Driving the Dakotas

Eight hours.

Eight hours in a car with two other adults and three kids.

Lake after lake rolled past our windows. Fields. Meadows. Farms. Somewhere in North Dakota, we saw our first bison. On a fence post, a bird stood watch.

"Hey, look," my sister pointed out.

"What? What?!" the kids clamored.

"It's a falcon," I replied. "A prairie falcon."

I wasn't exactly sure that it was a falcon, but I couldn't imagine what else it might be. Later, the next morning, an image search proved me right, at the time, though, I didn't know. It looked like a falcon or what I imagined a falcon to be. An hour or so later, we saw another.

"They're bad," my sister said.

"They're not bad."

"They're predators."

"Yeah?"

We were in a different part of the country. Birds of prey of fence posts. Bison in the fields. Fields. Small towns with the distinct presence of grain elevators and an equally distinct lack of stoplights.

At a stop sign, we turned onto a highway, one of the last legs of the trip. Passing traffic zipped by at 70 miles per hour. We turned and merged, from a complete stop to 70.

At that point, we read jokes from a terrible riddle book to one another.

"What do you get when you cross a cactus and a bike?" and "Why does a barber always get places first?" and "How does a duck celebrate the 4th of July?"

A very flat tire. He knows all the short cuts. With fire quackers.

"Knock knock," we prompted.

"Who's there?"

"Boo."

"Boo who?"

"Mason's crying back there!"

The car erupted in laughter far more than it erupted in fights, but there were those, too. Minor spats.

"He's touching me" and "Get your feet off my seat" and "It's my turn to sit by Uncle Scott."

Silly songs and spoken word. I read aloud from my own papers, a gift, from a choose-your-own adventure story, from a book about North Dakota.

Nobody really cared about the state tree (American Elm) or the state bird (Western Meadowlark); though, the falcon earned comment as did the fields of canola, rolling golden outside our windows as we sped to one of the place from which we came. A fort. A family farm. A family we barely knew but called our own.


Tag: Family Travel