Canola and the Horse on the Hill

The yellow flowers carpeting sloping hills like a hand-stitched quilt spread over a four-poster bed is canola. The canola fields are a surprise every time they appear, their yellow like no other. I was stunned and happy to see each new field, if it was framed with green, trees or other crops, all the better.

Canola grows in North Dakota. Probably other places as well, but its presence here is the more striking for keeping company with oil wells and natural gas fields where every few miles there are flames burning off the excess gas. The flames come from five or six-foot pipes coming out of the ground, like birthday candles planted in all the far reaches of a cake. It’s not celebratory exactly, but it is light.

In addition to oil and gas production in North Dakota, there is also coal mining. And cattle, many cattle, black Angus cattle that bunch up together in the corner of a vast pasture, hide to hide, and we wonder why. There is so much room to roam.

We went to Theodore Roosevelt National Park to see North Dakota’s version of the Badlands which is gentler and greener than South Dakota’s. The park is known for its bison, massive creatures so large that when you see one from afar, you think it’s a pick-up truck that took a wrong turn and ended up at the base of a huge rock butte. We saw a lot of bison. We even saw bison babies. But the best thing I saw wasn’t the bison.

It was this horse.

I was walking up a path to a lookout over a vast valley. The wind was fierce, so I held on to my hat, and when I saw two young men in motorcycle chaps coming toward me, I yelled, “I’m afraid I’ll lose my hat!” They smiled big broad smiles and pointed past me, both in unison like they’d rehearsed. I thought maybe one of them had already lost their hat. “What am I looking at?” I asked.

And then I turned around.

I took a dozen pictures but none of them showed the horse as it was. Sometimes eating grass, sometimes standing in repose, a perfect horse, and sometimes with its head in the air, sending a loud echoing neigh into the glorious wind.

I am so happy here, I thought, and went to tell my husband to look up the hill.