Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
the residents might agree, as Brother Odo did. But if there's one thing I continue to learn
on this trip across America, it's that nowhere is nowhere. Just before dinner, the switch-
board took a phone message for me and passed it to Brother Odo. A television reporter
for an NBC affiliate in Bismarck had gotten a tip that I was staying at the abbey, and she
wanted to know if she could meet me the next day for an interview.
I phoned her back. We arranged to meet the next afternoon at a location on the out-
skirts of Mandan, which is just to the west of Bismarck and across the Missouri River,
sort of a twin city. When I got there, it was the end of a long day for me, seventy-five
miles in the heat—I left at dawn, witnessing a spectacular prairie sunrise—and as I ap-
proached our meeting place on a suburban two-lane thoroughfare with middling traffic
but an accommodating shoulder, I hit an unexpected obstacle. I had ignored the signs
declaring that all traffic had to exit—generally directives like that don't include bicycles,
or at least I choose to think they don't—but presently I was entirely by myself, and after
a mile or so the road came to an abrupt end in a construction site.
I had to dismount, an achy, unpleasant thing to do when you're not at the end of a
ride but merely near the end. My knees felt stiff, and with my feet on solid ground my
ankles felt wobbly. In any case, there was no obvious place for me to go. Directly in front
of me, fifty yards of pavement was being replaced, and at the moment there simply was
none, just a smoothed-out dirt underlay packed into the shape of a two-lane highway.
Workers were smoothing a plastic sheet on top of it in preparation for a layer of steaming
asphalt. I couldn't walk across the plastic, and the side of the planned road dropped of
three or four feet before leveling out onto a dirt lot where several construction vehicles
were parked.
Still, if I could help it, I wasn't about to turn around and loop into Mandan, adding
miles of pedaling for my already weary legs. Besides, I could see a TV truck parked a few
hundred yards beyond the roadblock and my reporter date waiting for me.
I shouldered my bike, saddlebags and all, and edged down the precipitous roadside
onto the dirt lot. Happily, I didn't collapse; my knees didn't buckle, my ankles didn't
fold. From a hundred yards away, a guy in a white T-shirt and a yellow hard hat—a
foreman of some sort, I think, and maybe the only uncongenial person in all of North
Dakota—was waving his hands above his head, warning me not to keep going, but I did
anyway and started walking across the site. He caught up with me just as I arrived at the
far end and said he would have me arrested.
In the ensuing, brief dispute he failed to follow up on his threat, but merely wagged
his finger at me (really!) and said he expected not to see me there again. I was happy to
promise him that.
