I’m here, at the gate of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Superior National Forest. In an unthinkable turn of events, the lake I’ve crossed for months in snow boots has turned into a wildly green, chirping playground of life.
I’ve been living here at the Minnesota lodge since New Year’s Eve, when my boyfriend and I arrived for our next seasonal job. Company housing here is the stuff of fairytales: we moved into our own private two-story cabin on the lake, furniture and cooking supplies in wait.
Winter treated us to beautiful silence and clear starry nights, and afternoon’s orange sunlight through the kitchen windows. Sometimes we would drink morning coffee (and second coffee- oh sweet life juice!) upstairs and watch snow devils bluster across the lake, thankful that we weren’t out there with them. Other times we couldn’t see though the frost on the windows at all.
Much of that -20F season I spent within two feet of the heater, reading book after book, identifying plants, and rationing the espresso cookies we’d bought at the co-op and the delicious, greasy gringo tacos we’d picked up in town.
When you spend months in temperatures so cold that it takes you ten minutes to put on enough clothes to be able to leave the house, you can sometimes forget what summer feels like.
But it came, and it’s here! It isn’t an urban legend after all! A lake made of water instead of ice offers much more agreeable recreational activities: now paddling out in a canoe or watching beavers from the dock are both likely ways to start the day.
The plants have gotten out of hand; by late spring they started popping up more quickly than I could identify them. This is a great place for wild berry picking, and over the course of the summer we’ll have our fill of raspberries, blueberries, serviceberries, tiny wild strawberries, and a handful of delightful thimbleberries. These deep red morsels look rather like raspberries but they taste more like a Christmas-spiced pie.
Life on the lake is slow and easy. On a beautiful sunny day we might float out in inner tubes, by night we sneak into the lodge’s private Hot Tub Hus with the stained glass window and relax the aches away. The walk from our cabin to the Hus is ten minutes, but late at night we usually prefer to drive my camper van. We both prefer not to drive, because it’s so much nicer to be driven while laying in bed and watching the pine trees go by upside-down.
We work in tourism, and the aches do come. Flipping rooms, checking in guests, hosting picnics, teaching art classes, piling wood- work is varied and often enjoyable, but still, often enough, long and tiring. It is the trade off for getting to live (our rent is nearly free) in the place where everyone else wants to vacation.
I know why people like to vacation here. Trips into nature lead us down lush and overgrown footpaths and scrambling around remote waterfalls. It’s fun to start where other people end; when we reach a waterfall, we climb up the rocks and follow the river back as far as we can, until it trickles off or the way is blocked. These feel like our secret spots, and when we find one I wonder how long they’ve been untouched by humans.
Other people, visiting families that have been coming to the lodge for 30, 40 years, fish and boat and swim on the lake. We see them on their private docks, from our private dock. I’d try to swim in the lake, but even though it’s not frozen, it’s still freezing. I did try swimming once, but I could feel the heat being sucked out through my ears and had a headache before I made it back to shore.
My camera is always, always on my person, because if a litter of baby fox are tumbling over each other on the side of the road, I’m not going to miss it. I like to imagine this as a real-life version of Pokemon Snap, where the goal is to film every animal and top the previous shot each time.
I’ll shoot video of anything interesting I see, and later I’ll edit it down into a sort of video diary that I can look back on to remember the highlights of my experience and share with anyone I met along the way. Sometime my videos are montages of people laughing and dancing and socializing. Here it’s different, quieter, and I know the video will have a more bitter-sweet quality. Lonelier, but lovely.
It’s easy to describe the nice times, but that’s not really the full picture. There is a lot of boredom, a lot of downtime in a place where so few people live. We’re 40 minutes from the nearest town, population 1000, without even a movie theater. But you edit those out, in video and in writing, and it makes the whole thing seem magical. A year from now, I will only remember it as magical. Time fuzzes the edges.
No, it’s not a social place, by anyone’s definition other than Minnesotans: the Minnesota Nice is strong here. Breaking into groups of small-town-tight bonds and feeling welcomed by strangers is shockingly difficult. But we love the animals (moose, beavers, foxes, hares, chipmunks, loons, eagles, bears, deer, and little critters), and the chance to live right in nature. It feels, unsurprisingly, natural. It’s a good place for reflection.
It’s a good place for reading, for art, and for study. My coworkers were weavers, photographers, and wood craftsmen. I’m a visual artist, my boyfriend a reader and lifelong scholar. Northern Minnesota is a place to slow down and take the time to get to know yourself.
The Boundary Waters of Minnesota have a few options for seasonal workers seeking jobs with housing. It’s worth doing your own research to find lodges and adventure outfitting companies, but also check the available jobs in Minnesota on WanderJobs.
Have a seasonal travel journal or company review you’d like to share? We accept guest posts! Email team at wanderjobs dot com.
