We stop at Minocqua Brewing Company, our first “small-craft pub,” for lunch en route to the North Woods Bed and Breakfast. I order the Road-Kill Red Ale, and Lilly the Whitehaven Wheat. The small TVs over the bar silently play a Weather Channel special on tornadoes. The fan goes out in the kitchen so we can only order salads.
The North Woods B&B greets us with a forty-three-inch stuffed muskie over the fireplace: a fish that had nearly capsized the lodge’s owners, Roger and Sue, while they baited one of the area’s three-thousand lakes. Roger, a retired science teacher on days when he’s not a fisherman, spends his days cutting back weeds clogging the lake outside their home and trapping beavers. Sue, a retired kindergarten teacher, volunteers at the Ojibwa reservation nearby. Her colleagues envy her because she has not yet been called a “white bitch.”
“Pardon my French,” Sue tells us with a chuckle. She rolls up the sleeves of her oversized red turtleneck.
Before dinner and before the rain, we take back roads to a path our hosts recommended. Other than the occasional boulder that juts out of Fallison Lake and a small collection of loons, the body of water broods undisturbed. The three-mile trail dips through pine forests and across planked walks out over the water. Brown and white metal signs scratched by years of weather recount the history of logging throughout the region. Lilly peers through a pair of binoculars strapped to her back like suspenders so she doesn’t have to cradle them in her hands when she walks.
“Everything looks so clear,” she says to me. “Wanna take a peek?”
Lilly erects a lit match in an ice cream sandwich and sings “Happy Birthday.” The handmade card she gives me proclaims “Luke is Lost.” The blue paper unfolds like a map and on the inside a stick figure on horseback wanders towards a damsel trapped in a tower longing to be found. I refold the card. Methodically, I remove all scraps of tape from the gift she has wrapped me until the paper unhinges itself from the small box.
“It’s a GPS!” I exclaim.
“So you’ll know where you are.”
Our first fight coincides with our first slog through traffic. Dipping down from northern Wisconsin, I-90 chokes us off from open road near Minneapolis. Like most of our scuffles, it starts off with some trivial annoyance that soon sheds light onto a larger annoyance that then gives way to flared tempers that in time either churn themselves away or flicker off into quiet acceptance.
The root of the fight arises from a debate on the proper ratio of nuts to dried fruit to M&Ms in our trail mix. I favor peanuts, Lilly pecans. There’s too much granola; Lilly’s not a fan of raisins. All the while it’s been thirty minutes, and we’ve moved maybe one hundred yards across the spewing interstate.
“I don’t think you should be so judgmental about peanuts,” I say knowing that I’m about up the register of the debate with a word like judgmental. “Food is neither good nor bad.”
“It’s fine if you like peanuts. Eat away. I just happen to think they are a very bad nut,” she counters.
“Can’t you just say ‘I don’t care for peanuts.’? Again, no need to pass judgment.”
“Are we really continuing on with this?”
The argument takes an awkward rest now, and we let the GPS guide us away from 90 and onto local highways. Red farmhouses and green fields flecked with bales of hay balled up like fat cigar stubs flank us. Clouds hang lower here, full but not ominous.
Soon I’ll be rooming in corporate housing in a honeycomb complex complete with faux sandstone water features, abstract art that’s not my own, and more TV channels than I ever knew could exist.
Soon I’ll be rooming in corporate housing in a honeycomb complex complete with faux sandstone water features, abstract art that’s not my own, and more TV channels than I ever knew could exist. Lilly will be on a volcanic island in the middle of the Pacific shooting invasive birds and dissecting their insides. Now we both have lines of the road in front us, rows of corn or soybeans by our sides, all these clouds above.
Local highways become numbered potholed county roads; county roads then loose their potholes by losing all pavement. Roads cast aside numbers and leave us with only dirt. The Corolla kicks up dust behind us. Pebbles pulse underneath the chassis with an inconstant pitter-patter: loose change in the dryer.
We coast into a campsite near Watson, Minnesota on the bluffs overlooking Lac Qui Parle, a thin body of water we’ll pace around and drop our feet in before sunset. We have to cart the tent and the rest of our gear into a walk-in site. The campground is almost entirely abandoned. It will be full in the spring and fall when birdwatchers gather to observe the migrations. The dipping sun cuts through the clouds and once it’s gone, thick storms of mosquitoes rise from the earth like puffs of smoke. Between the wind and hacking at bugs, tent assembly takes longer than expected. We’ve got nothing to cook, nothing to make a fire with anyway, so we eat apples and granola bars, picking at handfuls of unbalanced trail mix.
We hustle into the tent in a distraught flurry as to keep as many bugs out as possible. We start a Hollywood in Gin by headlamp light until the discomfort of propping ourselves up in such tiny quarters becomes too much of a chore. We sleep.
Howling wakes us in the middle of the night.
“Lilly,” I say with a dry throat.
“It’s just timber wolves.”
It’s an eerie chorus that sometimes sounds close and sometimes very far away.
“No, it’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“I like pecans just fine.”
