Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
9
Nowhere Is Nowhere
Saturday, August 27, Bismarck, North Dakota
G
oogle Maps tells me I'm maybe fifteen hundred miles from Pittsburgh, which means
if I don't wander in too many loop-de-loops and nothing too dreadful happens, I can get
there by October 6, which is the day before Jan will be in New Orleans for the wedding
of one of her oldest friends' sons. Here's the current plan: I'll fly from Pittsburgh to New
Orleans to meet her, and then we'll return to Pittsburgh together and she'll ride with me
for a few days. To where we don't know. We also haven't quite figured out yet what to do
about getting her a bicycle in Pittsburgh; how, from wherever we end up, she's going to
get to an airport for a flight back to Paris, or how I'm going to get appropriate wedding
clothes to New Orleans.
Meanwhile, here I am for the very first time in North Dakota, where people are relat-
ively scarce but all seem happy to see me. The population is under seven hundred thou-
sand—only Vermont and Wyoming have fewer residents, though I wasn't surprised to
learn that though Montana has more people it's actually less crowded—and it has felt to
me not only as if everyone knows everyone else but that they've made it their collective
business to see that I have a good experience here.
For about two hundred miles, from my encounter with Max Baucus outside of Glen-
dive, Montana, through Bismarck, halfway through the state, I've been on and off I-94,
riding when I can along service roads and an old highway that served as the main thor-
oughfare before the interstate was built and now runs parallel to it, largely unused and
unattended to, like some unkempt family member being kept away from the neighbors
in the attic. The bicycling has often been rewarding; you go for miles through golden
ranchland in the company only of handsome black steers grazing in meadows or cooling
off in shallow ponds. However, there are stretches where the pavement goes to gravel
