It's Spaeth, Not Speath

More people should do what Bob Wefald has done. Wefald, a Bismarck attorney who served as North Dakota Attorney General from 1981-1985, and as a District Judge from 1999-2011, has written an autobiography, titled “Moments.”

I bought it in hopes that I could read it and find a passage or two which would qualify for my ongoing series “The Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota.” Alas, that wasn’t the case. Bob Wefald is a decent writer, as you might expect of someone who has likely written tens of thousands of legal briefs and opinions. He uses good grammar, his sentence structure is just fine, and his paragraphs are short, making the book easy to read. But, as Joe Friday (I’ll just bet he was one of Bob’s heroes) might say, he just stuck to the facts. The book just doesn’t inspire, or convey any great love for North Dakota. It could have as easily been set in Kansas or Kentucky.

I also bought it partly to see if I was in it, because I had quietly been one of the architects of his defeat in his re-election attempt as the Republican candidate for Attorney General in 1984, and then, 20 years later, helped him get through the early phases of his re-election campaign for South Central District Judge, a non-partisan office, in 2004. He came to the ad agency where I worked in 2004 for help getting out a press release announcing that he was seeking re-election to his judgeship post. He certainly knew I was still active in Democratic-NPL politics, and we chuckled about that a bit, but I was sincere when I told him I had heard good things about him as a judge (uh-oh, that’s going to draw some comments from some of my attorney friends) and would help him get his campaign started. As it turns out, he ran unopposed, as do most judges in North Dakota, so my help was of little consequence. And I wasn’t in the book.

But my money (he’s selling it for only ten bucks) certainly wasn’t wasted. I recall my friend Mike Jacobs once writing a review of an autobiography by former North Dakota State Senator Bryce Streibel. He started with something like “There are two words that describe Bryce Streibel’s autobiography: Awful. Interesting.” Bob Wefald’s book isn’t awful, but it is interesting.

I read it in two sit-downs. I read the first 25 pages or so to learn quickly about who he is, were he came from, his family, stuff like that, and then I skipped to the last 75 pages, which talk about his political life. A couple days later, I went back and read the 100 pages in between, covering the time from his high school years, through his marriage and having a family, and his Navy career and starting out as a lawyer. Total read time, about 3 hours for an average reader, I’d say. If you’re a political junkie like me, just go right to page 123 to read about lots of people you know and events you remember.

For example, he devotes about half a page to the first few days of 1985, when North Dakota had two Governors, and his role in that. George Sinner took office on January 1, but Governor Al Olson refused to leave until a few days later when the Supreme Court ruled against him. Wefald remembers it pretty much as I do. Sinner’s own memoirs will be off the press in a few weeks, and it will be interesting to see if Sinner recalls it that way as well. He also writes about Gov. Olson taking a pay raise in the middle of his term after he had told the public he would not take it, and discusses one of the key incidents in his 1984 defeat, the one in which a state crime bureau agent taped one of Spaeth's speeches and gave Wefald the tape. That’s the beauty of these “real-time” autobiographical books in a small place like North Dakota, where the authors are unimportant except in their own state. They're recording history that’s happening in our own lifetime.

I really don’t have any criticisms of the book, except to note that Wefald falls prey to the greatest danger for self-published books: sloppy proofreading. Wefald goes to great lengths at the front of the book to tell us that the book has been proofread by three people besides himself, but that he takes full responsibility for any mistakes. There are a few misspellings. For instance, he spells former Bank of North Dakota President Herb Thorndal’s name wrong a couple of times, and spells it two different ways in the same paragraph. But the most egregious error is the misspelling of the last name of the man who defeated him in 1984, Nick Spaeth. He spells it Speath every time he uses it, about a dozen times. This is the problem with self-published books. A publishing house would have employed a fact checker to check the spelling of every name in the book.

I take back my earlier sentence. I do have one criticism. There’s an incident for which he goes into pretty great detail which I wish he had left out, and I can’t for the life of me understand why he included it. You decide for yourself if you really want to know this. He’s writing about the trips that he got to go on as a member of the National Association of Attorneys General.

"The second wonderful trip (in May 1984) was one Susan and I both got to go to Japan – all expenses paid! When I heard about this trip I quickly got my name on the list. Bob Abrams, the New York Attorney General, at a cocktail party, met a prominent New Yorker – Angie Biddle Duke – who at the time was in charge of the U.S. – Japan Foundation. The foundation was funded by a gift of $50 million by a Japanese businessman who was successful “by day and by night,” i.e., he apparently controlled all the gambling in Japan. It started with us being told that all our expenses would be paid and that we could bring along our spouses if we paid for them. Then they said if we paid to get our spouses to Seattle, their trip expenses to Japan would be covered, but we would first have to attend a two-day seminar in Seattle and pay our expenses. We signed Susan up. Then we were told that if we were willing to fly business class instead of first class, the foundation would pay for all the expenses of our spouses. At the Seattle seminar we were told Japan was very expensive, so they could “only” give us $ 200 per day per AG spending money, and they handed out the money on the spot. Once we got to Japan it turned out that most of our dinners, events and hotels were covered. The trip lasted about two weeks . . . Our out-of-pocket expense for everything, including souvenirs, was less than $100."

I can’t even count the number of ethical lapses, much less the legal ones (including, likely, some IRS issues) in that paragraph. But the statute of limitations has long since expired, and the election a few months later took care of the problem, so I guess if he wants to brag or titillate us now, it’s okay. Just disappointing.

(Aside: Once, when I was North Dakota Tourism Director, an advertising agency with which we did business offered to me and my deputy tourism director a pair of tickets to the U.S. Open Golf Tournament which was being held in Minnesota. We asked the Attorney General (not Wefald at the time) whether it was okay to accept the tickets. He said it would be okay to take them if we paid for them. We did. About 50 bucks each, as I recall. We took a day’s vacation from the office and drove to Minneapolis. When we got there, we spotted the same Attorney General having greenside cocktails in the hospitality tent of a major corporation. We never asked him if he paid for his ticket.)

But back to matters at hand. You can buy Wefald’s book by going to the office of the State Bar Association of North Dakota on Washington Street in Bismarck. Bob donated a few hundred of them to the State Bar Foundation to sell as a fundraiser. As I said, it’s only ten bucks and well worth the price to read about people you know and events you may have participated in. Heck, you might even find your own name in there.

Northern Hawk Owl Adventure

Lillian and Jim adventures always start innocently enough. This week Monday it was “Jim, where is Glenfield?”

I know there is only one reason on God’s White Earth that she would want to know where Glenfield is: someone’s spotted a rare bird there.

I bit. “It’s between Carrington and Cooperstown.” And then, opening the door wide: “Why?”

“A guy on my listserv says there is a northern hawk owl there . . . (about a three second pause) . . . tomorrow?”

Well, of course, tomorrow. That is the joy of being retired. That is why we worked all those years, so that when a northern hawk owl appears in Glenfield, North Dakota, we can appear there to observe it.

The listserv message from someone at Valley City State University, which arrived about lunchtime Monday, January 24, read “I went through Glenfield on Friday, January 21 and the Northern Hawk Owl is still there. It was sitting atop a tree on the north side of highway 200 (right before you get to the intersection of 200 and 20.)”

Lillian is a devoted birder, I’ve told you before. Driving 150 miles to put a new bird on your life list is a reasonable thing to do. So we did.

We drove through a world of white, arrived in Glenfield, drove to the intersection, drove north, then south, then east, then west, then all around town, slowly, perusing the stark trees, to no avail. There’s a lot of snow out there in north-central North Dakota. In Glenfield, the city crew had cleaned Main Street and School Street (that’s the actual name on the street sign of the street the school is on) and then just cleared a path through the rest of the town’s streets, leaving banks on both sides higher than my head, and then gone back with a front end loader and tunneled into the driveways of the few occupied houses left in town. Thoughtful.

After an hour or driving very slowly on the streets and highways around Glenfield, we were ready to admit defeat, but Lillian said “Let’s drive a little ways east one more time, and she did. We spotted it at the same time. It was perched high atop a tree at the far end of a shelterbelt running perpendicular to Highway 200, probably 250 yards off the highway, just east of town. I could see Lillian looking at the same thing I was, and I said “That’s not big enough to be . . .” and she cut me off with “Yes, it is.” She pulled into the driveway of the shop beside the shelterbelt, a metal building with a couple pieces of machinery and a purple Jeep Grand Cherokee, all plugged in and ready to start, beside it, and grabbed the binoculars.

“That’s it!”

The Northern Hawk Owl is about the size of a crow, with a typical owl face, no visible ears or neck, but with kind of a long pointy tail, unlike most owls, more like a hawk (hence its name, I suppose) and when it flies, it looks much like a kestrel. It flew after we had observed it for about 15 minutes, disappeared behind the building, and then miraculously flew right to the top of a tree right beside our car and perched on the tip-top branch of a Siberian Elm, about 60-70 feet up, I suppose. We watched it there for quite a long time, snapped a few pictures with our point and shoot camera, and then left it there and headed home. We sent a picture of the bird against Tuesday’s bright blue sky, a great break from this dreary white-sky winter, to a birder friend in Grand Forks, and he wrote back that it couldn’t possibly have been taken in North Dakota because the sky isn’t that color here.

The Northern Hawk Owl is not a North Dakota bird, so seeing one is rare here, and a birder’s delight. You can learn more about it and see better pictures here. According to Lillian’s bird books, it is found in the boreal forests of North America and Eurasia usually on the edges of more open woodland. It is not migratory but occasionally will fly south of its breeding range (which this one seems to have done, settling in Glenfield for the winter). It waits on a perch and takes advantage of its rapid flight to overtake prey. The Northern Hawk Owl has exceptional hearing and can plunge into snow to capture rodents below the surface. I wish we’d have seen that!

For the record, Lillian counted the birds on her life list this morning, and announced the Northern Hawk Owl was her 350th North American species. Pretty amazing. I’ve decided birding is a great hobby. We got to spend an entire day driving across North Dakota, accomplished what we had set out to do, and all it cost us was 30 bucks worth of gas and 11 dollars for two Subway sandwiches in Jamestown. Keep those listserv messages coming!

The Delegation Speaks

Long ago, in another life, I was a reporter and copy editor for The Dickinson Press. My main job was to “put the paper to bed” five nights a week, but we only had one full-time reporter, so I also spent much time taking phone calls from people with prospective news stories. Some were legitimate tips: there’s a big fire at the Farmers Union Elevator, or a semi loaded with hogs just tipped over on the Interstate and there are pigs everywhere. Some were people just seeking a little free publicity.

Some of the most frequent callers were the three members of the North Dakota congressional delegation—at the time, Senators Milton Young and Quentin Burdick and Congressman Mark Andrews. Actually, they didn’t call themselves—they had staff press people who called. Usually they were calling with news of a special project benefiting North Dakota that had received some positive Congressional action.

Most of that Congressional action involved grants or loans to rural electric cooperatives. In those days, the early to mid-1970s, there wasn’t really the profusion of earmarks like we have today. But a $300,000 low interest loan from the Rural Electrification Administration to Slope Electric in New England, North Dakota, to upgrade electrical service in Hettinger County was a pretty big deal then. From time to time there would be highway projects, like approval of a $100,000 grant from the Federal Highway Administration for a new bridge over the Cannonball River. Those are the kind of projects that grew into the earmark system we North Dakotans have enjoyed for the last couple of decades when “Team North Dakota” was running a full-court press to fund energy corridors or research corridors or rural water systems.

In the ‘70s, there was no quicker form of communication than the telephone. These were the days before e-mail, before even fax machines, so I would sit at my typewriter (remember those?) with the phone scrunched between my ear and my shoulder, and take dictation from a Congressional press aide. The only other alternative would have been Air Mail (remember that?) from Washington to Bismarck and then next day postal delivery to Post Office Box 1367 (all these years later, I can still remember that box number), zip code 58602.

Of course, all three members of the delegation wanted to take credit for the special project, so when something happened, it was not unusual for my phone to ring three times in the space of a few hours with the same news. I didn’t want to have to take dictation on the same story three times, so I developed a policy that whoever called first was the one who got his name in the paper. “Senator Milton Young today announced . . .” News is news, the first time you hear it. The second and third times, it is not news. So if Andrews’ guy called first, when Burdick’s and Young’s guys called, I would just say “Thanks, I’ve already got the story.”

Eventually the press aides, who subscribed to the North Dakota Newspaper Association’s clipping service, figured out my policy. They’d get this big envelope full of clippings of stories with their boss’s names in them once a month (today of course, their job is much easier—they just read the online versions of each paper each morning), and if it looked like one of them wasn’t getting his fair share in the Dickinson Press, maybe they’d move me up their priority list for calls. Instead of calling the Forum or the Tribune, or KFYR first, they’d think about calling me first. I used to just chuckle at the thought of these press aides running through the halls of Congress to get to a phone (no cell phones in those days) to call this damn reporter out in the boondocks of western North Dakota so their boss would get in the paper.

This was all brought to mind last week when I read a story in the Tribune about a federal loan guarantee for a new Holiday Inn in Williston to accommodate oil field workers. The story began:

BISMARCK, N.D. (AP) - North Dakota's congressional delegation said the federal Agriculture Department's Rural Development agency will guarantee a $4.7 million loan for the construction of a Holiday Inn Hotel in Williston.

Adequate housing has been a problem in western North Dakota because of the booming oil fields. Sens. Kent Conrad and John Hoeven and Rep. Rick Berg said North Dakota's oil producing counties have 23,000 more people today than they did a decade ago.

Now, that would not have been unusual between 1986 and 2010, when the North Dakota’s delegation was all Democrats. But we’ve got a mixed marriage down there now, like we did in the 1970’s, and I guess I didn’t expect to see joint press releases from Senators Conrad and Hoeven and Congressman Berg. That just wouldn’t have happened in the days of Burdick, Andrews and Young. I remember that there wasn’t much love lost between those three at any time in their joint service, which ran from 1963, when Andrews came to Congress to join Burdick and Young, through 1980, when Young stepped aside and Dorgan joined the ranks.

So I was pleased to see that the cooperation that started in 1987, when Conrad joined Burdick and Dorgan, and ran through the end of last year with Dorgan, Conrad and Pomeroy, is continuing with Berg and Hoeven joining Conrad. At least I hope that is what is going on. It could be that they all three e-mailed a similar press release to the AP office in Bismarck and the reporter just combined them into one story. But I hope that’s not the case. I hope this cooperation is real. There’s talk about Republicans and Democrats sitting together at the State of the Union speech next week. Wouldn’t it be nice to see our three guys sitting together? I’ll be watching.

Footnote: I emphasized zip code 58602 a few paragraphs ago. I want to tell you a short story about that zip code. Zip codes were implemented in the early 1960’s. The way it worked in North Dakota was that all North Dakota zip codes started with 58, and then the urban centers were given the third number, starting in the east, (hence 580 for Wahpeton, 581 for Fargo, 582 for Grand Forks, all the way across the state to 588 for Williston. Then, the postmasters in those urban centers were assigned to dole out the 4th and 5^th numbers to the small towns in their geographic region, generally based on the alphabet. They had some discretion on how many they wanted to reserve for their own towns. An old friend of mine, C. Ray Culver, was the postmaster in Dickinson at the time. So C. Ray started assigning numbers. Amidon was 58620. Beach was 58621. Belfield was 58622. Bowman was 58623. And so on. But Dickinson was 58601 for home delivery, and 58602 for post office box delivery. The numbers 58603 through 58619 went unassigned, and remain so today. Why? Because in 1963, C. Ray was one of Dickinson’s greatest boosters, and he was absolutely convinced Dickinson was going to grow and grow and grow, and would eventually need that many zip codes. Today, Fargo, for comparison, has 15 zip codes and Bismarck has 7. Dickinson still has 2. But hope springs eternal. There’s a big oil boom going on out there. C. Ray’s been gone for a long time, now, but I’m still cheering for him.

Thanks, Kent

I’ve been involved in North Dakota politics a long time. I’ve said many times politics is the greatest spectator sport ever. My involvement has always been as a coach or cheerleader, not a player. I’ve never sought, or even thought of seeking, public office. I’ve jokingly said that will have to wait until all my college roommates are dead. I’ve been involved in winning campaigns and in losing campaigns. I’ve never fretted much about either, because politics is cyclical, and winners and losers change into each other frequently.

Still, I have fretted some about the November 2, 2010 election, because it was such a sea change from two years earlier, and I’ve been trying to sort it out. Yesterday, I decided it was time to try to put some thoughts on paper (online, actually, since that is my communications vehicle these days). So I pulled a book off my shelf that has been sitting there for a dozen years or more now. It’s called “When Incumbency Fails: The Senate Career of Mark Andrews.” Its author, political scientist Richard Fenno, Jr., wrote books in the late 1980s and early 1990s about the political careers of five U.S. Senators: Andrews, Dan Quayle, Arlen Specter, Pete Domenici and John Glenn. His work on Andrews came as a result of befriending the North Dakota senator and making numerous trips with Andrews to North Dakota between 1980 and 1986—the six years Andrews served as our state’s junior senator.

“When Incumbency Fails” is Andrews’ story, mostly told from Andrews’ perspective. Fenno gives Kent Conrad little credit for defeating Andrews in 1986, laying the Andrews loss generally at the incumbent’s own feet, generally for “losing touch” with the folks back home. Conrad, Fenno says, just happened to be in the right place at the right time, and ran a credible campaign. Based on Fenno’s analysis of the election, he could have called the book “The Accidental Senator: Kent Conrad’s Unlikely Senate Victory in 1986.”

I was something of a coach and cheerleader in that campaign, and I know better. Kent, and his then-campaign manager, Lucy Calautti, ran a brilliant campaign, took advantage of some Andrews missteps, took some big gambles, and won by just a couple thousand votes, stunning everyone in the country except themselves.

I read through the book yesterday looking for some thoughts that might help me understand the 2010 election. Answers to the questions “Why did Byron Dorgan decide not to run?” and “Why did Earl Pomeroy lose?” Into the evening, I pondered those questions, started developing some answers, and then put it aside to watch Prairie Public Television’s hour-long documentary on a couple days in Byron Dorgan’s last months in office (good show, by the way—kudos to Bob Dambach and Dave Thompson). When it was over, I reached for Fenno’s book and a notebook, and started to make some notes so I could write today. I also grabbed my Blackberry, which I had silenced during the show, and saw an e-mail from Sara Garland, Kent Conrad’s chief of staff, with a short note: “Kent would like to speak with you. Best #??? Thanks.”

I hit “reply” and typed in my cell phone number. Two minutes later, at 9:55 p.m. EST, my cell phone rang. It was Kent.

“Jim, I want you to know that tomorrow morning I am going to tell my staff, and put out a statement, that I am not going to seek re-election.”

There followed a brief conversation, about 5 minutes, in which Kent said all the right things, things you are reading and listening to in the media this morning. “Jim, I deeply believe the country is in serious financial trouble. I don’t want to spend my time the next two years campaigning. I want to get this deficit under control. I want to spend my time doing that. I hope that my legacy will be that I helped get this debt under control. I really deeply believe that this country is headed for the financial cliff, and I can’t allow myself to be distracted by raising money around the country.”

I said I respected his decision and hoped to see him in the Obama cabinet sometime in the future.

The Washington Post broke the story on its blog at 8:30 this morning. I, along with thousands of others who have signed up to receive periodic e-mails from Kent over the years, got an e-mail from him at 9:00.

When I was reading the Fenno book yesterday, I flagged a page which included one of the few direct quotes from Kent in the book. According to Fenno, in 1990, when he was preparing to write this book, he asked Conrad how and why he decided to run. Conrad’s reply, according to Fenno:

“You would have to start when I was fourteen years old. I came to Washington when Kennedy was president, and I visited the Senate. When I got home, I said that I wanted to be a senator some day; and I figured out the best time for me to run would be in the late 1980s or early 1990s. Everything I did afterward pointed toward that goal. I decided to start with a statewide office to build up my name recognition and then to run for the Senate. Which is what I did. I know that sounds crazy, that no one could have that kind of confidence. But I always had the confidence. I believe it was my destiny . . . I lost some races. But I always believed I would win, whenever I ran. I think you have to have that kind of confidence, especially when you were like I was (in the Senate race). I had absolutely no money, and no one thought I could win.”

I don’t know if Kent really said exactly that to Fenno. Neither does Kent remember clearly exactly what he said. What I DO know, because I’ve known Kent so well for so many years, is that he almost never does anything without a plan. What I also know is that in the final days of that 1986 campaign, Kent and Lucy both told me that the race was very, very close, and that there was a chance he could win. And he did, pulling off the biggest political upset in North Dakota history.

But this is all about today’s news. I started out re-reading Fennos’ book yesterday so I could comment on yesterday’s news—the 2010 election. Why did Earl Pomeroy lose to Rick Berg? If Fenno were writing a book today about the 2010 Pomeroy-Berg race, he might sense that Earl committed the same sins as Mark Andrews—he didn’t pay enough attention to his supporters and the general public back home. Let me give you an example—something that’s been troubling me for a couple of years.

Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad and Earl Pomeroy are all personal friends of mine. All have been for many, many years. I’ve volunteered on all their campaigns, and I’ve been on the paid staff of their party when they have run for election or re-election. Over all those years, I had never really asked them for anything except good government—until 2009. In the spring of 2009, I went to Washington on a short, two-day trip to lobby the three of them on something that was pretty much inconsequential in the big picture, but important to me at the time. I called each of their offices and talked to their scheduler and got an appointment to meet with each of them briefly over a two-day period. My first appointment was with Kent Conrad, at 1 p.m. the first day I was there. That morning, I got a call from Kent’s scheduler who said Kent might be a few minutes late, but to come into the office anyway and visit with a bunch of my friends who worked there. I did. Kent arrived about 15 minutes late, apologizing by saying that, at the last minute, he had to have lunch with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve. He said he had a meeting shortly with the budget conferees—they were negotiating the budget for the United States that afternoon—but that he had 20 minutes or so to visit with me. We did. He said he would see what he could do.

My meetings with Byron and Earl were the next day. When I got to Byron’s office, his chief of staff, Elizabeth Gore, ushered me into the conference room and said Byron would be in shortly. She and I visited a few minutes, and then Byron came in, apologizing that he had another meeting going on in his office, but they could wait a few minutes. We talked. He said he would see what he could do. He went back into his other meeting.

As I was leaving to grab some lunch before heading for my meeting with Earl, my cell phone rang. It was Earl’s scheduler, calling to say Earl needed to reschedule our meeting for later in the day. Ended up, the only time he could see me was about 15 minutes before I had to get in a cab to get over to the Baltimore airport. I said I could make that work, because I only needed to talk with Earl for about 15 minutes. I arrived at Earl’s office a little early—just in time to see him walk down the hall toward his conference room with a small group of lobbyists. His receptionist asked me to have a seat. I sat. After a few minutes, Earl’s chief of staff, Bob Siggins, came into the reception area and sat down beside me. He said Earl was going to be tied up, and what did I need? He did not even invite me into his office to visit. Just sat there in the reception area. So I told him what I had intended to tell Earl, and he said that he thought the Senators were better equipped to handle that, and I jumped up and left to grab a cab to the airport.

All the way home, and for the next two years, I remembered that trip, how Kent had squeezed me in between Ben Bernanke and the Budget Conferees, and how Byron had left one group sitting in his office and come to hear me out, and then how Earl had been too busy with other things to see me. To be fair, it might have just been "one of those days" in Earl's office, but it left me with a bad taste in my mouth. And I wondered, all the way up to Election Day 2010, how many other of Earl’s North Dakota friends besides me had gotten a phone call from Earl’s campaign staff last summer or fall seeking help, and had said they were just a little too busy this year to volunteer to knock on doors or make phone calls or stuff envelopes for Earl.

Footnote: I told Kent Monday night that I was pretty disappointed that Earl had just moved his office a few blocks, down to K Street, to become a lobbyist, and that there had been a small story in the papers here about Byron being hired by a Washington law firm as well. And that one of the problems with Washington was this “revolving door” setup where Senators and Congressmen just hang around and get paid way more than they were making in office, to talk the same people, only now on behalf of special interest clients. Kent assured me that Byron wouldn’t be doing much lobbying, if any, and he assured me that HE was not going to be a lobbyist. Period. I believe him. He has, or is making, other plans. I’ve known Kent for almost 40 years. He has never done anything without a plan. I am eager to see what it is.

Since the first day Kent took office in 1987, he has focused on the budget deficit. I know one thing: There is no one better equipped to lead the process of solving our country's budget problems than Kent Conrad. Now, with re-election pushed aside, I think he will be one of the leaders to get this country straightened out. He's still a young man. He could serve many more years. He's put the country's interests ahead of his own. I'm proud of him for making this decision. But I am a little fearful of what all this means for North Dakota. The loss of all this seniority is a sobering thought.

On the other hand, it may be that Kent is saying we're entering an era when seniority--the ability to deliver for your home state--isn't so important any more. Kent is saying the country is in deep financial trouble. And if the system has to change to solve our country's problems, he's going to lead that change by example. Good for him.

Meanwhile, thanks, Kent, from the bottom of my heart, for everything you’ve done for our state and our country. I know you, like Byron, have enjoyed it. And also like Byron, you have decided not to do it any more when the enjoyment is gone. God bless you and Lucy.

It’s almost time for Spring Training. Play Ball!

Winter Of The Blue Snow

A month ago today, a clear, crisp December morning, I walked into Bismarck’s Medcenter One to have some routine surgery on a small disk in my lower back that was protruding a bit and needed some trimming at the hands of one of Bismarck’s finest neurosurgeons. In on Thursday, out in time to spend the weekend at home was the expectation. And then, Murphy’s law took over. Anything that could possibly go wrong, did.

To make a long story short, three surgeries and twenty nights in the hospital later, I am back at my computer, but not much else, recovering from a fusion of disks 4 and 5 in my lower spine. Angel/nurse/wife Lillian will now guide me through a couple more weeks of recovery as the residual pain fades and I can resume things like walking and driving.

Old, out-of-shape, overweight bodies react differently to things like surgery than they used to. I can’t do much about the old, except to act younger, but I can, and will, do something about the other two. Starting now.

Well, then. While I was captive in Room 471 of Medcenter, Christmas and New Year’s and Brett Favre came and went, we got a new Governor and Senator and Congressman, the Legislature came to town, and winter arrived in all its glory. I am pleased about some of those things.

I shall have a good bit of time to read for the next few weeks, so I dragged out my old copy of “Ranching With Roosevelt,” by Lincoln Lang, which includes, as I told you a couple months ago, some of the Best Things Ever Written About North Dakota. Lang devotes 40 or so pages to the winter of 1886-87, the “Winter of the Blue Snow” as it came to be known later. Here’s an excerpt, with a carefully crafted conservation lesson which, I suspect, may have had its beginnings in late night campfire conversations between Lang and the future 26^th President of the United States.

In quick succession came more blizzards, so that by the middle of December travel had become practically impossible. Everywhere monstrous snowdrifts were in evidence, often packed solidly to a depth of a hundred feet or more beneath the faces of the bluffs bordering the river and creek valleys. Except for an occasional let-up, while the northern furies were concentrating for a new drive, it was always snowing, blowing, and intensely cold. When the sun came at all, it appeared as if viewed through lightly smoked glasses, always attended by the omni-present halo and sun dogs.

There were twelve of us at the ranch, all told, inclusive of my mother and sister. For all we could learn of what was going on outside, we might as well have been in the Arctic itself. Even our nearest neighbors could no more reach us than we could reach them. Of outdoor work there was but little we could do save to go around on foot, whenever possible, among the cattle ranging in our immediate vicinity and keep them moving. As we had no feed for (our cattle), they at first made a valiant attempt to rustle a living off the scant grasses exposed here and there between the drifts. Cleaning this up, they became reduced to such sage-brush they could find protruding above the snow. Soon—very soon—that, too, was gone. Then they lost heart. Bunching up in the more sheltered corners, they refused to be chased out. Refused to do anything save stand there and invite a quick release from their misery. As the snow piled up around them, many became drifted under and smothered. Others froze to death, often on their feet, to fall and receive celeritous snow burial.

As the winter advanced, darker and darker became the outlook. There could be no denying that, even if we were not admitting it, for we were never easily depressed. Perhaps conditions were not so bad elsewhere on the range, we thought. So, like many another, we lived in the vain hope that the bulk of our stock might pull through.

Hardest of all, perhaps, was the experience of the women folks. However, they had already learned to adapt themselves to the new country and the conditions as they found them. They always made the best of things as they came, finding occupation of one kind or another and maintaining a cheerful front, so that they pulled through as well as any of us.

But it is a long road that has no turning. In the latter part of March came the Chinook wind, harbinger of spring, releasing for the first time the iron grip that had been upon us. At last, it seemed, the wrath of Nature had been appeased. She had taught us our lesson. Had in part wiped out the herds that had been overrunning and destroying her preserves—the home of her wild kinsfolk. Now she would go about rehabilitating the land in her own fashion and would breathe upon it the soft breath of spring that would ever stand notable in the history of the Bad Lands and be one of phenomenal growth, which she would follow with a series of favorable seasons.

A few days later such a grim freshet was pouring down the river valley as no man had ever seen before or would ever again. For days on end, tearing down with the grinding ice cakes, went Death’s cattle roundup of the Little Missouri country. In countless valleys, gulches, washes and coulees, the animals had vainly sought shelter from the relentless “Northern furies” on their trail. Now, their carcasses were being spewed forth in untold thousands by the rushing waters, to be carried away on the crest of the foaming, turgid flood rushing down the valley.

With them went our hopes. One had only to stand by the river bank for a few minutes and watch the grim procession ceaselessly going down, to realize in full the depth of the tragedy that had been enacted within the past few months.

And watching it, too, in the mind of the man who knew, there was more than room for the thought “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” The White Man had desecrated Nature’s preserves. Had saturated the earth with the blood of her wild kinfolk. Had replaced them with his herds. Nature had come back at him in full measure and had retaliated in her own peculiar way. Now she was sweeping out the carcasses as something obnoxious in her sight.

Hardly were we surprised when our tally sheet, succeeding the spring roundup, showed a loss of about 80 per cent. At that we were better off than many of our neighbors, it being estimated that 85 per cent of the vast herds roaming the Bad Lands in the fall of ’86 had been wiped out of existence. Becoming thoroughly discouraged after that, most of the ranchers sold out the remnant of their holdings and quit the business and the country.

Theodore Roosevelt, of course, was among those who cried “enough.” He absorbed his losses and afterward spent little time in the Bad Lands—vacations and hunting trips interrupting his political and writing careers, both of which were flourishing in New York City. The rest is history. Having read my way through the first two-thirds of Roosevelt’s life in the biographies by Edmund Morris, I am resolute to finish by spring the final piece of the Trilogy, “Colonel Roosevelt.” It sits beside my recliner now, a marker between pages 64 and 65—just under 700 pages to go. I’ll share some of it with you when I am done.