William Phillips boarded a Greyhound bus in Utica, N.Y., with a one-way ticket and his last $600.
He'd been studying at State University of New York Institute of Technology until his financial-aid package collapsed in the credit crunch.
At 21, without family support, he began looking for a job -- any job -- but could not find work in Utica, even at McDonald's. So in January, he got on a bus bound for Bismarck, N.D.
After three days, the bus dumped Phillips into a North Dakota night with a record low temperature of 44 degrees below zero.
"I arrived in jeans, a leather jacket and a hoody," he said. "I couldn't stand outside for more than 10 minutes. .. I was thinking, "Oh my God. What did I just do?'"
Extreme cold was not the only low. Phillips had come here, sight unseen, because of Bismarck's unemployment rate. At last measure, for August, it was the lowest of any city in the nation at 3.3%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Bismarck, the state capitol, is home to more than 100,000 people, nestled along the Missouri river, surrounded by imponderable horizons of rolling farmland, and tucked beneath some kind of magic protective sheath.
There's no rash of foreclosures, no bank failures, and no Ponzi schemes making headlines here.
Just about every crop is a bumper this year. Trucks busily haul monstrous wind turbine parts along Interstate 94. But there are still decades worth of coal to be mined and oil to be drilled.
To the north are the Bakken oil shale fields, which the U.S. Geological Survey recently estimated to hold 3.65 billion barrels, possibly putting North Dakota in a league with Saudi Arabia.
Oh, and get this California: the state government here is running a surplus.
"North Dakota is really immune to what's happening to the rest of the world," said Holly Kohler, 33, a homemaker who lives outside neighboring Mandan, N.D. "We feel like we are in our own little bubble."
News about the nation's economic woes often seemed like reports of distant wars -- at least until September when Bobcat Co. announced it was closing its Bismarck plant. It had employed as many as 1,100 people two years ago, including Holly's husband, Al Kohler.
"We didn't feel like we were in this recession until that day Bobcat said it was closing the plant," she said.
Al Kohler, 34, had worked at the plant for 12 years, including night shifts as a welder and lathe operator. It was only a matter of time before the global downturn in the home-building industry meant a downturn in orders for construction equipment as well.
"I went into the garage, kind of drinking my sorrows away," said Al of the day he got the news.
He has two daughters, a mortgage and wife with a medical condition that prevents her from working and requires reliable insurance to pay the bills.
She soon joined him in the garage. "I looked at her and said, 'I'm jobless and don't know what I'm going to do.' And she said, 'You know what, this is a good thing.'"
Holly had begun searching jobs listings online. Within two weeks, she helped Al land a position in Kenmare, where he'll work on oil field equipment as a welder and fabricator. The job is about 150 miles away, almost in Canada, but the insurance benefits are more generous than what he had before, and he'll no longer work the night shift.
Russ Staiger, CEO of the Bismarck-Mandan Development Association, told me he has a prospect in another manufacturer that may announce plans to open up in Bismarck as early as next month. Meanwhile, Bobcat isn't a total loss for the state. It is consolidating its North American machinery production in Gwinner, N.D., adding hundreds of jobs about 200 miles to the southeast.
Staiger is a North Dakota native who has been with the economic development group for 30 years. "I've been thrown off by a horse and I've been stomped on by a bull," he said. "We don't spend a lot of time licking our wounds."
It took Phillips less than two weeks to find a job as an information technology specialist at Fireside Office Solutions, a local provider of everything from office furniture to data management systems.
"He's worked out very well for us," said Fireside co-owner Dan Vondrachek, who swears he does not ordinarily hire people from the Greyhound station.
The Bismarck economy is so strong, he keeps selling office equipment and business services. And he is still looking to hire a couple folks who can sell furniture and copiers.
"I'm hoping I can attract someone from Minneapolis, where some businesses like ours have laid off half their staff," he said.
Phillips, who arrived with almost nothing, now has a car and an apartment. He's swiftly adapted to town that he says is not that much different than Utica.
"There's a Wal-Mart to do my shopping. There's a Starbucks to get my coffee," he said.
He posts photos online to highlight some of the regional differences for his friends: Local barbecue competitions, freshly dried deer jerky from a big hunt, and snow in October.
Many of his friends, he says, have graduated college only to find a job market as bleak as North Dakota's cold, winter skies.
"I told them, you can always get a job here," he said. "But they didn't want to leave New York for North Dakota."
At least not yet.
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