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North
Dakota
...we pass through the geographical centre of North
America
September, 1997
September 17th: In the yellow-green brown prairie we approach the Geographical Centre of North America. From Route 2, Rugby looks pretty well like anywhere else around here — a couple of garages, a store or two. The jolly women at the counter of the garage where we gas up, admire and "Oh My!" over the rude pendant that Lenore bought me for my birthday. The coffee is good.
Around Rugby lie dead level fields, scattered with hay bales that remind me of gigantic caterpillar faeces. Each farm has a wind break of big, dark green late-summer trees, a silo or two, a barn, a couple of sheds, lots of machinery in various states from gleaming new to mouldering, and a house. You very rarely see any signs of life. Farming here is done from inside a vehicle of some sort, be it a pick-up truck, a tractor or a combine harvester. Or even an aircraft, like the yellow crop dusters we saw earlier today.
Yet this country is less monotonous than the mixed forest of Ontario or Michingan/Minnesota.
A few weeks later we would have witnessed the autumn colours that we've seen just hinted at by a flick of red and orange here and there.
But the endless walls of trees that line the highway for hundreds of miles, broken only rarely by the sparkle of a lake, we find, in the end, overwhelming and depressing. I am not even cheered by the straight scars that mark the routes of dismantled railroads.
We camped at Turtle River State Park, glad to be under clear skies after the gloom of Minnesota. Then it is back to Route 2.
I pick up and send e-mail from the Chamber of Commerce at Devils Lake. Then, for a few hours I am able to ignore the view and sit typing in the passenger seat as Lenore drives.
Halfway through the day the scenery changes to a gentle, feminine undulation.
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