Post 164 - August 22, 2020

Day 164…

I am in Fargo, North Dakota - mission accomplished! I have now been in all 50 of these remarkable United States.

At the welcome center in Fargo, they actually have a thing called “Best for Last Club”.  Apparently enough people have North Dakota as their final state that it is a thing. They gave me a certificate, a sticker and a t-shirt and took my picture with the medallion on the wall. It was kind of great to have a fuss made over the whole thing.

Also, in the welcome center, I was thrilled to see, was the original wood-chipper from the Coen brothers’ movie Fargo. I fear that everything I know about North Dakota may have come from that film. Selfie - check.

This post is late today. I apologize for that, because I couldn’t really find anywhere to write.

I am starting this in a breakfast place called The Shack on Broadway but I’m sure I won’t be able to finish. 

It’s busy.

The servers are all in masks but none of the diners are. Obviously, you can’t eat or drink with a mask on, but I can’t tell whether or not people came in with them.

While the state encourages people to wear them, there is no official mandate to do so.

The hotel I stayed in last night was far less fancy than anywhere I have stayed so far. The person at the front desk was wearing a mask and was behind a plexiglass shield, but I don’t know that any extra measures had been taken with the room.  It didn’t seem like it. I wiped down all of the surfaces that I thought I’d be likely to touch and hoped for the best.

As of yesterday, North Dakota has had a total of 9,242 cases of COVID-19. 130 people have passed away. Daily cases and testing both hit record highs on Thursday. Out of 7738 tests, 274 were positive. That’s a rate of 3.54%. The aim, everywhere, is to get that percentage rate below 1.

Burleigh county, near the center of the state is where the greatest percentage of the new cases are cropping up and that’s about 250 miles west of where I am now.

The Republican governor, Doug Burgum strongly advised folks returning from the recent Sturgis motorcycle festival in South Dakota to all get tested as soon as possible because of the outbreaks that happened there as a result.

North Dakota, despite what I thought, is still in the eastern side of the country.  The geographical center of the lower 48 states lies in Lebanon, Kansas. North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska and Kansas are all very roughly the same width and the same rectangular shape, although Colorado cuts a big notch out of Nebraska’s southwestern corner. They are basically stacked on top of each other with North Dakota being at the top of the four and Kansas at the bottom. Lebanon lies on the top edge of Kansas in about the center of the state. Fargo, where I am is on the far eastern side of the state.

North Dakota was either the 39th or 40th state admitted to the union. Both North and South Dakota were incorporated as states together on November 2, 1889. So that nobody would ever know which one had become a state first, the President, Benjamin Harrison, shuffled the papers as he signed them.

Despite looking enormous on the map, North Dakota is only the 19th largest state in terms of area. It is, however, the fourth smallest in both population and population density. Fargo is the largest city, but Bismarck, in the center, is its capitol.

Fast forward to a few hours later. The breakfast place, while excellent, got too crowded.  

I am now about two hours away, sitting in the pew of a church built in 1881 that is part of the National Buffalo Museum and Frontier Village in Jamestown. Jamestown is due west of Fargo and interstate 94 gets you here in almost a completely straight line.

Despite what you may think after watching the movie Fargo, it is blisteringly hot here. By “here” I mean all of North Dakota. There seems to be very little shade anywhere, as there are very few trees. What there are is endless fields. It is just about 90 (32C) degrees outside today with no clouds. And no breeze.

Therefore, I am sitting in a church.

I meant to get here to Jamestown earlier, but I detoured up, out of the way, to the tiny town of Blanchard to see the KVLY-TV television transmitting mast.

It is out in the middle of nowhere. Flat farmland stretches out as far as the eye can see in every direction. It must be truly awful in the middle of winter with all the snow blowing around. The snow would completely cover up what few features there are. The tower doesn’t look like much. It is just your basic metal transmission tower sticking up out of the prairie.

What makes it interesting is that up until 2008 when the Burj Kalifa was built in Dubai, the KVLY-TV mast in Blanchard, ND was the tallest man-made structure on the entire planet. The Tokyo Skytree and the Shanghai Tower have now surpassed it as well. I guess I am now going to have to go to Shanghai since I’ve already visited the other two.

I am at the national Buffalo Museum to see the world’s largest Buffalo. It’s a statue not a live animal and it stands 28 feet tall. I can see it from the window of the church where I am sitting so I’ll take a walk over and have a look in a bit.

Then I will visit the gift shop. I love a good gift shop. I adore a bad one.

When we were kids, we would go on endlessly long car rides during the summer. How my sister and I survived sitting in the back of an un-airconditioned two-door Ford Maverick, I will never know. We didn’t even have windows. The small oval glass would just notch open about an inch.

One summer we drove from New Jersey all the way down to Florida where we got to go to Disney World. Another summer, during the height of the heat, we drove down to New Orleans. We would stop everywhere there was something to see. It would drive my father crazy that my mother, sister and I would always want to make a beeline for the gift shop. “It’s just junk”, he would say. He just didn’t get it.

It did take me a long time to get rid of a lot of that junk. I’m still working on it. Rubber snakes and fake pirate coins and reproduction musket balls still turn up in some of the boxes I have in storage. These days, I try and limit myself to postcards.

The postcards that I am mailing to my family are actually starting to back up because I can’t find anywhere to mail them. I don’t think it has anything to do with the current postal service crisis, more to do with where I am ending up.

The US Postal Service under the dubious leadership of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy seems to be being gutted.

In an address to the Senate yesterday, DeJoy said that all of the changes that have been happening were all a normal part of how the USPS does business.

The House, however, met today to propose a $25 billion bill to ensure that the USPS stay afloat - especially with the upcoming election just months away.

The President, of course, is doing everything he can to discredit mail-in voting. This is because the communities that tend to use that option the most, typically are not the people who would tend to vote for him.

There is nothing wrong with voting by mail. It has been around for a very long time.

During the Civil War, polling stations were set up in army encampments that would allow soldier to cast their ballots and six states allowed them to send their votes home by mail.

Historically, there has been no more fraud connected with mailed in ballots than there has been with ballots cast in person at local polling stations.

Six states have already sued the USPS over the diminished services and sixteen more have suits in process. The bill that the House is going to vote on later today would provide for all of the ballots to be sent first class.

Regardless of what happens, the recommendation from everyone is to mail your ballot in as early as you can. I think that we are going to do everything in our power to vote in person when the time comes and just not take the chance.

Yet another crony of the President’s has been arrested.

On Thursday, his former Chief Strategist, Steve Bannon was taken into custody off of a luxury yacht off the coast of Connecticut. He is charged with defrauding the American people. He apparently siphoned off donated funds that were meant to build the President’s border wall between us and Mexico and then used them for himself.

While it is completely unsurprising that Steve Bannon would eventually be arrested for something, it is rather surprising to discover who ultimately arrested him - Postal Workers.

The Postal Service has an armed investigative unit. They typically handle cases that have some connection to the mail service.

This isn’t new either. The first person in charge of this unit was a guy named William Goddard who was appointed by Postmaster General Benjamin Franklin in 1775 to investigate mail fraud and theft.

Postal workers interviewed Billy the Kid about thefts on the Stagecoach runs - which was how the mail was transported in those days. They interviewed Lee Harvey Oswald about the rifle he used in the killing of President Kennedy because he received it in the mail. They also helped hunt down the mail bomber Ted Kaczynski in 1996.

There are about 200 federal crimes that can spark action from the US Postal Service and there are nearly 1,300 inspectors on the force.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution empowers Congress "To establish Post Offices and Post Roads".

This is yet another attempt by this administration to undermine the basic structures of our government. Beyond voting, we rely on the mail for home delivery of our medications, paychecks, unemployment checks, holiday presents and holiday cards and, of course, postcards.

Having gotten to my bucket-list goal of stepping foot in North Dakota to complete the set of 50, I now have to go all the way back home.

Rest assured that I am not going to retrace any of my steps.

There are plenty of new things to see out there and get postcards of.

And I need to find a mailbox.