Niagara, ND

Last summer, I rode a bicycle from Chicago, IL to Devil's Lake, ND. Since I've never written about the adventure, and since it was a long December as far as temperatures went, I thought January might be a good time to talk about summer 2008. January is Bike Month at the Drawing Board.

--

Getting out of Grand Forks was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. Here was a large, sprawling city with beautiful greenways, theaters, hospitals, a university. Then we rode west for twenty minutes and it was all gone as if it had never existed. I've never experienced such a sharp line between the decivilization that was the townless parts of North Dakota - which was most of it.

We rode for a few hours before stopping for a quick lunch at an air force base somewhere in North Dakota. Suffice it to say, we didn't exactly fit with the regular clientele.

And so we rolled out again. North Dakota is the kind of state where you can celebrate individual trees. In Indiana, uncivilized land is farmed or forested or claimed - truthfully, none of it is reallt uncivilized. But in North Dakota, the roads cut through a kind of landscape that's remained untouched since Native Americans passed through a few hundred years ago.

It's in this context that the trees stand alone, fighting a losing battle against a furious wind.

And it's the same way that we rode west on US-2; alone in North Dakota, fighting a wind that was battering us violently from the south. I suppose we were cutoff from most of the news of the world, but I had heard something about a hurricane in Florida. I dismissed it, thinking that such a thing would hardly affect me while I was in a state like North Dakota.

I received news the day before that windy weather was ahead; a result of the hurricane. To quote a local, "There ain't a single tree between here and Florida to block that wind."

Beyond belief, that toothless man was right. We rode with a crosswind from the left that was as vicious a thing as I've experienced. I worried about literally blowing off of every bridge we traversed. We rolled along at 11 to 12 miles an hour, stopping briefly at a rest stop so Paul could nap. Meanwhile, I commiserated with motorists who had to stop to take a break from the wind. This kind of riding was not fun.

After 40 miles of this kind of slow torture, we settled on finding the first town we could and rolled into the town of Niagara, North Dakota.

People in North Dakota use the word town pretty liberally, we learned. It was the first sign of development we'd seen all day, and the place didn't have a gas station, a store, a restaurant. It also featured no paved roads. It did have a post office, which offered little in the way of assistance at 6:00 in the evening.

We spent the next hour looking for someone in the town that could offer some advice; perhaps a sandwich. Woefully, we discovered only a few dogs who looked angry to see us. We wandered, hoping for something that might be called dinner.

A local pastor was the first person to spot us, probably because we were trying to break into to his church. He introduced himself, explained that no, there was no food for miles, and offered us a frozen pizza for dinner. It went down easier than it was returned.

We set up camp under brutal wind conditions and prepared for bed. A five-year-old boy arrived, announced that he was hiding from his grandmother and proceeded to remove his pants so that he could show off his Spiderman underwear.* I'd heard about this kind of stuff. Fearing a sting operation from Dateline, we ran from the kid as if he was a movie monster, and when we returned, he was gone.

I don't think either of us knew it would be our last night in that tent.