Sense of Place 4.23

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

04.23

the SENSE OF PLACE issue

CONTENTS THE SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE NON-FICTION 02 NORTH DAKOTA’S LAST LYNCHING

by Mike Hagburg

WHAT IS POSSIBLE BRENNA GERHARDT EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR

FICTION 08 LIGHTS OUT

by Amber Burke

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2

THE HUNTER OF LONE TRACTOR PLAIN

by Mark Holman

22

AN EXCERPT FROM NINETEEN FORTY-FIVE

by Brian Striefel

MEMOIR 30 EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK WHILE THE WINDMILL WATCHED

by Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor & Janine Pfeiffer Knop

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SENSE OF PLACE

by Bruce G. Pitts

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44 RIVER BOY

by Leif Wallin

48 TOMATO PERSON

by Lisa Rask

POETRY 52

BISBACK BADLANDS

In the introduction to their book, Senses of Place, anthropologists Keith Basso and Steven Feld write that sense of place is “the experiential and expressive ways places are known, imagined, yearned for, held, remembered, voiced, lived, contested and struggled over.”

Given the rancorous tone of our world, the “contested and struggled over” part of this definition stands out when I reflect on what this place I've called home for over forty years means to me. Distrust, fear, and anger punctuate too many conversations I’ve had with people reflecting on the state of our state. The prayerful part of me lingers on the words “imagined, yearned for, held” because they carry a prophetic hope that this place of extremes in temperatures and temperaments could find a greater purpose and more inclusive vision. As a society, we would do well to learn how to remember with humility and honesty in order to move forward with clarity. Nostalgia is the flimsiest of foundations on which to build a better world.

There is still so much I don't know about this place, especially the history of the first peoples whose languages remember and voice ideas that have sustained communities for thousands of years. It's only possible to get a full sense of this place with this knowledge. Humanities North Dakota plays a small part in educating about the history, languages, culture, and issues of the tribes who dwell here. We will continue to partner with Indigenous-led nonprofits, colleges, and educators to do more.

I hope you will use the tools of lifelong learning in the humanities to explore what has been and what is possible.

Much heart, Brenna Gerhardt Executive Director & Fellow Lifelong Learner

by Jennifer Lemming HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE is published by Humanities North Dakota.

To subscribe, please contact us: 701.255.3360 info@humanitiesnd.org humanitiesnd.org

The Humanities North Dakota Magazine has been made possible in part by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Democracy demands wisdom.

Hover your smartphone camera over these codes and tap on the link that appears.

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or Humanities North Dakota.

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RAINSHADOW

by Debora Dragseth

54 BAD LAND RISING

by Jim Muyres

56

MONOLOGUES

by Mark Vinz

58 AR-15

by David Solheim

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IF THE WIND

by Aimee Geurts

ABOUT THE COVER ARTIST, SHELLEY LARSON Artist Shelley Larson, a long-time Bismarck resident, has always had a love of nature and conservation. She has enjoyed painting since she was a child and over her lifetime has won many awards for her work.

Her paintings feature colorful landscapes with complimentary colors, and she ultimately wants them to bring “happiness” and hope to those going through cancer treatment. “I want to share the joy from my heart with the use of bright colors to create serene landscapes.”

Shelley enjoys all art mediums, but watercolors are her favorite. Many of the pictures she has painted are from their ranch and cabin near Crooked Lake and McClusky, ND, where she shares the love of the outdoors with her husband, Craig. She hopes her paintings encourage endurance, strength, courage, and life. They are a symbol of “hope” on display at the Bismarck Cancer Center, which has been a trusted community resource, providing compassion and care for over two decades.

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Full article with footnotes can be found at ndcourts.gov/about-us/history/north-dakotas-last-lynching James Bannon

NORTH DAKOTA’S LAST LYNCHING

by Mike Hagburg, N.D. Supreme Court Staff

I Charles Bannon

n the early morning hours of January 29, 1931, a mob broke into the small stone jail at Schafer, North Dakota, and seized Charles Bannon. The mob hanged Bannon from a nearby bridge. It was North Dakota’s last lynching.

Bannon, who was 22 years old, had spent only a few days in the Schafer jail prior to the break-in.

He was moved from the larger and more secure jail in Williston on January 23, 1931, so he could be arraigned in Schafer on charges that he murdered the six members of the Haven family. His father, James Bannon, was also confined in the Schafer jail, awaiting arraignment as an accomplice to the murder.

A FARM FAMILY DISAPPEARS The Haven family lived on a farm about a mile north of Schafer, a village east of Watford City.

The family had five members: Albert, 50, Lulia, 39, Daniel, 18, Leland, 14, Charles, 2, and Mary, 2 months old. As of February 1930, the family had lived on their farm for more than ten years. They owned household goods including a piano and a

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radio as well as “considerable livestock, feed and machinery.”

No member of the family was seen alive after February 9, 1930.

Bannon had worked as a hired hand for the Havens. He stayed on the Haven farm after the family disappeared, claiming that he had rented the place. He told neighbors that the family had decided to leave the area.

Bannon’s father James joined him at the farm in February 1930. Together, they worked the land and cared for the Haven family’s livestock through the spring, summer and fall of the year.

Neighbors became suspicious by October 1930, however, after Bannon started selling off Haven family property and crops. Bannon’s father then left the area, saying that he was going to try to find the Haven family.

James went to Oregon, where Bannon said the Haven family had gone. James wrote a letter on December 2, 1930, to Bannon from Oregon, in which he advised Bannon to watch his step and “do what is right.”

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the other members of the family—instead he said he killed them because he was scared.

In his last two confessions, Bannon stressed that he acted alone in killing the Havens.

Bannon tried to convince authorities that his parents, in particular his father James, knew nothing about the murders. Nonetheless, the authorities kept James in custody.

L to R: State's Attorney J.S. Taylor, accused killer Charles Bannon, Williams County Deputy Sheriff Earl Gorden, and Sheriff Charles Jacobson.

In December 1930, Bannon was jailed on grand larceny charges. In the course of the investigation that followed, authorities discovered that the Haven family had been murdered.

THE HIRED HAND CONFESSES On December 12, 1930, Bannon gave a statement to a deputy sheriff in which he admitted involvement in killing the Haven family, but claimed a “stranger” acted as instigator.

The next day, in a lengthy confession to his attorney and his mother, Bannon admitted killing the Haven family in a violent fracas that followed Bannon’s accidental shooting of the eldest child, Daniel. Bannon suggested in this confession that he was forced to kill Leland, Lulia and Albert Haven because they tried to kill Bannon after he shot Daniel.

After Bannon confessed, authorities tracked down his father James in Oregon. James was accused of complicity in the murders and extradited back to North Dakota.

In a final confession that he wrote out himself in January 1931, Bannon again admitted killing the rest of the Haven family after accidentally shooting Daniel. In this confession, however, Bannon did not claim that he acted in self-defense when he killed 4

WAITING IN THE SCHAFER JAIL Bannon, his father James, Deputy Sheriff Peter Hallan, and Fred Maike, who was in jail on theft charges, were present in the Schafer jail on the night of January 28-29, 1931. A crowd of men in masks arrived at the jail sometime between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m. on January 29, looking for Bannon.

The sight of lights flickering through his windows woke Sheriff Syvert Thompson, who lived near the jail, and he went to the scene to investigate. The mob captured him and led him away from the jail.

Thompson and Hallan said that the crowd numbered at least 75 men in at least 15 cars.

The mob battered down the front door of the jail and overpowered Deputy Hallan. After he refused to tell them where the keys to Bannon’s cell were, the mob escorted Hallan out of the jail. Using the timbers they had used to break down the jail door, the mob began work battering down the cell door. Witnesses said the mob appeared disciplined and wellorganized, going about their work as if under strict orders.

Maike told investigators that the mob had so much trouble trying to break down the cell door that they almost gave up. After the mob broke the door down, Bannon surrendered and pleaded that his father not be harmed.

Members of the mob brought in a rope and placed a noose around Bannon’s neck. They dragged him from the jail. The mob put Deputy Hallan in a cell with Bannon’s father and Maike, who had been left alone.

Outside, Sheriff Thompson heard the men demanding that Bannon “tell the truth” or face hanging. Bannon told them that he had told the truth.

After taking Bannon, the mob shoved Sheriff Thompson into the jail cell with Hallan, barricading the door. Thompson and Hallan were not able to free themselves until after the mob dispersed.

The lynch mob first took Bannon to the nearby Haven farm, planning apparently to hang him on the spot the family died. The caretaker of the farm ordered the crowd off the property, threatening to shoot if the mob did not leave.

LYNCHED OVER CHERRY CREEK The mob took Bannon to the bridge over Cherry Creek, a half-mile east of the jail. The new high bridge was built in the summer of 1930. Bannon was pushed over the side of the bridge with the noose still around his neck. Authorities said the lynchers use a half-inch rope, with one end tied to a bridge railing and the other tied in a standard hangman’s knot by someone with “expert knowledge.”

Bannon was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Williston.

Governor George Shafer called the lynching “shameful” and ordered an immediate investigation.

Attorney General James Morris (later a Supreme

The jail where Charles Bannon was held.

Court justice), Adjutant General G.A. Fraser, and Gunder Osjord, head of the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, were sent to the scene. Morris interviewed witnesses and examined evidence from the lynching.

The rope used was of special interest to Morris. He said that the noose had been tied by “someone with expert knowledge.” He also pointed out that the rope had a thread of red hemp running through it, which could be a manufacturer’s mark. Morris concluded that “the lynching was well-planned in advance” and that “three or more leaders . . . kept the mob organized and under control.”

Morris said that the governor had ordered the investigators to “go to the bottom” of the lynching.

The state investigation, however, was not fruitful: no member of the lynch mob was ever arrested and Morris concluded after less than a week of investigation that it would be impossible to identify any member of the lynch mob.

The Federal Council of Churches investigated the lynching in the spring of 1931. The Council found that even though feelings ran high against Bannon in the community, authorities “took the prisoner back to the scene of the crime, put him in a makeshift jail, and thus gave every chance to a mob.” Frank Vrzralek surveyed North Dakota lynchings in 1990 and noted that one similarity among several lynching cases was

Haven's barn and manure pile where the victims were buried.

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FOUNDER OF CANTICLE PRODUCTIONS AND PRODUCER OF THE END OF THE ROPE FILM “grossly inadequate” protection for the prisoners.

On learning of the Council’s work, Morris wrote Rev. Howard Anderson of Williston, who conducted the investigation. Morris wanted to know if Anderson had obtained any information that might help the authorities; Anderson responded that the Council had focused on the circumstances leading up to the lynching. He stated: It did not come within the scope of my investigation to try to discover who the members of the lynching mob were. That, it seems to me, is the duty of the sheriff and state’s attorney of McKenzie County.

Whether or not these duly constituted officials have performed their duty in this, or to the full in their holding of Bannon, is something you know as well, or better, than I. After escaping the lynch mob, Bannon’s father, James, was tried for the Haven murders.

Concerned about James’ safety, attorney W.A. Jacobsen asked Morris what steps would be taken “to see that this man is kept alive during the time he is in the county.” The trial was moved to Divide County, where James was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

Jacobsen and E.J. McIlraith, James’ attorneys, argued on appeal that James was not involved in the murders and that the evidence did not support the charges against him. The attorneys pointed out that the “witnesses for the State were so anxious to convict the defendant . . . that they made their testimony to suit the situation, and made the testimony so positive as to convict him, if there was any possibility of doing so.” The North Dakota Supreme Court, however, upheld James’ conviction.

James was admitted to the state penitentiary on June 29, 1931. As he left the jail in Minot, he told the guard “you are seeing an innocent man go to prison.” When James sought parole in 1939, Attorney General Alvin Strutz (later a Supreme Court justice) was sent to McKenzie County to 6

Daniel has an M.F.A. in Acting from Columbia University.

investigate whether the community believed James was innocent. In a report dated May 18, 1939, Strutz concluded that the belief in the community was that James was guilty at the very least of helping cover up the murders. James was released by the state Pardon Board on Sept. 12, 1950. He was 76 years old.

In the wake of the Bannon lynching, State Sen. James P. Cain of Stark County introduced a bill to revive capital punishment for murder in North Dakota. Supporters of the bill argued that the lynching would not have occurred if Bannon could have faced a death sentence. The North Dakota Senate rejected the bill on a 28 to 21 vote.

SCHAFER TODAY At the time of the Haven murders, Schafer was the county seat of McKenzie County. Today, all that remains of Schafer is a cluster of buildings, including an abandoned school and the Schafer jail building.

A sign stands next to the jail, outlining the history of the jail and the events of January 29, 1931, when Charles Bannon “was taken by an angry mob and lynched.”

Strutz concluded his 1939 report on the lynching with these thoughts: There is no doubt in my mind but that some prosecution should have been commenced for the lynching of Charles Bannon. No conviction could have been had in McKenzie County, it is true, but the State might have secured a change of venue and, even though no conviction could have been had it seems to me that such a crime should not be allowed to have been committed without at least an attempt to punish those who perpetrated the same. It may not have been a popular thing to do in McKenzie County but on the other hand it would have been the right thing.

Schafer is approximately five miles east of Watford City on North Dakota Highway 23. l

He moved to North Dakota in 2015 and began working as a writer and producer. He lives with his wife and five children in Bismarck, where he currently serves as Chair of Dramatic Arts at the University of Mary.

END OF THE ROPE

When a family mysteriously disappears from the town of Schafer, North Dakota, suspicion lands on a sociopathic farm-hand, and the entire community rises up to take justice into its own hands. The film is based on the true story of the infamous Charles Bannon case of 1931.

HND: Why this story for a film?

Daniel: End of the Rope is a true story based on the book End of the Rope written by Dennis Edward Johnson. It’s a fascinating true story that asks some interesting moral questions and provides a powerful picture of life in northwest North Dakota in 1931.

HND: Who was the first person you told your idea to?

Daniel: Dennis Johnson and I initially discussed the movie.

HND: Describe the film in three words.

Daniel: Western crime thriller HND: Most exciting moment from filming.

Daniel: We filmed at the Fairview bridge and tunnel. A beautiful and iconic North Dakota location.

HND: Biggest obstacle while filming.

Daniel: It was a massive logistical undertaking.

Hundreds of extras.

Dozens of vintage cars. We built the set of an entire town. We filmed in a warehouse converted into a sound studio.

HND: What do you hope people say after they see the film?

Daniel: Powerful and beautiful filmmaking.

HND: Is there anything else you would like to add?

Daniel: Tickets are available to Red Carpet premieres at www.endoftheropefilm.com

END OF THE ROPE WILL PREMIERE IN THEATERS THROUGHOUT THE REGION BEGINNING THIS SPRING

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LIGHTS OUT

By Amber Burke

I

am closing my eyes because the lights have come back on. These blinding glints across the field of my vision, and the dryness in my mouth, in my throat, remind me of being on the snow-covered prairie delivering mail.

“Dad, they’re not turning the lights out,” my son Cliff says to me. “We talked to them. The lights are always on.”

Those winters delivering mail, the prairie was like a hospital room with no walls, white and bright. I feel again the way I felt when I shoveled my black Ford truck out of the snow, again and again, to make it through the fifty-two miles of my dirt-road route outside Napoleon. Shovel after shovel.

My shovel might as well have been a spoon. My heart was as strong as two hearts, my muscles bone-tired. And the wind ripped the moisture from my eyes. But sometimes I would feel a presence alongside me, looking after me.

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After enough shoveling, I felt warm. Once I cleared enough snow, I would get in the truck and drive toward the horizon, awash in brightness, the sky indistinguishable from the land. And I felt sure that if I kept driving, I would get right to Heaven with my mail. This was a long time ago.

“They said they’re not turning the lights out, Dad, did you hear?” That’s Janie. She sounds a lot like her mother. And looks like her, too.

My son is here, and my daughter is here. They do not understand me, my children, but their not-understanding does not annoy me the way it usually would because they seem to be far away.

On the other side of something. Janie rubs my arms. My arms feel far away, but she makes them

come back when she rubs them. She makes my arms out of nothing. She knows how to do these things that women can do: make something out of nothing. The kinds of things my wife could do.

Maggie. I came back from Iwo Jima, uninjured, though minus two tonsils, and I asked Maggie to marry me. I had never had a girlfriend. I had never gone anywhere with Maggie alone. But we got married, and it turned out that I loved her and that she made excellent kuchen. When we were poor those first years, when Cliff was a baby yet, she had a way of making coffee with almost no grounds, coffee that still tasted strong. She was as good as any woman. Like the sky and the earth in Napoleon.

Good and real and there.

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The sun seemed to be in line with the earth, I was in line with them both, and I felt lifted like the sun was pulling me up more than the earth was pulling me down.

“I’m thirsty,” I say. My eyes are closed and my mouth is closed. There is something against my lips.

“Open your mouth a little. They took the tubes out so you could drink.”

“I don’t want the tubes,” I say.

“We know, Dad,” Janie says. “They took them out.”

She is a good daughter. Sometimes, I would take her with me on my route, and the farmers waiting by their mailboxes leaned into the truck, and said, “Little girl, do you want to come home with me?”

She always shook her head no. She never wanted to go home with them. Then she grew up and moved away, but she’s back now. I’m sorry she doesn’t have a husband because she is soft and patient and would make a good wife.

“How long do I have?” I ask now. Or I might have asked earlier.

“You’re going to make it to Easter, but not Memorial Day,” the doctor says.

“Who cares about Memorial Day?” I say. One day isn’t enough to remember anything. One needs years to do the work of remembering.

I don’t know if Memorial Day is soon or a long time from now. I don’t even know if this is winter or summer. It could be either, or both, for sometimes I feel very cold and sometimes I feel very hot. I was cold before but now I am hot. My blood is stinging.

Summers, the mail route was easier, but I had the farm to think about. And it hurt my body, the work I did: heaving the rocks out of the way of my red tractor, bending, standing, seldom taking a break even to drink. I would look up at noon and see the sun right above me. When it beat straight down on me, when I was most unprotected, I felt most protected. I was sore and hot, my mouth was dry, and the sun was smack in the center of the sky, right above my patch of earth. The sun seemed to 10

be in line with the earth, I was in line with them both, and I felt lifted, like the sun was pulling me up more than the earth was pulling me down. I did not mind the soreness or the heat or the thirst.

“My throat,” I say.

“Do you want some ice cream, Dad?” Janie asks.

The lights go out again, and my own blood is burning; there is a terrible sharpness in my gut. It amazes me what the body can do to itself. The pain feels like it must be coming from outside, but it is coming from inside.

“Look, he’s in pain. Look how his arms go up,” Janie says.

“They all do that.” My eyes are closed, and I don’t know this voice, but I know it is a nurse-voice.

Cliff is asking the nurse if I have had my morphine shot, and the nurse is saying she will check.

They don’t always do things right. My wife was at this hospital twenty years ago. I know she would have lived longer if Cliff had been here, telling them what to do, but no one thought it was a big problem, what she had wrong with her. Then she died because someone made a mistake, and no one was with her.

My two children are getting along. Cliff is glad that Janie is here, and Janie is glad that Cliff is here. People think sometimes that I am not paying attention, but I have always paid attention. Cliff and Janie don’t always get along, and I don’t blame either of them. Of course Cliff would resent the sister he sees as flighty, a wanderer; Janie would resent Cliff for being dogged and dutiful always. I have resented Cliff sometimes because of how much he reminds me of me.

The pain whites out my thoughts. It is worse than when they took my tonsils out in the tent in Iwo Jima. I wouldn’t have said anything about my tonsils swelling, if the pain hadn’t been so bad, because they didn’t have much equipment. But the pain was bad, so I told them, and they reached into my throat with burning-hot tongs. Snip, snip. I bled and bled.

I could have bled to death, and what was there to stop it?

“He got his morning shot.” The nurse is back.

“He’s supposed to get an evening shot, too,” Cliff says.

“I don’t know anything about that,” the nurse says.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” I say.

Cliff helps me to the bathroom. I am shocked by my reflection in the mirror. If possible, I look worse than I feel. Whiter than white, in a backless papery gown, and so hunched over. I don’t like it when people don’t stand up straight. It seems disrespectful. To something.

“I can’t straighten up,” I say.

“That’s okay,” Cliff says.

“I’m still taller than you!” I say.

He is holding me, but it is a free fall to the toilet seat. Things still work weakly but getting up again takes the cooperation of armies.

The walk back to the bed is worse than the walk from the bed; the steps I take yank on my gut. I can feel this thing eating me from the inside. Someone needs to reach in with tongs and take out all my organs and all my bones.

Then Janie is serving me ice cream: the spoon clicks against my teeth. I feel better. People eat ice cream, and they feel better. I get tired; I nod off; I wake when I get another shot. The hurt of the shot has become the same as relief.

I laugh a little bit.

“He’s laughing,” Janie says. “He doesn’t know what’s going on.”

I know. I know who’s here, and who isn’t. I know Cliff’s son isn’t here. I know Josh let him down. He is not like Cliff, never was.

There’s nothing here, I remember my grandson saying when Cliff visited me on the farm. This was when his son was a child, not long after Maggie died. I was lonely, so I was glad Cliff brought him: Josh, a little boy with his hair cut like mine when I was in the Navy.

I stood outside with the child and tried to think what I could show him because what he said pained

me. I was going on seventy then. With my two pensions, I’d stopped having to farm to get by, so it was true that there were no more cows, no more chickens, not even wheat, just long grass that bent and chuffed with the wind, and the government gave me a little money not to plant the land. I donated the money because I didn’t think it was right to get money for not working. But what was here was not nothing.

“Look around!” I said. I showed my grandson where there’d once been a sod hut. I showed him a wooden fence slouching in the grass, the strapping power lines. It was early in my marriage when the power lines came this far into the country, and, the farmhouses lit up, all our wives discovered how dirty everything was. They cleaned and cleaned.

After that, we men had to take off our shoes on the doorstep whenever we came inside, even though the dust still rose from our clothes. Even though without shoes, we felt vulnerable and small and like children.

“What?” The child didn’t understand what I was trying to show him. But all around us was so much: a sprawl of land below a deep cup of sky! Ragged clouds blowing fast. The land in Napoleon felt more like land than the land in other places, the sky more like sky. More there. Maybe because I could see so much of both.

“Your dad is from here. I’m from here,” I said to my grandson. I tried to make him understand. “My grandfather came here with a spoon in his boot.”

Imagine! I said. I imagined: he comes as a young man from Odessa, drives his ox and cart who knows how far, gets here. He’s dusty. He’s covered in dust. It must have felt like a mail route that lasted for states and states. It must have been that hard.

He brings his spoon and he brings his wife, and his wife brings a rock to weigh down the sauerkraut pot because in Russia rocks were precious. All to get to land that is nothing like Russia, where there are no grapes growing. Where there are so many rocks!

But he built a sod hut, and the earth kept him safe inside itself. It was a good hut: even when cows walked on its roof, which they did, more than once, it did not break. And now that house that 11

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even the weight of a bull could not bow is no more, and you, child, are here, made out of something that is gone.

What I am saying is perfect and clear, and the child I am talking to looks at me like he understands everything I am telling him. I suddenly know that this is not happening, not what really happened. I know that because I have never spoken words that were perfect and clear, and no children have ever looked at me like they understand me.

And I am crying because I know I am not on the farm. I sold it not long after Cliff’s visit.

“He’s upset,” Janie says. “Don’t be upset, Dad.” I pipe down by the time the priest sits down and starts talking about his own mother dying in this same room, in the empty bed next to mine. He goes on and on.

“I’ll mail you a pamphlet,” he says, “on grief.”

“Not a good father,” I say.

“You are a good father,” Janie says.

“He’s not a good priest. The man who was just here,” I say. Or maybe he wasn’t just here. Maybe it was after my wife died that a priest visited me and talked all about himself and his own mother. Weeks later, a pamphlet came in the mail with instructions for mourning. It told me not to give away my wife’s things for at least a year. I had already given away all my wife’s things.

Then the room is full again, and the good priest, the one I like, with the hair with white spots like a deer’s, comes and gives me last rites. He wets my hands and my feet and my face with oil, blesses me, and I can feel warmth coming down like wet sunlight.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” the good priest says in his pious voice that sometimes squeaks. “You have excellent timing. It’s almost Easter, and every Easter renews the promise that resurrection awaits us all.”

“I don’t know about that,” I say, though, by the time the words escape my mouth, the priest is already gone. I do not know about the resurrection business.

A bunch of women show up and see a stone that’s been rolled away from the mouth of the tomb. They go in: no body there. My first thought would have been thieves. Moving a stone out of the way seemed like something a man would have to do to get in. Not 12

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a god, to get out. Couldn’t a god go right through the roof?

“Dad, you’re going to see Mom,” Janie says.

“I don’t know about that,” I say.

“It’s the morphine,” Cliff says. “He knows he will see Mom.” I don’t know that I will see my wife. When I found out she had died, I felt something drain from me, and I realized that the sense of a comforting and righteous presence I’d had watching me for most of my life was not Jesus or God but my wife. I could feel her attention on me even when she was not there. And then, after she died, I could not feel her watching me anymore: all the snow I shoveled, I shoveled alone.

Which made me stop believing in Heaven. If there is a Heaven, I think, I would be able to feel my wife still watching me from it.

Unless, of course, she is busy.

But I have kept going to church, because what else is there to do? What else is there for me? Catholicism is the key I have in my pocket. If Catholicism is the right key, I will be able to open the box, but it might be that I don’t have the right key. Or it might be that I will open up the mailbox, but the mailbox will be empty.

“I won’t have a letter,” I hear myself saying.

“Shhh, Dad. You’ll have a letter,” Cliff says.

I am outside. It is almost noon, and the sun is above us. Cliff is next to me, interlacing his hands behind his neck and looking up. He’s telling me to sell the farm.

“I’m not ready,” I tell him.

“Dad, just consider it while you’re lucky enough to have someone who wants to buy. Otherwise, this land will go back to the buffalo.”

“Don’t talk to me about the buffalo,” I say. It insults me to hear about the buffalo. My grandfather did not wrest this land from nature, I did not spend my whole life moving rocks from it, just so I could surrender it to the buffalo.

“Think about selling, before it’s worth nothing.”

How could it be worth nothing? The sky is such a strong blue that there could be another sky above it, the land so solid there could be another earth

The land in Napoleon felt more like land than the land in other places, the sky more like sky. beneath it.

“I’m not going to farm, Dad. Neither is he.” He motions with his chin to his son. Josh plays with the mailbox; the red metal flag squeaks up, squeaks down.

I don’t want my children or my grandson to have to work as hard as I worked. But I want them to want to keep the farm. It would be good for them. It would keep them from wanting foolish things, if they had the farm to come back to. But they go someplace farther when they decide to travel; they go to big cities or beaches. I have never much cared for cities, where buildings are like paperweights pressing down the land. And I was at war on the ocean, and that was enough ocean for me: oceans are full of blasting ships and smoke, dying and bobbing men.

The land ringing my flat farm has always been a thousand-mile trench against the ocean. I have felt safe. And sometimes I think that if my children would keep the farm, they would be safe, too.

I sold the farm. I moved to Bismarck to be closer to Cliff. Good thing. His son left and never came back. Cliff was always too easy on him. I was not easy on my children and now, look: they are tending to me.

Sleep is like a dark pond, and I go into it, I come out of it, and I go into it, come out, and sometimes I feel like I am both in it and out of it. Then, I drop suddenly into a depth I had not expected: my whole self sinks under water, as if I have spoons in my boots and rocks in my pockets, and I am surprised to find that once you go deep enough, once it gets dark enough, it starts to get lighter again.

I have nearly made it to another surface: a top of the pond on the bottom of the pond. That’s it, I think. I found it. The light, all this time, has been right there, on the other side of the darkness.

I open my eyes with a start. “When did I die?

Before midnight or after midnight?” I ask.

“Dad, you’re not dead,” Cliff is saying. He’s the only one here now, and I’m glad no one else heard me.

“I know I’m not dead,” I scoff. Of course, I know that.

“It’s before midnight. It’s eleven.”

“What would make me go off my rocker like that?” I do not want to go off my rocker. Or, if I go off my rocker, I would like to go back to the farm where I grew up and raised my own family. I would not like to spend my last hours alive thinking that I am dead.

That seems a waste of time.

“You’re on some pretty strong meds. You have a drip now,” Cliff says.

They are talking about bringing me to Cliff’s house, but they cannot find a nurse. I know it is hard to find a home nurse in this city because there aren’t enough nurses for all the old people who are always dying. The old people come from the farms to be closer to children and hospitals. An army of old people, marching to cities to die.

“He’s not getting any treatment here. He can’t stay. We have to move him to a nursing home if we can’t find a home health care worker,” a nurse’s voice says.

“I want to stay where I am,” I say. I may say.

I’m on the farm yet. The sun, the sky, the grandson putting rocks in the mailbox, taking them out. I look around. I understand that it is desolate, but there is something in the desolation that is good.

Life here isn’t easy, and it isn’t beautiful. But what is there to be proud of if you survive in ease and beauty? If I brag from time to time about my height or my strength or my smarts, it is because these are all things that I eked from this stony patch of earth.

I look at those thin trees, the rows of trees planted to block the wind: they’ve got to do many times the work of ordinary trees, to hold down the land, to keep the dust from blowing, because there’s so much land and so much wind and so few of them.

Their branches are always shaking as if, from the inside, they are trying to tear themselves apart, raise themselves up: long-dutiful trees, ready for their own assumptions. Those are the trees that deserve admiration.

13

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&

Life here isn’t easy, and it isn’t beautiful. But what is there to be proud of if you survive in ease and beauty?

Cliff is shaving my face.

“You came back,” I say to my son.

“I never left,” he says.

It is not good for young children to watch old men die, but my own children are old children now, almost the age I was when I lost everything, my wife and my farm. It is good to watch old men die, at a certain age, because you have to learn how to die yourself. I have watched my brothers and sisters die and my parents die, and my greatest pain is that I did not see my wife die. I suppose it is my turn. There are so few ropes holding me here.

“Are you okay, Dad?” Cliff asks.

“It hurts,” I say. The razor stops.

“I pressed the button, Dad. It should stop hurting soon,” Cliff says.

I can hear the razor scraping against my skin again, but my chin is down somewhere else, at the bottom of a steep slope.

“How does that feel, Dad?” Cliff asks. My hand is on my face. I wonder if Cliff put it there for me.

“Better?”

“I know I was hard on you,” I say to my son.

“It’s okay.”

“I know I was hard on you, but look how you turned out,” I tell him.

There is a long pause, and I am not sure he heard me. He says, “You’ve been a good dad, and I love you.” I can tell we are alone, because of how his voice sounds. Young. “We’ll all be okay here.

We’ll miss you but we’ll be okay. Don’t worry about us.”

I know what he says is meant to be an untethering, but now I notice that I am dying in the middle of a story that I will never know the end to: who will tend to my children, when they die, the way they are tending to me? Where are their children?

“I’m not ready,” I say. “I’m not ready.” I hold onto the ropes.

“The farm is falling apart. It’s time to let it go,” Cliff is saying, as we look toward the horizon. “You can sell. Go anywhere.”

It is noon. The sun is straight overhead, and light 14

is coming down over us like the ribs of the umbrella.

Our shadows disappear beneath our feet. There is a feeling at this time of day that the sun is not ascending, not descending; it is where it is, and each time it’s there, I think it might stay.

“Come on, Dad. Let go.”

I clutch at the farm with my eyes; I am sure this place is worth more than anyone knows: the sky above the sky, the land beneath the land.

The screen door creaks open.

There is a shadow that changes the weight of the hospital room, and I know someone else is here. I make out a figure framed by door. It looks like my wife’s.

“Dad, I’m back.”

I see my wife on the doorstep. “It’s time,” Maggie says, wiping her hands on her apron. Her hair is in its neat curls, and her spectacles reflect the sun.

Children come running. Whose children are these?

There are so many of them, all heading for the house together.

“Take off your shoes,” Maggie says.

The children take off their shoes quickly and run in, but I have to sit on the doorstep to unlace my boots, which takes a long time. When I have my boots off, I stand up, I go in through the screen door, and it is bright inside. So bright that I realize I am not inside: I am outside, standing with no shoes under the sun. Light on top of light on top of me. And behold: at last, I am rising; I am dust in the light. I am weightless in the noon. l

AMBER BURKE is from North Dakota. She is a graduate of Yale and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars who now teaches writing at the University of New Mexico in Taos. Her creative work has been published in magazines and literary journals including The Sun, Michigan Quarterly Review, Raleigh Review, Superstition Review, and Quarterly West, and her writing regularly appears in Yoga International.

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| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE |

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE |

T THE HUNTER OF LONE TRACTOR PLAIN

by Mark Holman

16

he Hunter turned his small all-terrain vehicle into the approach to a vast field split by a low grassy peak that extended a half mile ending at a slough hole. The raised hump that divided two areas stretched toward an old tractor sitting next to a tree’s broken and burned stump, just visible on the horizon atop a small island surrounded by cattails. The sky was blue with a handful of wispy clouds, the sun already dipping toward setting. On the island’s edge, the remaining bright yellow leaves of a tightly spaced grove of young cottonwoods shimmered and danced, reflecting the low sun in tiny flashes of light.

On one side of the rise lay the unkempt yet uniform rows of a recently harvested field of yellow corn stubble stretching to the edge of the far horizon where the standing stalks of an unharvested field stood. On the opposite side of the berm, an area of wild-looking grassland stretched to the horizon in a raucous yet pleasing mix of a thousand shades of gold, red, yellow, brown, and black swaying in the gentle late afternoon breeze.

The pleasant panorama, constructed from the season’s transient blend of light and space, gave everything a glinting gold-kissed hue in the low afternoon sun of late fall. The Hunter listened to the soft rustling of the grasses and caught a whiff of their pleasant dried smell. The only sounds were of the breeze, swaying plants, and the low hum of a combine somewhere past the horizon vibrating through the air. Judging by the dustiness of the skyline, the combine must be just a few miles away.

Stepping off the machine, The Hunter turned to reach for a bolt action rifle in a case attached to the ATV. Holding the gun up in the air with one hand, he pulled a clip of shells from his pocket, snapping it into place. Readjusting a small backpack on his back, he slipped the rifle across his shoulder. As he stepped onto the rise, he looked out at the field of dried, swaying plant life, whose desiccated multihued stalks waved in the light wind of the crisp November day, making the pleasant scratching sound of dried grass swaying in the breeze. So much more enjoyable than the wind that whipped and lashed the vast field to and fro the day before when he had to lower his head into the wind to stay

A nice day can wipe away worry about the past or the future. upright and keep windblown soil particles out of his eyes. How quickly something pleasant could turn tortuous by adding just a few miles per hour of wind or a few degrees of temperature. Today was good, though, and he would enjoy it. A nice day can wipe away worry about the past or the future.

The hump, created by the accumulation of soil atop an old fence line of indeterminate age, now buried and covered by a mix of plants, was a dull brown gleaming in the low sun that gave everything a gilded shine. At some point long ago, the soil presumably had come from the grassy field, like a carpet rolled up on one side of a room. Ignoring that wind had stripped a whole field of soil, past farmers had built a fenceline atop the buried one, like a new civilization building atop the remnants of an old one.

When the Hunter’s boss had bought the land from the old farmer, they dug up part of his pasture to plant corn but left the sandier part as grassland in a government program. To remove the fenceline, the Hunter had hooked a giant four-wheel drive tractor to one post with a chain before driving parallel to the fence. As he went, steel posts popped out like toothpicks, ending with a half mile of wire and posts bouncing and jiggling behind the machine like some insane land leveling contraption.

Later, he had buried the pile of twisted wire and posts with rocks, picked from the field, as if trying to erase the human and geologic past to create something new.

The top of the hump provided an excellent vantage point to survey the relatively flat topography. He put his binoculars to his eyes and scanned the terrain in all four directions. If there were a deer within range, he could see it standing here. Spinning ninety degrees from the grassy field, he looked closely at the yellowish corn stubble that was just tall enough to hide resting deer. On the 17

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | far edge of the horizon stood the unharvested cornfield, probably where they all were, he thought.

But as the day waned, he knew they would be moving from the safety of the field toward the water of the old slough hole with its broken-down, crumbling tractor and shattered tree.

He pulled back the bolt of the rifle to move a shell from the clip into the chamber, and as he did so, checking to make sure the safety was still on. Slinging the rifle on his shoulder again, he began to walk the half mile atop the old fence line, following the game trail along its peak. The well-trod path was kept open by a proliferation of local creatures that used it as the fastest track to the shelter and aqueous salubrity of the slough hole. The ancient, timeless wisdom of life to find the easiest path between two points was worth heeding. Paths first forged by wildlife became human trails and then roads.

Just then, a hen pheasant, blending into the ground until he almost stepped on her, jumped up, giving him a bit of a start, the rapid fluttering of its wings creating musical notes with the air as the brown and black-flecked creature strummed its wings, then glided to the ground. The commotion of the hen had caused something to start moving in the grass ahead of him. An explosion of movement a second later, and a group of small gray and cinnamon colored birds with a smaller half-moon downward curve in their wings took flight, landing hundreds of yards into the deep grass of the field. Watching the small, elegant 18

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | partridges land, he was now wondering why he hadn’t decided to bring a shotgun.

He thought briefly about putting away the rifle and pushing through the waist-high tangle of grass on one side of the rise or calf-high corn stubble on the other to chase up something. He quickly pushed the thought aside since stirring anything, let alone shooting, would disturb the peace of his primary goal for the day, the large whitetail buck he expected to see at the slough hole. All year he had been watching it move around the area while working in the fields, seeing it primarily at dusk around the slough hole.

Besides, high-stepping corn stalks to avoid getting stabbed in the leg by the razor-sharp spikes or leg pushing through wind-tangled dried grasses interwoven with spiky Russian thistle digging into his legs and thighs wasn’t as appealing as a stroll and high vantage point of the accumulated windblown hubris of human manipulation of nature.

As the sun dipped low, he remembered how he had spied the buck moving slowly near the slough hole the previous day as he dumped the last hopper of corn from the field into the grain cart. Tomorrow, he would take the final truckload on the long round trip to Grain Terminal One, where it would become fuel for some of the machines that grew the corn in the symbiotic cycle of plants feeding machines and machines growing plants.

The crow of a cock pheasant, far off in the corn stubble, brought him back to the moment. Pushing

aside the fantasy of bagging a pheasant, he looked ahead toward the broken and burned remnants of the great cottonwood on the small island. The jagged and scorched remains still stood taller than he did, and he was too young to remember when the tree was struck down by lightning years before. The charred, broken, and hollow remnants of the once great tree still stood high enough to be seen from the road, the charring acting as a preservative that had allowed it to remain for decades.

He had heard it had once been the largest cottonwood in the region and had been a striking sight in late fall when its leaves glowed an iridescent yellow in the waning sunshine.

The old farmer, whose family had owned the land for generations before selling it to his boss, who farmed half the county, had allowed people to walk the cattle trail that used to run at the base of the berm to see the natural wonder. That changed the night a combination of wind and lightning took down and burned the old tree whose broken, charred, decaying ruin still held power to instill awe. Standing inside its hollowed shell, one could still reach with outstretched arms and not touch the sides.

Pulling his gun from his shoulder to be ready for a deer to jump up, he continued to walk, stepping high to avoid a burrow dug into the side of the trail. He had been keeping one eye on the ground analyzing the scat and tracks of the many creatures who used the path to get a feel for what things might be in the

area. Walking over the burrow, he thought it might belong to the coyotes he heard yipping in the evenings after he had shut down the machines.

As one of the few raised areas in a mostly flat landscape, the old fence line, perforated with the burrows and holes of various creatures, served as a safe space for animals pushed to the margins of the fields by the constant human disturbance. It was common to hear the barking and yipping of coyotes at night. People said there was a time not so long ago that you didn’t hear coyotes. It was a time when the countryside had more people with more livestock, more guns, and more dogs. In a present that had given way to vast regions growing just a handful of plants and animals, the human environment had given way to one dominated by machines. In the handful of spaces where the machines weren’t, the wild things could thrive within chemically enforced boundaries.

He raised his rifle to his shoulder and glassed the slough ahead of him through the scope.

As he slowly moved the eyepiece across the island in the center, he spied the buck he had been watching all year, ambling just between the rusty old tractor and the carbonized stump of the giant cottonwood. It stood there browsing the ground, unaware of him. Was this the moment he had been thinking about all summer? He wavered between pulling the trigger and letting the buck go to savor the anticipation for another season or just letting such a wonderful creature keep

In a moment, tension transformed into the mixed joy of success and melancholic regret . . . living. Aiming for a moment, he assessed that it was an easy shot. Quietly clicking the safety off, he held the rifle tightly to his shoulder, staring down the scope’s crosshairs to center the slowly moving deer. He tracked it moving through the high tan grasses that denoted the dryer land that followed the edge where the cattails signaled water-saturated ground and shallow water at the slough’s edge. Centering the crosshairs of the scope as it slowly walked, he aimed. When he was sure of a clear shot, he squeezed the trigger, and the gun let out a booming crack, recoiling hard against his shoulder. It always came as a shock to break nature’s relative silence with the violence of sound and action.

In a moment, tension transformed into the mixed joy of success and melancholic regret at striking and watching a fellow creature fall to the ground. He always wondered if he should say a prayer or conduct some ritual to honor the creature that had paid the ultimate price so that he could hang its horns on the wall and eat. He always came up empty since, in his world of cornfed consumerism, deer were resources like corn to be managed and harvested, not beings that deserved some reciprocity.

He arrived at the slough’s edge, where the buried fence line ran to

the edge of the small island. Due to the frosty nights, It had lost its pleasant herbaceous smell, most evocative on still evenings as the fog settled over it. Stepping across the squat land bridge formed by the buried fence line barely rising above the cattails’ fluffy heads, he moved onto the tiny island. He looked at the old tractor, a heaping hunk of metal whose once bright paint was faded after decades in the sun and beginning to erode to spots of rusty roughness. The Hunter could see that the head was removed from the engine as if someone had attempted to fix it or salvage parts. Three carcasses, a plant, an animal, and a machine lay within feet of one another on the tiny island. For a moment he imagined the great Tree of Life broken, its four-legged fruit splayed on the ground due to the excesses of the dead tractor. In some parallel reality of the multiverse, the same tractor thrived next to a healthy deer and tree. A different world was only as far away as the imagination.

Stepping past the tractor, he leaned the rifle against its engine, catching a whiff of its pleasant fermented mix of old dirt, organic matter, grease, and oil that gave it the distinctive smell of forgotten old machines. Walking toward the buck, the Hunter noticed it lay on something higher than the surrounding shades of brown 19

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | grass and still green leafy spurge.

The deer lay on its side, legs splayed outward, looking peaceful.

He kicked the tips of his boots as he walked and hit something solid just before reaching the deer.

Removing his pack as he knelt, he felt the edges of something hard buried beneath season after season of layered dried grass, wrapping it tight like the arms of a wicker chair. Intrigued, he grabbed the deer by the legs and rolled it off. He pulled a short knife out of its sheath and began to slice the dead grass stalks that cocooned the metal in a tangle in various states of decomposition toward grass made humus at its bottom.

Pulling the iron remains of an old walking plow from decades of slowly being buried and consumed by the earth, he stood it up in its natural position.

As he knelt, gazing for a moment at the unique find and catching his breath from the exertion, he noticed for the first time a sky crisscrossed by the tracks of aircraft contrails moving in every direction and others stretching from ground to sky of a type he had never seen. It was common to see the Air Force from nearby bases doing things in the sky. Watching them broke up the long days sitting on the tractor, but this was more than usual. For so much activity, it was still oddly quiet, just a low rumble, barely audible below the drone of the distant combine and the rustle of the remaining golden leaves of the small cottonwoods at the edge of the island. The display of looping contrails and rising rockets danced in a strangely quiet show 20

| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE | across the dimming blue of the sky; shimmering, evanescent fluffy white lines breaking through the slow transition from blue to orange to darkness. A plastic bag caught in the branches of one of the small cottonwoods, fluttering in a chaotic unnatural way, fractured the trance of the almost silent ballet in the sky, his mind returning to the moment.

The setting sun spread light out in deep reds and oranges touched by wisps of purple, and the shadows of the tractor and the shell of the dead tree were getting longer. The relatively warm afternoon air had turned cooler, tinged with the touch of comfort that comes with the pleasant moment of the day’s completion between light and dark.

The lengthening shadows of the tractor and tree spurred him to work on gutting the deer.

He began to cut open the chest cavity, regretting that he had used his knife to cut out the old plow.

He pulled out a small sharpener and gave it a few quick strikes to refresh the blade. He sliced the chest cavity, splitting the pelvis and pulling it open to reveal the warmth inside, like turning on a small heater.

He began to pull the innards from their viscous attachments on the sides of the body cavity, using his knife to trim as he went, his hands warmed by the action. He pulled the guts out and dragged them to the side into a pile. The coyotes would eat well tonight, and that spot would sprout something new in the spring from the blood and fluids that soaked into the ground.

His hands warmed from the body of the deer, but feeling the chill because of his lighter dress; he decided to start a fire. Even though it was an unseasonably warm hunting season, whatever that meant anymore, the chill in the air was enough that he wouldn’t have to rush back and could hang the deer in the garage and pull off the hide before the body cooled down fully. So many things had been turned upside down by weather that no longer followed old rules, but this was a nice moment, and he would savor it.

Tipping the old plow back on its side so that it lay somewhat flat to form a fire ring, he gathered some dried fallen wood from around the old cottonwood stump. Breaking up tiny twigs, he made a small pyramid in the center of the half circle formed by the plow. Pulling a piece of crumpled paper from his pocket, he placed it in the center, setting it alight with a match from his other pocket. The flames quickly engulfed the dry wood, and he began to pile successively larger pieces onto the growing fire. Soon, he was collecting larger chunks pried off the broken tree by dragging uncut deadfall to the edge that could be slowly fed into the fire as needed. When he finished, he could grab the unburned ends and throw them in the little spot of open water at the center of the slough.

Reaching inside the body cavity of the deer, he cut out one of the tenderloins and rinsed it with water from a bottle in his pack. Shaping a makeshift skewer from a stick, he sculpted it

quickly to clean the bark, offering fresh, clean wood to push the meat through. Using a relatively clean piece of the wood he had gathered, he cut the meat into cubes before skewering and placed them over the fire to cook, not directly over the fire, but off to the side to slowly cook, fashioning a makeshift spit from some sticks.

He took out cans of spaghetti and beans from his pack, opening them with a small knife in his pocket. Pouring the contents into the small pot, he mixed them with a stick and set them on one side of the flame. He then walked over to the small rock pile and looked for something to use as a plate to put everything on. On the glaciated prairie, most stones were roughly spherical, lacking flat sides or sharp corners unless broken. He found a soccer ball-sized piece of granite with a flat side sheared off, possibly by striking the old plow long ago.

His little meal cooking and smelling good, he stopped and sat down on the springy cushion of grass and pulled a small thermos from his pack, pouring himself a cup of coffee. Taking a long sip, he stared at the deepening colors of the sunset laced with fluffy contrails and considered the present moment. The colors of the little fire almost matched those of the waning evening, crackling and glowing in shades of red, orange, blue, and yellow that blended with the sunset at its edges. The tip of the sun was disappearing, and the sky just had that slim edge of light along the western horizon tinged a deep orange, turning dark.

The opposite sky was already

beginning to show a few stars of the slow transition from day to night. The moon’s outline began to appear as part of the seamless daily handoff between the sun and moon.

The gentle cacophonies of insects and birds that made sundown so pleasant in warm months were gone in the frozen evenings, replaced by a new harmony of a few titering sparrows and the squawk of a crow in the nearby quivering grove of cottonwoods. Relaxing, he watched as the diminishing light at the world’s edge was slowly giving way to the new world of stars on the far edge of the heavens to his back—the daily ending of one world and the beginning of another.

Before long, the tenderloin skewer was sizzling. Taking it off the fire, he put it to the side to cool on the plate rock. It cooled fast on the cold stone, and he tested a piece chewing slowly. Next, he grabbed the pot with a glove and set it on the rock to cool. He took a bite of the mixed beans and spaghetti. As he chewed, he looked off in the distance toward the now dark, blood-red sky and the slim line of the remaining glow of the dipping sun. Enjoying the convivial moment by the fire, roasted venison, with beans with spaghetti, the sky flashed bright, and his vision went blank. Before his brain could even wonder what had happened, a wave so hot it incinerated all wondering washed over him. He never saw the impressive mushroom cloud curling upward in a mix of reds, oranges, grays, and blacks above

the last sliver of the setting sun.

The tractor stood as a silent witness, the only thing not made of earth left standing in a landscape that stretched as far as eyes could see if there had still been eyes to see.

People returned to the place long after the trees and grass started to grow again. In that place, new people began to call things by new names. The iron brick of the tractor, the lone landmark that hadn’t been burned away by nuclear fire, stood out in the terrain. To that lonely place, with its old tractor, revered as one of the magical feats of the mistshrouded past when machines transformed and consumed the world, they gave the name: Lone Tractor Plain.

The world moved on. The memory of what had come before carried on in myth, story, and fragmentary texts in an old tongue few could read. In this new world, the sun rises and sets, the stars and moon shine, the wind blows, and life bursts forth in every imaginable color. On Lone Tractor Plain, generations of life come and go, and the tractor endures; the tractor abides. l

MARK HOLMAN lives in Williston, North Dakota, where he enjoys writing in his spare time. This story is a prequel to “The Tractor and the Tree,” published in the 2020 Sense of Place issue.

21

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| SENSE OF PLACE ISSUE |

AN EXCERPT FROM

NINETEEN FORTY-FIVE

by Brian Striefel

T

he train departs well after midnight, and by dawn, we roll into the first snow squall. Four days in a train sounds straightforward, but North Dakota storms completely erase the landscape, and by Minot, a full-blown blizzard halts our progress. The early blizzard will hold us up twelve hours, according to the engineer. Truthfully, I need those twelve hours to reload. I need some time to get my confidence back. I’m fearless in Browning, why not the world?

The train chugs into town. I stare through the window at snow blowing parallel to the train, lifting up over the top into a swirl on the other side, changing directions like the thoughts inside my head.

I close my eyes. The falling snow disappears, replaced by my own swirling doubts, yet there’s nothing out there that I can’t face, step by step.

I need my feet firmly planted, and my eyes open, all of the time.

The porter’s familiar limp moves up our aisle. I’ve heard about Minot’s side streets, places that few outsiders see. Channeling those thoughts, John asks a simple question.

“Hey, Charlie, what would you advise for supper here?”

Our amiable black porter thinks a minute. His eyes scrunch at both sides, and his constant smile widens a bit.

“You a little adventurous, John? ’Cause the best places here call for a little adventure. The best places here is on Third Street, ‘High Third.’ ” “Charlie, I would say a little adventure might be in order tonight, so what can we get on Third Street?”

“Y’all can get anything you want on High Third,” Charlie says, “and I mean anything. Saul’s is an excellent choice. Try Saul’s Barbeque. Tell ’em Charlie asked about Luella and her pet mouse, ask ’em about that.”

Charlie laughs, maybe remembering some dalliance from the past.

“What do you mean anything?” I ask. “Anything might get John in trouble?”

“Not that John looks to stay out of trouble,” John says.

“Well, you do have a pretty lady on your arm, so you don’t need none o’ that. So let’s say a little liquor even though it’s Sunday, and a card game if that catches your fancy.”

22

“Oh, no,” I say.

Charlie laughs out loud again. “Men likes poker,” he says, “all of ’em, black men, too.”

The storm has already passed through Minot, and a warm south wind reminds us that it’s only October after all. We walk up Main Street as directed, past Saunder’s Drug Store, and across Central Avenue.

Peals of laughter halt us at the door, temporarily propped open by a slim brunette waving at some friends inside.

She holds the door open for us.

“Are you going in? Good luck with Al, and don’t say I didn’t warn you about his jokes. Nothing’s sacred in this town.”

I shrug my shoulders and pull John inside the Terrace. Glass blocks scatter natural light around an elegant circular bar. To our right, a hundred bottles of wine and liquor wait for purchase inside a glass display case.

“You come in for the joke?” a large man asks. “Well, it’s no joke. I’m Al, Alfred Emil, and that was my neighbor, Bette.

I’ve been trying to ask her sister Bernice out for some time. Bette always promises to line us up, but she’s kinda protective of her big sister.”

“Maybe her sister needs protecting?”

I ask.

“Oh, Bernice can take care of herself.

Anyway, I went to the doctor today, and he wrote me a prescription, are you ready?” Al sits on a leather bar stool nearest the door. From the looks of his biceps, I guess he owns a farm or works the railroad.

“Sure,” John says. “I’m definitely ready for a joke.”

“Alright, I go to the doctor about all my aches and pains, and he looks me over a long time, and he writes me a prescription, you know what it says? It says ‘Prescription to cure a bachelor’s 23

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aches; deliver to the man ten yards of silk—with a woman wrapped in it.’ ” The small crowd erupts again, more to Al’s delivery than the joke itself. His mischievous smile and his exaggerated gestures endear him to anyone he meets. Al buys us each a beer, a Schlitz, because that is what Al thinks everyone should drink.

I quiz him a bit about this woman he wants to date.

“You got to see Bette on the way out, just change the black hair to blond. One sister is as beautiful as the other. Their mother died young, and those girls kinda raised each other, so they’re pretty tight.”

“Bette’s beautiful, that’s for sure,” I say. “You live around here?”

“Southwest about thirty miles.

You traveling through?”

“Headed east,” John says. “All the way to New York.”

“Best food around is over that direction a few blocks.” He motions west with his thumb. “Any business along Third Street.”

“We’re heading to Saul’s,” John says. “How’s that?”

“My personal favorite,” Al says.

“Saul’s barbeque could make a grown man cry.”

“As long as I can keep us out of trouble,” I say.

Al looks around the room.

“Keep your nose clean. Saul’s is a fun-loving place.”

Twenty minutes later, we thank Al for his hospitality. He directs us west on a path already trampled through the snow toward “High Third.” Brick buildings hold the smell of coal smoke and vehicle exhaust.

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John pulls me close, and I feel warm. He walks in deeper snow and guides me down the beaten path. A slushy pool blocks our way, and he carries me in his arms.

I wonder how our lives would change if this war ended today.

The Avalon, the Coffee Bar, the Twilight Inn, the Parrot―Third Street bustles with brightly lit signs that overlook a broad river valley north and west. Cars pack every side street despite the storm. We walk into Saul’s Barbeque. The floor is worn clean, the odors smoky-tasty, the atmosphere abuzz with lively chatter. This isn’t a church convention crowd for sure, but some of those folks are here, the fun ones that don’t talk about High Third when they leave.

Saul’s menu sums up his establishment well. John holds it in one hand. The index finger of his other hand taps some interesting offerings: pork hocks and cabbage, pork rinds, sausage and grits, chicken feet. We order the smoked pork hocks. John mentions that Charlie the porter sent us, and a shot of whiskey accompanies John’s coffee.

Middle-aged businessmen crowd the tables, along with a few couples, and a handful of military men. Four black waitresses rush about, keeping tables full and customers satisfied—our waitress visits near the end of the meal.

John deals an imaginary card deck by his lap where nobody else can see. The young black waitress studies him. One hand drops to her hip, the other rests on our table.

“What’choo trying to show me?”

“Charlie the train porter sent us over. He loves everything about this place.”

“Describe Charlie for me,” she says.

“Well, he’s about your height, twice your weight, with a hearty laugh almost like a crow, and he said to ask about Luella’s pet mouse if that’s helpful.”

“Oh, you know, alright,” she says, her voice dropping. “And I’m Luella, by the way. Tell you what, make sure there’s an extra dollar in your tip, and you both want to use the washroom down that hall to the right.”

“John and Abby here, Luella,” John says.

“Nice meeting you, John and Abby.” She departs with practiced sway.

“C’mon John,” I say.

“Oh, just for an hour, Abby.

We’ve got nothing else going on for the next ten hours.”

The tip turns into a five. The washroom holds a toilet and sink opposite a broom closet, but one minute after we close the door, the broom closet opens from the other side, and a muscular black man eyes us both. He’s stout, athletic, handsome, and well-dressed.

“You friends of Charlie?”

“Yes sir, we are,” John says, “John and Abby from Montana.

We’re acquaintances of Al Emil, too. He bought us a Schlitz down at the Terrace, told us a bad joke.”

The man looks us up and down.

“Well, come on in, John and Abby, I’ve got a chair for you, sir. Ladies are not allowed at the tables, but you are welcome at the bar, and we have anything you might like to

drink tonight.”

He leads us through a false door sealed from the backside with wooden blocks. We walk down a stairway and into a lively poker room filled with cigarette smoke. Two black girls in skimpy outfits hustle drinks out to four crowded gambling tables.

“Right over here, sir. My name is Saul and welcome to my establishment.” A familiar laugh roars above the rest. Al Emil slaps his cards down on the nearest table.

“He beat us here,” John says.

“He’ll beat you in cards, too,” Saul says. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.”

“John plays pretty well,” I say.

Saul smiles. “Not tonight. I’m gonna start you off at a different table.” He motions John toward an open chair.

I sit down next to a pretty blonde at the bar. She looks familiar.

“Oh, another gambling widow for the night. They take us out for supper, and this place just pulls them away. My name’s Bernice.”

“I’m Abby, nice to meet you, Bernice. You’ve been down here before?”

“Oh, several times. My husband and Saul were good friends, which isn’t really a good thing, but whatcha gonna do?”

“You know Al Emil?”

“Everyone knows Al Emil.”

“Let me buy you a drink, Bernice.”

“Well drinks aren’t cheap, dear.

It’s Sunday, but Saul has no liquor license anyway. You know, this place started during prohibition

and didn’t bother with a license when the government changed their minds.”

“You live in Minot, Bernice?”

“Right on Main Street over a clothing store. My first husband wrapped his drunken carcass and our new car around a tree a few years back, so I’m raising a little girl myself. Her name is Dorothy.”

“So, you and Al got a thing going?”

“I work as a railroad ticket agent and help the girls down here on weekends. Al here treats Dorothy and me very well. He’s a gentleman, and after the first man, I know what I want.”

“I’m glad you found him, Bernice.” I look around the room and laugh. “We met him downtown at the Terrace. He’s quite a character, a very likable character.

He keeps looking over here at you.

All the men sneak a peek over here every couple minutes.”

“How about you, girl, and this handsome serviceman, bestlooking guy in the place. He couldn’t take his eyes off you when he followed you in, let me tell you that. He keeps glancing over here, too, gonna lose his butt at cards.”

“His name’s John, and we met a few weeks back.”

“You really like him.”

“Oh, I don’t know.”

“Well you make a perfect couple, this big handsome guy and a beautiful redhead, almost like a picturebook. I can tell right away you know your way around men, too, around people. You’re a little salty. Redheads always come out a little salty.”

“I don’t know about that either.”

“You’re sitting in an illegal gambling hall, drinking bootlegged liquor with a stranger, and you could own the place.”

“Actually, my confidence needed a boost, and you sure are helping. You see, I’ve never left Montana until now, never done anything to speak of, and now we’re riding a train to New York.

John must return to the war, and I’ll volunteer as a nurse.”

“I’ve been all over, girl,” Bernice says. “My father Bill liked to travel, and I can tell you right now, you’re spirited, bright-eyed, good looking—you can get anything you want anywhere you want it. Use those eyes, use those curves, a little demure smile. Never, never let them see you sweat.”

“Anybody ever see you sweat, Bernice?”

“Not since I grew up enough to know how men work. I married too young, thought that men made all the decisions, but that’s what they want you to think. They’ll do anything you want IF you let them make the decision that you lead them to.”

I laugh a long time at her words. She’s beautiful, that’s for sure, not with the haughtiness that usually accompanies beauty. She’s lived her share of heartache. She’s cleaned manure off her shoes. She’s coughed on dust along gravel roads, cried during childbirth, and buried an unwholesome husband. She’s a good sister to the brunette named Bette and probably a very good mother too.

“You’re right, Bernice. They’ll do 25

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anything you want if you let them make the decision that you lead them to. I know you’re right, but I never heard it in words. Thank you.”

“You are most welcome, my dear. Just remember that the men are in charge, but they’re still men. Think about how you look at them, then hang on certain things they say. Derail their agenda, then rebuild it very slowly.”

“Have you rebuilt Al’s agenda?”

“Al has no idea what his agenda even was six months ago.”

“It wasn’t all that hard then?”

“No. Listen, Abby, men have good traits and bad traits. You don’t want any of them at face value, yet with a few adjustments, they will wind up tolerable to wonderful, depending on your needs. You have it in you—your natural beauty, your ease around people, your spark. Men want an equal, although most men like control, too. Give them both.”

“Play them.”

“In a sense, because they play you, too. We all offer ourselves to others, even you and I. We share what we want, then maybe something comes of it. You control your own destiny.”

“Oh Bernice, this advice is all wonderful. Now, where does a girl freshen up down here?”

“Let me show you because this is a place where a girl should not freshen up alone.”

A roulette wheel spins round and round. “Come on red, gotta be red,” a white-haired man chants.

His handlebar mustache gives him an air of distinction. “Good 26

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evening, Bernice, nice you could join us tonight.”

“Thank you, Leonard. Here, let me touch your chips for luck.”

She leans over a bit further than necessary, pats the chips, kisses his cheek.

Beyond the bar, Bernice swings another door outward into a lighted tunnel. The wooden floor shows signs of frequent use by a drinking crowd―cigarette butts, bottle tops, and even a broken red shoe. I perceive the direction as north.

“Right down here, Abby. There should be two drinks waiting for us when we return, gin-tonics, my favorite.”

Bernice locates a fully functioning bathroom framed in large wooden timbers. There’s even spray cologne and a mirror near the door. We take turns using the toilet and Bernice leads on our return.

“Leonard buys you drinks sometimes?”

“Leonard’s on the city council, which means Leonard drinks free.

He’s also the fire chief. Say the cops plan a raid down here. They all get ready at the station, all these extra men and everything.

However, the fire station shares the same building, get my drift?”

“I get your drift, Bernice. So how does Saul get rid of liquor bottles and stuff, you know, without alerting the law?”

“Take a lookie here, girl.”

She does a one-eighty, back toward the bathroom, and continues down the passage away from the poker room. A

single suspended wire connects light bulbs every twenty feet, illuminating damp walls, old pipes, and rusty metal.

“These tunnels started out as service corridors, running steam all over this part of town from the power plant. Once abandoned, the tunnels were condemned and blocked off until all the businesses on Third just cleaned ’em back out.”

She stops at a dark passage forking right.

“Can you smell it?” She reaches around the corner and lifts a flashlight but the beam hardly cuts the darkness.

“It smells awful.”

“That’s where everyone dumps their trash, the stuff they can’t put out, like liquor bottles and Lord knows what. Saul took us on a little tour once. What you have back here is an old underground coal mine, a pit.”

“Their own private dump.”

“And I’m not sure what all lands up there, maybe a body every now and then, that’s what Saul alluded to. He’s never done it, although he’s heard talk. Man loses at poker, spouts his mouth off about going to the cops, you know, the underworld operates here like any place.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“You’re new, dear, you and your man, and I want to look out for you.

This town doesn’t follow the rules so keep your fun secret and make sure you both get out safe.”

“Thanks, Bernice. I love a little adventure.”

“C’mon then. I’ll show you some

more. I’m good friends with Erma, the lady that does laundry for lots of the girls. I help her out on and off, so I know my way around. Turn back down this tunnel here.”

“Not as tall as the last one.”

“It’s all old heating tunnels.

They fixed some of them up to move things business to business.”

We walk further away from Saul’s into a narrow hallway leading to another restaurant, bigger and brighter than Saul’s Barbeque.

“This is the Avalon,” Bernice says. “They have the secondbest chicken in town, and this place is packed at one in the morning. You can get things at one in the morning that you can’t get anywhere else.” We’re staring at a diamond sky from the rear hotel entrance. A row of houses populates the street behind us, and the valley stretches out immediately beyond.

“I heard that,” a skinny waitress says. “Who’s the meanest man in town, Bernice?”

“Not Al Emil, that’s what I think,” Bernice peers down the hallway until the black waitress reaches her.

“How’s y’all doing this evening, Bernice? And who’s got the best chicken?”

“Fine, Etta. Your tag’s sticking out. Just a second. There, got it.

The Parrot’s got the best chicken.”

“Heck, Bernice, our chicken’s always been better than the Parrot.”

“How’s Erma’s little boy doing, Etta?” Together they look out the window.

“Still colicky, up half the night.

She turns on that porch light,” Etta nods, “and one of us goes over and walks with her. I’m thinkin’ babies might be a little too much work.”

“She’s lucky to have you girls.”

“We all love Erma. She takes good care of us, too.”

There’s movement on the porch, the brief flame of a cigarette.

“Her husband, Selmer. He’s out there smoking now, but sometimes he’s outside with that child half the night.”

“I need to stop over and see Erma,” Bernice says.

Etta walks back into the kitchen.

Bernice shrugs her shoulders.

“Out the front door then, Abby.”

Bernice leads down the hotel corridor. We pass a crowded lunch counter where an elderly man in a black bowtie greets us in passing.

Bernice pulls the door shut behind us, and I find my directions accurate; the Parrot Inn sign glows almost two blocks south.

“C’mon, let’s get back.”

“So this little boy with colic, does she swaddle him tight?” I ask.

“I don’t know, Abby, it’s the first I heard about the baby’s colic.”

“Swaddling really helped with babies in the hospital. Anyway, what else happens above-ground on High Third?”

“Alright, across the street and up those three stairs, that’s Tuepker’s Grocery. All they sell is canned goods and bread; their ‘blind’ because the grocery business covers for gambling and drinks downstairs. The owner kinda runs things on Third, ‘the

Mayor’ we call him.”

“What’s a blind?” I stop.

“A blind is what you want people to see rather than the real business that you keep out of sight.”

“And what things can you get at one in the morning?”

“Lotsa things. Booze, drugs, and more gambling if that’s your thing.

People come down late because it’s a big damn party when all the legal businesses hafta shut down. Folks that aren’t ready to call it a night don’t hafta and let me tell you, this place hops on the weekend. Of course, one main attraction is always the girls. Men can get a girl all night.”

“Call girls.”

“Pretty much all of them, all the waitresses you have seen tonight.

Waitressing is a blind, too.”

“Got it.”

“Back on this side, we got Metro Barbeque, then the Coffee Bar,” she points right as we walk, “just stay out of there.”

A passing driver toots his horn, and we wave together.

“Finally, Ma Butler’s place.

She’s got the best barbeque pit, and those are my favorite places besides the Vendome Bar and the Point Hotel way down on the end there. Now back to the bar before they miss us.”

“Evening, Bernice.”

“Good evening, Dee D. There might be a button down at the Avalon.”

“Thanks for sayin’ so,” the black man continues on his way.

“That’s Dee D. Govan,” Bernice says. “He’s buying in at the Parrot.”

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| H R U O M F A S N R I T E I B E NnUuM bers for humanitieSs NnOoRrTH m N I R th DdAK EeAar in Y akOoTA T y SCHOLARS ta LAaSst HOURS OF

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l

“How about the Parrot?”

“I never spent much time across the street. My friend Erma lives behind the Avalon, and she introduced me to the owners on this side. Everyone but the Coffee Bar guy, because he’s got a temper.”

We zig-zag through a path of shoveled snow, back into Saul’s, down the stairs from another false door, and into the gambling area.

“Why didn’t we go back downstairs at the Avalon, Bernice?”

“Remember what the black girl first said at the Avalon?”

“You mean the beautiful girl talking about the meanest man in town?”

“Yeah. That means there’s an undercover cop in the Avalon.

Better off using the front door.”

“Wow, how’d you get to know all these people, Bernice?”

“Well, like I said, my friend Erma introduced me because I was pretty broke when my husband died. Ma Butler and her girls found me extra work, and they were so generous when Dorothy got sick, buying food and toys, and clothes.

They had money when nobody had money, you know, during the Depression. Good friends to have, those girls, intelligent, generous, not what people might expect. I love them all, and we keep each other out of trouble.”

“Bernice, do you keep Al Emil out of trouble? Maybe another marriage on the horizon?”

“Oh, everyone knows Al and Al knows how High Third works.

28

He ran booze out of here during Prohibition. Al likes the girls, but not for keeps if you know what I mean.”

“Never say never.”

“Did Al put you up to this?”

“No, I swear to God, no. We ran into Al at the Terrace, seemed like a good guy.”

“Yeah, like I said, everybody knows Al.”

Saul’s Barbeque seems normal enough upstairs, and although we didn’t appreciate the “anything” portion of the railroad porter’s advice right away, it doesn’t take John long to settle in. He plays for two hours. He wins fifty bucks, tips five to the dealer, five more to Luella, and we both shake Saul’s hand on the way out.

“Thanks for coming in folks,” he says. “Your handshake is your word, and I appreciate your discretion about the entertainment this evening.”

“I really enjoyed the game, Saul, and I assure you we will keep our night to ourselves,” John says.

“Is a girl welcome for a drink if her man finds himself indisposed, Saul?” I ask.

“Anything for you, my dear. You brighten up the room with that red hair, oh my, you are lovely.”

He closes his eyes and shakes his head.

Saul’s my father’s age, mid-40s.

I know Bernice steered me right.

Offer a man what he wants to see, and he lets his guard down. Once you discover what’s back there, the rest shouldn’t be all that hard. l

Author of three North Dakotabased novels, BRIAN STRIEFEL researched Minot’s famous “High Third” to shape this excerpt from Nineteen FortyFive. The characters who Abby and John meet are real people.

Business descriptions, slang, offhand comments . . . this excerpt delivers High Third in all its bawdy notoriety . . . delivered in an entirely fictional scene.

500 50

EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMMING WEEKLY NEWSPAPER COLUMNS ON THE CONSTITUTION

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& AUTHORS INVOLVED WITH PROGRAMS

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WE HELPED OVER PEOPLE EXPERIENCE THE BENEFITS OF LIFELONG LEARNING WITH PROGRAMS AND EVENTS FOR EVERY SCHEDULE AND STYLE OF LEARNING

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AN EXCERPT FROM

WHILE THE WINDMILL WATCHED

by Jackie Pfeiffer McGregor and Janine Pfeiffer Knop

I saw the lifestyle of neighbor helping neighbor as the glue that held this rural society together.

MEET THE PFEIFFERS THE WINDMILL I am The Windmill, a towering intermediary between wind and underground water—thirst-quenching water. My coordinated mechanism draws life-giving water from the aquifer and stores this liquid within a circular, wooden stock tank for the refreshment of the livestock on the Pfeiffer farm. Yet within this portrait of North Dakota history, I have an additional role. I am The Observer—The Observer of Time.

I stood as sentry over the land and people who awaken within these pages.

Particularly, I observed the Pfeiffer sisters—Jackie and Janine, daughters of Jack and Eudora—as the years progressed. With a watchful eye, I caught sight of a recurrent theme in the metamorphosis of The Sisters’ personalities. I found it to be true they were notably similar in integrity, honesty, morality, and work ethic, yet uniquely different in pursuits and experiences. It is hoped that you, reader, will also find this to be true as our tale unwinds.

Proof of the girls’ unique, individual characters came to light on a summer day in 1954.

The setting was my sturdy metal ladder.

THE MENOKEN COMMUNITY THE WINDMILL Observing the invisible parameters of our Menoken community meant more than just having the same village name written on a stamped envelope. I saw the lifestyle of neighbor helping neighbor as the glue that held this rural society together.

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Members of this cohesive group of local citizens held positions of public school and Sunday school teachers. I saw neighbors serving as 4-H leaders for community children. Families picnicked together, and after a sweaty day of work, they cleaned up and promenaded with each other at square dances. They raised funds for the local church when men hosted pancake suppers. Those jovial fellows could really flip pancakes!

As neighbor Zella Trauger once told the Pfeiffer sisters, “Nobody thought that they were better than the other one.” These activities and social gathering places were influential in shaping the characters of our authors during the 1950s.

MENOKEN SCHOOL JACKIE I was fortunate to have been a student of Mrs. Violette Arntz during my first four primary grades. Mrs. Arntz was a very tall, well-groomed, gifted lady who radiated a commanding presence!

She loved her job, evidenced by her many smiles, and the students loved/liked and respected her! She was kind, firm, and fair.

THE SISTERS Each Christmas, Mrs. Arntz directed an operetta. It gave all students, from grades one through eight, the opportunity to have a thespian experience whether they wanted it or not. Depending on the operetta, some students memorized speaking parts, all had group singing parts, and all were appropriately costumed. One of the most memorable operettas performed by our school was The Little Blue Angel. In fifth grade, Jackie played the part of a lonely princess who wondered if there was more to Christmas than receiving “just things.” At the end of the program, it was revealed by the little blue angel—a classmate dressed in blue who stood behind and to the top of the evergreen Christmas tree—that there was something more important than “things.” The best gift was the Christ Child.

THE CHURCHES JACKIE Everyone who was involved in church activities and was not Roman Catholic, participated 32

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at the Methodist Church. A traveling minister, the Reverend Edward Parker, presided on Sundays.

Our neighbor to the north, “Grandma” Mabel Salter, faithfully took Janine and me, and her granddaughters Patty and Janny, to Sunday school. I left the house with a coin-filled hankie that contained my offering for “those poor children in Africa,” as relayed by my Sunday School teacher, Mrs. Salter.

Mom made sure that the coins were secure in my little makeshift purse, so much so that sometimes Mrs. Salter needed to loosen the knot in order for me to place my offering into the felt-bottomed brass collection plate.

4-H THE WINDMILL Jackie and Janine matured into learned young women in the nine-year season they were each a member of the two Menoken 4-H clubs.

Why, you wouldn’t believe how the lessons of 4-H projects opened their minds to the learning of new skills. Aromas of freshly baked blueberry muffins and mouth-watering cherry pies drifted through open kitchen windows into the farmyard where I stood.

I would catch a glimpse of a newly sewn, carefully pressed garment attentively placed on a hanger and poised for judging at the 4-H dress review in Bismarck. Jackie’s instinctive love of horses and Janine’s innate love of cattle were the catalysts in becoming accomplished 4-H livestock handlers. Mind you, though, the skills they learned through 4-H were all due to the patient teaching and encouragement of Eudora and Jack.

THE ANIMALS THE WINDMILL Four legged. Two-legged. With wings or without. Farm animals represented income.

They were the source of home-grown, high-protein sustenance.

Funds from the sale of animals were used to pay the bank, the feed store, and the grocery store.

Bills and coins from their sales were traded for fuel purchased to stave off below-zero temperatures. The cream check or egg money paid for children’s piano lessons or 4-H project expenses.

Yet, as vital as animals were to the financial bottom line of a farm family, they also provided friendship and camaraderie between man and beast.

They gave solace to those seeking a listening ear.

Truly, I observed animals as nonprofessional mental health therapists. Stroking a horse’s mane or a dog’s forehead while sharing the day’s woes brought a peaceful regrouping of heart and mind.

Life was simply in balance when a farmer stood within his flock or herd and gazed upon its beauty.

COUNTRY CLOTHING THE WINDMILL The art of fashion design tickled the creative spirits of the Pfeiffer Sisters years before they each became accomplished seamstresses. But it was chicken feed—yes, chicken feed—that laid the foundation for fabric selection.

JACKIE During our young years, flour, chicken laying mash, and baby chick mash/chick starter were purchased in colorfully printed fifty-pound sacks. I did not appreciate having to wear a dress that had once been a chicken feed sack! Imagine shopping at the Peavey Elevator in Bismarck for your next dress or skirt fabric! Little did we know that the farm elevator would serve as our first “fabric store.” When Dad instructed us to pick out the mash sacks, we knew we’d end up wearing them!

THE SISTERS At Dad’s request, sometimes during various lambing seasons, we girls had the opportunity to become novice midwives if a ewe was having a difficult time giving birth. Dad would check the ewe to discern why she was having difficulty lambing. If he realized that the normal birthing position with the lamb’s nose resting on both front legs was not Two seasons a year, he delivered a marketing present, it was time to masterpiece—a heavy, thickly bound volume intervene. That being known as the mail-order catalog. the case, the smaller hands of us young girls could fit into the birth JANINE It was our rural mailman who played a huge canal more easily than his to assist with the birth as role in our learning about fashion. Two seasons nature had intended. It was freezing cold within this a year, he delivered a marketing masterpiece—a outdoor animal science classroom known as the heavy, thickly bound volume known as the mail-order barn. Yet we sisters concluded that using our novice catalog. Sears, Montgomery Ward, Aldens, Spiegel, veterinary skills to bring new life into this world was and J. C. Penney held places of prominence in aftertotally rewarding. school viewing. A catalog was two inches thick and complete with a “New York runway” of fashions for THE CHORES every member of the family—all at our fingertips!

THE WINDMILL The Pfeiffer family operated as a team. Jack and Eudora worked cohesively, breathing UNSEEN THREATS a strong work ethic into the lives of their children.

THE WINDMILL People living on the prairie in the The bloodlines of their ancestors had introduced that 1950s faced multiple seen and unseen threats. North virtue decades earlier.

Dakotans such as the Pfeiffers rose to overcome Chores required of The Sisters were not difficult. those challenges by facing them head-on, thereby But what the responsibility of those chores fostered welcoming advances in medicine, technology, and was both personal and family accountability. inventive sciences. Through their windows, I noticed Teamwork! Year in and year out, “Working Together” small bottles of iodine and Mercurochrome holding was the unspoken mantra on the Pfeiffer farm. residence inside mirror-fronted bathroom home medicine chests. With a drop of either of those red

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liquids and topped with a flesh-colored Band-Aid, cuts and scrapes of the skin healed quickly.

However, it was those sneaky unseen threats of a higher order, in the forms of disabling and life-threatening viruses and bacteria along with government world greed, that were the nemeses of life. Scary? Indeed!

Observing over and beyond our Menoken community, I witnessed the fact that no one was naturally immune to these possibly life-threatening perils. I shudder to think of the potential path of destruction to human life we might’ve walked had not brilliantly gifted scientists and government leaders opened a progressive pathway for a better life on the prairie. In my opinion, though, the game changer for rural progress—electricity!

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Christmas tree was dressed with glass balls, papiermâché bells, strings of large, colorful lights, miniature glass-ball garland, and thin tinsel icicles. Virtuous patience was practiced with the placement of each individual silver strand. It was a Christmas-decorating sin to throw those shimmering strands onto a bough!

WHAT WAS SO SPECIAL ABOUT FRIDAYS JANINE As our family worked and relaxed together on Fridays, I did not have a smidgen of realization that those occurrences would serve as the building blocks for my future. In retrospect, they played a gigantic role in forging my personal growth and my destiny!

Jackie and I observed Dad’s personal attention to genuine customer service on his egg route in Bismarck. He was an honest businessman! He delighted in having us accompany him as he sold AN UNEXPECTED VISITOR eggs in the city’s professional offices. Carefully JACKIE One early summer afternoon in June 1954, nestled within our little-girl arms, Jackie and I proudly our paper-doll fantasy world turned into tumultuous carried string-wrapped cartons of two or three dozen reality! Shortly after dinner, we sisters were sitting on eggs as Dad happily carried a durable cardboard Janine’s double bed playing paper dolls. The blue case of fifteen dozen eggs. Dad was in his realm; if he could have cheerfully whistled while he carted that egg case around, he As our family worked and relaxed together would have! His false teeth on Fridays, I did not have a smidgen of prevented that musical sound from his pursed lips. realization that those occurrences would A genuine smile and a serve as the building blocks for my future. polite “thank you” were always extended to those sky featured fluffy, white cumulus clouds. I remember who bought our product. He never grew tired of looking out the south-facing window having two conversing. Our egg customers loved buying from observations: an unusually large cloud, large enough Dad; he delivered a quality product along with to block out the sun, had just passed, and the outstanding camaraderie. One couldn’t help but want airplane I spotted in a split-second view was flying to do business with Jack Pfeiffer! way too low! I quickly put two and two together, and OUR LAST WORDS realized that the darkening cloud had really been the THE SISTERS Growing up on the vast prairie could shadow of the airplane! Within about fifteen seconds have instilled a feeling of isolation within the souls a terrifying, loud boom shook the house! of us sisters. There are stories of other rural North THE HOLIDAYS Dakotans whose childhoods reflected that feeling.

JANINE Excitedly, Jackie and I were co-chairmen of However, we never experienced the reality of the annual house decoration committee. Our fresh remoteness. Perhaps it was our proximity to the 34

capital city and the opportunities it presented to us.

Perhaps it was the fact that our parents gave us a peek into a world beyond farm life while at the same time offering emotional and physical shelter and security within our environment.

Upon reflection on the journey of our lives in rural America during the 1950s, the words inscribed on these pages opened our eyes to the blessed gift of being the daughters of Jack and Eudora Pfeiffer.

This writing experience further deepened the understanding of our incredible cherished legacy.

THE WINDMILL I no longer stand tall on the North Dakota prairie, but personal memories, just like the wind, continue forever. With advancing years, my functional service declined; my watchful eye observed with only fading clarity.

Jack and Eudora’s “until death do us part” came to pass in the 1980s. Until that time, they lived in the house they had built on their farm in the Menoken community. The family’s indelible rural legacy is encased within the cover of this book. Their productive slice of North Dakota prairie— those acres over which I stood observing their family life and the Menoken community—the land they lovingly stewarded with every inch of their being, remains in the Pfeiffer family today. l

THE PFEIFFER SISTERS, JACKIE PFEIFFER MCGREGOR AND JANINE PFEIFFER KNOP grew up on a North Dakota farm in the 1950s, watched over by their parents and the windmill that tirelessly provided them with the water vital to their survival.

Jackie and her husband, Bob, blessed with two daughters and four grandchildren, spend much of their time volunteering, traveling, and enjoying activities of hiking and kayaking in northeastern Washington.

Janine and her husband, Fred, blessed with two daughters and four grandchildren, are retired from farming in southwest Iowa and carry on with their mobile gourmet coffee cart business and dessertbaking business, Miss Nini’s Fine Desserts.

The following is taken from the collection of recipes found at the end of the book. The recipes were popular in our community in the 1950s.

OLD-FASHIONED DATE BALLS

Gladys Goehring Menoken, North Dakota

INGREDIENTS: 2 large eggs 1 ½ c. dates, finely chopped 1 c. sugar 5 tbsp. butter 2 ½ c. crispy rice cereal 1 tsp. vanilla ½ c. chopped English walnuts ½ c. shredded coconut Additional 1–2 c. shredded coconut DIRECTIONS: In a bowl, beat eggs. Stir in dates and sugar. Melt butter in skillet. Add eggs, dates, and sugar. Cool until thick. Add crispy rice cereal, vanilla, English walnuts, and ½ c. coconut. Mix and cool. Form into teaspoon-size balls and roll in remaining coconut. Keep refrigerated due to cooked egg mixture. Yields about 5 dozen.

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SENSE OF PLACE

by Bruce G. Pitts

“Why were you in jail?”

This question was posed to me by a man named Bud. He was robust, missing a thumb, clad in bib overalls, a blue flannel shirt, and cowboy boots. He and about fifty other townspeople were gathered at the Galaxy Supper Club to welcome their new doctor—me—to Barnesville, Minnesota.

Barnesville is a Red River Valley town of about 2000 souls located twenty-five miles southeast of Fargo, North Dakota.

I was confused. “What makes you think that I was in jail?”

Bud replied, “When Mike introduced you he said that you’d gone to college in jail.”

I smiled. “No, Mike said that I had gone to college at Yale.”

“Oh. Where’s that?”

“In Connecticut.”

“Hm. You could have gone to NDSU.” Bud seemed more curious than concerned about my criminal record. I would soon learn that having gone to jail was more relatable to the good folks of Barnesville than having gone to Yale.

I grew up on the east coast in Rhode Island.

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After Yale I went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. The U.S. Public Health Service paid for much of my medical education in exchange for the promise that, upon finishing my training, I would serve in a medically underserved community for two years. I completed a residency in internal medicine, spending most of my final year working in the intensive care unit, a sort of fellowship in high-tech critical care before such a thing existed. I had committed the first thirty years of my life accumulating the credentials I’d need to rapidly ascend the east coast’s academic medical hierarchy.

It was during the last year of this training in 1979 that a woman from the Public Health Service called to ask where I wanted to fulfill my two-year service obligation. I said, “Alaska.” She said, “Everybody wants to go to Alaska. You need seniority to get posted there. You don’t have any.” I looked out the window. It was a typically miserable winter day in Philadelphia—dark, starless, chilly, wet, sleety. The New England kid in me said to the PHS woman, “Where else is it cold and snowy?” She replied, “How about Minnesota?”

This decision, uttered without forethought during a 45-second conversation, set the stage for the rest of my life.

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I’d never been there, but I remembered a photograph of Hubert Humphrey fishing on a lake when he was running for president. To myself I said, “Minnesota. Looks like Maine.” To her I said, “Sounds good.”

This decision, uttered without forethought during a 45-second conversation, set the stage for the rest of my life. As it turned out, western Minnesota looked nothing like Maine. It also turned out that Clay County, where Barnesville sits, was not medically underserved. It just looked that way to the federal government.

The feds based its assessment of medical need on the number of doctors living in a county.

There were plenty of doctors practicing in Clay County but most of them lived on the North Dakota side of the Red River where income taxes were lower. Carl Simison had been Barnesville’s doctor for over thirty-five years.

He was a big man, burly and gruff, who did everything from delivering babies to removing gall bladders, taking X-rays and prescribing eyeglasses. He accepted no insurances. When he announced his intention to retire, the town’s leaders figured that they could qualify for Public Health Service assistance.

Carl was very kind to me when I arrived. I had no place to work.

The new clinic hadn’t yet been built. The city set me up in the 38

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old jail between the police station and the municipal liquor store. I saw my patients in a cell, in their homes, or at the nearest hospital twenty-five miles away. When I wanted to talk to Carl, I crossed the street and waited with the others in his waiting room. On one occasion I wanted to ask Carl for his records on a patient I had hospitalized. I sat in his waiting room with the usual cadre of Barnesvillians. His walls were paper thin; we all listened as Carl chastised a young woman whose mouth he was sewing up.

“It’s pretty dumb to drink from a broken bottle,” he roared.

The woman emerged with a line of sutures extending from the corner of her mouth to her chin.

Carl stuck out his bloodied gloved hand to her and said, “That’ll be five bucks.” She reached into her purse and handed a fiver to Carl.

He opened his wallet and shoved it in. As the young woman left, Carl said to the folks in the waiting room, “Lunch time.” They all got up and left. Most of them weren’t there to see a doctor in the first place. They were there for the show.

When we were alone, I asked Carl for his records on our mutual patients. He laughed out loud.

“The only records I’ve got are these.” He opened a file box filled with cards bearing countless slash marks for all of the babies he had delivered (over 3500 in all).

Pointing to his imposing brow he added, “All of my other records are up here.” I knew then that Carl was going to be a tough act to follow.

My superb academic and clinical credentials were meaningless to the people of Barnesville. I grew up in a part of the country where the most important question was, “Where did you go to school?” and where inquiring about one’s religion was strictly taboo. Nobody in Barnesville cared where I went to school, but everybody I met asked me where I planned to attend church. They were not initially impressed by Carl’s replacement.

Why wouldn’t I do obstetrics? Why couldn’t I prescribe eyeglasses?

Why would the new clinic need to hire extra people just to take the X-rays and run lab tests? They were deeply offended when I asked them to make appointments to see me. “Nobody in this town needs an appointment system except Rube, and his makes sense.” Rube was the local barber who wrapped up his haircuts by declaring, “That’s good enough for the girls in this town.” He gave good haircuts.

My second-class status in Barnesville was readily apparent in the grocery store. There were two checkout lines, and they were always long in the early evening. I remember feeling flattered when a woman approached me to ask a medical question. I responded

politely. She immediately crossed to the other line where the town’s chiropractor was holding court with a large group of locals seeking his medical advice. He routinely counseled against childhood vaccinations and espoused that spinal manipulation could cure cancer. The lady who had spoken to me waited her turn to compare my advice with his.

A few months into my tenure as a country doc, the same Mike who had introduced me to the town came to see me at the new clinic.

He knew that business was slow.

He gave me a few pointers. “Doc, you need to shed the necktie.

Put on a flannel shirt and some nice boots. And come to the high school games. People like to show off that their town has a doctor.”

So I changed my sartorial habits and started attending boxing matches and Friday night football games. I remember the first time that a Barnesville Trojan went down on the gridiron under my watch. From the stands I waited to see if he would get up. He didn’t.

I quickly realized that folks in the stands were not looking at him like I was. They were looking at me. I got the point. The crowd parted as I descended to the field. I made a spectacle of examining the young athlete, as if I could actually feel anything through thirty pounds of pads. I called for the standby ambulance crew to bring out a stretcher. We sped off to the clinic

Anything I had done in the past, however glorious and entitling it may have been in the east, was of no value in Barnesville, Minnesota. with the siren blaring. The kid was fine. Business at the Barnesville Area Clinic took off the following Monday and was relentless thereafter.

I was becoming familiar with the mid-western, agrarian values in which I was newly immersed.

Anything I had done in the past, however glorious and entitling it may have been in the east, was of no value in Barnesville, Minnesota.

What I did yesterday didn’t matter.

The only thing that mattered was what I did today. As Mike explained to me, “Around here we earn our stripes every day.”

A short time later I was called back from lunch at the Wagon Wheel to see a man with chest pain. I found him sitting on my exam table, sweaty, breathless, pale. His name was Henry. He wore jeans, a gray thermal shirt, dirt-caked work boots.

“When did pain start?”

“While I was climbing onto the combine this morning. It just filled my chest and took my breath away.”

“Is the medication helping?”

I asked. I had given him a nitroglycerine tablet to place beneath his tongue.

“Ya. It is better.”

I scanned the EKG that my nurse had taken before I arrived.

“This shows that you’re having a heart attack, Henry. A big one.

We’re going to plug in an IV and get the ambulance to take you to St. Ansgars. I’ll follow you up there.” St. Ansgars was the closest hospital in Moorhead, Minnesota.

Moorhead is home to the Prairie Home Cemetery, the place from which Garrison Keillor adopted the name for his radio program.

Henry shook his head. “Nope.

Can’t do that. I gotta finish the harvest.”

“If we don’t get this taken care of, you may not live to finish the harvest. This is serious, Henry. It could kill you.”

Henry stared at me, saying nothing for a few long seconds.

“Nope. I gotta go. Give me some of them little pills to put under my tongue. I’ll come back when the corn is done.”

I argued with Henry a while longer, but I knew it was a hopeless task. Henry was more afraid of missing harvest than he was of dying. It was partly about money. His wife and four kids relied on him to convert a year’s investment of labor and capital into the ready cash they needed to live. But I knew that Henry’s 39

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recalcitrance was about more than money. In the 1970s U.S. farm policy had encouraged farmers to assume debts that many were unable to meet. Henry wasn’t just afraid of losing a crop. He was afraid of losing the farm that his grandfather had homesteaded eight decades earlier. He was afraid of losing a way of life. To him this was a matter of pride, identity, and duty. He would surely rather die than break the chain of love, obligation, soil, and grain that made him a man.

I had not encountered this situation before moving to the Red River Valley. I understood the circumstances that might cause a person to choose death.

My father fought in WW II as a very young man. My aged grandmother refused treatment when diagnosed with cancer. But I had never met a person who would rather die than miss work.

East coasters don’t think that way. I had taken care of a lot of Philadelphians when they or their loved ones died. The rich ones commonly perceived death as a big surprise, an injustice, a rude insult, a crude joke, something to be avoided at all costs. Surely something can be done! Poor Philadelphians couldn’t escape death’s violent or drug-soaked presence in their squeezed neighborhoods. I gave bad news to both the rich and the poor, certain that I would provoke a 40

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Death here is personal, small, inevitable... We are quiet people.

In death we just get quieter.

strident emotional outburst. I didn’t know any Philadelphians who would show up for work if they thought it would kill them.

Henry left my office and finished his harvest. He came back to see me about two weeks later. He had survived his myocardial infarction. He and I spent the next few years managing his heart failure. The cardiologists of the time had little more to offer than I did.

Henry was my first introduction to the calm acceptance of death’s reality among my new neighbors. They didn’t greet fatal diagnoses with the screams, howls, and paroxysms to which my Eastern sensibilities had been accustomed. Instead, they responded with silence, serious deliberation, perhaps a few soundless sniffles, and finally, “Alright then. Thanks, doc.” Intense sadness. Deep disappointment.

No histrionics. No visible fear.

I mentioned this phenomenon to a friendly Barnesvillian after I had been in town long enough to have observed it several times.

She surprised me by quoting Francis Bacon (1561-1626): “Death

is a friend of ours; and he that is not ready to entertain him is not at home.” She added, “Death here is personal, small, inevitable, attended by the neighbors who will gather together to harvest your field if you can’t. We are a quiet people. In death we just get quieter.”

Later that winter the town was snowed in by a blizzard. The roads weren’t open. There was no way to get to a hospital. Marcella, the town’s 24-7 police dispatcher, called to tell me that a baby had died at a home across town. She said that the plow was on its way to clear a path for me to drive there. When I arrived, two young parents were holding the lifeless body of an infant across their laps. The parents had found their baby dead in its crib early that morning. The child was beyond resuscitating. They asked me to take him to Mr. Dobmeier. Like many small town morticians, Don Dobmeier also ran the local furniture store. This probably had something to do with building both coffins and cabinetry in the old days. Dobmeier told me to bring the baby to his house. In the winter the ground was frozen too hard to bury the dead. He stacked coffins in his garage until the spring thaw.

The plow led the way as I drove the dead baby to Dobmeier’s house. It was a bumpy ride. The baby lay wrapped in a blanket

on my front seat. I had to reach over to keep his stiff little body from bouncing to the floor. This death was personal, small, far too soon, attended by parents and by neighbors who plowed a path, pronounced a death, and gave a lifeless child a home for the winter.

I remember a woman who saw me repeatedly because of vague symptoms of fatigue, sleeplessness, anxiety, and migrating pains. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with her, so I did what the good folks of Barnesville had taught me to do when confused about a patient: I made a house-call. I had learned this lesson in the early days of my country practice, before I had an office and the only place I could see patients was in their homes.

It quickly became apparent that house calls were better than all of the social workers in the world in figuring out why patients weren’t getting better.

On this occasion a little girl answered the door, a dirty child in a torn dress. The house reeked of cigarette smoke. The floor was covered with trash. My patient lay on a beat-up sofa. A man sat in a recliner with a cigarette in one hand and a beer bottle in the other. He ordered the child to bring him another beer and offered me one. I declined. He gave me a dirty look. When the child brought him his beer, he slapped her across the face. “You

didn’t open it, you little slut.” She took the bottle back to the kitchen to open it, a tear marking a white track down her dusty cheek. It was nine in the morning. The child wasn’t in school. It didn’t take long to figure out why my patient wasn’t getting better.

One summer morning I was awakened by a call from Marcella.

She said, “Doc, the anhydrous storage tank north of town sprung a leak and a big cloud of the stuff is covering I-94. A bunch of people drove into it. The rescue team is on the way. They need you there.”

Anhydrous ammonia is a substance that farmers inject into soil to enrich its nitrogen content.

Upon contact with water, it turns into ammonium hydroxide, a caustic substance that dissolves living flesh. People exposed to anhydrous ammonia experience immediate distress in their watery tissues—eyes, mouths, and throats. Their airways can swell and close off so suddenly that breathing is impossible. On that bright summer morning, over twenty motorists were blinded and struggling for air. Our small town made up for its scarce medical resources by rallying in force to save lives. The clinic staff tended to the less severely wounded, flooding their eyes with water, giving them oxygen, calling their families, holding their hands. The volunteer ambulance and fire

crews transported the critically wounded to hospitals twentyfive miles away, calling ahead to secure the care they’d need. I rode up with the two victims most likely to require tracheostomies to open their airways. The rescuers suffered from the anhydrous, too.

Our eyes watered, and our throats stung. Everybody survived, but some were scarred for life. One of the victims was an opera student on her way to Minneapolis for an audition. The anhydrous withered her vocal cords. She never sang again.

During my second year in Barnesville I received an invitation to return to a prestigious academic position in Philadelphia. Just a few months earlier, it would have been an answer to my dreams.

But Barnesville had changed me.

I remember the moment when I decided to stay in the Valley. I had received a call from the hospital in Moorhead that one of my patients had gone into shock. I hopped into my red Bronco and headed west along dark roads, bouncing over pillow drifts and hoping that the storm wouldn’t get worse. Halfway along my journey on I-94, it started to snow in earnest, as it does sometimes in a Minnesota autumn.

While lost in whiteout and barely able to see the highway ahead of me, I caught sight of something out of the corner of my eye, something ethereal that floated in and out of my vision. I 41

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realized that my truck was being ghosted by a group of snow geese. There must have been ten or fifteen of them. They flew next to me for several miles before silently disappearing into the white haze. Magical. Beautiful.

Something that would never happen in Philadelphia. I felt like I had been visited by a supernatural force determined to influence my choices.

I spent a third year in Barnesville to finish what I had started, but I knew that I wasn’t cut out to be a country doc. My training was too specialized. I had a baby son, and taking calls every night wasn’t sustainable. I had started to make a life in the Valley. I recruited a new doctor to Barnesville and moved to Fargo where I could do what I was trained to do. And being on call only once a week looked mighty attractive.

The Fargo Clinic (then MeritCare, now Sanford Health) was the right choice. It was a large, multispecialty group practice, physically connected to the hospital where its doctors cared for their patients—the Mayo model. For nearly forty years, I got to do things that I would never have been able to do in Philadelphia’s more rigid medical culture. Fargo was small enough that pretty much everybody had to wear more than one hat if anything 42

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I felt like I had been visited by a supernatural force determined to influence my choices. was going to get done. This suited both my wide variety of interests and my short attention span.

Over the years, in a variety of roles, I came to know the many faces of the Red River Valley.

I taught advanced cardiac life support and advanced trauma life support in Crookston. I gave lectures in Mayville and Wahpeton.

I learned a lot about Grand Forks as associate dean of the University of North Dakota’s medical school.

I worked on clinic and hospital mergers up and down the Valley while Chief Medical Officer at Sanford Health. I married into a family that farms near Lidgerwood and Sisseton—and wound up taking care of not only members of my wife’s family, but also members of her ex-husband’s family. Such acceptance and candor would never happen in Philadelphia.

My wife’s family came to represent to me the things that I respect and adore most about the Valley. They were kind, hardworking, and tough as nails. Her uncle, Ray, and his son, Maurice, farmed near Lidgerwood. Ray was pretty old when, on a memorable Saturday, Maurice called me in Fargo and said, “Dad is on his way

up to Fargo in an ambulance.”

“What happened,” I asked.

“Well, he was gored by a bull.”

“How is he?” I inquired.

After a pause Maurice replied, “Dad or the bull?”

“Your dad!”

“Oh, I think he’ll be OK. I told him that you’d meet him in the emergency room.”

“Of course I will. I’m on my way now.” But I was curious. “How is the bull?”

“The bull’s not so good. Dad was so angry about being gored that he went to the barn to get the sledgehammer and hit him over the head with it. The bull’s dead.”

Some years later Maurice was run over by a massive four-wheeldrive tractor. It crushed his pelvis.

Maurice was transported to Fargo, then flown to Minneapolis. Doctors offered little hope of his survival.

Maurice is in his late eighties now, still plowing and combining. To this day he’ll laugh and say, “Ya, we’re pretty hard to kill in this family.”

I have always been struck by the sheer danger of the farming life, and more struck by how philosophical and accepting farmers are about the risks they face every day. Shortly after I moved to Fargo, a Barnesville teenager lost his arms in an auger attached to the tractor he was driving for his father. He died.

Nobody got sued.

I am an old man now. It has

often been said that one of the Valley’s greatest exports is its kids, and my kids are no exception.

They were well educated in Fargo’s public schools. They went to good colleges. They have enjoyed successful careers, one on the east coast, one on the west. When I talk with their mentors, colleagues, and clients, their comments echo what I have long associated with the ethos of the Red River Valley. Our kids are humble. They are hard working.

They are exceedingly competent.

They are good to work with. They earn their stripes every day. They never showboat. They never take their positions for granted.

They never behave as if they are entitled or privileged. In Valley words, “they get ‘er done.”

These characteristics may be taken for granted in the Valley, but they are exceptional on the coasts.

They stand out. The Valley grows great crops. The Valley grows great people. l

BRUCE PITTS was a doctor in Fargo for over thirty years at the Fargo Clinic/MeritCare/Sanford.

He is married to Ryn Pitts, father to P. Casey Pitts, and step-father to Amber Olig. Together, they summer on Pelican Lake. His wife still farms in South Dakota.

IT SHOULDN’T BE DIFFICULT, FRUSTRATING, OR EXPENSIVE TO PURSUE A JOURNEY OF LIFELONG LEARNING. THAT'S WHY SINCE 1973, HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA HAS DEVELOPED AFFORDABLE, ACCESSIBLE AND ENGAGING CLASSES AND EVENTS. WE ARE A NONPROFIT DEDICATED TO HELPING YOU EXPERIENCE THE BENEFITS OF LIFELONG LEARNING.

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That was the moment I learned to respect the power of the river.

THE RIVER BOY

by Leif Wallin

I

have always lived within a stone’s throw of a natural source of water. That is quite an accomplishment since I grew up in North Dakota, a state better known for wind and prairies than for rain and agua. My parents bought a house on the banks of the Mouse River. The front yard was the size of a football field, and it became the neighborhood center for games of hide and seek, kickball and tag.

The yard gently sloped upwards to the house, which sat about three or four feet higher than the other homes along the river. My parents were both college music professors, and this became their dream home. They built an addition specifically for their Steinway grand piano. Appropriately, we named this the Music Room.

Its floor was two steps lower than the main section of the house. It had a vaulted ceiling, hardwood floors, and a grand picture window that looked out to the river.

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As a child, living by the river was a grand adventure. We had thirty feet of backyard before the land sloped down to the water’s edge. The riverbank was filled with oak trees, jack pines and shrubs. It was so dense with foliage that you could not see across the river from the back windows.

My parents built a dock at the water’s edge, and we’d fish for bullheads, a scary looking fish with stingers and ugly whiskers. We’d pull up crawdads, a mini lobster with pointy pincers. We would dare each other to see who could last the longest when sticking our fingers into its claws.

In the winter, my eight-block walk to school was cut in half as I could take a shortcut across the frozen river. Once, I got to the middle and heard a crack beneath my feet. I took a deep breath and froze, still and stiff. Nothing happened. I inched my

foot forward. More silence. Then I dashed as fast as I could to the other side. That was the moment I learned to respect the power of the river.

When I was nine, the residents of my small town experienced a hundred-year flood as the Mouse River spilled its banks. But to me, that was an adventure. We had to evacuate our home. We moved in with a family friend who lived on the north side of the river valley. Their family of four welcomed the Wallin family of five into a threebedroom, one-bathroom house. I was thrilled because I gained an older brother. My parents, however, were thinking more about that single bathroom and nine butts.

As the inundation continued, the neighboring properties were swamped with several feet of water on the main floor. But we were saved by that three-foot rise in our front yard. Water filled the basement but did not reach the first floor. My mother recalls that when you took the two steps down into the Music Room, water would squeeze through the floorboards with each step. Keeping water below the first floor was a major victory. If water reached the main floor, it would trickle up the walls like a kid sucking on a straw.

Mom borrowed a little fishing boat which we used to check on our house. We puttered the boat along streets that, even as a child, I recognized.

Mom steered the boat up our driveway. and we motored past those hundred-year-old oaks. The six-foot hedges that marked the border with the neighbor’s yard were totally submerged.

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The cracking of tree trunks sounded like blasts from a shotgun.

What had been an oasis of green became a barren, denuded river trench.

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The situation in Minot reached the national news. Headlines blared: “The Mouse that roared,” and “The Mighty Mouse.” Outsiders might have laughed, but it did not seem funny to us locals. The city survived, but, sadly, we experienced hundred-year floods in six of the next ten years. In each of those years, we had to move out or be prepared to move out on a moment’s notice.

In 1976, a five hundred-year flood bore down on the city. As a sixteen-year-old, it brought a new set of adventures. We got out of school to fill sandbags. This was going to save the city, but mostly what I remember is flirting with girls and the taste of the sugary icing on the sweet rolls provided by the Red Cross to fuel us as we shoveled sand into bag after bag.

The National Guard brought in big machinery to clear the riverbanks of brush and trees. Anything that slowed the flow of the water had to be removed. I hid in the house as cranes came in and slammed against hundred-year-old oak trees. The cracking of tree trunks sounded like blasts from a shotgun. What had been an oasis of green became a barren, denuded river trench.

Giant earth-moving machines rumbled in and built a ten-foot dike of clay and mud along the trench. These would become permanent dikes to finally rid the city of its annual problem. The city evacuated the low-lying areas and quarantined the entire section of the city where I lived. Once again, we moved in with our friend on the north side. I still walked to school, but I had to skirt the borders of the quarantined area.

At sixteen, I considered it a challenge to evade the authorities to visit my house. Like a soldier behind enemy lines, I weaved through alleys and backyards crouching low so as not to be seen. When I got to my house, it was locked up, but I was able to climb through a basement window. I was in! Then I realized that there was no electricity or heat and, most importantly to a teenager, no food. I wandered around. It was a ghost house with an emptied basement and first-floor objects all hauled up to the second floor. I realized that this was not just a game.

A few nights later, we got a call. Just upstream from our house, the water bore against the dike at a bend in the river. The city thought the dike might break. They decided to put a secondary dike in front of our house. If the main dike broke, the city would be saved but our house would be a goner. In my teenaged brain, I thought of the fame this would bring. Like martyrdom, our house laid down its life to save the city. But the main dike held, life moved on, and the city survived.

After I left Minot, I was constantly pulled to water. I lived a stone’s throw from the Red River in Fargo, and later a stone’s throw from the Missouri River in Bismarck. I moved to Minneapolis and bought a home

a stone’s throw from Lake Nokomis, and perhaps two stone throws from the Mississippi. On hot summer days, I’d ride my bike to Lake Nokomis. I’d jump in and let the healing power of the water cool my overheated skin. Or I’d walk the pathways along the Mississippi River where the soothing calm of the water brought me back to peace. With my children, we’d bike to Minnehaha Falls Park. We’d squeeze around the fence and hike along a trail at the base of the falls. On humid August days, the waters of the creek would splash against our skin.

The ledge surrounding the falls would drip with saturated groundwater.

It felt like a country hideaway, yet we were in the middle of the city.

We would bike to the little beach at Lake Nokomis and spend the afternoon playing in the water. I’d be the water monster from which the kids loved to flee. I learned that no matter how much my children fought, if I threw them into a pond, a lake or a stream, they would forget all sibling troubles and play for hours.

Water is fun when you are a kid. But now, I’m an adult, about the same age as my parents when they experienced those flood years.

I didn’t really have any skin in the game. I was a kid. As an adult, can you imagine motoring a boat up your driveway to your dream house?

You still pay a mortgage on that house, and there is no flood insurance.

When the water recedes, you clean mud, water, and sewage from the family home. And that’s only if the dikes do not fail, because if the dikes fail, there is nothing left to clean. I think of my parents, and I realize I have another reason to look up to them. Would I be strong enough to take on such a calamity?

Water holds much symbolism. Water baptizes us. It cleanses our souls. Nearly all religions have a flood story, where water first wipes the earth clean, then provides a rebirth–a fresh start to those remaining souls. Destruction, then deliverance.

Living on the Mouse River had a considerable influence on my life.

I saw the power of the river as it flushed away nearly an entire city. I saw that, in the face of ruin, people pull together. Friends take you into their homes. Schoolyard rivals become allies as they struggle against a common enemy that knows no loyalties. It takes a village to save a city.

In a few short months, the water is again clean and fresh. People play on its banks and swim in its flows. The river didn’t make me, but as I breathe, it did shape my life. l

Water holds much symbolism. Water baptizes us. It cleanses our souls.

LEIF WALLIN proudly identifies himself as a North Dakotan. He is semi-retired and lives in Minneapolis, near Minnehaha Creek and the Mississippi River. He reads, writes, and tells stories to keep the heart warm on cold winter nights.

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(Late October)

Y

esterday was the first day that I have not had fresh garden tomatoes in the house in 4 months. No green and burgundy tiger-striped cherries. No brandywines, wide as a slice of bread, slightly pink with green shoulders.

No hefty red roundies that are the definition of garden variety. No pointybottomed fruit or oblong saucedestined varieties. No grapes, plums, pears, or heavily ribbed heirlooms.

A friend teased me, mid summer: “We get it, you grow tomatoes!” after my seemingly hundredth photo showing them in various scenes: on the plant, in a bowl, in a bucket on the grass, perched on the cutting board, in the sink with water droplets, chopped and waiting for the salad, bubbling in a pot, beefy slices on a brunch plate, gathered with other fresh produce, nestled in a frittata, all cut up and destined to be the star of the salsa, panzanella, or shakshuka.

I was putting together a dinner salad last night and reflexively looked for the tomatoes to add. None to be had. I had to rethink the dressing I had been making all summer because something was off with the absence of tomatoes. Time for a November vinaigrette? A bit heavier on the honey from the missing sugar of the summer tomatoes? Or do I leave it as is and add apple? Just like you plan your time away around the planting or harvesting of the garden, you build your menus around the abundance or dearth of tomatoes.

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TOMATO PERSON

by Lisa Rask

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you will spend parts of chilly days thinking about planting them. On the days a foot of snow falls, you will remind yourself that Mother’s Day will come, the ground will thaw, and you will be able to plant in soft earth, no snow for miles.

You might pore over seed catalogs to start them yourself and devote a section of your home to their germination. You might buy starts instead and babysit them for weeks when the weather is moody and the wind is like a bully to tender, hopeful sprouts. You will plan their outside visits. They will harden; you will be proud. You will tell other tomato people about their progress, but you may edit out the part where you killed some by forgetting them outside or shocked them by letting them get too dry.

You will watch the calendar and the temperature, you will look for social media evidence that serious gardeners have taken the leap, and you will finally plant your tomatoes, placing cloches or other protection such as coffee cans or milk jugs around them. My family’s method employs old wooden shingles. They surround the babies with protection until they are ready for big, open cages. First, you place them tightly around, and as the plants strengthen and grow, you widen the surrounding, eventually removing them and storing them until next year.

The cedar shingles first lived on top of Chimney Butte school, 49

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When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, your family members become tomato growers too.

Likely against their will. situated just north of Stone Lutheran Church in Morton County. This church and graveyard are near the family farm and homestead, and my dad still has the keys. My brother was the last baby baptized at Stone. The final church bulletin is still in the foyer, and each time we visit we look for his name and remark about time passing. My sister and my grandparents and other relatives are buried there. As a child I was spooked and thrilled that my last name was on so many of the headstones. My dad and grandpa tore down the old school in 1973 and saved and carried away the shingles in old feed bags. Later that summer they reroofed their hog house with them, keeping some for use in the gardens. Dad gave me a box of the shingles when I bought a house, and, each time I place them around a new little plant, I think about how many times they have served this purpose and in how many North Dakota gardens they have provided shelter. Even if you brush off the dirt when you pull them out, there is always a little left over from the seasons before.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you will excitedly watch for blooms and vibrate with excitement as they begin to appear on the vines.

You will yell into the house that it is happening, and you will try to predict which plant will be the busiest.

Your cautious hand watering may give way to the overhead sprinkler. Maybe you will carefully prune and direct the vines in a cage or support structure.

Maybe you will give up pruning and let them take over everything. Maybe the weeds are frequently pulled, or maybe they grow in tandem with the vines.

But when you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, your family members become tomato growers too. Likely against their will.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, there comes a time when there are probably too many, 50

and you start to take them for granted. You regret your life choices, and you openly judge that naïve, hopeful spring version of yourself who believed that any of this was a good idea. You wonder why you forget (in less than a year’s time!) how big a tomato plant can get. You might angrily rake up the fallen tomatoes you could not get to in time while cursing your May enthusiasm. You might announce to your family that you are only planting four plants next year.

You might declare that you will never again plant a cherry tomato variety. You are lying to yourself and your family.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, and there are huge quantities of them available to you for several weeks on end (and you have them in some fashion for most meals), you have the luxurious privilege of being able to lazily cut off the whole end rather than paring tightly around the core when buying that single tomato from the store in February.

Your cutting boards will run with bright juice for months on end. You will make enemies with fruit flies. You will startle when the dried vine top that fell off in the bowl reminds you of a spider. All available counters will house trays of them in various states of ripening if there is an impending hard freeze. You might give some to people you believe will enjoy them as much as you do.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you might one day walk into a slug horror show and learn about how strong your will is to keep this thing going. You may reach for a tomato and instead sink your fingers into a smelly, wet globe whose decay you could not first see. Or you might go out in a light rain to grab tomatoes for canning and meet the most gigantic spider you have ever seen, holding court on one of the plants. One day there is a plant that grows and grows and grows but is otherwise barren of fruit.

You will pull it out. It will make you think of holding your newborn in the hospital and seeing a priest walk out of your neighbor’s room, realizing that the baby did not make it. You will see the empty space for the rest of the season and wonder, “Why that one?”

There will come a time you lose a whole plant to disease. You will think about how the garden mimics birth, life, and death.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, you watch the weather, you weed, water, prune, amend, pick, clean, prep, cook, and plan how to put them by.

Sometimes you are so swamped by the late August heat and humidity that you freeze some whole to save your sanity. You wash jars and rings and source lids. You pressure cook huge batches of spaghetti sauce. Sometimes you must force your family to help you cover plants with sheets or blankets in the sneaky spring or in unpredictable October, and you keep watching the weather. And you worry. There is almost inevitably a day or two when you rush to gather everything before a killing frost. There will be a year you do it with a flashlight in the dark.

There may be a year when you are too exhausted or overwhelmed to gather or protect them, or some other priority comes up. It might be hard for you to accept that you could not get them in time, and you might carry the regret around far longer than is needed or useful. When the plants die, the bright green of the vine is simply gone after the frost steals its life.

When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, one day there are simply no more. All the plants have been pulled, the cages are stowed, the hoses are inside, and there are no bowls or trays or pesky fruit flies. You will look at the garden you watched explode with life, and you will see the bare ground and feel relief and sadness. There may be some cherished jars of tomatoes, summertime bottled and waiting in the pantry. But the bounty is over.

The part of the grocery store you have completely ignored for months will come back into view. And you will even buy them sometimes. You are, after all, a tomato person. But you might grimace when you feel how tough it cuts, and you might think

about how wan it looks compared to the impossibly bright red of your garden tomatoes. You will pull out your phone and find photos to prove how red yours were to your partner who nods with understanding, having already heard this over and over. This is the moment when you may start to rethink that tomato retirement announcement you made when you were overwhelmed.

Tomatoes have a way of mightily asserting themselves even when you have not been a good gardener. They offer metaphors about hope, tenacity, and incremental change. They make you think about your powerlessness over nature and how we must find acceptance with the unexpected. How small your control really is, no matter how tight your grip.

Sometimes your energy matches the garden, the weeds are pulled, and you feel proud and capable.

Sometimes the garden spins out of control, the weeds take over, and you feel guilty and ashamed.

But the tomatoes keep growing.

Nothing charms me more in the garden than when a volunteer plant from a forgotten, dropped, overripe tomato makes its way into existence the following year. Except that first little bloom. Or the grappling vine on the cage. Or the first barely red cherry, eaten right there in the garden. Or the plants, all heavy with fruit. Or the first seriously dense slice on sourdough.

Or jars lined up in the pantry. When you grow tomatoes in North Dakota, it is not really a hobby.

Maybe “avocation” is a better word. Our house has a break from them for a while now, and because of the wait and the wonder, come spring and summer, I will be ready to welcome them again in their time. l

LISA RASK lives in Bismarck with her family and posts too many Instagram stories of her cooking. If food were a love language, she would speak Tomato.

A lazy pruner, she spends her time each summer in complete awe of what magic will go ahead and happen anyway even if she does not get to the weeds on time. (This is a lesson from the tomatoes about self-compassion.)

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BISBACK BADLANDS

by Jennifer Lemming

Bison are back, our national sanctuaries

RAINSHADOW

Of animal landscape.

by Debora Dragseth

Nothing is a more natural sight than Bison roaming free In the Badlands.

Inimical, thirsty and dry.

No mystery here why her denizens roam.

With sleepy indifference, I watch the dirt dance.

JENNIFER LEMMING moved to North Dakota from Indiana 8 years ago, following her husband’s new nursing job. She lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, where she hands out her extra copies of the Poetry Magazine to anyone interested, usually in tattoo parlors and beauty salons in Mandan and Bismarck North Dakota. Her most recent blog post about living in North Dakota can be found by the host’s site, Hudson Valley Writers Guild, hvwg.org.

The rain shadow has called me home.

The Rocky Mountains and the Cascade Range cast a massive rain shadow across the Great Plains causing the climate of the grasslands to be semiarid—a place where evaporation normally exceeds precipitation.

DEBORA DRAGSETH is a college professor at Dickinson State University in North Dakota. She was raised in Mt. Vernon, South Dakota, and is a fourth-generation graduate of Mt. Vernon High School. Unlike the gypsy scholar she claims—or had thought she wanted–to be, the author has quietly returned to the vast prairie she once so vociferously left behind.

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BAD LAND RISING

by Jim Muyres

Western land now called the Dakotas, North and South.

On this white earth cheated native warriors are birthed then early die.

Modern warrior spirits rise, roar, are muffled, smothered, dismissed by indifferent conquerors.

Prayers are sent, sung on wings of hope searching for missing gods.

Beer and whiskey and meth to feel something.

They crash cars, burn bars, bloodied in their own blood.

They howl their pain, wild eyed they fight, they are Men. Lost, they live wanting, waiting for a path to open in the void where the spirits live, they die waiting.

The Women, too, downcast eyes wise, too many tears, owning their People’s broken journey.

Their proud pedestal of Womanhood made mud.

They come alive in the other world of dreams.

Their fingers trace ancient designs on fragments of shattered pottery, symbols of a truth, such beauty, they wonder how to weave them whole.

A caress in the wind the voice of Grandmother’s Grandmothers calling with wisdom from the past.

Awakened visions roll across mind’s eye, remembered seasons of plenty.

Eyes shine hope in the faces of smiling brown babies lolling in tall windblown prairies.

Brothers and Sisters chase joy through sunlit days, moonlit nights.

A People from a past, living in a Present they do not fit.

They have been left behind.

They did not die in their time.

In this Bad Land, reservations, ancient voices now awakened call, shaking a wearied people out of a painful reverie.

The spirits hidden within are called to The Sundance, to live again.

The Sundance reborn lives in a circle.

Not too young Men, nothing but brave are drawn.

Courage a birthright so strong so thick, darkblooded, muscled they heed the call.

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Drums beat, flames rise, eyes alive they wildstride in primal rhythm.

Chests pierced, flesh torn, blood drained, moth drawn to this night’s fire.

They dance with mystic forms, visions swirl, a holy circle swells to a drumbeat.

From their hearts a higher song forms, chants rise across time, ageless familiar calls, all gathered know the songs, echoes of other times, this time, future time.

Watching Old Men know.

Blanket wrapped Women, warmed and blessed by the moon and fire’s light, are filled with that greater something.

Drums beat, pulses follow, no more yearning.

Boys now Men, tranced, reeling.

In this dry night bathed in their fresh and crusted blood.

Lean, half naked, emptied, then filled with the strength of a thousand bears.

Eagles whirl across their mind’s sky.

Soaring wings replace the pupils in their flashing eyes, beyond free they could fly.

A full moon rides wide in the sky, a lantern to the wonders below.

A too young Boy slips away from the fire and dance, unbeknownst, Girl-watched, she follows.

His gait is sure he stops at the edge of the world, reaching down he waters his world, the strong stream of an almost man.

The moon stares down immense, so near.

Boy notches arrow, draws, challenging the moon so near.

He aims high, lets fly, an arrow lost to space will never come down.

Low in tall grass, Girl flushes, childlove stirs.

Drums beat, the earth whirls, on and on.

JIM MUYRES is an emerging artist and recently received a McKnight Foundation, Artist Development Grant from the Prairie Lakes Regional Arts Council. He lives in Minnesota, but is a former National Park Service employee where he worked and lived at the Theodore Roosevelt Park in North Dakota.

He gets out of bed for relationships, social activism, photography, slowly remodeling a house, and being outside.

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MONOLOGUES

by Mark Vinz

Still, her absence fills this house. . .

–Donald Hall There are so many things I want to tell you.

When I come home from errands, I can’t help wondering which room I might find you in, so I can let you know what’s been built or torn down in our old neighborhood.

Look out the window, I find myself saying.

The sunset should be brilliant tonight.

Let’s go out and chase it in the car, like we used to do—chase it till we finally learn the meaning of last light.

Grazing, we used to call it, those nights we didn’t want to cook or even leave the house. See what’s in the Fridge, you’d say, and we’d make do—lettuce, cheese, some fruit, and what was left of bread.

Those were times I’d wonder about the ones we knew who claimed they lived for food.

Whatever we invented seemed just right.

We ate together, and I lived for you.

Now I still stay home but graze alone.

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Thanks be for daughters busy sorting through their mother’s clothes and all the other acquisitions of her days— especially books. She read as if her life depended on it, and for a while, it did.

Whenever I take one of them from a bookcase, something usually falls out from between the pages—a folded-up review, a postcard from an old friend, a lovely marker—and I sit down to browse.

As much as I loved her, our tastes were so different, from books to films to rooms.

It took us longer than it should to learn what didn’t really matter, that simply being there would always be enough.

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.

He was also the mentor for both Deb and Louise.

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IF THE WIND

AR-15

by Aimee Geurts

by David Solheim

If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go mad

On my wall hangs an aerial photo Of my grandparents’ farmstead, An award for soil conservation, Taken when I was ten years old.

If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go ma d If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go m a d If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go m a If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go m If the wind doesn’t stop I think I’ll go I think I’ll I think I I I

Returning to the place of my childhood and finding beauty in the landscape I used to find ugly.

Looking for home in the beauty and finding it easily. Oh, the colors!

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I see the big willow tree Where my cousins, my brother, and I Built a multi-level treehouse.

The buckboard chassis we drove As a stagecoach or covered wagon In our westering imaginations.

Abandoned among the rusting machinery, The horse-drawn binder where we Pretended to be farmers like our uncles.

At home in town, summer was filled With sandlot baseball games. In fourth grade I struggled with long division and penmanship, Read of dinosaurs and Viking myths, Envied families with encyclopedias.

When the fire alarm blared, we marched Out to the monkey bars until the all-clear sounded.

We curled under our desks hoping to survive Predicted tornadoes or Cold War bombings.

While we huddled a classmate’s Angry adolescent brother or Father losing a custody battle Might spray the room with bullets Riddling desks and bodies Like prairie dog towns Robbing me of sixty-five years, Making the green photograph My last memory Instead of the beginning.

DAVID SOLHEIM has published in more than 30 periodicals and had work included in five anthologies. His most recent book, A Week on the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers: Thoreau’s 1861 Minnesota Journey Revisited, and his four books of poetry are available at buffalocommonspress.com. He was the North Dakota Statehood Centennial Poet and is an emeritus Associate Poet Laureate of North Dakota.

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Humanities ND Magazine Writers’ Guidelines Humanities ND Magazine is a quarterly publication that engages with ideas on all topics related to the Humanities and accepts submissions throughout the year from writers across the United States. In 2 (Spring and Fall) of our 4 issues, we offer specific programmatic content about the many events, courses, book/author discussions that Humanities ND offers. The other issues, “Sense of Place” (spring) and “Gray Matters” (fall), ask for specific kinds of content submissions. Please bear in mind that we seek a variety of voices and perspectives, and, to that end, we rarely publish submissions from the same writers in these 2 issues each year.

Program Issues (spring and fall): Instructors are encouraged to submit “teasers”—not a syllabus or specific course description, but rather something more reflective though related to their upcoming courses. They may submit in any category (essay/ article, fiction, poetry) and must imagine an audience that might be intrigued by their course offering. We occasionally offer other pieces in our program issues, but they primarily focus on courses and events.

The “Sense of Place” Issue (spring): For this issue alone, we focus most particularly on submissions from writers with a direct connection to North Dakota, and consider work from all categories.

Writers might focus on how that connection has affected them, in terms of history, memory, education, landscape, ethnic identity, art, music, culture, family—a broad range of topics.

The “Gray Matters” Issue (fall): This issue, as its title suggests, focuses on more cerebral/ philosophical ideas. It often features “scholarly” articles (see below) but could include clearly written discussions on any relevant issues of concern to writers. It might also include contemplative poetry, memoir, or short fiction.

SUBMISSION CATEGORIES, GUIDELINES, AND CRITERIA Humanities ND Magazine accepts several kinds of 60

HUM NITIES NORTH DAKOTA MAGAZINE

01.22

the SPRING PROGRAM issue

submissions and actively seeks those submissions year round. at any time for the “Sense of Place” or “Gray Matters” issues. Please note the specific guidelines that pertain to each category and see also Submission Criteria: NONFICTION: Most of our submissions come from writers of articles—essays, creative nonfiction, memoir. These pieces should fit a range of a minimum of 1,000 to a maximum of 4,000 words.

Although we do accept previously published work (for which we do not pay), we prefer original work.* Within this category, we also accept “scholarly” essays, with the understanding that they must reflect consideration for a wide audience, not merely for colleagues in the writer’s field. Such pieces should demonstrate careful research, must make a clear, cohesive point within the 4,000-word limit, and must be well argued with supporting materials from personal or professional experience.

They may focus on any humanities topic: culture, literature, film, history, ethnic studies, art, music—on any human/society endeavor or product.

FICTION: As with nonfiction submissions, we expect a 1,000—4,000-word range and expect, with certain occasional exceptions, that work will be original/unpublished.* Both short stories and chapters/excerpts from novels will be considered for publication.

POETRY: Poetry submissions must not exceed 60 lines. Given our limited ability to publish the poetry

that we receive, we accept no more than 2 pieces/ poems per submission. Submissions of greater than 2 pieces will not receive our consideration. As with all other submissions, we prize original work but may consider previously published pieces.* ARTWORK: Please note: While we currently seek and encourage submissions of artwork to accompany articles/fiction/poetry, we are not accepting unsolicited submissions of artwork at this time. All submissions—original artwork, personal photographs, graphic art—must be of high, reproducible quality and are only published with appropriate permissions, for which the submitter is responsible. *REPRINTED WORK: Selections of nonfiction, poetry, fiction, or artwork are allowable submissions. In this case, we generally look for recently published work, though, depending upon context, an older piece could also be considered.

These submissions must be specifically identified as such and include both publication information and appropriate permissions—no exceptions in this regard.

PAYMENT FOR PUBLICATION: We pay $250 for articles, fiction pieces, and poetry, and $500 for scholarly essays and artwork selected for publication. Authors and artists maintain rights to their work and, if a piece is used on our website, can request that their piece be taken down at any time. As noted above, we do not pay authors for reprinted work.

2. No piece of any kind should be submitted without the writer having performed a careful selfediting process to assure that it is as error-free as possible; 3. Pieces should clearly identify the writer and title, and provide the writer’s e-mail address/contact information; 4. Submissions must be double spaced, conform to standard expectations regarding usage, and be written in 12-point typeface with appropriate margins (generally 1 inch) all around; 5. All submissions will be initially reviewed to determine whether they meet both our criteria and our current need. Humanities ND Magazine reserves the right to refuse any publication that does not meet such expectations. Please note: submissions that are accepted are not guaranteed immediate publication. Our acceptance response will indicate when we anticipate publication; 6. Writers should anticipate that Humanities ND Magazine will edit for clarity—in terms of style, grammar, and mechanics. We will never tamper with content, but may ask questions related to it when necessary.

All questions should be submitted to Rebecca Chalmers, Editor, HumanitiesND Magazine at hndmagazine@humanitiesnd.org

SUBMISSION CRITERIA NUTS AND BOLTS: All submissions must conform to some basic considerations, among them 1. Please carefully read all information regarding magazine issues, guidelines, and criteria prior to making submissions using the Google form (this link can be found in our magazine and on our website at humanitiesnd.org/news).

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Levi & Bethany Andrist Kenneth J. Glass Blaine Johnson Sara Garland Dave & Ann Reich Rebecca S. Thiem Geri Beckman Rande Zander Luise Beringer Joseph C. Jastrzembski & Zoe Spoomer Robert & Laurel Weigelt Jessica Rockeman Angela S. Gorder Marilyn Foss George & Janet Daley Jury Bill & Marcia Patrie Erienne & Ryan Sandness Kyle Jansson Dan Lederman John Robinson Jennifer Johnson Jason Grueneich Nicholas J. Glass Terry & Janet Jacobson Robert Franek Matt Elbert Mitzie Nay Amy N. Stromsodt Amber & David Augustadt Kelli Hively & Trygve Hammer Searle & Emmy Swedlund David Bjerklie Nancy Guy Ruby Grove Shadd & Marnie Piehl Bonnie Larson Staiger Harley D. Engelman ND Community Foundation Cynthia Goulet Wally Owen Michele Schaaf DeLoris Zenker Martin & Mary Fritz Mona Rindy Angela Uhlich Dale Sandstrom

Sherri & John A. Stern Janet Fisher Gerard & Sharon Fisher Sean D. Cleary Joy L. Wezelman Arla Teske Dennis Romfo Char Brekke Kevin Carvell Richard Smith Joyce Gerhardt Mildred Rothgarn Kathleen Jones Irvin Nodland Karen Ryberg Joseph & Katherine Satrom David R. Solheim Ruth Hursman Daryl & Linda Timian Bridgette Readel Bonnie Smith Sherill Fosland $99 and below Dorothy Lick Kim Crowley Mary Ruth Franzen Elna K. Solvang Shirley McMillan Jessie Fuher Amy Nelson Elizabeth Sund William R. Caraher Tim Olson Debbie Mantz Cathy Daane Deb & Walter Lancaster Linda Hoganson Amanda Mack Christine Tate Paul S. Stubbs Linda K. Weiss Erika Bolstad James H Quirk Ann Crews Melton Brenna & Tom Gerhardt Bruce & Ann Bremmer Stacey Goldade

Susan Dingle Emily Klym Karen Busse Brenda Schell Dan Vogel Iona M. Loken Mark & Susan Liebig Amy Ingersoll Linda L. Larson Jane Paulson Arne & Gayle Selbyg Charlotte Olson Joyce Krabseth Verna LaBounty Bethany J. Andreasen John L. Allickson Kathy Korba Shelley & Brad Farrell Marita B. Hoffart Dennis & Diane Schill Ellen M Bjelland Leah Hummel Janell Marmon Erin Laverdure Kayla A. Schmidt Hariett Davis Burton M. Nygren Lillian Crook Karen Gray Carol Kendrick Pug Ostling Jennifer Hamel Doug Wurtz Jennifer Lemming Lisa Heilman Lacie J. Van Orman Anita Casey-Reed Shirley Quick Melissa Haut Jennifer Lies Michael Tappan Paul H. Koetz Angela Blackford Linda Jenkins Emily Vieweg Molly & James Herrington Sheila Siragusa 63

Humanities North Dakota presents a brave conversation with New York Times bestselling author

BOARD OF DIRECTORS & STAFF HND Board of Directors CHAIR Dennis Cooley, Fargo

VICE CHAIR Linda Steve, Dickinson Lyle Best, Watford City Dina Butcher, Bismarck Patty Corwin, Fargo Harley Engelman, Bismarck Angela S. Gorder, Bottineau Hamzat A. Koriko, Grand Forks Jessica Rockeman, Richardton Prairie Rose Seminole, Garrison Barb Solberg, Minot Amy Stromsodt, Larimore Rebecca Thiem, Bismarck Sarah Vogel, Bismarck

Caitlin Doughty

Staff

Brenna Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Nick Glass, Director of Fiscal Operations Sue Skalicky, Program Director Lacie Van Orman, Marketing Director Joleyn Larson, Podcast Producer Crista McCandless, Program Manager Rebecca Chalmers, Editor Humanities ND Magazine Kayla Lewinski, Content Curator

701.255.3360 info@humanitiesnd.org

HumanitiesND.org

North Dakota’s Largest Lifelong Learning Community

HUMANITIESND.ORG

April 20 7:00pm AVALON EVENT CENTER, FARGO LIVESTREAM AVAILABLE

Caitlin Doughty is a

mortician, advocate, and bête noire of the traditional funeral industry. Her educational webseries "Ask a Mortician" has been viewed almost 250 million times and all three of her books were New York Times bestsellers. She founded a Los Angeles funeral home as well as the funeral reform collective "The Order of the Good Death", which spawned the death positive movement.

Tickets

PAY WHAT YOU WANT UNTIL APRIL 13, THEN PRICE CHANGES TO $50 EACH

humanitiesnd.org/events 64

HUMANITIES NORTH DAKOTA 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501

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BISMARCK, ND IMAGE PRINTING, INC.

Workshop SEPT 2023 - MARCH 2024

INTENSIVE VIRTUAL WRITING WORKSHOP FOR WRITERS, SCHOLARS, AND HISTORIANS TO HONE AND IMPROVE THEIR WRITING VISIT HUMANITIESND.ORG/LITTLE-MO APPLICATIONS DUE SEPTEMBER 1