Canada, Oh!

Tonight we got an email from our son, who is proposing a trip along the north shore of Lake Superior with his girlfriend Rebecca. This is, I suspect, primarily a re-creation of a trip he took with his father in 1996, but that trip was itself a re-creation of a trip his father and I took in 1979. He probably owes his existence to that trip.

I had taken a contract job in St. Paul that year and was having a great time in the twin cities. Tom remained behind in a house we shared with friends in Madison, and I commuted home on the Greyhound bus every other weekend. It was a hellish trip and I resented having to make it. In between, I made calls from a phone booth on 7th Avenue in St. Paul--Tom would leave messages with the operators to ask me to call. It was all a bit more personal in the pre-cell phone days, even in a phone booth on the 3M plant-side of the tracks in St. Paul ( the whole neighborhood smelled of Scotch tape).

By the time he arrived to pick me up in St. Paul at the end of the contract, our future was a question mark. We spent the next two weeks, meandering along the north shore of Lake Superior, moving and re-pitching our tent every night. We got good at it--it became less of an ordeal and more of a smooth process. We learned a little something at each stop.

We (I) learned that you can lose a lot of money playing gin rummy for double or nothing, especially after many Amaretto shooters. We had the opportunity to mine amethysts and learned that you can't pay rent with the proceeds. We spent time in a town with the largest incidence of twins in North America, and learned that they don't walk around arm-in-arm for the benefit of tourists. We learned that a small chipmunk can make a very large dent in a pot of macaroni, and that it is never a good idea to engage in a tug-of war with a skunk over a loaf of bread. We learned that baby moose are still plenty large and that border guards (even then) don't appreciate humor that involves weapons. Somewhere between Thunder Bay and the Mackinac bridge we also found our future again.

So yes, my son, you can borrow the tent, the stove, the lantern and the cooler. You are on your own for the Amaretto.