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Home to Zoar

ÝÝÝÝ The blank eye of the darkened picture window takes up nearly the entire back end of the white double-storied RV swaying and lurching across the rutted red-dirt road ahead of us as we wonder if the frustration and dread we feel parallel those of the Donner Party stuck behind the Prairie Palace wagon snailing its doomsday path through the Utah desert.Ý Road construction.Ý Road construction as never seen beforeóthis time the entire highway gone, ripped into hillocks and trenches, a trackless battleground a quarter mile wide scarring the prairie for seven miles of mindless mayhem, Tonka toy playground on a grand scale.Ý Somewhere ahead of this caravan of unintentional pioneers runs a pilot truck.Ý SOMEONE has to be guiding these vacation vehicles, dirty farm pickups, and unsuspecting passenger cars back and forth across wallowy soft, then unforgiving hard windrows of Dakota topsoil.Ý Boom, crunch, thud, then a harrowing scrape of city-bred undercarriage against the gleeful rocks of droughthy wild high plains revengeóserves you right for traveling here, you tourist greenhorn.Ý Tonka drivers sun and windburned to an angry, implacable brick-red hue cast glances, no grins at the luckless followers.Ý Just drive, push dirt, dig, press the persistent prairie landscape into small manís plan for progressóand over the top of these anxious innocents, if necessary; we have work to do.Ý For those in line, no turning backóand woe betide those who try the trip by night, no guide, no lights, no limits, no warning, no quarter for those who challenge such a place at such a time.

And then, unceremoniously, pavement.Ý The caravan speeds, spreads, separates.Ý Grazing antelope do not react; pheasants in the barrow ditches go about spring business undisturbed by dirt and havoc; road noise resumes the rhythmic ke-chunk, ke-chunk, ke-chunk of winterís heaves and swells and then drones to a pause.Ý Thunderhawk.Ý Several wind-beaten clapboard houses, squatting galvanized grain bins, a road sign:Ý ND-49, stark black figures on a chiefís silhouette.Ý Swing wide, then left, gather speed and watch the June prairie sweep past, grassy fronds of bar-ditch grasses waving a prelude to fields falsely green, ground falsely fresh, looking turned and full of promise in this yet another dry, dry spring.Ý Not a car anywhere; we left that pilot in a construction moonscape miles ago and are awash in this oddly mapped land of leavings, evidence of human tinkerings amid a plan beyond our changing, eternal prairie waiting now and always for a rain, the touch of blessing that keeps us always hopeful, kept our people here, kept our past and now our future always certain, always tenuous, always based in prayer and pride.Ý Windbreaks of bent, twisted Russian olives gnarled together protecting the fruits of years of hand-carried moisture to hillsides not designed for trees; small and sometimes greater gaps where death, drought, insects, frost took young trees early, their absences a clearer memory if left unfilled, like the scattered graveyards of their planters full of families broken by the hardships of this place.Ý Dakota.Ý Hurtling wary into snares of families past, the sky vast and endless, unexplainable, unfeeling blueóthis part of life, of trouble, of me.