Happy Birthday North Dakota: You Are Now 125!

Today is North Dakota's 125th birthday. On this day in 1989, at 3:40 EST, President Benjamin Harrison shuffled the statehood papers for North and South Dakota, signed them, and shuffled them again, so that it would be impossible to know whether we were the 39th or 40th state. Today North Dakota is giving itself a fabulous 125th birthday gift. The magnificent $52 million expansion of the North Dakota Heritage Center is celebrating its grand opening today. Our state museum has always been great. Now it is world class.

After a 125-year struggle to forge a viable rural civilization in an exceptionally challenging environment at the heart of North America (Eric Sevareid's "blank rectangle"), about as far from the centers of power, money, culture, and access as it is possible to be, suddenly everything seems possible for North Dakota. Many of the bedeviling historic problems of North Dakota life have suddenly been "solved" or at least addressed in a way we could not have expected back in 1989, when we "celebrated" our state Centennial in a somewhat muted and anxious manner. Those historic challenges--outmigration, rural decline, the slow death of small towns, underfunded public institutions, including K-12 schools and higher education, economic marginality, over-dependence on agriculture and federal aid—all seem less dramatic today.

For most of North Dakota history we have been a quiet agrarian people. As late as 1975 it would not have been inappropriate for us to erected winter-welded signs at the portals leading into North Dakota, saying, "Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people." That's Thomas Jefferson speaking, the man who bought North Dakota but never visited it, a man who never had to feed calves at 47 below or shovel out the fermented grain at the bottom of the bin.

As long as food matters—and what matters more in life?—North Dakota will be primarily a farm state. Oil may bring in greater revenues, but I agree with the Jeffersonians, including former ND Governor Arthur A. Link, that the highest and best use of our land is family farms. In fact, I believe a new agrarian movement (even revolution) is taking root in America, and that the number of farms in North Dakota will start to grow, though they will not be the industrial giants of the late twentieth century.

We have never been a glamorous people and the great majority of us could never be accused of being fashionable. For most of our history we have found it possible to live here only through hard work, gumption and grim perseverance, frugality, stoicism, thrift, and extremely modest expectations. Almost every one of us has kin who were cash poor all of their lives, conservative in every purchase and every life decision, dressed usually in patched and hand-me-down clothing, humble to the point of self-effacement, but who managed somehow to put one or more of their children through college, and died in genuine prosperity. I remember watching my grandmother Rhoda pay an old hired man at the end of the wheat harvest. She carefully put a few dollars into his gnarled hands, and then pressed a handful of coins into his palm. She paid him to the penny, and there was no possibility that she would round up his wages to the next dollar. Things were that tight.

That set of dynamics made us who we are. There is something magnificent about it.

It was said of Thomas Jefferson that he could "tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet." For that he is regarded as America's Renaissance man. But the farmers and ranchers of North Dakota, and their sons and daughters, can—even now--strip an engine, cultivate a field, judge a rodeo, weld a chassis, build a barn or fence, wire a house, pull a calf, roof a shed, dig a drain field, drive a school bus, milk a cow, eviscerate an antelope, can cucumbers and tomatoes, back a horse trailer into a crowded space, chair a meeting, or lead a capital campaign to build a new church. This massive, marvelous competence and pragmatism has allowed us to survive in the semi-arid, windswept, and sub-arctic place we call North Dakota. We Dakotans are outstanding at the basics, and—in the end—the basics matter most of all. When the national or world collapse comes, where do you want to be, midtown Manhattan or Mott, Los Angeles or Linton?

We have been through some very tough times in the history of North Dakota. In 1933, for example, the average North Dakotan earned $145 per year, compared to the national average, in that terrible time, of $375. More North Dakotans abandoned farms and left the state during the 1930s than at any other time during our history. Steinbeck could more accurately have written The Grapes of Wrath about North Dakota than Oklahoma and Arkansas. Say what you want about FDR and the New Deal, but his rural stabilization programs saved North Dakota, and rural electrification was one of the most significant things that ever happened on the Great Plains. At one point, in 1935, 175,000 North Dakotans were on direct federal assistance. The federal government has played an essential role in North Dakota's survival.

Historically, we have exported wheat and cattle, coal, and oil, but also topsoil, water, and our young people. Things are changing now, thanks mostly to new technologies. The Bakken boom is convincing many of our children to stay in North Dakota, rather than fulfill their early adult dreams elsewhere, and the new amenities that come with economic success make North Dakota more attractive in cuisine and culture than ever before. Genetic modification has brought us drought-resistant strains of wheat and corn that enable us to harvest abundance much more often than in the first 100 years of North Dakota history. North Dakota was one of the pioneers of no-till agriculture. Soil erosion—one of the most significant problems of North Dakota history—is now largely a forgotten issue.

From an economic point of view (jobs, prosperity, lowered taxes, state budget surpluses, opportunity for new businesses, adequate funding of our basic institutions), this is the very best time in our 125-year history. It seems to me that no rational being, surveying the long, sometimes grim, struggle of North Dakota history, can wish the Bakken boom had never happened or would go away. (Managing it wisely, at a sustainable pace, with the fewest growing pains, is another matter altogether). If we had to choose birthday messages for North Dakota on November 2, 2014, we'd want to quote Prime Minister Harold Macmillan, who told the people of Great Britain in 1957, "You've never had it so good."

Life is easier now. There is far less heavy lifting.

My concern is whether the "new North Dakota" will be as successful in shaping human character, resourcefulness, and integrity as the old one that is so undeniably and perhaps inevitably passing into ancient myth. There is no turning back. Most North Dakotans frankly do not wish to go back to or even romanticize that more strenuous, marginal, hardscrabble life. But all of us, I believe, recognize that something that has been essential to our identity as a people is being lost, and that in some important way we will be less even as we are more. That's the paradox of modernity.

I love this place.

Happy birthday North Dakota.

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Somewhere Below the Bombast, Real Issues Await Us

I don't know about you, but I will be mighty glad come November 5 when the 2014 election season is over, and we can all calm down and get on with our lives again. If America was still a healthy democracy, we would all now be engaged in careful and respectful political debate. We'd be filled with pride to live in a nation where so much actual power resides in the hands of the people. We'd be agreeing on the facts, and debating the merits of the candidates and the issues. It is not civic pride that I feel, however, but confusion and disgust. If you have been reading the expanded letters to the editor page of this newspaper, or watching the television ads, you have been provided a short course in all the logical fallacies and deliberate political distortions available to human ingenuity.

Let the yard signs come down. Of this much I am sure: when archaeologists dig up Bismarck 10,000 years from now, they are going to wonder just who this "Sitte" was. And Oban and Potter and Martinson and Kaiser.

If we were wise, we'd ban all political ads on television. There are really only two types: the Reaganesque "It's Morning in America Again" ads with children playing in parks and farmers leaning proudly against combines; or "Willie Horton" ads designed to damage one's opponent by proving that he is a corrupt hack who is soft on crime (or race). Both types engage in subliminal messaging. In other words, they are not really about public policy or even political character, but rather about our primal hopes and primal fears. When was the last time you saw a political ad on television and took it at face value as a reliable, fair, and representative short portrait of a candidate or an issue? What is the useful civic takeaway of an ad in which a rancher pets his hunting dog and says he's a sixth generation Montanan? Impressive though that is, how will that make him a better U.S. Senator? It doesn't tell us how he will vote on immigration reform. It doesn't even tell us how he will vote on the farm bill.

If we took the millions of dollars that have been spent in North Dakota this year for the ballot measures alone, and spent it instead on civics classes in our public schools, we'd be infinitely better off. Among other things, that money could be used to train young people to see through the lies, distortions, ad hominem attacks, demonization of the opposing point of view, false claims, red herrings, and straw man "arguments" that now pass for political discourse.

First I see an attractive young mother from a small town who says that local pharmacies are essential to the sanctity of rural life. Half an hour later I see an attractive young mother from a small town who says that she'd be able to afford antibiotics for her children's ear infections if only we'd permit fair competition to drive down the prices. Later still I see an attractive young mother from a small town declare that once the big box stores get control of our pharmaceutical supply, they'll jack up the prices, just you wait. By the time the evening is over all I want to do is move to a small town--because the camerawork is always done on a perfect July evening, just before sunset; people are greeting each cheerfully other on main street; everyone has a world-class dog; and, as Garrison Keillor says, all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children, even those with ear infections, are above average. Give me some political ads shot in ground blizzards.

I'm sure you have seen those electronic dog fences that mark the perimeter of someone's property. When the dog gets close to the perimeter it is gently warned by a bell or a sweet little vibration in its electronic collar, but if it goes over the line it receives a shock. After a few weeks the dog becomes a model citizen. If there were any real justice in the world, there would be a little shock when citizens or political handlers stray from the merits of the issue or the provable facts. And when a political candidate lies, or attacks his (or her) opponent, or tries to hide behind veterans or the American flag or the Bible, that should bring on the taser.

Here are some of the "arguments" I would like to see discouraged by timely electric shocks:

1. Questioning the motives of the other citizens. Example: "Anyone who votes against Measure 6 has never gone through a divorce?" Really? How do you know?

2. Deliberately exaggerating the consequences or the cost of some proposed measure. The dollar numbers being thrown around about Measure 5, for example, the Clean Water amendment, rise to more insane and apocalyptic levels week by week. We need to vote on the merits of this proposal, not on the myths.

3. If you read letters to the editor across North Dakota, the writer's preferred vote always leads to paradise on earth or at least preserves the happy status quo, and the other option (the wrong vote) leads to the end of civilization as we know it. This is known as "binary thinking" or "the law of the occluded middle."

4. Accusing "out of state interests" of intruding themselves into the purity of North Dakota life. In almost every case, both sides take all the out of state money they can. I find it interesting that a state whose shale fields are now being developed with gigantic quantities of out of state money provided mostly by out of state entities to bring up oil that mostly benefits out of state interests, could be so prickly about "out of state" intrusion into the political process. Perhaps I am missing something.

5. Playing the "freedom" card. Example: "If you ban smoking in restaurants, you are letting them take away our freedoms, the kind our Founding Fathers intended, the kind we fought for in World War II?" Really? That's what WWII was about? Who knew?

And 6. Normalizing the worst-case scenario and the slippery slope. Here's the logic. "If Measure 7 passes, the Rexall Drug Store in such and such a village may have to close. Ergo, if Measure 7 passes, all small town drug stores will close. If all small town drugstores close, our children will die of strep throat. This will lead to the collapse of rural America. Do you love your country?" This is also known as reductio ad absurdam. But you see it every day in some form or other.

Call me a naïve idealist, but it seems to me that the system only really works if election "debate" clarifies the issues and provides citizens with the information they need to make responsible choices on election day. Given all the time and the vast sums of money devoted to these elections, the citizen who walks into the voting booth should have a clear idea of what a proposed ballot measure would do, what it would not do, what problem it is trying to solve, at what cost, what problems it might in turn create, who is likely to gain from its passage, and who is likely to lose. In other words, what we need is good information, not political spin.

As usual, we'll muddle through. But we deserve better.

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If We Were Still a Republic, Heavy Security Would Not Be Necessary

"When I hear another express an opinion, which is not mine, I say to myself, He has a right to his opinion, as I to mine; why should I question it? His error does me no injury, and shall I become a Don Quixote to bring all men by force of argument, to one opinion?"

TJ letter to his favorite grandson, Thomas Jefferson Randolph
November 28, 1808
  
Thomas Jefferson had no Secret Service protection. He walked to his inauguration. He rode his horse alone around Washington, D.C., during his eight years as President. No attempts were made on his life.

The recent breakdown in Secret Service protection of President Barack Obama has alarmed the American people. Several individuals have gotten over the White House fence and even into the building itself. On one recent occasion, the President rode in an elevator with a man who had a gun on his person. We are fortunate that there has not been a serious assassination attempt on President Obama. The head of the Secret Service, Julia Pierson, resigned in early October in the face of these disturbing incidents.

The U.S. Secret Service was created in July 1865 to combat an epidemic of counterfeit currency. It was not until the 20th century that it began to protect national officers, including the President.

The first Presidential assassination attempt occurred on January 30, 1835, nine years after the death of Jefferson. An unemployed house painter named Richard Lawrence approached President Jackson after he left a funeral held in the House chamber of the U.S. Capitol. His gun misfired. Jackson, 67, who was a soldier and a serial duelist, clubbed his attacker several times with his cane. Lawrence managed to pull out a second pistol. Fortunately it misfired when he pulled the trigger.

The first President to be assassinated was Abraham Lincoln on April 15, 1865. After that James Garfield, William McKinley, and John F. Kennedy were assassinated in office, though many more attempts were made on sitting Presidents.

Jefferson never feared assassination, and he passed his entire, sometimes controversial life, without a security detail. He did, however, receive his share of hate mail. During his second term, when he chose to respond to British and French hostilities on the high seas with a total economic embargo, his popularity was seriously damaged. One citizen wrote, "You have sat aside and trampled on our most dearest rights bought by the blood of our ancestors." Another exploded with, "You red-headed son of a bitch." Jefferson's response was more bemused than alarmed. "They are almost universally the productions of the most ill-tempered & rascally part of the country," he wrote to his closest friend James Madison, "often evidently written from tavern scenes of drunkenness."

There may be several reasons why no attempts were made on Jefferson's life. First, as the Andrew Jackson incident proves, guns were relatively primitive in Jefferson's day. Each gun fired a single bullet only, and then took a considerable time to reload. Second, the President was not as well known then as he is now, in the age of hypermedia. Most citizens of Jefferson's time had no idea what the President looked like, and they would have had a very hard time picking him out of a crowd. Most Americans lived their entire lives then without any contact with the national government of the United States. Not only was all politics local then, but life was profoundly local in every way.

Most important, perhaps, is the fact that we were a republic then and we are a quasi-monarchical nation now. We are closer to Rome in the age of Augustus than we are to the illusory republic of the Founding Fathers. Augustus pretended that the Roman republic still existed, paying a kind of sentimental-cynical lip service to old republic forms, while ruling the emerging Roman Empire as an uncrowned monarch. So little was at stake in Jefferson's time that it would have been unlikely for a citizen to fixate on any national figure. Jefferson defined his role in the most restrictive and unambitious way. His goal was to reduce the national debt, reduce the size of the army and navy, eliminate internal federal taxes, and return as much sovereignty as possible to the individual states. Not much to decry in terms of Presidential authority.

Thomas Jefferson was a cheerful stoic, who didn't take himself too seriously, and who had a confident, serene, and undramatic view of his life as.as statesman. It would have been uncharacteristic of him to think about personal security. His daughter Maria was more concerned about the loneliness and craftiness of the White House than she was about security issues.

Read the full text of Jefferson's superb letter to his grandson Thomas Jefferson Randolph.

Further Reading:

• Jefferson's English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo and the Republican Revolution by Burton Spivak
• To His Excellency Thomas Jefferson: Letters to a President edited by Jack McLaughlin
• Jefferson and the Press: Crucible of Liberty by Jerry W. Knudson

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One Glorious Stolen Day Before the Snow Flies

Knowing that winter cannot be far off, I stole a whole day out of my life last week and ventured to Sitting Bull's cabin on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation. Sitting Bull (1831-1890) was more or less just minding his own business at a lonely homesite a long way from Fort Yates when Standing Rock Indian agent James McLaughlin decided to have him arrested in mid-December 1890. McLaughlin regarded Sitting Bull as a thorn in his side, an impediment to assimilation, an aging hero of the Resistance whose very existence might inspire other Hunkpapa Lakota to hold out against the conquest of their lands and way of life.

McLaughlin authorized Sitting Bull's arrest by a squad of "metal breasts," i.e., a large force of Indian policemen backed up (at a distance) by white soldiers in case things go out of hand. The dawn arrest was bungled, the inevitable skirmish ensued, and the great Lakota seer was shot in the back of the head at point blank range. Thus died ignominiously and entirely unnecessarily one of the great figures in Dakota (and North Dakota) history. His role in life, forced upon him by iron historical circumstance, was to defend his people and his homeland from those who came to take it away for their own purposes. Among other things, he was one of the masterminds of the stunning Lakota and Cheyenne victory at the Little Big Horn in June 1876. By the time Agent McLaughlin decided to eliminate him fourteen years later, Sitting Bull was really not much more than a harmless old man trying to live out his last years as far away from white people as possible.

Last year I learned the hard way that it is impossible to reach the cabin site after the snow flies. So I drove first to McLaughlin, South Dakota, and then on back roads to the turnoff, after which you bounce and jolt along to the cabin site through roads so rutted that your head caroms off the roof of the car with some regularity. It's precisely the kind of road that should lead to Sitting Bull's cabin: not for the faint of heart, not for all seasons, rugged enough to make you remember it's a pilgrimage not a casual jaunt.

I've been to the cabin site maybe five times, all in the last few years. It's one of the most beautiful places on the Great Plains, on the north bank of the Grand River, across from some rugged river hills, nestled in a broad grass valley inhabited only by cattle (and ghosts). You have to want to go there. The quiet at the site is so complete that for a few minutes you almost cannot believe that such a place can still exist in our bustling noisy world. As I sat where the cabin once stood, I heard a lone late-season meadowlark sing its perfect little song. Unfortunately, I do not speak its language, so I could not learn what it had to teach.

The cabin is long gone. What remains are a small fenced enclosure with a marker (for others killed in the skirmish), a big metal SD historical sign, and such reverence objects as pilgrims choose to leave at the site. There are always a few medicine bundles of bright cloth tied to the fence, which encloses a twenty by thirty foot patch of sacred ground. The medicine bundles usually contain small quantities of tobacco. Once I found a beaten up copy of the Bible there. Often there are small pieces of animal bone, or metal rings, or beads.

The historical sign was written long ago by South Dakota white historians, before the American Indian Movement (AIM), before the Indian cultural renaissance of the 1970s. The phraseology of the sign has a somewhat condescending feel to it (it is usually the victors who write history), so a few "rasp and file revisionists" have done some careful editing of the raised metal text. Where the white historians described Sitting Bull as a "clever prophet," the Lakota (or pro-Lakota) "editors" have filed away the arguably belittling adjective "clever." The original writer summed things up by calling Sitting Bull "misguided." That word has been more or less obliterated by those who do not share that view.

Vandalism or not, I am filled with admiration for what the revisionists have done at the site. They could have torn down the sign altogether. They could have shot it full of holes, or thrown paint or blood on it, or spray-painted expletives across the full text. Instead, with considerable care and precision they have filed off the most Eurocentric phrases on the sign, but left the bulk of the historical inscription in place. You can still make out the words they have removed—probably that was purposeful—but at the same time you have been made aware that the dominant culture's interpretation of this important historical moment is no longer acceptable, at least to the individuals who spent several hours working the revision with hand tools. It is clear that they had strong feelings about what was offensive in the original language, but they have engaged in an act of historic dialogue rather than mere outrage. That's precisely what we most need as we think about North Dakota history in a new, holistic, fully contextualized, and nuanced way.

If I were teaching a course on the history of the American West, I would ask my students to find out what they could about who wrote the original text for the sign, where, and especially when, and then to think hard about the revisions—especially how they simultaneously preserve and yet re-write the original text. Then I'd have them find other historic markers on the Great Plains, particularly those concerned with cultural conflicts, and think about ways in which they might be re-read and re-written in light of what we now know about the complexities of our history.

The Grand River meanders along just south of the cabin site. Like the Heart River or the Little Missouri, it is a grasslands river, here and there graced with stands of cottonwood trees. About a quarter mile downstream on my side of the river I saw what I thought was the perfect cottonwood, tall and very old, standing a little apart from the rest, with a triangular array of golden yellow leaves high up, shimmering in the fall sun, golden, yellow, slightly orange, some still green, all brilliant and the whole effect simply magnificent. I ventured over to the base of the great tree. It almost certainly was not there in 1890, but it sprang up within living memory of those dark and bloody days on the northern plains.

As I lay on my back on the grass, hands cupped behind my head, deep in the grass, almost buried in the grass, listening to the breeze dance in the brittle cottonwood choir above me, soaking up the last squibs of the summer sun, I thought about the coming of winter to the northern plains. It is coming, like it or not. The trees will soon be bare. Many of the dirt trails that I love most in North Dakota will soon be closed for the winter.

But for the moment I was just a lazing creature in the tall grass, toasting in the afternoon sun, in one of the least industrialized places of America, on a carpe diem journey into the middle of nowhere.

This is what we must conserve.

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The Jefferson Hour at Tidewater Community College (October 15, 2014)

Clay Jenkinson, a humanities scholar who adopts the persona of Thomas Jefferson, engaged students and answered questions during a morning session on Oct. 15 at Tidewater Community College's Chesapeake Campus. Students from American literature classes and others came to the Black Box Theatre in the Chesapeake Academic Building for the one-man performance.

www.tcc.edu/arts

A Sigh of the Loss of the Age When Dickens Mattered

As Dickens wrote, we live in the best of times, we live in the worst of times. I’m giving a couple of guest lectures at BSC for my friend Kimberly Crowley. The novel we chose together is Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” published in London in 1861, at the same time the American Civil War was beginning.

The students are smart, engaging, and eager to learn. They have way more street sense than I had at their age, and they have been exposed, in their short lives, to a breathtakingly wide range of cultural stimuli.

Still, I don’t think I have had much success with Dickens. I certainly don’t blame them. But I feel a powerful sense of loss. It is possible that we truly live in a post-literate time. People read, of course, perhaps now more than ever, but the number of people who read Dickens (1812-1870) or Dostoevsky, etc. is diminishing rapidly until I think we may be reaching the collapse point.

There was a time not so long ago when you could walk into any college literature course anywhere in the English-speaking world, slap a Dickens novel down on the desk, and expect students to have read it a week hence. And most of them would do so. It would not be easy reading. But they would do it, because there was still widespread agreement that it was important to read such books, and our K-12 educational system still worked hard to prepare young people for such challenges.

In my time, the only way around actually reading a classic was Cliffs Notes. The stigma of being caught consulting such a cheater’s guide was huge. Today, thanks to the Internet, there are hundreds of websites dedicated to Dickens and “Great Expectations,” many of them outstanding, some with sample student essays, and all with the kinds of study questions that help you get through a hard book for the first time. Today it is possible to have a serious encounter with a great novel (or biography, or work of philosophy or theology) without ever reading the book. Think of that.

I’m a slow reader — I believe it has held me back in life — so I have to really commit myself to read a book as long as “Moby Dick” or “Crime and Punishment.” If I started reading “War and Peace” today, and only interrupted my reading long enough to sleep and eat, I’d need a very long week to get through its 1,440 pages (567,000 words). And who ever has such a week of unstructured time?

I’m both a professional reader and old enough to have been educated in the “big hard book” tradition of American education. If I find it hard to carve out enough time to read “Great Expectations” (185,000 words, 500 pages), imagine how much harder it is for students, who did not grow up in that more bookish era, who are usually working part or full time in addition to taking college courses.

Besides, these young people have never not known television. I grew up when there were just two channels, when you had to get up out of your chair to turn the channel, and when the broadcast day ended after the nightly news. These students grew up in a world saturated by media; now they can watch or hear virtually anything on demand.

Most television remains the “vast wasteland” that FCC chairman Newton Minow described back in 1961, but with hundreds of cable or satellite stations, and a virtually infinite range of Amazon Prime or Netflix options, there is now always something of high quality worth watching. In that “matrix,” Tolstoy doesn’t stand a chance.

We have a breathtaking array of ways to entertain ourselves. In Dickens’ time, there were few. We must simply face the truth. Books have come to play a pretty minor role in personal entertainment in the 21st century. I believe it is important not to wring one’s hands and bemoan this loss as if it were the “death of civilization as we know it.” I certainly don’t think it does any good to browbeat college students for not knowing what they have never been taught or expected to know. We must meet them where they are, and give them the tools they will need to thrive in the decades through which they will lead their adult lives.

But. We are all subject to the human condition. By which I mean that we all dream beyond our capacity to achieve. We all know jealousy, envy, and impossible longings. We all have self-doubts. We are all subject to waves of self-destructive activity. We all have periods when we doubt our faith. Everyone steps back from time to time to wonder what it’s all about, what the meaning of life is, how old and big and purposeful the universe is, and how it came to be.

We wonder why we were born, what our larger purpose is, and where we go when we die. All of us, I believe, bear scars that cover soul wounds that can never fully be healed. All of us do things we know are wrong, and then we wonder how that could have happened. And we know ecstasies that are impossible to communicate to others.

That’s part of what I mean by the “human condition.” Where do we turn for clarification, for insight, for possible answers? Some turn to God and prayer. Some turn to priests and pastors and psychologists. Some turn to family and friends. I turn to all of these for help, but principally I turn to the humanities, the set of texts that wrestle incessantly with these very questions.

I’m not trying to generalize for the culture at large, but I know I don’t speak merely for myself or English majors, when I say the world will be a lesser place without Charles Dickens in it. Dickens gets at some aspects of the human condition better than anyone else who has ever tried.

Dickens illuminates the life of anyone who has experienced family dysfunction (and who has not), anyone who has felt the heartlessness of the society in which she or he lives, anyone who has been damaged by the pace and the cost and the injustices of the legal system, anyone who has any form of obsessive compulsive disorder, or lives with someone who suffers from that malady.

Dickens’ ability to explore and unpack the human character is stunning. His prose sometimes takes your breath away. There are passages in Dickens so great that you literally have to get up from where you were sitting because something in his way with words, some offhand psychological insight, some perfect detail, or his ability to articulate what you already knew but could never have put into words, forces you out of your seat.

At that glorious moment you want more than anything else someone on earth to share the experience with. The terrible loneliness of reading is that there is almost never anyone to call or write or reach for in the dark.

But the chief reason to read Dickens is the almost infinite pleasure he provides if you can steal a few hours from the noise and pace of our times, sit in a good chair, and surrender to the imaginative universe of one of the world’s greatest geniuses.

Start with "Great Expectations."

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Want to Make Things Worse? Abolish the State Board of Higher Education

When we go to the polls on November 4, we'd be making a serious mistake, even a colossal mistake, if we abolish the State Board of Higher Education, and replace it with a three-person commission. I repeat: as we seek to get better accountability and performance in higher education in North Dakota, the very worst thing we could do would be to pass this dangerous amendment (Measure 3), which would throw our entire system into pandemonium. It might even lead to an exodus of students from our 11 colleges and universities.

Higher education is expensive and complex. We need a fairly large and diverse State Board that represents every region of North Dakota, and brings a range of backgrounds, perspectives, ages, professions, and expertises to the table. A three-member commission appointed by the governor would be too small and too beholden to the person who appointed them, to protect the autonomy of our colleges and universities. Autonomy is the key word. Imagine for a moment a system that would permit the governor (whoever she or he is) or the legislature to start micro-managing higher education. Oy vey. The existing State Board of Higher Education is the right instrument for governing the system. It needs to be tweaked a bit, I think, but not abolished.

If we did this rash and unnecessary thing, we would be jeopardizing the accreditation of our 11 state colleges and universities. And no, this is not some sort of convenient talking point for those who advocate retaining the existing system. It is the stark truth. Accreditation of North Dakota's colleges and universities is granted by an entity known as the Higher Learning Commission, headquartered in Chicago, one of six regional accrediting organizations in the United States. The Higher Learning Commission exists to make sure that institutions of higher education meet certain standards, so that the public (and taxpayers) know that our large investment in higher education is paying off. We routinely certify and license accountants, dentists, doctors, nurses, even lawyers. Those "accrediting" entities protect us from fraud and shoddy work. That's precisely why we accredit institutions of higher education.

The Higher Learning Commission has no interest in intruding itself into North Dakota's political arena, but it has been asked by a range of disparate individuals, what would happen if the people of North Dakota passed this amendment. Their answer, very cautiously stated and with many humble disclaimers, is simple: chaos, and a serious threat to continued accreditation.

Delivering college and university education to young people in the 21st century is proving to be a complex and at times problematic business. I can understand why the public is frustrated. Tuition just keeps going up and up, in spite of the fact that North Dakota is now a very wealthy state. Each of the 11 institutions in North Dakota, and particularly the two flagship universities on the eastern border, at times appear to regard themselves as independent city-states like Florence or Venice, too proud and too grand to be governed by "outsiders" (like the State Board or the Chancellor of Higher Education). Meanwhile, something like 20% of the students who arrive within college and university gates require remedial training in math and English. The list is long.

So what is to be done?

The answer is not to blow up the system out of frustration, and install something that has not been carefully studied. The proposal before us—to eliminate the State Board and create a three-person commission—was hastily thrown together at the end of the last legislative session. It was born of frustration and impatience rather than careful reflection. If the people of North Dakota want to make fundamental changes in the way higher education is governed, we should create a blue ribbon commission to study best practices throughout the United States and bring a series of recommendations to the legislature, or empower a legislative interim committee to explore options and report back. At the very least, we should enter into a serious dialogue with the Higher Learning Commission to see what reforms or new models would meet their exacting standards, and which would be counter-productive.

A state government does many things—pave roads, collect taxes, manage wildlife—but higher education is a uniquely complex undertaking that needs a very significant measure of independence from the routine legislative and bureaucratic process. Jefferson famously said that his University of Virginia "will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind, for here we are not afraid to follow truth wherever it may lead." To protect the intellectual life of colleges and universities, where professors sometimes produce scholarly discourse that is unpopular or provocative, where many essential research projects seem abstruse or frivolous to "common sense" citizens looking in from the outside, we need to maintain a wall of separation between state government and the sacred work of the universities.

The existing State Board of Higher Education was created to protect our colleges from the political meddling of North Dakota's populist Bill Langer (Governor 1932-34, 1937-39), who fired seven NDSU (NDAC) employees for failing to contribute to one of his campaigns. The Agricultural College (as it was then known) lost it accreditation for several years owing to Langer's machinations. The State Board of Higher Education was created thereafter to ensure academic freedom at our colleges and universities, and autonomy from political pressures.

I do believe we need some structural changes in the way we constitute the State Board. I favor a variation of what in judicial circles is known as the "Missouri Plan." An independent committee recommends a slate of worthy applicants to the governor. The governor chooses someone from the list. Then the State Board has to confirm the appointment by formal vote. Two years later, that board member has to stand for re-election by the people of North Dakota. This would provide important new tools for both the people and the board. The board could, if it felt strongly enough, reject a governor's appointment. This would seldom happen. And the people could vote no confidence to a board member who is perceived to be out of sync with the will of the electorate. We want good individuals on the State Board, but we want them to be more accountable to the people who dig in their pockets to pay the taxes to support higher education.

In my opinion, we do not need radical changes. What we do need is pretty simple: a long period of stability and good governance. We've had a rocky last decade, but with the appointment of Larry Skogen as Interim Chancellor we have begun to find a rhythm of integrity, stability, honesty, and good sense. There is very widespread agreement in North Dakota that Dr. Skogen has been an excellent Chancellor, that he has stopped the hemorrhaging, rebuilt the University System office, and shown us the path to a new era of good feeling in higher education. If the State Board now hires a more permanent Chancellor of Skogen's integrity—someone who understands the unique character of North Dakota, someone who seeks both excellence and harmony—we will stop talking about the problems in higher ed and get on with the real business of our 11 colleges and universities: preparing young people to be complete human beings, to have the tools to realize their dreams, to be enlightened citizens of the United States, and to compete successfully in an increasingly complex global marketplace.

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Autumnal Setbacks in the Serenity of the Garden

Autumn is definitely here now, unmistakably. The sun now glares directly in my face as I drive to work at 7:45 a.m. It gets dark so early in the evening now that it feels as if the endless summer light just collapsed overnight sometime in the last three weeks.

The cottonwood leaves are starting to turn. There is nothing quite so lovely as the cottonwoods along the sacred Little Missouri River when they burst into fiery yellow-gold sometime in September. They define the term "achingly beautiful." Hiking the badlands on a crisp autumn morning when a jacket is required but soon becomes a burden, when the light is so clean that it clarifies the beauty of every object in nature, and the blue of the autumn sky makes you weak in the knees, that's reason enough to live in North Dakota. Hunters hunt as much for this as for the birds and venison. Hunting allows strong rural men to be poets for a few days per year without losing face. I love listening to farmers talk about the pure satisfaction of the first day of the wheat harvest without self-censorship, and hunters are positively romantic when they talk about the quality of the light and the sense of oneness with nature as they move through the grassland or stubble.

On the morning I wrote this I woke up three times before dawn—first, of course, to pee, which can be done on autopilot without really waking up at all. Then to pull a blanket off the floor below the bed and drag it up to my chin. Finally to go pheasant hunting in the back yard. But the blanket first.

One of the purest delights of autumn is those mornings when you wake up sometime before first light realizing that you are cold, because you fell asleep under a single sheet, and the temperature has dropped ten or fifteen degrees in the course of the night. You are still very tired and groggy, a little grumpy that this mere meteorological circumstance has disturbed your sleep, and for quite a while you pretend that you can maybe gut it out till your regular waking time without searching for the errant blanket at the foot of the bed. I don't know why we all try to resist just fetching the blanket and getting it over with—a simple motion, after which we know things are going to be much better--but we all procrastinate, losing good sleep meanwhile, until the discomfort finally becomes painful enough to tip us into action and force us to do what we should have done half an hour sooner.

I spent that much time, or more, doing a variety of heat and convection experiments under my bed sheet. I tucked the sheet right up to my chin. I got into the fetal position. Then I got into the fetal fetal position, until I looked like John Lennon on honeymoon. Then I pulled the sheet over my head. I thrashed in place a little to generate some internal fire. After all of that, I cursed under my breath and reached over the end of the bed to get the blanket, a lovely Pendleton of rich chocolate brown with wide rust and charcoal stripes. A perfect autumn blanket.

I love the process of warming up. Of course you want to be warm instantly, but if you are patient and just let the experience unfold, you can actually learn to enjoy the thermodynamics. The acute chill disappears almost immediately with the advent of a blanket, and then the gradual "toasting" process actually creates an exquisite joy. The continuing slight chill makes you glad to be alive. With any luck I can at this point fall asleep again for some really satisfying "top up" sleep.

Alas.

Sometime in late August, a little terrorist cluster of pheasants began to ravage my garden. I ran after them with a baseball bat. I sprinkled commercial varmint repellants along the perimeter. I begged my friend Jim to turn his faithful hunting dog Lizzie loose in the district. I bought live traps. I wired the sheaths of my sweet corn shut with rubber bands. I threw netting over my tomatoes. But these were pampered suburban welfare pheasants, who knew no decency and did not respect the rule of law. Eventually I bought a paint ball gun—actually a paint ball assault rifle—and began to obsess about revenge. Those pesky pheasants transformed me overnight from a serene Jeffersonian gardener to an enraged and pathetic Elmer Fudd.

Last weekend I gleaned most of the last produce from my garden, ate a couple of perfect minimalist garden meals, and began the autumn cleanup and shutdown. I pulled the tomato cages and stacked them as carefully as such unwieldy contraptions can be stacked. I pulled up all the gallon-sized tomato cans and put them in a neat pile. I mowed the whole garden and prepped it for a thorough fall tilling. The only produce still on the vine is in my raised Monticello garden: a few Hidatsa squashes, an ear or two of Mandan corn, a few Jefferson Costoluto Genovese tomatoes that are still worrisomely green, and two butternut squashes.

My point is that I had, by now, largely stopped fixating about the pheasants. Whenever I walked past my paint ball rifle near the back door, I had begun to feel faintly ridiculous. Maybe I had over-reacted. One must share the abundance, after all, and the fine dynamics of evolution have made plants such as corn and tomatoes desirable to a variety of critters so that their seeds can be distributed across the land. Maybe the pheasants were not perpetual entitlement bums, but just troubled birds going through a rough patch. Surely they had some melancholy sense that they would not be alive much longer. Perhaps they quote Ecclesiastes in the evenings as they hunker in the prairie just west of my yard.

So when I woke for the third and final time this morning to the sound of "kuk… kukk.. kuck" in the vicinity of the garden, I slipped out onto the deck in a mostly light-hearted mood. I was clad in suburban camouflage--t-shirt, boxer shorts, and slippers, holding a faux Rambo and Full Metal Jacket assault rifle stocked with orange paint ball ammunition. Nothing ridiculous there!

The pheasant saw me coming and slipped between two rows of corn stalks. I approached as silently as Natty Bumpo, then fired a burst of ten paint balls into the corn. The appalled pheasant flushed and squawked at me menacingly as it flew off. Point made. Time to shower.\

But when I looked into my raised Jefferson garden, my heart fell on the ground. I was light-hearted no longer. My last acorn squash had been violated by those very pheasants. I do not exaggerate. The entire interior had been consumed, after a gaping hole had been pecked through its many hard rinds. I would not have thought it even possible for a bird to hack its way into such a well-protected vegetable. My last garden dinner was now entirely despoiled.

I fell into a towering, drooling, helpless rage, and swore that I would eat the culprit(s) for spite, with a commercial squash on the side, even if their breast meat was stained with orange pigment! I rushed into the house and reloaded my magazine.

O the humanity. This ain't over.

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Don't Throw Out the Rascals, Throw Out the System

This last week the U.S. Constitution reached its 217th birthday. When the Founding Fathers, 55 men, all prominent, completed their task in mid-September 1787 and emerged from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the great sage of the delegates, Benjamin Franklin, was asked what exactly they had produced behind closed doors. He replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." 

In almost every meaningful respect, we have lost it.

Lately I have been reading about the last days of the Roman republic (146-44 BCE). Rome's long career of military conquest beyond its rational and defensible borders had put unbearable strains on the ancient senate. Roman armies had ceased to be manned by sturdy citizen soldiers from the small farms of Italy. They were increasingly replaced by foreign mercenaries who fought for money rather than liberty. Meanwhile, a motley potpourri of refugees had poured into the city of Rome from all the provinces and occupied territories. Many of them did not speak Latin. Most of them did not give a fig about the Roman constitution. They were less interested in becoming true Roman citizens than having access to the increasingly large and expensive grain doles that Rome established to buy off crime and urban unrest. Power-hungry men like Julius Caesar and Pompey bribed and hustled their way to the top, amassed large personal armies with which to overawe each other and all virtuous opposition, and provided the masses with mindless but showy entertainments to take their minds off of all that they were losing. (Today, we call that Keeping Up with the Kardashians).

Rome had gotten too large and unwieldy to be held together any longer by its ancient republican constitution. Earnest patriots like Cicero and Cato did their best extend the life of the old system with strenuous orations about virtue, simplicity, the rule of law, and why the republic still mattered. But when the inhabitants of a nation cease to share a common spirit, a common sense of mutual affinity and mutual sacrifice, a common sense of national identity, it's only a matter of time before the whole enterprise collapses.

Eventually, Caesar's grand-nephew Octavius (Augustus), gathered the shattered Roman state together under his personal dictatorship, solemnly staged a few faux-republican rituals now and then to allow people to pretend they still governed themselves, and got unapologetically with the real business of Rome: world empire. I believe we are approaching that moment.

Benjamin Franklin's republic was designed for a different time (when a musket was a high-tech weapon and the Atlantic Ocean was a moat of almost infinite width), and—frankly—for a different people (a largely English-derived population of highly educated farmers and small tradesmen). Our Constitution was designed to move public affairs forward at a glacial pace—which made sense in a three mile-per-hour world where nothing much was at stake. The Founders could not possibly have imagined the zip and frenzy and lethality of the modern world—cruise missiles, Internet commerce, the internal combustion engine, nuclear warheads, skyscrapers, or the capacity of a government agency (the NSA) to listen to every utterance of every single citizen whenever it wishes, for good reason or bad, instantly and secretly.

Like it or not, the United States is not a quiet and isolationist backwater any more. We somehow became the world's sole superpower and cultural hegemon, wealthy beyond dreams, with more than 750 foreign military bases scattered all over the planet, and a breathtaking, boundless appetite for resources, especially carbon. And yet we continue to try to govern ourselves with a constitution written by agrarians and isolationists dressed in wigs and waistcoats, who just wanted to be left alone by their national government.

Look at our national paralysis. We cannot pass immigration reform. While we dither 10,000 illegal immigrants cross our borders every single day. We cannot find consensus on a national health care delivery system. We cannot establish a sane national energy policy. We cannot agree on national educational standards, but by all measures we are slipping behind other nations in literacy, math, science aptitude, and engineering. We cannot decide who takes us into war, the House of Representatives (as the Founding Fathers insisted), or the president, who increasingly rules by executive order, mostly because nature abhors a vacuum and a great nation must do something.

Meanwhile, the people are fed a steady diet of what the Romans called "bread and circuses." We spend more time debating the felonies of football players Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson than we do the "high crimes and misdemeanors" of our public officers. I've watched some of the ESPN discourse about these crises in the NFL, and on the whole the discussions have been more thoughtful, civil, and nuanced than the political debates on Fox and MSNBC.

We need to take our lesson from the Romans, so that we do not suffer their fate. Here's what that would mean. Wisdom consists of calling things by their right names. We are no longer a republic, and we aren't in any meaningful sense a democracy. The evidence suggests that we are now a global consumerist empire, a worldwide military-petroleum resource complex, ruled behind the curtain by corporate interests whose principal loyalty is not to America, but to profit. Even before Citizens United (2012), moneyed "interests" had virtually unlimited access to members of Congress, and now their ability to choke the system with money is essentially infinite. Many members of Congress really do set out to be good public servants and to represent the will of their constituents, but they are so completely suffocated by privilege and surrounded by individuals of vast wealth and power and presumption, that they soon cease to have a meaningful link to average Americans. The Constitution we like to celebrate (every September 17) is a lovely relic, a sweet chapter in civics textbooks, but it now bears very little resemblance to the way we are actually governed.

Second, we need to step back and rewrite the Constitution to address the pace, and the technological and demographic conditions of our time. In other words, we need to jettison the mythology of America so that we can get back on track with the modern mission of America. Given our global reach and our colossal international power, given our insatiable material desires, and given how dangerous the 21st century is proving to be, we are going to need a more efficient national government with fewer of the checks and balances that hold up legislation. We are going to have to grant the president more power, because otherwise he is just going to have to take it. It's this simple: we can either rewrite the constitution to get on top of the actual dynamics of the way things are done, and thereby stay in control, or we can cling to the fiction of our "republic" and seek to restore it, while the actual work of our government is done in secret conclaves by people who have never been elected.  

I know I sound pessimistic, but I'm not. We are a very great nation, filled with of people of integrity and creativity and good will. We just need to take back our government from those who have hijacked it. We deserve better. If it ain't broke don't fix it, of course, but since it is clearly broken right to the core, we the people have to step up and renew America.

We need to become Jefferson's people again—with some updates.

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The Thrill and the Honor of Participating in Ken Burns' The Roosevelts

"It was my crowded hour!" 

Theodore Roosevelt on July 2, 1898—the day he led the charge up San Juan Hill.

The response to Ken Burns' latest documentary The Roosevelts: An Intimate History has been overwhelming. All credit to Ken Burns, who is a genius, and Geoffrey Ward, who has been researching and writing Ken's scripts for many years, and who is the shining star of "talking heads" in this 14-hour epic about TR, Eleanor (his niece) and FDR (TR's 5th cousin).

Working with Ken Burns has been one of the principal honors of my life. I was one of the talking heads in his documentary on Jefferson (1998), and an historical adviser to the film. I was in The National Parks: America's Best Idea. And now I have had the joy of being a commentator about Theodore Roosevelt in this film.

The wonderful outpouring of congratulations and praise I have received has moved me beyond my ability to describe. It is so strange looking at a television screen, seeing George Will, Dorris Kearns Goodwin, H.W. Brands, Patricia O'Toole, and others giants of our time, and then suddenly seeing myself. It's a little disorienting, and of course I half blush and half cringe to see a: what I said; b: how I said it: c: how it fits into the larger context of the film.

I was interviewed several years ago for the film, at Ken's home and studio in Walpole, New Hampshire. One sits in a chair about three feet from Burns, with a film camera rolling and a separate audio track, and there is no rehearsal, no hint of what he might ask. He just starts with some provocative statement, and his questions, his penetration, his visual responses, his followups, all bring out of the interviewee (or at least this one) much more than we came to say or thought we had in us.

Then you leave for the airport, cursing the day you were born, wishing you had said that differently, and thisbetter, and that more succinctly. Whenever I come home from Walpole, I write a formulaic letter begging for a second interview. This never happens. Ken says, "The best way to stay off the cutting room floor is to 'stick the landing.'" 

After that, you (or at least I) actually half forget that I was interviewed at all. And I assume that what I had to say, even if it helped to inform the script, would surely have wound up on the cutting room floor.

Finally, often several years later, when the film airs on public television, I like everyone else have to watch to see what's in it. As someone who makes documentary films himself, I am always astonished by Burns' genius as an editor.

Frankly, I wish in The Roosevelts I had said a few things I did not, and wish I had not said, or said differently, a few things that wound up in the film. In particular, I wish I had softened a little my statement that Roosevelt was a killer. He WAS a killer, to be sure, and in some ways a jingoist and a warmonger, but that needs to be contextualized very carefully before it can fully make sense. TR lived in a more "heroic" age than ours, and it was still widely felt then that war was the grand test of a man's character and a nation's destiny. TR's thirst to kill quadrupeds was not so much bloodlust (though perhaps there was some of that) as a desire to dominate the world around him. The same dynamics that characterized Roosevelt led Europe into the most disastrous war in its history in 1914. Millions of young man sang and exulted as they marched off to bloody and muddy death in the trenches.

At any rate, there is so much more to admire in TR than to criticize--it's a shame to spend much time questioning his actions or motives. He is one of the most fascinating, most exuberant, most energetic, curious, questing, intelligent, and well-read men of American history. He is so much larger than life that the phrase doesn't do him justice.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to study him, and to be one of those to try to make sense of him for America's greatest documentary filmmaker.

Two people have contacted me to tease me for using the phrase "writingest president." One of them is one of my dearest friends, my old secretary Naomi Brooker of Grass Valley, CA. The other is an Australian woman I have never met, who said, "at least you did not say threepeat!" I stand by my phrase, though I actually borrowed it from one of the greatest historians of our time, Donald Jackson, who wrote about Lewis and Clark as "the writingest explorers of all time."

I've reconnected with old lost friends in the last few days, and made some new ones. Two of the historians I most respect in the world have taken the time to write letters of praise. I'm on cloud nine, humbled, moved deeply, and of course RESOLVED to get better, learn more, master more, become better read and better educated, and to make this one of the moments which increase one's creative life rather than cap it.

I think this is Ken Burns' best film ever, no thanks to me, and that the episodes on FDR and Eleanor are, if anything, dramatically better than those on Theodore.

Again, to all of you, heartfelt thanks. Bully.

Further Reading:

• The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris
• Mornings on Horseback by David McCullough
• Theodore Roosevelt: A Strenuous Life by Kathleen Dalton

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Well Done, Our Good and Faithful Public Servant

Valerie Naylor has been the superintendent of Theodore Roosevelt National Park since 2003. Now she is retiring. I'm glad for Valerie, who is one of my closest friends, but sad for North Dakota. We need her brand of quiet but unapologetically firm leadership now more than ever, as the fracking industrial revolution encircles the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (TRNP).

Valerie has been an amazingly effective public servant during her 11-year tenure. She has borne the responsibility of protecting the national park through a period of unprecedented challenges: a pesky south unit inholding whose private owner tried to transform into an outsized pile of cash; repeated efforts to force a bridge across the sacred Little Missouri River in the vicinity of Theodore Roosevelt's Elkhorn Ranch; the long and divisive campaign to protect the Eberts Ranch (in the prime Elkhorn Ranch viewshed) by permitting its private owners to sell it either to the National Park Service or the U.S. Forest Service (in the end, it was the latter); the great elk-reduction controversy of 2010-2011, which even Valerie's loud and sometimes abusive critics eventually praised as a "classical textbook case of wise and thoughtful management"; and now the impact of the oil boom.

How do you honor private property rights and cooperate with reasonable development and at the same time protect North Dakota's only national park, which consists of three relatively small and separated units that sit right in the heart of oil country?

If the Bakken oil boom were on the perimeter of Yellowstone National Park there would be two very important differences. First, there would be an extremely robust local, regional, and national debate about responsible development in the vicinity of the park. Unfortunately, Theodore Roosevelt National Park and its crown jewel the Elkhorn Ranch are not sufficiently well known across America to generate the kind of national conversation they deserve. With most other national parks—Rainier, Arches, Yosemite, and perhaps especially Yellowstone—it is immediately and automatically understood that they belong to the whole people of the United States, that it is in the entire nation's interest to cherish and protect them, and that the local communities are not always the best custodians of their integrity.

Second, Yellowstone is so much larger than TRNP that perimeter distractions have less visual and audio impact on the heart of the park. Yellowstone National Park embraces 2.219 million acres, Theodore Roosevelt merely 70,000 acres, the largest parcel of which (the south unit) contains only 46,158 acres. From most places in Yellowstone or Glacier, you cannot see outside the park. You feel that the park goes on forever in every direction. There is almost no place in TRNP where you cannot observe what happens on the other side of the perimeter fence. From the highest point in the south unit, Buck Hill, you can see well more than a dozen oil sites, some of them of course flaring their untapped gasses. National park perimeters matter all over America, but they matter more in small parks than in the large ones.

Valerie has worked hand in hand with oil companies to limit their impact on the park experience. We go to national parks for many reasons, but somewhere near the center of their mission is a determination to provide us all a sanctuary from the everyday hustle and clutter of our advanced industrial civilization. We go to the national parks to enjoy a simplified, more basic experience in a place that is kept as far as is possible in its natural state. The national parks are remnants—perhaps "islands" is a better term--of the vast untrammeled wilderness that America once was. We go to them to find relief from the bustle, the humdrum, the consumerism, and the over-domestication of modern life. Theodore Roosevelt said we go to them so that we don't get too soft and comfortable.

Valerie has been a lover of Theodore Roosevelt National Park since she first visited the badlands in her childhood. She has worked in a number of other national parks and monuments in the course of her career, but this was the assignment she most wanted. She fully understands that a national park supervisor must address whatever challenges come her way, but I think it is fair to say that her life's dream was not to spend the heart of her career in weekly, sometimes daily, negotiations with oil company executives, striving to win little half-satisfying victories about where to place the rig, and what color to paint the storage tanks to blend in with park terrain. The amazing people who are drawn to careers in the National Park System have souls that are drawn to the bison snorting on the banks of the river in the morning fog, or the restoration of native grasses in a landscape that has been compromised by leafy spurge, or that exceedingly rare glimpse of a mountain lion slipping over the ridge. They want to do positive work to enrich the properties they manage, not fight rearguard skirmishes at tedious indoor public hearings.

I have had the good fortune to observe most of Valerie's tenure at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. She has done superb work along the lines of her park service job description, often in the face of criticism, but always in a way that makes her critics or opponents respect and genuinely like her. There is nothing brash or assertive or self-aggrandizing in her management style. She has such obvious integrity and character, and is so unfull of herself, so quietly dedicated to process and rational decision making, so unwilling to take the bait in the sometimes bombastic public debates, that she has won over two types of skeptical people: know-it-alls who believe they could manage the park better than any trained professional; and the large body of people who have an instinctive distaste for federal authority, federal supervision of the public domain, and federal employees (the feds!).

Valerie is not one of those temporary federal officials who appear on the horizon to take up a job, do it well, fraternize to a certain degree with the local folks, and then move on to the next assignment without much fanfare. She has become a friend to Medora, the badlands, and the people of North Dakota. In some cases, she has become family.

Now Valerie has purchased a beautiful modest conversion van RV. She plans to travel extensively throughout America—and beyond. She has more wanderlust than almost anyone I have ever known. I imagine her exploring America in that lovely rig, meandering from national park to national park and to wild places throughout the continent that most of us have never heard of. She has friends all over the country. She has an insane desire to step foot in every county of the United States.

I feel a little grumpy about her plan. My most persistent dream—since I was 18 years old—has been to buy a brand new, cat-free conversion van RV and travel the country for a year or two with books (now miniaturized on iPad!), cameras (no darkroom now required), and a typewriter (no postage now required). How I will envy Valerie as she wakes up in that rig, somewhere in America, on our public lands, with nowhere particular to be and a moose nosing about in the clearing.

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Immigration Reform: Let's Start by Rewarding Those Who Play by the Rules

This is a parable about the promise and the paralysis of America. I was dining at the Rough Riders Hotel in Medora last week with Sheila Schafer. Her favorite waiter was serving us, a handsome and exceptionally friendly and well-spoken young man from Argentina. I'll call him Frank. He is here on a work visa, but he will soon have to return to Argentina to remain in compliance with American immigration law. His fiancé—I'll call her Lucy—is an energetic and graceful young Argentinian woman with a perfect spirit of hospitality. She, too, works in the hotel restaurant. They are a photogenic and charming couple just starting their life together.

They love America. They are ideal candidates for the American Dream. They would like to stay here permanently. "Lucy" and "Frank" would be ideal American citizens—hard working, self-reliant, law abiding, well informed, and more enamored with American ideals than many of us.

They will almost certainly not get to spend their lives in the United States, and it is extremely unlikely that they will become American citizens. The Theodore Roosevelt Medora Foundation employs young people from several dozen countries. Most of them spend a couple of seasons here and then return to their native lands with stories to tell about the American West, and money in their pockets. A few wish to stay and cast their lot with us. It is almost impossible. The legal wranglings that would be necessary to try to help them achieve their American dream would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and there is no guarantee of success.

It took me about twenty minutes to write the three paragraphs you have just read. If it is true that approximately 10,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States every day, then 139 individuals have sneaked across our borders while I tapped out these words, and more than 500 entered the U.S. illegally while Mrs. Schafer and I dined on lobster bisque and lamb chops.

This is not good, not right, and decidedly not just.

Every nation has a natural right to set its own conditions of citizenship. This is fundamental to the idea of national sovereignty. Each nation develops a social contract: you are a citizen of X-Land under the following conditions; these are your rights as a citizen, and these are your responsibilities. Nobody requires you to show up on our shores, but if you do, you have to meet the conditions we have agreed upon or, with all due respect, you are not welcome here. And, by the way, you have to stand in line, for there are hundreds of thousands, even millions, of people around the world who want to live and work in the United States, and become naturalized citizens, and they are up ahead of you. Why should foreigners who respect the law and play by the rules wait—some for ten years or more, some forever—while those who begin their American journey by violating the law and cheating the system are rewarded?

I know it's a little more complicated than that. Extreme poverty makes people do desperate, sometimes heroic things. People flee oppression when they see no alternative. Certain American businesses—particularly labor-intensive agribusiness, the building trades, landscape services, and the hospitality industry—benefit from our porous southern border and are not eager for tighter immigration control. The staggering differential in prosperity and material blessings between the United States and its southern neighbors makes illegal immigration inevitable and irresistible. There are jobs that most homegrown Americans prefer not to do. It's a cruel paradox: the law of supply and demand lures illegals here—to the advantage of the American economy—and then we get to blame and exploit the most vulnerable human beings in our midst.

At some point the Congress of the United States is going to pass immigration reform. We've gotten close a couple of times, but the die-hards in the House of Representative are so insistent on the moral dimension (see above) that they forget that this is also an urgent practical issue that must be resolved. The McCain-Kennedy bill of 2005 was defeated by furious blow-back from those who are determined to destroy any plan that would permit the 11-20 million illegals in the country to be given legal status as permanent guest workers or de facto American citizens, even if they paid a $1500 fine (try enforcing that). Plans to round up and deport illegal immigrants may sound appealing to those who cannot transcend their sense of moral outrage, but that would be ruinously expensive, would almost certainly fail to achieve its ends, and would turn the United States into a police state. It also violates the basic humanity both of those who would be deported, and of those who would deport them.

I think we all know, deep below the rhetoric of outrage, that at some point we are indeed going to have to grandfather the millions of illegal immigrants in, whether we like it or not, while at the same time attempting to create a clean slate of better, more enforceable immigration protocols.

If a wall along our southern border is the only practical way to prevent people from Central America from infiltrating the United States illegally, I say build it, though the idea makes me feel a little icky for two reasons. First, it doesn't seem like a very attractive symbol of America. To my mind, it feels like something that belongs in the category of Guantanamo and the appalling Fourth Amendment violations of the NSA. It makes the whole country a gated community. Second, it feels like an act of desperation and moral feebleness, like Hadrian's Wall in northern England, up at the far extreme of the Roman Empire; or the fascistic-feeling walls that now slither through the no man's land between Israeli settlements and what's left of the Palestinian Homeland.

So the world's greatest "nation of immigrants" slams shut the door.

We would probably need to add a few new words to Emma Lazarus' magnificent sonnet, "The New Colossus" (1883), that graces the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York harbor: "DON'T give me your tired, your poor, DON'T SEND
your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, YOU TAKE CARE OF the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. DON'T send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me: 
I lift AND GLEEFULLY EXTINGUISH my lamp beside the golden door."

Still, if a majority of Americans insist upon a wall along the Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona borders, if that is the deal-breaking condition for our finding it in our hearts to let most of the current illegals remain in the land they sought out to fulfill their dreams, then I say let's break ground.

But here is what I would like to insist upon when comprehensive immigration reform comes. We need to find a way to fast track an equal number (in other words millions) of people like Frank and Lucy, who have been standing in line for a very long time, who yearn to breathe our free, fabulous air, who yearn to contribute their talents to the economy and the culture and civility and creativity of America. Those who have played by the rules need to be celebrated and embraced, not punished, with a national apology for the years we have kept them waiting while we engage in pointless demagoguery about issues that in many respects are beyond human control.

We should give special honors to those who play by the rules.

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Jefferson Doused Within Boundaries of the Louisiana Purchase

I have been more fortunate than my friend in the article of health. So free from catarrhs [serious colds] that I have not had one, (in the breast, I mean) on an average of eight or ten years through life. I ascribe this exemption partly to the habit of bathing my feet in cold water every morning, for sixty years past. A fever of more than twenty-four hours I have not had above two or three times in my life.

Thomas Jefferson to Dr. Vine Utley
March 21, 1819

Thomas Jefferson was a dignified man of enormous self-control and self-restraint. He was essentially a character in a Jane Austen novel. His personal space was never invaded by others. He was only angry two or three times in the whole course of his life. It is doubtful that he ever really raised his voice. 

The period in which Jefferson lived (1743-1826) was almost infinitely more formal and civil than our time. The social revolutions since 1826--in music, art, conversation, clothing, entertainment, and all other forms of social intercourse--would probably shock even Andrew Jackson, whom Jefferson believed too vulgar for higher office in the United States.

Surely nobody ever dumped a tub of ice water on the Third President's head. 

On the other hand, Jefferson was a lifelong advocate of cold foot water baths. He owned a copy of Floyer and Baynard's The History of Cold Bathing: Both Ancient and Modern in Two Parts (1706). Jefferson was so much a creature of habit, so addicted to orderliness in his personal life, that the impression of his bath pail can be seen on the wooden floor next to his alcove bed at Monticello.

Here are the facts. On Monday August 25, 2014, the Lieutenant Governor of North Dakota, one Drew Wrigley, unceremoniously dumped a trashcan of ice water on the Third President's head, on the capitol steps of the North Dakota State Capital in Bismarck, North Dakota.

Mr. Jefferson received the water assault with his usual stoic imperturbability.

The incident was part of a national phenomenon in which citizens doused themselves and each other to help raise money to study and eradicate a disease known as ALS (Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis). Although Jefferson would surely have resisted such antics, he was a lifelong advocate of public health, an early and steadfast supporter of the new smallpox vaccine (invented by Dr. Edward Jenner of Britain), and a lover of science and technology. He wrote a fan letter to Dr. Jenner that is one of the great encomiums in the English language.

Here is Mr. Jefferson's initial response:

1. Daily footpaths in cold water were efficacious. Perhaps a full body ice shower would serve as a blanket immunity to all disease and discomfort.

2. This "affair of honor" was certainly less lethal than most such events: notably the duel that ended the life of Alexander Hamilton and the career of Aaron Burr in July 1804.

3. Perhaps the Lt. Governor would like to remember that it was Mr. Jefferson who purchased most of North Dakota from Napoleon Bonaparte in July 1803. One would think that gratitude would be more appropriate than a sneak attack on an 18th century gentleman.

4. The ND state Capitol is one of just three that violate Mr. Jefferson's neoclassical preferences, first seen in his design for the Virginia Capitol at Richmond. That design, submitted by Jefferson from France, created a neoclassical, Palladian template that has been employed in virtually every state. North Dakota's 18-story capitol tower has its own beauty, but it would not be approved by Jefferson's aesthetics. It is just the sort of place where a water assault might be expected. 

5. All's fair for a good cause. ALS was not diagnosed and certainly not named in Jefferson's time. It is at least possible that John Adams was suffering from a form of ALS in his later years.

6. Lt. Governor Wrigley and Mr. Jefferson were seen to shake hands after the incident.

Further Reading:

• Founders Online: From Thomas Jefferson to Vine Utley, 21 March 1819
• Jefferson Treats Himself: Herbs, Physicke, and Nutrition in Early America by John M. Holmes
• Jefferson and Science by Silvio Bedini

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From Meteorites to Motel 6: The Pain of Re-Entry

MILES CITY

I woke up the morning I wrote this in a Motel 6 to the sound of a rodent-sized dog barking its head off. When I staggered to the window and pulled open the curtain, I saw a very large, slightly clad man with tattoos over 50% of his body smoking a cigarette with one hand and drinking a beer with the other (7 a.m.), periodically telling the yapping "Princess" to shut the "heck" up. Princess seemed to me a strange name for a very large tattooed man's rat terrier, but soon enough a comely woman appeared, smoking as she came, with tattoos over 85% of her body, and some visible piercings, too. It was a fascinating wake-up call at the end of ten days in wild country.

But they left the light on for us.

One day earlier I sat for four hours on a rock in the Lochsa River just inside Idaho reading a book. From time to time I looked up at the dark evergreens that carpeted the steep slopes evenly from the river to the top of the Bitterroot Mountains. Hawks flew in stately leisure low over the water. Orange, yellow and red wildflowers graced the little meadows in the river bends. The never-ending waters of the Lochsa rolled gently over the lower half of my body, certainly not too hot, just barely not too cold. Whenever I looked up from the pages of my book, I saw tens of thousands of points of lights dancing on the river all the way to where it turned a corner and disappeared forever into the American West. It was one of those heaven on earth days, those Huck Finn days, those A River Runs Through It days. I tried to breathe deep and live deliberately (as Thoreau advises), to drink in the whole perfection of the day and the place. "Suck out all the marrow of life," said he. I tried to be fully present and fully alive to the present moment, because I knew that it would be at least a year before I sat in that river again, and maybe never.

Maybe never. There is a haunting feel to those words.

I haven't kept a precise count, but I reckon that was about the twentieth time I have sat in the Lochsa for at least an hour on a summer afternoon, about the same number of times I have sat for an hour in the sacred Little Missouri River. I'm not quite sure why, but sitting still in a thing that flows past forever almost invariably puts you in a philosophic mood. Where does all the water come from and where does it go? Why doesn't it ever run out, like the hot water in a Motel 6 bathroom? If you threw a ping-pong ball into the water, and there were no dams anywhere downriver, would that ball eventually slide past New Orleans and bob into the Gulf of Mexico? How long would it take? What is my message to the people of New Orleans—or Lisbon?

What happens when we die? How am I different from the trout that just brimmed the river surface, or are we just two equally important (and unimportant) momentary effusions of the unrelenting Life Force that covers the planet with verdure? How does a Salmon find its way back to its upstream spawning grounds years after it flowed over the bar into the salt of the Pacific Ocean? Why do humans scurry about so much pretending they have urgent things to accomplish, and why does our species quarrel so unceasingly? Pronghorn antelope don't gossip and backbite and take Prozac.

The Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (ca. 535-475 BCE) said, "No man ever steps in the same river twice." The river changes. The water that flowed over me in Lochsa will soon be redistributed over the broad sweep of the planet. And we all change too. I know I am distinctly a different man (in some respects) from the one who sat in the Lochsa last year at this time. Frankly, I wish I were more not less different. I wish we were really capable of re-inventing ourselves, of re-booting our lives, of burying the Old Adam once and for all.

This is the point each summer when my Lewis and Clark cultural tour in Montana and Idaho ends, and I return to "civilization" (i.e., Bismarck). I woke up yesterday in a funky, perfect Spartan lodge west of Missoula, and I ended it at Motel 6 in Miles City. Because I was not quite ready for re-entry, I spent the day driving slowly, even aimlessly, along US highway 12 from Helena to Forsythe. It is one of the most beautiful roads in America. I never once turned on the car radio. For the first few hours it parallels the Musselshell River, named by Lewis and Clark on May 20, 1805. Then, at Melstone (east of Roundup), the river turns north and US 12, continuing east, enters some of the most beautiful empty plains country you will ever see. I stopped several times to take photographs, knowing in advance that no photograph can do justice to the vast, unimproved, un-industrialized openness of the countryside, where even the cattle are so swallowed up that they barely register.

I thought of my artist friend Catherine Meier, now of Duluth, who gravitates to such places and draws huge paper "canvases" of undifferentiated plains landscapes. Since I met her in Red Cloud, Nebraska, earlier this summer, and saw some of her stunning representations—some big enough to cover an entire wall in a gallery or auditorium—I have been found myself saying, somewhere or other, "Catherine Meier needs to set up her shop here." There was a place on my drive yesterday that was so beautiful that I instantly nominated it as a top-ten Great Plains landscape.

In a few minutes I am going to push "send," and find gas, soda, and licorice, then amble on to Glendive, Medora, and then Bismarck. There is light rain in Miles City, just right for the melancholy feel of the day of return. "The world is too much with us," Wordsworth wrote, "late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers."

I made it up the Wendover Death March for the umpteenth time, with less pain and exhaustion than usual. Thirty of us sat around a fire while Nez Perce elder and historian Allen Pinkham explained why his people, the Nimiipuu, decided to assist, not kill, Lewis and Clark. (There was a long debate!) When he began to explain how the Nez Perce named the constellations of the night, a meteorite shot across the vault of the sky. All of us were alive in ways we had not been, and probably will not be, six months prior or hence.

At the same time we saw the International Space Station move slowly, but surprisingly bright, from one horizon to the next. One of our group, an outstanding New York Times reporter, said, "Hey, there is an phone app that tells you when the ISS is over your zip code."

There is pain in re-entry. The world is too much with us.

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Reconnecting with History and the American Dream—On the Public Lands

I missed my deadline this last week—with permission—by a couple of hours. When noon Wednesday came, I normally would have been pushing "send" from Bismarck or somewhere, but in fact I was gamboling in the Judith River in north central Montana. The Judith enters the Missouri River from the south near today's Judith Landing, after a 124-mile journey from its source in the Little Belt Mountains. It is one of the most beautiful tributaries of the Missouri.

A few of us have been sloshing around in the Judith to avoid having to end our three-day canoe trip. Each year I lead a cultural tour of Jefferson and Lewis and Clark lovers through the pristine White Cliffs section of the Missouri (three days) and then along the remote Nez Perce Trail west of Missoula, Montana (four days). There was a good lunch of tuna salad and fresh fruit waiting at the take-out point, but we few lingered in the last stretch of the Judith. I get this adventure just once a year and I have to squeeze all the spiritual regeneration possible out of a few key moments in the heart of the American West.

The Missouri is a big, powerful river. When 17 canoes spread out on its broad surface in the morning, and move down the river at different paces, they tend to get swallowed up by the sheer size of the river, and by the magnificent and dramatic valley through which it flows. For the last couple of years, my canoe partner Becky and I have kept our eyes sharp for the somewhat hidden mouth of the Judith, turn abruptly right, and then churn our canoe a few hundred yards up against its surprisingly powerful current. Then we park the canoe on a gravel bar and just play for an hour in the warm, brisk, whimsical Judith, where the scale is small enough for you to feel you are flowing like a river. There were six of us this year, including a young geologist who was clearly an otter in her previous life.

The Judith was named by Lieutenant William Clark. Meriwether Lewis had proposed the name "Bighorn," but on May 20, 1805, William Clark, thinking of his future back in civilization, renamed it for a young woman he fancied, one Julia Hancock, of Fincastle, Virginia. Clark married his "Judith" on January 5, 1808. (How could she do otherwise after having a noble Montana river named just for her? Clark made her immortal.)

We slogged up the Judith for about a quarter of a mile in our river shoes, then slipped in and just let the stream bob us slowly towards its confluence with the Missouri. It is shallow enough to stand up in, and you bump a fair number of bottom rocks if you don't line yourself up just right. But after about ninety seconds of wincing and "yow"-ing, you reach a point where the channel is deep enough to lift you up and carry you like a pine log through its sweeping curves. That is one of the happiest moments of my year. That little interlude of free floating is, among other things, a sacrament to several magical friendships.

A river feels like a living being with its ripples and eddies and rills and gurglings. It is possible to speak meaningfully about the "souls of rivers." When you finally allow yourself to relax completely—just surrender to the grace of the river come what may—it feels as if you are now truly one with the river, not some independent self-important biped with a unique identity (ego) and a looming deadline. It's heavenly. Toward the end of the ride, a tree has fallen across the channel. If you lurch up just at the right moment, you can grab a bald skeletal branch and hang on for a few minutes while the river tries to pull you away to the Gulf of Mexico.

Now the members of the tour group have checked into the Grand Union Hotel in Fort Benton, chosen between the halibut-with-risotto and peppered bison entrees for dinner, and each of them is taking approximately three consecutive showers to get the Missouri River grit out of their bones. I'm still river ratty. We will meet for hors d'oeuvres and live local music on the hotel patio in a couple of hours, and then dinner in a private dining room, during which I will encourage each person to debrief (out loud) on the Missouri River phase of the journey everyone slips off to sleep in a real bed. Tomorrow we depart early for the Bitterroot Mountains, which proved to be the severest challenge to the Corps of North Western Discovery in both directions (September 1805 and May-June 1806).

Like most other people I love America, and thank God I was born here of all the possible places where one might have been born. No one gets to choose. I feel proudest to be an American on three occasions per year. First, on Thanksgiving—that uniquely American holiday when we gather in small groups to celebrate the abundance we enjoy as Americans. We have been blessed with natural resources and economic opportunities unprecedented in the history of the world. Second, on the Fourth of July (often enough at the Medora Musical), when you suddenly find yourself surging up into a full-throttle Lee Greenwood, giant flag, and fireworks mode. It's great to let go with all the patriotism that is in you from time to time. There is something about the idea of America that remains so stirring in our hearts that you actually find yourself overcome with tears of pride and happiness. And you dream that we will somehow find a way to recover.

Third, when I am out on the public lands we have set aside not for the rich and the well born (as Alexander Hamilton had it), but for all Americans to enjoy. Thank goodness much of the American West is arid or inhospitable or magnificent enough that enlightened presidents and legislators have set many parcels aside to remind us of what a fabulous continent we inhabit, so that all Americans—forever—can follow in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark or explore the Custer battlefield, or sit around a camp fire in Yellowstone National Park talking about the end of the world, or hike side by side in the badlands of western North Dakota without unnecessary industrial intrusion.

Where else on earth could you find such a glorious array of public lands that will never be handed over to the most privileged Americans to be fenced and posted to satisfy purely private vanity? Glacier National Park, Yosemite, Canyon de Chelly, Devils Tower, Mount Rainier, Canyonlands, Arches, the Great Sand Dunes. And on and on. Imagine if we Americans had not all been blessed by the conservation passions of Theodore Roosevelt, who learned how much was at stake in the West right here in Dakota (1883-87). Imagine North Dakota without Theodore Roosevelt National Park, and our 61 US Wildlife Refugees (the most number in America), and Fort Union and Knife River National Historic Sites?

Tomorrow we head west to a lovely mountain lodge (Lochsa). The day after that I will endeavor for the eighth time to survive the Wendover Death March (nine miles more or less straight up). If you never hear from me again, it will be because I left a lung or two in the footsteps of Lewis and Clark, in one of the most beautiful places in America.

On the public lands.

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Expletive Deleted: Richard Nixon's Resignation Forty Years After

The last days of Richard Nixon's presidency have been getting a lot of play lately. It's the 40th anniversary of his resignation—the only presidential resignation in American history. Late one night I listened to a documentary about the Nixon White House tapes. Hearing the smutty Oval Office conversations of the 37th President of the United States, and the grainy German brogue of Henry Kissinger flattering Nixon as "one of the greatest American presidents" thrust me right back to my late childhood. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have been making the rounds of the interview programs to commemorate the anniversary. They are no longer the callow Washington Post city beat reporters who stumbled onto one of the great stories in the history of journalism, but hoary and wrinkled national icons.

Last week I saw a Colbert Report done in retro 70s style in which Stephen Colbert, sporting 70s sideburns and chain smoking, managed to interview Nixon aides Pat Buchanan and John Dean in the same half hour. They are both old men now, but their personalities have held up surprisingly well after decades in the bruising arena. Buchanan cheerfully said Nixon should have burned the White House tapes. Dean speculated that the 18 ½ minute gap (on June 20, 1972, three days after the burglary) contained cover-up evidence so damaging that Nixon felt he could only survive if he erased that section of the tape.

When transcripts of select tapes were grudgingly released by the White House in April 1974, the American people were deeply dismayed to hear Nixon's potty mouth—the constant use of the f-word and other presidential filth, hints of anti-Semitism, racist innuendo, profound cynicism, a kind of base political grubbiness that made you want to shower. And those were the tapes he agreed to release!

I remember precisely where I was when Nixon resigned. It was August 8, 1974. I was a cub reporter and photographer for the Wahpeton Daily News. It was a summer job after my first year of college. We had one of those old AP wire machines in the newsroom. All day every day it clacked out what seemed like miles of copy on endless rolls of coarse tan paper, like a clunky oversized manual typewriter caught in perpetual motion. Every twenty minutes or so the copy editor, a man named Johnson (who had a Hasselblad camera), walked over to the AP teletype and tore off the accumulated copy—about the sagging economy, the increasing desperation of the war in Vietnam, and the latest antics of the Patty Hearst and the Symbionese Liberation Army. He used a metal rule (called a pica pole) to tear the ten-foot length of AP copy into individual stories, some of which he marked with a red pencil and sent back to the next room to be set into newspaper type.

The AP teletype machine had an alarm bell system. If the AP regarded the news as especially important, a bell would ring. If it were more important, two bells. Etc. On most days, and for weeks at a time as I remember it, no bells rang. But this was one of the pivotal days in American history. At some point in mid-morning, five bells rang in quick succession. There were eight or ten of us in the newsroom gabbing and pretending to work, some just loitering as Nixon's presidency unraveled before our eyes, styro coffee cups strewn all over the furniture. When the alarm bells went off we all rushed, like a newsroom cliché, to the AP teletype and actually jockeyed for position. The words tapped out in a kind of hectic and agonizing slow motion. The AP reported that it had learned … on good authority … that President Nixon … would resign … at noon the following day, August 9, and … that Nixon … was preparing … to address the nation on … television … later tonight. There is nothing like the excitement of terrible news, especially when it has no direct relation to your personal life.

That afternoon the crusty publisher of the Daily News, Newell Grant, sent me out to Wyndmere or Hankinson to take pictures of a farmer who had won the Soil Conservation Farm of the Year award. I drove slowly listening to radio updates on KFYR. I was experiencing that strange great-crisis numbness: "How did this happen, what can it mean, what will happen next?" I arrived at the award-winning farm in mid-afternoon, loaded a 35mm film canister into my Canon F1, and knocked at the door. It took a long time for the farmer to come to the door. I introduced myself. He, too, was benumbed. He looked at me with a kind of stern sadness and said slowly, "You will have to come back some other time, young man. The President of the United States just resigned. This is no time to stand around in a shelter belt."

The farmer's response seems a bit silly in retrospect, but that is only because we have all endured so much disillusionment in the last four decades, lost so much decency and civility and decorum and modesty of spirit. We are now collectively jaded about the nature of power. Back then there was still a sense that American government resonated with the provisions of the U.S. Constitution, that the way things actually happened in the national arena could be understood by reading a civics textbook. The President of the United States used the f-word? The president ordered thugs to break in to the offices of his enemies, including the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist in Los Angeles? That's Ellsberg of the Pentagon Papers. The president delivered weepy (and perhaps intoxicated) White House monologues about how the power elites of American had always hated his guts and sought to destroy him? The president believed the "Jews" control everything? The president had known that Vietnam was lost before he took office, and his "secret plan to end the war" was just an empty campaign catch phrase?

That evening, when the president addressed the nation, I walked into a bar in Breckenridge with my camera. Somewhere in my files is the photo I took, which ran the next day under the headline, "Back Home in Breckenridge." It's a grainy Tri-X black and white photo, of Nixon staring out of a flickering television screen high above a group of five or six old men drinking Schnapps, two of them in suspenders and wearing checkered flannel shirts. I asked the men what they made of it. They all had rural accents. "Crook finally got what he deserved!" said one of them. "What he done, they all do, he just got caught," said another. "This is a sad day for America." "Hell, he opened China. That'll be remembered long after this nonsense is forgotten." "You wish we had McGovern?"

My late father's dream was to listen to all 2,636 hours of the White House tapes. That would take a full year of eight-hour days—more Nixon than I wish to hear. But I'm going to listen to a bunch of the most important of them in his honor, and take one last roll of film with my old Canon F1. And find and scan that Breckenridge bar photo. And drink a little Schnapps for all we have lost.

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The Joy of Air Travel in the Post 9-11 World

Approximately once a year I report on post-9-11 air travel in America. Here is this year’s installment. I was in Phoenix last week trying to get to Bismarck. It was 104 degrees in the shade.

I’m type A on air travel. I show up two hours early even at Bismarck International. My Travel Fret Level (TFL) was about two on the ten-point scale. I would not be getting home until after midnight. And there was no backup plan. The Denver to Bismarck flight was the last of the day. In the post 9-11 universe, I regard it as a successful domestic trip if I actually reach my destination on the same day I started, no matter how much later than intended. That’s a pretty low standard, I admit, but anything more exacting is likely to send your frustration rate through the roof. There was merely a 45-minute layover in Denver. That always raises my fret level to orange. I’d rather have two hours in a leisurely layover, even three, than sweat my way through the inevitable flight delays.

Predictably, the Phoenix gate agent came announced that our flight would be half an hour late in taking off. Two things crashed immediately into my mind. First, I would almost certainly miss my second flight. Second, the agent was almost certainly lying about the length of the delay. That perhaps sounds cynical, but I received my Million Mile Flyer plaque from United earlier this year, and I know whereof I speak. I went up to her in the politest possible way to seek more information.

Here is some serious advice. When there is a delay you need to have answers to the following questions. One. What is the cause of the delay? If she or he says “equipment,” it is going to be a very long day. If she says “weather,” there is some hope, because your connecting flight may be delayed, too. Two. Is the incoming plane in the air? None of their predictions about take-off time, or their bland assurances that “your connections should be good,” have the slightest meaning unless the incoming plane is already in the air. They usually get annoyed when you ask them this question, but they will look it up if you persist. Three. Am I protected on the next flight?

The Phoenix gate agent lied to me about the nature of the delay. She knew I knew she was lying, but she brazened it out, because many agents figure they can buffalo you and it usually works. Generally speaking, their chief goal is to get you away from their counter and out of their hair as quickly as possible with as few keystrokes as possible. They count on the general passivity of the air traveler. But I never mouth off to a gate agent. Remember, before your ordeal ends, you are going to need them.

Eventually we boarded the flight. The captain came on to tell us that he was really sorry for the delay, that only God can create thunderstorms, that he would do his best to make up time, and that he knew we all were more interested in our safety than in whatever it was we had intended to do once we landed, etc. The usual patter.

I calculated that it was just theoretically possible that I could barely make my connection, if every ensuing transaction occurred flawlessly—no delay in takeoff, no additional flight vectors, no storm front over Denver, no parked plane blocking our path into the disembarkation gate, no delay in the jet way positioning, and a very short hop between gates. In other words, I was certainly going to miss my next flight. But it was just close enough that I began to fret and sweat and grind my teeth and check my watch every two minutes. For two interminable hours I sat in a stew of anxiety and unhappiness, entirely unable to concentrate on my book, or anything else.

When we landed in Denver, a man from five or six rows back tried to barge his way through the rest of us with his three pieces of carry-on luggage, because of course he believed that his tight connection must be more important than any of ours. When he tried to run me down, I turned politely and said, “Actually, my connection leaves seventeen minutes before yours.” He wanted to slit my throat. We got off flight one only fifteen minutes later than had been predicted, and I got myself into the OJ Simpson, “sprint the airport” crouch. But just then my phone bleeped, and United informed me that I had not missed my Bismarck flight after all.

Instead of leaving Denver at 9:40 and arriving in Bismarck at 12:32, I would now be leaving Denver at 12:50 and arriving at 3:41 a.m. Oh the joy!

By now my body was covered with that rare double sheen—the stew of sustained anxiety, coupled with the usual airplane germ veneer. The Denver airport was more or less deserted, though I am happy to report that a crew of three maintenance men changed out broken seat cushions in my gate area using power drills that sounded like the pneumatic tire shop wrenches. We boarded our flight “on time.” The flight attendant on the last leg was young and chipper, with a high-pitched nasal voice that sounded worse than those pneumatic drills. At 1:30 a.m. she found it useful to explain to us all of our drink options down to the finest distinction between diet and full sugar sodas, including every juice variety known to humankind, and then she regaled us with highlights from the latest edition of United’s Horizons magazine. As she worked her way up and down the aisle, she slammed into me repeatedly with her cart or her shoulder, even though I had squeezed myself into a near-fetal position.

I had called ahead from Denver to a Bismarck taxi service to make sure I would be able to get a cab at so ungodly an hour. The very nice dispatcher told me she would have a taxi waiting when I landed. There was, of course, no taxi. When I called to inquire, a different dispatcher, clearly sleep-deprived, rebuked me very gruffly for even thinking that a person could get a taxi in the middle of the night, denied that I had made a reservation, then said even if I did make a reservation, I should not have regarded that as a serious commitment. By now it was nearly four a.m. and I was considering whether to walk home (nine miles) dragging my bag behind me, or just sleep in the airport.

Finally, a taxi turned up as dawn’s early light appeared in the east. There were four or five of us waiting. As I approached the empty taxi, a well-dressed man of about 40 hurled himself in front of me, and hissed, “Hey, buster, I ordered a taxi at 11 o’clock. You can’t just walk off the plane and take my cab.”

Theodore Roosevelt would have beaten him to a pulp right there. I opened my mouth to unleash a long day’s frustration at a very deserving target, but no words came out. So I just backed away and started the process all over again. I got home in time to shower for a full work day.

That was my last Bismarck airport taxi ride.

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Will It Ruin Your Day If I Use the Word "Snow Blower?"

July is almost gone. Any day now the box stores will carve out large spaces for school supplies. We all know what's coming—what every North Dakotan knows must come—and it makes us want to linger outdoors in the evening, makes us want to schedule more picnics, more hikes, more days at the lake, more time on the river, more afternoons in the badlands than we would think appropriate if this were southern California and summer lasted forever. We cannot afford to pace ourselves here. North Dakotans have to squeeze in an awful lot of recreation between July 1 and Labor Day. It's use it or lose it on the northern plains.

My daughter and I were in Medora last week to see the Medora Musical with the great Sheila Schafer, now enjoying her fiftieth summer in the badlands.

Sheila's husband Harold Schafer (1912-2001) started with nothing in life, worked like a demon, made what was then a vast fortune by marketing Glass Wax, Snowy Bleach, and Mr. Bubble, and then gave it all away—to worthy young people who needed money to go to college, to fledgling organizations and institutions across North Dakota, to perfect strangers for whom he felt instantaneous bursts of sympathy. But above all to the broken down little cattle town Medora, which he began to restore in the 1960s.

After he had rebuilt the Joe Ferris Store and the Rough Riders Hotel, Harold more or less inherited the Burning Hills Amphitheater when the NDSU outdoor melodrama Old Four Eyes broke down. At the time, the amphitheater was just plank boards and a rudimentary stage perched on a steep badlands slope. No seat backs. When it rained, the hillside oozed down onto the stage, and Harold and Sheila could be seen, along with Gold Seal's Rod Tjaden and whoever else was handy, shoveling mud and bentonite off the stage to clear the way for the show.

Harold decided that what Medora needed was a music and dance extravaganza—songs with a western feel, a little dollop of "Teddy" Roosevelt, a little gospel, a little humor, some serious patriotism, and a celebration of virtue and the work ethic. Harold brought reliable family entertainment to the badlands, derivative, during those first years, of the Lawrence Welk Show. In the middle of each show he wanted a visiting "act:" acrobats, clowns, comics, or—if the gods were smiling—a dog act, like one of Harold's perennial favorites, "Victor Julian and His Pets." Nothing like a dozen poodles in pink tutus.

In the early years, a crowd of 300 was seen as a "stunning success," but even to achieve that, Harold sometimes had to round up nurses or bank tellers in Bismarck, bus them at his own expense out to Medora, feed them along the way, and give them free passes to the show. If you think about it, it's an inherently insane idea: to try to get a thousand people per night to venture west to a village with a permanent population of around 100, for the purpose of seeing an outdoor song and dance show during North Dakota's brief temperate season. Only Harold Schafer could have cooked up such an improbable notion, and only Harold Schafer could have persevered to make it work. In 1992, the current version of the Burning Hills Amphitheater was built, with its wide stage, sets and backdrops worthy of Hollywood or Disneyland, a state-of-the-art sound system, and comfortable seats. All it needs to achieve perfection is a second escalator. Average summer attendance is now slightly more than 100,000.

The Musical is always good and sometimes great. But I doubt 1000 people per night would venture into the Bismarck Civic Center to see it. The magic of the Medora Musical is that in order to see it you have to sit in the open air on a summer night in the badlands. You begin the evening under blue skies and end it under the twinkling stars of the northern hemisphere. Before the show, I like to linger up on the Tjaden Terrace, where you can look to the south and see North Dakota's greatest butte, Bullion Butte, off on the horizon, and nothing but broken badlands in between.

As I sat there Tuesday night, next to two of my favorite people in the world, in shirtsleeves, with happy, relaxed, and happy people seated all around us, I had that sudden realization that we North Dakotans get, "Hey, I'm sitting outside at nine p.m. It's still light. There are no mosquitos. The temperature is absolutely perfect. I'm in my shirtsleeves." But gurgling through the lower reaches of my brain was the grim knowledge that there are really only about fifty such shirtsleeve days per year in North Dakota, about one in seven. There are at least four months per year (November-February) during which no amount of protective gear would be enough to keep you in am amphitheater seat for two hours, four more (October and March-May) when you'd be in a pathetic group huddle under parkas, stocking caps, mittens, and blankets, and the Burning Hills Singers would be blue, stiff, lurching stick figures, blown off the stage from time to time, slogging not clogging to the sound of music. Actually, I have experienced such an evening at the Musical, two years ago, and it was in late June!

September is arguably the most beautiful month in North Dakota. In an ideal world, the Musical would start on June 20 and continue to October 12. That's 114 temperate days, outdoor amphitheater days. If we lived by "Summer Savings Time" rather than Daylight Savings Time, and the North Dakota school system would agree to cooperate, we wouldn't have to roll up summer (boats, cabins, picnic and camping gear) on Labor Day, and effectively shut down our outdoor life a month early. We North Dakotans need to savor every temperate day we get. It's a shame to move life indoors prematurely, when there is still so much joy to be banked in anticipation of the first ground blizzard.

In the course of my life, I have seen the Musical at least 50 times, most of them with Sheila Schafer whooping next to me, shouting out "hi, band!," laughing, wiping away tears, dancing in her seat, and single-clapping, as if she were sitting in the amphitheater for the very first time. All I can say is it's quite a show—and so is the Musical. When she is in the house, all the performers bring their best game to the stage. It's impossible, I realize, not to be carried away by Sheila's youthfulness (at 89) and generosity of spirit, but I do honestly think this is the best Medora Musical ever. The talent of the Burning Hills Singers is more uniformly high than ever before. Chet Wollan just gets better every year, and he somehow fills that whole wide stage when he steps forward to sing. Candice Lively has a perfect Medora Musical voice. When she sings about North Dakota, I just well up in state pride every time. Host Emily Walter is so major a talent that it is amazing she is willing to spend it out here on the frontier. And Bill Sorensen's buffoonery never fails to make the audience groan with appreciation—what could be better than that?

It got dark a little sooner last night. By my calculation, we have just 36 days until Labor Day. That's when we fire up the snow blower, just to make sure.

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Jefferson Was Not Opposed to the Death Penalty—But He Was Humane

And whereas the reformation of offenders, tho' an object worthy the attention of the laws, is not effected at all by capital punishments, which exterminate instead of reforming, and should be the last melancholy resource against those whose existence is become inconsistent with the safety of their fellow citizens, which also weaken the state by cutting off so many who, if reformed, might be restored sound members to society, who, even under a course of correction, might be rendered useful in various labors for the public, and would be living and long continued spectacles to deter others from committing the like offences.

Thomas Jefferson
Bill for Apportioning Crimes and Punishments, 1778

Thomas Jefferson was not opposed to the death penalty. He believed that a citizen used up his "social contract" rights to life under two conditions: heinous, aggravated murder, and treason against one's country. After writing the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson returned to Virginia, where he was named to a committee to revise the entire law code of the former British colony to bring it into accord with the principles of a Republic, and to harmonize Virginia law with the best practices of the Enlightenment. Jefferson later said it was the single hardest labor of his life.

When he began, there were 39 capital crimes in Virginia, including the stealing of a cabbage. By the time he finished, the number of capital crimes had been reduced to two: heinous, aggravated murder, and treason against the state. Unfortunately, the Virginia House of Delegates did not share Jefferson’s enlightened views. They refused to pass any reform law that did not retain horse stealing as a death-penalty crime.

Jefferson, who was one of the best-read men of his time, was a student of the Italian humanist Cesare Beccaria (1738-1794), who proposed a range of penal reforms. Beccaria argued that it is not in the interest of the state to seek vengeance on behalf of the victims of crime and that the administration of cruel and unusual punishments put the state at a moral disadvantage. The state’s only true interest, he argued, was maintaining the social order.The just state should seek only to restore order, sequester dangerous individuals, and--if possible--rehabilitate them.

Jefferson was naturally a gentle and pacific man. He was clearly influenced (as his prose above indicates) by the humane principles of Beccaria. In the name of humanity and efficient law enforcement, he removed virtually all of the capital crimes from the Virginia code, keeping only the residual two--for crimes he believed so grave that they extinguished a perpetrator's right to life itself.

The botched execution of Joseph Wood in Arizona this week would almost certainly trouble Jefferson. He believed that whatever the state does should be done as humanely and quietly as possible. Still, the method of capital punishment in his time was hanging, by which standard the event in Arizona was arguably humane. Public hangings were still a spectator sport throughout much of the "enlightened" world in Jefferson's time (1743-1826).

To read the full text of Jefferson's proposed penal code for Virginia, click here.

Further Reading:

• On Crimes and Punishment by Cesare Beccaria
• Jefferson and Virginia by Dumas Malone
• Thomas Jefferson: Lawyer by Frank L. Dewey

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