T+89: The Good, the Bad, and the Odd in Minnesota

Mile 3010: Midland, MI

After leaving Sauk Centre, we continued on the Lakes to Marshes path until it intersected with the Lake Wobegon Path, which has two arms.  The first continues south until just outside Minneapolis/St. Paul.  The second turned north and went through farmland and crossed the upper reaches of the Mississippi.  We took the northern route.

All throughout North Dakota, we had become expert at spotting the water towers (or water balls, as I like to call them) of towns towards which we headed.   Seeing that water ball provided a boost of energy in the last three or four miles of biking before a break.  (air conditioning! cool drinks!)  In this part of Minnesota, we see church spires first.  The further south we go, the larger and more epic the Catholic churches become.  In many parts of our trip so far, Catholic churches were absent or tiny.   

Covered bridge on Lake Wobegon Trail

At Albany, we turn north and follow the Lake Wobegon trail through cute little villages surrounded by corn fields or marshes.  We start to notice that the marshes are dry and the corn looks parched.  It is hot, but the wind is at our back because we are going north, so we tool right along.  We are heading to the town of Little Falls, where we cross the Mississippi and then turn east again to cross the state.  About ten miles from Little Falls, we enter the hamlet of Bowlus.  It has a very sweet town park; Wes wants to stop in the shade and drink some water.  We start to pull into the picnic area when we look across the street and see Jordie’s Trailside Café: Coffee and Homemade Desserts

Everyone who knows Wes will recognize the he has spent nearly every day of his life for the past five years at Jordi’s Café con Leche in Detroit.  There is no way we are not going in this cute brick café.  Inside, we drink glass after glass ice tea with lime and visit with Sonya, the daughter of the owner, Jordie.  Sonya hauls out notebook after notebook of notes and records of long-distance bicyclists who have stopped by on this route.  They have a particular fondness for this type of traveler and have maintained relationships with several for many years.   Sonya, laughing, tells me I have to go see the men’s bathroom.  It is a completely over the top shrine to the Twins baseball team.  All the wall space is covered with player photos, pennants, schedules, and posters.  There must be at least a dozen stuffed animals in Twins uniforms.  

The whole place is very frilly, funky, and comfortable, with real tablecloths, real but unmatched dishes, and a stream of folks in and out to say hi.  Sonya asks where we are staying.  Before we can answer, she says, “Why don’t you stay here?  Lots of cyclists camp in the garden around back.  We’re having a pasta and pizza buffet tonight.  It’ll be fun.”   Wes and I look at each other.   We are pretty far from our mileage goal, but this place is pretty special and a night without a hotel cost would be good, soooo….

They show us to the garden.  It is magical.  They have created a water fall, with pools full of koi, surrounded by rocks and teaming with all sorts of flowers.  There are numerous little angels and cheerful signs.  Why the effect is not cloying, I can’t comprehend.  Instead, it is pretty, and peaceful, and welcoming.  I set up shop on a covered, rocking picnic table.  Wes grabs a newspaper, finds a nook, and settles into to one of his favorite pastimes. 

Two older bicyclists stop by to see if Jordie’s can cater their next big ride.  They are fascinated by our trip and equipment and we are fascinated by them and their bikes.  They are both well into their 70’s, seemingly a pair, although they strongly emphasize that they do not live in the same town.  They belong to a bike club whose youngest member is 55 and whose patriarch is 85.  “On the Tuesday rides, he’ll stay with the pack and make sure everyone is doing all right, but on the Friday rides, forget it!  Nobody can keep up with him.”   They are both small, slight people.  The woman is about my size.  They are riding Giant road bikes.  She offers to let me give her bike a try.  I step on her tiny clip pedals, press a few strokes, and cannot believe how far I have gone.  The pick-up and pull on this bike is astonishing.  It would be easy to maintain a pace of 15-20 miles an hour on this thing.   I am jealous.  Of course, there is no way this light and powerful bike could pull or carry a load.   But we surely could make better time if our average running speed was greater than 10 miles an hour.

All the food at Jordie’s is handmade, mostly by Sonya.  This includes the pizza dough and some of the pastas.  None of the food is very fancy or elaborate, but it is delicious and thoughtfully presented.  We choose to eat in a little alcove of the main dining room, where we can watch the steady stream of locals come in, get hugs, eat pizza and pasta, and gossip.  This is obviously a community center.  While in the alcove, we see a little shrine and read a framed and mounted newspaper article with the headline, “Jordie’s Trailside Café opens in a muted affair.”  The article tells that the brick building, now so cute and ruffly, had been a longtime railside bar, owned by Jordie and her fiancé Mike.  Drinking apparently got the best of Mike and he died from his alcoholism.  Jordie decided she would never serve anyone another drink of alcohol, closed the bar, and with the help of her daughter created the café which would be dedicated to hope and wholesomeness.  Now it is a haven of poetry, music, gardening, and homegrown food, with a constant throng of diners, visitors, and gardeners.

We have a nice sleep on the grass to the sound of the little waterfall.  We have a hard time dragging ourselves away the next morning, staying for breakfast and watching a several groups of construction workers come into this frilly place for their sausage, eggs and homemade bread.   We push off on the bike trail, headed up to the Mississippi River.   While riding, we visit with two middle-aged women on slow, heavy bikes, who like so many women when they hear of our long ride, exclaim, “Doesn’t your butt get sore?”  I tell them yes, it does and give them advice on managing the pain.   I think they are shocked at my strategies and realizing that discomfort is part of the package.

At the bridge, Wes stops to get his video camera to film this most momentous of river crossings.  He is effusively disgusted to find out that his GoPro camera has no charge even though it has not been used since the last charge.  This is a real irritant with this device.  I can see that these good farm women from Minnesota are very uncomfortable with this display of emotion.  They hurriedly make their goodbyes and rush off as fast as their slow, comfy bikes can take them.

Once again, the dear little Veer phone saves the day and we are able to film the river crossing.  On the other side of the river, we realize we have made a big mistake.  This trail ends on US Highway 10, a super busy divided highway, full of trucks and cars going full speed.  We have gone about six miles too far to the north and now have to travel on the shoulder, facing a stiff headwind, to get back on the right track.  It is really awful cycling.

We spot a road to the east and decide to bail.  We wander through back lanes and finally make our way back to where we should have been, having wasted 12 miles and a bunch of energy fighting the wind. 

Back on track, we head east, climbing and falling through a series of back roads where the crops are becoming increasing burnt.  There are whole fields of dead and dry soybeans; corn stalks with little, bent heads chatter in the hot, dry wind pouring in from the southeast.  We are in the farm lands of central Minnesota and seeing firsthand the effects of the severe drought in this region.  It is the first topic of conversation in every shop or bar.   There was too much rain in May and June; planting was delayed.  There has been no rain since late June.   Most farmers have no capacity to irrigate. All they can do is watch their crops thirst to death.

There are very few cafes in this part of the state.  Here and in Wisconsin, food is available in almosy exclusively in taverns.   We stop for lunch in a non-descript bar in Ramey, MN.  The customers are a group of farmers.  I hear one lament, “Last year, I was getting 360 bushels of corn to the acre.  This year, I will be lucky to get 60.” 

There is one young woman working.  She is the bartender, store clerk, and cook.  We ask about the special and she tells us it is chicken wild rice soup with a grilled cheese sandwich.  Sounds good.  Twenty minutes later she returns and we know for sure we are not at Jordie’s.   The soup is a gloppy combination of barely heated cream of chicken soup, Cheez whiz, and cold wild rice.  The sandwich is probably Kraft singles on margarine soaked Wonder bread.  It is a rare day when Wes can’t eat, but this is one of them.

 We fight our way down to the town of Milaca, where we have another odd experience.

The town has two choices for lodging.  One is a Motel 8 out on the highway.  The other is the Phoenix Hotel in town.  The Phoenix is a mixed used re-development of the former high school.  In addition to small retail, some condos, and a Pizza Hut, the high school is now a convention center and hotel with an almost hidden entrance.  The layout is peculiar, and our room is through a twisty turny hall on the second floor.  The hotel clerk tells us not to leave our bikes outside, they will surely be stolen and that there is plenty of space in our room.  We clonk our bikes and BOBs up the elevator into our odd room which has a giant bathroom foyer upon entering, then two beds with two televisions around the corner.  

We settle in for the evening and I tell Wes I would like a glass of wine while I work on my blogs.  Wine and beer are only sold in state liquor stores in Minnesota.  We are told the store is just six blocks up the street outside the hotel.  We set out walking, and the blocks and sidewalks soon disappear. Then there are no streetlights.  We walk on and on.  No store.  This feels more and more like a goose-chase.  We walk all the way out to the highway.  No liquor store.  We give up and buy ice tea at a Hardee’s and walk back, having never seen the store.  By the time we get back to our twisty-turny room, we’re done.

We hope for better day and a passage into Wisconsin the next day.  However, this is Minnesota and nothing goes quite as planned for us in this state …but that is a story for another post.

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posted from Midland, Michgan

T+63: Harvest on the Hi-line, Part 2

Mile 1810: DICKINSON, ND

We have had a number of adventures during the last week or so, but I wanted to finish telling the story of the Hi-Line, even though we left that country 5 days ago. 



Empty land on the Hi-Line

After our stop in Galada, we make our way to the town of Shelby.  On the way, we pass the Sweet Grass Mountains, three large anomalous buttes in the north, seeming unattached to the landscape.  They are on our left all morning, and we are interested to learn that they were revered as places to conduct vision quests.  In Shelby, we go into the coffee stop and the family there is quite surprised.  95% of their business is through the window.  Inside there is the owner grandma, her daughter and husband, teenage son, three little kids and a dog, occupying every available chair.  When they realize we want to sit, the dad and teenager leave and grandma scoots the kids away.  It is not long until the kids and dog are back, and I am getting them overexcited, playing tug of war with the miniature Australian shepherd.  I am always delighted when we encounter animals as I really miss Louie, Mimi, and Spike at home in Detroit.  The town has prominent anti-meth signs, but feels pretty healthy and solid.  When we park the bikes and go in the café, we have several conversations.  The same occurs when we go in the little restaurant. One fellow puts down his paper, scoots over three seats at the counter and asks us about our travels.

We camp that night in the city park in Hingham, which is a tiny town that has closed its beautiful three story brick school.  It still maintains its lush town square park on a volunteer basis, where it also offers free camping to all comers.  There is one café/bar/RV park in town.  We make our way there and meet Mike, the owner, who looks like Bob Seger’s younger brother.  He is a former 5^th grade teacher and has taken long distance bicycle tours.  He and Wes immediately get into teacher talk.  (In my experience, all teachers everywhere want to talk to other teachers about teaching.  It is sort of like a survivors’ society.)  He was often the only man in the building in the small towns where he taught.  Eventually he was promoted to management, which he hated.  He lasted a year or so, and decided he would rather own his business.  Among other things, his business caters to the traveling bicyclist.  He gives us a wooden nickel for a free drink at his establishment, with the instructions to give it a touring bicyclist heading west.  He says he does this all the time and it is amazing how many of the wooden nickels make it back to him.

We cruise into the piercingly hot city of Havre, which serves as the de-facto capital of the Hi-line.  Wes tells me a story I have never heard.  This is a rarity in our marriage.  As a high school student, he hitchhiked here from his hometown of Jackson, WY.  At the time, he thought all of Montana was mountains, and was shocked at the dry, dusty town.  There is a small mountainous range south of Havre called Bear Paw Mountains, but they are covered with scrub juniper and cedar.  Even though they are called the Little Rockies, they are a far cry from the pine-scented highlands of the west.  We decide to push on to the little town of Chinook on the Milk River. 

It is well into the 90’s as we make our way to the Chinook Motel.  I use my phone for the first time to listen to RadioLab podcasts and this helps the miles go by quicker.  I wonder why I hadn’t thought of that earlier.   About 5 miles from Chinook, a bicycle tourist crosses the highway to talk to us.  (Mostly we just wave at our fellow travelers as they go by.)  He warns us of the hard travels ahead, tells us of incredible mosquitos at Saco, and asks us about the route ahead.  We tell him he is just four days from the mountains and he almost cries.  The long miles from Bar Harbor, Maine are wearing on him, and the last 10 days of no trees, high temperatures, and limited services are wearing him out.  I regret not giving him the wooden nickel.  He could have used the encouragement and the cold beer.

At the Chinook Motel, not only was the hotel clerk exceptionally kind and competent, we meet the first installment of men’s coffee klatches that will become a regular feature of the next section.  This group says they are the unofficial Town Council, that “they give ‘m lots of counsel, that nobody ever takes.”   The same four grey-haired guys, with the farm implement baseball hats, and Wrangler jeans, are there again the next morning.  In café after café for the next few hundred miles, we see versions of this, but we do not see groups of women anywhere and wonder where they congregate.  Or if they do.

As we traveled the Hi-Line, we were really struck by how out-going and friendly the people were.  The route goes in and out of several Native American reservations.  The first one after the Blackfeet Reservation is the Fort Belknap, where we visit the tiny town of Harlem.   This is another railroad town, with the requisite grain elevator and businesses lining the tracks, but it is also on the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre reservation.  We stop to get a milkshake (an indulgence only permissible when cycling 50 miles a day.)  The shop is equally staffed by blonde Germanic or Swedish types or tall leggy or barrel chested Native Americans).  We have a long conversation with a barrel chested fellow who asks about our trip.  We end up talking about adventures in general, and he tells me of a horse trip he and group from the reservation took from Calgary to the Black Hills.  That must be at least 800 miles by horse.  They did not use wagons and they needed to change horses every 30 miles or so.  They were retracing the historic homelands via horse.   That’s a lot of horses and a lot of logistics.

The days are hot and we tarried too long at Harlem, so we attempted to stop at picnic grounds at Fort Belknap, only to eaten alive by mosquitos.  I stopped for just a few moments and looked down to see my calf covered by at least 50 mosquitos.  We decide to push on, perhaps foolishly.  We are way out in a desert-y landscape.  Gone are the wheatfields and we are crossing rough highlands until we come to the Milk River.  To make matters worse, we are cycling into a hot headwind. 

We plug along, going through our water at a fast clip.  We stop about 8 miles outside of Dodson, under one of the very few trees we have seen in miles.   We are running out of energy, so we need to re-fuel.  We eat our apple and a bit of cheese, dole out the last bit of water to ourselves, and slap the jillions of mosquitos which materialize out of the desert. 

Eight miles on a good day is hardly anything, but in a state of increasing dehydration and fighting a strong wind, it is very difficult.  We had left a message on the answering machine of our next lodging, but of course, I have no service, so there is no way to know whether we have a place or not.  Our map says that there is a store in Dodson.  We are so dehydrated and hot, we think we better get some liquid before riding out of town to the small ranch B & B where we are staying.  In the tiny town, we can find nothing.  So we turn straight into the wind and ride a few more miles.

When we knock on the door, there is a long while until it is answered.  We are almost desperate.  Finally, our hostess, Sandy appears and asks us in.  We immediately drink two full pitchers of water and full pitcher of ice tea.  We must have looked like something the cat drug in: completely sweat soaked and dusty.  This was one of those moments where a shower feels like a gift from God.

She is a garrulous former social worker, who has had a very who has had a very varied life.  The house is on land her grandparents homesteaded, but she has lived and worked in Malaysia, California, Arizona and more.  She offers to take us to the next town for dinner, but we demur.  She then offers to cook us salmon, which we again turn down.  She proceeds to make herself some for herself, but gets so caught up in her storytelling that she burns the salmon, and completely smokes up her newly and beautifully renovated kitchen.  She just laughs it off and goes on with one hair-raising story after another.  Being a social worker with a territory of over 300 square miles took her into lots of difficult driving and people situations.  She confirms that meth is rampant and has been since her first encounter with it in the 1980’s.

The next morning, after a restful sleep in the western antique filled house, she prepares us breakfast, and again gets so caught up with talking that there is very nearly another cooking disaster.  As it was, the sausage I ate (but Wes did not) was crispy hard on the outside and pink on the inside.  This is a fact which has an impact later.

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Posted from Bismarck, ND

T+47: A Stormy, Stormy Night

Mile 1122:  Between Whitefish and Kalispell, MT: Snyder household, home of our niece, Kelsey

The bathtub of Lake Koocanusa
 

We left Koocanusa Resort well before sunrise, afraid that we would burn out from the sun, as we had the day before.  We need our jackets and are cycling well.  It is 48 miles to the little town of Eureka, where Wes lived 40 years ago.  He has been looking forward to going back and we have been thinking a lot about what this Canadian border town has meant to us. 

Koocanusa Reservoir stretches 80 miles of the Kootenai River (well into Canada) and was one of the last big dams built by the US Army Corps of Engineers.  It had been a beautiful, rather large mountain river, sacred to the Kalispell people.   The dam is several hundred feet high, which means that the road on either side of reservoir had to be carved into the living rock, and that the bank is a hard edge.  There are none of the wetlands, beaches, deltas, or even rocky points that would be typical of a natural lake. 

Mile after mile we ride, cut rock cliffs to our right, a line of trees to our left, and an occasional glimpse of hard-edged water below.  For reasons we cannot fathom, the road climbs several hundred feet above the reservoir, then swoops down to 50 feet above the reservoir, over and over.  It never goes to the water, and other than going down to cross the occasional incoming stream, we cannot understand why it keeps going up and down, up and down.   After going thirty miles with what feels like pointless changes in elevation, we are cursing the road designers, the Forest Service, and whoever thought an 80 mile bathtub was a good idea.  There are no services, few turnouts, and a kind of relentless tiring tedium. 

We are very pleased when we finally leave the bathtub to head east and go the town of Eureka.  There a series of steep ups and downs, in traffic, with no shoulder to get into town, and we are hot and tired when we pull in.  Wes and I had visited Eureka in the early 1980’s, when we took a hitchhiking tour of the US.  It was a nearly dead lumber town at that time; the lumber mill that had employed Wes in the 1970’s was long gone.  We don’t know what to expect 30 years later.

As we entered the town from the north, Wes keeps saying, “I don’t recognize any of this.”  When we finally get into the older part of the town, we are stunned.  There are galleries, massage therapy businesses, sushi, and yoga places.  We stop at an eatery that had been the only restaurant in town 30 years ago.   We find out that original Eureka Café was closed, but then the daughter of the former sawmill owner (Wes’ former boss) had reopened it as a retro chic diner.   At one gallery we visit, the shopkeeper says, “Oh yeah, if it weren’t for the Canadians, this town would be dead.”  They come here to shop and for recreation.  An automatic 15% discount on taxes, and a favorable exchange rate means great bargains for them.

We go set up camp in the little town park where Wes’ life changed.  He had just lost his job at the lumber mill, and was camping out, trying to figure out his next move.   He saw an older man, riding a bike with saddlebags, come down the hill into town.  He ended up at the same little park.  Wes had a long conversation with this former City University of New York  (CUNY) professor who left his position to go explore America.  It was 1973.  The talk stretched into the night, and the next morning, Wes loaded his tent, sleeping bag and what-all into a backpack, and rode off with Bob Rowe, to ride across America.   Traveling with this odd genius was Wes’ personal tutorial.  Years later, when I heard Wes’ stories of these travels, I fell in love with him and knew I had at last met my traveling companion.

I had gone up to the main street to go to a thrift store.  On the way back, I followed a young man riding on a much too small bike, who went to a small tent set up next to ours in the community park.  As it turns out, he was an economic refugee, out of a job, staying in the park, trying to figure out what to do.  I lent him a tool to raise his bike seat; he immediately broke the tool.  He offered to trade me a screwdriver for the broken bike tool, with the caveat that he had no money. I didn’t want his tool, but incident does encourage him to work on the bike and make it work better and fit him better. 

He said, “I rode this bike over 150 miles to get here, hoping I can find something.”  Over the next hours, as he smokes cigarette after cigarette, he tells us of his efforts to find a job and a place to live.  A friend of his has cabin he can stay in, but he can’t find the friend, and any way the cabin doesn’t have either heat or electricity.  He seems quite beaten down by his experience, almost rudderless, not quite at-- but not far from-- desperate.  We ask if he has tried in Williston, ND, the famous oil shale boomtown.  He tells us a story being hired as a subcontractor there to paint modular school rooms, only to have the contractor pocket the whole fee and never pay them.  “I thought I’d come back to Montana, where at least people tell ya’ the truth.”  A local couple from town bring him some food and drink, and offer some suggestions about where he could get work.  He offers reasons why their suggestions won’t succeed.

That night, we secure everything and go to bed early.  In the middle of the night, we are awakened by someone hollering.  “Yo, yo, yo”  then “Hey, I’m yellin’ as loud as I can.”   At first we think it is our hard-luck neighbor, but then realize it is coming from a different part of the park.  After the ruckus goes on for a while, Wes decides to go investigate.  Across the park, Wes sees a youngish man, staggeringly drunk, reeling about, trying unsuccessfully to put up a tent.  Apparently, he was trying to rouse the other campers to get some help.  Very shortly afterward, a truck pulls up and we hear the voice of a young woman. “Mike, Mike, c’mon.  Get in the truck.  C’mon Mike, get in truck.”  After a bit of back and forth, Mike finally relents and off they go.  There is no sign of Mike or his failed camp making the next morning.

Before we can fall back asleep, a big storm blows in bringing strong winds and lashing rains.  Our tent with a full rain fly holds tight, even though it leans crazily in the gusts.  The next morning, we see our neighbor’s tent has not fared so well.  Although it is standing, it is clear that its tiny rain fly only kept part of the rain out.  We guess his sleeping bag and clothes must have gotten wet.  We tuck a little cash in his bike bottle rack.   We hope he buys groceries.  We take our leave while he gently snores.  We are not the people that will change his life, but we hope that someone rides down that hill and does.