day 35 -- williston to morehead, MN

what I noticed as I pulled out of williston was the dust. dust on cars in the motel parking lot, dust on the sidewalks, dust on street signs. as much as dust is iconic for the dakotas, it still surprised me -- when I first glanced at the dust-streaked cars I wondered how it was that every car in the parking lot had arrived there on dirt roads. and there are a lot of the latter, admittedly, but I think that had nothing to do with this urban dust. and wind, also iconic but surprising just the same. figured that heading consistently east would spare me from the worst of it, but plains gusts are stronger than that, ricocheting off the relentless sand hills. there was something incessant about those hills that I can't quite figure out...you'd think that of these landscapes the endless open spaces of the Montana plains would qualify as oppressive, not gently rolling scrubby hills above a slow-moving river. perhaps it was fatigue, perhaps it was that I couldn't process anything more complicated than plains-to-a-mountainous-horizon at this point. whatever the case, the maze of scarred hills was daunting. I tried to imagine it covered with tallgrass prairie, but that was hard to do while dodging and passing lumbering tankers and passing relief-valve flames roaring behind brand new oil and gas rigs that are surely residual from the halcyon days of $95 barrels of oil. presumably these ancient coastal swamps are richer than illinois cornfields, but still it's hard to imagine profiting from these trickle wells when the oil gushes unabated from saudi sands. halliburton was here in any case, and in a sprawling convenience store in new town on the Fort Berthold reservation there was a rack full of flame retardant coveralls. (but none of the giant wrenches I saw in texas.)

the three affiliated tribes -- mandan, hidatsa, arikara -- were in the midst of election season as well. and just as the incumbent sherriff in any county election wears his/her badge and pointed hat on election signs to demonstrate crime-fighting bona fides, so incumbents here wore feathers and braids. I was following SR1804 as it right-angle snaked around the chain of lakes, taking a scenic route suggestion from the atlas as far as Underwood before turning east on SR200 instead of continuing south to Bismarck and I-94. the significance of '1804' it didn't occur to me until I was on the road -- I figured the four digits signified a county road taken over for yet another auto trail, but of course this was lewis and clark country and so the 1804 wasn't a random number. I couldn't get into the 'in the footsteps' angle, possibly because I was headed the wrong way, but also because everything about the modern traverse is so different than the original journey. I know that's obvious, but it's hard to imagine what they saw and how they traveled while flying along on asphalt behind 50 horses, give or take. the mud, the baggage, the endless scanning ahead for a better track.

when I turned east I rather suddenly found myself in more comfortable flatness. endless wheat, a few towns, but most of the latter offset from the main road. this was real farmland isolation -- not the nothing-for-100-miles of nevada, but skeletal towns enclosed in small stands of trees, tucked away a half mile from passing traffic, a post office and two bank branches and a gas station and a rarely-open cafe...all just enough to keep residents close. no tourists except for the occasional wayward biker who mistakenly took a dirt road into town instead of the haphazardly paved one asphalt artery. an absolute isolation despite the presence of towns 10 miles down the road in either direction, though I'm sure consolidated high schools and commuting to urban jobs and the like make living here less shut in than it appears from the outside. I passed on the 'confederate bar and cafe' in McClusky not really wanting to know how the owner landed on the decision to paint a charming stars-and-bars across the roof of his establishment, or how it fit at all with the north dakota experience. and would stonewall have darkened the doorway of a cafe? perhaps the proprietor came north to plant peanuts unmolested by people of any color other than pink. also iconic and obvious, but the unsullied caucasian-ness of eastern dakota and the rural minnesota to come was remarkable.

anyway...the rest of the ride was a zig-zag toward Fargo and an inevitable stretch of I-94 -- I passed on riding by the KVLY television mast, which at 2063 feet was for two periods the tallest human-built structure in the world. (a Polish mast outstripped it in 1970 before collapsing in 1991; burq khalifa has rather more impressively passed it now.) I did pass by Sykeston, the home town of one Travis Hafner, whom a baseball historian tells me has a slim lead in home runs hit by a north dakotan over Darin Erstad. and Williston claimed Phil Jackson as a high school grad. and on the edge of arrowood national wildlife refuge -- tragedy. I was following SR9 and its right-angles, watching various waterfowl in some of the 10,000 lakes (more like ponds here). and then one hopped onto the road ahead...I slowed a bit, but the duck saw me and lifted off with plenty of room to spare. but at the last second it dipped low and straight at me...toward my face, specifically. quick calculations determined that this wasn't a good thing, so I half-swerved and half-ducked -- not enough to miss it completely, and it glanced hard off my left shoulder. a thud at 65mph, for sure, but presumably worse for the duck than for me. couldn't find it in the rearview, and when I wheeled around it was nowhere to be found. ugh. sickened me to think of likely injuries, but nothing to do.

the positive highlight, however, was a stop for a buffalo chicken pizza at the 'pizza ranch' in carrington, ND...a chain that I'd never stumbled across despite its dozens of locations in the heartland, especially iowa. sorta like the 'texas roadhouse' chain, based in Clarskville, IN.