Milestones:  Miles to Grand Marais  

By Connie Colwell Miller

Last fall, my husband and I took our toddler son on his first road trip north to Grand Marais to see the autumn colors.

Before we became parents, my husband and I were into the whole North Shore camping bit.  My husband is a photographer and a nature enthusiast and I’m a poet and a writer, and we’ve always entertained dreams about some magnificent collaboration — an award-winning Boundary Waters photoessay or a compilation of breathtaking photographs with poetry to accompany each image.

Problem is, unless you count the time we drove up the Gunflint in our poor excuse for a minivan (our son in utero and inflicting intense morning sickness and exhaustion upon me), this past fall was the first time we have traveled North together.

You see, our son is an intense personality.  According to my husband, the boy is ruthlessly self-centered, damn him, and demands constant satisfaction.  Car trips are not usually well-tolerated, and patience is not one of the child’s virtues.  When we force the issue, we are punished with screams of the highest and most eye-twitch-inducing decibels. 

Of course, the Grand Marais trip did raise challenges.  We endured a hyper-embarrassing tantrum at a breakfast diner in town that included jelly-lacquered hands pressed against a window pane and some kind of insane drum solo with a pair of forks.  At a gift shop, I turned around just in time to see him pitch a round candle across the store like a baseball.  Then there was the choking spell in the car that resulted in a handful of bologna and puke for me.  

But I have to say, all things aside, the trip was worth it.  The boy tossed rocks into Lake Superior for something like two hours.  We took some beautiful walks, stopping to examine berries and leaves and rocks with the kind of scrutiny only a small child can sustain.  My husband and I played poker in our tiny hotel room until I beat him out of all his pennies.  The three of us spent hours in the hotel pool, submerged in warm water while the wind rapped against the windows outside.  And, after accidentally clocking me in the jaw with his cast-iron skull, my son repeated his first-ever swear word.

I realize my son is probably not old enough to remember this trip, not cognizant enough to later recall the slow blinking of the lighthouse, the small whitecaps on Superior, or the sharp colors of the changing leaves.  However, I do believe this experience will shape him in an unknown yet important way.  Maybe, when he’s older, he’ll smell autumn leaves and be overcome with a sweet sense of warmth that, for reasons he can’t quite explain, hearkens back to his youth.  I am occasionally awash with feelings like that, nostalgic emotions that I can’t explain, but that somehow shape me just the same.

Jelly fingers and bologna puke aside, my husband and I did good.  We exposed our son early to the rigors of the long road trip, the fresh air of the great outdoors, and the hours-long wait while Daddy peers through his camera, watching for the moon to rise above the bluffs.