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.

From the Tip of My Pen

I never know what words will flow from the tip of this pen. It’s a very mysterious gadget to hold. Mine of choice is a ballpoint pen, sometimes a cheap Bic, sometimes an upscale Parker T-Ball Jotter. When I was a young lad I loved taking my mother’s fountain pen and use it to scribble away. It held a reservoir of words that flowed for quite a long while. That style was an improvement from the dip pen which held only a few words before it needed another dip into an ink well or bottle. Neither the fountain pen nor the dip pen prove friendly to this lefty because of the way I hold the pen and sweep from left to right. The left hand is always in contact with the fresh ink on the page and smears it.

In an earlier age, let’s say the time of writing the Declaration of Independence, writers used something else to pen their words - goose quills. Thomas Jefferson wrote the many-word Declaration with one. A handy device called a pen knife that some of us carry in our pockets today can convert a feather to a pen. It’s just a small folding knife. Its original purpose was for trimming and sharpening quill pens.

Sometimes a pencil in hand becomes as mysterious for its output as an ink pen. I’ve become something of a snob since I prefer Blackwing Pearls which are advertised as writing with “Half the pressure, twice the speed.” Since the Zanbroz store in downtown Fargo closed, I need to find a new supplier. After all, John Steinbeck used them (I can dream, can’t I) and said “they really glide over the paper.” He was said to have looked at his sharpened Blackwing and saw a lightning rod.

As far as putting these writing instruments to work, I only had to look around.  My copy of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold lies open on my desk. The book celebrated its 75th birthday this year, and it contains a wealth of writing. One passage leaps off the page. He reminisces that in his youth with “trigger-itch”  they never passed up a chance to kill wolves.  One day a party of them started firing at a she-wolf until it went down with its wounded pup  following behind. He wrote, “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.” The scene profoundly affected him and he noted that as time passed the thinning of the wolf opened the way for the deer to increase in numbers and negatively influence the environment.

Another story of the wolf comes to mind when the anthropologist Loren Eiseley shared this. He spoke of the time one winter evening while sorting through a box of  fossilized bones he had collected. His dog named Wolf slept on the floor beside him. When Eiseley dropped a large bone between them, the dog woke and took it in his mouth. The specimen, probably 10,000 years old and rock-hard, became the dog’s possession as if to say only fools gave up bones. Any attempt to take it resulted in the animal’s baring his teeth and snarling viciously at his master. As Eiseley noted, “I was the most loved object in his universe, but the past was fully alive in him. I knew he was not bluffing. If I made another step he would strike.”

To defuse the situation, Eiseley got up and walked to the door speaking calmly to his dog, “Wolf, a walk in the snow.” All of a sudden, the promise of some  playfulness outdoors let the dog forget the bone and he willingly came on the run. A blizzard wind was blowing, and after a frolic, the dog wanted to return indoors where he promptly fell asleep on the rug. Uncontested now, the bone was picked up and placed high on a shelf.

As youngsters we listened to a steady influx of stories about wolves: Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Little Pigs, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, and many others such as Jack London’s books The Call of the Wild and White Fang. According to Roman mythology, the city of Rome was founded by twin brothers Romulus and Remus, who were raised by a she-wolf after being abandoned as infants.

Wolf stories have flowed easily and often from the tip of a writer’s pen. Next time you pick one up, stop and wonder how to unlock it. Maybe it doesn’t need to be unlocked. Try pressing it to paper and watch the words tumble out.