Moving to North Dakota was a real culture shock. It is totally different than New Jersey. The state if flat, flat, flat. Not a hill to be seen for miles. We moved into apartment houses that had been built especially for the Safeguard project in Cavalier, N.D. Not sure if I’ve mentioned it before, but that’s what the project was called, the Safeguard Project. I’ve already talked about the P.A.R. site and the M.S.R. sites. I worked at the P.A.R. and it was about 15 miles outside of Cavalier.
I always carpooled to work since everyone who lived in the apartment houses where we lived worked at the same place. I was one of about 10 programmers whose job it was to get the softwear tested in a real environment and then get it working. Just like any other job, it had deadlines and schedules and sometimes we worked pretty hard and other times, there wasn’t much to do at all.
We were members of the Langdon Branch of the church in the Fargo Stake. Langdon was another small town about 30 miles west of Cavalier. So, when we went to church, it was a thirty mile drive each way. We would leave in the morning and just spend the day in Langdon. Almost all of the people who went to the branch worked in some way for Safeguard. At the peak of activity, we had about 65 people coming to Sacrament meeting.
I must describe the roads in North Dakota. Most of them were very wide and straight as an arrow. As I said, there are no hills (at least not where we were). They have dug very wide shoulders on each side of the road because in the winter, the roads get icy a lot and you can slide off the road very easy. I know, it happened to me more than once. But when you do slide off, they want to get you off the road as far as possible, so the shoulders are intentionally wide so you can get out of the way of on-coming traffic. I remember one memorable drive into work one morning. There were four of us un the car. I was driving and we were cruising along at 40 or so. Suddenly, I must have hit a patch of ice because I no longer had control of the car. The rear end slowly swung around until we were facing back the way we came. We travelled backwards for several feet and ended up in the ditch in the snow. No one was hurt and it didn’t really do any damage to the car, but it was an eerie sensation. To have absolutely no control of the car.
Dad