I HATED to admit it since she’d been so nice, but the girl at the café in downtown Grand Forks was wrong.
“Oh,” she’d exclaimed, when I told her of the day’s plans. “Winnipeg! It’s so great there.”
The conversation got started the way conversations do in towns like Grand Forks; it’s more difficult to stay anonymous than it is to make new friends. We were standing in a coffee house, called Porpoura, one of a string of interesting small businesses on the Third Street in this not-unpleasant college town. We were talking about Grand Forks, about winter and about Winnipeg, about 150 miles to the north.
We were talking about Winnipeg because North Dakota, while interesting, is kind of quiet, particularly in winter. After a while, one’s mind begins to wander. Visiting a city like Grand Forks is like traveling to New Brunswick, New Jersey from somewhere exotic and then not taking the train into Manhattan for the afternoon. Even if you think New Brunswick is the bees knees, you’d have to be nuts not to be the least bit curious as to what was going on up the road.
Then again, Winnipeg is not New York City. Also, curiosity, as we know, killed the cat.
The first sign of trouble should have been the reception at the border, which was about as icy as the roads had been earlier that morning. As any frequent traveler to the north knows, Canadians do not spend a lot of time questioning arriving tourists. According to people who keep track of these things, tourism was worth $66.8 billion to Canadians as recently as 2006. Apart from the usual questions as to whether or not I am, for instance, operating a small gun store out of the back of my rented Kia Sorento, it’s generally pretty easy to get into Canada.
Not that day it wasn’t. Fearing for the security of the nation and apparently completely disbelieving that it was possible for someone to be on vacation in Grand Forks (true) and to be curious as to the possibilities of lunch in Winnipeg (also true), I lost what seemed like hours while customs officials gave me the royal rundown. My passport confiscated, I had no choice but to wait in an uncomfortable and cheap chair in an office that looked a lot like a small town branch of the Department of Motor Vehicles, complete with surly people behind the counter who don’t appear to be doing anything and yet, at the same time, are not in any way available to help.
Whatever dirt they were looking to dig, they didn’t find — eventually, they let me go without so much as a wan smile or a thanks for my time. Because of the delay at the border, I ended up arriving in Winnipeg a lot later than I’d hoped. The day, which had started out sunny, had started to go very bad. By the time I got to the city’s somewhat sketchy center, it was almost dark, despite the fact that it was barely three o’clock in the afternoon. The lack of sunlight made things worse than they already are during winter in Winnipeg.
The city’s modern history is fairly simple: fur trading post in the 1700s, rose to prominence with the railroads in the 1800s, spent most of the last century trying to chart a course to the future, with mixed success. The most impressive thing about Winnipeg, though, is that there all these people living up here on the tundra, as if the notion were not competely absurd. The most recent census counts more than 700,000 people; the only other large population center around is Minneapolis-St. Paul, and we all know how insane those people are.
Clearly, what is needed is for Canada to form its own Sunbelt, complete with wholly-Canadian (instead of just partly-Canadian) versions of Fort Myers and St. Petersburg. If Canada had a place with swamps and palm trees, you can bet that Winnipeg would empty out within the month; even the nicer neighborhoods would look more like the city’s North End does today. Just out of Downtown, it’s not where you go to see the city that raised up everyone from Neil Young to Nia Vardalos putting its best foot forward. Besides lots of train tracks — too many train tracks, actually — there are a number of scary movie-ready flophouses, tons of blank storefronts and a fair bit of unimaginative graffiti.
The neighborhood is one of a handful that helped give Winnipeg its ugly reputation as the most crime-ridden large city in Canada back in the earlier part of the 2000s. The only reason I was in the North End was because a friend in Toronto had told me to go for bagels. She’d given me a line on a good bakery on Selkirk Street. Humorously, the place was called Gunn’s.
Founded in the 1930s by Polish immigrants, this was, I had been told, a top spot to sample local-style bagels and cream cheese. Gunn’s, turned out to be a bright oasis in a cold and unwelcoming desert. The bagels were warm and chewy; the cream cheese — which in Winnipeg comes slightly tangier than usual and smooth enough for easy spreading — was excellent. In fact, it might have actually been worth the drive. Of course, at this point in the day, the bar for success had been lowered considerably. All I wanted now was to make it back across the border without getting the third degree.
An hour or so later, standing in a chilly metal shed where customs officials were trying to figure out how to pry the plastic molding off the doors of my rental car, I began to remove layers of clothing. Everyone was very polite and friendly, apparently content to withhold judgment until they found the Moldovan sex slaves / heroin I was probably hiding lots of under the false bottom of my trunk. I asked the guard assigned to me, how was it that my story — just in Winnipeg for the afternoon — could be met with such skepticism? Being next door, was this not something she’d done herself from time to time? They have a lovely market and shopping area down by the river there. Was life in Pembina, North Dakota so unbelievably rich and full that she’d no need for further excitement?
Slightly distracted by my chest — heaven only knows what possessed me to wear my “World’s Largest Hot Dog” T-shirt that day — she was almost apologetic as she explained that she wasn’t really familiar with Winnipeg at all. It may have been next door, but it just wasn’t on her radar. It hadn’t occurred to her to be all that curious. She seemed perfectly happy here in Pembina. Serene, even.
Waiting out the temporary destruction of my rental car in a punishingly small room fronted by a one-way mirror, I realized I’d just been offered a valuable lesson about gratefulness. Lucky me, all I’d had to do was spend an afternoon in Winnipeg.
Waking up in Fargo the next morning, I bundled up and went for a stroll along Broadway, the heart of the city’s remarkably cosmopolitan downtown. Fargo’s downtown is one of the more pleasant surprises on the road between Minneapolis and the Western states. The heart of North Dakota’s largest metropolis — about 200,000 people when you factor in Moorhead, Minnesota across the Red River — takes on a rather outsized significance. Fargo is a nice place.
And while it wasn’t more than five degrees that morning in the New York City of North Dakota, it was at least very sunny. The sky was clear blue, it wasn’t snowing, blowing, sleeting or anything like that. Because it was a nice day, this meant there were people walking down the street in fleeces as if this were a cool evening on the beach in Santa Monica, ducking in and out of the cafes, design shops, boutiques and restaurants as if nothing were out of the ordinary, as if we were not in North Dakota, as if it were not nearly zero degrees Fahrenheit.
Leaving them to catch their death, I ducked into Josie’s Bakery, a cozy little café over by the VFW hall, ordered some coffee and pumpkin cookies and found myself wondering what had taken me so long to get here.
For more information about travel to North Dakota, visit ndtourism.com.