North Dakota is peaceful.
That is the first thing I should say, because if I start anywhere else this will sound like a hate letter.
There are places here where I can walk outside and see no neighbor in sight. There is open land, enormous sky, stillness, weather moving across the horizon before it reaches you. On the farm, especially, there are moments when the quiet feels almost sacred.
And yet I have spent years feeling like there is something spiritually wrong with this place.
Not the land itself. The human atmosphere.North Dakota feels, to me, like a place that refuses to become.
During the warmer months, it can almost fool you. The fields are green. The sky is huge. The sunsets are beautiful. Everything seems peaceful and pastoral, almost Shire-like.
Then the cycle starts.
Ticks in spring.
Mosquitoes in summer.
Flies after that.
Wasps becoming increasingly homicidal as autumn approaches.
And then winter arrives and stays for what feels like half the year, with temperatures dropping below -30 with wind chill and snow piling high enough to turn the landscape into something less like a state and more like a survival map.
People joke that nothing happens here.
That is not entirely true.
Things happen.
They just rarely seem to accumulate into culture.
Everything is serviceable.
That word keeps coming back to me.
Serviceable.
The restaurant feeds you. The building keeps the wind out. The store has what you need. The road gets you to work.
Nothing has to be beautiful.
Nothing has to be strange.
Nothing has to make you feel anything.
It just has to function.
There are obvious reasons for that mentality. This is a harsh, rural place. Distance matters. Weather matters. Practicality matters. When your car failing to start can become a legitimate emergency, you learn to respect usefulness.
But somewhere along the way, practicality seems to have become an entire worldview.
Why make something extraordinary when adequate will do?
Why experiment when nobody asked for it?
Why build a venue if there is no audience?
Why become an audience if there is no venue?
A friend once said to me, “The stage and the crowd need each other to survive.”
That sentence explains more about North Dakota than I expected it to.
Someone could come here and make something incredible.
The problem is that nobody wants to stick around long enough to make it happen.
The ambitious kid leaves.
The artist leaves.
The musician leaves.
The queer person leaves.
The chef leaves.
The person who wanted to start the weird little bookstore or gallery or performance space leaves.
Then everyone remaining looks around and says, “See? There is nothing here.”
And they are right.
Until someone tries to change it.
Nobody chooses to be here.
You wind up here.
I know that is not literally true. There are people who love North Dakota and deliberately build lives here.
But emotionally, culturally, there is a strong sense of inheritance rather than arrival.
People are here because their family is here.
Because the job is here.
Because the land is here.
Because moving somewhere else costs money.
Because they ended up here somehow and then thirty years passed.
There is a kind of self-loathing that can grow out of that.
People resent the place, but they also defend it. They make fun of it, but they do not want outsiders making fun of it. They complain that nothing changes, then become suspicious of anyone trying to change anything.
That contradiction shows up in darker ways too.
North Dakota has a comparatively large Native population, and racism toward Native people is common enough to feel atmospheric. People casually repeat stereotypes about Native people being criminals, thieves, drunks, troublemakers.
What is especially disturbing is how often that contempt gets internalized.
I have heard Native people say racist things about other Native people. I have watched people distance themselves from their own communities as though proximity itself were shameful.
That kind of self-rejection is not unique to North Dakota, but something about this place makes it very visible. There are rigid hierarchies here and not many ways to escape them.
So people learn to survive by proving they are not the kind of person everyone has agreed is beneath them.
Fish.
Work.
Drive.
Drink.
Repeat.
Because when there is nowhere to go, nothing to do, winter outside, and hours of driving between anything resembling a cultural center, alcohol becomes one of the easiest available forms of entertainment.
There is a reason small rural bars can feel less like nightlife and more like civic infrastructure.
And still—
I like the quiet.
That is the contradiction I cannot escape.
I can hate the culture and love the silence.
I can feel suffocated by the social environment while feeling liberated by the physical one.
No neighbors can mean isolation.
No neighbors can also mean freedom.
An empty horizon can feel lonely.
An empty horizon can also feel infinite.
Not hell.
Limbo.
Because hell would at least be dramatic.
North Dakota is quieter than that.
It is a place where things almost happen.
Summer almost makes you forget winter.
A town almost develops a scene.
A venue almost opens.
Someone almost builds something interesting.
Someone talented almost stays.
Something almost becomes permanent.
Then the weather changes. The funding disappears. The person moves away. The building closes. The field stays a field.
That may be the strangest thing about living here as a creative person.
My instinct is always to look at something and ask:
What could this become?
A website could become a place.
A song could become a world.
An empty building could become a venue.
A forgotten town could become a community.
A blank field could become a stage.
But the cultural response I have often felt around me is simpler:
Why?
Why bother?
And maybe that is the part that feels spiritually wrong.
Not the cold.
Not the isolation.
Not even the boredom.
It is the persistent sense that imagination itself is somehow excessive.
That wanting more beauty, more culture, more art, more possibility is embarrassing.
That things should remain useful, predictable, familiar and good enough.
The tragedy is that North Dakota is actually a perfect place for weirdness.
There is so much space here.
So much silence.
So much forgotten infrastructure.
So many enormous skies.
So many landscapes that already feel surreal.
You could make extraordinary things here.
Maybe the greatest frustration is knowing that.
Looking across all this open space and feeling possibility everywhere.
Watching a place capable of becoming almost anything repeatedly choose to remain exactly what it already is.
And then walking outside at sunset, hearing nothing but wind through the grass, seeing no other human being for miles, and thinking: