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High winds and storms kept us off the water last weekend in the Boundary Waters. But I still count the long weekend as a huge success because we recovered something old and found something new.

First to the old.

When someone asked me recently to name a teacher who had an influence on my life. Orv Gilmore was among the first I recalled. He was one of a team who taught a cultural history class for seniors at Albert Lea High School in 1958-59 — a survey of world history that included the art, literature and music of the periods we studied. The lifelong interests that course inspired have enriched my life immeasurably.

Orv Gilmore’s name came up last weekend during a visit with Dan and Irene Hellie at their cabin on the Gunflint Trail in northeastern Minnesota. Dan, a distant cousin who also had Orv as a teacher, mentioned that Orv was a summer visitor on the Gunflint.

At the mention of his name, I felt a pang of regret; I had failed to respond to a questionnaire sent several years ago in connection with an invitation to a reunion of former students. We weren’t able to attend the reunion and I set aside the questionnaire intending to respond ... someday. He wanted an essay. Just like old times.

As soon as we returned this week, I found Orv on the Internet — an Orville Gilmore described in a University of Arizona Cooperative Extension, Yavapai County, Backyard Gardener column as a veteran master gardener. His Cottonwood phone number was listed. Orv, it turns out, had not given up on teaching in retirement. After leaving ALHS, he taught at Lakewood Community College in White Bear Lake, Minn., retiring in 1980. He lived year-round in a cabin on Gunflint Lake until 1992 when he moved to Cottonwood.

So I was able to finish some old business by telling Orv, 87, how much his teaching has meant to me and reminisce with him about the New Year’s Eve when he played Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake on his outdoor speakers so my girlfriend and I could skate to music on Fountain Lake.

As to the new, because we couldn’t paddle, we laced up our hiking boots and followed a trail through the area that burned last year to Magnetic Rock, a 30-foot-high monolith that is all the more striking because the forest that surrounded it burned.

We approached through the charred trunks of pine and birch, across exposed bedrock and through the bright green of new growth, the promise that the 90,000-plus acres that burned on both sides of the border is recovering. It was a rare opportunity to witness the rocky ribs of the terrain that will be hidden again as the forest regenerates.

Our soggy hikes through young pines, some almost 3 feet tall, and wild flowers including bright orange wood lilies, were a treat we wouldn’t have had if not for the wind that might otherwise have been the bane of a canoe outing. And just maybe we wouldn’t have had the cabin time when talk of old times brought up a bit of unfinished business.