Nov 30, 2008 - 04:05:25 CST
Mom Christmas, Dad Thanksgiving. Anyone who says that divorce is not a cataclysm is in denial.I had all the time in the world to think about things this year, because I drove to western Kansas to get my daughter, who is now 14. It's a trip of 751 miles across the loneliest stretches of highway in America. The combined population of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas is 5,986,497. These four large rectangular states contain (for the moment) approximately 1/16 of the U.S. population, but we all know that the overwhelming majority of Plains people live east of the 100th meridian, indeed east of the 98th meridian. Grand Forks, Fargo, Aberdeen, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Lincoln, greater Kansas City and Topeka have a combined population of 1,930,411. They all lean yearningly into the states to the east.
I was driving out in the empty quarter on the other end of the plains. That alone is reason for thanksgiving. My route took me through Dickinson, Bowman, Marmarth, Camp Crook, Belle Fourche, Rapid City, Hot Springs, Chadron, Alliance, Sidney, Ogallala and Imperial before I entered Kansas airspace just south of Benkelman, Neb. Add up the population of those towns, with the exception of Rapid City, and the descriptors that begin to pile up are desolation, wind-swept, isolated, dilapidated and forlorn. My favorite part of America.
Here's what I saw.
South of Marmarth, on the western banks of the Little Missouri River, on the old Camp Crook road, almost unbelievable amounts of oil development. Enough to make your jaw drop. I took photographs of everything I could see from the road - it made for a very long 35 miles to the South Dakota border. This is some of the least-visited country in North Dakota, and most beautiful too. It's as isolated as any place on the Great Plains, and it has been transformed from a kind of magic outback into an industrial landscape. Because almost nobody goes there (you have to want to go there), all this oil extraction occurs below the radar. Oil development is a fact of life. It is in some respects reason for thanksgiving - look at the North Dakota budget surplus - but it also is a jarring, scarring, marring assault on the magnificence of the rolling hills and butte country that we choose as our homeland.
I try to take a different route to Kansas every time I go see my daughter. No matter which route I choose, I have to eat up the northern half of the Great Plains to get there. It's a very long way between decelerations. The only stop signs are at correction lines and major road intersections. It's really easy - and delightful, and a little dangerous - to go into a semi-trance. We take the Great Plains for granted, but every hour or so I wake up and look out at something that takes my breath away. A pine-dotted ridge halfway to the horizon, a butte shaped by the butte god for pure butte perfection, a sluggish S-curved plains river (creek) carving out little half-hearted Badlands here and there in its journey, pyramidical sand hills barely holding their thin veneer of wispy grass, sensuously contoured rolling hills that seem to drift off to the end of the Earth in every direction, Bear Butte from 20 miles away, barely visible in the haze.
The variety of the Great Plains is remarkable. As with great books, you have to read the Plains again and again to see the subtleties. On this trip, I saw ridges and isolated hills that I had never noticed before. At least five times in two days, I wanted to turn off the pavement and head down the gravel roads to explore and maybe get lost or stuck or saved. It cost me something to keep on the straight path - I know my Robert Frost, that I might never be back - but the young whipersnapper at the other end of the journey was where my joy and thanks overwhelmingly reside, and I would hack my way through bin Laden or a desert of thorns to get to her.
The skyscrapers of the Great Plains continue to be grain elevators, including the big clusters of concrete giants. This fall they were all full to bursting, with rail cars lined up to haul all that grain away. Up and down the plains I saw at least 50 vast mountains of wheat next to the tracks in a perfect Hershey's Kiss pattern, rust tawny. The world economy may be in slow-motion collapse, but the sheer abundance of the harvest, the glut of grain so great that it could not be stored or carried away, made me fall in love with America all over again. Everywhere, I saw farmers combining in the yellow brittle corn rows with huge semis at the edge of the field, hastening to get the crop in before winter blows in earnest. I wondered if they would have to combine through Thanksgiving this year - if they did, think of their sense of weary, but intense satisfaction at the end of the day when they came in to see that mountain of food spread across the rarely used dining room table.
We sometimes forget: Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. It is a celebration of the grace of American abundance. That abundance is best seen not at Best Buy, but among the heartland's towns and fields.
And when you least expect it, driving to beat the band up over a hill, a herd of 30 pronghorn antelopes grazing by the side of the road, the quintessential Great Plains animal on a stunning autumn Great Plains day. They pause for a second or two before they storm the next ridge, and then pause again to stare and maybe return nonchalantly to grazing. Is there anything more beautiful than an antelope, a quivering still or charging San Juan Hill?
Finally, stiff and brain-numb, I pulled up in front of my daughter's school, got out and shook the shards of Doritos off my jeans, and signed her out. She came down the hall at the fastest clip that accords with teenage detachment. Her smile, when she got within range, filled me with love and thanks and happiness right through the roof. I banked it up like grain.
In a few days, I get to drive her home, by a different route, at $1.85 gas. My chief thanks in life is to be her father. My second thanks is to live on the Great Plains. My third is that so few others wish to crowd our homeland.
(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute. He is also the Theodore Roosevelt Scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State University. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Clay at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)
steve wrote on Dec 5, 2008 6:10 AM:
I'm on the East Coast now but my house is for sale and my brother
and I will be heading to the Dakota's soon. Thanks for the
encouragement to move there. "
Tom wrote on Dec 1, 2008 6:50 AM:
solivagus wrote on Nov 30, 2008 10:48 AM:
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