“Fargo, like the movie where everyone dies?” Hek asks when we roll into town. “Yes,” I say, “but that’s movie is more a satire about small town Minnesotans than North Dakota’s biggest city.”
Along the way we take a detour to detroit lakes where my three youngest siblings and Dad had just arrived at a lake cabin for the summer vacation. We introduced Hek to the exciting sport of bean bag toss, the game that tends to keep us kids up til 4am over the holidays.
My dad told the story of how he got thrown out of the Peace Corps for building a radio station instead of planting a tomato garden, and Julianne apparently is a really good swimmer, and disappeared into the lake where she frightened a family of ducks.
“You have a nice family,” Hek tells when we leave the cabin.
My nice family decided to drive out to our gig at the Red Raven, and my sister Teresa and brother twelve-year-old brother Isaac brought guitars to play a favorite song in the Armstrong household. On stage, I played the Travel Write Sing guitar, painted for me by my brother Tyler when I was in Iceland. It’s a kids guitar, and a quick Google search confirms that it is marketed to teenage girls.
But it’s a good guitar, and it’s been passed from hand to hand in my family for the last ten years.
Tom, Julianne, Hek and I finally found the right venue to do a full band song and we plan to do it again at tonight’s stop, “The Angry Beaver Lodge” in the intrepid little town of Oakes, North Dakota. I first visited Oakes in January, where I gave a talk to the high school about poverty and human trafficking. I befriended the Computer Science teacher, Larry Engel, and he and his son invited us to come out to play Oakes.
This morning we did a radio show with Phil Parker on KFYR 550. Phil has been off-and-on radio partners with my dad for the last twenty years. I remember going to his house as a kid to jump on his trampoline, which kept my mom on the tense edge of her seat.
Hek Whistling Around Town
