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    Breath of Wilderness: The Life of Sigurd Olson
    Breath of Wilderness: The Life of Sigurd Olson
    Breath of Wilderness: The Life of Sigurd Olson
    Ebook125 pages55 minutes

    Breath of Wilderness: The Life of Sigurd Olson

    By Kristin Eggerling

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    About this ebook

    Breath of Wilderness is the story of Olson's love for wild places and how that love transformed his life, inspiring him to play a key role in the movement to preserve wilderness throughout North America, including the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the largest lakeland wilderness in the country.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherFulcrum Publishing
    Release dateMay 25, 2016
    ISBN9781938486418
    Breath of Wilderness: The Life of Sigurd Olson

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    • 3/5
      Admiring and inspiring biography of the naturalist and devoted conservationist who helped draft the Wilderness Act of 1964.

    Book preview

    Breath of Wilderness - Kristin Eggerling

    Foundation

    Foreword

    My father, Sigurd Olson, was a trailblazer through history and life. Through the thickets and confusions of his youth and times, he cut a trail to the world of beauty, love, order, and meaning in nature. Like any boy, he loved being out in the woods, learning about wildlife, hunting a deer, being educated by the stern lessons of the northern seasons. But he did not

    Robert Olson (or Bob) and his brother, Sigurd Olson Jr., spent much of their childhood outdoors. Here their father, Sigurd Olson, shows them how to fillet a fish

    wander. Like an Indian guide he followed deer trails or snapped off branches to mark the trail he was making.

    Even as a child, he knew how wonderful it all was. As a man he put it into words like a map for others to follow. He called it wilderness, not as

    an unmapped jungle but as an Eden for our hearts

    and souls.

    The beauty of this book is that Kristin Eggerling has brought his story to a new generation of would-be Sigurds, at that age when we make our greatest decisions. These are not decisions about what we should do with our lives, or about how to make a living, but about discovering, like Sigurd did, what it is that we love and forging a trail of it through the wilderness of our own life and times.

    —Robert K. Olson, president emeritus,

    Listening Point Foundation

    One

    Daniel Boone Days

    Sigurd Olson loved the forests, lakes, streams, and wild creatures more than anything else in the world. Born in Chicago on April 4, 1899, to Lawrence J. and Ida May Cederholm Olson, Sigurd later said, I should have been born in a log cabin.

    When Sigurd, or Sig, as most people called him, was five years old, his mother took him to Lincoln Park just north of downtown Chicago. As they walked through a grove of maple trees, he was struck by the blazing colors of the leaves, vivid with fall oranges, reds, and yellows. It was a memory that stayed with him throughout his life.

    Around the age of six, Sig moved with his family to northern Wisconsin, where he spent his childhood and adolescence. The Olsons first lived in the community of Sister Bay on the Door County peninsula. Life there was full of adventure for a boy who loved the outdoors. Sig ran free exploring the woods, shore, swamps, and orchards. At night he listened to the foghorns moaning in the harbor. Later, the family moved to Prentice, a logging and farming town in the north-central part of Wisconsin, and then finally to Ashland, in the far northern part of the state along Lake Superior, where he attended high school and college.

    When they were young boys in Sister Bay, Sig and his older brother, Ken, often walked to school together. As Sig shuffled down the path in the early morning, his black lunch pail swinging on his arm, he heard the meadowlarks singing from the fence posts and the trilling of the frogs in the swampy grass.

    Forgetting about the time, he knelt to touch the wildflowers that covered the ground. He marveled at the delicate sky blue petals before pressing his nose into them to breathe in their subtle fragrance. He thought to himself, I love the music of the frogs, the birds, and the smell of wildflowers.

    Ida May and baby Sigurd, Sig’s brother Kenneth, and his

    father, L.J. (or Lawrence), around 1889 or 1890

    Just then his brother Ken reminded him to hurry up or they would be late for school. Sig ignored him and grinned broadly as he picked a few of the flowers to give to his teacher.

    These will make Mr. Yates as happy as they make me feel, he murmured. He didn’t care that his thoughtfulness would encourage his classmates to call him Teacher’s Pet.

    Even at school he spent more time yearning for the outdoors than studying spelling. Mr. Yates, a strict teacher, conducted regular spelling bees by lining up all the students in a row along a crack in the floor and giving them each a word to spell. When a child misspelled a word, a look of displeasure crossed Mr. Yates’s stern face, followed by a whack across the student’s hand with a ruler.

    More than once, Sigurd spelled a word wrong because he was distracted, staring out the schoolroom window and daydreaming

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