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Clay's Weekly Columns

The Bittersweet First Moment of Autumn in Dakota
by Clay Jenkinson
August 29, 2010

I can pinpoint the precise moment when fall came this year. It was last Sunday-Monday at about 4:30 a.m. All summer I have been sleeping with nothing but a thin sheet, and that only for the security of it. Ever since the Fall, humans have felt the need to cover up. I’m one of the most emphatic coverees. My house is air conditioned, but I refuse to use it, because this is North Dakota. I woke up at 4:30 Monday morning because I was cold—really cold. The windows were open throughout the house. There was a quilt, made for me by my grandmother 50 or more years ago, on a chair nearby. Rather than fetch that blanket the other night, I tried to huddle up in the fetalist of fetal positions, and wound up wrapping myself in that sheet as in swaddling clothes or a medieval funeral shroud. When I finally did get up, I had to begin by escaping, Houdini-like, from the sheet.

Fall.

I turned my sprinkler system off this week. I reckon if time it just right, I’ll need to mow the lawn just one more time this year.

The irony of this is that just as the signs of autumn begin to accumulate, we had the hottest days of 2010. For a couple of days the heat was almost oppressive. The air felt oven-heavy and unsettled, and I found myself looking to the West for signs of a gargantuan thunderstorm. None came. For a couple of days I couldn’t get enough water onto my tomato plants.

This has been quite a summer. North Dakota summers are more complex and subtle than we tend to remember come January. June is typically volatile, wet, and often quite cold. This is the time when the Medora Musical rains out a number of times. Sometime around July 1st, reliably hot weather arrives, pretty suddenly, and then a period of “timelessness” ensues for four or five or six weeks. It’s summertime and the living is easy. During this period thunderclouds build on the western horizon almost every day, sometimes becoming storms and just as often fizzling out in a few squibs of heat lightning. The high temperatures tend to be in the 80s or lower 90s, and at night we get temperate open-window sleeping weather. Then, sometime after the first week in August, dog days come to the Northern Plains. This is when you most want to get to the river in the heat of the afternoon. There is nothing quite so satisfying as being on a sand bar, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, when it is blistering hot, when the light is blinding and all the countryside a mirage, and you just surrender into a vegetative state and for once just BE.

In any given year, you get only a few such experiences. In North Dakota, you have to store them up against the protracted season of iron desolation, like squirrels or ground mice.

My tomatoes are many, but tardy and only the size of baseballs. Furtive night critters are taking bites out of the ripest of them. My corn looks fabulous in three haughty rows. Each stalk towers like a corn god. The corn has tassled but not yet filled out. I can’t wait for the moment when I boil my first ear from my own crop and slather it with butter. I’ve been eating tomatoes and onions for about two weeks. For a few weeks per year I graze in the evenings. The cost of that experience, in water and seed and nurturing, is irrationally high, especially if you bring farmers’ markets into the equation, but the soul pay is just enormous. When I gather up a few things from my garden and eat them with the earth still hovering about their husks, I feel more present, integrated, in tune, and authentic than at any other time. Alive. To grow a cucumber and then eat it too is to reconnect with something so fundamental as to be too good for language. (But you see it has not stopped me, alas).

Every evening that I can now I take a long walk in the evening breeze. As I walk off the stains of the day—the strains are heavy these days—I try to look around and open my eyes fully, not just to see the plains but to SEE them, if possible, to drink it all in to the fullest. I try to remind myself that two months from now it will be dark by that time of evening and if I go walking, I’ll have to suit up first. I’m going to can tomatoes, of course, but how do you can a North Dakota summer? I take deep breaths and talk out loud—as often as not, to myself—about what I see around me, so that the experience gets deeper in. Every night that I can, I read out on my deck until dusk, knowing that all too soon in the evening I will be inside shutting the cold out not urging the cool in.

I went out with friends to Chuck Suchy’s Bohemian Hall music festival last Saturday night. There were several hundred of us, splayed out in lawn chairs, listening to North Dakota’s troubadour, his marvelous wife Linda, their son Ben, and their friends. The nearly full moon rose between the hall and the droll little church on the hill across the road to the southeast. It was as magical a night as I can ever remember, with Chuck singing and storying the agrarian experience, giving the Dakota experience its best and most authentic voice, in his usual self-depreciating and gentle way. It was just this side of blanket weather after the sun went down. It would have been a perfect night at any time of the summer, given the von Suchy family talent, but of course its annual arrival marks the moment when summer begins to surrender and we coil up the hoses. That made the evening more enchanting and more poignant.

Because in the back of our minds, we all knew.

And So, Let the Debates Begin
by Clay Jenkinson
August 22, 2010

The political season is heating up. Once the Medora Musical closes (September 5) and our children go back to school, we need to get serious about who will represent us in the 111th Congress of the United States. As you know, John Hoeven, Tracy Potter (and Keith Hanson) are running for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Byron Dorgan. (There is still time to change your mind, Senator Dorgan!). And Rick Berg, Earl Pomeroy (and DuWayne Hendrickson) are seeking to be the sole North Dakota voice in the U.S. House of Representatives. Pomeroy, the incumbent, is currently serving his ninth term in Congress.

Hoeven is almost certainly going to be the next U.S. Senator from North Dakota. He currently leads in the polls by a 69-25 margin. But a lot can happen between now and November 2, particularly in the ugly 24-7-365 partisan swamp that now poses as the American republic. Candidates on their way to coronations sometimes flame out (Ed Muskie, ’72; Gary Hart, ’84). Unlikely challengers sometimes surprise everyone—Bill Clinton did not think he would win the presidency in 1992. Still . . . .

Congressman Pomeroy, as the political cliché has it, is “in the fight of his political life.” I think Pomeroy would disagree with that assessment on several counts, but everyone (including Earl) agrees that it’s an exceptionally tight race, and Berg, a Fargo businessman with a long career in the state legislature, has a very good chance of winning a seat in Congress.

The state’s political and media communities are abuzz with talk about debates. All the candidates say (formulaically) that they are willing to debate, but between scheduling difficulties and political gamesmanship, no debates of the kind we need—statewide commercial prime time broadcast—have so far been scheduled.

If I were Governor Hoeven I wouldn’t be eager to debate, either. Hoeven has a comfortable, even a commanding lead, and he has nothing to gain by squaring off with his opponent. His goal, surely, is to stay firmly in command of his message and to minimize his exposure to situations he cannot fully control. Like all political front-runners, he is more interested in protecting his lead than in engaging in civic adventure on the campaign trail. This is Politics 101.

Potter, the underdog, naturally would love to debate Hoeven a number of times between now and the election. His primary goal is to crack the shell of inevitability that currently surrounds Hoeven. (And of course, that is precisely what Hoeven seeks to avoid). Potter is a brilliant, articulate, witty, and voluble man who is exceptionally quick on his feet. Surely he believes that he could out-debate the more reserved and cautious Hoeven. Potter insiders are now saying that Hoeven is afraid to debate Tracy. This is absurd. Hoeven has been Governor of North Dakota for ten years. He’s a confident public speaker and he has the advantage of being highly disciplined about what he lets come out of his mouth. I have had the opportunity to hear Hoeven debate (Heidi Heitkamp) at very close quarters and I know that he’s formidable. So I don’t think either candidate is likely to mop the floor with the other.

But they do have very different visions of North Dakota (which we are entitled to hear, side by side, with follow-up comments, questions, and clarifications), very different ideas of the role of government in the lives of the American people (which we are entitled to hear in detail rather than in sound bites and 30-second TV ads). And fun though it might be fun to hear their views of whether an Islamic mosque should be built near Ground Zero in New York, I’m much more interested in hearing their views of how we should manage the whopping oil boom that is revolutionizing northwestern North Dakota; how we should solve the now-too-much, now-too-little problems of the Red River; how we should handle the burgeoning waters of the Devils Lake basin; what we should do about property taxes in North Dakota; how best to invest the gigantic state surpluses that are being generated by oil revenues so that North Dakota can flourish through the entire 21st century; how we can improve white-Indian relations and respect the sovereignty of North Dakota’s Indian nations; what kind of national farm bill is best for the nation and the farmers of North Dakota; how we can develop our mineral resources and still conserve the stark beauty of our plains landscape, and not just in the badlands per se; what, if anything, can be done to stabilize and refresh rural culture on the northern plains. And so on.

The debate(s) I really want to see this year are between Rick Berg and Earl Pomeroy. Particularly because we have only one Congressman (as opposed, say, to California, with 53), we the people of North Dakota need to scrutinize this race with particular seriousness. On the one hand, we need to know a great deal more about Rick Berg before we grant him so much power, and, on the other, we need to hear Congressman Pomeroy explain and defend his record, particularly on the controversial health care reform bill that has upset so many of his constituents. Both candidates, in my opinion, have more to gain than lose from a series of statewide debates.

As do we.

The truth is that these debates are not really about them, but about us. As the candidates exchange their views in each other’s physical presence (a very different beast from formulating them apart), we get the opportunity to think about who we are, what we want from government, where we are headed as a people. We might possibly graduate from our easy-answer political opinions to a more nuanced and mature political outlook. We have the opportunity to engage in serious political discourse, not a simplistic exchange of talking points of the kind that one hears on Fox and MSNBC. Debates are an important, even essential, forum for our political engagement. North Dakota is at a crossroads. We need to think hard about the future before we cross the road.

I hope the people of North Dakota will put pressure on the candidates to step up to the podium—together, soon, and often.

Clay's Weekly Columns

And that's the way it seems--to the far right
by Clay Jenkinson
August 15, 2010

On a long drive to Kansas I listened for two whole days to nothing but conservative talk radio on my Sirius satellite system. Really, really conservative talk radio, the voice of the hard right, the kind that wonders whether President "Barack Hussein Obama" is actually a United States Citizen.

It was eye-opening, to say the least. Here's what I heard:
-- Allowing a mosque to be built near Ground Zero in New York City will not be regarded as a sign of tolerance and our open, multi-cultural society. It will be regarded by the Islamofascists as a "second victory" over the Great Satan in the heart of Manhattan. Our Islamic enemies will crow that they have not only succeeded in perpetrating the greatest attack on the United States in our history, but that we are so weak and irresolute that we are willing to let them build a monument to their attack in the very shadow of the World Trade Center. It will be their way of rubbing salt in our wounds, and our spinelessness will only encourage them to attack us again.

-- Michele Obama's visit to Spain shows that the president and First Lady don't give a damn for the mass of the American people as we suffer through the greatest recession since the Great Depression. Furthermore, according to a talk show host named Andrew Wilkow, the fact that Mrs. Obama was living it up in Spain while her husband celebrated his 49th birthday in Chicago suggests that he, like such other Democrats as JFK and Bill Clinton, is having extra-marital affairs, including with someone named Vera Baker.

-- U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's decision to overturn California's Proposition 8 (which outlawed same sex marriages) is an example of the kind of "judicial activism" that is destroying America. When an unelected judge overturns the decided will of the majority, as in the Prop 8 case, he is effectively waging war on the U.S. Constitution. Any suggestion that Walker's decision is the logical extension of the "equal protection clause" of the 14th Amendment is, according to hosts Gary Bauer and Tom Rose, a deliberate distortion of the clear historical intent of the 14th Amendment, which may, by the way, need to be overturned.

-- "Obama Care" is just the leading edge of Barack Obama's plan to transform America from the freest country on earth into a socialist or even communist regime. It's all about redistribution.

--Justice Elena Kagan is "the least distinguished appointee to the Supreme Court in American history." She's a pro-abortion, pro-gay (probably gay herself), anti-military, anti-gun, judicial activist, who believes that the sacred U.S. Constitution has been flawed from its creation in 1787.

-- Barack Obama is incapable of speaking without a teleprompter. He's not nearly as intelligent as all his worshippers think. Take his ghost written boilerplate away and he makes George W. Bush look like Daniel Webster.
-- Vice President Joe Biden is a foul-mouthed dunce.

-- Barack Obama is only happy when he is apologizing for what he regards as the many sins and failures of American history. His speech at Cairo on June 4, 2009, was "the most anti-American speech ever delivered by a president of the United States." It was little short of treason. His declaration in Cairo that the United States would not hereafter torture its detainees was appalling because a: we don't torture anyone, thank you very much, and b: we need to use "enhanced interrogation techniques" to get information from our enemies in the real (not idealist, Obama-like) world in which we now live.

-- The oil spill catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico should not any longer be regarded as a BP problem but a "BO problem." The Obama administration's handling of the environmental crisis has been so ham-handed and inept that it is now unfair to George Bush to call the Deepwater Horizon oil spill "Obama's Katrina."

-- The moratorium on offshore oil drilling in the Gulf of Mexico is a disastrous over-reaction to the spill, which was an accident involving one service provider for one oil company. The moratorium will destroy a vibrant gulf oil industry, beginning with the smaller, independent companies, without solving any problems or preventing any further oil spills. The actual reasons Obama has imposed the moratorium are twofold: first, to punish the southern tier states that did not vote for him in 2008 by ruining their economies; second, to continue his planned systematic assault on the carbon economy.

-- The claim that the earth is experiencing Global Climate Change (formerly Global Warming) is "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people." We all know that the evidence for GCC was fabricated by power-hungry liberals to advance their anti-capitalist, anti-American agenda.
-- The Obama administration's economic initiatives-bailing out the banks and the automobile industry, etc.-did not accomplish what they intended. In fact, they worsened the economic situation at the same time they bankrupted the country. We would have been better off letting the market solve the problem, as it invariably does when we lower taxes and empower capitalism to correct its own excesses. Besides, the housing and bank collapse was the work of liberal congressmen who wanted to put irresponsible minorities into homes that we all know they cold not afford to pay for.

Each of the conservative talk show hosts I listened to said, in the course of a one or three-hour program, that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party are literally destroying America as we know it and as the Founding Fathers intended it. Unless we stop them-and several of them hinted that it may take some sort of armed protest - the America that we know and love will quite simply disappear.

They're not kidding. It is, they say, that grave.

I have only a couple of quick reflections on what I heard between Bismarck and Kansas. First, the men who spoke these words (and the callers that reinforced them) seemed to be speaking from deep conviction, not routine partisanship. Second, although I believe only a hardened minority would accept all that they asserted, I do believe that in the late summer of 2010 a majority of Americans believe a majority of what they unambiguously claimed.

We're in for a wild ride come November.

Autumnal Thoughts as the Light Begins to Recede
by Clay Jenkinson
August 8, 2010

Somehow it always depresses me to see pre-season football appear, as if suddenly, on my television screen. It feels like an intrusion. It spells the end of another summer. More than New Years, the first pre-season game makes me step back and ask myself what I have accomplished in the last year, and why project X is still not finished. It makes me feel as if I have been lapped—again.

The march of time seems to accelerate. The inexorable grind of the calendar—so insensitive to our moods, our needs, our soul rhythms—has a particular tyranny in a place like North Dakota, where the winters are vast and predictable and the summers are brief, volatile, and highly unpredictable.

I cannot remember a summer I have less wanted to say goodbye to. The last couple of winters on the northern plains have been long and a little oppressive. Psychologically, I needed this summer, if that makes any sense. There have been so many false starts to this summer that it feels like it is over before it ever really began. It’s a race against time (and the first frost) for my tomatoes.

The other day I walked into a Target store somewhere in the American West and stumbled into a half-acre section of school supplies. I felt indignant, the way you do when the Christmas displays appear before the Halloween candy is hardly eaten. I left the store without making my purchase.

Last night a small group of us celebrated my mother’s 79th birthday on a sandy beach of the Snake River in Lewiston, Idaho. My mother makes 79 look good, even great. She sat on a camp chair looking totally alive and vibrant, in the confident way of those born under the sign of Leo, and I sat across from her feeling tired and spent. It’s true that I have worked harder this year than in any previous year that I can remember, and I just finished nine extremely strenuous days hiking and canoeing the Lewis and Clark trail, but the sad fact is that my mother takes better care of herself than her son does.

Meanwhile, the dusk caught us a little unprepared. We have become so habituated to the long summer evenings that we had not noticed, until last night, that the days are growing shorter and the reign of light is beginning its withdrawal. That moment of realization always sends a tremor of melancholy along one of my many fault lines. We lit candle lanterns and sat eating splendid birthday cake while the Snake River bluffs silhouetted and closed in all around us. I am so fortunate to have such a mother.

My mother has in many respects conquered time, while I seem to be a vile collaborator. By letting myself get so unnaturally busy, I appear to be putting my foot on the accelerator of time. What could be more idiotic than that?

On the Lewis and Clark cultural tour that I led over the past two weeks, I had two revelations. On about day seven, we hiked up Wendover Ridge, about a hundred miles west of Missoula in the heart of the Bitterroot Mountains. It’s a nine-mile hike more or less straight up. The vertical gain is just under a mile in the exact footsteps of Lewis and Clark. One of our participants, a brainy and outspoken beer distributor, was heard to wail, about halfway up the steep slope, “Didn’t Lewis and Clark ever hear of @!!@#@!! switchbacks?”

The leader of the hike was a thirty-something Montana outdoorsman and guide named Chad, who loped up the slope as if he were out strolling with a Sunday school class. At no point in the five-hour hike did he breathe hard. Meanwhile, the blustery beer distributor coughed up a lung every ten minutes or so. I stayed up with the first group of five hikers merely to save face. Shame alone kept me near the front of the pack, which by hour three extended all the way up and all the way down the mountain trail.

It is truly one of the severest hikes I have ever been on.

Six times (between scheduled breaks) I had to stop to blow for thirty seconds or so. This really upset me, though I probably had the same experience the previous two times I climbed Wendover Ridge and just repressed the memory. I’m leading the same cultural tour next year around this time. At the top of the mountain when I could spare enough breath to speak again, I told Chad that next year I am going to make the hike without a blow. He looked at me in the kind manner of a nursing home attendant and said he would look forward to that.

As we closed in on the finishing line—marked by an ice chest brimming with cold, cold water bottles—an older man who had been hanging back in the second group suddenly sauntered past me and finished the hike second only to the miserable twerp Chad, as if he had been airlifted by helicopter to the 8.75 mile mark. His name was George and he was fresh as a morning meadowlark.

Later that night, over an exquisite dinner prepared by our outfitters, I learned that George, who is somewhere in his mid to late sixties, has run marathons on all seven continents, including Antarctica. Here’s his story, an inspiration and an admonition to us all. He was 47 years old, working in a high-stress job, at least 20 pounds overweight, and beginning his descent into abyss of creaky, achy, sedentary middle age.

He started running with a few of his buddies, got the bug, and now has run 50 marathons, including some super marathons and mega marathons—all over the world!

But here’s the kicker: George told me that he has done his best professional work, and his best creative thinking, since he started running; that he has more time in any given day; and that he has never felt more alive in his life.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, shall I listen, or just freefall?

Drifting down the Missouri River with Karl Bodmer
by Clay Jenkinson
August 1, 2010

This summer, I have had the joy of leading two cultural tours — two weeks on a cruise ship in the eastern Mediterranean, and now 10 days on the Lewis and Clark trail in Montana and Idaho. Talk about contrasts!

From Cairo, which the U.N. regards as the densest urban population in the world with 70,000 people per square mile (that’s all of North Dakota’s population in a single township, with oodles of room to spare), to the White Cliffs region of the Missouri River in Montana, east of Fort Benton, where there are far fewer than two people per square mile.

When I travel abroad, the thing I miss most is the sheer vastness of America, particularly the American West. Far away, in coffeehouses in London or taverns in Greece, sometimes I close my eyes and daydream America: not our amenities (burgers, coffee, pizzas, hotels, who cares?) but wandering through empty country west of the Mississippi River with no particular deadline.

There are lots of open places all over the world (deserts, savannahs, pampas, steppes, plains), but so far as I know there is only one landscape where it is easy and comparatively inexpensive to hop in a car and wander in dusty, windswept, endless aimlessness.

Here’s the formula that makes the American experience magical and unique: Prosperity plus our incredible mobility plus comparatively cheap gas plus the vast and still lightly settled outback plus our unique national mythology in which freedom and space are inextricably interwoven.

As Stephen Ambrose liked to say, “Nothing like it in the world!”
As I write this, in a historic hotel in Fort Benton, Mont., we have come off three perfect days on the Missouri River, floating and gazing and hiking and talking about nearly every aspect of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. By now, I’ve said just about everything I know about Lewis and Clark, and I’ve started making stuff up.

Our group consists of 31 Lewis and Clark and/or Jefferson lovers from around the United States. When there is time, we’re also discussing German Prince Maximilian’s ethnographic journey through this same country in 1832-33.
Yesterday morning, we floated past the exact spot where Maximilian’s colleague, the Swiss watercolorist Karl Bodmer, painted what one historian has called “the most spectacular vista of the voyage.” It’s the image of the Stone Gates, off in the distance upriver, with a romantic castellated white bluff in the right foreground and a brown columnar monolith called La Barge on the left bank in the middle distance. (You can Google it). I turned just enough in my canoe to take a handful of photographs without tipping over.
It was thrilling, beyond thrilling, to have gazed at that painting a hundred times over the years, to have written about it, and now to have camped literally IN the painting. And then, the morning after, to have turned around as we drifted down the Missouri River in canoes and to have seen precisely what Bodmer saw 177 years ago. The landscape is essentially unchanged. Think of that. That’s one reason they call Montana the last best place.
Later in the day, about 10 of us cinched up our lifejackets and jumped into the river to drift down the last two miles to our evening camp. Buoyed by the lifejackets, we swam out to the middle of the river so we could just surrender to the powerful current of the mighty Missouri. We bobbed like corks among the White Cliffs, laughing.

That night in camp, we settled into our tents, cleaned up just a little, drank a little wine and ate some hors d’oeuvres, took a short hike, had some group talk about Lewis and Clark, ate a splendid dinner—salad, beef tenderloin, Dutch oven potatoes, zucchini and, for dessert, cobbler, then sat in a circle around a fire pit listening to two young river men of the outfitter crew, Mike and Pete, as they plunked a banjo and a “gee-tar” and sang western folk songs, some of their own creation.

It was one of those rare magical nights in the heart of the American West. Everyone was tired and well-fed, glad to be on this journey of discovery in Lewis and Clark country, and relaxed in a way that is virtually impossible back in what Huck Finn called “sivilization.” Part of our satisfaction was that we had in some small way earned it: paddled our way in pairs to our evening encampment, rather than be delivered there by way of an internal combustion engine. We all felt renewed as well as a little sore in the back and shoulders. We felt more self reliant, a little bit more in control of our lives for a change, as well as sunburned above our knees. We felt (perhaps a little smugly) that we were in a place you have to work at to get to, and that it meant more to us because we had worked at it rather than just shown up. Nobody wanted to move from those camp chairs. We wanted to linger forever in our state of physical fatigue but not exhaustion, all senses on alert in that slightly numb zone that comes from a day out in the sun and water. Coyotes called into the night.

And then, no surprise, but utterly stunning nevertheless, the full moon brimmed up over the eastern ridgeline. The moonrise over the Missouri was as magnificent as any I have ever witnessed.

In fact, we all stood up more or less in unison to walk to the clearing in the cottonwoods to gaze and gape. Even banjo boy and guitar man abandoned their song in mid-strum to come notice the moon.

Half an hour later, the moon cast eerily perfect moonshine over the cliffs, the river and the long thin line of cottonwoods that line the river on the north bank on this stretch of the river. It felt like being in an X-ray.

Half a dozen of us tried to take photographs of the scene before us. We knew no photograph could ever capture that moment. And though we lamented that fact, we knew too, that this made the moment a perfect embodiment of what we sought when we set out on this journey.

Re-entry of a weary, bleary, but very satisfied traveler
by Clay Jenkinson
July 25, 2010

It’s astonishing, and a little sad, to see how quickly we are re-absorbed by our home culture after a period of travel in foreign lands. The cruise group that I led to the eastern Mediterranean visited six countries on three continents in two weeks. We spent enough time among the three great western religions — Islam, Judaism, and Christianity — to get a glimpse of the fundamental varieties of mankind, even in the West.

We encountered food, clothing, manners, body language, architecture, traffic patterns and styles, money, sounds, odors, music, and plant life that one never experiences in North Dakota. It was a rich, sensuous, challenging, sometimes troubling parade of the Other. America seemed very far away — which is one of the principal benefits of foreign travel. It was one of the most satisfying journeys I have ever made. True, it was rushed and hectic — but it served as an excellent menu of places I want to see again (and again) and places I have now seen once and for all.

We got home on schedule, feeling as grubby and oleaginous as it is possible to feel without lifting a bale or driving a stake. It’s a miracle. Start the day in Rome, end the day in Bismarck. I’ve spent a fair portion of my life reading about explorers. On a really good day, toiling from first light to dusk, when all 40-some of their strapping young men worked at the top of their bent, Lewis and Clark might make 15 miles against the current of the Missouri River. Me? 5,210 miles just sitting passively in hermetically sealed aircraft (no rowing), three free movies, two hot meals, endless offers of water and snacks, my computer, my iPad, books, soothing music. Thank goodness we haven’t gone soft!

The only choke point in all of our travels was passport control in Detroit on the return journey. It took almost two hours to get my two minutes with one of the four U.S. passport agents. Twenty gleaming passport booths, four agents, “serving” 550 people in a line that sashayed back and forth endlessly, so that every 15 minutes or so you saw the same exhausted, helpless stranger moving the line in the opposite direction, glacially. The effect of this colossal bureaucratic indifference (exhibited by U.S. agents, but by no other nations we visited, was to turn people who were “so glad to be home” into a line of grumpy, then angry, then livid, then sullen, and finally incredulous refugees in their own country. Meanwhile, a deliberately unpleasant woman in uniform strutted the perimeter of this sea of stressed humanity and barked out, “No cell phones! no cameras! no iPods!” This abrasive refrain every 30 seconds, as bewildered travelers tried to use their cell phones to call their families and travel agents to explain that they would be missing their connecting flights.

Welcome to America.

My tomatoes survived.

The minute I had showered and burned my travel clothing, changed the sheets, called my daughter, and returned my passport to “important documents” shelf, I ordered new books so that I can process my travels in the months ahead. It is so easy to be swept back up into the routine of our lives that we risk turning our travels into stimuli blips rather than cultural experiences and cultural mirrors. So I ordered a biography of the historical Jesus, a book about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, two books about Cairo and a collection of three novels by Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006), who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. I also found downstairs my copies of Lawrence Durrell’s “Alexandria Quartet,” his four short novels (1957-60) about eros and Einsteinian relativity in the Egyptian city Alexandria. Summer reading.

For the next couple of years I will now magically “see” articles in newspapers and magazines about Egypt, Turkey, Greece, Israel, Italy and Palestine, when I would have been unlikely to see and read those same articles had I not been on this journey. This is one of the joyful consequences of travel. I was arrested as a spy in Yugoslavia in 1977. Since then I have never seen an article on Yugoslavia, or the republics into which it fractured after the death of Marshall Tito, that I have not slowed down to read. It’s like learning a new vocabulary word — suddenly we see it everywhere, when for all of our lives till then we have never noticed it. This is the magic of perception: we see only what we have lenses to see.

Travel is the gift of new lenses.

I wish every presidential candidate were required by iron custom to travel the world for six months alone with nothing but a backpack — no handlers, no five star hotels, no welcoming committees and receptions, no special “front of the line tour” of the Parthenon or the Egyptian Museum at Cairo. They’d have to wash their own clothes in fetid laundries in Crete and Copenhagen and Krakow—washing with the “great unwashed.” Without the lubricant of power and overt prosperity they’d have to negotiate their way through a world (hotels, cafes, transport systems, customs, privies) in which English is not the first language. They’d have the burden of getting everything they purchase home in that selfsame backpack. Like every other genuine traveler, they’d spend a fair portion of their time walking long distances in foreign cities.

This modest proposal would save the world.

The minute we force ourselves out of our comfort zone and our provincialism, and stop taking the world for granted, we realize that in spite of our power, our wealth, and our role as the world’s unipower, the rest of the people of the world don’t spend much of their time thinking about America. It’s a paradox. Everyone everywhere gets why America matters, but in spite of that, it’s surprising how little America really matters outside of our own borders. It’s refreshing to know that. Takes us off the hook a little bit.

Oh, one more update. Mother made it home. She did not run off with a dancing master. But she is young.

In which my mother marries an Italian dancing master
by Clay Jenkinson
July 18, 2010

NAPLES, ITALY -- Our Mediterranean cruise is nearly over, and by the time you read this, God willing, I will be inspecting my tomato plants out behind my house in Bismarck. I say "God willing," because I am currently on the swimming pool level of a 650-passenger cruise ship just off the west coast of Italy, a mere 5,210 miles from Bismarck in what the French call Dakota du Nord.

If I am to water those unhappy tomatoes anytime soon, a large and cascading number of discrete logistical events must occur without any considerable hiccup. I must disembark from the ship at dawn tomorrow, take a cruise company bus to the Rome airport, reconnect with my luggage, get a seating assignment, go through Italian passport control, fly to Detroit, Michigan (11 hours in steerage), go through American passport control, reconnect with my luggage, go through US customs, recheck my luggage, catch a flight from Detroit to Minneapolis, and then another from Minneapolis to Bismarck.

We're booked on the last flight to Bismarck, so if anything goes wrong at any one of these choke points (note from long experience: things go wrong), I will be spending the night at the Thunderbird Motel out near the Mall of America. Or in Detroit. Or in Rome. Wearing clothing that I will be in the mood to burn, and clearing my chin the next morning with a shaving-cut razor provided by the half-sympathetic clerk at the hotel desk.
We take international travel for granted in this era of unbelievable mobility.
We should not do so.

I'm leaving my mother behind. Not because I am a bad son, not because she has done something unspeakable, not because she has fallen in love with an Italian dancing master (though that would be kind of cool), joined a kibbutz, become a Palestinian freedom fighter or an Al Qaeda operative, or failed to declare her cache of 789 postcards of the places we have visited. I am leaving her behind in the Eternal City, Rome, because she (with a score of others) is doing a post-cruise visit to the Vatican, the Pantheon, and the Coliseum, on the principle that if you get this close to Rome you may as well do more than use its airport as your portal out of Europe. I would like to take her to Bernini's incredible statue, "The Ecstasy of St. Theresa," in the Cornaro Chapel, but my work and my tomatoes are calling loudly to me from 5,210 miles.

I'm a little uneasy leaving my mother behind in the Old World. My only consolation is that she is the most autonomous and self-reliant person I know. Still, I will not be here to be cut to ribbons in my duel with the dancing master.

This has been an absolutely amazing and overwhelming 14-day journey to six countries on three continents. I'll have more to say about our experiences in the next couple of weeks. For the moment I want to draw a simple contrast. In the past four days we have visited two Mediterranean places that start with the letter C-Cairo, Egypt, and Capri, Italy.

The island of Capri (on the south side of the Gulf of Naples) is one of the most privileged places on earth. It is a playground of the kind you see on "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous." We stood at an overlook on the top of the tiny, craggy island and looked down into breathtaking bays at dozens of yachts that are larger than the largest ship in the Age of Thomas Jefferson. Fewer than 20,000 people live on Capri, and their income is probably modest, but the folks who visit for more than a few hours are among the wealthiest and self-entitled people in the world. My mother and I sat at an outdoor café eating $17 gelato and-well-just gawked.

In Capri one hears all the languages of the first world: German, French, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Dutch, Italian, and British and American English. It's the Tower of Babel at $1,000 per day.

Frankly, gilded Capri is a place that I don't much admire or even respect, in spite of the fact that-of course-I fantasize those yachts and envy the cosmopolitan bling at the same time I shake my equalitarian Dakota head. It's hard for me to regard the precious micro-universe of Capri (and its many cousins across the world) as authentic in any meaningful sense of the term.
Cairo, by contrast, is one of the most densely packed and impoverished cities of the world. The overwhelming majority of the people who live there speak Arabic. There are 17 million people in Cairo and its immediate environs. If the rich and famous visit Cairo at all, they have been given secret directions to little enclaves of comfort and privilege in the vast sea of raw sweaty humanity that spreads out in every direction world without end.

I've seen a fair amount of the world, but I have never seen anything like Cairo anywhere. It's unbelievably compelling. It's like a nightmare Disney fantasy of a squalid, chaotic, haphazard, unbearably poor, sprawling, vertiginous megalopolis without any apparent zoning laws. Tens of thousands of five to 10-story brick or concrete apartment buildings just sprout into the air in furious clusters no matter which way you look. Most of them are radically unfinished-like the x-rays of shoddy apartment complexes that will never meet code. Our guide told us, in fact, that these exoskeletons of buildings are not intended to be finished, for the minimalist Egyptian tax codes punish polish.

And beneath this endless sea of precariousness and filth live millions of human beings who-at base-want the same things from life that we do.

Whatever else it is-headquarters of the Arab League, the intellectual capital of Islam, one of the most storied cities on earth, urban disaster-Cairo is authentic in a way that other places, including Capri, can never be.

I don't care if I ever see Capri again (or Aspen for that matter), but I will return to Cairo soon, perhaps often, and meanwhile start to read whatever I can that might help to make sense of its uncanny paradoxes.

Your roving correspondent in Israel
by Clay Jenkinson
July 11, 2010

HAIFA, Israel — We’ve been on our Mediterranean cruise about a week now, 71 of us, mostly North Dakotans and a sprinkling of others.

The cruise ship we are on has a capacity of about 675 —so one in 10 on the ship is a North Dakotan. Seldom outside of its borders do North Dakotans represent so large a market share in anything.

The other passengers find it somehow amusing to meet so large a gaggle of North Dakotans at once, for most of them have never met such a being at all. When we all wear shorts, it amounts to the largest amplitude of bone-white bodies ever loosed at one time in the Mediterranean. Some wag from Arizona suggested that we file an environmental impact statement.

Itinerary: Athens, the islands of Santorini (paradise on earth) and Patmos, then the ancient city of Ephesus on the western coast of Turkey, now Israel, then Egypt, followed by a longish jump to the west coast of Italy — Naples and then, finally, Rome.

Covering all that ground in two weeks is a romp: Greece, Turkey, the Holy Land, Egypt, and Italy. Christian lands, Islamic lands, the multicultural Holy Land. Three continents: Europe, the Near East, and Africa, if you can really call Egypt Africa. Five language groups: Greek, Turkish, Hebrew, Arabic, Italian. Temples, churches, synagogues, mosques, cathedrals, and — of course — the Vatican.

We have barely reached the halfway point and everyone is at sensory tilt.
Lots of Greek salads. Lots of eggplant.

A week ago we were wandering around the Acropolis in Athens, gazing at the ruin of the Parthenon with open-mouthed awe. Our Greek guide told us that Athens had been continuously inhabited for more than 4,000 years. That blandly delivered statistic made me lose my concentration.

One week before our trip I drove from Bismarck down to southwestern North Dakota to attend the Regent Centennial. Yes, Regent has reached its 100th birthday. In a mere 3,900 years some fish-white guide will be able to tell a group of olive-skinned Mediterraneans: “Regent has now been continuously inhabited for 4,000 years. Back at the beginning of time there was born here a statesman by the name of Dorgan. ... Judging from the recently excavated ruins of heroic monuments just to the north of town, their gods appear to have been a tin can nuclear family, pheasants, and (of all things) grasshoppers.”

The day I write this, we visited the Sea of Galilee. Wow. I never thought I would type those words, no matter how long I lived. In a day-long shore excursion we visited (in the following order): 1) the place where Jesus delivered the Sermon on the Mount; 2) Tabgha, where Jesus fed the 5,000 with just five loaves and two fishes; 3) Capernaum, which served as Jesus’ headquarters during his three-year ministry at the Sea of Galilee; 4) and the River Jordan.

Next, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, but let me stay focused on today’s wonders.
It was too much of a whirlwind for me. Our coach roared around the Sea of Galilee as if there were no tomorrow. At the Mount of Beatitudes, we literally made so brief a stop that had Christ appeared, we would have had to interrupt him in mid-Sermon on the Mount to board the bus.

Moreover, we were herded inside the church that has been erected on the Mount (as we were at the other sites, too), when it is crystal clear that Christ’s ministry was conducted outdoors. I so wanted just to sit outside there on the low mountain for a couple of hours trying to imagine how an obscure rabbi from a throwaway village like Nazareth in a little sliver of land at the west tip of Asia could change the world so thoroughly that we date the whole human experiment as BC (before Christ) and AD (in the year of our lord). Alas, like Pontius Pilate, we did not stay to hear the answer.
Still ... Here we were at one of the handful of most important places on the planet, where what may be the single most influential homily ever delivered was delivered, a radical rebuke to wealth, power, social hierarchy, and institutional complacency. Really? The meek will inherit the earth? Do tell, rabbi.

What an unbelievable honor and joy and provocation to rededicate one’s life to stand where the first followers of Jesus heard the Sermon on the Mount.
Eventually, we roared into the spot where John the Baptist baptized Jesus. My mother and I (and almost everyone else) removed our shoes and waded into the River Jordan. This is just about as moving and mystical a moment as life offers — irrespective of the religion you profess or the depth of your spiritual longings.

Think of what happened at this little stream 2,000 years ago and its impact on everything that has followed. When my daughter was baptized back in Reno, Nev., in 1995, my preacher friend Bill Chrystal sprinkled her with water imported from the River Jordan.

A few months later, north of Marmarth, I dipped my amazing daughter full immersion into the Little Missouri River, much to the consternation of her mother. Today I filled an empty coke bottle with my own supply of Jordan water (I collect water from my travels).

Every Muslim is expected to perform the hajj — the journey to Islam’s holy of holies, Mecca — at least once in a lifetime if she or he is able to do it.
My experience today was rich and satisfying, but it was nothing compared to that of a significant number from our travel group. For them today’s pilgrimage was their hajj, the consummation of a lifelong dream that somehow someday they would visit the Holy Land, walk (while they still could) in the footsteps of Jesus, bow their heads in the exact locations where began a religion that now encompasses 1.2 billion people worldwide, a religion that shapes, inspires, and redeems their lives.

To observe their spiritual fulfillment — an uncanny mingling of ecstasy and humility in the face of the sheer mystery of what Christ wrought — was one of the greatest joys I have ever experienced.
But it was, I confess, observation.

Of cottonwoods in the breeze and rhubarb flan
by Clay Jenkinson
July 4, 2010

Summer finally came to me last Sunday. I was asked by my colleagues at Fort Mandan to be on hand as a judge for the annual Rhubarb Festival. Naturally, I jumped at the chance. This is as close to the judges’ table at “American Idol,” “Dancing with the Stars” or Miss Universe as I am ever likely to get. Besides, I love rhubarb.

Come January, I can actually make my mouth pucker just by conjuring up my grandmother, Rhoda Straus’, rhubarb sauce. She cut rhubarb stalks into inch-sized pieces and then boiled them in well water perfectly saturated with sugar. When you bit into the sauce, months later, it disintegrated, almost dissolved, in your mouth like beef cooked for several days at a low temperature.

Meanwhile, you puckered up as if you had been stung by a squad of rhubarb bees. It was heavenly. I’d give anything for a few quarts of that sauce.
When my grandmother died in 1993, there were more than 500 quarts of farm produce in her basement, on crude 2-by-12 shelves my grandfather had thrown up for her back when she was a mere canning machine. She’s my inspiration for all the genuine things I do in life.

When I moved back to North Dakota four years ago, one of my first excursions was to Fergus Falls, Minn., to dig up some rhubarb from just south of the lilac bushes behind her farmhouse. She has been dead these many years, but I got permission from the present owners to take enough stock to get my own Rhoda Straus crop started. It gives me enormous pleasure to make my first rhubarb dessert of the spring. I use my grandmother’s recipe. Next year, I’m going to enter the Fort Mandan contest surreptitiously, under the nom de plume Mr. Rheum Rhabarbarum (of New Leipzig). Hint: Graham crackers.

Last Sunday was as beautiful a summer day as you could ever imagine: 72 degrees, a sweet breeze, the Missouri River sliding by just to the west with lazy sandbars and a few half-sunken tree trunks, and a perfect, pure blue sky. The great Merrill Piepkorn and the Radio Stars from faraway Fargo were to perform more than two hours of music in the picnic pavilion.

As soon as I arrived at Fort Mandan, I started the rumor among the assembled multitude that I was a rhubarb judge who could be bought. I made it clear that the price would be comparatively low (a new Bobcat skid-steer loader) and that the deal could be done by way of a secret handshake. My hope was to “throw” the contest and possibly touch off the Great Washburn Rhubarb Scandal of 2010. Several matronly women approached me waving giant rhubarb fronds — which I took to be a sign — but there was a deputy sheriff on the grounds and nothing came of it.
These women are serious about their rhubarb concoctions — if that is the right word. Rhubarb cake, rhubarb muffins, rhubarb swirl, rhubarb bars (called “rhubars”), rhubarb Bundt cake, rhubarb upside-down cake (I regard that as a decadent form), a rhubarb conserve, rhubarb reduction and, of course, rhubarb pie. It’s easy for me to make light of the contest, but some of these women approach the scoring table with the menacing determination of a duelist. They all say North Dakota things like, “Oh, shucks, the only reason I brought my celebrated sour cream rhubarb syllabub is to make sure you have enough entries this year,” or “My pie is OK, but not as good as the one I won the Western Hemisphere Pan-American Grand Championship with last summer.”

I didn’t dare make eye contact with several of them, lest they force me to my knees employing nothing but a glare worthy of a Jedi knight in a “Star Wars” episode. These prize homemakers saw through me immediately as someone who may know a bit about raspberries or possibly even about Lewis and Clark, but who had no business whatsoever judging the viscosity of a rhubarb glaze. I was so nervous I could not add up the scores for creativity, taste and presentation. We had to bring in a professional accountant.

By the time I had tasted my 24th rhubarb flan, I was a nervous wreck. Just to be safe, I slipped out the back door gripping a black powder musket and a pipe tomahawk like someone fresh from the White Perogue. I made my way as unobtrusively as possible to a grassy spot behind the picnic area just under the magnificent cottonwood trees of Fort Mandan, some of which are well more than 100 feet high. There, I lay down in a rhubarb- and sugar-induced diabetic coma, and half-dozed in the warm but not hot sunlight of that Sunday afternoon.

The genial Piepkorn (North Dakota’s answer to Garrison Keillor) was at his absolute best. The music was just what you’d want to hear on a lazy summer afternoon on the banks of the mighty Missouri, at just the right volume. The only downside of the Radio Stars concert was that the results of the rhubarb contest were to be announced at 3 o’clock from the very same microphone at which the Radio Stars crooned, and before long the most confident of the rhubarb babes sat down together in the front row, grim and surly, arms crossed, like the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

I love North Dakota. I am in love with North Dakota.

Fortunately, I dozed off just at that point. For the first time this summer, I slowed down long enough to listen to the breeze make the cottonwood leaves dance. The tree directly in front of me was 120 feet high — at 45 feet the trunk exfoliated into five graceful branches perfectly in balance. I don’t know if there is any Great Plains sound finer than the dance of the cottonwood leaves — especially when the breeze ebbs and flows. It’s astonishingly beautiful.

With what was left of my consciousness, I could hear Piepkorn singing “Get Along Little Dogies.” When he came to, “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” I thought the rhubarb queens were going to rush the stage.

In which your roving correspondent embarks for ancient Greece
by Clay Jenkinson
June 27, 2010

My next two columns will be filed from the Mediterranean. On any given Tuesday I tend to be flying somewhere. This Tuesday I’m flying to Athens. Wake up in Bismarck, wind up in Athens. Even after a lifetime of flying hither and yon, I’m astonished that this is possible. One of the key markers of life in the late 20th and early 21st centuries is profound mobility.

That phenomenon has dramatically changed life in North Dakota, made us much less the “blank spot” at the center of the continent that Eric Sevareid bemoaned 50 years ago. When I was growing up in the ’60s, the big leap of our mobility had not yet occurred. I flew for the first time when I was 16. My daughter has been on more than 30 flights and she’s not yet 16. Modern mobility is the product of cheap oil and unprecedented first-world prosperity (i.e. cheap oil), and we cannot assume that this historical anomaly will continue forever.

See the world while you can.

Technically, the purpose of my two-week journey is work. I’m leading a cultural tour, a cruise, on the Mediterranean — Athens, the islands of Santorini and Patmos, Egypt, the Holy Land, the Greek city of Ephesus on the coast of Turkey, and finally Rome. It’s a whirlwind tour. To call what I am about to do “work” is a pretty big stretch, but my assignment is to open my mouth and hope that intelligent words come out of it for 14 straight days. I’ve been to Greece a number of times in the course of my life, but as far as I’m concerned, you can never get enough. If I won the lottery, I’d go to Greece for two or three weeks every year for the rest of my life.
I’ve been to Ephesus and other places on the coast of Turkey (what historians call Asia Minor). In fact, I’ve been to Troy, up on the northwest coast of Turkey, at the entrance to the Dardanelles Strait, which connects the Mediterranean and the Black Sea. Troy, of course, is the site of the war (1184 BCE) between Greek and Trojan armies over the abduction of Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, by the Trojan prince Paris. “Abduction” is not quite the right word, since she ran off with Paris willingly, but her departure really, really upset her husband Menelaos, who launched the world’s most famous war to get her back.

It’s a kind of Jerry Springer episode of the ancient world, but on a really big stage with thousands of causalities. Seldom, on Springer, does the aggrieved husband actually burn down the town of the man who seduced his wife. Not yet, anyway.

The story of the Trojan War is told in Homer’s “Iliad,” which is not only the first book in western civilization but arguably still the greatest. When I lived in England, I did my best to read it in ancient Greek. My best wasn’t very good, but I took more pleasure in that quixotic struggle than in any other intellectual endeavor of my life.
Menelaos got his wife back. By the time we catch up with them in Homer’s “Odyssey,” they are back home in Sparta (in Greece), and they have somehow worked out a kind of edgy marital reconciliation. Whenever “the incident” threatens to flare up (as, one would expect, it occasionally did in the Atreus household!), Helen puts a magic drug into the wine jar, and she and her still-a-little-miffed husband zone out into a kind of pharmaceutical bliss. It’s a heavily medicated marriage.

As one of Shakespeare’s characters says, “anything mended is but patched.” No greater wisdom has ever been spoken.

The learned world assumed that the whole Troy story was just a kind of fairy tale, or a whopping literary exaggeration of some dimly remembered minor skirmish between Greek mainlanders and Turkish Asiatics, until the German amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann (1822-1890) came along. He believed in the literal truth of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” and had memorized the great epics as a child. In 1873, using archaeological methods that today would be regarded as barbaric, Schliemann found Troy, just where Homer had said it would be 2,500 years previously. This almost unbelievable discovery shocked the world and proved that the Homeric epics were based on fact, not fiction.

The more you give yourself to the cosmos of ancient Greece, the more fascinating it becomes. I cannot wait to gaze up at the Parthenon from my hotel room in Athens. I cannot wait to eat an authentic Greek salad — the best in the world — and linger over souvlaki and spanikopita (Greek spinach pie, my favorite food) — at an outdoor cafe on the edge of the wine dark sea. No place in Greece is more than 85 miles from the sea.
The island of Santorini (thought by some to be the site of the lost city of Atlantis) is to my mind the single most beautiful place on earth. It’s what’s left of the rim of an ancient volcano that peaks up over sea level. It’s what you conjure when you think of the Greek islands: white buildings with intense Greek blue trim, the astonishing beauty of the sea, the almost unbelievable clarity of the light, and an unpretentious local culture that really does seem to dance on the beach like Zorba.

Of course I am eager to see the Pyramids and especially the Sphinx, and glad to have the chance to see Jerusalem, home to three of the world’s great religions. I’ve never been to Egypt and never to the Holy Land, and — save for this trip — probably never would.

Strangely enough, the place I am most eager to visit is the island of Patmos, 13 miles square, in the far eastern Mediterranean, where St. John the Apostle received his revelation. I’m reading the wild and nearly impenetrable Book of Revelation to get ready. I’m hoping to be scorched by the divine — either Yahweh, Zeus, Adonai, the Logos, the Demiurge, or Diotima, it don’t matter to me, as we say in the American West.

And yet still get back onto the cruise ship by suppertime.

The magic gate to North Dakota’s Petrified Forest
by Clay Jenkinson
June 20, 2010

I don’t remember the first time I went to Theodore Roosevelt National Park. It was when I was very young. My father worked for a bank in Dickinson. The annual bank picnic was held in the park. At that time we were the kind of family that experienced the Badlands mostly from the overlook at Painted Canyon. My father was a brainy and decidedly indoors sort of man. He did not hunt. He did not hike. He did not fish. He did not camp. He did not play ball. His very limited interest in nature was satisfied by a jaunt along the loop road in the national park once a year.
His favorite way to observe wildlife was through the window of his car. On the one occasion when we went camping — against his better judgment — in the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, he spent the first part of the evening cursing the day we had purchased a heavy green canvas Montgomery Ward pup tent, which he couldn’t figure out how to erect. At bedtime, he actually changed into pajamas before inserting himself, feet first, into the tent. The mosquito netting snapped rather than zipped shut, and he fretted endlessly about the possibility of a nocturnal raid by bugs, prairie dogs, skunks, vermin, or snakes, which he seemed to regard as inevitable. He was, in short, a wilderness moron.

The tent collapsed on my parents sometime in the night and that was the end (as well as the beginning) of our family camping history.

My father sincerely believed that the whole point of civilization was to emancipate us from ever again sleeping on the ground. He used to say to me, “Look, ten thousand years of slow human progress has brought us beds, refrigerators, ovens, couches, electric lights, and hygienic toilet facilities. Why would any rational being turn back the clock on all those conveniences, and pretend to enjoy it too?”

Fair enough. I know a lot of people who agree with him, more or less.

A few days ago I had the joy of taking a very different family of three from Illinois for a hike in the national park. The parents are historians with an interest in Theodore Roosevelt, and their son is the brightest and most agreeable whippersnapper I have met in a very long time. I gave them options: the loop road followed by ice cream (the Charles Jenkinson option); a hike somewhere in the park; a serious venture down West River Road to Bullion Butte and possibly on to magical Marmarth; a trip to the Petrified Forest.

They jumped at the Petrified Forest.

We drove west of Medora and north on West River Road. If you follow the tiny brown TR icons on the ranch and forest service roads (gravel), you get to the parking lot for the Petrified Forest in about half an hour. To get into the park, you have to bend over and crawl through an ingenious little gate in the park fence. The gate was designed to let humans in but not let buffalo out, but it has the droll effect of reminding you that you are entering a magic kingdom, like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts or Alice’s wonderland. Probably nothing could have induced my father to take that plunge.

The Petrified Forest is one of the handful of best places in North Dakota. After a short and delightful hike you crest a hill and come upon hundreds, perhaps thousands of petrified trunk and stump sections of ancient trees, thought by geologists to be between 55 million and 67 million years old. They are grand, stark, gnarled, massive, and weirdly strewn about as if by a disorganized petrified giant who gathered materials for a building project and never quite saw it through. Some of the stumps, which are thought to be primordial cousins to the cypress, are plunked on the side of nearly vertical cliffs in a manner that seems to defy gravity. The lingering stupid boy in me wanted to run up and try to dislodge a couple of them so that I could watch them tumble down into the valley. I resisted the urge to be a reverse vandalizing Sisyphus.

The petrified trees pop out like colossal mushrooms where the Sentinel Butte and Bullion Creek formations are exposed in the Badlands. As you scramble around the dry, scarred landscape, it’s not easy to appreciate that the zone where we were hiking on an absolutely perfect North Dakota June afternoon was once a subtropical forest at or near an Everglades-like swamp. As you stand next to a petrified stump 5 to 10 feet wide, the remnant of a tree that was at least 100 feet high tens of millions of years ago, your brain tries to wrap itself around the concept of geological time. But what’s actually right in front of you is too amazing and magnificent, too present and commanding, to turn away from toward some animated diorama of the geological imagination.

TRNP Superintendent Valerie Naylor says the Petrified Forest is thought to be the third largest in the United States.
All I could think was: this treasure is in North Dakota. My guests are happy, relaxed, and enchanted. They are seeing one of the wonders of the world in a place where they would never have expected to see it. They will not forget this day, when they sauntered through an ancient forest ruin surrounded by the greenest grassland you have ever encountered, the grass strewn with the most beautiful wildflowers you could ever happen upon. Temperature 68 degrees and only a gentle breeze to remind us that we were hiking on the Great Plains. This will be their memory of North Dakota. Splendid satisfaction.

My remarkable father could have told all of us how a petrification works — how the organic fibers and structure of the tree are gradually replaced by local minerals, so that petrified wood is not wood at all, but rock that has become a simulacrum of a tree that has vanished from the earth. He would have loved to explain that process — over a thoroughly civilized meal and a fine glass of wine, indoors.

Summer has come at last, and we’re in hyperdrive
by Clay Jenkinson
June 13, 2010

It’s hyperdrive season in North Dakota. The sun is finally shining in something like a serious way, and suddenly it’s as if every living thing on the northern plains — including humanity -- went from hibernation into warp speed overnight. The trails and the river are full. U.S. 83 on a Friday afternoon looks like a boat show parade, but only in the northbound lanes. There is no daylight hour in my neighborhood that is not accompanied by the drone of small internal combustion engines.

At 4 p.m. on any given day you can smell bratwurst bursting at one end of the block and barbecued ribs sizzling at the other. Men are out fussing with their grills in “World’s Greatest Dad” aprons, hailing their neighbors in a good-natured, “isn’t this just terrific?” way, wielding outsized new grill utensils that were Christmas or birthday gifts. On Saturday mornings, Menards feels like the Mall of America on Christmas Eve. In the evenings I see people sitting resolutely outside on the patios of restaurants even when they are clearly miserable from the chill or wind or both. Overnight, 10,000 motorcycles have appeared on the streets, like Ostrogoths at the gates of Rome.

Welcome to summer in North Dakota.

The five-week span between Memorial Day and the Fourth of July is the most frenzied and feverish time of the year on the northern plains. We’ve been cooped up all winter — and a prolonged winter it was. Now suddenly we burst forth in unison to do all the things that can be done in shorts and shirtsleeves. We all know from hard experience that we have a window of no more than 90 days to ski, hike, go to Medora, ride bikes, camp, garden, go fishing, drive with the top down, go boating, swim, picnic, climb buttes, lie out in the sun, stage reunions with our farflung families, shoot off fireworks, start and finish elaborate household projects, and take our family vacations. Our collective attitude seems to be, “Look, we’re going to cram all of this “fun” in, come hell or high water, and we will enjoy it no matter how maniacal it feels. Furthermore, we’re not going to ease into the summer, but plunge and hurtle into it as if it might end too soon, in August.”

It might. And whenever it ends, it will be too soon.

I drove past two rodeos Sunday on the road from Bismarck to Alexander and back again. In village parks all over North Dakota, family reunions face down the tornadic June breeze.

Five new houses are not just going up in my neighborhood, but springing up. It’s as if they each come in a tiny kit that fits in the back of a pickup, and when someone places it on the ground and pulls the string, the house just deploys itself overnight in an elaborate series of unfoldings, like a Mars lander. One day I see a couple driving in extreme slow mo through the neighborhood. The next day they are back with a couple of others in big white pickups. They stand in front of an empty lot with their arms around each other. Three days later a Bobcat appears and darts around the lot for a while. And two weeks later a brand new house is framed against the sunset. Last year was a quiet year for homebuilding in my corner of town. This year Bismarck feels like a boomtown. A bunch of folks are building three-story ridgeline houses north of where I live, lest we fail to recognize their prosperity.

I haven’t turned my sprinklers on yet, and still I can’t keep up with my grass, which, when I last had time to inspect it, was actually going to seed. I’ve mowed twice so far — purely out of shame. My neighbors have mowed five times at least, and even their grass looks out of control. At this point, it would be possible to spend every evening and every weekend working in the yard. Some do. There are actually traffic jams at the grass clipping dumpsters near Horizon Middle School.

I planted my garden last Saturday after Gov. Link’s funeral. It seemed like the best possible way to honor that great man of the earth, North Dakota’s Antaeus. I wanted to get my hands in the soil. I wanted to smell the earth. I wanted to shut off my brain and just be. I wanted to lie on the land, and look up at the June clouds.
I was ashamed to have waited so long to plant (June 5), but I reckoned that we had had so few warm days, so few Btus, that I hadn’t actually lost much growing season. In four pell mell hours I tilled a 20 x 60 foot garden patch twice, trenched it with a hoe, planted 92 tomato plants (I have no idea why — it just happened), three long rows of sweet corn, two rows of Mandan black corn, beets, carrots, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, squash, pumpkins, peppers, peas, beans, okra, and watermelon. My mother sat in a lawn chair in the tall grass at the edge of the garden and just supervised, while dozing and reading a book and dozing.

It was a perfect weekend to say farewell to Art Link. Sunday morning on our way to Alexander we stopped in Killdeer to get sodas and red licorice. “What a beautiful day in North Dakota,” I said to the woman behind the counter at the big quick shop.

“Yeah, that’s two this year,” she said with a studied dollop of sarcasm.
After the Fourth of July things slow down a bit in North Dakota. The days will be hot and the thunderclouds will gather in the late afternoon. That’s the time to lie out all day on a sandbar or to lie down flat in Little Missouri River on dog day afternoons.

Summer is here at last.

Arthur A. Link: The Last Agrarian
by Clay Jenkinson
June 6, 2010

he passing of Art Link Tuesday was the death knell of one phase of North Dakota history.
We will not see his like again.

He had just celebrated his 96th birthday. At 96, death can be a release, but I know for a fact that Art Link was not ready to go. I had the joy of spending a couple of hours with him 10 days ago.
He was as vital and engaged with the world as someone half his age. He spoke of the future like a man who expected to see it. In his last days, his voice had taken on a piping quality. A severe thunderstorm forced us to go down into the common room of the facility where the Links live.

I asked Art if I could push him in his wheelchair. With some reluctance, like a parent turning over the car keys for the first time, he agreed. I made the rookie mistake of approaching the elevator head on. The governor barked out the proper wheelchair protocol. "Back in! Back in!" he cried, and "Line up straight so you don't scrape the door sill." We laughed hard at my ineptitude.

In that same evening, just a week before his death, after almost a century of good life in North Dakota, Art Link expressed his concerns about the energy boom that is unfolding up in his home territory in northwestern North Dakota. He talked about his sweetheart Grace, who served cake and coffee and shook her head and laughed at his courtliness. He shook hands like a young farmer.

What was the meaning of his life?

He was the son of an immigrant who went on to be the governor of North Dakota. Just stop and think about that for a moment. We are unlikely ever to see that again. His life exemplifies the story of North Dakota. In the last years of the 19th century, tens of thousands of Europeans took the risk of migrating from their homelands to the heart of the American steppe.

They worked incredibly hard and most of them prospered in a modest sort of way. Their greatest achievement was that they made it possible for their children to have better lives than they did, less burdened with hard physical labor. Art Link had natural gifts that elevated him into public service, but his story nevertheless epitomizes the North Dakota chapter of the story of the American Dream.

He was actually called to public office. That's extremely rare. The story is part of the Art Link legend. There is a surprising amount of Art Link mythology (stories that are true but have a kind of winsome larger than life quality).
It was the spring of 1946. The Nonpartisan League of McKenzie County was holding its annual caucus. The creek in front of his farmhouse at Alexander was flooded, so Art Link could not get to town.

That afternoon, a car drove down the hill toward the farmstead, inching as close to the edge of the creek as the driver dared. When Art approached, a man representing the NPL called out, across the creek, "I just stopped, Art, to tell you that we nominated you for our candidate for the Legislature up at the caucus today."
For North Dakota that little creek was a Rubicon.

He was as authentic a man as you will ever meet — plainspoken, artless, straight, earnest, grounded. And yet he had an exquisite sense of humor and a playfulness and a lust for life that made it impossible not to cheer up in his presence.

In my opinion, he represented the very best of the North Dakota character — the humility and strength of a man of the soil; a profound, usually unspoken, belief in the nobility of the agrarian way of life; a solidity of character and principles that made him impervious to inessential things; passionate, usually unspoken, love of the quiet landscape of North Dakota; a belief in the redeeming power of hard work; an unwavering unposed allegiance to family, place, nation and state.

When the great test of his leadership came in 1973, when North Dakota might have become an energy sacrifice zone, he reached deep into his core to coin words that changed the nature of the energy debate. We will cooperate fully with the need for stepped up energy development, he said, but we cannot permit that industrial activity to be a “one time harvest.” Those words resonated with the core values of the people of North Dakota.
We did not shrink back from our destiny as one of the leading energy producers in America, but we shifted gears thanks to the leadership of Art Link. “Slow, orderly development,” he said. Could there be any greater wisdom than that?

His creed (and his legacy) is perfectly articulated in the speech he delivered in Mandan, on Oct. 11, 1973, "When the Landscape Is Quiet Again." That poetic expression of the primacy of stewardship in North Dakota life should be memorized by every North Dakota schoolchild. It should be given as a welcome wagon gift to every new North Dakotan, particularly those who come to work in the energy corridor.
A while back, Mike Jacobs of the Grand Forks Herald explained to me what Art Link had meant for North Dakota. At the close of a long and remarkable interview, Jacobs said, "He so represented what we thought we were." In a mere eight words, Jacobs — as usual — nailed it.

Notice that he did not say, “He so represented who we are” or “who we were,” but “who we thought we were.” There is deep insight and a smidgeon of disillusionment in that sentence, spoken by another North Dakota leader with deep agrarian roots.

In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner wrote a famous essay about the significance of the frontier in American history. In 1890, the U.S. Census Bureau officially declared that the American frontier was closed. At the end of his masterful essay, Turner concluded, "And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

The death of Art Link has closed the first period of North Dakota history. Our agrarian phase lasted from 1889 to approximately 1989. What we will be in the 21st century we are still to determine.

Unfortunately, we will not have Art Link to help us remember who we are.

Of wind and travel in the unsettled season
by Clay Jenkinson
May 30, 2010

It wasn’t the isolation and the hard work that made Great Plains pioneers go mad. It was the wind.
When the annual Santa Ana winds come to Southern California, the crime rate soars. The novelist Raymond Chandler might just as well have been writing about North Dakota when he said, “It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that . . . curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen.”

The storms that passed through North Dakota were impressive even by Great Plains standards. Everywhere I have gone people have been buzzing about it, in a way that is normally reserved for the aftermath of the severest of blizzards. I walked into the same coffeehouse two days in a row only to find the same man telling the same story to the same people about the miasma of fog, wind, and blinding rain on the highway west of Mandan Tuesday.

Stuff has blown off of my house and deck and driveway that I didn’t know could blow off. On the highway Tuesday I was mesmerized by the way the fierce gusts created wave and dervish patterns in the lush tall green spring grass. My little Honda was buffeted like a pinata from shoulder to shoulder and everywhere in between. The rubber door and window seals just gave up the fight and played an Aeolian trumpet riff all the way across the state.

A friend of mine who was walking in downtown Fargo was almost beaned by a flying pizza box.

Some folks flew in from faraway to attend an important meeting in Dickinson this week. They had never been here before. When they walked into the room they had a wide-eyed wind-blasted look, as if they had spent the afternoon with King Lear on the heath. “So this is North Dakota!” They were so impressed by our climate that one of them — who was here to pitch his company’s services — actually told us, unapologetically, “You are really the middle of nowhere here.”

People who have lived here all of their life have told me they are not sure they have ever seen anything quite like the winds of the last few weeks. Which is probably an exaggeration.

When Meriwether Lewis was trying to move his flotilla of six canoes and two pirogues past today’s Williston into Montana, the Corps of Discovery was delayed for so many days by such appalling winds that he actually wondered — for a day or two — if they would ever get to the Great Falls. Two weeks later, all was calm. Temporarily.
As a very frequent flyer, I have more flight delays and missed connections in May and June than in the worst months of the winter. Once, seven years ago, in June, I was delayed in Tulsa by a lightning storm, which made me miss my connection to Durango at Denver International. My lecture was scheduled for 8 the next morning, and I make a point of never failing to show up, no matter what. I was completely exhausted by the time (10:15 p.m.) the airline agent finally informed me that my luggage had been lost. So I rented a car and drove literally all night to get to the conference. That meant I-70 from Denver to Grand Junction (243 miles), then US 550 from Grand Junction to Durango (169 miles).
It was, of course, a dark and stormy night.

I got to the point on that all-nighter drive — we have all been there — where I was so bleary that I had to sing at the top of my lungs to stay awake. I had to open all the windows on the rental car to let the rush of air blast me into some semblance of consciousness. It was the kind of fatigue wherein you try a range of unprecedented eye stretches and blinks, including rough eyeball massages with your thumb and fingers. The kind of fatigue in which eventually you actually slap your face hard to stay awake, and shake your head like a rag doll, and engage in yogic breathing to try to super-charge your lungs and bloodstream. The kind of fatigue in which several times per hour you are jolted back to consciousness by the rumble strips on the shoulder of the road.

And that was the easy part of drive! The last stretch, the road between Ouray and Durango, is one of the most beautiful in America — during daylight hours for a confident and well-rested driver. Just at the time I had reached maximum exhaustion and despair, I drove up three of the most spectacular and breathtaking passes in Colorado: Red Mountain Pass (11,275 feet) between Ouray and Silverton and Molas (10,899) and Coal Bank Passes (10,640) between Silverton and Durango. These are the kinds of mountain passes on a narrow road without more than perfunctory guard rails that used to send my acrophobic father onto the floor of the back seat with a blanket over his head. I got out once, to stretch, and looked over the lip of the road into the abyss in dawn’s early light. I was literally gaping down thousands of feet into the valley below, without a guardrail of any sort between me and eternity. I recoiled like someone who has come snout to snout with an angry bat.

When I finally got Durango, at 6:49 a.m. I was as bleary and sweat-gluey and rumpled as it is possible to be. My one remaining dream in life was to take a shower (no time to buy a toothbrush) at the hotel before going to the lecture hall, even if it meant putting on the same foul and fetid clothes. I walked up to the desk like a survivor of the Bataan Death March. The young clerk crisply informed me that there was no room available, because of course my reservation had been voided at midnight.

He is now living in a witness protection program.

Nekoma 40 years on
by Clay Jenkinson
May 23, 2010

Last Sunday marked the 40th anniversary of the protest march at the ABM missile site at Nekoma. On May 16, 1970, approximately 1,500 people gathered one mile north of the village of Nekoma to protest what the anti-ballistic missile system represented — nuclear proliferation, the idea that nuclear war was survivable, the widening of the War in Vietnam, and the killing of four students at Kent State University just two weeks previously.

More or less on a whim, I drove up to Nekoma last Saturday. I was only 15 at the time of the protest in 1970, queasily negotiating my adolescence in a cow town almost 500 miles away from the action.

I wished I were driving my old brown Ford Falcon with its tube type radio and roll down windows (and gas at 35 cents per gallon), but it was a Honda with satellite radio and gas at $2.95, instead. I drove the back way, in no hurry whatsoever, listening to Janis Joplin just to get into the spirit of the thing. My plan was to be at the ABM site at dawn on May 16, 2010, 40 years on, and to plant a tree, “in remembrance of things past.”

A number of prominent North Dakotans participated in that march. Now they are in their 60s. A great deal of water has flowed under the bridge since that weekend 40 years ago — a different time in a different America. Unless you lived through that decade, it’s hard to comprehend how the combined dynamics of Vietnam, rock music, the counterculture, recreational drugs, the martyrdom of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, unprecedented freedom and mobility, the civil rights movement, the birth control pill, and Bob Dylan shaped a whole generation of American young people. Even for those who lived through that period, it is — on any given day in the 21st century — a kind of hazy pixelated Oz. It makes you understand the meaning of British writer Leslie Hartley’s great sentence: “The past is a foreign country.”
In that tumultuous decade we went from “Where the Boys Are” and “I Want To Hold Your Hand,” to “Apocalypse Now,” and “Hey Jude.”

1970 was the year of Kent State, the release of Robert Altman’s film “M*A*S*H” and the Beatles’ last album, “Let It Be,” the completion of the World Trade Center, Apollo 13, the first Earth Day (April 22), the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and the first broadcast of Monday Night Football on ABC, starring Keith Jackson and Howard Cosell.

The ABM protest march in May 1970 was called a “Festival of Love and Life.” It was a very serious protest against the further nuclearization of North Dakota by people, mostly young, who believed that if they ever got their hands on the levers of power, they would launch the Age of Aquarius. It’s impossible to meditate on that concept without smiling a little wanly. I can hear Sarah Palin saying: “How’s that hopey-changey thing workin’ out for ya?”
The ABM site was activated and deactivated in the same year: 1976. It was operational for just a few weeks. Total cost: approximately $6 billion.

I finally arrived at the Nekoma site about 8 p.m. on Saturday after infinite digressions — the McClusky Canal, Lonetree Wildlife Management Area, Minnewauken (now being eaten by Devils Lake), Sullys Hill National Game Preserve, etc. By the time I set up my cameras to catch the sunset I was “empty and aching and I don’t know why.” The vast sky was full of late-spring, early-summer bilious clouds piling up in a dome so blue it made you ache to look at it. A hint of localized rain. I gazed from a half mile away at the centerpiece (the photo-op) of the ABM site, a huge abandoned concrete pyramid with the top cut off. On each of the four faces of the truncated pyramid there is a giant oculus, the unblinking eye of the military-industrial complex, like something out of Orwell’s “1984.”
It’s eerie and in its own way incredibly impressive and imposing.

As I stood there trying to make sense of what it signifies — in the history of North Dakota, in the history of the Cold War, in the history of human folly, in the history of my friendships — a rainbow suddenly appeared with one foot right over the great pyramid. In that perfect, serene, late-evening moment, at the end of a wonderful day of driving Dakota on obscure roads, I so wanted to believe that I lived in the world of Genesis 9:13, in which God could balance a rainbow above the Nekomas of the earth to say “never again will you practice the arts of annihilation.”
But we are fallen creatures, all.

I drove slowly into Langdon and got myself a room at the local motel. The woman who checked me in lived in the apartment suite behind the desk — that kind of motel. She gave me an actual key attached to a plastic diamond etched with my room number. That kind of motel. I walked over to the Sportsmans Bar for a beer and a bar pizza. Perfection.

At first light I was back out at the site, closer now, cameras ready.

With considerable furtiveness, I planted my lilac tree. I did not wish to become the only casualty of the ABM Protest March! I said a little prayer. I was utterly alone. So far as I know I was the only human being who commemorated the 40th anniversary of the Nekoma peace march.

Heartache. There were three very different individuals that I so intensely wanted to see drive up the dirt road where I was parked Sunday morning, in search of the same thing. Had any one of them ambled up, out of the blue, on that anniversary, at that place, I would have regarded it as nothing less than the redemption of the project of our lives. But I could not invite them, because that would make it a mere rendezvous rather than a miracle or a sign of grace.

OK—We want our summer and we want it now
by Clay Jenkinson
May 16, 2010

What we need now are some Btus. I don’t ever remember so gray and glum a spring, a raindrop and a gust here and a drizzle and a gale force blast there.

We have interminable winters in North Dakota and often very harsh ones. I’m no expert, but we must have just about the longest and severest winters in the United States. My daughter also lives on the Great Plains, 751 miles south of here, and on any given day, when we talk by phone or Skype, she reports significantly better weather.
We’re North Dakotans. We’re tough. We’re stoic. We accept that we live in a challenging climate, and though we grumble about the weather, we tend to do so in a good-natured way. But there is an implicit bargain we have made with the universe: pummel us as you need to through the long winter, just give us a compensatory summer of sunny, nearly-hot days and nearly-cool nights.

Is that too much to ask?

I feel that the universe is breaking the contract this year. Don’t you dare truncate our summer! Every time I walk into a store or shop, the clerk now says, “Think we’ll ever see the sun again?”

The days are getting longer and longer, but not much warmer. This is theoretically my favorite time of the year, between mid-May and the 20th of June, and I feel I’m being cheated out of it this year, for sins of which I am unaware. I say June 20, because once the summer solstice arrives (6:28 a.m. June 21, 2010), I begin to pre-grieve the loss of light. I’m happiest when I know that each day, no matter what else is true, there will be a few more minutes of light, that the evening is going to linger beyond reason and science. Is there anything more wonderful in North Dakota life than the endless dusk of early summer? I love to sit out on my deck in shirtsleeves drinking it in, gazing at the tangerine glow on the horizon, relaxing in the fullest sense of the term. By mid-June, the afterglow of day — pink, yellow, gold, orange, sometimes all at once — can literally circle the horizon all the way around. On a night like that you can actually feel the temperature begin to drop, one degree every 15 minutes, until you know you need to get up and go inside, at least to fetch a blanket or jacket, but you cannot quite bring yourself to do it. It is just too exquisite to break the spell of such a cosmic eve.

People here often decry the wind. I’m not one of them. It is certainly true that there are days when the wind drives you batty here, but that only happens 10 or so days per year. I don’t know how many perfectly still days we have in a calendar year. Not many. On any given day North Dakota is a state of wind, from tornado or Arctic blast at one end of the spectrum to some infinitely gentle caress of the air at the other end of the spectrum, something so tender that even the word “breeze” is too strong to describe it. I live for those moments. And if there is a tall old cottonwood tree to speak the language of that soft zephyr, I call that paradise on earth.

I have not had that experience yet in 2010. It’s making me edgy and I think it’s making everyone else edgy too. You may think I’m joking about feeling cheated out of a proper after-winter, but I’m not. It is the exquisite summers — dry, clear, toasty, and bright — that enable us to forgive the harsh winters that dominate this quadrant of the earth. Historically and today, we’re a people who have learned how to accept delayed gratification. But if you take that gratification away, a kind of discontentment grows in the North Dakota consciousness. I’m serious.
My rototiller is just sitting out in the garden, forlorn. I fired it up a month ago, on a dry blowsy April day, and managed a few rounds before the mud gummed up the rotors. It spit and choked at first like an animal coming out of hibernation, but once it found its rhythm I felt like a character out of Rolvaag’s “Giants in the Earth.” Think about it. Walking behind a 4-horsepower tiller cutting a narrow swath of black earth has more in common with pioneer agriculture than the “climate-controlled” gigantic agriculture of our time. You have to wrestle with your rototiller — no power-assisted steering. You inevitably get dirt underneath your fingernails. You actually feel like a tiller of the earth.

It’s time to plant my garden. I have dreams of cornucopia and a tomato crop to shame my paltry previous efforts. It’s been so long now that my tiller will choke and gasp again. In a year like this, it’s foolhardy to predict the last frost.
I won’t really relax now until two things occur. I want my first evening of endless dusk, with a good book and a glass of wine out on the deck before it gets too dark to read. And I want my first true summer thunderstorm, one that comes from way off in the West in a slow pounding inexorable advance, and cracks the sky in two when it finally lingers overhead. I want that moment when you stop counting seconds between the flash of lightning and the clamor of the thunder. I want to be a little scared of the lightning streaks, but not scared enough to retreat.
That surely cannot be too much to ask.

And yet, I know that when that turning point comes (next week, on the fourth of July), the grass in the Badlands is going to pop. Gray dropsical springs are not at all uncommon here. We all know that when our summer finally comes, when we get our first hot day and reluctant night, we are going to appreciate it more intensely than ever before.

The Greatness of William L. Guy
by Clay Jenkinson
May 9, 2010

Last Tuesday marked the 40th anniversary of the Kent State Massacre. Next weekend marks the 40th anniversary of the peace march on the ABM missile site at Nekoma. On May 15-16, 1970, approximately 1,500 people, mostly college students, gathered at the Stanley R. Mickelsen Safeguard complex to protest nuclear proliferation, the escalation of the Cold War, and — of course — Vietnam.

William L. Guy served as the governor of North Dakota between 1960 and 1972. The ABM protest march happened on his watch.

For that we have reason to be enormously grateful.

On May 12, a nervous and hostile U.S. Justice Department sent out a riot control team to meet with Guy and other North Dakota officials. Guy regarded the federal agents as high-handed and patronizing, but — in his calm and competent way — he assured them that he would take adequate steps to prevent things from getting out of hand at Nekoma.

The shootings at Kent State brought America to a kind of collective nervous breakdown in the days and weeks following May 4, 1970. Hundreds of colleges and universities were simply shut down for the rest of the semester. The largest student strike in American history erupted across the nation, 1 million protestors for each of the four dead in Ohio. The war had come home to the American heartland. Every thoughtful American wondered — what next?
A few days before the march, Guy issued a statement of several hundred words to the people of North Dakota about how he intended to handle the situation. “I do not expect violence in this week’s demonstrations,” he said, “especially by those who point to the destructive waste of violence and war.”

“Peaceful demonstrations are in the best tradition of this country’s democratic process,” he said. Guy explained that he was putting the North Dakota National Guard on “strategic weekend drill status” in northeastern North Dakota, but that the guardsmen would not be carrying ammunition.

The ABM peace march occurred less than two weeks after the catastrophe at Kent State. It is a study in contrasts. It reminds us of how important it is to elect leaders worthy of the sometimes-grave responsibilities with which we entrust them.

In Ohio, Gov. John Rhodes, campaigning for the U.S. Senate as a champion of “law and order,” went out of his way to condemn the Kent State students who were protesting President Nixon’s invasion of Cambodia, thus widening the war he had pledged to wind down in the 1968 election. "They're worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes," Rhodes said.

In Ohio, Rhodes 1) wrested control of the situation from the administration of Kent State University and informed university officials that he, not they, would handle the crisis; 2) demonized the protestors, ordered them not to demonstrate, and called them un-American; and 3) called out the National Guard, instructed them to take a hard line, and put bullets in their guns.

In North Dakota, Guy 1) refused to demonize the protesters or condemn the demonstration, which he publicly defended as in the best tradition of American democracy; 2) made sure the National Guard was nearby, but instructed them, in his words, “not to interfere with the peaceful demonstration nor were they even to be present or visible along the assembly routes and at the ABM site;” 3) granted demonstrators permission to plant “peace trees” on the highway right-of-way near the ABM site; 4) and went to Grand Forks to meet personally with the students and faculty of UND, to listen to their concerns and to assure them that if they behaved responsibly they had nothing to fear.
Guy listened rather than preached.

Because northeastern North Dakota was sodden from spring rains, Guy even instructed the National Guard to deploy two tow trucks driven by guardsmen in civilian clothes to pull vehicles out of ditches or farmers’ driveways free of charge.

Civilian clothes.

Guy flew up to Grand Forks on May 13. He first met with about a dozen faculty members, who expressed their fears that the ABM march might spiral downward into another Kent State, then spoke with several hundred students in a UND dormitory complex. “The atmosphere,” he writes in his memoir “Where Seldom Was Heard A Discouraging Word ... Bill Guy Remembers,” “was tense and explosive.” While he was at the lectern in the dormitory, a note was passed to the governor saying, “Attorney General John Mitchell wishes to talk with you.” Guy assumed it was a joke, but immediately after the meeting returned the call.

You remember Mitchell, don’t you? Mitchell (1913-1988) was Richard Nixon’s campaign manager in 1968, then his tough-as-nails attorney general. The colorful champion of “law and order” later went to federal prison for his Watergate crimes.

When he got Guy on the phone, Mitchell pressured the North Dakota governor to use the North Dakota National Guard to secure the ABM site. Guy flatly refused. It was a federal not a state facility, he said. Besides, he said, American citizens had a perfect right to engage in peaceful demonstrations.

The attorney general then asked, “Do you plan to be at the demonstration site?”
Guy replied, “Only if they need one more warm body to swell the crowd. You see, I too, protest the waste of tax money that the ABM represents.”

At that the attorney general of the United States said, “Oh my God,” added an “expletive deleted,” and hung up on the governor of North Dakota.

The march on the Nekoma missile site was completely peaceful. The protesters planted trees, flew kites, and sat in a wheat field listening to poetry, free speech, and rock music. Nekoma had more in common with Woodstock than Kent State.

Experts who have studied that horrific month in American history say that our Gov. William L. Guy provided a “textbook case” of “precisely the right way to respond to a situation of this sort.”
Thank you Governor Guy.

Kent State: Forty Years After
by Clay Jenkinson
May 2, 2010

(This is the first of two columns about Kent State and its aftermath. Next week, Clay Jenkinson will contrast Kent State with Governor William L. Guy's handling of the ABM Missile Site protest in North Dakota on May 16, 1970, less than two weeks after the shootings in Ohio.)

Tuesday marks the 40th anniversary of the Kent State incident. On May 4, 1970, the Ohio National Guard fired directly into a crowd of students at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. The Guard was on campus in response to student anti-war protests. On April 30, 1970, in a televised address to the nation, President Richard Nixon had announced that he had authorized the invasion of Cambodia, Vietnam's southwestern neighbor. More than a hundred American campuses erupted in protest at the widening and deepening of the war in Vietnam.

Kent State was unique only in the mayhem that followed.

The shootings at Kent State began at 12:24 p.m. Guardsmen fired 67 bullets in 13 seconds. Four students were killed, nine wounded. The students were unarmed. Two of the four students killed, Allison Krause and Jeffrey Miller, had participated in the protest, but the other two, Sandra Scheuer and William Knox Schroeder, had merely been walking from one class to the next when the mayhem occurred. Schroeder, in fact, was a member of the campus ROTC chapter.

In the dark and eerie aftermath of Kent State, the largest student strike in American history overwhelmed the nation's college and university campuses. More than four million students and faculty members joined the strike nationwide. 450 college campuses closed, some of them for the remainder of the spring semester. On May 9, more than 100,000 angry protestors marched on Washington, D.C., partly in response to Kent State. Nixon speechwriter Ray Price said, "The city was an armed camp," and the atmosphere felt like civil war. In one of surrealist moments of the national crisis, President Nixon, sleepless and haunted by the unrest, ventured out alone into the streets at 4:15 a.m. on May 9. The President wandered into a vigil being held by 30 dissident students at the Lincoln Memorial. There, according to Vietnam War historian Stanley Karnow, Nixon "treated them to a clumsy and condescending monologue, which he made public in an awkward attempt to display his benevolence."

Many good Americans of all political affiliations felt that the country was coming apart in May 1970.
The most potent and enduring symbol of the Kent State Massacre is a photograph taken just after the shootings. It is one of the great photographs of the 20th Century. John Filo, a senior photojournalism major at Kent State, was working in the darkroom when he heard rifle shots. He rushed out in time to take a b&w photograph of 14-year-old runaway Mary Ann Vecchio, kneeling over the body of Jeffrey Miller, her arms outstretched in agony. James Michener called her "the girl with the Delacroix face." The photograph was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

My parents were so upset over the Kent State shootings that my father never really got over it. I was 15 years old. As soon as it was published, we ordered James Michener's outstanding "Kent State: What Happened and Why?" and took turns reading it. Although Michener makes it clear that there was fault and provocation on both sides, my father just couldn't understand how firing live bullets into a crowd of students could ever be justified-period. It is clear from all subsequent studies of the incident, official and unofficial, that the Guardsmen were in no danger. The protestors were armed only with epithets and a few rocks, and they were so completely mingled with innocent university students moving from one class to another that it was impossible to determine who was a threat to public order and who was just trying to get to chemistry lab. The four slain students were standing at an average distance of 345 feet from the nearest Guardsman, and the closest, Jeffrey Miller, was fully 265 feet away.

The Vietnam War had come home to the American heartland. Now, as my father saw it, we weren't just killing an enemy we didn't understand in a faraway jungle on the other side of the world, but gunning down our own college students who were observing their First Amendment rights to protest what they regarded as a pointless and unjust war.
Forty years have passed.

I don't blame the individual Guardsmen who fired those rounds on their M-1 rifles that day. They were young, frightened, poorly trained, and exhausted. They had been redeployed to the campus directly from Cleveland, where they had spent the previous days trying to restore order during a tense and bloody Teamster's Strike. Their nerves were jangled and what they needed more than anything else was sleep. They were put into an impossible situation by their superiors, including a strategically impossible situation at the bottom of a hill on the Kent State campus, from which any retreat looked like . . . well, a retreat.

But I do blame the officer(s) who gave the order to shoot, and who put bullets in those guns.
And I blame Ohio Governor James A. Rhodes for ordering the National Guard to the Kent State campus and then enflaming an already volatile situation by publicly calling the protesters "un-American." At a news conference on May 3, Governor Rhodes declared that the protestors were bent on destroying higher education in Ohio. "They're worse than the brown shirts and the communist element and also the night riders and the vigilantes," he said. "They're the worst type of people that we harbor in America. I think that we're up against the strongest, well-trained, militant, revolutionary group that has ever assembled in America."

At the time of these incendiary-and patently absurd-pronouncements, Rhodes was running for the U.S. Senate in Ohio. He had decided that his best prospect for winning the Republican primary on May 6, 1970, was to take a hard line on the anti-war movement. Had there been no pending election, Governor Rhodes might have responded to the disorders at Kent State with good sense rather than inflammatory denunciations.

Just a few weeks ago, on February 23, 2010, a 17-acre portion the Kent State campus was added to of the National Register of Historic Places as the Kent State Shooting Site.

Some time this year I'm going to visit the site.

In which your faithful correspondent goes to the prom
by Clay Jenkinson
April 25, 2010

I flew to Denver at the crack of dawn last Friday to see my daughter. I did my best to doze in the little space into which I was boxed. When we arrived in Denver, it was still dawn. I rented a car, stopped to buy a gift for my child, and then drove east toward her village in Kansas. It’s a four-hour drive through some of the biggest, openest landscape of the Great Plains. I love the drive, because it is the path to my principal happiness.

Saturday was prom. Prom is so monumental in her little Mott-sized town that, grammatically speaking, it doesn’t even require a definite article. We don’t go to the prom. We go to prom.

A father is not the best aide de camp on an occasion like this. So much of a girl’s prom prep involves grooming and tucking and hitching and hooking. There is a vast array of things a father never thinks about with respect to his adolescent daughter, because his heart still sees her as a 4-year-old sitting in a heap of Legos or a 6-year-old hugging him unhesitatingly in a thunderstorm.

I don’t ever want to be asked whether a strap shows because I do not want to be that observant in a world that, in the most important sense, is none of my business. When she asks, “Does this look all right?,” the only sane answer is “yes” unless she realizes that you are humoring her, in which case you are toast. But if you are ever foolish enough to say, “no,” you are in for a long afternoon, because you are going to be expected to justify your answer before a hostile jury, and your response is going to prove that you are a moron, and an insensitive one at that. When your daughter asks, “Dad, which looks better ...,” it appears to us like Identical X versus Identical Y, but if you give the wrong answer you can throw a whole 15-year-old solar system out of equipoise. It’s best to stand around like Fred MacMurray with a credit card, ready to run last minute errands.

My daughter and I have a wonderful relationship, full of laughter and joy and adventure. We approve of each other. But … she’s 15. We have reached the point in which I am, at best, a superfluous and at worst an annoying person. Most of our time together is splendid, but when we are in the presence of her peers, particularly boys, my job — if I only will stick with the script — is not to do something appalling. The problem is that almost anything can be construed as appalling, including (apparently) existence. It’s a minefield and there is no map or rulebook.

Nincompoop that I am, I did not realize that preparing for the ... preparing for prom is a daylong affair. Late morning: two full hours with a local hairdresser. My urban bias made me wonder if I had cash enough to cover the appointment, but the total, with tip, came to $20. Hail to thee, rural America! Then she took the world’s longest bath. Then we went to Taylor’s house for makeup.

How can I draw an accurate picture of that fascinating rite of passage? Eight girls in T-shirts and team mascot sweat pants, all wearing flip-flops, chewing gum as if their mouths were generating the electricity for the curling irons and hair dryers. All of them simultaneously gabbing, gossiping, primping, dissing, eating, laughing, questioning, bickering, suggesting, comparing, fussing, crying, and texting — while listening to music and watching TV. All in various stages of Big Hair.

On the long kitchen island, boxes of congealing pizza and a dozen half-eaten Subway sandwiches, big bags of chips, a dozen liter bottles of soda. Cans of heavy-proof, industrial strength hairspray on every flat surface. Half a dozen mirrors propped up spa-like on tables and counters, behind each of which one or two girls grimacing and striking Vanna White poses. I felt like one of those creatures in a dinosaur movie. As long as I remained perfectly mute and immobile, the pack of Pubesaurians were unaware of my presence.

Although each one had had her hair thrashed back into the 1980s by a trained professional earlier in the day, it turned out that each girl’s hair needed to be redone in some essential way before she could possibly face the world.
Finally, there was just enough time to go home and dress before a young man in a pickup would appear at the door, as if from the future. I sat in the living room awkwardly, book on my lap, fretting with my camera and my Mount Sinai lecture. The boy came right on time, slicked and gussied, after a prep time of approximately half an hour. He came for my child and left with a pretty young woman. I hardly recognized her as mine.

I went to the Grand March, locally known as the “Promenade,” and took enough photographs to earn a “Daaad!!!” glare-frown. Then I slunk back to my hotel where, for the next six hours I had only one thought. May there be no glitch, no setback, no hurt feelings, no disappointment, no fracture in my beloved child’s romance with life — not tonight.
She slipped in deep into the night and woke me up just long enough to say that it had been “perfect.” I would have cried had it not seemed so pathetic, so Hallmark channel. The next morning I found a heap of 37 sprung bobby pins, a “diamond” studded hair clasp, and a cloth pink rose, all excavated from her hair at 3:15 a.m. before she flopped down into sleep. I put them into a baggie and brought them home to Dakota. I’m going to give them to her on her 30th birthday with a photograph of her at the Promenade.

The next afternoon, we spent three hours together shoveling pig manure out of the stall where she is keeping her three 4-H hogs. The irony of our trajectory from prom to pig pen in 24 hours was not lost on either of us. We were in perfect harmony. But she texted a lot.

Obama, we've got a problem
by Clay Jenkinson
April 18, 2010

This last week marked the 40th anniversary of Apollo 13. The third attempted moon landing (April 11-17, 1970) turned into a space nightmare on day three when the explosion of an oxygen tank in the service module damaged the mission's electrical supply and severely reduced its oxygen supply. The three astronauts, James A. Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred W. Haise, hunkered down into a kind of circumlunar hibernation and managed to cobble together just enough life-support systems to pony their aircraft safely back to earth. They used the lunar module (the LEM) as a celestial life raft. Apollo 13 traveled all the way to the moon and then used its gravity to slingshot back to Earth. The nail-biting mission has been called NASA's "most successful failure," because of the sheer ingenuity exhibited by the crew and an extraordinary ground support team.

Twelve Americans have walked on the Moon. The last man on the Moon was Eugene Cernan, December 11, 1972. That was 38 years ago.

How did we let that happen? The spirit of the thing was not, "been there, done that," but rather that Neil Armstrong's little stroll on the Sea of Tranquility (July 21, 1969) would inaugurate a new age in human history. We'd construct a permanent scientific colony on the moon, erect a series of space stations and orbital spaceports, journey to Mars and maybe Venus, and perhaps much more. In other words, the Apollo Moon program was meant to be a beginning not THE END.

Now the Obama administration has announced its plans to scrap NASA's Constellation moon program. The proposed crew capsule for Constellation, the Orion, is to be scaled back into something that won't be capable of landing on the Moon-or Mars. Obama's argument is that there is no point in returning to the Moon just for the sake of returning. He believes that this is a good time to step back and formulate a rational, realizable, affordable, and yet still bold long-term space exploration agenda. Probably he is right, but I believe it essential to "stay in the game" between now and the ever-receding launch date of that brave new era.

NASA is planning to retire the aging and expensive shuttle fleet either this year or next. That means the United States will not have a vehicle capable of putting humans in space for at least a decade and perhaps as much as a quarter of a century. Once the last shuttle touches down in the California desert late this year or early next, the only way we'll be able to get astronauts to the International Space Station will be on top of Russian Soyuz rockets. The Obama administration's suggestion that astronauts ride into space on American commercial rockets is intriguing, but unrealistic. Besides, if Apollo 13 teaches us anything, it is that projecting and endangering human beings in this way should be an expression of our national ideals, rather than a commercial venture. Capitalism is a great system for delivering packages between Louisville and Los Angeles. But it should not be entrusted with the nobility of space exploration.

If Lewis and Clark had been leading a commercial venture up the Missouri River, we would not study and revere their explorations today.

Meanwhile, China has already sent three tailonauts or yuhangyuans into orbit (September 2008), one of whom performed China's first space walk. China plans to create its own orbiting space station in the next couple of years, and to land on the Moon by 2017.

At the risk of sounding like General Buck Turgidson (George C. Scott) in Dr. Strangelove, I don't relish the idea of our principal 21st century global competitor China performing Moon landings while we twiddle our thumbs back here in increasingly-slack America. Like it or not, space exploration is a gesture of geopolitical dynamics, an expression of both national and international prestige. Since we will soon have no rocket of our own capable of putting men in space, what happens if our relations with Russia deteriorate? Will they withdraw their taxi services for the nation of Alan Shephard, John Glenn, Frank Borman, Guss Grissom, and Buzz Aldrin?

I know the arguments against the American space program, from its inception in the late 1950s to today. 1. It was as much or more about the Cold War and competition with the Soviet Union as it was about exploration. The first astronauts rode into space on the same boosters that poised for launch in ICBM missile silos. 2. It was profoundly expensive, and while Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969, the world below (the "sublunary world") was awash in problems that ought to have been addressed with all that money and manpower. 3. Our preference for "manned" space missions-however rich in human drama-was a costly gimmick that diverted funds from the unmanned missions that would have accomplished much more for a fraction of the cost. 4. Once we had accomplished the "feat" of landing men on the moon, our space program went into a kind of aimless drift, from which it has never recovered. 5. The shuttle was a wrong turn for NASA. The only justification for the shuttle-aside from the Buck Rogers dream of a "space plane"-was that it would dramatically cut the cost of carrying humans and gear into space. It failed that test abysmally. Meanwhile, two of the five shuttle craft, Challenger and Columbia, blew or burned up, killing 14 astronauts.
I know all these arguments, but they dwindle to nothing in the face of the romance, heroism, and the quintessential human aspiration of space exploration.

When we landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, Walter Cronkite said, "Everything else that has happened in our time is going to be an asterisk." The father of the Saturn V booster that got us there, Werner von Braun, said, "I think it is equal in importance to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land."
That's the spirit.

Meanwhile, we need, all of us, to be learning Mandarin Chinese.

The sounds of trains and American memories
by Clay Jenkinson
April 11, 2010

Spring has sprung. I’ve been out walking the trail from my house to the end of the line and back, a distance of about five miles. The meadowlarks are singing with such joy and lucidity that it’s impossible not to smile when I walk outside. It’s as if they have been waiting all winter to have the chance to sing their liquid magic song again. I’m pretty sure that’s not good science, but that’s how it feels. The representative sounds of Dakota — the meadowlark, the croon and whoop of the coyote, the train whistle off on the horizon, the breeze moving through the cottonwoods until it rises in growing waves to a jangle, and then very slowly subsides until it almost but not quite goes still. We live in paradise.

When I go home to see my mother, I lie in bed at night listening to the trains. She lives in Dickinson two blocks from the railroad tracks. Somehow that sound in that place arcs straight into the heart of my nostalgia. “Nostalgia” derives from two Greek words: nostos, which means homecoming, and algos, which means pain. I’m not sure why we feel an agreeable pain over that which is past, but we do. Trains meant much more when I was a child than they do now. They still routinely carried passengers back then. Airplanes were exotic. The roads were all two lane — fragile ribbons that rode the contours of the plains like an organic roller coaster.

When I was a student at the University of Minnesota, I used to ride the train home for the Christmas break. Once, as a luxury, I got a couchette with a black porter who came in to make up the bed after supper. I’d be dog tired after final exams. I used to sit up in the observation car, in sweet end-of-term melancholy as we chugged along past the fields and lakes and forests and villages of Minnesota, dozing off to the sway and “clackedy clack clackedy clack” of the train. The trains that I rode then were never more than half full — maybe that’s why they are gone.

As often as not, a young bearded man with a guitar would appear in the observation car around dusk. He’d strum in a lazy Woody Guthrie kind of way, and maybe sing a few bars of this or that. Sometimes this would draw a couple of young women — which, no doubt, was the point. I gazed out at the countryside, wishing I had musical talent, wishing he did, for that matter. At some point I’d drift off to my berth and use the droll little bathroom, and climb up into the snug little bed. The sheets were invariably tight as a drum. There is something heavenly about slipping between cool sheets on a moving train. I’d read myself to sleep, which never took very long.

Sometime later — minutes? hours? — I’d wake up as the train huffed and jerked to a stop at some small Dakota town like Medina or Tappen. We’d be motionless for a few minutes and I’d look out, if I could keep myself awake, at the depot and the platform, and see perhaps an older woman with a modest valise standing near the depot on a light carpet of snow, patiently waiting to board the train. Finally, after what seemed like an interminable delay (and often was), the train would inch forward, pulled taut by the engine, and then slowly press further out onto the short-grass plains. As we began to pick up a little speed on the outskirts of town, I’d watch the village infrastructure play out, and the vast prairie open up and swallow the train again. And then the pendular rhythm of the train would rock me back to sleep, with an occasional shriek at the curves as the iron wheels glanced against the rails.

As we thrummed slowly towards home through the night, the Willa Cather, O.E. Rolvaag countryside would be punctuated at long intervals by lonely little farmsteads, set well back from the tracks, half a mile or a mile away, with a single orange yard light half illuminating a ghostly barn and chicken shed, and the two-story Dakota farmhouse. There were people living in those houses, all bedded down for the night, in the heart of the heart of America, so far from the centers of power, money, entertainment — and other people.

The prairie light would wake me up at dawn — bleary, blinking, disoriented. I don’t sleep soundly on a train, any more than on the first night of a camping trip. The porter would appear with coffee and a menu, and I’d eat a full breakfast as I gazed out on the stubble fields and the gathering buttes, my mind now bent on home. It was often bitterly cold outside. Some of that cold would press through the big window. Once the bed was murphy’d back up into the wall, I’d wrap myself in a blanket and read and doze and daydream and gaze about.
When we crossed the bridge at Bismarck, I’d sigh in satisfaction that I was home, in the part of North Dakota I loved (and love) best, with its laughingly low population density and its stark landscape and big, big sky. When we reached that astonishing bluff and breaks country between New Salem and Glen Ullin, I’d start to pack up my books and notebooks, and anticipate the first sight of my father standing alone in the Dickinson depot glancing at headlines in the Minneapolis Tribune.

Somehow all the romance of America is riding on that train, crossing North Dakota almost 40 years ago. When I hear the sound of the train from my house in north Bismarck, I experience a little rush of satisfaction, especially late at night. But when I hear the trains moving through Dickinson, from my bedroom in the house I grew up in, I am transported to an America that is gone, by a spiritual locomotion that I wonder at but do not fully understand.

Confessions of a carnal lover of books
by Clay Jenkinson
April 4, 2010

I read lots of books-three or four hours per day. I read parts of books for the work that I do, and I start way more books than I finish. This is partly because life feels a good deal like a freight train and that which is pressing and immediate often cuts off the luxury of a long untangled read. It's actually a little depressing at times, to discover that I stopped 3/5 of the way through Dickens' "Bleak House" because of some urgent project deadline, and for whatever reason could not pick up the thread of the novel again after several weeks of neglect. Heaven, in my theology, is the place where I will be able to read through "War and Peace" in a "single sitting," even though that sitting might take up two weeks of eternity. No problem: it's eternity.

Geek that I am, I have often fantasized that the phone rings and it is the CEO of Penguin Books and she says, "Congratulations, you have just won the Cosmic Nerd Lottery. We need your address because a semi-trailer will be arriving tomorrow afternoon with a complete set of our books." Think of those Penguins-hundreds of titles identical in dimension all lined up on floor to ceiling bookshelves with their gleaming orange spines. The temptation would be never to open the books so that the spines would never be creased. Perhaps they could send two complete sets-one for use and one for glory.

The writer Anne Fadiman has written a fine little book called Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader (1998). Fadiman is the daughter of the late Clifton Fadiman, who was one of the judges for the Book of the Month Club. She says there are two types of readers-courtly lovers and carnal lovers. The courtly lovers never write in the margins of their books, never dog-ear a page, never lay a book down spreadeagled. Courtly lovers try to get through the book with the lightest reader's "footprint."

Carnal lovers regard a book as an instrument to be used, not mollycoddled.

I'm essentially a carnal lover of books. I strip them of their jackets almost immediately and almost always wind up throwing the jackets away. I underline and bracket. I write on the blank pages at the front and back of the book. I have a fairly elaborate set of marginal notations that I use so that I can find what I need later, or transcribe it into the essay I am writing, or put the passage in question into a sorting category for gathering up later. I leave books open all over the house. In a pinch, almost anything will serve as a bookmark, from a genuine bookmark to the utility bill. (This can lead to trouble). If I am drinking tea or eating an orange, you may find stains at random places in the book. I have a system of several types of dog-earing, each with a different meaning.

At the same time I have many books-usually of the "complete works" variety-wherein I am an ethereal courtly lover. No markings, not even my name at the front of the book.

Not so long ago I was making a short stack of books that have a very special place in my memory in order to photograph them against a black background. Don't ask why. The books I was gathering were not the books I most love in the world. They were the books that hold a special place in my consciousness because of where I was or who I was with or what was going on in my life. It's like the song you hear on a jukebox or the radio and suddenly you quit whatever you were doing to listen in reverie. You are transported back to some moment in your life when that song served as the cultural accompaniment to something intensely good (or bad). That's what these ten or so books signified.

I opened two of them.

One was an Oxford paperback edition of Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina." An English professor whom I revered told me that he regarded the first hundred pages of Anna Karenina as the best hundred pages in literature. I was going to England to study for the summer. Just before heading to the airport I bought a gleaming new copy of AK. I read through the entire flight from Los Angeles to London, then settled into my digs at Oxford's Hertford College, and for the next five days did nothing but read "Anna Karenina." This is the only time that has ever happened to me in a long life of serious reading. I read while I ate, and walked, and rode the bus, and I read at night until I could not keep my eyes open a second longer, and then I woke up and started reading again.

It was heaven on earth. In the course of that marathon I bought some oranges. As I flipped through it a few weeks ago, holding it in my hands like a baseball signed by Harmon Killebrew or one's first Bible, I found a page with a faded orange stain on it, where Vronsky accidentally breaks the back of the horse he is riding in the race. In an instant, my whole being was suffused with a precise memory of the room I was reading in some 30 years ago, the way I was pealing that orange, the sense of wonder in reading that magnificent passage for the first time. The emotions of joy and sadness and lost youth were overwhelming.

Then I picked up the assigned text for my freshman Introduction to Drama course taught by Professor Bernard Gutenberg, who had a Roman nose and all the hauteur you want from your first great English professor. I turned to "Hamlet," which is my book of books.

There in the margins were my innocent, puerile notes, written by someone wrestling with Shakespeare for the first time. Notations like: "Hamlet-unhappy," "is he threatening suicide?" "what is a bare bodkin?"
I blushed to Shakespeare's "empyrean."

How do we invest in the future of North Dakota?
by Clay Jenkinson
March 28, 2010

Dear reader, I have a homework assignment for you, if you choose to accept it.
I have the good fortune of belonging to a small dining society. Five of us meet once every couple of months to share a meal and engage in general conversation. Occasionally, we agree to read the same book or article before the next meeting. Mostly, we just talk current events. It seems that no matter where we start we always wind up talking about the future of North Dakota.

These are people who are so interesting that after three years, I am not sure whether they are Democrats or Republicans or neither.

When we met the other night, one member of the group, a well-informed and well-connected industrialist (have I mentioned that I have no idea why they want me at the table?), gave a spontaneous report on the latest technologies in the Bakken oil field. It was brilliant — the lightning turn-around time of the new rigs, the use of a fine round sand to fracture the deep underground formations, the dramatically smaller “footprint” of the surface infrastructure, the almost incredible volume of activity that we are likely to see in Mountrail County, etc.
And the money, Rocky, the money.

He concluded his informal assessment by saying that thanks to the convergence of new technologies and this enormous oil field, North Dakota is going to be awash in cash. Even if the next few legislative sessions spend money freely building a new prison, toning up state agencies, bringing the salaries of state employees and educators up to something like the national average, funding worthy projects and initiatives, North Dakota is going to rack up unprecedented budget surpluses? How large? Nobody knows for sure, but he said he would not be surprised if within the next decade — even with all of the projected government spending — North Dakota has a surplus of $6 billion.
Nice way to begin the 21st century.

Unless world oil prices collapse, all this is going to happen, regardless of whether your environmental politics are “drill, baby, drill” or “oh, please, don’t let this happen to us.”

We are living in one of the most interesting moments of North Dakota history. We are making the transition from an agrarian to a post-agrarian phase of our history, from a century of economic hardship and marginality to a time when we collectively will be as rich as Croesus. The oil and coal crescent, with epicenters at Stanley and Beulah, is becoming the Alberta of North Dakota. The source of North Dakota’s wealth is shifting from the Red River Valley to the carbon corridor. A whole new class of the super wealthy is being generated — overnight — among folks who only a few years ago were struggling to make land payments and buy their children tennis shoes. Without really thinking about it much — Stanley is a long way from Fargo, and even from Bismarck, a long way from “major” media — we are witnessing the pell mell industrialization of the North Dakota landscape. If you try to imagine the infrastructure that will be required to find and lift 5 billion barrels of oil two miles out of the ground, and then truck, train and pipe it out of the state, you begin to get an idea of what we are wading into with the nonchalance of Mr. Magoo.

I have two questions, one of which I hope you will accept as your homework assignment.

Since it is clear it is going to happen, whether this prospect fills you with ecstasy or fear and loathing (or both at once), how can we manage this decades-long extraction boom wisely so industrial activity unfolds with the most benefit and the least adverse impact on the natural and social landscapes of North Dakota?

And what should we do with the money? That’s where I hope you will send me your thoughts. Everyone understands that these extraction revenues will not continue forever, that at some point the boom must end, if only because the last of the recoverable oil has rolled or flowed out of the state. North Dakota will not enjoy magnificent budget surpluses forever. These vast revenues represent a windfall, what former North Dakota Gov. Art Link correctly called a “one-time harvest.” If we invest our surplus revenues wisely, if we concentrate rather than distribute the money, it is possible to lay the groundwork for a century (or more) of unprecedented stability and prosperity in North Dakota — a century in which we attract citizens from elsewhere, a century in which our own children are less likely to bolt for better lives elsewhere.

So here’s the assignment. Write a one- to two-page memo explaining what you think we should do with the revenue, how we should invest it and to what end. Explain where you think North Dakota is headed, what North Dakota will look like in 2050, what you would like it to look like as a northern Great Plains society. What problems do you think we need to address, in what order, and how can these surpluses be used to address them? What concerns do you have about these extraordinary developments?

How do you see our identity as North Dakotans changing, our relationship with each other and with the land, our politics and our quality of life? What would you most like to see happen to North Dakota and what would you least like to see happen?

I’m inviting you to send me your thoughts. I’ll read them carefully and summarize the results in later columns.
If you are willing for me to quote from or post your memo, please indicate that.
I have no outcome in mind here except a better understanding of who we are, where we are and where we are headed. I’m fascinated and concerned about how we can use these stunning revenues not as a Christmas bonus but as a lever to create a fabulous 21st century North Dakota.

Out of Hibernation in a Magical Landscape
by Clay Jenkinson
March 21, 2010

Snirt season. Not far from my house, on Horizon water tower hill, the snow removal folks have built a snirt mountain. But the sun will bring it down.

Tuesday afternoon I returned from a long auto trip to Minneapolis. When I arrived in Bismarck in late afternoon, it was warm and sunny so I decided to go running for the first time in 2010. I scrounged up running gear, found an iPod and headphones, and lurched out into my neighborhood. I don’t know if you have ever let your body go to the point that you are mere human wreckage, so appalled by how out of shape you are that you are on the verge of saying, “Oh the heck with it, I’m just going to give up and wallow for what’s left of my life in the seventh circle of the Inferno, the pizza and beer dispensary.” But the quality of the air, the exquisite clarity of the early spring light, the sense that it will now be possible for the next seven months to dwell partly outdoors again, and the musical genius of the Beatles’ White Album, impelled me forward. It was like coming out of hibernation.

By the end of my run-walk, I felt wonderfully alive. The air was a little chilly now. My body ached—agreeably--in some new ways. I looked around from the bluff I was on and tried to drink it all in, draw the air as deep into my lungs as I could, and tried to look out at the Great Plains as if for the first time.

We live in a strange and astonishingly beautiful place. The landscape swelled and rolled away to the vanishing point in every direction. So much and wide a land and so little human presence on it. All that human pride over so light and temporary a footprint on a geography so overwhelming in scale. The Great Plains are and always have been mostly empty. A man I met in West Virginia once sat back to think about the Great Plains, then said: “It’s a lot of country all spread out.” The human project is dwarfed here—for me, that’s much of the appeal.

Off to the south the perfect little landscape punctuation mark of Little Heart Butte. Bismarck would be diminished if that modest buttelette, like our children, packed up and moved away for a better life. I tried to imagine what the Bismarck-Mandan corridor, the confluence of the Heart and the Missouri Rivers, must have looked like to the Mandan Indians when they gazed south from Double Ditch, before the coming of the you know who. It makes you ache to think about it.

If you had enough money to live anywhere on earth, where would you choose to live? Would it be here? It would be fun to take a plebiscite. If you had been born in Wadena, Minnesota, or Walla Walla, Washington, or Warsaw, Poland, and without warning you were parachuted into North Dakota in the middle of the night, what would you think come daybreak? Would you revel or recoil? Would you call it flat or rolling country? Would you bolt or break sod? Would you crow or cry, curse or celebrate? And what if the wind were blowing?

If we didn’t take it for granted, what would we think of this place?

I drove across North Dakota the other day, east to west, and paused at the green sign just west of Valley City, “Continental Divide. Elev. 1490.” I regard that spot as one of the greatest places on the Great Plains. It is a perfect monument to the improbability, even the absurdity, of North Dakota. If you get out of the car and gaze around for a while, the landscape looks identical in every direction. You have no sense that you are standing on the crest of the North American continent. It’s not quite as sublime as Loveland Pass (CO), at 11,990 feet above sea level, or as rugged as Monarch Pass (CO), 11,312, or even Montana’s Logan Pass in Glacier National Park at 6,646 feet. It’s just an undifferentiated place in the middle of an undifferentiated place. And yet, thanks to the inexorable laws of gravitation, waters on one side of the sign flow into the Sheyenne, Red, Hudson’s Bay system, and the land on the other side of the sign drains into the Missouri, Mississippi, Gulf of Mexico system. It’s as serious a continental divide as the postcard of Independence Pass, 12,095, near Aspen, Colorado.

The “Continental Divide, Elev. 1490” sign at milepost on I-94 might seem like a wisecrack in a Garrison Keillor monologue, like a North Dakota joke erected by a state highway department with a sense of humor about how people merely traveling through North Dakota must feel about this place. But as the people of Fargo know all too well this week, almost half of the countryside of North Dakota sheds its moisture into glacial Lake Agassiz, whose only outlet pipe is the inefficient Red River, the too much, too little Red.

My garden is slowly emerging from the snowpack, though I have not glimpsed the black earth yet. Yesterday, for the first time in 2010, I thought about tomatoes and sweet corn.

Our winters are long and frequently brutal, but the payoff is magnificent, when winter loses its grip on our place and our lives, and we emerge from our caves in jackets for the first time, like grumpy and suddenly very hungry bears.

If my fingers were as sore as my legs, I could not type these words. I’m planning to run again tonight, if I can find a way to tie my tennis shoes. I’m going to stop again on the ridge—to celebrate renewal and attempt to make sense of this magical place. Or maybe just to gasp for breath.

The ghosts of Marmarth and the wielding of Occam’s chainsaw
by Clay Jenkinson
March 14, 2010

You’ve probably been amused (or alarmed) to read of recent doings in Marmarth, the magnificent and odd little village of 119 people tucked into extreme southwestern North Dakota on the western edge of Slope County. When I heard that researchers were on their way to Marmarth this weekend in search of the paranormal, I asked myself, “How will they know?” The researchers are really going to have to calibrate those machines. Marmarth is easily the most paranormal place in North Dakota.

Does Marmarth have ghosts? I doubt it, but I can hear my friend Patti Perry, the mayor, laughing her nicotine laugh and saying, “Yeah, you want to see ’em, just go over to the bar.”

I know this much about ghosts: I have left several of my past lives in Marmarth. Some of the best moments of my life have been lived and lost in and around Marmarth. I spent my honeymoon there. I started my life as a public humanities scholar there. The best photograph I ever took was near Marmarth. My greatest hikes have begun, or ended, in Marmarth. (In each case the mayor has patched up my wounds, served me her exquisite goat sausage, and called me a fool.) The greatest friendships of my life have a Marmarth connection. When the rapture, the end time, or the great collapse comes, I’m heading to Marmarth. It’s already half there.

The village is debating whether to adopt a new 80-page zoning document. Mayor Perry, in her marvelous inimitable way, predicted that a meeting about the zoning regs was “gonna get western.”
Advocates of the zoning document rightly argue that life is changing in the lower North Dakota Badlands — intensive oil extraction, hobby ranches, increased recreational and paleontological activity — and that now is the time to get a handle on 21st century developments.

But Mayor Perry, who understands that Marmarth has for a very long time been a refuge for folks who — how shall we put it — are not really “zoning sorts of people,” told the Tribune’s Lauren Donovan, “They’ve got stuff in there that’s going to give them nothing but grief. They don’t have the manpower to enforce it.”

I love Patti’s use of the English language. In philosophy, there is something called “Occam’s Razor,” named after 14th century English theologian William of Ockham. It means, essentially, that when you are given the choice between a complex or convoluted explanation for something and a simpler one, the simpler one is usually correct. Ever since I met her 25 years ago, Patti Perry has been wielding not just Occam’s Razor but Occam’s hatchet and Occam’s chainsaw. She could outwit Hamlet in her blunt, no-nonsense way, and if Ludwig Wittgenstein turned up in town one Friday night, she’d talk him into giving up philosophy and going to work in a feedlot. She’s one of the smartest persons I have ever met, and maybe the single funniest. She’ll reawaken the common sense in you even if she has to pummel it back to life. She takes no prisoners. She saw through me the day I first met her, and I have regarded her as the Oracle of the Cottonwoods ever since.

“They’ve got stuff in there that’s going to give them nothing but grief.” Who could ever improve on that? It’s a piece of universal wisdom. Apply this to the United Nations Charter, or the Bill of Rights, or the Balfour Declaration, or the Senate health care bill, or the New Testament, or an idealistic young couple’s handwritten wedding vows, or King Lear. It gets to the heart of the human condition every time, and the laws of unintended consequences, and the best laid plans of mice and Marmarth.

John Hoeven is almost certainly going to the U.S. Senate come November. Tracy Potter will be a very worthy opponent if he gets the Democratic nomination later this month, but I will admit that I would give almost anything to see Hoeven debate Patti Perry once a month between now and the election. With such a sparring partner, he’d either fine tune into the best senator in North Dakota history, or he’d wind up in a feedlot with Wittgenstein. Let me be the first to say: Patti Perry for U.S. Senate.

The key to understanding Marmarth is that all bets are off. Marmarth is a tiny village set in a very out of the way place. In a sense, it’s what Medora was before Harold Schafer decided to tone it up, except that it’s on a road much less traveled than the NP-US 10-I-94 corridor that passes through Medora. At one time, Marmarth had a population of 1,300 people, a vaudeville theater and an opera house. The well-restored Mystic Theater still graces the north-south main street, and the stunning ruin of the Barber Auditorium continues to serve as a magnet for dreamers and ghostbusters.

Marmarth is a kind of life support ghost town at the confluence of the Little Missouri River and Little Beaver Creek. It’s one of two towns in Slope County, which is the 14th least populated county in the United States. You don’t just happen into Marmarth — you have to want to go there. It’s tucked away and isolated, and it’s essentially off the grid of the known world. It’s North Dakota’s Wyoming. That’s what makes it so utterly charming in a kind of “take a deep breath” sort of way. Aside from the stable ranch community, exemplified by the extraordinary Badlands philosopher and raconteur Merle Clark, Marmarth is the home of eccentrics, ne’re-do-wells, scofflaws, ruffians, cracked dreamers, and misfits — all in the best sense of those terms. People who would find Bowman too confining, or even Rhame for that matter.

To zone Marmarth would be to de-Marmarthize it. Patti is right, as usual.

I have one suggestion and one prediction.

Take the time one of these weekends to drive down to Marmarth, and have supper at the Pastime Restaurant while you are there. I promise you won’t be sorry.

Prediction: Patti is going to whup me when she reads this.

Song of the meadowlark sounds in Prairie Dream, Colo.
by Clay Jenkinson
March 7, 2010

I heard my first meadowlark of 2010 last week. It was not in North Dakota, but it was a meadowlark and I was on the Great Plains. My heart just soared. During the years when I lived elsewhere, out of meadowlark range, I used to drive back to North Dakota with the windows open in my car. When I heard my first meadowlark, somewhere in Wyoming or Montana, I knew I was “home.” I’d stop the car — I drive the “blue highways” rather than the interstates whenever possible — and stretch and look around in wonder at the treelessness of it all. I’d stand under the vast sky in silence and just listen to the unbearable lucidity of the lark.

When I heard my lark last week, out in the middle of nowhere, I could actually feel my emotions moving up my body the way the spaghetti water boils over the kettle, toward the moment when you burst into tears with joy and the immense purity of life. I love that feeling — when we cease to be a “head delivery system” and our bodies re-integrate and for an instant tell us who we really are. I was alone in antelope country on a Great Plains day that was not spring, not yet, but spring was definitely in the air. I did not burst into tears, but I tried to keep the emotional pot at a near-boil for as long as possible.

I heard my meadowlark in eastern Colorado on one of the most improbable highways on the Great Plains. It’s CO 94, which connects Colorado Springs to U.S. Highway 40 not far from Kit Carson. It’s one of those pathetic roads that doesn’t even connect two towns. It starts at a conurbation — Colorado Spring — and plays out at an undifferentiated sagebrush pinpoint in the heart of the heart of the continent. After 94 climbs up out of the Colorado Springs basin onto the high plains, and gets past the junk yards, hubcap shops, motocross tracks and meth motels, and passes through a few half-hearted ranchette subdivisions, it just settles into a razor-thin asphalt line that yawns out across the emptiest quarter of America.

It’s one of my top-five roads in the American West. It also is the road to my Oz — to the village where my daughter lives.

The big dramatic moment on CO 94 (east-west) is its junction with the equally god-forsaken CO 71 (north-south), at a place called Punkin Center, which, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, supported a population of nine in the year 2000. From the look of things now, I’m guessing there has been a little rural decline and outmigration since the millennium. Trying to learn how Punkin Center got its name (predictable, boring), I discovered that when it was founded in 1918, it was called Prairie Dream.

Oh, that it were still Prairie Dream. It could be named capital city of the Buffalo Commons. It could be the subtitle of the Poppers Thesis, “The Future of the Great Plains: The View from Prairie Dream, Colorado.” If you planted a geometric compass at Punkin Center and drew a circle with a radius of 100 miles, how many people would you encompass? Would it be more than 150? Would it even break 100?

Was Prairie Dream named in irony, back at the end of World War I, by plainsmen with a sense of humor? Or did the Founding Fathers believe that somehow, some day it would be a thriving metropolis with an opera house and a movie theater? Today it is nothing but a couple of sad looking doublewides, a tall bold Lee Greenwood flag pole and a junction cafe that is open about one year out of eight.

In the course of my life, I have driven CO 94 many times. I have driven it in melancholy and rage, in exaltation and adventure, in courtship and in the sweet satisfaction of parenthood. It is one of those few roads that are equally good both directions — whether you are leaving a dilapidated farm town and heading to Mecca (to the orthodontist, to the ballet, to the French bistro), or leaving the big city (with its strip malls and chain stores, crime and hustle) and heading out to the rural core of America. I have never driven CO 94 without seeing pronghorn antelope. I love to stop and watch them lope away to some safe middle distance spot where they can turn to gaze back at the intruder or, if they get spooked, sprint demonically over the ridgeline.

If over-civilized guests from some faraway urban enclave asked me to take them to a place where they were absolutely certain to see their first pronghorn antelopes, I would meet them on the campus of Colorado College in Colorado Springs and drive them out east on CO 94. Two things are absolutely certain. First, they would see their pronghorns. Second, one of the guests, at some point out near Prairie Dream, would laugh a little nervously and say, “You sure wouldn’t want to have car trouble out here, would you?”

Indeed.

I enjoy it most when I am out there alone, gazing and anticipating.

At the end of that three-hour drive, there is a 15-year-old whippersnapper waiting to see her papa. She has not awakened to the magic of that road yet, though she has been on it a couple of dozen times. When she opens that screen door, in a village the size of Mott, in a slightly more prosperous phase of Dorothea Lange’s plains country, she throws her arms around me with abandon and I throw my arms around her with abandon, and, by a magic I don’t understand but attribute to God, the vastness of the American outback evaporates into one perfect lingering hug.
A few weeks from now, the song of the meadowlark will melt the winter of our discontent here in Dakota, too.

And they say the age of the book is over:
Confessions of a slow reader
by Clay Jenkinson
February 28, 2010

By the time you reach my age, you know by default where your principal interests lie. At one time I thought I might like to learn Sanskrit in order to read the Hindu sacred texts. It looks like that is not going to happen, to put it lightly. When I get hopped up on my self I like to think of myself as a fellow of wide curiosity, but as soon as I come to my senses, I realize how very very very little I know about a teeny tiny number of things. And, truth told, I don't even know those things very well. On the vast adamantine spectrum of knowledge, I am obscurely chipping away in a few little marginal areas with a very dull jackknife. Last night, I tried to decide if I know at least one thing better than anyone else in the world.

Nope.

Well, maybe the contents of my garage.

I read the other day that 172,000 books are published each year in the United States alone. Britain publishes more than 200,000 titles. In a good year, if I make it a priority, I can read 75 books.
Whenever I let myself think about these things, I despair.

I love the novels of Charles Dickens, but haven't read them all. In fact, I don't know of a single author I have read "through," unless it is someone of miniscule output like J.D. Salinger. I love Thoreau's "Walden" and Twain's "Huckleberry Finn" and at one time or another have vowed to memorize them, or at least their highlights. Time is running out. The same goes for Paradise Lost. (I've memorized the first 100 lines-just 9,565 lines to go!).

That's the rub. When you are 20 or 40, you think you have all the time in the world, so you can postpone the moment when you will begin to master X (Mickey Mantle's lifetime baseball statistics or Beethoven's symphonies). But when you reach inglorious middle age, you realize that you are going to have to haul in the great net you threw out so boldly into the sea of knowledge, and replace it with a couple of humble fishing lines upon whose hooks you have fastened the worms of your diminished brain matter. The great net, meanwhile, hauled in mostly old boots, spent beef stew cans, and medical waste.

Sometimes I actually make lists of things I should know but don't, or of books I know I ought to have read by now and haven't. Both lists are long and depressing. Forget the 372,000 books published annually in Britain and America. If I only spent the rest of my life reading books I should have read-from Herodotus' "Histories" to Dickens' "Dombey and Son"-I'd not even accomplish that. Do the math. The list of "classics I have neglected" is at least 2,000 titles deep-at least! If I read 75 of those (often very long and difficult) classics per year for the rest of my life, I'd need 27 really productive years just to break even. Meanwhile, while I was slogging through George Eliot's "Middlemarch" and Faulkner's "As I Lay Dying," more than 10 million books would have been published in English, many of them-as they say-quite good.

We live in the great age of the book, not to mention the Internet. Somewhere inside the computer that is sitting on my lap as I write, I have stored the complete Encyclopedia Britannica (55 million words, 100,000 articles) and the complete Oxford English Dictionary (20 stout volumes, 59 million words, 310,100 main word entries). Close your eyes for a moment and imagine those 70 folio volumes actually stacked on my lap as I sit in 24e on an airplane, or in my hotel room, or in the pub. Now there's a babe magnet!

I'm one of the prime beneficiaries of what might be called the electronification of culture. I get to carry an excellent reference library with me all of the time-except when I am hiking in the Badlands. If you add the textual resources stored on my laptop (see above) and the music stored on my iPod (160gb), and add to that the resources instantly available on my "crackberry" and my Kindle (300,000 books ready for immediate download), I have more knowledge in four lightweight devices that fit together in a small attaché case than in the best library of the Enlightenment.
So why am I so dumb?

And then there is the Internet. The online encyclopedia Wikipedia now has 3,204,028 articles in English alone, and there is literally no end in sight. That's 32 times more information than Britannica, which for 250 years was the greatest compendium of knowledge in the English-speaking world. And Wikipedia only began its work yesterday, in 2001. May I just pause here to say that people (principally teachers) who shake their heads at Wikipedia and sternly warn their students not to consult it are just, if I may coin a term, ludd-idiots. For ready knowledge you'd be insane not to turn to Wikipedia.

Here's a trivial pursuit factoid. First website?-A.D. 1995. Today there are 162 million websites, and growing exponentially. Still more astonishing--half of them seem to be porn sites.

Imagine for a moment what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of this-that you can carry the accumulated wisdom of western civilization around with you, weighing less and occupying less space than a single book, Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire would have taken up in his time. The world of the 21st century is awash in knowledge. It rains knowledge 24-7-365, in highly agreeable packages, designed for maximum consumer advantage. And the truth is that we are just getting started here.

I am left with two questions. One: So why am I not 35 years old, on biological hold, and destined to live forever? And two: If all this is true, why do half the American people disbelieve in evolution and nearly half claim that global climate change is a hoax?

North Dakota is an acquired taste
by Clay Jenkinson
February 21, 2010

You've probably seen the story about the Florida family that moved to Hazelton four years ago, lured by the promise of free lots and home purchase subsidies, and now has given up on North Dakota and plan to move back to Florida. Michael and Jeanette Tristani and their 12-year-old twins have had enough of us. Michael's conclusion: "No one really wants new people here." Jeanette: "People prejudge you without getting to know you."
Let's face it. North Dakota is an acquired taste. I know people who have moved from somewhere far away to Dickinson, Bismarck and Fargo, who find our Dakota cultural landscape frozen and forbidding. They quite literally talk about "culture shock," not in the "wow, they actually serve borscht in that restaurant" sense, but "it's not very comfortable to live here and frankly I don't feel very welcome" sense. They literally wonder if they are going to be able to tough it out here.

And those newcomers are living in our metropolises! Imagine moving from somewhere like San Diego to Osnabrock or Bowman or Hazelton. Before they began their 1,800-mile odyssey to the Great Plains, did the Tristanis read Sinclair Lewis's "Main Street"?-America's classical account of the smug saccharine suffocation of small town life? For that matter, did they listen to Garrison Keillor's more genial monologues about the whitebread clunkiness of Lake Wobegon?

If you suffer from agoraphobia (fear of wide open spaces), you might not want to move to North Dakota. Or ancraophobia (fear of wind), or psychrophobia (fear of cold) . . . not to mention treelessnessophobia, velveetaphobia, coupedupophobia.

I know a highly educated man who teaches at the University of North Dakota, who told me that after 10 years of living and working in North Dakota (if Grand Forks can really be called North Dakota), he now believes he has finally learned how to survive this place. Ten years. "You still cannot get a good bagel here," he concludes with a world-weary sigh.
Look folks: North Dakota is a low population, windswept, splayed out and seemingly featureless place, stuck up in the middle of nowhere, about as far away from the cultural hot spots of America as it is possible to get. Average annual temperature: 42 degrees. One of the five windiest places in America. If Los Angeles is the film capital of the United States and Nashville the music capital. and New York the financial capital, and San Jose-Palo Alto the high tech capital, then North Dakota is the .... (fill in the blank).

Oh, yeah, it's Eric Sevareid's "large rectangular blank spot in the nation's mind." Note to newcomers: You're going to want satellite TV.

When I travel, I sometimes tell people elsewhere that there are times when Applebee's is the best restaurant in my hometown. They howl with snobby derision at this, and they often say, solemnly, "I could never live in a place like that." Fair enough-that's good natural selection. What they don't understand, when they speak condescendingly about our amenities and our isolation, is that there are a hundred towns in North Dakota that would give anything to have an Applebee's.

What we need is a mandatory North Dakota Orientation Course (NDOC) for folks who are transferred here, stationed here, marooned here, incarcerated by marriage vows here, and for that anecdotal handful who actually choose to move here to "get away from the rat race."

Upon entering North Dakota airspace, every newcomer would get two handsomely laminated conversion charts. One chart redefines automobiles. If you want to fit in here, you need to know that in North Dakota the Chevrolet Impala and Ford Taurus are regarded as sub-compacts and the Suburban three-quarter ton a mid-size. The Ford F-150 is officially defined here as a "starter pickup." On the back of the card, we'd print the following bit of homespun wisdom: "If you don't like to buy gasoline, don't move here."

The other card (personalized for Hazelton or Mott) would indicate distances. Nearest movie theater. Nearest Wal-Mart. Nearest bookstore. Nearest Thai food. Nearest "chain restaurant of any sort." And the 800 number for Allegiant Airlines.

Forget Larry Woiwode and Louise Erdrich. I'd make Mylo Hatzenbuhler the poet laureate and cultural czar of the NDOC project. Just so they know they're not in Florida or California anymore, for a solid week newcomers would be strapped into barcaloungers to listen to such Hatzenbuhler classics as "To All the Cows I've Milked Before," "Hens in Low Places," "I Feel Yucky," "Born to Be Wide" and "Oh, Little Town of Amidon."

The NDOC orientation program would consist of several broad subject categories:
Cuisine. Courses would include "666 Uses for Velveeta (Including Velveeta Fudge)," "The Tao of Hot Dish," and "Serving Bars at Weddings, Funerals, Baby Showers, Bridge Club, Graduations, Anniversaries, Family Reunions, Holidays, the Ballet, and a Few Other Occasions." Plus the graduate seminar on "The Twelve Month Grill on the Northern Plains."

Gadgets. Newcomers would first be taught to identify and later to use head-bolt heaters and remote car starters; and issued two sets of solid steel picnic tablecloth clover clips, cleverly shaped like giant paleo-mosquitoes, welded during the winter by the Welcome Wagon Farmers Auxiliary of Wishek. Each immigrant would memorize the recreation mottos of North Dakota: "Why sweat: It's a lot more fun with an internal combustion engine," and "Pinochle-The Game that God Plays."

Architecture. I haven't really worked out the details but I know the course begins with units on "The Four Car Garage: Best Practices," and "The Four Car Garage with the Extendo RV-Boat Port."

I think you begin to see the kind of the orientation I have in mind for new immigrants-to avoid another Hazelton-Tristani debacle. Optional non-credit courses would include, "Hey, That Gray Treeless Gale Force Lake is our Weekend Hideaway," "Why a Butte Is Called a Mountain," and "Yes, as a Matter of Fact, it IS Always This Windy."
What do you think?

Winter in Type A country
by Clay Jenkinson
February 14, 2010

This has been a winter to remember and, as they say, it ain’t over yet. We appear to have moved into a wet cycle on the northern Great Plains. That’s good news on the whole—for agriculture, especially ranching, for the great reservoirs on the Missouri River, which are refilling after a long period of drought. It’s not such good news for the folks who live along Apple Creek, at Devils Lake, or along the Red River in Fargo and Grand Forks.

My mailbox is more or less buried now, like the cache of vintage Scotch whiskey from the 1909 Shackleton expedition that was recently found under the Antarctic ice. From time to time I go out and hack away at the snow and ice embankment—especially after I get one of those “Last Warning,” or “LAST WARNING, and this time I really mean it” or “Don’t make me go postal” notices from my contract mailman. Recently he has taken to cutting out letters from magazines and newspapers and pasting his warnings on the Violation of Mail Protocol forms. I think he’s getting a little testy.

I feel genuinely sorry for the postal carriers in a hard winter like this one. Even during the summer, trying to get slippery sheaves of junk mail into the boxes through the window of a mini-van while lurching forward 20 yards at a time all day long, sounds like yoga to me. In the heart of winter, when the snow removal embankments pile up it must be extremely frustrating and contortionistic. If you add up the number of times per run that an inaccessible mailbox gums up the process, you will understand why the carriers get a little peevish.

This winter I know only two things: that I now have nine, count them, nine, different snow removal devices—some purchased at enormous expense; and that in spite of that array of snow weapons, I have the worst snow removal record in my subdivision.

May I rant for a moment here? I love my neighbors, but from an “estate grooming” perspective they are really annoying. One April when the grass was still in hibernation, my neighbor was out mowing his lawn in a heavy coat. In the course of an hour of precise quincunx swathery he didn’t fill the mower bag even once. Eventually I went out to ask him why he was doing so unproductive (meaning insane) a thing. He said, and I quote, “I just like to mow.”

Now that’s just wrong.

This winter, my neighbors have been so disciplined and may I say so obsessive about snow removal that it would seem as if we had all met in the fall and agreed to compete in the international Clean As a Whistle snow removal festival. They don’t just remove a utilitarian amount of snow from their sidewalks and driveways. They do plumb line edge work, on the principle, apparently, that concrete, like fine red wine, must be allowed to breathe. If there were a miniature snowblower edger, like a 6HP minivac with teeth, they’d have it.

When the snow starts to fall I sit at my kitchen table with a good book looking out at their houses waiting to see who will break first. I imagine them suited up in polar wear just inside their front doors on catapults, going over their snow removal checklists, studying the weather channel like the Kabbalah, straining for the first possible moment when they can push the eject button and get out there to shovel. The moment the snowfall shows signs of slackening, they burst out of their houses and start to blow snow to kingdom come.

When the work is nearly done, they meet at their property boundaries to high five through inch-thick mittens, and pluck ice stalactites from each other’s beards, and talk rig specs (over the drone of those rigs). From where I sit across the street, they appear to be introducing their snowblowers to each other like two large dogs in a park. This year they are engaged in a friendly competition to see who gets the joy of clearing the driveway and sidewalks of the widow on our block. She has the back of an Olympic athlete—frankly, I think she’s working them like a couple of internal combustion saps. They stand over there like Roman border guards at the barbarian frontier—reckoning that any snow that remains on concrete for more than a couple of hours will bring on the collapse of civilization as we know it.

And then they look over at my house and frown.

I’m regarded as the subdivision curmudgeon and killjoy—no seasonal flags, no Griswoldian Christmas light shows, no faux abominable snowman, no array of laser carved Halloween pumpkins. I mow my lawn at the longest intervals by far—just this side of hay or code violations—and I regard my driveway as “clean” if I can still get in and out of it.

The other day, just to show my neighbors that I too have the right stuff, I got out my snowblower and careened around my driveway for a while. I think (or at least hoped) they were on the verge of welcoming me to the Club. But then I hit a full Sunday newspaper buried under the snowpack and watched helplessly as my Death-to-Snow 4000 shredded it into 100,000 bits of confetti, and threw that confetti two hundred feet in every direction, like a parade to my ineptitude.

I spent the rest of the afternoon until dusk (where are early sunsets when you want them?) on my hands and knees in the middle of the street gathering up bits of newsprint—and kissing suburban male bonding goodbye.

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 rol