Living in Small-Town North Dakota as an LA Native

Me arriving North Dakota for the first time on Jan. 3 (on the western border near Beach, ND). If you’d told me just five or so years ago — when I was still in high school — that I’d be living in a small town in North Dakota in 2024, I would have been confused, more than anything. I probably would have said something like, “How did I end up there? Did I move there on purpose?” I might have even had to Google where North Dakota was on a map.   The biggest thing I’ve realized since moving to Devils Lake is how perspective shapes the way people view their hometown. It’s funny looking back to when I first started college in Eugene, Oregon, thinking that that would be an enormous adjustment from LA. Eugene is relatively colder and rainier than LA, and it’s a small town by comparison. I’ve always preferred warmer weather, and I was used to living in the second-most populated city in the country.   But the “small town” of Eugene is about the size of Fargo, which has the highest population in North Dakota. To a Devils Lake native, Eugene probably would probably feel like the big city. And now I laugh about thinking Eugene was a small town while I was there.   Visiting Eugene, Oregon, for the first time as a high school senior. (Autzen Stadium, the home of Oregon football, can be seen in the distance.)   Oregon weather is also much, much more manageable than North Dakota weather. Coming to Oregon from Southern California, it’s easy to complain about the gloomy winters and the amount of rain, but once you’ve spent a week in sub-zero North Dakota temperatures, you would gladly take an Oregon winter. Oregon doesn’t even get snow most of the time, and it rarely drops much below 32 degrees. That’s paradise compared to North Dakota, which may very well be -32 at the same point in the year.   I didn’t consider any of this until about seven months ago.   Having experienced small-town life for more than half a year, it’s already easy to see how moving from a small town to a big city would be an adjustment. It would probably be a combination of exciting and overwhelming. From Devils Lake, even making a trek to Grand Forks or Fargo feels like a pretty big shift. People likely get very used to their small town, and they’re happy with that.   Well, for me, LA was my small town. It’s easy to take a place for granted when it’s all you’ve ever known. I used to think it was weird that people went to LA for vacation, or that somebody would want to live in LA their whole lives. I couldn’t imagine staying there forever. I was determined to go somewhere else for college, and didn’t understand all the kids who picked colleges in the area.   I already view LA a little bit differently now.   Having warm weather year-round in LA, especially if you’ve never lived anywhere else, isn’t something you even think about. (In fact, a lot of people complain about “cold weather” anyway.) Not to mention the amount of restaurants, movie theaters, schools, entertainment options, parks, and the numerous cities within the city. There’s just so much of everything. But I was used to that. It wasn’t something I really appreciated. LA already feels like such a distant memory, almost like I view it now through the lens of a lifelong Devils Lake resident and not someone who’s still spent the majority of his life there. I do miss a lot of things about it.       In some ways, I still feel like I never fully knew LA. Despite living there for 18 years, there are plenty of parts of LA I’ve never been to or have never even heard of. In seven months of living in North Dakota, I already feel more familiar with the state’s geography than that of LA.   That sort of leads to my next point, which is how much traveling I get to do in North Dakota. A lot of people might see that as a negative. I have to drive for about 90 minutes to get to a theater that shows more than three movies a week, or to go to a Target or a book store. As a sports reporter for the local Devils Lake teams, many of the games and tournaments are in places like Fargo, Bismarck, Minot, Mayville, etc., all of which have driving times of well over an hour.   But I enjoy that. Right before moving here, I drove 13,000 miles around the country in 36 days. I had lots of marathon days, but the one that sticks out is when I drove roughly 940 miles in a single day, going from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to San Luis Obispo, California. It was about 13.5 hours of driving, not including stops. I still can’t believe I did that. I’ll go into more detail on that day and that wild trip in future posts on this blog.   But traveling and exploring excite me, and it’s something I’ve gotten to continue doing here in North Dakota. I’ve driven across hundreds of miles of farmland to visit some of the state’s biggest “cities” and tiniest towns. I’ve gone over into Minnesota many times — including a trip all the way to Minneapolis — down into South Dakota, and up into Canada. I also can’t forget the trip when I first moved here in January, when I drove from Portland, Oregon, through southeast Washington, through northern Idaho, then all the way across the state of Montana and into North Dakota before I finally got to Devils Lake. I love long drives through vast areas of the country. That’s actually a disadvantage of living in LA; long drives like that usually aren’t necessary or convenient. Well, you might get some long drives, but it’s usually because you’re stuck in traffic, not because you’re going anywhere far. Going anyplace in North Dakota, on the other hand, is pretty much always going to take the exact same amount of time, every time. A drive from LA to San Diego can be as short as less than two hours, or as long as three and a half hours. A drive from Devils Lake to Fargo is basically always going to take two hours and 20 minutes if you stay around the speed limit.   Michigan, North Dakota (population: 268).   Before happening to get a job at the Devils Lake Journal last November, I don’t think I’d ever spent much more than five seconds consecutively thinking about North Dakota. The most it had entered my mind was probably in fifth grade when we had to memorize all 50 state capitals and point to each state on a map. So I’d heard of Bismarck. And I’d heard of Fargo because of the movie Fargo. That was about it.   So it wasn’t my first choice. I didn’t know where I was going to end up. But it was the first place that offered me an opportunity, and rather than just wait around in Oregon for something else to come up, I decided to take it. The first couple of months were a bit tough, throwing myself into the fire — or more accurately, the snow — with weather I wasn’t used to and a place I’d never heard of where I didn’t know anybody. But as the weather has warmed up, I’ve also warmed up to it a lot as I’ve gotten to know the athletes, families, and communities in the area. It’s been tons of fun to explore a part of the country I’d never been to before, one that differs significantly from the type of place I grew up in. The experience of North Dakota has been a fascinating adventure and an absolute blast.   For the first 18 years of my life, I lived in the same house in LA. But in the five years that have followed, I’ve gotten to experience about as wide a variety of climates and lifestyles that it’s possible to experience in the U.S. I’ve lived in sunny, celebrity-filled Hollywood. I’ve lived in a rainy but spirited college town in Oregon. I’ve spent a summer getting to know East Coast people while interning for a baseball team on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. I’ve driven through 36 states over a 36-day period, experiencing a whole swarm of different areas in one giant swoop. And then I’ve moved to Devils Lake, North Dakota, a town of a little more than 7,000 people in one of the coldest and most isolated regions of the country.   So that’s where this blog begins. Throughout all these travels and life changes, I’ve taken numerous photos and videos, many of which I’ve never posted or shared publicly. Through these documentations, and all the memories I still have stored in my brain, I’m going to take the readers through these various adventures. Simultaneously, I hope to write more about my adjustment to living in North Dakota as it goes on, along with all my future trips I hope to take. I’m well on my way to my goal of visiting all 50 states — right now, as of writing this post, I’m at 41.   Stay tuned.