Episode 17: “Oh, Canada” Road Trip

Introduction: Themes and Reading Companions

My last cross-country trip in 2005 had several themes: Frank Lloyd Wright buildings, to visit 4 men who fought with my father in WWII, to visit some places that I had never seen (Niagara Falls, Carlsbad Caverns, Charleston and Savannah, etc.), and to at least touch all the states in the lower 48 that I had never visited before.

What are the themes this time? One is to visit friends and family, some of whom I have not seen for decades, some of whom I have never met. Also: to attend baseball games in parks that I have not seen as well as to visit Japanese Gardens. Also, several architectural landmarks, and other sights along the way. And the ultimate goal: the Canadian Maritimes (New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island sans Anne of Green Gables, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Labrador), then back for Quebec and Montreal; this means that after this trip I will have visited all 50 states (accomplished when I drove to Alaska two years ago) and all Canadian provinces and territories except Nunavut.

Let’s focus on baseball parks for a second since this is a major theme. I have never seen a game in nine of the 30 major league cities. With this trip I will reduce that by five and there will then be only four cities where I have not seen a game. Does this mean I have to go to Houston and Dallas? I have to note that I have gained further respect for Michael’s feat in 1991 when he visited all 26 parks (at the time). I had a hard time figuring out how to visit five. It required some weird backtracking.

My itinerary is along the northern tier of the US, into Canada for Toronto, back to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati (baseball schedules dictated this weirdness), back east to DC, up through Philly, NY and Massachusetts, then Maine, and, finally, the Maritimes, then back to Quebec/Montreal.

Some of the reading material I have taken is the same as last time: William Least Heat-Moon’s “Blue Highways” and Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charlie”. My only real guide is “Road Trip USA” by Jamie Jensen – I find it a terrific guide, mainly because his tastes are similar to mine: architecture, baseball parks, and outlandish road signs.

Since this blog might actually be “after the fact”, I might arrange some of this material by topic, rather than by chronological order. Then those of you who are not interested in baseball can skip the episode on that subject.

The Beginning and the Hi-Line:

I chose to take I-90 to Spokane. I had sort of wanted to go along US 2 from Everett to Acadia National Park in Maine for a good part of the journey (Jamie’s “The Great Northern” route). But I was anxious to make some tracks at the beginning and I have been on almost all of US 2 in Washington (including the start of my 2005 trip) so I decided to start by driving I-90 to Spokane instead. One thing I saw along I-90 is something that I have always thought should be done: provide signs for the type of crop being grown along the road.

When I got to Spokane I saw my first roadside attraction:

The Spokane urban sprawl depressed me. It always saddens me when I think of what we have done to the American Landscape. The rest of world seems to be following suit, but we started it. I also realized that this is the biggest town I will see until Minneapolis. After about an hour of the crap along Highway 2 northeast of Spokane I was Jonesin’ for the Interstate again.

In Kalispell, Montana I stopped at Albertsons to check out the size of the food packages. I have fond memories of this town from a1969 trip: a small town (at the time) with one supermarket that had outlandish sized packages of cheese, bacon etc. To feed the farms and ranches, I assumed. When I returned in 1991 I was greatly disappointed to see how much sprawl had taken over and I could not see any large packages in the supermarket. This time, Kalispell did not seem so bad: yes, lots and lots of franchises but maybe after Spokane it did not seem as bad as I was expecting. And I did see a couple of large packages of cheese and tubs of butter this time.

In Essex, near Glacier National Park, I had lunch at the Isaac Walton Inn that was constructed by the Great Northern railroad to house railroad workers. I talked to the waitress about cabooses, which one can stay in at the lodge. I am reluctant to talk about the waitress this on this blog, since we have to be aware that it is in cyber space and can be read by anybody, so if you want to hear about this, send me an email and I will reply with the story.

Here is a monument at the continental divide near Glacier National Park: the rain that was falling to the left of the obelisk would go to the Pacific, the rain that was falling to the right would go to the Atlantic.


So, what will happen when there are no more glaciers in Glacier National Park? What will they call it? The “National Park Formerly Known as Glacier” or “Global Warming National Park”?

The Hi-Line

The “Hi-Line” is what US 2 is called locally as it hugs the border of Canada. It goes on for miles and miles on the relatively flat Great Plains. Both Jamie and William talk about it, trying not to actually call it boring. William talks about his car going pock-pock, pock-pock interminably on the tarred road cracks. He says: “No place, in theory, is boring of itself. Boredom lies only with the traveler’s limited perception and his failure to explore deeply enough. After a while, I found my perception limited.” They must have fixed the road since his trip since I heard no such pock-pock sounds.

And William quotes Gertrude Stein: “In the US there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” (BTW, it may not be widely known that Alice B. Toklas was born in San Francisco but moved to Seattle with her father, an early Jewish businessman in the Northwest.)

Jamie says that across North Dakota the road hems and rolls and yawns forever. “It’s a long, flat, (and dare we say it? Dull) drive across the state….”

So, I too am alone with my thoughts. I have been asked, what do I think about at these times? For one thing, cows don’t eat meat. We don’t seem to eat animals that eat other animals but do eat animals that don’t eat other animals. This does not seem fair. Also, I was thinking about turning my rusty green propane tank into the Yellow Submarine. And about the bugs that were at one moment living creatures (with families, and dreams of the future – well maybe not) and the next moment are goop on my windshield. But mainly I was just engaged in the moment, not thinking of the past or future, just experiencing what I call the “Zen of picking them up and putting them down”, mile after mile.

You realize why this part of Montana is called Big Sky country – it really is. A photo is hard to capture it. The road in Montana did not bypass towns and I was happy to slow down for a few minutes to visit these lonely places. Here is proof that Cut Bank is the coldest spot in the nation (thanks to the presence of a US Weather Service monitoring station):

After Cut Bank, I stopped briefly in Shelby, to check out the Marias Museum in a former house in a residential neighborhood. The museum houses a model of the 40,000-seat arena built for the1923 world heavyweight fight where Jack Dempsey defeated Tommy Gibbons. It was a publicity stunt to lure people to this oil boomtown but only 7,000 people showed up.

Along the Hi Line the towns have exotic names: Kremlin, Havre, Zurich, etc., all of which were founded by the railroad and settled, in the main, by northern and eastern European immigrants enticed here by the railroad’s offers of farmlands and homesteads. Here is the post office in Kremlin, Montana:

And then around the corner:

Near Havre I heard a radio advertisement (as a break in the announcements of the results of local school board elections) for a bull auction, and here is a direct quote, word for word: “All the bulls have been semen-tested; lunch will be served”.

And here is Chet Huntley’s schoolhouse in Saco, Montana. It was amazing to think that someone who was so large on the American news scene (starting with the 1956 Conventions) could have come from this small place.

And if this is Saco, where is Vanzetti?

In Glascow I stopped at the very funky local museum. It includes an entire bar, iron lung, fantastic political button collection, dioramas of Western scenes by a local woman, and automatic music in one room (it turns on when you walk into the room) of the high school band – with bagpipes, of course, this is Glascow – playing their fight song (On Wisconsin). I told the two elderly ladies in charge that I thought their museum was terrific. Why are there always two elderly women “manning” these little museums?

The Fort Peck Indian reservation raised issues about high school mascots. Political correctness led to Stanfurd becoming the Trees and my high school dropping the nickname “Warriors”. But at Poplar, Montana, inside the Res (where Sitting Bull surrendered six years after Little Big Horn) the High School Mascot is the “Indians” and in Brockton (also within the Res) it is the “Warriors”. Outside of the Res, the town of Culbertson’s teams are called the “Cowboys” and “Cowgirls”. No kidding!

As Highway 2 entered North Dakota it seemed to bypass towns, in contrast to Montana. I was reminded of my work several years ago for a local jurisdiction in Lithuania, when I told them that I thought following the European Union’s standard for highways (requiring national highways to bypass small towns) could lead to the further economic decline of the town where I was working. When I visited a year later and saw that, in fact, the bypass had been constructed, this became my Career Recommendation Not Followed Number L-3 (“L” for Lithuania). Just a note: I tried to keep off the interstates as much as possible on this trip, but sometimes (when I was pressed for time to make a baseball game, for example) I had to take them. One of the problems with bypassing towns in this way is exemplified by the fact that later in this trip I didn’t even get an idea what Eire, Pennsylvania is like.

Getting back to the Hi-line, in Minot (rhymes with Why Not), North Dakota I had lunch at Charlie’s Main Street Café. Pink leather booths, waitress very old and skinny. I still had a hankering for biscuits and gravy (after seeing this at a place where I stopped for coffee in Montana) and with this dish you also get eggs over either “American Fries” or hash browns. I wondered what American Fries were but did not ask because I wanted hash browns in any case. Later, as I was looking at the Middle American faces chowing down on Middle American Food, I wondered whether this was the “real” America. Then I figured out what American Fries were – or, more accurately, what they were not: NOT French fries. I was glad I didn’t ask what they were. Outside of the restaurant I heard piped music from a radio station playing the Doors’ “Come on Baby Light my Fire”. I wondered if they knew where Jim Morrison is buried?

Minot also boasts a park with various buildings, artifacts, and sculptures hailing its Scandinavian heritage. Here is a very large Swedish horse, and a replica of a church with statues of skiing heroes.


After Minot one comes across what is supposed to be the geographic center of North America. According to a woman in the adjacent museum/tourist trap it was determined by figuring out where the center of gravity would be of a piece of plywood (for example) cut out in the shape of North America (including Mexico).

Another obelisk! Without getting too Freudian, is it just men that design these things and what, after all, is it all about?

Just about everything in North Dakota seems to be named after Teddy Roosevelt who spent a lot of time here, and I guess grew from a scrawny, sickly youth to a lover of the outdoors in this state. I now know why he is on Mt Rushmore in South Dakota – I always thought he was a bit out of place with Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln. It must be because North Dakota made them do it; otherwise they threatened to step out of the way and let South Dakota float up into Canada.

I realized that I had been in three time zones in two days: I woke up Tuesday in the Pacific time zone (Idaho) and went to bed in the Mountain time zone (Montana); on Wednesday I woke up (of course) in the Mountain zone and went to bed in the Central time zone (North Dakota).

One last word on Country Music, which I listened to a lot on this part of the journey. I found that the current hits are not as humorous as the ones on my last cross-country road trip: those included “Bon Jovi Makes Her Clothes Come Off” – I remember hearing that as I crossed the Appalachians and thinking at the time that it doesn’t get any better than this. One new song I heard now was slightly humorous: “Got Home at the Wrong Five O’clock.” Another one was mostly about middle aged, middle American, male angst: “can’t pay the bills for the kid’s clothes, the washing machine is broke, and the wife is two months late”.