Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Mahnomen, on the Wild Rice River. (
Mahnomen
means wild rice in Chippewa. For lunch
in Ada, I had wild rice soup—excellent—at the Wild Rice Diner.)
The casino seemed garish where it was, a several-winged building with a vast parking
lot set down in the confines of a town of maybe twelve hundred people that serves
mostly as a shopping center in the middle of a region devoted to hunting, fishing,
and agriculture. It's the kind of place that books touring performers for one-night
stands—country singers, television sitcom actors doing stand-up routines, and the oc-
casional aging rock band like the Guess Who. It's got the big buffet, the windowless
gambling caverns open twenty-four hours, the overweight smokers pumping coins into
electronic slots, all of it an attenuated facsimile of what made Las Vegas what it is—that
is, the glittery promise of instant satisfaction and dream-come-true success.
It was strange to spend the night there, but I wandered around the place. I listened to
a dreadful lounge-lizardy singer in one of the bars, though I didn't stay long; the air was
rank with stale cigarette smoke. I did eat two meals, dinner and breakfast, at the buffet,
complete with gluey desserts that were a boon to my calorie loading, but all in all I was
happy to get going again in the morning.
It was a short day, just forty miles, but the destination was a welcome one: Itasca State
Park, home of Lake Itasca, the headwaters of the Mississippi River.
I'd always wanted to go there, not for any complicated or even specific reason, but
just because the Mississippi is such a vivid American symbol. I've crossed it a number
of times before (in a car, mostly), but always in places where its grandeur made an im-
pression. That this mammoth, continent-cutting waterway even
has
a beginning is sort
of stupefying, isn't it? Like imagining Paul Bunyan as an infant.
Inside the park, I followed the signs to the headwaters, locked up my bike at the wel-
come center, and walked a quarter mile or so to the water's edge. It was a little bit cloudy
and the breeze carried an autumn chill, and as I waded in the river, traversing its stony
bottom barefoot from shore to shore—a journey of ten or twelve feet—I kept my Wind-
breaker on. It was an absurdly exhilarating experience.
The headwaters are a peculiar attraction, a pretty spot with the water from a reedy
lake spilling over a breakwater of rocks but hardly breathtaking. Still, it has the tug of
vivid Americana, and so I couldn't help thinking about Mark Twain.
The idea that this unassuming brook becomes the mighty Mississippi is belief-defy-
ing, and I kept thinking how incredibly cool it was that I could drop a Ping-Pong ball at
my feet and pick it up in a week or two in Louisiana. There were a lot of families around,
kids getting wet, parents taking pictures.
