Lotsa Harrassment by Law Enforcement

The trip is off to an infuriating start because for the third in as many months I’ve been in a situation where law enforcement officers make defamatory accusations of no merit.
The one Saturday night was the worst, and could have lasting repercussions. First night of the trip, camped in a state forest campground on my way north, sleeping, after midnight, suddenly somebody tells me to come out of my tent. If they said they were cops it was the first thing out and I slept through it and don’t remember. I ask what for, and one of them repeats the command except adds, “lemme see your hands.”

Initially, I thought I was being robbed, but even without contacts and with Mag-lites pointed in my face, was able to identify them as police, Lake County Sheriff’s deputies. One of them said their bloodhound (it appeared to be a goofy little Cocker Spaniel, but I can’t see much without contacts though still enough to see it was no hound) had tracked directly to my tent from a car that had been entered and rifled through.

They kept their flashlights in my eyes and disbelieved most everything I said. Then I sat at the picnic table shivering in long underwear while the deputy ran my license and the dog handler trained his light on me. Later I moved into the squad SUV and talked with the deputy, telling him repeatedly what I’d been doing before going to bed. He still believed that stupid dog over me.

“I’ve seen him work before,” he said, and added how the dog used signals to show he was smelling me. That was the most frustrating, because there I was telling him in plain English that he was blaming the wrong dude, but to no avail. He would file the report with the county prosecutor, who may decide to summon me to court, all the way up in Two Harbors.

The first of the three happened in Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. My friend Barn, his girlfriend Jessica and I reached the park entrance at about 6:30 for a quick peek, the park was to close at 7. The ranger at the entrance booth said in an it’s-all-good sort of tone that we could stay past dark (sunset was around 7), just to be careful of antelope on the road while leaving. About a half hour after close I was making a photo and heard shouting. A ranger was yelling at us to get up where he was and don’t discard the rocks we were supposedly stealing.
A second ranger showed. She called me a liar when I told her what the first ranger had said about staying past dark. They searched our pockets and Barn’s car. Jessica had a bottle cap she’d picked off the ground that the fresh ranger actually confiscated. They let us go with a warning.

The second run-in was a couple of weeks ago. I went to pick up my wife Lily’s friend, Gugu, at the airport. Gugu was flying in from India to take an exam and visit. I waited while customs interrogated her for four hours. She had a proper visa and paperwork, but they accused her of planning to work illegally, of intending to marry an American for citizenship “like her friend” (we later joked the security man was proposing to her). They demanded her computer passwords and read her email and chat room transcripts. They called Lily, who was seeing a patient at the hospital, and threatened that unless she talked to them at that very moment they would send Gugu back to India and ban her from the U.S. for five years. They called me and her uncle in Virginia. At three and a half hours in I called them and a man denied she was still in custody. A half hour later she was finally out bedraggled and hurt.


As for now, I’m in Grand Marais at least through the night. I’m staying with my old friend Adam Gallagher who is living on the beach in a camper. The spot is okay with its abundant wildflowers surrounding much of the camper, the expanse of polished cobblestones leading to the lake and the morning sun burning like a red ball over an unseen Michigan every clear morning. Full Post»

A Nonlinear Frame

For the last few years I’ve been brainstorming for a good way to write about hiking the Appalachian and Pacific Crest Trails (plus 2,000 miles of the Continental Divide Trail). I want to avoid a linear recollection of the trips, and may now have a way to do that.

This spring I spent a month in the Southwest desert and was blown away that within the week I was, for the first time ever, completely homesick. In a few days I’ll be leaving for another trip, about three weeks long. This one will be a shot at recapturing some of the mind-bending introspection and quiet fun that attracted me to wilderness travel in the first place. Perhaps such things were only possible while younger, more care-free and single, but I don’t think so. Maybe it was the constricting canyon walls and blowing dust of the SW that dried my spirits, or possibly just inadequate physical conditioning. Missing my wife was a big part of it, but two loves must be able to coexist, even though they often require separation from the other. If there’s anyplace to do it, it’s the familiar rocky forests surrounding Lake Superior. Cool lake water and mossy chunks of basalt under pine, birch and cedar form the backdrop of my outdoor memory.

So, through the surprise of the desert trip, and the as-of-yet unknown outcome of the Northland, connections and comparisons can be made with the long trails, and around this frame, the story unfolds.

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Tent and a Trail

The driver’s seat of our old Grand Cherokee was a good vantage point to spot the delivery box on my doorstep holding a tent to test for Backpacker Magazine. It’ll likely only amount to a line or two of copy, at best, but, hey, it’s still exciting to receive a positive reply to one of my queries.

My original major destination of this trip was The Coastal Trail in Ontario’s Pukaskwa National Park. It looks like a real beaut on the map—hugging the Lake Superior coast for 60 kilometers in a roadless craggy boreal wonderland until it dead ends on the lonely banks of the Swallow River. From here I was going to simply turn around and walk back, in lieu of dropping money I don’t have on a boat pick-up, but after calling the park learned a footbridge has been deemed “structurally unsound,” and that they were waiting on an engineer that very day. The Canuck sounding fellow told me to call back Monday, which I did, but they are still waiting for the engineer and the trail may be closed for some time.

Here’s a link to a photo of the bridge. It’s a gnarly looking thin thing, but where else other than Canada would a whole hiking trail be shut down to keep people from treading onto a bridge that may perhaps be unsafe? I would rather have the liberty to personally assay the span myself and risk a tragic plunge into the Willow River than be told the entire walking coastline has been closed to prevent the possibility of its failure.

Oh well, Lake Superior Provincial Park has another trail by the same name and similar distance, albeit unfortunately lacking the rare remoteness of Pukaskwa.

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Twin Cities photos posted

About four miles and into the narrows of Paria Canyon early this April I ran into another hiker. It was at a time I was beginning to realize then that 1) it had been years since I’d gone backpacking alone 2) my fitness level was lacking, and I was already tired—amounting to a sort of low grade hysteria that I was going to have for the next four days--so I was glad to see another face. We ran into each other later that day and then again the next, but the interesting thing was that this fellow, Kevin Venator from St. Louis, is the creator of a website, http://www.americaswonderlands.com, that I’d used in planning that trip. He’s also working on a stock library of city images (http://www.gigastock.com), so after returning home, I contacted him and submitted a mass of Twin Cities photos, which are now posted:

Thanks, Kevin!

http://www.americaswonderlands.com/Minneapolis_pictures.htm

http://www.americaswonderlands.com/Saint_Paul_pictures_st_paul_mn.htm

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