I’ve seen a lot of the world via computer screen—& not just digitized montages reminiscent of America’s Funniest Home Videos or 90’s music videos trounced from MTV to YouTube or documentaries on PBS’s website, but I’ve actively navigated bits of the earth I’ve never been to, & will likely never ever personally behold.
I even bookmarked a Google Earth location in southern France (a wavy green bit between Rocbaron & Belgentier) just because.
Because why not have somewhere impractical & irrational to hold in your back pocket as a wondrous just in case.
Why not have a dozen?
You can visit Ernest Shackleton’s Hut in Antarctica. It was restored entirely to resemble when he last roosted there, even with the stashed two crates of whisky returned, minus a small sample that was analyzed in order to recreate the turn of the century liquor for the discerning drinker.
Rows of mason jars & crates of supplies, crates as supplemental furniture all with a slick patina of having a hundred years’ worth of perspective.
It’s a nice place to sit sometimes. You can pull your chair up real close to the monitor, lean in & squint to mimic the soft focus of memory.
**
N 47° 35’ 021” W 93° 12’ 233”
My younger brother’s response was immediate when I asked where I could find Dad’s old land on Google Maps. “Those are the coordinates where his favorite stand was.”
I’d never been to his place up north—only heard stories.
When I was growing up we hunted small game near Chuck’s, near Bruce’s on public acreage, on Chuck’s neighbor’s land who didn’t know we were there so keep it down—alright?
I only had one deer season where I could be pried away from my extraordinarily engrossing teenage life for a whole week. We went to Bruce’s cabin. I saw a number of squirrels, heard “Name” by the Goo Goo Dolls at least six times on the evening radio. There was no TV. I learned to love spreading peanut butter on the bottom of a cheap cinnamon roll, felt the tingly touch of frostbite, read Crichton’s Congo, & had an alright time, though as a teenager I definitely saw it more of a drag than I do with the rosy glasses of retrospect on.
Wanting so badly to see a ghost. But even then it was alright. I just had, you know, my own crap going on. As most teenagers do.
Especially ones with newly divorced parents.
**
Dad didn’t get his land until a little before I turned 18. Up north, super cheap.
Way up north.
It was swampy—I heard. Tons of bugs. Like mesh nets of mosquitos that get stuck in your teeth
& the corners of your eyes when they’re swarming bad. The driveway’s so muddy you have to park a half-mile back & walk in. But careful—you can sink past your knee in the muck. Use the board path.
But I was too busy for that. I had my own crap going on, & once 18—I followed that crap immediately to the coast, where all crap eventually goes.
San Diego was the hub of skating, & Minnesota, while a solid backbone to the country—maybe the first vertebrae, its Atlas—was simply not Southern California in any aspect. Which was appealing.
But here I am, back via Google Maps. I saw the lot behind Saint Tim’s where they always held the fall carnival. I learned to love roulette through their dart game. “White or Red, kid, put your money down—throw the dart. Black lines or squares & the Lord wins, kid, & ya can’t be mad if the Lord’s the one gettin’ your money.”
You learn to accept house rules quickly.
I saw the brick back of the flower shop that once bore my carefully crafted graffiti in all its bubble-letter glory. A quick sand blast a few years later had scoured that from all but memory.
**
But, up the 65. All the way.
I won’t bother with the whole road trip through Streetview. I’ll skip past my adolescent range only a dozen or so miles before the road names were entirely strange—though an app that automated drives down memory lane would certainly do well.
I could imagine my dad brewing a cup of crappy coffee in the kitchen he’d grown up in, watched his parents grow old & both die in, & which he then lived in alone until he too died.
Such is life.
Until it isn’t.
It is dark—cold. The heater untouched despite the daytime chill. He waits, leaning against the counter, for the coffee to finish brewing—drinks it. Pours the remainder in an old wear-polished thermos. A thermos that’d travelled to many an ice fishing house, many deer stands, had sat in his pick-up cab at some tiny lake’s boat launch on countless early, early mornings, when even snowplow drivers were still asleep, shaving sheep in their surreal work dreams.
**
Up the 65 (though the 35 would likely be quicker). Up through Cambridge, where Aunt Sandy, now in Isanti, once lived—too distant for visits aside from Christmas. Miles amplified by the lack of scenery.
Up past lake after lake with names like Mud Lake & Coon Lake & Lake Minnewawa & Mille Lacs Lake. Lakes like puddles in a gigantic, dappled land—a field tossed & mashed by the gnash of a vicious storm.
Up the 65 through Mora as a 70’s era Cessna wobbles toward an unsteady landing like a duckling approaching the ground after its first flight. Past Spring Lake, but not the Spring Lake
which lent my high school its name—one of the two had a cameo in a Pixar film about someone leaving & wanting so badly to go back that her brain goes out of whack—& Spring Brook but not my Springbrook which lent its name to the nature center that held court for an 86’ tornado’s sixteen minute dance—the first tornado ever filmed from a helicopter.
Up the thin split between Knife Lake & Pocket Knife Lake—its diminutive little brother.
Google Maps accommodated my memory by capturing this stretch of two-lane highway in the fall. To me fall recalls poetry not because of its beauty but its cruel editing—the stripping of once flashy red & orange leaves for wasting their worth on gimmick while the cautious & solid yellow aspen leaves, & the condensed mint of evergreen needles color the landscape against the bleakness of a brown & grey backdrop.
Which is its own beauty.
A poem stripped of its façade, the eye-catching fall-ness of its gaudy language.
It’s not so bleak as it sounds—I don’t think.
**
In all actuality, the leaves were always orange.
Trees stop providing the nutrients for chlorophyll production which normally block out the orange with pushy production-green.
There’s still green grass, despite patches of brown.
San Diego’s green season—essentially—lasts only a few weeks. Everything else maintained the façade of vitality through the power of will in that desert (& tons of imported water).
But even in this bleak fall I’ve been streetviewing along—through—there’s fluffy white clouds with a little damp underbelly ready to drizzle a little—but not storm—the sky is a bright light blue & not the pale off-white blue that some poems have, & the air is crisp as the air in Shackleton’s Hut, though—not nearly as cold yet.
**
Dear reader, do be soothed to know that I’ve gazed ahead & we’ve entered summer before we reach the stretch of highway 65 that runs along the meandering upper reaches of the Mississippi. But still we’re not to dad’s cabin, which he built after purchasing the land for a steal.
A steal. Even for land in a swamp.
I imagine him sitting in the small, near empty cabin in the dark, an empty can of beans sitting beside a pan air drying, a single spoon & bowl.
A GPC smoldering an inch from his knuckles as he chuckles & replays the bit from Holy Grail that feels most relevant:
“Listen, lad. I built this kingdom up from nothing. When I started here, all there was was swamp. Other kings said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp—but—I built it all the same, just to show 'em. It sank into the swamp. So, I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third one. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one... stayed up! & that's what you're gonna get, lad: the strongest castle in these islands.”
Of course he’s talking to me, because I’m the one imagining this, though I’m the only son that never saw the land, never helped clear brush or build this or that or hunt or scout.
No balloon-ball in the limb-choked yard too claustrophobic even for Wiffleball. It was there, but I, you know—I had my crap going on out in California, & my crap didn’t pay for crap, & plane tickets, well—plane tickets are expensive. I made it back for a couple Christmases.
The first couple, mostly.
**
The road trip’s soundtrack has been taken over by “Name” as I continue north, up the 65. The lyrics roll along the flat road like coins down a slide.
This road, the moment that passed me by. This song: a tired, tired song replaying on the radio & I sing along because what else can I do? Hide? There’s nowhere to hide out on a road trip.
At home there’re plenty of places.
Shackleton’s Hut is a great place to hole up when the world has it in its collective head to get you. When you want to find a small place in the Antarctic you want to sit in a corner of that shack & be tiny for a while.
I sit with my back to the stove & look at the scuffed wooden floor & imagine the lives of those explorers over a hundred years ago, with temperatures even colder than the 60-below-zero I’d grown up dreading. My Sorel boots, a futuristic bit of frippery to the fur-covered men who all appear like mountain men from Jeremiah Johnson in my visions—perhaps because it was dad’s favorite movie.
Or I look at the ceiling at the pair of runners under their sledges & think of the mile after identical mile of snow passing under those runners like blank months of calendars
when nothing of note happens.
**
Up the 65 past Mille Lacs Lake, into the Solana State Forest & the overcast has grown more ominous. The cloud cover of regret has begun to huddle together in sky. I begin to wonder if I’d been on the wrong road when I’d peeked ahead & saw a lush green summer lay in store.
Checking the date of the Google streetview recording I feel I’ve written it myself. October 2008—the month before deer hunting season. The first season after dad died. I stop & sit roadside in the state forest. In my computer chair, in San Diego in 2014 but—simultaneously—in the year of my father’s death, in the state I grew up in.
An unknown road.
Rice River sits beside me unmoving to my plight or the passage of time—stuck here in 2008. Hardly a river, or even a brook—this ditch, offshoot of a creek—is beset by weeds & muck.
To my right, east, the break in trees is just about to end & a chorus of fall colors rises. The clouds warn of rain. Dwelling on the past here is bound to dampen my psyche when this trip was intended as a happy one.
Now it’s dad singing “Name” as if expecting me to answer his questions
“Did you lose yourself somewhere out there?”
“I grew up way too fast.”
“Did you get to be a star?”
“Reruns all became my history.”
“A tired song keeps playing on a tired radio.”
“I’m tired too, radio, but I won’t tell ‘em your name.”
Seriously, development people, Memory Lane LLC, chop-chop, we need this app. Or, maybe it’s just me.
I can’t stick around here & do it, so it’s time to leave Rice River, the forest, time to move on, even if time won’t.
**
But time always moves on, & in McGregor less than three miles later we’ve left the bleak cusp of winter. 2008’s cam turns slightly to the left & BAM!
The brilliant lusciousness of summer 2012. July 2012, what a month. I’d just graduated with my masters & was full of enthusiasm. Promise.
Although by July the lush period had passed in San Diego, Minnesota was fresh & vibrant. & Reader, I’m sorry I looked ahead. That it’s the first place I looked. I’m sorry I knew that it was midday & the roadside was bathed in the sort of vital summer kelly green that follows a wet spring. That I knew the few clouds in the sky are but breaths—wisps of ice crystal teasing the blue.
Other than that, it was almost exactly the same as the roadsides I’d seen through most of the journey. It was always the past, & maybe someday I will go there in person out of the same nostalgic urge that made me call his number, the same as when it was grandpa’s house number.
The same one dad gave girls when he was in high school.
Walking by proud pigeons on the Pike in Long Beach the day after he died I dialed one last time with an apron still tied around my waist & less than fifty bucks from the lunch rush. I didn’t expect anything except the reception of his answering machine, & hoped I didn’t have to hold my voice steady for a live person, though—I admitted to the machine (whom god-knows-who eventually checked) that I only wanted to hear his voice once more, as tourists bubbled away from me like I was a match marching its pyre only inches under the clear cellophane wrapper of existence.
But that was the 2008 me. The clouds have all but cleared by dad’s place, which is back in the woods somewhere in the bright sunshine that makes me wanna play catch with someone—anyone. San Diego or Minnesota, Antarctica or Rocbaron—Cuers even.
We’ll throw a Wiffleball or a honeydew or a snowball.
Or just shoot the crap with my dad while we throw a ghost ball like in Field of Dreams.
The path ahead of me was one I had never travelled. We weren’t farther north, just—somewhere that I’d never been. On that road, the sun was shining & everything—everything in all directions was green & shimmering.
These places exist everywhere.
Zebulon Huset is a high school teacher, writer and photographer. He won the Gulf Stream 2020 Summer Poetry Contest and his writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Atlanta Review, Meridian, North American Review, The Southern Review, Fence and many others. His short prose chapbook Between Even Rows of Trees is forthcoming from Bottlecap Editions.