Observations From a Wedding
On making your tribe, what Fargo folks are really up to and where the heck the wind came from
“Where are you from and what do you do?” Some people think it’s gauche to ask, and it makes you sound like a quiz show host prompting a panelist to reduce themselves to a tidy bio.
Well, what else are we supposed to talk about?
“Hey there, stranger, how about that current political situation? Boy, that fellow we got in office is just gangbuster-keen, no? I’m loving all the legislation!” No. Are we supposed to talk about religion? “Say, I couldn’t help but notice you had an Orthodox cross. Do you really believe the icons are a direct manifestation of the saints, or do they strike you as just a medium for contemplation?” No. That’s a third-drink conversation, if you’re having an amiable discussion on things metaphysical.
There’s nothing wrong with where someone is from. You can ask if a person was “born in these parts, or did you choose this fair corner of the country?” If the response is some place you don’t know, you can ask and learn. Really! Didn’t know DeSmutt, Kansas, was the fennel-oil capital of the country. When you ask a person from Highway 10 what they do, they’ll often reply with a dismissive tone, as if to say nothing anyone could possibly care about, really. “Oh, I’m in the bacon line.” But no, I am interested! Do you distribute? Manage a plant? You cornered the Swine Market and you have a million squealers in a vast industrial barn up the road?
So. That said, I recently found myself in Arizona at a wedding, and almost everyone was from Fargo, my hometown. You’d think it would be a relief to drop the whole where-you-from bit, because we’re all Fargoans past or present, right? No, of course not. The minute you establish a tribe, you create the conditions for subdivision, strife and factional friction. My nephew, for example, brought his girlfriend, whom I’d never met. I asked if she was North, South or West. North Fargo was where I grew up—unpretentious, lots of postwar ramblers. The people who put on airs and wanted to swan around with their kind were more likely to live on the South side. West meant West Fargo, which once meant slaughterhouses and dirt fields, and now means offices, industrial parks, software, hospitals and cul-de-sac nirvana.
“No,” she smiled sweetly, “I’m from Moorhead.”
I assumed a stricken look, recovered somewhat and shot my nephew a questioning look. “Dude? Moorhead?”
“I know,” he said.
“A spud?”
“She’s a keeper, though.”
“Okay, well, we’ll see.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with being from Moorhead, Minnesota, Fargo’s sister city across the Red River. But those of us in Fargo were united in the belief that Fargo was better, just as Southside Moorhead people looked down on Northside Moorhead.
Of course, to the North, it’s Grand Forks (North Dakota) vs. East Grand Forks (Minnesota), but if it ever comes to blows, it’ll be the two Grand Forks against a united Fargo-Moorhead. And all of us versus Manitoba.
The most interesting part of the evening was the smoker out front, where the men congregated to wave around cigars and pretend as if they regularly lit up a lot and discussed the Ways of the World. I had to ask: What do you do? And the professions rolled out, one after the other: an agent for obscure financial instruments, in-house store design for a chain of sporting-goods stores, web designer, warehouse manager, lake-district bar owner, petroleum distribution and, my favorite, residential glass fabricator. He was one of those guys who waves away the question—eh, no one cares about glass, it’s just there, as long as you can see through it, who cares—but once I started asking questions like a good journalist, he opened up, and I got a glimpse of the State of the Industry. They used to put argon between the two panes, but that’s on the way out. Now they create a vacuum. The new LCD-embedded panes go opaque with the touch of a finger, a simple electrical connection.
Woe to those who think Fargo’s nothing but ya-shure-you-betcha types chewing on a stalk of wheat; they’re perfecting translucent microscopic LCD embeds.
There was a lot of talk about moving out West, maybe. Arizona has a powerful poll on the people of the plains who start to think it might be nice not to fall on the ice when you’re just walking the dog. A guy I knew took a fall, clapped his noggin, lost his sense of smell. Just like that. One thing kept coming up in the discussions about getting weary of the weather: the wind.
The wind? I asked. I mean, yeah, we had wind, there’s nothing between us and Canada, but I never really thought back to childhood winters and thought that damned eternal wind. But everyone brought it up. Was it worse? Had the earth’s rotation picked up?
Maybe I left Fargo before I could notice. Maybe if I’d stayed I would have felt an additional 20, 30, 40 years of wind erode my soul. It does something to you when the wind seems to be pushing you south your entire life. You end up in Arizona, like a leaf blown into the corner of the porch, and you dry up in the sun until another gust from an unexpected direction smushes you to dust.
Well, you gotta go sometime, and it would be nice to get some golf in before you do.
Maybe you’ll end up in an old folks’ home in Arizona, and that wouldn’t be bad; not so much wind. You hope if it comes to that you’d get a nice nurse. And one day she’d ask: Where are you from? What did you do? It really does all come down to that.
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