So little time! Anyone who knows me can imagine the combination of awe and frustration that I felt as I contemplated the "main event" at the Mustard Museum in Mount Horeb, Wisconsin: an array of about 400 mustards of every conceivable flavor, texture, and degree of hotness, all of which one is invited to taste with tiny, disposable plastic spoons. There are ballpark mustards, grainy mustards, honey mustards, garlic mustards, jalapeño mustards, mustards flavored with limes, raspberries, barbecue sauce and horseradish. There is one mustard so hot that the staff dispenses it personally, insisting that one sniff it before sampling a microdot of it, presumably to avoid lawsuits. Needless to say, I worked my way happily through many jars and finally purchased four, including that infernally (or, to me, celestially) hot one.

Now, there are those among my students and colleagues who would allege that my travels are merely lightly veiled pretexts for seeking out and scarfing up the tastiest foods that America and the world have to offer, from grilled sturgeon and fresh cherries in Kiev to Peru's national dish of barbecued guinea pig. I would answer this sweeping charge with just one word: "Bingo!" Actually, that's a qualified "bingo," as travel holds other compelling allures for me. There is no doubt, however, that the mustard museum was a pilgrimage goal for me, a personally meaningful place that sooner or later I just had to visit, joining such previously achieved goals as the Taj Mahal, Macchu Picchu, Elvis' Graceland, the Dallas Book Depository, the Kremlin, and the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. Goals are vital to travelers, but so are side trips, and I will freely admit that, using a culinary bible called Road Food, I enthusiastically detour, sometimes many miles, from my basic itinerary to savor the best down-home food in the U.S.A. For instance, a high point of this past summer's trip was the Norsk Nook, a friendly spot in the inviting village of Osseo, Wisconsin, where the cooks keep succulent beef, pork, veal, and turkey roasts cooking slowly all day, every day. This results in state-of-the-art hot sandwiches of ultra-tender meat between two thick slices of homemade bread, slathered in mouth-watering gravy, with a side of perfect mashed potatoes. I followed this up with a wedge of creamy butterscotch meringue pie and, spotting another diner, an elderly woman, blissfully ingesting this same pie, I engaged her in conversation and we agreed that if more people spent more time seeking out and enjoying such treats, there would be less violence, corruption, illiteracy, and other bad things. Thus, eating well is a moral necessity, right? The good news is that virtually every corner of America features such oases as the Norsk Nook. As I said before, so little time!

Of course, I had to eat well on this trip to fuel up for meeting my other major goal, a long-dreamed-of wilderness canoe trip into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area on the Minnesota/Ontario border. This is a special corner of the world where one paddles for a couple of miles and finds himself gliding through a picturesque blue and green maze of hundreds of lakes, connecting rivers, azure skies, and countless islands cloaked with pine trees, replete with haunting loon calls, huge northern pike arcing out of the water to tempt fishermen, tail-slapping beavers and majestically soaring bald eagles. Losing oneself in this sublime world is well worth taking on the challenges the trip entails, which are actually part of the fun.

One of these challenges is navigation. Our map of the area looked like a jigsaw puzzle version of a Jackson Pollock painting. However, with many years of experience behind me, I could make sense of the map and we moved through lake after lake, guided by islands of specific size or shape, dramatic promontories, and river outlets. Only once did we blow it. Battling waves two to three feet high on a big lake, with the canoe riding up and down them like a water-borne roller coaster, we missed an outlet and veered into (yipes!) Canada. We managed to find a wonderfully located campsite on a point of land overlooking a string of islands, some eagles, and a stunning sunset. However, I must chauvinistically note that the campsite per se, which was just a site for a tent, did not measure up to the American sites where forest rangers, operating like the shoemaker's elves, have boated through providing firepits, logs to sit on, and, the camper's greatest treasure, a supply of ready-to-use firewood.

A second challenge is, you guessed it, providing for properly tasty and filling camp meals. I met this challenge thirty-four years ago by selecting a wife, Evy, who can build a fire and cook a meal in a typhoon. There must be a Mohican somewhere in her gene pool. She always has a strategy. For instance, this time we carried good frozen hamburger with us in a small thermal pack, which provided us with classic burgers the first night out and on the second night, Ev tossed the remaining meat into one of the American food industry's masterworks, Hamburger Helper's Southwestern Beef dinner. It tasted fabulous; trust me. Though I will, with no regrets, drop a lot of bucks on a gourmet meal in a three-star restaurant, I'm equally devoted to those dishes which verify the old cliché that anything, including seemingly mundane supermarket offerings, tastes better outdoors, on the trail. The only exception to this rule would be Hormel's canned beef stew, which contains mysterious meat tidbits that resemble segments of a bronchial tree.

Another initially daunting challenge loomed when we met another party following a different route. When we told them that we were looking forward to paddling out of the wilds on the serpentine Horse River, they visibly gasped and said that it couldn't be done, that rangers had warned them off, because the water was low and the passage was virtually impossible. We said that we had no choice, as our car was waiting at the end of that route. As we pushed off, we tried to read their lips, which seemed to be saying, "Vaya con Dios, you poor devils." We entered the Horse through a labyrinth of marshes which we slalomed through carefully, and moved into a beautiful, narrow river that required dodging countless rocks and actually climbing out of the canoe twice to lift it over beaver dams! The final stretch gave us some idea of what the ball in a pinball machine must feel like, as we threaded our way between boulders, often caroming from one monolith to another. We sighed with relief when we entered the next lake, relishing the feeling that our canoeing skills had met the test and elated by the scenery which, on this dazzlingly sunny day, had been breathtaking.

Our major challenge, as any canoeist could guess, was portaging. There are numerous places in the Boundary Waters where, for instance, the connecting rivers feature waterfalls, and one simply has to carry his gear around them on trails. That gear includes the canoe itself. On our many canoe trips, we had made only a few short portages, but this journey required four miles of them! In days gone by, wooden and metal canoes made this a Herculean task. However, the same modern outdoors technology that brought us they four-pound tent and the two-pound stove has also provided us with the Kevlar canoe which, if not feather-light, seems relatively close to it. Our outfitter's prediction that we could "sprint along the trails" with our forty-three pound Kevlar craft was a bit exaggerated, but it had a comfortable padded u-shaped yoke that fit across my shoulders and enabled me to carry the canoe by myself. It seemed lighter with each carry, and we tackled the distances energetically, including one which was over a mile long. Enjoying the rugged trail sights at a necessarily moderate pace, we got into a groove that felt right and demystified the task, making us ready for the ultimate portage which our outfitter, for obvious reasons, had not described for us. It went straight up an almost vertical slope strewn with large rocks. Scrambling up the sheer incline while balancing the canoe was tricky in the extreme, and I burned some calories (okay, admittedly I could spare them) in the process. However, I achieved my goal of making it in one carry, without putting the canoe down or stopping to rest. Evy said that I'd earned some points with her for this feat, though it remains unclear as to how they will be rewarded. At any rate, I felt I'd earned the relaxing run down the final lovely lake and the cold beer at our take-out point, a surreal, log-constructed wilderness bar called The Chainsaw Sisters. (Don't ask.) We happily headed back to the town of Ely, where our outfitter just happened to operate a terrific cafe called the Chocolate Moose, where we devoured fresh walleyed pike sandwiches and homemade blueberry pie. A fitting end to my kind of trip, one which gives both the muscles and the taste buds a satisfying workout.

—Harry Dawson, at the Prep since 1965, has been Chairman of the English Department since 1974. He has explored six continents and has recently fulfilled his wish to have visited all fifty states.