The rest of the school year involved Steve in a constant effort to escape as often as possible from doing things he hated. It helped that it was spring. Whenever the walls seemed to be closing in around him like the jaws of a mammoth vise, he leapt onto his cycle and fled into open spaces in a cloud of dust. Steve made the woods his backyard and the country roads his private pathways, all aimed at reliving his one perfect day.
It was a strange fact that the more he employed his cycle to drain off the pressures swelling within him, the more he succeeded in stirring them up. The only relaxation he could count on came when he was on the move. His rides did succeed in momentarily smothering the fires of frustration within him, but like a shovelful of coal on a bed of smoldering clinkers in a furnace, their long-term effect was to generate more heat and energy than ever. Returning to the dormitory in the evening was a growing disappointment. The pangs of emptiness quickly caught up with him. As long as he was on the run they trailed out behind him like the dust he was raising, but as soon as he stopped they were all over the top of him, right down into the pit of his stomach.
By the time school was at last over until fall, Steve had developed a firm concept of what he wanted to do that summer. He had long since concluded that the only thing preventing him from reliving the carefree happiness of his first spring day in the woodlot was having to come back to face on a daily basis people who were committed to enchaining his will to theirs. The answer? Get as far away from such people as you can. Find a place deep in the northern woods where you can spend the entire summer in harmony with nature in all its simplicity and undemanding routines. Leaving most of his things packed in a trunk in a store room at Christiania, he took his bedroll and a few other essentials and set off for home to get some money and pacify his parents.
Lars was bitterly disappointed when he found out that Steve had no intention of spending the summer on the farm. He had already lost most of his hope that Steve would succeed him, and this dashed the rest of it to pieces. Julia too was heartbroken. But Steve, displaying considerably more initiative than his parents were used to, insisted that having a variety of experiences was part of a good education and that next summer he might well decide to stay home. So Lars gave him enough money to last him through the summer, and then some.
Taut as the string of a bow, the arrow poised, young Stephan Pearson roared off one early morning for parts unknown. Rolled into a compact bundle and lashed to the rear fender of his cycle was everything he thought he would need for the whole summer—a bedroll, a long-barreled revolver, a few clothes, a cooking kit, and some toilet items. Stuffed under the lashing was also a lunch his mother had given him at the very last moment. Inside the lunch was a tear-stained note that read, “Please, darling, if you get lonesome, come home.”
Get lonesome? He already was! Had he ever been anything else? Lonesome was normal.
His first idea was just to keep going until he came to the “perfect spot” of his mind’s eye: a cool stream in a wilderness far from human interference, flowing lazily through rolling hills and towering trees, in a glen filled with lush vegetation and prolific berry bushes, with animals and signs of animals everywhere. There must be thousands of places like that in northern Minnesota, and one of them would be his, he told himself as he headed in an easterly direction.
As he drove along, he had to force himself to slow down. What was there to hurry? There was no reason here for entertaining the morbid thoughts that he had tried to escape from all year. After all, none of the people he encountered along the way in stores or gas stations was out to force him to do anything. Calm down! Take it easy!
As it happened, Steve spent the rest of June roaming around in northern Minnesota. First he went to Warroad near the south shore of Lake of the Woods. He was tempted to stop right there, but a little voice inside him said, No, this is not far enough away from the lumber industry and tourists. So he drove east to Baudette and then south through the wilderness to the Red Lakes, encountering a few startled Indians on horseback along the way. This country pleased him in a way, but it was not exactly the kind of terrain where he could expect to find his “spot.” The trees were scrubby and the undergrowth was scraggily, and it was flat as a pancake. He often stopped along the way as he slowly wound down. He knew his “spot” was ahead of him, somewhere. That’s all that mattered. It was a happy few days for him.
When he arrived at a point east of the southern shore of Lower Red Lake, he turned east along a small winding road not much more than a fire lane. He followed it through the tiny hamlets of Northome and Effie and into the wilderness beyond. And there one morning as he was chugging along the narrowest road he had thus far encountered, the motor of his cycle gave a couple of coughs and a sputter and stopped dead. He tried in vain to restart it. Nothing obvious appeared wrong to him. So he decided to walk the cycle in a leisurely way on to the next town, Togo, where he would get a mechanic to look at it. He had just passed Deer Lake. That meant, according to the map, that he was over halfway to Togo from Effie.
He had not foreseen how much sheer sweat it would take to lug the bulky machine down the lane. Each little rise, not even noticeable when the cycle was running, seemed like a mountain now. As the day progressed, he was assaulted by thirst, dust, and weariness and discouragement. His canteen was not large enough to last between streams. The cycle sunk heavily into the loose sand at many points along the way. His arms and legs ached from the nonstop effort. The sun beat down on him pitilessly. When evening came, he was still a long way from Togo, tired, hungry, dirty, and without much food. Despite himself, he was starting to feel irritable and disenchanted. The sun had already sunk beneath the horizon when at last he came to a much needed brook where he soaked his legs in the cool water and drank deeply. Then he loaded his revolver and walked up the brook in search of his supper.
Nothing presented itself. Chipmunks scurried around. A hawk circled high overhead. Nothing edible was to be seen—no grouse, no rabbit, no squirrel, not even a raccoon. So in the last faint glow of daylight, he followed the stream back to the cycle and made supper of a raw carrot and a few crackers. Then he stretched out in his bedroll for the night, pretty disgruntled.
The next evening, hungry and bone-weary, he finally nursed the dead cycle into Togo. But Togo was nothing more than the place where his trail crossed an equally obscure trail! Marking the spot almost ceremonially was a small log cabin with a stable behind it. Thank God there was a light burning in the cabin. Steve took heart and rapped on the door. An old geezer with a full white beard and white hair covering his shoulders answered the door and listened in rapt disbelief as Steve explained what had happened.
“Shonny,” he said toothlessly. “I ain’t heerd of nothin’ sho dadbing shtoopid ash that in all m’ born daysh. Ya mean ya trushted that ther contraption to bring ya through thish here wild land without nothin’ happ’nin? Well, I shpect I gotta put cha up fer the night. I sure dunno wha cher gonna do with that ther contraption.”
The two of them scarcely exchanged another word all evening. Steve got the distinct impression that his host thought he was crazier than a hoot owl. He served him up a warm dose of some kind of stew in a badly cracked bowl which tasted pretty good, finished off with a cup of something like coffee. The old duffer’s eyes never left him until they turned in for the night. It was all pretty awkward, but also comical in its own way. Steve stretched out on the dirt floor in his bedroll, aware that he had intruded uninvited on the old man’s privacy, but also that he really needed him and was genuinely grateful to him.
In the morning he gave the old fellow his revolver and some money as security, rented an ancient buckboard from him drawn by a haggard draft horse and loaded his motorcycle onto it, tying it down as best he could. The old man told him his best bet would be to head for Virginia which he could find by traveling east to the first intersection and then turning south “fer a good peesh.” It proved to be a long and tedious haul.
It took four full days to reach Virginia. Steve lived on a sack full of baking powder biscuits supplied by his host. The old horse rarely exceeded one mile per hour. Once in Virginia he was another week-and-a-half getting the parts shipped up from Duluth for the mechanic to install, a week of pure misery for him. Virginia represented Steve’s worst nightmare: the destruction of wilderness to appease human greed in the name of progress. Everyone there had pinned their destiny on the ugly scar of the open-pit mine. The only virtue in the whole place was their carefree disregard for the Prohibition Amendment. Steve appreciated that.
It was a full two-and-a-half weeks before Steve pulled up in front of the cabin in Togo with the horse and buckboard. He had been tempted to sell the old nag and the wagon and move on, but the thought of forfeiting his revolver and much of his money was enough to induce him to return. The old man had just about written off the old plug and the wagon as losses and chalked up the revolver and the money as gains when Steve pulled up in front of the cabin. After staying the night with the old man and thanking him sincerely for doing what he could, Steve fired up the motorcycle first thing in the morning and set out.
Steve had only one thought when he set out—to put that wretched country behind him as fast as he could. It had been a long and clumsy three weeks that had contributed nothing to his goal for the summer. He would look elsewhere to find his “spot,” and it wouldn’t be in Minnesota.