Understanding North Dakota

I’ve been reading about North Dakota these days. Memoirs and diaries and long articles. It’s research for a novel set and in some ways about North Dakota. I have been reading with two basic questions in mind: “What is it like to live there?” and “Why do people stay?”

The first one is commonplace, but the second feels specific to North Dakota. Seen from the perspective of someone raised in the Chicago suburbs and well versed in what magazines and newspeople and top ten lists tell us are suitable places to live, the Dakotas fall short. Cold, economically depressed, and most of all, empty.

It is hard to wrap one’s imagination around a place as empty as North Dakota. Melanie Hoffert reports in her wonderful memoir, Prairie Silence, that there is an average of nine people per square mile in the state. When you figure most North Dakotans live in or around the two cities, Fargo and Grand Forks, right on the Minnesota border, that leaves a lot of empty land to the west. And the people who live there have fierce attachments to that land.

The people of North Dakota went to that frontier with the same dreams as other immigrants moving west. Primary among their dreams was the dream of land ownership and farming. The homesteads, however, proved difficult to hold onto. Ole Rolvaag, in his classic (about South Dakota or, more properly, Dakota territory) Giants in the Earth, gave a rough idea of the way the winds across the blank prairie could drive a person crazy. What struck me when I read that book was how far the new settlers had to travel just to find enough trees so they could build a wood house. Rachel Calof tells much the same story in her diary about being a Jewish settler near Devil’s Lake. In the winter they kept the chickens under their beds.

And then there is oil. I’ve been surprised by the lack of outrage or any real resistance to the fracking and horizontal drilling industry in western North Dakota. To help me understand, I read Fractured Land, by Lisa Westberg Peters. It introduced me to the depth of the oil hopes out there. Oil rights go back a century in the state, and there have been several waves of unsuccessful attempts to strike oil. Mineral/oil rights are often held separately from “surface rights,” so a different family might own the oil rights than the one that farms the land. And oil, in fact, more than food, is what many hoped for from that land. Add to that the current number of jobs created by the industry, and the situation starts to make sense. On top of that is a more wild west anti-government-interference attitude that is deep-seated in the state. Which just makes the fracking industry in North Dakota, the least regulated in the country, even more dangerous. The New York Times has done a good job covering this side of the story.

The roots of that anti-government history is beautifully told in Ann Marie Low’s 1984 memoir, Dust Bowl Diary.   The book includes Ann Marie’s diary from 1927-1937, when her family lost their farm to a government conservation effort. The diary entries are connected by summary and connecting material written by Low. Her love for the land despite its difficulties, especially in year after year of drought, shines through in every entry. As the end of the book nears, her frustration with Roosevelt also becomes a theme. Along with accounts of teaching in a country school, farming with her brother and father, and teaching herself how to stuff gophers and other small creatures, she tells the story of land agents coming in and buying up the family farms for a wildlife refuge.

The refuge was clearly part of a program to take land out of agriculture that had virtually blown away during the years of drought. The land was clearly, at that moment, worthless. But it was not worthless to the farmers. The farmers had hopes. They had been through ups and downs in the previous decades and held onto those farms. Add to that the fact that some were paid so little that they still owed mortgages on the land the government took, and you’ve fostered some serious bad feelings against banks and the government.

Of the books I’ve read recently, no one has answered the first two questions better than Melanie Hoffert. Her book is lovely, thoughtful, and gets closest I’ve ever read to articulating the pull and draw of a landscape that to many other people looks like a wasteland. Her book is ostensibly about understanding her identity as a lesbian vis a vis her home town and family farm in North Dakota. As she’s come into her own, mostly in the Twin Cities, “silence” has become a bad word. If she’s not talking about her gay identity, does that mean she’s ashamed? Does that mean she’s in the closet? Is everyone at home not mentioning it because they can’t accept it or, worse, are in denial?

What she comes to understand is that it is only she who is choosing not to talk about it, not to share, keeping herself in silence. And also that there is a comfortable silence, a full silence, that belongs to the prairie. There are silences filled with love. It is not about silencing. Which is not to say it’s all goodness and light out there. However, her relationships– with family, friends, the land, and also with God– are just fine, solid, loving and deep.

As I try to get deeper into understanding this world around me and these places, there is a goodness I’m trying to tap into. Not in a sentimental way, but as a core truth that we need to read about and see in people’s stories. Lord knows the surface and a lot of what’s going on in North Dakota is beyond troubling, including an increasing inability for people to find work with purpose, increasing drug trade and crime, and wide-scale destruction of the land out west. But I think in some ways I understand why people stay there. It is not in the hope of striking it rich, that’s for sure (most of the mineral rights folks no longer live there, just get their checks sent to them). It’s because that’s where they’re from and it is a land that has formed them and there’s nothing else like it.