Week 41a - Across Minnesota

NOTE: This week is broken into multiple parts on account of having too much material for one post.

After breakfast and a shower, I said goodbye to DS and got on the road, headed west toward Minnesota. The air was filled with the sounds and smells of summer: buzzing insects, grass and aromatic field herbs effervescing in the sunshine, and spring's pollen fermenting in lakes and ponds. I'd elected to take the scenic route to squeeze the last bit of juice I could out of Wisconsin, and I was soon on gravel roads that coated my brand new chain in dust. I passed by some cranberry bogs (not especially attractive until fall, I've been told), and through the natural marshes of the Necedah Wildlife Refuge. I took my time on shady gravel roads meandering through farmland, and stopped for brunch in Sparta at a cute little restaurant called Ginny's Cupboard. After a delicious meal, I noticed that there was a farmer's market across the street, and wound up buying some white beets and some unfamiliar varieties of radishes. I tried to find out more about them, but the farmer's wife working the booth was an older East Asian woman who spoke very little English, so I had to be content to learn by tasting. As I got back on Punkin and rode out of town, every person I saw seemed especially beautiful, and every animal and plant and facet of the landscape. I started singing Give Yourself to Love, and choking up. A feeling came over me that I can only describe as falling in love with the whole damn world. Just glad to be alive in this perfect little corner of the universe.

As I approached La Crosse, there began to be more and more hills, quite a bit pointier than the ones I'm used to. When glaciers came from the north in the last ice age, grinding everything flat, they stopped just north of this region, which is called the Driftless Area because it lacks the deposits of glacier-carried rock that are called drift. So the land was shaped by water instead of ice, and has a carved-out appearance. I crossed over the Mississippi River, looking down at beaches full of people splashing around to escape the heat, and stopped for gas just on the other side in Minnesota. There was a group of motorcyclists taking a break there, and one of them, a New Zealander, cheerfully mansplained to me that "that's an Australian bike you're riding, mate!", confusing Punkin with the Honda CT110, known down under as a "postie bike" because of its use by the postal service, kind of like we have those iconic trucks used by the USPS. I just nodded and smiled, and well, Punkin does have the seat from a CT110 so it's not entirely wrong. Leaving just as the Kiwi and an Irishman started chaffing each other, I took a road called the Apple Blossom Scenic Drive, which climbed in gentle switchbacks through lush apple orchards, up onto a ridgeline with a fantastic view out over the river. As the view opened up I noticed a lot of people parked on the right side of the road and looking east. Oh how nice, I thought to myself, people stopping to sit in lawn chairs and just look at the river, in this day and age. When I pulled up next to an older couple on a Harley Softail to find out what was going on, it turned out there was an airshow going on at the airport over on the Wisconsin side, and these were the people who were unwilling to pay $55 per car to see it close up. "I've been hearing the Blue Angels practicing all week," the woman told me.

There was no schedule posted and they didn't know when the next act would be. With binoculars I could see the six planes of the Blue Angels lined up on the Tarmac, but they didn't appear to be ready for takeoff yet. So I passed the time chatting with the couple, hydrating myself, and tightening bolts on Punkin, while dragonflies put on a small but impressive airshow of their own over the grass by the roadside, already bent over heavy with seed. After fifteen minutes or so, a roar echoing from the distant hills announced the start of the next performance. At first the plane was hard to spot because the engine noise lagged so far behind it. For a moment the roar seemed to be coming from a nearby bald eagle soaring up on a thermal, and then I caught a sparkle of sunlight glinting off the fuselage of the F-35A Lightning II (uh yeah, I looked it up later). I locked on with my binoculars, and watched the pilot pulling back into a breathtaking vertical climb, looping back and barrel-rolling into an upside down pass over the airport. Then she flew out over the hills until we couldn't hear the engine and returned for pass after pass of aerial ballet. For the finale she angled the plane up so that the thrust of the jets was directly creating lift and drifted along so slowly it seemed almost impossible, like the plane was hanging in midair. I wondered aloud whether this was a more difficult maneuver than most people would assume, just like riding a motorcycle very slowly requires special skill, and got a chuckle from the Harley guy. Well satisfied with my stop, I waved goodbye and got back on the road. Holy smokes, a bald eagle and a fighter jet flying over the Mississippi River? It doesn't get much more American than that, folks.

The road wandered away from the river for a while and when I passed a restaurant with a sign that appeared to say "Burgers - Beans - BBQ", I made a U-turn. Any place that advertised their beans had to be my kind of joint. On closer inspection, the word on the sign was "Bevies", but they did in fact have beans on the menu so it was all right. Down the bar from me was sitting a guy who resembled a lanky Lutheran minister dressed in camo, which to me, as a first time visitor, seemed extremely Minnesotan. After that second and final lunch stop, my route went back to the river and tracked along it for tens of miles. Despite the varied scenery, I started to get sleepy in the late afternoon, and pulled over at a trailhead to nap in the shade. Then I got back on the road, admired the blue water glinting through the trees and the marinas forested with sailboat masts, skirted around historic Red Wing because I was too overstimulated to enjoy it, and headed west to find a campsite in the Richard J. Dorer Memorial Hardwood State Forest. The spot I'd picked out on the map turned out to be at the end of a rutted dirt road with some houses on either side and "Private Property" signs plastered everywhere... not a good sign. And the turnaround at the end of the road was damp, buggy, and ill-favored, so I decided to keep looking. The second site I found was between the road and a large creek, next to an ATV bridge. It was at the edge of a small unpaved parking lot... but good enough for one night. Lots of motorcycles were passing north on their way back to the city, and one rider saw me and pulled over to talk. He turned out to be a short-haul truck driver with a Slavic accent named B, who was out scrubbing in a new tire on his Suzuki V-Strom. He asked right away if I was inspired by Ed March and Rachel Lasham, which indeed I was (congrats B for being the first person I've met who'd heard of those crazy Brits). We were certainly on a similar wavelength when it came to motorcycling, but he had to make use of the remaining daylight and I needed to get to bed, so our conversation was short.

I awoke to drops of dew on the tips of the tall grass and sunlight on the treetops across the road. A trout fisherman pulled up and struggled into his waders. I'd camped minimally with just my mosquito net, so I was able to quickly pack up and head for the nearest diner, which was in the cute little historic town of Cannon Falls. While I was waiting for it to open, a pair of bikers pulled up on KTM 750s, and we had a nice conversation about the merits of gravel roads and taking the slow way. The diner filled up within minutes of opening, which made sense because the food was pretty good. From there I headed to Northfield to stock up at Just Food Co-op, my last chance to buy organic produce and all things crunchy until I got to Bismarck in the middle of North Dakota, and I'm really glad I stopped there because it turned out to be one of the best natural food stores I've ever shopped at. On my way out I met a guy named L, who was there buying water, and we got into a conversation. He felt like the river was poisoned and the world was falling apart, and I tried to convey a little bit of what I've been gleaning from Walt Whitman and Peace Pilgrim. I'm pretty sure he got what I was trying to say because, along with some pictures and video he'd taken of me, he sent me this Whitman quote:

I will show that there is no imperfection in the present, and can be none in the future,
And I will show that whatever happens to anybody it may be turn'd to beautiful results,
And I will show that nothing can happen more beautiful than death,
And I will thread a thread through my poems that time and events are compact,
And that all the things of the universe are perfect miracles, each as profound as any.

Good stuff. From there the land gradually began to flatten out. I found the road names funny, riding along a gravel track through farmland with a name like 137th Avenue, as if planned in advance to be part of some vast megalopolis. But I'm sure it would have been hard coming up with meaningful names for all the roads in such a vast expanse with very few remaining natural features. I saw my first windmills among the grain silos, quite majestic and pleasant to look at. Before long I was riding into a strong headwind from the west, sometimes so powerful that I was only crawling along at 35mph with the throttle all the way open. But it was even worse going north and taking it from the side, and it didn't help to have all those groceries loaded high up and turning Punkin into an inverted pendulum. There were a few gusts that leaned me over far enough to get my heart racing, but I managed to keep control without too much trouble. Mainly what wore on me was the mental struggle of staying constantly prepared for an unpredictable push from the side. Again I got sleepy in the afternoon, and stopped next to the cemetery in Bunde to nap under the shade of the tall oaks in the churchyard. The trees rustled pleasantly in the dry wind, and a buzzard circled in a thermal with three swallows diving around it. Eventually biting flies found me, such powerful fliers to brave that wind, and I had to move on. I stopped for gas at an old-fashioned station called Sunshine and Whiskey (named after a country song, the cashier told me), with an attached liquor store called Salty Heifer Off Sale (named after a drinking incident, the cashier told me).

Soon one side of the road started to be natural prairie while the other was boring old cornfields, and I tried to puzzle out all the ways they made the same landscape look so dramatically different. Then there was prairie on both sides, interspersed with woodlands, as I reached the day's destination at Lac Qui Parle State Park. The park's name, which means "lake that speaks" in French, is because of the vast numbers of waterfowl that land there during migration, but I guess I must have missed that because the place seemed pretty quiet. I reserved a spot in the upper campground, which was on a small section of prairie, and pitched my mosquito net under the one tiny tree. I made pickles out of most of my fresh vegetables, and ate a lazy dinner of quick oats soaked in kefir. An inquisitive little 13-lined ground squirrel visited my campsite and came within a few feet of me, striking cute poses, and I admired the beautiful markings on its coat, which alternated between solid and dotted lines. I watched a magical sunset over the lake, flaring out through a line of pines on the horizon. I woke up briefly during the night to the howling of wolves. Life's good.

Things I Learned

• There's a prairie plant with the kind of spiky seeds that break off and stick into your skin. Luckily they aren't like the kind with barbs so they brush off pretty easily and are only a minor annoyance.
• There's a kind of tiny black fly that moves very fast and so is very hard to kill. It's a major error to let one of them get inside the mosquito netting. Are these the dreaded blackflies I've heard horror stories about? Thank goodness I haven't encountered swarms of them yet.
• Northern states all seem to have signs duplicating the road markings. For example, the beginning and end of passing zones are indicated with signs, as are the turn lanes at intersections. At first I thought the traffic engineers had a low opinion of the populace's intelligence, but then I realized it's because you can't see the paint on the road when it's covered with snow!

Wonderful Things

• The smell of a cereal factory, even if I wouldn't eat the kind of cereal they make.
• A slender deer silhouetted atop the ridgeline of a cornfield.
• Riding alongside a great blue heron as it flies up the river.
• Rainbows gliding along the length of a massive irrigation sprinkler as I ride by.