I Was Thinking...

I was thinking that...
* Mary sure can grow pretty flowers.
* I don't know the name of any of them.
* I'm glad I got done mowing this morning before it got any hotter.
* I will be surprised when the Repubs/Tea Partiers find someone who can utter two sentences without sticking his/her foot in his/her mouth.
* Mary sure is a good cook.
* A chicken crossing the road is poultry in motion.
* I wish I was back in college studying harder.
* Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
* I wish I had read better literature way back when.
* Mary's eyes sparkle when she gets mad at me.
* The definition of a will is a dead give-away.
* I wish I knew a good Ole and Lena story - wait... here's one:

One night a torrential rain soaked up the countryside and the waters rose several feet. Mrs. Johnson was sitting on her roof with Lena waiting for help. She noticed a cap floating near the house. Then she saw it float far out into the front yard, then float back to the house; it kept floating away from the house, then back towards the house. Her curiosity got the best of her, so she asked, "Lena, do you see dat der cap a floatin' away from da house, den back again?" Lena replied, "Oh yeah, dats my husband Ole; I tole dat lazy such and such he vas gonna cut da grass, come hell or high water."

They say the trees are dying

The river running between Bismarck and Mandan still flows fast and deep. Sometime after the first week of July is the time the Corps of Engineers will gradually begin shutting down the gates at Garrison Dam. An article in the Sunday Bismarck Tribune spoke of another problem arising: the trees setting in water will die due to lack of oxygen. That will add to the catastrophe because of the unsightliness of dead trees. The forestation along the river is beautiful, thick and lush, but now that will be lost. The real estate mantra of location, location, location backfired in this setting for the coming years. The picture of the railroad bridge pretty well illustrates the point. The structure will be denuded, no trees will stand between it and me when I take pictures in the future.

One newly married couple featured in today's newspaper had to forgo their honeymoon and stay home to fight the water. Another lady just retired from her job but cannot go home to enjoy herself, they've rented a little apartment to see themselves through the flood. Those stories and hundreds of others are being told. The young marrieds will see themselves through into the future, but retirees don't have as many years left to rebuild.

At the Convention

The Western Writers of America convention still runs through tomorrow, Saturday. I've enjoyed being in attendance, meeting people from all over the country and listening to their tales. One acquaintance made, Dr. Richard Slatta, is the son of my high school freshman English teacher, and my school superintendent, his father. Fortunately, I experienced great instruction in my English classes for all four years and now was pleasantly surprised to learn Mrs. Slatta still lives in Oregon, and though she doesn't see well, she at 102 years of age remains clear minded and plays the piano. He says he will ask her if she remembers me. My journey with learning the grammar of the English started in high school, and then in college it really received a boost: I took a year of German from a taskmaster named Frau Braun. I still remember studying very hard one night and like an epiphany the world of language usage seemed to unfold. I've grown rusty since I did not practice it enough in my working years, but it slowly returns and I have pleasant thoughts about the whole affair.

Membership

This week the national convention for the Western Writers of America convened in Bismarck. It is a group I've always thought I would like to join, but being they always met elsewhere I never did get around to discussing my eligibility for membership through the mail. This week I worked up a representative portfolio of material I have written and presented it to the membership chairman. After looking it over he said the only thing left for me to do was hand him a check for dues. So now I am a bona fide associate member of this national group. I told Mary that I'd better crank out some good material to prove I am worthy of membership.

On Monday evening we attended an event featuring a panel made up of a few of the prominent members. One of them was the producer of the HBO series on the second president John Adams. I own the DVD set of this show and have watched it, three times because it is so well done and interesting. Today I sat in on a discussion topic of researching the military frontier, and one of the participants was the author of the book from which the recent movie "Crazyheart" was developed, and in which Jeff Bridges won the Academy Award for his acting performance.

Next year the convention is in Albuquerque. Hmmm ... I wonder...

Aging

I am a dues paying member of Anytime Fitness, an exercise club in Mandan. Some of the same people can be seen pretty regularly working out whenever I go, usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. One of them is a grizzled old Vietnam veteran whose license plate I've noticed bears the Purple Heart decoration. Stand-offish a bit at first but now easy to approach, I struck up a short conversation with him one day about how much harder it is to work out now that we've gotten older. Soon we were talking about how we could work long hours hauling hay bales when younger. For some reason I then thought I could quote Tennyson's line from the 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... He was quick to reply, "Yah, and Popeye said 'I am what I am.'" His comic strip humor trumped my literary quote, and I've had a couple of good laughs with my wife when recalling it here at home.

I see the picture I took yesterday of the barn and windmill tower as a metaphor for the aging process and accepting the present state for what it is. They too have gotten old, but with a little fixing up could still be useful.

Blue Ribbon Heifer

How old was I, maybe 12? Proudly I stood holding the holstein heifer that I showed as a 4-H project. I was training her to lead when my mother caught me with her Kodak, and the picture shows, if viewed very closely that I was not using a show halter, but a stall tie-up that worked pretty well for this docile heifer. I showed her at the Lisbon 4-H Achievement Days and the day is still bright in my memory. There were 10 or 12 animals in this particular class and we did our thing circling in the ring under the gaze of the dairy judge. He started shuffling animals around
to place us, and after a bit, I found myself and heifer standing at one end of the formation. Naive as all get-out I think I expected further juggling. No, he had made his decision and my heifer stood as the best in her class and received a blue ribbon. The judge made comments about her nice conformation, but added one bit of advice: he said I should be using a show halter. Of course my mindset became rectifying this problem, and in the following weeks I solved it.

I spotted a nice white leather number hanging behind the counter in Merlin's Leather Goods store in Enderlin that priced out at a few bucks, and after going home and doing a little creative financing I bought it a while later. If my math serves me correctly this all transpired 57 years ago, and I still own that halter.

Stockyard Stories

Today a trip to the heritage library to read hundred year old news items from my hometown paper led me to this topic. Frontier journalism in those days, especially in the small town publications, printed lots of fun reading like this: "The Sheldon ball team was prepared to go to Leonard Tuesday morning and glom the cotton, or in plain lucid English, win the purse at the big ball tournament, but Jupitor Pluvius got in the job first with his sprinkling cart and Monday night and Tuesday morning the sky juice fell in such copious quantities that playing ball was out of the question..." and "The Owego ball team went to McLeod last Sunday and the swatters from that burg cleaned them up by a score 0f 11-5."

I liked this one, too: "A Brooklyn woman who sued a man for kissing her has secured damages in the amount of six cents. The man who got the kiss must feel pretty cheap." And the Mormons came around then, too: "Two Mormon elders were in Sheldon last Saturday attempting to convert our residents to the Mormon faith. We presume there is a shortage in the wife market and they were making an attempt to obtain a fresh supply. As far as we can learn they met with no success, even the bachelor girls being able to escape their eloquence."

The picture of the cattle car was posted to relate to this item: "The Southwestern Stockyards cafe is serving excellent meals a la carte to transients of the hobo genus. The vicinity of the stockyards is a favorite rendezvous for tourists of the side door Pullman class and when the pangs of hunger begin to afflict them they repair hither for the purpose of replenishing the inner man. Every man is his own cook and furnishes his own 'eats'". Seldom, if ever, have I ever seen reference to the stockyards in Sheldon, but I can still see it in my little-boy-eyes. It sat on the west side of town along the tracks, and I still clearly remember going to town one Saturday night and hearing one of my pals say, "I saw a bum hanging around there today, but Dad said to stay away from there!" So we did, but colorful stories were conjured up in our young minds.

How an image in a person's mind changes. When looking around the internet for cattle cars most of the references to them were associated with words like Bergen-Belson, Auschwitz, Jews, etc. My first thought would have been that of hauling cattle, but to many it means The Holocaust.

Tipperary

Several years ago I became interested in the story of a horse of which I have been trying to write my version. Numerous times I've written it and once even performed a version at the poetry gathering in Medora. The last re-write came about this past spring when in a poetry class I came up with the following version. Fellow class members liked it, or said they did, and one, Sheila Schafer, even purchased a hard-cover biography of Tipperary's story at the Western Edge store in Medora and gave it to me. How I came to be interested in the story will be told in another blog.

Tipperary by Lynn D. Bueling

When I was young Frenchmen came
buying herds of thousands of horses
like me to ship to their battlefields
and haul their cannons and wagons
through the mud and the bodies
of men fallen in the conflict.
They rejected me, my spirit too great
to be tamed for their use, but then my owner
thought that if I couldn't be ridden
my destiny lie in the rodeo arena.

With so many grimy hands holding
money wagered I earned repute
as the wild horse that couldn't be ridden.
The years passed and a couple did succeed,
once when I limped with my ankle injured.
My fury became hidden delight
when I threw the riders into the dirt,
even better yet when the ground was mud.

But I grew old, pain and stiffness settled
into my limbs, a ruined gladiator. To show
me off one last time, they paraded me
in Belle Fourche in front of a bandstand
while a band played my namesake "Tipperary."
I entered shaggy, sagging, mindless
of the spectators disappointed with my sad
appearance. But... that tune sent sparks
shooting through my veins, I threw
up my head, and stepped to the time
set by its measures, and I heard applause
again like old times past. The memory
lingered awhile after the music stopped,
but then I dropped my head and walked
away to face the storm.

Finally set free on a northern prairie
I wandered forgotten and stumbled
in drifts that came with the winter winds.
I died frozen, alone, with the wind howling
like the starved coyotes that gathered
to tear at my flanks. They found me
in the spring, my bones picked clean,
shining, white.

Things You Hear at an Auction

On Saturday we drove south and east of Mandan to attend Mary's sister and her husband's auction sale; they have decided to move off the farmstead where he has lived all of his 69 years and build a home in Mandan. Over the span of years a good deal of machinery and hardware accumulated so they liquidated to make room for their successors. I have always enjoyed hanging around auction sales and listening to the cry of the auctioneers, rubbing elbows with the crowd, and hearing stories being told. Flood stories floated: one I hadn't heard yet - deer are climbing the dikes and punching holes in the plastic with their little, pointy hooves.

I visited with the executive v.p. of the ND Stockmen's Ass'n (she happens to be my niece); her story of knowing one rancher in the northern part of the state who is forced to sell 350 cow-calf pairs illustrates the severity of the season and the hard conditions that have settled in. And rain it does! Last night a strong thunder storm dropped another inch of rain at our place with a strong chance of more rain each of the next seven days showing on our weather map. I thought the thunder and lightning had knocked out our wireless computer modem, but no... the tech guy came this morning. The only thing wrong was my screw-up in connecting wires to accommodate the new tv we hung in our kitchen yesterday.

Rock-lined Terraces

There's something about the randomness of these rock walls that I find attractive. I'd much rather see these shapes and forms than perfect rows and patterns. I took this picture standing on the lot that Mary's sister and husband purchased to build their home on and is only a few blocks from our home. It was when we drove up there to see their building site that I noticed this scene and resolved to return with my camera. A steep draw slopes off to the undeveloped area to the west, and lots of wildlife and cattle can be seen from the view. When I first saw them I was reminded of structured walls I'd seen pictured in magazines such as National Geographic that were located in places like Tibet, South America, and other places where tillable land was scarce and this was the answer to planting crops in severe inclines.

I first saw terraced land when I traveled south to harvest wheat in Kansas and Nebraska. There they make use of them on rolling land to stop the soil from eroding. The dirt berms were too steep to climb over with our machines so instead we followed their curves and combined parallel to them. Interesting patterns began to show through the stubble as we cut the wheat. By the way, the elevation of the land in the picture is about the highest Mandan offers. Stories of the flooding below us along the river will only get more grim. The crest won't hit until about a week from now, and a good deal of property will suffer.

Stepping Out

Mary tells me the name of this iris is "Stepping Out." And that is just what we did last night as we quietly celebrated our 37th wedding anniversary by going out to eat at the Texas Roadhouse. Quietly celebrating does not describe our wedding day, though. My friends and relatives who came over to Raleigh from the Sheldon area experienced a good party. Red Eye, a homemade concoction, if drunk too fast or too much really makes your knees weak, and that happened to some of the unwary. Kegs of beer, a sitdown meal, and live music really rounded out the day. Thirty seven years passed by just like that!

Watching "Pickers" on TV

Occasionally I like to watch the American Pickers tv show, and when I tuned in last night they visited a man who owned lots of old cars parked in dusty, leaky old buildings. For some reason the old cars made me think back to my old cars, especially my first one, a 1948 Chrysler, one like the picture above. Dad bought that car from Eph Loomer for $200 in 1958 because it had a fluid drive transmission that was easier for me to drive after my accident. This was in the
Elvis era when the young fellows were taking Fords and Chevies and customizing them to comply with the latest trends of the day. So here I came rolling down the streets in this big limousine. That car came to me in good condition featuring red plaid woolen seat upholstery, twin spotlights, and a tan paint job. I took lots of ribbing about my "tank" but for some reason no one ever complained about riding with me. I don't know of any pictures of that car and had to find this one on the internet. Years later, after I no longer owned it, I began thinking I'd like to have a picture and saw it parked in Smoky Sletmoe's pasture. When I finally got around asking him if I could tromp in there to snap some photos he informed me it had just gotten compacted and sold for scrap. Oh well, I've got my memories.

Then in another segment of the show the pickers found an Indian motorcycle that brought back some more memories. I had one experience with the old Indians. A friend, Larry Sprunk, owned one and offered me a ride one day. I got on behind him and held on tight (and tighter) as we began driving along a country road. As we picked up speed I knew he was driving fast, and at one point he hollered over the roar, "You just turned 80 on a dirt road!"

Another experience with motorcycles came when a classmate of my brother Howard, Lynn Bunn, came one day to help us move cattle. He was driving his 150 cc Honda, a very popular little bike in its day. After the cattle work was completed I asked him if I could take it for a spin and promptly killed the engine when I put it in gear. Thinking it was unpowered I gave it some gas the next try and I took off - straight into scrap metal piled at the edge of our shop. I twisted a knee in that wreck and limped around on crutches for a few days after that. I've since given up on motorcycles.

250 mm Zoom Lens, Part I

The University of Mary sits high on a bluff east of the Missouri River. On the back side of the library building one can walk close to the edge and look over. With my new zoom lens I looked to the north and saw this elementary school and a house near it that were well-ringed with high dikes of sandbags. Water is near, and with the river height projected to raise another two feet or so, it remains to be seen if all these dikes and hold or begin leaking or collapsing from the pressure. Literally hundreds of dump trucks are still hauling thousands of loads of clay to build miles of protection. A FEMA official inspected them and was featured on our TV news; he was well satisfied with the dikes' 40 foot width at the base and 10 foot width at their crown.

I am suddenly reminded of the flood in 1997 when it reached Grand Forks and inundated the downtown area and a fire broke out destroying several buildings. The slogan they adopted there was "Come Hell and High Water."

250 mm Zoom Lens, Part II

(For some reason I couldn't put three pictures on the same blog entry, still learning...)
We drove south a couple miles from the University of Mary and turned in where the sign said Kimball Bottoms. This is the scene we came upon. A couple of fellows had waded in and were having young man fun catching the carp that floated over the road. They had to be fast; this was not lazy water. From where I stood with the camera the sound of the water passing over the road sounded like a mountain waterfall. And this is just a little backwater creek! I might come back here when the river reaches its crest.



While at Kimball Bottoms, on the east side of the river, I visited with a guy on a motorcycle who told me a good view of the water could be had from near the Veteran's Cemetery, located on the west side. After driving over, I couldn't find a good spot for photos and decided instead to pull into the cemetery. This is a well-maintained site; many of the gravestones still displayed their Memorial Day decorations, and with bird-song filling the air, we found it very peaceful out there.

We're ready

I've been accused many times of being full of B.S. and today will probably not be an exception, but I've mentioned before that given our house elevation the only danger we have could possibly be a failure to the sewage system in town. So --- the above picture shows my solution.

The Missouri River did reach flood stage this morning, something over 16' but in the next two days will come up another 2'. Those 2' will be the problem, some houses just won't make it. Some property resides outside of the dikes that have hurriedly been constructed. Last evening I returned home from my camera class driving on I-94 and was amazed at the number of loaded dump trucks rolling on to their assigned dike building. Miles of dikes are being built and a projected four million sandbags have been filled. We North Dakotans always prove to be resourceful as illustrated by this true story:

After having dug to a depth of 10 feet last year, New York scientists found traces of copper wire dating back 100 years and came to the conclusion that their ancestors already had a telephone network.

Not to be outdone by the New Yorkers, in the weeks that followed a California archaelogist dug to a depth of 20 feet, and shortly after, a story in the LA Times read: "California archaelogists, after finding 200 year old copper wire, have concluded that their ancestors had an advanced high-tech communications network a hundre years earlier than the New Yorkers."

One week later a local newspaper in ND reported the following: "After digging as deep as thirty feet in his pasture near Sheldon, Sven, a self-taught archaelogist, reported that he found absolutely nothing. Sven has therefore concluded that 300 hundred years ago, North Dakota had already gone wireless."

North Dakotans are such a proud bunch!!!