August 20: Little Yellowstone County Park

     All heads turned my way when I walked into the Gackle Cafe at 8:00 a.m.  There were six men sitting at one table and eight men sitting at another.  On the other side of the room were six women at a table.  Nobody was having anything other than coffee and not one of them was under 60 years of age.
     I was greeted with a couple of polite "hellos" and then they all went back to chattering at their respective tables.  I sat alone, ordered coffee and a small breakfast and quietly ate it when it arrived.  Only after I got up to pay did I start getting peppered with questions about my ride.  I also got weather reports, information on road conditions, and wishes for a safe journey.  The owner of the cafe thanked me most emphatically with a firm pat on the back.  I assumed he was overjoyed that somebody actually ordered some food.  When I left that place I was feeling pretty special. 

     If I was not on a bike the last two days and instead was driving, I would speed up and say to myself, "This is excruciating.  Let's get the hell out of this wasteland."
     Then the bicycler part of me would say, "Seriously?  Did you not notice all of rolling hills and those lakes and wetlands?"
     "Those aren't lakes.  Mille Lacs is a lake.  These are more like ponds or, better yet, swamps."
     "They may be swampy but certainly you enjoyed seeing the various ducks and herons and pelicans."
     "The what?"
     "You heard me," bike-me said.
     "Well I might have seen a couple of ducks."
     "I saw a hundred ducks if I saw one.  I had to laugh at this one kind of duck that takes off by running on the water and pounding its wings on the surface like a drummer hitting his snare.  And in that one bay alone there must have been 30 big white pelicans."
     "Oh," said motorist-me.
     Biker-me kept it up.  "Did you see all those hawks?"
     "Oh yeah," motorist-me perked up.  "He was sitting on a telephone pole.  I have to admit, THAT was pretty cool.  I love birds of prey."
     "You saw one hawk and that was pretty cool, huh?  I must have seen at least 20 of them and several screamed out that CHREEEEEEeeeee sound that they make."
     "Well, how do you expect me to hear that with the windows closed, the air-conditioning on, and Spoon blasting on the sound system?" motorist-me replied, feeling kind of hip with the Spoon reference.
     "Not only that," bike-me continued, "one red-tailed hawk played a little game with me.  As I approached his telephone pole perch, he took off and flew to another one three poles ahead.  When I got to that one, he did the same thing.  This process repeated itself four times until he flew across the road and yelled, 'CHREEEEEEeeeeeee.'"
     Unimpressed, motorist-me said, "whatever you saw or did, it took you two days.  I took ME two hours."
     Biker-me had no answer to that.

     It was so quiet on these roads and there was so little traffic that sometimes I felt like I was in a wilderness.  If somehow I was staring at a lone sunflower growing inches from the side of the road and was suddenly shocked by bone-jarring rumble strips (which I did) or if a small mammal bolted in front of me out of nowhere (which it did,) and if I had wiped out as a result, it could easily have been 15 or 20 minutes before my broken, bloody body was found.  I thrive in that kind of solitude.

     This evening I am camped at the Little Yellowstone Park.  The Sheyenne River flows right behind me in a deep valley.  There are no other campers.  Oak trees tower over me and provide shade.  At some point today, the high temperature is expected to be 99 degrees.
     At 8:30 p.m. all of the dragonflies in Barnes County got together in a clearing at the north end of the campground for a dragonfly jamboree.  At 9:00, several owls began hooting.  I laid in the sweat lodge that was my tent.

Little sunflowers at roadside.  Flat land.  Hawks. Rodents.