Strange signs in North Dakota
Added on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 by Carole Nash Editor
Strange signs in North Dakota
North Dakota tractors had very big tyres pulling wide sowing machines attached to a bowser of what might be pesticide, nutrient or just water. Newly sown crops of short grass, alopecia thin on the ground until they thicken and shoot, replace fallow fields of rough grass.
Highway2 goes on interminably, four lanes separated down the middle by a broad dip of grassed reservation. It’s all farming and clapperboard houses in these parts where everyone has planting machinery parked on the lawn in the way we might have a small grass cutter. Tin grain silos about the size and shape of an African mud hut stand in batches, some by enclaves of trees others more isolated in a large plain or maybe by a watercourse. Places come and go and business loops take you into the administrative heart of what look like self-contained communities. There are banks and restaurants car show rooms and on the outskirts of every town a place where you can buy a tractor. Lake tops unfurl in a stiffening breeze unimpeded by tree or fence across a flatness that creates a big horizon. There is nothing to look over, nothing hidden through which you need to peer through. Maybe this is how North Dakotans share their secrets? The train track follows the road and at every intersection, a hamlet of food stores and motels cluster together to attract business.
I crossed North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin and driving past signs that advertised frozen custard butter burgers as their trade mark food item I slept in the car yet again, still not able to catch up with the four riders I had promised to trail and sweep up if necessary. Within quite a broad vector I could rescue most of those guys ahead of me. The Baltimore’s were at Niagara, Tim was seeing a friend in the east, Mr Oliphant had long since left Tucson and Moffat and others were doing America the way it should be done, slowly. So far no problem texts so in the middle of a Minnesota forest by Leech Lake I spoke to a sheriff in his car and asked him if the area was safe and he nodded that it was. Apart from barking dogs and a few drunks it was fine and I slept well. I have slept on the road all my life and when alone, prefer it to the clutter of a hotel. The next day I drove the 134 miles into Duluth.
Aerostitch sell one of my books and owed me some money and Peter the accountant was kind enough to sign it over to me. One of the girls in the office was Russian and when she found out I was going back to Alaska later in the summer asked if I’d take her. Around the corner from the building I turned right at the lights, crossed a spur of Lake Superior in sight of the Aerial Lift Bridge. Joining highway 53 south for Eau Claire I trundled along considerably slower than the way I ride my R1 and grabbed more emails online in a McDonalds and sorted out a little more business.
Down the road on the 53 I stop to make a call and grab a small chicken combo from A&W a chain specialising in making all American food. The sullen faces of the servers are akin to people resigned to a life of servitude. I don’t know what the options are in the state of Wisconsin, but it’s less than many places elsewhere unless you like fishing. The spread out places and widely separated buildings in small towns create a default separation of people. This is especially evidenced in car people. In the car, across very wide roads, a certain distance transfers into the very nature of everyday interaction. American vehicle owners are so polite to each other, not because Americans are the politest race in the world, but because it’s possible they have forgotten how to reasonably resolve simple misunderstandings on the road. I feel if I make a wrong turn some redneck will pull a gun on me - he surely will have one in his car. But then the opposite view holds that if by advocating you hang a man for stealing a loaf of bread, not only will he not steal the bread, the punishment is so extreme for the crime it also will never get used. The bread thief knows this and just maybe more bread gets stolen than if the punishment was merely a simple beating.
It’s easy to bait the yanks, they do it to themselves. Irony is not understood and they will have driven around the block before it sinks in that someone has taken the piss. Too late to get shot, you’re up the interstate, just like everyone else, driving like a lemming hoping the cops don’t pick you out. And this is how I drove across Wisconsin.
At De Forest I pulled off and found a family restaurant. The difference between a family restaurant and say a McDonalds is waitress service. If you get a very fat waitress it’s definitely a downer but it testifies that the food is good - actually, in America good food is defined by plentiful. Of course the best thing about an American waitress is that she’ll smile at you and laugh at your jokes. Yep, for the promise of a 10% service charge she will also think your ugly child is cute and wish you well as you leave. An English waitress by contrast would rather choke on her own vomit than show such gratuitous hospitality. The way an American waitress speaks also holds a clue to how north mid-west interstate society comports itself. It is upbeat, resonates around a single tonal level with pitch perfect niceness. In the distance I could a waitress circulate, slowly getting nearer, circling around the tables saying exactly the same thing to everyone. Whilst I recognise that she was wishing everyone to have a nice time, she was actually telling them, “you have a great weekend won’t you?” The way she intoned at the end of her sentence sounded like a tax demand and when she finally confronted me and I asked if that was obligatory.
“What’s obli-ga-tory?” she said with surprise.
“That I have to have a great weekend, do I have to?”
She frowned and then suddenly laughed and passed the test. She knew I was joking. “No, you don’t have to,” and she tousled her hair a little, “but, hey, you’re here so you might as well, whadayasay?” Perfect logic in a way and her upbeat view, however unsympathetic to the emotion of the moment (I could have been depressed knowing I was going to drive around Chicago at midnight) was in perfect harmony with the idea that if it’s difficult, we employ the -‘we don’t want to go there do we’ - philosophy of life. “So are you on vacation or what?” she said working hard for her service charge. “Yes, I’ve just come up from Argentina”. Now this was unfair because I didn’t know where the hometown of this restaurant, De Forest was until I got here, equally, I just knew she didn’t know where the hell the Argies lived. “I bet that’s a nice place?”
Goodness, I thought to myself, this conversation was going exactly to plan. “No, it’s cold now, it’s winter.” I was being a bit naughty; I mean who needs to care about the southern hemisphere when you’ve got 429 TV channels and Stannar chairlifts to help fat people get to their bedrooms. Just then, a very fat person tripped up by my food booth as we were chatting and in regaining his balance crashed both feet to the floor, shuddering my table with a bang making my onion ring fly off my fork. “Well look at that, you’ve lost your onion ring,” she said professionally smoothing away the embarrassment, “I’ll just go and get you another.”
The restaurant was now empty and as I got up to leave three people came in to dine. No judgement intended and as part of my unintentional observational study of anyone I saw, thy just happened to be mostly fat and yes, two more walked in. They were not just fat they were morbidly obese. When this fat bloke fell over I thought they were going to call for a tow truck. These two people would take up two seats each on an aircraft and anything they might need to assist them to climb up a set of stairs would require more than a belt drive and something related to a JCB. The less than very fat person looked as if he had lost a chromosome getting out of his car at which point I left scratching my head wondering how on earth these people put men on the moon.
I paid my bill, gave the kind waitress two dollar notes and as I started my drive to Chicago and beyond to find yet another field to sleep in, wondering where on this large continent were my riders, scattered far and wide, and what anyone would make of a free range DIY ‘I-can-do-it’ Nick Sanders tour!
