Badlands and Dinosaurs

From the New York Times: Badlands and Dinosaurs

By BRUCE WEBER
GLENDIVE, Mont. — One rejected idea for the title of this blog was “The Wind Is My Enemy”; a bit too arch, I think. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t so. I’d had a long stretch of good fortune, wind-wise (and weather-wise, generally), but Sunday my run of luck ended.

That day, I turned off eastbound U.S. 2, the conventional cycling path through the northern states, because the oil boom around Williston, N.D., has created dangerous, or at least unpleasant, cycling conditions through the area; instead, I forged a path of my own, south from Wolf Point, Mont., to the tiny crossroads town of Circle (where the sign over the local newspaper office reads: “Today’s News — Next Thursday.”)

My reward for creativity and intrepidness? Hills and headwinds for 50 miles. It was, perhaps, the toughest day of my trip (I can think of one or two other contenders), which is now slightly more than a month old and slightly less than 1,500 miles long. The good news is that I’m getting in shape; it’s a day’s ride I couldn’t have finished four weeks ago.

Traffic has been light, and with the exception of the occasional farmer hewing wheat fields in a combine, actual people have been few. Lazily grazing horses have been noting my progress, but mostly my company has been entomological. The region had a very wet spring, and insects are everywhere. For the last 300 miles, grasshoppers have been leaping from the roadside and bouncing off my ankles, pinging off my spokes. Black flies (I think they’re black flies) and mosquitoes have lain in wait for me to stop for a swig of Gatorade. Moths and butterflies flutter in the weeds. The sound of millions of what? — crickets? — has been following me everywhere, a lighthearted white noise that sounds almost like jingling bells. I feel somewhat lost in America here, a feeling at once spooky and titillating. Part of this, I suspect, is a New Yorker’s provincialism, an astonishment at being so isolated, so vulnerable to forces of nature like the wind. Funny, but I never feel that way walking through Washington Square Park.
For a New Yorker, eastern Montana may be the most alien environment in the country. Starkly beautiful, vast and empty, horizontal in the extreme (the horizon is everywhere you look, a 360 degree circle), it is known for the size of the sky, Indian reservations and dinosaur bones.

I made a couple of brief off-route cultural stops (both in an automobile driven by a photographer who followed me for a couple of days). One was a powwow in Poplar (just east of where I turned south) on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation, home to Assiniboine and Sioux tribes. The weekend-long event, a celebration of tradition that amounted to a rather wild, yet rather wholesome dance party, attracted hundreds of people, many from far enough away to surround the grounds with a temporary tent city. During the evening I spent there, the dancers, most clad in startlingly colorful costumes and many wearing bells around their ankles, ranged from preschoolers to tribal elders, and they were accompanied by several men seated around a single drum, furiously beating out a rhythm and singing, in the Cree language, a mesmerizing, warble-like call to the dance. I’d never seen — or heard — anything like it.

A couple of day later, I visited Makoshika State Park, a gorgeously stratified series of hills, a kind of badlands environment just outside of Glendive that has been a font of dinosaur fossils and that looks like a science-fiction movie set — “Planet of the Apes” maybe (not the new one). Eastern Montana is rife with famous dinosaur finds — the first T. rex ever discovered (in 1902) was found near Jordan, about 100 miles west of here — and many of its small towns boast museums. (Even those that don’t, like Circle, tend to promote the string of tourist attractions, known as the Montana Dinosaur Trail, with prominently displayed dinosaur statues.) There are two museums in Glendive. Alas, both are closed on Mondays, the day I was there, though the Makoshika visitor center has a small but instructive display of fossils that includes an impressive and angry-looking skull of a triceratops, a three-horned beast from something like 65 million years ago.

The name Makoshika, by the way, is a variation on a Lakota phrase that means land of bad spirits (i.e., badlands). The park itself is strange and beautiful, with vistas that let you look out over the hills, imagine prehistory and still see the town. In fact, the entrance to the park is just beyond a Glendive neighborhood; you drive out of a school zone and into the Cretaceous period. Nope, not much about eastern Montana reminds me of home.