ND Day 3 - Breakfast, Buffalo, and Boisterous Crowds
Today I started out by getting some coffee at a trendy spot in Fargo called Atomic Coffee with cool local art on the walls and good strong beans in the roast. It was an excellent start to the day.
The good start continued with breakfast at a place my friend Ian recommended from his hometown of Casselton called Kerry’s Kitchen. This sweet unassuming spot was a class act all around with a great food, low prices, and a classic diner vibe.
For breakfast, I got maybe the best bacon, egg, and cheese I’ve ever had. There was nothing particularly fancy about it, but everything was just incredibly well done. I feel like this style of breakfast sandwich too often comes with those weird rubbery egg patties, but this bad boy came with not one but two perfectly over-medium fried eggs sandwiched around some crispy strips of bacon with a tasteful bit of cheese on top. It was excellent, and the only thing better was my dessert. I had initially thought to myself “This will be a sizable mid-Western sandwich, and I don’t usually do breakfast, so maybe I should keep it light and not get a pastry” but then I saw this magnificent chocolate peanut butter cookie with a fat glob of peanut butter in the center and chunks of peanut and milk chocolate drizzled about. Incredibly decadent, but one hell of a breakfast. I can see why my friend referred to the restaurant as his hometown’s pride.
After my hearty breakfast, my next stop was in the town Jamestown, home of the World’s Largest Buffalo. This behemoth clocks in at 26 ft. high and 46 ft. long and was crafted out of 60 tons of concrete by artist Elmer Peterson in 1959. On the one hand, it feels like cheating that it’s not a living breathing buffalo, but taking into account just how massive it is that’s probably for the best and it’s hard not to be impressed that a person was able to make this. In 2010, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the buffalo’s completion the town held a competition to decide on a name for him and the winning name was Dakota Thunder which is both a little unimaginative and also very fitting.
Naturally, because I’m a 12 year boy, nothing made me laugh harder than the artist’s commitment to giving his giant buffalo some giant cojones.
Just a short walk up from the big buffalo, Jamestown has arranged a series of frontier-era buildings into a small one-horse village filled with various period artifacts, history exhibits, and local arts and crafts. It made for some fun and informative strolling, and I really had a perfect day for some good old fashioned moseying.
I wasn’t kidding about the one horse-ness of the town either, as I could have gotten a horse drawn carriage tour of the little frontier village but I thought it would do me good to stretch my legs a bit.
My first frontiersy stop was the town’s bank featuring some great vintage heavy duty vaults and a rickety old adding machine. I don’t know if it was an intentional choice that one of the safes was from the Buffalo Vault Company but it seemed very fitting considering Dakota Thunder was just down the street.
Next up I visited the town jail and maybe it’s just me but I thought the old metal jail cell was a sort funny location for a box labeled “Contributions”. Maybe bribery was just a lot more up front and casual back then.
My next stop was probably my personal favorite spot in the frontier village, a small local art gallery called the Kirkpatrick Gallery. It was an excellent and impressive display of the talent and creativity of the area’s artists and artisans. My personal favorite was an artist named Florence Pratt Trudell who painted sweet, traditional pastoral scenes on deeply non-traditional mediums such as birds’ feathers, rocks, leaves, and (perhaps most surprisingly) saw-blades. I loved it.
Florence’s daughter, Joann Herman, is also a talented artist and she created the other big highlight of the gallery for me, this truly wild collection of ceramic screaming pigs:
The next building was dedicated to the map makers, geologists, and surveyors from yesterday and today who first documented the lay of the land in the Dakotas. It was cool seeing the evolution of the various tools of the trade, thought I’ll be honest most of the details went whooshing right over my head.
I got a kick out of seeing some vintage P.O. boxes in the frontier town’s post office, if only because they seem to have not changed at all in style and appearance over the past 150 years.
In the town’s general store, I found out that Coca-Cola put out a series of collectible glass bottles with Dakota themed designs for North and South Dakota’s centennials and I thought they actually looked surprisingly cool and I can see them really spicing up a hipster’s apartment… as long as they don’t drink any of the shockingly still full bottles.
The next stop was a recreation of the Western writer Louis L’Amour’s Writer’s Shack. L’Amour was a prolific and beloved writer (even receiving a Presidential Medal of Freedom), publishing over 100 books in his lifetime. While he was probably most well known as a writer of Westerns, his works ran the gamut from science fiction to historical novels to non-fiction to poetry. In his lifetime, he was one of the best selling authors in the world, and a number of his books and stories were adapted into films and television shows with probably the most well known being the John Wayne film Hondo. I wasn’t particularly familiar with L’Amour beforehand, but it was cool seeing artifacts and photographs from his fascinating life, and he certainly seems to have left his mark on American pop culture whether you’re aware of it or not.
Next up was the frontier dentist office, which was interesting though the idea of 19th century dentistry sound truly hellish. This guy for example seems to be starting nowhere near her teeth!
Taking a breather after the dentist, I really loved the bright green view from the hilly frontier village out over the rest of Jamestown.
I even saw a goat! Though sadly this beardy boy did not at any point use this slide which I would have really paid to see.
My next stop was the town’s one room schoolhouse complete with great old maps and books, a seemingly much too modern teacher, and my personal favorite: an in-class stove with a note saying “the children often put their whole potatoes on the heater” as if it was just so taken for granted that obviously schoolchildren would be carrying whole potatoes.
Next up was the town’s church which had really beautifully carved and painted wooden chairs, tabernacles, and pump organs to make the stop worthwhile even for a godless heathen like me.
After visiting all the frontier stops, my next stop was Jamestown’s other big attraction: the National Buffalo Museum. The museum was dedicated to the history and cultural impact of the American Buffalo, and it was the kind of museum I love that takes an oddly specific topic and expands outward from it for a really engrossing and interesting experience.
Things began very fittingly with an incredibly intact fossilized skeleton from Bison Antiquus, a giant ancestor of the modern American buffalo who roamed the great plains between 18,000 and 10,000 years ago. This big hunk o’ bison regularly would have clocked in at 7 ft. tall, 15 feet long, and 3,5000 lbs!
B. antiquus was accompanied by some of the earliest bison art ranging from photos of 12,000 year old cave paintings in France to more modern imaginings of prehistoric scenes. My favorite was probably the incredibly shaggy-looking first recorded drawing of an American Bison by a European dating back to 1552.
Next up was another 10,000 year old skull that paleontologists aren’t quite sure how to categorize since it shows features of two ancestral buffalo, our old friend bison antiquus and another fella called bison occidentalis. Regardless of species, the preservation was remarkable and the over three foot long horns (from tip to tip) were particularly impressive.
Next up was an exhibit on the evolution of humans hunting buffalo. In the top left, you can see Native Americans displaying both cunning and moderation as they disguised themselves like wolves to sneak up and pick off a buffalo at a time. Next to that you can see that European Settlers took a different approach shooting as many buffalo as they possibly could just for the hell of it. While the hulking buffalo might seem pretty fearsome with their large horns and intimidating mass, they’re actually generally quite docile and trusting of humans so they were very easy to shoot and because they have terrible eyesight and were unfamiliar with firearms they couldn’t really tell that buffalo around them were dying so pioneers could kill quite a lot before they’d figure out that they should run away. And boy did they, driving them to the very brink of extinction, as they shot them from train cars to give tourists and travelers a bit more excitement. The sheer excess of the killing is horrifically well illustrated by the photo on the bottom right of a man standing on a small mountain of bison skulls.
While the extent of the hunting was out of control, I do have to admit that their display of buffalo fur clothing did look like it would really come in handy during a North Dakota winter.
The museum actually has their own herd of buffalo they take care of, but when I went outside to see them they must have either been out grazing or lounging in the shade. Even if I didn’t see any buffalo, it was a pretty spectacular view out over the rolling green expanse.
Back inside, the museum was selling a children’s book that gave me a great new idea for a nickname:
The next exhibits were some of my favorites as they focused on depictions of buffalo in art. There were sweeping panoramic prairie scenes, sometimes painted on buffalo hide (which is either very morbid or circle-of-life-y depending on how you look at it), intimate portraits of bison at rest and in dynamic action, and more abstract lyrical renderings as well making it a nicely well rounded collection.
Accompanying the paintings, there were some particularly excellent sculptures out of clay and bronze that really captured such life-like features in their subjects even when they depicting more dreamlike, allegorical scenes. The one on the bottom right by the hilariously named Charles Sharles was probably my favorite because it brought a weird grace to the slightly absurd scene of a whole herd of buffalo tumbling over a cliff.
The next few displays were about the relationship between the buffalo and the Native Americans of the region. It feels like a mega-cliché to say that the local tribes used every part of the buffalo, but the range of items that could be made from parts of the buffalo was genuinely impressive. Items included spiritual medicine bags, tools, bags, clothes, tents, musical instruments, children’s toys, gambling pieces, spoons, drinking cups, powder horns, knives, and painting materials. It’s a lot of versatility out of bones, hides, and horns.
My personal favorite piece was this sewn hand bag with cute buffalo design on the front.
Next up was a small but impressive collection of local North Dakota pottery with the highlight for me being an elegant white buffalo vase by a Native American artist named Pahponee.
In the next room, there was a stuffed buffalo calf which was super cute in a sad sort of way.
The Last exhibit was about White Cloud a rare and beautiful white buffalo who lived most of her life at the museum before dying of natural causes. She gave birth to a white calf who still lives there today, and the majestic mother-child pair were a huge draw for the growing museum and in a way they still are.
White buffalo are considered sacred across many different native cultural traditions so its’s always considered a pretty exciting event when one is born, and the the rest of the exhibit was filled with press clippings and art inspired by White Cloud and other great white buffalo over the years.
After the Buffalo Museum, I made my way back to Fargo, where the big event in town was that the 45th president Donald Trump was stopping by for a big ol’ rally. While I’m no fan of the Donald and I certainly wasn’t going to pay any money to see him, I felt like I would be doing myself and this blog a disservice not to at least stop by and see what it was like. Trump’s election was a big motivator for this whole project, because it was a big wakeup call that I really had only been in one tiny little bubble of the country my whole life and maybe I didn’t understand how people all over were really feeling. To me, Trump is a-political, he’s just a silver spoon fed rich kid who always got what he wanted except his daddy’s love so he has big gaping narcissistic hole in heart which he can only fill with accomplishments and adoration that boost his ego at the expense of every single person around him. I don’t hate him because he’s conservative, he’s not even that, I hate him because he’s selfishness personified, one giant Id, who will burn down everything as long as he feels liked. He’s a con-man and bully, and I thought it was painfully obvious in every speech he gave, every ducked accusation, every scandal, but enough people saw something different that I had to entertain the possibility that I missed something. I didn’t know what I wasn’t seeing about this guy, but I think going to the rally cleared some of that up.
The first indicator that things were going to be really chaotic was that as I was pulling up to the stadium housing the rally, the parking was an absolute shitshow. People had just decided that they were not going to wait in long lines of cars for a free spot and started just pulling over and parking wherever the felt like so they could get a better spot in the line to get in the building. When I found an actual spot, I made way over to that line and it was wild. You can see in my photo that the crowd was massive (and very white) and trash was just spilling out of the garbage bins. I had no idea how long people had been out there, but it felt more like a tailgate party than a political event. I think that’s one thing Trump has done that most politicians can’t really pull off, in that he’s made things fun for supporters. He makes it a big party, he says all the things people are waiting for him to say, and he’s created a sense of community. Other politicians are killjoys and drips who talk about how we have to give a shit about our planet, pay our taxes, and stop killing people in the street. People feel like they’re being scolded for things they don’t feel like they’ve done (despite systemic problems in fact being everybody’s responsibility), and they don’t like it. Trump doesn’t do that. He says the things people hate suck, and that the things they like are great. He never really actually has a plan, but he makes his people feel good about themselves. Liberals don’t do that. And one big realization was that there is some truth to this in the way we categorize Trump supporters.
In Boston at least, people talk about Trump supporters like they are all poor and dumb, which is simply not true. That’s just one more way of demonizing poor people for the problems rich people create. The crowd was filled with Vineyard Vines, expensive Trump merchandise, and college sweatshirts. Poor and dumb, these people were not. They were largely educated and upper middle class (and again very very white), and that’s when it clicked for me. They’re not dumb, they will probably benefit from a Trump presidency. They see Trump, and they can see the next levels of wealth that are possibly in reach for them. Tax cuts might help their small businesses. If they’re religious, he’s promised to fight abortion legislature. By avoiding any sense of environmentalism, he’s saved them making expensive modifications to their businesses and transport. I always saw him as an out and out liar, but in a lot of ways he has kept some of his promises to his people. The problem is it’s short-sighted and it’s selfish. For me, even a huge amount of personal financial gain is not worth the gutting of public services, a lack of a plan for the changing planet, a lack of guaranteed health care, and the continued victimization of people for the color of their skin, their gender, their immigration status, or their sexual orientation. I don’t genuinely think that all his supporters don’t care about these issues, but they don’t prioritize them and they feel it’s something that can come second to their own advancement. Perhaps, there’s some merit in the “look out for yourself first” mentality. Truly, in theory you can do more good if you have more money and social capital, but Trump is, at the end of the day, incompetent and like Reagan and Bush before him, he’s just setting up a bubble that, at the time of me writing this, is already starting to burst. Trickle down economics has taken more jobs from Americans than Mexico could even dream of. Some people will benefit from his policies and ride out the crash better than they were before, but many will have short term gains and nothing to fall back on when it comes crashing down because again he’s gutted any kind of social protections.
You see it in the parking and the trash cans, people just really aren’t thinking about how the things that benefit them might not benefit others and might screw them over later when they get parking tickets or have to step over piles of trash. It’s scary, but I know from my psychology classes people (regardless of political affiliation) are fundamentally not good at delayed discounting, seeing that making sacrifices today will result in benefits in years to come. If the reward is too far away from the action, people bail for something that makes them feel good now. It’s a human thing to do unfortunately. That’s the great libertarian myth that people are fundamentally good at looking out for our own interests. We are actually very bad at this on both personal and macro levels, and that’s why psychologists exist. We are terrible as a species at seeing how we get stuck in patterns that hurt us, we don’t have good and complete perspectives on ourselves nor our actions. At one point a group of protestors (the sad small group on the right, bless their hearts) started marching and chanting across the street, and one guy said “Can you believe they have kids with them? Just recycling whatever their parents say.” while his daughter stood next to him in a “Make America Great Again” shirt. Just because you can identify a problem in others doesn’t mean you can see it in yourselves. Another woman in the crowd was being pushed in a wheel chair by a Caribbean nurse, and all I could think was “What do you hate more your health care or the immigration policy that let your healthcare worker come here?” but I’m sure she doesn’t see it that way, her situation is different. Almost nobody, not even the garbage white supremacists Trump refuses to openly denounce, thinks of themselves as “the problem”. That’s the mistake I think people on my end of the political spectrum make too often. We demonize over attempting to understand the very human thought processes that get you there. And on my end it can be hard not to feel the urge to demonize some of the more egregiously horrible stuff, like defending police brutality and gun lobbyists and racism, but when we lash out it makes people double down. They think “I’m not a racist, I’m not a bigot, I’m a good person” and when liberals say otherwise it hurts and it rings false to their own self-conceptions so it makes us seem like unwarranted persecutors so why should they believe anything else we have to say. I don’t agree, at all, but I understand. A lot of the t-shirts said stuff along the lines of “Make Liberals Cry Again”, so I think that that’s another big part of the equation. People feel like they’ve been mocked and belittled by the left, and they’re not totally wrong, so in some ways Trump represents comeuppance. A big “we’ve had to deal with your shit, how do you like it?”.
The comedian in me wanted to do some fun man-on-the-street stuff and film it. I was going to pretend to be a high school newspaper reporter (because of my little boy body) and ask people questions like “Is Trump a great American dictator or the greatest?” but when I filmed myself asking “Is this the line for the Kenny Chesney concert?” I didn’t feel good about it. I still thought it was funny, but I realized I was the asshole here. This was their event, even if I didn’t love it, and I was coming in and making fun of them rather than engaging in conversation. It’s simply not nice, and while maybe being mean isn’t tantamount to banning Muslims from entering the country or putting babies in cages, it’s something I had a choice not to do. I can’t criticize people, and then do the same thing I’m criticizing, it only legitimatizes the things I disagree with, so I stopped. While I can’t hide my disdain for the current president, one small thing I could do was just not be a dick to people who I didn’t really know. So I left, the event wasn’t for me, and I wasn’t going to be changing anybody’s minds. All I was going to do there was fill myself with impotent anger. I’m not saying political comedy or the protestors are wrong, I think it’s important to voice dissent, but it’s also important to know yourself and pick your battles. I did roll down my windows and blast the album of semi-songs Bernie Sanders recorded in the 80s while I driving away though so that put a smile on my smug liberal face.
After the rally, I had a lot of thoughts and feelings to process so I did the holy trinity of working things out by getting some pizza, some beer, and calling my mom. The pizza came courtesy of great local spot called Rhombus Guys which had a variety of inventive toppings, perfectly proportioned personal pizzas (say that three times fast), and very reasonable prices. While one big draw might be their fine selection of local meats, I realized that it might have been about a week since I’d eaten a vegetable so I went with their Backpacker Pizza which came with spinach, tomato, artichoke, mushroom, red and green bell peppers, feta, mozzarella, and roasted garlic. It was divine and I could pretend it was sort of healthy so I was a pretty happy camper. To wash it down, I kept things simple but solid with a light refreshing Original Lager from Fargo Brewing Company.
After dinner and talking to my mum, I made my way to the night’s open mic at a place called the Pickled Parrot. The bar was a classic divey sports bar, but I think because of the rally most people were either there or staying clear of the city center in preparation of the post-rally rush so it was a very light crowd. There were a handful of college friends drinking who got roped into being an audience, and then me and three other comics going up to perform.
The host, who’s name I sadly didn’t write down, was a very nice guy and he did his best bringing as much energy as he could to the half-hearted proceedings. He mostly did what I think of as “bro comedy” talking about wild drinking and drug stories which seemed liked a pretty reasonable swing for a crowd of sleepy drinkers, but I have to admit isn’t my personal favorite style of comedy even though he did it well.
I went up next and did decidedly fine. I got a few solid laughs, but it would be a stretch to call it a great set. More like something that they sat through and didn’t hate, then something they were actively enjoying, which is sometimes pretty par for the course with comedy.
The other two comics were two of my favorites that I meet in my days in Fargo, Chase Raeder and Josh Dullea, and they continued to impress me as both strong performers and generally really great dudes. Chase had my favorite line of the night with “I've been improving my life recently. I stopped passing out on toilets. And started passing out on bidets.” and Josh did a largely improvised set about just getting out of the Trump rally which he had to go to with his dad. His dad wanted to be there, and he wouldn’t to people watch, but it was a complex feeling having someone you love support someone you really don’t. For something that had literally just happened to him, it was a pretty solid and engrossing set despite not having time to really polish it, though I’ll admit thinking about the rally bummed me out a bit. Fortunately one good thing about dive bars everywhere is that PBR is rarely more than $4.
After the comedy was done, I spent a while just hanging out and talking to Chase and Josh, sharing stories, retelling our favorite Norm Macdonald jokes, and just having a really great time. I was looking forward to seeing them at the next day’s mic, but I never did due to some unforeseen incidents that I’ll touch on in the next post and I’ve always felt bad since that I never got to say a proper goodbye to them and the other really great Fargo comics who made my time there really happy.
After the mic, I made my way to my Air BnB for the night which was actually in a loft over the Red Raven Espresso Parlor where last night’s open mic was so that was a fun bit coincidence, and made me pretty excited to wake up in the morning because I knew there’d be great coffee exactly 0 feet away from me.
Favorite Random Sightings: A billboard with the shocking slogan “Get buck naked in West Fargo”; an advertisement that said “Dump Salad”; a motel called the C'mon Inn; and the craziest billboard I may have seen in the whole country which said “84 million Americans have pre-diabetes even puppy lovers” (The more you know)
Regional Observation: Minnesota and Michigan are probably more famous for their lakes, but I’ve gotta say driving through central North Dakota there were a lot of pretty great lakes in their own right.
Albums Listened To: You’re Dead! by Flying Lotus (one of the first largely electronic albums that really won me over with its weird, intricate, jazzy constructions); Younger than Yesterday by the Byrds (a classic); Zen Arcade by Hüsker Dü (an influential album that really challenged the idea of what punk could be with a over-arching narrative and folk, psychedelic-rock, and jazz influences beyond just pummeling hardcore punk); Zopilote Machine by The Mountain Goats (just the songs my sister liked best since she sent it to me)
Joke of the Day:
While visiting a water show a tourist asked one of the divers, "Why do scuba divers always fall backward off their boats?
To which the diver replied, "If they fell forward, they'd still be in the boat."
Songs of the Day:
Such a beautiful music video
This is an insane amount of star power on one stage, at one point Clapton steps on Dylan’s entrance pretty badly and then runs away which I thought was very funny to see unfold
Wild that this is a Byrd’s cover
“One of us, I’m not saying who, has got rocks in her head” is a dang brilliant line