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Guest Essay

By Terry Tempest Williams

Ms. Williams is a writer who lives in southeastern Utah.

It’s easy to become smug and believe the great outdoors exists only west of the 100th meridian.

As a child growing up in Salt Lake City, I was half a day’s drive from America’s Red Rock Wilderness and Zion, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands and Arches national parks. We camped in Utah’s national forests — from the Wasatch Mountains to the Uintas.

But my Western land bias was shattered this spring, when I made a pilgrimage to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness in Minnesota. Known by some as the “People’s Wilderness,” these 1.1 million acres of lakes framed by boreal forests and wetlands is a liquid landscape unlike any other, wild with wolves, lynx, loons, moose and an astonishing variety of warblers.

To a desert dweller, the Boundary Waters are dizzying and blinding with a brilliance of light that I have not encountered elsewhere. When it rains, water bodies appear as a book’s marbled end sheets with swirls of gunmetal gray, indigo and silver.

With Becky Rom, the 76-year-old founder of Save the Boundary Waters, an environmental advocacy group, as my guide, the wild bounty offered solace to my weary soul in these wrought times. The locals’ love........

© The New York Times