Dad's Memory

Sitting at this keyboard the day after we returned from Lisbon after another two-day stay I can take time to think about the people I am descended from. My folks now reside there in the Parkside Home, and Mary and I each week have been taking regular trips to their apartment to sort and pack things in preparation for an auction sale on May 30. We’ve come across many things of a high-interest nature such as old cards, letters, and pictures, and during the 3:00 coffee hour at Parkside we sit and ask questions about them.

The ladies at the home were all a-twitter yesterday because it was their inaugural organizational meeting of a “Red Hat Society.” It so happened I had taken to Dad a red cap emblazoned with “Sheldon Shadows” so Ma able to wear that until we shop for something more appropriate. I had wheeled Dad down there too because we thought we were going to have our coffee with them, but, no, they kicked us out, ladies only. So we returned to the spot where the men were being served. Their discussion turned to weather and Dad started remembering the spring of 1936 when he said he and a hired man put in the crop with horses, and it was so cold they had to walk behind the horses to keep warm. A question arose: was it the year the dust blew so bad? No, that was 1934.

I had taken pictures to the folks so they could identify for posterity the people on them. While we were waiting for the ladies to crown their queen and finish with festivities we went down to his room and looked at pictures. I found that I couldn’t write fast enough because of the wellspring of information that flowed by the gallons. A picture of his brother Leslie holding four work horses brought this comment: That’s Queen, Topsy, Bird, and Dolly, and Queen was a daughter of Topsy. I eventually got Bird and Russell got the two white ones. The memory was pretty strong. I’d guess that photo was seventy-five years old.

A photo, about 85 years old, of a threshing scene we’d blown up to fit on an 8 ½ by 11 sheet soon filled completely on the back side with written reminisced information. It was snapped about 1927 and pictured his Dad’s threshing machine, a Nicholson-Shepard Red River Special that was worn out by the time Dad worked with it and consequently seemed like it was always broken down. Two men shown were Nels Bjerke on the left with horse team of Sam and Molly, and Ludvig Davidson on the right with Cub and Jesse. The tractor powering the machine was an Allis-Chalmers 20/35. The facts kept pouring forth. The 1924 Model T touring car had been modified into a pickup and Grandpa came to own it by trading his Willys 6 to Richard Fritz even-up. Oh, by the way, when Dad was ten years old the Model T was the first car he ever drive.

The earlier mentioned Ludvig Davidson once hired Dad to help him haul hay for two days and paid him $4 for his labor. Grandma Bueling, his mother, was so happy because then Dad could buy a pair of Star Brand shoes to wear while, at nine years of age, he ran a McCormick binder. Otherwise, he would have had to work barefooted in the grain field.

Dad has always had a soft spot for the heavy work horses did during this period and told of a time he hauled grain on a gravel road and how sore their feet got. It also was hard on the wooden wagon wheels so at the end of the day he ran the wagon into some water so the spokes would soak and tighten up a bit. The memories never stopped coming. I am going to start carrying my recorder so I don’t have to write so fast. Then, the ladies came back energized from their Red Hat gathering so our history lesson drew to a close.

Nightcrawlers

Last Friday on Katie Couric’s CBS news program I watched a feature that brought back a memory. Steve Hartman has been doing similar things on the show that Charles Kuralt used to do before he passed away, and he revisited a place called Sopchoppy, Florida. Kuralt had talked to people who did “worm grunting,” whereby a wooden stake was driven into the ground and a steel bar was rubbed across the end grains to produce a loud vibrating or grunting sound. The racket caused night crawler worms to come out of their holes where they could be picked up by would-be fish bait salesmen. It is thought the worms feared a mole was burrowing for them, so they climbed up into the daylight to escape the predator. During Kuralt’s interview with one of the hunters he got him to admit making about $200 per week gathering the little critters. Unfortunately, for him and others like him it got the attention of the IRS people who came and made them claim the income. When Hartman repeated the same question 25-30 years later, no one would confess to the income they made. They had become “media-savvy,” but they were still rasping the steel across the end grain and gathering buckets of the bait.

The memory revived in me had to do with gathering night crawlers, too. We were students at Valley City State when someone suggested we gather some bait. Immediately, I had visions of “snipe hunting” and feared they would try to make me the butt of some outlandish joke. I’m pretty sure we were fueled and fired up with beer in our bellies so I let myself get talked into the adventure. The city park became the scene, and we were cautioned to walk quietly watching the ground carefully while the experienced one shone a flashlight down. Here’s where I suspected the snipe-hunt: we were told that when we saw a night crawler stretched across the ground, yet anchored with one end of his body in his hole, that we were to dive for it, that they were very quick. Disbelief and skepticism overtook me then. How could a worm move quickly? “There’s one, see ’im? You were too slow! He disappeared.” Not seeing it, I knew then I was being toyed with. But a couple of the others kept diving to the ground on their knees and, sure enough, they were coming up with the prize. The whole episode struck me as being so ludicrous and funny that all I could do was double up with laughter; I doubt that I ever did catch one. Gradually, as the night wore on, I became a believer, but it’s an episode from carefree youth that brings a smile to my face each time I think back on it.

This, too, Shall Pass

Spring has come all at once! Every slough, creek, and river has filled to overflow and race down any route it can find. In the hill country around here the water runs out of all the ravines and gullies, collects into larger flows, and really makes its presence known. But because it is hilly it will be over just as fast as it started. Interstate 94 got shut down between us and Jamestown for a day. After the spring of ’97 road crews constructed higher road beds on it in a couple of spots, and now, since other water-vulnerable spots have shown up, that road equipment will probably be at it again. I heard on local radio about the hardships that have been created out in the countryside: washed out railbeds, washed out gravel roads, washed out bridges, etc. The after effects of all this water will be felt for some time.

Last week I spent a couple of days in Lisbon for family business and saw lots of activity there in anticipation of the Sheyenne River’s rise. Lots of dump trucks hauled dirt to build dikes; flat bed trailers loaded with pallets of sandbags traveled through town all day; National Guard equipment, vehicles and personnel were in abundance; and evacuation plans were being made for the hospital and soldier’s home. Ironically, just a couple weeks previous to this, Lisbon facilities housed some evacuees from the Fargo flood. My parents now both reside in the Parkside Lutheran Home in Lisbon which, fortunately, sits on high ground.

The high water lets me appreciate a period of local history I’m presently studying; it is the freighting industry where carts and wagons pulled by ox teams served Forts Abercrombie and Ransom. Two routes were established to get from one place to the other - a low water route and a high water route. When able to travel the low water route, they could have forded the Sheyenne in a couple of spots to follow a direct route. Obviously this spring they would have had to take the longer high water route which departed in a southerly direction from the Owego settlement to follow a large bend in the Sheyenne River and then headed westward to what is now Lisbon and then beyond to Fort Ransom. It would have taken longer, maybe a couple of days. Today, if farm families aren’t completely cut off they may have to find longer high water routes, also.

Forty Years Ago

Yesterday I rummaged through a drawer where some of my keepsakes lay which are, for the most part, seldom looked at. After I left graduate school I decided to purchase for myself a college class ring. Well, there it sat looking pretty much like a new one since I never wore it that much. The year of graduation inscribed on it made me take notice, and I’ve been reminiscing about those days ever since. Nineteen sixty-nine was the year, and when I did a little simple math I realized it has been 40 years since I graduated with my master of arts degree. I remember that year with pleasure; along with studies we had a great social time. There were about a dozen of us taking classes in the administration department; we were a diverse lot who established the Driftwood Lounge in Greeley as the headquarters for our shenanigans, story-telling, and general all-around shiftless behavior.

Colorado, still not over-populated at the time, possessed many scenic wonders, and I got around to see them as much as I could. Looking westward from the campus the Rocky Mountains rose high and sharply serving as a source of eye-candy for this flatlander. I still remember the time when large flakes of snow floated on the air, and a girl who had never seen snow fall sat transfixed in front of the student union’s west windows. She probably remembers seeing snow for the first time in her life; I remember the total scene: the girl, the snow, the mountains.

How can I forget to mention the odor of manure that swept the campus each time the wind blew from the northwest. The Monfort Feed Lot with 100,000 head of cattle fattening in its pens reminded us of their presence, and as they always said in Wahpeton with its foul smell of sugar beet processing, that’s the smell of money. I believe Monfort’s capacity has grown, but it has also relocated its operation to a more favorable position as regarding its wind-borne odors.

Forty years! So much has transpired over that period of time. A wife, two sons, grandchildren, jobs, and now retirement. The responsibilities a person assumes can almost hobble him at times, and the scars a man bears have been earned. I just typed and framed a quotation from Tennyson’s poem Ulysses:

“Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are…”

No matter what I wish now that I would have done or shouldn’t have done with my life, I will continually remind myself “that which we are, we are.” Colorado was one of the bright spots, and it came at the end of an odyssey similar to Ulysses' when I drove to Alaska searching for great things, ended up in Greeley in graduate school, and lived the first days of the rest of my life.

Is It Spring Yet?

We’re experiencing the kind of winter that the rest of the country thinks we always have. Here it is April 1 and it’s still here. In my limited travels it has never been unusual for people, upon learning I live in North Dakota, to make off-the-cuff statements like “It’s cold up there, isn’t it,” “Those winters you have aren’t for me,” or “We sure laughed when we saw that electric plug-in cord hanging from the front end of your car.” I hope this isn’t the first of a series of bad winters again. When I was a young lad it seemed as it we were always blocked in during the winter. I remember when cars were often left sitting out at the head of the driveway because we couldn’t drive into the yard.

The flood threat seems to have passed for now, at least in the Fargo and Bismarck areas, but we’ve got a heck of a lot of snow to melt again since this last blizzard dumped a pile. In fact, the snow had melted right down, but now we have to start all over again with the thaw. The record keepers say we are just within an inch or two of having the most snow ever.

We live close to the Heart River which feeds into the Missouri River, which is also close. Water rose to high levels in those rivers, mostly attributed to ice jams. A week ago I couldn’t get over how high and wide the Heart River was running. It was packed with chunks of ice and tree branches. It reminded me of a herd of four-legged critters running through a chute, and it moved me to versify:

March 22, 2009

Heart River water
ran wide, deep, and fast beneath
the Sitting Bull Bridge
carrying grinding ice floes,
a stampeding herd
of buffalo choked into
a closing canyon.
Hunters crouched, aiming cameras
from the banks, marksmen
intent on bagging trophies
to boast while seated
around family room fires.
Then, as that deluge
passed, those foot thick carcasses
lay strewn on the banks and fields
to melt under the spring suns.