Going to Gooseberry Falls

I miss a turn somewhere and end up in a small town near Henderson, MN (population 900). I stop behind two cars waiting out a train at a railroad crossing. I shift into park. It’s late afternoon and the sun is bright in my eyes, cutting through the frost that still tinges the edges of my windshield and windows. I roll my window down a bit to counter the oppressive warmth of my heater. I check my gauges for gas and temperature, my mirrors for approaching cars.

The little red car in front of me shifts into park, turns itself off. The exhaust gives a last puff of smoke into the daylight. The driver steps out, his tall, bony frame straightening into the cold wind. He blows into his hands. I can’t hear his door slam over the metal clattering of the train.

He walks to the car in front of his, leans down, and starts talking pleasantly into the driver-side window. I squint into the roar of the train at their conversation. I glance at my rearview as a truck pulls up behind me, rusted to the frame. A bearded man in a trucker hat steps out, waves up to the tall, skinny man, and joins him at the first car’s window.

Part of me wants to join them, and I try to imagine what I might say. Nothing occurs to me. The tall one claps the bearded one on the shoulder and laughs. I suppose they might be calling each other fucking assholes in a way that shows they’re actually fond of each other. Or maybe they’re telling church jokes like the elders at my church used to do when I was a kid, each of them laughing at the loudest member of the group pretending to speak in tongues or jerking spastically like he’d been “possessed by the Holy Ghost.”

All I really know is that I desperately want some company as the men pass the next ten minutes in good humor, and when the train finally runs out of cars, they take their time saying their goodbyes. I’m not sure they even notice I’m here.

Two minutes later I’m back on the highway, cruising at 75 toward Gooseberry Falls.

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When I drive this fast in my ’96 Accord, the steering wheel vibrates so hard my hands go numb. So I alternate which hand holds the wheel and which one rests. I try to remember to notice the brown fields flying by.

I try to remember where I’m going and why: up north. To see a waterfall. To see the state I’m new to—or something like that, anyway. I think it is probably more that on a Friday morning in a college town deserted for Thanksgiving break, any kind of movement feels like progress. “And it’s a beautiful day for a drive,” I tell myself.

I drive past an exit advertising the World’s Largest Ball of Twine and actually think this sentence in my head: “I wish I was the kind of person who would go see the World’s Largest Ball of Twine.” Instead, I know that I’d only agree to visit the World’s Largest Ball of Twine if they put it on the side of the interstate, so that I might slow a bit and glance in its direction as I pass. I wouldn’t want anyone to see me visiting the World’s Largest Ball of Twine. I don’t want people thinking I’m a tourist.

But—of course—I am.

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Just north of Minneapolis, I stop to piss in a Starbucks. For some reason, the comfy chair by the fire is open, and it seems a waste to just leave it there. So I sit down and end up staying for a couple hours. I don’t talk to anyone.

Most everyone else is staring at their laptops or waiting for their orders so they can leave. All except for one girl. She is standing near the counter, talking with a boy who is trying his best to speak with her while he makes cappuccinos, Frappuccinos, and lattes. I can’t make out what either of them are saying, except when he shouts out “Venti Grande Mocha-something” and another sullen-looking undergrad scurries over to grab the drink and return to the laptop’s glow.

After a while, I get sad watching the girl and the boy. I make up a story for her: that she gets lonely in her dorm room. That she wants badly to make friends, but is so terrified of real interaction that she can only show her desire by being overly nice to waiters and cashiers. I ignore the voice in my head that knows I’m just talking about myself. Instead, I think how the boy probably just feels sorry for her, mostly wants her to go away.

I shake my head at the poor girl. Pity, I tell myself, is the only thing worse than loneliness.

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North of the Twin Cities, the roads get slicker. They go up and down through the thick evergreen trees. Their pines are heavy with the only still-white snow in sight. Northern Minnesota feels like a different state. My dad used to say states were only lines on a map, but I think that something always changes when you cross over.

I’m still new to Minnesota, though. A stranger. I’ve moved enough times to know that this is the hard part, the period of time where everyone I meet sees me as alien, and all my old best friends are getting used to their lives without me. And this is grad school, too. So I won’t be staying. Three years and then I’m gone again.

An old friend of mine, Ruthie, talked to me recently about making new friends. We met up in Chicago a little more than two months ago. I hadn’t made any good friends here in Minnesota yet, so it was a relief to drive the seven hours to meet her there. She was visiting from Japan, where she had been teaching English for more than five years.

“I’m just tired,” she confessed to me over large margaritas with tiny Coors bottles tipped over inside the glasses, “of making good friends and then seeing them leave a year later. It makes it harder for me to find the energy to speak to any of the new people I meet.”

I nodded and sighed. And when we walked back down the street to our Holiday Inn, we didn’t say anything. I don’t know what silenced her, but I was already dreading the next day and the seven-hour drive back. Another friend flying in the opposite direction.

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It’s dark now and it’s getting hard to see which way the road turns up ahead. The stars are only a distraction.

In middle school, my best friend Jeremiah and I lay on a rock in a forest clearing and stared at the same sky. We drank bourbon in wincing sips until we couldn’t see straight, then swore for the sound of it. We told each other that when we married some girls and started our families, we would buy land in Colorado and build our houses next to each other. That we’d always keep the doors open.

But he went to prison our senior year. I moved two states away and then two states back. I told myself that I came back to be close to him. I remember visiting him in prison, trying to describe to him what the new schools had been like, the times I saw a face I thought I recognized, but then realized it couldn’t be the person I wanted it to be. That person might as well be on a different planet. That person might as well be dead.

He didn’t ever tell me what prison was like. He only wanted to hear me talk.

By the time he got parole, we didn’t know what to say to each other. We tried to reconnect a time or two, but it seemed easier to let him out of our deal.

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A semi’s lights blind me in my rearview. I slow, and it gets in the left lane and roars past. I’m relieved to be in the dark again. When I worked the overnight shift at a convenience store in St. Louis, the constant lights of the Shell station used to bother me. When I needed a break, I would go behind the carwash and sit in the dark until I heard tires or shoes grinding the pavement somewhere in the parking lot. Then I had to trudge back into the bubble of light and say hello to whichever poor soul was also awake and seeking company or comfort or refueling.

When they left mere minutes later, I’d start counting the cigarettes; my nightly inventory.

I speed up so I can keep following the semi’s tail lights.

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Duluth is dying down by the time I pass through. Just a few stragglers stumble down the street under yellowing streetlights. I can’t help but feel a certain menace in the place. I decide to park and walk by the lakefront. I’m not sure which great lake it is, but I call it Superior in my head. I throw some rocks that plunk into the water as a group of teens walk by, shouting their youth at the rest of the city.

“Even my penis is cold,” one of the boys shouts.

“I refuse to warm it up for you,” a girl shouts back.

“Put some pants on,” another boy shouts.

I don’t look back to see if the first boy is really naked. I lose track of them as I watch the water.

I want to call my mother, but I know she won’t pick up, won’t call back. I want to call someone who wouldn’t be surprised to hear from me.

When I walk back to my car several hours later and turn on the headlights, I stare at the graffi ti on the wall in front of it. “Weezy was here” is partially covered by “I’m Batman!” and “BALLS.” A sloppy, neon-green rodent or cat stares back at me. “Eat Sammy’s Noodles,” the wall tells me.

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When my dash glows a green 1:06 a.m. at me, I wonder if maybe it’s time to stop and rest. There’s still more than an hour to go. Instead, I widen my eyes and keep going. I don’t know what for. This morning (yesterday?), it seemed like a good idea to drive up to Gooseberry Falls, to see the state. But now? It feels like a useless gesture. Like a destination is self-deception.

When I was 15, I used to sneak out and drive in my dad’s car. Not because there was anywhere to go. I just couldn’t stay in the house while everyone else was asleep. Too much low breathing behind closed doors.

When I got caught and arrested, my mom and dad picked me up. My mom yelled back at me from the passenger seat, but my father sat at the steering wheel and quietly asked me questions. This continued for an hour in the station’s parking lot: “Why?” “How often?” “Who goes with you?”

I remember making eye contact with my father in the rearview mirror, both our faces lit only by the dash’s green clock. “I don’t even know who you are,” he said to me.

Now I want to turn around and go home, to get into my bed and sleep. But I am thinking of my parents’ house for some reason. And, when I remember that my barren studio’s hard bed is all that’s waiting, I keep driving.

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At half past one, I pull off the highway, park, and fall asleep on an entrance ramp.

I wake up to a knock on the window. I’m startled, roll it down. A policeman shines his light in my eyes.

“Everything all right, sir?”

“Yes offi cer. I was just resting a bit before plowing on.”

“All right then. Just wanted to make sure you weren’t stuck or having any car troubles or the like. Be careful.”

And he starts to walk away.

“Thank you, sir!” I shout back at him. He waves.

I notice, looking back at his headlights as he starts to pull away, that snow is coming down heavy, in large flakes. My arm is wet where snow has drifted through the now-open window and melted.

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I wake up, stiff from the car seat. I don’t waste much time stretching and peeing in the snow before starting out again. It’s still dark, but it has somehow shifted from night to morning, at least in my head. And I’m close now. I pass an exit for Pigeon Falls. The name makes me think of a bird that can’t stop crashing to earth.

It won’t stop snowing. And no matter how often it has snowed in the years since we broke up, I can’t help but think of Justine and her deep, throaty laugh. Her cheeks used to go a pleasing kind of red in St. Louis’s winter, and no one has ever looked as good in a scarf as she did. I know because she told me so.

Justine always insisted she loved snow, every kind and instance of it, even when she had to scrape it off her car at five in the morning. I think she’d even like the gray slush that builds up here in Minnesota on the curbs, in parking lots. The piles get two or three times my height sometimes. It should be ridiculous, but I usually forget to notice them.

The first time Justine told me she wanted to go sledding that winter, I thought it was endearing and I laughed at her enjoying it. But her boundless enthusiasm for it started to annoy me. I wanted to go home and sit under a blanket with a mug of coffee and watch Christmas movies or Frank Capra films. So when she wanted to go sledding the next day, and the day after, I started to wonder if maybe she had some sort of brain damage. I told her I’d rather stay home and scream back and forth with her stupid parrot all day than spend another minute outside in the snow.

I know the snow argument isn’t why we broke up. Heck, we waited until spring. But it’s the argument I think about the most for some reason.

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When I finally arrive at Gooseberry Falls State Park, a sign says they don’t open until six. But there’s no gate or offi cer around to hold me to it, so I park in the perfect white lot anyway. I take my camera with me, and trudge up the trails toward the crashing sounds of water. The dawning light on the new snow makes my tired eyes hurt.

When I get to the top of the falls, I take some pictures. A lot of the water is icy, but it seems to be in the process of thawing. Or freezing—it’s hard to tell. I cross the river by stepping on slick rocks, part of me thinking I’ll fall and get swept off the ledge.

When I was little, I once got carried away by the strong current of the Mississippi. I bobbed along the river in an oversized orange life jacket and stared up at the sky. Unconcerned. I became small in the distance. But my father came ripping through the pull of the water and dragged me back to the muddy shore.

I think I should tell someone this story. I think I should ask my father if it really happened this way, if I’ve imagined my young indifference.

I think that maybe I should be in a picture, but there’s no one here to take it. The park is silent. From my spot beside the falls, I can’t find a single clue that another human has ever been here. So I set a timer and set the camera on a rock, dry under a tree. I stand in front of the falls and wait for the light around me to hit the sensor, so I can prove that I was here.