Tales from the Christensen Cruiser

The drive down from Franklin was a top speed sort of trip. I was late and was looking forward to having dinner with Mike Meyer and Barbara Beatty that evening. The Meyer’s house was just across the street from the house I grew up in, (at least until I was eight). When I was a kid, this was the world to me, and the Meyers and the beach right beside their house was a huge deal. Nahant is a very small community just North of Boston and is as close to an island as you’ll find, there is just a causeway connecting it to Lynn. It’s surrounded by the Atlantic and is only 1.2 square miles in area, and I believe the smallest township in Massachusetts by area. The trip went flawlessly and fast, but I was going to be a little late and called to let them know. By the time I got into the area it was dark and then things went south. Running low on gas, I got off the turnpike and did it just a bit too early, and promptly got lost. I hadn’t been there for a number of years, but I know the roads some, and nothing is too far apart. I was a bit north and suffice it to say that I ended up going completely in the wrong direction more than once. I ended up almost in Saugus, for pete’s’s sake. I stopped to get a couple of gallons of gas on the fly and kept moving, finally careening into the driveway way late – something like 8:30. It was really embarrassing; these people had had dinner waiting for hours. They didn’t miss a beat, gave me a glass of wine, and I set down to a wonderful dinner with Mike, Barbara, Mike’s brother Chris and his wife, Marie.

It was great just being in Nahant, but to stay the night at the Meyer’s house was way cool. Mr. Meyer was an architect and this was his house. It looks nothing like any other house around. I can’t describe the style too well, as it wouldn’t conform to any particular one. It was built in 1949 and is a cutting edge mid-century home…very square, and very simple in every detail. This was his baby and makes a pretty cool statement even today. I came to this house when I was first walking, and it is totally familiar – it even smells just as it always has – really cool and comforting for me. Also, Mrs. Meyer was one of my mom’s best pals, and Marjorie and she traveled together to Europe and were best friends until she died. So this was a special place for me to be. Ed Meyer also drove early fifties Studebakers, the beautiful Raymond Loewy designed models that went totally against the gaudiness, chrome and bodaciousness of most cars of the fifties. Loewy designed everything from the logo on the Lucky Strike package (and put the logo on both sides of the package so no matter which side was up when it hit the table the logo was visible), to steam locomotives, the interior of Air Force One and everything in-between…check out his work, it’s easy to find. So even his cars matched the house and spoke to his aesthetic – simple, with form following function.

Some asides…Meyer’s Beach is where my dad used to throw his boat in the water. The boat was a Sabot, which he built in the living room of the house we lived in. It is a fine boat, and he did everything including sewing the sail. Anyway. He would get on this funky old hat with some sort of cushion arrangement, and lift this boat on to his head and carry it across the street and drop it in the water. This is no mean feat. I have never done it myself, and I’m a strong guy. There was a time when we were on the ranch, he was well into his sixties at the time, and walked by the boat and he wondered if he could still do that lift. He went and picked it up and put it on his head. He was walking around like some cock rooster for days afterwards! Anyway. He took me fishing a few times, and off that beach is where I caught my first fish. He had a spinning real and I had a drop line and I got a bite – a big bite. I didn’t really know what I had but it was more than I could handle so dad took it from me and pulled it up, saying that he thought I had hooked a boot. He pulled in this monster fish and I just about jumped ship. Thing was huge to a four year old or whatever I was at the time.

…A bit of background on Mike Meyer. He used to babysit my sister and I and was the coolest babysitter you could ask for. I was just a squirt, so I had to go to bed early, but he would let Debbie stay up late and watch Perry Mason – big doin’s for her. Mike would do drills with her so she could run to her bedroom, kick the brick away from the door and be under the covers pretending to be asleep in seconds. He has always been a great guy. When he got back from Vietnam, he traveled all over the country hitching, buying cheap cars, whatever. He stopped by our house in Los Altos and had a very small knapsack, about the size of a kids school backpack, and a small one at that. He carried an extra shirt and pair of pants and that was about it – He had a great pair of boots, I remember that, but it was my first example in traveling light. I remember sitting on the front lawn with him just before he left and Debbie and a friend left to go someplace, and he made some comment about “College Girls”, and I nodded, trying to be as cool as an eighth grader can be, not knowing what the heck he was talking about. I went with my mom when she dropped him off at the 101 highway entrance and still have the image of him walking down the road with his thumb out and this tiny knapsack burned into my memory. I’ve always looked up to him and still do.

I got to sleep in a room with a view out to Boston. The next morning I got up and went out to the truck to realize that in my haste to make it in the door for dinner I neglected to switch the reefer from twelve volts to propane. Dead battery. So Mike jumps me with his car and I leave it to charge up as we read the paper. The truck is still pretty loud, so it was easy for me to hear as soon as the engine started to sputter. Out of gas. Could I be any worse of a guest? Nobody sells gas anymore in Nahant, so Mike was kind enough to run me over to Chris’s house to get a can and then to Lynn to get some gas. Sheesh – did I feel like a dork. He also took me by the new town wharf on the way back to the house. The town had just rebuilt it on the original footprint, so it looked the same as it did when they used to do the big Memorial Day parade. It was a totally small town parade and everyone that had a uniform would march, both World Wars, the Korean war, Girl Scouts, Cub Scouts, the high school band, and then a helicopter would come and drop a big wreath into the water by the wharf.

I mentioned that I was going to go to church and Barbara said she would like to go as well. The Nahant Village Church was my grandfather’s church for over thirty years, and I have many memories of him in the pulpit. Most of the time when I was there, I was just reading and re-reading the handout trying to assuage my boredom, but I remember well the Reverend Rosmond MacDonald bringing home his points by slamming his fist on the lectern. This was amazing for me to see, as he was the coolest sort of Grandfather and very calm at home. He smoked a pipe and from my earliest days he let me sit in his lap and light his pipe. Over and over again he would let it go out and let me light matches to light it again. Legal playing with matches! And who was going to argue the point with the minister? He was a great guy, but in the pulpit he seemed a different guy than the one whose lap I sat in. Either way though, behind the pulpit or at the house, he walked his talk and took some very unpopular stands because it was the right thing to do. He totally got it. I have some of his sermons from over the years and a few newspaper clippings about one of his shining moments.

He and my grandmother always lived in drafty old parsonages until they finally could afford to build their own house. In the last one, their next-door neighbors were very well to do and their daughter was away at college. She ended up having a stillborn baby by herself and putting its’ body in a trunk in the basement of her sorority house. This was the East coast in the fifties, and this girl was pilloried and the whole thing was front-page news. This girl was going to be practically strung up, or at least go to prison for many years. Though a very unpopular position, my grandfather saw that this was just a very young girl who had made a horrible mistake, and went as far as talking to the governor to get her out of prison. She did get out and ended up having a chance at some sort of normal life and had one, I believe. That one action says a lot about my grandfather and what he was made of. He didn’t just talk the talk.

Going to this church is special for all sorts of reasons. The last time I saw my grandmother I took her to this church. She was a tiny little thing, but in church she could belt out the hymns without even looking at the words – had just a beautiful voice. She was also a big part of my Norman Rockwellian childhood, and would have fresh homemade cookies and vanilla ice cream and seven-up floats for my pals and me when we stopped by on our walk home from school. At the service we sat next to Mrs. Hall, a woman that knew my mom. The minister made an announcement that I was there and asked me to say a few words. Edie Honeywell piped up that she lived in our house; she and her husband bought it from my parents in 1962.  I didn’t have much, but managed to say a few words about my grandfather. The service was comforting for the ritual and memories it evoked. Afterwards, Catsy Fowle came up to say hi, yet another friend of mom’s. Both of these women were well into their eighties, so it was great to see them both, and wonderful to have these people come and say what a good friend my mom was to them.

It was great to hang out with Mike’s wife Barbara. I’ve always thought her to be pretty neat, but this time I got to spend some time with her one-on-one and had some great conversation. On the way back down the hill from church, she pointed out where Longfellow’s’ cabin used to be. I never knew that he used to spend time just up the street, so that was pretty cool to find out. We enjoyed the same beach, Henry and I! Barbara is a professor at Wellesley College in early childhood education and wrote a book on the history of the subject and different models and theories that have been used over time. Both Mike and Barbara are very smart cookies, in addition to being pretty great people.

I left after lunch and went and found my grandparents’ grave and cleaned it up a bit. I sat with them for a short time and headed North to Rockport, my final destination.

Franklin was my first real destination of the trip. The cabin and quarry were my Aunt Jean and Uncle John’s. They bought the property in the early seventies, I believe. Somehow or another, they asked me and cousin Toby to build a fireplace in the cabin. So in 1977, in the middle of a cross-country trip with my girlfriend at the time, Leslie, the three of us went to Maine and built this fireplace. It was a monumental task and hard in all sorts of ways. I’d never laid a brick, nor had Toby, but with the confidence of youth, we built a fine fireplace. It’s a very modest cabin, but the fireplace could be in a place three times its size and look just fine. It is granite on the inside of the cabin, and brick on the outside of the building. On our best day we might have gotten two rows of granite fitted and laid. There is no running water at this cabin, so bathing was done in the quarry, and by the time we were near done it was the end of October and was damned chilly. It was all part of a great adventure and having a fire or two in that fireplace is on the agenda most any time I am anywhere close.

I got there fairly late, so just got my sleeping bag and knocked out for the night. The next day I got up and went in search of Don Anderson, not knowing whether he was still among the living or not. Don built the cabin for Jean and John, and was really good to Toby and me while we were there and gave advice when asked for. I had seen him when Casey and I visited fifteen years ago – the last time I was there. I went to his house and lo and behold, he was there. Now eighty-two, he was in good shape all in all, and lent me a ladder to get the stone off the top of the chimney, as well as a load of firewood to use. He had lost his wife within the last year and even with the typical Yankee stoicism, I could tell how pained he was talking about it.

The second day I was there, I was on the phone, (yes, on the phone – no running water, no electricity, but the cell phone worked most of the time – weird), and I heard the meekest knock at the door. I opened it to find three guys with piles of sleeping bags and so forth standing out there. Turns out it was a guy by the name was Ben Starr, and he was traveling through with his partner of many years and one of his oldest pals. They hailed from Texas, and Ben was on a show called Master Chef. My cousin Michael’s daughter Lisa’s partner Christian Collins, knew him from being on the program himself. (Sorry, but I couldn’t figure a better way to get that out.) I believe Christian came in third on the program. So Ben and his partner Christian (not the same), and his pal JP were just delightful, and here I meet them out in the woods in Maine. Life is indeed strange and wonderful. We had a nice, but brief time together. I may have to look into that show.

I had several things to do at the cabin. The gas wasn’t hooked up, though the tanks were full, the roof was leaking around the fireplace, and a few other things. I got the gas hooked up with the help of a regulator I got at the Home Depot in Ellsworth, got the gas lights working and the stove operational. The gas refrigerator even still worked. Years ago, on the first trip in seventy-seven, it wasn’t working and I determined I needed a part. John informed me that they had thrown the last one away at the dump. I was horrified and went to try to find the old one. I drove in to the dump, past the sign that said “No Burning” and up to the dump proper, which was on fire or smoldering in many places. This was still the seventies, and in this part of Maine, things were still pretty wild – the people were tough. They had to be. Anyway, I got to the top of the pile and looked down to the bottom of the cliff everyone threw their stuff over and clamored down to try to find the old reefer. I found it and had the tools out and was taking off the thermocouple and kept hearing these shuffling noises and so forth. From out of nowhere came this voice from the top of the pile…”Watch out you don’t get shot! People come here to shoot the rats” Great. Talk about making a guy feel safe and comfortable. I forget the guys’ name, but he was a total Down-Easter – around 92 years old at the time, thin as a rail, still driving some sort of huge rusty American car. The summer we were there he painted one of his buildings downtown. These buildings were downtown, and it was a really tall building. He was up two stories painting this thing – just incredible. I fixed the refrigerator, by the way. The oven was another story. The darned thing blew me across the room once way back when, and this time was no different. I tried to light it and the whole oven was in flames. I ended up taking that apart and finding a gaping hole in the main gas line to the oven. I replaced the line with a piece of brake line I got at the Napa store in Ellsworth and bent and flared to fit. I was pretty proud of that one.

My time there, when not trying to get the place back in shape, was spent doing some drawing and painting, taking walks, and even jumping in to the quarry, which in October is brisk, to say the least. I swam the one day that was tolerably warm and I got to hang out in the sun to dry. It was my one good chance. It was great to have the time to paint and write. Though I had great intentions of drawing and painting on the road, there wasn’t as much time for it as I had hoped. Maybe I never did get slowed down enough. At the cabin, however, there was plenty of time, comparatively speaking. It was great being there. The cabin hadn’t had much use for years, so it felt really good to give the whole operation some TLC. I spent the last morning doing the last of the winterizing. I put a fabulous blue tarp roof on the shed/outhouse, put the boards over all the windows and doors and shutting everything up. My intention was to get out and on the road by twelve. In typical fashion, I was on the road by twoish, heading South for Nahant.

I rose early to get to the ferry at Essex. It runs from New York to Vermont across Lake Champlain. I parked the rig in line and wandered around the little downtown area. I was truly in the east now. Since I arrived in the dark, it really hadn’t hit me yet, but the town of Essex was pure New England. It had the requisite church with the tall, thin steeple. The fall colors were in their full glory as well. They apparently were a week or two late this particular year – not too good for the tourists, but pretty fine for me. The ferry pulled in and loaded.

It was a fine old craft, very similar to the Rhododendron, our local ferry that runs from Tacoma to Vashon Island. This was about the same exact size, but even older, built in 1913.  She was named the Adirondack. It had bead board, double hung windows, just a cool old boat. The trip across Lake Champlain was beautiful, with various sailboats getting under way. I got off the boat and headed for Burlington, Vermont. I wasted some time trying to find a part or two for the truck to no avail, and then looked for a breakfast joint.

I found the diner of my dreams on the way out of town. It was called The Parkway, coincidently the name of the little tavern in Tacoma where I met Sandy almost eleven years ago. This place was just plain awesome. Built in the forties, it was a totally original diner, all deco and stainless steel, just a beautiful venerable roadside diner. It had never been moved from the original site, had never been “upgraded”, and was under the ownership of the third Greek family in a row. It was as good a breakfast as I have had – set and setting and all that, but these people knew how to run a diner. The place was packed and ran like a Swiss watch. If you’re ever in the area, I’d highly recommend you stopping by.

I motored on to Montpelier, the capital of Vermont. It is a totally charming New England city – downtown is just a beautiful collection of great old buildings. Lots of brick, and at least three churches you could see at once. I found a great independent bookstore and prowled around a bit, found a fabulous art supply store and bought a nice little portable easel. As I walked back to my truck there was a young guy walking in the same direction and he asked if he could have a ride. His name was Gabriel and he rode with me for a short while. He lived a nomadic life and seemed to be doing just fine.

I breezed through New Hampshire in a heartbeat. In that part of the state it is about forty miles across – hard to believe for a guy from the West coast. I got into Maine and meandered at a slow pace. I decided to stay in Rumford, Maine, as it was named for Count Rumford, who is one of my heroes. He was a contemporary of Ben Franklin, and invented some cool stuff. He was a Tory though and got left out of most history books as a result. The invention that sticks with me is his fireplace design. Called a Rumford fireplace, they are found throughout New England in a lot of the old houses. They are very shallow and tall, and it usually looks like the fire is practically out in the room. By looking at one, you would think it would smoke like the dickens, but they don’t. As a matter of fact, they draw as well as any fireplace you will meet. As well as a specific set of parameters to build one of these fireplaces, he also invented the smoke shelf, which all fireplaces now have. The function of a smoke shelf is to make the wind coming down the chimney make a u-turn and head back up the chimney. Vrest Orton of The Vermont Country Store wrote a wonderful little tome about these fireplaces years ago. I have yet to build one, but it is on my list of things I would like to do.

As it was getting towards dark I saw a sign for the Perennial Inn in Rumford Point. Owned by Jenna and Darlene Ginsberg, it was off the main road a bit, and was the house of a wonderful old farm. There was a nice old barn as well, not to mention a hot tub. It was great. As I got into my room, I saw just what a wildman I looked like. I’m lucky they let me have a room – I was unshaven and had a big old grease stain on my face. I looked quite insane to be honest. Turns out they raised Chocolate Labs and I got to meet one of their dogs. Really a nice dog, so I got my dog fix for a time.

The next day’s drive was just spectacular. Fall colors, a nice road, and I was honing in on my goal – Franklin, Maine. I drove to Bangor and then got on Highway 1A to Ellsworth. I picked up a few supplies and headed to the cabin and quarry in Franklin. I made it before dark. The cabin was still standing and looked to be in fairly good shape. The salt marsh below was just the same, and the quarry, with the exception of the graffiti sprayed on the rock faces, was as beautiful as I remembered.

I got to Buffalo and found my way to a muffler shop. It was a chain, which has some sort of “touch” which shall remain nameless. There was a nice young man at the desk and he said they could do what I wanted. The guy doing the work put the truck up on the lift and we got under and I showed him what I thought the problem was. He was a nice enough guy and seemed like he knew what he was doing. The job typically doesn’t require the skills of a rocket scientist and he didn’t seem to be one. Someone, years before had mounted the exhaust pipes solidly to the chassis, so as the engine moved and vibrated, the tailpipe did not, and this caused problems. It looked to be a repair of an emergency Mexican sort, which are great repairs for the most part, but this one had a design flaw. As an aside, there was a time when I was in Mexico as a young man and we were way out in the sticks – Palenque in the seventies, a very rural place at the time. I watched as these guys were putting a transmission back together in an old jeep. I was stunned as they cut a gasket out of a Ritz cracker box and buttoned it back together. It totally rocked my world…I thought one just couldn’t do such a thing. It worked great, and it has colored my way of working to this day. Similar to Robert Persig using a beer can to make shim stock to tighten up the handlebars on his friends brand new BMW in “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” – one of my road trip sacred texts. It was another thing that “just wasn’t done”, but was in-fact, a fabulous repair. So. Nothing against a “Mexican repair” – sometimes they are the best thing one can do; however this particular one had outlived its usefulness.

The tech and I agreed on what needed to be done and I went in to the waiting room to wait. Meanwhile, the boss comes in, who is not in a very good mood, and is ordering the young guy around like a drill sergeant. A couple of young girls came in with their tailpipe dragging and he was dealing with them and went out to have a look at their car. I could see the kid was having some trouble being pushed around by the boss, and come to find out that he was his father. I commiserated about that a bit and then went out to check on the work. I got to the lift to see a big old dent in the truck. I asked what the hell happened, and the guy had somehow lowered the truck on to a ladder and just bent the heck out of the side of the truck. I am just pissed and go back in to the waiting room and tried to breathe it away so I didn’t blow a fuse and go off on anyone. It’s not like I don’t make some bonehead mistakes myself. I do, and plenty of them to be honest. I calmed myself down enough to go back out, just as the boss is seeing it for the first time and asking the tech how the f**k this happened, and then I’m all up in it, and the boss is getting a wrecking bar ready to start bending things back and I won’t let him touch it. This is a total New York in-your-face sort of guy – we are as far apart in demeanor as the two coasts. He already said that the work would be for free, and showed me a way overpriced, padded bill. All I want to do is get on down the road, but this guy is almost acting like it is my fault this happened, and telling me that I wouldn’t believe the week he’s had and so forth. I am saying that my week isn’t going so damn well either and we end up taking it outside and he’s acting like this is no big deal, and I am talking insurance, and he’s saying “For THAT?” insulting both me and the faithful truck. He’s screaming “What would make you happy? – What would make you happy?” in a totally New York sort of way. “You want money? How about a couple of hundred bucks – would that make you happy?” At that point, I took the two hundred and got the hell out of there. Welcome to New York.

At that point I just wanted to get to New England, so I drove like hell on Interstate 90 to Albany and then north on Highway 87 all the way to Essex, New York, on Lake Champlain, close to four hundred miles, one way or another. I was totally beat, both cumulatively and from the day in general. It was Saturday and I was ready for a real bed and a shower, not to mention a cocktail and dinner. I ended up at the Cobble Hill Inn and sat at the bar with the nicest couple, the Cunningham’s from Elizabethtown. We sat at the bar while I had dinner and a bourbon and we talked about music and stuff for hours and hours, There were no rooms available – not because they were full so much as that nobody comes that time of year. They let me stay in the lot and I crawled out to the truck very late. They introduced me to a shot of some sort called a “Hind Tit”, which I had one of to be social. I’m glad I just had one of those. The next morning could have been painful if I had had more. Josh Cunningham was a music aficionado of the best kind. He loved music more than most things and was in to all sorts of music – he was open to most all of it. They were just a great couple of people. We had a great time together, and it was the good side of my New York experience. Everyone at this place was great.

When I hit New York, New York many years ago, the first time I had delved into the city by myself, it was to go on a blind date with my pal Neal’s grandmother to a reception at MOMA. I was astonished. I had avoided the city for many years – driven by it, because frankly I was intimidated by people just like the muffler guy. You always see that sort of stuff in movies and so forth. I ended up arriving early on a Sunday morning and got out with my dog Sheba and wandered around. The sun was out, it was a beautiful day, and to a one, the people were some of the nicest people you could hope to be around. The city was just crackling with energy, and I was smitten.  The nice people at the Cobble Hill Inn renewed my faith in New Yorkers, and the good people of Essex did the same.

I finally made it through customs at 6:00 P.M. I drove east on Canada Route 11. I headed out to circumnavigate Lake Superior. I didn’t want to drive too long, but I needed to cover some ground as well. I still had a long ways to go. The country was very farm-like to begin with, with lots of cool old barns. There were signs warning of horse and buggies, so I am presuming there was an Amish community somewhere near, but I saw no evidence of that.

Through much of this trip I had tried to stop before dark and get settled. I didn’t quite make it this night. I stopped in the town of Atikokan and got some sleep. Next morning I was up and rolling by 7:45 and drove hard all day. I drove through some hellish fog into Thunder Bay. In the town of Blind River I had some dinner at a tavern and by the time I finished it was getting dark. I had asked about a place to stay and was directed down the road to a place I “couldn’t miss”. Not a lit sign anywhere, as most places were already closed up for the winter. I saw a sign out of the corner of my eye and headed for the place. It was the Beacon on the River Marina & Campground in Spanish, Ontario. It was a few blocks off the main road, and when I found it everything was totally dark – I couldn’t see a thing. So I drove around a bit looking for signs of life, and eventually the lights went on and a very nice couple appeared. Their names were Russell and Jean, and they put me right next to the main store/office. They were just great, and even invited me to their house the next morning for coffee. Russell was about my height and maybe just a smidge older, both he and Jean were great and the conversation the next morning was totally enjoyable. Turned out his parents were Danish and he spent the first few years of his life speaking Danish. They had only had the place since May and were busy getting the place in shape, rebuilding the docks and so forth. It was a full-on marina with a huge lift for pulling good-sized boats. I got a card on my way out and didn’t realize until I was down the road a piece that his last name was Christensen. Wild.

I was rolling early and making tracks. The country was beautiful, and I kept seeing these little rock cairns by the side of the road. Come to find out that they are called “Inukshuks”. The word means “likeness of a person” in Inuktitut, the Inuit language. They were originally created as directional beacons or aids for caribou hunters. Nowadays, they are more a way to say hello or I was here. They are cool little whimsical things. The other things I was seeing constantly were “Night Danger” signs to get you to watch out for moose. Wild stuff in the real sense of the word. I was seeing lots of fall colors, and was mystified by what appeared to be deciduous conifer trees. Turns out they were Tamarack trees and in fact do shed their needles every fall. I guess I get to learn a few new things on this trip.

Next day I pushed hard again and ended up in a little campground in the town of WaWa. I kid you not. WaWa. I found a really nice campground, and with thoughts of old Saturday Night Live skits in my head got a bit of shut-eye.

Next day I headed down the east side of Lake Superior and when I was in the middle of Lake Superior Provincial Park, I decided that I had to get in it. I found a really cool beach and went in for a swim. Swim might be a bit of a stretch – it’s October in Canada – a dip would be a better description, but I did it. It was great. The bottom went out for a long, long way almost flat. It would be a fabulous lake to swim in with a little sun and some warmer temperatures. I motored around the top of Lake Huron, stopped briefly on the outskirts of Toronto and made it to the border at Niagara Falls, figuring to spend several hours getting back across the border into the states. The guy pretty much just waved me through in a few seconds – go figure.

I drove into Niagara Falls and parked a couple of blocks away from the falls and walked to take a look. Even though I had seen it before, it was still pretty awe-inspiring, even at night. I got some dinner and just popped the camper on the street, figuring I was dangerously tired and any ticket I got would be far better than stacking it up somewhere. The next morning I got up and did the full walk around the park and looked at the falls in the light of day. Really amazing. After driving like a banshee for two days straight my header pipe noise was at full volume again, so I set off for Buffalo and a muffler shop.

            I rolled east towards Lower and Upper Red Lake, wondering if I should wait in some town to find out if the hornet that was having a bad day and stung me was going to send me into shock out in the middle of nowhere. I hadn’t ever had a bad reaction to a sting, so I figured what the heck. Red Lake is the largest lake in Minnesota, lower lake being the home of the Red Lake band of the Chippewa Indians. Red Lake is the largest lake in Minnesota, which is sayin’ something in the land of 10,000.

I was in the groove at this point and worked at slowing way down. I was doing forty or forty-five atound the lake and in no hurry. I was already way off of Hwy 2 and ventured farther afield, picking very obscure roads. I ended up on dirt roads way out there. I still had some of my coffee from the junkyard, and in honor of Mr. Steinbeck, added some ”authority” to it. So arrest me, a healthy splash of fine bourbon was just the ticket. If a guy can’t have a small tincture of whiskey out in the sticks, when can he. So now I’m down to twenty-five or thirty. Ambling along at a leasurely pace, figuring my spot for the night would appear. I overtook a porcupine travelling a bit slower than me on the road. It was getting dark, and as I got back to pavement, there it was; Hillman’s Store and Tavern in Washkish. I went into the tavern where Larry Hillman was tending bar. There were a couple of guys there, and Larry said he had a spot with power and showed me to it. Just a beautiful spot, right by the river. By the time I got leveled and raised the camper , everyone was gone from the tavern so I turned around and bunked down for the night. With power, I could settle in and watch an old Perry Mason or Naked City DVD, Fun stuff. You get to see things like Duston Hoffman playing a minor role as a two-bit hood long before The Graduate. Lots of people before they hit it big, and some plain journeyman actors who slugged it out for years and later in life got juicy roles on things like Law and Order – stuff like that.

I had decided to stay a couple of nights to regroup and change the aforementioned exhaust manifold. I was still finding places for everything – just like the boat that Scuppers sailed on. I had a hook for my hat and a hook for my coat, a hook for my pants, etc. etc. etc. Scuppers the Sailor Dog was my absolute favorite book when I was little. Dad would read me a story every night and I always wanted to hear that one. It got so he could be thinking about all sorts of other stuff because he pretty much had it memorized. This cool little dog gets shipwrecked, finds a toolbox, builds a comfy little shack, repairs his ship, and lives happily ever after. Is it any wonder I love to work on stuff? Not to mention that I grew up in a house that dad and mom were remodeling one two by four at a time because that’s about all they could afford. My first memory of a television was a big square black and white job that sat on two cement blocks left over from the foundation. I tell ya, this fixing stuff is in my blood.

Next morning I got up and did the manifold switch. Since I had had the other one off in Whitefish, it was a piece of pie. It went together nicely. I then went for a nice walk to the state park just up the road. Really cool park with an honest-to-goodness fire watch tower that was open to climb. It was really tall and at the top there was a great view of the lake. It just amazed me that this humoungous lake was just sixteen feet deep at its deepest.

As an aside, (and I guess this whole thing is an aside, the way I ramble from one thing to another), when my daughter Casey was very small, I was in a bookstore with my dad and they had reprinted the book. I have a video I took as dad read that story to Casey. Now she could have cared less about the story, but it was a highpoint for me to hear him read that to my child,(and anyone who remotely knew my dad knows how rare being in a bookstore was – not a bookstore sort of guy – Mom yes – Dad no.)

Anyway. It freezes hard there in Northern Minnesota. Lots of ice fishing for Walleye. Big suckers – some over forty inches in length. I talked to Larry about it and he told me that his brother creates an ice road every winter that goes for miles and miles. He developed techniques that his dad taught him and the ice ends up being thicker where the road is because he plows it and leaves the snowdrifts on the downwind side. Where there is no snow to insulate the ice, it freezes thicker. That night I was looking forward to hanging in the tavern and talking to some of the locals. I arrived at five or so to find it closed for the night. Nobody home at all.

That was fine and I got rested up and hit the road north towards International Falls the next morning. The radio said that this particular day was going to be unseasonably warm, so I drove for a while and pulled off on a “minimally maintained” county dead-end road. It went straight for a mile or so and ended. I did about a fifteen point turn-around to get headed back where I came from and settled in to enjoy the sun. Beautiful day. That’s where I did the drawing of the truck. I filled up the Sun Shower with water, had some lunch, did the drawing, and ended the rest stop with a nice warm shower in the sun. Great stuff.

            I got to the border at International Falls and spent quite some time getting through. They were very nice, buy very thorough. And these were the nice guys! I had nothing to hide, but being checked out that thoroughly would make anyone a bit nervous. I just couldn’t wait to come through and talk to our very own Homeland Security boys upon my return.

I motored east and stopped in the town of Warren. It being Saturday, I decided that after a week I could spend the night in a motel, and checked in to the Elm Creek Motel, a great old-style motor court. I had the luxury of a shower and a meal at a little tavern close by and collapsed in bed and watched some TV for the first time in a week. The guy who ran the place had an accent right out of the movie Fargo. Nice guy, who helped me with his pesky internet connection. With all of the homogenization that is happening with all of the instant and worldwide communication, it’s heartening to hear all of the local accents as I move around the country.
Next morning I continued driving on Minnesota highway one. The road was very rural with beautiful farms throughout. By now it was apparent that my exhaust manifold repair didn’t work at all, so I was looking for parts along the way. I spotted a pile of mangled cars and trucks at the side of the road and pulled off. I wandered amongst the junk and was thinking that a lot of people died in these cars – they were just a mess, most totally smashed up. It took me a while to realize that whoever put them there used some sort of a loader with a claw on it– no death and destruction, just somebody that grabs them and stashes them in this pile. There were a few old Fords around and I saw a fine manifold on one, so drove to the nearest farm about a quarter mile away and asked about the parts, not wanting to get arrested or shot or something over some old car parts. There was a nice young man there who knew the guy with the cars and looked him up in the phone book. He got his daughter on the line, who then gave me his cell phone number. His name was Darwin and he said he would sell me a manifold for twenty bucks and I could “just leave it in the loader”. It was a nice afternoon, so I raised the camper up, put on some water for coffee and went to work. It came off easily and there were some other choice parts that I found, so I called my man Darwin and asked if I could pull what I wanted for fifty bucks. He said sure, and I got a bunch of other stuff. I heated up some chili, had a cup of joe and threw parts in the truck and was off. I never even met this guy. It was a great illustration of why things feel so different out in the country. I can’t really imagine that happening in a metropolitan area. That sort of thing is one of the reasons I love being out on the road in remote areas – people are different. Maybe we wouldn’t be comfortable talking politics, but on the level of one person to another, it’s just great; at least that has been my experience through the years. Being out in a junkyard on a nice day with the coffee on in the middle of nowhere was just great. Enjoying such a thing is in my DNA somehow. My mom used to remind me that when I was about three or four and we would be driving from Nahant to Boston, we would pass a huge junkyard and I would be ecstatic saying “Look at all the neat junk, mom!” Some things never change. I don’t know where that came from, but it has always been so with me.
I listened to a lot of country music on the radio out there – not that there was a whole lot of choice! There was a song that played shortly after my parts gathering episode about a guy just wanting to go on “some old back road”. It was a pretty cool song, as it talked about how an old back road cleared his head. There is something to that for me. There is immediacy about rolling down the road and having nothing but a rig and taking care of it and paying attention to that little microcosm. Compared to life in general, it is a much simpler thing. Of course there are problems that crop up, especially in a thirty-eight year old truck, but for me, that is part of the trip. Things can go wrong, but it creates opportunities to meet interesting people. (Or not, as in Darwin’s case) My friend Bob Patterson once told me, “Pete, you’re the only guy I know who will break something just so he has something to fix!” I see it just a bit differently, but I have to admit there is some truth in what he said.
This brings me to another thing. Why take such an old truck on this trip? My wife Sandy wondered that, like why I didn’t take my newer little panel truck or some such. I told her that anyone could take a new rig across the country, but that wasn’t my deal – that would be someone else’s trip. There’s no sport in taking something new, at least not for me, it’s just not as interesting. More importantly though, I think that machines, just like people, get more soul as they age. This sucker has been deep into Mexico. She has some miles under her. An older machine has earned a little respect, just as an older person should.
A little illustrative story…there was a time long ago, in the 1970’s when Ken Kesey was going to speak at the Evergreen State College in Olympia. A bunch of us decided to go down to see him, so we piled in to the Banana Boat, my 1951 GMC one-ton panel truck, to drive to Olympia from Tacoma. So I’m all excited, he being one of my major heroes, and have a load of hippies in the back, and as we are getting on to I-5 the truck just starts to run like hell, coughing and sputtering. People were a little nervous, but I spanked the old girl on the dashboard and told her to straighten up and fly right and she just smoothed right out. Purred like a kitten the whole way down and back. People in the truck were impressed, (as was I, to be honest), but more interesting than that was that in Kesey’s ramble that night, he talked about his ‘63 Mercury Comet that he drove for years and how that car got him places in part because he loved that car. His point was that love works with inanimate objects as well as living things. It’s the only part of his talk that I remember, and I really believe it to be true.
My parents were given a Chevy when they were married, and my mom named it, “Oink”. I remember from and early age her patting it on the dashboard and talking to it. We lived in the land of salted roads, so the typical East Coast rust took its’ life after a while. At one point, one of the fenders was flopping around loose from the rust damage, and mom got out there with a wrecking bar and ripped the sucker off. She drove it for a few more years with no fender. She loved that old car, and it got her where she needed to go for many years. Now, don’t get me wrong, this old junk and these old vehicles don’t rise to the level of my relationships with people, and the love is of a different sort, but it is there, and I think it is real.
So an old machine. Ibs’ truck was made when our country was still making the best stuff. Granted, the cars of the seventies slid pretty far downhill, but it took a few more years before the trucks followed. If you go back a few years earlier, back in the sixties, you really couldn’t buy a bad American vehicle. I don’t care what it was; they were designed well and put together nicely as well. We were full of ourselves, and riding high and it showed in what we made in the states. Not that vehicles haven’t improved since then – they have. Unfortunately, up until fairly recently, it was the Japanese and other countries who were building cars that were the best. I think that the American auto industry is on its way back, but there is a reason some of the companies almost went belly-up. The product wasn’t up to par. We used to make the best stuff in the world. Not so much anymore. Heck, we don’t make much of anything anymore. We need to get that back. We need to honor the people that can design and build good things and do it right here in this country.
Thinking along those lines and probably just to be a stubborn old coot, when I was packing up tools for the trip, I decided that there wasn’t going to be one metric wrench in the box – not one. Part of the reason for this trip was to refresh myself and to remind myself just what a great country we live in. I needed to get back into the heart of it and not listen to the pundits and naysayers – to see for myself how we are doing. So I brought tools from that era, when nobody needed any damned metric tools. And having an old soulful machine is a good thing in another way. It is a conversation starter – people want to know about it. They might think I’m a bit nuts, but they are curious. When one gets out and meets people one-on-one, it is invigorating to realize how many great people there are around the country. And a lot of them appreciate an old, soulful machine,

I drove around the south end of Glacier Park and saw my first fall colors. I crossed the great divide on red pavement and drove on through Shelby, where I tuned in to a radio station that played Blackfoot Indian chants on the hour. I was in the true west now. Outside Selby I saw Lake Elwell on the map and headed for that. It was several miles off of Highway 2 and was dirt the whole way. It turned out to be some sort of reclamation area, and was very primitive. I was planning to take another stab at fixing the leaking manifold and needed to let things dry for fifteen hours before I could run again. I got the work done just as it was starting to rain, had a nice dinner and went to bed as the weather turned just as predicted – NASTY. Turns out it hadn’t rained since May in the area, and it took this Northwesterner to bring some rain to the area. Not just some – an inch and a quarter through the night, while it blew like stink. I got up the next morning to be greeted by my changed surroundings – a total mud hole. Once I was packed and ready to go, I headed out. I started down one road and knew I’d sink to my axles, so picked another route out. I had put some great mud and snow tires on the rig before I left and they sure came in handy on this morning. It was some of my favorite kind of driving – really slippery and slidey – in these situations it’s really important to keep the momentum up and just feel the rig. No over correcting. It’s a beautiful thing – being right on the edge of disaster. And being fifteen miles from the nearest paved road made it just that much more so. It was a great beginning to the day.

I gassed up in the town of Chester, got some propane and drove on Propane for a tank. I stopped for lunch in a tiny town named Rudyard. And weird as it may seem, there was this cool little car museum there, right in the middle of nowhere.  Turns out that some German guy came through a few years ago on a motorcycle, saw this building, decided that the town needed a car museum, bought the building, and gave it to the town.

I spent the night in Glasgow in a comfortable RV park and headed out early the next morning. It was still rainy and windy. The truck was running well and I ran to Wolf Point, where I got some supplies and gassed up. I headed out of town and got not more than a mile out of town when the truck started running like hell. I swung it around and limped back in to town. I tried three places, a small shop, the Ford dealer and the Chevy dealer and nobody could help, so I went on my way and ended up dead in the water in the middle of a back alley. Truly dead in the water, as it was still raining cats and dogs and the truck was in a big ‘ol puddle. And then along came Andy Schultes, a young cowboy, who asked if I needed any help. He got his pal, Matt Ransom, and they ran me back and forth to the auto parts store not once, but twice and hung out with me until I had her running again. Turns out that the gas I got in town did something to the propane solenoid and starved me of gasoline. I ended up buying them both lunch – just a great couple of guys, and just the sort of magic I hope for on the road.

I headed east on two into North Dakota. The highway turned into a four-lane road at the border, a little too big for my taste. This was a fairly busy area as it is where the oil shale fields are. It is a total boomtown situation. There is work to be had there so it is crowded. Andy and Matt warned me about how crowded the area was, and they were sure right. The RVs were stacked like cordwood with no room at the inn. I had also been told of the flooding that happened a year ago when the Souris River overflowed in the city of Minot. There was unbelievable destruction as I drove around town. I remember reading about it in the news, but it sure brings it home to see such a thing in person – There were stacks of debris piled up all over town. I couldn’t find any place that would take me, so I ended up parking on the street downtown. There was a nice wine and tapas bar, which I made use of. Tapas in Minot, North Dakota…who woulda thunk it? I got up the next morning thinking I could find a cool old breakfast joint – a three-calendar place, as William Least-Heat-Moon called it in “Blue Highways”. The place was packed with a whole bunch of locals and a waitress who was probably close to eighty and still totally on her game.

I wandered around downtown, found a cool independent bookstore, got a few books and hit the road. This four lane road stuff was just too big for me, so I hooked over to highway one and traveled east on that road. Much better. Hit the Minnesota border around six that evening.

Tales from the Christensen Cruiser. It got that name the night before we left. Richard Turner brought a nice, cheap bottle of Champagne and busted it over the front bumper, christening it with that name, which he said just came to him. It was Ib’s truck, and was probably right up there with the most extravagant thing he ever bought for himself. He gave it to me la year or two before he died, and had many ideas for it, including bringing it to Richard’s place in Mexico. Ib took this rig deep into Mexico and it was the ultimate camper for him, a big step up from the Volkswagen buses he took as far as Central America in years before. I had decided to take Ib’s set-up a few weeks before, changing my plan to take the 68 Camper Special. Ib’s truck is just weird enough to make things interesting; like that it runs on both gasoline and propane. It has monster tanks for both fuels. Problem was that it hadn’t been used since I last used it in 2004 or so, and it had a few problems then. It had been mostly sitting for the past several years, but even after sitting for months, it fired right up for me. I drove it a bit and it was so much easier to drive than my other trucks. Power steering, power brakes, automatic transmission…all things that I am opposed to in a truck, but for this trip, it was just perfect. It changed my mind and I decided to take it. It is a 1973 Ford Ranger Camper Special with only 74,000 miles on it.

Fortunately, I had made out a report for Ib as to the condition of the rig so I had an outdated to-do list to start with. I knew the fridge was toast, so I scored a very cool replacement, which runs on 110 volts, gas, and also 12 volts, so you can keep things cold off of the truck’s alternator while you’re running. I had to take the camper off the truck to get at all of the propane lines and tanks so they could all be checked and certified, I off-loaded it in the back of the Brick House and took the truck to a great place in Auburn to get worked on. After that, I had to get the tires organized. Ya see, I have four old Ford trucks, (you’d have to know me…), and the tires were all wrong…long story short, I believe I changed a total of twenty tires to get all of the trucks shod in a way that made sense, and end up with the best tires on the truck making the cross-country journey. In doing so, I couldn’t help but notice that the brakes had never been replaced, so the nice folks at Stadium Titus-Will did that job for me. (This is progress people; at least I didn’t do that job myself!)

I had to unload all of my stuff out of the 69 ford camper that I also had, and get all of Ib’s stuff out of the Alaska camper, sift it all and pick what I wanted out of all of it. I got and installed the new fridge, but the door swung the wrong way, and it being a modern design, one couldn’t just switch the hinges to the other side, like on most refrigerators. Strange, they had that one figured out in the sixties – now they have to redesign that idea so it requires a totally new set of hinges, which I then had to order from Texas a week before lift-off.

I had help from Cos putting the camper back on the truck, a very nerve-wracking job, fraught with possibility of disaster, which was fortunately averted. Harold helped with the installation of the new refrigerator, and I threw whatever I thought I would need into the back of the truck. This getting ready to go rest, renew, and relax is hard work.
That’s always been the case – the hope is always that all the work ahead of time will make the trip go a bit more smoothly. It doesn’t always work out that way, but it’s what one shoots for anyway.

Sandy had a nice bon voyage get together with Harold and M.L. and Richard and Carol on Friday night. The only hitch was that Barclay; our twelve-year-old Golden Retriever wasn’t eating and not doing well.  He had a hard night, and wasn’t remotely interested in food, even treats. Saturday morning he was right on the path to the truck, keeping his eye on me as I packed my last stuff. I had a talk with him asking him to try to last until I got back to die, and also told him if he couldn’t wait that was fine too. I managed to get everything on board, said my goodbyes, and was on the road by one o’clock.

I planned to take US 2 across the country, a fine looking blue highway that crosses the country in the north, then cross over in to Canada at International falls and motor over the North side of Lake Superior and end up in Maine. To start, however, I thought I would stick to 90 until I determined how all systems were operating. I made it through North Bend and over Snoqualmie pass with no problem, reminding myself of the time I blew up the Banana Boat so badly that I threw a rod through the oil pan and the oil was boiling it was so hot. A longer story than I want to tell right now, but mentally, it was a nice hurdle to sail over mentally and physically. The truck was running well.

I spoke with Sandy and she had taken Barclay in to the vet and he was winding down – his heart rate was really fast and systems were failing. He had been failing for some time, but I had no idea that he was so close to death. Sandy had the very tough job of putting him down that night. The night I left. Sheesh. One of the toughest parts of having an animal is when that decision needs to be made. I had been saying goodbye for several months, but it was shocking that it happened when it did. He was a very wise old soul, and right up there with the finest dogs I have known. He also was the last living connection to my parents.

I made it to Vantage on the Columbia and pulled over for the night. The camper looked like a tornado had hit it – stuff strewn all over. I got out two ancient cans of Dinty Moore stew and had an easy dinner. Next morning I spent a couple of hours finding where things should go and stowing stuff. About this time I started to realize some of the stuff I had forgotten, the most amusing being that I had packed no shoes. I had the one pair of Stan Smiths that I was wearing with the holes in them and that was it. No address book as well. Those were the biggies, but in the big picture no big deal.

The next day, Sunday, the second, I motored east in a fairly casual manner, stopping wherever I felt like it, getting supplies. I found a pair of shoes at a western store in Ellensburg that fit well enough. I left Interstate 90 towards Spokane and ventured on to two lane roads, passed through Spokane heading to Idaho on US 2. I decided to stay in Sandpoint Idaho and stayed at a motel that had some RV spots for a fee. Twenty bucks got me power and water and the use of their pool, hot tub, and shower. Pretty good deal.

Monday was a beautiful day, and I made use of it tooling through Idaho and western Montana. I stopped near the border and drew a picture and sat in the sun for a while. Had a great time stopping at junk stores and yard sales. I stopped at Logan state park in Montana. It was the first time I had been totally on my own – no hook-up whatsoever, just what I had on board. It was a small park, on Lake Thompson. Tons of birds, but not another soul, not even anyone from the park.

Next day I visited Noel Poux and his wife Bonnie in Whitefish. Noel is my old friend Doby’s brother and I hadn’t seen him for years. I had never been to his place and it was just great. He is a rabid hunter and has amazing animal heads all over his barn. Beautiful house and compound in general. It also has a shop to die for, so I asked if I could do a little work on the truck. I had an exhaust leak on my driver’s side manifold. I managed to get all eight bolts loose without breaking one, which for you non-mechanics out there is a major victory. It was only as I was tightening it up that I saw the crack in the manifold. So it’s better, but needs a new manifold. The bonus is that since I have been in there and gotten everything loose, replacing it will be a cinch. I got to meet one of Noel’s best pals who was just taking some fresh jerky he had made out of the oven. Probably the best jerky I have ever tasted, there was both elk and buffalo if I remember correctly. Bonnie made a great dinner and then introduced me to their totally nuclear massage chair, which I let have its way with me until bedtime. The next morning we went to visit his mom Shirley, who I had known while Doby was still alive. I hadn’t seen her since he died. Nice visit.

After that I hit the road and made tracks east. More to come…