Stop Daydreaming and Paddle

What the wilderness taught me...

May 27, 2026

In the summer of 1993 I was working at a boutique investment banking firm in Manhattan.

Navy blue suit and white shirt, that was the uniform. We all wore it like a costume that said I belong here even when we weren’t entirely sure we did.

Two auditors arrived from Minnesota that summer to do due diligence work at our office. I had never met anyone from Minnesota before. I had never been anywhere near Minnesota. And yet there they were, two men in navy suits and white shirts, practically indistinguishable from everyone else in that Manhattan office, except for one small detail that would change everything.

One month later I was going to a wedding in Wisconsin.

I mentioned it to them almost in passing. And one of them said you should really go to the Boundary Waters.

I did not know what the Boundary Waters was. I went to the bookstore on Fifth Avenue and did my research. A vast wilderness on the border between Minnesota and Canada. Ancient forest. No roads. You need a permit just to enter. Minnesota, for those who don’t know, is called the land of ten thousand lakes. That is not a metaphor. There are actually ten thousand lakes.

I got the permit. I told my boyfriend we were going.

He said yes. He always said yes to my ideas, even the ones that probably should have given him pause. He is an Eagle Scout and I am a Bengali girl from Queens who considered the Bloomingdale’s shoe department an extreme sport. I figured between his wilderness training and my talent for surviving a 60% off sale at Saks Fifth Avenue, we would be fine.

What I did not fully disclose to him, or perhaps to myself, was the complete inventory of my inexperience. I had never canoed. I had never camped. I had never been anywhere that could genuinely be called wilderness.

Also I could barely swim.

I was going into the Canadian border wilderness with my swim instructor. The irony was not lost on me. Much later.

We met at the airport in Minneapolis. Went to the wedding in Wisconsin first, a beautiful celebration in a state that felt like another country to a girl from Queens. Then we drove to the edge of the wilderness, stayed overnight at an outfitter, collected our gear, and went in.

Five days. Just us. A canoe, a topographical map, a compass, and each other.

Every day we paddled for five or six hours, moving from one body of water to the next. When there was no water connecting them we portaged, which means you carry the canoe over land on your shoulders along with your backpack, your food for five days, your tent, your sleeping bag, and your entire sense of self worth.

It rained. Heavily, at times. The kind of rain that arrives sideways and has clearly never heard the word umbrella.

One afternoon the sky turned dark and the lightning started and I was in the front of the canoe looking for somewhere to land, somewhere that felt safer than the open water. I was doing what I have always done in moments of difficulty, which is to say I was gazing at the scenery and finding it beautiful and completely ignoring the fact that we were about to be struck by lightning.

He yelled from the back of the canoe. This gentle, patient, soft spoken man who had never raised his voice at me in three years together.

Stop daydreaming and paddle.

I paddled. Faster than I knew I could.

We hung our food in a tree every night because of the bears. Not metaphorical bears. Actual bears. We saw moose footprints in the mud, enormous and impossibly fresh, close enough to make us both very quiet and very still. We cooked on rocks at the water’s edge as the sun went down over a lake so still it looked like the sky had decided to lie down and rest.

There was no noise except what we made and what the wilderness made. No city. No office. No navy suit. No shoes on sale anywhere.

Just two people, a canoe, and ten thousand lakes.

I was twenty nine years old. I had spent my entire life moving fast, working hard, performing competence in a suit that said I knew what I was doing. And here, for the first time in my adult life, I genuinely had no idea what I was doing.

It was the most alive I had ever felt.

What I know now, living thirty three years on the other side of that trip, is that the wilderness does something to you that ordinary life simply cannot.

It strips away everything you use to convince yourself and others that you are prepared and capable and in control. And when all of that is gone, when it is just you and the rain and the actual bears and the open water, you find out what is underneath.

I found out I was braver than I knew.

I found out that I could trust this man, this patient Eagle Scout who had taught me to swim and was now teaching me to navigate something far larger than a pool in Queens, with my actual life. Not just my heart. My life.

I came back from that trip and I was not the same person who had left. Something had cracked open that I could not name then and can only partially name now. A door had opened that I did not know was closed.

A year later I left New York. Left the suit. Left the firm. Left my family and my friends and everything familiar and moved thousands of miles away to California.

I was obedient to something I could not fully explain. The wilderness had shown me something true and I could not go back to pretending I hadn’t seen it.

This morning I walked in the woods with that same man, my husband of 28 years, and our dog Arcturus.

No map needed.

I have been thinking lately about what it takes to stay. Not just to stay, but to keep choosing. Over and over, in the ordinary moments, when nothing is magical and nobody is watching.

The wilderness teaches you something about that too. You learn to read the terrain together. You learn to trust your partner when you are not sure which way to go. You learn that the portage, the hard carrying part, the part where you are moving between one body of water and the next with everything on your back, is just part of the journey.