Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
sheep shearers. I remember a Ferris wheel and a rickety-looking bungee jump concession
(I passed on both) and on the midway a set of blond triplets, maybe four years old, all
of them stuffing puffs of pink cotton candy in their mouths. They'd be college graduates
now.
This afternoon I found a different Brainerd, prosperous and bustling, at least on its
outskirts, thronged with traffic and swathed in shopping malls, and I became tangled in
a series of busy roads, taking me along one commercial strip after another. I was trying
to head south, toward Saint Cloud, but after I found myself on the entrance ramp of
Highway 371, gulping with anxiety as I watched traffic zipping along at sixty or seventy
miles an hour, I retraced my steps for five or six miles, back into the center of town.
It's funny, but I hadn't once thought about where I might cross paths with my previ-
ous trip until today when I did it. And it spurred my memory; all afternoon and evening
I've been reviewing that trip in my mind.
In 1993, I came into Brainerd from the southwest and I left heading to the northeast.
From here I rode toward Lake Superior, through the cultural landmarks of two gener-
ations—Hibbing, Bob Dylan's hometown, and Grand Rapids, Judy Garland's—to Ely,
a hunting and fishing outpost amid the boundary waters. That was the northernmost
point of the journey, a place where the woods were terrifically dense and beauti-
ful—“lovely, dark and deep,” I remember thinking, Frost's phrase, though he was writ-
ing about winter in New England—the road signs had pictographs of moose and snow-
mobiles, and at dusk the mosquitoes arrived in clouds.
Two tiny highlights of that first trip: in Grand Rapids, where Garland was born
Frances Gumm, I stopped at the Judy Garland Museum on the third floor of a former
schoolhouse and discovered that on June 18, 1977, Dylan (né Robert Zimmerman) had
been there and signed the guest register. Then I hit the road, coming up behind a
friendly jogger going my way, and slowed to talk to him. “I'm heading for Ely tonight,”
I said, pronouncing it properly: EE-lee.
“If you want to speak to God,” he responded, “it's a local call from there.”
Backtracking away from Highway 371 turned out well for me. In the center of
Brainerd—as in a lot of places, the core of the city was considerably more worn than
the perimeter—I found a bicycle shop where a couple of the salespeople were eager map
readers and advice providers, and they pointed me east, toward Mille Lacs Lake. (That
is, 1,000 Lakes Lake. MEEL-lock, they would say in France—or Quebec—but here it's
muh-LAX.)
