The Wilderness Has Teeth, But It Sings

Sunset on Seagull Lake, Sunday, June 29, 2025

We took our four-year-old grandson, Z, to the cabin this weekend, along with his mom, Billie. By the time this posts goes out, we’ll be back across the lake and on our way home … Z will be asking to go back.

The cabin—a rustic one room log cabin built by hand in 1933—is in the Boundary Waters, six hours away from our home in Minneapolis. It’s a water access only property, which means we have to—as the last leg of our long journey down the North Shore of Lake Superior and then the Gunflint Trail—take our boat the rest of the way.

There is no soft landing here.

The cabin and bunkhouse at night

Every trail, including the one from our dock to the cabin door, is a tangle of gnarled roots and spilled rocks that sometimes come loose underfoot, like memory. The cabin is crooked, leaning slightly forward, as though it remembers something we do not. There’s no traffic here, only the surprisingly loud announcements of the hummingbirds outside the screen porch. That, and the slap of lake water against rock.

Inside, the old pine floor bounces on its concrete blocks. Outside, the constant ebb and flow of mosquitos. All of it is an exhale. The pine needles and woodsmoke, the lichen and the fallen trees, the mystery of the loons.

“Can we live here, Nana?” Z asks. Even after his third splinter and second stubbed toe and a dozen bug bites, he is living his absolute best life. This child is built for the wilderness, and the wilderness is built for him.

The wilderness is built for all of us. We just don’t always remember.

Nights come quickly here. The sky rolls down over the lake with grace and force. And when a waxing crescent sets behind the tree line, something spectacular can happen. Like on Saturday night when we stepped barefoot onto the dock at midnight to listen for the sound of stars (I think are always making sound, we just don’t know how to listen). We looked down at the water and saw a scattering of light so brilliant, so thick, and so close to the dock, I thought I could scoop some stars up in a net. The lake was full of the Milky Way, too. The entire cosmos doubled in still water. I’ve only seen this phenomenon once before—it is apparently called specular reflection. It will always stun me to stand in darkness so complete, so familiar, and yet barely know which way is up. ¹

This is how the wilderness rewires us.

Z learning to use binoculars

I think about that long ago autumn when Billie asked me, “Mama, why does everything have to die?” I think of the man who broke my heart so hard that a central part of it collapsed. I recall my Nana’s apartment in Duluth—freighter horns in the distance, the living room filled with her old perfumes and stuffed animals, her laughter when she said she was in her second childhood.

The mind, like the lake, gives up its objects when stillness comes.

During the day, the wind finds the trees and makes music. Everything is doing its ancient work: the eagle riding thermals, the ant carrying its burden over a ledge, the chipmunks busily being chipmunks.

I think of a time when I cried quietly in a restroom stall because I couldn’t remember what it felt like to belong. And now I am here, held by this indifferent, benevolent place that does not know my name and doesn’t need to.

I understand what Z feels here, and why.

I feel it, too.

We are the same that way.

Pink rainbow and cotton candy clouds over the island

It is hard to explain to anyone who hasn’t come here why the hardship of wilderness feels like part of the medicine. How the cold of the lake shocks the body awake. How hauling water or lighting a fire with damp kindling makes the body remember its usefulness. How being sore from paddling and scratched up from tree branches and insect bites reminds us that we are permeable, and therefore alive.

Sometimes, when sun is a pink-gold bruise above the treetops, I just stand and let the wild name me.

Back at home, I will dream of this place and wake up aching. Not for the cabin, not even for the lake, but for that part of myself that opens here, raw and starlit and unafraid of the dark.

I’ll remember the haunting sound of the loon. How it calls. How it waits. How it calls again.

Writing in the Dark | The CAMP (in person at Camp Wandawega!)

Join us August 18 - 22, 2025, a 4-day immersive retreat at historic, beautiful, rustic Camp Wandawega, with featured writer Tia Levings, NYT bestselling author of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape From Christian Patriarchy.

This very special, first of its kind (for Writing in the Dark!) experience is shaping up to be so beautiful, with writers from around the country and even the world (!!), all ages (20s to 80s) and varying experience levels joining us for this daring adventure.

And we have a few remaining indoor beds in the camp’s charming Old Hotel/Bunkhouse … hopefully one of them is for you.

CAMP will call to the fierce and wild in us to “peer over the edge of doubt,” leave our comfort zones, and see beyond what we think we know. We’ll get closer up to the world and to the words we use to convey the world. Closer to ourselves, each other, and the truth. We’ll generate and polish new work while taking up new approaches to the page that could never happen outside of an immersive environment tailored to tap the untamed within us.

We’ll transform our writing together during this immersion in nature and creative community. CAMP is mornings of lakeside yoga and meeting under the trees for lively discussions of craft and generative writing exercises. CAMP is small group specialized workshop intensives (musical, visual, and sensory, led by Brianna Lane, Billie Oh, and Jeannine Ouellette), and Tia Levings, featured writer. CAMP is evening readings, campfires, talent shows, music, and camaraderie. And of course classic summer camp fun like swimming, boating, biking, archery, arts & crafts … and who knows, maybe even capture the flag.

Get details here and/or reach out to us at writing@writinginthedark.org with questions!

1. https://martyknapp.com/making-photographs-milky-way-reflects-at-lake-nicasio/