The Long Silence

I will be silent for quite a while, as I am heading out to the wilderness. I am doing a three day canoe trip into Minnesota’s Boundary Waters Wilderness Canoe Area, immediately followed by a 6 day trip with my friend, Jeff, and some of his students.

Blogging and engaging in discussion with readers is very enjoyable (some of our readers come to feel like friends to me), but there is nothing quite like being on a canoe, away from immediate access to civilization. Sometime on the second day, I lose the concept of clock time and shift into operating on what, for lack of a better word, I call natural time. The movement of the sun and the growling of my stomach determine the schedule, rather than the despotic bell (bonus points for recognizing that reference). I don’t carry a watch on these trips, and I despise anyone who does.

There’s also a particular feeling that occurs around the third day, when after packing up camp and loading the canoe I step in, settle down, and as I feel the bobbing and shifting of the canoe in the water I think, “yeah, that’s better; much better than the awkward stumping about on land.”

And above all, there’s no telephone to answer and no internet to access. The cell phone adds that remind that with their technology I’ll never be out of touch? Hah! Who wants to always be accessible to other people? I’ll be out of touch, all right, and damned glad of it.

But I’ll be back in about two weeks. And even my children have shown they can get along without me for that long, so I doubt it will be an emotional trauma for any of our readers.