Marc de Celle moved to Fargo in 2005 and found it so unlike anywhere else he had lived that he coined the term northern prairie culture to name it and the phrase How Fargo of You to acknowledge examples of anonymous kindness he encountered himself and that he heard others describe about their own experiences living in the zone spanning Manitoba and Saskachewan in the north down to Iowa and South Dakota to the south. He posits that Fargo is at the center of this culture which is why "How Fargo of You" works. That and the fact that "How Northern Prairie of You" doesn't have the same ring to it.
I am not surprised that it took an outsider to discover the qualities that make Fargo and its environs so unlike other places. I grew up across the Red River of the North from Fargo, in Moorhead, Minnesota, and I have spent a good number of years exploring other cultures. For all these years I have been observing how different everywhere else is when a more accurate observation might be how similar everywhere else is and how different Fargo-Moorhead is from all of them.
For example, de Celle pointed out that the media's crime reporting in the Fargo-Moorhead area initially sounded nothing like what he was accustomed to in Phoenix where his family had lived before their move to Fargo. Instead of the long list of crimes reported on TV, a single crime seemed to be the focus of reporting over a long period of time. Since he had been told by friends in the media in Phoenix that the more "ordinary" murders never made it into the news, de Celle was surprised that the crimes reported in Fargo ended up being vandalism and break-ins, not bigger stuff. But then he did some research and discovered that what was being reported reflected what was happening. Very few crimes occur in Fargo-Moorhead, so very few make it into the media headlines. But those that do are covered exhaustively, from initial report of what happened, to the arrest of suspects, to the trial, and eventually sentencing. De Celle came to appreciate that what gets reported locally in fact reflects exhaustive research by reporters, something that doesn't always happen in other localities where "local" news ends up just being rehashing the news sources from elsewhere. Instead of being amused that local news, local sports, and local weather are really local in Fargo-Moorhead, de Celle began celebrating the localness.
I lived for a school year in Carbondale, Ill, a college town in the middle of farming and recreational lake country, very similar in many respects to the Fargo-Moorhead area, where I taught English as a Second Language at Southern Illinois University. In the nine months I lived there, I heard multiple news reports of "alledged" rapes and at least one case of a farmer discovering the remains of a decomposing body in his field when he began plowing in the spring. The contrast in the local news there made me wonder initially if Fargo-Moorhead was underreporting crime or if Carbondale was over-sensationalizing the news. I knew that Carbondale appeared to be different, but I thought Carbondale was the anomaly, not vice versa. I had spent so many years trying to figure out how to get out of the Fargo-Moorhead area that I hadn't recognized the values I would miss when I left.
I have been reading my journal from my days in Iran recently, hoping to find more stories to write about. What I wrote in my journal, however, was not a string of stories; I wrote about feelings. And having read de Celle's book, I now have a better idea about why I had so many very negative, or at least conflicted, feelings in Iran. Once again, it wasn't that Iran was all that different from much of the rest of the world (well, maybe it was partly that); it is that I grew up experiencing a world where things worked. There were rules in place that people in Fargo-Moorhead followed, like de Celle's amazement at motorists on the Interstate merging into the left lane when advised that the right lane would be closed a mile down the road instead of zipping to the absolute end of the lane and then trying to merge in after successfully passing all the patient and polite motorists who merged early.
I have often told Alex that when we go through security at the airport in Fargo or Minneapolis, they mean it when they say to empty your pockets and place containers with liquids into a zip lock bag which must be placed into a bin separate from your carryon when items go through the Xray machine. In Washington and other cities through which we have traveled, those rules are more often suggestions. Failing to follow them may result in a TSA agent's ire, but more often can someone be excused through self-deprecating humor that allows the TSA agent to chide kindly instead of scolding seriously. But where Alex has considered this rule-following behavior as inflexibility, I have always seen it as serving the greater good. Instead of the tragedy of the commons, northern prairie culture exhibits the celebration of the common good.
That kind of behavior provides a level of predictability that was totally absent in Iran. I now think my culture shock was amplified by the contrast not just with U.S. or Western norms, but with the northern prairie norms that hadn't entirely evaporated from my expectations. After reading my journal from Iran, I recall just how out of place I felt there. And I can't help but wonder whether my bosses might not have concluded at least tentatively that they had made a mistake taking a chance on me.
I am so very glad that Marc de Celle and his family moved to Fargo so he could experience northern prairie culture from his outsider's perspective so that I can benefit from his analysis to understand my own journeys outside of the northern prairie better.
No comments:
Post a Comment