Fern Near Stairway Portage

 

Summer solstice has come and gone.  The days remain long but are now getting shorter.  Heavy rains continue to pound northern Minnesota out of it's drought.  Long days mean just that for us.  The work days seem never-ending.  Afterward we have plenty of garden chores, BBQ's with friends, moon rises over Superior and angling to take up the remaining portion of our waking hours.

The garden is flourishing.  Fishing is as good as it gets.  Blueberries are ripe for picking.  With great effort, next winter's firewood continues to stack higher and higher...

Cold Rain in July

Ever since I read One Man's Wilderness, the story of Richard Proenneke who homesteaded the remote south west Alaskan bush, I've had this ideal of a life tucked up in the wilderness where I would build and explore and photograph by day and write by night.  The life that we know today is an attempt at this notion mixed up in the realities of modern America.

We were planning on camping on Seagull Lake tonight.  However, a cold July rain hampered our blueberry-pickin', walleye hookin' foray.  Instead, I'm tucked away in along Superior writing, listening to music and watching Penelope play with the camping gear that remains unpacked and strewn around the cabin.

It's funny: I've been more busy in the last couple of months as ever in my lifetime.  I've been maxed out professionally and personally for a while now.  For some reason though despite all this I've gained a particular insight of my current situation.  Although it is nothing that I envisioned as a young kid; camping along the water trails of Boundary Waters reading Proenneke's proclamations by headlamp, I've realized that life is everything that it is suppose to be.  It is a fine, delicate balance of dreams, ambition, thought-out decisions, luck, love and hard work. 

The rain beats down on a forty degree day in July.  Rumors float of snow tonight in the high country.  My back hurts.  Still, I am more grounded than ever...