Puget Sound and the Acorn Motel

Day 11, July 10th
Distance travelled, about 200kms

The river woke us early so we were on the road before ten.  We took the opportunity to stop at Deception Falls, a wonderful woodland near the site where the last spike was hammered into the great northern railway we had followed from Michigan.

James Hill, the railway entrepreneur was there that night, a freezing, stormy January in 1893, but he asked one of the labourers to do the deed, and then everyone reposed for the photograph the next morning.

Deception Falls was a magical ecosystem of cedar and pine, kept lush and cool by the river roaring through the woodland.  We saw what is probably the last white pine in Washington State, all the others had been decimated by a virus imported from France.

We drove through the Cascades for about an hour and as we went west the temperature dropped significantly and it got misty and cool.  We stopped at one of the hundreds of coffee shacks on the side of the road and had our first lattes since Halifax.  We needed it.  We were getting closer to civilization and the roads were busier.  The houses were bigger.  The gates were more abundant.  Everything we hate about America was becoming the norm.

Around lunchtime we said goodbye to Route 2, our beloved highway that had brought us so far west and through so many beautiful places.  Instead of hopping onto the 5, we decided to take the 9, which runs alongside and which we thought would be more bucolic.

Bad idea.  It brought us through the bedroom communities for Seattle.  Layer upon layer of gated communities, lake-side condos, golf clubs, marinas, spas...... then suddenly we were in rural Washington again for a few miles.  The gates disappeared and so did the Mercedes.

A couple of miles later they re-emerged.

What are these people afraid of, we wondered. That they have to lock themselves.

We finally got to Everett, the Puget Sound was shrouded in mist, so our first glimpse of the Pacific was a bit of a bust.  We travelled over to Whibdey Island and suddenly, there it was!  The San Juan Islands lay curled up like furry caterpillars in the sun.

We drove to the ferry terminal at Anacortes and just missed the ferry to Vancouver Island.  We traveled down Whibdey Island to the village of Coupeville, deemed 'cute' by the lady at the terminal.

It was cute alright.  A hand me down version of Nantucket swarming with Seattle seniors on a day out.

We backtracked to Oak Harbour, the main town on the island and found Garry in the Acorn Motel, who gave us a great room with a power shower and a 42" tv screen for 60 bucks.  I got cleaned up and Himself watched deadliest catch and we enjoyed sleeping in a bed for the first time in a week.  And we would get to Bowen looking relatively human.

First half of the trip done.

A few days on Bowen, and then we have to drive ALL THE WAY BACK TO HALIFAX.

From the Rockies to the Cascades

Day 10, July 9th
Distance travelled, 942kms
Wildlife..... nope

Next morning we woke to the birds singing the morning into being again, and decided that instead of picking our way through Washington State, we would make a push to the Cascades.  We had a crazy idea that we could get to Puget Sound and then over to Vancouver Island for a day before we got to our Pacific Coast destination of Bowen Island.

First, we stopped in Libby, Montana, a deceptively beautiful town at the edge of the Rockies.   I say deceptive, because although Libby is a really beautiful town, one I would consider living in, it was the site of a corporate environmental outrage in recent years.  The townsfolk mostly worked in an asbestos mine, and consequently the whole town was poisoned and had over 12,000 deaths from cancer before an outraged mine worker single-handedly forced the US government to act to clean up the town.

We stopped nonetheless.  A bit of solidarity with the townspeople, who were wonderfully friendly and hospitable.  We had breakfast in the Libby Cafe.  The ladies working there fed us with huckleberry flapjacks and coffee while I got caught up on bills and emails and all kinds of internet-related activity.

Then we drove out of the Rockies and down into the Idaho panhandle.  It was mixed deciduous and conifer forest with long shady driveways leading to secluded log cabins.  I wondered whether I would meet Viggo Mortensen, my all time favourite crush, who has a cabin in Idaho.

No luck.  My marriage safe for another while!

Then we came out of the forest and drove through farmland and passed into eastern Washington over a narrow bridge on a gorge, which had proved the last barrier to the westward push of people in the 1800s.

Then, suddenly, we were on prairie again.  Vast fields of wheat stretched goldern as far as we could see.  Only a thin line of blue on the western horizon convinced us we hadn't gotten turned around again in some strange accident of navigation.

By mid-afternoon, it was roasting.  We stopped at the Rooster Restaurant in Reardon for jalapeno burgers and then sweated through another two hours of flat prairie and 38 degree heat.

At Farmer, we stopped for gas.  It was stifling.  The only shade in the gas station was behind the ice cabinet on the forecourt.  Two travellers and their dog were tucked in there sheltering from the swelter.  She was from Quebec and had lived in Belfast.  He was from Wisconsin and they had been hopping freight trains to try to get to BC for the cherry harvest.

Their sign said Wenatchee, which was where we were headed, but we had no room for them unfortunately, so we had to leave them behind.

For another hour, the landscape changed again, into that almost desert landscape that stretches from the Okanagan Valley in BC right down to Mexico.  High ridges, covered in dwarf pines zig-zagged away from us to the north and south.  Up, up, up we went through a canyon to a high peak, and then down again through a series of switchbacks until we came out into the baking heat of the Columbia Valley wine district.

Cherry, apple, and orange groves stretched back from the road, and higher up in the hills, lines of vines stood to attention in the setting sun.  We passed a lake, surrounded by gated McMansions, the first we had seen on this trip.  We started seeing lots of Hispanic people, mostly driving beautiful classic Mustangs and pick up trucks.

Wenatchee was all hustle and bustle and towers of fruit boxes in loading bays, so we moved on through Leavensport, a tacky village all done up like a Bavarian alpine village, and finally made it to the cool, lushness of the Cascades. 

We found a state national park by the river and pitched tent in a swarm of hungry mosquitoes.  Once we built a fire and put our jeans on it wasn't too bad, so we drank a nice Columbia Valley red and roasted weiners and commented on the sheer diversity of this beautiful state.  I went to bed and listened to the river roar and wondered if we would see a vampire, so reminiscent of Forks was the woodland in which we were sited.

150 miles to the Pacific.

Birthday at Lake Koocanusa

Day 9, July 8th
Distance travelled, 150 miles
Wildlife spotted, nothing, but learned how to bear tap.

I awoke on my 42nd birthday to find that Himself had gotten cold in the night and stolen all the extra blankets and most of our Coleman double sleeping bag.

And most of the air mattress.

This year, I thought, this year I will not stand for this shit anymore.

Just then the sun hoisted itself over the mountain and the temperature rose ten degrees, so I left him to swelter and got up and made myself some coffee and watched the sunlight dance among the tall pines shading our campsite.

A couple from Saskatchewan had pulled in to the site next door the previous evening.  We checked out our licence plates and made friendly Canadian signals to each other.  On the road, everyone does that.  It's a human equivalent of the butt-sniffing dogs engage in, I think.

Turned out the Saskatchewanians were moving to Halifax soon for a year.  I gave them my business card.  Having moved to the city seven years ago with a bag and no contacts, I pretty much know what they're in for.  It's hard to fly into a town blind.

In penance for the blanket-robbing Himself cooked me birthday bacon and eggs and then we packed up ane hit the road west again.

At Whitefish, we pulled into an arts festival underway in the town park.  I took advantage of the day that was in it to buy two prints by Missoula photographer, Jane Goffe, who had a stall at the show.  Both photographs depict quiet moments in rural Montana and will help me remember the trip for many years to come.

Whitefish was a nice town.  Really really nice.  If I had to live in the US, I think I would settle here.

We bought some lemonade from the Whitefish Skate Club stall and got back into the baking car.  It was already 33 degrees, and it wasn't even lunchtime.

After a spell on Hwy 2, we turned off at MT37 and headed down into the Yaak Valley, a place made famous by the books of Rick Bass.  The road took us along Lake Koocanusa, created by the damming of the Kootenai river.  The lake stretches ninety miles, 40 of them in Canada, and the name comes from KOOtenai, CANada, USA.  About ten miles down, a small bridge led over the lake.  We got out of the car.  It was too hot to breath.  If we went over the bridge we would be three hours or more in the heat.  If we stayed on the MT37, we could be at the KooCanUsa Marina and Campsite in forty minutes.

I had travelled all this way to see the Yaak Valley.

It was just too hot.

We headed her for the marina.

The owner, Randy, a man who had not cut his hair since 1974 (by my reckoning) checked us in and delivered a huge pile of firewood to our campsite for five bucks.  We wondered whether we would even need it.  We took a shower in the shower block.  It was such an amazing feeling to be clean after three days of baby wipe hygiene in the mountains.  I brushed and brushed and brushed my hair with the shampoo in it, thenwith the conditioner in it, then when I got out of the shower and finally it was tangle-free.  (Prairie winds, while exotic, romantic and mysterious, are death to thick, porous hair follicles like mine).

Marina at Lake Koocanusa

We sat under some trees and thought about how hot it was and waited for the sun to go down.

An hour passed.

That friggin' sun has not moved one inch, I said.

Yup.

I gave up and lay down in the tent until I heard Himself walking around outside and reckoned the temperature had dropped enough to be mobile.

We mooched over to the marina and had Montana steaks with tots and salad and drank Budweiser so cold the bottles sweated and finally it was cool enough to sit on the deck and watch the swallows skim the water for flies and dodge the boats and logs in the water without flinching.

We met a local boy, Dan, who was studying Irish by watching TG4 on YouTube.

He wanted to practice his vocabulary.

We invited him over to our campfire and gave him the beer we had bought in Quebec that was too strong for us and he pronounced it good and told us all about himself.

He was a mechanic.  We had known that as soon as we met him because his fingernails were all short and broken, with grease underneath.

He was having difficulty with 'agam, agat, aige, aici, etc.  Could I help?  I reached into the depths of my memory and tried to help him out.

He was building a hydrogen engine for his boat.  He went into great detail about this and I tuned out as I do when all things mechanical are being discussed.

He was wondering about how to pronounce the seasons in Irish.  Could I help him out?

He kept bees and made his own mead.  He had successfully blended a raspberry mead and was just about to top it off when his neighbour chased a cougar through his yard with a shotgun and blew the top off the jar.

He had come home and spent four hours cleaning raspberry mead off his house.

What was it about the druids in Ireland, how long did they have to study?  I amazed myself by pulling that information out of somewhere.  Truly the brain is an amazing organ.

Sometimes he and his brother went and found a black bear engrossed in a huckleberry patch or something, and crept up behind and grabbed its ass.

You gotta give it a good shake.  Then you just watch that bear steak up a tree as fast as it can!

The other extreme sport in the region was moose-tipping.

After a while, when the stars came out, Dan said he had to go back to his boat because he was going fishing for some eel-like creature that tasted like lobster.

Himself stared mournfully at his receding back.

I'd have liked to go fishing, he said.  But he was too polite to ask.

Maybe some day we'll hear of a wonder-kind from Libby, Montana who has solved our energy crisis.  Or of an enormous explosion on the Koocanusa Lake.

Either way, it was a treasure to meet Dan the Irish scholar on my birthday.

Glacier National Park

Day 8, July 7th
Distance travelled, not much
Wildlife spotted - a mountain goat.


Our first time waking up and not having to break camp.  We woke up early to the arrival of an enormous truck emptying the bear-proof garbage can near our site.  It is so difficult to open that bin, it must be a testament to the dexterity of the bears in the area.  You have to slide your hand into a narrow opening and push a metal plate down and then lift the whole lid with the back of your hand high enough to get a second hand under it and then up.

We had a leisurely breakfast and people spotted.  It was a national park, so we were fairly close to other sites.  Just down the road from us, an elderly couple sat in the biggest coach RV I have ever seen.  Occasionally, an elderly man wearing cashmere sweatpants would walk up to the garbage can and put one thing in it.  We never saw the woman.  As far as I could see, they never left the RV apart from that. 

I guess money doesn't buy you anything but somewhere nice to sit by yourself.  If you're that kind of person.

Road to Logan Pass.

Later we drove up to Logan Pass on the Rising to the Sun Road.  It meandered along the river and then up through a series of switchbacks past Belton, Oberlin, and countless other peaks, layered one after another like the crest of an ice dragon, all blue and white and grey.

At Logan Pass, there were the usual multitudes of buses, cars, bikes and bicycles that congregate at these sites. We took a few moments to walk in the snow and cool our feet in it before leaving to find a little more solitude back down in the park.

in the afternoon we hiked up to Avalanche Lake.  Of course I was all nervous at first.  It being America, where people sue each other for not warning them that coffee is hot, there were signs everywhere screaming, 'danger - bears'.  But as we passed family groups with children running around nonchalantly I began to feel like a bit of a fool and calmed down.

The hike took us through a cool, green and brown cedar wood.  The trees were massive.  Each one had a unique bark.  We passed one that had been struck by lightening that had hollowed it out and blackened the remaining shell completely.  Even though the day waws very hot, when the trail dipped towards Avalanche Creek the temperature dropped so much it was chilly. 

When we finally got to the lake, it was a picture perfect glacial scene.  The lake glowed green blue under the sun.  At the northern end, four waterfalls thundered down from the avalanche, feeding the lake with ice cold water from the summit.  We sat on a rock and I dipped my feet in the water for the thirty seconds or so it took for them to grow numb.  A young deer hovered near us in the woods, deciding whether or not to draw near.

Avalanche Lake, Glacier National Park

It is heartbreaking to think that by 2020, these glaciers will have disappeared forever and then who knows what wil happen to this eco-system, with its dependence on ice cold water and its fragility in a too-dry environment.  On a selfish level, I am glad that we got to spend that afternoon just sitting there, pulling the heat and coolness and sky and mountains and water into my soul to nourish its eco-system for another year in the world of work and mortgages and silly worries about ridiculous things.

Finally we left, and walked back down through the cedar wood to the campsite to cook supper and sit and watch the endless dusk of the moutnains until finally it was dark and the first star emerged in the chill air.

Coming to a stop - Glacier National Park, Montana

Day 7, 6^th July

Distance travelled, not much

Wildlwe hife spotted, a chipmunk

Friday dawned with my first hangover in months.  I’m not used to hard liquor anymore and I had had a few vodkas to keep up with the fishermen the night before.  After a shower we decided to head straight for Glacier National Park down the road.  Camp sites are first come first served and we wanted to get a good one.

I was feeling pretty ropey so Himself drove and as we queued to get into the park, I opened my bag to get the entrance fee out.

No purse.

No GODDAMN purse.

Which means no drivers license, no credit cards, no money, no debit card, no health insurance.

We turned the car around and headed back to the Roost.

The one thing about biker bars is that the patrons are the most honest people around.  Sure enough, when I walked in the owner smiled and waggled the purse at me. 

I pulled out your licence and said, she’ll be back, he beamed.

We had a coffee on the house and chatted about this and that and then headed back into the park where the queue had thinned out considerably, but we were still able to camp near Avalanche Creek right in the middle of the park.

Surrounded by peaks, the river is so cold that the temperature drops right down as you approach its glacier-fed waters.  We are camped in a cedar forest and the air smells sublime.  Each tree is old and has its signature bark.  Finally we can relax for a day or two.

Sitting by the campfire tonight, it is difficult to comprehend the distance we have travelled in just a week.  Although it’s just a few hours by plane, the layers and textures of a roadtrip make it seem much farther.

I have achieved one of my life dreams, to drive the Hi Line to the Rockies.  And soon we will get all the way to the Rockies.

And tonight, I am being a really big girl and sleeping in Grizzly country.

Across the Hi Line to the Rockies

Day 6, 5^th July

Distance travelled, 770kms

Wildlife spotted, a mountain goat, finally!

The landscape in Eastern Montana is highland prairie.  There were no farms along most of our journey into the state, as it is Sioux Nation.  We pulled into Wolf Point late.  The town was a melee of trucks and people cruising Main St in old cars, kids hanging out the back.  The Fourth of July fireworks had already started.

I stopped at a gas station and asked a very frazzled-looking young cop about camping options.  For a tent?  You could camp in the park, I suppose, he said.  He gestured towards the sound of the fireworks.  We decided to check into the motel instead.

After a shower and some laundry, we got spruced up and went looking for a Montana steak.  Of course, everything was closed for the Fourth.  We gave up and headed for McDonalds, trudging through town in the stifling heat.  It was closed.

Catastrophe!

Then we noticed the drive thru was still open. But only for a few more minutes.  We raced back to the motel, got the car and swung through just in time.

We ate our burgers with beers in our hotel room and then Himself stretched out on the comfy bed and slept and I typed for a couple of hours and watched the fireworks from my window and listened to the cacophany.   

As I watched the moon come up over the railway tracks and listened to the haunting whistle of the incoming trains, Himself dreamed he was in a gunfight.

Next day we hit the Hi-Line.  It had felt good to sleep in a bed, and as we were a little higher up the air wasn’t so heavy.

The Hi-Line stretches from Glasgow to Shelby, across eastern Montana, and was one of the last parts of America to be settled.  And one of the first to be abandoned.  Although it wawsfirst settled in the 1870s, there were few here until the railway went through the Marias Pass to Spokane and beyond.  In the early years of the twentieth century, newspaper ads extolling the virtues of the soil here were posted by railway companies in need of populations along their lines.  Glossy brochures showing bumper crops and full of ‘scientific data’ were mailed to gullible city dwellers across the US and Europe.  They came on the train.  They leased land from the train company.  They borrowed seed money.  By the twenties the water had gone and so had most everyone else.  Driven out by the drought.  By the wind.  By the winters.  By the hailstones.  By the isolation.  This is big, empty  country.

Everywhere there is barbed wire fencing, in various stages of decay, guarding fields empty of everything except rough grass and wildflowers.  Between Indian lands, there are a few hardy souls farming cattle on the dry pasture land.  The road follows James Hill’s Northern Pacific railway.  Occasionally we would veer towards the Missouri river, ambling through the hills and then trees would provide some vertical perspective.  But mostly it was just straight lines headed west.  The railway tracks.  The power lines.  The barbed wire.  The road.  All of them a palimpsest on fainter tracks laid before us.  The buffalo.  Blackfeet and Sioux following them.  Ranchers moving cattle south to water.  Londoners struggling with a plough in their new world.

The palette is subtle.  Along the buttes the earthen tones are washed with a summer glaze of green, and in the vast pastures, pale pastel wildflowers break up the green.

Abandoned Mission, Montana

We stopped at a boarded up mission church.  Built to convert the Assinaboine and teach them western ways.  A flock of martins burst out from the eaves in protest.  The graveyard was full of plastic flowers and other markers.  I found a pair of men’s shoes lying in the grass.  Then a horde of angry biting flies descended on us and we beat a retreat to the car.  Leaving the dead lying on their hill overlooking the plains. 

A little further on in Havre, we had to drive around the back of the Holiday Plaza shopping mall to find the Wa’khpau Chu’kun buffalo jump.  This 2,000 year old kill site was where Assinaboine hunters drove a winter’s worth of buffalo over a butte and into a cleft near the Milk river every Fall.  Then they processed every part of the animal for use through communal effort. 

What must they think to see their Newgrange, their Stonehenge, almost covered over by a mall?

Soon we saw the Sweetgrass Mountains emerge to our north.  The Blackfeet believe that Rapi created them out of boulders left over when he made the Rockies. 

A few minutes out of Shelby, the road rose and turned slightly northward and we could see the salamander crest outline of the American Rockies.  At once strange and familiar, like so many American landmarks, there is very little left of the glaciers that once crowned them.  It took us another hour to draw near at Browning, centre of the Blackfeet Nation.  Then we turned south and went over the Marias Pass, the most northerly year round route through the mountains. 

We had to stop for construction, so I got out of the car and looked across the reserve to the mountains. Cabins and trailers hugged the slopes her and there, most with some horses corralled alongside.  Behind them, the peaks rose; blue and shadowy.  Without definition.

Then we got going again into a switchback and over a gorge with a blue green river running through it. 

Just past the summit of the pass, we saw a mountain goat standing on a ledge overlooking the tumultuous river.  Then it was down again into the trees and a landscape I feel has been imprinted on me by so many films since the first movie trip I took with my father to see Grizzly Adams. 

We skirted Glacier Park, our destination tomorrow, and headed for Corom and the Packer’s Roost bar.  We scored a campsite just down the road, which meant we could walk up and let our hair down a bit.  After a long drive.

The first guy we met had no shirt, no front teeth, and a bear claw hanging from a leather thong around his neck.

“Don’t just look forward for bears!” he screamed.  “Look up for mountain lions too.  They’re in the trees!”

The second guy we met was a biker from the Yaak Valley.

Owner of the Packer's Roost

The third guy we met was a Blackfoot who had spent fifteen years fishing in the Bering Sea.  Himself and Jim spent the rest of the evening talking about fishing.  As the night closed in, so so slowly, we went inside through a smoking area full of stoned bikers leaning on leather car seats with haggard women in leather trousers drinking daquaris and smoking cigars.

We stumbled home under a big moon and slept until the cold woke us up before dawn and we had to get a blanket out.

We were in the mountains at last.

Across the Prairies to the Hi-Line

Day 5, July 4^th Independence Day

Distance travelled 610kms

Wildlife spotted:  many, many stuffed animals at the Museum of the Great Prairies, Rugby, North Dakota

We had promised ourselves a lie-in and an easy day, but were woken early at Turtle River by thunder and one of my storm warning headaches, so we broke camp and packed the car to avoid getting everything soaked yet again.

Just as we sat into the car, enormous warm rain drops began to fell so we decided the best thing to do was head west.

I ‘m so used to going west now, I don’t know how I’m going to transition to going east.

Soon we were on the prairie proper.  Long, long fields of rape seed and wheat stretched out into infinity.  The odd grain elevator or house broke the monotony of the skyline.  Above us, the sky was so huge that we could see the edges of the storm chasing us.  The dark, almost black clouds trimmed in gold.  The light filtered down onto the swamp grass along the highway and gave it an odd yellowish wash.

The highway is twinned here and the speed limit is sensible, so we hummed along.  Little towns appeared every now and then and demanded that we slow down and inspect.  Even though nobody is walking around.  Petersburg.  Michigan.  Lakota.  Each one a straggle along the highway, with a Main St at right angles, and maybe a third street to create some depth.

What must it be like to grow up in one of these towns?

We stopped in Rugby.  Named after its English predecessor by a shareholder in the North Pacific Railway company that is its raison d’etre, it boasts the geographical centre of the continent of North America.

Its prosperity was marked by the fact that it had a business district, stretched along each side of the highway.

We fetched up to the Museum of the Prairies, which was started sometime in the sixties.  It was a vast collection of the bits and pieces of everyday life on a prairie farm, sorted into a fairly decent sort of logic throughout a collection of old buildings from the region.  A room full of sewing machines.  A room full of guns.  Of dolls.  Of wedding dresses.  An old caboose.  A cookhouse.  A fully rendered log home from the 1880s.  Two huge buildings full of Studebakers, and Model Ts, and Oldsmobiles.  Bearskin coats and wolfskin coats, and horse hair coats, and bison robes and rabbit furs.  A barn full of farrier tools. 

When I asked the attendant, she said everyone in the region had cleared out their attic for the museum.

I guess you don’t throw out much when you’re homesteading.

It’s a marvellous record of how a hardy, sturdy people, mostly Scandinavian, hewed a living out of this place.

The room full of animal heads was very sad though.  Bison, moose, sheep, goat, deer, wolf, bobcat..... Not many left of any of them. 

We moved on through the farmland.  Acres and acres of rape, interspersed with grains.  On and on and on it went.  The road was so straight that we commented on a bend.  The towns got a little grubbier.  Quieter.  No parades in any of them.  The odd flag.  But mostly very quiet.

Towards Minot, it began to rise a little, very slowly, but it never went down again.  We cruised through that town looking for lunch, but probably due to the day that was in it, there wasn’t much happening on the chow front.  Either that or Norwegian Americans don’t eat out.

We decided to head over to Willeston, on the Montana border.  After Minot, the tillage pretty much ended and although the country was still beautiful, it was left much to its own devices.  Wildflowers were in bloom, all yellow and blue and white, and there was an odd white tail deer around.  It was all very lush, but you could see the sandy earth underneath and now it was rising in mounds around us, getting bigger, although still soft and rounded. 

We saw an oil derrick.  Then another.  Then we were deep in oil country.  Derricks everywhere, bobbing their robotic heads up and down as if to some invisible alien overlord.  Trucks hurtling around the roads, with large oil tankers on the back.  Work camps everywhere. RVs everywhere. 

We have driven across four states in the last two days and we did not see one house being built.  Not one.  When we got to Willeston, it was crawling with people, building sites, pickup trucks, and realtors.

Just like Fort McMurray, Himself said. 

I hope they know what they’re doing.

And I’m glad I’ve seen the northern Dakotas before it’s too late.

We got the hell out of there and drove into Montana.

About ten miles in the craziness stopped again, and it was just us and the road and the sky and the land.

The trees gave up pretending they had any business in the landscape, and so did the farms.  What houses there were got smaller and less tidy, but most of them had some palominos or painteds running along a ridge.

A butte rose up and ran south, below the train track, parallel to the road on the southward side. 

A hawk soared above us looking for field mice.

We stopped on a hill and got out of the car and looked at the western horizon.  It seemed from the length of road ribboning out ahead of us that it was a long ways to go yet.

The wind danced in my hair and sang in my ear.

From the Storm to Turtle Lake

Day 4. July 3^rd

Distance travelled 540kms

Wildlife spotted:  either there is a conspiracy afoot, or  there are no critters left on this continent.

We learned our lesson from the previous night and headed straight through Duluth next day and onto Gerry’s Army and Navy Store in Grand Rapids Minnesota.  Along the way we noticed some trees were down.

Ooh, yah, said Sue as she showed us the tarpaulin section of the store.  Down by the guns.  Big storm here last night.  We weren’t expecting it, nooo.  Lotsa trees down alright.

We were tenting, I said modestly.

Ooh my!  My son did that once, just in his dad’s yard, mind, and his tent it was a big pretzel then next day.  Sue just about doubled over in laughter at the thought.

We got two tarps, just to be sure, and some more tent pegs.   And a mallet.

We continued on through the Minnesota lake country.  The Mississippi river rises in Itasca forest and meanders through Cass Lake and Big Winnie before turning south towards St. Paul.  Beautiful country, rolling hills and farmland, with fat lazy cattle and acres of hay and clover.

It was carnage.  Power lines down.  Trees down everywhere.  Cops out in force with chainsaws.

I offered up a prayer to the Great Bear Spirit for keeping us safe.

After a quick stop in Bemidji, nestled in a crook of Old Man River the land started to rise in a serious of long, slow hills.  Huge fields spread out in a patchwork of grass, soy and vegetables.  The trees were pushed to one side, guarding perimeters and farmhouses.  We were almost at the Great Plains ahead of us, and to our north, Ontario has finally given way to Manitoba.

By Fosston, we could see the dark loam that marks the Red River valley.  A few more miles and we drove through Grand Forks and into the West.  The Wild West of our imaginations. 

Although it was after six, it was a stifling 34 degrees, so we pulled into the only wooded area we could see and stayed at the Turtle River State Forest.  This one had no bears, hot showers, and a dozen college kids out for a 4^th July drinkathon in the next site.  I didn’t care. I was safe.  I was clean.  I was asleep in no time.

Provinces travelled:  Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Quebec, and Ontario

States visited: Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and North Dakota