Kindle Edition
Amazon
eLectio Publishing
Amazon
Barnes and Noble
Category:
Memoir
Publisher: eLectio Publishing
ISBN-10: 1632130289
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 240
Copyright: June 17, 2014
ISBN-13: 1632130289
Price: $4.99 (eBook)
This book is filled with humorous and heartfelt accounts of trips to the BWCA in Northern Minnesota with friends and brothers over the last 25 years.
Jim Landwehr and his brothers pursue their love of the outdoors by tackling some of the country's most remote terrain, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. While encountering crazed loons, widow-making portages, and temperamental automobiles, they also discover more about each other and their long deceased father. In recent years, with a desire to instill their love of the area into their own children, they include them in their voyages, and the legacy continues. Their exploits are woven throughout with humor, emotion, and warmth.
Excerpt
Much of what makes or breaks a camping trip is determined by the quality and selection of equipment. This was our first foray into the woods without parents or other family involved. We packed what we thought would work best, given our experience and substandard budget. None of us knew any better, nor had the means to do anything about it if we did. Besides, it was just a canoe trip, how hard could it be? We would quickly learn how unforgiving the water and woods were to ungainly equipment and poor planning.
During the planning meeting, the subject of tents was brought up.
“I’ve got a couple of two man tents. One is brand new and the other is pretty beat. I think the zipper may even be broken. It’s down in my basement somewhere. You’re welcome to use it, but there are no guarantees on it,” I said.
After a few shrugs, no one else offered anything better, so we decided to make it work. When you’re a pie-eyed high school grad, you can make anything work. Needless to say, I was happy I made the investment in the new Eureka a few weeks before. My brother Tom always said that you cannot underestimate the value of a good tent, and I certainly knew which tent of the two I was sleeping in.
The rest of the equipment we took with us all bordered on substandard, designed more for car-camping than canoeing and portaging. Of course there was the “essential” Coleman lantern. It sounded good on paper; providing light for playing cards, warding off black bear, sending SOS signals to aircraft overhead, and the like. Unfortunately, we neglected to factor in the possibility of broken-mantles. Mantles are small sacks or pouches made of cloth. They tie to the gas outlets on a lantern and when they burn they turn to ash, serving as the ignition point for the lantern. They work fine as long as the ashen mantles are not bumped or broken. If they are broken, what you have on your hands amounts to a low-grade civilian flamethrower. They can be fun if you’re sporting an asbestos flannel shirt and a welder’s helmet, but otherwise, pretty useless in the woods.
After discovering the broken mantles, there were many moments when heaving the useless device into the woods seemed like the most prudent thing to do; a kind of a deep woods Molotov cocktail for the city boys. Instead, the item became our boat anchor. Not in the literal sense, but rather it was the item which, when rendered inoperable, suddenly becomes dead weight that must be lugged around for the duration of the trip. Every trip has one.
Another poorly chosen article for a couple of us on the trip were large, cumbersome, cotton-filled sleeping bags. Why mess with goose down when you could lug what amounted to a seven pound cotton sponge on your back? They were bulky and heavy when dry; when wet, they quickly doubled in weight. Ounce for ounce, they were undoubtedly the most burdensome items on the trip.
Perhaps the most definitive of all bad equipment choices was the drab green, army-issued folding military shovel. Unlike the cotton “sleeping bag sponges” and the “lantern flambeau,” which had functional purposes behind being packed, this item’s utility escapes me even to this day. Lord, what were we thinking? It turns out foxholes aren’t really necessary on most campouts. Trenches, not so much, either. If a US/Canadian war were to break out, though, we were set.
Some good advice for any camping trip is if you can’t eat it, wear it, sleep in it, or start a fire with it, leave it home.
|
