ND Day 4 - Big Gardens, Big Turtles, and Big Setbacks
Today I started out by getting coffee at the Red Raven Espresso Parlor since my Air BnB for the night before was in the loft above the shop so it was too convenient not to go. Even without the convenience, it was one of my favorite cafes in the city with its refreshing iced coffee and artsy atmosphere and I’d been wanting to come back since the open mic that had been hosted there.
With fuel in hand, I started making my way right up to the edge of the Canadian border to see a place called the International Peace Garden which I’d been told was a North Dakota must-see. It was a nearly 4 hour drive though from Fargo so along the way I stopped at a cozy roadside diner called Coffee Cottage Cafe in the town of Rugby to get some more coffee and some lunch. I went with the Crab Melt sandwich, and if you’re thinking cheesy shellfish in the middle of a land-locked state is a pretty bold choice, you’re probably right and I don’t know what the hell I was thinking but it actually ended up being a really good sandwich and somehow far from the worst choice I would make this day.
Continuing along the way the garden, I passed by an impressive bit of public art in the town of Dunseith called the W’eel Turtle. The stoic shelled reptile is made from over 2,000 car rims that a local motel owner named George Gottbrecht had saved in his garage for some reason. Gottbrecht enlisted an artist named Curt Halvorsen to turn his junk into something special and the turtle was born. The final sculpture comes in at 18 ft. tall and 40 ft. long, and my favorite thing about it is that at one point the head was motorized so it would move but too many people wanted to climb it so they had to take out the motor for safety. I didn’t actually get a chance to stop and take a photo with the big guy, but luckily some fellow travelers on the internet snagged this shot of him in all his bumpy glory:
From there it was on to the International Peace Garden, a 3.65-square-mile garden on the border of Dunseith, ND and Manitoba built in 1934 as a tribute to the enduring peace between Canada and the United States (minus that pesky War of 1812). Roughly half of the garden is on the Canadian side, while the other half is on the US side, with an extravagant sunken gardens at the center where the two countries meet. Visitors from either side of the border don’t have to go through customs to enter the garden since it’s a shared space, but you do have to go through customs going out something at this point in the day I was blissfully unaware of.
The first thing that struck me about the garden was just how expansive it was. I started by driving along a road that looped through the Canadian side, and it was just rolling green hills and forests as far as the eye could see. Plus even though it’s a top attraction in the state, it’s still at least a 2-3 hour drive from any larger city in ND so between the sheer size of the gardens and the relative remoteness of the location, you really feel like you’re pretty alone in nature and it truly is very peaceful.
Keeping the peace train a-going (my apologies to Cat Stevens), my first stop within the grounds was the Peace Chapel, a lovely modernist non-denominational place of reflection with cool, calming architecture, a gentle hazy light from the stained glass doorways, and hundreds of famous quotes about peace scrawled across the walls. It was really lovely, but one danger about being that soothing a space is that there’s a chance that if you sit on one of those benches you might fall right asleep.
After the peace chapel, I kept driving along the loop road and just over the US side of the border I came to my next stop. It turned out to be the North American Museum of the Game Warden , but I initially stopped because I thought the symmetric art-deco inspired design of the building was really neat and I wanted a better look. I really liked how the further you stepped back from the corner it started to look like one continuous flat surface which is a fun optical illusion to slap on a museum.
Since I stopped anyway I decided to check out the museum. I’ll be honest, because I’ve never hunted or even really fished (we used to fish in the pond at the camp for kids with special needs I used to work at but between myself and the campers it was pretty rare that we caught anything) I wasn’t 100% sure what a game warden really was. I guess I assumed it wasn’t too different from being a park ranger, but it’s more intense than I would have expected since if a warden is going to arrest anyone it’s going to usually be an armed poacher or hunter which can get dicey (and now that we’re living in a post-Tiger King world I think we all have a new respect for just how freaking insane some exotic animal people are). And even without the human element, wardens are often tasked with watching over big chunks of natural lands totally on their own so even if just a normal accident happens they could be pretty far out from civilization which could be scary at worst and just sort of lonely at best.
My favorite part of the museum was that it gave a great opportunity for local artists to really showcase different works inspired by the various natural worlds of North America:
Naturally my favorite piece of art was this quilt which featured a giant turtle holding up international flags like a big shelled cheerleader. I found out later that the gardens are near the Turtle Mountains so that’s probably why there was so much turtle imagery but at the time it was very fun to think different artists just thought of it as the most peaceful animal.
By far the most baffling piece of “art” was this “humorous” poster that feels like it’s trying to be an inside joke for game wardens but actually ended up being for no one. The kid is cute, but he also looks genuinely upset about the whole situation. I truly don’t know what anyone involved was thinking.
Last but not least, there were some excellent stuffed bears from around the continent and one statue of a Smokey the Bear-esque game warden who is trying to look tough but the illusion is ruined somewhat by what I can only describe as a sassy girl pose with his hands.
After the museum, I hiked through the woods a bit and came across this beautifully rustic stone picnic area:
The view from the little stone hut really captures what a pleasant day I had for this excursion:
Next I made my way to the main Formal Garden area which was the real show stopper of the area. It was such an explosion of different colors from all the garden’s collection of over 80,000 flowers, that each step brought new sights, scents, and joys. The site also serves as a test garden to see if some plants can grow in North American so some of the flowers might just be blooming for the very first time on this side of the globe. As impressive as everything was, I was visiting at the end of June so I feel like the Spring bloomers were starting to wane and the Summer bloomers were only starting to open up, so if I’d gone at a different part of the year it might have been even more tremendous. It’s a testament to how stunning the area is that even in a period of transition it still feels like a really special space.
A popular highlight of the garden’s collections is a giant 18 ft. long floral clock whose unique clock-face is made up of between 2000-5000 flowers and features a new design each year. It was initially installed in 1966 as a replica of the Bulova Floral Clock at Berne, Switzerland, but a new more design unique to the International Peace Garden was unveiled in 2005 designed by a team from St. Louis, MO. Unfortunately for me the flowers for the clock are generally planted in mid-June so they were only just starting to bloom, so I didn’t get to see the full effect of the design but since I’d never seen anything quite like it before, I was still mighty impressed.
Complementing the gardens was an extensive and visually dazzling array of water features with jets, peace-inspired sculptures, and pleasant stonework guiding it up and down the grounds. The picture on the right in particular, I think, gives a great sense of just how massive the gardens are:
The centerpiece of the water features is huge octagonal pond with a gently misting fountain roughly right at the center of the entire garden complex so if you look out in any direction you’re guaranteed to be treated to dynamic vistas.
Last but not least, it wasn’t open currently but I had to snap a picture of this sleek modernist greenhouse and interpretive center before getting ready to make the 3 hour drive back to Fargo.
It was a going to be a long ride, my coffee was wearing off, and I wanted to make it back to Fargo in time for the open mic that night, so I was a little thrown off when I got stopped at customs as I was leaving the garden. I now know that’s customary, but because I didn’t have to go through customs going in, since you don’t leave the country by more than a couple hundred yards while you’re in the garden, I didn’t expect it. And then I started to worry, because close to five weeks ago while I was in Colorado, I had assumed I would be being a bad tourist if I didn’t at least peruse Denver’s famous dispensaries. I bought one joint and some “gourmet” peanut cup edibles because who could resist something gourmet. The problem is the gourmet chocolates basically melted right away, and while I don’t have anything against marijuana I’m just not a particularly heavy smoker of anything so as soon as they started questioning me at the border, all I could think about was whether or not I had finished the joint and whether I had thrown it away the last time I cleaned my car (something that happened clearly not as regularly as it should have). My heart started sinking before they asked me anything about what was in my car, because I knew as soon as they saw I had MA plates, got a look at the absolute mess in my backseat, and raised their eyebrows to high heaven when I honestly answered I was trying to get to a comedy show in Fargo, my car was going to get searched whatever I said. My sister likes to make fun of me for what I said next, and rightfully so, because when they asked if I had any legal or illegal drugs in the car (strange wording so I remember it vividly because I also wasn’t sure if I was supposed to say my anti-depressants as a legal drug) I opted to answer with the probably much too honest “I don’t know” all but guaranteeing my car getting searched. It definitely wasn’t the absolute smartest thing in the world, but, unlike a routine police inspection, border officers don’t need a warrant or even probable cause to search a car if they deem it necessary so while it was a stupid thing to say, I had already assumed I was getting searched anyway so my logic was I might as well not make them angrier by lying about it. Plus, there was a reasonable enough chance that there was nothing in my car so at most they’d just think I was really strange.
No such luck, they found .5 grams left of the joint (roughly 1/5 of a teaspoon) and the melted chocolates somewhere in my trash pile. Ironically if I’d actually been more of a smoker there would have been nothing in the car because I don’t think it takes being a pothead to realize the average rate of smoking a single joint is usually much less than 5 weeks.
Much stranger and more frustratingly, they also found a shoebox full of brownies that my mom had given me when I drove off in January which had almost instantly rolled under my seat and been forgotten about. They were a disgusting green-ish grey color and the consistency of stale chalk, and somehow they all also tested positive for marijuana. This confused me, and this confused the border patrol, because I had been, if anything, too honest about everything else so I’m pretty sure they really did genuinely believe that my mom gave me the brownies. They assumed my mom gave me pot brownies and didn’t tell me which they thought was pretty funny (I was less amused), but my suspicion from having taken psychopharmacology is that it was likely a chemical called anandamide in chocolate which is very similar structurally to cannabinoids under normal conditions so I’m guessing if you leave said chocolate under a car seat for six months you probably mess with the proteins enough that it would be close enough to set off most first pass drug tests. I’ve also since read other people’s horror stories about having regular chocolates test positive for weed so it seems like I’m not the only one, and if anything I was incredibly lucky that things didn’t take any turns for the worse.
Unfortunately for me, the border guards ever so kindly informed me that (cue full midwestern accent) “they would have let me off with the roach, but because ya had that whole mountain of edibles there they were going to have to call it in” My non-weed was getting me in more trouble than my actual weed! Still at no point did anybody actually tell me I was being arrested, which I’m not sure is totally legal but I guess they assumed it should have been obvious to me. I didn’t think so though as I was still holding out hope that because I had bought the weed legally in the state I got it from and it was such a small amount that I would just be getting a fine. I was wrong, but it took close to three hours of sitting at the border station waiting for a police officer in the nearest big town (45 minutes away) to have enough of a lull in her regular schedule to drive up and pick me up.
I should say up front that my experience getting arrested is hugely indicative of the different privileges that I experience as a white man in this country who also happens to look a lot like a little boy. My experience was so tame and relatively peaceful and it was still one of the scariest things that ever happened to me, so it breaks my heart that so many people that don’t look like me have gone through so many hellish experiences under similar circumstances. For some reason, lots of people on the internet (even in my own home town’s facebook page) like to balk at the idea of white privilege being a thing at all let alone a major factor in the criminal justice system, but if you are a white person and feel like that is true, then I strongly urge you to get arrested and see how you are treated. In my case, my arresting officer knew I’d never been arrested before so she helped me adjust my body so that my cuffs wouldn’t cut into my wrists while I was sitting in the car on the 45 minute drive to the station. She knew bail was cash only so she drove me to an ATM on the correct assumption that I didn’t have $300 cash on me, and when I couldn’t reach the numbers with my hands cuffed behind my back she put in my PIN for me. This was happening on a Thursday and the earliest court date was on Monday so if I hand’t been able to post bail I would have had to spend 4 nights in jail, and I happened to learn through chit-chatting on our drive that currently the police department in the area was embroiled in a small war with some of the gangs on the nearby Reservation because police officers had killed a gang member in a drug bust and then the gang retaliated by killing a police officer so currently nobody was happy and it wouldn’t have been a very fun four nights for me in that police station. It’s fucking insane to me, that the difference between me walking out of there that day and me having to spend four days and nights in a confined space with violent criminals was just one person feeling bad for me and going out of there way to help me because she saw that, and I quote, “You cried like a little bitch when I put the cuffs on ya so I figured you couldn’t even last one hour in jail.” The way I was treated was beyond good in the grand scheme of things, but it’s so so broken that it just happened because of the whims of a kind officer not because it’s standard practice. It doesn’t even have to be based on something as extreme as racism, all she had to do was not feel like trying to find an ATM and that would have been it for me (though I did overhear some officers referring to Native Americans as “prairie n*****s” so if you don’t think race is a factor you’re beyond naïve”). Or if I just hadn’t had enough money to post bail, which I wouldn’t have had at most points in my life, I would have been screwed. And this is before I was even tried so you could in theory be not guilty but poor and still end up in jail until your arraignment, and I think it’s disgusting that we currently have a system where you can be put in significant bodily and psychological danger just for not having money but it’s fine for a rich murderer to walk free if they can afford it. That should make anyone mad, and it’s really sad to me that people are quick to dig in their heels at the very idea of prison and police reform because they know or are related to “good police officers”. I have relatives who are good people and police officers, I was arrested by a good police officer, and we shouldn’t be reliant on good people making sure the law is carried out humanely, the law itself and the systems in place should be good and humane full stop. Clearly right now they are not. Nobody died or got injured or got more than a little embarrassed in my story but I think it shows at least a dozen points where things could have easily gone in different directions and sadly the news is full of examples when it did. I’m very thankful for Officer Ann, pictured below (her idea after I posted bail because “this’ll look on your blog there”) and I got lucky but somehow I would feel a whole lot better if we lived in a world where luck wasn’t such a deciding factor in something as major as the criminal justice system.
On a lighter note, Officer Ann was off duty after processing me (and overhearing a very hysterical phone call home to my mom where my sister was able to finally convince her not to fly to North Dakota because they might think she’s my “dealer”) so she continued to be awfully kind to me and drive me back the 30 miles to the border station where my car was. We stopped along the way for dinner and ice cream from Dairy Queen. This is the point when I’m telling a punchier, funnier version of this in my stand up, where I again reiterate that I have something beyond white privilege which is “white looking like your arresting officer’s baby boy privilege” and I essentially gained a new protective North Dakota mom. I tried to seem cool by mentioning that I used to work at a Dairy Queen, but at this point the bar for me being cool was pretty unreachable. We did bump into a young Native American woman having dinner with her family, whom Ann checked in with because she had been arrested a year or so ago for drugs but Ann always felt like she was a good kid who just had just gotten stuck with a shit boyfriend so she liked to keep in touch with her and help her when she could, and now the young woman was going to college! This again solidified to me that Ann really was a genuinely good person, doing her job for all the right reasons, but it makes me so sad that there aren’t more systems in place to reward that and make that the norm.
After Ann dropped me off with a very mom warning to “not do anything stupid” before my court date on Monday, I figured I had well and truly missed my open mic for the night and I really didn’t want to be on my own so I called up a friend of mine who happened to be staying in Bismarck doing an internship at a law office working with Native American groups to fight the Dakota Access Pipeline (my friend is a much better person than me). I was supposed to meet up with him tomorrow, but I asked if he’d mind me coming a night early and he graciously offered me a futon.
It was a three hour drive from the border to the state capitol along very dimly lit rural roads, and just when I was getting kind of fatigued by the dreary, dark landscape, a bobcat lunged out of some tall grass and smashed it’s head into my right front bumper. Today just really wasn’t my day. I don’t know if it ran into the grass across the street or if it had rolled under my car but I got a pretty good look at its ferocious face as it lunged out of the darkness so I was very sure that it was a wild animal and it wouldn’t be a great idea for me to get out and check on it. When I did eventually get far enough a way to check out my car the whole right side of the bumper was basically hanging on by a thread. It’s a testament to how eventful the first part of this day was that sometime when I tell my arrest story I forget that I was also attacked by a bobcat which is not usually an afterthought when you try to remember your day.
As I was approaching Bismarck, the skies just opened up and it started to torrentially down pour because why wouldn’t it. I was close enough to my friend’s place that it didn’t make the driving too bad, but like a chump I parked in front of the wrong place so I got absolutely soaked trying to find the right house. Luckily, Julian, who was one of the funniest young comics at Harvard just a few years below me, was waiting for me with some hot tea and I got to end the day sharing good jokes and good company with him and his roommate, Sarah, who also turned out to be a wonderfully kind and funny person. After such a rough day, I can’t really express how much it meant to me spend that time drying off in their kitchen just chatting and laughing before bed.
Favorite Random Observations: a window ad on a restaurant that just said “Hot Pork” (really to the point); a sign that said “Help Wanted Part Tim”; Generous Jerry’s Fireworks (thank goodness he’s so generous)
Regional Observation: While it was raining, I also got to see my first mid-western lightning storm and it was shockingly different than what I was accustomed to on the East Coast. Rather than distinct vertical bolts, it was like huge sheets of lighting would just spread out horizontally across the sky. It blew my mind.
Albums Listened To: 1 by the Beatles (we’ve now made it beyond the alphabet); #1 Record by Big Star (an incredibly confident debut that got almost completely buried by terrible management at the time it was released); 01 Unknown Album (a hodge podge of random singles from disparate bands like Kings of Nuthin, Murder by Death, Outkast, and Tupac); 1:3:1 by Dufus (just the song Little Bitta Reggae); #2 by Farewell Continental (just the sweetly named song Son of a Bitch Son of a Whore); 4- Trackaganza! by Chris Murray (a low-fi self produced folk-ska album by an underrated Canadian)
Joke of the Day:
The owner of a drug store walks in to find a guy leaning heavily against a wall.
The owner asks the clerk, "What's with that guy over there by the wall?"
The clerk says, "Well, he came in here this morning to get something for his cough. I couldn't find the cough syrup, so I gave him an entire bottle of laxative."
The owner says, "You idiot! You can't treat a cough with a bottle of laxatives!"
The clerk says, "Of course, you can! Look at him; he's afraid to cough!
Songs of the Day:
I watched this movie A LOT growing up, might explain a few things
a great, sad, pretty song
a very mean punk sing along
Sweet dork