Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
South Dakota, just as I got there on my bike. We rented a motorboat on the Missouri
River (and grounded it in the muddy shallows, as I recall). We ate enormous steaks and
drank several martinis at a roadhouse, and for a day and a half tossed around familiar
stories from our days together at the University of Michigan, where we were both of-
ficers of a student movie co-op. It was a great break for me, even though I did have to
ride the following day with a hangover.
Al produces movies for a living now, the right profession for someone with a great gift
for persuasion and for getting things done. He's a big guy—I mean, like, six four, two
fifty—with an expansive personality, admirably un-insecure. Unlike me, he's willing to
talk to anyone at any time. Nothing involving conversation ever seems to daunt him—he
won over a lot of girls with sheer verbal charm—and it used to piss me of all the time
when we were in college when we'd be on the way someplace and run into someone he
knew and I'd end up in an agony of impatience waiting for him to conduct some detailed
bit of personal business.
Also, he can fix things—I have a hard time driving in a nail—and he is a resourceful
problem-solver. For example, he found a way to get hold of me while I was on the road
in 1993 in order to arrange our meeting in Pierre. When we were in college, he made
money doing carpentry work—he hired me for a roofing job once, out of pity, I think,
but ended up firing me, anyway—and for a while we shared a house that had a lot of
jury-rigged plumbing and wiring of his design. We made a movie together once; I wrote
a pretentious script about an illicit love affair in which the main character was a piano
tuner, and Al produced it, talking the owner of an Ann Arbor piano showroom into let-
ting us film there.
Al is a man who respects precedent, and it was his idea that we should repeat our
mid-continental meeting. In fact, he wanted to return to Pierre, though I don't think he
was too disappointed when I said was a little too far north to get there. Instead, I sugges-
ted Lake Itasca.
He had arrived after midnight, having driven three and a half hours from Minneapol-
is, where he had flown from L.A., via Phoenix. We'd barely said hello when he stumbled
into the cabin I'd rented, and when I left for the loop ride he was still asleep. When
I got back we began our reunion in earnest. We rented a motorboat on the lake (and
briefly got tangled in the reeds along the shoreline), hiked a couple of trails through the
woods, swatted some baseballs at the batting cages in a small, old, touchingly low-tech
amusement park, and ate enormous steaks at a local roadhouse. Passed on the martinis
this time, but we did stop for a drink in Park Rapids at the Royal Bar, where the sign
outside declared it served POSSIBLY THE BEST BURGERS & FRIES IN NORTHERN MINNESOTA and
the waitresses were wearing shirts with the slogan WARM BEER/ROTTEN FOOD/SEVEN DAYS A
Search WWH ::




Custom Search