ONCE THERE WAS A SPOT

Larry Watson

I’M NOT SO idealistic or naïve as to suggest that the Bismarck, North Dakota, that I lived in from the age of five to the age of twenty (1952 to 1967) was a classless society. Not at all. It was a largely middle-class community, and it certainly had people living in poverty, just as it had people of wealth. But here’s the thing: While the poor aspired to a middle-class life, so did the wealthy.

Let’s say you were a lawyer or you owned a lumber company or you ran a construction company or you owned the city’s taxi service or you were a successful real estate developer. (These were the occupations of homeowners on my parents’ block; my father was one of the lawyers.) You could afford a nicer house than a schoolteacher or a cigarette salesman, yet the homes of all these families looked the same. When my wife moved to Bismarck with her family in 1958 they lived on the same block as the governor of the state, and I’d defy anyone who didn’t already know which house was the governor’s to pick it out from its neighbors. Later her family lived across the street from the mayor, and his house was as ordinary and unpretentious as any on the block.

The city had its grander houses, to be sure, but for the most part those had been built in an earlier era; they were older houses clustered near the center of town. The dwellings of newer construction were invariably modest, and almost all single-story ranches or split-levels.

In the company of friends, I entered more than a few of those houses, and once I was inside I could see that some had features that made them nicer than others—a plusher carpet, a paneled basement rec room, an extra bathroom, a console color television, a sectional sofa. But these touches were for the comfort, convenience, or taste of the residents; they didn’t affect the impression of the house—or of its inhabitants—from the street.

How to account for the middling effect in that place and time? Perhaps it was a collective memory of the Depression, which so many of our parents lived through. Since they’d witnessed what it was to lose everything, they might have believed it was better not to accumulate too much. Maybe it was ethnic influence. The ancestors of many North Dakotans came from Norway and Sweden, and to Scandinavians ostentation was a sin only slightly less grievous than murder. It was all right to keep up with the Joneses; it wasn’t all right to show them up. Many of the men had served in the military during World War II, and in the military almost everyone lands in the middle ranks. Maybe it was some strange influence of setting, of place and time, that made people believe the middle was where they belonged; they lived, after all, in the middle of the continent in the middle of the century. Or perhaps this was an era when the citizenry still took to heart their Christian religion’s lessons on humility. Whatever the cause, the city could have had a credo: Don’t try to show you’re better than your neighbor.

When did it change? I’m not sure. My wife and I moved away, but on one of our annual trips back to Bismarck, probably in the mid-1970s, we noticed that on the once-bare hills that surrounded and looked down on the town, houses were being built, grand houses, many of them, and over the years there were more and more of them, and they became bigger and more imposing (“big-roofed houses,” my architect brother-in-law calls them). At some point the houses that our parents had bought with the idea that they would live out their lives in them (true for my mother; she died in the house she’d lived in for more than fifty years) weren’t large enough for school principals or doctors or oil company executives or heads of state agencies. Families believed they needed more. One bathroom certainly wasn’t enough. Three bedrooms wouldn’t do. A triple garage was a necessity. Soon Bismarck became a city with houses that grandly declared that their occupants belonged to the higher socioeconomic classes. Anyone driving down this block had to know that the people here had more money than the people on that block.

Of course matters of social class are always complicated by culture, region, ancestry, history, politics, race—to say nothing of the eyes of those making observations and coming to conclusions. It’s entirely possible that when I recall a city that tried to show itself to the world as a community of equality of class I’m completely full of shit. But maybe, just maybe, on the wind-swept, heat-blasted, blizzard-besieged northern Plains, once there was a spot . . .