Much ado about nothing: North America by bicycle

Morning after noon: Day 1: July 10

It’s not easy to begin a long-distance bicycle journey, something I’ve contemplated for at least a decade and first learned about in college. It’s not the insurmountable that frightens me; physical duress I can bear like a Stoic. But I’m also a Socratic, and questions weigh my mind: Why go on such a trek? What of lasting significance is to be accomplished? Isn’t it a self-centered waste of money and risk of life? I’m envisioning a grizzly encounter in the mountains of British Columbia.

In the afternoon of July 10, 2025, I check my bicycle with a low-cost carrier at Narita Airport, and a bowlegged balding man with a gut comes to take it away, recalling with longing the days when he used to go touring and joking that he is too fat and old to do it anymore. And since the day begins in Japan (where I’ve lived for half of my life), I arrive in Vancouver on the morning of the 10th, and I’m picked up by a Sikh in an Uber XL and taken to a bicycle shop (already busy so early) where I reassemble my Giant and dispose of the packing materials and cardboard box. Then, I ride to a sports store to get a canister of isobutane for my burner and a can of pepper spray for those imagined bears.

Homo sapien vs. bear: Day 2: July 11

Large cities can be more stressful for a cyclist than the boondocks because of people on the street looking to find and walk off with something valuable. Luckily, the hostel had a large storeroom in which to keep my bicycle for the night, but when I come out of Starbucks after a 5 a.m. breakfast, a shifty hooded fellow is crossing the street toward my modest but still expensive rig loaded with two panniers and a pack. He changes directions back to the other side when he sees me, and I follow Google Maps’ recommended routes out of fairly bicycle-friendly Vancouver and onto the busy highway.

Tentatively testing the cycling waters, I adhered to Google’s suggestions for the first day, except when I come to a traffic officer who informs me that though the highway is closed to traffic, I can proceed, but that I probably don’t want to witness the aftermath of the fatal accident ahead. The opening roadkill, of which I’ll decide to keep a litany, has turned out to be a roadkiller, a Homo sapien. I thank the officer and follow the detour, not out of fear of witnessing death but out of respect for the dead’s privacy and for the efforts of the emergency responders doing their work.

I huff up some hilly but quiet side roads and eventually back to Google’s route, which takes me past fruit farms, some where families of Sikh are picking blueberries and cherries. I sample the invasive Himalayan blackberries and stray red cherries and green apples I find along the ditches, and after a Subway dinner for fresh vegetables, I arrive at Cheam Fishing Village and Campground on the Fraser River, named for some fur trader. This is the 10,000-year-old fishing and hunting grounds of the Sto:lo, which is their name for the river. I look at the Sto:lo woman on Wikipedia, weaving a basket – she’s very East Asian, almost Japanese – and I imagine ancient people in small boats following wildlife along the shorelines and currents of the north Pacific rim.

I’m too tired to attempt a refreshing dip in the Sto:lo; I’ve managed one of my longer distances on the first day. However, I’m not keeping an official kilometer tally; the meaning I make is more important than the journey’s length. And I catch a fleeting glimpse of a bear, the only one I’ll see (if I saw it at all): either a young grizzly or a cinnamon bear loping through the failing evening light between dark woods. Self-satisfied in my readiness, I sleep soundly with my spray at my side.

Homeless: Day 3: July 12

The go-to restaurant for reasonably priced calories, not to mention free electricity and wifi, is McDonald’s, but only in Canada, where the meat is Canadian raised and the potatoes Canadian grown. The customer service is also notably better than in the U.S., perhaps because the franchises are largely owned and operated by Sikhs.

The Canadian McDonald’s still attracts the homeless, however, and this morning I’m greeted in Hope by a woman with a fully loaded shopping cart (which she defends with a baseball bat) searching the sidewalk for stubby cigs. “Do you have any cigarettes?” she asks. “I don’t smoke,” I reply. “That’s good. Don’t start,” she says. Living on a bicycle but one day, I already can’t help but feel homeless myself, particularly while self-important automobiles speed along the Crowsnest Highway.

Much of the nihilistic traffic is vacation-bent: cars pulling trailers, trucks pulling boats, mobile homes pulling trailers, boats, trucks and cars, leaving me to suck plumes of exhaust at 1300 meters as I huff and puff over Allison Pass. I feel little better than the roadkill I put to memory: four evening grosbeaks, three wee snakes, butterflies, a raccoon, and one motorcyclist. This highway, a recommended bicycle route, is meant to accommodate big quickly-traversing machines, and the rest stops have nothing but toilets and Tesla chargers. When I run out of water in the midday heat, I have to make use of my filter at the quickly-moving mountain streams.

I’m relieved to finally arrive at the provincial campground called Coldspring and its hand pump, until I see posted the “boil water” advisory. Even most campgrounds are exclusively for automobiles that are fully loaded with supplies. My exasperation is quelled by the unpretentious appearance of the campground attendant, an awkward lanky college girl with red hands. As she registers my site, I tell her she reminds me of when I worked at a state campground in the U.S., and she says she wants to try a bicycle trip some day.  

My frustration returns when the packed gravel pad refuses my stakes and I have to gather rocks to secure my tent lines, but finally, I’m able to charge my cellphone with my foldable solar pad, to bathe in the chill of the Similkameen River (a tributary of the Columbia), to filter drinking water from the well, to cook a modest meal of oats and dehydrated vegetables, to take a photo of the mother and child ground squirrels scrounging for morsels and grooming each other, to clean and pack everything up so as not to attract the nearby cinnamon bears a camper has mentioned, and to fall straight asleep from exhaustion.

Sunday: Day 4: July 13

I start my days early to witness breathless landscapes come alive with wildlife in the long mountain twilight: the wading birds calling beside an oxbow from which trout jump and over which a juvenile bald eagle flies. And on this Sunday, just before Sunday Summit, I spy a mother moose nursing a calf in the bushes of the wide right-of-way on this side of the wire fence. 

Part of my reason for cycling across North America is to enjoy the outdoors, but soon the litter along the road and the extremist traffic's roar as it belches black smoke accelerating uphill continue to cynically disparage my logic. Then as I arrive in Princeton, I’m greeted by smoky air of a quality worse than that found in Tokyo. Whether the culprit, a regional forest fire, is seasonal, the result of rain shadow, or induced by climate change, to which automobiles make a sizable contribution, I can’t say. 

In the evening, I’m standing in solidarity with a biker nursing an Old Milwaukee. We share the freedom and concerns of the road as we watch a helicopter clatter overhead as it reloads with water or fire retardant to put out the flames visible on the hill not so distant from the city campground. Luckily, the wind is blowing the small conflagration away from us.

Following: Day 5: July 14

I’m singing the chorus of Nina Simone’s “Sinner Man”, trying to remember the words. I roll along, seemingly more quickly in the cold and darkness, through the wilds and into the fruitlands near Keremos, a dry pastel landscape with green river valleys of irrigated orchards and vineyards, not unlike something from the end of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath or out of Virgil’s agricultural masterpiece, The Georgics: “Then every vineyard ripens with plentiful fruit, / richness fills hollow valleys and deep glades, / and wherever else the god has turned his handsome face” (from Book II, trans. A.S. Kline). At a gas stop, I buy a plastic bag of local beef jerky from a Sikh man, and at a fruit stand, I pay a Sikh woman for a plastic bag of local dried Italian plums. She wishes me a safe journey.

Some of these lands still belong to American Indians, First Nation peoples of the Lower and Upper Similkameen bands, and I stop and take photos of their horses for my daughter, who likes to ride these creatures loved by humans since before we carved them from mammoth tusk and painted them on the white walls of limestone caves. Farther on, I park behind a semi-trailer at a pulloff overlooking a scene reminiscent of Georgia O’Keefe’s painting “Pedernal”, offer a prayer that the spirits keep me safe during my continental crossing and continue on toward Osoyolos, attempting to quiet the chatter in my head.

I skirt the Canadian/U.S. border and come across western kingbirds below in mountain sage and above on a pair of electrical lines held aloft by weathered utility poles from which the creosote has long drained. Then on the pavement a dead western meadowlark bearing its coat of arms on its chest: a black chevon on a field of sunny yellow. Next a dead dragonfly called a twelve-spotted skimmer with black-and-white banded wings. And finally a live California quail, with its forehead feather jutting like a Swiss guard’s helmet plume, standing sentinel on a fence post above a dusty yellowbellied marmot disappearing like a fat pontiff into its ditchside den. 

I’m again reminded of my daughter, who is studying French, when I see a bilingual sign in warning-yellow posted above a pale green ravine peppered with black Angus: the black-typed phrases “shooting range” and “champ de tir” are separated by an ambulant stick-figure voided with a red circle and slash. After taking a photo, I continue to walk uphill, still not used to the steep terrain, when I hear a call from behind. A tall thin Anglo man draped in a fluorescent yellow-and-orange pancho and wearing a bicycle helmet with wide sombrero rim pedals up and introduces himself as Mike from Victoria. The reflective tape on his garb glitters in the hot sun as it climbs toward noon. We agree to ride together the rest of the way into Osoyolos, and I let him lead, saying, “I’m a good follower”, but just as we get going, Mike’s rear tire starts to go flat, and he tells me to go on ahead and will catch up at the Nk’mip Campground, a large native-run lake-side park peopled annually by a cult of recreational-vehicle drivers. 

After an unsatisfying humus sandwich at a local cafe, I stop for supplies at a grocery and meet Mike at check-in. He and I exchange site numbers and agree to talk later, and I go find my RV lot, set up my tent in the shade, refill my water bottles at the tap, and plug in my phone at the outlet. I’m about ready to relax when a tornadic windstorm howls into the campground, filling the air with sand, stripping leaves and twigs from the trees, and carrying off unsecured objects. My tent is flattened and the stakes pulled from the ground, and I put on my bicycle helmet and a mask leftover from Covid, hunker down behind someone’s sedan, and watch as the RV goers stroll around with cups of beer as if the apocalypse were just another day on the beach: a barefoot woman with her tan paunch hanging over her bikini bottom and a scrawny bald man in black speedo and flip-flops. One woman with a stern redneck-look continuously circles through the sites as she attempts to place her two misplaced lapdogs, and a young father lackadaisically pulls his baby boy in a red wagon below a wailing willow, which, whipped into hysterics by the wind, comes crashing down seconds later. 

Another felled trunk perfectly creases the bed of a black pickup truck while others nearly miss, clip or cave RV roofs. One of my ragged willows is suspending large broken limbs ominously over where I was going to lay my head for the night, and when there is a lull, I pack everything back on my bicycle and wheel it over to Mike’s site, where the trees are of a sturdier variety. While campground maintenance cleans up, I sit and listen to stories of Mike’s long-past travels, including in Turkana, Kenya, where he once spent a blustery night, arms and legs splayed to the four corners of his tent, while his two guides slept soundly outside, each wrapped in a simple tarp.

Our talk meanders through the difference of life in Japan, the benefits of immigration to Canada, Democratic complicity in Trumpian politics (they would rather have Trump to carry forward the two parties’ main unpalatable policies than have Sanders undermine them), our suspicion of the wired internet-age, birdwatching by song-identification app, and the gear packed on our bicycles, and he gives me pointers for the journey ahead, such as drinking chocolate milk for nutrition and energy and visiting the National Grasslands in southern Saskatchewan. His grit-filled eyes tear up when he recalls the reintroduction of bison on native lands, and I suggest reconstituting a fuller native cuisine, including not only meats but wild vegetables (sansai in Japanese), such as timpsila, a starchy prairie tuber that was a Sioux staple. There is an awkward silence, and when I rise to return to re-set up my repaired site, he suggests that we meet at the campground in the valley over the next summit, where his wife has made him a reservation. I agree, but inside I suspect that once I get going, I won’t be able to stop that early in the day, and I wish him a good ride to Calgary. Perhaps I’m not a good follower afterall. 

Apocalypses and anarchists: Day 6: July 15

I’m up by three and on the road by four. And as I tiringly rise out of Osoyolos, taking the switchback in turns on bicycle and on foot, I pause to watch the morning sky slowly dim and put out the city lights and stars. In my head I compose a poem for the now speck-sized camper community still dead to the gathering day:

For the end of the world

Canadian’s will come

away from their TVs with  

light beer in plastic cups, go

sit in the sand, butt cracks 

peeking from speedos and

bikini bottoms, look up at the

engulfed sky and remember 

the summer of ’25, the wind 

that toppled trees, smashed

an RV, and say, “At least 

no one got hurt.”

By sunrise, I’m at Anarchist Summit, which Mike has dreamed of cycling since boyhood when passing through on a family vacation, and I feel bad about getting here first. On the other side, the land is suddenly calm green pasture and stately straight-backed pines, and I feel like walking down through the wide expanse of grass sloping away from the road to lie down and sleep forever beside the weathered clapboard house with gray barn on the distant misty pond.

By opening time, I’m already in the Kettle Valley, Mike’s intended destination, and I stop for coffee at the Rock Creek Cafe, where the owner is out watering the potted flowers. A group of regulars, four older men come in and invite me to have breakfast with them, and as they talk, I yearn to stay and wait for Mike, but the momentum of my journey is nagging as I rub my hands over my knees covered in spandex leggings, and within an hour, I’m gone, and by the end of the day, far away in Grand Forks. 

I purchase chain oil and a pair of padded bicycle shorts for my already blistering butt cheeks that I’ve lathered with antibiotic ointment. A quick stop at a local cafe for a sweet to enjoy with tea at the city campground, and I’m set for the evening. Except I’m not satisfied despite my good progress; I miss Mike and the old men at the cafe, or “Naughts” as I’ve dubbed them, and cursing my restless drive, I begin to compose another poem.

A breeze: Day 7: July 16

I wake to the smell of a passing skunk checking out the crumpled paper bag that held my brownie, while the park lights cast the silhouettes of grazing deer onto my tent. The grass is wet from the sprinkler system making lawn through the night in this arid area where there otherwise would be none. Today feels lonelier, and the sporty male cyclist with whom I barely exchanged a few words yesterday is still asleep at the adjacent site.

I’m off again puffing uphill on bike/on foot or letting gravity careen me dangerously downhill, forcing cold air into my face and filling my eyes with tears. The Crowsnest, however, is more populated than I imagined back in Japan, and five minutes after realizing I’m going to have a flat from the tick-tick-tick of the staple scattered by a logging truck and picked up by my rear tire, a jolly long-necked goggle-eyed Manitoba man with a toothy grin pulls over his jalopy, which he appears to call home, and throws my bicycle and bags among the mattress and cooler box in back. He offers to take me to Creston, where he has family, a two-day cycle east, but as his minivan weaves from the overly generous play in the steering, I direct him to a Christina Lake bicycle shop that would have been an hour’s walk and is now less than 10 minutes away.

My first flat has turned out to be a breeze. I lock up my bicycle at the shop that has yet to open and walk down the road to a cafe for a coffee and sweet roll. By the time I’m back and waiting, a loud man with a shifty bum eye and a car-salesman’s voice shows up early and fixes my tire before running off to get his breakfast. I’m back on the road, and I see my first lazuli bunting, a bird that that appears to have been put together in a Mespotamian atelier: urine-softened ivory for its belly, beaten copper for its breast, and a head chiseled from that deep blue stone, lapis lazuli. 

The road leads over the pine-covered Paulson Summit to Nancy Greene Provincial Park, named after a white-woman skier in colonial/capitalist and so anti-feminist/anti-environmental fashion. It’s another basic campground with a pit toilet and a green-painted cast-iron hand-pump (made in Wisconsin). And today my bath is a silty mountain lake tinctured with the tannins of decaying pine needles. Two little girls are also swimming here. “Why is the water brown?” one asks. “Because of the sand,” the other replies confidently and then exclaims, “Look, I can go deeper!” And she holds her nose, dips like a duck, butt and feet in the air, and goes under. 

Easily enough I make a fire from wood abandoned at a nearby site, patch the punctured inner tube for a spare, and cook up a packet of Indian chickpea curry with oatmeal, while keeping an eye on the weird guy with German shepherd parked in front of the toilet. I train my binoculars on the birds overhead, eavesdrop on the parking lot conversation of a guy asking his friend to go huckleberry picking tomorrow, and hope the hole next to my tent holds ground squirrels, thinking of the snake moving beneath my body-warmed sleeping pad when I woke one late summer morning in an Altai Mountain river valley.

A half Nelson day: Day 8: July 17

There was a bit of rain last night, but my tent is tucked under some bushy pines and is dry. It’s only a 27km ride into Castlegar, and I stop at McDonald’s for a Mighty McMuffin, hashbrown and medium latte. It will be an easy day to Nelson, a net-calorie-saved day rather than burned. A Naught from Rock Creek, the one I’ve dubbed James Buchanan, suggested I go this way and take the ferry across Kootenay Lake to skirt a busy, tough, boring mountain pass. I’ve decided to put my trust in him and give thanks for the kind people who have helped me thus far.

It’s another day of unspeakable beauty, but I try to do it justice. I note the purple-blue chicory, a childhood favorite, along the road. I want to dig one up and make a tea from its roots, but the asterid is always growing beside the asphalt, which I imagine has leached petrochemicals into the roadbed. So I continue along the river, where I see a cormorant and find a utility pole topped with a meter-thick nest of sticks, upon which an osprey is perched, keeping house.  

I have four pairs of underwear, after which I have to do the wash. The last time was Princeton Municipal Campground, so I cycle straight to the laundromat in Nelson, get coins and detergent from the attendant, load and start the machine, and sit and page through a cookbook someone has left here, taking photos of interesting recipes, such as this for salmon ceviche:

1lb fresh wild salmon

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

Juice of 6 limes; plus 1 lime, sliced, for garnish

1 tsp honey

2 tbsp grated peeled fresh ginger

1 red chili pepper, finely chopped

¼ tsp salt

Optional: ¼ cup chopped cilantro

Optional: ¼ cup diced red onion

Pat salmon dry and slice into ¼-inch slices. Whisk together oil, lime juice, honey, ginger, chili and salt in a large bowl. Place salmon slices gently in bowl and let each piece soak in lime mixture for 5 to 10 minutes. Turn slices and let salmon soak completely on other side for 5 to 10 minutes. Transfer salmon to a platter and garnish with cilantro and red onion, if desired, and sliced lime rounds.

The recipe reminds me of my travels to Guam and Peru, where ceviche spread along the Spanish global trade route and where now a vortex of plastic refuse is all that unites this former empire. But once my laundry is dry, instead of finding fresh salmon, I order a fried British Columbia halibut wrap with fries and an IPA, at a restaurant with outdoor seating so that I can keep an eye on my bicycle. I’m desperate for calories as I’ve started to burn my body fat, but I try to take my meal slowly while enjoying the warm afternoon in the shade. 

Halfway through, an old lady plops down next to me to rest her feet: “Is it okay if I sit here?” she asks. “Of course, please,” I reply. Perhaps it's my inviting and attentive demeanor or my wide knowledge and experience, but throughout my life, people, regardless of their backgrounds, seem moved to strike up conversations and then tell me their life stories. This white-haired woman with sharp face and blue eyes and neatly dressed in bleached cotton blouse and polished silver jewelry is one of these, and she soon is relating how her family came over from Germany after World War II, how her father had worked in forestry in the Harz Mountains and then in mining in British Columbia, and how she was the last child, the only child born in Canada.

Our conversation then moves on to her dislikes: Trump and religion, which makes her the second descendant of Third Reich citizens I’ve met in North America to abhor bigoted speech and Christian fanaticism. She equally dislikes the rich hippie Vietnam draft dodgers who have taken over this part of BC, something the Naughts had also warned me about. “They’re all rich now,” she says. “Well, they came from money. Came up here to escape the war and started their communes. Called themselves hippies. Now they’re yuppies. Took over everything and started telling other people what was what.” I’ve noticed that Nelson is disappointingly touristy, a place where privileged young people come to zipline or mountain bike, but there also appears to be a lot of vagrancy, poor wanderers. She suggests I go north, where she’s from, where it’s more beautiful, but I laugh and say that I don’t have the fortitude to zigzag all over the place. 

My mind is made up to cross the continent, and I pay for my meal and leave the woman with her daughter, who has returned from shopping. I’m eager to get an ice cream at the shop uphill from the main drag and then check in at the campground back downhill, where I will buy a Coke from the hippie-era vending machine, so hippie, in fact, that it has to be opened like a refrigerator and my drink handed to me by the young man tending the office.

Destined: Day 9: July 18

I cross the bridge out of Nelson and head north, arriving at the ferry terminal about 5 a.m., more than an hour before the first departure and just as a dockside cafe is opening. I have a sweet roll and coffee before going to stand next to a gray-bearded biker who exclaims that the last time he tried to cross the crew didn’t show up. Luckily, that is not the case today, and just as the sun is breaking over the mountains, we skim across the calm of Kootenay Lake, a damned reservoir part of the Columbia River watershed, and I watch a bald eagle hook a fish with its talons as the ferry pulls to the other side. 

I cycle through Crawford Bay, where they are setting up for a folk festival. A woman on the ferry, perhaps one of those hippies turned white-haired yuppie, invited me to attend in order to, I have a feeling, increase turnout and, in turn, revenue. But as in Rock Creek, I’m too restless to sit and wait, and waste a day of progress. I’m also ever concerned of running up camping fees, each stop for the night being another expense. I haven’t chanced wild camping; perhaps it feels unsafe, perhaps I’m afraid to run out of water or go without a toilet, perhaps I don’t want to feel homeless. I strike on and arrive in Creston in the afternoon.

Despite my disappointment in not stopping to enjoy myself, I rationalize that there is a certain fate to my momentum. I wouldn’t have met the woman in Nelson if I had lingered in Rock Creek, and I wouldn’t have come to the Golden Flour Bakery, where I’m approached by the bicycle-shop owner next door, if I had stayed to listen to folk music. The shop owner is, in fact, just the man I want to see, to check my tire pressure, and once I finish my coffee, I dissemble my packs and roll my bicycle into his establishment. 

He does a thorough job with the wheels, fixing a rubbing front brake pad, and wraps my upper handlebars with padding, to help ease the pressure on my hands that is causing metacarpal syndrome and making my fingers go numb. As he works and we talk, I see myself twenty-five years ago. He is young with a new family, a part of my life I’ve already tried and tested, and I can’t help wish him all the best and eventually a midlife sojourn like the one I’m on. But when we start to discuss learning languages, I awkwardly chuckle without thinking when he says he has dyslexia. I don’t mean anything by it – my fatigue has delayed my ability to process before responding – but I think I’ve offended him. 

Back on the sidewalk with my tuned-up bicycle, I run into the Subway at the end of the block for a sandwich to take to the campground, and when I run back out, I’m approached by a tan talkative middle-aged woman, another destined encounter. From her updo down to her sandals, she seems decked for a night out but, on closer inspection, has a slightly soiled appearance, and her belly is bulging her tight dress. She mentions dinner and an apartment, and I can’t help feeling she is propositioning me for a meal and/or money in exchange for sex. 

Then she conjures interest in my bicycle journey, talks spiritually, philosophically, gives a stop-n-smell-the-roses type of speech, which I add to and expand on (I’ve studied philosophy a tad) until 10 to 15 minutes later she finally gives up and comes around to the point and presents a business card for her side gig: Jehovah Witness evangelist. I say it was nice to meet her and think to myself that it’s almost futile for the religious solicitate to bait poets; we are an order, a priesthood unto ourselves (not to mention, I have a degree in theology and 16 years of parochial school). After a day of cycling that began at 4 a.m., this exhausted starving poet only wants to get his tent erected, have dinner, shower and pray for sleep.

The undersung: Day 10: July 19

In the darkness, I have the apple fritter that I bought at the Golden Flour, and by sunrise I’m stopping on the first of two truss bridges over the meandering Moyie River at Curzon and watching two mule deer raise their heads from the middle of the shallow tree-covered sun-splattered water. Later on, I come across a group of Canadian geese on an island, and then a colony of Columbian ground squirrels in a pasture, where sentinels whistle shrill alarms before disappearing below in a racing flash of fur. Finally, a turkey vulture high in a tree reminds me of the recent roadkill: so many deer, including fawns, and a snowshoe hare, eyes closed and on its side as if running in its sleep.

I spy and taste some occasional gooseberries and then stop and search on my smartphone for the bountiful deep-blue berries along the roadside, determining that they are safe: Saskatoons. I pick handfuls of the mealy and mildly sweet fruit, popping them in my mouth and into a ziploc baggy to possibly make into fresh jam. And I’m in luck, as I catch the tail end of the Cranbrook farmer’s market, where I walk my bike through the stalls and purchase a little plastic bear with a few ounces of honey to sweeten the jam and a wedge of hard goat-milk cheese to eat it with. 

I once made a wild cranberry jam over a larch-wood fire in the Sakha Republic taiga that was perfect on the buttered homemade bread we had, and even better after the greasy wild duck soup with potatoes, carrots, onions, and garlic. At the Mount Baker RV Park, my foraged menu is not the most harmonious of flavors and textures; I wish I had gotten the soft cheese in spite of my worries of spoilage and leakage. But the satisfaction is in having a meal from this land, which seems so undersung, if not derided, by the people speeding through it to their desired destinations and activities. I take a shower and tuck my panniers under my tent flap for the thunderclouds I see blotting the sunny sky, the first storm of this trip. I lie there waiting out the cracking flashes of lightning that threaten death and destruction and the heavy wind-driven raindrops that batter through pinholes in my thin translucent shelter, while cold rivulettes of water seep beneath along the long dam of my body.

Feeling: Day 11: July 20

In the morning twilight, I’m feeling this landscape: a cloud-swept sky and mountains rising over a mist-covered river. Later, two curious horses lean their chests into their split-rail fence to watch me, and I take another photo to send to my daughter. Perhaps they think I’m strange, and yet I’m one of them, of their spirit, and they trot along with me until they run out of pasture. I feel for them, corralled from freedom. I feel for the doe with fawn crossing a stream, free to survive. I feel for the lady manning Jaffray Sports and Hardware, who gets to live out here but has to ring up apple fritters and coffee before sunrise. I feel the fresh morning air, the wet deck tables that are already beginning to dry from last night’s rain.

I feel for the litany of roadkill this morning, including a buck in velvet and two birds: an American robin and a white-throated sparrow. But the list of living aves runs longer as I decide to take more time to stop and train my binoculars: I feel an osprey or fish hawk; a northern flicker, the yellowish woodpecker often found on the ground; blackbilled magpies, the crow’s more colorful chattier cousin; and Canadian geese, honk honk. And just before my destination of Fernie, I stop along the Elk River and feel the cedar waxwings eating Saskatoons, American redstarts and an orange-crowned warbler catching insects amidst pine boughs, and two red crossbills pecking gravel of the highway pulloff.

I’ve decided to stop early to celebrate before I traverse the final mountain pass, the Crowsnest, and I arrive at Mount Fernie Provincial Campground long before noon, as the crew is still cleaning up after today’s departures. Since I’m on a bicycle, the flustered uniformed woman in an official park pickup directs me to the walk-in sites near a set of bear lockers and says she will check me in later. I feel for her, as I used to do the exact same job at a state park in Wisconsin, and while I wait the two hours for her to return, I set up my tent, arrange abandoned firewood in the fire ring to dry for later, put my bags away in the locker, and charge my phone and battery pack with my portable solar panel.

After registering, I cycle into Fernie, to a bar and grill called The Brickhouse for what turns out to be a lackluster burger, fries and IPA – I can make a better burger back home and I prefer black beers, which are proving hard to find so far. I feel it's going to rain, so I abandon the outdoor seating and eat inside and then cycle back to the campground, where I wait out the hours washing the road mud from my bike at the nearby sprayer station, tending my punky campfire, looking for thimbleberries, a type of bland raspberry, and watching a redstart glean spiders from the tops of the tall pines. Kids on dirt bikes zoom up and down the campground roads, and as I go back and forth on the paths to the bathroom, I encounter a couple with a helmeted little girl struggling to balance on her tiny wheels; she says thank you as I stand to the side and let her pass – a struggling cyclist myself, I feel for her.

Weighing: Day 12: July 21

It’s another day of weighing the uplifting and the sad: the river’s form versus the formless rain, the Three Sisters peaks rising out of the wilderness versus the strip coalmine rising before the Sparwood McDonald’s, the sign explaining the Ktunaxa Nation versus the explication of European settlement, two deer looking up from the brush below versus one deer bloating upon the roadside gravel. A white osprey on its nest above calm pine-lined waters versus a dark-eyed junco at the uncalmable stream rushing past Lost Lemon RV Campground and Cabins. 

On this gray day, I’ve finished early, again, and I keep warm and dry in the camp laundry, washing my clothes and reading the book about Shakespeare saved on my phone, which weighs the evidence in favor of the highly-educated idealist serving as 17th Earl of Oxford versus the illiterate businessman grain-hoarding in Stratford: 

[T]he cash strapped Queen made a grant of an annuity to Oxford of 1000 pounds payable quarterly. There were no overt strings, and no accounting: it has been suggested that the grant was in part to settle some claim Oxford might have had, but the strongest suggestion is that it was to enable Oxford to continue with his productions of patriotic plays on the public stage, and patronage of any new writers (Shakespeare’s Revolution, p. 120). 

I’ve successfully traversed the Crowsnest and passed into Alberta with little fanfare.

The Naughts: Day 13: July 22

I wake feeling nostalgic for the Naughts at Rock Creek, regretting that I hadn’t asked them more questions. As a poet and writer, I should’ve known better. On this rainy morning, I’m having British Columbia withdrawal blues, and I promise that I’ll try to see people better. I start with this nice Sikh guy at Circle K, who lets me eat my pastry and drink my coffee inside, inviting me to sit on a back counter. 

My plan is to cycle to Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump World Heritage Site, but the weather seems to have other plans as I’m hit in the darkness by an 11-degree-Celcius rain and wind. I press on and come across a short-eared owl that was clipped by a semi in the night. Taking it by a tip, I drag its wet rag body to the roadside and then step on the wings in turn to pull one primary feather from each – the owl being a symbol of Minerva, the Greek goddess of poets. 

I pray to the bird to protect my future passage, while the wind continues to pick up speed, blustering across the plains as I near the intersection for the only real city in the area, Pincher Creek, visible 4km in the endless distance. The weather has left me little choice but to turn off, and by the time I sit down with my hot coffee at McDonald’s, my wet-clothed body is wracked by shakes and shivers. I check in at the Super 8, which allows me to take my bicycle into my room, and I depack, set things out to dry, shower, and change clothes. 

I have another coffee in the lobby, listening to a man talk about dealing with his alcoholic father as a child, making my meteorological troubles superficial. I spend the rest of the day doing laundry again, reading more about Shakespeare, and putting some finishing touches on the poem honoring the Naughts back in Rock Creek. There is no need for regrets, I decide: I know just enough not to be overly burdened by facts, to compose a concise portrait:

A Legend

At a greasy spoon called Rock Creek

in a river valley named Kettle 

four retirees gather for breakfast, 

each taking their regular chair

center stage the wooden shack that

the owners have put up for sale.

Boss, a portly Japanese electrician 

in flannel and suspenders, settles

his back to the window and orders,

off menu, two soft-boiled eggs,

bacon and toast. To his left, facing

the open door and presiding over 

those coming through, is President, 

a cross-legged James Buchanan

attired in athletic casual and dining 

on a healthy bowl of berries, granola

and yogurt. Boss calls to the waitress

that his toast needs butter or jam or

something, and one egg dislodges and

drops from its brass server to the table 

to the floor. President reaches, snatches 

it up and judges, “Still good,” before 

handing the egg back with a tremor 

that betrays the onset of Parkinson’s. 

The screen door bangs and Dutch 

just now jaunts in in short pants 

that show off scabbed lanky legs 

and, with a bovine grin, a pidgin 

Hollander bawl and the hard knock

of his worn high-school football ring

on the tabletop, he slaps down 

a snapshot of a sizable rainbow trout 

that all question whether or not

was captured according to law.

“Catch of a lifetime!” swears Dutch, 

“As a knight of this Round Table!”

Which leaves skinny Willy, the frail soul

slouching in the entry, a bearded 

philosopher-bard who, between 

nibbles of his breakfast burrito special, 

mumbles from under his cap, “Knights? 

We’re not knights -- we’re the Naughts.”

Jump in the sun: Day 14: July 23

It’s 11 degrees warmer than yesterday and thousands of lux brighter, as warm and bright as the blood from this freshly squidged fox with a lone gray intestine snaking from its gut. Apparently it was caught between car and bridge at Old Man River Dam. The day is as warm and bright as the prairie cone flowers and sunflowers that begin to appear along the paved road, and as warm and bright as the wild rose, meadow blazing star, and invasive blueweed along the gravel through the Peigan Reservation. It’s as warm and bright as the golden bay horse leading a galloping herd across an expanse fenced with barbed wire, once an uninhibited ecosystem of shortgrass. As warm and bright as the savanna sparrow, catbird, eastern kingbird, and red-tailed hawk. As warm and bright as the chokecherries ripening beneath this buffalo jump.

Belly-up badger: Day 15: July 24

As the semi-deserted Oldman River Provincial Recreation Area didn’t quite feel safe, with strange vehicles parked, I ponied up the cash for a site at the River’s Edge RV Park across the road. I’m the first one out the gate in the morning, which the owner has told me to leave open, and I head for McDonald’s for breakfast before entering the highway, still quiet as a bird in its nest at this hour but which by noon can be summed up by the roadkilled badger I find on its back, buckteeth showing and soft white belly to the cloudless sky. 

I cycle eleven hot hours from Fort McLeod to Medicine Hat, over 200km, with my only reprieve being a Piri-Piri Chicken at the Bow Island Subway and a black-cherry ice-cream at Crowsnest Cones in Seven Persons, where the shapely girl reminds me of John Updike’s “two scoops of vanilla” in his story “A&P”. She’s nice enough to refill my water bottles, but unfortunately, I feel too old and too much a gentleman to bother her more.

My reward is a 3 p.m. oatmeal stout at Hell’s Basement Brewery in Medicine Hat, a hot and dusty rodeo town, and my respite is a can of baked beans and shower at Gas City Campground, where I help my neighbor, a barechested Québécois biker, move his picnic table. I’m tired, not only physically but also mentally from the realization that I could’ve ended up like that badger today: the semi that passed me from behind hauling a house could’ve clipped and killed me if the driver hadn’t moved over into the oncoming lane. 

Caution: Day 15: July 25

I remind myself that there are three types of people who honk at cyclists on the highway: those offering encouragement, mean pickup truck drivers that don’t like you on the road, and those offering an official warning of danger. I enter Saskatchewan more cautiously, but as the shoulder has suddenly gotten worse, I soon get my second flat, in the rear again, from a piece of wire from a blown-out steel-belted semi-trailer tire. There are no bicycle shops for 100 kilometers or more, and I remove and replace the tire on the roadside, no one stopping to offer help this time. I pump up the tire as best I can with my tiny hand pump and try to put the incident out of mind, but I’m worried as the rear carries all the weight. After my first flat, I even jettisoned some extra clothes, tools and supplies in a dumpster in Princeton, to lighten the load.

I try to take in the landscape, but with all the obstacles left by vehicles on the roadside, including glass, nails, screws, wire, wood splinters and other scraps, I have to keep my head down and my eyes peeled, and I think of Mike and his philosophy to break up the day visiting sites and museums. And yet, I catch sight of a flock of white-faced ibises, a pied grebe, and a redtailed-hawk, while the roadkill is easier to catch amidst the litter: a deer, a ground squirrel, a sparrow, and another short-eared owl. 

I stop at Tompkins to refill my water bottle and get a sandwich at the Pioneer Co-op. I walk my bicycle over to the No. 1 Ice Cream stand, where the lady lets me eat my meal before I buy another two scoops of black cherry. When I tell her I’m from Japan, she says she’s going to take the cruise there from Vancouver next year. For a moment, I wish I had gone cycling in Hokkaido like I did last fall, and then, I’m back on the road, head down, to Gull Lake, an economically depressed town. It’s here I’ll turn south for the National Grasslands. I should probably continue into Swift Current first to have my rear tire checked and get some more gas for my campstove, but I want to get off this punishing highway, which by midday is an anvil under the hammering sun.

At the local grocery, I pick up a can of chili and a plastic box of four brownies – dinner and breakfast – and return to the campground in town, which is mostly full of families in campers and RVs. A South Asian guy with rotting teeth and in a ragged T-shirt approaches to ask for a can opener. As I open his salmon, he informs me that he has just come from the Grasslands and found it beautiful. I thank him for his encouraging words and warn him not to cut himself on the jagged edges.

Kung fu: Day 17: July 26

Minutes into my turn south, I have no regrets getting off the highway. Despite a dead coyote whelp indicating the automobile still rules out here and the oil wells letting me know I’m in fracking country, it’s more peaceful and picturesque. When I come across a beer can or fast-food container, my mind does its mental martial arts and equates despoiling nature to shitting in a church – an argument that the bigot probably couldn’t muster enough humility, unfortunately, to follow.

As the sun rises, I skirt the edge of thunderstorms and arrive in Shaunavon before 9 a.m., where I search for campstove gas at the Co-op grocery but instead come away with a small cigarette lighter, as well as BC cherries, and I sit in front of the local library eating the whole bag. Some people are setting up for a farmer’s market, and an old man approaches and warns me that I better get cycling because a storm is coming. I plan on camping here for the night, and my too-confident comeback is that I can always wait it out. And then a woman named Yiya setting up a lemonade stand with her boy tells me she hosts cyclists on a site called WarmShowers, and my accommodations for the night have been decided. 

I wear down the hours having something sweet at the Meeting Grounds Coffee House and something healthy at El Faro Market, and so I don’t go blind in the prairie sun, I stop to buy a pair of sunglasses at the Red Apple Store. The rest of the afternoon I spend doing laundry and watching dated family movies with Yiya’s kids in the basement: Spy Kids and Kung Fu Panda. 

I tend to be uncomfortable in others’ homes: I hate to impose on people, my heady philosophy often doesn’t jive with theirs, and I’m not the most exciting guest. But Yiya’s family, who remind me of some of my wild cousins I spent summers with in the ’80s, is very inviting. And at dinner, burgers and chips in the backyard, I try my best diplomatic jujitsu to navigate the Christian talk of Yiya’s friend, who has adopted a quiet elementary-age Indian girl and a frustrated pubescent First Nation boy. I wish I could offer these kids what I’ve given my own, and I identify with the boy, who talks fondly of his biological mother’s Saskatoon jam. 

Yiya wanted me to stay up and play a board game with her and her husband, but I plan to get an early start tomorrow. I thank her for the good rest and shake the silent husband’s hand, greasy from cleaning the grill. He’s a reserved teacher, like myself, who also works summers wielding an herbicide sprayer, eradicating weeds around oil wells, but I feel I’ve disappointed him, as well as his talkative wife. I descend guiltily into the basement. As I lie down to sleep, I think of Po, voiced by Jack Black, and his realization that there is no secret ingredient to life. You just have to believe in yourself – and not give up.

The undiscovered country: Day 18: July 27

Long after leaving Yiya’s yard and closing the gate while everyone still slept, I realize that I must have dropped my little Canadian flag given to me by the old lady manning the information center in Cranbrook. I had strapped the benign maple leaf to my rear bag in the hopes that it would ward off the more aggressive pickup truck driver, especially the one that drinks Bud Light, but now the friendly flag is gone. I push on with the strappy resolve of the eastern kingbird at the back of a red-tailed hawk. 

I cycle south past vast fields of wheat cloaked in darkness. At Frenchman Valley, I stop and take a photo before the teary-eyed rollercoaster drop, riding the brakes, and the heavy-breathed fight up the other side, in first gear or on foot. This gorge feels leftover from the past, a vestige of annual bison hunts, and I think of the book I read about the Oglala Lakota medicine man Black Elk: how his vision of the Sacred Tree encompasses all humanity. And I think about how he attended Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee and got separated from his Wild West show in Manchester and ended up convalescing in Paris. Shakespeare would’ve liked him, I imagine.

At Climax, all shuttered and still asleep for Sunday, I’m forced to buy water from a Coke machine and turn east without a cafe break. I see a loggerhead shrike, a flock of blackbilled magpies, and then the steady rhythm of the occasional killdeer going through its instinctual ritual of drawing predators away from the nest: it flutters up from the ditch and flies low over the road, calling, lands and then teeters forward on its tiny feet, weaving like a drunk and pretending to drag a broken wing, before taking flight for real and circling back from whence it came. 

At one farm, the real predator, a red fox trailing its bushy-gray white-tipped tail, flashes through the ditchside sunflowers, crosses the road ahead of me and disappears beneath a pyramid of round bales standing in the barnyard. There are isolated thunderstorms all around, and I barely stay ahead of one until Bracken, where the sizzle of lightning vaporizing raindrops as it courses to the ground forces me off the road. With luck, I find the community center with its overhang, and I roll my bicycle up the handicap ramp and stand there, staying dry, munching beef jerky I must’ve bought weeks ago and cheese curds I got with the cherries in Shaunavon. 

I check the weather radar website on my phone. The storm is getting far enough ahead that I won’t catch up with it as it moves to the northeast, and I tentatively venture back onto the road. Three deer bound across the way ahead, and I scare up a sunny explosion of roughed grouse as I approach Val Marie, the gateway to the National Grasslands. I pull up to the park office, fill my water bottles at the tap on the side of the building and go in – only to be informed that the Grasslands campground is full and the access road has been muddied by the rains to make passage too difficult for bicycles. I’m disappointed as I’ve traveled two days to see the bison, and yet I’m somewhat relieved as I’m exhausted after 109km and worried that my underinflated rear tire will not survive the 20km of gravel in and back out again. 

I’ve seen bison many times before, written about them for an ag newspaper, and even cooked up bison burgers in the shadow of the Black Hills at Custer State Park, onetime Lakota lands. I run my hand through the fur of the displayed hide and look at the blown up photo of Sitting Bull and read how the Hunkpapa leader and his people took refuge in Frenchman Valley from the U.S. Cavalry. Then I myself take refuge from the midday heat in the cafe across the road, having a brownie and coffee with cream as their latte machine is broken. There’s not much more for me to do except have the pulled-pork sandwich special, a beer and another coffee at the Val Marie Bar & Cafe, a Chinese-run establishment that only takes cash. And I spend the evening at the city campground reading more about Shakespeare/Oxford. 

The playwright’s “The Winter’s Tale”, according to Richard Malim’s book, might be about the rise of Sir Walter Raleigh, a leading figure in the colonization of North America: “Walter Raleigh’s home village in Devon was Fardel: the archaic word fardel, meaning bundle, is found six times in this play and only once elsewhere” (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 157). That “elsewhere” must be “Hamlet”, because Wiktionary gives this quote from the work:

[W]ho would fardels beare / To grunt and ſweat vnder a wearie life, / But that the dread of ſomething after death, / The vndiſcouer'd country, from whoſe borne / No trauiler returnes, puzzels the will, / And makes vs rather beare thoſe ills we haue, / Then flie to others that we know not of (Second Quarto, Act III, scene i).

I wonder if that “undiscovered country” serving as metaphor for the land of the dead is not the continent I’m almost halfway across, and I give thanks I’m taking it in the opposite direction of William Blake, the doomed main character in Jim Jamaruch’s western Dead Man.

Medicine man: Day 19: July 28

Another thunderstorm passes in the early-early morn, and I’m off at 4 a.m. to begin the ascent north toward Moose Jaw on the Trans-Canadian Highway, to have my tires checked. This will have to serve as my Grasslands, I think, as I round the national park on the freshly wet Highway 18, mysteriously unfolding in the darkness. The indigenous knew no such boundaries or delineations, but Sitting Bull learned the magic of these when he fled across the U.S./Canadian border, the Medicine Line, which his pursuers could not cross. I offer a prayer to the Lakota leader that my day may go well.

The post-rain twilight begins to take on red hues. Mule deer bound into a gulch. Coyotes howl in the distance. I come across a ’70s pickup abandoned on a pastureland rise. I roll down slopes and huff up hills and listen to a tick-tick-tick coming from behind, thinking there must be a stick or something stuck in the wheel. Then, like a gunshot, my rear inner tube explodes. I’m flabbergasted. I laugh out loud. I had imagined I might have another flat, but not that my entire tire would shred, and I realize that low air pressure coupled with the weight of my body and packs made the rim wear through the tirewall.

I’m at least a two-day ride from the bicycle shop in Moose Jaw and a day from Swift Current, almost straight north. I can’t walk my bicycle very far for fear of damaging the rim, and I decide it will be meaningless to flag down a driver, because there’s nowhere near that they could take me to get a new tire. I’ve yet to see anyone this morning, anyway, and I pull out my phone to look up tow services, finding the nearest one open is in Swift Current. I call twice before I get an answer and explain that I’m on 18 going toward Mankota, a couple of clicks east of the gravel road 628. They are reluctant to come at first, worried someone will pick me up in the meantime, but I finally convince them I have no other viable options despite estimated expense.

I half lift, half roll my bicycle into a pasture drive and take off the packs and stand there waiting, watching a pair of horned larks through my binoculars. A man in a large dual-rear-wheeled pickup, who appears to be checking cattle herds, passes going west and then again as he heads back east. It’s an hour or more before I see the tow approaching. 

In a jiffy, we throw the bicycle on the rear seat, removing the front tire to make it fit, and deposit the bags on top. We start the hour return talking about demolition derbies, which his son and granddaughter do and which I’ve written about for a local Minnesota newspaper. Unlike Mad Max, a red gas can in the driver compartment replaces the tank to avoid leaks, fires and explosions, and there are rules about what can and cannot be welded to the outside of the car. Our talk then moves on to electric vehicles, how he tows them often because they run out of charge and how I encountered Tesla stations at rest areas in British Columbia but no water; and about the town of Cadillac we pass through, how it has an auto shop that sells flowers but not bicycle parts and how I could buy a bouquet and hold a funeral for my whole cycling setup. 

In Swift Current, where the red-faced driver jokes “nothing is swift or current,” he drops me off at Canadian Tire, assuring me it’s the best place to get new treads as well as the isobutane I still haven’t found. I find the gas but not my size tire. I try two more stores in this stripmall area without success before shouldering my three packs and beginning the 45-minute walk to the bicycle shop downtown that Google says opens at noon. Somehow during the tow, my front tire also went flat, and both squeakily crinkle as I roll them along.

The photo of Pedal Works Bike Shop on Google doesn’t look promising, and I call the sportier, more commercial shop in Moose Jaw to see if they have my tire. If I cannot find one in Swift Current, I may have to go there, by taxi or tow as there are no trains or highway buses in this geographical oddity. The dumb car-salesman voice on the other end of the line says, “Yeah, we probably have that size tire.” “Could you please check,” I say, “before I come all that way?” “Sure, just a moment…. No, sorry, we don’t have that size. Would you like me to order it for you?” “No.” I start to think I may have to just trade in my bicycle for one with functioning wheels.

I also start to think that since my prayer this morning, Sitting Bull has been playing a joke on me, until I reach Pedal Works, where the owner, Grant, is just opening up for the day. By the time he finds my size tires and tubes and begins to replace both, I glean from the conversations of higher priority customers filtering in and out that Grant has been gone on vacation for the past week and that this is his first day back. And I realize that it would have been futile for me to have cycled here from Gull Lake, that going south to the National Grasslands was the only way that I could have ended up in Swift Current on the right day, at exactly the right time, at the only bicycle store within 200km with my size tire. Sitting Bull has been looking after me for some time. 

I find that Grant and I also share a bit in common; we’re both language teachers. He taught French in the now closed building that the tow passed in Cadillac and also English in Taiwan, “rich kids wanting to go to school in California,” he says. We voice our concerns about the car-centric culture and climate change, and when he finishes up with my tires, I praise him for the miracle. I have a Piri-Piri chicken and a cookie at Subway, head back to Canadian Tire for the isobutane, which I put off purchasing because of the weight, and then to the campground on the eastern edge of town, where I cook up a meal of dried soup mix and oatmeal.

Flying: Day 20: July 29

A light rain christens this mostly cloudy day, marked by eight dead sanderlings; then a frozen treat on Chaplin-Old Wives-Reed Lakes Complex, a dual-purpose shorebird oasis and sodium-sulphate mine; and finally Moose Jaw, which I read backwards as if it were a wadi in the Arabian desert: Waj Esoom. I’ve gone far on my new tires, flying along the Trans-Canada to the Peanut Hills Campground.

Who matters: Day 21: July 30

I wake as my neighbor tenters, two older Ontario women driving to Alberta, are also packing up. I’ve been telling people, when asked, that I’m headed for Toronto, and they mistake that I’m Canadian, but I’m not in the mood to correct them, preoccupied with my cycling routine. A kingbird is catching bugs mid-air and a cottontail rabbit browses on the irrigated green of the campground. 

It’s a short day; I don’t have to hurry. But as I move with the morning rush hour, I’m so lost in thought that I zoom by a woman in a red sedan pulled off to the side. I look in my rearview mirror and debate stopping and doubling back to see if she needs help, but the more I think about it, the greater the distance between us grows, and I ultimately decide it’s too late. I’m ashamed. I’ve become no better than the preprogrammed drivers, so intent on my destination that nothing and no one else matters. I count five dead blackbirds and two dead crows.

I come to Regina and think of Mike again, not only his philosophy to ride slowly and mindfully but also his advice to redistribute some weight to my front wheel. First things first, though, and I follow my routine of stopping for a bakery item and latte, this time at Bobbi-Joe’s, where I sit outside with a line of motorcycles guarding my bicycle from the many homeless people. The number of vagrants in western cities has been concerning me, and I wonder what these poor people do during Canadian winters.

The first bicycle shop I visit, run by a couple of loud out-of-shape old farts, only carries a heavy expensive front pannier set, but at the second, a young athletic guy with a Tom Selleck mustache rings up two small plastic racks that can be zip-tied to the front fork. He helps me bring my bicycle in the shop and offers to lend me some tools, but I have what I need and soon have the accessories mounted. I strap my sleeping bag to the left and my tent and inflatable sleeping pad to the right.

I kill some time at The Everyday Kitchen, having a sandwich and another coffee and reading my Shakespeare book, while warily keeping an eye out the window on my more expensive rig with its added gear. Where I’m robbed, however, is at the highway-edge campground that charges me RV rates for a site without water, electricity or even a picnic table. The only benefit is the coin laundry and free shower, and I make use of both as the orange disk of the sun sets.

Adam-upon-Avon: Day 22: July 31

I’m wondering if I’m in the Red River drainage yet, and I Google the elevation of Moose Jaw, 440m, and Regina, 577m. I decide that I’m not, and confirm that the road not only feels like it has been going steadily uphill for hundreds of straight boring kilometers but it actually has. I’ve been constantly plagued by the phenomenon I call “downhill up”, in which the grade appears to be in descent but actually is ascending, a frustrating feeling akin to running in one’s sleep but not being able to get anywhere. I’m tiring of the highway again but still wary of venturing too far from ready bicycle shops, and I decide to take Highway 48 instead of 13, the Red Coat Trail, a popular cyclist route farther south.

The sun is another orange disk this morning, which I assume is from the forest fires in northern Saskatchewan – a woman in Grant’s bicycle shop back in Swift Current talked about supervising the evacuation of people, about the tires of a car catching fire requiring the transfer of the occupants to another car. But instead of coming out of the northwest, the wind has been steadily impeding my progress by blowing out of the southeast, and the plant smoke I begin to smell on the breeze may not be from trees but from crop burning in North Dakota that is showing on the air quality website. Annual post-harvest burns are one of the contributing factors in northern India’s horrid hazes.

After an egg sandwich and coffee at Tim Horton’s, I pull onto 48, where shortly I’m greeted by an explosion of roughed grouse from the ditch. Farther on, I stop to watch a meadowlark through my binoculars, and the day is met with more birds frequenting the prairie-pothole pockmarked landscape: red-tailed hawks, American coots, pied-billed grebes, ring-billed gulls, and black terns. Even the roadkill birds are something to look at, as their plumages don’t fade and are arranged like fowl in a Dutch Golden Age painting titled “Dead Birds”: two limp ruffed-grouse hens with variegated brown-white-and-black feathers, a tiny house wren with its white-specked chestnut tail, a black-crowned/white-chested eastern kingbird, a beachy-backed/foamy-bottomed sanderling, and a sprawled short-eared owl with two yellow irises fully retracted from its wide onyx pupils. From the latter’s wingtips, I again pull a primary feather each.

I have lunch in Montmartre, a piece of Paris, France on the Great Plains complete with a miniature Eiffel Tower. Its Sister’s Bistro is a snug place with seating upfront – a mismatch of padded and plastic chairs with metal frames at metal tables with enameled tops – and kitchen in back – where I can see the women working through a wide service counter. The specialty is coconut salmon curry on rice, but needing calories, I ask the beautiful gray-haired waitress for the rural standard: hamburger and fries and a cinnamon roll and coffee. 

I check out the school-kid-quality artwork on the gray-painted board walls, and two women who saw me on the road say hello and offer their encouragement. When done, the kitchen graciously fills my water bottles, and my waitress, getting off work, wishes me luck. I repay the compliment by praising their little restaurant. I’d like to stay here, but I want to get farther down the road, and I push on to the economically depressed Glenavon, pick up a can of chili and box of frozen desert bars at the Indian-run grocery, and go to the Lions park campground, where I plug all my Canadian coins, just shy of the suggested $9 camping fee, into a money box fashioned from a piece of 8-inch metal pipe with a thread-on cap and a jagged acetylene-torched coin slot.

The “tent area” is a grass edge sloping into a drainage ditch, and I pull a picnic table from beside a storage shed, across the ditch and next to a pine tree, where there is a water spigot and steel-drum garbage can. I set up my shelter, prop my solar panel to charge my phone, cook my chili up with oatmeal filler, and eat, scarfing half of the super-sweet desert bars and saving the other half for breakfast. I then read more of my Shakespeare book and think about the towns Glenavon and Shaunavon and how “avon” means “river” and that the real “Avon” of Shakespeare was not Stratford-upon-Avon but probably Hampton Court Palace on the River Thames, where many of the Sweet Swan’s plays were performed. And I shower, brush my teeth, and turn in early due to the mass of mosquitos rising from the marshy little avon tentside. 

Tokyo cowboy: Day 23: August 1

The red sun and haze indicate that the smoke is getting thicker and the air quality worse than Tokyo’s, again. I’m worried since, with the extra physical exertion, I’m breathing heavily this dirty air. I pass a duck whose head is lying at its feet, one of the days numbered dead, including two snakes, a mouse, a sanderling, and a green female goldfinch. Bright yellow male goldfinches with their mates flit up from the ditches and follow me, swallows swoop or perch on powerlines, and a broadwinged hawk drinks from a prairie pothole where coots paddle and from which black terns chase me, squawking at the back of my helmeted head. I see western kingbirds and eastern kingbirds, roughed grouse, and a red-tailed hawk. 

Wawota. I look for a place open for lunch, and all I find is a bar and grill owned and operated by Filipinos. The friendly rolly-polly Filipina waiter is singing to a Whitney Houston song, and after she takes my order and brings my soda, we have a conversation about Japan, where many Filipinos work and live and where she has a friend married to a rich man. She’d like to go there some day, and her camaraderie makes me forgive the quality of the fish-and-fries special, which looks like leftovers re-deepfried three or five times. After I eat while glancing between the window, the ESPN axe-throwing program, and the old ladies teetering in, she kindly refills my water bottle, telling me to take care in the heat.

The exertion and the smoke under the midday sun is beginning to contribute to a cough and congestion, probably acquired from sleeping on damp ground. When I see a ring-billed gull, I start singing the Alsessi Brothers “Seabird” to clear my throat and to take my mind off the road, as well as my sore posterior. As I loudly voice the lyrics, the cattle I’m passing begin to run along with me en masse like a massive bison herd across muddy pasture, through a prairie pothole, to the end of the fenceline, where I leave them.

I stop at the Maryfield Corner Store, another Indian-run establishment, for an orange juice, hoping the vitamin C will cure my throat. When I say how far I’ve come today to an out-of-shape biker who passed me on the road, he laughs and says he gets tired going 100km on his motorcycle. I down the orange juice and throw the bottle in the can across the street and push on to the Pipestone Creek valley and up into Manitoba, where the paved shoulder suddenly disappears. I stop and take a photo of a wild pink rose; it symbolizes grace, which I’m finding hard to achieve with automobiles on my back.

Surging and ebbing with evening afterwork traffic, I pedal as fast as I can on the road, hugging the white line, before I’m driven onto the rough gravel shoulder by oilfield men in semi-tankers or pickup trucks, one that impatiently honks and then barrels away in a cloud of exhaust and dust. My efforts seem dumb, but I’m more of a cowboy than these guys in their air-conditioned cabs. 

I ride into Virden, dismount at the rundown Sooper Dave’s Country Convenience Store and fight to open the bum cooler door for a chocolate milk, which I buy along with dinner’s can of chili. The Lion’s park campground is thankfully just down the road. I think only two more days to Winnipeg, the official halfway point on my journey if I decide to go farther than Toronto. I plan to celebrate with a dark beer and sleep in a real bed. 

Other people: Day 24: August 2

I plan to do laundry at the Meadowlark Campground in Brandon, so it will be a short day, marked by fast-food stops, resting, recuperating and drawing comfort sitting among other people. I say good morning to the couple moving to New Brunswick, who have come back west to collect their dog and take the journey slowly in their camper, and soon I’m at the Tim Horton’s in town catching snippets of old-timers gathered for morning coffee talk about rats, reminding of my father’s talk of the rodent in Grandpa’s corn crib: “There must be rats up north – must be getting too cold for them….” “Norweigan rats…in the grain bin…Dad….” “Sewer rats…huge…New York….” Outside, Sikh truck drivers dressed like hiphop dancers climb out of their semis lined along the frontage road.

I take a photo of purple prairie clover, a flower collected by Meriwether Lewis in Nebraska, 1804, and of two dead cedar waxwings, a bird that returned annually to the meadows of my Wisconsin childhood. A dead porcupine later, I stop for lunch at the McDonald’s in Brandon. And after I’ve finished my meal, the white-haired bearded guy sitting at a table across the aisle calls out that he used to cycle everywhere when he was studying woodwinds in Indiana from ’68 to ’71, then in Ontario, and finally here in Brandon. He talks about how a headwind can really slow a rider, and I opine the stubborn gales that continue to blow out of the southeast, impeding my progress. 

The man goes back to what appears to be knitting, and I go back to my Shakespeare, before I cross the Assiniboine River to the other end of town for dinner at Subway. While eating my go-to Piri-Piri chicken with spinach, tomatoes, onions and banana peppers, a First Nation kid who’s taking his meal to-go asks, “You like to bike around?” I explain I’m cycling across North America and make a joke about how tired I am. “I’m Adam,” I say. “What’s your name?” “Trevor,” he says. “Nice to meet you, Trevor,” I say, thinking of the college ministry-trip I took to the Turtle Mountain Reservation, directly south of here in North Dakota. He wishes me luck on my way, and I secretly hope I’ve inspired him to head out and discover this continent from which, by the chances of history, we both were born.

Again: Day 25: August 3

Brandon’s Tim Horton’s is a block from the campground, and again there is a group of old men gathered for coffee. Again, there are Sikh truck drivers parked outside. Again, the sky is hazy, mixed with the mist rising from the Assiniboine River, which thickly fogs my glasses again and again. Again, the morning cold tears up my eyes like that morning I galloped across the Mongolian plain and decided I wouldn’t fall off my horse. Again, the sun climbs toward noon. Again, I remove my windbreaker, apply sunscreen to my face and put on sunglasses. Again, the day is marked by death – a mole, a merlin and a female goldfinch – and life – milkweed forming pods, yellow prairie coneflowers open to the sun and soft goldaster going to seed. Again, I stop for a Big Mac at McDonald’s. Again, I curse the nihilistic violent extremist traffic as the day grows hot and loud on the Trans-Canada Highway. Again, I end my day at a campsite, Portage la Prairie’s Industrial Exhibition Campground, on an island surrounded by a lake that appears to be a massive old oxbow of the Assiniboine. Again, I cook a can of chili for dinner, take a shower, brush my teeth and go to bed.

Make Adam Gorgeous Again: Day 26: August 4

It’s a very short day of pedaling, but by the time I reach Winnipeg, I’m the wings-broken dove, the head-smashed-in fox. My cold is just about full-blown, but I’m hoping this stop will cure me. First, I relieve my bowels of the load I’ve been carrying all morning. Then, I order something healthy, a falafel wrap and mango juice at Habibiz Cafe, where the owner lets me bring my bicycle inside the foyer of the building. Next, I go down the street to McDonald’s to have a coffee and wait for check-in at a private home that lets rooms for about $50/night. I haven’t bothered to use the WarmShowers app I’ve downloaded, as I just want to rest in silence. 

Two guys are having a philosophical discussion in the booth ahead of me that ranges from community-space planning to Trump. They are decidedly against the President of the neighboring country, but instead of spouting vitriolic derision, they are analyzing what makes him popular among his followers – an analysis that needs to be held up like a mirror to MAGA, which I joke to myself stands for Make Adam Gorgeous Again. 

I receive the information for check-in by email and go to the house, where I take my packs and bicycle into the kitchen. So far, the people I’ve seen on the street tell me this is not a city where you can leave expensive gear outside. I take a shower, change clothes and then cycle to one of the nearest craft beer places. I know I probably shouldn’t drink with this cold, but I’m hoping beyond logic that the alcohol will kill it. 

I also cannot NOT celebrate. It’s been on my mind for hundreds of hard-won kilometers. Unfortunately, however, I’m forced to settle for a brown ale because there are no black beers and for a couple of snack-sized samosas because there’s no meal menu. I try again at an outdoor venue along the Red River where a DJ is playing unsatisfying soundbites of pop songs from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s, obviously catering to my generation or older. Again, no black beer or big food, but my choices are a step up to a pretty good hazy Indian pale ale and a pretty good broccoli wrap.

It’s pretty good to be outside this sunny evening, too, sitting with people and cycling the pretty treelined streets back to the house, but I’m feeling far from gorgeous. With a bottle of water on the night stand, I climb into bed and watch videos on my phone, occasionally coughing and blowing the mucus seeping from my nostrils. 

Scared: Day 27: August 5

In the night, my worst fears have come to pass: my coughs have deepened, my mucus has thickened and yellowed, and my aches have turned to feverish sweats. I arrange to stay another day and trudge on foot to the drugstore a few blocks away for brownies, soup, orange juice, and sinus-and-cold medicine. Halfway through the day, the mother of the house shows up and has me change rooms so she can give mine to another guest. I’d like to stand in the foyer and talk longer, but I’m not feeling up to it, and I quickly move my things so she can clean. Through the closed door of my fresh abode I listen to her little son playing jokes on her and giggling, “Did that scare you?!” 

I take a dose of medicine, drink the liter of orange juice, eat the four brownies, and have the can of soup, as well as the complimentary instant ramen on the desk. It’s comforting, but I’m becoming emotional and scared that I won’t be able to continue. I think about giving up, about cycling as far as Grand Forks, North Dakota and taking the train into Chicago. I look at train schedules from Winnipeg to Toronto. I watch more videos to distract myself and take more medicine, hoping it helps.

Homeless again: Day 28: August 6

For some reason, the shared-bathroom door is locked at 4 a.m. and, still, at 6 a.m., when I try the doorknob again, tentatively knock, and ask if anyone is in there. Getting no response, I wildly imagine the other guest has passed out while using drugs. I lay out a towel on my room floor, in case of splashes and spills, and relieve myself in a 500ml sports drink bottle, dumping my pee carefully down the kitchen drain. I wash the bottle well, put it in the recycling bin, and wash the sink. I heat up some water in the hot pot, have a breakfast of tea and oatmeal, pack my bags and put my bicycle back together outside. Before I cycle off, I’m sure to give my hosts a five-star rating and send them a thank you message for sharing their home; this morning’s bathroom debacle, I assume, is not their fault.

I head for a strip mall on the way out of town, stopping on the bridge crossing the Red River, over which two bald eagles sit in a dead tree preening their feathers, or perhaps stropping their beaks. At the Canadian Tire, I shop for another can of gas, which is locked inside a glass display case to keep it from shoplifters, and the clerk must escort me to the checkout. I was told at the hunting store in Gull Lake that isobutane canisters were too paltry to carry out West, where they load propane tanks on their trucks, and here in Winnipeg my gas can is associated with thieving vagrants. I tell the clerk that I’m surprised by all the homeless in town and ask what they do in the winter, when it can get below -40 celsius. “You know, they go to shelters, into businesses, on city buses, camp…,” she says in a semi-concerned but matter-of-fact manner. 

I walk my bicycle down to the Co-op, where I’m followed by staff as I peruse the shelves for food ideas, including a bag of flax, something that I’ve never tried but I think will serve nicely as a lightweight portable source of protein/oil for my soup and oatmeal, eliminating the need for bulky bags of beef jerky and nuts. I also get an orange juice for my cold, which I sit drinking behind checkout and watching the storm clouds move in. I consult the weather radar; it will be almost noon before the system has passed. 

I plan to go only as far as the campground on the edge of town, so I tuck my bicycle under the Subway overhang just as the rain starts and go in and order an early lunch. I eat at the window counter before the deluge, watching people run to and from cars and duck in and out of shops across the way. I was planning to remain here awhile, but the owner has the air conditioning turned so high that it causes my still feverish body to shake. I feel like an undesirable person being made uncomfortable, forced out and made to move on, and when the rain lets up, I leave and wheel my bicycle around to the warm McDonald’s on the other side, where a vagrant reclines in a booth checking out my bicycle and where I nurse a hot tea as long as I can.

Still achy, I pedal slowly along the highway to the campground, where I’m greeted by a gate, an intercom and, contrary to the information on Google Maps, a recently posted laminated card that reads “No Tent Camping”. I press the button and try to explain to a young woman’s voice that the internet indicates that they have tent sites. “We haven’t changed our website yet,” she says. “That’s not my fault,” I reply, but she has already cut the intercom. I press the button multiple times and try to explain my situation, but she keeps cutting me off. I know this time that I’m being discriminated against, for appearing indigent.

“What kind of people are you?” I shout, hoping she can hear me despite the intercom. “Definitely not Christians.” I turn my bicycle around and pedal on, suddenly energized by my indignation. I remind myself I’m trying to attain grace, that healthy anger is not centered in the ego; it’s carefully focused into constructive action to achieve progress benefiting the wider community. An isolated outburst here wouldn’t help anyone, least of all myself. 

Though I have to pay the motorhome rate, I find the happy woman running the Arrowhead RV Park south of Winnipeg much more inviting, and I’m ashamed of my cold. I even find it humorous how her boy and girl manning the till almost short-change me for laundry detergent and coins for the machines. And soon enough, I’m sitting peacefully with one of the other guests, a tan woman wrinkled and weathered by the sun, reading our respective books and waiting for our wash: “Once a member of the audience says to himself that that is unfair and likely to be foreign to the nature of God, and looks to the character and conduct of rulers of his/her own time who claim divine right, a political Revolution will follow as night follows day” (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 201).

Through thick and thin: Day 29: August 7

It’s 9 a.m. in Île des Chêne, and I watch a pair of creamy-yellow western kingbirds sitting high on a utility line as I wait for the sun to finish cresting the trees and dry out my tent drenched with dew and my down jacket damp with my night sweats. The medicine seems to be working, however, and I’m not feeling too bad when I arrive in St. Pierre-Jolys at noon and order the 12-inch Piri-Piri on wheat. I think I’m eating well enough to maintain weight – I’m not even cycling through any really difficult terrain, like the remote Andes of Peru and Bolivia, where the landscape suddenly plunges by a thousand meters – but with the long days before Winnipeg and my recent illness, I’m getting noticeably thin and burning my muscle mass.

At the grocery, I pay for a box of ginger teabags, exchanging pleasantries with the silver-haired checkout woman with abnormally swollen hands, and then head south on the packed gravel shoulder, which has been smooth but now is growing rougher. The traffic is growing violently heavy, also, and I’m debating whether to keep taking this highway. I turn east onto the road for Grunthal and start to slow down to consult Google Maps when, without a warning bark, a beefy red mastiff bolts out of nowhere and begins to chase me. Fortunately, he’s too old and fat, but he’s made up my mind for me as I speed down the quiet country road flanked by farm fields and woodlots. 

The middle-aged man who owns and operates the Green Valley RV & Cabins outside of Grunthal is as thick as the dog that chased me but muscled. He asks me about my plans, but I let him glory in his own travel stories, asking whether he rode a motorcycle through South America and what it was like crossing the islands in the Great Lakes. His answers are unelaborate, and he directs me to a large site in a scrub oak woodlot. 

A ruby-throated hummingbird flies up to inspect the bright yellow bag holding my tent and sleeping pad, and I think of the wide spectrum of that bird species throughout the Peruvian landscape, from the amazilia in the Australian bottlebrush trees lining a Lima street to the sparkling violetear in the cantuta growing on the green mountainside below the Inca ruins of Choquequirao. There I joked and laughed while playing cards with fellow hikers, a woman and her teenage son and daughter.

MAGA Country: Day 30: August 8

There was lightning and heavy rain early last night, but I slept soundly under the trees. I check the radar website in the darkness and decide the weather will hold for the rest of the day. I go south on roads through wetlands and come across a blue heron standing on the shoulder and the occasional snake or frog mooshed by careless local traffic that has preceded my passage. A female red-headed woodpecker flies off a fence post to the side of a utility pole. Two swaths of big bluestem flank a long straight stretch of road through pines. I pass a stuccoed Ukrainian church that is about the size of a prairie schoolhouse with a silver Eastern Orthodox dome over its tiny transept and two similar caps topping its square towers. Its only nemesis is abandon to the harsh Canadian elements, and it will not suffer the sudden fate of the old Soviet architecture now being demolished in Ukraine for capital to redevelop.

The day goes from gray to partly cloudy to mostly sunny as I move millimeter by millimeter down the map to the Minnesota border, taking an orange juice break at a gas station selling quinoa and chia seeds in addition to the typical jerky and meat sticks. Lunch is hamburger and fries at a restaurant run by Koreans, who charge me for drinking water. And the afternoon break is an ice-cream cone and a whole liter of chocolate milk. Seeing my getup, the girls behind the counter joke that they have no reason to start exercising, and I laugh and tell them to take it slowly and not start with a 5000km bicycle trek.

At border inspection, the smartlooking young guard asks me if I have marijuana, and I make him crack a smile when I say that I don’t think I would have the strength to do drugs and cycle across a continent. By 7 p.m., I’m signing up for a site beside the lake in Warroad, “goose poop island” the attendant calls the area, and I wonder why the city campground office has a Trump campaign sign pinned to the wall. This is a public building in a democratic nation, not some local general secretariat in Siberia hung with a portrait of Stalin. 

In the large gravel turnaround by my campsite, two pickup trucks do wheelies like angry bulls around a young man acting as matador, or rodeo clown. He laughs and waves as the large cloud of stirred-up dust wafts over me and my dinner. I somewhat forgive them; it’s Friday night. But I forgot how base and mean rural Americans can be; I went to school with the same sort, who enjoyed hazing a kid just for the fun of it. That’s your Trump voter: taking pleasure in demeaning other people’s existence. My disappointment upon returning to my own nation is assuaged only when an older Iowan walking his dog invites me over to his camper for peach cobbler. 

I graciously accept the extra calories and one of my favorites, pie with ice cream, and he introduces me to his wife, who explains the simple American recipe that, of course, includes a cup of sugar, a stick of butter, a box of instant store-bought something, and a pop in the oven at 350F for 30 to 40 minutes. The man and I sit down together at their picnic table, where I follow his convoluted southern twang through his general claims of walking and sleeping in trees out West, of rescuing soldiers held prisoner by the Viet Cong, of being hit by a car while running an investigation as an FBI agent, and of meeting now-deceased country music celebrities, like Roy Clark and Kris Kristofferson. He offers no qualifying details and often says, “I forget”, when I ask a question.

My disappointment returns, and I’m glad when he runs out of steam. I graciously decline his offer of more cobbler and return to my site for peace and quiet and to savor my successful ride. And I secretly yearn for Canada, despite the fact that everything I passed today resembled MAGA country: economically depressed conservative Christian towns, where one pickup driver honked me off the road. However, I can’t forget the friendly Canadian: the guy in the beater sedan who honked encouragement. It’s never wise to stereotype, I decide, and I hope for a better U.S. tomorrow.

Feeding: Day 31: August 9

After an egg sandwich and a latte at a local cafe, I get off the main highway and ride through sunny farm country, where they are harvesting buckwheat or flax or something. I see two sandhill cranes feeding in a field around noon and, later, three white pelicans fishing on a Lake of the Woods inlet. A roadkilled owl and frog have had their last meals, are food for microbes and/or whatever insect or animal finds them first. On a similar sunny morning in September, spring in Australia, I encountered a dead kangaroo every kilometer, fast food for the wedge-tailed eagles.

In Baudette, no viable eateries are open, and I stop at the local grocery for baked beans, buns, sauerkraut, and precooked brats containing wild rice. I take my shopping to Timber Mill Park, where at a pavilion of picnic tables, I cook and devour the four sausages with can of kraut and half the can of beans, while guarding my stove flame from the wind and fending off a single white gull and a couple of yellowjackets scavenging a meal. 

I’ve eaten lunch and dinner in one, and I take a shower, set up my tent and lie down early, sipping water and listening to the approaching thunderstorm. I decide not to throw up, and I drift off and sleep soundly through the night.

Border: Day 32: August 10

Yesterday’s big meal has made me close to gorgeous, and I finish the hotdog buns with the peanut butter that I also purchased. I then follow the Rainy River towards International Falls. I see Canada across the waters and wonder at how easy it would be to paddle a canoe to its shores or drive a car across the ice in winter – I think I’ve seen it once in a movie. The wild knows no borders, and the juvenile bald eagle perched on a large nest near Indus can fly, without passport, to a tree on the opposite bank and deeper north to the forested lakes of Ontario. Why are humans contained, as if prisoners of their countries?

I also bought an apple yesterday, which, at Loman Park, I slice with my pocket knife and dip in the peanut butter. There is a continuously flowing artisan well here, and I fill one bottle with the fresh cold water, drink deeply and refill it. In no time, I’m cycling into International Falls and having a huge doughy Amish cinnamon roll and a latte at a table made of logs inside Ronnings Coffee Shop. Google Maps, which tallies distances in miles now instead of kilometers, shows better-looking cafes in Fort Francis, Canada, but I’m stuck on this side.

Everything seems better north of the border as I head for the one campground in town, a rundown place left over from more prosperous times. I shower, put on a change of clothes, and then cycle to the one laundromat, where two very large women with a little baby are loading washers. I check the prices and get change at the Subway next door. After my clothes are dry and repacked on my bicycle, I want to sit down for awhile, so I go to the one McDonald’s in town, just down the street, only to receive a Big Mac that tastes like it was made the day before and left out all night, served to me by a worker who looks like he hasn’t showered or had a change of clothes all week. I’m almost in tears, weeping for the loss of the golden arches with the little red maple leaf. 

I cycle over to Menards for another can of isobutane, which only comes in the smallest canisters in the U.S., and then back to the campground, where I build a fire with wood I recycle from the surrounding vacated sites. Foul smoke rises from the doused half-burnt logs on which campers threw their garbage, and I’m swathed with the concern I’m making my congestion worse again. Two black-capped chickadees hop from twig to branch of the overhead pine as twilight falls, and I wait under the few stars poking through patches of open sky until the fire consumes most of the viable tinder before I turn in to dream of all I’m missing on the other side of the border.

Landing: Day 33: August 11

This morning I land at the Coffee Landing Cafe in a mainstreet corner-lot building, one of those brick turn-of-the-20th-century ones with hardwood flooring and high punch-patterned tin ceilings painted white, and I can’t imagine there is a place much better than this in Canada. In the storefront window is a coffee roaster snuggled between the street-end wall and the inner entry, enclosed like a spacestation airlock for the blustery winters that once dipped to -55F in 1909. At a table against the plateglass on the other side is a group of old men convened in close conversation, and I’m reminded again of Rock Creek. A sage white-bearded man sits at the counter reading World War II history, and various couples, young and old, filter in for calories and caffeine. 

The young waitress has swollen hands, and her wincing smile as she listens and replies to the banter of a guy in what looks like an embroidered Kazakh skullcap, or takiya, may be as much from pain as it is from feeling rushed taking meal orders and serving drinks. I sip a coffee with cream and wait for the young blond man to cook my omelet with sides of potatoes-and-sausage and toast.

I exchange my remaining Canadian dollars at the bank with a happy young man in training, use my pocket knife to remove a sharp stone fragment embedded in my rear tire, and cycle to Wooden Frog state campground on Kabetogama Lake of Voyager National Park, where my neighbor is a bearded Californian with kayak strapped to the top of his minivan. He’s headed to the Boundary Waters, a place I dreamed of after inheriting a copy of Sigurd F. Olson’s Singing Wilderness when Grandpa passed away in 1984, but the idea has since lost its luster as the Waters are one of the most frequented wildernesses in the U.S. As natural places are more and more overused, Olson’s adages ring less and less true: “Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium.” It may be best to incorporate wildness into our everyday environments, instead of turning nature into a vacation parking lot.

This campground certainly isn’t the wilderness that I was expecting. A motorhome across the way is running a generator, probably for air conditioning and/or their TV, and when I go down to the public landing and beach, shrouded in a haze from far-off climate-change-caused Canadian forest fires (though I suspect domestic particulate matter is just as much the cause), I’m surprised to find so many motorboats making waves in the distance. Nonetheless, this is my bath for today, and standing chest deep in stirred silt, I pinch my nose, hold my breath and dunk. 

I light the wood that I’ve already scavenged from deserted fireplaces, lower the heavy iron grate, and heat a can of chili, bought at the corner gas station on the way in, stirring in a few tablespoons of supplementary flax. I follow this with a pot of ginger tea as I swat numerous houseflies with a T-shirt, chase the intermittent patches of sun with my solar panel, scrounge the odd lingering raspberry from the campsite’s edges, and pick apart Shakespeare, or Oxford, who was something of a naturalist himself and who, as patron (and writer and editor?), is featured as Apollo holding a snake’s-head fritillary and cob of corn in the frontispiece of John Gerard’s 1597 The Herbal. Gerard describes the raspberry, or Raspis or Framboise, as as having “leaves and branches not much unlike the common Bramble, but not so rough nor prickly, and sometimes without any prickles at all, having onely a rough haireines about the stalks : the fruit in shape and proportion is like those of the Bramble, red when they be ripe, and covered over with little downines, of taste not very pleasant : the roote creepeth far abroad, whereby it greatly increaseth” (p. 1090). 

I disagree with Gerard on the taste; I love the tang or sourness of all wild fruits, and as a boy, I used to comb the ditches with my family for blackcaps, filling plastic butter-bowls and ice-cream buckets. Sadly that world has greatly diminished and been co-opted into a marketable lifestyle. Serenity and equilibrium, like the king’s forest of old, are becoming the property of the monied, and often turned into loud, disorientating outdoor playgrounds of kicks and thrills. Perhaps nature is best left alone, but then I wouldn’t be able to lie here under a late-night storm feeling the thunder reverberating through the granite lake bowl, or catch the mournful cry of a loon when it subsides.

Doty: Day 34: August 12

It’s a wet morning and there’s still a haze, but cycling in Minnesota has been a bit more easygoing while not as desolate as southern Saskatchewan. In Cook, I stop for a reuben at the Rose Cottage Baking Company. A doty couple with walkers and a score of pastries struggle out the door, where I sit by the wastebin. I half get up when they encounter the obstacle that is my loaded bicycle, but they veer off the sidewalk onto the grass and manage to get around. I go out anyway to retrieve my low water bottle and ask the kitchen staff to refill it.

After a morning on the main state highway heading south, I’m able to find some well-paved county roads away from the logging trucks and all the motorboats wider than the pickup trucks that are pulling them. Then I’m back on another state highway heading east, not stopping until Soudan’s Only Store, evidently the sole store in Soudan, for my usual dinner can of chili and for my usual ice cream, a scoop of blackberry on top and one of peanut-butter flavor below. I sit on a spindle-backed chair at a round hardwood table and listen to an indecisive man hem and haw over the flavor choices. Logging, speedboats, ice cream: it all seems a bit outdated, 1980s-ish, and I ponder whether or not this world reality will hold water much longer.

Going into Lake Vermillion, another state campground, I brake often to preen handfuls of tiny raspberries from bushes along the drive and pop them in my mouth. It takes three or four attempts to register online, and an isolated rain shower starts just as I’m setting up. I don my blue raincoat and orange rainpants and get everything squared away without getting too wet. 

Too tired to walk down to the lake at twilight, I’m drinking ginger tea at my table when an elderly man from one of the RVs pauses while walking his dog. He asks me about my cycling, saying he encountered a woman coming from Boston, Massachusetts on a bike, and I ask him why so many motorized crafts are allowed in a national park. He turns out to have been a huntsman and fisherman in his day, and he describes how large the swells can get on the vast bodies of water and how people used to sink dead car engines, grease and all, to the lake beds as permanent anchor points, at which to tie up and fish. The prize catches out here include, in ascending order of size, walleye, lake trout, pike, muskie and lake sturgeon. And I think of my college history teacher, who liked to spend half the class telling personal tales, hitching his small outboard behind his red compact pickup with topper and driving up here to drop line and hook when school was out for summer. I offer a prayer to his spirit to watch after me. I offer another to my advisor, the one that set me on course to be an English major and a writer, an angler of stories.

Birdbrain: Day 35: August 13

I pull off by Clear Lake to watch a loon in the morning mist and then again at the entrance of Superior National Forest to test the Merlin birdcall identification application, which I’ve finally downloaded. The bird I’ve been hearing everywhere, that I thought was a robin, is the red-eyed vireo. The app says I’m also picking up a black-and-white warbler and black-capped chickadee. I pull off to test it once more on a bicycle trail not showing on Google Maps, and again, a red-eyed vireo but with an alder flycatcher this time. 

I politely move to the side and shout to a thin elderly man flying straight for me on a road bike: “Does this trail go to Ely?!” But he passes without slowing, without a head nod (the traditional Midwestern roadway greeting), without even a good morning. Sadly, he’s oblivious not only to the flora and fauna but even his fellow human, and I’m afraid his militant dedication to his exercise routine won’t help him live forever. “Flies on shit,” I say to myself, a phrase that I usually reserve for the singleminedness of drivers.

I stay on the highway into Ely, savouring a real break and real breakfast, despite the 5a.m. energy bar I used to wipe clean the peanut-butter jar. At Britton’s Cafe, a pine-paneled place that supports “our veterans” and takes only cash, I order a huge straight-off-the-food-distributor-truck meal from the gap-toothed waitress: a plate of hashbrowns topped with melted cheddar, a plate-sized omelet with two pieces of buttered raisin-cinnamon toast, and a mug of coffee with a picture of a hooked northern pike, fighting to free itself from its instinctual mistake to feed. It’s a meal I would typically abhor but not at my current rate of caloric immolation. In the booth in front of me, a mother and son receive a stack of moon-sized pancakes that they won’t be able to finish and will have to take away but which for the moment they lather with butter and drench in multiple syrup flavors, and I temporarily regret my menu choice.

I pass through more of Superior National Forest, stopping to use the app – swamp sparrow, American crow, blue jay, American goldfinch, barn swallow, red-breasted nuthatch, red-eyed vireo – and collect wild black cherries and violet beebalm flowers in plastic baggies. After Finland, where I re-inventory the night’s supplies, I set up at Eckbeck state campground and refill my bottles at another continuously flowing artisan well. I go down to the rapid Baptism River, strip to my underwear, and lower myself awkwardly into a small eddy of the glacier-smoothed stone shallows, bathing by cupping handfuls of water over myself. I watch a cedar waxwing center-stream alighting to and from a deadwood snag, snatching insects from the sunny air.

On my cookstove, the beebalm flowerheads turn from violet to pale white, tincturing into a greenish tea. Between bitter sips, I suck astringent skin and flesh from the cherries and spit the pits. Both are supposed to be native remedies for fighting colds, and I feel that their medicine is working on the last of my congestion and cough. Tomorrow I will be on Lake Superior, the gichi-gami or great sea.

Ignorance: Day 36: August 14

I enter the Lake Superior basin and turn south, and after a coffee and cinnamon roll at Timber Coffee, get on the Gitchi-Gami State Trail, which the huntsman/fisherman told me started behind the ice-hockey rink in Silver Bay, where he used to live. I find it easily, and soon I’m throwing chipper good-mornings and hellos to everyone I meet, some on traditional bicycles and others on electric ones, which are now popular, especially with the aged and overweight. Fifty percent return some sort of greeting and 50 percent stare dumbly at me and are gone. Having traveled around the world, I don’t feel particularly close to either party, but I feel sorry for what I imagine is the complacent ignorance of many of them, enjoying what they probably envision as their trail on one of their last sunny days of summer in what they think is only their country.

When the trail runs out, I brave the extremist traffic and roadside debris to Two Harbors. I park my bicycle beside a trash can at a gas station, go in for a ham sandwich and orange juice and come back out to eat. A mentally disabled man changing out bags slams the garbage cover on top of my bicycle, and I wonder why the woman supervising him does not do or say something, like apologize or excuse themselves. “Let me get that out of your way,” I say and move down the walk to the end of the building. The inability of even supposedly normal people to deal with anything outside the norm of their daily routine astounds me. 

Before I set off, I inspect my wheels, turning them slowly, and find a piece of glass in the rear tire. Perhaps the Statue of Liberty should be replaced by a guy in a pickup throwing a beer bottle out his window, and I think of my trip to Laos, which the U.S. used as an ammo dump toward the end of the Vietnam War, dropping more ordinance than on Europe during World War II, most of it on one spot in the highlands called the Plain of Jars. South of town I frustratingly slip off my pedal as I try to cross traffic and turn onto scenic route Old Highway 61, and not wanting to deal with the stones spun by automobiles to the shoulder, which according to signage is the “Bicycle Lane”, I coast along on the unobstructed road. 

The pickups and SUVs using this road, however, don’t know the definition of scenic, or perhaps they think it means “seeing” how fast you can get anywhere, or nowhere. “You’ll never get there!” I shout as they speed by. Or, “That’ll never be fast enough!” A pickup honks from behind. There are no oncoming cars and there’s plenty of space to pass, but he continues to lay on the horn. I throw him the only bird every American can identify, Digitus vulgaris ctr., which I immediately regret, knowing that I’ve just endangered my life. The driver pulls off the road and rolls down the window in order to give me bicycle lessons, which is funny because I haven’t seen any cyclists flagging down pickup drivers to tell them to obey the speed limit or not throw trash from their windows. “Learn some manners,” I shout rolling past and onto the safety of the far shoulder.

Farther down the way, my stomach sinks as the same pickup driver walks into the road in front of his house to give me a piece of his mind. I wonder why he’s so threatened by a guy living on a bicycle when he has a nice house on one of the most beautiful lakes in the world and a high-horse-powered vehicle that he can drive almost anywhere. When I see his red face and chaw-stained teeth, instead of getting irate, I’m disgusted and discouraged by such an unworthy adversary. I calmly explain that the shoulder is sometimes littered with debris that requires me to drive onto the road. “That doesn’t matter,” he exclaims, as if I’m supposed to drive over every nail and shard of glass.

“I pay taxes for this road,” he insists, as if he built the road himself, which is not true as the road was built long before he was born, probably by socially-minded democrats (perhaps including veterans returned from World War I), and it has been maintained by federal and state funds. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, what became US 61 started as Trunk Highway 1: 

Work on Minnesota 1 began in 1921 with surveyors mapping the new road over footpaths and trails first traveled by Native Americans – particularly Ojibwe and other Anishinaabe people. Some sections were built over military roads laid out in the mid-1850s. Others were built adjacent to rail lines from the late 1800s. The road was constructed a section at a time, and a formal opening was celebrated on August 27, 1921 (https://www3.mnhs.org/mnopedia/search/index/thing/highway-61-minnesota). 

“We all pay taxes on some road somewhere,” I tell him with a laugh, thinking of my crowded little street in Japan, where I rarely drive our tiny three-cylinder car and where taxes make his look like school lunch money (but then the Japanese have universal healthcare). As his shouts fade behind me, I think my bicycle is sustaining more wear than it’s meting out to “his” road, and he chose to pay road taxes, tacked onto each gallon of gas, when he bought his gas-guzzling truck. Does he know this? Does he know our own history? How we benefited from the Homestead Act, which accelerated the theft of lands belonging to natives, forcing them on reservations? Does he realize we must depart this world one day and don’t really own anything but our own actions? Obviously one type of Trump voter: he hasn’t traveled very far from home physically or mentally.

Afraid of his fascist indignation, I pedal warily on, careful not to go in the road right-of-way anymore, afraid he’ll sideswipe me, and I think his pickup does pass slowly and then disappear out of sight forever but not mind. I’m relieved to see a roly-poly woman squeezed in matching helmet and spandex bikepacking the other way, and we merrily wave to each other. Secretly, I’m ashamed that my confrontation with the pickup driver might endanger her; I feel responsible for other cyclists. And yet not even all cyclists are on my side, a fact driven home when an athletic woman out for a day ride doesn’t return my hello but smirks and cycles on ahead. Defiant (in my assumption) at being ignored, not passed, I quickly close the quarter kilometer between us and speed a half-kilometer ahead. But in my fury of pedaling, a bumblebee flies down my unzipped woolen icebreaker, stinging me five times before I crush it and stop and shake it out. A moment later, it begins to rain, and I have to stop again to cover my packs, and the stuck-up woman passes me once more without greeting for good. Some kind of liberal Democrat? I wonder.

I doggedly hike my bicycle up the hills of Duluth and find the Whole Foods, where I get some chia seeds, raisins, dates, and coconut-and-nut date treats. With the checkout woman, large-eyed and auburn-haired, I exchange love for the Middle Eastern palm fruit that I call the candybar of the desert, and she wishes me a safe journey. Finally a civilized person, I think, and I meet another, a gray-beared man from Phoenix, at the campground. We share our love of thunderstorms on the Great Plains, the fast rivers and thick forests of the upper Midwest, and wanderlust away from our wives. I’m friendly with my neighbors, too, wide-eyed wary Christians from Chicago praying over their dinner, but I know I can’t say much about who I am (e.g. a poet), where I’ve been (e.g. a gay bar in Johannesburg) or what I’ve read (e.g. my Shakespeare book these days), which are far outside any reality they might imagine. They just wouldn’t understand, despite my belief that everyone is capable of learning anything. Some of us, I suppose, just need to put a little more effort forward.

Then again, I can’t help think of the words of the mutt in Cervantes’ Dialogue of the Dogs: “Wisdom in the poor man is obscured, and need and poverty are shadows and clouds that darken it; and if it happens to be revealed, it is judged as foolishness and treated with contempt” (Trans. Edith Grossman). A poor man is easily dismissed, even if there is some truth in what he says, no matter his education. The error we make perhaps is claiming that we have access to the truth, when in fact we only have an inkling, heard a rumor true or false, before having experienced the fact. At most, we can question — and perhaps get out into the world. 

Floating on my back: Day 37: August 15

Duluth is turning into a stack of looping highways, which fortunately has a pedestrian and bicycle way leading over the St. Louis River to Superior, Wisconsin. I stop at the bakery A Dozen Excuses, the only place open this early, for a plain apple fritter and coffee with cream. The owner and I exchange a few words about Japan, where her now aged mother once lived for awhile. 

Am I learning grace? I wonder after yesterday’s heated encounter. It’s difficult not to take things personally out on the road, where one is exposed to the constant rev of indifferent engines and the rare but real hostility of drivers who think the road is theirs. I suppose I could’ve offered the pickup driver some type of conciliatory apology, at least to assuage his ire. In college, I once helped detain a disgruntled local man with bow and arrow from attacking drunken graduates rowdily celebrating, including burning a manky couch on the main street of “his town”; I felt sorry for him and his mental isolation, and I didn’t attend his court hearing, hoping he wouldn’t be sentenced too severely.

I follow the Osaugie Trail out to Highway 13 to skirt Lake Superior and take a break at the Davidson Windmill and Eskolin Log House, where thankfully there’s a port-a-potty in which I can relieve myself without being disturbed. I deposit a pocket-change donation in the coinbox for use of the loo and read the historical descriptions, thinking of Grandpa, who liked to drive his pickup with campertop north to where he had a Finnish friend with a sauna. I wish the one here were operating. One thing I prefer about cycling in Japan are the numerous public onsen and sento, where one can stop almost daily and soak one’s tired body for less than five dollars. I’m hoping for at least a cold swim in the lake by day’s end, and I dip in and out of the Bois Brule ravine, fly by ditches of Queen Anne’s lace in full bloom, and arrive in Herbster by noon, where a belted kingfisher is angling from a powerline over the mouth of the Cranberry River. 

I pull my own catch at The Cranberry over Superior: a beautifully-breaded and crisply-fried long-fillet with a side of fries, coleslaw and roll. I don’t think I’ve ever had such a good fishfry, except for Mom’s of course, and the beauty-blessed woman waiting on me has genuine bright eyes and smile, and serves my meal without feigned attentiveness. I get up to pay at the bar and am approached by a tipsy white-haired man, who starts in about his brother or someone who is or was a cyclist and, contrary to appearances, is or was quite strong, intimating that I, too, may be stronger than my overall build, which is slighter than the average American’s. It’s true, I suppose; at least I’m physically undeterred so far in this journey.

I’m not unshaken, however, when back outside I pass a ghostly-looking woman with long white hair and pale face set with yellowed eyes. A woman with dementia wandering the streets in a house dress, I rationalize, and I say hello as she stares at me without reaction. I’m hoping she is not a bad omen as I pull into the campground hugging the shore of the lake. The red-bearded host in shorts and T-shirt shuts off his mower and informs me that they are fully booked but that I can tuck my tent beside his camper where two women have also had to set up, on the backside of a thick blue spruce. I erect my small inconspicuous abode on the front side, and soon we are good neighbors.

The talkative one is large and thick as a farmhand, and we marvel at the world’s majesty: the places I’ve cycled through and her dream of tying a drybag of food and water to her leg and swimming along the shores of Kauai, Hawaii. Her thin almost-frail-looking partner in stylish red-rimmed glasses reminds me of an intelligent, gracious great aunt who’s a retired nun, and both invite me to dinner later, explaining that they were out picking hen-of-the-woods this morning and have more than enough for two. I happily agree, even though the last time I ate wild fungi I ended up spending the night in a hospital in Iwate, Japan with an IV in my arm. Our guide had mistaken “moonlight” mushrooms for oyster, and the bioluminescent fungus actually was glowing when I vomited it, along with copious amounts of sake, beside the Shinto shrine hung with shunga (Edo-era porn) that was holding its annual autumnal equinox play: the god gifting a goat instead of the desired woman and a phallus in place of the requested sword. 

In the bathroom, I take off most of my cycling clothes except the outside pair of shorts, put on a T-shirt and flip-flops, and walk across the road to the red-sand beach. I slowly enter the lake to acclimate my body before falling onto my back, my preferred way to enjoy a swim. I find soon enough, however, that this freshwater is not as buoyant as the saltwater of Tomori Beach, on Amami Island, where I floated a few months prior. I right myself. The water is so clear that I can see through feet, yards of lake, just like the meters I could see through at Tomori, but as I level my sight with the wind-roughed surface and look out across the endless, deep northern expanse, I seem more exposed, more insignificant than in the protective inlet that held the hug-warm Pacific waters where a father snorkeled with his 10-year-old son and a mother played with their small children near shore. Here families dally, as well, and a young couple sitting on the sand rises and ventures tentatively into the waves.

I shower and sit reading, listening through the pine boughs to the lesbian couple laugh and giggle as they cook dinner. Soon they deliver me a plastic fork and a waxed paper bowl of chicken sausage, wild rice and hen-of-the-woods and then knock on the door of the laidback camp host, who I can hear watching TV, and hand him a bowl, too. They invite me to sit with them on the beach, but I don’t want to impose on their time together watching the sun set, and I imagine that they are grateful that I’ve declined. Instead, I sneak a peak of the sinking orange orb reflecting off the rippled water from behind where they sit side-by-side in lawn chairs. It’s truly a majestical sunset, one that I’ll remember for the rest of my hopefully long life. 

Particular humanity and mutual relationship: Day 38: August 16

Before heading off to the toilets and showers, the cleaning woman asks about my trip and apologizes that the roads in this area have inadequate bicycle lanes, and I finish a jar of peanut butter with two energy bars and set off to cover some distance before the arrival of the rainstorm that the radar is showing.  It’s 7 a.m., and the dimented-woman/spectre is standing, again, in the road, and I wonder if she’s not the troubled spirit of some departed soul. I wish a good morning to her blank stare.

I finally see the vocal but elusive red-eyed vireo and arrive at the Cornucopia Coffee and Sweet Shoppe just as the first raindrops fall. I chain up, make sure the covers are over my packs, and go in and order a latte. I plug in my phone and battery, begin to read, and soon reach and finish the “Afterword”: “There can be no doubt that there was a Revolution in English literature in the period 1575-80: it is fully evidenced and critics acknowledge its existence. For many academics perhaps an alien world appears, as they do not recognise Shakespeare/Oxford and that premier position which he occupies, not just in English and world literature and in the process of the triumph of English as a means of communication between peoples on this planet, but in the understanding and revelation of the particular humanity and mutual relationship of each one of us” (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 297). Despite this writer’s lengthy convoluted phrasing, he has a solid premise.

There are still over one hundred pages of tables, appendices and notes, and it’s still thundering, so I order another coffee. The cafe has since filled up with arrested vacationers passing the time talking and playing cards, which reminds me of the “Big Game” Dad used to orchestrate on rainy Saturdays, when he couldn’t put us kids to any productive work, gathering us in the screened patio and handing each of us a deck for a romp of communal solitaire. The competition would get so heated as we rushed to unload our cards on center piles, ascending in order from ace to king, that Mom would never join in. On holidays, Dad, his brothers and brothers-in-law betting on sheepshead were more raucous. The only solemn card games I can recall were when Dad took out the cribbage board for Mom’s dad, a former Marine who liked to recount his exploits: crashlanding in Shanghai and pulling his fellow passengers out a window of the wreckage before it caught fire, watching Russians through binoculars and boxing a gigantic native American in Alaska, training fellow Marines in explosives on Puerto Rico till one blew off his hand, and orchestrating the pyrotechnics for John Wayne’s Sands of Iwo Jima.

I’m pedaling, again, now through the lands of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa and into Bayfield. It’s still gray, and I’m debating whether or not to take the ferry to Madeline Island – to attempt camping and to see if my college poetry teacher is here on her yearly writing retreat. Lunch hour has passed, and I find a nearly empty cafe manned by Europeans working the Wisconsin summer tourist industry. My waitress is a coy blond Slavic girl, and she brings a naked burger on a dry bun flanked by three rounds of pickle and a splattering of chips, the kind elementary school kids pack in their Avengers lunchbox. I can get a better meal at McDonald’s Canada for cheaper; I had a better veggie burger at a McDonald’s in Prague; and I deduce her employer can afford to tip her for serving me. 

This town is depressingly crawling with aimless vacationers. There’s not a great chance I’ll find any campsites open on a weekend during the busy tourist season. And I assume my teacher will be back in Indiana preparing for the new school year and that I can catch her there and ask her about Shakespeare. But just as I decide to blow town as fast as I tried to get here, I’m stopped by a healthy rose-cheaked white-haired lady in the street. At first I think she wants to ask me about my trip, but really she wants to talk about cycling around Lake Superior years ago with her teenage daughter. I ask her how conditions were over the top, where people told me it’s dangerous, and she replies that they took a bus because she didn’t want to risk her daughter getting hurt. I briefly say hello to her girlfriends that have congregated around, and then I leave to scarf an energy bar on a quiet residential street to supplement my poor lunch. I have to race for the campground in Ashland. 

Continuously flowing: Day 39: August 17

The city campground has a continuously flowing well, probably the biggest and most powerful one so far. I empty my two water bottles and refill them with the glacial spring water and cycle into town to the Chequamegon Family Restaurant for a reasonably-priced good-sized cycler’s breakfast: fruit, omelette, pancakes, and a piece of pie. And of course the refillable cup of coffee, into which I empty cuplette after cuplette of creamer.

I take a backroad east out of town and make for the Upper Peninsula, Michigan, where I once drove a dewy late-summer morning, leaving the ocean-like waves and beach of Bay View Campground behind and regretfully clipping a woodcock that suddenly flushed from the ditch. That day, I realized a driver cannot fully sympathize with the landscape but only move through it like a mobile couchpotato, removed from the violence inflicted, viewed through the neutralizing screen of the windshield. Today, out in the open air, I watch three hawks circling, catch sight of a redbreasted grosbeak, and listen to the calls of an eastern phoebe. The mashed innards of a turtle and the rot of a deer are visceral.

Soon paved secondary roads run out, as do offroad trails, passable only to all-terrain vehicles in summer and snowmobiles in winter, and I have to brave the shoulder of Highway 2. I stop to pee in the weeds on a side road and a sudden car honks my offense. Sometime between when I was three, weeing on the elementary school playground, and pissing here now, people have grown so sensitive and yet insensitive at the same time. This area is thick with Wisconsinite Trumpers and Chicagoan vacationers, and the annihilating traffic is a loud steady stream of semi-trailers and recreational vehicles pulling trucks pulling boats pulling ATVs.

I stop at the Frontier Bar to ask if 169, which is posted “Closed in 4 miles”, is passable to a bicycle. “Where do you want to go?” the bartender asks disinterestedly. “South,” I say. “Yeah, you can get through.” I buy a pack of beef jerky to show my thanks and cross the highway to the mouth of my new route. I won’t be going to the UP after all. Summer’s motorized vehicles have again frustrated my enjoyment of the more lovely passages through the continent. I pray to my great uncle “Wild” Bill and my woodshop teacher Br. John, both left-leaning nature lovers born and raised in northern Wisconsin, to watch over me.

I pass through Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest to the entrance of Copper Falls State Park. I could camp here, but Google Maps is showing a free campground in Glidden, which is very appealing as I told my wife that I would try to spend less money. Unfortunately, this doesn’t leave me any time to pause my pedaling to see the falls, and then again, I’ve already seen similar endlessly cascading waters beside roads in Minnesota. And beauty is where you make it, not at any specific point marked off with signage and gate, requiring an entry fee.

I muster on through the wooded landscape but soon feel my front tire going wonky, a sure sign of a flat. I pull over where a man is mowing the lawn in front of a house proudly displaying a red-white-and-blue Trump sign. The leak seems slow, and instead of pulling the tire off, I furiously pump it back up with my tiny pumper. The man doesn’t come over to inquire about my troubles or travels. He doesn’t even look my way to acknowledge my existence. “T-Rump,” I mouth inaudibly, thinking of a terrorific dinosaur that is 90 percent buttocks. I can only imagine that the mower-man must think that it’s my own fault for being out here on a bicycle and that I don’t deserve any assistance. I’m afraid he might come over just to tell me to get off his property.

My lame tire seems to be holding, but I pull over to check it again at the sign marking the Great Divide. The landscape is relatively flat, but from here half of all waters flow through the Great Lakes and on to the North Atlantic, while the other half flows down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico, or is it Gulf of America – this sign hasn’t been “corrected”. America is actually the first name of Brazil, which I assume is the female form of Americo, a Portuguese form of Henry, after Henry the Navigator, the half-English founder of the Age of Discovery — the whole Amerigo Vespucci story a fabrication to obfuscate the fact that the discovery of Brazil was much earlier and kept secret from the Spanish to keep them from claiming it. Christopher Columbus, now believed to be from Cuba, Portugal and possibly the nephew of Henry, probably had made the discovery. Perhaps this whole continent should be renamed North Peru, the southern one being from which, according to recent archeological and genetic evidence, many crops, such as corn, cocoa and potatoes, as well as native culture originated 9000 years ago. All these were carried north by a continuous flow of peoples, closely related to those of Southeast Asia – a flow that continues to this day. 

Ironically, a Vietnamese-American I know, a Trump supporter, doesn’t think just anyone south of the border has rights to enter the United States, even though her own parents were freely given citizenship simply for being on the U.S. side of its illegal military intervention. All those left in Vietnam dead (3-4 million?) or alive were bad people, I guess. “Only those that are worthy can come to the U.S.,” she asserts, and I think that’s pretty presumptive for someone with little moral authority on the issue, someone who, despite her Catholicism, made her wealth from others’ misfortune during the subprime mortgage scam. I suspect “worthy” means dollar-worshipping, i.e. “In God We Trust”, and, also, that her conservatism is merely a reaction: her deep desire to be considered American, as well as her jealousy of new immigrants usurping her once special status in American mythology. 

A person can only set their own worth, not others’; otherwise, they err on the side of fascism. Hate, jealousy, and greed are not taking a stance on an issue; they’re symptoms of, if not overt, subconscious fear and frustration that one will never have enough or be enough over their neighbor no matter how rich or successful. It’s a Wild West, gangster mentality, which some of my second-generation-American classmates acquired while braving the crack-ridden streets of 1980s-90s Chicago, when elements in the government were busy creating the drug problem in order to arm the Contras in Nicaragua, another Vietnam. The future is not closed national borders but world citizenship – something I can appreciate by having lived abroad. When the time comes, all walls will eventually have to be surmounted.

The women attendants at the gas station in Glidden are very friendly, answering my questions about the campground, refilling my water bottles and letting me sit in-store chewing and swallowing a pint of ice cream. I pack my purchase of chili and nurse my bicycle over to the free woodlot behind the city’s history park and museum, where I cook and eat dinner. I depack and set up my tent before I remove my front wheel and take it into the sun, away from most of the mosquitos. I find and remove the piece of steel-belting wire that has wormed through the tread; patch and reinstall the inner tube; and reinflate the tire. I’ve lubricated the lip with water and shampoo, as suggested in a YouTube video, but no matter how hard I pump and pull, I cannot get the tire to seat properly, and the wheel wobbles slightly as I test ride it. It will have to do, I decide, until I can get to a bicycle shop in Woodruff tomorrow. My undaunted drive has reached its limit for today.

Chipper-er: Day 40: August 18

The Glidden gas stop is notably moody Monday morning: the gal at the register grumpily rings up my breakfast sandwich, and the gimp I greet limping from his pickup doesn’t return my “Good morning.” Out on the road, I hear the mocking laughter of a pileated woodpecker, and two SUVs honk, I assume, to get me out of their way while another two drive too close for comfort. The roadkill this morning includes a deer, skunk, and porcupine. My spirits only slightly recover when I get a honk of encouragement by a car going in the opposite direction and I spot a turkey scurrying into the undergrowth. 

It’s a drizzly day, my rump is killing me already, and in exasperation, I joke that I will never get to Woodruff, when I finally give in and pull up to the building holding the Milky Way Coffee Company and order a sandwich, scone and large latte. There’s a group of middle-aged women gathered for lunch evaluating different TV series. One woman mentions her son’s favorite show, which she says “is strange.” I chuckle to myself, not only because the show is called “Stranger Things”, but because it’s chock-a-block full of ’80s and ’90s culture references, a world in which these women grew up and which includes Dungeons & Dragons, a roleplaying game invented by a Wisconsinite. I even reveled in the idea of being a wizard when I took up the game one summer with one of my stranger cousins.

I decide to take my bicycle to the closest shop, the Chequamegon Adventure Company, which turns out to be the right choice. Andrew, son of a Methodist minister who moved to this region, replaces my inner tubes and rotates my tires, putting the more-worn rear on the less-weighted front. I’m hoping to get across the rest of North Peru (sic) on these balding treads, I tell him, and our conversation steers through my recent trials and tribulations to his adventure kayaking on Lake Superior, during which he gets as emaciated as a cross-continental cycler. We connect in our philosophies, and he offers his services free of charge. To show my appreciation, I purchase a new tire-patch kit, which I really do need, and a shop T-shirt, one size smaller than usual for my now skin-and-bones build. 

On Andrew’s advice, I follow a crushed-gravel bicycle route south to Clear Lake, a state campground where the graying woman attendant appears flustered: her hot sandwich lies unfinished and cold in its foil wrapper as she deals with me and other customers. I tell her about my bicycle journey and that I’m from Wisconsin and used to work for the Department of Natural Resources, too, but that doesn’t endear me, and I have to pay the high $40+ out-of-state camping fee. She does assign me, however, to a nice lakeside site, where I’m greeted by a hummingbird curiously inspecting a chipmunk climbing thorny briars to reach their firm juicy fruit. “Save some for me,” I say.

I snatch a couple of the blackberries, set up my tent, and go down to the lake for a dip. I close my eyes, pinch my nose, dunk and get out, drying off and changing at my campsite. Refreshed and chipper with my new T-shirt and my renewed tires, I walk to a handpump for water for my bottles and cooking pot, and once I’ve finished dinner, cleaned up and brushed my teeth, I’m in my tent fast asleep until the middle of the night when the yips of coyotes wake me. I sit up, undo my screen and flap. I lean behind a tree, out of the light shafts the next-door campfire is casting, and pee as inconspicuously as I can into the ash pile maintenance has made in the weeds. 

catholic with a small “c”: Day 41: August 19

The birdcall ID app is picking up a black-capped chickadee, red-eyed vireo, and eastern wood-pewee, and I see the ruby-throated hummingbird again, this time checking out a downy woodpecker on the dead white birch overhead. Later, down the road, the app identifies a Tennessee warbler and a red-breasted nuthatch, and I catch a loon with my own ears and many northern flickers with my own eyes.

It’s mostly quiet on the secondary roads I take, and at a tree across from a sign that reads “Deport Liberals”, I liberally pick two green apples. I don’t consider myself a liberal; I tend to go it alone, perhaps because I was raised in a post-Vatican II ecumenical atmosphere. I believe at the most radical of being considerate of others' well-being and, in the very least, of providing health care and education for all. I cross a highway only to find Google has put me on an impassable gravel road, and I turn around, repass the “Deport Liberals” sign and take a paved route south, arriving fairly early in the day at the Perch Lake Campground, Langlade County, where it's just me and the tattooed camp-host with the coughing pickup truck. He kindly gives me his business card with cell number in case of emergencies, but perhaps he just has a hankering for company.

The campground is overflowing with ripe blackberries, which I eat by the handful, brushing away the equally abundant mosquitos before I retire to the breezy bugfree lakeshore to unfold my solar panel and read up the remains of my Shakespeare book. It argues that William Shaksper of Stratford, a Puritan, couldn’t have had the ideological leaning, let alone education, to write the plays. Puritans lobbied to have the playhouses closed, and the writer of the plays exhibits “a clear sympathy with England’s Catholic heritage and practices.” Richard Malin writes, “While William’s cultural impact on London is zero, his business impact on Stratford is considerable.” Some of Stratford William’s very un-Christ-like dealings include grain hoarding, which exacerbated famine, and petty lawsuits, not unlike the Trump variety. 

I have dinner and turn in before the mosquitos get really ravenous, thinking that the real Shakespeare was catholic with a small “c”, riding the thin line between camps, which forces his formation of the modern literary mind: away from moralizing pedantics toward the examination of the human soul. Again, coyotes wake me in the dark, and again, I have to pee into the woods. I’m pretty sure the excited pack of yips and barks are not wolves, which a member of our church, Dick Thiel, helped to restore in the ’80s and ’90s, and I climb back into my tent, leaving the flap up, and train my app on a hoot, an owl, a barred owl making its own cries, sounding out a positive reply from the darkness.

Lost worlds: Day 42: August 20

After battling the morning’s mosquitos, I’m back on the road, stopping at the Lumbercamp Segment of the Ice Age Trail and remembering Great Uncle Bill, who grew up with the new forests replacing those clearcut from northern Wisconsin in the late 1800s and early 1900s. When Chequamagon-Nicolet National Forest was established in 1933, he was already 14 years old and served as a lumberjack-for-hire not long after. In his later years, he was an Ice Age Trail volunteer in the West Bend area, and he took me to the home of a farmer along the route that he had befriended. I gazed in envy at the large display case of arrowheads and other stone artifacts, probably from an Upper Mississippi Woodland culture, which annual frost heaves and the farmer’s plow had unearthed.

The mosquitos force me to move on until I stop again to train my binoculars on a bald eagle weighing down a pine’s crown and preening its feathers. I catch an indigo bunting, a bird I haven’t seen since boyhood, amidst corn tassels. Then a molted brown-and-white juvenile bald eagle on a deer carcass way past wasted, a great blue heron on the inside of a river’s side, two eastern kingbirds playing king of the hill mid-flight, an explosion of goldfinches erupting from the goldenrod, and two sandhill cranes rowing steadily through the air while sixteen more crane their necks in various arrangements across a cut hayfield, as if posing for a Brueghel painting. There is a white-tailed deer by a house and two more later in a pasture. 

The fenced horses, unlike the frisky ones I passed out West, are disinterested tubs satiated on the rich Midwestern grass. I take a variety of secondary roads and county highways, passing industrial dairy operations from which a steady stream of slurry tankers haul load after load of liquified ammoniac excrement to be sprayed on fields. These factories are sprawling zones of covered concrete milking parlors, covered concrete loafing areas, and open concrete bunkers of silage sheathed with white plastic and weighted down by old tires, and I start to wonder if the bulkweight produced per cow is greater in shit or milk. These farms are nothing like the 30-cow dairy Grandpa had, a bouquet of fermenting corn silage, sweet clover and alfalfa hay, cow patties and pee mixed with lime, and the warm froth steaming from the stainless-steel tank in the milkhouse. They’re even less like Dad’s 20-acre hobby of milk goat and meat pig, steer and chickens, with the odd rabbit, turkey and horse. And lightyears from Alonzo training his oxen team to turn to a “hee” and a “haw” in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Farmer Boy.

I see worlds upon worlds, generation after generation: what has been lost and gained with each pass. One is the flora. For example, since British Columbia, I’ve noticed purple knapweed, an invasive species that entrapped me between my two co-workers at Mill Bluff State Park: the naturalist, who went about pulling the weed out, and the maintenance man, who secretly replanted it in the turnaround’s flower bed because he liked how it looked. Other frequent invasives have been purple loosestrife and the common tansy, which I read about outside the history museum in the Kettle Valley. But at the same time, I see some beloved ditchside natives: Queen Anne’s lace, yarrow, meadow goat’s-beard, and black-eyed Susans. And I finally find and taste the not-so-sweet bunches of wild grapes, which I used to strip from the vines for Mom’s jelly, and happily munch a few more feral apples, another childhood favorite, within reach of the right-of-way.

Rooted: Day 43: August 21

I wake at the Bear Lake Campground south of Manawa and try to be quiet for my RV neighbor, who kindly “knocked” on my tent last night to offer me a meal, saying, “I notice that you don’t have a cooler,” which made me imagine a grilled bratwurst and potato salad, once common Wisconsin summer fare. Regrettably, I had already eaten my chili/flax meal and was about ready to pass out after reading and drinking a root beer in the camp store while waiting for my laundry. 

Today is another bird day in my native land. At 6:05 at Lat:44.410, Lng: -88.929, the app picks up a northern cardinal, red-breasted nuthatch, and Carolina wren. At 6:47 at Lat:44.458, Lng:-88.780, a cedar waxwing, American crow, yellow-billed cuckoo, and another cardinal. There’s the male indigo bunting, its dark blue summer plumage fading, in the tassels of a foggy cornfield; the red-and-blue-hued white-cheeked American kestrel, a tiny falcon about the weight of a mourning dove, perched on a TV antenna; three sandhill cranes fattening on fieldcorn; small bursts of roadside goldfinches, the brilliant yellow males and the dull dark-green females; flicker after northern flicker flitting up from where they’ve been eating ants; red-winged blackbirds ringing from marshy ditches; pileated woodpeckers laughing from woodlots; a mother turkey with this year's hatchlings, now juveniles and next year adults; a big flock of barn swallows congregating for migration; the first small “v” of Canada geese; two turkey vultures perched in a tree and patiently waiting on it all. 

Today is another wild fruit day, as well. I find my first roadside pears, perfectly formed but still a bit hard. I try some elderberries and understand why Mom cooked these, like the grapes, into jelly with cupfuls of white granulated sugar. And the palatable apples within reach are becoming more frequent, each with their own texture and flavor: soft and mealy, hard and bitter, and my favorite, crisp, juicy and tart. I’m biting one down to a nub when a girl riding next to a man in a Gator waves, putting me in high spirits. That is until I stop at Subway, where the spineless server, a pony-tailed effeminate kid decked in black and wearing earrings, treats me like I’m a plague to his existence. But then he is disrespectful to a woman customer in the same way, while anytime a macho guy in workboots orders, he turns submissive and pathetically fawning. Perhaps he’s afraid of being mistaken for gay, or perhaps he’s transgender and hates the pandering condescension of those he perceives as liberals. Whatever the case, I can’t help but feel sorry for his lack of a centered self. 

Brown white-tailed deer, gray cottontail rabbit, black gray-squirrel, Google leads me to the Devil River State Trail, which takes me almost all the way into Manitowoc, and I cycle down to the port and buy a ticket from the affable ladies there for the night ferry across Lake Michigan. As I’m probably three days or less from Indiana, I’ve emailed my poetry teacher to warn her of my approach – I haven’t seen her in more than 25 years. Then I cycle back to the city center for a beer and hamburger, stop at a gas station for a container of ginger cookies, and return to the port to wait out the hours for the S.S. Badger’s departure while watching the ferry crew go about their tasks. I observe their cheerful laidback banter, comfortable in their unconventional work: one marvels at the night-vision goggles of a drifting military veteran, and two others crack jokes over the electric car that’s parked in the wrong area.

Believe: Day 44: August 22

I wake in the top-deck dining area after falling asleep with my feet up on a chair. The sky is still dark and I see a shooting star, the last of the annual Perseid meteor shower. I smell and see the smoke, blacker than the night sky, our 1952 coal-fired vessel is belching, and I think of my French-Anglo great-grandfather Howard Edward de Fault, a sailor on this lake, who wasn’t married to my Lithuanian great-grandmother, Bernice Juska. Both probably crossed paths while frequenting the bar at the end of their street in Racine, and I wonder if he was a solemn cruel man or a jolly chap that liked to sing a shanty or two. The ditty from Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”, “With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain…,” runs through my mind, and then I try making up my own song, but in my grogginess, I quickly stumble on rhyme-less line endings.

The lights of motorboats speckle the waters, getting a headstart, while other fishermen wait impatiently in the bay, held back by the coast guard keeping the way clear for our passage. It’s twilight yet, and I cycle downtown, where a cafe is just opening. My teacher has written back that she is on Madeline Island, saying, “I would love to see you if that is possible. This is when you know this is a big country.” She has no idea how true her statement is; I haven’t told her that I’m cycling across North America and was through Bayfield six days ago. I call the number she’s given me, telling her that unfortunately it will be difficult for me to “kill time” until September 2, when she returns to Indiana, and I offer her a big hug over the phone, grateful for the poetic path she set me on so many years ago. I ask her about Edward de Vere, but she says she doesn’t “believe” all that, which I find is a commonly used word when professors (new and old) dismiss what I see as very strong evidence for the 17th Earl of Oxford being Will Shake-Speare. I’m a bit disappointed but not surprised. “Anyway,” I tell her, “it’s the language, the beautiful language that’s most important.”

I could’ve spent two weeks scoping out Leelanau County, where the writer Jim Harrison made his foray into literature while fishing and hunting. “We are nature too,” he sagely says, attributing the words to Shakespeare in the French documentary “The Earth is All that Lasts”. In the trailer, he’s driving the big white sports-utility vehicle that I saw him leave in after he brushed past me and my drunken goofy smile at the Wagon Wheel Saloon in Patagonia, Arizona, when I told him I couldn’t hang around. I suspect he might’ve shown me his secret places if I would’ve jilted my brother who had to get back for work. But as I watch him on YouTube smoking in his SUV or sitting in a sleek red motorboat on some private lake out West, I’m disappointed; he’s just another monied old fart with two expensive gasoline-powered machines, which terrorize the outdoors and have been the bane of my bicycle journey. I believe more in the Sikh truck drivers who gave me wide berth throughout Canada, even though they were the culprits of my tire troubles and may just have been careful to avoid having run-ins with the law. Most Toms, Dicks and Harri-sons, I believe, should probably not be out in the woods, at least not with machines, and I think of 80-year-old Great Uncle Bill during one of his last deer hunts, walking into the snowy balsam-fir forest manned only with a rifle and plastic toboggan.

I sit for awhile at a picnic table on the very green lawn of Ludington’s lakeshore park, eating a turkey sub (there’s no Piri-Piri chicken this side of the border), finishing up my ginger cookies, and reading about the construction of The Theatre and its successor, The Globe, which “followed in design the plan suggested by the Roman architect Vitruvius (d. c.20 BCE) in his De Architectura Book V with its circular interior and octagonal exterior. The book can only have been very rare in England in the 1570s…. Sir Thomas Smith [Oxford’s tutor] had four copies, in Latin, French, Spanish and Italian in his library…” (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 357). I think, also, of the octagonal Byzantine churches, one of which Oxford attended in Venice, and how the revolutionized stage replaced the Catholic morality play and was an attempt to reunite an ideologically divided nation. 

At the RV campground just north of town, my app picks up a tufted titmouse, American crow, northern cardinal, black-capped chickadee, and red-eyed vireo. Harrison also said he doesn’t trust anyone who doesn’t believe in birds; there, he may have a point. I build a pallet-and-branch fire scrounged from a debris heap beside my site and incinerate bits of litter left by other campers: black plastic zip-ties and an aluminum tube of cobalt-blue paint. I see a hawk in the trees, and when I get up in the night to pee, I smell the skunk foraging the campground. I believe in skunks: the mother leading her five kits, when I was 14 and on a logging road in the night with Great Uncle Bill.

Right: Day 45: August 23

Before leaving town, I cycle south to the beach for the photo I missed yesterday and, turning right toward town, come upon three deer running down a crossstreet as I head for a big omelet breakfast at the Old Hamlin Restaurant, a wood-paneled place hung with black-and-white photos of the lake ferries. I’ve mournfully set aside any plans I had or imagined for going north or south, and I head east, where I discover the Pere Marquette, a rail trail that spans almost the entire peninsula. Despite my differences with Harrison, I ask Jim to look after me through his birthland. 

The Pere Marquette River is supposed to be one of the cleanest in the state, and I see a great crested flycatcher that is flushing insects from a pine, a poplar felled across the trail so recently by a beaver that the leaves are still pert and the woodchips damp with life, and a green frog that is hopping marshward into the shade while a gray snake stretches in the sun over the warmed crushed gravel. The latter two species will have to remain unknown as I’ve yet to foray into herpetology, and I stop in Baldwin for a bathroom break and a chocolate-dipped cone with two scoops of black walnut at Jones’ Homemade Ice Cream Shoppe. Lunch is another Subway.

I turn right off the trail and pull through a burg called Sears, which boasts a few paltry residences and a one-room clapboard post-office, and come upon Crittenden Campground, where I sign up as the sun sets on a lake where tanned children are at play. It was here in mid-Michigan that Harrison grew up and lost sight in one eye, and in memoriam, I have one of the apples I pocketed during the day, make an unsweetened astringent sumac-berry tea (Harrison had a lit mag named after the plant), and sample the wild grapes growing on the chainlink fence behind my tent. Sandhill cranes echo gargling croaks in the distance. It all feels right, that I’m supposed to be right here, right now in this unintended place at this unintended time. 

Lonely: Day 46: August 24

In the low-hanging mists of daybreak, the cranes are already calling from the dew-drenched meadows, and I think Jim Harrison is the backlit young buck raising his velvety antlers into the sun to watch me pass. A great blue heron stands above its reflection in mirror-deep marsh water. Cottontails race ahead and clear the trail. At the Kaleidoscope Cafe, I laugh an embarrassed thank you when the gregarious woman owner calls “Thanks for comin’, hon!” I’ve just finished a cinnamon roll and coffee and charged my phone and battery. 

A lone bittern, most likely a green heron, is perched in a tree over the wet beside the raised railroad bed, which must’ve still carried coal-fired steam engines when Harrison was born in 1937. A turkey crosses the way, and near Farwell, the app picks up a pileated woodpecker, tufted titmouse, eastern wood-pewee, black-capped chickadee, and northern cardinal – the titmouse and wood-pewee being the only two voices I’ve yet to commit to memory. Six cedar waxwings flycatch from deadfall trees half submerged in a blooming expanse of white waterlilies, or “beaver root”, when looking at the world bottom up instead of top down. A catbird cries from the thickets.

Just before the next town, Clare, I see a skinny older woman resting off to the side with a yellow bicycle overloaded with large rear and front panniers. She’s crossing the continent, too, and tells me there’s a famous donut shop on the main drag. I pretend to be surprised, having seen the Cops & Doughnuts Headquarters on Google Maps and having opted for the nearer Kaleidoscope. I tell her that I’ve already had a sweet roll and coffee but would love to stop for another, which is more than true, and add that I will meet her there. 

I cycle ahead, chain my bicycle to a lamp post beside a streetside table, and join the line snaking through two conjoined touristy storefronts, loudly done up with police paraphernalia and merchandise, including mugs and T-shirts. The long display case offers just as lengthy a lineup of rolls and bars to choose from, but I go for a couple of standard glazed donuts and a medium coffee with cream and return outside to sit and wait. 

Phyllis, who’s pedaled from Bend, Oregon, soon parks her bicycle next to mine, orders and then disappears down the street in search of a tastier source of caffeine. I’m left to bat the yellowjackets away from her long john that’s lying on a plain paper plate and from the open waxed bag of sugary bakery items that I assume she’s saving for later. I also keep an eye on her unsecured rig, which a tanned older gentleman in unfastened helmet and saggy black speedos keeps walking past. Finally, he asks, “Have you seen the woman riding this bicycle?” “She went down the street for coffee,” I say, “but I can’t remember the name of the shop.” “Well, can you tell her Jeff says hi?” explaining that he, too, is cycling across the continent and that they’ve been crossing and recrossing each other’s paths.

Phyllis finishes up the explanation when she returns, asking me if I’m doing the Northern Tier, too. “What’s that I ask?” “It’s a trans-continental trail starting in Washington State and ending in Maine,” she replies. And then we describe our self-designed routes: she, up into British Columbia, back down into North Dakota, through the Upper Peninsula and onto Bar Harbor, and I, across the Canadian plains, kiddie corner through the Upper Midwest and, now, to Boston. I marvel at her more circuitous route and stamina, and she says she used to teach phy ed in Atlanta, Georgia and has been cycling since she was a young woman but is now old with lots of medication she has to tote around. I note the medical emergency bracelet she is wearing and the instructions attached to her handlebar pack.  

We briefly talk politics, and she voices an interest in Heather Cox Richardson and her “Letters from an American” podcast. I tell her I will check it out, but perhaps I’m pretending to follow again. Being a curious, deep-thinking guy, I typically eschew historical-political analysis and rely on my own private enquiries and experiences as a poet, journalist and documentary filmmaker. I’m academically-minded, and like Richardson, I’ve made a similar analysis of the Republican Party’s turn after Theodore Roosevelt but long before her 2014 book To Make Men Free, when I took an elective political-science class in the 1990s.

Phyllis and I disappointingly agree that the famous Cops donuts are no longer homemade and must come off of a truck, and I leave her in front of the shop, promising to return her salutations to Jeff, who I pull up beside down the trail. In his New Englander accent, I learn he’s a retiree living in Arizona but started his cycling in Anacortes, Washington and, after Bar Harbor, will push on to Boston for his granddaughter’s birthday in late September. “It’s the one date on this trip I have to keep,” he says under his huffs and puffs. I assume I’m encumbering his cycling and wish him a good trip, but he replies, “Yeah, don’t let me slow you down,” and as I quickly pull ahead in search of the lost hour, I’m ashamed I’ve abandoned his desire to converse. 

By the time I’m through the late-afternoon shower and setting up at the Bay City State Park Campground on the shores of Saginaw Bay, I know I won’t see Phyllis or Jeff again, who are probably a half day behind me. In the rain-swept campground, I graciously receive the hearty hello of a boisterous guy who admires my voyaging and then go through my lonely routine of cooking and eating, having tea, showering, brushing my teeth, and finally turning in for the night. 

Making it: Day 47: August 25

Venus is bright in the morning sky, and I cycle to the shore of the Lake Huron inlet and watch a heron, two cranes and a few geese and ducks in silhouette against the orange twinge of mid-twilight. A couple of deer stalk the sandy beach. It will be awhile before the sun breaks the skyline, and I regretfully hit the road. 

I grab breakfast and charge my phone among the oldman coffee-groups at McDonald’s and then skirt the bay, morning calls of a cardinal greeting me, and attempt to move to another waterside campground. However, the asphalt highway shoulder is too narrow and littered and the nihilistic violent traffic too extreme with semi-trailers and impatient pickup trucks that I again change course, turning south to find a secondary route east toward an alternate destination. A turkey vulture has its head in a deer carcass, a baby racoon lies closed-eyed and curled like a fetus, and a dove has been rendered into an unidentifiable lump of feathers. My planned easy day now looks to be a very long one, but that buck in velvet appears again, bounds from the ditch flowers and disappears into a woodlot, and I’m reassured Harrison will help me make it through. 

    Another Country

    

    I love these raw moist dawns with

    a thousand birds you hear but can’t

    quite see in the mist.

    My old alien body is a foreigner

    struggling to get into another country.

    The loon call makes me shiver.

    Back at the cabin I see a book

    and am not quite sure what that is. (from Dead Man’s Float, his final book)

Soon, I pedal up to Ed, a portly man in suspenders getting his mail in front of a clapboard house with red barn. He tells me he used to have a Trek and has hosted cyclers, letting them set up in his yard. He asks if I need anything. It’s still early and my water bottles are mostly full, and apologetically, I say, “Nope. I guess not.” “Well, you know where to find me,” and he gives me a hearty slap on the back as I cycle away. I appreciate the human contact but again feel ashamed to have deprived an old man of company and myself of a theoretical piece of apple pie and a coffee.

My verve propels me to The Sub Shop in Caro, where without blinking, I put down a foot-long turkey-and-lettuce wrapped in wax paper and a large styrofoam cup of root beer, saving the peanut-butter chocolate brownie for later. Then I’m back zigzagging north and south in a general southeasterly direction, trying to avoid the two road extremes: one heavily traveled and the other abruptly turning into gravel. Thunder clouds building to the west eventually catch and drench me, overcoming the water resistance of my 10-year-old Gortex rain jacket. I take refuge from the lightning and the cars’ spray under a farm’s large silver maple, trying to keep my phone screen dry as I search, again, for substitute passage.

By the late sunny afternoon, I’m fighting kilometer after kilometer, I mean mile (I forget I’m in the U.S.) of unavoidable muddy rutted gravel roads, stopping only to pilfer apples from trees absconded to nature. One is perfect; it’s crunchy, juicy tart revives my spirits, and I break onto the paved highway just below the Sanilac County Lexington Park Campground. It’s past six and the camp host is getting ready to grill his steak dinner and, in weary exasperation, tells me just to grab a site at no charge. I thank him and assure him I’ll be gone early.

I’m worn out myself, and instead of cooking, I grab what ready items I have, some wild apples, my brownie, and a squeezable tube of Skippy peanut butter and bag of mini pretzels purchased at a Bay City 7-Eleven, and go sit at one of the picnic tables perched on the ledge above Lake Huron. I made it, I think, I made it.

Taking note: Day 48: August 26

I cook a pot of oatmeal, flax, cranberries and honey and take it down to the beach, littered with a rusting desk chair and collapsing tipi of driftwood, and settle on a chunk of water-worn concrete to watch the sunrise. My peace of mind is momentary, however, and I lose my patience with the morning rush-hour roadracers while enroute to the EZ Laundromat in Port Huron. Perhaps grace is an impossibility on roadways.

I use the toilet and change clothes, so I can wash my cycling outfit, and run across the street in flip-flops to the Dollar General to get change. I return only to find, with a heavy sigh, that the automated machine on the wall requires the purchase of a membership card with $10-minimum charge. I load a washer, swipe my shiny new plastic, and settle wallside to listen to a mentally disabled couple, dropped off by a caretaker. The roly-poly woman with dyed hair is complaining about her counselor to the scrappy guy with a smoker's voice, whose distant replies concern the laundry. “They’re taking notes, but they’re not listening to me,” the woman whines. Once my clothes are dry, I burn my remaining account on packets of trail mix from the snack machine in the corner; I won’t be back here again.

The highway bridge to Canada is not passable to pedestrians, so I head south toward the ferry crossing, and recalling Phyllis’ talk about food, stop at a Jet’s in St. Clare for my first pizza meal and a diet Pepsi. Some trailside wild grapes later, I sign in at Algonac State Park, set up my tent and unfurl my solar panel on the sunny site with no trees and read the afternoon away at a shaded neighboring lot, including about Oxford’s influences, such as Chaucer and Beowulf, and a note from Ben Jonson about the earl: 

He was indeed honest, and of an open and free nature: had an excellent fantasy: brave notions and gentle expressions; wherein he flowed with that facility, that it was necessary he should be stopped: Sufflimandus erat (he had to be suppressed) as Augustus said of Haterius. His wit was in his own power; would the rule had been so too. Many times he fell into those things, could not escape laughter; as when he said in the person of Caesar; one speaking to him: ‘Caesar, thou dost me wrong.’ He replied, ‘Caesar never did wrong, but not without just cause’ and such like. There was more in him to be praised than to be pardoned (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 398). 

Canada, visible across the St. Clare River, will have to wait until tomorrow.

Refuge: Day 49: August 27

At a Tim Horton’s, I’m listening to an old guy say over a cup of coffee “Winters were longer then; we’d be skating in November," and I know for sure I’m back in Canada. The morning was a surreal slow drift from Michigan to the Ontario shore past an empty cargo ship headed north. After a brief talk with the female border-agent of Asian descent and a stop at the monument commemorating Tecumsah taking refuge in Canada during the War of 1812, much like Sitting Bull in Saskatchewan a generation later, I arrived here.

I take the River Road. which has an American colonial feel, and I find another historical marker where a mill owner provided food and shelter to Tecumsah. There are cardinals, goldfinches, barn swallows, kingbirds and hawks. I pull up to a fresh-produce stand and buy a couple of apples with a U.S. dollar, but the purchase is unnecessary as I find another amazingly tart and juicy apple roadside and then a 30-foot tree loaded with pears, which I pack for later. I then have to take main roads, and the traffic’s violence thickens and turns relentlessly extreme. Even the decrepit man limping with cane to his car parked fully athwart the sidewalk doesn’t return my hello but rather forces a nihilistic smirk, as if my passing is holding him from what little reinless mileage he has left on his life.

By day’s end, I get so frustrated when I’m forced off the narrow paved shoulder by a dump truck that I kick up a spray of gravel that dings off the senseless automobiles. The sound jars from my memory the conversation of a British Columbia biker who said he threw handfuls of marbles into the windshields of cars that endangered his life. I try to recover some face by being jocular with the attendant at the Dalewood Conservation Area, but she’s as unmovable as a bovine as she rings up the overpriced site and two Oh Henry! candybars. She puts me near potable water and bathrooms but half a kilometer from the showers, which, in my fatigue, I skip for the night. I take refuge in preparing my dinner: leftover emergency dry chili mix bought in Duluth, Minnesota, combined with chopped fresh Cuban sweet peppers from a roadside stand and nitrate-free venison sausage from a gas stop, both in Michigan. It’s one of my better meals, and I feast while watching the great blue heron on the water behind my site. 

Blessings: Day 50: August 28

Around midnight I get up to pee into the trees. Some restless geese are gaggling, but the people having a party near the boat launch have departed. I go back to sleep before a good Canada McDonald’s breakfast. By the sunny late-morning, I’m back on small roads where an elderly man pulling a mower behind an ancient red Farmall gives me a hearty wave. I get a raised hand, also, from a Sikh on a cellphone as his co-workers go over a field of tobacco with an elevated harvester; and a curious glance from a white boy as he sits with others on slowly moving seats shaded with tarpauline, pulling cucumbers from ground vines and dropping them into plastic buckets between their legs; and a hearty blessing in Spanish from a Mexican who stands on a hilltop where I can’t see what they are picking.

I can almost taste the cucumbers being pickled with the dill growing in vast fields back on the Great Plains. But a storm cloud is building in the east, a sign of things to come, and a light rain begins as I lock up my bicycle beside the Simcoe Farmers’ Market and cover my packs. I wasn’t looking for this, a pleasant respite, where I get a sauerkraut topped sausage with pop followed by a box of chocolate cheesecake, which I devour right away, and a loaf of raisin bread for the plastic bottle of raw wildflower honey, which I bought earlier today at another roadside stand and tucked in with my sleeping bag.

Back on the road, I fatefully hit the core of the storm and am anointed by a thundering downpour just as I find an oil refinery hiding on the shores of Lake Erie. This witches brew – torrential rain mixed with lightning, truck traffic and the stench of simmering petroleum – is pissing me off, and I curse myself for having come this way, but I battle on like a bloodied Macbeth to the Haldimand Conservation Area, where I laugh ironically but good-naturedly when I’m told I will have to boil the water and that my tent site will be across the road, not on the lake. 

No matter; the rain won’t let up till 9 p.m. and enroute I find a tin roof held up by four posts over a public picnic table, where I pause to wait for an intermission in the storm. I then quickly set up my camp, secure the covers over my packs, and take a long hot shower, stripping off my dripping clothes and donning a dry set. The rain is so heavy, however, that it quickly dampens through my spare rain jacket as I retrieve my cooking gear and re-seek shelter under the tin pavilion. I make a chili meal followed by another sumac berry tea, sweetened, this time, with Ontario honey.

I wait for 9 p.m., when I tear the pages from the campground magazine brochure and stuff them into my waterlogged water-resistant-but-not-proof hiking shoes. Everything will need a laundromat tomorrow, and put on my not-too-damp down jacket and slide into my not-too-damp sleeping bag and count today’s not-so-bad blessings off to sleep: a flock of kingbirds preparing to migrate, a “v” of geese, goldfinches, flickers, swallows or martins lined up on utility lines, a handful of wild grapes, a hatful of pears.

Holding its absurdities to its face: Day 51: August 29

I’ve kissed goodbye to Lake Erie and the oil refinery in the distance and am barking back at two ridiculous raving-mad German shepherds stamping their forms into the high page-wire fence surrounding their worn yard. I think about making good use of my bear mace. Canine companions are psycho mirrors, emulating their owners’ personality; everyone knows “god” spelled backwards is “dog.” But I decide I don’t need to stop to check my map, and I continue to Dunnville and the Broadway Laundry, where the owners have concealed every outlet behind false walls so that no one can extract one unpaid-for amenity from the place; even the power source for the TV that no one is watching is hidden above the drop ceiling. I plug my phone into my backup battery and change in the bathroom, putting on flip-flops and waving my hand in front of the paper dispenser sensor about 12 times to stuff my manky shoes with absorbent toweling. 

The ancient machines are cryptic, and I lose a quarter in a washer before I learn from the lady attendant that they take only dollar coins. Between washing and drying an elderly woman takes my seat – I guess she needs it more than I and my saddle-rawed butt-cheeks – and I stand for an hour reading:

Coleridge is also important, for, in discussing Shakespeare’s political outlook, he writes, ‘...he should be styled a philosophical aristocrat… you will observe the good nature with which he seems always to make sport with the passions and follies of a mob, as with an irrational animal. He is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding its absurdities to its face; and sometimes you may trace a tone of almost affectionate superiority…’ (Shakespeare Revolution, p. 407). 

Not only did Coleridge suspect Shakespeare was a noble, Andrey Platonov, a Russian writer who lost his son and ultimately his own life to Stalin, seems to have known it. He writes in “Factory of Literature” (Trans. Anna Kalashyan), “Chekov had a notepad, Pushkin worked in archives, Anatole France advocated the scissors instead of a pen, Shakespeare was broadly relying on the memoirs of his circle of aristocrats” (https://publicseminar.org/2014/01/andrey-platonovs-factory-of-literature-uncreative-writing-and-the-networked-book/). I find it strange that a writer from humble means in a non-English-speaking country could be so sure of Shakespeare’s identity. 

Perhaps Platonov learned Shakespeare’s identity from preceding literati, such as Mikhail Lermontov, who idolized Shakespeare to the point he even sketched a likeness, or as Leo Tolstoy, who hated Shakespeare with equal passion and expressed it in essay form (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/27726/27726-h/27726-h.htm#Page_127). The absurdist Platonov certainly takes the Shakespearean attitude toward what Coleridge calls the passions and follies of a mob when writing stories about the Russian Revolution, Civil War and the early Soviet Union: he is never angry with it, but hugely content with holding its absurdities to its face.

I order the falafel wrap at The Minga Cafe and 20 minutes later get a hummus wrap. Same thing, different form, and the date bar and latte I’ve also purchased are what I really desire, as well as the outlet generously spouting electricity. Besides, this is truly a beautiful main-street shop with exposed original brick walls and high ceilings – and the subdued lamps illuminating a sofa area with throw rug and a row of round tables with four spindle-backed chairs each make for cozy conversations. A short mentally-disabled worker stands in front of a bookshelf with a broom staring blankly into the space before him. 

Next to me, a tiny white-haired woman is as thick as Robin Hood with three Friar Tuck types with shiny pates and woolen faces, discussing Avenger movies, Robin Williams, public broadcasting, and the demise of the national health-care system into an uncaring for-profit business. I imagine Canada’s socialist medical services could be an embarrassment to the ruthless U.S. system that boosts shareholder returns through increasingly-expensive substantially-pared insurance policies, and through attempts (dishonest in my own experience) to deny coverage under those policies. And I’ve seen indications that U.S. companies have been working to privatize, or “open markets” north of the border, as well as in the United Kingdom and Japan, and I suspect, elsewhere.

I wonder if the geese flying south notice any absurdities between the two North American countries. Or do the goldfinches, martins, bluebirds, or any other migrator? Do the Canadian black-capped chickadees wish they had obtained permanent residency in the United States? For me, it’s hard to get vegetables in restaurants in either place, but the wild fruit along the way, such as these astringent pears found today, are filling the void nicely. As does my canned chili with flax dinner. As does this tea I’ve just made from mint growing beside my site at the Chippawa Creek Conservation Area and Campground. And yet, as a cyclist, I’m thankful for the calorie-rich cheese curds and the raisin bread and honey, also on the menu tonight. Two cedar waxwings are flycatching from a dead tree overhead. Are the bugs tastier here than elsewhere? A catbird cries from the thicket not unlike a cat, if cats regularly called, which they don’t except when breeding or fighting. 

Against the cold fire ring, I prop my solar panel to face the Great Campfire in the sky, the sun, and I take a log reduced to charcoal and place it on the dog turd embedded in the grass near my tent so I don’t have to smell it. The people at the RV site strung with party lights are drinking and tossing bean bags in a game of cornhole (Have they watched “Beavis and Butthead”?) – their dogs bark at me each time I pass to go to the bathroom and/or get water, and each time they yell at them to be quiet. Perhaps my bear spray would be more effective.

In their jolly banter, they drop words like “kosher” and “Rev. Shmuley”, and I assume they are Jewish but can’t determine for sure their religious or political leanings. I wonder what they think of Israel’s demolition of Gaza. When I visited the levant country, I found it wearisome using public transportation due to all the metal detectors and barriers and the kid soldiers milling about, and I gave up the idea of visiting the West Bank. Other than wandering through the monotheistic Disneyland of Jerusalem, I stuck to Tel Aviv, which I thought was a fairly eclectic city, with Arabs and Jews and even Africans frequenting the Mediterranean beach where I was stung by jellyfish. Whatsmore, the falafel restaurants were frequent and the supermarkets stocked with kosher hummus, which I suspect is just as good as halal. Perhaps Christians should come up with their own Good Friday humus, but then again, Christ was about moral integrity and didn’t dicker over laws.

Tourist hole: Day 52: August 30

Cardinal ring, blue jay caw, goldfinch chirrup. Morning. Vietnamese get together at the Tim Horton’s in Welland, and then Indian mothers and fathers bring their kids from karate or taekwondo practice. I watch the guy who took my order, a rubric/algorithmic CEO-type, drive away in a luxury SUV; he’s a far cry from the warm-hearted sparse-toothed attendant I had at another franchise. The owner perhaps? 

After crossing the drawbridge over the Welland Canal, I approach Niagara in steps, walking my bicycle. First, streamlets rushing amidst wooded paths. Then the main body of the Niagara River, obscured by shoreline thickets and construction. The ledge just before the falls. And the falls itself, where everyone from around the world squeezes for a look and/or photo: the model-like women with tight pants and painted faces, the muscled men with tight shirts and slicked hair, the Sikh family from grandparents to grandchildren, the Russian mother with straying children, the African man in sunglasses, the Chinese mother and daughter in suncaps, the Arab couple. My soul, like water, drops with the weight of 3000 tons and rises a 150-meter tower of mist.

I say a prayer. I say goodbye. I go grab a Subway (which is more expensive in this tourist hole), change my Canadian dollars, and take the bridge back to the U.S. I hear a Japanese voice somewhere from behind say “Sugoi! Jitensha de!” – clearly amazed I’ve cycled to and am cycling from here. And after waiting in the sun behind running cars for 30 minutes, it’s finally my turn. 

I hand the young woman agent my U.S. passport, and when she asks my place of residence, I reply, “Japan”, and then she inquires how I’m going to pay for this trip and how long I plan to stay in the United States. Though she’s nicer than the border agents I encountered during the W. Bush presidency (or “the boy king” as Robin Williams referred to him) and she accepts my honest and affable replies, both of her questions are troublesome and don’t make logical sense, except maybe to a fascist. I’m a citizen of the country; they can’t reject me if I’m impoverished, and I can stay as long as I want. Besides, I told the nice Canadian agent that I wouldn’t be in her country for more than four or five days, and I don’t want to renege on my promise. 

On the U.S. side, I cannot locate any campgrounds near the falls, which sports casinos and luxury hotels, and the New York State campground on Lake Ontario at which I was hoping to stay is full. I cycle out of this hole to a Sam Good RV park owned and operated by an Eastern European repairing a motorbike in front of the office. It’ll do. There’s water and electricity and a shower and an Italian grocery across the street, where I get my can of soup, a jar of peanut butter and a plastic bag of Greek pitas. 

A pair of pears: Day 53: August 31

Peanut-butter pitas for breakfast: I can almost taste the end of my cycling foray across North America, and soon I’m at the first lock of the Erie Canal, an early form of American merchant transport that I read about in elementary school. The 200-year-old towpaths have been turned into the Canal Trail and Empire State Trail, a combination of pavement and crushed gravel spanning the entire length of the state, and suddenly, what I thought would be the most difficult area to pass through has turned into the easiest. 

I go through each town dubbed “port”, Lockport, Gasport, Middleport, and so forth down the line. A pair of cormorants dips below the slow, almost still waters. I stop for a wild apple or two. Flocking migrant robins and flickers fly up from the trail edge. Permanently residing cardinals ring from concealed locations. A drawbridge raises to let a couple in a motorboat pass and lowers again. Red hawthorn berries are unpalatable raw. 

I come upon a wide-bottomed man and woman standing beside their bikes and munching pears in a small park-like grove of 30-year-old trees. They are volunteers collecting litter along this segment of trail, and I pull up beside them, pluck two perfectly shaped fruits and join in the feast. Through a mouthful, I bemoan all the garbage I’ve encountered, and the woman, from Colorado, says the trash beside the roads is worse out there. “You wouldn’t think it, being Colorado and all,” she adds. 

The two give me tips about where to stop and not stop and inform me of Pittsford Farms Dairy, in the suburb east of Rochester. “You’ll know you’re in the right neighborhood when the tax bracket suddenly changes,” she says and raises a hand with an upturned pinky to indicate hoity-toitiness. I pack some pears for the road, thank the pair for their work and get going, eventually turning north to touch the waters of my final Great Lake, Ontario.

Thankfully, the Hamlin Beach campground is not full, but I find that my site is disappointingly littered with cigarette butts and wrappers and that the woods behind are full of a year’s worth of paper plates, plastic utensils and aluminum cans. I’m again flabbergasted at the stupidity of Americans who deface their own country, as well as the lack of ambition of the state-employed staff to clean the sites properly. When I worked at Mill Bluff in Wisconsin, half of my job was picking up after people, and I get busy building a fire of half-burned logs from neighboring sites, combing the ground for the flammable and feeding it to the flames.

I erect my tent up the hill from the fire ring and go take a shower before trekking over to the public shore where people are grilling and kids are swimming in a buoyed-off area. I leave my flip-flops on and wade not so far into the not-so-clean water. There is a washed-up fishing lure and a motorboat in the distance, and I think of all the lead sinkers polluting these waters, let alone the residential and industrial waste that was seriously damaging the lakes by the 1950s — until that is U.S. investors turned to Japan and made it the most polluted place on earth by the 70s. I pray no child steps on the barbed hook.

I turn around, wash the sand off my sandaled feet at the outdoor shower, which reminds me of the one on the nude beach in Barcelona, where I side-glanced at the sunburnt one-legged man with his schlong swinging free. I walk back to my site, retrieving the pieces of fallen branches I spotted earlier, and use the kindling to stoke my fire and cook the can of chili I picked up at the Kendall Dollar General. I’m conserving my isobutane canister so I don’t have to buy another one. And the logs I’m trying to burn away are so large that I decide to cook a wild apple-pear-honey compote for breakfast, too. I let it simmer over the blue flame for an hour and lie back on the picnic bench and watch a female cardinal in the pines above. 

It’s past nine, Cassiopeia and Ursa Major already visible, when I finally secure the pot in the middle of the picnic table, weighing the lid with a stone I rescued when de-littering the site. Before being abandoned out of neglect or parental command, this once-precious wild-pear-sized rock had been carefully painted by the previous camper, a little girl, I assume, with a yellow sunshine over a message in blue: “Be Happy”.

Bottom feeding: Day 54: September 1

I fill up on compote-and-peanut-butter-stuffed pitas and go wash the pot and refill my water bottles at the yard hydrant with a metal riser pipe and a cast-iron pull-handle/spigot painted orange. It’s just like the pump where I got water for Dad’s rabbits; in winter I crunched through the snow from and back to the barn in white rubber boots lined with plastic bread bags to keep my socks dry. As I return to my campsite, a skunk with an extra-fluffy extra-white stripe emerges from the woods, and we both jump. For a second she thinks about going into a spray stance, but I draw back and she disappears into the woods again. 

Three young deer cross the driveway out of the park, and there’s a tree in the median from which I collect more apples before heading back south to the canal-side trail. Today there are lots of apples and lots of deer and lots of cottontail rabbits, as well as lots of people walking, running and cycling, for the Labor Day weekend holiday. Some are fishing, probably for bass, though I imagine there are mostly muddy-tasting bottom-feeders, like slimy green-skinned bullheads, in these dull, stagnant waters. 

After using tweezers to remove the piece of wire I’ve discovered during a routine check of my front tire, I pull into upscale Pittsford. I don’t get the ice-cream cone the volunteer pair mentioned, however, but a brownie, coffee and sandwich for lunch and a jar of honey and loaf of sourdough for the road. 

Everything is golden in the sun: goldfinches, goldenrod and the yellowing leaves of the cottonwoods. I make up a song to take my mind off pedaling: “Cottonwood, if I could, I surely would, sing a song for thee….” There is a belted kingfisher and a black-crowned night heron. Cedar waxwings angle for bugs in the air, and a woodchuck, for tubers in the earth below.

It is a long day to the free backroad, backwater site at May’s Point Lock, number 25. Except for two passing late-evening fishermen, I’m the only one here, and I unfold my solar panel and charge my phone while I eat some sourdough, peanut butter and honey at the picnic table near the port-a-potty. There’s no potable water, and though I was sure to bring extra, I try to conserve it, using the tap on the side of the lockmaster’s shed to wash my utensils. There’s also no shower and there’s no time to kill, and as soon as I set up under a tree beside the lock, I brush my teeth, go to the toilet, put on a change of clothes and go to bed.

Peace Love Coffee: Day 55: September 2

A flock of white egrets flies overhead from the Montezuma Refuge, though it's not much of a sanctuary as Interstate 90, the same road that cuts Mill Bluff State Park in half, screams by 24 hours per day. Also, why is it named after the Aztec leader murder under colonialism? And why does it smell like a septic? I wonder how much raw sewage used to be or still is dumped into the canal. I turn east for Weedsport, repassing the cozy farm from yesterday, one like Grandpa used to have, a real farm with its red barn perfumed with manure and lime, silage and grain, hay and milk. Below the mow, lights glow, barn fans hum, and the milkers pump their suction rhythm as morning chores get underway.

After Weedsport is Jordan, which I imagine some early American fundamentalist named after the river between the seas named Galilee and Dead, and as I roll into town, my stomach turns when I’m greeted by a white clapboard house with placard images of the Confederate and U.S. flags stuck in the lawn like presidential campaign or “Jesus loves you” signs. I wonder how this is allowed to fly in Yankee country. Although I got a kick watching the Rebel-colored General Lee in the Dukes of Hazzard while sprawled on the carpet between the console TV and Grandpa’s recliner, and although the show should have served to divorce the Confederate flag from Christian fascist associations, the Southern Civil War symbol is no longer valid. When Luke Duke, Tom Wopat (a Czech-American from Lodi, Wisconsin), became U.S. Marshall Gill Tatum in Tarantino’s Django Unchained, the Confederate rag was buried once and for all for the good of all.

Along the trail is posted another placard, for Peace Love Coffee, and desiring something sweet with a hot brew, I decide to chance a stop in the Biblically-monickered town. I blow my nose, wipe the morning tear stains from my glasses, and go in. The shop is a cosy brick storefront with flowery purple theme, and though a group of grumpy retired farmers jaw in the corner left of the door, I can’t imagine the confused flags-advertiser frequents this establishment. As I add cream to my coffee, I wince with shame when I see I’ve missed the alcohol disinfectant handspray, and I retire to a table near the plateglass right of the door, hoping my unshowered self is not causing too much of a stink. 

A lot of love comes my way from passing local cyclists: “Good luck, buddy!” “Safe trip!” “You doin’ okay?” “Have a good one!” “Have a good trip!” And then I stop at a ratty McDonald’s along a busy Syracuse highway where the black guy at the register is dead-faced and aloof. I get it. Not only am I white, but I know from working at a Burger King in college that fast-food service is not a job that gives you a sense of pride. When I ask if he can fill my water bottle, he doesn’t reply but finishes what he’s doing and wordlessly hands me a big plastic cup full of ice water, which I pour into my bottle outside. I want to believe there’s kindness in everyone somewhere.

The canal is often an abandoned shallow bog along this segment of trail. Cottontails hop, stop and then shoot into the undergrowth. A blue heron stands motionless, sunbathing, wings folded open like a solar sail propelling a probe through the vacuum of space. Cedar waxwings, sleek mohawked acrobats, catch some sun and flies. A gray fox slinks into the shadows of the trees and bushes. It’s quiet but sometimes depressingly lonely. On an intermittent road, a racoon’s kidney lies beside its body. 

At Lock 20’s free campground, just before Utica, I meet a Japanese-American, Kyosuke, who says his parents are from Japan, though he’s a bit ambiguous about where, and he drops the subject. We talk trail, his going west and my going east and his low bottled-water supply and my water filter that I haven’t used since British Columbia. He says he’s going to jump into the lock well for a bath. I tell him I’m not brave enough for that and think that if the groundwater is not fit for making tea, this surface water cannot be safe for swimming. I wash my head and face at the shed tap, as well as clean my chili/flax-dirtied dishes and teeth. And I wish my lone campmate a lovely journey and a peaceful night.

In my head: Day 56: September 3

Bicycle wheels are like old projector spools and the sun, the gas-fed flame illuminating frame after frame, and as I click along, I sometimes I think I’m in a Jonas Mekas film celebrating this paradise. A belted kingfish plunges into the Mohawk River. It’s 7 a.m. Kids are out waiting for the school bus. Summer is over. I stop at a Stewart’s, a regional gas-stop and convenience-store chain with indoor and outdoor seating. I get an apple fritter and a coffee with cream, slide into a red-laminate bench-seat with matching table and plug in my cell. A guy checks out the lotto forms on the table but can’t find the one for Powerball. Gambling is unrewarding, especially if you win, because it doesn’t require any investment of self, creative or other. It merely reinforces the ideology that money is supreme, distracting people from the fact that heaven is now and they have human rights to clean water, food, shelter, health care and education, not to mention meaningful engagement (work).

Soon a couple of ragtag regulars wander in, including a gregarious guy named Ben, who seems to know everyone, or has them “stored in his brain” as he says. His eyes are goggly and he slurs his words like a drunk through sparse brown teeth. After I tell him I’m going to Boston, he talks about a crosscountry cyclist who was going to New York, inquires if that’s where I’m going, and then asks me what my name is again. “I need a chip in my brain,” he says, “but then the government could spy on me.” “That’s what these are for,” I laugh, holding up my iPhone, which is 10 models behind the times.

Deer, cottontails, dragonflies, a woodchuck wiggling under a building. I sidle up to the low counter at The Village Restaurant in Canajahorie and order a cheeseburger and fries and a coffee and chocolate pie. The burger is a thin patty and the pie, a thin pudding, but I like the feel of the place and the waitress fills my water bottle. They don’t take cash, and I withdraw some cash at the ATM by the bathrooms and pay and tip at the register. I need change for laundry anyway, I think.

I repeat the limited playlist in my head over and over to get through the day: the Alessi Brothers’ “Seabird”, Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman”, Katrina and the Waves’ “Walking on Sunshine”, Shakespeare’s “When that I was and a little tiny boy…” and my cottonwood song. I stop at the Amsterdam Stewart’s for a pint of ice cream, but it’s too frozen for the plastic spoon, and I sit outside with my foldable metal camp-spoon, which doesn’t fare much better, collapsing each time I try to dig out a bite. By the time I’m finished, my hands are sticky and my shorts spotted with drops of chocolate. 

Beside the wild apples I continue to find, the Stewart’s Shops have been a great psychological solace on this long hot day, and I sit down at one last outlet for two slices of greasy pepperoni pizza and chocolate milk before seeking my last free campground at Lock 6. It’s already getting dark when I walk my bicycle across the lock doors to the grassy side with picnic tables. A heavy black labrador barrels up and jumps on me, snuffing and slobbering my outstretched hand and then wags over to mark my tent with a squirt of piss. One of a pair of men, a chiseled all-American athletic type with 5-o’clock shadow, calls the dog off, apologizes and inquires if my low-weight tent is an Agnes. “No, it’s a Zpack,” I say, checking the label. And he says he and his mate could fit in it nicely. At first, I think he means the dog, and he repeats the phrase, and I know he means his partner standing in the distance. “I’m sure you could,” I reply. 

He mentions a campground in Waterford where I can get a shower, but I tell him I’m about ready to pass out, and giving up either the idea that I’m game or that I’m gay, he leaves me to my pre-bed chores. I brush my teeth and piss into the woods, and except for the mosquitoes, the day's worries are finally draining from my head. Like a Giordano Bruno, I look up at the sky and wonder what are the stars and galaxies that make up the visible constellations. I only know Sirius, the dog star, but Orion won’t be up until morning.

Finding roads: Day 57: September 4

It’s still dark. I forgot to charge the two batteries in my headlamp, and I stop to tape my flashlight to my handlebars. I pass through Waterford. Twilight. I hit one last Stewart’s, untape my flashlight and find a route with rural roads. The sun is on the rise. Kids in driveways are waiting for the bus again in familial groups, brothers and sisters, parents and child. A girl hugs her mom and dad and poses for a photo. A little boy waves and then so do his mommy and daddy. 

I cross onto Vermont farm roads, which sometimes turn into worrisome gravel but only for short distances, and I think of Robert Frost’s New Hampshire farmhouse, a front-porch view of the White Mountains, where I stayed as resident poet 15 years ago, reading at the St. Johnsbury Athenaeum with poet Ron Padgett:

American Cowslip

Nothing is

the way you think it is

going to be.

Take this little flower

from me, and let it go

into the way you think of it.

And so it grows

and is the face

of Daisy the cow speaking,

she my young grandma

growing and wearing

a pink slip and who fell

from the sky that was

clear blue and pure

all over the place

you called home

as it moved out

from under you

in the slow

rotation of the sphere

you call a star,

a flower, a mind.

Cardinals, three deer, a cottontail rabbit. More apples and pears. A skunk crosses a city street, and a man in his yard records it with his cellphone. Massachusetts. I hit a Subway for lunch. The towns out east are deteriorating, I think, even historic colonial buildings. I hit a small gas stop for a chocolate milk and some type of chocolate brownie treat and sit outside eating and listening to a mother scold her boy for misbehaving: “They’ll never let us back here again!”

From the minibar bottles and shards of broken whiskey glass, I notice that, rather than cheap beer, hard liquor is the drink of choice of alcoholic East Coast drivers. A hawk swoops across the road to retrieve its prey and, flying back, is almost clipped by a passing tractor. No designated bicycle trail today means dead wildlife, again: Bambi. Huffing up a steep hill, I’m almost roadkill myself, not by cars but by a woofing whalloping great dane. Luckily, I jump so fast off my bicycle and get in a defensive position behind it that the dog is too afraid to commit to an attack. And his owners call him off with a scolding tone: “You get in the house! We do not chase bicycles!” 

This is my third day of hard riding with no shower, I have to do laundry and it’s going to rain tonight, so I decide to treat myself to the Red Roof Inn in South Deerfield, where I wheel my bicycle into the room, like back at the Super 8 in Alberta. Being only two days from Boston, I also need to de-supply, use up or throw away things I no longer need. So after showering, I mix the rest of my oatmeal with flax, two sliced wild apples and the rinsed remains of my honey jar and take the pot along with my cookstove behind the hotel. After an intermission of eating and washing clothes, I return outside to burn off my gas canister by boiling water, which I make into instant hotel coffee and drink while watching the tailend of Finding Dory, the only TV programming I can stomach. Tomorrow will be my last day, I decide. I’m done trying to find safe passable roads and worrying about flats. I will cycle to a FedEx and mail my bicycle back to Japan, and fly the long way home, through Europe.

Bicycle box: Day 58: September 5

The easiest way to a FedEx is south to Springfield. The morning is still dark and misty with lingering rain, and I kill some time getting breakfast at the Dunkin’ Donut attached to the gas station next to the hotel. Then I make my way slowly, often on bicycle trails skirting urban areas – there’s no American cowslip but walls of invasive Japanese knotweed in white powdery bloom. A hawk. Commuting cyclists. One last apple, so high up, I have to throw a stick to knock it from its tree.

Springfield is something out of an absurdist novel. I wheel my bicycle into the casino elevator to get to the FedEx upstairs only to learn that they charge extra for shipping because they are located in this gambling establishment. They direct me to the FedEx downtown, but they don’t have a bicycle box, haven’t had one for weeks, maybe a month. I ask if they can order one and have it here today, and they say no. Shipping companies are evidently helpless when it comes to shipping supplies to their own outlets.

I call a UPS. No answer. I call a sporting goods store, but they crush all boxes leftover from unpacking bicycles. I call a bicycle store, but their dumpster is not covered and all the boxes were rained on last night. I call the same UPS. Again, no answer. I call a second UPS farther away. They have to check … and they have two boxes. I ask them to save me one, and I immediately take off, at first going two kilometers in the wrong direction. 

After finally arriving at the UPS Store, manned by four or five people, they tell me it’ll cost over $2000 to ship my bicycle, more than a flight. I call the FedEx I’ve just come from to ask their rate. But the woman there explains they can’t give a quote unless I come to the store so they can measure the dimensions of the box. I tell them I was just at their store and already have the dimensions and weight. But instead they transfer me to a call center, where a young woman with Spanish accent asks for my name, phone number, and the sending and receiving addresses. For the first, I say, “Your downtown address in Springfield, MA”, which she has to look up, and then, “Japan.” “Oh,” she says, “I’m not trained for international shipments; I will have to transfer you.”

After jumping through the same hoops of the next call-center woman, I get a quote of over $1000. I do the same for DHL, and the price is back up over $2000. I decide I’m not fabulously wealthy and will have to take my bicycle with me. I dismantle the bicycle in the lobby, and while the UPS staff pack up all the parts for $90, including the box, I repack a pannier to carry on the airplane and put the other with camping equipment in my expandable backpack as checked luggage. I pay and thank the staff for their help and carry everything to the Panera Bread next door, where I get a sandwich and coffee.

Eventually, I use my Uber app to get an extra-large vehicle to Springfield Union Station. The driver of the SUV, Tina, is on the phone when I slide the box in back, and when she gets off she apologizes and says her girlfriend needed advice. “She hasn’t been on a date for years and has just lost enough weight to where she’s got back some confidence again,” she explains, saying her girlfriend is black while her date is white. “She’s sick of black men and told me ‘I’m not dating a n— ever again!’ Excuse my language, but that’s how she speaks.” Tina’s own mother is white and her father, black. I laugh at her frankness, and I ask how her girlfriend met the guy and what his job is. Tina assures me that they bumped into each other in person and that he has a very good job, and we both decide her girlfriend has been presented with a great opportunity and has nothing to lose.

Tina, about my age, is more perplexed than awed by my choice to cycle over 5000km, and I thank her, tip her on the app, haul my bags and box inside the station and use my phone to buy a Flixbus ticket for Boston, paying extra for oversized luggage even though I’m doing all the portering. I get a water at the station shop and struggle out the door to the bus bays, where kids with dreads dressed in name-brand clothing are smoking pot, skateboarding and bouncing a basketball. I sit against the cement wall and wait. And wait. And wait. The bus is five minutes late. 10 minutes. 20. By the time we’ve navigated the apocalyptic Friday-night traffic and arrived in Boston, I’ve reserved two nights at the HI Boston. I walk, carrying the backpack, pannier and box on my back for four blocks. I decide it’s more pleasant to cycle 10 miles than carry a bicycle and gear for half a mile. 

Poetry and the rest: Day 59: September 6

After waking early and biding my time in the lobby, where the coffee isn’t free, I walk down the street and have a salmon sandwich, pistachio bar and coffee at a Tatte Bakery & Cafe, a chain outlet with Parisian Metro decor: small white mosaic floor-tiles and large white enameled wall-tiles. Then I walk diagonally across Boston Commons from the old “Grand Lodge of the Masons in Massachusetts” building toward the bridge that will take me over the Charles River toward The Harvard and Grolier Poetry bookstores. 

Everything about this area, from the Masonic lodge to the Commons’ tennis courts to the trains reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, a modern encrypted spoof of Elizabethan London and the whole idea that Edward de Vere, 17 Earl of Oxford, was Shakespeare – not to mention the infinite other historical and political subtexts. It’s a novel that pressages all the Wikis, from Wikipedia to Wikileaks. Holding that thought, I pause for a pristine port-a-potty in a small park hosting a supply of saplings being planted along the street. I relieve myself and am relieved; there is nothing worse than standing among book shelves and having a bowel movement. 

The Harvard Bookstore is not that impressive – and I cannot find many of the authors I know and like. Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon does a much better job. I peruse the section on Tudor England, hoping to find something on Shakespeare. Most of the books are around Henry VIII, who seems to be a hot topic these days (perhaps they are warming up to Shakespeare), but I find one, The Bookseller of Florence by Ross King, which mentions Shakespeare when talking about an Italian named Ficino and his Platonic Theology: “Man’s use of language indicates that he has a divinam quandam mentem (‘a divine sort of mind’).... Claims about man’s godlike powers look back to the insights Ficino discovered in the Corpus Hermeticum as well as forward to writers such as Shakespeare” (p. 375). This might insinuate Shakespeare read Ficino or knew someone who used Ficino’s work, like the famous heretic Giordano Bruno, who was staying at the French embassy in London.

Could an illiterate man from Stratford have a divine sort of mind? Yes, but without much practice reading and writing, he wouldn’t be able to make much use of it. The Bookseller quote supports the idea that the real Shakespeare would’ve had access to a large library or libraries from a young age, which were only owned in the day by very rich men, i.e. nobles, such as Edward de Vere’s guardian, William Cecil. I think King’s book may be worth a read, but I opt for a book of poems by Seamus Heaney, a poet whose monosyllabic British Isle words I savor: “The squat pen rests; snug as a gun” (from “Digging”, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47555/digging). I sigh; I didn’t really need to buy the book of an author I already know. And I leave The Harvard Bookstore and walk around the corner to the Grolier, which opens an hour later. 

My efforts are not entirely foiled; I find the authors my poetry teacher mentioned over the telephone: Kaveh Akbar and Victoria Chang. But while I’ve written about family alcoholics myself and played make-believe with my little sister using blond and brunette versions of Matell’s Barbie, there’s a paucity of fecund phrases in the few pages I scan. What happened to the very good works I bought here 25 years ago? Where are Jack Gilbert’s Great Fires and Tony Hoagland’s Donkey Gospel? The old has to make way for the new, but is the love of the language still there? I find on prominent display the book of a classmate who lives in Boston: Shadow Act by Daniel B. Johnson, about a reporter friend of his, James Foley, who was beheaded by ISIS in Syria. To me, it sounds like something David Foster Wallace might have included in Infinite Jest had he lived to tell or encrypt the tale, and I purchase a copy as much out of support of a fellow poet as out of curiosity.

Poetry mission, if not accomplished, has been attempted, and I begin the hour retracing my steps to the hostel, taking a break for a reuben and fries at a sports bar with TVs showing American football, a cruel game full of sexism, hazing and militarism. Supposedly, Shakespeare played tennis and bowled and was a fair jouster, as well. Back in South Boston, I follow a father and his two boys into a shop for two scoops of rum-raisin ice-cream, which is about one-third the portion and twice the price of the ice cream in Seven Persons, Alberta. I recross Boston Commons, where they are now having an Asian-American festival. Someone tries to sell me some ang ku kueh, red tortoise cake, and a guy in a changshan, a long robe, is doing xiangsheng, a form of standup comedy called “crosstalk”. Skirting the stage, I check if there are any viable meal stands, but I opt instead for a huge greasy slice of pizza and a diet Pepsi at the parlor next to the hostel. 

I was going to save Shadow Act for the plane, but I read the whole book, half sitting in the lobby drinking coffee and half lying in bed. It’s good, a delicate weave of Daniel’s family life, a diary James wrote and hid while hostage in Libya and flashbacks to when Daniel and James were young teachers. He handles the material very well, without judgement or pandering, and there’s a heart-turned word or two: “then, I feel, once more, / my wife finger the spray // of freckles & liver spots, / softly chiding, // Wear more sunscreen, love” (p. 103). And while you get some sense of who the main characters are, we are rightly left unsure of the world(s) in which they move, particularly James. I put out the light. Someone is smoking pot on some floor below, and I hear the fire alarm go off in the building across from the dorm window. 

Enskied: Day 60: September 7

I try to hit a Dunkin Donut, but the door is still locked, so I buy some oatmeal and coffee at the lobby counter for breakfast. I then ask for two black garbage bags to tape over my bicycle box. It’s raining, and I stand in a secondary doorway waiting for my Uber XXL. I marvel at how the bags appear tailor-made and how this doorway is spot-on – even when things go awry, they can be brought to perfection with a little ingenuity. The black suburban, driven by a guy wearing dreads and a suit, drops me off at the airport. 

I’m way too early, and then my flight is delayed three hours, which leaves me ample time to finish up the notes of my Shakespeare book. However, I revisit one quote from the beginning of the book that caught my eye, one which summarizes Shakespeare’s method of word choice, a method to which I, too, am partial: “often the sounds of words rather than their meaning provided associations which brought them from the store house of memory to the point of the pen” (quoting Edward Armstrong, Shakespeare Revolution, p. 30). One example, in “Measure for Measure”, is “enciel’d”: Shakespeare took this softer-sounding word from Dante and used it in place of the harsher English version, “enskied.” It’s such sound-associations that enliven metaphor and move poetry. Poets must be aware, lest their egos hollow their wit and blunt the stab of their lines: the squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Souris: Day 61: September 8 

I arrive in Montreal around midnight. The customs officer tells me of the best places to over-night, adding that he’s slept in airports, too, Belgium, but I’m only half listening. Through the night I move from spot to spot. First, because there’s too much noise. Second, because I have to go to the bathroom. I wake by the Java U cafe opening at 5 a.m., and I get a coffee and carrot cake. Afterward I wait by some chairs where a mouse, or souris in French, is foraging, venturing out when I’m not paying attention and shooting away whenever I move. 

Checking in, I have to help security cut open my box to examine my bicycle; US customs did it without my knowledge. Everything looks to be in order, and I praise the UPS guy’s thorough work. I’m happy, even though I’ve been feeling bad traveling with a bicycle, due to its excessiveness, but after seeing all the luggage of other travelers’, including their carry-ons, I think I’m actually traveling light. And on the plane, the man and woman across the aisle have not only taken up the space in their overhead bin and almost all the space in mine, so that I can barely squeeze in my small pannier.

The flight is packed. I’m in the aisle seat, and the black guy next to me turns out to be rude, treating me dismissively when he wants to get out or back in and treating the stewards subserviently whenever they bring drinks and food. He demands extra wine and sodas for himself and his wife, and when I take the last beef meal, he claims that they do not eat pork. I offer him my beef, but he refuses, and the steward eventually brings them a first-class meal of salmon and rice, while I chew my grisly bovine that tastes porcine. I sympathize with his desire for better service, rather than being crammed and fed like a caged animal back here, but when he rudely reclines his seat into the family with a baby behind him, he merely exhibits a selfish disregard for all people.

Memory: Day 62: September 9

I ship my bicycle from Narita Airport and take the two hours of trains home. Two months elapsed and a whole continent traversed, but it’s almost like I never left, albeit I’m on the verge of appearing as rundown as an ultramarathon runner in the Chihuahuan Desert, drinking his own urine. I need to gain back a couple of the six kilograms I’ve lost, and yet I’m afraid of returning to my old self, and I spend the next week keeping busy emptying and cleaning my packs and their contents, cleaning and rebuilding my bicycle, and making chicory coffee and date bars in memory of my trip – a memory that I’m writing right here, right now. It’s not to brag; I didn’t go as far as the guy whose presentation I attended in the 1990s, who went from Alaska to Argentina before smartphones and Google Maps. And I specifically traversed the land I come from, the only one I have much authority to talk about and challenge. I’ve hopefully held its and my absurdities up to a mirror, honored the beauty of people and nature, and made a fine farewell, if I’m not worthy (monied) enough to ever see it again.