Chasing the Wild Rice!

So I've been on the road now for four days now...on my way from Portland to Minneapolis to harvest wild rice with some friends (which, it turns out isn't actually rice after all, it is distantly related to rice, but in fact, it is some other grain altogether which the natives in the area called Maroomin, or something like that; I'll have to find the correct spelling for some later entry.) Anyway, god what an adventure it has been already! I got a Craigslist ride from Portland with a guy named David in a Nissan pickup and everything was going great..until the truck started overheating in the high desert in Washington. We began periodically adding water, thinking that would keep us going until at least Missoula, where David has some friends, but in reality, the truck pretty much exploded trying to go over a mountain pass in Idaho.

So we got what we could from the truck and walked down to the nearest town, a little town of about 800 people called Mullan...and that is where we stayed for the next few days, trying to find a mechanic or someone who could help us out. The people of Mullan where all very nice, but since we got into town on a Sunday evening, everyone said nothing could be done anytime soon anyway. So we sat at the bar and had drinks and burgers (David is a sometimes vegitarian, but in a town like Mullan Idaho, there is nothing but meat on the menu.) We talked to a bunch of locals who claimed to be mechanics, but all of them didn't seem to have the first clue about what was going on with the car. A real mechanic, we where told, could be found the next town over called Wallace. So we decided to travel to Wallace, which was six miles away the next day and see if we could find the alledged mechanic.

That night, we made the best of things by sleeping next to this scenic bike trail in a tent that David luckily had with him. The next morning we ate at the tiny diner in town and then, David suggested we rig up some sort of "bike trailer" because he had a bike, but I didn't. So we searched around town (luckily, there where piles of abandoned shit everywhere,) and at first it looked like we where going to fashion some sort of Mad Max cart, but eventually we settled upon an old shopping cart, which we added a scrap-tin shade thing to, since it was over a hundred degrees, and we decorated the whole thing with wild flowers and some wild plastic flags laying in an old gas-station parking lot. Suprisingly, the shopping cart stayed pretty secure behind the bike...I thought for sure the whole thing would tip over every five seconds because the back wheels on a shopping cart are all wobbly and the front wheels are typically fixed. We got a tiny accordian out of David's stuff, and we each took turns sitting in the shopping cart and playing the accordian, and riding the bike....

TO BE CONTINUED...

Love ya,
Carrot

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