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.)


	"This battered land": North Dakota's past tense, circa 1936 (Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

I HAD PUT 3,000 MILES ON MY BRONCO in a state that's 300 miles wide. I'd looked at dozens of ghost towns and buildings in dysfunctional burgs, vacated farmsteads mildewing in the rain, gorgeous, melodramatic sweeps of land wrapped in shelterbelts and crying out for someone to adopt them. Everything was good, but nothing struck me as exactly right.

So I drove a few miles west of Minot, up in the north-central part of the state, to check out some land for sale in Gassman Coulee. I parked in the stubble of a wheat field that was part of the property and hiked down into the coulee. Every step took me farther away from the wind. When I descended to the pastures on the floor of the draw, where an intermittent creek meandered, my heart began to thump. Thick stands of bur oak and hawthorn marched up the draws. As I strolled along a heavily used game trail, a covey of wild turkeys fled before me and hid in a thicket of wild roses. I stopped to sweep my hand through a lush, waist-high carpet of grass and forbs. Although the ground was matted with the tangled, un-natural mulch that fire and then grazing buffalo would quickly groom, it seemed like I was peering down at the canopy of a rainforest, there were so many species of grass. I looked away, certain that every blade was numbered. And, of course, the place felt haunted. The clapboard house had caved in and surrendered to saplings and vines. There wasn't another human habitation in sight, and if I had anything to do about it, there never would be. Hold on, I told myself, I think someone's about to say "Eureka!"

I looked at the price on my printout again. When I called the realtor from my cell phone, she assured me that it was accurate: $70,000 for 112 acres. The reason it was so cheap, she said, was that farmers didn't want it—most of it was too hilly to plow. But it was an ideal place to raise bison. And ride horses, at least from April to November, because from December to March the average daily low here is two degrees, a good temperature for killing insects but too cold to burden the lungs of horses with heavy effort.

A minor matter, I thought. I was suddenly seized with an image of spending the winters here like the mad Norwegian immigrant writer Jon Norstog, who penned a score of epic Old Testament passion plays in the early 1900s, setting them in type by his own hand and printing them in a shanty on the prairie.

I dialed Kitty, imagining the expression on her face when she heard the good news. I figured that, like North Dakota itself, she could be coaxed into seeing the wisdom and rewards of making old things new again.

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