The Dirt Road

A Story by Nestar

True story of a crazy camping night in Northern Minnesota

THE DIRT ROAD

The sun begins to set. After hours of kayaking and swimming in Lake Itasca and strolling across the source of the Mississippi River, we are hungry. Actually, I’m always hungry. If my dad was Chinese, my name would be ‘Star’ Ving. The plan for the night is to stop by a local grocery store for chicken and then grill it on the campfire in the middle of the northern Minnesota wilderness. A couple of weeks before, my old friend Rakesh (who is still young enough, though!) and I had camped in Yellowstone, and it was a lot of hassle to keep the food cold throughout the day, so I calculated that it would be wiser to wait until late evening to do groceries. Now, it’s 8:30pm and dusk settles as my travel companion and I drive out of the park and onto a deserted winding road.

There is supposed to be a supermarket right at the north entrance of the park according to our brochure, but we don’t see anything so we decide to just type in “grocery stores” into the GPS and drive to the closest one. The GPS screen clearly lays out our options: a Walmart in 30 miles or an Asian Market in 25. An Asian market in the middle of barren, all-Caucasian northern Minnesota? Sounds exciting! Maybe we can barbecue something more exotic than chicken tonight, like a duck. Or an octopus!

After about 10 miles, the GPS tells us to turn right onto a dirt road. As the car starts rattling and stones begin to ricochet off doors, I become more and more skeptical. Can there really be an Asian market at the end of this dirt road? At the same time, the road keeps hurting our miniscule car, which doesn’t have a powerful engine or a four wheel drive. If something happens to the car, we will be stuck in darkness without phone reception in the middle of nowhere. To make things worse, my travel companion isn’t concerned at all, chattering excitedly about the prospect of an adventure. This is a girl who wanted to purposefully tip over the kayak in the middle of the lake earlier today. Since she is younger and female, I know that she won’t be much of a help in case it comes to pushing the car or changing a spare tire. I am responsible for her safety in addition to my own. But even though the logical part of me wants to turn back, the adventurous part takes over. What if the GPS is right? What kind of an Asian market could exist here?

Fifteen miles later, I successfully maneuver the car onto a tamer, paved road. The GPS insists that the Asian market will be on our right in a mile. I look to the right. Rows and rows of conifers stare back. We keep driving. The closer we get, the less likely it seems that there will be an Asian market, or in fact anything human-made around here. We approach the flashing dot on the GPS. Okay, Asian market in 0.5 miles…0.3 miles…0.1 miles…400 feet…

No Asian market, not even any ruins or remains. Just deep woods.

The Asian market was just a mirage. Now, we are both starving and have no idea how to get back. The GPS has officially lost its credibility. I am certain of only one thing: I will NOT take the car down another dirt road again. The GPS keeps telling us to turn on one dirt road after another, but I defy it. I’m an excellent navigator, after all. If I navigated my way through the jungles of Nepal when I was a kid, I can definitely find a civilized road back to the state park without the help of this silly machine.

A few minutes later, though, the perfectly asphalted road we’re driving on becomes a dirt road too! And so, I decide to risk it, turn right at the closest opportunity, and venture on the fifteen mile drive back to the main road.

Now, this dirt road that I turn onto…the word “dirt” is an understatement. This road is much, much dirtier than a dirt road. The dirtest. I’ve lived in a third world country for twenty years and have never seen a road this bad. In between the trees, there are two narrow leaf-covered trails of tire marks. As we inch forward down the road at centipede-speed, our wheels plop up and down in the mud, leaving behind spurts of dust. There are puddles everywhere, and I try, mostly unsuccessfully, to sidestep them. A truck zooms towards us from the opposite direction and we dip the car sideways off into the grasses to let it through. As we drive through jungle, my travel companion fantasizes about the fairy-tale-like woods and the magical creatures that might inhabit them. Magical creatures? I’m picturing something more along the lines of a ghost movie. Maybe cannibals with hunting dogs ready to pounce as soon as one more wayfaring stone pops our tires.

The fifteen-mile dirt road turns out to be 25 miles long. After over an hour, we somehow manage to escape the cannibals and are back on the main road leading back to the park. It’s almost pitch dark now, still no food, and even if there are grocery stores nearby, they will probably be closed by now. Miraculously, as we drive back into the park, we see a gas station with a little country store that closes in fifteen minutes. One cashier and two separate doors, one for food and one for liquor. Transaction #1: Pork sausages. As I pay, I ask the cashier if they sell chicken. Transaction #2: Five frozen chicken breasts in a blue plastic bag. We’re about to leave when my companion suggests that we get spices for the chicken. Transaction #3: Lemon pepper and ground chili. Finally, Transaction #4: Four big cans of Foster’s beer. Ready to go. As we leave the parking lot, I suddenly remember that we need to light the firewood with something. Transaction #5: Butane fluid.

We’re adventurous, so we decide to go without any of the bare necessities of camping. All we have is firewood and the food we just bought. We use sticks for spoons, maps of Itasca State Park for plates, crumpled notebook paper for paper towels. No water, we sanitize our hands by burning them above the fire. Finally, we eat! Yesterday, we had horrid Chinese food from a street vendor in Duluth. If I could give it a grade, I’d give it an F-. This chicken is awesome, though, and, finally, we relax…

As we sit and chat by the fire, we suddenly hear a loud rustling sound behind us. All that beer must have lured the bears to our campsite! We rush to the car, slam the doors, and point a flashlight out the window towards the center of the clearing where the rustling was coming from. A huge pair of glowing, wild, moon-colored eyes peers back at us.

While we had been sitting by the fire, a fat raccoon had invited himself over for dinner! He sits by the now-empty torn-apart plastic blue bag which only minutes ago contained three uncooked chicken breasts. Raccoon bats the bag with his enormous black-clawed paw, causing the rustle. I get out of the car and pour butane fluid on the fire, trying to scare him away with the big flames. But instead of fleeing, our guest nonchalantly scurries over to the picnic table, hops up with acrobatic skill, tears open the tightly tied garbage bag, and retrieves the uneaten sausages from the rubbish. Seems that we bought just enough food for the three of us!

We don’t have a tent, so we spend the night in the car, along with a quite unfriendly mosquito family that decides to hold a feast inside our car. It is so hot, and in the middle of the night, half-asleep, we turn on the air conditioning. When I wake up in the morning, the car won’t turn on. Seems that, instead of turning the key all the way and turning on the engine in the middle of the night, we just turned on the electricity. Our car is now out of battery. Luckily, there’s a really nice Mexican lady camping nearby who wakes up her husband for help. This guy is a pro: he carries an emergency car kit in his trunk with a special jump start machine, expertly backs his car centimeters from ours in the narrow clearing by our campsite, and successfully jump starts our car.

We’re back on the road! The speed limit here is 60 miles per hour, but once in a while it becomes 40, when we pass a town. Town = one house, an abandoned ivy-covered bar, a red truck, and a US flag. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we are being tailgated by a peculiar red truck driven by a bald, white-bearded guy who frantically waves at us to pull over on the side of the road. I do, but we stay in the car and only open the passenger window a bit. The man, who is quite plump, waddles over to our car at an impressive speed and waves his hands, screaming “Your trunk is open! It could explode any second!! You would be blind!!! You could die!!!!” He grabs our trunk and slams the hood down with impressive force before stomping back to his truck.

The road curves ahead as we leave Itasca State Park behind. Puffy dark storm clouds gather in the horizon as an ominous dull roar echoes through the woods. Thunder? A cannibal? A bear? Only time will tell! We drive on.