The Low Adventures: Trekking Superior
Hiking Trail
Part 1: Introduction
By Tim Krenz
November 29, 2016
Why on god's otherwise even-leveled
earth did I spend two or three weekend trips a year, or sometimes 8
or 9 days, climbing trails with a heavy backpack, if those trails
always went up and up hills and moutainish peaks, instead of the
nice, level ground between them; or walk almost 800,000 steps on the
soles of battered, smelly boots; to cover almost 280 miles of trail,
sightseeing detours, and spur trails to the car and back; why did I
endure warm or freezing rain, snow, and depressive heat that made fog
over Lake Superior on hot, sunny, windless days; for what did I trek
in total from Two Harbors just north of Duluth, MN, to the Canadian
border, and not in a straight line or in any sections of trail that
made any logical order or plain sense in the way we did them?
For almost a decade now, I pondered
that question: The “why did I do it?” question. What compelled
me to challenge my overweight body and my smoker's lungs, my crooked
knees, my butt-grabbing pain to literally carry myself over the next
step or hill? The severe challenge of the Superior Hiking Trail now
rests in a hubristic memory, a feat that I did that which so many
others did in much better style, and could do in a few weeks what
took me and my worn out body six years to find time to finish.
I swore at those hills that never
stopping climbing. I cursed the rain that forced me to eat cold
suppers of some dehydrated crap in a metal bag, in my tent, while I
wrote the journal of this low, not high, adventure. I know the answer
now, to most of my questions, and the “why did I do it?”
question. I will admit no guilt, other than accomplice in this
particular story of my life. The camping high court of adventure gods
would not condemn me for my act of extended temporary insanity. Why
did I trek the Superior Hiking Trail? Well, I blame my good friend,
Craig.
The story, of course, has its
beginning. This story began in November of Two-Thousand-and-One. By
then, I had lived in my apartment for over two years, since around
the time Craig returned from Africa with his Peace Corps fiance,
Jennifer, the daughter of a Kansas pastor. The apartment on main
street Osceola, WI, itself possessed many qualities besides spacious
rooms. It owed a view from its upstairs window of Wilke Glen and the
Cascade Falls, and rebounded the sound of crashing water to white
noise me asleep or into relaxation whenever I left the window open
Craig still calls that the ultimate
bachelor writer's pad. Aside from the window views from the top of
the corner building, downstairs, I could sit on the sidewalk at the
coffee shop next door, and I could walk to the public library or the
brazier for ice cream, both of those within one block. Most of all,
as Craig said, I had a trout stream and the Mill Pond kitty corner
across Cascade Street. I lived an idyllic, though rather empty life.
Of importance to me, two months before that day in November 2001, I
committed to significant changes in my personal and spiritual life,
heretofore run rampant in lethargy and slackness. I had barely begun
that razor's path of enlightened learning, but I knew fuller, more
purposed and even some deliberate living lay ahead.
That November Saturday, Craig brought
his family to Osceola to visit his parents, and he stopped by my
place alone to talk about Bill Bryson's book, A Walk in the Woods.
Then he asked me to trek the Superior Hiking Trail on the northern
Lake Superior shore together with him. While I fitfully watched a
tense, and ultimately disappointing, Michigan-Wisconsin college
football game, Craig talked. And he talked. And, . . he talked. The
idea deeply intrigued me. I asked questions, but his answers always
came clouded with no certainty as to how many years of weekend
camping it would take us to complete the trips. But if anything
happened to me, he promised get me off the trail, even if it took
several trips (Huh?).
I always enjoyed camping, as a kid with
my family, and in Boy Scouts. I always wanted to do long distance
backpacking. With my new commitment to more vigorous, actual living,
instead of dreaming, I eventually said, “Craig, I'll do it!” I
felt enthused, and honored, that my good friend since college years,
(we did not know each other in our smallish high school), asked me to
go on this great adventure.
“Tim, let's go for ride,” Craig
said. “My dad let me take his classic car today, his classic, mint
conditioned car. We'll ride in style and talk more about it.” I did
not know that Craig's dad had a collector's car, and I knew nothing
about hot rods or “muscle cars,” so as the football game entered
halftime, we went out the downstairs door and into the garden out the
back of the shops.
We walked through the parking lot on
that cool, cloudy fall day, and I asked Craig, “Where's the car?”
“Right there,” he pointed, at a
classic and mint car. I looked at this immaculately-conditioned white
car with a red racing stripe along its length on the side. Craig
drove to my place that day in a great looking, flawlessly preserved,
Ford Pinto. Although we had to wait for spring to trek the trail,
the real adventure just began.
