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.
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