She Bought One

Miss Hansen, my high school math teacher, bought one of my books while we were in the Barnes and Noble coffee shop in Bismarck. She maintains an interest with her old students. And now my class is thinking about celebrating 60 years since our graduation in 1960.

4 Years Ago

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Lynn Bueling

October 29, 2015 · 

Miss Hansen bought one!

Lily Enlightens Granddad

Lily enlightens Granddad about some important things in her life. (After her ice skating performance.)

What Makes a Story

Whenever a writer wants his work to fit the definition of a story, he must consider this: The cat sat on a mat is not the beginning of a story, but the cat sat on the dog’s mat is. The first half of this little test just makes an observation, but the second leads to action and resolution following a free-for-all.

Our move to a condo a little over a year and a half ago came about in part to eliminate climbing stairways, mowing grass, blowing snow, and whatever else goes with owning a large house. It was a good move for us but isn’t particularly story worthy. However, a story can be wrestled from the fact that people were mowing grass one day and running snowblowers the next as a result of the recent October blizzard.

A big story is the powerful storm that left in its wake many thousands of unharvested acres covered with deep snow. Machines, greased and ready-to-go, can’t harvest the corn, soybeans, sugar beets, and potatoes. The acres that can be salvaged will no doubt suffer in quality as fields get torn up with machines getting stuck in soft ground. In some cases larger operations have crews standing idle with nothing to do. Adding insult to injury, reports tell of snowmobilers roaring through the fields which prompted the state secretary of agriculture to issue a plea to stay out. It is a big story without a happy ending.

As a much younger man, I followed the wheat harvest into Kansas and Nebraska for several years. The first year our outfit pulled in at a truck stop in Medicine Lodge, Kansas where our boss wanted to ask around for farmers needing a combine crew. It wasn’t long before a distinguished looking gentleman drove up in his once-stately but now well-worn Chrysler Imperial. Personal troubles had placed him in desperate financial straits and he needed his wheat crop brought in.

He had an immediate problem, though. He couldn’t talk any custom operators into bringing their machines to his fields. Why? With recent rainfalls, the Medicine River had flooded over much of his rich bottomland, flattened his heavy stand of winter wheat, and sent all sorts of broken branches and deadfall onto his fields. No one was interested in taking his job on. Since our outfit had traveled down there “cold turkey” with no pre-arranged jobs waiting for us, the boss thought about it and decided to accept his offer. 

We set our headers as low to the ground as possible and started cutting. That wheat ran good, even in its sorry condition. It was slow going because we had to stop often to carry away the forsaken chunks of wood that the machines could swallow and cause damage. One other problem slowed our progress. The ground was soft and our machines often became “stuck in the mud.” A self-propelled combine generates lots of torque on the pull, so with nothing else available, the not-stuck machine needed to stop cutting and drive to the aid of the disabled one. The chains we carried that summer found frequent use. 

The farmer commended our crew for saving more of his crop than he expected. I remember him saying, “It’ll pay lots of bills.” With the combines loaded on the trucks, we drove on to another job. I looked in the rear view mirror and saw what I took to be the farmer’s eternal optimism: his hired man driving a tractor plowing rich red Kansas dirt in preparation for next year’s crop. So it was that summer of 1964.

Breaking Free

Through the years I’ve collected quotations, witty sayings, and well-turned phrases that have caught my eye. While attending a recent lecture I was reminded of a quote I’d saved. It was something Gerry Spence said, the trial lawyer from Wyoming, the one who liked to wear a buckskin jacket with fringes topped off with a big hat: “What if we have been born in a cage like the polar bear at the San Diego Zoo, and having known nothing else, we accept the cage as freedom?” Let me tell you why that’s significant here.

The lecture was given by a young lady named Megan Phelps-Roper at the recent South Dakota Festival of Books in Deadwood. She is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, the founder of the Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. His congregation made news some years back by standing on the street where they derided and insulted families who had come to the funerals of fallen soldiers. They also directed their rage and wrath at others deemed sinful by Phelps. At these events the young Megan would stand, already at the age of 5, holding a sign inscribed with some rude abusive phrase she couldn’t yet read. 

As she matured, she realized the world couldn’t be viewed in black and white terms like her grandfather preached, but that Bible interpretations varied and could even be in error. Social media such as facebook and twitter let her engage in conversations with more enlightened people. It was an Orthodox Jew from Jerusalem who pointed out inaccuracies in her understanding of Old Testament translations. She finally did some independent thinking, left her family’s church and has written of her experiences in a new book “Unfollow: A Memoir of Loving and Leaving the Westboro Baptist Church.” 

She and a sister ended up in Deadwood and took residence at a bed and breakfast for a month with the intention of doing a lot of reading which they’d previously been denied access to. Here’s where the Gerry Spence quote came alive for me. Since the girls’ mother had been in complete control of their lives, basically robbing them of their free will to make decisions, they didn’t know how to break completely free of her influence.  They asked the owner of the bed and breakfast if it would be all right for them to walk downtown to look around. Imagine, Megan was 20 years old at the time and she asked permission to leave the house; the owner of the establishment wasn’t much older than she.

The sisters walked through snow and in wonderment along Deadwood’s long main street filled with casinos and finally entered one where they approached the bar to order hot chocolates. Megan found it liberating to enter the world she’d been forbidden to go before. Now she feels more Christian than ever after realizing how awful her church treated others who did not fit their mold. She has since married a young man from the area and given birth to a daughter who had just celebrated her first birthday.  

Megan Phelps-Roper probably related to the recent news item of Ellen DeGeneris and George W. Bush sitting side-by-side at a football game. As she said, “During the game they showed a shot of George and me laughing together and so, people were upset. They thought why is a gay Hollywood liberal sitting next to a conservative Republican president?” The President and DeGeneris did not let their differences keep them from enjoying each other’s company.

Recalling a Few Stories

History is important to me, as is the ability to express why. It’s quite easy to find a topic and herd some words together into an article, although sometimes too much can be said. A humorous observation made about Ernest Hemingway’s writing fits well: “In 1936, Ernest Hemingway caught a carp and decided not to write about it.” Some things are best ignored.

I started thinking about some of the stories I didn’t ignore. Take for instance professional athletes from the area such as the boxer Charley Retzlaff from Leonard who fought Joe Louis at the Chicago Stadium in 1936. Retzlaff’s record at that time was good - 77 pro fights with a  70% KO figure. Louis was an up-and-comer who wanted to fight him and as the song goes “with a crashin’ blow from a huge right hand” made short work of Charley, in one minute and twenty-five seconds to be exact. The ironical ending to the story showed a bruised and battered Charley walking home in a blizzard after the man giving him a ride needed to turn around because the road was blocked.

Two baseball figures rated attention - Cy Pieh and Lynn “Line Drive” Nelson. Nelson, a Sheldon native, born at Sheldon, became a Chicago Cubs pitcher who also could hit, having an overall batting average of .281. He also boxed as a middleweight and took pointers from Charley Retzlaff. The spitball throwing Cy Pieh from Enderlin signed with the Yankees in 1913 and is mostly remembered from a game in 1915 when he entered the 9th inning as a relief pitcher. His team faced the Boston Red Sox whose pitcher happened to be Babe Ruth. In the 3rd inning of that game Ruth hit the first of his 714 career home runs. 

Many stories originated from the vicinity of the Missouri River where steamboats became a popular way of hauling passengers and freight. These steam powered boats required fuel, and woodhawks started cutting and stockpiling wood to sell to the passing steamers. Two men set up camp north of Bismarck with the intent cutting cords of wood for boats arriving after the spring ice breakup. 

They built a hut and furnished their meager pantry with supplies. Deep snow fell and blocked them in, the roof leaked and dripped on their pantry goods and soaked their gunpowder. With no way to get out and hunt, they became very hungry. One day a mouse ran across their crude table where one man’s quick hand grabbed it. “Are you going to eat that mouse?” his partner asked. No, he baited a hook and caught a catfish with it. 

Prohibition prompted a few articles. There were a lot of thirsty citizens during prohibition periods, a condition solved in different ways. Open sales in Moorhead facilitated shipments into the state, either openly or hidden. My great-grandfather cooked his own, but after receiving a tip that the sheriff planned to come checking, hid the still in the cupola of his barn.

The Garrison Dam and the growing reservoir displaced people and destroyed farmland. We’ve never forgotten the time we sat down with a rancher who helped drive his family’s herd of cattle from the targeted area to a new location between Raleigh, ND and McIntosh, SD. They settled on the historic Wade Ranch after a ten-day trail drive.

I might never find another story that tops that of Dan Panko, otherwise known as “Rattlesnake Dan.” Unable to get his fellow legislators talked into passing a bounty on rattlesnakes, he ventured into the wild to find a den of them in dormancy, box them up,  and dump them on the legislative floor. In the warmth of the chamber, their winter-stiffness softened and they began to writhe around. He got his bounty.

One of our giants of history showed signs of his humble roots. After the invasion of Normandy in World War II General Eisenhower moved his headquarters there. A grateful farmer lent him a milkcow whereupon his mess sergeant tried unsuccessfully to get some milk from it. He didn’t know how, so Ike sat down and filled the bucket and said, “You city slickers have a lot to learn.”

I couldn’t help reminiscing this week. It’s been fun and educational finding these stories and writing them up. Don’t worry, there are more out there.

Books and Authors

A weekend getaway to Deadwood and this year’s South Dakota Festival of Books provided us the opportunity to meet and listen to many authors that the gathering attracts. You have to pick and choose because several sessions run at the same hour. I counted 65 authors in attendance.
First, I chose Hank Phillippi Ryan’s presentation “An Inside Look at Fiction and Journalism.” She is an investigative reporter for Boston’s WHDH-TV who has won 34 Emmys and 14 Edward R. Murrow Awards. After years of reporting she started writing thriller novels.
ML Cavanaugh, an active duty lieutenant colonel in the U. S. Army presented “How Fiction Can Preserve National Security and Save Our Democracy,” and a fellow at the Modern War Institute at West Point. His message - stories shape society.
A colleague of Cavanaugh’s and co-editor, John Amble is the editorial director at the Modern War Institute at West Point. He presented “From Washington to Patton…to Skywalker: Why the Most Powerful Military in the World Is Turning to Fiction.” He made one interesting point: military reading lists have started to include fiction works.
While attending other sessions I won’t bother to mention, it was the last one that was most impactful. Megan Phelps-Roper was a former member of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church. Led by her grandfather, that was the church that protested military funerals, gays, and whatever else he deemed sinful. She and her sister through social media started seeing that alternative views existed and escaped to live and think freely. Powerful. It will be the theme of my next newspaper column.
The festival concluded with the “Longmire” author, Craig Johnson, giving his always humorous talk. Next year the festival will be back in Brookings and good chance we’ll drive down I-29 to attend.

Please, Say It Isn't So

Words fail me when I try to describe the springtime trill of a Western Meadowlark. Try as I might, I can’t do it, although when I close my eyes I hear that beautiful melody filling the air as I drive through the countryside. Meadowlarks mean spring to people who savor the beauty of its song. It sounds so rich and pleasant that six states call it their official state bird - Kansas, Montana, Nebraska, Oregon, Wyoming, and North Dakota.

But something’s happening. The numbers of our state bird are shrinking, and perish the thought, might disappear from the earth. It is troubling to think about and shouldn’t be dismissed by saying it will never happen. History says it can. Passengers Pigeons once numbered in the billions but have now become extinct. A location in the eastern part of Ransom County bears the name of Pigeon Point from early pioneer days when they could easily be hunted in the trees.

A hunter in Pennsylvania reported that with one shot from his shotgun he brought down forty-one birds thickly crowded in the trees. European settlers deforested the countryside to clear farmland, an act which destroyed habitat. Another large factor contributing to their demise was the development of markets for their cheap meat. The last one died in captivity in 1914. No conservation action had been taken.

Our national bird, the American Bald Eagle disappeared from our skies but luckily benefited  from efforts to save it. The only place I’d ever seen any was in Alaska, but now they can be seen here in eastern North Dakota. The Endangered Species Act offered the protection they needed to make a comeback.

Remember how the disappearance of Whooping Cranes filled news reports. Grizzly bears numbers declined and the California Condor almost became history. Looking back, over fifty species have recovered under protection of the act.

We don’t yet know if our meadowlarks will need protection, but some sources say the continent has lost nearly 3 billion birds representing hundreds of species over the past five decades.  Put another way, there are 29 percent fewer birds in the United States and Canada today than in 1970.

The phrase “canary in a coal mine” comes to mind. It comes from the old coal mining days when miners carried caged canaries with them into the tunnels of the mines. In there if poison gas was present, that little bird would keel over dead before the levels of the gas reached those hazardous to humans. Therefore the miners knew they’d better get out before they died, too. A wordsmith could spin the canary concept to apply to the shrinking numbers of birds in our environment. Scientists and environmentalists have begun promoting the idea.

Concern for the environment does exist and needs to be dealt with now and in the coming years. One more quotation comes to mind - “A society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.”