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To preserve backcountry sites when canoeing, follow Leave No Trace principles. Don't know them? Visit www.lnt.org. Better yet, get hands-on practice during one of AMC's two-day Leave No Trace courses. See www.outdoors.org/education/lnt for information.

For someone with so much to say, Alex Wilson doesn't say much. As co-author of most of AMC's Quiet Water guides, Wilson has written thousands of words about New England's calmest lakes, rivers, and ponds. As founder of BuildingGreen, Inc., he's written many thousands more about earth-friendly construction.

But this afternoon, one hour up the Androscoggin River under clearing skies, the words are few. Barely audible. Spoken into late-summer wind and sun and grassy riverbanks, where great blue heron patiently stilt around in the shallows. Still waters run deep, they seem to say, with pickerel especially.

Alex, bearded and wearing a corduroy button-down patterned with loons, and his wife and business partner, Jerelyn, share a canoe, Jerelyn up front, Alex at the stern. They've been paddling this way for at least 25 years. At Alex's feet sits Roxy, their golden retriever, who, Alex says, "loves to sleep in a tent and won't chase wildlife." The couple is in their 50s now, and, with their kids grown and the earth warming, they're working harder than ever.

Along for the ride, my friend Gabrielle and I paddle solo kayaks that we've packed with gear and food for a three-day introduction to quiet water camping, graciously hosted by the Wilsons. For a while, we trail Alex and Jerelyn, detouring through a hushed grassy marsh where we momentarily run aground.

I don't mind being stuck. I'd spent the last week zipping around preparing for the trip, the extra planning an unavoidable amplification of life's everyday hum and buzz, and now—not that I'd noticed, at least not yet—there's nothing to do but enjoy the river. Right?

I dig in and rush to catch up with the Wilsons.

"Have you been here before?"

"What's your favorite spot?"

"Why Quiet Water?"

Looking away to the woods, Alex and Jerelyn answer in turn, a few reluctant words that I can't quite make out. But I'm starting to close in now, on their far side, having left the shore in order to hear them better. Slowly, they lift their paddles out of the river. Alex passes the binoculars to Jerelyn, gesturing toward a shadow or flick and flitter.

"Normally, we paddle close to shore," he says.

"Sometimes we'll see a mink."

"If," says Jerelyn, her green eyes light, "we're quiet."

This time, having finally caught up, I hear every word.

"Do not speak unless you can improve upon the silence," the saying goes, and, as anyone who's been there knows, once you leave the road behind, the silence of the Androscoggin as you slip east toward New Hampshire's Lake Umbagog Wildlife Refuge is pretty near perfect. The river is flat and wide, and each time a fish jumps, the water bubbles like champagne. Overhead, a burst of swallows scatters like confetti thrown into the wind. The wind? Well, yes. As we near the lake, the river opens up, and the wind, you could say it's screaming.

At more than 12 square miles, Umbagog (it's pronounced um-BAY-gog) is among the bigger lakes listed in Quiet Water: New Hampshire and Vermont. "Potentially dangerous winds and waves can come up very quickly on this large lake, making open boat paddling hazardous," Wilson writes. Recalling that Umbagog means "shallow water" in Abenaki, I call out to Gabrielle that the lake's average depth is only 15 feet. I learned this in Wilson's book.

Right now, we could hop out and stand, knee deep in the waves. Look, our campsite is mere yards away. I yell into the wind, "Just around this point!"

And it is, with Alex and Jerelyn already there, unloading their canoe, Roxy snuffling in nooks and crannies. Number 27, one of 30 wilderness sites around the lake, Molls Rock has two picnic tables set on a grassy spot above the point. There are several decent tent sites from which to choose, two pit toilets offsides, a cobbled beach, and fragrant, deep woods all around. We unpack food and gear, set up tents. Alex strings a drying line. The wind drops, and I'm excited to hear the story about the Wilsons' first trip here, to this very same campsite 19 years ago, with their two daughters, 2 and 5 at the time. Jerelyn, however, is going to take a nap. Alex, it appears, is already sleeping.

I think about dinner, making a fire, my husband, my kids, calling my kids, my iPhone, left, receptionless, on the front seat of my car. But it's a flat spot under a small birch that's calling right now. And so, I set up my chair and sit, watching the clouds cowspotting the hillside on the far shore, until I, too, fall asleep.

At some point, Alex appears and starts shaving small pieces of wood into kindling. Jerelyn and Gabrielle join us, and we share some wine, and then, fire burning, toast and devour six of Jerelyn's homemade chicken and pesto calzones. We put on warm hats, and, as a crescent moon rises, we talk. About paddling and passive houses, gardening, global warming, the $50,000 award Alex has just won for his pioneering work in sustainability, losing our parents, our kids. Oh, it was quite a trip, we finally hear. Their younger daughter, Frances, she's a junior in college now, had a high fever. It was pouring rain, and Alex was scheduled to paddle some 40-odd miles of shoreline for the first Quiet Water guide. Did you consider turning back? "Oh, sure," says Jerelyn, "I remember holding Frances tight to my chest.... We're going into the wilderness, I remember thinking. We could wait it out anywhere, why not here?"

We cover 10 miles the next day. We see sandpipers, a hummingbird, loons and eagles, the shadow of a moose, the wake of an otter, kingfishers. Around rocky points at Glasby Cove, Spillman Cove, and Pine Point, over beds of freshwater mussels, we paddle, the water emerald green and mirror still—for now. At the headwaters of the Rapid River, we stop for lunch. Bare feet warm in the sun, we share tuna fish on crackers. Then, after sitting quietly for a while, Jerelyn and Alex take another nap.

I'm happy to follow their lead.

Just that morning, while doing nothing under the birch on the point, I caught a glimpse of something bright. In the quiet, there it was, just as Jerelyn and Alex had said, a mink. It stared at us for a long time, then dove, curling around the rocks, its feet flashing white. When Alex called to it, kissing the back of his hand, the mink cocked its perfect little head as if to say, what? And then, with an obsidian wink, it was gone.

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