Fargo, North Dakota



I thought I was going to survive this trip without being subjected to gravel, but I had to endure two stretches during my last two days on the road, both times a surprise and both I could have avoided by riding on Interstate 94, whIch is allowed in these parts. The first was a five-mile dose entering Valley City.  The second came the next day for eight miles halfway between Valley City and Fargo. 

I avoided a fourteen-mile stretch of gravel by riding on the Interstate after leaving Valley City.  I wasn’t certain I would be able to until I came to the entrance ramp and there was no sign forbidding non-motorized vehicles or farm equipment or anything.  Both the night and the morning clerk at the motel I stayed at assured me bicycles were allowed on the Interstate, but I didn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes.  

I had a nice wide shoulder with minimal debris.  I didn’t suffer any more turbulence from the 18-wheelers than on a two-lane wide road, maybe less though their roar may have been a little harsher on the ears as they could go a bit faster.  I could have continued on the Interstate all the way to Fargo, but I turned off with forty-five miles to go when I came upon a paved road paralleling the Interstate.  

If I had known it would turn to gravel after eight miles I might have stuck with it, as did just about every else.  I encountered only three pick-ups stirring up clouds of dust in my hour of non-pavement.  There were gravel-free lanes most of the way but narrow enough thwt I was continually in danger of being blown into the thick gravel sandwiching them by the strong side wind from the north. It did cause a few heart-stopping moments when it did.  

I was happy to enter the wind-blunted semi-sprawl of Fargo, the largest city in North Dakota with a population of 115,000,  just enough to rank it in the top three hundred metropolises in the US.  The road I was on took me right by the Carnegie Library on the campus of North Dakota State.  When the library was built in 1905 it was the North Dakota Agricultural College.  Not only has the university changed its name so has the library.  It is now Putnam Hall housing the departments of Criminal Justice and Political Science and Public Policy.  A plaque on the exterior of the building acknowledges Carnegie.

I continued on to the lone Statue of Liberty donated by the Boy Scouts in North Dakota.  It was just before the bridge over the Red River to Moorhead, Minnesota, Fargo’s sister city.  The official Boy Scout plaque was on the side of the statue’s base.  On the front wss another plaque saying this statue had replaced the original.  It’s the second replica I’ve come across after the original had deteriorated from the elements.  

It was nearly dark when I rolled over to the Amtrak station with hopes that I might be able to get on that night’s train rather than having to wait until the next day.  I was also eager to confirm that the station could supply me with a box for my bike.  Unfortunately the station was closed and wouldn’t open until midnight. The hours posted on the door were 12 a.m. until 7:30 a.m.  I was faced with the dilemma of trying to find a place to hang out until midnight or heading to a cluster of motels (all the Inns—Days, Ramada, Quality, Holiday, C’Mon, America’s Best Value along with a Motel Six and assortment of the usual chain motels) at the intersection of the Interstates 94 and 29.  With so much competition it would be the cheapest motel of the trip. 

Before I’d decided what to do a cyclist happened by, the owner of a nearby bike shop.  He was rushing to see his father at his retirement home before he went to bed, but had the time to point to a heated parking garage I could slip into until midnight.  He also said that if I needed a box for my bike I could find one in a pile of cardboard outside his shop.

I went over to the garage and sat beside a heater and set of electrical outlets marveling at my good fortune of having it recommended.  It was perfect, but the more I thought about the long odds of there having been a cancelation opening up a seat for me on the train I decided it wasn’t worth the bother of sitting on concrete for over four hours with the likelihood of having to bike across Fargo and check into a motel after midnight. I might as well get that over with and look forward to a day of exploring Fargo.  Returning a day early would just be a favor to Janina’s cats, as she had left that day for a two week artist’s retreat, and they were going to have to survive on dry food until I returned and could supply them with their daily can of meat. 

I chose America’s Best Value Inn as it came with breakfast and was only two dollars more than the Motel Six, the cheapest of the lot. The Indian woman at the counter quoted a higher price than the on-line price.  She said I could book it on-line but it would take thirty minutes to process.  I thought I was doing her a favor by buying direct, but she didn’t see it that way.  When I asked if its website was right about there being breakfast, she said that was only on weekends.  I said I’d go over to Motel Six then, to which she dropped the price to that of the Motel Six.

When I left in the morning an older guy came in wanting to check in early drawn by the low rate and the breakfast.  When I gave him the dope on those issues he shook his head and sighed, “Everybody’s got a scam.  Someone tried to charge me an extra dollar for coffee yesterday.”  He was living in his van.  It was a cold night as it had gotten down to ten.  He said he was looking for a place to live but it was hard to find something affordable for his Social Security. I told him if he just wanted a shower he could use my room, which perked him up immeasurably.  He grabbed my key card and dashed up the stairs.

My first destination for the day was a nearby mall, the largest in Fargo, as it had a Museum devoted to Roger Maris, a native son.  It couldn’t have been more topical, as his American League home run record of sixty-one in 1961 had just been broken. The first entrance I tried led right to it—three class cases of memorabilia along a walkway with a string of flags above giving the date and place of each of his home runs.  There was also a small room with a handful of seats from Yankee Stadium facing a screen showing an hour-long, continually-playing documentary on his life. 

The doc was superb.  It contained interviews with his wife (his Fargo high school sweetheart) and several of his six children and Bob Costas and other journalists and Mickey Mantle and many other players. Next to the screen was a list of figures comparing Maris to Babe Ruth whose record he had broken to the dismay of many.  Maris was twenty-six when he hit his sixty-one.  Ruth was thirty-four when he set sixty in 1927.  Ruth weighed 251 pounds, Maris 200.  Ruth had a 48 inch waist, Maris 35 1/4 inch.  

As far as the controversy of Maris having a 162 game schedule, compared to Ruth’s 154, the documentary pointed out that Maris had only seven more at bats.  They both benefited by the short right field of Yankee Stadium, but Maris hit thirty-one of his homers on the road. The documentary also pointed out that there was no controversy of Ruth having a much longer schedule when he first broke the home run record of twenty-seven homers with twenty-nine in 1919.  The documentary also dispelled the myth that Maris and Mantle didn’t get along, as they shared an apartment with another teammate in 1961.  Not only did Maris win the MVP award in 1961, he’d won  it the year before.  

The documentary concluded with Maris’ funeral in 1985 after succumbing to cancer at the age of fifty-one.  He was buried in Fargo.  I asked the other person watching the documentary if he knew where the cemetery was.  He said he did and was going there next.  Me too.  It was north of the city abutting the airport.  The cemetery office was closed but a guy on a crew working on a power line along the road pointed me in the direction of where the grave was.  He said he didn’t realize Maris was buried there until the day before when a guy on his crew discovered it when he entered Holy Cross Cemetery on his smartphone. It even gave the coordinates of the gravesite.  

A tiny sign pointed to the grave that I missed on my first passby as I was scanning the graves for “Maria.” His tombstone was in the shape of a baseball diamond and stood above all those around it.  It simply bore the name “Maris” above a left-handed swinger with 61 above the bat and ‘61 below it.  At the base of the tombstone was “against all odds.”  There was a scattering of offerings by the grave—coins, baseballs, a Yankee hat and a baseball bat.  I was glad I had made the effort to see it. It was my second grave of the trip along with that of Sinclair Lewis.  Sites were coming in pairs, as I had seen two Statues of Liberty as well.

On the way to the cemetery I passed the stadium of the minor league team Maris had played for.  This one replaced the one Maris played in.  It was built in 1996 and with the exact dimensions of Yankee Stadium.  His number had been retired here, as it had been by the Yankees.  The stadium had up until a few months ago a Maury Wills Museum, as he had been a coach and announcer for the team for twenty-seven years even though he had been a long-time Dodger.  He’d adopted Fargo as a place he liked being and was much loved by the community.  But shortly before his recent death he wanted his memorabilia given to his children and the museum was no more.

Just two blocks from the baseball stadium stands a Fargodome for indoor sporting events and concerts and such.  It is on the campus of North Dakota State University, as is the baseball stadium.  Back downtown as I surveyed the large library for a window to lean my bike against so I could keep an eye on it from within a sixty-year cyclist pulled up.  He’d done a bit of touring, his longest ride across Minnesota. He was headed to a twenty-four hour restaurant just a few blocks from the train station where I could fill in the three hours from nine p.m. until midnight awaiting the opening of the Amtrak station if I cared to opt out of the parking garage.  I had a lot of food I was trying to make a dent in, so I wasn’t all that inclined to buying more.

I ventured back to the bike shop by the train station to verify there would be a box for my bicycle if need be. The quite friendly owner, Tom, apologized for being in such a rush the night before, as he could have offered me a warm spot to hang out in a building he was rehabbing across from his bike shop, which I could use this night.  We walked over to scout it out.  As we talked, we learned we had much more in common than we realized.  He had been a bicycle messenger in Minneapolis and had toured in South America and had been on L’Alpe d’Huez at the same time I had been more than once during the Tour de France. He such a devotee of the Tour he organizes groups to go over for it.

My trip was ending up in fine fashion.  My extra day in Fargo was certainly putting a bow on it.  I was even able to have the bike shop extract a water bottle bolt whose 
head I had snapped off, forcing me to hold the cage in place with a piece of wire.  The final piece of the travels fell in place when I was the first passenger at the station shortly after it opened at midnight.  

The station master said I didn’t need to box my bike or turn the handlebars or remove the pedals.  It would be accepted as is.  All I need do was strip it off all its gear, pay twenty dollars and then when the train pulled in hoist it into the baggage. I was able to stuff all my gear into my duffle except the two sleeping bags and sleeping pad, which I’d carry on and make use of. I also carried aboard my dayback filled with food and reading material and various sundries in my handlebar bag.  

I had been waning sitting and reading in the basement of the building being rehabbed greatly tempted by a can of Coke on a table with architectural plans, but sitting under the bright fluorescent lights in the train station took the edge off my fatigue.  Two older single women arrived before one and then two single guys before two. There was a small rush of four more passengers at three.  

The train was right on time at 3:30.  About twenty passengers disembarked and then we were allowed aboard.  I had a seat to myself at the back of a car, but I laid down on the floor behind the seat and slept solid for four hours woken shortly before we arrived at St Paull by the warning that one hundred and fifty people would be boarding, filling all the seats.  I took to my seat and continued snoozing in a more upright position. 

The thirteen hours to Chicago, some of it along the Mississippi, capped another fine month of travel, my third 2,500 mile bike tour in the US this year, each Carnegie-inspired.  I visited twenty-eight on this one I hadn’t been to before (twenty-two in Minnesota, three in Ontario and three in North Dakota) plus a handful of others I’d previously been to in Illinois, Wisconsin and Minnesota.  

Along the way I crossed the Mississippi nearly a dozen times and went beyond the Arctic Divide in Canada.  I passed through the home towns of Minnesots’s two Nobel laureates for literature (Sinclair Lewis and Bob Dylan) and the hometowns of a couple of sports icons—Chicago Bear great Bronko Nagurski and the home run king Roger Maris.  I came upon noteworthy statues of Paul Bunyan and Smokey the Bear along with that of Nagurski. I passed through Minnesota’s largest Indian Reservation and had my passport perused at two border crossings.  I was snowed upon and ferociously barked at.  I started out with one sleeping bag and returned with two, one a gift after my first was stolen, and the other an end-of-the-season close-out bargain.  I needed both and more on the coldest of nights.

As goes the Carnegie-quest, Minnesota becomes the fifteenth state I’ve completed.  I came within one of completing North Dakota, as the seventh of its still standing Carnegies is in the far southwest corner of the state, a bit out of my range on this trip. The twenty-eight I added on this trip brings the tally to 1,070.  I still have 436 to get to in the US, most of which are in the northeast and northwest.  Slowly but surely I’m going to get them all.