Month: August 2017

(a dream of permanence)

It’s a very late cold winters night at the Nebraska lake, complete starry night clear as thousands of small shimmering birds emerge from the snowy ground.  Taking flight, they sound like rustling leaves in a strong wind, as if their wings were thin light metal. 

Almost instantly, they settle as stars in the sky and a young man in my room touches my shoulder and says “now”.  He dissolves into small, rapidly oscillating moonlit waves on the lake, turning into more small shimmering metallic birds taking flight into the night. 

Oh! North Dakota!

I’m traveling again for work, this time to a diabetes conference in Indianapolis. I enjoy seeing different cities and places, and sometimes I encounter something unexpected (Princeton, NJ), usually reflecting my own ignorance. I meet people who live and work in these locales, and they all have something good to say- albeit, I am getting this through the filter of convention, hotel, corporate, university, or restaurant business, but they all have “something”.

I get inquiries about where I live (often, most know nothing about us as a state), and I don’t have trouble saying things they find interesting. This reinforces in my own mind about what I’ve always see as an inferiority complex often on the part of many North Dakotans. With a few exceptions (cue, Fargo), I have found it perplexing in the 28 years I’ve lived here. We wonder why we don’t have things big cities have (always the strange comparison to the Twin Cities, which is 5 times the size of our state), our standard of natural beauty are mountains in neighboring states, forgetting altogether the remote rugged painted canyons and of our badlands and our sweeping grasslands. I live in a former glacier bed! Dinosaurs lived here. It’s spectacular if you think about it.

Instead, we obsess over racist idiots in the news, who certainly don’t represent us. Somehow, we think dysfunction in government speaks for all of us all the time, when often, it doesn’t. Somehow, 2 or 3 horrible weeks of winter weather is represented as many months of not being able to be outside.

I get to travel all over our state for work, too. North Dakota can be whatever we choose. It’s our choice to make. I live in a community that really inexplicably came back from a devastating flood, and much younger than before. Fargo and Bismarck are booming, and dare I say, have a modicum of “hip”. I can get great coffee in places like Williston. I walk through the park and see happy young families. Have you watched a storm move over the open prairie? It’s positively spiritual. And the sunsets, my god, the sunsets.

I know we can’t be everything for everybody, no place can. And sure, we have problems we need to overcome, everyplace does. I say, find what we are North Dakota, and embrace it.

photo credit dansorensonphotography accessed 8-4-17