American Road Trip 1: North Dakota to Glacier

Day Five: Minot, ND, to Chester, MT

It’s hard to imagine just how big the American agricultural machine really is. Knowing that I am only scratching the northern tip of flax, corn, and cattle country, this day has been (until its end) an exercise in open sky and broad fields.

Fleeing Minot was an easy choice—after all, Motley Crue and Culture Club were scheduled to perform, and if Taylor Swift sold out, then surely. . . . but once out of that town, the rest is a series of ranching, old mining, and seed towns linked by railroads and the Milk River.

Once we vanquish trees from our existence and flatten the space around us, the earth drops away and the sky is indeed larger. My peripheral vision cannot absorb it all: multiple weather fronts can be seen from dozens of miles away. I contrast this to my home where I might spot a tornado only if it appeared 50 yards from my roof. Over and over I saw trains with dozens of grain cars—but I saw the entire train, from engine to caboose, and then had acres of room before and after it. Rivers—when they appeared—wound into horizons, not around bends. And, on the horizon, five miles out, behemoths rise . . . two grain elevators, one rotted and abandoned, its windows broken and debris landscape; the other functioning, twenty feet away, slowly shedding its steel and aluminum siding, one corner tower bent askew.

But there is a fine line, I think, between awe and boredom. During some moments of the 8-hour journey, I spoke aloud in surprise: hundreds of hay rolls, spotting the landscape against a series of power lines and a lone river; the nearly florescent lavenders or yellows of flax fields, carved against the gentle slopes; the startling blue of water painted against the green. And the same images later, with my car on cruise control and my legs tucked up against the seat: endless electrical poles against another river bank; pastures of cattle beating the scrub grasses around one fertile field; nearly nothing but green and dirt yellow, green and dirt yellow.

There is not a car on US-2 (well, except when I slow to 45 to pass through a one-intersection town with a bar called “Bear Paw Pub” or “Black Bear Tavern” on the corner—then there is sometimes a pick-up pulling into or out of the lot); there is not a single worker on any farm (which I contrast to Nepal where endless rice paddies were always spotted with the vivid colors of women working or the ox-plows with men pushing). Occasionally I see a network of automated field sprinklers, hundreds of yards long, slowly wending their way across the sodden fields; rarely I see a combine churning through the green.

So of course I had to find something to do. The stop at a pretty but uninformative “Montana Welcome Center” was thrilling enough. But then I heard about the Fort Peck dam: What, the second largest earthen dam made by hydraulics in the country? Of course!

The stop was worth it. Not only did I find that Montana was working of a tourist theme called Dinosaur Highway in combination with the Lewis and Clark Trail, but the dam (and its New Deal history) was actually stunning. How, in the 1930s, do we decide to dam up the entire Missouri River for a power project and simultaneously create a new reservoir larger than Delaware, New Hampshire, and Connecticut combined? And once the workers of Fort Peck finally finished (and FD Roosevelt cut the ceremonial ribbons) what becomes of the town which rose up during the years of construction? The town is now a living museum with only 1/10 of the population remaining, and the recreation site and wildlife refuge created is one of the largest in the world.

But where to stay tonight? To break the monotony, I thought I would push on and push on to the next town, but not to get caught searching after dark. What’s more, I was driving into an enormous electrical storm. Lightning cracked down in the distance, striking into the town miles away (which I could see because of that flat land (see above!). Sun to the north and south, deep gray-blue anger to the west ahead of me. Could be tornadoes, too—how was I to know?

When I arrived in Chester, I looked for the camping signs (hearing that there were some good ones here near a reservoir). A woman pointed me in the right direction. “How far?” I asked, looking at the front moving closer. “How do I know?” she said. “I just look for the signs.” And so I drove south (into the path of this south-easterly storm, down a gravel “highway” bordered by more cornfields. Stopped long enough to get a beautiful photo of an abandoned house against the looming storm—straight out of Andrew Wyeth, so definitely worth it, but then realized that the campground was 15 slow miles down the gravel road.

As I’ve come to expect, it was nearly empty. I threw up my tent and made a fire as the storm inched closer. The campground was nearly treeless, just shrubs and a sapling to shelter me—ha. Cooked a fast meal, dove into the tent, and the rain and wind came down.

It lasted all night, but I slept hard and the tent held. The only mystery when I rose early to leave in the morning was that the few campers I saw in the distance had pulled out in their RVs sometime in the night and that—I try not to think about how this happened—one of the hot logs I had left in the iron-grill covered fire had vanished: not ashes, not a miscount—the charred smoking thing had been taken.

Day Six: Into Glacier

So I fled the campground without stopping for breakfast. It was too isolated, too weird: Andrew Wyeth meets Franz Kafka narrated by Rod Serling. And I didn’t realize just how close I was to Glacier! By 8:30, I was in the park, winding my way along curved roads, past dozens of B&Bs, trying to hold myself to the road while I gawked at the next bend’s angle on the Rocky Mountains. I would see it all in time—I concentrated on getting into the park, going up to Babb and hoping for a spot in one of the most popular camps, Many Glacier. I got in, with only two or three spots remaining. Yes, the light from the public toilet (flush!) is over my right shoulder as I type, but it is a small price.

Went down to walk the Grinnell Glacier trail for an hour while I waited for a nature walk to start. Met a small group there and we returned to the ranger-led trip. Saw a black bear, fairly close, missed the grizzly that was reported 20 minutes up the trail, spent a fair amount of time with two moose in a small lake, and saw baby calliope hummingbirds. Pretty good for my first afternoon there.

Went down to see Glacier Hotel which my brother described as Stephen King-esque, and he’s right. If the hallways were a little more narrow and winding, I could ride a Big Wheel down them and see the twin girls. Picked up a forgettable boat cruise at the hotel (why did I do that, again?), and saw that the canoe rentals were expensive and wouldn’t get me very far in the lake—portage, my brother’s suggestion—seemed like an unclear possibility without maps and such, which are hard to find here.

And then, around 6 this evening, I tried a hike to Akkupenny Falls, only a mile into the mountains. The rangers start with hiking rule #1: Don’t hike alone. I reasoned that if many others were on the trail, that counted as following the rule. Lots of cars at the trail head, but no one on my particular trail. This afternoon’s ranger underlined the danger of bear and cougar attacks, and I started singing my “Mister Ed” songs again (see Alaska stories). Okay, so maybe my imagination is vivid, and maybe that is combined with a reality statistic of 350 or more grizzly, an unknown number of mountain lions, and real incidents of people dying from attacks. Those odds are better than automobile accidents (and I drive cars) and lotto winners (which I’ve occasionally played). I, uh, turned around about a half mile up, talking about statistics to any bear that was listening. Besides, I have more to do with my life after my trip to Glacier.

Tomorrow I try the “Heart of Glacier” hike, but it is ranger-led and with a group. Pretty challenging for this 46 year old body, I think, but it will be a good mid-way point to the trip. Wednesday I will leave early to do the Going-to-the-Sun Road early enough to beat the traffic and see some wildlife—then we’ll see what the west side of the park brings.

But tragedy struck today. Not only is my phone out of service up here, but it fell to the rocks during my near-hike to the Appekunny (I used it for a clock). The screen has broken, and so Twitter updates and text messages are no more until I find a new one. I’m surprisingly emotionless about it; but I type this blog in the now silent campground, large buzzing critters about my head as I sit at this picnic table, and the temperature drops.