chase scenes serial #15
‘Blue Collar Comedy and Cross Burning’ specials. Yet my pleasure at entering into such a ripe environment was not complete for upon ordering a plain bagel, two of which were stored in a Tupperware sandwich package, I asked if they did not have any peanut butter. They did not. But as if snapping out of her real world fog and reentering the sweet walls of Coffee Break; the girl behind the counter offered that they did have “peanut butter syrup.” I feel that nothing more needs to be said about that scenario, and we are beginning to descend into Min/St. Paul. The Twin Cities is what I shall call them because I cannot spell the name of the one that starts with ‘M.’ I do not mock these places lightly. In a sense I am confronting my own stereotypes and I am generally thrilled to encounter locations and establishments outside my norm. They provide more cause for me to note them than would a place that sold Black Metal records or French novels. For certain I could find something to say about these places but it seems, on trips such as these, that I relish more the chance to eat an iceberg lettuce salad in Trapper’s Kettle, Belford, ND‡. And merely describing it as this is not sufficient because it allows those past
‡ I keep meaning to consult a map to see whether the town was Belford or Belfield. At the end of our long hike and relatively long drive through ranches and oil fields, back from the north unit, the town was a welcome dose of civilisation, although not the sad shock back to chain restaurants and chain motels and open businesses that we would have suffered had we drove on to Dickinson, or Dickenson. There was a single restaurant at the interstate commercial district that was clearly marked ‘Restaurant’ with its name, Trapper’s Kettle, hardly visible in weathered copper over dark wood. We gave other options not a second thought and dove right in. It was an incredibly large restaurant with odd furnishings such as a salad bar in a canoe and bristly rope lariats wound across the back of each chair. Everyone seemed to know each other and people would make the circuit from table to table saying “good evening.” A rotund man in overalls spent more time at each table appearing to have meaningful conversations with each group. We speculated that he was either the mayor or the preacher. I don’t know if there was a center to the city set apart from the highway where there might be another eating establishment. I recalled being in Mexico City and getting chastised by my colleagues for eating at VIPS, a south of the border Denny’s clone where I ordered the most bitter lemonade concocted on the planet. They felt that it was not an ‘authentic’ experience. It was in Mexico was it not? “Where do you think Mexicans eat; where do you think Belfieldians eat?” Although I felt rather uninspired eating at Trapper’s Kettle, and I could have found the fare anywhere else, I was in North Dakota, and these were real local people, not curiosities. Who am I to question their validity, to smirk at their Saturday evening social?
