We had almost gone there several times before, but always it had come down to this: North Dakota or someplace else? Someplace else had always won before, but not this time; this time we would make it to perhaps the most dismissed state in the great West. And by golly, we did.
Not that it had been a certainty from the start. We had originally planned on Glacier Nat Park, but that had been partially closed and fogged in by huge fires both in the park and upwind, causing not only smoke but ash to fall from the sky, and Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota would have been our stop-over sight – if we had the time. And then we had nixed N Dakota all together, to go maybe to Rocky Mountain Nat Park in Colorado. But by the time our momentum had got to the level of actual plans, Rocky Mountain was having snow and temps in the low 20’s. So, in the end, Teddy and N Dakota became not only our stop-over site, but THE site. Oh, how jealous the fates of N Dakota had been!
First, though, was more weather, and it looked to be raining in the north longer than in the south, so we chose to make the Badlands Nat Park in S Dakota our stop-over point. It turned out to be the best of our decisions.
The Badlands are every bit of what the name implies if you are a farmer. Multi-colored sandstone and clay cliffs dominate the area, and that gray clay turns to an impossible sticky gumbo with even the slightest bit of moisture. Often, though, there is no moisture, and it is impossible now to think that this area was once farmed. For grazing it had been all right, and now buffalo dominate the area, to such a point that on two hikes into the hills we were suddenly confronted by grazing buffalo who were not too happy to see us. Believe me, they are very, very big up close.
For a national park, they, the Badlands, are even better than for grazing. We chose to pull our camper into a campsite labeled “primitive,” where the only service was a pit toilet. It was also used by horse people, and the horse manure and buffalo chips which were scattered and piled everywhere gave a ranch-y odor to the place, as well as food to more than the occasional fly, but it was all marvelous. Situated way, way away from any town or thru-road, there is a quiet there that is nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.
And by God stars, too. That evening we had hiked to an overlook and there met a man of around fifty who was traveling alone from his home in Canada to visit his girlfriend, a professor at Stamford U in California. He was an artist and free thinker – a bum, really, not much different from myself – and he had come back with us to our site to sit around the charcoal fire (no wood was allowed because of drought) and talk about truths both real and imagined. There, the stars soon overwhelmed the conversation, as satellites and meteors whizzed beyond us with startling regularity. And the Milky Way was truly a royal road. What a night.
But Teddy awaited us. There are two sections to Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota – one to the south and one to the north. We stayed first in the one to the south, which was big and beautiful and full of buffalo and elk, but it rained that day and then the next, and the campsite was crowded. Even with the rain, no fires, or even charcoal, were allowed, and after a long wet hike the one full day that we stayed, we headed to the north section. There, the weather cleared and the campsite – with drinking water but no shower or electricity – was beautifully located on the Little Missouri River. Wonderful hikes were taken through more badland-style cliffs mixed with good pasture and so many buffalo that it was often dangerous – and exhilarating – to walk anywhere.
But that first night we discovered that our gas canister was out of gas. And worse, the battery for the pop-up was dying. We could live without either, but the battery ran both our lights and the water pump, the loss of both causing some discomfort. So we walked and explored all the next morning and the first part of the afternoon and then headed to the nearest full-sized town some 30 miles to our north to charge the battery and exchange our gas cylinder. And there, oddly, we were to find the most interesting, if not the most beautiful, part of the trip.
We had seen the oil pumps working away all across the landscape ever since we had entered North Dakota. In some spots one could see for dozens of miles in every direction across the rolling prairie, and in that scope one could pick out dozens of those pumps see-sawing among Black Angus cows, making money for the once- struggling ranchers. But on our drive to the town of Watford, Katie bar the door. It was oil, oil, oil, from pumps to tanks to muddy roads that led to pumps and tanks, and to power lines that burned the oil. Here, one is in the famed Bakken oil field, and oil is impossible to ignore. It is no exaggeration to say that at least half the vehicles in the region were pick-up trucks, most the big, noisy, powerful diesel kind with 4 wheel drive and enough equipment in the bed to run and service a small town. And more: nearing Watford, we were startled by the thousands of cheap make-shift housing for the thousands of workers who had come to lift the oil from the ground and make big money off of the boom. The shacks were usually ugly and often located in fields that were nothing but mud flats, unadorned with any vegetation or sense of taste anywhere. Still, they came.
The workers - almost all young to middling-age men – were as unadorned as the housing. In every store, restaurant, and gas station we went to, men filled the spaces with muddy boots and muddy overalls and hardhats. They also filled them with a restless energy that spoke of drunken fights and harassed women, but also of hope and fun. It was a somewhat dangerous energy but one that was overall good: things were happening, everyone was making big money, and so much now seemed possible in a town that just 10 or so years before had been a fading pastiche of leaky houses and rusting cars. Now, the sky was the limit, and the boom was on. Roads were being built, more and more housing was going up, and more and more shops and stores were rising from the dry Dakota earth.
But are there new schools among those new buildings? Do all those young men have a future in the area? And that is the problem with such things, such boom towns that the Dakotas have seen time and again since the Black Hills gold rush. Money is flowing and dreams are being realized, but all will probably be short-lived in Watford. Yes, it could become a new center for cancer research, or for engineering or whatever, but it will probably slide into oblivion once the oil runs out, and everyone knows it.
Make hay while the sun shines, they used to say; live life to the fullest when in the glory of youth, some might also say. In America, the waves of boom times never seem to end, as if a perpetual teenager has become our permanent mascot, or volkgeist. The Europeans make fun of this, telling themselves that we have no culture – why, we do not even have a cuisine! But boomtowns are hope themselves, and the temporary is the ordinary. The old cultures seem to bleed themselves out, dying, as TS Eliot said, with a whimper, not a bang. He did not mean this as a good thing, and in the 1920’s he envisioned what seems to be happening in Europe today. But we have immaturity and energy and a lack of “culture” on our side, with little to tie us to any spot or regime or glory days. It makes for a nervous nation, one that is always on edge and always tinged with just a little fear, for without tethers, where might we run to? No one knows – and that’s the point of it all. No one knows anyway, even when they think they do. Our way of life is truly “living the dream,” for that IS our universal dream: hope, fear, impermanence, and the inevitable crash. It is not only much more theatrical and interesting this way, but true to our vison as a species; true to our eternal sense of hope, and to our eternal blindness.
Make hay while the sun shines - great art and philosophy are not built with such a notion. But we are restless seeds and this is our way. We will reach the stars long before we understand why they are there, but maybe then we can sit back and contemplate. Until then, welcome to Boomtown. It is seldom dull and always a risk, and there is always the next horizon calling from some other godforsaken place that will slack our thirst before we again move on. FK
Not that it had been a certainty from the start. We had originally planned on Glacier Nat Park, but that had been partially closed and fogged in by huge fires both in the park and upwind, causing not only smoke but ash to fall from the sky, and Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota would have been our stop-over sight – if we had the time. And then we had nixed N Dakota all together, to go maybe to Rocky Mountain Nat Park in Colorado. But by the time our momentum had got to the level of actual plans, Rocky Mountain was having snow and temps in the low 20’s. So, in the end, Teddy and N Dakota became not only our stop-over site, but THE site. Oh, how jealous the fates of N Dakota had been!
First, though, was more weather, and it looked to be raining in the north longer than in the south, so we chose to make the Badlands Nat Park in S Dakota our stop-over point. It turned out to be the best of our decisions.
The Badlands are every bit of what the name implies if you are a farmer. Multi-colored sandstone and clay cliffs dominate the area, and that gray clay turns to an impossible sticky gumbo with even the slightest bit of moisture. Often, though, there is no moisture, and it is impossible now to think that this area was once farmed. For grazing it had been all right, and now buffalo dominate the area, to such a point that on two hikes into the hills we were suddenly confronted by grazing buffalo who were not too happy to see us. Believe me, they are very, very big up close.
For a national park, they, the Badlands, are even better than for grazing. We chose to pull our camper into a campsite labeled “primitive,” where the only service was a pit toilet. It was also used by horse people, and the horse manure and buffalo chips which were scattered and piled everywhere gave a ranch-y odor to the place, as well as food to more than the occasional fly, but it was all marvelous. Situated way, way away from any town or thru-road, there is a quiet there that is nearly impossible to find anywhere in the world.
And by God stars, too. That evening we had hiked to an overlook and there met a man of around fifty who was traveling alone from his home in Canada to visit his girlfriend, a professor at Stamford U in California. He was an artist and free thinker – a bum, really, not much different from myself – and he had come back with us to our site to sit around the charcoal fire (no wood was allowed because of drought) and talk about truths both real and imagined. There, the stars soon overwhelmed the conversation, as satellites and meteors whizzed beyond us with startling regularity. And the Milky Way was truly a royal road. What a night.
But Teddy awaited us. There are two sections to Theodore Roosevelt Nat Park in N Dakota – one to the south and one to the north. We stayed first in the one to the south, which was big and beautiful and full of buffalo and elk, but it rained that day and then the next, and the campsite was crowded. Even with the rain, no fires, or even charcoal, were allowed, and after a long wet hike the one full day that we stayed, we headed to the north section. There, the weather cleared and the campsite – with drinking water but no shower or electricity – was beautifully located on the Little Missouri River. Wonderful hikes were taken through more badland-style cliffs mixed with good pasture and so many buffalo that it was often dangerous – and exhilarating – to walk anywhere.
But that first night we discovered that our gas canister was out of gas. And worse, the battery for the pop-up was dying. We could live without either, but the battery ran both our lights and the water pump, the loss of both causing some discomfort. So we walked and explored all the next morning and the first part of the afternoon and then headed to the nearest full-sized town some 30 miles to our north to charge the battery and exchange our gas cylinder. And there, oddly, we were to find the most interesting, if not the most beautiful, part of the trip.
We had seen the oil pumps working away all across the landscape ever since we had entered North Dakota. In some spots one could see for dozens of miles in every direction across the rolling prairie, and in that scope one could pick out dozens of those pumps see-sawing among Black Angus cows, making money for the once- struggling ranchers. But on our drive to the town of Watford, Katie bar the door. It was oil, oil, oil, from pumps to tanks to muddy roads that led to pumps and tanks, and to power lines that burned the oil. Here, one is in the famed Bakken oil field, and oil is impossible to ignore. It is no exaggeration to say that at least half the vehicles in the region were pick-up trucks, most the big, noisy, powerful diesel kind with 4 wheel drive and enough equipment in the bed to run and service a small town. And more: nearing Watford, we were startled by the thousands of cheap make-shift housing for the thousands of workers who had come to lift the oil from the ground and make big money off of the boom. The shacks were usually ugly and often located in fields that were nothing but mud flats, unadorned with any vegetation or sense of taste anywhere. Still, they came.
The workers - almost all young to middling-age men – were as unadorned as the housing. In every store, restaurant, and gas station we went to, men filled the spaces with muddy boots and muddy overalls and hardhats. They also filled them with a restless energy that spoke of drunken fights and harassed women, but also of hope and fun. It was a somewhat dangerous energy but one that was overall good: things were happening, everyone was making big money, and so much now seemed possible in a town that just 10 or so years before had been a fading pastiche of leaky houses and rusting cars. Now, the sky was the limit, and the boom was on. Roads were being built, more and more housing was going up, and more and more shops and stores were rising from the dry Dakota earth.
But are there new schools among those new buildings? Do all those young men have a future in the area? And that is the problem with such things, such boom towns that the Dakotas have seen time and again since the Black Hills gold rush. Money is flowing and dreams are being realized, but all will probably be short-lived in Watford. Yes, it could become a new center for cancer research, or for engineering or whatever, but it will probably slide into oblivion once the oil runs out, and everyone knows it.
Make hay while the sun shines, they used to say; live life to the fullest when in the glory of youth, some might also say. In America, the waves of boom times never seem to end, as if a perpetual teenager has become our permanent mascot, or volkgeist. The Europeans make fun of this, telling themselves that we have no culture – why, we do not even have a cuisine! But boomtowns are hope themselves, and the temporary is the ordinary. The old cultures seem to bleed themselves out, dying, as TS Eliot said, with a whimper, not a bang. He did not mean this as a good thing, and in the 1920’s he envisioned what seems to be happening in Europe today. But we have immaturity and energy and a lack of “culture” on our side, with little to tie us to any spot or regime or glory days. It makes for a nervous nation, one that is always on edge and always tinged with just a little fear, for without tethers, where might we run to? No one knows – and that’s the point of it all. No one knows anyway, even when they think they do. Our way of life is truly “living the dream,” for that IS our universal dream: hope, fear, impermanence, and the inevitable crash. It is not only much more theatrical and interesting this way, but true to our vison as a species; true to our eternal sense of hope, and to our eternal blindness.
Make hay while the sun shines - great art and philosophy are not built with such a notion. But we are restless seeds and this is our way. We will reach the stars long before we understand why they are there, but maybe then we can sit back and contemplate. Until then, welcome to Boomtown. It is seldom dull and always a risk, and there is always the next horizon calling from some other godforsaken place that will slack our thirst before we again move on. FK
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