Thinking this must be mid-summer, 1992. The Wild Dog Tour. Between heaven in a mad mansion and hiding in the wet woods. – JDW
“He who sees everywhere the Self, in all existences and all existences in the Self,” we are told in the Upanishads, “shrinks not thereafter from anything.”
Did he take a dump. The dog, I mean?
We toured Ben & Jerry’s, “what a long strange dip it’s been.”
We stopped in North Hero, Vermont. “Are you alone or are you together?”
Got so frazzled in Quebec we didn’t know which way was est or quest. By the time they were fluent in French, they were in Ontario.
Where Barker couldn’t tell what language the locals spoke.
Filled the tank of Imperial Gallons and paid in dollars and got change in Canadian currency and Barker knew he’d been ripped off four ways to Sunday. Took two gas pump jockeys (benzine equestrians) and “zee boss” to do it.
Just acting out my role, I figured. If they work that hard to swindle me out of a couple of bucks, I applaud them. Haven’t seen such talent since the old Sgt. Bilko television show.
That was actually MY cash. Not Hiawatha’s. Seems as if an honest man can no longer afford to make himself known.
The first night out of Camp Eldorado, having driven through a Montreal suburban rush hour, – there’s a treat – the dark and driving rain – always fun – Barker finally pulled over. He was just kidding himself if he said he could see where he was going. Hiawatha, frightened by the black window in front of her, had long ago joined the dog in the back of Merry Miler.
Our first night away from the soft succor of Grant Justice and his lovely abode was at Gibson Lake in Ontario.
Parked the van between a couple pines, where it couldn’t be seen from the road. Just past the NO CAMPING sign.
Barker thought, I am exhausted, the way is treacherous, we’re in the middle of nowhere, what are they going to do me if they find me. Didn’t even cover up the windows, they were so tired.
They quickly got settled in and…SMACK! A large splash of water fell like a pebble dropped two floors on Barker’s forehead. It was raining so hard, the roof, the rear door actually, was leaking. He wiped his face clean, rolled over, and….
SMACK! A liquid karate chop to the back of the neck.
All Barker could think, Boy, I REALLY miss Camp Eldorado. He stopped the leak but couldn’t stop waiting for some Psycho Mounty With A Grudge to happen upon us. Sleep was uneven.
Up bright and early, but not before the mosquitos, we raced quest on the TransCanadian Highway. Hoping to make it back into the U.S. before they’d have to buy petrol again.
“I wonder if they’ll let us back in,” Hiawatha asks rhetorically.
A chill shivers through Barker. Bad zen, he thinks. Ever since they’d crossed the border, he’d been fantasizing about his new life in some federal penitentiary, the love slave of a 400-pound Chicano serial killer.
Probably put him in the same cell with Mike Tyson.
Turns out Hiawatha had secretly planted the stash in HIS shaving kit. Barker’s!
That’s why they call her, Logic Queen Of The Universe.
A BREAKTHROUGH CAN POINT YOU IN THE WRONG DIRECTION.
Stopped a beautiful sandy beach on Lake Superior west of Munsington High School. Home of the championship Fighting Mustangs. So lovely we had to stop. Headed to Marquette, which is about thirty miles west. A flock of Canadian geese. I counted eighteen, bunched in three groups of six. In formation, twenty feet apart. How do they stay in proper alignment? What’s the point? We are at some sort of natural wonder nobody’s fucked with as yet. All to ourselves. Sunlight streams through the clouds and the geese stay in line.
We played doggie-in-the-middle until the three of us were exhausted. Sounds a little dirty, huh?
Just throw the yellow ball back and forth, with the dog chasing from one of you to the other. Tease him just a little, then let him catch the ball. Barker had spent many hours doing exactly that. Which is how he knew there are dogs in Heaven. Be almost worth dying to see Andy and Major and Jaxx and Shane and Dixie and The Dude again.
The second night, back in these grand old United States, I KISS YOUR DIRT, AMERICA, we parked between some U-Haul trailers behind a Mobil Station in Marquette. Home of Northern Michigan University. Which sounds like a cool school. Marquette seems redundantly cold.
We started early, so we stopped early.
The fleet’s in. In the waterfront park, a rock band called Discovery is playing for a small but noisily appreciative crowd, apparently desperate for any excuse to get rowdy.
Discovery is off the boat, the very grey and very close U.S.S. Boulder. Named after a particularly great male rock, no doubt. The LST-1190 designation indicates, when Discovery isn’t entertaining, they are operating equipment for amphibious landings. The local folks are in line, waiting some hour and a half in line to climb aboard.
With a couple of hours to kill, we read in a plastic booth in Mister Donut until we couldn’t stand the smoke. Slept straight through for nine hours
Yawn. Good Morning. Pouring rain of course. The WILD DOG meteorological curse continues. I spent the night like I said, behind the Mobil station in Marquette parked between some U-Haul trailers. Every one with a slogan. America’s Moving Adventure. Best Moving Value. Move Yourself And Save.
There is a certain zen to overnight parking. An aware man soon learns to become one with A SENSE OF THE VOID. MOVE YOURSELF AND SAVE? Could be a message there applicable to improving one’s self. SAVE YOURSELF AND MOVE.
Had a little snack at Mr. Donut last night. We should fire bomb all the franchises based on my experience. Car wash woke us up this morning. Yawn. Pouring rain.
Checked the mileage Friday morning. Barker left Grant’s place wanting to cover five hundred miles each of the first two days. 498 the first, 502 the next, without even paying any attention.
The third day was a stroll. Detoured through the Porcupine Mountains along Lake Superior.
“As early as 1750 B.C., Indians mined copper in the Porcupine Mountains area during the summer seasons. Using fire, water and stone they fractured masses of copper and shaped them into tools, ornaments and projectile points which were traded throughout North America.”
Not bad for savages. “These ancient miners extracted 500 million to 1 billion pounds of copper from the area.”
Here are actual park instructions on how to bearproof your camp. “The only sure way to protect your food from bears is to be smarter than they are. Pitch your tent as far as possible, at least 25 feet upwind, from your cooking area and your food/garbage. Try to place the store near climbable trees. Suspend your food from a limb using a counter-balance system without tieing the rope to the tree. At night or anytime you are away from the camp during the day, remove all food from your pack and place it in a plastic bag or in a sleeping bag stuff sack. Tie two pots or metal cups to the outside of the bag/stuff sack to rattle and alert you if they should be moved by a bear. Suspend the stuff sack by a rope over a medium-sized branch four to five inches thick at the trunk about twenty feet above the ground. Pull the sack up to the branch and tie it. Counter-balance a rock, log or other food sack of equal weight to the other end of the rope as High as you can reach. With a long stick push the counter-balance upwards until both it and the stuff sack are suspended twelve to fifteen feet above the ground as close to the branch tip and five feet below the branch. Retrieve the food sack by pushing the counter balance upwards until the food sack can be reached. A clean campsite without tempting or strange odors will best insure a night’s sleep untroubled by bear visits.”
Good luck in the woods and HAPPY CAMPING. I am betting the bears’ manual spells out a number of counter measures in simpler terms.
And so we continued on in search of a 53-foot statue of Hiawatha. The World’s Largest Indian. Ms. Moscowitz and I still can’t remember if Hiawatha was a brave or a squaw.
I think it’s a guy.
She thinks it’s a woman.
Hiawatha, my squaw (“That’s Squaw, Sir, to you, cowpoke,” she informs me) took us to the completely wrong town. Silver City. She was looking for a lucky deal just like the settlers were back in 1870something when they moved the Indians out. The Indians used to find gold nuggets and silver nuggets and the settlers never could.
Lost, we discovered the Porcupine Mountains. It would be a great place to come back to for a hike.
Maybe on snowshoes even.
Eighteen mile hike to Presque Island. The park rangers have been thoughtful enough to provide distance markers and maps at the trailheads. Would it be a one-day trip or a two-day trip? One day in, two days back?…I was thinking actually four days.
“It’s, what would you guess, nineteen degrees Celsius?,” I ask.
“Cold,” she say. “Cold. Maybe lower than that. 55 degree Fahrenheit tops.”
Sign says DO NOT PASS. Meanwhile we can’t see twenty yards ahead of us. The road is barely a car’s width. Listening to Bob Seeger. Porcupine Mountains is a great place. Please don’t come here.
“I feel comfortable here,” Barker said, slowing to admire more greenery.
“When you were in Northwest Portland,” Hiawatha poked, “we couldn’t hardly get you out of the neighborhood.”
Boy, that was dense.
Damn straight.
I mean where I used to live, what I think about as HOME, equidistant from Escape From New York Pizza, Powell’s, Key Largo, and the river. Didn’t want to know about the woods. Would never go camping. A wilderness experience was shopping in the produce section of the grocery. Or sleeping with a woman who didn’t shave.
In this forest, Barker was comfortable here. No people. No police. No traffic. No stoplights. There’s no sunshine but he could handle that.
Hiawatha is now claiming she got us lost just so we could get to The World’s Largest Indian, which is now in a different town, right? We’ll get there late, just as the sun breaks through the clouds. Better for photos. That’s what she wanted. Only the delay into the rain-soaked Porcupines made it possible. There’s more than one way to skip a storm.
After a long hard rain, where animals have been bunkered up, both the prey and the predator, the deer and the wild dog. Does anybody poke their head up regardless of the time of day. After a storm.
Say, if it’s noon, do they come out and graze if they haven’t been out there at their normal dawn-dusk patterns?
And, if that’s true, wouldn’t a wolf stick his head out?
Does the wolf just take his nose and go looking for where the deer are sleeping until their dinner time?
I wonder…