Missouri River

Long day. Michael is processing and it’s getting dark here in the day use area of Lewis and Clark State Park, North Dakota. I just got back from a grueling walk with Sasha along the Missouri. I was in my usual “airy fairy” state of delight with nature, remembering my childhood wanderings in Missouri, the clay along the river edge was cracked mosaic and filled with the hoof and paw prints of deer, raccoon and other critters I don’t know. I think Sasha was trying to encourage me to head inland when I suddenly went to my knees in the clay. Even though I couldn’t get my shoe out without reaching into the mud to retrieve it I was still in a state of delight, enjoying the cool steel grey of the river ooze that’s just under the top layer of sandy brown. Just as I was getting enough mud out of my shoe so my foot could go back in it, Sasha started tugging at her leash. (A leash was for any other humans we might come upon who might scold us for her being free in a State Park as well as for her recent misadventures with porcupine and fish…) She was tugging at her leash as I was trying to juggle my muddy beer cans and plastic. When I pulled her back to me her muzzle was again covered with porcupine quills!
At that point, I had to shift into my other hemisphere, the nurse side. ‘Had to keep her head up, as she was fighting me to rub her snout on the ground, plus make it back along the bank, through the high weeds, and back to Michael and his leatherman pliers. This time she’d tangled with a very much alive adult porcupine so she sported impressively long quills that were in deeper and it was a lot harder and even more traumatic to get them out. I’m amazed she’s still talking to me.
When we first arrived here the main stimuli were crickets and the relentless wind, blowing the cold front storm that had followed us from Montana, in behind us. The marquis quoted Clark who had said (April 1805) this was a place of “some very handsome high planes and extensive bottoms.” In his day this place was teeming with buffalow and elk, in fact, Lewis had been shot in the thigh a few days earlier by a mostly blind fiddler on the crew who had mistaken him, in his leather clothes, as an elk… It sounds like something I would do…
Anyway, our time in Medicine Lake, Montana (population 250) was productive. I found out a little more about my family history, got to see where my mother was born, and connect with a long lost cousin.
It was kind of sad to cross into North Dakota with so little exploration of Montana but we are eager now to see family in Minnesota and Wisconsin so are picking up the pace, as best we can with having to pick up and process veggie oil every 300 miles.

PS We are sending from Bismark, N.D., could be anywhere USA. Peace to you. Sasha is fine, she says to tell you.