We Know When to Quit

We didn’t press on. We turned back.

It was the wise thing to do. Even if we had to turn our truck around on a narrow dirt logging road with shoulders made of deep soft sand. I had to get out of the truck to direct the turnaround maneuver.

We were on a logging road in the U.P. east of Grand Marais. The regular road to where we wanted to go was closed because it is finally being paved. We like the old dirt road, H-58, well enough. It was wide and pretty level and we were fine with it not being paved. But progress is good so we looked for a detour to where we wanted to go.

A truck coming out to H-58 where we were parked trying to figure out where to go pulled up alongside us so we asked if the road he just came from would get us where we wanted to go. Right after we took the driver’s advice to take the logging road to where we wanted to go,, which was an inland lake for a good swim, we saw a sign that said “Not an official detour.” This made us both very nervous, me especially, because I am Doomsday-prone and had us careening off the road into the trees, down the river bank to be partially submerged while the Deliverance banjo echoed through the trees.

After many miles on the logging road, the unofficial detour, always veering to the right as the signs nailed on trees told us, we met up with a man in an ORV who told us to backtrack and pick up 835 and take it to 410. This would graduate us from a logging road with no number to back roads of the same condition but with a number which seemed like a step up in navigation so we did as he instructed.

We motored along until we saw the road where he said we should turn and it looked like Dead Couples Pass to us so we turned around and backtracked all the way back to the so-called main road, drove home, and went swimming in Lake Superior in front of our house which is what we should’ve done in the first place.