New Town, ND
Above: Here’s a picture of the storm that I barely avoided. This picture is from www.minotdailynews.com . See below for the URL to the article that I got this image from.
Above: Manhattan ain’t Paul’s only playground, ladies and gentlemen.
Wednesday, 7/12 9pm
Location: New Town, ND
Coordinates:
Didn’t take reading
Today’s mileage: about 77
Tomorrow’s destination: Minot, ND
My very friendly neighbors in the campground were generous enough to offer me home-made breakfast. I had a lot of fun eating and chatting with them. They’re really energetic, adventurous, intelligent folks. Actually, in a lot of ways, they reminded me of my parents, aside from the fact that a mobile home is among the last thing my parents would ever spend money on. I was fascinated to hear that their next trip will be to Bhutan, a country known recently for promoting a Gross National Happiness index as opposed to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) index. As I stood up to leave, they handed me an apple, some string cheese, and trail mix for the road. Although I didn’t know it at the time, the food they gave me would later turn out to be a godsend.
I left Williston a little before 10am, oblivious to the struggle I had in store. To put it succinctly, Mother Nature dealt me a ruthless smackdown.
Once on the road, the prevailing easterly winds were overtaken by stormy weather, which sent the winds sailing headfirst in my direction. At around 1pm, I stopped at Lund’s Landing, which was built as a resort/marina on Lake Sakakawea. Unfortunately for the proprietors, a friendly mom and pop pair, the water level on Lake Sakakawea has dropped so far that there’s no water to be found anywhere near Lund’s Landing. There’s still a dock with a nice two-story outdoor patio, but now it just overlooks a field. I asked the owners what happened to the lake, and they gave me the same expanation that the people in Ft. Peck gave me: the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is draining the lake to ensure that there’s enough water downstream to keep the barges in Missouri afloat. You can imagine how popular that policy is here.
Getting back to my bicycle travails, I foolishly neglected to look ahead on my bike map to figure out where my next rest stop would be. As I found out later, the next place with food/water was 55 miles away. Ignorant of this fact, I set out without any additional provisions.
By 6pm, my feet were really beginning to drag, figuratively speaking. All day long, I could only muster about 11mph in the headwinds. To complicate matters, when my route turned south, I found myself heading directly into a horizon filled with ominous, dark clouds. The sky began to flicker, and soon I could see lightning bolts lashing at the ground. At that point, it wasn’t raining yet, and I couldn’t hear any thunder, so I continued pedaling. However, it didn’t take long before I heard the rumbling of the oncoming storm.
When you’re in the middle of relatively feature-less plains, it’s hard to gauge the distance of lightning visually. I tried to count the seconds between the lightning bolts and the thunder, but there was so much lightning that I wasn’t able to determine which flash corresponded to which rumble. Eventually, I began to see lightning strike the fields 90 degrees to my left, and I decided it was time to get off my rolling lightning rod.
I coasted down into the ditch on the side of the road and whipped out my tent as quickly as possible. I set up the tent in under 10 minutes, just in time for the rain to hit. I didn’t so much care about getting wet; I just didn’t want to end up as chicken-fried roadkill.
I lied down in my tent and listened as the thunder grew louder and more frequent. Suddenly, a car horn blasting from the road several yards away from my tent jolted me to attention. I looked at my watch and realized that in the process of getting in my tent and listening to the rain and thunder, I had somehow fallen asleep for the last 30 minutes. Instead of cursing the car horn, I should have thanked it for waking me up! For he next hour or so, I looked out of my tent every 10 minutes to get a feeling for whether the storm was getting better or worse.
For a while, I considered staying in that spot overnight, but with only about 12 ounces of water left, I decided to push on if at all possible.
At about 7:30pm, I decided to make my move and get back on the road. To my right, I could see a sunny sky. To my left, all I could see was a dark curtain of stormy clouds. With any luck, I reasoned that perhaps I’d ride right past the storm.
Somehow, it didn’t seem to matter which way the road curved, the wind hit me in the face in every direction. After another hour, I resorted to my final method of combatting the wind: insults. I shouted every obscenity that came to mind, and yet the wind continued unabated. Now tired and out of breath, I almost gave up. However, a few moments later, I spotted the shores along Lake Sakakawea that marked my approach to my destination, New Town.
I pulled onto Main Street and ducked into a motel. After a grueling day, I decided that I would splurge on a brick and steel roof over my head, in favor of my usual a nylon and aluminum one. I secured a room and jumped into the shower, and then looked outside again to see how the weather was holding up. Like opening the door on a speeding train, the storm outside announced its presence with a roar. I suddenly felt like a genius for getting a motel room, despite the fact that my decision had been inspired entirely by exhaustion, not weather sense.
I recoiled back to the motel bed, resigned to the fact that I’d have to wait until the next morning for a bite to eat. Just then, I remembered the food that my neighbors from the night before had given me in that morning. I reached into my bag, pulled out the string cheese and trail mix, and flopped onto the bed with a triumphant smile.
Epilogue:
When I checked into the Minot KOA the next evening, the manager asked me where I had traveled from. When I told her New Town, she gave me a surprised look and gasped, “Oh, so you came from out near Coleharbor, didn’t you? Did you know that it got destroyed by that storm last night?” I asked her what she meant by “destroyed”, and she replied that 80% of the buildings in the town had been razed by the winds. Sure enough, the Minot Daily News the day after that (Friday) devoted an entire page to images of the buildings reduced to scrap metal. Fortunately, there were only minor injuries in the storm.
Here’s an online article that details the devastation: http://www.minotdailynews.com/News/articles.asp?articleID=4121
Comment(s):
Minot is pronounced “My Not”. If you want to avoid public ridicule, don’t ask a group of people at a diner how to get to “minow” (like the fish). Just take my word on that one.
Tags: Travel
daviddmcmillan