Prairie Arrival

Three days on the road, and I find myself whisked from a Chicago hotel room six stories high to a basement in a house on 2nd Avenue, Williston North Dakota. What we passed through to get here:

Space. The folds of white rock whittled away by the Mississippi to the scattered patches of Minnesota forest to space,

                        wide                                                                            open

space. Prairie stretches in all directions away from us here, the hills long and slow to rise, the grass covering the land in one ubiquitous color. The sky turns purple in autumn noon light and the land under sun looks like molten gold.

Also, cows.  Like this one in New Salem, apparently the world's largest Holstein.

I'm here for the boom, like everyone else. But instead of mining oil, I'm mining stories. Black Gold Boom is a project run by radio producer Todd Melby - he talks to people doing interesting things in the oil patch and makes radio and multimedia stories about them.  And I'm here to help.

From Williston, North Dakota.