The Welfare State, Tax Farming, and the Flat Tax

My friend the barista at my favorite coffee house asked me the other day to write "about how we can convince all Americans to take full responsibility for their lives and so far as possible meet their own needs." This is something I think about a lot. My two favorite presidents—Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt—both believed that sturdy self-reliance was the true meaning of America. I'm not sure they would have quoted 2 Thessalonians 3:10—"The one who is unwilling to work shall not eat"—but they both believed that American should be an empowerment rather than an entitlement society, that nobody owes us anything, and that there is no excuse for laziness.

I'm not with Mitt Romney that 47% of the American people "will never take responsibility" for their lives, that they are a cheerfully permanent dependency class that votes Democratic so that they can continue to live off the hard work of the beleaguered 53% who carry American into the future. In Romney's cruel formulation (admittedly, an off hand toss of red meat to the base), just under half the country is locked into a co-dependent relationship with the Democratic Party: the bums (by his math, 169 million Americans) need the Democrats to keep their food stamps and welfare checks coming, and the Dems need the bums to stay in power. I find this argument so cynical, heartless, and fundamentally offensive that I hate even to put it into words.

Still, we all know that some percentage of the American people (in other words, millions of people) are gaming the system when they are able-bodied enough to take care of, or help take care of, themselves. Roosevelt would want to thump them into good sense. My view is that that percentage (the "sponges") is in fact relatively small, and that it is pretty heartless to blame people who would work if they could for not being able to find work in a lackluster and sputtering service economy just emerging from the worst economic recession since the Great Depression.

Nobody can look at the welfare statistics and not be saddened. Currently, 23,116,928 American households receive food stamps. That's a total of 46,700,000 people on food stamps (13%). Almost 13 million people are on welfare (4.1%). Over one million children receive their first formal education in the federal Head Start program. In 2012 alone, the federal school nutrition programs delivered more than five billion lunches to more than 31 million students nationwide. The federal WIC program (Women, Infants, and Children) provides primary or supplemental basic health care programs to millions of Americans. Currently there are 75 million Americans receiving Medicaid. And on and on. That IS a lot of dependency. And someone has to pay for them.

I'm in favor of all of these programs—proof that we really are a great and compassionate society rather than a ruthless one. And—from the Mitt Romney 47% worldview--it is certainly true that these social programs have all been Democratic Party initiatives, most of which were denounced at their inception by the Republic right as socialist, nannystate, mollycoddling, welfare queen, intrusions into the free flow of a capitalist economy that should just be permitted to do its magic. It is also true, as Romney says, that welfare recipients vote overwhelming Democrat. Still, is there anyone who thinks it is healthy that the United States of America has this much need, this much dependency, this much welfare? We talk about means tests (I'm all for them), but we should probably also find some way to conduct "true needs tests." Let the true bums work or starve.

When I was growing up, most Americans regarded welfare and food stamps as last resort stopgaps to be regarded with some sense of shame. My kin (and probably yours) used to swear that nothing in the world could induce them to accept food stamps or welfare, and they were even a little disparaging of unemployment insurance and workman's comp. That attitude has changed dramatically in the last thirty years. I'm certainly not for stigmatizing poverty, but nor do we want to nurture or perpetuate a culture of entitlement.

In my opinion, it's not the poor that are dragging the country to ruin, though I agree that the existence of a semi-permanent welfare class would violate the fundamental ideal of American life: that in a bountiful land of freedom and opportunity, each individual, each family, takes care of itself by way of hard work, thrift, sacrifice, and resourcefulness. That may sound quaint in 2013, but without that spirit North Dakota could never have been settled. My grandparents represented everything that is right with America. They worked hard every day of their lives. They never had much. But their lives were amazingly abundant. They knew grinding poverty for long periods of time, and yet they never would have dreamed of accepting assistance from beyond the boundaries of their farm. Hurray for them. But we must not assume everyone has such tools and gumption.

Of course we should find ways to reform the "welfare state," but before we do that I suggest that we eliminate corporate welfare (countless billions), upper class welfare (a range of tax dodges, deductions, evasions, amortizations that amount to nothing more than the fleecing of the American dream), and middle class welfare. I have prosperous friends in Kansas who "farm the farm program" in ways that are perhaps legal but in my opinion unethical, wealthy and middle class friends in North Dakota who "farm the Medicaid program" by letting you and me pay for their parents' and grandparents' care in high-end nursing homes. I say, abolish all tax deductions of any sort and see who squawks loudest. It won't be the poor and minorities.

If I were in charge of the universe (which, thank goodness…) I'd scrap the current Byzantine federal tax system, and institute a simple flat tax of 10% of income, no deductions. I'd exempt anyone earning less than $25,000 per year. Well, not quite. I'd insist that everyone who files a tax return in the Exempt Category be required to write a check to the IRS for $500 per year. That would be the Minimum Federal Tax and no working adult would be allowed to escape it. I do believe we all need to have "skin in the game," as they say, to pay something to the national government for the many services it provides us. I think at least once a year every working American should have to write an actual check to the IRS so that we remind ourselves—positively, not indirectly—of two things: that government costs money, and that it is no fun writing that check, however large or small.

Under this system, the person earning $54,000 per year would pay a flat tax of $5,400. The person earning $13.7 million would pay a flat tax of $1.37 million. No deductions for mortgages, children, second homes, medical expenses, farm equipment, charitable giving, etc. I'm not wedded to 10%, because I don't know that it would meet our treasury's needs, but it has the Jeffersonian advantage of being a decimal system that anybody can easily compute. It took me several years to teach my daughter how to compute a 15% tip at restaurants, but 10% she could do from the age of eight.

Here's the basic hypocrisy, I think. When we decry the "entitlement society," we usually think of the "have nots." We'd be better off looking in the mirror.

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Holding America Hostage at the Cost of Constitutional Government

Like almost everyone else, I’m so disgusted with Congress that I wish we the people could force a national vote of no confidence for the whole lot of them, and start over. I believe if we chose 435 people at random from the 340 million Americans, we would do much better. And I feel certain that no group of 435 average Americans chosen by lottery would stoop so low or be so short-sighted as to shut down the government of the United States.

We are a very great nation. Great nations don’t let their governments collapse or for that matter just lapse. They pay their debts. They honor the sanctity of contract. They attend to the hard work of public legislation like adults. They pass budgets. They move forward by way of intelligent compromise. They get things done, even when it is no fun.

The pathetic carnival we have all been witnessing would be hard enough to watch from Bismarck, North Dakota, but this week I am leading a group of 30 cultural tourists on a journey through Jefferson’s Virginia and Washington, D.C. We spend all day every day talking in reverent and earnest tones about the Founding Fathers and Thomas Jefferson, about the Enlightenment and the Idea of America, and then as we wind down for the night we turn on the television sets in our hotel rooms and watch the latest political pornography in the national capital of the United States 237 years after Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and 225 years after the crafting of the Constitution. It makes you want to weep—or throw up—or just throw all the rascals out.

What happened to America?

If our schedule had been reversed, and we had gone to tour the Library of Congress one day later, on Tuesday, October 1, we would have found the doors locked, and a note on the door explaining that Congress had shut down the U.S. government for no rational reason.

The American people deserve better. We deserve so much better.

For what little it is worth, I believe that while there is plenty of blame to go around, among Democrats and Republicans alike and a Congressionally inept President, in this instance the principal blame belongs to the right wing of the Republican Party. If, as they say, the core issue is the Affordable Health Care Act—Obamacare—and the government of the most powerful country on earth is being shut down by those who just cannot bear to see it take effect, then those sour grapes absolutists bear a very heavy responsibility and I hope they will be held accountable by the American people.

Obstructionism is not ok. It would not be ok if America were a relatively minor nation. But we are not a minor nation, though we are now on a rapid downward spiral that is likely to damage our position in the world, reduce our international credit rating, and make other nations turn elsewhere for world leadership.

The Tea Party zealots appear to be willing to damage the lives of tens of millions of Americans to make their point, to stand by cheerfully while more than 850,000 federal workers are sent home without pay, to precipitate a breach in a wide range of public services from the National Parks to air traffic control, some of which are vital to our national life, and some of which involve the basic security of America.

Not only does the action of a grim and fanatical minority violate the core principle of American political life—majority rule—but it actually threatens the future of majority rule as a concept of civil society. We now begin to reach the point where serious political thinkers, at home and abroad, will ask: is the United States governable? The fact is that the United States is in the midst of a new civil war—being waged between those who like to pretend that they are the modern Samuel Adams and John Hancock heroically opposing taxation and big government, and those who realize that this is now the 21st century and America, with a third of a billion people, necessarily requires a large and complex national government.

Perhaps the obstructionists (the new political nihilists) have forgotten the mechanics of legislation established by our Constitution. Irrespective of the merits of Obamacare as national health care policy, the fact is that the law was enacted by both houses of the United States Congress (March 2010). Then that two-house Congressional legislation was signed into law by the President of the United States. That’s how our system works. Anyone who has taken a basic civics course understands this. You don’t have to agree with this or that law, but we can only function as a civil society if we play by the rules we have all agreed to honor.

After it was enacted into law, Obamacare was legitimately challenged in the federal courts. It went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. On June 28, 2012, the court issued its landmark decision affirming that the Affordable Care Act was indeed constitutional. At this point all three branches of the national government of the United States had endorsed Obamacare. That would seem to have settled the issue. It’s not about whether you or I like the health care law. It is about how laws are passed in a democratic society.

But of course that wasn’t the end of the story. In the 2012 Presidential election, Republican candidate Mitt Romney declared—unmistakably—that the first act of his presidency would be to repeal Obamacare. No one who followed the election could doubt that this was his highest priority. In other words, Romney defined the national presidential election as a referendum on Obamacare. Romney lost that election—not marginally but decisively. So if the election was a referendum on Obamacare, the American people appear to have affirmed the law in spite of whatever misgivings they had about some of its provisions.

The Republicans of the House of Representatives have now voted more than 40 times to repeal or defund Obamacare. None of these bills has been seconded by the duly elected Senate of the United States. If, somehow, a repeal law passed both houses of Congress, President Obama would certainly veto it. Unless a 2/3 majority of both houses voted to override that veto, the health care reform law would stand. That’s civics 101.

I know some, perhaps many, of my readers think Obamacare is a disaster that will raise costs, reduce services, and make an already Byzantine health care system more cumbersome. They may or may not be right. Only time will tell. But that is not the point. No single faction should be permitted to hijack our national political system because it disagrees with duly enacted legislation. The intransigence of the Tea Party position is so great that there isn’t a chance in the world that President Obama can yield to their extreme demands. To do so would be to abdicate his role as President of the United States. It would be giving in to political terrorists. In other words, and ironically, the right-wing Republicans have ensured the survival of Obamacare by forcing everyone who believes in the American system to support it, irrespective of its merits.

My tour group is now on the bus for the hour-long drive from Richmond, VA, to Monticello. I reckon that the serene and rational Jefferson would oppose any national health care legislation whatsoever, but I am absolutely certain that he would defend the sanctity of our democratic process with his life, his fortune, and his sacred honor.

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Let's Cut Off Their True Food Supply: In Other Words, Let's Ignore Them Now

So the white supremacists have come to the soil of North Dakota. Our job is to make sure it is not fertile soil.

Now that the initial flurry of angst is over, and the street confrontation of September 22, 2013, has peacefully come and peacefully gone, the best thing we can do, I believe, is to leave them alone to their first winter in Leith. They are in for a considerable surprise. As you and I know, but they might not yet or not quite, winters are very long and not altogether balmy in rural North Dakota, on the northern Great Plains. After six or seven months of high winds, ground blizzards, below-zero temperatures and rawhide wind chill, plus the cabin fever of living almost entirely indoors in a town that doesn't even have a quick shop or a bar, they may choose to pick up stakes and winter hereafter in Scottsdale or Hemet. Or perhaps they'll tuck away their Nazi flags and hateful rhetoric, form an Optimist Club, and start writing rural redevelopment grants for poor little Leith and Grant County. Maybe we should flood them with hotdishes and fleischkuechle—kill them with kindness as my mother-in-law would say—in the hopes that they clog up their arteries, settle into their recliners, and start purchasing the premium NFL Sunday Ticket Package. Once they start watching Real Housewives of Orange County, our troubles are over.

I do not take their presence in our homeland lightly, but I believe that this unwelcome visitation is a test of our character and the robustness of our rural democracy. We would be equally foolish to under or to overreact.

We need to remain vigilant, because such types occasionally do (rather than say) appalling things, but as long as they are just verbal extremists wearing anti-social body art, the best thing we can do now is completely ignore them. They feed on us, on our outrage, on the righteous attention we give them. The way to hurt them is not to call them names or try to cut off their access to rural water and sewer, but to ignore them and assume that as long as they don't commit illegal acts they are free to mimeograph Aryan newsletters and spy a Jew behind every American success story. I don't blame the media for giving them the attention they have received so far—it is big news, national news, when a group of self-proclaimed extremists invades a wee pastoral village of 15-26 people in one of the most unsensational states in the union. But now that we have noted their presence, expressed our displeasure with their silly but dangerous doctrines, and put them on notice that we are watching their every move, we should turn away in quiet disgust.

I'm with Voltaire (1694-1778) and the Enlightenment: "Madam, I disagree with what you say, but I shall defend to the death your right to say it." But the minute they burn a cross on someone's front yard we'll unleash the full fury of the Civil Rights Division the U.S. Justice Department on them.

I had never been to Leith before last Sunday. I have driven past it many times, but nothing had ever compelled me to turn off the highway and drive three miles over gravel roads to see the hapless little village. Now that I have been there I really like it and, like almost everyone else, I wish the supremacists would take their British Israelist flags, their Jewish conspiracy theories, and their dark hearts elsewhere. I defend their right to exist and to spew, but I don't like it that they have chosen us to be their petri dish, and frankly I wonder why. They did not choose Massachusetts or San Francisco. One of my friends said they made a fundamental strategic mistake. Instead of Leith, they should have located in nearby Heil, population 15. They could have painted over the town sign to Seig Heil. In addition to that, New Leipzig is close at hand, and up at the other end of the state is Walhalla, if they are really planning a Wagnerian Götterdämmerung.

Meanwhile, I'm a little suspicious of some of the calls on the state's radio talk shows, stoutly defending the newcomers' first amendment and property rights. I agree in theory, but I wonder what the talk show chatter would be if instead of white supremacists Leith had been invaded by a cell of Radical Environmentalists, or PETA activists, or Marxist-Leninists, or Anti-Frackers, or Shoshone Indians, or—God forbid—Sharia Muslims. We'd be more likely to hear "lock and load" than "live and let live."

It would be interesting to know how many white supremacists are scattered across the North Dakota landscape. I don't just mean tattooed and swastika white supremacists (extremely rare), but also "maybe after three drinks at the bar with like-minded friends" white supremacists, and "well, I really don't like to talk about it much, but I do sometimes think we white folks have lost control of our own country" white supremacists, and "I'm not prejudice (the d usually omitted), but I'm noticing an awful lot of Ne-groes in the oil patch" white supremacists, and "why am I supposed to feel sympathy for Indians when they spend their time cashing their welfare checks and huffing—why can't they get their @#X#X together?" white supremacists. I don't know how many full-bore white supremacists there are in North Dakota, but the number is more than zero, and if you add in the percentage of people who would never display a Nazi symbol or fly a Confederate flag, but who are not altogether unsympathetic with at least some parts of the doctrine of chief supremacist Craig Cobb and his friends, you begin to feel a little uneasy

Anti-Semitic incidents are rare in North Dakota, but they do occur. Contempt for the lifestyles and values of American Indians is so routine that we hardly notice ourselves. And to be openly anti-Muslim—well, that's just American patriotism since 9-11.

I listened carefully for a while last Sunday as Craig Cobb explained his views to members of the North Dakota media, who let him hold forth without interruption and made no attempt to argue with him. Much of it didn't make sense to me, but I did hear him say that the Civil Rights bills of the 1960s and 1970s were a social disaster that unleashed a black reign of crime terror in our cities; that Jews control the world, particularly Hollywood and banking; that our lax immigration protocols are producing the mongrelization of the American dream; and that the Founding Fathers intended a White Christian Nation and they knew whereof they spoke. Heck, that's just Rush Limbaugh on a bad day, except perhaps for the anti-Semitism.

The best thing about the protest rally in Leith was the presence of about 50 Lakota Indians and their friends. In their marvelous dignity and their prayerful seriousness of purpose, they made us all realize that the presence of these Aryan skinheads among us is a very grave and disheartening thing, a sad day in the long, hard, uneven arc of social justice that is the unfinished history of North Dakota. A setback, but potentially also a breakthrough.

And I fell in love with the Lakota woman who spoke forth at the height of the tension: "Come set up shop on the Rez—see how that works out for you." The lovely assembly of 300 anti-supremacists laughed.

A long healing laugh.

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Recreating Robert Kennedy's Fifty Mile Hike Fifty Years After

A few of my fascinations coalesced last weekend and left me with foot blisters. In a few weeks (November 5-7), the Dakota Institute and Bismarck State College will co-host a public humanities symposium on John F. Kennedy. November 22 marks the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination. To get ready I've been reading as many books as I can about the life and achievement of JFK.

A couple of months ago, I cannot remember quite how, I learned that in the course of his reading President Kennedy discovered a 1908 executive order by Theodore Roosevelt instructing officers of the U.S. Marine Corps to undertake a fifty-mile hike. TR was worried that our military officers were becoming soft and (to use his term) "effeminate," so he challenged them to hike fifty miles within twenty hours in no more than three days. To quell the public outcry (that he was a tyrant and a bully), the somewhat portly Rough Rider proceeded to ride his horse more than 100 miles in a single day. Kennedy was concerned about the fitness of the American people in the wake of several lackluster Olympics and of course Sputnik, so he wrote to his Marine Corps commandant David Shoup urging him to make his officers undertake the Roosevelt hike.

Before that could happen, JFK's younger brother, Robert Fitzgerald Kennedy, the Attorney General of the United States, decided on whim one Friday afternoon to walk fifty miles the following morning, Saturday, February 9, 1963. RFK was 37 years old. Their route would take them along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal from Georgetown to Harper's Ferry. The towpath along the canal was covered in places with ice and slush. Kennedy had done no training for the hike and he made no effort to obtain appropriate footwear. He walked the entire distance in his street shoes, and yet he completed the hike in just seventeen hours and fifty minutes. Life magazine followed him along with chase vehicles and a helicopter. When the last of his three companions gave up the hike at mile 36, RFK said, with his characteristic rueful wit, "You're lucky your brother is not the President of the United States!"

So it is now the fiftieth anniversary of the fifty-mile hike of one of my heroes Robert F. Kennedy. I belong to a little men's group that dines together from time to time and occasionally undertakes a mild adventure. Although the other three are among the busiest professionals I know, and infinitely more powerful and important in their communities, we all agreed, more or less at the last moment, to undertake at least part of the hike on Friday the 13th (hmmm) and Saturday the 14th of September. Our route would take us from Dan's Super Value in south Mandan out to Fort Rice on the Rough Rider Trail. We'd camp overnight there, and then stroll back to Mandan. That's 27.5 miles out, 27.5 miles back, or—to adopt a heartbreaking metaphor--two walking marathons on successive days. We positioned cars at staging points along the way so that we wouldn't have to carry much and we could deliver injured bodies to walk-in clinics or carcasses to next of kin.

We set off at 7:30 a.m. Friday looking like four guys who took advantage of the RFK hike to buy new gear. One of our group—I'll call him Larry—bought his first sleeping bag in thirty years. With his antique walking stick and his green felt hat, he looked like a middle-aged member of a Bavarian hiking club. The others—I'll call them Niles and Vern—had daypacks full of power bars and moleskin, and as always they breathed good will and determination. I was sporting a brand new orange Camelbak, a giant Leatherman tool I stole from a Lewis & Clark companion last month, and a Cloverdale Tangy Summer Sausage, even though my friend and adviser Melanie Carvell (the famous triathlete), has the absurd notion that those who wish to be fit should not be eating anything that delicious and self-indulgent on the trail. We all agreed to despise her advice, though she is the fittest and most physically accomplished person we have ever met, and though we feared that she would swoop down on us at mile nine to confiscate the contraband salami.

Things went pretty well for the first mile.

Here are some scattered comments I picked up on the trail, mostly from the Bavarian. "Fort Rice is a really long way from Mandan, wasn't Fort Lincoln more historically important?" "Guys, the Rough Rider trail was established for ATVs. Isn't that the right way to do it?" "Forget Carvell, hand over that @#@XX# summer sausage." "I just remembered my root canal was scheduled for this morning, I'm sooo sorry, gentlemen." "Ask not what you can do for those rotten Kennedys, ask what you can do for yourself." "Hey you—suggester of this hike--does that Leatherman have a gutting device, by any chance?"

Not without some strain to our hips, calves, feet, and the human spirit, we waltzed into the campground at Fort Rice around six p.m. We had staged our camp car there at dawn, at a perfect campsite, assuming that we would be the only campers that night. But while we earned our way to Fort Rice in a manner to win the respect of Thoreau, a couple of loutish fifth wheelers with North Dakota plates simply appropriated our site, and actually dragged a picnic table to their common area with a chain and a pickup. The Bavarian and I were approximately 26 miles behind Vern and Niles in reaching camp. When they asked the desperadoes why they stole our site, we were told, "you have to get here early if you want to hold your place." We overcame our urge to engage in a rumble with the rapscallions, and humbly set up camp as far from their RV generators and television sets as we could.

On Saturday there was a rain-induced diaspora. Two of our group went back to town straight away. Niles and I hiked the first 8.5 miles, but when we could hear slushy sounds in our shoes in the downpour, we drove home. At this point, we were no longer a group, but just four weary and disappointed individuals. I took a very long bath. But my conscience was eating at me. I was not alone.

Here's the amazing end of the story. Without any mutual consultation three of us actually finished up the hike in our scattered neighborhoods. Vern did a full 22.5, and Niles and I each did 14 to get to fifty, all within President Roosevelt's timeline. The fourth member of our group had a genuine work crisis that prevented him from completing the hike at this time, but he did say two things as we all parted company: first, that he fully intends to walk at least 27.5 miles in the course of the remainder of his life; and that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck was right when he said that he who loves law or tangy summer sausage should never watch the making of either.

Autumn in North Dakota is often the most temperate time of the year. You can still hike fifty miles over two or three days. In doing so you would be serving your health and discipline in a lovely way, and paying respect to the man who may have been the greatest Attorney General in American history.

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Humans Must Love Carbon if They Will Frack the Earth to Get It

Neutral observers from Jupiter would have to conclude that earth humans must really crave carbon, they are willing to go to such lengths to get their hands on it. For the love of oil, they are willing to put up with Saudi Arabia's state sponsorship of anti-western schools (madrasha), and for that matter Saudi princes' sponsorship of anti-American terrorist groups. (I write this on the 12th anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States. Fifteen of the 19 hijackers were Saudi nationals, and yet the United States subsequently invaded Iraq, which had nothing to do with the attacks. Hmmm.)

They are willing to tear the living daylights out of east central Alberta to get at tar sands that can be made—at vast expense—to release a not very clean elixir of oil.

We are willing to fight an endless series of resource wars in the Middle East to insure that the oil comes out of the ground and flows towards America. This is formally known as the Carter Doctrine. In his State of the Union Address on January 23, 1980, following the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter said, "An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force." It would be impossible to make sense of the unending Gulf Wars without factoring in the existence of the world's single richest concentration of oil in the region. In other words, if there were no more oil under Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, and Saudi Arabia than there is under Minnesota, imagine for a moment what our foreign policy might look like.

We are willing literally to slice the top off of the mountains of West Virginia to get at the coal that lies underneath.

And now, of course, we appear to be willing to transform western North Dakota beyond recognition to get at the shale oil and natural gas that lie 10,000 feet or more beneath the surface of the most beautiful (and formerly quiet) landscapes of the state. The technology is breathtaking, nearly miraculous. First a series of stiff pipes penetrate vertically to a depth of almost two miles. To get a sense of how much energy this involves, try digging a 10-foot hole this afternoon with a fence post digger. Then the stiff pipes are made to turn a corner at a full 90 degrees (try that with steel fence posts!), and snake out another mile into the heart of a narrow oil-permeated shale formation. Then a sand-bearing slurry is forced down and out all that pipe to a series of perforations (little trap doors) in the laterals, where, under almost unbelievable amounts of hydraulic pressure, it fractures the shale and then keeps the fractures open by depositing countless little sand or plastic wedges in the cracks.

At that point, with the help of additional hydraulic manipulation, oil finally begins to pool from a gazillion fractures. By employing more energy to turn a pump jack at the surface, that oil can be made to slurpy up along a pipe that may be three miles long. At which point, using more energy, it can be made to travel to a refinery, either through a steel pipeline, or on giant trucks or rail cars. At the refinery, thanks to yet another large expenditure of energy, the crude can be forced to separate into some of its ingenious carbon expressions: diesel, heating oil, kerosene, liquid petroleum gas, and of course gasoline. Which is then trucked, at considerable expense, to your neighborhood gas station. Where, for $3.85 per gallon . . . .

Think we want this stuff?

It costs somewhere between $10 and $20 million to develop a single frack well in North Dakota. At the moment, North Dakota is producing over 825,000 barrels of oil per day, which makes us the nation's second largest producer of crude oil. Current American oil consumption (not counting oil-based byproducts) is 18.83 million barrels per day. In other words, North Dakota is now producing about 4 percent of America's daily consumption of oil. If America depended solely on North Dakota for oil, we could at the moment supply the insatiable maw with oil for just 17 days per year. What is happening in Killdeer, Watford City, Williston, Dickinson, Parshall, Stanley, Crosby, and the badlands, is happening in a lot of other places on our watery little planet.

If the only known copy of the works of Shakespeare were trapped in shale two miles below the surface of the earth, do you think we'd take the trouble to go fetch it? Would we fracture the earth to recover 3-5 percent of the musical output of Beethoven or Mahler? Would we organize two thousand truck events to recover the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo's David?

My point is that we are hopelessly, helplessly, appallingly addicted to carbon. We literally cannot live without it now, and we have to be prepared to do whatever it takes to go get it. If that means an annual US Defense Department budget of $600 billion, we're willing to pay that price. If it means giving the Saudis a pass (not even a slap on the wrist) after 15 Saudi nationals (and the Saudi mastermind Osama bin Laden) perpetrated the gravest attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, we appear to be willing to "let it be" to make sure that Saudi oil continues to flow our way. If it means turning western North Dakota into an industrial park, we have to be willing to marshal the cement trucks and lay the pipe, because the existing pattern of American energy consumption requires no less.

We could, of course, revolutionize the way we live rather than the communities and badlands of North Dakota, but addiction is addiction, and my Honda hybrid and your Birkenstocks are not going to break it. We could, of course, throw the same amount of money at developing serious alternatives to crude carbon as we now use to extract crude carbon, but the virtually infinite pools of oil and gas newly available thanks to the magic of first-world technology are more likely to deepen our addictions than tip us into greener alternatives. Alas.

When I ran out of gas near Glen Ullin 10 days ago, at 10:38 p.m. on a dark and stormy night, while musing about questions of this sort—about the future of the soul of North Dakota—I had barely stopped cursing myself for blithering idiocy when I was able to smirk at my hypocrisies. Before that little drama ended, I had hiked 4.4 miles out and 4.4 miles back to fetch a single gallon of gasoline, for which I paid $3.79 (not counting soft tissue damage and the various psychological repercussions). By 3 a.m. I would have paid $37.90 for that gallon of gasoline and by 5 a.m. $379.00.

To supply our insatiable carbon needs, there have been a lot of Bakkens elsewhere in the world, and we have been able to ignore them because they have not disturbed our lovely back yard. But now the chickens have come home to roost, and we have a moral duty—no matter what we do about the North Dakota oil rush—to gaze honestly in that mirror.

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"Spindle Top, an important oil region near Beaumont, Texas, U.S.A." From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

When We Start to Lock Our Doors, Are We Still North Dakota?

Last Friday I had meetings in Dickinson and Medora. I lingered over dinner with one of my friends at the Rough Riders Hotel, and then turned my Honda towards Bismarck and put it on autopilot. It was a lovely evening. The countryside, somehow, was still green in the last days of August. My mind was pre-occupied with the topic that now never goes away: How does the spirit of North Dakota survive the massive carbon boom that has rolled like a great tidal wave over our land and people? My friend had shown me a map of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, now essentially encircled by industrial activity. With much more to come, and no end in sight for the rest of our lives.

What will western North Dakota look like in 2015, 2025, 2035, 2050? Nobody knows for sure, but it is hard to believe that it will ever again look like the North Dakota I love so much: mostly empty and windswept, long stretches of ribbony blue highway with little or no traffic in either direction, fierce little towns hanging on against the forces that are depopulating the rural districts of America and the world. Grass landscapes rolling endlessly in every direction, punctuated by ridges and box buttes, with not much more human "improvement" than fences, cattle, a few scattered ranches, and farm to market scoria roads. The sense that the Great Plains just go on forever swallowing up human possibility and serving as a platform for the galloping escapades of pronghorn antelope. And of course the sacred river, the Little Missouri, meandering through the best of all that country in no hurry at all, carrying its six inches of silted water through one of the most beautiful and unusual landscapes in the world.

I love that North Dakota.

That North Dakota is now gone, except in diminishing and endangered patches. I know we have no right to cling to that North Dakota, given what it had come to represent: decline, outmigration, loss of a sense of the future, economic marginality. But that doesn't mean I don't miss it and feel that its rapid evaporation is tragic.

As I drove home with a perfect dusk in my rear view window, I mused about these things, and wondered what the right response to these developments is. Most North Dakotans seem unambiguously joyful about the oil boom, which has brought so much prosperity and renewal to the state. The sense of the state—taken as a whole—seems to be something close to "Drill, baby, drill," or as one of my friends in the industry puts it, "The best is yet to come." Most North Dakotans seem only vaguely—lip-service--concerned about the impact of the boom on such places as Killdeer and Watford City, and as for Williston—well, most North Dakotans seem to agree that Williston has never been the aesthetic capital of the state, or wished to be.

I disagree with most of that, but I am just one puny little voice, and I confess that my ambivalence eats up my anxiety every time. I do not wish the oil boom would go away. That seems irresponsible to me, given the sad history of rural decline in North Dakota, particularly western North Dakota. But I do wish three things, pretty strongly. One: that the boom would slow down, and move forward at a more orderly, sustainable, conservative, and community-friendly pace. Two: that we could hammer out a broad North Dakota consensus about some few parcels we'd like to spare—the Little Missouri River Valley, the concentric perimeter of the three units of the national park, the Killdeer Mountains and Bullion Butte, the remaining roadless areas of the Little Missouri National Grasslands, Native American sacred sites, historic battlefields. Three: that we would have a serious, open-minded, and frank statewide conversation about the oil rush and the future of North Dakota.

These do not seem to me to be radical suggestions, but sane and essential suggestions. The fact that such ideas are now routinely branded as "radical" or "anti-development" or "elitist," tells you how far the energy politics of North Dakota have rocketed to the right. We are now in many respects a one-party state (never a good thing, no matter which party), and we are in danger of becoming a company-state, like Montana in the age of Anaconda Copper. I believe we can be grateful for the oil boom without becoming servile, and we can maintain the sturdy independence of the North Dakota character without jeopardizing the enormous benefits of Bakken shale to the state.

Meanwhile, if I were the state legislature, I'd try to give the communities in the impact zone everything they need to survive this thing. It would not be a blank check, of course, but it would be something quite close to a blank check. These communities are in a free fall, and some of North Dakota's best local leaders are working 80 hours a week under almost unbearably stressful circumstances merely to keep their communities from collapse—water and sewer, streets, daycare, crime, drugs, gangs, basic zoning, DUIs, schools, waste facilities, dust mitigation, traffic, not to mention the sex trade and human trafficking. Why would we as outsiders want to doubt Stanley's or Watford City's assessment of what they need to get through this with something like their quality of life intact? If we doubt the perspective of the people who actually live in those towns, who do we think knows better what they need?

A month or so ago I was part of a conversation with several residents of Williston and Watford City, plus some serious oil boom executives. A lifelong resident of Watford City said, "I've lived in Watford all of my life. It has never been easy, but my wife and children and I have made a very good life for ourselves here. In all of that time, even when we have been on vacation, we have never locked our doors, and we have always just left the keys in the car wherever we stopped. This year, for the first time in more than fifty years, we have started to lock our doors." To which one of the executives replied, "Welcome to the modern world, Bob."

Because I was just listening to the conversation, I said nothing, but I wanted to shout: No No No No No No No! That's NOT an adequate response. It's not that we live in North Dakota because we don't have to lock our doors here, but the fact that until a couple of years ago you could live your entire life in North Dakota and not have to lock your doors is one of the very best things about this place. It's not the end of the world when you start locking up and looking over your shoulder in the parking lot, but it is the end of something so valuable in North Dakota life that its loss is (to me) profoundly disturbing. Along with the steady disappearance of pronghorn antelopes, mule deer, meadowlarks, eagles, bighorn sheep, and mountain lions.

At 10:38 p.m., as I pondered these things I ran out of gas for the first time in 43 years, a few miles out of Glen Ullin. Before that "long day's journey into night" ended, I was aware of the urgent necessity of oil in a whole new way.

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"Doorway, 26 Chestnut Street, Salem, Mass." From the New York Public Library.

Seeking Renewal on the Wendover Death March in the Footsteps of Lewis and Clark

FORT BENTON, MT.

I'm sitting out on the patio of the Grand Union Hotel looking at the Missouri River. This is the halfway point of my annual Lewis and Clark canoeing and hiking trip. We have spent the last three days paddling through the magnificent White Cliffs stretch of the Missouri. Tonight we regroup in a historic hotel (which mostly means showers). Tomorrow we head up to Lochsa Lodge on the Lolo Trail just inside Idaho (west of Missoula), and prepare for four days of hiking along the most pristine stretch of the entire Lewis & Clark trail from Charlottesville, VA, to Astoria, OR.

This year I'm joined by 35 adventurers from all over the United States—and one winsome young geologist from Australia. With my tour partner Becky, that makes our little corps of discovery about the same in size as the permanent party of the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804-1805). The main difference is that we cannot establish military discipline. Last night one of the enlisted men engaged in an unauthorized incursion into our limited supply of liquor. After a wonderful midnight thunderstorm that woke and enchanted our urban guests, he went wandering through our camp like King Lear on the heath, tripping over guy lines, chanting patches of patriotic song, and invading tents of perfect strangers in search of his longsuffering wife. This produced a little chaos. We wanted to flog him at dawn, but he looked pretty self- or spouse-flogged, so we merely pardoned him to nurse his hangover. The mesh cowboy hat that he has been wearing all week looked as if it had gone through a tree shredder. I predict a long run of temperance in his future.

These are minor concerns. Each year for five years my canoe partner Becky has attempted to drown me in the Missouri River. She's a natural water nymph with a heart the size of Montana, but she has two exceedingly bad habits. She stands up from time to time in the canoe, and she turns around to take pictures, adjust her life vest, reach for something in her kit bag, ask me a question, or just tempt the river gods. No amount of caution or rebuke can prevent her from taking appalling risks, and every summer I lose not only my new camera—an expensive sacrifice to what Meriwether Lewis called the "mighty and heretofore deemed endless Missouri River"—but books, notes, GPS devices, journals (both my own and the expedition's). I went to my favorite camera store a few days before this trip to buy my fifth annual digital camera. The clerk said, "Ah, it's your annual Montana trip, is it?"

I can now report a miracle. My camera survived the canoe portion of the trip. We'll see how it fares on the Wendover Death March.

I don't know if I can explain why this annual trip means so much to me, but I am going to try. When you are out on the river drifting through some of the most enchanting scenery in America, or placing one foot in front of the other on a serious and strenuous hike directly in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, you get out of yourself. You all know that persona you drag around almost every day of the year, full of fears and frets and frustrations and figments and frauds and foolhardiness. It's almost pure pleasure to check that tinny thing at the embarkation point, and become a more basic and authentic self for a few days. The camping trip tasks are very basic: paddle, hike, perform rudimentary acts of hygiene in rudimentary structures, sleep, eat, warm your hands in the fire in the chill of the evening, and get up in the middle of the night to pee in the dewy grass just outside your tent, and then linger in your shorts in the night chill to watch for a shooting star. The idea is to let the past slip away, put the future on hold at the other end of the journey, and just try to BE for a change. Feel the tinge of sunburn on your face and legs, the affirming strain in muscles you don't much use in what Huck Finn calls "sivilization," and let the long stretches of pure silence redeem your life.

There is also the "same time next year" phenomenon.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus famously said "you can never enter the same river twice." That is true of the Missouri. This year it was down by three or four feet from last year. Last year's gravel-bottomed swimming hole was a mud bog this year. The air was easily ten degrees cooler this summer, and the afternoon swimming was therefore less imperative. Etc. But I also know I bring a different me to the river every year. My left shoulder was not a factor this time. I was more serious, less playful in the evening talks. I know why, though I'm not willing to explain it. People from all over the country insisted on my talking about the Bakken oil boom, even though I came out here in part to escape the oppressive never-endingness of that subject in my life. I threw myself into this year's adventure with none of my usual detachment—in part because there is so much I wish to escape from this year, and I am counting on the journey to provide spiritual renewal.

When we undertake the Wendover Death March Friday morning (nine miles more or less straight up) I will be listening to my body take that severe strain. Every summer I wonder when the year will finally come when I cannot make the hike—or, worse, choose not to make the hike. In a strange sort of way, this summer journey is my way of testing who I am, who I still am, and who I might be able to become, because the one constant is that a full year has passed since the last seemingly-identical journey.

The jury is still out about this year's Death March, which is led by my glorious young friend Chad, now just under 40, who prances and gambols and jibes his way up Wendover Ridge as if he were jogging to the corner post office, while the rest of us bend over and cough up a lung every ten minutes and curse the day Chad was born. The trip would not be worth making without Chad—who knows everything about the Bitterroot Mountains except the trees, which is a bit ironic if you think about it—and it certainly would not be worth making without Becky. They are the north stars of my summer.

Mostly I thank God I live in virtually the only country on earth where this is possible—where the population density is light in the heartland, where there is still plenty of public domain to play and wander in, where the qualities of wilderness and frontier still have some potency in our national soul, and where the words "the West" touch off a long reverie of romance, awe, redemption, mystery, and renewal.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately," said Thoreau. That indeed is my quest.

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The Etiquette of Texting in the Age of Electronic Loneliness

Yesterday I was being driven in a taxi from one part of Seattle to another. The taxi driver was a Muslim man who spent the entire twenty-six minutes talking in frenetic Arabic to someone on his cell phone. I don't know if they were making dinner plans or plotting revenge. All I know is that they were talking with great animation, and I didn't understand a single word my driver said. He was driving so fast that I was a little uneasy. Nor did it make my ride very pleasant to have to listen to what seemed like high-energy chatter, but I'm sure being able to multi-task in this way makes his work life less tedious and perhaps more productive. We drove through the fashionable Capitol Hill district of Seattle. On our right we passed a young man on a bicycle riding no hands and texting as he glided through traffic. That was the most creative (and dangerous) instance of texting I have seen so far. I suppose the ultimate would be to text while riding a bull in a rodeo. People must really want to text to take such risks.

What did we do before we could text Homo sapiens have been around for 250,000 years, and somehow we got by without texting until ten years ago. Now, approximately six billion texts are sent per day in the United States alone. Young Americans (18-29) send or receive on average 88 texts per day. The other night I sat at a long bar in a Seattle hotel and all eleven people sitting there were texting alone, concentrating even more on their cell phones than on their drinks. Not a single conversation of any sort was occurring between those eleven bodies. The bartender was texting, too. I was not texting, but I was reading a book on my iPad.

The Internet gave us the capacity to send emails at some point between 1995 and the millennium. The electronic letter phased out the paper-and-postage-stamp letter with breathtaking ruthlessness. I still send traditional letters to my daughter, and occasionally to others. She regards such letters as quaint relics of a forgotten age. She senses that a letter in the mailbox is somehow more significant than an email, but I can tell that she thinks it is a bit silly to deploy the resources of the US Postal System for six or seven days to deliver to her essentially the same words that I could have sent her instantaneously from anywhere on earth. The postal service is a reasonably efficient document delivery system now being displaced by a stunningly more efficient delivery system. I imagine when she receives a letter from me, it feels to her like that birthday card you used to get from your grandmother with a $5 check in it. You shake your head a little, even though you do appreciate the gesture.

I spend a lot of time in airports. Computers, cell phones, and texting have taken a lot of the tedium out of waiting for the next flight. It certainly beats that earlier phase of electronic culture when people carried little game devices around and played them in seat 23b with all their bells and dings and whistles blaring, as if they had a full grown pinball machine in front of them. What bothers me most now are the people who stop dead in their tracks in airport walking lanes, without warning, and when you lurch and scramble to avoid running them down, you discover they merely stopped to tap out a text. Hey Brad, 'sup This happens to me every time I fly now.

Texting is so addictive that once you are in there is no turning back. My mother is a great case in point. Sometime around 1998 I forced her to buy her first home computer. She resisted that rite of passage as if I were trying to put her in a rural nursing home. I'm too old, what would I do with it, I'd never be able to figure it out, I've lived my whole life without a computer, why would I need one now But of course the minute she had her first massive Gateway computer she recognized it as an essential tool of life. We went through the same nonsense about her first cell phone, her first laptop, and her first Nook. She relented in the end in the Battle of the Cell Phone by admitting that it might possibly save her life if she ran off the road in a blizzard. And for several years she used it only when she traveled. More recently we had a daylong argument about getting her a cell phone on which she could write texts. My fingers would be too clumsy on such a small keyboard, why cannot I just pick up the phone and call if I have something to say, I'm eighty years old for the gosh sakes, etc. This summer my amazingly persuasive daughter convinced my mother to buy her first iPhone, even though she had sworn earlier in the week that nothing could ever convince her to abandon a true keyboard for a touch pad. Now she nonchalantly exchanges texts with her granddaughter and with her significant other in Minneapolis, and a few days ago she somehow managed to send me a photograph from Cody, Wyoming. She has a fancy stylus for her phone. I'll look over at her and ask what she's doing Oh, just texting Russ (the S.O.) to see if he thinks Tiger or Phil will win the tournament. Oh my. As Hamlet put it, Is man no more than this?

One of the positive benefits of texting is that it makes us get to the point. It's the modern telegraph system. Nobody likes to tap out a 500-word note. I think it also invites us to be witty. A perfect text is worth a thousand words. It is certainly easier to text in one's regrets for not coming to a dinner party than making that call, which might end in the host persuading you to come, after all, or might leave you feeling like a lout. You can text what you dare not or would rather not say, and you can text at any time of day or night without necessarily disturbing the recipient.

Texting allows us to reach out to someone in a small way, without the duration and heavier implications of a phone conversation. Hey, thinking about you. Just wanted to make sure you are ok Don't forget to make the car payment. Have I said I love you yet today Texting is ideal for some types of communication. Think of how long that car payment phone call might have lasted and what Pandora's boxes it might have opened. The telegraph works better.

I have even heard of instances of people breaking up with their lovers by text—the rare Dear John text. Hard to believe anyone could ever be so barbarous and insensitive, but such things are a fair indicator of where we are and where we are headed as a culture.

C U next wk.

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The Healing Power of Laughter: Oh Larry and Mo Where Art Thou?

One of my favorite people has been in town, and it couldn't have come at a better time. His name is David Nicandri. He's one of the best Lewis and Clark scholars in the country. His book, River of Promise Lewis & Clark on the Columbia (published by our own Dakota Institute Press) has won rave reviews. One eminent historian has called it the best book on Lewis and Clark in a generation.

All that is great, but it is not why I cherish David Nicandri so much. There's an even better reason He has one of the greatest laughs of anyone I have ever known. When he finds something funny—and he does so several times per conversation—he throws his head back and releases an unguarded, unmistakable open-mouthed laugh. His laugh is always lusty and it is often wonderfully noisy. His laughter is no mere hee hee, or a muted uh, huh, huh, ha, huh. He's all in, as they say. If you were from Jupiter and hadn't figured out the human necessity for laughter, you might think he had just been stabbed with a spear. He laughs because he cannot help it. And then I laugh because I cannot help it. In a world of insincerity and disingenuous people (they are legion), I love the visceral authenticity of laughter.

Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of 18th century London, and the author of the first great dictionary of the English language (1755) defined laughter as convulsive merriment. That's absolutely perfect. I'm not much of a laugher myself, but when I am in front of an audience and I manage to make people laugh—laugh until they double over, and turn and smile at each other—I am for that moment the happiest man alive.

Just why people laugh is something of a mystery. We know that apes laugh, by way of a form of gruff panting, and other animals, including non-primates, produce odd vocalizations during play. First laughter in human infants tends to occur between 3.5 and 4 months after birth, long before our children learn to speak. Most experts believe that laughter has more to do with social bonding than with humor per se. People seldom laugh alone. When I do, I'm always a little embarrassed. We know that laughter is highly contagious.

That's one reason I am so fond of David Nicandri. His laughter over the past few days has had two enormously healing effects on me. First, we tend to find the same things funny, often rather abstract things that only occur in the minds of people who have spent too much time reading about the same episodes in history. His laughter affirms my understanding of the quirks, tensions, and absurdities of the Lewis and Clark expedition. Second, his laughter is so wonderful that I find myself joining in (spontaneously) because I want to get on that bandwagon of joy and affirmation. In other words, his unforced, unconscious laughter triggers mine, because he is my dear friend, because I believe in his life and work, because (below the radar of consciousness) he gives me permission to laugh out loud, hard. And when we laugh out loud, hard, we cheer up. Perhaps we even heal.

My mentor Ev Albers used to laugh more than any serious person I have ever known. His laugh was a kind of heroic chuckle, but what made it so infectious is that it would last so long that eventually tears would be streaming down his cheeks, and he'd have to take his glasses off twice or thrice to dry them off. And he had the very unusual habit of not just inviting you to laugh with him but essentially forcing you to join in. He'd literally bring his massive face within a couple of inches of yours—invading your personal space, looking you straight in the eye from extremely close range—and in the end you'd be unable to resist joining in, if only for self-protection. Ev would close his laugh episode by saying, Oh my! in a sad emphatic sighing way, as if to say, Life is so unbearably painful in so many ways, that the only response to it that is not destructive, is to laugh.

We've all heard the following dialogue. I'm surprised you could laugh at such an awful thing that happened to you. And the response Well, it's either laugh or cry. I know plenty of people who have laughed until they cried or cried until finally they actually began to laugh. These convulsions are related somehow, and it is not always easy to tell the difference. They are both involuntary. They both bring about a release of pent up energy and emotion. They both have the capacity to bring catharsis and relief. How many times have you heard someone say, Afterwards I went home and had a good cry

Both Albers and Nicandri are men who know how to laugh at themselves. In fact, particularly to laugh at themselves. This may be the single most important source of sanity we have. And it makes them immensely likeable.

Back when I was married, I sometimes laughed in moments of crisis or alarm—the death of a relative in an improbable feedlot accident, a child's tumble down a flight of stairs, a sudden divorce filing after 48 years of seemingly happy marriage. She thought my laughter was inappropriate, even obscene, at such a moment. Perhaps it was. But it was something more, I think—an involuntary convulsion in watching the universe pull the rug out from under our complacent sense that we are immortal and that life is what it seems on any given Tuesday.

When they say laughter is the best medicine, the experts really mean it. The late Norman Cousins actually wrote a book about the power of laughter in the healing process. When he faced a seemingly terminal illness, he literally taught himself to laugh many times per day. I made the joyous discovery that ten minutes of genuine belly laughter had an anesthetic effect and would give me at least two hours of pain-free sleep, he later wrote. He watched episodes of The Three Stooges. When the pain-killing effect of the laughter wore off, we would switch on the motion picture projector again and not infrequently, it would lead to another pain-free interval.

No matter how unhappy I am, if I watch The Three Stooges or any of the Leslie Nielson Naked Gun movies, I cheer up. In his darkest or weariest hours, I would walk in on Ev Albers and find him wiping his eyes along that laughter-crying axis as he watched Mo poke Curly's eyes with a pitchfork.

One of Freud's most brilliant books is called Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious (1905). It's a really insightful study of what makes us laugh, and why. His view, essentially, was that humor occurs when the conscious mind permits the expression of something that society usually suppresses or forbids—aggression, sexual candor, or disruptive candor of any sort. Thus the old Henny Youngman joke, Take my wife-please, plays on the ambiguity of citing one's wife as an example (as in take the budget surplus, for example) and expressing a barely suppressed desire to get rid of her (take her off my hands). It's not a particularly funny joke, but its structure gets at the essence of what a joke does.

Mark Twain famously said, Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. We are going to need a lot more laughter if we are going to punch through the paralysis of our time.

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Here Comes August: Time to Turn Things Up a Notch

So we've reached carpe diem time in a North Dakota summer. Seize the day. Before you know it, you'll begin to be bombarded by back to school advertising. I hate the moment in mid-summer when you walk into one of the box stores and bump up against massive back to school displays. It actually bothers me more than seeing Christmas decorations on the shelves before Thanksgiving, or that odd moment, the day after Valentine's Day, when all the Valentine's cards are brusquely pulled from the shelves at the grocery store and unsentimentally replaced by Easter Cards. That always seems so heartless to me, opportunistic in the worst sense.

There is only a narrow window left when the summer of 2013 will feel carefree and unending. How can it be almost August 1 The minute you sense autumn lurking out beyond the northern horizon, the rest of your summer activities will feel a little like a forced march. The joy then may be more intense (because we know all too well what's coming), but the essence of summer is that early July feeling that you are off the clock, that time is expansive or perhaps endless, that you are almost as carefree as you were growing up in a North Dakota town, when you burst out the banging screen door right after breakfast and came back in at the other end of the day, then only when your mother's voice got threatening. Bikes, bats, dirtballs, sprinklers, swings, forts, rafts, popsicles, the dank smell of the swimming pool locker room where you took the shortest rinse that could be regarded as compliance with pool rules.

The minute I hear the words NFL pre-season opener on television, I experience a wave of pure melancholy and loss. Too soon, too soon.

As far as I am concerned it has been a spectacular North Dakota summer. I have spent at least 20 evenings out on my deck with a breeze and a series of good books, reading a few pages, then sipping a glass of white wine, then drinking in the western sky and keeping on the lookout for Venus just above the horizon. And reading some more. In the past few weeks there have been just enough mosquitos to drive me inside at dusk, not enough to induce me to buy a Citronella candle.

In countless houses around North Dakota the following conversations are taking place today. If we're going to get out to the Medora Musical this summer, we'd better do it soon. If we're still going camping this summer, we'd better pick a weekend. If we're going to invite the Ricardos for a pontoon ride on the river, we'd better call them right away. If we are serious about driving out to the old farm to pick buffalo berries, we'd better figure out when.

I did get to do a picnic on a butte. My friend Joey was in town from Texas. He's a scion of the King Ranch family. With a group of anarchic merry makers from Beach, we made the ascent of Camels Hump Butte (3,273 feet). We established a base camp in a lovely grass bowl on the northeast side, and spread out a perfect evening picnic on erratic lichen-topped sandstones. Over dinner, the rancher who owns the thing (wouldn't you love to be able to say you owned one of North Dakota's principal buttes) serenaded us with his ukulele. But he redeemed himself with his grass-fed beef carpaccio, the best I have ever tasted. Thus refreshed (at least physically), we scrambled up to the summit, and sat in glorious silence to take in the improbable majesty of the broken country of the Great Plains.

It won't be a complete summer until I have spent an afternoon lying on a gravel bar in the Little Missouri River, with a bottle of water, a wedge of Cloverdale tangy summer sausage and a Triscuit, a cube of quality unsweetened chocolate, and a good book, preferably Walden. You read. You doze. You gaze around listlessly at the starkness of the badlands. You read a bit more and meditate on Thoreau's magical perceptions of the killer contradictions of American life. You doze. The parts of your body in the river are almost cold. The parts in the sun are almost toasted. Lonely hot badlands breezes waft over your bare shoulders to remind you of the strangeness and emptiness of the place. You make a Triscuit-summer sausage sandwich with a Swiss army knife reserved for these occasions. You lie down completely on the polished scoria and sandstone gravel, with some chips of smooth lignite mixed in, feet pointing downriver towards the Gulf of Mexico, arms outstretched first in the Da Vinci position and then close to your side, your head pointing directly upstream, parting the current of the river.

Paradise.

The sun slips behind one of the few clouds in the sky and the world goes gray and you involuntarily release a cool shiver. You pull yourself up on your elbows to inspect—a passing cloud A thunderstorm Is it evening already Does this day ever have to end

These moments are literally the happiest of my life, although in every superlative I ever utter there is a trump card, now 18 years old and beginning to think about heading back to college. She and I walked across the Little Missouri River a few weeks ago just outside of Medora. This river—alone among all the rivers of the world—has marked her short life. She was baptized in the Little Missouri when she was just a few months old, her father gripping the diaper, her mother having a nervous breakdown. I have carried her over to the other bank and back again on my shoulders a dozen times over the years. This was the first time she walked across on her own feet. We held hands hard, partly because that improves everybody's balance, partly because it was one of those perfect dad-daughter moments, and partly because she does not yet know how to read the river sufficiently to anticipate the moment when the firm bottom gives way to the gloppy shore mud that can suck you in to the knees, or worse, before you know what's happened.

As a frequent flyer I know I miss some lovely opportunities, but so far I have not had the joy of a massive and punishing thunderstorm this summer. I was, however, awakened last Saturday by one of the best experiences of ND life, a dawn thunderstorm followed by a sweet sustained rain shower. There is nothing quite like awakening at 4 a.m. to a crack of thunder, and then engaging in that foggy dawn internal debate about whether to hide under the covers and try to sleep through it, or get up and experience its full satisfaction.

Nor have I taken a thousand mile drive (coming); or canoed the White Cliffs of the Missouri (coming); or heard the croon of a coyote from inside a sleeping bag (coming); or counted meteorites on my back; or gotten lost on a two trail track in the badlands until the dust choked my nostrils and I looked nervously at the gas gauge. Life would be so much less without that.

With the arrival of August, I can hear the clock ticking, and as the evening begins to cool, I have found myself muttering lines from Shakespeare's Richard II I wasted time and now doth time waste me.

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Of Tawny Grass and the Medora Musical and a Perfect Summer Night

The solstice has come and gone. That always trips a little anxiety deep below the surface of my summer joy. We have reached peak light and now we are heading back into the darkness at the rate of three minutes per day. I spent that evening outside. It would be a crime against the light to be inside on 21 June. I don't know what your top five things about North Dakota are, but for me the lingering summer dusk is one of them. Sunset plus two hours of speechless serenity. Yellow followed by gold followed by pink followed by Bloody Mary red followed by charcoal and gray. Each color phase longer and subtler than the last. The pink sometimes wraps itself all the way around the horizon. Now station a thundercloud way, way off on the far western horizon intermittently pulsing with firefly light and you have paradise on earth.

When you sit out on a night like that, it is like a moment out of the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam by the English poet Edward FitzGerald (1809-1883):

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread-and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness-
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
To which I reply, Oh let the summer linger and the light.

On the Fourth of July I went to Medora with my daughter and my mother. My daughter is home in western Kansas for the summer. She is involved in 4-H for the last time as a competitor and she already feels the loss. Ask what is the most Jeffersonian thing in America and you will get a range of answers--from the exquisite Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress to the perfect cubic dining room at his retreat home Poplar Forest in Bedford County, VA. As far as I'm concerned, 4-H may be the epitome of Jefferson's vision of life rural kids learning principles of stewardship, humane care of livestock, household economics, craft, nutrition, rural teamwork, and responsible record-keeping, at the hands of enlightened community volunteers.

We sat through the Medora Fourth of July parade in mid-afternoon smirking, had supper in the hotel, and then went to the Medora Musical with Sheila Schafer, now enjoying her 49th consecutive summer in the badlands. Her health issues keep creeping up towards the tipping point, and she just keeps swatting them away with her perpetual youthfulness and lust for life. Her refrain seems to be, I'll let you know when I'm ready! I just want my daughter to be in the presence of such a woman, the most life-affirming person I have ever met. So there I was in the Burning Hills Amphitheater on a fabulous early July evening, with my three favorite women in the world my 18-year-old daughter, my 81-year-old mother, and the ageless Queen.

There were about 1,800 people in the crowd. The singing and the dancing are especially splendid this year. The prestidigitator Bill Sorensen (co-hosting) tells jokes so lame that we guffawed in spite of ourselves. My daughter laughed until she had tears in her eyes. And the principal co-host Emily Walter has such beauty, talent, and stage presence that in my opinion she deserves a much fuller portfolio, in Medora and beyond. Off in the distance Bullion Butte, and the sinuous thread of the sacred Little Missouri River.

The show was moving towards its close. The Burning Hills Singers had danced themselves out. The two North Dakota songs—Come Home to North Dakota, and Always North Dakota-- choked me up, as always, and sent a surge of raw North Dakota pride right into my heart. The finale this year is a beautifully understated patriotic medley. As it began, the most wonderful thing happened. Spontaneously, without cue cards or a barker or an MC, the large crowd just stood up to honor America, born 237 years ago in the pen of our most gifted dreamer Thomas Jefferson. It was everything you could want on the Fourth of July—just retro enough to clear out all the noise of modern life and make you believe again.

Afterwards, Sheila handed out hundreds of ice cream bars out behind her cabin tucked under the bluff at the edge of town, while one of the best fireworks displays I have ever seen cascaded down just over our outstretched heads. God Bless America.

On the way home the next day, near Almont, I noticed that the prairie grasses have begun to turn. After a late wet spring, the northern plains are beginning to take on their proper tan and russet look. The moment when the grass turns, mostly green and partly tawny, mostly tawny but still partly green, is my favorite moment of the summer in North Dakota. It's the paling and the graying of the green. That's when I think Ah, I live on the Great Plains of America.

This last Tuesday night I found myself at home alone with no pressing deadline. There had been a quick soaking thunderstorm about four p.m. so I could not work in my much-neglected garden without becoming a human mud ball. I made myself a little dinner of little leftovers and ate it in silence as I read the famous steeplechase scene in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. All my electronics were in the off position, as they say on commercial aircraft. The house was perfectly quiet. I took my book and a glass of cold white wine out onto the deck.

The temperature was perfect, precisely what I would have dialed up if I had a hotline to the great god of meteorology. It was not hot. It was warm and, depending on how the breeze stirred, sometimes a little cool and sometimes a little toasty, but toasty in just the right way. No wind, just a gentle breeze that came and went without any drama, like the steady even breathing of the continent. If it had been ten degrees hotter or the breeze three miles per hour stronger, it would have been just one of those North Dakota summer evenings with a summer wind. That would be just fine, but I would not have lingered outside. But this was an evening so perfect in every way that it made me forget that there is winter on the northern plains. About an hour into my reverie, I remember thinking, If I died at dusk tonight (rather than go in to fetch a jacket), I'd be wholly content. The Oglala warrior Crazy Horse used to ride off to battle saying, Le anpetu kin mat'e kin waste ktelo, it is a good day to die. That's how I felt Tuesday night, though I am quite happy to be alive and (reverie or no reverie) there are, fortunately, dozens of projects that must be completed before I let myself croak. Still, that feeling that this is what human happiness is, there is nothing that is missing, was exquisite. I miss my daughter sorely, but if she had been with me we'd be chattering and laughing, not drinking in the gentle breeze in a silence so powerful that you hear it, if that makes any sense.

I just lay there just taking in the evening like a human zucchini, letting thoughts drift in and out of my mind the way you see those motes in your eye drift around slowly and disappear. Somewhere in the distance a mother called out lovingly for her children to come in now for the night.

Happiness at its core is such a simple thing.

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Old Ruts and New Beginnings at the 40th High School Reunion

Last weekend my high school class gathered for our 40th class reunion. Bleck. The class of 1973 at Dickinson High School once numbered just under 200. According to the count of our informal class historian, ten of us have died so far. (The clock has started to matter). But only about 45 of us turned up for the reunion. The usual suspects. Where the other 150 graduates were I have no idea. Perhaps they thought it would be impossible to find rooms in the new Dickinson of the Bakken era.

We followed the time worn pattern. Reception Friday night with homemade hors d'oeuvres, made by the same cluster of women who have done all the work at every function since we were in first grade. The Rough Riders Roundup parade on Saturday morning. And then a banquet in the appropriately named Sodbusters Room at the Elks Club on Saturday night. Plenty of drinking. Lots of catch-up talk. Really You joined the Peace Corps Why didn't I know that How did you like Upper Volta So this is your fourth wife Well, she's really very lovely. So prison's not so bad, huh Or my favorite You've lived in Dickinson all this time I've never run into you in 40 years!

The most amazing thing about a high school class reunion is that everything is different and yet everything is also frozen in time. Some of the kids from the wrong side of the tracks have prospered in amazing ways, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps, and done remarkable and important things in the world. It's thrilling to hear their stories. It makes you believe in the American dream again. And yet the moment they enter that room, they walk through a portal back in time to 1972, when George McGovern made his quixotic run for the presidency against Richard Milhous Nixon, and the Watergate break-in touched off one of the most fascinating political crises in American history. Suddenly we are all thrust back into a small town class system that is surprisingly tenacious (and vicious). Social cliques that have been unfed for forty full years suddenly reassert themselves, and everyone is immediately made aware that the popular elite continue to regard themselves as a breed apart and above. For the most part everyone accepts their allotted place on the great chain of being. We're like dairy cattle suddenly let into the barn we all waddle right back to our old assigned stanchions.

Ancient grudges catch fire like an ember long buried in a heap of ash that suddenly gets a whiff of oxygen. Ancient unrequited romantic longings play themselves out as if someone pushed the eight-track tape back into the slot right where it left off at that famous spin the bottle party in 1969. People stand around gossiping about who has a crush on whom, and who won't accept that Brent doesn't fancy her and never will. The incident at the state basketball tournament is hotly debated as if it occurred a week ago Thursday rather than 42 long years ago, at the other end of our lives. It's as if we are all helpless to emancipate ourselves from our primal roles. Actually, I think we secretly like the old stew of adolescent angst.

We could not have been more pathetic in the big Saturday morning parade. Almost everyone turned up late, as if to a float-decorating session on the weekend before homecoming. Some of us had to be hoisted up onto the flatbed with a crane. Most folks brought deck chairs, and the usual women brought extra chairs for the ones who forgot to bring them, just as they forgot to bring a pencil to math, or a note from their parents before the bus trip to Williston. We were Float 139 or something, so far back that the lead vehicles virtually lapped us before we moved at all. If there had been a lamest entry in the parade we would have won hands down. The parade, in fact, was essentially an elongated trade fair for the Bakken Oil Boom featuring gigantic rigs of mysterious purpose that lumbered through the streets of west Dickinson like a stray herd of Triceratops. We (of '73) just sat there on those deck chairs, all spread out to appear to be numerous. It felt more like the outdoor deck of a nursing home after supper than a class of young men and women that once looked upon the world as their oyster. Nobody cheered us. I studied the crowds along the street. They were looking at us with the same disbelief we once reserved for the Class of 1947 To this fate I will never come. I will never be that old. And this is just the 40th. Ten years from now we'll need an array of oxygen valves.

We all gathered more or less on time for the big banquet at the Elks. It was just like old times my date stood me up, even though she had invited me to the event more than a year ago. I gave the after dinner talk, because RB, our class president, didn't show up again. He has been specially invited to each of our four reunions. On several of those occasions he has agreed to come—and speak—and each time he has failed to turn up. At which point the organizers have tended to turn (in dismay) to me, the junior runner up.

I told two stories, one about adolescent love and one about mature love. The first story was about a girl named Linda Kokko with whom I was helplessly in love in eighth grade. It took me eleven movies at the one-screen downtown movie theater to work up the courage to hold her hand (about the time the credits began to roll), and then—on a perfect winter night at the skating rink over by the college—I somehow stumbled over the threshold and had my first kiss. She moved to Billings shortly thereafter (so far as I know, unrelated). As a farewell gift I bought her a birthstone ring at Britton Jewelers for $2.45. When my father—a decidedly hands off father—found out about it he came in my room one evening and closed the door. (Trouble ahead!). He asked me to confirm the story that Miss Kokko was leaving the territory and that I had spent all of my available capital on a birthstone ring. Through crimson blushing I confirmed the word on the street. At which point he gave me virtually the only advice he ever offered: 'Son, never buy oats for a dead horse.'

Well, I have been buying oats for dead horses all of my life, no letup in sight.

But then I told the story of my mother, now 81, who attended her 50th college reunion in Moorhead ten years ago. My father had been dead for eight years at that point and mother had sworn off any possibility of second romance. She ran into a boy she had dated a couple of times in college. Back then—the cad--he had sent her a Dear John letter, which—in her sweet Germanic way--she still has, and has thrown in his face from time to time. They rekindled their romance at their 50th class reunion. They are still an item, very much in love, and mother is, I believe, happier than she has ever been.

I've adjusted to this amazing occurrence with my usual evenness of temper. My shrink says I should stop wetting the bed sometime late next year.

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The Bakken Oil Boom from the Back of an Open Airplane

Last week I wrote about a whimsical airplane journey I took a couple of weeks ago with a North Dakotan who is a key player in the Bakken Oil Boom. We flew in a small funky yellow two-seat plane from Bismarck to Bullion Butte, then down the Little Missouri River to Watford City, and then overland back to Bismarck by way of Zap and Golden Valley. It was a nine-hour adventure with someone of infinite good humor, who boomed and busted in the oil boom the last time around, in the 1980s, then stuck it out through all the lean years when all the summer soldiers and sunshine patriots sought their windfalls elsewhere. I have the deepest respect for what he represents—a homegrown North Dakotan with persistence and superb instincts that have now finally paid off in a big, big way.

Last week I wrote about our adventure. Today I want to try to make sense of what I saw as we flew over the green grassy plains of North Dakota in a wet June.

In every crisis of life, no matter how big or small, it is essential to try to step back and view things from a broader perspective. It really is true that we cannot see the forest for the trees. That's a cliché, but if you try to look at a big phenomenon from too close to the ground (or ground zero), you see only what is immediately before you, not the larger pattern of things. If, for example, you are a Wall Street Journal reporter or someone from the BBC, and you fly out from New York or London to Denver and then on a tiny plane to Williston, ND, to make sense of the oil boom, you are going to see a city bursting with energy, enterprise, dust, chaos, congestion, noise, construction, and growing pains that make it not a very attractive destination. But Williston is not the oil boom and the oil boom is not Williston. Williston is one of the choke points of the oil boom.

The oil boom is many things that cannot be seen from the air. Full employment. The promise of energy independence for America. A whopping state budget surplus and what is tending towards full funding for a wide range of institutions and enterprises that have been living on thin gruel for most of North Dakota history. Jobs aplenty. New life in small towns. One of my closest friends is a faux-curmudgeonly former newspaper editor from Crosby. We had a long conversation in the heart of the badlands a few weeks ago and he said this. I have lived in Crosby, ND, all of my life. What you have to understand is that for almost all of my life we have been managing decline and depopulation, economic marginality, and loss. Do you know what that is like for a town to go through We have had hundreds of meetings over the years about how to find a way to save and regenerate our little hometown. Nothing really worked. Suddenly, thanks to the Bakken, we are viable again, and growing. There are shops on mainstreet and every house in town is full of families or workers. Heck, we even have a housing boom in Crosby. We wish the growth were a little less and a little slower, a little more organic, of course, but do you think we can really wish this hadn't happened

Towns like Williston, Watford City, Killdeer are just scrambling to survive this tsunami, and keep life livable for both long-term residents and newcomers. They are currently fracked communities as well as fracking communities. But other towns as far away as Bottineau, Harvey, Bowman, Spearfish, Kenmare, (etc.) are experiencing indirect regeneration from the Bakken phenomenon. They may be the biggest winners. A moderate amount of new life and economic activity makes all the difference in a rural community like that. Faraway Grand Forks is reaping benefits thanks to extremely intelligent strategic planning, and Bismarck is a becoming a new place. Just walk around downtown for a couple of hours and remember what that experience was like even as few as six years ago. Last week I told a visiting capitalist from Chicago that Bismarck is going to be the Tulsa of the Bakken Oil Boom. He laughed hard and said dream higher. Which means that he doesn't understand the history of the Great Plains at all.

Here's what you see if you spend ample time flying over the western half of North Dakota merely trying to drink in what you can observe from a couple of thousand feet. First, there is an awful lot of North Dakota. Even now, in the midst of this industrial juggernaut that is plunking down oil wells at the rate of approximately 2000 per year, there are, as a famous writer put it, more places where nothing is than something is. North Dakota (and the larger Great Plains of which it is a small rectangle) is still a vast and open landscape that is, after 150 years of white settlement and economic activity, largely empty in every direction.

Second, the development is only initially gross and transgressive. But once the pump jacks are installed and the pipelines are buried and the water and fracking trucks move on, the landscape gets pretty calm again. From the air it is not ugly. To my mind the boom does violate one of the things I most love about western North Dakota—its essential primordialness—but from a couple of thousand feet the footprint is not nearly as overpowering as it seems from the junction of US 85 and US 2. Or from a bench in the city park in Alexander, the home of one of my heroes Arthur A. Link, the man who reminded us that there are values in the North Dakota character greater than money-making. The choke points are really choked.

Third, the badlands are indeed punctuated in every direction with oil activity. I find that disheartening, as does my oil-soaked pilot-friend, but the badlands are still the badlands and they are astonishingly beautiful and largely untouched, even with a buff-colored tank array here and a drilling rig there. If we adopt some special protocols and restraints for badlands development, especially on federal and state lands, we can probably make the oil boom respect this sacred corridor carved by wind and the Little Missouri River, and at least minimize (ok, moderate) the impact somewhat. I do worry what will happen when all those 10-year development leases start to come due, but there is still time to save a few of the finest parcels. In fact, there is still time to create the modest Prairie Legacy Wilderness of about 65,000 acres, to set aside a wee little sliver of the few remaining pristine acreages. We should save these parcels for seed.

No matter what happens, there is still going to be a vast amount of North Dakota that wears, and will always wear, an exceedingly light industrial footprint. We are going to have to discover parts and places of North Dakota outside of the prime recreation zone. We are going to have to take our spirit recreations in landscapes we have hitherto largely ignored. We are going to have to come to terms with loss.

And we the people are going to have to fight to chasten this thing in some important ways. Because our leadership is so far not doing much chastening.

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