Portal

Montana stretched so far ahead that it dropped below the curvature of the earth and disappeared into North Dakota, where herds of antelope crossed the highway and the greain really did ripple in waves.

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© 1995-2007 Carla King | All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

I was so inspired by all this greatness, America the Beautiful burst forth from my very soul, even though I couldn't quite remember all the words -- you know, whether "purple mountain majesty" comes before or after the "fruited plains" part.

I sang at the top of my lungs through two small towns and past a missile silo. And still the road rolled on, a straight shot to the horizon, where a black cloud shaped like a fire-breathing dragon hovered low in the sky, smack in my path. Descending from the heavens, it blew bolts of lightening from nostrils filled with gray whirlpools of smoke. I knew it was coming to get me.

The wind rose and the dragon grew to cover the blue sky with black, and amazingly a town rose up from the prairie. It looked like the Emerald City from afar, but close up it was Trucker Town Heaven, and studded with cheap motels. I ran to the first one with a vacancy sign, abandoning the Ural between a minivan and a station wagon. The heavy glass door shut behind me, and with a crash of lightning that shook the building, the sky opened up.

THE NEXT DAY I rode against a headwind toward the International Peace Gardens shared between America and Canada. I planned to be there by evening. But after about 30 miles the bike quit, without warning and without complaining. I coasted to a level grassy spot and checked for vital signs.

There was gas, and there was spark. I kicked it over. No problem. It ran. Maybe it was just a strange little blip. But after only two more miles it quit again, in front of the only farmhouse in sight.

The people who lived there were having lunch, but they let me use their phone to call Ural, and then insisted that I eat a slice of lemon meringue pie. Randy suggested switching out the ignition box. I thanked the farmers profusely and set out once again. But the bike quit a few miles later in front of the next farmhouse, where another kind farmer recharged my battery.

"Sounds like the generator went bad," Randy said. "Maybe something shorted it out. Get to a place I can send you another one."

I thought about the rainstorm, and all the water that had dripped from under the seat where the ignition box is, and under the fairing where wires connect. The storm had swept rain into every crevice.

When the bike started to quit again, I begged another charge -- every farmer has a battery charger -- and got to Portal, North Dakota, and the AmeriCana Motel.

PORTAL, NORTH DAKOTA, is no International Peace Garden. This seedy border town has a population of about 150, a motel, a cafe, a gas station, a duty-free shop, and four bars. Turns out it's cheaper to drink in America than in Canada, which is right across the street over the railroad tracks. But first you have to check in at the border station, which is one of four along the North Dakota border that are open 24 hours a day.

At eleven the next morning I sleepily went into the cafe and consumed about six cups of transparent coffee. Then Susan, the manager of the AmeriCana, breezed in and handed me a note. It was from Randy.

"He said it's imperative that you call him immediately," she told me. "And I'm going to the grocery store in half an hour if you want a ride."

Randy laughed when I called. "So how did you manage to get in a place where overnight mail gets there in two days?" he asked.

Since it was a weekend, I'd be there until Monday.

"This used to be quite an exciting town," Susan told me while we were driving to the grocery store. Then she rolled her eyes. "You wouldn't think so to look at it."

Then she added: "You know, I wouldn't want to be stuck here if I didn't want to be, but in the motel business, I kind of feel like the world comes to me."

I was kind of feeling like that, too. I was getting stuck so much, I didn't have much choice. But if I were stranded in Grand Forks I could walk to a grocery store and fend for myself in some hotel or campground. I could go to the movies and restaurants and have café lattes for breakfast -- but I probably wouldn't get to know anyone.

Maybe that's what this trip is all about: getting stuck and making the best of it. And at least I was in a motel with a telephone.

Susan and the AmeriCana Motel

BY SUNDAY I'D MET most of the people who lived there, as well as some others who, like me, were visiting unexpectedly. Susan had become my new best friend. We spent a good part of each day together. I went to her house in the morning for coffee, and spent each evening with her, too.

While I waited, I engaged in hours of idle conversation with the border guards, one an insanely paranoid patrolman who didn't allow me to take a photo because he thought I might be a Russian spy.

I thought he was joking, and joked back.

"Of course," I said. "This whole thing is a setup. I'm only pretending to be broken down in Portal, so I can garner secrets from you guys."

I laughed, and he stomped out of the room. The customs people looked at me, horrified. "He's serious," one of them said. Another shrugged and said, "And it might be true, you know." I looked at him in disbelief. He looked like an otherwise rational person. "Really," he said, catching my look, "you just never know. I wouldn't let you take my picture, either."

I went over to the Canadian side, where the officials laughed. "No, we're not afraid you're a Russian spy," he said. "This is not what you would call a major border. Now maybe in Vancouver..."

While I was hanging out at the border I met Bruce, an American who was stopped there on his way to Alaska to work a gold mine. The Canadian officials found out he had a D.U.I. conviction on his record and wouldn't let him into Canada, so his partner left him there with no money and no transportation. Susan let him stay at the AmeriCana in exchange for handy work like cutting grass and painting. But he had no way to make money.

"I have to get across," Bruce said to us outside the hotel. He pointed at the line, just before the railroad tracks. "It's not so far, and maybe at night -- "

"You'll be in jail if you try that," Susan interrupted sternly. "They're serious about that line, Bruce."

But Bruce was desperate.

The next day when I got my new generator, he watched me put it in, and handed me wrenches. He was a mason, he said. He'd always lived in Minnesota.

Bruce the gold miner.

"So, I thought the gold mining days were over," I said.

Bruce lit a cigarette and rubbed his sparse beard. His face was all angles, and his eyes were large and blue. I couldn't tell his age. People seem to weather here in the northwestern wind and sun. The dust gouges their pores, and it's only by peering into their eyes that their youth is apparent. Their eyes always surprise me, to see clear sky blue and bottle-glass green in weathered brown faces.

"Oh, no," he replied. "There's a living to be made there. And hunting and trapping, too."

"I'll get there," he added. "I'm not going back to Minnesota." He looked suddenly smaller. "I'm not going back there empty handed."

This struck me as a line from a bad movie, and I almost smiled at the cliché -- but then I stopped myself, horrified. This wasn't a movie. I suddenly realized the gravity of his dilemma. It is not easy to give up your home and go mining for gold in Alaska on somebody else's claim. I wondered what drove him to that.

Bruce watched appreciatively as I slid the generator into the gears of the camshaft. Unlike most people, he didn't joke about how he'd like to go with me, or say how he'd like to go on a trip like mine one day.

THE URAL STARTED right up, and I hooked the voltmeter to the battery to see if the generator was charging it. The needle went to 12 volts. When I revved the engine it rose to 14. When I let it idle and turned on the light it dipped below. Success.

Susan waved goodbye. I was sorry to leave her, but the machine felt great. The gears scraped a little from third to fourth on my way out of town. I tried it again and wondered if I'd have to stop for a readjustment, but this time the gears shifted quietly. It had settled in.

I turned left onto Highway 5 toward Bottinau and the International Peace Gardens. Twenty kilometers went by. A farmer waved from his tractor, the sky was blue, and grain was swept back and forth by a gentle breeze that pushed me from behind. Suddenly there was a terrible rattling noise and the sound of something small falling onto the road and pinging away into the grass.

My first thought was that the generator had come unmeshed from the gears. Maybe I hadn't screwed the bolts down tight enough. Then I thought that maybe a crankcase bolt had fallen off and the engine was blowing because it had leaked out all the oil.

I coasted to a dirt road and checked everything. All the bolts were there, so I prepared to take the generator out, just to look. Maybe I could fix it and keep going. I wanted so desperately to keep going even though I knew it was stupid to think that was possible.

Though repairs frustrate me, I am fascinated by engines -- the pressure of valves opening and closing, pistons pressing gas and air into combustion chambers,the small explosions that force movement of the gears and drive shaft, the generator and voltage regulator and battery and lights all working together to createenergy as long as there is fuel. And it all works until it gets old or is deprived of something it needs to continue. Just like us.

AS I PULLED on the generator, something clanked. It was the fan housing on the generator. I unscrewed the flat-bottomed cup attached to the end of it, and inside I found the fan, a bolt, and a washer, all in separate pieces. What a relief. I would only have to reassemble them and would be on my way again. But I saw that the bolt had been sheered off and was too short, and I didn't have anything even close to that size in my toolbox.

Okay. I'd go back to Portal and dig around the gas station garage and put it back together. It wasn't very far. I'd be on the road again in a few hours. But as I knelt down to put the fan back on, I smelled gas.

And there it was. A tiny familiar drip running from the welded place on the gas tank down the rubber gasket and drying before it hit the top of the air filter. A tiny drip. But a drip nonetheless. Dang. The fourth gas tank. So I was stuck again. Twenty miles away from Portal on a country road and 20 miles away from the next town. The dirt road I was parked in front of was blocked off by a high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire and marked with a meaningless five-digit number. The road didn't seem to go anywhere, or be much used. I pushed the Ural closer to the fence.

As I was taking out my suitcase and my computer, the sheriff stopped beside me.

"You'd better roll that thing farther away from that fence," he said, and added, only half-jokingly, "the Air Force boys'll come running out with guns. That's a missile silo you know."

So I left my Russian motorcycle 50 feet away from a fence that protects a missile that, until maybe last year, was pointed at Russia. I thought to myself that ifthe Air Force comes out of the gates of that fence they're likely to take the Ural apart to look for bugging devices or bomb it, one or the other. Tomorrow I'dprobably return to the site and there would be a black hole in the ground.

Maybe that wouldn't be a bad solution.

I ASKED RANDY over the phone if he just dreaded hearing from me.

"Actually, I kind of enjoy your calls," he said, and I could almost see the smirk on his face.

Randy said he would send out the new fan along with a new gas tank, which would take two days. Susan was delighted to see me. She hadn't cleaned my room yet, and now she wouldn't have to. The Ural was delivered to me in a horse trailer. It seemed appropriate transport.

"If one more thing happens," I told my dad on the phone, "I'm going to ask you to put my Yamaha on a trailer and get out here."

To take my mind off my troubles, Susan and I went to Al Capone's Hotel across the border, long ago abandoned and boarded up. He'd run his bootleggingbusiness from there, right beside the train tracks. His notorious gang rode in from time to time on their horses, shooting and stomping around, it is said, as adistraction from the noise of the stills in the basements.

"I want to get inside," Susan said, and began prying at the sheets of plywood nailed over windows and doors.

It was eerily silent, a hot, still day. I looked up at the facade. The large white letters spelling out GRAND VIEW HOTEL were still visible on the brick. I didn't want to go in.

"We're in Canada, Susan. They might arrest us for breaking and entering, and we'll go to jail."

Susan stepped back. "Yeah," she said. "But someday I'm going to get in there."

BEFORE WE GOT BACK to the AmeriCana, the wind had picked up and clouds had gathered. In a little while it began to rain, then thunder, then lightning.

"Now see?" said Susan, a little too happily. "You wouldn't have wanted to be out camping in that."

No, I was quite happy to be there chatting with her, in her living room with pictures of her kids and the one of her as the high school prom queen. In thepicture, she sat in a purple chiffon gown and a rhinestone tiara and a big smile. Though she now had grown children with kids of their own, she didn't look that much different.

It rained harder. The drops hit the house sideways with the force of bullets.

"Should we be worried?" I asked her, thinking suddenly of tornadoes. "Wasn't it tornado weather today -- hot and still?"

"Don't worry," she assured me, lighting a candle. "If it were a tornado the town siren would go off."

The next day, for lack of anything else to do, I went to the duty-free shop, and the clerk asked me, "Were you here for the tornado last night?"

"Tornado?" I felt a chill run from my neck to my toes.

"Yeah. The one that destroyed that town 30 miles away from here. It went past us, and touched down on a barn just past that field." She inclined her head in the direction of the field beside the motel.

"But the siren..." I stammered.

The clerk laughed. "Oh that," she said. "The siren tower was struck by lightening at the beginning of the storm."

No. I cannot conceive of anything else going wrong.

Index | Dispatch 13