The Great Migration: Day 4: Beresford

Current Location: Beresford, South Dakota
Status: Exhausted and Giggling
Listening To: David Bowie - "Do Anything You Say"
Been Reading: Elizabeth Haydon - Prophecy

You know the drill: "read more".

Well...We've reached the Southern crust of South Dakota...putting us a mere hundred-ish miles away from our ultimate destination in the Red River Valley. This is good, as we're both reaching our breaking points. Strange that sitting still for so long would be so tiring. And yet, here we are, stumbling and red-eyed like drunkards. Exhaustion makes me chatty, and I've been rambling about Luc Besson and Darth Maul. Oh, what I would do for a red Sharpie marker right now...but mine are all in a box, somewhere. Well.

Today we moved from seeing the corn fields of Kansas to seeing the corn fields of Nebraska, and then crossed the wide, lapping Missouri River to behold the corn fields of Iowa. We have determined that Nebraska's fields are the least favorable. Also, they've been the only state where we've actually had to stop at a truck weigh station (twice!) and this lowers it, somewhat, in our estimation.

My left eye has become terribly bloodshot, lending a disturbing kind of asymmetry to my face. And the increasing humidity--as we move further from the Southern deserts and nearer to the Northern lakes and rivers--has caused my hair to become animated, jutting out from my scalp in a dark halo of random and uneven crinkles like twisting snakes on the head of a gorgon.

No rain today. The wide sky has been a vast, clear dome of spotless blue--waning from a deep azure at the zenith, down to a pale, cold tinted white at the horizon. It has been an unusually wet Summer, and even Arizona and New Mexico have been covered with dark, desaturated greens. But now, as we progress North, one can clearly see the color becoming more and more saturated, leading from yellows into brilliant verdant hues. (Partially, of course, this is because we're seeing a progression from more fields of wheat to more fields of corn to more fields of soybeans, but there's still something poetic about it.) We've still been in lands of rolling hills, but soon it will iron out into the endless expanses of flatness, perfect save for the visible curve of the Earth at the far horizon, that make one think of the mathematical x-y plane.

We finished Mercury. A lousy ending to a lousy book. Tried to listen to Tolkien's The Hobbit (an old favorite of both my father and myself) that my sister graciously loaded onto her iPod for our enjoyment, but after a chapter we determined that the sound quality through the portable speakers doesn't work over the roar of the highway. A grievous pity.

...I'll sleep early tonight, after doing a little more sketching on ol' Maul, here. (My beloved, beloved Darth Maul. <3) Tomorrow we reach Grand Forks, unload the truck, and I sign the lease on my new digs, makin' Chez JoJo official. I'll probably be able to snag somebody-or-other's 'net in order to let y'all know that I made it, and a possible timeline for when I'll be set up with electricity and connectivity in my own pad.

Sweet dreams of sheep to all.
~JoJo on the Go-Go