Cruising around in The Lander Van

Been awhile since I’ve taken ride in the abstract. A blog post about a blog while riding in the blog’s inspiration. Comparisons to the Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington stepping out of the digital world and into something completely incoherent of real life aside, the van itself is the entity; the conductor has been real to me all along. Connecting the unmentionable tales of transgression in the 90’s Ford Club Wagon were never tangible to me. I finally got to touch it, unload a freshman year’s buildup of accessories and go on the hunt for trout.

It was a day of multitasking, C.J got his fix of steelhead fishing, I got my tarmac fix and fresh pavement amidst a dearth of traffic on Highway 3. We reconvened north of Betty’s Pies to join forces and look for stream trout as an a la carte for dinner.

The vehicle gives me a topic for layered writing I decide as we drove the due north of Highway 2 in Lake County. What will be the summer’s overplayed songs chime on the radio.

I think the van is left un-described intentionally by my brother in his writing. To splurge the details is to give something away, I felt, as Van Helsing purred along the East Alger Grade, dust streaming up behind us in search of the headwaters of a stream. Describing too much of the crashing through the alder branches and tight casting quarters and it becomes a glorified fishing story teetering on the edge of revealing too much geographical truth.

Like the headwaters of a fine North Shore River, the van must be experienced in person; authenticated and verified. Codified in story to ends unknown.

On the way back we stop by the editor’s house in Two Harbors to see if he happened to be home. The van will stay, parked, but the conductor is off on Saturday en route to fight Wyoming’s fires should they flare up – so we make an attempt to keep up appearances. The redactor’s house: a back porch is guarded with two unknown individuals and an ATV for sale. The lingering men tell us he who we sought was still up in Grand Marais. The van had barely come to a rolling stop. More rivers, more fish, more reading of the water to be done.