The one place and time when winter overwhelmed me was in North Dakota when I taught at Minot State 50 miles from the Canadian border. North Dakota is entirely too close to our annoyed, colder neighbor and should move down a couple of tiers. The Great Plains sweep from Saskatchewan and Alberta straight down to Mexico, a huge corridor for winds to whip up and down over the biggest aquifer on earth from Nebraska southward. It is mostly hilly prairie, which some have suggested should be returned to the native bison, not to mention the Native Americans, except that Scandinavians and others established huge granaries of wheats and corn, sorghum and millet, later soy beans, and are not likely to give up their Breadbasket. (One of several Nordak surprises were the maroon flax fields around Strasbourg, Lawrence Welk's hometown.) North Dakota has the Missouri River valley for its major hilliness. Its Turtle River Mountains would not make respectable hills farther south. I think wind erosion has left most of the state so flat that on my first visit, running low on gas, I learned welcoming lights are deceivingly distant. I could see Jamestown 17 miles away, and I learned later that one should never try to head for ranch yard lights, ordinarily miles from the roads though clearly visible. That is the sort of geographical caution North Dakota is, even as I think its west-end Badlands as handsome as Texas' Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo. Its Badlands are not as big as South Dakota's les mauvaises terres a traverser, "bad lands to travel across," which the New York Times once laughably located in the Lakota tribes' sacred Black Hills, though perhaps the two North Dakota sections put together might be. Teddy Roosevelt did his Charles Atlas transformation from puny youth to pugnaciously robust man in those Badlands. So North Dakota does have its scenic attractions as well as the historic, with, e.g., Fort Union at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone, almost in Montana, built by John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in 1828, and Fort Lincoln, with its Custer house and Mandan village.
When I digress, I digress, but I did want to be fair to the state whose winters produced the Air Force cartoon booklet that irritated all the Chambers of Commerce, "June, July, August, and the Rest of the Year." (North Dakota has two of the three strategic air bases protecting the United States on the north, the Great Circle Route from Russia in the Cold War days.) I should say first that a perfect summer day is from my North Dakota summer memories, temperatures in the high 70s, low 80s, warm sun against brilliant blue, and sweater time the minute the sun went down. But, as I discovered in my three years there, winters did indeed last from the end of September into May, well after Mom was writing that the lilacs had bloomed. My pharmacist here, also from a northeastern Nebraska small town, wanted to reminisce recently about our country winters of snow from November to April, but I couldn't forbear one-upping him with North Dakota. We could date the various storms in the frozen layers like geological strata, never having any January thaws or chinooks. I learned differences did exist among zero, -10, -20, and -30, though any lower didn't make any difference at all. I learned immediately what a head bolt heater was and had to keep my car, Jeremiah, plugged in even in its garage and certainly in the college's open parking lots, which had meter-like electrical outlets for that purpose. As a bachelor and New Kid on the Block, I was regularly given night classes at the air base 13 miles north of Minot and took very seriously the recommended emergency precautions--blankets, candles, sand, matches, food, extra winter clothing--not only against the fatal cold but the swift blizzards with nothing blocking their horizontal fury blasting down from Canada. One night, after my Humanities class, I came out, got in, grabbed my parking brake handle to release it, and it broke off in my hand like a goblet stem. I knew unprepared motorists regularly froze to death; the frozen death count in my last year there, one of the I've-got-to-get-out-of-here factors, was 27, as I recall. And we all knew about the two construction workers caught at the edge of Minot itself in a blizzard who survived only by tearing up their car seats and burning that and newspapers in their construction helmets to keep alive.
A huge irony of the large Air Force population was that virtually all of them had license plates from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida. (And knowing Northerners were frequently stationed down south meant the armed services had, as usual, perverted senses of humor.) A North Dakota winter was the most drastic introduction to snow and ice these drawlers could've imagined. Minot is built along a steep-sided, wide canyon of the Souris (Mouse) River, split its east-west length by that stream. Main Street has an incline of, say, 65 degrees, a hellish place for a driver's test, as I discovered. The major highway, U.S. 83, not only has steep North Hill and South Hill but, like other street crossings, a high-arched viaduct over the river. Warned, when I saw a Deep South license plate headed for any of those trouble spots in snow-packed or icy conditions, I detoured and found another way.
One of the topics while we ate boiled eggs in the Student Union during coffee breaks was the fascinating Halingdahl syndrome, from the Norwegian city of such long winters that "stir crazy" was inadequate to describe the citizens' wintry claustrophobia. As explained to me, any social occasions were excuses to erupt in Viking violence from snowbound frustration. (Minot was largely Norwegian but very ethnic, with not only other Scandinavians but Russians and Greeks. How enough of the warm Mediterranean latter ended up there with their large Greek Orthodox church I never learned.) So brawls and stabbings enlivened Halingdahl weddings, I was told. Albeit about Indiana, William H. Gass' title story from his short story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, seemed ominously close to the Halingdahl syndrome and not that far removed from Aiken's story I mentioned in the last entry, the fatigue of hard winter descending to wrathful depression and manic behavior.
When I seemed to be catching the contagion, I fled--to Illinois, as the job hunt turned out. It was the only time I felt winter scaring me irrationally, especially with the mortal cold, as lethally silent as carbon monoxide. With two stretches of over 30 miles of no towns on the highways between Center and Minot, I actually feared trips home or back. I could give a very strong answer to the city's motto hanging over Main Street, "Why not Minot?" But that was then, and now I wouldn't mind living in the warmer Snow Capital of Buffalo, New York, at all. How rational is that!
P.S. I was told then "Nordak" was a detested nickname; it never seemed derogatory to me but useful and in the American habit of abbreviating anything possible. Minot State College is now Minot State University, and my friendly Geek--their company name--who heals my computer ailments is from that city.
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