Imagine North Dakota.

Jamieson Ridenhour never even tried.

To him, it was hypothetical. One assumed it existed in order for the country to actually have 50 states. But it wasn't proven, not really.

Then he came here, pulling up some entrenched South Carolina roots to do so, to take a job teaching 19th century British literature at the University of Mary.

Three years later, the cold empty space of this place is colored in.

"Red and blue," Ridenhour says, grabbing the color metaphor, which could be patriotic, but is not.

The blue is the sky, the immensity of which he never tires of experiencing.

The red is the scarlet drapery of many sunsets. He has a redundancy, practically an embarrassment of photographs of those scarlet skies, taken from the patio of his south Bismarck home.

He said he and his family find themselves at the window, drawn like magnets to metal, to watch the sun drop behind the bluffs tinting the horizon with color that mocks Crayola's best efforts.

"It's just overwhelming," he says.

Ridenhour, 38, doesn't have much of the South left in his voice, possibly from his stage experience. But his grandmother "y'alls" with the best of them.

In horror, she calls from South Carolina with one eye on the Weather Channel and the other on her far-away grandson who by all rights could be dying in minus 22 degrees. Perhaps it's best no one explains the concept of "wind chill factor" to her.

He's far from expiring, coping quite nicely with jumper cables and a helpful neighbor on standby.

This is the Ridenhour family's third winter. "You deal with it, you dress for it, you get your systems in place," he said.

Jobs like the one he landed at the University of Mary aren't thick on the ground. When he started his job search in 2005, after earning his doctorate degree, he sent out 75 resumes, was given four interviews and one offer.

North Dakota would be an adventure. And the University of Mary, a college steeped in the Catholic and Benedictine tradition, would have not only a Charles Dickens kind of a guy, but a serious acoustical guitarist, Buddhist and vegetarian on staff.

Ridenhour said he was "wary" of the differences, but they've not been an issue. If anything, he finds similarities in the Benedictine values of hospitality, community and moderation.

His wife, Gwyn, is an elementary librarian, his son, Ian, 7, is a drummer of some local renown in a band Blind Mice with his dad, and Eva, 4, is still just a kid.

He teaches a full load at the university, including a class on vampire literature. The class predictably packs in students who are as intrigued as he with the ghoulish folk beliefs from the 1600s.

He gave a talk on Dickens in Garrison, which hosts the annual holiday Dickens Festival, and wanted to intellectually get past the "Christmas" thing in their understanding of the man.

He's in the midst of directing "The Importance of Being Earnest," which will be performed at Mary April 10-12.

He and his son are part of the musical accompaniment for this weekend's performances by the Northern Plains Ballet.

In short, in these months, North Dakota transformed from a strange place to a home place.

It's been a deeper settling than he imagined when he understood it would be a place he would have to not only imagine, but live in.

"It feels very spiritual," Ridenhour said. "I'm so aware of the immensity and of being such a small thing in the center of it. There's a sense of enormity, of majesty."

The South - perhaps because of the trees - never made him feel, like Bismarck does, that the city is connected to the landscape, like the child's chant of the hip bone being connected to the leg bone.

Lest his praise sound hollow and unbalanced, he reminds himself of the adjustments, of the extremes, of those "What could you possibly be thinking?" talks with his family.

He has concluded that North Dakota is mostly a misconception for those who don't know it.

"That cold empty place? That's not the reality," he said.

(Reach reporter Lauren Donovan at 888-303-5511 or lauren@westriv.com.)