8/11/26 – Boundary Waters enthusiast and frequent visitor of Sawbill, Steve Wilbers, has shared with us a beautiful short piece he wrote. Given the nature of this particular summer, with the reunion and the recent closures of the boundary waters, it’s the perfect thing to share.
Dragonflies and Love’ Laughter
By Stephen Wilbers
Do you believe, as I do, that things that are lost sometimes return?
About 15 years ago I was on a writer’s retreat on a small Rainy Lake island preserved and
protected by the Oberholtzer Foundation. My cabinmate was Scott King, one of Minnesota’s
foremost dragonfly experts and publisher of Red Dragonfly Press.
I remember watching in awe as Scott spent nearly an hour with a magnifying glass trying to
pry open a dragonfly’s damaged wing as it was emerging from pupation. When I saw his
dismay at not succeeding, I was reminded that becoming attached to even the smallest
creature is a beautiful thing.
Before his untimely death at 56, Scott published This Northern Nonsense, a chapbook of my
poems that included this poem:
Dragonflies
See those two dragonflies?
Do you see how they hover
above the blue water,
and how for an instant
the world stands still?
Do you see how the waves stop
beating the shore, how
the birds pause to listen,
the butterfly holds its tongue,
and on the transparent
wings of summer
all that is lost
returns?
On Sunday, July 10, I was paddling from a Sawbill Lake campsite with my niece Meg Simon,
a 2010-13 Sawbill crew member, when we noticed that the clouds looked strange. They
were tinged brown. It was a sweltering, windy afternoon, the day before the Boundary
Waters Canoe Area Wilderness was closed down due to a line of fires stretching 300 miles
northeast into Canada.
We were paddling from a campsite where I had stayed in 2007 with my 82-year-old father
on his final trip to the Boundary Waters, where his ashes are now scattered. That trip with
my dad was the last of our 29 consecutive years of canoeing together.
I was swimming near the campsite’s smooth sloping granite shore, thinking about the
snapping turtle that had chomped down on a walleye I had left on a stringer, when I felt
something odd.
“Uncle Steve,” my niece said from the rock above me, “there’s a dragonfly on your head.”
I didn’t know whether to feel complimented or insulted that it had mistaken my bald head
for a rock. Either way, I slowly submerged to see what it would do, and when I rose, it
landed on my head again. Not once, but several times. Each time I could feel its prickly feet
and gossamer weight.
“It looks disgruntled,” Meg said, laughing her wonderful laugh. And then we were both
laughing.
Then she said, “Maybe it’s Grandpa talking to you.”
Stephen Wilbers is a former FOECLA board member and newspaper columnist whose July
2025 Musing was titled “Fireflies and Falling Stars.” He has served as Associate Director of
the University of Minnesota’s Creative Writing Program and as board chair of the Loft
Literary Center. His publications include books on the Boundary Waters Canoe Area
Wilderness and books on writing, including his Ph.D. dissertation on the history of the Iowa
Writers’ Workshop, which was published by the University of Iowa Press. His poetry
collections have been published by Red Dragonfly Press and About Place Journal.
Steve went on his first canoe trip in 1979 when Sawbill was operating under Frank and Mary Alice. This year he and his niece, Meg, joined us for Sawbill’s 70th reunion 一 isn’t that amazing? For many visitors like Steve, their first trip through Sawbill has had them coming back for years, excited to experience a new part of the boundary waters while also hoping to see some familiar faces in the store that they’ve met along the way. Sawbill saw lots of familiar faces this year from various decades returning to make new memories with old friends, reclaiming pieces from their past and remembering those lost to it. The age of being 21 with your friends and going for night-long paddles may be over, but meeting up with those friends years later, sharing the boundary waters with your kids, or grandkids, on their first ever trip is the start of a brand new adventure.
Fortunately, we were able to have the reunion before the closure of the boundary waters. From July 14th to July 30th, no one could enter the boundary waters and to say things at Sawbill slowed down is an understatement, however, the support we received from all of you did not. People still showed up to camp in the campground and others drove up the trail just to shop in our store. We also received many online orders with heartfelt notes telling us to keep our heads up. And once permits became available again, it didn’t take long for our summer crowd to return in full swing. Our days recently have been busy and long, and we wouldn’t want it any other way.
Thank you, Steve, for sharing your writing with us. We hope to see you pass through on your next trip!
-Kay