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It’s Still All There
Forgive me. It’s late and I’ve had a whiskey, and I really shouldn’t. But.
Sunday I went up to Fargo for a funeral. It had been a while. Your sister texts you that your last aunt died, and you throw a bag in the car and head up the old road.
The fastest way to get to Fargo from Minneapolis is the interstate, a friction-free road. You can cruise at 80 – okay, well, 79, if you want to avoid the Smokeys – and slide through the farmland. You don’t see anything but crops and tall signs for gas stations and franchise burger joints. Faster is not better. Take the old road, Highway 10. Until the interstate was built, this was the only way to get from here to there. It winds through towns with names that span high and low – Royalton, then Motley. It skirts the perimeter of some towns, drives through the downtowns of others. A few years ago the highway department decided to do Staples a favor, and run a bypass on the south side, so trucks wouldn’t always be grumbling down the main drag. In compensation, the city got state money for local road improvement, and if you pull off 10 to drive through the downtown, you see nice planters and banners and new sidewalks. But the movie theater is closed, and the paint on the sign for Lefty’s Bar is faded and peeling. You wonder if people miss the trucks and traffic. It was a sign that you were connected to the world. The bypass is only two blocks to the south. But traffic is fast and no one stops.
I stop. It’s a ritual: get gas at Staples. I don’t need to get gas; a tank can take me from my Minneapolis front door to my sister’s house. But it’s a good spot to stop, stretch, hit the head – and if there’s anything I learned from being the son of a gas station owner, it’s that you’d best buy some gas if you’re going to use the restroom. It’s only fair.
The gas station has a fair-sized C-store (convenience store, in the parlance) with a Subway franchise. They redid their coffee station. It’s now brewed on-demand. The owner had to make a calculation: the on-demand system will probably break down now and then, but the old coffee urns had to be tended hourly. Someone had to make the coffee. Someone had to make sure the coffee hadn’t been sitting on the burner for six hours. The new machine was spiffy. It had an option for bold. Of course, I went with bold. Why wouldn’t you?
The clerk at the counter was pushing late 30s, or a fine early 40s. The tips of her hair were tinged with watermelon hues, and she had a nose ring. Cheerful as a June dawn. I told her the windshield wiper fluid on the second island was almost dry, and she appreciated the information and turned around and told the other guy at the register. Young kid, beefy, wearing the company smock. She told me to have a nice day now! and I wished her the same.
The next stop was Verndale, a tiny town with a park on the edge of the highway. There’s a faded LIONS CLUB plaque on the chain-link fence. A playground for the kids: a dad was wrangling two happy tots. A WWI memorial with the names of the local boys who went over there. A flagpole dedicated to a citizen who died in WW2. The flag was at half-mast. I sat in the shelter by a building that houses the town’s first fire wagon, smoked a cigar, had my coffee, thought of the last time I was here, and all the times before that. Sometimes a train comes through while I’m there, and the ground shakes. The effort of bringing the goods from the coast makes rings appear in your coffee go-cup.
Back on the road. Cruise control at 69, kiss the breaks when you enter a town, slow your roll. An old gas station, no pumps. Bar with a beer sign. Hair salon with a font from a 1990s Windows package. Lions, Elks, Rotary. State Champs, 2003. World’s Largest Turkey statue. Divided highway. 65 again; floor it.
Pulled in around five. Fargo was Fargo – bustling, prosperous. A new 20-story office tower and hotel sits on Broadway. A few blocks away, a new apartment complex rises, six floors. Downtown thrives while the outlying neighborhoods boom; West Fargo is still building. New houses, new shops, new restaurants. Amazon built an enormous facility in the industrial park. The area by the airport has huge new cargo buildings. Every gas station, fast-food joint, restaurant, and retail place has a sign begging for workers. My brother-in-law laments the difficulty of finding and retaining help at the store.
We went out to eat at a restaurant that hadn’t existed eight months before. Loud calamitous din, fantastic food. No one wore masks, aside from a few. I asked my sister and brother-in-law how the whole mask-and-COVID thing was going. It’s not a pressing concern. So it seemed to me – the only time I noticed a mask was the face of the young Starbucks employee handing me an Americano from the drive-through window.
It reminded me that the moment I left the Cities, I left the masked society behind. Everything felt like 2019.
The next morning I went to the boneyard to visit my forebears. I’d forgotten that they’d laid out another cemetery next to the church’s graveyard, a military cemetery. All the headstones were identical, like Normandy, or Snelling, or Arlington. There were too many already – but surely many of those were vets, of which Fargo has many. They laid it out to accommodate many.
On the way back to the Cities I thought of some writers who are perfectly empowered to discuss the fate and foibles of the Fargos of America, but would probably twitch in their seat if you drove them around, first out of fear that Red Indians would come whooping over the horizon, and then out of dismay that none of this comported with their preconceptions. There’s the classic movie theater, still open, all the marquee bulbs flashing. There’s where the symphony plays. There’s the museum. There’s the central library. There’s the coffee shop with the rainbow flag. There’s the 30s office building with Moderne lines; there’s the dense housing; there’s the bright new big school, lavishly funded. There’s the big newspaper building. There’s the University. Oh, look, there’s the other University. There’s the historic architecture. Here’s the river. Beyond all this, endless grain and toil.
But not in the old sense. My cousin gets Netflix in the cab of his tractor. The last time I saw him was at the VFW. It was a new outpost but had historical elements that kept up tradition. It was across the street from the funeral parlor where we’d both seen our fathers in the box. I learned a lot about the rural co-op he was in, and talked with his wife about family history. She’s the official historian, updates the genealogical sites about all the people who came here and carved straight lines in the dirt and grew things. It was a great night. I often feel like a lesser man because I knew all this, and I left.
But there’s failure, and then there’s failure, and then there’s utter, uncomprehending, arrogant, fatuous, savior-complex failure.
You didn’t mention the comment with the Chesterton quote but there may very well be a connection with your point here involving urban men (or what was once recognized as men).
In the 20th Century there always seemed to be an outsized majority of voluntary military enlistments from Southern states when compared to any other comparable sized region of the country. That has likely shifted now since the South is not as different , rural versus urban, as it was then and technology is a much bigger factor as is shown when the reasons for the Afghan Army collapse are given by our government. We apparently don’t teach those we help how to fight like the Taliban. We are not looking good.
Thanks for the ride.
I agree with this a lot, but one must be careful. Remember when there was judicial-enforced busing of students, the aim of which was to have the government choose neighbors for people.
Mr. Smith, who is this beneficent “we” of whom you speak?
The thing that gets me about that guy is how exactly backwards he gets it.
Take any activity that’s done by rural whites. Run the numbers on who participates in it. Does it come one iota less than the average number of blacks in the population? Well then, you thought pickle-chucking was harmless fun but you might as well have the ol’ stars ‘n bars in the back window of your pickup truck, you grand cyclops you.
The rest of the world isn’t getting more racist; it’s that wokesters have defined anything that isn’t woke to be explicitly white supremacist. Rural America can’t have any other identity because if it did then that identity they’d associate with the old Confederacy too.
Wow, James, you drove Highway 10 to Fargo and didn’t stop in Dilworth to say Hello? You can see where I live from the highway. So speaking of Staples, do you ever stop at Morey’s Seafood Market? Their smoked fish is terrific. I even liked their smoked salmon and I hate salmon.
That’s in Motley, isn’t it?
That’s excellent.
It is far easier to demonize and marginalize that address the actual thoughts and concerns of the people you disagree with. He might as well called us District 12s.
The same applies to relatives vs. friends. We don’t choose our relatives, but we do choose our friends.
Monowi, Nebraska is still there too. Its population doubled in the 2020 Census, from one to two. I believe it was the smallest incorporated village in the US in the 2010 Census. It turns out that there was no population explosion in Monowi, just an algorithm at the Census Bureau that believes no one should live alone.
You’re right. It is Motley.
That’s stupid and should be illegal given what the census is for.
Salmon for people who don’t like salmon sounds like my kind of place.
In the old days we hardly ever drove through Motley when anything was open. It was usually late at night, at the end of a 800 mile drive (almost). Eight years ago Mrs R developed back problems that make us want to stop overnight on the way, so we now drive through at normal times of day.
How you people can eat salmon so far inland is beyond me.
Refrigeration. Air freight.
Science!
It’s gross by then!
It’s gross at the time it’s caught.
I tried to find out if pickle-chucking was a thing. I didn’t get any hits, but I did find out what a ‘snickle’ is.
I blame you.
Forks.
Oh, yes! Mmm, mmm, mmm!
I didn’t have you down as a snickler in truth, but I should have suspected.
Deep fried Mars bars are good, too.
Yeah, sorry, made that one up myself. With a name like that though it really ought to be.
That’s true. Fish are gross. Especially ones swimming in fresh water.
One small thing that caught my eye, that Fargo has a 20:story building! This is a city of 125,000 people and a metro area of 250,000. On the other hand, the State Capitol is 19 stories tall, and as North Dakota’s largest city, Fargo may have wanted to exceed Bismarck!
Don’t worry. The flatness of the Red River Valley more than makes up for it.
Southern people don’t need them around anyhow.
Noah lives in a world without men, apparently, and thinks that stating his infantile thoughts on social media is what people do, today, in order to effect positive change in the world.
Noah needs to get out and meet some men. If the only one he’s meeting is the one in the mirror, he’s got Flaccid McMilkSop as a role model, and that ain’t gonna git ‘er done.