The International Writers Magazine: US Travel: Book Extract

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The Minnesota watershed moment • Lori Hein I’d spent 25 years traveling the globe. After September 11, I felt a need to explore America, to make sure it was alright. My two kids and I took a 12,000-mile back road journey into the heart of the country, embracing it as it embraced us. In this excerpt from "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America," the book that grew from our odyssey, we cross a remarkable line – invisible, but palpable:

Minneapolis

Somewhere near Hawley, Minnesota, "Everything Under the Sun for Good Living," Adopt-a-Highway by the town’s Boy Scout Troop, there was a remarkable change in the topography of the United States of America.

We had left the west. There was no sign, no landmark, but something had clearly happened. Near Hawley, at some spot whose exact position I failed to record, the land turned green.
A palpable current ran through New Paint. Nine and a half thousand miles on the road, and we were riding through green country again. To us, green meant east, and home. It was August. We’d been gone since June. At this point in distance and time away, we were open to a little tug from home, a gentle pull toward familiar ground, a tiny welcoming squeeze. Minnesota’s timing was perfect.

I was soon overcome by the realization that the sudden green-equals-east feeling washing over us was, in the truest sense, a watershed. Where the green feeling began and then intensified, blowing the brown and yellow dry-color feelings of the west away from us, scattering them like puffs of dust along Route 10, we were within 50 miles of the place where the Mississippi River is born. The river whose name means "gathering of waters" in Ojibwe, the river that defines the nation’s east-west geography, the river that was once the liquid demarcation line between just-born America and lands west, was speaking to us. The green feeling was a message sent by the Father of Waters that we were now within his embrace.
We were pointed due east, and I looked to my right, past Adam, and out the window into the fertile land that rolled away south to the horizon. The water that gathered on the land we drove over today would, three months and 2,300 miles beyond that horizon, reach the Gulf of Mexico. The Louisiana shrimpers we’d driven past in July, docked at Delcambre with their aqua nets furled and hoisted like luminous grasshopper wings, had bobbed in water that had left Minnesota in April. The roiling, brown Mississippi that floated the Natchez, whose steam calliope had welcomed us aboard our cruise downriver from New Orleans to Chalmette had, in spring, been clear, north woods trickles. With this one, long look south out the window, onto and past fields of Minnesota sunflowers, all things were connected.

We didn’t need to visit Lake Itasca and wade into the 10-foot-wide headwaters of the Mississippi to feel the great river’s power to awe and refresh. Fifty miles from its source, and a hundred miles from any place where the nascent flow had any size to speak of or carried the name Mississippi, we were already renewed by it, and by the profusion of glacial-carved lakes, all sculpted by the retreat of the Ice Age.

Save for the California and Oregon coasts, the absence of water had defined our trip for the 6,400 miles since we’d crossed the Red River at Shreveport, Louisiana the day before entering Texas. Yes, after that we’d crossed the Rio Grande, the Snake, the Salmon, the Missouri and other storied rivers, made friends with smaller beauties like the San Juan and the Truckee, camped at Lakes Powell and Tahoe, gazed into Cascade-ringed Crater Lake’s cobalt depths, and driven atop the vast but endangered Ogallala aquifer, intermittently visible wherever Plains irrigation systems sucked out its water and sprayed it over fields of grasses and grains. But, overwhelmingly, the earth had been afire or waiting to ignite, causing people from Texas through the Dakotas to pray for rain and thank God for firefighters. In some places, like the southern reaches of Nevada, there was nothing to burn, and the earth was a parched, brown, treeless void.

I thought of the series of little waterless ironies that will always conjure Nevada for me. I’d picked Rachel, writ big on the map, as an Extraterrestrial Highway oasis, and we dreamt of Dairy Queen cones, but when we reached it, we could see the whole thing in a blink. I mumbled, "That’s Rachel. All of it." A slow, sad "All of it…" echoed from the back seats, where the kids were watching Dennis the Menace. I sent Adam into the Quik Pik that sat near the Little AleInn, "Earthlings Welcome," to find out about the old mine-like structure in the desert just off the highway. The clerk came out into the blast furnace heat to talk with us, and explained that the old raw mill once took in anything dug from any mine in the area and turned it into saleable commodity. The clerk was a very heavy man in his thirties, and I wanted him to get back to his air conditioning, but we were desert company, and he wanted to talk.
"Where y’all from?"
"Massachusetts."
"Massachusetts! Welllll, thissss…," he said, sweeping his arm over the oven-hot barrenness, "is Nevada." We stood silently for a long moment, looking. Dana, Adam and I saw variations on a brown theme. He saw something more. I looked hard, trying to feel some bit of what he saw in all this dryness. After giving us sufficient time to appreciate the view, knowing the mine structure across the road had brought us into the Quik Pik to begin with, he pointed out another abandoned vestige of Nevada’s past he thought would interest us, a derelict silver mine sitting small across the desert on the far horizon.
"What time is it here?" I asked, thinking we might have crossed a time zone since morning. Indeed, our friend confirmed that we’d gained an hour.
"Yer in the Pacific time zone."
"Pacific time zone!" squealed Dana. "That’s so weird! There’s no water!"

As we pulled away from bone-dry Rachel, passing the "NEXT GAS 110 MILES" sign, which made you check your fuel gauge not once, not twice, but three times, the home-mixed tape I’d been listening to delivered up Smetana’s The Moldau. As the sweeping symphonic swells evoked the undulating majesty of the great Czech river, we passed carcasses of wild mustangs, brought down by lack of water, lying without eyes in the dust.

Not long after, at Warm Springs, writ medium on the map and with a toponym that promised succor, we’d watched a group of bikers climb a fence at the boarded-up Warm Springs Bar & Café, ignoring the big red "KEEP OUT" sign. The ramshackle building constituted the entire empty town. The bikers all held canteens, the only containers their bikes had room enough to carry. Empty here meant waterless through the rest of unforgiving Nevada. A few of them stood by a small stream that trickled next to the abandoned café. It looked tempting, but they had likely noticed the cattle in the desert and wisely did not fill up with those waters. They turned their attention to the building itself, hoping to gain entry and find a tap serendipitously still delivering running water. Had there been one or two of them, I would have shared, letting them dip into our cooler, where sloshed this morning’s melted ice stocks, New Paint’s air conditioning unable to keep that day’s ice alive for very long. But a biker’s dozen I couldn’t help.

Where water had been an elusive, prayed for, and sought after life-giver for so many thousands of miles, now, in northern Minnesota, it flowed in abundance. From this remarkable watershed moment, the presence of water would define the rest of our journey, from here, at the Mississippi’s source, to the Hudson, which we’d cross for the second time on our quest, only hours from home, on the trip’s last day.
The Minnesota watershed moment was one of the most sudden changes we felt America make as we traveled her. Most of her changes had been slow and subtle, the transition from one climate, topography, economy or culture a smooth, gradual swallow. She eased you into the next part of herself in stages, holding onto pieces of what you were about to leave until you were ready to leave them, quietly slipping in new things, pieces of the places to come. Once you were fully in and of them, and comfortable, the old pieces disappeared. In this marvelous way, America made her vastness accessible and her diversity comprehensible. Somehow, through both her people and the power of the place itself, she was able to be both many and one.

© Lori Hein (www.LoriHein.com; world travel blog, http://RibbonsofHighway.blogspot.com), 2004. Excerpted from "Ribbons of Highway: A Mother-Child Journey Across America." Used with permission.
Book proceeds to go to tsunami relief indefinitely. Details on blog

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