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It was mid-September and we had pulled stakes from our Yukon Outpost.  Our last night in the Territory, we stayed with dear friends who served us up a fine supper of a big black bear roast, salad and spuds from their garden. A huckleberry pie put us to bed out in their big wall tent. It’s tough to leave with these compelling ingredients easing into my soul. “Stay here,” is the message.

Alas we are aliens to this foreign country. (Why does it feel so wrong to think of Canada as a foreign country?)And our time is up so we must head south to the Big Noisy.

A few years ago, a three-year-old, absurdly precocial, bush kid named Juneau was chatting about leaving the Yukon to visit relatives in the “Big Noisy.” He was referring to his mother’s home ground in New York City. And in a nano second after telling us about the big city, he had jumped subjects to livestock. Juneau understood that their big, home-grown pig had to be kept close to the house because the animal was a porcine delight for the local grizzly bear. But he also understood that the hog was going to provide his family with winter sustenance and that was perfectly okay.

 

For the next two days we enjoyed our drive down the Alaska Highway, a highway we have gotten to know quite well. We have travelled this corridor of civilization for half a dozen years and we know where to dally and where to keep driving.

Gold is abundant on the mountainsides in the fall. If you travel the highway in the ten days from September 15th through the 25th, you will be treated to slopes loud in their chorus of gilded colors. These grounded fireworks can be distracting so don’t be shy about pulling over for a good dose of amazing “wows.”

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However after having our annual “recalibration” in the Yukon where we are lullabied to sleep every night by a tumbling river, Miss Nancy and I both felt the insipid creep of “civil-lies-ation” as we headed south. An Alberta friend wishes us well and waved us off with a stretching grin and cheer, “Good luck on your re-entry into the “Excited States of America!” I smiled at his joke, but dammit we earned that title! According to a story in the Washington Times, the USA is the most overworked nation in the developed world.

Who cares if Canada is consistently number 5 or 6 as one of the worlds happiest countries! Who cares if Forbes magazine calls Canada “the most prosperous nation in the Americas and ranks first in personal freedom”?

As we make our autumn migration towards an easier winter in Minnesota, there is a very real shift in energy. The pulse quickens exponentially the closer we get to Minnesota. The accelerated heartbeat is not from excitement or even the eventual approach of family. No, the blood begins to race as the gaze goes from glaze to furtive and increased glances in the rear view mirror. There is a direct correlation to an increase in human population to an overall harriedness on the highway. I don’t like it.

However, we found some unexpected solace in North Dakota. It appears that the Peace Garden State has embraced the seductive sell of the extraction industry. But like all boom and bust cycles, their high days will taper and disappear. So just swallow the Kool-Aid flavored, “Git While the Gittin is Good,” and the hell with aquifers, farmland, wildlife habitat and our children’s future.

Our Dakota hideout was the Theodore Roosevelt National Park where we surprised ourselves by staying four nights. In an 1899 speech, Teddy Roosevelt implored, “. . . our country calls not for the life of ease but for the life of strenuous endeavor.” TR would have been proud of us because for three days Miss Nancy and I mountain biked through the bison, forded the Little Missouri River with our hiking boots knotted and draped over our shoulders and packs on our backs to go beyond the civil-lies.

Pulling out of Medora, we found ourselves sucked up in the current of Interstate 94 and swept east towards Base Camp in Minnesota where a summer’s worth of fecund mice hailed us home. We are once again one happy family tucked into a small patch of woods where images of vast, wild Yukon landscapes will be relived all winter.

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