Shower The People

On Tuesday night, James Taylor was showering 18,000 people with love at the Excel Center in St. Paul, while across the Mississippi, at brand new Target Field in Minneapolis, Mother Nature was showering 30,000 or so Minnesota Twins fans and 40 or 50 Yankees fans, I suppose, with rain. Lillian and I were at the Excel Center (you'll notice from the photo we had good seats up front). Our friends Jeff and Linda were at Target Field. James Taylor’s concert with Carole King lasted more than 2½ hours. The Twins game was called because of rain after five innings.

It’s the first Twins rainout, of course, in many years, since they just moved from the Metrodome to the spectacular new outdoor field this spring. Here’s the rule on rainouts at Target Field: If the teams play at least five full innings, the fans are considered to have gotten their money’s worth, and no refunds are issued, and no tickets are issued for the last four innings, which are generally played the next day. That’s a pretty standard policy among outdoor venues. At the Medora Musical, for example, if the show lasts an hour before the rain comes, you are considered to have seen the show. Still, it left a lot of Twins fans unhappy. They haven’t had an outdoor venue for a long time, so they forget what the rules are.

The good news, of course, is that the people who have tickets to see the next day’s game also get to see the final four innings of the previous night’s washout. We were among those people. So Wednesday, we got 13 innings for the price of 9. Not that it mattered. The Twins lost both ends in a lackluster performance. Jeff and Linda and Lillian, all cheering for the Yankees, liked it though.

For the record, Target Field is a great baseball facility. I had not been to an outdoor Twins game since 1961—49 years ago. To digress, that year, I sold the most subscriptions to the Sunday Minneapolis Tribune in some sort of geographic area surrounding Hettinger, North Dakota, and won a free trip to see the Twins in their inaugural season at old (but brand new then) Metropolitan Stadium. I got on the train at Hettinger, joining those who had gotten on, I think, at Miles City, Glendive and Bowman, and we picked up fellow teenaged salesmen/deliverers (yes they were all paperBOYS) all the way along the Milwaukee Road to Minneapolis—probably 40 or 50 of us in all by the time we got to the Twin Cities, where we spent a night at the Normandy Hotel and went to a Twins game. I don’t remember who they played or if they won. It did not matter. It was the biggest night of a 12-year-old’s life, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I never saw them again until after they moved indoors in 1982.

Here’s the difference. In 1961, and for many years after, major league baseball players were All-American Men, with cleanly shaved faces, short hair (even in the 60’s and into the 70’s), and their uniforms fit like a glove. Today, most Twins (and other teams’ players, I think—I am not a big fan and don’t watch a lot of baseball except for the World Series) have facial hair of some kind, and a lot have visible tattoos, and they wear these baggy goddam pants that look like they were borrowed from Shaun White. Time was, the pants came just below the knee and they wore high stockings (ever wonder where the Boston Red Sox or the Chicago White Sox got their names?), and they looked like real baseball players. Wednesday, I think there were only four or five of the 50 players on the two teams who dressed like baseball players. The rest had long baggy pants that drooped over their shoes. I hated it. Other than the American League’s designated hitter rule, I think baggy pants are the only change in baseball in 110 years. Call me an old fuddy-duddy, but I liked it better before.

One tradition that hasn’t changed: The manager and coaches, no matter how old and fat they are, wear the same uniforms as the players. It’s the only sport that does it, and it’s kind of goofy. I mean, imagine Bud Grant on the sidelines in full pads (although at least football players don’t wear baggy pants) or Phil Jackson sitting on the bench, with those long skinny 60-something-year-old legs of his sticking out from basketball shorts (and those pro basketball uniforms have gotten baggy over the years too). Still, it’s hard to picture Ron Gardenhire in a three piece suit trotting out to the mound to tell Francisco Liriano he’s given up one too many hits and has to call it a night.

All in all, it was a grand little four-day getaway, and just the right combination of entertainment. Next week I head west with my best male friends for our 35th annual canoe trip. We’ll be on the Little Missouri River, which for the second year in a row has stayed navigable into June. There’ll be no report here, other than survival. We agreed long ago not to write about it.

Sumbitch

Okay, I’ve been gardening. Haven’t stopped to plagiarize any good authors for a few days. But today I did find one more travelogue to share. This one “Blue Highways” by William Least Heat Moon. In 1978, unemployed, separated from his wife and about to be divorced, Heat Moon (That’s how he signs his books. Lillian and I had the good fortune to have supper with him a few years ago and shamelessly dumped all our books on the table. He signed them.) jumped into his Ford Econoline van and circumnavigated the United States, traveling on mostly paved back roads, those which were colored blue in the Rand McNally Atlas. When he finally reached North Dakota, he headed east across the state on Highway 5, which runs from Montana to Minnesota in the extreme northern tier of North Dakota counties. (Personal note: it is also my favorite highway in North Dakota.)

Here, in two excerpts (one just a bit too introspective for me, but worth sharing because it has his famous line about shooting a gun down the middle of the highway, a line which has since been stolen by many other writers, often without crediting its origin, and the other one of the funniest things ever written about North Dakota) he writes about the road east of Fortuna and an encounter in Cavalier, on opposite ends of the state.

The country gave up the glacial hills and flattened to perfection. The road went on, on, on. Straight and straight. Ahead and behind, it ran through me like an arrow. North Dakota up here was a curveless place; not just road, but land, people too, and the flight of birds. Things were angular: fenceposts against the sky, the line of a jaw, the ways of mind, the lay of crops . . .

You’d think anything giving variety to this near blankness would be prized, yet when a Pleistocene pond got in the way, the road cut right through it, never yielding straightness to nature. If you fired a rifle down the highway, a mile or so east you’d find the spent slug in the middle of the blacktop.

Here the earth, as if to prove its immensity, empties itself. Gertrude Stein said: “In the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. That is what makes America what it is.” The uncluttered stretches of the American West and the deserted miles of roads force a lone traveler to pay attention to them by leaving him isolated in them. This squander of land substitutes a sense of self with a sense of place by giving him days of himself until, tiring of his own small compass, he looks for relief to the bigness outside—a grandness that demands attention not just for its scope, but for its age, its diversity, its continual change. The isolating immensity reveals what lies covered in places noisier, busier, more filled up. For me, what I saw was this (only this): a man nearly desperate because his significance had come to lie within his own narrow ambit.

See what I mean? But his Cavalier experience, looking for a place to get a gas line leak fixed, makes up for it.

I couldn’t remember how much money I had left, but I did know strangers with stalled vehicles get soaked in isolated towns. Axiom of the blue road. That two-inch plastic gas line, of course, should cost no more than a quarter, but in the realm of high technology you don’t figure the simplicity or inexpense of an element, you calculate availability.

At Cavalier I pulled into the first garage I saw, and a teenaged boy with the belly of a man came out and stared. People don’t just throw words around in the North. I lifted the hood to show him the line. I didn’t speak either.

“Sumbitch’s likely to catch fire!” he said.

“I know that. Can you fix it?”

“Pull the sumbitch in the bay fast and shut her down. Goddamit!” He backed off a safe distance as I drove in.

“Have you got that hose?” Here it comes, I thought.

He pointed toward a big coil of hose hanging on the greasy wall. “Fix every sumbitch in the state if we had to.” The boy’s blackened hands grappled with the connection. He struggled, cut himself, cursed, and took off on an analgesic tour of the grease pit, blood seeping from his oily finger. I picked up the pliers and tried to free the clamp. My hand slipped as the connection popped loose, and I cut my finger. The boy sliced a piece of hose off the coil and clamped it in place. “That’ll take care of the sumbitch,” he said.

“Very speedy service. What do I owe you?” Here we go.

“A dime for the hose and two bucks for labor—that’ll take care of the leak. But it won’t do nothing about the real problem under your hood.” Here it comes for sure. “Water pump’s about to go.” He grabbed the fan blades and pulled them back and forth. “Shouldn’t be no play in the fan. When those bearings give, fan’s coming through your radiator and that’ll be all she wrote.”

“I’ve been keeping an eye on it.”

“How long’s it been like that?”

“About nine thousand miles, I guess.”

He slapped his forehead to indicate my stupidity. “Summmbitch!”

“Trying to buy a little time.”

“You’re gonna buy a lot more than time when that sumbitch goes. I wouldn’t even drive the sumbitch to Hoople.”

“How far’s Hoople.”

“Eighteen miles.”

“Can you fix it?”

“Wouldn’t try. Take the sumbitch to the Ford dealer.”

So I did. The service man said, “Can’t get parts on Saturday. In fact, I couldn’t get a pump before Monday afternoon—if then. All of our parts come out of Grand Forks, so you might a well drive down there yourself.”

“Can I make it?” For nine thousand miles I hadn’t worried, but now I worried about seventy.

“Quien sabe, podnah? You know? Maybe you make it home. Then again, maybe you won’t make it to Hoople.”

I went down state 18 toward Grand Forks and wondered what this Hoople place was that figured as a basic guide to distance in Pembina County, North Dakota. I couldn’t get to Grand Forks before five o’clock, so I drove slowly, relaxed in my fate. The truck had carried me to the Atlantic Ocean and then to the Pacific and halfway back to the Atlantic. But now, of course, the sumbitch might not make it to Hoople.

Heat Moon writes abut North Dakota again in “River Horse,” his attempt at grabbing a share of the popularity of the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial by taking a boat on inland waterways from the Atlantic to the Pacific (sort of—he had a little problem with Missouri River dams and the Rocky Mountains). But it’s fun to read because Heat Moon is an entertaining writer. The North Dakota section is hilarious. His best work, I think, is PrairieErth. Ken Rogers turned me on to it when I was recovering from surgery many years ago and it got me through recuperation. If you haven’t read any Heat Moon, start with that one.

That "Large Rectangular Blank Spot"

Arnold Eric Sevareid was, for many years, the most famous North Dakotan. As a boy, watching his commentaries on the CBS Evening News, I learned not just what had happened that day, but what it meant, at least from one brilliant man’s perspective. I can’t tell you how many times my dad said to me, with obvious pride when he agreed with one of Sevareid’s commentaries, “He’s from North Dakota, you know.” “Yes, Dad, that’s the fiftieth time you’ve told me that,” I would mutter to myself. But God, he was something. He was a commentator, but he was not Glenn Beck, or Bill O‘Reilly, or Keith Olberman or Ed Schultz. He stood alone, with that chiseled face, those piercing eyes, and that clipped Midwestern voice that calmed us with the unspoken words “This is the truth, so listen very carefully.”

What Eric Sevareid said in his nightly commentaries were surely some of the best things ever said by a North Dakotan. We’re all familiar with his “blank spot” comment from his autobiography, “Not So Wild A Dream.” Here’s the whole paragraph, for some perspective.

North Dakota. Why have I not returned for so many years? Why have so few from those prairies ever returned. Where is its written chapter in the long and varied American story? In distant cities when someone would ask: “Where are you from?” and I would answer: “North Dakota,” they would merely nod politely and change the subject, having no point of common reference. They knew no one else from there. It was a large, rectangular blank spot in the nation’s mind. I was that kind of child who relates reality to books, and in the books I found so little about my native region. In the geography, among pictures of Chicago’s skyline, Florida’s palms, and the redwoods of California, there was one small snapshot of North Dakota. It showed a waving wheatfield. I could see that simply by turning my head to the sixth-grade window. Was that all there was, all we had? Perhaps the feeling had been communicated by my mother, but very early I acquired a sense of having no identity in the world, of inhabiting, by some cruel mistake, an outland, a lost and forgotten place upon the far horizon of my country. Sometimes when galloping a barebacked horse across the pastures in pursuit of some neighbor’s straying cattle, I had for a moment a sharp sense of the prairie’s beauty, but it always died quickly away, and the more unattainable places of the books were again more beautiful, more real.

Makes you just want to scream, doesn’t it?

But the book is a good read—even though it is not my favorite Sevareid book. That would be “Canoeing With The Cree,” his account of a canoe trip he took as a young man. In 1930, when he was just 17 years old, he and friend Walter Port, just a couple of years older, set out in a canoe from Minneapolis, up the Minnesota River to Big Stone Lake in South Dakota, into the Red River, then downriver into Lake Winnipeg, through the lake, and then on various lakes and rivers into Hudson Bay. More than two thousand miles, more than three months, in a canvas canoe, with gear made in the 1920’s—not a single North Face jacket or sleeping bag, or Patagonia dry bag, or Cabela’s paddle. Just two young men determined to do what no one had done before. And they made it. To someone like me, who has spent many hours in a canoe, Sevareid’s account, written when he was just 22 years old, was both fascinating and terrifying. An excerpt:

The next morning Walt and I came as close to death as I ever wish to be. Stripped to the waist, heavy boots on our feet, we were following the shoreline which ran due north. Walt was in the bow. A steadily increasing wind from the south kicked up the waves higher and higher. The logical thing to do would have been to stick close to shore, but it was impossible, as reefs ran out a mile into the surging lake. Once around them, visible only when we could distinguish between the white spray they caused and the white of the breakers, we would be safe, as we could ride almost any wave coming from our backs. We headed in a northwesterly direction, mostly out to sea as I endeavored to get beyond the boundary of the rocks, which lay just below the surface. The breakers were nearly six feet high now, and we were taking water over the gunwales steadily. We dared not take our eyes from the kicking spray ahead of us, where, we knew, lay the end of the reef.

“I’m out far enough,” I thought, “and here we go north,” and I swung the nose of the canoe. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the coming waves, which lifted us up and down, each time throwing us farther ahead. Paddling was very hard and trying to steer in that wind and water was tiring on the muscles of my arms and my stomach.

Now we were beside the rocks, I judged. At that moment a great wall of water lifted the stern high in the air and as it ran along the bottom of the canoe, spray pouring in, Walt yelled “Paddle! Paddle! The rocks!”

Our blades tore furiously at the water and we stayed on the crest of the roller for several seconds, long enough for it to carry us directly over the reef, which we glimpsed beneath us. My judgment had been imperfect, and only that wave, coming when it did, saved our lives. Behind the reef, we drifted calmly, weak from the experience. Had we crashed, we would certainly have drowned. Despite the fact that both of us were good swimmers (we had been on the school swimming team) we would not have lived long, weighed down by the heavy boots in a heavy sea.

According to the map that was Observation Point, and later we listened to many stories of its deadliness.

The rest of the book (my copy is a short 200 pages in paperback) is no less thrilling or interesting. They overcame incredible odds, and made a trip no one had done before, and few since. Surely Sevareid went on to face many greater dangers in his years as a war correspondent, but this was his first test, and he had passed with flying colors. Here are the last two paragraphs of “Canoeing With The Cree.”

On the eleventh of October Walter and I reached Minneapolis. We had left when the city was in the bloom of spring, buds were sprouting into new leaves and the grass was turning green, and the air was soft like rain water. As we walked toward home, our boots kicked up dead leaves that covered the sidewalks, the grass was turning into the drabness of fall. The smell of bonfires was sharp in the air, and smoke arose from the chimneys.

We went by the school, sitting on its terraces among yellow trees. As we drew nearer and nearer to home, high-school boys and girls passed us on their way to classes. We realized that we were looking at them through different eyes. We realized our shoulders were not tired under the weight of our packs. It was as though we had suddenly become men and were boys no longer.

Sevareid's story is told in "Not So Wild A Dream," and I recommend it. He went on to college, to continue as a stringer and reporter for the Minneapolis Tribune, then to Europe as one of "The Murrow Boys," (I also recommend you read the book by that title) and then his legendary television career. His last regular nightly broadcast was on November 30, 1977. Here's that broadcast.

One Time Harvest

"The coal industry has come west in search of four basic resources: cheap clean air, cheap coal, cheap water and cheap politicians. They’ve found each of these in North Dakota."

Those words come from a man who is, today, arguably, one of North Dakota’s most important people. He’d shun that title, but he saw something in 1974 that troubled him and set out to do something about it. Paired with former Governor Art Link, Mike Jacobs, in his writing over about a 5-year period through the mid 1970’s, did much to motivate his own generation here in North Dakota to make sure the largest industrial change in our state’s history had what might be today called a happy ending.

In words that could easily describe the change taking place in the oil country of western North Dakota today, Jacobs wrote, in 1974:

“So the Northern Plains states face the last quarter of the twentieth century standing on an industrial frontier which will crowd their wide open spaces with people seeking release from their mining camps and boom town homes, which will bring new pressure groups, including industrialists and industrial unions, to transform their politics. Farmers and ranchers and the independence they value will be of less consequence.

“This book examines the industrial impetus in one state, North Dakota, and finds it frightening. The industrial frontier promises to leave the plains depleted, without a resource they once held. The coal men propose to disrupt a land and life which is unique in the United States. The industrial frontier will change the plains. To a large measure, noise will replace the quiet; rush will replace the easy pace of living; strangers will replace neighbors; smog will replace the big, clean sky; spoil piles will replace the verdant prairies and the peace and pleasure we take in our land and our people will be diminished. The nation will be less for the changes.

“The coal men who come to this frontier are like the buffalo hunters who came to the frontier in another time. They killed the bison and left the stench of rotting carcasses and mounds of bleached bones. They made survival of a civilization impossible.

“Unlike the buffalo, though, coal can’t be replaced. Coal beds can’t be rebuilt by man. Coal is a one time harvest.”

That is from the introduction of “One Time Harvest: Reflections on coal and our future,” written by Mike Jacobs and published by the North Dakota Farmers Union in 1975, in the very early days of the coal boom in North Dakota.

Looking back, now, over those 35 years, it is clear that North Dakota did some things right. The pressure from Governor Link, from mostly Democrats and a few Republicans in the North Dakota Legislature, and the first real environmental stirrings in North Dakota, often led by the passion found in Mike Jacobs’ writing in his somewhat shabby little newspaper, The Onlooker, did not stop coal development in North Dakota, but insured that it was done right. As we face much the same kind of massive disruption in today’s North Dakota Oil Patch, we’d do well to learn from those lessons of the 1970’s. Here’s the personal note Jacobs penned at the beginning of his book.

Dear reader, my friend:

Today is Thursday, August 28, in the year of our Lord 1974; in the year of our nation, 198; in the year of our state, 85; and in the year of my life, 26, nearing 27.

The wheat harvest is all but done across the state and the sour ornamental apples on the tree in our back yard are ripe. The squirrels will be moving in on them any day. The few they leave will fall onto my unkempt yard, the bane of my neighborhood, and rot in the grass. I never rake them up.

On this day, between the harvest and the apple-falling, I am going to write you a book. All summer long I have put off writing this book. Instead, I have occupied myself with a good dose of that desperation which Henry David Thoreau found was the lot of the mass of men.

For those of us who live in and love the land called North Dakota, that desperation has been a little heavier this long, long summer. First came heat and drought, then the awful mess called Watergate, then the heavies, energy conglomerates who have monstrous plans for our land and sky and water, advanced their cause before the state government. Moreover, we learned of the starvation the world faces while we Americans accumulate opulence. While we seek ways to take our pleasure, the world seeks its next breath of good air and its next bite of food.

Indeed, these six months of living in North Dakota, U.S.A., on the planet Earth have convinced me that the only issue worthy of our attention in the last half of the twentieth century is human survival. All other issues relate to this one in one of two ways: in the guts or in the spirit. The guts issue is sustenance. Can we live at all? And the spirit issue is dignity. Can our lives be worthy?

These are issues of ultimate concern. They cannot be escaped no matter how we wish to elude them. They must haunt us, dare us to go on, challenge us to find ways to continue. These are the issues which the book addresses. Although I have despaired, I have always known it would be written. You’ll get your book. It is important to my sense of self that it get done for I believe there is affirmation in action. More important, it is vital to the future of this state that some things be said clearly.

I want to communicate to you my understanding of this place and the threat that faces it and its role as the human predicament worsens. That’s going to take discipline on my part—a discipline I’ve never practiced—and patience on yours. The book is going to digress into physics and metaphysics, ethics, ecology, anthropology, history, even etymology. That last learning is the study of the origin of words.

I’m no expert on any of these things, or on any thing at all, for that matter. I’m a journalist. So you’re going to be wondering why you should be listening to me drooling over my Smith Corona and chomping on a toothpick. The man who’s addressing you is a 27-year-old malcontent who’s raised more trouble than wheat, after all.

OK, OK. But I care about this place. I am a native. I was born and raised in northwestern North Dakota, in the hills that roll away toward the Missouri River and the Gulf of Mexico, where the snowmelt we drained from our farm yard eventually ended up (unless it ran into our well first, as the State Health Department always warned us).

The Jacobs’ spread is on top of the highest hill in Mountrail County. From the front steps of our old green farm house you can see 20 miles in every direction except north—and that’s only because that old green farm house is behind you. I was very young when I learned the beauty of the wide and handsome sky and the solace of the wrinkled prairie hills. By the time I was eight I knew where every crocus and buttercup would blossom in the spring and where every wild rose would appear as June ended. The hills all have names which I gave them, and the valleys also. I remember the names, though I have never shared them. I feel as close to that earth as ever I have to anything that could not answer my mumblings.

I have a lapel button, left over from the sixties when such things were popular, that says “Celebrate Life.” The hills of home taught me the truth of that motto and convinced me that working for a life all men might celebrate is a high calling.

The hills of home—how I missed them when I went away. My wife still has the troubled letters of a lonely, messed up kid who went off to St. Louis, a great, hot and stinking city, to be a radical and change the world; then to Seattle to stare at mountains which he could never see because the smoke of the city hid their loveliness. That lonely kid came running home and married the rancher’s daughter.

My first real job out of college was at Dickinson and I hadn’t been in that friendly town a week when I began hearing about coal. Within a month, I knew what was in store for this glorious country I came home to and have no wish to be driven from. I began writing about coal and our future. I am still writing about coal and I suspect I will be for a long, long time.

This book is the result of four years of fact gathering and idea sifting. There is much that is personal in it, delivered out of a passionate attachment to this country. There is much that is technical and uninteresting. I hope that all of it can help as we struggle to make decisions about the kingdom we inherit.

Surely those words of introduction, and the content of "One Time Harvest" by Mike Jacobs are some of the most important words ever written about North Dakota. There are not a lot of copies of “One Time Harvest” around, although I’d bet many North Dakota libraries have one. It was poorly bound, and I have two copies that are in pieces, as well as a pretty good one I found at a rummage sale a few years ago. It is pleasantly designed, and illustrated with drawings and photos by a couple of young North Dakotans Jacobs encountered along the way, Kari Armstrong and Clay Jenkinson. As we’ve moved from the last quarter of the 20th century to the first quarter of the 21st century, and from coal development to oil development, I think we have to be constantly vigilant, and learn from development mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, I don’t see another North Dakotan out there as articulate as young Mike Jacobs, to caution us along the way. But many of the lessons learned and the laws passed in the 1970’s are serving us well today. I ran into an oil patch county commissioner last weekend, and during our visit about what’s going on out there, he said “This is going to be one wild summer.” More about that later.

The Bloody River Of The North

Erskine Caldwell is best known for two of his early novels, “God’s Little Acre” and “Tobacco Road.” He actually wrote 25 novels and about a dozen works of non-fiction, including, in 1976, a book of essays titled “Afternoons in Mid-America,” his last published work except for his autobiography, published after his death in 1987. “Afternoons in Mid-America” is a series of essays written during and after a car trip with his wife Virginia through mid-America, the premise being that he had set out to find out if it was true, as his father had explained the legend to him, that the shadows of similar objects were longer on the west side of the Mississippi River than they were on the east side. His trip led him through Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Here’s a short excerpt from his North Dakota visit.

In the seemingly limitless flat valley of fertile land in the southeast corner of North Dakota, there is an area of dark, rich soil which has been the enduring gift of a providential glacier of the ice age, and on the banks of its waterways is a tree-shaded former gathering place of a tribe of Sioux Indians. This campground was called Wahpeton by the Indians, and Wahpeton is now the home of several thousand white American farmers and storekeepers and their families.

Here, in the beginning, as if to make certain its presence upon the earth would be unfailingly noticeable for a long time to come, a river was formed by the retreating glacier and was made to flow northward through the valley—while all the other rivers both east and west of it were flowing southward, to the Gulf of Mexico. This strange backward-running river, meandering slowly through the wilderness to Hudson Bay and the Arctic Circle, has come to be known as the Red River of the North.

Two clear-running streams converge only a few yards from the Wahpeton bridge, these waterways being the broad Bois de Sioux and the rippling Ottertail Rivers. And there, in full view of all who stop to gaze upon it, the two rivers create a whirlpool that often is wildly turbulent.

Swirling from this whirlpool the Red River of the North has its abrupt origin, and it immediately begins its long passage of hundreds and hundreds of miles through the Dakota valley and deep into Canada.

The churning whirlpool at the confluence of the Bois de Sioux and the Ottertail has fascinated mankind since early times, when the tribes of Sioux Indians drove buffalo herds across the treeless Dakota plains to be slaughtered in the summer shade of the riverside elms and cottonwoods.

In the language of the Indians, Wahpeton was a descriptive word indicating the location of running water and shady woodland. And it was here in Wahpeton that whenever the Sioux gathered on the banks of the whirlpool to slaughter buffalo by the hundreds for meat and hides, the clear water ran red with buffalo blood, to give the river flowing north a vivid name. However, when the first Americans came upon the scene to barter for buffalo hides, they failed to translate correctly the Indian name for the colorful stream, and so the Bloody River of the North never came to appear by its authentic name in the charts and maps of the region.

Now, in modern times, the whirlpool of the three rivers, when seen from the Wahpeton bridge, continues to swirl and gurgle as it has for centuries past, and the only buffalo to be seen is a single ancient bull grazing diligently on the well-trampled turf at the nearby Wahpeton Zoo.

Well, Erskine, that’s one version. Thank you for that. Beyond the history lesson, I’ve been fascinated since I first read this about his choice of the word “Americans” for the white traders, dismissing the natives as Americans. I want to think it was carelessness rather than ignorance or bigotry. Maybe this isn’t “One of the Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota,” but it was fun to read.

Caldwell’s visit to North Dakota in the summer of 1974, I think it was, consumes about 30 pages of the book. At the time I was a reporter for The Dickinson Press, and I had friends (fellow college students) who worked evenings at the two major hotels in Dickinson, the Holiday Inn and the Ramada, and who would call me whenever someone famous checked into their hotels. One evening I got a call telling me that Erskine Caldwell had checked into the Ramada (luckily for me this friend was an English major and not a math major—he had actually heard of Caldwell). Turns out Caldwell was spending a couple of days in Dickinson, and I wangled an interview for The Press. The highlight of my story, as I recall, was his habit of carrying 100 watt light bulbs with him for his motel stays. In the book which resulted from this trip, Caldwell ends each chapter with a letter to a friend of his in France. Here’s the letter that appeared at the end of the North Dakota chapter. It has nothing to do with North Dakota, but I’m sharing it because it is fun—and because he told it to me in person.

Dear Marcel,

As you know, we here in the United States are slowly recovering the best we can from an ordeal put upon us by a big-business scheme to make America prosperous by manipulating the law of supply and demand. This modernization of fundamental economics was accomplished, for the most part, by popularizing throw-away Coke cans, non-returnable beer bottles, and self-destructing automobiles.

Fortunately, that era of folly and nonsense is coming to an end, but the ill effects are going to be with us for a long, long time. We are now busily boycotting brewing companies that persist in bottling beer in non-returnable containers, and we are sending children out to salvage aluminum Coke cans in city dumps, and we are sicking Ralph Nader on automobile makers who are slow to begin making everlasting automobiles. More than that, concerned citizens are urging us to buy every gasoline-saving device that comes on the market and begging us to lower thermostats in winter and raise them in summer, in order to conserve scarce oil reserves and electrical energy.
As sympathetic as I could be in this matter, nonetheless I am selfish enough to want adequate illumination for reading after dark. I’m admitting this because I’ve discovered during the past few weeks of travel that there are many motel operators who have found that they can lower their costs and increase their earnings, while at the same time be publicly commended for conserving energy, by removing ordinary-wattage bulbs and installing low-wattage bulbs in their sleeping rooms.

There are many television addicts in the land, of course, and they prefer having dim lights in a motel room while watching their favorite programs. But there are some other travelers, and I am one of them, who find that reading a newspaper or magazine or book for an hour or so is more appealing than television viewing before hopefully bedding down for a night’s restful sleep.

The bulb-switching motel operators had me baffled and muttering for weeks about dim lighting in their rooms. But no longer! Now when I go into a motel room and find a 25-watt bulb in a reading lamp, I remain calm and unprotesting. The reason I can remain unperturbed is that now when I go into the room I have my own personal 100-watt bulb which I carry with me wherever I go for the night. I read well and my eyes are not strained, and the next morning I’m always careful to remove my 100-watt (1710 lumens) bulb from the motel lamp and return the 25-watt (190 lumens) bulb to its original socket.

Of course, environmentalists and conservationists may claim that the use of 1710 lumens instead of 190 lumens depletes vital electrical energy. However, I can point to the fact that a television set consumes far more energy than my 100-watt bulb and, besides that, the latter can never be blamed for making the slightest contribution to noise pollution.

Best wishes,
Erskine

Hypocrisy

Goldangit, I've been trying so hard to stay away from politics lately, but I am wound up this morning. Maybe it's the gloomy weather that has me in a crabby mood, or maybe it's because I didn't win the Powerball lottery again last night, or maybe it's waking up and finding one of the most outrageous stories in months on the front page of the paper. Yeah, I think that's it.

In all my years of watching politics and government in North Dakota, I have never seen anything as phony or as blatantly political as Governor Hoeven's instructions to his agencies to cut three per cent from the state's budget. Period. I don't need to go on a rant here. North Dakotans aren't stupid. We all see through this. Governor, you ought to be ashamed. Another period.

Here Is Where The Map Should Fold

In 1960, when John Steinbeck had published more than 20 books and was arguably America’s greatest living writer (my bias), he set out, with his dog Charley, to rediscover the country about which he had been writing for much of his adult life. In his introduction to “Travels With Charley” he writes “. . .my name had become reasonably well known. And it has been my experience that when people have heard of you, favorably or not, they change; they become, through shyness or the other qualities that publicity inspires, something they are not under ordinary circumstances. This being so, my trip demanded that I leave my name and my identity at home . . . I could not sign hotel registers, meet people I knew, interview others, or even ask searching questions. I had to go alone and I had to be self contained, a kind of casual turtle carrying his house on his back.” So in his custom-made pickup camper he set out to see America. Here are his impressions of western North Dakota.

Someone must have told me about the Missouri River at Bismarck, North Dakota, or I must have read about it. In either case, I hadn’t paid attention. I came on it in amazement. Here is where the map should fold. Here is the boundary between east and west. On the Bismarck side it is eastern landscape, eastern grass, with the look and smell of eastern America. Across the Missouri on the Mandan side, it is pure west, with brown grass and water scorings and small outcrops. The two sides of the river might well be a thousand miles apart. As I was not prepared for the Missouri boundary, so I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child. Such a place the Fallen Angels might have built as a spite to Heaven, dry and sharp, desolate and dangerous, and for me filled with foreboding . . . And then the late afternoon changed everything. As the sun angled, the buttes and coulees, the cliffs and sculptured hills and ravines lost their burned and dreadful look and glowed with yellow and rich browns and a hundred variations of red and silver gray, all picked out by streaks of coal black. It was so beautiful that I stopped near a thicket of dwarfed and wind-warped cedars and junipers, and once stopped I was caught, trapped in color and dazzled by the clarity of the light. Against the descending sun the battlements were dark and clean-lined, while to the east, where the uninhibited light poured slantwise, the strange landscape shouted with color. And the night, far from being frightful, was lovely beyond thought, for the stars were close, and although there was no moon the starlight made a silver glow in the sky. The air cut the nostrils with dry frost. And for pure pleasure I collected a pile of dry dead cedar branches and built a small fire just to smell the perfume of the burning wood and to hear the excited crackle of the branches. My fire made a dome of yellow light over me, and nearby I heard a screech owl hunting and a barking of coyotes, not howling but the short chuckling bark of the dark of the moon. This is one of the few places I have ever seen where the night was friendlier than the day. And I can easily see how people are driven back to the Bad Lands . . . In the night the Bad Lands had become the Good Lands. I can't explain it. That’s how it was.

Surely those are some of the best words ever written about North Dakota. I am especially pleased with his spelling choice of Bad Lands versus Badlands. Tracy Potter, who has been promoting tourism to North Dakota for almost 25 years, says there ought to be a law requiring them to be spelled that way.

As soon as I get time, I’m going to share some words with you from another great American writer who passed through here almost 15 years after Steinbeck, and who, unlike Steinbeck, was not traveling incognito. Later this week, I hope.