Driving Tours in North Dakota - Raising North Dakota (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine July 2003

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Destinations Special: Summer Road Trips
Raising North Dakota (Cont.)


	"This battered land": North Dakota's past tense, circa 1936 (Farm Security Administration, Office of War Information Photography Collection)

DRIVING NORTH FROM FARGO, I didn't bother looking for bargains, because the Red River Valley is one of those national sacrifice areas that has been surrendered to industry and is largely controlled by dynastic families. In this case the industry is intensive grain and sugar beet farming. Although the grass here once stood to a horse's withers, almost all of it has gone under the blade, and most of the acreage in this river corridor costs more than we could afford. The only reason I ventured onto this nearly rockless and relatively lush edge of North Dakota was because I wanted to revisit Grand Forks, site of the most exhilarating years of my life.

We lived on McKinley Avenue in a trailer court called Presidents Park, scraped from a cornfield, while my old man

What caught my eye was an abandoned Lutheran church in excellent shape. "Some guy from Rugby beat you to it," I was informed by a man who rode up on a tractor. "Bid $600 for it."

planted the prairies with Minuteman missiles tipped with thermonuclear howdies. Although I was enrolled—at least on paper—at Central High School (Go, Knights!), when my cronies and I weren't in class, we would hit the streets, the malt shops, anywhere but the halls. Piloting a tractor-size 1948 Chrysler sedan (which I bought by delivering the Minneapolis Tribune on foot in the snow), I woke up every morning believing I'd ascended to heaven. Presidents Park was a largely parent-free zone under the strict control of teenagers.

In order to piss off almost every adult I knew, one autumn I campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. His campaign slogan ("In your heart you know he's right!") was bowdlerized by the Democrats to read, "In your guts you know he's nuts!"

I dismissed the widespread predictions of a Lyndon Johnson landslide. Voters lie in order to look like conformists, I reasoned, but when they actually step inside the booth they'll do the right thing and vote for the guy who isn't afraid to launch a few of those rockets my daddy spent his long working hours planting under the wheat. I changed the name on our street sign from mckinley to au h2o and ignored the frosty reception I got on the doorsteps of voters. Especially after a Central High junior named Maggie joined the campaign.

The night before Halloween, we stood grasping our campaign brochures on the porch of some leading citizen's grand old Victorian house, on Belmont Road. Maggie suddenly plucked the cigarette from my lips and, with a deft and practiced gesture, flicked it into the yard. Then she put her tongue in my mouth.

"Vote for Barry?" I said when a housewife came to the door.

"Go neck somewhere else," the woman said.

Now Presidents Park is just a low-rent island in a sea of condos and apartment buildings, without a stalk of corn in sight. I decided to check out the devastation caused by the 1997 flood, when the river inundated downtown, which then caught on fire, supplying the media with days of astonishing images of what appeared to be some war-torn city overseas, symbols of North Dakota's anguish. But I was comforted now; except for a few bare lots, it didn't appear that much had changed, especially not Central High.

After my brief tour of Grand Forks, I drove west through Rugby, which lies at the precise geographical center of North America. I was thinking that for urban paranoids who don't feel safe unless they're in the deepest part of their apartments, North Dakota is just what the doctor ordered. Pushing farther on through congealed fog in McHenry County, I pulled into the alleged ghost town of Berwick. Sidewalks from busier times had been torn asunder by roots and frost heaves, and none of the 20 buildings along its few tree-lined streets seemed to be occupied. I got excited again. Maybe this was the place. I checked out a brick one-story, a former bar called Holmes'. But what really caught my eye was an abandoned Lutheran church that was in excellent shape, its 40-foot whitewashed spire rising out of sight in the gloom. Although Berwick was surrounded by grain fields, there was some native prairie here and there that might be coaxed to expand while we converted the church into a place to live. We could stable the horses on one side of the nave and live in the other. Keep chickens and warbling finches in the spire and ride every warm-season day from one end of the empty horizon to the other.

"Some guy from Rugby beat you to it," I was informed by a man who rode up on a lawn tractor. This was Bob Forrest, a retired construction worker who invited me into his house to meet his wife, Marjorie, a longtime North Dakota resident. "They bid $600 for it," Marjorie said, offering me a cup of coffee. She showed me her school albums from the days when Berwick had been a bustling little farm center where country people came on Saturdays to sell their cream to the long-gone general store. "Now there's just us three old couples," she said wistfully. "Oh, and Moose. Moose is a farmhand."

"It sounds like a close-knit place," I allowed.

She looked away. "We don't socialize much anymore."

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