North Dakota
Suggested by: SFPL
Traveled: December 21-26

I knew there was a reason I was so diligent in jotting down written mile markers just after I closed the books in the first half of this trip. I wanted to avoid the frustration I face now: the fading colors of a world I remember vividly enjoying, the snips of voices just out of my range of hearing. The people in Erdrich’s world were thoroughly charming; I wish I had taken the time just after meeting them to do them justice.

Here is the gift they have given me that has withstood a month or two of life getting in the way: the miraculous in the everyday. It struck me then and stays with me now. I don’t mean the miracle of the kindness of strangers or true love, I mean the mystical, almost circus-like events that were woven indistinguishably into these people’s ordinary stories. Spills on the ice create the likeness of Christ, a mother gets into a demonstration plane at a fair and never returns, a beautiful woman feels herself sinking beneath her lawn from her patio furniture is too pointy in the soft dirt.

It was a seemingly ordinary story with Alice-in-Wonderland rules. And yet Erdrich creates her characters with such honesty and compassion that their lives seem true and wholly realistic. The little tickles of the fantastic aren’t out of place in small-town North Dakota. They are necessary to capture the magic of being alive together for years. Of scrubbing a butcher-block clean for decades with your mean-spirited cousin and good-hearted friend in the next room. Of living in a small town when the world makes big changes. Of having children before you want them, of having a child nobody understands. Magic actually makes life more real. It does the wonder of it all justice.