Our deployment blog as we leave tropical Washington, D.C., and head to Fargo, N.D., for a year.
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Leaving our mark...
The long winter is finally over. Not because it's gorgeous out, but because North Dakota finally has an elementary school listed in the Wikipedia: Bennett Elementary School.
The entry was created by Katie's fourth-grade class. I came in and demonstrated what the Wikipedia was (about half of them knew already), and noted that Bennett had no entry, indeed, that not one elementary school in North Dakota had an entry. The kids took the bait, and we researched the article over two more class sessions, the last one just before school let out for the summer.
I thought it was a cool project, because it gave the kids a good lesson on what the Wikipedia is, how its entries are created, and, more generally, how to research, source, and construct an article of their own on a topic they're actually a little interested in. And at the end of the day, instead of having worked on a project just for the sake of working on a project, we have added a little bit to the world's store of knowledge.
Katie and I took on the task of assembling the research into the article. I was afraid for awhile that we would get distracted by summer and head home to Maryland without getting the damn thing published. But we managed to get it out. Now I'm afraid that the entry will be deemed insufficiently noteworthy for inclusion in the apparently-not-quite-bottomless Wikipedia pit. We'll see.
The senior class of Falls Church, Virginia's Marshall High School were told by their graduation speaker last week to avoid Fargo at all costs.
"My advice to you today," said one of the school's history teachers, Tim Kane: "Work hard, believe in something, be passionate and be persistent in whatever you do or you will end up in Fargo."
"Yes, Fargo, North Dakota — the armpit of civilization. Why Fargo, you ask? Because for me, Fargo, North Dakota, is the physical and spiritual symbol of what happens to you when you die inside."
Awwww... that's not very nice. After all, the East Coast doesn't have to look this far for world-class armpits – New Jersey alone has several outstanding ones, including my native city of Camden. Certain parts of Richmond, in Kane's home state, come to mind as well.
How fitting that the address took place in DAR Constitution Hall, a symbol of ignorance in Washington ever since its managers prevented Marian Anderson from singing there in 1939 because she was black. Eleanor Roosevelt, disgusted by the racism, resigned from the DAR and arranged for Miss Anderson to sing on Easter Sunday morning from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to a rapt crowd of 75,000 and a national radio audience. Where's Eleanor when you need her?
Kane's comments were reported this morning in the Forum in a column by its editor, who printed Kane's work phone number and e-mail address, and urged his readers to teach him about Fargo and to "[r]emember to follow his own advice and 'believe in something, be passionate and be persistent in whatever you do.'”
Neither I nor the Forum's editor, apparently, feel like having much of a sense of humor about this. I think it's because the weather has been gorgeous this past week; today is a high in the mid-80s with 50% humidity. We are totally headed to the pool for the day the moment it opens, and I'm not going to take anyone saying anything bad about this town today.
After a week of heavy rain leading up to the Fargo AirSho, organizers were getting a little nervous; advance (nonrefundable) ticket sales were slow. “Whether we put a show on or not, we have $300,000 worth of expense,” one of the coordinators told the Forum. “All we ask is that people take the risk with us.”
The appeal to Fargo's community spirit proved unnecessary, as Saturday morning was beautiful, and about 15,000 people showed up to see the sights, the air show's best day ever.
Also helping was publicity from the Navy's Blue Angels, who took flight practice at low altitudes all over Fargo this past week, providing a window-rattling running reminder that this town was about to have an air show. Jen and I had lunch on the south side of town on Thursday, and the formation of four Angels swept over several times as we ate. Our waitress said the day before they had come by so low and loud they caused sympathetic vibrations in the kitchen's exhaust hoods, which had scared the hell out of one of the cooks. But she said this with a smile on her face – I get the impression that people thought it was pretty cool. The lunchtime flyover did provide the final bit of convincing I needed to drag the family to the show.
I laid down the rules for the kids as we took the shuttle bus from the parking lot: "No matter who asks you, no matter how nicely they ask, no one is joining the Air Force or Navy today. Got that?" We found a relatively dry spot in some still-soggy grass, and set up on our blanket:
One of the planes demonstrated was the Air Force's A-10 Thunderbird II. The announcer claimed the plane featured "devastatingly good looks." Nice try. Even I know that the A-10 – better known as the "Warthog" – is as ugly as it is effective. And boy, is it effective. Up at the top of this post is the A-10 flying in tandem with the P-51 Mustang, a legendary – and good-looking – fighter plane from WWII.
We were also treated to a B-52 flyby:
The announcer encouraged us to walk around the rest of the show, as we could see the action from anywhere, as they had "The world's largest theater screen – the big blue North Dakota sky."
Katie and Joey and I took a look around the displays. They crawled into a few helicopter cockpits and then took turns controlling a missile battery:
I gotta say, I had not seen that before. Best thing was, there were no lines – they just walked into the cockpits or grabbed the stick and started aiming.
Show organizers zipped around in GEM electric vehicles and on oversized Segways with rugged all-terrain tires, the latter being something I had not seen before. One display as we walked in was a bunch of really big pieces of farming equipment. I tried to convince Joey that they were airplanes, not tractors. "We're at an airshow, Joe. Why would they have tractors here?" I almost had him going.
The highlight of the show was, of course, the Blue Angels:
It had been unclear for awhile whether they would perform, as they had lost an Angel in an airshow crash in April. They apparently asked an alumnus to return, and performed with all six slots filled.
The Blue Angels are kind of a funny thing. They're very fast, and very loud, and they like to show off how closely they can pass each other, and how closely they can fly next to each other, often with one plane upside down. But something seemed missing. Maybe it's because these guys are flying fighter jets that are so capable that they can easily do what used to be impossible, or maybe it's because they're such superior pilots that they make it look easy. But somehow their performance came off as kind of sterile rather than thrilling. It was cool to see once, but I'm not sure one would get much out of seeing them again. In some ways, seeing them buzz the town the week before was cooler, as it was unexpected.
Here they are toward the end of their show, doing what I think is called the "Delta Break." I've seen film of a tighter cross, but this was plenty tight for me:
Little-known Blue Angels fact: the group's name stems from one of its founders' spotting an advertisement in 1946 in The New Yorker for the city's popular "Blue Angel" nightclub.
The AirSho was a cool outing. Having said that, it was overwhelmingly, if not surprisingly, militaristic. A few civilians showed up to put their stunt planes through their paces – and they were pretty impressive – but the bulk of the show was showing off machines designed for killin'. Having said that, the A-10 was the only plane for which its description centered on its firepower; the flying abilities of the others were impressive enough that we didn't need to dwell on their killing capacities.
After the show was done, the five of us were treated to a miracle of efficiency: we strolled to the front gate, hopped onto the first bus that pulled up, were taken directly to our parking lot, and zipped right out. "This is just the perfect-sized town for any kind of event like this," Jen said on the bus. (By contrast, the Joint Services Open House at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland draws hundreds of thousands of people annually, and creates traffic havoc in and around Washington, D.C. We had never mustered the courage to go when we were back home; it's convenient that even for Fargo's popular events you don't need to be brave, you can just show up.)
On Sunday, as Katie, Joey and I were out for a Father's Day bike ride, the Blue Angels treated us to a show in the skies above us as we rode north. "Angels at 10 o'clock!" Katie cried out as the diamond formation came into view. Joey joyfully rang his bicycle bell in an effort to get their attention he fully knew was futile. We were lucky to be on a very straight road, as our eyes were skyward for a good portion of the ride. Heading home later, we saw two Angels streak off to the south and disappear into the clouds, presumably heading for their next show.
Our great friend Dan Powers sent greetings this evening, along with a link to a cool map that tickled him. It renames each American state with a country that generates a similar gross domestic product (GDP) each year:
North Dakota, forty-eighth among the states and D.C., matches up to Ecuador (70th among nations at $32 billion). Seventeenth-ranked Minnesota, appropriately enough, is similar to Norway (28th among nations with a $262-billion GDP).
At lunch today, my colleagues J. and P. had a great idea: "Why don't we go kill some clay pigeons?" While in general I'm really not a big fan of guns, I figured this was a golden opportunity to try something I'd never get to do back East.
So after a return to the office of a respectable length, we took off for the sporting-goods store to pick up shells and pigeons, then drove out to a deserted field on the outskirts of West Fargo. It was a beautiful afternoon to be outside.
Here's how it works. One guy places a clay pigeon, a little soft ceramic disc, in a plastic arm. Here are the two together:
He throws it:
Then the other guys shoot at it. We were throwing them low today, because the wind was picking them up pretty well – a few actually boomeranged over our heads. It doesn't take much effort; I'd say it's easier than throwing a Frisbee, and harder to screw up.
In this clip, the camera is sitting on the box of targets in the grass. I yell "Ready!", throw the pigeon, then pick up the camera to film J. and P. shooting at it. Very exciting; lots of wind noise:
I was shooting a 20-gauge pump shotgun with target loads, versus a larger 12-gauge shotgun and more-serious "hunting loads." J. took a good deal of pleasure in having me try out his 12-gauge with the biggest hunting-load shells he'd brought along, which near about ripped my arm off when the shotgun kicked back. Here's the bruise I have at the moment, which will undoubtedly get far more colorful tomorrow:
Want to know something surprising? I was pretty good. I hit my very first target, and then hit about 75% of them from there on out. No one was more shocked than I, though J. and P. were close.
Here's film of me at the end of the afternoon hitting three in a row. You're not going to be able to see the targets disintegrate with YouTube's low-quality video, so you'll have to take my word for it. On the last one, I'd forgotten to pump the shotgun, so I missed my first shot. I then pumped it, fired, and hit it on the second try:
[Please excuse my undoubtedly myriad serious safety violations.]
What P. is saying, as the film ends, is, "I find it very hard to believe that this is your first time doing this." It made my day. I'm attributing it to good coaching from J. and P., and from hundreds of hours over the years of playing first-person-shooter video games.
I was very pleased to have been asked along, and more than a little glad that I didn't embarrass myself in the process. I was also pleased to be able to tell the kids about it and not have to tell them I'd killed anything.
The list of things I've gotta do before we leave Fargo is getting shorter.
Well, we had a great weekend going to the rodeo and then to the city pool all afternoon Saturday and Sunday.
The only glitch – and I'm only reporting this out of an obligation to make this deployment blog complete – was that we accidentally left the van unlocked Saturday afternoon, and Jen's purse was stolen out of it.
There was hardly any cash in it; we were able to cancel all the credit and debit cards and stop payment on the checks Jen was carrying before anything else happened. (The lack of activity on the cards makes me think that the person simply wanted the cash and ditched everything else – which adds up to a lot of trouble on our side for their gain of $20.)
Still, Jen is out a driver's license and a cell phone. The Fargo cop to whom Jen gave her report said not to worry about it, to tell anyone who pulls you over that your purse was stolen. We'll see how that works. In the meantime, Jen received a call back from a very unexpectedly nice and helpful person from the Maryland MVA who will get her set up with a temporary 45-day license to tide her over until we return to Maryland's warm and humid embrace.
The cell phone is a bit more of a pain. We've been dying to finish up our two-year contract with the ever-pleasant-to-deal-with Cingular, which is up this fall. If we get a replacement phone from them, we'll have to either pay full price for it or get a mildly subsidized phone stapled to an ironclad brand-new two-year commitment. I think I may pick one up used on eBay instead.
Or: Jen suspects I am less than fully upset about the loss of her cell phone because I figure she might let me buy one of Apple's upcoming iPhones (right) to replace it. And while that may now be the case, I can honestly say it didn't occur to me until she said it out loud.
In related cell-phone news, Cingular has very thoughtfully has placed "Off Network" on the main screen of our phones these past few months to remind us on a daily basis that we're costing them money by not being in an area where they provide their own service. When I called to get Jen's phone deactivated, several Cingular folks gingerly raised the issue; I replied that when I'd called them before we left Maryland and asked whether we could get out of our contract because we were moving to North Dakota, they had said, "Oh, no, no, no...." So the daily reminder that it's costing them dearly to transmit our calls on other people's networks has actually been a happy part of each of my days.
Last week, Judge B. and I were discussing the family's trip out to the western Dakotas. One thing I was hoping to see while we were here was a rodeo, I said; he immediately suggested the Hawley Rodeo, a local institution held in June each year. I didn't get around to Googling it until Friday, and lo and behold, it was that night and the next!
Jen was a little dubious, but responded to the argument that since I had agreed to go to the Fargo Star competition against my better judgment (and ended up enjoying it immensely), she should return the favor.
The weather looked to be gorgeous Friday night, and looked a little iffier for the rest of the weekend, so we, uh, seized the bull by the horns and took off for Hawley, about 20 miles east of Fargo in Minnesota. The rodeo featured seven events: Bareback bronc riding, saddle bronc riding...
...tie-down roping of calves, steer wrestling, team roping, barrel racing, and for the big finale, bull riding.
We saw our buddy Erin at the rodeo. She grew up nearby and used to barrel race. "It's a girl thing," she said, and indeed, most of the barrel racers were women. They had two breeds of "barrel racers": national and local. What's a barrel race? Well, here's Shannon Porch from Wanblee, S.D., one of the national racers, tearing it up:
The national riders made it look easy; the local riders provided a better idea of how difficult it is to get a horse to make those kinds of turns.
During the internission, they had sheep riding for the kids. We all thought, "Oh, how nice! Like pony rides, but on sheep." You had to sign up in advance for it, which we did not do, and then they picked a few names. Ellie was moderately distraught about not being able to do it.
We should have known – it's not at all like a pony ride. It's more like a bull ride, but kid-sized. They had to wear helmets, and the idea is to see who can hug the neck of the sheep the longest – and not fall off – while the sheep wander around, not really minding their riders. The event led to some colorful spills (right; click on the picture for more detail).
The kids crowded the fence to watch. I thought once Ellie saw all these kids getting tossed off their animals, she would reconsider her desire to do it, but no, she went from moderate to quite acute distress – distress so severe it could be cured only with a few cookies.
The only off note was a full page in the rodeo program entitled "A Sad Parallel" comparing the mess birds make when you put out a feeder to the mess made by those allowed into the United States through our immigration policies. (Though the piece wasn't specific, I think it was referring to our Mexican brethren, not Canadian.) One complaint: "Corn Flakes now come in a bilingual box." Oh, the humanity! I had no idea the people of Minnesota wanted so badly to have those migrant farm work jobs for themselves. It was perhaps the most unfriendly thing I've seen since I've been here.
The finale was the bull riding, and it was everything you'd expect. Some cowboys barely made it out of the gate before being tossed high; some made it to the buzzer. The kids crowded the fence again, and were thrilled. I think even Katie liked it; she is taking animal cruelty pretty seriously right now, and was not a big fan of the calves being lassoed, yanked around by the neck, and tied up. But the balance of power in bull riding clearly shifts to the bull – the men seem quite outmatched. At one point, I believe the announcer said, the score was "Bulls 7, Cowboys 4."
About 840 people attended the rodeo on Friday with us. It is the biggest annual event in Hawley, a town of a little less than 2,000 souls. The five of us sat on a blanket and ate quite reasonably priced hot dogs and nachos for dinner. As Jen and I strolled across the grassy hill in search of some food, she graciously admitted she was enjoying herself.
It was a beautiful night, and the rodeo was a great excuse to be out in it.
The rain that fell on us on our trip to the western Dakotas also, apparently, fell on Fargo while we were gone. As a result, the city is in a state of emergency.
Well, technically. All the emergency declaration seems to mean so far is that the city spent the day building a dike between the Red River and City Hall:
Down on the south side of town, where we live, the river is also impressively high:
The Forum is doing its civic duty in this moment of crisis:
City officials also want to remind people to follow several city ordinances regarding temporary dikes.
People are asked not to climb or destroy dikes, enter areas deemed off-limits or operate watercraft in a way that damages flood protection efforts. Violations can result in your arrest by police.
That's right: Please do not destroy the dikes.
The reason we had no mosquitoes last year was that Fargo had an exceptionally dry spring. This spring is exceptionally wet. I just can't wait to see how thick July's cloud of bugs is going to be.
The long winter is finally over. Not because it's gorgeous out, but because North Dakota finally has an elementary school listed in the Wikipedia: Bennett Elementary School.
