More Culture Shock In Dickinson, North Dakota

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In the South, where I grew up, education is valued and respected.  If a person was a teacher, a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer, they were respected.  I believe that there were several reasons for this.  Church and the Bible were important in the lives of people in the South.  The preacher was looked upon as a person with higher learning, as wise, as having sound judgement, as someone to be respected.  The preacher, nor the citizens, would tolerate disrespect towards a preacher. Similarly, teachers were looked upon as someone with higher learning, as wise, and having sound judgement, as someone to be respected.  Doctors were very highly valued, they were treated with respect and were treated as very important people.

Anyone in the South, would hope that their child would grow up to be a teacher, a preacher, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer. It was good that a child would grow up to be knowledgeable, well read, knowing about the world, able to make informed decisions, to be able to practice their profession where they chose, to not be tied to a place, or to be limited in life by the lack of understanding or lack of knowledge.

I did very well in school, my classmates who liked me were proud of me, my classmates who didn’t like me wouldn’t deny that what I had done was good, that I would go to college, that that was good.  When I was going to college and working, my co-workers whether they liked me or not, they would not disagree that what I was doing was good.  When I graduated with a degree in engineering and went to work as an estimator, engineer, superintendent, and project manager, my employers and co-workers either acknowledged, or did not disagree that the engineering education and learning was important.

When I got to North Dakota, I found that the people here have disgust and hatred for people with an education.  In about the middle of 2013, there was a national newspaper article, that said North Dakota had the highest percentage of people in the United States with less than an 8th grade education, and, that North Dakota had the highest per capita beer consumption. That explained a lot.

As I explained in my previous post, I have been to the North Dakota pioneer museums, life was very hard in North Dakota, the early pioneers in the late 1800s and early 1900s lived in houses made of grass sod because there were no trees to make lumber.  They had to burn dried animal dung for heating and cooking.  Whole families of six to ten people lived in houses that were less than 300 square feet.  Life was very hard in North Dakota, even into the 1950s and 1960s.  What good would it have done for a man or woman to gain higher learning if they were going to have to fight the land and the cold to survive.  There would not have been a way to spare children from daily labor necessary for survival, for them to have the time to do a great deal of studying.  There would have not been any money to send children away to college.

If a man or woman did start to learn about the world, about what life was like in London, Paris, New York City, or Miami, and were interested in that sort of life, would they remain in North Dakota, and once they were away, and knew what it was like to have a toilet, would they ever want to return to Dickinson?  I imagine that the people who had the aptitude for college and were able to leave Dickinson, might not have wanted to return because there were not any job opportunities for them, suitable marriage opportunities, cultural or social opportunities, just a very hard bleak life of farming with seven months of winter.

So the reason why most of long time residents in Dickinson hate people with an education, is because they do not have an education.  They never saw the need for it, it had nothing to do with their way of life, or they wanted more education, but did not get it, and now they are bitter about it.  The people who got an education probably do not come back,  I know how they feel, it is very frustrating trying to live and work with the highest beer consuming/lowest education level people in the United States who hate people with a college education.

Culture Shock In Dickinson, North Dakota

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I am originally from a small town in a southern state.  One of the elements of culture where I am from is hospitality.  I believe that two reasons why hospitality was important and apparent in the south, was due to the protestant religions such as Baptist, Methodist, and Presbyterian, and due to readily available resources.  I will try to explain this.

The protestant religions teach foremost the belief in Jesus, God, and doing what Jesus and God have instructed.  Jesus taught about giving and kindness to others.  As a brief example, Jesus was with his apostles and they witnessed church goers as they made offerings,  one man gave a substantial amount, one woman gave only a penny or two.  Jesus asked the apostles who gave the most, they answered that a particular man had given a substantial amount.  Jesus said, no, the woman who gave the few pennies gave the most, because she gave all that she had.  As another example, Jesus was invited to the home of a wealthy man, and upon everyone being seated, the household was embarrassed when a harlot showed up, and began to wash Jesus’ feet, and I believe I remember she dried his feet with her hair.  The house guests thought that this woman was trash and that Jesus should not have had anything to do with her, however Jesus pointed out that no one else had offered him the courtesy of washing his feet when he had entered this home, the woman was showing him reverence and kindness.  So, in the South, where they believe in the Bible, they try to incorporate what the Bible says into their day to day lives.  I will give an example.

I had a friend named Joseph who was from Georgia.  Joseph was 35 years old, he had a wife and a daughter.  He was a self employed tree trimmer, and he was poor.  In the winter of 2009 when the economy started to go bad, he had to go to the food bank, because he did not have enough money to buy food.  In the spring and summer, he got by O.K., but just barely.  I stopped by his house at about 5 p.m. one evening when he had just gotten home from doing a tree job, he had stopped at Dominoes Pizza and bought a large pizza.  He asked me if I would like some pizza,  I said no, thank you, I had already eaten, but the real reason was that I knew that that pizza was just enough for him, his wife, and daughter.  Just then, two young Mormon missionaries stopped at his house, Joseph and I both knew them, and talked to them from time to time.  Joseph said, “Hey you guys are just in time for some pizza, would you like some pizza?”  They said, “Oh yeah, great, thanks.” and they ate half his pizza.  There was just enough left for his wife and daughter after the missionaries left.  The rented house that Joseph lived in was very small and bare.  I had already passed through the kitchen and saw that there was not any food in the house, just maybe an almost empty bag of old bread, maybe a can of beans.  I said to Joseph, “Well, it looks like they ate all your pizza.”  Joseph said, “Oh, it don’t matter, I’ll find something else to eat.”

The second reason why people in the South have hospitality, is that they have been accustomed to having resources available.  In the South, trees are plentiful, so it is not difficult to get wood for furniture, firewood, or housing.  Domestic animals like chickens, cattle, pigs, and goats are not difficult to keep.  Wild animals like rabbits, possums, squirrels, turkeys, alligators, and fish are not that difficult to come by.  So, it was not that difficult to survive, you could afford to be hospitable, even if you were poor, it was not like you were going to die.

In North Dakota, things were different.  I have been to North Dakota pioneer museums, and have read and seen the exhibits.  I have talked to older North Dakotans about how things were growing up around Dickinson.  The pioneers that came to North Dakota in the late 1800s and early 1900s lived in small grass sod houses, the walls were constructed entirely of grass sod.  The houses were small partly because there was not a lot of things to burn to heat them, dried animal dung was collected to burn for heating and cooking.  I have been inside some of these houses on old farms outside of Dickinson, they were very small, very primitive, maybe a 10’x12′ room adjoined to another 10’x12′ room, and whole families lived in them.  I have talked to people who said that even growing up in Dickinson in the 1950s, that many people still had out houses.  It was common for the mom to keep the roll of toilet paper, that children were not given toilet paper, if you wanted toilet paper, you had to go and ask, and that you might be given three sheets.  Apparently life was brutally hard in North Dakota until recently, there had been a scarcity of basic necessities.  If you talk to people about it, you will begin to understand that hospitality was something that was not done, it was so hard for a family to survive, there wasn’t hospitality.

In the eight months that I lived in Dickinson in 2011, and the sixteen months that I have been living in Dickinson currently, it was not until I understood how hard life had been in North Dakota, that I realized this is one of the reasons why the residents in North Dakota are not hospitable and friendly, and why they don’t even know that they are not hospitable and friendly.

Improving Life in Dickinson, North Dakota

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In my previous post, I listed some positive things about Dickinson, North Dakota.  I could have mentioned Alive at 5, which is a street party in downtown Dickinson that is held every Thursday during the summer months from 5 p.m. to about 8:30 p.m.  1st Avenue is closed to traffic from 1st Street to Villard to make room for a band, food vendors, and a beer garden.

I went to about half of the Alive at 5 events, and I enjoyed every one of them.  From what I saw, everybody who came had a good time.  For the first half of the summer, all of the musical performers were very good, but towards the end of the summer, Dickinson hosted two well known performers, Gwen Sebastian, and a few weeks later Kat Perkins.  I met these women, they were very positive and friendly to everyone, they were very nice people, they created a lot of excitement in Dickinson.

The people who came to Alive at 5 were infants to people in their late 80s, moms and dads, kids, teenagers, bikers, hippies, everybody.  As I have stated previously, there is a shortage of women in Dickinson, but at the Alive at 5 event, there were probably as many women as men, and many of the women were attractive.

The Odd Fellows Lodge of Dickinson organized the event, which was a great deal of work.  The entertainers had to be selected, scheduled, booked, and paid, and in order to pay the performers, a lot of money had to be raised in a variety of ways.  Advertising was sold, VIP tickets were sold, donations of labor and equipment were made to set up the event.

I have met some older people in Dickinson, some of them were bikers, hippies, farmers, oil field workers, who told me about the music festivals that used to be held just east of Dickinson in the 1970s, I think they were at the Green River in Gladstone.  These older people that had lived in Dickinson their whole lives, some of the only happy memories I ever heard them talk about was being young and going to the Green River concerts, that or sometimes they would talk about the Queen City Club.

On west Villard, where Aarons Furniture is now, it used to be the Queen City Club.  The Queen City Club was a large bar with a dance floor, and every weekend they would have a band. This was back in the late 1970s and 1980s from what I can gather.  One older guy that I talk to, told me about how everybody used to get dressed up to go out on Friday and Saturday night to the Queen City Club, the men and the women.

But this older guy reminds me, you can’t do that now, nobody can go out and have a good time now, they’re so worried about getting a DUI and losing their jobs.

I enjoyed going to the Alive at 5 event.  I do recall that the police did stay away from most of the Alive at 5 events and did not try to catch people as they left.  I am very glad that the Odd Fellows Lodge members, the volunteers, and the Rock Bar did all the work to have the event.  This made life this year in Dickinson much better.

Start of Blog Dickinson58601.com

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I first came to Dickinson, North Dakota, in 2011.  I had a home and a business in another state, but business was bad in that state.  I wanted, and needed, to make more money.  I lived in Dickinson for eight months.  I returned to Dickinson in 2013, and have now been here for sixteen months.

I wanted to express some of my thoughts about Dickinson.  If you are from out of state and living in Dickinson, many of you will know exactly what I am talking about, when you read them. If you are from Dickinson and have lived here most of your life, some of the things that I say might not have been apparent to you.

If you are living in a different state and are considering moving to North Dakota, I would like to caution you.  Several times in my life, I have moved to another state to start over.  The things that you go through, such as finding a place to live, finding a job, getting your driver’s license changed, getting your vehicle registration changed, meeting new people, finding things to do, it is not the same in North Dakota.

Unfortunately, the information that you get from an official city website does not really describe what living in that city is like, and the Chamber of Commerce website will also try to present a city in a completely positive manner.  In the past, I have been cursing mad, when I have come to find out that an area I had moved to had something that “I wished somebody had told me about.”

To start this blog off, I will list some positive things about Dickinson, North Dakota, and some negative things.

The positive:

  • Dickinson has a nice recreation center, called the West River Community Center.  It has an indoor pool, indoor tennis courts, indoor basketball courts, a weight area, rock climbing wall, and a few more things.  It is open to everyone for a moderate daily fee, or a fairly low priced membership.
  • Right in Dickinson, there is a lake, called Patterson Lake, that is nice to visit.  Approximately seventy percent of the perimeter of the lake is undeveloped and is available for walking or cooking out.  It is open to everyone, and in the summer there is a small daily fee.
  • There are more jobs openings in Dickinson right now than you will find in other cities.

The negative:

  • The cost of housing in Dickinson is so high, that even if you are well paid, the cost of housing could easily take fifty percent or more of your take home pay.
  • Your opportunity for recreation and socializing is extremely limited.  Dickinson is cold for about seven months out of the year, during these cold months, you will not want to spend a lot of time outdoors.  You might want to enjoy having some drinks at a bar or restaurant, meeting people, talking to people, but it is not safe to do this in Dickinson, because you will soon get a DUI.  I am in my 40s, and never in my life have I seen normal adult socializing crushed more than the DUI process in Dickinson, arrest first, test blood alcohol level later, post bail, $3,000 to attorney, probably dismissal if your BAC was below .08 to begin with.  This has never happened to me, but it has happened to so many people that I know, and I have seen the police doing this, that it is too dangerous to go to bars in Dickinson.
  • There are way more men in Dickinson than women.  There is a shortage of women in Dickinson.  There is such a shortage of women in Dickinson, that the good looking house wives in Dickinson have to hide, and try to get their shopping and errands done between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. before the men get off work.  I lived in Dickinson for over a year thinking that there were only ugly women in Dickinson, until one day, I went to the grocery store at 4:30 p.m., and there they were! very good looking women!  I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t figure out what was happening, they had been hiding all along!

The most important thing that I can say to those of you who are living in a different state, is that if you are thinking about coming here, the cheapest one bedroom apartment that you can find will probably be about $1,500 per month, a two bedroom apartment will be about $2,000 to $3,000 per month.  Most of the job openings in Dickinson will pay about $15 per hour.  Most of the people in Dickinson that I have met, worked with, lived with, have made between $12 to $22 per hour. Some of the highest paid people that I have met, a union electrician who worked a lot one year made $90,000, and a drill rig boss that I met probably made a little over $100,000.  I have personally met at least five truck drivers working here that were broke, due to not being paid at all or being poorly paid.