My son and I lay in the tent, reading and listening to the approaching storm. It was mid-July, and we were camped on an island of Norway pines in Ontario's Quetico Provincial Park.
The storm had been building for the past couple of hours. Now we could feel the temperature dropping.
When the first raindrops began pelting the tent, each of us reached out a tent door to zip the rain fly shut. Before I could get mine shut, the front arrived in its full fury.
Wind drove fine dust from the forest floor into my eyes and teeth. In less than five seconds, it whipped under the fly and deposited a layer of grit and pine needles over the entire inside of the tent.
The wind had reached such a velocity that I hollered to my wife and daughter in an adjacent tent.
I knew we should get out of the tents and move to the windward shore, just in case any old pines decided to topple in our camp.
But by the time we were ready to make that move, the wind suddenly dropped to a more reasonable level. We stayed put, listening to the thunder and watching the lightning.
It was a good storm, and good storms always hold your attention in the wilderness. You lie there in a grove of tall trees, wondering where the next bolt of lightning might strike.
We didn't think much about the storm the next morning as the four of us made our way over the portage from Sunday Lake to Meadows Lake. The portage is more than a half-mile long and seems to climb more than it drops.
A couple of other groups started the portage about the same time we did. All of us came to a premature halt when we encountered a large jackpine that had apparently blown down in the storm. Its crown was across the trail, its branches too big to break off by hand.
We had the only saw among the three groups, and I went to work, lopping branches. The trunk of the tree, at chest height, was far too big for the saw. We removed enough branches, then began passing canoes from all three groups over the tree like firefighters in a bucket brigade.
Word came back from up the trail that four more trees were down. It took two hours for us to make that portage.
The storm wasn't through toying with us. The last afternoon of our trip, five days later, we were camped on Burke Lake when we noticed smoke rising over the horizon.
Later, we would learn that lightning probably had ignited a fire that smoldered for several days before it finally took off. We would also learn the fire was less than a mile from us.
As the smoke billowed into the sky, we contemplated our options - paddling and portaging on, or staying there and keeping an eye on the fire. Before we had much time to think, a pair of DeHavilland Twin Otter aircraft on floats arrived from the north.
For the next three hours, they would skim the water on the next lake over, filling their floats, then fly low over the fire to release the water. We sat on a rock at our camp and watched the air show. By supper time, the fire was out.
By then, we figured we had gotten our money's worth out of that story.
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