In North Dakota: Cafe Life

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"Our biggest day was our grand opening," said Murdean Gulsvig, the cook this day, along with his wife Doris. Opening day was Feb. 1, 1986. They served 134 people in their new $34,000 building. Last year they took in $51,000, about $11,000 of that a clear profit. Today they owe only about $5,000 on their mortgage. "We're a nonprofit organization," volunteered Walter Barbknecht, who owns a striking resemblance to Mortimer Snerd. "When we're making money and not owing money, it has to be spent in the community. The park needs some equipment. And we just voted $1,000 to a feller that had a heart-bypass operation."

The mayor, Orville Bergh, Daryl's father, came in and took no credit, saying, "They got all this organized while I was up in Milwaukee. Not bad for a little jerkwater town like this." Mayor for six years, he said he had been mayor for too long. "They complain about everything." He is paid $15 every time the town council meets. His Norwegian father was born in a sod shanty in 1883. His proudest bureaucratic achievement is a $6,000, 500-ft. concrete sidewalk that runs alongside Main Street, which is dirt. "That boy is mine too," said the mayor, pointing to another son, David, a trencherman about the size of a post office.

At his table, David Bergh was explaining, "A 90 mile-an-hour fastball takes .44 seconds to reach home plate."

"How do you figure?"

"Well, we're out talking one day how long it would take, so you've got to take 5,280 feet times 90 miles an hour, which is 475,200 feet in one hour, which is 3,600 seconds that you've got to divide by, which gives you 132 feet per second, but since it's about 55 feet from where the ball is released to the plate, you've got to divide again, and that gives you .44 seconds, assuming the ball drops 3 feet because of gravity."

"I see."

"You think that's something, think about this," David went on. "The federal budget is a trillion dollars. The day Christ was born, if you had a trillion dollars and you spent a million dollars a day, that money would run out about the second week in November 2704. I got the figure written down somewhere."

"Mercy."

About here Walter Barbknecht, seeing that a visitor's head was spinning, offered a tour of town. "Orville's real proud of this sidewalk," the tour began, then abruptly turned conspiratorially candid. "The restaurant inspector is giving us a bad time. They want us to make the doors to the restrooms bigger, for the handicapped. And shields over the lights. Tiddly things. They don't want fluorescent bulbs to break over the food. We did our own plumbing and wiring, just volunteers. We have a good plumber, but he doesn't have a license, so they're hacking on that. If this place ever goes under, it won't be from lack of business. It'll be from lack of peace and harmony.

"Then of course we've had a flap or two. The gouging, for one. Say your wife is cooking. It means you get to eat free. But we had 'em bringing the whole family in here for breakfast and dinner. Oh, we had a big flap over that one."