Driving Tours in North Dakota - Raising North Dakota (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Destinations Special: Summer Road Trips
Raising North Dakota (Cont.)


	(Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

I LOOKED AT A COUPLE of small cattle spreads in Slope County whose prices were right, but restoring these treeless, browned-out pastures seemed like more work than I wanted to take on. On the way to the next county, I stopped at a 1,700-acre wheat operation owned by Ernie Holzemer. The buildings were cocooned by more than five linear miles of ash and elm trees planted in dense shelterbelts to combat wind erosion, giving the place the gentrified appearance of a country club. Because North Dakota is sprinkled with thousands of these islands, like the archipelagoes of the South Pacific, I decided to add abandoned farmsteads to my quest.

Holzemer, 52, has, in fact, fabricated his own golf course—four holes in the strips of grass between the shelterbelts, with another two holes planned. He is a self-taught golfer. "I bought my clubs," he told me, "at a pawn shop." Well, why not prairie golf, I thought, adding the sport to the other inducements for life on the range. A few rounds of small ball every morning after the chores, followed by a martini and lunch at the clubhouse. Sweet. The next morning the sun finally drilled a tunnel through the smother of clouds that squatted on the plain so low I stooped when I got into my Bronco. As I headed south from Interstate 94 toward the burg of Regent, the ground haze evaporated and a stunning flatness was grandly illuminated. What a map I have calls 100th Avenue SW (as if a mighty city might someday stand here in these windblown fields of Stark County) is a 32-mile stretch that locals call the Enchanted Highway. Installed here and there along this remote two-lane blacktop are enormous, striking metal sculptures standing against the unsheltering sky. Here's a covey of gaudy ring-necked pheasants on a hillside, featuring a rooster 70 feet long; the world's largest metal grasshopper (according to Guinness World Records 2002); a 70-foot buck bounding over a mammoth rail fence; and a tin family whose huge, propeller-hatted boy grasps a lollipop. They were created by artist and retired schoolteacher Gary Greff to attract visitors and to counter what the Web site RoadsideAmerica.com calls the "dire depopulation predictions" of the national media. "Spunky North Dakotans say 'BITE ME!' to out-of-touch urban doomsayers, with their weepy laments of prairie beauty," the Web site maintains.

Much as I admired Greff's work, what was beginning to absorb all my attention was the ultimate product of North Dakota throughout much of its natural history: bison. According to the North Dakota Bison Association, there are 23,000 animals in the state, out of some 270,000 across the country. Eric Rosenquist, the manager of 6,000-acre Cross Ranch, the Nature Conservancy's model stock operation and preserve sprawled across the bluffs above Sanger, admires the animal because of its heroic ability to thrive in the worst storms that North Dakota can throw its way. "We never feed them hay in the winter," he told me. "They'll dig through two feet of snow to get at the grass, which is dormant seven months of the year. Then sometimes you'll see them standing on the tops of the hills looking right into the face of the blizzard. It just doesn't faze them. At the same time, you'd see cattle huddled in a gully trying to get out of the weather."

Rosenquist said that the animals, along with fire, are the perfect tools for maintaining grasslands so all of the hundreds of varieties of plants growing on North Dakota's epic lawn have a chance to thrive. "These grasslands are dynamic," he explained. "They need to be constantly disturbed." It's the nature of bison to graze a patch of prairie right down to the nubbin and then move on to another patch so the first piece has a chance to rest and recover. Because they eat every kind of plant, all the competing varieties of native flora are compelled to play fair.

Farther east, near the James River, in LaMoure County, I suddenly pulled over because of the way an abandoned wheat farm caught the late-afternoon light. There was something about the rise on which the buildings had been erected—or maybe it was the hedgerows of trees radiating from the once elegant multi-eaved house, built in the 1920s—that reminded me of farms I've seen in France, earthy and gracefully at ease with the landscape. On the lawn was a velveteen couch that looked like it had been dragged out of the house so someone could gaze at the stars in comfort.

Since the windbreaks concealed me from all directions, I built a campfire in the yard, warmed up the buffalo burger I'd bought earlier, and sat down to enjoy it. When you dine on one of these wild, grass-fed, hormone-free animals, you're struck by how dense and dark the meat is. All four of the state's Indian reservations are building and managing their own herds, and many of North Dakota's bison producers are already supplying a boutique market in the big cities, where porterhouse steaks sell for $40 in restaurants. You can see what a potential bonanza there is for ranchers who do it right.

After I finished dinner, I decided that this particular area wasn't quite right. For one thing, there wasn't much grass, only fallow fields plowed for grain. I decided to concentrate my search on land that had never been bludgeoned by a plow.

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