Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
He was right. More than a hundred years old, with dual towers soaring above
Richardton, an isolated prairie town of five hundred, it's an astonishing structure to
come across. It was a scalding afternoon, the sunlight white. I'd ridden the twenty-five
miles from Dickinson slowly, and, desperate at one point for shade, had lain down the
bike in the front yard of a lonely farmhouse and napped briefly under a tree so isolated
it seemed lost. The flats of North Dakota, unlike those in Montana, are really, genuinely
flat, a vast floor, and as I approached Richardton I could see the town huddling on the
prairie a long ways away, the brick spires of the church beckoning like the beam of a
lighthouse.
The monks (they're Benedictines) took me in, gave me a simple, pleasant room, fed
me, and invited me to Vespers. Brother Odo, an amiable, earnest man in his seventies,
was my host, and as we walked the grounds together he told me the remarkable fact that
he had grown up in Richardton.
“One day when I was twenty, I walked down the street to the monastery and I've been
here ever since,” he said.
He was surprised when I said I worked for the
New York Times
; as it happened, the
paper had sent a reporter and photographer to Richardton just a couple of weeks earli-
er. During my ride, I haven't exactly been keeping up with the news and my newspaper
the way I normally do, but my colleague Erik Eckholm had written an article about the
cattle ranch that the abbey has run for more than fifty years and is now in the midst of
closing down.
“A cattle ranch?” I said. “You're kidding.”
Brother Odo took me out back to look out over the ranchland. Rather startlingly, the
flat plateau I'd ridden in on came to an abrupt end and we had a fine vantage point to
appreciate the nineteen hundred rambling acres of the ranch. We walked downhill and
around a corral where the air was rich with fecund smells and cows were bellowing. Be-
nedictines and bovines: just another summer evening in Richardton, North Dakota.
Afterward, we shared dinner with Brother Placid, the last of the monastery's cowboy
monks. He had worked the ranch for half a century, he said, but at seventy-six could
no longer contend with the rigors of the job and there was no one to take his place. The
abbey houses twenty-eight monks right now, but younger monks haven't exactly been
flocking here—the last to enter the Assumption monastery came in 2002, and nine mem-
bers of the order have died since then. The ones that do live here aren't all that interested
in ranching, Brother Placid said. He put it more quotably to Erik: “They're not cattle-
men,” he said. “They're more interested in the intellectual stuff.”
That wasn't the only surprise of my visit. Richardton, like Sentinel Butte, is the sort
of place that a New Yorker like me would describe as the middle of nowhere, and even
