Road Trips

One part of my job involves supervising pre-service teachers (also often referred to as student-teachers) doing their internships in area schools. Most of those schools are within the city, but this semester I also have a per-service teacher in Hettinger, ND and another in Sidney, MT. Furthermore, twice per semester another professor and I take a busload of prospective Teacher Education majors to New Town, ND for a field experience during which they observe classrooms and help out however the teachers choose (e.g., handing out papers, working with small groups, etc.).

Moral of the story: I have been doing a lot of driving recently for work. The route southward to Hettinger takes me on gently curving roads through occasionally hilly terrain past vast fields and pastures toward the SD border. The road also happens to be a grotesque battlefield strewn with the corpses of pheasants, raccoons, rabbits, skunks, cats, deer, and other critters that have "played chicken" with oncoming vehicles and lost. Hettinger takes two-and-a-half hours round trip.

The route to Sidney takes me first on Interstate 94 through the rugged Badlands of southwest ND and into the plains of eastern MT until I get to Glendive. Then I head north on a curvy, hilly highway alongside the impressive Yellowstone River and through some alternating areas of woods and fields and pastures. Homicidal deer lie in wait along either side of the highway between Glendive and Sidney, the animal kingdom's equivalent of suicide bombers. Sidney takes four-and-a-half hours round trip.

The route to New Town takes me north through the Killdeer Mountains, a gorgeous part of the state but a treacherous section of highway on which motorists are well advised to heed the ever-changing speed limit advisories. 45 miles per hour may be fine for this half-mile, but when the sign says to drive 20 miles per hour when rounding the next curve, it means it. Going off the road would mean tumbling to a certain death at the foot of the mountains, careening first through trees and rocks past many thousands of years of layers of minerals exposed by glacial activity and finally coming to rest in a tangled heap of metal and charred flesh upon the grassy grazing grounds of bison (a scenic route toward death, I suppose, should one have the wits about him/her at the time to take in the beauty en route to one's demise).

You might have already guessed this, but deer hide out in the ditches along this stretch of the road, too, waiting to leap out at the most inopportune time. It requires a keen eye, enjoying not only the beauty of the terrain but also watching out for deer and paying close attention to the speed limits. Cattle, too, are a common sight right in the middle of the highway. There are certain parts of the highway at which I know that I will see a rogue cow, having escaped the fence and "making a run for it," albeit with the speed of a bovine . . . which, to the human eye, looks like a film in slow motion mode. Why those particular ranchers don't fix their fences is beyond me. There was a cow out on the road on my way back from Sidney, too, this week, so perhaps modern cattle have evolved into wilier creatures than I remember.

After making it alive to the north side of the Killdeer Mountains, one finds oneself on the Fort Berthold Reservation, and the section through which the highway winds has steep hills and winding roads and gorgeous trees. Nearing New Town, one discovers the Four Bears Bridge spanning Lake Sakakawea. Large bodies of water always impress me, and the bridge offers an excellent vantage point for taking in the grandeur of the incoming Missouri River and the lake that stretches off to the north and west. New Town takes three hours round trip.

Once I'm in Hettinger or Sidney or New Town, I'm busy in the school observing the pre-service teacher or supervising the field experience students in their classrooms. However, there isn't much to do while driving to each destination besides take in the scenery and think--sometimes in my head, sometimes aloud (worthwhile radio stations fade out of reach long before I get wherever I'm going). When I ignore the carnage of roadkill and the threatening stare of diabolical roadside ungulates, I can appreciate the beauty of the rugged buttes and verdant valleys, the rolling rivers and majestic lakes, the fading grasses, and the trees whose leaves are bright green at the bottom but progressively more golden toward the top.

One doesn't normally associate such a mix of beauty and danger with training future teachers, but that's my life! (Or maybe it's just life as I see it.)