“What was at the heart of those days? Things like the taste of bread right out of the oven when you were good and hungry. The smell of newly plowed earth. A horse munching oats and bending its head to be rubbed. The way the late, flat sun sent long slants of light across the prairie grass.”
I save quotations by scribbling them down in notebooks and then forget about them until running across them again, sometimes years later while searching for ideas. When after reading them I find they still resonate, then I am glad that I took the time to copy them. The above lines were taken from the book Those Days: An American Album by Richard Richfield (1931-1994). Critchfield earned recognition as a war correspondent, then as the author of several books. He happens to have been a North Dakotan, born and raised in Hunter. I remember him from the days when I spent a little time looking up information in NDSU’s Institute for Regional Studies. He, too, sat at a table in the midst of several printed works which he’d placed in a haphazard semi-circle and worked diligently away. When I looked at the copyright date of this book, 1986, I believe that An American Album ended up as the product of those hours I saw him sitting there. He stood not very tall and wore the thickest glasses I’d ever seen, but physical attributes aren’t necessary; his command of the English language excelled, and he wrote his prose so well and readable that I find it a pleasure to open the book at any point and read a few paragraphs.
Critchfield bears emulating; he, along with dozens of other accomplished writers, serves as a guidepost to follow. If I were to have written the opening quotation, it may have come out like this --- Many pleasant memories survive my late childhood, things like the taste of warm lefse, straight from the griddle, on which I smear butter that melts and runs from the rolled ends, the smell of freshly mown alfalfa or fermented, sour silage that makes me think of sauerkraut, a dog stretching out to let me scratch her belly, and the sounds of gentle breezes magnified in the rustling leaves of the cottonwoods. A Pulitzer Prize will never be awarded for those words, but I enjoyed the sensory trip it took me on.
Paging through Critchfield I randomly stopped at page 225 and read this: Whenever freight trains came through town, migrant workers would be riding on the boxcar roofs. The country’s farm economy had never recovered from the collapse of 1920 . . . a migrant army was on the move. . . Some of these men had been on the road for years - jumping freights, hitchhiking, panhandling, shunting back and forth across the country in hopes of a job. They slept in haylofts or bunkhouses . . . nomads nobody wanted to see except in the August-to-October threshing season. Dad has talked long and often about these men that his father would hire at harvest time, but the Sheldon poet Tom McGrath in his book length poem Letter to an Imaginary Friend described their lot most graphically when he wrote of the hired man named Cal whom McGrath’s uncle, the boss of the harvest crew, beat mercilessly when the threat of their unionizing through the Wobblies movement became known to him. McGrath, the young boy, witnessed this spectacle:
We were threshing flax I remember, toward the end of the run-
After quarter-time I think - the slant light falling
Into the blackened stubble that shut like a fan toward the headland -
The strike started then. Why then I don’t know.
Cal spoke for the men and my uncle cursed him.
I remember that ugly sound, like some animal cry touching me
Deep and cold, and I ran toward them
And the fighting started.
My uncle punched him. I heard the breaking crunch
Of his teeth going and the blood leaped out of his mouth
Over his neck and shirt-…
I find great pleasure in reading the literature written by great authors and enjoy making connections of these works like I have just made between Critchfield and McGrath. My deepest regret is and always will be that I have not read enough since I wasted my time doing other things for too many years.
