North of the Border

Sunday, a gray day, and cold, on 9^th Avenue in Frostbite Falls. 

 
It has finally turned cold and snowed—minus ten last night, plus six at noon.  After just a week in this alien climate, my Pasadena body thinks that plus six is okay. 

I have driven 3, 230 miles and am halfway around the loop shown in the above map.  I have another week here before leaving February 17 to cross the northern states.   

I crossed the border early this morning into Ontario, Canada, to some of the loveliest sights of this winter adventure.  If only I could convince you of Canadian winter beauty in its coldest best.  

Escape from Trump to Trudeau, annihilation to humanity.  It’s just a border crossing, but it’s like revisiting an escape from the Vietnam War, from American exceptionalism, in all its falsity, to just people getting along.  Even the trees seem happier.   

Ice Road

Perhaps you have launched your boat from a trailer by backing down a ramp designed for this purpose.  It was on such a ramp that I drove down to water level and instead of sinking, continued out onto ice of Kabetogama Lake.  Having never done this before, I was in four wheel drive and creeping scared.  

Other car tracks in the new snow lended encouragement,  and soon I felt almost safe.  A plow had piled up banks of snow along both sides of the “road”  and I cruised along imagining wakes from my boat. 

Some places, a chilling wind at zero degrees whipped the plowed banks into art forms, and in other places the wind removed all snow from the ice, which looked rather like asphalt pavement.  I worried about cracks in the “pavement” and wondered if they had anything to do with rumbling sounds I heard in the distance.  

Then I saw what looked like water along the “road” and got out to assure myself that it was not water, but ice.  It splashed when I stepped in it.  And a layer of ice had clearly been broken into pieces by passing tires.  It was all disconcerting, but since other tires had gone further, I decided to continue. 

A group of small structures began appearing in the distance.  You can see four of them in the left photo.  (Click on any photo to enlarge it.)  The right-most one appeared to have steam or smoke rising from it.  The others seemed vacant.  

I parked the jeep and walked toward it.  There were fresh car tracks leading to it and steam was indeed rising.  I stood some ten feet away from the door and called “Good morning.”  It took me several tries, but the door finally opened a crack, and a man inspected me.  “Come in and close the door,” he said.  

Within five minutes I believed I had met a friendly fisherman, happy to answer my many questions about life in the far north and told me why ice fishing is so great.  “I suppose you don’t get many visitors,” I said.  “I thought I was hearing things when you called.” 

That flimsy-looking rod and line have dropped  a minnow about thirty feet down, near the bottom of the lake, through an eight-inch hole in twenty-inch thick ice.  He bored the hole with that auger, and if he wants to sleep, he has two bunks.  He has six holes through the floor of his ice house if he keeps them all free of ice, for six lines if he chooses.  Today he has just two lines down under the ice.  That fish finder is from his summer boat; it detects movements of fish.

He explained the cracks and the slushy water on the ice and the rumbles I heard in the distance.  They are all caused by expansion and contraction of the ice and changes in pressure on its surface.  These forces crack the ice and pump water up through the cracks.  They are nothing to worry about.  

I drove several more miles on the lake, happy for having met a kind man in an ice house, a warm time in a chilly wind.  Having experienced many such encounters with tenuous beginnings, I wonder if, all together, they legitimize the one that could go wrong.   

Michael Angerman of Corvallis, Oregon, has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing mv daily locations.  Please see Michael’s Map:    Michael's Map       

Frostbite Falls

The tracks I left
with chains on my boots

I put chains on my boots
to reduce slipping on ice.

I came to the coldest place in the lower forty-eight states to experience real winter.  I was here for two months in the winter of 2009-10, and found life honest and very cold for the unprepared.  But if there is anything I do well, I think it is being prepared.  I research, anticipate and plan carefully.  If with a little bragging, I can say that it usually works out satisfyingly.  Many of you can say the same for your poetry, painting, ceramics, collage, and music.  Travel to wild places is my primary form of satisfaction and possibly my contribution the general artistic community.  But this time it didn’t work, not here in Frostbite Falls. 

Poverty-level houses
along the Blue Ox Trail

Main Street
International Falls, MN

I drove here on dry roads.  My engine heater isn’t even needed, nor are my winter tires, winter antifreeze, nor my windshield washer solution that will not freeze at fifty below.  I feel like a polar bear in the desert.  Everyone here complains that snow fell, then above-freezing temperatures melted it, and now it is ice and dangerous—not the way extreme winter is supposed to work.   

Katrina 2009

Sandy 2020

Maybe you remember Katrina at Sandy’s  Café, the smart girl I liked so much in 2009.  Well, in the intervening ten years, she’s graduated from college and holds a high position in Minnesota State government helping the underprivileged.  Her mother, Sandy, for whom the place is named, served me breakfast this morning, proudly praising her daughter.  Here they are together, with a gap of ten years, that seems to me like a week.  

Jerry and Sandy Netland 2009

Jerry and Sandy Netland 2020

Here at the Voyageur Motel, mom and pop, Jerry and Sandy, pose as they did ten years ago, still at it, still busy all the time, but now cynical.  They want to quit, give up the motel and go traveling.  The town’s gone to pot and help in impossible to find.  Ten years ago, they bragged that Minnesota people are the best workers in the country.  

A pile of winterwear that, if I wore it all,
would look like a kaba,
better known as a hippopotamus

So here I am sitting in Room 25, just three doors down from where I sat in 2009, wondering how to spend two weeks.  Happy, in a way that weather is relatively warm, and I can go out without much fear of frostbite, and sad to see so many people complaining.    

I walked the Blue Ox Trail this morning.  It looks the same as in 2009, groomed and ready for snow machines.  I took pictures of low-income housing along the trail,  thinking they are not the ones complaining.  I don’t see them at Sandy’s, maybe at the low-cost bar uptown.   

Sculpture in packed snow

Michael Angerman of Corvallis, Oregon, has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing mv daily locations.  Please see Michael’s Map:    Michael's Map       

Iowa Farm Life

Iowa—A Sea of White

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Laurel and Hardy
Pen on Napkin
Jim Miles

I met Jim Miles at the counter of Carrows Restaurant in South Pasadena California, ten years ago.  For an older man from WWII, we hit it off in a way where age doesn’t matter, and we talked of many things.  When he couldn’t ride the bus anymore, I picked him up at nine every Tuesday morning.  He talked of farming in Iowa and the war, and of the plants at Griffith Park.  His stories shifted from delightful to insightful to sad.  After he died two years ago, I was one of only two at his Catholic funeral; and I alone followed the hearse to the burial site.  

His Iowa relatives never understood why he left for California.  After I helped them settle the estate, I said that on this trip I could stop by and try to explain.  They agreed.  

Iowa in winter is an ocean of white.  Farmers living near Alta, where Jim grew up have brought in the harvest of corn and soy beans.  Fields lie dormant, waiting for spring.  Farmers relax, and some of them take in visitors from the land of fruit and nuts.    

Alta, Iowa is a corn and soy bean town.  Silos, once filled with silage, (rotting green corn plants for cattle feed), are now mostly filled with corn or soy beans for world markets.  And because the silos cannot hold all the corn, areas beside them are used to pile corn outside.

When I arrived on February 1, some of the outdoor piles had been hauled to market.  But great piles of slowly rotting corn were being moved by train, truck, and ship to feed people all over the world. 









The only busy farmers seem to those who raise hogs and turkeys.  Come spring, manure from hog barns will move to the fields in these “honey wagons,” where it fertilizes the grain that feeds the hogs.  It doesn’t smell bad, but I told Dan Young, Jim’s nephew, that I didn’t want any of that honey.  “It provides some of the nutrients, but chemical fertilizer is also needed to grow GMO corn. 

Jim grew up on this farm with his house, silos, and barns in among those distant trees.  The house is gone and this new one built in its place.  The family farmed, and still farms, about seven hundred acres.  Jim left because of his asthma, they say, and I think it’s partly true. 

He walked or rode the bus on this road to school.  I imagine him, even then, thinking beyond corn and soy, reading and wanting more of plants, selecting Griffith Park so he could work environmentally with all sorts of plants of plants—like a certain Berkeley graduate who just wanted to work with trees. 

Jim’s closest relative, Dan Young, is retired from farming and lives in this house in Alta, where we talked and came to some closure on the life of Jim.  

Some farmers harvest the strong northwest wind.

Michael Angerman of Corvallis, Oregon, has prepared an interactive map of my trip showing daily locations.  
Please click:    Michael's Map