Rush Hour Rambling

Weather: Partly cloudy and windy.

Harold and Hal at the Sinclair Station, Conde, South Dakota.
Where’s Harvey?

Roger was a happy fellow. We were sitting together at the bar in Minerva’s, the restaurant at the Ramkota Hotel in Aberdeen, and he was telling me his story. I was eating my dinner, and Roger was enjoying the good life, retirement style.

In his working life, he had been Superintendent of Schools in the district I was about to ride through the next day. This is the place I have named “Agriculture Alley”, and it consists of all the little towns along Highway 37 between Aberdeen and Huron. Much of what he told me I cannot mention here, but suffice to say it had been an interesting career.

Before he left me, he told me about two fellows who run the Sinclair station in Conde, South Dakota. Their names were Harvey and Harold, and he described them as a couple of old curmudgeons, waiting patiently in their lair on the prairie for travellers to harrass. He had known them for years, and always found them cantankerous, if amusing to deal with. So I decided to look them up.

Thursday dawned with clouds threatening rain. The skies cleared some throughout the day, and by the time my business was done, the sun was peeking through and warming the fields below. The wind was blowing fiercely, however, as it usually does when I ride these prairies.

My timing was awful. I finished the quality audit at our Aberdeen plant early enough that I would be riding to Huron on work time. That meant no stops, except for gas. Luckily, Harvey and Harold work at a gas station…

Despite the wind, it is always a pleasant ride down SD Highway 37. This is America’s Breadbasket, with “amber waves of grain” as far as the eye can see. It puts a traveller’s soul at ease, seeing that we have such agricultural abundance in this country.

Rolling into Conde, I spotted the Sinclair station right away. I have always liked the Sinclair brand, because they are the closest thing we have to the service stations of my youth. The attendants don’t pump your gas, check your oil, and wash your windshield anymore, but somehow they still have the right look about them. It must be the service bays, which is where I found the two fellows in the photo at the top of the page.

I was a little apprehensive, dismounting Frogwing in the relentless 40 mph winds. I figured I might endure some abuse from Harvey and Harold, just for the sake of this blog. Imagine my disappointment at finding Harold and Hal to be some of the nicest gentlemen I’ve met since I started taking these trips into America’s Heartland.

Yes, that’s right, Harold and Hal. Apparently, this was Harvey’s day off. I wonder if these guys are brothers. Some parents do resort to alliteration when naming multiple children. I’ll have to ask, next time Frogwing and I are passing through.

We spoke briefly, and they got a kick out of Roger’s description of them. Then they posed for my photo, and bid me farewell. If I hadn’t been on company time, I would have hung around for awhile.

The rest of our trip to Huron was uneventful. We arrived to levels of traffic I have never seen in this little city. The South Dakota State Fair was in town, and the streets were filled with pickup trucks. I checked in at the plant, got some info on the Fair, and then rolled across town to check in at the motel.

After a prime rib dinner at the Tailgate, I didn’t feel like battling crowds for stuff-on-a-stick. Frogwing carried me back to the Holiday Inn Express, where I settled into bed with my large book of Phillip Marlowe mysteries. One more audit to go, and then Frogwing and I would be free to ramble the weekend away. Or so I thought….

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 6:19 am and is filed under Ride To Work. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.