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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The Light Returns, Can Spring Be Far Behind?

As far as I'm concerned, winter's over. I'll bet we have had the same experience sometime in the last ten days or so.

Last weekend I was in Florida, and I arrived home late last Sunday night. After puttering around the house for a while I slipped into bed (clean sheets!) with a book about the English explorer and courtier Sir Walter Raleigh. There is nothing quite so enjoyable as cheating sleep for an extra hour because the book you are reading is that good. It happens seldom and it is always a thrill. My eyes were drooping with road weariness and fatigue, and literally trying to close, but I was so engrossed in an account of Raleigh's 13-year imprisonment in the Tower of London (1603-1616) that I was unwilling to give in to the mere carnality of sleep. One of Raleigh's themes—because he was the epitome of the Renaissance man—is that the soul is divine and immortal, or at least in search of the divine, while the body is a base vessel, and therefore it is our duty in life to give our best energy to the work of the soul. So I read until well after 1 a.m., just to the point where you get that little sick feeling that you have cut a big hole into the next day's alertness and productivity.

These days when I go to sleep I silently summarize what I have learned today, silently out loud, if that makes any sense, not only because it is a way of retaining at least a little of several hundred pages of information from several books on several subjects, but because it invariably puts me to sleep faster than Sominex. My internal monologue had reached, "Queen Elizabeth had four principal favorites in the course of her 45-year reign: the Earl of Leicester, Christopher Hatton, the Earl of Essex, and Walter Raleigh," when at last I fell asleep.

Well, now you know why I live all alone!

The next thing I knew I was sitting up in my bed blinking off sleep and stretching, startled by all the bright daylight streaming into my bedroom. My immediate assumption was that I had slept late—another victim of the Tower of London—and that my whole day was going to be scrambly. You know how when the day starts out in a "time hole" things usually never quite calm down. But when I glanced over at the clock it was only 7:30 a.m. And then I said out loud, "The light has returned, the light has returned."

We may get some brutal weather between now and mid-April, but as far as I'm concerned, winter is essentially over the day you realize that the light has returned to the northern plains. That moment just happens, suddenly, when you least expect it, like the morning you wake up and feel the sudden urgent need to get a haircut. In the instant when you realize that the Light has triumphed over the Darkness once again (Genesis 1:3)—a primordial human experience that goes back to the inarticulate dawn of humanity, to henge structures or beaver totems—you actually find yourself lifting your head from the ground and looking around at the great plains with a renewed sense of life, and wonder. We spend the winter cast down.

The relativity of time is one of the great mysteries of life. A watched pot really doesn't boil. If you agree to have one more drink in a bar at 10:30 p.m. the next thing you remember is the bartender telling you and the other dregs to clear out. If you have an important project due at the end of the week the time hurtles by to punish you, but if you are waiting for your daughter to arrive home for the Christmas holidays the time creeps along, as Shakespeare puts it, like a "whining school-boy, with his satchel and shining morning face, creeping like snail unwillingly to school." You think you don't have time for a daily walk or a run, but if you carve out that hour the day expands mystically with the free gift of time. And of course you live longer, too. I read once, in a book on yoga, "He who stands on his head three hours a day will conquer time." At some cost to your romantic life, I'd say. If you are sitting in a coffee shop writing to deadline, complete strangers will sidle up to chat, and your closest friends will sit down to tell you about the Bobcat skid-steer they received as a Christmas present. Thus torturing you twice. It's the iron law of deadlines.

Last night I began to gather my garden seeds, and to make plans to bring in an astounding crop of tomatoes. The snow is receding from my yard, a little more each sunny day, evaporating rather than melting, and the black earth in one quarter of my garden has been exposed. It won't be long before I will be able to see where I abandoned my hoses when the snow blew in for the first time last fall.

In my neighborhood, most folks have stopped shoveling their driveways. "The heck with it, may as well just wait it out now," seems to be the weary refrain. It won't be long before my near neighbor fires up his lawnmower "just for fun" in his driveway. The day is coming, sometime in the next month, when it's 57 degrees and the streets are running like cricks, and every sap in the subdivision is out washing his car by hand, wearing shorts that should be banned even where men are tanned.

Back to Walter Raleigh (1552-1618). He named Virginia after Elizabeth the Virgin Queen. But he never set foot in Virginia, or the Outer Banks of North Carolina, for that matter, where his lost colony at Roanoke was planted. Between his epic voyages in search of El Dorado (on the east coast of South America), Raleigh was a prisoner in the Tower of London. But he cannot be said to have wasted his time. In the Tower Raleigh wrote The History of the World, more than a million words in approximately 1,400 folio pages. That book has been called "the greatest work of art ever produced in a prison cell." It is one of the supreme achievements of the Renaissance, written in the same exquisite English prose as the King James Bible. It was James who threw Raleigh in prison on trumped up treason charges. The History of the World is one of the greatest no-longer-read books in the English language.

Last year I held a folio copy of the first edition of The History of the World (1614) in my hands in a museum in the Outer Banks. I caressed it in silence with the lightest possible touch, like a sacred relic. For me, that moment was as satisfying as fondling a gold ingot or plunging my hands into a barrel of Bakken crude.

I mean to read the History through, between now and the coming of the first fall snowstorm. Out on my deck in the cool of the evening. Soon.

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Let's Put Our Hand on the Lever Rather Than Our Head in the Sand

Just to be clear.

For what little it is worth, I am solidly in favor of the Bakken Oil Boom. I'm just one citizen of 700,000, of course, and I don't regard myself as having any special insight. But I love North Dakota with all my heart and I want this our shared homeland to thrive in every sense of the term. I see prosperity and economic development as great things, but certainly not the only blessings of North Dakota life. Sometimes I think we are so benumbed by gratitude that this great economic miracle has come to us that we forget that we have the opportunity and responsibility to set the rules of engagement, and take special care of values in North Dakota life that are hard to quantify but essential to our long term happiness.

The Bakken Oil Boom is potentially one of the greatest things ever to happen to North Dakota, if we manage it right, and invest the windfall to create the best possible future for our children and grandchildren. If I could snap my fingers and make it go away, I wouldn't do so. If I could snap my fingers and make it slow down a little, I probably would, but not if that would in any way jeopardize the continuation of serious economic development in North Dakota. Actually, at this point, I don't see how it could be slowed down without violating the property rights of private mineral owners who have signed leases with oil companies, and I am certainly not in favor of that.

According to the experts I trust, the most hectic phase of the oil rush is now coming to an end and a more orderly and less frenetic phase is beginning. As the infrastructure starts to catch up with the volume of human and industrial traffic, the level of chaos and congestion should start to come down. As our law enforcement systems (town, county, state, and national) get the personnel, resources, and training they need to master varieties of anti-social behavior previously rare or unknown on the North Dakota prairie, criminal activity should begin to come down to less alarming levels.

I believe that I am like most North Dakotans in that I now spend a lot of time trying to make sense of what is happening to our beloved homeland, and I'm more often filled with ambivalence than pure joy. Some of what I see delights me. Some of what I see troubles me. Some of what I see horrifies me. Frankly, I'd rather not spend my time thinking about the oil boom. I prefer to think and write about the dance of cottonwood trees after the first freeze, the savagery of a great July thunderstorm, the chaffy smell of the wheat harvest, the way pronghorn antelope turn on their afterburners when they really decide to run. Or the fabulous campy joy of waiting for the Burning Hills Singers to rev up at the Medora Musical. You know: North Dakota.

But rather suddenly an Industrial Revolution has come to the northern Great Plains and like it or not we are in the thick of it. It is now impossible to ignore. The sheer oomph of it (the volume, the speed, the seeming recklessness, the glut of men and vehicles and camp followers) forces everyone who loves North Dakota to wrestle with certain questions—what this means for our character and identity as a people, how this boom will change our towns and cities, how it will transform our favorite landscapes, how this thing will affect outdoor recreation and the state's cherished wildlife, how we should spend the vast private and public revenues, how this will affect our spirit of place. You don't have go out of your way to seek these questions. They hurtle into your consciousness, like it or not, sometimes when you least expect it. We would not be good citizens of North Dakota unless we rise to the challenge of trying to manage our future rather than be steamrolled by it.

Most Bakken benefits should bring delight to every North Dakotan Full employment. Amazing budget surpluses. Tax relief. Full funding for our educational systems. Even more important: Rural renewal. An end to a very long era of depopulation, outmigration, rural strain, and rural decline. A new confidence in the step of virtually every North Dakotan. A belief that the Bakken may propel us into a much better future than we could have dreamed of without its gigantic infusion of energy and capital into North Dakota life. These are benefits of such value, and they solve deep systemic and historic problems of North Dakota life so convincingly, that it's hard to see how any rational person could wish the boom to go away.

Troubling things: Train derailments. Accidental oil spills and water spills. Barroom brawls. Respiratory issues among livestock herds. Surface owners disrupted by oil development from which they get few or no benefits. Loss of wildlife habitat. Industrial encroachment on some of the most beautiful landscapes of North Dakota. Rushed and sometimes shoddy development in oil boomtowns. Skyrocketing rents for people on modest or fixed incomes. The loss of a sense of serenity and security among non-oil residents of our communities.

Horrifying things: Deliberate saline water spills. The spike in murder rates in North Dakota. Drug gangs and actual drug wars in the Bakken zone. Sexual assault, prostitution rings, sex trafficking (i.e., the abduction and rape of young women in Asia, Eastern Europe, and America's Indian reservations, and their delivery into the oil fields). The number of traffic fatalities in which longtime North Dakota residents are killed while simply attempting to go about their lives in the suddenly industrialized landscape.

I do firmly believe that the benefits of the Bakken Oil Boom greatly outweigh the costs. But that doesn't mean we should shrug our shoulders and accept the dark side of the boom as inevitable or "the cost of doing business." The answer is not to decry the oil boom or to live in denial of the "costs," but to address these problems with unblinking firmness, with the gumption and good sense that are the hallmarks of North Dakota life, and with a genuine sense of urgency.

We need to give the oil counties and cities absolutely everything they need to keep on top of this thing, no questions asked, no haggling or penny-pinching. We need to have zero tolerance for industrial negligence and stick it to individuals and rogue companies that violate our landscape, our farm fields, and (potentially) our water supplies. We need to bring in however many cops and federal agents it will take to crush the sex trafficking and the drug gangs. We need absolute transparency in our state agencies, no lies, omissions, or sugar coatings. We need more regulators to enforce North Dakota's excellent regulatory laws. We need to do everything we can to diminish the impact on Theodore Roosevelt National Park and a dozen other very special places in our magnificent countryside.

And we need our state leaders to assure us (out loud) that they regard these problems as something deeper than "growing pains."

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Welcome to the New North Dakota: Enjoy Our "Growing Pains"

Ah, yes, the new North Dakota.

A minor oil spill here and a "minor" oil spill there, a barroom brawl tonight and a domestic homicide tomorrow, a wellhead natural gas explosion in Tioga and an oil train derailment and fire in Casselton. Traffic fatalities now so frequent in northwestern North Dakota as to have ceased to be news. A man living in a dumpster and bodies dumped in dumpsters. Prostitution now punctuates the landscape as densely as oil flares, and prostitution-related violence is filling our emergency rooms. Drugs, drug gangs, drug wars. In fact, nearly pandemic drug use among potential workers, according to the oil industry exports themselves, represents the "biggest roadblock" to a more robust development in the Bakken Oil fields.

How do I know these things? I read it all in the Bismarck Tribune. On the night before I wrote these words I went to the Tribune website to look up something entirely unrelated. But the harmless little thing I was looking for was buried under a slurry of horrifying stories about what North Dakota has become in the last decade. Take a look yourself. It's like seeing your nephew for the first time in a couple of years. His parents look on him as the same old Ralphie, but you instantly notice that he is six inches taller than when you last saw him, he has some chin hairs, he wears outsized jeans jammed well down on his hips, his voice cracks when he talks about the Super Bowl, and he catches himself about halfway into the f-word. Compare copies of the Bismarck Tribune (or Dickinson Press, or Williston Herald, or Minot Daily News) from February 16, 2005, and February 16, 2014, and, as Shakespeare puts it, "hark what discord follows." You can say goodbye to the sleepy old family farm homeland we once were.

When I was growing up, if there were three murders in North Dakota a year we regarded it as the coming of Sodom and Gomorrah. We may have been boring, and we all fretted about depopulation and rural decline, but we were an astonishingly peaceful and neighborly place with a very high quality of life that somehow made up for the dearth of social amenities. Back then, if someone in our acquaintance locked his car doors at night we regarded him as a nervous Nellie.

In the past eight years, the quality of life in North Dakota has soared and plummeted at the same time and from the same cause. We are rich (on the whole, though unevenly), but anyone who tells you we have not lost anything worth keeping has apparently drunk the crude.

Here's what I learned in 30 minutes at the Tribune website Tuesday night.

North Dakota highway 23 west of New Town was closed for seven hours last Saturday after a Louisiana oil field worker by the name of Huan Son of New Iberia, Louisiana, collided with two semi-trucks and a pickup. He was attempting to pass a semi on the crest of a hill. He wound up getting himself killed, causing an oil spill, harrowing the lives of the three other drivers (none, apparently, injured) and damaging their property, and tying up traffic on one of the Bakken's key oil arteries for seven full hours. People don't usually pass on hills unless they are filled with reckless testosterone, drunk, or so frustrated by the antlike pace of traffic that they take what at first seems like a calculated risk. None of the four drivers involved in the wreck have been identified as North Dakotans.

Ten years ago this would have merited banner headlines in the state's newspapers and it would have dominated the coffee klatch salons in North Dakota Cenex stations for days. By now it is just a nub in the news. It has gotten to the point that I don't even read through such stories anymore. We just shake our heads and move on.

Meanwhile, a "routine" trailer court homicide investigation in southeast Mandan has proved to be the tip of a criminal underworld iceberg. It all began when a man named Alex Landson was found dead of multiple gunshot wounds on January 27. As the web of felonious activity widened, investigating officers found methamphetamines, psilocybin, marijuana, drug paraphernalia, a 9mm handgun, $5,400 in cash, and four cellphones. Hmmm, what cottage industry must this represent? One of the murder suspects and two others were also charged with terrorizing and felonious restraint. They had apparently lured an unnamed woman to one of the defendant's homes, assaulted her, held her against her will, and threatened to kill her and her children. The principal suspect apparently called a friend in search of rolls of plastic with which to wrap her body once they killed her, and bleach and gloves so that they could scrub away the evidence. They actually boarded up a door on the house to prevent the woman from leaving. She says they assaulted her with a stun gun. In spite of all this, she was able to escape the next day.

When you get to the "we'll kill you and dispose of your body with Saran wrap" stage of drug trafficking, you are no longer merely supplementing your income as a night clerk.

In related news, a 67-year-old Missouri man by the name of Marvin Lord has been charged with facilitating prostitution at a north Bismarck motel. Hotel employees called the police after observing Lord meeting strange men in the motel lobby, escorting them to his room, and then waiting in the lobby for them to return. A 41-year-old Chinese woman in his company has been charged with prostitution. As is usual in such cases, she pled not guilty. Lord claims they are married. He told the judge they have been in North Dakota "a little over a week." The Chinese woman has a valid travel visa. She has not been named because it is possible that she is the victim of sex trafficking.

Sex trafficking. In North Dakota. In North Dakota! In NORTH DAKOTA.

Last Sunday, Minot police arrested five men alleged to be operating a prostitution ring in the "Magic City." It need hardly be said that these crimes—brought to light by deliberate sting operations—are merely the tip of the prostitution iceberg. That such activity is one of the "growing pains" of the oil boom goes without saying.

Is all this your idea of North Dakota?

Stories indicating that the state of North Dakota is losing $1 million a month in natural gas (flaring) taxes, that Amtrak trains can hardly pierce through the glut of oil train traffic on our beleaguered railways, that a "Watford City man" has been charged with eight felony counts for gun possession (related to murders and mayhem in Spokane, Idaho), that state game wardens can hardly keep up with the poaching epidemic, or that it is going to take a couple of years to clean up the September 2013 Tioga oil pipeline spill, are now considered too "minor" to hold our collective attention.

Words matter. To call these things "growing pains" is a form of economic and linguistic obscenity.

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Intimations of Mortality on my Birthday

I rattled through another birthday this last week. Thanks to Facebook, which celebrated its tenth birthday on my 59th, I received greetings from several hundred people scattered hither and yon across the planet. Facebook is many things—mostly good—but for me the best of it is the birthday list, one of the great inventions of the electronic revolution. In the old days I knew fewer than ten birthdays, and managed to miss even some of them. Now, if I only check the FB list in the morning, I can reach out to all of my friends on their birthdays. And even though we all know that it is Big Brother Zuckerberg rather than our innate thoughtfulness that makes this happen, the simple fact is that nobody is sorry to be remembered on her or his birthday. If you stripped Facebook of cat photos (cat seeming to play a piano, cat seeming to watch Kardashians) and extremist political "memes," and preachy New Age maxims ("Reach for the Sky, Not the Pie"), there would be very little left. I like to think of Facebook as a Birthday App for approximately a seventh of the world population.

My birthday was a little somber. One of my closest friends died a week ago in Reno, Nevada, and I could not (can not) get her out of my mind. She was just 67 years old. Then came the news that one of my favorite actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman, died of a drug overdose in New York City at the age of 46. To top it off, I had to go see my doctor in Bismarck on my birthday.

A week ago in Dickinson, as I was about to get into my car, parked on a hill, while carrying a heavy bag, and talking on the phone, I slipped on some ice. My feet did that cartoon thing at 650 rpms, but I could not regain my footing (hill, heavy bag). As I went down I reached out to steady myself on the trunk of my car with my right arm (mistake). Then I felt that horrible sickening moment when the whole weight of your body forces your skeleton and musculature to bend in a direction they were not designed to bend, and you realize that not even the instant intense pain is a sufficient measure of how badly you have dinged your body. It would have been better just to have fallen. In retrospect, I'm surprised that my arm didn't just wrench right off like a turkey wishbone. It was ten below.

For the next few days I actually had to use my left arm to position my right arm—on the steering wheel, at the j-k-l-; position on the keyboard, on the shower spigot. My right arm was essentially inert, as if a very large bent summer sausage were attached to my right shoulder by a piece of baling wire, but with workable fingers at the end of it. If I kept the arm tucked right into my ribcage the pain subsided mostly, but when I screwed up my courage to move the arm, some structural things in my shoulder snapped and tripped and at a certain angle the pain went straight through the roof. It was not very easy to sleep. If I rolled wrong in the night, the pain was such that I actually shot out of the bed like a middle aged rocket. At one point I contemplated learning to write with my left hand. It could not have hurt more if I had gnawed it off like a beaver in a trap.

I'm not much of a doctor sort of guy. I've only spent two nights in the hospital in my life, long ago in my childhood. But at some point in the last week I decided I am going to need my shoulder and right arm, so I got an appointment to see my doctor, a really wonderful man whose care I would hate to lose (are you listening Obama?!) By the iron law of automobile breakdowns and health problems, my shoulder was doing pretty well when he poked and prodded, and he concluded that I didn't need an x-ray and certainly not an MRI. He's one of those knuckleheads who believes in human health more than industrial medicine. I told him it was my birthday and I what I really wanted was a doctor like Michael Jackson's or Rush Limbaugh's, who would prescribe a range of miracle pharmaceuticals (up, down, sleep, ecstasy, mellow, alert, numb, lobotomic), particularly that thing they give you at the colonoscopy where you are not even sure that it occurred afterward. He suggested asprin. He wouldn't even give me a prescription for sleeping pills. Like my friends at Fox, I'm just going to blame Obamacare for everything.

I went to the drug store to get the one thing he prescribed for me. It would be about half an hour, they said. So I decided to spend a part of my birthday working every aisle of the store. I have the following report.

One. Never go to a drug store on your birthday. You cannot work the aisles without a very lively sense of your mortality. The shelves are chock full of things that remind you of how much can go wrong with your body: bandages, trusses, knee braces, adult diapers, pain creams, rubber sheets, heating pads, cooling pads, enema bags, collapsible canes, black eye patches, hemorrhoid donuts, toilet seat extenders, and ten thousand potions that either retain or eliminate your bodily wastes, at any rate of disposal you can imagine.

Two. For the first hour I watched an octogenarian try to find the right replacement battery for his hearing aid. It seems cruel that the labeling on these batteries is in the tiniest possible typeface, and that the invisible etching makes it virtually impossible to tell the difference between identical battery X and identical battery Y even when you are young and eagle-eyed. Nobody helped the elderly man, of course, and if they had tried—well, he wouldn't be able to hear them until he installed a new battery in his hearing aid.

Three. I believe the word "relief" is the commonest word in the store. Pain relief. Bowel relief. Pressure relief. Anxiety relief.

Four. Let me now praise capitalism. How many types of painkiller do we really need? Two bursting aisles? How many varieties of vitamins—a version for every orifice? How many types of shampoo, hand cream, hair dye, lipstick, deodorant, or hair spray does a free society want or need? There are, I discovered in hour two, several dozen varieties of condom—comfort, size, fit, color, aroma, ribbing, duration. How would one ever be able to choose?

Five. I'm happy to report that you can still buy a Vegematic in America, and a device to make boiled eggs without those pesky shells, and an electric mold for the perfect Taco salad shell.

My co-pay was so high that I could have ditched the medicine and bought each of the 234,000 Valentine cards in the store, and every bag of stale pistachios.

Ah, birthday memories. I blame you know who.

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Bread and Circuses, a Mythical State of the Union

I watched the opening bars of the State of the Union Message on Tuesday night, but I couldn't bear to watch the whole thing. Once I saw the guy from Duck Dynasty up there in the gallery, I lost heart. When's the last time you heard a good State of the Union Message? They tend to be endless lists of small policy initiatives, coupled with patently erroneous claims that the state of the nation is better than everyone knows it to be. At one point the President said we have cut the deficit by half—did anyone really believe that? At another point he said we've had truly impressive national job growth. While urging Congress to extend unemployment benefits (again) to 1.3 million good Americans who cannot find jobs.

I hope I live long enough to hear a President who just levels with us. If I were Obama I'd admit that the rollout of the Affordable Care Act was pathetic. I'd admit that we did not protect our diplomats in Benghazi well enough, and that the administration's immediate public relations response to the attack was a shameful act of deliberate deception. I'd admit that the deficit is out of control. Candor—a fundamental honesty about America's real situation—would, I believe, build bipartisan respect and perhaps even support. We know from the latest Wall Street Review poll that 63% of Americans think the country is heading in the wrong direction. That's worth noting if you really want to talk about the "State of the Union." Not great.

It seems to me the Thomas Jefferson had it right. He chose not to go up in person to Congress to deliver his Annual Messages. He broke with the habit of his two predecessors, George Washington and John Adams, whose annual appearances before Congress Jefferson saw both as a waste of time and quasi-monarchical. Jefferson didn't want America to be about pageantry. He wanted it to be about limited government, "a few plain duties performed by a few honest men." To fulfill his constitutional role, Jefferson wrote (no ghostwriters) an Annual Message and sent it by courier up to the Capitol.

It wasn't until Woodrow Wilson that Presidents returned to Congress for these annual processionals, in which all three branches of our national government face each other in the same chamber—and the black-robed Supreme Court, apparently, just sits there solemnly in the front row, unmoved by the political circus. It amazes me that Theodore Roosevelt wasn't the one to break Jefferson's precedent of silence. It must have nearly killed him when his dreaded rival Wilson read his Annual Message out loud in person before Congress on December 2, 1913. Surely out of one side of TR's mouth came, "The self-serving scoundrel!" and out of the other, "Why didn't I think of that, Edith?"

What we really need is a constitutional revolution. Presidents have recently been ruling more and more by executive order. That's not even slightly the spirit of the Constitution written in 1787. It's the legislative branch that is supposed to pass laws and set policy, the executive to enforce them. If the President can raise the minimum wage by presidential fiat, then we are no longer a republic in any meaningful sense of the term. This President is threatening to use executive orders to work around the Republicans in Congress, but the Founders wanted the people's work to be done exclusively by the people's representatives, and they were unambiguously committed to checks and balances in the national government. I find this trend towards government by executive order alarming, particularly since there is no grant of such authority in the Constitution itself.

We also need to address the question of war powers.

I went to see Lone Survivor the other night. If I had known how gory it would be I might not have gone. The film is about a special forces raid in Afghanistan that goes terribly wrong; only one individual of a cluster of Navy Seals survives the broken mission. The film is based on a true story. Lone Survivor was so harrowing that there were times when I had to cover my eyes, and afterwards I actually felt the need for a glass of wine. For me, two reactions were unavoidable. First, that we owe our men and women in uniform an unlimited quantity of respect. It's hard to believe that there are Americans who are willing to take such risks, to give (as Lincoln put it), "the last full measure of devotion" to the freedom and security of the United States. But they do.

Second, what the heck are we doing in Afghanistan? We all know that Afghanistan has been invaded by a range of empires in its long sad tribal history, and that the Afghanis always "win," because the occupiers eventually lose heart and go home. Our military troops have performed admirably under difficult conditions there, but we cannot even keep the US-backed puppet government under Hamid Karzai from openly decrying American actions and repeatedly betraying American interests. Who exactly are we fighting for, and to what end? Political stability? Easier to land an astronaut on Mars.

When we finally leave—after what the President called "the longest war in American history"—and the Afghani tribesmen settle into another chapter of their endless civil war, reprisal followed by raid followed by atrocity followed by temporary dictator followed by assassination, does anyone really believe it will have been worth the loss of 2,287 American soldiers (so far)? Who will be the last American to die in Afghanistan? And for what?

Over the past week I have been rereading Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, one of America's greatest books. He, like Jefferson, believed that it was too late in the world's history to settle our international disputes by way of war. It was Franklin, in the Autobiography, who concluded his section on the success of the American Revolution with, "There never was a good war, or a bad peace." The Founding Fathers wanted to make sure war wasn't one of our routine ways of dealing with the rest of the world. So they insisted that wars must be declared by the House of Representatives, the branch of government closest to the people themselves. They insisted that War Department appropriations must be re-authorized every two years, so that we did not fall into the habit of permanent and independent militarism. They believed that wars should be paid for with ready tax money, so that the people would realize how expensive they were and, in most cases, think twice before opening their checkbooks and committing the nation to a species of organized barbarism in which, as Jonathan Swift put it, "A soldier is a Yahoo (man) hired to kill in cold blood as many of his own species, who have never offended him, as possibly he can."

Modern Presidents have far too much independent authority to wage war, and of course we don't actually pay for those wars, except in the lives of the dedicated Americans who go fight them on our behalf.

The highlight of the State of the Union Message was President Obama's beautiful tribute to Army Ranger Sergeant 1st Class Cory Remsburg, who was grievously wounded in Afghanistan and who has endured a long series of operations merely to get about 50% of his body functions back. We owe him and tens of thousands like him way more than a standing ovation and solid veteran's benefits. We owe him a better U.S. government and a more authentic national purpose.

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Praise for Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem's Special Places Initiative

We have now reached the defining moment of North Dakota life in the 21st century.

North Dakota Attorney General Wayne Stenehjem has quietly put together a very modest proposal to designate a small number of acreages of western North Dakota as special or extraordinary places, and to require oil companies to treat those few parcels with special care when they extract the oil. The Attorney General has proposed that the North Dakota Industrial Commission, of which he is one of three members, adopt a set of special rules (or processes) for the management of those few acres.

It's that simple. And here's the most important point. If the Industrial Commission votes to accept Stenehjem's proposal, not a single barrel of oil will be put off limits.

The short list of parcels Stenehjem has in mind includes such things as the near perimeter of the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park; North Dakota's most magnificent landform Bullion Butte (south of Medora); the inner channel of the Little Missouri River; historically important sections of the Killdeer Mountains; the confluence of the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers; the shoreline of Lake Sakakawea; Pretty Butte north of Marmarth. And a few others.

If you ask 100 people to name the most beautiful, fragile, pristine, or sensitive parcels of western North Dakota, almost everyone's list is going to be the same for the first dozen or so places. Everyone understands that the best of the badlands are more valuable to the Idea and Identity of North Dakota than a lovely coulee near Parshall or Crosby. Public lands are inevitably easier to identify with, recreate on, and protect than strictly private properties, however beautiful those may be or special to their private owners. We take our collective identity from those things and places we especially prize (a flag, a veteran's cemetery, a church, a landscape vista), and it is in the interest of a civilized people to make reasonable discriminations about such things as they develop and clarify public policy.

When Stenehjem began to think about this initiative he said, emphatically, that any list he made would need to be shorter rather than longer (a very few very special places, not a unrestrained conservation "wish list"), and that no list would preclude oil development in those parcels. He was adamant that the state of North Dakota has no right to violate the sanctity of contract between private parties or to intrude itself between a willing mineral owner and a willing oil company.

The shortness of Stenehjem's list and his repeated vocal insistence on the sanctity of private property rights has frustrated some members of the environmental or conservationist community in North Dakota. But Stenehjem did not undertake this initiative to please this or that constituency. He has taken the lead because he loves North Dakota, greatly appreciates the landscapes that happen to overlay the Bakken oil shales, and because he understands that reasonable regulatory protocols are as important in the oil fields as they are in all businesses that impact public health and welfare. As a member of the state Industrial Commission, he has a unique public responsibility—to uphold our laws, to promote economic development, to serve the interests of all North Dakotans, and to balance competing interests for the benefit of the broadest number of people possible.

I think Wayne Stenehjem deserves great credit for his leadership in the most critical issue in North Dakota life, the most critical moment (I believe) in my lifetime as a North Dakota citizen. My respect for him was always high, but it has deepened dramatically as this initiative has begun to unfold. The easiest thing would have been to just leave it alone, to stamp the oil permits and get out of the way. To show leadership at a time like this is to invite criticism and backlash from both ends of the spectrum, and to have one's integrity maligned by those (on the one hand) who think that any restraint on the oil industry is tantamount to confiscation and communism, and those (on the other) who believe that the special places initiative is nothing more than a public relations smokescreen behind which the "rape" of North Dakota will continue unabated.

The Attorney General is no wild-eyed liberal. He is not a "radical environmentalist," as some in the oil industry like to characterize those who do not rubber stamp all of their extraction plans. He is not trying to lock up North Dakota to oil development, or even a tiny number of parcels. Above all, he knows and respects the U.S. Constitution, the North Dakota Constitution, and the common law. He knows and condemns what would constitute a Fifth Amendment "taking" of landowners' or mineral owners' property rights, or an unfair burden on private property. He's a brilliant man. He's a Republican. He's a cheerful and serious advocate of the oil boom. He's a man of unimpeachable integrity.

The fate of the Attorney General's initiative is going to tell us who we are and what we value and where we draw the line as the first half of the 21st century unfolds in North Dakota. If his leadership prevails, it will not only help to mitigate the industrial impact on those parcels he has designated (and yet still permit oil development), but it will also reassure the people of North Dakota that the government of the state is directing this great economic boom rather than being passively directed by it, that we are sovereign, that we are in control of our own destiny. His list may seem conservative and modest, but it will make a huge difference to the spirit of North Dakota. We are awash in oil.

If Stenehjem's initiative fails, if neither Governor Dalrymple nor Ag Commissioner Doug Goehring chooses to support the Special Places protocols, it will be an unmistakable sign that nothing is sacred in North Dakota anymore, that everything is for sale, with the least resistance, to the highest bidder. It will be a license to the oil companies that they may have their way with us, because we are insufficiently committed to our own sacred landscape to make reasonable requests about how it should be stripped of its oil reserves.

Oil industry pressure on Governor Dalrymple is going to be gigantic, almost unbearable. Already a "landowners' group" has sprung up, located interestingly enough in Tulsa, Oklahoma, denouncing the Attorney General's initiative, urgently warning mineral owners that, "Nearly a million acres of private land across the Peace Garden State may soon be restricted or even condemned." This is so erroneous that it would appear to be a naked lie, both with respect to the number of acres in question, and the suggestion that lands may be condemned, which is no part of Stenehjem's proposal whatsoever. Furthermore, that "landowners' group" warns that, "Out-of-state interests are pushing their anti-development agenda in Bismarck." This would be hilarious if it were not patently untrue and unfair. The Special Places initiative was wholly the brainchild of Wayne Stenehjem (decidedly in-state!) and nobody else, and his "agenda" is in no way whatsoever "anti-development."

I find such tactics simply appalling. An initiative of this importance deserves a serious public debate. That debate will be passionate, possibly even acrimonious at times. But it ought to be a debate by North Dakotans about the future of North Dakota, and it ought to be conducted with a commitment to honesty and fair play.

In my 58 years, I have never felt more strongly about anything than I feel about this.

Are There No "Higher Laws" in North Dakota Life?

For the past five days I have been holed up at a fabulous Spartan resort just inside Idaho west of Missoula, Montana, with a dozen folks from all over America. We gathered in the mountain snow at Lochsa Lodge for the sole purpose of discussing one of the world's great books, Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or Life in the Woods.

Walden has many themes. It is much more than a book about one solitary man's love of nature. It is a surprisingly muscular and argumentative book that wrestles with some of the main issues in American life, then and now. It was published in 1854 at a time of rapid industrialization in the United States, when the railroad boom was transforming the landscape and the social structure of America in an unprecedented manner.

One of our participants was an ideological libertarian. He believes that government exists solely for the purpose of protecting property rights, and that anything else government might do is an intrusion into our liberties. He believes that absolutely everything can be "monetized," and that the free market is the best tool humans have to sort everything out, from the price of a loaf of bread to the delivery of health care.

So, to take an easy example, it's the year 1900 and the timber companies are cutting down every redwood tree they can get their hands on because there is a lucrative market for redwood lumber. Theodore Roosevelt (a big believer in free enterprise) decides that unless government steps in to manage the resource and conserve it for future generations, the short-sighted profiteers of the timber industry will cut down the last redwood to squeeze the last dollar out of the species. Moreover, Roosevelt believes that there is an inherent majesty in a redwood forest and that is in the interests of American civilization to release a few extraordinary things from the tyranny of the market. TR therefore determines that the national government will supervise the timber industry on public lands to insure the sustainability of our forests.

According to our Lochsa libertarian, that was the wrong thing to do: sloppy, sentimental, misguided, unfair, possibly un-American. "If you really think a redwood tree is as valuable standing in the air as it is turned into lumber for redwood decks, then you need to outbid the lumber companies tree by tree or forest by forest. The market works." You don't want a power co-op to put up wind towers just offshore at Martha's Vineyard, outbid them for the resource.

Thoreau was something of a libertarian too. He trumped Jefferson's "that government is best which governs least," to declare, "that government is best which governs not at all." Thoreau was committed to the individual, not the state. But Thoreau believed that individual had a duty to evolve from the brutishness and savagery of his base character into a more enlightened being, that America cannot be a great civilization unless we learn to hearken not just to economic laws but also to what he calls "higher laws." An individual who learns to hear "higher laws" does not believe that the value of everything can be measured in dollars. I think Roosevelt would regard Thoreau as hopelessly naïve. While you wait for the slaughterhouse owners to evolve, you are going to eat a fair quantum of rats, excrement, and tainted pork in your breakfast sausage.

On the third day of the Lochsa retreat I took a long walk through the woods in the hopes that I would encounter a wolf or a mountain lion. As I crunched through the pure white snowpack along the magnificent Lochsa River, I wondered what are the higher laws of North Dakota life in the era of the Bakken Oil Boom.

An oil shale deposit is different from more traditional pool oil because once you perfect the technology, in a fracturing boom you "strike oil" nearly 100% of the time. There is so much shale oil and natural gas in western North Dakota that you can more or less arbitrarily pick your spacing protocols, lay down a drilling grid of 40-60,000 wells, and then systematically work the field over time, until you have created the maximum extraction efficiency. Most of the land in North Dakota is privately owned. Even most of the public lands are open to development. As long as there is money to be made—and the money to be made dwarfs anything North Dakota has ever seen or dreamed about—oil companies are going to come get it. The drilling of any one individual well is a highly-efficient, nearly miraculous example of human technological ingenuity, and the environmental "footprint" of any given well is comparatively light, especially once the fracking process is over. But add all those drilling events together—systematic oil extraction in every direction—and then add in the pipelines, the storage tanks, the transfer facilities, the natural gas processing plants, the new roads and railroad spurs, the bypasses, the giant parking lots for idle trucks and pipe, and the industrial "hospitality" infrastructure, and—voila--you have transformed western North Dakota from a quiet rural countryside into an overwhelming hive of pell-mell industrial activity.

All on the principle of the market. Although the overwhelming majority of the oil wealth of North Dakota leaves the state never to return (such is the history of North Dakota), the amount of money being left behind in the hands of mineral owners, service providers (from water haulers to car dealers and hotdog stands), and in the coffers of the state treasury is so vast that it makes a mockery of my libertarian friend's economic equations. A day care provider in Watford City can barely pay her bills and put tennis shoes on her children's feet (traditional economy). An elderly couple in Dickinson, living on a modest pension and Social Security, is told that their rent will triple on March 1st (traditional economy). The rancher who would rather not see oil development in that special pasture near the river is told by a company representative or his lawyer that he will be getting checks for tens of thousands of dollars per month if he signs in triplicate, here, here, and here (the oil economy). Who can resist?

It's as if there are two types of currency in North Dakota today—the currency of our state's 125-year history, in which we toiled and scrimped and wound up moderately prosperous because of the quality of our character and our work ethic, and the new currency of unbelievable stacks of carbon money, funny money, that staggers the imagination and overwhelms any discussion of "higher laws."

I believe that North Dakotans value many things that cannot be monetized. If there were a precise enough way of polling the people of North Dakota, I believe that the majority would say they do not want western North Dakota to be overwhelmed by industrialization, however grateful we are for the surpluses and the full employment and rural renewal in our beloved state. Our traditional commitment to higher laws—family, neighborliness, community, volunteerism, faith, stewardship, civility, lawfulness, decency--is what has made us such a special people in such a special, improbable place. But this thing that has come upon us is so gigantic and the payoff is so huge that it is eroding things in our heritage and our character of incalculable value, in both senses of the term.

There is a value in a rolling prairie and windswept ridge, but who will be left to measure it?

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When Did We Get Too Sophisticated to Honor Lawrence Welk?

Three cheers for the State Historical Society of North Dakota (SHSND) for voting to buy the Lawrence Welk homestead at Strasburg, ND. The vote of the SHSND advisory board on January 10 was ah-six-a to ah-five. Lawrence Welk is as much a part of our heritage as Sitting Bull or Custer or Lewis and Clark, none of whom knew they were North Dakotans. Welk never forgot for a moment. If Bobby and Cissy had danced on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Meriwether Lewis would have cheered up and written his book after all.

I'm saddened to hear the naysayers on the editorial pages, blogs, and radio talk shows sneer at Lawrence Welk's greatness, or say that era of our history is "past and good riddance," or that Lawrence Welk is a cornpone source of cultural embarrassment to North Dakota, or that "we cannot afford to be spending our hard-earned tax dollars on something of so little importance." Hard earned?

Remember, the North Dakota tourism theme is "Legendary." The Lawrence Welk Show ran on national commercial television (ABC) for 27.5 years, 1,065 episodes, some of them in living Technicolor. Add to that syndication and three decades of public television reruns, and you have one of the handful of most popular and most important programs in the history of television. Creator and host? A rural North Dakotan who followed his dream and ventured off of a hardscrabble farm into national prominence--and yet never forgot where he came from.

I know the Welk homestead is "lightly visited," to put it mildly. The place where the Champagne Music Master was born and where he first played the accordion is visited by only a few hundred folks per year. Hard to think there will be much of a turnaround even under the superb management and better interpretation of the State Historical Society. But that's not the point. I know the Welk farm is out of the way, that you don't just happen upon it on your trip to Minneapolis or Denver or Big Sky. You have to want to go there, and when you get there, out there in the middle of nowhere, there is not very much to see. Maybe that IS the point. Welk should be a hero to every dreamy North Dakota kid who wants to start a band in his garage, every fifth grade doodler who dreams of being Michelangelo, every shy farm girl who dreams of being a Rockette or performing with the Berlin Philharmonic.

At a time when North Dakota is undergoing a massive industrial, social, and economic transformation, letting its rich ethnic heritages blink out without so much as a fare thee well, it is in our interest as a people to remember who we are, where we came from, and how hard our forefathers worked to prove up this state.

Lawrence Welk was born on March 11, 1903. North Dakota had been a state for just thirteen years. He was the sixth of eight children born to Ludwig and Christiana Welk, who had immigrated to America in 1892 from north of Odessa in today's Ukraine. During their first winter on the Great Plains the Welks lived under an upturned wagon covered with blocks of sod. Think of that! By this standard the family of Laura Ingalls Wilder were aristocrats. No running water. No electricity. A primitive outhouse. Not a tree in thirty miles. Buffalo chips for fuel. No radio, no telephone, no link of any sort to the world beyond the wind-blasted prairie.

Welk's rags-to-riches story has a mythical, almost Biblical quality to it. When he was scarcely more than a boy, he somehow convinced his father Ludwig to allow him to order a mail-order accordion for $400. That's a lot of money today. It was a small fortune in 1910 or 1915 dollars. He promised his father he would toil on the farm until he was 21 to pay him back for the accordion, and that any money he earned off the farm laboring for neighbors would be contributed to the family's needs. He fulfilled his commitment.

After touring the home counties and then the Dakotas with bands directed by others, Welk plucked together a couple of starter bands—the Hotsy Totsy Boys and later the Honolulu Fruit Gum Orchestra—and for several decades traveled all across America performing in bandstands, gymnasiums, municipal auditoriums, and ballrooms. In 1951 he settled in Los Angeles and, well, you know the rest.

Full disclosure. I'm not particularly a Lawrence Welk fan. I don't plan my Sunday evenings around Lawrence Welk Show (LWS) rebroadcasts on Prairie Public Television. But I am in love with the heritage of North Dakota, and a huge fan of what Welk represents in the history and culture of this state. There was a time when Welk was our greatest national figure (perhaps our only national figure), when every North Dakotan—whether you liked his music or not—felt pride that someone from this windswept and isolated prairie state had risen to such national prominence. We also recognized that Lawrence Welk had not (like Angie Dickinson, for example) done everything in his power to abandon and repudiate his North Dakota roots. We knew that he was proud of his Germans-from-Russia heritage, proud to be a North Dakotan, unwilling to take voice lessons to homogenize his accent into American Midwestern bland.

He came back to North Dakota frequently. He performed at the Medora Musical. In many ways, he inspired the Medora Musical, and for a time there was a considerable revolving door between the talent his friend Harold Schafer was featuring at the Burning Hills Amphitheater and the cast of the LWS. Harold and Sheila Schafer discovered Tom Netherton. Sheila remembers the moment on the Apple Creek Country Club (at that time the "Pebble Beach" of North Dakota) when she forced Welk to pause long enough on the tee box of the fifth hole to listen to Netherton audition. Welk signed Netherton on the spot. Legendary.

At one time, tens of thousands of North Dakotans played the accordion. Invented in the 1820s-40s in Germany and Russia, it's versatile, capable of producing beautiful music, but (more to the point) portable and powered without electricity. That makes it a perfect instrument for the American frontier. Imagine how dreary the history of the Great Plains would have been without the accordion. It is to German and German-Russian culture what the fiddle was to Virginia and Kentucky in the age of Jefferson. Not long ago I asked the great troubadour Chuck Suchy how many people now play the accordion in North Dakota. "A couple of hundred, just maybe a few thousand still," he said, "but not for much longer."

Some people have been suggesting that the Welk home be moved to Buckstop Junction at Bismarck or Bonanzaville at West Fargo, as a cost-effectiveness gesture, so that more people will have the opportunity to see the home where he grew up. But that defeats the purpose altogether. At Bonanzaville the Welk house is just a modest clapboard house ripped from its context. Out there on the godforsaken prairie in the Sauerkraut Triangle, it's a lonely but important shrine. It is worth a long day's pilgrimage.

I hope the Historical Society will stabilize it, conserve it as it is, and not put up a modern interpretive center. I hope they erect some thoughtful out-of-the-way interpretive signage, but mostly just maintain the Welk homestead as a symbol of what we once were, and all the great possibilities that grew from all those humble beginnings.

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Lawrence Welk photo by MCA-Music Corporation of America-management (Public domain) via Wikimedia Commons

Let's Prepare for Our Big Birthday by Taking Charge of Our Destiny

Welcome to 2014. It's going to be quite a year for North Dakota.

On November 2, North Dakota will celebrate its 125th birthday. Back in the desperation era of the 1980s—when our story was economic marginality, rural decline, consolidation, drought, and outmigration—reasonable people wondered if North Dakota had a future. At the time of our centennial "celebration" on November 2, 1989, some wondered if there would even be a bicentennial in 2089—or whether North Dakota would just crumble and blow away like Grassy Butte, Ambrose, Bowbells, or Tuttle. We heard about the "emptied prairie" syndrome until we were sick to death of it. The experts reckoned that some rump of folks would perhaps always remain on the northern Great Plains, because they were born here and somebody had to keep the lights on, but that the great majority of our young people would seek their destiny elsewhere where there were less wind, shorter winters, more and better amenities, and a livelier connection to what is happening in the great world. One of my closest friends—a serious philosopher—wondered out loud whether North Dakota would lose population until it reverted to something like territorial status.

Now, 25 years later, we are a state bursting with money and opportunity. The people of North Dakota now openly express optimism and pride, and a sense that the future is going to be exciting. More people live in North Dakota than ever before—the population tipped over 700,000 at the end of 2013. Who could have predicted that twenty years ago, or even ten? We are likely to top out at well over a million before this boom era ends. We have more money in our state coffers than we know what to do with. Our public institutions are more generously funded than ever before in our history. After many decades of barely getting by, North Dakota suddenly has enough money to fund a wide range of desirable initiatives, with money to spare. A modest amount of the windfall has been set aside by the ND legislature for broadly construed "conservation" purposes, and a monumental amount is being sequestered as a permanent Legacy Fund. That fund already amounts to 1.4 billion dollars. It is likely to reach far beyond $3 billion by 2017, the first year that the legislature is permitted to spend a small percentage of the fund per biennium.

We should take our cues not from Alaska, which likes to divvy up its oil windfall by way of cash payments to Alaska residents, but rather Texas, had the foresight in 1876 to establish an oil-drip Permanent University Fund (now topping $14 billion) to support higher education. Wise use of its immense carbon revenues has enabled Texas to create one of the world's greatest universities, the UT at Austin. And to fund globally significant museums, galleries, event centers, and libraries. To some it may sound elitist (or just crazy) but it is undeniably true: create great universities and great things are going to happen to your state.

I know many North Dakotans are skeptical of higher education at the moment—thanks to years of turbulence, scandals, and out-of-control administrators—but we'd be making a terrible mistake if we pulled away from our historically high commitment to higher education. This is the time to redouble our efforts to create the best-educated citizens of America--in faraway North Dakota, seemingly so distant from MIT, Yale, and Cal Tech. We should do this here in North Dakota because for the first time we can really afford it, and because every study indicates that the twenty-first century is going to belong to the societies that invest deeply in education at every level.

If we invest the windfall wisely, we could become one of the most attractive places to live in America by 2050, and we could overcome the 20th century "problem of North Dakota," that there is not enough within our borders to convince our children to make their lives here, not enough to lure new families who had the misfortune to be born elsewhere.

We are so rich now that we could, if we have vision enough, provide free or virtually free tuition to every young North Dakotan to attend colleges and universities within our boundaries. California did this at one stage of its amazing history, and the result was social and economic miracles that have changed the world. At a time of unprecedented prosperity, there is no justification for letting the high cost of higher education dissuade our young people from attending North Dakota colleges and universities, particularly when the oil fields are luring our young men away from a permanent investment in their futures (higher education) to the carnival of sudden, temporary, often enough anarchic, pocket cash.

As we roll up to November 2, our 125th birthday, we North Dakotans should take some time to step back to assess our history and our heritage, to engage in something like a statewide conversation about what brought us here, who we are, what we value, what we wish to preserve at a time of gigantic change, where we are heading, and where we would like to wind up down the road. The best way to celebrate our birthday would be to create a new North Dakota social contract, a twenty-first century mission statement, so that we can direct the economic miracle that has come to North Dakota rather than be, in the end, merely overwhelmed and damaged by it.

The epicenter of the state birthday celebration will be the amazing new North Dakota Heritage Center. You can see it taking shape on the capitol grounds: bold new galleries, new auditoriums, new exhibits, new storage space for the treasures of North Dakota, carefully conserved old artifacts and breathtaking new electronic bells and whistles. The existing Heritage Center has been the home of the collective memory of the people of North Dakota—a gem on the Northern Plains—but the new Heritage Center (with 39,000 square feet of galleries) is going to be one of the best in America, an expression of a new dance in the North Dakota spirit. It will look forward as well as back. It will be a perfect 125th birthday gift to the people of North Dakota. And if you think this could have been accomplished without the new prosperity of the Bakken Oil Boom, think again.

And yet, as I write these words, North Dakota is burning. A BNSF train hauling crude oil out of North Dakota derailed at Casselton on December 30, igniting a fireball that lit up the New Year to remind us of the immense cost of our sudden, unprepared-for economic success. It can, it has, and it will happen here. The innocent folks of Casselton were urged to evacuate. But the accident at Casselton, while dramatic, is hardly unique. Out west, many hundreds of oil wells are flaring their natural gas instead of capturing it, a profligacy that is literally burning up $100 million of carbon per month in a state that was once a sanctuary for family farmers. That's more than a billion dollars per year.

There was a time in the history of North Dakota when that was all the money in the world.

Casselton is the home of five North Dakota governors. We are going to need some very creative leadership before and after our 125th birthday.

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Failed Lefse and Perfect Fruitcakes on Christmas Eve

I'm writing this on the day after Christmas. My hands are dry and chapped from washing dishes and shoveling snow. Like you I am exhausted in that wonderful post-Christmas way, bleary, a little in awe of how much strain of activity goes into the buildup to Christmas morning, and how quickly all that frenzy is transformed into neat little stacks of gifts and a giant plastic bag of torn wrapping paper.

Without any spirit of exaggeration, I think I can report that I have loaded and unloaded the dishwasher 17 times in five days, done seven loads of laundry, shoveled four times, and run a dozen "last second" errands. My favorite was to the grocery store on Christmas Eve, where there were actual cart traffic jams as approximately 500 of my fellow Dakotans, some home for the holidays and therefore clueless about where to find the marshmallow crème, shoveled multiple cases of soda into their carts, some carts ranging the aisles in tandem at the hands of perky, demonic sisters-in-law. At one point I was reduced to telling a complete stranger: "Hey! No texting in the aisles. I'll run you down like a prairie dog on the highway." Fortunately, she smiled back rather than whap me with the 14-pound pork loin she was chucking into her cart. I had leisure to read Time Magazine's complete "Person of the Year" profile of Pope Francis in the checkout line. His attempts to preside over Catholic Christendom in a Christ-like way are raising some eyebrows.

My daughter requested a "live" Christmas tree this year, not the three-unit plastic tree that I usually manage to drag out from an obscure corner in the garage. We went Christmas tree shopping on the coldest day of the year: minus 23 and don't forget the windchill factor. Here are just a few highlights of a daylong saga: I install new battery in the Jeep; Jeep slips on ice and runs into curb; left front tire blows; we pony Jeep to nearby Best Buy parking lot; toy jack in Jeep (never before used) missing key part; father, wearing only a sports jacket, walks to Lowes to buy tools while daughter huddles in stricken Jeep reading magazine; father also buys mittens and a hat (idiot); first attempt to change tire fails owing to toy manufacturer's jack; good friend of father's walks across parking lot to smirk and commiserate and asks several dozen pointless and inaudible questions, before admitting that she has never changed a tire; father tells good friend to go jump in a lake (somewhat "softened" version of actual advice).

Once the tire was changed, we drove to Mandan to buy the world's greatest Christmas tree, which we tied to the roof of said Jeep and somehow managed to shove into the house, not without some frame damage. We spent the evening in a tangle of Christmas lights, which balled up more completely once we put our sap-encrusted hands on them. We made the Christmas tree star ourselves from foam board and the 24,300 bottles of tempera glitter paint in my daughter's craft drawers.

So far we have baked six fruitcakes, twelve batches of my mother's famous toffee; two batches of sugar cookies and one of chocolate meltaways; and two pies. On my repeated trips to the grocery store I have thrown embarrassing amounts of butter into my cart, again and again. On Christmas Eve we made perhaps the lamest batch of lefse (our first) in the history of Nordic culture. We will try again tonight.

The only calm in all this chaos was on Christmas Eve when my daughter offered to read the nativity story from the New Testament books of Matthew and Luke. We sat in the three best chairs in the living room with candles lit in every direction. She was wearing the new pink pajamas she had just opened—one of my mother's annual ritual gifts. I fetched up one of my Bibles, the New King James Version, and mother and I sat quietly as my only child read one of the most familiar of all stories in a voice that is two parts woman and yet still three parts a child. She did not stumble over "Zacharias."

Do you ever have one of those moments when you become aware that you are witnessing something you don't want to take for granted, don't ever want to forget, something you want to let get in deep, and so you try to become present, truly present, in a heightened way? "Some day I will look back on this moment and realize how magical it was, and how fleeting, and I will wish I could remember every detail—the quality of light, the sound of the music, the size of the Christmas tree, the color of the upholstery and the wrapping paper, the timbre of my child's voice…."

As I sat there I thought: for many years, my mother has been parked in a kind of timeless zone in which she is old without being elderly. She is healthy, autonomous, funny. She requires no special logistical arrangements. She drives herself to Bismarck and we do not fear for her (or others!) when she is on the road. At 82 she is still giving not needing. But the day is coming in the next decade when she will slip over some invisible line and become elderly. I won't mind making special arrangements when that moment comes, but it gives me the deepest pain to think that one of the most vigorous persons I have ever known cannot persist in this phase of her life indefinitely.

And I thought: my beloved daughter, heart of my heart, soul of my soul, now 19, is here tonight because this is where she wants to be, in that brief zone when she is making the transition from child to full adult. But the day is coming—and not far off—when she will announce to her parents that she is not coming home to the Great Plains for the holidays because she has a chance to study Orangutans in Malaysia between semesters, or that "Biff" has asked her to join him in Montreal this Christmas to meet his parents, or—alas—she is bringing "Biff" here and thinks perhaps we ought to discuss the sleeping arrangements in advance. Nooooooo.

Linger, my favorite women, please linger.

To my mother, whenever she does anything that smacks of "winding down," I say sternly, "Don't you grow old!" At which point she looks at me in a quizzical way, a little impressed perhaps that I am rooting for her so strenuously, but also as if to say, "You moron, do you think I want to grow old or that it makes much of a difference if I don't?" And to my daughter, whose life is going to be so much more bigger than mine, and who brings an earnestness to existence that I have never known, I want to quote Thoreau: "As long as possible live free and uncommitted."

As you can see, in my attempt to be fully present, I had slipped into this reverie instead. Such is the fallenness of man. And then I heard my daughter's voice again: "When they saw the Starre, they rejoyced with exceeding great joy" (Matthew 2:10).

A favorite verse, two celestial women in the candlelight, a cozy house with new tree smell, hot tea, and Santa on his way. Perfection.

See you in the new year.

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Starting the Car on the Coldest Day of 2013

Finally, more than forty below the morning I wrote this. Twenty-three below in absolute terms, wind chill minus forty. According to the U.S. Weather Bureau, it's the coldest it has ever been on December 11th in Bismarck. I love days like this. This is when you truly feel like a North Dakotan! The snow has a perfect blue cast. The air is absolutely clear, crystalline, electric, almost crackly. You feel that if you fired a pistol into the air on a morning like this, the whole sky (the Bible's empyrean) and everything under it would shatter into a trillion miniature ice crystals and just collapse around you in a prolonged tinkling. I watched the sunrise from my kitchen window well after eight a.m., but it seemed as if the real sun was vacationing in Australia and we were assigned a sub from the minor leagues. Plenty of light but no heat. The sun looked like a giant fried egg yoke congealing on the eastern horizon.

When you walk out of the house on mornings like this, the utter windlessness makes things a little eerie. We all know how to handle the usual North Dakota ground blizzard, the day's first bite of raw wind that feels as if it might rip your outer skin right off. But when you walk out the door expecting wind and discover that the great world is unnaturally silent, when you sense how incredibly cold it is rather than immediately feel it, that's a wonderful North Dakota moment. Suddenly you are a character in one of Jack London's Klondike stories—some survival instinct deep in your DNA below the tripwire of consciousness realizes that you are now in a potentially dangerous situation, that there is no room for error on a morning like this, that if you ran out of gas near Glen Ullin (as I did in August), you could die in short order no matter what you're wearing. For Jack London characters up on the Yukon in mid-December, it is always a life-or-death struggle to strike the last match successfully with numb clumsy fingers. For us the question is: will the car start?

My old used Honda has a remote starter. That's the sort of over-civilized gadget I like to sneer at, like heated car seats or hand warmers. I tried it twice from the kitchen window this morning, but my car just wheezed and coughed. So I ventured out to the crisp air, a mere 54 degrees below the freezing point. Silence. The only sound, the faraway crunch-thud of my feet on the snowpack, seemed as if it were miles away, or that it was coming from someone else's feet. It was so cold that when I pulled open the car door it felt as if it might just sheer off from low temperature metal fatigue. I sat down on the seat. It was frozen solid. It didn't give a millimeter. So it was that cold. The seat was as hard and uncomfortable as metal bleachers on New Year's Eve in International Falls, MN.

Normally, when you start a car you just do it without a moment's thought, because it is a habit so deeply engrained that it somehow just happens: key finds its way to ignition switch without aiming, key turns clockwise the instant it is fully inserted, car starts the minute it has the chance. But when it is this cold, particularly if you are out in the badlands or away from a ready back-up plan, you have to have a premeditated internal combustion strategy. I paused for maybe ten seconds before I turned the key. In the course of a long North Dakota life, I have been involved in half a dozen big winter car dramas. About average, I think. There is nothing quite so dispiriting as hearing the battery grind down and finally poop out on those few occasions when it really matters. At best it means you are in for a long day of cracked skin and foot stomping and probably bloody knuckles, and we all know how seldom an extreme-cold jumper cable transfusion works. When the engine does that eh-heh, heh . . . heh ……. heh . . . oh heh! thing and then you hear the click, click, click of system collapse, your heart just falls onto the floorboards and cracks into a thousand shards. "Here we go."

In those ten seconds, as I sat high up on (not in) the frozen solid front seat and watched my breath frost up the windshield on the inside, I reproached myself, for not having a better car, for not having plugged in the head bolt heater, for not living in Bermuda, and of course for having left the hoses out for another bruising winter because I reckoned the mild weather would never end this year. I knew I had to make some choices and get things right the first time. Just turn the key and hope for the best? Feather the gas pedal while turning the key? Press the gas pedal down to the floor once, quickly, and then turn the key? Go back to bed and forget the whole thing? Like an Apollo 13 astronaut, I began by turning off every potential battery drain: the radio, the heater, the dome light.

My trusty Honda started up on the second attempt, with at least half a minute of battery life remaining. When it is this cold, the just-started engine races for the first few minutes as if it's running on espresso not gasoline. The whole car shakes and snorts and rattles as if it is about to lift off or break up. But at least the car was running. Suddenly I felt a little smug and I smirked in praise of Japanese engineering. I turned on the radio and dialed it to KFYR—half-hoping to hear the Ole Reb yodel up the weather report. It was so cold that the speakers in my car buzzed and blared as if the cardboard membranes had cracked during the night.

The last remaining problem was the windshield, which was entirely covered with a thin, quite beautiful, but hard-as-steel frost curtain. This was not one of those occasions when I could just shoot an abundance of wiper fluid over the ice and cheat the frost away. My windshield scraper was buried somewhere in the back seat under many layers of holiday season strata. Rather than excavate it this morning, which would probably have involved getting out of the car and opening the back door, I decided to try to tough it out. I could almost make out the road through the gray crystal screen, if I squinted just right, and I reckoned it would melt before I killed anyone. I was running the defroster at full brassy throttle, thus pointlessly blasting 20-below air at the windshield (and my face) from within. If I bent over until my eyes were just above the level of the dash—a strenuous yogic posture made more difficult by the high frozen seat—I could occasionally find a narrow slit through which I could peer out at the roadway. It was like driving to work wearing a welder's helmet.

I'm happy to report that I seem to have collided with nothing as I drove—at least I heard no big thuds—and now that I have completed this report, I've started to get some feeling back in my fingers.

Welcome to another North Dakota winter.

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Mad Dog Vachon's Death Eclipses the Gaiety of Nations

The recent death of the professional wrestler Mad Dog Vachon (1929-2013) hit me like a metal folding chair or a flying drop kick. Vachon died quietly in his sleep in Omaha on November 21 at the age of 84. He is survived by six children, seven grandchildren, and two great-grandchildren. I hope they all suited up in trunks and high-top boots for the funeral, like a professional circus family, and I hope the obsequies were held not in a church but in the "squared circle" of a dank wrestling arena out near the stockyards. Rumors that the two officiating priests actually tagged off during the service have not been substantiated.

Mad Dog's death set off a chain of bittersweet memories for me. Such names as Wahoo McDaniel, The Flying Frenchman Rene Goulet, The Crusher, The Bruiser, The Crippler, Nick Bockwinkel, The Very Capable Kenny Jay, Bobby Red Cloud, and Cowboy Bill Watts came flocking in on me for the first time in many years. If I close my eyes I can actually see Dr. X strutting around the interview area in his celebrated mask, hands outstretched like a cat, bawling and bragging and growling and threatening to break Vern Gagne's legs one by one and throw him unceremoniously into the Mississippi River, while mild-mannered host and promoter Wally Karbo tries to talk him back to civility.

I can see Mad Dog and his brother The Butcher breaking the rules and double-teaming Dusty Rhodes and against an exposed turnbuckle, while the 123-pound referee, with an outsized expression of sorrow and disbelief, threatens them with immediate disqualification. Let's face it. Now that he is dead we can for the first time safely declare that Mad Dog Vachon was a thug and a cheater in the ring. (I do not impugn his private life. I'm sure he was a model citizen outside the ring and a doting father who did not—as rumor had it—put his children in a Greco-Roman knuckle lock when they would not go to bed). But once he crawled into the squared circle he was a fleshy desperado with missing teeth, a bald head, and a goatee that made him look a little like Vladimir Lenin on steroids.

He bit. He scratched. He stomped. He choked. All that before the opening bell. And he had a penchant for raking a foreign object across the eyes of his opponents and then hiding the F.O. in his one-shouldered tunic in a way that everyone on the planet could see except the referee, who for some reason was momentarily distracted. Ah, the injustice of the world. `

It is sometimes said that if we got back every hour that we have spent watching TV, we could walk around the planet. Forget that. If I just had every hour back that I spent watching the old All Star Wrestling show that emanated from Minneapolis, Minnesota, I could walk the planet several times.

Almost every Saturday night between seventh and tenth grade, my friend Robert B. and I made homemade pizzas in his kitchen two blocks from my home near downtown Dickinson. We called it All Star Pizza. Clever boys. One of us would knead and spread the dough while the other cut peperoni slices and sprinkled the powdered Parmesan over the canned tomato sauce. We had pretty good timing for a couple of knuckleheads, so the piping hot homemade pizza came out of the oven just about the time the AWA announcer Roger Kent introduced the show. It was broadcast in black and white, of course, and the camera work was primitive. He invariably began by saying, "Good evening everyone, this is Roger Kent ringside coming to you from the Minneapolis Auditorium…" He made it sound as if he had three names, Roger Kent Ringside, so that's what we called him.

Actually, Roger Kent Ringside was a great sports announcer with a mock-heroic style perfectly suited to the … er, ambiguities of the sport. He expressed grave indignation when Pampero Firpo (The Wild Bull of the Pampas) raked another wrestler's eyes against the long zipper on his tunic. At least once per show he'd say, "Ooooh, I hate to see that hold. Ladies and gentlemen, that hold is barred in many states." When Iron Man George Gadaski made his characteristic move, Roger Kent would say, "That's an Arm Bar with a Twist–sounds like a drink to me!" And we laughed every time. When Dr. X entered the ring, masked and menacing, stomping around and making mock runs at the shrieking folks in the first row, Kent would invariably explain: "As perhaps you know, Dr. X has deposited a $1000 certified check in a Minneapolis bank for anyone who can break the Figure Four Leg Lock once it has been properly applied." Oh, we knew! Even then, uneducated as we were, Robert and I knew that Dr. X had left himself an infinite amount of legal wiggle room in those words: "once properly applied."

I'm guessing that Mad Dog was not Vachon's given name. If you name your son Mad Dog, you can kiss the Senate goodbye. Or the Papacy or the ballet. Names matter. You name your son Mad Dog and you should not be surprised when he comes home from Head Start with a trio of pit bulls, or gouges the eyes of his third grade teacher with a number two pencil. Who names her son Mad Dog? Name your son Mad Dog and he's almost certainly going to become a professional wrestler or perhaps night security at an auto wrecking yard.

But I am being facetious. Actually, the man who would later be crowned (well, actually, belted) one half of the Tag Team Champions of the World was christened Maurice Vachon in Montreal. That sounds more like an art historian or wine connoisseur to me, and it would not do for a sport in which the phrases "back breaker," "the atomic drop," and "pile driver" are mere routine. Vachon was actually a serious amateur wrestler before he crossed over to the dark side. He competed at the 1948 Summer Olympics in London, and he won a gold medal at the 1950 British Empire Games.

After a long, brilliant, and criminal career, Mad Dog finally hung up his tunic in 1986 when he was pretty long in his remaining tooth. As MacArthur said, old wrestlers never die, they just slip under the ring. One year after his retirement, Mad Dog was struck by a hit and run driver in Omaha. His leg had to be amputated. I completely discount the persistent rumors that the driver was wearing a mask and that his vanity plates said FGR4LGLK.

I saw Mad Dog fight twice, once in Fargo in 1968 and a year or two later in the auditorium at Trinity High School in Dickinson. Robert's father drove us to a match in Fargo for his eighth grade graduation present. We were thrilled to sit close enough to be spit on by several 300-pound nearly naked middle-aged men. I frowned at Mad Dog after a particularly egregious chokehold, and he smirked back in a sweetly menacing way. I felt we bonded.

How I feel about the death of Mad Dog was best expressed by the British literary dictator Samuel Johnson when the great actor David Garrick died on January 20, 1779. "His death," Johnson wrote, "eclipsed the gaiety of nations."

And I fervently hope when he entered the gates of heaven, Mad Dog and St. Peter enjoyed an Arm Bar with a Twist. A double.

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Thanks to Valerie Naylor for Award-winning National Park Stewardship

As my mother and our guest and I sat around my dining room table on Thursday evening, we explained some of what we are thankful for this year. Our lists are long—health, friendship, family, freedom, longevity, and the abundance of American life. But this year I feel especially thankful that Valerie Naylor is the Superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park.

A few weeks ago, Valerie received the National Parks Conservation Association's prestigious Stephen T. Mather conservation award. She accepted the award at the 36th annual Ranger Rendezvous in St. Louis. It's an amazing achievement, all the more impressive because Valerie did not seek it and, in her characteristically modest and matter of fact manner, she neither expected it nor, for that matter, ever even thought about it. She just did her job with exceptional skill and thoughtfulness, and those who study the future of North Dakota from elsewhere in the nation realized how important her superintendency has become. She won the 2013 Mather Award for her outstanding vigilance in protecting Theodore Roosevelt National Park from the impact of the Bakken Oil Boom, and for her previous management of the complicated and controversial elk reduction project that reduced the elk herd at TRNP from 1200 to about 200 critters.

Theodore Roosevelt National Park is one of America's 58 National Parks. The great documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has called the National Park System "America's best idea." TRNP is North Dakota's only National Park. It is one of North Dakota's best assets and finest treasures, without which we would be a far less interesting place. It is a relatively small national park, at 70,446 acres, and it is subdivided into three units: the North Unit near Watford City, the South Unit just north of Medora, and the Elkhorn Ranch Unit (218) acres, midway between.

The three units embrace and protect some of the most beautiful and distinctive terrain on the Great Plains. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) had a significant presence in all three units of what became the National Park, especially the Elkhorn, where he established one of his two Dakota Territory ranches between 1883 and 1887. All three units are bisected by the magnificent Little Missouri River. Because the three units are separated and fairly widely dispersed, they present a serious management challenge. They have lots of perimeter, and no single unit is sufficiently large for a visitor to escape entirely the nagging claims of the outside world.

Now that the Bakken Oil Boom has overwhelmed the landscapes, the social structure, the economy, and the politics of North Dakota, the National Park is beginning to resemble a beleaguered trio of wild and endangered islands surrounded in every direction by a noisy industrial revolution. The three units of TRNP are more important to North Dakota and the world every day, because they are becoming the last precious remnants of what was once an endless untrammeled wilderness, what Roosevelt described as "a land of vast silent spaces, of lonely rivers, and of plains where the wild game stared at the passing horseman." If that Rooseveltian sentence does not make you ache for our losses, nothing will.

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A No Frills Quiet Thanksgiving on New Dishes

Never in my life have I looked forward to Thanksgiving more. I have been so busy this year that I just feel bewildered, numb, vague, and disembodied. I look on the holiday as an enforced and very welcome day of rest. My daughter is spending the break with her mama in northwest Kansas, so there will be no more than three for the Thanksgiving feast at my house, and perhaps a few ringers for pie and brandy. I do most of the cooking and my mother, who drives in from Dickinson, does the … er supervising. She raises her eyebrows with some frequency, tells me she can never find the spices in my cupboards, says, "Don't you think it is a little early to peel the potatoes?," asks me such questions as, "Are you going to use a measuring cup on that?," and eventually offers, with cheerful exasperation, "Do you want me just to organize your kitchen and at least throw the time-sensitive perishables away?"

The answer to these questions is no.

Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, by magnitudes. It is one of America's greatest inventions. And it almost alone props up the sweet potato industry. It has, until recently, resisted the commercialization that has buried Christmas in materialism, merchandize, secularity, and economic stress—all things that Jesus would have deplored. Thanksgiving is one of two moments in the year when the vast majority of Americans are doing the same thing at the same time, and like its distant cousin the Fourth of July, on that day we all tend to eat the same things at the same time. It's when we as a national family break bread together. Earlier in my life I knew some perverse iconoclasts who, for no good reason, refused to make turkey, dressing, cranberries, gravy, green beans, mashed potatoes, gooey marshmallow sweet potato thingy, and pumpkin pies. They'd do a crab-stuffed pork loin instead, or shish kabobs on the grill, and they'd substitute a syllabub with a mango reduction for good old pumpkin pie.

My answer to that is "why?" spoken in the loudest permissible indoor volume. Twice a year I bake a turkey. Twice a year I make cranberry sauce. That's about the right frequency, and I see no rational reason to mess with so delicious, so blessed, and so traditional a holiday meal.

My mother and I are having our annual squabble about the size of the turkey. She advocates about a 15-pound game hen, and I want a solid 24-28 pounder. "What are you going to do with all those leftovers?" she asked the other day, right on schedule, in precisely the tone and words she has used for the last ten years. "What difference does it make?" I snapped back in a case closed sort of way. "It's Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving is about abundance." This debate is one of our Thanksgiving traditions. She knew how this was going to come out before she opened her mouth, and I knew she was going to make her annual lame suggestion. Then, just to be insulting, she said, as she has for the past six years, "You're not thinking of trying a deep fried turkey again, are you?"

Had to bring it up! Ha'ad to bring it up.

Once a few years ago with my friend Tom I deep-fried a turkey in my front yard. It was one of those raw Thanksgiving days with leaden skies, a whipping intermittent wind, a windchill of about five below, and some ground drifting. In short, a perfect North Dakota Thanksgiving Day. After pouring about forty gallons of oil into the new fryer and igniting a propane flame under the aluminum tub that had the sound and fury of a fracking flare, we spent a full hour heating that oil to the boiling point. We stood around the contraption beating our hands on our thighs to stay warm, exchanging views on whether we would be able to put out the fire before we burned the house down, and chanting from Macbeth: "Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," (emphasis on trouble), "fire burn and cauldron bubble." My mother had protested this whole operation as dumb and "iffy" from a Thanksgiving point of view. When the $20 of oil finally came to a boil (for the first half hour, it was a dead heat between my modest propane burner and North Dakota winter), Tom and I lifted the cover with a tree branch and with my usual optimism I lowered a beautiful, plump, Dickensian turkey into that seething vat.

Instantaneously there was one profound four-second hissing sound, like a single burst of a train whistle. Then a little mushroom cloud rose up over the fryer to about 35,000 feet. The pot began shaking like the first stage of a Saturn V rocket at takeoff. We looked at each other in an uneasy, queasy sort of way and glanced through the big window at my mother, who was frowning at us from inside. It would not have surprised me if she had been shaking her fist. Numbskulls!

"We're toast," I said. And Tom said, "Actually, the turkey appears to be melba toast."

When we lifted that once-glorious bird out, fifteen minutes later, it had shrunk to the size of a stunted grocery store kiosk chicken. It had a dark brown leathery look (and smell) like a football that had been lowered into a deep fat fryer. The skin was mottled and there appeared to be caverns in several places along the sides of the breast, as if part of the white meat had literally been vaporized. "These turkeys are said to be succulent inside," I said without much conviction. "The idea is that the sudden immersion in hot oil seals the moisture inside the carcass. There may have been some shrinkage, I'll grant you that, but I'm betting it is dee-licious." Tom said, "Sounds good to me. Think your mother will buy it?"

So that one did not become a family tradition, but mother brings it up every year at this time. It's not clear whether she is just trying to shame me for the fun of it, or whether she actually thinks that without her pro-active rebuke I'd be tempted to transform another fabulous turkey into a fist-sized slab of dry jerky again, just to confirm the results of the first experiment.

This year we will light table candles and toast my daughter, her granddaughter, with a glass of white wine, listen to Nora Jones at a low volume, and say a few of the many, many things we are thankful for: "Well, at least you didn't try to fry the turkey!"

"Yes, mother."

The glory this Thanksgiving will be eating our favorite meal of the year on my new dishes, made by the exquisite North Dakota potter and ceramicist Tama Smith of Beach. I helped a little with the design, though the artistry is all Tama. The plates and serving bowls are brown and buff and rust and charcoal—to look like the badlands and the butte country south of Medora—and through the middle of each dish runs a heartbreaking blue trace of the sacred Little Missouri River. When mother and I picked them up the other day in Beach, Tama and I both burst into tears as we gazed at their magnificence. They are far too beautiful to eat on, but we will.

They represent what North Dakota means, and may still mean, if we manage this thing right.

That would be worth thanksgiving.

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"Thanksgiving Dinner, Quincy House, Boston, MA." 1899. From the New York Public Library Digital Collections.

The Fallout of the Obamacare Rollout Will Plague the US for Decades

The bungled rollout of the Affordable Care Act is one of the worst political disasters of my lifetime. It may mean that Obamacare is doomed. Under a parliamentary system, it might mean that the administration of President Obama would fall in a "no confidence" vote. Before this mess ends, you can expect to hear relatively serious calls for President Obama's impeachment. The colossal failure of Obamacare so far is a setback for the national government that will leave a toxic trail of political fallout on the United States for decades to come, long after Barack Obama has slipped away into his post-presidential career.

The debacle jeopardizes one of the progressive movement's most cherished goals—universal, affordable health care for every American citizen—a dream that goes back at least as far as Republican Theodore Roosevelt. It also jeopardizes the progressive movement more generally, at a time when America is falling behind in the world arena precisely because it has failed to address a range of serious challenges with all the tools that a modern society needs to thrive.

Just when we thought the national crisis of political hatred and unalloyed partisanship could not possibly get worse, the Obama administration has thrown kerosene on the anti-government fire, and given the fading Tea Party movement a new lease on life. It has permitted everyone who predicted that Obama would be a failed President to say (prematurely), "I told you so."

In the month since Obamacare began to come into effect, two fundamental problems have emerged, and more are sure to come. The problems are (1) the immediate and continuing failure of the $300 million website Healthcare.gov, and (2) the fact that the workings of the new system have made Obama's endlessly repeated pledge—"if you like your current health care plan you can keep it"—seem like a filthy lie to the American people. The news that three San Francisco-based knuckleheads with no ties to the U.S. government were able to create a brilliant and efficient Obamacare support site (Help Sherpa) virtually overnight takes us into the arena of pure absurdity.

If the Affordable Care Act was ever going to win widespread affection and convince the skeptical American people that the time has come for a national health care system in the United States, it had to work. It had to exceed expectations from the moment it came out of the gate. It had to be a model of government efficiency. It had to look like something a twenty-first century internet savvy President would do. It had to create a national buzz of renewed optimism: the federal government is back after 30 years on the political robes. Instead, it has been a greater disaster than even its most vicious detractors could have dreamed. Listen to Rush and Sean: how they do crow in pure joy about the failure of an initiative designed by well-meaning people to address one of the principal problems of American life: the failure of the existing health care system to provide portability, absorb people with pre-existing conditions, and provide minimal positive health care to the 30-50 million people who have, until now, been subjected to our heartless "emergency room health care option."

The Affordable Care Act was to be Obama's signature accomplishment as President and it was to be the basis of his historical legacy. That and killing Osama bin Laden. Every American has a right to ask: if this is your signature achievement, and you had years to develop this website at virtually infinite public expense, why would you release it when virtually any serious beta testing would have shown you that it doesn't work? If Obama cannot fix this thing ASAP, and apologize in a completely unguarded way to the American people, he is headed into the gulag of Jimmy Carter, whose administration will forever be symbolized by the failed raid (Operation Eagle Claw!) on Tehran on April 24, 1980.

Now everyone who has hated Obama since before he was even inaugurated (I know scores of such people in my little circle alone), everyone who hates rule by Democrats, everyone who hates Obama's style, his perspective on world affairs, his outsized political confidence, everyone who hates "the liberal agenda," will feel vindicated and empowered. Such folks will be even more strident and obnoxious in the future, and "the failure of Obamacare" will be their rallying cry, like the Alamo or the Boston Tea Party or the sinking of the battleship Maine.

Since the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the central mantra of political conservatism has been "government always screws things up." In his first inaugural address, delivered on January 20, 1981, President Reagan famously said, "government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem." Think of the paradox of this! The new President of the United States, the elected head of the American government, begins his eight-year tenure by denouncing government. Every President since Reagan has had to operate under the shadow of Reagan's cynicism—the paradoxical view that government is a disaster except when it is funding and operating the largest military behemoth the world has ever seen. At one of the lowest ebbs of his presidency, Bill Clinton was heard to say—a little pathetically—"government still matters."

I remember hearing former Speak of the House Newt Gingrich, at the height of his intellectual and political power, deliver a lecture at an Inns of Court event. His theme was the inefficiency of government. Why, he asked, is it a hassle to mail a parcel in a U.S. Post Office, and so easy to send a package by Fedex or UPS? Why should a visit to a state's Department of Transportation to renew a driver's license or register a new car be a daylong nightmare? Why does private enterprise provide quick, efficient, reliable, and friendly service to its customers, while public services are typically slow and inefficient, and your transaction is usually handled by a rude, unsmiling, and bored functionary whose salary you are paying.

There is an answer to the Gingrich thesis, but in the last month I have wondered many times why Obama didn't just ask Amazon.com to administer the health care program. After all you can buy books and refrigerators at Amazon.com, DVDs and snow tires. Indeed Google, Oracle, and other internet masters have offered to help fix the broken Healthcare.gov system. I say, turn them loose.

In the end, I predict, the problems with the Affordable Care Act will be fixed, and that some future version of it (Post-Obamacare 3.0) will come to be seen as a central and cherished benefit of American life, like Social Security and Medicare. In the meantime, I believe that Kathleen Sebelius should resign (on the principal of parliamentary accountability), that President Obama should shake up his administration at every level, that he should reach out in an unprecedented way to the Republicans to devise some kind of health care compromise that fulfills his promise that "if you like your health care plan you can keep it," and he should deliver a nationally-televised address to the American people in which he acknowledges this catastrophe and never utters one defensive statement.

Even so, for decades to come, whenever a new government initiative, bureau, or program is announced, we can expect to hear—in the blogosphere and talk radio land—"Oh, yeah, remember the rollout of Obamacare?"

This is not just a setback for Obama and the Democrats. It is a setback for America.

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