West 2008: Friday, July 18, 2008

There are 284 scenic miles that separate Dickinson, North Dakota and Glasgow, Montana, and we drove those miles this day in one of the shorter driving days at four and a half hours.

Our first stop shortly after leaving Dickinson was at the Painted Valley exit on I-94 east of Medora, ND. Here the prairie suddenly becomes the badlands. From the parking lot of the visitor center here one looks into the twisted and colorful valleys lying in the south unit of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

A few miles down the Interstate, at Medora, ND, is the entrance to the south unit of the park. Here the National Parkway Road takes one on a breath-taking tour of the Badlands that inspired the nation’s twenty-sixth president to urge Congress to set aside wilderness areas as national parks to preserve them and the wildlife that thrived within them. Along the way, Linda was delighted to spot a herd of wild horses along the road.

On the Parkway Road, we first came to the site of a prairie dog town where the little creatures sound warnings when danger comes near.

We also saw wild horses and a buffalo or two as we drove along the road. But the most impressive sight was the scenery of rock and stone and scrawny plants that consume whatever moisture they can find and cling for their very lives to the buttes and canyons that run everywhere in the park.

In the afternoon, we drove the rest of the way to Glasgow, Montana. On our way we could clearly see that a storm was approaching. Fortunately when it arrived, we were in Wolf Point, a small town on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. We took refuge in the parking lot of a fast food restaurant and holed up until the rain let up.

After settling in to our motel in Glasgow, we drove about twenty minutes to Fort Peck, Montana, a small town located in one of the windiest spots in the state. The town is located at the eastern end of the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge. It is where the prairie ends and the rugged hills begin.

When the pioneers crossed the prairie, it seemed endless to them. Miles and miles of an ocean of grass blowing in the incessant wind produced in part by the fact there are few trees to break it up. They thought they would never get out of the prairie.

But what they did not know is that just ahead of them, when they finally left the prairie, something much worse awaited them.

Photo: Buffalo relaxing at the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, North Dakota.

West 2008: The Trip of a Lifetime

It was a trip planned over the course of five or six years. It was a trip of a lifetime.

Several years ago, while working on my book, Windsor’s Child, I thought it would be rewarding to go to Farragut State Park in Idaho, which in the early 1940's was the Farragut Naval Training Station. Readers of the book will remember that this is the place where my brother, Ron, was sent for training when he enlisted in the Navy in 1943.

As I discussed the possibility of this trip with my wife, she added that she would like to visit Montana, which is right next door to Idaho. She was especially interested in the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Montana.

These two sites became the focus of a dream trip, one that would take much time and money to bring to life. I planned this trip several ways with different itinerary and costs, and finally early in 2008, the year of the fortieth anniversary of our wedding, we decided to make the trip. We leased a new 2008 Toyota Rav 4, made the final plans, and set out on the trip on Tuesday, July 15, 2008. The trip would take us over 4500 miles, consume thirteen days, take us into eleven states and four time zones, and past one million (more or less) orange barrels. It was budgeted at about $2500. The price of gas was hovering around $4.00 per gallon as we made the final plans for the trip. We decided we were not going to get younger (I was 67 and my wife was 60 at the time), and gas was not going to get cheaper, although it did get cheaper during our trip.

It became apparent to me early in the planning that this trip would follow two historical routes. First, it would follow the trails blazed by the hardy pioneers who decided in the early 19th century to pull up stakes in the east and head west, not knowing how arduous the journey would be or what they would find once they arrived at the end of their journey. Across endless prairies on ox-pulled wagons that, at the end of the prairie, hit ground so tortuously twisted as to be impassable, they followed their dreams to the new promised land of the west.

But we were following another trail. In 1943 when my brother was sent to Farragut for training, the Navy shipped him from Detroit to Idaho on a train that followed roughly the present-day route of Interstate 94 across the northern tier of states. In his letters home, he mentioned passing through the twin cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis in Minnesota, through Bismarck, North Dakota and through the state of Montana, all of which we would pass through on our journey west.

The story of how those early pioneers won their west is a well-known segment of American history. The story of how my brother won his west is a well-known segment of my family history.

Linda and I now add our own story of how we won our west in this journey.

This is a daily journal of the trip of a lifetime, a trip we called West 2008.

The picture shows our Rav 4 in the Lake of the Woods Park near Mahomet, Illinois.