Moving a Mountain?

I ran across a quote from Ernest Hemingway that I had to copy down: Always do sober what you said you'd do drunk. That will teach you to keep your mouth shut! That was a lesson that came hard but it was a good one to learn. It was hard to save face when I said I could move mountains at night only to find the next day that all I could manage were a few shovelfuls.

I doubt whether the present presidential contenders drink much on the campaign trail, but they do seem inebriated with the attention given to them whenever they dismount their bus and start shaking hands with the crowds. So many promises get made, but those of us who have lived through lots of these campaigns know better. The reality of the office must be overwhelming to anyone who gets in there....

News from the oil patch in North Dakota keeps coming. In order to get a troublemaker out of Aspen, Colorado someone there bought him a bus ticket so he could come to North Dakota and get one of the plentiful jobs working in the oil boom. He already has had offers from a few people here to buy him a bus ticket back and get him out of here. It seems he got drunk when he got off the bus and urinated on the side of a building, so he's spent the last week in jail. He wants to go back to Aspen.

Reference to a great animated video appeared on www.northdecoder.com a couple of days ago under the blog headed "Weekenders (Year Enders?). It depicts the growth of oil drilling in NW North Dakota, and I could only think "Wow!" after watching it play to the end - it takes less than a minute.

Happy New Year!

Crescent Moon

A couple nights ago I looked into our southwestern sky and saw this crescent moon hanging in a clear sky. The sight reminded me of a time when my family and Mary's parents were riding in a car after touring some points of interest in the vicinity. Mary's mother looked up and saw this moon hanging in this orientation and said, "The old folks always said this is a dry moon. The rain sits in the curve and can't run out." I've often thought this statement is a good reason to listen to the older generation, because of the richness of the myths and legends they possess knowledge of.

The moon gets its share of attention with sayings like once in a blue moon, or he hung the moon, or barking at the moon, and if I looked hard enough I could find lots of other references to it.

The Indians referenced the moon when they gave names to the months based on the cycles of the moon. Each tribe said it differently. The Lakota called our month of February the Moon When the Trees Crack; Mandan-Hidatsa called April the Moon of the Breaking Up of Ice; Cheyenne called January the Moon of the Strong Cold and December the Moon When the Wolves Run Together; Chippewa called March the Snow Crust Moon, October the Falling Leaves Moon, and November the Freezing Moon; Apache called April the Moon of the Big Leaves; Assiniboine called June the Full Leaf Moon; etc. Seasonal and monthly cycles were powerful in the lives of primitive people. Science hadn't yet entered into their picture and they best explained their world with what they observed.

Ole always lurks in onecorner of my mind. He was asked one time which is more useful, the sun or the moon? Vell, I tink it's da moon because the moon shines at night when you want the light und the sun shines during the day when you don't need it.

Ole and Lars were walking home from the pub and Ole says to Lars, "What a bootiful night, just look at that moon up dere." Lars stops and stares at it and says, "Ole you'se wrong, dat's not the moon, dat's the sun." So they argued about that for awhile til they came on a very drunk man named Sven. "Say, help us out here. Vat's dat shining up dere? The moon or the sun?" Sven stared up high, then with crossed eyes back at them, "Beats me, I don't live around here."

The Day After Christmas

Browsing through my book shelves I pulled out a book where I had underlined several points. Curious as to why, I took some time to re-read them and now remember how I spent quite a little time musing over that book, Man's Unconquerable Mind by Gilbert Highet.

I marked one passage that stated "We are all cave men. The cave we inhabit is our own mind; and consciousness is like a tiny torch, flickering and flaring, which can at best show us only a few outlines of the cave wall..." As I write this my mind has focused on that one task. What I ate yesterday does not shoulder its way into my thoughts until, just now, I dredged it up.

This statement holds lots of truth for me, "Every human brain is filled with unused power. Out of all the billions of men and women who have lived, only a few hundred thousand have been able to employ so much of that power as to change the world. The rest have been dutiful or lazy, good or bad, sensuous or self-denying, thrifty or wasteful, cowardly or brave." Cream rises to the top.

The author liked Dante and said he felt and understood the insatiable longing for knowledge. He made Ulysses say to his sailors, "as they shrank from the horror of the unknown,

Consider well the seed from which you grew:
you were not formed to live like animals
but rather to pursue virtue and knowledge."

The summation of this author's philosophy is stated powerfully in this one long passage that I remembered him writing, "Day and night, from childhood to old age, sick or well, asleep or awake, men and women think. The brain works like the heart, ceaselessly pulsing. In its three pounds of weight of tissue are recorded and stored billions upon billions of memories, habits, instincts, abilities, desires and hopes and fears, patterns and tinctures and sounds and inconceivably delicate calculations and brutishly crude urgencies, the sound of a whisper heard thirty years ago, the resolution impressed by daily practice for fifteen thousand days, the hatred cherished since childhood, the delight never experienced but incessantly imagined, the complex structure of stresses in a bridge, the exact pressure of a single finger on a single string, the development of ten thousand games of chess, the precise curve of a lip, a hill, an equation, or a flying ball, tones and shades and glooms and raptures, the faces of countless strangers, the scent of one garden, prayers, inventions, crimes, poems, jokes, tunes, sums, problems unsolved, victories long past, the fear of Hell and the love of God, the vision of a blade of grass and the vision of the sky filled with stars." He pretty well encompasses the capability of the human brain with those words.

Merry Christmas

A friend sent me the following, and I thought it good enough to pass on -

There comes a point in your life when you realize:
Who matters,
Who never did,
Who won't anymore...
And who always will.
So don't worry about people from your past,
There's a reason why they didn't make it into your future.

I'm not certain the sentiment fits the Christmas season, but it's good anyway.

I think it's unfortunate that I am always glad when Christmas is over because of the high pressure sales gimmicks that get laid on us by merchants. They convince too many people to buy things they don't need just because it's Christmas so you need to get out and spend. That's what makes the economy work, I understand, but it still gets tiring. Then the day after, Christmas is all but forgotten because sales need to be visited to get the really good deals.

We plan to have a nice Christmas anyway, and I wish the same for anyone who visits this blog post.

Napoleonic Cannon

Mary asked one day not long ago where I get my ideas to write. I replied, "Give me a spark and I'll build a fire." And now she shakes her head and tells me that is so contrived. Well, it is what it is. Anyway the cannon picture is of one of those I used to build ten years or so ago. With the help of a friendly farmer from Sisseton who turned three brass barrels for me, I built in 1/12 scale. I gave him one cannon in exchange for the other two.

Now here's where the spark came from. I just read a Bernard Cornwell historical novel titled Waterloo. Napoleon made good use of this style of cannon in his warfare and this is modelled after them. The Battle of Waterloo took place in 1815 and an interesting item for me is that this cannon was still used heavily during our Civil War. Technology developed slowly during this period. A few rifled barrel cannons did appear but the armies of both the North and South were slow to replace the Napoleonic.

Cornwell has written many historical novels and accurately portrays the periods he writes of. I took note of one passage in this story where the hero and another soldier wanted to eat between skirmishes. They stripped a metal breastplate from a dead French soldier, turned it upside down to make a kettle of it, grabbed a smear of axle grease to use as shortening, and cut a chunk of meat from a freshly killed horse, and curbed their hunger.

I don't think this is far-fetched at all. Field kitchens could not roll onto the middle of a battlefield and feed men in combat. They were on their own. A book in my library Following the Custer Trail tells of the hardships the common soldiers had in Custer's command. The officers had cooks and good rations but not so for everyone who had to subsist on hardtack, beans, salt pork, and maybe wild game if it could be found. Usually the wild game was shared with the officers and Custer's dogs. Building individual cook fires was not easy. If it rained their fuel got wet and if they depended on dried buffalo chips it would be soggy and would not ignite. It probably has not been any different for any soldiers at any other time.

Fill in the Blanks

When a building like this one is viewed from the highway, a person can only guess at the story that belongs to it. I read an interesting quote from Dee Brown, the author most famous for Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, who said on being a historical novelist, "Sometimes there isn't enough material. There's a story there and you can't fill it in with facts, so you let your imagination run wild."

I'm finding that I need to be a historical fiction writer when I work at my story writing. There exists a scant outline of events but little else. How else to give shape to the story? I know that in 1867 a wagon train returning to Fort Abercrombie from Fort Ransom got caught in a three day blizzard near Lisbon. That plus only a few other tidbits are all that exist regarding their being stalled. That is when I had to invent a character to carry the story along making him a veteran of the Civil War who confused the smoke of battle with the zero visibility of the storm.

I know that a few months earlier that year a large prairie fire swept down upon an encampment of half-breed Indians near Fort Ransom and killed twenty of them but spared the fort. That's about all. So the old imagination got called into play again and a story materialized.

I know that a man named Hickey lived his later years in Sheldon and died there. His obituary stated how he traveled with Major Reno as a freighter at the time of Custer's demise and probably saw a good deal of the aftermath of that battle. Boy, I think there's a big story there and am working on it now.

I know that a location in Owego Township is named Pigeon Point because of the thousands of Pigeons seen roosting there in the 1860's. I did not know they were trapped to ship to cities as a meat product and that in order to decoy them in trappers would sew shut the eyelids of a few of them to flutter about underneath the net. There's a story there, too.

If only a person uses his imagination he can fill in all the blank spots.

Norwegian Delicacy

The next door neighbor lady called a couple of days ago and invited Mary to come over and make fattigman with her. I'm sure glad she accepted the invitation because what she brought home tasted almost like those Ma used to make. No two look alike with all those crazy shapes they take on, but that just makes them interesting. Then, when coated with powdered sugar they taste mighty good!

Mary talked to my mother on the phone yesterday and learned an interesting tidbit that I think I heard once but had shoved so far back in the recesses of my mind that I never could have dredged it up. Dad's Swedish and German heritage did not include an appreciation for lefse, but my mother's, being 100% Norwegian, did. Grandma made it atop an old cook stove and it was exquisite. (This being the same cookstove I remember my grandpa strolling over to, lifting the lid in the firebox, and spitting his snoose juice into where I heard it make snap and crackle noises.) But back to the story. The first time my dad ate lefse was at my grandparents' place, and he must have liked it because he ate too much. She went on to tell how he then could not sleep that night and turned on the radio to help pass the time. It was then that they first heard the news of Japan's bombing of Pearl Harbor.

A couple more Norwegian treats come to mind: rosettes and krumkake. Of the four I've mentioned I have to say lefse stands at number one on the list, but the rest take close seconds, thirds, and fourths.

To complicate matters for our Norwegian brethren they are presently experiencing a shortage of butter. Milk production is down and adding to a shortage is a new fad of a high fat, low carb diet that seems to be sweeping through Europe. It has resulted in butter smuggling, rip off prices of six times normal, and even resorting to buying from Swedish shops. I feel sorry for them!

P.S. After reading the foregoing my wife reminded me gently but forcefully that the fattigman is a German goodie, too, although known by a different name: snowballs, pigs ears,

Playing King on the Hill

This scene of a horse on a manure hill caught our attention last Sunday as we drove back from the Veterans Cemetery. Mary said it looked like the picture we have of The End of the Trail. It can be compared a bit, but the famous portrait has a defeated looking Indian sitting on the horse that doesn't look in any better health. I went back this morning to snap the picture; it is only about a half-mile south of our place.

This particular herd of horses numbers to a couple hundred or so. I don't know what plans the owners have for collecting so many in one bunch, but it could be slaughter. They could soon be slaughtered again because Congress lifted its five year old ban on funding horse meat inspections. No dollars were appropriated though to fund inspections so I don't know where that leaves the situation.

The last U. S. slaughterhouse butchering horses closed in 2007 in Illinois. If it or any others begin butchering again, animal welfare activists have promised to protest.

I have never tasted horsemeat, but apparently lots of people have. It's often been said that the French eat it. I don't know. I remember reading in Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls of how there was always a pot of horsemeat stew cooking in the cave where the partisans hid out in the Spanish Civil War.

December

With the sun shining and temperature mild we drove the few miles south to the veterans cemetery to view over thirty-seven hundred wreaths placed there Saturday. In contrast to the marble headstones and the bleak winterscape, the greenery and the bright red ribbons decorate the burial ground with a colorful tribute. The activity was part of the Wreaths Across America project and was sponsored by the local unit of the Civil Air Patrol.
...
The Missouri River has not iced over yet and still flows freely, but low. A local business, the downhill ski resort, can't make artificial snow because of problems getting enough water through their pump for their snow making machines.
...
The common folks are rising up and being heard. I've lost track of how many Arab countries experienced what is being called Arab Spring where dictators have either been kicked out or still hang on only with the aid of their murderous military. The Occupy Wall Street movement continues in the USA and probably because of the milder climate the West Coast seems to be the center of it. And who could have thought that Russian people took to the streets to voice criticism of the election process in that country. 2012 might just be an interesting year!

Lefse ?

The hands of this novice lefse maker work the dough, roll it out, and throw it on the griddle. A pinch amount of cursing flavors the batch to pieces of parchment that are lefse-like and quite edible. The family cleaned up the first batch at Thanksgiving and now will get a second batch at Christmas.

A lady told this story on Lena's lefse making. Talking on the phone, Lena told her that snow was falling and was almost waist high already. The temperature dropped way below zero with an increasingly strong north wind blowing. Of course, Ole has done nothing but look through the kitchen window while she made the lefse. She said if it got much worse she may have to let him in the house.

To give my mother a little excitement, I called her as Mary had her hands in the dough and said she was doing it again. I believe she thinks we are upstarts and probably never will get it right. She always had a variation of this lefse poem hanging on her kitchen wall above the stove:

Yew tak yust ten big potatoes. Den yew cook dem til dar done. Yew add to dis sum sveet cream. And by cups it measures vun. Den yew steal tree ounce of booter, an vit two fingers, pinch sum salt. Yew beat dis werry lightly, if it ain’t goot--it iss yer own fault. Den yew roll dis tin, vit flour. Light brown on stove yew bake. Now call in all Scandihuvians tew try da fine lefse yew make.

Rye Whiskey

"It's a whiskey, rye whiskey, rye whiskey I cry
If I don't get rye whiskey, well, I think I will die"

Driving across the Missouri River yesterday, I turned on the Sirius satellite radio to an old country station and heard Tex Ritter's song playing which, to me, wrung out all kinds of memories. I thought of the time beside a lake in Manitoba, the name of which I cannot recall, when on a fishing trip with a friend, we shared a campground with a bunch of party-time Canadians. There was plenty of firewater to go around that night, and we were doing all right until one of them brought out a bottle of rye whiskey. Always being one who likes to try new things, I immediately stepped up to the trough and morphed into a pig . Then I probably became the life of the party and surely must have had a good time. In contrast to the line of the above lyrics, I thought, after the fun was over, that I would die because I did get it.

That was the same trip, whether it was the night before or the night of I've forgotten, that we sacked out in our tent, and I awoke during the night thinking my friend sure snored loudly. Next morning we exited to find our campsite a shambles, a bear had come in the night and helped himself to anything edible plus a few other things.

Story-telling started at the party scene, and the theme turned to bad bears. About that time one of the women stepped into an outdoor toilet. Of course, with the fear of bears in the night now planted in her head, one of the men stealthily walked up behind the toilet and gave out a fearsome growl which caused the woman to scream and burst out of the flimsy structure. A chorus of laughter and teasing welcomed her.

So long ago! Sometime in the 1960's. With a hangover giving double vision and nursing the top of my head which had blown off, we headed for home the next day. I think my friend wanted to fish another day, but alcohol does bad things to a guy. I haven't had a drink of alcohol for about 22 years.

Are We Wimpy?

My mother related this story over the telephone yesterday, it being her deceased sister's birthday, December 4, 1923. Come Christmas Eve three weeks later her parents bundled her up to ride in the horse and sleigh to her grandma and grandpa's house. I can't remember the distance or direction they would have traveled, but at any rate, it would be beyond us now to consider it.

I still remember an incident planted in my five year old head: it was 1947, with my brother only a few months old, and we traveled 11, maybe 12 miles south of Sheldon to visit an uncle's family. My grandma and another uncle accompanied us, and on the return trip home, a blizzard caught us near the Sheyenne River, forcing us to spend the night at the Pemberthy farm. Next morning Dad and his brother walked home, and several hours later Dad returned with a team of horses pulling the hayrack mounted on sled runners. We must have bundled up because I don't remember being cold, even though the distance was about 6 miles.

1947 was a cold, deep snow winter, the winter of my grandpa's death. In order to attend his funeral the uncle living 12 miles south had to ride up on horseback to attend the service.

Those years after World War II found the country struggling to modernize and move forward, but remnants of old ways remained that people could draw from when necessary.

A movie on my must-see list is due to open around Christmas, War Horse. Set in World War I, it tells of a boy's horse that was sold by his father to the military. A great demand for horses and mules existed during this time to be trained as cavalry mounts or draft animals to pull artillery, supply wagons, ambulances, etc. Of course, the boy goes on a search to find his horse; I hope he is successful. My grandpa who fought in WWI told of how it bothered him to hear the screams of the wounded animals, of which hundreds of thousands were killed. A rodeo horse I am interested in, Tipperary, was rejected as too wild to tame by French military buyers who came to the Dakotas and Montana during that time. The demand for these animals was very great.

Dusting Off an Old One

I don't know if the following poem has ever been circulated for others to read, but it's an early one, and I've always liked it.

I drove through
after the snow and the wind
made the cow paths
on the hillsides
look like layers of corduroy.

Then, snows from old winters
began to drift
in my mind,
and I remembered

when
the house and the barn
shouldered the white winds
that rattled windows and
wailed through the eaves,

when
the township hired
Loomer's tracked Cat
to scratch canyons
through blocked roads
and open a route
to town and school,

when
Dad broke a horse
to harness by letting
her buck and struggle
in a deep bank
behind the barn until
she began to yield
to the pressure on the bit,

when
Grandpa died and storm-whipped
drifts built, then blocked
the way to the funeral,
so some flew in,
Russell rode up on horseback,
and the county plow
opened a way for Dad,

when
the party line told
Ma that Grandma needed
potatoes and decided the big
boy I was could walk
the blocked mile through
long, blue drifts
to take a few to her
where I was invited in
but declined
due to the long walk
to return,

when
the undergone,
unmentioned, uncounted or forgotten
storms piled up in layers of memory
like the drifts in the ditch
and shelterbelt
so that I can't sort
them out until I
get to the point

when
Brandon was born and
his soon-mother said it's
time to become the parents
we've wanted to be, and
we got in the car and it
got stuck in the snow
piled at the side of the house
in the flowerbed, and I
floored the Hornet's foot feed
until it burned and melted
the snow under its wheels
and gained the grip
and the noise
it needed
to wake the neighbors,
and we were off
to Fargo to make
a family of three.