Solid Ground

About Solid Ground

South of Langdon, a four-story concrete pyramid still stands alone on the open prairie near Nekoma, built decades ago to watch the northern sky and long since gone quiet — and Solid Ground plows the same flat wheat and canola country all around it, where nothing breaks the wind for miles in any direction. Cavalier County's fields run in long, exact sections, and a section road out there can drift shut end to end in a single overnight blow, snow packed hard enough in the ditch to need a real push rather than a light pass. The crew works those farm approaches and rural driveways first after a storm, since a stranded lane out on the grid can mean a family cut off from town until someone clears it. Back in Langdon itself, the same trucks handle the county seat's ordinary residential streets and a handful of commercial lots near the courthouse, smaller work but no less needed once the wide open country is passable again. There is a plainness to this ground — flat clear to the horizon, one strange concrete shape rising out of it to the south — that the crew has come to read like a map for where the wind will drift snow next.