Although we had lost an hour crossing into the Central time zone, we were still one hour behind the east coast and my e-mail started dinging at 7 AM. There was a bit more actual paying work to be done before we could hit the road. The kids wolfed down the free hotel continental breakfast, eager to maximize their pool time before we left. I set up the laptop in the steamy pool room, finished my work tasks and then did a bit of route research.
The weather looked like it would be better the farther north we were. Severe storms with damaging hail were forecast for Saturday on the southern edges of the Great Lakes, so I made the decision to go north. Plus, I was really curious to see Duluth.
There were two route options: the Interstates (faster but with a lot of construction) or the state roads. It wasn’t much of a contest. We were a rolling museum after all and there are only so many truck stops and billboard that you can see before they all start to look the same. We peeled off I-90 right after Sioux Falls and headed north on Minnesota 23.
For miles and miles, the road was flanked by corn on one side and soy beans on the other. Everything about the landscape told us that we were seeing agriculture on an industrial scale. Anyone who has ever flown across the country has seen this patchwork of fields punctuated by small clusters of towns, so we had fun thinking about the people flying overhead seeing the reflection of our windshield as small white speck far below.
The roadside view of agriculture on the eastern edge of the grain belt is different from the western farms where the dominant features are big irrigation apparatuses and water supply channels. Here, each small town had a grain elevator next to the railroad tracks, at least one feed and tractor store and every once in a while there was a farmer’s co-op displaying today’s buying price for corn, beans and wheat. Western Minnesota looked to be very productive land.
Midwestern spumoni: corn, concrete and soy.
On the far right you can just make out the 18-wheeler trailer that is out in this field. It gives you a sense of the scale of this equipment.
No farm stands to be seen in this area, but there were plenty of roadside Anhydrous Ammonia depots.
Most farm elevators like this one had the city or town name painted on them. I am guessing that the elevators are the social connective tissue for these small towns since schools seem to be few and far between.
We saw a great line of familiar brown tanker cars on the railroad tracks parallel to the road. These were similar to the ones we had seen in Davenport, Iowa on our westward journey and my assumption then, and now, was that these were cars carrying gas or oil from Canada. A few miles later we saw the ethanol plant. No need to call Starlee Kine – this mystery has been solved. Ethanol production is just as controversial as oil and gas extraction and soon we were noticing small roadside billboards asking “Oil Fields or Corn Fields?” with pictures of flaming oil rigs next to majestic rows of corn. In both Wyoming and Minnesota, seeing these working landscapes dotted with small towns whose fortunes rely on big industries, I began to understand why their politicians favor the needs of the constituents instead of addressing the larger national and global issues that we feel we can see so clearly from our perch in Vermont. To be fair, we also saw a ton of wind turbines in these areas. but guess what? There are no wind-turbine supply warehouses, no feed stores to fuel the turbines, no small-town co-op advertising today’s buying price for kilowatts. Aside from installation and maintenance, the renewable energy industry doesn’t support nearly as many jobs as more traditional methods of extraction and production so I’m guessing it doesn’t earn very many votes in the farming towns of middle America.
This was an unexpected discovery. I would rather find something like this than to stop and see the world's largest ball of twine.
One of the turbines on the left is getting repaired. It's not uncommon for them to get hit by lightning and damaged.
We stopped for lunch in Marshall, MN, a small city that is home to Southwestern Minnesota State University and is also the corporate headquarters to Schwann’s, the famous frozen food truck business. The Wooden Nickel Saloon was quiet at noon, but the space was huge. Clearly, this is where the pitchers of beer overflow and the entire town hangs out most nights and weekends. On a Friday or Saturday night after a football game, this place must be packed.
You will not find a falafel wrap with a babaganoush spread and hummus on the side at the Wooden Nickel. But feel free to indulge in a Peanut Butter and Bacon Burger with Garlic Parmesan Fries and a PBR tall boy. (I only had one of those three things.)
As we crossed the Mississippi in St. Cloud, I could feel the ache in my shoulders from staying up late the night before. I was tired, but not sleepy, still able to drive alertly but eager to get to Jay Cooke State Park, an expansive area with rivers and gorges just south of Duluth, to relax. Earlier in the day I had checked on site availability and the park had 24 sites available on a first-come, first-served basis. We rolled in at 6 pm to learn we had been shut out. The ranger’s expression communicated to me in a less-than friendly way: what do you expect, stupid? It’s a Friday in August. Then she handed me a full page of “nearby” campgrounds and refused to provide any advice on which ones might have availability and which ones were not a total dump. So we had to do that research on our own. Not surprisingly, there were plenty of dumpy campgrounds with plenty of availability. Aside from wanting to have a semi-pleasurable place to camp, security also becomes a concern at these below-the-bar campgrounds so we kept moving on. Miles and hours later, we finally found an available site in a private campground within the Duluth city limits. It was not ideal, but it was clean and almost full, indicating that others like to camp here. We had been so lucky finding sites so many other times this trip, we were bound to have to compromise at some point. It turned out to be just fine after all.