The North Woods: Lakes, Silence, and the Land That Water Made

Eleven thousand years ago, a glacier that covered most of the northern half of the continent began melting back. What it left behind was the topography you see in the northern third of Minnesota: ten thousand lakes, the official count is over eleven thousand, scraped from the bedrock by ice, draped with glacial till and outwash sand and gravel, surrounded by boreal forest growing on soils too shallow and too cold for farming.

The number ten thousand lakes is a marketing phrase. The honest number is larger. What defines northern Minnesota is not any one lake but the density of water in the landscape, the way water appears at every low point, fills every glacial hollow, links to the next lake through a narrows or a beaver-dammed stream, and eventually drains either north to Hudson Bay through the Red and Rainy rivers or south to the Gulf of Mexico through the Mississippi.

The Ojibwe built a civilization on this landscape over centuries. Their canoe routes through the lake country were not random, they were engineered knowledge of the shortest portage routes between basins, the locations of wild rice beds, the seasonal movements of fish through cold-water streams. The canoe routes the voyageurs used in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Ojibwe routes, paddled in Ojibwe-style birchbark canoes built from materials the Ojibwe knew how to work.

Wild rice, manoomin in Ojibwe, meaning the good seed, is still harvested in the shallow lakes of the north woods by Ojibwe families exercising treaty rights that have been defended in federal courts as recently as the nineteen ninety-nine Mille Lacs Band Supreme Court decision. The rice is not farmed. It is harvested by canoe, beaten from the stalks into the hull of the boat with wooden flails, and processed traditionally. It is the taste of this place in a way no other food quite is.

The north woods today are a managed landscape, a mix of national forest, state forest, wilderness area, tribal land, resort property, and second-growth timber stands. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a million-acre roadless zone pressed against the Canadian border, is the most heavily used wilderness in the United States by permit count. Sigurd Olson, who wrote about the north woods for decades from his home in Ely, called the silence of the lake country a rarity in the modern world, something worth going a long distance to hear.