ELY – We met at a golf course.

Bill Rom, 80, who grew up in this town on the edge of what is now the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, chose the location. The public course sits at the top of the hill leading out of town, just a few blocks from the home Sigurd Olson lived in for most of his adult life. Rom had an 8 a.m. tee time the morning we met. He usually walks the nine holes of the course in about two hours, he said, and indeed, there he was at the clubhouse at 10 a.m. sharp on a morning in late August. After a brief conversation, we went into the clubhouse to pore over some maps of the Quetico-Superior canoe country wilderness.

Rom’s been in the news a fair amount recently. The Star Tribune, the state’s largest newspaper, recently ran a story with the following headline: “This man says he’s visited every lake in the Boundary Waters reachable by portage. It took six decades.”