I am guilty of a dreadful selfish crime
I have robbed myself of all my precious time
– Robert Earl Keen
In the course of a day, or a week, or certainly in a lifetime, it’s inevitable that we’re going to miss things. Most of those things are small: a word we fail to hear or a look we fail to catch. Others are huge: a performance, a party, or the desire of another person for our presence. In either case, the loss is really ours because we missed the gift in the moment through inattention or willful blindness. It’s a crime we commit against ourselves, although other people also feel the impact.
That may be one reason it is important to get out on the road. Traveling disorients us and makes us see things that we wouldn’t or couldn’t before. Routines are good, but routines allow the extraordinary things we encounter every day to become the ordinary back drop of whatever it is we have decided is more important. Our whole day, for instance, may depend on the sun coming up, but how often to we take that minor miracle for granted.
When I departed from Akron, I drove to my brother and sister-in-law’s house in East Lansing. I had imagined that their neighborhood was some slightly more hip version of Happy Days, being as it is on the edge of a major research institution. I was not disappointed. As my sister-in-law and I sat in the back yard (so as not to spread whatever residual VID was hanging around), I marveled at the cool, fresh air of Michigan in the late summer. She assured me that this experience came at a cost: many months of cold and grey.
Yet when my brother finished his conference call, the three of us set out to stroll around the town and the campus. Any college town is going to have its share of transience of course, but they also bore witness to their permanence in that place. Raising children who can walk to school, making plans for the annual Homecoming parade, and chatting with local store owners and friends, they showed me that this place is home. At least as long as there are children in the house, which can be a frighteningly short time when it starts coming to an end.
After we said goodbye, I found out the hard way that getting from the bottom to the top of the mitten does not take a frighteningly short time. It takes a long time. And when I arrived in Mackinaw City, I was prepared for an evening on the shores of Lake Huron. What I initially met was a room that could easily have served as the example of what you wind up with when you “use one of those bargain travel websites.” I had, in fact, used one of those bargain travel web sites. For forty seconds, I debated whether or not paying another twenty bucks for one of the rooms that was pictured on the website was tantamount to caving to the demands of my ex-wife, and then I decided that the two had nothing to do with each other, plunked down my credit card, and fell asleep to the sound of the lake lapping against the shore.
What I woke up to was a glorious sunrise over Lake Huron. I have, of course, seen the sun come up over water before. By one of the curious tricks of geography, I’ve seen the sun come up over the Pacific Ocean in Panama. But maybe enough travel disorientation had set in that the sight took me off guard and filled me with awe. My mind was flooded with the last verse of Charles Welsey’s hymn “Christ whose glory fills the sky”.
Visit then this soul of mine
Pierce the gloom of sin and grief
Fill me radiancy divine
Scatter all my unbelief
More and more thyself display
Shining to thy perfect day
If ever there were a soul in need of piercing, it was mine in that moment. Funny how that works out. So I set out to see what a pierced soul might see on a random Tuesday in Mackinaw City (as Lefty Frizzell’s “Saginaw, Michigan” played in my head). The most dramatic thing, of course, is the bridge.
Again, I have seen bridges. I have driven over the old Cooper River Bridge from Mt. Pleasant to Charleston in a fifteen passenger van, an experience which would convince even a young man of the need for estate planning. Still, as bridges go, the Mackinac Bridge is pretty spectacular. (No, I don’t know why it is “Mackinac” and the town is “Mackinaw.”)
After a stroll, I went thence across the bridge (much less harrowing than my South Carolina experience) and stopped on the other side for groceries, including a box of frosted raspberry Pop Tarts. Now my journey was truly going to begin because that evening I would be camping out in Wisconsin. From my previous experience driving across the country, I knew that the adventure really begins when you a) get off of the Interstates and on to two-lane highways and b) camp.
I spun along the coastlines of Lake Michigan and Lake Superior (pictured), finding them to be every bit as charming as the New England coast. I could imagine my friend who grew up on these shores engaging in a multitude of sports, all of which would require helmets, and fitting right in with all of the locals who were clearly of Scandinavian descent.
I pulled into the campground at which I had reserved a spot, only to discover that there was nary a Park Ranger to be found. Not only was that thirty five bucks squandered, but it also would have been reassuring to have a subtle law enforcement presence in the Great North Woods. Still, I cooked ramen on the stove and slept for the first time in the tent I had gotten for a bargain in the Blue Ridge Mountains, at a place called “Blue Ridge Bargains.”
In the morning, I was pleased that the set-up had worked so well, including the fairly massive battery I had purchased to operate my CPAP. One difference between cross country camping at 25 and at 51 is that at 25, I did not require a mechanism somewhat akin to an F-15 pilot’s mask (so I keep telling myself) to prevent my asphyxiation in the middle of the night. I was not particularly pleased that it was raining.
Still, this was an adventure! or so I told myself as I bundled up a soggy camp and headed for Minnesota. Somewhere along the way, the woods started to give way to rolling plains. When I got to around Bemidji, I crossed the Mississippi, twice. In both cases it was little more than a stream. Perhaps to make up for the diminutive size of the Big Muddy in that region, a local tried to engage me in a drag race at a stop light on the way to the Bemidji WalMart. (The Pop Tarts I had bought in Michigan were treating me well, but the “instant cappuccino” was not. I needed something stronger,) It seems as if they don’t see a lot of Jeep Wranglers in those parts. I would learn why later.
I also learned that Minnesota parks are only slightly better patrolled than Wisconsin parks, at least after Labor Day. Still, I did manage not only to get a spot, but I also got a receipt. And a shower, which is never to be missed if one has the opportunity while camping. What did stun me was the discovery that my lighter sleeping bag, which I thought was rated to 40 degrees, is actually rated to 49 degrees. There is a significant difference.
I almost did not get out of bed in the morning, but when I did, I discovered that I had been hauling a piece of cargo more valuable than I had realized: David James Duncan’s latest book Sun House. I may have been brought to tears several times in the fifty or so pages I read that morning, and if I had not been on something that resembled a schedule, I would have been happy to remain in that Minnesota campground until I finished the entire thing.