Lost in the West - Life is a Wheel - page 115

mercial life—motels and restaurants and outlet stores and gas stations and such—out
by the interstate interchange. Just beyond the town limits is Makoshika State Park, a
series of gorgeously stratified hills, a kind of badlands environment that has been a font
of dinosaur fossils and that looks like a science-fiction movie set—the original Planet of
the Apes , maybe. The town has two museums—alas, both closed on Mondays, the day
I arrived from Circle at about noon, though I did walk through the Makoshika visitor
center, which has a small but instructive display of fossils, including the impressive and
angry-looking skull of a triceratops, a three-horned beast from something like sixty-five
million years ago.
The name Makoshika, by the way, is a variation on a Lakota phrase that means “Land
of Bad Spirits” (i.e., Badlands). The park itself is strange and beautiful, with vistas that
let you look out over the hills, imagine prehistory, and still see the town. In fact, the
entrance to the park is just beyond a Glendive neighborhood; you drive out of a school
zone and into the Cretaceous period.
Anyway, Senator Baucus and I talked a bit about the president's new health-care law,
and I said I worried that congressional Republicans could muster the votes to repeal it;
he said he didn't think so, though he was worried about the challenges to its constitu-
tionality that seem headed for the Supreme Court. 3 He wished me luck and said if he
were me he'd continue down the service road, and if it came to an end, I could always
toss my bike and my gear over the separator fence and get on the highway that way
(which is exactly what I ended up doing).
I'd done that before, I told him.
“It's probably against the law,” he said, smiling as we shook hands.
One more word about markers. When I entered North Dakota yesterday it was for the
first time, and in so doing I accomplished a creditable feat: I've now set foot in every
state in the union. Creditable is a good word for that, right? It isn't quite remarkable ,
and it's not special enough to be singular ; amazing is way overstating it. Estimable isn't
bad, but creditable is better, more modest, a deserved but unostentatious pat on my own
back, self-satisfied without being smug.
At the WELCOME TO NORTH DAKOTA sign on I-94, I stopped for a minute and did a little cel-
ebratory dance. Then I peered up the road toward the horizon and the Midwest. Where
does the Midwest begin, after all? Minnesota? Wisconsin? Or on the east side of Bismar-