Not too bad, then.

After years of graduate school in Colorado and at the University of Illinois, my wife and I moved to downeast Maine where for three years I taught at a small university. Despite the fact that I am an artist whose painting specialty was nourished by the incredible textures of Maine, we are not small town or coastal types, so in 1985, during our third year there we planned a move back to Illinois.  We were thinking Chicago, what with its robust opportunities for fine art and illustration.  Our planning was interrupted by the head librarian at the university pulling me into his office to excitedly point out a position listing for an art professor at a Concordia College in someplace called Moorhead, Minnesota.  I had never heard of Moorhead; his assertion that it was part of the pleasant community of Fargo-Moorhead did little to settle my vague but definite unease that anything associated with the term "Fargo" must involve stagecoaches, rustic surroundings and general discomfort (these associations did, of course, predate the 1996 movie which might nowadays suggest other, equally unpalatable associations).  He maintained that the community and the college were favorites of his, and that we would surely enjoy both.  Our research in response to our questions about the nature of the place and its people told us that west central Minnesota was settled by Swedes and Germans – but primarily Norwegians – and that the Red River Valley was incredibly flat and even more incredibly cold.  Hoping for a meatier description than is told by these general facts, I asked what the place was really like.  "Well," he said, "you listen to Prairie Home Companion.  It's Lake Wobegon. People 'go with' and things are often 'not too bad,' or even 'not too bad, then.'  There are extroverted Norwegians who, during a conversation, look at the other person's shoes.  The things Garrison Keillor talks about – the strong women and church suppers with hotdish and Norwegian bachelor farmers – are really there."  It required very little time after moving to Moorhead to discover that what we took to be only good radio fare was, in fact, the absolute and charming truth.  The truly amazing thing is that ALL of it was true.

The information we had gathered about the area did raise our collective eyebrow, in that my wife, Pat, is half Hispanic, and this area in 1985 was only 2% non-Caucasian.  When I came to interview for the position at Concordia, I asked Pat to come along.  Not for the actual interview, of course, but to see how she thought she might adapt to living in a place that was 98% white – a place so very different from her native Oklahoma.  After a day of me interviewing on campus and Pat bounding about the community, we traded thoughts.  "OK, from what I've seen, the community is as advertised . . . and 98% is pretty white," I noted.  "Do you think you would be comfortable here?"  Her reply was succinct and honest: "This place isn't white – it's BLONDE."  But she added that she had the sense that people here were genuine and sweet, and that she'd like to give it a try.  Try we did: we found her perception to be spot on, and the open and genuine sweetness that we found when we first moved here 23 years ago is still the norm in the more diverse and populous community of today.

When I interviewed at Concordia, it was very early April, and happened to be about 70 degrees.  It was sunny and pleasant early in the day, but there arose a steady and stiff wind that blew throughout that day and into the next.  When I was asked to offer any questions I had regarding the college or the area, I asked whether the wind blew all the time.  "Oh, no," said the Art department chairperson, "of course not."  With that, she moved on to another, wholly non-meteorological, subject. A cross-country relocation and a couple of weeks into the fall semester later, a day of strong and steady wind brought me, stumbling and disheveled, banging through a doorway to find the department chairperson.  "It doesn't blow all the time, eh?"  I asked.  "Now, David," she smiled, "it was a bit of a lie, but I thought if I told you it was this windy you might not agree to come.  Besides, it's pretty much like when my husband (who was for many years chairperson of the English department at neighboring Moorhead State University) was working to build his department, I would overhear him on the telephone working on an uncommitted faculty candidate, saying, 'Well, yes, that's true . . . but it's a DRY cold.'"

It is a dry cold.  And parts of Lake Wobegon show up all over hereabouts, all of the time.  And all in all, it's not too bad . . . then.