Here Is Where The Map Should Fold

In 1960, when John Steinbeck had published more than 20 books and was arguably America’s greatest living writer (my bias), he set out, with his dog Charley, to rediscover the country about which he had been writing for much of his adult life. In his introduction to “Travels With Charley” he writes “. . .my name had become reasonably well known. And it has been my experience that when people have heard of you, favorably or not, they change; they become, through shyness or the other qualities that publicity inspires, something they are not under ordinary circumstances. This being so, my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home . . . I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. I had to go alone and I had to be self contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.” So in his custom-made pickup camper he set out to see America. Here are his impressions of western North Dakota.

Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota, or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn’t paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart. As I was not prepared for the Missouri boundary, so I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding . . . And then the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled, the buttes and coulees, the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look and glowed with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black. It was so beautiful that I stopped near a thicket of dwarfed and wind-warped cedars and junipers, and once stopped I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light. Against the descending sun the battlements were dark and clean-lined, while to the east, where the uninhibited light poured slantwise, the strange landscape shouted with color. And the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought, for the stars were close, and although there was no moon the starlight made a silver glow in the sky. The air cut the nostrils with dry frost. And for pure pleasure I collected a pile of dry dead cedar branches and built a small fire just to smell the perfume of the burning wood and to hear the excited crackle of the branches. My fire made a dome of yellow light over me, and nearby I heard a screech owl hunting and a barking of coyotes, not howling but the short chuckling bark of the dark of the moon. This is one of the few places I have ever seen where the night was friendlier than the day. And I can easily see how people are driven back to the Bad Lands . . . In the night the Bad Lands had become the Good Lands. I can't explain it. That’s how it was.

Surely those are some of the best words ever written about North Dakota. I am especially pleased with his spelling choice of Bad Lands versus Badlands. Tracy Potter, who has been promoting tourism to North Dakota for almost 25 years, says there ought to be a law requiring them to be spelled that way.

As soon as I get time, I’m going to share some words with you from another great American writer who passed through here almost 15 years after Steinbeck, and who, unlike Steinbeck, was not traveling incognito. Later this week, I hope.