Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that it always seems possible to increase your comfort or efficiency, if not both. Anyway,
it didn't ease the soreness on my sit bones—that's going to be around for a while—but
the pressure on my perineum was appreciably eased, and I no longer felt a tiny stab of
pain in a region I can accurately refer to as “down there” with each pedal thrust. Plus,
the yellow stripes are so incongruous they're cool.
“It's a test saddle so we'll give it to you for half price,” Jennifer said. “Just let us know
how you like it.”
“Sold,” I said.
The Morlocks told me they used to own a bike shop in Bismarck, but they became
tired of what Jennifer called the big city. They're both former bike racers, both native
North Dakotans. Jennifer owns the distinction of having once been pictured on the front
flap of the official North Dakota state map. In Medora, a perky tourist town that exists to
serve the park, there is almost no place to live, she said, “so we moved to the suburbs.”
That would be Sentinel Butte.
I told her I'd been there and met Rick Olson.
“You talked to Rick?” she said.
“At some length,” I said.
“That would be Rick,” she said.
The next morning I climbed for a solid two miles out of Medora and headed east on I-94.
The sun was just getting above the hills—the same ones I'd ridden the day before in
Roosevelt Park—and if an interstate highway can be said to be beautiful, this one, in the
early light and quiet, was. It was fifteen miles or so before I could exit—an uneventful
stretch, happily—and then another fifteen or twenty on the lumpy pavement of High-
way 10 to Dickinson. One notable sight: a field of sunflowers, acres of them, a bright
yellow smear as far as I could see across the table-flat landscape, spreading out from the
road to the southern horizon, their faces knit together and waving lightly in the breeze
like a gigantic silk scarf.
It was dazzling, awe-inspiring, and as I stood there I found myself imagining the work
it had taken, weeks or months ago, to seed a blank brown field, and I wondered if, as he
did the planting, the farmer had in his mind's eye what he was engaged in creating, the
lovely expanse I was looking at—the farmer as artist.
Of course, it had never before crossed my mind that sunflowers might be a crop.
I mean, aside from the ballplayers who chew the seeds and spit the shells out on the
dugout floor, where's the demand? Turns out most of the seeds are crushed for oil. Only a
small portion are harvested for snacks; they're also used for bird feed. This is information
