In search of North Dakota (day 2)

Thursday, May 15, 2008
Montana, North Dakota

Today was to be the big day, the day of discovery, to settle once and for all whether there really is a place such as North Dakota or whether—like the Loch Ness monster, the land of Oz, or the Bermuda Triangle—it is a thing of fantasy, of make believe, of wishful thinking.

After a good night's sleep, and sleeping in a little, Anna and I used the treadmills in the motel's exercise room. Peter went to the pool. We ate from the motel's full hot breakfast selections, packed our things, loaded the car, and were on the road again by about a quarter to ten.

East of Billings, as we now traveled along I-94, we started listening to a CD of interesting half-hour episodes of This American Life, an NPR radio show. While listening, as we traveled along through eastern Montana, Peter driving, Anna in the front passenger seat, I right behind her, I started feeling very nauseous, then broke out into a cold sweat, got very dizzy, and felt exceedingly sick. Here we were out in the middle of nowhere, and I was feeling awful. I did not know if it were some reaction to the two Imodium pills I had taken just as we were leaving Billings or if it were car sickness (which I have never before suffered) or whatever illness has been plaguing me the past couple days. Whatever the reason, I was very, very sick. So I slouched down into my seat and tried sleeping it off. I do not know how long I slept, but after some miles I felt a little better, and we stopped at a rest area somewhere before Glendive to take a bathroom break and to eat our lunch. I reverted to my safer diet of banana, applesauce, and water.

For at least the last hundred miles yesterday on I-90 before we reached Billings, and again today on I-94 until we crossed the river a final time at Glendive, the freeway paralleled the course of the Yellowstone River as it coursed its way east and north toward its confluence with the Missouri River in northeastern Montana. We crossed it a number of times, so sometimes it was to our left, at other times off to the right of us.

For a number of years members of our family have doubted the existence of North Dakota. As we came to the border between Montana and North Dakota, we pulled off to the side of the road to take pictures of the Welcome to North Dakota sign to serve as evidence to the skeptics back home that there really is such a place. Unless, of course, it is all a part of a vast hoax (similar to that depicted in the Truman Show), but if it is it's on a rather grand scale because we spent a good part of the day driving across some 350 miles of it.

The first exit in North Dakota was to a town called Beach, seemingly an odd name for a spot in the center of the continent so removed from any beaches. We stopped there to refuel the car.

Later in the afternoon, as we continued across the state on I-94, we saw a humongous statue of a cow on a hilltop near New Salem, learning later from a brochure at a rest stop that it was Salem Sue, the World's Largest Holstein Cow. We are not making this up.

We also passed Theodore Roosevelt National Park in the Badlands of western North Dakota and in the middle of the state crossed the Missouri River just before driving through the state capital at Bismarck. Somewhere in the eastern half of the state we saw a huge statue of a buffalo, rivaling our friendly holstein further west, although we cannot verify if it is the World's Largest Buffalo.

Across the last part of Montana and continuing across most of North Dakota we were listening on CD to an audio book entitled Divide.

We reached Fargo this evening around eight o'clock Central daylight time, having crossed from the Mountain to Central time zone somewhere in western North Dakota (although sooner than the map in our atlas showed we would). We found the Country Inn & Suites and checked into the two-room suite that will be our home for the next three nights. We fixed black beans, Spanish rice, and tamales for our supper in our motel room and watched an episode of Lost and the ten o'clock news.

With North Dakota today, I have now been in forty-five of the fifty states. With the prospect of going into Minnesota tomorrow, which is just across the river from Fargo, that will make forty-six. Not counting my imminent visit to Minnesota, I have not yet been in Alaska, Hawaii, Maine, or Wisconsin.