What made you realize so young what you’d do with your life?
In fourth grade, the first book I read was the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and that really influenced me. When I was fifteen, I took a motorboat down the Mississippi River with my brother. At twelve, I bought my first wooden boat and fixed it up, then I sold it. I upgraded to a better boat, fixed that, and sold it. For three years, I upgraded boats. Then I traded my last boat and got an $1,100 loan. I finally had the boat I needed to go down the Mississippi River. That was my first and last motorized adventure. It was just a neat experience.
We were arrested in every Southern city we pulled into. They arrested us because they thought we stole the boat. So they would bring us to the police station. After a while, we weren’t worried about it. We always knew it was good for a hot meal, and they would call up my parents and it’d be OK. And then we’d find a used-car lot in town and talk to the salesmen—they always liked us “little vagabonds”—and we’d ask them if we could sleep in the station wagons. We ran out of money several times. Our parents loaned us the money, we had to pay it back. When we got to New Orleans, we were out of money but we didn’t want to wire back. And we met this old bum in his sixties. He had a great heart. He took us under his wing, showed us New Orleans, how to get around. We’d sleep under newspapers in the French Quarter, then at three in the morning we’d make our rounds after the food warehouses would close and throw their produce out and we’d get that.
Did you sell the boat and hitchhike back?
No, we drove it back. That was the hard part. And that year there was a lot of rain in the North, the river was rising and the current was really tough. We had motor troubles all the way up.
I couldn’t sell the boat. I’d had it for two years. I still had payments on it. Plus, we water-skied all the time. Boating was a big deal for a Minnesota boy. In high school, I had an old ’52 Cadillac with a trailer hitch. Spring and fall, almost until the water froze, after school, we’d go out and water-ski a couple hours a day at Bryant Lake. This was in 1959. Gas was nineteen cents a gallon then—I remember that because we not only had to put money in the gas tank, but we had to fill the boat too. Money was always an issue, all my life. Still is. When you have big dreams and you want to do stuff, you have to be a genius in certain ways. All along it’s been that way for me.
The Castle—your conference center—has been a dream for a long time, right?
Yeah, for thirty years. It’s not something I wrote down. I never talk about where I see myself going. I just sort of feel it or know it, without feeling it or knowing it. This is something I’ve always wanted, something I always saw myself doing. But it did involve some tough decisions, like putting the road in. That was the biggest compromise of my life. I never thought I’d have a road here, but… It was a difficult decision. But it was either do that or don’t build the center. The first couple years, I was going to do it without the road. In the winter of 1988, we dogsledded in a million pounds of gravel, 5,000 bags of cement, and we mixed it in a cement mixer all by hand, and we poured the foundation. But trying to do it all by hand, it didn’t seem like it was going to be possible.
So, after your Huck Finn trip, what was your next big adventure?
When I was seventeen, in 1957, I got inspired by a National Geographic article about kayaking. So a friend and I planned a kayak trip up in the Yukon. We used to practice in the spring of the year at Lake Harriet and Lake Calhoun, at Thomas Beach there. We’d night- kayak across Calhoun, Lake of the Isles. Then we shipped our kayaks to Juneau, Alaska, and hitchhiked up. That’s when I really got hooked. But it wasn’t like, “Oh, I love this trip.” It was miserable. We were lonely and hungry. The scenery was incredible, but the bugs and the food were horrible. The maps that we had, there were big sections that were totally white, and it would just say “unmapped.” One really neat thing was that in some of these so-called unmapped areas, we met some of the old-timers from the gold rush in 1898 and their wives. And we’d come into their cabins. These two kids stumble in just to warm up, and they’d feed us this amazing food and we’d just keep eating and eating. And we’d complain about the bugs and the misery. And a couple of these old guys said, “Boys, mark my words, you’ll be back.” No way, we thought. We finished the trip and hitchhiked home. By the time I got home, and a week or two of college, I was already plotting my next trip back.
Did you like school?
I went through a Catholic education all the way through. Worked myself through high school. I had a choice. I could have gone to the public school in Richfield, but I didn’t want to. Richfield’s a very good school, but I wanted to go to Benilde. It was very strict in the late fifties. The Christian brothers were very good teachers.
I wasn’t into religion, I just wanted to go because I thought it was a good school. Then I went to St. Thomas. I barely got in; they admitted me on probation. I had to work very hard for grades. I was a C student. I’ve always had to work hard, just had to put in a little extra effort. I didn’t get the A’s. I got C’s. If I really screwed up, I got F’s and D’s. And if I did that, on the home front, the alarms went off, and I got grounded. I’m really proud of my Catholic education. I had nothing but good teachers all the way through my life. I’m not saying anything against the public system; it was my choice. I was a product of a very good education. You look back on how you came up, and I owe it all to my parents, and I had a good education.
Are your parents still alive?
My father passed away four years ago. My mother still lives in the same house in Richfield. I’m so fortunate. Five of my siblings are in Minneapolis. I have two brothers on the coasts.
Describe what you’ve been doing since 1997—your last expedition—and how you decided to get back on the dogsled.
In 1998 and 1999, I had a good writing job for Lands’ End; they paid me very well. That gave me time to start working on this book I wanted to write about my dogs. I’d finished a few chapters on it. And when I finished the Lands’ End job, I thought I’d go for it; I had enough to get by on for about a year, I thought I’d finish that book and launch my writing career. But I hit the wall on it. I got so burnt out on the book, I thought I’d never go back to it. That’s when Aaron Doering called from the university. I was hungry for work. I thought I’d give a talk at the university, whatever. But Aaron said he had a contact for a potential sponsorship and expedition. Aaron had worked for National Geographic, and he was an educator. I could see we had a lot in common that way, and he had this contact with Coca-Cola. It looked like a real strong contact. They were going to give us a million-dollar sponsorship to cross the Arctic Ocean. But suddenly the economy fell apart.
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