Andermatt Conley Verena. The War Against the Beavers: Learning to Be Wild in the North Woods

University of Minnesota Press, 2003. — 192 p.A lifelong city dweller, Verena Andermatt Conley had long harbored romantic ideals about the natural world and dreamed of a wilderness retreat for herself and her husband, Tom. When a sizable tract of land along the Vermillion River on the edge of Minnesota’s Boundary Waters - complete with two primitive log cabins - became available, they jumped at the chance to own a piece of paradise. The War Against the Beavers is a wry and funny account of two people’s ten-year apprenticeship in backwoods living, from their arrival as literal babes in the woods to their education in the ways of nature as they face plagues of insects, fungus, storms and droughts, and embark on a lengthy campaign to eradicate a colony of beavers that threatens the peace and beauty of their forest refuge.Juxtaposing idyllic descriptions - hiking and cross-country skiing, swimming and canoeing in clear waters, harvesting berries and wild rice - with the intensive labor of maintaining a wilderness homestead, Conley draws a beguiling picture of the ups and downs of backwoods living. After a period of peaceful coexistence, the beavers become bitter enemies whose depredations threaten to turn a substantial portion of forest into marshland. Odd solutions - axes, shotguns, and dynamite among them - and extermination attempts by still odder locals hardly faze the beavers. It is only the arrival of a mechanized, and much more menacing, threat - bulldozers and other heavy machinery clear-cutting the woods - that restores perspective to the obsessed cabin-dwellers.Having come to the North Woods to escape the rigors of modern life, the couple finds instead that their beliefs on animals, humans, and nature are tested. They emerge from the experience with a hard-won wisdom and a new and deeper understanding of the ever-changing character of wilderness.Verena Andermatt Conley was born and raised in Switzerland, where she grew up reading picturesque and adventurous portrayals of the great American wilderness. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.