Introducing Notes From Highway 10

I once saw a graph of states ranked in the order in which people found them memorable. One of those bits of statistical flotsam with questionable methodology, dropped on X or Facebook for engagement. It had just five tiers, sorting states into the “unforgettable” and “least memorable” levels.

There are various ways to look at this. Consider the power of one person’s New York memory:

“I shall never forget hearing Lennie Bernstein play Mahler’s 1st, with his clever accentuation of the klezmer orchestration in the third movement. As the music poured over me, its beguiling mix of mockery and melancholy, I couldn’t help but wonder anew: Bern-stine, or Bern-steen? Why can’t I remember that? I say one and then the other, and half the time I sound like a fool. Anyway, it was 1972, and the memory I will take to my grave.”

Or another’s:

“New York? Never forget it. Got mugged last summer by a guy on a bike who reeked of weed.”

Clearly, “memorable” doesn’t necessarily equate to “good.” I have intense memories of a city in Norway where my family spent a miserable rainy afternoon when the cruise ship diverted, and we had to choose an alternate port. The tour bus driver, hastily recruited to drive everyone around for an hour, apologized that there was nothing to see, but at least the rain was so torrential that we weren’t seeing how boring it was when the sun was out.

Memory’s also a tricky thing. I tend to reconstruct all the family trips as merry as the von Trapps dancing up the Alps, while forgetting the cross words and small spats. When I retell the tale of trying to keep my wife from following handmade signs that promised great bargains if you’d only go down these increasingly dark side streets in Naples, it’s funny family lore! As opposed to the truth, which consisted of me making a serious, strenuous, theatrically gesticulating case that we would be knifed and miss the ship.

Anyway. Minnesota, my home state, is in the bottom tier of recollected states. That hurts. Iowa is more popular. Iowa! We literally sit on that state like it’s an ottoman. This makes no sense, because we have everything: a big city abounding with museums and theaters and parks and restaurants (and honestly, it wasn’t destroyed and is no longer on fire). The middle of the state is dotted with hundreds of lakes; the south has rolling hills; the north has a vast expanse of untouched wilderness for the canoe-and-tent set. But it’s not enough to register with most people. Perhaps it’s more ordinary than we think.

But consider two states in the top tier: North and South Dakota.

I can understand the latter: It has huge heads carved into a mountain. Four disembodied noggins staring impassively into the distance. That you remember, if only because you drove so far to see something you’d seen in pictures all your life, and now you expect them to do something. If you’re there, you probably visit the Badlands, which are aptly named: a blasted moonscape whose alien arid beauty makes you think that Elon Musk might give up the Mars ambitions and just settle here. There’s Wall Drug, a sprawling, cluttered tourist trap that has an animatronic model of Ronald Reagan from the 1940s, dressed up like a cowboy, herkily-jerkily clapping in a mechanical jamboree. There’s a civic auditorium decorated entirely with desiccated corn. South Dakota is memorable indeed.

But North Dakota is not. I say this as a native, who loves the state and its infinite flatness. There is nothing that settles the soul like driving straight on I-94 for hours, passing nothing but fields, the clouds piled up in the prairie sky like impromptu mountain ranges. There is but Fargo, the midstate city of Bismarck with a skyscraper capital, and lots and lots of buried nuclear weapons in the upper west. If you were in North Dakota during an atomic war, and saw the Minutemen rise from their silos on pillars of flame, well, yes, you’d remember that. But otherwise?

Perhaps the existential contemplation that settles into your soul after an hour on the flat freeway is something few shake off. Perhaps it’s the northern part of the Badlands that stretches into the upper Dakota iteration. Perhaps people conflate the two Dakotas, lump them together. Seen one, you’ve seen them both. North Dakota, South Dakota; tomato, tomahto.

Personally, I find all states equally memorable, in that they’re all unique places in this remarkable nation. Everywhere I’ve been, I remember. I probably remember Florida more than Alabama, just because of Disney World and cruise-ship ports and hours spent examining Miami Art Deco.

But. There was a moment in Alabama when I pulled off the road on a hot July afternoon to fill up my van at a two-pump independent gas station, the sort of place where they never rehabbed the old 1950s white design—or scrubbed it much, either. I wandered over to the station and got a Nehi soda out of a chest freezer. Walked it down the rails, popped the top on the opener bolted to the side of the machine. I don’t know if it was grape or orange, but it was, at that moment—far from home, heartsick, lonely, with an afternoon of long road ahead, culminating in a cheap motel with a saggy bed and sandpaper towels—well, it the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted, and I’ll never forget it. That, to me, was Alabama.

Or maybe Mississippi. Point is, it was America. There’s no tiers for me. Just 50 fine examples.

Highway 10 runs from Minneapolis, Minnesota, to Fargo, North Dakota—and points beyond. Along the way are every sort of person and every sized American town. Whatever people are thinking about or doing, you can find it on Highway 10.