Top: Threshing, 1937. The author’s Bottom left: Snow in 1943 nearly buried the garage on our grandmother’s farm Bottom middle: The author’s grandmother, Katherine Gebhardt Rempfer, and her sister-in-law, Fredrika Gebhardt, 1925 Bottom right: The author’s cousin, Paul Speidel, and his bottle lamb, 1926 All photos courtsey of Elizabeth Rempfer Fiechtner, courtesy of Mike Rempfer, Bismarck, ND
speaking immigrants stuck. Plucking up the courage to leave their villages and vineyards and fields, cross half of Europe, the whole Atlantic and then another half-continent, had wrenched them to the core, left them hungry to burrow their roots down into the earth, something to hold them in place. In those first decades, it took everything they were—fertile, tough and prolific—to wrest a living, by brute force, from this treeless and semi-arid place. Even today, in North Dakota’s politics and culture, you can feel the after-echoes of our grandparents’ fear, as greenhorns, of being duped, cheated, taken advantage of. The wounded pride of feeling their way through another foreign culture, at feeling foolish, being ridiculed, of the stigma of the bumpkin, the peasant. Economically and politically, prairie people have felt both forgotten and exploited. Living in a small and sparsely populated state, with a culture emphasizing humility and obedience to authority, we are left feeling ourselves at the mercy of faceless forces, those who set gas prices and commodity prices. Buy high, sell low. “A German will fall into work like another man into sin.” – from the book Plains Folk, by Father William Sherman Wind, grasshoppers, drought, blizzard. You can try to out-think them, out-plan them. Mostly, you can work, and drive those around you to work, until you drop, knowing all that labor can be extinguished
in a ten-minute hailstorm. Farmers share the same dread, have the same knots in their stomachs. Here, that means short, broken sleep at calving time, pushing yourself from daylight past dark at harvest-time, racing against whatever the sky might deal out, outrun disaster, get the crop in, safe. Please, no sleet at calving. Please, no hail at harvest. Please rain. Please, but not today. Small things can be disastrous. So no slacking. No goofing off, leaving the corral gate open; taking a day off from haying, only to have a thunderstorm flatten the field. Catching a hand in the power take-off; leaving a spark that ignites a haystack. Carelessness is no minor vice. Taking risks is not just foolish, but can be deadly. When people wonder why North Dakota doesn’t breed squadrons of risk-taking visionaries and daredevil entrepreneurs, we could wearily say that making a living from the land gives us all the risk we want, thank you.
The question outsiders ask most often is, “why don’t you leave?” The answer is, lots of people have done so. Even some who loved it dearly have given it up. The 1930s took a big slice. The 1980s took another. But for those who stay, despite it all … well, sometimes people love the thing that tests them to their limits. Because to survive 35