North Dakota?

I’ve landed in a place you’d never think to go: a prairie paradise of sauerkraut pizza and buffalo hot dogs, of bull-a-ramas and pitchfork fondues; where sunshine and hailstorms take unpredictable turns blasting the fascinating but wind-swept landscape--and the fascinating but wind-swept people.

I’m in a place called Bonanzaville, USA, where, in 102-degree heat, off-duty wheat researchers and auto mechanics are spending their Saturday reenacting the pioneer fur trade, wearing handmade clothes, tanning deer hides in a tepee and chomping on Dilly Bars from the local Dairy Queen.

I’m in a different world, and I’m only in North Dakota.

It’s been fairly called America’s Outback; it’s been unfairly called America’s Siberia. But never, ever, despite its mesmerizing, eerie views of endlessly flat farm fields and dramatic desert buttes, has North Dakota been called America’s Vacationland.

I’ve come here because almost nobody else does. This is the state visited by fewer people than any other. Not only does it come in way, way behind Florida and Hawaii; it comes in behind Delaware. Behind Rhode Island. Even behind South Dakota.

This is the state the guidebooks forgot, the last frontier of American tourism: Go ahead, try any big bookstore travel section and search for even a mention. Go west of Minnesota and east of Montana, and you might as well be in Canada. The best I could do for guidance was a disturbingly fleeting passage in a 50-state guide that describes North Dakota as

“somebody’s quiet afterthought . . . a place to pass through . . . charming, picturesque and a bit maddening.”

This is the state where the governor, Ed (Edward T.) Schafer--who you can easily meet on a free tour of the state capitol--calls its most outstanding characteristic its “nothingness.”

And it’s the state that endured humiliation on national television last year when the satiric documentary series “TV Nation” visited in the middle of winter, aired endless footage of snowstorms and frozen breath, and asked Schafer why people would ever want to visit.

“It’s a place where you can still get lost,” the governor answered, carefully adding that he didn’t mean lost on a map. He meant, he said on national television, lost . . . mentally.

Actually, he’s got something there. A trip around North Dakota turns out to be the essence of travel; it isn’t the destination that matters but the journey. It isn’t just a state you’re exploring; it’s a state of mind.

“For us who live here, it’s like, ‘Why would anyone come?’ ” said Saundra Perry, who runs the White Lace Bed & Breakfast in Bismarck, but who would rather be in Montana and is continually surprised that anyone ever asks to spend the night in her single guest room. “It’s too far between every place.”

But ultimately, that’s North Dakota’s powerful appeal. Montana’s already over-trendy with the nouveau ranches of Ted Turner, Meg Ryan and their ilk. This is still undiscovered country, and some people know it.

“My wife and I on the weekends, we put a Thermos of coffee in the car and some sandwiches and go driving,” Marlin Kunze told me as he took a cigarette break under the grand stairs of Bismarck’s capitol. “When we see a gravel road I hit the brakes. Whichever way the car pulls, that’s the way we go.”

That’s the wisdom of the neglected plains, and that, more or less, is what I did for five eye-opening, tire-spinning June days that mixed the bizarre with the beautiful. I traveled 1,000 miles--and would have liked to have traveled 2,000without ever leaving the state and breaking the spell.

I was transfixed by the impossibly flat, wind-swept landscape of North Dakota’s eastern half, where the country’s most constant winds ripple the endless fields of grass like the sea. Here and there, a ruined barn sat under flaking coats of faded paint, its roof buckling like the back of an old packhorse and the far-off horizon peeking through its empty door and window frames like a ghost world.

I looked into the painted eyes of the “World’s Largest Buffalo,” stood beneath the fiberglass hooves of the “World’s Largest Holstein Cow,” and walked the surreal shores of the country’s largest man-made lake, where the water’s edges are formed by desert bluffs.

I stood atop the buttes in the western badlands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park--one of the smallest parks in the system, though it seems to go on forever. Rows and rows of buttes, what seemed like billions of buttes, spread out until there was nothing else, like one of those stereoscopic pictures that suddenly pops into three dimensions.

*

I clambered over clay-streaked bluffs to come upon bison and river bends, and wide-screen vistas that defied logic--and that the rest of the country hasn’t appreciated.

“They don’t know what they’re missing,” said Theresa Halstead, leading a Pentecostal church group from nearby Williston on a hike through the seemingly empty park. “And don’t tell them. We like it this way.”

Sorry.

I began in Fargo, home of the cultural center known affectionately as the Fabulous Fargodome and namesake of the recent movie that does a nice job of depicting life and the local accent in North Dakota, even though it mostly takes place in neighboring Minnesota. The small-town city regularly shows up on lists of the country’s best places to live. But just because it’s a nice place to live doesn’t mean you’d want to visit there, said Kevin Zeppers, the first North Dakotan I met.

“This is the middle of everywhere,” he said, somewhat hopelessly. “You can see 30 miles in every direction. Some people find that interesting.”

Closer in, amid downtown Fargo’s quartet of 100-year-old railroad depots and handful of newly minted coffee bars, I eyed the cement handprints of the city’s own eclectic Walk of Fame (Marie Osmond . . . Oliver North . . . Dr. Ruth Westheimer . . . The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band) on the sidewalk in front of a printing shop. Around the corner was Duane Johnson’s used bookstore, where I watched the frequent, endless freight trains--the biggest things in sight throughout the state--add bursts of breeze to the gusts ruffling the ceiling-high stacks of paperbacks through Johnson’s open door.

“Wind,” Johnson noted, “could be the state’s greatest crop.”

Johnson, who has the distinction of having sat down by mistake on Roger Maris’ coffin when it arrived at the Fargo airport, had information about the state piled in his head like his stacks of books. Some of his Saturday afternoon customers proved to be aficionados as well.

“People here think it’s boring, but it’s not,” said Todd Allen, who comes up from Texas with his wife, Bonnie, each summer to Jamestown, where he flies a crop duster and she photographs the landscape. “It’s fascinating. History’s all over here. History’s sitting by the side of the road.”

Over the next few days, in fact, I would track the paths of Lewis and Clark, Gen. George Custer, Sitting Bull, Theodore Roosevelt and, according to one commemorative plaque, “North Dakota’s pioneer dentists.”

My first historic stop was at the tourist attraction called Bonanzaville, USA, a pioneer village in West Fargo, where the town’s oldest log cabin, used as a hotel in 1872 and as the city jail three years later, is preserved along with a couple dozen historic buildings collected from around the state. The real surprise, however, was the fur-trading reenactment, where I shared buffalo stew with men actually nicknamed Digger, Lodgepole and Stumpy, who tried to explain the comparative merits of black-powder hunting rifles.

I pressed on: In Casselton, the home of three former governors including “Wild Bill” Langer, I looked over the preserved downtown, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, stretching from the Spare Time Lanes to Mane Street Hairdressing. Outside the former Grosvenor Mansion, built by the man who owned the original town bank, Inez Woell was touching up the wood on a side deck, part of the renovation since she and her husband bought the house last year.

*

She proudly showed off the grand rooms to a complete stranger, including the pool table they’d set up in the center of the cavernous third-floor ballroom. Heading west, then south after a night in the Tower City Bed and Breakfast, between a horse farm and the Lutheran church, I swooped along the emptiest, straightest back roads in America, driving and stopping, driving again and stopping again, unable to view the scenery just through the car window.

I visited orderly little towns dominated by grain silos and church steeples while Anita Bryant sang “My Little Corner of the World” on AM radio. I photographed the ruined barns of Ransom County and watched the endless fields of grass wave across what must be the world’s largest lawn. I felt a little like Clint Eastwood running around Madison County a couple of states over--if Clint Eastwood toured his covered bridges wearing beige tennis shoes and driving a Dodge Neon.

Swinging north again to Jamestown, I reached the World’s Largest Buffalo, a 60-ton behemoth with surprisingly soulful eyes. The official state brochure, somewhat defensive about one of its main attractions, sternly warns about the 26-by-46-foot cement monument: “It is a tribute--not a novelty.”

I took another swing south through the farm fields just to be able to drive up the Missouri Riverbank along Lewis and Clark’s trail, still almost the way they found it except, of course, for the road itself and a few odd pieces of threshing equipment.

In Bismarck, the North Dakota Heritage Center was a delight, and not just because of the box of buffalo chips with a sign inviting visitors to “sniff here.” Towering above the museum and, in fact, above the plains for miles around, is the incongruous 19-story Art Deco state capitol building, a sort of stripped-down Rockefeller Center of the prairie that tour guide and lifelong North Dakotan Beverly Schlenker calls “very plain and ugly” on the outside. (Perhaps she wouldn’t have been so frank if I hadn’t been the only person on the tour.)

Also part of the tour was the governor, who could be seen gazing at his computer terminal in his first-floor office, and who later took the time to explain what he had really meant on TV about getting mentally lost.

He really had been talking about the state’s western badlands, he said, where he grew up: “It’s really a place to go and get in touch with your own internal . . . spirit, isn’t it?” he said, after pausing for a while.

He paused a while longer. “Introspection,” he came out with, finally.

Well, anyway, the governor knows where to get great pancakes in Bismarck, and I took his recommendation and went to the Drumstick, a diner owned by its waitresses. I ordered just one, like the governor told me, and it was impossibly big and fluffy, just like he said it would be.

Just outside of town I stopped at Ft. Abraham Lincoln State Park, where a replica of Gen. George Armstrong Custer’s house shows how high he was living before he rode out to his doom at Little Bighorn. Among other things, it shows that his wife, Libby, wore a wig made out of his hair, and that he built his house on the site of an Indian village.

To the north, past farm fields broken only by lonely church steeples, I came upon Lake Sakakawea, named for the young Indian woman who guided Lewis and ClarkD through the area, and the largest man-made lake in the country. It was created by damming the powerful Missouri River.

Landlocked North Dakotans sail, canoe and swim along more shoreline than Florida has. On the other side of the Missouri, the West really begins, and the time zone and the landscape change together. Suddenly, just when the flatness had begun to become an 80-mph blur, I was among the buttes and valleys of the Killdeer Mountains, skirting the edge of a hailstorm to arrive at the north unit of the state’s crown jewel, Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

I began there in the northern segment, which is separated from the southern segment by about 70 miles of road. When a marked hiking trail crossed the 15-mile scenic driving route, I jumped out for a quick look around and found myself on the edge of a bluff overlooking the tremendous valley of the Little Missouri River on one side and butte upon butte on the other.

By the time I stopped rounding one bluff after another to see what the next view would bring, I had climbed a mile along the towering edges.

After hours of such solitary exploring, I finally pulled myself away, and in the evening I landed in my final stop: Medora, the gateway to the southern unit of the park and home of the Medora Musical, a relentlessly hokey, two-hour extravaganza with a flag-waving finish in the Burning Hills Amphitheater--a $4.2-million outdoor auditorium built into the badlands buttes, complete with a seven-story escalator.

The musical is the centerpiece of an effort with Disneyesque ambitions in which Medora has been refurbished with old-style buildings housing gift shops and recreating a town that never quite was. There’s a replica of the Rough Riders Hotel, where Teddy Roosevelt used to visit from his nearby ranch.

In the movie theater, “Fievel Goes West” plays every single morning, helping create a family atmosphere that jostles elbows with the town saloons outfitted with blackjack tables.

Most of the town, including the three motels, are run by the Medora Foundation begun by the late Harold Schafer, who was the maker of Mr. Bubble bubble bath and Gold Seal floor wax, and was the governor’s father.

But the best place to eat in town is the Iron Horse Saloon, which has placed a subtle sign by the door: “This establishment is independently owned and operated.”

And the best place to spend the sunset isn’t at the musical but in the park itself, where you also can spend all day driving, hiking and even horseback riding through the badlands, as I did behind a 13-year-old trail boss known as Dusty in the park and just plain Dustin back home in Bismarck.

During my last dusk in North Dakota, I clambered down the edge of a soft sandstone bluff overlooking a river bend--the same one Gov. Schafer had pointed out to me in his office--and was alone at the edge of a field where buffalo were on the move. I counted 20, then 50, then almost 100, adults and fawn-colored calves, making their way up from the river in the gathering dusk.

I’m not sure how long I stood there, as the sky turned colors behind me and the buttes threw longer shadows across the plain.

I was getting lost . . . mentally.

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GUIDEBOOK: Dakota Digs

Getting there: Northwest and Frontier fly to Fargo, with a change of planes in Minneapolis and Denver respectively. Advance-purchase round-trip fares start at about $340.

Where to stay and eat: Fargo: Bohlig’s Bed and Breakfast, 1418 3rd Ave. South; telephone (701) 235-7867. Historic home surrounded by gardens and porches; $40-$45 double.

Zandbroz Variety, 420 Broadway; tel. (701) 239-4729. Pastries, croissants and Dakota Sodas in the back of a converted grocery.

Tower City: Tower City Inn Bed and Breakfast, 502 Church St.; tel. (701) 749-2660. Country Victorian rooms in a 1904 house with porch swing and views of the owners’ horse farm; $58 double. (Tower View Cafe is a highway-side diner with aspirations and homemade sour cream raisin pie, run by the inn’s owners.)

Bismarck: White Lace Bed and Breakfast, 807 N. 6th St., tel. (701) 258-4142. Charming, private upstairs rooms in a family home; $60 double.

The Drumstick, 307 N. 3rd St.; tel. (701) 223-8449. Plate-size pancakes in a 24-hour luncheonette owned by its waitresses and recommended by the governor.

New Town: Four Bears Casino and Lodge, tel. (800) 294-5454. Businesslike but austere hotel and casino run by three affiliated tribes on the grounds of the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation; $55 double.

Medora: Rough Riders Hotel, a rough reconstruction of the original where Teddy Roosevelt stayed, run by the nonprofit Medora Foundation; tel. (800) MEDORA1. Its handful of rooms sell out in season, leaving visitors with only the Badlands Motel, more basic roadside rooms also operated by the foundation. Both hotels, $70 double.

The student-staffed Rough Riders dining room serves up a $12.95 bacon-wrapped filet mignon, among pages of choices, but the Iron Horse Saloon has an outdoor porch, more character and better steaks.

Marmarth: Pastime Club and Steakhouse; tel. (701) 279-9843. Steakhouse of such repute that, despite its remote spot in the southwest corner of the state, reservations are recommended on weekends.

For more information:

North Dakota Tourism Department, 604 East Blvd., Bismarck, ND 58505; tel. (800) 437-2077.