Osler's Razor

I realize that while I am keeping up with the Razor's promises regarding rants and haiku, I am way behind on repressed memories and recipes. Sorry, man. Today I will start catching up on repressed memories.

As some of you may have gathered, I have just returned from my annual sojourn to Osler Island, up in the boundary waters of Minnesota and Ontario (I was able to post the blog in advance-- nice trick, huh?). We have two cabins up there-- completely off the grid with no electricity, no phone, no running water, just lots of wilderness and lots of Oslers. To get there from Waco, just get on I-35 north for about 1200 miles until it ends in Duluth, then go north by car about 200 more miles, then another 6 miles by boat until you are about 50 yards into Canada.

When I was about nine years old and we were on our annual trip to the Island, my parents decided to take a little family jaunt to something my Dad spotted on the map called Silver Falls. We had heard that it was a pretty, decent-sized waterfall just into Quetico Provincial Park. So the five of us piled into a fishing boat and headed out. We cut across the big lake and into a bay where the falls were marked. After a while, we headed down a river. Soon we could hear the falls, but for some reason we couldn't see them-- we kept expecting to see a curtain of water falling ahead of us. The sound got louder and louder, but still we couldn't see the falls.

Then, for some reason, the engine died just as we went around a bend. It was then that we realized the reason we didn't see the falls was because we were about to go over them-- that the river we were on was about to drop over the falls. Stupidly, we didn't think through what it meant that we were going with, not against, the flow of the water. We were all about to die. My Dad furiously tried to restart the engine and at the last minute, with about 30 feet to the falls, it caught and we escaped.

The funny thing is that in those moments between when we realized our predicament and when the engine started, we laughed and laughed and laughed.