Sense of Place 2014

2ECOND THOUGHT A publication of the North Dakota Humanities Council

spring 14

on

[the SENSE OF PLACE issue]

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Photo by Joleyn Larson, Mandan, ND

OUR PEOPLE. OUR PLACES. OUR STORIES.

note from the executive director I was at a book festival listening to a panel of award-winning writers talk about finding inspiration for their stories when one of the speakers declared, “All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.”

I found his point well-taken until Debra Marquart got up to speak and said, “Actually, there is only one story with two sides; the person who goes on a journey is the stranger who comes to town.” I’ve been a fan of Debra’s ever since.

Four years later, Debra came into my office and proposed to go on a journey of her own. She had been following the rapid changes happening in her home state and wanted to find out for herself what was really happening behind the news headlines.

Her idea was to travel across western North Dakota and capture stories from both the long-time residents and the strangers coming to town.

Her discussion came on the heels of a conversation I had two weeks previously with another writer from our state. Taylor Brorby contacted me to discuss the lack of professional writers living in North Dakota and currently publishing their work.

“Brenna, there is so much happening back home right now. Who is telling our story? Who is representing us to the world?” Coming from the same hometown, but growing up years apart, we agreed growing up in a rural town on the Great Plains is an experience like no other. We reminisced about the colorful characters who populated our community with names like Sleeping Jesus and Stinky Bloom. We laughed out loud remembering the coach who handed out individual baggies of potato salad to children at Halloween and taught us how to survive being a passenger on a sinking ship by having us jump into the deep end of the community swimming pool fully clothed, whether we knew how to swim or not. Note: Most of the football team he coached did not know how. You can’t make this stuff up, we agreed. We decided we needed to start a statewide discussion on developing opportunities to attract and encourage good writing right here.

The seeds of a great idea had been planted and in the fall of 2013 the ND Humanities Council send Debra and Taylor on a tour of western North Dakota to conduct 26 intensive writing workshops in towns affected by oil development. We titled the project, Our People Our Places Our Stories, and this special edition of On Second Thought magazine is a collection of some of the best stories collected during the tour.

They represent neighbors and strangers, oil workers and stay-at-home moms. They range from a personal essay reflecting on the past, to a fictional story set hundreds of years from now. They are only a small sample of the richness, diversity, and talent within our boarders, and they demonstrate the value of our most precious natural resource: our people. As we reap the economic benefits of oil development, let’s not forget to invest in the things that truly matter.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt Executive Director

features [contents] Cover photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

SENSE OF PLACE

2 Editors’ Introduction

By Taylor Brorby and Debra Marquart

4 Homecoming

By Stephanie Blumhagen

6 A Case of North Dakota Nature Preserves

By Jennifer Strange

12 Learning God in North Dakota

By Kate Ruggles

16 Fritos and Beans

By Melanie Smith

18 Prairie Panorama

By Michael Ogden

20 The Rock

By Debbie Wonser

24 The Future is a Distant Land

By Mark Holman

30 On Completing a Memory

By Taylor Brorby

36 Carte Blanche

By Debra Marquart

Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this magazine do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities or the North Dakota Humanities Council.

ON SECOND THOUGHT is published by the North Dakota Humanities Council.

Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Editor Jan Daley Jury, Line Editor To subscribe please contact us: North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org

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DEAR READER: 4,500 miles. 4,500 miles in three weeks is how many miles we logged zipping, conversing, and teaching across North Dakota.

It felt good to be back home, visiting new places, making new friends, and bearing witness to the rapid growth and development happening in North Dakota.

We traveled as far south as Hettinger and Solen, as far east as Devils Lake, as far west as Beach, Williston, and Watford City, and as far north as Crosby. We taught wonderful college students in Williston and Dickinson, and we were able to visit new places for each of us, like Dunn Center, Tioga, and Powers Lake.

We were often traveling across the prairie at the perfect hour: 4-5 p.m., when the slant of light makes the subtle hues of wheat, prairie grass, and buttes burst in full autumnal regalia. We saw the wild horses in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, pronghorn antelope and pheasants along Highway 22, and snow geese in Divide County.

Our travels were marked by North Dakota’s abundance of life.

Something, too, we found in abundance were writers. North Dakota is one of three states in the nation without a Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program. But perhaps the best-kept secret of the prairie is that there are people picking their brains and putting pen to paper. In this issue, you will find some of those people--they may be your neighbors, new residents to North Dakota, or long-forgotten friends. We hope you enjoy their words as much as we have.

It is said that after Michelango died, someone found a note to his apprentice, scrawled in the old artist’s handwriting. The note said, “Draw, Antonio, draw, Antonio, draw and do not waste time.” In this line of thinking, we believe that the pieces that follow bear witness to those people of North Dakota who believe in the power of words.

Enjoy.

Debra Marquart and Taylor Brorby

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sense of place INTRODUCTION

Photo by Taylor Brorby.

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HOMECOMING

By Stephanie Blumhagen

bar, picking at appetizers, ruby liquid in thin stemmed glasses so delicate. The server stalked past in heels, dressed all in black. You leaned in, swirled the wine in your glass and you asked me, “Why?” You said, “Why are you moving home? Why now?”

I perched on that stool, in the shadow of that marble rotunda where the leaders of the Evergreen State had agreed on the nation’s highest minimum wage and that marriage should be about love, not gender.

I gazed out the picture window, framing sailboats on the Puget Sound, and white-topped jagged silhouettes of the Olympic Mountains in the distance.

I couldn’t tell you why then. I fumbled and said, “My job is about to end. Grad school is over. I’ll miss you.

I’ll miss this. It’s time to move on.” I said, “My parents and grandmother are getting older. It’s time to be closer to family.” What I couldn’t explain, as the whiteshirted bartender polished gleaming glasses with a towel as crisp and white as the cuffs of his shirt, was that I needed to come home to the sky.

I didn’t have the words then to paint that moment in July when I knew. I was home for a week, a last chance to say goodbye to my dying uncle. Alone at midnight I sat on the front porch, tiny stones and holes in the weathered concrete leaving prints in the undersides of my legs. I was choked and twisted inside with questions whirling, mourning family Christmases missed. If I came home, would it be for family or me? These ties that bind, would they chafe? These ties? Would I mourn the deep fern-filled forests, the towering Douglass fir trees, and my freedom? I turned my eyes to the all-surrounding sky, clear black, layered deep with starlight. Bright, crisp, unfailing faithful sky. I knew I was coming home in the fall and I knew why.

Poking at pickled quail eggs in that wine bar on Capitol Street, I couldn’t describe how my thoughts unfurl under prairie sky, stretching, reaching, filling the endless space around me. As we drove from

Washington to North Dakota for my uncle’s memorial service, the land slowly leveled to rolling hills, the trees thinned, the world opened up. Somewhere east of Richardton, on I-94, I felt invisible wings opening, catching the wind like kites.

I couldn’t tell you then, how fall sunset slants, slips in sideways, illuminating grass stems, painting gold and bronze light on brome’s fringy tops and waving spears of crested wheat. I didn’t have words then for sunsets that wrap around you on all sides, a canvas painted new each evening. I didn’t yet know about driving west on a still October evening. The sky painted streaks of peach and pink above and behind.

Blue and mauve and wisps of cloud caught gold light.

The potholes turned glassy liquid mirrors, so that the sunset was painted in the water to my left and right, spread across the sky above and behind, I was engulfed in color on all sides. I didn’t know then that at home I can drive into the sunset, become part of it.

Here I’m not a mere visitor, but a thread in the tapestry, a piece of the landscape, roots sunk three and four generations deep in rich soil. The coastal mountains, Pacific Ocean, and Puget Sound were never mine. I loved those forests, but it was love on loan. These places belong to other people. I could never make them my own.

At that wine bar in Olympia, sipping wine with my friend, I couldn’t speak then the words already scratched onto the pages of my journal. The words my uncle said not long before I said goodbye. “When she’s done out there,” he said, “she’ll come home.

She has it in her. It’s who she is.”

Stephanie Blumhagen is from Drake, North Dakota. She holds MPA and MES degrees from The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA and moved back to the prairies of North Dakota in September 2013 after eight years among Washington State’s evergreen forests and mountains. She is employed as the Grant Writer at Dakota College at Bottineau and resides in Bottineau and on the family farm south of Drake.

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

In August, you and I sat on those tall chairs by the

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A CASE OF NORTH DAKOTA NATURE PRESERVES

By Jennifer Strange

It’s a right bison jam—massive brown beasts in every direction. The first ones are down in the waterhole to the left of the car.

A small pool with frozen edges, it resembles a silvery-gray theater in the round, spindly black treetops forming a roof overhead. Three huge, brawny mounds shoulder each other. Their heads are bowed, muscular black tongues working the pond’s surface just now thawing after October’s early freeze. We drink in the moment.

My husband Terry and I have brought our visiting friend Liz on a day-trip to the Theodore Roosevelt National Park North Unit, a 24,000-acre reserve that stretches through the Little Missouri Badlands in the southwestern quadrant of North Dakota. Liz has traveled to the High Plains from her home in Washington, D.C., to see our new apartment and to witness for herself the booming Bakken oil field region. The two of us grew up six hundred miles southeast of here, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and have been best friends for exactly three decades. For the last two of those decades, we’ve lived a continent apart, she on the East Coast, I on the West. Terry and I shaved about 1,400 miles off of that distance last year when we relocated from southern Oregon to the cowboy town of Killdeer, North Dakota, a centuryold outpost, population 800, that sits along Highway 22 in the foothills of the historically battle-worn Killdeer Mountains, right on the eastern border of the Bakken shale formation.

Because most Dakotans—especially those of us who have left the area— keep tabs on our similarly named sister state (as if somehow we’re all related), Liz and I had been closely monitoring North Dakota’s oil boom for years. At first we were shocked by how much media attention our neighbors were getting; after all, this was the vast and sparse Great Plains, the “Great Flyover,” the place we left because there was nothing going on. Gradually, though, our taunting gave way to genuine curiosity and we brought our husbands into the conversation: Could a person (perhaps Terry) earn back the retirement savings he’d lost in the Great Recession by working in the oil patch for five to ten years? Could he do it without risking health and safety?

Could a freelance writer (perhaps me) survive and even thrive on the prairie?

In early 2013, Terry and I decided to take the chance. He landed a job with a fourth-generation, locally owned transportation company, bravely moved himself and a carload of stuff across the country and has been happily driving a water tanker ever since. Seven months passed before I got all the loose ends tied up in Oregon, secured us an apartment, and joined him in

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Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

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Liz called soon after we’d settled in. She’d booked a flight.

One Monday morning in mid-November, I drove the forty miles to Dickinson’s busting-at-the-seams Theodore Roosevelt Regional Airport to pick her up. We immediately set about touring the area’s newly human-crafted horizon, me explaining as best I could what she was seeing for the first time. Those towering scaffolds? They support enormous hydraulic fracturing drills, whose packers plunge the planet like gigantic hypodermic needles. Those constantly seesawing pumpjacks? They keep oil flowing from shale to tank.

Those alarmingly random torches, lighting the landscape day and night? Those are what you’ve been hearing so much about: Methane gas flares. And, of course (although this hardly needed explanation): The bumper-to-bumper industrial traffic, its chain of headlights now famously visible from space.

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

this grand adventure. These days, while my husband’s at work, I am tapping away at my latest project, accompanied by the strangely beautiful view from our third-floor windows: tornado-shorn treetops, a dulling metal grain elevator, and, in the distance, the long, low butte that frames each day’s flaming frontier sunrise.

“This is like seeing God.”

Two solid days of sightseeing and verbal analysis left us mentally and emotionally parched. Even two-for-one glasses of wine at the Buckskin Saloon couldn’t help shake the shock of how deeply the boom has rocked the Bakken. We’d ventured into the bar to escape the din of development.

What we found were road-ruddied, beer-gulping guys with oil company emblems on their overalls.

It’s Wednesday now and Liz and I have figured out that we are thirsting for a nourishing taste of nature, something to help wash down all the man-made hustle and bustle. Terry’s got the day off and is behind the wheel of my silver Subaru Forester. Liz and I sit in the back. We’ve been touring the national park for about four hours and are nearing the end of the 14-mile scenic loop that’s carved along the ridge line above the serpentine Little Missouri River. Soon we will be heading back to Killdeer. The sun has started to retreat toward the western horizon; it’s a month before winter solstice and, by 4 p.m. this far north, things begin to darken.

We are quiet and meditative. I can’t help but reflect on the contrast between the park’s serenity and what lies ahead on the highway. That’s when the bison at the watering hole come into view.

The largest one turns toward the car—his massive, anvilshaped head darker brown with much longer fur than the rest of his body—and looks me in the eyes. His are rheumy, cloudy, not bright and clear like the dozens of white-tailed 8

mule deer that have been flanking our movements all day.

His shoulders are so hunched, surely it must be painful.

But that’s his nature, I’m reminded, a nature that allows him to sprint at 30 miles-per-hour; at least that’s what the sign at the campground said, and if the size of the bison droppings all around were any indication, these fellows are not to be messed with. Good thing this big bull bison isn’t sprinting now, I think: He’d floor us in a flash!

We are at arm’s reach, just a few feet from the watering herd. We didn’t mean to sneak up on them, it’s just the timing of the thing. Dusk has completely descended by now and ours is the only car on the weaving, single-lane road. We’d seen a solitary bison earlier in our drive, soon after having started out. That burly bull was silhouetted against the blinding, pouring, leaning midday sun. I’d snapped a shot because he looked like something out of a coffee table book: The hulking, humpback profile perfectly iconic, from Native American times, from even before that, one has to assume. It was the bison outline that every school kid remembers from history lessons about the Wild West.

But this show of mammalian muscle at the watering hole is different. Perhaps it’s because we are so blissed out from our wildlife overload. Perhaps it’s the unsettling comparison between these bison slurping up earthly fluids while we humans are drilling for different—but just as vital, at least

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economically—earthly fluids outside the park’s borders. In any case, I’m starting to wonder: Is every day in the North Unit like this? Is there so much wildlife in this relatively small area because development is encroaching on the animals’ natural habitat? Or could it be that these beasts are putting on a sunset show just for us, communicating something that maybe we haven’t yet grasped? After all, that first, picture-perfect solitary bison and those dark-eyed mule deer from earlier were impressive. If we’d witnessed no other animals or birds during our drive through the park, surely our thirst would have been sated. Yet those initial sightings proved to be just a little spoonful, a wee sip of the Nature Preserves we were to be served.

Two hours earlier we’d parked the car at the loop’s midway point. Oxbow Overlook sits high above wide stretches of ancient badlands. Coats zipped against the autumn air, we stepped lightly toward the canyon’s gravelly edge. Layers of colored sandstone and clay, whitewashed by the elements, made it hard to tell at first whether the formations below were flat or rounded, long or square. Our eyes adjusted to the shadows. Outcroppings of shrubbery and rocks came into relief.

Gullies and spires, smooth buttes and jagged lines texturized the horizontal still life. The Little Missouri River stitched a winding valley seam down its middle. Above us, a pair of golden eagles rode the thermals, cutting slow figure eights on the cloudscape.

“Shhhh! Look at that!” I whispered. A quartet of bighorn sheep had appeared on the ridge to our left. They postured deliberately, doing their bighorn sheep dance, the dominant male with the largest horns leading a few steps ahead before the smaller three would lift their grazing heads to follow, always on the inside of Mr. Alpha, hugging the craggy drop-off in case a prompt escape was called for.

The three of us froze. Watched. Waited. Minutes passed before the sheep, one by one, began to leisurely disappear from view, picking their way down into the valley.

“Our spirits are on the wing,” Terry said softly, his eyes moving from the sheep to the still-circling eagles. I could feel him next to me, tall, warm, calm, completely sacrificing himself to the moment. I’ve always admired his ability to untether from life’s weighty anchors and float in the unseen realms where the universe performs magic on our souls, waving over

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

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us the wand that fills us with sparkling energy, hope and optimism. I’d seen photos of my husband taken in the early 1970s: A long-haired, back-to-the-land hippie, studiously constructing a geodesic dome somewhere in Oregon’s dense Cascade Mountains. (His first child would be born in that dome a few years later.) Even then, Terry possessed an ease in nature’s awesome arena, a palpable and mutual respect between him and the world around him. I squeezed his hand. I felt overcome by good fortune.

On my other side stood Liz, aglow, the sun turning her long golden hair the exact color of autumnal prairie grass, lifting in the breeze. Right then, I envisioned her—coiffed tresses undone by the wind, pouring wildly down the back of her camelhair coat; knee-high black suede boots hugging shapely calves; dark designer sunglasses shading moist hazel eyes—as a strong palomino mare in harness, straining to gallop away yet holding herself in place.

Despite her refined urban glamour, it’s apparent that Liz is from this land. There’s no denying it. The wilderness speaks to her, holds her in thrall, a cradling force.

“This is like seeing God,” she whispers, leather-gloved fingers touching her lips. She watches the ram’s curling crown of horns descend into the valley. I sense her forging the scene into a mental talisman that will protect and inspire her for months to come.

For my part, I can’t stop the tears, they just keep falling down my face. No sobs, no sniffles, no coughs. Just tears.

A torrent. I imagine myself a giant Jennifer, bigger than anything! I imagine myself stepping off the cliff onto the riverbed below, crouching down, my enormous palm resting on the ground, lowering my large and voluptuous self into repose. First on my side, ear resting on bent elbow, sightline even with the cliff tops, the sheep watching me instead of the other way around. I can almost feel myself laying my cheek in the river, the early winter water so cool, running along my skin. In my reverie, I wet my tongue; the river tastes pure and good.

At that moment the three of us exhale a long sigh, a sigh that melds with the air and forever binds us even more closely together. I am in the middle, still crying, holding the hands of my husband and best friend.

Ten full minutes pass before we gingerly resume our places in the car. Terry turns us around and we begin the sevenmile drive back to the park’s entrance. There is no need to speak. Before long, a dozen longhorn steers amble across the field to our right. I look at them and I realize I am nothing more—and nothing less—than just another magnificent beast in the wild, trekking over the land, feast or famine. I, too, am conditioned to be exquisitely aware of 10

At that moment the three of us exhale a long sigh, a sigh that melds with the air and forever binds us even more closely together. the many obstacles placed in my path by humans and Mother Nature alike. I, too, am skirting oil wells and avoiding power lines in order to make it home alive and well. I, too, drink from this earth.

A putty-colored desert cottontail scurries across the road and vanishes between some sandstone pillars.

Now we are at the watering hole full of bison. Terry brings the car to a slow stop. Our windows are wide open. We share this last golden ray of dusk with the beasts. For a split second, all seems perfectly silent and still. Then the cacophony is revealed: Great grunting and lapping, heavy wheezing and coughing. Surface ice bursts and crackles under the bisons’ hooves and against their legs. They slosh around, kicking up shallow, muddy water. Long ropes of wet brown fur whip back and forth from their soaking chins. I see steam coming out of the bull’s nostrils as his body’s hot air meets the winter-chilled pond. I remember the collective sigh that Terry, Liz, and I had all let out half an hour earlier and I visualize these beasts breathing in some of the air that was once inside of us. I’m swimming again in this profoundly simple reality—the oneness of nature—when I turn away from the drinking bison. There’s movement ahead, big and dark.

On the side of the road about thirty feet in front of us lumbers another bison, up from the ditch beyond. She’s heading our way. (For some reason, I assume it’s a cow, she’s practically petite next to the bulls we’ve seen.) Then a second bison appears, then a third, then a fourth, then two more before the granddaddy of them all hauls himself up over the edge onto the road and slowly, wholly unperturbed, pushes this bison parade forward. We have clearly parked smack in the middle of watering time and the entire herd is meeting for Happy Hour.

“It’s a traffic jam of bison,” says Liz, finally breaking our human quietude.

“It’s a bison jam!” I say. “And we’re invited.”

Everyone’s thirst is quenched.

Jennifer Strange is a newspaper and magazine journalist whose articles and photographs have won numerous Alaska Press Club, Inland Press Association and Suburban Newspapers of America awards. She holds degrees in journalism and English from the University of Kansas and is currently earning a Master of Fine Arts in nonfiction writing through Pacific University. Jennifer lives in Killdeer, North Dakota, with her husband.

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My husband and I have lived in western North Dakota for almost six years, but it was not until I was one month away from the birth of my second child, nearly two years ago, that I began to accept and even embrace all that life had to offer.

Before that point I was very scientific about my North Dakota journey.

LEARNING GOD IN NORTH DAKOTA

By Kate Ruggles

“Well, I do not like living here, but it is good, so I will deal with it,” I told myself. Often.

I was numb and not ready to feel, because I still had not worked through the one question that sat in the middle of my chest—why did God send me to a place that I did not want to be?

A year after we moved to North Dakota, my husband had just completed an internship at a church in Williston, a small city by my standards, and took over a church in Watford City, a small city by anyone’s standards.

When people found out we were moving there, they would get excited.

“Watford is an awesome city!” one person told us. “It is a progressive little town and way better than Williston.”

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It was like dabbing iodine on a deep cut and a part of me wanted to hit them. But since I was working hard to keep my cuts hidden, my only response to statements like that was, “thank you.”

angry and I felt alone. I struggled with feelings and thoughts that were not very spiritual and wondered what was wrong with me that I could not get myself together.

I told my husband a while ago that I was okay with being a pastor’s wife and that I would support him pursuing a career in ministry. But once it was staring me in the face, at a small church in a small town, I was scared,

On the one hand, the community was great. I found myself among people who truly understood the value of what their hands produced. They were descendants of pioneers who planted by hand in the summer and

hunkered down in a homestead shack in the winter. They endured The Great Depression, or what they call ‘the dirty thirties,’ they lasted through two fizzled-out oil booms and they were thankful for every day they were given.

I fell in love with them, and yet I did not want to be there. I was two people and I hated it.

In the meantime, two things

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midst of so much unrest. And now, I had a child to attend to, a family to take care of and responsibilities that had not gone away because the boom had arrived.

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

The boom didn’t care if we were tired or had other plans. It was here and it was powerful. In an instant, I saw people that worked hard their whole lives, work even harder. With their heads down and their shoulders square, in the dead of winter, they met the boom head-on. They had no other choice and neither did I. So, with my first child in arms, I followed suit.

happened—oil activity exploded and I had my first child. Perhaps the boom made being a first-time mom seem more intense or being a first-time mom made the boom seem more intense. Either way, all I knew was that everyone was out of breath. And so was I. Overnight, the intoxicating calm of Watford City was replaced by the sound of oil activity and all that came with it—trucks, traffic, noise and people. A lot of people. They needed

things, and sometimes they needed the same things that I did.

It was hard, not just because the same town that serviced the needs of less than 2,000 people was now being asked to service the needs of 6,000 to 8,000 people, but because on top of all the incoming needs, I still had my needs. I was still looking for answers in the midst of having to give answers and I was still looking for peace in the

I fought for my child to see the doctor, even though there were no open appointments until tomorrow. I rushed for a parking spot at the grocery store, because there were only eight of them and I did not want to carry my child, with blankets piled high on top of her car seat, across the street to get groceries. Then have to carry them out, grocery bags hanging off one arm, my child’s still awkward car seat hanging off the other.

My daycare was 10 miles out of town.

Before the boom, I drove it with no problem, because I loved her and loved the way she took care of my baby. After the boom, however, it became an exhausting process of bundling my baby up and driving in and out of town behind semis and white oilfield pickups. Every day seemed to add 50 new vehicles and it was clear by the way they were driving that they were not hauling the precious cargo that I was.

At first I thought the intensity would subside. Then, when there were no 13

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available doctor appointments until next week and the street was the best spot I could find for the grocery store, I realized that I did not know what intensity was.

A while ago, God gave me a promise. It was a promise that he was going to do something new and I took it to mean that he was going to do something new where we used to live. But I was wrong.

I fell in love with them, and yet I did not want to be there. I was two people and I hated it.

About a month before my second child was born, I began to realize that I was a part of something new. People were moving from all over the world in search of a new life, and they were moving to western North Dakota because they thought they could find it there. They lived in campers and man camps, or they slept in their vehicles. They came ahead of their families to scope out what the area had to offer, and whether it was really as good as they had heard.

Part of my struggle in living in this place was the fact that I wanted to stay where I was and see God work there. Where I felt that God had failed, I finally started to understand that he had actually delivered beyond his promise.

See, life in the oil boom of western North Dakota is not easy. And people who come discover that really quickly. They discover that they either have what it takes to make it out here, or they do not. If they make it, then on top of finding a new life, they find what they are made of. They become a part of a warm, hard-working, tight-knit community, they find a place to raise their kids, and some even find redemption, freedom from their past, and God. I often tell people that when God called us to North Dakota it blew up anything I thought I knew about him. I discovered that that was the point. I found out what I was capable of and I found out who God was.

Life in Watford City is still difficult on many levels. More resources have rolled in,

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but people have too. Housing is still expensive and hard to come by, as is land, and we are never quite sure how long a new thing, whether it be service, business or person, is going to last.

“Is this place really only open for one hour on Saturday?” stated one newbie at the local post office.

We had been in line for roughly 40 minutes and I smiled internally as I answered his question with ascent. I remembered thinking the same thing when I first moved to town and there were only 1,800 residents and the wait time was only five minutes.

“That just does not happen in Wisconsin,” he retorted.

As another newbie engaged him, I was thankful to be able to turn away from the conversation. I listened to them complain about this town and compare it to the place they came from, and I wondered if they were going to make it here. If they were going to learn the lessons inherent to life in oil-impacted western North Dakota and if they, too, would someday turn away from their own newbie, reminding themselves of the person they used to be.

I have lived here for almost five years.

I bore the brunt of the 2010 oil boom in Watford City, alongside all the other people who lived here when it started and who are still living here now. And as much as I understood why he asked the question, I am not there anymore.

My sights are now on the future. My future and the future of the community.

And, together with those who call Watford City their home, that is what I will keep my sights on—the future.

Kate Ruggles is a writer for the McKenzie County Farmer in Watford City, N.D. She moved to North Dakota six years ago and this story is her effort to put all that has transpired since that move into words.

THE PEOPLE AND IDEAS TRANSFORMING OUR WORLD We live in a rapidly changing world. Travel, technology, and economics are uniting us in ways we could not have imagined just a short time ago. Advances in science and engineering are providing unheralded possibilities for problem solving and discovery. Major cultural and political shifts are transforming the global landscape overnight, leading to unrest at home and abroad. The Game Changer Series offers you the opportunity to keep your finger on the pulse of the world by cutting through the headlines and bringing you the biggest news stories of our time directly from their source.

series game chang•er noun 1. an event, idea, or procedure that effects a significant shift in the current manner of doing or thinking about something.

OCTOBER 9, 2014 FARGO, ND BETWEEN TWO WORLDS: AMERICA AND THE MIDDLE EAST Political unrest continues to take violent form in many countries of the Middle East as everyday people fight for the freedom and justice that many Americans take for granted. The outcomes of these conflicts will forever alter the economic, political, and social landscape of the region and force America to renegotiate our relationship with this part of the world as the pace of globalization accelerates. The ND Humanities Council has gathered an extraordinary group of men and women journeying between America and the Middle East in the roles of journalist, marine, political exile, humanitarian aid worker, immigrant, Islamic convert, poet, comic book writer and more. Their stories of courage and compassion amid war and conflict will bring home the reality half a world away.

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FRITOS AND BEANS Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

I slip on my green-striped rain boots and button up my insulated, newly purchased and appreciated wind-breaker as I feel the striking Canadian wind blowing the northwest side of the camper, rocking it like a weathered dinghy in a storm-raged sea of white-topped waves.

I grab my keys, slip out the aluminum door, barely saving it from the grabbing arms of the wind, and tread through the 10 feet of sloppy mud that lies between my rickety wooden stairs and the driver side door of my Pontiac. My two children are snuggled up on the pullout couch watching an old DVD of Ice Age on my laptop.

“Jimmy, watch after your little sister; I’ll be right back!”

That’s not true. I won’t be right back. All I need to do is run to the store for a can of beans and some Fritos to complete our supper of chili. In a normal town, on a normal afternoon, I would be right back. But our town is not normal.

Normal is a fascinating state of being which I no longer try to emulate. A sluggish economy contributed to my husband’s loss of a supposedly secure job, leaving us with a dwindling savings and a hefty mortgage. Like all the other pioneers making the adventurous trek to the overpopulated small towns of western North Dakota with infrastructures the size of a stalk of wheat, we found ourselves living in a man camp lined with dozens of campers and propane tanks.

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By Melanie Smith

In the first two months of our “oil boom” living, I tried to convince myself a life of “new normal.” In my mind, I tried to replace my 1800 square foot home, centrally heated and air conditioned, with my 250 square foot camper equipped with the latest and greatest space heater Walmart could provide. I put a plant on the tiny ledge above my minisink to replace the flourishing garden I left behind. The homemade quilt spread on the double bed squeezed into the back of the camper was meant to satisfy a longing for my former spacious, rustic décor. My new normal boasted of tiny co-existence in a sardine can tossing on a vast sea of grain.

It takes me a minute or two to manipulate my two-wheel drive out of the mud pit. It’s an art. Turn the wheel from side to side and press on the gas in spurts. The mud eventually produces a smidge of traction and my small, economical, urban-loving car is free. Looking ahead to the highway, I notice a break in the steady stream of trucks that constantly lines the road. Here’s my chance! I press the accelerator, lurching through three cavernous potholes, bolting onto the highway and fishtailing into my northbound lane, right between an oil truck and a “wide load” mobile home.

Trucks. I have a new appreciation for the five o’clock rush in my old town. Drivers pass the time there in predictable four lanes with Starbucks and iPhones. Here? Venturing out onto the highway is ranked right up on the death-defying, risk-taking, life-threatening events like rattlesnake taming and base-jumping.

The typical twenty-something oil-field worker is your biggest threat. At any moment, he can jump into your lane

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Photos by Taylor Brorby.

to pass a truck hauling nine tons of pipe that is going just a bit too slow for him. He is much more important…and arrogant…and inexperienced than just about everyone on the road. He doesn’t even flinch when he sees you heading straight for him. He knows you will slow down, and he will zip right back over to his lane and carry on with his life.

I look up into green, slightly mascara-smudged eyes. Her cheeks are chapped, her hair a bit wind-blown and pulled back into a scrunchy. She wants to know if I found everything I needed. I wonder if she has little ones cuddling at home on her camper couch. Does she have to slop through mud too?

What did she leave behind at her old home?

Meanwhile, you spend the next hour re-evaluating your life and decisions, rejoicing in the chance to live another day.

You are lucky, because Mr. Twenty-something-oil-guy doesn’t always judge his speed and your willingness to acquiesce correctly. More fatal crashes occur in this major oil-producing county than any other county in the state. Today, I’m risking my life for beans and Fritos.

I look knowingly into her weary face and imagine seeing a speck of homesickness. I think of my two camper cuddlers watching Manny and Sid’s arctic journey and my own oil-field guy who at that moment is hopefully resisting the urge to pass the pipe hauler in front of him.

After two miles and fifteen minutes of traffic, I arrive at the store. The floors are brown with mud and dirt and I fit right in with my muddy boots. I’m embarrassed by the stares. Here, I know the stares are solely based on the fact that I am a woman, a rare sight in this neck of the woods.

I don’t make eye contact. I tell myself that these are surely respectable men just like my husband, just trying to grasp that opportunity the oil provides.

But I just want some beans and chips. I want to make it home alive. My family is hungry and I want to feed them. I’m contemplating camp stove cooking on my two tiny burners and three inches of counter space. I don’t want to think about these random love-starved mud-caked oil men. I keep my head down and my feet focused.

Checking out, head still down, I’m fumbling in my purse for my debit card when I hear a sweet voice. “Hello, how are you today?”

Within an hour, we’ll all gather together in our tight space with spicy aromas of chili spice and cumin welcoming daddy home from the field. We’ll share our daily struggles and accomplishments. I’ll pass out the bowls, spoons and bag of Fritos and we’ll warm our bones with beans, letting the savory Texmex flavors momentarily satisfy our taste for home. We’ll be together; we’ll be warm and by God’s grace, we’ll be safe.

What more could I ask for? I smile back at those green smudgy eyes and thoughtfully reply, “Yes…yes, I have all I need.”

Melanie Smith and her family have been recently transplanted from a life in the military to the booming oil fields of North Dakota. In addition to educating her own children at home, she also teaches 19th and 20th Century Literature online to other homeschooled students all across the nation. Fritos and Beans is Melanie’s first attempt to “sit at the typewriter and bleed,” as Hemingway so famously articulated.

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PRAIRIE PANORAMA

By Michael Ogden

The first shot is a tractor glinting in the sun, running to make more lined grooves.

It is all saccade, the shadows move on, quick and delivered from an outside edge of visual awareness. Golden wheat fields and stark blue ponds at 60 miles per hour all day long while driving to jobs. The scream of churning drills and the drone of steel motors belching diesel. Men dwarfed like mice in the light of towering oil derricks that pop up like cities in the night. Then it’s on to the next rig in the eerie glow of halogen. It is a flurry of essence and the soft oily things in the patch are memories that fade with every new mile gone.

Glowing orange haze horizon black Promethean landscape echo.

Dinosaur blood, sulfur, crustaceans Pump jack dipping down! back up, down.

Oil. Black gold, clean wheat radiating spica.

Flat great drain tops ocean basin, layered lines receding pool.

Oil.

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Say you start as a worm on a rig, crawling out of the cellar to beat down nuts as big as wheels onto the BOP, or Blow Out Preventer. It is roughneck work, and if you are skilled enough to crawl past worm status you might get lucky, but not like Monkey, the man with no thumbs who now grips levers like a lobster since the morning his thumbs were clipped off like butter.

Abandoned farm houses in regal decay with rusted cars and farm vehicles weathered down to a color somewhere between cinnamon and black. The clothes line that last hung Sunday School clothes in the Great Depression. The swing set hanging by a bolt. A bright white porcelain cookstove you can see from the road as the rafters and walls have collapsed into it.

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

There is new life near the shelterbelts of trees with cocky ringneck pheasants climbing over road berms and flapping above speeding vehicles. Hawks, falcons, eagles, American White Pelicans, geese, ducks, porcupines, elk, deer, antelope. A bull moose racked and split clean in a truck bed at the M&H Smoke Shop with its tongue the size of a loaf of bread hanging out on the tailgate. The steaming head of a Black Angus bull blowing vapor out of his nostrils and a frosted sheen to his coat. A white horse, still among the background of a broken gray barn.

A sidewalk showdown with men walking down the streets of Williston swinging Subway sandwich bags with the intensity of carrying bazookas into battle. Bloated machismo. What if teachers or plumbers acted like that? I have a job, so get out of the way? The humble yield to grace and manners.

Are we all in this together?

Michael Ogden is from the Flathead Indian Reservation in Western Montana. He has a Bachelor’s Degree in Journalism from the University of Montana. Ogden is currently employed in the petroleum industry and lives in Williston, North Dakota.

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THE ROCK

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

By Debbie Wonser

The Rock pulled me to itself, summoning my spirit until my young body had little choice but to comply. I’d run out of my parents’ farmhouse, barefoot if I felt wild and tough enough, on a dusty, somewhat-graveled road up the hill to my dad’s shop. Sparks often flew from Dad’s welder as he brought his antiquated farm machinery back to life. Those sparks and their molten metallic stench assaulted my senses. My mom had once flash burned her corneas when she was welding ships together during WWII, and sometimes welding sparks burned holes in my dad’s clothes. Then I’d run past some granaries and a metal machine shed and crawl through a barbed-wire fence because I wasn’t tall enough yet to straddle its rusty four wires. I took special care going through that fence; my back bore scars from being caught in its snare. Then I’d walk between two hills until I came to the Rock.

The Rock protruded like a giant triangular prism from the southernmost of those two hills in North Dakota’s deep White Earth Valley, covered in lichen, surrounded by sharp grass and cactus, purple pasqueflowers in the spring, orange wood lilies and blue harebells in the summer. From the bottom of the hill, the Rock was twice my height, but if I scaled the steep terrain, it was easy to step onto the Rock’s large, flat top. The dampness of the earth resided there in that hill. I could feel it deep in my bones. When the sun bore down on hot summer days, I could smell the hot grass, similar to the aroma of bread I baked back at the house at 350 degrees Fahrenheit in my mom’s electric oven. I called this rock my prayer rock, for it was there I’d go to say my repetitious Catholic prayers until I’d find myself conversing with my Best Friend, my God, in my own words.

I told God all about how I didn’t want Communists to take over the world like my mom and bachelor uncles said they might “unless America woke up,” whatever that meant. I asked God to give Dad a good price for his Hereford and Angus cattle. I begged for friends my own age who were girls. I lamented how mean and unfair all boys were. How much I missed my sister Sheila and wished she’d come back to North Dakota to live. How I wished I had been born with curly hair so my mom wouldn’t roll up my blond hair in the dreaded hard plastic curlers once a week. How much I worried about my mom dying.

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But on the Rock, God’s side of the conversation didn’t use sentences, words or scary pictures, but conveyed peace, and on the Rock I was understood and loved.

The few times back at the house, after my sister Karen would recite the Guardian Angel Prayer with me, we’d go through the list of people she wanted God to bless, with me repeating her words, and she’d add, “…and help Debbie to be a good girl.” I very much hoped I was a good girl. I had heard all about hell and purgatory—had seen pictures even, and I didn’t want to live in an ocean of flames with my arms extended to the Virgin Mother, pleading for her to give me mercy. But on the Rock, God’s side of the conversation didn’t use sentences, words or scary pictures, but conveyed peace, and on the Rock I was understood and loved. Best of all, I was never alone.

This cathedral faced my dad’s scrap iron pile, a metal graveyard of combine skeletons, frames of old forgotten trucks and cobwebs woven by generations of spiders. The Rock was inside the Highway Pasture, so large that round cow pies lay about as a smorgasbord for flies. Yet the Rock was holy somehow, a pulpit in my own Westminster Abbey. The Rock somehow squeezed into my Roman Catholic paradigm and became the venue for my own version of a vision quest. The dolls who accompanied me on these prayer vigils agreed; this was a sacred place and they kept their respectful silence.

The White Earth Valley hosted its share of sacred places. Although the Rock held a particular fascination for me, other wonders in the valley also held my interest, like the curious rings that were about ten feet in diameter we called tipi rings. These rings consisted of rocks that were all about five pounds or so, and they were spaced about eighteen inches apart. The rocks once held down the animal skin hides of the tipis snug against the ground and kept out the sharp, biting fangs of North Dakota winds. Once Native Americans obtained axes that allowed them to make wooden pegs, they didn’t use rocks to make tipi rings anymore.

An indentation in the ground on a bluff that overlooked the valley facing west was once an eagle pit. According to the Hidatsa history, the pits were dug about five feet square and about four feet deep. The hunter would lie in the pit on grass, his head to the north. A rabbit or coyote became bait and fresh blood poured over the lung of a buffalo drew the eagles in. The hunters would lift a lid-like pit cover and grab the eagle when it landed on the bait. Then once the eagle was secured, it lost some tail feathers. It took about three eagle tails to make a war bonnet or maicumapuka. I camped overnight on this bluff once.

My brother’s dog, Frank, and I woke up to a glorious morning—fog was rising off the White Earth River as red hues of dawn woke up the valley. The dew had soaked into my sleeping bag and pillow and the morning air filled my lungs with fresh oxygen. I remember thinking Julie Andrews in the Sound of Music had nothing over on me.

Joe Pancerzewski, a national old-time fiddler’s champion, would come back to visit my parents once in a while from his home in Enumcalw, Washington, and tell stories of the White Earth Valley he knew in the early 1900s. He’d tell stories of people like Morgan Marmon who raised 200 horses and let them just run loose on the prairie in the days before barbed-wire fences. Joe was always full of stories of barn dances and riding horseback through the valley decades before. “The hills never change,” he’d say.

The valley held its share of tales of horse thieves who, once caught, were buried facedown after their hanging, and mysterious, still-unsolved murders in its past, but most of the population were hardworking Scandinavian and German farmers and ranchers who somehow eked out a living in the brutal climate. Indeed, the valley exacted a heavy toll from all its humans, young and old. Children took on adult responsibilities early.

I was eight years old, but I reasoned since I could create white yeast bread from scratch, I was old enough to move away from home and get married. Marriage seemed like the

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ultimate emancipation from my parents and nine siblings and all the injustice I perceived I faced as the baby of the family. Never mind I had no marriage prospects; that seemed like a minor detail.

I think I coveted my own personal freedom so much back in 1976 because two hundred years before, the United States had declared its independence from Great Britain.

I scoured the hills for wildflowers that were red, white or blue to transplant in front of my playhouse to celebrate the bicentennial. My wooden playhouse used to be a sleigh that would transport children to a one-room country school in the winter. I, too, attended a one-room country school, but in my day, parents drove students back and forth to school most of the time in their cars or trucks. I remember walking home from Chilcot School one time in the winter. It had been awful. I wore red and white checkered polyester pants and when I stepped onto a snow bank, I’d sink, time and time again, until my wet legs were numb with cold. At least the White Earth River (we called it “The Crick”) was frozen, so that it was easy to cross.

That summer, the closest to blue I could find to plant in front of my playhouse was some purple alfalfa, and its long tap roots were longer than even my 8-year-old ambition wanted to fully excavate. Yet loving God and loving the United States seemed to go hand in hand, and I did what I could to pay proper homage to my country that year.

In January of 1976, my sister Sheila, mailed me the New Catholic Picture Bible from her home in Illinois where she worked for a publishing company, and I had devoured its stories. I thought of Moses, the angry old man who struck a rock to bring water to Israel. I caressed the cold hard rock under me. I could never strike it; that would be like allowing the U.S. flag to touch the ground, like spitting out the lily-white communion wafers Father Lukach dropped on my tongue on Sunday mornings or Saturday nights.

A few pages later I read about Joseph. His brothers hated him so much they sold him into slavery, but Joseph forgave them and even saved their lives and the lives of their families. The giant-slayer, David, was one of my favorite characters. He, too, was discounted by his family and later became king of all Israel. I decided someday, when I’d birth a son, I’d name him David.

Meadowlarks, robins, warblers, goldfinches, crickets and bees sang in my surround-sound choir by the Rock.

When I’d break into song myself, the choir would listen. I composed songs about God, like David in the Bible did, and nobody laughed. My five older brothers at home often laughed at me; nature did not.

This church had no dress code and when I look now at the one photo I have of my eight-year-old self, I have to say that was a good thing. On the picture, I’m wearing a pinkish shirt, buttoned to the very top, and brown and orange plaid pants. But the Rock didn’t mind. The Rock also did not mind my guests, Cleo, the big white tomcat, and Huckleberry, the un-pedigreed dog, who followed me wherever I walked outside, but never in the house, for a dog’s place was outdoors, my dad said. Only when calves had hypothermia would Dad allow animals in the house, and they’d get a long soak in our home’s only bathtub.

I’m sure the calves had stories to tell their moms when they were reunited outside about the little-girl human who shampooed their hair when she thought no one was looking.

One time, I forgot a little doll blanket I had crocheted and brought out with me to the Rock. I found it weeks later, unraveled by a bird to make a nest. This was the only tithe the Rock exacted of me, but I didn’t mind.

The Rock never demanded casseroles for potlucks, never argued which Bible translation was best, never threatened to take me off its membership roll when I grew up enough to move away and didn’t visit as often. The man I loved proposed marriage to me not far from the Rock, and later our son, David, who grew four inches taller than any of my brothers, picked orange lilies on its hill. When I was forty, my favorite brother’s ashes flew over the Rock, free at last from chronic myelogenous leukemia as a July wind carried him south.

I wonder sometimes if the Rock misses that innocent, lonely girl who sat, cried, and prayed on it. I wonder if the notes of my childhood songs still ricochet off the scrap iron pile, the sound waves ebbing in and out, even after all these years. Yet the Rock, the scrap iron pile, the birds, the wind and the wildflowers have become a part of me, always with me, as much a part of me as my blue eyes and North Dakota accent others say I have but I can’t hear.

Churches made with human hands keep disappointing me. The Rock summons me still.

Debbie Wonser lives near Tioga, North Dakota, 3 miles south of the hospital where, when giving birth to Debbie, her mother admonished the nurse not to wake the doctor “because I’ve been through this nine times before.” Debbie holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from North Dakota State University where she paid her tuition by working as a writer and news editor for the Spectrum. Debbie later worked as an intern, writer and researcher for Common Cause Magazine in Washington, D.C., and studied short story and novel writing with the Long Ridge Writers’ Group based in Connecticut.

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To the Old Ones, it had been known as North Dakota.

The place had once buzzed with the sound of machines and the cacophony of a brief flowering of mechanized civilization. Now, the once powerful machines of another time sat, slowly decaying and melting into the landscape. They had been fueled, it was said, by the very substance of the Earth. The origin stories spoke of a time when the Old Ones in their arrogance consumed the Creation. It was said they had cracked the very depths of the Earth itself, churning its substance through machines, pumping and squeezing the finite vital fluids and ores to fuel their appetites that were never satiated. Energy from the Earth fueled life itself, as it always had, yet for a brief moment, like the builders of the biblical Tower of Babel, a civilization had flourished in an incredible efflorescence of mechanized man, by harvesting the power inherent in consuming the very body of the Earth.

Old maps the man had found among ruins displayed North Dakota as a large rectangle imposed on the landscape. He had always wanted to travel to these “places of the lines� to see what sort of imprints or barricades might be inscribed on the earth. He had once been in the ruins of an old library and had found a large, cracked and faded map of a place that had once been called the United States. Fascinated, he had rolled it up and taken it home. In the winter, he would often spread the fragile paper out on the table and stare in wonder at all the lines and places upon it. They had little meaning now.

The sun was beginning to dip in the west as he walked up to the top of the small ridge. A rusted, vertical cylinder with a conical top stood on the horizon just ahead, the remains of its corrugated, zinc metal shell overgrown with rust and the sooty stains of countless prairie fires. As he walked closer, he could see the remnants of foundations denoting the presence of what the Old Ones had called a farmstead.

According to tradition, these places had been occupied by a family who raised vast quantities of food to feed people beyond number. In the unpredictable climate of the present, there were few places where food could be grown with any assurance. All but a few of these ancient agricultural villas were long abandoned, either melting back into the earth, or salvaged and recycled for new purpose by new people. Once common, most of the corrugated metal tubes, once used to store dried grains, had been stripped from the landscape by violent storms.

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Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

Energy sustained life. Without energy there would be no life.

[sense of place]

THE FUTURE IS A DISTANT LAND

By Mark Holman

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He often moved among the ruins with the trepidation of one entering a place where the voices of the dead spoke from every broken wall and shattered road with an unquiet restlessness.

Still, here and there, a few had been spared by the terrible winds and remained, defiant sentinels of the lost age.

The structure had one small door through which he stepped onto a cracked and crumbled concrete floor. Light streaming through a round opening in the roof illuminated the dull zinc walls of a circular room about fifteen feet in circumference, the remnants of past fires lay in the center of the room recessed within a deep pit. Generations of fires, repeatedly heating and cooling the cement, had excavated a jagged hole, now filled with the detritus of a thousand warm nights. The walls were covered with a pictographic graffiti dominated by men on horses chasing animals with spears and guns. Imbued with meaning that was lost to him, he recognized this as the work of nomads he knew, an extended family group that migrated through this region. He smiled at the thought of meeting them again to trade.

As he walked, he had picked up small pieces of wood and dried dung to warm the night ahead. Setting a handful of cattail fluff in the center of the pit, he pulled another bundle from his pack. Undoing several layers, a small ember glowed with dull intensity. Setting the ember within the fluff, he blew, gently encouraging a small flame. In about a minute, small twigs crackled with the pleasing sound of life sustaining warmth. As he relaxed and went about the contented work of growing the fire into something that would last the night, he drank in the rising smell of burning wood like a soothing elixir. The fire crackled softly, the intensity and speed growing as it consumed the wood, smoke and sparks rising upward in a swirling dance of haze and points of light, moving out into the fading light through the hole in the conical ceiling.

About three feet from the edge of the fire pit, he unrolled a small lightweight pad he had found in a long buried basement of ruins that had once been a store. The Old Ones had made things of such durability, that even hundreds of years later, he could still find useful items. On top, he placed the bundle that held a lightweight sleeping bag, another wonder of the Old Ones. To many on the plains, the abandoned places of the Old Ones were places of ill fortune and unquiet spirits that were to be avoided. He often moved among the ruins with the trepidation of one entering a place where the voices of the dead spoke from every broken wall and shattered road with an unquiet restlessness.

There were unspoken rules of hospitality in places of shelter on the plains. A

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traveler would leave fuel for a future visitor or welcome others to join in a share of the food and warmth. Off to one side, illuminated by the growing firelight, the man spied two large pieces of well-seasoned wood. He lifted one of the pieces and tucked it into the fire. The flames licked up the sides of the old wood, slowly transforming the white, bleached shell black with the first incursions that would ultimately consume it. Grabbing the other, he tucked it opposite and a little off to the side so that it would not catch fire until the other piece was almost burned out.

In this way, the fire would both burn long and create a sustained heat that would warm the cold concrete below him. He stared into the flames as they grew, a bed of warm coals pulsated with a red and black flicker, as the remnants of past fires came back to life. A sense of well-being came over him, comforted by the fire. Reaching into his pack, he pulled out two good-sized potatoes, placed them in a small pot and replaced the cover. Leaning over the fire pit, he chose a broken concrete ledge to let them cook overnight.

Digging further into his pack, he pulled out a few pieces of dried meat, bread and honey, placing them on a cloth.

Reclining sideways on his bedding, he made a small sandwich, which he chewed and swallowed without ceremony.

A reddish yellow light streamed into the door as the last rays of sunlight danced on the floor and wall. The man got up and walked outside with a long package wrapped in buckskin. Unwrapping it, the long blade of a sword reflected the golden radiance streaming from the sun. Holding the sword high, he moved it side to side, watching the play of iridescent light on the surface. There was incredible energy in this reflected light. Many times he had used the energy to start fires or to heat water. If

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only it could be harnessed, he thought, his dependence on wood, dung and the black rock, mere derivatives of this primal source, could be set aside forever. This was an energy that took nothing from the landscape and held the promise of ending his constant struggle to find adequate fuel to survive. It was the energy that gave life to everything around him. What limitless reserves of existed in a source that rose to greet him every morning?

He looked at the shining blade with a sense of pride and accomplishment, knowing It would soon be in the hands of the most powerful person in the region. The man had made many swords, for many warlords, yet this was his finest work. He had searched the detritus of the Old Ones for the finest raw material. He had then crafted a blade that rivaled anything he had yet created, layers of steel revealed as gently flowing waves upon the surface of the blade, adding a textural beauty to what was already a work of art. Sitting down on a rock, he watched as the last rays of sunlight stretched out from the horizon, illuminating a canvas of purple shades infused with the last streaks of gold and yellow. The air was touched with the first anticipation of winter, a faint hint of crisp, cold freshness bit upon the edges of the smell of drying fall grasses, as the sun settled into the horizon.

Stepping back inside, the room had warmed significantly, firelight and heat reflected off the walls, creating an air of convivial coziness. The flickering created the illusion that the figures on the wall were in motion illuminating a live buffalo hunt moved across the wall. Lying down, he tucked himself inside the sleeping bag, pulling his hat down over his head to provide extra warmth. He smiled as he closed his eyes, listening contentedly to the crackle and pop of the fire.

In the morning, he awoke to the sun streaming in through the opening above. Wisps of smoke rose from the embers of the previous night’s fire.

It still emitted a gentle warmth that felt pleasant as he crawled out of the sleeping bag and into the crisp bite of the fall morning.

He opened the steaming pot that had been cooking all night, vapor rising as the cover was removed. He poked the potatoes with his knife, causing the earthy aroma to waft up in a cloud of steam. Grabbing his pack, he pulled out a thick lump of hard cheese wrapped in cloth, placing it on a large piece of the remaining wood, he sliced a few thin pieces with his knife. Using the side of the knife blade, he pressed the thin slices into the potatoes, smashing them as he did so. Once cooled, he ate them without ceremony. To warm the chill of the morning, he used a stick to stir the hotter coals in the pit to the surface.

They pulsated with an inner glow, sending pleasant waves of heat up from the pit.

Finishing, he stood up and moved to the edge of the door. The grass was edged with a sheen of silvery white frost that glowed in the growing light of the day. He looked across the jagged gorge of the valley and the ruins of the old town, staring at the broad expanses of rolling grass and plains. The Old Ones had preferred to build their cities in river valleys. Most of these places now were little more than ruins toppled within the gorges of violent water channels. He often reflected on what a happy life it must have been to be able to live safely along a river. Looking across the deep vertical sides of the river gorge, he could just see the top of his destination poking up on the horizon. He quickly rolled up his bedding, stuffed everything in his pack, and started to walk down the hillside.

To the Old Ones, this had been an important place of many industries that fueled their world. The imposing concrete structure had, it was said, been a storage facility for the vast quantities of food needed in the age of the Old Ones. The landscape was dotted with the remnants of these decaying, yet durable structures. It rose above the softly undulating hills of waving grass like a giant rectangle, its sheer vertical mass rising into the heavens. The dull, ivory colored concrete glinted in the sun from afar as if being lit from within.

It was truly impressive to behold as the morning sun made it glow with an otherworldly radiance. Smoke rising from the area heralded it as a place of great activity. He caught the pleasant whiff of roasting meat mixed with wood smoke drifting on the wind. A smile came across his face as he drank in the smell and thought of trading for a fresh cooked meal. He quickened his step. He was almost always hungry these days.

As he looked at the rectangular behemoth, the man had difficulty believing that so much grain could be produced to fill the giant vertical cylindrical tubes that stood in long rows and formed the largest manmade thing he had ever seen. Its high walls had withstood the onslaughts of many attackers as the most impregnable fortress on the northern plains.

Part of the structure had once been used, it was said, to burn the black rock. Some said that the black rock held a mysterious power that the Old Ones refused to heed. The man, as an ironsmith, revered and respected the power inherent in this material, marveling at its ability to change the very structure of metal. Why had the Old Ones, with all their wizardry and knowledge not given it the same respect? These were just stories. Stories told by drunken old men around the fire at night. Surely, the same people

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[sense of place]

who built this mighty citadel had not been not so shortsighted.

He remembered the old story often told at night around a warm fire when he was a boy. It was a familiar tale, a sort of creation story for the current age. As he walked, he retold it to himself.

For many ages, humanity had lived with the Earth and was one with the Web of All Things and the Creator. In the beginning there was the Creator and nothing else. The Creator created life in a complex web that connected and bound all things together. Humans were created as part of the Web and lived as part of its interconnected system. As humans grew in their knowledge, they developed technologies that gave them an illusion of being outside the Web of All Things.

They took much and gave back little, fueled by the body of the Earth. Coming to believe in their mastery over all things, they misused the Earth in increasing frenzy, as the fibers of the Web stretched to breaking they consumed the very substance that held the Web together. The Old Ones had the illusion of being disconnected from the Web, even as it bound them more tightly within it. One day, the fibers could stretch no more. One-hundred thousand nightmares befell the Old Ones as the timeless guardians of the Web rose up. It had been a terrible time followed by a long period called The Forgetting when everything started over.

The man smiled and walked along the aqueduct that ran from the river of the ruined town to the sprawling trade center that straddled the old road. He always marveled at this road and its two raised embankments that pointed straight east and west to the horizons. Legend said that they extended to where the land met the great oceans. The nomads who travelled on this ribbon of rock had never seen the end of it. In places it had been broken up by rivers or blocked by

Coming to believe in their mastery over all things, they misused the Earth in increasing frenzy...

rock falls that further obfuscated its original purpose. In most areas, it was covered with a scrum of plants that rose up from frost-worn cracks, impeding the movement of a walker.

Here, near the citadel, it was groomed smooth and water flowed in the channel between the roads in an open aqueduct, making a pleasing sound that calmed the senses. The sunflowers protruding everywhere along the road, were finishing their annual bloom, like colorful many headed hydras bursting with yellow, then fading to brown. Winter would not be far off.

Extending to the horizon north and south from the road, a watery ditch, shallow on one side with a steep grade on the other, sloped up to a ridge topped by an assortment of machines of the old civilization. The detritus had served for centuries as an effective palisade against attackers of all kinds. The remnants of machine containers that had transported the Old Ones and their products were packed end to end and stacked upon one another to a great height, forming the most imposing defensive wall on the plains. He had heard that long ago, teams of men and animals had brought these machines, at the behest of the first ruler, clearing them from the surrounding landscape as far away as the forests to the east. In the ditch below the palisade, amid the cattails and fluorescent green algae-covered water, rusty, metallic hulks of spiky and protruding iron rose out of the water forming another barrier.

The bottom of the ditch was lined with an intimidating collection of implements that had once been used on the great farm estates.

Upon this bulwark, made of the tools of a bygone era, was a narrow catwalk fronted by a protective wall upon which armed men walked.

The fire and oxidation kissed metal, a mottled mix of shades of brown, made a statement on the landscape of something permanent and manmade. Staring at the seemingly endless wall, its enormous proportions reaching to the horizons and the heavens, he thought wistfully of stories he had heard of the incredible efforts required to construct great pyramids in a distant time and land. It was once again a time when such things were possible.

Mark Holman is Library Director at Sitting Bull College.

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[sense of place]

OUR IMPORTANT WORK RELIES ON YOUR Give to the ND Humanities Council and help transform lives in your community.

RECENT DONORS FOUNDER $500 - $999 Joel & Kristie Frieze ASSOCIATE $100 - $499 Bethany Andreasen George & Cheryl Mizell Kara Geiger Melissa Gjellstad Earl & Patricia Donaldson In Honor of Pauline & Donald Colquhoun Kenneth J. Glass Patricia Grantier Jay & Nancy Hestbeck Thomas & Katie Hutchens Herbert L. Meschke Jeff & Peggy Miller Mabel A. Olson Louise Stockman Aaron Barth George & Janet Daley Jury Thomas & Brenna Gerhardt

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CONTRIBUTOR $25 - $99 Alice J. Anderson Mary Jo Davies Eidler Mary G. Frojen

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[sense of place]

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

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[sense of place]

ON COMPLETING A MEMORY

By Taylor Brorby

The earliest memory I have is of death. I’m three, going on four, and am sitting in my grandmother’s Buick, lined with a soft, chocolate brown interior, and waiting for her to see her own mother, my great-grandmother.

Parked outside of a small grey apartment building in Center, North Dakota, the car gently vibrates as I wait for my grandmother to come back to the car. I’m alone, enjoying a juice box, and am looking around, wondering what’s going on.

Why did grandma leave me alone? Maybe it’s a surprise!

Maybe she has a present for me!

It is a surprise, but not the one I imagine. My grandma emerges, looking older, haggard, and drawn. She pauses at the front door of her mother’s apartment building, stumbles a bit. She pulls from her pocket her compaq and powders her nose, looking up to the sky to fight back her tears.

I found out later in life that my father had to break into my great-grandmother’s apartment and found her sitting in her green chair with velvet fringes lining the bottom, slumped and cold. The room was cold, I was told; the television was on with a gentle static humming in the background, as if she were just dozing off to take a nap.

I imagine my father’s heart pumping harder and harder as the gentle tic, tic, tics of his knock grows into a crescendo of thump, thump, thump, leading into a climax of, “Grandma, are you in there? Grandma, stand back! I’m breaking in!”

I imagine him breathless, as if he just finished a sprint, hunched over, hands on his knees, eyes pooling with the gentle tears that drip, drip, drip to her cold linoleum floor.

I imagine my grandmother becoming hysterical as my father calls her, trying to tell her that four letter word that struggles to flick from his tongue, that word that lands with a thud: Dead.

My grandma comes back to her 1989 Buick Park Avenue, the one that was bought new from the dealer, which is now two years old, and takes out her compaq yet again and powders her cheeks and nose. I see her quickly flinch, holding back what must be salty tears, trying like steam to escape from a boiling kettle. She clears her throat, and through a strained voice says that we’re about to go to her house so she can talk with Grandpa. She rips at the key to start the ignition, jolts the car forward, as we then come to a glide on our way to her house. The scene looks the same to me—leaves roll in the wind, grass is the same mottled brown. I do not have the sense of self to ask my grandma what has happened, have the sense of perspective to ask her if she needs a hug or a moment to herself to scream. Instead, I play the role of her grandson who is three, going on four, and buckle my seatbelt and look forward to going to Grandma’s house.

————————— I remember the basement, its musty smell and unfurling strands of grey-blue smoke. We are at Zion Lutheran Church, a country church, several miles south of Noonan, which is nestled in the northwest corner of North Dakota, gently hugging Montana to the west and Canada to the

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[sense of place]

Divide County exists as some faraway land in my memory—like an attic, it is out of sight but not entirely out of mind. north. Divide County exists as some faraway land in my memory—like an attic, it is out of sight but not entirely out of mind.

There is must and smoke because this is an old church, and my father, his siblings, and my great-grandmother’s children all smoke. They light up in order to settle down, to help them relax into the fact that their mother, their grandmother, my great-grandmother is dead. I see great-aunts and great-uncles, distant cousins, and my own family sitting in cold steel chairs, struggling to look relaxed in the face of being shaken. I am told I am cute, that I have red hair just like my father, and am bounced on unfamiliar laps. I want to go home.

————————— Divide County It hugs Canada to the north And lays against Montana’s eastern breast.

A landscape pressed by copper coins Whose basins are filled with the Drip drip drip Of cold grey-blue alkaline water.

Whose landscape haunts the nooks of my memory.

That place where dirt and clay enclose My great-grandparents.

A landscape that rips at my chest Leaving my breath beating like a train at the tracks.

————————— I never knew them, my great-grandparents. My greatgrandfather, the man whose name I bear between my first and last names, died eight years before I was born, and my great-grandmother is wedged into a coffin in my

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memory. I’m sure I sat on her lap; I’m sure she even gave me birthday and Christmas presents, but in my young life of three, going on four, my great-grandma now exists as an objective fact, rather than a subjective player in the experience of my life.

————————— I returned to Zion Lutheran church 22 years later. After teaching creative writing in Powers Lake, North Dakota, I went driving through Divide County, looking for a white country church; the one where I knew my greatgrandmother was buried—only, I did not know its name.

I texted my aunt, sister, and father, “Hello from Hamlet, North Dakota,” my great-grandmother’s hometown, now populated with seven people. At the north end of Hamlet sags an empty brick school, what once must have been the focal point of the small town.

Did my great-grandmother go to this school? Did she run through the fields that flow out from Hamlet? Did she pick wild flowers near sloughs and shelterbelts? Did she long to run away, to her own faraway land?

I turned east, driving past numerous pump jacks that flared and fumed natural gas. As I drove, I called my father, asking him where my great-grandmother was buried. (I thought there was a church in Hamlet, which, after driving through the town, I realized there is not.)

After listening to my father describe the direction of the church from Hamlet, I headed north on Highway 21.

Divide County is dotted with ponds that look like copper coins have been imprinted into the landscape, filled with azure blue water.

The clouds grew grey and dark, releasing a steady rain

[sense of place]

that pat, pat, pat on my windshield.

Against the steel blue-grey horizon, Zion Lutheran Church stood white as a bride on her wedding day. I turned left off of Highway 21, heading to the land that holds my great-grandparents.

I ran through the graveyard, searching for the name I so longed to see: Emma Moss. I saw familiar names— Fenster, Fagerland, and Johnson—names that followed the coal boom south to Oliver County in south-central North Dakota in the late 1960s.

I found them, Clinton and Emma, my greatgrandparents, in the northwest corner of the churchyard, marked by a copper-colored granite stone. I relaxed my shoulders, breathed the cold autumnal air that was now flecked with the first signs of snow, and I turned to go into the church.

Entering Zion Lutheran Church flooded my memory with must and smoke—but the basement floors were no longer wood—the only real memory I had of the building—and instead were now carpeted.

I went into the sanctuary, greeted by a stained glass picture of Christ kneeling against a large stone, draped in a crimson Roman toga, his sheet-white face turned heavenward as sleeves of gentle white linen wrapped his arms. Mountains dot the background of glass, with billowing thunderheads over Christ’s head. Evergreen florets mark the top of the stained glass, and Greek columns—Corinthian columns—bracket the window panes.

A soft yellow-cream color paints the inside of Zion Lutheran Church, as well as plastered walls filled with

florets, four-leafed clover enclosed in a gentle circles, and baseboards of fleur-de-lis that push the eyes towards the altar.

As I entered, I moved to the front and sat at the upright mahogany piano and began to play hymns. A dead mouse lay next to the piano bench.

————————— This flow’r, whose fragrance tender with sweetness fills the air, Dispels with glorious splendor the darkness ev’rywhere.

True man, yet very God, From sin and death he saves us and lightens ev’ry load.

————————— The music lingered like a delicate perfume in the creamcolored interior. I filled the sanctuary with melodies and improvisations, dancing together as the piano created in me a complete patchwork of memories.

————————— The ground was stiff and icy as I left Zion Lutheran Church. I looked across the road into a field filled with sloughs and dotted with grey-watered ponds. Pump jacks gently rose and fell, pulling sweet crude oil from deep beneath the earth’s crust. I gently inhaled as I closed the chapel door, smelling the tang of petroleum.

Taylor Brorby is writer-in-residence at Holden Village. His work has appeared in Orion Magazine, the Northern Plains Ethics Journal, Sleet Magazine, Augsburg Fortress Press, among others. He is this year’s Abdelkader Education Project’s essay judge and is currently working on a vespers service for climate change. He is a contributing editor for The EcoTheo Review and writes on education and environmentalism for The Huffington Post.

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Two States One Book

Classic midwestern text serving as statewide reading selection for North, South Dakota

The humanities councils in North and South Dakota are using a classic midwestern novel to engage citizens in both states with original and poignant literary programming while also celebrating 125 years of statehood.

In a joint effort with the 125th Anniversary Committees from both states, the humanities councils of North and South Dakota will commemorate the entry of South and North Dakota into statehood with a special One Book collaboration as “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography” by Kathleen Norris will serve as the One Book for both states in 2014.

Norris’ New York Times bestselling book, in which she

paints “a fine portrait of the High Plains and its people as well as a very personal memoir of a spiritual awakening,” according to Publishers Weekly.

Norris has spent significant time in both states and maintains a residence in Lemmon, South Dakota.

Both councils are extremely excited to work jointly on a very special and unprecedented One Book collaboration, and to commemorate both states’ heritages with the brilliant work of a tremendous author.

Community reading groups will read and discuss the book throughout the spring and summer. Interested readers will also have a chance to meet the author as she tours both states

To interact with readers and promote exploration of the book’s themes, Kathleen Norris will visit communities throughout North and South Dakota.

North Dakota

(see accompanying schedule), or at the 2014 South Dakota Festival of Books, Sept. 26-28 in Sioux Falls.

One Book www.ndhumanities.org

Mon. June 9 – Grand Forks (Fire Hall Theater, 7 p.m.)

Tues. June 10 – Ellendale (Ellendale Opera House, 7 p.m.)

Wed. June 11 – New Rockford (New Rockford Opera House, 7 p.m.)

Thurs. June 12 – Minot (Taube Museum, 7 p.m.)

Fri. June 13 – Watford City (Pioneer Museum, 6 p.m.)

125th Joint Event with South Dakota Mon. June 16 – Lemmon, SD (Location and Time TBD) & Hettinger, ND (Sense of Place Concert featuring Jessie Veeder Scofield, with poetry by Kathleen Norris) Sat. October 4 – Bismarck (Bismarck State College, Campus Read Event, 2 p.m.)

Dakota

Tour Schedule South Dakota

www.sdhumanities.org

Sun. June 15 – Rapid City (Rapid City Public Library, 1 p.m.)

Mon. June 16 – Lemmon (Location and Time TBD) Tues. June 17 – Timber Lake (Dewey County Library, Time TBD) Wed. June 18 – Aberdeen (NU27 Auditorium, Presentation College, 7 p.m.)

Thurs. June 19 – Sioux Falls (Avera Prairie Center, 5:30 p.m.)

Fri. June 20 – Watertown (Watertown Regional Library, 4:30 p.m.)

Sat. June 21 – Pierre (Capitol Lake Visitor Center, 10:30 a.m.)

Thurs.-Sun. September 26-28 – Sioux Falls, (SD Festival of Books) Tues. September 30 – Yankton (Marian Auditorium, Mount Marty College, 7:30 p.m.)

[sense of place]

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[sense of place]

CARTE BLANCHE

By Debra Marquart

I don’t think any of us ever pinned him down about the details. Somehow, in our family (and I’m not sure how this was accomplished, because I don’t recall ever being yelled at about it) we just understood that to talk about money was low and rude. Also, to ask too many questions was low

and rude. So it only followed that to ask too many questions about money was not only low and rude but also impertinent.

But, here was the checkbook in my hands now, evidence that the socking away had occurred.

Prior to this, I’d lived a cash-only life. I didn’t need much. I had a little job waitressing at Maggie’s Café in high school to buy the luxuries. Then, as now, I spent most of whatever I made on three things—books, clothes, and music. Even at that moment when I held my first checkbook in my hands, I had no idea how it worked.

But once at college, I took to writing checks like a natural, like a real pro. I learned that there were more things in the world to want than I’d previously imagined: shoes in black, brown, and tan; sandals in low and high heels; dresses, sweaters, and skirts; raincoats, umbrellas, and hats. Makeup and jewelry. Books on philosophy and history. Albums for bands that weren’t even on the radio.

With my new college friends, other girls from small towns around North Dakota set loose now

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

As we were packing up the Chevy with my things for college, Father handed me a checkbook from the Stock Growers Bank. It looked odd and official in his hands—legal, even—and nothing like the buckets of milk or the hay bales or any of the other things of agricultural that I usually saw him carrying around. Inside the plastic navy blue cover, tucked into the crease, was a stack of bound checks with my name on them.

“Use these,” he said, “to buy what you need while you’re away.”

Over the years, sometimes at the end of harvest or when the livestock was loaded up and taken off for sale, my father would make vague references to the money he was setting aside for us kids— let’s say, equal to the price of one calf for each of us—in payment for helping him and Mother with the milking and the work in the fields that year.

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[sense of place]

in the big city, I also discovered eating out. In Napoleon, my hometown, there was pretty much only Maggie’s Café and the pool hall downtown, where you could still get the best order of french-fries ever made for 25 cents. But in Bismarck, there were places like A & B Pizza and the Big Boy Drive-In. I don’t think we ever splurged on expensive restaurants, but we skipped out on the college food service enough to eat our way across town. We all gained the requisite Freshman 10 Pounds.

My monthly bank statements must have read like an ethnographic study of the odd habits and proclivities of this new creature my parents were discovering me to be...

My monthly bank statements must have read like an ethnographic study of the odd habits and proclivities of this new creature my parents were discovering me to be, a female college freshman. It would have been better than satellite tracking or inserting a computer chip under my skin, because once I went paper, I went paper. I don’t think I ever learned how to get cash out of my checking account.

I mention the bank statement now only to point out two other amazing facts that I didn’t know at the time about checking accounts—that a bank statement was mailed out each month, and that it was being sent to my parents who, I presume, studied it carefully.

About eight months into this experiment, my dad called me up and said, “Well, we’re closing down the checking account.”

“Why?” I asked, incredulous. It seemed to be working so marvelously.

That’s when I learned about the bank statements that were coming to my parents along with the monthly pack of cancelled checks, those little numbered slips of paper that I had wildly signed, torn out along the perforations, and strewn across the counters of stores and restaurants in Bismarck.

“But I still have plenty of checks,” I told my father. And that’s when I learned another stunning thing—that money had to be put into the account to counterbalance the writing of the checks. I don’t recall anyone ever mentioning the part about making deposits, or maybe he told me about checks and balances, but it simply fell from my head like algebra and chemistry and calculus had.

Even before I understood all the intricacies of banking, even after, I marveled at the counter checks in the café and stores in my hometown. In the Red Owl and the Rexall Drug near the chewing gum and the cigarette lighters, in Maggie’s Café near the mints and the toothpicks in their cellophane wrappers, a tattered pack of counter checks from the Stock Growers Bank was always tucked in the crevice between the napkin holder and the cash register.

The counter checks were left blank of any information—convenience checks for people who may have forgotten their checkbooks at home. Not only the normal places on the check for the “date,” the “dollar,” and the “pay to the order of” were left blank. Not only the long line for the signature was left blank, and the spot marked “memo,” where you could write “rent” or “fishing gear” to remind yourself what you’d just spent money on. But also the upper

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[sense of place]

left corner of the check where the account holder’s name and address usually was printed and the long bottom edge of the check where the account number was shown were all left blank. It seemed like carte blanche, courtesy of the Stock Growers Bank.

It appears naïve and quaint on the surface, but what keeps counter checks from being an embezzler’s dream is the safety net of the small town, the merchant’s knowledge of all of his customers, the families they belong to, and what their history has been. A small town is a claustrophobically finite world. Everybody’s watching; everybody knows. And a small town is not a place where you want to start bouncing checks, counter or otherwise.

It’s like fouling your own nest, or, as my father used to say, “shitting too close to the house.”

About my own derelict checking account—later, I discovered that the banker, Parkas, would call my father when my checking account ran low. “Debbie is overdrawn again,” he’d say. Then my dad would run downtown and deposit a few hundred more dollars. Years later, my mother told me that they would sift through the checks I had written—$1.25 at Dairy Queen, $2.33 at Village Inn— and shake their heads. They were paying $5 for every overdraft.

Everything I think and write about home these days makes me feel like crying, because so much of it is gone, pushed out of the way through the natural forces of time, erased through death.

When I remember the solemn gesture of my father handing me my first checkbook as I left home for college, never to return—although none of us knows that yet—when I think about him rushing down to the Stock Growers Bank to deposit two hundred more dollars to cover my checks for lipstick or panty hose, I have to get up and walk around a while. I have to unload the dishwasher or play with the dogs.

Because my father has been gone from the world for almost twenty years now, and I doubt I will ever find anyone who loves me as much as he did. And that world of home, that world of checks and balances that he believed in has changed so much, beyond anything he would have imagined.

When I drive through western North Dakota these days, I think of him. When I see the flare pits burning off natural gas around the oil wells, burning off natural resources into the already fragile atmosphere just because no one wants to slow down long enough to collect it, I think of him.

Photo by Jesse Veeder Scofield.

I’m sure they were devastated by the waste of it, and I’m certain my father found it hard to fathom why I needed so

much in the world in excess of the price of one calf sold to slaughter each year.

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[sense of place]

When I see the oil and water tankers navigating slippery country roads and read about the catastrophic accidents that result on the highways; when I hear of pipeline ruptures emptying thousands of barrels of crude into a farmer’s field; of trainloads of fuel exploding near a small North Dakota town; of fracking fluid and oil and saline water spills occurring almost daily in rural regions where people are dependent on well water, I think about how much this is all going to cost.

Because it’s a finite world. Everybody’s watching; everybody knows. And I wonder who is going to step forward to pay for this, to settle the bill when it comes due. And I think I have an idea about who that is going to be.

...we have so many questions that need asking.

The world my father trained me to live in is not the world I live in now. So I must shed some of his training. To talk about money, about checks and balances, and who’s going to pay for all this is not low or rude. To ask a second question, or a third question, or even a fourth or fifth is not impertinent. Because we have so many questions that need asking.

That day, after my father called me at college to tell me he was closing down my checking account, he said he would wait a few weeks until the checks had all cleared.

After that, for the next few days, I went on a spending frenzy. I bought toothpaste and toilet paper; rugs and comforters and bed sheets; pajamas and bathrobes; nail polish, shampoo and face moisturizer. I bought chocolate bars and camera film and underwear.

It felt like the end. I tried to buy everything that I thought I was going to need for the rest of my life. But it wasn’t the end. It was just the end of carte blanche, the beginning of resource management, of life stewardship, of understanding limits, of maturity.

And I’m not going to beat myself up about not understanding how money worked. Just recently, a friend of mine told me about how her teenage daughter had asked her for money, and when my friend said, “No, honey, I don’t have any money,” her daughter said, “Yes you do, mom. All you have to do is put your card in the machine and it will give you money.”

So maybe it’s just something developmental that we all must go through, like that period before frontal lobe development when we feel as if nothing can touch or hurt us, and we think the whole world is just a space left blank for us to write our wishes upon. And it would never even occur to us that someone is running around in the background cleaning up our messes, that someone we love fiercely is paying the highest prices just to make good on the things to which we have foolishly committed our signatures.

Debra Marquart is a professor of English at Iowa State University. She teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State University. Marquart’s work has received numerous awards and commendations including a Pushcart Prize, and a 2008 NEA Creative Writing Prose Fellowship among others. Marquart’s memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, received the “Elle Lettres” award from Elle Magazine, a New York Times Editors’ Choice commendation, and the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. Marquart is also the author of two poetry collections— Everything’s a Verb and From Sweetness—and a collection of interrelated short stories, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories, which draws on her experiences as a female road musician. Marquart’s latest book, a poetry collection, Small Buried Things, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press in 2015.

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Greetings!

It is both an honor and privilege to be joining the North Dakota Humanities Council as the Development Officer! In order to ensure our humanities programs continue to flourish throughout North Dakota, I will be in charge of designing and implementing fundraising and development strategies.

I have always had a passion for learning, whether it is researching past historical events, analyzing what is going on in the world right now, or predicting what is going to happen in the future. The Humanities Council offers many opportunities to learn and develop, both personally and through community. I want to ensure that we are able to give people in North Dakota the opportunity to study languages, literature, history, film, civics, philosophy, religion, and the arts.

Through strategic planning, creating relationships with both old and new donors, as well as corporations, I am confident that we will be able to continue to foster creativity and knowledge of all kinds.

Before joining the North Dakota Humanities Council, I worked with several non-profits to create and implement fundraising programs throughout the United States. Outside of fundraising, I am an active volunteer and currently serve on the board for the North Dakota Human Rights Coalition. I received my Bachelors of Science from the University of Mary, Bismarck, ND and went on to pursue a Master of Public Administration from Hamline University, St. Paul, MN. I am looking forward to being back in the state and a part of this organization!

Stacy Schaffer Development Officer

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North Dakota Humanities Council 418 E. Broadway, Suite 8 Bismarck, ND 58501 800-338-6543 council@ndhumanities.org

ndhumanities.org

We have ways of making you think.

Board of Directors CHAIR Najla Amundson, Fargo VICE CHAIR Aaron Barth, Fargo Bethany Andreasen, Minot Tayo “Jay” Basquiat, Mandan William Caraher, Grand Forks Virginia Dambach, Fargo Kara Geiger, Mandan Melissa Gjellstad, Grand Forks Kate Haugen, Fargo Kristin Hedger, Killdeer Janelle Masters, Mandan Christopher Rausch, Bismarck Jessie Veeder Scofield, Watford City Jaclynn Davis Wallette, West Fargo Susan Wefald, Bismarck STAFF Brenna Daugherty Gerhardt, Executive Director Kenneth Glass, Associate Director Stacy Schaffer, Development Officer Angela Hruby, Administrative Assistant The North Dakota Humanities Council is a partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. The humanities inspire our vision of a thoughtful, respectful, actively engaged society that will be able to meet the challenge of sustaining our democracy across the many divisions of modern society and deal responsibly with the shared challenges we currently face as members of an interdependent world.

“A place without meaning is no place to be.”

— Wayne Gerard Trotman

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