Fargo

I love the Coen Brothers, but the movie "Fargo" certainly does not do justice to the real town. "Fargo", of course, is about a bunch of slow talking Minnesotans who pepper their conversations with a "Ya sure" a lot.

The real Fargo is in North Dakota, and the people there talk nothing like Twin City suburbanites. They sound more like the cowboys from "Lonesome Dove" than they do the characters of the Coen Brothers movie.

OK. So they took some artistic license with the naming of the movie. After all, would a movie called "Eden Prairie" have the same cache?

But my real problem is that the movie leaves the impression that the real city is a boring, middle-of-nowhere place. Fargo IS a middle of nowhere place, and that's what makes it cool. But after two long weekends of visiting the town, I think it's everything but boring.

The fact that is is surrounded by a flat-as-a-pancake prairie, with no other major city to be found within 100 miles, naturally makes Fargo interesting. There is a great minor league baseball team, some terrific stores, a nifty little museum devoted to baseball great Roger Maris, who grew up in Fargo.

Really, Fargo is the northern gateway to the west, and that in itself makes it cool. The guys wear cowboys shirts, the girls walk around downtown in flowing dresses. There are pickup trucks and motorcycles and hot sports cars. Oh, and there are a lot of trains running through there.

Moorhead, Fargo's little Minnesota sister, has a great Scandinavian heritage center, the Hjemkomst Center. I had my first (and last) meal of lutefisk there. Hjemkomst, by the way, means homecoming in Norwegian.

But the best surprise for me is how great Fargo is its bicycling. There are bike lanes everywhere, and the street systems made up of a numbered streets and avenues make it easy to find your way around. There are great paved biking paths weaving through a bunch of nice parks, and the Red River running its meandering way north makes it all interesting.

I stayed at the Super 8 on the south end of Moorhead, and used my bike to get just about everywhere. But I also took a couple of long bike rides out into the country, and the prairie roads make riding interesting. On a 60-mile loop, I found the flatness and the fields and loneliness awesome. For the first hour. Then I realized that nothing much was changing. I was tapping out a decent tempo, never shifting up or down, never having to think about much of anything at all. It was at once cool and disconcerting at the same time -- there was a distinct sensation that despite all the work being put in, I wasn't moving at all. I found myself looking at my computer a lot, just to make sure I was making headway.

I also went for a nice 6-mile out-and-back run, heading south out of Moorhead. I ended up on a gravel road that ran between a cornfield on one side, soybeans on another. No cars, no people, just me and plants and an occasional blackbird. The vistas were amazing, and sky was everywhere. Such a cool sensation of the open spaces, so different from running and biking in hilly, green and woodsy Marathon County.