Pelicans on the prairies

Monday, June 11, 2007

WILLISTON, NORTH DAKOTA — It was a longer drive today; the stop we had considered as our end point seemed to come too quickly and we had more juice to go on, so we continued till we got here, a small town just near the border between North Dakota and Montana. We’re camped at Buffalo Trails Campground, which looks like a used trailer lot to me – not a twig of a tree on the whole lot and scrubby grass squared off by dusty brown dirt roads with weatherbeaten posts to mark off the sites and provide the power and water. No matter; we’re just spending the night and driving on. We haven’t even unhitched from the truck. It’s 92 F and we’ve turned on the AC for the first time. Whew!
Our journey today took us from Grand Forks right across the state. The land looks much like the prairies in Canada; mostly flat with a few trees and, by the road, quite a few small ponds with reeds and rushes, and a few clumps of trees here and there. I spotted a lovely little bird perched on a tall reed that our bird book identifies quite accurately as yellow-headed blackbirds.
Val was the one who spotted the pelicans first. There were several large white birds with s-shaped necks and long, pointed beaks in one roadside pond, and sure enough, they were pelicans. A few miles further on there was a whole flock of them, bunched tightly together on a muddy bank and looking from a distance like the incongruous snow dump you see next to hockey arenas in summer. Our bird book also confirmed their presence in this region, so we weren’t seeing things.
We got some relief from the flatness of the land in a couple of places where rolling hills developed, carpeted in bright green grass that looked as groomed as a golf course. Some of the vistas were so lovely I had to roll down the window and attempt a photo. The process was more complicated than it sounds.
I’m sitting in the passenger seat with the laptop on a lapdesk on my lap, wired to the GPS sensor on the windshield, wired to the power pack, which is plugged into the power inverter and wired into the power point of the truck (formerly known as the cigarette lighter). Looped over the headrest behind me are the binoculars and the camera case. So, when an interesting vista comes along, I have to reach over my head to reel in the correct strap for the camera case, untangle it from the binoculars, unzip and remove the camera, try to avoid crashing into the computer screen in front of me, turn the camera on and wind down the window. I was doing all this as these beautiful rolling hills whizzed past. Buffeted by the influx of hot, humid wind (in contrast to the cool air-conditioned truck), I pointed the camera out, trying to avoid getting an extreme closeup of the rear-view mirror in my frame, and panning to my right to find the shot I wanted.
At that precise moment, a bank of land rose up and blocked the entire scene, and we drove up an incline to reveal.....a huge expanse of flat prairie, stretching ahead for miles! Some time later we did come across some more rolling hills, but none quite as beautiful as the ones that got away.
One interesting spot we passed was in a small town called Rugby. It has a large stone cairn that marks the exact geographical centre of North America. So there’s just as much continent north, south, east and west of Rugby, North Dakota and there we were, smack dab in the middle of it. And now, westward ho!