Member-only story
The Compass Wasn’t Wrong
How right answers can lead us in the wrong direction
Many years ago, I spent two weeks canoeing and portaging through the Boundary Waters of northern Minnesota.
We put in near Ely sometime in September, while the calendar still insisted it was summer. The trees agreed. They were green, the lakes stretched ahead of us, and for the next two weeks almost everything we needed would travel with us in our canoes or on our backs.
This was before smartphones, of course. There was no GPS. No little blue dot reassuring us that we were, in fact, where we thought we were.
We had maps.
We had a compass.
And, apparently, considerable confidence in our ability to use both.
I remember being out on one of those lakes, paddling with our small group. We knew the direction we were supposed to travel. That part wasn’t particularly mysterious. Take out the compass, find our bearing and paddle toward it.
Except when I looked ahead, I could see several small islands.
Somewhere among them was the island where we were supposed to pitch our tents for the night.
Which one?
