Jeremy Bold, Tyler Bold, Gwendolyn Hoberg, Richard Hoberg, and Bruce Ringstrom

The WalkAcross

North Dakota

Day 10 – June 12Starting point: Hebron

Ending point: Glen Ullin12.6 Miles

Hail like machine gunsBatters our little shelterNo choice but shelter. –R

extra space, but we didn’t feel too squeezed — and we set out for Glen Ullin in good physical condition.

RICHARD: It wasn’t so cool that night, which was nice. I think we all slept well.

GWEN: Breakfast and taking down camp were unremark-able — oatmeal and granola bars again — but I was thrilled to nd that m lower calf tendon pains were percent gone. I felt like I was walking almost totally normally as we got on the road! I don’t know how, but it was very welcome.

JEREMY: At 7 a.m. passed the closed shops all over Main Street, peeking in the windows of the Hebron Herald/Rich-ardton Advertizer, the Mayer Theater, Lapp’s Jack & Jill, the bakery, the historical museum and public library, Brick City Drug (sensations of McClusky, the old town of my grandpar-ents Bold, washing through my body), gasoline-smelling auto shops, cars for sale, empty park benches and picnic tables.

The trail provided interesting new scenes of nature.

JEREMY: We’ve begun to encounter marshy areas now, birds relentlessly chirping, hundreds of swallows swooping around, hovering above and beneath these little sloughs: whole eco-systems of overpasses above cricks and coulees, swallows eat bugs who eat weeds who eat water.

GWEN: I enjoyed observing a few small insects today during breaks. A tiny leafhopper hopped around on me for a little while, and a little ying bug of some kind rubbed its anten-nae and legs together in a variety of ways as it perched on my nger.

TYLER: Sometimes the feeling of life around me is like static electricity in the air, crackling, about to spark.

The park we camped at was on the outskirts of Glen Ullin. Tyler and Jeremy waited there with the gear while Rich-ard and Gwen retrieved the food we had dropped off at the house of Vicki, a city employee, on the drive to Medora. They also checked out the Broken Spoke Cafe & Saloon, where we planned to eat that night, to make sure it would be open. Then we all set up camp by a shelter and hung out until dinnertime.

TYLER: I’ve been tracking the weather throughout the day, and I am vaguely aware of a storm that is working its way eastward from Montana. It’s basically chasing us, I think.

GWEN: I’ve just felt moodier and more taciturn and self-doubting as dinnertime has approached. I would like to have someone else to talk to and be around tonight, and/or a book to read. But those are not options, so tough. Actually, the Bold parents are meeting us at the Glen Ullin restaurant for dinner in about an hour, but I don’t envision their wanting to talk to me in particular for very long. But I guess I’ll be able to listen to someone new.

Tom and Royann Bold arrived in the late afternoon and drove us to the Broken Spoke, where most of us had the locally fa-mous fried chicken talked up by the owner.

GWEN: I’m not a fried chicken connoisseur, but it was pretty good. Awesome gravy.

Even after a large dinner, back at camp we ate almost the entire large bag of cookies Royann had brought for us, which tasted even more delicious with cold milk. We all felt it was nice of them to make the trip from Bismarck to see us, and to

WAND Part I: Daily Account | 77

bring treats. They left for home after we nished the cookies and milk.

RICHARD: Then things got crazy. Major thunderstorms started rolling in. Heavy rain, and then quarter- to golf-ball- sized hail!!

TYLER: I’m in the outhouse without a poncho when the rain starts to fall. It’s one of those intense, cathartic summer storms. I’m stuck, but Richard comes to my rescue, running out with raingear after a few minutes. The rain turns to hail just as we get back under the shelter. I’m loving it, the ter-ror and noise of a classic Dakota hail storm, and we out here so vulnerable!

GWEN: It hailed for perhaps ve minutes, and the largest stones we found afterward were walnut-sized.3 We decided that if a tornado happened, we would go to the primitive bathroom, which was concrete with a imsier roof of ple i-glass or something.

As it stormed all around us and began to grow dark, we played cards under the large shelter, where we had also moved the tent, but grew increasingly wary of our situation.

RICHARD: Just when we were starting to worry about the wind blowing the rain into us (to say nothing of the tornado warning on the weather report), a pick-up pulled up with the Glen Ullin emergency manager in it, asking us if we wanted shelter. We declined, thinking we’d be ne, but as things got worse we decided to call him and have him and his brother pick us up and drive us into town to the community center.

We hurriedly wrapped our packs in the tent and tarp because they would have to go in the uncovered truck beds. Just as we

nished, our two saviors arrived to drive us to the town hall. The white-haired, sturdy-framed emergency manager was matter of fact about our safety, not making much eye contact with us.

78 | The Walk Across North Dakota

RICHARD: Water was owing like a river in the streets and there was serious ooding happening in town, too.

We spent the night in the town hall basement, called the Blue Room. The carpet against some of the walls was damp from water seeping in, but we could hardly have cared less and were relieved to have somewhere secure to spend the night. Upstairs Jeremy found some old wrestling mats to lay our sleeping bags on, and once our adrenaline died down, we fell asleep under the dim glow of exit signs.

WAND Part I: Daily Account | 79

This has been a sample of The Walk Across North Dakotafrom North Dakota State University (NDSU) Press.

To purchase a copy, click the following link (or copy and paste the text into your browser's URL bar):

https://epayment.ndus.nodak.edu/C22800_ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=6760&SINGLESTORE=true

Contact: Suzzanne Kelley, Editor in Chief 701.231.6848 suzzanne.kelley@ndsu.edu

North Dakota State University Press Announces the Publication of _______________________________

The Walk Across North Dakota By Jeremy Bold, Tyler Bold, Gwendolyn Hoberg, Richard Hoberg, and Bruce Ringstrom

_______________________________

The Walk Across North Dakota, Gwendolyn Hoberg, ed. Publisher: NDSU Press Publication Date: March 3, 2016 ISBN: 978-0-911042-84-9 LC #: 2016930155 Price $19.95/ Trade Paper/ 234 pp., 10 photos, 2 maps Subject: Travel Narrative Distributed to the trade by Partners Book Distributing

Contact Nancy Nelson, nancy.nelson@ndsu.edu, for bookseller discounts and individual sales.

Over the course of two summers, five young friends traversed North Dakota by foot, starting at the Montana border near Beach and finishing in Fargo. Their more-than-400-mile trek is an exploration of backroads, small towns, wildlife, and terrain, a deliberately unhasty quest in search of what it means to be “from North Dakota.”

The Authors

Left to right, our intrepid authors are Richard Hoberg, high school English teacher, Fort Collins, CO; Bruce Ringstrom, criminal defense attorney, Moorhead, MN; Jeremy Bold, librarian, Boulder, CO;

Tyler Bold, internal medicine physician, Boston, MA; Gwendolyn Hoberg, editor, writer, musician, Moorhead.

Contents

Introduction Profiles Note about Nodaiku WAND Part I: The Walk from Beach to Bismarck WAND Part II: The Walk from Bismarck to Fargo Walks That Came Before Planning Planning Part II Technology Reflections Acknowledgements Notes

Blurb

“The journey across North Dakota is one I’ve made many times, but within the confines of my car. In The Walk Across North Dakota, these five companions experienced sights, sounds, people, and critters that we in our cars miss. Their adventure reminds us that the Peace Garden State is a place most wonderful.”—Bennett Kubischta, North Dakota Department of Transportation, Retired

Excerpt from Jeremy Bold, “Reasons for joining the WAND [Walk Across North Dakota]”

“Why are you doing that?” people often asked as they stopped to talk to us during our walk across western North Dakota. I cannot help but smile when I recall their puzzled faces, fading into the distance, as they considered my joyful reply: “Why not?!” I had done a fair share of traveling in this land as a kid, but could only recall trips going to and from home, racing past slow-moving clouds in the big sky, rolling swiftly over roadside snowdrifts in the car, with no time to explore all that land in between.

When I returned to North Dakota for the WAND coming off a couple of years in New York City, that hub of urban overstimulation, I was excited for this opportunity to find renewed appreciation for a land I had previously experienced as monotonous, boring, and alienating. It was an existential adventure in the land of my youth, and a deliberately unhasty quest to understand my sense of place in the Blank Rectangle in all of its marvelous emptiness. Like Eric Sevareid, I was surprised to encounter strangers in distant cities who knew nothing of this state and wanted me to answer “What’s it like there?” My initial feelings were primarily defined by times of angsty youth, when I could only fantasize about more exciting places where I could have grown up. This made it impos-sible to say anything special about this place, and my standard reply was to say “I don’t know . . . like normal, I guess” and shrug.

Undoubtedly, this answer was shaped by my lack of life experience in other places, as well as by a culture of humility that tells residents not to speak too proudly about what makes the state

unique. Feeling that I had taken too few detours and too little time to appreciate the details of being present here, I came back to re-discover many things that make North Dakota weird and fantastic: wandering the back roads alone without another person in sight for hours, watching thunderstorms approach in the wide open skies over the prairie, and listening to the sound of wind that brushes the grass, bringing silence to a mind buzzing with thoughts. . . . I realize that my desire to return to North Dakota and write about the sense of place there was less about filling in the “large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind” and more about exploring the blank spot in my heart where my sense of home there should be. So many nights of my childhood, I recall lying awake in bed, listening to the hum of cars on the interstate going far from my home and imagining all the other places where that road could take me. Now, after a few thousand intention-filled steps in this land of my past, I recognize that despite how far away from North Dakota I may venture, I can never really leave it behind.