Wisconsin to Saskatchewan

SO HERE we are on a tall, lightweight motorcycle, fighting the wind every mile of the way west and north. Friday in Wisconsin is more of the same punishing, hyper-turbulent air, but the week-long rain is behind us. That’s good. Now it’s hot and dry, but the piglet remains all but unrideable in wind this rough.

Hot and cold air masses are clashing somewhere not far away, I know that. And then I ride through it: a wall of cold air just south of Lake Superior. The temperature drops 30 degrees and the air smooths out on the other side.

I pick up US 2 in Superior, Wisconsin and ride across Minnesota to within 60 miles of the North Dakota line. The number goes in my journal, 306 miles for the day. Half a day’s ride for the iron piggy but a fine showing for the piglet.

A dozen miles west of Fosston, Minnesota, I commandeer a couple of picnic tables under a roadside shelter, one table for cooking, one for sleeping. My map says the lake this shelter backs up to is called Oak Lake. I cook steel-cut oatmeal for dinner, and put beans in a water bottle to soak for a red-bean-and-brown-rice breakfast. Got my meals mixed up, I know…

People generally leave you alone when you’re sleeping in a public space next to a motorcycle. Road-worn Harleys, for certain, and maybe road-warrior-style Suzukis, too. Still collecting data on that.

In any event, someone who wanted to share the shelter would need to have true grit. Maybe they’d pull a Rooster Cogburn and call from afar, Who’s in there? I’d say, A Methodist and a son of a bitch. Let them decide whether they wanted to find out which one I was.

There’s a tremendous fly hatch on the lake tonight, millions of them.

These guys…

They get in your water bottles as you fill then, turn it into gray bug soup. They don’t bite, so that’s good.

I sleep in my riding gear, wake up cold in the wee hours, unpack my sleeping bag to use as a blanket, back down on the table, Zzzzz…

Up at sunrise, I make cowboy coffee, then comes a sad text from the bride: our friend in Mexico, Tarquino Felix Flores Hernandez, left this world unexpectedly, and far too soon. Tarquino was 41, married to his love, Layla, and hoping to become a father. He was a lifelong Phantom reader who befriended me years ago.

A lucha libre wrestler for fun and a dentist for pay, he wrestled as El Dentista. Wore the image of a big molar on the forehead of his lucha libre mask. What a hilarious and generous spirit he was. I miss him already.

Tarquino inspired a Phantom story I wrote in 2012, for newspaper syndication around the world. The late Paul Ryan did a great job illustrating it. The Phantom goes to Mexico to help a police chief break up a criminal gang. He ends up in the lucha libre ring, in the guise of the chief’s wrestling alter ego, El Guerro Latino. There he battles and defeats the leader of the bad guys and the town thinks it was the chief who bested Public Enemy #1. We had such fun with that story.

Tarquino appeared in the story as the chief’s “trusted man,” his fixer. Paul had only a few photos of Tarquino to go by, so the character in the comics really didn’t look like him, but it was fun in any case.

I’ll write more about Tarquino when I get back home, and will show you some of the daily strips on that story.

Saturday, I cross the North Dakota line into Grand Forks and hear that wonderful Harley rumble. Dozens of hogs in a line are headed my way, many riding two-up. Most give me the friendly down-low biker wave, doesn’t matter that I left the Harley at home. I see the last of them pulling out of the local dealership, there’s some kind of organized group ride going on. So I pull in, talk to some of the guys there; one in particular must be the owner, he seems to be in charge. I tell him I’m on my way to Alaska, have everything I need to do a quick oil change and roll on. Can I borrow a drain pan and dump two quarts of used oil in the recycling tank?

You bet, no problem. He points to a beardy guy standing at the service door around back, he’ll give you a drain pan. So I walk back there to relay the information. When Beardo goes inside to get a pan for me two of the techs start giving him a rough time. I can’t hear the whole of it but it’s an unhappy conversation, let’s say. I’m taking money out of their pockets if I work on my bike myself.

Beardo comes back empty handed, I say don’t worry about it, brother, no big deal, I’ll change oil around here somewhere today. He says, no, stand by, I’m going to go find the owner, and (I guess) get the owner to whomp on the techs with the bad attitude.

Nooooo, I say. You people all have to work together long after I’m gone. Don’t go looking for the owner.

I’m going to find the owner, he says again.

Okay, and while you’re doing that, I’ll be putting on my helmet and gloves and riding away. Which is what I do.

So I cruise around Grand Forks, see an AutoZone store, pull in. Really good guys behind the counter. Chuck, and the manager, Jeremy. They think the Alaska thing is cool.

Alaska!? On that bike?

Would it be all right if I did a quick oil change out behind your building? And, if so, could I leave the used oil here with you?

On both counts the answer is: of course you can. That’s why we have a used-oil tank, to make it easy for people to dispose of their oil properly.

Much appreciated, guys. I’ll buy a drain pan from you. No need, Chuck says, we have a pan out back that you can use. He goes and gets it for me.

So how do you like that? I get skunked by my very own Harley tribe and it’s a couple of AutoZone car guys who come to the aid of the lone rider far from home.

Here’s the piglet getting fresh oil out behind the AutoZone…

Saturday night finds me in the northwest corner of North Dakota, hunting for a place to sleep.

I ride until after dark and end up table surfing again, this time in a town called Kenmare. I’m in a deserted, nearly treeless campground on the main drag. It’s owned by the town, maybe always was, but somehow it has the look of a failed commercial venture. A guess on my part.

The sign says $5 if you pitch a tent. Honestly, $5 seems high. The place looks like Mad Max might camp here. I walk all the sites and there really isn’t any place I’d care to pitch a tent. Stony gravel everywhere.

Around 11 that night, I’m writing at the table I’m planning to sleep on and I hear gravel crunching behind me. A man who lives on the edge of the campground has a ham and cheese sandwich for me, a can of Pepsi, a bottle of water, and—it’s a cold night—he’s got a sleeping bag I can use if I don’t have one.

I had heard kids and a dog from over his way earlier, vehicle doors opening and closing. Family man.

I’ve talked about this here before, but there’s something about a long-distance solo motorcycling journey that people everywhere respond to. They want to help you get to where you’re going. Maybe they think you won’t; the odds are too stacked against you. Or maybe it never gets articulated that way on the inner workspace, but something subconscious says it’s time to help.

They always want to feed you, that’s a given. One time in West Virginia I didn’t even have the iron piggy’s motor turned off yet and people from two different campsites were walking my way with plates of food stacked high. The first guy to reach me, a Harley rider himself, said, “Hey, biker trash, you hungry?”

The ham-and-cheese sandwich in Kendare, North Dakota, was a meal in itself. A rich bread from a bakery, or homemade, and a slab of ham that must have been 3/8ths of an inch thick.

I thanked the man for his kindness, slept on the table from midnight until five, saddled up and rode for Saskatchewan.

Pump jacks everywhere on the farms and ranches out here. Whether it’s an economic choice or necessity I have no way of knowing, but they’re getting everything the land has to give. Like the old man on the last page of “The Giving Tree.” Now all he needs is a stump to sit on. And the tree, as they say, was happy.

The border crossing into Canada is empty, no waiting. Show my passport, answer a few questions and I’m in. I pull over in a little town called Macoun to brew a morning mug of tea. Had a pleasant 85 miles behind me, a fine start to my day.

I love these ghost towers on the horizon. So full of history and the lives lived in their shadows. Sleep by one and you’ll listen to it all night. They creak, rattle, snap, pop, doors groan open on rusty hinges and suddenly slam shut. They’re always full of pigeons cooing in the eaves.

A part of me wants to close here and pretend there’s nothing more. Trouble is, if you can’t bring yourself to tell the whole story, you’re lost as a writer. There are no road signs that will make any sense to you after that.

So while I prefer not to speak of this here, not now, not ever, not anywhere, to anyone, I might as well tell you I got blown off the road again by these godawful prairie winds.

I’m not hurt, and the piglet’s no worse for wear. Despite that we left the road at 60mph this time.

Unlike in Illinois last week, it wasn’t because the violence of the wind overcame the friction of my tires against the pavement. It was because I fell dead asleep in the saddle.

Buried the lede on this story, didn’t I? But there it is: I fell asleep riding yesterday. Fell asleep at 1:30 on a sunny afternoon and rode the bike off the road in what were, I have to say, the luckiest-ever circumstances in which to do so.

There was nothing there to hit. No fence, no trees…  A few more miles down the road and there would have been. Utility poles everywhere.

Looking back, it wasn’t that I had slept only five hours the night before; I do that routinely. The issue is that riding a tall, light motorcycle in turbulent air is nonstop work. And I’d had eleven hard days of it.

All morning I’m riding Saskatchewan Route 39 to Moose Jaw and my eyes closing, chin dropping, then suddenly back up, eyes wide, then closing again, and so on, and so on. I keep trying different strategies for staying awake: scan the road and check mirrors to a count, a cadence, do breathing exercises, say my thoughts out loud.

I finally pull over at a little store, fill up the tank, buy a bottle of iced tea for the caffeine. Then I go around the side of the building and throw my sleeping pad down in the only shade I can find, under the gas sign. If I let go of the pad I’ll never see it again, it’s that windy on the prairie.

I’m on my back. This is what it looked like looking up, big steel sign creaking and banging in the wind as if it might fly to pieces and be scattered.

I close my eyes but don’t sleep. Then I get back on the bike, where I soon do.

I wake up to the bike quartering down a grassy embankment at speed, headed for a freshly planted field. As you may imagine, this new information served to… Get. My. Attention. My full attention.

There are two emergency motorcycling rules to live by in a situation like this (and others, like sudden tire deflation): don’t touch the brakes, don’t chop the throttle.

I have no idea what I did with the throttle, I was asleep, after all. Had maybe a half-highway-speed grip when I awoke, and held it there so as not to freewheel into the soft ground and go ass over tin cup.

So down the embankment we go, cut across a corner of the field, and quite a lot of energy gets absorbed when I hit the up-embankment at an intersecting gravel road. Then I’m on the brakes hard, before we can cross that road and end up in another field.

I pull to a stop and look back at the 100-or-so yards of trespassing wheel track the piglet and I had left.

That truck is on Route 39, piglet’s on the crossroad we ended up on. The wheel track we left goes up the middle of this pic. And dig it, I didn’t run over the guy’s survey stake.

Looking back the other way. That vehicle is about where I fell asleep and rode off Route 39. Wheel track is in the middle here, too. As you can see, nothing to hit and ruin your whole day while you’re napping.

Would never have made it on the iron piggy. She’s too heavy. We’d have been crashed up at the bottom of the embankment, or certainly as soon as we hit the soft, plowed earth.

Piglet powered right through, her big 21-inch front wheel leading the way. This bodes well for the Dalton Highway to Prudhoe Bay, don’t you think? And the Dempster to Tuktoyaktuk.

The main road was probably empty when it happened. I say that because nobody pulled up and stopped. If you see a motorcyclist ride off the road, you stop, right? Most Americans, and all Canadians, let’s say. I think there were no witnesses for a mile in either direction.

The wind was from the south so it pushed me off my side of the road instead of across the oncoming lane. Would have been a rougher ride on that side, there are train tracks over there.

So all’s well that ends well. I snap a few pics of my off-road tire track, just in case I do choose to confess the stupidity of riding while dozing. But I’ll go with what it gets me: the satisfaction of reporting the whole journey, not just the parts that make me appear to know what I’m doing.

After the mishap, I get back on the bike, ride 20-or-so miles to Moose Jaw, buy a can of this… can’t hurt…

Then I get on the Canada 1 West highway, intending to stop at the first campground I see, there to sleep for a few days before I go the 400 miles to Calgary, to see friends there. That’s how I come to be here at Besant Campground, a guest of Bill and Shauna Campbell, and expect to be here until tomorrow morning.

I slept like the dead last night, in a lovely, dreamless oblivion, and awoke feeling like a new man with fresh eyes for the world. There’s a colony of purple martins here. I can see them overhead now, dozens of little spitfires swooping, diving, tilting into turns. They’re gorging on mosquitoes. Such a marvel to see how they float and vector in while intercepting and scooping up the easy ones, then flap like mad to get the ones that think they’re getting away.

Will hail you from my friend Bill B.’s in Calgary. Until then, the piglet and I remain here, in happy repose.

Tony DePaul, June 3, 2019, Caron, Saskatchewan, Canada