During Covid, me and my family were living in Chile, after coming back, we decided to take a trip to the Boundary Waters in northern Minnesota, away from people and into nature. This trip, which included all of my immediate family, including my 2 year old sister, at the time, was full of many adventures in itself. We navigated through a thunderstorm, encountered a pregnant leech on another of my sisters legs, used diapers to avoid opening the tent and letting the mob of buzzing mosquitoes in and struggled to find a campsite without much daylight left. These weren’t the end of the dilemmas, on our way home we stopped in Grand Marais, at the Duluth Trading Co. Our canoe was on top of our car, poking out a bit from the rear of the car, another car hit it and damaged the tip of the canoe. Now, after many attempts to fix it, it sits in our backyard, saying “Help me, that poor accident isn’t going to take me down.” This isn’t just a canoe we need to fix, it is the canoe that taught us that being in the Boundary Waters isn’t a vacation, it is work, it is an adventure. Despite this, the cool water on our skin, the food that only tastes good on trail, the song of the loons and the smell of the thriving woods, was enough to bring us back, and we have improved our canoeing skills and our ability to work together under hard circumstances.

– CW

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