Fargo

“We’re usually the last state,” the young woman at the Fargo-Moorhead Convention and Visitor’s Bureau noted a few weeks ago, with a resignation that belied the inherent boosterism of her position.

This was after I told her I’d flown into Fargo’s Hector “International” Airport (quote marks mine) the previous afternoon for the express purpose of adding North Dakota and bordering Minnesota (in which Moorhead alliteratively sits) to the list of states in which I’d run.

As usual, I’d gone into far more detail than anyone wanted, having been asked the quite reasonable question, “What brings you to Fargo?” It isn’t as if Fargo is a commercial hub to which I’d likely been sent by my Washington, DC-area employer to close some big multinational deal. I clearly was too old and nerdy looking to have been lured to North Dakota by the promise of a high-paying if back-breaking job in the oil fields. And anyway, I was in the wrong part of a very large state for that. The only reference to North Dakota’s boon industry I would see during the course of my four days in the area were T-shirts at the airport that read “North Dakota: It’s One Fracking Thing After Another.”

It no doubt also seemed unlikely to this young woman that I’d flown all the way to Fargo to pay cult homage to the eponymous 1996 film, despite the visitors center’s more or less obligatory display of the actual movie-prop wood chipper just 10 or 15 feet behind us. I’d seen the dark comedy when it came out nearly 20 years ago, and I well recalled that a couple of bungling crooks fed a body into the device in one memorable scene. This was dutifully memorialized by a fake foot sticking out of the chipper’s chute at the visitors center. But hadn’t that film, its title aside, been set primarily in Minnesota? And hadn’t the movie’s buzz expired way back in the Clinton administration—never mind that it recently spawned a cable TV series that critics seem to love but few people seem to watch?

Well, she had asked what brought me to Fargo, so I gave her the whole story. About how “running,” to me, doesn’t mean participating in an organized race, or even running with another human being. About how I don’t record my speed—I am in fact incredibly slow—but do record my duration. About how, by my own definition—self-imposed rules I am duty-bound to follow—a “run” means shuffling along at my own plodding pace for a minimum of one uninterrupted hour, entirely within a given state’s borders. About how I developed the goal of running in all 50 states when I realized, somewhere around age 50, that I already was about three-fifths of the way to my goal by virtue of personal and work-related travel. About how his was the reason I'd driven several years ago to Harlan, Kentucky, where I had the misfortune of eating the worst Chinese dinner imaginable. About how this also was why I’d run, pre-dawn, in downtown Fargo that very morning and would, the next morning, drive into Minnesota, park my rental car, and add that state to my list—thereby reducing the magic number for legend-in-my-own-mind status to 14.

Rousing herself from my long-winded explanation, the visitors center woman responded that it’s not that unusual for tourists to tell her a 50-state running goal has brought them to Fargo. But the lure, she said, almost always is the city’s annual marathon. These are runners whose goal it is to complete an organized 26.2-mile race in each of America’s 50 states. (I’m well aware that such people exist, but I have no interest in working myself that hard.) What these marathoners typically tell the visitors center staff, my host reported, is that North Dakota is their very last stop. The unspoken but unavoidable implication is that they’d deemed no other state in the union to be so godforsakenly unappealing or geographically remote. They’d gutted their way through the likes of Oklahoma and Arkansas, they’d sweated on the Mississippi Delta and bundled up for Alaska’s chill before finally gritting their teeth and conceding, “I have no choice. North Dakota it is.”

     

I didn’t really know how to respond, except to nod. I’d been in Fargo less than 24 hours at that point. The downtown area, I saw, has its charms. It features, among other things, an impressively restored old movie theater in which I later would see a film, and a sleek boutique hotel in which I later would spend a night. But that didn’t quite seem like a compelling counterpoint to the judgment of scores of marathoners. “There have got to be other states that suck more” didn’t strike me as a particularly helpful thing to say.

What I ultimately decided to do was to buy a T-shirt, and to sign the guest book. More on those things shortly.

First, though, it must be noted, for the record, that I thoroughly enjoyed my stay in Fargo, well beyond my visit to that historic theater and my stay at that charming boutique hotel. I toured worthwhile art museums in Fargo and Moorhead. I visited the Roger Maris Museum in West Acres Mall, which pays endearing tribute to a native son who broke Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record in 1961 only to be compared unfavorably, and with no little vitriol, to the beloved Bambino. (There is, of course, no mention of Maris’s record having later been shattered during Major League Baseball’s dark Steroids Era.)

I viewed a replica Viking boat in Moorhead that local Minnesotans valiantly sailed across the Great Lakes and all the way to Norway in 1982. Oh, and speaking of Norway, I ran very early one morning in lovely Fergus Falls, Minnesota, where I took my favorite photo of the entire trip: a bit of hilariously vulgar regionally themed graffiti, scrawled on the wall of a derelict warehouse. It juxtaposed a Norwegian flag with a disembodied Super Mario-looking head that had a crudely drawn dick and balls dangling from its mouth. Ha!

I dined at some very good restaurants in Fargo and conversed with  affable locals at dive bars. Also, my in-car soundtrack was a “classic vinyl” satellite radio station that immersed me throughout in Hendrix solos, Byrds harmonies, Van Morrison mysticisms and Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s flights of synthesizer fancy. This made me almost giddily happy at times.

Like all mid-sized cities lacking an identifiable persona, Fargo has sought to brand itself. Not having much to work with except an old movie featuring the brutal disposal of a body and its own sense that you’d have to be crazy to choose Fargo as a vacation destination, the tagline of this campaign is “North of Normal.” North Dakota is north, all right, in both name and geography, abutting the Canadian border. But there’s really nothing discernibly abnormal about it. Like everywhere else in contemporary America, it features many more miles of faceless retail than it does architecturally striking downtown blocks. All the young people have tattoos. The citizenry can stand to lose a pound or thirty. Ubiquitous signage touts the local sports team—in this case the North Dakota State University Bison.

Still, Fargo hardly struck me as the booby prize of all places in America. When I heard, “We’re usually the last state,” I thought, “Awww! Chins up!”

So, I bought one of those “Fargo: North of Normal” T-shirts. I will wear it in utterly normal Bethesda, in hopes, for the city of Fargo’s sake, that those who see it will imagine the city to be awash in noir quirkiness, perhaps patrolled by a pregnant sheriff who resembles actress Frances McDormand.

What I wrote in the guestbook was this: “I was born without a right hand. I’m staying away from that da*m wood chipper, as I can’t afford to lose more limbs!” Sure, I probably was trying too hard. But I left the visitors center hoping that subsequent tourists might read the entry, chuckle a little bit, and maybe—just maybe—think to themselves, “Now, that was north of normal.”