The Portland Not-Exactly-Express: Day 5 - Idle Hands

This is a case where the journey is far more interesting than the destination. There just isn't a whole lot going on in Devils Lake. There's even less to do since I don't have a vehicle. But I'm getting ahead of myself, that's the destination and there's not a whole lot to say about that. The train ride started out pretty mundane once we pulled out of the station, it wasn't until dinner that it got interesting. I hadn't had an actual meal on the train yet save for a ham sandwich between DC and Chicago, so I made a reservation in the dining car. The dining car has several 4-person booths where everyone is seated communally, so my table was me and 3 complete strangers. One of them was a guy that I had seen getting on the train and was behind him in the lounge car to get something to drink. He is the type who is perpetually unhappy. When the waitress tried to seat him with people he didn't know he got upset, insisting that he didn't know these people and that he wasn't gay so he wasn't having dinner with a bunch of strange guys. The waitress actually managed to calm him down and we all sat down and looked over the menu. Less than a minute of grumbling later the guy jumps up, says "Fuck this shit," and walks out of the dining car. This didn't seem like it was going to be a very good dinner, but it quickly got better. That's when Cedric Red Feather broke the tension by telling a joke about a bear sniping his ass with a constantly complaining rabbit.

Cedric Red Feather is a Mandan indian and what he called a turtle priest, the person in his tribe responsible for story telling and prophecies. Cedric is also a Purple Heart medaled Vietnam vet. He was caught in a fire fight he no longer remembers, waking up a month and a half later at a base hospital in Japan. After his recovery - which involved reconstructive facial surgery, shoulder, arm, and leg repair and left him deaf in one ear - he went through a rough period of isolation and alcoholism. At some point in the mid-80's he sobered up and began to pursue his dream of becoming a painter. He got his Bachelors at the Savannah College of Art and Design and was working on his Masters at the University of Memphis when he was visited by what would become his spiritual guide. Cedric admits that his guide doesn't actually exist, but that hasn't stopped either of them. Cedric quit school and became actively engaged in the revitalization of his tribe's spirituality and began working with the same type of veterans that he had avoided after his injuries. Cedric was on the train because he had just returned from signing a contract with a publisher to print his book about his life and his family's history - and he also doesn't like flying. Aside from his own rather interesting life, his family has seen and done a lot. Included in that history is that of his great-great-great (I think) grandfather, who was part of the band of Mandan who helped guide Lewis and Clark on their expedition of the Louisiana Purchase. The book, entitled Mandan Dreams, should be out sometime this coming Spring. It wasn't all serious, as Cedric had tons of stories from his tribes creation stories and beliefs as well as several jokes that he took a great deal of pleasure telling. It was obvious that his role as tribal story teller was truly what he had been born. Real or not, his spirit guide hadn't led him astray.

As much as I was enjoying talking with Cedric, the dinner service was over and we all returned to our seats. The rest of the train ride was spent trying to get comfortable, dozing off, trying to get comfortable again, and dozing off some more. At some point I actually slept more than a few minutes because one of the train attendants had to wake me up around 6am to let me know we were 10 minutes out from Devils Lake. And then about 30 seconds later we pulled into Devils Lake. Math was not someone along the chain of communications strong points. I hustled to get my crap together and stepped off and made my way to the train station waiting room. I had barely set my bags down when a guy told me I couldn't stay because he was locking up. The train hadn't even left yet and he was already closing down. Turns out they open just long enough for departing passengers to wait and then they're closed for the day. Now the problem with this was that I had no idea where I was going, what I was going to do while I was here, and I needed a place to use as a base camp until I did. The man asked me if I had a ride, if I had a room somewhere, and then finally asked me what the hell I was doing in Devils Lake. I just shrugged. He shook his head and told me he'd drop me off at the McDonalds and gave me a lead on a motel I could check out once the sun came up. The guy, whose name was Hal, spent most of the relatively short ride trying to figure out my reasoning for traveling to random places with no plan but eventually seemed to just chalk it up to the folly of youth.

The rest of my time in Devils Lake has been pretty boring. I got a chuckle out of a local radio station saying that today was going to be a rather mild, if a bit breezy 22 degrees today. They failed to account for the on and of sleeting that bites as it gets whipped around violent by that "breeze." I found a cheap motel only a mile from the McDonald's that what it lacks in luxury it makes up for in its cheapness and the fact that it has a clean bed and a roof. I quickly realized that this is not a town you get around easily withoilut a car, which meant there was virtually nothing to do here. Even visiting the town's namesake lake was out of the question, probably even in nice weather. I walked back downtown to check out the area and have lunch. I found a nice cafe that had a good burger and a tasty beer cheese soup, which completely messes with my belief that cheese can make just about anything but beer better. To get downtown I had to walk through a small park that had a baseball field and an oddly out of place skate park, but beyond that Devils Lake is just a small town like you'd just about anywhere else in America that seems to have more than its share of churches and bars, but not much else going for it.

After my pretty low intensity day here and a check of the weather in West Glacier, I made an executive decision to skip my stop in West Glacier. If the weather and transportation are inhibiting here, the going would be even more rough in West Glacier. It's at least 10 degrees cooler, its been snowing all day and forecasted to continue for the next few days. There's far fewer establishments there, and most of it is seasonal and this isn't the on season. It's not off my list of places I want to visit, it's just not going to happen on this trip. Instead I will blowing straight through to Portland and probably spending 2 days there instead. The biggest downside is the fact that it will be a 26 hour ride. That's a long time to be stuck on a train. As a result there probably won't be any updates until Friday. The lack of internet or anything interesting happening will probably make it hard. Until then...