Redfield and Redlin - the Red centre.

The open road.

That’s what a road trip is all about. We’re crossing the country on the back roads now.

Unless caught behind a slow farm vehicle, it is easy driving.

We’re in the heart of the American corn country.

The land is flat. The crops are gorgeous. They are thriving. Great tracts of green corn. Acres of young soy bean. More acres of golden hay.

Lots of tiny towns with huge silos.

Wind farms out there in the distance.

Blunt, population 342, has a silo, a church and a handwritten “Welcome to Blunt” sign.

Harrold, population 209, has massive silos.

This is silo territory. Their conical stainless steel tops glint like silver crowns on the horizon.

Highmore, population 795, has services, a bar, a store and more immense silos.

Crops, crops, crops. So much wheat. Fields of gluten, we laugh.

A tiny town called Zell, population 53, features a proud church spire - which turns out to top an abandoned Catholic church wilting under its peeling paint. Nearby is a monastery in ruins.

What happened, we wonder.

Now we’re in Spink County.

Lunch stop, Redfield. It turns out to be a little charmer of a thriving town, silos and all.

Its town symbol seems to be the Pheasant. The red they find in the field? One assumes.

A giant pheasant with a slightly perplexed expression sits atop a pole in the main street. He’s beside a flag at half mast. The flags remain in mourning mode across the country following the revenge shooting of the police in Dallas.

There aren’t a lot of choices for lunch in little Redfield.

The streets are Sunday quiet. Just the one restaurant. And it is busy. Heavens, there is a queue for tables?

Is all of Redfield at Leo’s Good Food? It must be the Sunday lunch ritual spot in Redfield. We hesitate at the entrance and ask people how long is the wait. “Oh, we’re waiting for a table for 10. Just two of you? Go on in. She’ll fit you in. It’s worth it, ” says one of the queuers. The hostess is very busy juggling

departing and arriving customers and waitresses are clearing tables for the demand. Everyone is very welcoming to us and, even before the waitress can assign us a table, a man paying his bill orders us to go and sit at the booth his group has just vacated. The hostess waves us through.

Homely, older waitresses scurry around taking orders and making cheery chatter. There’s laughter from the kitchen.

Families are squeezed into booths.

The menu lists old-time Americana dining classics at laughably low prices.

It also has specials. We zero in on them. I order the baked ham, Bruce the chicken Cordon Bleu. They are on the table in a trice.

There’s a baked potato and a big blob of cranberry sauce on my serve, with green beans in a strangely sweet BBQ sauce treatment. At first, I turn my nose up at it. But, oddly enough, it complements the ham beautifully, Bowls of yellow jello are popped on the table. “Wow, dessert?” I exclaim. “No, it’s your salad, hon,” says the waitress. It is a fruit in lightly tart aspic creation, surprisingly good. In a few minutes, she returns with a tray of home-made pies - rhubarb, chocolate silk, lemon meringue… “This is dessert, which one would you like?” she asks.

Phew. All included in the low price - a substantial

Sunday lunch. Not particularly exciting food. Just honest, down-home country grub in the midst of a warm-hearted rural community.

It is moister here. Ponds and small lakes are appearing out the window. Birdlife.

Ducks, herons…look, red-winged blackbirds. We love them.

More crops, crops. Some of them have labels at the end of rows.

Trials, huh.

On the outskirts of Watertown now and the hoardings start.

“How mad is she? - Makepeace Jewellers”, “You ought to see someone about that - Medicine Clinic”.

Watertown, South Dakota, has a strange claim to fame.

It is home to what is arguably the world's most lavish art gallery devoted to one artist.

It stands prominently on the edge of the town - a massive faux classical edifice.

It could be a zillionaire’s retreat. I suppose it is, in its way.

It is the Terry Redlin Art Center.

Just try keeping me away!

I have never seen the like. The description “over-the-top” was invented for this place.

Terry Redlin’s name does not immediately ring a bell with me. But the moment I see his art, I realise that I have seen a lot of this art over the years. He is the great American populist, a skilled painter who hit a nerve on the art market with a particular romantic style of nature art.

Most commonly, he used sunset sky hues beneath which he depicted snowy villages or brooks with ducks, lyrical country homes with a labrador sitting in the snow outside…

Few of his works are set in daylight but those that were, we like the best.

His super realism skills are undeniable. The works have technical finesse.

This gallery, brainchild of his son,

exhibits his original oil paintings.

His money was made with prints of same.

Those prints adorn walls throughout the USA. His images are on Christmas cards and china plates.

He is beloved by the masses. Hence the immense wealth which produced this palatial gallery.

He seems to have been a lovely man, as are many artists. He was

giving people something which made them happy. He is quoted as saying how lucky he had been to spend his life making memories.

This statement is sad irony since Redlin died from Alzheimers.

The gallery includes a gift shop area in which one can sit and see a documentary about Redlin. This suits me, filling in the blanks. He became an artist when he lost a leg as a boy. He was a commercial artist for a long time before going out on his own. Of course, he was always a commercial artist if one thinks of the market he was and is satisfying.

His wife came from a noted ice cream family. There is a theatre in the building and lining its

walls are extensive collections of historic ice cream paraphernalia. This is a drawcard in itself. Bruce and I linger and enjoy the milkshake machines and the hundreds of different ice cream scoops. Bruce loves ice cream and it evoked wonderful memories of his childhood.

There is no admission charge at this affluent gallery but one can buy prints and cards and plates and rugs. Not cheap.

Redlin was never cheap.

This adventure into upmarket kitsch brings me a little closer to the heart of America, I feel. It’s always a voyage of fascination.

Our Country Inn hotel gives us a lovely room with a view out over prairie grass and to somewhere nowhere on a road out of town.

Big sky view.

I catch a swim and we sit in the sun beside the prairie grass for a while - until biting flies pester me.

Soon the weather closes in again. There are storm warnings all over the media.

We grab dinner and then snuggle up to wait for the sky show out the window.

It comes late. I lie in bed and watch the sheet lightning.

Torrential rain and strong wind.

It goes all night and is still hammering sheets of rain into the window in the morning.

It’s OK. We are not in a hurry. The radar says it is going to pass soon.

We lie in and luxuriate, reading online newspapers.

From Seattle to Mars

And thus we turn to the east.

Seattle’s morning traffic on the major roads is a hell variously described as a pinch, a gridlock, bottleneck, a stopstart, a wait, a jam… so we head east on the back roads to avoid it..

Good move. How pretty. How enlightening. An intimate view of backwoods life in America.

From the land so densely crowded with towering trees we pass through fertile valleys where people are farming by hand. Yes, hand ploughs in American fields and groups of people at work planting - rice, it turns out..

Duval pops up, a quaint and inviting little touristy town. The road meanders on following what seems to be an old canal almost clogged with waterlilies out into swampy lands and more cultivated fields. It is rich volcanic soil here where the Cascade mountains make such a grand backdrop, their ridges making a horizon serrated with the spikes of pine trees.

Valleys of baby corn, strawberry fields, a town called Carnation, blueberry farms, hay, hay, hay, a flower farm, a Christmas tree farm, horses and a fast-moving river glinting in the sun. Snoquelmine Falls. We don’t stop although it seems a popular spot. We are on the clock today. We have a date..

.

A sweeping new road going by the proud name of “Better Way” reveals the latest thing in rural housing developments, very sophisticated with elaborate rock engineering tiers for houses up the grand old mountain..

.

Suddenly, dense traffic, lumbering trucks, red lights. It is the motorway junction. Route 90 East. We scoot onto it and join the flow. The road is rough and noisy but big and good after the back roads. It cuts through valleys with mountains towering on either side, some still with their rocky peaks capped by snow. Some slopes are almost vertical and feature ski lifts. Ski slopes and chalets come into view amid the mountain coverings of mighty trees..

Oh the trees. So many trees. Beautiful, but they can become claustrophobic.

I’m glad when we start to enter a rain shadow area where the trees are sparser and smaller..

.

Now the Cascades have given over to softer undulating hills which are covered in wind farms, huge mighty turbines..

Then the plains come with hay and cattle - and Trump signs..

America. The great open road at last..

Ironically, the landscape is a bit like that around Port Augusta. It looks like saltbush plains - until we come upon the great inland reclamation project with mile upon mile of giant circular crops irrigated by vast, slow-moving sprinkler arms. I’ve seen these crop circles from the air and wondered about them. Now my wonderment is that I am actually driving across that landscape between them. Corn, corn, corn - miles of corn, that great American staple..

.

Finally we reach Moses Lake which is a charming resort town set around a mighty inland lake. Here, my Brainstorms friend M R “Mars” McDonald is waiting for us with his art teacher friend, Geoff. We have never met but know each other over many years from life shared in that great online community founded by Howard Rheingold. Mars is an artist and his work is on show at the Moses Lake Museum and Art Centre.

I’ve loved it for years as he has shared it on Brainstorms and Facebook. But, in reality, his photo art somehow miraculously impregnated into perspex sheets, is so vivid it is almost 3-D. Thrilling.

Mars is an urban archeologist. His study is the land of posters, be they noticeboards, telegraph poles or dumpsters. He depicts the details of the layering of posters, the years of replacements, overlays, tear offs, staples… One happening eclipsing another over the years, Circuses, meetings, plays, concerts, politics… Marvellous colours and shapes, messages, images, textures…

The result it a semi-abstract of strange melancholia, a commentary on transience … The depth of field and the high focus of the images gives them new and different perspectives. It’s all pretty wonderful.

Mars walks me through the show.

It is extensive and the gallery, there in the civic building of Moses Lake, is sleek and versatile. The other art on show was of complementary high standard, a section of it wood sculptures some of which reiterates elements of Mars’s idiom.

Thereafter, Mars takes us all to lunch in a charming gourmet market and restaurant. We have rich, juicy, immense burgers, mine a reuben in burger form - naughty American food. Messy and delicious.

It has been a very special and rewarding meetup..