Surviving and dying in the Boundary Waters. The return of a popular fictional Minnesota private investigator. Women’s lives in Zambia.
We’ve got an eclectic mix for you today. (Courtesy of the Minnesota Historical Society Press) “Last Entry Point: Stories of Danger and Death in the Boundary Waters”: by Joe Friedrichs (Minnesota Historical Society Press, $19.95) I was pinned on the log near the middle of the river.
The surging river kept me locked tight against the tree while water poured over my life jacket and upper torso. My legs were under the tree. The current wanted to pull me down and under the tree, while simultaneously my top half was being nudged over the log.
My body gradually took on the shape of the letter C. — from “Last Entry Point” Joe Friedrichs is an experienced canoe paddler on the lakes in the sprawling Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness near where he lives. Like most lovers of the majestic BWCA and the adjacent Quetico in Canada, Friedrichs and others in his party knew what they were doing when they headed into the BWCA.
Yet they capsized in the “brown churning rapids of the Temperance River.” Friedrichs survived by gathering all his strength and pulling himself out, but it was a close call. Billy Cameron wasn’t so lucky.
The first sentence of Friedrich’s exciting (and sometimes painful) book is: “On paper, Billy Cameron did everything right. And he still died n the Boundary Waters.” Cameron, an avid outdoorsman, fell from a ca.