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Clay's Weekly Columns
The end of two giants who shaped American literature
by Clay Jenkinson
February 7, 2010
Two extraordinary American men of letters died recently: J.D. Salinger and Howard Zinn.
Salinger was 91. He was the author of one of the most iconic novels of the post-war period, "Catcher in the Rye." A few years ago it was the most banned book in the public schools of the United States, as well as the second most often assigned book.
Zinn is best known for his monumental, "A People's History of the United States." He was 87. "A People's History" is not the kind of book you sit down and read through. It's an alternative history of America, focusing on the groups that are routinely ignored in standard histories, ideas that are suppressed in what might be called patriotic or triumphalist histories. Zinn wrote the kind of history that drives Glenn Beck and Lynne Cheney nuts.
I reread both books last week.
"Catcher in the Rye" is a novel about adolescent angst, alienation and disillusionment. It's also about the profound confusion of discovering one day - with an equal mix of fascination, shame and disgust - that sex drives and distorts everything, and you didn't understand that all this time and now - suddenly - you do, sort of. "Catcher in the Rye" is a first-person narrative by a teenager named Holden Caulfield, who has just been expelled from a private boy's academy for non-performance. It's a rambling account of his actions in the days immediately following expulsion, with a stream of consciousness monologue about the phoniness of almost everything and everyone, and an adolescent's search for authenticity.
My adolescence was not particularly defined by angst, but there was a significant measure of chaos in my family. I moved my bedroom down into the dank, damp, dreadful basement, where I painted every surface black and threw up black lights and posters, and listened to Abbey Road day and night for several years. I remember the precise moment when I decided all adults were humbug ("phonies" in Holden's vocabulary). It involved a cocktail party my parents were hosting. Their very drunk and Babbitt-like friend invaded my sanctuary to challenge me to a game of ping pong and to lecture me like the guy in "The Graduate" about what I should do with my life. He staggered around the ping pong table, paddle in one hand, highball in the other, slurring his words and pontificating about the glories of main street business.
As Holden Caulfield says, "That can get on your nerves after a while."
To escape from my family and probably myself, I went to work at the Dickinson Press when I was 15, more or less full-time, and as far as I can remember for the rest of my high school years I went home merely to eat and sleep, much to the consternation of my mother. I've been a sad workaholic ever since.
I don't remember when I first read "Catcher in the Rye," but it was at least 30 years ago. There was a time when the book brought on a lot of trouble for earnest English teachers, who assigned it because it was "relevant" and "daring," and then stood by like champions of the First Amendment as the principal and school board got blistered by ministers and outraged parents.
When I reread the novel as a tired middle-aged adult last weekend, more or less in one sitting, I made two somewhat distressing discoveries. First, it was an entirely new book to me. Here was one of the most familiar and epochal books of my lifetime, and it was as if I were reading it for the first time. I didn't remember that most of it took place in New York City, that Holden does a good deal of underage drinking in hotel bars and jazz clubs, that he hires and then loses nerve with a hotel prostitute, that he is beaten up several times in the course of the novel, and that he sneaks into his parents' townhouse late at night to see his beloved younger sister Phoebe. In short, I didn't remember much of anything, frankly, except teenage angst.
That really bothered me.
Second, for the life of me I could not figure out what all the "Catcher in the Rye" fuss was about. I guess the answer is that a lot of cultural water has gone under the bridge since 1951. There's some bad language in the book, including a very indirect use of the f-word toward the end, and there is a pretty steady stream of imprecise virgin's musings about sex. Organized Christianity takes a few shots, and authority figures of every sort are pilloried. But truly, there is not much in the novel that you don't routinely see on Disney and Nickelodeon these days.
The novel is indeed subversive in the sense that it beautifully explores the agony of passing into early adulthood and lets every reader know that his or her nihilistic musings about how cruel, insensitive, and full of it adults and institutions can be are shared by plenty of others.
I'm a little ashamed to say "Catcher in the Rye" didn't really speak to me this time around, though it made me look in the mirror and ask myself if I stagger around talking platitudes and "plastics," and of course it made me wonder if, in the last 30 years, I have grown up or just grown complacent about the inauthenticities of American culture.
I always preferred Salinger's other works, particularly "Franny and Zoey" and "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters." It is to those that I will now turn in my private tribute to the late, reclusive and lyrical J.D. Salinger.
Blizzard weenies and the loss of N.D. gumption
by Clay Jenkinson
January 31, 2010
I was in Fargo last week to do some interviews at Prairie Public TV for a documentary film I’m working on. I had driven in Sunday evening from the West, through the first flush of the blizzard. The roads were not particularly icy, except in scattered spots, but the wind was blasting out of the north with a sickening fury.
It was the kind of wind that makes you feel as if nature’s actual intention is to scour humanity right off the surface of the earth once and for all. It was the kind of wind that makes you work hard just to keep the car on the road. The minute you let up, it tosses you like a styro cup right over to the edge of the pavement — if that’s pavement down there and you’re not just rumbling across the open range of the plains. The wind chill was through the charts. My favorite TV meteorologist said, in his precise technical jargon, that it was “instant death” to be outside.
I love North Dakota.
Even though the wind was interrupting my meditation on why North Dakota is so lightly populated, I remember thinking, “Hey, this isn’t so bad.” Right then I’d blunder into a localized whiteout that might last 10 seconds and might last 10 minutes — a total powdered sugar eclipse of orientation in which I couldn’t see 5 feet in front of me, couldn’t really make out the road, didn’t dare slow down much for fear of being crushed to shrapnel by an 18-wheeler, didn’t dare try to pull over to the shoulder because a: I couldn’t discern a shoulder and might already be on it, and b: I was pretty sure any deviation from straight forward meant the ditch and a very very long evening, and of course, “instant death.”
There are few things more unpleasant than entering one of these total visual shutdowns at 60 mph and realizing that the only intelligent thing to do is to proceed at nearly the same speed while straining frantically to recognize any hint of just where the car is on the road surface. By the time you’ve negotiated three or four of these (before Jamestown), you’re a wreck. You’d wet your pants if your Germanic upbringing hadn’t made that an impossibility. On about the fourth such whiteout, your eyes begin to play tricks on you, and a road you know to be straight as a laser beam starts to seem serpentine and Appalachian.
Just why you grip the wheel with all your might, I don’t know, and your shoulders lift and clench, and you blink your eyes, windshield wiper like, a 100 times per minute to get maximum resolution. Not that it matters much, because all there is to see is a vast undifferentiated miasma of white noise, which might be agreeable were you not hurtling along in a tinny metal capsule at 50 mph.
When I finally got to Fargo and checked in, I had that brain-dead but hepped up road numbness you get after a very long or a very tense drive. As I sat sipping a beer in the Naugahyde lounge, with a literal quiveration in my hands, it felt as if the CIA had been beating me for days with a sock filled with miniature marshmallows. It was pretty late before I could wind down enough to fall asleep. I think I watched five hours of “Classic Bowling from the 70s,” plus some infomercials for a new egg cracking device with a free one-time add-on gift of a hoojie that lets you scramble an egg in the shell. Finally! One of mankind’s most ancient problems solved by American ingenuity.
All that heroic driving was for naught, it turns out. Come Monday, the Red River Valley people I had risked my life to interview played the “blizzard card,” and asked to reschedule. When I pressed them to buck up and join the strenuous life, they informed me with a kind of righteous finality that all the schools in Grand Forks and Fargo were closed and that even the universities themselves had shut down. My selfish desire to interview them, apparently, was now endangering our children.
Here’s my question — and I ask it in earnest. When did we North Dakotans become weenies?
I don’t want to sound like “one of them,” but I don’t remember the schools ever closing in my youth, no matter how appalling the weather. There were no East Berlin “Road-Closed” checkpoints on the freeways. We were allowed — even encouraged — to venture out and get ourselves killed in really bad weather, and even in blizzards seat belts were regarded as a kind of squeamish option. Until I was about 20 there was no “wind-chill,” and the only thing that stood between a North Dakotan and death was a green parka and a can of Heet.
We lived in Dickinson, about half a mile from the grade school I attended. I walked to school every day, winter and summer — actually home for lunch and back too — and never thought twice about it. Even in blizzards my mother used to wave cheerfully as I set off — like a miniature crew-cut Per Hansa from Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth” — and the sense I had was that she’d be glad enough if she ever saw me again, and stoic if I were found at the end of the winter on a haystack somewhere.
That was North Dakota!
One of my closest friends said the other day that what makes North Dakota winters endurable for him are the heated seats in his car. Oh my.
I’m ordering that egg scrambler — lest I burn a calorie to get fed.
The haves have spoken, the have nots will have to lick their wounds
by Clay Jenkinson
January 24, 2010
Massachusetts Republican Scott Brown shocked the nation (and probably himself) Tuesday when he defeated Democrat Martha Coakley 52-47 percent to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Edward Kennedy. The conventional wisdom was that the people of Massachusetts would elect a Democrat as a way of honoring Kennedy, who died in office on Aug. 25, after a lifetime of public service. It also was assumed that the Democrat would win because Massachusetts is the most liberal state in the union, and because health care was one of Kennedy’s principal causes. In other words, it was a legacy election.
And the Republican won.
The election results in Massachusetts are a measure of the anger and the angst of the American people. Not all of the people, of course, but a large enough block to capture a “safe” seat in a liberal enclave, and to send an unmistakable message to every senator and representative in Congress: if you continue to press the progressive agenda, particularly health care reform, we will take you down.
The forces of reaction are in a sourpuss mood, and they have taken control of the national political debate. Incumbents beware, especially Democratic incumbents. The army of the truly angry is relatively small, but they are loud, well-organized, and politically astute. I believe their surprising success comes because they have found a way to tap into a pool of energy much bigger than themselves — the widespread angst, anxiety, and uncertainty of the American people as the 21st century begins.
The stunning Republican victory in Massachusetts will dramatically embolden the Antis. Anti-tax. Anti-health care reform. Anti-immigration. Anti-deficit. Anti-global warming. Anti-government.
Although a modest majority of the American people have expressed general support for health care reform, somehow this package, concocted at this time, in this way, with this level of political bribery, has turned the majority (or a very large and vociferous minority) against reform. In rejecting reform and returning to the status quo, I personally think we are making a mistake we will all regret.
But I get it. The people have spoken — first with their voices and now with their vote in Massachusetts. It is always a mistake to defy the will of the American people. If the people have soured on health care reform, they have an undisputed right to retire any politician who doesn’t listen. It looks like the election of November 2010 is going to be a plebiscite on where President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress are taking the country.
Still, we all sense that the national turmoil is about something much larger than health care.
Here’s what I think is really happening. The people of United States are having a hard time coming to terms with the 21st century. We liked the 20th century, “the American Century,” when the world was awash in cheap oil and when, thanks to our brand of hectic capitalism and two world wars, we became the undisputed colossus of the planet.
The 21st century is going to be different. We all know it. Everyone feels anxious about what our lives are going to be like in a world in which America is not automatically king of the hill. Whether we like it or not, we are going to have to put some breaks on our runaway consumption of resources. We must either make the rough transition to a post-carbon energy future or we are going to have to fight resource wars around the planet to maintain the supply lines, and foul our own nest by way of unrestrained domestic energy extraction.
The forces of reaction want to seal our borders and ship the illegal immigrants back to where they came from, but we all realize — whatever our core politics — that this is a logistical impossibility. We can punish those — like Senators Kennedy and McCain — who looked at the issue carefully and said we may as well find a way to naturalize those who are already here, but that doesn’t mean we can really stop the hemorrhaging at our borders. It is easy to punish, almost impossible to find a solution.
The rest of the major powers — our closest friends in the world — are weary of our penchant for military solutions to global problems. They are deeply disillusioned by our misadventure in Iraq and they are openly appalled by America’s use of torture (“enhanced interrogation techniques”). We can defy our allies if we wish, but in a world where global cooperation is necessary, this only marginalizes us in a swamp of American exceptionalism.
The rest of the world has accepted the fact of global climate change, and has begun to legislate the industrial and consumption adjustments that an acknowledgement of man’s damage to the biosphere requires. America is the most reluctant of the major nations to accept the idea of global climate change, and the only nation in which more than a handful of cranks call global warming “the greatest hoax ever foisted upon the people.”
The progressives are earnestly attempting to ease us into the 21st century. The forces of reaction are clinging to the less problematic world of the 20th century. Those who deny global climate change, thumb their noses at our “weak and hypocritical” allies, know “exactly what we need to do with illegal immigrants,” whose contribution to the health care debate is, “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” and whose solution to the world energy crisis is “drill baby, drill,” are making an ambitious run for the soul of America, and the plain truth is that they are winning.
I am Joe’s nincompoop
by Clay Jenkinson
January 17, 2010
My friend Jim, who is some kind of wild optimist, said Tuesday, “The first day of the January thaw is one of the best days of the year.” And he was right. The light has begun to return to the dead earth. The snow on the streets and sidewalks started to melt. People were out shoveling in shirtsleeves. We didn’t get a January thaw last year. Even though we all know it is not really true, we are letting ourselves believe that the end of winter is in sight.
Still, as the fourth week of the new year begins, I’m a creature of mere gloom.
Have you noticed the following phenomenon? That sometimes things go really well and seem to line up in triumph, as if the gods had chosen to favor you just for the fun of it, with no reference to karma or merit. But at other times a number of things fall apart in quick succession, as if the gods had called a council and decided to remind you of your littleness. Again, no reference to merit.
After a prolonged run of good fortune, my luck turned in a big way just after Christmas.
My daughter lives 751 miles away. I drove my Jeep down to Kansas to get her on Dec. 21, drove back the next day (1,502 miles round trip). We added a couple of hundred miles within North Dakota. Then on Jan. 2 I drove her back to Kansas, and returned the next day. We are now at 3,436 miles for the holiday and the Jeep has performed admirably.
Oh beware of hubris, grasshopper.
On the melancholy return journey, at 9:15 p.m. Jan. 3, 2010, I crossed the ND-SD border on US 83, north of Herreid, feeling pretty smug about my Christmas travels in the face of the holiday blizzards. At that moment, without warning or provocation, my Jeep began to die. I don’t know the first thing about cars, but it felt as if I had blown a cylinder. With my foot pegged to the floor I could only drive 60 mph and if I slowed to under 40 mph the engine just stopped altogether in the middle of the road.
I immediately broke into a cold sweat. I cannot have had five true cold sweats in my life.
There are few sinking feelings worse than when your car breaks down in the middle of nowhere, particularly on a severely cold and windswept night.
In the end I managed to pony the stricken vehicle back to Bismarck. The next day I limped it down to the car dealership where I slapped down my least maxed credit card and said I knew it was going to need serious work and that I pre-authorized whatever it needed. You know you are in real trouble when the auto rep calls you back to ask you if you really truly genuinely want to go ahead with the repair — in spite of the blank check you had already dangled before him. Turns out it is going to cost an arm and a leg to get new heads and valves and much more. And it’s one of those impossible situations in which you really just have to pay the staggering cost, because the only alternative is the junkyard.
Arm and a leg — which brings me to cluster malady number two. The next day I discovered that my knee was broken. It was like a Looney Tunes cartoon — except for the shooting pain from my kneecap to the top of my skull every time I moved my leg a hundredth of a millimeter. Between spasms I racked my brain to figure out what I had done — in a life purely sedentary —to biff my knee.
Here’s my definition of middle age. When your body starts to break down not because of a heroic ski accident or a botched triathlon, but just for the fun of it. Under oath in a court of law, I could not name the incident that blew my knee. All I know is that one moment I was hiking happily in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, and the next moment I literally could not walk. I’m hobbling around now, but I literally fell flat on the floor when I got out of bed this morning. When I want to cross my legs, I have to lift my left leg by gripping the cuff of my pants. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic.
Remember that old Reader’s Digest series, “I am Joe’s X”? — I am Joe’s Eyes, I am Joe’s Liver? It was about how you take your ear for granted, but if you stopped to think about it for a minute, you’d be filled with awe at God’s intricate handiwork. “I am Joe's right ear, and I do all this in a space not much larger than a hazelnut! Joe considers his eyes as his most important sensory organs. Yet, without my partner and me, he would be doomed to solitary /sonic confinement.” Etc.
My knee will surely recover — I’ve been trying to walk it off — but it’s a sobering reminder of how fragile we are, and how grumpy our body becomes if we forget to serve it alongside our mind, heart, spirit, career.
Meanwhile, at just the same time, I dropped my cell phone into a toilet. It doesn’t do them any good, I can tell you that.
I have no fatted calf or goat to sacrifice to the goddess Fortuna, but I hope the wheel thaws enough to turn again before my roof collapses.
The elk and prairie gogs are dancing in the streets
by Clay Jenkinson
January 10, 2010
Sen. Byron Dorgan’s announcement Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in November is a staggering blow to North Dakota. It takes a long time to become an effective senator, to learn the ropes, to learn how to do legislative horse-trading, to get enough seniority to shape policy and move legislative bills through the labyrinth of Senate procedure. Dorgan has been at it a long time — for 18 years in the Senate and for a dozen years before that in the U.S. House of Representatives. He’s mastered his craft. He’s at the height of his powers. He is quite literally one of the most powerful men in America.
And now he has chosen to leave the Senate. North Dakotans are both stunned and mystified by his decision.
In my opinion, those who are claiming he was afraid of the potential Hoeven challenge are just being silly.
Renunciation of power is always a breathtaking thing. Men (and now women) spend their lives trying to get power. As the folks who are already lining up to succeed Dorgan will soon learn, power is lovely to contemplate but exceedingly hard to obtain. In almost every case it eludes the grasp of even the most ambitious, organized, politically clever, and well-funded individuals. To get to the United States Senate is a big, big thing. To leave it at the height of one’s career, with tons of seniority and access, is really a shocking choice.
If someone had asked last week which of our three national figures was most likely to retire voluntarily, North Dakotans would have put Dorgan last on the list.
Whatever your political affiliation, you must know that his departure will create a diminution of North Dakota’s weight in the national arena. He will leave a void that will not be filled by his successor for many years, if ever. Nobody can deny that Dorgan has unceasingly brought good things to North Dakota. If we define a representative as someone we send to Washington to protect our interests, to keep as much of our money here as possible, and to send programs, funds, grants, energy and research corridors to us rather to someone else’s state, and wherever possible to embody our state character and our value system, then Byron Dorgan must be regarded as one of the handful of great senators in North Dakota history.
Dorgan’s retirement in January 2011 will mark the end of an era in North Dakota political history. For one thing, the odds are that his successor will be a Republican, and that will break the quarter-century Democratic lock on the U.S. House and Senate. And just as Art Link was the last North Dakota governor who listened to the election returns in his family farmhouse, so Byron Dorgan may be the last small town U.S. senator in North Dakota history. His two colleagues are urbanites by North Dakota standards, and the new political paradigm of money and media, coupled with the homogenization of our national experience under the banner of Best Buy, Starbucks, and Olive Garden, means that men and women from small towns will have a harder time ascending the national political heights.
Paradoxically, Dorgan leaves the arena at the moment when North Dakota is more powerful than it has ever been before in American history — and may ever be again. The harmony and solidarity of our congressional team, their aggregate seniority and political intelligence, the temporary fact of one party dominance of both the executive and legislative branches, and the delegation’s (particularly Conrad’s) closeness to President Barack Obama, make North Dakota much more powerful than a backwater farm state of 640,000 citizens ought to be.
All three of our congressional team are extraordinary men, but I believe Dorgan is the most quintessentially North Dakotan. He’s from a small town out in the middle of nowhere. There is a little of the cornpone philosophy of the town cafe and the village feed store in his character. He loves to test our national and international financial arrangements, farm program, and foreign policy against the gold standard of the barbershop and the co-op elevator of Regent and the thousands of places like Regent around the country. He speaks in the sometimes quaint metaphor of Schwinn bicycles and Red Flyer wagons and the county fair. He’s one of America’s greatest advocates for the survival of the rural way of life.
If (with considerable over-simplification) Kent Conrad is regarded as a legislator’s legislator and a policy wonk, and Earl Pomeroy is seen as a man of decency, thoughtfulness, and compassion, Bryon Dorgan is best understood as a genuine prairie populist, at times a prairie radical. He’s spent his career challenging, and often dressing down, the plutocrats, the “big interests,” obtuse federal bureaucrats, and condemning, at every turn and in every way possible, the outsourcing of the American dream. Whenever I happen upon him on C-Span I stop to watch his performance, because he is invariably well-prepared and interesting, and he is able to combine a kind of wry high dudgeon with that exquisite moment when he steps back, smiles his slightly smart-allecky smile, and says, “Well, I for one….” or “Back where I come from ...”
In many respects, Dorgan is the embodiment of the American dream. The boy from Regent (population 311), from the lower heartland of the middle class, as far from the corridors of power as it is possible to be born, grows up to become a United States senator, then uses his power not to line his pocket or smooth his own path, but to serve the folks back home from whom he sprung and where his heart still resides. Dorgan is the embodiment of the meritocracy we still try to regard as the meaning of America.
Dorgan has spent his whole adult life in public service. He’s entitled to retire whenever it suits him.
Nevertheless, we his fellow North Dakotans have reason to grieve.
I know I do.
North Dakota — and each one of us — is diminished by his retirement.
'Hamlet' and Kodachrome in the digital age
by Clay Jenkinson
December 27, 2009
Now that Christmas is over and the new year looms, I want to write about one day late in 2009 that points to the new world that will unfold in 2010 — and beyond.
I was in Boston.
That morning, I turned on the HD wide screen wall-mounted television in my hotel room. There, on CNN, a consumer reporter cheerfully announced that Eastman Kodak was retiring Kodachrome film once and for all. Why? The world has switched to digital. Only a handful of photographic purists and creatures of habit still shoot in film. Film is a thing of the past.
A wave of nostalgia rafted through me. I’ve been thinking about the ghosts of Christmas past lately. If the best Christmas I ever had was not the one in which Santa brought me a blue Huckleberry Hound stuffed animal (and my sister got Deputy Dog), it was my 14th Christmas, when my parents, not Santa, gave me my first serious camera.
It was a Canon and it took something called 35mm film. That was when 35mm was a format used principally by professional photographers, particularly newspaper photographers, and very serious amateurs, while most folks still used Instamatic cameras with flashcubes. I still have the color photographs I took outside that Christmas day, of our snow-dusted house in Dickinson, and of my friend Robert’s Dalmatian dog.
There is no way I can find the language to explain what that camera meant to me, but probably you can name some gift that singly matters more than most of the gifts you have ever received combined. I still keep it in a special place in my mother’s house. I know the significance of this story has everything to do with the confluence of the time (1969), the evolution of technology, and the comparative poverty of my parents. Because a year ago I gave my 14-year-old daughter an infinitely more expensive 35mm camera and though she was grateful, for her it was just another gadget.
Mama, don’t take my Kodachrome away.
Later that day I was in Harvard Square. I took a friend to a wonderful independent bookstore on Mass Avenue. We agreed to separate and wander for an hour among the stacks. Not wishing to lug books back to Dakota in the age of Amazon.com, and possibly pay excess luggage fees, I simply wrote down half a dozen titles of books I wanted to give as Christmas gifts. I ordered them later that evening in my hotel room. They were waiting on my front doorstep when I got back to Bismarck later that week.
Toward the back of the bookstore I happened upon a large machine about the size of a photo kiosk in a mall. It looked like an enormous Xerox machine that had been taken apart late one night and put back together by MIT students on LSD. A large placard affixed to the side said, “Introducing Paige M. Gutenborg, our new book-making robot and your vehicle to millions of books — in minutes.”
I realized that this was a full printing press in Plexiglas. I had read about one — the Espresso Book Machine — located at the New York Public Library. Any of literally hundreds of thousands of books can be printed on site, on demand, in just a few minutes.
So I decided on the spot to print a book! A remarkable woman named Bronwen Blaney is the Harvard Book Store book barista. She’s clever, funny, amazingly well informed about books and book-making technologies, formerly the assistant manager of the store, now giving a portion of her life to the cutting edge — literally.
All I had to do was choose my first instant book. The pressure was intense. Here I was, walking through the portal into a brave new world, and I had to get it right. Some day, I knew, I would look back fondly on the quaintness of my first instant book, once we print all of our books that way, at quick shop kiosks 24 hours per day, a quart of milk and a copy of “Walden.” At the moment when two roads diverge in a yellow wood, you don’t want to choose “Wayne Newton: The Lost Years.”
For a raft of reasons I choose “Hamlet,” the first book that knocked my socks off (October, 1973, Nashville).
Ms. Blaney let me throw dozens of questions at her in the half hour it took to print five copies of Hamlet. She knew of 15 such book kiosks scattered around the world. There are several rival kiosk manufacturers. This machine costs ca. $100,000. The kiosks aren’t going to replace the traditional book, but they supplement it beautifully, allowing bookstores to have a finite in-store stock and then a virtually infinite “instant stock” of books that can be printed in just a few minutes. These machines enable consumers to get out of print books for a reasonable price. My “Hamlet” (the 1899 Edward Dowden edition) cost $8 per copy. The novelty factor is enough to help independent bookstores survive the box store onslaught. The machines can help writers self-publish books at a very low price.
Twice in half an hour Ms. Blaney had to fix paper jams, and at one point she was poised with a magenta ink syringe over the electronic robot like Mary Shelley’s Dr. F. But while we gabbed about the electronification of civilization, “Paige M. Gutenborg” printed me five copies of my favorite book, trimmed the pages, glued the bindings, affixed the paperback covers, and plopped them into an electronic chute, all in the time it takes those movie theater kiosks to deliver photos of you and your best friend.
It was a kind of electronic miracle in Harvard Square. This revolution is going to make Johannes Gutenberg look like a guy with a crayon.
The next morning, thanks to an initiative on Delta Airlines, I sent my first e-mail from space. At 37,000 feet, somewhere between Boston and Atlanta, I wrote and sent an end-of-year report to colleagues, 20 e-mails to friends, and two digital photographs.
Brace your binary soul.
Interviewing Dan Rather
by Clay Jenkinson
December 20, 2009
Last week I had one of the greatest experiences of my life. In New York City Tuesday I had the honor of interviewing former CBS News reporter and anchor Dan Rather. For five hours
I was sweatin’ like a Baptist preacher in a Texas whorehouse.
The Dakota Institute is making a documentary film about Eric Sevareid (1912-1992). Sevareid is one of North Dakota’s greatest exports. Born in Velva. Educated at the University of Minnesota. Canoed with his high school mate Walter Port from St. Paul, Minn., to Hudson’s Bay in 1930, a distance of 2,250 miles. Went to Paris in 1936. Together with William L. Shirer and Edward R. Murrow, Sevareid helped to invent correspondent-based broadcast news — on radio. In 1946 he wrote one of America’s best 20th century autobiographies: “Not So Wild a Dream.” With reluctance and some nervous tics and habits, he made the transition to the new technology of television, and helped to make CBS the gold standard of broadcast news. From 1963 to 1977 he was what Dan Rather calls “America’s only philosopher-broadcaster.” Two or three nights a week for 14 years Sevareid provided two minutes and 20 seconds of analysis and commentary.
During one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history, Sevareid was the single most significant national voice of reason and clarity. With the help of Sevareid’s thoughtful evening musings, America somehow lived through the turmoil of the assassinations, the Civil Rights Movement, Vietnam, the youth movement and anti-war protests, the space program, and Watergate.
He’s a North Dakotan. We should be enormously proud of that.
Thanks to the initiative of Brenna Daugherty of the North Dakota Humanities Council, Rather agreed to an interview. A window of opportunity suddenly opened last week, and we all scrambled to make it happen. The gifted videographer and editor David Swenson of Makoche Recording Studios shipped cameras and lights to New York to prepare for the shoot. My job was to conduct the interview. I’ve done hundreds of video interviews in the last 10 years. But for this one I was really nervous. Really really nervous. Add some more reallys.
At Rather’s level of intensity, not to mention busyness and celebrity, anything can go wrong and usually does.
After all that worry and all that flurry of preparation, on Tuesday morning it finally just happened. We set up in Rather’s modest office in Manhattan. He appeared alone, precisely on time, thanked us (thanked us!) for doing a long-overdue documentary on Sevareid, told us he had a couple of meetings he had to attend in the early afternoon, but that he would give us as much time as he could. He carried no notes. No assistants, no makeup folks, no bustling secretaries or interns. Just a living legend of American journalism all alone with a couple of sweating rookies from Dakota.
He spoke in a quiet voice. He maintained eye contact for five hours. In the whole course of that time he never said one sentence that could be construed as egotistical or self-serving. He weighed his words carefully, with earnestness and deep respect for Sevareid and all that he represented. In the course of the day I gave him two opportunities to decry the current state of television news, and he adroitly turned the discussion back to the virtues of the “Norse god” from the Great Plains. He told marvelous anecdotes about hunting with Sevareid, visiting Paris for the first time (with Sevareid), taking Sevareid’s sometimes Olympian advice, including about the hard reading required for a great career in journalism. He told us the story of a bloody firefight at dawn in front of the hotel they were staying in in Saigon. Sevareid appeared on the street in a silk bathrobe and slippers.
About an hour into the interview I remember saying to myself: “This is one of the most extraordinary honors of my life, to be listening to an American icon talk about a man he regards as an American giant.”
Rather is now 78 years old. But there is nothing of the old man about him. He’s fit, strong, handsome, and unbelievably well-spoken in an unpretentious and spontaneous way. There was such reverence and nostalgia and even sorrow in his demeanor that it was both thrilling and a little painful to sit 4 feet across from him. As a proud Texan, from the other end of the Great Plains, Rather understands how Velva and North Dakota shaped Eric Sevareid.
Rather is an important man, in my opinion a great man, at the end of one of the most storied careers in American history. He was not far from the grassy knoll when President John F. Kennedy was killed on Nov. 22, 1963. He was one of the first reporters to go to Vietnam, when even his own network thought it was a minor conflict at the other end of the planet. He was first or one of the first into Afghanistan, Pakistan, Tiananmen Square, and Iraq, when they were the most intense hotspots on the planet. Although Sevareid had enjoyed a full and legendary career by the time Rather came on the national scene in 1964, they “shared” two of the greatest stories of the second half of the 20th century: Vietnam and Watergate.
Rather said if there is a Mount Rushmore of broadcast journalists, “two faces are certain: Edward R. Murrow and Eric Sevareid.”
I know I sound starstruck and a little overwrought. But just wait until you see the film.
The Coming of Winter and the Ebbing of the Light
by Clay Jenkinson
December 13, 2009
What a glorious fall we’ve had. Autumn lingered. It wasn’t exactly Indian summer, but it was amazingly mild by North Dakota standards. We have had a long succession of windless days, and the autumn light was exquisite. Whatever follows now will be easier to endure, because this year’s perfect fall cut the coming brutal weeks down to size.
Now clearly it is winter: hard frost on the windshield in the morning, leaden skies, the sluggish start of the car engine, the realization, when you step out on a clear day without a coat, that it would not be merely uncomfortable but dangerous if you stayed out uncovered very long. Long nights.
But even winter has come in like a lamb this year. In the summer I wake up quickly and pop out of bed and into the world. In the winter I love to return to consciousness slowly, to readjust the blankets and eke just a little more comfort out of the night, to peer out the bedroom window onto the endless prairie to see what the day portends. And then to get up grumblingly and bleary-brained, impatient that it takes 90 seconds for the shower to get hot. I love to wake up to a light dusting of snow and to crisp crystalline Great Plains skies. To walk out the door and get a little teaser bite of Arctic air, just enough to remind you that it is winter and it is North Dakota. Sometimes before I start my car I gaze for a while at the frost crystals on my windshield and try to reclaim the wonder of my childhood.
The great goal of life is to stay alive to wonder in the face of the manifold disenchantments and disillusionments — as Hamlet puts it — “that flesh is heir to.” My daughter is clinging to Santa Claus as if he were saving her from drowning — which in a sense he is.
We live in paradise on the northern plains. I even like the dreariness of winter in North Dakota, the undulation of drab gray and brown land off to the far horizons. I sometimes spend whole hours musing on the winter quietude of the countryside, the economy of motion that all creatures show in a landscape where every calorie matters. A couple of years ago I visited Yellowstone National Park in the winter. Our ranger told us not to startle the buffalo in any way, because they were in such a photo finish race against starvation that any unnecessary exertion might make the difference between death and survival. At this time of year, I like knowing there is not a mosquito alive for hundreds of miles, or a fly. I like to think of all the creatures who are hibernating in the earth, sleeping, eking and waiting it out.
Next Sunday night is the longest of the year. The winter solstice occurs at 11:47 a.m. CST Dec. 21. At that moment the sun reaches the end of its annual pendulum swing, lingers for a moment, and then turns back toward light and life. Thereafter, every day gets a couple of minutes longer all the way to late June. Hallelujah. The daily injection of more light after Christmas is the compensation we get for living in a place with brutal winters.
I lived in England for four years — mild winters but latitude 51.45. Bismarck’s latitude is 46.80. On Dec. 21, in Greenwich, England, the sun sets at 3:57 p.m. In Bismarck, 4:50 p.m. If any part of you sees any validity in season affective disorder, that’s a dramatic difference for people prone to the winter blues. When I was there, during the pre-Thatcher Labour years of the mid-’70s, strikes were common, including in the electricity industry. I remember once going to a Chaucer tutorial in a seminar room at Hertford College that was built in the 16th century.
Stop there: Bismarck in the 16th century. Bismarck and Mandan were full of ... Mandan Indians, perhaps 20,000 of them in nine or so villages flanking both sides of the river, but there wasn’t a white person from here to St. Augustine, Fla., a distance of 1,564 miles as the crow flies.
Meanwhile, back in England, in 1978, we’re at this Chaucer seminar with a tutor who would have been a great medieval monk. Minutes after we began the lights went out — labor’s rolling blackout of the week. So we lit four thin candles (tapers), and finished our two-hour seminar by flickering candlelight. It was eerie and perfectly magical, one of the most satisfying moments I’ve ever had with the great texts. We were reading a 14th century poet in a 16th century room by way of humanity’s longest serving and most renewable artificial light source.
Think of North Dakota before electricity.
Winter is reading time in North Dakota. Long nights for big books. A nitwit friend of mine gave me a new translation of Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” the other day, and told me she “expects” me to read it through during the winter holidays. I cannot remember the last time I just stayed in bed all day reading (30 years at least), but I’m going to try to carve one out sometime in the next three weeks.
Winter? I say bring it on.
Pondering (but not second guessing) the mountain lion shooting
by Clay Jenkinson
December 6, 2009
I was really saddened and disturbed by the killing of the mountain lion in north Bismarck on Thanksgiving Friday (Nov. 27). After a family spotted the lion at 6:30 p.m. near the former Home Depot building east of State Street, Bismarck police and North Dakota Game and Fish employees hurried to the scene, where a police officer killed the mountain lion by way of a shotgun at 15 yards.
The mountain lion was 6 feet long. It was a young male. It weighed 100 pounds. It was killed shortly after 7 p.m.
Of course I understand why the mountain lion was killed. As the Tribune editorialized Wednesday, better safe than sorry. Imagine if authorities had done nothing and the lion had attacked a pedestrian. Denunciation of Game and Fish would be drowned by demands that we undertake a punitive extermination program throughout the state. When a potentially dangerous creature wanders into an urban environment, or rather if it is spotted in an urban setting, its death is a near inevitability.
I get it, and I am not criticizing the response of the Bismarck police and Game and Fish on a holiday night, in the dark, in an empty field just a few hundred steps from a densely populated apartment complex. I’m not automatically going to say they did the right thing, but I do believe they acted responsibly, and that they should not be criticized for their handling of the incident. They responded according to the protocols and the missions of their agencies.
The death of a mountain lion is not the end of the world — except of course to the mountain lion.
Still ...
I’m terribly saddened, and I just want to wonder out loud if perhaps there is another way to think about what happened last week.
The way to achieve understanding is to try to clear our minds of irrational fears and ignorant prejudices, and to learn what we can about the behavior patterns of the other species in question. Here’s what we know. The mountain lion was a fully-grown young male. Such young males are driven out of their birth habitat. They go in search of new homes that meet their desired habitat parameters — access to food, shelter, mating partners, and security. (Just like us.) The lion killed last week was almost certainly just passing through -- along what Game and Fish naturalists acknowledge is a natural corridor or “highway” along the valley of the Missouri River. In other words, if it had not been spotted, or if it had just been left alone, it almost certainly would have been well away from the human settlements in and around Bismarck within 24 hours.
Unlike coyotes, mountain lions do not like to live in or near human settlements. The chances that this one was going to set up housekeeping behind Home Depot are roughly zero. It might have been possible for the police and Game and Fish to maintain a vigil at the four corners of the empty lot in question, guns ready, the folks in the neighborhood warned to be cautious, with the understanding that the lion would almost certainly lope out of town in the course of the night.
Might it not have been possible to tranquilize the mountain lion (with lethal force poised as backup if things miscarried)? Again, I acknowledge that it was a holiday evening, after dark, and the lion was hiding in a cavity among glacial rocks bulldozed into a pile in the middle of the empty field. I visited the site Saturday afternoon. The mountain lion had chosen a very good place to hide. There were no animal bones at the killing site, among the glacial rubble. This was not a hunting midden of a long-term resident.
Mountain lions almost never attack humans. On extremely rare occasions, they do, and those scattered stories have created a folk terror that is not supported by the facts. Each year there are approximately 25 fatal dog attacks on humans in the United States, and hundreds of life-threatening but non-fatal attacks. The total number of recorded mountain lion attacks on humans between 1890 and 1990 in the United States was 53, of which 10 were fatal. None of these incidents occurred in North Dakota. The sad truth is that our irrational fear of mountain lion attacks belongs to the same category of humanity’s ancient fear and hatred of wolves or vampire bats.
To put it in a glib, pop-cultural perspective, a citizen of Bismarck Friday night was almost infinitely more likely to die from a domestic shooting, a drug overdose, an alcohol-related car accident, or driving while texting (guilty!), than from an attack of a majestic peripatetic mountain lion on a fascinating and mysterious journey to somewhere else far from Burleigh County.
What happened that night, not at the center of Bismarck but up at the northern frontier, with a clear wash-and-coulee escape route to safer prairies, was certainly the safe and “right” thing to do, but I confess that it feels a little hasty to me, a little reactive, a little unimaginative, and a little irrational.
Better safe than sorry. But I know two things. First, if I saw a mountain lion anywhere in North Dakota, including here, I’d be the happiest man alive. Second, knowing what I know now, the very last thing I would do would be to call the authorities.
The death of the Roman Republic: Is the story about us?
by Clay Jenkinson
November 29, 2009
I'm reading the most fascinating book about the end of the Roman Republic. The book is called "Rubicon: The Last Years of the Roman Republic." The author is a Cambridge-educated Brit, Tom Holland, who is blurbed as "an accomplished radio personality in Britain."
It's a book I automatically picked up somewhere -- because I spent many years studying Greek and Roman literature, during my own classical period (it's all rococo now!), and because I am for some reason fascinated with last things, last performances, and endings of eras. In the hectic pace of my life, sometime during the last year I bought the book, and made the mistake of putting it down at random in my house, where it was promptly swallowed up. The other day I tripped over it, picked it up, and decided to read a chapter or two. Now I'm hooked.
Rubicon is an intelligent, witty, and insightful book written for the general public. Every school child learns that Julius Caesar led his legions across the tiny Rubicon River in the north of Italy on Jan. 10, 49 BCE, thus precipitating the civil war that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic. The ancient historian Suetonius reported that on that fateful day Caesar said, "The die is cast" -- in other words, that he was staking everything, his future and perhaps even his existence, on this extra-constitutional invasion of the Roman homeland.
Caesar (100-44 BCE) is one of the most fascinating figures in human history - it would be hard to nominate anyone more fascinating. We know an enormous amount about him because the Romans were remarkable record keepers. He wrote about himself in the famous war Commentaries (almost every young Latinist's first sustained Latin text). His correspondence was vast: he is said to have dictated letters from horseback to three secretaries simultaneously. He intrigued and troubled everyone, including the greatest letter writer of the ancient world, Cicero.
Caesar was a dissolute and deeply indebted dandy (we'd say, metrosexual) from one of the handful of leading families in Rome. Though he represented the highest Roman nobility - in a country where nobility was everything -- he came to champion the poor urban masses (and partied with them too). He sought power with unscrupulous ambition - bribery, seduction, acts of political theater, demagoguery, and of course outright force - but there was something so graceful and admirable in his personal style that even his enemies found it hard to hate him utterly. When he got supreme power, he displayed clemency and an administrative mastery seldom equaled in history.
And then the last true "republicans" assassinated him on March 15, 44 BCE, the Ides of March. Enter Shakespeare (stage left) with every student's first (somewhat unfortunate) encounter with the greatest writer in the English language.
Even so, Rubicon is not really about Julius Caesar. It is about the forces that pulled the ancient Roman republican "constitution" apart in the last century before Christ. The Roman Republic consisted of Spartan hardscrabble farmers who were cantankerous about their self-reliance and committed to a concept of craggy "virtue" that is wholly alien to our Barcalounger Nation. Rome's wars, which were localized, were fought between harvests by farmer-citizen-soldiers. Luxury was regarded as un-Roman. Honor and a homespun independence meant more than anything else. You get the picture.
Then Rome began to acquire a Mediterranean empire and guess what happened? The citizen soldier came to be replaced by a standing army of the poor and the immigrant who fought for upward mobility rather than the principles of the republic. Illegal immigrants flooded Rome. Their desperate poverty and restlessness were bought off with state welfare. Luxury and self-indulgence shouldered austere simplicity off the stage. Rome created and then demonized its enemies. Because the "barbarians" did not fight according to "civilized codes of warfare," Rome learned to hold its empire by way of grotesque exhibits of power and terror. This created as many enemies as it quieted. The empire became so far-flung, so chaotic, so expensive, so complex, that the venerable old republican constitution was stretched to the breaking point.
And then it broke.
I'm not enamored of Cato Institute analogies between the fall of Rome and the coming "fall" of America. The differences between us and Rome are considerable, maybe fundamental. I don't fancy those leather chair debates about whether it was lead paint or the welfare state or Christianity (as Edward Gibbon had it) that destroyed Rome. But I do think books like Rubicon and Cullen Murphy's "Are We Rome: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America" should be read by the Obamas and the Gingrichs of America, as well as by the Dorgans, Conrads, and Pomeroys.
Here's the essence of it. Rome became a world empire without really "trying" to, and world empire proved to be fatally corrosive of Roman values. Instead of facing this transformation, Rome continued for more than a century to pretend it was still a republic. Because the Romans preferred to live in nostalgic illusion rather than face the world they had created, the strain on the ancient constitution was so great that when it finally broke, the result was chaos, civil war, and dictatorship.
But, as Sinclair Lewis said, it cannot happen here.
Yesterday, I ordered a dozen copies to give away as Christmas gifts.
Abundance, gratitude, and family love-and Mother's gravy
by Clay Jenkinson
November 22, 2009
This week Thanksgiving, my favorite day of the year. I have a turkey so big and buff that there can be no doubt that it has been taking performance enhancing steroids. I'm going to dig the last of the potatoes up from my garden (thank you, prolonged fall). I have cranberries to boil, pie fixings, Jell-O and gelatin, onions and celery, and stuffing mix. I even ironed the tablecloth well in advance.
Mother makes the gravy. It really bothers me that her gravy is always perfect and mine never. It should be possible for just about any idiot to make gravy, right? She's the gravy master and, now that I am well into middle age, I think I can safely conclude that gravy making is never going to be one of my strengths. The good news is that mother is not smug about her gravy, when clearly she has a right to be. She's just workmanlike about it. It's the same every year-like clockwork. (That's what family traditions are made of). At four p.m. she washes a few dishes in the sink or gets out a measuring cup we'll need for whipped cream. She makes sure we are not making eye contact-and says, with a studied casualness, "Want me to do the gravy this year?" Not even "make." "Do the gravy." That's her confidence level.
And every year I don't answer until she turns around so I can study her expression the way they did in medieval Chinese diplomatic summit conferences. But she never shows any hint of derision or contempt. So I relax. And I reply, "Of course, you make the best gravy." Sometimes she answers that with, "I know," but it is said with such matter of factness that it doesn't bother me. Now she IS a little smug about her pumpkin chiffon pie, and we all know that's the kind of pride that Jesus was always warning us about, but her chiffon pie is so incredible that nobody, not even a hepped up in-law has ever objected.
My daughter will not be with us Thursday (in the rotation, it's Dad Christmas, Mom Thanksgiving this year). That will be sad. She loves to set the table, to ask 20 times, "when do we eat?," to fuss with newly-drawn hand-made place cards even when there are just three of us, to light the candles and adjust the napkin holders. I love to just sit and watch the frank funny conversations she has with Grandma. It's pure joy to observe that glorious uncomplicated love that comes only in the grandparent-grandchild package. I luxuriate in my mother's un-held-back amusement at the dramas and the antics of the girl she eventually calls "you little rascal," in a way that makes them both light up with happiness.
At the beginning, we hold hands and go around saying what we especially give thanks for this year, but really there is no need. It is all right there, pure and beyond words. Besides, this is one occasion when each of us practices brevity, because the dining room table is sagging with abundance, and we cannot get at it until we stop holding hands and saying big things. The potatoes are right in front of us, steaming in a dollop-topped bowl, and our palates are pre-puckering for the ecstasy of cranberry sauce.
The two holidays that bring families together from faraway places are Christmas and Thanksgiving. I love to be flying home to North Dakota on the Tuesday or Wednesday of Thanksgiving week. That's when the North Dakota expats travel home for the holiday. I'm not normally an airplane talker, but on those holiday-week flights I often ask the obvious expatriates what their North Dakota plans are. When I do this, they almost invariably drop their character armor and relax into the question, often actually sigh, and then talk about what they miss about home. They get dreamy expressions on their faces and move into a narrative about family quirks and traditions-who always brings the green bean hotdish-that they have told many times before.
Many of these returnees talk about getting out to walk on the land, or drive around the old farm.
Their eyes often reveal regret and they will say, "My wife and I both have great jobs in Des Moines, and we really like it there. We'd love to live in North Dakota, but . . . ." And there it is again-the story of North Dakota.
Some do comic shtick on their family dynamics. Occasionally a whole section of the plane joins the fray and becomes a kind of roundtable Lake Wobegon monologue.
We land and everyone fusses their appearance and we file off the plane towards baggage claim. Wound up and poised to spring, beyond the security glass, are a dozen clusters of families breathlessly waiting for Sarah and the kids to get there, pity her husband Brad couldn't get off work this year. And the welcoming children have their faces pressed up against the glass, straining to see a beloved sister or cousin or Aunt.
There is so much linger in the hugs.
I don't think there is anyone who does not pause sometime on Thanksgiving Day to feel grateful for the freedom, the mobility, the energy, the Pilgrimage, the vastness, and the unbelievable abundance of America.
Diary of a Very Frequent Flyer
by Clay Jenkinson
November 15, 2009
Boston, Wednesday, Nov. 11. Before I went to bed last night I spent some time programming my wake up call. Only once in my life have I missed a plane by over-sleeping, but on several dozen occasions the hotel has failed to deliver the wake up call as requested. This means that I am a poor sleeper the night before a flight, because you never know. Sometime around midnight I actually had a lengthy internal debate about whether to go with the automated system-reliable unless I mis-program it--or with the desk clerk, where a different kind of human error lurks. This morning the phone rings precisely at 6 a.m. Bleary with fatigue, I immediately begin to calculate how much of the next hour I can remain in bed and still make my flight.
6:17 a.m. The shower in my room is excellent. I've seen enough CSI television to know that my hotel room, no matter how tidy it looks, is actually a fetid swamp of bacteria, hair strands, the residue of gross bodily fluids, and toenails that pinged off the clipper like meteorites. If there were a disposable full-body sheath I'd wear it in every hotel room, like a quarantined astronaut. As it is, I sometimes wipe down the remote with a washcloth on the principle that that's the one thing everyone touches. At least three times I've only succeeded in shorting them out.
No five second rule for me.
6:31 a.m. I call down to the desk to arrange transport to the airport. Desk clerk explains that taxis are unreliable, but that he can arrange a town car for roughly the same price. I sigh. Whenever this happens, I feel as if I'm in Turkey, where the cousin of somebody's brother in law knows a guy who would be happy to serve me. Fully aware that this has effectively doubled my transit cost, I meekly agree. Not much fight in me this morning. He'll call back to confirm.
6:35 a.m. Someone with profoundly limited English calls to say he will be waiting for me at 7 a.m., that he will put my name on the car window, and that if I have trouble just to ask for Gigi. He asks me to spell my name. I decide to go with "Clay" rather than "Jenkinson." It takes approximately four minutes to say and spell, spell and say, then spell very phonetically, my four-letter name.
6:58 a.m. I locate Gigi, even though the hand-drawn placard on his window reads "Chlghlaugchaa." Luggage loaded, we take off for the airport. In an accent so thick that it feels like Velveeta, employing a mixture of pigeon English and Farsi, he asks me which airline. I answer wearily, knowing from extensive experience that he will ask the same question as we approach the airport. When I say "Northwest, er I guess Delta," Gigi explodes into a violent clarification of the recent corporate merger. "Not same, not same, two terminals, how which?" His intensity is as great as if he were denouncing international Zionism. I consult the god Blackberry.
7:06 a.m. With deep misgiving I ask Gigi how much my ride is going to cost and whether I can pay with my credit card. He throws up an appallingly large dollar figure (in perfect English), followed by "flat!" And then a long and utterly unintelligible dissertation on the hidden costs of processing credit cards, coupled with a grinning explanation of why there is no need to bring the IRS into the equation. I take this to mean, "cash only."
7:18. a.m. We stop at an ATM machine.
7:29 a.m. The Boston skyline is glorious this morning. In the perfectly clear and crisp autumn light the John Hancock Building looms like a monument to the triumph of engineering and capitalism. As I look out at an array of planes lofting over one of America's great cities, my mind inevitably casts up memories of 9-11. Logan International is my least favorite American airport. Over the years, I've sweated out a dozen or more hours in the tunnels in helpless rage as my departure time approached. But after 9-11, Logan (from which two of the flights originated) has felt morally contaminated to me, the way Dallas must have seemed in 1964.
7:30 a.m. To get my mind off Mohammad Atta and the image of hijackers slicing the throats of innocent flight attendants (Professor Ward Churchill's "little Eichmanns") I glance through USA Today. It's a day of somber news. D.C. sniper John Muhammad executed by lethal injection (in the 21st century!). The President's remarks at Fort Hood. Abortion likely to derail the health care debate. Former astronaut Lisa Nowak sentenced in Orlando for her bizarre assault on a fellow astronaut's new girlfriend. And, in that abbreviated "Across the USA" section, the welcome news that Fargo's roller derby debut was a stunning success.
7:48 a.m. Gigi asks me which airline.
8:19 a.m. After a brief and bitter dispute with an airline clerk, the gist of which was that I should have intuited which unmarked line to stand in, I sail through security. In fact, I sail a little faster than genuine security would require. But hey . . .
8:32 a.m. Bagel, sharp black coffee. The New York Times. A new book.
It's going to be a good day.
DSU and the agony of parenthood
by Clay Jenkinson
November 8, 2009
The deaths of three Dickinson State University students in a single-car accident have stunned the people of North Dakota, particularly the 16,035 residents of Dickinson. Suddenly, the fragility of life and the randomness of calamity have percolated in us all. The instantaneous burst of national media attention has, ironically, deepened our local sense of shock and loss.
Three young women in the early, early prime of life — the garbled, broken cell phone calls — the frantic search — the sinking feeling as the hours pass — the wild speculations of the self-appointed “commentators” in bars and coffee houses. And then the sad inevitability of the discovery of the tire tracks, the oil residue in the pond, the vehicle and the “recovery” of the bodies.
My mind went straight to my 15-year-old daughter, who has a learner’s permit, lives in rural Kansas and drives the gravel roads. I wanted to hurtle through space and hug her tight and never release her into the minefield of life. I wanted to hug her tight and scold her for the unnecessary risks she will take between now and middle age. I heard on NPR the other day that most car accidents occur during a young person’s first year of driving. I wanted to tell her that — see how much of it I could get in before her eyes rolled out of the conversation. I want my daughter’s life to be an adventure, not a tame thing, but I want every episode to come out right.
Life turns on a dime. One minute you are eating dinner and watching “60 Minutes.” A minute later, the phone rings. After that, nothing is ever the same.
Every parent lives in dread of the late-night telephone call. I cannot let myself think about the calls that went out from Dickinson on
Sunday night without experiencing a wave of nausea and horror.
Writing to a friend in 1786, Thomas Jefferson tried to express his anxiety about the thought of his 9-year-old daughter Maria crossing the Atlantic Ocean alone to join him in Paris. “I drop my pen at the thought,” he wrote. When I first read that 25 years ago, I thought Jefferson was being melodramatic. Callow fool that I was.
Every time my daughter’s mother calls, day or night, and starts by saying, “I’m calling about Catherine,” my system shorts out and I literally stop breathing until it turns out that she only needs a new clarinet or that she didn’t get picked for the school play.
The DSU students were all from somewhere else. Kyrstin Gemar, 22, was from San Diego. Ashley Neufeld, 21, was from Brandon, Manitoba. Afton Williamson, 20, was from Lake Elsinore, Calif., south of Riverside. (Seven years older than my daughter, six and just five). They were all DSU softball players. As I write this (Wednesday morning), nobody is quite sure what happened late Sunday night northwest of Dickinson, but the three young women had a reputation for country road stargazing.
That’s the part that bothers me most. People who come from elsewhere to North Dakota temporarily usually find our place b-o-r-i-n-g. They cling to the institutions that brought them here, seek out amenities that which they could just as easily have experienced elsewhere, anywhere, and seldom venture off the interstates, much less off asphalt. They “put up with” the northern Great Plains — because it is a temporary posting — but make no effort to absorb the essence of this vast improbable outback. My guess is that most DSU recruits explore the surrounding territory as little as possible.
The late Pierre Salinger (JFK’s press secretary) studied for a time (1943-44) at Dickinson State University. He later said, predictably enough, that though it was not quite the end of the world, you could see it from Dickinson.
These three young women apparently took pleasure in wandering away from the lights of the city to dark places where they could see the stars as they can only be seen in the middle of nowhere. In other words, they wanted to experience the North Dakota in North Dakota. They were not clinging to Walmart like a consumer-culture life preserver, or passing their evenings online. They were out together on the back roads of western North Dakota gazing up at the heavens. I find that incredibly admirable.
I don’t know exactly what happened Sunday night northwest of Dickinson, but a vivid scenario (that probably has no relation to what occurred) keeps running through my imagination. I can picture the midnight joy ride, “joy ride” in the best sense of the term — the sheer joy of being young and perfectly alive, with friends, on an adventure, in a car moving a little too fast, in the middle of nowhere.
I know the exhilaration that comes from driving fast on dirt roads at night, when you don’t quite know where you are, and the only illumination in the universe comes from your headlights.
A hundred times in my life I have driven out on gravel roads around Dickinson chasing thunderstorms or “burning the carbon off the cylinders” or just burning off steam, and have come suddenly to a sharp turn or a T-intersection, or just lost control of the vehicle for an instant as it drifts laterally toward the ditch. At that moment you suck in all the air at once and go monstrously alert, and somehow make the turn, somehow regain control of the car. It’s a rush like the best roller coaster and the glory is that you are in control, or at least in charge.
Even without the slightest hint of recklessness, a car accident on an unknown dirt road can happen to anyone.
One of my daughter’s schoolmates has flipped her parents’ vehicles twice on dirt roads in Kansas in a single year, and somehow walked away from both accidents with nothing more than bruises. Ironically, ickily, that has brought her a little bit of celebrity.
This is a hard blow for Dickinson State University, where such great things are happening, particularly the recruitment of students from all over the world. It is a hard blow for Dickinson. Back in July, a tornado burst in on the south side of Dickinson, leaving millions of dollars of property damage in its swath, and yet not a single life was lost. Now, in an instant, three deaths darken the scene. Every parent who has seen this story, all over America, has experienced the pain and anxiety of living for children whose lives we cannot fully or finally protect. But all this is nothing compared to the pain of the families of Kyrstin Gemar, Ashley Neufeld, and Afton Williamson, the ones who got those calls.
They were out looking at the stars.
Bill Guy and the "Charisma of Competence"
by Clay Jenkinson
November 1, 2009
On almost any given day, I regard myself as the luckiest man alive. The wacky career that I have hacked out (or perhaps just stumbled into) has given me the chance to get involved in projects that sometimes make me wonder whether I am awake or merely dreaming. At the moment I have the enormous good fortune of working on a documentary film about former North Dakota Gov. William L. Guy. The film, produced by the Dakota Institute, will be completed in 2010.
I could use your help.
Every child remembers the moment when she or he first came into a wider consciousness-realized, that is, that the world is not just meals and playmates and church and school and family, but rather a big, big, complicated and inexplicable place in which most of the action takes places so far beyond Stark County, North Dakota, that the rest of the world does not know that Stark County even exists. Every political junkie remembers the moment in which she or he realized that the world is not just a natural growth, but rather a socially organized system in which a group of energetic and colorful people speak for the rest of us, whether we want them too or not.
I remember the very first moment I felt pride in being a North Dakotan. It is not a coincidence that that moment was created by Gov. Guy. It was the Democratic National Convention-in 1964, I believe, when television was still flickery low-res experience in black and white. In casting North Dakota's votes for the "next President of the United States," Guy began by saying he had the honor of representing a state that "was cleaner and greener in the summer, white and brighter in the winter." I remember, as if it were yesterday, sitting up a little straighter at that moment, looking around at the adults in the room to observe their reaction, feeling a suffusion of something very akin to a blush go through my whole body, and feeling my first moment of fierce pride in being a NORTH DAKOTAN.
North Dakota mattered! North Dakota was not Eric Sevareid's blank spot at the center of the continent, but rather a place that could hold its head up in the national arena. And the spokesman for that state pride was a young man in perfect health, a bright-looking, zesty man with a crew-cut, possessed of a smile that was wonderfully genuine, a little ironic, and even ever so slightly smug.
From that moment on I have felt that North Dakota, for all of its geographic and social marginality, was in some improbable way the best place on earth. Nor am I alone in this. I have met dozens of other people who remember that moment-cleaner and greener, whiter and brighter-for precisely the same reason.
Bill Guy served as governor of North Dakota between 1960 and 1972. If John Hoeven completes his third term (hem!), he will have served as long as Guy (12 years), but Guy will continue to hold the record for number of times elected governor of North Dakota. He was elected four times: two two-year terms, followed by two four-year terms.
Guy is widely regarded as having helped to bring North Dakota into the second half of the 20th Century. North Dakota (born in 1889) has a very short white history, and until ca. 1946, it was a kind of primordial array of farms and basic-services towns. After two world wars and the farm depression of the 20s, the Great Depression of the 30s, and the Dust Bowl, North Dakota was still a backwater place with a weak infrastructure when Bill Guy burst on the scene in the late 1950s. As Jean Guy puts it, "So much had been put on hold during the middle years of the century." Most of our roads were unpaved. The Interstate Highways were unbegun. State government was close to negligible, almost entirely reactive not proactive. State institutions, including educational and mental health facilities, had a kind of caretaker ennui about them.
Guy came to power in North Dakota the same year that John F. Kennedy was elected President of the United States. Just as Kennedy promised to get the country moving again after what he regarded as the languid Eisenhower years, so Bill Guy determined to transform North Dakota's economy, to find ways to process our commodities here rather than send them away raw for value adding elsewhere, and to professionalize state government and spark it back to life, beginning with the State Bank of North Dakota.
Guy did all of that, and more, and he had the good fortune to preside over North Dakota during the greatest steel and concrete decade in American history.
He was a friend to JFK. Jean Guy tells a hilarious story of a state dinner at the White House in 1963. Bill and Jean were discombobulated when they discovered that they were to sit at different tables, and that she, not the governor, was assigned to Table 1. That night First Lady Jean Guy sat one seat away from the President of the United States, directly between Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and one of America's greatest writers John Steinbeck. Dinner entertainment was provided by the poet Basil Rathbone. North Dakota's Governor Bill Guy-assigned to Table 8-does not remember who his dinner mates were!
The late historian Larry Remele once attempted to analyze Governor Guy's greatness. He said that Bill Guy was not a man of grand vision. Nor was he a spellbinding stump orator. Guy had, in Remele's felicitous phrase, "the charisma of competence."
Now, at 90, fully 50 years later, Bill Guy is a frail man, but he is still actively involved in the issue that was central to his political career-water. He believes that the future of the Red River Valley, indeed the future of North Dakota, depends on diverting water from the Missouri River to the Sheyenne and Red, and that a pipeline between Bismarck and West Fargo, not the old McClusky Canal, is the proper way to deliver it.
He's one of my heroes. This last week I conducted my sixth daylong television interview with the Guys in Fargo. I cannot wait to see the finished documentary sometime next year-but we have to finish it first. If you have photographs or films in which Bill Guy makes an appearance, if you have documents you'd be willing to share, the names of people we ought to interview, or stories you think we should know, please contact me.
Let's conserve an endangered species: The heritage rancher
by Clay Jenkinson
October 25, 2009
Recent trends in the Little Missouri River badlands fill me with anxiety.
Last summer, part of the legendary Logging Camp Ranch was sold at auction. After a number of small parcels were conditionally sold to a range of bidders, all 1,000 or so acres were trump purchased by a single buyer.
Last Monday, the Southern Cross Ranch went on the auction block in Medora. Six individuals purchased parcels of the 4,400 acre ranch, which straddles McKenzie and Golden Valley Counties. The home place, including the ranch headquarters, was sold for $800,000. All the parcels combined brought the owners a total of $4.4 million. This time, when the whole ranch was offered for sale at the end of the auction, there were no bidders. Thus the great Southern Cross Ranch has been broken up. It will never be a single lonely ranch again.
The great Badlands breakup has begun. I suppose we were all just naïve to believe that the North Dakota Badlands would remain forever a timeless district of open vistas, cottonwoods and scattered ranches with their low, funky ranch houses tucked into the bases of the buttes. Like most of the other magical places of the American West, the North Dakota Badlands have been discovered, at a moment when the wealthy (North Dakotans, expatriates, wise outsiders) have more discretionary income than at any previous time in human history. Until very recently, he or she who wanders along the scoria roads from one end of the Little Missouri Valley to the other in North Dakota has seen one of the last authentic and unblemished frontier landscapes in America. If it does not look precisely as Theodore Roosevelt left it when he returned to the East in 1890, it is so nearly that pure and pristine that it causes your heart to ache as you gaze across the breaks.
Things are changing fast out there-and not for the better. We are witnessing the front end of a storm of change that will shatter the magic of the Little Missouri River Valley once and for all.
Here are my core Badlands principles, which I believe are shared by the overwhelming majority of the people of North Dakota. One-the Badlands are North Dakota's greatest scenic asset, the crown jewel of our 70,762 square mile rectangle of prairie and Great Plains landscape. Two-the Badlands are our most important tourist destination and marketing resource, the main reason that the least visited state in the union gets visited. What makes the Badlands so attractive to everyone is some combination of the stark, broken landscape through which that whimsical improbable river flows and the palpable sense-felt by all visitors--that somehow the district has escaped the kinds of development that have compromised the heritage, the openness, the loneliness, and the spiritual possibilities of other remarkable landscapes of the American West.
Three-the highest and best use of the North Dakota Badlands is traditional cattle ranching, which, of all human enterprises, pays the most respect to the fact that the Badlands are really grasslands. Traditional ranching represents the lightest human footprint on the Badlands. Ranching erects a minimal, unintrusive, and aesthetically pleasing infrastructure on the landscape. It supports the most attractive (and quintessentially American) human culture: the laconic cowboy in chaps, bold belt buckle and hat, riding the ridge alone against an endless horizon, saddle leather creaking, rifle ready. It is impossible to be a good rancher without developing an intimate, loving and subtle understanding of the rhythms of land and grass and season. A tourist, by definition, is a temporary visitor. A mineral prospector comes to find the needle of treasure in a haystack of worthless (because worth less) land. A weekend homesteader sits on the verandah drinking in the view and the clean air, but packs up the car come Sunday afternoon and flees back to urban amenities.
The rancher is only Badlands denizen tap-rooted in the land. He (or she) is what Henry David Thoreau called himself in Walden, a "self-appointed inspector of snow-storms and rain-storms ... surveyor, if not of highways, then of forest paths," an observer of the quiet movements of wildlife. The rancher is the one who discovers the range fire after the dry thunderstorm, the one who inhibits the poacher, the one finds the trace of the mountain lion that crossed his lands in the night, the one who walks out to see what the stranger in the pickup is up to.
I believe the most endangered species in the Badlands is not the mountain lion or the black-footed ferret, but the traditional ranch family.
Four-Any future of the Badlands other than traditional ranching-hectic energy extraction, hobby ranches and ranchettes, a non-dirt and gravel infrastructure, amenities-based recreation, the locking up the Badlands for absentee-owner hunting-represents more loss than gain. It is the transfer of what has amounted to a North Dakota commons to the privileged few.
The heritage rancher running cattle on a checkerboard of mingled public and private lands with mild but enlightened federal supervision is the ideal denizen of the North Dakota Badlands. We use legislation to protect ferrets, prairie dogs, mountain lions, and eagles. Why don't we do the same for our endangered ranchers?
Don't get me wrong. I believe landowners are entitled to sell their ranches any way they wish, to any willing party. If they want to break them up into ranchette parcels, that's their right. If they want to sell them to the National Forest Service or the National Park, they have every right to do so. If they want to sell them to conservation buyers who live out of state, or absentee hunters, that too is their right. Nothing is ore American than that.
So, what's to be done? I'm not really sure. But three things seem pretty clear to me.
First, there is nothing to be gained by wringing our hands and assuming that the future of the Badlands is inevitably beyond our control. Enlightened societies decide what they value, and then use all the tools at their disposal to protect and promote those values.
Second, we need an immediate protracted, wide-ranging, and open-minded statewide conversation about the future of the Badlands, jointly supported by state government, private foundations, landowners, churches, hunters, conservationists, historians, and property rights advocates. All of it painstakingly reported by the media (including print) through special programming.
Third, we ought to follow the lead of other states, including our neighbors Minnesota, South Dakota, and Montana, and work together to enable the ranchers and farmers of North Dakota to enter into perpetual conservation easements. Although they are regarded by some as a threat to freedom and the vanguard of more outside control of our property, the indisputable fact is that intelligently legislated conservation easements have been a godsend to farmers and ranchers throughout the American West. Conservation easements are one extremely useful and important tool in the preservation of traditional family ranching and farming, and we are, to my mind, insane not to use a tool that has proved to be so essential to the preservation of family agrarianism elsewhere, including places like Montana, where even the hardest skeptics have seen the light.
You can winterize the mower, but can you winterize the soul?
by Clay Jenkinson
October 18, 2009
Suddenly, winter or at least wintry. My garden now looks like Halloween, like a caricature of a garden from which not everything got harvested. The corn was magnificent this year, but I wound up sharing most of it with furtive unidentified nocturnal creatures who grew bolder every time they got away with a raid deeper into the corn rows, higher up the stalk. Now I go out into the garden in late afternoon to survey the wreckage and look for onions that I've missed. The wind, or even a breeze, sets off the death rattle of dried out corn leaves. and you look up involuntarily at the western sky to check for storms. It all fills me with melancholy, not this time for the coming of winter, but for the scatterbrain, hugger-mugger, grab and go life that I have built. Or rather: just let happen.
The line that haunts me is from Thoreau: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." Embedded in that beautiful, elusive word is the root liber or libra, which signifies a pair of scales. To live deliberately is to slow down long enough to weigh the decisions and the rhythms and the linear motions of one's life. I long to live deliberately-to linger in my garden in the cool of the evening, to lavish on all that I do a scrapbooker's patience and meticulousness. But the sad fact is that I am a ham-handed plate spinner jogging barefoot over a sea of plate shards.
It may be heresy, but I confess that I love gray leaden low skies, with a pale yellowish band of brighter light down near the horizon, enveloping the ranges of rolling rust and earthtone hills reaching out to the ends of the earth. I like a crisp inkling of the arctic when the breeze edges up to the border checkpoint of true wind. The average annual temperature in North Dakota, remember, is 42 degrees. If you are trying to "market" North Dakota in a glossy travel brochure, you picture us in shorts at the summer picnic, a towheaded girl in face paint, the big lake stretching out behind. But the day I have described above-the gray, clouded-over, slightly brooding, endless vista, Great Plains day-will statistically come up more often on the North Dakota wheel of weather fortune than any other. So will a day in which the wind is just at the boundary of disagreeable. This is the true state of the state where we live. Some of my friends are weather whiners. They wish they lived in the North Dakota of the hundred best days of the calendar year. But that would not be North Dakota. If that were our climate, we'd have an icky population of 2.2 million, or 5.3 million.
The great annual October exodus has begun. If we had a snowbird exit kiosks south of Bowman, Linton, Ellendale, and Wahpeton, on highways 85, 83, 281, and I-29, we could double the surplus.
I love the first morning that you get into your car and find frost on the windshield. I love the first morning that makes you double back inside to fetch a jacket. I love the coffee shop excitement of the first ground blizzard.
My tomato crop was not much better than average this year. I let my friends carry away tomatoes in bags and baskets, whenever it suited them, and the great bulk of what was left wound up in the world's largest batch of salsa-onions, peppers, tomatoes, all plucked from my garden patch. Where is a Vegematic when you really need it? There are still a couple of hundred bright red tomatoes out there on the freeze-dried vines, glaringly red against the increasingly buff-tan-gray-green of the autumn countryside. Every day they lose a little of their red luster, their skins shrivel just a little bit more, and the ones that have ruptured (bratwurst-like) ooze a slightly darker tomato blood. I'm going to leave them out there until they reach their final blahness, as a warning sign for me to get my life together.
A couple of weeks ago, as I walked the big loop of my suburban neighborhood, I saw a boat in the driveway of every fourth house or so. Now, two weeks later, they have all gone into hibernation somewhere-in a friend's or brother-in-law's Quonset, in the unused family barn up in Oliver County, or-for the urban professionals!-at a storage rental facility. The newest houses in Bismarck's new subdivisions sometimes sport not just a three or four car garage, but the extendo-garage with an RV and boat bay.
Meanwhile, back in grasshopper land, my yard is like an end-of-magazine puzzle page: See how many separate winterizing tasks this nitwit has approximately 10 days to dispatch. My sprinkler system needs to be blown out and shut down. Something like eight long hoses need to be drained, coiled, tied with twine (yeah, right), and stored in the garage. Assorted nozzles, sprinklers, and tree-root hydrators need to be gathered up and put-this year-in the same place. There is a rototiller lurking out among the pines and a lawn mower that needs to go to the repairman. It pooped out early in July and since then I've just poured a cup of gas over the engine and tossed in a match when I want to start it. My four new lawn chairs will gray-out like my tomatoes if I don't fetch them, stack them, and tuck them inside. My grill needs to be battened against the gale force winds to come, and the propane canister probably ought to come in. The five flower planters would survive the winter if I just left them where they sit on the front steps, but they'd make shoveling more difficult and they'd undoubtedly get chipped. Speaking of which, it would make good sense to fire up the world's largest snowblower that was obtained (note the passive voice) on the black market in the severest moments of last winter. My troublesome Topsy Turvy tomato anti-gravity devices have already been thrown on their funeral pyre. I need to plant garlic.
All of this needs to get done-tick, tick, tick, tick. I can say with weary assurance, not all of this is going to get done.
Who expected winter to pop into our lives in the way it did this year? I thought we were going to glide in this time. The leaves thought so, too. Have you ever seen this phenomenon before, when the leaves fall green? Somehow that makes me very sad-cheated even-because I regard the radioactive golden-yellow iridescence of the Little Missouri cottonwoods in October as our pre-pay, the pay forward, for the rigors of Dakota winter.
It bothers me, too, that we did not take delivery of our quota of 10 massive thunderstorms this summer.
Oh, Lord, give us just 10 days of perfect Indian summer-days to coil the hoses and sit out on the deck with friends sipping crisp white wine-and we will call it even. Actually, we'd settle for five.
A Lonely Hero and a Lonely Grave
by Clay Jenkinson
October 11, 2009
Wednesday, the Natchez Trace, Tenn., 72 miles from Nashville. Dusk. Today I had the great honor of carrying the North Dakota state flag at the final event of the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial.
All week several hundred members of the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Association have been meeting in Memphis, Tenn., to commemorate the life of Thomas Jefferson's friend and protege Meriwether Lewis. Lewis (1774-1809) died in the early morning hours of Oct. 11, 1809, at a lonely inn on a backwoods trail that connected Nashville with Natchez on the Mississippi River.
Today we rode buses to the site of that crude hostelry, where a solemn commemorative parade and graveside ceremony took place. An estimated 1,200 people attended the service. It was a perfect, sunny, warm fall day. A dozen state flags were part of the procession, including our own.
Hero Meriwether Lewis almost certainly committed suicide 200 years ago this week. He was 35 years old. Though he had led the most successful exploration in American history, Lewis was a deeply troubled man in the summer of 1809.
He was ill (probably with an advanced case of malaria), mentally unbalanced, nearly bankrupt, and overcome with fear that he had failed to meet Jefferson's expectations, both as the governor of Upper Louisiana, and as an enlightened explorer. Though he had been back from what he called "my late tour" for three full years, he had not written a single page of his projected three-volume account of his discoveries.
Lewis was en route to Washington, D.C., and Philadelphia at the time of his death. In his bags were financial records that he hoped would convince the War Department that - as territorial governor-he was not guilty of administrative malfeasance. He was also carrying the elkskin-bound journals of the expedition.
His intention was to travel to Philadelphia in the hope that he could overcome his appalling writer's block and get an account of his journey into print before Jefferson's patience was entirely exhausted.
At Grinder's Inn, on the edge of Chickasaw Indian Territory, at approximately 3 a.m. on Oct. 11, 1809, Lewis apparently shot himself twice, first in the head and then in the abdomen. He died, according to eyewitness accounts, shortly after the sun came up.
As I write this, on a tour bus returning to the conference headquarters, people are speaking in low tones as we look out on the melancholy afterglow of an October sunset. We all were powerfully moved by the commemorative ceremony today, during which a bust of Lewis was unveiled, and representatives of half a dozen organizations laid wreaths at Lewis' grave, a broken column over rough foundation stones.
Our own David Borlaug, president of the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Washburn, was one of the most prominent figures in the national event. He joined other former presidents of the Trail Heritage Foundation in laying a wreath on Lewis' grave.
Earlier in the week, the emeritus president of Monticello's Thomas Jefferson Foundation, Dan Jordan, publicly declared that it was Borlaug who first suggested that Monticello host the first national signature event of the bicentennial (January 2003).
Two beloved figures in the Lewis and Clark world offered remarks at today's commemorative service. One was Bud Clark, the great-great grandson of the expedition's co-captain William Clark.
He spoke of what he called "one of the most extraordinary friendships in the history of the American military." He quoted Lewis' letter of June 19, 1803, inviting Clark to join the expedition, followed by Clark's response, which, he said, contained "two invented words and four spelling errors." William Clark was a notoriously slipshod (some say creative) speller, who somehow found it possible to spell the word "Sioux" 28 different ways in the expedition's journals.
The second short address was by Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs, the daughter of the late Stephen Ambrose, who did more to lift the Lewis and Clark Expedition to national prominence than any other individual, with the possible exception of documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. Even now, 13 years after its publication, "Undaunted Courage" is almost universally regarded as the best narrative of the Lewis and Clark Expedition ever written.
The late great Stephen Ambrose died of lung cancer in October 2002, just as the bicentennial was being launched. His daughter Stephenie, also a historian, told the audience at Grinder's Stand that her father was surely hovering about site today.
Her voice broke, and many in the audience wept, when she said, "When Lewis came to this place he had much on his mind. Without doubt, he was not at peace and in many ways was in severe distress. It was not a place any who knew or loved him would have foreseen as his final stop."
This year's Trail Heritage conference was entirely devoted to the life and death of Lewis. Although most scholars, including the authoritative Ambroses, have unhesitatingly concluded that Lewis died by his own hand, an outspoken minority of historians, and about a third of the Trail Heritage membership, believe he may have been murdered instead.
Several sessions of the conference were devoted to the controversy, which has a little of the feel of Kennedy assassination disputes, including a robust debate about such forensic questions as whether an expert marksman like Lewis could "miss" while attempting to shoot himself in the head with a pistol. Murder diehards demand that Lewis' body be exhumed so that forensic anthropologists can examine his skull for powder burns, traces of lead, and bullet trajectories. For a variety of good reasons, the National Park Service has declined to dig Lewis up.
A new biography of Lewis by Tom Danisi and John Jackson offers an intriguing new theory. Danisi told a rapt audience that Lewis did in fact shoot himself, but not to commit suicide. His malaria was so advanced, so unbearably painful, Danisi said, that Lewis shot himself merely to extinguish the pain. His self-inflicted death cannot really be called "suicide," any more than the people who jumped out of the Twin Towers on 9-11.
My own view, for what it is worth, is that Lewis committed suicide in the traditional sense of the term: because he could not write the book, because he felt that his governorship was ending in failure and collapse, because he had disappointed the man he most wanted to please, because he could not seem to find a woman who wanted to marry him, and - significantly - because he had peaked too early.
When you have discovered the source of the "heretofore deemed endless Missouri River," what's left?
As I write these final paragraphs, it is pitch dark. Most of the folks on my bus are asleep. The only light on the bus is the glow of my computer screen. This has been a wonderful day. I'm operating on reserve battery power. As things blink out at the end of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial, I feel two equally powerful emotions.
I am terribly sad to know that the great commemorative journey has now - by any measure - come to an end.
And I am so proud to have carried the North Dakota flag across the finish line.
Reflecting on four years of writing columns and censors
by Clay Jenkinson
October 4, 2009
Today is the fourth anniversary of the start of my Bismarck Tribune newspaper column. I can hardly believe that four years have passed since I returned to North Dakota.
I can tell you, unhesitatingly, that these have been the happiest four years of my life. These have been the most productive years of my life - and I'm just getting warmed up! The work I have done since I returned to North Dakota matters much more to me than work I have done elsewhere that might seem, in the minds of some, to be more "important."
This column has given me a weekly opportunity to process "a native's return," a forum in which to try to make sense of North Dakota at the beginning of the 21st century, in a way that I hope has been useful to others. North Dakota is at a crossroads - and I get to stand at that intersection making observations of the things I see around me. What a privilege.
Writing this weekly column has been the most satisfying thing I have ever done - on the professional front. I get more pleasure from actually writing it than from any writing I have ever done. I want to thank you sincerely for taking the time to read my words.
Four years, 208 columns, averaging 1,100 words each, makes for more than a quarter of a million words altogether. That's approximately the length of Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" or John Steinbeck's epic "East of Eden, " double the length of "Huckleberry Finn."
I randomly reread a few dozen columns recently just for the fun of it. Frankly, some things I didn't remember ever having written. That was an interesting revelation.
I'm astonished to report that I have never missed a deadline by more than a couple of hours, once or twice a year. It hasn't been easy. I travel extensively. I've "filed" my column from all the major airport concourses in the country, from European Internet cafes, from museum gift shops, and in the parking lots of motels all over America, where I have paused to poach the Internet. My column has been made possible by the electronic revolution, by our magic capacity to transfer words over immense distances merely by clicking the "Send" button.
Back in 1964, our fellow North Dakotan and my hero, Eric Sevareid, with his usual mix of earnestness and a touch of gloom, wrote about the humble labors of the columnist and commentator. "He makes many mistakes," Sevareid wrote, "but none is ever so serious as the mistakes of the specialist, as his discoveries are never so important. His daily work can be satisfying, his total professional fate rarely so. He is perpetually at school and conducts his education in public, which is often hard on others and embarrassing to him."
What have I learned about North Dakota during these four years of public education? Most North Dakotans are less anxious about the shape of the future than I am, most are less nostalgic for the North Dakota (the agrarian backwater) that is fading away to make room for Best Buy and Olive Garden. Most North Dakotans seem pleased with our current prosperity and the new waves of industrialization of our landscape.
Most North Dakotans are frankly tired of talking about the underlying challenges of our life in this faraway sub-arctic place: the undiminished outmigration of our young people; the wholesale graying of our population; the agonizing decline of our small towns and rural lifeway; the restlessness and quiet desperation of our disregarded young people, which results in an epidemic of underage drinking; our growing dependence on extraction (an effective re-colonization of the northern Great plains); the loss of some of our most scenic corridors to ridgeline and riverfront homes; the continuing industrialization of the beleaguered Missouri River; the barely scabbed over wound of White-Indian relations on the Great Plains; the failure of our educational system to produce heritage-proud North Dakotans.
I am aware of a conviction among many of my fellow citizens that these are good times for North Dakota and that any significant debate about these issues is a pointless exercise in wringing our hands over macro-economic and social dynamics that are beyond our control.
Many seem to believe that an earnest conversation about the future of North Dakota may in some mystical way jinx our parade of prosperity and progress.
Meanwhile, attempts have been made over the past year to silence me. At least one institution I work with has been threatened with a loss of funding if it continued to associate with the likes of me. My crime? Publishing words about matters of importance to me in a newspaper that nobody is required to buy in a newspaper column that nobody is forced to read. My goodness, that is a pretty grave crime!
I try my best every week to be reasonable and to put forward arguments and opinions based on evidence, based on a lifetime of reading and reflection, and close observation of the world around me. I even try on every occasion to look at the issue from the other points of view. Who would have thought that a series of essays calling for a careful public conversation about who we are and where we are headed would be regarded as "divisive" or "irresponsible," or "outrageous?"
Frankly, in a world of public discourse dominated by O'Reilly, Limbaugh, Hannity, Olbermann, Savage, Beck, and Schultz, I often think my columns are mere milquetoast.
Absurd though this would seem to be in a civilization that pretends to celebrate free speech and robust debate, I take it all very personally. More than once this year I have thought of silencing myself for the good of the institutions my detractors say I "represent." For a number of months I endured one of the great depressions of my life, deepened when I realized that I was looking over my shoulder as I wrote my columns.
Then, in Montana, on the Fourth of July, I found the courage to declare a kind of spiritual independence. I did some checking and discovered that of the nearly 200 columns I have written, 150, at the very least, have consisted of my prose love songs to North Dakota and the Great Plains. I spend most of my time celebrating this wonderful, improbable place wherein we choose to live, writing lovingly, and with all my heart, of the seasons, agriculture, the rolling hills, buttes, the pleasures of the gardens; our history; tornados, wind, ground blizzards, crocuses and cottonwoods; and of course the magnificent Little Missouri River Valley and the Dakota Badlands.
More personally, it suddenly came to me that through this column I have met hundreds of people, several of whom are among the best friends I have ever known.
So I'm going to continue to write lovesongs to Dakota, continue to raise questions about our ways and means and identity as thoughtfully as I can. No part of me believes I have answers to these challenges, but I feel pretty confident that I know how to ask the right questions.
Our national parks: places to play in and pray in
by Clay Jenkinson
September 27, 2009
Tonight's the night for part one of the six-part Ken Burns documentary on the National Parks. American's greatest documentary filmmaker has turned his camera on what he calls "America's Best Idea." In the haunting extended quotation that opens the 12-hour film, John Muir (1838-1914) says, "Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in where nature may heal and cheer and give strength to the body and soul."
Muir's words could serve as the mission statement of America's glorious National Park System. Unless you prefer Theodore Roosevelt (at the Grand Canyon, May 1903) instead: "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it. What you can do is keep it for your children, your children's children . . . forever."
Burns' documentary could not have come at a more crucial time. Our National Parks-still the glory and envy of the world-are under-funded and run down, choked by too much automobile traffic, unnecessarily politicized, and sometimes distracted from their core mission. They are increasingly landscapes of controversy rather than serene contemplation and renewal. In a number of respects America's National Parks have lost their way, and in a more important sense the American people have forgotten how to love and protect their (our) National Parks. The Burns film is certain to be awe-inspiring. I hope it also inspires a national conversation about the idea of the National Parks and their future.
The challenge for such a documentary film, even in the age of wide-screen high definition television, is to find a way to capture the sublime. I've seen enough highlights reels of the film to know that Burns has performed his usual magic. It seems certain that he has made the National Parks look better on the screen than they have ever looked before. Even so, we need to remember that what we are watching is nothing more than a two-dimensional screen. You need more dimensions than two to experience the National Parks, including an appreciation of the fourth dimension, time.
You certainly need more than just sight to come to terms with the wild places of America. You need the sound of the distant coyote, the crackle and snap of the late evening fire, the dance of the cottonwood leaves as the breeze picks up or passes through. You need the smell of bacon at first light and the sharp, slightly burnt smell of cowboy coffee, the subtle, dusty, sensuous aroma of Ponderosa pines and the dry pinch of sagebrush on the morning walk. It's the unhurried conversations you have in low tones with your mother, your brother, your daughter, your lover. It's the agreeable ache in your calves at the end of the day and the knowledge that tonight your sleep is going to be well-earned by way of renewed communion with the natural world and its rhythms.
Ken Burns' film is certain to increase visitation at America's 58 full-bore National Parks, including our own Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Park Rangers will be hearing his name a lot over the next couple of seasons. "We saw the PBS television series by Ken Burns and we decided right then . . . ." Fair enough, but I hope the film does much more than that.
What we really need as the 21st century begins is the moral equivalent of a "Gettysburg" rededication-not to the idea of America, as Lincoln put it on November 19, 1863, but to what the late Wallace Stegner called "America's best idea." America's National Parks experiment is 137 years old now (Yellowstone, 1872) and the experiment is looking a little confused and threadbare. Congress' recent decision to allow visitors to carry guns into the National Parks reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of their mission as sanctuaries where humankind's usual domination of the natural world is checked at the gate. The bungled "resolution" of Theodore Roosevelt National Park's purported elk problem reveals not only the politicization of what should be science-based wildlife management strategies, but also one of the fundamental paradoxes of the National Park System-that humans have to manage what they say they want to leave alone.
We need to remind ourselves that the National Parks are sacred precincts where normal human behavior, especially industrial behavior, is expected to defer to the laws and rhythms of nature as humbly as is possible. The total footprint of all of our National Parks is a mere 83 million acres, as opposed to 193 million acres of National Forest and 264 million acres of Bureau of Land Management domain. (On these federal lands, economic activity is not only permitted, but encouraged.) The National Parks represent a mere 3% of the American land base. In other words, the rest of America is all open for development, for what is called "improvement" in one form or another. The little slivers of the National Parks-modest islands of the original America in the vast sea of the infrastructure of the United States-deserve to be treated as New World cathedrals and they should be entered, as are chapels and basilicas, in hushed tones.
In particular, we need to find a better way to manage the internal combustion engine in the National Parks. The automobile is arguably the greatest mass-consumption machine ever invented. Look what it has enabled. There is literally nothing I enjoy more than driving the American West in a loopy, unhurried, "might just turn off to see where that road leads" sort of way, with no fixed idea about where I will spend the night, and with ample time to stop at all the historical signs and many of the historical sites.
But that's the West at large, not the National Parks. The best way to experience a National Park is not through the windshield of your car, but on top of your legs. The best way to see the parks is not from pavement but from a trail whose footprint on the land is so marginal that you have to concentrate to stay on it. From a car-hermetically sealed, windshield-tinted, air-conditioned, Bach or Beatles on the stereo-Glacier and Canyonlands are essentially theme parks. They are really only National Parks in the fullest sense if you experience them on foot. And yet studies show that most people see the National Parks from inside the industrial bubble of the automobile and their footwork is chiefly to restrooms, visitor's centers, and souvenir shops.
There is no easy way to thwart the undeniable convenience and comfort of the car, but park planners need to continue to invent new ways for us to experience America's wild places with nothing but shoe leather between us and raw nature. Park literature and entrance station signage should encourage us to get out of the car and hike (or stroll), should urge us at the very least to open the windows of the car, turn off the stereo and the DVD player, and stop to smell the wild roses-or the sagebrush. Perhaps there could be a rewards system of some sort for those who park their cars and use their legs instead.
Modest proposals for national health care reform
by Clay Jenkinson
September 20, 2009
I know exactly how to fix the American health care system. Since by now the whole country is all stirred up over the name-calling, sound-bite, "don't bother me with the facts" shouting match that passes for our national health care debate, I propose a 12-month moratorium. During that year of sweet silence, I propose that the existing health care program for the 535 members of Congress, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, be dissolved. As a consequence, all 535 members of Congress will be thrown into the hoppers of the COBRA system, which enables most individuals to maintain their existing health care plan for a limited amount of time at their own expense. When their COBRA benefits run out, members of Congress, carrying their "pre-existing conditions" with them, will be free to shop for health care insurance as "independent contractors" according to the existing laws of the states they represent. Or, the entire Congress will be entitled to join a group-pay health insurance plan that shall be no better than the statistically average or median health care plan now available in America. This new statistically representative Congressional plan, with its significant co-pay requirements, high deductibles, exclusion of dental and other "luxury" or "non-necessary" coverage, and limited doctor pool, will be infinitely better than what is available to the tens of millions of people (an estimated 46 million individuals) who are presently un- or under-insured in America, but it will be significantly inferior to the plan now enjoyed by the most fortunate Americans, including, of course, members of Congress.
If such a yearlong "experiment in authentic representation" could be required of members of Congress by a national initiated measure, I think it is fair to say that the American people would get a rational, humane, just, and universal (just because universal) health care system within days of the expiration of the experiment.
Oh, and one more thing. Each member of Congress shall set up his or her own appointments and checkups, personally do all the health insurance shopping, and personally fill out all the paperwork, rather than offload these lovely tasks on staff.
Lots of people say we have the best health care system in the world. This is a pretty wild generalization. It's essentially a meaningless statement unless you define the beneficiaries of our system pretty carefully. What the claim really means, I think, is that for those who are fortunate enough to have excellent health insurance (six in ten Americans have "adequate" health insurance, some percentage of that group "excellent" health insurance), the American system is as good as any in the world. In other words, for the haves our existing system is on the whole really good. For the barely haves or have nots? Well, that's a different story, isn't it?
Most people who make the "best in the world" claim have never actually used the health care programs in the rest of the world, and a large percentage of them have never even actually studied the health care systems of Germany, France, Japan, or even Canada. Most of the predictable litany of "evidence" we hear about the cost of other first-world systems, their inefficiency, care-rationing, waiting periods, roll-of-the-dice doctor assignments, etc., amounts to little more than a continuous loop of worst-case anecdotes that bear little resemblance to the general truth of what those national health care systems accomplish, for whom, at what cost.
I lived four years in England. Twice during that time I made use of the British national health care system. My experience-from which I would not of course extrapolate much-was entirely satisfying and completely un-frustrating. In fact, as a free market American, I was surprised that I, a mere foreign national, was unhesitatingly welcomed by the staff of the British National Health Service (the much-pilloried NHS), as if adequate health care were a basic human right or something. Silly socialists!
I don't pretend to understand the American health care "system" in all of its Byzantine complexities. But I know a few things.
First, I trust the so-called Gang of Six, the group of six centrist and cost-conscious U.S. Senators who are trying to shape a moderate national health care plan. The Gang of Six consists of three Democratic and three Republican Senators: Max Baucus (D) of Montana; Jeff Bingaman (D) of New Mexico; Charles Grassley (R) of Iowa, Mike Enzi (R) of Wyoming; Olympia Snowe (R) of Maine; and our own Kent Conrad (D) of North Dakota. I have great respect for each of these legislators, and even more for the sane, thoughtful, realistic, and bipartisan process they are collectively engaged in. In a Platonic world, if you were looking for an Ideal Legislator to address the health care problem--a hard working, fiscally-sound, no-frills, exceedingly disciplined and well-informed U.S. Senator who knew how to balance idealism and common sense, to give us a reform plan we can actually afford and live with rather than just posture and preen-you could, I believe, never do better than put North Dakota's Kent Conrad in charge. Whatever the Gang of Six comes up with, I hope we simply legislate into national law. Conrad is giving a portion of his life to mastering this issue, while we blather on about death panels.
Second, I wish we could all agree to drop the name-calling and the inflammatory labels and just focus on the substance of the health care argument. Calling any national health care program "socialist" short-circuits debate and is merely intended to discredit. If we insist on employing such charged and derailing labels, I want to say that I really like our "socialist" national pension program (Social Security), our "socialist" defense department, our "socialist" Interstate Highway System, our "socialist" public libraries, our "socialist" National Parks, even (with qualifications) our "socialist" public schools. Let's get serious, shall we?
Third, we should all reject the heartless "emergency room equals universal access" canard. The naysayers like to say "anyone can walk into an emergency room at any time without insurance and they have to take care of you." Great. Then let's mandate that as the national health care plan for all Americans. The first time one of the haves takes that walk through the doors of an emergency room without insurance, that heartless argument will be jettisoned forever.
Personally, I'd like us to create a European-style full cradle to grave national health care system. In the long run, I believe we'd save money individually and nationally. All you'd have to do is present your Social Security Number at any clinic or hospital in America and your malady-from your first ear infection to quadruple bypass-would be covered in its entirety.
But I would cheerfully settle for the following reforms. 1. Guaranteed no-shame catastrophic health care for all Americans at taxpayer expense. 2. Guaranteed health care for all American children. 3. Insurance portability, with no ejections from the system for "pre-existing conditions." 4. Moderate, but not Draconian, tort reform. 5. A genuine free market of insurance options so that all consumers have access to all providers across state lines.
Meanwhile, let's remove Congress from its fantasy world of health care privilege that most Americans cannot afford and don't share.
Oh let us linger in the clear crisp light
by Clay Jenkinson
September 6, 2009
Can the summer be over? The last performance of the Medora Musical is tonight. I'll be there with the incomparable Sheila Schafer, the Queen Mum of North Dakota, who cheers and claps and barks out a celebratory shriek now and then - to the amusement, often astonishment, of the innocent folks in the rows in front of her, who have never heard so many joyful decibels burst without warning out of so diminutive a woman.
It's fun to watch her in action, miming salutes to the musical's performers, winking at Job Christianson, shaking hands with the parade of old friends and perfect strangers who approach the folding chair throne in row G, often shyly, to tell her how much they appreciate who she is and what she has done and represents. When she lets rip one of her ear-splitting blasts of beatitude, someone nearby invariably turns to give the "perp" a dirty look, but then relaxes into a broad smile and says to the person he's with: "Oh, it's Sheila." She's an octogenarian biologically and, like Theodore Roosevelt, approximately 6 years old in spirit. It's impossible to be around her and not want to live at a higher decibel of joyfulness and gratitude. As C.S. Lewis said of the poet Spenser, "to know her is to grow in mental health."
Meanwhile, on Labor Day, the Burning Hills Amphitheater will host a celebration of Medora's Wade Westin, who died suddenly on Feb. 13 at the age of 34. I had the good fortune to work with Wade a couple of times in the last few years. He represented everything that Harold and Sheila Schafer sought to enshrine in Medora. Everyone who knew Wade admired both his work ethic and his flawless character. The program at 2 p.m. Monday is free, but donations are encouraged for the Wade Westin Memorial Fund, which will benefit his two children, Wyatt and Hannah.
Can the summer really be over? Even in this off year, my tomatoes are starting to roll in in a big way. Every couple of days, with the help of The Triathlete, I pick the patch clean (she eats two cherry tomatoes right off the vine for every one that finds its way into the bucket). But the next time I look out my window at the garden, it's awash again in globular red. My sweet corn is magnificent this year. I love nothing more than venturing into the garden, unceremoniously cracking off a couple of ears and tossing them into a pot of boiling water. Sometimes I take a glass of white wine, strip off my shoes and just sit in the garden, Thoreau or Huck-like, and gaze at the pumpkins, trying to figure out how so much biomass can time-lapse out of a seed the size of a fingernail. I give away superabundant tomatoes with only a small surge of reluctance, but I've discovered (without shame) that I'm a corn miser.
My Topsy Turvys ("tomato anti-gravity units") are approaching their last gasp. They have great sentimental value to me, but I do not really understand or trust them. This summer I've endured 96 percent of all of the mud showers of my life while trying to water the 15 dwarf tomatoes they've managed to produce. Once a week or so, I've tried to give them away to P.T. Barnum's Americans, but all of my friends are savvier than I am and their eyes glaze over the minute I go into Topsy Turvy rave mode. I've been composing a classified ad for the Tribune: "Free Topsy Turvys to good home, plus $2,000!"
It's a paradox. Autumn is far and away my favorite season in North Dakota, but it always aches a little in the way of borrowed time. We can never fully forget that glorious Indian Summer also is the portal to Roosevelt's "season of iron desolation" on the northern Great Plains. Have you noticed how suddenly it started to get dark too soon? Mid-day I think, I'll mow the lawn in the cool of the evening, but a few hours later I find myself racing against the sunset to finish the last swaths. I grieve the loss of light.
I love to wake up cold in crisp, cool sheets - wait it out as long as I can while I build up the nerve to crawl down and dangle over the edge of the bed in search of the fallen blanket. I love the morning air when you first venture out - the subtle but sharp harvest smell of it, the exquisite mauve, goldenrod, rust and ash-green light, the unbelievable clarity of the air, the blue, blue, blue of the sky, the tendril hint of arctic chill, charming because you know it will be 75 degrees by 1 p.m. I love the bustle and optimism of back-to-school time in the heartland, the school supply mania at the box stores. I like the sweet melancholy of watching my neighbors batten up their boats and Jet Skis.
Up to a point, every autumn day is more perfect than the last, more crisp, more exquisite. In spite of a lifetime of sobering experience, for one lovely moment of delusion you let yourself think it will never end. Ah, but it does. One morning you wake up and look out into the gray-black sky, the whip-wind and the snow flurries.
I live up near Horizon Middle School, where back-to-school traffic is fierce. We need a stoplight at the corner of Ash Coulee and Washington. There will be a bad or fatal accident there soon. Twice a day that quarter mile of once-county road feels like downtown traffic in Rome at the full moon - otherwise placid soccer moms darting into the traffic stream like the Earnhardts, SUVs careening in and out of the Horizon loop almost on two wheels, preschool road rage, harried parents taking appalling risks to get to work or - worse - to get Hortense or Poindexter to school on time. So much for the "school's back in session, drive carefully" bumper stickers. Turns out it's not the general public who need to heed the warning.
I've been scouring my garage for jars, lids and canning vats. My mother, who helped me scald and freeze a couple of hundred tomatoes a year ago, has petulantly vacated the state for the duration. In retribution, I am thinking of leaving my emptied Topsy Turvys on her back steps, but not until I have sliced each one of those hard-won tomatoes into watery eighth-inch wafers and fought off the urge to just devour them so that I can pay sacramental homage to the loveliest friendships of my life.
Never send to know for whom the bell tolls
by Clay Jenkinson
August 30, 2009
The news of the death of Ted Kennedy hit me hard, even though we all knew it was coming. The last of the Kennedy brothers is now gone, precisely 45 years, nine months and four days after the line of demarcation of our era was drawn in Dallas.
It would be mere sentimentality to soliloquize about "the final eclipse of Camelot." That bus left the station a very long time ago, in the age of American disillusionment, somewhere between the death of Mary Jo Kopechne and Jacqueline Kennedy's marriage to Aristotle Onassis. Still, there is something in the death of the last of the brothers that nips at the idea of mortality for anyone who can remember where he or she was on Nov. 22, 1963.
One of the most remarkable and tumultuous eras of American history is starting to blink out. President Obama - whose presidency owes more to Ted and Caroline Kennedy than to anyone else - said Wednesday, "An important chapter in our history has come to an end."
The theme of today's TV talk shows will be that after a profoundly rocky start and a rocky enough mid-life, Ted Kennedy went on to become one of the most hard-working and effective members of the United States Senate. That there has been a kind of quiet redemption in that, and that the United States has been made a better place by the hard but not always glamorous legislative work that he has done.
I was about to write that I have never really succumbed to the "Kennedy mystique," but who can really say that with any honesty? The grace, beauty, wit and ironic detachment of JFK; Robert Kennedy sweeping his hair over his forehead before speaking stammeringly, fiercely and lyrically about the unfinished work of America; the utter resilience of Ted Kennedy in the face of burdens seemingly beyond the ability of any man, especially so imperfect a man, to bear. Think of the list of people Ted Kennedy had to bury and eulogize in the course of his 77 years, before he was himself released this last week. He was the only one of the four Kennedy brothers to die of natural causes.
Can anyone listen to JFK's inaugural address without experiencing - "for one brief shining moment" - waves of hope, sharp waves of loss? Or Robert Kennedy's unforgettable spontaneous speech, in Indianapolis on April 4, 1968, following the assassination of Martin Luther King?
There are plenty of people who profess to feel nothing but contempt for Ted Kennedy, particularly given Chappaquiddick. I'm not one of them. I have always felt a sense of sadness for what must have been the burden of being the last, and in some important respects the least, of the Kennedy brothers, constantly to be compared to golden brothers who, because they died so young, were already elevated to the American pantheon. To have to soldier on after two gifted and accomplished older brothers have been assassinated, with sufficient reason to fear he might be the third, especially if he pressed toward the pinnacle of American life. Add to this the relentless father, Joseph Kennedy, driving his sons to work and wench and win no matter what the cost. To wonder, in every crowd, on every street corner, what symmetry nut or copycat psychopath was concealing a loaded gun. To inherit the burden of being the family patriarch so young and out of order, without having ever sought that role, and being in many ways ill-equipped for the part.
Heartless people talk about the self-destructiveness of Ted Kennedy. I know a little about demons. It is not impossible, I think, to discern a sad but uncanny survivor behind all the erratic behavior. By running his presidential hopes off that bridge (July 18, 1969), in some horrible, almost unthinkable way, with irony worthy of Greek tragedy, Ted Kennedy arguably saved his life. Nobody condones what happened at Chappaquiddick. But it is way less interesting to cast judgment than to try to understand the appalling crucible of being Ted Kennedy. My friend the preacher, who knows something about demons, too, said, "There is no greater burden than being told you are a person of great potential."
My daughter was fortunate enough to attend last year's Democratic National Convention in Denver. She met the redoubtable Mrs. Clinton, somehow found the courage to tremble up alone and shake Madeline Albright's hand, and attended, with 84,000 others, Barack Obama's acceptance speech at Mile High Stadium. It was, for a child of 14, a crazy week of logistical chaos and continuous overstimulation, like going to a county carnival that took itself too seriously, featuring rides based on current events themes. She called me breathlessly at really odd hours to tell me she didn't have time to talk and then gave me some wild life-etching tidbit from her convention experience. A few hours after Ted Kennedy's surprise appearance (Aug. 25), she called me to summarize one of the headiest days of her young life. "I was so honored to hear Mr. Kennedy give his last public speech tonight, Daddy." I said, "We don't know that, honey. He may live a couple of more years, and probably he will speak to other groups." Replied my wise child: "No, Dad, you know exactly what I mean."
Even if his faults were obvious to anyone who cared to look, and one of them profoundly troubling even for those of generous and forgiving spirits, it is undeniable that the best energies of Ted Kennedy's life were dedicated to making America a better place to live, especially for the least fortunate among us, and to calling America to a higher sense of itself. He gave the best of himself for five decades to public service. His contributions to civil rights, voting rights, the rights and dignity of labor, and to our crazy-quilt search for a humane and affordable health care system entitle him to legislative immortality.
He was America's most prominent champion of those millions of people who have few resources and fewer advocates. He put it best (with the help of Theodore Sorenson) at the 1980 Democratic Party Convention, accepting bitter defeat at the hands of Jimmy Carter, "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, the dream shall never die." You can hear the way he pronounced that sentence, can't you, and no matter how skeptical you are, or disenchanted with the Kennedys, it stirs that part of you which dreams of an America equal to its founding promise.
In what I regard as his greatest speech, delivered as a eulogy for his brother Robert, on June 8, 1968, Ted Kennedy spoke words that are equally appropriate for himself: "My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life ... He saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.
"Those of us who loved him and who take him to his rest today, pray that what he was to us and what he wished for others will some day come to pass for all the world."
Happy Birthday, Meriwether Lewis
by Clay Jenkinson
August 23, 2009
My life can get so hectic that I nearly forget who I am. I was driving pell mell from Fargo to Bismarck on Tuesday night when it suddenly struck me that it was Meriwether Lewis's 235th birthday. Jefferson's protege was born on Aug. 18, 1774, within sight of Monticello.
There was a time in my life, and not long ago, when I lived and breathed Lewis and Clark. Now that remarkable adventure (1803-06) has slipped to the second tier in my cluttered-up garage or attic of a mind. I felt a twinge of sadness and shame that I have let Lewis and Clark slip a little. It's like very nearly forgetting your best friend's birthday.
The '60s poet Rod McKuen wrote, "The mind is such a junkyard. It remembers candy bars but not the Gettysburg Address, Frank Sinatra's middle name but not the day your best friend died." Indeed. I can remember a couple dozen plotlines of "The Andy Griffith Show" and even "Charlie's Angels," but this morning, at dawn, I was trying to remember the Labors of Hercules and I couldn't get past four. That's terribly saddening. But it also tells you something about the power of television.
At any rate, happy birthday, Meriwether Lewis. Not that he would be glad to be so greeted. Though American mythology remembers Lewis and Clark as cheerful, more or less interchangeable, heroes in buckskins, they were actually remarkably different men. Clark fits the stereotype pretty well, but his friend Lewis was a tightly wound, self-critical, brooding, often melancholic man who took himself, his transcontinental mission and life very seriously. During the two years he lived with the immortal Jefferson in the White House prior to his expedition, the cheerful, even-tempered and Pollyanna-esque president noticed what he called "sensible depressions of spirit." He also noticed that Lewis drank, sometimes to excess.
That, at least, was Jefferson's retrospective assessment in 1813, four years after his protege committed suicide.
Yes, suicide. I remember the moment when I first learned that the leader of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, the Neil Armstrong or John Glenn of his time, killed himself just three years after his return to civilization, after leading an amazingly successful 7,689-mile scientific expedition from St. Louis to the Pacific Ocean and back again, by way of our own Missouri River. He was 35 at the time of his death. He put a gun to his head and another to his abdomen at a lonely trailside inn in Tennessee. When I read that for the first time, in a book by David Freeman Hawke, I was in the office of the late, great Everett C. Albers, director of the North Dakota Humanities Council. "Did you know Lewis committed suicide in 1809?" I asked. Ev, who believed that the humanities are the elixir, the sorcerer's stone, the key to a complete and satisfying life, said, "No. Why did he do it?"
I have been trying to answer that question for the last 25 years. And not with much success. Suicide is always a profound mystery, even when the perpetrator and victim leaves a suicide note, which Lewis did not. I have hunches about Lewis, based on repeated and thorough sifting of the evidence, reading and rereadings of the large and growing literature on the subject, including Lewis's journals, endless meditation, research into the troubled returns of other explorers, including the fascinating contemporary case of the second man on the moon, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin, and careful readings of case studies of the suicide phenomenon, beginning with John Donne's "Biathanatos" (the first-ever defense of suicide) and ending with the Johns Hopkins psychology professor Kay Redfield Jamison, whose book "Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide" has a chapter on Lewis saying that he is just the sort of driven, high-strung, self-castigating man who fits the profile.
In the end, the survivors never really know why anyone committed suicide, including someone they have known intimately for a lifetime. The mystery abides, deepens, perplexes and eats away at one's sense of the rightness of things. For most of the history of Christianity, definitively since St. Augustine's definitive "City of God" (A.D. 410), suicide has been regarded as a sin and a crime. I'm with John Donne: judgment is easy, understanding hard, almost impossible, and that is in our interest always to be charitable about something so intensely personal and inexplicable. I know this, too: That a suicide, any suicide, is like stone dropped into a very wide pond, creating a permanent (multi-dimensional) ripple action that gnaws at all the survivors and creates a crisis of meaning and identity for everyone who knew the person in question.
I have been writing about this as if Lewis's suicide, though ultimately a mystery, is an unquestioned fact of American history. That is not quite so. Though Lewis's two closest friends, Thomas Jefferson and William Clark, were shocked but not surprised when they heard the news in October 1809, and though all the evidence we have points to suicide, a dedicated cadre of diehards believes - hook, line and sinker - that Lewis was murdered on the Natchez Trace (murderer unknown) and that some sort of conspiracy was undertaken by those around Lewis to call it suicide instead. The murder theorists are loud and fiercely determined, and they are trying to get poor Lewis exhumed so that forensic experts can examine the skull. This has a kind of "second gunman, grassy knoll" feel to it. My hope is that the National Park Service, which maintains the burial site at Hohenwald, Tenn., will continue to refuse to extricate Lewis's bones.
My own deep prejudice is that documents, near eyewitness accounts and historical analysis are a better tool than shovels in making sense of the richness and complexities of Meriwether Lewis.
Lewis celebrated (well, observed) his 31st birthday on the Idaho-Montana border near Dillon, Mont., on Aug. 18, 1805, not long after he bestrode the source waters of the "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River." After acknowledging that he had lived about half the time he expected to dwell in "this sublunary world," Lewis fell into dark self-reflection. "I reflected," he wrote, "that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the happiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now sorely feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended."
Well, I can certainly relate to that. I find myself in the midst of a much less articulate, but similarly self-critical, look in the mirror about once a week, and I'm now way beyond the halfway point of my time in "the sublunary world."
Even so, like Lewis, I always conclude my self-flagellation with resolute optimism. Said Lewis, "I resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least endeavor to promote those two primary objects of human existence, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestowed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself."
Rest in peace, Capt. Lewis.
Summertime and the living is (un)easy
by Clay Jenkinson
August 16, 2009
Summer finally rolled in this last week - go cool off in the river summer, micromanage the windows and window shades summer. Corn and tomatoes summer. Drive to King Cone on the edge of town summer. Too hot to eat summer.
I was beginning to wonder, actually. But the Great Spirit finally cranked up the Btus on the northern Great Plains. Now is the time to go see the Medora Musical, to sit in that fabulous amphitheater just at that moment when the heat relents and the temperature starts to drop a degree per minute, gazing out before the show at the massif of Bullion Butte and forgetting for a moment that North Dakota is not always so hospitable. Now is the time to wade through the Little Missouri River looking for a gravel shelf to lie down on and take in the sun for a couple of hours, a hedge against the "iron desolation" of January.
I have been gone for two full weeks, a fortnight chock full of labor, adventure and sensory overload in a place far away. Even so, I found myself thinking about North Dakota throughout my travels, and fussing over my garden the way absent parents worry abut their teenage children left alone in the house for the first weekend ever. I don't know quite what I expected to unfold in my absence, but I reckoned I'd get back to find the garden ripe enough for a continuous daily mini-harvest between now and first frost. I got periodic reports from my friend The Triathlete - cool and rain, mostly, said she - but in my gardener's optimism I reckoned that time and the endless light were on my side.
As soon as I got home, I walked out to check the garden, even before walking through the house. Good news. The weeds are under control this year. Last year, they got ahead of me and then went on to get the best of me. This year, thanks to firmer supervision by The Triathlete, I spaced the tomatoes better and once even engaged in what I regard as horticultural heresy: namely, using the rototiller between rows as a weed control device.
More good news. The corn is in full profligate exuberance. I have four rows of corn this year, perhaps 40 plants in all. The corn grew at least a foot in my absence and it is tasseling and heading out.
In my Wobegonian world, corn is the parable of the mustard seed (Mark 4:30-32). The Kingdom of Heaven, Jesus said, "is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth? But when it is sown, it groweth up, and becometh greater than all herbs, and shooteth out great branches." Just yesterday, it seems, on a cold morning in May, I poured a packet of dry corn seeds into the cup of my left hand and crawled through my garden planting a dull yellow, wrinkled, seemingly inert seed every 6 inches or so. Now, two months later, those improbable parched kernels have metamorphosed into lofty towers of steroid green, higher in proportion to their surroundings and girth than the Empire State Building, and a far greater miracle of engineering. All that stalk and leafage to produce a cob of corn. I eat them as languidly as possible to savor the miracle. The earth is awash in the Life Force.
Meanwhile, frankly, I am worried about my tomatoes. I hope I am not being a nervous Nellie (or Nigel), but my 87 plants are bushy, still blossoming, and the tomatoes that have already developed are solid green and no larger than plums. Some have a black rot below their tropics of Capricorn. By this time in August, one in 10 tomatoes should be red or reddening. My two Topsy Turvys continue to turn my life upside down.
I decided to make a wee little cherry tomato salad for supper, to celebrate the best of all experiences: homecoming. So I plucked a dozen of the ripest grape-sized tomatoes and with my hands cupped together carried them like rare quail eggs into the kitchen, washed them in cool water and spread them out on a sunny plate. With the most delicate knife in my drawer I carved them up into teeny little slices and salted each one liberally. Then I ate them, Charlie Chaplin-like, in little delicate miniature bites the size of your thumbnail, and sighed with animal content between each bite.
Summertime, and the living is easy.
At the Denver airport, I discovered that I was returning home at the moment of the annual Perseid meteor shower. So as soon as I had washed up my little plate and fork, I gathered a blanket and pillow and drove out north of Bismarck to an undisclosed meteor-viewing location and lay flat on my back on the prairie I love more than Paris, Alaska, Santorini, London or Montana. It turned out to be a mediocre meteor shower (a modest burst every 10 minutes or so and a few spectacular strikes in two hours of doze-and-wake observation), but an unbelievable night.
As I lay on my back gathering what strength I could from our collective grassland, like Antaeus of Greek myth, lamenting how few constellations I can identify, I was startled to observe the gibbous moon rise like an overripe orange over the eastern horizon. It was as parched and mottled as those seeds of corn, infinitely far away, remote and unapproachable. Lifeless - and a little menacing out there in the middle of nowhere. Do you believe there are spirits abroad in the night?
As the moon rose over that open plain, it grew brighter and brighter until it cast a mystical wan yellow light over all the Missouri bluffs. It's hard to explain how something that dim could be a little overpowering, a garish low-watt moonshine that cast long foreboding shadows over the plains. Fool that I am, I first concluded that the moon's intensity would ruin the meteor shower. I stood up and stretched every muscle I can still access like a New Age Great Plains yoga dork, and breathed deeply, and tried to get present - to live in this single moment completely and with no withholding. It dawned on me there on the vast plain, as I teased out muscles I had neglected for years, that the mooncast was, in fact, most of the magic of the night. You are never present if you wish what is were otherwise.
I made a slow, awkward pirouette to drink it all in - the lights of Bismarck to the south, Mandan's lesser cast to the southwest, the dipper and Cassiopeia circling the pole above me to the north, the bold borrowed light of the moon, my own shadow 50 feet long, apparently trying to jump off into the Missouri River, and the glorious Jupiter bursting out of the southeastern sky like the king of solar system.
Tomato growing weather.
In the Beginning All the World was Alaska
by Clay Jenkinson
August 9, 2009
HAINES, Alaska - If you ever get the chance to visit Alaska, take it. I'm with the two most important women in my life, my mother and daughter, on a 10-day cultural tour of the 49th state (Jan. 3, 1959). I'm lecturing about Theodore Roosevelt and conservation, but mostly I'm just drinking in the overwhelmingness of the country. The other day I mentioned Montana to an Alaskan. He looked at me with pity and said, "Oh, Alaska Jr."
There's a paradox about Alaska. It's so big that nobody ever really sees much of it, and it has a weak infrastructure owing to its isolation, low population density, appalling ruggedness and the sheer distances between villages. In a lifetime, it is possible to see all of Montana, though that would have to be your main commitment. But even if you were a very young and idle billionaire, with a plane, a helicopter, a pilot's license and an iron constitution, you could never really master Alaska. It's that big.
Alaska, at 615,230 square miles, constitutes a sixth of the United States. That's fully nine times larger than North Dakota. The mighty 1,500-mile Yukon is only the best known of Alaska's gazillion rivers, most of which run a kind of gray cement slurry produced by glaciation. We did a white water raft trip on the Nenana River near Denali National Park, after dressing up in dry suits that might have been developed by NASA. Had we fallen in, we would have died not of hypothermia, but grit-grind. It made the Little Missouri seem like a purling transparent stream.
Seven of the 15 highest peaks in North America are in Alaska, including of course the crown of the continent, Mount McKinley (Denali), at 20,320 feet. McKinley is more often than not cloud-obscured. We tried three times to see it, and never did. None of the top 15 North American mountains are in the lower 48 states, by the way. I have stood proudly (actually, bent over, hands on knees, sucking supplemental oxygen) at the summit of White Butte, at 3,506 feet, the highest peak in North Dakota, but I will never climb McKinley, which has already killed four experienced mountaineers this year.
Alaska has 17 National Park System properties, depending on how you count, 10 of them created in 1980, at the end of the Carter administration, in what must count as the single greatest moment in the history of American conservation. If you add up the acreage, Alaska's national parks would effortlessly swallow up everything in the lower 48. Theodore Roosevelt, who seems never actually to have visited Alaska, started the preservation process in 1902, when he set aside the germ of what would become Tongass National Forest, now, at 17 million acres, the largest in the world. He also established the 5.4-million-acre Chugach National Forest, prevented runaway coal development in the territory, and used American might to thwart the barbaric seal slaughter practiced by the British and the Japanese in the Alexander Archipelago and the Aleutians. Roosevelt also declared six federal bird sanctuaries in Alaska, and one national game preserve (Fire Island).
Roosevelt appears to have wanted to make Alaska America's last best place, a kind of North American super-park that would enshrine the pure physical magnificence of the continent, as he liked to put it, "for our children and our children's children, forever." That was visionary leadership.
I'm learning all of this from nationally acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley's new book, "The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America," which is dedicated to one "Sheila Schafer of Medora, North Dakota, whom I love with all my heart." What an honor for Sheila and North Dakota! At 940 pages, "Wilderness Warrior" is a book the size of Alaska, and I'm only just beginning to sluice through it.
Alaska has loomed large in my mythology all of my life. Some of my high school classmates went up to work on the pipeline. (We gazed at the pipeline a few days ago near Fairbanks, and stopped for photo ops). John McPhee's marvelous "Coming Into the Country" (1973) makes you want to drive a camper pickup up the western spine of the continent from Vancouver to Prudhoe Bay or, with your favorite adventure mate, ease a canoe into the Yukon at Eagle, Alaska. Jack London (1876-1916) wrote several dozen of my favorite short stories, particularly "To Build a Fire" and "Love of Life." They are essentially all the same story - what happens to men (males) who venture a very long distance from Seattle or San Francisco into a vast, silent, lethal Arctic country in quest of sudden wealth, which they are preordained never to acquire?
We've seen moose, sea otters, reindeer, bald eagles, puffins, dolphins, seals and humpback whales, but so far no bears. But the most magical of all the magical things we have seen has been the calving of a glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park. Our modest excursion boat edged quietly in toward the massive ice face of a glacier many hundred feet high. The pilot shut down the boat's engines. For an hour, we just floated and bobbed there in the vast silence of the North, gaping in awe at the dense river of ice as it inched its way out over the lip of the land and sloughed off a shard here, a slab there, with a retort that sounded like something between a crack of thunder and a rifle shot. The massive glacier seemed to be alive and cracking its knuckles as we gazed over at it, a few brightly covered kayakers sashaying in among the ice floes for a more intimate encounter.
The sound of the fissuring was eerie and enchanting - somehow loud and muffled at the same time, simultaneously violent and gentle. I have never seen anything quite like it. Without being urged to do so, everyone spoke in hushed tones. The glacial ice was sometimes white, sometimes snirt-ash, sometimes a kind of emerald blue, as if touched by a kind of celestial radioactivity. Some of the ice structures were monumental and brutish, others delicate like semi-transparent minarets, leaning turrets, or spires in Superman's Fortress of Solitude. Some calves zinged off like slingshots, and others fractured almost indetectably off the mass and then in slow motion descended the glacial face in a ballet of grace and gravitation. I could have stayed forever.
If your spirit cannot be refreshed in Alaska, it probably cannot be refreshed. The 17th century British philosopher John Locke wrote, "In the beginning, all the world was America." In other words, before western civilization began its slow agonizing spread out of Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, the whole planet was an endless primordial forest or grassland in every direction, with uncharted, untamed, untainted rivers tracing the landscape in quicksilver sine curves. Back then, says Locke, the human footprint on the planet was miniscule - a few little clearings in that global outback. The world was all "America," if by America we mean the wilderness Europeans "discovered" in the 16-18th centuries.
In Rooseveltian terms, it may be said, that Alaska in 2009 is the biggest mostly pristine chunk of what was once America.
I'm coming back - again and again.
The Shakespearean Legacy of Crystal Reid Austin
by Clay Jenkinson
August 2, 2009
You have seen a number of tributes to Crystal Reid Austin in these pages over the past couple of weeks. Here is mine. I did not know her well. We never had a real conversation. And yet, even from the periphery, it was impossible not to be woken up by her energy. She seemed like a cat on a hot tin roof to me. I went to her funeral. Her father's tribute was so cheerful, so celebratory, so bemused and tolerant and affirming, that I reckoned on the spot that a lot of what was great about her came from him.
Nothing makes my heart jump more than father-daughter love.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) said, "An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man." Shameless sexist! Surely the sage of Concord meant that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one remarkable person. It's not that there would never have been a Capitol Shakespeare company had not Nebraska-educated Crystal Reid given a portion of her brief life to Bismarck, but she made up her mind early on that there was going to be open-air Shakespeare in Bismarck and she, more than anyone else, made it happen. In this instance, Emerson's "lengthened shadow" takes on some additional meaning. Crystal's sudden death just days after her wedding has a dark Shakespearean irony about it. Ten years from now her business articles and columns will be mostly forgotten, but her high-wire spirit will live on every time Macbeth quavers before a phantom dagger in the shadow of the North Dakota State Capitol, every time the doomed Richard III calls for "a horse, a horse," every time Hamlet debilitates himself was "thinking too much of the event," and above all every time that Rosalind or Viola or Cleopatra wrings an improbable double entendre out of some perfectly straightforward utterance.
Crystal has given us an institution that makes Bismarck a better place to live. She came like a gust of fresh air from somewhere else and took us more seriously than we sometimes take ourselves. The best memorial we can create to her is to make sure Capitol Shakespeare thrives, as Macbeth puts it, "until the last syllable of recorded time."
I went to see Capitol Shakespeare last Sunday night mostly because I love Shakespeare (this side of idolatry), but partly to get a glimpse into Crystal Reid's world. If Sunday was any indication, her world signifies exuberance, artistry, hijinks, pratfalls, and considerable passion.
"The Merchant of Venice" (written ca. 1596) is not one of my favorite Shakespeare plays ("Hamlet," "Twelfth Night," "As You Like It," "King Lear," "Richard II," "Othello" - did I mention "Hamlet?"), but it is a great and amazingly powerful play, and it seemed fitting that the protagonist Portia is a headstrong, resourceful and playful woman who is not afraid to disguise herself as a man and who boldly takes charge while the men in her circle stand around wringing their hands. She easily triumphs over the most darkly powerful figure in Venice - Shylock - and she instantly shows her new husband Bassanio who is going to wear the codpiece and the doublet in that household.
You know the story. The Christian merchant of Venice Antonio is so determined to assist his promising, but irresponsible, young friend Bassanio that he enters into a perverse contract with his enemy Shylock, the money-lending Jew. If Antonio fails to pay back the money he has borrowed on the appointed day, Shylock is entitled to cut a pound of flesh from Antonio's body. This "merry wager," as Shylock calls it, masks the profound antagonism between the Jewish and the Christian communities in Venice. Meanwhile, Bassanio successfully woos the impossibly rich maiden Portia - by way of a "chose the right strongbox" riddle - and Shylock's daughter Jessica runs off with a Christian suitor Lorenzo - and steals her father's money bags, too.
Antonio forfeits the loan. By the laws of Venice, Shylock is entitled to his pound of flesh. You see him in court - the embodiment of greed and malevolence - sharpening his butcher knife. In the end, thanks to the casuistic intervention of Portia (disguised as a learned jurist), Shylock loses his court case on a technicality and is legally dispossessed of half of his fortune, too. Jessica marries Lorenzo. Portia marries Bassanio. Portia's maid Nerissa marries Bassanio's friend Gratiano. Everyone finds happiness except Antonio, who is left with his constitutional melancholy, and of course Shylock, who leaves the stage a broken man. "I pray you give me leave to go from hence. I am not well."
In Shakespeare's time, the usurious Jew was a stock villain figure. Elizabethan audiences cheerfully exulted in his train of losses: of his daughter and his ducats, of his perfectly sound legal position, of his serving man Launcelot, and of his pride and his dignity. It's not nearly so easy to jeer nowadays, given the appalling history of anti-Semitism. What was once a rollicking play in which the superannuated Old Testament villain (exemplar of Justice and Judgment) is bested by the New Testament youngsters (Mercy, Humanity), is now disturbing to anyone who possesses what Shakespeare calls "the milk of human kindness."
"Merchant of Venice" only works (for us) if Shylock is portrayed as a complex, often sympathetic figure. BSC theater professor Dan Rogers' portrayal at the Capitol was masterful. He managed to draw out Shylock's humanity from Shakespeare's complex text without jeopardizing the comic balance of the play. No easy task. The rest of the cast also was generally superb, and Seth Eberle and Carly Shaub brought an irresistible and over-the-top spirit of physical comedy to the performance.
It was as fine a night as you could ever ask on the lawn of our extraordinarily beautiful Capitol. Just as the play started a little tempest of wind rustled up the trees all around us, and everyone in the audience had one of those North Dakota moments when you think, "Oh no, is the wind going to wreck this event?" But the gust turned out to be an erratic, a single reminder that nature, not humankind, is in charge here. The evening calmed to shirtsleeve perfection.
As I sat luxuriating in a live performance of a play written more than 400 years ago, I reckoned that Crystal would have been exceedingly pleased. In Falstaff's words, she was not only witty in herself, but the cause that wit was in other women and men. We are all so deeply in her debt.
Aurora Pays Visit to North Dakota
by Clay Jenkinson
July 26, 2009
Did you see the Northern Lights on Tuesday night? It was well after 11 and I was winding down for the night. I was weary in body and soul. For no good reason I ventured for a moment out onto my deck — just to feel the night air and internalize the midnight breeze.
I looked up. There in the northwestern quadrant of the night sky hovered an aurora borealis, a luminous miasma of soft white diffused light, with a little tincture of gray-green, looming like a vague celestial amoeba over Saskatchewan and Alberta all the way up to the pole. It was making a little tentative visit to North Dakota, and I was lucky enough to have stepped out of my interiorized life in time to see it.
So much of life is accidental.
Immediately I thought of getting out into the country to see it right.
It was late and I had a full schedule on Wednesday — including writing this column. I’m sleep starved virtually all of the time. The smart thing to do would be to watch it for a few minutes from my deck and then turn in. But at the end of our protracted winter (was that early June or early July?) I pledged that I would not fail come summer to "live deep and suck out all the marrow of life," as Thoreau put it in Walden.
Even now, in the midst of some achingly beautiful extended dusks, I look out from my house at the hills to the southwest and I can almost see the winterscape and almost feel the biting wind in my bones six months from now either direction. Soon enough, sooner than you think, I find myself saying, sometimes out loud. Carpe diem, you silly Dakotan.
Here were my first serious Northern Lights since I returned to North Dakota almost four years ago — and I was contemplating just going to bed? How pathetic is that? So, with that literal internal dialogue we sometimes find ourselves hosting on our shoulder — "this is stupid, just go back into the house and go to bed," versus, "seriously, you prefer sleep to wonder?!" — I drove out to Double Ditch Indian Village State Historic Site on N.D. 1804 north of Bismarck. Needless to say, I was the only car in the parking lot.
When you turn off your car lights in the middle of a nightscape away from the grid there is always a little inrush of anxiety.
It was a dark and still and brooding night. It was at the low end of shirtsleeve weather, 56 degrees, no perceptible breeze. The grass was never less than 6 inches deep, thick, dense and trippy. The air was gelid. I was a little afraid, the way we get when we first face the night away from the umbilicals. For the first time I noticed that Double Ditch has some serious contours and ridgelines. They were silhouetted — slightly menacing and yet powerfully inviting — against the glow of the aurora.
Even in daylight Double Ditch is a place of palpable mystery. At night you can feel the sacred inching up your legs.
I lay down out there on top of the remains — ruins is the wrong word — of that once-bustling Mandan Indian village, bustling at the time of the Declaration of Independence, quiet now for more than 200 years. For as long as my work-conscience permitted I lay on my side looking up at the aurora, watching it dance in the northern sky.
At times it faded as if it might just blink out and leave me there in the darkness. In its periodic retreats, the left edge of the constellation Cassiopeia (shaped like a splayed W) emerged. The most important person in my adolescence taught me to identify Cassiopeia. That in itself brought on a rush of memory and wonder.
At times the aurora seemed to form itself into columns, into vague shafts of greenish white light not so different from Albert Speer’s light symphony at the Nuremberg rallies in the 1930s. My head told me that the aurora is a mere soulless phenomenon of physics, the atoms of solar wind interacting with charged particles in the magnetosphere. Blah blah blah. But if you haven’t utterly banished your sense of wonder, you know that the Cree were closer to the "truth" when they called the Northern Lights the Dance of the Spirit Beings.
As I lay there gazing in wonder at the aurora and peering through to the stars, I found myself in the midst of one of those periodic attempts we make to fathom the universe and our place in it. The aurora is a neighborhood phenomenon, a fluorescent glow against the razor-thin veneer of atmosphere that envelopes the Earth and makes it habitable. But the stars are — at least to the mind of humanity—infinitely far away. The moon (a mere quarter of a million miles away) we can visit a couple of times if we throw the whole weight of our will and technological concentration at it. For a staggering cost we can plant our flag on the lunar soil and then come back and crow about the majesty of man.
But the stars stagger all our pretentions. They put us back in our place — a very insignificant place in a puny corner of a modest-sized solar system in a back bend of a fair-sized galaxy, which is merely one of an estimated 125 billion-500 billion galaxies in an expanding universe.
It wasn’t always so. The contemporaries of Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) believed that the Earth was the center of a young and finite (almost miniature) universe made of up concentric circles with God himself hovering over the crystalline outer firmament like the aurora of auroras. Theologians and philosophers like Aquinas made much of man, because back then, for all of his faults, man was still the center of the universe.
That was before Copernicus, before Galileo’s telescope. That was before Freud, who taught us that most of what goes on in our souls takes place below the radar of consciousness, and before Darwin, who taught us that if we are the most extraordinary of created beings, we also are disappointingly temporary and certainly not the final product to which all things tend.
Just how alone we are in the cosmos depends on which lens you wear, but I know I looked around a little helplessly out on the ridge Tuesday night in the midst of my prayers of gratitude to have the good fortune to live in North Dakota.
A minor meteorite, a little shooting star, streaked down to the black earth somewhere very far away. Suddenly, the aurora felt like a security blanket.
It was 40 years ago today ...
by Clay Jenkinson
July 19, 2009
Forty years ago today, the Apollo 11 spacecraft entered lunar orbit and disappeared around the back side of the moon. While you were sleeping last night, we reached the anniversary of the moment when astronauts Michael Collins, Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin and Neil Armstrong passed the point (33,822 miles from the moon) where the Earth's gravity played out and lunar gravity began to draw the Apollo 11's command, service and landing modules toward the Sea of Tranquility.
In the jargon of space travel, that's known as equigravisphere. It's a beautiful word and a lovely metaphor worthy of prolonged meditation. Among other things, it's a great parenting metaphor.
The actual anniversary of humankind's first step on the moon will occur Monday at 9:56 p.m. CDT. That's when Neil Armstrong stepped off the ladder of the Lunar Excursion Module. It was in fact a three-foot step for a 38-year-old American man, a Korean War veteran and naval aviator. And though we can all agree that it was, as he intoned, "a giant leap for mankind," it is not quite clear, 40 years out, just what it signified.
More than a billion people worldwide watched Armstrong's blurred, lurching, grainy, grayscale movements on live television. I was one of them.
Can it be 40 years?
Come Monday evening, I'm going to open a bottle of champagne and decant a photo album I compiled decades ago, with its handful of hand-developed 3x4-inch black and white prints of that epochal moment in the history of exploration. I took those photographs, lights off, everyone hushed, with my exotic new 35mm camera, a couple of feet across from our flickering television set.
I'm going to set up my telescope on my back deck, though it's a left-parenthesis new moon Monday, with no "Tranquility Base" to be observed. The new moon has always been my favorite. The merest lunar sliver it may be, but I want to try to magnify the moon Monday night to the size of Apollo 11 in my memory. I might drink a little Tang as a champagne chase. And I'm going to watch "The Right Stuff," the 1983 movie based on Tom Wolfe's brilliant account of the first years of the American space program.
At the time of Apollo 11's liftoff, at 8:32 a.m. July 16, 1969, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite declared, "Everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk."
In the long run, this may prove to be true - almost certainly it will - but in the short run it seems a little over-dramatic, even a little embarrassing. The commentators-including North Dakota's magnificent Eric Sevareid - solemnly predicted that the world would never quite be the same after July 21, 1969. They explained that an enormously significant line of demarcation had been passed on the timeline of human achievement, that humankind had at last graduated from its home planet, that we were headed to the stars - or at least to Mars.
They gazed at the famous Apollo 8 photograph of earthrise over the sterile foreground moon, and mused about the loneliness of the Earth in the vast outback of space, the fragility of our diminutive watery lifeboat, the gossamer thinness of the biosphere that envelopes the planet, the impossibility of discerning national boundaries from the perspective of space, the possibility of a new dawn of human consciousness.
Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart said, "You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you crossed. From where you see it, the thing is a whole, and it's so beautiful. And you wish you could take one from each side [of the world's conflicts] in hand and say, 'Look at it from this perspective. Look at that. What's important?'"
Sevareid, as usual, captured the mood of the moment perfectly on the day of the Apollo 11 splashdown in the Pacific Ocean: "We're always going to feel, somehow, strangers to these men. They will, in effect, be a bit stranger, even to their own wives and children. Disappeared into another life that we can't follow."
Sevareid was right in a way that he could not perhaps have anticipated as he intoned those portentous words. Neil Armstrong has had very little to say about his historic achievement. What he has muttered over the years has been taciturn, prosaic, and largely technical. A disappointing debriefing by the "first man on the moon."
Buzz Aldrin's re-entry has been extraordinarily difficult - and fascinating. He's written extensively about the problem of making sense of his experience - coming to terms with it himself, explaining it to others. His first book, "Return to Earth," asked the question, "When you've been to the moon, what's left?" That was 1973. He has a new book, just out, "Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon." I've just begun to read it.
The Age of Aquarius may still come to pass. It's early. Though we've had 40 years to make sense of the moon landing, unlike Armstrong and Aldrin, most of us have not spent much time thinking about it. Anniversaries like this one exist to stir stuff that has settled into obscure corners of our souls.
In my personal mythology, I regard the moon landing in 1969 as unquestionably the greatest event of my lifetime, the greatest event in the history of technology, and the moment when I most felt that anything was possible for humankind (and everything was likely).
Whenever I remember Armstrong saying, at 3:17 p.m. on July 20, 1969, "Houston. Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed," I literally get goose bumps. I regard Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders's reading the first verses of the book of Genesis from lunar orbit (Apollo 8) on Christmas Eve 1968 as the greatest moment in the history of liturgy. And I consider "Earthrise" to be one of the handful of greatest photographs ever taken.
Even so, it seems to me undeniable that humankind has not yet learned to read that photograph with wisdom as well as awe. Forty years out, Velcro and Teflon aside, if you didn't know we'd been to the moon, you wouldn't know we'd been to the moon. The pessimistic Founding Father John Adams would surely say, "What's the one thing you are certain to carry with you to the moon? Human nature."
Give it time, I say.
The question I intend to ask Monday night, as I stand out alone on my deck, is not, "when you've been to the moon, what's left?" but rather, when you've been to the moon, what's next?
Knee high by the 12th of July
by Clay Jenkinson
July 12, 2009
The Fourth of July has come and gone and now summer is half over. It feels as if it hasn't really begun in some ways and sooner than any of us can wish it will be over.
On Labor Day most of the people I know are literally going to say, "Where did the summer go?" My annual post solstice melancholy has visited a couple of times in the last two weeks. It is not a big blues, just a slight lament that there is no way to lasso the light, no way to can the long lingering afterglow of the sunset.
I spent the Fourth of July in Yellowstone National Park. It snowed at 2:30 p.m. on the road from West Thumb to Old Faithful. I have pictures.
My friends on a ranch in the pines near Amidon say the grass is so high the cows are starting to have to go looking for their calves.
My garden is flourishing. As far as I can tell all 87 tomato plants are thriving. If nothing goes wrong, I'm going to be bathing chest-deep in tomato juice come September. There isn't a weed in the tomato patch. Every plant is neatly enveloped in a taut aluminum cage. At dusk the miniature yellow blossoms look like the milky way. So far this year I live in tomato-topia. I go out sometimes just to smell that greatest of all garden smells.
One of my friends gave me two Topsy-Turvys, those wacky upside-down tomato-growing green plastic cylinders you get on late night television. They are hanging like a couple of albatrosses over my front porch. So far they've been nothing but trouble. I guess I belong to the "if God had wanted tomatoes to hang upside down he would have rethought gravity" school, but I am trying to make the best of it.
Every three days or so I climb up a ladder with a hose to water the dang things. Every three days I get a mud slurry shower from the water cascading through the unused tomato slots. I add more soil than water to the cylinders. The concept of the Topsy-Turvy eludes me. Perhaps there is a TT extension course I could take. Consequently, the rest of my tomatoes are raising themselves, the beneficiaries of nature's fecundity. The 30 or so tomatoes I will harvest from the TT's are as high maintenance as Angelina Jolie.
My potatoes are becoming alarmingly profuse bushes. If there is as much happening below the surface as above, I'm set until the apocalypse. The problem with tubers is that you never know until you dig.
The leaf work of my watermelons, cantaloupe, pumpkins, eggplants, and cucumbers is the best I have ever seen in any garden anywhere. What a year! I have two types of corn - regular old grocery store seed packet corn and Mandan Indian corn, the gift to my daughter in the last year of the Lewis and Clark bicentennial.
All the corn (all that corn that survived the early summer cold, that is) looks great - knee high by the you know what - but the Mandan corn is amazingly strong, handsome, and proud. I find myself just sitting by the edge of the garden gazing at it, "like a lover at his mistress," as Thomas Jefferson might have put it.
Jefferson was right about so many things. Here are two of them. I have had a very high stress summer. I can carry a world of angst into my garden, but if I get myself down on my hands and knees and delicately, in silence, pull the weeds away from the plants I am trying to protect, and actually put my hands into the earth, and let the meadowlark at the edge of the garden speak to my soul, I soon find grace and equilibrium. All the magic and mystery of life flows up through my fingers with redemption, like God's own Miracle Grow.
Jefferson also understood the sweet life-affirming dynamics of gardens. In a letter to his friend Charles Willson Peale on Aug. 20, 1811, Jefferson wrote, "Such a variety of subjects (i.e., different garden plants), some one always coming to perfection, the failure of one thing repaired by the success of another, and instead of one harvest a continued one through the year." Nobody has ever said it better than that.
Last year I had poor tomatoes and no corn, precisely one year after the best corn and tomatoes I ever grew. This year my carrots and lettuce have not done well, but you should see the peppers. "The failure of one thing repaired by the success of another." My peas and beans are nearly ripe now, but the corn won't be ready until September. "Some one always coming to perfection."
I look forward with the deepest anticipation to that day, a few weeks from now, when I come home after a dreary hard day of meetings, remove my shoes like Huck Finn, walk out into my garden, and gently extract an onion, one tomato, one cucumber, a potato, and a splendid ear of corn.
I'll let the water run the black earth off of my fingers, off of those vegetables' astonishing variety of surfaces and colors, and make myself a little humble Jeffersonian salad.
The radical, revolutionary former president wrote to Peale, "but though an old man, I am but a young gardener."
God bless you Mr. Jefferson (though you are, we know, a deist). For all of your faults, America owes more to you than to any other human being. North Dakota too.
How it was in America on July 4
by Clay Jenkinson
July 5, 2009
Do you remember those old Life magazine stories that attempted to create a slice of life profile of the United States? They were usually titled "A Day in the Life of America." They featured sentences like, "At 7:04 a.m. in Cleveland, Ohio, a convoy of 23 garbage trucks at the Cuyahoga County Sanitation Facility begin to fan out into the city's 48 boroughs, to collect what will before day's end be a mountain of 497 tons of trash."
These Life magazine stories were stirring. They made the commonplace heroic. They simultaneously made you appreciate the vastness of our continental republic and the commonness, even intimacy, of our national experience. Garrison Keillor wrote a parody of the formula in the New Yorker in 1975. It was titled, "How It Was in America a Week Ago Tuesday." It was so well done that my friend Steve and I wondered if it was really a parody. A couple of years later I had the chance to ask Keillor about the many "statistics" of the article: 4.6 million cans of soup, 160 million cigarettes, 40 million quarts of orange juice and 2 million plates of leftovers. "Made 'em up," he intoned in his best Wobegon voice. The plates of leftovers should have tipped me off.
Wouldn't it be wonderful if there were a way to create a precise and comprehensive profile of America for the Fourth of July weekend now ending, an exhaustive one-day cultural census of the United States on its 233rd birthday? If Thomas Jefferson could witness America this weekend from a lofty hot air balloon, what would he see? More to the point, what would he say? Would he weep for the American republic or shake his dreamy head in tolerant bemusement at the myriad of ways we have come to define the phrase, "the pursuit of happiness"?
How many bratwursts bit the dust this weekend? How many people experienced their first watercraft ride, ran their first marathon, assembled their first s'mores or attended their first Major League Baseball game? How many teenagers experienced their first furtive kiss this weekend? How many Americans hoisted or waved a flag? How many slept in a tent? How many people will be nursing a beety, painful sunburn tonight, shaking their heads at the folly of it all? How many Americans shot a bottle rocket? How many shot a gun?
Amber waves of grain. Purple mountains' majesty. America means wide open boundless space and rivers to make your heart ache with national pride.
It would be fascinating to have the weekend stats for the number of hot dogs eaten, and pounds of hamburger, and slices of cheese; for buns, brats, chicken wings, marshmallows, bottles and cans of beer, units of guacamole; for the national square footage of steaks, or (better yet) the length of all the steaks eaten this weekend laid end to end across America with a starting block at Mount Rushmore. How many of those steaks began their journey from creature to consumable on a ranch in western North Dakota?
Inquiring minds want to know.
If you added together the money value of all the food and fuel and stuff that has been consumed this weekend by America's 306,798,000 people, of which of the world's 192 countries would it equal the annual gross national product?
American means abundance.
How many bags of charcoal have been opened across America over the last three days? How many bags of ice? How many bags of potato chips? For that matter, how many bags of marijuana?
America means freedom not unmixed with a streak of misrule and anarchy.
If all the gunpowder in all the fireworks detonated over America this Fourth of July were put into a single barrel, how large would that barrel be and what could it blow up? (Would it finish the Crazy Horse Monument or merely smooth his war-weary forehead?) How many Americans are saying that this was the best fireworks display they ever saw? And how many have preferred to remember a Fourth of July long ago when the world was a magical place and red Radio Flyer wagons and homemade ice cream were the marker of the holiday and the measure of happiness?
How many Band-Aids have been applied across American in the last 72 hours with a kiss and words of comfort? How many casts have been set by doctors called away from picnics and pontoons, ball games and the Boston Pops?
How many Independence Day babies were born this year? How many of the newborns were named Thomas Jefferson Schamansky or Thomas Jefferson Xiong? Or Liberty or Freedom Malloy?
America means diversity.
How many prayers have been spoken this weekend for our troops in Iraq (141,000), in Afghanistan (32,000), in South Korea (26,339); for the men and women serving their country at the 820 military installations in more than 40 countries worldwide? How many Americans have died in uniform this weekend? Imagine those calls.
America, in the 21st century, means empire. Mr. Jefferson would not have liked that at all.
How many times, in how many places, did citizens hear Lee Greenwood's patriotic anthem "God Bless the USA" and how does that compare to the frequency of the song's performance on the Fourth of January or the fourth of October?
How many weddings were performed across America on Saturday? How many of those occurred in the six states that have legalized same-sex marriage?
America means tolerance.
How many men in bolo ties or top hats or funny wigs stood before a crowd of patriots Saturday and read aloud the preamble of the Declaration of Independence? How many featured speakers tried to articulate what it is about America that is so amazing, so inspiring, so breathtaking, so free, so important to the world, and got choked up and left the podium feeling a little embarrassed?
How many people, born in how many countries, became naturalized U.S. citizens Saturday? I know that 66 people, from 35 countries, took the oath at Jefferson's Monticello in its 47th annual naturalization ceremony. Seeing that ritual in that place is high on my bucket list.
How many people at some point during the weekend looked up from whatever they were doing, in the midst of the celebratory hoopla or the sheer relaxation of a sandbar, and said, "My God, I love this country. I'm so glad to be an American"?
I know I did.
America is still the last best hope of the world.
A Long Day's Journey into Adulthood
by Clay Jenkinson
June 28, 2009
I've been thinking about journeys lately, partly because the North Dakota Humanities Council has been conducting a fascinating journey stories initiative, partly because I have been writing a long essay about journeys (the "Odyssey," Huck Finn, Kerouac's "On the Road") and partly because I just made a loopy auto journey of 4,895 miles with my daughter. She's now a genuine American teenager.
My vehicle averaged a miserable 18.3 miles per gallon. That's 267.48 gallons. The price of gas hovered around $2.75 per gallon. Not to mention motels, souvenirs, entrance fees, emergency toothbrushes, ice for the cooler, appalling quantities of soda and chips, daily ice cream treats and value meals at all the major fast food outlets, at every one of which we were urged to order the big-calorie version of whatever it was that we wanted. The geographic zone we explored was bounded by Detroit Lakes on the east, Yellowstone National Park on the west, Washburn on the north and darkest Kansas on the south.
We saw a grizzly bear. The Yellowstone River was running as full as I have ever seen it. It was green as Ireland for almost the entire journey. Only on the return, in the marvelous Custer State Park in South Dakota, did the grass have the bleached and tawny look of summer on the Great Plains. I took a photographic portrait of my daughter at Mount Rushmore, to enlarge and hang next to the one I took of her there when she was 9.
Actually, she'd like that earlier one retired to a closet.
We played miniature golf. We talked about God and life and books and colleges and boys(!) and family and "the course of human events."
She predicted that the mountain carving of Crazy Horse will never be finished. We attended the Medora Musical. We hiked. We drove over Beartooth Pass and wandered through obscure canyons in Wyoming that would be national parks anywhere east of the 100th meridian.
There are no words to explain the immense joy of wandering America with the person you love most in the world, sitting together in the car, drinking it all in, laughing endlessly, talking in lovely bursts of memory and revelation, and gazing out in silence for long stretches on the endless highways of the West. Drifting past distant pine ridges you would love to visit and never will. In Deadwood, S.D., as Simon and Garfunkel voiced it, "She said the man in the gabardine suit was a spy." As with all good journeys, we discovered things about each other and about ourselves that we did not previously know.
We made a sweet pilgrimage to my grandparents' farm just south of Fergus Falls, Minn. It was her idea. She had never before been to the farm, which is no longer owned by our family. Nor had she ever visited the graves of her maternal ancestors.
No one lives on the farm now. The house was locked, the barn boarded up, silo and granaries empty, the humans and livestock all gone, the flower beds overgrown with weeds. Still, we could feel the souls of my grandparents there, and though we did not talk about it much, I could see that it was an important rite of passage for my only child.
Her great-grandparents are mythological creatures in her consciousness. She never met them. She has been told they were giants in the earth. She wanted to see the ground that made them strong. I told her beautiful, wry stories about her mother's first visit to the farm. She was gratified to see us all together, even if only in my narrative.
Eventually, all journeys must end.
I dropped her off at her mother's house in northwestern Kansas on Father's Day. We all shared a quick meal. Then I turned the car north and started for Dakota.
It was about 8:30 p.m. Exquisite light, no wind, an open road straight to the vanishing point, my heart full of love and joy and biting sadness. With the radio off and windows down, I cruised along at a deliberately unhurried pace.
The wheat down there in Kansas is ready for cutting. It's going to be a bumper crop.
The sky was that serene blue of late June. Temperature 72 degrees. It was the first day of summer, the longest day of the year, in the season of endless dusk. The car seemed to drive itself through that improbable Van Gogh landscape: section-sized fields of yellow wheat, oppressively green corn, a flawless blue sky, antelope drifting the ridges and the charcoal ribbon of backroads highway. Somehow to me it was more beautiful than the Rocky Mountains or Yellowstone National Park.
In that wonderful numb state we get into at the end of a very long day of driving America, I tried to imagine my daughter's re-entry into her world after two hectic weeks with Papa. She would be telling her mother stories of our adventures, showing off her new clothes, queuing up journey photographs on her laptop (no need to send film to the developers any more), repeating strong and amusing bits of her grandmother's conversation, describing moments that would make little sense to her mother out of the context of the trip. She also would be trying to determine the minimum quantum of time she needed to spend with her mother before she could call her best friend to catch up on a world much more real and significant than the one her faraway father inhabits. I felt no self-pity in that. Life is what it is.
She was to start driver's training the next day. It occurred to me that in our immense journey she had never once consulted any of the maps or atlases in the car. For perhaps the last time in her life - she will be 15 soon - on her summer vacation of 2009, she put herself wholly in her father's hands. She had assumed (erroneously, in the way of our children) that he knew what he was doing. It suddenly struck me, in the afterglow of that long, long Great Plains day, that there will never be another auto journey with my daughter in which I do all of the driving.
My heart broke - right there on Kansas Highway 27.
I wanted to hoist her life (and mine) up on blocks and put the vehicle into reverse and race back the odometer, like the shadiest used car dealer in the country.
No, grasshopper and gray-haired wanderer, the journey is always forward.
So what's the 'right' solution to the surplus elk population?
by Clay Jenkinson
June 21, 2009
Two Sundays ago, I wrote about the overpopulation of elk in the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and tried to explain why hunting is not an option. I argued that traditional hunting is illegal in national parks, as well as a violation of longstanding National Park Service core policy, and that even if those two insuperable problems could be overcome, it would create a logistics nightmare to try to get heavy elk carcasses out of the park without four-wheeled vehicles.
The elk would have to be hauled out to the park's limited road system on the backs of horses or hunters - in most cases for many, many miles. Meanwhile, traditional users of the park - those who like to drive the loop road or hike the park's many trails - would be not only disrupted, but endangered by the concentrated hunting activity.
In my previous column, I acknowledged that the idea of letting North Dakota's hunters reduce the population is attractive and it seems like common sense. People who I respect asked, "Why not create some sort of carefully crafted, one-time exception to the no hunting rule, let unpaid, volunteer hunters solve the problem, and then manage the remaining elk so that this doesn't need to be done again? Really, how 'awful' would that be?"
I know good and honest people who will never take the national park's proposed elk management plan seriously because traditional hunting is not one of the options. In fact, they regard the proposed set of options as yet another sign that federal land management types are nincompoops who are totally out of touch with the real world.
In other words, the "common sense" solution is in large part fueled by sagebrush country's contempt for federal ownership of the public lands in America, contempt for federal land management agencies and personnel, for any federal regulation of the nation's natural resources or economic activities.
If you have been following this seemingly interminable debate, you know that the management team at Theodore Roosevelt National Park has been exploring six possible responses to the elk problem.
1. No action.
2. Sharpshooters.
3. A roundup, followed by slaughter-off site. This sounds awful, but it is, after all, standard operating procedure on every cattle ranch in North Dakota. And the meat would be processed and donated to worthy institutions.
4. Transferring live elk to other parks (not necessarily national) around the country.
5. Increased elk hunting outside the boundaries of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
6. Fertility control. This means injecting some female elk with pregnancy inhibiting chemicals.
Option four (what is called "translocation" in the management jargon) would seem to be the best answer to the burgeoning elk problem. After all, this is what is routinely done with excess bison in TRNP and used to be done with elk. There are other parks around the country that would gladly take our surplus elk. The problem here is chronic wasting disease.
Although no TRNP elk have tested positive for CWD up until now, no elk could be transferred until the herd was systematically tested. The test sample would be huge (about 375 of the current estimated elk population of approximately 1,000), and unfortunately, the CWD test is lethal. If the herd tested negative and it were therefore possible to relocate the park's elk, the management team would probably try to ship out all but 150-200 of the existing herd. That would reduce the herd to a lovely remnant that will not soon become an issue. While the population slowly rises, new management technologies are likely to emerge.
Options one (no action) and six (fertility control) are not really viable. The TRNP elk herd is growing too fast to permit inaction. Although park officials are quick to point out that the park's flora can support the existing population - we are not in a crisis - the elk numbers will soon become a very serious problem if nothing is done. The technology of fertility control is still pretty primitive. TRNP Superintendent Valerie Naylor says that option six was included on the assumption that better fertility control techniques and chemistry will be available in the next 15 years. In the short term, birth control probably cannot solve the problem.
So that leaves roundup and slaughter, reduction by professional sharpshooters, translocation and increased elk hunting outside the park.
When the list was first released, Theodore Roosevelt National Park solicited public comment. Wanting to be a good citizen and pretending I knew something about species and ecosystem management even though I have never studied biology or read a single book on the subject, I formulated my own "common sense" seventh option. It's called the "Just Say No" option. I urged Superintendent Naylor to invite former first lady Nancy Reagan to visit North Dakota with one of those white megaphones to urge the elk of the national park to abstain from sexual activity. You will recall that this was Mrs. Reagan's advice to the young people of America during her husband's presidency (1980-88).
I cannot remember now if Naylor responded that I or my idea was beneath contempt.
The idea of professional sharpshooters is abhorrent to most people - though just why amateur hunters are regarded as more honorable than professional game management marksmen is slightly difficult to understand. Public reaction to sharpshooters would be profoundly negative. That "option" is almost certainly not going to make the cut.
The translocation option will probably be ruled out for the same reason. The public will not like the idea of 375 elk being killed to determine if they have a disease.
I predict that the "preferred option" will turn out to be roundup and the slaughterhouse. It's simple, efficient and cost-effective. The meat will be preserved and donated to charitable institutions.
My own preferred option would be to drive the elk out of the park to neighboring lands, the majority of which are under the jurisdiction of the Little Missouri National Grasslands. Then North Dakota's hunters could cull the herd in the time-honored way. This is, of course, easy for me to say, since I don't own a ranch in the Badlands surrounding TRNP. I'd suggest a compensation payment of $100 per carcass to the rancher on whose acreage the elk was hunted.
Here's the paradox: Any solution to the elk problem is going to require human industrial intervention. That fractures the sweet mythic notion that the national parks are sanctuaries where nature operates by primordial rhythms untainted by human control. There is no "natural" solution to the TRNP elk problem. That means that everyone - including the dedicated park staff - will come away with a sense of disenchantment.
Wordsworth said it best in one of his finest sonnets: "The world is too much with us."
Heaps of praise for Restaurant at Rough Rider Hotel
by Clay Jenkinson
June 14, 2009
With gas prices creeping back up and the national economy in freefall, nobody is quite sure what the North Dakota tourism season will look like this year. Everyone I know in the industry is curious and a little apprehensive. Experts contend that it is likely that people will spend their recreation dollars close to home.
It's especially hard to get a sense of how this tourism season is going to unfold because of the bizarre weather we've been having - snow in western North Dakota in early June! My mother, using the precise language of meteorology, said that in Dickinson "it has been colder than Sam Hill's left ankle." Wow, Mother, you don't have to get all technical.
I know a fair amount about history and virtually nothing about the hospitality industry. But I can make one completely enthusiastic recommendation. Get yourself to Medora sometime soon and eat at the new restaurant at the Rough Riders Hotel.
Here's what you can expect: outstanding food by an award-winning chef in a historic village on the banks of the Little Missouri River in the midst of the most beautiful effusion of grass I have ever seen in North Dakota's breaks country.
The Badlands are the greenest they have ever been in my lifetime. They're almost garish-green. Driving in with my mother and daughter the other day, I saw west of Fryburg some hills and buttes I have never before noticed. Every hillock, ridge and bluff stands out this year in high relief. It's as if there were suddenly a Great Plains of Ireland with velvety box buttes in every direction. It's as if Emerald City and Dodge City had been folded into a single landscape by a god with an offbeat sense of humor.
But it's the marvelous food at the new restaurant I want to talk about today.
The chef is a man named Richard Siegel, 49, now a North Dakotan, but originally from La Mesa, Calif. Formerly a 911 police dispatcher in San Diego, he drove to Wahpeton three years ago, more or less, on a whim to check out the culinary school at the North Dakota State School of Science. It was obviously a fit. Among other things, he is the 2008 and 2009 North Dakota state champion for culinary arts. In 2008, he took fourth prize at the National Skills USA Culinary Competition. In 2009, he placed first in the same competition.
Those are just his credentials. It's the food he prepares that makes Siegel amazing.
I don't know what I was expecting when we walked through the door of the remodeled hotel. I have strong and fond memories of the old restaurant, where I have eaten a dozen times over the years. The old restaurant had a boxy, dusty, Old West vibe. It actually felt like you were eating in a historic frontier hotel, even though we were all vaguely aware that the Rough Riders Hotel was a reconstruction that opened in 1965. It was spare and wooden and open. For me, the sense has always been of eating a better than expected meal in a funky historic space, and when you looked around you could actually feel that Theodore Roosevelt might have dined at your table, or Howard Eaton or A.C. Huidekoper.
That was then.
My first impression of the new restaurant is of gleaming glassware in every direction. Everything is much darker, richer in tone and more luxurious. There are, comparatively, a sea of tables arrayed over a much larger space, and every one is covered with a dark tablecloth and so much glass - including large red wine goblets - that you wonder where the food is supposed to go. The dominant feeling is that you are not in old ,shabby, genteel Medora anymore, but in Telluride or Aspen or Sun Valley.
Frankly, it's gorgeous.
The new dining room is dominated by a fireplace made of bricks salvaged from the old North Dakota State Capitol building, which burned on Dec. 28, 1930. With his characteristic eye for possibilities, the late Harold Schafer purchased a couple of pallets of the red bricks more than 40 years ago. He reckoned that someday somehow they would be useful. Now they are the centerpiece - in a certain way the historical foundation - of the new Rough Riders Hotel.
The old dining room had a seating capacity of 55. The new restaurant, 100. The old restaurant had a cramped, impossible kitchen that actually held up food delivery on busy nights. The new kitchen (actually two, one for catering) is a gleaming state-of-the-art facility that Siegel called "a chef's dream." The old subterranean (non-ADA compliant) bathrooms have been replaced by something you might expect at a luxury airport. There is, in addition, a bar on the southwest corner of the reconstructed building that seats 26. The wine selection is superb - way beyond my tin palate.
Before dinner, I got a sneak preview of a few of the eight hotel rooms that already have been opened. A year from now, when phase two of the hotel expansion is complete, 68 rooms will be available year round or nearly so. Each room has a hand-selected armoire, a unique bedstead, luxury linens and, of course, a historic flatscreen TV. The nearest rooms of this quality are at the Hotel Donaldson in Fargo.
There were eight of us at dinner, including the incomparable Sheila Schafer. Two ate salmon, one beef, one lamb chops, one buffalo steak and two walleye. I asked for a surprise sampler plate and wound up with small portions of duck, walleye, beef and lamb. Incredible red bell pepper soup with crab. By pretending to my friends and family that I have press credentials, I managed to poach bites from every plate. Everything was delicious -the lamb and walleye first-rate. The walleye was the best I have ever eaten.
By the time we had finished our entrees, the desserts, including a white chocolate raspberry cake and a magical key lime pie, were entirely superfluous, but we managed to find just enough room to sample - well, actually, devour - them.
All of this may sound really expensive. It is not.
As we finished our exquisite desserts and began to contemplate suiting up in parkas, long johns, stocking caps and blankets for the Medora "summer" Musical, I felt a wave of nostalgia for the old rattletrap Rough Riders Hotel. I will remember the old hotel with a little touch of bittersweetness as I dine at the new restaurant - again and again and again.
No Easy Solution to Park's Elk Problem
by Clay Jenkinson
June 7, 2009
A few nights ago in Medora - on an achingly beautiful early June evening - I had dinner with six of my closest friends.
We sat around a historic table in a historic house in a historic village in North Dakota's premier playground. It was prime rib, crusted hash brown casserole, corn bread, horseradish, fresh asparagus, homemade bread, followed by rhubarb pie and chocolate cake (both homemade). And that was just the food!
The dinner was hosted by the youngest 84-year-old who ever walked the Earth.
The wine flowed. We talked about everything in the way of a dinner party among friends who share a long past but don't get to see each other very often anymore, who share a common basic outlook, an essentially common way of looking at life. We are all lovers of the North Dakota Badlands. All lovers of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the national parks in general. All hikers.
All seven North Dakotans.
The dinner was exquisite. An anthropological mouse in the rafters would have observed a ton of joy and good will in the room, catch-up questions all around ("so how's that project coming along?"), earnest conversation on a wide range of subjects (though never NASCAR or Katie Couric's hair), and every few minutes explosions of laughter of the lift-the-roof kind.
It was pretty close to what we all dream of in life: loving friendships, mutual respect, the sacrament of life-affirming friends breaking bread together in a place with special significance, talking the issues in an earnest way but never too far from humor, wit, and light-heartedness. Conversation for the sheer joy of it. As the evening progressed (it would be a sacrilege to say "wore on"), the temperature dropped and the light outside that log house deepened and snuggled the dinner party into deeper intimacy. In those moments when the conversation paused to gather itself back up, we found ourselves looking up and realizing that we had forgiven the long brutal winter and essentially forgotten it.
June in North Dakota. Payoff time in a land dominated by wind and winter.
After we had warmed up on a range of easier topics, from Obama v. Cheney to the promise of this year's Medora Musical, inevitably the conversation turned to elk in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. We spent a full half hour on it, maybe more. We gave it our best shot.
As Hamlet put it, there was "much throwing about of brains" on one of the hottest topics in North Dakota life. There were no anti-government grumps at the table, no antagonists of the national park mission.
We could sort of all agree that there are too many elk in the national park (approximately 900), though at least three of the park lovers lamented that they had never or seldom seen an elk in their drives and hikes. And we accepted by way of deference to environmental science that the desirable number of elk in the park is somewhere around 400. That means that approximately 500 elk need to be removed from the park - one way or t'other.
Beyond that, we could not reach consensus. In the end, we threw up our hands and sighed and congratulated ourselves in not having to make the decision.
Between the seven of us, we were just able to patch together the six action alternatives that have been developed and circulated by the park's management team: 1. No action. 2. Reduction by professional shooters. 3. Roundup, exportation, and euthanasia off-site. 4. Giving the elk to other parks ("willing recipients"), assuming the North Dakota herd does not test positive for chronic wasting disease. 5. Step up elk hunting outside the park's boundary fences. 6. Birth control.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park's Elk Management Plan has been widely criticized and sneered at because it does not include "good old-fashioned hunting by North Dakota volunteers" as an option. A very large number of people, probably a solid majority of the people of North Dakota, some of them very powerful and prominent, believe there is a simple, common sense solution to the problem: let non-professional hunters draw down the herd.
This is regarded by many as an obvious, inexpensive, efficient and even dignified solution to a problem that has been made to seem more complex than it is by feds who are, as usual, completely out of touch with reality.
Self-conscious of our own littleness as we sat around that historic table - a table where Mark Twain once sat, and Clarence Darrow, Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Sanger, John Muir, Rudyard Kipling and Booker T. Washington (not all at the same time and not in North Dakota) - we tried to rise to some kind of enlightenment. We all acknowledged the appeal of the "traditional hunting" idea. It makes sense. It is, in fact, enormously appealing if you willfully choose to ignore some really hard truths.
But the hard truths keep flooding back.
One: Federal law prohibits hunting in the national parks.
Two: Unless the enabling legislation of any specific national park explicitly permits hunting in that park, the general prohibition prevails. The 1947 enabling legislation of Theodore Roosevelt National Park does not enable hunting in this facility.
Three: It has been the deeply held determination of the National Park Service for many decades (really since its inception in 1916) to preserve and champion the hunting ban systemwide, except where the enabling legislation (as at Grand Teton National Park) makes a carefully crafted exception.
Fourth: Since no off-road vehicular activity is allowed in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and some of the south unit (10,500 acres) is actual federal wilderness, the logistics of North Dakota's hunters' packing elk carcasses out of the park amounts to a virtually insuperable impediment to the "common sense" solution.
And fifth (and to my mind most important): Allowing traditional hunting in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, however appealing it may seem, would shatter the very idea of a national park as a solemn sanctuary for wild life (Thoreau likes this to be in two words, not one, so that humans can be part of the equation).
The national parks are little islands (in a sea of "improved" and developed land) where man's characteristic domination over the natural world is severely restrained by mutual consent and hard-won national legislation.
Given those powerful constraints, which some of us embraced with passion and others with reluctance, we were thrown back on the six available options. We could agree on only one point. We all absolutely hate the idea of professional "snipers."
As the perfect evening wound down, we all understood that all options except "no action" involve human intrusiveness in the sanctuary. So the question is: what's the least intrusive of the available options?
Meanwhile, pass the wine.
Bitterness and Backlash Over Nickname
by Clay Jenkinson
May 31, 2009
The recent decision by the State Board of Higher Education to instruct University of North Dakota President Robert Kelley to retire the UND sports nickname Fighting Sioux fills me with hope - and some dread.
On the one hand, I applaud the 8-0 decision of the statewide board, which gives Kelley the political cover he will need to make the controversial change. It took considerable courage for the board to make that vote. Each member deserves public praise, whether you agree with the decision or not.
It was not really a vote about the nickname and logo but rather about stopping the hemorrhaging - and about the credibility and integrity of higher education in North Dakota. Thus ends a prolonged crisis over a sports moniker that has distracted UND from its true mission, damaged its standing as the state's premier institution of higher learning and moral instruction, divided Grand Forks, hurt UND's and North Dakota's image in the national arena, and cost the state millions of dollars. All this for an athletic nickname.
On the other hand, in the wake of the historic decision, I can feel the winds gathering of a backlash against the Indians of North Dakota and their leadership. In the long run, white-Indian relations will likely improve, not so much because of the decision, but because of what it symbolizes. In the short term, however, I fear that Fighting Sioux diehards will project their frustrations onto the last people who deserve to receive them: the American Indian citizens of North Dakota.
Here's what bothers me. By granting (October 2007) UND the opportunity to "convince" the Sioux (Lakota and Dakota) Indians of North Dakota that the name and logo were not objectionable, the NCAA put the shoe on the wrong foot, and potentially worsened, rather than improved, relations between the two cultures in North Dakota. Just think for a moment of how insane it is for white folks to venture out into Indian Country to tell Indians how they ought to think about a nickname and an icon borrowed from their culture.
For more than two years, UND's athletic, alumni and administrative leadership have been engaged in a full court press in Indian Country to persuade North Dakota's Dakota and Lakota tribes to endorse Fighting Sioux, against their better judgment.
The process seems to me to degrade everyone involved, and it does not seem fundamentally different from the treaty charades of the 19th century, in which white men who wanted something (usually land) showed up in Indian Country with flattering rhetoric, presents, big promises and veiled threats, then complacently smoked "victory" cigars on the way back to "civilization," with land cessions or trespass agreements in their pockets.
Back then, if the established Indian leadership refused to cooperate, the white negotiators sought other "leaders" who had more pliable principles or picked off the rank and file with promises and annuities.
The agreement reached between UND and the NCAA in 2007 unfairly shifted the political burden of the Fighting Sioux controversy onto the backs of the Native American community and North Dakota's Indian leadership. Although this may be seen as a form of empowerment, it had the effect of forcing the Dakota and Lakota to make the final decision in a university's quarrel with the NCAA.
If the Dakota and Lakota refused to endorse Fighting Sioux, suddenly they would become responsible for decision that had the power to frustrate, outrage, offend and disappoint literally thousands of white people.
That's exactly what has happened. Anger that should be directed at the NCAA or UND's leadership now gets redirected at the Indians of North Dakota. That's a miscarriage of justice and moral responsibility.
Over the last two years I have heard lots of grumbling - some of it racist.
The non-binding plebiscite on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation has only made things worse. On April 22, members of the tribe voted 774-378 to endorse Fighting Sioux. That has enabled white diehards to argue that the Indian leadership at Spirit Lake and Standing Rock is "out of touch" with the Dakota and Lakota rank and file, and that leaders like Standing Rock's nationally respected Ron His Horse Is Thunder should step out of the way and "let the people decide."
I'm always amused when white Americans insist that people of other nations should be allowed to override their constituted leadership, while we supinely allow our government to carry us into one bad situation after the next. I would, for example, have loved a national plebiscite on Iraq, Afghanistan, enhanced interrogation techniques, the bank bailout.
It is all too easy for white folks to find fault with Indian leadership - the stereotyping runs deep in non-Indian "understanding" of life on the reservation. Some Fighting Sioux diehards are now pitting the people of Spirit Lake against those of Standing Rock, and the rank and file of both reservations against their elected leadership. Divide and conquer - it's a very old habit. Why do we do it? Because there is something we want.
The state board's gutsy decision May 14 may lower the temperature a bit and return some of the responsibility to where it belongs. I hope so.
The important thing is that the long paralysis is coming to an end, and the resolution - however frustrating in the short term - is good news for UND and North Dakota.
Now the narrative can shift from a quixotic fight to save a problematic nickname to all the good and important things that are happening at UND. Those achievements have been eclipsed by the controversy. Now the state of North Dakota has effectively cast a vote in favor of Indian cultural sovereignty and against continued appropriation of Indian traditions and iconography.
We all know that North Dakota has an "image problem" in the national arena - from bitter windswept winters to the Legislature's decision not to pass legislation protecting the gay community against discrimination, from National Geographic's "Empty Prairie" thesis to the new disclaimers and admonitions that our lawmakers have mandated at North Dakota's sole abortion clinic. Rightly or wrongly, Fighting Sioux has been regarded nationally as a sign of the stuckness of white-Indian relations in North Dakota. This decision may be a harbinger of better relations to come.
Above all, the decision indicates - in a small, but symbolically important way - that we have reached the end of the long dark era in which white people presumed that they could simply take whatever they wished from American Indians.
Gardening as a Poem of Filial Respect
by Clay Jenkinson
May 24, 2009
My grandmother Rhoda Straus planted a garden every year all her life, until her osteoporosis became so bad that she literally could not crawl through the black earth any more.
She lived her whole life in or near Fergus Falls, Minn. Until some time well after World War II, her life was a very hard one. A faraway accountant just looking at the figures would have called it poverty.
If there was plenty of food (and not much else), it was because Grandma gave a significant portion of her life energy to food production - milking cows, feeding steers, separating cream, churning butter, baking bread and pies, canning, freezing, drying, and curing cottage cheese on the stovetop.
Not to mention driving the grain truck. She baked bread twice a week from the age of 8 to 92.
That toast was the best toast I ever ate.
She saved every plastic bag she ever got her hands on, from the day when the newfangled first plastic bag appeared in northwestern Minnesota in the 1940s to the last few years when it no longer mattered.
The moment any plastic bag had served its primary purpose, however firm or flimsy its construction, she smoothed it out on the counter with her strong calloused hands, folded it twice as if it were agricultural origami, and placed it like lace in a drawer in her kitchen.
In those early years, the bags were clunky. When you pulled one out to put a sandwich in it, decades later, you'd see the fault lines of its construction, and the accumulated mottling from use after use after use.
When Grandma died in 1993, my parents and I converged on the farm to clean out the house. My mother, who left the farm, went to college and never looked back, not once, opened that drawer, made a little sound of appreciative disgust and dumped her mother's lifetime plastic bag collection unceremoniously into the trash. How Rhoda would have clucked at that.
Grandma's left thumb was pitted and grooved like an Edison recording cylinder or an old cutting board - which is precisely what it was.
I don't suppose there is any way of knowing how many potatoes she peeled in the course of her life, but I think "infinite" is the correct technical term. I have her favorite knife. It has been sharpened countless times over 60 or 70 years (though never by me) until it's literally about half the size it was at the time of its purchase. It's curved like a scythe from the way Grandpa honed it.
I used it yesterday to cut up seed potatoes. When the dull edge slashed through the first potato to my uncalloused, consumerist thumb, whose principal encounters are with the space bar on my laptop, a wave of pride and an inrush of sorrow passed through me into the black soil of my garden where I sat. A meadowlark sang its liquid song like Chanticleer, just over in the prairie grass.
Some very large part of me believes we have lost more than we have gained.
She made patchwork quilts all her life, from remnants of cloth left over from sewing projects. You could, if you wished, "read" one of her quilts: that one's the shirt she made for Grandpa the year the cultivator fell on his leg; that's my sister's nightgown for her fifth birthday; that's the drapes that still hang in the dining room; that's the year her church circle went nutzoid over cowboy kerchief throw pillows; that's that sky blue corduroy jumper you can see in the family studio portrait from 1968, when rural Minnesota was time immemorial and the rest of the world was coming apart at the seams.
In my 20s, I made half a dozen quilts at the farm, with Grandma's advice and consent. It was like working with an inscrutable Zen master. It always felt as if she might suddenly thwack me with a stick for a dropped stitch, or blindfold me and say, "Tie the yarn with your heart, not your fingers, grasshopper."
Because I had no heritage basket of fabric scraps, I bought a yard of this and a yard of that to make a special quilt as a wedding gift. When we set up the card table in the living room of the old farmhouse and I pulled out those gleaming, unscathed yards of cloth, Grandma looked at me in disappointment and a hint of contempt. I could hear her thinking, "You may be intelligent but you are not very smart, are you?"
When I was studying in England, she used to send me journal letters on crinkly onionskin paper (to save on postage), 500 words one day on the hail damage from the big thunderstorm, 100 words three days later on the good sermon at church.
Her beautiful penmanship (the Palmer method), in several colors of ink on the same page, flowed through gift pens from the grain co-op or the veterinary clinic or insurance adjuster.
I remember one evening opening a lean airmail envelope with four sheets of onionskin in it. The first line read. "Today I put up 42 apple pies." I thought: "Great, I read act two of King Lear and spent three hours with my friend Douglas in a coffee shop."
A life radically misspent.
When I moved into my house here, the first thing I did was hang a photograph of Grandma on the wall leading into my kitchen, carefully positioned so that I would see it every single day.
The snapshot was taken in 1980. She is standing behind a large wooden picnic table on the worn concrete slab that jutted out from the one-story farmhouse. The table is covered with ripe tomatoes - every square inch, every square millimeter from tip to tip in both directions. The red tomatoes are so neatly nested against each other that to add a single cherry tomato would require starting a second tier. She stands behind that part of her tomato crop in a thin faded cotton farm dress.
My grandmother didn't like being photographed, and she understood from her scarred thumb to her work-weakened knees that pride goeth before the fall. But if you look carefully, there is a glorious, unmistakable, though barely perceptible, intimation of smugness in that portrait.
You could say that I plant a garden, now that I have returned to the heartland, in Grandma's honor, but that would not be quite accurate. I plant a garden because the almost buried, nearly spent, barely glowing ember in me that is Rhoda Straus' grandchild is the best of me by far.
Thwack.
The Lure of the Open Road
by Clay Jenkinson
May 17, 2009
Several of my friends and I had dinner the other night on the outdoor deck of a popular restaurant by the railroad tracks. We chose to sit outside not because it was warm, but because it was possible. We knew from the start that we were going to freeze - and we did. We opted for outdoor seating as a vote of no confidence in the winter that now seems finally over.
Spring has sprung, the grass has riz, and all I can think about is gettin' out on the blacktop roads of America. I want to grab someone with a sense of spontaneity and a flexible work schedule, throw some clothes and a toothbrush into a duffel, jump in the car and drive off at random into the American West. With no destination in mind except the freedom of the open road. No hotel reservations, no mission statement except adventure and endless conversation, with nothing but a sad little return date tucked as far back as possible into our pockets. We wouldn't even gas up before leaving the city limits because any gesture of good sense might break the spell and scold us back to our desks. Gas and red licorice and sodas in ... Beach or Sidney or Miles City. Thereafter? Let the road write the narrative.
We'll just drive all day, windows open if possible, eating up the miles at an unhurried pace, stopping for cheeseburgers at a home-owned roadside cafe, getting out to stretch or hike or change drivers. Gab endlessly about everything that comes to mind, laughing for the sheer joy of rekindled animal life, talking the issues, gazing silently for long periods at the endless western Badlands, buttes, pine ridges, clouds and sky, river valleys, rolling and sand hills and just plain open flowing plains in every direction until you shudder at the sheer size of America and the audacity of torpedoing into the heart of it in a contraption you couldn't really fix if it broke down in the middle of all that nowhere.
Paradise.
And sometime around dusk, a shag carpet motel in a faraway marginal plains town, the local "nightclub" out on the curve at the city limits, a perfect ribeye medium rare and a slightly wilted house salad with French dressing. And the coldest beer you ever drank.
After decades of loopy pointless auto trips through the American West, I know that thus far I have seen only a tiny, even pitiful, fraction of what is there to see. I've wandered along fragile filaments of roads on the back of the infinity of the continent and a handful of historic sites, parks and monuments scattered across a vast and largely empty landscape. In a place as obscure as the hills of Ekalaka, Mont., at the heart of Marlboro Man's America, there is more scenic beauty and romance than in most of Europe, and yet if you made a list of the 100 best places in the American West, it wouldn't even register - except perhaps among Ekalakans. If you could put the land around Ekalaka on a flatbed and truck it to Germany, they'd instantly make it a national park, possibly their premiere national park.
In Oregon last week, out by McMinville, in a rental car, I passed a man on the side of the road with a foot-long black beard shouldering a 20-foot wooden cross toward the Pacific Ocean. Traffic whizzing by, people shaking their heads in derision and disgust, turning to their road companion and saying, "Did you just see that?"
It's not clear what the proper thing to do is when you see someone carrying a large cross across the outback of America. Do you give him licorice or a crown of thorns?
I'm not sure what kind of crazy or divine (or crazy and divine) motivation put that long-haired beatific man under that cross on a Friday afternoon in the heart of Oregon, but in a country where 50 million people watch "American Idol" at the same time, I felt nothing but admiration for the blue highways pilgrim and his grail quest.
The other day I had the impulse to buy a big touring motorcycle. Does Bobcat Co. make a road bike?
You can hear the sense of joy and expectation in the journal entry of Meriwether Lewis on the day when the Corps of Northwestern Discovery finally threw off its winter sedentariness and got back on the road, April 7, 1805.
"We were now about to penetrate a country at least two thousand miles in width," Lewis wrote, "on which the foot of civilized man had never trodden ... entertaining as I do the most confident hope of succeeding in a voyage which had formed a darling project of mine for the last ten years, I could but esteem this moment of our departure as among the most happy of my life."
I know that feeling - toward the end of the first day of driving, when you've gotten into a smooth road rhythm and the car is running perfectly, and you are awake in a way you haven't been awake in a long time, drinking in the majesty of America, not quite sure just where, and you realize that you could drive evermore in that perfect zone.
Out in the Thunder Basin of Wyoming, between Gillette and Casper, the tribal homeland of the pronghorn antelope, it is still possible to wonder just how much the "foot of civilized man" has trodden the grass and sage. Which is why we go there. Somewhere between Havre and Browning the West will swallow up all your cares and give you a momentary sense that anything is still possible.
Unfortunately for my sense of contentment, just at this time, for accidental (?) reasons, I'm reading the greatest of all American road novels, Jack Kerouac's "On The Road" (1957). If you haven't read it, give yourself that pleasure. It's one of the foundation texts of the Beat Generation and there is no other book that gets so close to the heart of the American trinity of car, freedom and the open road.
"On The Road" contains possibly the single best road sentence ever, a sad Tocquevillian utterance that gets to the heart of the essential restlessness of the American spirit.
"Whither goest thou, America, in thy shiny car in the night?"
This State's Weather is Defined by the Wind
by Clay Jenkinson
May 10, 2009
Canoeing the Little Missouri River last weekend on a windy (and I mean windy) afternoon, I asked two of my closest friends how many "perfect" days we have per annum in North Dakota. My friends - a couple - are deep, insightful, ideal North Dakotans, lifers, who love this place with all their hearts. They get it that North Dakota has a raw and at times brutal climate, and it doesn't bother them much. They'd never be snowbirds, even if they won the lottery.
It would be interesting to know what percentage of our population would flee the harsh months if they had the means. It would be equally interesting to know what percentage of the population actually does bolt for Florida, Arizona and California sometime after Halloween when the season of "iron desolation" comes to the northern Plains. Then compare those percentages to Colorado or Hawaii. Or even Nebraska.
What is a perfect day in North Dakota? That, of course, depends on the eye of the beholder, but we can all agree that it means something like: blue in the sky, clarity in the air, nothing that could be called a wind and temperature not a factor. That allows for perfect winter days, when jackets or coats are necessary, along with proper gloves and footwear, but Aeolus, the Greek god of wind, has tied up all the winds in his leather bag. I've experienced a handful of perfect days at 15 below zero - so long as there is no perceptible wind, not even a tendril or a whiff - when a kind of cosmic peace has come to blanket the Great Plains and you could stand in Pembina and hear a beer can drop in Marmarth. Actually, those are among my favorite North Dakota days.
Answering my question in the middle of the wind-stymied Little Missouri River, one of my friends said "30 perfect days per year." The other, "No, that's too few." Then the conversation broke down, as we fought like Argonauts to keep our canoes in the river against a wind that was determined to throw us up onto the shore. This is not an exaggeration. We literally spent the day doing everything in our power to keep our canoes in the river. At any given time, one of our four canoes was careening into the riverbank, while its churning helpless paddlers cried out in protest like Job.
In North Dakota, you have to factor in the possibility that the June wedding, the August family reunion or the fall picnic will be ruined by wind or a sudden cold front. Any given day in the calendar can be appalling, including during the North Dakota summer. No ceremonial function or event can be planned here with assurance that the "weather will cooperate," as we like to put it. The Fourth of July can be magnificently hot, bright, brassy and blue - on the river or at the lake - followed in perfect slow motion by a sweet gentling of the light and heat around sunset, so that you sit around the fire or grill in the ever-so-slight chill, sipping something in animal contentment and eating just one brat too many as you wait for fireworks. On nights in the heart of summer when the tangerine and charcoal dusk lingers for a couple of hours, you want almost to swoon with joy. Those are the nights you truly wish would never end.
Just as often, Fourth of July can sandblast you right over into Minnesota like a tumbleweed, with a gusty, thrumming, incessant, blasting wind that propels you into a sour mood, especially when your mother or brother - whoever is in charge of holding things together - says, "Well, let's just make the best of it. Put those cinder blocks on the corners of the table cloth."
It's really all about the wind. I'm always amused when my fellow North Dakotans say, "I like everything about this place except the wind." That's like saying, "I like everything about church except the sermon," or "I like everything about coffee except the taste." If you don't like wind, you don't really like North Dakota. If you live for those few days per year when North Dakota's weather is limpid and perfect - we all love those days and store them up in our souls - you really love the "California" in North Dakota rather than the "North Dakota" in North Dakota, if that makes any sense.
North Dakota is a stark, windswept, treeless place where on any given day, chosen at random, the temperature is probably between 20 and 60 degrees, when there is at least a breeze and just as often a gale force wind, The most significant factor in North Dakota life is that you can never allow yourself to forget climate and weather. There is no day in the year when you might not need a coat. When you start out on an auto trip any time between October and June, you have to consult the paper or almanac, then gaze around at the sky and wonder what might blow in when you least expect it. More than most other folks, we North Dakotans live in nature and pay it the respect it demands.
That shapes us in really important ways. There is grit and pit on our windshields and our souls.
Without wanting to seem like Pollyanna, I like to look at our rawboned climate through the other end of the lens. How many undeniably awful days do we have per year, when the wind blows like a son of a gun and makes it impossible to think straight, when you find yourself getting frustrated and emotionally exhausted whether you wish to or not? On how many days do you huddle inside listening to the grit pitting your windshield or the windows of your house? Odd though it seems, I love to listen to that insect-like Dakota sandblast of snow or sand, as long as I'm inside, though it always makes me wonder how well my property values are holding up. On how many days does the inside of your car howl and whistle (like a trumpet) no matter how good the door and window seals?
In my calculus - or mythology - there are approximately 325 perfect days per year in North Dakota. I like my North Dakota visceral, not a scene out of Bride's or Sunset Magazine.
Besides, when our canoe trip finally came to an end, a splendid Badlands ranch couple was waiting with wine and cheese and the best beefsteaks you ever ate.
Half of their savor came from the wind.
Fort Union in the footsteps of Karl Bodmer
by Clay Jenkinson
May 3, 2009
When Lewis and Clark visited these parts in 1804-06, they brought along a blacksmith and a carpenter, a sign language interpreter and a mapmaker (Clark), but they did not bring an artist. It was a military reconnaissance mission into unknown and potentially dangerous territory and there was literally no room for nonessential personnel.
The captains needed every ounce of every man's thew and sinew to propel the Corps of Discovery to the Pacific Coast. I don't know how many Evinrude outboard motors would be required to propel a clunky keelboat and 30 tons of baggage up against the pre-dam currents of the Missouri River, but since not even steamboats existed in 1804, Lewis and Clark crossed the continent on behalf of President Jefferson on the backs and thighs of their doughty men. Even expedition commander Meriwether Lewis had to double up as specimen collector, celestial navigator, diplomat and field scientist.
A good visual artist was a luxury Lewis and Clark could not afford. Not that they weren't aware of the gap this left in their record of the journey. After he "discovered" the Great Falls of the Missouri River on June 13, 1805, Meriwether Lewis - who was an outstanding writer - did his best to pen a description of the principal waterfall of the Missouri River, "which has from the commencement of time been concealed from the view of civilized man."
Today's readers know he succeeded, but Lewis was convinced that he had failed to capture the essence of what he called "this truly magnificent and sublimely grand object." He lamented that he did not have the talent of a good landscape artist like the 17th century painter Salvator Rosa. Even at that moment, when he felt like a complete failure, Lewis does not say he wished he had brought an artist on the journey - he wished instead that he had artistic talent.
One generation after Lewis and Clark, the Enlightenment ethnographer Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied in Germany (1782-1867) visited the Upper Missouri. He was self-consciously traveling in the wake of Lewis and Clark, with their journals and maps in his rucksack. Unlike Jefferson's muscular proteges, he was a traveler, not an explorer. He was not opening new country but buying a ride on a fur-trade steamboat on a transportation infrastructure that was well established. Payload was not an issue. Cottonwood-powered steam was doing the work. He had the luxury of bringing an artist into the wildest country of the continent.
That artist was Swiss-born Karl Bodmer (1809-1893), arguably the greatest artist ever to paint the Missouri River and the Great Plains. You can see his artwork in books or online, or (better yet) at the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center at Washburn, where all 81 of Bodmer's magnificent aquatints are on display this year.
Last Sunday, I had the pleasure of taking a group of about 40 history lovers on a loopy bus journey to faraway Fort Union, the reconstructed American Fur Co. trade fort located on the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers, 25 miles southwest of Williston. Although Fort Union was at one time one of the most significant outposts in the North American fur trade, it is now isolated and lonely. It's one of those places you have to want to go to, because nobody just bumbles into it on the way to somewhere else. The giant, splayed-out rolling hills and breaks country around Fort Union is to the rest of North Dakota what North Dakota is to ... say, New York or Massachusetts.
Our goal was to climb to something called Bodmer's Overlook, recently developed by the Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site. At the summit of a bosomy hill a mile or so north of Fort Union, you can literally stand where Bodmer stood in 1833 when he painted his famous watercolor of the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone rivers.
It was a gray but sometimes luminescent day, blousy, bordering on windy. Big sky - bigger than Montana's, for all the PR boasting of our bully neighbor to the west. The clouds pillowed the whole sky from horizon to horizon without a single blue break or oculus, big dramatic but not threatening clouds, clouds so prominent and beautiful that they force themselves into your view and refuse to be mere backdrop.
The sky toyed with drizzling a couple of times, but nobody got even slightly wet. The temperature was somewhere around 40 degrees - chilly but by no means cold or even disagreeable. The endlessly receding grass was still brown and gray after the brutal winter, but you could see (actually it was more like feeling than seeing) that it was about to pop into Ireland green.
On the bus from New Town to Fort Union, we kept saying, as helpless as Meriwether Lewis, "welcome to Bodmer's America." It's as if God borrowed Bodmer's aquatints when he fashioned the landscape.
It takes about 30 minutes to climb the trail to the summit. After establishing a base camp on the first knoll, we distributed a dram of chocolate to each pilgrim and made the final ascent.
Bodmer's Overlook is one of the half dozen most magical places in North Dakota. The vastness and openness and endlessness and treelessness and windsweptness and end of the universe-ness of that lavishly rolling grassland in that outlier corner of North Dakota is almost unbelievable.
Even to a North Dakotan who loves big open "empty" country, it's foreboding and a little frightening. It feels like it might swallow you up. In fact, it does swallow you up - in a way that makes you feel thrilled and apprehensive at the same time. You cannot be there and not be made aware of the "littleness of man," and temporaryness of your existence. It's a buffalo commons where even buffalo might glance around a little uneasy.
Everyone went silent as we gazed down on two of the world's great rivers as they folded into each other. Our corps of discovery moved instinctively together into a little cluster on that remote hill, which is at once the center of North America and the edge of nowhere. From where we stood, the fort on the brink of the river looked like a popsicle stick model in a diorama the size of Wyoming.
It was a perfect moment in a perfect place on a perfect day. I'm planning to return again and again as long as I can hike, and like Coleridge's ancient mariner, I've been singing the praises of Fort Union country to anyone who will listen.
This is why we live here.
She Should Have Said 'World Peace' and 'An End to Cancer'
by Clay Jenkinson
April 26, 2009
The flap over Miss California's refusal to endorse same sex marriage at the Miss USA pageant may seem frivolous in the face of the 10th anniversary of the Columbine High School shootings, the worldwide economic collapse, the eight-year jail term imposed on Fargo-born journalist Roxana Saberi by the Iranian courts or former Vice President Dick Cheney's latest defense of torture.
Last week's beauty pageant flap was frivolous and intensely serious at the same time.
In retrospect, 10 or 20 years from now, I believe the 2009 Miss USA controversy will be regarded as a pivotal moment in the history of American civil rights - not on substance, but as a kind of pop cultural marker of the rapid transformation of American society on the question of homosexuality.
It seems to me inevitable that the rights of gay people will receive wider and wider legislative and judicial endorsement; that the national movement to protect gay rights is accelerating almost beyond our capacity to keep up; that in fact the doors are about to be blown off the remaining restrictions on consensual gay activity. By 2025, I believe, most states will have legalized gay marriage, including North Dakota. Long before that, I believe the U.S. Supreme Court will decide, following the logic of the recent unanimous Iowa Supreme Court decision (Varnum v. Brien, April 3, 2009) that there is "no rational basis" for outlawing gay marriage, and that the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution necessitates the legalization of both civil union and gay marriage, and the outlawing of any discrimination against sexual orientation and consensual activity. (To anticipate the bloggers: yes, I realize that bigamy lurks somewhere down that slippery slope.)
Some readers will be appalled by this prediction. Others elated. We can disagree until we are blue in the face about just what marriage signifies -in biblical, social or moral terms. We can debate the precise mix of tradition, sacrament and procreation in our personal or national concepts of marriage. We can puzzle over the bizarre frontier of church and state (Christian wedding and legal contract) in the American institution of marriage. And we can - if we wish to throw away our time - try to decide whether homosexuality is mostly nature or mostly nurture.
The plain truth is that in the course of my lifetime I have witnessed the essential normalization of homosexuality. When I voted for the first time, in 1973, except in a few anxious urban enclaves, gay people lived marginal and furtive lives in a world in which the majority culture was widely ignorant, bigoted and hostile. I have witnessed the almost unbelievable pain that social and legal stigmatization caused in North Dakota's gay community - clinical depression, double lives, social-front marriages. Today, as the slightest contact with the primetime television spectrum proves, or contemporary literature, music, film, theater or for that matter politics, most formerly anxious Americans (I certainly was one of them) have come to the point where they have shrugged their shoulders and decided that gayness is essentially harmless, surprisingly close at hand, and no threat to civilization.
Much progress, much more to come. And yet as the gay stigma moves toward collapse, including in the heartland, it is important to insist upon respect for those who are still wrestling with the new face of American life. Legal tolerance is not necessarily the same as social and moral endorsement. Which brings us to Miss USA.
Now that beauty pageants take themselves seriously as scholarship and leadership mills - a kind of national town forum in bikinis and spike heels - bosomy, bubbly social philosophers are asked to articulate an exit strategy in Iraq, formulate nuclear containment policy against the whimsies of North Korea and re-fashion the American health care system.
It's an insane burden - to force a young woman packed into heels and a push-up bra, who practices a patriotic drum and fife solo by day and tries to determine the minimum number of calories required to sustain life by night, to weigh in on geopolitics or medical ethics on live national television. It's even more insane to punish her when she gives the "wrong answer" or speaks authentically from her heart.
When Miss California Carrie Prejean was asked if the same-sex marriage laws of Vermont and three others states should be extended nationwide, she replied, "I think it's great that Americans are able to choose one or the other ... same sex marriage or opposite marriage," then added, "I believe that marriage should be between a man and a woman ... that's how I was raised."
Whether you agree with her conclusion or not, her answer was thoughtful and diplomatic. She began by celebrating American freedom and diversity. Then she did what most politicians and many beauty pageant contestants refuse to do: She actually answered the question, grounding it in what she described as her idea of America and her family's values. After that, fully aware that she had been forced by a biased pageant judge into a no-win situation, she said, "No offense to anyone out there."
Ms. Prejean believes her answer cost her the crown. I wouldn't be too sure - it's a beauty pageant, after all, where a misplaced wink or the shadow of a hint of a glimpse of cellulite can morph mascara into rivulets of shame. Still, the aftermath has become a predictable parable of the End Time through which we seem to be living. Prejean has been roundly denounced by some commentators for her "offensive" and "intolerant" and "deeply hurtful" answer (huh?!), at the same time she has become, overnight, the crowned queen of "Sean Hannity's America."
Is it too early to predict that Ms. Prejean will be considered as a possible running mate for Sarah Palin's 2012 presidential bid - on the so-called "Brains and Beauty" ticket? Bring your own coin.
My daughter and I are reading Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." The other night I watched Philip Seymour Hoffman's magical performance in "Capote," the 2005 film about what then would have been called a "flaming homosexual's" improbable 1960s excursion into the red, red heartland to write about the murder of a farm family near Holcomb, Kan. Somehow western Kansans came to terms with the flamboyant but brilliant Capote. He went on to write one of the great books of the 20th century.
I urge you to see the film. The Capote story is a parable about American social transformation much greater than a beauty pageant faux pas.
The Rites of Spring: White Carp Loose Among our Streets
by Clay Jenkinson
April 19, 2009
The moveable feast of Easter was perfectly set for North Dakota this year. It was the precise line of demarcation between winter and spring 2009. I went to Kansas to visit my daughter for the holy day. When I left Friday morning the snow, though diminished, still covered my big backyard. It was snirty and heading toward the consistency of a soiled snow cone, but it looked as if it might linger until June. When I returned Monday afternoon, it was entirely gone. Just like that. And none of it in my basement.
The snowpack in my backyard was so vast this winter that at one point I nearly bought a Bobcat - to conduct "preventative trenching" and become "a snow emergency hero in my neighborhood." The fact is that like nearly all men, I yearn for a Bobcat. It's all that's left of my dream of life. The fact that I have absolutely no reason to own one does not diminish the craving. For one brief shining moment in February, it seemed to me that I could justify owning one - a spanking new one with lots of attachments and the inevitable trailer - to save my house from flooding. (And my neighbors' houses, I quipped sanctimoniously). Somehow good sense returned. Thanks to a generous friend, I obtained a snowblower on the black market instead, at a time when they were as rare as a unicorn. It is now, except for cars, my most serious industrial object. I know the upshot: The snow blower's gleaming hopeful existence in my garage virtually assures a decade of dry and open winters in North Dakota.
I have good news and bad news about my garden, which is visible for the first time since November. The good news is that I did not, in fact, leave my rototiller out all winter, at the spot where it ran out of gas on that Saturday afternoon when it seemed as if Indian summer would last forever. The bad news is that the retreat of the snow has revealed a real mess of rusted-out coffee can tomato shields, strewn about in a most un-Jeffersonian manner, hoses and sprinklers, a perpendicular pitchfork with a snow-line clearly visible about 4 inches from the top, and other detritus of a grasshopper's lifestyle. Ah, but there are already green shoots of voluntary (or leftover) onions and garlic.
If the Btus come soon and hard enough, I predict that this will be a bumper crop year for tomatoes. Last year, for me, was just so-so. Against my garden partner's strenuous protests, I'm intending 73 tomato plants this year, and I'm going to lay in a box of Mason jars every time I go to the grocery store between now and September.
Every evening now in my neighborhood, folks are inventing reasons to be outside doing stuff: picking up trash that had been mummified by the snowpack, raking and in some cases combing the sand from their boulevards into the street, trying to jack their supine mailboxes back to vertical, bouncing balls and practicing golf swings, hosing the grit from the porch and driveway, and even washing their SUVs by hand. People are wearing shorts when we all know it is not really shorts weather yet. If anyone doubts that this is a Nordic enclave at the top of the nation, just walk through any subdivision after supper and observe the flashes of blinding white flesh that has not seen the sun for six months. We all look like the underside of humanoid carp. And it is sadly clear that we have let ourselves go during the long winter.
It's delightful that these rites of spring so far do not involve the internal combustion engine. We are in that glorious interlude between the muffled and huddled winter and the obsessive drone of summer lawn care. People are actually leaning on rakes and talking to their neighbors, so glad are we to be able to spend as much time as we want outside after work.
I want to ride the gazillion dollar bike my friend Melanie made me buy. The salesman, her friend, realizing that the famous triathlete was talking Mr. Schlump into buying a bicycle worthy of Lance Armstrong, actually asked me if I wanted streamers for it. There are two problems, however. I don't dare open my garage door for fear that the mountain of stuff I literally threw into the maw - in the dark, wind howling, at 20 or more below zero - throughout the winter will cascade down on me like a closet in a sitcom. And, as far as I can remember, I wrecked the tire pump when I used it to prop open the hood of my Jeep on several of the occasions when I had to jumpstart the engine.
I've been trying to run after a winter of appalling torpor. At 54, the old snap and resilience of my body is a bittersweet memory. As I lug my carcass down the street, I feel like a freight train powered by a Ford Pinto engine or a tugboat powered by an old D-cell battery you find at the back of a drawer in the laundry room. I no longer prance along scoria roads and ridgelines, but merely jog around the block - it is a big block - so that if I collapse I won't have very far to crawl home. Normally I disdain running to music because it interferes with my reverie with nature, but this spring I have been listening at high decibel to the Beatles on an iPod merely to drown out my wheezing. It feels as if I am running in medieval chain mail and armor, on lead legs. There are moments, startlingly frequent, when I literally think, "Oh the hell with it, I'll just sit in a Barcalounger and give up altogether. The terminally sedentary life is much under-rated."
I drove to Dickinson and back on Tuesday. The snow was entirely gone except in heavily shaded places, and the countryside was as drab and gray and lifeless as it can ever be. Ah, but there was bright blue water running in every coulee, creek, stream and culvert. The geese honked lustily high overhead as they chevroned towards the North Pole.
In the next few weeks the land of North Dakota is going to burst back to life as if the world were just emerging from the Great Flood - which is precisely what has happened.
Easter: Among other Things, the Return of the Light
by Clay Jenkinson
April 12, 2009
Because we've had a sockdolager of a winter - long, windy, often bitterly cold, perhaps unprecedentedly snowy - most of us are feeling a little cabin feverish. Our North Dakota spring is finally showing signs of shaking off slumber and trying to get in sync with the "official" spring season, which began 23 days ago (March 20).
Have you noticed how deeply the returning light has cut into the long dark winter night of the northern Great Plains? If I had a fatted calf, I'd sacrifice it now to the returning light. Theodore Roosevelt's "season of iron desolation" is at last ending - although at this point, it would not surprise us much if nature threw one or two more cheap shots at us as we lean on our knees fighting for air.
The Christian meaning of Easter is the more profound for its echo of festivals of return, renewal and "resurrection" that predate Judaism by untold millennia.
Time for first sightings of the pasqueflower (the crocus) and the erotic dance of the prairie chicken.
I love the light. I love the annual return of light. But can we please slow down the locomotive of the summer equinox (June 21, 12:45 a.m. CDT) this year and linger in late spring just a little? Some of the best moments of the North Dakota year come on the evenings of the next month when we find ourselves commenting, out loud, in shirtsleeves, a little chilly but not quite willing to fetch a jacket, on how late it is light, how the sunsets are creeping up toward 9 p.m., how the day seems willfully to be holding out against the darkness.
Because the winter has been so formidable, I have felt pretty disconnected from the landscape of our homeland. For months it has been hard to get out, hard to get around, hard to stay out very long. Last Tuesday, to my mind, was the first truly magnificent day of 2009: 50-some degrees, a spring breeze this side of wind, open skies, wild decibels of light. It would have taken shackles to keep me indoors.
My friend Leon and I have been talking about a project involving buttes (of all things) for more than a year. On Tuesday, when cabin fever and spring fever converged, we dropped everything and flew over southwestern North Dakota in his single-engine airplane. He's a pilot, an artist and a lover of North Dakota's back country.
We flew from the Mandan municipal airport to magnificent Marmarth and back again, at 3,000 feet, zipping from butte to butte as in some absurd connect the dot project. We circled the bigger, more dramatic buttes to photograph them from every possible angle.
Our headset conversation, aside from a sliver of air traffic compliance, and "Could you circle that one again?" was like a Chatty Cathy on steroids, hepped up on the glory of North Dakota. "Wow." "That is an incredibly beautiful butte." "Can you believe the quality of light today?" "I don't think I have ever seen the countryside look so gorgeous." "Oh my goodness, would you mind zipping over to that one?" "Look at the way the snow brings that butte face into relief?"
Our madcap itinerary took us from Crown Butte (2,321 feet high) to the Schollaert Hills (near Almont) to Heart Butte (2,509 - never more beautiful) to Pearl Butte (2,828, south of Lefor) to East and West Rainy Buttes (North Dakota's most classical buttes, 3,356 and 3,347) to White Butte (at 3,506, the summit of North Dakota). Then to Black Butte (3,465), Pretty Butte (stunning, in spite of its inadequate name, at 3,182), and of course, the butte of buttes, the mother of all buttes, the butte that changes the course of the Little Missouri River ...
Bullion Butte.
If there were only one butte, it would have to be Bullion (3,336). We circled it until we were dizzy. We were effectively too close to do it justice with photography, so huge is its footprint, so wide its reach, so complex its system of feeder and tributary buttes. We gazed in ecstasy at the sharp Teepee Buttes that are a part of its massive south face. We buzzed my favorite North Dakota resort, the Logging Camp Ranch, nestled into North Dakota's sole pine forest. We flew in awestruck silence over the endless elongated tight looping oxbows of the Little Missouri River as it searches for a way to get around Bullion Butte and resume its northerly journey to the mainstem Missouri near Halliday. We saw - and grappled, up close and personal - with the geology of the alluvial plain of the Rocky Mountains.
It just felt fabulous to be alive on such a day in such a place.
We noted a score of places we intend to visit by car, by four-wheel drive, on foot. Always in part, at least, on foot. Because of the long Laura Ingalls Wilder winter, I plan to make this the most intensely active summer of my life - at least since, when the world was all before me at the age of 8, I built forts and played sandlot ball with my boyhood pals, eons ago in Dickinson. I plan to picnic on public access buttes, to lie in the grass of flattop buttes and gaze indolently into the sky, to "loaf and invite my soul," as the poet Walt Whitman phrased it.
We formulated a handful of observations from 3,000 feet.
North Dakota is anything but flat, especially west and south of the Missouri River. It is, in fact, a jumble of rolling broken land, a maze of complex contours, punctuated by spectacular box buttes. Thus far the human footprint on the land is relatively modest. The plains landscape is not what it once was, but there is a seemingly infinite array of country all spread out in every direction. The ribbons of scoria, blacktop and concrete roads are a slender gossamer, the farmsteads and villages and industrial structures are widely diffused, and - frankly - not very intrusive.
There are a dozen unnamed buttes for every one with a sobriquet.
There is still a lot of snow to melt. This is going to be one of the greenest summers ever, and the grass will flourish until we cry in joy.
The Heart River is a really beautiful stream, much underrated as plains rivers go.
But the Little Missouri is the sinuous signature of God.
Happy Easter.
The Agony of Being Away at Such a Moment
by Clay Jenkinson
April 5, 2009
By the time you read this, I will be safely back in North Dakota after a two-week cruise through the Panama Canal. Well, maybe. Given the winter we have been experiencing, surely one of the wildest in North Dakota history, nothing is entirely predictable anymore. If we are not boarded by pirates at Cabo San Lucas, if our good ship does not sink after scraping a reef along Baja California, if the coastal lands west of San Bernardino do not plop, chucked by the San Andreas fault into the Pacific Ocean, if there is not an air traffic controller strike in San Diego or Denver to test this generation’s resolute president, if we are not all beset by yellow fever or Legionaires’ disease, I will be home by the time you read this.
And mighty glad to be home.
Meanwhile, I have begun studying the book of Revelation. Is it the fifth or the sixth seal that has now been opened on the northern plains? If locusts descend upon Langdon or Linton this summer, we’ll know for sure that it’s the end time.
To be far, far away and incapable of being even minimally useful during one of the most intense fortnights in modern North Dakota history has been one of the most difficult experiences of my life. Throughout our voyage, I have thought of the helpless frustration of families of soldiers whose sons and daughters are in harm’s way at the other end of the planet, or soldiers in end-of-the-Earth postings helplessly worrying about their wives, children, siblings or parents back in flooded, blizzarded North Dakota.
My daughter, my mother, my closest friends and my house are high and dry. For all of us, that is the main thing. But not the only thing.
I’ve been devouring what e-mail, CNN International and quick, but informative, phone calls can provide about the state of things in North Dakota.
My friends have warned that I will need to shovel my way into my house — not for the first time this winter.
Half a dozen times in two weeks I have lectured about Theodore Roosevelt’s conviction that the credit in life belongs not to the critic, “but to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood.” These lectures have been delivered by a man whose face is marred principally by Caribbean sunburn, who is not anywhere near the arena, but rather on a cruise ship listening to round two of a shipwide karaoke contest.
Time to rethink my life. Again.
We undertake journeys to see other places and other cultures in order to learn something about ourselves.
Here’s what I’ve learned.
1. Timing is everything. There is nothing wrong with a Panama Cruise — it’s thrilling, the trip of a lifetime — but when Bismarck is enduring its only significant post-Garrison deluge, and Fargo is hanging on by a thread of sandbags, one’s only true duty is to be on hand to contribute one’s might. To be absent is to be worthless — and in a sense meaningless.
The fact is — and in this I do not think I speak only of myself — that I have spent most of my life on the periphery, peering in with a bewildered and semi-detached bemusement. Life is not something I live, but rather mostly observe. And yet I feel pretty certain that this is the only life I am likely to get.
2. If home means anything, then home is the place you go when there is nowhere else to turn, when you need the deepest infusion of love and place and security, when the most fundamental issues are at stake. And in return for that, when home needs you, whether it is bypass surgery or cancer or the flood of 1997 or 2009, you get yourself there as quickly as possible and do whatever you can. On those occasions when home is synonymous with community, the American dream finally means something more than prosperity and property.
3. Leadership in crisis is important, and we have seen it in the response of the mayors and councils of Fargo and Bismarck, in the initiatives of the governor and in the style and substance of our three superb national figures, but the plain truth is that almost all of the credit belongs to the countless thousands of unnamed, but not nameless, individuals who have filled and hefted sandbags, taken each other in in extremity, patrolled the dikes, performed what the poet William Wordsworth called “little unremembered acts” for perfect strangers. The North Dakota heroes of 2009 have a common name: “Anonymous.”
When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled America in 1832, what impressed him most were the voluntary associations and the nongovernment initiatives of the American people. When something needed to be done, Tocqueville wrote, people just turned up and set to work. Unquestionably, that spirit is still alive on the plains of North Dakota 177 years later. Democracy at its best is a spontaneous act.
The last two weeks have shown North Dakota at its finest. There is something so noble and meaningful in the way people just turned up at the Bismarck Civic Center and Fargodome merely because there was a thing that needed to be done, because they loved North Dakota and did not want to see it hurt. We all yearn all of our lives to be part of something larger than ourselves. These moments seldom come. When they come they redeem everything.
4. Perhaps North Dakota is a windswept, uncool, isolated, backwater place far from the hot corridors of American life, but it is absolutely superb in a crisis. The simplest Katrina-North Dakota comparison fills you with pride until you want to burst. Still, we must not embrace this moment in smugness or a sense of superiority, but with the dream that life in all of America could still be what North Dakota has been in the last two weeks, violence-free, un-looted, ego-less, profoundly responsive, a common experience in the fullest finest sense of the term.
To have missed that is to have missed everything, even if my basement and window wells prove to be dry as Sahara. There is no crepe suezette or fruo fruo drink — or even wonder of the world — that can measure up to that.
I am so glad to be coming home.
The Agony of Being Away at Such a Moment
by Clay Jenkinson
March 22, 2009
This is one of the oddest and in some ways most unsettling moments I can remember. It's Wednesday, March 25, 2009. I'm sitting on the deck of the Holland America cruise ship the Statendam, in the middle of the Panama Canal. We are taking a shortcut through the Western Hemisphere at its narrowest isthmus (50 miles) on a journey that began six days ago in Fort Lauderdale and will end a week from now in San Diego.
It's a slow-motion, 14-day journey from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast through one of the engineering wonders of the world.
Stop the ship, I want to get off.
Communications are pretty primitive on these cruise ships in the middle of nowhere, and almost unbelievably expensive. Three quarters of the Earth is ocean, and the cell towers are widely spaced. I'm traveling with people who are news and communication junkies, anxious caffeinated folks never far from their cell phones, laptops and BlackBerry devices, and yet the overwhelming feel on a cruise ship is of being in Never Never Land, where one eats to excess half a dozen times per day, watches a ventriloquist with a duck one night and highlights from "Mama Mia" the next, and saunters through island port towns in search of a Senor Frog chain restaurant or a $45 Rolex watch.
Although I am accustomed to talking with my daughter every day, I have called her only once so far, at $16 per minute. The onboard Internet is expensive and frustratingly intermittent. We are, in many respects, cut off from our known world. I'm concerned, in fact, about whether I will be able to e-mail this dispatch to Tribune Opinion Editor Ken Rogers.
The Staatendam is carrying 1,200 or so passengers on what is, after all, nothing more than a mid-winter lark. Sixty-five of us are part of a Satrom Travel cultural tour: Panama in the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt.
Most of our group lives in North Dakota.
We are all in a low-level panic. If there were any way off this ship and access to an airport, at least a quarter of our group would depart now, from the middle of the Panama Canal.
Half a world away from home, we are hearing sketchy and horrific reports, shreds of disjointed information, about ice jams just north and just south of Bismarck, evacuations of Fox Island and Southport, Corps of Engineers plans to dynamite the ice dams, and 2 million sandbags in Fargo. Someone at breakfast said it is possible that the Kirkwood Mall could be flooded. Somebody else said he'd heard that the spigot of Garrison Dam has been completely turned off.
At the same time, we hear crazy rumors of a wild spring blizzard that has closed the Interstate west of Mandan. Family members of several of our cruise participants have reportedly spent the last two nights stuck somewhere away from their homes.
Simultaneous blizzard and flood. In North Dakota, this must be a very intense drama. Out here, in our Panamanian limbo, it sounds like the Apocalypse.
It's 80 degrees here, brilliantly sunny. On each side of the Canal Zone is a virtually impenetrable jungle - oppressive foliage in oppressive humidity. The Statendam is ambling towards the Pacific Ocean at about three miles per hour. This is a part of the world utterly alien from the tawny treelessness of the Great Plains.
Someone just rushed in to the ship's library and Internet cafe to say the President of the United States has declared all of North Dakota to be a disaster area.
People spend a whole lifetime dreaming of a trip through the Panama Canal. My thoroughly grounded friend Jim said his transit last year was one of the highlights of his life. We've spent the past five days talking about the industrial ingenuity of the canal, which cuts 7,800 miles off a ship's journey from Seattle to New York. We've spent hours discussing America's role in the revolution that birthed the Republic of Panama in 1903. We've laughed at Roosevelt's jingoistic high-handedness in declaring, years later, in Berkeley, Calif., that "I took Panama," and his wild boast that instead of proposing the project to the Senate and letting that august body debate the merits of the canal for 50 years, he just did it himself by executive action and left the Senate to debate him instead. We've had a fairly sharp debate about Jimmy Carter's wisdom in 1977 of initiating the retrocession of the canal to the Panama. The majority of our group believes Carter did the right thing, but the minority have passionately (and loudly) repeated the refrain, "We stole it fair and square!"
The homes of at least six of our fellow North Dakota passengers are now at least partly underwater in Bismarck and Mandan, and there is absolutely nothing they can do about it except wish we were already in San Diego.
Our cruise is not ruined. Those directly afflicted are surprisingly stoical. They point out that there is little they could do about this calamity even if they were looking at their flooded homes through binoculars rather than through what amounts to our tin can on a string communication system.
But for all of us there is a shadow now over our winter holiday in the Caribbean. At a time like this of world economic chaos, in which even the best-insulated people feel an economic uncertainty they thought they would never again experience, a vacation of this sort creates a little internal itch of guilt and anxiety.
Now add this: To be away from our precious prairie home state at a moment of once-in-a-lifetime drama, makes us all feel helpless - unbelievably helpless - and a little frivolous, too.
Where were you during the perfect storm of the ice jam blizzard flood of 2009? Oh, we were on a cruise through the Panama Canal.
Unless this is a 10,000-year flood, my house is high and mostly dry, I presume. Still, I'd give anything to be home today.
I've been power-walking like a lab rat in endless circles around the ship's deck to avoid, on homecoming, the wrath of my trainer friend Melanie.
Pointless circles, if you think about it. I'd infinitely rather be hefting sandbags along the lower Heart.
The confessions of Rip Van Concertgoer
by Clay Jenkinson
March 22, 2009
My friends invited me to ride with them to Fargo last Sunday to hear the Eagles, a rock band that flourished back in the 1970s. I said yes, not because I am an Eagles fan, but because I wanted to see what a concert of aging rockers singing to aging boomers would signify.
At eight o'clock sharp, bandleader Glenn Frey welcomed us all to the "Assisted Living Tour" of the legendary Eagles. "We are the ancient ones, the ones that wouldn't die," he said. We, the ancient ones in the crowd, roared our approval, throwing our backs out in the process.
I've only been to a handful of rock concerts in the course of my life, decades ago, and my memory was of a miasma of blue haze in the arena, perfectly appalling loudness, widespread wastedness, the sweet aroma of marijuana wafting about from various directions, and the dazed ecstatic audience silhouetted like a stoned Milky Way of glowing cigarettes, joints and Bic lighters.
Alas. Sometime between 1973 and 2009 the world changed, and I apparently was asleep as usual.
For three hours, the Eagles, represented by lead singers Frey and Don Henley, lead guitarist Joe Walsh, and Timothy B. Schmit on bass, played a live "best of the Eagles" concert, interspersed with a handful of new songs from their 2007 "Long Road Out of Eden" album. The new songs were surprisingly good, but the audience was there not to hear contemporary creative artists actively exploring the world around them through music. No, we were there to open a time capsule of a period of American life that has faded almost to the vanishing point.
We were there to hear ghosts from our past. We were there to relive for one night the lost golden decade of our adolescence. We attended church services in the morning and an Eagles concert in the evening, and worked on our taxes in between. Was it live or was it Memorex?
The Fargodome's ushers were everywhere, and they were intrusive. They lessened the pleasure of the concert for everyone and ruined it for many. They were stern and graceless, professional killjoys, about as relaxed as presidential Secret Service men at an outdoor rally.
They kept everyone at their seats, in fact, in their seats, and they gave hushed stern lectures to anyone who let the music liberate their animal spirits. Is this a rock concert or the philharmonic, I wondered, as I watched grim security personnel do everything in their power to prevent a rock concert from being ... well, a rock concert. It was like being at a Kiwanis convention with light after-dinner entertainment by an Eagles knockoff band.
Rock 'n' roll is a form of anarchy. It is meant to be transgressive, to violate the "square" codes of the diurnal community, to liberate in everyone in the arena energies that we know are an important element in our being but which don't get out much.
We are meant to relax our self-control and let something out of the cage of civilization that we are a little sheepish about the following morning. Rock concerts are only rock concerts when otherwise responsible people boogie and air guitar and hip bang and high five and hug strangers or semi-strangers in a "We're all just one people, man!" sort of way.
Rock is unapologetically sexual. That's why, for a while, it freaked out our parents and childhood preachers. But it's a healthy, social sexuality that declares, at the top of our lungs and with bodies that literally cannot stand still, "We are animals, we're lusty and we're profoundly alive, and there are subterranean rhythms that we must loose into the world to remain authentic."
The music was loud but never deafening. The four Eagles themselves looked a little mottled as I observed them through my binoculars from the 10th row. At times they looked stiff and uncertain of just how to behave on stage, as if they were the retired parents of rock stars suddenly handed guitars in the middle of a charity concert.
Only when Walsh played guitar solos did the concert awaken those primal energies that are the heart of rock. When he wound himself up that the old magic was still there. He grimaced and frowned and contorted his frame and fingered his guitar and thrust it experimentally about the space in front of him in search of some elusive final ecstasy.
These are facial expressions and gesticulations that occur only in rock 'n' roll, some athletic activities and the bedroom. The crowd in the Fargodome was with Walsh twang by strum by grimace, many in uninhibited pantomime, and for a few glorious moments it might have been 1972.
A few rows in front of us was a group of six couples, all in their late 50s. They were handsome well-fed children of the 1960s, now clearly upstanding citizens. They were wonderfully expressive and light-hearted, wanting nothing more than to shrug off middle age for a night and revisit the all-but-forgotten freedom of adolescence. I enjoyed watching them as much as the concert.
The ushers browbeat these innocent citizens as if they were about to rush the stage with box cutters. One woman among them, the one most relaxed in the groove of memory, was so offended by the puritan usher that I thought she was going to pull up her shirt and flash him. It was not the exposure of cleavage that stopped her, I think, but the fear of midriff.
As we listened to "Take it to the Limit" and "Lyin' Eyes," I think everyone in that arena felt the percolation of the same set of questions. Where did our lives go? Why has everything since that time in American history been so much less marked by intensity and possibility? If we were that then, who are we now? Who would have thought I would ever cross the line into the realm of Social Security? How do we sort the mythology of our lives from the way we have actually chosen to live them? When will the last Beatle die, and what will it portend?
We filed out a little somberly, puzzling the echo of the last song the Eagles sang Sunday night in Fargo: "Desperado,you ain't gettin' no younger/Your pain and your hunger, they're drivin' you home ... you'd better let somebody love you, before it's too late."
Groundhog Seems to Have Died of Exposure
by Clay Jenkinson
March 15, 2009
My fingers are actually numb as I try to type this (mid-week). It's the Ides of March and it's 14 below this morning with enough wind to make it bite. I was up working (if reading can be called work) well before dawn, and when the sun came up at 8:03 a.m., bright and intensely yellow in a blue clear sky, I made the mistake of thinking it must be a typical March day with the temperature below freezing but well above zero.
Then I walked outside.
North Dakota hit me like a brickbat, because I was not expecting fierce cold, was not even minimally dressed for it, have not yet come to terms with daylight-saving time so early in the year. Oh my, this is a quite a winter.
A lingerer. It's not quite yet a doozie, but we can now see it from here. At this point, we may as well go for some appalling new records, including accumulated snowfall, that will seal our image in the nation's consciousness for this century.
My Honda did not want to start this morning. I regard this as mere attitude, a species of winter fatigue, since it is a Honda, and they always start no matter what. I've owned eight of them, never serviced one beyond oil and filters, and they have started unambiguously in the wildest weather the Arctic Circle can throw at us.
There are only a handful of certainties in life: death, taxes, that fleischkuekle is never as good as your dream of it and the reliability of Hondas. This is not intended as a commentary on the proposed government bailout of the Detroit auto industry, but think about it.
My Jeep is in the service bay half a dozen times per year at least. My Japanese Honda: occasional oil changes. My American Jeep: death by a thousand niggling repairs and a few major breakdowns.
I actually had to coax my Civic into life this morning and overcome a brief flooded engine crisis, and then it actually shut down, in a pique, at the first stop sign. That's when I noted minus-14 on the digital dashboard display.
My across-the-street neighbor, middle-aged like me, was out shoveling last evening as the temperature dropped and the wind started to flare up. It was the myth of Sisyphus for North Dakota. It was hard enough for her to loft the snow up over the 4-foot ridge that has accumulated at the edge of her driveway. But when she had thrown it over the heap, it blew right back into her face.
I soon realized how frustrating it must be for her to look over at her able-bodied neighbor, snug at his kitchen table, while she battled the Siberian elements. Now, I pride myself on being a sensitive guy, so I went and hid in another room.
My closest friends, lovers of North Dakota all, have been grumbling for the past few weeks, and no longer in a jocular manner. Enough already is the refrain. "This storm was the last straw," said one. "I've had just about enough winter for one year, thank you very much," said another, with a kind of crisp formal peevishness.
A third, who knows something about wildlife, told me that these are the late-season storms that kill off weaker members of the herds. "Their nutritional reserves are nearly spent, and their immune systems are fragile by the end of winter. A storm that would not have been serious in December decimates wildlife in March or April."
Frankly, that probably explains my Honda, too.
Have you noticed that people are getting a little irritable? Civility is ebbing away fast as we face the fact that we are having the longest boldest winter of recent memory. The incrementally longer days are the only sign that the winter cannot hang on forever.
Well, don't be too sure. The town of McKinney, in Renville County, now nearly defunct, recorded a temperature of 48 below in March 1897. Powers Lake endured 24 below in April 1975. And it was 3 below in Larimore in May 1967. I repeat, May! That's two months from now.
It can snow in North Dakota in every month except July and August, and temperatures below freezing have been recorded for all 12 months. At Manfred, in July 1911, the temperature dropped to 23 degrees. But at least it was above zero.
As I sat reflecting on this winter this morning, for the first time in my life I found myself thinking, "It would be possible for a grim, pessimistic and self-pitying person to wonder, in a moment of weakness, from a narrowly meteorological point of view, why any rational being would live in North Dakota, if she or he had a choice of places to live."
I'm ashamed even to articulate that sentence, which does not reflect my own view of North Dakota, but after we label five straight storms, "surely the last one of this winter," it is possible to feel a little less judgmental about the snowbirds who flee to Hemet or Scottsdale or Fort Myers after the corn harvest.
My daughter, who lives on the central plains in Kansas, a mere 751 miles south of Bismarck, has spent this week with her high school team golfing - outside - on Astroturf greens, in jacket and at times even shirtsleeve weather.
Meanwhile, at the upper rim of the Great Plains, I'm still buying Heet for my Jeep with every tank of gas. My furnace is sounding like an old two-pack-a-day smoker.
I have not yet grumbled, not once. As far as I'm concerned, this is the best winter I can ever remember. But my friends are no longer letting me tease/rebuke them. Their eyes have taken on a menacing aspect. And to be perfectly candid for a moment, I am planning to live this summer, should it ever arrive, with more activity, more intensity, more joy and more adventure, than any other 80 days I have ever experienced.
Where are those Great Wrestlers of Yesteryear?
by Clay Jenkinson
March 8, 2009
When I heard that legendary professional wrestler Vern Gagne had killed a 97-year-old fellow resident in a nursing home, I admit I was filled with mirth.
The first words out of my mouth were, "I hope it was a pile driver." But then I made the mistake of looking into the incident a little, and all the mirth slipped away.
Gagne, who is 82, suffers from Alzheimer's disease. The man he killed, Helmut R. Gutmann, 97, was a violinst and a well-known cancer researcher who had fled Nazi Germany. Not much room for giggling there. Gutmann's family has so far compassionately declined to pursue legal action. Gagne's family is understandably mortified.
By the time I finished reading about the incident, the milk of human kindness was running in my veins, not Geri-speed. (Geri-speed was the magic elixir Gagne used to promote on television back in the golden black and white age of All Star Wrestling.)
It fills me with melancholy to think that Gagne has Alzheimer's and will finish his life in a care (possibly maximum care) facility.
To paraphrase Douglas MacArthur, old professional wrestlers shouldn't die, they should just fade away into a kind of wrestling Valhalla, where Wahoo McDaniel and Pampero Firpo the Wild Bull of the Pampas are locked forever in a two-out-of-three-fall grudge match on the plains of heaven, and all the others are sitting around in lush folding chairs drinking ster . . . I mean carrot juice cocktails.
A heaven in the shape of a "squared circle," where Wahoo will always do his signature Indian war whoop around the ring. Where Firpo will always rake his opponent's eyes along the zipper of his full-torso wrestling tunic, to the outraged pantomimic consternation of the 140-pound referee.
I first saw All Star Wrestling at my grandparents' farm in Fergus Falls, Minn., when I was in seventh grade. They had a little grainy black and white television set not much larger than a dinner plate. They went to bed early because they were dairy farmers, but Grandma would sometimes stay up with me on Saturday night to watch part of the broadcast.
It was she who informed me in semi-reverent tones that Vern Gagne was something special, a gifted high school athlete and amateur wrestler, a "gentleman of the ring," who attempted to bring decorum and legitimate wrestling moves to a sport regarded by its critics as a form of carnival.
Grandma reckoned that pro wrestling was fake, but in fact was not altogether sure, and we together cried foul out loud in that lonely Minnesota farm house when The Crusher snuck a "foreign object" into the ring with which to jab at Gagne's throat or eyes.
This was always a profound mistake. Gagne played by the rules - never choked, gouged or bit, always broke the hold when the referee tapped his shoulder - but the moment The Crusher or Gorgeous Bobby Heenan introduced a "foreign object" or went for the eyes or choked for an unnecessarily long period of time, the inner Gagne woke up and the match was soon over.
Gagne would go into warp drive and deliver one, two, sometimes three flying drop kicks in quick succession. Then in quiet contempt he simply put his knee on his vanquished opponent's chest while the referee counted him out.
My grandfather would wake up to our protest shouts at the television set and grumble loud enough for Grandma to excuse herself and trundle off to bed.
After that I watched All Star Wrestling every Saturday night for a couple of years - until my own Geri-speed kicked in. I saw two bouts live, submitted photographs to "Wrestling News" and got Vern Gagne's autograph. For a brief time in my life, he was a god in a Speedo to me.
Every year or so since, I have tuned in to see what's new in the world of professional wrestling, but it has no appeal to me now, not because I have grown up, but rather because the sport has.
It is far too violent now, too acrobatic, too highly produced, too raw, too vulgar in language and gesture. Once the Vaudeville went away, so for me did the appeal.
It was so much better when it was clunky and redolent of the carnival, when the top ropes were still basically off limits, when there were no chairs and tables in the ring, when the interviews had a comic feel to them, when female wrestlers looked every bit like the reluctant wives of the male wrestlers, tunic'd up for the good of the struggling corporation.
If Gagne is in a nursing home, where, I wonder, are all the others? Where are the Vachon Brothers, Maurice ("Mad Dog") and Paul ("The Butcher") Vachon? I read a few years ago that Mad Dog Vachon had his leg amputated in 1987 after he was injured in a hit-and-run accident in Omaha, Neb. (Which of us does not suspect Dr. X at the wheel of that vehicle?)
Where is Scrap Iron George Gadaski? (Alas, he is buried in the Trinity Lutheran Cemetery in Clayton, Wis.) Where is The Flying Frenchman Rene Goulet, with his lovely sequined glove? Where is The Very Capable Kenny Jay? He was born with the dumb name Kenny Benkowski in Holdingford, Minn., in 1937, but he soon realized he would never become an international superstar unless he ditched his birth name for something heroic like "Kenny Jay."
Where is Dr. X? At an undisclosed location, no doubt. More to the point, who was Dr. X? Why was he never successfully unmasked? And does he still have a $1,000 certified check in a Minneapolis bank for anyone who can break the figure four leg lock once properly applied?
Above all, where is Roger Kent, the fabulous AWA play-by-play announcer, who opened the show every week with the line, "Hello everyone, this is Roger Kent ringside coming to you from the Minnesota Armory ..."
For a long time, I reckoned his last name must be Ringside, for I never heard it any other way. No program went by without RKR saying, "He's going for an arm bar with a twist - sounds like a drink to me!" and "Oh, I hate to see that hold. That hold is banned in many states."
These memories fill me with joy and sadness. I would give all that I have to spend one more Saturday night with my grandmother Rhoda Straus in that farmhouse watching one of the Vachon Brothers beat the living daylights out of The Very Capable Kenny Jay.
Alas, that Vern Gagne should end his great life in a disqualification.
Best future for the North Dakota Badlands:
Working ranches
by Clay Jenkinson
March 1, 2009
What do we want the Badlands to look like 50 or 100 years from now?
The Little Missouri River Valley is a broken landscape corridor that enters North Dakota modestly south of Marmarth and steadily widens and deepens and becomes more dramatic as it moves north toward Watford City and then suddenly turns east toward its confluence with the Missouri River proper.
By the time the Little Missouri Valley reaches the North Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, it has learned to carve up the countryside so effectively that we can honestly speak of the "Grand Canyon of the Little Missouri."
Through the middle of this orgiastic, tumbled, god-blasted maze of bluffs and buttes and earth-buttresses runs the hapless but vitally important Little Missouri River, which carries silt and water in equal proportions. Except for a few weeks (sometimes days) per year, the river is so water-starved that you can wade through it with nonchalance.
You can sit in it if you choose a gravelly patch. In fact, it's typically so shallow that you can lie down in it, feet-first downstream toward the Gulf of Mexico, and luxuriate in the laving of the warm sluggish current. One of my favorite activities in the world is to sit in the Little Missouri River fully clothed on a July or August afternoon hour after hour reading a book about the West.
You cannot do that in the Red. You cannot do that in the Mouse. You cannot do that in the Missouri.
The North Dakota Badlands are a magic landscape. They are North Dakota's "Montana." The appeal of the Badlands is that they are so different from the rest of North Dakota, which visitors tend to call "flat," but we prefer to call "rolling plains."
Tucked into the southwestern corner of a state that Eric Sevareid called a blank spot at the center of the North American continent is an exotic and self-contained region of "otherness," a wild, stark, magnificent landscape with a unique aura and a distinctive history that involves Theodore Roosevelt, an impulsive French nobleman and colorful, fiercely independent cattlemen. The whole package is irresistibly dee-lightful.
It's ours. And there's a national park in the heart of it, commemorating three things: the intrinsic beauty of the Badlands; the fact that one of the greatest of all Americans lived here and acknowledged that this place, beyond all others, got under his skin; and the conservation philosophy that Roosevelt developed in part here, which led him to do more for wise-use conservation of our natural resources than any other president of the United States.
The Badlands have looked more or less the same for tens of thousands of years. They had perfected their eerie magic long before humans ever tiptoed from the safe forest and lake belts out onto the treeless and arid Great Plains, and they will look more or less the same when the human project finally withdraws. It's the short term that is problematic.
What makes the Badlands so attractive to the human spirit is that we have mostly left them alone. Mr. Jefferson's rectangular survey grid system of section line roads breaks down on the lip of the Little Missouri River Valley. That's always a sign that something wild is about to happen.
Almost none of the Badlands corridor is farmed. Where it is tilled, it really shouldn't be, at least from an aesthetic perspective. Bridges are rare: Marmarth, Medora, the Long X on U.S. 85, the once-Lost Bridge on ND 22. Good reason to be exceedingly skeptical of all new bridge (and low water crossing) proposals. The human population is sparse, dispersed and diminishing.
There are only two towns on the Little Missouri River in North Dakota, and three more in the Badlands country. Medora (population ca. 100) gets most of the attention because of the musical and the pitchfork fondue, and because it is the portal of the national park, but Marmarth (population 140) is more enchanting, anarchic and improbable in its oxbow-oasis-at-the-end-of-the-world way. Killdeer (713), Grassy Butte (252) and the megalopolis Watford City (1,435) are wild and windswept Badlands towns. Think how much less interesting North Dakota would be without them.
As the 21st century begins, the left-aloneness of the North Dakota Badlands is seriously endangered. And when you cease to leave the Badlands mostly alone, the indefinable hypnotic appeal of the corridor begins to evaporate. We need to face the fact that the Badlands can be drilled, graded, bridged, ranchetted, paved, "improved" and even recreationed to death.
If you have seen the Bitterroot Valley in Montana, or the Flathead Lake region, or Telluride or Aspen in Colorado, you know what can happen when a spectacular landscape attracts too much improvement. In my view, we are already at tilt on oil development (rigs, thumping oil pumps, scoria roads, methane flares, pad and waste ponds) and there is clearly going to be much more of it in the years ahead. Hobby ranches and ridgeline homes make perfect sense to those who own them, but represent a kind of bane and scar to almost everyone else.
The best way to save the North Dakota Badlands is to "conserve" the existing for-profit family ranching system that has been in place since T.R. and the Marquis arrived in 1883. The working ranches in the Little Missouri River Valley are widely diffused and tucked into the contours of the land. Their environmental impact is low. Their infrastructural "footprint" is lighter than that of any other economic activity.
Their mission is to produce good grass year after year - which means that ranchers essentially perpetuate how the Badlands would look if humans were not there at all. Under difficult conditions, today's ranchers continue to exemplify the rugged independence and self-reliance that has been the heart of the American frontier experience. They are a living, hard-working and colorful link to the romantic cowboy heritage of the grazing country of the American West.
I'd rather see heritage ranchers like Merle and Linda Clark of Marmarth or Robert and Ann Hanson of Amidon on the land than newcomers of any stamp. They know what we have and they know precisely how to keep it pristine.
Presidents' Day: Mattress Sales and presidential rankingsy Birthday, Lincoln
by Clay Jenkinson
February 22, 2009
Presidents Day has come and gone, and mattress sales have sprung along. Presidents Day is always chiefly about Abraham Lincoln (and not, say, Grover Cleveland), in part because it falls on or near Lincoln's birthday (Feb. 12), in part because Lincoln's visage is the most recognizable in American history and in part because Lincoln is widely regarded as the greatest president.
This year, because it was the bicentennial of Lincoln's birth, was a kind of Abe-session. Dozens of new books have been published to mark the occasion, including Ronald C. White's outstanding "Lincoln: A Biography."
For a few days, PBS seemed to be all Lincoln, all of the time. On the 16th president's actual birthday, I happened to be at the University of Vermont in Burlington. At 2:12 p.m., bells were scheduled to ring all across America in honor of the "great emancipator."
With three UVM historians, I stood out in the rain for 10 minutes listening to the tolling of the bells. It was extremely moving - if really cold and really wet - and none of us felt that we would be paying proper respect if we huddled under an umbrella. Approximately 1,000 students walked past us during our vigil wondering what kind of morons stand out bareheaded in freezing rain 10 feet from a warm, dry student center.
Ah, but it was the tintinnabulation of the bells, bells, bells. Bells.
Historians always bristle and grumble when they are asked to rank presidents, but they secretly enjoy it, because it's fun and it permits them to make sweeping judgments about American history. This year, C-SPAN asked the usual suspects to weigh in.
Lincoln came in first (duh). Then George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt, in that order. This ranking vindicates Gutzon Borglum's Mount Rushmore choices, more or less, though it removes the increasingly problematic Jefferson and replaces him with Theodore's fifth cousin Franklin Roosevelt, the only president elected four times.
Jefferson ranked seventh in this poll, after Truman and Kennedy. I disagree heartily with ranking Kennedy so high (so deep runs the Kennedy mystique), and I'm surprised that Jefferson was not thrust well back into the pack.
Jefferson's reputation has been in steady decline for the past 20 years for a variety of reasons. Jefferson's tortured attitudes towards race and slavery have been the central focus of recent biographies and studies, as well as his Indian policy, which set in motion the twin pillars of 19th century expansionism: removal and assimilation.
There also is Sally Hemings, of course, and the recent emphasis on the Machiavellian tendencies in Jefferson's political life. The dark side of Jefferson has tended recently to eclipse such minor achievements as the Declaration of Independence, the Louisiana Purchase, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty and the University of Virginia.
Jefferson has become the poster child for the unresolved race issues of American history. I doubt that it would be possible to chisel his face on Mount Rushmore today.
For the record, I believe that much of the current disillusionment with Jefferson is unfair. For all of his inconsistencies, Jefferson is, to my mind, the most important figure of the founding generation of American history.
More effectively than anybody else, he laid out the ideals of American life and the essential dreaminess of the American experiment. He taught us that the president must be an aspirational figure who believes, as Ronald Reagan (ranked 10th) put it, that "it is morning in America again." You cannot come to terms with America unless you wrestle with Jefferson. This is not true of Monroe, of the two Adamses, or even of Washington.
The C-SPAN historians ranked George W. Bush 36th of the 42 presidents in the poll. This is pretty harsh - and a little hasty, of course. Only time will tell, but everyone seems to agree that it does not look good for the younger Bush, who comes out slightly ahead of the pantheon of American ignominy: Millard Fillmore, Warren Harding, William Henry Harrison (who died after one month in office), Franklin Pierce, Andrew Johnson (impeached but not convicted) and James Buchanan (dead last).
Bill Clinton ranks 18th in the C-SPAN historians' poll, flanked by John Quincy Adams and James Madison, both of whom, as Gerald Ford once put it, if they were alive today would be rolling over in their graves.
Madison, after all, is the author of the Bill of Rights and the father of the U.S. Constitution. J.Q. Adams was arguably the greatest secretary of state in American history. It was Adams who squared off what became North Dakota in 1818, at the 49th parallel, instead of leaving the watershed boundary of the Louisiana Purchase in place. Without Adams' diplomacy, the whole Sheyenne and Red River watershed of North Dakota might now be Baja Manitoba.
The point, I suppose, is that the historians are ranking presidencies, not presenting lifetime achievement awards. If they were, J.Q. Adams, as well as his illustrious father, would rank very high. These rankings remind us that great presidents are not always great in other respects (Lincoln, Truman) and some of America's greatest men (Jefferson, Madison, Adams I and II, Ulysses S. Grant) have been undistinguished presidents.
I was delighted to see that Roosevelt ranks fourth in the estimation of America's premier historians. He was a great man and a great president. If he were alive to respond, he'd call it a bully good poll, but he would also surely stand back, a little forlornly, to admit that he was never really tested as president by a great national "predicament" (you can hear him clicking off the word) - a war or fundamental diplomatic impasse or economic catastrophe.
He was glad to preside over seven years and 171 days of peace and general progress, but he knew, because he was arguably the best read and best prepared of all American presidents, that true greatness should be reserved for those, like his distant cousin, who carry America safely through periods of grave crisis.
Whether this will bump George W. Bush up the poll a little over time remains to be seen.
Happy Birthday, Lincoln
by Clay Jenkinson
February 15, 2009
By the time you read this, Abraham Lincoln will be 200. He was born on Feb. 12, 1809, in a backwoods cabin near Hodgenville, Ky. He died on April 15, 1865, in a house across the street from Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. He was the first American president to be assassinated.
Lincoln's Bicentennial comes at a magical moment in American life, or rather it would be magical, if we were not so cynical, over-stimulated, partisan and distracted.
Precisely 200 years after the birth of the man who freed the slaves, the United States inaugurates its first African-American president. He, too, is a relatively obscure Illinois politician who burst upon the national scene - as if out of nowhere - at a time of national crisis.
Barack Obama self-consciously launched his campaign in Springfield, Ill., back in 2007 and, in a moving tribute to his illustrious predecessor, last month he retraced Lincoln's pre-inaugural journey from Springfield to the national capital by way of a special historic train.
The only difference is that in 1861 president-elect Lincoln had to slip into Washington, D.C., quietly, almost clandestinely, because of assassination threats. Obama, in spite of his carefully cultivated detachment, entered the national capital like a Caesar in triumph.
Beware of hubris.
President Obama took the oath of office on Abraham Lincoln's Bible. He has invited some of his political rivals to join his administration, principally his "William H. Seward," Hillary Rodham Clinton. Thanks to this and other parallels, Doris Kearns Goodwin's "Team of Rivals" has become one of the most talked about books of our time.
All of this is fascinating - and deeply moving if you let it get inside your perimeter fence of skepticism. At the beginning of his tenure as president, Obama has done an exceedingly bold and risky thing. By invoking the sainted Lincoln so often in so many ways, he has invited comparison with the man widely regarded as America's greatest president.
This is bound to rub some people the wrong way. If I were the president-elect, I'd be invoking Millard Fillmore and Gerald Ford! The next four years will be among the most interesting in American history. I admit to being as skeptical as I am hopeful, as fascinated as I am anxious.
Lincoln belongs to the very small club of presidents who grew in office. In his first inaugural address, the hypersensitive Thomas Jefferson correctly predicted that "it will rarely fall to the lot of imperfect man to retire from this station with the reputation and the favor which bring him into it."
Jefferson himself was diminished by the presidency. In response to the victimization of American shipping by both Britain and France in the Napoleonic War, Jefferson formulated a total economic embargo (nothing in, nothing out) as a peaceful alternative to war. The embargo failed. It cost Jefferson much of his political popularity. He fell into a kind of presidential paralysis during the last year of his second term, and left office in a kind of bewildered Mr. Magoo disarray.
Most presidents decline rather than grow in office. Here's a short contemporary list: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, George Bush I, George Bush II, Bill Clinton, even Ronald Reagan (remember Iran-Contra?).
Lincoln entered the presidency with one goal - to hold the union together. He famously said: "If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that."
Lincoln was certain that slavery was wrong, but he did not believe the Constitution gave him the authority to interfere in the internal affairs (the sovereignty) of existing states. What he wanted to do was keep slavery out of the new territories of the American West.
At the start of his presidency, Lincoln was not exactly a racist, but he did not advocate the emancipation of enslaved Americans, and he did not support social equality between America's black and white populations.
In other words, at the time of his first inauguration (March 4, 1861) Lincoln was dedicated to a very limited goal and he embodied what we would regard as a very limited enlightenment on the question of race.
Four years later, in his second inaugural address, without ever calling attention to himself, Lincoln explained how he and the United States had been transformed by what his hero Jefferson called "the course of human events."
If you haven't read Lincoln's second inaugural address recently, I strongly urge you to do so. It is unquestionably the greatest inaugural address in American history, in part because it is one of the shortest (third shortest, in fact, at 701 words). Lincoln could write better even than Thomas Jefferson.
Nobody really wanted the Civil War, says Lincoln, but "the war came." It was more costly than anybody could have predicted. It lasted longer than anybody could have foreseen. And nobody could have ever imagined how violent and unbelievably deadly it would be.
The death toll reached 623,000. The combined death tolls of all subsequent wars in American history, including the two world wars of the 20th century, barely exceed the number of Civil War casualties.
Lincoln's point, in the second inaugural address, is that the tragic magnitude of the war had engulfed the earlier constitutional argument, which now seemed quaint, even trivial, in the face of so much national catastrophe.
The shattering of the American social order and the devastation of the American landscape had changed the terms of the argument. The grief, the gore, and the gravitas of the last four years now imposed a new meaning on what had begun as a sectional conflict. In fact, said Lincoln, the meaning of the war was now no longer in human hands, but in God's.
In the harrowing crucible of office, Lincoln had grown to understand that the Civil War was not finally about states' rights and the Constitution, but about slavery. He grew to understand that America literally could not go on unless and until slavery were eliminated in the land where "all men are born equal," once and for all.
Then Lincoln uttered the darkest words of his life, the darkest words of American history: "If God wills that it (the war) continue, until all the wealth piled up by the bondman's 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash, shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"
In the inaugural crowd that day, while Lincoln spoke these unbearably powerful and painful words, stood a 26-year-old actor, a bitter and unreconstructed Confederate. His name was John Wilkes Booth. One month and 11 days later, he killed the man who had the audacity to read the war this way.
A Chance to Vote Yes for Rural North Dakota
by Clay Jenkinson
February 8, 2009
Politics is about difficult and sometimes painful decisions.
The Heritage Center auditorium was packed on Tuesday for a hearing on the proposed repeal of North Dakota's unique pharmacy law. It made front-page news in this newspaper. The testimony was passionate, sometimes uncomfortably so.
The repealists make a strong case for fair competition, wider variety and lower prices. The anti-repealists make a persuasive case for rural access, community stability and the kind of personal attention we all used to get before the giant multinational corporations ate America.
The repeal proposal is generating so much passion because we are wrestling with two of our biggest concerns in life - access to affordable health care and the future of rural America.
My head and my heart are at odds on this question.
I live in the amenity haven of Bismarck, where I have "take for granted" access to all of the basic and some of the finer fruits of life. What I know about rural America comes from my wanderings and my visits to my daughter, who lives in a windswept village in northwestern Kansas, population 682.
One gas station. Two car washes. A bar that sells 3.2 beer. A couple of hair shops. A bank. A modest grocery store. An appliance store. A bare-bones lumber yard and hardware store. An implement dealership. Ephemeral knickknack and craft shops. A library open a couple of afternoons per week and a one-screen movie theater open Friday and Saturday nights. Two cafes. No fast food.
We all know these towns. They have been the incubator of the character of the people of the Great Plains.
From a certain point of view - you have to point the lens pretty carefully - my daughter lives in a kind of rural paradise. It's 4-H country and the land of family livestock menageries. It's a place where "neighbor" is still a verb.
At the same time, as a parent, I'm all too well aware that there are things that are glaringly missing out there in godforsakia that my daughter will need to thrive in the 21st century. I deplore that, and try to supplement her "education" as much as I can, but the fact is that I know she is gaining much more than she is losing by growing up in a small rural town in the middle of nowhere.
I have been watching my daughter's town decline for 25 years. My former wife believes in the small town verities. She shops locally whenever possible, even though the produce is often meager and wilty in the grocery store, the seafood locked up like ancient mammoths in blocks of ice, the card selection clunky and severely limited.
She'd rather buy a more expensive washing machine at the local store than a cheaper, better one from the big box store an hour away.
She understands that every purchase is a vote.
But as the local grocery store continues to decline in a slow but inevitable trajectory, she buys a little more every month from Darth Wal-Mart, because she cares about nutrition as much as she cares about the economic survival of the local grocer, her friend, whom she greets on main street a dozen times a week.
She knows that every head of lettuce she buys from Wal-Mart, even though it is dramatically better lettuce than the local grocery offers, accelerates the decline of her hometown. She feels this dilemma every week, almost every day, of her life. This is the story of our time on the Great Plains of America.
And this, essentially, is what the North Dakota pharmacy debate is about. That's why it is so painful.
Like all North Dakotans, I have been worrying about outmigration and the death of rural America off and on for 30 years. We have watched once-thriving small towns struggle and decline. Some have died.
Those that remain are almost all on life support. It's heartbreaking if you let it get beneath the protective shrug. Our agony and at the same time our solace has been the chorus that "there's not a darn thing we can really do about it."
Now, suddenly, the pharmacy bill reminds us that we are not entirely helpless. This is one of those rare moments when the representatives of the people of North Dakota have the power to decide what our future will look like.
This is quite different from our normal role of standing on the margins wringing our hands as the impersonal dynamos of change roll over us. This Legislature must make a really hard choice that is going to have a measurable impact on the survival prospects of rural North Dakota.
It seems to me undeniable that the repeal of the pharmacy law will damage our towns and villages and isolate them further, even if it provides greater variety and lower costs to individual health care consumers. Nobody believes that the existing law will save rural North Dakota. But it will help a little, and a little means a great deal in towns that are teetering on the brink of further collapse.
I spend a lot of time wandering around the blacktop back roads of North Dakota. It gives me great pleasure to meander the streets of small towns, to make a few purchases, to order a piece of pie in a village cafe, to buy the prized local sausage in the meat market.
Most of these towns have a drug store, as often as not in a brick building on a corner of Main Street, sometimes with an old Rexall sign creaking in the wind. These drug stores are the last gasp of the old general stores that served as de facto community centers in rural America. They provide a modest selection of paperback books, local crafts and jellies, Hallmark-knock-off gifts for the various rites of passage like graduation or confirmation, a few fuses and farm parts, and once in a while a nut cart or a soda fountain.
They are modest (and marginal) little department stores that manage somehow to meet an amazingly wide set of consumer needs at home rather than 50 or 100 miles down the road. Make no mistake: the engine of these shops is the pharmacy, without which, they'd have shut their doors a decade or more ago.
The economic and social orthodoxy of our time is that the consumer is king, that the free market should prevail, and that saving costs is more important than saving communities.
In other words, if you can get a better deal on a new car in Minot than in Minto or Max, you ought to do it. That orthodoxy, unfortunately, spells the death of rural North Dakota.
My view is a very simple one. In those very rare moments when we have the power to vote yes for rural life, we have a moral imperative to do so, even if it means that our lives will be a little more expensive.
Target, Wal-Mart and Walgreen's are gigantic faceless corporations that regard North Dakota as an outback market, not a home. Mott and Wishek and Cavalier are North Dakota.
We must do what we can for them. It's about who we are, not what we consume.
And Then There Was Skype
by Clay Jenkinson
February 1, 2009
My daughter lives in northwestern Kansas. She is 14. Her life is as busy as it could possibly be. Whatever my tired heart has to give, has been freely given to her, and there is no other child, no other claimant.
So I live and breathe for her, which is of course insane, for she is 14, and she was born, like every other child in the world, to pull away in her second decade of life. The pain of this would be unbearable, except that I know she cannot become the adult I am so eager to meet unless I hold open the door and call after her to wear mittens and phone home whenever she can.
We see each other at least once a month, without fail. I call her (cell phone to cell phone) every day, 350-plus days per year, often several times per day, and we now text too, which is just a high tech and inexpensive way of telegraphing a wee message of affection.
It's amazing how a "Hey, Papa, 'sup," can make my day and keep me from drifting into the backcountry of despair. I write her a couple of actual letters per week, hand- or typewritten, and send them in a big white envelope, with something called a postage stamp. It's very odd, this phenomenon.
For about 50 cents, I can get a trained professional to come to my house and pick up a very small item and then carry it 751 miles to a young woman far away. She infallibly gets the little package in three or so days - for less than 50 cents!
As you can see, I regard the U.S. Postal Service as little short of a miracle.
My daughter, however, looks upon my letters as a quaint Paleolithic affectation, a very late and low-tech echo of something you might read in "Little Women" or a novel by Charlotte Bronte. She senses, I think, that I write these letters as much for me as for her. Maybe she is right.
It always settles my heart to put a blank sheet of paper in front of me and take half an hour to compose a letter to her. It means that for that half hour I am thinking solely about her. I try to guess what it would please or comfort her to read from her absent papa. It gives me a chance to try to imagine the rhythms of her life, the moments of unreserved laughter, the many plaguing anxieties of adolescence, the little feuds and misunderstandings with equally constipated classmates, and the first waves of possibility that come in these years and fill a young person simultaneously with eagerness and dread.
I went underground when I was 14. I literally moved into the basement, and much that was most compelling in my life never again found its way to the dinner table. Where is she with the subterranean, I wonder, and look up from the page with my own wave of anxiety.
She gets it that my writing actual letters to her should be regarded as something special, and she puts them, when she is not too rushed with "practice" and Scholar's Bowl or the game against the hated cross-county rival, in a special little box.
Perhaps some day she will read them through in a single night, looking for clues, remembering the days of her childhood, taking a transfusion from the unmistakable, unceasing expressions of love they contain. My letters are little more than a continuous attempt to find new ways to say I love you and I am thinking about you today.
In the mythology of my life, actual letters-in-an-envelope are one of the supreme pleasures. I don't receive many letters any more and don't write many either, given how easy it is to stay in touch by other and more efficient means. We can lament this as much as we please, but it is not likely to change. I fear the day when the last piece of traditional mail is delivered in America and the last newspaper thumped up on the porch at dawn.
The best letters I ever received came from my mentor and closest friend. I keep them treasured up in a special box. I open the box and glance into them now and then, but I cannot really read them, because they are too raw with soul. I used to write and receive love letters when I used to love.
My father, who lived at the other end of the loquacity spectrum, for many years sent me what I called "terse notes." He somehow expressed all he wanted to say in a couple of bone-lean paragraphs. I reread those terse notes now and then and smile and sometimes laugh out loud, but mostly I just miss him and wish he were around so that I could share this portion of my life with him, and put my daughter at his feet.
My daughter doesn't understand this meaning of letters - and really why should she? That was then and this is now. It's like asking her to enjoy old time radio drama or the Grand Ole Opry. She has been typing since she was 6 and she has never lived without access to a computer.
When I was struggling to produce a PowerPoint lecture a couple of years ago, I called to say goodnight, and wound up discussing my frustration. "Oh, Daddy," she replied, "let me walk you through it." Which she did.
Now we have discovered Skype. Skype is an Internet communications technology created by a team of software developers based in Tallinn, Estonia. It allows free online phone calls (ho hum) but also video conversation. Now a few times a week my daughter and I "Skype up," as she puts it, and talk for a few dozen minutes face-to-face across 751 miles.
It's so magical that it is scary. Last night, she "called" pretty late and I had to shake off my bleariness because of course I was "on camera." She wanted to talk about Homer's "Odyssey," but also about her friend Jess who is being a brat.
To see her mouth quiver just a bit, almost imperceptibly, as she tried to brazen it out and say she didn't care if Jess "ever, ever" apologized, was worth all the postage stamps ever printed.
We live in a fabulous time and we must embrace the new world that is bursting like fireworks over our heads. But I'm still going to write those letters.
The Day America Came of Age
by Clay Jenkinson
January 25, 2009
There are times when America is its worst self and there are times when it is its best self. America was its best self on Tuesday, when 1.8 million people made the pilgrimage to the mall in Washington, D.C., to witness the inauguration of the first black president of the United States.
The whole world was watching.
The rest of the world is important, but Tuesday was really about us. Promises implicit in America's founding, but never before realized, were fulfilled on the steps of the United States Capitol. There were almost 2 million witnesses. They will never forget what they saw there, and their overwhelming presence there means that America will never be permitted to understate the meaning of what has now transpired.
In a strange way, Tuesday was not about Barack Obama. It was about the people who journeyed to the nation's capital to stand by him. They came from every corner of the country by every available means of transportation. Some flew in private jets. Hundreds of thousands of others came in vehicles that the Joads might have driven to California on Route 66.
The picture of that giant mass of humanity huddled together tightly in the cold, hour after hour, in that space, on that day, for that reason, instantly becomes one of the handful of defining and transformative images in modern history. It ranks with the photograph of the Earth taken from the moon in 1969 or Nik Ut's 1972 photograph of the naked Vietnamese girl fleeing napalm and mayhem or the haunting image of Robert Kennedy lying serenely in a pool of his own blood at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 6, 1968.
I had the great good fortune to be in Washington for the inauguration.
I asked everyone I encountered what Tuesday meant. Almost all of them were complete strangers. I was surprised by how many paused to think about it before they spoke. Their answers were thoughtful and moving and deeply sincere. The best came from Colorado Rep. Ed Perlmutter, whose eyes were brimming with tears as he came off the Capitol steps at 1:30 p.m. He had spent much of his time in the open-air congressional gallery gazing over the head of the president at the sea of humanity between the Capitol and the Lincoln Memorial, two miles away.
He was looking out on Walt Whitman's America - every age, color, orientation, political outlook, language, nation of origin, religious sensibility, occupation, and level of education. Winners and losers, rich and poor, urban and rural, blue state and red state. And every individual in that vast vigil would return home with a story that was in part common and in part uniquely his or her own, for nobody who stood there Tuesday made the journey without a unique sacrifice and plenty of logistical challenges. It would be magnificent to have a map of America (or the world) showing the hometown of every person who stood on the mall.
Perlmutter paused for a long time before he replied. "Today," he said, "America came of age."
Tuesday was one of the transcendent moments of our national experience. For the rest of time, in any short list of milestones in American history, the election and inauguration of the first black president will be listed in the top 10. And yet Tuesday represented more than that, much more. For one thing, Barack Obama took the oath of office on the Bible that America's greatest President Abraham Lincoln used in taking the same oath 147 years previously. The symbolism of that is almost overwhelming. Union, not slavery, was Lincoln's obsession at the start of the war, and yet he grew in office like no other president and came to realize, before his second inaugural address in 1865, that unless America read Thomas Jefferson's "all men are created equal" as a universal, not a limited declaration, we could not go on. That understanding cost him his life one month and eleven days after his second inauguration, which took place on the same Capitol steps.
The meaning is deeper still. Barack Obama took the oath of office in a city of the Upper South built by slaves, carved out of slave states at the insistence of southern slaveholding statesmen, in part to protect their "peculiar institution." Eight of the first 12 Presidents were slaveholders, among them George Washington, James Madison, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson and the apostle of liberty Thomas Jefferson.
We are living on one of the pivot points of American, perhaps world, history.
The election of Barack Obama has been something of an abstraction to me between Nov. 4 and 2:30 a.m. Tuesday. I knew what it meant from a civics perspective, but it hadn't really sunk into my heart and soul. I think probably most other Americans are undergoing a similar experience: it is going to take a while for the momentousness of this event to sink in. We're each going to experience a series of realizations of what it means that an African-American has been elected president of the United States.
I was staying in a modest hotel in Alexandria, Va., out near the airport. It was ruinously expensive, obscenely expensive, right at the frontier of "this just cannot be worth it" expensive. I'm not in any way a wealthy or even a well-off scholar, so I'll now need to change some of my spending priorities in 2009 to pay for my trip. Still, in an important sense it was not a painful financial sacrifice for me. My hotel was at full occupancy (and more), and the great majority of guests were African-Americans who work much harder than I do for much less. In the lobby you could immediately see two things. First, their sacrifice in making the inauguration journey was much greater than mine in every way. And second, they didn't regret it for a single second.
The swearing-in was scheduled for noon. The Metro subway system started running at 4 a.m. I was due at my function at 10 a.m. and I reckoned, to be on the safe side, that I'd leave the hotel around 7:30.
At 2:30 a.m., I heard a door slam down the hall. At 3, there was a door slamming every few seconds. By 4:30, I realized that I might as well just get up. When I had showered and dressed, I rode the elevator down to the lobby to find some breakfast.
What I saw next, I will never forget. People were streaming out the doors of the hotel in waves. The streets were full of people moving in great tributary streams toward the bus stops and the subway stairs. At 6 a.m., the Metro was bursting with people, fire marshal full, dangerous, and exceedingly claustrophobic. And when I arrived at the Mall, oh my.
It was the largest crowd I have ever seen. If every North Dakotan had gone to the inauguration, it would have been regarded as a light turnout. There were more people packed in a two-mile, 309-acre grass ribbon than in all the vast space of the Dakotas and Montana combined.
We took our places and listened with unprecedented attention.
What would the sages say?
Whitman: I hear America singing, and the refrain is "no retreat."
Shakespeare: Obama bestrode the world like a colossus.
Jefferson: There is, in fact, something new under the sun.
And the Negro spiritual:
Here at last, here at last, who would ever have thought we'd be here at last?
We have, in part, overcome.
Let the Rototiller be in the Garage
By Clay Jenkinson
January 18, 2009
Mountains of snow. The roads are narrowing. Valley Drive as it crests Ash Coulee has been reduced almost to a single lane. At what point does it start to feel like driving through snow tunnels? I feel sorry for the mailmen and women this year, both those on foot and those who do drive-by deliveries.
No matter what I do, I cannot keep my mailbox unobstructed. The plows roll through in the middle of the night (beep beep beeping as they back up), and though they do a superb job, they invariably leave a ridge along the line of mailboxes on my street. Whenever I think of how this must complicate my mailman's job, I go out and hack away at the ridge, but it is getting harder and harder to keep up, and my mailbox is actually now in danger of being buried by the sheer accumulation. Is there a point at which snow could actually paralyze the city?
No end in sight.
As far as I'm concerned, it's the best winter ever, but then I am not feeding cattle or trying to keep a small business parking lot clear.
I bought cross-country skis a week ago in Fargo, for there were none to be had then in Bismarck, and I pulled out from a deep recess in my garage a never-used pair of snow shoes. The cross-country ski trail at Riverwood Golf Course is absolutely spectacular. When you stop to gaze at the charcoal smudge of the tall riverside cottonwoods against the almost unbearably pure white canvas of the snow, you drink in the magic of North Dakota in a whole new way. Everyone you meet on the trail wears an expression of joy and wonder and "who knew?"
When I look out at my garden as it slopes up west of my house, now covered literally with 8 feet of snow, I have four thoughts of about equal potency. First, this is going to be my best garden ever. Second, did I leave my rototiller in the garden that great November Saturday? I hope not. Third, my house is almost certainly going to flood. I don't know whether to just shrug my shoulders and hope for the best or to start stockpiling cubits of gopherwood and pitch. And fourth, I cannot wait to see Lake Sakakawea rise up to the something like its normal pool level.
Imagine the waves of phone calls that Sears, Menards and Lowe's are getting as people who were hoping to gut it out give up and seek the help of the internal combustion engine? Apparently there isn't a snowblower for sale on the Great Plains right now, and the few that turn up are fought over like Super Bowl tickets. I've heard a rumor that a few otherwise good and perfectly healthy individuals have been reduced to playing the "sob story, elderly shut-in" card. Fortunately the salesmen have been trained to detect such lies. (So, I'll try another strategy). Actually, I'm beginning to think that all snowblowers are just toys in a winter like this. I'm thinking "Bobcat."
Everyone who is old enough is now talking about the blizzard of 1966, which left drifts up to the roofline of our house and killed five people in North Dakota. My family lived in Bismarck then, in a bungalow over on the east side, about a mile from a little ma and pa grocery store on Broadway. Either the roads were closed or the cars wouldn't start, and our neighbors began to run out of food. Finally, Mrs. R. (the Beret Hansa of this story) told her strong but dunderheaded husband Mr. R. that he would have to take one of the children's sleds and fight his way through the storm to the little store to buy enough basic supplies to get them through.
This, by the way, is a true story.
Mr. R. bundled up in all the coats, mittens and scarves he owned and silently knelt down to buckle up his overshoes. It was a solemn moment when he kissed his wife and children goodbye. Stoically, he threw his weight at the front door and forced it open, and thrust himself out into the raging storm in that instant before the door slammed shut again. He was immediately swallowed up by the blizzard. We could hear him singing some kind of brave heart song but we could not see him 5 feet from his front door. It was fearfully cold and the wind was blowing unobstructed from the North Pole to New Mexico. There was real danger in his venturing forth. Once he was gone, we gathered up all the snow that had blown into the entryway when he opened the door and ran it down the sink. We played Monopoly and shared a can of Spam.
Mr. R. was gone for a very long time.
We were beginning to get worried.
Finally, near dusk, we heard a muted thump on the front door. We were not at first sure whether it was our hero returning or a mere trick of the appalling wind. When we forced open the door, there was Mr. R. looking like the abominable snowman - with iced eyebrows and snot stalactites, stiff and numb as an oversized snowman, but with a huge grin on his face. We pulled him into the house sled and all, and excavated him from the stiff layers of winter clothing in which he was now fused.
He could not speak for some time.
Then. and only then. we turned to the sled.
Here is a precise inventory. It contained a loaf of bread, a case of Hamms beer and two cartons of cigarettes.
It took many years for Mr. R. to live down that story. Somehow the Spam and bread got us through, KFYR regained its network signal, the plows made the roads passable and that year's wheat harvest was spectacular.
The Awesome Power of the Legislature
By Clay Jenkinson
January 11, 2009
The North Dakota Legislature is back in town. This is the 61st session. For the next three months, 94 representatives and 47 senators will make a series of decisions that will have an impact on all of our lives and help to shape the future of North Dakota.
It's an awesome responsibility.
Sometimes I imagine that it would be exciting to be a legislator, but when I think of how much is at stake, I shrink away with a firm conviction that I don't really know what North Dakotans want or need and I don't really know how to find out what they want or need. Oh, sure, tax relief, but even though that comes in a clear and unmistakable voice, it's not at all clear how to produce a tax reform that is both rational and fair.
Our most diffident great man, Thomas Jefferson, said, "I have no more desire to govern men than to ride my horse through a storm." He called the presidency "splendid misery." He meant it.
I have great respect for the 141 North Dakotans who have put their regular lives (in Bowman or Larimore) on hold to live in motels and rental properties for a quarter of the year, in order to engage in an exhausting, often tense and sometimes tedious process in which there is frequently no clear-cut answer. It's not a thankless task. I know North Dakota senators and representatives who thrive when the Legislature is in session. But even the "happy warriors" confess that being a citizen legislator is a challenge and a sacrifice and it is as often about podiatry as it is about the penal code.
We've all heard the quip attributed to our namesake, Otto von Bismarck: "He who loves law or sausages should never watch the making of either." It's a wonderful insight, delivered by way of a German analogy that we North Dakotans can appreciate. The joke about the messiness of legislation is so good that we tend to forget the point: In the making of both law and sausage, the process may be a shambles, but the result is generally very good. Just don't hang around the abattoir - I mean the Capitol.
When you contemplate the power of the Legislature, it almost makes you gulp. It's one thing to designate the chokecherry as the state fruit (2007), but it is quite another to decide whether an adult can smoke in a car in which children under the age of 16 are riding. Does government have a right to make that judgment? When I see an adult smoking in a car in the presence of children, it upsets me, but I know too that one of the most cherished of American values is distaste for government intrusion into our private property and private lives.
Politics is seldom about easy things. It's more frequently about the distribution of a limited basket of loaves and fishes, about when to lock someone up and for how long, about how, in Jefferson's terms, "to take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."
It's one thing to decide whether a university gets a new building, quite another to decide whether to continue to protect hometown pharmacies from the juggernaut of the multinational box stores. In 1819 Chief Justice John Marshall famously wrote, "The power to tax is the power to destroy." This Legislature, like all others, has the power to make or break businesses, institutions, government programs, even government departments. It can starve worthy and unworthy institutions or it can feed the worthy and the unworthy like the fatted calf.
What's the best thing to do with a surplus of $1.2 billion? Give it back to the people? Spread it around among all the worthy institutions and projects in North Dakota? Invest it strategically for the future happiness and prosperity of the people? Lock it up in anticipation of troubled times? Do a little of each of these things? Does anyone really know for sure what's best?
Everyone agrees that we need to spend more money on both K-12 and university education. But how much more? And where to target it? How can we be sure that more money will mean better results? What can we really sustain over the long term? Who really knows?
I have thoughts about how to spend some part of the $1.2 billion surplus, as do other citizens, every legislator, every department head in state government, every lobbyist, every newspaper editor, and of course the governor, who outlined his legislative agenda Tuesday. The genius of our system is that no single individual will decide what to do with the surplus. This vast pool of money will be spent only after painstaking deliberation and debate by a formal body of people we have directly chosen to represent us.
The will of the people of North Dakota already has been distilled by the election process. Now it will be distilled again by the legislative process, which has the classical American structure of two houses, each empowered to deliberate in its own way, both required to agree on any legislation that reaches the governor's desk. The governor, in turn, has the power to veto any legislation he believes will not be beneficial to the people of North Dakota. It's a somewhat cumbersome system, designed in 1787 by James Madison and others, but it has the power to refine and clarify our collective will and to protect all of us from impulsive government action.
A legislative session involves late nights, horse trading, over-stimulation. Bombardment by constituents, lobbyists, and small gifts. Setbacks and stalls and sudden breakthroughs. Posturing, pet projects, prejudice, and even pettiness. And endless hors d'oeuvres.
But at its core the process is majestic, even breathtaking. Each North Dakota legislator now represents 4,539 people. You are one of them. In a quasi-mystical way, you are in the Capitol for the next three months.
The Fraudulent Attack on “Clean Coal”
Have They Been to Stanton?
By Clay Jenkinson
January 4, 2009
Have you seen the ads that are blanketing TV attacking the coal industry? Produced by something called the Reality Coalition, they specifically seek to discredit the idea of “clean coal,” a term much bandied about in the recent Presidential election. You can watch the ad at www.action.thisisreality.org. I think the coalition’s purpose is to “teach” the American public that there is no such thing as clean coal; that no clean coal technology is really in development; and that if we want to survive we have to shut down the coal industry. The ad is tremendously powerful. The ad really offends me. It should offend you too.
North Dakota and the energy industry need to respond intelligently and forcefully. And soon.
In the 30-second video, a plant engineer stands before a coal power plant. He’s young, earnest, a little geeky. He’s wearing a white shirt and holding a clipboard. He’s a briskly efficient professional man. He offers to take you on a tour of a “state of the art clean coal facility.” But when you walk through the door of the gray corrugated steel façade, you don’t in fact enter a power plant. You are instantly back outside in an industrial wasteland. The tour guide has to shout to be heard, and like a robot, he keeps repeating the phrase “clean coal technology” as he venerated the very concept.
While he shouts out his love of coal, admitting--as if it were a minor consideration—that burning coal is “one of the leading causes of global warming,” we are not looking at him but rather at the countryside which he is walking us through. “Take a good long look!” he says, while he squats in a yellow-gray blighted landscape on which nothing will ever grow again.
The land in every direction looks like the smoothed out surface of the Moon or a bleached out Mars, except that it is dotted with some blasted shrubs—mere barren sticks in the ashy ground—with just the slightest hint of green in the shrubs that cling closest to the ground. Message: this is the amount of life the earth can support if you license any more coal power generation plants.
Then a black screen appears on your TV with the words, “In reality there’s no such thing as clean coal.”
Leaving aside its truth value, the Reality Coalition ad is an extremely well made and effective piece of television, and I believe it is going to have an enormous national impact. When I saw it for the first time, paying that half-attention that we have developed as a way of coping with commercial tele vision, I thought for an instant that it was an ad actually produced by the coal industry. You know, one of those “we’re doing good things for you,” ads you see in the ag and oil industry campaigns.
Here’s the hidden message of the video, the “contribution” of this environmental coalition—with close ties to Al Gore—to the energy debate. “These coal guys are destroying the planet earth. Don’t believe what they tell you. They are out of touch with reality.”
Choosing the actor who played the coal engineer was a stroke of genius. He’s a good-looking guy, and he’s clearly a serious believer in coal, not a PR pretty boy. The producers hired one of those hair restoration ad guys who look terrific when they are wearing a hat, and like the actor-director Ron Howard when they aren’t. Later in the ad, when he’s wearing his hardhat, the engineer looks good—and young. But at the start of the ad, when he’s holding his hardhat in his hand standing in front of the Entrance to the Future, he looks much older and much less healthy. With his prominent nose, bony forehead, and sunken eyes, with his pale skin and darkened lips, he looks, in fact, cadaverous. The subliminal message here is that he is one of the living dead—and of course he is in this instance the “national representativeD of the coal industry. He’s offering to lead you to the Land of Death.
The Reality Coalition would deny this analysis, of course, and insist that I’m “reading into” the video text in a way they never intended. You be the judge. If there were a freedom of information act for media companies that cater to advocacy groups (from the NRA and the Christian Coalition to the Reality Coalition) and we could see the internal correspondence and memos, we’d all be appalled and fascinated at the same time.
It’s time we differentiate routine television ads from what might be called “ad videos.” Ad: Ginsu Knives or credit counseling. Ad video: the sensuous little “film projects in miniature,” that stand on their own as sophisticated creative acts, at times works of art, and only indirectly sell some sort of product. You’ve seen them for the hippest foreign cars or Coca Cola.
We need a serious national conversation about our energy future. This ad does not contribute to that conversation. It cheapens it. In fact, it prevents it. It takes reason and good sense off of the table. It does not deliver its promise of “Reality .” It manufactures a gothic dystopia in which the truth is deliberately distorted to short-circuit the debate we need to have about coal and our energy consumption habits. It fundamentally derails the discussion by appealing not to our heads but to the deepest of all human urges—the urge to survive. The message of the ad belongs to the category of false logic known as “false dilemma.” It offers you this choice with nothing in between: coal = death of the planet; stop burning coal = the planet gets to live.
That the ad is deliberately misleading is perfectly clear to anyone who has ever studied the data or driven through the energy crescent in North Dakota. The landscape in coal country is not blighted. The rolling hills of North Dakota’s coal country are covered with grain and grass, as often as not with bold sunflowers. The natural contours of the landscape between Washburn and the badlands are especially beautiful. The Missouri River flows with serene majesty right next to some of the power plants. Even they, if the truth be told, in some light and from some angles have a kind of industrial beauty. This is not T.S. Eliot’s wasteland. If the folks who made this ad visited North Dakota and spent a few days in the countryside that surrounds our seven coal plants, I wonder what “defense” they would craft to justify their naked piece of propaganda.
Coal has its problems, but it is undeniable that we need coal for the foreseeable future. We Americans are carbon hogs. We consume a quarter of the world’s oil, coal, and natural gas even though we are just 5% of the world population. Unless we are prepared to engage in a fundamental revolution in our way of life, we’re going to need to continue to power our civilization with carbon fuels. Coal is an essential element of the carbon equation, partly because it is so abundant, and partly because we have all the coal we need right here in the United States. In other words, it’s a natural security issue in an era of perceived energy scarcity and religious fundamentalism.
If the coal industry shut down one power plant per week for the next two years, the electrical grid would collapse (as it did in California in 2006). Within a few months the American people would by crying: “Burn anything you want with or without scrubbers. Just give us back our power.” And by the way, the industry does not mine coal and burn coal for the fun of it. There is a demand for power. Coal fills part of that demand. It’s a classical moment out of Adam Smith. Characterizing a basic and unglamorous industry vital to our daily happiness as some sort of dastardly leviathan with plans to destroy the planet is profoundly reckless and disingenuous. In fact, it9s obscene.
That said, in spite of some industry claims, coal is not a panacea. It’s a bulky, dirty form of carbon, expensive to transport, and when it is burned, it emits things that are profoundly unhealthy: carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, mercury, fly ash, particulates. We need to keep pushing the coal industry to find and adopt “clean coal technologies.” Great progress has been made. More will come, if we keep our focus, and remember that these technologies can only be adopted if they are affordable.
We need a thoughtful, well-informed national dialogue about the future of energy: coal, oil, natural gas, wind, nuclear, hydrogen, biofuels. We need the environmental community to be a central voice in that debate. We need the environmental community and concerned citizens to raise tough questions about effluents, mining techniques and reclamation, and regulatory compliance. I am particularly worried about air quality here in North Dakota. But how can the environmental community (or at least this coalition) be expected to be taken seriously if it refuses to debate with integrity?
We also need to have a very sober, look-into-the-mirror, discussion of the energy and environmental implications of our way of life. If we want to continue to live at this level of material opulence and conspicuous consumption, with our SUV’s lined up in Wal-Mart parking lots next to trucks filled with merchandise manufactured in China, the earth is going to take a hit. Al Gore is right about that, and he’s a very valuable figure in the global environmental debate, if he will just agree to play responsibly.
Back in September, former Vice president Gore said, at a global environmental rally, “If you’re a young person looking at the future of this planet . . . I believe we have reached the stage where it is time for civil disobedience to prevent the construction of new coal plants that do not have carbon capture and sequestration.”
This is a man who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007? Gore’s remarks were irresponsible, and it should trouble all of us that he has attempted to turn young people against their parents and grandparents as we enter a difficult period in the history of energy development and distribution.
I think the North Dakota legislature, which is about to convene, should issue a resolution of dismay reading something like this: “North Dakota is coal country. That gives us a good understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of coal fired power plants. We welcome a thoughtful national debate about the=2 0future of our energy needs. These ads are a sad and deliberately misleading caricature. Propaganda cannot help us create a sensible and environmentally responsible energy future.”
I think the energy industry needs to hire the best video production company in the world to make a series of ads that explain the truth about coal. 1. Coal is not a very clean fuel, but we absolutely need it for the foreseeable future or we cannot continue to live the way we do. 2. Coal is not clean, but it is cleaner than you think and the technology (some of it pioneered by the Energy & Environmental Research Center at UND) is getting better every day. 3. It is quite possible that if industry and government work together, with scientists, environmentalists, landowners, and accountants all at the table with equal voices, we can come close to solving this problem. 4. Besides, China is the real issue. China is building one new coal power plant per week and their industry is often lightly and sometimes un-regulated. The United States with its wealth and technological ingenuity, is likely to solve its problem. China and India and Russia are going to cause the gravest environmental stresses of the 21st century.
Searching for Christmas Spirit in all the Wrong Places
by Clay Jenkinson
December 28, 2008
If your experience is similar to mine, "the Christmas spirit" is not something that comes automatically on the heels of Thanksgiving. In fact, as I grow older, I find that getting into the Christmas spirit is a bit like getting into the clothes you wore to the senior prom. It can be done, but at serious cost to the human spirit. And don't look in the mirror.
This year, I feared that I would never get into the spirit.
We all know the truth. Christmas is better when it is simpler and less materialistic. When we slow down and smell the cinnamon. When somehow the birth of Christ gets to stay somewhere in the equation. When we give ourselves the gift of singing. When we sit by the light of the fireplace or the Christmas tree and talk in quiet sincerity with those we love.
So, just to make sure we don't become complacent with that serene picture of love and family and Christ, we Americans have somehow transformed Christmas into a monthlong decathlon of shopping, partying, decorating, shipping, drinking, cooking, baking, gift-wrapping, gift-delivering, gift-exchanging and gift-returning, not to mention re-gifting. Forty percent of all retail commerce occurs around Christmas.
Perhaps because this Christmas season began with a man being trampled to death in a Long Island Wal-Mart on the day after Thanksgiving, I had a particularly hard time getting into the festive mood. I've been unusually busy this fall, and by the time I started to get serious about Christmas, it was bearing down on us like a freight train. The only thing worse than the Christmas rush is the Christmas desperate scramble.
In a moment of madness, I decided to make most of my gifts this year. That always sounds so wholesome and enlightened at the moment of conception. Then, on the 20th of December or so, you find yourself pacing the canyons of Wal-Mart alone at 3 a.m., looking for replacement glue sticks and glitter paint, and asking a bewildered nocturnal stock clerk whether Goop or epoxy is better for gluing a baby food jar Christmas tree into place on green-painted plywood. By the time I had finished my gifts, my whole house had been transformed into a small but inefficient industrial assembly line. There was no need for egg nog - I did not want it to interfere with my glue and varnish buzz.
When it was all over, in the light of day, all those homemade gifts looked really ... homemade.
A few days before Christmas, I drove down to northwestern Kansas to see my daughter, who is now 14. It was 15 below zero as I turned south at Sterling. The day had begun with a jump start and a new Die Hard "double-extreme, Arctic Blast" battery, and bloody knuckles, too, because I had perversely refused to let the Sears crew install it. It warmed up two degrees every hundred miles of the trip, but the wind was a grim, grinding constant for all 751 miles.
The wind was so violent and unrelenting that it felt as if the entire Great Plains were about to be overturned, like a tumbleweed, into the Midwest. I had to grip the steering wheel with both hands just to stay on the road. When I met the big 18-wheelers on the narrow stretches of the highway, I had to prepare for the double wallop, first when the big rig created a temporary wind screen for my car and nearly sucked me into the vortex of the trailer, and then when it cut me loose, like a sledge hammer, back into the storm.
By the time I got to my daughter's village, I was brain-numb from the road, and my arms were actually sore from fighting the wind.
My daughter is a freshman in high school, now in the era of Paris Hilton. On most days she is still three parts girl to one part young woman, but she is definitely no longer the child of my Christmas fantasy, breathlessly waiting for the thump of Santa Claus on the roof, leaping out of bed like a Seuss character to see what's under the tree. She has been proficient on a computer keyboard since she was 6. She spends as much time on the parallel planet of Facebook as I do checking my e-mail. She has never known a world without media saturation. When I try to explain to her that when I was a child we had only two television stations and no cable, she can almost comprehend it, but when I tell her we had to get up to change the channel - well, she's just not buying that. She has reached that moment in her life when toys are no longer acceptable gifts. She wants clothes. She wants makeup. She wants iTunes credit lines. She wants a Netflix account. Ho ho ho.
Whenever I walk past an Easy Bake Oven, I just want to throw it into my jumbo shopping cart. Why can't I buy Legos or a red wagon or even Barbie doll accessories anymore? Clothes? Who wants to buy his beloved child clothes? Or makeup? Why would I encourage the advent of the makeup phase of her adolescence? I don't know much, but I know this much with certainty: Any clothes I purchase without having been given the precise size, color and catalog number are going to be unceremoniously exchanged on Dec. 26 for what she really wanted. And if I am merely the credit card for items precisely specified and pre-inspected by her, how is that Christmas in any meaningful sense of the term?
On the evening of my arrival in Kansas, after a drive of 14 hours on roads that were not icy, but - much worse - intermittently icy, my daughter and I were informed that we wanted to go to the Christmas program at the church. Given my exhaustion and the limited amount of time I had to spend with my child, I was not eager to attend the service.
We attended the service.
It was an evening of singing, readings from sentimental Christmas stories and skits. At times it felt like a cross between a Christmas pageant and a karaoke evening at a non-alcoholic community center.
But then my niece Mara and her friend Audra stood up in front of 200 people in a Methodist church in a village in Kansas and sang "O Holy Night" a cappella.
Before they were two lines in, I burst into tears. Their pure thin voices, the magnificent lyrics of the hymn, that lovely elusive idea of human redemption, the solemnity of the church, the sudden memory of my grandfather Diedrich singing "Silent Night" in German in a church in Fergus Falls, Minn., when I was 7 and life was still magic - all that simply trumped the secular insanity of the season and restored me to life.
I took out the pew Bible and opened to Luke 2:1. "And it came to pass in those days that a decree went out ... "
Now I was ready for Christmas.
The Whole World's Sap is Sunk
by Clay Jenkinson
December 21, 2008
Read fast. Today is the shortest day of the year. As I wrote this, a few days ago, the sun came up at 8:23 a.m. a huge bloody egg yoke disk in the southeast.
Thanks to the appalling blanket of cold that currently envelops the Great Plains, the rising sun was as gigantic as it was impotent. Just as there is a wavering effect in the light near the horizon on extremely hot days, so too, in the bitterest days of winter, the air between you and the rising sun is so dense with trillions of microscopic ice crystals that it has a magnifying effect, a kind of ice pixelation of the sky.
Here's a paradox. At Rugby (or Rio) the sun is 93,000,000 miles away, a distance so great that any Earth distances are negligible. It's the same toaster at both latitudes, the same distance away, and yet merely by virtue of the tilted axis of the earth (23.5 degrees) and the consequent daily quantum of direct sunlight, Rugby's temperature this week was 5 below zero and Rio's 71 above.
From every chimney between my kitchen window and the horizon, sluggish house-hovering smoke, as if every building housed a College of Cardinals that had just elected a new pope. Brutally cold mornings like these are strangely quiet and lovely, as if God turned the sound down a few decibels to pay respect to hibernation.
When I walked out to my car, in a thick stocking cap, I listened to my feet breaking the surface of the snow. The muffled crunching as the surface crust gives way is one of my favorite sounds of the Great Plains. On a winter hike of any distance it has a beautiful hypnotic effect. You can hear it in your tires, too, on snowy streets, if you drive slowly and keep the radio off. Unless the wind is blowing, life on severe winter days here is like living in a glycerine aquarium.
My favorite poet, John Donne (1572-1631), captured the essence of this time of year in his solstice poem, "A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy's Day," which was in fact written about the longest night and shortest day of the year.
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk.
Donne's great poem - worth reading in its entirety - suggests that all life at the winter solstice feels as if it has shrunk down to the foot of the bedcovers. I've spent a few winters in England where houses, then and now, have no central heating, and I've done my share of hunkering at the foot of the bed in the fetal position under a mountain of blankets.
Today is the first official day of winter - as if any North Dakotan needed that coy Bureau of Standards announcement. The conventional international designation of seasons has little meaning in North Dakota. If Greenwich were located at Rugby, not east of London, the seasons might run a little differently. Winter: Nov. 15-April 15 (five months). Spring: April 16-June 25 (10 weeks) . Summer: June 26-Sept. 20 (14 weeks). Autumn: Sept. 21-Nov. 14 (10 weeks).
Good news. At 7:04 a.m. today Eastern Standard Time (6:04 here), the sun reached the far other end of its annual pendulum swing, lingering for an instant over the Tropic of Capricorn. The word "solstice" commemorates that almost imperceptible pause at the end of the pendulum swing. It literally means "the sun stands still."
Today is the longest day of the year in Alice Springs, Australia, Easter Island, Kruger National Park in South Africa, and Rio de Janeiro in Brazil. At high noon in those places, the sun today will be directly overhead. Up here in Dakota the sun will make a lazy little horizon-hugging arc from southeast to southwest, lighting our frigid world for just eight hours, 31 minutes, and 55 seconds. At the summer solstice, on June 21, we get a full 15 hours, 52 minutes, and the afterlight lingers, as you all know, forever.
Why is the solstice good news? We all know winter is just getting rolling in North Dakota, (and with any luck it will be a doozy), but every day hereafter, between 6:04 this morning and your first wind-shattered picnic of 2009, will provide a few more precious minutes of light. For those, like Donne, who suffer from seasonal affective disorder, the worst is now behind us. We stoic North Dakotans, wedded to a fault to common sense, tend to sneer at upstart diagnoses like SAD, which, like gout in the 18th century, have the feel of being disorders of people with too much leisure on their hands. But who among us does not feel a rush of regeneration sometime in February, no matter how cold the weather, when we become aware that the days are noticeably longer?
Theodore Roosevelt was no John Donne, but he lived in North Dakota, not in temperate England, and he wrote about our landscape and climate as well as anyone ever has. More than a hundred years ago he wrote a perfect description of last week's furious blizzard. "When the days have dwindled to their shortest, and the nights seem never ending, then all the great northern plains are changed into an abode of iron desolation. Sometimes furious gales blow out of the north, driving before them the clouds of blinding snow-dust, wrapping the mantle of death round every unsheltered being that faces their unshackled anger."
I got a full dose of iron desolation when I returned early last week from a business trip to Memphis, where I had walked around carelessly in my shirtsleeves. Unfortunately, I missed the brunt of the storm, but when I lurched out into the airport parking lot, I found drifts of snow inside my car. That's a brisk wind! Truly, there was an inch-high crust of snow on my steering wheel and a fairly large bank of snow on the back seat.
I had never experienced that before. I turned the key with the confidence of a featherweight in a bout against Mohammed Ali. As I paused on the iron leather seat, strategizing what I knew would be my one and only one attempt at starting the car, I indulged myself with hope, but in my heart I knew the truth. I was welcomed home by the official North Dakota blizzard sound: "click nick click nick ... phut."
When the taxi got me home, 90 minutes later, for the first time in my life I actually had to shovel my way into my house - in the grasshopper jacket, no gloves, no hat, I had worn to Memphis. My house appeared to have been blown about 4 feet off of its foundation.
Ah, but there is good news. The house was toasty. There were no drifts of snow inside the house. And when the next day broke, I discovered that my garden is covered with about 5 feet of drifted snow.
I'm going to have great tomatoes in 2009.
Merry Christmas to you all.
Who Staffs the TSA for the Sin Detector?
by Clay Jenkinson
December 14, 2008
Running late while driving home to Bismarck the other day on U.S. 83., I decided I should send a text to my colleague, whom I was to meet for dinner. The roads were lousy - patches of snow, some serious ice, the kind of wind that actually makes you wonder if your car could be whisked laterally off the road.
I texted (there's a new icky verb) with one hand and then pressed "send." This made me feel pretty smug. We live in an age when it is possible to send a telegram from the middle of nowhere, by way of a device in your palm no bigger than a cigarette pack.
I hate being late. I reckoned my colleague would be glad to know that I'd arrive within the next 10 minutes. With the pride of someone on the "cutting edge," I finally looked up to see the lights of Bismarck.
There was a tandem fuel tanker truck no more than 30 feet in front of my car, inching along at about 15 mph!
I won't say that my life flashed before me, because it didn't. But my universe immediately shifted into slow motion, and I do remember thinking - out loud - "This is going to be a really bad Christmas." Without even thinking about it, I shot over into the passing lane - I could feel and hear my traction "give," in one of the most sickening feelings in life - and whisked around the tanker truck, missing its massive rear bumper by 10 feet or so.
As my body literally gelled into a cold sweat, I began to do the what-ifs. What if I had added two more words to that text? What if it had been a two-lane road? What if there had been a car passing me in the left lane? What if I had lost control of the car on that wild instinctive veer? Could I have survived the rear-ending of the tanker truck? Do airbags really work?
But here's the real question: Why wasn't there a highway patrolman on that stretch of highway, someone who could have written me a $500 fine for negligence and reckless endangerment? If we arrest people for driving under the influence of alcohol, how is driving under the influence of distracting gadgets any different? I could have killed myself and others over a "running late" text message, or wound up in the hospital costing Blue Cross $1 million to keep my sorry ... er, self, alive.
Note for to-do list: Stern letter to my daughter about cell phones and driving.
People do dumb stuff.
I am haunted by the story of Gary Ness, the director of the North Dakota Aeronautics Commission, who pleaded guilty last week to a Class C felony for taking a bank envelope containing $1,770 from the counter of a Bismarck convenience store. He's going to resign his $77,406 per year job over this. The victims were consulted to set some of the terms of his punishment, including a $2,000 contribution to the Ruth Meiers Hospitality House.
I don't know Gary Ness from Adam, but by all accounts he is a good and decent man, who has been a solid and responsible public servant, who on July 10 did a really, really dumb thing. What is the appropriate punishment for his crime?
So far: front page banner headlines in his hometown newspaper; intense humiliation; a $2,000 "contribution" to charity; 50 hours of community service in each of the next two years; lawyer's fees; and now the loss of job, career, reputation. Shall we stone him, too? Or put him in stocks?
People do dumb stuff. Sometimes really dumb stuff. I know I have. Have you?
Nobody should condone what Ness did, but this all feels excessive to me. From the moment I first read about the story last summer, I felt that there were extenuating circumstances at work here. Ness did not break into someone's home or car, did not grab an envelope out of someone's hands. The envelope was clearly left on the counter. There was no premeditation (he wasn't scoping out convenience stores). Another man - I could name a dozen prominent national figures here - would have gone to his grave insisting that he inadvertently picked up the pay envelope after buying a newspaper in his hurry to get to work.
There is a proportionality problem here. A life shattered over an impulsive act that unfolded as quickly as I swerved out of the way of the tanker truck?
At one of the lowest moments of my life, my minister, a thoughtful Congregationalist named Allan Bloom, delivered a sermon in which he said, "Which of us would want to be judged by our worst day?" That sentence shot straight into my heart. Isn't it interesting that when we turn to God and his ministers in crisis, there is almost always something that speaks to the heart of the problem, which is usually the heart?
July 10 was Gary Ness's worst day. That means there are more than 22,000 other days to account for in the life of a former naval aviator, a graduate of North Dakota State College of Science and North Dakota State University, the director of the North Dakota Aeronautics Commission since 1986.
When my hero, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was being subjected to a security hearing by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954, and unfairly stripped of his security clearance because he was lukewarm on the hydrogen bomb, his enemies (Cold War public "servants") fixated on Oppenheimer's worst day.
Although he was an atomic physicist and government adviser of spotless loyalty, he had bungled the aftermath of a minor security breach in the Manhattan Project. Those who wished to destroy Oppenheimer seized on the incident and blew it obscenely out of context in order to make Oppenheimer look bad. It worked, and America lost the services of one of its most outstanding scientists.
Oppenheimer's lawyers and friends defending him using the "whole man" approach. Given that we are all sinners, that we all have bad days, that we take our eye off the ball - or the road - we can only really judge a person's character by looking at the whole life: biography, career, writings, public statements, police records, friendships, faith, community life, family.
Try the "whole man" approach with, say, O.J. Simpson and former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards. Or with Saddam Hussein and former Clinton National Security adviser Sandy Berger, who capped a distinguished career by stupidly absconding with some classified material from the National Archives.
At any airport in America, you are forced to walk through the metal detector to make sure you are not carrying a weapon. What if there were an even more sophisticated device: a sin detector at every mall entrance or grocery store or church door? I get nervous and feel a little guilty every time I walk through an airport magnetometer - for fear, I suppose, that I might be caught "packing" a 12-ounce bottle of hand lotion.
Let him or her who is without sin walk through the magnetometer first. I'll be lingering nervously somewhere near the middle of the line.
North Dakota: Let it Be a Place, Not a Platform
by Clay Jenkinson
December 7, 2008
A few days ago, I had the opportunity to address a large group of rural telephone cooperative board members and about 100 state legislators. The topic that was set for me was "The Magic of North Dakota."
It is my favorite topic.
A friend of mine in New York, learning of my intentions, raised his eyebrow and said, "Can't wait to hear this ... the 'magic' of North Dakota?"
My speech consisted of several arguments. First, I asserted that the magic of North Dakota comes from a combination of three factors: the landscape, the character of the people and our heritage. Take any one of these away, and North Dakota is a mere platform rather than a place.
For about half an hour, I listed what I regard as the 10 specific sources of North Dakota's magic. Finally, I spent a little time exploring the threat to the magic. I think the landscape, character and heritage of North Dakota are all being eroded, while we, Nero-like, play the fiddle song of prosperity.
Here, in a nutshell, is my list.
1. The endlessness of our landscape. In West Virginia long ago, I met a man who asked where I was from. When I answered, he said, "The Great Plains. That's a lot of country all spread out." In the last 10 days I have driven 3,198 miles up and down the Great Plains, to Kansas and back again twice. The endlessness of the Great Plains is amazing - even at times shocking.
2. The emptiness of our landscape. It's always been pretty empty, and now it's really empty - and rural depopulation is not nearly over yet. Thriving city-states like Bismarck and Fargo, a wide range of scattered marginal towns and endless empty country in between. There's a lot of pavement for very few vehicles. Don't break down.
3. The fauna. On any given day, if you really want to, you can see antelope, deer, elk, prairie dogs, feral horses, and buffalo. If you are lucky, you also can see bighorn sheep, coyotes, and a moose. And if you are touched by grace, you might just maybe possibly someday see a mountain lion or a wolf. The main reason you can see all of these creatures, by the way, is the twin existence of Theodore Roosevelt National Park and the Little Missouri National Grasslands. All praise to federal land supervision.
4. North Dakota's in-betweenness. We are a transition state, partly midwestern and partly western. I would not want us to be Minnesota, though Fargo and Grand Forks seem to yearn for that. I would not want us to be Montana. We get energies from both paradigms. That makes North Dakota a kind of unsettled place, a sometimes hard to define place, a place of cultural tension. Some people like to say that at statehood in 1889 a geographic mistake was made: it should have been East Dakota and West Dakota rather than North Dakota and South Dakota. I disagree. Just as the atom is held together by the "curve of binding energy" between protons and electrons, so too North Dakota has a fascinating curve of binding energy between, say, Grassy Butte and Grafton.
5. The rawness of North Dakota. The climate here is on the whole moderate, but for about 40 scattered days in a good winter it is unbelievably cold, at times almost unbearably cold. The wind blows here more than in most other places, and we have come to terms with it. In my reckoning, there are only about 10 days of drive-you-crazy wind per year in North Dakota. This is a state where you ignore the elements at your peril. I love the most violent thunderstorms, too, the ones that make you wonder if you are going to be metamorphosed into bratwurst.
6. American Indians. We are fortunate to be the home of a large and increasingly visible and assertive Native American population. The Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Ojibwe, Dakota, and Assiniboine remind us that North Dakota was once a very different place, operating by a fundamentally different set of cultural liturgies. The white conquerors of other plains states, most notably Kansas and Texas, did their best to rid themselves of Indians early on. Thank goodness that did not happen here. The fact that North Dakota is a two-culture state creates serious challenges and tensions, but it contributes to the magic.
7. North Dakota is bisected by one of the world's greatest rivers, Meriwether Lewis' "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River." We've done our best to put the anarchic and capricious Missouri into a Corps of Engineers straitjacket. For a long time in Great Plains (and American) history, utility trumped magic. That era is coming to an end. With luck and good leadership, we are going to restore some of the magic.
8. Manageable scale. As someone said at my dinner table, North Dakota could be characterized as "a small town with a long street." In North Dakota, it's not six degrees of separation, but two or three. We still have only a single area code. This is a state where you can run into your United States senator in a grocery store. I always hide my Twinkies.
9. Our agrarian heritage. From 1889 until about 1989 we were Thomas Jefferson's "chosen people of God," a state of family farms, small villages and stewardship values. As the 21st century begins, we are making the awkward and painful transition from our family farm past to a more diversified and cosmopolitan future. This is the single most significant dynamic at work in North Dakota today. We periodically are made aware of how agonizing this transformation really is, but we do our best to keep a poker face. That, in my opinion, is a mistake.
10. The sheer improbability of living here. On one of the appalling wind days, or when it is so cold and blustery that it virtually rips the bark right off of your exposed flesh, or when you hanker for Thai cuisine, you have to stop and ask yourself: Why do I choose to live here and not elsewhere? If you could live in Minneapolis or Santa Monica or Missoula, where a new Olive Garden restaurant is not regarded as a major cultural amenity, why would you choose to live in a cold, isolated, windswept, low-wage, emptying place, whose highest peak is a chalk butte at 3,506 feet? It's a mystery. But the improbability of North Dakota is one of its greatest charms.
So there's my list. The threat, which I will explore at a later date, is that we are industrializing our rolling hills and Badlands landscape with unprecedented greed and gumption, and siting our industrial fixtures with no regard to the heritage of the Great Plains. We are walking away briskly from our agrarian roots and values. And we are paying far too little attention to the rich heritage of our white and Indian history.
But hey, we are more prosperous than ever before, and the Legislature is going to toss money around as if there were no tomorrow and no yesterday.
Thanks and Antelope in the Empty Quarter
by Clay Jenkinson
November 30, 2008
By the time you read this, Thanksgiving will be over. I'm writing these words on the morning of Thanksgiving eve. Later today, at my house, a gathering of the frayed strands of my little nuclear family. On the counter, cans of cherries, pumpkin and a fres
Mom Christmas, Dad Thanksgiving. Anyone who says that divorce is not a cataclysm is in denial.
I had all the time in the world to think about things this year, because I drove to western Kansas to get my daughter, who is now 14. It's a trip of 751 miles across the loneliest stretches of highway in America. The combined population of the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas is 5,986,497. These four large rectangular states contain (for the moment) approximately 1/16 of the U.S. population, but we all know that the overwhelming majority of Plains people live east of the 100th meridian, indeed east of the 98th meridian. Grand Forks, Fargo, Aberdeen, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Lincoln, greater Kansas City and Topeka have a combined population of 1,930,411. They all lean yearningly into the states to the east.
I was driving out in the empty quarter on the other end of the plains. That alone is reason for thanksgiving. My route took me through Dickinson, Bowman, Marmarth, Camp Crook, Belle Fourche, Rapid City, Hot Springs, Chadron, Alliance, Sidney, Ogallala and Imperial before I entered Kansas airspace just south of Benkelman, Neb. Add up the population of those towns, with the exception of Rapid City, and the descriptors that begin to pile up are desolation, wind-swept, isolated, dilapidated and forlorn. My favorite part of America.
Here's what I saw.
South of Marmarth, on the western banks of the Little Missouri River, on the old Camp Crook road, almost unbelievable amounts of oil development. Enough to make your jaw drop. I took photographs of everything I could see from the road - it made for a very long 35 miles to the South Dakota border. This is some of the least-visited country in North Dakota, and most beautiful too. It's as isolated as any place on the Great Plains, and it has been transformed from a kind of magic outback into an industrial landscape. Because almost nobody goes there (you have to want to go there), all this oil extraction occurs below the radar. Oil development is a fact of life. It is in some respects reason for thanksgiving - look at the North Dakota budget surplus - but it also is a jarring, scarring, marring assault on the magnificence of the rolling hills and butte country that we choose as our homeland.
I try to take a different route to Kansas every time I go see my daughter. No matter which route I choose, I have to eat up the northern half of the Great Plains to get there. It's a very long way between decelerations. The only stop signs are at correction lines and major road intersections. It's really easy - and delightful, and a little dangerous - to go into a semi-trance. We take the Great Plains for granted, but every hour or so I wake up and look out at something that takes my breath away. A pine-dotted ridge halfway to the horizon, a butte shaped by the butte god for pure butte perfection, a sluggish S-curved plains river (creek) carving out little half-hearted Badlands here and there in its journey, pyramidical sand hills barely holding their thin veneer of wispy grass, sensuously contoured rolling hills that seem to drift off to the end of the Earth in every direction, Bear Butte from 20 miles away, barely visible in the haze.
The variety of the Great Plains is remarkable. As with great books, you have to read the Plains again and again to see the subtleties. On this trip, I saw ridges and isolated hills that I had never noticed before. At least five times in two days, I wanted to turn off the pavement and head down the gravel roads to explore and maybe get lost or stuck or saved. It cost me something to keep on the straight path - I know my Robert Frost, that I might never be back - but the young whipersnapper at the other end of the journey was where my joy and thanks overwhelmingly reside, and I would hack my way through bin Laden or a desert of thorns to get to her.
The skyscrapers of the Great Plains continue to be grain elevators, including the big clusters of concrete giants. This fall they were all full to bursting, with rail cars lined up to haul all that grain away. Up and down the plains I saw at least 50 vast mountains of wheat next to the tracks in a perfect Hershey's Kiss pattern, rust tawny. The world economy may be in slow-motion collapse, but the sheer abundance of the harvest, the glut of grain so great that it could not be stored or carried away, made me fall in love with America all over again. Everywhere, I saw farmers combining in the yellow brittle corn rows with huge semis at the edge of the field, hastening to get the crop in before winter blows in earnest. I wondered if they would have to combine through Thanksgiving this year - if they did, think of their sense of weary, but intense satisfaction at the end of the day when they came in to see that mountain of food spread across the rarely used dining room table.
We sometimes forget: Thanksgiving is a harvest festival. It is a celebration of the grace of American abundance. That abundance is best seen not at Best Buy, but among the heartland's towns and fields.
And when you least expect it, driving to beat the band up over a hill, a herd of 30 pronghorn antelopes grazing by the side of the road, the quintessential Great Plains animal on a stunning autumn Great Plains day. They pause for a second or two before they storm the next ridge, and then pause again to stare and maybe return nonchalantly to grazing. Is there anything more beautiful than an antelope, a quivering still or charging San Juan Hill?
Finally, stiff and brain-numb, I pulled up in front of my daughter's school, got out and shook the shards of Doritos off my jeans, and signed her out. She came down the hall at the fastest clip that accords with teenage detachment. Her smile, when she got within range, filled me with love and thanks and happiness right through the roof. I banked it up like grain.
In a few days, I get to drive her home, by a different route, at $1.85 gas. My chief thanks in life is to be her father. My second thanks is to live on the Great Plains. My third is that so few others wish to crowd our homeland.
Visiting the Alpha
by Clay Jenkinson
November 23, 2008
Clay Jenkinson has been writing a weekly column for the Bismarck Tribune for more than a year. It can be found every Sunday in the Dakota section.
What could be more deee-lightful than seeing Theodore Roosevelt's Sagamore Hill with the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Valerie Naylor? Well, I can think of one thing, actually, but he has been unavailable since Jan. 6, 1919, when he died in his bed, at his beloved Sagamore, of an embolism.
As I write this, I'm trying to imagine being greeted at the door by Colonel Roosevelt himself. He loved visitors from out west, particularly North Dakotans, especially if they were packing pistols. In fact, Roosevelt had a strange tolerance, even affection, for murderers, as long as they were sheepish about it, as long as there was some mitigating fact or circumstance, and automatically if they were former Rough Riders.
I'm a North Dakotan, raised in Dickinson, a town of legendary importance to Roosevelt, for that was where he took the boat thieves in April 1886 and where he delivered his first great speech, on July 4, 1886. Unfortunately, I am not a murderer, though if you fly enough these days, you can certainly imagine the satisfaction. The minute he heard the word Dickinson, Roosevelt could be expected to tell the story of the boat thieves for the umpteenth time - how he loved to talk about making a citizen's arrest of "desperadoes" in the middle of nowhere and sleeplessly marching them overland to justice, in a spring blizzard. The Dickinson doctor who looked at his beat-up feet after the ordeal said Roosevelt, whom he had never before met, "was all teeth and eyes."
Roosevelt could be expected, too, no matter where his guests were from, to exaggerate the amount of time he spent in North Dakota - at some points later in life he said it was up to 10, even 15, years, when, in fact, the total accumulated time came to something like 359 days spread over four years between 1883 and 1887. Roosevelt was, among many other things, a fabulous storyteller. But we get it: North Dakota really, really mattered to Roosevelt, and he wanted others to know just how much.
Superintendent Naylor and I were on a fact-finding mission involving Roosevelt documents and photographs. This was my first visit to Theodore Roosevelt's "other" home. I have made the pilgrimage to the Elkhorn Ranch several dozen times over the years. The Elkhorn cabin is now nothing but grass and your imagination. Sagamore Hill is a ramshackle Queen Anne style house, beautifully-maintained by the National Park Service, on a hill overlooking Oyster Bay on Long Island. Depending on how you count, for there are closets larger than my bedroom, Sagamore consists of 23 rooms, all stuffed with Rooseveltian stuff. When you enter the house, it feels as if the colonel has just walked out for a few minutes to kill a hippopotamus or something. The house does not have a mausoleum feel to it like Mount Vernon. It feels as if it is still being lived in by an eccentric, larger-than-life figure, who enjoys hunting and reading in about that order.
Up till now, my standard for presidential homes has been Monticello in Virginia. The contrast is so profound that you wonder how Jefferson and Roosevelt can stand having to share Mount Rushmore through eternity. Monticello is a Palladian brick mansion with a neoclassical dome, an expression of the Enlightenment, an airy, light-gathering structure with 13 skylights, the interior walls painted in eggshell pastels. The owner was dedicated to reason.
How to describe Sagamore? It's mahogany-dark. It feels like the medieval hunting chalet of a very wealthy, very well-traveled and educated, very lethal, hyper-masculine man. Every room exhibits mounted heads of wild animals bagged all over the planet. Roosevelt's first buffalo, shot north of Marmarth in September 1883, is on display in the North Room. Remarkable pelts of lions, tigers, bears and other quadrupeds are strewn around the house like throw rugs. There is a large bronze rhinoceros in the entrance hall. It was my first rhino bronze - who knew there even was such an art form? Virtually every raised flat surface in the house is cluttered with bronzes - mostly of the "stopping the stampede" variety. Sagamore feels like a warehouse of Remington knockoffs. At one time, there were more than 100 animal trophies in the house. A few dozen have been removed to other Roosevelt sites, though no cosmetic adjustments could lessen the offense to PETA.
This is the home of the Alpha Male.
Two thoughts kept crossing my mind. First, Roosevelt's wife Edith must have been a very strong woman. Early on, she must have realized that being married to Theodore meant, in a sense, that she would be setting up housekeeping as best she could in his life, rather than attempting to create her own ambience. I've never seen a home where the yin and yang of gender balance is so out of whack. At Sagamore, you enter the receiving room, the North Room (added in 1905), through a gateway of two gigantic elephant tusks, said to be the largest on display anywhere, the gift to Roosevelt from the king of something or other.
The second thought that kept coming into my head was, "There had better not be karma." I saw an inkwell made out of a rhinoceros foot and a wastebasket fashioned out of the foot of an elephant. It reminded me of what the financier J.P. Morgan said when Roosevelt left the United States on his yearlong safari in 1909: "Wall Street expects every lion to do its duty."
As you walk through the house, you sense what a force of nature Theodore Roosevelt was. If ever there was a larger-than-life character in American history, it was Roosevelt, who punched out ruffians in frontier bars, went on a yearlong safari in Africa to relax after his presidency and who explored one of the last uncharted rivers in South America on a whim. "It's my last chance to be a boy," he said in the spring of 1914, before undertaking a journey that in some respects makes Lewis and Clark look like weekend strollers, a journey which nearly cost Roosevelt his life. He climbed the Matterhorn on his honeymoon. He took diplomats and Cabinet officers skinny-dipping in the Potomac and Rock Creek.
There are books everywhere in the house. Roosevelt is said to have read a book a day, in addition to all of the physically strenuous things he did. He drank coffee in oceans. He wrote more than 150,000 letters. He wrote more than 35 books, some of them American classics.
You also can sense the children in the house, for Roosevelt was, of all presidents, the most dedicated family man. Six children - all full of beans, especially Alice - and cousins, nieces, nephews, friends, hangers-on, plus pets of an eyebrow-raising variety of species, including the "pet" badger given to Roosevelt on his 1903 conservation trek through the American West.
Eventually we were shown the bedroom and the bed, where Roosevelt died on Jan. 6, 1919. It was a really moving experience, and somehow excruciating, to think that a man so full of life in every way, a man the contemporary historian Henry Adams called "pure act," could ever actually die. I could not look at the bed for more than a few seconds. I remembered that when TR died, his son Archibald cabled the others with a simple and profound notification: "The old lion is dead."
Woodrow Wilson's Vice President Thomas R. Marshall said, "Death had to take him sleeping, for if Roosevelt had been awake, there would have been a fight."
Confessions of an Economic Moron with No Practical Skills
by Clay Jenkinson
November 16, 2008
I’m going to write about the economy today, so here’s my McCainism. I don’t know much about economics. But I know what I see and read. We’re in real trouble this time. America’s economy is like a strong but flabby boxer who has taken a severe blow to the head and looks like he may go down at any moment, but with any luck might just make it to the bell. We’re teetering. What if we go down?
The American automobile industry is on the ropes. It probably needs to be allowed to die, or forced to undergo some really severe reorganization. That’s not likely to happen, partly because even in its haunted and stunted form, the car industry is still a key sector of the American economy and the multiplier effect would have devastating consequences not just in Detroit, but across the whole continent. Given our national obsession with the automobile, the utter centrality of the automobile to America’s sense of itself, we are unlikely to let the industry collapse. But if you cannot produce for a profit something that virtually every American cannot live without, something is terribly wrong.
The airlines are really in a desperate state now, losing money hand over fist. On any given day, about half of them seem to be in Chapter 11. Since 9/11, flying has been a pretty miserable business anyway — Greyhound buses in the sky, I like to say — but the bankruptcy of the industry has added all sorts of new degradations and discomforts. The services on airplanes appear to have reached their statistical minimum, but stay tuned. We are now paying for our ticket, paying for our bags, paying for aisle seats, paying for food.
We cannot let the American airline system collapse because it carries more than two million passengers per day, and keeps aloft a large percentage of our economy. Ticket prices need to go up, but then people will fly less.
Over the past two months, Wall Street has lost 40 percent of its value and the global financial elite has stood by helplessly as $16.3 trillion of wealth has simply evaporated, $4 trillion in the United States alone. The American people have lost more than $2 trillion in their retirement accounts over the last year — those Americans who actually have retirement accounts, that is — and only a portion of it will ever be recouped. That’s money the American people won’t spend now, which means, somewhere down the road, empty stores in the malls, layoffs, downsizings, credit crunches and who knows what more?
Every day now it is Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, AIG, Washington Mutual, Wakovia, and on and on and on until my eyes glaze over. When the pundits and the national politicians assert that this is the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, I fall into perplexity, because so far there are no soup lines, and the Joads have not thrown everything they could on the truck and set out for Route 66 and California.
I have a good friend in Chicago who is a stockbroker and investment counselor. We talked about all of this for a couple of hours the other day. He’s been managing people’s money for 40 years, in good times and bad, and he has done a great deal of reading and thinking about economics. He’s had the worst autumn of his professional life. He loses sleep at night worrying about his clients, who are watching their dreams of retirement (and much more) dissolve and there’s no end in sight. He looks haggard. He believes things are going to get a lot worse — and he did not add the rest: “before they get better.”
The U.S. government is throwing money it doesn’t have at what it regards as key industries to try to stop the hemorrhaging. It feels to me like the parable of the boy and the dike, except that there are now leaks everywhere, and I have the uneasy feeling that the whole dike is unstable, like the flood walls in New Orleans, and that a tsunami of economic disaster is not longer unthinkable.
That’s the rub. All of my life, as a post-New Deal American, I have assumed that we have built so many protections and self-corrections into our economic system that another Great Depression is impossible. Maybe it is. Still, the economy is teetering, punch-drunk, trying to stagger on, putting on a show of strength, because confidence — we all know — is the basis of a healthy economy.
So far, North Dakota has been mostly spared. I say that as if I knew what I am talking about, but I bet there are thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of good, hard-working, North Dakotans who are straining as never before to pay their bills, to keep their houses, to make car payments, to fill the car with gas. Overall, however, North Dakota has a fortunate cushion. We have the farm bill, good commodity prices and some intense energy activity. At a time when the national housing industry is having its worst downturn in 30 years, subdivisions are still being scraped out of the Dakota prairie. The unemployment rate in North Dakota is under 3 percent.
I moved home three years ago in part because something in my consciousness, below the radar, told me we are headed for trouble, and when the trouble comes, I want to be in North Dakota and not elsewhere. I read a series of books, beginning with James Kunstler’s “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century,” that made me feel that the glorious period of unprecedented prosperity, mobility and material happiness that followed World War II, may not be sustainable, at least not if we want to call ourselves a democracy in any meaningful sense.
Here’s the problem for me and for millions of others. My generation has never known want. We have lived on the froth of staggering prosperity and access, surfing through life as if it could only get better and better and better, and we have absolutely no psychological capacity, so far as I can tell, to face a grimmer world. Second, spoiled and mollycoddled as we have been, we have never bothered to learn any real survival skills. Our grandparents didn’t exactly enjoy the Depression years, but they had excellent skill sets — sewing, gardening, canning, carpentry, neighboring and squeezing the most out of a dime.
I’ve got nothing!
In a world of real poverty, I’m either going to starve or face a long, hard apprenticeship in basic living skills. Imagine the endless whine of the baby boomer in a Great 21st Century Depression. My mother has declared, with some emphasis, that I cannot move in with her.
Here’s my immediate concern. Economists used to say that when America sneezes, Europe catches a cold. My read of Great Plains history suggests — I hope I am wrong — that when the national economy falters, a couple of years later North Dakota has an economic stroke.
I’m going to line my garage wall with cans of baked beans. And learn to sew. And call my mother more often.
I'll Put it in Plain English
by Clay Jenkinson
November 9, 2008
Did you see that several of the regional councils in Britain have banned the use of Latin words and phrases in official documents? Such expressions as "bona fide," "ad lib," "ad hoc" and even the universally understood "et cetera" have been forbidden in Bournemouth and Salisbury.
The Plain English Campaign has been waging war against jargon, bureaucratese and foreign phrases for decades. Now, at a time of unprecedented and growing diversity in European life, the drive toward basic English is gaining ground fast.
Naturally, lovers of the classics and "refined" English are discombobulated (wigged out). Their vituperations (angry denunciations) are creating a stir in Great Britain.
I don't think Latin is the problem, actually. There are only a handful of Latin phrases in standard English, from "mea culpa" (my fault) to "ex post facto" (after the fact), and they are pretty well naturalized. What would we do without "ad nauseum" (until you feel like vomiting) and "non sequitur" (something that does not follow from what was said before)? It makes perfect sense to say, "He spoke until we felt a little nauseous," but that's not really what you mean. "He spoke ad nauseum" has a wonderful sarcastic bite to it. It skewers the long-winded in a clever and unmistakable way. I'd be sorry if we banned the phrase in favor of plain English.
"Ad hominem" (attacking the person, not the argument) is one of the standard tools of American debate - just listen to Hannity and Colmes or spend a few minutes with the readers' comments at the Tribune Web site.
There are, I think, some French phrases we could do without in English, like the overused "de rigueur" (socially required, as in "the silk scarves that were de rigueur at the Academy Awards") and "fait accompli" (a done deal). I'm not fond of "hors d'oeuvre," in part because I can never remember how to spell it, but also because "appetizer" is an exact - if a little less elegant - equivalent.
And yet everyone knows what hors d'oeuvre means, so I don't see why we should try to discard it. But do we need "hors de combat" (out of the battle, out of service) and "raison d'etre" (reason for being)? How is it useful to say of Bobby Fischer, "Chess was his raison d'etre"?
As far as I'm concerned, the rule of communication is simple. You are either trying to communicate or you are trying to show off. If your word choice and style get in the way of communication, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Word choice matters far less than attitude.
English has, at least since the Norman Invasion (1066) and the Renaissance (15th through 17th centuries), done more borrowing than any other language. What would we do without "sofa" (Arabic) or "tsunami" (Japanese), without "hammock" (Caribbean Taino) or "safari" (Swahili), or without "entrepreneur" (French)? I hope, in the name of irreverence, that it is true that President Bush once said, in pity and contempt, "Too bad the French don't have a word for 'entrepreneur.'" That sentence, if accurately reported, effectively summarizes his life.
The rule in Bournemouth and Salisbury should not be to ban Latin phrases merely because they are Latin, but rather: "Be careful to communicate in a way that can be understood by a wide range of people.
We are not writing literature here, but getting information into the hands of people who turn to our council not because they want to, but because they need to have contact with their government. In other words, use good sense. This is not a time to write the "great English novel." That phrase works for "great American novel," not so well for British fiction.
I've never understood why people get so worked up over language. The great William Safire made a career out of being a language cop, as has the superb columnist George Will. The point of communication is to communicate - if it works, I am for it; if it fails to inform or please or persuade the listener or reader, I'm against it. What I object to is using language to separate yourself from your community. When my daughter says, "Dad, I'm down with that," I object, not because it is slang, but because for a fairly long time I thought she meant she didn't like the idea. Au contraire, sez she.
At a committee meeting on a college campus a few months back, we were talking about a pamphlet we intended to publish to explain a big project. A literature professor who was there, sniffily observing the conversation (what he would surely call the "discourse"), piped up to say, "Ah, I see what you have in mind, a kind of prolegomenon to our latter efforts."
Prolegomenon? Jeez!
I know what it means-introductory material that must be read and understood before we can go on to the really important (and difficult) stuff. But jeez! My colleague used the word not to move the conversation along, but to make sure that the rest of us knew that he lives in a more rarified world than other people. Believe me, we got it. The conversation ground to a halt while the rest of tried to decide if we knew what a prolegomenon was and whether we should simply chuck him out the second story window.
That should be the standard: Are you moving the conversation along? If yes, carry on. If not, you need a prolegomenon hauling bales or cleaning out the chicken coop before you should be trusted to teach our children. Twice in the last two weeks, I have heard scholars, at public humanities events, use the word "trope," which means a convenient metaphor or catch-all for a set of related examples.
Here's a trope sentence: "Sarah Palin was doing her just plain country folks trope again." But "routine" or "shtick" or "gimmick" would have served just as well. Since these were public humanities events, paid for by our tax dollars, I wanted to say, "Hey, who are you trying to communicate with here, anyway?"
I'm sure I am frequently guilty of the very sins I am describing. For which, "mea culpa." When this happens, I am setting back my goal, because what I am trying to do is communicate clearly, thoughtfully, cleverly, fairly.
If I am describing a butte or the badlands on a wind-swept autumn day, my goal is to put you in the scene so you can smell the hint of winter in the air and hear the rustle of the graying and shriveled cottonwood leaves. If I am arguing against locking up the North Dakota budget surplus or chartering a state oil refinery, it is not necessarily because I think I am right and it is not to be impressive. I'm satisfied, even thrilled, if I persuade you to step back and think about a public issue with fresh eyes.
In my universe, we'd teach Latin in all of our schools. And teach people to use it lightly in life.
Last things matter
by Clay Jenkinson
November 2, 2008
On Wednesday I went up to the bluffs just west of Bismarck State College to watch the final two spans of Memorial Bridge come down. The implosion was scheduled for 10 a.m. It actually occurred a few minutes after 11.
A quiet crowd of more than 1,000 was strung out along the ridgeline. Some people stayed in their cars, more stood or sat on the prairie grasses sipping coffee out of high-end Styrofoam cups. There were a dozen or so boats in the water half a mile upriver from the bridge, including a red canoe. The minute I saw it, I wished that I had taken my kayak down to the river in the morning and witnessed the bridge come down from the water's surface. A couple of folks were standing like sentinels on a slender sandbar in the center of the river. How I envied them.
I was surprised and pleased that so many people came to watch the last gasp of Memorial Bridge. Implosions always draw a crowd, I suppose. The mood was festive in a muted sort of way. I tried to reckon what percentage of the crowd felt sad to see the venerable old bridge spans collapse into the river. Not many, I think. It was more about spectacle than loss.
BSCPresident Larry Skogen had invited folks to watch the implosion from the splendid new energy building on campus. The view from the fourth floor is magnificent. Both of our colleges, BSC and the University of Mary, have buildings with spectacular views of the Missouri River. That is incalculably important in the education of our youth - as important to the spirit of our place as the neoclassical colonnades are to the spirit of the University of Virginia at Charlottesville.
However much the Missouri has been compromised and degraded by industrialization, it is still - even in its Corps of Engineers straitjacket - one of America's greatest rivers. Not even the notorious Flood Control Act of 1944 and the Pick-Sloan Plan, which threw up six giant mainstem dams between Fort Peck, Mont., and the bottom of South Dakota, could quite destroy the romance of the Missouri River or its extraordinary heritage. North Dakota is fortunate to be bisected by what Meriwether Lewis called "the mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River," even in its domesticated state. Try to imagine North Dakota without it.
When John Steinbeck came through in 1960 in his pickup camper Rosinante, doing the field work that led to "Travels with Charley," he instantly recognized the importance of the Missouri River. "Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota," he wrote, "or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn't paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart."
Sarcasts put it more rudely in my youth: "Mandan, where the West begins, and the East dumps its garbage." I have always loved Mandan, mostly because it is not Bismarck.
Memorial Bridge was the arched symbol of Steinbeck's line of demarcation. It was, with our unique Capitol building, the most widely recognized landmark in Bismarck. The three more recent highway bridges at Bismarck are efficient and structurally sound, but essentially invisible. You can cross them without really thinking about what you are doing, because they do not scare you or make odd humming noises or call attention to their engineering. Memorial Bridge was a kind of clunky 20th century exclamation mark that said: "Hey, pay attention, you are now crossing one of America's major rivers, and it wasn't easy to build a crossing here, so don't ever take the Missouri River for granted."
Those days are now gone forever.
When I got to the energy building, I hesitated a second too long at the door, and discovered that I actually had no interest in going inside. I didn't want even a remarkable 18-foot-high pane of glass to stand between me and the bridge. Besides, it was just about as beautiful a late fall day as I have ever seen - 50 degrees (above!), a gentle breeze, a dry, breathtakingly clear sky, crisp as Halloween time generally is. It was jacket weather, just this side of chilly. It just felt glorious to be alive on such a morning, and everyone who gathered on the ridge knew: Not much longer now.
By Wednesday morning, I had long since come to terms with the fact that Memorial Bridge was going to be erased from the Bismarck-Mandan landscape. Like many others, I hated to see it go, because it so thoroughly represents my idea of Bismarck. Until the other day, it had never not been there, in the whole course of my life.
I believe the bridge should have been preserved as a monument to our past - the Capitol will be obsolete one of these days too, but I bet it will not be imploded to make way for some gleaming State Bank of North Dakota-like building. At least one span of Memorial Bridge should have been lovingly placed on a river ridge, like the old threshing machines that punctuate our lost homesteads. Or parked downtown as a pedestrian plaza, the way the old "Biggest Little City in the World" signs are preserved on Reno's back streets. But there was no sufficient public outcry to save the bridge - or a chunk of it - and everyone understood the structural challenges it presented to those who maintain our infrastructure.
I made my peace with the loss of Memorial Bridge on the last day it was open for traffic, July 31. I drove across it twice that morning, half an hour before traffic engineers closed it, and I walked across it from east to west and back again. Only a handful of people walked the bridge that day, though hundreds queued up to make their last drive across the bridge, which opened for traffic in August 1922.
Still, I feel great loss, in a very personal way, the way one feels when one of the Beatles dies or a venerable president or movie star from the golden age of film. I can remember in my youth riding in the back of our Ford Falcon from Dickinson to my grandparents' farm in Fergus Falls, Minn. In my childhood the only way to get there was old Highway 10. The Memorial Bridge was the only way across the Missouri in this part of the world. It still had its steel mesh roadbed then - which frightened but fascinated my sister and me, and just frightened my phobic father. The hum of the car's tires on the bridge delighted us. Crossing the great bridge was an event then, a marker of the progress of our journey, perhaps because we were not in the back seat fumbling with iPods and Nintendo DS.
I am feeling old today. Some of my spans are showing signs of fatigue.
Rest in peace, Memorial Bridge. You will be much missed.
Looking to Lurch or Soar?
By Clay Jenkinson
October 26, 2008
The election approaches. Here in North Dakota, it seems unmistakable that John Hoeven will be retained, resoundingly, as governor and that our sole congressman, Earl Pomeroy, will win a ninth term in the House of Representatives. These are both very deserving incumbents.
We're going to have a new president in two weeks. I cannot understand why anyone would want to be the president of the United States. Bandaging America back together and getting it to lurch on in the usual way will not be terribly difficult, but renewing it as a constitutional republic that stands for the best ideals of our time and leads the world toward enlightenment, will take leadership we last saw in FDR.
The next president is not going to be a Bush and he's not going to be a Clinton. That era is over (1988-2008). It's a relief to almost everyone in America and in the world that George W. Bush will soon retire. He's tired of being president, I sense, and the country is unmistakably tired of him. He barely registers in the national consciousness any more. It seems clear that his presidency will be very harshly judged by history. He will be regarded as a man of very limited capacity, who had the misfortune to preside over the country when 9-11 was visited upon us. His responses to the crisis squandered much of the good will we built up in the world in the course of the 20th century. He will be condemned for having sullied our greatest asset: the idea of America.
If President Bush is staking his historical reputation on the notion that radical Islam is making a run at world domination and the destruction of the infidel West, beginning with America, and that our response to such a fundamental threat has to be unsqueamish and not overly punctilious with respect to the U.S. Constitution and the Geneva Conventions, he is, I hope, going to be sadly mistaken. First of all, I do not believe that Islam is bent on world domination or the destruction of the West. Second, I fear that historians are going to say that we did more to damage ourselves in the post 9-11 world than any terrorists could have managed.
For me it is this simple: if we don't adhere to the rules of international law and the human rights tradition of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, we are not America any longer.
I know what I want from my next president and, even more importantly, what I want from my country. I want us to finish our adventure in Iraq in a responsible way. It's not clear to me whether it's worse to leave or stay, at this point. If we want to begin to recover our standing in the world, especially among our friends, we have to get this endgame right. We need to consult the world community and listen to its advice with real humility. We cannot just cut and run merely because we are weary of the war. We owe it to the world, to the Iraqi people, to the future of the Middle East, to the American soldiers who have gone to war on our behalf, and especially those who have died or come home severely wounded, to do the least bad thing. How did it come to this: the least bad thing?
I want my next president to quietly repudiate the Carter Doctrine (1980), which says Middle East oil belongs to the world (especially us) and we will take it by force, if necessary. Instead, I want the next president to move us substantially toward an alternative energy system.
We are not going to get there in four or eight years. Wild promises inevitably breed disillusionment. But let us start in earnest. As long as we are addicted to foreign oil, especially the oil under Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, and the former Soviet Union, we are going to have a distorted foreign policy.
I want the next president to get serious about the Palestinian problem. Really serious. It was a bold thing in 1948 to plant the nation of Israel in the ancient biblical landscape. Now the world community, led by Israel and the United States, needs to show equal courage in carving out a viable Palestinian state and then giving it the chance to prosper. If this is done, there may still not be peace in the Middle East, but until this is done, there cannot be peace.
I would like us to enact a reasonable national health care plan, because our neither-this, neither-that system is bankrupting us while ignoring millions of good Americans. But like most people I know, I am not overly confident of government's capacity to manage that key sector of our national enterprise.
I also know strongly what I don't want to be encouraged or endorsed by the 2008 election. I don't want to go to war against Iran. I don't want torture to be a part of our interrogation regimen, and that includes the list of near-tortures that we have been engaged in since Sept. 11.
I don't want unsupervised and unrestrained surveillance of American citizens, foreign nationals who live here, or foreigners of any sort, for that matter. I don't' want to continue to treat the U.N. with contempt. I don't want to call other leaders or nations evil.
I don't want to put ideologues on the Supreme Court and I certainly don't want abortion to be the litmus test, either way. I want justices to be chosen for their judicial temperament, their open mindedness, and the respect they have earned in legal circles.
I want America to work carefully to rejoin the community of nations.
I don't expect that you will agree with all of these ideas, but it seems to me better to invite a dialogue about the identity and the policies of the United States at the beginning of the 21st century, than to debate whether Sarah Palin is a moose-hunting babe or a good guest on Saturday Night Live, or to let our election discourse be dominated by Joe the Plumber's notions of what is and what is not socialism.
Yes, McCain is old and Obama is black. The Reverends Wright and Hagge have said some awful things. These are mere distractions from the issues that really matter to our future.
The United States will soldier on no matter what. Let us stop lurching. Let's stride confidently but with humility and good sense into the future.
Three Years of the Wind (er, word) Generator
by Clay Jenkinson
October 19, 2008
It is now three years since I began writing my column in the Bismarck Tribune. That's 156 columns or approximately 187,200 words. Somehow that gives me a sense of productivity. I write therefore I am. Life is a blur. I cannot remember what I did in May 2007, or two weeks ago for that matter, but I have in a little stack 156 columns that somehow recreate the procession of the weeks.
This year, I confess, I missed my deadline twice, but not by much, and I always wore a hair shirt for a day or two afterward. I pride myself in meeting the weekly deadline. I do it out of respect for Ken Rogers, who invited me to write this column and then graciously yielded his Sunday space to it. And I do it because I don't ever want to feel, "boo hoo, I have to meet my deadline, whatever will I write about?" When that happens, I will say farewell.
It may sound odd, but writing this column is the most satisfying thing I have ever done professionally. It is not in any way lucrative, but I care not. The Tribune and you have given me the opportunity to process my life as a North Dakota returnee through you. In a way this column is a weekly love letter to North Dakota. The best decision I ever made was to move home. I will never leave. I feel more alive here and more true to my values here than I have ever felt anywhere else. It's a privilege to be able to share my observations, and to try to make sense of North Dakota by talking to it every week. Writing this column has helped me to clarify my thoughts and emotions about this place. Thank you.
I continue to write too many words per week, as some of the bloggers like to point out. They are right, I am wrong, and I periodically resolve to study brevity. But it's what Mark Twain said of smoking: "Oh it's easy to quit smoking. Heck, I've quit 20 or 30 times." I'm going to give a shorter word count another run.
There are people who say I have been away too long, or I should never have returned home, that I am out of touch with the spirit of North Dakota. This actually hurts my feelings, but I realize too that I chose to expose myself to strangers in this way, so I have little right to feel hurt.
I have respect for many different types of North Dakotan, and I believe that there are very few cut-and-dried stories or clear-cut decisions. I try always to see the other side of the issue at hand because I believe most people are earnest and authentic in their views, and I should not regard mine as wiser. That would be stupid. I believe what I believe but I am seldom wedded to it.
Still, I feel very strongly about some issues. The lands we love so much here are in some peril. The Badlands are changing and fast. You have to get off the paved roads to see this. That's one reason why not enough North Dakotans are concerned yet about what is happening north and south of Medora. You have to drive the gravel roads of the Badlands to see the alarming impacts, particularly of oil development.
Here are my big concerns as I enter my fourth year of writing these columns:
1. How can we channelize this oil, coal, wind, ethanol, and biodiesel boom so that it helps us prosper and contributes to America's energy needs, and yet does not devastate our landscapes or make undue demands on our groundwater supply or disrupt our community social structure in negative ways? We all know that these are considerations that deserve a great deal of attention, and yet we are not having an honest statewide conversation about this. Why not?
2. How can we plan the future of the Little Missouri River Valley in a way that gives special weight to the long-term beauty of the place, its lovely eerie magnetism, it's out-there-aloneness? How can we make sure that what we love most about the Badlands is still the dominant characteristic a hundred years from now? I am against putting up a bridge or tossing a low water crossing in the Little Missouri River anywhere near the Elkhorn Ranch. I am not altogether against a proper bridge located out of noise range, though I lament that we have reached that threshold of convenience or necessity.
3. I fear that we are going to pass these two knuckleheaded revenue initiatives and condemn ourselves to mediocrity as we enter the 21st century. We are blessed to have a big budget surplus. This is not a time to lock it up. Give it back to the people, or to spread it around among worthy state institutions. Our Legislature needs to talk this through in a creative and mutually respectful way and forge a wise strategy for using the surplus as an investment in our 21st century future. That's what democracy is about. We are at a crossroads in North Dakota history. The 21st century character of North Dakota will be determined by this legislative session or the next.
4. I fear that we are going to let the Red River Valley make a raid on the Missouri River. They are bent on having a pipeline from Bismarck to Fargo, and while we go about our business the backers are moving that project forward. I think it would be a profound mistake to send the waters of the Missouri River to Fargo, not only because that would just give our most successful city (and valley) our blessing to dominate the rest of us much more dramatically and forever, but also because I think this is the era of restoration of the industrially compromised Missouri, not further degradation. Historically we have treated the Missouri with great arrogance. We need to take a humbler path hereafter and that begins with saying no to the Red River water grab.
5. I worry, too, about the future of family agriculture and our small towns and villages. I think we must not shrug off their decline or demise as something inevitable and not capable of human adjustment.
Whenever I need to renew my own spirit, I get out onto buttes, or along the Missouri River ridges, or into the Badlands or the Killdeer Mountains. That always makes me think we live in paradise, if we stay rooted to the soil and don't sell our unique birthright for a mess of profit.
Thank you for reading me. You have no idea how much it pleases me to meet someone on the street who says he or she read a column I had written about X. I appreciate your e-mails even when you think I am full of beans. I love the idea that in some very small way these columns help shape the conversations you are having. That is what I most want from this weekly labor of love.
And So, Once More, Back to the River
by Clay Jenkinson
October 12, 2008
After a so-so summer, we have been given the gift of an absolutely magical autumn. It has been a variable autumn - now drizzly and gray, now windswept, now perfectly still and sun-drenched like an immortal tableau of the savannah, now hot and dusty like August, now tiptoeing on the lip of the first serious freeze.
We even had that remarkable autumn thunderstorm a couple of weeks ago. It was somehow distinct from the typical transient, masculine, blowhard summer storm. It was gentler without being less spectacular, and there was clearly a kind of summer curtain call in it. I stood out in it until I was drenched.
A friend of mine, who lives north of town overlooking the Missouri River, said he has never seen the five elements - grain stubble, the late lingering green of the prairie grasses, the fall sky, the Missouri River and the irradiating gold of the cottonwoods - look more beautiful than in the last 10 days.
"Wish we could just freeze frame it for a few months," he said and then immediately sighed, because he knew that the glory of a perfect autumn day is the awareness, never far back of the joy, that it cannot last, that sharp winter is hovering on the northwestern horizon, and that the months of what Theodore Roosevelt called "iron desolation" are queuing up to pound us into submission.
There have been a number of days in September and early October that for some reason we call "Indian summer" - these are the days we live for. These are the days when the light is gentler than summer light, and the plains stand out in bas relief, when the warmth of the afternoon air is somehow borrowed heat, and when there is change in the air, however subtle. There also have been mornings that are clearly the advance agents of grim winter on the northern plains. When I wake up to leaden sky and stiff, scuttering wind, I think: Brace yourself.
It's the variety that makes this time of year so attractive. I love North Dakota in all of its moods.
After a series of meetings in Dickinson the other day, I had pressing business back in Bismarck. I drove my car up to the Interstate interchange fully intending to hurtle home and eke out a life of duty. But when I got to the interchange, and gazed out onto the buff butte country to the west, I just gave up and turned the car west toward the Little Missouri River. I felt like Lot's wife (Genesis 19:17).
For me, there is only one irresistible place in North Dakota. It is more or less anywhere between Marmarth and the Long X Bridge on U.S. 85 north of Watford City. The oftener I stick my foot in the lonely Little Missouri River, the saner and happier I am. For me, it is really that simple.
One of my close friends lives out there and is willing to go hiking on short notice. So we thermos'd up and drove into Theodore Roosevelt National Park.
From the Wind Canyon overlook, the valley of the Little Missouri River was as beautiful as I have ever seen it. If you close your eyes and imagine it, you can see it far better than I will be able to describe it. The air was perfectly clear and lucid. It felt as if we had been glaucomic all of our lives, and suddenly we'd had Lasik surgery. The sky was vast and embracing and endless in every direction, the best blue you ever saw, about 15 percent of it dashed with scattered thin autumn clouds.
We stood on the ridge of broken country and we looked off at broken country in every direction, but it did not feel at all hostile or forbidding. It felt miniature in scale and welcoming and timeless. (Ah, but time is catching up with the Badlands. We all know that.)
There was more than a breeze and less than a wind. For the most part the breeze was precisely the same temperature as the day, but every 40 seconds or so it carried a momentary column of chill air. We almost shivered, but then didn't, because it was not disagreeable after all and it passed on almost as soon as we felt it.
And in the middle of that circle of land and sky before us was the magical improbable Little Missouri River ambling along in lazy S-curves, blue as God, sheathed in the most perfect trim of golden cottonwoods you have ever seen.
The leaves of those bordering trees were the color yellow squared or cubed, and in places a tawny golden so sensuous that it made our knees buckle a little to gaze upon it. The river cut cliffs where it made its turns, ribbed with dull coal and red-pink scoria heaps, and bentonite caps of shattered, marble-sized, dry gray mud, like a thick berber carpet.
And then, as we sat there in speechless wonder, a herd of 18 pronghorn antelope sprang up in perfect unison just below us, and charged off toward the river as if this were the pronghorn Olympic trials. They kicked up a low thin cloud of dust as they belted across the sage flat, driven apparently by the sheer exuberance of their quadruped lives.
It was as superlative a moment as I can ever remember.
We walked down along the ridge to the river. We did not need to bushwhack because the buffalo had already trampled out a rutted path about the width of a suburban sidewalk right down to the river. The game trail followed the contours of the Badlands with perfect equipoise. It was as if a buffalo with a Ph.D. in engineering had designed the road after months of careful triangulation, studying geographical information systems' maps and taking core samples along the ridge. It was not the ancient Romans who invented road building, but the game herds of the Earth.
When we got to the river, which was clear and less than a foot deep on a chip-rock bed, we didn't even discuss it. We just walked into the river fully clothed, shoes and all, and tramped around for more than an hour. We had expected the water to be cold but it wasn't. Here and there we sank into little pools up to our knees, but for the most part we were walking on water in a perfect place at a perfect moment.
We found two large flat sandstone rocks in the middle of the river, each a foot above the surface, about 20 feet apart. We lay down on them, on our backs, and gazed up at the perfect sky. In the course of half an hour each of us dozed a little. We were silent mostly, but from time to time we spoke with a simplicity and authenticity you'll never see in a committee meeting.
Have I mentioned that we live in paradise?
Waking up to great books in adolescence
by Clay Jenkinson
October 5, 2008
Many of Clay's columns are archived at Bismarcktribune.com; search for Clay Jenkinson. If you like Clay's columns, you might forward a few to newspaper editors where you live and encourage them to carry Clay's weekly essays.
My daughter Catherine called me about 10 days ago to announce that she had read F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby." She is still young enough to belong to the "guess what?" school of conversation, so it took some time for me to prove that I was never going to guess right and that she may as well just report the news.
At the suggestion of her language arts teacher (what used to be called English), she had been trying to read Jane Austen's "Emma." But she "couldn't get into Emma," so she picked up "The Great Gatsby" instead. She had read it in a single night - I hope under the covers, with a flashlight -and it had immediately catapulted into the best book she had ever read. If her experience is anything like mine, it will not be able to hold that position very long.
"The Great Gatsby" is a great novel, but it also is primarily an adolescent's book, which shines brightest for those who are just leaving the chrysalis. It gets at two extraordinarily important themes at the heart of adolescence.
n Some of the people we will meet in life are not just "what they are." We all construct our personalities to a certain degree, and create a mask that we present to the world, but some people do this with special gusto. Such individuals fascinate us. We gravitate towards them like a moth to the flame. The persona they create has a sort of defiant brittleness about it, and they cling to that persona, that character armor, with such fierceness that it often winds up hurting others and hurting themselves. A great humanities text like Gatsby, by brilliant focused simplification of a very complex issue, allows us to process this phenomenon in a highly agreeable way. That's what the humanities do. That's why we need literature.
Jay Gatsby, it turns out, began his life as James Gatz from North Dakota, who at the age of 17 shed his identity as the son of a marginal farmer, and, with the help of a temporary mentor, re-constructed himself as the great Gatsby.
Any adolescent trying to figure out how to navigate the fractured dissimulations of the adult world needs to process the problem of fashioning a "face to meet the faces that you meet," as T.S. Eliot (that other adolescent favorite) put it. I can imagine my daughter reading the novel alone in her room (we always read alone) and experiencing wanderings of the soul she has never known before. I can imagine her feeling exhilarated but also somehow a little guilty as she looks up from the text and tries to come to terms with Fitzgerald. And herself. And life.
n "The Great Gatsby" also belongs to the "burning the candle at both ends as we dance recklessly against the fact of death and mediocrity" school of literature. For an adolescent, life is at the same time breathtakingly exciting and - as we look around at the odd way adults behave - routine, unpoetic, habit-bound, boring. When we face the first great disillusionments of our lives - and there are many - we have to decide whether we are going to shrug our shoulders and get on with life in a dogged and accepting way, or find some mad, heroic way to thwart the malaise. Here is a characteristic sentence from Fitzgerald, who coined the phrase "The Jazz Age": "So we drove on toward death through the cooling twilight."
Adolescents love the idea of Higher Law. Adults eventually come to realize it is hard enough to comply with the regular laws of life, much less higher laws. Our vital, questing, questioning children despise that in us. As they should.
It moves me to tears to think that my daughter is beginning to hack her way through the great texts with a mingled sense of mystery and perplexity.
I can imagine life without pizza - though I would be really sorry - but I cannot imagine life without great works of literature to divert us, delight us, disturb us, de-center us, and demand of us that we do the hard work of being authentic.
About the time of her 14th birthday in August, I wrote Catherine a letter straight out of First Corinthians 13:11, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
For a variety of reasons, I try to write her a couple of old-fashioned hand-written letters per week. In this letter, I strongly urged her to begin reading the great books, made the best case for serious literature that a 14-year-old was likely to listen through, and offered several incentives for her to read such books with passionate commitment. I made a short list of the sorts of texts I had in mind: "Huck Finn," "Robinson Crusoe," "Their Eyes Were Watching God," "Gulliver's Travels," "My Antonia." I did not think to put F. Scott Fitzgerald on the list. I had not read "The Great Gatsby" in 30 years.
I love our children's capacity to surprise us.
What does "The Great Gatsby" mean to a 14-year-old who is just beginning to understand that in the adult world there is a set of dynamics that she didn't even know existed two years ago?
As she makes the slow chemical metamorphosis from girl to young woman, from child to adult, from innocence to experience, she must have so much on her mind that nobody else - perhaps especially not her parents - can help her understand.
I reread "The Great Gatsby" last week, because the greatest gift we can give to a fellow reader is to read the same book on parallel runways. I found it a little thin in middle age, but I recognized its greatness and on every page I could almost, just about see my daughter tiptoeing like Alice in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz. In those alone but not lonely hours, she was over the rainbow and she was looking at the world through a lens she has never worn before.
She tells me that her class will be reading Dickens' "Great Expectations" later in the semester and Homer's "Odyssey" in about a month. Can there be anything more wonderful than that? That alone justifies public education. "Great Expectations" is one of my top five novels in the world, and Dickens is my number one author.
Better that her language arts teacher get her started on that than that her papa ruin the possibility of Dickens by over-selling him at the outset. I very much hope she reads the "Odyssey" in a prose translation, because you have to come to terms with it as a story before you are even half-ready to spend the rest of your life dancing with it as one of the world's four or five greatest poems and works of art.
Thomas Jefferson famously wrote to John Adams: "I cannot live without books." Right as always.
Human Nature at its Best
by Clay Jenkinson
September 28, 2008
What a strange and fascinating creature Homo sapiens is.
Sometimes I just sit in coffeehouses listening with half an ear to other people's conversations. I don't try to track a single conversation, partly because it is none of my business, partly because I'm not interested in the narrative except insofar as it illustrates the range of human interests.
One couple is going through the Tribune's listing of garage sales in an earnest, though not very intense, debate about which ones are most worth checking out. A small cluster of investment counselors are pretending to work, but they are really swapping sales stories from their travels to the small towns of North Dakota. Some of those stories are colorful. Each one slips out of the conversation and back, without leaving the table, to check e-mail and return some texts.
Two men at another table are talking about the prospects of the Chicago Cubs with an intensity one would expect to see in bilateral negotiations about nuclear proliferation. Statistics are flying back and forth as if they were missile throw weights. These men are arguing according to formal rules of logic they would never use if they were talking politics or a domestic issue. I hear glimpses of a friendly but serious dispute about how much difference a great reliever really makes in the game.
Says one: Obama is a radical liberal and we should not be hoodwinked.
A woman in her 60s is showing her friends her newest scrapbook project. This is not your mother's scrapbook, in which a bunch of flat items (with the occasional pressed rose) were attached with doubled-over (not even double-sided) tape and black triangular corner frames that had about a 40 percent failure rate. This is scrapbooking on crack. Each page is a kind of 30-by-30-inch work of art, complete with decals, hand-cut mats and frames, tiny stiff paper clipped by a miniature scissors into a lattice-work pie topping, There are flags and banners and ribbons and "Welcome to Disney World" signs appliqued on an extremely thin canvas. Items can be attached to the page that have moving parts. There are things that speak or sing if you touch them or smell like pumpkin and cinnamon just when you turn the page from October to November. Have you ever seen a great scrapbook? They are magnificent.
In this instance, in the coffeeshop, it is clear that her friends love her dearly but are not so sure about "this scrapbooking addiction," which is how they describe it later.
Says another: Ron Paul is the only candidate that the Founding Fathers could approve.
A group of four women in early middle age are talking in gentle earnestness about a passage from the Book of Luke. One of the four is a little sarcastic, much to the amusement of the other three. They close with a quiet prayer. For some reason that makes me well over in admiration that we live in a place where you see a fair amount of that in public spaces.
I love the range of human interests. How wonderful that this one creature on earth has this kind of ingenuity and imagination and inventiveness and curiosity. An antelope is to my mind one of the supreme miracles of creation. But it cannot build the Pantheon at Rome or get into an argument about federal grazing policy with its neighbor. On the one hand, having amassed the world's foremost collection of Elvis decanters may not seem quite on the same plane as Leonardo da Vinci or Michael Jordan, but there is something delightful about it nevertheless - for its sheer exuberance and zaniness.
Someone in Arkansas has the largest Pez dispenser collection in the world. Ah, but a banker in Orem, Utah, is making a run at the title. He has mortgaged his house. It's not funny. I know a man, a dear friend, who began collecting books about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and wound up double- and triple-mortgaging his house, working his credit cards like a juggler, and literally sleeping with a shotgun on his chest for two years because he did not have a home security system.
I know someone who has the goal of actually stepping foot in every county of the United States. From several hours of listening to the lecture that might be called, "Why County Collecting Is a Serious Cultural Enterprise," and - what is worse - being convinced that she was right, I joined the club as a non-participating associate member. I can tell you this much about the cult. There are some counties that are isolated by water or the quirks of the U.S.A.-Canada border. You have to really want to go to those counties, at very considerable expense, and when you get there and put your foot on the ground you have achieved your goal. May as well get back on the boat taxi.
I know a woman in California who is the world's second-ranked geocacher. This involves a global positioning satellite receiver (GPS), maps, a willingness to travel a lot and scramble, and a pot of gold at the end of the journey. There is a funny space alien action figure in one cache and a poem in praise of light in another. You have no idea how much rummaging around the desert and among deserted city lots geocaching involves. The elect are always scrambling up Mount Shasta or snorkeling in the waters of the Gulf of California. The people who do this are committed to it in a highly disciplined way. They develop strategies. They have geocaching conventions. I admire the practitioners more than the hobby. Keeping a spirit of adventure and imagination alive in life is the key to happiness.
One person lives to rebuild classic motorcycles. Another likes to take a twilight sauna no matter what. One crochets four evenings per week like a machine. Another micro-tunes a salt water aquarium. There are stamp collectors and people who prefer to spend their evenings at the bar and lovers of NASCAR, people who run 10 miles every dawn, ground blizzard or no, and poets and short-story writers (mostly young) who know they are going to get published soon, but fear maybe not, too.
What a species! A journey to the moon and a collection of Nazi memorabilia. A heart transplant and fantasy football and the incomparable music of North Dakota's troubadour and number one voice, Chuck Suchy. The Louvre and the World's Largest Pelican. Science has taught us that the rest of the animals, at least, are much more "civilized," talkative, and complex than we like to pretend, yet we alone have developed to the point that we can open ourselves up and repair our bodily mechanisms. Humans are the only animal that can cheat or at least postpone death by sheer ingenuity and that lovely opposable thumb.
Hard to think all this is random.
Telling the Truth at Monticello Amid the Droll Delights
by Clay Jenkinson
September 21, 2008
As often as I can, I make the pilgrimage to Thomas Jefferson's Virginia and take the tour of Monticello. Last week, I had the joy of visiting Jefferson's mountaintop retreat with the new president of Dickinson State University, Richard McCallum.
Of all the historic homes I have ever visited, Monticello is the one that most clearly reflects the personality and value system of its owner. Shakespeare's birthplace at Stratford-upon-Avon is a wonderful shrine to Britain's greatest writer, but you cannot discover the seeds of "Hamlet" or "King Lear" in that provincial cottage.
The minute you walk into the entrance hall at Monticello, however, you start to "get" Jefferson. The two-story foyer is a kind of museum of Jefferson's enthusiasms: lavish maps, statuary, artifacts from the Lewis and Clark Expedition, bones of the mastodon, the interior dial of a wind vane and the famous weighted calendar clock that not only tells the time of the day but the day of the week.
In his private suite of rooms, Jefferson housed telescopes, sextants and octants, his polygraph (an elegant but extremely low-tech Xerox machine), and his immense library of almost 7,000 volumes, all surrounding a swivel chair he designed with an accompanying chaise lounge.
A visitor early in Jefferson's presidency called his mountain home "droll." That's a perfect description of America's most famous eccentric. The house is filled with trick closets and secret passages and optical illusions-a wine bottle dumbwaiter, a gorgeous parquet floor so intricate that it drove his contractor to distraction, alcove beds, triple sash windows that can be used as doorways, a passive air-transfer air-conditioning system. Jefferson modestly called these innovations "gimcracks," but he clearly poured a great deal of his creative energy into making his house a reflection of his personality and his immense intellectual curiosity.
If I were wealthy, I'd put a dome on my house and build a Mandan earthlodge in my backyard. Or, if I emulated Jefferson, I'd just buy it all on credit and try to out-minuet my creditors.
Jefferson's achievement was so spectacular that everyone who studies him wonders when or, for that matter, if, he slept. He knew seven languages, including Latin, Greek and Anglo-Saxon, which he studied not to read "Beowulf" (eminently worth doing), but because he believed democracy began among the Germanic tribes of northern Europe. He kept five daily diaries - a garden book, an account book, a farm book, a weather log and a correspondence log. He designed the Virginia State Capitol - one of the most beautiful and influential in American history - his two homes, Monticello and Poplar Forest, and the University of Virginia, "the hobby of my old age."
In some important ways, he also "invented" America, and not only on July 4, 1776. Jefferson's influence on the history of North Dakota, for example, is almost incalculably large. He bought about 60 percent of it from Napoleon. He influenced its size, gridded it out with the rectangular survey system of square miles and section lines he devised in 1784, sent one his proteges to explore it and establish the patterns of white-Indian relations in the Louisiana Territory, created the model for its university campuses and crafted the mission statement for the first century of North Dakota life: "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God." The fact that North Dakota is nearly a perfect rectangle (drat that Red River) is all Jefferson. If he had had his way, every western state would be square and identical in size.
During our visit to Monticello, which had to do with the digitization of historical documents, Dr. McCallum and I were able to call on the retiring president of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation.
Dan Jordan has had one of America's most fabulous jobs for the last 23 years. During his tenure, Monticello created programming to observe the 250th birthday of Jefferson and the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. It founded the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies as well as the Jefferson Library, which serves as a model for what Dickinson State University is trying to create with its proposed Theodore Roosevelt Center.
Monticello has also taken on the publication of "The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: Retirement Series," which, in approximately 23 volumes, will provide a definitive scholarly edition of all the extant letters Jefferson wrote and received between 1809 and July 4, 1826, when he died simultaneously with his friend and sometime rival, John Adams.
All these are important contributions to the world of Thomas Jefferson. They have effectively transformed Monticello from a historic home into a serious engine of Jefferson discourse.
But, in my opinion, Jordan's greatest achievement has been to manage a historic adjustment in the nation's attitude toward Thomas Jefferson. When I first started thinking about Jefferson half a lifetime ago, he was at the apex of his historical reputation. Everyone knew that there was a problem of "Jefferson and slavery," but back then he was regarded as an unbelievably gifted statesman and creative artist - America's Renaissance man -who was a reluctant politician and an even more reluctant slave holder.
That was then.
Today, in most circles, Jefferson is regarded as a racist, a contemptible hypocrite on the issue of slavery (and several other fronts), a cheerful but ruthless dispossessor of American Indians from their sovereign lands and a Machiavellian politician who, like Richard Nixon, was willing to "screw his political enemies," chiefly Alexander Hamilton and John Adams.
Dan Jordan does not subscribe to this sour portrait of the "fallen" Jefferson, but he has not, like diehard Jefferson defenders, tried to turn his back on the dark side of a very great man. He has made Monticello pro-active on the problem of slavery and even Sally Hemings. Under Jordan's enlightened leadership, a great deal has been done to illuminate the lives and difficulties of Jefferson's "enslaved people," as they are now more often called. He has made sure plantation tour guides are forthcoming about Jefferson's paralysis over his ownership of fellow - presumably equal - human beings.
On our tour the other day, our docent, a white Southern woman in her late 50s, introduced the subject of Sally Hemings in the dining room. Recent DNA tests, she reported, have led the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation to conclude that Jefferson was the father of at least one of Sally Hemings' children. The crowd nodded without a single twitch or snigger.
Twenty-five years ago, that would have been unthinkable. Back then, guides called Jefferson's 200 slaves his "people," and they angrily dismissed biographer Fawn Brodie's "outrageous" claim that Jefferson had a long-term sexual relationship with one of his slave women.
Instead of trying to make Monticello the last holdout for the discredited heroic myth of Jefferson, a kind of Jeffersonian Alamo, Jordan has made it a national model of how to come to terms with the historical record for what it actually reveals rather than for what makes us feel good about ourselves, our heroes and our history.
Like Jefferson, Jordan now has earned his nunc dimittis. He will be very much missed.
Canning as the Light Fades
by Clay Jenkinson
September 14, 2008
Suddenly, as if out of nowhere, I am lamenting the loss of light. I'm not meteorologist enough to understand it, but between June 21 and some point in early September, the evenings linger endlessly in a way that feels constant and uniform - and perhaps permanent. Then one late summer or early fall day - as if out of nowhere - it's getting dark at 7:45. There is some moment at which a switch seems to have been thrown, and our summer revels are declared over, and the summer light is packed up with the boat and the family-size tent. It makes me literally want to cry out in anguish.
Now we begin that gloomy and inexorable slide toward existence in the dark: children heading off to school in the dark, darkness awaiting us as we return home at the end of the work day. Even the lowering winter clouds seem to signify that the hidden sun has been switched to "energy saving" mode.
I do not mind the cold, no matter how cold. But, like Dylan Thomas, I want to rage, rage against the dying of the light. The sole compensation for this loss is the little seed of knowledge that half a year hence the evening will come when I look around the prairie like a pronghorn antelope on alert and say, out loud, "The light's back!" I'll be outside, trying to untangle the hoses from the heaps that I tossed unceremoniously into the garage the day the first big freeze was announced this fall, and I'll suddenly notice - in a recognition of pure joy - that light has returned to the world.
The recent freeze near Hettinger was a shock that threw me into tomato processing. Some sort of creature has been taking one bite out of each of my beautiful tomatoes, so I decided to make tomato juice to preserve what they did not eat. I bought a dozen new jars and lids, sterilized them in the way that my grandmother taught me long ago. I washed and trimmed the tomatoes and then blanched them, all to the tune of Handel's "Largo."
I pressed the juice through a French colander with a wooden pestle. I filled each jar to the proper mark with warm - almost hot - thick tomato juice that was so sensuous, so magically red, so pregnant with the earth's fertility, that I had an impulse to bathe in it. Then I wiped the tops of the jars with a paper towel, placed the rubberized lids on top of the jars as carefully as if I were docking the space shuttle, and then spun the brass screwtops into place with a kind of flourish, like a '50s DJ.
The rest was simple: Lower the jars into the mottled canning pot, make sure they are covered with an inch or more of water, boil slowly for 40 minutes, extricate carefully, cool slowly. Voila.
I know I am making a big deal out of something many of you do with cool efficiency year after year, but for me it is a very big deal. I have now stored up a handful of jars of tomato juice against the apocalypse. It's the first time I have ever canned all by myself, and - frankly - the second time I have ever canned. My life mostly has been about hectic consumption and wastage. Now, in mid life, home where my heart always has been, I have finally turned a corner and begun to exhibit a teeny glimmer of stewardship. For me, canning those few jars of food I have actually grown in my own garden was a sacrament as powerful as baptism. I have more jars and many more tomatoes and I am going to try to see this through - for a change.
The jars I have already "put up," as my grandmother used to phrase it, are on the shelf in my front entry, glowing with the life force, right next to the lone jar of pickles she granted me when we canned a dozen quarts of her prize cucumbers together 20 years ago. I have carried that jar of pickles from house to house and town to town across America since that day in her linoleum kitchen in September 1988, when she was still in her late prime, still storing up produce against the lean times. Every time I have moved, I have attended first to that jar of pickles, wrapping it carefully in big fresh sheets of packing paper, then in towels, and placing it in the center of a big box marked "FRAGILE."
The ancient Romans had something called Penates - the household gods unique to each family - which they treasured up in the most important place in their homes. The Penates were a little like American Indian medicine bundles. They protected the household and the sanctity of the family. The word Penates actually derives from a Latin word for "provision of food." I have my Penates now, in Bismarck, in North Dakota, at the center of the North American continent, presided over by Rhoda Straus' alpha jar of cucumber pickles. Every day when I walk by those jars of tomato juice, I feel a wave of pride and also a sharp rush of loss.
The softer fall light, glowing rather than shining through air clarified by the recent rains, has made North Dakota's countryside a paradise. The fall light somehow brings the buttes and the coulees and the ridgelines into greater relief. It's as if "flat" North Dakota is being rendered into 3D. I have discovered buttes I never bothered to see before. Each time I see something as if for the first time, I say to myself, "I'm going to climb that butte and see what the world looks like from up there." Soon, while there is still light.
The other night, I went out walking the trail near my house with a good book. There is almost nothing I enjoy more than that. Before I could turn back for home, I was squinting in the dusk to read about events that happened long, long ago and far away in a world that never could have conceived of North Dakota. By the time I stumbled onto my home street, there were a million stars and Jupiter bright and proud in the southern sky. There are compensations for the loss of light.
I am making two resolutions, one of which I know I will keep. First, on Dec. 21, the darkest day of the year, I'm going to uncork the first of those jars of tomato juice and drink it. Second, I'm going to roll up my hoses properly this year. Really.
The end of an Era in Spearfish
by Clay Jenkinson
September 7, 2008
When I heard from a dear friend that the Black Hills Passion Play was staging its last-ever performance last Sunday, I sprang into action. I have a soft spot for last things. On May 7, 2006, I took my old Shakespeare professor to the last performance at the old Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis. It was Shakespeare's "Hamlet," which also had been the first play staged at the Guthrie when it opened on May 7, 1963.
And now the Passion Play, which is one of those timeless, perennially in the background institutions that you think always will be a feature of American life and then suddenly disappear forever. I had seen the road show version of the PP at Trinity High School in Dickinson when I was 7 or 8 years old, but I had never been to the big amphitheater on the west end of Spearfish, S.D. The 70-year run that began on June 18, 1939, was now about to end. This saddened me.
Breathlessly I called for tickets, a knot of anxiety at the pit of my stomach. I was sure that because it was not only the last performance of the season but also the last performance ever that it had been sold out for months, and that I would be told there was no room at the inn. I was prepared to connive for tickets, if necessary, and even to show up on spec and try to buy tickets from a scalper - though that sounded vaguely blasphemous. Turns out tickets were readily available.
That saddened me even more.
I got a seat in the fourth row, just beyond camel and horse range, for the PP should really be called the Passion Pageant. The stage is billed as "the longest (that is, widest) stage in America," which is not necessarily a virtue, because a fair amount of the action occurs so far from the audience that you have to squint to keep up with a story you have known by heart since you were a child. To my middle-aged eyes, Golgatha could just as well have been Chadron, Neb. At some points in the play more than 100 people (and a dozen or so animals) are on the stage at once. I brought binoculars.
I remember as a boy hearing ads for the Passion Play voiced by KFYR's Dan Brannon. Back then Josef Meier portrayed Jesus. In the radio ads he was always referred to as "Josef Meier Famous Christus Portrayer" (hereafter JMFCP), as if the actor's last name was actually Portrayer.
Unfortunately, Josef Meier (JMFCP) retired in 1991 after 9,000 performances as the Christ. Just think of that for a moment: arraigned 9,000 times before Pontius Pilate (who washed his hands every time), forced to wear a crown of thorns 9,000 times, crucified 9,000 times in the most purely sincere of all American portrayals of the most somber story ever told. Meier died on Jan. 31, 1999, at the age of 94. He represented the seventh generation of his family to portray Jesus in the PP, which has roots all the way back to the 13th century. There is something marvelous in the idea of Meier carrying on the family tradition, not breaking the string of seven generations of continuous Christus portrayal. I remember sitting in Trinity High as an enraptured child. There was something strange and uncanny in seeing him portray the son of God - audacious, powerful, troubling, moving, odd, noble.
In recent years, Jesus has been portrayed by Chuck (in such a context, I think Charles would be more appropriate) Haas, who has now participated in the PP in one capacity or another for 36 years. He's good, but for me the Christ only can be incorporated by Josef Meier (FCP). I tried, as I sat among about 3,000 others in an amphitheater that can seat up to 6,000, to remember my youth, when the magic of life was still fully open to me. I tried to substitute Meier for Haas, and, in Coleridge's words, to suspend my disbelief and surrender to the magnificent solemnity of the event.
We live in irreverent times.
There was a group just behind me that had come on a bus from somewhere, and it was filled with chatterers, including a husband who made it clear to everyone around him that he was not happy to be here. It sprinkled off and on through the whole performance. At times it rained.
Fairly early on, someone on stage, a member of the Sanhedrin I think, said, "It is over." The curmudgeon behind me quipped, "Great, let's head for the bus." This was greeted with some nervous laughter and several rather stern rebukes.
Later, when the rain was just at the clear-the-amphitheater magnitude, Jesus said, after a meeting with his supporters, "Arise and let us go." The scoffer behind me said, and not in a whisper, "Now there's a good idea!" Eventually he huffed off to the visitor center to dry off. I was glad he was not there when someone on stage, perhaps Jesus, said, "Come, let us drink."
The Passion Play is a wonderful paradoxical mixture of stimuli. At times it is truly profound. At times it is cheesy. In places, there is a Cecil B. DeMille epic quality to it and at other times it looks like the most ambitious village Sunday School pageant ever mounted. Most members of the cast are community volunteers. As I look at their faces behind the costume house beard-work, it is hard to know if they are having the time of their lives or just going through the motions, glad their large, unpaid summer commitment is over. During the initial crowd scene, members of the audience all around me cheerfully and loudly pointed out cast members they recognized from their daily lives in Spearfish, and gossiped about their dilemmas.
At the crucifixion, Meier's son-in-law, Guido Della Vecchia, sang Handel's "Largo" live, at the Black Hills Passion Play, for the last time ever. His voice was pure and beautiful. You could feel the deep emotion in his valedictory performance. It was overwhelmingly moving.
Though it had rained quietly throughout the performance, the minute Jesus was nailed to the cross and lifted upright on the hill on the south end of the amphitheater, it began to lightning and thunder. Such a moment could never have been planned or even hoped for. There was a time in American life when this would have been regarded by the audience almost as a miracle - perhaps it was. The crowd was thrilled - and a little nervous, of course, because each of us had to worry lest Charles Haas (who was now the highest object in Spearfish, and in a mighty precarious position) suffer a very different kind of martyrdom.
Somehow all these heterogeneous elements-the rain in the open air playhouse, the aria, the close of a remarkable era, the unmistakable passion of the Passion Play, the memory of Josef Meier (FCP), Dan Brannon, the lightning strikes on Golgatha, even the irreverent grump in the crowd - seemed to me to be an almost perfect expression of what I love most about America.
As I drove home the next morning, past the center of the United States, all I could think was: I love this country.
Stop and smell the train
by Clay Jenkinson
August 31, 2008
When someone asked me the other day what my Labor Day plans were, I realized to my chagrin that I am planning to labor on Labor Day. Even worse, I hadn't even thought about it.
My life is out of control. At times, it feels like a freight train hurtling along, crushing any crocus or cow or cat that blunders onto the tracks, only to discover that the freight cars contain nothing but those foam peanuts (hoojies, I think, is the precise technical term) that you find in UPS boxes. The lives of most of my friends are out of control, too. It's all bustle, meeting, project, deadline, initiative, work trip, memo, conference call, download, and strategy session. To what end, every sage, including Jesus, Socrates and the Buddha, would ask?
It is not rendezvous, saunter, and muse.
An observer from Jupiter would have to ask, "What kind of caffeinated little creature is this, anyway?"
Some of my friends check their cell phone messages a dozen times per day, as if they are urgently expecting a call from St. Peter about the status of their salvation project. I have a very close friend from Louisville who, admittedly, is a librarian, who will do a PDA Web search on any subject at any time on the slightest provocation. The world indeed is at his fingertips, but the "world" in the screen of a PDA is a binary digital world, a virtual world, not the lush windy grassland that is - or was - the actual Earth.
The great American poet Walt Whitman wrote, "I lean and loaf at my ease observing a spear of summer grass." This summer, I haven't even had time to cut my grass, much less get close enough for a scandalous grass stain. My grass was so long the last time I mowed that I might easily have just bailed it. I have a push mower with a big engine and it just chocked and bucked its way across my lawn, even at the most glacial of paces. I thought of turning a bunch of Marmarth goats loose in my front yard, but I was afraid they'd get lost in the wilderness. Next time, a swather.
And now my 71 tomato plants are beginning to exhibit a kind of appalling fecundity. As I plunge through them, pulling a weed here and a weed there, each red-orange tomato seems to look up at me and say, in my grandmother Rhoda's voice, "So, are you going to can me or just let me rot on the vine?" I've been looking forward to canning tomatoes all spring and summer, and now that the harvest is coming, I feel I have to schedule my "tomato processing project" as if it were a trip to the dentist.
My grandmother lived for 92 years. For at least the last 80 of those years, she spent much of her summers in the garden. She canned several hundred quarts per year: rhubarb sauce, peaches, applesauce, beans, carrots, pickles, tomato juice, tomato sauce, tomato quarters, whole tomatoes, beets. The little cinderblock basement of her farmhouse looked like an illustration for the Whole Earth Catalogue. Literally hundreds of jars of produce in all the colors of the pastel palate were lined up in Mason jars on crude wooden shelves built one fall by my grandfather. I have unlimited respect for those shelves and the family farmers who built and stocked them.
And, oh, that rhubarb sauce. My mouth literally puckers as I remember the perfect sweet-and-sourness of the mash and I actually feel those rhubarb fibers dissolve before they slip down my throat. And yet, the last time I ate grandma's rhubarb sauce was at least 20 years ago.
I doubt that she ever once in her long and productive life allowed a tomato or an apple or a cherry or a raspberry to go uneaten, unprocessed, or unshared. There were no hoojies in her wheelbarrow. She was the very epitome of Jeffersonian husbandry. When the cherries were ripe, she calmly turned her attention to cherries. Nothing wasted, nothing lost. No fuss, no mess, no rush, no angst.
Food storage was for her a sacrament. She did not call attention to it, but she never chattered when she worked in her cracked linoleum kitchen. Her thumb was creased like an old wooden cutting board from the hundred thousand potatoes she had peeled in her lifetime. She wore housedresses, always. I can close my eyes and see her standing at the sink in a homemade brown and white-flecked housedress so venerable that it was nearly translucent from the washings. She wore calf-length nylons rolled down to her ankles. Even in her last years, she would not let my mother buy her an automatic washing machine because she feared it would overwhelm the drain field.
Twice a week, she got out the dented tin canister of flour and made homemade bread, using the same broken china cup as a measuring device for decades. She was not a fancy-dance quilter but a Little House quilter, saving every scrap of material from her sewing projects, and cutting out squares from worn out blue jeans and work shirts to incorporate into the next blanket.
I have her tin flour canister. I make bread a dozen times per year. Although I know the recipe by heart, I always open her handwritten cookbook and fashion the loaves by way of the perfect cursive of her recipe. In three locations in my house, I have 2-foot-high stacks of her quilts, perfectly folded. I strew mothballs among them, not because I have moths, but to remind me of Rhoda Straus' attic, a squat, hot, crouching treasury worthy of the Homeric epics, the world's largest hope chest, a Rotary convention of moth balls.
I've been multi-tasking as I write this column - planning my 2008 Labor Day. I know now that come Monday, I am going to put up my hammock for the first time this summer. I'm going to can tomatoes. I'm going to eat my evening meal drawn entirely from my garden, except for the homemade bread, one loaf of which I am going to share with a slightly ailing but very dear friend. And, because the nights are chill now, I'm going to fetch out my favorite quilt, freshen and air it in the early fall sun, and cover myself with it no later than 10 p.m.
A Modest and Extremely Important
Wilderness Proposal for North Dakota
by Clay Jenkinson
August 24, 2008
An ad hoc group, known as the North Dakota Wilderness Coalition, has put together a sensible and modest proposal to designate some 68,000 acres of public lands in North Dakota as permanent wilderness.
It’s a purely wonderful idea whose time has come. If we don’t act now, it’s an idea whose time will be soon be gone forever. As far as I can determine, there is no rational reason to oppose the proposal. Nobody’s ox is gored.
The proposed Prairie Legacy Wilderness will not be a contiguous unit. The coalition has designated six parcels for wilderness status, five diffused across the Badlands of western North Dakota, and a sixth in the Sheyenne National Grasslands southwest of Fargo. Why scatter the parcels in this way? Alas, we have so thoroughly domesticated all the rest of the wild lands of North Dakota that these are more or less the only remaining primitive islands in a sea of development, mostly oil development.
In the early 1970s, North Dakota possessed more than 500,000 acres that were deemed by the U.S. Forest Service (the National Grasslands) as suitable for wilderness. By 1977, that number had been cut in half. Today, there are about 40,000 prime suitable for wilderness acres left. Time is running out. As we stare over the brink toward an energy boom an oil, coal, natural gas, wind and uranium rush that will dwarf the three or four that have come to North Dakota before, we need to select a few precious acres of what is left and say: Not here!
The proposed wilderness areas are Bullion Butte in Billings County (9,720 acres), Kendley Plateau in Billings County (16,810 acres), Long X Divide in McKenzie County (10,670 acres), Twin Buttes in Golden Valley and Billings counties (13,590 acres), Lone Butte in McKenzie County (11,510 acres) and the Sheyenne Grasslands in Ransom and Richland counties (5,410) in southeastern North Dakota.
North Dakota is already graced by a few slivers of wilderness land. Chase Lake and Lostwood National Wildlife Refuges each contain a few thousand wilderness acres. The two units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park embrace a little wilderness, too, on the west bank of the Little Missouri River. These little parcels of already designated wilderness represent merely one-tenth of 1 percent of North Dakota’s land base. If the coalition’s humble and thoughtful proposals become law, another one-tenth of 1 percent of North Dakota will become wilderness.
Can we stand that much wildness in our midst? One-fifth of 1 percent of our total land base?
Our neighbors all have chosen to protect more wilderness than we do. South Dakota contains 77,570 acres of wilderness in two units; Montana 3,443,038 acres in 15 wilderness areas; Minnesota 816,268 acres in three units; Wyoming 3,111,232 acres in 15 units; Idaho 4,005,754 acres in six wilderness units; and Colorado 3,390,635 acres in 41 units.
Think of what this proposal really amounts to. A handful of little patches of wild land would be preserved forever as prairie, plains and Badlands remnants, as reminders of what the northern Great Plains once were. Why would anyone oppose a wilderness plan so intelligent, so well thought through and so carefully targeted?
And yet there are people who will oppose this proposal not on its merits, but merely because they cannot stand the idea that the conservation community would win a little victory in the land use wars of North Dakota and the American West. I hear the phrase “damned environmentalists” almost every day of my life. Some will oppose the plan because the word “wilderness” is such a loaded term at this dispirited, resource-hungry moment in American history. Look how this single, profoundly American word makes North Dakota’s political leaders squirm. Some will oppose the proposal because it violates the seemingly sacred American notion that nature exists to be exploited, extracted, developed and “improved”, or because it is somehow disturbing that we could decide just to leave a parcel of our land alone, forever, just for the sake of leaving it alone.
Why do we need wilderness? Here’s why.
On a tiny percentage of our public lands, we need to remind ourselves of what America looked like before we began to slice and dice it with our industrial tools. A century ago, Theodore Roosevelt called upon us to preserve some bits of the America of Daniel Boone and Lewis and Clark. He wanted Americans of every generation to have a chance to reduce life to its lowest terms and sleep on the ground out where the wind rustles through the trees at dusk.
Forever.
We need to protect a few scattered sanctuaries where we can go to refresh the human spirit without being reminded of the amenities and the infrastructure and the daily hum and drum of our lives. It can be argued that we don’t need much such space, but we certainly need some. Roosevelt called American wilderness places “our cathedrals”, our Notre Dame, our St. Peter’s, our Parthenon, and he insisted that we treat them as lovingly as Europeans maintain their sacred grounds.
Above all, we need to show, even if only in this modest and symbolic way, that we have the capacity to restrain ourselves as we come to terms with the landscape on which we have chosen to live. Acts of restraint, as every theologian knows, dignify our experience, and bring a greater measure of purpose and integrity to everything we do. Fully 89 percent of North Dakota is farmed and ranched. Only 2.7 percent is owned by the federal government. Over in our neighbor Montana, the feds (that is, we the people) own 29.9 percent.
This seems to me like a proposal that everyone can support, if only because it is so extremely modest. There are no “takings” here. Some state lands would have to be transferred to federal jurisdiction; a few acres of private inholding would need to be purchased to secure the integrity of the parcels. Nobody’s barn has to be torn down. Carefully regulated grazing and hunting still will be permitted on the wilderness acreage. If there is oil under these small parcels, it can almost certainly be reached by slant drilling.
Nobody can argue that this proposal represents a slippery slope or a Trojan Horse designed to open the door to bigger, wilder proposals that will follow if this one is successful. There is almost no land left in North Dakota that can qualify as wilderness. If this proposal succeeds, it’s the end of the wilderness story: just two-fifths of 1 percent of North Dakota, while the other 99.6 percent can continue forever to be not wilderness.
At this point in American history, most wilderness proposals require real sacrifice. They represent hard choices that have to be made in our attempt to balance the magnificence and sublimity of the American West against other important values like economic development and the sanctity of private property. This North Dakota proposal, to re-designate 68,000 acres already in the public domain as “wilderness” rather than “roadless,” is as painless a wilderness plan as ever has been advanced.
Let’s get it done. Now. While there’s still time.
Bakken Workers Scarce
by Clay Jenkinson
August 10, 2008
Last week, I had the good fortune to dine in Bismarck with 20 high level employees of a large oil company, a company that does considerable business in western North Dakota. My official role was to provide a little after-dinner lecturette about “our state North Dakota.” You know: 47th in population, 19th in area. Three distinct regions: Red River Valley, Prairie Pothole, western slope. Outmigration. Meadowlark, the telephone pole (state tree) and the chokecherry. Yadda go ta North Dakota, where there’s cattle and there’s wheat and there’s folks that can’t be beat.
As you can readily see, I had nothing much to contribute to our guests, who were mostly from a place called Houston, but I eagerly signed on for the dinner in the hope of learning something about the future of oil development in our region.
I started by delivering a rather extensive lecture reviewing everything I know about oil. I quote my lecture in its entirety: “It’s some kind of liquid carbon, isn’t it? I’ve heard that up from the ground comes a bubbling crude?” Having thus established my street cred, I had the good sense to shut up and listen. One of the most important rules of life, especially for those prone to hold forth, is that you never learn anything while you’re talking.
I peppered our petroleum industry guests with questions for more than an hour. Here’s what they taught me.
One: The Bakken oil pools at a depth of about 10,000 feet. But you don’t just drill straight down those two miles and — voila. Once you reach 10,000 feet you begin horizontal drilling another 9,000 or so feet. (Fascinating explanation, here, of how the pipe turns the corner). Now we’ve sunk almost four miles of pipe and still no oil. At this point water at extremely high pressure is forced down the pipe. This requires a lot of water, a great deal of power, and just imagine the pumping rigs. These jets of water shatter the shale that straddles oil, thus pooling a larger concentration of oil in one subterranean spot. Now you can pump the oil to the surface.
It’s extremely expensive to get at Bakken oil, but once you reach crude, the flows can be amazing.
The Bakken field w |
