A band of local rebels target their alcohol-fueled rage at a Chicago family one dark and endless night in the Boundary Waters. Was it a solitary instance of malicious harassment, or an opening salvo triggering a cultural war in the wilderness?

August 7, 2007, Ely, Minnesota—Jay Olson and a couple of local buddies loaded themselves, several gallons of gasoline, a Glock 36 handgun, an AK 47 assault rifle, an arsenal of fireworks, and not as much beer as you might expect into one modest motorboat. Setting into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, Olson and his band of rebels piloted their Alumacraft through 12 miles of glacial lake chains to arrive safely on pristine Basswood Lake where, much to the chagrin of the canoeists camped along the shoreline, they began launching fireworks into the night sky.
“I just thought they were rowdy fishermen,” says 64-year-old Emmerich Koller, who was in for a surprising night of harassment. “In retrospect, they were looking for a fight.”
Emmerich, a retired schoolteacher from Chicago, was camped along the shore with his adult daughter, Marina, 26, and his 11-year-old son, Andrew. When he asked the rebels to be quiet, they rounded on the Kollers, threatening Marina with graphic rape, mocking Emmerich’s Hungarian accent, and yelling, “Go home, enox,” (local slang for “environmentally obnoxious”), but eventually motoring off.
Elsewhere on the water, families scrambled for shelter behind their shoreline campsites, sure that the firearms discharging from Olson’s boat were aimed at, and not over, their heads. By 11 p.m., the rebels grew bored and motored back to the Koller’s campsite for more action. “This is when I knew we must hide,” said Emmerich.

Accessible Wilderness
About 2.5 million years ago, two-mile-thick glaciers tore into Precambrian granite to create the Escheresque gashes that make up today’s Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness—1,200-plus lakes each concealing ancient, inverse crags beneath the iron-soaked water. Fifty miles of boreal forest, glacial lake chains, and impassable tamarack bogs separate Ely from the north side of Lake Superior. Nine months a year, protected by harsh winters and frozen beauty, the citizens of Ely drift alone in a cultural eddy.
This is a harsh land sheltering an insular society. The Slovene settlers who immigrated to work in its iron ore mines left a millennium of cultural oppression and reeducation in a country that hadn’t seen independence since the Roman Empire marched in and was finally able, after 200 unsuccessful years, to quell this rowdy tribe. This is a culture that has always known external power—be it Austro-Hungary, the Soviet Empire, Saint Paul, Minnesota, or the U.S. Forest Service. And just as Slovenia emerged—language and culture intact—after the genocidal Yugoslavian aftermath, the Elyites have no problem doing things their own way. So when, every summer, the chicness of solitude pulls 200,000 paddlers, mostly from urban areas, to transform this town of 3,700 into the staging ground for the most popular plot of designated Wilderness in the North America, there’s bound to be some conflict.

Float Plan
The shadows were already growing long at Fall Lake Landing as 19-year-old Casey Fenske, Zach Barton, 19, and Travis Erzar, 20, launched their 14-foot Alumacraft and motored northward. The 12-mile trip to Basswood is one of the few waterways where you can forgo the tedious repetition of the J-stroke in favor of a 25-horsepower outboard.
The aluminum hull came to rest at the northwestern edge of Fall Lake, and the three friends engaged a portage wheel from either gunwale and pushed the now-amphibious craft and its payload (a 22-caliber rifle and a Schmidt-brand beer cooler containing a buffet of Bud Light, Coors Light, and Pabst Blue Ribbon) across a laughably easy 80-rod portage to Basswood Lake.
Prior to 1993, the portage up to Basswood was a commercialized truck ride across nearby Four Mile Portage. But trucks have no place in the progressive, 21st-century ideal of Wilderness.
“The [Boundary Waters Canoe Area] Wilderness Act really changed our whole way of life,” says 67-year-old resident Margaret Sweet, “Basswood Lake used to be dotted with cabins and resorts.”
Sixty years ago, while these rustic resorts were cropping up everywhere along this shoreline, visitors took Disneyland-style duck boat tours into the fast-developing wilderness. Resort goers accessed remote getaways via Ely’s armada of floatplanes until the 1951 ban. About the same time, privately operated truck portages opened to shuttle boaters on an overland shortcut up to Basswood. Prior to the 1960s, the lake was abuzz with motorized fishing boats. Cabins and resorts were integral to the character of the shoreline.
“The last of the iron mines closed in 1967,” says Sweet, “It was at that point that the town had to make a decision to focus on tourism or die.”
With the end of logging in 1978 (thanks to the BWCA Wilderness Act), the town completed its dependence shift from resource harvesting to resource exhibition.
And with bans or restrictions on snowmobiles, float planes, duck boats, truck portages and, of course, motorboats, the town reluctantly capitalized on the only means of economic propulsion it had left: a paddle.
“The economy took a nose dive after the mines closed,” says mayor Chuck Novak. “The population declined 60 percent.”

911 Calls
Fenske & Co. pushed their way up to slender Newton Lake where he navigated through the twilight between miles of rocky islands buttressing rocky shore. At the north end of Newton, the three friends again disembarked, portaged, and emerged onto Basswood’s Pipestone Bay where they were greeted, with more granite, pine, water, and endless constructed Wilderness.   
Fenske gripped the throttle and navigated north through the sliver of water that separates Pipestone and Jackfish Bays, a few hundred yards from the imaginary line that marks the beginning of the demotorized zone. Drifting in the dry, late-summer air, Fenske killed the motor. The three waited, thinking of giving up on Olson’s crew who they had motored up to meet. Then they saw a flash against a sky and a light reflected in the black waters of Basswood Lake: fireworks. Fenske took this as a good indicator that his friends were close.
The two boats met up at the Y that connects Pipestone and Jackfish Bays with the rest of the lake. Olson’s two passengers were 37-year-old Barney Lakner and an unnamed, 16-year-old minor, dubbed “MU” in the criminal complaint. The three had been on quite a jaunt before they met the Fenske crew. They’d motored to Canada and back, vandalized a water level gauging station, and made their first round of verbal assaults on a group of enox canoeists.
“I made the mistake of being the one to say something, anything, that would provoke them,” recalls Emmerich Koller. About 9:30 p.m, Emmerich, Marina, and Andrew were tucked into their sleeping bags and zipped inside their tent on a shoreline campsite at the south end of the non-motorized section of Basswood Lake. Unfortunately, this campsite also happened to be located near the small island where the rowdy rebels were defacing the gauging station.
“The noise carried so well at night,” says Emmerich, “and we couldn’t sleep, so I finally got out of the tent and shined the flashlight on them and immediately they started cursing and cussing.”
Emmerich, who spent a career teaching teenagers, responded by reprimanding the rebels’ inappropriate language. This did not have the desired pacifying effect.
The rebels called the Hungarian-born Emmerich a communist and told him to get off their land. Several times they raised their engine prop from the water and revved the motor in a show of obnoxious domination. Emmerich pleaded that the rebels were scaring his children. They responded by shooting a firework over the Kollers’ heads.
“How do you like that?” they taunted.
Thankfully, Olson, Lakner, and MU eventually packed back into their Alumacraft and left, firing their weapons with reckless abandon as they motored south.
As the two motorboats floated together at the Y, the group later known as “The Ely Six” shared neighborly beers and took turns shooting each others’ guns. Olson, Lakner, and MU mentioned the confrontation at the Kollers’ campsite.
“It was like they [Olson, Lakner, and MU] had something against him,” said Erzar in his original statement to investigators. After some discussion, The Ely Six decided to go up and torment the campers.
“I heard two motors coming,” recalls Emmerich. “I grabbed my duffel bag, and we ran in our pajamas toward the latrine. But it occurred to me that this wasn’t a good idea, because if we could find our way to the latrine, so could they. The bushes were very thick, and we pushed into them maybe 10, 15 yards. Three guys [Olson, Lakner, and MU] came to shore. We hunkered down. They went through our stuff, telling us to come out. Telling us they’re going to …” The Rebels made threats of violent rape, articulated in anatomically vulgar detail. “… They say they will kill us. They tell us if we come out and make them S’mores, they won’t kill us. They were really crazy. That was the scary part. If they’re out of their minds, there’s no reasoning with them.”
Eventually, Olson, Lakner, and MU got back in their motorboat, rejoined the Fenske crew, who had waited on the water, and again headed south. Emmerich, Marina, and Andrew, convinced the seeming departure was a trap to entice them from the cover of the bush, stayed hunkered and hidden. After a quarter of an hour, Emmerich took a chance: he retrieved his duffel bag and powered up his cellphone, all the while fearful that the backlit screen would easily betray their hiding place if the rebels were still lurking nearby.
The first 911 call reached a skeptical operator, but after several disconnected calls because of spotty coverage in the Wilderness, Emmerich got the message through. By this time they were convinced the rebels were gone for good. They told the Forest Service not to bother coming to help. As the evening wore on, however, a geographic pattern of 911 calls from threatened or disturbed campers developed. The calls easily pointed law enforcement to intercept and arrest The Ely Six at Fall Lake landing, about five miles north of town.

Land Use?
You won’t catch many locals referring to Olson, Fenske, and the rest of the crew as ‘The Ely Six.’ Elyites are quick to distance their community from the Basswood Lake incident. 
“These were typical teenage boys running amuck at night,” says Casey’s mother, Ruthanne Fenske, “And while the town has shown an outpouring of love and support for these kids, no one supports what they did.”
Elyites are also quick to say that this incident has nothing to do with the land-use issues of the past. “This was just a bunch of very foolish people who made some very bad choices,” says Nancy McReady, President of the local pro-motor group Conservationists with Common Sense. “This incident shouldn’t reflect on the community; it’s not something anyone has endorsed or condoned at all.”
But as members of at least five different families, some well established in the community, Olson, Lakner, Barton, Erzar, Fenske, and MU raise questions about the cultural relevance of their actions.
Paddlers are referred to colloquially as “enox” and “swampies” (for their dung-colored, quick-dry, button-down shirts, wide-brimmed hats, and zip-off pants). In a culture that has its own anti-outsider jargon, is riding up to Basswood to go pick on a few swampies an act that is, although isolated, still cultural? Is it a stretch to imagine that the phrase, “get off our land,” has something to do with land use?
Fur, timber, and iron ore were the original exports here. Canoe country outfitting is the new commodity. Tourism brings money to this outsourced ore-mining economy, but, with a median household income of less than $28,000, not that much. Tourists contribute by purchasing embroidered moose pillows, pinecone bed lamps, and singing-loon clocks. And these objects in turn put a pastoral, Caribou Coffee-styled vision of Wilderness into the living rooms and lobbying sentiments of voters who decide that it’s important to designate wild lands free from motors or truck portage access.
To the seasonal visitor, The Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is art for art’s sake. Its existence, if not its presence, is comforting. It is the antithesis to the faux main street, suburban-sprawl strip mall. Wilderness is the cure for the urban loft district idling empty in the wake of a by-gone housing boom. It brings relief from the agonizing traffic jam, the $5 iced vente mocha, and the $12 wifi hotspot. The wild is the cure for our crazy civilization. It is our escape. It is the dog Buck in search of his roots and the boy Alexander Supertramp in flight from his. And in that way, Wilderness is no different from wild rebellion. Wilderness is the angst-ridden teenager pulling the prop from the water and revving the engine till it spews a cocktail of burnt oil and spent gas.
The next morning, Emmerich squinted into the sky and saw something that would have been commonplace 60 years ago but seemed out-of-place in the progressive, 21st-century ideal of Wilderness: a float plane circling, and then landing. After making their statements to the Forest Service, the Kollers decided to finish their canoe trip. They paddled a couple of miles farther north and spent the rest of their vacation on a secluded island, just camping out. “We tried fishing,” says Emmerich. “We didn’t catch anything. We swam. We read books. It was beautiful.”