Along The Road

The Trough

Driving along the Laura Ingalls Wilder Historic Highway, through the great southern plains of Minnesota, I got an image different from the factory floor that I saw in southwest Wisconsin/southeast Minnesota: cute, chubby piggies lined up, cheek by jowl, their heads hanging over the Appalachians in the east and the Rockies in the west, snouts buried in corn, swilling at the great American feed trough, old ArcherDaniels himself, feet planted in the Gulf, pumping oil in at the mouth of the Mississippi.

Nor words nor pictures can do justice to the vastness of American agriculture. You have to experience it, to drive through it, and not by the major highways. You have to travel the two-lane blacktops, mile after mile, hour after hour, with nothing but corn and soy beans as far as the eye can see in every direction.

This, of course, does not do justice to the folks living there; working people mostly, prosperous, feeding the world. I especially like elevator towns, little hamlets of two hundred or fewer, living in the middle of nowhere because it was, at one time, a convenient place to put a grain elevator. There's usually a gas station with a couple of pumps, a cafe, a bar, a post office of course, and a church or two. Sometimes there's an effort to attract tourism, as in Walnut Grove, home to the annual Wilder pageant. It must have been beautiful country once...it still is, when you can read it between the endless lines of corn stalks.

Nostalgia is a pointless exercise...you can be sure that whatever you're nostalgic for, someone currently dead was nostalgic for whatever was replaced by what for you is a fond memory. So, as ADM progressively incorporates what was once a thriving independant economy, new lives will come to recall the good old days before ADM wiped all the elevator towns off the map and replace man-driven machines with robot run, GPS located auto-combines, and folks had nothing left to do but move or retire.

Amazing what a stunning transformation can be engendered by a subtle change. Drive off the edge of Minnesota, up a gentle rise of hardly a hundred feet, and suddenly you're in Cattle Country. The air is suddenly dryer, clearer, less languid than down in the humid bottom land. Perhaps it was only that the muggy heat was lifted, and that it was not the endless corn fields that so oppressed me. Southeastern S. Dakota seems more human somehow. I can imagine myself travelling in it rather than through it, riding a pony over the open, gently rolling hills, covered as they are with something you could ride through, tremendous fields of grass, instead of being choked with endless thickets of corn. Even the dirt looks different.

Of course, I was raised on Cowboy Bob, not Farmer Bill, so maybe it is only me. I don't really want to punch any cows, and I'm not really all that comfortable around horses, though I like them well enough. Anyway, I could actually imagine living around here, though I suspect I'd eventually miss the ocean. Too bad the West Coast is so damn conscious of itself.

Travlling west and north the rumpled sheet of SD stretches and flattens, the edges of the vistas receed until they disappear over the horizon. There are cornfields here, and though the comparison may be unfair, SD corn having been planted later, they don't seem as confining as those in Minnesota. Much of the uncultivated middle of SD is wetlands, part of the great central flyway that includes the Cheyenne Bottoms, in Kansas, near the town of Great Bend where I spent a year before moving on to New York. And here I am, seven years later, heading slowly back, hitting all the hotspots I missed on the way out.

North, through the beautiful Missouri River Watershed, into North Dakota. Beautiful, that is, until you get to Bismark.

Bismark seems to have managed the worst of all possible worlds, combining urban sprawl and a shabby old downtown. I searched in vain for anything funky. (By the way, if you're ever in Mankato, MN, site of one of America's bloodiest Indian masacres, stop in at Coffee Hag, the most (perhaps the only) truly funky Java joint in the midwest.) Bismark actually consumes dirt. North Dakota, of which Bismark is the capital and principal city, is booming on rising energy prices, extracting the lignite deposits that Lewis and Clark noted in inch thick to yards thick deposits in the exposed banks of the Missouri River.

After giving up on Laura, I followed Lewis and Clark up the Missouri, through gently rolling hills and deeply cleft badlands, listening to Rez radio (the remnants of the great Sioux nations were driven here). Actually, you can't follow the Missouri River anymore. You have to follow Lake Sakakawea, North Dakota's great tourist mecca. Between resource extraction, wheat and cattle, tourism, and bees (yes, bees...ND is one of the few places that hasn't been africanized, mited, and sudden hive disappearanced out of the honey business), ND is a happening place.

And tomorrow I'll be moving on to Reserve, MT, home of Pure Montana Organics 1250 hectares of wheat.