Since this story takes place in North Dakota, and its locale is of great importance if this tale is worthy of acceptance, I feel it would be remiss of me if I didn’t reacquaint you with some pertinent facts about that state:
North Dakota is located in the north-central part of the United States; it’s bordered by Minnesota on the East; South Dakota in the South; Montana in the West, and the Canadian provinces of Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the North.
With that location in mind, it’s important to remember that there are only 640,000 people living in that entire prodigious state, and that there are fewer than 100,000 inhabitants residing in its largest city, Fargo.
To give you an idea of the significance of that information, please keep this in mind: North Dakota, which occupies 68,975 square miles of land in our country, is thirteen times larger than Connecticut, which only has 4,845 square miles of land, yet that diminutive state has more than five times as many residents. That should tell you how sparsely populated North Dakota is. In fact, as they say in that state and not necessarily in jest: “You have to walk a hundred miles if you want to have a word with your next door neighbor.”
I mention that fact because if North Dakota wasn’t as sparsely populated as it is, I don’t believe that the unearthly circumstances that occurred there could have taken place.
And that’s the whole description — nothing about the story or even the genre, just “ya gotta realize how empty North Dakota is.”
