Drove back and forth to Fargo this week. Split time between Hwy. 10, the miniseries, and I-94, the three-hour movie. Here is a report.
1. There is a segment between Evansville and Alexandria where the four lanes become two, and semis are rushing past you close enough to peel off your paint. Remember, fines are doubled in a work zone — but you can do the normal speed, because there's no one working.
There's never anyone working. You know they have to work at some point, because after three months the cones disappear and the road is ... well, flat, like it was before. But you never see anyone. Perhaps burly elves appear at midnight from under the orange cones, and get to work, singing lusty pavement shanties and puffing on pipes that stink of asphalt. MnDOT doesn't let on because everyone would show up to see them, and I have the feeling Construction Elves would be prone to mooning.
2. When you see a billboard that says only "We do cows," you want to slow down to see if it's an ad for a slaughterhouse, a vet or a tattoo shop. You don't know what they do to or with cows because you're not the sort of person whose life involves finding a place where cows can be done.
Yet, someone is driving around worried and jumpy, thinking: "Where the devil am I going to get these cows done? Every day I come home, and the wife asks if I did the cows." And then there's the sign; what a relief.
3. If you're on Hwy. 10, always pull off to study each historical marker.
"On this spot in 1864 Olaf O. 'Ole' Olafson built the first 'left turn on green' turn signal. The area had not yet been electrified; Olafson employed a team of painters, or 'arrow boys,' to quickly daub the arrow, then paint it over after a minute."
You see a sign for Left-Turn Daze, Aug 4-7. You can just imagine. Everyone gathers for a cookout and movie in the park after dark, some Disney thrown up on a bedsheet. The kids run around in the twilight margins of the celebration, the teens sit on the hoods of their cars deriding everything but secretly loving it, and the old folks tell stories about the year they replaced Olafson's sign with a newfangled electrical one and the arrow boys got a snootful and ran it over with a John Deere.