Leaving Minnesota, the theme changes from food production to the rape of Dakota — North Dakota. Driving along Route 2 at a steady 70-75 to cross the state, we’re feeling the wind, breathing the space, feeling the West coming up. Ranch country. Land of the scenic sunflower and the tamed canola. Hay bales and herds in the fields and cattle in feedlots awaiting the truck by the road.

Then oil wells start to appear, recognizable ever since by the bobbing of the “yes-men,” as we call the pump jacks in Holland. So evocative and iconic is the pump that it has a whole series of nicknames here, my favorite being grasshopper pump, indicating an intimate acquaintance with grasshoppers. Dutch Wiki has the name of the inventor, Walter C. Trout. But these are not your Daddy’s oil wells— almost every pair or triplet of yes-men is accompanied by a series of extra tanks and some other constructions: Is this the hydraulic fracking of the Bakken Formation?

Slowly the number of wells increases, until the farms and ranches are dotted with them. Fields of canola vanish, hay bales rot in piles by the side of the road: as we move along, most farmers appear to have turned to oil for revenue. Or sold and lit out for warmer territories in their RV. Who would blame them? The winters are fierce in North Dakota. As are the summers. Once every while there is a break and the Carpenter and I turn to each other: “that family’s holding out!”

Tankers with what we slowly realize is “Bakken crude,” so-called, dart in and out of the pumping stations much like bees collecting pollen in a field of clover. Suddenly a big stink as we drive by a flare burning off gas. And here I had thought that was a thing of the past.

It dawns on us only slowly how eerie the kind-of-rural landscape has become — cows interspersed with oil, daisies notwithstanding. There are virtually no cars or even tractors on the road: only trucks and white pick-ups with orange safety flags sticking up from their rear end. The businesses lining the highway serve industry: selling oil tankers, rigs, gravel, maintaining your wells or equipment — all “energy” companies of some kind or another with generic innocuous and vaguely alternative sounding names like Energen or Vida Energy. Vida Energy, for sure.

Suddenly, we see a tiny development of some sort — a fenced-in area with double wides. “Bakken Homes,” $24.50 per night, advertises the sign. Feedlot for workers. We stop at a gas station and supermarket. Lots of high quality grab-off-the-shelf readymade food. Save for the occasional farmhouse, nothing is even twenty years old. Everything is either new and shiny or new and dusty. Only the grain elevators are rusty.

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Being the semi-rural sorts we are, and on a camping vacation in hinterlands to boot, it feels like a sojourn among the Philistines, which judgment has the effect of slapping me in the face with my own hypocrisy. Not to put too fine a point on it, but as we toddle through this rolling landscape the gas gauge goes down fast. The old Toyota beastie with cap, fully loaded, is getting15 miles per gallon at 75 miles per hour. Quickly we set a new speed limit at 65.

Suddenly all oil paraphernalia disappears. Back to grassland — here and there a herd of grazing cattle picturesquely dotted against the horizon. And then the earth splits and we’re in badly misnamed “badlands,” gorgeous as they are. This is our goal for today — Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Those dots, it turns out, are bison, part of a breeding program so successful they have to cull the herd. Ode to the man who made sure we have something left, for the moment at least.

Having reached the golden age of 60 I now own a lifetime pass to the National Parks and it works when I brandish it. Entrance free, camping $7 here at TRNP (North Section). Nice spaces, good bathrooms, plenty of water. No showers, but hey. We stay for a day to walk a gorgeous trail along the ridges. Early in our hike we run into a couple turning back because they have just seen a massive bear on the trail. We look at each other and decide to push on. The bear is long gone. Wild coneflowers (Echinacea angustifolia), variously known as Elk Root or Black Root, are blooming abundantly, more pink than purple on these wonderfully barren hillside meadows.

On the way back to the campground we run into an extensive gravel paving and oiling operation of the campground and its access road — National Parks of necessity not being the pristine environments we make them out to be — and get about half an hour of complete freedom to lean back in the truck, drink water, wait for the crew to finish, and watch increasing numbers of vehicle operators get increasingly irate.

As we leave the next morning, a couple of buffalo are happily munching by the side of the newly paved stinky road. “Don’t get out to photograph them,” warn the signs. You’d have to be out of your mind to.

The price we pay for all these goodies is the rest of North Dakota.