Middle America - literally

Sunday I had a long, largely pleasant trek through appx. half of North Dakota. Few, if any, states get such a bad rap as ND, but I found it to be nice. Not spectacular, but nice. Sure, the area is flat and boring in places, but other places are quite hilly and you often have a lake or some trees to brighten up the day.

I almost didn't go up north at all. The weather forecast in Fargo that morning had the area I was going through as the ONLY one in the country with chances of "severe thunderstorms." I've gone through bad weather in the US, and I know it's not a joke, so I seriously considered going straight west.

As it was, there was hardly a wind gust on the whole trip. It did rain for the first hour or two, but nothing torrential. No flash floods, no thunder, no lightning, no tornadoes, no hail, no nuffin'. Just undulating prairies, fields and woods all around, stretching for miles and miles towards the horizon and beyond.

Since my road map showed it as "The geographical center of North America", I had already decided to stop at the tiny town of Rugby. I have no idea what criteria they use, but the town does have a marker on a corner, by some dusty little restaurant. I've read that the actual center is a few miles off, in the middle of nowhere, but this was close enough for me. I took a few pics and then pondered stopping in at the rather large "prairie village museum" I could see just down the road.

I thought in the end that I could at least check it out, and I am soooo glad I did. Not only is the place absolutely filled to bursting point with stuff, glorious stuff, but I also had a long, rambling conversation with the woman at the counter, and her husband who was bringing her lunch; both very nice and helpful people. They were both partly Norwegian, and from my later walk through the museum, I could establish that so were most of the early settlers there.

Sure, there were other Scandinavians and some Germans and people from other countries, but one of the truly funny things was the absolute dominance of Norwegian family names. You'd generally have some sturdy, solid, American first names, like Vern or Jack or Myrtle or Mary. And then some last name like Halvorsen or Grønvold or Bråten; unfuckinmistakably Norwegian in origin, would come at you like a punchline.

I spent a good hour walking around, looking at pictures, reading captions and taking a shitload of pictures. There's a huge area out back where they have something like 30 buildings of variable sizes, all of 'em full of sweet, sweet stuff - from groceries to furniture; from toys to cars, from beer cans to uniforms. I highly recommend a visit here, it's worth driving a few hundred miles for.

Now, being a modern day slob, and having grown up in a filthy rich country with pretty much all the modern conveniences imaginable, I can barely begin to imagine what life must have been like for the early settlers, many of whom came from small farms on some steep hillside on the west coast of Norway. Now they had an enormous prairie surrounding them, and the ocean was thousands of miles away. Still, they soldiered on.

They worked the land, most of them - the immigrant museum on Ellis Island has some good statistics that show Norway as the country with the highest percentage of farmers - but they also got an education. They didn't necessarily stay farmers for many generations, instead becoming doctors and lawyers, teachers and businessmen, innovators and entrepreneurs. In short, they became a part of that wonderful, great tapestry of human lives that is America.

All pics here.

"He who knows how laws and sausages are made, will never again sleep well" - supposed saying by legendary German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Ironically, these words are written in Bismarck, the state capital of North Dakota.


Stuff. Tons and tons of stuff. *droooolz*


From the cabin that makes up the toy museum.


Trolls or Vulcans?


An old schoolhouse.


Rural school with teachers & kids. Can you guess how many of them are Norwegian?


Here are their names; Traynor and Lester are the only non-Norwegian ones, so 10 out of 14 were Norwegians.


This was called "The Norwegian House", though I can't for the life of me see anything Norwegian about it. The truth is, they largely adopted American building customs... and everything else, pretty quickly.


Old bar with lots of beer cans on the wall.


One of the many, many old cars in the collection. They even had some old T-Fords. Click the link to the pic gallery above to see them all.


"Turkish baths" were supposed to cure most ailments. I vaguely remember some old Donald Duck comics that featured these torture instruments.


Oh, ah do lubs me some ice cream.


Early "Occupy" camp *snort*


Dis be how dey treated bad folks way back when.


At the end, the museum lady showed me this fully functional Edison phonograph. To my surprise she also said they had several boxes with music on. I advised them to contact the Edison archives asap as I'm sure they'd be interested in something like this.


If you say so.