Time to Stop Exporting Our Native Talent

My mother and daughter and I were sitting at the Medora Musical on the Fourth of July—soaking in the joy of a perfect evening in a perfect place. This year's Musical looks back over 50 years of song and dance on the stage of the Burning Hills Amphitheater. At one point the lovely and talented host Emily Walter mentions a few Musical performers who went on to national careers: David Soul (Starsky and Hutch), Job Christianson (Broadway), Tom Netherton (The Lawrence Welk Show), and most recently Kat Perkins (The Voice).

It's an impressive but only a partial list. Harold Schafer's summer open-air show has been the nursery for some major national talent. More importantly, it has served as a platform on which scores of talented young people have had the chance to live out their dreams of performing live before large audiences in one of the most beautiful places in North Dakota.

When Theodore Roosevelt spoke of "the glory of work and the joy of living," he helped to create the mythology of the Old West frontier. That mythology is alive and well in Harold Schafer's Medora, and in Sheila Schafer, now 89, who sits in Row G, a whoopin' and a hollarin' as if she were seeing the Medora Musical for the first time. We all know that she has seen the Musical on several thousand occasions in the last 50 years, and yet every evening that she glides down the escalator into the amphitheater, the magic of an outdoor theater in the heart of the badlands rejuvenates her. And everyone around her.

One of the best things about the economic miracle that has come to North Dakota is that it is laying the groundwork for a burst of new cultural activity in a state that has traditionally exported its talent. The old paradigm was represented by Angie Dickinson and Eric Sevareid—talented and ambitious North Dakotans who were born and raised here, but who left the state at the first opportunity and seldom came back. In fact, Sevareid and Dickinson both sometimes spoke about North Dakota as if it were a slough of rural parochialism and mediocrity that had to be overcome if one really wished to live a full and happy life. Once they achieved escape velocity, they gave their mighty energies to other zip codes, and came back once in a very long while to accept awards from a state that congratulated itself for giving the world people it could not keep.

That North Dakota is ebbing away and I say good riddance. I revere Sevareid, who epitomizes what sane public commentary should be, and who was a lively presence at the birth of broadcast news. And I had the chance a year or so ago to be part of an interview with Angie Dickinson, who has softened her quarrel with the northern prairie, and whose performance in Rio Bravo (with John Wayne, 1959) is enough to make you fall in love. But they left forever.

The Minot-born actor Josh Duhamel is a source of pride for North Dakotans, and he seems genuinely to care about the land of his childhood, but we ought to be prouder of musician and writer Jesse Veeder-Scofield, who has chosen to live on a ranch near Watford City, when she could live anywhere, and who sings the song of North Dakota (not Texas, not Hollywood, not New York City and not Nashville), including the song of the oil boom. Her creativity and her art are not just derived from the broken country of western North Dakota, but her Muse seems to be here, in the creaking floors of the old ranch house and out along the ridgeline. Her presence amongst us makes North Dakota a better, richer place to live. She is just getting started. We need people like Jesse to explore our experience and tell our story, to tease out the mystery and identity of North Dakota in the twenty-first century. Her presence will attract other young artists, especially young women, to cast their lot here and not just bolt for easier venues.

The same is true of our fabulous troubadour Chuck Suchy, who is a great musician and an actual farmer south of Mandan. That's the source of his authenticity. His music over the last few decades has taught us how to love our home place. He has given us a vocabulary for our pride in wildflowers, in a red hunting dog bursting through the tall grass, in the dignity of agricultural life. He is more significant to North Dakota than Warren Christopher, now deceased, who was born in Scranton in 1925, and who served as President Clinton's Secretary of State. Christopher was an important diplomat, but what did he do for North Dakota? He's in the Rough Rider Hall of Fame, as he deserves, but the fact is that he built his life elsewhere. He was one of our great exports. Chuck Suchy has done more for us than anyone who was merely born here. And he is not yet in the Rough Rider Hall of Fame.

Over the past couple of years I have heard Governor Jack Dalrymple, on at least half a dozen occasions, say that we should use some of the great Bakken oil windfall to fund and encourage cultural activity in North Dakota. I love it when he speaks of the cultural heritage and potential of North Dakota, of our responsibility to give it as much attention as we give wheat and soybeans, higher education and oil zone infrastructure. It is clear that he has a vision of what North Dakota could and should be in the year 2030—and beyond. Few places ever get what we are getting—a sudden gigantic infusion of wealth and possibility, beyond our immediate ability to spend it or spread it around. I think the Governor is right that we will be judged—centuries hence—by just how we invested the surpluses.

We have it in our power to make North Dakota the most remarkable place on the Great Plains, one of the most remarkable places in America, if we have the imagination and vision to plant the seeds now.

Great things are already happening here. Some of them are still below the radar, but you will hear more and more about them in the coming years. Organic farms, community gardens, a new higher agrarianism, a food coop (soon!). A renaissance of craft and localism, more high tech and somewhat less clunky than the kind we prized in our grandparents. Independent filmmakers are sprouting up all over the landscape. Brew pubs. Young writers are coming or returning to the state, drawn by the complicated story of the boom, but their best work will almost certainly be about something else that is rooted on the northern plains. When is the last time a North Dakotan wrote anything as good as Larry Woiwode's Beyond the Bedroom Wall (1976)? That moment is likely to come, and it will owe something to shale oil.

I do not wish to play down the dark side of the industrial revolution that has swept into our beloved homeland. But we need to remember that the other side of the coin represents virtually infinite possibility, if we have the strength and imagination to insist upon it. We must demand a conservation and cultural renaissance as our compensation for the losses we feel but hardly yet dare to express.

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Those Who Whack Weeds Are the Chosen People of God

The summer solstice has come and gone. Though I am continually amazed towards dusk that it is still light at ten o'clock p.m. (where did the evening go?), I have begun to feel that low-level uneasiness that comes immediately after the solstice. Summer as we know it in North Dakota is just getting started (it was 62 degrees on July 1), but something deep in my diaphragm groans that it is all down hill from here until late December, when the forces of darkness overwhelm the earth, and we are plunged again into sub-arctic night.

Make hay while the sun shines. No evening passes now in my neighborhood without kids clattering by my house on skateboards and scooters, adults (usually women) processing their days together while engaged in the slow-mo North Dakota version of the power walk. After supper, as we sit out on our decks listening to the breeze in the trees, we can almost forget, for an instant, that most of the North Dakota calendar must be spent indoors. What would human life be if we did not have a magical ability to forget pain?

Up near Horizon Middle School, under the blue water tower, there is a grass clippings collection plaza with eight or ten huge white steel containers. In the evenings, men congregate there, delivering a few bags of clippings in gleaming giant pickup trucks that could haul barrels of lead just as easily. They leave their engines running and frisk the clippings into the appropriate bins. Frequently they linger and lean on the back fenders and talk with men they don't know about optimal sprinkler cycles or whether Roundup is really the answer. A visitor from Jupiter might surmise that this civilization is required to bring grass sacrifices to propitiate some pastoral god. Perhaps the Jovians would initially conclude that the water tower must be that god, for on any summer evening, dozens of huge pickups appear ritually at its base with pure grass tributes. The great god Mulch. Sometimes there are little traffic jams at the clippings site. Ah, summer.

All of my adult life I have read Jefferson's prose poems about the glories of agrarian life—"Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God," and "I think our governments will remain virtuous for many centuries; as long as they are chiefly agricultural." The great Jefferson's pastoral idealism has always appealed deeply to me—perhaps because I have never actually farmed!—but it has felt a little like an abstraction, like an English major's pastoralism. But now that I have an actual vegetable garden it is much more real.

Several nights this last week, I ventured out at about six p.m. to tackle the weeds that have eaten my garden. I don't quite understand the biology (or perhaps it is the karma) of weeds, but I can tell you two things that have the certainty of natural law. First, in the cool, rainy, even chilly June just past, my corn and tomatoes barely clung to life (five inches high by the Fourth of July!), but all the weeds proliferated as if they were on an invisible Miracle Grow drip. I was gone five days last week. When I came back the Canada thistle were the size of large pumpkins. I don't understand why weeds grow like, well, weeds, and spread maniacally and thrive, while onions and potatoes droop around in stunted form, looking anemic, and waiting for the July heat.

Second, these weeds are like the killers in horror films—they never really die. I go out with stiff gloves and a little hand hoe, and work three hours among the tomatoes and corn to uproot those weeds I can, and clip the rest as close to the ground as possible. It's unpleasant work. The Canada thistle have really highly evolved defense systems. When I am not wincing from sticker pain, I mostly muse about the genius of farmers markets, where for a fraction of what it costs me to grow a bushel of vegetables, I can buy oodles of beautiful organic produce grown by someone with a real talent for it. Still, at some point in the evening I have cleared the tomato patch to perfection, and—with a feeling of satisfaction bordering on smugness--I go into the house and pour myself a tumbler of whiskey.

But two days later—the minute you turn your back--there are scores of new weeds, as tenacious as the first wave, creeping in at the wan little defenseless corn stalks.

Last night, in a rage, I went out with my weed whacker and attacked the Canada thistle. It was like a scene out of the Iliad. I should have worn protective goggles. I waded boldly into a sea of thistle and began to fell it. I had carefully adjusted the plastic string so that I could take out weeds without damaging those few remaining plants I wish to protect. It was a scene of pure garden carnage. The weeds were so tall and thick, and so full of all the moisture that should be nurturing my tomatoes, that the whacker threw up a green slurry, and sometimes gobs of green sludge, into my face. I had to refill the whacker tank twice.

Finally, dusk arrived mercifully at my little patch of ground. It was a perfect sunset, with charcoal and tangerine skies to the west, and a magnificent crescent moon setting about the same time as the sun. The temperature was exquisite—shirtsleeve weather just edging towards the evening chill. I hand watered my tomatoes, filling each venerable rusted coffee can to the brim, twice. The glugging sound of the water filling the tomato cans took me magically across space and time to my grandmother's garden near Fergus Falls, MN, and there she was, in a faded-flower cotton apron, with her thick pure white hair and her gold-tipped front tooth, puttering about her flawless, weedless garden, stooping to pluck some lonely stray sprig of a weed from the pea patch.

I was a real mess. My whole front looked as if I had stood too close to the painting bay of an autobody shop when they were rehabilitating a John Deere tractor.

But I had brought order to my garden. I had got down on my hands and knees and out of my head, and I had pressed my fingers into the soil. I had given all of my attention to the careful nurture of a few plants that were domesticated in the Middle East or South America tens of thousands of years ago. I was doing something that really mattered in some very basic way, and my whole body was involved. I could not do it without stooping to the earth in prayer.

As I slumped into my chair, after stripping down to my shorts and a tshirt, I felt better about the world. I felt better about myself. I felt more whole. I felt more alive. I was happy. And I could almost taste that tomato that is still only a yellow bud on a rangy little plant in my back yard.

Thomas Jefferson was right, as usual. An American garden is as much the meaning of the Fourth of July as those glorious abstractions in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence.

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What Happens When the Great White Father is Black?

The President wasn't here very long last week, and he did just one thing in the state, in a place few North Dakotans have ever visited. It is not clear just why he came or what will come of it. I wasn't there, but I have friends who were there, and their reports are fascinating.

I know there are people who wish President Obama had visited the Bakken Oil fields to observe our staggering economic success and perhaps gain increased respect for carbon. I would have liked him to visit the badlands, perhaps Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch, or the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University.

But there is a lovely simplicity and purity to what Mr. Obama did. He made the long journey to North Dakota just to spend a little time with American Indians, particularly Lakota Indian children. He didn't try to make the trip a Dakota smorgasbord--with five scattered stops, a ticker tape of hectic policy briefings, meet and greets, and an ad hoc tarmac news conference. Instead, he went to a pow wow. If he had a political agenda, it is difficult to discern just what it was. Some folks say he was fulfilling a campaign pledge, but it was certainly much more than that. One of the perks of being President of the United States is that you get to meet anyone you want—from the poet laureate of Ireland to the current NBA champions, from a Nobel-prize winning entomologist to Bono. The President and First Lady wanted to see American Indians--in their homeland not in the Oval Office, on their (Indian) terms, at a long-scheduled traditional event, outdoors, not at a "Presidential Summit" staged at some impossible distance from the heart of Indian Country.

There is something noble in that. I loved the front page photo in the Bismarck Tribune last Saturday, of President Obama (clearly moved, clearly enjoying himself, not stern as he sometimes appears) leaning into a group of Indian children, telling them their lives can be better, that they can achieve great things, that they should pursue their dreams and he will help if he possibly can. I spent much of Saturday trying to imagine the impact of that. It is possible that that moment could make a difference—could make all the difference—in one or more of those young lives. When someone of great consequence looks you in the eye, singles you out from the 316, 999, 900 other Americans, and says, "Yes, you can make a difference, you can improve your life and the life of your friends, we are counting on you, we believe in you," that may just be the leaven that helps transform a community.

Think about it. For most of American history, Presidents have told Indians to jettison their values, their economic systems, their social structure, their culture, their lifeways, and "get on board" with the Anglo-American dream. When Jefferson addressed a delegation of Choctaw leaders, at the White House, on December 17, 1803, he said, "A little land cultivated, and a little labor, will procure more provisions than the most successful hunt; and a woman will clothe more by spinning and weaving, than a man by hunting. Follow then our example, brethren, and we will aid you with great pleasure." When he met our own Sheheke of the Mandan nation on December 30, 1806, Jefferson advised the leader he called "The Wolf" to convince his people to give up warfare and live in peace and harmony as white folks do. How he said this without smirking I don't know. "Remember, then, my advice, my Children," he concluded, "and carry it home to your people."

President Obama is not an assimilationist. He does not subscribe to the historically dominant U.S. Government policy of "kill the Indian and save the man." What he brought to the windy plains of North Dakota last week was simple but profound: respect, recognition, validation.

It would be a great thing for any President to have come to Cannonball to meet Indians on their home court. But it clearly is more meaningful in that this President is an African-American, a man of great achievement and success who comes from a historically-oppressed minority, addressing representatives of another historically-oppressed minority. Obama's message of "possibility" means something more when you consider that this is America's first black President, that fifty years ago we had to send in federal troops to make it possible for African-American children to attend the schools of Little Rock, Arkansas, or to enroll at "Ole Miss."

When friends of mine attended the University of Colorado Law School in the early 1990s, a young Oglala Lakota woman named Delores was in the first year class. We all spent a good deal of time together. Even though the University had an enrollment of more than 20,000 students, and an Indian Studies Program, Delores had a hard time finding anyone who could understand her world or appreciate her homesickness, especially at the law school. She said she knew the Pine Ridge Reservation was beset with problems—that in some ways it was a disaster—but it was her home, it was where her friends and family lived, it was a miniature world where she felt "secure." One day in the spring semester she came to us and said she was quitting law school immediately and moving back to the rez. We tried to convince her to stay at least to the end of the year. "No, you don't understand," she said, "there are so few brown people here. I miss being with brown people." Delores was gone by the weekend and we never saw her again.

Things are better now, but far from perfect. Young Indians still often feel isolated and alone at UND, NDSU, and other universities. Retention is a significant issue, in spite of some excellent pro-active university programs. Things won't get much better until we have more Native American professors, nurses, doctors, lawyers, CEOs, athletes, board of higher education members, government employees, novelists, accountants, and perhaps especially K-12 off-reservation teachers, to prepare the way for a broad American Indian renaissance. Just after the Revolution, John Adams said, "I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. . . in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain."

It takes time. It may take generations.

I like to think that one of those young people who met the President of the United States last week—in part because she met the President--will grow up to change the world, to win the Nobel Prize for chemistry, to write the great American novel, to file an important patent, to become the Secretary-General of the United Nations, to be the president of a great university, or make one of our tribal colleges a world class institution. Or just to make life better and more culturally rich for her fellow Lakota.

In the wake of all the post-Fighting Sioux aftershocks and incidents, some of them very recent, President Obama could not have come to the Standing Rock Indian Reservation at a more opportune time.

I'm so glad he came to this one place for this simple purpose, and without other distractions.

Respect. Recognition. Validation.

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Yo-Yoing Through the Bakken Debate in the American Outback

Everywhere I go now the first thing I am asked about is the Bakken Oil Boom. But before I have the chance to stumble out a few uncertain sentences, the people who bring up the Bakken interrupt to tell me everything I need to know.

In Red Cloud, Nebraska, at a literary conference, I met three or four biology professors from Nebraska and Iowa. They didn't ask a single question, but they told me with a degree of righteousness that immediately set my teeth on edge, that fracking is an environmental disaster, that man camps are dens of iniquity, that the water supplies of North Dakota will be poisoned for hundreds of years, that oil extraction is an unsustainable form of economic development, that industry doesn't give a damn about the communities of North Dakota. Etc.

When they stopped raving to catch their breath, I tried to say, "Well, you have to understand that for a very long period of time (1930-2005) North Dakota has been undergoing an agonizing rural outmigration and decline, and the oil boom, however overwhelming it may seem, has stopped the hemorrhaging, given us full employment and…" But they didn't want to hear what I had to say. They didn't even try to listen. They interrupted me before I had even begun to try to explain our situation. "Unsustainable." "Fools gold." "Whatever its temporary benefits, it's definitely not worth it." They were angry at the state of North Dakota, and angry at me because I was apparently some kind of pro-development stooge.

Their arrogance and condescension were enough to make my skin crawl. I wouldn't let myself be as rude as they were, but I wanted to say, "Hey, unlike you I actually live in the state of North Dakota and I love it with all of my heart. I want the best for my homeland, even if it thwarts my personal mythology of the state. Since 2005 I have spent almost endless amounts of time trying to make sense of the boom, struggling to figure out what it will mean for the future of North Dakota and the Great Plains. In fact, I now spend so much time brooding over the fracking boom that is has damaged my life and cut into my pursuit of happiness. As far as I can tell it is a very, very complex phenomenon that does not lend itself to simplistic pronouncements either way. Surely it can only be understood in the context of the strained economic and political history of the Great Plains, which I'm guessing is why you are attending a conference on prairie literature." It was no use. Their minds were closed, not open. It was as if they were condemning a dental root canal as an intrusion on the sanctity of the mouth, without bothering to ask what set of needs or problems it was intended to solve.

Then I went to Omaha. My hosts were bankers and investment councilors. They asked me about the Bakken. But before I could even open my mouth, two or three of them said, "You guys are the luckiest people in America. Jobs, opportunity, budget surpluses. You North Dakotans must be doing something right. If that moron in the White House were not waging his war against carbon, we'd be able to tell them Arabs to shove it." (They used somewhat more colorful terms).

I tried to say that the man in the White House doesn't seem to me particularly anti-carbon, once you look at the facts--that was the end of the conversation for some of my hosts. I started to say that while the Bakken is on the whole a wonderful thing for North Dakota, it was putting some pretty considerable pressures on our communities and our landscape. But I was not permitted to utter two complete sentences. "You'll get over it," one man said. "Every other state should be so lucky, beginning with the People's Republic of California." Another man said, "You know what they say about methane flaring, don't you? Smells like money!"

If they had been willing to listen, I would have said something like. "You should come to take a look for yourselves. The Bakken oil boom has solved many fundamental problems for North Dakota, and the people of the state overwhelmingly support it. We're rich, and thanks to the boom we have opportunities unprecedented in our history. But one of the very best things about North Dakota is the quiet sweep of the landscape, particularly west of the Missouri River. On the whole, humans have, until now, imposed a light footprint on the prairie. There is a subtle beauty in the land that grows on you. It's primordial. It has helped to create the character and the spirit of North Dakota. We have deep agrarian roots. If you want to see what we have valued, just visit the state fair. It's true that the spirit of the buttes and the badlands and the Little Missouri River cannot be measured in dollars and sense, but we all need to remember that the value of a civilization (or a community) comes from intangibles that cannot be measured or put up for sale."

They didn't want to hear any of this and, had I uttered these words, they would have said, "Are you nuts? What have you been smoking?"

In Reno, this morning, I was leading a public discussion of the life and work of John Wesley Powell (1834-1902), the one-armed Civil War hero who floated the Colorado River canyons in 1869, including the Grand Canyon. The conversation almost immediately turned to the Bakken. "What would Powell have to say about it?," a woman asked. "I don't know," I said, "he died before oil was a serious fuel in the industrial world."

But this much I do know. Powell, who addressed the ND Constitutional Convention in 1889, had three core values. First, he was a Jeffersonian who believed that America (including its natural resources) belonged not to corporate interests but to the broadest possible middle class. Like Jefferson he believed that family farming was the highest and best use of land.

Second, Powell was a utilitarian. Every form of development should benefit the broadest number of people possible. All resource questions should be decided for the benefit of the commonwealth, and government should be an absolutely neutral referee. Although he loved the romance of the Colorado River, Powell came to believe that any cubic inch of water that reached the sea without being used for irrigation was being "wasted." Lake Powell is named for him.

Third, Powell believed passionately that humans have the right and the duty to manage their resources in the most enlightened possible way. He believed that every form of economic development can be managed for the benefit of mankind, but if we simply fold our arms and let the Titans of Industry have their way with us and the land, we will all be complicit in the desolation of the American Garden of Eden.

As I left the sweet independent bookstore where the discussion was taking place, I saw a Prius and a Ford F-250 in the parking lot, each with a bumper sticker. Ones said, "There Is No Planet B." And the other said, "If You Can't Farm It, You Have to Mine It."

I leave it to you to determine which vehicle each sticker adorned.

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A Literary Pilgrimage on the Northern Plains

They take their authors seriously in our neighbor states to the south. I was invited to give the keynote address at the annual Willa Cather conference in Red Cloud, Nebraska this year. Red Cloud is in extreme south central Nebraska, almost on the Kansas border. I decided to drive, for reasons that will become clear, and because I love nothing more in the world than a loopy and largely pointless auto journey over any landscape west of the Mississippi River.

Cather (1873-1947) is quite possibly the greatest Great Plains writer. If you have not read My Antonia or O Pioneers!, you owe it to yourself to seek them out right away. They are novels of the pioneer era of white settlement of the plains. Antonia Shimerda is a young Bohemian girl who comes with her immigrant family straight from Eastern Europe to the fictional town of Black Hawk, Nebraska, to take up a homestead. Her Old World parents are unable to adjust to life on the windswept, primordial prairie—what Antonia calls "your cawntry." Her lovely, dignified, inept father eventually commits suicide. But through pure sacrifice (of what our generation might call the pursuit of happiness) and decades of body-damaging labor, Antonia succeeds in building a modestly successful frontier life. That summary doesn't do justice to the novel, which is really a series of vignettes that illustrate the elemental vitality, even magnificence, of this young pioneer woman. My Antonia is one of the handful of books I reread every two or three years, and I always burst into tears at the very same moment in the text.

To prepare for my lecture, I read scads of Great Plains literature. Five Cather novels. She's Nebraska. Hamlin Garland's fabulous autobiography, A Son of the Middle Border, arguably the greatest of Great Plains autobiographies, with the possible exception of Eric Sevareid's Not So Wild a Dream. Garland was Iowa and South Dakota. O.E. Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth. He was South Dakota. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie and The Long Winter. South Dakota. Lois Phillips Hudson's Reapers of the Dust. North Dakota. Rachel Calof's Story. North Dakota. And Kent Haruf's Plainsong. He's Colorado, the only living author of those I read to get ready for my lecture.

All this reading was pure joy. The irony, of course, in that I got to sit with these great books in my favorite reading chair with a glass of wine by my side, in a house with windows, insulation, central heat, siding, and electric appliances (that's my "work"), while the folks I was reading about (who made it possible for me to have so frivolous a life) lived in caves, sod houses, and shacks, burning buffalo chips for fuel, literally faced starvation during the first lean, terrifying winters on the plains, and worked themselves to death (some literally) to prove up the cawntry. Hamlin Garland writes about following a one-horse plow from dawn to dusk for eight full weeks (56 successive days) when he was nine years old, and for being rebuked, with the threat of a whipping, when in sheer exhaustion or boredom he would lie down on the prairie to gaze at the clouds for half an hour. "We were all worshippers of wheat in those days," he writes in one of the finest passages in his book.

As the day of my lecture drew closer, I decided to make my auto trip to Red Cloud a literary pilgrimage. I drove from Bismarck to Jamestown, then to just north of Aberdeen, where Garland and his parents established homesteads. Virtually all traces of their lives in Brown County, SD, are now gone, but there is a gravel county road rather grandly named "Hamlin Garland Memorial Highway." He deserves better.

At each stop on my pilgrimage I read favorite passages from the books in question, puzzled over county maps, took notes and scores of photographs, and purchased whatever seemed requisite from interpretive centers or the village's Rexall Drug Store, which still tends to have a small book selection tucked away towards the back.

Then I ventured east to De Smet, SD, one of the homes of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Wilder's books are no longer my favorites in this genre, but they have a very special place in my heart because I read them when I was first coming alive to the idea of literature, and they had nothing to compete with on the broad desert of my brain except the Hardy Boys. When I read The Long Winter, I remember feeling my first savage inrush of jealousy, when I realized that Almanzo Wilder was intending to marry Laura, whom I loved. The Laura Ingalls Wilder complex at De Smet is charming: historic buildings, a gift shop, and a garden with lilacs strong enough to make you stagger.

After a night in Sioux Falls, I drove to Bancroft, NE, one of the homes of my favorite Great Plains poet John Neihardt. Neihardt is best known for his Black Elk Speaks, a romanticized account of the life and vision of the Lakota holy man, Ben Black Elk, but he was also the poet laureate of Nebraska, and the author of the only Great Plains epic poem, The Cycle of the West. The interpretive center there is modest but wonderful, with excellent old-style exhibits about his life and work, the obligatory 12-minute film, and a gift shop, where I purchased one of the last cassette tapes in America. The curator asked me if I knew how to use one! And I shocked her by saying I still drove a car with a cassette player!

Red Cloud has given itself to Cather as Hannibal, MO, has given itself to Mark Twain, but with infinitely more taste and dignity. The conference took place in the old Red Cloud Opera House (now the Willa Cather Center). Each year at conference time, 100-250 people come from all over the country, from all over the world, to celebrate Cather's art and life.

The British lexicographer Samuel Johnson said, "The chief glory of every people arises from its authors." I love it that Nebraska takes Cather and other writers so seriously that it works hard to keep their work and fame alive, to wrestle with the hard questions that great writers ask about the communities and landscapes where they live, and to deepen the spirit of place of the Great Plains. We need more not less of this, particularly in North Dakota, which is in the first heroic phase of an erasive industrial and cultural revolution. Conference participants received "footprint" maps of Cather's Webster County. I went to each of 20 sites, including the spot where the real "Mr. Shimerda" was buried after his suicide, and then, with deep reverence, to the grave of Annie Sadilek Pavelka, who helped to inspire My Antonia.

On the long journey home I stopped in the Sand Hills of western Nebraska, north of the village of Ellsworth, at the lonely grave of Mari Sandoz, the author of Old Jules, Cheyenne Autumn, and Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas. Mari wanted to be buried looking over the orchard her crusty, irascible, heroic father Jules Sandoz planted, and there she lies, for eternity, a monument to what a strong and disciplined woman can do by stringing together words in the English language.

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Not Exactly Giants in the Earth, But Pluck and Gumption

Last night, after a long stressful day, I ventured out to my garden in the back yard to take a look. The odd placement of Memorial Day this year has me disoriented. It's only the first week in June but it feels as if I've been tardy in getting things started. Several of my friends put their tomatoes out too early and lost some to frost. I planted most of my garden on Memorial Day weekend. So far my 41 tomatoes are alive but spindly and anemic. They need a steady train of BTUs.

The winter was so long and unsatisfying this year that I looked forward to the temperate season (May 1-November 1) more than in any year since I returned home in 2005. My hope was that we would glide sweetly into summer by way of a long series of gentle drizzly days with the temperature in the high 50s. Instead, one day the trees were barren and the next day all the cottonwood leaves had popped into a full canopy of brilliant verdant green. Not just "as if overnight." This year, overnight!

North Dakotans like to say that we have a seven (or nine) month winter, followed three days later by summer, with little or no spring in between. That has always seemed like a myth to me, but that's precisely what happened this year. According to my home weather station—an array of integrated weather monitoring modules that would have made Thomas Jefferson weep with joy—the last time it froze was May 16, at 28.5 degrees at my house. Since then the temperatures have climbed into the high 80s and even low 90s, and on several nights in late May I was almost tempted to turn on my air conditioner. (I just couldn't make myself do it).

I'm worried about drought. Normally, I till my 50 x 60 foot garden three times before I plant. Once I got my tiller working (more on that below) I crept it out into the garden, and with deep joy started to turn the soil. After I had made two rounds I couldn't quite understand why things were going so well. Then I realized that usually the subsoil is moist enough to clog the tines of the tiller every fifteen or twenty minutes, which requires shutting down the rig and clearing the tines with a wooden stick or screwdriver. Tedious work. In a typical spring I do this at least a couple of dozen times before the soil is ready for planting. This year I tilled the entire garden all three times without ever once clogging the machine. Even on first tilling the soil had the consistency of coffee grounds. Not good.

The tiller provided a home handyman challenge of a much graver sort this year. It's a heavy duty Sears tiller, my mother's housewarming gift to me nine years ago. It has been an extremely reliable machine. It typically starts on the first or second pull even after a long winter. This year it wouldn't start at all. So for two days the focus was a new sparkplug, some new bits for the carburetor, fresh oil, forcing air through fuel hoses, and other Hail-Mary remedies. By the time it finally started I was in a mood to churn the earth. But when it had turned precisely one three-foot swath of the garden, there was a sickening metal-on-metal sound, and though the tines continued to turn smoothly, the forward propulsion mechanism just stopped working altogether. In other words, if I wanted to till with the thing now, I'd need an ox or a mule.

Thus began a very long (and sometimes very frequent) series of trips to the big box hardware stores, specialty farm stores, the Internet, and Wal-Mart. It took five days altogether to fix the thing. I was tempted from the beginning of this ordeal to retire the tiller, and buy a brand spanking new one that I had begun to covet on the many journeys to the garden shops. But my advisers assured me that it could be fixed. I have been reading Thoreau this winter, and I knew he would be against abandoning my old tiller, 99% of which was as strong as the day it was born. Besides, that old rusted out black hulk has high value to me, in memory of some gardens past, and because my dear mother gave it to me.

To get to the drive train required taking the tiller almost entirely apart. This meant scores of screws, bolts, cotter pins, precise sequencing, and a growing pile of parts and bits that gave me great anxiety about ever putting the thing back together again. When the guts of the machine were finally exposed, in a blue-green trough of gritty grease, I discovered that a drive chain (like a bicycle chain) had broken. Trip to three box stores (hereafter TTBS). For the first time in my life I fixed a chain link (using some very interesting new one-function tools). Put the whole damn thing back together again at infinite cost to my knuckles. It didn't work. In fact, even the tines were inert now. Took it all apart. Discovered that the clutch system was extremely primitive and yet persnickety at the same time. Somehow managed to fix it. By now the drive train gasket was torn. TTBS. Fired up tiller. Seemed to work, but after thirty seconds the rubber transmission belt began to burn up before my eyes. TTBS. Installed new belt and fiddled with tension springs to prevent burning. Fired tiller up. Within seconds, second belt burned to a crisp. At this point my greatest (and possibly only) desire in life was to pour five gallons of gasoline over the Sears Best tiller and light a match. TTBS.

By the time I finally got the machine working again, my pride was pretty deeply engaged in the project. Fortunately, I had the help of an extremely resourceful geologist who has spent the last few years in the outback of Australia, where, if you cannot weld, operate a torque wrench, and machine a new bolt, you are going to die of starvation. My tiller now works again—I ponied it through three complete tillings of my garden, without a single subsequent breakdown. I cannot say it works like a charm. It works like thing on its last legs, with some odd metallic rumblings from inside that I never heard before, and it has a kind of internal combustion limp. Every time I fire it up, I can feel the low-tech fragility of its inner workings, and I'm gentle with it now as if it were operating with three stents, a transplanted pig's heart valve, and a pacemaker.

The good news is that everything's planted, and most things are now up (though barely). The Canadian thistle is thriving. If it were edible, I'd stop gardening altogether. So far I'm ahead of the weeds, though not by much. Last night I found that my sweet corn is an inch high, a gorgeous strait up pale green. That miracle—one dry wrinkled seed that will soon metamorphose into an imperturbable four-foot stalk with two bountiful ears of corn, each with 800 kernels!—is enough to make it all worthwhile.

The grace of God is in a garden—and redemptions of all sorts, and healing. And the essence of life.

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On the Road in Search of Crazy Horse

Last weekend I went on a quixotic journey through the Black Hills country and the Pine Ridge in search of Crazy Horse. All such explorations should be done in pairs—Lewis and Clark, Stanley and Livingston, Bert and Ernie. My travel companion was one of North Dakota's top educators. I'll call him "Larry."

The Lakota warrior and absolutist Crazy Horse (Tasunke Witko—1840-September 6, 1877) has fascinated me all of my adult life, ever since I heard a Methodist minister in Alliance, Nebraska, draw careful parallels between Crazy Horse and Jesus back in 1985. His point was that establishment culture has a very hard time with absolutists—uncompromising idealists who refuse to conform to the dominant paradigm of their time. Essentially, said the pastor, it becomes necessary for the more powerful culture to eliminate the threat, often with the help of Quislings (factional collaborators) from the oppressed tribe. However much we honor and even idealize these absolutists, he said, things actually go better in the hands of clever pragmatists like Spotted Tail and Red Cloud, who, after a brush with warfare against the dominant culture, decide to negotiate rather than fight for their way of life.

There is an extensive literature on Crazy Horse. We were, between us, carrying a dozen books on or around the subject, particularly an excellent recent study by Thomas Powers: The Killing of Crazy Horse. Every time we stopped at a CH site, we rifled through the books to get pertinent details and, if possible, maps.

Our goal was to get as far as Camp Robinson near Crawford, Nebraska. That's where Crazy Horse was killed on the evening of September 6, 1877. He was 36 or 37 years old. He had never been defeated in battle. He had, in fact, been the strategic mastermind of the stunning U.S. Army defeats at the Battle of the Rosebud (June 17, 1876) and the Little Bighorn (June 25, 1876), the first against General George Crook and the second against Lt. Colonel George Armstrong Custer and the Seventh Cavalry. After the debacle of the Little Bighorn, the United States determined (in the white heat of national humiliation) to break the spirit of resistance of the Lakota and Cheyenne people once and for all, and force them to decide between life on reservations or actual extermination.

General Crook and other U.S. military leaders harassed the "recalcitrants" (i.e. the victors of the Little Bighorn) with ruthless fury in a series of dawn, scorched-earth, raids in the fall of 1876 and the spring of 1877. Finally, on May 6, 1877, Crazy Horse brought in his band of Oglalas to "surrender" at Camp Robinson. He came in not because he was beaten in battle, but to spare his tiyospaya (his lodge group) of about a thousand men, women, and children, further suffering and privation. The Crazy Horse procession from the bluffs above Camp Robinson on May 6, 1877, was more than a mile long. The great Lakota freedom fighter rode in with dignity, head up, proud, undefeated--nothing like the "vanishing Indian" of the famous painting. As he looked on in amazement, one of the army observers that day quipped, "This isn't a surrender, it's like a Roman triumph."

Four months later the U.S. Army killed Crazy Horse in a skirmish right in front of the guardhouse at Camp Robinson. He was invited in to have a conversation with "the soldier chief," guaranteed safe conduct, assured that it would be simple enough to settle some differences and reduce tensions between the policies of the occupation army and the conquered Lakota. But the actual U.S. Army agenda was to arrest Crazy Horse, and send him off to spend the rest of his life in an island prison in the Dry Tortugas off the coast of Florida. This is the usual routine for race wars. Roughly the same thing happened to Sitting Bull (on December 15, 1890) at his cabin on the Grand River near Fort Yates; to the Haitian freedom fighter Toussaint L'Ouverture (April 7, 1803); and to the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko (September 12, 1977)--among many others. Bring them in with promises of safe conduct; then an "unfortunate incident" occurs which eliminates the threat and puts an end to the resistance. When Crazy Horse realized that he had been betrayed, in the doorway of the Camp Robinson jail, he attempted to make a break for freedom. He was fatally wounded in the abdomen by an army private with a bayonet thrust. At the time, his hands were being held behind his back by his fellow Lakota Little Big Man. This, too, is the routine. The conqueror/occupiers inevitably manage to build or encourage a pro-U.S. faction that winds up doing some of the more disagreeable "wet work." Sitting Bull was arrested and then shot in the back of the head by "Metal Breasts," the Hunkpapa Indian Police who answered to the white agent James McLaughlin.

We found the exact spot where Crazy Horse was killed. We'd been gabbing, exchanging views, reading aloud to each other, and "arguing" the issues for hundreds of miles, two born talkers, fellow historians, and roadside adventurers.

But now we went silent for a long time.

It's easy for us to see Crazy Horse as a kind of culture hero. That's a luxury of living so far now from the conquest phase of American frontier history. I wonder how we two would have regarded him in the summer of 1876 or 1877? If you want to see what white folks thought about all of this in September 1877, just look at the old newspaper files from the Chicago Tribune or the Bismarck Tribune. It's hard to deny that we are the beneficiaries of the imperial dynamics that tried to shove the undefeated Oglala warrior into that cramped rectangular guardhouse.

Later that day, we pieced and threaded our way to the unmarked site, not far from Pine Ridge, SD, where the body of Crazy Horse was placed (for a short time) on a scaffold overlooking Camp Sheridan. There was a sacred discretion in that.

We are all so lucky to live on the Great Plains, where some of the most extraordinary moments in American history occurred, and the "footprint" of that history is so recent, so fresh, so unpaved-over. Even the fact that most sites are unmarked is a kind of historical ecstasy. You have to leap into the unknown with weak photocopied maps and grainy historical photographs in hand, and puzzle things out on the endless rolling and ridgeline landscapes of the plains. Anyone who wants to can follow Custer to the Black Hills (the Thieves Road) or to the Little Bighorn can do so--on glorious gravel roads--or follow Lewis and Clark from the mouth of the Grand to the mouth of the Yellowstone, and stand where they stood, poke around the Hidatsa earthlodge village where Sacagawea became an adult, or visit Sitting Bull's lonely haunted cabin site on the Grand.

We climbed Bear Butte (near where CH was born), visited the problematic Crazy Horse Monument in the Black Hills, and clomped around the battle site at Slim Buttes where General Crook almost had a mopping-up encounter with Crazy Horse on September 9-10, 1876.

Friendship, I believe, is the highest form of human relationship. And you know who they are.

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Dumb College Hijinks and Cultural Reconciliation in North Dakota

Just when you thought race relations on the northern Great Plains were moving into a new era of greater respect and sensitivity, along comes a disheartening setback. By now you are aware that a group of University of North Dakota students wore t-shirts to an off-campus Grand Forks event called Springfest that featured a caricature of a male Indian in a feathered headdress drinking from a beer bong, with the words "Siouxper Drunk" displayed in bold capital letters above the imagery.

UND President Robert Kelley issued a statement condemning the message on the shirts as "an unacceptable lack of sensitivity and a complete lack of respect for American Indians and all members of the community." Kelley rightly pointed out that Springfest was not a university event and it did not occur on campus. North Dakota University System Interim Chancellor Larry Skogen said the shirts exhibited "ignorance, intolerance and hatefulness." Skogen, who wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on Indian relations, said, "I am indignant about the disrespect conveyed in the repulsive messages on those T-shirts and how this conduct hurts those insulted."

The tastelessness of the stunt would be hard to exaggerate. The stereotype of the "drunken Indian" is one of the most vicious slurs in the long sad history of white-Indian relations. Alcoholism is a serious problem in the American Indian population (as it is in my white family). It has complex roots involving trade policies, poverty, unemployment, forced assimilation, unviable reservations, cultural collapse, and despair—but the best way to think about it is within the context of the conquest of the continent by Euro-Americans between 1492 and 1953 (the year Garrison Dam was dedicated). It is, in the terms of the great University of Colorado historian Patricia Limerick, just one of the "Legacies of Conquest." The only decent response by non-Indians looking at this problem from the outside in would be magnanimity, sadness, sympathy, a willingness to pitch in in any way outsiders can (by funding every useful treatment and education program), and a willingness to explore the historical dynamics of colonialism in the history of the United States. Needless to say, "drunken Indian" gags, even if not intended to be racist, even if they have more to do with collegiate hijinks than with a deliberate intention to hurt, are profoundly insensitive and ugly.

In addition to that, the t-shirt incident has to be seen as yet one more in a long series of aftershocks following the official retirement of the "Fighting Sioux" nickname and logo in 2012. I doubt that the nitwits who hatched the t-shirt gag knew how darkly they were scratching one of the most serious cultural wounds in North Dakota life. They are probably just as bewildered by the storm of outrage that has followed their stunt as all the rest of us are by the gross insensitivity of what they did. I very much doubt that they set out to be hateful. Still, when you see the images of the offensive shirts, in group photos of students hamming for the camera with the now-inevitable "thumbs up" and "oh, yeah!" pose, all you can do is shake your head and ask, "What were they thinking?"

We can all follow the dumb logic of some late night planning session: "Sioux=Sue=Sioux-per—cool!; since we plan to get wasted at Springfest after a long winter semester; wouldn't it be a cute commentary on the whole mascot controversy to …?" The thing I cannot understand is why someone in the student group didn't say, "I'm not so sure this is a good idea. Don't you think this is going to upset a lot of people? Let's keep brainstorming." As the controversy heated up, the t-shirt fulfillment company, CustomInk, released a statement, saying, "We handle hundreds of thousands of custom t-shirt designs each year and have people review them to catch problematic content. But we missed this one." Really? They might want to fine-tune their "problematic content" meter.

My view is that the best response to these students is not to punish them but to use this as an opportunity to teach them (and all the rest of us) to be more thoughtful about inter-cultural relations. In essence, the lesson is really simple: one culture should always be very careful about the ways it describes, depicts, or appropriates the iconography of another culture. This is a particularly important thing for historically-dominant cultures to remember when characterizing historically-subject cultures.

Meanwhile, I think we need to calm down. We are living now in the Era of Cultural Outrage—on both sides, on virtually every question. Spend half an evening hour on Fox, then half an hour on MSNBC and you will get a lifetime supply. Outrage can be fun—it is certainly good for ratings—but is almost always oversimplifies complex situations and reinforces cultural and political polarization, rather than lead to a more harmonious and enlightened community. These students did not come out of a vacuum. They are products of a certain cultural milieu. They have grown up at a time when North Dakota is groping its way towards a new understanding of the lives, the history, the culture, the religious observances, and the challenges of our Indian neighbors, whose homelands we inhabit: the Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Ojibwe, Assiniboine, Cree, and Dakota. The UND incident is, among other things, an indication of how much cultural healing we still need to pursue at UND, in North Dakota, and throughout the United States. The fact that there is a substantial American constituency that still regards the name Washington "Redskins" as inoffensive is a sure sign that the road to cultural harmony is going to be a long one. It is going to take a very deep commitment to mutual understanding and reconciliation on both sides, and a remarkable level of patience and tolerance—in both the Indian and the non-Indian community.

The worst thing about the UND t-shirt slur is that it comes at a time when there is such good news in Indian Country. More American Indians are graduating from high school than ever before. More are going to college than ever before, and many are earning advanced professional degrees. There is good and hopeful economic news on the reservations—thanks to casinos, energy development, mining, increased investment in tribal businesses. Reservation nutrition programs are making progress in addressing diabetes and other major health concerns. Tribal colleges (for which North Dakota has been a pioneer) are doing really important work--at home--where most Indians prefer to be educated. A broad national pan-Indian cultural renaissance is now entering its second phase. Some Native American languages are making a slow comeback. A significant burst of new Native American literature has emerged in the past couple of decades, led by one of our most gifted living writers Louise Erdrich.

This sort of incident rattles around every coffee shop and bar in North Dakota for a couple of weeks. I heard some pretty ugly remarks from people who know better while I was writing these words. This is a golden learning opportunity for all of us, but I hope we remember that these are, after all, college students, doing the dumb stuff that college students do (remember?), and that we need to give more attention to their cultural enlightenment than to the easy art of righteous condemnation.

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When the Thunder Comes, Summer Cannot Be Far Behind

On Monday, March 5, I heard my first thunder of 2014. It was the 125th day of the year, one of the first shirtsleeve days of 2014. I'd been in Dickinson for an early evening meeting. My soul is ragged these days. I'd promised myself I'd bend down in prayer before a crocus (pasqueflower) before the day was out, and I have learned to measure my mental health in reverse proportion to the number of days since I was last in the badlands. So on a whim I drove to Medora, into Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and then into Cottonwood Campground. I'm keeping what I call "last minute camping equipment" in my vehicle through the summer.

Given the rapid industrialization of western North Dakota, Theodore Roosevelt National Park has emerged as the one last pure sanctuary where, as long as you are facing inward from its boundaries, you can climb up over a ridge and be sure you will not see a fracking rig or an array of storage tanks on the other side. There is something deeply, even profoundly, comforting in knowing that the National Park will always be able to deliver that spiritual solace—a quiet landscape left alone by man's hustlings—no matter what happens beyond the park perimeters.

There were just five occupied campsites in Cottonwood campground. Three of them had large RVs, and there was one other tent a few hundred yards away. RV and fifth wheel folks tend to spend their time inside their portable houses, which begs some questions, but makes them ideal campsite neighbors.

Part of what makes tent and backpack camping so enjoyable is the way it forces simplification on our lives. If you have to carry it on your back, you are not going to take much, and much that you think you need you soon find that you don't.

It was a "short notice camping trip," so all I had was a blue and off-white tent, a lightweight air mattress, a sleeping bag, water, an exquisitely elegant and miniature gas cooking burner, two miniature pans, a plastic knife and spoon, a small salt and pepper shaker in one reversible cylinder, a Swiss Army Knife, a butane lighter, one food packet, two small bars of chocolate, a miner's lamp that you attach to your forehead with its elastic headband, and a book. I had a backpack, too, but this was car camping, so I barely needed it. This whole ensemble weighed less than twenty pounds. There is something purely delightful in assembling all this miniature high-tech gear. I was roughing it, but roughing it at the top of a very ingenious industrial pyramid.

Nor is such gear cheap. Making any important thing lightweight is an expensive challenge. I just made an itemized list of the gear described above, and the retail price—if you were starting tomorrow—comes to $1,385.40. The backpack ($450), tent ($250), and sleeping bag ($250) are the big ticket items, but once you have them they will last for twenty years or more, if you aren't infected with a raging itch for newer, lighter, more ingenious gear. I can hear my father saying, $1400 would buy a lot of hotel rooms, and they throw in the shower and toilet.

As soon as I had picked my campsite (a very complex enterprise in an organized campground, fraught with second-guessing, backtracking, and lingering misgivings), I walked down to the sacred Little Missouri River. It was up, but not greatly up, and flowing as calmly as it ever gets. I reckoned I could walk through it without wetting my chin, but it was now just an hour before sunset and I didn't want to have to start a fire at my campsite. I never light fires when I am alone. It feels self-indulgent and, though I know it is silly, I don't like the feeling of being exposed alone in the firelight with darkness all around me. I put up the tent (four minutes), and threw my sleeping bag over a bush to air out. The air mattress is one of those self-inflating units.

In honor of the 17-day hike I took on the Little Missouri River a few years ago, and in pursuit of simplicity, I decided to cook a freeze-dried meal from a plastic pouch. You can buy them now at any good outdoor recreation store. They are surprisingly tasty. I chose Chicken & Rice, but if I remember correctly the Lasagna and the Kung Pao Chicken are the best of the lot. All you do is tear open the top of the package, pour in 14 ounces of boiling water, seal up the packet (it has a double ziplock), and let it stand for about ten minutes. Voila: a hot camp meal that occupies a space somewhere between "not bad" and "surprisingly good." I wouldn't recommend it for a date, but on the whole I wouldn't recommend camping with anyone who isn't as eager to do it as you are. The 6 a.m. sullen, sleep-deprived, "I cannot believe you talked me into this," "this is going to be a very bad hair day," look is priceless, but you do wind up paying a price down the line.

After supper, I folded and tucked all the miniature gear back into the appropriate satchels. This is an important part of the ritual, for it reminds us of how little we really need in life, how easily our basic needs can be met, and how much more graspable and manageable life is when we reduce it to lowest terms.

For a while I read my book—a novel by Dickens—at the picnic table, using my nerd headlamp. For a while I stood silently in the juniper trees listening to the concert of a half a dozen species of birds bedding down for the night. And listening to the strange comings and goings of the breeze—a long period of complete calm followed by a little flow-through of purposeful air, and then two more soughings through my campsite, a longer one and a shorter, at long intervals, but never rising to the strength of wind. I remembered John 3:8: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit."

It is a little eerie standing there all alone on the banks of the Little Missouri River, ears on special alert, trying to drink in the spirit of place of the Great Plains, trying to identify the sounds of quiet (crickets, frogs, owls, bats, small rustling mammals in the dry grass), and puzzling over the way the unhurried breeze now visits, kissing the tops of the trees, and then slips away like a living presence.

An hour later, cocooned in my down bag, I heard the first rumble of 2014 thunder off to the west. As I dozed in and out of sleep the little starter storm crept in to my tentsite, and gave me two outstanding "just over your head" ka-booms, no interval between the flash of lightning and the thunder retort.

It was just scary enough to be perfect. It was the sound of a much-anticipated summer in North Dakota.

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A Great Shakespearean Actor—Fourth Decade On

Long, long ago, when I was studying at Oxford University, I spent a week between terms at Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. I saw nine plays that week. I was studying English Renaissance Literature at Oxford, and at that point Shakespeare and John Donne were my life. During my time in England I was able to see 34 of the 37 Shakespeare plays, some multiple times.

For a range of reasons Hamlet is my favorite work of English literature. It was my first great and overwhelming literary experience when I went off to college long ago. I've read it fifty times at least, taught it, seen it every time I've had the chance, memorized swaths of it, and more. My life's dream has been to perform as Hamlet in a production of the play, though at this point I'm pretty long in the Elizabethan tooth, and the rapier and sword fights may be too much for my rheumatic joints. Can Laertes and Hamlet settle their dispute in a bowling match?

That week in Stratford I saw Hamlet four times. The lead was a young British actor named Michael Pennington. He was perfect. He somehow embodied the whole meaning of Shakespeare for me—the wit, the eloquence, the savage wordplay, the existential brooding, the uncanny sense of "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." If Hamlet is the greatest of plays—English literature in its purest expression—in my opinion Michael Pennington was the greatest Hamlet, better than Lawrence Olivier, Derek Jacobi (whom I saw perform Hamlet at the Old Vic in London, with my visiting parents), or Kenneth Branagh.

When I was not sitting in the RSC theater that week, I studied the Reformation in a back room at the Stratford Public Library. One afternoon about two I was working all alone in this small chamber, books on all four walls, some behind cages, when in walked a disheveled, muffled, bundled up fellow with the kind of head cold (bordering on bronchitis) you can only get in England. He was hacking and coughing and blowing his red nose, snuffling, pulling besotted cloth handkerchiefs out of various pockets and bending over to sneeze.

But soft you now! I suddenly realized it was Michael Pennington in the flesh, sans costume and sans makeup. We were entirely alone. I virtually worshipped him and all that he stood for. But I was so shy that I did not go up to him and tell him how much his work meant to me. I sat there flushed and diffident, while he drifted slowly along the shelves not paying any particular attention to anything he saw. He was just killing time and trying to get it together for the performance he must give in four or five hours on the most important stage in Great Britain. I feared that I might break his concentration or annoy a great actor while he meditated his role.

For the thirty-five years that have followed that moment, whenever I have thought about it, I have kicked myself for not saying, quietly, "Mr. Pennington, I don't mean to disturb you, but I want to say your Hamlet epitomizes for me all that I love in English literature, and in my opinion you draw out of the play more significance than anyone who has ever played the role. I've seen you three times already this week, and will see you again tonight, assuming you live that long. You seem to be seriously under the weather." At which point, in my imagination, he draws himself up into full Prince of Denmark, makes a mind's-eye flourish with a dirk or Yorick's skull, shouts, "The play's the thing!" and flounces out the door to meet his destiny.

I sat there like a stone.

Flash forward to 2014. My mother and I flew to New York to see my daughter for Easter. My daughter is studying the humanities these days, and her favorite work of literature (so far) is Shakespeare's King Lear. A few weeks ago, while doing a little internet search on Pennington, who (I discovered) also played Moff Jerjerrod, the commanding officer of the Death Star, in the film Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and British Prime Minister Michael Foot in The Iron Lady, I learned that he is currently in New York performing as the lead in the Theatre for a New Audience production of King Lear. Somehow I managed to get tickets.

So on Easter Saturday my mother, my daughter, and I took our places in the theater to await Lear's fatal and appalling decision to force his three daughters to compete for a larger chunk of his kingdom by engaging in a demeaning flattery charade. "Who," says Lear, "shall we say doth love us most?" Over lunch nearby I had had second thoughts about the whole enterprise. "It's probably never a good idea to scratch one of the central myths of your life," I said. "What if he is mediocre, or broken by life? What if my youthful enthusiasm was totally misguided? Maybe it would have been better just to leave it alone in golden memory."

The Theatre for a New Audience approximates the dimensions of Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. The seating is steeply vertical. The large stage is entirely bare--no curtains, no proscenium.

Suddenly there he was, hair white as snow, bearded, his face not as tight as it was back in his "salad days." He had been a young Hamlet in the 1980s. He was young Lear now.

And he was magnificent. I don't know if Pennington would say Lear is a harder role than Hamlet or vice versa, but each of the great Shakespeare roles presents its own almost unbearable challenges. King Lear is about rage. Lear has to do a great deal of howling and raving and blaspheming over three long hours, and yet at times he has to speak in something like a broken whisper. Typically the actor gains the effect (of limitless outrage) by losing the audience to Shakespeare's fabulous and intricate language.

Not Michael Pennington. He was flawless. There are four or five great set pieces in the play, among the finest in all of literature. The audience needs to be able to follow the language with which Lear sees through the frumpery of Renaissance social and legal convention into the existential heart of things: man is, in essence, a "poor, bare, forked animal." Pennington perfectly embodied Lear and brought the character to life as I have never seen him before in film or on stage. There wasn't a false note in his magical performance.

I sat on the very edge of my seat, exulting, luxuriating, listening with all my might, crying, open-mouthed in wonder at the genius of Shakespeare and the genius of Michael Pennington. When we were settled in our taxi, my mother and daughter said merely, "Well?"

"It was stunning. He hasn't lost a step. And it is possible," I said, "that he is even finer as Lear than he was in Hamlet." Though one must never scratch a myth.

My only regret is that I could not stay in New York for two weeks and see Pennington as King Lear four more times, while haunting the New York Public Library between performances.

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The Rites of Spring in a Gale Force Wind

One of the things I love most about North Dakota is its rawness. You can create all the PR campaigns you want to show prospective workers that North Dakota is a quality-of-life paradise, but the plain fact is that it's an acquired taste and it is definitely not for the faint of heart. We've had a long, cold, unrelenting winter (fifth coldest in Grand Forks history), and every time you think it's about over, it wallops you in a new way. Three times I have put my shovels away for the year, and three times I have trudged them from their niche in the garage. I have damaged or ruined two pair of shoes by walking on what I assumed was at long last dry land.

So this is spring, is it? I've been more buffeted in the last week than I was all the long winter, perhaps because, like many of you, I started my annual outdoor life a little prematurely. Again. We cabin feverish North Dakotans explode out of our houses sometime in late March or early April, the minute it feels like spring, with white shins and a long list of planned activities, but we always see our shadow and scamper back inside for a few weeks longer. When was the last time you did not have to throw on a coat on Memorial Day? In North Dakota it is never reliably hot until the first week in July.

I'm deep into spring cleaning. On Saturday last I shoveled out the garage, not without some significant help. It was a sunny, warm day, thank goodness, but I found things in my garage that one should never encounter in such a place. In one sense it was like Christmas—wow, a brand new unopened socket set, wow, so that's where I put that buffalo robe. And in another sense it is like waking up in the third circle of Dante's Inferno. In that famous portrait of hell (14th century) everyone gets the eternity they deserve in an ironic karmic sort of way. For someone like me, who has almost never thrown away a sheet of paper or a notebook or a file, who has bought new toasters for every place he ever lived in, no matter how briefly, my hell will be to be buried under mountains of such detritus, unable to reach out to the New Testament just inches in front of me because I'm so heavily weighed down with a lifetime accumulation of pointlessness. How many boxes can you own? By the end of the day I discovered that there are things even the landfill won't take. Whatever happened to the old joyful anarchy of the town dump?

Last Sunday I drove deep into Indian Country and climbed a butte overlooking the Grand River in northern South Dakota. Saturday had been shirtsleeve warm, even t-shirt warm, so I was not prepared for the seasonal about-face that occurred overnight. When I got out of the car, wearing a coat that I had regarded as too thick back in my Bismarck entryway, I realized it was chilly. Ten minutes later I realized it was cold. And then I finally grasped, to my astonishment, that it was January cold, just this side of dangerously cold. The temperature had dropped at least fifty degrees overnight, and the wind was blowing like a sun of a gun. My brain is wired to discount the idea of windchill for the most part, and automatically after the spring equinox, but I actually found myself scrounging the back seat for a face mask and gloves on April 13th, the 103rd day of 2014.

I hiked up that butte with great joy. Unfortunately, I had to lug my out-of-shape, winter-sluggish body with me all the way up. This was already my second butte of 2014—it's going to be a great year—and the payoff, the view from the top, was spectacular. Not badlands, but broken lands in every direction to the end of the world, and in the near distance the Grand River cutting its way listlessly to the Mighty Missouri. Somewhere out in that vast open space, Sitting Bull's cabin site tucked into a perfect cottonwood bend in the Grand.

Eventually I found a hollow on top of that perfect box grass butte and lay down under the wind for half an hour. I even dozed off. There are few joys of Dakota life greater than that, napping on a butte under the radar of the rawness of the Great Plains.

Back home and steam cleaned, I reckoned that Sunday was just an example of those one-day throwback cold snaps you can get in any month of the year in North Dakota, but that the new week would be balmy and splendid. Over the weekend I heard from an unimpeachable source that the first pasqueflowers (crocuses) were blooming in the southern badlands. Are not those gossamer and infinitely gentle membranes of the palest blue, pure understated purple, a white that is more beautiful than white should ever be, the perfect Great Plains symbol of Easter, of renewal, and of resurrection? Every year at this time they press up unannounced through the gray dead grass of winter earth. It is worth a picnic trip to the badlands in the spring just to see the crocuses. You have to get down on your stomach and crawl up to one the way you would to the very lip of the Grand Canyon. They are that beautiful.

I woke up Monday to a winter wonderland, a perfect blanket of wet white snow in every direction. I literally did a double-take as I wandered out bewildered to the kitchen. By 11 a.m. it had snowed two or three inches, and yet it melted sufficiently by five p.m. that when I walked the long trail up by my house it was entirely dry, and it would be hard in a court of law to prove that it had snowed at all.

In the evenings I've been taking long walks, every day no matter what, which for me is the only way to break the sedentary habits of winter. But the wind has been blowing so hard and so incessantly that it has rattled my brains. It literally blew a set of headphones off of my head the other day, and a few of the gusts nearly blew me off the trail. When I stopped last evening to exchange calls with the meadowlark on the trail, the wind literally swallowed up everything each of us said. At night the wild gusts beat against my house as if it were a February blizzard. When the first calm warm sunny evening comes, 68 degrees and a 2 mph breeze, I'm going to slaughter the fatted calf and drink a glass of dark red wine as the sun slips over the western horizon.

The near-total lunar eclipse Monday night was magnificent. I got up four times to gaze in wonder.

We are fortunate to live out in the middle of nowhere, where there is so much to explore, and where you ignore the earth and the natural world at your peril. It's a kind of backwater paradise, if we have the will to keep it.

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The Ages Have Been at Work and Man Can Only Mar It

My goal this summer is to visit all the Special Places designated by Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem and the North Dakota Industrial Commission. Last Saturday I took a couple of delightful badlands greenhorns to the Killdeer Mountains and Little Missouri State Park. We drove from Bismarck to Dickinson the easy way as quickly as possible. Then the adventure began. We turned north.

North Dakota highway 22 between Dickinson and the New Town turnoff used to be one of the greatest roads of the Great Plains. Now it is not much more than an industrial corridor, one of the two north-south transportation trunkways in the Bakken Oil Industrial Park. The other is US85. When I was growing up in the 1960s, ND22 was one of those wonderful "barely paved" roads, narrow, serpentine, a little dangerous in places, a slender ribbon of asphalt that looked as if it might just blow away in the next big drought. You felt like you were on a vision quest when you drove it, especially north of Killdeer. During the last oil boom, in the 70s and 80s, it was widened and straightened and given proper shoulders. That made it safer and less interesting. And now it has been transformed into an ugly industrial corridor. You cannot believe how long it takes you these days to get out of Dickinson's corrugation-and-Quonset shadow. The north-suburb stoplights stretch up to where Manning is supposed to be!

We stopped at what's left of Lost Bridge 20 miles north of Killdeer. The funky old steel girder bridge, built during the Clutch Plague, has been gone since 1994, when a typically bland and efficient DOT concrete slab replaced it. It used to be one of the most delightful moments in North Dakota wandering, to crest the bluff where the rolling plains break down and suddenly you are cast right down into the heart of the badlands, and way, way down there where a cottonwood river runs through the scene there was the uncanny little steel arch of Lost Bridge. Somehow that lonely bridge made a magical landscape even more magical. It reminded you of both the poverty and the audacity of North Dakota in 1930, tucked up in almost complete isolation at the top of America along the Canadian border, a profoundly rural and simple land of barely mechanized farms and traditional horseback cattle ranches. The bridge had been built in anticipation of a serious north-south road, a paved road, but the funds just weren't there in those desperate years when a third of the people of North Dakota were on direct federal assistance, and the outmigration was appalling, so the bridge, impressive for its time, just sat there all alone, gleaming for no good reason in the middle of nowhere, with a two track dirt road snaking off in either direction.

Lost Bridge was part of the romance of North Dakota. That romance is being erased now at a furious pace because that vast sweet western landscape is being refitted as rapidly as possible as an industrial platform for the mere extraction of oil and gas. Our gods are now Efficiency and Profit and Economic Development and Production. Nothing is sacred to such gods. The Bakken carbon zone is merely a problem to be solved—how to turn that entire landscape into an interlocking extraction machine as efficiently as possible. There is no room for romance in such a paradigm, or the kind of quaint country heritage that you find in those old thick county history books, Slope Saga, Pioneer Tales, and Echoing Trails. There is no longer any respect for the sacred places of North Dakota, because to grant that anything is sacred the extractors would have to acknowledge that western North Dakota is something more than an industrial platform, and that would force them to do some tiptoeing, which would violate the gods of Efficiency and Profit. To such an Extraction Engine the Lost Bridges of the West are just a nuisance and the badlands are just a slightly more challenging development platform than the smooth plains all around them.

One small section of the old girder bridge has been embedded into a roadside turnoff on the south side of the Little Missouri River. A number of years ago a superb outsized metal historical marker was attached to the last span, with an incised image of old Lost Bridge and information about how it came to be lost. The sign is gone now. Where did it go? It was too big to be stolen, so it must have been demoted.

The Republican Party platform, adopted a week ago in Minot, opposed the proposed Clean Water, Wildlife, and Parks Fund Constitutional Measure by declaring proudly that North Dakota has "balanced development needs of the industry with the stewardship of our state's natural, historical, and environmental resources."

Here's an example. Precisely where ND 22 sweeps up to the lip of the Lost Bridge badlands, precisely where the rolling plains yield to the magnificent chasm of the Little Missouri River, in what has to be regarded by any breathing being as one of the four or five most beautiful places in North Dakota (or for that matter, on the Great Plains), a Salt Water Disposal plant has been erected. There it is, right on the rim, right at the entrance to Little Missouri State Park, a dozen large brown cylindrical storage tanks, and an array of dumping stations that looks like a gigantic covered truck stop. A line of huge mud-splattered oil trucks idles nearby, waiting their turns, their diesel gurglings replacing the quietude of the last great stretch of the Little Missouri with industrial noise.

All I can say is that you have to go see it to believe that such a facility could be built in such a place, when it could just as easily have been built just about anywhere in the neighborhood, and at the very least a couple of miles back from the South Rim of the Little Missouri gorge. If you didn't know better, if you were a visitor from Jupiter, you'd have to conclude that it was put there for the express purpose of destroying the view and the serenity and the grandeur and the poetry of the place. But you do know better. It wasn't erected in one of the most sublime places in North Dakota out of malice. It was thrown up there out of indifference.

At the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, in May 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt said, "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it." Well, this is our Grand Canyon, and oh my have we marred it. Who's responsible for this travesty? We are. Industry is indifferent. Dunn County didn't stop it. The state of North Dakota permitted it. We the people were apparently asleep and, voila, one morning it was there.

I urge you with the deepest sincerity to go see it right away. And ask yourself, is this ok? Is this "balanced development" that exhibits "stewardship of our state's natural, historical, and environmental resources."

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Whining the Long Winter from Heated Car Seats

Enough winter already. If you don't like winter you don't really like North Dakota. Still, enough.

I have a well-off friend who whines all through every winter as if some dark cosmic conspiracy existed to chap his lips and make him dread getting out of his car when he gets to the office. He could live anywhere in the free world—Arizona, California, New Mexico, Florida, even Colorado—but he chooses to dwell here. Keep in mind that he lives in a climate-controlled house. He has never had to shovel coal, cut firewood, or even light a pilot light for all I know. He has a thermostat, which means that he doesn't have to stoke the fire when he is cold or back it away when it overheats his house. He has indoor plumbing with designer fixtures, the kind you pay extra for when you buy a house.

In the morning he starts his car from inside his kitchen while reading the paper and making himself cups of designer coffee on his sweet digital coffee dispenser. In the background, his home theater system plays cheerful morning music selected by a cloud brain that monitors his choices over time and suggests new sounds for the royal ear. He does not have to face the outdoor air in order to get into his car, and when he gets in he is greeted by pre-heated seats. The garage door opens automatically to let him out and then closes behind him as he drives off. He has an array of electronic comforts to get him from his garage to the office—XM Satellite Radio, an inborn navigation system, hands free cell phone service (did I mention heated seats?).

So far as I know he has never fed (or pulled) a calf, never fixed fence in a sleet storm, never hauled a bale, never cleared a drain field on Memorial Day, never shoveled his way to the milk barn at 4 a.m. In fact, when it snows here in Dakota, he has a professional crew who spring into action in the night to clear his sidewalks before the sheer inconvenience of it can be noticed.

At any given moment, between October 15 and June 5, he basks in a climate-controlled shirtsleeve interior space, sealed off from the Great Plains. He could just as easily be in Honduras or Hong Kong. He has not had to get up to change the channel for thirty years, and these days he is never more than 10 seconds from a handheld device that would have made Leonardo da Vinci faint with delight. From the top of his flawless palm, he can tell you any fact at any time from a variety of online sources, text his sons in a faraway state without seeking or buying a postage stamp, Facetime with his granddaughters (for free, for ever, anywhere on earth), check his stock profile, buy tickets for a movie, pay his utility bills, make (and edit) a movie of his foot at the end of his Barcalounger, or even pull files through his phone from his work computer across town. And of course check the North Dakota weather using his weather app, and then post a whining lament about our horrible winters on Twitter or Facebook.

Ah, the strenuous life.

The funny thing is that his great-grandparents grew up in a sod house they made by cutting out clouts of prairie earth with shovels and axes. One of his uncles lived in a cave with a wooden front door. The interior of the sod house was 16 feet by nine, and the window (when they finally got one) was a translucent piece of sheepskin. They kept warm in the winter mostly by huddling, all eight of them, the pioneer "group snug," and the whole family slept in just two beds. They burned buffalo chips to cook and what scattered wood they could find in the nearby coulees. Occasionally they lit lamps at night, but for the most part when the night came they all just went to bed. The outhouse was a fetid gash thirty feet from the shanty; in the winter they just used old gallon-sized coffee cans in the corner of the hut and lugged it out in the morning. Someone hauled water into the house every day. When they bathed, two, three, or five members of the family shared the same water in succession. When they wanted to know where Beethoven was buried or how many acre feet there are in the Aral Sea, or what the highest peak in the Andes is, they pulled their battered copy of Funk and Wagnall's one-volume Cyclopedia of World Knowledge out of a trunk, browsed it for half an hour, and decided it was not really necessary to know what the highest peak in the Andes is.

We North Dakotans were once that people. That stock, as we like to say. That was a brutal life, or at least a very basic life, and they really did walk four miles through the snow to school. When they finally got a party line telephone they thought they had died and gone to heaven, but they never made long distant calls unless someone was dead or seriously ill.

We would never go back to lives of such hardship and privation. There is little romance in a world of that much pain and blood and loneliness. If you think I am exaggerating about the conditions of our pioneer forebears, read one of the most astounding Great Plains books, Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains. It's Laura Ingalls Wilder on steroids (or acid or strychnine).

In a sense, the oil field workers who have moved here from Arkansas and Texas and Louisiana are more like our pioneer grandparents than we are. They live for the most part in places of flimsy insulation and walls that rattle in the wind. The heaters in their dwellings make a lot of noise and don't regulate the temperature very evenly. They work outside, and though the gear is better now, they face the full-on brutality of the heart of North Dakota winter day after day. I feel sorry for them in a winter like this. They came for the gold rush opportunity they heard about back home, where there were no good jobs to be had, and they wound up in the most trying climate zone of their lives.

Last week when I took my long evening walk I heard my first meadowlark of the year. He was a loud proud lark on a power pole. He sang at me and to the best of my ability I sang right back to him in the same language: "sure sure, she sure, shuh sheh sheh." I have my seeds sorted. I buy a few more packets every time I go to the grocery store now. I haven't spent an evening out on my deck yet, a guy in a parka and mittens trying to spend an evening out on his deck, but I thought about it as I drove through the blizzard to Dickinson last Monday. And if I concentrated with all my might, I could almost re-call the smell of tomatoes growing in July.

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Spring Break in Rome: With Thanks to Monsignor Shea

By the time you read these words I will be walking the streets of Rome with my favorite person in the world.

Over the years I have written fairly frequently about my daughter. My reason for doing so was that she was having a typical Great Plains childhood in a town the size of Mott—growing up with daily access to a family farm, 4-H, cheerleading, the Christmas pageant at church, driving a grain truck during wheat harvest, the local loudmouths denouncing the Federal Government while waiting for their USDA deficiency payments. You know, rural life on the Great Plains.

Since she went off to an eastern university I have written about her less, because her experiences now are less meaningful as a window on the Great Plains, which is my principal subject. I frankly doubt that she will ever come back, except for holidays and burials. In her short lifetime she has witnessed a hardening of the spiritual arteries of rural Kansas (let's pretend it is only Kansas), and she never took to the windswept bluffs and the seasonal rivers of the plains the way her mother and father each did. Ah, but I had the greatest mentor in the world.

Sometime back in October, she called me from her dorm room and said, "I want to talk about Spring Break." My heart sank. Film loops of the 1960 "classic" Where the Boys Are had instantly begun to run through my head—and they were at the innocent hijinks end of the Spring Break spectrum. What if it's Girls Gone Wild in Fort Lauderdale, Cabo, South Padre Island, Jamaica, Aruba? The dreaded and deadly Aruba! But then she interrupted my nightmare reverie with, "Dad, if you are free during those dates would you take me to Rome for Spring Break?"

I doubt that she could have spoken any other sentence in the world that would have pleased me more fully: Rome, Spring Break, Papa. I cleared my schedule. We booked tickets. She chose the hotel.

Nerds Gone Wild.

There are so many "must see" sites in Rome—things you must see every single time you go—that there is never much time for the scores of second tier attractions, and the thousands of third tier attractions, any one of which would be the most important cultural destination in North Dakota or Montana, if Caesar Augustus (63 BCE-14 CE) or Pope Julius II (1443-1513) had happened to have built them here. There are only a handful of inexhaustible cities on earth, and Rome is at the top of the list: Rome, Paris, London, Vienna. . . If you went to Paris once a year for the rest of your life, you would never be able to conclude, "Well, I have now seen everything Paris has to offer." Rome, if anything, is even more inexhaustible. Our plan is to walk ten miles a day, maps and apps in hand.

It is her first trip to Rome, my fifth.

My daughter has been studying Latin in a curriculum so rigorous that its sends me reeling when she calls at 11:30 p.m. to ask me about a passage in Catullus or Ovid. So our primary interest—this trip!—is classical Rome and Renaissance Rome, though she has also expressed interest in visiting a museum dedicated to Goethe, and the graves of the English poets Shelley and Keats. The only thing I have insisted upon is that we see as many of Bernini's statues as possible. If it is possible that there is a sculptor greater than Michelangelo, I believe it is Gian Lorenzo Bernini (1598-1680). Virtually our first stop will be Bernini's "Ecstasy of Saint Teresa" at the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria.

I cannot imagine going to Rome and not seeing the Sistine Chapel no matter how many times you have seen it, no matter how frustrating the crowds are, or the guards who are trying to manage those crowds. Or Michelangelo's Pieta, the exquisite sculpture of Mary, the mother of Christ, holding the broken body of her son. Such works of art—there are literally thousands in Rome—are among the greatest expressions of the human spirit on earth, equal to Hamlet and Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and the Parthenon and Dante's Inferno. They are also among the greatest expressions of humankind's spiritual hunger. To see them is to ache for human possibility.

This time, I get to see these things through the eyes of the person whose soul I am most invested in of all the souls on the planet. In the old days I would be leading her from painting to statue to tomb to ruin to mosaic, promising gelato as a dividend for just one more cultural stop. Now she will be leading me to places and works of art she has been reading about in her university core curriculum, and explaining their significance (or their significance to her) while I stand beside her filled with pride and double wonder—wonder at the things we stop to observe, and wonder at the young woman observing them. This happened last spring when my mother and I went to New York for Easter. We three went to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and about half an hour into the experience this young sprout said, "Dad, Grandma, I want to show you my favorite Monet." And off we marched into another room. It was one of the supreme moments of my life. I stood next to her as she explicated the painting, looking a good deal like National Lampoon Vacation's Clark Griswold when he is blinking off tears of sentimental family love.

Back home in THIS paradise, my mother and I spent two summers back in the mid-70s wandering around the badlands of North Dakota for a project she was doing with a grant from the ND Department of Public Instruction. She interviewed 50 ranchers and cowboys. I took the photographs and ran the reel-to-reel tape recorder. We camped half a dozen nights in places she did not really want to camp and we cooked camp stews on a wee stove together at the end of remarkable days adrift on scoria roads. That was almost forty years ago now, yet for both of us it remains the very center of our relations of mother and son, and whenever we need a dose of renewal in our friendship, we hearken back to those days of miracle and wonder.

The Pantheon and St. Peter's 2014 will be one of our dad-daughter centerpieces forever, I hope.

A week ago I had the honor of dining with Monsignor James Shea, the president of the University of Mary. He served me a simple dish of exquisite subtle pasta that he put together effortlessly while he offered wry advice about places to linger and places to eat in Rome. We are so fortunate to have Father Shea in our midst, for as long as we can keep him. His learning, his grace, his vision, his boyish life-affirming out-loud laugh, his belief in the spiritual traditions of Rome and the spiritual possibilities of the northern Great Plains, make this a better, richer place to live. He is also our premier guide to the Eternal City.

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"Parte di ampio magnifico Porto." c. 1751. Giovanni Battista Piranesi. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

Industrial Commission: North Dakota Will Be an Energy Sacrifice Zone

A few weeks ago I wrote here that I regarded the Special Places initiative as perhaps the most important moment of North Dakota history in my lifetime. This last week the ND Industrial Commission voted unanimously to "approve" Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem's proposal—but so stripped of its original intent as to be essentially pointless and meaningless. The original proposal (December 2013) would have designated a number of Special Places in western North Dakota and required oil companies to tiptoe around them as they extracted carbon from under both public and private land in their immediate vicinity. In its second generation (February 2014) the Initiative went from a proposed rule to a proposed process, thus seriously reducing its capacity to really protect anything. And now it has been stripped, at the Governor's insistence, of any application to private land and private minerals.

I am by nature an optimist. But for the moment I am really deeply saddened to see the Industrial Commission throw its immense weight (as usual) behind the dynamics of wholesale development—drill, baby, drill—rather than take measured risks on behalf of the commonwealth values of North Dakota. The Industrial Commission has a constitutionally-mandated responsibility to create broad policy protocols for economic activity in North Dakota. In other words, the state government of North Dakota has the right and responsibility to set the terms of industrial engagement as we strip our countryside of its immense oil shale reserves. If Governor Dalrymple and Ag Commissioner Doug Goehring had voted to adopt Attorney General Stenehjem's proposal as he originally presented it, the oil industry and "landowner groups" would have howled, but they would have soon found a way to work with the new protocols, which would have affected only a tiny fraction of the oil properties in North Dakota. Even in its original form, the Initiative would not have prevented a single barrel of oil from being extracted from beneath our soil.

So what's left after last week's vote? A list of special places—still a very good thing, in my opinion, because the State of North Dakota has now gone on record as believing that there really are some extraordinary places worthy of special care. James Madison resisted the Bill of Rights at first (1787) because he thought it would be a mere "parchment guarantee." He was wrong. The Bill of Rights has become a fundamental baseline American text around which we the people can rally when our natural rights are jeopardized. Think of the power of "invoking the fifth," or demanding respect for "my first amendment rights" (or second). The Special Places List of 2014 gives the people who love the landscape of western North Dakota official permission to rally around more than a dozen extraordinarily beautiful and fragile places that need and deserve advocates.

The effective collapse of the Special Places initiative points to a deep problem of North Dakota life. If the Special Places were Mount Rushmore, the Grand Tetons, Yellowstone Falls, Monument Valley, Devils Tower, Half Dome, Mount Rainier, or Lake Tahoe, I believe even a pro-development Industrial Commission would find ways to protect their sanctity by setting special conditions for industrial activity on adjacent private properties. If our Special Places were as obviously spectacular as the ones listed above, the people of North Dakota (and throughout the United States) would be their champions and clamor for their protection. The simple truth is that most North Dakotans have never seen the Killdeer Mountains or Pretty Butte or even Little Missouri State Park. Most North Dakotans live well east of Bismarck (the 100th Meridian), and the closer you get to the Red River Valley, where the bulk of our population lives, the more North Dakotans lean into Minnesota. They look east not west. Their idea of a special place is Detroit Lakes.

North Dakota's Special Places are not sublime in the Grand Teton sense of the term. Probably only a few dozen North Dakotans have been to all 18 of them. Most North Dakotans will acknowledge that the badlands are pretty, but when they say "badlands," most North Dakotans are referencing what you see from the Painted Canyon overlook off Interstate 94, what you see from the Burning Hills Amphitheater, or (a couple of times in a lifetime) along the loop road in the South Unit of Theodore Roosevelt National Park. Most North Dakotans have never been to Bullion Butte and only a few thousand have ever climbed it. White Butte, the highest point in North Dakota, at 3,506 feet, is hard to pinpoint as you hurtle along US 85 between Belfield and Bowman. It's not even as impressive as its more traditional cousin Black Butte (on the other side of the highway), and it generally gets talked about by way of a flatlander's smirk.

We North Dakotans undervalue the beauty of our landscapes, including our public lands. We compare our landscapes unfavorably with those of Colorado, Utah, and Montana, or the woods and lake country of Minnesota. For most of North Dakota's policy makers, by which I mean the Industrial Commissioners, the state's regulatory bureaucrats, and most members of the state legislature, the lands in question are something of an abstraction. The attitude of most North Dakotans is that there is not much special here, that the country west of the Missouri River is a vast and largely bleak empty quarter that should be damned grateful that it now finally has found a way to attract economic development. Matthew 6:1: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also."

I sincerely wonder how many of the Special Places our three Industrial Commissioners have visited. I don't mean by flying over them in a plane or helicopter or driving past them en route to somewhere else in suit and tie. I mean get out of the car and spend some time in hiking boots. I know that Wayne Stenehjem ventured quietly to Bullion Butte when it became an issue before the Industrial Commission a year or so ago. That seems to me to be exemplary leadership. I wish the three commissioners would take a weeklong Special Places vacation, with no media and no neckties, camp out on the ground (no RVs) at Pretty Butte north of Marmarth, and climb White Butte on a hot July afternoon, to watch the thunderheads gather and rumble in from the west. I'd want them to have a picnic of baguettes and cheese within the perimeter of Theodore Roosevelt's cabin site at the Elkhorn Ranch. Month after month the Industrial Commission sits in judgment of the future of North Dakota and yet they have been making profound decisions about places they know mostly from maps.

I hope everyone who is reading these words will go visit the Special Places between Easter and first snowfall. If you contact me (see below) I will give you tips about how to sequence your visit, and which ones you can legally climb. We need to build a broad protective constituency for the subtle magnificence of western North Dakota. Until you have been to the Elkhorn Ranch (no climbing required), you cannot, in my opinion, quite realize how much is at stake as we frack North Dakota.

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