A letter to home or what I did last Summer
by Herb and Dan Kuehn
Chapter one, Herb and Dan on bicycles
dear family,
Because you probably want the whole story, I’ll write as much as I can before my hand gets cramped.
On our first day out, we only went about 10 miles from home. We were having some trouble with the bikes, so we stopped early to get them fixed. The place we stayed was under a bridge by the Buffalo River.
All we had all along to eat for supper was some rice and cinnamon sugar. All the wood around was wet, but we had a few cans of sterno cooking fuel to make a fire with. As it turned out, there wasn’t enough heat, so our rice was hard and tasted horrible.
That night we went hungry. We figured we could last until the next day without much trouble. Well the next day was Sunday and we couldn’t find an open store until we got to go to Crookston. It was about suppertime when we got there, and as our brother Jack would say, “we were so-o-o-ome hungry.”
After that we didn’t have any trouble with hunger at all. We started eating better. For instance, a typical day food would be: cereal or pancakes for breakfast, soup and sandwiches for lunch, and spaghetti, noodles Romanoff or macaroni and cheese for supper.
We also had stuff like cookies and candy bars for snacks.
At Crookston, we met another bicyclist who was going from Chicago to Oregon. We decided that we would like to head in that direction too, so we started heading for the Black Hills.
From Glyndon to Crookston, ND, the ground was real flat but as soon as we headed west, it got hilly, but it was really beautiful countryside. If you ever want to go on a nice Sunday drive, you should follow the route we took for a while at Crookston.
There’s a really nice park. We stayed at a wayside rest, a wayside rest about a mile east of Crookston. There’s a river by the park inside Crookston, and they have swingset and all the rest.
If you go west from there, you’ll come to the James River. The river has carved out a beautiful valley. We stood and marveled for a while, but not too long, because we wanted to coast down to the river.
Going down was really great. We coasted at about 25 to 30 mph for about 2 miles.
I won’t write about the walk up the other side of the valley because it’s all anti-climax, but when we got to the top, we wondered how we were going to make it up the Black Hills.
Chapter 2
Dan and Herb on the river
Well the next big event happened in Bismarck. Dan and I were riding through town wondering how we were going to make it through the Black Hills when we came to the bridge over the Missouri river.
We stood above the river for a while until we noticed somebody’s boat get away from him. His boat moved pretty fast, so we thought that if we had a boat we could drift that fast all summer until we got to New Orleans.
We rode around town a while to decide how to get onto the river. We soon discovered. We soon discovered that no hardware stores were interested in buying our bicycles. So we rode down to a marina on the river to see how much boats cost.
We chose a 14-foot flat boat, a duck boat, for $165 including oarlocks, oars and life preservers.
The lady that sold us the boat was only too happy to tell us about the fast current on the river and like a couple of fools we ate it up.
So anyway, we lashed our bikes to the boat like this. Well something like that:
And we went on our way down the rushing river… for about 5 miles. Then the river started to slow down and widen out.
After carefully consulting our charts we learned that stretch we learn that stretching out before us was a 200-mile long lake!!!
Lake Oahe (pronounced oh-wa-hee) is supposed to be one of the longest lakes in the US, but we just said oh well and decided we could row across it.
After about three days we hadn’t gotten 50 miles. We decided to sell the bikes and get a small motor.
That night when it was just getting dark, we saw some lights off in the distance. Our map said this was probably Fort Yates, a pretty good size town of about 3000 people built on an island.
We thought we could row to that before it got dark, but it was dark for about two hours by the time by the time we got there.
After we had been asleep for a while, it started to rain. It was the worst storm that I can remember, but I suppose they look worse when you’re outside and it’s the middle of the night.
I was already scared because to get to the island we had to row through a bunch of partially submerged trees. We ran into a few because we didn’t see them in time.
On top of that, it was getting pretty wavy. It was lightning so much that for about 10 minutes straight it was as light as day.
The wind was blowing like crazy and we had to struggle just to keep our tarp over our heads. The next morning, we found our boat upside down in a small cove, but it didn’t have any holes in it or anything.
Our bicycles were somewhere in the bottom, along with our food, cooking utensils, notes, identification, and lots of other stuff.
This is when we started saying oh well a lot.
We still had most of our essentials, though, because before we went to sleep, we brought up our clothes, sleeping bags, tarp, and travelers checks.
Searching the beach, we found our orange life jackets and a few other things that floated. Really, it was kind of fun, like a treasure hunt or something. The water was real cold, but we went in anyway to look for our bikes.
Just as we were giving up, I stubbed my toe on a handlebar.
90% of the bikes were under the sludge, but we finally yanked them out. We went into town and put an ad on a store window, saying we wanted to sell the bikes bicycles and buy a motor.
Before dark we had sold our bicycles for about $50 and bought a motor for $60. The motor didn’t work so well. It was a 3-horse, but we just said 00 well, and the next morning we put it away from Fort Yates never to return again.
The motor made just a horrible noise, but we rode from morning until dark so we could get off the lake. It took us about five days. Some days we were slowed or couldn’t go at all because of the rain.
Oh well.
Now I start telling you about nice things that happens.
The night before we reached the dam, we stayed at a small camping area along the shore. There were three sets of campers there besides us. After we had a hearty meal of pancakes, and were sitting around playing our instruments and watching the river, a guy from Wisconsin came over.
He gave us a very large plate of shrimp salad that his family couldn’t eat. We were pretty full from our pancakes but you can’t turn down shrimp salad, so we thanked him and offered him a “chair” and sat around and talked for a while.
Around dark, three guys from another group came over and gave us an inch-thick barbecue T-bone steak, three hamburgers in a bun. They sat down with us to and after we finished, they offered us some two-layer chocolate cake with ice cream, but we just didn’t have room.
Well, the next day we reached the dam. We thought we could just carry our boat over, but we would have had to carry it about a mile and a half, so he sat around and said oh well a lot, for about two hours as a matter of fact, but then all of a sudden, a forest ranger pulls up to us and asked if we were the ones trying to get over the dam.
We say yeah and he tells us to get in the car and help him go get us a boat trailer. When we got to the marina below the dam they told us they would take us over for $15, but the Ranger pulled some strings and got the trailer for free.
On the way back to the boat, the Ranger picked up another Ranger another ranger who had a camera and was supposed to take pictures of the great flat boat portage.
We had a real good time loading up the boat, getting our pictures taken, and all that.
The foresters told us that the US Army Corps of Engineers would take us over the rest of the dams for free, so we didn’t have to worry about that anymore.
There were three more dams and we went over every one in a different way. At one, they picked up the boat with a crane and put it in a truck. At another, they used a tracter, and we portaged the last one ourselves by rolling the boat with logs.
We were able to portage the last one because the water went right up to the ? on both sides. We only had to portage about a quarter mile but when we got below the dam we discovered we were on the lake not the river, so we had to make another short portage to get back on the river.
On the Fourth of July. We pulled into a small town called Springfield South Dakota. I don’t think we’ll ever forget Springfield.
When we got there, the whole town was on the beach having an ice cream social.Pretty soon a few people came up to us and asked us the usual questions of where’d we start, how far we were going, etc.
After we talked for a while, they left. But about an hour later two of them came back and said they made an agreement that one of them would feed us if the other would find us a place to stay.
We thought that was a pretty good agreement so that night we had a college dorm all to ourselves, including the showers, TV, and a laundry room. One of the men was a college dean.
The next day we were treated to a chicken dinner by Norm at Norm’s Tavern. After we ate, the resident head of the dorm decided that he wanted to buy us some groceries. It was a holiday, though, and the grocery store was closed, but the town no but the owner of the store opened it as a favor to us.
We got five dollars worth of groceries then they drove us back to our boat and helped us launch it.
From there on we had current, so we were just lazing along the rest of the way.
For a while we had a raft which we built, but our pontoons would fall out when we when we hit logs, and little branches along the shore would sweep off all our gear. We couldn’t figure out any way to steer it, so we abandoned it.
Oh well, and now about our Lake of the Ozarks adventures. When we got around Jefferson City Missouri we were a little low on cash. We had about $100, but we wanted some security, so Dan decided that he was going to try to sell portraits what he does in pencil for three dollars.
The first place we went was a park. We met a college student who offered us a place to stay while we were making our millions.
He suggested that we hitch a ride down to the lake of the Ozarks and try to sell the portraits down there. So the next day we went down to the lake.
After not getting a customer all day, Dan decided to do a girl’s portrait for free, but for some reason he just couldn’t do a good job on it, so he decided to liquidate his business and return to Jefferson City.
Before he left, he mailed a postcard to Ron. We made it back before dark.
One rainy morning, we arrived at the mouth of the Missouri river, the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers meet at the smelliest place in the world, St. Louis. It smelled so bad that we had to bunch up towels and put them over our noses in order to breathe.
All along the shore you could see sewage and industrial waste emptying into the river. Some of it was vomit yellow. Some of it was yucky blue, but most of it was brown.
All of that junk going to the river made it look metallic, sort of a mercury color. On top of all that, huge barges were going by on all sides. Their wakes were real bouncy we just bounced right past most of St. Louis.
We finally pulled in on the edge of town and took a bus downtown. Dan was interviewed by US news and world report. They wanted his views on the national situation. He said he thought everything was mostly OK.
That night we were going to go to a rock ‘n’ roll revival with Jerry Lee Lewis, The Coasters, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, but we decided we didn’t have enough cash, about $10 counting busfare.
From St. Louis on, it rained hard absolutely every day for the next two weeks. By the time we got to the Tennessee border we were fed up with sleeping on a wet. We were fed up with sleeping in wet sleeping bags every night, hardly ever getting dry wood for a cooking fire, and just all around feeling miserable, so we decided to sell the boat.
No sooner had we decided when someone came up to us in a speedboat to talk to us. We asked him if he wanted to buy our boat. He said how much, we said $75, and he said sold.
And we were off the river. Later, some other people said they would’ve given us $700 for it.
Oh well.