Driving the valley

This semester, I travel to the other campus in our college two days a week. I'm teaching two classes there while one of the other psych profs is on sabbatical. If I could drive straight there, it would be about thirty-five, maybe forty miles. Depending upon the roads I'm forced to take, the drive can go be between 52 and 65 miles. Today, because of the road conditions, I had to take one of the longer routes.

See, I live in a valley. Closest mountains are a thousand miles to the west of me, though there are some pretty big hills about 400 miles to the east and west. The valley that I live in is that of a river, the Red River of the North, a bitch of a river that likes to push out of the banks every few years to disrupt the lives of the people that live near her. Eras in the valley are recorded by the floods; '97, '79, '56 and '57, and so on. They are also tabulated by blizzards, though we haven't had a real good one in a few years. Back in '97, however, well, we had a lot that year.

We had a light snow last night, and winds today caused the roads to get a bit slick. Now, I know that a light snow and some wind doesn't make a big difference in some places in the world, but, they have something that we don't. Topography. Yup, it's pretty damn flat here, and because it's flat, the wind doesn't have much to get in it's way. Lots of farmers plant windbreaks, rows of trees on the edges of fields, that knock it down a bit, but, there are many stretches along my route that the windbreaks are miles away from the road. Ditches drift and fill, often becoming flush with the road by midwinter. These are normal ditches, either; they are über ditches, some that are 20 to 30 feet deep and 50 to 60 feet wide.

As I was driving, I started out taking my normal route, and by the time I got to one of the small towns where I make a decision, I looked forward and saw nothing but white. The road was completely covered with snow and ice. I looked at the clock and made a fast calculation, and decided to take the long way. For me, that means backtracking, because the road that I turned onto angles northwest, and I was heading northeast. I know, it seems like a petty thing, but, I was shaving it close to get to class on time as it was, and the backtracking adds almost ten miles to my journey. Better safe than sorry, though.

A few miles along the way, I turned back to the east. There is a small town there, and as I got to the edge, the valley opens. It's the high valley there, meaning that I'm not too far from the edge of prehistoric Lake Aggassi (A-gas-si), which after the last ice age covered much of this area, leaving some of the most fertile land in the world as it drained. It still looks flat as a table, but, if you know what to look for, you can see changes that occur. One of them is the broken forest lands. We call it the prairie-to-pine zone, and it was once bordered by a vast oak savannah that ran from north of Winnipeg to the Gulf of Mexico. I kept moving along, drinking in the surroundings when I could, mainly because even the state highway I was on was snow covered and icy and spots.

I'm not a native to this area of the state, and it's taken me a long time to see the beauty of extremely open spaces. I don't care that there are tree lines and windbreaks ... it's still OPEN compared to where I grew up. I think the fact that I can see so much sky makes me feel almost claustrophobic. I am starting to enjoy it, though, but, I yearn for the day when I can once again live surrounded by trees and topography.