An Alternative Reality - One Sociologist's Vision of a Retreat from the Nuclear Age

Arthur Vidich bought 5 acres on an Island in Quetico Provincial Park after World War II (see arrow)

Several years after World War II, Arthur Vidich and his wife Virginia Wicks Vidich bought an island located on Trafalgar Bay within Canada's Quetico Provincial Park. At the time, it was the only privately owned parcel of land located within the 1,843 square mile Park.  Art hired Frank Powell,  a Chippewa Indian to build a log cabin on a spectacular ten acre island with a panoramic view of Trafalgar Bay.  He hoped to use it as a vacation getaway but in the back of his mind he saw it as an insurance policy against what he perceived to be the reckless escalation of the nuclear arms race between the Soviet Union and the United States. In the event of a nuclear war, he surmised, the family could survive by retreating from urban life where nuclear annihilation was expected.

Frank Powell with Arthur Vidich circa the 1960s

As a child, I visited the cabin numerous times and was impressed at how remote it was from civilization. It took us a day and sometimes two days to travel over 25 miles of rivers, lakes and numerous portages to reach the cabin on Eagle's Nest Island (formerly known as Vidich Island). This watery crossing of the Canadian border came after a grueling 55 mile ride on poorly maintained roads running from Grand Marais, Minnesota to the end of the line at the Gun Flint Trail. 

Art with his sons, Paul & Charles &
his father at Eagle's Nest Island

I was fascinated by the ease with which we could pass across the Canadian border in the middle of the wilderness without any border guards, border crossings or any sign of government intrusion into this vast wilderness.  While we might be free of government oversight, we were totally on our own. In an emergency we were days away from being rescued since these were the days before cell phones.  Only the smoke signals of the Ojibwe and Chippewa tribes could be counted on for rapid communication and we certainly were not up on that communication strategy.

Fishing tales of catching giant fish and seeing all kinds of wildlife were routine activities everyday. We still have photos of fish my father caught that were nearly as long as my younger brother Paul was tall (see photo).  Living in Quetico was like living in Siberia but my father loved it and, as a former Marine, relished the freedom that came with survival off the land.  

Art on his first trip to Quetico before his cabin was built

My brothers and I went on long canoe trips without our parents before we were teenagers. We learned to live on our own in the midst of this vast wilderness. We became experts at avoiding bears, choosing campsites which would protect us from carnivorous animals, running rock strewn rapids in our aluminum canoe and living off the land when our supplies ran dry.  We suspected that our parents really would have been as happy if we didn't come back as if we did.  They were the type that believed in baptism by fire.

The nearly completed log cabin Frank Powell built

My father's sense of triumph over the nuclear arms race came to a screeching halt one day when he saw American military planes flying right over Trafalgar Bay.  According to his student Laurin Raiken, this upset Art Vidich and the result was he eventually became disenchanted with Quetico as his solution to the arms race. "There is no place to escape" are the words Raiken recalls Vidich uttering many years later after he had sold the cabin on Eagle's Nest Island to a man from Chicago.