Clay's Weekly Columns

Clay Jenkinson's weekly column for The Bismarck Tribune

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From Setback to Success:
The Next Phase of Higher Education in North Dakota

by Clay Jenkinson
June 16, 2013

The sudden buyout of the Chancellor of Higher Education's contract is a really unfortunate development in North Dakota life. I only met Ham Shirvani once and I found him really impressive. From what little I have seen at first hand, and from what I have heard from trusted insiders, I get that his bedside manner left a little to be desired. Given all that has passed, all that has been alleged, it is perhaps best at this point for us all to conclude generously that the relationship between Dr. Shirvani and the educational and political leaders of North Dakota was just not a good fit. My sense is that the Chancellor was just as bewildered by us as we have been by him. I hate to see a man of his achievement and gifts depart under a cloud.

It was a very expensive mistake for North Dakota. I'm a taxpayer who does not begrudge any of the money taken from my pocket for education--pre-school, Head Start, K-12, school lunch programs, international exchange programs, technology innovations. There is nothing more important in a civil society than educating our children, each according to his or her best learning style, each up to her or his capacity. I'm very happy to pay my share. But I do begrudge the idea of spending the best part of a million dollars to get rid of a servant of the state. Tossing that kind of money around should be unthinkable, and, for most of North Dakota history, it would simply have been impossible. It is a sign of the ways in which the carbon lottery has corrupted our sense of value that we can write that gargantuan check with a shrug. I believe Dr. Shirvani is entitled to whatever exit compensation his contract specifies, of course, but if I were in a marriage I could only get out of by giving my spouse a million dollars of walking around money, I'd learn to appreciate her tuna hotdish and her dumb cousin Fred.

Just let me be chancellor for six weeks. I'm sure to screw things up much more quickly and obviously, and I'll gladly take my banishment for just $650,000!

Shirvani's departure not just an expensive, but a costly setback to higher education in North Dakota. Because of the turmoil during the tenure of recent chancellorships here—Robert Potts, Bill Goetz, Ham Shirvani—the 63rd North Dakota legislature voted to let the people of North Dakota decide in November 2014 whether they want to abolish the State Board of Higher Education altogether, and replace it with a three member commission appointed by the Governor. In my opinion, that would be a terrible mistake. We should fix the problems of the Board of Higher Education, not dissolve it. The Board was created in the mid twentieth century to protect higher education from the meddling hands of governors and legislators. We need a Board that is quasi-independent of the political process, just as we need a quasi-independent Federal Reserve Board to protect our money supply from naked political manipulation.

Even if Shirvani had been a sweet-tempered and understated chancellor, he would have had an extremely difficult time of it, because he was brought in to bring a new kind of order to higher education to North Dakota, to control—rather than be controlled by—strong university presidents like former NDSU president Joe Chapman, and to figure out how to bring eleven independent and self-serving colleges and universities into an orderly and efficient planetary system. That's a very tall order, a minefield to negotiate under the best of circumstances, like dragging the petty fiefdoms and principalities of central Europe into something called the nation of Germany. Chancellor Shirvani never developed the trust and credibility he would have needed to whip the system into shape. It would be a great mistake to decide it was all his fault.

So now what? The urgent imperative is to name an interim chancellor who enjoys widespread trust, a true North Dakotan (born and educated) who is dynamic without being narcissistic, a superb listener who retains a strong independence of thought, a leader who is forceful without being overbearing, someone who knows how to get along with the leaders of North Dakota, including the more colorful and strong-minded members of the legislature. We need a man or woman who has his ear to the future of higher education in America and the world, a pragmatic innovator who is not afraid to think outside of the box, but who understands the pressures and constraints that make sudden or wild changes impossible. We need someone who will work in open cooperation with the members of the State Board, but stand up to them with genial firmness when necessary, someone who is more interested in education than in empire building or personal advancement, someone who genuinely respects the presidents of our colleges and universities and does not regard them as his subordinates, but as dedicated co-professionals. We need someone who will bring a new level of transparency to higher education, and work closely with the legislature to address the issue of spiraling cost in higher ed. We need someone who knows how to laugh at himself.

This is a time of revolution in higher education. Thomas Friedman's flat world means that any pro-active person can get access to the best educational opportunities around the globe without getting out of her or his pajamas. The Information Revolution means that everyone has access to oceans of knowledge 24 hours a day, free—literally in the palm of one's hand. Higher education is not going to remain a process of knowledge dumping much longer—the timeworn system in which the Professor who has knowledge places it into the hands of the Student, who seeks knowledge. That made sense in the Middle Ages when books were literally chained to the library wall. It makes little sense in the Age of Infinite Access and Information. Professors are going to have to become knowledge coaches rather than knowledge providers, and even someone "graduating" from Bismarck State College or Mayville State is routinely going to take courses from MIT, the Sorbonne, Stanford, Oxford, or Arkansas State, and listen to lectures by the best scholars in the world in a breathtaking range of new delivery systems. Traditional degree-seeking may in some respects give way to a much broader system of learning modules and skill certification. The local university (Minot State, for example) is only going to survive if it embraces the brave new world of educational possibilities. Any institution that merely hopes that a bunch of students will just show up in the fall is going to be as much a fossil as the Triceratops. We need a chancellor who understands where things are headed, and wants to make the best of it for our institutions.

The new chancellor (and can we stop calling this person a chancellor—geez, no wonder the job goes to their heads!) should begin by scheduling town hall meetings at every college town in the state, and then ten non-college towns, to listen, listen, listen.

And fight with all of his might to persuade the voters of North Dakota to retain the Board of Higher Education come November 2014.

 

Four Hundred Columns and So Very Little Wisdom

by Clay Jenkinson
June 9, 2013

Well, folks, this is my 400th column if my calculations are correct. Not that I have a neat stack of printed columns in carefully marked file folders that I could count. If Donald Trump called to say he would give me $500,000 if by midnight tonight I could make an accurate list of every column I have written since 2005 and its title, I'd have to forfeit the prize. It would be a day of considerable shoveling. Fortunately, one of the best internet tools is a site called timeanddate.com. It enables you to enter two dates and then it instantly calculates how many years, months, weeks, hours, and seconds have passed. Watch. I was born on February 4, 1955. That comes to 58 years, four months, and one day. It merely feels like 93! I call that the "lifechill" effect.

I have now been on earth for 511,344 hours. Only 78% of them wasted! 1,840,838,400 seconds. Etc. The site has a range of other fascinating tools—calendars, solar and lunar eclipses, countdown clocks, solstices and equinoxes, distance calculators.

If Thomas Jefferson had had access to timeanddate.com he would have regarded himself as the happiest man who ever lived. He had a genuine mania for this sort of information. It made him feel that life on earth could be negotiated rationally. (This is surely the triumph of hope over human experience). More to the point, it made him believe that he could control life rather than be controlled by its vast subterranean forces, the percolating chaos just below the surface of consciousness.

So 400 columns. Here's another way to look at it. I won't tell you what I'm paid, because I love writing this column more than anything else I have ever done and money is not the issue, but I believe "lightly compensated" would be the correct technical phrase. In 400 columns I have written approximately 484,000 words. By my reckoning, that comes to about 4.2 cents per word. So it really is true that talk is cheap. Given the nature of my professional career, I'm in the paradoxical position of being better paid for the words that come out of my mouth than the ones that come out of my pen.

But I don't mind a bit.

I'm a little perplexed by life right now, uncertain of how to negotiate the future. I came back to North Dakota because it is the place I love most of all the places in the world. It is the place I have never been able to get out of my system. No matter where I have traveled or where I have lived I have thought of myself as a child of the Great Plains, and it has never once been an embarrassment to me. But I would not change my birthright to be a Kansan or a Nebraskan for all the world. Sometimes people I meet blanch when I say I'm from North Dakota, as if I were revealing a thing that would have to be overcome. But that which I value in me, that which I value in life, comes alive when I see East and West Rainy Butte south of Dickinson or Sentinel Butte west of Medora. My deepest joys in life have been hiking in improbable places that are ignored by those who need Aspen or Glacier National Park to feel the sublime. I'd rather watch a cluster of pronghorn antelope race over the ridge than have perfect seats for Hamlet in London or spend an evening listening to Yo Yo Ma with half a dozen of my closest friends, and believe me I would rather do those things than almost anything I can imagine. For me the sublime is in the caress of the wind in the cottonwoods as dusk approaches, and I would run all the rivers of the world into a concrete cistern before I would fall out of love with the Little Missouri River. If God said, "Tonight is the last night of your life, spend it where your heart lives," I would lie out under a patch of rangy cottonwoods north of Marmarth next to the sacred river trying to fathom the stars; and later in the evening God would deliver up the best thunderstorm of my life for my curtain call."

I was not one of those young North Dakotans who couldn't wait to leave. When I have lived elsewhere I have felt uprooted and lost. One of my favorite Greek myths is about Antaeus, the half-giant who was invincible as long as he had his feet firmly planted on the ground. Hercules was able to defeat him only when he figured out how to lift Antaeus off of his feet. I find it impossible to contemplate the idea of "home" anywhere but in North Dakota.

There are plenty of places with better restaurants than North Dakota, with more cultural amenities, better bookstores, museums, galleries, boutiques. There are plenty of places with more diversity, a wider spectrum of political and social engagement and possibility, more lifestyle opportunities for young people, more tolerance for that which is eccentric. There are plenty of places with more distinguished architecture—with fountains, statues, memorials, parks, historic sites. All those things matter greatly to me, but they are not enough to balance the joy of driving on a gravel road into a place where the prairie grasses carpet the earth and the sky is so vast that you feel like an ant or a Lilliputian swallowed up by the boundless face of the earth—and far off in the distance is a muted blue box butte beckoning you to return to the romance of life. It is here, Roosevelt said, "that the romance of my life began."

And now that North Dakota that I love with everything that I have in me—the Endless Empty left alone by the main traffic lanes of life—is shattered. I know there is no compelling reason to say no to the economic miracle that has been visited upon us like a spaceship from a far galaxy, and even if we wanted to say no it is no longer clear that we have the capacity to stop it. So I find myself asking, what is the meaning of my life?

Every time I express even muted anxiety in the face of the tsunami of change that is redefining what I thought was North Dakota—undisciplined growth, social strain, the industrialization of our sacred landscape, the monetization of an agrarian civilization--the blowback is overwhelming. Yet if God said, "You have to vote yes or no on the carbon boom, there can be no middle ground," I would swallow hard and vote yes. But my heart has been breaking in a kind of silent slow motion for several years.

And I do think there is a middle ground.

I want to thank you for reading my words. You have no idea how much that matters to me. If I am given the honor and privilege of writing 400 more columns, I am going to tell the truth as my limited capacities and perspective allow me to see it, as carefully and respectfully and playfully as I can. But I'd rather write about rhubarb and Rhame than waste water management.

Now I'm up to 511,347 hours.

 

The Trials of a Suburbanite on a Soggy Memorial Day Weekend

by Clay Jenkinson
June 2, 2013

When I first moved into my neighborhood, mine was one of the few houses. At that point nobody cared if my lawn was mowed, or for that matter if I had a lawn. In the last six years a house has sprung up overnight on virtually every available lot, and now land to the west that was promised to remain in pasture is opening up to suburban development. I miss living on the edge of a vast prairie, but what has happened was entirely predictable, and I have no right to complain. I miss my meadowlark Chanticleer.

Memorial Day was just about the soggiest time I can remember. My goal was merely to do some necessary delayed housecleaning, including about 15 loads of laundry, to get my grass cut for the first time this year, and to plant my garden. For the past two weeks I have observed the black rectangle of the garden back of my house get into sharper and sharper contrast with the lush green grass, some of which was by now at least six inches high.

As the weekend began, couples in my neighborhood began to roar out town with their boats wearing festive hats and shirts. Soon enough, some of them were limping back, sullen, sodden, and resigned. It was a North Dakota Memorial Day weekend.

Neither of my mowers would start. Then I got one started and the self-propel unit would not engage. So I went into the house and called a guy from the classified section of the Tribune to come over and do it for me while I planted the garden. He showed up an hour later, made one round with his modest mower, packed it back up in his van, and said, "You're on your own, bub." By now it was mid-afternoon Saturday and I had neither mowed my lawn nor planted my garden, though I had folded a great deal of laundry. Every time I started to get something done outside, rain came. Then I waited until it was possibly dry enough to resume, went out in freshly laundered clothes, and then more rain came. My lawn was easily the most unkempt of any in the neighborhood. This is a neighborhood (alas) where men don't just mow more often than is strictly required. They do fancy quincunx and cross-hatch patterns in their mowing, bag everything that they cut, and then wander about with plastic sacks gleaning the scattered tufts of cut grass that didn't make it into the mower bag. Albert Schweitzer said, "My life is my argument." I know this sounds a little extreme, but there are folks in Bismarck, and elsewhere, who seem to be saying, "My yard is my argument." I had to get that lawn cut.

So I found a service manual for my mower online, printed it out (112 pages), and studied it for a while to try to figure out how to fix the drive train. The manual read like the Bhagavad-Gita. Who writes these things? How do you make sense of a sentence like, "Remove flange B (see page 31 and appendix R2d2) next to lower tension pulley RY (illustration 4.67) without adjusting directional spring LMNOP." The illustrations were just as bad as the bad technical prose, and my brain clouded over somewhere near "flange."

So with herculean effort I packed up that mower into my jeep, which has been sitting idle all winter, and ransacked the garage to find a bungee cord to hold the rear gate down. I had to jump the engine because the battery was dead, and pump air into the right rear tire, which was semi-flat. But I was determined to take that mower to a repair shop the lawn guy had muttered the name of as he abandoned me. All of this preparation took about an hour. Then I found my wallet, slid into the jeep, and drove ever so slowly all the way from north Bismarck down to south Bismarck on Washington Avenue, not wishing to lurch in a way that dislodged the mower into the traffic like a clunky suburban missile. My pace annoyed everyone, including me, and the detour on Washington near the Cathedral District was an additional pain, but eventually I arrived at my destination, not without stopping twice to consult Google maps on my dying Blackberry, which needs to be rebooted now about three times per week. My heart sank. There was a hand-lettered sign on the door saying, "We have decided to be closed this weekend so everyone can enjoy Memorial Day." Enjoy!

So I drove with equal care all the way back up to north Bismarck, sat down with that manual and began to study it like quantum mechanics. At some point it seemed clear to me that all I needed was a new drive belt (and the ability to install it). I got into my car and drove to the hardware store. It was packed like Black Friday at 6 a.m. There I had a series of conversations with men and women in red vests, all of whom told me in one way or another, some at great length, others with considerable apology, "Hey, we just sell the things." I studied those laminated parts sleeves that hang by various sections of the store (wipers, batteries, oil filters) and finally chose Belt X, knowing—beyond a shadow of a doubt—that what I really needed was Belt Y. But if I had chosen Belt Y, then it would surely actually have been belt X. That is the iron law of home repair. Just for fun I bought a new blade for the mower.

It was raining pretty hard when I arrived home. I gathered up a set of tools, most of which have never touched a human hand, and went out to fix that mower. After removing a long series of flanges and bolts and pins (some just for the heck of it), I discovered that Belt X was indeed too big. I was as wet as a Vancouver sea otter and the manual was disintegrating on the grass. But with grim determination I got back in the car and drove back to the big box store to get Belt Y. There were approximately 150,000 cars (actually pickups) in the lot, but I hacked my way back into the store, found Belt Y, made the exchange, and headed home.

The belt fit. Somehow I managed to replace all the flanges and pins, not without having to pull it all apart and start over twice. When I was done there were no spare parts—that's my standard of a perfect mission. It was now dusk. If I had had a motorcycle helmet and a flak jacket I would have put them on at this point, for I was pretty sure the mower would blow up when I pulled the cord, or the new blade fly off and cut a slice right through my living room and out the other side. The mower roared into life on the first pull. The self-propel unit worked.

A suburban miracle! For the first time in life since 11th grade shop I had fixed something with an internal combustion engine all by myself, and with only four trips to the hardware store.

It was a little triumph of the human spirit at a time when I desperately needed that. Next day I mowed my lawn for about five mower-choked hours, and even managed to plant four rows of sweet corn and 40 tomatoes in the rain.

 

Of Rhubarb and Rootedness in an Age of Industrial Change

by Clay Jenkinson
May 26, 2013

When I wrote these words Wednesday morning, the sun was shining with brassy spring clarity and the whole world was suddenly green, glorious green. My lawn went from dormant to overgrown overnight. My friend Jim says the four days of rain and drizzle now behind us should be regarded as this year's "bad North Dakota Memorial Day weather," but I am pretty sure he is an optimist. By the time you read this, we'll know.

My rhubarb has burst into the sky like a fairy tale. I wonder if there is anything that grows faster and more luxuriantly than rhubarb? Ten days ago it was just poking through the earth--garish, a raw sickly yellow-green effusion down near the black surface of the garden. But then in an instant it just sprang up. It's already two feet tall, with no end in sight. By this time next week I'll make my first rhubarb pie of the year. My mother prefers rhubarb crumble, but she's going to have to get in line for that.

It was the Chinese who first cultivated rhubarb thousands of years ago. Rhubarb (Rheum rhabarbarum) is fully described in a Chinese classic book called The Divine Farmer's Herb-Root Classic, which dates to 2700 BCE. I have not read the book (primarily medical), but so far as I know it does not contain a recipe for "rhubarb marshmallow Jello" or "rhubarb-strawberry peanut butter bars." I like to imagine the hungry or enterprising proto-Chinese individual who first got down on the ground and gnawed the sour red-green stalk, and somehow decided to declare that this odd luxuriant thing had culinary possibilities. Presumably sugar was already available. That was at least two thousand years before the Great Wall of China was constructed.

I planted that rhubarb when I returned to North Dakota seven years ago. It came from my grandparents' family farm at Fergus Falls, Minnesota. Every winter it disappears into the earth and then every spring it reappears by magic. One of the best reasons to keep a garden is that it makes you ponder and wonder. The Life Force is so powerful. Nobody is quite sure how it happened, but somehow the third rock from the sun oozes life out of every one of its pores—redwoods, wheat, ants, aardvarks, cottonwoods, orangutans, prairie dogs, pigs, mocking birds, condors, rhinoceroses, and of course human beans. And rhubarb.

It's impossible for me to believe that Earth is the only place in the universe that supports life. Current estimates are that there are not just millions of solar systems in the universe, not just billions, not even just trillions, but quadrillions of solar systems in every direction--all the way to the border, where there is surely another neighbor universe fiercely loyal to its own Constitution. Surely "Wheel of Fortune" is playing somewhere else in the cosmos, too. "Energy shortage" is a very local term.

People of the Renaissance (1450-1625) reckoned there was just one solar system in the whole universe and that the Earth was at the very center of it. Now, thanks to the invention of the telescope and all that followed, we know that we live on a lush little planet in a modest planetary system heated by a third rank sun in an obscure corner of a moderately-sized galaxy, tucked away in a back corner of the universe. That has presented some challenges to human self-importance. But as long as I have access to oxygen, bread, clean water, and the spidery scratchings of Henry Thoreau and Charles Dickens on beige paper, I am pretty content, however miniscule our footprint in cosmic terms.

So far, my garden is a large rectangular black smudge in my big back yard. Unfortunately, I did not get it planted before the big rains of last week. As soon as it dries enough to support my hands and knees I will crawl along orderly lines and rows pressing tiny seeds into the good earth, with plenty of room between the tomato plants. My goal this year is simple: keep up with the weeds. This is essentially a full time job. I have failed to stay ahead of the weeds in six of my seven years of gardening. The one time I triumphed I had the help of a superhero.

Three weeks ago I was doing something in Fargo, and I had a little time on my hands, so I slipped down to Fergus Falls to visit the old farm. My goal was to dig up a little more of my grandmother Rhoda's rhubarb, tucked out near her profuse lilac bushes, and transplant it to my garden, just to set the right tone for this summer. My grandparents have been dead for twenty years. In their elderly years they sold the farm to Fergus Falls, as a possible extension to the city landfill. They were permitted to live out their lives on the farm, and it was not at all clear that the landfill would ever eat the property. My mother had warned me that she had seen industrial rumblings the last time she was in Fergus Falls, but my hope had been that the farm would somehow survive intact, thanks to Minnesota environmental policy or revolutionary changes in waste disposal.

But no.

When I crested the hill to look down on the 80-acre farm (a third pasture, two-thirds cropland), I saw that the old funky farmhouse had vanished from the earth. That 1500 square-foot one-story bungalow (once much smaller, added onto three times at least) represents to me all that is rooted in my life, all that is agrarian, basic, integrated, simple—grounded. Where the house once stood a garbage collection and sorting dock has been thrown up, with bays that say, "tires," "appliances," "metal," "wood," etc. I drove down into the yard and parked where I reckoned I had always parked, paced off the perimeter of the house, so far as I could locate it in the barren disoriented landscape that was once a modest dairy farm, and then walked back to where Grandma's big garden should be. The long rows of the lilacs she loved so much were gone—unceremoniously bulldozed in a single afternoon. The workman had probably not even noticed the three little clusters of rhubarb.

What was once rich black earth was now a broad staging area of yellowish hard-packed clay. The bent clothesline where for forty years she hung laundry with ancient wooden clothespins was gone (relocated, no doubt, in the "metal" bin). The long windbreak on the south side of the house was gone. The slightly leaning garage that smelled of old oil rags and rusty tools was gone.

I drove home to Bismarck in silence, without even turning the radio on to hear the news at the top of the hour. I'm going to nurture my rhubarb the way Neanderthal Man kept embers alive as his tribe moved from one camp to the next, and dig away a few rhubarb roots to plant elsewhere in my garden, just to be sure. And when my daughter finds the full adult rhythm of her life, I will give her a little of her great grandmother Rhoda Straus' rhubarb stock (like sourdough starter), to plant wherever she lands, prefaced with a pretty stern little homily and family prayer.

But I am never going back to the old farm in Fergus Falls again. Ever.

 

Conversations with the great humanist James Ronda

by Clay Jenkinson
May 19, 2013

TULSA, Okla. — A city of more than 300,000 built largely by oil, bestriding the Arkansas River in northeast Oklahoma. The same Great Plains, more or less, just 800 miles south of North Dakota. If my quick calculations are correct, Tulsa has 13 buildings taller than the North Dakota Capitol, including two giants: the CityPlex Tower at 60 stories and the Bok Center at 52. It also is the home of two great art museums, the Gilcrease, built by oil, and the Philbrook, also oil. Oklahoma now ranks fifth in oil production, North Dakota second (but stay tuned). Tulsa also has a great university, which is why I am here.

Before I get started in earnest, however, I just want to pause to hope that our payoff for the wholesale industrialization of our Western quadrant is a philanthropy boom that benefits Williston, Dickinson, Minot and, above all, Bismarck (our Tulsa?), and gives solid sustainable support to such nonprofits as the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation, the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University, the Lewis & Clark Fort Mandan Foundation, the Fort Lincoln Foundation, etc. Texas and Oklahoma, at the other end of the Plains, are culturally enriched because some of their oil gazillionaires chose to invest in museums, galleries, theaters, parks, gardens, fountains and universities. The historic problem of North Dakota has been that the wealth generated here tends to leave the state and we are generally left holding a bag that contains 30 pieces of silver.

This is our moment, and we are politely requesting our cultural payoff.

I came to Tulsa with two giant bags of lights, video cameras and tripods to interview one of the most remarkable people I have ever known, Professor James Ronda, now emeritus professor of history at the University of Tulsa. For many years, Ronda held the H.G. Barnard Chair in Western American History at TU (endowed by oil). Among other things, Ronda is one of the greatest Lewis and Clark scholars in the world. He's the author of what is arguably the most important book about the expedition, "Lewis and Clark Among the Indians" (1984). We had invited him to come to the national Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation annual meeting (symposium) in Bismarck and Washburn at the end of July 2013, but he can't come.

So I suggested that I travel to Tulsa to interview him on camera about the future of Lewis and Clark studies. He agreed, so here I am serving as videographer, audio engineer, grip and interlocutor, all at the same time.

And loving it. Professor Ronda will be 70 in a few days. He's been retired for a couple of years. He speaks with passion, information, humor and complete sentences. We did three hours of an interview Tuesday (the day I'm writing this), planned five or six hours Wednesday and two more Thursday morning, before I lug all that stuff home, including 10 precious little SD cards full of insight and wisdom.

"Lewis and Clark Among the Indians" was what Professor Ronda carefully calls a radical book. He simply turned the lens from the usual white man's narrative of the 1804-06 expedition, and tried to see the Lewis and Clark story from the Native American point of view. Ronda and his wife, Jean, traveled the trail in 1980. He read everything he could get his hands on, studied tribal traditions and oral histories, but above all examined the journals of the expedition with brilliant and painstaking care, to excavate, if possible, the Indian point of view. Not an easy task, because Lewis and Clark were traveling fast, with a very demanding set of Enlightenment priorities, and they were inevitably "Eurocentric." Ronda spent five years on the project and the result, "Lewis and Clark Among the Indians," was not only a radical, but a revolutionary book, a watershed study that changed permanently the way we look at the Lewis and Clark expedition. He wrote a book that anyone who wants to understand Lewis and Clark must read. What could be greater than that?

My cameras are set up in Jim's living room, which is part library and part "cabinet of curiosities" of the kind that men like Thomas Jefferson created to exhibit paintings, sculpture, mammoth bones, artifacts and other curiosities that reflected their intellectual tastes and served as conversation pieces for their guests. Jim sits in his favorite place — a deep brown chair, ancient and a little exhausted from all that hard reading over the past couple of decades. On Tuesday, we actually got down on the carpet to examine an extremely high-quality facsimile of William Clark's famous composite map of the American West — a gift from Yale University for one of the hundreds of humanities projects Jim has directed in the course of his career. Jim's wife, Jean, mostly tries to stay out of the way — "You can imagine that I have heard some of this before," she says with affectionate irony — and she brings us tea and coffee and sponges our faces in the moments when we return to our corners. I pitch questions over the top of my main video camera and then just sit back to drink in his answers. Ronda is a master of the art of conversation. Every thing he says is rich with reference to a lifetime of deep reading. He's never arcane or obscure or pompous in the way of some lifetime academics. He just opens his mouth, and a brilliant stream of Idea flows out into the world.

Ronda has read more books than anyone I have ever met, and — more to the point — he has let them percolate through his mind and heart and soul, and inform his character and mature outlook. I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-read person, but the fact is that I am really nothing more than a bush-leaguer, and I find myself furtively jotting down book titles and feeling waves of self-disappointment as I listen to him weave lovely conversational tapestries in every direction — effortlessly, it would seem. He has read what there is to read in American history, in Western Americana, in travel and exploration literature, in American Indian literature, in the biography of the Anglo-American world, but that is not the most impressive thing about him. Without ever trying to show off, without ever becoming oppressive, Ronda speaks of Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dr. Johnson, Emerson, Willa Cather, Milton, D.H. Lawrence, Hemingway and Twain as if they were his dear friends. Which they are.

The great English critic George Steiner was once asked, "How many books do you think you have read?" To which he replied, archly, "It's not how many books you have read. It's how many books you have read twice."

Jim's going to pick me up at my motel in 15 minutes. I need to brush my teeth. This morning, we are going to talk about our favorite common book, Henry David Thoreau's "Walden." He's taught it repeatedly (never with full success) and I've taught it many times (never with much success). Once we get warmed up I'm going to ask him what Thoreau meant when he wrote, "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately." Deliberately — there's the rub. I'm as excited this morning as if I were about see Michael Jordan play for his last championship, or see "Hamlet" in Stratford-upon-Avon, or listen to the Berlin Philharmonic, or meet President Jefferson in his cabinet of curiosities at Monticello.

 

At last, At Last, Shirtsleeve Weather on the Northern Plains

by Clay Jenkinson
May 12, 2013

Suddenly, it is not merely spring but it feels like early summer. It's hard to believe that just a couple of weeks ago we got whacked with a late heavy snowstorm that buried cars and choked traffic all over Bismarck and Mandan and led to cancelled flights. It's as if a merciful meteorological god tripped a switch last week and said, "Let there be sudden, compensatory summer." I don't know about you, but I have managed instantly to forget the protracted winter almost as if it never happened, except in one really important way. Because I live in North Dakota (and not San Diego), I have learned to cherish every single shirtsleeve day we get, as if there were no tomorrow, as if we are living on borrowed time.

Because we ARE living on borrowed time. Not to sound too pessimistic, but on June 22, just 41 days from today, we will have experienced the longest day of the year, and every day thereafter all the way to Christmas will be a shorter day and, of course, a slightly longer night. On Labor Day, just 113 days from now, all the lake cabins will be shut up, the boats seal-wrapped and tucked away in the barns of our farm kin, and the state's tourism industry will stick handmade "See you next year!" signs in the window. And by about October 15, just 156 days from today, we will probably have experienced our first little warm-up snowstorm.

So make hay while the sun shines. Carpe Diem. This is North Dakota.

My neighborhood is suddenly awash with runners, strollers, parents pulling their children along in red wagons, bikes with training wheels, dogs choking themselves as they churn forward at the end of the leash. On any given day during the long winter, my neighbors spend the statistical minimum of time outside. They come home from work and drive straight into their garages without pausing at the mailbox, and then simply disappear for a full fourteen hours. Only snow removal can keep them outside for more than a few minutes at a time, and most folks seem to regard snow removal (for who really shovels any more?) as a grim unavoidable task to be undertaken with surly discipline. There is much grimace, but very little grinning.

My friends around the corner are serious runners. They are basically the only form of non-hibernating life to be seen in my neighborhood through the winter. I watch them lumbering past my kitchen window in parkas, like polar bears or mummies, even on appalling days of wind and bitter cold. Suddenly, within the last week, they have been transformed into gazelles, and they prance and glide past my window in lithe togs. Taunting, I think.

I have one neighbor who insists upon grilling approximately once a week right through the winter, the weather be damned. I sometimes see him at 5:15 p.m. on a January night, through the ground drift, illuminated in the vast blackness of the northern plains as if by a single forty-watt bulb, lifting the grill lid against gale force winds, turning cuts of meat in a snowmobile suit, his hands in clown-sized oven mitts, looking like the first man on the polar icecap of Mars. That's determination.

Now that the meteorological switch has been flipped, every evening my neighbors spend the minimum amount of time indoors. They park their cars in their driveways after work, and on any given evening half a dozen are washing their stretch designer SUVs by hand, lifting sudsy outsized sponges from plastic buckets, telling their rat-sized lapdogs to stop their endless yapping, listening to soft rock FM on the car stereo. They wear shorts and flip-flops and their exposed flesh looks as if it has never known a solar ray or BTU. Virtually every lawnmower in my subdivision has been fired up for a test run at least. I have two neighbors who take landscape gardening seriously—one house down the street actually displays a "Best Yard of the Year" sign. Impressive, but the couple who live in the green house in the next block over are the finest landscape gardeners I have ever seen. They literally spend hundreds and hundreds of hours in their yard every summer, squatting or sitting on their bottoms somewhere along the perimeter of the house with a trowel or clippers, planting flowers and shrubs, trying new ornamental grass and flower varieties, edging their lawn with laser-like precision, and giving it the feel of the 16th green at the Masters. What makes them so admirable is not only the beauty of their yard—the classiest yard in the hood—but the fact that for all of that loving attention, their yard has an understated, rather than the more common "gunked up," appearance. There is an elegance in their lives that I admire and envy. I sometimes walk by and just gaze at their zen serenity.

I'm a yardwork . . . er minimalist. I agree with Matthew 6:1: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." I'd rather walk the neighborhood reading a book than trim my grass. Most of my neighbors regard my book-walking with bemused tolerance. A few appear to think of it as a violation of minimal community standards of decency. But I'm harmless and almost never thwap like Charlie Chaplin into the tailgates of their pickups. I sometimes bark back at the lapdogs (but never the mastiff at the bottom of the block), and I always stop to listen to the meadowlarks and sometimes call back to them in pidgin larkspeak. I'd rather water my beans and tomatoes than mow the lawn. I try never to listen to music when I am outside, because I love silence, and want to be alert for the birdsong and the gentle soughing of the evening breeze, and—if things go very well indeed—a distant rumor of thunder or the yip and croon of the coyotes at dusk.

Last night I sat out on my deck for the first time this year, with a wee little campfire in my fire pit, a book in one hand, and a glass of wine in the other. Pretty quickly I had to go in to fetch a light jacket—it is not quite yet one of the divine, endless-dusk, just this side of slightly chilly, evenings that we live for. But the afterglow of the sun lingered in that exquisite northern plains way. Venus was astonishingly pure in the western sky, and the planet Jupiter glimmered directly above it. The color of the sky near the western horizon was charcoal, as late as ten p.m., but straight above was that summer blue-black night that makes you ache with joy and feel again the wonder of things.

It was after eleven when I finally forced myself inside. We have all been patiently waiting a very long time for this cluster of days. We had better make the most of them, because the clock is ticking.

All my garden seeds are poised by the back door, waiting for their moment in the sun.

 

The Errant F-Word is the Least of Our Challenges

by Clay Jenkinson
May 5, 2013

First it was the Bakken Oil Boom—a miracle of oil shale fracturing technology that has made our state economy the envy of the rest of the nation. Then it was the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Then U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp got taken to the Washington Post woodshed for being one of four Democratic Senators to vote against a more comprehensive system of background checks for those who wish to purchase guns. And now it is the f-word.

We are no longer Eric Sevareid's "blank rectangle in the nation's consciousness." We are now the carbon-drenched potty-mouthed outlier of the Bible Belt where strippers perform on poles at the front of convenience buses. Look for a spike in tourism!

My daughter called me from the east coast last night to say, "Dad, your f-bomb guy is on the front page of the Huffington Post." This morning he was on the Today Show. By now you all know the story of how a "former news anchor," as he will hereafter be known to human history, A. J. Clemente, made what has been called "the worst TV debut ever," on KFYR television on April 21. Beginning with the rare double "expletive deleted," his one-day television career went viral on the Internet, where such language is decidedly not taboo. Clemente got his fifteen minutes of fame and his pink slip from KFYR simultaneously.

Except for the oil boom, these are ephemeral blips in the nation's consciousness, and people elsewhere will soon retreat to the standard image of North Dakota as a square flat windswept icebox so far from anything that matters that it's a joke. That doesn't bother me a bit. Our goal as a rural commonwealth is not to win public relations points with the rest of America, but to cooperate together to produce a state that works in every sense of that term, a place where all people enjoy a high standard and quality of life, a place we are all proud to call home.

The magic and magnitude of the oil boom have almost made us forget who we are. For the first hundred years, from 1889-1992, we have been a farm state, one of the most agrarian places in America. As the 21st century moves into its second decade, we are still primarily a farm state—always number one or two in wheat production, first in pinto beans (56% of American production), first in canola (90%), and first in flaxseed (95%). We produce a quarter of the nation's honey, 43% of the nation's sunflowers, and 35% of the nation's barley. At any given time there are 1.7 million cattle ruminating among us, roughly two cows for every man, woman, and child in North Dakota.

Until 1992 the entire story of North Dakota's white history could be summed up in that old Farmers Union bumper sticker: "Farming is Everybody's Bread and Butter."

What we are now, what we are becoming, is not so clear. We are not quite post-agrarian: agriculture is still the number one industry of North Dakota, and our 32,000 farms are on the whole thriving as never before. The multiplier effect of agriculture is such that if we suddenly stopped farming, the state of North Dakota would collapse and most of the small towns would just dry up and blow away. For most of the history of North Dakota, we have ground out our modest prosperity the hard way—long years of intense and unending hard work on the land, resulting in enough profit to send our children to universities in cities, including our own, from which they seldom return. Until about three sessions ago, the work of the state legislature was not to distribute the loaves and the fishes like imperial Rome, but to find a way to eke out a modicum of public life with one fish and a couple of loaves. If you read about the lean years of North Dakota history—i.e., most of them—the state legislature's unenviable task was to find some way, some how, to keep our schools open and the highways paved. In the 20s and 30s, through part of the 50s, and most recently during the Sinner years (1984-92), the state of North Dakota genuinely had to worry about whether it could keep the lights on.

Now, suddenly, we are rich. We have an increasingly diversified economy. Thanks to good leadership, a combination of generous state and federal investment, and the institutional genius of entities like the Energy & Environmental Research Center at UND, NDSU's Research & Technology Park, and BSC's National Energy Center of Excellence, North Dakota has reached a "take off" point that changes the basic equation of who we are and what we do. Now we are not just one of the leading energy producers in North America, but we are becoming a template for that hard-to-tune formula of technology, taxation, regulation, and "business atmosphere," that extracts the most revenue and production out of a gigantic oil field. Now we are not merely one of the most important food producers in the world, but a template for the conjunction of agrarian work ethic and cutting-edge agricultural practices and technologies that produce better yields under a wider range of meteorological conditions than ever before.

For most of North Dakota, this is a period of stabilization after a long nightmare of slow decline. For western North Dakota, this is a time of unprecedented, at times runaway, growth. Our state coffers are full—so full that everyone feels entitled to sidle up to the trough. These days the state legislature has the unenviable responsibility of having to explain that North Dakota's seemingly gigantic prosperity is something of an illusion. After urgent infrastructural needs are met, there is not enough money to fund every worthy enterprise. Nor is it necessarily the business of government to fund every worthy thing even if it has the money to do so. One of the iron laws of economics is that with the coming of prosperity, expectation and "need" rise too, and it is just as possible to be rich-broke as poor-broke.

The "costs" of sudden enormous prosperity are harder to measure than the benefits, but you only have to drive through oil country to see the effect (perhaps temporary) on the glorious subtle rolling bluffs grass landscape of our west-river outback, including our national treasure, the badlands. And the social effect on our towns and cities, which—except for Williston—are experiencing "growing pains" never before seen on the Great Plains.

Those things worry me, but I know that our state and local governments are working day and night to manage the Oil Rush as sensibly as possible under the overwhelming circumstances.

The thing that eats away in a slow drip deep in my heart—impossible to measure, difficult to articulate, trouble to talk about—is what all of these amazing 21st century transformations portend for the character, the identity, and the values of the grandsons and granddaughters of Mott and New Rockford and Stanley and Grassy Butte.

We are going to have to work very hard to maintain our heritage.

 

 

The death of Bill Guy leaves a terrible void in North Dakota life

by Clay Jenkinson
April 28, 2013

The giant of North Dakota political life, Bill Guy, died Friday morning.

In any list of North Dakota governors, Bill Guy ranks high in the short list of great ones. In my pantheon (leaving aside living governors), the top five, in no particular order, are John Burke (D, 1907-13), Lynn J. Frazier (R, 1917-21), William L. Langer (R, 1932-34 and 1937-39), Arthur A. Link (D, 1972-80), and, of course, William L. Guy (D, 1961-73), the only governor of North Dakota elected four times. It is quite possible that Guy was the greatest governor in North Dakota history, because he more than anyone else brought North Dakota into the modern world — North Dakota after the outhouse — and he more than anyone else made North Dakota a factor in the national arena for the first time.

We are all the beneficiaries of Bill Guy's leadership, even today.

When he first appeared on the political horizon in the mid-1950s, he was courted by both the Republicans and the Democrats. Both parties recognized his extraordinary capacities and his attractiveness as a political candidate. He would have been the same Bill Guy in either party, I think, because he was a pragmatist, a technocrat and what I would call a progressive conservative or a conservative progressive.

He was a friend to John F. Kennedy and a friend and adviser to Lyndon Baines Johnson. He attended JFK's inauguration, and he and his wife, Jean, were present at a dinner party at the White House for the Grand Duchess Charlotte of Luxembourg on April 30, 1963. When they arrived at the White House in a taxi, not a limousine, they presented their invitation to the ushers. Jean was assigned to Table One, just one person removed from the president of the United States.

Mrs. Guy sat next to Secretary of the Treasury Douglas Dillon on one side and novelist John Steinbeck on the other. And what about the governor of North Dakota at that White House banquet? He was assigned to Table Eight! When in an interview I asked him who his table companions were that night in Camelot, he smiled his beautiful, gentle smile and said, "I have no recollection."

JFK and Bill Guy were elected in the same year, 1960. They were young, handsome men with remarkably beautiful wives and energetic and photogenic children. They were both advocates of technology, education, space exploration and a dynamic American military. Both of them campaigned on the promise of getting their respective jurisdictions "moving again" after years of stagnation and dullness. When JFK in his inaugural address declared that "the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard peace," he may as well have been speaking for Bill Guy, too.

Kennedy was born in 1917, Bill Guy on Sept. 30, 1919. Both had served in the Navy in World War II, and both had narrowly survived the sinking of their ships by Japanese fighters. Guy had one better war story than JFK: In November 1943, the destroyer on which he served (the USS Porter) accidentally fired a torpedo that nearly sank the USS Iowa, on which President Franklin D. Roosevelt was traveling to Tehran, Iran, for a war conference with Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin. That would have been a career stopper.

The differences between Guy and JFK are also instructive. Kennedy was born into a family of enormous privilege and wealth. Bill Guy began (and finished) his life as a man of modest means. What JFK knew about agriculture could be contained in a thimble. Bill Guy was a farmer who raised sheep and earned a master's degree in agricultural economics from the University of Minnesota (1946). Kennedy was a restless man who could not live without constant access to new women. Guy was a monogamist who regarded his wife, Jean, as his greatest personal, social and political asset.

Kennedy died in a moment of appalling public violence at the age of 46, on Nov. 22, 1963. Bill Guy died quietly in West Fargo at the age of 93.

Bill Guy was a friend to JFK, but a friend and trusted political adviser to LBJ. In September 1967, LBJ sent Bill Guy to South Vietnam to observe the first "free" elections in that troubled, war-torn "republic." On the day of the election, had his entourage been on time, the governor might have been killed in a terrorist attack on a voting site he was scheduled to visit. By the time he returned to the United States, he was convinced that the war was unwinnable. In the spring of 1968, Guy wrote a courageous letter to the president (which I hold in my hands as I write) saying that his post-Vietnam travels through North Dakota had convinced him that the people of the American heartland were no longer committed to the war, and that it was time to bring our boys home.

On Jan. 23, 1968, when North Korea captured the USS Pueblo in its territorial waters, and accused the United States of spying and violation of its territorial sovereignty, many hawks in Congress urged LBJ to strike back hard. Gov. Guy sent his friend the president an amazing telegram urging him not "to rattle any sabers" over the Pueblo affair, because it was not worth opening a second war front in Southeast Asia, and because — Guy implied — the U.S. was probably not as innocent in the incident as it wished to pretend. "Perhaps in time," Guy wrote, "the North Koreans will have the job of scraping the barnacles off the Pueblo hull." President Johnson heeded Guy's advice. The Pueblo Incident, as it is known, was eventually resolved without bloodshed.

All this I learned in reading Bill Guy's lovely memoir, "Where Seldom Was Heard a Discouraging Word: Bill Guy Remembers" (1992), and in interviewing him for 20 or more hours for the Dakota Institute's documentary film, "The Charisma of Competence: The Achievement of Bill Guy" (2010).

There are two things that Bill Guy was unable to achieve in his extraordinary life. First, he was rejected by the citizens of North Dakota in 1974 when he challenged Milton R. Young for the U.S. Senate. That loss, by a small number of votes, ended Guy's political career and, in my opinion, broke his heart. Second, he was an unheralded prophet on water issues. Guy was never able to solve the principal infrastructural challenge of North Dakota life, the problem of the Red River of the North, which supplies far too much water for a short period in the spring, and too little in dry years to sustain North Dakota's most important city. No matter how much political capital he gave to some version of Garrison (i.e., Missouri River) Diversion, he could not find a way to get it done. North Dakota is stalled for not having taken his advice in some form or other.

Nevertheless, it is impossible to contemplate the North Dakota we all take for granted in 2013 without factoring in the leadership of Bill Guy. He was the pivotal figure in our modern history, the father of the two-party system in North Dakota (now in some disarray), and, ironically, a thoroughly bipartisan leader who was at the same time the political mentor of such Democratic worthies as Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad and Earl Pomeroy, among others.

The death of Bill Guy leaves a void in North Dakota life that can never be filled. I'm deeply saddened to learn of his passing, and my heart goes out to Jean and their children, Nancy, Jim, Debby, Holly and Bill Jr.

 

 

The Errant F-Word is the Least of Our Challenges

by Clay Jenkinson
April 21, 2013

The national North Dakota buzz continues.

First it was the Bakken Oil Boom—a miracle of oil shale fracturing technology that has made our state economy the envy of the rest of the nation. Then it was the most restrictive abortion laws in the country. Then U.S. Senator Heidi Heitkamp got taken to the Washington Post woodshed for being one of four Democratic Senators to vote against a more comprehensive system of background checks for those who wish to purchase guns. And now it is the f-word.

We are no longer Eric Sevareid's "blank rectangle in the nation's consciousness." We are now the carbon-drenched potty-mouthed outlier of the Bible Belt where strippers perform on poles at the front of convenience buses. Look for a spike in tourism!

My daughter called me from the east coast last night to say, "Dad, your f-bomb guy is on the front page of the Huffington Post." This morning he was on the Today Show. By now you all know the story of how a "former news anchor," as he will hereafter be known to human history, A. J. Clemente, made what has been called "the worst TV debut ever," on KFYR television on April 21. Beginning with the rare double "expletive deleted," his one-day television career went viral on the Internet, where such language is decidedly not taboo. Clemente got his fifteen minutes of fame and his pink slip from KFYR simultaneously.

Except for the oil boom, these are ephemeral blips in the nation's consciousness, and people elsewhere will soon retreat to the standard image of North Dakota as a square flat windswept icebox so far from anything that matters that it's a joke. That doesn't bother me a bit. Our goal as a rural commonwealth is not to win public relations points with the rest of America, but to cooperate together to produce a state that works in every sense of that term, a place where all people enjoy a high standard and quality of life, a place we are all proud to call home.

The magic and magnitude of the oil boom have almost made us forget who we are. For the first hundred years, from 1889-1992, we have been a farm state, one of the most agrarian places in America. As the 21st century moves into its second decade, we are still primarily a farm state—always number one or two in wheat production, first in pinto beans (56% of American production), first in canola (90%), and first in flaxseed (95%). We produce a quarter of the nation's honey, 43% of the nation's sunflowers, and 35% of the nation's barley. At any given time there are 1.7 million cattle ruminating among us, roughly two cows for every man, woman, and child in North Dakota.

Until 1992 the entire story of North Dakota's white history could be summed up in that old Farmers Union bumper sticker: "Farming is Everybody's Bread and Butter."

What we are now, what we are becoming, is not so clear. We are not quite post-agrarian: agriculture is still the number one industry of North Dakota, and our 32,000 farms are on the whole thriving as never before. The multiplier effect of agriculture is such that if we suddenly stopped farming, the state of North Dakota would collapse and most of the small towns would just dry up and blow away. For most of the history of North Dakota, we have ground out our modest prosperity the hard way—long years of intense and unending hard work on the land, resulting in enough profit to send our children to universities in cities, including our own, from which they seldom return. Until about three sessions ago, the work of the state legislature was not to distribute the loaves and the fishes like imperial Rome, but to find a way to eke out a modicum of public life with one fish and a couple of loaves. If you read about the lean years of North Dakota history—i.e., most of them—the state legislature's unenviable task was to find some way, some how, to keep our schools open and the highways paved. In the 20s and 30s, through part of the 50s, and most recently during the Sinner years (1984-92), the state of North Dakota genuinely had to worry about whether it could keep the lights on.

Now, suddenly, we are rich. We have an increasingly diversified economy. Thanks to good leadership, a combination of generous state and federal investment, and the institutional genius of entities like the Energy & Environmental Research Center at UND, NDSU's Research & Technology Park, and BSC's National Energy Center of Excellence, North Dakota has reached a "take off" point that changes the basic equation of who we are and what we do. Now we are not just one of the leading energy producers in North America, but we are becoming a template for that hard-to-tune formula of technology, taxation, regulation, and "business atmosphere," that extracts the most revenue and production out of a gigantic oil field. Now we are not merely one of the most important food producers in the world, but a template for the conjunction of agrarian work ethic and cutting-edge agricultural practices and technologies that produce better yields under a wider range of meteorological conditions than ever before.

For most of North Dakota, this is a period of stabilization after a long nightmare of slow decline. For western North Dakota, this is a time of unprecedented, at times runaway, growth. Our state coffers are full—so full that everyone feels entitled to sidle up to the trough. These days the state legislature has the unenviable responsibility of having to explain that North Dakota's seemingly gigantic prosperity is something of an illusion. After urgent infrastructural needs are met, there is not enough money to fund every worthy enterprise. Nor is it necessarily the business of government to fund every worthy thing even if it has the money to do so. One of the iron laws of economics is that with the coming of prosperity, expectation and "need" rise too, and it is just as possible to be rich-broke as poor-broke.

The "costs" of sudden enormous prosperity are harder to measure than the benefits, but you only have to drive through oil country to see the effect (perhaps temporary) on the glorious subtle rolling bluffs grass landscape of our west-river outback, including our national treasure, the badlands. And the social effect on our towns and cities, which—except for Williston—are experiencing "growing pains" never before seen on the Great Plains.

Those things worry me, but I know that our state and local governments are working day and night to manage the Oil Rush as sensibly as possible under the overwhelming circumstances.

The thing that eats away in a slow drip deep in my heart—impossible to measure, difficult to articulate, trouble to talk about—is what all of these amazing 21st century transformations portend for the character, the identity, and the values of the grandsons and granddaughters of Mott and New Rockford and Stanley and Grassy Butte.

We are going to have to work very hard to maintain our heritage.

 

Of Dawn Flights and Irresponsible Snow Removal

by Clay Jenkinson
April 21, 2013

I'm filing this from the Bismarck, the Minneapolis, or perhaps the Norfolk, Virginia, airport. It's five-thirty a.m. I'm two hours into this day already, and I'd be the definition of bleary if I weren't already off my center of gravity. This is one of those unpleasant three-hop travel days: Bismarck to Minneapolis to Detroit to Norfolk. I dread three-hop days because anything can happen (and usually does), and if the first bad thing occurs early in the day, that sets off a chain reaction of delay, OJ Simpsonesque sprints between gates, and bouts of gluey-sweaty dread and frustration. That extra hop triggers what I regard as air traffic chaos theory.

As a seasoned post 9-11 traveler my standards are very low. Here are my three cardinal travel principles. 1. If I get to the place I want to be at any point on the day I want to be there, I regard that as a victory. 2. The key to travel is stoic patience no matter what. Those who get worked up are seldom rewarded, and travel rage is as exhausting as it is pointless. 3. Never say nasty things to the gate agents or desk clerks when things go wrong, even when you know they are lying to you, because later that same day things are going to go much wronger, and you are going to need the very person you wanted to tell off.

When the giant mid-April blizzard hit the Great Plains, I was in Chicago. I had barely gotten out of Bismarck before the storm began, and when I saw the Facebook postings by my friends from Dakota, of snow creeping up the sides of the state capitol tower, I knew I was in for a tedious return. On Sunday morning my cell phone began to fill up with cheery robotic auto-messaging calls from Delta Airlines that began with the dreaded phrase "flight cancellation notice." Because of the oil boom, all flights in and out of Bismarck are full all of the time, and I soon learned, after an hour on hold with Delta, followed by abject begging, that I would not be able to get back to Bismarck, at the earliest, until one full day after my scheduled arrival. All the intervening flights were booked solid, oversold in fact, with scores of passengers on standby lists, and the officious ticket agent explained that I should really be grateful: only my high frequent flyer status enabled me to return to Bismarck within the current decade.

When I finally got back to Bismarck Monday afternoon I had to shovel my way out of the airport parking lot. That took about thirty minutes. It was only possible because I was able to "borrow" a shovel from a pickup parked a couple of vehicles away from my lowly snow-banked Honda. Still, I was cheerful, because I was home in North Dakota. But when I got to my neighborhood in northwest Bismarck, I discovered that the streets had not yet been plowed (5 p.m. Monday), and that my driveway was entirely inaccessible.

It was virtually impossible to find any place to park in the two-track constricted streets of my neighborhood where my car would not be crushed by a careening SUV, but I finally managed to huddle in next to a giant snow bank a block away. I hiked to my house in my dress shoes, leaving my bags behind in my car, which I expected never to see again, and then for the second time in seven years, actually shoveled my way into my house through the four foot drifts that banked my front door. I changed my shoes, immediately fired up my snow blower, and started to clear enough space in my driveway for my car and then some sort of crude path through the street drifts next to my driveway to enable me to hurtle and skid in if I aimed just right. It took three full hours to clear my driveway and my sidewalks. At times my big snow blower choked and clogged and balked at the sheer volume of snow, but I was in such a good mood that I cleared the sidewalks of my neighbor to the north, just for fun.

My next trip began at dawn Wednesday (the day I write these words), so the turnaround time was very short. By Tuesday night at 11 my street had not yet been plowed (somewhat annoying, understandable given the size of the storm). Nevertheless, I reckoned I would be able to grind, spin, and weave my way out of the neighborhood over the frozen street meringue at 4:30 a.m. Just before I collapsed into bed I had a fleeting, "but what if…?" moment. I soon relaxed, however, because I knew my beloved and friendly city would never conspire to make my life more difficult.

First thing this morning, even before showering, I looked out at the dimly lit streetscape before my door and discovered, to a wave of disbelief and deep anger, that the city plow had come through during the night to clear the street, which it did by unceremoniously piling the snow in three foot ridges before every driveway on the block. No effort of any sort, not even half-hearted, had been made to keep driveways clear. To the untrained eye, it appeared as if the nocturnal snow plow operator, transfixed by some sort of pure malice, had gone out of his way to block every driveway to the maximum extent possible, thus forcing every worker of the neighborhood to begin the day by hacking his way through the formidable ice piles. Not even the biggest four-wheel-drive vehicles could have smashed through these frozen barriers without getting high centered. Had the snowplow come through any time before midnight, I would have been right behind it with my shovel to carve out an access track in the relatively soft, just-moved snow, but by 4:20 a.m. the ridge—my gift from the City of Bismarck—was as impervious a wall as those concrete abutments you see lowered onto the edges of urban freeways.

I don't expect much from the city of Bismarck, but I would prefer that city workers didn't go out of their way to impede the lives of honest citizens. And don't tell me that the sheer volume of snow made such shenanigans inevitable. Any reasonably thoughtful plowman could have minimized the inconvenience to 50 taxpayers in my block alone. The fact is that he left the street in worse shape than he found it, and he cost every homeowner hours of unnecessary labor and lost productivity. Left alone to our own devices for several days, we resourceful folks had managed to make our street navigable. It was the trained and indifferent professionals who imprisoned every citizen in his or her house.

Not having a couple of hours to waste tunneling my way out, I called for a taxi. This was a flight I could not miss. My heart sank when the first words out of the dispatcher's mouth were, "please hold." At that hour. In the end, I made it to the airport in time to board my flight, pre-rattled and grumpy.

Good news, just in. Moment's ago the captain came on to say there will be a half-hour's delay while a ground crew de-ices the plane, just to be sure. Welcome to the domino effect.

It is going to be a long day's journey into night.

 

Spring and the Lure of the Endless Road

by Clay Jenkinson
April 14, 2013

It's road trip time. After an extended and disquieting winter, what my soul needs most is a long pointless auto journey into the heart of the American West, maybe all the way to Big Sur or San Diego and back again. My heart has cabin fever and my spirit is tied up in knots. I need to get out into the deepest outback of Wyoming or Utah on a minor blacktop highway with nowhere particular I have to be—to feel better about life, to feel optimistic again about the prospect of the American experiment. I've never traveled America by car without cheering up. You eat burgers in Formica-tabled ma and pa road diners in the middle of nowhere, you see a folk art American flag spraypainted on the long side of a haystack, a homebrew welded mailbox with a second compartment twenty feet up marked "airmail." And a beauty parlor in a small town graced with a sign that says, Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow."

A range of things have been giving me the road itch. Partly it's the time of year. In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) wrote, "Whan that aprill with his shoures soote, The droghte of march hath perced to the roote, Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages, And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes." Translation: When the earth comes alive again in the spring, people long to go on road trips." Chaucer understood the two fundamental principles of the long journey: All great road trips are spiritual journeys (religious pilgrimages), and it's not really a road trip unless you get beyond your comfort zone and "seken straunge strondes." (Stronde here means land). Like Meriwether Lewis, you have to walk off the map of your known world. When I take a long auto trip I try always to pad my itinerary with a couple of extra Robert Frost "way leads on to way" days, in which, on a whim, you drive a couple of hundred miles out of your way to see the world's largest ball of twine or Oregon's version of "hell's half acre." I love hurtling through Colorado and seeing a minor road that leads off into some intriguing place I have never been, slowing down, and then—with a little lovely hesitation—turning off the safe main highway to see just how lost (and therefore "found") I can get.

One of my good friends, Chad, called the other day to say that he was moving from Bozeman to West Virginia, his U-Haul was packed and he wondered if he could crash for a night in Bismarck. I never heard from him again, except to say he might have to alter his route to drive around the freak April snowstorm. The storm was fiercer in Colorado and Oklahoma than in Montana, so I'm hoping, for the good of his soul, he went by way of Amarillo or Mexico City instead. Meanwhile, my friend Gary is about to drive in a small pickup from Bismarck all the way to California, but with a preliminary stop in Hastings, Nebraska. I want to be in those vehicles with a well-thumbed road atlas, a good book I have never read, and a bag of red licorice.

And now the film version of Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957) has been released. It's the book of books for the lover of endless loopy road trips. I read it every couple of years and each time it delights me in a new way and deepens my love of the astonishing freedom of America. I'm planning to see the film, of course, but I'm almost certain it will be disappointing, for how do you capture on celluloid that sudden sense of liberation, of being completely alive and renewed and fully (for a change) present in the middle of some giant bowl of the earth, as in Nevada, when you top one mountain range and look down on the narrow straight ribbon of asphalt that threads all the way to the vanishing point at the other end of the horizon, to another mountain range, where, when you finally top it, you will see another straight ribbon of highway . . . ? I'd rather envision Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty in my imagination than see them reduced into the flesh of some coiffed up Hollywood actor with perfect teeth.

If I won the lottery, I'd buy a compact van-style RV called a Roadtrek 210, and drive it right off the lot to go search for America. For a full year. With no particular plan, except that during that year I would want to visit some of the National Parks I have never seen—Olympic in Washington, Kings Canyon in California, Big Bend in Texas, the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida, Acadia in Maine—and some historic sites, Hemingway's home at Key West, the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, the site of Chief Joseph's surrender in the Bear Paw Mountains near the Canadian border in Montana. Etc. And I'd drive through Canada in both directions, too, to see how the other English-speaking nation of North America handles its affairs. I've spent so little time in Canada that I'm ashamed.

I'd create a website and produce a daily blog, and post photos of dawn in Monument Valley or a snow squall in the Sierra near Bishop, CA., that would make you ache to get out on the road yourself. I'd write a book about Searching for American in a Year without Television. And take long hikes in places I have never been.

This was actually one of my earliest dreams. Back in high school I coveted a larger-framed Open Road RV, because back then I spent hours in study hall trying to figure out how to install a darkroom in the back of the rig. My dream plan was to wander America as a photojournalist, develop the films in my miniature RV darkroom, and then send articles and black and white prints in manila mailers to newspapers and magazines. I also needed a bigger rig then because I intended to pack a library of about 100 books and that was going to take up a good deal of space. Now, thanks to the digital revolution, I can pack not 100 but 10,000 books in a device smaller than a box of Kodak printing paper, and my "darkroom" would consist of a miniature laptop computer loaded with the best Photoshop software, a couple of two-terabyte external hard drives, and a stack of 100 SD cards. In other words, the stuff that would have taken up about a quarter of the RV space in 1973—the library and the darkroom—would now fit in an attaché case.

If my bucket list could only include one item, this would be it by far. I've got the licorice. Now all that's missing is that pesky $100,000 rig, some gas money, a jug of wine . . .

And time, the most precious and elusive of all commodities.

First stop, Ekalaka.

 

The Anthem of the Great Plains: The Song of the Meadowlark

by Clay Jenkinson
April 7, 2013

All the snow has been gone from my yard for several weeks now. The interim between the final melt and the first serious appearance of new growth in the grass and trees is the least beautiful phase in the North Dakota calendar. Everything looks gray, bare, smudgy, and lifeless. The light is returning in a big way, and that cheers everyone up, but what the light reveals is for the moment rather ugly.

North Dakota is beautiful to behold, in one way or another, between the arrival of the first pasqueflower (crocus) around April 5, and that moment in November when you realize that winter has come to stay. That's a full seven months of plains paradise. You can make the case that North Dakota is beautiful in the winter, too. I love gray luminescent days at 15 degrees above zero when there is a kind of radioactive glow in the cloud cover, and out near the end of the horizon you can see a narrow band of clear sky with a yellowish blue cast to it. Add a 5 mph breeze and a half-hearted snow cover, and that becomes one of my favorite moments of the year.

So now that the equinox has evened out the light and Easter has come and gone we can look forward to a glorious sequence of North Dakota events. 1. The first crocus. I regard it as a lost year if I don't get out to butte or badlands country to hike in places that are likely to support crocuses. The annual crocus window is a narrow one, no more than a few weeks, and—like Easter—it is a moveable feast. You have to find the time to go seek out the crocuses, sometimes on short notice. But then they pay off so wonderfully when you spot your first crocus of the season and actually lie down on the brown grass in your thick jacket, usually on a slope or hillside, to inspect them in all their magnificent fragility and delicacy, and the most perfect shade of subtle blue that God has on his palate.

2. The first meadowlark. I have breaking news! Just when I began to formulate the above paragraph, about prairie flowers, I heard my first meadowlark of the year. That moment, 8:35 a.m. CDT, Wednesday, April 3, 2013, at 100.48.44 west longitude and 46.51.25 north latitude, marks one of the handful of my happiest moments of the year. I am writing these words this morning at my kitchen table rather than in a coffee house. Literally, as I was thinking through my next paragraph, that magical unmistakable sound, the anthem of the Great Plains—the neet neet twit a twit nit nit—found its way through my glass door. At first I didn't believe it, so great was the coincidence, and so unexpected the meadowlark's return, but then I stood up and went out on my deck to listen. Sure enough, there it was, somewhere out in the prairie grass west of my house, singing the miracle of life—and return—and renewal—and of course territory. It made me think of a line from a poem by William Wordsworth: "Oh, there is blessing in this gentle breeze."

3. The first thunderstorm. Last year was not a great year for thunderstorms, as I recall it. I'm happiest when I get to experience a dozen or more powerful storms per summer, including a couple of sockdolagers, the kind that make you wonder if you are going to live through the worst of it, or be found the next day like the bratwurst you accidentally left on the grill all night. The first spectacular thunderstorms don't usually come until at least June, and often July, but we can expect a handful of starter storms, a few warm-up storms, in April. This has been an extended (though not very brutal) winter in North Dakota, so it might be as late as the second half of April before we get the first one. When it comes, I automatically get myself outside to observe it, to smell the air, to cheer on the streak lightning, to count off the seconds and do the distance calculation, to listen to the bumble, rumble, mumble, kerbloom of the thunder, and to let the hard cold raindrops fall on my bare head. These early thunderstorms often promise more than they deliver, and after a while you shrug and go back into the house a little disappointed but still determinedly upbeat, in the same way you congratulate your niece after she underperforms in the big basketball game.

On at least three occasions over the years, I have been pretty sure I was going to be killed in a lightning storm. They were, naturally, among the best moments of my entire life. Two of these occurred in the badlands, one in Kansas. There is nothing quite like seeing a storm moving in in super slow motion from the far western horizon and wondering when and how it will arrive, and what it will bring. That first moment, when the leading edge of hard wind strikes your face, when the cottonwood trees bend over appalled, and you realize, "here it comes," is one of the best reasons to live on the Great Plains. I want the lightning to crack open the firmament.

4. The first Saturday morning when a full half dozen lawnmowers drone around the neighborhood, and folks lean on their rakes and brooms to catch up with their bleachy neighbors who are also emerging from the North Dakota hibernation. By six p.m. you are sure to smell grills from several directions at once.

5. The first evening that you sit militantly out on the deck. We all know it's technically too cold to be out there, and you have to be all bundled up, but it's been a long winter and you decide it's "just too nice" to retreat into the house. I love this moment. People in Florida or California would regard this as mere insanity, but we perform this annual ritual as an act of joy and defiance.

6. And then, hallelujah brother, that exquisite northern plains moment in late May or early June when you linger on the deck in a thin jacket, talking in low tones with someone(s) you cherish, with a glass of wine, and when you finally stand up you realize—with the deepest satisfaction—that it is ten o'clock and it is still light out! It's so light so late that you actually have to say that out loud, even if you are all alone, as I usually am.

It's hard not to think that that is the very finest moment of the whole year. And then you stumble inside with such reluctance.

 

The North Dakota Image in the American Mind

by Clay Jenkinson
March 31, 2013

One of the most interesting books on Thomas Jefferson was written by an eminent historian Merrill Peterson. It's called, The Jefferson Image in the American Mind. It charts the way the American people have assessed the life and achievement of Jefferson—in his own lifetime and through the course of American history right up to the mid-twentieth century, when it was written (1960). Recent events have led me to think about the North Dakota Image in the American Mind. How does the rest of the nation see us? In a marketing survey—conducted in a back room in the nation's malls—what are the words people from other states would use to characterize North Dakota? Is our image in the American mind positive, negative, or what one of my friends calls "a cypher of indifference"?

One of our greatest sons, Eric Sevareid, famously called North Dakota a "large rectangular blank spot in the nation's mind." That was back in the 1940s, seventy years ago, when North Dakota was a quiet agrarian backwater. How are we perceived today?

You can hardly have a conversation elsewhere these days without hearing the phrase "Bakken oil boom." Everywhere I go, people congratulate me for living in a place of full employment, a gargantuan budget surplus, a place enjoying an "economic miracle." Thanks to the parade of national media folks who have made their pilgrimage to Williston's Walmart and to Watford City's Gene Veeder (now the most often interviewed North Dakotan), and the tendency of Republican presidential candidates to point to North Dakota as "the answer" to all of America's problems, there is suddenly a national North Dakota buzz. For the first time in my lifetime, North Dakota is a happenin' place, a place people point to with respect and admiration rather than sarcasm and derision.

That's not precisely the image of North Dakota I'd want to project to the world, but given our history of blankness, perhaps we should gratefully take what we can get. For most of my life, North Dakota has been the butt of the nation's jokes—brutally cold, wind-blasted, flat, featureless, forlorn, forsaken, clunky, backward, endless winters. I remember the sense of deflation I always felt in my early adulthood when someone on the Tonight Show would make a North Dakota joke. Even today, when a national entertainment figure (including Jon Stewart recently) wants to make a "middle of absolute nowhere" jibe or craft a "flyover country" gag, it is usually North Dakota that gets the nod.

What I personally love most about North Dakota is what is least measurable about it, least "improved," least monetized. Nebraska's Willa Cather wrote what I regard as the greatest single passage on spirit of place in the Great Plains: "There was nothing but land: not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. No, there was nothing but land--slightly undulating, I knew, because often our wheels ground against the brake as we went down into a hollow and lurched up again on the other side. I had the feeling that the world was left behind, that we had got over the edge of it, and were outside man's jurisdiction." That's from My Antonia, published in 1918.

That North Dakota, I fear, is deep jeopardy. It's what made us who we are. I pray we don't jettison it altogether in the name of prosperity.

The biggest benefit of the Bakken Oil Rush is that it gives the people of North Dakota an opportunity to invest boldly and sagely in the future of our usually-overlooked state. Our rising prosperity and confidence can be seen in the institutional building boom across the state, funded mostly by oil dollars. Every major North Dakota community has a vibrant and growing arts culture—independent filmmakers, creative and funky web designers, new galleries, emerging poets and novelists, more dance, restaurants with style and not merely grub, better orchestras and string quartets, a livelier commitment to the plastic arts. Thanks in part to the boom, the North Dakota Heritage Center is burgeoning across the state capitol complex, with an additional 97,000 square feet of tasteful and state-of-the-art galleries, and it will soon take its place as one of the Great Plains' finest museums and convening centers. Prairie Public Television is doing amazing things, most particularly in documentary films that are beginning to catch up with North Dakota's neglected heritage. Fargo has grown—not just in population—into a major Midwestern small city, with more diversity than the Champagne Music Man could ever have envisioned.

Thanks to all of this, our young people are beginning to stay here in increasing numbers, and (who would ever have predicted this?) new families are moving to North Dakota from elsewhere not just because there are jobs here, but because they recognize our rising quality of life. In short, in the past few years, thanks to the federal investment in the Red River Valley's institutions of higher education, thanks to high commodity prices and a new era of agribusiness prosperity driven by emerging technologies and genetics, and of course thanks to a virtual infinity of shale oil, we have begun to approach a North Dakota take-off point or critical mass. Our future, if manage our public affairs sanely, conserve our landscape, and invest wisely in the future, appears to be marvelous.

God forbid we shoot ourselves in the foot at this critical moment, for which North Dakota has been aching all of its collective life.

If I were governor of North Dakota I'd create a permanent Commission of Young North Dakotans, made up of 70 young people between the ages of 16 and 36. It could be known informally as the Septuagint Group—septuaginta is the Latin word for 70. Why 70? That's one young person from every county (53), one from each of the colleges and universities (11), and one from each of the Indian Reservations. They'd meet every other month somewhere in North Dakota (and at times outside of ND) to tour institutions, facilities, communities, and landscapes, and they'd try to envision the future of North Dakota.

They would be challenged and empowered to explore a range of questions, including: 1. What would it take for you to want to spend your life in North Dakota? 2. What are the most important problems North Dakota needs to address? 3. What do you like about ND and what do you dislike? 4. What are the amenities that would make your life in North Dakota more satisfying? 5. What things about North Dakota (customs, laws, structures) make it an attractive place and what things dissatisfy you or give you a sense of embarrassment? 6. What is the image of North Dakota in the American mind, and how can we improve that image and yet remain true to our values and our heritage? 7. What would it take to attract young people from elsewhere to cast their lot with North Dakota?

And as soon as they were prepared to make their report, I'd listen intently, with both head and heart. And act, too.

 

The Elkhorn Ranch: Magnificent and vulnerable

by Clay Jenkinson
March 24, 2013

Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch is one of the most important places in North America. It is a quiet and serene bit of sacred land tucked away deep in the heart of the North Dakota Badlands. It is a shrine to Theodore Roosevelt, one of America's greatest presidents. It is a shrine to the American conservation movement that has roots to Thoreau and Jefferson, but which found its first great governmental expression in the administration of Roosevelt between 1901 and 1909. It is perhaps the most beautiful place in North Dakota.

As the Bakken oil rush moves deeper into the Badlands of the Little Missouri River, I worry more and more about the perimeter of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The national park itself will be spared, of course, but if we are not careful to "site" wells and storage facilities well away from park boundaries, hidden wherever possible behind bluffs, the industrialization of western North Dakota will damage the sanctity of this national treasure, and impair the experience of everyone who visits the park, including the people of North Dakota. I worry particularly about the small and vulnerable Elkhorn Ranch site.

When Theodore Roosevelt ranched and hunted in Dakota Territory between 1883 and 1886, the Elkhorn Ranch was eight miles long and perhaps 10 miles wide. It straddled the Little Missouri River. Roosevelt found the Elkhorn in June 1884, not long after the simultaneous deaths of his wife, Alice, and his mother, Mittie, in New York City on Valentine's Day. He already had one ranch in the Little Missouri River Valley — the Maltese Cross — just seven miles south of today's Medora, but now he wanted to find a place of solitude and retreat deep into the Badlands, far from the usual traffic lanes. He rode out on a horse for a few days alone to brood and search for a remote place to establish a second ranch. He found the ideal location 35 miles north of Medora, far from the madding crowd, in a sweeping river bottom tucked beneath dramatic bluffs. Here he could grieve for his wife and mother, write books and articles, and hunt and wander alone in a place where he would not see another human being for weeks on end. At the end of the day he sat in a rocking chair on the veranda with a book, reading, gazing at the strange Badlands formations on the other side of the Little Missouri River and drinking in the silence. The only sounds he heard were birds in the cove where he built his cabin, the dance of the cottonwood leaves when the breezes stirred and the call of the coyotes.

The cabin and the other ranch buildings are long gone, but the feel of the Elkhorn is essentially unchanged — 129 years later. In 1910, in Fargo, Roosevelt said he would never have become the president of the United States were it not for the time he spent in the Badlands. He meant it. We need to live up to the responsibility of that statement.

Virginia has produced eight presidents of the United States. Ohio seven. Montana none. South Dakota none. Wyoming none. Minnesota none. North Dakota has the great fortune of having been the Western home of one of the greatest men of American history. Theodore Roosevelt lived and ranched and hunted and played cowboy among us for four years (1883-1887), and he had a significant presence among us for a full 35 years (1883-1918). But it goes much deeper than that. In North Dakota, Roosevelt recovered his physical health and bulked up into the exemplar of the strenuous life who is carved on Mount Rushmore. In North Dakota,Roosevelt found a way to repair his heart and recover his spirit in the dark days after the sudden deaths of the two most important women in his life.

He knew this: "Black care," he later wrote, "seldom sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough." In North Dakota, Roosevelt overcame his New York and Harvard snobbishness and class bias, and learned to march thieves across sodden gumbo flats and get down in the dirt to wrestle calves during the roundup, no better or worse than all the hard-working people around him. In North Dakota, Roosevelt learned to appreciate the common people of the heartland of America and, more importantly, to understand them. The people of the heartland recognized his admiration, respect and earnestness, and they became his most stalwart supporters for the rest of his long and sometimes controversial career as an American reformer. In North Dakota, Roosevelt began to formulate his bold conservation principles — backed with on-the-ground experience and personal observation. He went on to become the greatest practical conservationist in American history — inventing the national wildlife refuge system, doubling the number of national parks from five to 10, naming the first 18 national monuments, from little Devils Tower in Wyoming to gargantuan Grand Canyon National Monument in Arizona, creating 24 federal irrigation districts (one near Williston and Sidney, Mont.), and setting aside 150 million acres of U.S. national forest.

When Theodore Roosevelt National Park was created in 1947, Congress set aside a mere 218 acres at the ranch headquarters as the Elkhorn Ranch site. It is about equidistant from the south unit and the north unit of the national park. In recent years, serious efforts have been made by the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service to protect the lands surrounding that modest 216-acre patch, so that the Elkhorn Ranch will always be a place of serenity and solitude. In 2007, the Eberts family sold its ranch holdings across the Little Missouri River to the U.S. Forest Service. That protected the viewshed of the Elkhorn from development — the landscape that Roosevelt saw from the veranda of his beloved 60-by-30-foot cabin. In 2012, the Forest Service persuaded a private Montana entrepreneur to cease threatening to develop a gravel pit in that same viewshed. Meanwhile, for many years now determined citizens have worked carefully but with great determination to prevent a bridge across the Little Missouri from being built at or near the Elkhorn Ranch.

Thousands of individuals — most of them unpaid and unheralded — have given a portion of their lives in the last 15 years to preserve and protect the Elkhorn Ranch site. Why? Because it is that important, that beautiful, that pristine, that delightful, that imbued with history and the outsize personality of Theodore Roosevelt. In my opinion, if only one place in western North Dakota — and one place only — could be spared from oil development, it should be the Elkhorn Ranch.

I pray we will not permit this magnificent place to be shattered and compromised to add a few dollops to the billions of barrels of oil we are going to extract from western North Dakota.

In 1903, at another place threatened with industrial development, TR had the courage to say: "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."

Let's find a way.

 

Advice to President Obama—Smile, and Cut the Deficit

by Clay Jenkinson
March 17, 2013

In the past two weeks I have tried to write about the things that are paralyzing our national political culture—extreme partisanship in Congress, fueled and encouraged by the cable talk shows. The pundits of MSNBC and FOX are now so nakedly partisan and so openly willing to demonize the opposition and distort the political record for partisan gain, that they are helping to drive our constitutional system into collapse. The way to fix Congress would be to allow purely scientific statisticians to redistrict the nation's 435 Congressional districts to make as many of them truly competitive as possible. The only way to deal with the extremists of the talk shows would be to switch them off—the ultimate vote of no confidence—and turn your radio and TV dials to public broadcasting instead. The general quality of public radio and television is outstanding.

I find myself longing for the return of Eric Sevareid (CBS) and John Chancellor (NBC). Whenever anything significant happened in American during their tenure, from a political assassination to a setback in Vietnam, we'd all make sure we watched the nightly news (thirty minutes). We knew we could count on these giants of television commentary to provide analysis, historical contextualization, insight, wisdom, and even wit—in measured and thoughtful prose with a steady flow of respect for points of view other than their own. On the few occasions when the great Sevareid went too far, Walter Cronkite immediately restored the balance with a well crafted, perfectly timed quip. Sevareid and Chancellor were centrists, whose mission was to find common ground in the unfolding and often bewildering American experience. Their purpose was to clarify our national experiment, not turn it into a form of bear baiting or cock fighting.

Ah, but we live now not then, in the era of political caricature, not in the age of Sevareid.

So far I have not said a word about the Presidency and in particular the Presidency of Barack Obama. He bears some responsibility for our political crisis. If he would only take my calls, I have three pieces of advice for him, based on the achievement of three of his predecessors.

First, the strategy of Thomas Jefferson: gracious hospitality and fine wine. Jefferson hosted two or three late afternoon dinner parties at the White House per week for up to twelve guests. He worked out the guest lists himself. He took care of his political friends, of course, but more often he invited his political adversaries to dinner. The food was always exquisite and there was usually something odd or marvelous like baked Alaska or ice cream (in an age before refrigeration). The wines were European, chiefly French, and world class. Jefferson didn't encourage political discourse at the round White House dining table (an Arthurian touch, no head of table, no foot). And he never held forth. In fact, he worked hard to draw everyone else out, on subjects close to their hearts, and his goal was that every person present would subsequently feel that he had been the President's favorite guest that afternoon. Even his severe political enemies, like William Plumer of New Hampshire, soon became grudging friends, and—often enough—political supporters.

President Obama should ramp up the informal White House dinners with Republican leaders and backbenchers, but he needs to listen more than he speaks, and steer the conversation to things that are not being debated across town at the Capitol. In other words, if these dinners are mere pantomimes of hospitality, they will fail. President Obama must really experience—and express—graciousness for them to work.

Second, the strategy of FDR: when you are being politically aggressive, smile. Ideally, an American President should give off the vibe of being above or beyond party. But in our constitutional system, the President is both the national figurehead (the prince) AND the favorite of one of the two political parties. It's a paradox. When the hurricane overwhelms New Jersey, when domestic terrorists blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, or when the space shuttle Challenger explodes on liftoff, we want our President to be a nonpartisan national healer and soother. But when controversial legislation needs to get passed or Congressional elections approach, the President is expected to be an uncompromising champion of his own political party. In the course of his 12 years as President, Franklin Roosevelt fought many dramatic and high-stakes political battles, but he had the wonderful habit of saying funny rather than vicious things about his political enemies. He was often hilarious. He preferred a jocular form of ridicule to pure invective. President Obama should take a lesson from Owen Wister's The Virginian: "When you call me that, smile."

Third, the strategy of Richard Nixon: do the counter-intuitive thing. In 1972, President Nixon went to China when it was still a communist nation in the throes of a cataclysmic "cultural revolution." If a Democratic President had undertaken that historic journey, he would have been condemned as an appeaser who was "soft on communism." But Nixon—one of America's anti-communist hardliners—could make the trip because nobody would dare call him soft. His visit changed the course of history.

President Obama should dedicate the rest of his term to solving America's fiscal crisis. If he would take on the deficit in a serious way, and out-slash Paul Ryan and the fiscal hawks, he could leave his mark on America, and graduate from being an average or above-average President to one of the near greats. The deficit is Obama's China. Only a Democrat can take on the entitlements and get away with it. Only a Democrat can cut out of the U.S. budget not just flab and fat, but some muscle too, face down the wilder proponents of the entitlement and dependency society, eliminate some worthy programs that are not truly essential to our national enterprise, and fix Social Security and Medicaid for the rest of the century. The Republicans have no credibility in those arenas. They could not get it done. President Obama could accomplish this great thing. It would be politically costly among traditional Democratic constituencies, but we all know it must be done if we are not going to go the way of Greece and the European welfare states.

President Obama should start by accepting the rational and nonpartisan Simpson-Bowles plan, and then take it farther. He should hearken to North Dakota's great fiscal master Kent Conrad, who has been crunching the numbers with increasing alarm as his Senate career wound down. The "doomsday" template of the Sequester legislation actually gives President Obama an opening to make severe cuts in our bloated, imperialistic, and unsustainable Defense spending, which, as everyone knows, is equal to the next 14 nations combined.

The definition of leadership is "bringing us to do the thing we all know we need to do but would not do without the lead of that extraordinary person."

Martin Luther King, for example.

 

 

The Fifth Circle of the Inferno: Cable Talk Shows

by Clay Jenkinson
March 10, 2013

If Dante were alive today, and creating his Inferno, he would probably condemn politically righteousness people to watch the cable talk shows 24 hours per day for eternity. Conservative Republicans would be sentenced to watch nothing but MSNBC—Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, Al Sharpton, Ed Schultz—and liberal Democrats would be condemned to watch nothing but Fox—Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly, Greta van Susteren. Any brain-dead individual who blinked or instinctively groped for the non-existent remote control would receive additional torture: liberals would subjected to highlight reels of Glenn Beck and Dick Morris for the rest of time, and conservatives would be doomed to watch Michael Moore and James Carville on continuous loop.

Dante Alighieri (ca. 1265-1321) condemned sinners to spend eternity in karmically appropriate punishments, punishments that fit the crime in a gruesomely creative manner. Choose your poison. Think of the pundit whose nightly "commentary" is—for you—the moral equivalent of fingernails raking a chalkboard for eternity.

Like it or not, television is America's main form of social construction. Young people now spend about as much time watching television (increasingly on laptops and handheld devices) as they spend in school. Which holds the adolescent attention better, the history teacher droning on about the five causes of World War I, or the squabblings of the Real Housewives of New Jersey? How can Bach compete with the Bachelor, Hamilton or Hannibal, or Henry VIII for that matter, with Honey Boo Boo, or the novels of Kafka with the novelties of the Kardashians? As a civilization, we have created a high-resolution wide-screen drug much more dangerous than cocaine or crystal meth, and for all practical purposes there is nobody manning the sluice gates. We do our best to interdict the sale and distribution of heroin, but we stand by blandly while our children ingest television (and video game) programming that damages their souls while making them believe that the hole in their hearts can be filled with X: Diet Coke, McNuggets, a Ford Fusion with Bluetooth technology.

How are our souls damaged by the lower nine tenths of commercial television programming? Let me count the ways. 1. The boundless fixation on sex, sexual innuendo, and sex divorced from the sacrament of commitment and respect. 2. Vulgarity, incivility, the routine use of ugly, demeaning, and aggressive language that would literally have been outlawed on public airways fifteen years ago. 3. The objectification of women and the radical sexualization of the nation's daughters, who are being hothoused in popular culture into a semi-smutty "womanhood" long before the first onset of puberty. 4. An almost unlimited pop cultural fascination with graphic violence, including gun violence. 5. An unrelenting reductionism of ideas, art, aesthetics, issues, subtleties, and complex situations into the lowest of the lowest common denominator. 6. Unrestrained and unrelieved materialism. Television is capitalism's ultimate expression of its core values. 7. The collapse of the art of genuine conversation and mutually respectful argument. 8. And, of course, every hour we spend watching The Steve Wilkos Show or Family Guy is an hour we are not reading a book, taking a walk, playing the ukulele, baking bread, having a thoughtful conversation, or gazing at the stars.

Does anyone doubt that our current political malaise—the effective collapse of American democracy—is related to the undisciplined ravings that now dominate talk television, talk radio, social media, and the blogosphere? When the pundits do little more than trot out the day's talking points (generated by the DNC, RNC, the White House, and Rush), and the talk show hosts gleefully abandon any pretense of fairness and objectivity, while interrupting all of their guests and literally shouting down those who dare to challenge their oversimplifications of American politic life, how can we expect to repair our broken public square? If our national politicians are petty and righteously uncompromising, and our media culture is angry and reductionist, how can we expect to move forward to solve the handful of fundamental problems that stand between us and the future of American civilization? These public figures who should be modeling the values and the civilities of our commonwealth are actually doing everything in their power to make things worse. Their crudeness and deliberate oversimplification of American problems and possibilities trickles down to the Cenex coffee shop and the corner table at Applebee's. Righteousness is almost never admirable. In a political republic, it is somewhere between a disease and a death knell.

Where should we turn in the electronic agora for nuance, generosity of spirit, and thoughtfulness? The answer, I believe, is actually public radio and public television, which to my mind are without question the fairest and most enlightening media we have in the United States. Every time I turn to Morning Edition, All Things Considered, the Charlie Rose show, or the myriad of other public radio and television talk shows, I experience a physical sense of relief, a resumption of calm and civility and hope, and a renewal of confidence in the future of America. I know some of you believe that public radio and public television are left-leaning, and perhaps at times they are, but I urge you to spend one full week listening to nothing but public radio and television, and see if you do not cheer up. Even if you disagree with what you take to be the point of view, as I sometimes do, I believe you will find great satisfaction in the quality of the discourse, the depth and accuracy of the reporting, and the maturity of the conversations you find there.

America is a very great civilization that is teetering on the edge of precipitous decline. We need to reduce the temperature of our national conversation, tone it down, shout less, listen more, show some respect to the half of the American people (165 million souls) who hold different views, and above all, stop to reflect and think before we bark out our reactions to the world around us. If each of us paused to ask, before we speak, "what do I actually know about this?," "where is the common ground, on what things do we all agree?," "what is the other side's best argument?," and "what if I am wrong about this?," we'd find ourselves awash in a sea of national humility, or at least silence. As always, Thomas Jefferson had it right: "every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle."

At the end of his first inaugural address (March 4, 1801) Jefferson provided the best prescription I know for democratic success and national happiness: "Let us restore to social intercourse that harmony and affection without which liberty and even life itself are but dreary things."

And turn off the television and take a long walk with a friend.

 

 

"If it Ain't Broke"—Believe Me, it's Broken!

by Clay Jenkinson
March 3, 2013

This morning I woke up with Barry Goldwater rattling around my brain. As I drifted in and out of sleep after first light, I found myself quoting the former Arizona senator and 1964 presidential candidate: "Let me remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." I have no idea how this ancient pronouncement burbled up out of the swampy morass of my subconscious. I think it was the word "extremism."

Yesterday while on the treadmill I watched the Jon Stewart Show as well as a series of talking heads on Fox and MSNBC. The main topic was the "sequester," the looming "fiscal cliff," and the "debt ceiling debate." Yuck. Is there any American who is not now weary of this game, and angry that the world's most important nation has been reduced to this pathetic and apparently perpetual carnival of bad faith?

As I lay in bed enjoying the irony that I was sharing it with Barry Goldwater, I formulated the following modest proposal to fix Congress, which now enjoys a heroic 15.6% approval rating. Obviously, Congress is unlikely to adopt these "extremist" reforms, so they would have to be instituted by way of constitutional amendment.

First, "Members of Congress shall not be exempt from any laws or mandatory programs they create on behalf of the people of the United States." I want senators and representatives to receive Medicare and Social Security like the rest of us, not a privileged alternative. I want them to have to go out and find their own individual health care insurance, to park their own cars, to live more like the rest of us so that they begin to represent us again.

Second, "At the beginning of every year, Congress shall set a target date for passing a budget. Members of Congress shall have their pay docked by $1000 for every day they do not pass a budget after that agreed-upon deadline has passed. Congress shall not be permitted to adjourn or recess after the target date until a budget has been passed and signed by the president." We'd get a budget every time.

Now the Senate.

Third, "Senators may not employ the device known as the 'hold.'" Today, grumpy senators frequently place a hold on an executive appointment. This tactic, nowhere enshrined in formal senate rules and procedures, and of course nowhere mentioned in the U.S. Constitution, permits a senator to block the confirmation of any appointee she or he wishes, for any reason whatsoever, or for reasons never publicly stated. At any given time, at least during Democratic presidencies, unhappy senators place a hold on anywhere between half a dozen and a couple of dozen nominees, usually to federal judgeships. The problem of vacant judgeships is one of the most significant issues in American jurisprudence. On some occasions senators have some actual political objection to a nomination, but just as often they use holds as a form of political blackmail, to force the administration to attend to some personal agenda or frustration not worth a moment of Congressional time.

Fourth, "The filibuster shall be prohibited as a procedural tool of the Senate, and except where the Constitution specifically requires them (e.g., treaties, the over-ride of a veto), supermajorities shall not be required to pass a bill or end floor debate." The sacred principle of the American system is majority rule. Holds and filibusters permit puny minorities—or a single curmudgeon—to hold up the business of a nation of a third of a billion people.

Now the House of Representatives.

Fifth, "Political gerrymandering shall be prohibited. Nonpartisan statisticians shall redistrict the 435 Congressional districts to make every seat competitive to the maximum extent possible." The current system of districting—a tacit conspiracy agreed upon by Democrat and Republican leadership—is designed to create as many "safe seats" as possible. The overwhelming majority of House seats are safe—Republic strongholds or Democratic strongholds. This has the effect of exaggerating angry political partisanship in Congress, because nowadays any given representative represents a solid partisan phalanx of like-minded voters, rather than the lovely, yeasty, all-over-the-map actual mix of Americans who live in most communities.

The vast majority of Americans are centrists and pragmatists, people who believe in compromise, people who are willing to make sacrifices to get things done in the public square. But if by deliberate engineering (gerrymandering) you create highly partisan safe seats all over the nation, two evil consequences follow. First, Congressmen have no reason to compromise, because they can somewhat honestly say they are merely "representing" the will of the people of their district. Second, the safer the seat the more likely the Congressman is to be challenged in a primary (to be "primaried") if she or he doesn't toe a severely partisan line. Safe seat gerrymandering effectively disenfranchises tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of citizens in each such district.

That's the current situation as we blunder through a series of artificial fiscal cliff and debt ceiling crises. If John Boehner entered into a compromise with President Obama to fix the budget and debt crisis by a careful mix of tax hikes and spending cuts (or spending cuts and tax hikes, if you prefer that order!), he'd probably lose his Speakership, thanks to what the British call "back benchers," safe seat severe partisans who have pledged never (ever!) to raise taxes. Or he'd face a primary challenge from a no-tax absolutist back home in Ohio's 8th Congressional District. But if John Boehner (or Nancy Pelosi) had to represent approximately 700,000 Ohioans of every demographic and political outlook, he'd do his best to find a compromise that pleased as many of his constituents as possible—or displeased as few as possible. That's how responsible majority rule works in a representative democracy.

Actual governing is inevitably about compromise. Otherwise there would be no need for politics. Safe seat severe partisans of both parties prevent that compromise, for there is no one in their districts to punish them for intransigence. In fact, it's just the other way around. Under our current dysfunctional system, the pragmatists and compromisers (i.e., actual statesmen and women) are punished for doing that which is basic and essential to the political process.

We will also need to face the massive two-pronged problem of the endlessness of our political campaigns, and the obscene amounts of irresponsible money that are thrown at Congressional races. I'd amend the Constitution to limit campaigns to 90 days, cap campaign expenses, and outlaw political action committees.

But that's another sort of dawn reverie.

For the moment, here's Barry: "Those who seek absolute power, even though they seek it to do what they regard as good, are simply demanding the right to enforce their own version of heaven on earth."

 

The Glory of Winter in a Sub-Arctic Windswept Place

by Clay Jenkinson
February 24, 2013

Finally, some North Dakota winter of the severe sort. I love it. It makes you realize what a fragile hold we have on this place so high up on the latitude chart. If this were the only season North Dakota had to offer, would anyone choose to live here? You see those National Geographic films about Jack London’s Far North, where winter is essentially perpetual, and a very small range of bumbling, mumbling insular creatures eke out their low-exertion lives in a very narrow niche of the biosphere. Fortunately the earth is poised at 93,000,000 miles from the sun. Were it half again that

 

A Modest Wilderness Proposal for North Dakota: Now or Never

by Clay Jenkinson
September 16, 2012

When in 2008 the Badlands Conservation Alliance and other groups formulated a plan to set aside a few thousand acres across North Dakota as wilderness, I thought it was a great idea. If ever there was an exceptionally modest proposal that bent over backwards to accommodate existing settlement and land use patterns, and suggested nothing more than designating a few scattered parcels for permanent wilderness protection, this was it. The land in question (except for 40 acres) is already part of the public domain, managed by the U.S. Forest Service under the jurisdictional umbrella of the Dakota Prairie Grasslands, or owned by the state of North Dakota. In other words, the proposal does not contemplate buying or taking private lands and adding them to the federal system; it merely re-designates a few parcels already in the public domain, to give special protection to a handful of remote and serene little grass islands thus far uncompromised by economic development. No one's ox is gored.

The wilderness proposal includes six parcels, five in the badlands in the west, and one in the Sheyenne National Grassland in southeastern North Dakota: Twin Buttes (13,590 acres), five miles west of the south unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park; Kendley Plateau (16,810 acres), northwest of Amidon; Bullion Butte (9,720 acres), 15 miles south of Medora; Long X Divide (10,670) a few miles south of the north unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park; and Sheyenne Grasslands (5,410 acres), 20 miles east of Lisbon, North Dakota. The proposal would also designate an 11,510-acre parcel at Lone Butte, a few miles south and east of the north unit of TRNP, as a wilderness study area. Add all of that up, including the proposed Lone Butte study area, and that totals 67,710 acres.

The total land area of North Dakota is 45 million acres. At the moment there are 39,652 acres of already designated wilderness in North Dakota in four existing parcels: one in each of the two main units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park; one at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge; and one at Lostwood National Wildlife Refuge in Burke County. That represents 1/10 of one percent of the ND landbase. Add the proposed new parcels to the system and you get a grand total of 107,362 acres or a puny one fifth of one percent of the North Dakota countryside. Here's a little perspective. Fully 52% of Alaska is wilderness, 57.5 million acres! California has 14.9 million acres of wilderness (14%), Montana 3.4 million acres (3%), and Minnesota 816.267 acres of wilderness or about 1% of the land base. Even South Dakota has 77,570 existing acres of wilderness. Nobody can call this a radical proposal.

If the idea seemed attractive and practicable four years ago, before the advent of the Bakken oil boom, the wilderness proposal is ten times more important in 2012. We should do this, now more than ever, now while it is just still possible, now before it is too late. If we don't do it now, we'll lose our last chance to protect a few unique parcels of our prairie homeland, because the pressure to lease every leasable acre of North Dakota is going to be overwhelming. In the 1970s, almost half (500,000 acres) of the Little Missouri National Grasslands was suitable for wilderness. Today there remain only a few tens of thousands of suitable acres—all encompassed in this modest proposal.

We, the 680,000 citizens of North Dakota, should agree to set aside this teeny, almost miniscule, percentage of our magnificent grasslands as a permanent sanctuary for the human spirit, as a reminder of what North Dakota was in the days of Theodore Roosevelt and Sitting Bull, as a symbol of our heritage value system, which understood (and still understands) that there are some things in North Dakota—including the idea of North Dakota--that are not for sale. We should agree that a few pristine acres of land already in the public domain are so beautiful and so satisfying and so untouched by human development that we can afford to protect them--at a time when virtually every other acre of North Dakota is open for industrial business. The imperatives of the Bakken oil boom are going to transform most of the landscape of western North Dakota into something that is not pristine. To create this wilderness would not reduce our state's net oil output in any measurable way. North Dakota is awash in oil—certainly 5 billion recoverable barrels, probably 10-15 billion barrels, and perhaps even 25 billion barrels or more. People who know the industry are now beginning to say that this could be the largest oil field on earth. The amount of oil we might have to leave in the ground if this wilderness is created is statistically negligible. To call it a drop in the bucket would be a hopeless exaggeration. If you do the math, it's more like a bead of perspiration in Lake Sakakawea.

Hunting would still be permitted in these wilderness parcels. So would livestock grazing. It might even be possible, thanks to the sheer (and increasing) ingenuity of oil extraction technology, to work out some compromise in the future to enable long-distance lateral access to the shale under these wilderness parcels.

Some critics of this proposal just don't want to give the conservation community even this tiny little victory. No wilderness, period! But it is important to remember that this is not an Armageddon-like battle between developers and environmentalists. Fully 95% of North Dakota is available for oil development. Proponents of this proposal are not trying to shut down or impede the industry. Nor is this a "foot-in-the-door" proposal as some have alleged. These parcels represent the sum total of land that is still suitable for wilderness designation. Nothing further is contemplated because nothing further is available. Some critics say that even 40 acres transferred from private to public domain is an outrage to the sanctity of private property in North Dakota. Surely a land swap could be worked out for those 40 acres (and a mule!) in the Bullion Butte parcel. Some say we would be locking up part of the badlands for a handful of "elitists." Nonsense. In recent statewide polls, a substantial majority of North Dakotans have indicated that they want to do whatever is reasonably possible to conserve the state they call home.

As usual Roosevelt got it right. When he first gazed at the Grand Canyon (millions of acres) in May 1903, he said: "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."

We have all agreed that man can develop almost every acre within the boundaries of North Dakota. Let's set aside these few parcels as a reminder of who we are and what we also value.

 

And So the Summer Ends: Chokecherries and the Musical

by Clay Jenkinson
September 9, 2012

And so the summer ends. I'm writing this from the patio of the new Rough Riders Hotel in Medora. It's going to be an absolutely perfect badlands day. I love North Dakota in all of its moods, but if we were only allotted one season for the rest of time I would choose to dwell in autumn. Chilly mornings, warm and sometimes hot afternoons, cool evenings, cold nights. Repeat, and repeat. The endless grasslands of America russet and tawny rolling away to the horizon way off, the blue of the sky so pure and clear that it makes you a little sad, and in the middle of the "larger theater of the badlands," as Sheila Schafer likes to put it, the sinuous Little Missouri River meandering in no great hurry to get anywhere, embraced by cottonwoods whose leaves have turned to the brassiest, most irradiated and pulsating yellow-gold-orange that you could ever imagine. The intense blue of the Little Missouri River against the earth tone grassland on a fall day feels as if it must be the hue of God himself or the Great Spirit, or at least their "favorite color," and if fills you with wonder to see two such closely related shades of blue—the thread of the river and the big broad sky—that are nevertheless unmistakably distinct. Add to all this an intermittent 5mph breeze to set the cottonwood leaves to occasional dancing, and a handful of pronghorn antelope to race madly across the landscape for no apparent reason, and you have paradise on earth, all tucked away in southwestern North Dakota.

We have to work hard to preserve and protect this grassy crescent of solace and serenity and profound beauty. It is not, as they say in the business, fungible.

Last night I went to the Medora Musical for the last time this year. By the time you read this the 48th season of the musical will be over. I was told on good authority that on Labor Day Sunday the Burning Hills Amphitheater filled to absolute capacity (an audience of 2,848) for the first time in several years. But last night there were no more than 300 people in attendance--mid-week, last week of the season, with the school year started and the boats and RVs tucked in for the long Dakota winter. We few, we happy few, were huddled together down in front sharing out blankets, arrayed in thick jackets, some in parkas, stocking caps, mittens, even a pair of ear muffs. When the young barkers came down the aisles shouting, "ice cold water," there were some good-natured North Dakota sarcastic quips from deep within the . . . er, crowd. At times we could see the breath of the Burning Hills Singers, and at times they appeared to be dancing in an unscheduled way just to stay warm. I especially love the Musical at the end of the season. The cast has long since worked out all the kinks. The show is tight and extremely confident. If you sit up close—and you may as well sit up close—you can see a little weary melancholy in their eyes; although they are all probably ready to return to their lives, having not, as one of them said, had a day off since May 14, they are also sorry to see the magic summer end. This year's Musical is the best I have ever seen.

I had to leave a little early, which means walking up the ramp to the top of the amphitheater. I lingered up on top and watched a couple of song and dance numbers from the margins. I was not ready to see this summer end—for a number of very particular reasons. I could feel the badlands brooding all around me in the pitch dark in the heart of the American West. A million stars hovered directly over the little hamlet of Medora. I felt—perhaps a little irrationally--that I had gotten especially close to them by climbing up to the ridge. It was just short of shivering weather, and though I could not see beyond the glow of the stage, I knew exactly where Bullion Butte stood twenty miles to the south, and Square Butte off to my right, and Camels Hump and Sentinel Butte too, and I could sense the Little Missouri threading its way through the broken landscape. Linger, summer, oh please linger.

North Dakota.

On Labor Day, chancing on a cluster of chokecherry trees on the path between Fort Lincoln and Bismarck, I paused to collect a couple of gallons of the puckery fruit. I had never done this before, but there the tree was, so heavy with chokecherries that it makes you shake your head in wonder at the sheer profusion of nature. My grandmother would never have passed by that tree without gathering the fruit, so to honor the coming of autumn I harvested about 20% of a single tree. It took much longer than I would have expected and I have a latticework of scratches all over my arms to show for it, and forty puncture wounds in my hands.

When I got home I decided to make chokecherry jam for the first time. It was 8:30 p.m. (A very very bad idea, this). By 1 a.m. I had 36 beautiful little jars of jam spread across my counters. I might have been proud of myself, had it not been for the three hours of cleaning, and picking out spoiled berries and stems, and doing late-night pectin calculations, and watching the two big vats boil over several times in an instant all over my stove and the cupboard below and the floor, and the many misadventures of my makeshift sieves, and using inadequate tongs to pull the jars out of the boiling water. And above all, seeing how vast a quantity of sugar is required to make chokecherries even minimally palatable. I could feel a root canal coming on as I poured a whole bag of sugar into one volcanic vat, just before it boiled over for the second time. Chokecherry jam, it turns out, is really just a syrup of chokecherry-colored sugar. It was a scene worthy of Ethel and Lucy in the candy factory. By the time I finished my kitchen was a scene of carnage and widespread berry stains, and I was a mere wreck of a man, wounded and burned in a range of ways, exhausted, more defeated than triumphant.

I swore never to take an autumn stroll again until the first big freeze. But I did love falling asleep while listening to the jars seal: pop . . . thuck, pop, thut.

 

The Inevitable Moment Comes Right on Schedule

by Clay Jenkinson
September 2, 2012

There comes that moment when you finally release your child into the great world. No matter how long you have thought about it and prepared for it, when the moment finally comes, it's unbelievably upsetting. In about an hour, I'll board a flight at JFK airport in New York and limp home, feeling about as helpless and powerless as a father can feel. Freshman orientation is now well underway—the formal one organized by the university, staffed by trained professionals, and of course the informal one that percolates through the dormitories, led by the Lords of Misrule, also known as upper classmen who have learned how to "game the system." Alas.

I am leaving behind me in Gotham City a young woman who is smart, enormously capable, full of a kind of pure vitality, and yet—at the same time—vulnerable and innocent and terribly—appallingly--young. I don't have any doubt that she can do this. None. But I know, too, that in the next few years she is going to grapple with the issues of adult life that are no fun to face at 40 or 50, much less when you are wet behind the ears and straight off the farm. A few weeks ago we were literally slopping hogs in a small town in far western Kansas; now she'll be slopping the subway, where your personal space is invaded in a range of unsettling ways, and you can never be sure which strange man is a menace and which man just looks like one. My daughter is wonderfully resourceful, but she has not yet developed the kind of "character armor" that is necessary to negotiate urban life. That look straight ahead, "don't mess with me, I have seen it all," persona will come in short order, but it breaks my heart a little that when I see her again she will be that woman, not the cherubic un-self-protective, open-souled country girl I last saw at the county fair.

We her parents are no more than a phone call (or for that matter an airplane flight) away, but we know that sometime soon she is going to venture into experiences that—here's the paradox—we would desperately want to know about and, at the same time, would rather not even think about. If my parents had known all the details of my adventures in college (and I am not talking about sex and intoxicants), they would have passed some sleepless nights, and I was at least 93% geek. It's not that you have to let them leave home that is so upsetting—it's that you have to let them become free agents in a fallen world, have to let them make their own mistakes, and extricate themselves from complicated situations, and even make some irreversible decisions without a reliable life roadmap. They are not going off to university. They are going off to life.

A significant number of things that have to go right in the next few years for them not to go terribly wrong. That's the principal source of my parental anxiety.

This isn't the first release, of course, but it's the big one. For the past 18 years, my daughter has almost never done anything without adult supervision. It began in the delivery room in August 1994 when we got to hold her for a few minutes and then she was whisked away for cleaning and swaddling by jaded professionals who made it clear to us—the first parents ever to have a child!—that this was not their first rodeo, thank you very much. Then there was the first night we went out to dinner and a movie and left her alone with a babysitter we were pretty sure was an escaped felon who traveled from state to state pretending to be the daughter of a family friend. On her first day of school she clung to us like kudzu; we cried hard as we drove away and we counted the minutes until we could come back to pick her up.

I remember the day I taught her to ride her bike. She made me promise not to let go. I let go. Off she rode into the future and though she faltered, she did not fall. I need to remember that one.

There was the day we let her drive the car for the first time, and the first time she drove the car to the next town alone. There was her first date, her first prom, her first solo airplane flight, her first night alone in the house. In the last four years she has gone off to camp, to Girls State, on church mission trips, to a weeklong national government and history program in Washington, D.C., but in every case there were actual adults, known to us, who served in loco parentis, who took it upon themselves to keep her safe, enforce the curfews, and make her brush her teeth.

Now, for the first time, she becomes her own supervisor, not in some sleepy college town in the American heartland, but in one of the world's great impersonal cities. She leaves one of the safest and least populated counties in the United States to find a new home in our most densely populated megalopolis. She moves from a place where she literally knows everyone—even the "pervs" as she likes to say—to a place where she literally knows no one. The university she is attending has made it clear that she must chart her own path, and it has sternly advised parents to limit their hovering—actual or virtual.

I spent yesterday doing professional work. Then I took a taxi up to meet her at the campus boundary. She jumped in and gave the cabbie directions like an old urban pro. That gave me a sense of assurance and made me smile unrestrainedly for the first time in days. We found a little Italian restaurant and had a quiet dinner. We talked about the Iliad, about her roommate (whom she really likes), about her schedule for the rest of the week, about a few things she still needs, about whether her mother is now temporarily or permanently a basket case.

We went back to campus, and sat for half an hour mostly in silence under the glow of the heritage lamps, holding hands, in a little sandy quadrangle in front of her dorm. She cried a little. I cried a little. She told me I must not cry.

The time for her floor meeting came. She stood up and hugged me as if it were the only hug that would ever matter. And walked through the door into her adulthood.

 

Letting Go - Phase Two of a Young Life Begins

by Clay Jenkinson
August 26, 2012

By the time you read this, my daughter will have settled into her dorm room, met her roommate, paced off the distances to her various classrooms just to be sure, and made a list of things we need to ship to her the minute we return to the Great Plains, where she grew up, the homeland she now leaves behind either temporarily or forever. She’s not the first rural kid from a windswept backwater to go off to a big university in the East, of course. It’s some comfort to remember that schools today have become expert at freshman orientation, at finding ways to make everyone feel welcome or at least not as acutely homesick and out of place as they actually, at first, feel.

This day has been coming for 18 years. It once seemed like something beyond any measurable horizon. Now it has sprung into my lap overnight. I remember holding my infant child in my arms, her droopy, trusting, wee bald head resting on my shoulder, and saying, solemnly, “If we save just $250 a month for the next two decades, we will be able to afford to send her to college.” Yeah, right.

I’m writing this at the Bismarck Airport (on Tuesday). We will converge in New York this evening, my child and her mother on a flight from Denver, oppressed by stuffed-to-the-gills luggage. I know my role. I’m the baggage handler mostly, the lugger of boxes, suitcases and small appliances; the checkbook, the problem-solver (“Oh, no, I forgot my power supply, Daddy”), and the almost-steady voice of calm. I’m allowed to take photographs but not too many. I’m allowed to hug my child but not too often. I’m allowed to weep uncontrollably, but only after I get into the taxi to return to my hotel. I must not criticize anything myself, but I am required to agree heartily with whatever criticisms are voiced by my daughter and her mother. I must reach out to shake hands with a range of complete strangers, but never say anything that could be construed by the most prickly and severe monitor on Earth as stupid, lame, rube-like or embarrassing. And suck in that gut!

Move-in is at 9 a.m. tomorrow and then, at 2:30, we release our fledgling into the second phase of her life.

As a divorced father, I have had to “let go” hundreds of times over the last 16 years, and I have grieved so deeply for the loss of my child as a daily presence in my life that at times I have been literally incapacitated. One reason that I became a pathetic workaholic is that it keeps me scrambling all day, all week, all year, and there is simply no time to go look steadily in the mirror of loss. This big release — sending her off to college — is actually the one I have been looking forward to for a long time, and my only dread has been financial. I know my child is intellectually ready for college, though her rural education has been mediocre. I know she is socially and emotionally ready too, developmentally ready, though she is hesitating on the outer boundary of childhood, and we are clinging to her there because we know that we will be entitled to less of her every year hereafter, and our hearts are already broken.

When I went off to college in 1973, it was a bit like walking off the end of the Earth. Long-distance telephoning was an expensive luxury, frowned upon by my father, who believed (loudly) that anything less than an emergency could probably wait until Thanksgiving. My daughter will be able to stay in touch by way of cellphone calls, texting, Skype (video), ePhotos and email — all too cheap to meter — and when all of those fail, I will be able to follow her life from afar by visiting her Facebook site. In my opinion, all this creates a little too much connectivity, too much lifeline. I want her to enjoy a foundation of autonomy that will enable her to explore, and to a certain extent experiment, with life, to undertake the glorious and perilous journey into the mystery of adulthood without constantly looking over her shoulder.

I know only this: This week, the most important person in my world is venturing out from the protective nest of a small agricultural town on the western plains into the great world. She is apprehensive right down to the bone. Rural life is not all good, but it really is true that the whole village helps raise your child, and even people you don’t like and who don’t like you will drop everything to come help you in an hour of need. The people around you are watching you (alas), but also watching out for you, and they know that a young person stumbles many times on the gravel road to adulthood. Support is there when you want it and “support” is there when you least want it, but rural folks never just turn away in indifference. And then one day you leave that cozy and cracked little world of Floyd the barber and fretting Aunt Bea, and enter an entirely new concrete landscape — vastly larger and inherently indifferent — where you have to create your own community for the first time. From now on, it’s a tightrope without the net.

She has to read the “Iliad” right away — it’s that kind of university — and then tilt at an intimidating stack of other great books ranging from

St. Augustine and Dante to Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. She’ll be too busy to be homesick, I hope, because she is about to discover that you surf through high school on your wits, but in college you actually have to earn your way to excellence and achievement. I am so eager for her to encounter the first great professor of her life, the one she aches to please, the one who inspires her to read more, read better, read deeper, and to write with soul and discipline, not just correct grammar. That mentor makes all the difference. Mine was a Shakespearean named Thomas Clayton.

The next few months will determine her life, or at least her university life. There are two types of student: those, no matter how much they study, who don’t let coursework get in the way of their social life or challenge their established early-adult persona; and those who jump off the rim of their childhood into the Grand Canyon of knowledge and possibility, and — in the words of Thomas Jefferson — “are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead.”

 

Tough Times for Mr. Jefferson—Victim of the Culture Wars

by Clay Jenkinson
August 19, 2012

I gave a talk about Thomas Jefferson yesterday to a special group of midwestern legislators, including two from North Dakota: Don Schaible of Mott and Ron Guggisberg of Fargo. After the closing dinner a very powerful swing-state legislator and I were waiting for the shuttle back to the conference hotel. He had missed my talk, but he was pretty sure he had Jefferson pegged. "How do you handle the slavery issue?" he asked, and without waiting for my answer, told me that Jefferson's ownership of slaves was "absolutely indefensible." "Agreed," I said, as agreeably as I could, "and yet we need to remember that eight of the first twelve presidents were slaveholders. That tells us how much public attitudes have changed in the last 200 years." My attempt to contextualize Jefferson failed. The prominent lawmaker turned away in disgust. As far as he was concerned, Jefferson can no longer be taken seriously even in those arenas that have nothing to do with race and slavery.

Really?

My view of the humanities is a little bit different. I believe life is infinitely complex, layered, fissured, elusive, and mysterious, and that almost nothing, including slavery, is as simple as it can be made to seem. I believe righteousness is the death of insight and enlightenment, and my motto as a humanities scholar is "judgment is easy, understanding hard." When I walk around my neighborhood reading a book, I sometimes wonder what sorts of dramas are playing themselves out behind the closed doors of houses with immaculately manicured yards and gleaming SUVs. You can buy the best snow blower on earth, but you cannot escape the human condition. You can, with practice, master a nail gun and apply Roundup without killing your trees, but who can ever really master the mysteries of love, parenting, friendship, grief, and restless longing? I'd rather try to make sense of Jefferson than put him on trial. I'm more or less with Hamlet: "Use every man after his desert, and who should scape whipping?" Jefferson, of course. But me first.

When people "ask" me how Jefferson could have done such and such or J. Robert Oppenheimer (or Meriwether Lewis, or Theodore Roosevelt) this or that, I always make a run at an answer and then say, "I wonder what the future will say about us?"

When I started my study of the life and achievement of Jefferson thirty years ago, he was riding high as the greatest of the Founding Fathers, a Renaissance man who could tie an artery, dance the minuet, survey a field, read Homer and Plutarch in the original Greek, design a neoclassical state capitol building, purchase an "empire for liberty" for three cents per acre, and formulate the Library of Congress classification system. Back then, the fact that Jefferson was a slaveholder mattered, of course, and cast him in a less than fully favorable light, but it did not cast a deal-breaking shadow over the entirety of his achievement. Today, in many circles, he is regarded as Simon Legree (from Uncle Tom's Cabin), leering at Sally Hemings with a glass of claret in one hand and a whip in the other, while his enslaved African-Americans bake bricks for his endless building projects. Thomas Jefferson has somehow become the poster child for the unresolved race issues in American life. And yet his views of race were little different from those of America's presidential saint Abraham Lincoln.

Jefferson is currently getting it from both ends of the spectrum. While the "enlightened" condemn him as a racist and a closet Machiavel, the evangelical right is bent on making him a Christian, even though all the evidence indicates that he was a deist and a Unitarian. A deist believes that a celestial Creator fabricated the universe and set the planets spinning, but that "Great Cause" declines to play a day-to-day role in human affairs, and does not answer our selfish prayers. Jefferson was not a Christian, if by Christian we mean one who believes in Jesus Christ, born in the womb of a virgin, a miracle worker and the Son of God, crucified and resurrected, a member of the Trinity. A pseudo-historian by the name of David Barton has recently published a book on Jefferson's religious views called The Jefferson Lies: Exposing the Myths You've Always Believed about Thomas Jefferson. The book is so profoundly erroneous—a series of wild and deliberate misrepresentations of what Jefferson actually thought and wrote, all designed to "prove" that he was a traditional Christian—that the publishers have pulled it off the shelves in the face of national condemnation of Barton and his methods.

My view is simple. Can't we let Jefferson be Jefferson? If you are combing the records of the Founding Fathers for those who wanted us to be a "Christian nation, founded on Judeo-Christian principles," you will have some measure of success. But the fact remains that, whatever their personal religious views and affiliations, the majority of the Founders were public secularists, who wanted an officially neutral republic in which an individual could be a Christian, Jew, Muslim, or atheist, and among Christian sects a Methodist, Lutheran, Baptist, Congregationalist, or Catholic—without civil reward and without civil penalty. Of all the Founding Fathers, the one who was least likely to endorse evangelical Christianity's effort to restore America as an officially Christian nation is Jefferson, who coined the phrase "wall of separation between church and state."

I suppose that's the main reason that the Texas Board of Education has now removed Jefferson from a list of Enlightenment political philosophers. Yes, believe it or not, the all-powerful Texas textbook vetters have written Jefferson out of at least part of the K-12 curriculum, apparently because they believe their America is more authentic (or comfortable) than that of the author of the Declaration of Independence, the founder of the University of Virginia, the first secretary of state and the third president of the United States. Religious thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas and Jean Calvin have taken Jefferson's place, though neither of them was an exemplar of the Enlightenment. If only David Barton had been allowed to claim Jefferson as a good Christian, perhaps we'd still retain him in America's history books!

As the twenty-first century begins, America seems to be befuddled about what to make of itself and its remarkable, but untidy, history. We are lost in the dark wood, searching for a national identity we can agree on. For the moment, the best thing we can do is raise our eyebrows at the sanctimonious and the cocksure, and slip away from all talking points whatsoever to go out and look up at the stars. And water our tomatoes.

 

Facing the Third ND Industrial Revolution with Care and Candor

by Clay Jenkinson
August 5, 2012

This is the fourth (and last) of a series of columns I have written about the Bakken Oil boom, based on a tour of oil installations around Dickinson and Belfield, led by Ron Ness of the North Dakota Petroleum Council and Blaine Hoffman of Whiting Oil. I want to begin by repeating that I am truly grateful for the tour they provided—extremely busy men for whom time is the thing they have in least abundance—and particularly for their candor in answering all of my many questions.

Over the past year I have discovered the hard way that almost anything I write about the Bakken Oil boom disappoints or offends (or outrages!) some percentage of my readers at both ends of the political spectrum, pro-boom and anti-boom, more carbon and post-carbon, "drill, baby, drill" and "not in my back yard." The only thing I can do, therefore, is to tell the truth as I see it, speak both from the head and the heart, and freely acknowledge in advance that I am probably full of beans. I take comfort in knowing that my readership is small and my influence negligible.

If I were in charge of the universe I would slow this thing down, mostly to lighten the burden on the people who live in towns like Stanley and Killdeer, and cities like Dickinson and Williston, and partly to reduce the impact on wildlife and on the subtle, lovely, and historically quiet landscapes of western North Dakota. My reading of history suggests that pell-mell growth is never good for a community, particularly a traditionally sleepy rural community like those that have been so central an element of the North Dakota character. I have spent a fair amount of time lately driving around Watford City and Williston and my hometown Dickinson. I understand why they are growing like industrial weeds, but from an aesthetic perspective they are looking pretty gross and ugly around the edges, and none of them is likely to win an "exemplary growth management" award, in spite of the strenuous efforts of well-meaning community leaders. If we could just slow the pace a little and phase in the industrial revolution, I think western North Dakota and indeed all of North Dakota would be better served. As one of the greatest North Dakotans said, "That oil's not going anywhere. We don't need to be in any hurry to bring it to the surface."

Booms don't work that way, however. Thanks to what I learned on tour I now doubt that we could slow things down, even if the people of North Dakota collectively wanted to, and frankly I don't see the political will to do so on the horizon. The development legal and leasing protocols that we have long since put into place, coupled with the fact that Bakken oil is "everywhere" west of the Missouri River, and the fact that the oil companies are striking "black gold" more than 95% of the time, has set into motion an industrial juggernaut that probably cannot be restrained. Ron Ness believes that it would be a mistake to slow things down, because this historically unprecedented investment in North Dakota's hard and soft infrastructure depends on the boom mentality—an urgency to get in while the action is hottest. Take the frenzy away (burst the tulip or dot.com bubble, as it were) and the boomers will look for other arenas in which to throw their investment money.

So, if the boom is unfolding with a tsunami-like dynamic that is now largely beyond human control (not everyone agrees with that proposition), our duty would seem to be to manage the Bakken as wisely as we can under the circumstances, to ease the pain for those in the impact zone, especially those who are not directly benefitting from the boom, and to do what we can to shape the hectic growth in ways that are tasteful, environmentally sound, and sustainable—if possible. And to be really enlightened about how we invest the giant windfall to improve the future of North Dakota.

The idea is to balance Capitalism and Commonwealth. My personal sense (no doubt wrong) is that we have been a little too grateful for the capitalism to keep our focus on the commonwealth.

Industrial revolutions are rough things. We need to remember that this is not North Dakota's first industrial revolution, though it is likely to be the most dramatic and disruptive. For the first half of the twentieth century, the wholesale mechanization of agriculture reduced the number of farms in North Dakota from 80,000 to about 30,000. It was an exceedingly painful revolution, the stuff of The Grapes of Wrath, particularly in the 1930s and 1980s, and before the Bakken Oil boom started we spent a fair amount of time wringing our hands about that revolution's legacies: outmigration, dying towns, and rural decline. The second revolution was the industrial taming of the Missouri River between 1930-1965. Although the completions of Garrison and Oahe dams were seen as a benefit to the people of North Dakota at large, their impact on the Lakota and the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara nations was unbearably devastating (not to mention structurally racist). The industrial scars remain sixty years later, and in some sense the wound is never going to go away. Meanwhile, the industrial boondoggle of Garrison Diversion (1964-1984) continues to distort North Dakota water politics to this day.

We will get through this, but we should not pretend that it is all wine and roses. I believe, on balance, that the Bakken Oil boom (properly managed) can be one of the best things that have ever happened in North Dakota. I don't see how you can care about jobs, rural renewal, the stabilization of our population, flush state budgets, institutional growth and improvement, better education for our children, and a lessening of our pathetic dependency on oil from cultures that loath us, without finding a great deal to celebrate in Bakken oil development.

Still, we need to do everything that we can (by which I mean more!) to preserve that which is best in our landscapes and in the North Dakota character. I believe we need more transparency in our state government, and more candor in assessing such things as the dramatically higher crime rate in the Bakken zone, the impact on wildlife (bighorn sheep, mule deer, antelope, mountain lions), the impact on our state park system, and the social costs of hectic development. We are adults: we can take it.

And those who exhibit industrial negligence, those who dump their wastes in ditches, fields, and wells, we should fine (and perhaps imprison) within an inch of their corporate life.

 

It's Here, It's Unstoppable, and We Must Manage It Right

by Clay Jenkinson
July 29, 2012

My last two columns have been as objective an account as I could provide of a wonderful tour I had of the Bakken oil fields, with Ron Ness of the ND Petroleum Council and Blaine Hoffman of Whiting Oil as my guides. In my last two columns I concentrated on the nearly-miraculous technological ingenuity that permits us to reach, fracture, and extract oil suspended in the Bakken shale, and on the great advances in environmental sensitivity in this, the third, oil boom in North Dakota history.

The oil rush is going to be massive, unrelenting, and ubiquitous, and it is going to transform western North Dakota in ways that we cannot yet fully fathom. Like it or not, we are in the midst of the unprecedented industrialization of our western landscapes. And though some of those lands are regarded by many as of limited aesthetic value, the boom will unquestionably also have a dramatic impact on the North Dakota badlands, including the Little Missouri River Valley. The boom will soon create a pervading network of development in the Little Missouri National Grasslands, and it will encroach on the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and on the serenity and sanctity of the heritage ranches of the North Dakota badlands.

Don't get me wrong. This may be a price worth paying for full employment, rural renewal, unprecedented budget surpluses, energy independence, and vast profits for the entrepreneurial classes. But we need to face the fact that the Bakken Oil Boom is going to change the face of North Dakota and the character of the people of North Dakota.

I have learned that there is probably nothing we could do to slow the boom down, even if we collectively wanted to. Given the leasing structure and the sudden immense scale of investment in the Bakken fields, the oil boom (like a tsunami) is on autopilot and it is not clear who, if anyone, has access to the controls. At this point, all we can do is make the best of a beneficial—but overwhelming—extraction mania that is probably going to last for several decades.

Two weeks ago I wrote that the Bakken oil boom may be one of the best things that ever happened to North Dakota, "if we manage this right and protect our people and our landscape to the maximum extent possible under the circumstances." Ever since those words flowed through my fingers, I have been pondering what, if anything, we can do to manage the boom wisely.

First, we need to do everything in our power to ease the strain, improve the roads, divert the traffic, and limit the social havoc for tens of thousands of North Dakotans (and newcomers) who will be living in hectic, dusty, congested, and increasingly unsafe boomtowns. As I talk with the folks who live in the impact zone, I sense exhaustion (including spiritual exhaustion) and increasing frustration, even among Bakken boosters. One woman from Killdeer said, "I am not saying I want the oil boom to go away, not at all, but if it did go away, I know I would feel relieved." I believe Ron Ness is right when he says that for the next five or six years North Dakota needs to invest up to $1 billion per year in the Bakken zone infrastructure.

Second, we need to pass laws that increase the rights of surface owners who do not own the mineral rights beneath their property. They should, I believe, be much more generously compensated for the disruption of their lives and the industrialization of their homesteads, and we should do something to increase their negotiating power in the siting of wells and pipelines. I understand how our legal system works, but it seems paradoxical that the vast majority of the benefits come to the subsurface owners, whose lives are not disrupted by drilling and extraction activity, and the vast majority of the pains come to the surface owners, who are the last representatives of the agrarian era of North Dakota history.

Third, we need to select a handful of the most magnificent places in western North Dakota, places that epitomize the stark beauty of the northern Great Plains, the uniqueness of our butte country, and the romance of the Little Missouri River badlands, and work hard together to prevent them from being despoiled by development. I know this is easier to talk about than to achieve, given the right of mineral owners to develop their oil resources, but there remain state and federal lands where greater restraint can legitimately be asserted. This will require strong and confident leadership. I believe that if North Dakota worked strenuously and took some risks to preserve even a few of its most majestic landscapes—the area around Bullion Butte, the deep badlands as seen from the channel of the Little Missouri River, the perimeter lands of Theodore Roosevelt National Park—the people who fear that we are selling our souls for a mess of pottage would be measurably relieved. It's the sense that suddenly "everything is for sale and nothing is sacred" that has given thousands of well-meaning people the feeling that something central to the very idea of North Dakota is being lost.

Fourth, as soon as we have caught up with the vast and urgent infrastructural needs, we need to invest the bulk of the surplus, for the next couple of decades, in the future of North Dakota. I am not entirely certain what this would entail, but it surely means investing in the kinds of social and cultural institutions that will attract newcomers to the state and retain a larger percentage of our young people in the twenty-first century. In other words, it means investing in North Dakota quality of life. It means working creatively to devise one of the best K-12 and higher education systems in the world, so that we become one of the most competitive workforces on earth. We should follow the lead of Texas in transforming oil revenues into performing arts centers in our capital Bismarck and other North Dakota cities; improved libraries (digital learning centers) throughout the state; world-class art galleries like the Joslyn in Lincoln, the Amon Carter in Fort Worth. And, like Norway, we should set aside an astounding legacy fund that will serve the needs of North Dakota for centuries to come, in good times and in bad. I think the state should create generous permanent endowments for our principal nonprofit cultural institutions: Medora, Fort Mandan, Fort Lincoln, the Theodore Roosevelt Center in Dickinson, the Heritage Center, the State Fair, Bonanzaville, the State Arts Council, the International Peace Garden, and others.

If we do these things, North Dakota can become a model of enlightened twenty-first-century development, and this boom will not leave behind a rusted-out wasteland of abandoned subdivisions and shattered dreams. Our future can be glorious—if we manage this thing right.

 

Lessons from a Guided Tour of the Oil Fields

by Clay Jenkinson
July 22, 2012

As I wrote last week, I recently had the opportunity to spend a day in the North Dakota oil fields with Ron Ness of the North Dakota Petroleum Council and Blaine Hoffman of Whiting Oil's Dickinson office. Last week I wrote about the technological ingenuity that allows us to send a steel probe more than two miles into the earth, then make it turn a 90-degree corner, and snake its way thousands of feet into the sweet spot of an oil-bearing shale formation. That formation is then pneumatically fractured (fracked) so that it releases the oil that has previously been locked in the shale. Current technologies thus allow us to extract gigantic quantities of oil (or natural gas) that would have been impossible to recover just a few years ago.

The best part of the field day for me was having the opportunity to pitch dozens of questions to two of the best-informed professionals in North Dakota. Here's what I learned.

Dramatic improvements in the oil industry promise a light environmental footprint at each well site. The pads are much smaller now. Reserve pits—hazardous to birds, harder to reclaim—will soon be a thing of the past. Multiple wells can be drilled on a single site, and then maneuvered far underground to reach out laterally in every direction to the productive Bakken shale formations. According to Ness and Hoffman, as many as 20 wells could be drilled on a single pad, and already it is routine for several to be drilled at one site. This will greatly reduce the number of access roads required to develop Bakken oil. It will "space" the wells far enough apart to reduce or eliminate the visual blight, what we think of as the "classical Texas oil field" phenomenon. Because the oil shale is everywhere (not concentrated in randomly scattered deep pools as in traditional oil development) the fracking wells can be lined up, one every 640 or 1,280 feet for long distances along a single section line access road. This eliminates the need for a winding scoria access road to just one well (as in the past), and enables oil pipelines, service vehicles, power lines, water supplies, flaring collection pipelines, and other extraction logistics to be channeled along a single production corridor. Thus industry efficiency and a much lighter industrial footprint go hand in hand.

Reclamation is now outstanding. When the oil production at a well site ends, the company is required by law to reclaim the site: seal the well periodically throughout its length, bury the wellhead safely below the surface, remove the gravel pad, restore the landscape to its former contours, replace the topsoil that had been set aside when the pad was developed, erase access roads, and reseed the ground. We visited three former well sites in the National Grasslands north and west of Belfield. They were so superbly reclaimed that a casual visitor to the badlands would never be able to identify them. Even our hosts had some trouble finding the sites. Only a grass biologist would be able to spot the difference, at least until the prairie completes its own reclamation of the site. Conclusion: several decades from now, "when the landscape is quiet again," it will be difficult to see much lingering evidence of the widespread industrialization of western North Dakota at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

There is really no way to slow the boom down. Leases on private lands require the oil company to develop the site within three years—or lose the lease. Leases on National Grasslands property provide a ten-year development window. (This is the reason that, so far, there has been less oil activity in the badlands than on non-federal lands.) The success rate on Bakken wells is so great (over 99%), and the leasing activity has been so frenetic throughout western North Dakota, that there is what might be called a "structural urgency" to develop the fields. The only limiting factors at the moment are the finite number of available rigs and the availability of personnel and development capital. Ron Ness believes that it would not be desirable to slow things down in the Bakken oil zone even if there were a way to do so. The intense boom & rush dynamics, he said, are attracting outside investors to build hotels, permanent housing complexes, restaurants, shopping facilities, and a wide range of other amenities that are changing the quality of life in western North Dakota for the good. If you transformed the "gold rush" mentality to something less frenetic (assuming it were possible), these opportunistic outside investors might back away from investing in North Dakota's future at someone else's expense.

We must meet the urgent infrastructural needs of the impact zone. Ness believes that North Dakota needs to devote approximately $1 billion of the oil surplus per year for the next five or six years to build an industrial and community infrastructure that will enable the oil industry to develop the Bakken fields more efficiently, more safely, with less dust and disruption, and with less stress on wildlife and the landscape. This includes relief for the impacted communities, a vastly larger and sturdier highway system, improved airport facilities, bypass roads, ruggedized oil corridor roads, rest areas, increased law enforcement throughout the Bakken zone, and much more. There is both a moral and a practical urgency in this. Both Ness and Hoffman said that the state—not the industry—should undertake these infrastructural developments. Ness said that while this investment might seem gigantic, in the long run it will serve to increase rather than diminish the state surplus; that it should be seen as a state investment rather than an industry subsidy; and that it will go a long way towards easing the "growing pains" in the impact zone.

If you accept either of these two propositions—that the Bakken Oil Boom is on balance not only a good thing for North Dakota, but potentially one of the best things that ever happened in North Dakota; and that the boom is here, here to stay, huge and growing, and at this point there really isn't anything that can be done to chasten it or slow the pace—then it is in all of our interests (from Fargo to Fairfield, Grand Forks to Grassy Butte) to find ways to manage the boom to the best of our ability, to ease the pain and strain in the impact zone in every possible way, and to invest the bulk of our current surplus in the oil zone's aching infrastructure.

You know the television commercial: "This is not your father's Oldsmobile." One thing is absolutely certain.

This is not your grandparents' North Dakota. Either we embrace the change or it will roll right over us.

 

It's Not Just an Oil Boom, It's an Industrial Revolution

by Clay Jenkinson
July 15, 2012

Last week I had the opportunity to visit the Bakken oil fields north and west of Belfield with Ron Ness of the North Dakota Petroleum Council and Blaine Hoffman of the Whiting Oil and Gass Corporation. In the course of a long day we visited two oil rigs, a fracking operation at another site, a plant that collects the gasses that would otherwise have been flared at the well sites, and several Whiting properties in the badlands that have been reclaimed after all oil extraction at the site has been concluded. It was an amazing, and amazingly generous, tour. I am immensely grateful to have had the opportunity to see the industrial profile of the oil boom through the eyes of such remarkable and dedicated professionals.

I want to pause first to worship human technology. At some point not many thousand years ago we were wandering around the African savannah plucking berries from shrubs, beating off intruders with clubs, and trying not to let the fire go out because it was so darned hard to get it started again. Today, a guy with a joystick can direct steel well pipe 12,000 feet into the earth, and then TURN a 90 degree corner (with stiff steel pipe), so that, with the same joystick, he can feel his way to a 3-15 foot vein of oil bearing shale thousands of feet away from the turn. Think about this for a moment. We can send down a straw more than two miles into the earth, through some very dense and unyielding formations, and then turn a corner and wander laterally until we reach an exceedingly narrow formation that the entire population of North Dakota could never reach with shovels if they did nothing else for the rest of their lives.

And that's just the beginning. Then we send water and a sand-bearing goo down that endless pipe at incredibly high pressure to fracture the oil bearing shale (like a window fan blowing open the pages of a closed book). This releases the oil that is bound up in that shale.

Two quick conclusions. First, humans must really have an infinite thirst for oil—they go to such lengths and expense to get to it. Second, human ingenuity and creativity (plus the opposable thumb) are magnificent evolutionary tools. We can deposit a live man on the surface of the moon, clone a living goat, talk to someone at the other end of the planet on a device no larger than a cigarette pack, and journey to the center of the earth with a metal probe. After spending a day in the presence of any cutting edge technology, it is virtually impossible not to conclude that human ingenuity is a limitless resource that can solve virtually any problem, and that as long as the United States continues to train and turn loose the human creative spirit at current (Steve Jobs) levels, we will be the masters of the world. There would seem to be a techno-fix for absolutely everything, and yet, as Woody Allen might say, we still can't balance the budget or get a good pastrami sandwich in Duluth.

The fracking technology is literally breathtaking. It is also very recent. It has allowed Ron Ness (and others) to project—using currently available technology—that it will be possible to recover 12-20 billion barrels of oil in western North Dakota. If that is true, the state of North Dakota alone has as much oil as the nations of Qatar or Angola, and a fifth (possibly a quarter) as much recoverable oil as the nations of Iraq and Kuwait. If we come to extract a million barrels a day, that's three years to a billion barrels. That would seem to indicate somewhere between twenty and sixty years of steady oil extraction before the North Dakota fields play out. And this only represents currently available technology, in a field where the technology is becoming more sophisticated almost by the month.

It is going to require tens of thousands of fracking wells to get all that oil up out of the ground, not to mention storage and shipping facilities, pipelines, rail lines and spurs, refineries, plants to handle the derivatives, water storage and treatment facilities, much wider and more ruggedized roads, and a housing and amenities infrastructure that is going to stagger the imagination. Dickinson is probably going to be a city of 50,000 people (for decades), Williston more, and Watford City, Stanley, Killdeer, Belfield, and other formerly sleepy villages are going to be transformed into something never before seen on the plains of North Dakota.

You know the old Chinese curse: "may you live in interesting times." While he was hunting in 1789, French king Louis XVI was told of the fall of the Bastille in Paris. "So it is a rebellion?" he said. "No, sire," replied the Duke de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt "it is a revolution."

The first and most important thing you need to know about this oil boom is that it cannot and must not be compared to the previous booms in the 1950s and the 1980s. The volume is almost infinitely greater. The amount of industrial activity a fracking well requires, as opposed to a traditional well, is greater by magnitudes. It takes approximately 2000 truck "events" to bring a single well to production. At this point there is virtually no geological gamble in fracking. We know where the oil bearing shale is. All we have to do is thread our way to it and fracture it, and voila: black gold. In the Bakken boom, it would be more accurate to say we are mining the oil than drilling here and there in hopes of finding a pool (as in previous booms). Because fracking is a more exact science, the wells can be lined up along drilling corridors, every X-thousand feet. This creates remarkable efficiencies in service roads and pipelines, and enables the industry to collect the gasses that have previously been burned off (flared) at the wellhead. Thanks to the real or perceived global scarcity of oil, this boom is very unlikely to collapse. Indeed, this time OPEC does not have sufficient production slack to conspire to undercut the world oil price and lure us back into Saudi oil addiction.

For all of its disturbances, dislocations, and growing pains, if we manage this right and protect our people and our landscape to the maximum extent possible under the circumstances, Bakken oil is going to be one of the greatest gifts that ever came to the people of North Dakota.

It's not an oil boom. It's an industrial revolution.

 

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