Nowhere Special in North Dakota
With my job, I have visited a lot of states. Coupled with family vacations, I’m so close to seeing the Lower 48. I had two to go and now there’s just one. I drove through North Dakota last week…and it sucked.
It started out when I got to Fargo and took a nap, then woke up to snow…a lot of snow. I asked the girl about the storm and it’s size and she looked it up on her phone. She then responded, “Oh geez! Yur screwed,” in that uniquely North Dakotan accent (with the movie Fargo if you don’t know what I’m talking about). Then there was that laugh they do. I asked how big the storm was and she said “it’s North Dakota.” She showed me a map on her phone and it really was the entire state and about 100 miles into Montana. Apparently there was a convergence of three different winter storm fronts over the state and that did not make for fun driving. I never knew they named storms, but it was named Winter Storm Quinn.
There was a thirty mile per hour cross wind and most places were expecting five to nine inches of snow out of the storm. When I woke up from my nap in Fargo and pulled to a gas pump, all the pumps facing North were covered in snow and ice while the South-facing pumps were clear, but you had to stand on the cold side of the truck as the wind blew at you since I was on the north side of the truck. So I stepped down into two inches of slush to get my gas. After I left I continued west and many times thought it was a mistake. The wind was blowing about thirty miles per hour with gusts up to about fifty. I was driving anywhere between thirty and forty, but closer to thirty, so about half the speed limit at best.
Onward to Bismark! That’s where I stopped for lunch at a HuHot (visit their Facebook Page), which has become one of my favorite places when I can find them. I asked the hostess how the if the state usually does a good job plowing and she said, “Not really! We’re really behind the times with that. They wait till its about half over till they get out there.” Crap! Nothing she said was any different than what I was noticing, but I was hopeful. That hope was crushed twenty minutes later when I hit a snow drift in the middle of the interstate and nearly went off the road.
Finally I got to Beach, North Dakota, which is the last city in North Dakota headed west on Interstate 94 and it was anything but a beach. Yep! It sucked as bad as the rest of the state. At least it was a flat state so the interstate didn’t twist and turn around.
Years back, North Dakota was the only state with a declining population. They had more people moving from there than the aggregate of people moving there and being born. They were the only state in the Union with a declining population and I fully understand why. I also have no reason to believe that trend has changed. It was a wasteland of cold that felt like there would never be happiness in the world again. Your mood truly starts to change in an environment like that and not for the better. It was truly miserable. I would like to go back in the summer and see the things I missed, one place being the Enchanted Highway. Stopping in those temperatures and that wind to see steel sculptures was not going to happen on this trip.
Thank you for reading this piece from Michael Beebe. For more about Michael, please visit TheMichaelBeebe.com or VagabondingAmerica.com.
