Back on the road.

At 8:30am CDT, I inched my way out of the Twin Cities rush hour traffic, looking westward, unsure of what lay ahead besides long hours in the car. At 9:00pm MDT, dangerously low on gas, windshield a kaleidoscope of bug impact craters, I rolled into Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan.

I've never driven a 12 hour day before, but there's something about logging long hours behind the wheel that lessens the impact of time. There was no real difference between six hours and twelve. It was only as the first leg of my roadtrip reached it's conclusion that I began to feel the weight of my hours spent behind the wheel in my arms, and the cramped confines of my rental in my legs and back.

My drive was never boring. I was traveling through uncharted territory for me, my first time in this region of the world. I have been to LAX twice, and once to Arizona; there are my sole real experiences in the North American "west". To start, I drove up along I94 to Fargo-Moorhead, ("Home of Roger Maris, the legitimate home run champion" - but Ruth hit 60 in less games) and a third of the way into North Dakota ("Legendary" - hyperbolic). In Jamestown, I branched off onto Route 52, a weird chimera of a state highway that twists and turns and takes many forms on it's way to Canada.

North Dakota was pretty much exactly what you would expect. It is a flat and dusty land; carpeted in prairie grasses, wheat, and canola; littered with bales of hay. The only topography comes courtesy of the rivers which cut across the state, mostly North-South, carving shallow grooves into the pancake. I traveled leisurely along the Des Lacs river for a half hour on my way out of Minot, a sleepy regional hub cum suburban nightmare oil boomtown. Then, the highway rose out of the basin, and it was off to the races again across the flats.

Yet emerging from the tranquility of the river was something of a twilight zone experience. Imagine returning to the landscape upon which you have spent nearly six hours galloping across, only to find it subtly changed. At first you don't notice it. More hay bales, wheat fields, splashes of canola fly past. Then, out of the corner of your eye, you spot the invader. It nods at you, up, down, up, down, up, down. And as your eyes return to the road, unnerved by what you have seen, suddenly the true nature of the landscape is laid bear to you. There, in the field passing on your right, nods another oil derrick. On the field to your left, a third. Casting your eyes further ahead, you see a movement that cannot come from the prairie wind. Up, down, up, down, up, down, nod a massive host of oil derricks, and you have stumbled amidst them as surely as if they had laid an ambush.

Welcome to the Bakken formation. You are surrounded.

It's tempting to read incredible violence into the landscape done by the derrick armada, but once you've overcome the initial shock, the derricks and their rhythmic motion become as common and as normal as the hay bales. The creeping feeling returns when you cross into Saskatchewan, ("Land of the Living Skies" - poetic) because the derricks are accompanied by flares; burning lighthouses across the oceans of waving green grasses. Then there is a period past the border where the ground has been turned up and churned by giant earthmauling shovels, the heart of each occupied by a large white control center large enough to be a house. And then it all fades, the derricks, the mounds of dirt, the monster machines, and you're lost again on the flatlands, the sun climbing down from cloud to cloud towards the broad-brimmed horizon.

Sometimes I forget that for each place in the continental US that is considered to be a frigid tundra (Read: MN, ND) there is a significant part of Canada that is much much colder, and that many people actually do live in these places. Where American density goes to die is basically the point where Canadian density is at its highest. For every bleak, American backwater, there is a bleaker, Canadian equivalent.

Saskatchewan is the haunted moonscape to North Dakota's lonely plains. The huddles of trees that give the North Dakotan landscape some measure of friendliness have abandoned Saskatchewan en-masse. The oceans of grass and canola fields stretch further out that you ever dreamed possible hours ago. It's a neolithic land. The silhouettes of silos and farmhouses stand alone like stonehenges, and you it adds to the mystique. "It's almost as if someone put that there intentionally", you think. And then moments later you remember that someone did put it there intentionally. But when the next agribusiness nexus rises out of the road, you're back to wondering what ancient people built this thing, and what on earth it could be for.

Saskatchewan is an understated place. There is nothing that demands your attention, nothing that kicks open your car door, drags you out by the collar and compels you to fork over $5 or a moment of your time. But its influence is subtle. The skies had two tiers of clouds when I drove through. There were friendly Cumulus clouds that made everything feel small, and streaking Cirrus clouds above that went on and on and made it feel like the world was very big and it was you that was small. As I drove along, the land spread taut ahead of me and I could see clearly the curvature of the earth. It was entrancing. A lonely landscape not looking for company, just for more souls to join in its quiet contemplation.

Only an extended stop at a construction site was jarring enough to break the spell. After that, it was straight on to Regina, although with constant glances at my dropping fuel gauge.

I have only been in Regina for an hour, and I plan to leave early in the morning. It's a surprising city. The city itself doesn't pack many surprises, it simply surprises you by existing. One minute you're passing by the same fields you've befriended for almost half a day, the next, you're on a tree-lined boulevard surrounded by dense residential neighborhoods, and a moment later you're passing by bars and a few outlet malls and then suddenly 50's office buildings, and then a glass office building or two, and that's the city. You will see none of this coming until it comes. This is possibly because Regina appears to have all of the trees in the province,. It's a very leafy city. Still, from far away, I initially mistook the Regina skyline for another agribusiness plant.

Tomorrow, a shorter drive (although still fairly long) skirting the edge of Canada's answer to the US's decades of gross environmental misconduct (Alberta's Tar Sands) and straight on to Calgary!