Driverlessness

The world's largest tiger muskie, in Nevis, Minnesota.

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For a couple days on either side of Fargo, I rolled through flat fields that just did not stop. Pictures don't show it, really, so I'll spare you that moment of tedium. But just as the upheaval that created the mountains I saw in the west is magnificent to ponder, the placid spaces -- the places where geologic forces seemed to not have touched -- are just as miraculous. (Now somebody will say that I don't know what I'm talking about, and of course I don't.) The plats, the fields, are all laid out, and every road, every single road, is straight, and every road that crosses another does so at a precise right angle.

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In Fargo I stayed in a Warm Showers house owned by Shawn V. His two middle-school-aged kids came and went and mingled. Shawn is an engineer, and supervisor, for John Deere,  which is based in Fargo, and makes, of course, agricultural machines. Shawn's an unassuming guy but has a resume he could boast about -- an engineering degree, an MBA he earned at night school, electronic engineering courses on his own, an MIT specialty certification in a course Deere sent him to (the course was "really hard," he said). Also, he was going to Japan this week with two colleagues on a business trip for the company.

I asked him what was going on at John Deere. He said they are working on GPS-guided machines that don't need a driver. This is exactly what Jerry Schillinger, my farmer friend, discussed. While I don't think Schillinger's machines were fully driverless yet, they were pretty close.

Shawn said they are also working on machines that can precisely target a single plant for, say, insecticide treatment, as opposed to spraying an area, and wasting spray and unduly polluting.

In the pantheon of driverless vehicles, he said, the aerospace industry is at the top, the agricultural industry is second, and driverless cars are third. Of course, the number of people you can hit and kill are few in space, and few in farm fields, and quite a few on city streets. So maybe the scale is loaded.

Also -- bored yet? -- he said there are big farm operators who trade in their year-old machines every year for the new model, because the pace of change is so great. These machines cost half a million dollars or more. The old machines are sold to smaller and smaller operators over a 40-year lifetime. So, John Deere, while churning out new machines, has to keep supplying parts for old machines -- and some of the sensitive electronic parts, like computer chips, have a short shelf life, so I suppose they might not make it into a machine before their useful life is done.

Crazy!

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Here's some recent pix:

This is Joey, from The Bronx (dig the hip hop way he wears his hat -- in NORTH DAKOTA!). He is an athletic coach and a reporter for the Valley City, North Dakota, newspaper. He interviewed me for a story about my ride, and found and removed a tick from my neck using his lighter. It only hurt a little bit.

This is Lauren, who drove the sag wagon for her doctor-husband who was doing hundred mile days across the country. She had a better trip than he did, I think, as she explored small towns and met people like me for lunch in interesting cafes. She offered to help me out, too, but at the time I was doing fine.

This is Dan, who was a nice guy despite the gangsta stylings. He and I rode together for parts of two days, and split a hotel room one night when we needed it. I gave him a discount on his share, as there was just one bed and he had to sleep on an air mattress on the floor.

This is nicest thing about the dying little small town I stayed in a couple nights ago. It rained.