For starters, North Dakota features the geographic center of the North American continent, in Center City, where you can stand on the spot. We did not go to Center City. Our trip started with a flight from Los Angeles to Denver, where we boarded a twenty-seat plane to North Dakota's capital, Bismarck, about 50 miles southeast of Center City (and 150 miles southwest of Rugby, the geographic center of North Dakota). When I was born there, Bismarck's population was 8,000. It is now 77,000.
A word about why we began our trip in Bismarck: Herman. That was my paternal grandfather's name. He left Ukraine at age 14 after his father was killed in a pogrom. He was the second in his family to leave after his older brother Sam, who went into the fur business in the Dakota's. Sam helped Herman get a leg up in Bismarck, where, in 1925, Herman built a two story brick structure downtown on the corner of Fifth and Main, across from the glitzy Patterson Hotel and kitty corner from the train station. The building housed, at various times, a men's clothing store, a liquor store and a pharmacy. My grandfather's family lived above the store. When he was five, my father watched from his bedroom window as the local Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in front of the building. He recognized the ringleader as the chief of police (and husband of his kindergarten teacher). On a Fourth of July, when he was a little older, my dad fired a rocket from his window that crashed through a window of the Patterson. I lived my first two years in the same second floor rooms, until we made the big jump to Los Angeles.
We learned that the building still exists and is designated a historic structure, and we wanted to visit it. Thus our first stop in the rental car was the "Lasken Block," as the old cornice proclaims it to be. Standing across the street, I gazed at the second floor windows and wondered what rights my brief sojourn there gave me now. Could I go upstairs, knock, and tell whoever answers, "I entered the world in these rooms. May I come in and look around, meditate, maybe find a morphogenetic field and channel my lost and barely remembered ancestry, like in Dune?" I felt the correct answer would be No, that my connection, if it was one, did not afford me passage across the boundary between longing and property rights. Or maybe I was afraid that if I did visit, nothing would happen. I would see some nondescript walls and maybe a linoleum floor while the people who lived there watched me and noted the futility of my search- and it would be, well, nothing, not a science fiction or ghost story, or any kind of story. Ironically, not going up those stairs is a story.
Our next stop in Bismarck was the capital building, two miles north, through pleasant residential streets. Along some of them grew American Elms (the state tree) that had escaped Dutch elm disease- tall, beautiful, brave trees. The capital building is referred to locally as a "skyscraper," though it's only 14 stories high, a mere bump in L.A. But it was as imposing this time as it was the last time I saw it, at age 8. Standing atop a long grassy rise, it is a good 12 stories taller than any other structure within hundreds of miles (with the exception of distant wind turbines and grain elevators). The 30's era art deco design, plus the phallic layout (a broad two-story base housing the state legislature and governor's office, with the fourteen stories rising in the middle) gives it the aura of Emerald City, with its palace of the Great Wizard of Oz.
As luck had it, the quarter mile loop running around the sloping lawn in front was occupied that Saturday by the annual North Dakota craft fair. Stall after stall featured stunningly wrought items of wood, glass, paint and fabric. Here was a boundary between bias and reality. My bias, barely known to me, was the idea that humans are more self-aware and artistic on the coasts than in the Midwest. No such difference exists. Thoughtfulness, concentration and skill characterize North Dakotans. Film at 11!
All the people we saw were white. Perhaps we were at the white center of North America. These are the people who are endlessly ridiculed and vilified these days in most American media and much university pontification. They are deemed undeserving because life has been so easy for them, and because they suck life out of non-whites. I personally saw no one sucking life out of anyone, near or far. Nor did I see signs that life is easy in North Dakota. Many striking paintings in the craft fair evoked angst and alienation. None evoked any kind of "supremacy."
In 2016, Donald Trump won 63% of North Dakota's vote; Hillary Clinton won 27.2%. Here was the boundary between red and blue. I was in a red state. And yet, no one seemed red. Nor could anyone tell what color I was.
When we left Bismarck, heading east on I-94, we found more boundaries in the content of radio shows and billboards.
Over some stretches it was difficult to find NPR on the car radio, though there were many evangelical stations. It must be lonely sometimes on the North Dakota plains, when the only company might be a man telling you about your soul, that you have one, and that it is important for the universe and will last forever. Why not? If I'm from a blue state, a blue person, does that mean I can't believe in the soul? Not that I'm certain the soul exists. It is a compelling idea, that we aren't just reflections, flashing for a few moments then gone- memory, identity, time, space...all gone. You can argue that our evanescence is too awful to be true, that the soul is necessary to give existence a point. You can argue anything.
The billboards often conveyed political content. Every half-hour we passed an anti-abortion message. Here was a boundary made intense by the language used by politicians and other "leaders" on both sides: If you support abortion rights, you support murdering babies; if you oppose abortion rights, you support harms to women. The formulations eliminate nuanced boundaries, creating two simplified stories of good against evil, one for each side.
Both formulations recognize a conceptual boundary between a newly fertilized egg and a more developed fetus with a heartbeat. There is agreement that these are both living things, but do they both have souls? I don't know if a fetus with a heartbeat has a human consciousness or a soul. Maybe it does, and maybe we should care; I'm just guessing, like everyone else. It seems unlikely that a newly fertilized human egg would have a human consciousness, or a soul. It's a single cell, with no developed brain tissue. It would make more sense to believe that the soul is attached later, when there are elements of human consciousness. None of this is proven, or can be proven, of course. The question becomes: if none of the essential considerations about abortion can be proven or known, how can anyone argue about it?
Such thoughts occupied many soporific hours driving across the plains, but there was also the news, which on this trip was dominated by the shootings in El Paso and Dayton, especially horrific because they happened on the same day. The radio presentations suggested an America coming apart at the seams, with violence ready to erupt at any time or place. Of course that's not even remotely what is happening. The number of mad killers as a percentage of the population is small, and would be negligible if assault weapons were not so easy to procure and if any homicidal lost soul couldn't get worldwide attention from a media that thrives on their crimes.
It was a disconnect to hear over and over about the violence while driving through hundreds of miles of wheat fields, where the violence is microscopic, involving insects and chemicals. No crazed person acts-out here, swinging wildly with a machete while railing against mono-culture. That's why wheat fields are not in the news.
We saw "Rocketman" at the vintage (and well kept) Fargo Theater, in which Elton John invites us to contemplate one of our favorite subjects: the pain famous people feel when they discover that not only are they as lonely as they were before they were famous, but it's a new kind of loneliness, even more brutal and cosmically empty than the loneliness before. Elton John was able to survive his ordeal. There is a boundary between people who can handle fame and people who can't. Rock singers seem to have the worst of it. Politicians generally do ok with fame. Why is that?
Next stop was the Twin Cities, where my wife's family lives and mine used to. We stayed with my wife's sister and brother-in-law in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis which is within Minnesota's fifth congressional district, represented by Ilhan Omar. She is intensely opposed by much of her district. Omar put herself on the political map with statements like, "Israel has hypnotized the world; may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel." Omar crosses the boundary between church and state when she invokes deity to fight a perceived national enemy, suggesting that she envisions herself operating in a theocracy. Interestingly, she does not follow her logic to invoke Allah against America because it took land by force from people who were here first. On the contrary, Omar seems comfortable living and prospering on formerly Native American lands. She feels differently, it seems, when the sin is hers.
We saw a family of wild turkeys strolling around my in-laws' house, digging up gardens in the front and back, crossing the boundary between human and animal. Another animal crossed a boundary at my wife's parents' place in St. Paul: a bat flying around in the lobby. In order to get out, the bat needed two doors opened at once (the two doors enclosing the warm-up space typical of Midwest lobbies). My wife held one door open while I held the other. A trapped bird would have taken minutes to figure out that there was an escape route, but the bat figured it out immediately, presumably using echolocation.
More animal encounters occurred when we traveled north to the Boundary Waters area. En route we spent a night and a morning in Duluth, on Lake Superior, which was filled with lovely butterflies and aquatic birds. Another boundary appeared in the Skyway, an elevated passage, unventilated and very stuffy, between our hotel and the canal area along the lake. The passageway was empty of all people but us. We checked a side passage that led to a movie theater showing Tarantino's "Once upon a time...in Hollywood." We thought of seeing it, but it was scheduled too late. When we re-entered the Skyway and turned left towards the canal, there was a tall, lean young black man reclining against the wall, watching our approach. He was wearing a baseball cap and jeans that hung below his waist, exposing an inch of boxer shorts. His tank top revealed long, sinewy arms. There was no one else around. As we advanced and looked his way, he hopped forward five inches, held his arms out and said, "Ha, ha." It was funny, in a theoretical way, crossing at it did a racial boundary in which he knew what stereotypes might rule us, and we knew that he knew, and he knew we knew he knew. Ha ha, indeed.
We didn't go to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (within Superior National Forest), so called for its proximity to the Canadian border, but toured areas to its south. Birch and pine forests extended to the horizon. We stayed at a lodge near the town of Bibawic, which features a fiberglass moose near the bandstand in the park. We walked all of Main Street at night, encountering no one. Everything was closed except several bars hosting locals who were nursing drinks and talking with people they had known for years. We could have gone into one of the bars, crossing the boundary between people we know and people we don't, creating perhaps intimacy with the other, but we didn't.
On the trip home we crossed one more boundary- that between moving by your own power, and moving via advanced technology. I refer to the two flights, starting at Lindbergh Airport in Minneapolis, and connecting in Phoenix, that got us home to Los Angeles. The flights were similar: each left on time, and each included lengthy periods waiting on the tarmac after landing while a gate was secured. These waiting periods were stressful, as people sank into thoughts of busy schedules now messed up, and perhaps into deeper waters about the meaning of modern life, perhaps concluding that a life spent in joyless cylinders waiting for release belied an existence without meaning. On the other hand, the flights landed safely, we did not die, and we were able to have ten days of experiences we wouldn't have had without air travel. The final boundary, then, is the one between what we're grateful for and what we're not grateful for, and the final lesson is that we're grateful and not grateful for the same things, in the way that we support and oppose the same things.
We saw a family of wild turkeys strolling around my in-laws' house, digging up gardens in the front and back, crossing the boundary between human and animal. Another animal crossed a boundary at my wife's parents' place in St. Paul: a bat flying around in the lobby. In order to get out, the bat needed two doors opened at once (the two doors enclosing the warm-up space typical of Midwest lobbies). My wife held one door open while I held the other. A trapped bird would have taken minutes to figure out that there was an escape route, but the bat figured it out immediately, presumably using echolocation.
More animal encounters occurred when we traveled north to the Boundary Waters area. En route we spent a night and a morning in Duluth, on Lake Superior, which was filled with lovely butterflies and aquatic birds. Another boundary appeared in the Skyway, an elevated passage, unventilated and very stuffy, between our hotel and the canal area along the lake. The passageway was empty of all people but us. We checked a side passage that led to a movie theater showing Tarantino's "Once upon a time...in Hollywood." We thought of seeing it, but it was scheduled too late. When we re-entered the Skyway and turned left towards the canal, there was a tall, lean young black man reclining against the wall, watching our approach. He was wearing a baseball cap and jeans that hung below his waist, exposing an inch of boxer shorts. His tank top revealed long, sinewy arms. There was no one else around. As we advanced and looked his way, he hopped forward five inches, held his arms out and said, "Ha, ha." It was funny, in a theoretical way, crossing at it did a racial boundary in which he knew what stereotypes might rule us, and we knew that he knew, and he knew we knew he knew. Ha ha, indeed.
We didn't go to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (within Superior National Forest), so called for its proximity to the Canadian border, but toured areas to its south. Birch and pine forests extended to the horizon. We stayed at a lodge near the town of Bibawic, which features a fiberglass moose near the bandstand in the park. We walked all of Main Street at night, encountering no one. Everything was closed except several bars hosting locals who were nursing drinks and talking with people they had known for years. We could have gone into one of the bars, crossing the boundary between people we know and people we don't, creating perhaps intimacy with the other, but we didn't.
On the trip home we crossed one more boundary- that between moving by your own power, and moving via advanced technology. I refer to the two flights, starting at Lindbergh Airport in Minneapolis, and connecting in Phoenix, that got us home to Los Angeles. The flights were similar: each left on time, and each included lengthy periods waiting on the tarmac after landing while a gate was secured. These waiting periods were stressful, as people sank into thoughts of busy schedules now messed up, and perhaps into deeper waters about the meaning of modern life, perhaps concluding that a life spent in joyless cylinders waiting for release belied an existence without meaning. On the other hand, the flights landed safely, we did not die, and we were able to have ten days of experiences we wouldn't have had without air travel. The final boundary, then, is the one between what we're grateful for and what we're not grateful for, and the final lesson is that we're grateful and not grateful for the same things, in the way that we support and oppose the same things.
