Riders Block XII

DAY 12

Grand Forks, ND to Yankton, SD

400 miles

 

Morning in North Dakota is cold but the sky is clear of clouds so I get in my car and cross back over into Minnesota in order to take US 75 instead of interstate 29.  The road is flat and straight and every once in a while I pass a flatbed truck or a slow-moving farm vehicle that has to take the highway to get to the other side of his farm, a mile or so down the road.  Route 75 is apparently the King of Roads, or so says the signs that I pass warning me of upcoming towns with populations in the two hundreds.

I stop in Fargo, passing back over the Red River of the North into the Dakotas and have breakfast at Denny’s.  It is certainly not my first choice but I am hungry and I want to eat and get back on the road.  When I emerge from the restaurant, the blue sky has complete disappeared under a dark gray cloud and I marvel at how in thirty minutes the weather can shift so dramatically.  I drive for most of the day under a black cloud that seems to be stretched across the sky in southeasterly manner but every time I think I am going to get out from under it, the wind shifts and the cloud continues to sit over my car, dumping heavy rain on me at thirty minute intervals. 

The hills of North and South Dakota look like a poorly maintained golf course.  They are brown and craggy with old fence posts and tenuous-looking wire guarding their property or keeping cattle contained.  At one farm, a lone barn with no foundation looks as if it dates from the late nineteenth century.  It sits at an angle amongst freshly rolled bales of hay on a landscape that looks like the waves of a rough sea.  Cattle dots the hills, which roll with rockiness in some places and then are without a single rise or fall all the way to the horizon in another.

The majority of towns in North and South Dakota seem to be built along the major route through the town, whether it be 75 or 81.  As you approach the town, you see the skyscraping industrial buildings, either dealing in feed or seed or sand or gravel and then after you pass the ugly, steel gray building, you see a few businesses and houses and then the corn fields and ranches return.  This routine happened without fail the entire way south through the two states, almost like the same person was the town planner for every hamlet in the Dakotas.

In the evening, the sky becomes blue and the air warms and I stop at dusk by Silver Lake, which is so small it is not even on my map.  The lake sits off route 81 and actually looks metallic in the fading light.  I stay the night in Yankton, SD.  The town sits on the Missouri River, which creates the border of South Dakota and Nebraska.  The old woman at the desk is slow and it takes her more than twenty minutes to complete my transaction.  When I tell her about my travels, she tells me about her own and how she drove to Iowa with her niece to find her brother’s grave and couldn’t find it.  After this exhausting encounter I retire to my room and fall asleep.