Betcha I can make you cringe with just one word: PORTAGE. Ha! If that doesn’t make you quake in your boots, you’ve probably never paddled anywhere north of Iowa!

Yeah, I know how we paddlers are. When we talk about how hard a trip was, we go on and on about tough rapids, long mileages, big waves on big lakes, horrendous headwinds, wild storms, ravenous bears, rapacious raccoons, blood-thirsty blackflies, damp matches and missing toilet paper. Or vice versa. But aside from the occasional account of some two-mile-long death march, nobody much talks about portages. Maybe it’s just too painful a subject.

Yet we all know it’s the portages that really get to us. We just don’t wanna talk about it.

I wasn’t too worried about portages that time I took my old school chum, Jeff, up to the Boundary Waters to do a little fishin’ one September. We weren’t goin’ far, for one thing. We were gonna paddle just far enough to escape the artery clogging crowds of late-season basecampers and reach quieter waters where the fish weren’t in a perpetual frenzy of fear. We wanted to angle with the element of surprise. So we were gonna hafta go in a few lakes. And we did end up with a real puddle-jumper of a route. But I still wasn’t gonna worry about portages. Most of ‘em were so short you could almost spit across ‘em, if your aim was good.

We put in at Snowbank Lake and wound our way through to Thomas. There was a heck of a lot of unloadin’ and reloadin’ of gear in between. But that really was the worst of it. Those dinky little portages were barely long enough to allow us to stretch our legs. Little did we realize they were just luring us on to worse things later.

When we finally got camp set up on Thomas, we were rewarded with havin’ the whole lake almost entirely to ourselves. There were hardly any transient neighbors comin’ through to spook the fish. I’d landed ourselves in a regular fisherman’s paradise. The only trouble was, we soon found ourselves havin’ a hard time landin’ very many fish.

We hunted fish all over Thomas and up the channel into neighboring Fraser Lake without comin’ eyeball to eyeball with very many walleye or lake trout. Oh, we caught a few; enough to keep us respectable. And if I were a true fisherman, I’d now give you an exaggerated account of how huge those few individuals were, lurking terrors of the deep that they were, and of the fights we had to reel ‘em in. But you all ought to know by now that I don’t lie like that.

Well, anyway, it didn’t matter all that much. Jeff and I had a lot of catchin’ up to do, seein’ as how we hadn’t really done any paddlin’ together since that time we tried sledding our old Core Crafts down a snow hill somewhere upstream from Bemidji a couple of decades back. And the weather held about as mild and favorable as September could be. So we weren’t hurtin’. Still, after a couple of days, we started castin’ about with the wanderin’ eye.

Now Jeff, he had an old, dog-eared, 25¢ version of a Fisher map that showed pictographs at the south end of Alice Lake. And Alice wasn’t all that far away. So one day, when the fish weren’t bitin’, we decided to go on a treasure hunt with Alice instead (takin’ the fishing tackle along, just in case).

Gettin’ to Alice required a sizeable portage, nearly 240 rods. But what’s 240 rods, between friends? After all, we were only gonna be carryin’ the boat and one little old pack. How hard could it be? And it didn’t look like there could be much in the way of elevation change between here and there. So we blithely set off.

At first, the portage behaved as most BWCAW portages behave, snaking aimlessly up and down in a desultory sort of fashion. But toward the far end, it started to get a bit more interesting. Jeff was ahead of me, carrying the canoe, when all of a sudden, his feet started splashin’ in water. And we’re not talkin’ a little, mid-portage puddle here, either. A shallow sheet of water stretched out for almost as far as we could see on either side of us. And the portage trail disappeared right smack into the middle of it.

There bein’ nothin’ else for it, Jeff went doggedly on and I followed, watchin’ him sink deeper and deeper into this ersatz lake with every stride. Before too long, Jeff was knee deep in portage. And Jeff’s a tall guy; his knees are usually a fair distance above the ground.

Then the footing got bad. In an effort to add injury to insult, the deepest part of the portage was paved with ancient, submerged corduroy. Wasn’t long before we were each dancin’ our own backwoods two step as we tried to not let our feet slide off the peeled, slimed logs underfoot. We could never see what we were about to step on, the portage bein’ submerged as it was, a foot and a half to two feet below the glassy, black surface. So we never knew exactly when we were likely to step on one end of a short length of log and launch the other end skyward to try and take a blind bite out of our other shin. I tell you, there are some kinds of excitement I could really live without. Jeff musta shared some of my sentiments since he was up there havin’ a few uncomplimentary things to say about the route on his own behalf.

Well, eventually the portage got shallower and we made it over to the next lake. Now, Alice is a pretty lake, nice sand beaches and all. But if there ever were any pictographs down there at the south end of the lake, they musta been hurled under a ton of breakdown off the cliff centuries ago. Or maybe they were just some cartographer’s idea of a practical joke. And we didn’t catch any fish, either. So it was kinda a wasted trip. And then there was the goin’ back ... across the same portage.

Goin’ back to Thomas Lake, Jeff graciously offered to let me carry the canoe. I figured fair was fair and took my turn. But when I got about shin deep, I saw this little frog jump off of something and go swimming up the portage ahead of me. And I couldn’t help thinkin’ to myself "This is just too darned dumb. Why am I carryin’ my boat across this might-as-well-be-a lake?’’ Not hearin’ any answer I could agree with, I rolled the boat down off my shoulders, set it back on the water, and started tracking it on across the portage.

From somewhere behind me, I heard Jeff exclaim, ‘’Hey that’s not fair!" but I just muttered, "All’s fair,’’ and kept pushin’ the boat through the water. If I coulda gotten my paddle back from Jeff, I woulda climbed in and paddled the darned thing across. I figured, if a frog can swim it, so can my empty Tripper.

Well, that was about the end of our portage antics for that trip. Except on our way back out to Snowbank, we did meet a couple and their dog comin’ in for their annual, two-week long, autumn adventure. We asked them where they were goin’ and they asked us where we’d been. When they heard we’d been across the Thomas-Alice portage, the woman laughed and asked, ‘’How deep is it this year?" when we measured off to Jeff’s knees, she laughed again and said, ‘’oh, you were lucky! Last time we were there it came up to here’’ and she drew a line with her finger just above the hem of her shorts and just below her hip.

You bet. We were lucky, just so long as you remember how much of a relative thing luck can be. So if you’re ever sittin’ on Thomas Lake, countin’ on your luck, with a hankerin’ to see the sweet sand beaches or non-existent pictographs on Alice Lake, just remember: it’s the portages that’ll get to you.

Well, ‘til next time, keep your paddle wet. And keep in touch. Drop me a line c/o Rich Furman and Morgan MacBain, 901 East Geranium Ave., St. Paul MN 55106 or editor@canoe-kayak.org. Let me know what sort of inpromptu portage dances you’ve been learning. Remember, Uncle Wally promises to 1) tell the truth so no one would believe it anyway and 2) never reveal your true identity to anyone, not even Arthur Murray.