[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 144 (Thursday, October 23, 1997)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E2063-E2064]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE BOUNDARY WATERS CANOE AREA WILDERNESS

                                 ______
                                 

                         HON. JAMES L. OBERSTAR

                              of minnesota

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, October 22, 1997

  Mr. OBERSTAR. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to share with my colleagues 
an article that appeared in today's edition of the Washington Post. It 
concerns legislation I have introduced entitled ``The BWCAW 
Accessibility and Fairness Act of 1997,'' H.R. 1739. I offer this 
article, written by Karl Vick, because it is a particularly well-
balanced, informative, and insightful account of an issue that has 
fallen victim to an enormous amount of misinformation.
  Mr. Vick's article describes the historically important role that the 
Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness [BWCAW] has played in the lives 
of Northern Minnesotans, as well as the current issue concerning access 
to this natural treasure that is before this body. I believe it would 
be beneficial for all Members, as well as the public at large, to learn 
from Mr. Vick's article.


              [From the Washington Post, October 22, 1997]

                         Ripples of Discontent

                             (By Karl Vick)

       Ely, Minn.--Once again the Boundary Waters Canoe Area 
     Wilderness is awash in the sort of righteous arguments, 
     political torments and generalized stress that people flock 
     to this serene constellation of lakes, islands and sky to 
     leave behind.
       And once again the fight is over the preferred method of 
     plying its glassy waters.
       Canoeists say a bill set for a vote today in a House 
     committee will expand the use of motorboats, sundering the 
     almost sepulchral tranquillity that has made these more than 
     1 million acres where Minnesota meets Canada the most popular 
     federal wilderness. More than 200,000 people visited the 
     Boundary Waters last year, arriving from as far away as 
     Holland, and 92 percent made their way among its 1,100 lakes 
     by paddling.
       ``It's like going back in time. I felt like a fur trader,'' 
     said Gail Klugman, after a weekend visiting from suburban 
     Minneapolis. ``It's just the most peaceful place I've ever 
     been.''
       Of those who prefer skimming along by outboard motor, on 
     the other hand, most live just minutes away. Locals visit the 
     boundary Waters mostly to fish, and complain that the number 
     of favorite walleye holes accessible by outboard has been 
     effectively reduced even below the 22 lakes left open to them 
     by legislation passed over their objections almost two 
     decades ago.
       ``The people who live up here and make a life of it--be it 
     at the mines, on the lakes, own your own business, whatever--
     these people are locked out of their own back door,'' said 
     Steve Koschak, who owns a resort outside Ely. ``And you can 
     say it's a playground for the whole country. But when you 
     live on a lake and you can't go out on it because of some 
     imaginary line going down the middle of it? That ain't 
     right.''
       Anglers have sought relief from a Republican Congress that 
     likes to approach issues with the assumption that locals know 
     better than Washington. Local advocates insist that the 
     measure the House Resources Committee will take up this 
     morning--an identical bill awaits floor action in the 
     Senate--would do little more than allow pickup trucks to tow 
     motorboats on three rugged trails between lakes, or portages, 
     that have been closed by federal courts.
       But the bills would also check a trend that has been 
     running toward canoeists and wilderness advocates for 
     decades. In Minnesota, the lid has come off a controversy 
     that, when last broached 20 years ago, tipped the balance in 
     a U.S. Senate primary, inspired class warfare across the Land 
     of 10,000 Lakes and put local Forest Service employees in the 
     habit of venturing into the woods only in street clothes for 
     fear of drawing gunfire if they wore their uniforms.
       ``It gets old, to say the least,'' said Frank Leoni, 
     standing with one foot in Newton Lake and one on the shore.
       A Forest Service employee dressed in flannel shirt and 
     rubber waders only because he had been casting a jig for 
     walleye, Leoni had just lifted a fishing boat onto a set of 
     ``portage wheels'' he and his buddies were about to haul a 
     quarter of a mile on their way home to Fall Lake. The boat 
     was laden with camping gear, fishing poles and the legal 
     limit of fish caught over four days. That's roughly as much 
     time, Leoni pointed out, as it would have taken them to 
     paddle waters they had covered in a single day with their 
     outboard.
       ``I think that's the concern of the locals, who work, you 
     know. Who want to come in for a day,'' said Dan Hernesmaa, an 
     Ely native. ``We enjoy the wilderness as much as the paddlers 
     do.''
       But not in the same way.
       Sound carries across water, and on the stony, glacial lakes 
     of the Boundary Waters it seems to carry like nowhere else. 
     Located just beyond the Laurentian Divide, north of which 
     rivers flow toward Hudson Bay, it is a lake land matrix 
     unlike any east of the Mississippi: a wilderness of rock 
     fields scooped out by glaciers, then filled by evergreens, 
     aspen and cold, clear water. The result is terrain of lush 
     color but almost austere stillness.
       Kevin Proescholdt, who worked as a guide in the area for 10 
     years before heading the advocacy group Friends of the 
     Boundary Waters, recalled hearing traffic from a road fully 
     six miles from his campsite. In such a setting the putt-putt 
     of a 25 horsepower outboard (the maximum horsepower allowed 
     on most lakes in the wilderness area) is cast as an all-out 
     assault on the hush that canoeists savor.
       A pair of them glided into the Newton Lake portage while 
     Leoni and Hernesmaa spoke, their craft's approach so quiet 
     neither man was aware of it until it skimmed onto the landing 
     beside them.
       ``It's really hard to contradict the locals, but I think 
     they ought to leave it the way it is,'' said Brian Nugent, 
     27, a New Orleans bartender armsore but otherwise refreshed 
     after five days paddling a canoe rented from Koschak's 
     resort. His father, an environmental scientist, had traveled 
     from Atlanta for the trip.
       ``It's just a special place, that's all you can say,'' 
     Richard Nugent said. ``If people want to partake of it they 
     ought to paddle like everyone else.''
       Residents reply that the Boundary Waters is unusual in 
     another way. Among federal wilderness areas established by 
     Congress in 1964, it is one of only a small handful that 
     historically has made accommodation for motorboats. Even the 
     1978 bill that banned mining and logging allowed small 
     outboards to continue on the 22 larger lakes that, together, 
     account for 23 percent of the wilderness area's water 
     surface. The problem has become reaching those lakes.
       Access to the Boundary Waters is restricted. In order to 
     increase the odds of a ``wilderness experience'' that federal 
     regulation defines as encountering other humans no more than 
     seven times in a day, the U.S. Forest Service issues permits 
     even for single day use. The agency also allows entry only at 
     specific sites, some a fair hike from the best fishing.
       For years, commercial outfitters cut down the inconvenience 
     by making trucks available to haul motorboats on three 
     portages, one four miles long. But under the terms of the 
     hard-fought 1978 legislation, those trucks would be allowed 
     only if it wasn't ``feasible'' to drag the boats overland by 
     hand. The crucial term was agreed upon in negotiations 
     between Charles Dayton, the attorney representing 
     environmentalists, and Ron Walls, a local lawyer charged with 
     representing Northern Minnesota interests.
       Dayton later confided that ``feasible'' was a linguistic 
     booby trap--a legal term of art that courts would almost 
     surely interpret in a way that would guarantee the motorized 
     portages would be shut down, as, indeed, the U.S. Supreme 
     Court in 1993 ruled they must be.
       ``Candidly, I doubt whether Ron as a general practitioner 
     in a small town knew that,'' Dayton is quoted as saying in 
     ``Troubled Waters,'' a book recounting the Boundary Waters 
     battle from the environmentalists' point of view. ``And I 
     didn't tell him about it.''
       Motor advocates waived the passage like a flag at a House 
     subcommittee hearing last month.
       ``We're not rubes,'' said Rep. James L. Oberstar, whose 
     district includes the Boundary Waters. ``We're not jack pine 
     savages. We're honest, decent people and we took them at 
     their word.

[[Page E2064]]

       ``And that word was `feasible.' ''
       Oberstar, ranking Democrat on the Transportation Committee, 
     sponsored the portage bill in the House while Rod Grams (R-
     Minn.) pushed passage in the Senate. The Clinton 
     administration opposes both, as it did a measure last year 
     that would have increased outboard use while bringing the 
     wilderness area under a ``local management council.''
       Todd Indehar, president of the grass-roots Conservationists 
     With Common Sense, said such a council remains his ultimate 
     goal. But lawmakers insist their ambitions extend only to the 
     three portages (and keeping motors on a section of one large 
     lake where they are scheduled to be banned under the 1978 
     agreement).
       ``I'm not saying you have to open this up and kowtow to the 
     people of Northern Minnesota and give them everything they 
     want,'' Grams said. ``But what are they asking for? Only what 
     they had.''
       In Ely, the appetite for a win is keen. With main roads 
     lined by canoe outfitters and a clutch of outdoorsy boutiques 
     (including one named for polar adventurer Will Steger, the 
     most famous local resident), the town of 4,000 appears 
     prosperous. But Ely has lost population in the decade since 
     the open pit mines cut back at the nearby Mesabi Iron Range. 
     And the tourism that, during the short summer, has taken up 
     some of the slack is built on a more effete appreciation of 
     the outdoors than most locals knew growing up.
       ``The impression is we get a lot of rich yuppies who don't 
     even know what to do with their money and they tell us what 
     to do, where to do it and when to do it. And the portages is 
     a symbol of that,'' said Vince O'Conner, 41, of nearby 
     Babbitt.
       The enmity goes back to at least 1978 and the 
     ``compromise'' that Indehar said destroyed a vibrant local 
     heritage of fishing shacks and family outings in the name of 
     an urban elite view of ``wilderness.'' The politically active 
     region mobilized against the U.S. Senate bid of Donald 
     Fraser, who had championed the measure in the House. And the 
     memory of his upset loss is still savored at the Hook, Line & 
     Sinker bait and tackle shop on Sheridan Street.
       ``You're looking at one of the baldheaded [expletives] who 
     helped send him down the tubes,'' said owner Leonard 
     Katauskas, the Salem in the corner of his mouth going jaunty 
     for a moment.
       It does not matter that the economic benefit of opening the 
     portages likely would be, as Katauskas put it, ``minuscule.'' 
     Nor is there traction for the argument that motors are 
     welcome in the 98 percent of Minnesota lakes that the lie 
     outside the wilderness area.
       The lakes many area residents grew up fishing lay inside 
     the Boundary Waters, and locals say they want to reach them 
     again even if the Forest Service imposes a $10 daily user-
     fee, as it recently announced it would.
       ``This,'' Oberstar said, ``is a contest over lifestyles.''

       

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