DAY 06 25112017

Crap, I drove too fast. 

The drive should have taken about 4 hours total - 2 hours each way - so by my calculation, if I started at 1:30 pm (which I did), I'd catch some nice afternoon light, dusk, sunset, magic hour, darkness, and be done by 5:30pm. I somehow shaved 30 minutes off my time, meaning I never got to capture the dark, but this is why I'm here for another 4 days - to account for any potential fuck-ups and/or missed opportunities. 

Thoughts that entered my mind as I drove in a not-quite-as-straight-as-I-hoped line (in no particular order):

1. This road is not quite as straight as I hoped. About 7 minutes in, the road curved through one of those towns where you're left wondering why they even bothered to name it. These are familiar to anyone who's driven through rural United States (and perhaps Canada, though my experience in Ontario hasn't quite been the same). It's your usual cluster of silos, barns, the singular gas station-slash-convenience-store, a handful of modest houses, and the whole thing is over before you even realize you were supposed to drastically slow down to 35mph - at which point you understand why they purposefully bent the road, though the hint was lost on me. Oops. This happens about 4 more times, through 4 more towns (my favorite is a town called Gackle, in no small part because the town is called Gackle), and only once did the road curve because of a geological formation. This road could have easily taken top place as straightest, longest road in America, were it not for those safety-conscious stooges in the planning department. As I've mentioned elsewhere on this website, the actual top position is hotly debated, with some claiming that US-80 in Utah has a longer (though not by much) stretch of uninterrupted road. Regardless, this will do for now.  

2. I had my usual 4 camera set-up, but this time I'd try something different. I'd try to be fucking disciplined, structured in how often and how long I press record. It's incredibly easy to try to capture it all, but the problem is I have to sort through this mind-numbingly boring footage when I'm done - so I decided to only hit record on my front and side facing cameras for 30 second every 15 minutes. Shooting at 120 frames-per-second, this would result is a potential 40 minutes of footage to sort through, should I chose to actually play it back at 24fps (for a 5x reduction in speed).

I'm not disciplined. I gave up on this almost immediately. There's just too much to capture to leave it up to chance. Whatever. Future-Marco will deal with this. 
 

3. After the first town, the road doesn't curve for at least another 30-40 minutes. During this time, between snapping a few photos and pressing record on my cameras, I let my mind wander. I play back a conversation I had with the front desk lady earlier this morning. I needed to convert some CAD to USD, and it being a Saturday, I ask her where I'd have the best shot at exchanging currency. Her immediate reaction was to ask me what I'm converting, which I thought was peculiar. So I tell her Canadian Dollars to US dollars. She accepts that answer (I feel like I just passed some kind of test), and she says she'll check for me. She stares straight at me and says "Hey Siri".

I reply was a very Canadian "Sorry?"

"Hey Siri, First International Bank and Trust opening hours"

Oh.

"I'm sorry, I didn't get that" (That's Siri speaking)

"Hey Siri, call First International Bank and Trust."

This goes on for a while. I had never seen someone use Siri with such determination, let alone to look up something you could have Googled in a second. I stand there patiently, amused more than annoyed. After giving me the info I needed, she asks me if I'm from Canada, to which I reply "yeah, from Toronto", to which, and I swear I'm not simply playing up the common American stereotype, she replies was the blankest of stares. I clarify with "Ontario". Nothing. She tells me that she's been there once. Pleasantly surprised,I ask her what brought her to Toronto? 

"Oh, no, just Canada" (like it was all the same really). "I went with my Christian Study Group when I was, ohhh, I don't know, I had my kid when I was 16, soooo, yeah I must have been about 12."

And I'm standing there feeling so superior, having all of my preconceived notions of this town and state and country confirmed in one interaction. She had facial piercings and her hair was an indescribable color between pink and green. She could have been 18 or 30 - who knows. 

"Did you get the Canada Rate?"

"Huh?"

"The Canada Rate?"

"There's a Canada Rate?"

"Oh yeah, here let me check."

She looks something up on the computer.

"I didn't get the Canada Rate, did I?" 

"No, look here, you're paying..."

She spent the next 10 minutes explaining the different rates they offer and what I could do and who I could speak to to get a refund and I'm thinking to myself that this girl is  going out of her way to save me something like 20 dollars and all I could do is quietly judge her.

I'm such an ass. I can't help but think that my initial lack of empathy and holier-than-thou attitude is exactly how this country has grown so divided. And this is verging on the political, so I'll end it by saying that I feel really bad and that if by some miracle Schantel (that's her name, I didn't fall asleep on my keyboard) finds this post, that I want to say I'm sorry. 
 

4. ND is not as flat as I would have thought.
 

5. Despite the almost constant freezing temperatures, there's no snow to speak of. Which in my mind might have been disappointing, but in reality the late fall colors are perfect under the constant clear skies. The harvested fields (mostly wheat and corn I think, but I'm no expert) shine gold, almost blinding. The skies are huge and there are few trees. My whole impression of the place is saturated orange and blue. 

6. As I return to the start of the drive, sun setting behind me, I notice a field fire, and wonder how the hell this is even possible with freezing temperatures, and that there must be no humidity to speak of.
 

7. The road ends anticlimactically, bypassing Streeter entirely by dipping south and becoming ND HWY-30. Not wanting to interrupt this first pass at it, I do a u-turn and head back, planning to explore Streeter on my second visit, which I decide will take place over a whole day, stopping along the way as I see fit. 


8. I miss the Tower. There's something beautiful and calming and meditatively boring about staying in one place and letting your environment change, as opposed to hurtling yourself forward in a machine that will, statistically speaking, probably kill me.  


9. Which is why I like to produce the images below, taking stills from my time lapse and compressing time into one image. 

This first one is the whole drive, all 3.5 hours, in one still. Each still is about 250 images out of 6000 (only because I run out of RAM if I use more), spaced out evenly.