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Oatmeal boy
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Matt jams with Seth the musician
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A great shot Matt took of himself on the first day he was in the canoe..or maybe 2nd
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The green fields of Norman County, MN
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Pac Lite foods Max Patch and Cheese--delicious
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The picnic/ hoe down with the wonderful people of Climax, Nielsville, Cummings etc.
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A picture of Matt and Scott at the Red River headwaters monument in Breckenridge, MN
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A different view of the green, flat land of Norman County, MN near Hendrum
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Matt pours scalding oatmeal on his crotch (Entry by Scott)
(Jul 7th, 2005) I (Scott) am not one to pass up a catchy headline and besides, it is true; Matt really did spill scalding oatmeal on his crotch. Scott helped immediately by reaching for the camera. Fortunately Matt had his spandex shorts on under his nylon ones and so the damage was minimal and temporary. And Scott got his picture…

Please note that we are doing two journal entries in a row so we can put up more pictures; if you want to see additional pictures follow the links to see our previous journal entries and go to the one just previous to this one…

We are writing to you from the wonderful home of Brad and Amy Bail. The Bail’s live in East Grand Forks and are putting us up for a very needed day of rest after traveling 250 miles in 7 days. Brad is my Dad’s cousin which makes him either my 2nd cousin or 1st cousin once removed…we successfully confuse everyone we ask. We’ve kept busy doing laundry, washing our very interesting smelling dishes, buying some supplies for Matt, meeting with the local press (the Grand Forks Herald will be running a story this Saturday), and eating tasty food that Amy made for us. Also, Scott’s grandparents came over from Nevis (near Park Rapids, MN) and we’ve had fun visiting with them.

We took out of the river last night after 37 miles, the last few hours of which was conducted in a delirious haze as we contemplated a day of rest. Just after passing the Red Lake River coming in from the Minnesota side we stopped at the home of Dr. David and Peggy Biberdorf, who live right on the river. Dr. Biberdorf has been a supporter of the expedition for quite some time and had told us we could stop at his house in Grand Forks. Dr. Biberdorf has a relative and friend in Russia who, along with other friends, have been following the expedition fervently. They think what we are doing is pretty cool but we think they are the amazing ones as they take month long canoe trips in the remote Russian taiga. We got to read some cool e-mails and hang out with the Biberdorfs but not for long enough as we have much to do in a short amount of time.

The last few days on the river we’ve settled into a rhythm of paddling with short, quick strokes, both of us using our bent shaft paddles. We take a break every hour or hour and a half and just lean back and float down the river—if we go to shore we have to deal with bugs. We wake up at 6:30 and put on our paddling clothes right away. Then we pack our personal packs. Next one of us starts breakfast while the other takes the tent down. Then we eat our oatmeal and drink our cocoa. Next we take down our ‘dry-fly’; the shelter we use to house all our gear and that we cook in. Then we pack all the remaining bags and haul them to the river. Then we pack the canoe. We paddle for a few hours then we do lunch for an hour somewhere along the river. Then we paddle some more usually until about 6:00. Then we unload the canoe, set up camp, change into camp clothes, and cook and eat Dinner. After Dinner we collapse into the tent and rejoice at being able to do absolutely nothing and have no mosquitoes bugging us while we do it. Then we usually read a little if we don’t have a journal entry to do for the website. Scott is reading Matt’s book, ‘All the President’s Men’, by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, about their Pulitzer-prize winning investigation of the Watergate story, and Matt is reading Scott’s book, ‘Expedition Canoeing’, by Cliff Jacobsen.

Most days we don’t see anyone at all. We’ve seen absolutely no other boats of any kind on the river except for Jim Murphy’s, the canoeist who was on the water explicitly to paddle with us. The river isn’t used much, but there is usually some cat fisherman and/or canoeists and kayakers/waterbikers on the river but we haven’t seen any, in part I’m sure due to the high water. We see countless deer and watch and hear many beavers slipping down the mud and splashing into the river. Falcons, hawks and Eagles are circling overhead quite often and the riverbank is a long series of dead cottonwoods, huge live cottonwoods, ancient rusting vehicles, green fields of sugar beets, soybeans, and corn, green ash trees and beautiful oak forests. The oaks are our favorite with the silvery bottoms of their leaves turning in the wind and glinting in the sun set against their darkly furrowed trunks. We stopped in one on a bluff in a driving wind to go to the bathroom, thinking we’d escape the mosquitoes. Half-naked and crouched is not the best position to be in when one discovers that one has found the most mosquito-intense place on the planet; a place where your arms darkened with the hungry swarm and the other not-covered places were left to their own non-existent defenses. Matt was so tormented that his bathroom experience quickly turned unpleasant in many ways, the details of which we shall leave for another time except to say that he was unable to perform some of the more crucial steps of the ‘going to the bathroom’ process.

We have a little radio we tune in when the paddling gets real long in the afternoon. Lately we’ve been dialing in the Fox, a classic rock station up here. We play a game where whoever guesses the artist of the song gets a point and you get another point if you can name the song itself. We play to 10 points and Matt has won every game. Scott remains cool, calm and collected and never gets ruffled about losing consistently, never threatens to use a canoe paddle in a manner other than which it was intended.

Two nights ago we paddled hoping to rendezvous with the good people of one of our favorite towns, Climax, MN. The Climax Community Club and the Sand Hill Settlement Society, and the Climax K-12 school, had had Todd and Scott to town to give a presentation on the trip many months before the trip and now the expedition was finally arriving via canoe. We hoped to meet Jane Vigness, the town librarian and a beekeeper and spearhead of our visits, at Frog Point, a historic spot on the Red that is now officially called Belmont Park, ND. We paddled hard and got there early, or at least got to the spot we thought it would be. We clambered up a steep muddy bank into a field of soybeans and looked around bewildered. We walked a bit and found nothing. Dejected, we returned to our canoe and resolved to paddle up to where the Sand Hill River comes in, thinking perhaps that is where Frog Point was. But then, just around the next corner, Jane pulled up in her car! Oh joy!

Not two hours later we’d set up our camp and were sitting around a campfire with 25 Climaxians (?) having a grand time. They all brought food for a picnic and we enjoyed it very much, especially Donna’s tater tot casserole and Jane’s homemade buns and fresh garden pea pods. Amazingly, Ron and Rachel Mulder and their grandson, 15 year old Seth, happened to drive through the park and stopped to chat. They were quickly invited to have some food and we all soon found out that Seth was a musical prodigy from the nearby town of Cummings and that between his grandfather and him they had a slide guitar, a guitar and a banjo in the car! Before long Matt had grabbed his harmonica and for the next several hours we had an old-fashioned hoe-down, hootenanny, sing along that included ‘Red River Valley’, ‘I’ve Been Everywhere’, ‘You are my Sunshine’, ‘Clementine’, ‘American Pie’, ‘the Auctioneer’, ‘I Saw the Light’, ‘Ill Fly Away’ and many other songs. There were people from 8 to 80 in attendance and everyone had a grand time. Terri, Haley and Alyssa Eidenschink talked with us for a while and we found out they have a lake place right by Many Point Scout Camp. Terri’s husband Gary is the mayor of Climax. John and Signe Vraa talked with us for quite a while and Scott recalled that on the earlier visit John had described himself as coming from a long line of Norwegian peasant farmers. Cousins Leon and Philip Hansted and Leon’s wife Donna sat with us and we listened to Leon’s incredible tenor voice. The next day at lunch on a bridge Phil came and talked with us for a while and told us a story. Back in the 50’s he’d had a job in the big town; Fargo and felt a bit out of place. This was reinforced when the store manager, who had a French name, made fun of his Norwegian name. Phil tried for years to get rid of his Norwegian brogue but eventually came to embrace it. We thought his brogue and his cousin’s were absolutely fantastic. Daryl and Marlene Paulsrud were there as were Elda and Joe Atalano. Joe is in charge of the Golden Eagles Boxing Club in Climax and his son Joe, Jr. is such a good boxer that they are finding it difficult to find someone of a high enough caliber to fight him. When Todd and Scott visited we got to see some of the boxing matches. The kids who box are very good sportsman and we’re told that the Boxing Club is run very well and requires the kids to do well in school and teaches them discipline and sportsmanship. Very cool. Elda Atalano has been learning how to play the guitar and jammed with Seth for much of the night.

We heard many stories of what it’s like to farm in the region and the history of the area; the park actually used to house large political rallies and, before that, had been a fairly good size town and port for steamships on the Red. Earlier it was a port for the Hudson Bay Company as well. Climax had earlier actually commissioned a playwright to write a play about Frog Point that the students’ then staged.

On July 4th we were particularly exhausted at the end of a long day and we walked through a field to a farmer’s house to ask permission to camp on the land. The house was well-kept; one could say the whole place was almost eerily well-kept. All the windows had covers on them, but the garage was open and cars were in it so we figured someone would be home. After repeated knocking at the door an very old woman came to the door looking equal parts very frightening and frightened. We then were scared and stammered to say our purpose. She interrupted by screeching ‘NO!!!!!!!!’ and slammed the door in our faces at which point we hurriedly ran back to our canoe, shaken and distressed.

And so it was with great trepidation that we approached the old, creaky house around the next bend. But it had a very enticing flat green lawn. We knocked and knocked again and no one answered. Dilemma. It was late and we were very tired. We decided we had to camp and that we would leave a note on the door. We were a bit restless, but in the end no one ever came home and we snuck off without a problem. The next night we camped on the edge of a field and the landowner Keith and his son Daryl came by and warmly welcomed us, which warmed us very much.

Tomorrow morning we will leave Grand Forks and head for the Canadian border. We’ve heard that a man in his 80’s lives up near Drayton and actually saw Eric Sevareid and Walter Port when they paddled past in 1930! We hope to get to meet him. He was 6 or 7 at the time but remembers it well. Eric wrote that he and Walt had come upon a church picnic near Drayton, and apparently this man was there. We’ve also heard that someone may be trying to organize an ice cream social near Drayton to honor the 75th anniversary of the event, so hopefully we’ll get to meet some more wonderful people and eat some ice cream. We expect to be near Drayton Sunday afternoon sometime. On Monday or Tuesday we’ll cross into Canada and by the latter part of next week we should be in Winnipeg. A day or two after that will bring us to the southern end of gigantic Lake Winnipeg, where our blood will pool in out toes as we look out over the endless treacherous waters and wild, isolated coast and contemplate two to three weeks on the Lake, the 3rd ‘chapter’ of our 4 chapter trip.

This Saturday there will be a good-size article about us in the Grand Forks Herald which at some point should be on the Herald’s website at www.grandforks.com

One sponsor we’d like to thank today is the Original Bug Shirt Company. We have bug shirts and bug pants and they are amazing. Scott lay down in a field of weeds under a blanket of mosquitoes and was able to relax completely, and both of us have worn the suits quite often as we set up camp or eat Dinner. As neither of us like bug spray, they are especially useful. The mesh screen can zip open or closed over our faces, and the ankle and wrist closures keep the creepy-crawlies out.