NORTH DAKOTA
Up until yesterday the view out the window seemed to be familiar. Even Wisconsin with its many lakes and evergreen tinted forests seemed familiar. But today I feel as if I am out West. I woke up in Fargo, North Dakota and now the landscape is new. The first thing that strikes me is being able to see to the horizon with fields so huge that they seem to stretch almost the far, fields that it would take half a day to walk around which now a a sheen of new grass but I expect will soon turn into something else. I have a feeling of isolation.
The farm houses, enclosed by a stand of shading trees to get them through the hot summer, are far apart and when there is a village it is just a few houses with a huge grain elevator. People must live in tight knit communities with the rest of the world seeming very far away. We just stopped at Grand Forks with nothing grand about it, only a few houses and a farm equipment sales shed.
It must have rained here recently because there are a good number of ponds in fields and along the tracks with no way to drain because everything is so flat. In the East the trains stopped often at towns I hadn’t heard of but real towns. Here there seems to be no where to stop. Even visits to a grocery store or a the doctor or the dentist must be a twenty mile trip and the hospital must be really far, all of which must create a feeling of self sufficiency and independence.
Probably if I were driving through North Dakota on a highway there would be occasional stores of one kind or another and gas stations and an occasional fast food chain restaurant, a McDonalds or a Bojangles, at least near an Interstate. But here along the tracks there is nothing for miles and miles except the endless enormous fields.
I haven’t seen anyone working in the fields yet. It is almost as if the fields are taking care of themselves. I have seen a few cattle in the fields but only three or four times in an hour. Mostly all I see is bright green emptiness with stands of woods, probably enclosing a farm house, in the distance.
And then came Montana, almost the same but a little less flat, an undulating flatness without hills but with gulches and the same enormous fields but on gently rolling land.
But in Montana there seems to be more land that seems to be unused, and more abandoned equipment or cars of other machinery along the train track with a few junkyards where it appeared that junk metal was being loaded into train cars. I doubt if people in either state would allow the government heavy hand of zoning, which is rejected even in Swannanoa. It seems as if there is so much empty land that if anyone wants to throw away a truck carcass they can leave it anywhere with impunity.
Something else that has interested me all the way from Pennsylvania is the large number of Amish people on board the train. Of the 200 people on the train at least 30 were Amish in several small groups. With no real understanding of the Amish I was surprised to see them on the train. I assumed they went everywhere in horse drawn carriages. One grandmother was making a two week trip to visit her daughter in Whitefish, something a horse and buggy wouldn’t let her do.
The Amish stand out with their distinctive costumes, the men with their beards, dark trousers with suspenders and blue shirts. The women have a distinctive cap and a pleated dress in pastel colors with a long skirt and long sleeves. They spoke among themselves in a dialect that I guess is called Amish. It sounds a little like German but isn’t German. They of course all speak colloquial American English.
They are expected to wear certain clothes and all look the same. But come to think of it almost all young American women dress exactly alike with either very short shorts, tattered jeans or tight fitting leggings regardless of whether the clothing enhances how they look or makes them look as if stuffed into clothing three sizes too small.
The Amish women all look both well clothed and lively, just as all the girls in their beautiful hijabs look lively and interesting in Istanbul. Why is it that we demand that everyone dress in the same peer imposed uniform that we currently favor for a year or two and feel threatened if they don’t. Are women wearing a hijab or a pastel Amish dress threatened by the way average young women dress, or shocked?
But why is it that I assumed that the Amish were making a once in a lifetime relocation from one Amish community to another instead of assuming that they were on vacation, needing to get away for a while from the conventions of domestic life at home, just as I am doing. And why was it when I got to the very elegant and expensive (from my perspective) Glacier Lodge, that I was surprised to find them here also, playing Abide with Me on the grand piano in the lobby and laughing around the table in the grand dining room? I felt out of place and they were completely at home.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 