Big roadside stuff in Minnesota and Wisconsin

Various discoveries during my meanderings through Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Paul Bunyan and a big blue bull, Bemidji, MN.

A feckin’ huge fish, Garrison, MN.

Not exactly a looker, is he?

And a bespectacled pink elephant on the edge of a gas station forecourt somewhere in southern Wisconsin.

Those are big numbers. It’s worth considering that ‘regular’ unleaded petrol priced at $2.91 9/10 per gallon in the USA converts to about £0.38 per litre. The current average price for a litre of unleaded in the UK is around £0.98.

Borderline personality disorder

A humble roadside chapel built in timber catches my eye as it flashes past. Up here, in the northern extremities of the state of Minnesota, there aren’t many things that catch your eye. A few enormous eagles have flown off at the sound of the car, and the odd deer has been sighted darting into trees, but otherwise there hasn’t been much to see.

Pressing hard on the brake pedal, I only think to check my rear view mirror as I come to complete stop. I need not have worried. In the small mirror I can see on the road that I have just traveled over stretching off to the horizon. I have not needed to make any input on the steering wheel for some 10 or 15 kilometers, the road has been dead straight. One hand resting lightly on the leather rim is all it takes to counter the bucking and swaying motions induced by the rough pavement, broken at regular intervals by fierce winters and sweltering summers.

I’m able to make a turn and drive back to the chapel.

Stepping out from the car I am greeted by near complete silence. A few rows of tombstones with Norwegian and Danish sounding names sit in solitary order at the back of the graveyard. There is room for at least another couple of centuries of death in this remote rural community, unmarked on my road map.

A few days earlier I had heard Garrison Keillor reading his weekly News From Lake Wobegon as part of his live broadcast radio show A Prairie Home Companion. I’ve seen the show before, at an unrecorded show in Vienna, Virginia last year. This time I’ve been able to make the trip from Chicago to Keillor’s home state of Minnesota, and on Saturday I was in the audience for a sold out live broadcast of his show at the programme’s home theatre, the Fitzgerald on Exchange Street in downtown St. Paul, Minnesota (you can listen to the whole show, and download Keillor’s News From Lake Wobegon segment as a podcast here). As usual, much of Keillor’s meandering opening to his monologue about life in a fictional northern Minnesota town was to do with the weather. Minnesotans like to talk about the climate, because the climate does a lot to make their life interesting. Autumn has arrived in northern Minnesota. Whereas I left friends in New York City last week who were planning ‘leaf peeping’ trips to see the New England autumn colours in the next couple of weeks, the trees in Minnesota are in full autumnal blaze.

A few days later I overheard a man in a diner lamenting that “it won’t be long now until the lakes are frozen over.” Autumn is not so much of a season in this part of the world, but a brief transition. But the further north I’ve travelled on my road trip from Chicago, the further it seems to have progressed. By the time I get back in the car and reach Roseau, Minnesota, it’s raining hard. The few remaining trees with any leaves on them don’t have much to be colourful with. A leaden grey sky has finally given up trying to be optimistic, and rain is pouring down upon the near featureless prairies of this remote region of the northern United States. After a healthy night stop in Bemidji, one of the last ‘big’ towns in the northern half of Minnesota, I’ve followed dead straight roads of broken tarmac and loose gravel to the final settlement of any notable size close to the border between this part of the USA and Canada.

Borderlands fascinate me. I’ve lived in or close to three border regions in my lifetime: that between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland (a once heavily surveyed and militarised dividing line, which now can be passed without a mark at 110km/h); that between upstate New York and Vermont and the predominantly French speaking Canadian province of Québec; and most recently in the city of Strasbourg, a city of mixed cultures and languages that has been German as many times as it has been French.

My reason for diverting so far north in Minnesota on this trip has been a passing interest in a simple but utterly baffling political cock-up… the Northwest Angle, a small chunk of the USA that has been cut off from the rest of the contigous states by a lake and Canada. Wikipedia does a good enough job of explaining how…

The Treaty of Paris (1783), concluded between the United States and Great Britain at the end of the American Revolutionary War, stated that the boundary between U.S. territory and the British possessions to the north would run “…through the Lake of the Woods to the most northwesternmost point thereof, and from thence on a due west course to the river Mississippi…” The parties did not suspect that the source of the Mississippi, Lake Itasca (then unknown to European explorers), was south of that point. A factor in this mistake was the use of the Mitchell Map during the treaty negotiations; that map showed the Mississippi extending far to the north. Consequently the Northwest Angle is the result of 18th-century ignorance of geography. In the Anglo-American Convention of 1818, the error was corrected by having the boundary run due south from the northwest point of the lake to the 49th parallel and then westward along it. When this north-south line was surveyed, it was found to intersect other bays of the lake and therefore cut off a portion of U.S. territory, now known as the Northwest Angle.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_angle#Origin

Compared to European countries, Canada and the USA have a rather fraught relationship across their border. Whereas the EU countries have agreed certain principles about free trade and movement between member states, Canada and the US still spend a lot of political energy determining trade limitations and travel restrictions. Although it is impossible to police the several thousand kilometers of the 49th parallel between the USA and Canada, much of which runs through remote and uninhabited land, border controls still exist, and the traveler needs to be aware of them.

Having said that, the closest border crossing to Roseau, Minnesota, isn’t on a particularly busy road. Above is the Canadian checkpoint at South Junction, Manitoba. It’s a wholly appropriate image of Canada to those who seek to enter the country… a small country cottage with a flag flying outside.

The border guard asks what the purpose of my visit to Canada is. Strangely, for a man who’s just arrived from America, I tell him that I’m going to Minnesota. He understands.

After an hour or so driving along increasingly remote Manitoban roads (both on metalled and unfinished surfaces) this sign appears. Read it closely, because this is indeed the only US Border Control point that operates on an honour system. A couple of miles further down the gravel road that leads into the Northwest Angle, you reach a junction, and this little shack.

That little shed is indeed an immigration and customs reporting station. Inside is a grey metal box.

And inside the grey metal box is a video phone with two buttons. One is labeled with an American flag, the other is labeled with a Canadian flag. Upon entering the Northwest Angle you need to press the American button to contact US Border Control. When you leave you need to contact Canadian officials by pressing the other button. You need to have your paperwork ready to hold up to the video camera.

I only spend about an hour in the Northwest Angle. Tony the Mustang leads me from one end of the small settlement to the other. Dreary cabins and trailers serve a small resort popular with golfers and fishermen. The lake that cuts the Northwest Angle off from the rest of the contiguous United States is a popular destination for anglers, and there’s also some hunting in the thick forests of the Angle. But with little else to distract me or give me reason to camp here overnight, I decide that going through the rigmarole of four border crossings (two via telephone) in one day is more than enough entertainment. The Canadian customs agent sounds unusually unfriendly when an immediate return to the USA is proposed. But with most of the border control budget of the US Department of Homeland Security going to other more pressing concerns, I’m able to slip back across Canada and into Minnesota without too much hassle.

On the road back from the Angle I briefly forget where exactly I am. It’s only the (metric) Canadian roadsigns that remind me of the strange differences in these indeterminate borderlands.

More about Tony the Mustang

As I hinted in an earlier post, I upgraded to the premier league of hire cars last week with a Ford Mustang convertible, seen here just before the tarmac ran out while driving through a small portion of Manitoba. The roof was up because of grey skies and occasionally heavy rain, but rest assured that I practiced my smug-git look with it down for much of the trip, and have the sunburn to prove it.

Following the tradition established with Kurt in Strasbourg, there had to be a naming ceremony, and it was decided that 918 5914 should assume the name of Tony. Kurt was called Kurt because he was so petite and feminine that he could only say good things about my masculinity. Tony was called Tony because… well, the Mustang was just a Tony. Imagine a kind of big, brash Italian fella who’s more show than substance. Those bold, muscular and vaguely retro lines might suggest that Tony’s a sports car, but don’t be fooled. This sports car has a heaving great petrol engine with a drink problem and a flabby automatic transmission that takes a second to respond to any urgent request for speed from the accelerator. It was certainly fun to cruise the highways of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois with Tony, but during our (frequent) stops for petrol his shoddy build quality was hard to miss. Closing either passenger door made the rear windows rattle in their frames; the entire fascia was doused in cheap and nasty plastic and the window seals around the edge of the folding roof were already beginning to come loose and foul the doors.

Despite all those complaints, me and Tony had something special going on, and when the man from Hertz printed off the receipt after some 1,700 miles he told me that Tony’s career as a rental vehicle was over. He was leaving the Hertz fleet and returning to the lessor, perhaps to be sold in an auction or through a back page classified.

I’ll miss you Tony; here’s to all who sail in him (and trust me, you sail rather than drive in a Mustang convertible).

A walk in the park

Insomnia hits me hard some times, harder than I realised it was capable of affecting me. I’ve begun to self-diagnose the symptoms and the causes, normally a backlog of very minor worries that have dug into my subconscious… work, studies, money or perhaps that intoxicating combination of all of the above. One very early morning in Chicago last week these bubbling thoughts penetrated my short dreams and dragged me kicking and screaming to the nocturnal surface. It was just becoming light outside and another hot day was coming. Tossing and turning on the bed of my kind host, I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t calm my worries about the new term.

Letting myself out of the apartment quietly (with bemused glances from two feline cohabitants) I walked the half block to the eastern edge of Chicago. Chicago sits right on Lake Michigan, with skyscrapers and apartment blocks built to within a stone’s throw of the water’s edge. Only the roaring Lake Shore Drive and grassy Lincoln Park separate the city from the water, the park cushioning the city from the expressway and offering permeable routes beneath it to the edge of the lake.

It was, by now, almost seven o’clock, and the early morning rush hour traffic towards Chicago’s ‘loop’ was beginning to thicken. Cars and buses roared past, separated from the park by only a fence and some shrubbery.

After passing beneath Lake Shore Drive the park opens up to spacious parking areas and sandy trails. For the first time in Chicago I saw people on bicycles, although in the typical American approach to cycling, they weren’t actually using their bikes to go anywhere, they were just cycling back and forth along the park for exercise. Joggers, walkers, power-walkers and yoga practitioners were dotted out amongst the park, all enjoying the cool morning breeze that wafted in off the lake. This lake is better imagined as a small inland sea. Michigan is somewhere over the horizon, a very long way away.

There was even some wildlife too…

…although the wildlife seemed more interested in me than the sunrise.

I turned north along the shore, making only eye contact with the other early morning risers. At one curve near where Foster meets Lake Shore Drive there’s a beach, and a small congregation of people was there on the sand sharing handshakes and hugs. Some kind of small ceremony appeared to have recently finished, and people dressed in sarongs and colourful clothes appeared to be wrapping up some early morning event.

Meanwhile, in the background, a city employee in a tractor pulled a sand cleaning device across the beach.

Snapshot: license plate #3

The third in a continuing series of Canadian and American rental car license plates (here’s number one and number two).

Let’s just say that the rental car options become a lot more interesting when you pass the age of 25. More soon about a 1,700 mile road trip…