I've always thought the old saying about North Dakota was unfair. You've surely heard it: North Dakota isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there.
Spoken by smug folks from elsewhere, it implies that the state is some vast wasteland where nobody would want to spend any time. The best thing to do in North Dakota, these folks figure, is to get on I-94, roll up the windows and go.
But I'm strangely attracted to the state.
Seven of us recently stayed at a rural farm home while pheasant hunting in North Dakota. We walked the fields. We talked to the farmers. We listened to the land.
For those of us who live in a boreal forest dappled with blue lakes, the North Dakota landscape at first appears bleak. And it is austere. The land is vast and wide-open. The gently rolling hills are mostly treeless, except for the groves around farm homes. Much of the land is pasture -- unbroken grassland where cattle have supplanted the bison. Where the soil has been broken, corn or soybeans or sunflowers carpet the countryside.
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People are like trees here -- something of a rare commodity. Step out on an October night, and you'd be hard-pressed to count a half-dozen yard lights to the horizon.
This expansive, lightly peopled landscape is what gives North Dakota its appeal, but you can't get a feel for it from the interstate. The way to know North Dakota is by walking the land or having lunch at a small-town cafe.
Walking, you come across the inevitable rock piles. Imagine the effort it took someone to lift those hundreds of rocks from the field, load them onto a trailer and haul them to a fence line.
On the rock piles, you find the bleached bones of long-dead cattle, presumably deposited there by ranchers. How did these animals die? Disease? A fierce January blizzard? Giving birth to a calf? And what of the ranchers themselves? They must have had plenty of time to think about life and death as they hauled those critters to the rocks.
Hunting pheasants, you're apt to see or hear other forms of life that are invisible from I-94. Healthy whitetails bolt from the corn rows. Hawks hunt from utility poles. Great horned owls are cellos tuning up in the groves. Sandhill cranes rattle across the sky. Hungarian partridges fly in close formation. There is life here, if you know where to look for it.
Talk to the people who scratch a living from this land. The waitress at the cafe. The guys at the next table. The farmer who tells you how the rain missed his land last summer. "You could see it falling two miles north of here, but we never got any," he says over lunch. A guy doesn't need a casino to gamble out here. Just plant your crops and watch the sky.
North Dakota is without pretense. There's an honesty about the people and the land. It's all laid bare, open for inspection. You take it as is.
That's the North Dakota I've come to know.
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SAM COOK can be reached at (218) 723-5332 or scook@duluthnews.com . For previous columns, go to duluthnewstribune.com.
