Buffalo River State Park to Hamden Slough

We spent the drizzly morning following the east bank of the Minnesota River, ducking into Milan to visit the Folk School (closed) and veering across the river on a gravel road that promised a route to the hamlet of Louisburg (pop. 89). The gravel seemed new and soggy, and we weren't keen on stopping just anywhere, but puttering along with the windows open we started to hear meadowlarks—Western meadowlarks—and we pulled over to take a closer look. Meadowlarks tend to perch on shrubs and fence posts, and it wasn't long before we spotted two or three.

It's an unusual landscape, boggy and expansive, but it seemed less hospitable in the drizzle. Once Hilary found Louisburg on the map we decided we didn't really want to go there, and we retraced our route to Highway 7. We crossed the river again—roughly fifteen feet wide at this point—near the headquarters of the Big Stone National Wildlife Refuge, and swung back to the east side again along the top of a dam near Odessa. It was no tragedy to discover that the nine-mile tourist drive through the refuge was closed—that often seems to be the case—and before long we were rolling down the long, bedraggled main street of Ortonville.

From this point on, mighty Highway 7 becomes a narrow, two-lane road winding through the verdant countryside above the east shore of Big Stone Lake, midway in elevation between the floodplain below and the cropland above, which is largely hidden from view by the crest of the hill. Maybe it was the drizzle, or the lake—wide and seemingly endless in length, it has the look of a fjord or a loch—but I almost felt like we were back in Ireland.

That feeling vanished quickly once we left the river valley and found ourselves once again traveling on long, flat, and mostly deserted two-lane highways surrounded by fields of corn, wheat, soy beans, and sugar beets.

Beardsley. Wheaton. Breckenridge. Two hours later we were in Moorhead. Our plan was to "get to know" the city better. After all, it's home to three universities. Yet the central core has little of the hipster vitality of downtown Fargo, just across the river. On the contrary, that "core" seems to have been permanently disfigured by several major rail lines and the traffic booming into and out of town on the four lanes of Highway 10. The Moorhead Center Mall was perhaps built to address that issue, but it doesn't inspire much enthusiasm with its zany marque and puzzling slogan: "Another Great Place to Shop." It makes you wonder: Where can we find that other, and presumably greater, place to shop? Somewhere nearby?  

The Hjemkomst Center, located in a shady park tucked into a bend of the Red River, conveniently holds most of Moorhead's tourist attractions, including a full-scale facsimile of a Stave church and a locally built Viking ship that residents of Moorhead and nearby towns sailed all the way to Norway. Both are impressive. But both have been on exhibit for decades.

The building is also home to the Clay County Historical Society and several small gallery spaces. We spent some time viewing a splendid exhibit of watercolors (see above), then walked down the hall to a quilt show organized by Studio Art Quilt Associates the theme of which was emigration and displacement. Interesting. We took a stroll out past the stave church and down to the muddy river. Perhaps if we'd continued our stroll upstream past the canoe rental and under the highway, then turn east toward the public library and the Rourke Art Museum, we would have gotten a better feel for the older part of town, but the sun was coming out and the air was getting steamy.

While researching the trip I'd singled out two local restaurants that might enhance our urban interlude: Rustica offered an appealing tapas-inflected happy hour and  Sol Avenue Kitchen, a recently-opened café in a retrofitted gas station on the north side of town, was notable (according to the website) for its outdoor seating and "globally inspired" street food. We drove by both places, but neither seemed quite right at four in the afternoon. We were itching to get back out into the country.

We'd reserved a campsite at Buffalo River State Park, twelve miles east of town. Like most of the picturesque countryside hereabouts, it consists of a modest river winding through a sliver of hardwood forest with open fields on either side, all of it dropping almost imperceptibly to the west toward the distant Red River. The patch of land on which the park is located, roughly a thousand acres, is notable because most of it has been planted with prairie forbs and grasses. The adjacent Bluestem Prairie Scientific and Natural Area, on the south side of the river, has never been farmed and is considered one of the most pristine and ecologically valuable prairies in the state.

The next morning we crossed the river on a footbridge a few hundred feet from our campsite and spent three hours following various trails around and across the fields. Though we watched a flock of bobolinks courting amid the grasses for quite some time, and spotted a second juvenile orchard oriole, most of our attention was directed toward the wildflowers, which can be appreciated equally well as vast and variegated fields of plant life, mostly green and pale silver, or as individual specimens.

I don't know much about wildflowers, but can sometimes recognize the families. Yellow clover, purple vetch, this one looks like wild gallardia—I'm sure there's a name for it—and there's a wild sage (Artemisia?). Butterfly weed offers a rare burst of intense color, but is outdone by the orange field lilies, growing in isolation well off the path. Milkweed blooms are in their fleshy pink state, forming globes three inches in diameter that look like they belong in a tide pool in California. The coneflowers are ragged. So is the culver root, whose elegant and elongated white blooms are appealing just the same. 

 We stopped on several occasions to admire a spindly, silver-gray plant sparsely distributed with small, well-proportioned lanceolate leaves. Still don't know what it is, but the winding patterns of the stems, viewed from above, looked like a kitchy wrought-iron wall decoration, only far more exquisite and natural.

We saw no one in the fields, but on our return to camp through the river valley woods we met up with an elderly couple out for a walk. She had grown up in Red Lake Falls, we learned, he was from Fargo. They were both wearing floppy straw hats. 

When I asked, they had trouble explaining why Moorhead remained so lackluster. "They're building some new apartments on the north side of town," the man said, trying to show some enthusiasm. I could tell he didn't like them. Then he said: "How old are you? We're seventy-nine."

We broke camp and headed north on highway 9, cutting east on County 108 to explore a chunk of Felton Prairie. A sign alongside the gravel road leading in said "no outlet" but that didn't matter to us. The traffic that passed us consisted of semis loaded with gravel from the pits on the ridge.  

We stopped at an overgrown parking lot a few miles in, surrounded by huge boulders to keep the ATVs at bay. We saw nothing but brush and sky vanishing into the distance, read a few sun-bleached signs about rare prairie birds we'd never see--where are all the chestnut-collared longspurs?--and the importance of conserving gravel for later generations. And we watched empty semis bounding up the gravel road we'd come in on to get another load of rocks at the gravel pit that remained out of sight beyond the crest of the ridge to the south. We decided to go north along a dwindling, sandy, two-rut road past abandoned pits, disused swimming holes, copses of towering cottonwoods, and barbed-wire fences. 

It all seemed sort of abandoned, sort of beautiful. A good place for a kid to build a fort.  At another time of year, or another time of day, it might have been great. At midday in July, ninety degrees, without a hiking path in sight, it was still worth a visit, and more interesting by far than a corn field, but still, merely "interesting."

Our final stop of the day, Hamden Slough, was more rewarding. Open water surrounded by grassy slopes. Black terns, yellow-headed blackbirds, and distant ruddy ducks with bright blue bills and upturned tails, drifting in the open water.

The town of Audubon, a mile south of the slough, has a meager claim to fame. A year before it was incorporated in 1872, the famous naturalist's niece accompanied a party of railroad officials on an inspection tour. (Why? I have no idea.) She was so impressed with the beauty of the region that she requested, if a settlement were ever to be established there, that they name it after her uncle. And they did.

I read this charming tale on a kiosk near the slough, and could well believe that this rolling, grassy countryside at the tag end of the Alexandria Moraine might have inspired the admiration of a nature-lover passing by on a train. Back in 1871 there were far fewer farms and far more prairie potholes blanketing the countryside. But it got me wondering who Audubon's "niece" actually was. Audubon was born in Haiti, the illegitimate son of a French naval officer and his Breton chambermaid. I can find no record that he had any siblings other than a half-sister, Rose, also born in Haiti, also illegitimate, who has vanished from the historical record. Hmmm.