En route

[offcntr]

So Denise is home from our vacation already, back in Eugene. I'm taking the long way around. Driving.

She inherited her mother's car back in January, and was also in Wisconsin in February; neither are good times to drive a nearly-new car cross-country to Oregon. So here I am in Billings, Montana, two days out from Milwaukee, with another two to go.

Didn't expect to run into anything ceramic to write about (though this little fella, found at a rest area just into Minnesota, has a fairly convincing raku copper luster).

But a little past Jamestown, ND this morning, I answered the call of excess hydration, and found this at the rest area. The display inside is devoted to the building of North Dakota's stretch of the interstate highway system, which apparently they finished ahead of everyone else (possibly because they had to do so little earth-moving to achieve a level grade).

The facade of the building continues the theme with this lovely, carved-brick relief sculpture featuring crane, jackhammer and the first piers of a highway overpass. I suspect the bricks were made in Hebron, ND (self-proclaimed Brick City), just a short drive west. Denise and I camped there once on a trip west, and were surprised to find that the very red gravel roads weren't granite (as in my home region of Wisconsin) but clinker, naturally fired chunks of red clay. They're created when layers of lignite--soft coal--ignite in the ground, and fire the surrounding strata of mudstone, naturally occurring clay.

You can see this writ large on the landscape at Painted Canyon, part of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, a little further along my way. Red tops of the mounds are the fired clinker, which resists erosion better than the still-water-soluble layers of clay underneath.