Canoe-Palooza Part Seven

I was in a canoe paddling with my dad when I noticed smoke on the horizon. I saw it first. Then, breathing deeply, searching with my nose, I smelled it. Softly rich like dissipating cigar smoke. Like city smog it clouds the details of the horizon until the trees blur together into a vague dark rim around the lake we are paddling on—like a ring around a bathtub. A forest fire—my mind flickers to the new saplings only four years old—now consumed.

My mind is engulfed with thoughts but in my hands is a canoe paddle not a pen and paper. I need my pen and paper, god dammit, before the flames of thought licking the insides of my brain—flashing from one synaptic branch to another—spreading fast like the fire I could smell. I need to write before the ideas disappear like the smoke—fogging—blurring. Shore is here and I jump forth to grab my notebook, abandoning my father to pull the canoe up to shore by himself.

Smoke wafts into the campsite from afar. I cannot see flames but I don’t expect to. This is not a close fire. To see the smoke before smelling it—that means something. A loon croons—possibly smelling the smoke as well. I imagine it recognizing the pale grey as a death shroud. The smoke fills his lungs and he cries out, siren-like, the alarm. Another loon calls back. As we sit in camp, discussing the happenings rather matter-of-factly, we hear a plane overhead and know help is on its way. If only I could tell that to the loon.

Update from my dad’s facebook: I learned that over 100,000 acres have burned east of Ely and southwest of where we were and almost all entry points to the BWCA have been closed. No damage to the area we were in this year, but it sounds like it completely wiped out the area we were in a few years ago.