If all the difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.
– Dan Rather
Two hundred twelve point seven miles from house door to cabin door. Three hours and fifteen minutes at sixty-five miles per hour, assuming a full tank of gas, a strong bladder, and no ’76 Winnebagos in need of a valve job in front of you. But that 195-minute trip is mere theory. We’ve never done it. Maybe no one ever has. There are just too many things to do and see and eat and smell and touch and reminisce about between the Twin Cities and Oma Tupa.
Our urban base is St. Paul, one of the few cities on earth where you can hit a deer while committing a drive-by shooting. On Friday afternoons the exodus begins, traffic on I-35 North thick as smoke from a Marlboro straight. Boats in tow and pop-up campers make each vehicle twice as long, and the wheezing interstate can hold only half as much. You think the lungs of the North Shore can’t hold it all; it will choke, gasp, die of cancer. A tumor irritated by all the foreign matter entering.
But twenty miles north of town the congestion loosens. The exhaled smoke begins to dissipate here and there. A small puff drifts off to western Wisconsin, a wisp or two into Hinckley, Duluth, and Cloquet. A few smoke rings waft lazily into the Boundary Waters Canoe Area and the Quetico. More settles into the hundreds of Ma-and-Pa Northwoods resorts. By the time you reach Silver Bay there’s just a trace of smoke. And you take a deep breath, forget about the emphysema of the big city, the yellow teeth of work, the long ash of stress.
For Kat and me the drive is not only a getting-to but also an escaping from. It is a time to reprogram. The Dodge Dakota is our decompression bell, and we are deep-sea divers needing transition time to avoid the bends. It’s a time spent purging worries about work and kids and home.
Kat has the strongest need to vent, and she does with abandon, sometimes talking work until we pass the Forest Lake exit, twenty miles up the road; on a bad week, North Branch. She’ll spout off stories of deals gone bad and gone good. She bounces ideas off me. If it’s a Friday she may wheel and deal via cell phone as we wend our way north. Sometimes I go silent; can’t we leave work on the desk? For me discussing work just stirs things up. I need to let the sediment settle. But silence is unfair; we both grew up in households where silence could mean lots of things — and spent a lot of energy trying to figure it out and how to fix it. So I listen, talk, focus, because I know if she has a chance to drain down, she’ll be all in, renewed and fresh when we reach the cabin.
Though a single leg of the journey can take four or five hours, there have been times we’ve done a complete home-to-cabin-to-home circuit in twenty-four hours; nine hours driving, eight hours sleeping just to spend seven productive — or sometimes seven not-so-productive — hours at the cabin. But the seven hours are not the point; the entire twenty-four-hour journey is what’s important. The hours of driving, side by side, 15 inches from each other, forces Kat and me to connect. The “quality time” argument just doesn’t cut it; it’s a phrase concocted by busy parents and workaholic spouses to diminish the guilt of working too long and too hard. People need to marinate themselves in one another’s presence for a genuine length of time. They need to breathe the same air.
And just as driving is a real part of the twenty-four-hour experience, sleeping is, too. Sleep is more than shut eyes. While we’re building, sleep is blowing up the air mattress at 10:00 p.m., then blowing it up again, every hour on the hour. Sleep is reading by the glow of a construction clamp light. Sleep is being lulled by the water crashing in and out of the thumper hole below, a hollow in the rocky shoreline carved by millions of waves, grinding away one grain of sand per punch to create a 10,000-year-old percussion instrument. Sleep is waking in the darkness, feeling your way down sawdust-strewn stairs, stepping outside to pee and being met by a million stars or the lights of an ore freighter sliding by or the spilled-milk glow of the moon over Superior. Sleep is holding each other tight with drywall mud caked on tired hands. Sleep is feeling the vibrations from the Monson logging trucks barreling down Highway 61. Sleep is a slow waking to the realization you’re at the cabin, not at home.
The twenty-four-hour journey is like the proverbial pig in the butcher shop where every part is used except the oink. Every part has a purpose. Every part counts. Every part is as real as the next. We remember to make the drive fun (Rule #1), and we do it without the hurry and scurry (Rule #2).
The joy-of-getting-there is not new. Even as a child, driving to my grandparents’ cabin, The Roost, was as much fun as being there. Though the drive was only two hours, in my small-scale world it seemed as though we were journeying to Argentina. The night before departure, my sisters and I would turn the back of our Chevy Bel Air station wagon into first-class accommodations. We’d pack the back with pillows, blankets, Tootsie Rolls, Archie and Jughead comic books, the Cootie game, and crossword puzzle books. Once on the road we’d stick our heads out the windows to cool down, endlessly check the aerodynamics of our zigzagging hands. We’d bounce freely between front and back seats. In today’s world my parents would serve hard time for child endangerment.
Singing was a major activity, and the Carlsen Chorale would belt out round after round of “When Sammy Put the Paper on the Wall,” “We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” and “I Ain’t a-Gonna Grieve My Lord No More.” Looking back, it seems odd that the whitest family on the planet would sing so many black spirituals.
We played on-the-road games. Most popular was License Plate Bingo, in which I’d infuriate my sisters by claiming to have seen Hawaii. Or there was the memorization game “I’m going on a trip . . .” and the guessing game “Twenty Questions” and all ninety-nine verses of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” No wonder the first question my grandfather asked my parents upon arrival was “stirred or shaken?”
There were some truly irresistible roadside attractions in the politically incorrect days of the sixties. There was an Indian reservation along Highway 169 where you could stop to buy chicken feather headdresses, rubber tomahawks, and plastic tom-toms. For twenty-five cents you could SIT IN A TEEPEE WITH A REAL INDIAN.
There was an animal park where you could buy soda from a vending machine, pour it into the bowl of a caged black bear in the parking lot, then watch him slurp it up. There was a goat that chewed Dubble Bubble gum while standing on a tractor. “PETA-schmeta” was the attitude.
But some things never change. If you don’t consider the “getting there” part of the vacation, you miss out on half of it.
Something happens when people gravitate toward vacationland. You can see it happen. That cold, straight, cast-in-place urbanism cracks. For some it grows into something soft and romantic; for others, wild and intense. But a vacation changes them. Those who thrive on 6:00 a.m. meetings, Brooks Brothers suits, and Tums trade it all in for blue jeans and a stack of midmorning pancakes. The lake dissolves the hard, tangled things at their core.
And the reverse is true, too. As they leave the big water, mile by mile, dashed line by dashed line, they sense a turning back into what they were. The softness hardens. The thing that guided them to the worn Adirondack chair to do nothing but daydream is pushing them toward a Steelcase desk and a Day-Timer. But like an agate, polished by years of back-and-forth tumbling, little by little they take on a permanent shine.
Often we have a kid or two or three along, which changes the dynamics. With two people there’s one relationship (A+B); with three people there are four (A+B, B+C, A+C, and A+B+C); and with four people there are rapidly escalating eleven relationships (A+B, A+C, A+D, B+C, B+D, C+D, A+B+C, A+B+D, B+C+D, A+C+D, and A+B+C+D). With seven people— the population of our family — the number of combinations leaps exponentially.
And each of those combinations and relationships has its own history, rules, and boundaries. At first blush this seems like a mathematical exercise, but it’s really an exercise in family dynamics. Whether it’s a one-on-one conversation in the hallway or a full forum around the dinner table, the topics and depth get tweaked, bumped, and filtered according to peoples’ sensitivities and the equation at hand. Our mathematically complex family is always working on the numbers.
No two trips are the same. Sometimes we only make it to the end of the driveway before returning to pick up some forgotten item — flour, drywall corner bead, Kat’s headache medicine. Katie — our half-deaf, three-quarters-blind Pekingese — usually paces in the backseat until we’ve been on the road long enough for her to figure out we’re not going to the vet’s but to the cabin.
Usually the first stop is the town of Hinckley, where Tobie’s — “Home of the World’s Best Caramel Roll” — is located, and I think they’re right. Glistening in goo and sugar, the size of a softball, they call like the Sirens to Ulysses. They’re so sticky, the ladies at the cash register throw a moistened towelette in the bag for every roll. On a summer weekend northbound tourists stand six deep in front of the bakery counter with that same look of anticipation they had thirty years ago waiting to get into a Grateful Dead concert.
Location is everything, and Tobie’s has location. Stationed halfway between Duluth and the Twin Cities, Tobie’s is ideally positioned a bladder’s capacity away from both. Started in 1920 as a café and bus stop, it was officially christened Tobie’s in 1947 when Mr. and Mrs. Tobie Lackner purchased the place. Within a few years they were pumping over 300 dozen donuts, 1,000 rolls, and 60 pies a day into the gullets of northbound fishermen, truckers, and locals. It thrived on one premise: bake it gooey, and they will come. Tobie’s was sold again in the mid-sixties, and the second and third generations of the Schrade family have inflated that one simple, megacaloric product into a mini-Disneyland. Around the perimeter of the parking lot sit an antique store, a gift shop, a gas station, a hotel, an ice cream parlor, and a now-defunct petting zoo; perhaps caramel-caked hands and shedding goat hair did not a good combination make.
Tobie’s was dealt a royal flush when the Ojibwe tribe built the Grand Casino Hinckley two miles down the road. Relegated to reservations on Lake Mille Lacs and other areas in the 1800s, the Ojibwe now get their payback one quarter at a time. The synergies between Tobie’s and the casino couldn’t be better. Both draw twenty-four-hour-a-day people looking for a little something to do within radar range of the big city; people looking for the rush of a quick hit, whether it’s jingling silver dollars or a sugar and caffeine buzz.
The two establishments are intertwined by the steady flow of big winners and big losers. At Tobie’s you can surmise the degree of people’s luck by the angle of their heads:
Hinckley’s other claim to fame is the Hinckley Fire of 1894. A desperately dry summer coupled with mountains of slash left by loggers created the perfect invitation for an inferno. On September 1 it knocked. The fire was so hot, houses burst into flames before the fire reached town. The emberlike glow of the firestorm could be seen in Iowa. Two hundred citizens clambered onto the Number 4 Limited train as it belched through town, pursued by flames. Those who survived submerged themselves in the shallow muck of Skunk Lake outside of town until the fire passed. Four hundred and thirteen residents were not as lucky.
The billboard outside the Hinckley Fire Museum depicting the disaster is not of the classic bright, blazing forest, but of smoky blackness tracking down a horrified woman. Inside are dishes welded together by the 1,500-degree heat, photos of the aftermath, and a life-size figure of Thomas Dunn hammering out his last telegraph message, “I think I’ve stayed too long.”
When I see the Barnum exit, forty miles farther into the journey, deep memories get unbolted. It’s here where two of my closest friends, Peter and Betsy, bought a farm right out of college. While many in the seventies read Mother Earth News and talked about a simpler, self-sufficient life, Peter and Betsy did it. They bought forty acres, heated with wood, concocted a homegrown hot sauce that made you see God, put up cords of zucchini, and lived close to the bone.
At their farm we’d set up our guitars and amps under the stars and jam until 3:00 a.m., the only neighbors to disturb having four feet or wings. On hungover mornings we’d listen to Dan Hicks & His Hot Licks while frying up huge batches of “everything eggs” — scrambled eggs containing everything identifiable from the refrigerator. On one of our bidaily runs to the Moose Lake Muni Liquor store, the spare tire in the trunk of Peter’s ’58 Chevy blew, and we thought we’d been hit by a meteorite until the dust cleared.
They sold the farm. Peter, Betsy, Nanny (my ex), and I bought some parcels of land deep in the Ozarks. Peter and Betsy were primed for the rugged lifestyle; they knew how to live simply from their years on the farm. They cut and peeled mountains of oak to build a cordwood home, started a garden, and got grooved out. We, though, found nothing simple in living simply. I spent hours every day hauling water from a nearby stream to a holding tank in the loft of a simple cabin we’d built. There were days all we could muster was to sit in front of a small RV fan run off a length of Romex wire connected to my truck battery. It all looked better in the pages of Mother Earth News than it did sitting in the 90-degree heat, 90 percent humidity of Gainesville, Missouri.
We struggled through four months of self-sufficiency; then within a two-week period, Maggie was born and my father died. We hit the back-to-the-land wall, retreated to the big city. Peter and Betsy moved closer to Kansas City and continued to lead a simple life for twenty more years. They pumped their water from a stream, grew their own food, delivered their two sons at home. Peter was a human Swiss Army knife who could fix or build anything. They were a couple that looked rock solid, but there were fissures. Peter hit a downward spiral and couldn’t find the rewind button.
We lived our lives on parallel tracks; we both derailed. I was able to emerge from the wreckage with only broken bones and a broken marriage. Peter died of hepatitis C. So every once in a while, when I’m driving north and feel squishy inside, I’ll take the side roads that lead to Peter and Betsy’s old Minnesota farmstead. I’ll slide the truck into park, squint my eyes, imagine Peter strumming his Gibson ES-335 singing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business” in the distance, and listen close.
To acclimate to North Shore time, Kat and I usually stop at Kitchi Gammi Park, also known as Pebble Beach, as we wind past Duluth. The nickname comes from the millions of Formica-smooth stones the waves have washed up and polished over the centuries. If there’s even a trace of childhood left in you, you’re skipping stones within minutes. In my toy mind I imagine stones saying, “Whoaaa, it took me 400 years to make it to shore; you’re not going to ski–i–p–me–now–ow–ow?”
It’s here you can first take in the contrasts that make Superior superior. You look right and see ore docks and mile-long coal trains, then left and see impossible rock formations. There’s contrast in the people, too. Teenagers do fearless “I’m-going-to-live-forever” dives, fishermen fish, drunks drink, lovers love, kayakers kayak, and everyone snaps pictures.
Once while driving in we spot a small group of people surrounding a girl in a prom dress and her not-so-well-dressed date. We stop to use the Porta Potty, and a pastor — still working on his zipper — strides out. He takes a glance at us and invites us to the wedding. We turn and notice the girl in the prom dress is the bride. She’s got a bun in the oven, and it’s not from Tobie’s. The congregation consists of nine people. The reception laid out on the picnic table is a Dairy Queen cake and a case of beer. Kat and I sit off to the side but listen and repeat the vows to each other like we’re the ones getting married. The ten-minute ceremony is simple, honest.
Kat whispers, “Let’s stick those twenties we just got from the cash machine into an envelope, give it to them, and git.”
I maneuver the truck into getaway position. Kat dashes over, stuffs the envelope into the bride’s hand, then runs away, yelling, “Thanks for helping us remember what love is all about.” And we’re outa there like bank robbers, checking the rearview mirror as the befuddled newlyweds stare.
But usually the trip goes like this: You burn hard through the first 100 miles of freeway (except for Tobie’s) because it’s mostly sod fields, outlet malls, and KFCs, then ease off the pedal at the rest stop overlooking Duluth and the harbor to stretch your legs and let your ears pop because of the elevation change. And it’s hard to pass the Lake Street exit without hitting Father Time Antiques, fondling the cedar strip canoes in the Duluth Pack store, and grabbing a cup of java at the Blue Note. And if you hear the lift bridge horn, you are pulled like a snagged bass to the canal to watch the 700-, 800-, 1,000-foot taconite, grain, coal freighters pass through the canal. Then on to the Glensheen mansion, home of grandeur and homicide, where the tour guide won’t let you even whisper about the room where Roger Caldwell took a pillow to his mother-in-law’s face and a brass candlestick to the night nurse’s head while drunk, henpecked, and in quest of inheritance.
And the hardest decision is whether to take the four-lane expressway, which gets you to Two Harbors in four John Hiatt songs or the ten-song Scenic Drive route, which clings to the shoreline and dips and weaves past ancient resorts that almost died and are now back in style because they’re so out of style. And if you get caught behind a trailer-toting Duster driven by an old man new to the North Shore, it’ll prolong your trip by half an hour, but it doesn’t matter because you cross the Lester, French, and Knife Rivers, where smelt run and fishermen bob in inner tubes with molded legs, where the streams enter sometimes gently like ribbon and other times crash hard and angry like punches on a has-been boxer. And you see tourists on the side of the road putting the darnedest things in their trunks — birch branches and jagged rocks seem to be Mother Earth’s best sellers. And past signs that say NO STOPPING, NO SMELTING, NO TRESPASSING, NO DUMPING HOUSEHOLD TRASH, NO PASSING ON THE SHOULDER, NO OVERNIGHT PARKING, but tourists say YES to them all.
Past Tom’s Logging Camp, Mel’s Smoked Fish, the Playing With Yarn store, Bob’s Cabins, all things you miss if you take the four-lane highway a mile to your left, a highway so boring they put corrugated wake-up bumps on the shoulders. And the tradition is to stop at the Two Harbors SA station, home of the coldest men’s room west of the Mississippi, where refrigerant must run through the urinals, and buy a pack of Marlboro Lights that we’ll smoke three of and let the rest turn dry and dangerous on a windowsill at the cabin. And then, though it takes grit, you forge past that veritable wonderland of Carborundum, the 3M Sandpaper Museum, then past railroad cars and lighthouses that chug and shine as bed-and-breakfasts, through the 1,400 feet of the Silver Creek Tunnel, where you gotta beep, beeeep, beeeeeeep, and past Betty’s Pies. Past Gooseberry Falls.
And you focus your eyes for deer in November, when the males are thinking more about romance than the prospect of bucking through your windshield at sixty-five miles per hour. Through towns almost dead, then resuscitated by hikers and snowmobilers, past Split Rock Lighthouse, the subject of more photos than Angelina Jolie, past the two 10-foot-tall Adirondack chairs in front of the Cove Point Resort, where seven out of ten tourists stop and sit to have their photo taken, and on along this road voted “one of the nation’s premier byways,” though anyone who’s driven it doesn’t need to see the trophy. Past the 320-foot cliffs of Palisade Head, where Macaulay Culkin in The Good Son dangled while his mom hemmed and hawed, and past Tettegouche State Park and the Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, where, if the size of the parking lot is any indication of souls saved, they better wear out a little more shoe leather. Then 100 feet before the mile marker you begin craning your neck to glance downhill to see if any tragedy has befallen the cabin — a fire, a burglary, a slide into the lake — then scratch for the key under a flat rock, undo the padlock for the chain across the driveway and head down, staying hard left because a slide to the right means a 300-foot tumble down cliffs, not a good way to start a weekend, then leap from the truck, breathe deep, and smile.