Day 2: Devils Lake, North Dakota
We leave pretty early, eager to flee this doomed and demon-infested place, and as we pause briefly for coffee we are given a hint of the town’s accursed nature: from where we sit, the first letter on the municipal water tower cannot be seen, so it reads “EVILS LAKE”. Without even stopping for fuel, we head out on Route 2.
Geographical Center of North America
Depending on how you measure it, Rugby, N. Dak., is the self-proclaimed “Geographical Center of North America.” A tall fieldstone obelisk marks the spot, near the junction of US Route 2 and North Dakota Route 3.
We finally manage to spiral inward to the junction of two rail lines, where there once stood nine grain elevators and a soda factory. Seven hundred people used to live here in Omemee, but most packed up and moved to nearby Bottineau, and now all that’s left are some overgrown sidewalks and a single ramshackle house that most recently was home to small livestock.
There is something sadly poignant about this abandoned little town, and we can only wonder about the people who lived here, and what compelled them to literally haul their houses away down the road to start new lives elsewhere.
Omemee, North Dakota
Ready, Set …
Q: What’s the only thing slower than a diesel Westfalia?
A: A giant turtle, riding a snowmobile. Tommy the Turtle, mascot of Bottineau, ND, marks the entrance to the nearby Turtle Mountains where, among other activities, you evidently may drive a snowmobile …
Sitting outside at our campsite picnic table, eating our dinner alone while the suspicious neighbors peer out their RV windows at us, we feel as out-of-place and incongruous as someone clipping his toenails in Aisle Three of the local supermarket.
After dinner we, like everyone else here, hide away in our own mini-motorhome and get some sleep for an early start.
Cool journey. It is sometimes even more interesting to add in some relatively recent, and very lively, political history. If you’re interested in a bit more about Devil’s Lake, you may want to read about its cross-border controversy with Canada.
There’s a long history, but this might be a good primer: http://aix1.uottawa.ca/~rparis/CIPS_Devils_Lake_Feb2008.pdf
Here is a bit of text from there…
Devils Lake is an isolated water body in North Dakota that has no natural outlets. Rising water levels in the lake caused flooding in local communities from the early 1990s onwards. To reduce the danger of further flooding, the State of North Dakota constructed an “emergency outlet” from the lake in 2005 in order to transfer some Devils Lake water through a series of canals to the nearby Sheyenne River, which flows into the Red River and eventually into Canada and Lake Winnipeg.
The governments of Canada and Manitoba had long opposed construction of this outlet, on the grounds that transferring Devils Lake water might introduce harmful invasive species and chemical contaminants into the surrounding watershed, which might in turn cause environmental and economic damage downstream in Canada. When construction of the outlet neared completion in early 2005, the Government of Canada launched a comprehensive diplomatic effort to prevent North Dakota from opening the outlet without first taking all reasonable and necessary steps to address Canada’s concerns.