Across the Prairies to the Hi-Line

Day 5, July 4^th Independence Day

Distance travelled 610kms

Wildlife spotted:  many, many stuffed animals at the Museum of the Great Prairies, Rugby, North Dakota

We had promised ourselves a lie-in and an easy day, but were woken early at Turtle River by thunder and one of my storm warning headaches, so we broke camp and packed the car to avoid getting everything soaked yet again.

Just as we sat into the car, enormous warm rain drops began to fell so we decided the best thing to do was head west.

I ‘m so used to going west now, I don’t know how I’m going to transition to going east.

Soon we were on the prairie proper.  Long, long fields of rape seed and wheat stretched out into infinity.  The odd grain elevator or house broke the monotony of the skyline.  Above us, the sky was so huge that we could see the edges of the storm chasing us.  The dark, almost black clouds trimmed in gold.  The light filtered down onto the swamp grass along the highway and gave it an odd yellowish wash.

The highway is twinned here and the speed limit is sensible, so we hummed along.  Little towns appeared every now and then and demanded that we slow down and inspect.  Even though nobody is walking around.  Petersburg.  Michigan.  Lakota.  Each one a straggle along the highway, with a Main St at right angles, and maybe a third street to create some depth.

What must it be like to grow up in one of these towns?

We stopped in Rugby.  Named after its English predecessor by a shareholder in the North Pacific Railway company that is its raison d’etre, it boasts the geographical centre of the continent of North America.

Its prosperity was marked by the fact that it had a business district, stretched along each side of the highway.

We fetched up to the Museum of the Prairies, which was started sometime in the sixties.  It was a vast collection of the bits and pieces of everyday life on a prairie farm, sorted into a fairly decent sort of logic throughout a collection of old buildings from the region.  A room full of sewing machines.  A room full of guns.  Of dolls.  Of wedding dresses.  An old caboose.  A cookhouse.  A fully rendered log home from the 1880s.  Two huge buildings full of Studebakers, and Model Ts, and Oldsmobiles.  Bearskin coats and wolfskin coats, and horse hair coats, and bison robes and rabbit furs.  A barn full of farrier tools. 

When I asked the attendant, she said everyone in the region had cleared out their attic for the museum.

I guess you don’t throw out much when you’re homesteading.

It’s a marvellous record of how a hardy, sturdy people, mostly Scandinavian, hewed a living out of this place.

The room full of animal heads was very sad though.  Bison, moose, sheep, goat, deer, wolf, bobcat..... Not many left of any of them. 

We moved on through the farmland.  Acres and acres of rape, interspersed with grains.  On and on and on it went.  The road was so straight that we commented on a bend.  The towns got a little grubbier.  Quieter.  No parades in any of them.  The odd flag.  But mostly very quiet.

Towards Minot, it began to rise a little, very slowly, but it never went down again.  We cruised through that town looking for lunch, but probably due to the day that was in it, there wasn’t much happening on the chow front.  Either that or Norwegian Americans don’t eat out.

We decided to head over to Willeston, on the Montana border.  After Minot, the tillage pretty much ended and although the country was still beautiful, it was left much to its own devices.  Wildflowers were in bloom, all yellow and blue and white, and there was an odd white tail deer around.  It was all very lush, but you could see the sandy earth underneath and now it was rising in mounds around us, getting bigger, although still soft and rounded. 

We saw an oil derrick.  Then another.  Then we were deep in oil country.  Derricks everywhere, bobbing their robotic heads up and down as if to some invisible alien overlord.  Trucks hurtling around the roads, with large oil tankers on the back.  Work camps everywhere. RVs everywhere. 

We have driven across four states in the last two days and we did not see one house being built.  Not one.  When we got to Willeston, it was crawling with people, building sites, pickup trucks, and realtors.

Just like Fort McMurray, Himself said. 

I hope they know what they’re doing.

And I’m glad I’ve seen the northern Dakotas before it’s too late.

We got the hell out of there and drove into Montana.

About ten miles in the craziness stopped again, and it was just us and the road and the sky and the land.

The trees gave up pretending they had any business in the landscape, and so did the farms.  What houses there were got smaller and less tidy, but most of them had some palominos or painteds running along a ridge.

A butte rose up and ran south, below the train track, parallel to the road on the southward side. 

A hawk soared above us looking for field mice.

We stopped on a hill and got out of the car and looked at the western horizon.  It seemed from the length of road ribboning out ahead of us that it was a long ways to go yet.

The wind danced in my hair and sang in my ear.