June 16 - Valley City, North Dakota

Since we hadn't been able to do the Valley City Volksmarch the previous day, after breakfast we drove into the city to find the starting point, which was the Broken Wheel Restaurant on Main Street. It looked so nice when we signed up that we decided to have lunch there after the walk and that turned out to be a good decision. The Valley City walk featured 8 bridges across the Sheyenne River that loops around through the city. Most of them were mundane, but the white suspension bridge leading over to the Valley City State University was very pretty indeed. That campus is small, only about 1,000 students, but had a fairly extensive set of campus buildings and specialties, according to a map we found out in front of the old Administration Building.

From the campus we worked our way southwest to the edge of the city about a mile away and climbed a good steep hill. There wasn't anything particularly scenic on top and at first I was puzzled why the club had routed us out that way. But then we saw the Solar System Wheel, a depiction of the solar system using circles of rocks somewhat like the Medicine Wheel rock formation put up by ancient native Americans. This was an intriguing and very large piece of work and I would have spent more time looking at it if we hadn't been attacked by voracious mosquitoes in that area. As we walked off past Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune boulders, the true proportion of the average orbital distances from the sun was preserved; the boulder representing each planet was roughly twice as far from the "sun" as the previous planet. Pluto was, quite clearly, an exception to this rule, being only about 20% farther out than Neptune, and that relatively close distance made it quite plausible to me that Pluto is an escaped moon of Neptune. This odd formation just reinforced the notion that you never can really predict what you'll find on a Volksmarch.

We also had very nice overviews of the city and river valley from the top of the bluff, and at one point on the pathway they presented a perfect panoramic photograph of the view with all the key sites numbered and explained. Since they also presented the pictures of the same structures in the old days, I could try to take some of my patented "then and now" types of pictures like I did for Yellowstone's Castle Geyser last year (see Wanderung 3). Some old grain and very large grain silos, in particular, had a new name on the side but did not seem to have otherwise changed their external appearance a bit. That map also told us where the U.S. Post Office was so that later in the walk we could mail off the letters written the previous day.

From the bluff we walked back down and kind of zigzagged our way south and east through town to get to Chatauqua Park, our next checkpoint. Along the way at 3rd and Main Street we passed a small RV "campground" apparently owned by the city. The sites were just bare places next to each other, but they did have electric, water, and sewer connections. The rates started at $6.50 for a site with no amenities and each service cost a couple of bucks more. This "campground" was not mentioned in any of our references or indicated on any maps, so I was quite surprised to see it. We liked our spot out on Ashtabula Lake, but if we were in a hurry or just trying to be really cheap (Do I hear Merlin laughing?), it would have been good to know it was there.

When we reached Chautauqua park we found it was where in the late 1800s families would camp and listen to educational presentations for two weeks in the summer. They borrowed the idea from the Chatauqua grass roots educational movement in the northeast, and it was nice to see it had spread this far west. In general I think the people of that era had a great belief in education and self improvement, and all the small colleges or universities we were finding in each of the small towns was concrete evidence of that fact. I remember my mother, a product of this period, reminding all her children (and grandchildren) "For goodness sake, get an education!", and most of us did exactly that.

The riverbank forming one edge of Chatauqua Park gave us a close up view of an extremely long and high trestle made of steel girders that spans from the bluffs on one side of the Sheyenne River Valley to the other, a distance of at least a mile or two I would estimate. This trestle is called the "High Line", for obvious reasons, and is still in regular use by the east-west train traffic. What surprised me was that on close examination the trestles were clearly built broad enough at the top for two rails and the rails currently used are off on one side. For all the world it looked like it was designed to be broadened into a two-track trestle at some time, but I could not find any mention of it ever having the second track. Curious.

The return leg of our route consisted of walking straight west for a mile, north for a little over a mile, and then taking an extra little loop that was probably tacked on to make the 10 kilometer distance. We passed an old Anglican church and the Barnes County Historical Museum lodged in an old store on Central Avenue and decided to give it a whirl after lunch.

The long awaited, and we thought well deserved, lunch was the buffet at the Broken Wheel restaurant. We each had a salad course plus spareribs, roast chicken breast, chilli mac, and potatoes, vegetables, etc. Please remember we started eating our largest meal at lunch in Germany during Wanderung 2 and have continued that tradition for health reasons, but as a result we eat rather more than most Americans for that meal. For $6.50 for the meal, drinks, and an ice cream desert (but not Culver's custard!), I don't think they made a great deal of profit on us.

The Historical Museum we visited next was really much better than the miscellaneous collection of poorly identified artifacts that I have found in similar local museums across the country. The reason, I think, was that they had one paid, full-time, professional museum director, who I had the pleasure to meet, and this gentlemen I think has carefully organized, situated, and labeled the stuff in the exhibits. Directly to the left of the entrance was a very complete HO train model of that High Line trestle and you could operate it for a quarter, which we gladly did. We had as much fun watching the HO trains crossing the trestle, I must admit, as watching the real trains cross the real trestle.

Some of the other exhibits were of the typical "labeled artifacts in glass cases" sort, but most were carefully constructed life sized tableaus of the historical setting. They had a tableau for a one-room schoolhouse, for example, complete with mannequins for the teacher and students. This was the first exhibit I have ever seen on this facet of frontier life that accurately told the advantages of 8 grades in one room the way my mother, who instructed a 1-room schoolhouse in the 1920s, had explained it to me. She said, and this exhibit confirmed, that there was a lot of incidental learning of the material for the upper grades by the students in the lower grades just listening and watching them go through their lessons. Additionally, the older students could even be assigned to directly help the younger ones when the teacher was busy elsewhere. I was surprised to learn that the last such schoolhouse in North Dakota had only closed in 1973, and I really wondered what our schools might have lost by stratifying kids rigidly into classes and then lock-stepping their progress through the grades.

Other tableaus showed family life during WWII, a corner drugstore soda fountain from the 1950s, and that sort of thing. I was so happy these tableaus were NOT behind glass plates first because I could get a better look at them from all angles and second because I could take much nicer pictures. One tiny display of WWII women working in industry featured a "Rosie the Riveter" mannequin (womenquin?) with a real welder's helmet and an autobiography of a local girl who went from North Dakota to the state of Washington to weld ship equipment, as I recall. What made that special was a woman who came up to look at it and told us that it was the helmet and autobiography of her mother who was coming into town to visit the next day! What fun it would have been to watch that woman inspect the display and maybe give some more oral history of what those years were like for her.

The coup de grace of our visit was, in this case, de graceful 1901 Oldsmobile coup! More accurately, it was a beautiful lacquered black wood curved-dash Olds with a single cylinder motor. The museum director backed it out into the alley behind the museum to start up the engine, and he graciously invited me to come out, look at it run, and take all the pictures I wanted (which was plenty). This example was one of only 15 in the world that still actually runs, and he was getting it ready to participate in a parade the next weekend. He started it by a hand crank inserted in a hole under the seat that I don't think I would have otherwise ever even noticed, and boy did that thing shake and shudder as the big single cylinder engine sputtered to life. I was surprised it wouldn't just shake apart after a while, but possibly the fact that the body was made of wood actually helped it resist damage from the constant vibration; I really think that a metal frame would have ultimately cracked.

Basically I had a lot of fun and if you get in this area and like history, you really should check out this museum even though you will also learn rather grim facts such as the fact that the German Maxim machine gun might have killed more people than any other weapon invented by man. That's the machine gun the Germans used to slaughter the human wave advances of the British, French, and Americans in World War I, where hundreds of thousands died in the trenches. And people wonder why I hate war.

While I was entranced by the museum, Monika went next door to a second hand store and found a Cabbage Patch doll. These were a fad somewhere in the late 1980s or early 1990s, and I recalled some people then thought they would become collectibles, but millions were made and of course they never did. Monika felt she was missing one for her doll collection, so she picked it up for $3.00, more of a garage sale price than a collectible price, in my book. This doll had bright blue eyes, a veritable mop of blond hair, and a sweet, dufus-like expression on her face, so Monika immediately named her "Valley Girl"(after all Monika bought her in Valley City), which just goes to show that she can be also guilty of very bad puns.

As we left the museum the curator told us about the new Scenic Byway that ran through Valley City, so we decided to take it to the south after buying some groceries in town. That turned into a two hour drive back to camp and was definitely not the shortest route! It was also only paved for the first 10 miles or so, the rest was a well graded dirt and gravel road. But I just compensated by driving slowly and we were rewarded by ever changing vistas of a river valley sculpted by nature into beautiful hills and ridges, many of which were clothed in deciduous trees. Most of the rest of the drive was fields and pastures with quite a variety of cattle, some sheep and quite a few abandoned farms. A wooded river valley with fields and pastures might sound pretty common for Easterners, but it really was quite unusual for the North Dakota landscape. In the fall, I expect that this is just a riot of color and it must be a popular drive, but we only met a car every few minutes and that was just as well given the dust raised by the passage of each car! One historic site we passed was a historical log cabin that was apparently used as a men's club for single guys around 1900. We also saw churches right out in the middle of nowhere, and I was surprised that they managed to hold onto their congregations when more convenient churches were surely located in the current towns and villages off our route, but it looked like they were surviving.

Curling back to Valley City on the paved highways, we once again passed underneath the impressive trestle bridge and returned to camp for a light supper and an evening of Competing Computers. Monika spent a lot of time processing the day's pictures while I struggled to express the day's events. It is amazing how I could try to get everything down but invariably remember things I had missed while sleeping that night. I had noticed that on some of our earlier trips, especially Wanderung 5, so I wasn't surprised by it but still sometimes a bit irritated. We did stop our activities long enough to take in a beautiful sunset over the lake.