On the Bed of a Vanished Lake

The city sits on the absolutely flat bed of a lake that hasn't existed for ten thousand years, Lake Agassiz, which at its peak was larger than all the Great Lakes combined. When the glaciers melted the lake drained catastrophically northward, leaving behind soil so rich and flat it seems almost theoretical—a plane extending in every direction until it meets sky, the horizon a perfect line drawn with a straightedge. This is land that makes geometry visible, that reduces the world to two elements: earth and air, the division between them absolute.

The Red River runs through the middle, north toward Hudson Bay, one of the few rivers in America that flows north, which seems appropriate for a place that operates on its own logic. The river is usually gentle, almost apologetic, barely moving through its channel. But in spring when the snowmelt comes and the river thaws from south to north, the water has nowhere to go, backs up against ice downstream, and floods with biblical regularity. 1997 was the worst—the water rose to fifty-four feet, twenty-six feet above flood stage, submerged whole neighborhoods, required evacuating most of the city. They built higher dikes afterwards, raised them and strengthened them, the whole city now ringed with earthen walls like a medieval fortress, protection against an enemy that arrives every spring with varying intensity.

The name comes from William Fargo of Wells Fargo fame, who never visited, never saw the prairie or the river or the sky that defines everything. The city was a stop on the Northern Pacific Railway, founded in 1871 where the railroad crossed the Red River, one of those pragmatic nineteenth-century decisions where location was determined entirely by transportation logistics. The town that grew up around the crossing was rough—saloons and brothels serving railroad workers and buffalo hunters, the kind of frontier settlement that existed in that brief window between indigenous displacement and civic respectability.

Weather as Civic Architecture

The winter here is not cold the way other places are cold. This is cold as an absolute, cold that kills engines and freezes eyelashes and makes breathing painful. January means weeks where the high temperature doesn't reach zero Fahrenheit, where forty below is possible, where the wind off the prairie turns the cold into something sharp and searching that finds every gap in clothing, every weakness in insulation. People plug their cars in at night—block heaters keeping engines warm enough to start—and still carry jumper cables as standard equipment. The cold is the thing everyone talks about, the shared ordeal that defines citizenship, the price of admission to living here.

The summer is the opposite, ninety-degree days with humidity that makes the air feel substantial, thunderstorms building on the prairie and arriving with lightning that illuminates the whole sky, hail that dents cars and shreds crops. The growing season is short but intense—eighteen hours of daylight in June, plants growing with desperate speed, gardens producing zucchini and tomatoes in abundance before the first frost arrives in September and ends everything. The mosquitoes in summer are legendary, clouds of them rising from any standing water, the state bird according to local humor.

More Than the Movie

The town grew slowly, then suddenly. The 1990s brought development—retail spreading south and west, the suburbs filling in around Fargo and bleeding across the river into Moorhead, Minnesota, the twin cities growing together until the state line was just an administrative boundary rather than a visible division. The population doubled from 1970 to 2020, Midwestern growth, which means modest but real, a slow accumulation of people and businesses drawn by low unemployment and affordable housing and the particular appeal of a place where life is comprehensible and manageable.

The Coen Brothers set their movie here, Fargo, though almost none of it was actually filmed in Fargo and most of the plot happens in Minnesota. But the movie captured something true about the place anyway—the accent ("Oh yah, you betcha"), the niceness that borders on pathological, the way violence becomes absurd in a landscape this banal. The accent is real, a Scandinavian-inflected English that flattens vowels and adds lilt to sentences, remnants of Norwegian and Swedish immigrants who settled the region and farmed the impossibly fertile soil.

The economy is agriculture and healthcare and technology in proportions that surprise people who assume North Dakota is only wheat fields and oil wells. Microsoft has a campus here. Bobcat manufactures equipment. Sanford Health runs a massive medical center that serves the entire region, drawing patients from hundreds of miles away because Fargo is the only real city for a radius that could contain several eastern states. The downtown has coffee shops and microbreweries and the minor-league baseball team, the RedHawks, playing in a stadium that fills on summer evenings with families eating hot dogs and watching fundamentally adequate baseball.

North Dakota State University dominates the south side of town, bringing 14,000 students and the football team that wins FCS national championships with regularity that seems almost unfair, the Bison Dynasty, small-school football played with a seriousness that makes the NFL look casual. Game days in fall the stadium fills, the whole city painted green and gold, tailgaters grilling in parking lots while the temperature drops and the season contracts toward winter.

The downtown murals cover building sides with images of bison and wheat and abstract patterns, public art that tries to make a flat landscape interesting, to add dimension where dimension is scarce. Broadway runs through downtown, old buildings renovated into lofts and restaurants, the Fargo Theatre with its art deco marquee still showing movies, the whole downtown district trying very hard to be vibrant and mostly succeeding in a modest Midwestern way that doesn't announce itself.

Belonging

The politics are conservative in a state that's the reddest in the nation, but Fargo itself is blue, an island of Democratic voters in a Republican sea, the university and the healthcare workers and the young professionals tipping the city leftward while the rest of the state votes as if FDR was a mistake that still needs correcting. This creates a particular kind of tension—the city's interests don't align with the state legislature's priorities, and the legislature wins because it has the numbers.

The immigrants arrived in waves, each recession bringing a new population. Bosnians in the 1990s, fleeing war, Lutheran Social Services resettling them in an echo of the Scandinavian immigration a century earlier. Somalis and Ethiopians, Bhutanese refugees, the city becoming unexpectedly diverse, halal markets and African restaurants opening along University Drive, the demographics shifting in ways that make old-timers nostalgic for a homogeneity that they remember as simpler but was really just exclusionary.

To live in Fargo is to live in a place that's fundamentally comprehensible. The city has traffic but not congestion, crime but not violence, ambition but not ruthlessness. You can buy a house on a teacher's salary. The schools are good. The parks are maintained. The government functions with the efficiency of people who take civic duty seriously. This sounds boring and it is boring, but boring is underrated, boring means functional, boring means you can raise kids and build a life without the constant friction of urban difficulty.

The sky is what makes it bearable, what transforms flat into expansive. The sunsets here are transcendent, the light refracted through hundreds of miles of atmosphere, turning the western sky purple and orange and red, the clouds lit from below, the whole dome of heaven performing for an audience of prairie grass and wheat fields and the occasional person who stops their car to watch. The thunderstorms arrive like drama, visible from fifty miles away, the lightning illuminating cloud formations that tower thirty thousand feet, the rain sweeping across the flatness in curtains you can see approaching.

The city persists in a place that seems designed to discourage human habitation—too cold, too flat, too far from anywhere that matters. But people stay, raise families, shovel snow forty times a winter and complain about it while refusing to leave. The river floods. The winter arrives. The sky goes on forever. The city endures not through beauty or excitement but through a kind of stubborn midwestern insistence that this is a good place to live if you're willing to appreciate what good means—safety, community, affordability, the particular satisfaction of surviving January and emerging into spring with the knowledge that you earned it, that you're tougher than the weather, that you belong to a place precisely because the place demands something from you in exchange for the privilege of staying.