Posted by:
scmd
(
)
Date: August 23, 2016 01:50AM
getbusylivin Wrote:
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> "If we moved there I would be the darkest person
> in the entire state!"
>
> Classic!
When I was six, my family drove through North Dakota once. We'd gone into South Dakota to see Mt. Rushmore, the Black Hills, and whatever else there was to see in South Dakota, including a storm that morphed into a bona fide tornado one night. My parents had never been into North Dakota, so they decided to drive a bit further north so that we could all say we had been in the state of North Dakota.
The first five years of my life were spent in Laie, Hawaii, except for summer trips to Utah, so I had experienced cultural diversity, but at the time of the Dakota vacation we were living in Utah County, which is pretty white, and was even more so in the 90's. The kids in my family would have all still been some shade of blond at that point. My dad would have outgrown his almost-towheadedness but was still close to blond. My mom's hair was the same blonde shade of her youth, courtesy of whatever product her hair dresser was putting on it. In summation, we did not have anything resembling Native American coloring.
We drove into what I believe was the small North Dakota town of Bowman. It was time for lunch. We didn't find anything resembling a restaurant or even a fast-food operation, but there was a mini-mart. We pushed our way out of the van and into the minimart and argued with our parents about what forms of junk food could actually pass as a meal until they finally gave in and approved "fruit" roll up, Hostess snack cakes, and an assortment of other garbage.
Just a block away was a school playground with a picnic table on the edge. The school was across the street from a Lutheran Church (probably the only church in town, as the town only had about 1,500 people at the time as I recall, though there may have been more churches we didn't see, and maybe even multiple Lutheran churches; some of these denominations seem to divide over light and transient causes, and one cannot expect an ELCA Lutheran to take communion alongside a Missouri Synod Lutheran; it isn't just the LDS that are picky about small things).
The Lutheran Church was apparently holding Vacation Bible School at the time we were there. Just as the younger children in my family finished eating the garbage we passed off as lunch and had ventured onto the school's playground equipment, the Lutheran Church unleashed its Vacation Bible School clientele to run across the street and have free play time on the school playground equipment. (I don't think they sent a single adult out to keep an eye on the kids. It' a good thing my parents weren't axe murderers or kidnappers out looking for more blonde kids to add to their already oversized brood.)
We were blond, but the Lutheran kids of Bowman, North Dakota were so incredibly white-haired that they made most of my siblings look like Panamanians by comparison. At six, I was still tow-headed enough to blend in with them. When an adult showed up to round them up and take them back inside, he tried to take me as well.
My mom said she looked at the eyes of as many of the kids as she could without looking as though she was a child predator, and didn't spot even a single green-eyed child, much less a brown-eyed one. It's a different world up there, or at least it was in the 1990's.