A Brief Encounter with Bismarck

Bismarck is brown, beige, brick and tan and a beer brewer with big brass bins near the window rests beside the Fireflour pizza and coffee joint which turned me away at 10:30am because I wanted pizza and they are only coffee until 11:00am.

My hotel is 9 stories tall and looks like the tallest building in the city. Half of the vehicles meandering the streets are pick-up trucks and half of those pickup trucks have dirt baked into them with love over months. One pick-up truck looks like it was purchased in 1987 and roars down the street with white male anger, a Trump-Pence bumper sticker placed delicately, perfectly, in the top-center of the rear window. The truck’s entire passenger side is mangled yet un-repaired. Dirt and injury are worn on the trucks like badges of honor, just as is the grey in the long dark red and brown beards of the aging white men who populate the McDonald’s I chose after the Fireflour rejection and talk with kind age while Fox News hums in the background on the big TV screens.

The checkout counter moves slowly. An old woman appears to be negotiating with coupons on her smartphone and the fat woman manning the checkout counter behaves with limited familiarity with the cash register. As the transaction proceeds into its third or fourth minute, the old woman gestures about “the people” waiting behind her for whom she is concerned. There are three of us, including me, and we really do not care. It is 10:48am in Bismarck, there is no rush.

Bismarck has a new baseball team this year. Their season runs from the end of May through August. “Baseball is back in Bismarck” blare the promotions.

Bismarck’s shop windows suggest little treasures of humanity, one window said something about “seeds of hope,” another is a thrift shop marketing its reusable wares and suggesting that buying things there helps people in some charitable way. I didn’t pay attention to how. A kind-looking older woman was visible at the checkout counter as I passed by the doorway. I pondered stopping in to look at the book collection and maybe buy sunglasses because it was very bright in Bismarck.


UPDATE: I went into Fireflour around 3:30, sat alone by the window and ordered the Chopped (a salad), the Shroom (a pizza), and a Diet Coke. The food was first-rate, excellent portions and taste.