RANDOM THOUGHTS - Friday, Apr 25, 2025

 

Sad news came this week upon hearing of the death of one of my classmates - all 12 years  …  The term “life is short” takes on added meaning now that I’ve grown old  …  The scars I have prove I’ve lived  …  Camping, where you spend a small fortune to live like a homeless person  …  Doing nothing is hard cuz you never know when you’re done  …  I’ve never eaten clams on the half shell  …  What do you give a man who has everything: penicillin  …  Today in 1990 Hubble Space Telescope was sent into orbit …  47 years ago Steve Martin hosted SNL and performed his hit “King Tut” …  Relish the journey, you might never reach the destination  …  Read history books  … The picture shows my hangout where I spend time each day  …  

All Is So Long Ago

“Evening Land,” a first-rate Swedish book of poetry contains a refrain that causes me to travel to other times in my memory with these lines, “With old eyes I look back. All is so long ago.” He talks about his life being spent far away, “In another world or as if in another world.” His imagination had taken him elsewhere in his earlier life, but now “all is soon over.”

I have a large collection of images that I’ve boxed and stored on a shelf in my memory. Every once in awhile I open the box and and look at them again. Some are small and light, others weigh heavy. They have accumulated over the years. I’m lucky because the box is large and continues to fill. Let me reach in and grab a few.

I’m standing in a hayfield reaching under a windrow of hay to hook my finger in the handle of a crock jug. Hot and thirsty, I hoist the jug high in the crook of my arm and drink long, cool swallows from it.

I’m a small boy and my grandpa has taken me fishing at Lake Teawaukon. He baits my hook and throws in the line while telling me, “Don’t take your eyes off that bobber!” I don’t for several long hours. Small perch pull it under and make it bob and bob. He takes me home at twilight just as a full moon rises. I look at it and see a bloat bobbing, bobbing, bobbing in the face of the moon, in my supper plate, in my dreams.

Goose bumps chill me when I lie in bed while a raging winter storm howls in the eaves. I’d imagine a woman was screaming inside the blizzard wind.

I’m in the barnyard. A bull eyes me from a distance in the pasture. His hooves kick up a dust cloud filled with hate for the man-child he spots. He charges. My fingers dig and claw into the wall of the barn, and I gain the rooftop just as he arrives snorting and bellowing.

We’re in the hayfield again. I’m a boy and always want to be where the men work. I’m given the simple job of cleaning out the spilled hay from underneath the stationary stacker. As it raises to offload its hay on the top of the stack, a main wooden beam breaks and hundreds of pounds crash to the ground just as I’ve stepped away.

With the arrival of spring I shed my long underwear and heavy overshoes to finally glory in the lightness I’m feeling. In the spring wind I watch fresh-washed clothes sailing and billowing with the wind.

Saturday night and we drive along the gravel road to Enderlin but we stop  at the railroad crossing by the Center Farm for a long train. It is being pulled by a steam engine blowing smoke and steam as it climbs the grade out of town. Sometimes another engine pushes from the rear helping it gain speed.

A long burlap bag hangs from a tall, shaky scaffold and waits there for me to toss in a twine-tied fleece and crawl in to pack it down. The bundles of wool accumulate, and the wool glistens lanolin-rich that soaks into my pant legs and softens the leather of my shoes.

What are my earliest memories from so long ago? There was a rooster that kept attacking me in the yard. With a long stick and one swing I removed that threat permanently. It ended poorly while finding eggs to gather and bring to my mother when one I’d placed in my pocket broke. Later leaving the farmyard and wandering down the gravel road, I entered a slough with tall reeds where my dog accompanied me.  His flagging tail alerted an uncle driving by whose curiosity caused him to stop. 

Unfortunately, some memories become stone and stay in the box. Maybe they will be dug out again in the future, but they are deeply bedded history that I can’t revive. Some of them deal with times I should have said something, but didn’t, and there are times when I should have kept my mouth shut.

The singer John Prime succumbed to Covid a few years ago but left us with one song called “I Remember Everything.” He writes, “I remember every tree. Every single blade of grass holds a special place for me.” Although we can’t take the words literally, they do hold meaning. With a little effort, we can remember much.

Missed Opportunities

I am not a fan of science fiction stories except for a few that have caught my eye. One written by Ray Bradbury called “All Summer in a Day” did make an impact. After a settlement had been established on the planet of Venus and families took residence, they established a school to educate their offspring. The story centers on a class of nine-year-olds who have gotten used to constant rainstorms. In fact, it rains so much that the sun can be seen only for an hour every seven years.

The classmate named Margot remembers the sun because she was a recent arrival from earth where she had taken the sun for granted. As the children talked, Margot described the sun to them, but they didn’t believe her stories. She endured a good deal of razzing and teasing for her  account of pleasantries she had experienced in the sun. It resulted in their ganging up on her and locking her in a closet.

The rare occurrence of sunshine on Venus approached and the teacher took the class outdoors to enjoy it. Poor Margot was forgotten in the closet as they ran outside the school to revel and bask in the sunshine. The hour went by all too quickly and when the sun started receding behind heavy clouds, rain started falling again. Returning indoors to their regular studies, they shame-faced remembered her behind that locked door and freed her. They began realizing what they had done to their classmate who would have to wait another seven years to feel the sunshine on her skin.

One memory came to me from the days when I still believed in Santa Claus and missed seeing him arrive at our house. My mother shouted at me from their bedroom that Santa Claus had just come. As you may suspect I ran in there as fast as I could. There was a package setting there all wrapped up nice with a big ribbon and bow. My question was when? Mom answered, “Just now, he dropped it off and left for his next stop.” I  rushed to the window and looked and looked hoping to get a glimpse of him and his sleigh. The gift was nice, but, oh how I wished I could have seen him with my own eyes. This was a missed opportunity.

When I had started working for a regular paycheck I got the big idea that I should buy some farm land. Some was available, and I drove over to look and talk with the owner. Maybe I wasn’t serious enough about it because I dropped the idea. It was the time when the soil bank program still accepted acreage to take land out of production and owners would be paid for doing so. When I started realizing people were doing this and using the annual income to make payments on their mortgages, I knew I had missed my opportunity to become a landholder. 

Most people can remember instances of missed opportunities for advancement or betterment. It seems as if it’s our natural lot in life. We started this article with the idea of science fiction. One other example of that genre comes to mind relating to a missed opportunity. It was the one-time television show on Twilight Zone called “Time Enough at Last.” A nuclear holocaust destroyed the civilized world to the point where only one person survived. A studious sort of man, a bookworm with very thick eyeglasses, emerged from the wreckage and wondered what he could do. He reached the psychological point of holding a pistol to his head to commit suicide. As he scanned the landscape he spotted the ruins of a library. His spirits lifted when he started sorting through the books lying in disarray and realizing he finally had time enough to read all the good literature available. 

In his excitement he dropped one book and as he bent to pick it up his glasses fell to the ground and shattered. He lost his opportunity. I brought this up on a recent visit to my optometrist to make light conversation. Here was his take on it. “It was unbelievable. He could have found glasses somewhere in the rubble that would have let him see well enough to read.”

Maybe it can be called greed but I missed an investment opportunity. During Jimmy Carter’s presidency inflation started raging and costs rose steeply. On the other hand if you had some money it could be invested in CDs at ever-increasing rates of interest. We scratched some dollars together to buy what for us was a sizable CD. We thought the rising rate had peaked. Nope. It went higher. So it goes.

Legendary Wild Horses

The topic of wild horses comes up occasionally in North Dakota. They represent an endearing model of wildness and freedom that most of us aspire to experience at times. You can see them running with manes and tails flying in the breeze in the Badlands, and most people look for them when driving through the park. Their ongoing presence became in doubt a couple of years ago when the park management said the horses were livestock not native to the North Dakota badlands, and thereby proposed they be removed.  

Vocal backers cried out with overwhelming support of the horses, but their presence in the park remained in doubt. The common sense approach to the topic decided a managed number of horses would be okay. That thinking recently reached the North Dakota Legislature when they passed a resolution urging the U.S. Congress to pass legislation protecting the herd. From that it is hoped that permanent legislation will be passed to protect the herd.

It would be fun to consider first beginnings of these horses. To do so we’ve got to go back about four million years ago to when horses first evolved on this continent. A study participated in by about 80 scholars and scientists at Smithsonian Institution offer that statistic but go on to state the fossil record of them disappeared about 10,000 years ago. The Spanish reintroduced them in 1519 when Cortez arrived. That is the event most of us remember from our school texts.

Some of the horses broke free and did very nicely on their own while running untethered. They are adaptable to incredibly harsh and extreme conditions of drought, cold, and heat. Native tribes quickly saw the value of a horse and began breeding them, trading them, and watching them spread northward until they arrived in our area.

Those horses fit right into the nomadic lifestyle of some of the tribes, including those in what is now North Dakota. Horses changed methods of hunting and warfare, modes of travel, lifestyles, and standards of wealth and prestige.

Common names for wild horses such as mustang or bronco attach to objects in our language. Ford Motor Company took both for models of their vehicles. I wanted a Mustang that sold for $2300 new when I graduated from college in 1964. But when I was ready to buy contract negotiations between Ford and the UAW broke down. It was thirty days before they settled. About 500,000 vehicle sales were lost, and mine was one of them. I ended up with a plain 1962 Ford Galaxy. To get a Mustang, I married a girl who had one. A highly successful warplane called a P51 Mustang appeared in 1943. I don’t know if the term cayuse has been used anywhere. 

We can’t neglect how wild horses began appearing in literature and became featured in many short stories, books, and films. One author, David Phillips, in his book Wild Horse Country tracked the introduction of them in stories. He started with the work of Washington Irving who gained fame writing The Legend of Sleepy Hollow and Rip Van Winkle. One night while camped out on the prairie he joined a group of men sitting around a campfire who talked of a legendary White Stallion.  They all seemed to have knowledge of him. Irving grew interested and began taking notes which are credited with being the first-ever written account of the myth of the mustang. 

Legends grew. Mustang hair became white like spun silk, glowed like moonlight, and was always seen on the horizon tossing his head in defiance. The legend kept growing and added to. Herman Melville even picked up on it with the legendary white whale Moby Dick that could not be caught. He took his inspiration from stories of the horses that appeared in various publications of the time. 

Zane Grey wrote dozens of pulp novels which included the wild horses and molded them into the American legend which gave birth to the Lone Ranger and his horse Silver. They first appeared in 1933 as a radio show in Chicago. J. Frank Dobie included horse stories into his work after talking to old-timers who had been early day cowboys. Owen Wister’s The Virginian still sells. The Virginian rode a mustang. With all the books Louis L’Amour  has sold there must surely be an untamed mustang in some of them.

Ten years ago I attended a wild horse sale in Wishek when the Theodore Roosevelt Park culled and downsized the herd. Interest ran so high that a person needed to get to the sale ring early to get a seat. Some didn’t and had to go to city hall where a television feed provided the action. Most of us in attendance weren’t interested in buying, but felt drawn there to experience something of their myth and legend instilled through stories. I suspect future events like that will continue drawing crowds.

RANDOM THOUGHTS - Monday, April 7, 2025

Rare sight - I saw a man reading a book in West Acres  …  New Von Maur store, acres of clothes racks  …  I drank from the Fountain of Youth, but it didn’t do any good  …  spring warm-up coming  …  Curbing climate change is incongruous with ‘drill, baby, drill’  …  Lost any money on the stock market lately?  …  I’ve lived a full life, but not full enough, still making plans  …  A clear conscience is usually the sign of a bad memory  … Found this love spoon in a box of ‘forgottens’  I’d carved from a solid piece of basswood  … 

Thinking About Old Red Barns

  Even in old age my dad kept active with interesting things. One of his hobbies entailed driving around the countryside taking pictures of old buildings and pasting them into a scrapbook. I took it off the shelf recently and started paging through it to see where he pointed his camera. Pictures taken in small towns and farms located in his comfort zone fill the pages. Some of the sites have since disappeared but remain captured on these prints, including red barns. 

Large roofs on red barns have been neglected. Wind, hail, ice, and a hot sun all took their toll on them. The large square footage on the roof can be translated to dollars, a lot of dollars, therefore they were neglected. The roof became swaybacked, windows broke, rain and snow started rotting the studs, and in time the winds and snowloads started weighing them down. Every time one collapses, it marks a lamentable passage.

At one time when quarter and half-section farms were common, a person could look out and spot a number of barns in all shapes and sizes outlined on the horizon. Having the sensibilities of growing up on the small half-section farm, I am now aware of their passing.

Our barn featured sliding doors on both ends and was big enough for our little John Deere “B” to pass through. In cold weather that little tractor spent the nights in it staying warmed by the heat of the milk cows and then starting easily in the morning. At milking time our sixteen milk cows stood eating feed at their stanchions regularly relieving themselves into the gutters behind them. The gutters were always full or so it seemed, and the tractor could pull the spreader through the alley for us to load manure into the spreader.

Red paint was often chosen to cover the barns and outbuildings, and in the light of a sunny day a reminder of it can still be seen clinging to parts of the wood on a collapsed building. It must have been an old wives’ tale that declared red should be used so cows could find their way home. We know that wasn’t right because now cattle are known to be color blind. I guess the same caution no longer applies to wearing red around a bull. It just doesn’t matter to him what color you wear if he doesn’t like you.

They used the color red for an expedient reason, not a stylistic one. Red paint was cheap. Linseed oil worked as a sealant. Used alone it naturally turned to a red hue. Adding lime, milk, and the humble product of rust added to the redness. If some blood from a newly slaughtered animal was added to the mixture, it turned a darker burnt red that stood weathering. I’ve never forgotten the time when we, a custom combine crew, drove away from Lake City, Kansas. We passed a Case tractor pulling a three bottom plow that turned reddish soil to the sun. It possessed a high content of iron oxide. It was rusty.

Cupolas straddling the peak of a roof served a purpose of acting as a ventilator for moisture to escape, whether from the cows or their body wastes or from hay drying in the haymow. The knowledge of one other use exists in our family lore when my great-grandpa having knowledge of a possible raid on his still hid it in his barn’s cupola. My dad reminisced about a silver dollar he found as a boy by the barn at Nome and joked it could have dropped from the pocket of someone who came shopping for moonshine. We’ll never know. Maybe one day an archaeologist will dig in spots like that and find other treasures buried beneath the surface.

In so many ways the barn stood as a center of activity in a farmyard. Some of us remember cats at milking time sitting close and meow-begging a squirt of milk. Our barn also housed a team of horses, pens of pigs and sheep, and always a stray hen or two wandering through.

Dusty haymows were more than storage for hay. Through the winter as hay had been poked down to the cows, a young man could sweep the floor beneath a basketball hoop and shoot away.We hollowed out caves in loose hay or piled bales to create private little hide-a-ways. If we wondered where the cat hid her newborn litter, we could often find them tucked away up there. And how about those barn dances. I’ve been to a few in a haymow. Barns were important.

Moving Freight

 Without elaborating, the newspaper in Sheldon printed a simple statement in their first issue declaring, “Prairie schooners are passing westward almost everyday.” It’s fun to imagine those ox, mule, or horse drawn white canvas topped wagons moving across the tall grass prairie singly or with others. At the end of their journey they found places to settle and build farms and communities. Rails had only begun lacing the countryside, so  how did settlers come by the goods they needed? They depended on those freight hauling wagons drawn by oxen, mules, and horses  that brought them here in the first place. 

A great story came out of Bismarck on the Missouri River that illustrates the movement of freight to satisfy the wants and needs of settlers. Prior to the arrival of the Northern Pacific in 1873, a settlement had sprouted and residents wanted cooked food to fill their stomachs. Iron stoves could not be purchased. Those stoves were manufactured in Cleveland, Ohio, but no direct route existed. A new stove took quite a journey to reach Bismarck. 

At a Cleveland dock on the Ohio River stoves were loaded on a steamboat and rode southwesterly until reaching Cairo, Illinois where that river converged with the Mississippi River. Then the stove hauling steamboat headed mostly northward until reaching St. Louis, Missouri. Here it reached its confluence with the Missouri River. A long trip still awaited, but the Missouri River would take them to Bismarck and beyond with that desired cargo. 

A person ordering a stove had to be very patient because the trip took some time. I can’t guess, but I do know some of that freight never made it. While traveling during one of our road trips we visited a museum near Kansas City that paid tribute to a sunken steamboat named Arabia. After striking a submerged object in the river it sank in 1856, 169 years ago. Through the years the river changed course and skirted the site of the wreck, silt and dirt covered it over, and then in 1988 it was rediscovered and dug up in a farmer’s field.

Many goods intended for settlers never made it. Over two hundred tons of material have been salvaged, and it is probable more might still be buried. Exhibits in the Arabia Museum include a wide range of salvaged goods, including lamps, dishes, silverware, cookware, firearms, shoes, buttons, hammers, saws, and yes, stoves. A great narrative with plenty of pictures can be found by searching for the Arabia wreck on the internet.

River and railroad traffic could only supply some of the demand. Hauling goods and material still required wagons pulled by oxen, mules, and horses. In 1863, General Sibley entered the territory with about 3,300 uniformed men. Their intent was to punish the Indians for their undesired behavior in the Minnesota Uprising. Imagine the army’s appetite at the end of a long marching day. To satisfy their hunger 225 mule-drawn wagons bearing foodstuffs and material plus a herd of cattle accompanied the army. The men who drove the mule teams became known as teamsters.

At least one of the teamsters who drove mule teams returned to make his home in the area. In the old Owego Church cemetery I spotted a lonely military gravestone standing by itself. One of the words engraved on it identified him as a “Wagoner.” The inscription identified the man as James M. Kinney, Wagoner, Co. B, 10 Minn. Inf. I have found a roster of these men and Kinney’s name is included. He earned a bit of fame when the editor of the Sheldon noted how he had walked sixteen miles through the snow into town to catch the next day’s westbound train to Lisbon where he wanted to stay at the soldier’s home. He entertained some of the boys that evening telling them about his experiences.

Another teamster living in the area is buried in the Sheldon cemetery. John T. Hickey wound up driving a supply wagon at a famous historical event known as Custer’s Last Stand. The headline of the local paper referred to him as Reno’s freighter. My reading of history tells me that Custer rode into the area and thought he would hit the Indian encampment at three different points. Major Reno led the detachment to which Hickey was assigned.  I’d like to have been in the presence of the man when he “often related with much vividness the stirring times of encounters with the savage Indian tribes that roamed over the state.” When he brought his family to Sheldon to settle he managed a large livery stable across from the NP depot.

Today we only need to drive along an interstate highway to see multitudes of semi-trucks hauling goods from place to place. And who drives them? Teamsters. A large union represents their membership, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.