Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
that perhaps no New Yorker carries around but every North Dakotan does. No wonder:
North Dakota has been the leading sunflower-producing state in the nation at least since
The next day—this morning, actually—I rode past two other sunflower fields, equally
vast, and I stopped to marvel at them each time. It occurs to me now that I've seen more
sunflowers in the past thirty-six hours than I saw in the previous fifty-seven years—tens
of thousands of them, maybe a million—and more than I'm likely to see again.
This is what this trip is for. Right?
Dickinson is a small city, and it was bustling when I passed through, with cars streaming
on and off the interstate, long lines at traffic lights, and pickup trucks loaded with build-
ing supplies parading along the main drag. After a solitary morning on a country road, I
felt like an ant returning to the anthill.
It was about noon, and it was hot, and I stopped at a Hardee's for a hamburger and a
tureen or two of lemonade. I'm pretty noticeable in a place like that, wearing bike shorts
and bike shoes, sweating through my shirt and sitting among working people taking
their lunch hour. I took a table in the window so I could keep an eye on my bicycle, and
I ended up in conversation with three genial young guys from Bismarck who work for
an aluminum siding company. I asked them about the sunflowers, and they laughed.
“Where are you from?” one of them asked, meaning, “Where the hell?”
They were curious about the trip and the bike and what I was carrying with me—and
were astonished that the newspaper was sponsoring the trip, that this was my job for the
summer. I've had a number of conversations like this, on the nice-work-if-you-can-get-it
theme.
Then they asked where I was staying that night, knowing that because of the oil ex-
ploration motel rooms are notoriously hard to come by in western North Dakota. They'd
heard, they said, there weren't any rooms even in Dickinson, where a lot of construction
was going on and workers from around the state were being accommodated. I told them
that I hadn't been able to find a vacancy in the hundred miles or so between Dickin-
son and Bismarck; I'd called ahead to all of the listed motels. All three of them. Finally,
though, a clerk in the last one I called suggested I phone the Assumption Abbey in
Richardton: “I think the monks there take in strays,” he said, and it was true. I spoke to
one of them, Brother Odo, and he said yes, there'd be a bed for me when I arrived.
One of the young men—I never did get their names—brightened. He said he'd been
there many times, that I'd be impressed by the abbey and the church, St. Mary's, that
houses it.
