"You're Mister Choo Choo!"

There was a pause. "Yes, I'm a Mister Choo Choo, there're lots of us you know." Mike came back well, from my unexpected outburst. He had just told me he was an engineer for the Canadian Railroad.
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When I was driving back in from the woods I drove Sixty miles or more through a smoky haze. I thought at first I was near a sawmill that was burning its sawdust, but I wasn't driving beyond the smoke, and I didn't think sawmills did that any more. It went on and on. It wasn't until I listened to the news later I realized what was the true cause, there were ninty-some wildfires started by lightening burning out in the Ontario backwoods. All of the firefighters of the area were busy extinguishing the fires. The smoke had lightened up a bit by the time I reached Sioux Lookout, Ontario.
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I was thinking North. Canada is big. If you look at a map of Canada you will see lots of towns with no roads to them. The Northern part of Canada is wide open with few, if any roads. The map I was using marked a number of roads that were winter roads only. Their routes crossed rivers and lakes when everything was frozen over. Frozen over! For the last three mornings there had been frost on my car. A month earlier I was swimming in the ocean off of the Florida coast. Now I was in an area that freezes over all winter long and I was about to go... Norther!

It was one of the reasons for heading into Ontario in the first place. Go as far North as possible within my time constraints. Ignace would be my jumping of point. I would drive up to Pickle Lake and keep going. The pavement ended at Pickle Lake, but one of my maps showed that it continued as gravel. Oboy! Let's go at least a hundred miles into the bush! And what a name for the end of the road, Pickle Lake! Funny thing about Pickle Lake. A few days later I was checking into a Motel and the Lady at the desk raised her eyebrows when I mentioned I had been to Pickle Lake.

"Pickle Lake, were you Crazy?"
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"I have good dreams..." The speaker was a fellow who repairs cameras in Missouri. He was showing me pictures of the propoerty where he lived. He had put in a lake and decorated it with lots of stone walls, docks, six-sided buildings and a waterwheel, actually three of them. Apparently, he dreamt of waterwheels a lot. "Life is about your dreams, finding them, following them and making them yours. You have to live your dreams." He has five waterwheels so far on his place. One at the entrance by the road, one by his front door and three by his lake. He was living his dream building waterwheels. He even had three or four little ones in his repair shop.

If life is about living your dreams, the Lone Pine Motel in Ignace, Ontario, where I was staying, was built of dreams. Dreams made into reality, one board at time. The Lone Pine Motel was built by hand and the man who performed the work did a beautiful job. The motel was his dream and he dreamed completely and thoroughly. He did not stop when he had walls and roof. Much of the trim of the building was custom milled. The furnishings in all of the rooms are all designed and built by him. Chairs, tables, desks, dressers, stools all made by him. Even the shades of the desk lamps are made of wood--ten panels spiraled out each with holes drilled into it spelling L-O-N-E (a pine tree) M-O-T-E-L, one letter on each panel.

He was considered by some a little eccentric. He was so possessive of his beautiful motel he became quite picky about whom he would allow to stay there preferring little old ladies and retired couples.
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Travel is not simply the act of bringing yourself to a new location, it is meeting new people, trying new foods and discovering the differences, obvious and subtle, in how people, just like you, live in other parts of the world even if that "other part" is simply the next town over. In my conversation with the locals of Schreiber, Ontario the previous evening, the conversation drifted into some of the delicacies of life that are unavailable in the States.

"Gravy," One fellow offered.

The whole table assented

"Oh yeh," he continued, "I went down to the States to go to a NASCAR race, eh. I was at a restaurant. I asked if they have any gravy for my fries. The waitress said she didn't know and went into the kitchen to ask. She came back and said 'We have ketchup.' What kind of restaurant doesn't have any gravy, eh? Up here we put gravy on everything."   ...Read more

When one travels left and right, up and down on the map, certain things keep needing adjusting. Three days ago I could leave at 6:00am and it was breaking light. On this morning it was black. Pitch black. I packed up and headed out into the darkness. Which is asinine in this part of the continent. Why? Moose! Out here there are moose. A moose is a gigantic creature. The body of an adult male can be 1,200 to 1,600 pounds. Um, that is easily half the weight of your/my car. What makes it even more dangerous is that the greater portion of that mass is above the hood of your car. That means mooseseses have long legs. Being hit by a vehicle moving at 60 miles per hour is bad news for the moose whether its legs are long or short. But for you the long legs can easily spell your death.

First, imagine you are sitting in your car and it is stationary. Now, imagine a mass weighing about 1600 pounds (725 kg) floating about three feet off of the ground. 1600 pounds is similar to two 100 gallon (378 litre each) barrels filled with water, ...but a moose is much denser than water so lets freeze these barrels just to get things right. Got all that? Next imagine these frozen barrels hurtling toward you, three-feet off of the ground at 60 mph (96 kph.) Oh gee, is that about where your windshield is? And that mass will hit you where? Hmmm, looks likt the top half of your car will be pancaked. Isn't your trunk a lovely place to end up mangled with ground moose? Oh, it's not? Well then, don't be a fool. Don't drive in moose country after dark! Moose are dark in color, their coats don't reflect light and their eyes are too high up to do so. Even during the day they can be hard to spot.
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How do we choose where we end up? When to stop? For some it is a personal choice. Others have it chosen through circumstance, work or other obligations causing us to be in one place or another. Still others leave it to chance. When Evelyn (of Evelyn's Place in New Orleans) decided she didn't want to be in New York City any more, she flipped a coin and the seventeen-year-old Evelyn headed to New Orleans. When we have the opportunity to choose--and really, we always do--how do we decide what place is for us and how do we define where we want to spend the rest of our lives?

When Eugenia and Rafal Stepien left Poland all they knew is that they were going to America. Where in America they were going to was still undecided, all they knew was somewhere on this continent they would settle down. They rented a car and drove across Canada and then back across the United States. They knew they wanted to buy a motel. A small place they could fix up and host people. They discovered in more populated areas, motels were not as profitable. People wanted to stay in hotels with bells and whistles. Country hotels were slower with fewer demands on the hosts. This suited them fine, they didn't want to live so much in the hustle and bustle of things. They chose Wawa, Ontario. For them it seemed like heaven. A small town surrounded by nature. The weather suits them fine, the summers are mild and they love the winter activities open to them. Wawa is unique for the area. There will be snow in Wawa when all of the areas around are without . Rafal loves the snow. He loves the rest of the year too, but all of the activities that are available only when there is snow is like pure play for him. Rafal is aware that just because it is below freezing doesn't mean it is cold. If the sun is out it can be the most comfortable weather you can experience.
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I'm chasing ignorance. Mine specifically. I see it everywhere and like a mad fire fighter I get dizzy with stomping it out, spinning like a dervish at 78 rpm. It was this very ignorance that took me to the tip of Michigan. I knew nothing about it. No one ever talks about it. And that strange peninsula to the west, what's with that?

It is the same stomping that causes me turn up some rutted side road. What does it have to offer? What can it show me? What can I discover there? On my way North that morning I turned off the pavement. The lakes up there cause the side roads to twist and turn. It was overcast and I lost my North. It didn't really matter. I found a nice lake and recorded there for a little bit. Eventually I found my way back and it only took an hour or so. It is beautiful in Northern Michigan full of nature and wilderness.
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It was an interesting conversation going on at breakfast. Two older men sitting at a table. Only one was facing in my direction and he had a louder voice, the other was quite soft-spoken so I only heard one side of the conversation. I was facing away so I didn't see any facial expressions. It was like listening to someone talking on the phone except the other person was right there. The accent I was hearing had a touch of what passes for a Minnesota accent. The pauses were long, monolog ran something like this:

"Well they just weren't biting that day, that's all. I wonder if Mike had any luck."

. . . the other fellow said something
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In San Francisco you learn to love the fog. Intimacy reveals its subtleties. You can choose to revel in those things you love about the inevitable while being prepared to endure the worst. I suppose the fog I have been experiencing in the Midwest is similar. This morning's fog was dense, wispy, hovering and a saturated blancmange all at various times. The air brilliantly clear and crisp at others. In the early stages of the sunrise, the fog was floating in a tenuous membrane 40 feet above the ground. When the light of the rising sun touched it, The gossamar veil lit up in a blazing neon china-red. The intensity of the color varied with the density of the fog. No longer was I driving, I was flying at 30,000 feet between two strata of clouds. Dark gray below day-glow bright above. I was tempted to climb onto the hood of my truck and shout out "I'm on top of the world!" but I would have had to take my foot from the accelerator and the effect of flying wouldn't have been the same after the truck slowed down.

I experienced so many varieties of inland fog today I feel I am almost a connoisseur. I took a break to eat and still ran into fog for another two hours. But you learn to love these things... Perhaps I will learn to take good pictures of fog. I haven't yet. All tips are welcome.
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I left Niles, Michigan. Once again the morning was cloaked in fog, thinner, more of a dense haze than a fog. Perhaps I was just getting used to it. Highway 51 took me Northeast.Tucked among the trees as I passed was a round house. The tops of the walls had chunks cut out to give it a castle-like appearance. Was this the home of a member of the Society for Creative Anachronism? A medieval survivalist? Who knows for sure, it is one of those mysteries of the road.

You find a lot of patriotism in the United States. This is not a new thing, though it may be somewhat unique. I have a book, "Cowboys and Colonels" written by a Belgian Baron who traveled through the Midwest in the 1860's. He was in a town in the Black Hills of South Dakota on the Forth of July and described the celebration the town staged in honor of Independence Day. A rag-tagged parade, the firing of guns and the whole town participated. He thought it was unusual, for that time, for a people to be in celebration of their country. Certainly, at that time in history, Russian serfs had nothing to celebrate. (The good Baron also had a very humorous ongoing commentary about the complete lack of any epicurean sentiment among the frontier folk of the time.)

U.S. Citizens generally have a love of their country, this is why we love to debate over what is wrong or right about it. I have seen people flying the flag in the deep South as well as up here in Michigan.
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