We're off...November 7

I awakened to a cup of steaming coffee from Bob and a gentle kiss on the forehead.  “It’s time for our next adventure, my love,” he whispered tenderly in my ear.  He smiled, the pale light of the cool morning behind him making a perfect invitation for our journey. 

           

            “Thank you my sweetheart,” I purred. 

Oh. That’s right. This is supposed to be non-fiction. Let’s start again.

            Bob bounced out of bed. “It’s 7 o’clock.  Time to get going,” he chirped perkily.  I wearily hauled my still half-sick body out of bed, stepped into my jeans, and creaked down the steps only to find he had misread his watch and it was really only 6 a.m.  But he did have coffee waiting for me. A quick shower, a quick breakfast, and a quick clean-up. “Let’s get a move on,” Bob said, already hauling things out to the car. 

            We had delayed our departure for a day because I picked up a virus. Fortunately, I was able to simply lie still all day Sunday on Mike and Cullen’s very cozy couch in front of a very cozy fire in their very cozy farmhouse. This morning I was still half-mast, so I dozed most of the way through northern Minnesota and North Dakota, awakened only by random exclamations from Bob. “Look how the soil has turned into a rich black!” or, “It’s really gotten to be prairie here!” or “See that snow beside the road” I woke up enough to argue with him about the high piles of something in the distance, which turned out to be dirt (as I had said). Shortly after, we passed Devil’s Lake, which is slowly and inexorably rising. U.S. Highway 2 was being raised about 3 feet in that area. 

            We stopped in Rugby, North Dakota, the “geographic center of the North American continent.”  We figured we better take advantage of the opportunity to get centered.  And from there headed due north toward Canada.  We stopped for the night at Dale’s Truck Stop and Café in Dunseith, ND.  Everything one could want in one place: Two big warm bowls of chili for $8, a convenience store with a newspaper, a lounge with giant bottles of beer, and a room for $31!!!  Yes, it was rudimentary, but it had a good bed and a flat screen television.

            Dunseith is within a few miles of the Turtle Mountain Chippewa tribal reservation. We picked up a Minot newspaper and a tribal newspaper, the Turtle Mountain Star.  Headlines on the Minot editorials were about Obama bullying Alabama on immigration and Obama’s scurrilous policy on pharmaceuticals.  The tribal newspaper’s editorial was headlined, “Were not the 99 percent, we’re the 99.5 percent” and ended with this: “The system we have is little more than legalized corruption.  To not stand up against it is to enable it to continue.  That’s something we cannot afford to do much longer.”   Go Turtle Mountain Star!