I was on my way to a little town in North Dakota where a friend lives about at the intersection of Norway and Washington streets — can you get any more perfect than that? And every little town is dominated by a Lutheran steeple.
A friend in Poland and I were emailing about how the eastern Dakotas and eastern Canadian prairies line up with Russia, ecologically. Only this is what you see instead of onion domes.
I drive on by, blasting Hedningarna (The Heathens) or some other Norski neo-folk on the Jeep’s speakers. The poor immigrants— their pastors thought that even Hardanger fiddle music was devilish. So much left behind.
If I remember the (relatively obscure) history of the area correctly, the Doukhobors, a “protestant” version of Russian Orthodoxy, moved to Canada, specifically Alberta and Saskatchewan in the late 19th Century. One of the things I remember reading about back in the 1970s, was the fact that they would attend the local council hearings and if they didn’t like what the regional government was doing, the women would take off their clothes and sit there naked to protest whatever it was they disliked, until they were arrested! Apparently there are still members of the religion living in Canada and in the US.
More info can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doukhobors#Canada.