When Ernest Oberholtzer was 17, he suffered
a severe bout of rheumatic fever that weakened his heart. His doctors told him
he wouldn’t survive the year.
On June 6, 1977, having dedicated his life
to preserving the Minnesota-Ontario lakes region as wilderness, his damaged
heart gave out – and he died at the age of 93.
Ober was a man of many passions, and perhaps
no passion was greater than his love of wilderness. At 28 he paddled with
Ojibwe trapper and guide Billy Magee across the Canadian Barrens to Hudson Bay
and back, completing the 2,000-mile, four-month exploration in freezing
temperatures and blowing snow just before the onset of the sub-Arctic winter.
He fought to protect an area he considered
"one of the rarest of all regions of the continent, if not the world,"
spearheading the 1930 defeat of a plan to convert the boundary waters lakes
into a four great storage basins for the production of industrial
hydroelectric power. He photographed Native Americans and wildlife,
particularly moose. He gathered Indian stories and legends. He studied the
Ojibwe language at a time when our nation’s policy was to suppress native
culture and languages among Indian children. He played classical violin,
collected books, and entertained friends by the dozen on his small Rainy Lake
island. Though he never married, women were drawn to him, and one in
particular fell deeply in love with him.
More than anything Ober wanted to write. He
wrote dozens of articles, thousands of letters to friends, and thousands more
in support of his plan for wilderness preservation, but he never achieved his
lifelong ambition: He never wrote a book about his travels with Billy Magee,
and he never wrote a book about Native American legends – books that would
justify his Northwoods existence, books whose royalties, he hoped, would solve
his lifelong financial problems. This failure haunted him as the great
frustration and disappointment of his life.
In his final years Ober
was robbed of his ability to speak by a series of minor strokes. As reported
by Joe Paddock in
Keeper of the Wild: The Life of Ernest
Oberholtzer, however, he still had
good days.
One day, the late Ted Hall, a former
correspondent and deputy New York bureau chief for Time-Life and publisher of
the Rainy Lake Chronicle, was pushing Ober in his wheelchair down a sidewalk
in International Falls.
According to Hall, "The whole morning there
hadn’t been a word you could understand. He just communicated by signs. And as
we were crossing the street, an Indian woman called out to him and started a
conversation."
Not until Ober’s friend had gone did Hall
realize that, in Ojibwe, Ober had been "completely, absolutely articulate."
After the conversation Ober once again "couldn’t get a word out."
I am fascinated by the mystery of language
and how it becomes a part of us. How is it that words become so deeply
ingrained in our brains, and in our hearts, that if one path is blocked,
another opens?
With these poems I hope to get some of those
words out, words out of me – a tree-hugging wilderness lover who has canoed
the boundary waters region for nearly 30 years and whose enthusiasm for
language, writing, teaching, and life knows no boundaries – and, if I’m lucky,
a few words out of Ober.
