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Wildfire shut the entire Boundary Waters at peak season. One Ely outfitter, spending his own savings to stay open, is giving back sixty thousand dollars he could keep.
Don't withhold good from those to whom it is due, when it is in the power of your hand to do it. Don't say to your neighbor, "Go … tomorrow I will give it to you," when you have it by you.
Proverbs 3:27-28
On July 6, lightning ignited fires in the forests around Ely, Minnesota. Eight days later the U.S. Forest Service did something it had done only twice before and closed the entire Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, the third full closure in its history and the longest on record. It landed in the first half of July, the stretch when the outfitters who send canoes into that water earn most of a year's income.
Jason Zabokrtsky runs Ely Outfitting Company, and the closure erased his season in an afternoon. He has canceled 128 trips, more than 500 people. He has 17 employees and, by his own count, work for two. To keep the company breathing he has begun moving money from his personal savings into the business as a loan.
Then he did the thing arithmetic cannot explain.
He is refunding roughly $60,000 in cancellation fees he was within his rights to keep. It is money he could have held at the exact moment he most needs it, released instead to the people whose trips the fire took.
Paul once pointed to a handful of churches whose giving made no financial sense.
2 Corinthians 8:2-32how that in much proof of affliction the abundance of their joy and their deep poverty abounded to the riches of their liberality.3For according to their power, I testify, yes and beyond their power, they gave of their own accord,
They gave from the bottom of their own poverty, and he treats it as the highest thing he can say about them. Zabokrtsky is not being repaid for his version of it. The financial reality, in his own words, is harsh.
A partial reopening on July 30 restored about a third of the wilderness, which is not the same as restoring a summer, and the town's whole income still hangs on water no one can control.
What he could keep, he gave away while going under. Integrity, it seems, does not wait for a good year.