Ups and Downs in North Dakota

Adjusting Expectations

Williston to Grand Forks- August 2

Yesterday I was mourning as I left the mountains of central Montana and traveled through eastern Montana and into North Dakota. For the first time it felt like I was just driving to get through an area instead of enjoying everything I was seeing and experiencing. It was hard to acknowledge anything much about this flatter, monochromatic landscape. I didn't take a single photo, even of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park buttes, which were definitely beautiful. I was a little depressed, I'll admit.

Something shifted this morning as I started off from murky, unappealing Lake Sakakawea near Williston. I always start out slow, driving maddeningly slowly for the cars and trucks behind me- until I pull over to let them pass.

There were hundreds of these behemoths dotted in the fields.

I committed to taking photos today, if only of the frakking contraptions extracting natural gas from the landscape. But I started to look with a kinder eye and I realized I had adjusted my expectations to something less majestic but none-the-less worth appreciating.

And there it was- amazing farmland with flourishing crops, rolling green hills, wheat fields juxtaposed with oil derricks, hawks on the prowl, wind farms, and just a big sky kind of cereal abundance. So that was the 'up'.

This is flax. Seeing it from afar, I thought it was either water or metal. The brilliance of the blue just isn't
represented accurately in this photo.

In some places there were 30 wind towers spread across
the croplands.

But I tried to find that little cafe I've been able to find in every town so far, tucked in beside the tattoo parlor or the beauty salon. and it was just a cafe desert, no matter how hard I looked. Even the restaurants had nothing for that annoying vegetarian such as myself. I felt truly like a stranger in a strange land, not wanting to at all. And that old sense of fear arose that I might be so totally different from these North Dakotans and that my ways might be so very odd to them. It was visceral and uncomfortable as I backed away from the selection of iceberg lettuce at the local market.

I kept on heading east. When I stopped at the last State Park before the border, they were going to do one of their twice weekly mosquito sprays tonight and I was done. I called Ariel and asked her to rescue me by finding a place for me to get decent food and a place to stay in Grand Forks, a city big enough to have some options. And so here I sit, in a Red Roof Inn, having experienced one of two semi-tough half-days on the road. But the photos show some of the pleasure I found in this state of such contradictions. Plus, I did get to stand in the geographic center of North America, even if there wasn't any cafe to be found in its vicinity.

See below for some interesting North Dakota Ag facts:


North Dakota is #1 in the following crops, with the percent of US total included-
Spring Wheat- 47%                     Durum wheat- 52%
Barley- 28%                                Navy beans- 45%
Pinto beans- 56%                        Sunflowers- 52%
Canola- 83%                               Flaxseed- 95%
Edible dry peas- 41%                  Honey- 23%