Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
and dust or disappears altogether, and the highway has been my only choice—that is, if
I want to keep pressing east. While it's legal to ride on the interstate, it's not especially
enjoyable, and I've considered heading south to get away from it. But the map tells me
that available roads would consign me to a zigzag path through small towns unlikely to
afford places to stay, and I'm letting that influence me.
I find it an interesting, slightly troubling dilemma, philosophical almost, and part of
me is disappointed that I've opted for straight-ahead progress rather than a more explor-
atory meander through a region in which I'm a virgin. I made the opposite sort of choice
once in Vietnam, venturing off alone into the jungle, and I had the most exciting, per-
turbing, challenging, threatening, and finally rewarding adventure of my life.
This isn't the same thing, I know; the risk-reward ratio is of a whole other order of
magnitude. They speak English in North Dakota, after all, they don't arrest bicyclists for
bicycling, and there would be little likelihood of my being stranded without water on an
unrideable path through the mountains. Still, something—some need, some momentary
weakness, or perhaps some subconscious insight—is dictating my pace here, making me
choose briskness ahead of uncertainty. Perhaps it's just that my age is showing, but once
again I find myself thinking of the purpose of the journey—the purpose of any journey,
maybe, literary included—and I'm struck by the conflicting needs of a traveler: to soak
up as much as you can and eventually to get where you're going.
In North Dakota, I got off I-94 as soon as I could, exit 1, at a town called Beach at the
state visitor's information bureau. (How does such a landlocked place get such a name?
Turns out it was named for an army officer who led a surveying expedition through the
region in the late nineteenth century.) The attendant, a woman named Jan (sigh), not
only set me onto the parallel road I've been using—old Highway 10—but also suggested
a local barbecue place for lunch and offered me cough drops. I've been hacking a bit,
though not as badly as a week ago.
Medora and Theodore Roosevelt Park were about twenty-five miles away, and I asked
if there were any services on Route 10 between Beach and the park. She said there was
just one, a tiny little burg about seven miles down the road called Sentinel Butte. The
gas station there is a hangout, she said, where people stop in and shoot the breeze.
“It'll be a good stop for you,” she said.
And so it was. A lot of dot-on-the-map towns I've ridden through are pretty desolate
and rundown, but Sentinel Butte is an attractive little place that you come upon sud-
denly after passing through acres and acres of sun-bleached pastures and wheat fields.
The midsummer lawns are green and the homes are neatly kept and the whole of it—you
