Notes From The Interior

A summer dawn breaks with cruelty upon North Dakota. It lays bare an inland sea. It spills across the splintered roofs of timber barns, of Amish farmhouses and sunken wooden sheds, each forgotten and consigned to quiet oblivion. The sky and flooded plains unite in blue infinity, and I gaze through sleepless eyes at a terrain clawed open, a land dissonant and brilliant in its curious desolation.

To ride the Empire Builder across the breadth of the United States is to see the dream rendered vacant not only by flood, but by the rush of demountables in Devils Lake, the ghost towns amid the plains, the scrapyards and broken riverbanks and fading billboards of the urban prairie. It is to see a land grappling with the waning of civilization, the unraveling and slow decay. It is to see a land, through a dew-addled window on a cool July dawn, which has remained forever in my inner eye.

The peculiar power of the scene was deepened through conversation. I was with Michael, a 23 year-old father of two from Traverse City, Michigan. We had boarded the train together in Chicago, and he was bound for the oil derricks of Williston to work with his brother. We passed the time watching a ribbon of meadowlarks weave over the distant skyline of Fargo with only the steady thrum of rail underwheel to ground us.

Our conversation drifted between the trivialities of our daily lives – travelling alone, the weather of a Sydney winter, his stint as an automotive engineer, his childhood. I asked him about leaving his family.

‘Well, it’s hard on the Peninsula so I have to go for them. And I’ll be back for Christmas, that won’t be long...’

He takes a creased photograph from his wallet – Sleeping Bear Dunes veiled in snow. Smiling, he sinks deeper into the warmth of his blanket and speaks with gentle self-consolation.

A pause. ‘Maybe we’ll go to Cleveland. Its better there.’

He falls silent and returns to the landscape as Williston approaches. We part with a few kind words. I watch as the station recedes. The Empire Builder forges westward.

The Empire Builder. I thought of the name all the way to Oregon. I thought of it as the sun burnt the morning haze off the Badlands, and I thought of it as a thunderstorm rolled across the Great Plains and I was still thinking of it as the ebbing light washed the northwest crimson.

And later, I thought of all that the name entails, a name so rooted in a time long since past, in a dream that remains so curiously elusive. I think about it still.