It’s Not Vacation

The man in the little booth was pleasant but efficient. I presented our passports and he could see that we had completed the “Arrive Canada App” complete with records of all our Covid vaccines and boosters. Being fully vaccinated is a pre-requisite to being admitted to the country at all.

He had a large number of questions to get through and he expected me to answer them thoroughly and truthfully.

“Are you bringing any ammunition or weapons including spring-assisted knives.”

I thought about my pocket knife. No spring assist. “No,” I said.

“Any alcohol?”

“I have some beer for personal consumption,” I replied.

 “How much?”

 “Six 12 oz cans. of a delicious Montana IPA. 12 oz is around a third of a litre,” I added helpfully. (They use the metric system in Canada as in every civilized country in the world.)

“Any cannabis?”

“No”

“Really?” he said as if he hadn’t gotten that response in a long time.

“How long will you be staying in Canada”

“About a week or two. We are on our way to Alaska.”

“Is your visit for work or leisure?”

For the first time, I had to think about my response and my thoughts went back to 1986.

My girlfriend Barbara and I were about two weeks into our trip around the world. In mid-February of that year, we had both quit our jobs and with our modest savings had flown to Brussels, Belgium for $99 on the original budget airline, People Express.

We had been dreaming and planning for this trip for nearly two years but as I was learning full-time travel was not exactly what I had expected. First of all, Belgium and France in February were freezing cold and our budget required us to camp. Our budget also required us to prepare almost all our food. A night in a youth hostel or a meal in restaurant was a splurge.

I had imagined a life similar to my semesters abroad in London and Munich. Cafes, pubs, and warm sunny days strolling through public parks. The reality was we were cold, sometimes hungry, and more often than I would have preferred, wet and uncomfortable.

I was likely complaining to my partner who was (and still is) much tougher than I, when she said what became a mantra for me during our 16-month journey through Europe, Africa, India, and Thailand.

“You can’t think of it as a vacation,” she said, “This is our job now.”

I have been very fortunate. I have always had work that for the most part I enjoyed, found interesting, and meaningful. But I also never had a job that was ALWAYS fun. As I used to tell my kids: If work was always fun, they wouldn’t need to pay you to do it!

So yeah, some days in the course of my career, even many days, were challenging, frustrating, nerve wracking, and even brought me to the brink of tears. We accept these challenges not only because they pay us, but also because our work seems worthwhile and solving problems allows us to grow and learn.

Now we are about three weeks into our overland trip to Alaska and in many ways, it feels like a job.

We wake up around 6 am. Make coffee and breakfast on the camp stove. We break camp, changing over the van from sleep mode to day mode and then we drive. Typically, we drive between 5 and 7 hours a day. We stop to hike, make lunch, get fuel, buy groceries. About 3 pm or so we start looking for a place to stop for the night and when we find one, we set up camp, and cook dinner. If we are staying at a place that has showers, we get them and then go to sleep.

Most of the time the camping has been pleasant but as we have gotten further north, the mosquitos have gotten worse and worse. Last night near Watson Lake, Yukon, the mosquitos filled the van as we were setting up and nearly drove us insane with their whining and biting all night. We were on our third days without showers and were hot and sticky in the van with the windows rolled up tight against the bugs and possible bears. This morning we awoke and without making breakfast or putting the van in day mode, we drove away as fast as we could back to the visitor’s center that was comparatively bug-free. There we used the bathrooms and the free wifi and made coffee in the parking lot until we were ready to continue our journey on the Alaska-Canada Highway.

Tonight, we are in Whitehorse, Yukon the last big town before we reach Southeastern Alaska. There are fewer bugs here but at a cost. We are in a campground that is right off the highway and we are squeezed in between the massive RV rigs and the highway where the traffic is roaring by. Still it is a tradeoff that we accept gratefully and I expect that the traffic will settle down sometime after sunset. Tonight, here above 60 degrees of latitude that will be at 11:25 pm with sunrise just a few hours later at 4:43 am.

Tomorrow will be a long day as we are hoping to make it all the way to Haines, Alaska some 400 km from here.

It has been a great adventure so far and fortunately the mishaps have been few. For the most part the journey has been interesting, meaningful, an opportunity to challenge myself and to learn. Last night was unpleasant and I’ll admit at one point with the mosquitos extracting more blood than I have given the Red Cross in a single sitting, I was ready to turn around and head home. But at the same time, we have already seen an ancient forest of thousand-year-old cedar trees, the reenactment of the Battle of Little Bighorn, a moose, four bears, elk, a marmot, and longhorn sheep. We have seen some of the most stunning scenery I have ever seen. And I have answered the question, “At age 60 do you still have it in you to travel this way, to be uncomfortable, even occasionally miserable, and still find the experience rewarding?”

The man in the booth was waiting, “Work or leisure?” he repeated.

“A bit of both,” I said.

Bored of the conversation at last, he sent us on our way waving us through. “Welcome to Canada,” he said.

Murky Truths, Many Stories

A late precursor species to modern humans was Homo habilis or “handy person,” so called because of its ability to use tools. The development of tools was a pivotal moment in human development. But perhaps the greatest tool ever developed was not the hand ax or the bow and arrow but the story. The power of a story has pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge and art but has also motivated people to persecute or even attempt to destroy other peoples. It is important to understand the difference between a story and a fact. Fact can be hard to know with assurance. It may be a fact that light travels at 299,792,458 meters per second in a vacuum but I only know that because I looked it up. I really can’t measure that myself.

Stories, on the other hand, I tell myself all the time, and who can say that one is right and one is wrong? As Yuval Harari, author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind has noted, stories are fine as long as they are useful but once they have outlived their usefulness, we probably ought to let them go and find new ones.

This week we visited the Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument near Crow Agency, Montana. The site, which is managed by the U.S. National Park Service, is the site of “Custer’s Last Stand” where in 1876 George Armstrong Custer led the men U.S. 7th Cavalry to a massive defeat as he was slaughtered along with his men at the hands of the allied Lakota, Sioux, Northern Cheyenne, and Arapahoe American Indian tribes. 

Since 1946, the site had been known as the Custer Battlefield National Monument. It existed to tell a story of the brave men who tried to beat back the “savages” who would interfere with the Manifest Destiny of the white citizens of United States to occupy the continent from sea to sea. Custer and his men died in the attempt but they died heroically, according to the story.

That story made sense (at least to the white folks) in Custer’s day and still did 75 years later when codified in the name of the place in 1946 right at the beginning of the cold war with the Soviet Union.  

But in 1991 (one year after he signed the Americans with Disabilities Act and two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall), President George H.W. Bush signed a law changing the name of the Custer Battlefield to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was a small change that indicated that the story itself was changing.

Today, the narrative descriptions on the site tell a story of a people whose land was stolen from them, who saw treaty after treaty broken, whose way of life was being taken and who fought back heroically and won a battle to preserve their way of life although ultimately they lost the war.

We happened to visit the site on the anniversary of the battle and got to hear native story tellers, many of whom were descended directly from the Indian combatants, Crazy Horse, Rain in the Face, and Sitting Bull.

Across the street from the battlefield is a “Trading Post” (large gift shop and restaurant). As we perused the tskotches (native word meaning knick-knacks) an older Crow gentleman who appeared to work there began speaking to us. His words were almost stream of consciousness and somewhat hard to follow. He quoted Aristotle and Tip O’Neil. He had lived in Washington DC and in New York. He had worked in the financial industry, as a staffer to Mo Udall, and for the National Park Service. Now in his 80s he had returned home to live on the Crow Reservation.

Stories can change he said. A law can be part of the way a story change. The name of a battlefield changes who the heroes are.

What stories are being told now about what America is and who we are? Who gets to tell those stories and who gets oppressed or freed by them? Facts are hard to know, but the differences in our stories hint at a deeper truth.

Yes, Toto, This IS Kansas!

When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else.

– L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900

Those of us who grew up on the description of the State of Kansas in the first chapter of L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz or who saw the classic 1939 MGM movie, which opens in black and white but switches to Technicolor when Dorothy’s tornado-swept house sets down in Munchkin Country, may have thought of Kansas as a gray, flat country, that goes on and on seemingly forever.

In one respect this impression is correct: Kansas goes on forever. However, it is neither grey nor in many parts flat.

Somehow during my first 58 years on the planet, I missed even driving through Kansas. Not a single business or pleasure trip took me to or through the Sunflower State. Then in September of 2020, Barbara and I drove out to visit our kids in Colorado. Pandemic made driving seem safer than flying and as we would be staying for many weeks and visiting Utah as well, we wanted to have the car with us. The most direct route goes straight through Kansas and I added it to my list of states visited at number 47.

We drove through Kansas again in December of the same year and then again on our way home in January of 2021. Neither the fall nor the winter passage prepared me, however, for the lush green that greeted us as we drove through last week just as summer was officially beginning.

The gateway to Kansas is a high bridge over the Kansas River just above where it joins the Missouri. The last thing you see leaving the State of Missouri as you drive west on I-70, is the town of Kansas City and a collection of somewhat rundown red and brown 19th Century buildings clustered near the river. I always want to stop and take a closer look but we always seem to be in a bit of a time crunch and this time was no different as we wanted to get to see our kids before our son took off for a business trip and our daughter and her husband left for a mini-vacation. There was a narrow window to catch them at home. Next time we will stop for sure.

Once across the river, the highway passes through Lawrence and then Topeka in short order. From the interstate Topeka appears to be a very pleasant little city, but again we had no time to stop.

Past Topeka, the landscape opens up into beautiful rolling hills that were at this time of year a deep lush green. Farms and cattle ranches form the vista as far as you can see.

It takes a long time to drive through Kansas. The state is almost 700km east to west (about 437 miles). We entered Kansas in the morning and night found still a pretty long way from Colorado’s eastern border.

The rolling green hills continue for hours. Somehow Kansas has largely avoided trashing up its highways with lots of road signs and advertising so there is little to spoil the view. Rest stops and services are far apart you have to keep an eye on the gas gauge. After a few hours, the land does begin to go very flat. The land is still green but it looks drier and the distances you can see seem enormous, the sky is very blue and large. Oil wells dot the landscape everywhere. With their long necks and cylinder-shaped beaks, they remind me of those silly drinking bird toys that were popular in the 1970s.

As I recall, many of them weren’t pumping in 2020 when oil prices were low but they were all pumping now. Somewhere along the way we passed yet again the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. “Next time,” we said as we sped past the exit.

Traveling home in January of last year, we spent our first night in our newly converted van at a campground in Cedar Bluff State Park west of Hays, Kansas. That night, with temperatures just below freezing, we appeared to be the only people in the campground. Even the office was closed and we paid by slipping some money in an envelope and dropping it in a slot. We camped right on the reservoir on a gorgeous starlit night. We were pretty warm in the van tucked inside our down sleeping bags.

Ommm my gosh, Kansas Brew!

We stopped there again last week on our way west. There were a few more people in the campground but the spot where we stayed before was open. We settled in to prepare a meal of stir fried vegetables and noodles with an ice cold Kansas-made Vertigo IPA that had made its way into our cooler earlier in the day. (It has, incongruously, a meditating deer on the label.)

It was pretty hot, no need for down sleeping bags this time, but a strong breeze kept things comfortable and kept away the biting Emerald City colored flies. The reservoir sparkled in the setting sun. It was like being home again, and everyone knows: there’s no place like home.

During the last bit of the drive the following day, the geography changed again to a kind of high, dry desert with its own stark beauty. More of the same on the Colorado side as we transitioned to mountain time. In another hour we were crawling through Denver traffic.

Kansas is, I think, an underrated state and we certainly didn’t do it justice speeding through in a just a day and a half. I feel sure that it is worth the much more leisurely visit that we are certain to make.

Next time.