There is a Stonehenge in North Dakota. It wasn’t built by Druids. Or Mandans or Ojibway. It originated with my father.
My father spent his final years living in the Turtle Mountains of North Dakota. He and his wife Georgia bought a modest, two-bedroom house overlooking a small woodland lake whose serene waters were only occasionally broken by a landing mallard, the churning webbed feet of a red-necked grebe or blue-winged teal, a northern pike or largemouth bass dimpling the surface as they fed on various insects, or a beaver moving a piece of birch or cottonwood to a nearby den. Two wild turkeys lived next door, sometimes gobbling on his rooftop, upsetting the TV antenna. He erected a sign at the entrance of the little dirt road that led to the house that identified this little Eden as Tranquility Base. This was a tongue-in-cheek allusion to his job as an aerospace engineer at Boeing, in Seattle.
