As the Crow Flies

Snow keeps piling up around these parts. I told Mary we’re getting set up for a good three day blizzard; those high banks plowed off to the side of the streets would fill to the tops, and we’d have to sit waiting for heavy machines to come in to clear the roads. A December snowfall record has fallen — 42.3 inches, over twice the average amount. The local reporting station is located at the Bismarck airport, but as the proverbial crow flies that spot is only about two miles from here, so that amount more than likely holds true for our location, too.
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I can tell another story regarding the line a crow flies. For several years I’ve been gathering information on the old time ox-cart freighters who crossed my home area hauling their loads, much of it between Fort Abercrombie and Fort Ransom. Their two major routes meandered a bit, one followed the high water route and the other the low water route. The low water route followed a more direct path between the forts. When the Sheyenne River ran low some accessible fords let them make better time on their journey.

We used to put up hay on a virgin sod meadow on the farm where I grew up, and I remember my tractor bumped over deep ruts each time I mowed or raked across it. Dad told me it was an old prairie road, but little else was said. Lately I’ve gotten to wondering if those tracks may have been part of the low-water route so I have spent some time in the Heritage Center library looking at old maps. There I found an old atlas dated 1884 that lays out a beautiful picture of how the land looked. On it two principal locations gave me information I wanted. On Christmas Day I brought the subject up with Dad again and he told me that an old-timer told him the trail in question was the Owego to Sheldon road and that he had hauled mail over it for a time. Given that information I laid a ruler between the two settlements of Owego and Sheldon and its crow fly line intersects our old meadow perfectly. So I can’t claim to have found an ox-cart trail, but I proved something else that was personal to me and that is satisfying.

My research will result in my writing a long poem, and this one verse came to me:

Handed this piece of the past
that otherwise would fall prey
to the vast Pit of Forget,
I recalled the times when I,
astride my hayfield tractor,
double-bounced over the cusp
of those ruts and cussed at their
presence.

Presidential Stuff

George W. Bush is this country’s forty-third president, and most of us are ready for number forty-four. I believe Mr. Obama is taking the right course by being relatively quiet as we approach his inauguration. He says we have only one president at a time. Bush can earn his paycheck until then and take the credit or discredit for what transpires. It appears as though Obama closely studies the presidency of President Lincoln; there is probably none better to take as a role model.

Santa Claus brought me the book of the second president that I had wished for: John Adams by David McCullough. I have opened it to read a few pages, and it looks to be a great read. Adams has probably been overshadowed by the book-end presidents of Washington before him and Jefferson behind him, but my previous reading illustrated how important a leader he was at our country’s outset.

He was at odds with Jefferson throughout his presidency and served just one term after Jefferson defeated him. One quote attributed to Adams was “Thanks to God that he gave me stubbornness when I know I am right.” Because he was stubborn he kept the U.S. out of war when France attacked our ships at sea. He knew we were not prepared for a military action, but instead he proceeded with diplomatic action. When talks were taking place he approved the building of six new ships, one of which was the U.S. Constitution. He wanted to be prepared for the next incident. He was the first occupant of the White House and a note he left upon leaving was carved into the mantel of the State Dining Room: “I pray Heaven to bestow the best of Blessings on this House and all that shall hereafter inhabit it. May none but honest and wise Men ever rule under this roof.” He died at the age of ninety, the longest living president until he was surpassed by Ronald Reagan who lived to be ninety-three. Then Gerald Ford broke Reagan’s record when he lived to be 45 days older.

The Best Laid Plans...

The English poet Robert Burns wrote this line in the poem To a Mouse on Turning Her Up in Her Nest with the Plough: “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley.” To translate from the olde English he said “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” We discovered quite rapidly our responsibility lies here in North Dakota so we have canceled our planned bus tour to the Southwest.

Some days ago Mary’s dad, 92, slipped on the ice and fell breaking the femur bone quite badly in his right leg. He has been hospitalized ever since and will need close attention for some time. Recently a phone call from my dad informed us my mother, 88, was taken by ambulance to an emergency room in a Fargo hospital to reset a dislocated shoulder suffered from a fall. It was her second episode with the shoulder, the first being a visit to a local hospital and an overnight stay. Then, we also found out that my dad, 93, had fallen while taking garbage out to their dumpster and could not get back up and laid there about a half an hour before help came along.

We’re in the midst of a hard winter with lots of cold and snow. We have decided it is best to stay right here, stock up with lots of books, and offer as much assistance as we can to our parents.

Shoes and Stalin

More on shoes: I remember a time when I was guilty of throwing my shoe at a target, too. One day I sat relaxing in my house in Sheldon, and I saw movement in the entryway. Myron Boeder’s pet raccoon, an animal with a local reputation for being a fearless pest, had opened my screen door with his claws and strolled into the kitchen snooping around for some treats, I suppose. My shoes sat on the floor in front of me, and I reacted immediately by picking one up and flinging it hard in the animal’s direction. He moved much faster on the way out than on the way in, and thereafter I got in the habit of latching the door’s hook.
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A small article buried deep on page 4 of our local daily paper caught my eye with the headline Russian treason bill could hit critics. The lead sentence stated that “new legislation backed by Prime Minister Vladimir Putin would allow Russian authorities to label any government critic a traitor — a move that rights activists said...was a chilling throwback to times of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.”

If the present Russian leaders act as Stalin did then citizens of that country will again be severely restricted if they want to speak out against government leaders and policies. To avoid punishment for treason individuals will have to restrain and censor their speech and actions. History says Stalin in his “Great Purge” killed off thousands of people whom he perceived as being dissenters, including many of army’s top generals.

Leon Trotsky rose to a high leadership position after the Russian Revolution. Then when Stalin began to exercise his murderous tendencies Trotsky fled the country, eventually settling in Mexico City where he continued to verbally assail Stalin’s tactics. Stalin quieted him though when he sent an assassin. Trotsky, unwittingly, welcomed this man into his home to hold a discussion. The assassin had a pick axe hidden under his topcoat and struck Trotsky in the head with it. His last words were “I think Stalin has finished the job he has started.”

Tragic-Comedy: Shoe Throwing

President Bush got a pair of shoes thrown at him in Baghdad, and I laughed along with all the jokes the comedians started making about it. In fact, I told Mary when I first saw the news of the incident that this will be a bonanza for the late-night talk shows. Well, I was right. The Huffington Post even features a video section where you can see several of the comedians accumulated in one clip: "Watch: Late-Night's Shoe Throwing Joke Bonanza." Last night Keith Olbermann talked to a comedian in a separate studio who ducked dozens of shoes thrown at him. But it's probably enough already!

I thought about it a bit and have concluded this is a tragic-comedy. Bush's demeanor at the time was admirable in that he tried to downplay it by saying something like that can happen in a free society. The tragedy is that we make our President into something like a buffoon and that the amount of respect paid to him has fallen to this level. Rodney Dangerfield made the quotable remark "I don't get no respect," and unfortunately that's where Bush is at. I'm glad a changing of the guard is near at hand.

Brrr!

Brrr! and Baby, it’s cold outside! With wind chill the temperature is 41 degrees below zero. Our short but severe blizzard moved on but didn’t want us mere mortals to forget, so it left us with temps registering in the lower levels of the thermometer after dumping a foot of snow. Yesterday after the wind lessened I cranked up my faithful John Deere snowblower to take the bulk of the snowbanks off the driveway and sidewalk and then went out this morning to clean up the sidewalk a bit, but I couldn’t stay out more than a couple of minutes. That air is just too sharp to be breathing while exerting. Thankfully it was a short storm. My standard for judging the severity of a blizzard always goes back to the one in March of 1966. It was the worst one in my memory. It was for other people, too, enough so that two gentlemen, Douglas Ramsey and Larry Skroch, published a book in 2004 entitled One to Remember: The Relentless Blizzard of March 1966 containing 661 pages of small type.

The tally of lives lost in that storm came to 18 humans plus uncounted livestock deaths. I spent the three day storm cooped up in a house in Bowdon, North Dakota that I shared with two other bachelor teachers. Believe me, the time passed very slowly. My mother got caught home alone, and luckily when the electricity failed the heating system in the house didn’t require blowers to radiate heat. Dad spent the time at a meeting in Fargo and couldn’t make it back. The cows didn’t get fed for awhile. In the book reference was made of my aunt Lorraine Devitt who stayed to work in a Lisbon nursing home for 30 hours straight before someone could get there to replace her so she could go home to rest.

As I write this I am listening to a radio talk show and hear several old timers call in to speak of the March 15 blizzard of 1941. A Google search turned up these statistics: only one inch of snow fell but 75 mph winds accompanied it and 39 lives were lost in North Dakota and 29 in Minnesota. As we’ve traveled around the country a bit the usual comment from people, upon learning we are from North Dakota, is “I hear it gets cold up there.” Duh.

A Blizzard and a Veteran

The threat of a blizzard roaring through our region this weekend hangs over us, and it makes me think about what needs doing before it hits. I’ve always said I don’t mind North Dakota winters so I’d better get mentally prepared for it. This morning I headed to the hospital again to visit the father-in-law who seems to be doing very well. Tomorrow will be a two-for-one visit since my sister-in-law will also be a patient on the same orthopedic floor with a knee replacement job.

I enjoy meeting people with interesting stories to tell. This morning we had to wait in the hospital hallway while nurses tended to Adam, and as we did so the gentleman in the next room stood in his doorway trying to get a staff person’s attention. After a bit one of the aides came and asked him what he needed, his answer was “Coffee, please.” He spoke to us in his Massachusett’s accent, and it wasn’t long before I realized he wanted to talk to someone. He told us he’d been hospitalized because he’d had a stroke. It didn’t take long before he said he was a veteran of the Korean War and was thinking of finding a veteran’s home. I mentioned the new one under construction in Lisbon but he didn’t care much if it was new or not but what kind of people ran it. We needed to report everything we said so it wasn’t long before I saw him dig a small hearing aid out of his pocket and fit it to his ear.

He walked with a limp so I asked if he had been in combat; he told of two bullet wounds in his leg and a bayonet stab wound in his shoulder. Yes, it was hand-to-hand combat. Was he a rifleman or a machine-gunner? He was a chaplain’s assistant. I was unsure if a clergy type carried weapons. He said, “I carried a .45 pistol, but I couldn’t shoot it with a Bible in my hand!” Apparently he had to set the Bible down since every able bodied man was needed to repel the waves coming at their hilltop position. By then, he had visibly tired and wanted to go back to lie down. I think I’m going to try and find him tomorrow and visit with him again.

Turns of Fate

We were reminded Monday evening of the speed at which a life can turn around. My father-in-law, 92, walked to his mailbox at the front of the house and slipped and fell on a patch of the treacherous ice that accumulated in our area. Wearing only a vest he was not prepared to lay in the below zero wind chill we had at the time. He hollered for his daughter in the house, but since his voice has weakened with age he did not make himself heard. Luckily, a house dog did hear him and signaled Sharon that something terrible happened. His persistence clued her to investigate after some minutes had elapsed, and she found him where he had fallen. She called 911, then us, and by the time we arrived at the scene five minutes later the ambulance and a fire truck were already on the scene.

In the ambulance he did not complain much about the pain, but rather how cold he was. Not to make the story much longer, he got hooked up with a good orthopedic surgeon who operated yesterday morning and put a rod into his badly broken femur bone, and, voila, Adam took his first steps on it today already.

Many of these old-timers possess incredible inner strength with a strong will to survive and do not let things such as this get them down. I think, too, of my parents who have been hospitalized and rose to live active lives again. For some reason the poem "Invictus" popped into my head as I thought about it all:

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate;
I am the captain of my soul.

(In Latin, Invictus means unconquered.)

A Fable

I don't spend a lot of time reading the countless stories that get forwarded in my email, but the following one made sense to me, so it is my blog for the day.

Once upon a time a man appeared in a village and announced to the villagers that he would buy donkeys for $10 each. The villagers, seeing that there were many donkeys around, went out and started catching them. The man bought thousands at $10 and, as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He next announced that he would now buy donkeys at $20 each.

This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching donkeys again. Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of donkeys became so scarce it was an effort to even find a donkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy donkeys at $50 each! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would buy on his behalf.

In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers: "Look at all these donkeys in the big cage that the man has already collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each." The villagers rounded up all their savings and bought all
the donkeys for 700 billion dollars.

They never saw the man or his assistant again, only lots and lots of asses!

Now you have a better understanding of how the WALL STREET BAILOUT PLAN WILL WORK !!!!

Research

On my way to Bismarck this morning I noticed ice floes in the Missouri River. Winter! My destination was the Heritage Center’s library to do some research on a few townships located in my home area: Greene, Owego, and Shenford. Since publishing my humble book of poetry I have suffered through a non-productive time. My mind has been blank except for a couple of decent poems I’ve been able to conjure up. I need many more if I’m to publish a second volume. Then out of the blue a whole trainload of ideas ran by which has prompted me to get excited about researching for them.

Idea # 1: As a young lad, I raked hay in an old meadow of virgin sod and always bumped across a pair of deep-rutted tracks that ran the width of the field. From where they came and to where they headed I often wondered. Then the epiphany struck — were they part of the old ox cart trail that ran from Fort Abercrombie to Fort Ransom? My trip to the heritage library to find old Ransom County atlases resulted in my copying a few pertinent township maps, namely Greene, Owego, and Shenford. With them I gained the section coordinate numbers to compare to locations listed in old research articles I copied several years ago when I became interested in one of the old ox cart freighters, Donald Stevenson. It is an interesting project. Some imaginative soul gave Shenford its name because of the crossing of the Sheyenne River was only SHIN-deep and can be easily FORD-ed. With the application for their post office the spelling Shinford was submitted, but it came back as today’s spelling Shenford. I don’t know if I can identify that two-wheel track in the meadow, but I’ll sure have fun trying.

Idea # 2: A few years ago I got extremely interested in a bucking horse in this area that was never be ridden except for one disputed time. It was before the modern rules of rodeo were written, so even with the cruel and unfair advantages riders possessed when they mounted him he fought back with fury. He was rejected as a World War I mount destined for the battlefields of France because of being unbreakable and escaped the glue factory because his owners saw money in him as rodeo stock. In the end he had been turned out to free range pasture and died unheralded in a blizzard. I wrote a long, rambling poem about him and read it at the Cowboy Poetry Gathering, but I know now I can make great improvement over that first effort.

Idea(s) # 3: Both Mary and I have collected numerous stories of ancestors who all suffered hardships. Their stories will soon be forgotten unless they are preserved in some literary form, just as the above two ideas need be.

Idea # 4: Many more will come my way. We attended our bank’s appreciation holiday feed last evening where we ran into two people we traveled with on our recent trip to Branson. They complimented me on the poetry book I gave to them and the couple they were with wondered if it was cowboy poetry. I stated some were but there are so many other good poems to write, too. So off I go.

Blood Letting

This morning I sat in the blood donor chair again and gave one unit of red blood cells and two of plasma. It takes awhile, probably an hour counting the intake interview, then they want you to sit in their waiting room for fifteen minutes before leaving. I don’t mind sitting the extra time because I partake of lots of their free pop and snacks. While the pump was drawing blood out of my body and circulating solution back in I had time to look around. One gentleman came after I was settled in and I couldn’t help but notice that he wore something remarkable - jeans with patches on the knees.

My mind turned to the archaic system of blood letting to cure sick people of their ailments, and those procedures weren’t very sophisticated. In fact, the barbers did a lot of the work including tooth extraction. Today’s barber poles with their red and white stripes reflect that. The pole represents the stick that the patients gripped in misery, and the stripes the bloody bandages that were wrapped around to dry. The shaped bottom of a pole represents the leech pot.

One of the first medical clinical trials on record took place in France in 1836. There a doctor treated pneumonia with blood letting, and some he didn’t. After a period of time he noticed the pile of dead bodies stood taller where they were stacked by the blood letting sink than the untreated pile. He determined that blood letting probably harmed the patients. Quite an epiphany, I’d say.

As far as famous people treated with the procedure I read where Andrew Jackson submitted. My history said, “Periodically, he experienced episodes of hemorrhaging and difficulties breathing, for which he was bled.”

Frosty Morning

A frost fog clouded the valley floor this morning; at the edge of this opaque whiteness emerged a herd of deer, a wonderful sight! We’ve counted close to a hundred deer at times that come to eat at the dormant alfalfa in this large acreage. Throughout the year several species of wildlife romp in that field: turkeys, pheasants, coyotes, deer, and who knows what else. At times they have visited Mary’s gardens, a fact attested to by the footprints we find.
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Since graduating from or attending colleges and universities, Mary and I receive regular mailings from their alumni offices in the guise, of course, of keeping us informed of our “beloved” alma maters. Their ability to keep track of us in our moves is really uncanny; they’d sure love to get a piece of our estates when we leave this old earth. Admittedly, there are bits of interest in these publications, and last week I received The Bulletin from Valley City State University where I read of the passing of an old history professor of mine, Dr. Donald Welsh. I remember especially one day in his class. It was a sad time in our country. I had learned just a few minutes earlier that President Kennedy had been shot. Dr. Welsh came in visibly saddened and told us our history class would not be held that day. For about a week a gloomy pall hung over everyone’s head.
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Who will replace Hillary now that she has been nominated as Secretary of State? I think one name I’ve heard mentioned was done in jest - Bill Clinton. I don’t think the U. S. Senate is a big enough field for him to play in, but it is not without precedent that a past president gets elected to congress. In my history book I read that our sixth president, John Quincy Adams, served seventeen years in the U. S. House of Representatives after his term of presidency.