SPLIT
ROCK LIGHTHOUSE
From
the very beginning Jack had planned a detour up Highway 61. He wanted
to experience the highway Bob Dylan had famously written of, take it
up to Hibbing and see the childhood home Dylan had grown up in there.
He thought he might find some of Dylan’s muse up there on the
Minnesota coast. But not even during his wildest office fantasies had
he pictured it this breathtaking; if ever there was a place to go
looking for Dylan’s muse, this was it.
He
sat Indian style
on a
flat boulder on the cliff at his campsite, looking out at Split Rock
Lighthouse looming in the distance over Lake Superior, its
revolving beacon flashing over
great crags of rock that made Superior’s coastline crooked here,
over a small island of
orangish gray rock which
was coated in
towering green pines, over the eternal horizon of Superior’s
waters. He looked with a
sense of wonder that he
thought he had lost along with his childhood a
long time ago. The scene
reminded him of the Oregon
coast in The Goonies
– when One-Eyed Willie’s
eighteenth century pirate ship emerges from the cliffs out onto the
Pacific, majestically
emancipated from its dark cave.
From his spot up on the cliff, he could hear children from campsites
below playing Ghosts in the Graveyard, chanting “Dead man! Dead
man! Come a-LIVE!” Oh, the sweet memories of childhood.
He
had arrived at Split Rock Lighthouse State Park in Minnesota just
before eight o’clock central time, with little time to spare in
pitching his tent before dark. It had been a long and beautiful
travel day. The four mile
hike from Lake Superior Cabin to his car seemed much easier than the
hike in, as many portions of the trail had dried up in
the sweltering heat of the last couple days. His
bags were also considerably lighter on the hike out, on
account that he no longer
had the weight of his food sagging
him down. Many more snake
sightings kept him guarded during the hike out, but he had seen so
many during his trip that he was mostly shrugging them off by then.
When he finally arrived at the trail head, sweaty and physically
exhausted, he never thought he had been so happy to see his car.
In an impromptu picnic he immediately scarfed down two pop tarts and a
hot water bottle he found sitting in the back seat, which gave him
just enough energy to resolve to see the Lake of the Clouds after
all. He blasted the air
conditioning and drove
through the forested road out of the park to Ontanagon, where he
picked up a cold bottle of Mountain Dew, a king sized Snickers bar,
and a long-awaited
fresh tin of Grizzly Wintergreen.
Feeling a new man,
he made the drive back into the Porcupine Mountains, determined to
make one last hike to see the famed Lake of the Clouds, which
did not disappoint.
There
were long stretches of the drive through the Western Upper Peninsula
and Northern Wisconsin during which he saw no other cars for miles
and miles, and on several of these occasions Jack caught himself
wondering if he had ascended to another world. For
the first time in several weeks he found himself feeling as if life
were more than a chore.
Along
the drive he
spotted several deer along the roadside, but other than that he saw
no wildlife – nothing but North
Woods forest, rolling hills, rivers and creeks, and small rinky-dink
towns that weren’t even on the map. He made a brief pit stop at a
scenic rest stop on the Superior coast of Northern Wisconsin, where
he admired the girls laying out on the beach and walked out on the
dock to view the enormous lumber mills on the lakeside, imagining
himself a die-hard Packers fan who had worked these mills half his
life; he
could live here, he thought – he could fight in a place like this.
He made a second pit stop
at an outpost in Minnesota just outside of Duluth, where he ate one
of the best pulled pork sandwiches of his life for dinner. From
there, he crossed
the Duluth Bridge and veered
North up Highway 61.
When
he had envisioned the trip, Jack had pictured some pivotal epiphany
or some other grand metaphorical event occurring on Bob Dylan’s
famed
Highway 61. Dylan
had been his very first inspiration for writing, back in high school,
and Highway 61 had always symbolized some metaphorical escape from
everything he hated about his hometown back then. He had even went
digging through his old high school cd collection, picked out
“Highway 61 Revisited” for this portion of the journey, hoping it
might set in motion some life-altering realization:
Well,
Georgia Sam, he had a bloody nose
Welfare
Department, they wouldn’t give him no clothes
He
asked poor Howard, “Where can I go?”
Howard
said, “There’s only one place I know”
And
Sam said, “Tell me quick, man, I got to run”
Oh,
Howard just pointed with his gun
And
said, “That way, down on Highway 61”
So
it was disappointing to find the entire drive up Highway 61 to Two
Harbors clogged by orange traffic barrels and men in neon green
vests.
“Still,”
he reminded himself, “hard to feel down considering
all the sights and scenery we saw today”. From the hike back up to
the Little Carp River Gorge, to the Lake of the Clouds, the Northern
Wisconsin coast, the Aerial Lift Bridge over the water in Duluth, and
the massive cliffs of the Minnesota coast, it was hard to complain
about that kind of day, especially considering that a mere five weeks
ago he had been pent up in a cubicle staring out the window, longing
for this exact place. And
still
the best was yet
to
come; when he arrived at his campsite in Split Rock Lighthouse State
Park at sundown, the view was unlike anything he had ever seen
before.
He
parked his car at the designated lot and made the short hike to his
campsite on the cliff. The
fire ring and tent site lay on level grass on a ledge of the cliff,
and a narrow trail led upwards to the crest of the cliff. He climbed
up to find the view of a lifetime laid out before him – a three
hundred foot drop to the crags of Lake Superior below, cliffs that
wound their way around a small cove that was protected by a small
island, towering pines jutting out at odd angles from all over the
cliffs and island. Above it all stood the majestic Split Rock
Lighthouse, its beacon revolving across Lake Superior’s vast, deep
blue enormity. He stood atop the cliff for a long time, breathing in
the lake air, reflecting, pondering life and the awe-inspiring
view
before him. The lighthouse fit so naturally into the scene that it
looked like it could not have possibly been man made. Jack thought it
must have stood there on the cliff for all of time – before man
ever stepped foot in this country.
When
darkness fell he gathered his radio, journal, and notebooks and
hunkered down in the tent. He adjusted the radio dial for several
minutes, searching for a decent station, letting his mind get lost in
each station he vetted before panning
the dial to the next – classical music (some Mozart composition or
another), Albanian talk show, “KQ Classic Rock Duluth” (the same
station he got at the cabin in the Porcupine Mountains, which he was
frankly sick of), Trump worship and Obama bashing on several
stations, religious babble, sports radio! Finally. There
seemed to be two sports stations mashed together by a miniscule turn
of the radio dial, both stations talking NBA Draft Night.
“Oh,
for Chrissakes,” he said out loud in the tent, as if asking the gods for mercy, "is the Chicago station really coming in clearer than the Minnesota station?"
[It was].
“Fuck
Chicago,” he thought bitterly, all of the memories of her apartment
in Wrigleyville swirling up in him like vengeant demons, “Chicago
is dead to me.”
After
scanning through the entire spectrum of the AM and FM radio dials again, though, he
accepted defeat and resolved to give the Chicago sports station a
shot. It was sports radio, at least, he figured.
“It’s
just a radio station,” he thought, attempting yet again to suppress
memories of the past two years in Chicago with her.
“Fucking
sick of these Chicago stations,” a darker voice whispered, “how
is it possible that Chicago stations come in across all the Great
Lakes?”
Jackson
was testing his limits. He opened the tent flap and smoked a cigarette while looking at the stars. He decided he would try and read some Harry Potter, try and get lost in another world for a while -- any world but his -- a plan which went smoothly enough until
the big news came that “with the fourteenth overall pick in the
2016 NBA Draft, the Chicago Bulls select Denzel Valentine, shooting
guard from Michigan State University”.
“Denzel
fucking Valentine,” he reflected, no longer angry but just plain
sad, “her alma mater”. At that, he lost it.
By
the time he calmed himself down, it was near midnight. He had wrote
out enough curses and mad thoughts in his journal for one night. He
unzipped the flap of the tent and climbed out to retrieve some
cookies he had accidentally left on the picnic table. The
stars were bright in a clear midnight blue sky. He spotted the Big
Dipper hanging above Lake Superior, glowing magically over the
cliffs. He crawled back into his tent, his flashlight lantern
lighting the interior, and readjusted the radio dial. KQ Classic Rock
it was.
“When
was the last time you were in a tent?” he asked, as if he were changing the conversation with someone.
The
last time he was in a tent was with Al and Jamie back in the summer
of 2011, the worst summer of his life to date, hitting the slopes and guzzling beers on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan in some
feeble attempt to forget the fact that the girl he had just
transferred schools for had left him mere weeks before they were
scheduled to move in to their apartment together, when he was a shell
of a human being. The last time before that was sophomore year in his
college house, when he and Andy lived in individual tents in the
unfinished basement for a semester after they had been kicked out of
their fraternity house, when he was a loose cannon.
He
listened to the sounds of night audible over the soft songs of the
radio. He
could hear the big semi trucks rolling down Highway 61. “Bob
Dylan’s sacred Highway 61,” he
reflected; he was here at last.
Jack wondered what those truck drivers were feeling and thinking as they rumbled through the lonely night – heartsick for a girl halfway across the country? Homesick for a house where children slept peacefully in their beds? Angry or content with the hand they had been dealt in life? – wondered if they could see Dylan’s ghosts out on Highway 61.
