by Jonathan Ringel (78-83, 85)
The first time I met the Root Beer Lady, I was struggling through a 1980 venture in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. It was, by far, my toughest six days during what were otherwise seven blissful summers at Nebagamon in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. Three years later I saw the Root Beer Lady a second time, and by then I’d learned some particularly Nebagamon-ish lessons that have lasted a lifetime.
The Root Beer Lady was Dorothy Molter, and she was a legend in the BWCA. Canoeists on Knife Lake would be paddling through its pristine waters when they’d come upon an island cabin, surrounded by a picket fence made of broken paddles (including one from Nebagamon). Inside was a white-haired woman selling bottles of ice-cold, homemade root beer.
Born in 1907, Molter became a nurse and started living on the island to help a man run a small fishing resort in the 1930s. After he died in 1948, she lived there by herself. The federal government wanted her to move out in the 1970s, but popular support helped her win a reprieve, and she stayed on the island until she died there in 1986. By then she’d served thousands of canoeists her root beer—cooled by ice cut from the lakes during the winter.
Minnesota Public Radio and Roadside America have excellent summaries of her life. And, in fact, she’s been somewhat immortalized. It turns out that the homestead belonging to Dorothy, who has been described as the last non-indigenous resident of the BWCA, was dismantled in 1987 and transported by dogsled and snowmobile to Moose Lake. From there, it was moved to Ely, where volunteers restored two of her cabins. They now serve as the site of the Dorothy Molter Museum.
I originally encountered the Root Beer Lady after I had finished sixth grade and was on my first wilderness trip—or at least the first one that wasn’t merely a two-day excursion to a nearby lake with my cabin mates. At the start of that summer, my instinct had been to stay in camp with all of my friends. But I recall my counselors and—frankly, everyone on the staff—pushing us to get our ranks and get the heck out of town. I had always liked canoeing, and I let myself be steered into signing up for what we then called a “Sawbill”—a six-day trip to the BWCA.
I soon found myself on a trip mostly with seventh graders that I didn’t know very well, and I felt completely out of my depth among more experienced trippers. And I soon found myself getting a reputation among our crew as a complainer. I had mastered my J-stroke on a five-mile paddle through Lake Nebagamon and had built a fire at CNOC. But once I was on the trip, everything seemed much harder than I expected.
It started with being woken up at the crack of dawn for a quick breakfast and long van ride. Wearing hiking boots in the canoe, and getting them soaked as we portaged from lake to lake, was also an unpleasant surprise. So was canoeing in the rain, getting drinking water by dipping a cup in the lake, eating food that always seemed spicier than I preferred and, especially, trying to clean spaghetti carb grease off plates.
Even when we came upon the Root Beer Lady at her island oasis of civilization, I was disappointed; I liked Coke more than root beer.
One afternoon after we arrived at a campsite, the counselors, Kerry Kornfeld and Jim Cantor, explained the problem to me. Too often, they said, I waited around for someone to tell me what to do. Too often I commented on what was going on (like how annoying the mosquitoes were) instead of seeing what needed to be done around the campsite, such as putting up tents, gathering water or wood or preparing dinner. To my horror, I even earned a trip report repeating these indictments of my tripping abilities.
As I recall at how awkward I felt 35 years ago, I’m a little surprised by what happened next. A year later, I signed up for another Sawbill, and this time everything felt easier. I knew what to expect and what to do, and I started to enjoy myself. The next year I stayed eight weeks and went on a hiking trip, a cycling trip and on the Isle Royale big trip. And as a ninth grader, I went another six-day Sawbill, visiting the Root Beer Lady again. Later that summer, I went on a Quetico big trip.
I realized the significance of my tripping lesson decades later. It was summer again, but I was in the office, and one day I found myself advising one of the journalists that I managed. “Don’t just wait around at the end of the day,” I suggested, “to see what needed to be done to get our paper out before deadline. Be proactive.”
Around that same period, my wife and I were in the early months of being parents for the first time. One night as Deb attended to the baby, I got up and started to wash bottles and dishes, and I recalled where I learned this key lesson of domestic relations—at an all-boy’s camp.
That summer, I read Sally and Nardie Stein’s history of Camp. I wrote them a congratulatory note and shared my memory of that first tough Sawbill and what I learned from it. Sally responded, “We can only imagine the chagrin Jon Ringel felt when he—perhaps for the first time—did not succeed at something.” Therein lay the genius of the camping experience that had never occurred to me. It provided a place to fail—and to succeed.
And it taught me to have the courage to test out the unfamiliar. The second time that I met Dorothy Molter, I actually savored the root beer.