| This day brought us across the entire eastern two thirds of Montana and into North Dakota, around 500 miles. We began to do higher mileage days to catch up on our itinerary. Often you will hear people say eastern Montana and North Dakota are flat, monotonous lands devoid of interest. They are correct to a certain extent. They are relatively flat, but they are not monotonous nor are they ugly or of little interest. It's not the land that has the problem; it's the viewer. In my opinion, these types of landscapes that have little relief and change only subtly over many miles have to be viewed with patience, quietness, and slow movement. They have a beguiling, subtle beauty that you have to work at to appreciate, but for which your effort will be paid in full. Some cultures that are faced with seemingly uniform environmetnal conditions become so attuned to slight differences in those conditions that they can describe them and give them unique names. Hence, the people of the arctic reportedly have 50 names for snow of different condition. Montanans and North Dakotans must then have a large lexicon for the subtle color shifts of yellow, tan, white, green, and dark, shadow, bright, dull, flat light palleted across the smoothed, rolling landscape. These are vistas that may not be as mystic, mythic or vertigenous as the mountains, but do more to hypnotize, mesmerize and spellbind. |
The temperature was incredibly hot on this portion of the trip. More on that in my next post.
