The Best Laid Plans . . .

More beautiful farm land.  Looking closer I begin to see signs advertising acreage for sale.  Have I been ignoring the reality so I can believe the pastoral? Have I been promoting a nineteenth, even a twentieth-century, notion of American power and abundance on the backs of failing farmers on failing farms?  I like to think not.  The neatly painted farmhouses and barns, the neatly plowed row on row of planted fields clicking past reveal a pale green of future abundance.  Should we be noticing more?  How much less farm land exists now than existed in 1960?  Is there more?  How much of what is right in front of us do we not see?   Dark Matter, indeed.

We are in the Great Plains.  Even before we officially arrived, the wind seemed to stand in our peripheral vision.  Now it is a character, a constant presence:  a giant hand pushing, pushing, pushing against the van.  Sometimes as we pass a truck, or it passes us, we are given a slap, just to make sure we are paying  attention.

A child of the West, I am happiest when untrammeled by . . . trees.  The sky here dominates.  The cosmos is closer.  I am reminded of the sky in the high desert at night, even as I look out upon this expanse of blue, marked by a few brush-stroke clouds.  In Valley City, North Dakota, we begin to climb.  The first rise we’ve seen in hundreds, maybe even a thousand miles.  The vista remains, but we climb.  We pass the Continental Divide at 419 feet.  Not the impressive altitude we expect.  Seeing standing water along the road, the arid West Steinbeck described seems a lie.  As we talk with people born and raised here, we hear again and again that no one has ever seen anything like it.  They, too, have known an arid West.  For them this is the lie.

When we arrive in Bismarck, North Dakota, we hear that the Missouri River is flooding homes.  Responding to a call for volunteers to load sandbags, we join others at Horizon Middle school and help fill two long, flatbed trailers with sandbags.  At the end of the day in Medora, North Dakota, we find the Little Missouri River has closed the bridge across the river from Medora headed west.  At dinner a chatty summer worker reports that Crow Agency, Montana—including Little Big Horn National Park-- is under water and I-90 closed due to flooding.  Hard to discuss the arid West when it refuses to be arid.  It appears that the trip has indeed begun to “take us,” to reveal its personality in defiance of our planning.

~ Margaret Downs-Gamble