North Dakota and South Dakota were admitted to the United States as the 39th and 40th States.
Happy … er … birthday, Dakotas!!!
I drove across the country with my boyfriend years ago. We went to many many states. We saw many beautiful things. We went through mountains and plains and prairies. But the states that touched us the most – the states that, frankly, blew us away … were the Dakotas.
Weird, but I don’t remember the two of us even SPEAKING to one another as we moved our way through the Dakotas. I know we did. But there was something about the landscapes there that struck us dumb. With wonder? Awe? Yes. But something else. Perhaps an awareness of our own smallness. We LOVED the Dakotas.
My memories there are rich, sensoral, and just snippets:
— Heavy grey clouds pressing in from horizon to horizon … watching the lightning occuring miles and miles away …
— The wet highway stretching out before us to the vanishing point
— An isolated gas station surrounded by dun-brown fields as far as the eye could see – the neon sign of the gas station gleaming through the rain – desolation – but poetry
— Rich fields of sunflowers on either side of the highway. The late afternoon light falling across the bobbing yellow heads of the flowers … the rich dark-brown soil
— The two small white-headed children we saw sitting on top of a fence – in the middle of nowhere – no grown-ups in sight – and in the paddock (also in the middle of nowhere) were about 10 grazing buffalo. The buffalo being watched over by these small gleaming tow-headed children. Odd. My boyfriend and I talked to them for a while. In blunt simple language.
Something about the landscape in the Dakotas made language seem unnecessary.
And here’s an old post I wrote about one of my favorite memories of all time. It’s from an experience we had in one of the Dakotas. It says it all. Hovering over this piece is an enormous silence. The silence of the surrounding land, the enormous sky … It didn’t press in on us, it wasn’t suffocating … but it wasn’t exactly liberating either. The landscape and the sky FORCED us to be contemplative. FORCED us to BE with ourselves. The silence persisted. Filling it up with silly chit-chat would have been useless because the silence was too big.
My love for the Dakotas is piercing and sensoral – and I was only there for 5 days.
Dakota post below:
Standing on a high windy plain with my first boyfriend as a thunderstorm gathered on the horizon and the light got low, and sickly-green, and so charged with potential you nearly wanted to scream. Waiting for the release. We had been hiking for hours, watching as the day changed, as the sky got more ominous. There had been a massive wind, whipping the tall grass on its side, nearly carrying me away with it. We got some incredible pictures of the approaching storm (we had no business being up on the high plains watching forks of lightning jag their way towards us, but whatever, it was gorgeous) … but the pictures cannot convey the feeling in the air itself . The hairs on my arm rose up, to meet the electricity in the molecules.
There were no people out there but us. (For obvious reasons. We were idiots.) Just a huge sky, changing on a moment to moment basis, getting fuller and fuller, lower and lower, and GREEN – not black, not purple … but GREEN … the sound of the wind in the grass … the feeling that we were about to get caught out in something pretty enormous and spectacular.
And then, I’ll never forget it:
For a brief whooshing moment, everything went still. The wind stopped. As though a giant hand had turned off the wind machine. Hush. A sudden alarming hush fell over the land. My boyfriend and I both stopped, feeling the change. We paused … holding our breath …
We were having the time of our lives. We were watching the storm unfold as though it was the best movie we had ever seen. We kept looking at each other, wordlessly, like: hoooly shiiiiit …
Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out – when everything came to a sudden sharp stop … took a breath … and then the heavens opened up) … and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I’ve only heard in movies.
The thundering sound of horses hooves … galloping horses … the galloping sound of MANY horses …
It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. Even though I’ve only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.
We were on the edge of a large dip in the land, a bit off the trail, and the sound came from far below. We walked over to the edge, in the middle of the eerie stillness, all the grass suddenly straight, still, motionless, and looked out over the dip in the land. And there we saw them – we had only heard about them and heard that it was rare to get a glimpse of them – but there they were – a herd of wild horses, racing along the bottom of the plain in a massive herd. There were about 20 of them, galloping like mad things, freaking out because of the storm … their manes and tails flying, their hooves churning up the dirt … neighing and whinnying in alarm, bucking and kicking and running …
I have never seen anything so beautiful, so moving, so unbelievable in my life.
They were fierce, savage, a bit scary, almost mythical. I’ve seen wild horses like that in my dreams. My fantasies.
We got no pictures, obviously. We couldn’t have captured it. We didn’t need to capture it.
I love horses anyway, but … to see wild horses … and not to see them grazing on a hill … but to see them AS wild, to see them running … Oh my God. Like Marlowe said: “the wondrous architecture of the world…”
Boyfriend said to me after we gaped at their frenzy far down the plain for a while, “We should get the hell back to the van. They know something we don’t.”
And we RAN off the plains, as quickly as we could, as the wind started picking up again, alarmingly, this time cold – a whoosh of cold … and we made it back to the van before the gods unleashed the torrents upon us in a thunderous crash. Hell broke loose. Massive wind/rain/electrical storm on the high plains.
But I am glad we took the risk. To see those horses. Those spectacular wild horses.
You seem to be re-running all of my favorite old posts, this last week or so!
Fireworks Over Bismark!
Red points out something I’d forgotten long ago; November 2 is the 116th anniversary of statehood for North and South Dakota. She write, of course, one of the loveliest homages to my home state that I’ve ever read. Snippet that…
Yep, the Dakotas are pretty much in a class by themselves (in almost every sense).
Then there’s the abandoned stove out in a pasture south of Dickinson, door torn off, labelled “open range”.
If you ever decide to write that book for Cashel, you could do worse than to spend a year in Maxbass ND. Not just for the storms, but for how fast the situation changes.
You also mentioned hearing the wild horses. If movie people really understood terror, they’d know that the scariest thing you’ll ever hear is hoofbeats in the dark. Absolutely paralysing.
Beautiful post, as usual. Like Mitch, I grew up in the Dakotas, though in western South, not North – and now, living in the Twin Cities, I can’t escape the memories of the quiet, the stillness, the beauty and power of Creation that you could encounter with just a ten minute drive in almost any direction.
Urban types don’t and probably will never get it.
Steve,
Urban types either never get it, or they get it HUGE.
Sheila’d be a good example. Another was one of my best friends from college, a cop’s kid from Chicago, a big brawling Polish guy whose very accent screamed “Da Bearss!”. He came to college in NoDak, hated the first semester or so…
…and gradually fell in love with it. He got married and is now a highway patrol in western NoDak. He’s probably the North Dakota-iest person I know today; it just got into him.
Drlivipr:
Maxbass? Wow – there’s a maxblast from the past.
I always thought Tioga would be a great place for a writer to camp out for a stretch.
Mitch –
Thanks for saying what I decided not to say. I was going to bitch about the little snark of “urban types” – because – uhm – I’m an “urban type”. Which means: I live in the city. Not that I’m a type. But that I live in the city. I could say “country types” just don’t get what it is that is so envigorating about the city – but that would be obnoxious.
My soul and heart and spirit is set free by nature. I choose to live in the city because of my lifestyle and my ambitions and because I need that constant energy in my life. But my favorite place on earth is the wild woolly west of Ireland … and also wild desolate places like the highways of the Dakotas.
Drlivipr –
I want to see that open stove … are there any pictures of it? It sounds amazing. Almost like an Oxymandius moment …
Need to go see ’em. I talked with my wife about moving to Wyoming, but she’s not biting. She doesn’t fare well even in a Northeast Ohio winter, so I’m disinclined to press the issue.
Ken – ohhhhh Wyoming!! Beautiful – I’m such an east coaster – there are so many hills and curves in the landscape that you almost never see horizon to horizon – it was so amazing to be in Big Sky Land.
Sheila, again, Im in awe of your ability to put down in words such full and complete emotions and experience. Simply amazing. You and Mitch are so right about either not getting it or getting it HUGE! I grew up in the West (Colorado) and my wife was born and raised in Detroit. We both were Air Force and she had never been out west before.
I still remember the first time we drove through Colorado together, on our way from Oklahoma to Utah. As we crossed the border I said welcome to colorful colorad that John Denver is full of crap. (that area is very flat and drab at that time of year) She just laughed. A little later, as we left the eastern plains and entered the mountains, she looked at me and said It more spectacular than I ever dreamed.
From then on, shes been a true mountain girl. Even though on our first camping trip in Colorado, she woke me up at about midnight asking what the howling from a distant mountain was. Coyotes I mumbled and rolled over. Will they bother us? No, just get some sleep. About 3 am, she shakes me awake Theyre getting CLOSER she hissed in my ear. Are you sure they wont bother us? Only if they hear you, so be quiet or go to sleep I grumbled. The poor girl, I think back on that night and picture her laying in her bag, eyes wide open, wondering if this pack of wild animals would rip through the tent at any second, while I lay there oblivious to it all!
Later that day as I was teasing her about it and explaining how we were never in any danger, she said to me Hey jerk, I grew up in Detroit. Im used to hearing gunfire and sirens at night, not peace and quiet! LOL, now, shed rather spend a week in a tent than on the beaches of Maui! She definitely gets it.
Sorry for the long post, I hope I didnt bore anyone. Thanks again Sheila, you made my day again!
rude –
hahahaha Wonderful comment! Not boring at all. :)
Ken: “I talked with my wife about moving to Wyoming, but she’s not biting. She doesn’t fare well even in a Northeast Ohio winter, so I’m disinclined to press the issue.”
I’d far rather spend a winter in Wyoming than anywhere in the northeast (yes, I include NE Ohio in that). (I went to college in Laramie, but I’ve lived many places.)
Sure, Wyoming can be bitterly cold at times. I can remember walking home from work in the winter when my car wouldn’t start. I got so I could tell the temperature within about 2 degrees when it was below -20 by how fast the air froze my nose hairs and how much it hurt to breath. The thing about the high plains, though, is that there’s sun most days and after one of those cold snaps, you might get a week with highs above 60 (in January).
There’s really nothing like the endless gray slog of overcast, 25 degrees, and snow showers for weeks on end that you can get in the northeast. I don’t think I’ve ever been as cold in Wyoming as the day I spent walking around DC in March.
Now the wind …. Let’s just say that most days* you can’t fly a kite, because the wind will shred it if it doesn’t break the string first. That’s the real challenge of living in Wyo.
* That’s probably an exaggeration, but it sure didn’t seem like it at the time.
Doug,
So true about the wind. My wife and I drove from Utah to Cheyenne in the winter during a blizzard. The next morning, the front of our BRAND NEW car looked like it had been sand blasted! Hadnt even made the first payment, and needed a new paintjob. I made the same ride a month or two ago on my bike and spent a good deal of the trip leaning severely into the wind Man did it suck (um, I mean blow?)
When I was at UW in Laramie, I was a member of the Society of Physics Students. At one meeting, we had a presentation by a snow engineer from the state highway department about the physics of snow. (The effect of the shape of snow fences and guardrails on snowbank formation, for instance). He said that snow wears out after it’s been blown 15-20 miles.
What he meant by “wears out” is that it gets smashed into smaller and smaller particles as it’s blown across the ground until it sublimes away.
Most places don’t really have to worry about how long it takes snow to wear out.
No photos in my camera. It’s alongside a fairly isolated stretch of highway, even by NoDak standards.
If it’s still there, it should be on the west side of Highway 85 south of Belfield. Maybe one of your readers that’s a bit closer could scout it out for us.
Mitch: We almost stayed. There was a three-bedroom house with three car garage and eight acres for less than 24k. Not a misprint, twenty four thousand dollars. Nice house, too. 40 below kept this riffraff out.