Osler's Razor

Irv Benson died this week in Grand Marais, Minnesota, some 65 miles from his home on Lake Saganaga, barely over the border in Canada. I have known him nearly my whole life, though I suspect he was much more memorable to me than I ever was to him. My family's life was full of characters, and in that cast he was one of the most distinct and wonderful.

Irv lived in the wilderness all year; we visited the lake for two weeks in the summer. He first went to Saganaga in 1948, and survived by running a trap line in the winter and a fishing camp in the summer. He was smart, witty, mischievous, and passionate, and was the heart of the small community on that lake. His wife, Tempest, had grown up on the next lake and knew all of the waters' secrets. My favorite legend (true or not) about the two of them was the time that they were running a trap line and Irv's socks got soaked and ruined, a serious problem in sub-zero temperatures. Tempest's solution was to shoot two rabbits, turn them inside-out, and put them on his freezing feet. Another version of the same tale had her using the rabbit as a cast on one of his broken limbs, and one or both may well have been true. Their life was like that-- improvised and brilliant, shaped by nature and their own inventiveness.

I doubt that I could eulogize him much better than the commenter to the last post, but my own addition would be that his spirit helped mine to grow, and his sense of what mattered challenges my own in the same way that the best always do-- by pulling me away from my self-centeredness and towards simpler truths and richness of life. I'm thankful that he was a part of my life.