Today: Joe's back. But first some other stuff. Think: North Dakota. What comes to mind? Either empty windswept prairie, or perhaps pictures from my Fargo site. In the former case, it’s a vast land that wears the mark of human activity lightly, at most. Start here.
It’s a Google Map of North Dakota. All those squares, all those lines: civilization. The grid laid over the land represents road and plots, ideas both literal and conceptual. It was all laid out a long time ago, at least in American terms, and when you consider how far this land was from the big throbbing cities on the coasts, it’s a remarkable accomplishment. It also suggests that the lawyers won in the end, but that’s okay; if you’re going to sell land, you need to know exactly where it is. If you’re buying land, the same applies. This picture is a physical manifestation of the dry lines in an abstract somewhere. No one who laid out these lines ever saw it from this perspective, but they all knew that’s what it looked like. The words on the paper said so. Why do I bring this up? A sudden stab of love for my home state, which will culminate in a long meandering trip through the Dakota backroads alone this summer? I wish. No, it came from the picture at the top of the page. I found it in the Strib archives – a 1957 photo of an abandoned town called Big Bend.
There’s still a Big Bend, or least a reference in the maps. But the buildings are gone. What sent the reporter up to take the shot? The back of the picture tells the story in a simple cutline: "Boarded up, Abandoned buildings line Main Street of Big Bend, ND. The boom has ended for the boom towns that helped build Garrison Dam." The Garrison Dam. Ah yes. North Dakota’s great civic works project, our Hoover Dam. As a kid I remember newspaper headline about the Garrison Diversion, a matter of some controversy. I googled around and found a Fargo Forum series looking back at the project: The power and promise of an entire nation seemed reflected on the shimmering water as President Eisenhower smiled and waved from a dedicating platform. Ike amongst the North Dakotans: that must have been a day. So I scrolled north up the road from Big Bend to look at the dam, and that’s when I saw it:
Whaaaa? Take a look. This is Riverdale - a bow and a drawstring, aimed at the future. The place where Ike spoke, the city they built to house workers who built the dam. It’s the Brasilia of North Dakota - a planned community built around a formal mall, with semi-circular streets radiating outward. It was founded in 1946. They thought more people would come, it seems - the empty plots testify to the future that never happened, at least not up here. It's sad to think that the people who designed probably never saw it like this, its order revealed from the clear heights of space. Two hundred and seventy people live there today. The big civic building at the end of the mall is for sale, and you can see its interiors here. This picture in particular has that Chernobyl vibe, and looks much like the world in which I grew up. The long blackboard, the heavy smooth-handled metal latches on the windows (they tilted in a few inches, no more) the acoustic ceiling with the long buzzing banks of fluorescent lights. That room livesiIn the back of the head of everyone who grew up in North Dakota in the latter portion of the 20th century; that’s where we all expect to sit for a while after we die, before we move on to the next place. Not to say Riverdale is limbo. You can leave it you wish. -- New Quirk - no Diner, alas, since I was busy all week getting ready for the trip that was not to be. Update on that: It’s strep. If we’d gotten on the plane to Disneylandworld, we would have probably infected half the plane. We’ve got magic bug-kill juice, and she’s more or less back to her normal happy self, except for the gutteral voice. My wife stayed home with her today, so I went to the office. It felt like old times, in a way; I didn’t have to watch the clock and be home for the bus, and I went early, like I did when Gnat went to school at the U. Back in those days I sat in the coffee shop and wrote Joe Ohio. So, I wrote a Joe Ohio. Yes, he’s back. I wanted to get the conclusion to the “cliffhanger” done, and then see if I could pick it up without fumbling or forcing it. It came as naturally as before, which isn’t hard when you’re just writing about people standing around discussing matchbooks, I suppose. I’ll start running new episodes next week.Just to set the stage, since it’s been a while: for months Joe received strange letters that alluded to some family scandal; they seemed to reinforce suspicions he had when he found out-of-state matches that used to belong to his father. He suspected it had something to do with his uncle, a character his mother regarded with distaste. (It wasn’t very complex and there wasn’t much of a mystery; these things are rarely anything other than what they seem.) The last letter he got suggested he would find the answers in a diner in Indiana, so that’s where he went. The penultimate episode is here. The new conclusion is here. New episodes, which pick up the story in 1957, begin next week. Thanks for coming by this week! See you Monday. |
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