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The Key

The Key to advertisers

in the Victoria Gazette.

Located at www.VictoriaGazette.com.

It took us nearly ten hours on Friday, October 10th, to drive from Victoria, Minnesota, to Tioga, North Dakota, to see our daughter Jenny and her family. Our son in law Christopher was solicited to be the project manager of an oil pipeline job out there that is preparing to supply the future oil needs of our nation.

A google search calls Tioga the “Oil Capital of North Dakota.” From what I’ve been learning, it could become the Oil Capital of America. Will our kids stay out in that distant land for the duration? It would be presumptuous to speculate.

Chris accepted the position on July 1st, and Jenny and the kids moved to Tioga just before this past Labor Day. Addie, 5, was on time for the first day of kindegarten at Tioga Elementary School. Gunnar, 3, thinks he’s a big boy because he gets to attend preschool.

The whole Tioga story has yet to be told, of course, but it is literally one adventure after the other for the little Norgaard family and those who know them, not to mention it’s an adventure for the entire little town (population currently 1,200) and possibly the entire nation.

Located in the northwest corner of North Dakota, Tioga has a very limited housing stock so our kids spent the first couple weeks in a tent followed by several weeks in a camper in one of the five Tioga campgrounds. Addie did not mind that the school bus picked her up at the campground for a while. As a matter of fact, the little ones wanted to live in the camper forever.

But there was a brand new duplex under construction in downtown Tioga -- only two blocks from everything important -- and they swiped it up. As Jenny’s creativity went on overdrive, they hired a carpenter to break open some walls and turn it into a four-bedroom, four-bathroom single family home. Very comfortable.

The vocabulary of Addie and Gunnar continues to increase in unusual ways. Because of the initial living quarters, they can now can tell you everything you need to know about “hotplate” and “laundromat” and “public showers,” for example, and they can draw pictures of oil wells and pipeline in the trenches and the red sky at night.

There is indeed a red sky at night because of the huge natural gas flames shooting out of the hills like booming bonfires. Black gold is the focus of the work in Tioga, and also natural gas. We saw the red sky driving home after a day of shopping in Minot. Amazing.

Prior to July of this year, the State of North Dakota barely existed for me and our family, and who ever heard of Tioga? By the way, it rhymes with yoga. The first syllable is pronounced the same as tie, as in tie your shoelaces so you don’t trip and fall in an oil slick.

Did I tell you about the trains? They run right through the heart of Tioga, maybe two or three every hour, one after the other, all day and all night, freight trains, some double stacked, some coal cars, some tankers, two and three engines pulling over a hundred cars. I counted them as we were first driving into town. We can’t see the trains from Jenny’s house but we can hear them.

When I first heard a Tioga train through the phone receiver, as Jenny and her mama in Victoria, Minnesota, were talking about everything under the sun, I thought it was tracking through their living room. Train thunder echoed and boomed across the wireless when it bounced off the walls and hardwood floors of their big empty house.

The first day that Allan and I were at the Nogaard home in Tioga, I stopped unpacking Jenny’s boxes each time a train was a comin’ down the track and goin’ through the town. The first night that Allan and I were sleeping in Addie’s new bedroom, I think I heard every train crossing the State of North Dakota. As soon as one was rumbling in, another one was rumbling out.

Of course, as nostalgia nodded in my direction, I recalled the train that once went through Ghent, Minnesota, where I grew up, and the train I took one time from Sioux City to Dubuque to Chicago, and the train that once crossed Park Drive here by our neighborhood in Victoria, and the elusive train I always hear at night when we sleep with our window open.

I don’t know how it happened, but by the second day and second night I hardly heard the Tioga trains. By the third day and third night, I couldn’t have told you there was a train track through Tioga. We were there six days. I look forward to our next visit. It’s a good nest for the kids.

In the event your interest in Tioga, North Dakota, has been tweaked a bit, I’m preparing a whole series of photos for Sue’s Album at www.VictoriaGazette.com from our six-day, fact-finding, kid-holding, heart-tugging time there. I suspect the oil adventure will continue for a while and that I will become familiar with the Amtrak passenger train that runs directly from Minneapolis to Tioga.

Meanwhile, in between here and there, planned for Abbot Northwestern Hospital right after this edition of the newspaper is printed and mailed, another family adventure is anticipated. Our son Nick and his wife Jen -- and all of us -- are praying and hoping for a safe and healthy delivery of their very first child, a little baby girl whom they’ve already named Sophia. I’ll probably have details for you in the next issue of the Gazette.