Headin' to Mpls

We gotta go celebrate grandson Luke's 3d birthday this weekend. I don't look forward to the drive, but we're gonna do it. I drove by the big bridge they dunked in the river yesterday; it's really strange to drive by on the new bridge and not have anything obstructing the view as I look north.

Ole dropped by and told a couple of stories about himself again: A Swede in our town was never able to develop a liking for Norwegians. So, one of his fellow Swedes was surprised one day to see the Swede give a coin to a monkey perched on the instrument of a Norwegian organ grinder. "I thought you didn't like Norwegians," said the friend. "Yah, dat's true," replied the Swede, "but they are so cute when dey are little."

Another: A Danish lady sent her husband downtown to get a pair of loafers. So he came back with two Norwegians.

One more; Ole proved he isn't so dumb --- An ocean liner was sailing the Atlantic when it hit an iceberg. Survivors were able to take to lifeboats except one boat taht was overloaded by three persons. Nobly, a Frenchman volunteered to sacrifice himself, leaping into the water with a shout, "Vive la France!" Next an Englishman stepped to the edge of the boat, bravely shouting out, "God Save the Queen!" and then jumped in the ocean. Finally, Ole the Norwegian stood up, reached over and grabbed a Swede. He shoved the Swede into the water, and then shouted out, "Long live Norway!"

The Bridge Came Down

The remaining two spans of what was once the only vehicle bridge spanning the Missouri
River between Sioux City, IA and Great Falls, MT fell into the water today after a series of about 300 detonations broke it into countless pieces. Both local television stations broadcast the event live and just before the plunger made contact, I turned the sound off my tv set to hear for myself the energy that was uncapped. As the proverbial crow flies, I sit about a mile away from the scene, and the slower sound took two or three seconds to get to me; it was loud, something like a kettle drum roll or a nearby thunder clap.

An employee of the state historical society stood with the reporter from the station I watched and gave interesting perspective about the bridge which bore the name Liberty Memorial Bridge, so-named to honor veterans of World War I. He said that with two years of the 1923 opening of the bridge, 2200 vehicles were crossing it each day. Designed for cars like the Model T or the Model A of the period, the span became increasingly out-dated with heavier vehicles crossing it in later years.

Animal rights people complained after the first event a couple of weeks ago. Clouds of pigeons swarmed out of the section that time with the explosions, and I heard some concerns also stated about the fish underneath. To appease the critics this time, bottle rockets were set off to scare the birds away, although it looked like thy just flew in a circle and settled back in. They said something was done about the fish's safety, too.

The best story of the day featured a 98 year old man who remembered the bridge construction when he was 12 years old. He said he asked a construction worker at that time how long the new bridge would last and was assured it would stand longer than he would. There he stood, though, in his walker being steadied by a man on each side, with the key words: there he stood.

1968

Today, for some reason, my thoughts ranged back to the time I spent in Alaska, 1968. Literature and stories of that place "where the world is young" had been gnawing at my imagination for a couple of years, so I just had to go find out if what I'd been hearing and reading were true. I arrived in Anchorage seven days later, driving through lots of rain and mud (the Alaskan Highway was not fully paved yet). I discovered a person needed a permanent address to even apply for work, and I did not want to jump through the hoops in front of me. With winter coming on, I did not think it a good time for me to be there, and with my financial resources steadily draining, I decided to get out of there. I thought a grand adventure would be to hitch a ride on an Alaskan ferry southward, so I drove the long road to Haines, the northern terminus of the ferry system, bought a ticket, and watched deckhands drive my Impala in the hold of the ship.

Prior to that I had a few hours to kill so I drove a few miles along the Lynn Canal and took the fishing pole out of my trunk. Never before and never since have I caught fish like I did that day. Those Dolly Varden trout bit and fought everything I threw at them, and I soon tired of it. Besides, a thickly wooded area surrounded me, and I remember worrying that a big bear might come out of the trees. I drove back to the loading dock at Port Chilkoot and turned my keys over.

The M. V. Wickersham was a sleek appearing, narrow bowed ship built in Sweden that carried up to 1300 passengers and 140 vehicles. She was a working vessel that served ports along the route with passenger and freight hauling. I found the receipt for my fare: $33.25 for me and $96.00 for the Impala. I rode for about thirty hours as we stopped at Skagway, Juneau, Sitka, Petersburg, Wrangell, Ketchikan, and Prince Rupert, BC. As we sailed along, I enjoyed sitting in the solarium lounge on the top deck with a beer in hand while I watched the world of the north country come at me through the glass. Mary and I went to Alaska by cruise ship to celebrate our 25th anniversary, but it did not compare with my first journey, more of which can be shared in the future.

"Shocked"

It'll be good to have both this political season over with, though I'm afraid we'll have to live with hard economic times much beyond the electing of new politicians. Alan Greenspan, past head of the Federal Reserve, said yesterday before some committee that he was "shocked" at what's happening in the economy and that he put too much faith in the self-correcting power of markets. He had been a champion of de-regulation all along, and it must hurt him now to admit to being "shocked." Of course, there are always cries of "Socialism" arising from the din if and when the Federal government steps in to correct some wrongs, and I think I even heard Sarah P. accuse Obama of being a socialist.

I have been re-reading a history book A People's History of the United States that I purchased a year ago at a gift shop in The Hermitage, Andrew Jackson's home. Authored by Howard Zinn, he writes from the point of view of the average, common person, not the big figures of history. It's a good read, and his populist point of view is refreshing.

Zinn writes, too, in my last issue of The Nation magazine an article titled "A Big Government Bailout" and makes the case that we have always had government intervention in our economy and gave examples, among them the establishment of tariffs to subsidize manufacturers, subsidizing manufacturers, subsidizing canals and the merchant marine, giving 100 million acres of land to the railroads, infusing cash into the aircraft industry after World War II, giving oil companies an oil depletion allowance, bailing out Chrysler Corp, bailing out the savings and loan industry, establishing the New Deal to rebuild the nation's infrastructure, establishing social security, etc.

Presently we have a lot of problems that everyone seems to be looking to the new President to solve. It'll take citizen participation to at least not answer the question of what is the biggest problem - ignorance or apathy with a shrug of the shoulders and say "I don't know and I don't care."

I'll Miss the Jokes

I'll miss this political campaign season when it wraps up; actually, what I'll miss are the jokes. Some of the issues aren't so funny, but there's always a comedian ready to jump on any opening. I like the one Jimmy Kimmel told: Sarah Palin had a good thought. She suggested that while Barack Obama is over in Hawaii visiting his grandmother, it might be a good idea for him to keep an eye on Japan.

Palin is a rich lode for the comedians. The spoofs they do about her on Saturday Night Live rate extremely high. I wonder what jokes they'll tell tonight about her $150,000 wardrobe when, after all, she is just another hockey mom. Comedy material dealing with her lack of knowledge of the constitutional duties of a vice president doesn't seem very funny,though. Contrary to her statements, a VP does very little constitutionally. LBJ found that out when he was JFK's VP. He thought he could continue to wheel and deal as before, but he frustratingly found himself shut out of any decision-making. She does not exhibit many of the characteristics I would find necessary in a potential leader, such as intellectual curiosity or being well read.

I can take a few stabs at writing comedy about her in the Ole and Lena style: Did you hear about the Norwegian secretary named Sarah. She is so experienced, she can type 20 mistakes a minute; or, Sarah was once a waitress in a nice cafe. One day a customer complained, "Waitress, I can't find any oysters in this stew." She replied, "Vell, yew vouldn't find any angels in an angel food cake, either, vould yew;" or, Sarah was elected to the town council as mayor. At her very first meeting, she suggested that they buy a new fire engine. When asked what the city should do with the old engine, she replied, "Vell, for one thing, ve could use it for false alarms."

With that, I shall quit because they won't get any better.

McCarthyism?

I got plenty disturbed last Friday afternoon watching "Hardball" on MSNBC with Chris Matthews. Politics is usually the topic du jour, and one of his guests that day was a U.S. Congressperson from Minnesota, Michele Bachmann, who accused Barack Obama and other members of Congress with having anti-American or unpatriotic views and should be investigated. Thankfully, Katrina vanden Heuvel, publisher of The Nation magazine followed Bachmann's rant and with an angry, impassioned response put it in very plain terms what this would mean - McCarthyism !

This country has operated quite well with divergent views since its inception, much like a pendulum swinging back and forth between left and right philosophies. If the U. S. of A. operated like Bachmann seems to want, we might as well call our system an oligarchy where a small group exercises control, much like we have been seeing in the Bush Administration and the financial system, both of which are corrupt and in shambles.

I am old enough to remember the period of McCarthyism when Senator Joe McCarthy of Wisconsin made wild charges, something that was not very comfortable to watch. He made the accusation that more than 200 Communists worked in the State Department and were committing traitorous actions. Subsequent investigations found no Communists, but he started the ball of rumor and innuendo rolling and went on to drag many before the House Un-American Activities Committee and asked the familiar question, "Are you now, or have you ever been, a member of the Communist Party?" His tirades continued until finally the Senate condemned him for "conduct unbecoming a member." I don't know what fate awaits Ms. Bachmann, but there is already a petition circulating to tell Congress to censure her.

Talkin' About Old Times

My father-in-law joined us for a supper of macaroni and hamburger hotdish last evening. He will soon be ninety-two years old, and like my parents he holds a huge library of memories inside his head. It is interesting to get them talking about their "old days," and I always try to preserve some of their stories on paper. How about this one we heard last night, for instance? No names will be mentioned here, but on a bull buying trip to Mandan, one of Adam's companions got drunk and rode all the way back home, 75 miles or so, in the trailer with the bulls because he wanted to get sobered up. Adam worried about him and checked on him several times, but apparently he rode back there all the way home.

These stories are all 60 to 70 years old. Here are a few more.

* A neighbor's house burned down because the man's kitchen matches were in the pockets of a pair of overalls that was hanging in an open porch. The wind kept slamming them back and forth and ignited the matches.

* A cow belonging to an acquaintance of his living in Mandan somehow got trapped in the city's ground level water tank and died there, a fact nobody knew about for some time as they drank the water.

* Adam rode the train a few times when he shipped his cattle by rail to Sioux City. His wife, my mother-in-law, always packed a big lunch which his companions always poked fun at until, of course, they got hungry and helped themselves to it. When they got to Sioux City, he said, you could buy a big steak dinner at the stockyards cafe for seventy-five cents. Then, cattle only brought about $50 per head.

* He made whisky a few times using as ingredients corn, potatoes, wheat, and chunks of sugar. He'd run it through the still two or three times, then test its purity by burning it in a spoon. If it all disappeared in the flames it was good.

* A hired man who Adam often hired at harvest time liked to drink, got drunk this one time, slept in the garage, and in the morning the new litter of kittens were crawling all over him. He tried leaving the garage later on and somehow got his head caught between the garage's sliding doors. There he hung, and Adam said he thought he was dead, but everything turned out all right.

* There are many more tales to tell and so many of them are tragically sad like the one where a relative in Russia drove a wagon load of prisoners to be executed and found out later on his father was in the wagon. They will be told at another time, however.

Redecorating

I'm back at my computer keys after taking a few days to redecorate my study. It took one false start (wrong color), a painting re-do, laying a new carpet, a little cussing at each other, and now it's done and I'm good to go. Mary works hard at these projects, and when she consented to helping me, she really dug in. I, of course, would not be able to do many of these things without her, but I do have to put in my two cents worth, although I mostly kept my mouth shut except to say, "Yes, ma'am."

This morning we hung pictures, one of them is a poster depicting our local national sports hero, the famous bucking bull Little Yellow Jacket. I admire him for being the accomplished sports champion that he is, besides the colors work well in here. The second picture up is my favorite of all time, "Found." In it a Collie dog howls for his master to come after he found a lost lamb in a snowstorm. I've always liked that picture for as long as I can remember. The folks had that scene hanging up when I was a small boy and still do. Familiar things feel good to me.

I've had a collection of black and white pictures grouped together that we hung up again, too. Four of them are of family members standing with teams of horses. Grandpa Bueling, a young man, stands in Plum City, Wisconsin in the early 1900's at the head of a large, strong team that he holds by their bridal straps. Dad's always said that he was a good horseman and broke a lot of them to work. Grandpa Sandvig, in another picture, sits on the seat of a hay mower hooked up to his team. He poses thoughtfully while giving the animals a rest. My mother and her brother, Marion, are young kinds, but in another frame, there they stand holding a mismatched team hitched to a hayrack. They look too young to have done much heavy lifting, but they probably were put to work doing something. One more horse scene shows my dad holding in one hand the reins of his team, Chub and Queen, and, in the other, my hand, a young toddler. I remember that team because they were still around as I grew older, and, under close supervision, got to drive them.

Two more pictures went into my grouping: one, a scene of Sheldon's main street taken sometime in the early 1900's, and the other, a picture of a man standing in a suspended wool sack who is packing the fleeces in it. He is a relative of Mary's, and it is the only picture I have ever seen taken of that kind of activity. It is meaningful to me because I used to do that and have always remembered how my shoes became soaked with the lanolin oil from the wool.

The TR Symposium

I drove over to Dickinson Friday and attended the Teddy Roosevelt Symposium sub-titled The Conservationist in the Arena. They had some top-notch scholars giving presentations, each of them full of interesting anecdotes. I started jotting down a few of them.

* Douglas Brinkley recently spent time with Lance Armstrong to prepare an article about him for some magazine. He said he found him to have such a strong inner strength that he wouldn't bet against him in the next Tour de France, a strength he compared to TR's of whom he is writing a biographical book.

* Dr. Donald Worster, history professor at the University of Kansas, said there are no checks and balances at work when the government acts as a business partner with corporatons. I think he was alluding to present day circumstances.

* Dr. Robert Morgan, author of Gap Creek, Boone: A Biography, plus other novels of Appalachian Mountain folks as well as some top rate poetry thought Daniel Boone and TR must have been close in temperament, both having a certain blood lust for killing wild game.

* Clay Jenkinson, our North Dakota humanities scholar, gave up many stories like these: TR took up jiu jitsu for awhile and said there was nothing more exhilarating than being thrown over the head of a 300 pound Japanese man; TR rode on a cattle train and ran along the tops of the cars to get to downed critters and prod them to stand up; TR thought it a great episode in his life when in Wibaux, Montana he downed a drunk bully with his fists and heard the drunks two pistols fire as he went down; TR said the most important time in his life was being a cowboy in Dakota; TR felt so strongly about conservation issues that he refused to give a speech in the Redwoods of California until signs welcoming him were removed from the trees he valued so much; they must have complied with his request because he was then attributed with this quote --- "I feel most emphatically that we should not turn into shingles a tree which was old when the first Egyptian conqueror penetrated to the Valley of the Euphrates."

All of the speakers spoke of the dichotomy present within TR. On one hand he became known as a conservationist, but on the other he loved to go on hunting trips around the world and shoot lots of animals. No one disagrees with the fact that TR was an imperfect man.

Dickinson State Univ., working in conjunction with the Library of Congress, has gotten the honor and responsibility for turning all of TR's papers to a digital format enabling scholars to research his life on-line. It is a huge task since the Library of Congress possesses 485 microfilm reels containing a half million of his documents. A representative of the LOC spoke to us and described the process. Anyone wishing to do research of TR will have to access documents through DSU's portal, a fact they are proud of.

Fall on the Missouri

The leaves started turning colors and falling from the trees in the Missouri River Valley. The beauty of fall never lasts, especially when the wind blows and the leaves start flying off like they are today. Mary keeps busy putting her gardens to bed for the winter, and our neighbor came over yesterday with his air compressor to blow out our underground sprinkler system lines. We can only wonder what kind of winter waits for us.

We had excitement around these parts on Monday. Demolition experts set explosives and dumped part of the Missouri River bridge into the water. A new bridge alongside the old one opened for two-lane traffic a couple of months ago, but the other two lanes were not in use yet because the west end of the old steel structure stood in the way. So down it went and construction to complete the new bridge goes on. I had driven by a couple of days previous to the explosions and saw workmen using cutting torches high up on the arches to weaken their joints.

We did not drive to the site when it was detonated, but television crews were there so we could watch the action live. I believe there were some 190 simultaneous explosions set off. Everything happened fast: we saw the twinkling of all the charges blowing, lots of dark smoke, and the almost immediate collapse of the structure. I couldn't help but notice the hundreds of birds taking wing from underneath to get out of there. In seconds it all lay in the riverbed. Workmen got busy right away to clean out the debris since they had only 24 hours to get it out of there. The bridge was 86 years old, and for a time was the only one across the Missouri. Prior to that barges ferried traffic across. After the smoke and dust settled a transportation department supervisor showed how the rust had worked and weakened the steel. He commented that it was worse than they thought it to be.

Clearing the Table

At 6:30 this morning we checked Mary into Same Day Surgery for a colonoscopy. The build-up to it with the fasting and drinking "witches' brew" yesterday made the actual procedure seem anti-climactic since it took only about 15 minutes. They gave her anesthesia so that took awhile to shake off, but the good news was that everything looked good and the doctor said she didn't have to do it again until ten years have passed.

The Friends of the Library held their regular sale of used books last weekend. As usual, I bought a bunch. Now I have so many that I had to build a new bookshelf yesterday to hold them all. It is time to downsize, of course, but how can I stop buying. At 50 cents a pound for hardcover books and a dollar a pound for paperbacks, it is one place where a twenty dollar bill goes a long ways.

I am still in the process of addressing and mailing my book of poetry to friends, relatives, and others. I sent one to Ted Kooser, a recent past U.S. Poet Laureate whom I have met and visited with. I hope he responds with a critique. I told him I'm a crusty old school administrator who can take the bad with the good, and I am looking for ways to improve. I have read and studied most of his work and admire his ability with words. This week Friday I plan to attend the Theodore Roosevelt Symposium at Dickinson State University. One of the presenters there is Robert Morgan who writes both prose and poetry. I hope to visit with him and slip a book into his hands. Well, I'm not too old to stop dreaming. And like it or not, I plan to keep on writing.

Back at It

I neglected my blog on Wednesday. I busied myself with printing my chapbook of poems and preparing it to mail out. I told Mary that I felt like I had just given birth. Of course, that immediately became a subject of ridicule. Then I told her that she didn't know because she'd never published a book. Again, I was corrected and I didn't think she'd ever stop laughing. A couple of years ago she published a family history book that became the top award-winning publication with the Germans from Russia Society. As she crowed and preened her feathers, I slinked away to do my own modest little thing.

Katie Couric interviewed the vice presidential candidates, and in one segment asked them to name their favorite movie. Joe Biden named "Chariots of Fire" and gave some insightful reasons why he felt so. Sarah Palin listed a couple, the names of which I've forgotten, but she liked them because they were about winners. It caused me to think what might be my favorite, and I would probably say "Saving Private Ryan." I've read a lot of history, but no amount of reading could let me imagine how horrendous the invasion of those beaches must have been. The scenes in movie were as close to realism as can be portrayed by actors and special effects, or at the least that is what I think. As time passes I realize I relate to the after effects the surviving veterans live with. So much gets said now about post-traumatic stress syndrome, but at the time it was not recognized as an ailment.

As a kid growing up I remember seeing many veterans spending a good deal of time in the bars drinking. I know now they were trying to dull their senses and memories of their wartime experiences. Unfortunately, they got pegged as drunks while scenes of death and destruction swirled in their heads. I'm sure battlefield veterans from any of world history's wars experience those same feelings and find it hard to function in a society that expects a certain homogenized behavior. I can only wish now that I had been more sensitive to these veterans. In brief that is why I think "Saving Private Ryan" tops my list of favorite movies.