Where Did the Time Go?

An often heard phrase goes something like “where did the time go?” Another one says “The older you get the faster the time flies.” We marvel at this seeming fact in our lives and voice it in many variations. I’ve been on this earth for eighty-two years and can verify that it happens.

Eighty-two years ago, 1942, and the United States had been in a state of war for about three

months. I can’t remember any of the details of the war but did sense the feeling of euphoria that

pervaded the country for a couple of years after the veterans returned home. It ended with the

spectacular event of atomic bombs exploding over two different Japanese cities. It finally

convinced them to surrender, and people started getting their lives back in order to live normal

lives.

Peace didn’t last long. Another war started, the Korean War. Fought on a smaller scale than the

previous one, it nevertheless sucked a lot of energy out of the nation. Nothing was solved since

Korea divided into two entities and is left in the still-existing state of war. At its beginning few

people even knew where Korea was on a map, but many gave their lives. Not many of us knew

where Vietnam was either, and there we were fighting an escalating war from which we finally

withdrew.

For me, fifteen U. S. presidents beginning with Franklin Roosevelt flew by so fast I never got a

chance to know them very well. Twelve North Dakota governors beginning with John Moses

came and went, regardless of any jokes about Moses. Other developments in my life have

occurred, such as marriage, family, work, computers, land travel, space travel, and so much more

that it’s pointless to try to name them all.

Since my life has passed by so quickly, I can easily imagine time-traveling to the previous

eighty-two years which lands me at 1860. Unfortunately southern states had begun seceding

from the Union, Abraham Lincoln won election to the presidency, and numerous clashes between

northern and southern armies occurred. But time goes on. Dakota Territory formed, the first

transcontinental railroad completed, westward movement began, statehood was approved, Henry

Ford built cars, and Teddy Roosevelt became the hero of the charge up San Juan Hill.

We roll over into the 20th century by watching the Wright Brothers making the first flight, our

entering the first world war, opening the Panama Canal, and suffering through a worldwide

influenza epidemic. Lindbergh made the first solo transatlantic flight, a severe drought coupled

with an economic depression struck, the 19th amendment granted women the right to vote, and

the first minimum wage appeared at twenty-five cents an hour. In 1941, one big occurrence

overshadowed most of the news that year, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Just like that two lifetimes whistled by. To extend again, why not play with the idea of

considering one more lifetime, a third life, to show just how fast it went by. It began in 1778, anddarn it, there’s another war, the Revolutionary War. But maybe it’s for the best since patriots

from thirteen states rose up against British rule and resulted in independence which our

forefathers melded into a republic. Did you know Yankee Doodle became the new republic

unofficial national anthem. Our Constitution was written and we chose George Washington for

our first president. We ratified the Bill of Rights. John Adams appeared as the second president

and we experienced a peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the other.

The first forty years of the 1800s saw Thomas Jefferson doubling the republic’s size with the

Louisiana Purchase. Then to figure out what he’d just done, sent Lewis and Clark on a mission to

find out. We fought the War of 1812 and Napoleon discovered just how big Russia was in the

wintertime. The Industrial Revolution started. The Erie Canal connected the Great Lakes to the

Atlantic Ocean.

The Oregon Trail became an outlet for western travelers, the 49ers arrived in California looking

for gold, Walt Whitman wrote “Leaves of Grass,” John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry, and

Charles Darwin published “On the Origin of Species.”

I’ve packed a lot into these past 246 years, three of my lifetimes. This has been a silly exercise to

play with, but time really does fly by. It’s possible to play the scenario all the way back to the

dinosaur age or maybe Adam and Eve. But it’s the business of theologians and scientists to tell us

about that.

The better way to reckon time might be to look forward into the future of our descendants lives.

A Greek proverb packs a powerful meaning: A society grows great when old men plant trees

whose shade they know they shall never sit in.

Random Thoughts - Fri Feb 21, 2025

 RANDOM THOUGHTS - Friday, February 21, 2025

Preserve the wilderness … Read a history book … If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you … Did you hear about the Norwegian who loved his wife so much he almost told her … Is it baseball season yet? … Still making plans for the future … The sooner we shed oil dependance the quicker we’ll develop alternate forms of energy … In the book Atlas Shrugged the world stopped when productive members of society went on strike … The best TV is watching reruns of “Mash’ … Today in 1878 the first telephone book was printed in Connecticut … Did I say read a history book … Pies yesterday at Sons of Norway: strawberry rhubarb and blueberry, yum …

Too Much or Too Little, Part II

 Don’t we all possess little quirks or idiosyncrasies? One of mine is the dread of seeing beautiful, productive farm land taken out of production for reasons of the “greater good.” Something that benefits the majority of people always requires some sacrifice or expense incurred by the minority. Here in Fargo we are witnessing the construction of a mammoth project that I hope doesn’t turn into a boondoggle for which people have already sacrificed.

What is called the Fargo-Moorhead Area Diversion Project creeps snakelike around the city for thirty miles. The dirt work plus the accompanying right-of-way take 4,500 acres. Another 30,000 acres are being provided for in what the engineers call a staging area, i.e. reservoir. 

It isn’t just a trench or canal since a lot of infrastructure accompanies it. Drive south of Horace and find a large concrete gated dam structure, but that’s not the only one. Two more are being constructed. In order for people to pass back and forth across the canal it will take nineteen bridges to facilitate traffic.

It’s the three billion dollar (that’s with a “b”) projected cost caught my skeptic’s eye. Then, how well will it work in a high water year. We don’t know. My mind always goes back to the McClusky Canal where construction took place from 1969 to 1976. It’s purpose was to transport water from the Missouri River to Fargo and beyond. I still remember the time I drove past one spot near the city of McClusky where the canal cut was deep in order to facilitate gravity flow of water. At its bottom ducks swam amongst the reeds and slough grass. Am I the only one who thinks it’s a boondoggle?

Closer to home the Maple River Dam rose out of bottomland starting in the fall of 2004 with completion in the summer of 2007. Its planners claim it reduced the depth and duration of flooding in 2009 and that without it, downstream flooding would have been significantly worse. One farmer tried to monkeywrench the project by selling a 1.4 acre parcel to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa for some woolen blankets and beads. But that became brushed aside in the court.Whether or not much good comes from the project is something I don’t know, but it cost $30 million to build and claims 2,800 acres of farmland.

The big daddy of North Dakota projects has to be Garrison Dam. Funny thing, its construction cost was a puny $300 million compared to the FM Diversion Project’s cost of $3 billion. Much of the dissimilar numbers though needs to be chalked up to inflation. In an online inflation calculator, that $300 million figure becomes approximately $3.5 billion today. Remember the old maxim: liars figure, figures lie. Mathematicians can refigure the numbers. At any rate, that number does seem to be more in line when compared to the FM diversion.

Resources don’t quite agree as to the size of the dam’s reservoir. One source states it covers 383,000 acres and is the 3rd largest manmade lake in the U.S. That many acres is equal to 597 sections of ground which makes for 16.5 townships. It all needs to be applied to human terms, though. The dam project displaced more than one-third of the Three Affiliated Tribes and took up about 95% of their land. When the tribes signed it over, a famous picture of the tribal chairman is shown crying as he says, “We will sign this contract with a heavy heart … With a few scratches of the pen, we will sell the best part of our reservation. Right now the future doesn’t look too good to us.” 

It wasn’t just Indians who were affected. At the time of procuring the land, white ranchers lived and worked in harmony among them. They suffered displacement, too, and were forced to seek new opportunities and homes, too. My wife knew one family well since they became next door neighbors. At one son’s kitchen table the three of us sat down and learned about their move.

Everything the family owned needed to be moved. They decided to drive their cattle herd to their newly acquired ranch  with a crew of four cowboys, plus the family’s head who drove a truck with its box converted to sleeping quarters. On the first morning, friends from the community helped drive the herd through the narrow Four Bears Bridge. Care had to be taken to funnel the cows into the bridge to prevent their falling down the steep riverbank and into the river.

An incident occurred when the herd had successfully walked onto the bridge. A car entered from the opposite end. Some of the cows spooked and turned back causing them to do some hard horseback riding to get the cattle turned. Then when the cows were heading in the right direction they “came off the other end like they were shot out of a cannon.” Now they had another roundup ahead of them. He said, “If they had gotten into those badlands, we would never have found them.” They averaged about seventeen miles a day over a 10 1/2 day period.

Dollar cost can be found easily enough as can the acres of ground involved. It’s hard to calculate costs in human terms, though. For instance, eleven rural cemeteries face some degree of flooding risk in the FM project. On the Fort Berthold Reservation the churches and families developed many cemeteries until 1952, when the Garrison Dam forced the relocation of hundreds of families within the flood plain. The dam led to the loss of farmland, homes, and community infrastructure. While it is easy to criticize all these projects, they are deemed necessary for the greater good. Teddy Roosevelt was the first great environmentalist, but his quote just doesn’t apply here: “Leave it as it is.”

The Cuban Missile Crisis

  In Clay Jenkinson’s newsletter today he writes, “Few people alive today can imagine the terror of October 1962. The Cuban Missile Crisis provoked hundreds of thousands of Americans to build bomb shelters in their backyards.” 

I am one who remembers it and the fright I experienced while watching the live report on our television.

Too Much or Not Enough

 

The picture accompanying this article captured a moment when my dad demonstrated his technique of water witching. As I remember it he walked around some and found a spot where the twig started vibrating and bending down which indicated a find. He was never convinced that he possessed any unusual ability in this matter, even though not everybody can experience dowsing. I can’t. Whenever I’ve tried it the stick is just a stick, dead in my hands.

Some believe the practice can bring results, others like the U. S. Geological Survey say underground water is prevalent, and it would be hard to drill a well and not find water. The USGS makes the point that water witching cannot determine depth, quantity, or quality of the find.

We’ve all been duped into buying something only to have regrets later. It might’ve been an object, a service, or an idea that did not prove to be what we thought at first. Not so long ago prospective farmers bought into the false concept that rain follows the plow. Land agents used that theory as a selling point to bring immigrants to the west and homestead the land. Of course, an influx of people meant money would circulate and some would land in their pockets. 

As a consequence of the faux-theory,  many acres turned “wrong side up.” Then when droughts occurred, the wind rose and raised that land to the air in huge clouds. An example of the damage can be seen while driving through the local region known as the sandhills. Many of my relatives lie scattered about in several cemeteries in that area where we visit every year. They probably dowsed for water too. It has been turned back to grassland, and now we  hear meadowlarks singing again.

Cities persist on locating and thriving on the banks of rivers. Then when these rivers flood people wonder why something isn’t done about it. There do not seem to be any wild rivers that engineers won’t tackle by building big dams to plug the flow. The depression of the 1930s came along and FDR wanted to put people back to work again. Under the direction of the Public Works Administration a dam in northeastern Montana began to bloom in the landscape to harness the Missouri River.

Over ten thousand workers came from all over to hire onto one of the construction jobs even though it paid just fifty cents an hour. Completed in 1940, it was just the first of six mainstem dams constructed on the Missouri River. This huge dam measures about 10,500 feet in length. Since no local infrastructure existed to accommodate that many workers much effort went into building housing, roads, or shopping. Government housing couldn’t be built fast enough which resulted in the rapid building of a slew of temporary shanty towns. 

When those engineers were done with their work on the Fort Peck Dam they must have been itching to continue. Next up was the Garrison Dam in North Dakota. Not quite as large as the Montana dam it still measures out at two miles in length. The government town of Riverdale rose to house workers, but again it wasn’t fast enough or big enough. Several shanty towns appeared to meet the housing needs. Ever hear of Dakota City, American City, Sitka, Silver City, or Big Bend? They existed during the construction period and disappeared as fast as they were built.

The workmen wanted recreation when they weren’t working and congregated in saloons. One in Silver City employed seven bartenders and as many waitresses to serve the crowds. The manager stated, “I can remember when this was so packed people had to wait to get in.” When one of these boomtown entrepreneurs saw the end of his good fortune he pulled out for Arizona saying he was heading for another federal dam site to build another town. He was a true boomer.

The Corps of Engineers went on to build four more dams on the Missouri River: Oahe, Big Bend, Fort Randall, and Gavins Point. Now the river is well under control, right? Nope. In 2011 the river flooded with disastrous results. Because of the volume of water, the Corps had to open the spillway gates which resulted in the evacuation of 900 homes in Burleigh and Morton counties.

A meteorologist in Bismarck stated the flood was created by a “perfect storm” of conditions with a late spring thaw of very deep mountain snow coupled with a heavy rain runoff in other areas. Consequently the water level in Lake Sakakawea rose so high it threatened the dam and the Corps felt obliged to relieve pressure by opening the gates. We lived there at the time and can attest to the problems of water spilling into the city.

Building dams and providing for a reservoir requires land and stories of displaced people can be told, too. We’ll save that for next week.

Random Thoughts - January 30, 2025

 

Adolf Hitler was named chancellor of Germany on this day in 1933 … I’m reading Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light, well written … A conclusion is the place where you got tired of thinking … I’m finally feeling normal after a bout with Covid … Now that the Vikings aren’t in, I don’t care who … Be yourself; everyone else is already taken … Quite a flurry of concern with funding freeze … Read a history book … The chuckwagon in 1/12 scale is my creation … 

HISTORYLESS AND IGNORANT

I watched a powerful true story yesterday on Netflix called “Agent 24.” It’s about a Norwegian man and the resistance he led against the Nazi occupation of Norway in World War II. He and his team committed acts of destruction and assassination in answer to the hated Nazi actions against Norwegian citizens. After the war ended he worked professionally but toward the end of his life  spoke of some of their exploits. One thing irked him in interviews and debates - people who tried to equate democracies with autocracies as well as having little patience for HISTORYLESS HISTORIANS AND IGNORANT JOURNALISTS. The Norwegian granted their highest medal for service to him. He died in 2012.

Thoughts in Isolation

Covid has taken over my life. I’m not invincible and too many days testing positive force me to sit  looking out the window at the cold whiteness of winter.  Isolated from the outer world, I turn to my books and inner thoughts for entertainment. Thoughts of wide open spaces color my imagined world. 

One of the writers with whom I  always find  nourishing thoughts is the Montana writer Ivan Doig. Born to the rigors of life on a sheep ranch, he excelled  in his studies and went on to earn a doctorate in history. He never taught college classes. Instead with the able support of his wife who did teach, he wrote full time. My favorite of his is a book he titled This House of Sky. In it he details his early life and schooling in rural schools of Montana, Northwestern University, and University of Washington.

One day at Northwestern a professor asked him to stay after class for a moment. Doig’s grades had slipped and caused the teacher to take note. Doig learned from that meeting that he must change his approach to studying. “Memorized dates and facts would not carry me in college as they had in high school, I must think out essay answers now.”

Essay answers. In other words he needed to start thinking and forming his own thoughts, instead of just taking the word of others and spitting them out verbatim. He took the lesson to heart and wrote a dozen or so books that offer plenty of thoughtful and entertaining reading. That leads to our North Dakota scholar, Clay Jenkinson.

Jenkinson involves himself with many projects, seemingly all at once. One of late has been following the route in the country of John Steinbeck’s book Travels with Charley. He has posted videos and narratives about that trip and promises a book on what he found. But another of the activities he involves himself with is hosting a retreat at a lodge in the Bitterroot Mountains of Idaho. This year’s two session meeting centered around the work of Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey. The topic for the second session dealt with some of William Shakespeare’s work.

What he reported from those sessions - the paricipants want a quality of conversation they are not always getting where they live. They come because they want something more than the information fed them through screens. They want to talk about ideas with others who want to talk about ideas. He laments the decline of liberal arts and humanities in the United States. It’s reminiscent of Doig saying he had to start thinking out essay answers now. After Idaho, Jenkinson headed off to Vail, Colorado to conduct a “Conversations on Controversial Issues” seminar.  

One more thought about Ivan Doig fits comfortably. He talked about the “stopless ricochets through the past, to places and persons of twenty and thirty years ago.” Isn’t that the way memories flit about, some lingering, some gone quickly. I’ve got lots of them like that.

One memory, simple as it is, keeps revisiting me when the thermometer drops low and ice crystals hang in the air. A door of the house where I grew up held a large frosted pane of glass on  which a bull elk had been etched. He stood in a mountain meadow bugling his intent to the mountains in the distance. This is what imagination does. Was I wrong thinking it was a message for me to get out and do my own wandering in the wilderness. The image is not yet complete, though, since one cold winter and through that same window I watched a large snow owl gliding back and forth over our south pasture. It still ricochets ghostlike through my thoughts.

We used to live without flickering screens glaring at us all hours of the day. Life was quieter with  minimal sensory intrusion. A picture remains in my memory of evenings in the living room where the family gathered. One gas lamp and one kerosene lantern provided  the necessary light. In  that light I could twist my fingers into shadow figures of imaginative animals that walked on the wall. Simple pleasure!

I’m not sure if a covid-fueled brain becomes muddled, but insignificant thoughts still flit. Here I stand on the side of a grain box and dip into the wheat with double-cupped hands to lift and heft the contents. Isn’t that what the big guys do? Too soon the years added up where I had to play the role of a big guy and climb into a dusty grain bin to shovel. The air felt so good upon exiting even though a lot of hacking and coughing followed.

Some of us thought we would never catch this beastlike Covid-bug, but it has certainly proved to me it favors no one. A song by MercyMe tells me “ Better days coming, watch and see… We'll dance through the pain and the sorrow …Knowing there's gonna be better days.”

Bulls, Beware!

Some of the events in the following story occurred in a pasture near Enderlin 116 years ago. The facts of it were reported in an obituary in the Ransom County Independent on April 23, 1909. They involved a tragedy where a farmer named E. O. Fausett was killed by his herd bull. In piecing the incident together the authorities stated that Mr. Fausett had walked into his pasture about 4:30 in the afternoon to bring in his herd of milk cows.

As so often happens,  daily rituals like this proceed without much thought or trouble so Mrs. Fausett didn’t think to worry until a half hour later. Something was out of the ordinary with the absence of the usual barnyard commotion at milking time that caused her to look out the kitchen window toward the pasture. 

This scene wasn’t normal! Mrs. Fausett could see the cows were acting strangely and milling about an object lying along the fence line. She ran outdoors, grabbed a pitchfork at the barn and called for the dog to come. An untamed wildness running in the veins of the herd must have agitated them to make her uncomfortable enough to set the dog on them. 

Yes, that object lying there along the fence was her husband and he plainly had been attacked by the herd bull. Maybe he had been trying to reach safety by crossing the fence. We will never know the extent of brutality displayed by the raging bull. On inspection the man’s body displayed bruising and broken bones indicating he had been rolled, head butted, and trampled. 

Mrs. Fausett could see there was no hope for her husband and that he had died in the attack. She left him and returned to the house to make the necessary telephone calls.

Some of this narrative has been imagined with the intention of rendering it to story form, yet it retains the facts. The newspaper called him a prominent farmer in the community. That he was well known and respected can be confirmed by the number of  attendees who packed St. Olaf’s Church for his funeral. 

Mr. Fausett was a Norwegian immigrant who came to this country with his parents in 1866.  This first of several major waves of immigration took place in the 1860s for a surprising reason. Steamships had become a valid way to travel in comparison to sailing ships. A steamer could cross in one week whereas a sailing ship took about two months. A Norwegian source says a large number left Norway, not necessarily because of poverty, but because of the lure of America. 

Reasons why the Fausetts emigrated are probably lost in the mists of history. Upon arrival they lived and worked in various locations, with E. O. finally settling in Liberty Township in 1881 when he filed for a homestead. There he prospered until the bull ended his life.

Was Mr. Fausett wearing something bright red in color? An “old wives’ tale” told us that the color red angered bulls. In fact a story of an enraged bull attacking a red fire truck occurred in Ohio in 1922. The truck on its way to a fire ran into a head butting bull “for the simple reason that Mister Bull, enraged at the fiery red which adorns the fire-fighting apparatus, plunged toward the truck.” That crew took a different route home. Science tells us today that red is not a triggering factor, that bulls are color blind.

Pitchforks became a common defense when facing a bull. After all, the occurrences were often in the barn yard where such things were found leaning in corners. A headline in a Wisconsin paper stated, “Fourteen-Year-Old Lad Attacks Savage Beast With Pitchfork.” A Holstein bull had butted a man and held him against the barn and kept grinding at his chest. The man’s son picked up a pitchfork and started jabbing the bull with it until the father escaped. The bull next charged the son but ran his eye onto one of the fork tines which blinded him.

I had my own experience being chased by a bull while barely escaping. A young lad, I was playing in the barnyard when I spotted our bull pawing dirt with his devilish cloven hooves a short distance away. Something told me I’d better scramble to the top of the barn’s lean-to for safety. Screaming for help, Dad came out of the barn wielding a pitchfork and drove him off. Next day one of Clark Douglas’s cattle trucks drove in the yard and hauled him away to become hamburger. Artificial insemination became our preferred method of breeding the cows.

Even  skilled and experienced bull fighters in Spain meet death. The famous matador Manolete died as he sunk a sword into a bull which simultaneously pierced him with a sharp horn tip. They died together. The U. S. has its form of bullfighters called rodeo clowns. Clowns get caught by bulls, too, and injuries occur. One of them offered a good piece of advice. Don’t try to outrun a bull, they have four legs and we only have two.

And before we go, consider the bull from North Dakota that earned a big name for himself in the sporting world, Little Yellow Jacket. I watched him in the last North Dakota rodeo he appeared  where as usual he bucked off his rider. Only a dozen riders did ride him over the course of his career. The average ride lasted only two seconds. He has been inducted into the animal division of the North Dakota Cowboy Hall of Fame.