The Power of Scenery

Those who read Louis L’Amour books know how clearly and accurately he described the terrain where action takes place in his books. Oftentimes he included a topographical map of the subject area. He collected a good many maps of this type and studied them to paint word-pictures of the area in his stories.

Living in this northern plains state as we do, a topographical map would be uncluttered with all the squiggly lines that define a mountain state’s topography. In those states they’ve given names to mountain ranges and individual peaks that rise thousands of feet. Here in eastern North Dakota not much in the way of landforms has earned a name. In fact, the extreme flatness has been named instead, you know Red River Valley or Lake Agassiz. We need to look at the western part of our state to find buttes with names.

One landform is present though that grows and grows and is becoming quite massive: the Fargo landfill. You only need to drive north on Fargo’s 45th Street, go across Main Avenue for another seven blocks or so and you’ll come upon it. Even if I am accused of stretching the truth or a fact occasionally, I am here to attest to its large size. When Caterpillars and large trucks climb to its top to scatter and pack the garbage, they look mighty small up there.  

The wife and I recently had a dinner table discussion about the amounts of garbage each household generates. Nearly everything except maybe a few potatoes or some nuts and bolts comes packaged and is utterly useless for anything else. Into the trash can the wrapping goes. While we were growing up, very little garbage accumulated. A burn barrel took care of combustibles, an outhouse received the Sears catalog, and broken machinery parts went into a pile for use in welding repairs. Furthermore, broken appliances could be repaired and put back into duty.

Many shows on Youtube can be found with archaeology the topic. On many of them, they need to dig and dig to find remains of the past which often times are few and far between. If they find the remains of a broken buckle from a Roman soldier or the ankle bone of a baby from prehistory, they are beside themselves. Plastics being used today will last long enough for future archaeologists to find by the truckload.

I don’t think it’s too far afield to mention that town dumps used to be interesting places to visit. We had one in Sheldon that was an irresistible draw for us young fellows. One noon hour a few of us decided we should take a little walk out to it and explore. At the time, the town was only 75 years old or thereabouts, and the pile still wasn’t very big. We had fun! I picked something up that looked good to me even though I don’t remember what it was. Somehow it even got transported home as treasure. 

A problem developed though - no one had a watch. As we enjoyed ourselves, time travelled fast until someone thought we should be getting back. Uh, oh, as we neared the once filled playground no one remained. Classes had started without us. We had a tough lady for a teacher who we’d all seen administer some pretty severe physical punishment at one time or another, and we had started expecting the worst would befall us. As we marched in silently, not a word was spoken, and our fellow students sat staring at us, anticipating some good entertainment. The teacher was in good spirits that day and said simply, “Have you boys been out sampling treasures in the dump ground?”

Funny how this started with Louis L’Amour topography, then city dumps, and now finally gets to the subject that generated this article. On my desk I have a book sent to me for review by the Western Writers of America titled “The Power of Scenery: Frederick Law Olmsted and the Origin of National Parks.” His work predates the work of Theodore Roosevelt and Edwin Muir, but because of the work of people like these, we still have beautiful scenery to view and walk through.

We started this discussion with Louis L’Amour and we might as well end with him and his wisdom. In his book “The Iron Marshal,” one of his characters states there are more than two hundred thousand horses in New York City. “Two hundred thousand! Did you think of that? Each horse will drop twenty-five or -six pounds of manure per day, and there’s a stable in near every corner block on Manhattan! Think of that! The day will come when they will not tolerate a stable or a kept horse in the city! You’ll see!”

It would build up in huge piles, attract flies, and stink terribly in hot weather. But at least it was biodegradable.