We have been in the backcountry of far northern Minnesota for over a week. Just came in to town today to get propane and top off our fresh water tank. We have no signal until town. Deer, bear, hunters, fishers and mushroom hunting. I’m working on some blogs, essays and a short-story that I’ll share later. Stay tuned.

This morning we pushed on to Duluth, which means we came about as close to driving diagonally across the State of Minnesota as one can. As is our habit, we stayed off interstates and four-lane highways.  We were forced to use I-35 for about fifty miles, but that wasn’t bad.  The experience did, however,  focus my thoughts on the subtle ways in which we damage our precious environment.

As I described in yesterday’s post, we spent two days at Birch Coulee in Renville, Co.  That’s farming country, and for hours this morning we drove through fields of soy beans and corn.  Because of our tremendous human over-population, I can hardly complain about the farms. (Actually, I’ve never complained about farms.) It isn’t like putting up another McDonald’s or Walmart that we don’t need. We need these farms. We need to support family farms! Family farmers love the land and do their bests to care for it because they want to pass it on to future generations. Big Agri-corps just work the land for a profit. They don’t take care of it. And, yes, I’ve seen the memes, “don’t complain about farms with your mouth full.”  The damage we did to the land was done long ago.  Minnesota became a state in 1858, and we know that white immigrants began to show up here and start farming as early as 1820.

The farming communities in western Minnesota sure aren’t growing.  Olivia, the county seat of Renville County, had a staggering 2,347 people in 2019.  It had 2,569 in 2000.  The really big city in the area is Willmar with a 2018 population of 19,673, up by 63 people from the 2010 census.  Then we got to Saint Cloud.  Pamela used to travel through St Cloud on the way to her husband’s home in Canada each year.  The last time through has been quite a few years ago and she said she didn’t even recognize it. I can understand.  It has grown by around 11.4 to 21.1% every census since 1990.  When Pamela was passing through it had a population under 50,000. The 2018 estimate was 68,462.  Here we began to see the signs and symptoms of human over-population.

It was actually around St. Cloud that we noticed several changes.  Firstly, the big farms were behind us. We were entering a different ecosystem.  Behind us the soil was black.  Except for some geological features like Birch Coulee, most of that area’s “surficial” geology is wetland-organic sediment according to the Minnesota Depart of Natural Resources.  Heading northeast from St. Cloud we were entering the famous lake region.  This lake region is awesome and the lakes are lovely, so I don’t want this to sound derogatory, but the lakes are actually holes left behind by the glaciers that filled with water. But aren’t they magnificent holes? Thank you Unci Maka;  Grandmother Earth; for such a wonderful remnant of the glaciers. We saw no big farms in this area.

While what few trees we saw in the southwest were ash, hickory, hackberry and oaks, when we entered the lake region we were seeing mostly firs, pines and lots and lots of birch.  The birch were as thick as our aspen are back home in Montana. I had to look them up to see if they too reproduce by rhizome. They don’t. Birch reproduce by seeds. It makes sense to see so many birch when the area is so wet.

Less than sixty miles from Duluth we had to use an interstate.  That’s when it really hit me.  Up until the introduction of the interstate system during the Eisenhower administration in 1956, our web of county, state and federal highways did minimal damage to the environment.  There was still sufficient damage done to the environment as we crossed wetlands and cut through fragile ecologic areas, but the big difference is that our one-lane roads didn’t stop or interfere with animal migration. There is, of course, the danger of animals getting hit. According to Outdoor Life, there were six million deer killed by hunters in 2018. The same year 1.6 million deer were killed by vehicles.  On interstates there are often barriers in the median as well as high fences on both sides to keep animals away from the road.  Not wanting an animal-vehicle accident is admirable but the means used to avoid such tragedy blocks natural wildlife migration which is a tragedy in its own right.  Wildlife bridges have begun to show up in the west, but we have never seen one cross an interstate. Our interstates are extremely detrimental to our wildlife!  Some of the old highway system had billboards, but generally signs were small, often on a farmer’s fence or his barn.  In eastern US we’ve gone from the ubiquitous “See Rock City” painted on the roof of a farmer’s barn (my grandfather had “Mail Pouch”) to a giant “Cafe Risque” every few miles from southern Georgia to central Florida. Those who have traveled to Florida more than once can tell you about these “adult store” billboards every few miles for several hundred miles. Since the interstate system started there has been a proliferation of giant towers holding advertising billboards and cell towers. These not only destroy the land around them but there must be roads to them for maintenance, etc.  Billboards are not only distracting from the beauty of the land, but detrimental to the environment.  I was very happy that we only had to be on interstate for fifty miles.

We came to Duluth today because of the weather.  There has been a heatwave for the past several days. The temperature effect of Lake Superior makes a big difference. While I was comfortable sitting in the shade at Birch Coulee, I found that my fingers were getting quite cold after sitting at the picnic table above the St. Louis River close to Lake Superior typing. The temperature is still 79 degrees with  69% humidity, so it must be the lake.  We’re staying at a place called Indian Point Campground, on the southwest edge of Duluth and on the St. Louis River. It is a nice place, but I’m anxious to get out into the wilderness where I belong. We plan to explore this area tomorrow then up the famous North Shore, along Lake Superior, and move into the interior forest and lakes when the cooler weather comes midweek.  The anticipation of what we will see and experience next is exhilarating.

     We are camped on the Birch Coulee (Fr. stream, river. Most likely archaic.)  in Renville County, Minnesota.  It is the site of a nasty battle during the Dakota War of 1862. (i)  Pamela and I avoid battlefields.  Such unnecessary death.  In this case, a detachment of Americans (the invaders) was just about wiped out by the Dakota (the locals).  As much as I hate the loss of life on either side, we should not have been here.  If the roles had been reversed, and we were defending our homeland and families from an invading force, we’d have songs written about our great courage and victory.  But enough of that.

I have a choice of direction by which to approach my account of Birch Coulee County Campground.  I can take the negative and talk about what we’ve done to the land, or I can take a more positive approach and talk about the fact that Renville County took grant money and did more than just set up a military memorial.  Since we already know the damage we’ve done to the prairies, I’ll stick with the positive story.

There are only four sites occupied right now (Saturday afternoon) with a large group having a picnic at the shelter.  When we arrived we met a local couple who were camping next to us.  It turned out that they were in the middle of the three sites because they had been camping with friends on either side of them.  They gave us a lot of good advice about camping in Minnesota and things to see in their southwest corner of the state.  They also shared a large bag of tomatoes from their garden.  They said that local youth don’t come here to drink but it is a popular place for families to walk the trails and wade in the creek.

     As you can see from the topo map, the area is a giant gash in otherwise relatively flat terrain. Those cliffs are around one-hundred feet high.  It’s obvious that part, most, or perhaps even all, of the reason for the area to be left natural is that it isn’t useful for farming.  However, we can give credit for it not being dammed. I would guess that it has been totally forested since the Ash grove in which we are camped are all relatively young trees.  There are a few old trees, but just a few.  There is one giant log whose diameter is almost chin-high!  I don’t want to consider the possibility that the area was not further developed because of the battlefield.  Sadly, we all know that a memorial to a good killing spree is far more important than nature. But my Abbeyness is showing.

This entire area is a lesson in glacial geological history which Pamela and I thoroughly enjoy.  Many glaciers crossed over Minnesota. An enormous lake was created northeast of here and a great river, called Warren, drained the lake.  Tributaries to the Minnesota, like the Birch Coulee, are thought to be channels that were initially eroded proximal to glacial ice, marking recessional ice margins, (ii)  surrounded by ground morraine, end morraine, which I would assume accounts for the rolling hills, and wetland organic sentiments. The latter would account for the rich black soil.

There is a bit over twenty-five acres of preserved nature here in midst of active farming, and we should be thankful for that. Its contribution to the health and welfare of the environment is extremely important.  I know that Renville County probably received a grant to create this recreation area. Most counties don’t have the funds to do things like this on their own. Nevertheless, I have to give the county administration credit for a job well done.  They didn’t just build a glitzy monument to a nasty, deadly battle. They salvaged land along a geological treasure, returned it to its natural beauty, creating a place for nature to be enjoyed and appreciated.

FOOTNOTES. 

(i)   https://www.mnhs.org/birchcoulee/learn

(ii)  https://files.dnr.state.mn.us/lands_minerals/re_plateB.pdf

One of my favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes is his explanation of going to Walden Pond to live. He wrote, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

What he learned was that what passed for advanced civilization; viz. towns, government and business; was really quite psychologically, emotionally and spiritually poor. He found that those whom the white people called “savages” were actually more comfortable, happy and, in many ways richer than the whites who looked down on them. Those WASPs (i) whom he observed in the community near Walden lived with tremendous debt, never found and/or took time to live, and saw nature as a contradiction to what they perceived as progress. Progress, he learned, was an excuse to destroy nature.

The reason that this quote has so much meaning to me is our similar experience. Seven years ago Pamela and I ‘went into the woods’. We became volunteers at Glacier National Park in far northwestern Montana. While we both have a great love for nature our action wasn’t as deliberate as Henry’s. That is to say, we weren’t expecting the epiphany that awaited us. We were ready and anxious to learn all that the wilderness had to teach us. We just didn’t expect the Walden Pond type of enlightenment.

That simple act led us to a life on the road, exploring mountains, prairies and desert. We now live in our twenty-one foot Roadtrek we call Mr. Spock. One of the first things we learned was that modern society is extremely limiting, confining and isolating.

I bet you find that strange. I also bet that you’ve never known anything other than what we call ‘sticks-n-bricks’ (permanent buildings) and accept the idea that everyone has to have a “permanent address”. That’s just a good way to be controlled, but that’s another story.

My intent is to focus upon the positive aspects of the Thoreau quote, but I do need to lay the ground work by explaining how modern society is limiting, confining and isolating.

Society limits you by defining who you are, where you live, where you will work, what you will believe, what you will wear and many other controls that limit your ability to experience life and experience the phenomenal vastness of your potential. To be so limited is an artificial barrier created for the sole purpose of controlling you. Social systems must control you to survive. If you give in, you will not experience the fullness of life nor will you ever know your full potential. You will be content with a stereotypical concept of success.

When was the last time you stood on top of a mountain you have just climbed? Not driving up and walking out to a vista. You climbed the whole freakin’ way. You look down and feel the rush of life. Yes, that’s life you’re feeling. That’s what it feels like to not be controlled and limited. You realize ‘I just did that!’ You climbed a mountain. You made friends with a bear. Well, maybe making friends is too much but you encountered a bear and the two of you went you own way in peace. You climbed rugged trails, encountered animals you’ve never met, and gawked at magnificent panoramic vistas from high promontories. You walked along narrow ledges that made your head spin, forded rushing mountain streams, and climbed over magnificent boulders. You experienced life fully.

Why would you want to allow yourself to be limited? It’s not because you want to be limited. It is because you’ve been taught to accept the limits. I spent an entire career dressing, acting, and talking like I was expected. When Pamela suggested that we go to Montana I asked ‘for how long?’ When she told me all summer, my reaction was ‘can I be gone that long?’ Of course I could but I was still living within societal limits. Like those observed by Henry David Thoreau societal limits keep you pigeon-holed and confines your thought and behavior.

The problem with the type of confinement we experience in society is that those who control the society want you to see the confinement as security. I would suspect that’s how it found its way into Orwell’s book “1984”. (ii) We have been brainwashed to see confinement as security, slavery as freedom.

“Oh, I have security here,” says the person about their life in the same town in which they grew up, in a house with a big mortgage and a job that, if they were honest, could go away at any time. But they’ve been taught that. They didn’t experience it as truth. ‘Oh,’ the controllers of society say, ‘you’ve got a house and a job. You have security.’ Yeah. Right. If you believe that I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn that I’ll sell you cheap.

Now, I do not have anything against having a house in the same town for years. That’s really nice if you know that’s what you really want. In fact, if you’ve actually given it serious thought, tried or considered alternatives, and decided that’s for you, I think it is absolutely great. But when you do it because you’ve been told and expected to do it that way, then it is confinement. Everyone has to make a living, but hundreds of thousands of people have figured out that they don’t have to have a house with a mortgage or pay an exorbitant rent for an apartment and a job in a factory, store or office. Just like the villagers near Waldon Pond, most people are confined.

Two new friends of ours are just starting their nomadic life. They are in their thirties. One runs a business with her phone. It doesn’t matter where they are. The other is a bartender. She can walk into almost any town, anywhere and get a job. We have friends that work as camp-hosts. Others do things like work the sugar beet harvest. All of these people are leading a free, unconfined life, but we are looked upon as odd or worse. For over 93% of our existence, humans have lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers. Where did we go wrong? (Actually I have a theory on that, but you need to follow my research on hunter-gatherers for that.)

Few of us are probably meant to be nomads, but all of us were meant to be free. Actually the environment couldn’t handle it if all humans decided to become nomads. Human over-population is far too great. (iii) Nevertheless, we can all refuse to be tethered and enslaved by the Social Systems which want to rule the world.

FOOTNOTES:

(i) WASP =df ‘white anglo-saxon protestant’, until recently a relatively accurate descriptor of the dominant person in the United States.

(ii) Orwell, George. (1949). 1984. New York City. Penguin.

(iii) If all humans were to disperse from cities and live as nomads there would be 317 people per square mile of every inhabitable area of the Earth! You can look it up or calculate it yourself, but the bottom line is that there are way too many humans on this planet.

    Having spent a lovely two nights on Rathbun Lake, we’re on the road again. Today we traveled across Iowa. As usual, we stayed off interstate and four-lane highways. Pamela’s a great navigator. She’s gone back to using paper maps and is finding the task much more enjoyable.   We actually spent the first couple of hours on county roads which were about the best I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen county roads from southern California to New England.  These county roads were better than Texas’ “Farm to Market” network and put some state highways to shame.  In any case, it was enjoyable.

We spent almost the entire 323 mile trip on US-169, an old two-laner from the US highway system’s history, but still quite good.  Well, you’re not going to travel seventy miles-per-hour or faster, but for those of us who are happy just to amble along and enjoy the scenery, it was just fine.

Driving through the heartland of Iowa we saw the damage from last weeks derecho storm. Entire fields of corn were flattened.  We saw giant trees that had been uprooted and what looked like great brush piles until you looked closely and realized that it was where the storm had dropped trees, plants and parts of buildings. In a few places we saw trees that had fallen on houses, and houses or other buildings with the siding ripped off, exposing the studs. We had heard it described as an “inland hurricane” but it seemed to have acted more like a tornado.  There would be places where the cornfield on one side would be untouched and across the road it would be totally destroyed.  We have read that as much as 45% of their crop was destroyed or damaged. The damaged area was a tremendously wide bands.

The landscape is beautiful, especially if you like farms.  For a long time I had to keep telling myself that the destruction of the Great Plains to create farms happened a long time ago.  Most of the towns were still small, neat and obviously geared to serving the needs of the farmers.  I was pleased to see that they weren’t all ringed by subdivisions that, in their turn, destroy the farmland along with further destruction to the land and pressure on natural resources. I must admit that seeing subdivisions springing up in what had been forest or farmland is a pet peeve of mine.  We’ve destroyed so much of our precious Earth with farming, mining, lumbering and other such enterprises, now we’re pushing out with unrestricted growth; houses, commercial developments and giant corporate campuses,  just to name a few; without any concern for the destruction to our planet or the future of our species as well as those around us.

I’ll have to admit that I was quite disappointed to learn that Iowa has no Covid-19 precautions in place.  I didn’t think about it at the Rathbun campground. There everyone stayed in their own family groups, outside, with plenty of social distancing.  It was when I stopped for gas and realized that there were no precautions at the gas station. None of the businesses in the town had any Covid-19 warnings or guidelines.  The danger in this was striking when we stopped for a snack and who should pull in next to us but a couple on a motorcycle wearing Sturgis shirts.  There have already been Covid cases reported that were traced back to the Sturgis rally; 250,000 unmasked people who took no precautions.  All it would take would be for the couple from Sturgis to be infected and pass it along to a clerk in Iowa who was not taking any precautions who would then pass it along to unsuspecting customers like us.  After realizing Iowa was taking no precautions, I could not wait to get away.

We are spending the night at the Wokiksuye Makoca (Dakota language for Land of Memories) Campground in Manakato, MN.  It is a city campground and park on the Minnesota River pictured above. Standing on the bank of the river you can pretend that the human infestation isn’t all around you, at least until a train goes by or a camper goes speeding down a hiking trail on his mini-motorcycle.  The woods are Box Elder, Ash, Slippery Elm, Hackberry, Hickory and Oak. The Cutleaf Coneflower is magnificent. The campground is very nice, with lots of room between sites and, a boon to nomads, showers.  We are still in the severely over-populated east, so we haven’t tried boon-docking.  All of the places we’ve stayed so far have been extremely nice; one state park, one Corp of Engineers and one city park.

Tomorrow we’re venturing near Minneapolis so that we can visit friends with whom we worked at Glacier National Park near our adopted home of Columbia Falls, Montana.  They’re going to visit us at a campground where we will have a social distanced reunion and a bring your own dinner; all for the sake of Covid safety. We like each other too much to take any less precautions. We had to get reservations because campgrounds near a city on a weekend are all full. $60 for dry camping with no amenities. No wonder city people think camping is expensive.  Don’t know if I should tell them that in 2019, on the road all year except for our bi-annual visit to the east to visit family, we didn’t pay $400 for camping. But that’s part of the nomad life-style.  Maybe I’ll share the secret some day, but for now, I must say good night.

The sun is setting on another day at Rathbun Lake. Fishers are silently making their way home while the geese overhead make quite a ruckus. Another flock of white water birds bank and land to feed near a half-dozen or so sandpipers. A short while earlier we had watched an eagle hunting above some high grass and a young osprey dive for fish. The pinks, reds and greys of sunset reflect off the lake creating a mix and blend of color. Campers, who have been gone on their adventures during the day, are returning and walking the campground practicing good social distancing. Dogs bark greetings, and the silence of the day is traded for a murmur of activity, exchange of stories and the occasional shreek of a child. Flowers are closing, crickets are singing and campfires are being lit. In a few hours the children will be asleep, the campfires put out, dogs quiet, and lights out. The only sounds those of nature. Good night from Rathbun campground, Iowa.