Big Turn West
Aug. 7
27,990 miles on the odometer.
Let's face it: We needed a bath. Well, I needed a bath.
"A little chilly, but not bad," was the way Bet recorded our morning dip in Lake George in or journal.
The Smiths invited us over to breakfast. We chatted for a while, then packed the bike and headed back to the highway, following the glittering St. John upstream. The river reflected the soft blue of the fair skies, and the rolling hills along the valley were lush green. Each town, no matter how small, had its church, usually a grand edifice with a towering spire, as a pin marks a berg on a wall map. The motor purred, staying cool with the passing wind doing its work on the deep fins of the cylinder heads above my toes.
Passing Grand Falls, we made the big turn: We were now on our way west.
Route 2 still kept us snug to the Maine border on the Canadian side of the St. John as far as Edmundston, where we headed northwest on Route 185 to Riviere du Loup along the great St. Lawrence River. We stuck close to the river on Route 132 and crossed into Quebec over the landmark steel cantilever bridge, which looks like a pair elongated diamond shapes shoved into each other.
Our first stop was at a little store where we bought some Laurentide beer, cheese and bread, and then made our way to the old section of the city. With the help of Bet's French, we found a little hotel on St. Louis Street. Our room had evidently been painted by someone on a nightmarish psychedelic binge, with day-glo designs over black. No matter; it was only $14 Canadian for a night. We walked the narrow streets past the artisans and hippies, and rode the incline down to the river.
Aug. 8
28,381 miles on the odometer.
Instead of breaking away early we walked around Old Quebec some more, visiting the Plains of Abraham, a flat park overlooking the St. Lawrence and site of a Revolutionary War military engagement.
By 11 a.m., we were packed and on the BMW again. Anxious to move west, we followed Canada Route 20 in an arrow-straight southwestern line toward Montreal, encountering an early-afternoon thunderstorm along the way. A few of the big drops hit us like stinging bullets before we made it to an underpass, where we stopped for shelter as sheets of rain loosened from the thunderheads splashed down. I took the opportunity to rest my eyes and sprawled over some rocks lining the grade inside the guardrail. I fell fast asleep.
Bet awakened me when the storm passed and we headed back out, following the lines where cars' tires had passed and the roadbed was a little drier. The highway at last made a swooping curve toward Montreal. The traffic volume had picked up considerably by the time we entered a tunnel leading into the city. This was where we encountered one of the few intentionally dangerous drivers we would see along the trip.
The smoothly paved road was still wet inside the tunnel, and the watery mix with road oil made the surface even more treacherous. The driver in the car in front of us suddenly hit his brakes hard for no apparent reason other than to cause an accident or scare us to death. I heard Bet squeal as I pumped both sets of brakes without losing control of the bike. We stopped a few feet from his bumper. This was no time to get angry, and there wasn't much I could do anyway except to take a deep breath, give him plenty of space and keep on going. I still don't know what set the guy off; maybe he just didn't like motorcycles or thought I was following too closely.
In any case, we made it into the warm, muggy city at about 3:30 p.m. and drove around a bit, not having any idea where we were going. We finally found a Vietnamese restaurant downtown and parked the bike so we could eat.
With plenty of daylight left and the storm past, we decided to break for Ottawa. From Route 20, we followed 342 and 40 to Route 17 into Ontario. We cut off to Route 417, known as the Queensway, which looped us into the national capital. Once in the city, we found a municipal park that welcomed campers.
We had driven 297 miles for the day, not too bad. Our lean-to, which I fastened to the top of a picnic table, qualified our makeshift shelter as the hands-down shabbiest in the place, an eyesore that turned more than one head for a second look. But we took some relief in knowing we wouldn't be there long, and that was unfortunate. Having no idea that Ottawa would just a few years in the future be our home, we had no idea of the beauty of the Canadian city known in its early days as Bytown.
With the arrival of 1980, we would be living a couple of blocks from the Rideau Canal, where I would launch my canoe and spend hours paddling to the locks that lower boats to the Ottawa and Gatineau rivers. I would paddle past the booms of logs driven down river to lazy upstream waters that seemed a thousand miles from civilization. Some days, I would paddle Bet to her classes at the Carleton University campus. We could walk across a bridge to another culture in Hull, Quebec, just north of the city. In the winter, Bet would skate to her college classes if it wasn't too cold, I would skate half of the day and sometimes into the night. The gardens and parks lining the canal would burst into brilliant colors when the tulips sprang forth in the spring. Museums, libraries, Parliament, shops and restaurants all within a short walk of our apartment. A major provincial park and ski area were a short drive away. Ottawa would give us a hometown, community feel in large city.
But this night, we were the slum of Municipal Park, two strangers just passing through.
Aug. 9
28,678 miles on the odometer.
But our lean-to worked when it counted.
At 5:45 a.m. a thunderstorm hit. We huddled under it until the worst of the storm passed, then hustled our gear off to the ladies' room and folded it up. Luckily, we had no early-morning visitors as we occupied the campground privy. By 6 a.m., the bike was ready and we were back on Route 17 again. The clouds cleared quickly as the morning sun warmed up. Well out of the city, we stopped in a little diner for some breakfast, hoping for a break in the weather. Suspecting we had a long day ahead, we loaded up on eggs, flapjacks with plenty of maple syrup, and several refills of coffee.
The sky was bright blue when we walked out of the modest, flat-roofed place, and it turned out to be a great day for riding. And as we had guessed, it would also be one of our longest, if not the longest, days in terms of miles, virtually all on the relatively straight Route 17.
At lunch time we stopped in a little tavern in an old brown wooden building just along the side of the road, I'm not sure where, but likely in the North Bay area of Ontario.
Back on the road, we hit six straight miles of unpaved roadway as we approached Sudbury, so it was a relief as we got back onto pavement and made our way due west for Sault Ste Marie.
The dusty swirls along the dirt roadway where construction slowed us down brought to mind stories told by Bet's grandfather, who had crossed the continent back in 1929, nearly a half century before our try.
Jake McKinney and his friend Elmer Caldwell were 21 years old when they left Delaware County in southeastern Pennsylvania, bound for Ukiah, California.
Their transportation was a 1926 Ford Model T touring car. The going was much slower then, Jake had said. You see, most of the roads were dirt then.
When it was dry, well, the dust just kicked up and covered everything, filled up your nose and throat. In the rain, there were deep, soft puddles that mired you down and had you slipping and sliding. They were narrow, too, and not always crowned right the way they are now, so you didn't know what to expect going around your next turn.
Never know what you might hit along those dirt cowpaths, and the tires being what they were, why, there were blowouts and flats all the time, Jake told us.
That's why it took Jake and Elmer a year to make the trip.
For sleeping arrangements, the Model T was equipped with three boards and a three-inch pad which Jake and Elmer spread across the seats from front to back at night. They covered up under a tarpaulin when the weather wasn't favorable.
We did most of our sleeping in the car, Jake recalled.
Attached to the running board was a box Jake and Elmer made to carry their food and cooking supplies. A two-burner gasoline stove was the kitchen.
The motorcycle had developed a slight skip in its usually steady purr by the time we reached Sault Ste. Marie. Nothing serious, but certainly worthy of attention. I waited for the blip to vanish, but it didn't. I would tend to it at the first opportunity, I told Bet. We'll be due for an oil change soon, maybe by the time we get to Minnesota, and I'll check it out then.
With the great locks and busy shipping canals below us, we crossed the bridge into the upper peninsula of Michigan. The Customs officers ordered me into a garage, where they pulled my tank bag apart and checked the nooks and crannies of the sleeping bag on the rear rack. After 20 minutes or so we were told we were free to re-enter the U.S.
Twenty or so miles into Michigan, we found Brimley State Park, where I had camped a few years earlier on a frosty April night with my cousin Chuck, who had been living in the Midwest at the time.
We had done 517 miles by the time we were finished for the day. The weatherworn lean-to went up again in a similar fashion as at our last stop in Ottawa, and we had once again established a slum colony in an otherwise respectable campground. Well, somewhat respectable. The BMW drew some attention from other campers. Three guys were admiring it as we told them where we'd been. They offered to sell me some pot, but, with Bet looking on, I thought it best to decline the offer.
We must have found someplace to eat _ I have no recollection where _ and then settled into our sleeping bag. We were both dog tired from the long day's journey, and talked a little before Bet was fast asleep. As I slipped toward slumber, my body feeling like it was glued to the ground, I remembered the trail I followed a few years earlier that led me from south Florida to this very spot along the northern border.
Brimley is on the south shore of Whitefish Bay, which juts like a big thumb-down at the eastern corner of the great Lake Superior.
Spring had arrived in Hollywood, Florida, where I had been working for the local newspaper, and the weather had turned hot and muggy. I sold my station wagon and trail bike and had signed on with an agency to drive a seasonal resident's car north, to Chicago.
I set out alone in the '72 Chevy Impala and headed north, crossed the Suwannee River and headed west toward the Florida panhandle, where I picked up a scorched-out hitchhiker, a hippie probably no older than 18, with a greasy mess of shoulder-length hair and nothing but the clothes on his back and a thin space blanket, which he kept bundled up in his arms.
The kid wasn't much of a talker and was happy to disembark around New Orleans, where he said a quick thanks, slammed the door and disappeared. I headed toward the Mississippi and bore north, following the river before stopping at the University of Mississippi. The campus was deserted because of spring break, but the dorms were still open, so I invited myself into one and had a long, hot shower before roaming around campus a bit.
Soon, I was back in the car heading north, one side of the Mississippi and then the other, before veering off toward Paducah, Kentucky, where the spring floods had left the Ohio River swollen. I walked down toward the toward the wide river to watch the branches and debris float by and stretch my legs, and sat on a stump to eat a sandwich before starting my last leg to Chicago.
I found my way to the owner's apartment and delivered the car all right, but neglected to follow the stern advice of the agency to accept cash only for my service. I was buffaloed into taking a check, and the guy stopped payment on it, leaving me pretty much broke.
Without wheels in an upscale region of bleak, gray highrises, I put on my surplus Army backpack, a relic from my Boy Scout days, and started walking toward the highway, where I would begin hitchhiking north to Wisconsin. With the highway in view, I stopped in a seedy little bar on the outskirts of town and asked for change so I could make a phonecall to my cousin. The bartender sneered and stared with contempt at me for a second, as if I'd asked him to empty his cash drawer into my backpack.
"What do look like, a change machine?" he growled.
Not wishing for trouble, I simply said OK and turned to walk out. On my way to the door, I heard "Here." He gave me the change for my dollar bill and I told him thanks and found a phone booth.
I scrambled my way across a ramp leading to the highway, walking backward with my thumb out. It got darker and darker and no one was even looking, let alone stopping. Along U.S. Route 41, somewhere around Great Lakes, Illinois, I decided I had to sleep and try again when it was light. I moved off the shoulder and found that the roadbed dropped sharply toward the woods, so I pawed around for a somewhat level spot where I could roll out my sleeping bag. I climbed in and closed my eyes, managing to doze off between occasional toots of horns and squealing of tires.
My fatigue overcame the interruptions and finally I slept, for a minute, or maybe an hour. What startled me awake was the sound of tires, like they were an inch from my head, spinning for a second or two in the soft sand at the edge of the shoulder. The sound faded as the driver evidently corrected his path and got his wheels back on the road. I looked up and the roadway and cars kept zooming along. I knew I was in dangerous spot and moved down to an even steeper spot, but the sleeping was over. I waited for the first light of day to resume my trek.
My luck could only improve as the sun made its first appearance. I hitched a ride and gazed at the flat pastures spreading beyond the sides of the highway. I passed a road house that brought back a funny memory from the early '60s, when my family packed the two-tone blue Chevy Nomad station wagon for the biennial trip to my Uncle Clarence's in Milwaukee.
Dad and Mom, apparently thinking their brood of five was all aboard, gassed up and headed down the ramp, accelerating the big V-8 for the highway. My little sister Rosemary was running behind the car, her hands waving frantically. Realizing they had miscounted heads, Dad quickly pulled over to the side and one of us popped the door open. Mom tried her best to calm little Rosemary as the rest of started in with jokes intended, in our awkward way, to dam up her cascade of tears.
Now, I was back on the side of the road, backpack at my feet, my thumb out. A highway patrol officer pulled over, his whip antenna swinging back and forth as the black and white Dodge came to a stop. He backed up and leaned over to flip open the door.
"D'ja know hitchhiking is illegal here?" he asked in a thick Wisconsin accent.
"Gee, no," I lied. He told me to get in the cruiser. It turned out he was a nice guy for a trooper, exchanging small talk between radio checks, and I appreciated the heat in his patrol car for the time it took for him to get me to the next exit. He dropped me off and told me to stay out of trouble, and even gave me directions to Madison, my destination.
Of course, as soon as the trooper was out of sight, my thumb was back out as I stood at the crossroads hoping for a ride west. A car slowed down and I ran up to it and hopped inside. The driver, a young midwestern-looking guy with neatly trimmed blonde hair, wore a white sweater and a friendly smile. He was a talkative sort, jabbering on about politics and eventually getting hung up on the topic of Jesse Jackson and his activism. I just let him go on, interjecting an occasional, "uh-huh" and "right" until the car finally slowed down where the guy had to turn.
Somewhere between the next ride or two, I twisted my ankle. At a crossroads where I had to turn left to get to Madison, I was half-limping along, hoping to get to the other side of the highway. Before I could get across, a Mustang slowed down. A girl who looked like a student was behind the wheel and asked if I needed a ride. Yes, I told her, and asked if she was headed to Madison.
"No, I'm going to Eau Claire. Do you want to go?" she asked.
Maybe I wasn't thinking straight, but I told her no thanks, I believe I'm headed the other way. I still wonder whether I should have just hopped in the Mustang and gone to Eau Claire.
Anyway, I finally made it to Madison, hobbling into town and finally turning into the first bar I saw, the Chuckwagon or some wild west name like that. I sat down and ordered a beer and soon someone was sitting at the stool next to me. I didn't really feel like talking much, but the guy kept chatting, and finally suggested we sit down in one of the booths across the room. That seemed like a simple enough request, although I was perfectly happy sitting on the bar stool.
So where you from, where you going, do you know people here, why did you come here -- the questions just poured out of this fellow, who seemed to take an unusual interest in a stranger who walked into a bar for a simple beer. Finally, he mentions that this is a gay bar, and wondered why I'd be here if I wasn't, well, like the others here. I told him thanks for the beer but I think I've made a mistake, and have to be getting along anyway. So I got up, grabbed my backpack and was out the door in downtown Madison.
I hobble-footed it down the street, thinking it best to get away from the Chuckwagon or whatever-it-was, and tried calling my cousin. Soon I got through.
I slept at his house that night and the next morning we packed his car and headed back east, for Michigan, where we had no particular plan except to stop at as many bars as we could before running out of money and gas. We drove our way from the southern end, up the west shore of Lake Michigan past Kalamazoo and through Muskegon and Traverse City, across the Mackinac Bridge to the Upper Peninsula and finally into Canada, just to say we'd been there. It had gotten colder the farther north we went, and by nightfall it was down below freezing. We headed back to Michigan and found a campsite in Brimley State Park, set up a pup tent and pulled it upright by tying the front rope to Chuck's bumper and then inching the car forward.
The place was desolate and quiet and we weren't the type of campers who were likely to whip up a meal of any sore over a campfire. We remembered the bar just down the road, and decided that was where we would eat.
It was a rustic, log cabin-style place and we were the only customers. The bartender was friendly enough, and we ordered hamburgers and fries, washing it all down with several beers. We chatted and laughed with the bartender for a couple of hours, and when it was time leave he warned us it was going to be pretty cold that night, and did we want to stay there. We thought about it, but finally decided to bumble back to the tent. Luckily, we had bought cheap air mattresses in Traverse City that day, so it turned out that we were plenty warm right through the night.
When dawn broke, the inside of the tent was coated with a thin layer of churning its way toward the east. As I looked toward the lake, the morning sun felt good on my back.
Now, a few years later, I was back at the same spot, Bet sleeping soundly next to me in this bad excuse for a tent. The stars were twinkling over great lake to our side, a sign that the weather would hold out for our next leg west.
Aug. 10
29,199 miles on the odometer.
It was 9:15 when we finally got up. There wouldn't be much in the way of clean clothes to put on, but we could at least get showers at the campground. We finally set off at about 11, following the arrow-straight Route 28 west across the Upper Peninsula, where the landscape reminded me a lot of Maine, minus the New England state's winding roads. We passed small rundown farms, woodlots and snowmobiles left on people's dooryards, as if there was some hope a sudden August snowstorm would sweep through. No chance today; it was hot.
We stopped at 1:30 in the afternoon in a bar for some lunch, but to our dismay there was no hamburger.
"Found one later and played pool," Bet wrote in our journal. I guess we found hamburger there too.
We cut south on 117 and then west, following the upper shore of Lake Michigan along Route 2 through Hiawatha National Forest and then south on Route 35. Somewhere along this route, and I have no recollection of what town we were in, we found a place called Jack and Angie's Supper Club.
As Easterners, we didn't know quite what to make of supper clubs, but decided this place was for us. It was clean, had a small, easygoing country crowd and dinner was quite good. We had steaks ($5.73 total) and beer and Reunite wine. The owner, Jack, told us about a campsite where we could stay right along Green Bay.
Jack's advice was as good as his directions. No one was around when we arrived at the campsite, which turned out to be more of a roadside pull-off where evidently quite a bit of partying had been done in the past. The campsite was littered with beer cans and bits of trash, but the view of the bay was great. As the sun set, we cleared a spot to lay out the sleeping bag and made camp. Even though this was one of our shortest traveling days, we were still tired from the previous day's ride and were soon asleep.
Aug. 11
29,385 miles on the odometer
Up at about 8 a.m., we packed the bike without wasting much time and were anxious to get on the road. We bore south past Green Bay, and then to Route 57, which took us past Lake Winnebago and on to Cedarburg, our next destination. My main landmark in the little town about 20 miles north of Milwaukee was Goose's Marine Bar, which boasted a big Blatz Beer sign over the front. I could remember from a couple of past visits that it was a hard right and a couple of blocks from Goose's to Uncle Clarence's house.
I remembered Goose, who took umbrage at being asked for a draft of Schlitz from his taps, which poured only Blatz "a working man's beer," as he called it. Actually, there is no better beer in Wisconsin because they are all good.
When we were kids, one of the obligatory stops during our visits to Wisconsin was the Schlitz Brewery in Milwaukee. There were also occasional visits to Holy Hill, the Wisconsin Dells and the Indian burial mounds, but we never missed the Schlitz stop. It was a great treat for us; the kids got little salt and pepper shakers in the shape of Schlitz bottles and all the pretzels we could wash down with endless refills of root beer while the grownups tasted glassfuls of golden, freshly brewed beer. One year, the pilgrimage to Schlitz was brought to a higher level when we noticed people walking around Milwaukee with cardboard boxes over their heads. One of us finally asked a box-headed pedestrian what was going on, and he explained that he was viewing an eclipse reflected on the inside of the bon through a peephole.
As I got older, I expanded the pilgrimage to also include the Pabst Brewery on my Milwaukee travels. The tours always ended in the hospitality room, where the proportion of fellow college students seemed relatively high. The niceties would usually end after three rounds, then the hosts would politely show us the way to the exit.
Now, I was back with my new wife on a motorcycle. Aunt Ellen's big grin showed something between amusement and amazement as we drove up to her white, stucco house on Madison Avenue. It would be a little while before Clarence, a carpenter, would get home from work. Ellen welcomed us in and insisted of doing some wash for us, which we appreciated, although given our light payload there wasn't really much to toss in the washer. The shower, in a real house, now that was the thing. Soon, Clarence was back home, then my cousins Lisa and Jay, who were also slightly agog to see what had wandered into their home.
The BMW would get a couple of days off. Clarence cleared a few of the bigger tools out of his lime van, packed us in and took us upcountry to his place in Mount Morris. I took in as much scenery as I could out of the back of the van, but it wasn't easy, especially after being on a motorcycle where the scenery is cinematic; you are actually part of it. He and Ellen did make sure, as we passed through the town of Ripon, to point out the modest little building that claims to be the birthplace of the Republican Party.
