Northern Roads
It was summer. I was tired of getting buzzed by the same drivers on the same Milwaukee road at the same time each day after work. My wife and I were tired of the rush hour traffic, the predictable pop music blaring through open windows. So we headed north.
She slowed the car on the gravel driveway. Our five-hour drive was up, and the cabin sat mottled in shadows. Before I grabbed my backpack, before I strung up my fly rod, before I threw the wheels on my bike, I walked down the steep wooded bluff to the clear, dark lake.
We were just outside Mercer, Wisconsin, a small northern town from which snowmobile paths and county highways string their solitary paths through forest. We were there to sit by the fire, and forget about the business back home for a little bit.
The next morning I brewed some coffee and ate an apple fritter, two eggs and some toast. Watching the lake through the trees, looking for patterns in the wind.
I wished I had a brighter jersey. Locals aren’t used to bikers on the roads, and I’d be alone. On the map, the road I rode out for hooks into a green and watery topography, and traces out in no predictable fashion.
County Highway FF isn’t quite fit for its designation. It’s less like a speedway, and more like a two-lane amusement-park ride, dipping and climbing through the same landscape that created the men of American folklore wielding mythic strength and insatiable axes.
Despite being encrusted in snow and ice for half the year, the pavement was hospitable. My line of sight never seemed to clear more than a hundred yards, inducing a satisfying claustrophobia as eighty-foot pine leaned over me. At their base, bright patches of pink and violet lupine gathered like telescope spied star-belts. I rode an ancient and stout railroad bridge over a roiling two-step waterfall that calmed into a huge lake.
I hooked onto Swamp Creek Road, and in less than ten turns of the pedal was churning through gravel and descending to water level. And then back up again and through a royal timber hall of spruce and oak. The road, or trail now, narrowed. Something in the woods’ verdant uniform caught my eye. I stopped.
Vertiginous silence. The marker, half covered by what I hoped wasn’t poison ivy, told me that I was on an old logging line. That horse-drawn sleighs piled with logs would skate along here in the dead of winter a hundred years ago. That I should stay out of the woods because they are private property.
I kept going, the gravel spitting beneath me. I turned onto an overgrown snowmobile path. Chippewa Fire Lane. I hadn’t seen a single car since I left the cabin an hour ago. I hadn’t heard anything since the waterfall. No one was there. Maybe no one had been there since the snow melted. Bright or dark jersey, there had been no one to see me. This solitude.
My wife, her family, and so many of my friends, cannot wait to see the first snowflake in a November sky because it means they will soon be back on snowmobiles. I’ve never understood their attraction to it. You need a trailer for your car—make that a truck—just to get the snowmobiles to a trailhead. It’s incredibly loud. There’s no physical exertion involved, so what reward? But, as I wheeled farther along, gaining pace, I imagined they must feel something similar to what I was then feeling.
I was finding speed. That I was on private property or public land quickly became irrelevant. Faster, and the forest became more immense and even less distinct. Sheer impenetrability. Yet, the wind at my face evidenced a passage through. The gravel turning over. The snow flaring up. Your heart in your ears. This speed is yours. In rapid trajectory comes freedom from the daily. Faster, and your legs burn. The engine reaches a higher pitch. Your heart in your ears. Then as if some impossible resonance is reached, all becomes quiet and clear. This silence. This clarity still exists, and I had found exactly what I set out for.
