Clay's Weekly Columns

Clay Jenkinson's weekly column for The Bismarck Tribune

(Many of Clay's past columns will soon be available in a book he is currently working on)

Dickinson State—Time for Reform not Punishment

by Clay Jenkinson
February 19, 2012

The scandal at Dickinson State University is almost too painful to contemplate. How did a fine and responsible institution of higher learning lose its way—to the point that it is now being called a "degree mill" by people who know better? More to the point, how can DSU's new president D.C. Coston clean house and restore confidence in a university that has been an important, even vital, part of North Dakota cultural life?

I've been associated with DSU for most of my life.

I'm concerned about the integrity and the future of the university, but I am much more concerned about the hundreds of good, decent, hard-working staff and faculty who work at DSU and have absolutely nothing to do with the enrollment scandal. These folks, who represent at least 99% of DSU community, had no knowledge whatsoever of the irregularities that have now come to light and cast a shadow over the great and important work that they do. Granting degrees to people who have not actually earned them is a grave breach of academic honor, but we must not lose all perspective as we react to the scandal. The great majority of students who study at DSU are earning their degrees precisely as students at UND or NDSU earn theirs—the old fashioned way, showing up for class, writing papers, taking tests, reading books, persevering in the face of the inevitable academic frustrations. The 86 members of the faculty teach their classes, advise students, engage in academic research, and attend professional conferences. I know many of them. They are a wonderful collection of scholars and teachers, men and women of discipline and integrity. They are as detached from this scandal as completely as professors of biology or linguistics at large national universities are detached from the athletic recruiting scandals that flow through the system like waves.

The solution to the problem is not to punish the university—though that perhaps is inevitable—but to find the culprits and terminate them, to complete a stern and transparent audit of all the ways and means of the university (not just enrollment), to clean up everything that is irregular, inefficient, and out of sync with best practices, and then to keep DSU on a short leash for a few years to make sure that it engages in accounting and certification practices that are "holier than Caesar's wife."

There is no excuse for what happened at DSU, but there is an intelligent explanation. As the new century began, before the coming of the Bakken oil boom, rural North Dakota was in the grip of what appeared to be an unstoppable spiral of decline—the outmigration of our young people, an aging population, declining birth rates, institutional decay. The specter of rural decline cast a shadow over hospitals and clinics, K-12 education (public and private) and, of course, Dickinson State University. These institutions had to decide whether to shrivel up and die, to manage decline, or to re-invent themselves. Dickinson State decided to recruit international students from China, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and two dozen other countries to maintain its enrollment (currently at ca. 2600). This was a creative and gutsy initiative, one rural university's engagement with globalization, a potentially remarkable means of increasing diversity in one of the least diverse regions of the United States.

Apparently a considerable percentage of the international students—particularly those from China—did not bring enough English language skills to America to be able to participate fully in the routine coursework of the university. I know for a fact that DSU worked very hard to accommodate the international students' needs, to increase their proficiency in English, and to find creative and legitimate ways to keep them moving forward towards bona fide degrees in a range of subject areas. Unfortunately, the cultural divide proved to be wider than anyone could have anticipated. It is essential to understand that DSU did not set out to sell hollow degrees to foreign students for ready money. But the pressure to maintain enrollment numbers and to "find a way" to get the foreign students through to graduation seems to have lured a few key individuals to falsify records, and to grant "social degrees" knowing full well that they had not actually been earned. I feel certain that these staff members did not do so with cheerful disregard of academic standards. They found themselves in a very difficult situation—with an important new, but problematic, class of students, upon whose success many felt the future of DSU depended. In other words, these staff members were trying desperately to keep the international initiative alive, trying to find ways to deal with the severe growing pains of the program, and—admittedly—making some bad decisions in the process.

I am not trying to excuse what happened, but I do think it is far more complicated than the dark headlines suggest. I think it would be a terrible mistake to shut down all of the international initiatives at DSU. Many of the foreign students are outstanding by any measure, excellent speakers of English, and they have brought great new energies and perspectives to DSU and western North Dakota. But we should insist that everyone who studies here has at least a moderate grounding in the English language.

DSU and all other institutions of higher education in North Dakota should step back and determine what a realistic, realizable, sustainable enrollment means in the twenty-first century. Energetic recruitment is a good thing, but DSU (and other universities) should not try to inflate their numbers by way of desperate measures. When the sustainable enrollment figures are determined, we should reform the higher ed funding formula so that the emphasis is on superb education rather finding bodies to count, so that there is a reward rather than a penalty for reducing enrollment to sane and sustainable levels.

Dickinson State University is a good and important institution that has made all the difference in the life of Dickinson and southwestern North Dakota since 1918. It has a promising future. DSU is going to become much more important as the oil boom swells the temporary (and permanent) population of western North Dakota, not only as an educator of our youth but a symbol of our cultural values. We need to work hard to get it back on track, and not punish it for what will, ten years from now, seem like a very ancient matter.

 

 

When nothing will quite do except a volume of Dickens

by Clay Jenkinson
February 12, 2012

Because of the nature of my work, I read more or less all the time. I have a large library, constantly in a state of disarray, because when I am working on something I fetch books from all over the house and concentrate them on my kitchen table, where the big windows are. By the time they need to be moved back to their proper places, I have moved on to the next project and it sometimes takes weeks . . . well, the truth is it sometimes takes months for them to get back to their places. I have been a serious reader from the age of 16, not before, and I'm unfortunately a slow reader. One of the largest sources of melancholy in my life is the realization that I will never be able to read even a fraction of all the books that I know I should read.
At the time I am writing these words, I am many thousands of miles from North Dakota and there is no bookstore or library handy. Someone came to dinner an hour ago and announced that "today" is Charles Dickens' birthday. That fact went through me like a shot, because I recognized that if he hadn't mentioned it, I would not have remembered the birthday of my favorite English novelist. Not good. More to the point, I suddenly realized that I would like nothing more than to spend the evening reading Dickens, but unless I can find a way in an impossible place to download a Dickens novel, I'm not going to have that joy.

Charles Dickens (Feb. 7, 1812-June 9, 1870) was at one time the most popular writer in the English speaking world. Many of his novels appeared serially in popular British magazines, chapter by chapter or episode by episode, and literally millions of people waited for the next installment with as much impatience and anticipation as we once reserved for the last episodes of Dallas or the next episode of American Idol when that program was at the top of its popularity. Writing by the installment plan is a great gig for those who can get it, because a series of regular deadlines is much more manageable and less intimidating than a single deadline that requires you to deliver an entire manuscript on such and such a date. It also allowed Dickens to adjust his tone (and to a certain degree his plots) according to the public's response. It's hard for us-in our post-literate age-to conjure up the Dickens mania, but he was as important to his age as the Beatles were to ours, and he had much more longevity as a creative artist than they did.

I am happy to confess that I did not read my first Dickens novel until I was about 25 years old. Somehow I had been spared that Dickens-killer, the high school assignment to blunder through "Hard Times" or "A Tale of Two Cities." I believe it is a serious mistake to force young people to read Shakespeare or Chaucer or Milton or the Iliad before they are really ready for it. Or Dickens. Nothing kills a classic as effectively as forcing it down the pubescent throat. My first Dickens was "Great Expectations." I remember being stunned by its sheer magnificence. When I came to the description of Miss Havesham's bridal table-she had been jilted on the day of her wedding and her whole existence had become locked in that moment of supreme pain-I immediately felt somewhere deep in my consciousness that I was now encountering one of the handful of supreme moments in the history of literature. Every day for the rest of her life, she wore only her yellowing wedding dress, and the uncut wedding cake had become a tissue of cobwebs with mice running up and down its tiers. When I read these words, I felt in some uncanny way that I already knew the story of Miss Havisham's humiliation, that I was coming upon something that was already in my soul, and that I was returning to it even though I had never head the story before or read it. I think maybe that is one of the characteristics of a classic. I had the same experience with Hamlet when I first read it, at the age of 18, and of the last scene of Moby Dick when I first read it at the age of 28.

Since then I have read most of but not all of Dickens. "Great Expectations"is not my favorite Dickens novel-that much I know-but I am not quite sure which of his novels IS my favorite. One of my tutors at Oxford University was asked this question by a fellow student. "Which Dickens novel is my favorite?" he said. Stage pause. "I suppose that answer to that is which one have I most recently read." My cluster of favorites include "Bleak House," "David Copperfield," and "The Pickwick Papers." A few months ago I read a critical study of Dickens in which the professor poured contempt on those shallow souls who are enchanted by "David Copperfield." One night, on a whim, I picked up DC and began to reread it (for the third or fourth time). I was drawn into the novel's imaginative world so immediately and so completely that I spent all of my non-work time for the next week reading it through (800 pages), and could only conclude that the professor in question was some kind of sourpuss. Dickens is famous for his characters, and of all of them-there are scores that stay with you for the rest of your life-Wilkins Micawber is easily my favorite.
Here's a bit of heresy. I don't like "A Christmas Carol" at all, and I regard it as a cruel irony that that sliver of mawkish sentimentality is the world's primary association with Charles Dickens, one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived.

I don't feel any better for having written about Dickens for the last two hours, as a substitute for actually reading him. It's no more satisfying than paraphrasing a joke.
As soon as I get home I'm going to pluck a volume off the shelf-I have never read "The Old Curiosity Shop," but something tells me that I will be gravitating to "The Pickwick Papers" instead.

 

In Praise of the Coffeehouse (Especially Fargo's Atomic Café)

by Clay Jenkinson
February 5, 2012

As I write this, I am sitting in a coffeehouse. I'm in Fargo. It's column deadline day, so I checked out of the hotel and walked over to Atomic Coffee on Broadway. Cars are moving slowly by on Broadway, their exhaust visible in a way that I associate with the Red River Valley. I ordered a plain toasted bagel with cream cheese (no strawberry, no jalapena cream cheese for me!), and a vanilla latte, plugged in my phone and my laptop computer, and now I am gazing around the room at little clusters of morning activity. A man is reading the Fargo Forum in a big leather chair, two women are talking in hushed, conspiratorial tones while leaning into each other across a table, a group of seven young professionals are trying to focus on their work meeting, but really just gossiping, talking about the Republican primaries, and teasing each other about workplace foibles or farces.

I love coffeehouses. I do some of my best work in them. I wrote much of my most recent book in a Starbucks in north Bismarck, but I would not have done so if there had not been free wireless in the store. These days free wireless is the key ingredient, not caffeine. I regard buying the expensive designer coffee as mere "office rent." I could, and probably should, work at home, where I have wireless and essentially free coffee, but I find having a low hum of human activity around me comforting. When I get stuck in mid-thought or mid-sentence, I can look up and watch people gesturing their passions, pains, or purposes across the room, or see what books they are reading, or just study human nature. Since writing a newspaper column is a social activity—a conversation with the community—I find it easier to think about my readers if I write in a coffeehouse.

Every coffeehouse has its own character. Each of the independent coffeehouses in Bismarck is its own little world (and worldview), and even the three Starbucks (four if you count Barnes & Noble) has a distinct personality. I've tried them all.

Atomic Coffee in Fargo is, I believe, North Dakota's best coffeehouse. Here's why. It's downtown, so people can walk in from somewhere else. That makes a big difference. The windows at the front of the shop are 12 feet tall and they let in a lot of light. Natural light is important. The street culture that passes by those windows is entertaining. Most of Bismarck's coffeehouses look out on dreary parking lots. The décor inside Atomic Coffee is perfect—clean, modernist, even a little postmodernist, and the tables are not jammed in for maximum occupancy. The tables along the brick wall have electrical outlets and each one is illuminated by a lovely lamp. The yellow incandescent light creates an intimate ambience, especially late on a winter afternoon, when it creates the feel of an Edward Hopper painting. Best of all, Fargo is big enough to support some social diversity and just enough hip downtown culture to bring in the occasional dreadlock, funky leggings, or an eyebrow piercing.

Coffeehouses have a long and interesting history. They got their start in the Middle East in the sixteenth century, and they found their way to Europe, thanks to the Ottoman Empire, in the seventeenth century. The first coffeehouse in England was opened in Oxford in 1652. Here's the value of free internet. I looked up the address just now (84 High Street, Oxford), and discovered that I have drunk tea there many times, without knowing until five minutes ago that it was England's first coffeehouse. In fact, I am now looking at an interactive panoramic photograph of High Street between sentences, and I am able to stroll (virtually) up and down the street from Queen's College and University College towards the Church of St. Mary the Virgin. I can actually see the cakes and signs in the windows of the coffeehouse (now called The Grand Café), and the scars of street repairs outside. Amazing technology. I'm back in Oxford by way of the Atomic Café. It feels a little quantum!

By the eighteenth century there were thousands of coffeehouses (and also chocolate houses) all over Europe. They were places where writers, conspirators, artists, and conversationalists gathered (back when conversation still really mattered). They were public salons at a time when there was less free-neutron individualism than there is now. The patrons frequently entered into group conversations, even among strangers. Newspapers (a new form of social media!) were shared around in those coffeehouses, because at that time hand-printed copies were few. Men (almost exclusively men) discussed and debated the natural rights philosophies of John Locke or the Social Contract of the notorious French intellectual Jean Jacques Rousseau. It may be said that a number of the ideas that generated the American Revolution were born or refined in English and French coffeehouses.

I remember reading a study of the Enlightenment by a historian named Preserved Smith. It contained a long passage about the effect of caffeine on the Enlightenment. Smith said that the Enlightenment could be characterized as a sustained caffeine high. Coffee and tea were new drugs in Europe then, and they lit up the artistic, political, and intellectual world. Dr. Samuel Johnson, the literary dictator of England, the author of the first great dictionary of the English language (1755), and a great frequenter of coffeehouses, is said to have drunk 40 cups of tea per day. No wonder he was productive! One wonders if he could every really sleep. Denis Diderot was able to produce the first great Encyclopedia (1751-1772), in part thanks to his caffeine addiction.

Today we take coffee for granted, though it was once a revolutionary beverage. I'm delighted that, thanks to Starbucks, there has been a wonderful renaissance of coffeehouse culture throughout America, including in North Dakota. Whenever I sit in one reading or writing, I feel a satisfaction that I am a little electron in a culture that helped give birth to some of my favorite writers, that deepened and clarified the principles of the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence, and that has enabled me to communicate with you each week at this time.

Dr. Johnson once said, "the tavern chair is the throne of human felicity." Not so. It is the solid table in a thoughtfully-conceived coffeehouse.

 

On Righteousness and the Future of the American Dream

by Clay Jenkinson
January 29, 2012

In his third State of the Union Address the other night, the President of the United States said that it is time to "lower the temperature" in Washington, D.C., to put an end to runaway partisanship and cynical mistrust and zero-sum obstructionism that has nothing to do with serving the needs of the American people. I was driving from Dickinson to Bismarck at the time of that utterance, and though I agree with the President 100%, I immediately texted my friend, "Fat chance!"

Of all the great nations of the world, the United States is now the most infantile and constipated. Our political system is basically a wreck—poisoned by extreme partisanship, incivility, righteousness (by which I mean loudmouthed and simplistic certainty that you and you alone are right), and what the President called "the corrosive power of money."

All this might seem like an entertaining sitcom or an off-Broadway farce if there were not so much at stake. Millions of previously middle class Americans are now living marginal and hand-to-mouth lives, for many not even paycheck-to-paycheck lives, but "how are we going to pay the rent" lives. While our national representatives smack each other with political brickbats like the Three Stooges or characters in a Looney Tunes cartoon, the other great nations (especially China and India) are pressing ahead into the second decade of the twenty-first century with efficiency and dispatch. The western world is teetering on the brink of economic collapse and the United States is rapidly snowboarding down to second-class status, and our team leaders—in this grave moment—are John Boehner and Nancy Pelosi.

As far as I'm concerned, both parties are equally responsible for the paralysis.

Newt Gingrich is currently riding high in the Republican presidential sweepstakes precisely because he seems sharp, aggressive, and nasty enough to "raise the temperature" in the coming election debates with President Obama. Poor genial Mitt Romney is regarded as too civil to wield the rapier or bludgeon that will be needed to cut the incumbent President down to size. Gingrich's "breakthrough" moment came a week ago in South Carolina when he righteously denounced the press for asking him if he wished to respond to his former wife's accusation that he had asked her to continue to be married to him while he carried on an affair with a House of Representatives staffer. At such a moment righteousness would seem to be the least admirable or decent response (Thomas Jefferson would have looked down sadly and said, "no comment"), but Gingrich's outburst of high dudgeon turned out to be wildly successful.

According to such pundits as the always-reliable David Gergen, Gingrich has tapped into "the vast reservoir of anger" that is awash in the American people. If that anger carries Gingrich into the Presidency, what will he do with it? How do you turn that "outsider" anger into policies that will restore America? Gingrich is, after all, a consummate Washington insider, who served in the U.S. House of Representatives form 1979-1999, and as Speaker from 1995-1999. Since then he has been a think tanker and a lobbyist. He's the very epitome of the revolving door phenomenon—in which former representatives trade their insider access for bloated salaries and unelected political influence that was never intended by the Founding Fathers.

The temperature is going to go up, not down.

Generally speaking, I agree with William Butler Yeats: "The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Most issues don't lend themselves to black and white, good versus evil, solutions. Take illegal immigration. If, in a 2012 Republican debate, Candidate X said, "Well, we have between 11 and 20 million illegals living in the United States. Most of them are decent people who work hard at jobs that are important for the American economy. If would probably be logistically impossible, even if it were desirable, to round all of them up and expel them from the country, so whether we like it or not we probably have to find some way to legalize their status as guest workers, without granting them full citizenship or rewarding them for their unlawful entry into the United States," he'd be booed off the stage. But if Candidate Y said, "Ship 'em out of here!" he'd get a bombastic standing ovation. (To his credit, Gingrich is a realist on questions of this sort.) OK, so Candidate Y is swept into the Presidency on the basis of such statements. His actual solution to the problem of illegal immigration, if he winds up addressing it at all, is certain to be closer to Candidate X's formulation than his own. Why? Because government has to try to solve problems rather than merely posture about them.

It's the same with the other fundamental issues: how to make sure all Americans have access to affordable health care; how to pay down the national debt; how to achieve energy independence; what to do about the outsourcing of what were once American jobs; how to restore our aging national infrastructure. It's easy to bloviate about these issues, infinitely harder to solve them.

Imagine a world in which all political figures and all interested citizens began debate on any issue by saying (and actually meaning), "I know this is not an easy problem to solve and that whatever we decide is not going to please everyone. I have my own conviction about what we need to do, but I don't feel righteous about it and I respect most other points of view. I promise to listen carefully and keep an open mind and I promise not to demonize people who disagree with me." (This should be the oath of office our representatives take when they start their terms.)

Two things. First, fat chance, though that is precisely the republic that Thomas Jefferson and most of the Founding Fathers envisioned. That is one primary meaning of the concept of American Exceptionalism: that we were going to be a republic that sought enlightenment rather than power or glory or vast wealth, that we would be a people who subscribed to civility and reason rather than rancor and impulse. Second, only if we find some way to approach that level of mutual respect and concord (lower the temperature, as President Obama puts it) will we be able to compete with China and other "managed societies" as the twenty first century unfolds.

 

A Reluctant Endorsement for the Keystone Pipeline

by Clay Jenkinson
January 22, 2012

For four or five months I have been trying to make sense of the Keystone Pipeline controversy. The proposed $7 billion, 1,700-mile pipeline would transport oil from Hardesty, Alberta, to Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. The pipeline would not cross the state of North Dakota, but it would benefit North Dakota by providing an efficient and safe method of transporting oil from the Bakken Oil Field to distant refineries. North Dakota currently ranks fourth in U.S. oil production (after Texas, Alaska, and California), and is likely to rank third or even second before long. We are currently producing more than 500,000 barrels of oil per day. Virtually all of that oil has to go somewhere else to be refined. Getting it out of North Dakota is a serious logistical problem. The Keystone Pipeline would approach the border of North Dakota at Baker, Montana, just over from Marmarth. An access facility at Baker would serve as an on ramp for Bakken oil.

The vast quantities of oil being extracted from beneath the prairie of western North Dakota can find their way to refineries by one of three transportation systems: railroads, highway trucks, or pipelines. No system is entirely immune to industrial accidents (oil spills), but a well-built underground pipeline is without question the safest and most reliable method of transporting oil, and the one that puts the least pressure on the social structure of North Dakota, as well as its existing infrastructure.

The national (and indeed international) controversy about the Keystone Pipeline has little to do with North Dakota. A list of environmental and landowner organizations too impressive to be ignored opposes the Keystone project, as well as somewhere between 50 and 100 members of Congress. The Obama Administration has serious doubts about the wisdom of the pipeline and is attempting to slow down the process.

The arguments of pipeline opponents move from the specific to the general. The pipeline may threaten wetlands and wildlife habitats along its path. It will transect 70 rivers and streams, including the Yellowstone, the Missouri, the Platte, and the Arkansas. It will cross (or now perhaps skirt) the fabulous and fragile sand hills of Nebraska, and it will cross the Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground lake underlying eight Great Plains States. The Ogallala supplies 30% of the nation's irrigation water and provides domestic water to more than two million people. A serious oil spill could be catastrophic.

Those are just the siting and spill issues.

Landowners in Nebraska have also complained about the high-handedness of TransCanada, which has allegedly threatened to use eminent domain to secure the pipeline's path if farmers and ranchers do not cooperate in leasing the right of way.

The larger issue has to do with our future relationship to carbon. Pipeline opponents, led by environmental essayist and activist William McKibben, argue that building the Keystone Pipeline endorses and indeed deepens our addiction to the carbon economy at a time when the United States should be doing everything in our power to develop a new energy paradigm that is not so harmful to the health of the Earth. If we are serious about addressing the problem of global climate change, serious about reducing the carbon "footprint" of the industrial nations of the world, we should be concentrating our ingenuity into developing alternative energy sources rather than "rewarding" a particularly dirty carbon source—the Alberta tar sands. The rap against the tar sands is that they are extremely expensive to exploit and that the oil they release is "dirty fuel," producing two or three times more carbon emissions than conventional oil, plus additional toxins. If we are serious about moving towards a lighter industrial footprint and a greener civilization, opponents say, the Keystone Pipeline is precisely the sort of "energy solution" we should reject. Pipeline opponents argue that even those who are skeptical about global climate change should reject the Keystone project simply because the tar sands are such an expensive, cost-ineffective, and toxic source of oil.

I see the merits of the arguments on both sides of the Keystone issue. I have been reading everything I can get my hands on, talking with everyone I know (ad nauseam), and wrestling with the dilemma we all find ourselves in. There is no clear path to an enlightened future.

Still, on balance I think we should hold our noses and build the thing. Here's why.

Two things are absolutely certain. First, Canada is going to continue to develop the Alberta Tar Sands whether we approve the pipeline or not, and nothing the United States can do would prevent that development. Second, Alberta's oil is going somewhere. If it doesn't pass through the Keystone Pipeline to refineries in the United States, it is going to flow towards the west coast of Canada, where it will be transported to China. In other words, we cannot "save the planet" by refusing to authorize the pipeline. We just give China a strategic advantage at the beginning of a century in which that rising nation of 1.3 billion consumers is going to be our principal international rival and antagonist. From a geopolitical perspective, that makes no sense. It may turn out to be a colossal mistake.

Furthermore, whether we like to admit it or not, we continue to be hopelessly addicted to oil (and carbon generally), and no viable green alternative is yet in sight. The United States already gets 20% of its oil from Canada. That number is likely to rise. In an increasingly dangerous world, where the remaining large deposits of conventional oil seem to lie under unstable or unfriendly regimes (Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Venezuela, Nigeria), knowing that Canada has the second or third largest oil reserves in the world should be a source of deep comfort to the people of the United States, even if tar sands oil is not ideal from an environmental point of view. Canada is our best friend in the world. It may be that the Monroe Doctrine is going to become even more important in the 21st century than it was in the 19th. The international consternation over Iran's threat to close the Straits of Hormuz reminds us of just how fragile the West's oil supply continues to be.

Besides, from a purely selfish point of view, the Keystone Pipeline is a godsend to North Dakota at a time when our infrastructure is being overwhelmed by oil production.

 

 

Oh Bring On Some Winter At Last

by Clay Jenkinson
January 15, 2012

Maybe winter has come at last. I hope so. Almost everyone I know is thrilled by the non-winter winter of 2011-2012, but I don't like it. I wouldn't have minded a mild open winter, but a bone-dry non-winter violates the very idea of North Dakota and fills me with a low-level anxiety. It was 62 degrees in South Dakota when I drove through it ten days ago. That can't be good.

I woke up this last Wednesday morning at about five when the first of a long series of blasts of wind struck the side of my house. It had snowed a little in the night, and some kind of front had moved in that brought the first serious winds of 2012 with it. Every four or five minutes a big gust smacked into the side of my house with such force that I could hear the grit grinding at the windows and siding, and the whomp felt as if it were testing how well my house is moored to the earth. As I slipped in and out of sleep I wondered why wind likes to gust—why it doesn't just flow evenly as the differentials of atmospheric pressure and temperature seek equilibrium. Everything I know about wind comes from the Bible: "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is every one that is born of the Spirit" [John 3:8].

So far that's the sum total of this year's winter.

I'm no meteorologist, so the following observations are all impressionistic. The creeks and rivers are running when they should be frozen. I drove past Crown Butte Dam the other day. It was a 40, possibly even 50-degree afternoon. I saw two or three ice fishing shelters widely dispersed on the lake. That seemed insane to me (well, actually, for several reasons). The ice looked like an immense sheet of Saran Wrap stretched across the water.

The migratory birds seem confused. Maybe they effortlessly adjust to exceptionally mild winters and just forgo the long trip south, at least until winter asserts itself in some unmistakable way. But I'm guessing the long bi-annual migrations serve purposes other than escape from frigid weather. If these birds are so finely tuned that they can fly thousands of miles to the same nesting grounds (and back again) year after year, surely there are subtle organic clocks in them, individually or collectively, that can only be maintained if they ritually observe those migratory rhythms.

For some reason, the nights seem exceptionally long this winter. Dark turns up unnecessarily early in the afternoon-evening, and dark lingers unnecessarily late in the night-morning. I hate waking up in the dark. And it's not just dark at 7 a.m. this year, but really dark. I have been brooding about that, and I have a theory. The defining qualities of this winter are 1) a barren landscape with no snow cover, and 2) weather (temperatures) that you would expect in October or April. Even though the proportions of night and day are precisely what they are in any other year (unless the earth has slipped on its axis!), those two other factors make it feel darker this year, because the memory chips in our bodies associate such high temperatures and windless days with the seasons of the equinox rather than the solstice, and they want the light to be commensurate with the feel of the atmosphere. If it were brutally cold, as per usual, the absence of light would be the least of our problems. Since our minds and bodies don't have to come to terms with extreme cold this year, they are free to pay attention to what is usually a lesser factor. If that makes any sense. And the snowless landscape this year (absorbing rather than reflecting what little light there is) makes us more aware of the long nights and short days than we would be in a more typical winter.

Here's another way to make sense of it. The temperatures have been so high that many afternoons about four I have thought, this would be a perfect day for a long walk along the ridge. But by the time I get myself home to take that walk, the sun has already set, and the prospect of having to walk in the dark dissuades me from undertaking that which the moderate temperature invites. Like the geese, I'm just confused.

Meanwhile, the full and nearly full moon has been unbelievably beautiful this week. As I roll into my driveway in the evening, there it is, a giant quivering ball of orange, rising up over the northeastern horizon like something out of science fiction movie. I cannot remember ever seeing it larger, more electric in its luminosity, or more wonderfully engraved with detail that is clear to the naked eye. I linger in my driveway, go into the house and call and text a few people: "go out immediately and gaze at the moon!" and then make dinner. But here's the amazing part. When I wake up in the morning and look out my bedroom window to the prairie to the west, there's the same moon, getting ready to set, yellower and paler now, and with a gray-blue dawn backdrop and the prairie below it like an Andrew Wyeth painting. What a way to bookend the long nights. To call the January moon of 2012 spectacular doesn't do justice to the sense of wonder if inspires.

Have you ever stopped to consider how lucky we are to have a moon to grace our otherwise lonely planetary existence? Imagine a moonless earth for a moment. Our lives would be so impoverished in so many ways.

My hope is that we get a month of hard winter now—a handful of ground blizzards, a series of days in which we brace for the wind chill before we force open the front door, some truly punishing cold, a sustained period in which the whole earth seems to have turned to gray steel, and the ridges of soil do not yield under the hiking boot.

Winter is North Dakota's primary business. I miss it this year. And I think it has put all of us off of our center of gravity.

 

North Platte: 687.31 Miles from the Epicenter

by Clay Jenkinson
January 8, 2012

here is no escape from the oil boom. A few days before Christmas I drove down to northwestern Kansas and back to fetch my daughter. Just after New Year's I took her back down to Kansas. Altogether I drove 3,175 miles—every one of them, because she apparently misplaced her driver's license. That sounds grueling but I actually love it. I love to experience the Great Plains in their broad and endless sweep.

Before Christmas I drove south on US 83, from Sterling, ND, to McCook, NE. Normally that is just about as quiet a U.S. highway as one can find anywhere, partly because it is only half-heartedly maintained. US 83 stretches out like a nearly taught ribbon (or filament) draped across short-grass plains country so vast that it makes you gulp involuntarily. The countryside is so empty that it swallows up the human imagination. In short, it's perfect. But this time the highway was crowded with traffic and a little dangerous. In the course of a long day I edged past hundreds of wide load semis, some so wide they required pace cars with warning beacons. They were all coming north, of course, presumably to the Bakken Oil Field. I recognized modular homes and doublewide trailers, gargantuan holding tanks that virtually ate the whole road, and flatbeds hauling Caterpillars and other heavy machinery. But there were also trucks carrying equipment I could not identify—what appeared to be giant control panels or transformer units. They blew past me in that way that nearly sweeps you off the road into the borrow ditch. Who would have thought that US 83 would become a service road to the great North Dakota Oil Rush?

Down on 83, back up on US 385 and 85, from Wray, CO, to Belfield, ND. My daughter slept most of the way—because she had apparently misplaced her vocal cords. Most people seem to find that route b-o-r-i-n-g, but I rank it as one of the top five highways in America for sheer beauty and On the Road possibilities. When I am out there crawling along that long fabulous stretch of nothingness, I feel more like a child of the Great Plains than at any other time. This time, however, the industrial traffic was unusually heavy, even though I was flowing with the Bakken current. It used to be that you could roll out to pass a slow vehicle on US 85 more or less at will, but on this trip I had two heart-in-the-throat moments when the semis were barreling down on me like Mad Max and there was no semblance of the kind of road courtesy we have all grown up with out here in the heartland.

We are all going to have to adopt new road habits if we wish to survive the boom. The road fatalities that have already occurred in the Bakken zone are not just unfortunate or unavoidable. We have to regard them as an unacceptable byproduct of rapid industrialization.

After I returned my daughter to her Kansas village at mid-day Tuesday, I turned right around and drove towards home. At North Platte, NE, I stopped for the night, road-bleary, travel-numb, and awash in sadness. I checked in to a virtually empty motel—the post-holiday doldrums in the hospitality industry. Then I drove a quarter of a mile to a chain pub, sat at the bar, ordered a salad and a glass of wine, placed a yellow legal pad and pen on my right and two new books on my left. Geek life. Not Jack Kerouac—more like Nigel Kerouac.

There was a well-lubricated thirty-something man sitting three stools down from me, studying his beer with glassy eyes. A woman about his age, who was leaving a large table elsewhere in the pub, stopped by to say hello. The following conversation took place.

"Hey, Tyler, what are your plans for the new year?"

"Hey, Karla. Not sure. I was thinkin' of moving up to North Dakota to work in the oil fields but it is so @#*!#*!@ cold up there."

"My fiancé wants us to head up there, too. He says he can earn $8000 a month up there."

I was so tired I had to spend a minute working that out to $96K per annum.

"They say the problem is finding a place to live."

"Yeah, Brad says he knows someone who moved up there with his father in the fall. They live in this little cabin they have rented from a farmer. It is incredibly tiny and icky. No partitions or rooms, just a double bed and a bunk bed and an old couch. There are four men living in that little box. The only privacy is a little closed off area for a bathroom. It's like living in a tarpaper shack during the homestead era. I don't think I could live like that, even if it was just the two of us."

"I'd like to go drive like a water truck, and save all the money so I could maybe come back in a year or two and start a business here. But if I do it, first thing I am going to do is buy me a big Ford F-250 pickup."

"So much for the new business! Think you could really save the money?"

"Probably not, but wouldn't it be something to have that kind of cash for a while? If you guys go up there, what will you do, Karla?"

"Not sure. I suppose I could always waitress."

"I hear strippers are making $3000 a week in Williston. You could change your name to Angel and make a killing."

She punched him hard—but playfully—on the shoulder. "Hey, you can't talk to me that way." Stage pause. "Think of how much weight I'd have to lose."

He finished the conversation. "I've been thinking pretty hard about it. I'd like to go, but who would want to live in North Dakota. I mean, geez, that's like living at the end of the earth. And it's so #@!#@! cold."

I wanted to interrupt at this point, to say, "Hey, you live in North Platte, Nebraska. I don't think you're really in a position to be uppity about American hotspots." But I shrugged it off. She went home to contemplate life as Angel the Bakken ecdysiast. He ordered "one more," as the refrain goes, and put his dream of life on hold.

 

In the Spirit of Janus: Looking Back and Especially Forward

by Clay Jenkinson
January 1, 2012

Welcome to 2012. This is the year we have to decide.

It's New Year's Resolution time. Some people make them and some don't, but even those who don't make them tend to take some time at the end of the year to review their lives, their habits, their unrealized dreams, and resolve to address some issues—even if they are militant about not writing out formal resolutions.

2011 was the year the Bakken Oil Boom took possession of the state of North Dakota. When I moved back to North Dakota six years ago it was still a kind of long shot, a pipe dream. By 2011 it was a massive on-the-ground phenomenon that had taken root 13,000 feet into our soil. The Bakken was easily the biggest story of the year 2011, the dominant narrative of North Dakota both at home and in the national consciousness. The Bakken Oil Boom is already, in its infancy, one of the biggest stories in North Dakota history, joining the Homestead Act, the transcontinental railroads, and the Dust Bowl as events that changed this place forever. If we are not very careful, when the history of North Dakota is written in the year 2500, the story will look something like this: "From statehood in 1889 until about the millennium, North Dakota was a quiet farm state. After two little starter oil booms in the 1950s and 1970s, at the beginning of the twenty first century new technologies permitted an oil extraction phenomenon so gargantuan that when it ended thirty years later western North Dakota had been transformed into an industrial park. The population of the state had risen to nearly a million people. North Dakota had become the richest state per capita, but at a social, recreational, and environmental cost that put unprecedented pressures on the traditional values of what had once been the nation's most agrarian place."

This is the year in which we have to decide if we are going to manage and chasten the Bakken Oil Boom, or just shrug our shoulders and let it sweep over us no matter what it does to the land, the identity, and the character of North Dakota. Up till now we have been so grateful for the boom—for the jobs it has provided, the prosperity, the budget surplus, the sense of state renewal and optimism—that we have mostly just looked on and nodded. But things have begun to change. You can sense it more than you can actually measure it, but in the course of the last few months the people of North Dakota, and especially western North Dakota, have begun to worry that the boom is getting away from us, that it is too much, too fast, too ruthless, too "costly," and that there is a significant chance that it is going to wreck that which we love.

I believe that it is still possible to tame and target the boom, without in any way jeopardizing its mighty benefits to the people of North Dakota (and American energy independence). I believe it is still possible for us to slow it down a bit, savor it a little, and build in some protections for those who are not beneficiaries of the biggest oil rush in North America: hunters, elderly people on fixed incomes, surface owners who do not own their mineral rights, North Dakotans who have to use the same roads that have been commandeered for industrial traffic, lovers of the badlands, average citizens who want nothing more than safe, civil, and orderly communities in which to live.

We need leadership. If it is already coming from the top down, we need to see it and hear it step up more to the bully pulpit, and assure us that all will be well. The people have legitimate concerns. Those concerns need to be addressed in candor by our elected representatives. The sense that most North Dakotans have is that our state government has essentially adopted the role of industrial cheerleader for the extraction economy, that it is working harder to strew roses before the path of the oil industry than it is to protect the long-term interests of the people of North Dakota. That may be an unfair assessment, but it is very widely held. If, on the contrary, the leadership is going to come from the people—if they are going to demand that state government chasten the boom and restrain the kinds of destructive excesses that are otherwise inevitable—2012 is the year in which we are going to have to assert ourselves. It is almost, but not quite, too late. A year from now the cries of anguish from Watford City, Williston, Medora, Belfield, Killdeer, Stanley, Tioga, Ray, and Dickinson are going to be shrill.

The last thing I ever heard former North Dakota Governor Art Link say, a few days before his death on June 10, 2010, was, "That oil is not going anywhere. We don't need to be in any hurry to bring it to the surface. It gets more valuable every day. We can afford to take some time in developing the field, to protect the land and the people of North Dakota."

So here's my New Year's Resolution, and one I ask each of you to make. Everyone who cares about North Dakota needs to carve out the time in the first months of 2012 to drive around the oil patch for a day or two. Here's the route I recommend: Start in Minot. Drive west on US 2 to Stanley and Ross. Then detour up ND 40 to Tioga and work your way west to Ray. Drop down US 85 to Williston, where you will try to have lunch. Then drive south through Alexander to Watford City, and over to Mandaree by way of ND 23. When you reach "Lost Bridge" on ND 22, take a good look around, for late in 2011 the government of ND cheerfully authorized a large oil field right smack in that fabulous stretch of the Little Missouri badlands. Drive through Killdeer, once the best little cowboy town in North Dakota, and then finish your trek in front of the new Theodore Roosevelt statue on the grounds of the Stark County Courthouse.

As your self how Roosevelt would manage the boom.

2012 is the year we North Dakotans are going to decide who we intend to be in the twenty first century.

 

With Apologies for Intruding on Your Christmas Privacy

by Clay Jenkinson
December 25, 2011

Merry Christmas, everyone.

In the years that I have done this, I have never addressed you on Christmas Day. I'm a little uneasy about it. If there is one day of the year that belongs entirely to the individual privacy of family, this is it. If not this, when? What am I doing on this sacred day infiltrating the sanctity of your home? It bothered me as a child to turn on the television on Christmas (if it were a weekday), and see soap operas and shampoo commercials flickering on the screen, as if it were just another day. It seemed blasphemous somehow. In my preferred universe, Christmas is the one day of the year when we all suspend regular human economic activity. It is very nearly the darkest and shortest day of the year, when, as the poet John Donne puts it, "the whole world's sap is sunk." It is a day for hunkering around the fireplace and contemplating miracles.

This is the day when Christian families descend most deeply into their private family traditions, switch off their ready access to the outside world, and engage in some basic rituals that define them and distinguish them from all other families. Just ask the sons and daughters-in-law who are brought into these dynamics for the first time. It's bewildering. Lots of unspoken rules, the innocent violation of which usually causes the core family to close ranks and ritually marginalize the newcomer. When the new daughter-in-law makes the mistake of declaring that she would like to make the dressing (from her just-acquired Global Village Holiday Ideas for a New Century cookbook), eyebrows are raised all around, and guest room tears are pretty sure to follow sometime later in the day.

Families define themselves by their Christmas traditions. A little ruthlessly.

Do they open gifts on Christmas Eve or Christmas morning? Is it one gift on Christmas Eve and all the rest in the morning? Are Santa gifts to be torn up simultaneously or one at a time with appropriate box shaking and guessing? Is someone, some Clark Griswold, designated as the tree Santa to distribute the gifts equitably and in proper sequence, or is it just a free for all? Is the wrapping paper carefully disengaged from the boxes and preserved for another year, as my Grandma Rhoda insisted (and clucked if her frugal code was violated), or is it just torn to shreds in all the excitement? Do you take breaks to get a caramel roll and refill coffee cups, or is everyone expected to linger until the last present—the gift card from the coop—is opened and exclaimed over?

In my family, the urge to see what was under the Christmas tree was cruelly delayed by my grandfather's quaint and selfish notion that the cows should be milked before we opened gifts. Dick Straus was a grumpy German farmer with a permanently gruff voice, raspy morning beard, and gnarled farm accident fingers, who had lived through the depression and the dust bowl and who regarded us as spoiled town kids who had no idea of the value of things. (Which, of course, was and is true). We were pretty sure he did some extra chores down around the barn on Christmas mornings just to torture us. In full view from the kitchen windows, he'd pull a bale from the haystack as if he were disengaging the keystone from a house of cards, and feed flecks of hay to the feeder cattle in slow motion, as if they were hors d'oeuvres he'd ordered up as a holiday treat. When he did finally walk up to the house, he'd remove his laced boots so slowly that it seemed as if he were about to bathe the feet of the Christ. After that he washed up for about 200 hours before he sat down to oatmeal and homemade toast, at the start of which he folded his hands in silent grace (that was just pouring it on!). Then, and only then, we were allowed to stampede into the living room to see what Santa had left us.

His rural deliberateness drove my sister and me (and even my mother) to the edge of madness. And yet I would give all that I have to see him walk into my house this morning, smelling of cattle and hay and manure and fresh milk, wash up for about 200 hours, and denounce my frivolousness. Those gifts were so much richer for his studied delay.

On Christmas Eve we ate oysters, though nobody but my father and grandfather liked them, and they were never very good out here in the middle of nowhere. On Christmas morning we ate my Grandma Rhoda's apple cake, invariably from the yellow and cream oven-ready ceramic bowl. She always apologized for the apple cake (I'm not sure why), and fretted about the toothpicks that held it together as it baked. Now I make apple cake every year no matter what, even though I am not very good at it.

The word "Christmas" covers a lot of ground in the America of the twenty-first century. For some families, it is a profoundly religious day. The focus is on the birth of the savior in a manger in Palestine approximately 2011 years ago in the reign of King Herod. For others it is a day of unbridled materialism and merchandise, in which everyone spends the second part of the day deciding which gifts to return to stores on December 26th, and in what sequence. For most children it is the most magical day of the year, wherein some gift too extravagant to justify, but still passionately wished for (and yet not really expected) turns up under the tree, as if the whole universe sought to please this one hoping-against-hope child in faraway North Dakota.

My daughter told me on the long drive up from Kansas that the best Christmas gift she ever received was a ball she had asked for when she was two. My first thought was that if I had only known that I could have saved approximately one billion dollars over the years. But then I remembered what Jesus taught us about the superior integrity and wisdom of children.

Rosebud.

God bless us everyone.

 

On the Road to Christmas Somewhere Between Yadda and
the Meaning of Life

by Clay Jenkinson
December 18, 2011

One week before Christmas. I'm driving to Kansas to collect my daughter: 751 miles down through the northern Great Plains. When I have leisure I drive out to Dickinson and take ND 22 south to the South Dakota border, then thread my way up over the marvelous Slim Buttes (site of the battle of Slim Buttes, September 9-10, 1876), and then drift past Bear Butte, one of the most sacred places in North American, now abominably threatened by vast asphalt biker bars. But when I am in a hurry I just drive down U.S. 83 from Sterling to Pierre, SD, through Valentine, NE, to North Platte and then McCook, and finally over to extreme northwest Kansas. That's the quickest route.

I'm in a hurry this year. The most important person on earth is waiting at the other end of the road.

There is a special joy (and bittersweetness) to this year's Christmas drive. My daughter is 17, a senior in high school, so by this time next year she will be a nervous wreck preparing for her first university finals. Then she will put her bone-weary body on an airplane and fly home to see her mother and sister. If I see her at all, she will probably drive herself to Dakota (not the other way around), or suggest we meet at the Mall of America for a couple of days of . . . er, relaxation.

I love the drive down for one reason, and the drive back for another. There is nothing like a long solo road trip to restore the weary soul, with red licorice in abundance, diet Cokes on reserve in the back seat, a good audio book or two, a couple of cameras for rolling plains vistas or Carhenge or roadside welder art. On the way down I pause for half an hour at a little retro turnoff at the Dismal River in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, where I have stopped at least 50 times since 1981. There is a modest farmstead there, tucked in scattered pine trees a quarter mile back from the road. The lonely little array of Christmas lights they put up fill me with the ideal kind of melancholy and hope for America. It is like being parachuted back into the imaginative universe of Country Western music between 1950 and 1975, before it went awry. I always get out of my car in the moonlight night—sometimes just brisk and sometimes oh-my-God cold—and stretch for a few minutes and then pee into the Dismal River (hence the name), and say a kind of Laura Ingalls Wilder prayer for my family and for America.

On the way back to North Dakota my daughter sleeps for long periods and wakes up once an hour to say, invariably, "how much longer?" She listens to her iPod and texts her best friends and some louts. She reads dumb celebrity magazines and young adult books, and makes me go through drive through at odd times. We stop in Rapid City to do the great bulk of her Christmas shopping, where she calls her mother from in front of some store I have never heard of to ask if Aunt X would like a cardigan with a reindeer on it (no), and I am requested to turn away while she does something mysterious at the pointless gadget section of Eddie Bauer. It is impossible to get out of Rapid City without going to Olive Garden where her half-year's lust for serious pasta is satisfied. (She lives in a town the size of Mott, but without Mott's elegance, beauty, and cultural sophistication).

Ah, but for several surprisingly long stretches during that endless Great Plains drive, we talk about life in a way we could not talk if we were sitting across from each other at the kitchen table. She tells me of her friendships and her relations with her mother and sister, her hopes and dreams and career aspirations (they change rather dramatically between talks), her fears and insecurities and disappointments, and strangely intense sorrows about things that no parent can really fully fathom. We talk about God, and sin and redemption, and in some carefully modulated ways we talk about the meaning of life. And when she is done talking about this, whether it has been two minutes or seventy-two, she is emphatically done, and the parent's duty is to know that from this point forward any attempt to sustain that dialogue is blah blah and yadda yadda.

Along the way, a dozen times a day, I say, "look at that ridgeline. Isn't it beautiful, honey?" or "look at the incredible quality of light this afternoon," and she looks up for a nanosecond from some story about the Kardashians and says, "oh, yeah," in a kind of "if you say so" tone. My principal fear for my daughter is that she will never learn to see the Great Plains.

I'm not sure when you can officially announce childhood's end, but I believe it occurs between the first and second years of college. They tend to come home a little beaten up and palpably homesick during the first year. By the second year, they have become young adults who do you the favor of coming home to let you do their 42 loads of laundry, pay for the dry cleaning of their special clothes, put gas and repairs into their cars, cook their favorite meals for them and clean up after them, and provide mere bed and board while they stay out half the night with old friends, consume every luxury item in the freezer, Skype people you have never met, sleep in till noon, and announce, on New Year's Eve, in front of grandma and your closest friends, that they are now. . . Marxists, Ditto-Heads, eco-feminists, members of "Free Palestine Now," Greenpeace cannon fodder, or about to join a free love no makeup commune in Vermont where they also plan to manufacture organic goat soap. That's when you know they have finally grown up!

I cannot wait, actually. The world is all before her. Meanwhile, I'm drinking in this valedictory childhood Christmas with my heart on full alert.

 

There Is No Place Like Home (And No Dust Mites, Either)

by Clay Jenkinson
December 11, 2011

For the past five weeks I have been more or less continuously on the road. My mind is numb and my memory is a blur. All I can think of is my flight home today, and for the first time in a week I am beginning to wonder where I might possibly have stowed my car keys. They'll be the most important thing in the world about 11 p.m. tonight in the long term lot at Bismarck international. Word on the street is that winter has finally come to North Dakota in a serious way. Imagine a lost keys or jumper cable crisis around midnight, in a windswept parking lot, after more than a month away, without gloves or an adequate coat, when all I will want in the world is to sort the mail, wash my face, and tumble into my own bed.

It's the little things that break your spirit.

The words "my own bed" have a kind of magical ring to me. When you live on the road you become a kind of bed and pillow test volunteer, except that you pay them rather than the other way around and you don't get to reject anything—you just find a way to live with it. Generally speaking, hotel beds are much better than they used to be. Lots of hotels these days feature premium beds and signature coverlets. Holiday Inn Express (my favorite) provides a labeled sequence of Goldilocks pillows (soft, hard, big, little, cushiony, Gandhi-esque). Still, most hotel pillows are appallingly fat and unyielding, so that your head is levered up in a manner not recommended by the American Orthopedic Association, and sleep is something that happens to you (out of sheer exhaustion) rather than something you willingly swim into as one of the principal joys of life.

I'm basically Howard Hughes without the long fingernails, or Monk from the popular detective television series without the assistant Natalie. I'm a militant germ-a-phobe. If I were rich I'd have an attendant with me at all times with a packet of wipes. And I'd travel with my own sheets. As one who spends a significant portion of his life in airports (and enjoys them), I can tell you that about 40% of men do not wash their hands after using the bathroom (it pains me even to write these words, and makes me want to go scrub my hands). When it is the more serious men's room hygiene breach, I have to will myself not to rebuke the barbarian as he saunters out into the world with manly indifference to public health. I beat back my sense of outrage for two reasons: first, I don't like confrontation of any sort; second, I am afraid that the man in question will fly into a rage and put those unclean hands on me! Whenever I pull down the covers of my hotel room bed to slip in, I literally have to force myself not to think about all the humans (and of course some pets) who have been there before me, and what they have left behind. After reading an article about dust mites in pillows not long ago (billions, trillions), I had to fight the urge to throw all my home pillows away and start fresh.

If I really had to I could probably recreate the post-Halloween itinerary—I vaguely remember New Hampshire, Chicago, Palm Springs, Missoula, Fargo, Portland—but nothing is distinct in my mind. I've been over-stimulated to the point that I just want to get home, live in my bathrobe for a few days, and reduce life to its lowest terms: do laundry, putter about the house returning things to their proper places, listen to some quiet blues music, and light a few candles as I read through the evening. When you have been on the road for more than a fortnight, one really good meal blends imperceptibly into another, and you begin to become complacent about amenities you would gush over if you were on vacation with Rachael Ray.

Which, by the way, I would regard as "a fate worse than death."

People elsewhere often ask me why I choose to live in North Dakota with its low amenity pool and its famously bad climate. It always amuses me to think that there are actually people in the world who regard ready access to a Brazilian restaurant or a world class wine bar as essential to their happiness, people who could not contemplate living in so basic a place as the Great Plains. I'm not sure what the meaning of life is, but I know there is more of it in a hike along a windswept ridge alone (or with a mostly silent companion), or in an evening in a Dickens novel, than in the grand opening of a new Asian fusion restaurant. There are a number of things I wish North Dakota was, and isn't, but there are whole swaths of things I am glad we are not. What I love most about the culture (as opposed to the landscape) of North Dakota is its groundedness, its authenticity, the way it remains rooted to the basic rhythms and rituals of life.

For the past four days I have been in Seattle, one of my three or four favorite cities in America. I've been staying downtown, which is festooned with the wonderful Christmas decorations that only great cities can afford. After a broken Thanksgiving I am looking forward to Christmas this year, particularly since my daughter is joining my mother and me on the northern plains. Somewhere in my garage is a miniature two-foot Christmas tree that has been one of the principal symbols of the holiday bond (often on the road) between a divorced father and his beloved and innocent child. I mean to find it this weekend, (dust it!), and put the Lilliputian decorations on it in a slow, deliberate way.

Every time I have heard the song, "I'll be home for Christmas," in the last two weeks, I have nearly burst into tears. When my mother and daughter assemble in Bismarck soon, and we spread out the Scrabble board with cookies baking in the oven nearby, I am going to suppress my urge to give them a stern dust mites lecture.

I cannot wait to be home.

 

A Brief Wave of Montana Envy Unworthy of a Proud Dakotan

by Clay Jenkinson
December 4, 2011

Since I last met you in this space, I have traveled with my friend David Borlaug to Missoula and Great Falls, Montana, and back again, by car, a distance of 1965.4 miles, ostensibly on business. Our main purpose was to meet with a web master and historian in Missoula, but I also gave a talk at Traveler's Rest State Park (one of the premier Lewis and Clark interpretive sites, at the foot of the Bitterroot Mountains), and we did three book signings for my new study of the Character of Meriwether Lewis.

The strange thing is that, freshly returned from a hectic professional journey, my main memories are not of Lewis and Clark, but of the magic of Montana. I love North Dakota with all of my heart and soul, and I try to be one of its principal cheerleaders, but the minute I clear Wibaux in the westbound lane I find myself muttering, "If there were only one state, it would have to be Montana." I hate it that they look down on us (we got yet another lifetime dose), but no wonder they look down on us!

The temptation is always to drive west by way of I-90 both because it is essentially speed limitless and because the freeway follows the magnificent Yellowstone River Valley all the way to Livingston. But here's the key insight: you haven't really done Montana until you have driven all the way across either on US 12 or 2 (the High Line), or on Montana 200. You have to get off the Interstate to feel the endlessness of Montana and its emptiness and its astonishing loveliness.

Let me get a brief rant out of the way, so that I can get on to happier things. Why is it that Bozeman, Helena, Red Lodge, Kalispell, and Missoula all have more varied, vibrant, funky, and satisfying downtowns than Bismarck, Minot, Grand Forks, and even Fargo? We stayed one night at the historic Sacajawea Hotel in puny little Three Forks (population 1,728), and it is easily more beautiful and elegant than the best hotel in North Dakota, and the food (at Pompey's Grill) was truly exquisite. North Dakota towns of roughly the same population? Harvey, Mayville, Oakes, Harvey, and Watford City. I rest my case. When are we going to get serious about quality of life in this our beloved Dakota?

OK, I'm done.

The whole of Montana just takes your breath away, over and over again, and in the end you cannot believe that one state can be allowed to contain so much that is unbelievably beautiful. The worst unnamed throwaway mountain in Montana is higher and more majestic than the tallest pinnacle in North Dakota (White Butte, 3,506 feet), and when you drive along Montana 200 from Great Falls to Sidney you realize, as if for the first time, what big country really is. It feels as if the eastern plains of Montana could just eat North Dakota for breakfast. The state highway is old and not very comfortable, like a farm to market road that graduated too soon. It rolls up and over the countryside rather than bulldoze through the rises and hills. The shocks of our car were grinding and screeching with some regularity as we hurtled like a roller coaster virtually alone across an immense territory, where you feel the belittling vastness of the American West right down to your toes. Don't break down.

Here is a heresy worthy of Mel Gibson, whose Mad Max movies somehow come to mind as you barrel down the thin blacktop veering around giant rigs that are not street legal even in Montana: I like eastern Montana much more than glorious picture postcard western Montana, with its world class mountains and clear trout streams. When you drive 200 from Great Falls to the North Dakota border, you come to realize that for the handful of people who live in that godforsaken outback, Sidney is a kind of Mecca of amenities and human possibility. Sidney!

We stopped for lunch at Jordan, population 303, in the heart of Garfield County, population 1,206. Garfield County is approximately the size of the state of Connecticut, population 3,574,097. That makes Connecticut just under 3,000 times more densely populated than Garfield County, Montana. And it shows.

We ate at an elongated, three-part café right on the highway. Part one is a combination convenience store and café, order at the counter if you don't mind. The second part is a dining area with a large yellow pegboard photographic gallery dedicated to the memory of someone named Jake Fellman. The third part is a curio and gift shop, huge, but as sparsely populated with purchasable things as Garfield County is with people.

We ate our ham and cheese sandwiches (the day's special) a little solemnly, not wishing to call too much attention to ourselves. We were, after all, vile North Dakotans, driving "one of them foreign cars" and daring to sport Lewis and Clark license plates in a state that one of our Great Falls hosts called "the epicenter of the Lewis and Clark world." (To which I replied, perhaps rudely, "We did not know you folks could spell epicenter.") To show our solidarity with Outmigration America, we each bought something in the gift shop, in which merchandise that could have been contained in kiosk was splayed over a floor space the size of a miniature Kmart. David bought Huckleberry jam and I wound up buying one of those really lame and ever so slightly naughty wall signs of the "sexy women have messy kitchens" or "drink coffee, do stupid things faster" variety. The clerk was the most fetching woman in seven counties and she eyed us with proper disdain, particularly after I exclaimed that I did not know there was no sales tax in Montana.

We finally re-entered North Dakota at 5:30 p.m., delighted to be home, and found ourselves in a giant 18-wheeler traffic jam at the junction of US 85 and US 2 at Williston. We're about to become the richest state per capita. My hope is that we use a portion of that windfall to make North Dakota the greatest of Great Plains states, to upgrade our quality of life and yet keep our superior agrarian character.

And leave benighted Montana in the dust.

 

 

When Squanto Was Displaced by Squander

by Clay Jenkinson
November 27, 2011

At the risk of sounding really Scroogey, I want to explain why I object so much to Black Friday, particularly now that it has been rolled back to midnight on the day after Thanksgiving. Forget the shoving matches, the Let's Make a Deal screaming, the Solomon-like ripping of items that two helmet-haired housewives determine to possess at the same instant. Forget the incidents in which some diabetic consumer is trampled to death as the doors open to a Walmart somewhere. What I lament is the increasing encroachment on the most sacramental day of the year by soulless consumerism.

Thanksgiving is the best national holiday for many reasons. It's about the core mythology of America. It commemorates the discovery and peopling of this continent by Anglo-Europeans, one of the most remarkable events in the history of the world. It reminds us that things were at first not all rosy for the Pilgrims in Massachusetts (1621) or the Virginia colonists in Jamestown (1607), not to mention the lost colonists of Roanoke (1584). It acknowledges—what we tend to forget—that without the help of native people and native protein (corn, squash, potatoes, turkeys) the colonists might not have survived at all. Thanksgiving is our annual celebration of abundance (the single most important fact of our national experience, even more than freedom), our one moment per year when we collectively pause to remind ourselves that food is sacred and that our national experience has been uniquely blessed on a continent that represents the cornucopia of the earth.

As far as I'm concerned, the thing that makes Thanksgiving so wonderful is that it has not been overwhelmed (yet) by the tidal waves of materialism and consumerism. Imagine Christmas without merchandise or restrained in Laura Ingalls Wilder modesty and you see what we are now in danger of losing forever.

Before you write me off as a total loser and killjoy, let me admit that at least on two occasions I have dragged myself up at dawn here in Bismarck, a bloated post-Thanksgiving curmudgeon, to join my gleaming-eyed daughter and her conspiratorial grandmother in the Black Friday ritual, grumbling all the way to the mall and back, mainlining double-shot espressos at every available station. I cannot say that I have enjoyed this method of ruining a perfectly good mashed potato hangover, but I have enjoyed watching my mother and daughter enjoy it, and I have seen something in their eyes—some frightening sort of capitalist-consumer ecstasy—that has inspired me to keep my smart aleck comments mostly to myself.

I know plenty of people who participate in Black Friday in a light-hearted (rather than toaster-clutching or middle linebacker) sort of way, who join the annual party not as primary consumers, but to show support for and solidarity with their truly insane friends. I have good friends who have lined up in front of the doors of Target at first light in stiff winds and 7 below Fahrenheit with the stars still blinking overhead, not to stampede towards a questionable bargain on aisle nine, but to be part of a now-established national phenomenon, not so much to get their hands on a plasma TV as to get them on stories they can tell of consumer mania and fist fights over a cardigan sweater. Fair enough.

But here's what is so objectionable. We had one and only one national holiday that was pure and sacramental, one day per annum in which we all stepped back from our mad, hectic lives to express gratitude for life itself, and to celebrate the delicate but rich lifeline of our national abundance in the presence of those we love most. It was bad enough that before the last casserole dish was cleansed of the last ring of yams or green beans half the family was talking Black Friday strategy and debating, in the manner of the UN Security Council, whether it was wiser to begin at Kohls or Best Buy, and whether sleeping bags would really be necessary this year. That was back when things were relatively sane.

Now, as "a courtesy to shoppers," the forces of capitalism have pushed the trenches back six or seven hours to midnight itself, where they are hesitating temporarily, before (four or five years from now) assaulting America's one last pure day right smack in the middle of the feast. This adjustment of the starting shot for consumer rioting actually distorts the dynamic of Thanksgiving, and sends tendrils of stuff-lust and filthy lucre into the heart of what should be our great national moment of blessing. I am quite serious. Now the nutzoid conversations about which merch is most critical to finger in which order of blitzkrieg at which end of town are much more likely to replace statements of grace and gratitude at the dining room table, or reduce them to perfunctory status.

Thanksgiving is our national harvest festival. The idea is that after a year of careful planting and pruning, we Americans bring some of our accumulated abundance to the table, to celebrate God's providence and bountifulness, to remind ourselves of how blessed we are to live in so fruitful a land, to share not hoard, and to give ourselves a much-deserved respite from labor. In other words, Thanksgiving is about pausing to honor our abundance, not grasping and pawing for more. Thanksgiving is about magical simple things—cranberries and home-baked bread and sweet potatoes—not about new golf clubs and colliding shopping carts. It's about that which is central to the life force, about things that rise miraculously out of the good earth, not about industrial wizardry and stuff that distracts from the core values of our national experience. Consumer capitalism gets to dominate all the rest of the year, including Christmas itself. Just grant us our one festival of simple gratitude.

Thanksgiving is the finest moment of grace in the calendar year, one that all Americans, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Jew, shamanist, and pantheist, can share in mutual peace and tolerance. If there is grace at Kmart, I have not yet found that aisle.

If I were king (or just Theodore Roosevelt), I would keep Friday the day after Thanksgiving clear (for leftovers), and the first big shopping day of the Christmas season would begin at 9:30 a.m. Saturday, the day after the day after Thanksgiving.

I can hear my critics say, "It's a free country." Of course I agree. And look how we are spending it.

 

 

Drooling with Elvis and Meriwether Lewis in a Convenience Store

by Clay Jenkinson
November 20, 2011

Never write a book!

As I type these words, on the oak desk before me are several unopened copies of my just-off-the-press book, The Character of Meriwether Lewis: Explorer in the Wilderness. There it is in its gleaming blue dust jacket, a product rather than a project now, officially birthed into the world, and—for good or ill—out of my hands forever. Is it War and Peace? Or just Bing: The Cocaine Years? I have no idea—but I have purchased a truss.

Some people think the life of a writer is glamorous. There are, I admit, little flashes of glamour, at a book signing when someone sidles up with a big shy smile and blurts out some lovely unstudied compliment. When people write a letter to say that something you wrote touched their heart or changed their mind. On one of those few—very, very few—occasions when you "get into the zone" while writing and the words flow magically through your fingers onto the screen and you are able to say precisely what you wanted to say in language that has its own syntactical beauty or sound. When the phone rings and it is someone saying she cannot imagine doing the big event next September without you in it, since what you wrote about X was so insightful.

You have to live for those rare moments, because they are really all the reward you are ever going to get for months and years of lonely research and countless hours of staring at the blank screen, hacking out flabby sentences. So you want to be a writer?, Hemingway (or Red Smith or someone else) said, "All you have to do is sit in front of a typewriter eight hours a day and sweat a pint of blood through your temples." Like most writers, I don't like writing nearly as much as I like having written. Since yesterday I have been holding my Lewis book in my hands, turning it over, feeling its heft, goofily gazing at it with a kind of wonder, as if someone else who shares my name had written a big book about one of my favorite subjects. I have not really cracked the book open yet, for fear that there is a whopper on the opening page or that after the first paragraph it just reads "peas and carrots, peas and carrots" for the following 496 pages.

I wrote this book on Meriwether Lewis in about 15 months, though it had been percolating in my head for many years. When I finally sat down to "write the damn thing," if I may use the technical term of the industry, my goal was to produce approximately 2000 words a day. For the first two months of serious writing, I worked about six hours a day, partly at home and partly at my favorite coffee house. During that period I was able to maintain something like a regular life. I was preoccupied but still recognizably human. People were beginning to avoid me in public places, however, because if they asked about the Bakken Oil Field I flashed from Bakken to bacon and from oil to kidney suet and responded with a passage about the average daily caloric intake on the Lewis and Clark Expedition; if they said "How about those Twins!" I held forth about the only brothers of the expedition, Reuben and Joseph Field, not twins, but twin-ish in their capacity as hunters and runners…. People's eyes glazed over if I said the words, "Now Lewis…" and even my mother, a Lewis and Clark buff, stopped returning my calls.

Then things began to heat up.

For the next five weeks I worked about eleven hours a day. By the end of such days, when you finally stand up and stretch and blink yourself back into the world, you are essentially a human zucchini: brain-dead, numb, stammery, confused, and unfit for human contact, like the folks emerging from the cave in Plato's Republic. This is the phase in which at the end of the day your back is fused into the osteoporosis position, your breath is some fetid combination of stale coffee and a pole barn, and your body has that gluey, clammy sheen that you feel after flying from Sydney, Australia, to Bismarck, in one 40-hour sequence of human degradation and germ-pooling. After such days you are really only capable of sitting in front of the TV screen watching a Three's Company marathon. (By the way, Jack Tripper is apparently not really gay).

During the final month I literally sat in the same chair at my kitchen table (where all the light is), working seventeen-hour days, and occasionally twenty, on autopilot. By then there were approximately 250 books strewn about the kitchen, in crazy "National Geographic collector" stacks, dozens at a time held open by staplers, pliers, and other books--dog-eared, coffee-stained, Post-it marked, some backs split. The great Dr. Johnson (1709-1784) said, "A man will turn over half a library to make one book." By now I was working every waking minute, literally sleeping just enough to allow myself to go on, eating only to banish hunger and employing the rare "all Cheetos and Diet Coke" diet. At that phase, if I woke up at 2:38 a.m. I was up for the duration. I would sometimes wake up in the middle of the night with a verb in my mouth, or wake up in a cold sweat realizing that I had somehow wintered Lewis and Clark in Fort Sumter rather than Fort Mandan or made Meriwether Lewis President Reagan's aide de camp. Or wondering whether you spell it grizzly bear or bare or bier.

Or bore.

By now I didn't even like Lewis and Clark any more, and I no longer cared whether Lewis was killed on October 11, 1809, or committed suicide, or was spotted with Elvis in a convenience store in San Antonio in 1983. When I wasn't sitting in a corner in the yoga position facing the wall drooling or playing solitaire on three computers at once for seven hours straight, I found myself cursing Thomas Jefferson for ever consummating the Louisiana Purchase and wondering what sort of mother would name her son Meriwether.

And then, suddenly, it was over. I typed the last sentence, the only short sentence in the whole book: "I like mystery."

I took a very long hot bath. And started on my next book, which, I believe, is Einstein's definition of insanity.

 

 

On the Genius of Ken Burns: Speaking in Cinematic Tongue

by Clay Jenkinson
November 13, 2011

Last week I wrote about the exhilaration and excruciation of being a "talking head" in a Ken Burns film. This week I want to write about the greatness of Ken Burns.

You have seen some of his films. He's still best known for The Civil War (1990) and Baseball (1994) and Jazz (2001), but he has created at least twenty documentary films in the course of his fabulous career. At the moment he is working on half a dozen new films, including Jackie Robinson, Vietnam, Country Music, and Ernest Hemingway. Burns is America's greatest documentary filmmaker and one of its principal public historians. His films are characterized by disciplined lavishness—outstanding scripts by historian Geoffrey Ward, beautiful, often sensuous cinematography, such talking heads as Shelby Foote, George Will, Stephen Ambrose, and Doris Kearns Goodwin, and that slow, haunting, exploratory pan over still photographs that is now actually known as the "Ken Burns Effect." The release of a Ken Burns film literally propels millions of visitors to the National Parks or to Gettysburg or Monticello, or to remote locations on the Lewis and Clark Trail. It has reached the point where he should be required to file a "Cultural Impact Statement" before letting PBS air one of his films.

His main current project is The Roosevelts: An Intimate History. Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919), Eleanor Roosevelt (1884-1962), and Franklin Roosevelt (1882-1945) were related to each other. Eleanor was Theodore Roosevelt's niece, the daughter of his dissolute younger brother Elliott. Franklin was TR's fifth cousin.

The star of The Roosevelts is Geoffrey Ward. He's an FDR scholar and biographer, and he's been partnering with Burns so long that he is now able to create essentially flawless film narratives. His biography of FDR, A First-Class Temperament won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the coveted Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians. For the first time, he agreed to appear as a talking head in a Burns film and he effortlessly steals the show. It's as if everything Ward has done in his distinguished career has tended towards this moment, when, in his calm, measured, emotionally disciplined, and thoughtful commentary, he perfects the medium he has been experimenting with for twenty years. At times it's literally breathtaking.

On Thursday afternoon we watched episode six, which was about America's entry into World War II. Before we began, Burns explained to us that the superabundance of good material had prompted him to split the war episode into two, to add a kind of bonus episode to the series, and that the rough cut we were about to watch was a little less finished than the others. He was right. It was still amazing, but the energy that had been building up for the previous three days slackened a little. It's a little hard to explain, but when all the elements are there—narrative, film clips, still photographs, music, talking heads, the style and pace of the edit—but not yet quite resolved into an audio-visual symphony, a film doesn't "sing" or "zing" or capture the full imagination of the viewer. Don't get me wrong. If Burns released it just as it is, it would still be as good as anything anybody else could produce. But he's a perfectionist, or a perfectionist squared or cubed. Genius is said to be "an infinite capacity for taking pains." There is no doubt in my mind that Burns is a genius. It is possible for anyone with talent--a good spirit, discipline, and a good education--to get to the 90th or 95th percentile of any project—in basketball, in tennis, in a book or film, in a building project. It's the last 5% that kills you. You can spend as much time on the last 5% as you spent on the first 95, and it is those last tweaks that make all the difference: that last bit of research when you are exhausted and bored with your subject, the hour shooting free throws in the gym when the rest of the team has gone to the pub, the reworking of a paragraph that you know to be just fine as it is, but which you (and perhaps you alone) know does not communicate precisely what you wanted to say.

In this case, after we had all watched episode six and talked it through, Burns took charge. He had been largely silent all week, listening to his guests critique his film. Now, in about three minutes and at a Tasmanian pace, he explained how he was going to fix the episode. He'd move this clip to that spot, and hold the music for another second at that juncture, replace expert X's commentary with another piece by Jon Meacham, fix that awkward jump, and he knew, by the way, that that key still photograph was historically anachronistic. Etc. He spoke so fast and with a kind of medieval guild insider jargon that we (at least I) couldn't really follow all that he was saying. It was if he were speaking in cinematic tongue.

Then he smiled his vast Ken Burns smile. And we all instantly knew that if we saw the film a month from now, it would be deeper, richer, and more compelling by something like a magnitude of greater perfection.

Genius.

As I sat last Friday morning in the editing chamber watching the seventh and final episode of The Roosevelts: An Intimate History, the episode in which FDR and Eleanor die, tears streaming down my face, I had two thoughts. First, I believe The Roosevelts may well be Ken Burns' best film. Just think of what it would mean to achieve that status, to be better than the epic Civil War. Second, I believe that the release, in 2014, of The Roosevelts will be a watershed moment in cultural history. I believe that The Roosevelts will mark the moment when documentary film ceased to be regarded (and dismissed as) a "derivative, ancillary, and subordinate form," and took its place as equal in historiographical rigor and depth and discovery to the learned monograph, the academic treatise, the full length book treatment, and the expert biography.

Burns is that good. We are that fortunate.

 

A Week in the Editing Room with Ken Burns

by Clay Jenkinson
November 6, 2011

No sooner was the huge Theodore Roosevelt Symposium over at Dickinson State University than I flew the next morning at dawn for New Hampshire to spend a week working with America's greatest documentary film maker Ken Burns. You know Burns: the Civil War (1990), Baseball (1994), Thomas Jefferson (1997), Lewis and Clark (1997), Jazz (2001), World War II (2007), the National Parks (2009), and—just a few weeks ago—prohibition (2001).

And that's the short list.

I'm one of the advisers to Burns' forthcoming documentary on the Roosevelts: Theodore, Franklin, and Eleanor. I'm also one of the "talking heads" in the film, that is, one of the scholars he interviewed for the film.

Five scholars, as well as about twice that many key staff members, gathered in Walpole, New Hampshire (population 3,734), to watch a preliminary version of the seven-part, 14-hour documentary film. Our purpose is twofold. First, to make sure there are no historical errors of fact or interpretation in the film. Needless to say, finding the factual errors is easier than finding problems with the interpretation, which is inevitably subjective. Second, to advise Burns on such things as pace, choice of visuals, music, narrative structure, the voicing of such historical figures as TR, FDR, Eleanor, Alice, etc.

Walpole, New Hampshire, is a classical New England village, picturesque beyond belief, set in gently rolling wooded hills out on the Vermont border. The roads are narrow, and they dart off without warning in all sorts of strange directions up and over hills. You expect Robert Frost to appear at any time, walking with a stick along a forked trail in the deciduous forest. Most of the leaves are still on the trees this late into the autumn. We're staying at a funky bed and breakfast that is also a working organic New England farm. Yesterday the inn served us organic sour apple French toast for breakfast.

Burns wears blue jeans and a sweater. I don't think I have ever seen him wear anything else. He's a genial and at the same time intense man, 58 years old now, but still remarkably youthful and full of talk of future projects, as if he were just starting out. A genuine genius. The characteristic Ken Burns mop of dark hair is still there, a little Beatles-like, and there is a little weathering in his face at last, perhaps just from all of his phenomenal success. Since the colossal Civil War documentary appeared in 1990, Burns has been the darling of public broadcasting, the premier documentarian in the United States, and the humanities schoolmaster to America. He has won seven Emmy Awards, and virtually every other prize that it is possible to collect for his amazing work. When his films are released, tens of millions of Americans stop what they are doing to watch for as many nights as it takes him to treat the subject.

I've had the great good fortune to appear in two previous Burns films—Thomas Jefferson and the National Parks: America's Best Idea—and, if my interview doesn't wind up on the cutting room floor, I will make a number of appearances in the story of the Roosevelts. It's almost unbearable to sit in the editing room watching the film unfold, surrounded by Burns' gifted staff of editors and four other historians, all with infinitely (and I mean infinitely) more impressive resumes than mine, and hear my voice come up as I comment, on film, about some aspect of Theodore Roosevelt's life, character, or achievement. Everyone is furiously taking notes, of course, while I blush and peep up at the big screen, unable to look away, like watching a train wreck, praying that I am not saying something so stupid, so inarticulate, so commonplace, or so historically misguided that everyone in the room will just shake their heads or snort their derision. My interview was more than a year ago. Naturally I have forgotten everything I said, and, as I watch the film's interpretive rhythm now in real time, I see and hear every flaw in my commentary. While the others sit back and enjoy the lush beauty of Burns' characteristic documentary style, I am a tissue of neurosis and severe self-criticism: "why did I wear that mustard colored shirt?" "I should have fasted for three weeks before the interview," "is that a piece of toast on my chin?" "well, of course TR was a conservationist—you think that is somehow an insight, you moron?" and "I sure hope Burns doesn't look up that quotation, because I can see that I used rarely when I should have said seldom."

By the end of each day of watching the rough cut of the film, I take Burns aside and beg him to re-interview me. "Just give me one more chance to make this right, Ken. I'll work out every day for six months. I'll memorize TR's Autobiography and Winning of the West. I'll take voice lessons. I'll go to counseling about my nervous tics and habits. I'll hire a fashion consultant. I'll grow bangs. I'll deed over my Jeep to you. Oh please, just give me one more chance to fix this. At the very least, I'll give you $10,000 to remove that thing I said about TR's big toe."

Alas. There I am forever, locked into a Ken Burns documentary film, all my many imperfections radiating at America (and my daughter), forever, or for as long as Burns' films continue to be watched by a nation grateful for his masterful achievement.

When my turn comes up for comments after we have watched a two-hour episode of the film, I find myself in the horrible position of simultaneously wanting to urge Burns to expunge every single comment I have made in order to improve the film, and wanting to keep my mouth shut so that I don't self-inflict myself out of the film.

You may think that I am exaggerating for comic effect, but I am describing precisely what I think and feel as I sit there in the editing room. It's even worse when my first viewing is in my own living room, after the film has been "locked" and released. The spectrum of my self-criticism runs from "I cannot believe I said something that completely stupid" at one end to "That wasn't half bad if I had just been more articulate" at the other.

The Roosevelt film will be released in 2014, and it will be wonderful, even if I make the cut.

 

A Bronze Statue Worthy of the North Dakota Theodore Roosevelt

by Clay Jenkinson
October 30, 2011

At 10:15 a.m. MDT last Wednesday in Dickinson, I was on hand to watch the installation of a new statue of Theodore Roosevelt on the Stark County Court House lawn. It was one of the proudest moments of my entire life.

Roosevelt delivered what I consider his first great national speech--at the first-ever Independence Day celebration in Dickinson in July 1886. It was a hot, exceedingly windy day. In the morning, Roosevelt traveled from Medora to Dickinson on a freight train. In the evening, he returned to Medora on a passenger train. One of his traveling companions that day was the editor of the Bad Lands Cow Boy A.T. Packard. After listening to TR talk about civic responsibility and America's great promise all the way over and all the way back, and after listening to TR's Fourth of July oration, Packard predicted that Roosevelt, who was just 27 years old, would one day become the President of the United States. To that, TR barked, "If your prophecy comes true, I will do my part to make a good one." Indeed.

The bronze statue was sculpted for Dickinson State University's Theodore Roosevelt Center by Tom Bollinger of Tempe, Arizona. He's a 1978 graduate of DSU. His marvelous creation is a slightly larger-than-life statue of TR, standing on a soapbox (literally), holding his prepared speech in his left hand. He's wearing cowboy boots, chaps, and a fringed buckskin shirt. On the soapbox in front of him are his holster and pistol, his hat, and a book, on which he has carefully laid his spectacles.

So far as I know, Dickinson now possesses North Dakota's only pedestrian (standing) statue of Theodore Roosevelt, who lived, ranched, and hunted among us between 1883 and 1887. Minot and Mandan both have equestrian statues (one large, one small) of "Theodore Roosevelt as a Rough Rider," sculpted by Alexander Phimister Proctor back in 1922. I am pretty sure the new Dickinson statue is the only one in America that depicts Roosevelt during his Dakota Territory badlands years.

Thomas Jefferson said it was worth a trip across the Atlantic to see Virginia's Natural Bridge. I can assure you it is worth a drive to Dickinson to see this amazing statue. Among other things, it's going to help to re-establish Dickinson as an important Roosevelt historic site. It was there that TR brought the three boat thieves to justice in April 1886, at the conclusion of one of his greatest, most strenuous, and most exhausting adventures. His feet were seriously blistered in the course of the two-week ordeal, towards the end of which he had marched the desperadoes overland through gumbo from the Diamond C Ranch at the base of the Killdeer Mountains to the jail in Dickinson. On the dirt streets of Dickinson the footsore Roosevelt encountered the region's only physician, Dr. Victor Hugo Stickney. Dr. Stickney patched up TR's feet, and like everyone else fell in love with the intense, boyish, erudite, and idealistic political reformer. TR, said Stickney, was covered in mud, yet he seemed "all teeth and eyes." Later that spring, Stickney invited TR to give the Fourth of July oration in Dickinson.

In that speech, Roosevelt, who desperately wanted to establish himself as an "authentic cow boy and rancher," said, "I am myself at heart as much a westerner as an easterner; I am proud indeed to be considered one of yourselves." He also uttered now-famous words: "Like all Americans, I like big things; big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat fields, railroads – and herds of cattle too; big factories, steamboats and everything else."

When we started the project a year ago, we knew that TR gave that speech in Dickinson, but we were not quite sure where. Fortunately, retired DSU professor Carl Larson, a born archivist, found an old newspaper story that reported that the speech was delivered on what is now the Stark County Court House lawn. The city of Dickinson and the Stark County Commission both generously provided some of the funding for the project, and the county commissioners agreed to site the statue on a new plaza in front of the 1936 Art Deco courthouse, one of the most beautiful in North Dakota.

Our goal was to depict him not as the over-sized, toothy, super-confident Roosevelt of Mount Rushmore (the TR of American legend), but as a young, slender man, still finding his adult character and style, not yet fully sure of himself, still emerging from a sickly childhood, and not yet fully recovered from the simultaneous death of his wife and mother on Valentine's Day 1884. I wanted Tom Bollinger to depict him not delivering the Fourth of July speech, but about to deliver the speech, gesturing tentatively, as if in silent rehearsal, looking out over the vastness of the Great Plains, a little nervous—and yet resolute, eager, possessed of confidence in America's capacity to lead the world, but understanding that we needed a national spirit to match the bigness and the magnificence of the West.

The result is better than any of us imagined. Bollinger's Roosevelt is not yet an American legend, but a remarkable young man on his way towards national and international greatness. We asked Tom to depict TR in what he liked to call his "authentic buckskin shirt," even though he probably wore something a little more formal to the celebration. TR believed that the "fringed tunic" was the single most characteristic American garment, the attire of his heroes Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and George Rogers Clark. In June 1884 he had commissioned a Mrs. Maddox near Amidon (on the Keogh Trail) to sew him such a shirt, and he made sure he was photographed in it in a New York studio to serve as the frontispiece of his first book about his Dakota Territory adventures.

The Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State is digitizing all the papers of the 26th President of the United States. But the larger goal is to deepen everyone's understanding of one of the most remarkable men of American history, to increase everyone's awareness of TR's footprint in North Dakota and to explore Roosevelt's powerful mind and character, particularly the transformation he experienced in the magical arena of the North Dakota badlands.

 

 

Backward or Forward?

A Tale of Two Revolutionaries

by Clay Jenkinson
October 23, 2011

2011 will be remembered as the year in which two of the most powerful and influential men in the world died. Like bookends. Together they represent the paradox of civilization, and the crossroads we find ourselves in as the 21st century struggles to establish its definition. On May 2, 2011, Saudi-born terrorist Osama bin Laden died at a fortress-like family compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he had been leading a furtive but toxic life for many years. He was 54 years old. Vocation: mass murderer.

On October 5, 2011, 8,072 miles away (as Globefeed.com just instantly informed me), Steve Jobs died quietly at his home in Palo Alto, California. He was 56. He died of pancreatic cancer. Vocation: inventor. Bin Laden was shot to death on May 2 by an elite team of Navy Seals. He was so effective as an impresario of terror and death that the civilized world had to extinguish him in order to go on. That same civilized world would have done anything in its power to keep Jobs alive.

These two men—baby boomers both--each affected and transformed the lives of billions of people across the planet. Think of that. Most of us, no matter how hard we try, affect the lives of no more than a handful of people in our immediate vicinity, and when we die we are simply swallowed up into the great maw of ephemeral statistics.

If the world can be divided into the Life Affirming and the Life Denying, bin Laden and Jobs represent the cartoon icons that sit on your shoulders, where two roads diverge in a yellow wood, pointing down the alternative paths that stretch out before us. They are both simple dressers. One wears an Afghan peasant's turban, the other a black turtleneck and blue jeans. The accoutrement of one is an AK-47, whose only function is mayhem, and of the other a slender aluminum device that integrates every aspect of your mental life and creates an invisible but nonetheless real lifeline between people in Cancun and Cairo, Portland and Peshawar. Bin Laden was a nihilist, who used his considerable talents to try to wall off the Islamic world from globalization, which he regarded as an American imperial plot to subjugate everyone else, especially Muslims. Jobs used his gifts to enable individuals to be more organized, well-informed, creative, communicative, cultured, and connected than at any previous moment in human history.

Bin Laden's road leads to the 7th century, Jobs' to the 21st, or perhaps "to infinity and beyond," as Buzz Lightyear puts it. Bin Laden's vision was so profoundly backward looking that it doesn't even register with the American consciousness. His imagination stalled out sometime around the Crusades (1096-1192) or perhaps at the Gates of Vienna (1683). His "vision" of life would climax the world's economy in goat-herding and poppy production, cast a patriarchal veil over 51% of the world's people, reduce education to a handful of anti-American slogans, bomb-making techniques, and the memorization of a self-contradictory book published in 654 A.D.

Jobs' vision was of a planet where seven billion people were provided access to an electronic toolkit (increasingly sophisticated, miniaturized, and affordable) through which they would be able to cross-pollinate and co-create in a way that would make the Renaissance look like a Renaissance fair and Gutenberg look like a cuneiform graffiti artist.

Bin Laden's "works" include the U.S. Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania on August 7, 1998; the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen on October 12, 2000; and of course the spectacular September 11, 2011, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Altogether bin Laden managed to kill approximately 3000 Americans, but his "greatest achievement" was to cause tens of billions of dollars of immediate damage in Washington, DC, and New York, and to "cost" the world's economies well several trillion dollars of lost or misplaced productivity. Almost single handedly bin Laden touched off an era of anxiety, rage, revenge, reaction, uncertainty, and illiberalism. Among other things, he will be remembered as the man who turned America into a security state and convinced us to damage our Constitutional values and our world standing by way of preemptive war, Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, and "enhanced interrogation techniques."

Of course bin Laden did not work alone. But if his movement had to be represented by just one man, he would be it.

Steve Jobs' "works" include Apple computers (including the iMAC that saved the company in 1998); Pixar Studios (1986), which produced Toy Story and revolutionized the art of animation; the iPod (201), which revolutionized the way we listen to music; the iPhone (2007), which revolutionized the very concept of telephony; and of course the iPad (2010), which allows you to compose a symphony, edit a documentary film, chart the stars, plan a road trip, adjust your sprinkler system in Bismarck while you fly over Brazil, or have a live video conversation with your daughter while you are in a farmhouse near Mott and she is at a café in Vatican Square. All this on an elegant little free-floating tablet about the size and width of your high school graduation photo.

Toy Story alone has brought joy to millions, death to none.

Of course Steve Jobs did not work alone. Back in the 1970s he and his business partner Steve Wozniak had a wild idea. They wanted to create a personal computer for people who did not have any programming skills or technical acumen—for people like you and me. This brought forth the Apple I in 1976, and the Apple II in 1977. (Enter, stage right, the marketing genius Bill Gates). We take all this for granted today, but the idea that a single family could actually own its own computer and that that device could run something called software (now, apps) that wasn't just brainiac number crunching but would actually improve and enliven our daily lives, was a futuristic, even preposterous notion when they decided to give it a whirl.

For ten years we have let bin Laden and what he represents divert the path of our remarkable, innovative, and life-affirming national journey. The life and death of Steve Jobs should remind us who we really are.

 

 

One Last Stolen Perfect Day in the Dakota Badlands

by Clay Jenkinson
Ocotber 16, 2011

For no really compelling reason I drove out to the Elkhorn Ranch mid-week, the day before I wrote these words. My intention was to write about something completely different—about the legacy of Steve Jobs—but my experience there, on an absolutely stunning Indian summer afternoon, was so purely satisfying that I want to write about it now, before the exquisiteness fades into the blandness of memory. A week from now I will still know what I meant to say about Steve Jobs, but I won't any longer be able to find words to express an October interlude at the Elkhorn in the heart of the heart of the North Dakota badlands.

No matter how many times you have been to the Elkhorn Ranch, 35 miles north of Medora, it's possible to get a little lost. I wound up making two wrong turns (briefly) even with the detailed Little Missouri Grasslands Map spread out on the seat next to me. That's part of the joy of the experience. The Elkhorn Ranch is remote. It was remote in 1884, when Theodore Roosevelt chose it and named it and made it his Dakota Territory ranch headquarters. I hope it will always be remote, that it will never be possible to reach the Elkhorn by paved road. It's essential that whoever makes this pilgrimage will think, "OK, I get it. You have to earn this experience, you cannot just pop off the highway to read the 200-word historical sign and snap a photograph of yourself with teeth bared like Teddy." In 2011 you can only get to the Elkhorn by threading around on gravel roads that never quite match the rational layout on the grasslands map. The awareness that you may get lost is essential to experiencing the American West.

When you get to the Elkhorn Ranch Site parking lot, you have to pass through a pedestrian gate (recently "improved" in a silly and upsetting way) and then walk about a mile on a well-marked trail to TR's homestead. Roosevelt lived in the last period of human history that was not dominated by the internal combustion engine. He could only get to the Elkhorn on foot or horseback (or rowboat for about ten days per year, if he timed it just right). It's really important that you cannot visit the shrine of the human embodiment of the strenuous life and wise conservation without using your legs.

Once I got to the cabin site I quickly took the still photographs and the video that had justified the mid-week journey, so that I could spend a couple of hours just drinking in one of the handful of best places in North Dakota without any industrial clutter. I ate a little lunch: baguette, two types of cheese, a glass of Merlot, and a square of superb chocolate.

Then for about half an hour I just sat in complete stillness under the ancient cottonwoods that stand directly west of TR's cabin site. The cabin is long gone. Only a handful of foundation stones remain to show visitors the outline of what was once a 30x60 foot ranch house. The old cottonwoods rise above what was back then the bank of the Little Missouri River. A few of them may be as old as Roosevelt's sojourn in Dakota.

This year's cottonwood leaves are not as profuse, as brilliantly yellow-golden, or as "radioactive" as they sometimes are. There's a certain half-heartedness to them this time around, though they are still magnificent. When fall cottonwoods are at their best their leaves are like wafer-thin amulets of the sun itself, storing solar intensity and the Lifeforce in an organic memory device the size of an irregular drink coaster, thousands to every tree, hundreds of thousands of cottonwood trees lacing and gracing the banks of the Little Missouri River all the way from Devils Tower to Twin Buttes, ND, and back again. If you stand up on the overlook of Wind Canyon in one of those 23-carat autumns, it makes your knees buckle, the beauty is so profound and heartbreaking.

I listened to the leaves dance in the intermittent breeze as long as I could. It was as perfect a moment as there will ever be in my life: the sky, the muted colors, the temperature, the breeze, the ancient shattered trees, the heritage of the place, the fierce life and endless legacy of TR, and of course the Little Missouri River running through it with its usual unhurried serenity.

Part of the joy was a kind of sweet melancholy in knowing that two months from now the northern plains will be locked in what Roosevelt called "iron desolation," and it will be much more difficult, and possibly impossible, to get to the Elkhorn Ranch. We've had a magical fall in North Dakota. Almost every day starts blowsy and chilly and gray and then somehow by early afternoon is metamorphosed into perfection—a wan but brassy sun illuminating the stubble fields and the grasslands with gentle yellowish light, just enough breeze to stir the soul, just enough to rasp and crackle the dry grasses, and waft a few dead leaves from one pinpoint in the vastness of the Great Plains to another pinpoint ten yards away. Above, that blue blue blue blue sky with high wispy autumn clouds, some of them thickening into a gray and charcoal half-front moving in from the west. The feeling of being out in the most beautiful place on earth in shirtsleeves this deep into October, but living on borrowed time, a bonus day, a tender unearned Great Plains day to store up in one's memory for the long string of severe ones lining up somewhere over the horizon, like the line of impatient taxis at a New York airport. One morning soon we will wake up, stretch, look out the window, and say, "It's here now."

Oh, one more thing. All the way up and all the way back, more than a dozen giant oil trucks hogged the gravel trail and thundered a very different ode in TR's beloved badlands: the unquestioned industrial anthem of the twenty first century in North Dakota.

 

 

Surfing Alone at Home in Post-Community America

by Clay Jenkinson
Ocotber 9, 2011

You've heard about books like Bowling Alone and Habits of the Heart that attempt to explain the changing social dynamics of American life. Today I launch my own thesis, which I hope will make me rich and famous and get me on all the talk shows. I call it the HD Widescreen Thesis. It was precipitated by an article I read in the Tribune reporting that the Bill Cosby performance scheduled for the Civic Center on November 4 has been canceled due to "soft ticket sales." The Amy Grant concert last Wednesday filled only 65% of the seats available in the Civic Center (Amy Grant!). Her concert in Rapid City on October 4th was even less well attended

What's going on?

It cannot be the national recession, not out here on the oil slick, where we are quickly becoming the richest state per capita. There may still be a little flood fallout in the souls of North Dakotans, but that seems to be evaporating as people reclaim their homes and we experience a perfect autumn. It certainly cannot be quality of the entertainers. Amy Grant and Bill Cosby, beloved icons of American popular culture, are perfect heartland choices. They should sell out overnight.

Here's my thesis. In the last half dozen years, America has undergone a quiet technological and cultural revolution that appears to be changing our habits in some fundamental ways. High definition television finally came to America (ca. 2007), decades after Europe, just at the time that the widescreen television became inexpensive enough for most families to purchase. I have a just-ok widescreen TV at my home, but when I travel to fine hotels (or even Super 8s now) I often find myself absolutely mesmerized by the visual clarity and the "home theater" feel of the plasma television. It doesn't really matter what I'm watching. A good HD widescreen TV is to regular television what television is to radio—it's a difference not of degree but of kind. Watching HD television on a big screen is like a drug experience. It sucks your whole soul right into the plasma, and you find yourself helplessly fixating on the contours of a human face or for that matter a box of detergent that fills the wall before you with a clarity and sensuality that is really more like magic than television as we have experienced it for most of our lives. Television directors have begun to add color for color's sake to their programming, particularly a kind of soul-warming blue that effortlessly lulls you into Lotus Land as you watch NCIS or Royal Pains. When my widescreen TV was installed, the technician tuned it to some Swedish basketball network, about which I didn't know or care, even slightly, and after watching it for thirty seconds I said, "I will never again leave this chair."

It's that good. Add to this that television has finally come of age and some of the programming is really superb, well-written, and culturally bold, and you can kiss the civic centers goodbye. After a long day of work and errands and squiring the kids around to this and that activity, why get in the car and drive to a big box arena where you plunk down $75 to be seated in Row 99L, and where you will almost certainly wind up watching Bill Cosby on the bad arena TV rather than squint at his antlike form as he moves across the stage? Chances are he's giving the same monologue on channel 784 anyway or—if he isn't—you can get his monologue on Netflix for instant streaming into your home theater. Netflix alone offers more than 100,000 titles (so far) and on February 25, 2007, the corporation announced its billionth DVD delivery. One billion, and that was four years ago. If I want to see Citizen Kane or the Beatles's film A Hard Day's Night, I can now do it instantaneously and for much less than it costs to go see a movie (of someone else's choosing) at a metroplex. Remember when the VHS recorder was regarded as a techo-miracle? Today, with a Blu Ray player and a plasma screen, you can watch whatever you want at home in godlike lucidity (no parking issues, no whipping wind, no sticky floor in the arena) while working yourself into a sedentary and diabetic coma with a bag of Cheetos and a sugary soda. It's the new American dream.

It will soon be possible to view anything that has ever been produced in the privacy of your own home, where you will have a home theater that is better in every possible way than anything you could possibly drive to. And at home you can pause the program (movie, TV show, lecture, etc.) while you make movie theater popcorn for pennies on the metroplex dollar. Movies long gone, movies that would never come to Bismarck, foreign films, independent films, documentaries by the thousands, the whole "works" of Ken Burns or Federico Fellini, all available to you with technology so advanced that it is as if a chip and projector have been installed in your brain.

This is bad news for public events. Lectures, symposiums, lecture series, live theater, and even pop concerts are finding it harder and harder to attract audiences. The events I host or moderate are increasingly offering live streaming so that people can stay home and "participate" via their laptops or iPads. It's a brave new world.

When I was growing up we had a bulky console television set with two or three channels and you actually had to get up and go to the set to change the channel. The picture quality was so poor that a movie theater was an infinitely better option. Today the HD Widescreen Revolution makes any movie theater seem clunky and low-res. That's why Hollywood is plunging into 3-D in an effort to provide the public something that is not already better served at home.

Mark my words. The HD Widescreen Revolution is going to change the world as much as the automobile did.

 

 

Processing the Idea of North Dakota with Gratitude and Joy

by Clay Jenkinson
Ocotber 2, 2011

The Bismarck Tribune has changed my life. In three important ways. I am filled with gratitude.

This is my sixth anniversary column.

When I moved back to North Dakota in 2005, Ken Rogers offered me the chance to write a weekly newspaper column. This is my 313th column. That's approximately 358,000 words. Almost all of them are about North Dakota.

My basic philosophy is pretty simple. I love North Dakota with all my heart. If I didn't love it I wouldn't live here. My goal is to sing the song of North Dakota—to celebrate the subtle beauty of the landscape, to try to describe the sound of the breeze in the cottonwoods, the magnificence of the meadowlark, the first mumble of the distant thunderstorm, the antelopes prancing the badlands. I seek to celebrate the many virtues of rural life, including small towns, harvest festivals, "neighboring," gardening, and canning, and to be a cheerleader and champion for this place and its people. I love North Dakota even when it is being grimly inhospitable—maybe especially then.

I believe we live in a very, very special place—what I like to call a windswept vast and open plain—and that if you let it get under your skin, you come to realize it is just about the most beautiful place on earth, in part because it is so sparsely inhabited, in part because it is so raw and close to the bone of life, and in part because it is so improbable that people would want to live here when they could live in X instead. North Dakota is, I believe, an acquired taste, even for those of us who grew up here, and my goal is to encourage my fellow North Dakotans to fall in love with this place in a new way, more deeply, with a greater sense of its strange and glorious uniqueness.

So how has the Tribune changed my life?

First, it has taught me to meet deadlines. I like to say I have never missed a deadline in six years. That is not strictly speaking true. On five occasions, I believe, I have gotten my column to Ken an hour late or—in one instance--up to five hours late. But I have always warned him in advance. I have filed all but one of my columns electronically. Indeed, I could not do this thing if it were not for email. I have filed columns from Cairo and from the Panama Canal, from steerage on a Boing 767 at 35,000 feet over Tennessee, and from the parking lots of innumerable Super 8 motels up and down the Great Plains, where I have pulled in at a screech to poach "guest" Internet services just before deadline.

When I started six years ago, Ken made it clear that my noon Wednesday deadline was not a target to be aimed at, but an iron commitment to be honored. He did not say it, but I sensed there was an "or else" in there somewhere. I've had trouble meeting writing deadlines all of my life. Most writers do. If there were no deadlines, there would probably be no newspapers and few books. Generally speaking, I'm with the author Douglas Adams (A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." But from the beginning I determined to meet my deadlines, come hell or high water, and I have done so. That alone is a source of pride for me. Among other things, the discipline imposed by this column has enabled me to write three books since I moved home.

Second, this column has brought many wonderful people into my life. I am not going to list them here, of course, but you know who you are. Many of my best friends are people are people I have met on the inky arena where these words are printed. Among the first of them was Melanie Carvell (the famous triathlete) who wrote to rebuke me (gently) for writing a satire on cheerleading. She has since become one of the best friends I have ever known, and she is quick to point out, as she drags me along the walking trail, that my daughter did become a high school cheerleader after all. Thanks to this column I have received a marriage proposal from a 93-year-old woman who wrote, "If this appeals to you, hurry!" But my favorite response of all was from the woman who wrote, "Every Sunday I open the Tribune to find your columns, and I sigh, because they are so damn long. But I always read them anyway and I want you to know I am never sorry."

Third, this column has given me a forum to process my return to North Dakota and, I hope, to help my readers process the changes that are coming to our beloved homeland. When I moved home six years ago we were still wringing our hands about the outmigration of our young people and rural decline. Remember the furor that was touched off by that awful National Geographic article (June 2008) entitled the "Emptied Prairie"? Now, suddenly, the world has been turned upside down and we are doing our best to absorb (and benefit wisely from) a tsunami of "development," in-migration, and the rapid industrialization and transformation of our quiet landscape and formerly sleepy villages. Given the magnitude of the energy boom and how profoundly it is going to change this place and its social structure, I could write about the Oil Rush every week. Perhaps should. I choose not to do so, however, partly because I want to celebrate North Dakota in a larger way, not sound the alarm, partly because the mavens of wealth-seeking are so touchy about the merest whisper of caution. I'm a harmony obsessive.

I want to thank you for reading what I write. Truly, you have no idea how much it means to me. This column, for which I believe I am paid in widow's mites or Yugoslavian dinars, is without question the most satisfying work of my entire career.

And I'm just getting started.

 

Relishing the Autumn with a Wary Eye on the Skies

by Clay Jenkinson
September 25, 2011

When I finish writing these words, about ninety minutes from now, I am going to go hiking in Theodore Roosevelt National Park with one of its principal admirers. I'm sitting out on the deck of the Rough Riders Hotel in Medora in shirtsleeves trying not to shiver. I'd be more comfortable inside, in the big TR-sized chairs next to the fireplace, but I'm trying to squeeze every moment, every squib, out of the "summer of 2011," and I refuse to move inside. Yesterday I drove from Bismarck to Dickinson without using the heater in my car, even though my fingers were numb on the steering wheel. Nor have I turned on the heat in my house yet in spite of the fact that I could actually see my breath the other morning when I inserted sourdough bread into my toaster. I warmed my hands over the toaster chutes, like a character in a Jack London story.

My scientific friends tell me that these gestures of defiance are unlikely to change the weather in my favor, but what do they know? They're the ones who subscribe to the theory of evolution. They're the ones who have been warning us about global climate change.

As I repeat here two or three times a year, I love North Dakota in all of its moods. I love it when it is a scene straight out of a ND Horizons calendar (all crocus and round bale), and I love it when it when the winds are blasting us into oblivion and making it literally difficult to stand up straight. I love North Dakota on those nurturing picture postcard mornings amid prairie flowers and azure skies, but equally when it is so appallingly cold on the northern plains that you have to beat your hands on your pants to keep them from freezing and falling off. I love North Dakota on the days when it is hospitable, of course, but I have a much greater love of this stark improbable place when it feels a little heroic to stake out a claim here at all. I prefer O.E. Rolvaag's Per Hansa to Michael Landon as Pa Wilder. Whether the long, punishing winters really keep the riff raff out, as the icky cliché has it, is a proposition that will be tested in the decade ahead, I believe.

We have four seasons here, though of radically unequal measure. Like everyone else we observe the standard demarcations at the solstices and the equinoxes, but no North Dakotan would actually shape his or her life according to such weak abstractions (in 2011, March 20, June 21, September 23, and December 22). I may be a little pessimistic, but I would place the North Dakota markers a little differently. I'd put the goal posts of winter at October 31 and April 15. That's 167 days or 46% of the year. My spring runs from April 15 until June 25. That's 71 days, or 19% of the calendar year. Summer in North Dakota runs from June 25 until September 5: 72 days, 20%. Thus autumn runs from September 5 to October 31: 56 days, 15%.

You may have a different sense of where the goal posts belong. If so, I would like to see your figures. My logic is pretty simple. You cannot really count on genuine summer weather in North Dakota until almost the Fourth of July. A June wedding is almost certainly going to be moved indoors. A family reunion in June is likely to feature a gale force picnic with the tablecloths weighted down with bricks. June is usually a blowsy, chilly, cloudy, and drizzly month in North Dakota, with lush green grass along the highways that is whipped into waves by the strong late spring winds. Memorial Day and Labor Day are typically "ruined plans" weekends in North Dakota. Winter can start at the end of September and it can continue well into May, but typically the first snow falls half-heartedly around October 15. That moment sends dread and melancholy through the North Dakota population, but it is almost always followed by a magnificent period of Indian summer, in which it nearly freezes at night and gets up to 60 or even 70 by day. Summer, fall, and winter follow the pattern I have laid out pretty reliably in North Dakota, but spring is the wild card season. Spring in North Dakota is like the curriculum of a U.S. History class. The professor says you are going to survey American history from Plymouth Rock to Vietnam, but, as things turn out, you seldom ever get past World War II. Very few North Dakota springs behave as they should. Winter and summer are always nipping away at the margins. There are many years in which we get about a twenty-day spring, when the transformation is so sudden that it feels like winter one day and summer the next.

I love North Dakota in good times and bad times, in sickness and in health, in rain, snow, sleet, and dark of night, in blizzard and thunderstorm, sultry, muggy, bone-dry or heart-sickeningly cold, in dust storm, bathed in northern lights, when the wind is whispering the cottonwoods or bending their ancient trunks to the ground.

But I love autumn best of all in North Dakota, days just like today. My fingers are thawing out. The sun has dispersed the morning clouds. The grasses of the badlands have finally turned rust-and-tawny, though there is still more green grass than I have ever seen this late in the year. I'm off now to find a slice of toast and a perfect rasher of bacon, and then to go out to see how the cottonwood leaves are shaping up. My friend, the lover of the badlands, says they are going to be magnificent. I cannot wait for that moment when we come around the bend and catch sight of the Little Missouri River for the first time, threading out its loopy sine curves in perfect blue against the bluffs on its long sluggish journey towards the Gulf.

My heart always leaps at that.

 

 

The Goose Is Laying Golden Eggs—All that Glitters is Not Gold

by Clay Jenkinson
September 18, 2011

Like almost everyone else I regard the energy boom as a good thing for North Dakota. The state treasury is rolling in cash. The oil bonanza has immunized us from the most severe national recession since the 1930s. There are jobs for everyone who wishes to exert him or herself, and the boom has driven up wages for everyone. We've spent the last three decades wringing our hands about rural outmigration and rural decline. Now suddenly, people are moving to North Dakota by the thousands, and soon by the tens of thousands. Towns like Killdeer, Watford City, Stanley, Ross, Belfield, New Town, and Tioga are bursting with activity. Dickinson and Williston cannot build motels fast enough to keep up with the hectic demand. The North Dakota economy is now more diversified than ever before. And this boom, we are told, will be measured in decades rather than a few hectic years.

Three cheers!

Nobody wants to kill the goose that is laying such golden eggs for the people of North Dakota, but I feel increasing anxiety—even alarm—about how the Bakken and Three Forks-Sanish oil booms are transforming our landscape, our communities, our character, and our values.

Here are a few of my concerns:

--We must protect the most beautiful places in North Dakota from industrial blight. At minimum we should have the discipline to protect the three units of Theodore Roosevelt National Park (and their viewsheds); the Killdeer Mountains; the still pristine sections of the greater Little Missouri River Valley; the confluence of the Missouri and the Yellowstone Rivers; places sacred to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara; and the I-94 corridor west of Dickinson to the Montana border. We cannot protect these places with sympathy alone. We have to negotiate development agreements with the oil industry to work around these state and national treasures. That's going to take creative and courageous leadership.

--I don't want the larger (the less spectacular) landscape of North Dakota to be ruined by rapid industrialization, either. The quadrant where all of this activity is taking place is far from the population and media centers of North Dakota. If every one of the 670,000 North Dakotans took a two-day drive through the energy corridor, I believe there would be widespread alarm coupled with an unmistakable people's call for an intelligent chastening of the boom. Western North Dakota is in the throes of an industrial revolution that is literally overwhelming our capacity to absorb it in a sane and orderly fashion. That oil's not going anywhere. In fact, it becomes more valuable with each passing day. We can afford to slow this pandemonium down.

--I don't want the basic character of North Dakota to be destroyed by the social distortions that gold rushes inevitably bring. We are a modest agrarian people tucked away in a backwater of North America. We have become the people we are because we have always earned our modest prosperity the hard way—by discipline, saving, and unstinting labor. Historically, North Dakota has been one of the most equalitarian and small-d democratic places in America. How do we hold on to all that is wonderful in the North Dakota character in the face of such glistering temptation? Suddenly, we have won the lottery. Beware.

--I worry about outdoor recreation, hunting, fishing, hiking, star-gazing. I worry about our wildlife.

--I worry about the social impacts of the boom as much as about the impact on our landscape. You know the litany: drunk driving, meth and other drugs, vandalism, domestic violence, sexual assault, escort services, the strain on traditional county and local social infrastructure, including public education, health care, and welfare services.

--I want the oil boom to benefit all of North Dakota (not just one quadrant) and every North Dakotan, not just those who own mineral rights or have economic interests in the oil patch. We need to find creative ways to use the windfall to lay the economic and cultural foundation of the twenty first century in North Dakota. In other words, we need to invest our surpluses wisely to prepare for the after-boom, to further diversity our economy, and to create the best-educated and most culturally remarkable state on the Great Plains. This is doable. We just need strong and creative leadership.

--I worry about the Saudi Arabia effect. Oil rich places tend to make three colossal mistakes. First, because the new revenues are sudden, vast, and accidental ("funny money," not really earned), governments begin to spend profligately. I share the concern of North Dakota's fiscal conservatives, including former ND Governor Ed Schafer, that if we keep raising the baseline of public expenditure (for education, government, infrastructure, etc.) we will soon reach an unsustainable plateau. Meanwhile, there is a tendency to give the people tax relief and to become more and more addicted to oil revenues. This is always a mistake.

Second, the real productivity of an oil-rich people tends to decline. It's a lot easier to make good money by sticking a straw into the ground than by milking cows, planting grains, selling insurance, or teaching children to read. Already we see that young people in North Dakota are abandoning college (and sometimes high school) to hurtle into the oil fields, where they can easily earn $75-140,000 per year driving a water truck. We will collectively pay a huge social price for this in the future.

Third, an ugly class system tends to set in. Those who own oil (or oil rights) and those who control access to that oil usually set themselves up as the new masters of the community. They buy luxury cars, build McMansions, and gate themselves off from their "mere" fellow citizens. Meanwhile, the "have oil nots" find their rents jumping beyond their ability to pay, the costs of routine services skyrocket, and the quality of their lives (traffic congestion, dust, rudeness, vandalism, and serious crime) diminish dramatically.

We need to drive the energy boom, not be driven over a cliff by it. We need to manage the transformation of our landscape and our people, not just chase after the juggernaut with a broom and dustpan to clean up the messes. We need to insist upon smart development, not "drill baby drill."

We're not just another energy arena. We're North Dakota.

 

Hey! Give Us Back Our Eleven Days

by Clay Jenkinson
September 11, 2011

And so the summer that never was is no more.

In the same way that you wake up one morning knowing (out of the blue) that you cannot go on one more day without a haircut, I woke up at first light this morning aware that suddenly summer is over and somehow fall snuck in without fair warning.

What happened to the light? I sat out last night on my deck reading a book. It was actually a little hot at 7 p.m., but it was, if this makes any sense, that "thin hot" or "false hot" under which you can feel the march of autumn. The sunset was very beautiful—a large pulsing tangerine in a thin golden sky with a couple of elongated charcoal clouds close to the horizon. But then I realized the sun was setting and it was only 7:30 p.m. I wanted the Archimedean lever that would jack it back up into the sky for another hour or two. Even worse, the afterglow now has a weary autumn feel to it. It makes a brief half-hearted appearance and then just turns off the light and goes to bed.

The long night is coming to the northern Great Plains.

England was the last European country to adopt the reforms of the Gregorian Calendar. The old Julian Calendar had been accurate up to a point, but it was slightly out of sync with the solar system and by 1752, when England finally installed the more accurate Gregorian Calendar, the old system was off by eleven days. So, literally, on September 2, 1752, people in the English-speaking world went to bed—and woke up the next morning on September 14. The great British satirist William Hogarth created a painting in which a lunatic out on the street can be seen carrying a placard that says, "Give us back our eleven days."

I am that lunatic. Give us back our summer. All eleven days of it.

Probably because my bedroom window was open this morning and it was just under 50 degrees, at dawn I dreamed that I was up on a ridge somewhere in western North Dakota gazing out at a vast and open landscape heavily dusted with dry snow. The skies were bright gray. The landscape was stunning—ridges and rolling hills, endless in every direction—black earth, white snow, rust grass and pale yellow corn stubble, a few weak blue open zones in the infinite gray cloud cover. A brisk but intermittent wind created a miniaturized ground blizzard effect here and there, or rather now here and now there. It was twenty degrees above zero.

WAIT. The only thing worse than seven months of that is dreaming of it before it actually comes. I literally shook off the dream, then defiantly ate my yoghurt and toast out on my deck—with involuntary shudders and numb fingers and toes.

The cottonwood leaves are starting to turn. I'm no dendrologist, but the leaves I have seen so far don't appear to be turning that glorious yellow-gold that makes you almost burst into tears that such beauty can exist in the world. So far they look like they are just going to gray out and die. Given how waterlogged North Dakota is this year, I had expected them to stay green longer than ever before and then explode simultaneously into a gazillion miniature impossibly yellow suns, each one dancing (the "Song of the Life Force") in the fall breeze. Maybe they still will. We need that lingering curtain call—especially this year.

As I tucked my blanket up under my chin, I felt a sharp wave of melancholia pass through me. Can it be that we've already experienced our last thunderstorm of the year? The number of boats that plied the waters of the Missouri River between Fort Lincoln and Fort Mandan this summer must have been the lowest in forty years. Over Labor Day weekend I saw a handful of boats on the river. They looked furtive or defiant, and certainly lonely. I did not spend a single dog day this summer searing on a sandbar, like a human bratwurst, when your eyes are so overwhelmed by the intensity of the sun that they go into some sort of monochrome mode, like a solarized photograph.

No state fair this year.

In every other summer I have, in July, driven the back roads of central North Dakota to gaze at the carpet of wheat—and to bring back a small trophy shock to display on my mantle. I don't know of anything that is more purely satisfying than a large field of dusty rust-golden wheat so gravid with abundance that the tall stocks are barely able to hold up their heads. And if there is the slightest breeze, oh my. Art Link's Dakota. I didn't make that drive this summer. If there was a North Dakota wheat crop this year, I missed it. It was out of sync. I was out of sync with it.

I've started to make my lists. Coil and stow the hoses. Till the garden and (this time) stow the tiller. Prep the snow blower. Buy gas. Gather the tomato cages and tuck them into each other like Russian matryoshka dolls.

I always worry a little about the term "Indian summer," because it seems to take part of its meaning from the concept of the "vanishing Indian," or "The End of the Trail," that famous painting of the lone Indian hunched over his weary horse at sunset with a lance under his arm. The term "Indian summer," in other words, is related to the Euro-American conquest of the continent, the idea that plains Indians were able to enjoy one last interlude of glory in their ancient lifeway before the end came.

Still, it's an indispensable concept and it describes perfectly how we feel at this time of the year.

This year more than ever before I want my Indian summer—right up to Thanksgiving Day.

 

 

Reading to Prepare for the 911 Symposium

by Clay Jenkinson
September 4, 2011

In preparing for the "September 11 Ten Years Later: Impact on the Heartland" symposium set for Friday through Sunday morning at Bismarck State College, I've been reading up a storm.
This is one of the greatest joys in my life, that I get to read about things that are inherently fascinating — for a living! I'm eager to hear North Dakota's Gen. Chuck Wald, who was one of the top commanders of the United States armed forces at the time of 9-11, former CNN anchor Chuck Roberts, and CNN producer-reporter Peter Bergen, who interviewed Osama bin Laden and wrote an outstanding book, "The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict between America and Al-Qaeda."
The North Dakota Air National Guard, the Happy Hooligans, also were a part of this amazing, sad, world-changing story, because they were flying CAP (combat air patrol) over Washington, D.C., on Sept. 11, 2001. If there had been more hijacked planes, a second wave of terror, that fatal Tuesday morning, the Hooligans might have been called upon to shoot down commercial airliners to spare the Capitol or the White House.

Lt. Col. Dean Eckmann, one of the three pilots of the 119th Fighter Wing Alert Detachment who scrambled into the air that morning from Langely AFB, will be talking about the role of the North Dakota Air National Guard in what is, so far, the seminal story of the 21st century.
It's hard to believe that 10 years have passed. I know precisely where I was when I heard the news (Phoenix, in a hotel room), and I know that in the confusion, rage, bewilderment, and sorrow that cascaded in upon all of us, I had only one impulse — to get to my daughter, who was just 7 years old at the time, 733.3 miles away, and to hold her tightly in my arms, perhaps forever.
Former Vice President Dick Cheney's memoir, "In My Time," is being released on the eve of the 10th anniversary. I pre-ordered it a month ago, and I can't wait to read his account of 9-11 and the troubled decade of its aftermath.

Though he disputes it for a number of good reasons, Cheney was effectively the acting president for most of Sept. 11, while President Bush was being scurried around American airspace at the insistence of the Secret Service.

It was almost certainly Cheney who issued the shoot-down order at 10:39 a.m. EDT, even though from a technical constitutional point of view, he was not in the military chain of command. (It runs: president, secretary of defense, chairman of the joint chiefs, regional commanders).
Predictably, the pundits are spending most of their time mucking around in the so-called cheap shots in Cheney's book, his apparently condescending attitude toward National Security Adviser (and later Secretary of State) Condoleezza Rice, and his suggestion that Colin Powell was not a completely loyal member of the Bush Cabinet.

Important, but not very important.

I'm much more interested in what the former vice president has to say about the meaning of 9-11, and the ways in which it has changed our understanding of the separation of powers doctrine, the role of the president in our constitutional system, the sanctity of the Bill of Rights, the relationship of the United States to the Geneva Conventions and the United Nations, and our relationship with our allies in Canada and Europe.

As I understand Cheney's point of view from his interviews and the biographies I have read, he subscribes to the following proposition. The world is a much darker and more dangerous place than you and I know. Beneath the surface of our daily lives, there lurk a wide range of bad actors, nihilists, "terrorists," men bent on the destruction of the West and in particular the United States and Israel. Some of these evil doers possess both the will and the wherewithal to damage America in significant, even fundamental, ways.

Our government dare not tell us candidly just how bad things are out there, because if they did we the people would not be able to sleep at night. We need to trust that our leaders are doing whatever it takes to keep us safe and secure in what is in some respects a nightmare world. While it would be nice to adhere to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution and the international rule of law, we can no longer really afford to do business under such restraints.

Our survival is going to require us to engage in enhanced interrogation techniques that the squeamish might call torture, to conduct widespread domestic surveillance in ways that existing laws forbid, to violate the sovereignty of other nations (e.g., Pakistan) to capture or assassinate senior terrorists, and to wage pre-emptive wars against nations that seem to threaten our interests. It's a shame that it has come to this, but it is a very dark world out there — and you have to trust us.

That's a very difficult proposition to swallow for anyone who loves our republican form of government, the principles of the Enlightenment, the idealism of America, or the hard-won protections of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights.
But Cheney may be right.

It kills me to write these words, but what if he's right, that the price of being America in the 21st century is that we must "do whatever it takes" to defeat the nihilists? What I like best about Cheney is that unlike most other leaders he is not afraid to tell us what he fervently believes to be the hard truth about the world. I'm going to devour his book the minute Amazon.com pops it on my porch.
I hope and believe there is another path, a national journey of light rather than darkness, a path that tries harder to honor the magnificent ideals of the American experiment. Still, the fact that President Obama has not closed Guantanamo, and has escalated rather than wound down America's war in Afghanistan, must give every one of us pause.

 

"I'm Proud to be an Amer-ican," Where at Least I Know There are Campsites

by Clay Jenkinson
August 28, 2011

My big summer trip to the Lewis and Clark trail in Montana and Idaho is in danger of slipping into memory, like everything else. I can remember stopping the canoes about a mile and a half from our evening camp among the White Cliffs, and about a third of our group cinching up life vests and just pushing out like corks into the channel of the Missouri River, and then just drifting down one of the world's greatest rivers in the 90-degree afternoon. At that moment, now two weeks ago, I didn't have a care in the world, and I was as present as I ever get. For an hour I just let the law of gravitation govern my life, while I gazed in complete relaxation at some of the least "improved" landscapes of North America. I put up no resistance to the law of gravity, just surrendered to Nature, and luxuriated in the inexorable force that was trying to draw me at its own pace down to the Gulf of Mexico. I remember thinking, if I were struck by lightning tonight, I wouldn't exactly be thrilled, but, if I got to choose, it would be after such a day as this, in the heart of the American West, that I would like to make my exit. (The problem is, that I'd probably survive the lightning strike, but with my toenails all blown off and I'd spend the rest of my life sitting in a high chair drooling and broadcasting CB radio signals through my fillings).

What I love most about my trips into the American West—camping, hiking, canoeing, sitting on the tops of buttes, sitting in the Little Missouri River reading a book, driving aimlessly on the merest blacktop roads or, better yet, gravel roads that seem to lead nowhere—is that we live in a country where all that is still possible. You cannot bob down the Rhine or Danube in a life jacket dreaming of Eden. None of the countries I have ever visited, with the exception of Canada, has what we have—and often take for granted--in the American West. Try camping in England sometime if you want to see can go wrong when you over-domesticate a countryside. Whenever I let myself venture out to wild country in America, sleep under the stars, listen to the nip and yip of the coyotes, gaze at distant nameless hills as they silhouette against the summer dusk, listen to the profound silence of the continent, squat around a snapping camp fire, I find myself flush up with a kind of higher patriotism—if that is the right word for it. Thank God I was born in this country, I think, the country with the world's greatest array of National Parks: Canyonlands, Redwoods, Yosemite, Arches, Yellowstone, Theodore Roosevelt, Joshua Tree, Great Smokey Mountains, Denali . . . . The documentary filmmaker Ken Burns has called the National Parks "America's best idea." I don't quite agree with that, but I do believe that our ready (and democratic) access to open space, to wild magnificent landscapes, is one of the principal glories of America.

The great western historian, essayist, and novelist Wallace Stegner (who grew up, by the way, in southern Saskatchewan), used to call for a "society to match the scenery." He believed that a landscape as magnificent as ours deserved a civilization that was inspired by that magic inheritance to rise to levels of dignity and civility and idealism never before seen in the history of humankind. That certainly was the initial promise of America. The primordial continent provided the staging area for the dream prose of Thomas Jefferson—a combination of possibilities that has dazzled and bedeviled the world ever since. These days, I believe, we are betraying Stegner's great challenge in a way that looks almost purposeful. It's one thing to listen to the low squabblings of Nancy Pelosi and John Boehner, Glenn Beck and Chris Matthews in one's kitchen or a Motel 6 somewhere, but out in the shadow of Glacier National Park it just makes you wince for our beloved homeland and all that we have thrown away.

We owe the continuing magnificence of the American West to three factors. First, the peopling of the United States by white folks moved East to West. The West was proved up relatively late in the game, and by then, we had begun to worry that we were gobbling the continent too ruthlessly. Second, the West is arid. If it rained 30 inches per year in Utah, it would look like Iowa, and there would be no red sandstone wildernesses to serve as solace to our frenetically consumptive souls. Humans plow wherever they can, often wherever they even think they can. The hundredth meridian, which runs more or less through Bismarck, marks the division point between East and West, between dryland agriculture (i.e., Indiana) and lands too dry to support crops without irrigation. If that line of demarcation ran through Billings (or even Beach), North Dakota would be a much, much less interesting place. Third, certain morally courageous individuals like Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Mary Austin, and Gifford Pinchot, but especially Theodore Roosevelt realized that if the U.S. government did not step in to preserve the most magnificent places in the American West, we'd just destroy them in the name of profit or divvy them up as private property to the most privileged and self-serving families. On the southern rim of the Grand Canyon, on May 6, 1903, TR said, "Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it."

Our quest for energy in the twenty first century is going to put unprecedented strain on the American West. We have to figure out a way to do this right, lest we turn America's greatest assets into Gillette or, increasingly, Williston.

 

"Heaven on Earth: Drifting on the Stream, No Jetskis"

by Clay Jenkinson
August 21, 2011

Last week, I wrote about the seductive power of anticipation, just before embarking upon a nine-day journey along the Lewis and Clark Trail in Montana and Idaho. Now that journey is over. I'm writing these words in a motel in Limon, Colorado. Immensely refreshed and renewed.

This was one of the few times in which the actual experience was as good as the yearlong anticipation. We had absolutely perfect weather—just hot enough to make the swimming in the Missouri and the Clearwater Rivers completely refreshing, but not hot enough to sap our energy and throw us into afternoon listlessness. The group of 34 participants from all over the U.S. proved to be completely harmonious—something that is seldom the case on a cultural tour. As the trip wound down at my favorite hostelry in the American West, a magnificent (because modest) 40s-style resort called Lochsa Lodge, we even had a crackling dawn thunderstorm to give us a sense of the sheer magnificence of nature. An hour later, with ground fog and the smell of ozone wafting through the scattered wood cabins of the lodge, I ordered huckleberry French toast and thick crisp bacon, with a tumbler of orange juice.

It was a nearly flawless journey into the heart of the American West.

If you ever get a chance to float the White Cliffs stretch of the Missouri River in Montana, take it.

For three days we were the only human beings on that stretch of the Missouri. The run between Coal Banks and Judith Landing is the finest segment in the Missouri's entire 2,750-mile sojourn to St. Louis. Best of all, we were able to luxuriate in a fabled place on one of the world's greatest rivers without having to endure the sound of the internal combustion engine. A single jet ski is enough to throw you out of a kind of mystical timelessness into the brute domination and self-satisfaction of industrial man. We passed through Meriwether Lewis's "scenes of visionary enchantment" in perfect silence.

One of my goals was to surrender to the experience and be completely "present" for a change, not to remain somehow or somewhat detached from the journey, if that makes any sense. It's harder than you think to be fully present. I wrote last week that I wouldn't mind an encounter with God or at least the gods of the Missouri River. I'm not sure about God, but the gods of the river apparently took me seriously and almost immediately conspired to prevent me from slipping into a "mediated" as opposed to direct experience of the journey.

I take way too many photographs when I travel. I know that if you are taking a photograph you are not actually experiencing the moment, but trying—in vain—to capture it instead. But I just can't help myself.

Early on the second day of our float I was routinely shifting my paddle from the right to the left side of the canoe. The T-handle of the paddle somehow managed to snag the strap of my brand new, just out of the box, GPS-equipped waterproof camera, and cast it unceremoniously overboard. For an instant after it kerplunked into the muddy Missouri, I thought of jumping overboard to try to retrieve it. Fortunately I managed to resist that act of madness, which would certainly have capsized the canoe (and all our gear) without providing the slightest possibility of finding the camera. For about thirty minutes I stewed over the lost camera (a significant expense) and the 200 lost photos (a much greater deprivation). And then I realized that river gods were telling me just to surrender to the experience, and not try to turn it into a slide show. So I shrugged it off and gave myself over to seeing the White Cliffs with fresh eyes—or in other words, to lay down the experience not on a postage-stamp memory card, but upon my soul.

It became a journey of extraordinary magic and grace. The greatest of all the great moments of the trip occurred on the second day among the White Cliffs, between Eagle Creek Camp and Slaughter Camp, in the heart of Karl Bodmer's America. There were 17 canoes altogether, and without orchestrating it in any way, four of us (two canoes) pressed ahead of the rest so that we could experience the float without the inevitable river chatter of the core flotilla. When we were separated from the nearest quip by a full mile, we all four pulled in our paddles simultaneously, wordlessly, in a kind of Missouri River ballet. There is one kind of silence in propelling canoes in a remote river by way of paddles. There is an infinitely deeper silence when even the quiet paddling ceases. For the next hour, the four of us just drifted down the Missouri River in absolute silence. Nobody peeped. It was 85 degrees and from time to time the slightest feather of a breeze (the word is too strong) caressed us for a few seconds and then melted somehow into the big expanse. We drifted by half a dozen bald eagles sitting atop high old cottonwoods. The cliffs arched to heaven above us like the ruined castles and fortifications of a tribe of extinct giants. We were puny beings swallowed up by the sublime in every direction. The sky was as blue as blue can ever be—a few faint wispy drawn-out clouds coalesced and then were absorbed again into the endless dome of Montana.

If life is ever perfect on earth, it is in that moment when you are with people you care about in a place that makes you live harder, purer, and more alive to possibility, when you realize that you are part of something much bigger than your little human drama, when you are one with yourself and nature, and you don't feel the need to break the spell with some mere utterance.

 

"The Seductive Charm of Anticipation among the White Cliffs"

by Clay Jenkinson
August 14, 2011

My theme is anticipation. I write this on the eve of a great western adventure. By the time you read these words I will have floated the Missouri River in a canoe in Montana between an embarkation point east of Fort Benton and a take-out place called Judith Landing. But I won't come off the river until my deadline has passed, so I am writing this column on the eve of our canoe launch.

Next week I will write as candidly as I can about what actually happened on our journey, but at this juncture I don't quite know. So far it's all anticipation: an-tis-sa-paaa-yaaa-shun. We just met downstairs in the motel meeting room in Great Falls. Thirty-four people from all over the United States, and one woman from Australia, have come here to participate in a Lewis and Clark cultural tour that I lead every summer. We'll spend four days floating through the fabled White Cliffs stretch of the Missouri River, where Meriwether Lewis encountered "scenes of visionary enchantment." Then we come out long enough to clean up and make contact with our families at the Grand Union Hotel in Fort Benton. After that short interlude we will go hiking and camping for five more days on the Lolo Trail west of Missoula, into the northern neck of Idaho, on the most pristine overland stretch of the entire Lewis and Clark Trail. My role is to lecture informally about Lewis and Clark a couple of times per day, and certainly around the camp fires at night.

I don't know what the guests expect from this nine-day journey, but I know what I anticipate.

Essentially, my body is a wreck of sedentary neglect, my soul is ragged from a summer in which lots of bad things seem to be happening to good people, from floods to family feuds and from fatalities to firings. Huck's lament to Jim, "Men sure can be cruel to one another," has been rattling through my head like a dark chorus all summer. Spiritually, I feel that I am running on fumes. The national politics have degraded almost everyone's sense of the American republic. As we walk off the grid to immerse ourselves in history and place, we don't know whether the free fall in the stock market will continue or stabilize.

Today a few of us took a little warm-up hike east of Great Falls to the Sulphur Spring from which Meriwether Lewis obtained mineral water to treat Sacagawea, who was gravely ill here in June 1805. She nearly died. He dosed the 18-year-old Shoshone-Hidatsa woman with the mineral water. She recovered—probably in spite of rather than because of his medical ministrations. The walk was just a way of getting everyone used to the idea that adventure requires some physical exertion. By the time we got back from the three-mile hike, I felt old, rickety, and—worst of all—dull.

My goal is to get back into my body, which I tend to treat as a mere head-delivery system. By the end of the week I would like to feel re-integrated, re-balanced, and restored. I plan to push my body hard and to the extent possible shut down the left side of my brain. In other words, I am anticipating a week of physical and spiritual healing. That's a tall order, but it has happened before on journeys such as this, and that, really, is why we venture into the wilderness. It's a paradox. By voluntarily jettisoning some of human "civilization" for a sustained number of days, we actually have the chance to become more human again. Better yet, we have the opportunity to re-integrate with the natural world around us. That requires some surrender.

Meriwether Lewis was an enlightenment rationalist and a Deist, like his patron Jefferson. A Deist is one who believes in a kind of clockmaker god, but disbelieves in the divinity of Christ. In other words, Lewis carried an essentially de-spiritualized view of reality into the wilderness of Montana. But Montana was so fabulous—buffalo from horizon to horizon, drinking creeks dry and actually blocking the forward progress of the Corps of Discovery in the Missouri and Yellowstone Rivers; grizzly bears as thick as the pine trees; five cascades on the Missouri River in close proximity; the big, big sky—that even Lewis was overcome by a sense of sheer wonderment. It was all so beautiful, so Edenic, so unscarred by European civilization, that Lewis had a kind of out-of-body experience that probably gave him the best single day of his entire life. That's what I want. Is that too much to ask?

Anticipation

I would like to fall in love--with life again, in a new way. I would like to be completely and uncomplicatedly "present," and not thinking about projects that I need to complete, bills I need to pay, people I need to contact. I would like to have an encounter with God or at least the god of the Upper Missouri.

At the end of the journey I will meet my daughter, who by then will be 17 years old. She'll be waiting as I come off the Lolo Trail. She will be full of anticipation too: I'm giving her my old Honda Civic as her birthday gift. At the moment that's pretty much all she can think about.

Funny how we pack so much hope and joy and satisfaction into things that have not happened, things which seldom deliver what they promised. Anticipation is a dangerous idea. I know something about the best laid plans of mice and men. I remember when my daughter's principal ache in life was for a cell phone, or a computer, or a driver's license. They have all come and gone and in every case the anticipation was more satisfying than the thing itself.

One of our participants, a geologist, says there is a chance for a very rare, very intense appearance of Aurora Borealis over the White Cliffs.

We can hardly wait.

 

"The Importance of Friendship in an Era of Incivility"

by Clay Jenkinson
August 7, 2011

At a time when the residual civility of American life appears to be collapsing, I want to write today in praise of friendship. I don't know how many people we get to know over the course of a lifetime. Probably it numbers somewhere in the hundreds. I'd divide that pool into the following categories: acquaintances; associates; "friends"; and true friends. We routinely misuse the term "friend," spreading it like thin frosting over a range of relationships that are clearly something less. I regard friendship as a sacramental relationship—at the center of it there is some deep pool of affinity and good will and affirmation and joy. In my hierarchy, the best thing in life is being a parent, but nobody can deny that there are many, many sleepless nights. The second best thing is friendship, where there are no sleepless nights, except when you are too young to know when to quit partying.

Third best thing: Ginsu Knives.

Friends are the ones we take the time to seek out. If you are not seeking them out, but just happily running into them from time to time, they are probably not friends. Friendship, like all important relationships, is hard work. In recent years I have become such a pathetic workaholic that I have neglected some of my friendships. That has lessened the joy of my life, and it often leaves me self-disappointed.

Friends are the ones who make our souls sing, the ones who affirm us even when we don't deserve it, who stand by us when "you have really done it this time," and who authentically cheer our successes and commiserate our failures and losses.

I'm with the Christian writer and lay theologian C.S. Lewis that, on the whole, friendship is a higher form of human relationship than romantic love. Love, at its best, provides ecstasies and intimacies that are uniquely satisfying, but they are hard to sustain. I know a fair number of good marriages, but not many great ones, and I have found—I hope this doesn't sound too dark—that marriage at times seems to be an institution that licenses people to treat each other with deliberate hostility and emotional indifference. The contractual permanence of marriage seems to be encourage some of us to bring our least best selves to the equation. Knowing how hard it is to get out of a marriage—not to mention economically devastating—and fearing that the grass on the other side of the fence is mostly leafy spurge, keeps a lot of people in bad marriages.

It's the voluntariness of friendship that makes it so rich and delightful. You don't have to be together. You have to want to be together, and that makes all the difference.

It was C.S. Lewis, I think, who articulated the distinction between friends and lovers with the greatest insight. "Though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person," he wrote, "nothing is less like a friendship than a love affair…. Lovers are normally face to face absorbed in each other; friends side by side absorbed in some common interest." Almost all the best adventures of my life have been side by side rather than face to face.

I had dinner the other night with one of my oldest friends. We've now known each other for a full 40 years. We haven't yet reached the point in our friendship where we compare our current medication regimens—that's my definition of when old age begins. It was pure relaxed joy on a perfect summer night. We've long since ceased having anything to prove to each another. The pool of good will and shared experiences is so large that everything felt right with the world for a couple of hours. We know the contours of each other's minds and characters all too well, and yet we still find each other interesting, and want each other's "take" on current events, mutual acquaintances, cultural occurrences, the present state and future course of North Dakota, and the badlands. Other true friends were present, and—as they say—a good time was had by all, but there was something deeply rewarding (though hard to articulate) in being with someone with whom there has been such a long and winding journey over so much common ground, with serious losses along the way, and no end yet in sight.

The best friendships are ones that have involved unforgettable adventures. My friend Douglas and I were arrested as possible spies in the old Yugoslavia—in 1977—and for about 48 hours we did not know if our adventure would wind up being called Much Ado about Nothing or Midnight Express, in which a young American winds up in a nightmarish Turkish prison. Though our lives have taken us in different directions, neither of us will quite let the friendship go, and no matter what else happens we will always have Dubrovnik. We don't even have to talk about it any more—though we do—because it marked our lives more than almost anything either of us has done. It doesn't hurt, of course, that we did not wind up in the Turkish prison.

Some friendships, like some campfires, require continuous stoking. Others have some kind of magic invisible fuel, and seem effortlessly able to pick up where they left off. Some friendships affirm us as we are, warts and all, and others call upon us to rise to our best better selves. Most friendships find their level early on and never change—we often lock them into a certain set of interests and practices, and call them back to the old comfort level when they threaten to change. Others evolve, and like the on-again, off-again friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, find their fullest expression later in life, after the toxic cocktail of testosterone (or estrogen)-ego-competitiveness-and ambition loosen their grip.

That is my dream of the future.

 

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