Warm holiday greeting

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 46
12/31/09

I hate New Year’s. Just hate it. This crap-ass holiday depresses me more than reading The Road while watching Mystic River. After two weeks of festive good cheer, parties and presents, fireplaces and holly, you wake up January 2 and Everything. Just. Sucks.

All those Christmas decorations – glimmering symbols of fun and warmth just a week ago – now serve as reminders that you have to get back to work. Get your ass up that ladder and pull those lights down, bitch. You spend two hours sweeping up the evergreen splinters that your Christmas tree – now nothing more than a dead and brittle fire hazard – so kindly deposited all over your house when you finally evicted its rotting corpse, but your feet will still resemble that dude from Hellraiser until March. You suddenly go from having worked maybe 2 full weeks in the last 6, and now you don’t get a day off until what? Good Friday? New Year’s Day is nothing but the first of 365 Monday mornings.

And you kid yourself with these ‘resolutions.’ Let me enlighten you here: If you really need some contrived reason to do something, it ain’t gonna happen. You either want to do it or you need to do it. Making a promise to yourself just because the picture on your calendar changed isn’t the best motivation in the world. I’m the perfect example here. A few years ago, I started wearing a flab suit made of neoprene for the express purposes of hiding all my fabulous muscle definition. I really need to take it off. Problem is, I can only do that by moving my legs at a ridiculous speed for minutes at a time. Jogging. I hate jogging. HatehateHATE. Yet I live in a place seemingly custom-made for jogging. And if I haven’t been able to get off my ass and do it in the spring, summer and fall, in the middle of this land of parks and scenery, I sure as shittin’ won’t start doing it because I made a promise in the dead of winter to a baby in a golden sash. Or Dick Clark. Who do you make resolution pacts with?

Here’s an idea. Maybe we need some incentive to keep these resolutions. Say you break one. What if Dick Clark showed up in the middle of the night and showered you with stroke drool? Good god, I want to go for a subzero run just thinking about that scenario. But if the only motivation is a promise made to yourself while slurping down sauerkraut and watching Ryan ‘I am a pimp’ Seacrest, guess what? You will stay fat. You will remain at your desk. You will keep smoking. You will continue killing hobos and wearing their flesh. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with these things. I’m just saying we should all stop kidding ourselves.

Anyway. I love the holidays. Had a very nice month sequestered here in Minny. Saw some good people, got some great gifts and gave some better ones. But the holidays are over. We can hope that 2010 sucks less than 2009. But we can’t count on it. Happy New Year. Back to work.

I'm glovin' it (nyuk!)

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 45
12/13/09
15:50

Before I moved to Minnesota, gloves were never on my list of things to worry about. Sure, if I knew I’d be spending an inordinate amount of time in the cold, like if I had to hide a body in a meat locker or keep a pair of black market kidneys iced up, I’d maybe make sure I grabbed a pair of work gloves.

But here? Holy shit. I wouldn’t be caught DEAD outside without a pair of neoprene, 750-fill power, lamb-lip-lined, water-proof, air-proof, battery-powered, one-size-fits-all babyskin gloves. Some mornings, you can’t get from your front door to the car without having to scrape the ice off your fingernails. And don’t you dare touch a doorknob out there. Not unless you plan to remodel your palms after that German guy’s in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Winter here makes you rethink a ton of things. Water pipe routes. Plow schedules. Emergency kits in your car. Ice thickness. How long its been since your car was started. Winter here is an opponent, not just some soggy bridge between fall and spring. But you deal with it. You check your propane every three days and hope to Christ that maybe the wind chill won’t drop the temps much under -15. And if it does get that cold? Screw it. You have nice gloves.

Here are some pictures, including fuzzy deer, a smartass rabbit, and some yahoos racing 'ice yachts' on ice that ain't been ice for too awful long.

So I was wrong about the blizzard...

Great White Disptach

Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 44
12/09/09
0847

It came. It saw. It kicked my deer blind's ass.

Here I sit at work, depite the blizzard that raged last night and is, in fact, still raging outside. I'm here despite the fact that I have the third longest and second most dangerous commute. Despite the fact that there is a snow emergency, and that Red Wing is largely deserted. Despite the fact that no one bothered to plow my road, meaning I had no clue where the road began and the Horrible Drifting Snow ended.

I have this asshole to thank:

Unlike his namesake, Ol' Oden here has never let me down. Does it have rust spots the size of a severed head on every flat surface? You bet it does. Does it take 45 minutes to heat up, even on a blistering summer day? Goddamn right. Does it plow through snow like a raped reindeer? Hell and yes. Keep in mind that the above photo was snapped over a year ago, and the rust has spread faster than Tiger's hepatitis.

Sigh. I could be sitting at home by the fire in my jammies, half drunk on cider left in the fridge since Halloween. I could be free to scratch me nuggers without first glancing in three directions. Sometimes, dropping $750 on this rattletrap snow molester doesn't seem like the wisest of choices.

Here are some pics of a snowed-under Red Wing. I'll likely be dropping in a ton more throughout the day, because goddammit, it's too damn snowy to work. Check me flicker page once in a while.

The calm before

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 43
12/08/09
06:25

There’s a blizzard warning in effect for pretty much the entirety of Minnesota and western Wisconsin. We’ve known about this looming monster since Sunday night, and it’s supposed to unleash hell upon us sometime between now and Thursday. When it does, it could dump 1-8 inches of snow. That’s crack meteorology right there.

A subtle edge lingers in the air, as everyone waits, breath held and shovels at the ready, for our first real snow of the season. We made it through November warm and dry. Barely even rained, mostly settling on sunny and 45ish. But we know we’ll pay for this tropical November. You opt not to wear a coat to work the week of Thanksgiving? In Minnesota? Brother, you better believe that retribution will be paid in full.

The warnings are all over the place. The quiet little brine streaks that appeared on the roads overnight. The occasional flash of orange in the distance, snowplows laying down ash and gravel. Every third pickup in the land proudly sporting a bigass shovel. The dump trucks overflowing with sawdust. Oh yeah. Gonna be a mother.

As I sit in my kitchen window on this grey, cold (but not as cold as it goddamn will be) Tuesday morning, packs of tight little flakes – barely flakes! – ease their way down to the ground. No hurry or malice in their movements as they powder the tiny doe in the yard. These flakes are just along for the ride, going where the breeze wills them. We know they’re scouts, secret warriors sent to sweet talk us into opening our doors, into embracing the true army when it arrives. We know this. We know that snowy halo on the little deer’s brow is a portent of Very Bad Things. We know this. Winter is coming. This week. And all we can do is wait.

Until then, we chew our nails and salt our walks and hope we didn’t drive our rear-wheel Chevy Toboggan to work on the day Icy Hell descends upon us all. Winter ain’t coming. Winter is here. Chain up.

Notes from damn near Canada (for reals)

Great White Dispatch

Notes From Damn Near Canada

No. 42
11/09/09
19:40

Airika, the dogs and I spent Halloween in a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Beside a lake. Near an abandoned mental institution. Ok, that last part was a lie.

Airika is batshit and loves camping. Me, I enjoy emphatically not camping. Call me crazy, but when I have a few days to kill vacation-style, I enjoy simple things. The beach. Warmth. Pooping indoors. So staying at the Snowshoe Country Lodge way up in the true Damn Near Canada seemed a decent compromise. Except I still had to shit outside and bathe from a bucket. Methinks I was bamboozled.

Snowshoe Country Lodge is about 4.5 hours norther than our place, way up in real moose-and wolf country. We were instructed to keep our speeds down near the camp, because 'moose are not afraid of cars.' Well.


We actually saw no moose, but we did hear wolves off in the distance every now and again.And then there was the frequent wailing of Eddie, the camp malamute (or husky or wolfish-type dog). Nothing like being jerked out of a Friday the 13th nightmare at 3am by an ear-splitting howl just outside your window. Terrifying and mournful, all at once. Like waking up to that creepy girl from The Ring standing at the foot of your bed, singing The Smiths.


Yep. You wanted water, you had to pump it your owndamnself. Vacation!

The trails around the lodge were pristine. More vague gaps between the trees rather than actual trails, it's clear that not a whole helluva lot of people get up to these parts.

Snowshoe Lodge is perfectly situated for either summer, when you can spend the time sunning on the banks of Sand Lake, or deep winter when you can snowshow (dar) or do some cross-country skiing. When we were there, it was just kinda wet. Checking this place out in the dead of winter, when everything is solid white and civilization is likely unattainable would be interesting. Of course, taking a 30-degree dump sucked enough. Take 40 of those degrees away? I might just start shitting in the wood-burning stove.

No running water or indoor terlet, but goddammit, our cabin was handicap-friendly.

Moss and lichen covered everything.

This is where we found all the bodies.


Tired old dogs.

A ton more pics at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vangoat.

Injun summer after all

Great White Dispatch

Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 41
10/27/09
0620

It’s damn near November, which means that while winter hasn’t exactly settled in, it’s standing outside our door holding a suitcase. Last Friday, a Christian Slater-style hard rain resulted in this…

…pretty much out of nowhere. It wasn’t really cold enough for accumulation, but the sheer volume of falling snow stacked up pretty quickly. Which made the drive home from work in my Chevy Toboggan sorta hairy at times. Have I taken precautions against another situation where an impromptu snowstorm makes driving a rear-wheel drive pickup with no weight in the bed a little less dangerous? Of course not. 300 pounds of sand is buried somewheres in my garage.

Anyway. A few days before the Day After Tomorrow slapped us in the face, were granted one last beautiful summer day. I managed to sneak out with my camera and remind myself that no matter how doom-and-gloom I get, I can always step outside and say, “Yeah. This is mine.”

The entirety of Barn Bluff, as shown from the, er, other bluff.

This is taken from the park that basically surrounds my house.

These, too.

The view-from-the-dock shot it kinda overdone, but for good reason. Damn, it’s purty.

And here's some other random shots from the day:

There’s a bunch more pics posted at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vangoat.
Enjoy these, because I’ll be spending Halloween weekend five hours north in some cabin in the woods. The next pictures you get here might be from the county coroner, and might include my axe-murdered body. Cabin in the middle of nowhere? On a lake? On Halloween? With no place to poop indoors? Yeah. Clearly not MY idea.

Seriously, though, the place looks pretty rad. My goal is to grab a picture of a moose.
http://www.snowshoecountry.com

What. Ever.

Great White Dispatch

Notes From Damn Near Canada

No. 40

10/12/09

0750

Three weeks before Halloween and I'm watching a legitimate snowstorm. Good times here in Minnesota.

Nice and happy pics

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 39
10-7-09
17:29

Since so many people gave me the bitchings about what a downer the last post was, here's some shiny happy photographs!


This is partying down in Red Wing.



Hey look, a bug on a flower. HOW CREATIVE I AM.


I do believe this young chap lives under my porch. Since he started showing up and dancing for the camera at PRECISELY 8:26 every night, Tulip the Dog has been trying her damndest to dig through the porch floorboards. This may be a coincidence. Or it may be awesome. Do you have a fox den under YOUR house? HELLS NO, YOU DON'T.


Felty.


Fawny.


Glowy.


This is Cankles the Deer. He has some sort of swollen hoof issue. His rear passenger-side foot is twice the size of his others. When deer have foot problems, their antlers grow asymmetrical.


And finally, a shot of Barn Bluff and the Eisenhower Bridge from Bay Point Park. Really, the Red Wing scenery even makes a hack like me look good.

I'll have a whole bunch of other pics posted soon at http://www.flickr.com/photos/vangoat if I can ever get my goodamn uploader to work.

Sure am glad it's rainin'

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 38
10-5-09
18:45

It’s been pissing rain for two weeks. It literally has not stopped raining for something like 12 days. Even when the sun does poke out, there’s always a dark cloud or two hanging around, ready to drop a few on your windshield, just so you don’t get too comfortable with all that warmth. But for the most part, the sun doesn’t even bother. We’ve had a peculiar wet and grey coupla weeks, a very Ohioesque stretch. It’s been kinda cool. Weeks like these actually make me miss Ohio a little.

But this morning, the rain was hard and cold and depressing. It had an extra bite to it, a subtle reminder that, yeah, this will soon turn to snow. It’s not the threat of winter that has me bummed. It’s the passage of time. Another season down. And what have you done?

When we moved to Minnesota, one of my overarching goals was to slow down. To take breaths now and again, get some things done that needed done not for practical-life purposes but for peace-of-mind, better-yourself purposes. To stop worrying about every goddamn little thing. To slow down, physically and mentally. I was going to do it. I was.

But you can’t slow down. Time won’t allow it. Christmas becomes Easter becomes summer becomes fall becomes Christmas. Every chronological landmark is a reminder of something I’ve meant to do but haven’t. The end of the baseball season reminds me that I haven’t paid my fantasy football fees. The first morning frost reminds me that I haven’t slapped plastic over the two-way wind tunnels acting as windows in my house. The falling leaves whisper that I haven’t mastered photography enough to properly capture them. Every Christmas, another year older, every New Year’s another chance to feel shitty about the three half-written novels on my hard drive.

You’d think that typing this, getting it on record, would be a form of catharsis or at the very least, a way to jumpstart myself. Something that causes me to leap into action.

Nah. I just want to bitch about something.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go back to watching the rain. This black and dreary day matches my mood, and I want to enjoy it. I’ll get something done another time.

*And I didn't take the photo. Stole it from somewheres.

Hardware the hard way

Great White Dispatch

Notes From Damn Near Canada

No. 37

9/23/09

19:47

Here in the Minnesota boonies, you have two options if you need furnace springs or c-clamp batteries. You can visit one of the helpful, privately-owned ACE Hardware stores that are pleasant in theory but likely don’t have what you need, or you go to Menard’s.

Menard’s is the Minny version of Home Depot or Lowe’s. I’m not saying that there aren’t Home Depots or Lowe’s stores available here, but they tend to stay huddled in the warm embrace of the cities. And usually when I need a doorjam pump, it’s an emergency that doesn’t allow me to make the overnight trek to civilization. So I go to a Menard’s, which thrives where no other hardware stores dare to venture.

Menard’s is exactly like your typical Home Depot except for the one fatal difference: They seem to have some sort of hiring policy that strictly prohibits attractive employees of any type. It’s not that they exclusively hire hunchbacks or midgets (although there IS a healthy amount of those freakshows running around). But everyone – EVERYONE – who works there has some sort of singular flaw that is as unexpected as it is creepy. From the back, she might be a cute little blonde checkout girl who fills out her dungarees quite nicely. And then she turns around and springs her harelip on you. Gah! And I didn’t even bring a can to open!

Or the classic little old guy with the toolbelt and overalls. From a distance, he kinda sorta looks like Joe Paterno stacking paint cans. Of course he can hep you. Except you get closer to ask where in the fuck they’ve hidden the blowtorch grommets and OH MY GOD HE’S NOT WEARING AND EYEPATCH BUT MOST CERTAINLY SHOULD BE WEARING AN EYEPATCH. Excuse me, sir, but I didn’t come here to SEE YOUR IMMORTAL SOUL through a hole in your face.

Or the hookhand who acts like there is no hookhand at the end of that pale, blotchy stump and waves it around dangerously close to your fleshy face-bits as he flails in the general direction of the toilet jacks. Thanks, Inspector Gadget, but the first Terminator flick scared the bejaysus out of me and you look like you just escaped from a SkyNet lab. Please get your droid arm away from my hoo-man eyeparts.

Or the customer-service whale with the birthmark shaped like the Lone Ranger's mask.

Or the dude in plumbing who looks like a bridge troll.

Or the actual bridge troll who runs the seasonal section.

Or the otherwise attractive teenage girl rocking the unibrow and full beard. Although I think she’s actually trying to make some sort of statement, because there’s no way to not know that you look like Kristen Bell crossed with Zach Galifianakis. She’s a goddamn Conan O’Brien gag. Sorry, hoss. Keep your style politics out of the workplace. I’m just trying to buy this here hammer jacket and I don’t need to think about complex societal issues such as these.

Menard’s is all the fun of a Home Depot (constantly getting lost, nonsensical organization, youthinkyerbetter’n me redneck contractors at every turn) mixed with the Mos Eisley Cantina and a Halloween Express. But they sell coffee and DVDs, so I guess they’re ok. And you never know when you'll need a chainsaw bubbler like, RIGHT NOW.

This may not end well

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 36
9/20/09
12:43


I guess it was just a matter of time until Pepe LePew started hanging out in the yard. The over/under for time until I have to drown a certain Weimaraner in tomato juice is 2 weeks.

21 Days of Summer

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 35
9/02/09
18:47

You look up and summer’s gone.

Your summer visitors have all trickled away. Your house is clean, your grass is mowed and for the first time in months, you have no plans – no chores – scheduled for the coming weekend. You build a big stack of magazines, comic books and even a real book or two, because you WILL sit your ass in that hammock and just read and enjoy the sun. Because you know it’s fading fast. Next weekend is going to ROCK.

And then you wake up on Monday and the temperature is 39 degrees. Fahrenheit. Seven degrees above freezing. In August. You suddenly remember you’re in Minnesota, and brother, your summer might be gone.

Ok. Enough of the second-person. This isn’t a Choose Your Own Adventure novel. But if it WERE, I’d certainly choose to step into the Cave of Time (the first CYOA book. A true classic.) and rewind to about three months ago. Maybe do some of the stuff I planned to do this summer.

On first reflection, it seems like this summer was a bigger waste than a Cleveland Browns season. Airika and I had plans. Big plans. We were gonna buy a second bike. Roll around, over and through the hundreds of miles of trails connecting our Little River Town to all the other Little River Towns in SE Minny.

We did buy a canoe. We were gonna explore all the little lakes, ponds, streams and rivers, not too mention grow a sack and put in on the Mississippi. We bought fishing poles with the names of some big-ass walleye and crappie stamped right on ‘em.

We were gonna hit every park, bluff and body of water between the Twin Cities and Iowa. Use ‘em and abuse ‘em. Make Tulip and Tilly wish they were housecats who got to stay at home and lay on top the TV.

We were gonna do a lot of things this summer. And here I find myself wondering where the eff my windshield scraper could be, because hey, there’s a goddamn frost warning and it’s not even September.

We didn’t do half the things we’d planned this summer. And that makes our first summer in Minnesota seem like a colossal bust. On the other hand, we did a ton of stuff that wasn’t on the itinerary. Things I never would have even thought to do if we hadn’t just…done them. Went to the Minnesota Zoo. Spent days wandering around the study in excess that is the Mall of America. Saved a baby deer. Watched plenty of great live music in the cities. Killed that hobo. Stumbled across the rickety old watchtower that sits atop a bluff in the southeastern tip of the state, and climbed that shit. Did some watching.

Wait. This watchtower deserves its own paragraph. We’d meant to check out Whitewater State Park, which, according to the Minnesota DNR website, has plenty of white water. Took us about 90 minutes of the usual twisty and turny Minnesota ‘highways’ to get there, and about 5 minutes before landfall, we saw this little sign on the side of the road. “Fire Tower,” it said, next to an arrow pointing, well, uppish. There are steps dug into the side of a bluff. Steep steps. 630 steep steps, by Airika’s count. Sucking wind, we crest the top of the bluff to see this not-what-you’d-call-embracing crow’s nest, sitting 100 feet or so in the air, atop 20 or so crisscrossing metal staircases. A flimsy chainlink fence surrounding the whole deal. It really doesn’t look like a place for visitors, except for the sign that says “Maximum visitors in tower: 6.” So we start up the first staircase. Which is swaying. Not even 15 feet up, we collectively decide to abort. Before we get the chance to start the long scoot back down the bluff, another party arrives and hustles to the top of this pointy metal deathtrap like it ain’t no thing. Did I mention that one member of this party was celebrating his 90th birthday? Shamed, we sucked it up and climbed the tower, swaying and praying to Jobu the whole time. And it was totally worth it. 100 feet above an already steep bluff that overlooks a picturesque little valley with a cute Children of the Corn town as its centerpiece. Smoke puffs in the distance, kids playing touch football in a clearing 600 feet down. Sadly, none of my pictures were worth a damn.

Anyway. We barely even made the park. And that’s what’s been kinda cool about this summer. Sure, all of our grand plans went up like smoke over Los Angeles (what, too soon?), but the stuff we did do turned out pretty ok. Practically all of our friends and family spent a few days with us (and if you haven’t, WTF?!), and for some reason, showing everyone around our little corner of Minny never seems to get old. Lark Toys and their awesome hand-crafted carousel, the National Eagle Center, Barns Bluff. Been there, done all that, bought the goddamn trinket. But it’s all worth seeing again, and I don’t mind having an excuse.

Still. With three official weeks left in the season, we have to really scramble to make the summer a success. Actually use the canoe that was such a pain in the ass to get. Catch at least one fish. Dip a toe into the Mississippi. Do what you’re supposed to so on weekends in the summer in a place such as this. There’s still time. We can salvage this beast.

Then there’s that huge stack of, er... literature I’ve built. There’s the hammock on the porch. Plans? Plans are for people who don’t have a place to stretch out and feel those fading rays of sunlight on their napping face. Pencil that in.

The Minnesota State Fair, in a nutshell

Great White Dispatch
Notes From Damn Near Canada
No. 34
8/30/09
17:25

A deep-fried, chocolate-covered, battered nutshell. On a stick.



















And don't forget...

Bring your insulin!