Up North

Up North

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

MY KTM 950 WAS PACKED AND READY to go, but the issue was in doubt.

All night long we’d been hit with thunderstorms that boggled the sleepless mind. Fireballs of lightning hurled themselves into the nearby woods, thunderclaps shook the house and we had to give our largest dog a Valium. The cats looked spooked.

At first dawn the phone rang. It was Lew Terpstra, my erstwhile riding partner. “My Guzzi is all packed, but I’m not going out in this,” he said. “Mike and Rob will have extra bikes for us to ride up at the cabin. Let’s take my Cadillac.”

“Okay,” I replied effortlessly.

I don’t ride in lightning any more. We lost a guy to a lightning bolt on a CWtrip a few years ago. When a storm hits on a road trip these days, I sit in a bar, eat Slim Jims and watch baseball.

So we threw our gear into the vast trunk of Lew’s 1998 Deville, which is quite swanky except for some minor peeling of the vinyl top. We cruised up through Wisconsin on Highways 12 and 13, running straight as an arrow for 200 miles to the Lac du Flambeau area, which means “Lake of the Torches.” French explorers called it that because the local Indians used to fish with spears and torches at night. Still do, I’m told.

“This Cadillac has a nice fairing,” I said, as rain hammered down. “And we’re averaging 28.1 mpg on my trip computer,” Lew noted. “That’s better than our two bikes would do, riding together.”

We were headed for the northwoods retreat of Mike Puls, fellow member of the Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang and our Road Captain for Life. Mike had invited the gang up for a long weekend, and about 10 of us were converging on his place like homing pigeons, or maybe locusts. Some were driving cars laden with groceries and large bottles of inexpensive bourbon, while others rode street or dual-sport bikes. Still others were pulling dirtbikes on trailers.

Mike’s cabin, you see, is right on the edge of the Chequamegon National Forest, home of some of the best ATV/dirtbike trails in North America. These wellgroomed ribbons of earth go on for miles and miles through dark woods, over rocky ridges and around blue lakes. Dream riding.

If you haven’t been there, the northwoods are different.

Southern Wisconsin, where I live, is Midwestern. It’s much like the hillier parts of Ohio or Indiana. But northern Wisconsin is-for want of a handier descriptionCanadian. Sergeant Preston of the Yukon would feel at home there. So would Nelson Eddy, Jack London and Hiawatha. It’s a land of blue lakes and tall pines. There are black bears and wolves in the woods. The eerie cry of loons echoes across the lakes at night. It’s a different planet.

Mike goes there partly because he inherited a charming old family cottage on a peninsula and partly because he’s a serious muskie fisherman. The muskie (or muskellunge, as it’s properly called) is a large, fierce predator that makes all other lake fish look like dime-store goldfish.

Luckily for us, Mike is not only a fisherman but a motorcyclist as well. Alongside the boats and trailers in his barn are several trail bikes and a couple of ATVs. Hence our decadent willingness to arrive by Cadillac.

We got there in the afternoon, and others arrived that evening and late into the night, emerging out of the dark rain with tales of deer and fog. Morning dawned cloudy and pleasantly cool, and a bunch of us hit the trail.

Conditions on the damp trails were perfect, and I did a 70-mile loop with Rob Himmelmann and Jeff Underwood, who both rode their Suzuki DR650s. I rode “Frankenbike,” a thing Rob had put together from an electric-start XR650L motor and an XR600 frame. Best of all worlds, like putting Einstein’s brain in the body of my old drill sergeant.

The bike turned out to be fast, comfortable and easy to ride. It soaked up whoops and rocks like a lunar rover from NASA. Great bike.

At the end of the trail, we turned down a short stretch of highway and stopped for a cheeseburger at a roadside tavern with log walls.

I commented to the bartender that we’d passed two closed-down road houses on the highway. Lots of real-estate signs.

“Business is way down everywhere up here,” she said. “All the bars and resorts are struggling.”

“Why is that?” I asked.

“Gas prices,” she said. “People don’t want to drive this far any more.”

That evening Mike made us a fine dinner of beef tenderloin on the grill and mixed Old Fashioneds from a secret recipe that induces a sort of relaxed wisdom previously known only to select ancient Greeks and Zen masters. We sat outside and watched the sunset through the pines on the lake. A slice of silver moon was rising.

I told Mike what the bartender had said and he nodded. “Another thing that’s happening up here is that wealthy retired people are buying the old lakeside bars and resorts and tearing them down to put up mansions. Problem is, all these old places are on beautiful pieces of real estate.”

I pictured the bar we’d all gone to for dinner the previous evening. Good food, a sizzling grill, Patsy Cline on the jukebox, the clack of pool balls on a green table, tap beer and a row of locals sitting at a bar that looked out on the lake.

It was, indeed, on a beautiful piece of real estate. And dozens of people were enjoying it.

As we left the bar, Mike told me the place was closing that week. Sold, sadly, to a developer.

I had an odd, disquieting flashback of a candle snuffer I once used in our church when I was an altar boy.

That night we went back to Mike’s and sat on logs and lawn chairs around a big campfire. I looked at the firelight reflecting off this circle of old friends, all connected through years of motorcycling. It was a perfect evening.

Suddenly that campfire felt just like a torch from Neolithic times, held up to fend off many kinds of encroaching darkness. You could sense there were bears out there, and wolves, but it didn’t matter for now. Lac du Flambeau, indeed. U