Do You See Watt I See?

There’s a wealth of interesting information about the National Christmas Tree and its associated “Pageant of Peace” within a massive Wikipedia entry that numbered a whopping 31 (ironically tree-killing) pages when I printed it out. And that didn’t count all the pages of footnotes I elected not to print.

I discovered, for instance, that this heartwarming symbol of nation unity and peace on Earth was a product of pure capitalism, conceived in the 1920s by an electric-industry trade group to promote its fledgling product. I learned that attendance lagged at the annual lighting ceremony during the years when President Truman flipped a remote switch from Independence, Missouri. This forced Harry to return to the White House for the 1952 lighting—a development about which he presumably was not wild. I found out that the 1969 and 1971 lighting ceremonies were disrupted by hecklers—Vietnam War protesters in the first case and nattering nabobs of anti-Spiro Agnew negativism in the second, because the vice president was doing the honors that year. I also learned that in 1978, First Daughter Amy Carter took a break from advising her dad about the dangers of nuclear proliferation in order to begin a First- or Second-Family tradition of topping off the tree with an ornament.

(If you’re counting, that’s a least three references in one paragraph—“wild about Harry,” a Spiro Agnew quote and a President Carter statement—that no reader under 50 likely will understand. Fortunately, if that's the right word, I probably haven't a single reader in that demographic.)

To me, the key page of the Wikipedia entry is number 20, which features a photograph that literally illustrates what I perversely love about the National Christmas Tree and its trappings—which occupy (currently, but not always) a small square of land on the Ellipse just south of the White House in the heart of Washington, DC.  That one photograph both solved a mystery for me and hints at—without quite telling the whole story—the big, ugly, but amusing truth about the whole operation that Wikipedia declines to acknowledge. That truth is this: The National Christmas tree, and everything that surrounds it, is hideously, godawfully tacky.

Let me to describe to you the photograph to which I’m referring. (Because, as you know unless you’re the very rare newcomer to this site, I’m too low-tech and lazy to have any idea how to post photographs, or even to have much interest in doing so. Use your damn imagination, and get the hell off my lawn.) The photo shows a big evergreen (or fir, or whatever) that’s trapped inside a framework of mesh wiring. Beside it sit a couple of wood crates on which the words “National Tree Train” are written. The photo caption reads as follows: “The model railroad train is ready to be unpacked and set up at the base of the 2012 US National Christmas Tree. An undecorated ‘state tree’ is to the right.”

Where to start? First, I alluded above to a “mystery.” I’d been wondering in recent years if I’d only thought the National Christmas Tree was an actual tree, as opposed to what it really looks like against the night sky: a huge triangular mass of lights resembling a monster version of the gaudy aluminum trees Snoopy hawks in the Charlie Brown Christmas special while the horrified round-headed kid decries the commercial greed-fest Christmas has become.

I mean, I seemed to remember, walking through the Ellipse at other times of year, there being a real, living tree at that spot. But then, every December when I’d arrive to marvel at the obscene Vegas-of-the-East spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace—with its giant, formless, zillion-watt “tree;”  its rows of smaller, bland, identical-looking "state" trees; its mixed-messages side-by-side nativity scene and Santa’s workshop; its fascinatingly Hades-like fire pit (an apocalyptic conflagration that seemingly might at any moment jump its hole and threaten the presidential mansion); and a jerry-rigged stage on which amateur-hour entertainers churned out holiday standards over a bad sound system—I’d see zero evidence of an actual living pine tree. In fact, the star of this yearly light show looks like nothing so much as the wet dream that had consumed Coolidge-era power-industry executives: Complete obliteration of the natural world, replaced by a constellation of glorious artificial light.

When I saw that photograph on the Wikipedia page (a quick aside: I don’t go to Wikipedia for evidence-based facts, but I do seek it out for the kind of detail that only obsessive citizen-researchers will happily spent vast volunteer hours compiling) it confirmed what I’d sort of suspected, but what had seemed too weird to quite believe: There really IS a tree underneath those uniform strings of diagonal lights and ornaments. But that living organism is utterly undecorated and dark. It is the irrelevant guts of a bedazzling, 100% -fake superstructure.

This bit of Internet intelligence reinforced everything that, to me, is bizarrely wonderful about the Pageant of Peace—despite the sad absence nowadays of the Yule log/fire pit, which was bulldozed in 2012 as allegedly incompatible with a reconfigured “site plan,” according to the National Park Service, which oversees the site. (I’m guessing what really happened was that President Obama suddenly realized in December 2011, gazing from his back portico to the Circle of Hell raging almost literally in his backyard, “There is a freaking inferno just beyond a flimsy fence that millions of right-wing nuts who irrationally hate me easily could stoke and fan in my direction.” Whereupon a presidential order was issued to fill in the pit, ideally with NRA President Wayne Lapierre having been thrown into it beforehand.)

I again lamented the fire pit’s absence this past Sunday night, when I made my annual pilgrimage to the site. I also didn’t see the nativity scene or Santa’s workshop, for that matter. But it’s possible I missed them both, as the crowds were crushing and there was a tented area to which I never got. (Another great irony is that the Pageant of Peace—a term coined in the 1950s to emphasize the “goodwill toward men” biblical aspect of Christmas—isn’t remotely peaceful. The place is packed with locals and tourists chattering away in a multitude of languages. You can’t move an inch without somebody’s camera-phone nearly hitting you in the eye. And the musical acts intermittently add a further level of noise.)

Still, this time as every year, there was much for me to enjoy. The central “tree” was every bit as blindingly, geometrically absurd as always. The 56 smaller trees (one for each state, the District of Columbia and five US territories), though in theory uniquely decorated, again looked thoroughly uniform. This is because—as presumably dictated by the Park Service—all the lighting and decoration is standardized, except for a few clear plastic ornaments on each tree that contain drawings or other artwork that’s been created by schoolchildren from that state, district or area. The problem is, given the size of the ornaments and the lighting, it’s nearly impossible to discern these unique details even upon close inspection—let alone from any distance. This is another compelling feature of the ludicrous spectacle that is the Pageant of Peace.

Then there are the trains—per that photo on the Wikipedia page. There’s not just one set of train tracks laid at the base of the National Christmas Tree. There are several. They collectively form a crazy quilt of locomotive madness, with trains chugging through a zig-zaggy landscape of toy villages and scenery that defies rhyme or reason. It is as if the Park Service noted the empty space surrounding the Triangle of Electricity and summoned a particularly disorganized model train enthusiast from his basement lair to please populate the area. Don’t get me wrong: Kids, even in 2015, love choo choos—as do nostalgic adults. I heard many happy exclamations. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with the trains, per se. What I am saying that they add to the air of vaguely themed chaos.

This year’s music didn’t disappoint, either. While I don’t wish to disparage the generous donation of time by unpaid musicians and singers, who brave the weather to entertain the throngs—and it was actually cold Sunday night, atypical of this global-warming December—the Park Service always seems to get exactly the level of talent it doesn’t pay for. What I heard a few nights ago was a brass band that sounded like a Victorian nightmare—the kind of ensemble that might have propelled scared-straight Ebenezer Scrooge straight back to deep-humbug mode.

The brass band’s missed notes still echoed in my ears as I turned around, en route to my car, to give the National Light Show, 2015 edition, one last look. What is it that I cherish so about this crazy conglomeration of clutter, this national Hoarders episode? For one thing, it’s resoundingly retro in this increasingly too-cool-for-school world of super-high-tech gadgetry. There’s nothing sleek or sophisticated about this annual event. It remains, by and large, the same as it ever was. Furthermore, it actually forces people to get out of their houses and cars, put on their coats, and stand around outside.

As corny as it sounds, the Pageant of Peace really does, too, succeed, at least in a small way, in promoting goodwill on Earth. It brings people together in one place at one time to enjoy something—and to momentarily leave behind all the rancor and vitriol that increasing poisons America and the world. It scarcely matters whether that enjoyment springs from love of God, electricity, trains or timeless (call it evergreen) tackiness. It just makes a body feel good.

In that, it’s something of an annual Christmas miracle.

When Life Is for the (Calling) Birds

Earlier today I Googled “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for any mention of the little-discussed human trafficking aspect of the beloved English carol. I mean, the song’s essence is that there’s nothing like finding a bevy of enslaved people and trapped fowl under, around and above the Christmas tree, courtesy of your true love.

Was it once acceptable in English society, I’ve lately wondered, for people of means to pay a middle man to round up eight maids a-milking, nine ladies dancing, 10 lords a-leaping, 11 pipers piping and 12 drummers drumming; cram them into a enclosure decorated to resemble a huge gift box; and present to one’s significant other a cacophonous conglomeration of 50 people—who presumably were covered in the combined waste of 23 confined birds?

The Internet is strangely silent on the issue. When I entered the search term “Twelve Days of Christmas human trafficking,” I found only one other person's observation, similar to mine, that this carol is far from benign. What I did not find were any scholarly treatises on the economic conditions in Victorian England that might have induced families to sell their milking and dancing daughters to the monied gentry for presentation as gifts, or any theories from social historians as to why lords, pipers and drummers were preferred marks of these gift-giving fiends—as opposed to say, carpenters, haberdashers and other townsfolk with skills more useful around the manor than such specialties as (respectively) leaping, piping and drumming.

Anyway, the upshot is that I listen to a lot of Christmas music at this time of year—so often hearing the same 15 or 20 songs on WASH-FM, our local Christmas music station, that I’ve had a great deal of time to absorb, consider and, in some cases, question the lyrics. This is ground I first covered, by the way, in a December 30, 2010, blog post titled “Did You Hear What I Heard?”It is available for review at any time on this site, should you care to share my puzzlement over why a man as seemingly humble as Santa Claus would assign his own name to the lane on which he lives, or should you, too, wonder whether the Andy Williams-sung “Happy Holiday”—singular—should be condemned for implying that only the year-end celebrations of Christians matter.

In fact, this year I’ve been playing WASH-FM in the car and at home even more than I usually do, because I find all the nostalgic cheer to be a hugely welcome escape from the news of the day. While it’s no secret that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, it lately seems as if that hand basket is weighted with cannon balls and falling toward Hades at light speed.

As if such overwhelming problems as world terrorism, the refugee crisis and global warning aren’t upsetting enough, this morning I unwisely read an entire article in the Washington Post chronicling how a focus group of Donald Trump supporters backed the billionaire buffoon even more vociferously every time a moderator repeated and factually refuted one of their hero's moronically uniformed utterances. One guy even used the occasion to vow that he would not piss on the current president of the United States to extinguish the flames were our nation’s chief executive to find himself on fire.

Given the choice between 1) encountering such vitriol in print, online and/or on the air, and 2) singing along with the happy if often nonsensical holiday tunes I've known since childhood, the latter option has tended to win out.

What's more, should you listen really closely to words of Christmas songs, I find that you even can find ways to channel anger that are kind of fun rather than cancerous. Here’s a prime example: I’ve heard the holiday staple “Have a Holly Jolly Christmas” approximately 18,000 times since Thanksgiving, and every time I hear the chorus I go apoplectic, albeit it in a bemused kind of way. This is the lyric: “Have a holly jolly Christmas/And in case you didn’t hear/Oh by golly, have a holly jolly Christmas this year.”

Think about that for a second. How in hell could you not have heard that you are wished a holly jolly Christmas?!  The singer—Burl Ives or whoever might be covering the song—just wished you a holly freaking jolly Christmas the previous sentence!! It’s like saying, “Get me that pen. Oh, and while you’re at it, get me that pen.” The message is unmistakable!. It’s the same message, expressed twice in immediate succession! How could you not have heard it the first time?! You want us to have a Christmas that not only is holly (whatever that means), but that is jolly, as well. We get it! Jeez!

I know, I know, it’s just a stupid Christmas song. It's not Shakespeare. Still, I’d much rather laugh while fuming about something so trivial than get red in the face, and sickened in the gut, contemplating some far darker joke, such as the sadly viable candidacy of would-be President Trump and his frothing followers.

Maybe Christmas music isn't your thing, whether that's because you're of a non-Christian background or you simply heard "Frosty the Snowman" one (or a hundred) too many times. My point is, we all must do what we can these days to preserve our sanity. Because the outlook for our country and the world is not good.

 In case you didn’t hear.

Departing Soon

The parameters and logistics have yet to be determined, but it already has a name: the Dead of Winter Tour.

There won’t be any media accounts or “merch” booths. This isn’t a concert series by the surviving members of a ’60s jam band.

It’ll be a personal trip to as many as four cemeteries in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. It wouldn’t necessarily have needed to occur in the next few months. But then that name hit me, and a voice in my head channeled Starship Captain Jean-Luc Picard commanding “Make it so.”

Actually, it has grown into a tour. It began with a simple desire to revisit the graveyard in southern New Jersey’s Pine Barrens where my maternal grandmother has been interred since 1981 and my paternal grandfather joined her 16 years later. I last was there for my grandfather’s graveside service in 1997.

But I’ve also had it in mind for a while now to pay visits someday—separately or on the same trip—to the final resting places of a pair of memorable if utterly dyspeptic ladies I first encountered as a volunteer and ended up counting as friends. Both have been referenced in this blog. Helen was a client of Iona Senior Services in Northwest Washington who lived in DC. Mildred was a resident of Springhouse at Westwood, an assisted living facility in Bethesda.

Helen was the long-divorced wife of a doctor who, in her telling at least, left her for a younger woman and screwed her big-time in the settlement. She’d had multiple sclerosis since the early 1970s, which forced her to give up her job as a nurse and had consigned her to a wheelchair by the time I met her early in this century. The disease would cripple her much worse by the time she died in a nursing home a few years ago. When Helen still was living in her high-rise condo building near American University, I’d look across the back courtyard to the pool in which she told me she swam regularly before her body betrayed her.

Mildred, conversely, had no real physical issues until the last. But, whereas I could imagine Helen having experienced periods of pleasure in her younger years—she loved to talk about a trip to South America she’d taken in the late 1950s, and the many concerts and shows she’d attended at the Kennedy Center and other venues in the ’60s—I was pretty sure the stridently discontented Mildred who I knew in her '70s hadn’t been temperamentally or philosophically much different in her younger years.

To me, Mildred was the embodiment of the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall, of the old Jewish woman who complains, “The food at this restaurant is terrible! And such small portions!” In fact, Mildred was an old Jewish woman. And, at holiday dessert parties thrown by Springhouse, Lynn and I more than once heard Mildred pronounce a piece of cake or pastry “lousy” while denouncing its chintzy size.

Mildred never married. I like to think she’d at least had some dates, but nothing she ever said suggested it. She had lived in Philadelphia most of her life, working in various secretarial and administrative jobs. The only trips I can ever recall her having talked about were to Florida and California. Both vacations were bitter disappointments. Florida was too hot, and Mildred didn’t like Floridians for reasons I no longer can remember. A girlfriend with whom Mildred had once worked invited her to California, but then mostly left her on her own once Mildred got there, the way she told the story.

Mildred’s widowed and decidedly infirm sister also lived at Springhouse. I seem to recall that’s why Mildred ended up there. The sister died years before Mildred did, leaving Mildred stranded in Bethesda, where she often rhapsodized about Philadelphia and wished she was back there. Although it was easy to imagine she’d ragged incessantly on Philly when she actually lived in the City of Brotherly Love.

Helen, too, also was from Philadelphia. In fact, it wasn’t until I started seriously thinking about this Dead of Winter Tour that I was struck by how much the two women had in common—marital  status, religion, and collar hue (Helen’s was white, Mildred’s blue) notwithstanding. They not only came from the same city and held the same worldview—everybody had it in for them—but they were experts at ill-serving their best interests. They both treated worst the people on whom they depended the most.

Helen hired, then lost to temper flares, a succession of paid caregivers in the years that I knew her. Day nurses came and went. She berated her regular cab driver about his tardiness, lifestyle and weight until he finally stopped returning her calls. Volunteers felt her wrath, too. She reduced one kindly old woman from her Catholic Church to tears because the “stupid” octogenarian had brought the wrong groceries.

Similarly, Mildred always had some problem with Springhouse staff, and she wasn’t shy about expressing it. I’m not saying her criticisms always were off-base. At assisted living facilities, as anywhere else, you get the staff you pay for, and those places tend not to pay much. I understand that it’s maddening to be ignored because your aide is jabbering in a foreign tongue on her cell phone, engaged in an extended personal call during work hours. But Mildred, like Helen, never much had the patience with the old attracting-bees-with-honey approach. If, indeed, either woman even believed that was a valid way to get things done.  

But here’s the thing. I genuinely liked, and still miss, both of them. I’m not exactly sure why, because they drove me crazy in various ways, and Helen in particular could be mean. (She once reamed me a new you-know-what after I returned from a multi-store search with what I thought were precisely the lidded disposable cups she’d wanted. “They’re all wrong!” she screamed.) Neither woman liked having her narrative of woe or summary of another's incompetence challenged by any suggestion that maybe things weren’t quite that bad, or that perhaps so-and-so was just having a bad day.

But I did have some success distracting them from their negative narratives. I could make both women smile. Sometimes visually, more often inwardly. All it took was sitting and listening, which made them feel validated, I think, in a way they seldom did otherwise. They shared with me happy memories that few other people had bothered to solicit from them. And they rewarded me for my efforts. They asked after Lynn, our cats, later our dog. (Although Mildred hated cats, and made a point of telling me so.) They always thanked me for coming to see them. Honestly, I can’t think of a time that a visit didn’t end on a good note.

Anyway, when Mildred died, her niece ran a brief death notice that named the Jewish cemetery in Pennsylvania which she was buried. Helen had no local relatives, and had no obituary or death notice in any newspaper that I could find online. But I wrote to her sister in New Jersey, who gave me the burial site. At this moment I have no idea precisely where in the house either bit of information lies, but those cemetery names and locations are around here someplace. I just need to find them.

So, let’s recap. I started off this post by writing that I didn’t originally envision this as a winter tour. I simply wanted to visit my maternal grandparents’ graves. And I’ve had it in mind for a while now to seek out Helen’s and Mildred’s resting places—sometime. When this became a tour was when, maybe two months ago, I was leafing through some old scrapbooks my mom gave me and found the obituary of my paternal grandfather, who died in 1966, when I was 8 years old. So, now I know where he’s buried, too. (Not that I couldn’t have asked my parents, but I’d never really thought about it.)  Grandpa’s cemetery is in north-central New Jersey, which just happens to be within reasonable proximity of the other three graveyards. As soon as I realized this, the concept of a tour was born.

I’ll still need to work it all out: where I’ll stay along the way, how many days I’ll take off from work, whether I’ll really want to include all four cemeteries or perhaps add to the itinerary a visit with someone who’s alive. (I have a standing invitation to see a friend in New York City.) But I definitely want to do this.

It’s entirely for me. I’m agnostic at best about the afterlife. I don’t fancy that the departed will be interrupting their harp lessons in Heaven to look down with a big smile and thank me for making such a long drive. (I doubt Mildred could find much to smile about in the Great Beyond, anyway, presumably deeming both the bright color scheme and the relentlessly upbeat vibe hugely annoying.) I’m sure that I’ll talk to each dead person out loud while I’m on premises, because that’s what I do. (I once thanked Johnny Mercer for writing the lyrics to “Moon River” at Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah.) But I’ll doubt that anyone really is hearing me.

That won’t matter, though. I have few memories of Grandpa, although the ones I do retain are happy ones. (He took me out in a rowboat the last time I saw him; that’s etched on my mind.) I remember Nana and Papa vividly enough to miss them often—especially Papa, who lived to be 95, when I was 39 years old. As I’ve already stated, I miss both Helen and Mildred more now than I ever would’ve thought. I often run past Helen’s old building, and it still feels weird that she’s not there, keeping the doormen hopping with her endless requests and demands. Springhouse, meanwhile, now sits abandoned—awaiting demolition so an office-retail complex can be built on the site.

In a practical sense, I’ll be driving a few hundred miles to stand briefly before a few headstones or burial plaques and talk to myself. In an emotional sense, though, I’ll be touching base with people who were and important parts in my life—people who merit remembrance in deeds and not just words.

It feels appropriate that Thanksgiving is coming up. That's a sentiment that will carry into the forthcoming Dead of Winter Tour.

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.”