Lost in North Dakota

When I finished my week in Brainerd last Friday, I needed time to regroup and catch up on some work. I wanted to find a place that at the very least approximated a city, someplace where the lettuce is green, fries are not the only side dish, and that breathes life instead of sucking it out of me. Fargo seemed like it had some possibility, plus I’d never been there. That cinched it. Never one to do things the easy way, I detoured to the Tewaukon National Wildlife Refuge in southeastern North Dakota, just because I could.

Everything was going well en route to the refuge until, after driving nearly four hours, I was on a gravel road, far from a town of any size, when the road I was supposed to take was being reclaimed by nature. Recent heavy rains had driven streams out of their banks, and—if you’ve never been to southeast North Dakota you may not realize this—there really is nowhere for the water to go except to spread out over the extraordinarily flat terrain and over a few gravel roads. I was only a mile from the refuge entrance, but I couldn’t get there from here. To make matters more interesting, I had no cell phone signal, and, as I soon figured out, my GPS was more lost than me.

I ventured down a couple more gravel roads, hoping to find a way around the waterlogged road, but I just didn’t see any obvious choices. So, I did the most rational thing: I pulled over next to an abandoned farm and ate lunch—a satisfying peanut butter and lingonberry jam sandwich with baby carrots and hummus on the side.

With my hunger satisfied, I did the next most reasonable thing. I drove back to the original flooded gravel road and parked, hoping someone might come by who could give me directions. Within a couple of minutes, my hopes went up as I saw a pickup coming down a nearby road, but, maybe they didn’t see me or maybe they didn’t care; whatever the reason, they drove right past me without even slowing down. Less than five minutes later, though, who should come flying down the road but the mailman. The mailman! The one person who knows his way around these roads better than anyone. He didn’t hesitate to turn and pull up right beside me.

As luck would have it, he had just come from the refuge and knew exactly how to get there, only it was a bit complicated. So, I took notes (it really was more tricky than I expected) and set out to follow his detour. (I found out later that he had called the refuge that morning to get directions himself. I guess he didn’t know all the backroads as well as I assumed.)

I managed to get lost one more time and was honestly beginning to feel like giving up and going on to Fargo, but I backtracked and found a place where I thought I might have made a wrong turn and two minutes later was shocked to find myself at the refuge entrance. I took my time looking around, then stopped at the office to pick the brain of the refuge biologist for about half an hour. I was going to explore more of the refuge but after encountering more flooded roads, I finally gave up and pointed the GPS to Fargo, a city I was pretty sure it could find.

For you North Dakota neophytes, the North Dakota Department of Agriculture wants you to know that the state is America’s top producer of the following:
• Sunflowers (43% of all US sunflowers)
• Barley (35%)
• “all dry edible beans” (34% of all US “edible dry beans”)
• Lentils (44%)
• Honey (24%)
• Flooded gravel roads (17% of all flooded gravel roads in the US are in North Dakota).

**Read about the Mississippi River in Road Tripping Along the Great River Road, Vol. 1. Click the link above for more. Disclosure: This website may be compensated for linking to other sites or for sales of products we link to.

I made it to Fargo in time for a nap and dinner. I was pleasantly surprised to find a more cosmopolitan city than I expected. I can now say that I got my introduction to Somali food in Fargo, and, judging by the reaction from the Somalis in the restaurant, they don’t get a lot of Caucasian visitors in search of their first Somali meal. I ate a lovely vegetable soup nicely spiced with black pepper, braised goat meat with seasoned basamati rice, and spiced tea that was much like an Indian chai. Lovely.

If you paid any attention to the news in the spring, you may remember hearing about severe flooding along the Red River of the North and seen video of worried but excited journalists standing in flooded fields wearing expensive hip waders with their stylish hair gently blowing in the wind. Well, I remember it, anyway. I wanted to see this Red River for myself. The river today, even though it is high for this time of year, is still a good 25 feet below the top of its narrow ravine. The thing is, once it gets above that valley, the land is so flat (as I mentioned earlier, in case you weren’t paying attention) the water will spread for miles, covering a lot more than gravel roads and driving up the cost of lentil soup and sunflower seeds for everyone.

Today’s Bad Decision: Forgetting my room number. I suppose this was inevitable, but I was not happy. I had just awoken from a nap after checking in to my motel in Fargo and went back to my car to grab another load of stuff. When I got back upstairs, I couldn’t remember my room number! I tried the electronic key in the door of the room I was pretty sure was mine (I could hear the TV, and I knew I left the TV on), but the lock remained locked. I was so sure that this had to be the right room that I tried three more times before I swallowed my pride and, with a pillow in my hand and a couple of bags draped on my shoulder, I went back to the front desk to ask for my room number. It turned out that the key wasn’t working because my room was actually two doors down from the one I had been trying it in.

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