Into the West

 We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.

We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on something big.

To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood. A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining country, power plant country, cowboy country.

Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.

At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your chest.  Inside the café, the tables were nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table – the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people leaned across tables to talk.

“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”

“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”

“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”

“What do you hear from your mom these days?”

“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”

After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting cards. 

An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its back, drying in the sun.

The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style, maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the hospital parking lots are now.

Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland, trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset. As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow and red scoria.

Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.

Badlands, and Medora – dusty. Dust on the car, dust on your legs, dust in your nose. Oh, and there are the cowboys, strolling down the street. Oh, and there’s a rattlesnake, crushed dead on the road by a passing car. We’re in the west.