Sense of Place 04.22

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

the

04.22

SENSE OF PLACE issue

CONTENTS THE SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE FICTION 02 IRIS RETURNS

by Michele Willman

NONFICTION 08 DOES THE PRAIRIE MAKE THE PAINTER?

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by David Bjerklie

16

TRUE NORTH

by Jill Kandel

22

LOOKING FOR AMERICA IN A DISILLUSIONED TIME

by Clay Jenkinson

30 THE INCOMPLEAT ANGLER

by Mark Vinz

16

POETRY

36

36

CARDINAL POINTS

by Bonnie Larson Staiger

38 FOLK ART

by David Solheim

40 THE FLEDGLING

by Jennifer Hernandez

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EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Before the pandemic, the three most common complaints we received on program evaluations, in order of popularity, were that the room was too cold, the room was too hot, and there was no coffee available on site. Now that we have moved the majority of our programs online, our three biggest complaints are: I can’t find the Zoom link in my email, I can’t log in to Zoom, and my sound isn’t working.

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Much heart, Brenna

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST, LACIE VAN ORMAN Lacie has a background in graphic design and enjoys dabbling with photography. Sandwich that between two slices of whimsy and you have her overall style. She loves creating modern prairie art prints that showcase her North Dakota roots and Scandinavian culture.

Cover art: It Matters to Me, by Lacie Van Orman

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IRIS RETURNS

AN EXCERPT FROM RESPITE

by Michele Willman

I

ris hadn’t been back to the old place since she’d left for good. She eased her light frame from the driver’s seat while her eyes flicked over the decaying yard. The house was still standing though it seemed to lean even more to the right. Maybe it was trying to steer clear of the water that was bubbling merrily down the creek bed—so unlike the days she’d waded through the meager trickle disturbing the frogs who were just trying to save their delicate skin from the heat.

The porch roof sagged, and the clothesline pooled like a child’s misplaced jump rope midway to the lonely stump of the beech tree.

The yard’s lone tree had anchored Ma’s clothesline, served as a good observation deck for pirates and cowboys, and temporarily held a rope swing that didn’t quite reach to the creek across the yard. Iris and Lil had both held on, gripping the fraying knot at its end with their bare toes, pulling and swinging, giggling and fighting.

They’d reached their toes and stretched their fingers to the inviting, but elusive, water, landing again and again in the dirt below. The beech’s absence left patches of scorched grass in what used to be the only refuge from the scorching

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heat. The barn seemed in better shape than the slanting house. Still upright.

Probably because neighbors, the Johansens and the McCuddy boys, had rebuilt it after Papa’s first effort had burned down. He’d never seen the reconstruction, completed months after he’d walked down the dusty road headed to Bismarck, where volunteers were massing, and then on to the trenches in France.

Iris left the shade of the worn pickup she’d parked kitty-wampus in the yard. Was that new paint around the big double doors? Or new doors altogether? They’d been half off their hinges when she left the place. Now, they echoed the sturdy building. Iris tugged her cane from the truck’s front seat and ambled over the smooth ground toward the barn. She hadn’t expected to be drawn there first. Her memories lingered on the story and a half, wood-sided farmhouse with its porch roof like eyebrows over the wide open mouth of the door. She recalled Lillian’s pudgy baby feet slapping on the wooden planks and out into the dusty yard. Ma and Landon sloughed in through the kitchen door after a long day in the fields. The four of them crowded together at the wide kitchen

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table that dwarfed the cozy room. Beyond the house were the fields, and the creek, and the hours she’d roamed the prairies looking for one more jackrabbit so she didn’t have to share the choice bit of loin with Lil again.

A glint of sun on metal caught Iris’s eye from the side of the barn just as her cane caught on a rutted tire track in the moist yard. She wasn’t alone.

She paused her journey, tilted her head, her good ear toward the barn, and listened a moment. The sounds from the distant highway droned. A familiar figure emerged from around the side of the barn, dark-skinned and white-haired. Landon. Surely, it was. He’d come back, too. He’d had the same idea. Now that Ma was gone, it was time to put the old place to rest. They’d put it to rest together.

The last Iris had seen of Landon was his retreating back on a winter night that had crackled. That evening, the frozen creek with its smooth

Now that ma was gone, it was time to put the old place to rest.

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bare ice had beckoned hardy skaters to take to their shiny blades for an escapade. But, as the night closed in, snow dusted the ice and made roads slippery and impassable. Light from the moon lit the cloudless sky giving the night an eerie sense of expectancy. She knew now that it was not the kind of night that Landon would have wished for, but it had been time to go. He had set off down the long drive, just like her father, Iris watching from the upper window, but Landon kicked up whiffs of snow instead of dust. And she hadn’t seen him since.

That would have been 1925 or ’26. Iris tried to remember, but the years, the decades even, blended together. Maybe earlier. She had been 10, maybe 11, she figured, and Lillian was getting big, maybe three, but old enough to have become attached to the old man. Old enough to see that he was part of the place. Part of their place. Ma hadn’t told Lillian that Landon was going. Surely she’d wanted to spare her, but Iris supposed now she’d wanted to steer clear of Lillian’s distraught, wailing babble at the loss of the old man. Well, Ma hadn’t exactly told Iris either, but she didn’t need to. Marie had tucked her youngest daughter under the patchwork quilt to ward off the cold, and Iris had snuggled in beside to keep Lil company until she fell asleep. Iris pulled her knees up so their cold feet intertwined in the way Lillian liked.

Lil’s close-set eyes rested on Iris’s face and she looked content knowing that her tomorrow would be the same as her today. Iris’s eyes rested on her mother’s, and she knew that it would not.

The slanted house, the sturdy barn, the frozen creek would be there in the morning, but Landon wouldn’t.

Kyle tucked his tools into the back of his truck and stepped back to inspect his work. The barn was more solid than he’d expected and hanging new doors had freshened it up and made it practical for the time being. It may not hold a herd of wild horses, but it could house Randi’s 4

menagerie for now until they could build new. The house was another matter. That would have to go.

On their first visit to the farmstead, before the offer had been made and accepted, he was unsure if he should step into the sloping structure to take a look around. Tempting a booted foot past the porch and through the open doorway, he jumped back at the scurry of mice and, god forbid, rats.

Taking a second plunge, his boots tapped heavily on the scuffed wooden floors, which looked like they’d once been polished smooth. The place had been cleared out long ago. Broken panes and dried crusts of leaves in the corners exposed years of neglect and an open invitation to the elements.

He leaned his head into the broken, narrow staircase ringed by a spider-web gauntlet.

“It’s like a goddamned haunted house,” he muttered as he attempted to brush away the sticky threads that clung to his hair and shoulders, wiping his hands on his jeans. Randi, fixing him with a look, had insisted they could renovate.

“Look, the foundation’s still good,” she urged, tapping her own sturdy boots on the intact floor of the main room. “It all just needs a bit of—” she gestured with her hands, palms facing, moving them from an angle to vertical “—propping up.” She almost had him.

He was a sucker for her schemes. That was how they’d ended up with the rabbits, and the goats, and the gol-dang chickens. Though he knew she’d likely win out in the end, he’d convinced her to get a construction manager out to take a look and give them some bids.

On their second visit, the helpful man had assured them, “This has got to go.” He paced around the main floor tapping on first one warped board and then another. Like Kyle, he tucked his head up through the staircase without hazarding the missing stairs and the mesh of spiders’ webs.

“Structurally unsound.” He thunked the wall with a boxer’s fist. “It’ll blow down in the next winter’s gale.”

“Hallelujah,” Kyle prayed.

“But it has stood this long,” Randi countered.

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“It all just needs a bit of—” she gestured with her hands, palms facing, moving them from an angle to vertical “—propping up.”

“Won’t it stand for a long time more?”

Kyle and the construction manager rounded on her hopeful face with parallel looks of incredulity.

Their investigations into the property revealed the first deed listing the year of construction as 1915. Lots of Randi’s friends lived in houses older than that, she reminded him. All they’d had to do was replace a bit of bulb-and-tube wiring and add a toilet or two, she cajoled, urging Kyle’s acquiescence.

But this structure had no bulb-and-tube. No wiring at all. It had somehow been overlooked in the spate of electrical lines established by Cass County Electric Cooperative in the 1940s that now ran the length of the highway, but didn’t turn down the long drive or run along the creek. And it wasn’t possible to add another toilet when there wasn’t one to begin with. The outhouse was a fragment behind the house, a one-holer now lacking the privacy of walls, though a smidge of door remained to hide a user’s knees from view.

“This is going to take some excavation,” the man noted, leaning back with his thumbs in his wide belt, counting the dollars the young couple owed him already.

Kyle called his parents the next day and asked them to take their Winnebago off the market. It might not be heading to Arizona again, but it’d make a cozy starter home. He just couldn’t decide if they should pull down the house first and park it right there on that sturdy foundation Randi was so hell-bent on praising or if they should park it up in the yard or next to the barn. If the house was gone, there’d be a good view of the creek, and the windbreak would still shield them from the bluster of the winter wind.

Weeks later, they were still debating the location of the Winnebago. While Randi waited for him to

come around to her way of thinking, Kyle had turned his attention to the barn and outlying structures. These they’d agreed to keep. For now.

Kyle nodded at his handiwork and stowed the rest of his tools. It wasn’t really fair that the goats would have more space than he and Randi. But he drew the line at shacking up with the animals.

Kyle tucked up the tailgate and headed back around to the front of the barn, head down, pondering it all. He smacked his new leather work gloves together and noticed the left one was a bit frayed. He’d be sure to point that out to Randi when he got back to Fargo. He was a farm boy now. The sight of the brown pickup settled in the yard like it owned the place startled him as he came around the corner. Why hadn’t he heard it drive up? The highway noise must carry farther than he’d expected and muffle noises coming from the yard. He’d considered that a blessing when he thought how it would lull him to sleep, drowning out all the bleating and clucking. But it had also allowed this strange vehicle to enter the yard unannounced. He looked between the barn, the old chicken coop, and the creek bed to where an elderly woman leaned heavily on a cane.

Its four-pronged, rubber-tipped legs seemed essential to the impossibly thin legs sticking out of her short summer khaki pants. She advanced on him with an open welcoming face, beaming as though they were old friends reuniting. Plopping the cane forward with each step, she made her way steadily toward him.

Iris’s smile faltered. She pushed her glasses tighter onto her nose and peered at the man coming toward her. His hair wasn’t white at all, but blonde. At least the tips of it were blonde, spiking 5

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“You’re on my place.” Iris said. She stopped moving but coiled inside ready for him to deny it. up from his head in tight curls. His skin was dark like Landon’s, but his springy step belied Landon’s slow, deliberate stride and stuttering limp. This man wasn’t Landon at all. Iris dropped her smile and wrinkled her nose in dissatisfaction.

“Hey, there,” he called to her, all friendly-like in that way young men talk to older women. As if there’s nothing to fear. “Can I help you?” He quickly closed the distance between them though Iris had only gone a few paces.

“You’re on my place.” Iris said. She stopped moving but coiled inside ready for him to deny it.

“Hey, I’m Kyle.” His voice continued at the same volume he’d used to greet her from across the yard though now he was only three feet away.

“What can I do for you?”

“You can start by listening to a word I’m saying.”

This man wasn’t like Landon at all. Landon would never be all bouncing up and down with nervous energy like this young man. She frowned.

“Yes, ma’am, but this is my place. Can I help you with something?”

“My daddy built that barn.” Iris flicked her cane a few inches off the ground in the direction of the newly hung doors. “And you went and messed with it.”

She watched Kyle’s bright smile fade and dismissed a twinge of guilt that suggested she was harassing this young man for not being someone else.

“My wife and I, my wife, Miranda, and I, we bought this place. At auction. In the spring. I didn’t know it was yours.” He looked well and truly uncomfortable now and the bouncing migrated to shifting from foot to foot.

“I gotta sit.” Iris stared at the young man. Kyle scanned the empty yard, the beech stump twenty yards away, the pickup truck, the barn doors. He backpedaled. “I got a stepladder in my truck. I’ll 6

get it. Just hold on, ma’am.”

“No. Shit. I got one of those sitting-things in the back of my truck—you’re going the wrong way— just pull it out and unfold it. It has wheels.” Iris wasn’t eager to allay his discomfiture, but the sun was getting hot and she’d been standing a while now. She felt beads of perspiration start to ball up on her temples. “And get my hat,” she called back to him as he opened her tailgate and rummaged around in her truck bed. “It’s in the front.”

She heard the click as he opened the transport chair and heard him wheel it right up to her backside. She refrained from commenting and instead sat heavily. Her narrow hips slipped easily into the chair’s open black vinyl seat. She heard him retreat, then the thunk of the truck door, and he came around to stand before her with a worn green fishing hat. Its broad brim excellent at keeping the sun off her pale face with touches of red where the veins confirmed her age and time spent in the full hot sun.

He peered down at her, concerned, though when standing they’d looked right into each other’s eyes.

“I’m Iris,” she said. “And you’re on my place.” l

MICHELE WILLMAN is an English instructor, a researcher, a writer, and a mother and is ceaselessly interested in learning new things. With these identities at the forefront, she is at work on a novel, Respite, about early twentieth-century farm life in North Dakota, a collection of stories on motherhood, and a project on traveling mothers. Her work has appeared in MidAmerica and in collected anthologies. She lives in Grand Forks with her spouse, four daughters, and two dogs.

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I

t was the winter of 1978 and I had just driven from Minot to Storrs, Connecticut, in a $500 car,

a trip that included being stuck for several days in Chicago, waiting for the interstates to reopen after a fearsome February blizzard paralyzed much of the Northeast. My girlfriend had just started graduate school at the University of Connecticut, and I was in doomed pursuit.

DOES THE PRAIRIE MAKE THE PAINTER?

by David Bjerklie

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In my memory, I had barely arrived amid towering snow drifts when I had the opportunity to meet my girlfriend’s fellow grad students at a very animated wine-and-beer-fueled party. After the good-natured marveling of, “Who would have thought we would meet another North Dakotan?” it didn’t take long before I was off to the races, spilling out and stumbling over as many of North Dakota’s unique contributions to the world as I could muster.

I no doubt mentioned that our wheat was highly prized by Italian pasta makers. Certainly I would have touted the path-breaking reforms of the Nonpartisan League and the innovation of the Bank of North Dakota. And, of course, I would have mentioned writers: Eric Sevareid, Louis L’Amour, probably Larry Woiwode, and possibly Tom McGrath (1978 being six years before Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine was published and eight years before The Beet Queen).

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| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | My motive, of course, was to demonstrate how essential Rosenquist’s North Dakota childhood was in shaping him as an iconic artist.

My inebriated finale, however, was reserved for that quintessential pioneer of Pop Art, James Rosenquist. Fragments of President Elect and F-111 may or may not have swirled into my mind’s eye. All I can remember in vivid detail is that I couldn’t remember his name. Not for the life of me. I had the taste of victory in my mouth.

All I had to do was retrieve the name. That peculiar physical effort involved in trying really hard to remember something undoubtedly played across my earnest face for way too long. It was pretty damned amusing to watch, remembers a guy who saw it firsthand, but who would nonetheless become my closest friend.

My boosterism as an exotic from the heartland was wide eyed and sincere but also a bit thin. It would falter that evening (North Dakota and James Rosenquist, no surprise, survived unscathed), and, truth be told, it would falter again, now and then, when I moved to New York City two years later. My native-son enthusiasms–or at least the way I incautiously expressed them–would eventually be tamed (at least a bit) in that process by which accumulating decades force us, if we’re lucky, to realize that the workings of cause and effect are not nearly so simple as we’d like to imagine.

And yet, 30 years after that post-blizzard evening in Connecticut, I sent a freshoff-the-press copy of Rosenquist’s 2009 autobiography, Painting Below Zero: Notes on a Life in Art, to the amused friend who had generously humored my exuberance. By then he was living in a picturesque village just outside Geneva, Switzerland, and I’m sure it cost me twice the purchase price of the book to get it to him by DHL. 10

My motive, of course, was to demonstrate how essential Rosenquist’s North Dakota childhood was in shaping him as an iconic artist.

I immediately read my own copy of Painting Below Zero and savored every detail of his heartland roots. I so very much wanted to track down Rosenquist and ask him... Well, what exactly would I have asked him? We would have both remembered the character of prairie skies and the horizon, the drama of changing seasons and colliding weather fronts, the pace of freight trains and the peace of county roads.

Those are common reference points, a good place to start, but what, really, did I hope those shared experiences would explain?

A couple of years after moving to New York City, I would become a science reporter for TIME magazine, and suddenly it was easy to get interesting people to field a few questions.

Though my opportunities as a TIME reporter usually revolved around scientists and medical researchers, I would occasionally use my TIME credentials to wrangle interviews with folks I just really wanted to talk to about subjects of interest to me. I did my best to justify these rogue interviews in terms of research for a potential science story. But I wasn’t sure how I would finesse an interview request to Rosenquist. I was nervous it might baffle him to be buttonholed by a science journalist—how could it not?

I wonder, though, if what actually stopped me from ever reaching out to him was the fear that he might dismiss my interest outright, or, even scarier, that he wasn’t much interested in being a fellow North Dakotan. That was a risk I never took. For decades, I would include “contact Rosenquist” on my to-do lists and fantasize about what sort of conversation we might have, but I never followed through. Instead, I continued to imagine our Northern Plains solidarity and wonder if our paths ever crossed on the streets of Manhattan.

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I also spent a fair amount of time pondering the degrees of separation between us. My dad was born in Grand Forks, in the same hospital but three years before Rosenquist, and grew up with his brothers and sisters in Gilby, just down the road from Mekinock, where Rosenquist spent summers working on his grandfather’s farm. One of my dad’s brothers, my uncle John, learned to fly at the Grand Forks airport, the same airport from which Rosenquist’s parents, also avid flyers, had hoped to launch a U.S.-Canada airmail route until the Great Depression and the death of Rosenquist’s uncle in a rainstorm plane crash brought an end to those plans.

There weren’t too many degrees of separation between Rosenquist and my mom either. She grew up on a farm near Fosston, about 75 miles from Perham, where Rosenquist spent part of his childhood; he also lived in and around Minneapolis, including the town of Atwater, where his paternal grandparents had a farm. By the time he was 12, he had lived in a half-dozen places in North Dakota and Minnesota, as well as a short time in Ohio, where his dad worked as an aircraft mechanic at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and where my dad would also work decades later, with my mom, sister, brother, and me in tow.

Since Rosenquist’s death in 2017, I have acquired a fairly glorious pile of books on his art.

They are glossy, coffee-table volumes, lavishly filled with illustrations. And yet, strangely enough, I’ve mostly stared at the covers, transfixed and puzzled in turns, by the imagery. I seem to have been content simply to possess the books, like souvenirs from a distant vacation. At least until very recently. And again, I wonder if it was because some part of me wanted to keep Rosenquist safely unknowable.

In Painting Below Zero, Rosenquist recounts his heartland upbringing and his path to becoming an artist. At 14, already interested in the work of magazine illustrators and cover artists, he painted a watercolor of a sunset that won him a

scholarship for Saturday art classes in Minneapolis.

At 17, he visited California with his dad and decided that’s where his fortunes lay; he was all set to buy a motorcycle and “go west, young man,” but his mom would persuade him to attend the University of Minnesota, where he studied art and graduated in 1954 with a two-year Associate in Art degree.

Cameron Booth, Rosenquist’s mentor at the University of Minnesota, encouraged him to apply to the Art Students League in New York City, and, in 1955, Rosenquist landed a one-year scholarship to the League and headed east.

Throughout this period, Rosenquist would make a living painting, first signs for Phillips 66 gas stations, as well as for storage tanks and grain silos, then billboards for Coca Cola, Northwest Airlines, and others. He painted eight giant coonskin hats for a Disney promotion of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier, and a little boy with a tuba two stories high. Once he got to New York, Rosenquist continued to paint billboards for the famous Artkraft-Strauss Sign Company. Many were for movies in and around Times Square. He painted the Astor Victoria Theater billboard for the movie The Fugitive Kind, starring Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, and Joanne Woodward, which was 395 feet wide and took up the whole block between 45th and 46th streets. He painted the billboard for 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and an enormously nude Ava Gardner for the movie The Naked Maja.

In much of his later work, it is easy to see where Rosenquist used the scale and imagery of billboard painting to create surreal juxtapositions of bodies and objects. In the late 50s and early 60s, it was a big idea (in every sense of the word); the dimensions of Rosenquist’s famous F-111, which he painted to wrap around the walls of the Leo Castelli Gallery in Manhattan, were 10 feet by 86 feet.

Rosenquist’s experience painting billboards was clearly a formative one in his development as an artist. And yet there are also plenty of billboards 11

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in Buffalo, Baltimore, and Baton Rouge. A North Dakota childhood doesn’t really seem necessary for Rosenquist to become “Rosenquist.”

So I wonder why I wanted so badly to see the prairie in Rosenquist. Why was I so invested in seeing the geography of his childhood explain things about who he was and how he saw–and painted–the world? On the one hand, it seems pretty simple: a young guy from North Dakota ends up in NYC, and he wears prairie pride on his sleeve. Nothing wrong with that, of course, beyond the obvious insecurity. And yet, the more fundamental question has remained in my mind for decades. Where are the lines drawn when it comes to the power of place? Do grassland expanses and wide-open skies actually stamp themselves on the perspectives, even the character, of a people?

I’ve come to have very mixed views on these questions.

First of all, no form of determinism is benign.

And geography is not destiny. But, on the other hand, no one would seriously deny that our environments—family, social, and cultural, but also our geophysical environments—play important roles in shaping our lives.

Most of us will occasionally attribute general characteristics to people in terms of place.

It’s usually very casual, and much of it is selfreferential. New Yorkers, for example, love to tout a certain stereotype of themselves, almost as civic duty. We also generalize about states or even regions, such as New England or the South. Even entire countries. When I was in college and had the chance to visit a 500-year-old family farmstead outside of Lillehammer, Norway, the elder of the family thought I should know what the fundamental differences were that distinguished Swedes from Finns from Norwegians. Five decades later, the guy I bought a new dishwasher from in Northern Minnesota offered me pretty much the same Scandinavian taxonomy, but with jokes I could understand (neither had anything to say about Iceland or Denmark, however; go figure). When 12

When we engage in this sort of geographic stereotyping, we don’t usually parse what part is cultural, what part is geography, and what part is pure branding. we engage in this sort of geographic stereotyping, we don’t usually parse what part is cultural, what part is geography, and what part is pure branding.

And if we stop to think too hard about any of it, of course, we realize it’s maybe a bit silly, or at least very simplistic.

But that hasn’t always been the case.

Geographic determinism (or “environmental determinism”, as geographers prefer) has a long and checkered history. Humans have clearly proven their ability to adapt to virtually every environment on the planet. We are a resourceful species indeed. To what extent, however, do those environments then shape diversity in human habitation and culture, not just in the obvious ways in how we live in a particular place–the clothes we wear, the foods we eat–but also who we are and how we see the world?

Take religion, for example. There have been writers who have argued that geography has historically shaped the form religion has taken at different times and places. It’s a premise that raises all kinds of provocative questions. What is it about a landscape, then, or a climate or the circumstances of settlement that might nudge human beings in the direction of monotheism?

Or polytheism or animism? In what sense do we create our gods in the image of where we live?

And how and why do our desert gods differ from our rainforest gods, our mountain gods from our valley gods?

In their book, Neo-Environmental Determinism, authors William B. Meyer and Dylan M. T. Guss trace the history of ideas that have fueled an environmental view of human development, explaining that this perspective “acquired a

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particular importance in post-medieval European thought as a way of accounting for the surprising diversity in human societies revealed by new accounts of exploration and travel.” It went handin-hand, of course, with conquest and imperialism, and would eventually also mesh with the ideas of Lamarck and Darwin.

The environmental explanation for human diversity was an idea that made for very strange political bedfellows, however. There were proponents of the geographic perspective that ranged from the reactionary right to the revolutionary left.

The 19th-century French anarchist and political exile Elisée Reclus chastised Europeans, as Meyer and Guss explain, for not admitting that their success was due to a fortuitous natural environment and not to any “fine personal qualities” they imagined they possessed. Reclus, for example, according to the authors, claimed “that all mountain peoples were courageous and deeply attached to their lands of origin, while coast dwellers possessed a wandering instinct and those of great plains a conquering one.” Reclus believed the environments most conducive to human achievement were the colder climes, the regions of the earth that forced human settlements to work harder to thrive. In the tropics, on the other hand, wrote Reclus, “man need only shake the branches or pull up the roots to find subsistence.”

With needs so easily satisfied, reasoned Reclus, societies did not advance as quickly as did their counterparts who had to work harder.

The use of climate to explain a society’s progress–or lack thereof–continued into the 20th century. If the Garden of Eden made life too soft and the wastelands made it too hard, was there a Goldilocks climate that was somehow just right?

Even when there was agreement that geography was important, there was wide disagreement on some pretty fundamental points. For example, some observers argued that the year-round heat of the tropics encouraged disease and parasites,

which made life there too difficult. But others claimed that, no, it was actually the cold of the northern regions that forced people to crowd together in close quarters during the winter, conditions that left those regions especially vulnerable to illness and pestilence.

Sometimes the experts simply wanted it both ways. Meyers and Guss quote Paul Robbins, who noted that throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, “harsh climates were simultaneously used to explain the ingenuity of some groups and the cultural limits of others.” It should be no surprise to us, really, that geographic theories were used to justify conclusions that had already been drawn.

“The effects of long, cold and snowy winters, for example,” explain Meyers and Guss, “were cited to account for both New England’s supposed success and Russia’s supposed backwardness.”

The effects of climate on human character were an ideological battleground. As Meyers and Guss point out, “in the 1920s, the poet Langston Hughes systematically inverted the assumptions of white environmental determinists of the time by lauding the human traits shaped by a warm climate and decrying those formed by a cold one.”

Decades later, the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop would argue that while peacefulness, in his view, characterized “the races that originated in a warm and bountiful climate, “ it was “cruelty and bellicosity” that were the hallmarks of “those arising in a cold and barren one.”

In reading about the history of environmental determinism, I was reminded of the bumpersticker sentiment that made the rounds while I was growing up in Minot. It went along the lines of “minus 30 degrees keeps the riffraff out.” It was intended as a weirdly comic bit of self-deprecation, I assumed, but, even as a kid, it made me uncomfortable. What sort of riffraff were we talking about, and why didn’t we want them here? And did people really believe that in some way the cold distilled moral goodness and admirable character?

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were first popularized in the U.S. at the turn of the 20th century by Ellen Churchill Semple, whose books included History and its Geographic Condition in 1903 and Influences of the Geographic Environment in 1911. Semple’s work, in turn, influenced Ellsworth Huntington, who wrote The Pulse of Asia: A Journey in Central Asia Illustrating the Geographic Basis of History in 1907, and Civilization and Climate in 1915. Both Semple and Huntington conducted extensive field research to bolster their theses, and Semple, in particular, was a pioneering academic.

But as the 20th century progressed, geographic determinism began to wane. It was increasingly seen as an intellectual accomplice to racism and imperialism. Racism could thrive without the support of geographic theories, of course. In fact, as Meyer and Guss note, “one of the nineteenth century’s most outspoken critics of environmental and especially climatic determinism was Joseph Arthur, Comte de Gobineau,” the French aristocrat and white supremacist who wrote, An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, and who would later inspire Nazi leaders. Gobineau, according to Meyer and Guss, “poured scorn on the notion that the biophysical environment could in any important way alter the characteristics or destinies of the different races of humankind.”

Stalin, too, would come to attack theories of geographic determinism, note Meyer and Guss, as “masking the sinister purposes of capitalistic and imperialistic warmongers.”

By mid-century, the consensus view was that any notion of geographic “determinism” had to be replaced by geographic “possibilism,” the idea that environments present only a range of possibilities, and that what really matters are the complex dynamics of societies in interaction with the possibilities posed by our environments.

And yet, the appeal of determinism, however misguided, is understandable. After all, maybe we can’t be faulted for wanting things to be simpler than they actually are, especially when 14

we give our justifications a scientific veneer. The writer Andrew Solomon, author of Far From the Tree, an extraordinary look into the workings of nature, nurture, and identity, once observed: “I feel that every generation has wanted to find an explanation that made other explanations obsolete.

In the ’50s and ’60s, when psychoanalysis was at its strongest, we wanted to believe that everything was determined by family environment.” Mothers who were cold or domineering or fathers who were absent or jealous were invoked to explain why children turned out the way they did. We got over that, thankfully, but “that gave way,” said Solomon, “to a biological determinism that told us, ‘it’s all in your genes.’” Genetic determinism would come to be applied to virtually every possible aspect of physical or psychological health and illness. In many ways, we are still in thrall to simplistic genetic explanations.

But determinism based on geographic factors has clearly gone the way of the Dodo.

Contemporary geographers tend to be hyperwary of any theory or interpretation that smacks of determinism. According to Meyers and Gauss, one way to sympathetically describe the field’s current rejection of the perspective is that it was “immunized during its disciplinary childhood by having and getting over a disorder, a kind of intellectual mumps or measles, from which it now enjoys a built-in protection.” A less sympathetic description, they note, would be to say that the field “suffers today from a neurotically phobic aversion likewise rooted in early experience, a traumatic one akin to being kicked by a horse or scared by a dog.”

The landscapes of our lives can play large or small roles, and play those roles in different ways at different times; one size does not fit all. And, of course, place is just one vantage point from which to look at our lives. My fascination with Rosenquist has been a way for me to look at questions of why and how I embody my own sense of place.

In September of 2021, Humanities North

Dakota hosted an event on “Sense of Place” that featured Louise Erdrich, Mark Vinz, and Debra Marquart in a panel discussion moderated by Tayo Basquiat. It was a wonderfully rich conversation and one of the many points that struck home for me was the exchange on the differences between the act of remembering and nostalgia. What are the elements of a complex, nuanced sense of place and how do we arrive at it? Can it be cultivated? What do we nurture when we nurture a sense of place? When and how does nostalgia undermine or subvert this sense? In my own experience, I’m honestly not sure where one ends and the other begins. But it seems to me a question that bears repeated scrutiny.

Rosenquist opens his autobiography, Painting Below Zero, with the observation that “Painting has everything to do with memory.” He continues by placing this act of remembering within the context of where he grew up, describing the Midwest as “a great generator of illusions,” and the North Dakota landscape in particular as “a screen on which you can project whatever you imagine.” It’s an affectionate remembrance of his youth, a collage of sorts, one that delivers details that create instantly vivid images in the mind’s eye. Here he describes an experience from the farm near Mekinock: Living on the plains, you often see mirages. One evening I was sitting on the front porch at sunset with the sun in back of me, and I seemed to see a giant Trojan horse walking across the horizon.

‘What’s that?’ I said, running into the house. “Look! Look at the big horse!”

Turned out it was the neighbor’s stallion that had gotten loose and, caught against the setting sun, it loomed as a giant that looked four stories high.

One of my favorite images in the book

What are the elements of a complex, nuanced sense of place and how do we arrive at it? Can it be cultivated?

What do we nurture when we nurture a sense of place?

is a snapshot of Rosenquist’s mother with a friend leaning against the body of a small plane, a Curtiss Robin; the caption says circa 1931. It’s a relaxed, confident pose, with both women rather snappily dressed, like dressycasual flappers, to my eye. Rosenquist makes the observation that “perhaps because the land is so flat–there were no mountains to climb–in North Dakota people wanted to go up in the air. My mom and dad wanted to fly, and they both became pioneering pilots.”

Though I know Rosenquist is describing this desire in a literal sense here, I love, in the abstract sense as well, the image of North Dakotans wanting to be up in the air.

Certainly it was the sky that I would first notice every time I got back to the state on a visit from New York. It would immediately dawn on me how much I missed that sky. The prairie is about the land, of course, and the rivers, potholes, sloughs and coulees, but there’s no question that it is also very much about that extraordinary, everyday sky. l DAVID BJERKLIE has been a science reporter, writer, and editor at TIME Magazine, TIME For Kids, and TIME Books since 1984, as well as a freelance contributor to national and international magazines and newspapers. He has been a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at M.I.T.; a Rosalynn Carter Mental Health Journalism Fellow; a National Association of Science Writers Travel Grantee; and a National Science Foundation Media Fellow at McMurdo and South Pole Stations in Antarctica.

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TRUE NORTH

by Jill Kandel

S

itting outside on a hot, sticky night, I looked up at a sky I didn’t

recognize. Stars I’d never seen in North Dakota shone down on me.

The brightest one, the one I learned first, was called the Southern Cross. I remember staring up in that evening dark, dumbfounded. I lived in a land so far away that even the stars were different. Sometimes, just before I turned in for the night, I’d hear the distant growl of lions.

I’d grown up in North Dakota and then, after graduating from college, met a man from the seafaring Netherlands. He was twenty-five years old when he first stepped onto North Dakota soil. After we married, we didn’t stay. How could we? He worked in tropical agriculture.

We opened ourselves up to the world and on our honeymoon signed a contract with the Dutch Government to work in Zambia. Six weeks later, we moved to a village so remote it took a ten-hour bus ride followed by an eight-hour canoe ride to reach it.

I was a foreigner in Zambia, holding my breath in wonder, as our canoe navigated tributaries and crossed the mighty Zambezi River. A herd of hippos yawned and rumbled at us, their thick yellow teeth revealed, their tiny black eyes blinking as they watched us watching them. Yellow Weaver Bird nests hung like Christmas tree ornaments from the boughs of bushes. Zambian Fish Eagles flew overhead. Kingfishers dove, capturing tiny, shining fish in their bright orange beaks.

The sun blazed directly overhead, hot and steady, hour after hour. I was both exhilarated and disoriented. I couldn’t tell where we’d come from or which direction we were headed, my internal compass lost as turns took us deeper and deeper into this new and watery kingdom of the Lozi People. We lived in the remote village of Kalabo for six years; our first two children were born there.

For a few months each year, when the waters receded on the Zambezi Floodplain, we could travel by Land Rover instead of canoe. Without a 17

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guide, we’d have been lost. The so-called road wound in and out of the bush, across flooded basins, and disappeared for hours without a trace.

Zambia taught me many things, among them tenacity, a make-do spirit, and a fear of snakes: green mambas, black mambas, spitting cobras, pythons. I was told Zambia had ninety-two different types of snakes, sixteen of which were deadly.

They were everywhere–in our chicken coop, the kids’ sandbox, our bathroom, and once, inside the toilet bowl.

After Zambia, we moved to the mountains of Indonesia and lived on the island of Sumatra, in the tiny town of Pondok Gajah: The Elephant Village.

My husband worked with local small-scale coffee farmers. I raised our two children and gave birth to another son.

If we kept our eyes open on walks in the mountains, we saw wild purple and white orchids and enormous Moose Horn Ferns. Sometimes the earth swayed beneath our feet, there in that volcanic and earthquake-prone Ring of Fire, and the window panes in our home trembled and rattled us awake at night. We’d fall back asleep to the smell of the night-blooming jasmine right outside our window.

I loved my life.

I loved the big wide world I’d become a part of. Flying squirrels glided silently through the Indonesian forests. The mountainsides were carved into enormous flat steps and held shining pools of water that grew fragrant jasmine rice. Goldentipped mosques reflected the brilliant sunlight. All around us, coffee trees flourished, the smell of their snow-white blossoms sweet. Neighbors taught me how to pick the bright red coffee cherries and suck the fleshy, sweet-as-candy outside that surrounds coffee beans. Massive cinnamon trees lined our road, and our kids would stop, pull off a piece of bark, and chew it while they played.

We lived in Indonesia for three years, and then my husband decided to return to school for his doctorate. My parents, wanting to get to know their grandchildren, suggested NDSU, and he agreed.

By that time, I’d circled the globe, this beautiful 18

blue pearl of a sphere, three times by airplane.

I was a seasoned traveler with a lifetime full of memories. I mourned the life we were leaving, grieved what we were giving up. But I was also a road-weary expatriate, three kids in tow, winging the globe, this time headed home. Finally, headed home.

Of the five of us, I was the only one returning home. My children–two, eight, and nine years old–had spent most of their lives in the tropics.

My husband had visited North Dakota, but much was foreign to him: subzero temperatures, snowblowers, the enormity of open space, the obsession with football, Jell-O salads, ice fishing, and hockey.

I was thrilled to be back; they weren’t so sure.

When I was a child growing up in Valley City, my mom liked to shop in Fargo. There are two curves on I-94 between Valley City and Fargo: one near Tower City, one near the Maple River. On a road that travels a straight line for nearly sixty miles, a curve was something to notice. My siblings and I used to sit in the car with anticipation.

“Hold on!” we’d say. “The curve is coming!”

We’d pass exits to Buffalo and Alice, and rest areas that our mom always commented on.

“Your Uncle Len built these rest stops, you know.”

“Yes, Mom. We know. You’ve told us before.”

Uncle Len, a pastor who often crisscrossed the state, hadn’t really built them. But he’d advocated for rest areas in North Dakota after seeing them in other states, on other journeys.

There weren’t many landmarks on the way to Fargo. A few small towns dotted the distance, noticeable mostly by their patches of trees. Next to the trees, the tallest sites visible were either church steeples or grain elevators. The remnants of tiny fallen-down barns sat like ducks on an ocean of prairie grass. This was the land I grew up on, the visual landscape I absorbed without thinking. Flat.

Wide. Open. When I learned to read, I loved that the word prairie contained, at its core, the word air.

It felt right. We were an airy state. Windy and wild.

On holidays, we drove to the northwestern part

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When I learned to read, I loved that the word prairie contained, at its core, the word air. It felt right. We were an airy state. Windy and wild.

Jill and her brother riding Aunt Ruby’s horse near Hazen, N.D. Circa 1963.

of the state to visit my dad’s brothers, farmers who’d lived near Hazen and Beulah all of their lives. Once we got past Bismarck and turned north, the roads narrowed into gravel hills. Dad would gun the car up and down those hills, and we’d whoop as if on a roller coaster, my stomach dropping as we crested hills and rushed down the back side.

I rode my first horse out in the hills of western North Dakota at my Aunt Ruby’s farm; I was five or six. She lifted me up onto his back, put the reins in my hands and said, “Have fun!”

After five or ten minutes, the horse gave his head a mighty shake, nudged his nose up toward the sky, and easily pulled the reins out of my small, inexperienced hands. He turned quickly, lowered his head, and I slid down his neck as if it were a slide. I landed with a jolt of surprise on the hard ground. The horse looked me in the eye and took off. I cried all the way back to Aunt Ruby’s farm.

“What’s wrong, child?” she asked, taking me in her arms. Sobbing harder at her kindness, I managed to wail, “I lost your horse!” “Oh, child,” she said, “Don’t you worry none. That old horse knows his way home.” Sure enough, he showed up later, trotting down the road, and went directly into the barn.

When I turned thirteen, my parents bought me a horse. A green broke, three-year old gelding.

I kept him at a barn north of town–$10 a month rent–and biked out every day after school to care for him, brushing his sorrel-colored coat to a shine. I didn’t have a saddle and learned to ride bareback, my damp blue jeans sticking to his sweaty back in the heat of summer. I also

learned my north, south, east, and west guided by the Big Dipper or the sun. It always surprises me when I give someone directions like “Turn south at the stoplight and then two blocks later go west,” and they look at me like I’m speaking a foreign language. I carry the orientation of the sun and stars, the placement of my body in relation to this globe instinctively. If my right hand reaches out to the rising sun, my nose is facing north. This isn’t a difficult concept, but it seems city folk are often confused by its simplicity.

Living back in the Red River Valley, I’m at peace in a way that is difficult to describe. I don’t need to question everything. I know the names of many of the trees, flowers, prairie grasses, and birds.

I don’t ask if a snake is poisonous. Of the eight snakes I might encounter in North Dakota, only the rattlesnake is venomous, and he has the decency to signal his presence with a rattle of his tail.

When I lived abroad, there were constant questions. Do I drive on the right or on the left?

Frequent miscalculations. Liters or gallons, miles or kilometers? I cannot recount the innumerable linguistic misinterpretations, where I thought people said one thing and they’d said another– cultural faux pas by the hundreds.

In Zambia, I clapped my hands in greeting, with cupped hands like a man instead of flat hands like a woman for a whole year before I even knew there was a difference. In Zambia, I whistled while walking down the road for months before someone had the courage to tell me what whistling meant.

My cheeks reddened as a neighbor finally told me, “Ahh, Madame, it means you are thinking dirty thoughts.”

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In Indonesia, I told people “I have a dog in me” instead of “I have the wind in me.” Dog and wind sound the same to my American ear. Dogs are abhorrent to Muslims who will not touch them. The correct terminology, a wind in me, translates to I have a cold.

I was often lost. Once I got on a train to Heathrow Airport to pick up my mom. I boarded the last coach on the train, and we took off. Later, when it made a stop, the train split, each half going in a different direction. I didn’t have a clue.

An hour later the train stopped again at a town that was definitely not Heathrow Airport. Let’s just say that my mother spent many hours pacing the airport wondering where I was then, in the day before cell phones.

In North Dakota life flows more smoothly, without the constant nagging questions, doubts, and second guesses. Of course, there’s still much to learn, for my home state changes as everything does. I’m reading for the first time about the Ojibwe people, their land, art, language, and culture. I’m learning about fracking. On drives west, bright sun glints off wind generators, newto-the-scene. They mesmerize as they twirl slowly round like gigantic pinwheel toys.

The demographics of my state have changed enormously since I was a child. According to the American Immigration Council, in 2018 over 35,000 new immigrants lived in North Dakota, people who came from the Philippines, Bhutan, Nepal, Canada, and Liberia. One in twenty residents of North Dakota is a native-born U.S. citizen with at least one immigrant parent, a category into which some of my own children fall.

But even though there are a multitude of changes and many new things to learn, I wake up each morning and look out on a land with which I’m familiar..

A gray squirrel nibbles some black sunflower seeds. She raises her tiny hands as if in prayer. I laugh at the pine tree, jitterbugging with the wind, a dance requiring partners to hold hands. I stare for hours out at this place. And I wonder. What is this quietness, this happiness? What is it that I’m 20

feeling so profoundly, so deeply? The feeling is as old as anything I know and takes me back to my childhood. Being here brings my life a sense of cohesion, a sense of harmony.

When we lived in Zambia, my husband carried a laminated card with him at all times, the size and shape of a driver’s license. On the face of the blue plastic card, typed in bold print beside his mug shot, were the English words “Resident Alien.” I laughed myself sick the first time I saw it and loved telling people I was married to an alien. There were times, living in Zambia, that I felt like an alien, felt like I was from a far-flung galaxy too distant to see.

Even after six years of living there, I never thought of it as home.

Home was a place of well-known tales, repeated histories, connections to my kin. My mom was a storyteller. One of her favorite stories was what she called The Great Easter Snowstorm. She loved to tell that so much snow fell overnight that the roads in town drifted in, inaccessible. The wind whirled and etched waves onto the surfaces of the snowbanks. My sister and I, aged four and five, were dressed up in our spring finery of thin yellow dresses billowing over crinoline slips, white anklets edged with lace, cotton gloves, and Easter bonnets bedecked with silk flowers. How could we miss Easter Sunday church? So Dad got out an old wooden toboggan and piled us onto it, covering our skinny legs with a blanket. “Let’s go!” he said.

And off we went. I remember the novelty of it all, with the street quiet, muffled by snow and lack of traffic, my dad walking ahead of us pulling the sled the four blocks down Second Street to Our Savior’s Lutheran Church. Inside the church a large wooden cross draped in black fabric hung over the altar.

It had been hanging there for weeks, dark and solemn. That Sunday morning, as the choir began to sing and the trumpets blared a Hallelujah, the pastor pulled a cord and the black drape fell to the ground revealing a cross exuberantly covered in Easter Lilies, as white as the snow outside.

These are my first memories. Cold and snow.

Music and joy. And resurrection. For resurrection is an innate part of life in North Dakota as spring

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The North Star. A fixed-destination star. It seems to me a sort of holiness, a sort of sanctity, this earnest star that does not move. follows winter year after year, life following death.

North Dakota is above all a four-season state, a changeable and changing place where the year is easily marked by wind and weather.

My first daughter was born in Zambia in March. But there was no melting snow, no wild unexpected blizzard, no snirt or frozen puddles to jump on just to hear the ice crack beneath my feet. Zambia was endless sunshine and heat.

It’s difficult to remember the timeline of our life overseas without all the familiar weather markers.

I say to myself, “She was born in March,” but there’s a disconnect. The four seasons of North Dakota have gone missing. Her birth in March, on a 90-degree sunny day, makes no sense to me, even decades later.

Living overseas became a sort of timeless existence, full of season-less years. How long the years felt. How they ran into each other. I was told, “It’s our rainy season,” or “it’s our winter,” but it wasn’t like any springtime or winter I’d ever known, and I never did come to understand it.

During North Dakota winters, animals slept for months, living off their own dwindling stores of fat. Trees hibernated, their roots reaching so far down that they found warmth from the earth itself.

Birds weighing less than a few ounces fluffed up and survived thirty-below nights and windy arctic blasts, only to wake up in the early dark and sing. In winter, water turned solid, and we drove cars over it to go out and catch fish that lived underneath sheets of thick ice. In winter, water turned into flakes and fell to the earth in intricate unfathomable beauty. The crimson red dogwood went on brilliant display, and the rhubarb waited.

I remember stopping once by the Zambezi River, near a beach so white it reminded me of snow. As I ran barefoot down the sand, it squeaked beneath my feet and sounded like the

squelch of newly fallen snow. Comparisons jumped to mind unbidden. Each new and novel experience had to be understood by contrast to what I had known. And what I’d known most of my life was North Dakota. Deeply, innately, firmly.

It comforts me now to go out in the evenings and gaze up at the night sky. Old familiar constellations peer down at me. The recognizable North Star, located in the tip of the Little Dipper’s handle–or, as others say, on the end of the tail of the Little Bear–shines bright. I have no trouble spotting it. The North Star sits over the North Pole.

The earth’s axis points almost directly at it. All year round, it shines out faithfully from nearly the same spot. No matter what time of year I look up, there it is in the same location. Known also as Polaris or the Pole Star, it barely moves across the night sky.

The North Star. A fixed-destination star. It seems to me a sort of holiness, a sort of sanctity, this earnest star that does not move.

I’ve come to think of North Dakota in much the same way. It’s the place I’ve known best in all the world, the point of orientation I’ve held for as long as I can remember, my oldest memory and the single spot on the entire globe that anchors and centers my life’s journey.

When I’m disoriented, when I’m lost, I only need to find her.

North Dakota, my true north.

My fixed-destination star. l JILL KANDEL grew up in North Dakota. She began writing at the age of forty, winning both the Autumn House Nonfiction Prize and the Sarton Women’s Literary Award. Writing is her way of making sense of a life lived on four continents and a cross-cultural marriage which has lasted over forty years. Her next book, The Clean Daughter: A Cross-Continental Memoir, is forthcoming from NDSU Press, April 2022.

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I was crying for something. It was more than the song, but I could not quite identify the source.

LOOKING FOR AMERICA IN A DISILLUSIONED TIME

by Clay S. Jenkinson

O

Killdeer Mountains, I was looking for some Native American flute music on my playlist when I triggered Simon and Garfunkel’s concert in Central Park instead. September 19, 1981. They sang all the great hits, but they did not really draw my full attention until they sang “America,” which occupies territory in my soul close to Kerouac’s On the Road and Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley in Search of America. When the two great troubadours reached the chorus, “we’ve all come to look for America,” and the New York crowd, estimated at more than 500,000 strong, roared with admiration and nostalgia, I burst into tears. I don’t know why. And so: I did not buy a pack of cigarettes and Mrs. Wagner’s pies and look for the closest Greyhound bus. The nearest convenience store was 70 miles away and I was, I admit, a little bit lost. I was crying for something.

It was more than the song, but I could not quite identify the source.

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Original artwork by Lacie Van Orman, Land of Ice and Stars

ut in the middle of nowhere the other day, a little bit lost in the badlands west of the

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| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | At one point, trying to thread my way back to a main-traveled gravel road, I wound up high on a bluff from which I could see twenty miles in every direction.

I got out of the car to take some photographs. These are the most rugged and the least visited badlands in North Dakota. In fact, when you turn off US 85 onto Long X Road, marked by a green street sign, some rancher has put up a big mean hand-painted sign that says “Private Road.

Authorized Traffic Only.” But it is not a private road. It is only a road that the rancher would like to keep for himself, but you can bet that the county grades the road in the summer and clears the snow in the winter. As I looked down into the bowl of the badlands from the high bluff, I remembered what Gertrude Stein (of all people) said, that “in the United States there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is.” If you could find a spatula large enough, you could lift the entire island of Manhattan (13.4 miles long and 2.3 miles wide) and place it comfortably in the valley below me with miles to spare on every side. I would be surprised if anyone now lives in that bowl, though it is surely a thumb of someone’s ranch. The population of Manhattan is 1.63 million. Imagine half a million people swaying together in the heart of the Dakota badlands and holding up their Bic lighters rather than cell phones.

Given the stark choice between living in New York City or the deep badlands west of the 24

Killdeer Mountains, I’d choose New York. I love some things that cannot be provided in rural North Dakota and really not more than marginally in our four North Dakota cities. But my life would be impoverished and dispiriting if I did not have access to open country, wide country, windswept country, broken country, empty country. I regard the fact that 1.2 million acres of the Little Missouri River country are owned and managed by the U.S. Forest Service National Grasslands system as one of the best things about North Dakota. If this were not true, I do not think I would choose to live here. I suppose for a while in the mid-twentieth century we rural Americans let ourselves believe we could have much of what the great cities have, in a kind of stripped-down way, so that we could enjoy what urban life makes possible but on a decentralized scale that preserved the character and values of an essentially rural community. You can see it in the half-empty brick main street of scores of North Dakota towns.

We never found that balance at the high-water mark of rural life, in the thirty years after World War II, and we certainly don’t have that balance now. Fargo, ND, claims it has found the formula, but it had to grow to well more than 100,000 (at the expense of rural North Dakota, whose solid young people she mesmerized and absorbed) before it could really make that claim. That might happen to Bismarck, too, though Bismarck will never be like Fargo,

even if the population explodes, but it decidedly will not happen to Williston, Dickinson, Jamestown, Devils Lake, Carrington, and Wahpeton.

I cannot imagine my life without the outback in it. I’ll go as far and high as Mount Whitney and the Sierra Nevada; and though such places are awesome, I don’t feel the same way about El Capitan or even the Grand Canyon that I do about some rolling country in eastern Wyoming. It has to be the plains, perhaps intermixed at the edges with low-density pine forests.

The Yellowstone River speaks to me in a way that the Columbia just doesn’t. I suppose this is accidental. I was born in North Dakota not Salida, Colorado, or Spokane, Washington. If I had been born in Bozeman, probably I would be one of the Montanans who make fun of flat old North Dakota. Where we stand depends on where we sit.

But, why did I burst into tears?

Well, first of all, because the America of Simon and Garfunkel’s song is so alluring and hopeful, vast and mysterious and beautiful in a uniquely American way. It’s hard to think of the sister song in Canada or Ireland—let’s all go and look for Romania? There is something in the American consciousness about immense space, much of it empty. About travel, the open road, the trail up into the high country. The song is also about a particularly American sort of loneliness, which finds expression throughout Kerouac’s On the Road:

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | The sun was going down.

I walked, after a few cold beers, to the edge of town, and it was a long walk. All the men were driving home from work, wearing railroad hats, baseball hats, all kinds of hats, just like after work in any town anywhere. One of them gave me a ride up the hill and left me at a lonely crossroads on the edge of the prairie. It was beautiful there. The only cars that came by were farmercars; they gave me suspicious looks, they clanked along, the cows were coming home.

Or here: What is that feeling when you’re driving away from people and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? — it’s the too-huge world vaulting us, and it’s goodbye. But we lean forward to the next crazy venture beneath the skies.

Or in my favorite single Kerouac sentence: “Whither goest thou, America, in thy shining car in the night?”

I love the loneliness of a solo journey in America, particularly in the American West. A bus will work but a car is better. The dusty cow town at dusk. The endless highways that are not Interstates.

The sense of American immensity you get when you drive four hundred miles in a single day and never come to a town with more than 25,000 people, the sense of being swallowed up by a country that is still not fully developed,

I love the loneliness of a solo journey in America, particularly in the American West. not even fully populated. There is something absurd but potent about being alone in that amazingly efficient and reliable machine, the automobile, in the middle of Wyoming or Utah, and wondering just what the heck you think you’re doing on whatever pointless journey you have undertaken, and you wonder also what kind of day you would have if your car broke down out here.

But it doesn’t—anymore. The road vulnerability of John Steinbeck’s Joads—flat tires and a persnickety carburetor—is over for the vast majority of Americans. Nothing between you and the stars. A pronghorn antelope charges off towards distant hills. More places where there is no cell service than adequate service. Seeing a gravel road with a sign that says, “Fremont Springs Primitive Campground, 23 miles minimal maintenance,” and so wanting to take that road to see what’s there, even though you sort of do already.

Loneliness takes several forms. There is loneliness in the abstract—the kind I am describing just now—and then there is the other kind of loneliness. You are in a remote area of Montana or Wyoming and you ache for the partner who gets this and gets you and wants to go check out that primitive campground and

is not afraid of snakes and reads the right books and is as willing to stay in a shag carpet motel on the edge of a small town as on the ground somewhere in an REI tent.

You want to share this improbable ecstatic journey experience with someone else who can feel the vibe and you know there is probably no such being, if you factor in previous commitments and experiences, timing, and the capricious moodiness of human beings. Somehow that feeling of multilayered loneliness seems more authentic and even more satisfying to me in western Colorado than in Edward Hopper cityscapes. And yet I know people who say they are never so lonely as when they wander a great city like New York or London at night.

I suppose I cried out there, too, because I am so disillusioned with the decline of the American republic, the falling off from whatever it was we were when we were at our best—the fatal differential between the one tenth of one percent and the 329,000,000 other Americans, the paralysis and the ugliness of our politics, the anger, the threats, the bullying, the smugness, the demonization. But mostly the paralysis. It reminded me of how the Roman senator Cicero responded when the purest republican, Cato the Younger, said some wildly idealistic thing about Rome. “Cato addresses the Senate,” Cicero wrote, “as though he were living in Plato’s Republic rather than the shit-hole of Romulus.” The word “shithole” resonates in a new way in the 25

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | Trump era. I love this country. I am an earnest and ardent patriot.

For a long time I really did think we might be the shining city on the hill, perhaps not quite but on that path. I believe in the idea of the American republic—the world’s exemplar of a people getting it right and living up to the Enlightenment’s highest standards, or at least trying to. I want so much more from America, and I see it now in measurable decline and fractionalization. I grieve for the idea of America. I used to think we just got better over time, not without setbacks, and we proceeded on or at least lurched towards perfection, always restless until we finally got there.

But now here we are, a monstrously wealthy failed republic, descending into several kinds of darkness.

Who would not weep for America, no matter what your politics?

I suppose I cried, too, for my lost youth. There was a time in my life when Simon and Garfunkel were just releasing powerful songs like “America” and “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Mrs. Robinson.” The 60s were a period of enormous cultural activity. It was the era of the Beatles and later fat Elvis, and Elton John, and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And, for the harder core, the Grateful Dead. I always find it a little embarrassing to be at a 60s-band concert in the twentyfirst Century, the Eagles at the Fargodome or David Crosby at the civic center. Their music is 26

Even in North Dakota there are hundreds of hidden wonders that most of us never see or bother to look for. still good—albeit 60 years old now—and the venerable rock stars, now senior citizens or worse, mostly can still stand up for two hours, but the audience is Baby Boomers just like me, and you can see the sweet nostalgia move in waves through the crowd, especially when one of the handful of great 60s anthems makes its appearance.

So much promise in the Age of Aquarius. And look at what we did and didn’t do with all that revolutionary hubris?

What was I doing on this Saturday afternoon in autumn but in my own way looking for America. Getting a little lost with plenty of gas and knowing that you are not truly lost concentrates the mind and inspires all sorts of creative energies. I could be reading or bowling or gambling on the Rez, but I have chosen to spend this Saturday wandering gravel roads in a zone that was mostly unfamiliar to me, and realizing that even in North Dakota there are hundreds of hidden wonders that most of us never see or bother to look for. I don’t want to be in a big Elderhostel bus with someone like me droning on up front with the always-faulty microphone.

I want to be alone out here or

nearly so. I want to feel that I am in some very limited sense an explorer (I suppose even a knight errant). But if I am seeking the Holy Grail, from which Jesus drank wine on the night before his torture and bloody death, I cannot articulate precisely what that Grail is. I am pretty sure I am going to fall short. Sir Lancelot fell short and he was the best of the Round Table knights. Steinbeck says that every creative person falls short and therefore justly fails to find the Grail. I like the idea that nobody really knows where I am on these journeys, though if I stopped to think about it, I am certain my late-model car knows how to be found if something really bad happens, and my cell phone has surely pinged some triangulation of my location. They would find me at some point, and nobody would be particularly surprised. I’m not trying to escape civilization or get away from it. I am seeking something deeper, earthier, more grounded, more authentic, more soul-satisfying than I get in daily life in suburbia.

I believe every place that has not been destroyed by industrial meddling intones a song that is like the Music of the Spheres in Renaissance cosmology. It is a song that can actually be heard, but you have to train hard, maybe for a lifetime, to hear its strains, and most of us don’t bother or give up early. I believe place knows how to speak to me if I can make myself stop to listen and clear my head. When you stand out there all alone in a big empty space with some jagged

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | edges or breaks to give it a bit of horizon, and your car is half a mile or more away, and the wind is blowing enough to get your attention but not enough to disturb your experience, and you give it a little time, something deeply sensual takes over and you feel alone out there in limitless space and monstrously alive at the same time. You feel that your little drama is too puny to register in the circle of land and sky in which you pivot and you would not be missed if you just lay down and decomposed into the grass, and yet at the same time you feel powerful and strong and somehow impressive for being here when you could be at Buffalo Wild Wings watching the game.

When I finally reached pavement about dusk and therefore could drive back the 140 miles to home as an automaton, I asked myself where I would go now to look for America. It would be more likely in Bowman or Bowbells or Binford than Bismarck. I think of the Friday night high school football game under the lights at a small town field with cars parked all along the perimeter of the field, some on a little bluff overlooking the field, with the nine-man team strutting to the forty yard line, and the guileless cheerleaders gossiping together before the kickoff about that boy from the other town who is so cool and hot. As the sun sets like a scene out of a Willa Cather novel, you can see the silhouette of three or four grain elevators a couple

of blocks away and, towards the edge of your vision, the two-lane highway to elsewhere where a few eighteen-wheelers rumble by every ten minutes, and even fewer cars. Whither goest thou, America?

I would look for America in the CENEX convenience store in Harvey or Cooperstown at 10:30 a.m. on a weekday with six or seven old men in baseball and feed caps drinking coffee and blaming the Democrats for everything, particularly Hillary and Obama. Only one or two have any real conviction about this political discourse, and, truth be told, they would rather talk about the girls’ volleyball team that is going to state. They are successful men, mostly farmers, and they like to try out the talking points they got from talk radio and Tucker Carlson, but they mostly come just to have coffee with other men and cut the aloneness of rural life. For fellowship. To “visit.” I do not judge them for their politics, and I hope they do not judge me for mine, and I often want to pull up a plastic chair and invite myself into their circle, a complete stranger, and to listen to them for half an hour and maybe ask a slight socratic question or two, but without any edge or attitude.

I wonder what it would be like to be them. They feel like really good North Dakotans to me. And I honor their place in food creation.

At some point the coffee klatch breaks up and they drive home to tell their wives what they heard and said.

I would look for America at an

amateur rodeo at the edge of a ramshackle plains village, with the beiged out wooden stands, about fifty feet wide and six tiers high, perhaps a third full of spectators, most of them kin to the competitors. The local girl in the pink rodeo suit belts out the Star Spangled Banner in a humble but patriotic way, and Ty, who just rode a saddle bronc for the full eight seconds, kneels down and raises his index finger into the sky to thank Jesus for his ride.

He means it with his whole being.

And all the kids charging around with smothered nachos and taco in a bag. The corny homespun announcer who edges up to a few blond jokes and recites a cowboy poem in which a lovesick wrangler refers to his girlfriend as a heifer. And the 18-year-old boy-man who got bucked off roughly and is pretty hurt but too stoic to express his pain or just stay slumped to the ground for a few minutes. He limps out of the arena with a stovepipe leg, wincing but not howling in his anguish. He has been told since first childhood that men don’t cry.

I would look for America at the Rotary Club meeting in Mott or Killdeer, now held in the basement of the Lutheran Church since the café couldn’t handle it anymore. There are only eleven members now, three too old to come to the meetings. A couple of church ladies provide the lunch. The modest proceeds go to the church window fund, never into the pocket of one of the cooks. The program today is

by Elma’s granddaughter Chanel, 27

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | who did her junior year in South Korea and has a slide show of some of the great places and people she met. When she is asked political questions, she holds back and stammers and says there are just a lot of things an American doesn’t understand.

She is now getting a master’s in sports medicine from South Dakota State University.

I could proliferate this Whitmanesque love song for a great many pages, but you get the idea. I would not go look for America in Washington, DC, though that surely is quintessentially American, too, the Senator greeting the 4-H Club of a small town from back home and getting a couple of pictures on the Capitol steps, before taking a call from the Vice President for Communications of Monsanto Corporation or the Sierra Nevada Mining Company.

I would not look for America in New York, though it is the most American city in the world, more than Houston or Los Angeles or Chicago or Seattle. I would not look for America at a major league sports stadium—hockey, basketball, football—because they have been commercialized and merchandized and overstimulated beyond recognition, but I know I could find it at a minor league baseball game in Wichita, Kansas, or Pueblo, Colorado. Or at the Class B basketball tournament at the Civic Center. Oh, my, there especially!

On the whole, rural America is in decline. The Great Plains continue to be depopulated. Not 28

all leave the state, but they move from villages and small towns to the major population centers.

There is a great emptying out in the outback, and palpable decline in the quality of community life, though the new farm house out on the home place is likely to be splendid, with 18-foot windows across the southwest side of the living room, and a home theater, a jacuzzi and maybe a sauna.

The individuals who live in those dwellings are not thriving, exactly, but they have never before had access to amenities and the fruits of life as those they now routinely enjoy at home, and yet somehow that little family enclave is not enough. They all know it, but they don’t know how to fix it. And there is certainly no turning back.

If I am going to live out here where the communities are more marginal than vibrant, where there is a feeling that we are just hanging on as long as we can, then I want compensatory joys and satisfactions. I find that compensation in small towns, where the noticeboard at the entrance of the café says “Today’s Special: Hawaiian Salad with Steak Fingers,” but even that can become stale after a while.

I find much more compensation out on the ridges, on the lonely trails, in the badlands, on the public-access buttes, in Theodore Roosevelt National Park. You take that away and I don’t want to live here any longer. Some of it has been taken away, by the pell mell industrialization of our western landscapes, but there is still enough to satisfy if you know to

look in the right direction and to tune out the scarrage.

I cannot explain any of this.

Or rather I can try, at enormous length, but in the end the mystery abides. There are hundreds of places within a four-hour drive of my home that are heartbreakingly beautiful, and yet they would not register to people who have not grown up on the Great Plains or sought them out for some reason or other. It matters to me that the Great Plains are an acquired taste.

In 1903 President Theodore Roosevelt created by executive order the first National Wildlife Refuge: Pelican Island in the Indian River in Florida. He went on to create fifty more federal bird sanctuaries, as he called them, two in North Dakota. He also established federal game preserves, including a refuge in northwestern Montana for a handful of bison that had somehow evaded the extinction mania of the late nineteenth century. By the time Roosevelt killed his first buffalo in southwestern North Dakota in mid-September 1883, just north of Pretty Butte near today’s Marmarth, by the best estimate there were no more than 1,000 bison left in North America. At one time—when Lewis and Clark drifted through between 18041806—there may have been as many as 60 million buffalo grazing North America. Roosevelt, the co-founder of the nation’s first conservation organization, the Boone and Crockett Club, wanted the bison to survive so

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | that his children and theirs could hunt the great quadruped. With William Hornaday, George Bird Grinnell, Scotty Philip, Charles Goodnight, and others, TR helped save the buffalo from extinction.

They came within a hair’s breadth of blinking out, like the passenger pigeon, but thanks to the work of a handful of pragmatic conservationists, they survived.

Today North America tolerates approximately 500,000 buffalo— in carefully managed enclaves throughout the American West, several of them in North Dakota.

The distinguished journalist Carl Bernstein says that America is in the midst of a “Cold Civil War.” We are at least two distinct nations now—red versus blue, coastal versus interior, progressive versus conservative, Trumpite versus anti-Trumpite, NRA versus Planned Parenthood, John Lennon versus Lee Greenwood, MSNBC versus Fox, the woke party versus the patriot party. The country is brimming with rage. Just where all this anger is coming from nobody can really say, but nobody can deny it either. There is an ugliness in our national conversation, which is more often a shouting match or a death threat than a debate according to Queensberry rules. It feels like America is dis-integrating. Almost every day I find myself saying, more plaintively each day and week, “I want my America back. I want America back.”

As things fall apart and the center cannot hold, I find myself taking refuge in the outback.

It matters to me that the Great Plains are an acquired taste.

There is not much of it in North Dakota or the Great Plains for that matter, but there is enough for my purposes. In North Dakota only 3.9% of the land is publicly owned. The rest is private and the forces of extraction—the forces that have been at the center of North Dakota life from the beginning—are squeezing profit from it with furious intensity.

I find myself looking for America there—up and down the Little Missouri River corridor, along the shoulders of the great buttes, off the trails in the state and national parks, wherever you can hear the message on the wind undisturbed by industrial noise. An old mantra percolates through my mind: the earth, the earth alone abides. I cannot imagine America without public lands. John Locke said, “In the beginning, all the world was America,” by which he meant that at one point the whole world was what America was in 1492: outback, with indigenous peoples living lightly on the land, without a slab of concrete anywhere on earth, and no internal combustion engines. There is a fair amount of that America left out there if you know where to look for it. Time for the industrial pendulum to recede.

Out where the wind blows across the grass I know there is a refuge from late capitalism and the spiraling collapse of

the American republic. When I venture there, I inevitably cheer up and clear my spirit of the slop and the merchandizing that have come to dominate American society. We used to listen to the earth much more than we now do.

We need to learn to listen again, like a people recovering from a stroke. Native Americans have known this all along; perhaps we will learn to listen to them in our hour or era of need. The only way to do so is to get out there where you pause to check to make sure the car keys are still in your pocket and you go still when you think you hear the distant call of the coyote.

The Great Plains delivers those lonely windswept landscapes.

It’s harder in Iowa and much harder in Massachusetts. In Simon and Garfunkel’s great song, the young man says, “Cathy, I’m lost…. I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why….” That’s the metaphoric brand of lost. I think our salvation, our refuge, is going to be the physical kind.

I’ve done my homework. I know where to find it. l

CLAY JENKINSON is a public humanities scholar who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota. He was the winner of the National Humanities Medal and one of the founders of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. His most recent book is The Language of Cottonwoods: Essays on the Future of North Dakota.

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THE INCOMPLEAT ANGLER: SOME NOTES ON FISHING, POETRY, AND PLACE

by Mark Vinz

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You will find angling to be like the virtue of humility, which has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings attending upon it.

–Izaak Walton

T. S Eliot said it, famously: “April is the cruelest month.”

Of course, he didn’t have Minnesota or fishing in mind, but he might have. While the long weeks of April are the final, most frustrating stages of waiting for the May fishing openers, the April weather will also usually determine just how good or bad the season will be. Too warm, too cold; too wet, too dry; too early, too late—I can’t remember an April that the old timers thought was a very good one, that didn’t in some way upset spawning patterns or the ecosystems of local lakes. What I can’t understand is why all the good Aprils happened way back there before I started fishing.

February and March can also be downright cruel to summer anglers, for that’s when most of the fishing specials air on TV. Of course, I feel compelled to watch some of them, much to the amusement of my non-fishing family, and I’m really at a loss to explain why. It’s simply another Minnesota ritual—dreaming yourself into that perfectly equipped boat you’ll never be able to afford, out there on some perfectly picturesque (and apparently bugless) lake you’ll never find, with a perfect day’s catch of trophy fish you know you couldn’t match in two lifetimes of trying. As most of us already know, there’s a lot more out there to catch anglers than fish.

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Some of our best poets and writers have been anglers.

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Beyond all the impossible promises, what is it that keeps those of us who fish going back? I’ve heard more than once that fishing is among the last meaningful “male” rituals. “Getting away” is part of it, I suppose, but even though the majority of people I’ve met who put down fishing happen to be women, I’ve never thought of fishing as particularly male, and certainly not anti-female. I do draw the line at “fisherperson,” however, much preferring Izaak Walton’s term: “angler.” That’s indeed what one who fishes is—a player of angles, sometimes to the point of exasperation. Similarly, I’ve never really thought of fishing as “getting back to nature,” either. Most anglers would be lost without all their mechanical conveniences; indeed, much of today’s fishing seems to depend on the ways we devise to carry more and more of the paraphernalia of civilization with us. And I can’t say that not catching fish doesn’t really matter. Of course it matters, just as putting up the net matters when you play tennis.

There are days, though, that it doesn’t matter very much.

Perhaps it’s the solitude—if you can get away from the thousands (millions, really) of other fishermen, that is. As a rule, they’re not a very solitary bunch. (Once, I confess, my lack of angling success drove me to attend a local fishing “seminar,” where I ended up feeling helplessly, hopelessly out of place in the midst of all those back-slaps and funny hats.)

Perhaps, then, it’s the friendship, the close relationships shared with a few good people that can only come about when we find an accepted way of forcing ourselves to take some time off from our more usual routines. But that’s not all of it, not by a long shot.

“You’re a poet. I would have thought better of you.” That’s what a woman said to me at a party once, when she overheard a couple of us in a corner discussing the virtues of leeches and crawlers vs. minnows at a certain time of the season on a nearby lake. I was too surprised to defend myself. Since that time I’ve often thought of what I should have said: how some of our best poets and writers have been anglers, and how some of the most memorable writing I’ve ever read has grown out of fishing trips. I think, of course, of Izaak Walton, of Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River,” of Richard Hugo and his heartbreaking Montana poems full of trout and dying towns: I’m fishing. I’m singing. My heart is not exactly giving lessons though I’ve been lucky enough in rare moments to take heart in some words, and to have a job teaching others to sing, to locate by game some word like “brown” in black water, to cast hard for that word, then wait a long time to set.

Now the reeling in, the fight, the black trout lovely on heather. . . (from “Langaig”) I think, too, of my Wisconsin friend Bob Schuler, whose devotion to

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fishing and writing is of the Buddhist variety: water calls out a man’s soul will he cast a Royal Coachman to ride proud slow over the sunscrubbed edges of a still pool or would he toss a Gray Ghost into the swarming current muscles rock-whipped white (“Fishing,” for Chuang Tzu) River anglers—what an odd and awesome breed they are, like relief pitchers and Medievalists. They make me think of all I don’t know about fishing, and then I think of those who speak of deeper, darker ocean waters filled with species I’ve only dreamed about.

But I’m content to be a lake fisherman (on water, thank you—not ice) and never ashamed to admit that rivers and trout streams tend to bewilder me.

For most of my life, too, I’ve been a land-locked Midwesterner, and in some important ways, I suppose, fishing reminds me of those roots—the good days, the bad days, the love-hate relationship most of us have with climate and place, and which appear in much writing by Midwesterners. It reminds me of tale-telling and tale-embellishing, of mavericks and artisans, of traditions passed on between generations. It reminds me, too, of my childhood, of my father’s Wisconsin aunts, Tillie and Emma, skinning the bullheads I dragged in at the end of a splintery cane pole; they deep fried them in batter and served them up triumphantly with a vat of German potato salad—when they weren’t fishing themselves, that is. And it reminds me of my father, a man who never liked fishing, but who’d take me, once in a great while, out of that deep fatherly duty it took me a long time to understand.

When you think about it, fishing is quite naturally the stuff of poems and stories. It can indeed be a powerful trigger to memories: When I was four, Father rowed me out to weed beds of sunfish so big our bobbers dove red and white to deep green. Foolish

bundle I was, I romped and screamed ‘til he tied me to the seat, afraid I’d drown us both. I dream of those days now, bright bobbers moving through sleep, pulled down by life I can’t control . . .

(Greg Keeler, from “Long Lake, Minnesota”) It can bring self-recognition, too, sometimes of the most painful kind: . . . the eyes give him away, and the hands That limply offer the string of dead perch And the bottle of beer. Father, I loved you, Yet how can I say thank you, I who cannot hold my liquor either And do not even know the places to fish?

(Raymond Carver, from “Photograph of My Father in His Twenty-second Year”) And it’s the leap of imagination itself, the enduring sense of awe at that “other” world, both in and outside of us: I remember fishing alone on the lake— listening to a symphony of cicadas, the metallic pop of sunfish rising for air, and how the glassy surface seemed to stare as I held the rainbow near a patch of moonlight that rose from beneath the water.

(Tama Baldwin, from “Hooking the Rainbow”) Finally, I’ve also come to understand how poems themselves are a bit like fishing—that meditative and ritual pursuit of something extremely fickle and elusive, something not of our familiar element, far from where we can clearly grasp what is going on; the stubborn perseverance and endless tinkering with craft; and at last, the jolting thrill of pulling up something we can never quite predict—trophy lunker or clump of weeds— no matter how carefully we’ve prepared for it. If, as Paul Valéry has said, “a poem is never finished, only abandoned,” might not the same be said of fishing trips?

It should be no surprise that over the years, I’ve 33

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Fishing, as writing, is an intensely personal experience, yet also one with a certain universality and timelessness to it.

written several fishing poems. The one that retains the most meaning for me is called “Weekender,” not only because it comes just about as close as I can come to defining the lure of fishing, but because it wasn’t originally published in a literary magazine but in Gray’s Sporting Journal: Once it was the catch that mattered, the big ones we knew were waiting just inside the reeds. Cut the motor, check the wind, and drift. Cast, retrieve, and cast again, then move and start all over.

Silly when you think about it, I suppose, but who really thinks about it— beyond the fierce tug on the line that lifts you for a moment somewhere else.

Up and down the shore until the sun hangs just above the trees—one more pass and then one more, it’s getting late, there’s only time for one last perfect arc into the dusk, the final turn, the long ride back—and still it comes, a tug at the end of that disappearing line.

Fishing, as writing, is an intensely personal experience, yet also one with a certain universality and timelessness to it, a thoroughly human activity endowed with meaning and significance glimpsed only in moments. In fishing, as in poetry, especially, you never know what you’ll reel in. There is always that new place to explore, too, more line to be let out, and, no matter how good you get at it, something else to be learned every time. l MARK VINZ was born in Rugby, North Dakota, grew up in Minneapolis and the Kansas City area, and attended the universities of Kansas (BA in English 1964, MA in English, 1966, and New Mexico (two additional years of graduate study in English). He is now Professor Emeritus at Minnesota State University Moorhead, where he taught in the English department for 39 years and also served as the first (1995-98) coordinator of MSUM’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. His poems, prose poems, stories, and essays, have appeared in over 200 magazines and anthologies and several book-length collections, most recently The Trouble with Daydreams, Selected and New Poems, North Dakota State University Press, 2021.

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CARDINAL POINTS

by Bonnie Larson Staiger

N

Where the wind comes from.

We keep a close eye out there even when it’s not – winter is not far away.

W

Where the sun disappears from high in the sky languid and lazy in summer.

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E

Where it reappears tomorrow low and slow to rise grudging in perpetual winter.

S

Where birds go when it snows some people too.

The rest of us keep watch – finding our way in the dark.

BONNIE LARSON STAIGER, a North Dakota Associate Poet Laureate, is the recipient of the ‘Poetry of the Plains and Prairies Prize’ (NDSU Press, 2018) and the ‘Independent Press Award: Distinguished Favorite’ (2019) for her debut collection, ‘Destiny Manifested.’ Her second book ‘In Plains Sight’ (NDSU Press, 2021) was nominated for the PEN America Literary Award in Poetry. She has received awards from Flying South Literary Magazine, The MacGuffin’s Best of the Year Anthology, and shortlisted for the Julia Darling Poetry Prize and the Great Midwest Poetry Prize.

Original artwork by Lacie Van Orman, The Missouri Runs Through It

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FOLK ART

by David R. Solheim

Thirty years ago on the high moraine A farmer looked at a pile of plowshares And thought, “I could make something out of that.”

He arranged them across the shop floor, Welded the outline of his horse, and Mounted it in the roadside pasture.

Startled by the transparent being, passersby Pulled in and made requests: Sheaves of wheat For the grandson of the bonanza farm, The wildlife club called for pheasants and geese, A nearby town “Welcome” with grain elevators, A Hereford’s head to support the neighbor’s mailbox.

His images from the scrapheap of farming Enlivened fifty miles of roadside.

Today they’ve rusted into sod.

Different names collect mail, and tires painted “No Hunting” hang from gateposts. Some of us Remember the artisan’s hand and see it still.

With this breath and while these pages last, The art survives the artist, though these too Are destined to dusty death.

DAVID R. SOLHEIM has published two chap books and four books of poetry. He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet, thanks to Larry Woiwode is an Emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota, and is an Emeritus Professor of English of Dickinson State University.

Most of his previously published works and his new literary travelogue “A Week on the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers: Thoreau’s 1861 Minnesota Journey Revisited” are available via buffalocomonspress.com.

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Original artwork by Lacie Van Orman, Wheat Fields

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THE FLEDGLING

by Jennifer Hernandez

I discover the fledgling in my backyard, puppy barking at something in the crabgrass.

Get back, I warn. Back! while the robins cry Chee, Chee! flitting from pines to crabapple tree.

Even the cardinals join in, scarlet male and dun mate whistling in shared distress.

just enough to flutter across the fence, reach relative safety, settle in the Creeping Charlie on the other side.

Yet, Chee, Chee! the adults keep crying.

Would you please just stop? I want to say.

Don’t you know the hawks can hear?

I grab the puppy’s collar, dance her away from the blinking bird who only sits on the unkempt lawn, mostly straw this season of drought. I drag the puppy into the house, go back to assess.

The fledgling hasn’t moved.

Her speckled breast belies her age, crooked wing her condition. I like to think the puppy hasn’t gotten her yet—or she’d be dead—but I can’t be sure.

The parents’ calls fill the air, pierce me through, not hard when my armor has already worn so thin. But then, the fledgling stirs, lifts into the air

JENNIFER HERNANDEZ is a native of Fargo and a graduate of Minnesota State UniversityMoorhead with a degree in English. She is a current resident of New Hope, MN, where she teaches immigrant youth and writes poetry, flash, and creative non-fiction.

Recent publications include This Was 2020: Minnesotans Write About Pandemics and Social Justice in a Historic Year, and her poetry can also be found found in the Nature Area Poetry Walk at Richfield Lake Park, as well as the Mankato Poetry Walk and Ride.

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HUMANITIES ND

MEMBER PROFILE

CHRISTIE IVERSON

H

umanities North Dakota member Christie Iverson would love to sit down to dinner with a Viking-age sorceress to get some insight into how this woman saw the world of her time and how that world treated her. Furthermore, left alone, imprisoned in a room for life, she would read, knit, paint, learn French, try to cook Vietnamese food and love on her three dogs, Ares, Nelly, and Chloe.

Christie and her three dogs (from left to right): Nelly the Husky, Chloe the Basset But, since she can do Hound, and Ares the Blue Heeler and noise maker. neither of those things, Christie is thankful for her a totally new way of looking at things. I just Humanities North Dakota membership. “After love that when it happens!” my husband passed away in an accident, I was Christie’s most recent read is A Swim in a floundering and needed an outlet for my grief Pond in the Rain In Which Four Russians Give and emotions. The Arts gave me that outlet, a Master Class on Writing, Reading and Life including Humanities North Dakota. I give to this

by George Saunders. The author takes the organization so it can continue to help me on reader through seven Russian short stories this new journey as well as help others find their by the greats – Chekov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, paths.”

Gogol – and explains them. “It is a fascinating Christie’s favorite humanities subject would book with insights into what makes a great be literature, specifically a well-written short story and how each of these authors did it. A story. At the age of twelve, living on a farm in very easy read.” When reading isn’t an option, the middle of nowhere, she read the book of Christie listens to the podcast This Jungian the month, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote.

Life where three Jungian psychoanalysts She didn’t sleep for a week. Thankfully, her discuss an archetype for about 45 minutes and experience didn’t deter her from giving up then interpret a listener’s dream. “It is full of reading. Instead she continued to fall in love interesting insights and ideas.” with literature, most recently enjoying authors And, Christie’s favorite Humanities ND class Alice Munro and Flannery O’Connor. “Their or event? “All of them! Each class leaves me stories catch my attention and then hit me with with something new that I have learned.” l

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HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA WELCOMES REBECCA THIEM Rebecca Thiem is a North Dakota native who grew up in Fargo, ND. After attending Valparaiso University where she obtained a Humanities degree, she volunteered in VISTA for a year in Rapid City, SD. She clerked for a year with Judge Myron Bright after graduating from UND Law School in 1980. She has practiced law in Bismarck since 1982.

Rebecca loves to learn and is pleased to join the Humanities North Dakota board.

NEW STAFF MEMBERS Mr. Green - Eccentric Arithmetician Alias: Nick Glass, Fiscal Operations Assistant You can never be too careful with your money! That’s why HND hired a second accountant to keep an eye on things. Nick knows his way around a computer and is helping automate our financial operations. Keep him in mind if you need to know anything involving numbers.

Ann Adjunct - Bringing Class to HND Alias: Lacie Van Orman, Marketing Coordinator Professor Program’s trusted sidekick is always on the lookout for great humanities content.

With sophisticated style, Lacie adds polish to HND’s programs and events, and her keen eyes are currently redesigning the HND website for better function and layout.

Board of Directors & Staff HND Board of Directors CHAIR

Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

VICE CHAIR

Marilyn Foss, Bismarck Rebecca Thiem, Bismarck Paige Baker, Mandaree Angela S. Gorder, Bottineau Lyle Best, Watford City Dina Butcher, Bismarck Dennis Cooley, Fargo Patty Corwin, Fargo Eric L. Johnson, Grand Forks Jessica Rockeman, Richardton Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison Barb Solberg, Minot Linda Steve, Dickinson Amy Stromsodt, Larimore

Staff Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Nick Glass, Fiscal Operations Assistant Sue Skalicky, Program Coordinator Naomi Vetter, Membership Coordinator Lacie Van Orman, Marketing Coordinator Rebecca Chalmers, Editor, Humanities ND Magazine North Dakota’s Largest Lifelong Learning Community

800-338-6543 info@humanitiesnd.org

HumanitiesND.org

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Have you ever imagined a world without the guidance of history, the wisdom of our greatest literature, the understanding of different religions, the ability to communicate in other languages, the engagement of citizens in the democratic process, or the ethical foundations of our legal system?

These pursuits form the humanities and without them we would not know who we are or what we stand for.

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Bush Foundation The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Many Dances Family Fund National Endowment for the Humanities Charles Hudson, in memory of mother Marilyn Hudson North Dakota Department of Public Instruction Bravera Bank Big Stone Giving Fund Paris Family Foundation Bismarck State College - Bringing Humanities To Life ND Council on the Arts David & Cathy R. Bliss Dave & Ann Reich David & Karla Ehlis Angela Gorder Christie Iverson Connie M. Hildebrand Rita Kelly Mary Ann Johnson David & Virginia Duval Joan K. Locken Ellen E. Chaffee Patty Corwin Jamie Stewart Robert & Susan Wefald Thomas & Jane Ahlin Sarah Vogel

RENEWING AND NEW MEMBERS

(since January 3, 2022)

$5,000 and above University Of Wyoming Bismarck State College Bravera Bank Paris Family Foundation $1,000 to $4,999 Christie Iverson Joan K. Locken Scott Wisdahl Big Stone Giving Fund Mary Ann Johnson

RENEWING AND NEW MEMBERS (since January 3, 2022) $500 to $999 Sarah M. Vogel Lawrence King Mary Gunderson Dave & Ann Reich Linda M. Steve Geri Beckman Levi & Bethany Andrist Robert & Susan Wefald David & Cathy R. Bliss Carol Kapsner $100 to $499 Nicole Poolman Barbara Solberg Thomas & Katie Hutchens Patty Corwin Sara Garland Eric & Lisa L. Johnson Rebecca S. Thiem Robert & Laurel Weigelt Rande Zander Marilyn Foss Kenneth J. Glass Dennis Cooley Luise Beringer Molly Leppert Ellen E. Chaffee David G. Adler Amber & David Augustadt Robert Franek Marie D. Hoff Nancy Devine Mary Kelsch Janell Hauck Lynn Boom Martin & Mary Fritz Jeanne Walstad Tiffany Pape Hoffer Mark L Vinz Nicole Crutchfield Peter Woodrow Jean D King Mona Rindy Kristi Miller Terry Jacobson Dakota West Arts Council Matt Elbert John Fishpaw Susan McNeil-Conley

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Lisa Durkee Arla Teske Mark & Susan Liebig Amy Ingersoll-Johnson Katie Ryan-Anderson Crystal Gilson Linda L. Larson Melissa Spas Mildred Rothgarn Kara Geiger Joyce Krabseth Ruth Hursman Alice R. Senechal Gerald & Jean Newborg Verna & Stanley LaBounty Laura Hjelmstad Bethany J. Andreasen Joseph C. Jastrzembski James H Quirk Laurel Jones Ferguson Books & More Marita B. Hoffart Erin Laverdure Kayla A. Schmidt Hariett & James Davis Lillian Crook Joletta Morrell Cheryl O’Meara Beth Schimdt Tim Olson Lyle G. Best Michael & Kim S. Chaussee Molly & James Herrington Robert W. Jansen Roxanne C. Boelz JoAnn Wittmayer Carol Cashman Shirley Quick Burton M. Nygren Al & Brenda Bollinger Timonthy Taszarek Patricia Lackman Kali Kiecken Alice J. Anderson Paul H. Koetz Jessie Fuher Jo Anne Curl

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