The following are sample writings from the Summer, 2000 issue of South Dakota Review.
Literary or Not: Mystery and Other Acts of Nature, Eileen Sullivan Poem: Dakota Sky (A Fragment), A. Waller Hastings
Story: A Very Short Story Begins on a Farm, J. Annie MacLeod Poem: My Husband, A City Boy, Decides to Buy a Truck, Debra Marquart
Poem: Driving Toward Home, Wherever That Is, Robert King Poem: At the History Conference, Linda M. Hasselstrom
Poem: Ascending Harney Peak, Clif Mason Poem: What Water Gives, Freya Manfred Essay: Come to North Dakota!, Debra Marquart
MYSTERY
AND OTHER ACTS OF NATURE
When my husband, Jamie, and I moved to South Dakota sixteen years ago, I
had never set eyes on the state. On a humid August evening we drove north from
Omaha, where we had stopped on our move from Missouri, and we continued a
land-bound version of an explorer’s river journey, meandering through
undulating hills and valleys carved by the Missouri River, up from our St. Louis
home, where the Missouri meets the Mississippi, through Nebraska and on to our
Dakota destination.
It was dusk as our car turned off I-29 onto Highway 50, Jamie in the
rental truck, and me following in our car. Down the highway ahead of us
something was happening. At first it seemed like an optical illusion, one
of those delicate, shimmering puddles you see on the road way ahead of you that
fade and then disappear as your car approaches. But this was dusk, and the
movement could certainly not be described as shimmering. It was hopping, but
almost as a single, wriggling unit. Thousands of small toads were migrating
across the highway. Before I even had a chance to register what it was I was
seeing, I was on top of them, horrible
tiny thuds on the underside of the car. An amphibious undercoating. By the time
I understood what was happening and pulled onto the shoulder of the road, it was
over. It was one of those random, chaotic encounters with nature. We had been
thrust, at 65 miles per hour, into nature. Welcome to South Dakota.
Jamie, riding much higher in the truck, his attention more tightly
focused on the instability and road resistance of his rented vehicle, remained
oblivious to the hopping hordes, and he swears to this day that I am making up
this story about toad migration. He never saw it, and remains a skeptic. This is
unfortunate because he is the one who would have appreciated it the most. It is
his interest in herpetology, the study of reptiles and amphibians, that has
given shape to our summers over the years. And, as he often tells me, with
regret hanging heavy in his voice, interesting herpetological manifestations are
few and far between in the Sunshine State.
Having lived in Missouri and studied reptiles in the comparatively
diverse herpetological ecosystem of the Ozarks, he was disappointed after a few
summers here to note a rare fox snake, yellow bellied racer, ring neck, milk
snake, hog nose or garter snake sighting as the extent of his reptile finds.
Perhaps South Dakota snakes behaved differently, more elusively, I thought, as
he pored over range maps of various non-venomous species.
In our early years together a trip to the Ozarks was intensified by the
prospect of coming upon a timber rattler. In the southeastern corner of South
Dakota he saw no timber rattlers, and the prairie rattlesnake, which we were
told could sometimes be found in the western part of the state, was not a likely
encounter, “unless it was carried here in the wheel of a truck, a bale of hay
or some other highly unlikely method of transportation,” my husband would note
sadly. I nodded sympathetically and looked with new scrutiny at the round bales
of hay whizzing past our car. A city child had once identified these as “cow
eggs,” drawing a cause and effect relationship between the large round bales
and the cows which shared the pasture with them. I wondered aloud, with a
shiver, what other creatures might hatch out of them. But my paranoia aside,
Jamie knew there were no miraculous snake sightings in our near future.
So he adapted. On our hikes now he still turns over every piece of wood
or rock, still drags us through grasses that wave waist high to old abandoned
barns in the prairie (“Rats and
mice. Good snake food.”), and still keeps his eyes on the roadside during dusk
country drives for any reptile crawling out on the pavement to warm itself under
the setting sun. And he listens with a mixture of annoyance and frustration as
friends report to him killing a snake found in their fields. “It must’ve
been six feet long,” they always tell him. And they usually kill it, assuming,
usually wrongly, that the snake is venomous.
It’s interesting how some people who live in a place as natural and
untainted as South Dakota seem locked in conflict with nature, how they wage
self-defeating battles against the very forces they court. Each summer we spent
hours coaxing seeds and sprouts to grow into food, to flowers, and spraying
others that we don’t like. I struggle to explain to my children as we
weed our garden why this one flower is beautiful while the sunny yellow
ones on our lawn that they dearly love must be pulled and thrown away. We buy
ladybugs to eat aphids that crawl on our plants, but put up fences to keep out
rabbits, and kill the snakes that might control the rabbits. We spend hours
cultivating little pieces of nature that please us, courting nature like clumsy
lovers.
I heard a funny story recently. A woman who lives in this part of South
Dakota installed an elaborate pond in her backyard. It featured gorgeous aquatic
plants like water lilies and was landscaped in a gentle valley lush with blood
grass and other foliage. Each square of earth surrounding the pond was lovingly
coaxed into greenery and rich floral blooms. The effect, I am told, was of a
natural wild spot, a retreat lovingly coaxed into shape out of the earth in this
Missouri River valley. The woman
had even added goldfish to the pond. Each day she would come to feed the fish
and admire her garden. But one day the fish started disappearing. The woman
would restock the goldfish and feed them dutifully, carefully testing the water
and checking for evidence of fish carcasses. There were none. It was a natural
mystery.
One day this woman happened to be near her pond at dusk when out of the
corner of her eye she saw a rather large bull snake stab into her pond, just a
lightning flicker of movement, and
grab a goldfish from the water in one smooth gesture of poetry in motion. At
least, that is how my husband would have described it. I am told the woman’s
response was decidedly more shrill and ear splitting. On that particular night
she learned what South Dakota tries to teach us on a daily basis: that nature is
unpredictable, mysterious and resistant to being controlled. Nature has a mind
of its own.
In the novel Jurassic Park, the character Dr. Ian Malcolm (played in the
movie by Jeff Goldblum) suggests this carefully controlled dinosaur park is
destined for disaster , and outlines the Chaos theory. He explains,
“ . . . the history of evolution is that life escapes all barriers . .
. Life breaks free . . . life finds a way.” And later this theory is proven,
in all its carnivorous truth, when ostensibly unfertile dinosaurs begin to
multiply; a consequence of dinosaur genes spliced with the innocuous genes of
toads. Velociraptors and Tyrannosaurs then do what comes naturally in the
prehistoric theme park, and start eating everything in sight. As the bull snake
did at the backyard buffet table pond.
We all agree on some level with Dr. Ian Malcolm, and then mostly forget
his warning about nature when it comes to our own back yards. But
nature cannot be subdued. Nor is nature easily domesticated, in backyard
ponds or fields of corn and beans. The best we can hope for, and all we really
ever want or need, is that nature will tolerate us, that the force which drives
the prairie grasses, with coneflowers and snakes, drives us as well, to life.
Sometimes I think of that fishing bull snake when I’m gardening. And those migrating toads. Sometimes I think of that tyrannosaur, too, when Jamie is turning over some rock or dead wood, hoping to find a snake. Every once in a while he’s rewarded. Not as often as he’d like, I’m sure. But then, as we learned that night driving into South Dakota, when you least expect it, nature finds you and that’s a mystery worth waiting for.
Dakota Sky (A Fragment)
Headed west from Minnesota,
a shining path against blue sky
seemed to lead us to Dakota,
a promised land; it was a lie.
We
broke the land and the land broke us.
With
strong steel spade and plow
we
mined mountains and prairie sod,
spinning
gold from wheat and rock,
so long as water
and mother lode
remained.
Drawn by promises of gold and steel plow,
we ebbed and flowed across the land, like a tide
on the ancient sea, now renewed in waves
of golden wheat,
leaving the detritus of our passing:
gray empty shells,
farmhouses foreclosed, forsaken,
saurian threshers poised against the sky.
A VERY SHORT STORY BEGINS ON A FARM
A very short story begins on a farm; a combine whirs; chaff carried by the humid
summer wind clouds the first sentence, making the words slow and thick and hard
to read. Only after the eyes pass this sentence, stinging a little, does the
smell match the heat and dust from the field the smell of sweat, a damp neck,
sour pits, the trickle of hot salt down a breastbone. A woman shades the sun
with one hand, wipes her eyes. It is sunset in the Midwest. The woman cannot see
the boy steering the combine, the man barking directions; they are a shadow
among shadows against the orange fire of the sky. Light like corn dust clings to
her eyelids, hands, neck‑this light and the clog of too many words across
the page seem to choke her; the story opens too stuffy and still for its genre.
She crosses the yard to the kitchen; heat from the oven presses against her arms
and cheeks. An overhead fan whirs, turning steam from a pot on the stove, and
the language suggests a motif, symbols in temperature or blades, but a very
short story doesn't have time for motifs—it must follow the woman to find her
trouble, the immediate problem that will redeem the vagrancies of this
paragraph.
Her secret: tonight she will leave. Brief, vivid details affirm this secret—fourteen fifty-dollar bills sewn into her bra, an out-of-state phone number at the bottom of her purse, a fan of paid-off credit cards spread on his desk like trump. She'd learned about the bra from an old World War II movie, Nazis rolling tanks past a window, a dark-haired woman biting off thread with her teeth. There are sentimental details too, her boy's favorite soup on the stove, his favorite cobbler cooling in the fridge, one of the his dirty t-shirts tucked in her suitcase. The details must work triple-time in very short fiction, must show a modem setting, a conventional family, a character marked by a string of inferences (precise-careful-clever-tender-determined-meticulous).
In
some way all farm stories are alike—an unhappy woman in a catalog dress, a
stoic man, a bottle of whiskey under the sink—and even her secret is known by
heart, the life at the other end of that number a big-city cousin, a waitressing
job, a lover. But she is leaving, walking out on twenty years of hot-dish,
muffled sex, and endless weather, so it is right to suspect a secret within the
secret. Maybe a murdered daughter from last summer found white and glistening in
a ditch, a pale scar against the miles and miles of threshed fields and dark
ponds. Or bruises like ink stains on the back of the woman's arms, hard pinches
her husband takes where no one can see. Or a distant memory, the smell of smoke
and summer sweat, a forbidden boy in a black car, his body crushing the bird's
bones of the woman's ribs and hips.
Now
the words are dark like a ditch; twilight rests on the sentences. The husband
and boy will be heading back, husks in their hair and down their shirts, marks
on their arms like paper cuts. Light from the kitchen will draw them, the eye of
the house—a beacon—the one place that exists in this story beyond which
there is nothing but heat and chaff and an out-of-state phone number that will
ring and ring in an unknown city in an unknown room.
The
woman is already driving to the bus station—she will leave the old Ford in the
lot; she will take nothing that's his—and beneath her skirt her thighs stick;
her upper lip glistens in the dashboard light. Damp and slippery in the folds of
her body, the woman thinks that hot weather makes for any horror. Three-days-dead,
her daughter had gone taut and shiny, an egg on a sidewalk in the hundred-degree
sun. She's full of fluid, someone had
said, a man with a tie and clean nails. We’ll
have to drain her. Such a memory, so placed, cannot help but sound like the
beginning of truth, the one true thing this very short story will offer.
But
weather slips beyond this moment, gathering force and edge, and it is not her
daughter's bloated skin but the ripe air of an evening thunderstorm, air that's
heavy and wet, the sky a blue-black bruise. And even though the genre resists
extended imagery, the woman makes random associations: her windshield wipers
like slaps, perched ravens like fists, the sound of far-off thunder like the
threat of her husband's footsteps down the hall. Once, in the many unwritten
pages before the first sentence, a summer lightning bolt had riven their hundred-year
oak tree, and over the years the charred cleft has become her secret
shelter—yet another image, a hollow like a turkey wishbone, cradling her
broken body.
The woman wipes the taste of metal from her mouth; a story that talks so much about cruelty and death cannot help but taste like blood. For six paragraphs, this story has resisted expectation, and now would be the time to bring it around, take on the fast, understated voice of very short fiction with its single effect and quick insight. But the sentences continue to move in slow motion, in a kind of plot-less, intense feeling that seems impossible in a story of only so many words. This feeling comes from another, older memory, the boy and the car, the one who used to skim his lips across the woman's belly like a raft down a river.
Just
last night she thought of this boy. A dog day, the night was so hot she slept
without her gown, stretched herself on the bed, a hog on cool mud. Her husband
was downstairs with the news and the whiskey, carefully placed in paragraph
three, and she touched herself the way the migrant's son had touched her,
fingers on corn silk. Young, their very bodies had been stories, pages and pages
to be turned and glossed and sometimes read with deep care. She'd known the
measure of her body, then, its grammar of sighs and sweat and taste and touch;
its unbroken code. But then a black night in the back of the boy's black car,
her father had found them. Her father had raped the air with his fists.
The
woman wonders how she will measure herself in a world beyond the farm and sky
and weather, how she will know herself against the narrow, double nouns of
cities: fire hydrants and potted plants, collared dogs and window-boxes. It's
too late for the story to follow her there, though; the slow details of this
night have eaten away her allotment of words. Her secrets within the final
secret of her departure are the only clues to how she will fare, to the life she
will live when she steps off the bus and dials the hidden phone number.
Perhaps a very short story cannot begin on a farm. The subject expects languor; weather is character; days are measured in snow and sun and rain and wind, not two martini lunches or trashcan fires at dusk. But any subject can invite the language of poetry or the grit of terse prose. The farm is tractors and aprons and throat-catching sunsets, but it's also money and torture and sex of all kinds. The very short story of the city, the slum, or the crowd has as much comfort as the sky through this woman's windshield, wide and blank as the end of this page. For all that matters in any story is a character in fierce or quiet pain, and this place is perfect for violence and need and anger and loss. This is farmland, after all, the country's heart—a thin topsoil over stones and raw clay.
MY
HUSBAND, A CITY BOY,
When
I find him, he's lying on the bed
with
magazines, surrounded by glossy
spreads,
the fleshy airbrushed tones
of
break-your-neck beautiful pick up
trucks,
their commercials promising
added
legroom, adventure in ownership,
and
deliverance from all life's hard, stuck
places.
Rock guitars chime with whiskey
voices
about narrow misses, rugged
times
survived, all thanks to the solid
dependability
of a 4 x 4. This is how
it
will be: 'you arrive in your truck
(AKA,
the rock) loaded down with fun-
loving
girls wearing tank tops and short,
fringed
cut-offs. They hop from the cab
tossing
their glossy hair to find the next
available
good time. In the back are guitars
and
amplifiers, and silver kegs full of
piss-warm
beer. Believe me, you'll kiss
yourself
then for having the horsepower.
This
is the new truck, he says. Gone
are
the days of gun racks and roped deer,
tires
kicking up tufts of dirt, the dark
shrinking
silhouette of a cowboy hat
as
the truck climbs the last rise. For me,
it
was hay bales, straw bales, alfalfa bales,
rocks,
rocks and more rocks, cranky
stick-shifts,
slippery clutches, feet barely
reaching
the pedals, driving lunch out
to
Dad in the august fields, dust and sweat
slicked
seats, the smell of oil and tractor
grease,
the thunk and tumble of gas cans
rolling
in the back. Listen, I tell him.
Here
are three things I'd like to never
again
do--wear a seed cap, live in a trailer park,
and
own a pickup truck. Eventually
I
add, wear safety orange, to the list,
but
that's years later and another story
altogether.
DRIVING TOWARD HOME, WHEREVER THAT IS
The
red car behind me, small as a bright
drop
of blood in the rear-view mirror,
grows
larger and passes, a man driving,
a
woman beside him, half-turned, one hand
casually
propping her head, and listening.
The
dark ridge of the Missouri valley
rises
to the west, miles away and eons,
"the
longest division of geologic time
containing
two or more eras." If you were here,
you
might be listening as she was, if I were
saying
something, like the Missouri's importance
to
the fur trade, or that aera was a
bronze Roman
coin,
or something more personal, except that
now
what's personal is you're not here.
These
are the grounds where people went on expeditions,
stalled
on sandbars in low water, capsized in high,
people dying so far away from home
their
old beds weren't even memories.
In
a small wetland along the road, a duck
sits
on the hump of a muskrat's den,
unconcerned,
comic, at home and not.
Barn
swallows, they say, are bunching now,
families
collecting at dawn on the cool highways,
little
radio signals sputtering in their blood.
Over
a hill, four silver trailers convoy
on vacation, a small, uncoupled train
of
couples shining like anniversaries.
In
South Dakota they drive the cattle down
to the closer pastures. Elk in Wyoming
are
on the move, their antlers gathered
in
the spring for art work and for shipping out
to
countries who make medicines, love potions
from
such various deciduous growths.
It
doesn't matter where home is. The winter's
coming. There are some laws we obey
without
knowing we obey, without knowing
there
are laws. Something edges down in the land
and
air in our bodies. And if not everything moves
south
toward you, my darling, it's enough. As if
it
has been years, I've been somewhere. Showing
my eras, I'm talking my way down river now,
a caesar returning with furs, with stolen gold.
At the History Conference
In
the overheated library
of
a small South Dakota college,
speakers
murmur all afternoon.
A
fan clunks, turning.
My
eyelids close as
a
soft-spoken man tells how
his
grandmother's eyes
would
not meet his
when
he discovered in the attic
what
he holds up before us:
a
robe and hood
of
the Ku Klux Klan.
The
fan thumps
like
drumbeats.
A
faded tassel spins.
Fear
stalks into the room,
waving
a torch.
A
flaming cross blooms
on
a forest hillside
near
the bookshelves.
A
Catholic priest
shot
by Hate
bleeds
on the floor
between
the desks.
All
around the room
hands
chill,
eyelashes
smoke,
hair
blazes.
Scholars
stare
at
one another,
faces
blank as white hoods.
Hands
clench
around torches.
ASCENDING
HARNEY PEAK
Each journey is unique, each journey is
the same.
As Jesse and I walk the three miles to
the summit
Of Harney Peak, tallest in the Hills,
the path's gravel
Grit and powdery dirt glimmers with
crushed mica.
A few bigger mirroring shards remain.
Granitic rock
Breaks the path surface, so we place
each step with care.
Pine roots gnarl and snarl across the
path, extravagant
Varicose veins. Tiny pinecones have
been smashed
Into the dust and pebbles by hundreds
of running shoes.
I wonder, what is our true destination
in this ascent?
Our bodies will know when they have
arrived
At walk's end, but will our spirits
know when
They have reached their journeys'
terminus?
And will that be but a temporary
arresting of an ever-
Restless motion, or an achievement more
durable?
We see small hard balls of horse dung
on the path,
And large black ants, foraging
everywhere,
And jet black spiders the size of our
little fingernails.
We stop to
watch a chipmunk quickly peel away
The layers of
a young green pinecone, eating only
The seeds,
dropping the remnants onto the brown
Needles. We
hear squirrels chittering back
And forth
from the trees. Every direction we look
We see pines,
birches, and aspens broken by last
October's
freak storm: tons of wet, heavy snow stooped
The trees and
then a cougar-screaming wind snapped
Them in their
middles. Others were literally blown over,
Uprooted
and toppled. Long strands of gray moss gauze
The
branches of some. Midway up the mountain,
Scores
of stumps (flat-topped by chainsaws) edge the path
Where
the Park Service removed dead trees that hung
Over,
obstructing the way. We greet all we meet
Coming
down. Most return our salutations but a few
Keep eyes lowered to the path and slide
by, or stare
At us in incomprehension or even
baleful ill will.
Has the ascent bled so much from their
souls?
The boulders and rock outcroppings are
covered
With short gray-green moss, making them
look somehow
Older, more ancient. Pale cirrus clouds
slip slowly
Across the sky. Odd that we hear so
little birdsong.
Are there so few birds in these
mountains? Water seeps
Appear from nowhere, make trickles the
width
Of two fingers, vanish in the grass. A
single small creek
Fans out shallowly as it bows about and
intersects
The path. We step on rocks to cross the
chanting water.
All along our route we see black-eyed
Susans, green foxtail,
Golden rod, plantain with their round
seed stalks sticking up,
Purple asters, and, more rarely, starry
Queen Anne's lace.
A very few times we see tough-skinned
red toadstools
Springing from rotting logs. We observe
an orange
Mormon fritillary sun itself on a piece
of peeling birch bark,
A plump black-striped bumblebee
hover over a flower.
To walk open-eyed during this
ascent is to feel
New neural pathways sprouting in our
brains.
We don't stop to rest but walk steadily
along, neither hurrying
Nor ambling. We don't break a sweat but
we know
We've done something by the time we
reach the place
Where twenty horses still stand,
saddled, tied by their reins.
We ascend the final flights of stone
steps, feeling sudden
Thigh burn, climb the steep steel steps
(almost vertical),
And attain the top of the lookout
tower. Below us mile
Upon mountain mile of the near- monoculture of the pine-
Hills quilled as densely as a round-backed
porcupine.
A dozen miles
away, thick rain slants from a gray-sodden
Bank of
clouds as though sliding down an invisible spillway.
Lightning
rips sky's blue-black fabric, ignites the firecracker
Strings of
our spines. On the stone landing below we drink
The last of
our water and shoot the last of our film
Before
walking out onto the peak's stone skull. Amazingly,
Fissures hold
a few yards of soil, from which grass sprigs up.
We walk,
climb, and clamber to a knob two hundred yards
From the
tower, and sit at last, to scan the vast unchecked
Expanses of
evergreen. Thunder sends its wrecking ball
Into the
hills. Clouds gather in the darkening sky.
Updrafts of
cool-warm wind feel pleasing
On our hot
faces and necks and arms. The wind
Blows breath
into us—blows vigor into bodies,
Poetry into
minds. We feel ourselves wheeled
Round on the
great planet, wheeled through
Sun-and-star-lit
infinities of midnight space, yes,
Wheeled about forever on the still-wild Earth.
What Water Gives
When
I was four I learned how water holds me up
if
I inhale and lift my feet,
how
water embraces all of me at once, both hard and soft:
more
like earth than sunlight,
more
like moonlight than the moon.
After
I fell in love with water
I
never woke in the morning
wondering
who I was or what to do.
I
swam, floated, and watched the skin of the lake
endlessly
replace itself.
I
would say water
is
my mother,
but
since I am a mother myself
I
know how much I fall short
of what water gives.
COME To NORTH DAKOTA!
One of the hardest things in the world to do is dispel the misapprehension which exists in many quarters in regard to
the newer parts of our own country. Persons who move from the eastern and middle states to North Dakota, or in fact
any of the northwestern states, frequently express their amazement at finding things so different from what they had
expected. They look for a vast, howling wilderness, and are
surprised to find a well settled, civilized country.
—Land Tract from the Northern Pacific Railway
Company, 1900.
If you leave Fargo at 9:00 in the morning, going west on I-94 and traveling at a reasonable rate of speed, you'll reach south central North Dakota by noon, just as the sun rises in a hot spike above you. In that time you'll have passed through the Red River valley, a lacustrine plain on the eastern border of North Dakota which is some of the richest farmland in the world and the drainage plain for the Red, one of the few rivers in the world that flows north.
Although
it's now a small river valley with land so flat, some claim, that you can
actually see the curvature of the earth as you're driving, at one time the Red
River valley was the bottom of the ancient glacial Lake Agassiz, a body of water
that covered, by some estimates, 110,000 square miles in parts of Canada,
Minnesota and the Dakotas, and the last remnant of which is Lake Winnipeg in
Manitoba.
Driving
west along I-94, the interstate that cuts east-west through the state of North
Dakota, you'll encounter a road so lonely, treeless, unchangeable and devoid of
rises and curves that it will feel to you like one long, held guitar note.
You'll have the sense, if your tires are in proper alignment, that you rarely
need to tap the steering wheel to keep your car on its straight-ahead path.
Now
you are driving deep into the center of one of the "square states," as
I recently heard a comedian refer to the conservative column of states—the
Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma—a region that loves Republicans, hosts
tornadoes, and holds down, like a rock, some would argue, the center of the
country.
It's
a place that, traditionally, has been considered to be devoid of story and not
even interesting to the experts who were paid to study it. Compared to the more
dramatic outcroppings in other parts of the country, the midwest offers few
excitements for geologists. Perhaps this is why, as John McPhee notes in Annals
of the Former World, "Philip King, of the United States Geological Survey,
encapsulated the Midwest in one memorable sentence: 'The rather monotonous
geologic features of the Interior Lowlands would seem of less interest than the
complex rocks and structures of the Canadian Shield, the Appalachians, or the
[western] Cordilleras, nor can we, in this book, devote space to them
commensurate with their surface area'."
Now
you have entered the heartland, the place where Jefferson's rectilinear
cadastral survey, the land grid plan that was called for in the Land Ordinance
of 1785, found its most perfect confluence of latitude, longitude, and country
so well-behaved that it laid itself down in neat, even squares for the
surveyor's instruments. Very soon, as the expedition moved west, the neatness of
the grid would be foiled by steep valleys, rivers, foothills and mountains, but
here in the monotonous square states, the survey subdivided the land easily into
square upon square, each measuring six miles by six miles.
As
Richard Manning observes in Grasslands, "these measures became the basis
for parceling lands under the various homesteading and land entry laws.... The
survey drew the lines, and yeomen were to be dropped between the lines like
numbers on a spreadsheet." The lasting effects of Jefferson's grid can most
easily be seen from the air as one passes over the plains—a lovely patchwork
of fields in different hues of greens, tans, and yellows, often in such perfect,
regular squares that the land below looks like a handmade quilt.
Despite
its easy inclines and farmable plains, the region was not impressive to early
assessors. In Grasslands, Richard Manning notes that during an 1820 expedition
under Major Stephen Long, the survey's official chronicler, Edwin James
"called the region between the Mississippi and Rockies a'dreary plain,
wholly unfit for cultivation, and of course uninhabitable by a people depending
upon agriculture for subsistence'." Manning observes that it was Edwin
James who first dubbed this area "the Great American Desert, 11 an
indignity from which the area has never recovered, and against which land
companies and state tourism bureaus have argued for over a hundred years,
producing rainfall charts, per acre wheat production figures, and colorful
tracts describing the region's wonders.
In
a 1900 land brochure entitled "Progress Made by the Farmers in Central
North Dakota, 'I created by the Northern Pacific railroad, one of the largest
holders of land in North Dakota at the turn of the century, images of prosperity
abound. On the cover is a photograph of a family dressed in Sunday clothes
standing in front of their two-story white clapboard farmhouse. Beside the home
is a carriage with two fine, white horses waiting to whisk the family off to
church, the town store, or some other civilized place. Beside the horse
carriage, taking up the left half of the photograph and looming like a dark
presence is the family's first home—a tow-lying, one room sod house with a
roof that slunks down slightly in the center. The caption reads: "Progress
in Home Building. Old and New Home of Erick Swanson."
The
brochure is full of such photographs showing new homes surrounded by small, neat
outbuildings. Interspersed between the photos are testimonials from area
settlers declaring their good fortune and prosperity since coming to the state.
"I was a coat miner in Scranton, Pennsylvania," one letter reads,
"and having a growing family I looked about to see if I could not leave
them with a better prospect than the life of a miner at daily wages. I finally
decided on North Dakota and came to Stutsman County in 1882 with my family, a
few household goods and a few dollars."
The
letter goes on to briefly describe the initial years of labor and hardship, but
it continues, "the end of every year left me in a better position than at
its beginning. I now have one thousand acres of this rich wheat land in a body,
a good new house and barn, 17 horses, 25 cattle, plenty of machinery, 3,000
bushels of wheat in a granary and feed for stock, the coming year. I do not owe
anyone a cent."
While
all of the facts and figures were no doubt persuasive, the most emotionally
powerful of the above statements almost certainly must have been, "I do not
owe anyone a cent." Perhaps it is true about people from all parts of the
country, but growing up in central North Dakota, I never met anyone who did not
yearn to be independent, free and clear of all claims, unfettered by debt, and
beholden to no one.
In
the Northern Pacific brochure, the testimonials about inauspicious beginnings go
on and on: "I came to Spiritwood, ND in 1886 from Detroit, Minnesota, a
young unmarried man with nothing but my two hands with which to gain a
livelihood"; or "I came to LaMoure County in 1886, with no money and
no property but two cows and took a homestead on the SW 1/4 of Sec. 18-134-59";
or "I write you a few lines to let you know what I think of North Dakota. I
came to Jamestown about eighteen years ago from Germany. When I arrived in
Jamestown I had only one hundred dollars which I spent before I did
anything."
As
one would expect, the body of the letters recite personal statistics—the
number of acres acquired since then, livestock owned, bushels stored, and
dollars in savings—but the endings of the letters emphatically declare the
region's ability to confer prosperity: "This certainly is the place for a
poor man to get a start in the financial world"; and "the wonder is
that more young men who are merely existing in the East do not launch Out, come
here and take a sure road to competence"; and "my wife had always been
prejudiced against North Dakota, but since she has seen it she cannot praise it
too highly"; and "you could not induce me to go back to Missouri; I
like the climate so much better here."
This
last statement, one of my personal favorites, reminds me of a report I heard a
few years ago on NPR's "Morning Edition" about the city of Ashley, a
small town in south central North Dakota near where I grew up, that was trying
to attract retirees to the region. Out of the north every winter, usually in
early January, a major exodus occurs as many of our wealthier retirees, usually
called "snowbirds, it migrate south to places like Arizona, Texas, and
Florida to escape the harshest months of the winter. But on this day, NPR was
reporting that the town of Ashley hoped to achieve a kind of reverse migration
by appealing to the retirees of the south, perhaps those living on a fixed
income, to migrate north for their retirement years.
As
incentive, the chamber of commerce was citing the recuperative powers of a
change of scenery and Ashley's amazingly inexpensive real estate (in my hometown
it's also sometimes possible to buy a home and the land on it for only a few
thousand dollars). In an interview with Bob Edwards, the host of "Morning
Edition," the mayor of Ashley boasted about the totally crime‑free
streets, and the cleanest air that anyone could imagine breathing.
After
a series of skeptical questions followed by unfailingly perky answers, Bob
Edwards asked the mayor about what facilities the retirees, with all their newly-found
free time and disposable income, could enjoy in Ashley—opera, ballet, shopping
malls? Well, the mayor had to admit, Ashley, a town of about 1,000 people,
didn't have any of those things, but they did have a local cafe, a grocery
store, a bar, a golden-age club, and a post office.
Did
they have an exercise facility, Edwards asked. Retirees these days like to keep
in shape, he explained. No, the mayor replied, but they had those
crime-free streets where a person could take a walk or jog any time of the
day or night.
"What
about the weather," Edwards asked.
"Oh,
the weather's beautiful up here year-round," the mayor insisted.
"But
I checked with the national weather service," Edwards said, throwing down
the gauntlet, "and they tell me the average temperature during the months
of December through February is ten degrees above zero, with dips down to ten
and twenty below zero."
There
was a slight pause on the line. "And that doesn't count the snowfall
figures and the wind chill factors," Edwards added.
"Yeah,
but that's a dry cold," the mayor insisted. "It doesn't feel as cold
here as ten degrees feels anywhere else. Most of the time I go out without a
coat."
It's
fortunate that Bob Edwards ended the interview at this point before the mayor
began talking about UFOs and receiving messages from the mothership, because the
North Dakota he was describing was some kind of alternative universe to the one
I experienced growing up on the plains.
In
reality, the cold of North Dakota is unlike cold I have experienced anywhere
else, with the possible exception of Alberta, Canada and the Arctic circle,
which is the place of origin of the wind currents, the Alberta clippers, that
breeze through and freeze our asses off each winter. This cold not only cuts to
the bone, it freezes the marrow. It's a cold that's impossible to describe
because it exists outside the province of language, perhaps a bit like the pain
of childbirth—as soon as it subsides and you are unthawing your frozen limbs
in front of the heater, your mind goes to work forgetting it. For stoic North
Dakotans, the cold is Nietzschean—if it kills you, you were a wimp anyway and
didn't deserve to live here. The weather in North Dakota becomes the hard rock
that you sharpen the blade of your will to survive against.
And
this must have been the way it was for the early settlers in Dakota territory
who survived some of the coldest winters and the hottest summers on record
inside their sod houses. Imagine their surprise when they encountered the worst
hailstorms, grasshopper plagues, and firestorms they'd ever imagined, calamities
of biblical proportion, followed by snow drifts as high as two-story buildings,
and the coldest winters they'd ever seen. It's a strange consequence that the
extremes of the place have nurtured a kind of healthy fatalism in the people of
North Dakota. "Well, it keeps the riff raff out," they like to say
about any meteorological occurrence that makes the state appear less than
habitable.
Prevaricating
about the charms of North Dakota is a longstanding tradition. In a 1924
brochure, also created by the Northern Pacific railroad, the farmer is again
invited to "come to North Dakota." On the cover of the brochure is a
montage of photos of farmland from three states—Illinois, Iowa, and North
Dakota. Impressive graphs show the per acre price of farmland rising in Illinois
from $8 in 1850 to $108 in 1910. In Iowa the land prices shoot from $6 in 1850
to $227 in 1920.
On
the bottom is a photograph of a new homestead in North Dakota. The superimposed
graph shows that the per acre cost of land in 1880 was $8, just as in Iowa and
Illinois. But now in 1920, it is still only $41. It's clear that here is an
opportunity waiting to happen. "Come to North Dakota," the headline
reads, "because history repeats itself." On the first page of the
brochure after the table of contents, so it will be impossible to miss, is a
line drawing of the North American continent.
The
caption above the drawing reads, "North Dakota: the Center of the North
American Hemisphere." The drawing seems fairly accurate. The "Dominion
of Canada" is in the north with the Arctic circle and part of Greenland
showing at the top; Mexico is looking a little squashed and anemic to the south;
the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans are where they should be, although there's
no Great Britain or Europe on the east or Pacific Rim countries peeking in from
the west. But somehow it's North Dakota that appears larger than normal in the
drawing. It is highlighted in a darker shade and elevated above the other
states.
Across
the drawing are superimposed two lines—one that cuts east to west across the
continent. The east leg of the line reads, $$not too wet, and the west leg reads
"not too dry." Coming from the north, another line reads, "Not
too cold," and the line continuing to the south reads, "not too
hot." Does it surprise anyone that these lines all meet, in a sacred
conjunction, over the state of North Dakota?
The
text at the bottom of the page reads a little like Bob Edwards' interview with
the mayor or Ashley: "Extremes of temperature to which the state is subject
are not unpleasant due to low humidity. Hot, muggy days are very rare in summer
and long twilight periods and nights are always cool.... The winters are cold,
but it is the dry, crisp, clear cold that is more healthful and more pleasant
for man and beast than the winter weather of regions of so-called moderate
climate."
One might feel compelled to argue with some of these statements, if they were not followed by one of the most astonishing claims I have ever read about North Dakota:
State authorities claim approximately 200 hours more sunshine during the growing season than the States of Ohio, Indian Illinois
and Iowa.... It has been proven that there is between 102 and 103 additional hours between sunrise and sunset on a line drawn through
central North Dakota than upon a similar line drawn through the central part of Indiana and Iowa during the season March 21
to September 21.
This is a stunning discovery for me—someone who has
ignorantly believed all these years that the earth rotates in a somewhat regular
manner, lighting and not-lighting different longitudes and latitudes in a
fairly consistent way. But I should have known that the sun would linger over
North Dakota, dread to leave it, the magnetic force of the state causing the
planets to heave and flex, the sun to pull a little closer to earth and shine a
little harder each time North Dakota came into view.
I
have seen this claim of more sunshine in several land and tourism brochures from
this time period. The scientific origin of the claim is never stated, and the
wording of the logic is often garbled and unclear, as in the above statement,
"It was been proven that" with no indication to follow by whom. And
misinformation proliferates as the tracts begin quoting each other.
A rare 1920s brochure entitled, "Own a Home in Logan County, North Dakota," my home county, makes similar claims of plenitude. On page four, are photos of thick herds of heifers and pigs. In the right hand comer, three men holding guns stand in front of a fence that is strewn solid with ducks, geese, and other unidentifiable types of water fowl. "Results of a morning hunt," the caption reads, and the smug smiles on the hunters' faces would make anyone envious. The text later in the brochure, on page twenty, takes a hard-line approach, cautioning you, the prospective land speculator, not to be hesitate.
The price of the land in Logan County is going up. There is no better time than now for securing a home where cheap lands