{"id":1554,"date":"2007-11-02T13:04:50","date_gmt":"2007-11-02T18:04:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1554"},"modified":"2007-11-02T13:09:45","modified_gmt":"2007-11-02T18:09:45","slug":"happy-birthday-nodak","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1554","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, NoDak"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was on this date 118 years ago that North Dakota was admitted to the union.\u00a0 (South Dakota, too, but, like, who cares?)<\/p>\n

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,\u00a0that you’re in the middle of outer space; above all, the sky.\u00a0 Writer Kathleen Norris, in her classic Dakota: A Spiritual Geography<\/a><\/em>, 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”.\u00a0<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

(Photo by Sheila<\/a>)<\/font>\u00a0<\/p>\n

The girl was onto something.<\/p>\n

I think it takes someone from elsewhere to really appreciate the place, in a lot of ways.\u00a0 And\u00a0Sheila wrote perhaps the best proof of that idea<\/a>, a while back, above a trip across the state(s):<\/p>\n

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 …<\/p>\n

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 …<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The thundering sound of horses hooves … galloping horses … the galloping sound of MANY horses …<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yeah.<\/p>\n

Happy Birthday, NoDak.<\/p>\n

(And you too, SoDak).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It was on this date 118 years ago that North Dakota was admitted to the union.\u00a0 (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,\u00a0that you’re in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-midwest","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1554"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1554\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}