Travel
North Dakota
By
Alan Wilkinson
I'd already had coffee over my campfire, so when the guy at Rick's Place found
a solitary tea bag behind the bar I settled for that. After 2,700 miles following
the 100th meridian north from
the Mexican border I was within an hour of Canada. Reluctant to complete my
journey, I followed the peeling wooden sign up the crumbling county road to Balta (pop.
73). There, curiosity
about streets named Kiev and Lublin sent me to the post office. The lady there
sent me to Rick's. "He reckons he knows about history."
"Balta?
Sure, it was settled by Volga Germans, kicked out of
Russia by the Czars in the late 1800s. They're all
over the Dakotas. Great wheat farmers."
John's
grandparents spoke German when he was growing up in Rugby,
just to the north, and as a kid he had the accent.
After 40 years on the railroad, he retired to Balta
and bought Rick's Place. "We do well. Friday night
is steak night. They come in from miles away. Word
of mouth. Tourists too-for the hunting. People like
it out here. Got a couple of Californians retiring
here next year."
At
the end of a dirt road, past a handful of neat homes
and tidy gardens, was the church. I expected one of
those tiny wooden frontier period places such as I'd
seen at Arena, the ghost town I'd visited near Bismarck.
The Lady of Mount Carmel,
however, is built of brick, with beautiful tall stained
glass windows and heavy pale wood pews polished to
a silky sheen. Beyond the church the road comes to
a dead end, and then it's mile after mile of cropland.
After
driving for two weeks through that sort of landscape
it felt strange to be walking over cool lawns, past
rose beds, a floral clock, and water features shaded
by specimen trees. I'd arrived at the International
Peace Garden, set among rolling hills
thickly wooded with aspen, oak, and birch-the Turtle
Mountains, the borderland with Canada.
Created
in 1932, the garden is a tribute to the friendship
between Canada and the United States. At its head are
four 120-foot concrete pillars representing the four
corners of the earth. A new addition is a tribute to
the dead of 9/11: an arrangement of 10 raw lengths
of steel girder taken from the wreckage of the Twin
Towers.
"What's
the procedure for visiting Canada?" I asked at
the gift shop. "Canada?" the lady asked. "You're
already in it." As befits a monument to international
understanding, the borders here are blurred.
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