Inclusion can be good and necessary. But sometimes people like to spend time with people like themselves.
Such is the reasoning behind a burgeoning effort by the Twin Cities group Wilderness Inquiry (WI) to sponsor what it calls affinity trips into the outdoors — meaning, in today's example, a recent excursion into the boundary waters by a group whose members are either deaf or hard of hearing.
During the adventure on a lake off the Gunflint Trail, none of the five paddlers, ages 21 to 64, heard a loon's lonesome tremolo or the slap of a beaver's tail against the mirror-like surface of a pristine lake.
