Hay!

Today we drove back across eastern Montana and western North Dakota to Jamestown. We're camped north of Jamestown at the reservoir campground. We drove for ten hours, got set up, and grilled a bison steak that we bought in Big Timber. It was great--so tender! A baked potato, some leftover carrots, a little salad and some cantaloupe--a great meal anywhere.

I'm convinced that one thing America does prodigously is grow hay. We must have passed thousands of bales of hay in the past week. If we were to do the trip again I would create a photo album of hay bale arrangements. Most of them are scattered out in the fields where they were baled. Often they are stacked in neat lines two or three tall. Today we even passed a couple balers at work, and a couple tractors moving bales. The landscape is absolutly covered with hay growing and hay bales. (We also passed grass along the sides of the road and in the off-ramp areas that had been baled.)

We did pass a lot of cows, and quite a few horses, and even some sheep who would be eating this hay, and I get that they eat it all year round. But we're talkin' really enormous quantities of hay.

Maybe if I drive around Minnesota I can find good hay bale sculptures to photograph. For a really thorough treatment I'd have to get someone to show me how the baler works to roll it up from the inside out.