Minnesotans, Start Your Engines?
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Outside magazine, September 1997
Minnesotans, Start Your Engines? A long-simmering feud heats up on Capitol Hill, as canoeists and speedboaters square off over some of the nation’s most hallowed wilderness Gary Joselyn dips his paddle into Poplar Lake and points his canoe northwest, heading out on a spin into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. At 68, he has the look of a man comfortable with his surroundings, and indeed the stroke work at hand requires little of his attention. The lake is quiet, a silence only occasionally broken by the sound of paddles Certainly Joselyn’s is a question that has divided Minnesotans for decades. And this month, the battle over the Boundary Waters is coming to a head, as Congress prepares to act on legislation that would expand the use of motorized vehicles in one of the nation’s largest and most heavily used wildernesses. As is often the case, the debate pits small-town locals against big-city The feud over the Boundary Waters, a vast expanse of more than a million acres and 1,100 lakes that stretches nearly 150 miles along the Canada border, has been simmering since 1978, when the federal Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act attempted to forge a compromise by allowing motorboat access to 22 lakes — some of which, like Brule and Sea Gull, would gradually Locals complain that the end of truck portaging has closed the wilderness to all but the young and strong. Joe Madden, who lives just 25 miles from the wilderness in the town of Britt, says he and his grandfather used to fish the waters of the canoe area all the time — but since the elder Madden’s triple-bypass surgery, a family tradition has ended. “Those portages are Indeed, at first glance the mechanization currently being debated doesn’t seem all that intrusive. The bill, cosponsored by Senator Rod Grams, a conservative Republican and former Minneapolis television anchorman, and Congressman James L. Oberstar, a moderate upstate Minnesota Democrat, calls for the reopening of the three portages to truck traffic and the expansion of While at press time the bill’s chances remain unclear — a more sweeping Boundary Waters bill died on the Hill last year under threat of veto, but this year’s offering is seen as a kinder, gentler version and, unlike its predecessor, is not laden with unrelated provisions — Vento vows to do everything in his power to derail it. In fact, he has recently introduced |