Road Trips

Thinking of road trips this morning but was sidetracked by a grocery trip. I guess that's the way the world goes round (thank you John Prine). Most of us like them, take them, and then wonder how the road home never seems as much fun as the one to adventure.

There's nothing like that 3:30 a.m. moment when you're ready to hit the road for your first trip to the Deep South after you've retired and you briefly awake to shift positions. Two eyes are staring in your face and asking, "Are you ready to get up?" Of course I grumbled and that's putting it mildly. A couple of minutes later I again grumbled, "What the hell, why not?" An hour later, the house shut down, Lois and I hit the road. There are few things as exciting as being on a road trip and watching a 24 below zero sunrise with better than a state's worth of pavement in your past.

My son and I have taken our share. In the early days he rode shotgun, but over years we shared the wheel. Thirty years ago it was the three hour jaunt to the cabin with fishing on our minds. Evolution led us to the Boundary Waters and finally to eight trips in northwest Manitoba. Those last trips, eight of them, are the ones I'll recall:

It's a bit over nine hundred miles to Cranberry Portage and a tad more to Snow Lake. Long, one-day drives taken after a half day of work, but the miles would fly by. Canoe on top and something over two hundred pounds of gear and food in the back. We'd leave around nine a.m. fueled by the knowledge a whole year had passed; a year I'd counted day by day. I loved our time together and where we chose to spend it.

We'd suffer though city traffic and get our road legs somewhere near St. Cloud, one eye on the pavement and the other on the canoe above. I was a beast on strapping down the boat and had built a dadoed a rack that'd allow us to pass a highballing semi at better than eighty miles per.

We'd roll the farmlands of Minnesota till the interstate dropped onto the near endless flat of the Red River Valley, once the glacial bed of a massive lake, all the while talking and listening to whatever music Allan chose to play—some hip-hop, a little Semisonics, a mix of R and B, the Beatles, and some John Prine. One time as we dove into our jumping off point I asked Allan to put on some wilderness, adventure music. He fired up Al Green. And we talked. We always talked, covering the gamut from God to Grapenuts.

We'd join with I-29 in Fargo and let it draw the Jeep directly north, a good direction, toward the border. Somehow, we'd manage to bumble ourselves through the inevitable questions. I'd always get the right answers to the wrong questions, or the wrong answers to the right ones, but never once did the latex gloves come out. The world needs more Canadians.

Across the border and past the Big Manitoba sign in front of the welcome station, the Red River would drift away and disappear into a tree line to our right, while the stark, concrete Highway 75 bee-lined toward Winnipeg passing though a few small towns along the way. Fast food in Winnipeg, bypassing the town on the Canadian version of a freeway, and less than an hour later we left the big city north-northwest on Highway 6. While still on the flats, the farms would disappear, the forests would close in, and curling rinks would replace bowling alleys.

By now we were passing through some of the most water infested land on the planet, swamp, bog, scruffy forest, and massive lakes to the east and west, the descendants of Lake Aggasiz. Once past the nearly non-existent town of St. Martin Junction, we left buildings behind for 225 miles. No demarcations of any kind till two hours later when we'd hang a left on Highway 60 and the world began to rise and fall for the first time in around 500 miles. The forest clamped down and closed us in like a corridor. At times the map would show we were passing within a mile of lakes the size of Leech and Mille Lacs but they remained unseen. All the while our conversation would play on against the background of music.

Conversation is universal and genetic. In one form or another, all forms of life communicate. It separates the living from the rocks. In the Army, particularly in Vietnam, us grunts had each other for entertainment. No radio, no television, no phone, nada. We talked of our pasts and our futures, our loves and our hates, and pissed and moaned all the time. But most of all, we worked together and shared what there was to share. If there is a good in war, it's the humanity on the ground and in the mud and rain and heat and death. Sharing time with my son in the silence of the road and then two weeks in the canoe and in camp, is one of the blessings of my life. We talked and listened to each other and read aloud, at many times with no one else within twenty miles. Treasured time.

Finally, we'd dead end at Highway 10 from the south and turn right toward our night in The Pas that now seemed only minutes away. Of course, it wasn't. Nothing in Northwest Manitoba is close by. The roads are long and towns are few. But we were on the verge. In the morning we'd draw on our woods clothes, grab breakfast, and hit the road once more knowing the government dock in Cranberry Portage and our doorway to the wilderness was only an hour away.