Road Trip

by David Salner

Green spruce and gray tamarack towered above him as he drove through a landscape of snow-covered, iron-hard dirt. He tapped the brakes to make sure the road surface wasn’t slick as he entered a town full of small plots and tightly packed homes, gray asphalt and aluminum siding turning gray. In one driveway a man leaned on his snow shovel, more interested in enjoying a cigarette outdoors than in clearing any macadam. He waved absently as Jerry drove by. Cloud cover pressed down, trapping the smoke from dozens of wood stoves and spreading a husky smell through the late-afternoon darkness.

He saw a parking spot in front of The Magic, the bar where he and his buddy Ryan hung out. It was a nice place with dim lights, polished oak, and shiny brass. The bars on the Iron Range were well-appointed, in contrast to the clustered and weathered houses. If you want to escape your routine, it shouldn’t be to a shabby old place. Entering The Magic, an impressively wide mirror greeted you, behind a display of every type of liquor you could imagine, including kinds nobody ever ordered. Like Campari. Jerry, always eager to try something new, had ordered a shot of it once. The bartender looked at him like he was from another planet. After downing it, Jerry was disappointed. Does this thing have any alcohol in it?

His glasses fogged up as he walked in, but he could make out a big blurry guy at the bar, already waving at him.

“Another round for Ryan, and I’ll take a Special X,” he told the bartender, whose name he knew, just not then. But the bartender remembered Jerry. Oh, the Campari guy.

“Great to see you, buddy!” Ryan chortled and raised his glass. “Here’s to Jerry, a guy who’s always got my back.”

“Likewise, old buddy.”

Earlier that day, as Jerry hurried to work, as usual a little late for his shift in the mines, Ryan caught up with him for just long enough to blurt out, “Jerry, do I have news for you, and it’s not good …” But they hadn’t been assigned to the same maintenance crew, so after eight hours of freezing puddles and aching muscles, Jerry still hadn’t heard the bad news. He’d imagined it must relate to Ryan’s girlfriend, Marcia Searle. She’d been breaking up with him for years. Most men would have gotten the hint, but not Ryan, the eternal optimist.

But the news didn’t relate to Ryan’s love life.

“Don’t be taking out a mortgage. In fact, that’s word for word what this fellow in personnel told my cousin.” Ryan’s cousin was a janitor in the Inner Sanctum, the huge building that housed the mine offices. “Not that my cousin would buy a house. He’s one of those tight-fisted Iron Range bachelor guys, lives in a flophouse, drives an old beater, and won’t pay for bar drinks. Nice guy, though.”

A general chattering had been taking place in the bar. It ceased with Ryan’s announcement. Rangers have a nose for a layoff rumor.

“Here’s to a short layoff and some good ice fishing,” Jerry responded. He was trying to put a good face on it, like he wasn’t fazed in the least if anyone was listening, and everyone was. He had expected this news, everyone on the Range expected a layoff—until it arrived.

“But less pollution, after a shutdown, eh?” Ryan added. “And I’ll be able to sleep in once in a while without that damn early morning blasting.” The blasting shook houses to their foundations, already full of large and small cracks. “And no rumble of crushers.” The crushers ground all night, huge pestles mashing iron boulders the size of a VW bus down to pebble size.

“At least no benzene, no tar on the windowsill,” Jerry admitted.

“No toxic dust on my truck in the morning,” Ryan chimed in happily.

“Or sucked into my lungs when I’m skiing,” the bartender added as he delivered the drinks.

Jerry sipped his second beer and realized he hadn’t eaten anything all day. A California burger was the answer to that, and healthy because of the tomatoes. Ryan declined.

“No one loves the North Country more than me.”

“It’s a beauty,” Ryan sighed.

Jerry nodded thoughtfully. What had entered his mind, however, was that it was a beauty only a few times a year, a month or so in the summer and a month in winter, after the first snow buried the tailings dumps and abandoned pits. Then the landscape was full of rolling, brilliant white hills, as far as the eye could see, a limitless perspective of glistening snow all the way to Lake Superior. A beauty, until it was blanketed by road cinders and smokestack grit.

“I know, we’ll be alright,” Jerry was trying to convince himself—and everyone who might still be listening—that a layoff didn’t frighten him. He ate half his burger and ordered another round from the bartender, who was still eavesdropping, looking at him hopefully, like maybe he would order a Campari.

Who wouldn’t welcome a layoff, Jerry was thinking. Throw the alarm clock out the window, sleep in; ski whenever you like; haul your ice-fishing hut out on the lake when the ice is a foot thick; drink brandy and pull in walleye and fierce, oily pike. A winter wonderland. Of course, if you were used to the boom and roar of blasting and giant machinery, the silence would seem weird. Peaceful at first, but creepy during the long hours of the night when you’d awaken to the quiet of a tomb.

Would it really be a relief to have a cup of coffee in the morning and not have to scramble to get ready for work? At first. But, as Jerry thought about it, he realized that he often looked forward to joining the cussing of a thousand miners swarming into dayshift, the pulse of industry, the traffic on the Finn Freeway heading into the mines. It assured him that he lived someplace important. This is where the steel in the car you’re driving was born, the girders in your office building, the spoon you’re stirring your coffee with. It wasn’t that Jerry loved waking up in the middle of the night to the concrete-splitting rumble of the mines, but he knew what the silence would mean. He wanted the identity he had as a miner. And he needed the paycheck.

Ryan had sensed the troubled mood despite Jerry’s efforts to hide it. He seized his friend’s shoulder and gave it a shake. “I got a couple acres we can stump. We’ll sell firewood, plus our unemployment checks. Woo-hoo, we’ll be sitting pretty.”

Jerry forced a smile, appreciating his friend’s effort at good cheer. Then he remembered that Ryan’s girlfriend, Marcia, was from the Twin Cities. Would she stick around once she got laid off? Plenty of young women had been hired into the mines. They had money in their pockets and were just as wild and crazy as the guys. What would happen to the rock-and-roll beat thumping out of big bars like The Sawmill? It was almost as loud as the crushers. There was a boomtown atmosphere on Friday and Saturday nights. Of course, with shiftwork, partiers sometimes went to work hungover or even still drunk. In theory, you got sacked for being drunk on the job, and it was a good theory, given the danger of some of the work. But it was only a theory.

Jerry had finished his hamburger but didn’t push the plate aside out of respect for Ryan, who was picking at the fries. They were enjoying the comfort of two friends sharing food. Ryan nodded appreciatively.

As he listened to the munch and nibble, Jerry was catching up with a worrying fact. His buddy had something to fall back on. Ryan owned a cabin, his pride and joy. Free and clear. And Ryan’s father and uncle both had a ton of seniority. They’d never be laid off. The Saarlampi family would always get by. Jerry had none of that. In fact, his paycheck supported his mom.

“As long as I can hunt, I won’t starve!” Ryan declared a little too fervently.

“Let me ask you something, just for hypotheticals. If it lasts six months, are you going to stay or leave?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it? Like Uncle Toivul always said, you can’t tell the length of a snake till it’s dead.”

“And by the time you figure it out, will you have anything left in the bank to get started someplace else?”

“I don’t see myself leaving. Hell, my family goes way back. The Saarlampis are Iron Range legends. My great granddad, Curt Saarlampi, was blacklisted in the 1916 strike along with most of the other Finns. That’s why so many families with Finnish names have those subsistence farms too small to subsist on.” This was history Jerry was familiar with, but it was dear to Ryan, so he let him continue.

“My generation was the first in our family to have indoor shitters.”

“They hauled enough iron out of here to build the skyscrapers in New York and Chicago and to go to war in the Pacific—” it was a familiar story to Jerry, but it still made him angry— “they went to war in the Pacific, three times. And a miner’s family had to shit outside on thirty-below mornings.”

“You know what the old timers say,” Ryan began.

“—they care more about the mule—” Jerry cut in.

“—then they do the miner—”

“—if a miner dies they can hire another—”

“—but they have to spend good money—”

“—to replace the mule.”

These words were gospel on the Range. In fact, they were gospel in all mining regions. Gospel, and true. You could probably hear miners in Appalachia and the Silesian coal basin of Europe reciting the very same mantra.

Jerry was starting to feel his beers but Ryan, who was way ahead of him, seized his friend’s arm in a huge hand and crowed, “Not to worry, old buddy, Congressman Oberstar will pass that bill outlawing foreign steel. He can’t afford to let the Iron Range go down the tubes.”

The beauty of barroom talk is the way you can leave the track of one conversation, switch rails and land on a more promising track. “Ryan,” Jerry cut in out of the blue, “maybe it’s time for a road trip. We could strike for parts unknown. Hop in the beater, head down Route 35. Feel the wind at seventy, stop in any old town we like.”

These words had tumbled from his mouth without any prior thought. But once out, they started to take on authority in Jerry’s imagination.

“We could tell people about mining iron, all the slickers who have no idea how we do it,” Ryan exclaimed, picking up on his friend’s enthusiasm.

“… and learn from them. What about the people who grow crops, pick fruit, butcher hogs?”

“I’ve always wanted to learn new trades,” Ryan cut in, his eyes alight with drunken imaginings. “We could bum around, sample the breakfasts in a dozen diners, put in a stint driving eighteen-wheelers …”

“We could go to New Orleans and work as pipefitters in a refinery. We’d make friends in the Big Easy, Cajuns and Blacks, they’d take us to dance halls where we’d listen to zydeco …”

The bartender was staring at them. He wasn’t surprised at what he heard out of Jerry—the Campari guy, always a little off.

Ryan was grinning as the images of delta life wobbled around in his head. “… We’d motor out in an outboard, see alligators closeup, catch sea bass. Then we could go to Arizona. I always wanted to see the desert and live someplace so hot I’d never have to wear a shirt …”

“… Why not land a job in a copper mine as mine millwrights, something that might be pretty familiar. Eat nopalitos and drink beer, listen to norteño in dusty cantinas, dance to twangy music with beautiful women on sweltering nights ...”

“… Why not? We’re certified mine millwrights, and both of us know how to dance …”

That was a statement Jerry decided not to take issue with. He thought of how he’d wanted to travel the length and breadth of the country. “We could take our unemployment checks with us, work odd jobs, work the extra-board in Seattle unloading ships in a rainy harbor; pick fruit with Mexicans in the San Joaquin Valley …”

“… When we came back, we’d get the whole lunchroom fired up telling them about our adventures …”

“I’d like to meet a cute school teacher in St. Louis,” Jerry mused. “Maybe I’d settle down with her.” He was also thinking about studying something, going to museums. They must have museums in St. Louis and a lot to see besides a great grayish-brown river. He’d seen the Mississippi many times but never that far south. He was picturing how wide it would be downstream, fat with the water of hundreds of tributaries.

Something had shifted in the conversation, which Ryan was just beginning to pick up on. “You’re not going to leave me, are you, Jerry?”

That was the signal for the bartender to ask if they needed another round. He wasn’t about to turn away a good-paying customer like Ryan, no matter how drunk he was getting. It wasn’t the barman’s job to keep him from drinking so much he’d drive off the road and freeze to death in the ditch.

“Do we look like we need it?” Jerry answered. The bartender shrugged.

Ryan wasn’t fit to know what he needed, but a good friend would know. Jerry gathered him up, arm over shoulder like a sloppy, enormous teddy bear, and stumbled over the ice to his truck. He deposited Ryan in the passenger seat.

“Buddy, you always have my back,” Ryan murmured, a drunken smile on his face. Tomorrow morning he’d wake up and wonder where his car was. If he walked to The Magic for a beer, he’d find it. But, Jerry wondered, would Ryan remember the talk, the cross-country travels?

* * *

Jerry sat on the couch in his ground-floor apartment trying to get a handle on the shutdown and variants from ‘partial-short’ to ‘total-long.’ He was sober enough to realize there were things he had to figure out, but drunk enough that he couldn’t get a handle on what they were.

He took another shower, hoping it would kick start something in his head, some degree of focus if not sobriety. After drying, it dawned on him that he hadn’t had a smoke since lighting up on the way home. A cigarette was just the thing.

He found the Marlboros in the pocket of his parka. He carried a bottle of brandy to the back porch, stepping into the prickly invigoration of ice-cold air on hot, damp skin, feeling his hair and beard instantly freeze and stiffen.

Concentrate, he thought, as he sat down on a frozen lawn chair. The setting was right for contemplation, a full moon overhead suspended in the brilliant clarity and lonesomeness of the north country sky. At this very moment a lot of people on the Range had heard the shutdown rumor and all were transfixed by it. It was a disappointment to learn that society didn’t need steel anymore. No steel for schools or hospitals, no steel for wheelchairs or library carts.

He stared toward the West Pit, one of two enormous holes in the earth that ate away at the town from opposite directions. That crater was just across the road, practically in his backyard. From where he sat, the beep beep beep of giant rock trucks backing up was loud. They’d be at it all midnight shift. Each one hauled upwards of 200 tons of ore. They were huge spectral machines lumbering over a moonscape. The company would be cracking the whip to enlarge the stockpile in these final days of work, to extend the layoff. But the truck drivers were no dummies. A lot of beep beeping was going on but not much hauling.

A shutdown meant towns emptying out. Busy enough at first, at least on Saturdays with yard sales going on. Good deals on tools, hunting rifles, boats hauled out of the lake and offered for sale in a last-ditch effort to scrounge the next month’s house payment. Good deals, but nobody buying. Then quiet streets, no lines except at the unemployment office. After a while, not even there.

Knowing the generous hearts of the steel and iron bosses, anyone with half a brain could predict the layoff notices would come the week before Christmas. “We regret to announce ... season’s greetings to all ...”

It was now the week after Thanksgiving, so Jerry didn’t have long to prepare. But maybe he shouldn’t leave. Maybe Ryan was right and they should stick it out. He could try it for one winter. His skis were ready. He could see himself skiing to the top of a tailings dump—beautiful in the snow, iridescent under the blinding rays of the afternoon sun. From there, he could gaze miles away into the crevice of an idled mine. The chasm would be filled with water shining like a distant river in a landscape of desolation, a lake of sorrow under ice and snow. The flakes had been falling on it, shift after shift, layoff after layoff, a history that someday would melt and be forgotten.

During the shutdown, such reveries would be magnified, the solitude multiplied, mile by mile, town by town, all the way to the icy gray waters of the Lake. He saw himself staring from a high crest over an ocean of snow. He plunged his poles down to the icepack and pushed off, flying downhill, building up speed, exhilarated by the descent, not really caring if he broke his neck hitting a piece of rusty rebar buried under the lovely snow or reached bottom.

Then he thought about leaving and what he’d be taking with him. Not what he’d pack, which wouldn’t be much. He realized that he’d learned more here than he would have earning an advanced degree at the finest university. As an Iron Ranger he knew how boomtowns grow up from the wilderness and young people pour in and fill the bars. Then, little by little or all at once, the mines are idled during a downturn the economists said would never happen. People leave, first just the footloose types, then even the hard-core. Nothing left of a once-thriving town but a gas station and convenience store. Weathered signs standing for deserted towns like Elcor, Mitchell, Redore. Curious, maybe even quaint—unless the ghost town is where you live. This isn’t Economics 101. Not graphs and statistics, but old roads the county stopped plowing, closed schools and hospitals.

Jerry tried to look into the future, to a new life somewhere else, telling his kids how he’d once lived so far north you had to bring the car battery inside at night or it wouldn’t crank the next morning; about the equipment, immense and strange as anything in the wildest futuristic movie. A truck whose cab sat four stories high, so high in the air that if you happened to run over a parked pickup, you wouldn’t hear the crunch of steel, wouldn’t know until the guy on the radio started to squawk.

Would he get lonely, away from everything he’d ever known? But maybe he’d have Ryan with him, kicking ass on the road, buddies to the end?

Then he felt the cold through the warmth of the brandy and went inside.

* * *

They met in The Magic almost every night for the next three weeks, but they’d never returned to the subject of cross-country travels.

On Christmas Eve, after they’d found coal in their stockings, Jerry and Ryan sat there, elbows on the polished oak bar. A cold front had moved in and squatted on the North Country. From time to time the door flapped open, someone came in, and they glimpsed the snow gusting on the sidewalk. They wouldn’t have ventured out on a night like this except for this drink, this moment of friendship in a bar. They looked around at a couple of solitary guys hunched over their elbows, staring into their drinks, and realized how lucky they were for the friend drinking beside them.

“Another round,” Ryan held his brandy glass to the bartender, who was refilling the fridge, keeping busy.

They tossed them back and meditated on the emptiness and the aimless sounds the bartender was making, the clink of glasses and bottles. Jerry was smart enough not to pose a question if he didn’t want to hear the answer, but he found himself without anything else to say, so he stumbled ahead. “The truck’s packed, but I got plenty of room …”

“I don’t know if that would work for me, Jerry. You live in a rental, but I have the cabin, with enough wood to burn all winter. Plus, I’m starting to get good vibes from Marcia. We might be getting back together, this time for permanent …”

About the author

David Salner’s first novel, A Place to Hide, is now available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Goodreads. His latest poetry collection is The Stillness of Certain Valleys (Broadstone Books, 2019). He worked all over the U.S., including in iron ore mines, and endured the layoffs referenced here. He worked in many trades and has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards. His stories and poems have appeared in many journals, including Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Iowa Review, Prairie Schooner, and Sundial. Visit his website at www.DSalner.wix.com/salner.

About the illustration

The illustration is Fairgrounds Hotel Bar - Allentown PA, photograph, 1976. Photograph uploaded by Atwngirl to Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.