Listening Point Survives July 4 Storm

"The day was hot and humid. I was having lunch in the cabin, listening to the far-off thunder across the lake, when all of a sudden the storm struck. I have never seen anything like it. I guessed that the wind had hit at 80 to 90 miles per hour. I jumped up and went to the cabin door to watch. The lake was churned into frantic rolling whitecaps. The colonnade of pines along the spine of the Point roared in the wind, and I expected them at any minute to come crashing down all together. But they held. Then to my left, a great crash as the biggest, tallest poplar on the place came down, missing the cabin but grazing the edge of the woodshed 20 feet away. Another foot would have smashed it. Another crashed somewhere behind the cabin but missed again.

“It was fascinating and terrifying to have nothing to do but to watch and wonder and hope. I thought of the old sauna and what a similar windfall would do to it. Then, just as suddenly, it as all over, quiet except for the dripping of the leaves.”

Sig’s grandson Derek, who was spending the day at the Point to help get cleaned up and ready for the centennial celebration visitors in a few days’ time, found himself marooned. While none of the buildings were touched, the trail to the turnaround and the road itself were crisscrossed with windfalls, some of them huge. One of the 18-inch, old poplar came down three feet from his car. There was nothing for it. He spent the rest of the day cutting himself out.

There have been suggestions that we declare Listening Point a chainsaw-free zone to keep it pristine, unpolluted by machinery and the sounds of machines, but, in this case, practicality had to rule.

The now-famous Fourth of July storm was a disaster from Ely to the Gunflint, from Burntside Lake to Saganaga. While the damages in and around Ely were spotty, from Moose Lake to Saganaga the storm literally flattened a swath of forest ten-miles wide and thirty-five miles long. Minnesota Congressman Jim Oberstar, after flying over the area on an inspection tour, declared that the forest looked like Mt. St. Helens after the eruption but with several times the acreage. There has never been anything like it; it destroyed a third of the BWCA.

Work to cope with the damages began immediately. Relief flights recovered stranded and injured campers. Fortunately, miraculously, no lives were lost. Portage crews went to work clearing portages and campsites buried under yards of downed trees. The President declared the northeastern counties a disaster area. Salvage loggers are moving in to clean out as much as possible. Life is returning to normal. But forest managers say that it is only a question of time before the wreckage dries and breaks out into forest fires.

People have become surprisingly philosophical about it. There is really no one and nothing to blame; it was an “act of God.”

“Our hearts are broken,” said one person who had lost several old and beautiful pines around his dream house. “But this is part of nature too and we have to accept it.”

In his last book, Of Time and Place, Sigurd wrote about another storm, which caused extensive damage to the area and on the Point itself (“Tornado”). He spoke of his worry about damage to the Point and to the cabin, of the “jackstraw puzzle of tangled debris,” of sadness at the loss of a large Norway pine, of thanks and of relief that the cabin had not been touched. But that was all. For the rest, he spoke of cutting windfalls and brush across the trails, of the slow process of repairing the damages, of salvaging firewood, of wondering about the meaning of the storm, about the logs, which would slowly decay and “sink into the soil and disappear.”

This from Sigurd Olson: no more words, no explanations, no philosophy, just acceptance like everybody else.