Just completed and filed my 451st consecutive Bismarck Tribune newspaper column. Now I have to go to Verizon to renegotiate my iPhone account, a fate worse than death, worse than the license division of Californias DOT on a Monday morning. Over the Memorial Day weekend I worked almost incessantly in my yard--mowing, trimming, tilling, planting, creating a watering system, putting rusted Mott coffee cans on the fragile tomatoes. Most of it was soul-work, healing work, hands in the soil work, but some of it was trips to Menards, on a day when every North Dakotan was at Menards, and some was cutting back the raspberry patch, which turned my forearms into a bloody scratched mass. My friends Jim and Lillian--master gardeners, my garden idols--note that this is the first May they can ever remember when there was zero precipitation in North Dakota--zip. I found in tilling that for the first time ever no mud stuck to the tines, which typically means lots of stops to clear the tiller with sticks and pliers. The earth of my garden was like coffee grounds, even on first tilling. I told Jim and Lillian that I was worried about the water bill. Jim licked his lips and said, Yeah, but its tomatoes! His rule is to grow lots of different varieties of tomatoes. You havent lived until you have had a Fuglie BLT straight from the garden in August. He says he eats tomatoes until he gets acidic sores on the inside of his mouth--then hes done, or nearly so. While I was writing, at my favorite coffee house, a very prominent North Dakotan stopped to say hello on his way to a commission meeting. He has Medora, ND, ties. Hes highly educated, funny, thoughtful. No flaming liberal. He said, Dont stop writing what you write. We need it, even if you get lots of negative pushback. Then he left and I had to push send without him here to run interference. Easy for him to say. I love to have written. I love to have written. Occasionally I love to write. I love the feeling of emotional exhaustion when I am finished, the sense that whatever else is going on I have yet again, for the 451st time, pushed send within the limits of my weekly deadline, and have tried, to the best of my limited ability, to say intelligent and intelligible things about the place I love most in the world. Thats a ton of good intentions, and just under 600,000 words. Approximately 585,000 of those words are pure love of the Great Plains. It can all be summarized in four sentences. 1. North Dakota is an amazing, improbable, windswept place that has its own magnificence, though it is an acquired taste and not for the faint of heart. 2. What makes North Dakota so great is not the amenities, not the boutique hotels and the superb cuisine, but rather the vast rolling plains, the small towns and villages, the harvest festival and the class B basketball tournament, the rural values and the redemptive innocence and integrity of our people. 3. If you really love North Dakota you have to love it in all of its moods, through drought and gale force wind and ground blizzard and the long long subarctic winters. If you only love ND for the 35 perfect days per annum, but you would rather be elsewhere for those five hard months, you do not really love North Dakota. And 4. This place is so marvelous, both in its landscape and its communities, that we are going to have to fight to keep it in the face of the titanic forces of industrial modernity and cultural deracination. We can probably have both: industrial prosperity AND a continuation of what is best in North Dakota. But that is decidedly not just going to happen without a very deep commitment to things that are not monetizable. csj
Posted on: Wed, 28 May 2014 17:51:14 +0000
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