idiot could see the surface of the lake was puckered with wind tracks.

            “It is. I can see your paddle. Turn around.” I kept paddling.

            “I said look at me!” He knew better than pulling teacher rank on me. It infuriated me. “Hold your paddle like this.” He was demonstrating with a long straight paddle, but mine was short, wide and had a bent handle.

            “Oh really! Want to change places?” Challenged, I stood up and turned, tipping the canoe dangerously.

            “Sit down. Why don’t you ever listen to me?”

            Regardless of what we said or did, the boat continued to veer off course on lakes. Neither of us knew that fully loaded river canoes, especially in cross winds, are impossible to steer. Our hybrid Voyageur didn’t have enough keel or length for tracking on lakes.

            I shouldered the blame, another trial I couldn’t resist. I was dead wrong about the weather, too. The rain didn’t stop. We arrived at, not peace, but a bearable silent tension.

            By the sixth day, we still vacillated between turning back and moving on each time the sun flirted with us.  The naturally dark landscape warmed, seeming friendly in the sunlight, and the breeze dried our tent and laundry between two and five o’clock. We reasoned that turning back at the half-way point made no sense. Either way, we were committed for six more days.

            Having finally agreed to go on, we set out very late for the next campsite. We were still paddling to our camp at five, when the buzzing of the seaplanes stopped. In a silence that was palpable, we paddled into a narrows, hovering in mirror-still waters. No other experience was more Boundary Waters than floating through a reflected sky. I felt suspended between heaven and earth beneath the stern aspect of a rocky peninsula that divided two lakes. However, something of the promontory covered with a jumble of wind-fallen trees, dark spruce, evergreen and pine and the sudden silence combined to render me anxious.

            It struck both of us; we surveyed the lake for another site, perhaps one with light and air like the one we'd just left, not this shaded cryptic spot. It was well after the hour it was necessary to strike camp and shore up for the night. We had to take it. Nevertheless, my mental litany was: This camp? Right now? Really? Here? I think I might have the same reaction at death: my life interrupted . . . not by choice . . . just the inevitable . . . but not nice enough.

            We set up the tent and cooked our one-pot stew. Any dreams of romantic evenings, lingering to watch the sunset at the campfire, or turning in to make love had long since flown. Our moods darkened with every storm. True to form, the rain arrived at dinner like an unwelcome guest, just on time and with all the bravado necessary for the intrusion. Again, we were driven to our tent to eat.

            “You’re letting in the mosquitoes,” John yelled at me when I unzipped the tent, juggling the stew pot and two cups in my other hand.

            “I’m carrying everything,” I said. “I’ve only got two hands. You zip the tent up!” We get crabby when we are hungry; it’s the low blood sugar and I usually let it pass. This time, I couldn’t. I hated him.

            “You put the stuff down. You unzip, step in and zip.”

            “I’m not your student,” I hissed. “Knock it off.”     

            “Thank God,” he said. I didn’t have a comeback. What occurred to me lit up a ghost and made visible my fear. He was behaving the way men do when they want out, and I had already accepted the challenge, hating him.

            “You behave like a man who wants a divorce.”

            He was stunned, not the reaction I expected.

            “No, no!” To my astonishment, John’s face began twisting and he let out a sob. “Is that what you think?” He took the pot and cups from me, and shaking with tears, tried to fold my stiff and unyielding body in his arms. “I thought it was you.” I hadn’t even know that I would hurt him.

            “Everything I do is wrong.” I burst into tears.          

            “No it’s not. I love you.” He wouldn’t let go, but I couldn’t soften. “I wanted us to have this time to get back together. You were so distant.”

            “So I get two weeks of torture for vacation?”

            “The rain’s not my fault. You needed rest and I needed to be with you.”

            “Rest! A fourteen day forced march? What were you thinking?”

            “You’re stressed. Needed exercise. You say it every day.”

            I smoothed his arm and until he loosened his grip.    “I need a job more than exercise.” Something about my strangled words caught his attention.

            “What?”

            “I was fired.”

            “Not possible! They need you.”

            “My project didn’t fly. Then, I took off.”

            “Oh my god.” John held me tightly and I let him this time. I needed something like comfort. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

            “I was afraid. You said . . . ”

            “Afraid?”

            “You said . . . You said . . . .” I lost it again.

            He pushed me away and I watched his memory kick in from arms length. “Only because I thought you were drifting away. I was afraid, too. I didn’t mean to pressure you.”

            We cried until we couldn’t anymore.

            When the rain stopped, John was able to start a fire from hoarded dry tinder. In the last light, we sat on log planks, watching a loon display its ability to walk on water. Its call shivered across the satin lake.

            “John,” I said, “I don’t care about anything else, but please, please, let’s get out of this park as fast as we can paddle.” I had reached my limit, but the worst of it was that I knew I had pushed myself all the way.

            “I love you! Tomorrow, when the rain stops, we’ll make a beeline for it. A shortcut, paddling hard, we’re three days to a warm motel.”

            “We can do some day hikes on the drive home.”

            When the rain started again, I don’t think it ever fell harder. Our tent, a solid, domed, rain tent, sounded like a drum that night. We fell asleep between squalls, only to wake with the next one. The breaks between them lasted fifteen minutes, just enough time to scuttle out to pee or get something we forgot or grab another meal.   

            By late in the afternoon the next day, we surmised that we were in a kind of rain tunnel. The clouds marched across the sky in ranks, all of them purple, and so, no variance in intensity from one squall to the next. Surely, we thought, the configuration of the land itself was the problem. The rain was not going to end or let up. We would have to run for it, make it to the other side of the clouds.

            We packed up the soaked tent. The next squall broke long enough to load the canoe. Then rain pelted us crossing the lake and soaked through the rain gear. The temperature fell to forty, set my teeth on edge and my muscles in a permanent retreat. Rain and hail hammered the lake to a pale slate. As we neared shore, I saw a lotus blossom, white instead of the more common yellow, one perfect full bloom floating beside the canoe.  Although they looked fragile, not a petal stirred under the pelting rain and hail.  They were stiffer than orchids, beautiful and cold.  I could not help thinking of our love.