Outfitted

Minneapolis, MN--Enjoying these last throes of Internet access and preparing (logistically, mentally, technically) for the trip.  I have little idea if it's going to go absolutely according to plan or if the kayak will prove impossible to navigate and the bike will break and the campsites will all be either very expensive or overrun.  On one hand I'm tremendously excited and on the other I feel a little anxiety creeping in but I'm confident it will dissipate when we finally arrive at Itasca.  We're going to spend a few days paddling around the lake and learning to judge distance from observation to map and back, and doing various other things.

Tonight we'll be doing various small logistical things and tomorrow driving up to Lake Itasca State Park to putter around for a few days.  I have absolutely no idea what kind of connectivity will be possible, so I might not post for a few days or more, but I will write blog entries and then at some point post them all at once, in order, so be on the lookout for stuff like that.  Pretty tired tonight, and various other things to do so will sign off for now and maybe write more later.

Outfitting

Minneapolis, MN--Went shopping at REI today ("outfitting" in the outdoorsman's lexicon, but never doubt the fact that it's shopping, and the kind of shopping where you nod knowingly a lot as the salespeople talk but trust me, you're not getting anything past them) and later, after we realized that the guys at REI just did not know what they were talking about when it came to kayaking (camping they could do, but somehow they inspired less than absolute confidence when it came to the activities where we could potentially actually get hurt), at a local place called Midwest Mountaineering, where we were instructed by a very knowledgeable, but somewhat blunt in both thought processes and demeanor, salesman named Guy, pronounced a la Francais, who while nice and possessing of an at least vague understanding of the word "budget" insisted that we buy the $3000 world-class touring kayak, or if not that then we absolutely had to get the $2500 somewhat-more-problematic-but-still-world-class touring kayak, or if not that then well he supposed we could make it down the river completely safely and pretty comfortably in this here more durable $1500 kayak.  So tomorrow bright and early we will arise and make our way to the store and most likely purchase (but not take with us quite yet because we're still having slight problems with the rear bar of the roof-rack) a big ol' kayak like the Arctic Injuns use, except engineered to within an inch of its life and built of heavy-duty polyurethane instead of, well, wood.

So what we have decided to do is this.  We don't want a tandem kayak.  So what we will do is alternate between driving, biking, and kayaking, one mode of transportation per person per day (the driver would have the option of taking the bike out for a jaunt because the kayak will most days be by far the slowest to the next campsite).  This will allow for fuller individual exploration and might also just be more fun--kayaking day after day after day would probably get exhausting (and potentially boring?), and I'm liking the idea.  So our plan seems to be to head up to Lake Itasca either Wednesday afternoon/evening or Thursday and camp there for a couple of days before actually leaving, so we get to explore the area.  One thing I hadn't quite realized about the trip is that we're not rigidly beholden to actually moving camp every single day, and that we can take a day trip every now and then if some site of interest is off the trail a little, and that we can adjust our distances and even skip some short sections of the River if it's safer and more expedient to do so (this last part seemed to elude Guy; either that or he had an excellent grasp of it which for quite obvious reasons he never demonstrated--a really good salesman, like a card player, never reveals his intelligence).

Feeling a little like Bartok must have the first time he did recordings, not knowing exactly how every detail might work even as he knew approximately what he was getting into.  Obviously there are better examples, but this one seems somehow appropriate in that he was cataloguing folk songs for two reasons: (A) to record for posterity and academic study, and (B) for source material for creative work.  Eve and Richard both lean a little one way or the other, maybe, but each of them, and the project as a whole, is trying to achieve some sort of mix of the two, and as I'm not sure on which side I really belong (not that I feel an urge to be on one side or the other, convenient as it might be to choose once and for all, and not that they're even at odds at all because the whole basis of the project is that they decidedly aren't).

Not sure what kind of Internet access might be possible when we do reach Lake Itasca but hopefully we'll be within twenty minutes' drive of civilization most of the time.

Twin Cities

Minneapolis, MN--Just arrived at the hotel in downtown Minneapolis having finally (finally!) crossed the Mississippi.  Midwestern cities always just spring up out of nowhere--you're in farmland and perhaps some suburban sprawl but nothing too dense, and all of a sudden BLAM you're staring up at skyscrapers and feeling your physical insignificance in a slightly different dimension from the farmland's enormous plains and sky.  Been reading Canterbury Tales since I clearly didn't understand them at fifteen years old, and consequently have been thinking in incoherent Chaucerian couplets all day.  It's actually kind of fun, especially when you don't show them to anyone else.

Minneapolis and St. Paul border each other across the Mississippi--glance at a map of the area and you'll get a mental image in your head of what it looks like on the ground, which is a large-scale version of the Twin Villages (if you're reading and you happen to have never been to Damariscotta-Newcastle, Maine, Google it).  You'll be wrong.  Approaching from the east along I-94, you see 'scrapers in the distance and assume you're looking at both Minneapolis and St. Paul together.  Then you arrive, and you start noticing that instead of going through, you're going around this (blatantly false) city center, as though it's a giant trompe l'oeil built by Paul Bunyan expressly to fool arrogant amateur geographers like myself.  It turns out that downtown St. Paul is a good five miles or more from downtown Minneapolis--they're both located against the River, but if the River forms a giant V, they're located at the two upper points.  So you pass the 'scrapers of St. P and then drive through a bit more suburban stuff and then you can finally see those of Minneapolis.  It's a bit of a mind-fuck, at least if you're arrogant enough to think, having only seen a map, that you know what it looks like on the ground.

Going to dinner, might post again later.  Free high-speed wifi is a goddamn blessing.

Ferry

Lake Michigan--Currently aboard the SS Badger, crossing Lake MI from Ludington, MI, to Manitowoc, WI.  Apart from yesterday's kayaking, it's my first time on a Great Lake.  They look like an ocean, feel like an ocean but, you know, aren't.  The ocean (I'm going to continue to think of this as the ocean, and to expedite thinking and writing will continue to call it the same) seems to me a terrific spot to write--music, a journal, stories, even the vaguest sketchings, to simply record.  It is, in a way, everything at once.  It figures in everything, fuses the widest disparities.  You perceive distance and scale in disproportionate and sometimes frightening ways.

Observation

Beulah, MI--Saw three deer this afternoon, two fawns and their mother, in the backyard of Eve's family's house.  I'm anticipating quite a bit of this kind of thing, but I'm curious to see just how much of my writing and thinking these kinds of observations will occupy.  When I think about this trip as an experience independent of any sort of goals, it's easy to imagine myself gliding down the River, mouth agape at all the wondrous things I'm seeing for the first time.  But the goals of the project demand more than just observation--I can't just walk into town, not speak to anybody, and expect to meet all the people who will make this trip what it's supposed to be.  Observation is what college was for; I wasn't expected to make any meaningful contribution to, well, anything of value or substance.  To take part in something potentially meaningful, something that hasn't done before, demands more than just observation, though of course the ability to be stupefied and to observe intently and with wonder is crucial to doing anything.  But I've already learned that ability--you could say I've almost mastered it--and to be an adult might mean doing more than that.  So maybe being a critic either means subjugating entirely the willingness and desire to be astounded, or possessing the ability to reflect, more or less objectively, on the time one has spent observing.  This is getting a little abstract, not to mention far-fetched, so I'm going to abandon this line of thinking before I get to befuddled.  Anyway.

Day Off

Beulah, MI--Arrived yesterday evening after driving from Rochester, NY, through Canada.  To be in Canada as an American, briefly, is to be as though in a dream.  I don't mean anything too pretentious or dramatic by that, just that in dreams the world is recognizable--we can function pretty well, we know our way around, we know what things do--but the details are just different enough for you to know you're not exactly at home, either, and that's what happens in Canada.  Signs are in French as well as English, even though you didn't take some long trip over the ocean (that, of course, is the other thing--it only happens during car trips, because you expect things to be different after a plane ride).  The half & half with which you are provided for your coffee is labeled "10%" because of course that's how much milk fat is in half & half.  "Stony" is spelled "Stoney".  The speed limit is called "Maximum" and is measured in kilometers per hour.  All these examples are obvious, of course, and not even that weird necessarily, and someone who had never been to Canada could probably imagine more.  There are places in the United States, I'm sure, in which this effect is even greater, and in fact I feel the same way in the South as I do in Canada (at least in terms of dream-like subtleties).  But the point is that it's a nice start to the trip, which of course will be a radical departure from the daily life I've known for so long.

[Later the same day.]

In a coffee shop in Beulah eating a mocha chip muffin and doing Internet things because the house at which we're staying only has dial-up.  Went kayaking in Crystal Lake this afternoon, which besides being a lot of fun was helpful, because the water was very pleasant and so we could practice falling in and getting back on the kayaks.  Unfortunately, my skin is now quite dry and consequently very itchy--not the itch of a bug bite but the itch you just cannot satisfy and which roams all over, while a bug bite, however annoying, is in a predictable and consistent location.  I smell like lake.  The itchiness is also such that contemplation is all but impossible; my span of attention, normally such a source of pride and boon to my thinking and writing facilities, is currently running at about two seconds long.  I must find some moisturizer.

From the cafe we move to the library and then back to the house, and we leave for Minneapolis real early Sunday morning, taking a ferry across Lake Michigan.  Internet should be consistent there, so I'll update whenever I can.

Night #1

Pittsford, NY--Just out of Rochester, quick post before I go to bed.  Drove from Brandon and got here around 7:30--took a quick break to see the Erie Canal up close.  It could do with a cleaning.  Will probably write more tomorrow night, when I don't face the prospect of an early departure.  For now, things are going well and morale is high.  Eve is very easy to get along with (I hope, but have not confirmed, that the feeling is mutual), which makes it easier to endure the small discomforts of which I wrote this morning.

Sleep well, world.

Final Prep; Packing The Car

Brandon, VT--I'm currently sitting in the upstairs lounge of the Brandon Public Library, staring at my computer, uncertain as to what frequency of connectedness I will have over the next few days.  Brandon's a nice little town, a lot like Lee, MA, with a regionally important road cutting through the middle, and the silence, of what probably used to be a truly quiet town.  Lots of small independent shops: a French-style cafe here, a sandwich shop there.

Been reading George Orwell's Facing Unpleasant Facts.  Orwell's fascination with the details and the tactile experience of life, and the effects of the same on the way we think about living, seem useful for my thinking about this trip.  I'm anticipating constant aches, fatigue, dirty hands, and wet feet; but these sacrifices seem perfectly reasonable in pursuit of knowledge/creativity/the new in the same way that he justifies a soldier's life in defense of socialism/one's country.

Woke at five o'clock this morning to enormous mountain (enormous not in objective fact, but in perception only--their closeness made them so) peeking through clouds.  The dawn was so overcast that the sunrise was imperceptible, the way a frog is said not to feel water heating up (I've heard many times that the frog thing just isn't true--but I like it, and in addition I'm positive it applies to humans, so I usually just treat it as an apt proverb or something).  Finished organizing and deciding what to bring, so we just need to return to the cabin and pack up the car, and then we're off to Rochester!

It feels, at this point, that the mere fact of my going on this journey gives me some sort of license to write whatever I feel like writing--or maybe I just feel that way because I have so much time to think, at least so far.  Maybe being so far away from the world, with just books and one other person, makes it not only easier but practically necessary to have thoughts that are worth expressing.  You can't give yourself over to passivity to books or conversation the way you might to television or, I think, the internet, where in both cases the speed of information overwhelms your ability to cut through with thought.  That's may be utter crap, but I'm doing something Important, so you should feel obligated to read it anyway.

Not sure if I'll have internet tonight (I'm assuming so, but I'll have to wait and see), so in any case either there'll be another post tonight or tomorrow.

-Mac

Preparing

Newcastle, ME--I am preparing for a trip.  I am searching for lost things and trying to get my life in order (though I would be satisfied with merely getting my thing-life in order) before I leave tomorrow morning.  Preparing for a prolonged camping trip is, I'm discovering, entirely unlike preparing for a normal trip.  Regardless of a trip's length, when one anticipates staying in hotels or houses or at a friend's home, one can anticipate the End, the return to shelter.  Not so for this.  Every detail must be considered, every problem prepared for, every discomfort anticipated.  Of course the task is impossible, and thus preparing for the trip becomes an exercise in preparing for problems and discomforts.  To insist otherwise is to bring one's home along on the trip, a man fighting a strong wind--and could there be anything more grotesque?

The packing is nearly finished, but since I'm leaving at the unholy hour of 8:45 a.m., the frantic packing in the morning is becoming the frantic packing at night, and so I sign off.