Happy Birthday, NoDak
By Mitch Berg
It was on this date 118 years ago that North Dakota was admitted to the union. (South Dakota, too, but, like, who cares?)
There are things I miss about the place; the dry air; the feeling you get driving at night down the highway with stars above you and farm lights around you, that you’re in the middle of outer space; above all, the sky. Writer Kathleen Norris, in her classic Dakota: A Spiritual Geography, describes meeting a young girl at a school at Minot Air Force Base, a girl who’d lived all over the world in her young life, and who was especially smitten by the sky, describing it as “…big and blue and full of the mind of God”.
(Photo by Sheila)
The girl was onto something.
I think it takes someone from elsewhere to really appreciate the place, in a lot of ways. And Sheila wrote perhaps the best proof of that idea, a while back, above a trip across the state(s):
For a brief whooshing moment, everything went still. The wind stopped. As though a giant hand had turned off the wind machine. Hush. A sudden alarming hush fell over the land. My boyfriend and I both stopped, feeling the change. We paused … holding our breath …
We were having the time of our lives. We were watching the storm unfold as though it was the best movie we had ever seen. We kept looking at each other, wordlessly, like: hoooly shiiiiit …
Silence covered the plains (this was the real calm before the storm, turns out – when everything came to a sudden sharp stop … took a breath … and then the heavens opened up) … and in that silence, we heard a sound. Something that, to be honest, I’ve only heard in movies.
The thundering sound of horses hooves … galloping horses … the galloping sound of MANY horses …
It has got to be one of the most exciting sounds I’ve ever heard in my life. Even though I’ve only heard that sound in movies, when it came to my ears, there was a rush of familiarity, and love, and knowing: Yes. That is that sound. I know that sound. Something in my DNA knows that sound intimately. It was thrilling.
Yeah.
Happy Birthday, NoDak.
(And you too, SoDak).
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:18 pm
Sigh. *he thinks wistfully of his homeland*
Am I the first to notice that the school in Vermillion is SoDakU? Probably not.
November 2nd, 2007 at 1:53 pm
One of my more enjoyable vaca’s was a January weekend in Minot. It was 29 below when I stepped off the train. Loved the cold and snow.
November 2nd, 2007 at 2:10 pm
One of my more enjoyable vaca’s was a January weekend in Minot. It was 29 below when I stepped off the train. Loved the cold and snow.
Sigh. *he thinks ever so slightly less wistfully of his hometown*
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
One reason to make the pilgrimage during deer hunting. Living here in Minnesota you rarely see the horizon, always obscured by trees. Next week we watch the sunrise and the sunset each day and both are beautiful.
November 2nd, 2007 at 3:45 pm
“South Dakota, too, but, like, who cares?”
Sodak is the only thing keeping Minot from becoming a cold Omaha.
November 2nd, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Our daughter lives 75 miles SE of Minot (Harvey/Martin) and we were out there visiting last weekend. On the way home, only about 5 miles out of Harvey, we came upon an accident…at 11 am, not a tree to be seen, a woman had hit a deer that had gone through her windshield and killed her. There was an older man on the scene and he had already covered up her head while waiting for the cops and ambulance. She was still sitting in the pickup. Horrible. I prefer the wide-open spaces to the tree-crowded highways we have here in northern Minnesota, but apparently it doesn’t save you if it’s your time to go. Before that I was starting to get a little down on deer-now I’m positively sick of them. They’re like rats nowadays. They should be “almost” eradicated. Tomorrow my husband, son and father-in-law will do their bit, along with thousands of other hunters. Get ’em!
November 2nd, 2007 at 10:36 pm
Colleen, it’s gotten bad enough down here that you’ve got the “earn a buck” stuff going around: hunters can’t get a buck without taking a doe first.
But moose are far worse. We’d lose on average over a driver a week in Vermont from a car/moose incident and for a state with 500K people that makes moose more of a threat than guns in NYC.
November 2nd, 2007 at 11:10 pm
Yeah, you are NOT gonna win with a moose! We were just out in Maine in early October and they said take those moose signs on the highways seriously…we did see one in Baxter State park, but she was in the swamp eating! We drove down through a bit of NH, most of VT and crossed into NY state near Ft Ticonderoga (all beautiful!)…down through NY to NJ (who knew there was such lovely scenery in NJ?!) and then to PA and all that way there were nothing but deer crossing signs and GOBS of traffic. The traffic near Philly made “the Cities” look “not so bad” traffic-wise!