Saturday evening, March 11, 2006, I set out to walk the outermost streets of Rugby just as the sun set, on the theory that one might learn things at the edge that he can't at the center. This is my report of that walk.
Walking around Rugby. I mean that -
literally. It was about 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 11, 2006. I set out to walk the perimeter of Rugby, the western-most streets, the northern-most, eastern-most, and I would come back to my motel room along Highway 2, which is pretty much the southern edge of town.
Someone recently observed to me that the world is a different place entirely when you walk it, compared to when you drive it. I know that. William Least-Heat Moon knew that in Prairy Erth. Walking is de rigueur in this business of deep history.
It had been a warm day; the snow and ice were melting. Water ran in sheets on the asphalt. All dirt had become mud and some of the mud was sloppy. On the west side of Highway 3 as I went north, I saw an inventory of mobile homes and pre-fabs and RVs. Everyone, it seems, wants to be some place, but not everyone is exactly sure where. The sun was in the far west and the rays of light were long-grained and slanted. I walked.
Farther north, and at the western-most edge of town, I found a large cemetery, big enough to need three entrances. It's a good cemetery: people are dying to get in. Someday I will have to spend several hours there looking at tombstones. Seems I spend half my life wandering cemeteries, trying to de-code the dead. You might say that walking and reading tombstones are my hobbies. My darling would call them "obsessions."
If you know much about Rugby, you know that, historically, the railroad tracks divided the community into North Side and South Side, and the division was cultural and economic as well as geographical. The division remains, in that the houses on the north side of town are smaller, less ambitious. The yards are more prone to automotive reclamation projects. Maybe the streets are narrower. Maybe the economic boat of the North Side residents was not lifted on the tide of the Bush tax cuts.
Rugby's water treatment plant is at the very north edge of town. Where they put the sewage plant tells you who has clout and who doesn't. The race track is on the North Side; so is the industrial park, anchored by Rugby Manufacturing and a smaller business, Samsara Cues, which makes cue sticks - very expensive cue sticks, sticks that cost as much as or more than Dick Cheney's 28-gauge shot-gun.
On the very northeast corner of Rugby a state-of-the-art, 136-bed law enforcement center and jail is being built; it will house the sheriff's department and the county's prisoners, and will take in prisoners from other parts of North Dakota, and perhaps even from other states. Think of it: to be sentenced to jail in North Dakota for the winter; talk about motivation to get yourself rehabilitated.
To be continued....
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