The Drive

The Drive - Northern Alliance colleagues King Banaian and James Lileks both talk about a subject near and dear to my heart; the drive from the Twin Cities to Fargo.

Actually, that drive is only part of the story for me; when I visit my parents, the real trip only begins when I get to Fargo; Dad lives 100 miles west of Fargo, while Mom is about 150 miles beyond that. When my parents divorced, my dad got the eastern half of the state while Mom got the west.

As a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, so does a trip to my parents' place start (once the heart-stopping slalom through the northwest metro road construction is over), with the second-most wretched drive I know: St. Cloud to Fergus Falls.

Lileks describes it thus:

...once you clear the great urban smear that extends 40 miles west, it’s you and the highway. Nothing to see; move along. After St. Cloud come the Expanse - 70 + miles with only two towns of any note, Melrose and Freeport. The latter has a smiley face on the watertower. I’ve always wanted to stop by. I never have.

And it gets worse; dreary radio, identical yet unmemorable towns, and the sense that you've seen the same little copses of woods and shelter belts before...and before that...and before that...

King notes:

Indeed, as you roll up that road you get churches that dwarf places like Albany, Freeport, not to mention the mega-chapel at St. John's in Collegeville. But after Freeport comes pretty much nothing before Alex, and after that a few lakes and fade to Fergus.

And then, just west of Fergus Falls, the world changes. The sky kicks the niggling, petty woods and hills to the proverbial curb, and if it's a partly-cloudy day you are treated to one of this world's most glorious spectacles; a day in the life of the prairie sky. The billowing cumulus billows buck and break across the gorgeous blue, rearranging themselves so that every few minutes, it's another vista; near sunset, the sun reflects off the tops of the clouds in a molten pink blur that, when I was a kid driving from Jamestown to my grandparents' place in Bismark, I used to imagine was immense lakes of pink dishwashing detergent...

...and much more, all of which is the only thing that makes the Ypres-like quagmire of the slog from St. Cloud to Fergus "Fungus Flats" Falls bearable.

I said, of course, that it was the second worst drive I know; of course, Central Wisconsin from about Black River Falls to just shy of Madison is worse. "Oh, look. Another hill. Trees. Fields. Fields and trees. Fields, hills, trees and more hills". I'm convinced that "Tomah" was Chippewa for "Too tired to go on".

Posted by Mitch at April 13, 2004 05:35 AM