Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
WEEK
printed on the back. Then we went across the street to the movies. (
Crazy, Stupid,
Love
with Steve Carell and Marisa Tomei, among others. Mixed reviews. I thought it was
crummy. Al liked it.)
Part of the joy of this kind of day is the culture shock of it, of course, a reporter from
New York and a filmmaker from Hollywood plopping themselves down serendipitously
in flyover territory and being reminded that the America we know on the coasts is a very
small slice of the pie. Just south of Itasca State Park, Park Rapids is a charming, unpre-
tentious town where an accordionist was playing polkas and Irish folk tunes on the side-
walk, the A&W root beer stand has drive-in stalls and carhops, and the old-fashioned
confectionery on the main drag is called the MinneSODA Ice Cream Fountain.
Al was leaving the next morning, and I was going to take an extra day off to give my
saddle-sore rear end a break. We'd pretty much finished chewing over the same old stor-
ies and sharing a few new ones, the kinds of things men our age talk about—retirement
plans, new and old romances, politics, the parts of our bodies that are breaking down.
His second marriage had dissolved not long before. From the first one he has twin sons,
one of whom runs a bike tour company in Barcelona. I told him about Jan.
I said it was remarkable that he'd come all this way to such an out-of-the-way place
to meet me, and that things didn't seem so different from when we met in Pierre, even
though a lot of summers had become a lot of falls in the interim.
“We'll do it again in another eighteen years,” I said.
One thing is different, he said. We'd arranged this weekend with texts and emails and
cell phone calls. It was easy.
“How did we do this the last time?” he said. “How did I even find you?”
It gave me a sudden chill to recognize that I'm so accustomed to wireless technology
that I can't even remember what it was like without it. One day you're a Flintstone, the
next a Jetson. As we grow older, we're always complaining about how fast time goes, but
this made me feel as though I'd raced through the last eighteen years without noticing
them.
“You did it,” I said. “I don't remember how, though.”
“Neither do I,” he said.
This afternoon I rode through Brainerd, a small city on the Mississippi—the river
wiggles as it goes south, and Brainerd is slightly east and south of Itasca—and I realized
I'd been there before, on my 1993 trip, though I didn't recognize the place. Back then, it
had seemed to me a typical farming center; I stayed in a small motel and spent an even-
ing at a county fair—maybe it was even the state fair—eating corn dogs and watching
