North Dakota

It is pitiful, my inattendance to this blog.
I write when I am inspired to do so and I suppose of late I have not been particularly inspired. I'm looking forward to the end of my trucking journey (semi-journey?) and figuring out how this bread oven business is going to work out. I'm sure the transition will not be as easy or as pleasant as i could hope it to be but it will be different and that will be welcome.
I did have a good last outing, filled with lucky timing and visits.
I left the house and headed as usual over to Baltimore to pick up steel coils. These were headed to St. Joseph, Missouri, a Missouri River town north of Kansas City and south of Omaha. It was the western most rail point in the US in the antebellum era and the place where jesse james' life was brought to an end. It is also a place where a great many cows end their lives and it was part of that industry that it seems I was serving.
The tin plate I was carrying was headed to Silgan Can who make a great majority of the tin cans in this country. The area south of St. Joe is where the stockyards are and surrounding this industry is the industry for packaging all this meat. It is almost like one huge factory made up of different companies and facilities. (Next door was cryovac, the company that makes the vacuum packed plastic bags in which larger cuts of meat are packed.
Before I had even gotten to St. Joe I was sent a message directing me to head to Assumption, Illinois once I was unloaded. This was back in the direction that I had come another 300 miles. Long deadheads are great. I'm still getting paid and the truck is faster and more fuel efficient.
The pick up in Assumption was of steel grain bin components. from a company called GSI which was undoubtedly Grain Systems Incorporated or International or something. These things I was picking up are the round corrugated steel bins with conical roofs that create the vertical aspect of the midwestern landscape.
These grain bins pieces, which took a long time to load and were a pain in the ass to tarp, were headed to Page North Dakota, a small town about an hour north west of Fargo.
A day before I had come to pick up this load i had received a call from some friends of mine asking if I would be able to come to our 5 year college reunion. I said that I did not know, that the freight was the decider and apparently the freight smiled on me that weekend since en route to North Dakota I could stop through Grinnell (Iowa) for the better part of the weekend.
On Sunday, after breakfast i hopped in the truck and drove north through the back roads of Iowa loving the beauty of the landscape in spring, a landscape whose dreariness a few months earlier made me wonder how i could have ever lived here.
I zipped up and around Minneapolis thinking of the first times I had been in this city, a tender and miserable memory. Then the long drive to the northwest towards Fargo. At a rest stop another trucker was putting away his fishing pole having spent an hour by the lake behind the visitors center.
I stopped in Fargo for a shower at the Petro and then continued to Page parking along the wide empty street of this tiny town over night until the sun woke me to unload.
Another driver and I had our trailers unloaded and then we repaired some tarps (sharp edges on these silo parts) and I got a load much more quickly that I had anticipated. I was to head to Beulah in the western part of the state about 100 miles from the Montana border.
The day was grey and cold and rainy and the soft green hills, strange enough in full sunlight were even more ghostly. Along ND-36 there are few towns and the lack of reference points makes for a drive in which time seems to dissolve. The drive did not seem short or long it just was, as if all happened at the same time or not at all.