Wellsboro, PA

The Ohio Turnpike is a stretch of toll road which cups the south-
western shore of Lake Erie.  Don't drive it, just don't, especially in
the rain.  For the entirety of the trip thus far, trucks were limited
to a speed 10mph below that of cars.  Not so on the Ohio Turnpike.
The supposed speed limit was 75mph for cars and big rigs alike.
With a wiper defying assault of water from above and below, a
culture of furious inches between bumpers, trucks howling past one 
another in every lane, and no shoulder whatsoever, those couple 
hours stretched on and on, brittle and clenched.

But all things pass, even the Ohio Turnpike.  We dropped into the
day lilies and cemeteries of rural Pennsylvania, Route 6 like the soft
syllables of a consoling grandmother.

The above photo is from Wellsboro, PA, an otherwise charming 
small town along Route 6.  Gas-lit lampposts, a train car diner, 
ancient elms, ornately masoned storefronts, breezy Victorian porches.

Michigan

Thanks, sign.

Grand Rapids, Michigan

We drove off the boat and onto Route 96 for the short leg remaining
to my cousin Mark's in Grand Rapids.  He and his two quivering 
beagles graciously hosted us for a night at their home.  That evening 
we were introduced to the culinary curiosity which is Michigan 
Mexican.  Well.

The next morning he took us out into the city, enriching the sights
with the learned narration of an architect.  Mark's an enthusiastic
champion of Grand Rapids and its neighborhoods glowed in the
light of his exuberant promotions.

Our destination was Meijer Gardens, a sprawling 158-acre art
museum, botanical conservatory, and the gem, its sculpture gardens.  
It had been a while since we'd both suffered the beautiful exhaustion 
of art-overload, but that's exactly what a person is faced with, 
strolling the center's innumerable outdoor galleries and promenades.  
It was a delight to move among the diversities of era, medium, and 
aesthetic.

The just-opened Japanese gardens hid haikus here and there in the 
folds of the landscape.

Crossing Lake Michigan

We took an auto ferry across the lake from Milwaukee to Muskegon,
Michigan.  It was a bit of a rough crossing.  High winds made for
six-foot swells and the boat heaved and pitched for most of the  
three-hour passage.  Initially jubilant families around us were 
silenced mere minutes into the ceaseless plunging.  By the time we
at last reached the far shore, most of these poor panting souls were
making frequent use of little complimentary bags handed out by the
crew.  An older woman seated in front of us turned to her husband
upon landing.  From the folds of her headscarf, with calm, lawmaking
finality, a voice gray and dripping with Eastern Europe, she told him,
"Never. Again."

Our breakfast fortunately held strong, though our faith in its resolve 
to stay put was certainly tested.  Megan had entered a meditative 
state so as to endure, envisioning the motion as giant clockwork.  
Each second was disciplined and she was not to be disturbed.  
Midway through I went up on deck for some air.  Imagine gentle 
giants giving you surprise shoves every few seconds, heedless of 
strangers' bodies or thigh-high railings.  The view, however!  The 
magnificent violence of the wind!  What a wonder to see a panorama 
of flatness, of inky blue, landless horizons, to have all the imagery of 
an ocean, and to know all of it was fresh water.  

Sheboygan, WI

Our good friend Danielle and her boyfriend
Tim live upstairs in this cute house, just a 
scant block from the shore of Lake Michigan.  
They took us on a walk through a beautiful 
and strange expanse of fresh water sand 
dunes, to a surreal abandoned forest gallery 
of cement sculptures (saints, squirrels, log 
reproductions, presidents), and introduced us 
to taco pizza.  A short but very sweet visit.

No nonsense Wisconsinism

En route to Sheboygan from Minneapolis.

The St. Paul Saints

Megan and I were taken out to to see the St. Paul Saints play the 
Fargo Redhawks.  A big group of my family went.  Being among 
them is a true pleasure, a pure, quiet contentment.   Their company 
coupled with baseball in a lively small park was blissful. 

Bill Murray is part owner of both the team and the ballpark.  He  
apparently frequents games and is rumored to take tickets and sell
programs.  No sightings for us, but we were abundantly content to 
be out on a beautiful evening with such fantastic people.  Plus the 
Saints won, a come from behind victory, 4-2.  And fireworks.

The Saint's mascot, Pablo Pigasso.  Each year it's a new pig.  Past 
names include Hamlet and Garrison Squealor.

Susan Elizabeth

The sisters, my Mom's aunts and her namesakes, buried in the Grady
plot at St Mary's.  Her aunts knew the baby was to be named for
them, and it's said, vied for who'd get first name. (Mom, what
if you were Elizabeth Susan?)

Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis

Yes, another waterfall.  But here's the secret, Californians:  The 
water is in the East.  Beginning midway through the Dakotas, 
everything turns green and remains so all the way to the Atlantic.  
(Right now in Massachusetts, just a few days shy of August, it's a 
dense wash of greens outside.  It rains every other day.  When will 
the price of CA real estate pull its head out of the parched sand?) 

Bill's leg

St. Mary's Cemetery, Minneapolis.  Grady was my maternal grand-
mother's maiden name.  Her sister Jean married Bill Baune.  While 
fighting in the Battle of the Bulge, Bill was shot in the leg while 
climbing through a barbwire fence.  The Germans had pinned down 
his would-be rescuers, so he was left dangling up there in agony, 
bullets in his leg, by some accounts for hours, by others for more 
than a day.

As the battle shifted he was rescued and sent home stateside.  After 
his return gangrene set in and his leg was amputated.  In Catholicism 
major limbs have to be buried in consecrated ground, and my Great
Grandmother Grady offered the Baunes a spot in their family plot at 
St. Mary's.  So, among the buried Gradys, somewhere down there is 
Bill's leg.

Some Midwestern favorites

Minneapolis, MN

Really?

Duluth, MN

From Anna's we continued on Route 2 across northern Minnesota
to my cousin Dan's in Duluth.  There he lives in a cool old house
with Waldo, a happy yellow lab and miraculous retriever of tennis 
balls.

Duluth elbows it's way up from the shores of Lake Superior with 
the topographical audacity of San Francisco.  In need of an ocean 
fix, Megan and I had been looking forward to the Great Lakes.  
There was the biggest of them, surf and all, but "America's third 
coast" didn't smell like . . . anything.  Alas, our longing only 
deepened without salt in the air, absent wafts of yarrow and the 
briny decay of beached seaweed.

Dan's a gentle hearted, amazing man, his actions apace with his 
ideals.  There isn't a screen in the house.  (I still remember his
letters from childhood, the envelopes carefully turned inside out
and reused, each stamped "Kill your television!").  His only electric
appliances are a few light bulbs and a small CD player, all powered
by a solar panel in the back yard.  His is a sharp, critical mind, 
surrounded by books.  He's long been without a car and gets to work 
on foot, by bike or on skis.  

His commute follows a trail he's voluntarily maintained for over 30
years.  It's quite beautiful and is treasured by locals, running along 
both sides of a lively creek near his home. The city of Duluth
named it in honor of his work.  

Dan the baker at Positively 3rd Street Bakery, which he's 
cooperatively owned and operated since 1982.  We stocked 
ourselves for the culinary uncertainties to come with fabulous 
breads, granola, and cookies.

We were out exploring Duluth on foot the next morning when rain
began to fall.  We quickened our pace, scanning for shelter as it
intensified over the next minute. It swelled suddenly to a deafening 
pitch and we broke into a run, bolting blindly to the porch of the 
nearest house.  We kept near the steps, shy to be on a strange porch 
but trapped there by the onslaught.  It was then that Megan noticed 
the door yawning ajar.  The house looked abandoned.  Dust and a 
few tipped over chairs, some wadded cloth.  Now that we were 
looking, we saw the front windows were boarded up.

Megan, very much out of character, stepped inside, gleeful of the
discovery.  A little spooked but alive from the rain and delighted
at her boldness I followed. Debris, some beer cans.  Hello?

Nobody.  We picked our way around into a larger room and saw
the staircase.  It looked as if it were being restored.  In fact it
wasn't a work in progress at all.  It was beautiful, heartbreakingly
beautiful, immaculate in almost frightening contrast to the dust
and broken glass around it.  The wood was of a fascinating, wholly
unfamiliar grain, hatching and spiraling like drops of ink in tea. 
As we moved between them, each bannister's graceful, irregular 
curves resolved into human profiles, exquisitely worked faces ripe 
with joy and sorrow, anger and bemusement.

The stairs themselves were more plainly shaped, but of the same 

mesmeric wood, its grain almost hallucinatory.  They descended 
a single swift flight to a small landing and a door, the most, 
well . . . the door . . . How do we begin?  The only way to–– The 
important thing is that we're going to stay here.  Live here, in this 
house.  Near it.  Ushers?  WE'RE FINE.  We won't be in 
communication . . . that goes without . . . but we want you all to 
know how much you've–– What we mean to say is we're . . . we 
can't.  Goodbye is what we are meaning to be singing.

Blowin' stuff up in Manvel, North Dakota

Here's what happens when you wrap 12 boxes worth of sparklers
tightly in electrical tape and attach a fuse.  When the tape is red-
orange and the fuse is green, the neatly wrapped bundle looks like a 
huge carrot, a carrot that's kind of a bomb.  It gives you a little shove 
in the chest from a hundred feet away.

Other great stuff about Manvel:

-  Massive piles of meat, say 36 venison sausage patties for a four-person breakfast
-  Venison bacon, similarly portioned.  These are my people.
-  If we'd had another person roll into town with us, we would have increased Manvel's population by a full percentage point.
-  A wild night where Megan skillfully defused a bar fight and I quite soberly raced a passenger-laden four wheeler through town
-  Our cousin Anna and her boyfriend Aaron, wonderful hosts and the latter in possession of a miraculous ability to remain on a careening off-road vehicle.  Great-hearted people.

-  Simultaneously a severe thunderstorm warning, an advisory for golf-ball sized hail (capable of decimating crops), and a deafening tornado siren!  Aaron's reaction?  Pile us all in the truck, drive out and take a look.  He and the town so nonchalant.  Anna finally convinced him to head home after a sheriff commanded us to immediately seek shelter.  It was all fabulously exciting. 

The Highline

Heading east away from Glacier we took Route 2, known as The
Highline, a nickname borrowed from the northernmost American
railway which largely remains within sight of the road.  Where
the approach to the park from the west climbed through foothills 
and gradually loftier mountains, leaving to the east was an abrupt 
drop into the plains.  The mountains in the mirrors formed a dramatic
skyline behind us, a purple wall erupting from the prairie.  

In western Montana, the vertical vacuum left by the mountains is
immediately filled by a spectacular display of towering clouds in
every direction, painting the land in great drifting patches of shadow
and sunlight.  In that vast flatness we were clearly able to mark a
storm's mountainous crawl across the land.  When its black 

downpour at last crushed over us, we could just as clearly see 

through to an advancing bath of sunlight, stark and cleansed beyond 

its borders.

"Ohh yaahh,"  said the North Dakotan gas station attendant, "If yuh
dohn't lake thuh wayther heere, weet fave minutes."  The truth is, I
love everybody with that accent just a little bit more.

The sky rules this stretch of highway, but the route is marked too 
by the steady presence of trains, some with lazily long strands of 
double-stacked cars.  Countless graying farmhouses, schools, and 
churches, abandoned and listing, are known as The Ghosts.

The sun was setting behind us just we as crossed the border into 

North Dakota and we drove into the heart of a storm we'd been 

watching swell before us for hours.  The rain was too much for 

the wipers, and the lightning bolts far too engorged as they arced 

onto radio towers.  Neither of us could believe the violence of the 

hail left the windshield intact.  In the midst of this uniquely 

midwestern fury, a dense double rainbow anchored itself to the 

plain on either side of the road.

Three Glacier timelapses

(Moms, click the bracket in the lower right corner of the player

to make it full-screen, then the gear icon, also on the lower right, 

to improve the quality to 720p.)

I would have liked to host this on Vimeo, but their software 

recognized the Philip Glass as being copy written.  The quality

suffers, but luckily Youtube's more back-alley policies allowed

me to post it there instead.

St. Mary Falls Trail, Glacier

Our last full day in the park we hiked the St. Mary Falls trail, down 
in the valley east of Logan Pass.  The trail passes by numerous 
waterfalls on the St. Mary River and on Virginia Creek, terminating
at Virginia Falls.

St. Mary Falls

Disney again overdid it with the blue-green dye.

This guy before Virginia Falls was nice 

enough to let me take his picture.  I didn't 

get a close up of his painting, but you can 

zoom in.  Nice little rendering.

The uppermost foot of Virginia Falls.  The 
cool misty blast was delicious after a hot 
uphill hike and made us literally hold onto 
our hats.

Sculpted strata beneath Virginia Falls.

Megan spied this gal hopping around in the froth of the creek.  

The American Dipper, Cinclus mexicanus, a rare species which 

nests only in vigorous mountain streams.  A moment later she 

flew up to . . .

. . . her nest!  I think this is just about the loveliest home I've ever
seen.  Go back a couple of pictures to see if you can spot it
from afar.

On our way back to camp we stopped for this mama crossing the 
road with her two cubs.  We got to watch them for a while tearing 
up plants and munching on the roots.  Best traffic jam ever.

After a bit she lumbered off down the hill, and her little ones
eventually followed.  One . . .

. . . two.

Hidden Lake Trail, Glacier

Our second morning in Glacier we set off for Logan Pass, accessible
via another engineering feat of the WPA, Going To The Sun Road.
Many regard this to be the most spectacular stretch of highway in 
North America.  It bisects the park from west to east, and takes one 
yawning switchback up the canyon wall toward the pass, from which 
one is either treated to or (ahem) terrified by the bottomless, epic 
expanse to the west.

Looking west along Going To The Sun Road. 

Looking east, a mile up Hidden Lake Trail from Logan Pass.  
Patches of the trail were still covered with snow, including a 
harrowing corner where one of us may or may not have clung 
to the snow for her very life.

Death march traversed, we could attend to rumors of a mountain 
goat herd somewhere up ahead, near the trail.  There was a rustling 
and we strained to make out wooly forms through the trees, when 
this scampy little character trotted out onto the snow.  Really, a 
frickin' wild baby mountain goat, right there, no problem.

Six pictures forming about a 240º panorama, with Hidden Lake to
the left.  The continental divide, from here all water flows west into 
the Pacific or east into the Atlantic.

These guys acted like we didn't exist.

Having picked a spot for lunch, I was burrowing into my backpack 
when this lady clacked by, casual as can be.  I could have reached 
out and run my hand along her side as she passed. 

Returning from the lake, we heard what sounded like a baby bleating
through the trees.  This teen-goat emerged, continuing its little call
as it picked its way down the mountain.

The Columbian Ground Squirrel!

Returning down Going To The Sun Road in the rain.

Avalanche Creek trail, Glacier

Our first morning in Glacier we took a trail leading right out of our 
campground.  It began in the shade of cedars, hemlocks, and birches

and climbed along Avalanche Creek, a roaring blue-green torrent.

Moss-carpeted forest flanked the trail to the south.  Returning hikers
seemed to have a joyful secret, their faces flushed and exultant.

After the density of the forest, we emerged to a staggering scene.
All sense of self melted away as we stood gaping: three—four!—five!
waterfalls slowly tumbling into Avalanche Lake.  As we adjusted a 
little the immensity before us, countless smaller waterfalls resolved 
into view, each a marvel, the snowmelt finding ways down from 
bony heights.

After basking for a while in the view, we made our way further up 
the trail along side of the lake, red cedars to our right, this absurd 
water to our left.

Undulating algae in a creek bed at the east 
end of the lake.