Eric Bergeson is a writer with 2 books and a weekly newspaper column.  We'll be adding his musings as we go along and actually creating a page where you can order his books and find out more about him.  He comes from a long line of nurserymen and no year is complete without a trip to Bergeson's Nursery in Fertile Minnesota.   

If you're interested in Eric's books, here's the Publishing Company  (More info at bottom of page)
Country Scribe Publishing
4177 County Highway 1
Fertile, MN 56540
Contact Eric via Email  ericberg@gvtel.com                                         new shoots on my Spruce Tree

June 2, 2003
After much reportorial legwork, sources have uncovered the founder of
the new 911 address system recently imposed upon rural areas, the
system whereby an old farmhouse on a mud road at RR 1, Box 126, has
been transformed into a suburban estate at 44502 520th Ave. SW.

Ralph L. Twinkledoofer, a career desk clerk at the State Department of
Bureaucracy Department in St. Paul, first made a name for himself in
the bureaucratic community when he succeeded in requiring farm people
to cover their garbage pits and install metal dumpsters instead.

The 911 address system, however, was Twinkledoofer’s crowning
achievement. With one brilliant stroke, Twinkledoofer accomplished the
bureaucrat’s dream: He complicated the life of millions for no apparent
reason, and with little opposition.

In a rare interview, the recently-retired Twinkledoofer revealed what
many have long suspected: The installation of the 911 addressing system
was all a big practical joke.

“I never thought it would go anywhere,” Twinkledoofer, said, sounding
surprised by his success. “Giving street names to every gravel road in
Minnesota was such an obviously ridiculous idea that I was sure it
would be laughed out of the legislature.”

That was before Twinkledoofer hit upon the brilliant idea of naming his
system, “The 911 Address System.” Once the powers-that-be were
convinced that 44502 520th Ave. SW would somehow be easier for
ambulance crews to find than a rural route address, all opposition to
the bizarre plan crumbled.

“I can’t believe they fell for that one,” Twinkledoofer said, somewhat
bemused. “I guess if you want to get something silly imposed upon
people, you just have to threaten their health.”

In retirement, an unrepentant Twinkledoofer collects stories of the
mayhem unleashed by his pet project. Stories of people who can’t
remember their own address. Stories of UPS drivers lost for days.
Stories of confused ambulance crews administering CPR to farmers who
thought they felt fine.

Twinkledoofer is the first to point out that his success was not
complete. His attempt to force high school students to memorize their
new addresses in order to graduate failed. “If only I had stuck with
four-digit numbers instead of five,” he said with a shake of the head,
“it probably would have been included in the Profile of Learning.”

But that small failure does little to dim Twinkledoofer’s dazzling
bureaucratic success story. “I never dreamed that I could force every
rural resident to order new check blanks,” he said with obvious
satisfaction.

To make it clear that he was kidding, Twinkledoofer added many
whimsical twists to his addressing system. For example, some gravel
roads are an avenue if you live on one side and a street if you live on
the other.

With a touch of humor, Twinkledoofer decreed that the streets and
avenues in a great swath of rural northwestern Minnesota be numbered
from middle of the tiny town of St. Hilaire.

“I can just see out-of-state visitors counting down from 540th Avenue
to 320th Avenue, thinking they’ll find skyscrapers when they finally
get to the single digits,” Twinkledoofer said with a chuckle. “Instead,
they find themselves at the liquor store in downtown St. Hilaire.”

Active in retirement, Twinkledoofer spends his days watching his
neighbors to make sure they don’t violate city ordinances. “I turned in
Mervyn Larson for a noise violation last Thursday,” he said with pride,
adding that he is working on getting an injunction to force the
Bjorkland’s down the street to spray for dandelions.
 

May 26, 2003
It is a singularly small town talent, and one I lack: The ability to
recognize oncoming cars soon enough to decide whether or not to wave.

I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to all of you who
have waved to me as we met at 120 miles-per-hour. I didn’t mean to snub
you. My intentions were good. In fact, I probably waved after we passed
and then spent the next couple of minutes hoping your feelings weren’t
hurt.

But all cars look the same to me, particularly when whizzing my way. To
recognize an oncoming vehicle soon enough to issue a convincing wave
seems to me a skill on par with hitting a Nolan Ryan fastball. I am
just not that good.

I could wave to everybody, I suppose, but that seems promiscuous.
Instead, I have divided area highways into waving roads and non-waving
roads.

Waving roads are side roads near home. On these roads, the odds are so
high that I will know the person in the oncoming car that I just go
ahead and wave at every one. I know that this means I might wave at a
strange car every now and then, but that is a risk I’ll have to take.

It goes without saying that all gravel roads are waving roads, even
those so narrow and frost boiled that you would be wiser to keep both
hands gripping the wheel as you meet. Not waving to a neighbor on a bad
gravel road is a snub that could start a long-running feud. Wave on
gravel, even if it means risking a head-on crash.

However, I consider major trunk highways and any highway more than
twenty miles from home to be non-waving highways. If you meet me on a
non-waving highway, don’t expect much, and please don’t think I am
stuck up.

The talent for recognizing oncoming cars knows no gender distinction,
and it is not genetic. Both my mother and sister have the talent of
recognizing cars, but somehow I missed out.

Small towns are filled with experts on recognizing oncoming cars, so
much so that I fully expect the Department of Homeland Security to tap
small town people to help with the fight against car bombers and other
forms of terror.

In fact, I feel like these people are spies already.

Who needs the FBI when you have locals who can say with confidence,
“What were you doing down by Barnesville last Thursday? I met you on
Highway 9.” I feel like asking, do you have my phone bugged, too?

I am just  lucky to find my vehicle in the West Acres parking lot
without first sticking my key in the locks of several other pickups
vaguely similar to my own. And those vehicles aren’t moving.

Once, while visiting a relative in California, I borrowed a car to go
to Barnes and Noble--and forgot what the car I borrowed looked like. I
stuck my key in the locks of so many cars that I was sure security
would pull me in for questioning.

I can tell a pickup from a car. That much I understand. But the
difference between a Buick and a Mercury eludes me. And all of these
monster SUVs look like tanks. Not a one of them stands out.

It is clear that I suffer from VRDD (Vehicle Recognition Deficit
Disorder). As a victim of VRDD,   I ask you to be understanding of my
sometimes erratic behavior in highway waving situations. I am powerless
over the situation, and am trying to find help.

May 19, 2003
One of life’s great mysteries: How is it that you can take a dozen
sensible, bill-paying, responsible, sober, mild-mannered folks, put
them together on a committee, and suddenly they become more dangerous
than a drunken twenty-one-year-old in a Camaro?

Even a committee of the most decent folks can quickly morph into a
many-headed beast. Nothing is safe. Old trees fall to the chain saw.
Beautiful buildings crumble. Ugly structures spring up in their place.
Antique church fixtures are auctioned off. Bulldozers are turned loose
to wreak random destruction.

Committees can create as well as destroy, but their creations are
usually limited to a list of infuriating regulations. In the committee
environment, silly rules spring up thicker than Canadian thistle on the
edge of a manure pile.

In the country, church committees are the usual culprit. In the
suburbs, condominium associations take the cake. Committees, boards,
associations, consortiums--all should come equipped with day-glow
orange warning signs.

Something happens to groups of people who are given power over other
people near them. Somehow, they manage as a group to be less
intelligent than any one of the group’s members. Even an Altar Guild of
gray-haired Lutheran ladies can turn into a snakepit of intrigue,
plotting and revenge.

Individual people can be reasoned with, but committees and boards
seldom respond to anything less convincing than a sledgehammer. Reason
means nothing. Good sense disappears. Humanity is elbowed aside by
sterile procedure.

In particular, any group that takes it upon itself to issue permits of
any sort sends shivers up my spine. Its a good thing I live in the
country. The thought of a neighborhood association or a city council
telling me to clean up my junk pile is enough to make me start
collecting guns.

Nothing beautiful has ever come out of committee. No committee has ever
written an inspiring piece of music, or created a beautiful work of
art, or designed a building of lasting merit.

No, the best that can be hoped for of a committee is that they deadlock
on every issue so they don’t do any damage.

Money matters dominate committees. We can save a few dollars on fuel by
blocking out all the windows, so we’d better do it. If we pave the
cemetery, we won’t have to pay for mowing. All in favor say aye.

It takes great strength of character for a member of a committee to
stand up for spending an extra dollar to save something beautiful or
old or of sentimental value. So, most committee members stay silent,
let the dullards with the calculators hypnotize them with numbers, take
a quick vote, and hope to get home in time for the ten o’clock news.

What good things there are in this world exist due to the unleashing of
individual genius. Great artists, musicians, composers and writers
submit to no judgment of their work but their own and that of a few
respected peers. Committees play no role except to grant silly awards
after the fact.

Leaders of people have to work through committees, but the great
leaders are great in spite of committees. In fact, great leaders often
become great leaders because they have an ability to bludgeon, shove,
and browbeat the committees in their path into allowing something good
to happen.

Such leaders are rare. Between those great leaders, we are stuck with
the mediocrity produced by committees of every sort, on every level,
everywhere around us.

May 12, 2003
The phone rings. You pick it up, but nobody’s there. It rings again.
You yell hello several times but nobody answers. It rings yet again a
minute later, you pick it up, and all you hear is a bunch of static and
snippets of a voice.

By now, you know. Somebody is calling from their cell phone while
driving on some county highway where reception is spotty. The signal is
strong enough to make your phone ring and force you up from the
recliner, but not strong enough to allow conversation.

When this happens, I have learned the hard way that it is unwise to
spit expletives into the receiver. The caller can sometimes hear you
even if you can’t hear them, and people tend to take rough language
personally no matter how justified the outburst.

Now, I take my remote phone along to the recliner so I don’t have to
get up six times in three minutes to answer a call from somebody who
isn’t there, yet another example of technology causing a need for yet
more technology to fight off the effects of the first technology.

When you finally do connect with a cell phone user, the reception can
cut out without warning. This can cause grave misunderstandings.

I once took a call from a friend I hadn’t heard from in a while. I
apologized to him for not making it to his Superbowl party two months
before. I was sure that he would understand, so I breezily said, hey,
sorry about that, I was really tired and really busy, maybe next time.

A long, sullen silence. It was clear that he was deeply hurt, so I
rushed to make amends. I said I felt bad for neglecting him, and
suggested we get together soon, maybe for coffee tomorrow.

More silence. Wow, I thought, this situation is worse than I had
suspected. It clearly required  some full-scale groveling. So, I went
on about how I had not been feeling particularly gregarious last winter
and really hadn’t been in touch with any of my friends, much less him,
and that he shouldn’t take it personally.

That did no good, which just made me mad. Good grief, I sputtered, if
you’re going to pout about it you can just forget it. I have no time
for this passive-aggressive codependent behavior. Why can’t you cut a
guy some slack?

No response. So I went off about how I don’t like football anyway and
the thought of sitting on a couch for five hours watching all that
overblown Superbowl hype gave me indigestion, which would only have
been made worse by his wife’s bad chili. I’d rather sit at home and
floss my teeth.

About then I realized something was wrong. “Are you there?” I said. No
answer.

Turns out, the phone had cut out sometime in the previous three
minutes. I had just conducted a three minute argument with a dead
phone, or so I hoped.

A few seconds after I hung up, the phone rang. It was the friend. He
sounded calm. His cell phone lost its signal, he said, so he switched
to the land line. He didn’t bring up the Superbowl party, so I didn’t
either.

I didn’t tell him that I had spent the past several minutes tearing him
to shreds. The call passed without incident, although my blood pressure
took a while to return to normal.

 

May 5, 2003
The local post of the Gitagadder Lodge held their spring banquet and
annual meeting at the VFW last Tuesday night. Twenty-two members
attended. A good time was had by all.

According to custom, Helmer Nelson roasted a pig and Harriet Skordal
brought her famous potato salad. Harriet’s potato salad is famous not
because it tastes good, but because she insists upon bringing a vat of
it wherever two or more are gathered. Most of it goes in the garbage,
stuck between paper plates, but she never seems to catch on.

After the meal, Gitagadder president Arvid Nelson opened the business
meeting. Although not a born leader, Arvid had been so flattered two
years ago when he was offered the presidency of Gitagadder only one
year after moving to town that he accepted immediately.

Little did he know that the only discernible duty of the president of
Gitagadder Lodge is to pick a date for the annual Christmas party which
offends nobody, an impossible task.

The issue reared its head at the annual meeting when Ervil Larson
announced that he and Elaine wanted to leave for Arizona December 15th
this year, and he sure hoped that the Christmas party could be held
before then.

Drawing on last year’s experience, Arvid said he couldn’t pick a date
until after the high school sports schedule came out in September. He
also knew not to interfere with Advent activities or Monday Night
Football.

Last year, the only open date was the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.
Nobody said a word in opposition until only seventeen people showed for
the party. At the January meeting, Arvid caught heck.

So Arvid learned the hard way that when the locals stare at you like a
herd of drugged Holsteins, it doesn’t mean that they agree with what
you have just said.

Poor Arvid. When he arrived in town to be the new loan officer at the
bank, he thought it might be a good idea to join some community
organizations. He didn’t realize that he was the first new member of
Gitagadder in twenty-five years, and that he wasn’t entirely welcome.
By making him president, the membership got their revenge.

In his first move as president, Arvid proposed a fundraiser to raise
the balance in the Gitagadder Ute Scholarship fund above $45.21, where
it had been stuck since 1993 when the lodge had allocated $25 to help
Jeremy Erickson travel to Australia on a basketball exchange.

No luck. The fundraiser idea died for a lack of a second. Turns out,
young Jeremy still hadn’t sent a thank you note to Gitagadder. Although
they never said a word, the membership felt that if that’s the way kids
are, they can pay their own way to Australia. So much for the Ute
Scholarship Fund.

Next, Arvid suggested that each member canvass ten homes in town in an
attempt to reach potential new members. But the stares he got in return
were so blank that Arvid knew the idea was doomed.

In despair, Arvid unilaterally appointed a committee of three members
to come up with a mission statement. What is Gitagadder about? What is
our vision for the future? But month after month went by and the
committee never found time to meet. The mission statement idea died a
slow death.

Finally, Arvid decided to just show up for the meetings and go through
the motions. No new business, no old business, no bright ideas, no
discussion.

His popularity soared to a level of begrudging acceptance. Members even
shared their opinions on the weather with Arvid over pumpkin bars after
meetings.

And so, poor Arvid learned a great truth. Most small-town organizations
exist for one reason and one reason alone: Lunch. Anything which delays
lunch or interferes with its digestion will be resented, resisted,
filibustered, and eventually defeated.

 

April 29, 2003
However low the rural economy sinks, let’s hope small towns never lose
their ability to throw a good funeral.

Oddly, one of the great comforts of a small town is the way people turn
out for funerals, even for the very elderly. In the city or the
suburbs, I doubt that you could fill half-a-room for a funeral of a
90-year-old, but in the small town, a full house is common.

In the city or suburbs, older people disappear from community life,
what there is of it, when they retire. In the small town, people
usually remain a part of the social fabric as long as they don’t move
away.

So, when an older person passes away in the small town, a whole bunch
of people feel as if they lost a friend. People of all ages, faiths,
and social groups fill up the old country churches with crowds seldom
seen on a Sunday morning.

Most older people have been a part of the scenery for the entire lives
of those younger than they. They almost attain historic landmark
status. They saw you grow up. You remember when they still lived on the
farm. Lately, you have run into them at the store, at the cafe, or at
other funerals.

Even though you might have only four or five brief chats with a person
per year, those little exchanges build up over the decades. Hearing of
an older person’s death can bring back poignant memories even if you
weren’t all that close.

Most of those memories are good. Some are mixed with guilt: Poor Lars,
I wonder if he ever found out I was in on the plot to fill his car with
live pigeons. Or if Emil found out that it me who called him late one
night pretending to be an Amway salesman.

And I wonder if Martha ever found out that I put a earthworm in her
soda thirty years ago. Martha, as it happens, later died of throat
cancer. As an eight-year-old, I was haunted by the thought that it was
the worm which caused her illness.

But if you stay around town long enough, you have time to grow up and
repair relations with most everybody. You have to, or life can become a
daily obstacle course of guilt and resentment.

Watching people near you go from positions of power and vitality into
old age makes one realize that the same thing will someday happen to
you. The dawning awareness that we all share the same fate tends to
breed civility in once brash youth.

Funerals bring together the community to see the best in one of its
members. Uncomfortable memories are tactfully avoided as the need to
forgive and forget is brought home forcefully without a word being said
to that effect.

Of course, the scrumptious food at small-town funerals isn’t a minor
matter. Not only is the food delicious, but it is unabashedly decadent.
There might be six dishes called “salads,” but not a shred of lettuce
pollutes any one of them. Just jello, whipped cream and marshmallows,
maybe a can of pineapple.

Coffee, cake, and loud chatter in the old church basement cap off the
funeral ritual on a less than somber note. Everybody is on their best
behavior, spiffed up, kind and considerate. The next-of-kin part, one
hopes, with a sense that their loved one mattered to many.

With each old-timer’s death, a little chunk of the way things were
disappears. A set of stories is silenced. A bit of wisdom is lost.

But the funeral itself brings out the best small towns have to offer.
Here’s hoping that small town funerals--with their tater-tot hotdishes,
jello salads and sturdy ceramic coffee cups--long endure.
 

April 21, 2003
Elton John, Billy Joel and their million-dollar speaker systems shook
the foundations of the Fargo Dome Saturday night. Due to the generosity
of a friend with an extra ticket, I was amongst the nearly 20,000
people of all ages in attendance.

Gathering 20,000 people in one room in a state as thinly populated as
North Dakota is no small feat, especially when one considers that the
average ticket price was over eighty dollars. As Billy Joel told the
crowd, “For what you paid to get in, we should be home washing your
windows.”

At their best, Elton John and Billy Joel are piano-playing balladeers.
Each has pumped out an endless stream of hits for the past thirty
years. Most of those songs bring a flash of recognition to people’s
faces within the first few notes.

Lilting 1970s songs like Elton John’s “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me”
and Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” awaken pleasant memories of endless grade
school summers for me. If the Twins weren’t playing on the radio, the
pop stations were.

Two of the first record albums I purchased in junior high were by Elton
John and Billy Joel. The Billy Joel album is still in a box somewhere,
but the Elton John record didn’t survive a fit of righteousness
inspired by one of those rock music seminars which made the rounds of
the church youth group circuit in the early 1980s.

I had thought Elton John was pretty mild compared to Led Zeppelin, the
Blue Oyster Cult, and other  evil rock groups preferred by my peers,
but I was appalled to find out at the seminar that Elton’s lyrics were
as nefarious as any of them and contained hidden messages which were
likely to corrupt my soul and had probably done so already.

Rather than attend the record-burning ceremony held at the city park, a
public display of piety I found unbecoming, I decided to just scratch
out the bad songs on the record with a hat pin and leave the harmless
ones alone. Although “Yellow Brick Road” was said to contain subtle
humanist messages, it was my favorite and survived the purge
unscratched.

But the message of the rock seminar soon faded away and I backslid into
old listening habits, habits which included generous doses of both
Elton John and Billy Joel. Whatever’s wrong with me now is probably
their fault, but I am so far gone now that I don’t care.

Elton and Billy didn’t seem very evil on the stage at the Fargodome.
They were way too loud, but not evil. Elton was pudgy and overdressed.
Billy Joel looks like the aging Brooklynite he is.

When they played together, one on each grand piano, alternating verses
on each other’s greatest ballads, it was priceless.  I got chills at
the first chords of “Crocodile Rock. I remembered hearing it on the bus
in sixth grade, in the pitch dark of a December morning in 1976, the
year daylight savings time was extended into winter to save energy.

But the pair’s unfamiliar newer music got lost in the horrible
acoustics of the Fargodome. The mediocrities in the band had to each
take their turn making their guitars screech. It was so loud that my
ears got sore.

I would love to hear Elton John and Billy Joel play a small concert,
with just their grand pianos, in a small auditorium free of overbearing
sound systems, screaming guitars, huge video screens, light shows, and
throngs of people. Both performers are talented enough to shine without
such props.

But when you are able to fill a stadium with 20,000 people at eighty
dollars a pop, I suppose that’s what you’ll do, no matter how much the
music is compromised.

 

April 14, 2003
On a recent perfect April morning, with temperatures approaching
seventy degrees, I happened to stop by an area school building. I was
surprised to find the dank gymnasium swarming with dozens of grade
school children, accompanied by their parents, coolers in tow.

It was a basketball tournament. On a Saturday. In April. For elementary
students, some of whom had traveled for hours to get there.

What is going on here? Shouldn’t a Saturday in April be a time when
grade school children scurry outside to catch frogs, dam up creeks, and
generally get into mischief? Shouldn’t their parents be out in the yard
raking leaves or washing windows? What perverse logic drives entire
families to spend a perfect April Saturday in a smelly gym?

I am appalled by how organized childhood has become. Activity after
activity. After-school programs for all ages. Organized, competitive
sports for near tots. Not even Saturdays or evenings are sacred!

These days, the thought of allowing a child a free, unplanned moment
seems to fill parents with fear and trembling. Programs, dance line,
organizations, clubs, play dates, elaborate parties. You wonder when
kids get time to just explore the neighborhood.

People want to do everything for their children, but they forget that
the best thing they could do is have interests of their own and provide
a close up example to their children of a person who has a life.

Modern children--those lucky enough to have a reasonably solid
family--seem to be excessively monitored, controlled, regimented, doted
upon, scheduled, kept track of, spoiled. Their parents seem to have
nothing better to do.

The children look dazed to me. Perhaps kids instinctively realize that
their success on the basketball court, even as a fourth grader, is
important because it helps their father forget his humiliating job, or
convinces their harried mother that she is adequate.

This perpetually organized childhood concept is a recent phenomenon.
When I was a child, kids were ignored. The adults had other worries. If
we wanted to be in sports, we drove bike in. We never expected our
parents to show up. They were too busy. Pity the poor sap whose mother
came to every game.

I was left to run wild on spring Saturdays. I cut down trees with a
hatchet and built a teepee. I dammed up the drainage ditch, then busted
the dam and watched the torrent with a sense of power. I brought home
baby birds, mice, rabbits and lizards. All of them died, so I held
funerals.

I tore apart a little old gas engine without permission. I smashed the
gauges on abandoned cars out back. I played with matches. I tried to
kidnap a neighbor kid and hold him for ransom. I sat on the roof  on
sunny days and used mirrors to blind passersby.

As long as I didn’t disrupt the economy, I was ignored. Grandparents,
neighbors and parents objected only when the destruction and mayhem
interrupted their work. I think most kids from my generation had the
same experience.

Earlier generations were even less watched. My dad attached a homemade
rocket to his bike and nearly blew himself into eternity. Later, to see
if gasoline really does burn, he attached a lit match to a door spring
and held it up to the gas nozzle. He squeezed the nozzle, only to have
the rush of gasoline put the match out. End of experiment.

Modern parents seem seem reluctant to let their kids make their own fun
and discover things on their own. They didn’t learn the wisdom of their
parents: Let kids be kids. They might get bruised up a bit, but they’ll
learn.
 

April 7, 2003
The wars fought by this country in its history cross the entire
spectrum, from the noble and memorable on one end, to the ignoble and
forgettable on the other.

The Civil War is remembered as the struggle to preserve the Union and
free the slaves. It was the most violent war in the world’s history at
the time, with tens of thousands dying each day of battle.

It was begun and waged, with utter agony, by a humble and humane man,
Abraham Lincoln, who, despite his resolute public face, searched his
soul during the long, dark nights of the war, wondering if he was in
the right, weighing the horrible human cost of battle against the
larger principles at stake.

World War II is also well-remembered. Few question the nobility of the
Allied cause. That war brought forth two great leaders, Winston
Churchill and Dwight Eisenhower, who, despite their conviction that
they were in the right and their determination to win, never lost sight
of the horrible human cost of the fighting.

As he watched newsreels of the Allied bombing of civilian Dresden,
Churchill stood up and shouted, “Have we become monsters?” He had deep
doubts, and they are to his credit.

Eisenhower’s dread of sending young men into combat drove him to smoke
four packs of filterless Pall Malls per day. When he accepted honors
after the war, he reminded his admirers in eloquent terms that he did
so only on behalf of those who died due to his decisions.

Both wars were epic conflicts. The outcome was uncertain, but the
consequences of not fighting were clear--and the results, however
imperfect, have stood the test of time.

At the other end of the spectrum are two forgotten conflicts, the
Mexican War and the Spanish-American War. Both were lopsided affairs in
which victory was never in doubt. Both were started with great acclaim
by men whom history has largely forgotten, Presidents James K. Polk and
William McKinley. Neither Polk nor McKinley regarded war itself with
anything more than a shrug.

The Mexican War ended in a great grab of territory by the United
States, territory which today includes much of the American Southwest.
The Spanish-American War ended with the United States in control of
Cuba and the Phillipines.

In both cases, the American public was lathered up for war by the
alleged threat the enemy posed to the United States, as well as the
corruption and brutality of their rule. But no matter the motive,
territory was the most lasting result.

Quick and easy American victories didn’t improve matters in the
long-term for the conquered countries. After many regime changes, Cuba
ended up with Castro, and the Phillipines wound up with decades of rule
by the murderous Marcos.

Perhaps for those reasons, the Mexican and Spanish-American Wars have
been largely swept under history’s rug. No documentaries on PBS trumpet
the virtues of the presidents who started them. No epic battles
inspired legends, songs or poetry.

To be remembered with pride, it seems, a war’s purpose must be clear.
Those who begin it must forcefully disavow and forbid less-than-noble
motives such as profit and territory. The threat prevented must have
been real, and the freedom brought to the liberated must be actual and
lasting.

In addition, it seems apparent that leaders who go to war, if they wish
to be remembered kindly by history or remembered at all, must do so
with soberness, humility, and a deep and sincere reluctance.

 

March 31, 2003
There must be a major goose airport near my house. Dozens of cackling
Canadians whoosh low overhead at all hours, sometimes in formation,
sometimes in pairs, honking away with an  noisy urgency which brings to
mind a suburban mom on her cell phone in rush-hour traffic.

So human, the geese. Forming groups, holding meetings, chattering
endlessly, following first this leader, then that, flying in enormous
but apparently meaningless circles, only to land again where they last
took off, in time for yet another meeting.

I don’t know what they talk about at goose meetings. I don’t speak
Goosian, and interpreters are scarce. At first glance, it would seem
that the availability of corn would be a likely topic, as would the
decision over who will lead the V formation tomorrow.

Some of the geese are sure to be chomping at the bit to get up early
and head north just after breakfast, while others just want to sleep in
and hang out around here for a couple more days. There’s a good
cornfield here, and who knows what’s up north? They say its nothing but
canola once you cross the border.

But further contemplation leads me to think that the geese have
developed extraordinarily effective coping mechanisms to deal with such
conflicts within the flock.

For example, if the flock reaches an impasse on the
should-we-stay-or-should-we-go issue, it seems that they simply split
up. The up-and-comers up and go, and the dawdlers hang around and
dawdle, with no apparent hard feelings between the two groups.

Such an elegant conflict resolution strategy separates geese from
humans, who would likely debate the issue for several hours only to
table it until the next meeting, at which time nothing would have
changed and everybody would just say the same thing over again, at
which time the whole issue would be assigned to a task force, which
would come up with the same recommendations as the last task force,
which is that further study is needed in order to arrive at a workable
consensus.

Geese, it turns out, have developed consensus-building strategies which
put humans to shame.

For example, geese have largely solved the the pressing issue of who
leads the V by adopting a “rotational command” strategy. Finding two or
four year terms impractical, geese instead change leaders several times
per day, with each goose taking his or her turn leading the V as his or
her energy permits.

Rotational command virtually eliminates the resentments and jealousies
which inevitably arise against the lead goose when he or she is elected
for a full four-year term. Such harping and infighting can seriously
erode flock morale over the length of the term.

Under the rotational command system, each goose takes a turn at the top
on a daily basis and sees firsthand that being lead goose is no picnic
and that he or she probably wouldn’t want the job full time even if it
were offered. Honking in the ranks continues, but harping ceases.

Self-esteem problems disappear under rotational command, as each goose
sees that he or she is a valued member of the flock and realizes anew
each day his or her interdependence upon other flock members. Teamwork
flourishes.

Motivational consultants are studying the goose leadership patterns for
possible application in human situations. However, due in large part to
ignorant human resistance to goose culture, such applications remain
unlikely in the foreseeable future.

Humans apparently remain too addicted to treasurer’s reports, new
business, old business, elections of officers and four-year terms to
adopt the effortless consensus-building strategies of the geese.

Marcy 24, 2003
Drastic change continues to roll across the countryside of Minnesota
with quiet but irresistible force. The harsh winds of economic reality
have ruthlessly felled the rugged old ways, old buildings, and old
institutions into streamlined modern swaths.

Isolated pockets of resistance hold out. A few country churches
struggle on, although the number of cars outside no longer requires
latecomers to park nose-in-the-ditch unless there is a meatball supper
or a funeral.

Some sagging barns remain, but only as relics. Dairy cattle have moved
on to the bovine equivalent of suburban apartment buildings, huge
computerized dairies so hidden that even rural children might be
excused for thinking their milk comes from a factory.

Farm machinery has become so efficient that the planting and harvest of
the quarter section next door can happen in one afternoon. The people
in the tractors might live twenty miles away. You still wave at them,
if you happen to be around the day they sweep across the field, but
that doesn’t mean you know who they are.

Not that long ago each quarter section supported a teeming farmyard of
kids, animals, rickety outbuildings, and noisy year-around bustle.

County fairs, originally meant to encourage for farm kids to show their
first attempts at raising animals and crops, or for their mothers to
show off their jellies and jams, have had to adapt to modern
entertainment demands or simply shut down.

And yet, despite this seeming tragedy, nostalgia for the old days isn’t
universal amongst the locals, and it tends to be confined to people
such as myself who didn’t have to live through the old days themselves.

Some old-timers express sadness and say, “Things aren’t like they used
to be,” or “We were poor, but we were happy.”  Yet the stories of
others, less often told, make it clear that the past was no picnic.

For example, increased openness has made it seem as if problems such as
alcoholism, domestic abuse, depression, and other social and personal
problems are recent developments. However, it is obvious that such
evils always existed, but were simply shoved under the rug.

What hope did an abused wife have fifty years ago? An alcoholic?
Somebody struggling with depression? It is easy to say that back then
people were tougher, and maybe they were, but you don’t have to dig
very deeply to hear stories of deep and unabated suffering.

Memory’s filter often sifts out the good and discards the bad. It is
easier that way, and probably for the best. But I have come to
understand why not every old-timer laments the passing of the old days
and ways.

Times were tough. The poverty was often grinding. The tight community
ties of the old days had their good side, and may seem idyllic to those
of us appalled by modern isolation, but those ties arose out of a
continual struggle to survive, and didn’t allow for much privacy or
individual difference.

The past was both better and worse than the present. I am for
preserving as much of it as possible, including the old barns, old
churches and old schoolhouses--not because the loss of the old ways is
a tragedy, but because the old days and ways can teach us how fortunate
we are today, and at the same time show us what we are missing.

March 17, 2003
The snowplows were out late last week. They had no choice, of course,
the roads were drifted, but if people could have just waited a couple
of days for our sudden spring thaw, the whole mess would have melted
off on its own, saving the county a little money in these financially
difficult times.

The property tax notice came in the mail a couple of weeks ago. My
house went up in value by a good chunk even though all I did for
improvements in the past year was clean the garage. I didn’t think the
garage was that messy, but it obviously was bad enough to hold my home
value down several thousand dollars.

They will probably raise my property taxes, although I would never
suspect that the county’s cash crunch had anything to do with the
increase in my home’s assessed value. I am sure it was the clean garage.

But even if county taxes do go up, we get pretty good value for our
county money. After a storm, the snowplows come by before I can even
get out of bed in the morning. Most county roads are well-paved and
well-maintained, and we need that.

Some property tax money goes to the school, which is a good thing. It
stays in town. It is good for kids to learn. Other money goes towards
county nursing, and everybody has good things to say about the county
nurse who comes out once per month.

As for the state tax bill, we are told we live in a high tax state, but
I am always impressed with how low the state tax bill is when it
arrives. Again, all of that money is spent in the state. Nursing home
aid is a good thing. We should take care of the weak and infirm, we
should have good roads, and we should have nice schools. That’s the
Minnesota way.

The university gobbles up a good chunk of the money, which I wouldn’t
mind so much if the football team weren’t so bad. For all that money,
you’d think they could win the Big 10 every now and then.

Granted, some university money goes to graduate students who write
dissertations nobody will ever read. I can’t complain about that since
there is a thesis of mine written at North Dakota taxpayer’s expense
gathering dust somewhere. It contributed almost nothing to the sum
total of human knowledge. However, the two years spent writing it were
so much fun I would never deny the experience to somebody else for
petty reasons of finance.

But it is the huge federal tax bill which makes gives me pause. You
wonder which defense contractor is going to get it, in which case my
contribution would probably purchase fifteen rivets, or if my money
might go to some artist in Greenwich Village who paints pictures with
elephant dung, or to some scientist at Berkeley who studies the mating
patterns of gnats.

In reality, I suppose federal dollars roll back into the area about as
fast they leave. As long as we keep having natural disaster after
natural disaster, federal dollars will continue to help clean up the
latest mess. And the feds are thoughtful enough to hire local people to
run around quizzing farmers for those agriculture statistics reports
nobody reads.

So, some of the money comes back to us from all the federal taxes we
pay, as much as it feels like legalized robbery when one writes the
check every spring.


 

March 3, 2003
After initial talk of the cold weather, small-talk conversation in the
north often turns to the all important question: “So how do you heat,
then?”

Wood heat seems to be the most cozy-sounding answer. If respond that
you heat with wood, you can expect people to say, “oh, that’s nice.”

There is a security to wood heat. If there’s an oil embargo, or if a
computer virus shuts off the electricity, you’ll still be warm. There
are enough fallen trees in the woods around here to keep all of us
toasty for a long time.

A clunky old fuel oil furnace is the next most cozy. It feels
dependable, traditional, comfortable. The tank isn’t pressurized, so
you can test it with a stick. I remember one old fuel oil furnace which
had a flame that you could see through a little window.

The chimney pipe from the fuel oil furnace in my grandparents old house
ran right past the stove in the kitchen. In the winter, Grandpa would
rub his back against the warm chimney like a horse scratching against a
fence.

I am too young to remember anybody heating with coal. If I smell a coal
fire, I immediately think of the old steam engines down at Rollag. I
have heard of coal bins with augers which automatically put more coal
in the furnace, but I’ve never seen one.

Coal and fuel oil often fueled a boiler which made steam heat, another
of the cozy old heat forms. It has been a couple of decades since I
have seen a house heated by those old radiators which hiss and wheeze
and carry on.

Some older public buildings are still heated with steam. I only know
because I have had to sit through a concert while the pipes in an old
church clanked and banged in the below zero weather.

Then come the modern heat forms. They aren’t as warm. I have a theory
that electric baseboard heat raises the thermometer up to seventy
degrees without making the room warm at all. Electric forced air does a
little better, but not much.

I think to feel warm, a heat source has to have a flame somewhere in
the house. Even if it is well hidden, there is a security to knowing
that there is a fire burning somewhere deep in the bowels of the
basement. Electric heat lacks such a flame.

Floor heat is a more cozy form of electric heat. It gives the building
a steady, penetrating warmth. But you don’t want the mice to get at
those wires under there! When floor heat goes out, it is usually done
for good, and that is a sinking feeling.

There are more newfangled methods. I just had a gas fireplace put in my
living room, and that thing really kicks out the BTUs. It gives me the
benefit of a visible flame without having to pull bits of bark out of
the carpet.

I don’t know much about heat pumps, nor do I know about those types of
heating which require you to dig dozens of wells. Milking heat out of
cold water doesn’t sound cozy at all, however.

Dependability is the main thing. Furnace trouble is a curse, enough of
a curse to get you lumped together with the heart attacks and strokes
during Sunday service.  “And please remember the Johnsons, whose
furnace went out last night,”  says the pastor as the congregation
quietly gasps.

Yes, in a climate such as ours, furnace troubles rank just below
serious illness on the sympathy scale.

February 23, 2003
Once a person’s vehicle is warmed up, cold, clear weather isn’t so bad.
Below zero weather is preferable having it right around freezing when
there’s usually sleet, slush, ice and general misery. There is
cleanliness and clarity to twenty below.

The scenery on the country highways is as crisp as the air. A trip in a
warm vehicle at sunset on a bitterly cold, clear winter day is
austerely scenic. The stark black outline of the leafless trees against
the pastel shades of the winter sky provides a picture made to paint.

People change with the cold, too. The colder it gets, the more people
sense that they are fighting a common foe. The kindness and camaraderie
of a shared disaster kicks in, but without all the hassle of a flood,
tornado or major blizzard.

The need to look nice goes out the window in below zero weather, at
least for everyone but adolescents. Cap-frazzled hair is acceptable in
all public spaces, including church. Boots so clunky that their wearer
can barely drag them along become objects of envy.

Cold weather creates a different moral climate as well. For example, if
somebody left their car running unlocked for a half-an-hour out at the
lake in the summer time and it got stolen, most people would think that
the victims were stupid enough to deserve it.

But at twenty below, parking lots outside of cafes, discount stores,
grocery stores and churches in towns both big and small are filled with
running cars, most of them probably unlocked. But you never hear of any
running cars stolen in deep cold, at least not around here. That
wouldn’t be right!

In July, if a drunk person knocks at your door at three a.m. and walks
in on his own claiming car trouble, you’re liable to chase him off with
a hunting rifle or maybe threaten to call the sheriff. When the same
situation arises in below zero weather, the only proper thing to do is
fix the poor sap some hot chocolate and visit with him until his
buddies arrive to pick him up at sunrise.

Same holds true for motorists stranded on the roadside. I avoid them in
the summer time. They’ll survive. Somebody’ll help them. They should
have been better prepared anyway. But if its ten below or colder, I
don’t think twice before helping.

Cold weather morality seeps into all areas of life up here, whether or
not weather is an immediate factor.

As I clunked out of the cold into a hotel lobby in Fargo last weekend,
I noticed a gathering at the front desk. An uptight-looking gentleman
stood looking miffed as a cluster of three clerks huddled over some
paperwork. Oh great, I thought, an argument over his bill.

The manager was called in. She pored over the bill as well. Things were
serious. The bill was for several rooms, and looked to contain many,
many phone calls. The manager furiously added it all up one more time.

“No,” she finally said, “I am afraid that’s the correct total.”

“Okay,” the man said, still skeptical. “It just doesn’t seem like
enough, and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t shorting you.”

“Nope,” said the manager, “you’re all taken care of.”

“Okay, then,” said the man.

Such an exchange could only happen in a very, very cold climate at a
very, very cold time of year.





 

February 17, 2003
A rare two days of clouds and rain made leaving Tucson slightly less
difficult, but only slightly. For ease of access, I threw my winter
jacket over the top of the boxes just underneath the tarp in the pickup
box, but didn’t really believe I would need to wear it two days later.

I remember my first trip to Arizona in the winter of 1995. When I
stepped off the train onto the platform in Tucson, I felt hot sun on my
face in January for the first time in my life. My mood lifted. I had
energy. I didn’t want to leave.

I have been back five times, and the effects have never dulled. I have
found Arizona in winter to be a powerful mood-altering substance,
available without a doctor’s prescription.

Minnesota’s cold winters drag me down and always have. In the
elementary grades, I invariably spent most of February home with
lingering diseases of some sort or another. My first grade class even
sent me a card saying that the gerbils missed me.

That pattern continued through college when I found it very difficult
to drag myself from bed to attend class in January and February. When I
made it to lectures, I nodded off or sat there in a numb daze. What a
mistake to take Ancient Roman history in the winter! A surer cure for
insomnia has yet to be concocted.

After college, it just got worse. I could work long hours and have fun
in spring, summer and fall, but when I would try to work in winter, I
couldn’t cut it. Over the years, I quit school twice and left several
jobs in either February or March.

So, when I felt the effects of the Arizona sunshine for the first time,
I resolved to sneak away and bask in the warmth as many winters as
possible--and right away, not after my joints have rusted in place and
my interests have narrowed to whist.

Not a lot goes on back here in the middle of winter anyway, at least
for those of us in seasonal work. People start living for ball games.
Or they linger at the cafe from breakfast until noon. Or they watch so
much television news that they turn into duct-tape hoarding wrecks.

Some people ice fish or drive snowmobile, but those activities freeze
my extremities. Plus, I would be the one to fall through the hole in
the ice or run into an oak tree with the snowmobile, probably on the
same day.

My Arizona life is pretty monastic. This trip I stayed in a little
apartment furnished with an air mattress, two folding tables, two
folding chairs, an old stuffed chair I eventually left in the dumpster,
and a box of books.

But the luxury of walking outside without a jacket! Of hiking in the
mountains, of watching the dazzling Arizona sunsets! Of driving with
your window down at 9 p.m. in January! Of real Mexican food!

Of course it had to end sometime. Reality hit when I had to dig my
jacket out of the pickup box in York, Nebraska. I was driving in thick
fog, and it was getting colder.

My windshield wipers iced up twenty miles later. Sleet turned to snow
at the Nebraska-South Dakota border. By Sioux Falls, winds reached 45
mph, and visibility was down to almost nothing. The temperature had
plummeted 40 degrees in three hours of driving.

A few hours later, my pickup’s tires crunched over the snow in my
driveway. It took 4-wheel drive to get through the big drift in front
of the garage. The cold air crinkled my nostrils. Cacti and burritos
were but a distant memory.

February 10, 2003
Abraham Lincoln’s reputation as a saintly martyr arose within hours of
his death and has obscured reality ever since. The Lincoln legend
contains some truth, but its growth was shaped by the politics of the
time.

At the time of his assassination, many Northern politicians and much of
the populace worried Lincoln was going too easy on the defeated South.
They much preferred to wring the Confederacy’s neck. Newspapers called
for the hanging of traitors by the thousand.

The Sunday after Lincoln died, prominent preachers in Northern pulpits
echoed the general feeling that the meek Lincoln was removed from the
scene by God to allow divine retribution against the South to flow more
freely. He was a saint, but his mission was complete.

Even Lincoln’s staunchest enemies in the North eulogized him as a
simple, pious man, martyred by the desperate and evil slave holders. No
harm praising the dead, they seemed to think. More importantly, the
murder of such a harmless man only proved that the South deserved
whatever rough treatment came its way.

But Abe Lincoln was not simple, nor was he particularly pious. In fact,
he was the shrewdest of politicians. He was our greatest president by a
large margin, but for complicated reasons long shrouded in myth.

The Emancipation Proclamation provides a good example. With that
eloquent document, Lincoln declared the slaves to be free. His great
words were destined to be etched in history books and  on granite walls
across the nation.

But a close reading shows that the Proclamation freed only slaves in
territory held by the South. In other words, because Lincoln had no
authority over those areas, the Proclamation freed absolutely nobody.
Furthermore, it kept in bondage thousands of slaves in territory held
by the Northern armies.

Historians still struggle to figure out Lincoln’s motives. Some say he
merely hoped that the Emancipation Proclamation would cause the
Southern-held slaves to rise up. Others note that Northern enthusiasm
for preserving the Union was waning as the battles grew more bloody.
The Emancipation provided a much-needed higher purpose to justify the
war’s carnage.

Yet others have found evidence that Lincoln hoped the noble words of
the Proclamation would arouse wild enthusiasm in the lower classes of
Europe, which would pressure European monarchs to quit supporting the
South. In fact, much to Lincoln’s satisfaction, this happened.

Lincoln could have issued the Emancipation Proclamation on his first
day in office. That he waited to do so until the idea became
strategically useful, and applied it only where it would cause the
enemy trouble, speaks volumes.

The Proclamation and countless other examples show Lincoln to be more a
brilliant lawyer than a moral crusader.

And Lincoln was a brilliant lawyer. In frontier Illinois, he was a
legend. If you killed a man in cold blood, Abe Lincoln was the lawyer
who could get you off, either on a technicality, or by convincing the
jury that the other guy deserved it.

Known to history as a placid and merciful gentleman, Lincoln was famous
on the Illinois frontier as a wrestler and fist fighter, perhaps the
toughest in the state.

Known to history as a martyr for a holy cause, Lincoln’s early
statements on religion reveal a testy agnosticism which only later
mellowed.

Known to history as comical storyteller, Lincoln frequently descended
into depressions so deep that friends considered him suicidal.

The misty idealism which causes us to celebrate Lincoln’s birthday as a
national holiday is appropriate. Lincoln was one of the greats. But
like many of the greats, he has been frequently, and often completely,
misunderstood.

February 3, 2003
The shuttle accident brings to the forefront a class of people who
don’t get much attention until disaster strikes: Scientists devoted
enough to their work to risk their lives.

The shuttle crew knew the risks going up. The astronauts must have been
aware that most commercial airliners have newer cockpit equipment than
did the Columbia. They, more than anybody, knew that the margin of
error when you hit the earth’s atmosphere at 16 times the speed of
sound is miniscule. Yet, they went.

Are such space missions foolhardy? To many of us they would seem so,
although a space mission is probably less foolish than Columbus’s trip
across the uncharted Atlantic in three tiny ships, or Lewis and Clark’s
plodding journey through thousands of miles of unknown terrain to the
West Coast.

Explorers aren’t normal people, whether they wrestle with the
microscopic complexities of DNA or the endless mysteries of outer
space. A curiosity few of us understand drives them, and drives them
mercilessly.

Most fourth-graders are full of curiosity, but with few exceptions,
their wide-eyed wonder at the world is boiled out of them by the time
they reach their teen years. Maintain a passionate interest in science
beyond your eighth grade project and you run the risk of hostility from
peers and indifference from parents.

By adulthood, most human minds have frozen into place on all levels.
People do not wish to have their ignorant bliss interrupted by facts.
New information, especially about some basic premise of our existence,
becomes downright irritating to people just trying to pay the month’s
bills.

For example, nutrition and diet scientists are more unanimous than
ever: To live longer and better, eat lots of fruit and veggies. Don’t
eat Twinkies. Eat whole foods. Eat lean meat. Cut out most sugar. The
information is simple and it is easy to find. Yet more of us are fat,
and fatter than ever before!

On a philosophical level, science has always been a threat to those
with beliefs too brittle to embrace with equanimity and gratitude the
wonders unveiled by scientific exploration and research. Their
constricted view of the world might be a cause for pity if such folks
weren’t so nearly in the majority.

Poor church-going Charles Darwin! He bore no malice, yet thanks to the
inordinate rage of those offended by his honest findings, Darwin has
spent the century since his death wearing horns. Earlier on, the powers
that be threw Galileo in the clink for having the gall to suggest that
the earth went around the sun instead of the other way around.

The scientists aboard the shuttle mission were amongst a rare few whose
passion for discovery survived the both the teenage pressures of
conformity and the adult temptations of lazy indifference. They broke
through the innate human resistance to the unknown and the new, and
accepted great personal danger to boot. They may well have been nerds,
individualists, perhaps eccentrics, but they were at the forefront of
our quest for knowledge.

We need more like them. We have been plopped into this magnificent,
mysterious world. To not look around with awe, openness and unbridled
curiosity at ourselves, at the universe, and at all living things is to
die an early death of our own.


January 27, 2003
Tucson’s clear desert skies make it a haven for astronomers. City
ordinances control outdoor lighting so city lights don’t obscure the
stars. Back yard observatories number in the hundreds. The largest
collection of telescopes in the world is perched on Kitt Peak, forty
miles to the west.

I have always wanted to look through a powerful telescope. I heard that
a Tucson astronomy club has a spot in the desert where they gather
twice a month on moonless nights. I looked on the internet and found
directions to the spot. I also found out they planned to meet there
last night.

The spot was remote. Twenty miles outside the city limits the road
turned to gravel and went over two rumbling one-lane bridges before
running through a ranch yard and into a pitch dark desert clearing.

A kid who looked about twelve ran towards my pickup with a dim red
flashlight, opened the passenger door and said, “Could you use just
your parking lights, please?” Oops. I had already managed to offend the
people I had hoped were going to let me see the stars.

Not to worry. I parked, and as soon as I shut the door of my pickup,
the kid said, “Wanna see Saturn?”

Of course. I looked in the eyepiece of his telescope, which was nearly
as tall as he. There was Saturn, just as in the pictures, the rings
casting a deep shadow on the golden globe of planet itself.

The kid, who introduced himself as Nick, took me to the next telescope
where his father was delivering an impromptu lecture to three
Australians who kept interrupting him with questions about UFOs. It was
so dark I could see none of their faces.

The Australians eventually got cold and left, and I was treated to a
private tour of the sky from a man who turned out to be one of the
professionals at the Kitt Peak observatory. Almost as impressive as his
knowledge of the sky was his ability to explain the stars in terms I
could easily understand.

He had a method of pointing out even the tiniest stars in the sky, and
soon I had spotted the only space object visible to the naked eye
outside of our galaxy--the Andromeda galaxy, one and a half-million
light years away, so dim that you have to avert your eyes from it just
a little to make it appear at all.

Through the telescope we looked at the Orion nebula, an astoundingly
colorful cloud of gas which has produced dozens of new stars, a cluster
of which sparkled within the multi-colored cloud like a handful of
diamonds in a velvet-lined box.

Nick hollered from his telescope that he had found a new galaxy. New to
him at least. He ran over to their minivan with his red flashlight to
enter the find in his logbook.

It was only then I realized that there were dozens of little observing
parties around the clearing. Each telescope was identifiable only by
the dim red lights blinking at the base of its tripod. I walked from
station to station. Each telescope focused on something different.

I saw Jupiter and four of its moons. I saw a star cluster so dense that
stars packed the tiny stretch of sky visible in the eyepiece like
sparkling grains of sand on the beach. I saw that the North Star, when
magnified, is actually a pair of stars.

As I pulled back onto the dirt road, my head was swimming. I was so
distracted by what I had seen that it took me a minute or two to
realize that the radio was quietly playing the song “Knock, Knock,
Knockin on Heaven’s Door.”

January 20, 2003
For a Sunday afternoon drive, I took a two-lane road south of Tucson
and ended up in a little town a dozen miles north of the Mexican border
called Patagonia.

Perhaps because it is as crumbling and decrepit as any dying small town
in the Midwest, Patagonia charmed me right away. Boarded up store
fronts. Porches sagging with junk. Empty lots grown up in weeds and
crammed with rusting cars.

But the school looked new, and was flanked by irrigated ballfields.
Mass had just finished at the little Catholic church, and huge Latino
families poured out onto the dried-brown grass in their Sunday best.
Tattered cowboy hats sauntered out of the little Ma and Pa cafe after a
leisurely Sunday breakfast.

Patagonia is snuggled in a picturesque valley between two dignified
desert mountain ranges. Through town runs a river which has created
what is called a “riparian” forest, a grouping of trees which forms in
the desert due to the almost continual presence of water.

And so Patagonia is shaded by an oasis of cottonwood, walnut, and old
gnarled live oak, a type of oak which doesn’t lose its leaves. Because
such a grouping of trees is so rare in the desert southwest, birds
flock to Patagonia--two-hundred and seventy five species of birds,
according to a pamphlet from the Nature Conservancy.

Patagonia is at 5,000 feet elevation. Its summers are cool. Its air is
clean and crisp. The evenings call for a crackling fire every night of
the year, according to a pamphlet from the Chamber of Commerce.

Scenery, birds, peace and quiet only an hour from bustling Tucson:
Clearly, Patagonia is doomed. There are early signs, which I didn’t
notice until my second slow cruise around town--discreet little signs
in fancy calligraphy.

Licensed acupuncturist. Medicinal herb consultant. Yoga instructor. Art
gallery. On the edge of town outside the gates of an enormous estate
was the kicker, a classy sign which said: “Life Rejuvenation Centre.”

One can only assume that a Life Rejuvenation Centre is where for $2500
per week you can bask in the desert sunshine, get your face caked in
mud, have a pedicure, get a massage and consult with a professional
spiritual advisor, all at the same time.

Poor Patagonia. It has been discovered by the SUV bunch. Soon it will
be overwhelmed by frazzled wealthy coastal types who see in its peace,
quiet, calm and quaintness a possible cure for their many psychological
problems.

Money will be no object. Old buildings will be turned into boutiques.
Dumpy houses on Main Street will sprout neon signs and smell of gourmet
coffee. Property values will skyrocket. The locals will wonder what hit
them.

The newcomers will bring their stress with them. There will be zoning
disputes. The new Italian restaurant and a sparkling convenience store
will combine to kill off the Ma and Pa cafe. The Broken Wheel will
close when Bill and Marie decide it just makes too much sense to sell
their liquor license to the new sports bar.

I felt like an intruder tiptoeing around with my Minnesota plates. I
could see suspicion in the eyes of the locals as I drove past the
church, the cafe, the bustling little grocery mart. They like that you
like their town, but they hate what you might do to it.

I could offer to cure their problem. My advice would be simple: The
Patagonians should just turn town the thermostat about 100 degrees,
level those darn mountains, and saw down those pesky trees in the river
bottom. Then their charming village could forever remain as pure as any
Midwestern farm town.

January 13, 2003
The southern Arizona desert is a flat plain. Out of that plain rise
several small mountain ranges. Each range appears as if it is an island
in a vast sea. The largest of these ranges, the Santa Catalina
mountains, forms a twenty mile wall which towers over Tucson.

The Catalinas loom as high over Tucson as the Rocky Mountains rise
above Denver. Yet to the untrained eye, the Catalinas look like little
more than a pile of rocks one could climb in a spare afternoon.

It is an optical illusion. Unlike the Rockies, the Catalinas must be
inspected up close to get a proper feel for their size. Hike a trail
into the mountains and soon you are snaking through impressive canyons
walled by massive cliffs. From the city, those cliffs look as if they
are about thirty feet tall. Up close, it is obvious they measure 500
feet or more.

You quickly realize it would take far more than a spare afternoon to
reach the top of the Catalinas on foot. Fortunately, one can drive to
the top of the range on the Mt. Lemmon Highway.

The highway climbs more than 6,000 feet in thirty miles. The road is so
curvy the trip takes over an hour. In those thirty miles, the
temperature dips thirty degrees. You pass through five distinct
climates before reaching the top.

The road starts in desert dominated by forests of the mighty saguaro
cactus. A few miles up the saguaro disappear, replaced by oak and
savannah grasslands. Some twists and turns later, the manzanita, a
bizarre green shrub with a trunk the color of copper tubing, takes over.

All along, breathtaking vistas pop into view. The hairpin turns of the
narrow road demand complete attention, so I pulled over to the side to
gawk lest I end up in a ravine.

Eventually the manzanita give way to junipers, and finally the road
tunnels through towering pine forests interspersed with groves of
aspen, just like in Montana.

Less than an hour before, I had driven past a bank thermometer which
read 80 degrees. Now, a wet blanket of snow lay on the floor of the
pine forest.

Near the top, three minivans with plates from Mexico sat with doors
wide open as about a dozen children tossed snowballs at each other,
perhaps for the first time in their lives. A snowman from previous
visitors stood off to the side, complete with a carrot nose.

By this time, it was three o’clock. My Norwegian blood was demanding
coffee. I had been dreaming that there might be a nice little coffee
shop at the top and sure enough, I was in luck.

A organic gourmet coffee shop, no less, with coffee made from beans
harvested by virtuous Central American peasants clothed in natural
fibers, and then roasted in kilns heated by domestic renewable fuels
produced by vegetarian union labor.

And pecan pie! I told the kid to warm me up a slice. That’ll be $5.81,
he said, and I jumped back about a foot. Turns out the pie cost $4.75,
and was not plain pecan pie, but “Chocolate Bourbon Pecan Pie.”  I said
what the heck.

Despite its virtue, the coffee was lukewarm. But the pie was worth
every cent, and I ate each bite very slowly, especially the layer of
dark chocolate pudding. So much for virtue.

Once finished, I sat back. Sunshine filtered through the pines and
filled the little mountain-top coffee shop with color. Thirty miles of
coasting downhill lay ahead. It was pretty clear that climbing the
Catalinas in a pickup was not a bad way to spend a spare afternoon.

January 6, 2003
Arizona is doomed to development and population increase. It doesn’t
take many sunny eighty degree days in January for one to figure out why.

The local paper here in Tucson is filled with the problems of
expansion: Zoning disputes. Overcrowded schools. Attempts to preserve
the desert. Water problems.

Most people here aren’t natives, but once they’ve moved here they seem
to do all they can to shut the door behind them. Yes, they live in a
new development, but they don’t want another new development on the
other side of the fence.

There is no shortage of hiking trails in and around Tucson, but there
are very few ball fields for the kids. Grass doesn’t grow naturally,
and every time somebody tries to build a park, the retirees, who don’t
care about ball fields, raise concerns over water use, traffic, noise,
crime, whatever they can come up with to put the ball field on hold.

Neighbors protest the new Home Depot, but it goes up anyway after
assurances from the company that they will be a good neighbor and that
the masses of customers they draw will drive nice and slow on local
streets and try to avoid hitting dogs and children.

We civic-minded, far-sighted citizens of rural northwestern Minnesota
have a thing or two to teach these Arizonans, that is for sure.

Most of our towns have had no trouble keeping Home Depot out. With few
exceptions, Wal-mart has been kept at bay, and chain restaurants are
prohibited except for those pizza counters at Cenex.

We have maintained large spaces of green grass in the form of football
fields, softball fields, fairgrounds, parks, playgrounds, and endless
yards. If enrollment continues to decline, our goal of one acre of
mowed grass per child will be attained early in 2010.

We have maintained strict limits on our population, forcing the biggest
polluters, people between the ages of eighteen and sixty, to move away
and do their polluting in the suburbs.

We have managed our water supply so well that for the past few years we
have had a surplus, which we are more than willing to sell to those
willing to suck it out of our basements or off of our wheat fields.

Environmental consciousness runs high. Wheat prices have been kept so
low that it no longer pays to clear trees to create new farmland.
Thousands of farmers have selflessly put their land in CRP in order to
provide enhanced habitat for the endangered pocket gopher.

The greatest stroke of genius, however, has been the maintenance of
bone chilling cold for five months per year. Nothing we have done in
rural Minnesota has done more to keep out large technology
corporations, families with small children, factories, industry,
diversity, and other evils.

Yes, it is lucky we in Minnesota don’t have 80 degree weather in
January or soon we’d be the ones stuck dealing with new Home Depots,
Wal-marts, strip malls, supermarkets and six lane streets.

Those are my thoughts as I sit caught in Tucson traffic, windows down,
in shorts and t-shirt, bopping my hand to the beat of the radio against
the side of my pickup on the fifth of January.

December 30, 2002
The new year brings an end to the eating binge which started in the
fall with church suppers, extended through Thanksgiving and into early
December with holiday parties for every group and organization, and
reached a climax with the feasts of Christmas.

With New Year’s, many people make promises not to eat so much. That is,
after they recover from the excesses of the New Year’s party.

New Year’s is one of the more feeble excuses for debauchery on the
calendar. Most people just stay home. That makes sense. I know I feel
more excitement when my pickup’s odometer hits a big round number.

New Year’s isn’t a holiday of wonderment for wide-eyed children, like
Christmas or the 4th of July. It isn’t an occasion for eating or
getting together with relatives after a long layoff, as is
Thanksgiving. It is an adult holiday, and one without any apparent
higher purpose.

Memorable New Year’s Eve gatherings? I really can’t bring any to mind.
I recall having the flu a couple of New Year’s. I spent another in the
hospital recovering from hernia repair.

One New Year’s Eve when I was in junior high, I called every 800 number
I could find in the ads in U.S. News and World Report and wished the
poor phone operators a Happy New Year. It felt good to spend my holiday
ministering to the unfortunate.

The two or three times I attended an official New Year’s Eve party, I
didn’t feel festive enough to hug and kiss people I barely knew at
midnight. Up to that point, people just sat at tables wondering why
they were there, why the music had to be so loud, and why they paid $10
at the door in exchange for a paper hat and a kazoo.

I suppose psychologists might call it holiday fatigue, the feeling of
wanting to get back to normal that sets in after the weeks-long binge.
You see it on the faces of people at parties. You see it on the faces
of people who are trying to find a store open on New Year’s Day. Let’s
get back to normal!

I even heard it in the voices of the phone operators of the 800
numbers. The woman who answered the number for Old Grandad Whiskey
wasn’t getting many calls that night, she said in her Kentucky drawl,
but she was glad to be working. Gave her something to do besides go to
a silly party.

She was glad I called, but she didn’t seem to feel she was one of the
unfortunate. I had no luck convincing her to send me a free sample.

The woman who answered the Dannon yogurt product information line was
glad to be working, too. She was based in Sacramento, and when she
found out I was in Minnesota, she asked what it was like to have a
white Christmas. I told her it was overrated.

This year features Christmas and New Year’s Day on consecutive
Wednesdays. Since holidays end up feeling like Sundays, you end up with
a month of Sundays in the space of ten days, bad news for people who
thrive on routine.

Yes, it is good to get back to a normal schedule, to start a new
semester, to begin a new fiscal year, to stay home instead of going
shopping, out for supper, or to another holiday program.

The days are getting longer. The ballplayers head down to Florida next
month. More seed catalogs arrive each week. Things are looking up.

December 23, 2002
During the holidays, it is traditional to get in touch with old friends
and otherwise lost relatives. But writing Christmas cards and letters
usually means giving an report on one’s life, a disconcerting prospect
for those of us who have fallen a mile or so short of perfection.

Some leap to the task with glee, penning Christmas letters filled with
dream vacations, high-achieving children, unbearably cute
grandchildren, new additions, new cars, topped off by the inevitable
little lecture on the True Meaning of Christmas.

The screed is photocopied, stuck with computer-generated labels, and
mailed out like campaign literature, as if there is an upcoming
referendum to determine Happy Family of the Year.

Such propaganda is understandable, I suppose. Nobody wants to hear the
bad news, and wrapping one’s life up into ten paragraphs of bliss with
a big bow on top must be enormously satisfying to those who can pull it
off.

But for most of us, the dishonesty required to pen such a letter, or
the alternative unpleasantness of spilling the messy truth, makes
writing a detailed Christmas report about as much fun as a colonoscopy
on tax day.

Christmas is a time when people feel more pressure than usual to make
their lives appear normal, sensible, happy, worthy of a Norman Rockwell
painting. Never mind that the truth is always more complex and that
such contrived happiness is usually skin deep.

Never mind, too, that the interesting people in the world are generally
those who couldn’t put their lives into a Christmas letter if they
tried, wouldn’t if they could, and who really have no need to broadcast
whatever happiness and normality they can muster.

Christmas can be an uneasy time for those who don’t lead
Christmas-letter perfect lives. It is a time when one is bombarded with
expectations. Those who fail to fulfill those expectations are expected
to explain.

You all getting together for the holidays? Maybe, if we feel like it.
But not necessarily. We have no plans. Have you done your shopping yet?
No, I don’t Christmas shop until I feel like it and if I feel like it.
You sent your cards yet? No, I think I’ll send St. Patrick’s Day cards
instead.

Others once led letter-perfect lives, only to have reality get in the
way. They could have written a shiny, happy Christmas letter, but
instead they got divorced to save their sanity. They might have all
gotten together, but Wilfred’s drinking is out of hand again and it
would just be a mess.

The perfect, happy Christmas gatherings often aren’t all they are
cracked up to be, either. Behind the pretty pictures lurk old
resentments and rivalries, cutthroat competition between siblings,
comparison of salaries.

The drive back to the suburbs is often a time to decompress, to say
“Can you believe she said that?” or “Why does he have to control
everything?” or “Aren’t their kids obnoxious?” or “Could he be any more
boring?”

Which is just to say that there are about a million ways to deal with
the pressures of Christmas, ranging from trying to make everything look
picture perfect to avoiding it all together.

So, here’s to a happy holiday to everyone, whether or not your life
fits well into a Christmas letter. If it isn’t always an easy time for
you, you aren’t alone. It can be a tough time for everybody, even those
who take pains to make their lives look perfect.

Merry Christmas, and keep the faith.

December 16, 2002
En route to Tucson, AZ from Minnesota, one travels hundreds of miles of lonely nothingness across South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas and the
panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas. The scenery finally gets interesting midway through New Mexico.

The hazards of long, lonely highways go beyond the danger of falling asleep at the wheel. The worst thing about such long trips is that
there is nothing to do while driving but think.

I am okay on the road as long as I daydream of being President and solving the Mideast crisis, or of pitching shutouts for the Twins, or
of finding oil reserves on my land in Minnesota--all equally improbable scenarios.

But take a wrong turn down memory lane and pretty soon you can be reliving that time you got beat up in eighth grade and oh how you wish
you could have a crack at that guy now. Or the time your athletic ability was insulted by the gym teacher. Boy, will I give him an earful
if I ever see him at the mall.

Old embarrassments return to life. The time I forgot my lines for the play. The time I went to school with a rip in my pants. The time I
forgot to show up for a final exam in college. The time I accidentally rushed into the women’s bathroom at the Country Kitchen.

Even if you manage to purge your sordid past from your head, something else will likely creep in.

Isn’t that little lump behind my ear getting bigger? I should have it checked. Or maybe I shouldn’t. I can just imagine what they’ll find.
Probably a brain tumor.

Twenty miles down that hypochondriac road and you’re picking out hymns for your funeral, to which nobody will come because you’ve wasted your
life doing things like driving to Tucson.

Just then some jerk cuts in front of you and forces you to slam on your brakes. That jolts you back to reality, but then you spend the next
fifty miles plotting revenge on him. Man, if I was only driving a dented old wreck, I’d ram he and his fat Cadillac into the next ravine.

Time to try the radio, but that does no good. The preachers on rural Texas radio stations rant and rave up and down the dial. The signal for
All Things Considered fades in and out from the nearest college town.

So, I am learning a new technique to keep my mind calm on long trips. It is called: Look at the scenery. I try to find something interesting
in all scenery, even in the dull states. For example, a while back I noticed that none of the ponds in Indiana have cattails.

Now, why do Indiana ponds have sleek, weed-free shores instead of the masses of impenetrable reeds which border our swamps in Minnesota? I
spent about sixty miles pondering that one. If anybody has an idea, let me know.

Today, I discovered that there are oil wells in southwest Kansas. In fact, oil wells are about the only interesting feature of southwest
Kansas. Some pump so slowly you have to watch them for a minute to detect movement.

But at least watching them pump gives one something to do on the road besides think.

December 9, 2002
People who think Christmas is a time of goodwill towards men haven’t driven through a Wal-Mart parking lot lately. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there in shopping land. Fight for the parking space, fight your way down the aisles, fight to get to the shortest checkout line.

I passed through Omaha, NE, the day after Thanksgiving, and the radio stations there reported several shopping related injuries, most of which happened at five in the morning when the doors opened to a few stores and people stampeded.

Advertisers must have the masses hypnotized. Why else would people do something so stupid and self-destructive as get up at five in the morning to shop for stuff they don’t need?

One recent afternoon venture into the shopping district of southwest Fargo was enough for me. I was thankful to get out without a fresh dent in my pickup. But I was amazed at the carts of junk in the checkout line. Pure junk.

An electric foot massager, for example. What do you suppose the chances are that one of those will get used more than three times before it gets stashed under the basement stairs? Not good.

I thought the economy was supposed to be in the doldrums. Heads are rolling in Washington. Politicians are panicking in St. Paul. United Airlines is going broke. Layoffs everywhere.

Yet, the buying binge goes on. New stores go up each day. New restaurants. New strip malls. All of them filled with crazed consumers.

This talk of hard times must make the old-timers snicker. What would happen if this country ever saw real hard times? Soup lines? Thirty-percent unemployment? A war with daily casualties?

About a year ago, I paid a visit to the suburbs and ended up in the living room of some people I barely knew. They were picking out paint for their kitchen. They had called over friends and neighbors to help with this major decision.

The kitchen paint problem was causing a rift in their marriage, it was clear. She favored a color called Puffin Beak Delight, and he preferred Tahitian Sunrise. The two colors looked identical to me. Each of the neighbors weighed in with their carefully considered opinions.

The debate was loud, endless and dead serious. The first color would tie in with the clock, it is true, but it wouldn’t bring out the colors of the china. The second, meanwhile, really does tone down the appliances, although it might overwhelm the curtains.

This went on for an hour. Trapped by circumstances beyond my control, I snuck into the living room and read a magazine on the $7,000 leather couch.

The debate in the kitchen reached an impasse, and I was called in to settle the matter. “What do you think?” they asked.

I puffed up my self-righteousness and said “I think I am glad we live in times when we can spend hours debating paint color instead of worrying about where we’re going to get our next meal.”

My attempt to introduce some historical perspective into an affluent American suburban kitchen failed miserably. The suburbanites just stared at me like I was an alien. I went back to my magazine, and they resumed the great paint debate.

I don’t wish hard times on anybody, but part of me would like to be around to watch those people try to feed themselves if things ever do go completely to pot.

December 2, 2002
When you visit relatives for the holidays, its a good idea to just go with the flow. The problem is, you never know where the flow is going to take you. On this Thanksgiving eve, I found myself at a baby shower in the basement of an old Methodist church in the wooded hills of southern Indiana.  The men of the clan were lured to the baby shower by the promise of food, combined with the threat of cruel and unusual punishment if they touched the food earmarked for Thanksgiving in the fridge back at the farm.  I’ve never been to a baby shower before. I always wondered what went on at those things. I half expected bizarre rituals of the sort that might go on at a Masonic Temple, or at the Sons of Norway.

The presence of a bunch of hungry males clearly goofed up the usual program. For one thing, I think the food is supposed to be served at the end. But as soon as the men got inside the door, they descended upon the fancy platters of crackers and cheese with a vengeance.  Each male had his own way of preserving his dignity in the female-dominated baby shower environment. One arrived in work boots and a baseball hat. Others ambled around and refused to sit down. For my part, I decided to conduct a sociological experiment.  In the interests of research, I kept track of how many times the word “cute” was used as the gifts were opened. I counted 33 usages of “cute,” fifteen instances of “look at that!” and 23 occurances of a long drawn out “awwww,” as in “awwww, isn’t that cute.”  I counted seven uses of the word “cool” to describe a gift. All of the cools came from males. The cool gift was not a little pink outfit or miniature blue jeans, but a sling-like gadget that you put around your neck which allows the infant to rest on your chest.

The future dad, a hulking former college fullback, first declared the baby sling cool. Others agreed, and gathered around to see how it worked. Future Grandpa, referring to Future Dad’s considerable bulk, chimed in, “Man, you’d better not trip and fall when you’ve got that thing on or you’ll have a pancake!”  Cake was served, after which a couple of the men started cleaning up, a signal that this had gone on long enough. Of course the women took over the clean up activities right away so things got done right, but it was the men who got the ball rolling. No need to sit around gabbing.  Instead, the caravan headed back to the farm for a bonfire. The excuse? A big brush pile and a stack of old lumber had built up to the point where it was an eyesore. It needed to go.

The pile was anointed with fuel oil and set ablaze. Flames roared towards the crisp Indiana sky. A rotten tree nearby caught fire. Live embers floated dangerously close to the house. One ember got in the woodpile and had to be doused. An old tractor tire caught fire and belched black smoke.  Nobody seemed too worried. One of the men pulled out a cigar. Another passed around a bottle of face-warming homemade wine. A neighbor came over to see if things were okay, and stayed on to swap stories in a soft Indiana drawl.  In the end, everyone survived both the bonfire and the baby shower. In fact, a grand time was had by all.

November 25, 2002
New York City is a great place to visit, but I am thankful to have been spared the trauma of growing up in its culture of scratch and claw competition. No wonder the city features a psychiatrist’s office every few yards! Brutal competition in all things, from the cradle to the grave. In Manhattan, parents hire coaches to prepare their children for kindergarten admissions tests. Is my child getting C’s? That can’t happen! Call in the psychiatrists!

Because competition is so intense, people limit themselves to a small specialty. If you decide you want to be a pastry chef, you scratch and claw your way up the pastry chef career ladder--and there is one. If you study 8th century Persian artifacts, you duke it out with other students of 8th century Persian artifacts.  Perhaps it is the dense population which makes people out here seem especially desperate to distinguish themselves. To do so, they either choose one vocation and do it very well, or they flaunt their inherited wealth, or they brag about their connections, or they inflate their resume until it nearly pops. When all else fails, they simply stand on the street and scream at passersby. That’s called going insane, and it is common.

Those lucky enough to obtain wealth end up just as miserable, for with wealth comes the obligation to be fashionable, eat at trendy restaurants, make a credible attempt to patronize the arts, and maintain a summer home in the Hamptons, wherever that is.  It is work being filthy rich. Magazines publish articles on how to dress for success, which cigars to smoke, whether cotton is in or linen is out, what is the right musical to like, who is the cool author to be seen reading, and which dog breeds are hip--as if you would adjust your tastes just to get ahead in the world!  Midwesterners who stumble into this dog-eat-dog culture are in for a shock. Most midwesterners work hard at the job in front of them, keep quiet, go home, watch TV, and expect good things to come their way. What they slowly realize out here is that working hard isn’t enough.

No, apparently you must also hang out with the right people, join the right clubs, own the right car, and wear the right clothes. I’ve met some Midwestern expatriates who have refused to play the status game out here, and they claim their career suffered.  The visitor to New York can take advantage of the competition without the need to suffer from it. Prices in New York City can be reasonable. Service is almost always superb. The arts are unbeatable. The music is out of this world.  But the visitor doesn’t see the drug-addled corpses of those the city chewed up and spat out. For every great performer or successful businessman, there are many more who were crushed by the competition, the pace, and the brutality of the pressure cooker that is New York City.

So I am happy to visit New York, take in some concerts and shuffle around the museums--and just as happy to head back home where the pace is slow, the people comparatively gentle, and where if anybody is so obnoxious as to judge you by your clothing or who your friends are, they can just go jump. 

November 18, 2002
They conduct Sunday evening services at Holy Trinity Lutheran Church just off Central Park on the Upper West Side of New York City--but Luther League they’re not.  Instead, they hold what is called “vespers.” Vespers is a term for an early evening service consisting of mostly music. At Holy Trinity last week, a well-rehearsed professional choir and chamber orchestra performed a cantata by Bach, and a talented organist led the congregation in several of the great old Lutheran hymns.  The congregation descended to the basement after the service, but there was no sign of the biblically-ordained Minnesota Lutheran lunch of open-faced Cheese Whiz sandwiches, cake and coffee. Instead, the sophisticated New York Lutherans sipped wine and nibbled aged cheeses.

New York City is a feast of the very best of art, music and food. It is true that if you can make it in New York City, you can make it anywhere, so the city teems with aspiring artists, performers and restauranteurs. Competition is so intense that only the very best survive. Bad restaurants go under in a hurry. Mediocre art is mocked and thrown out. Average musicians are not tolerated.  Hungry actors and artists seem to make good waiters and waitresses. Service in New York City is the best I have seen anywhere. No ditzy “my name is Mitzy, I’ll be your server” gushiness--just efficient, quiet and quick attention to what you need.  The city is unfathomably large but easily accessible, and full of serendipitous surprises. You may travel into Manhattan for a concert of Bach, but on the trip to and fro you will see and hear enough to keep your mind busy for days.

In the subway station deep underground near Holy Trinity Lutheran, friends and I struggled to reach the right train. However, a small crowd had gathered between two pillars around a group of baggy-clothed young men. We waited to see what was up.  And waited. The crowd grew, so we figured something good was in store. Our train came. We let it go. Some of the young men stretched out, others danced around a little, but nothing organized happened for a long time.  Suddenly, a boom box started pounding. One of the young men took a run at a brick wall, climbed it, did a back flip, and the impromptu subway show was off with a bang.

The performers took turns breakdancing on the cement. Each had a unique style. One was clearly a gymnast and punctuated his dance routine with dazzling flips. Others flew through the air and landed softly on the cement. The crowd cheered. Another train came and went. Finally, a formidable 300 lb. black man stepped forward to center stage. We wondered what he might do. Back flips seemed unlikely. We hoped he wouldn’t imitate the others and spin on his head or land on his neck.  Instead, the big guy stood perfectly still and merely twitched to the beat. He twitched his neck and bobbed his head. He jiggled his chest. He slapped his belly and sent waves of jiggles down his leg. Without so much as moving his feet, he performed a symphony of coordinated jiggles and twitches which, when finished, brought a joyous roar from the assembled crowd.

That is New York City. From Bach to break dancers within a few hundred yards, with a talented jiggler thrown in to boot. It is a big-hearted, crazy city that never fails to make this midwesterner smile like a kid at the circus. 

November 11, 2002
The main problem driving to the East Coast from the Upper Midwest is getting around the Great Lakes. The most direct route is to drive south of them all, but that means fighting through the drag-race traffic and frequent toll booths of Chicago. This trip, I decided to weave between the big lakes instead.

The longer, more remote northern route features endless woods, frequent swamps and long stretches of lonely two-lane highway. All the way from Bagley, MN to Buffalo, NY, the golden tamarack trees glowed, their falling needles dusting the road with bright yellow.

The wilderness, the empty highways, the small towns and the forests are a wonderful alternative to the freeways and big cities on the southern route. But it was close brushes with the lakes themselves that made the trip most memorable.

My motel room in Ashland, WI was fifty feet from the shore of Lake Superior. The sullen gray waters beneath the bruised clouds reminded me of a phrase sung by Gordon Lightfoot: “Superior, they said, never gives up her dead, when the skies of November turn gloomy.”  I was glad not to be out there on an ore boat.

US Highway 2 hugs the northern shore of Lake Michigan for over one hundred miles. Huge waves broke against the shore. When the road dipped down near the beach, gusts of wind pelted my pickup with a mixture of sand and spray.

Highway 2 is mostly two lane, but almost every mile of it from Duluth to Mackinac is newly paved. I got so carried away driving like a Gran Prix driver on the smooth curves that when “low fuel” light came on, and I discovered I was 39 miles from the next town. I made it, but the stress of driving on empty in the middle of nowhere took several months off of my life expectancy.

Big bodies of water mean big bridges. All told, I crossed five enormous high bridges between Duluth and Buffalo. The most impressive was the Mackinac suspension bridge connecting Upper and Lower Michigan. Far below churned the strait connecting Lake Michigan with Lake Huron.

For one hour I was stuck on the high bridge from Port Huron, MI into Canada, waiting to go through customs. In the channel way below, the cold waters swirled from Lake Erie to the right into Lake Huron on the left.

The bridge which crossed high above the harbor in Hamilton, Ontario was the most frightening. It seemed old and unsafe. A forty mile-per-hour wind pushed my pickup from side to side. Three feet from my left tires, the pavement abruptly ended. No curb, no barrier--just the abyss.

The final crossing of my trip was over the bridge at Niagara Falls, where the waters from Lake Erie tumble down into Lake Ontario. If you can block out from your mind all the various viewing platforms and towers, as well as the cluster of hotels on both the Canadian and American side of the falls, Niagara is everything you could imagine.

Niagara Falls was the crowning jewel of a three-day journey between the five biggest lakes in the world. I’ve seen the Great Lakes on the map since I was in elementary school, but until I saw them up close, their utter immensity didn’t hit home.

November 4, 2002
(webmasters comment:  I think Eric has Outdone himself on this one!!!)
I would just like to thank you all for your support last Tuesday. I couldn’t have done it without you. Your many kindnesses throughout the campaign have touched both myself and I very deeply.

Thank you for tolerating my campaign’s advertisements. I know they were an insult to the intelligence of anybody with a brain larger than a frog’s. But most elections are decided by the frog-brain swing vote, so what can you do? Get down there in the mud, I say.

Thank you for believing that my opponent is the devil incarnate. He’s actually a nice guy, now that he’s defeated, but we felt we needed to bring up the womanizing thing, even though we have no evidence. Did you see him squirm? Could have been something to the charges after all, in which case my campaign provided a valuable public service to his wife.

Thank you for believing that if elected I will provide free prescription drugs to all seniors, as well as juniors and sophomores. I have got a few boxes of free samples in my office. Stop by and we’ll fix you up.

As for my promise to save the family farm, I’ll get right on it. According to my staff, the lone remaining family farm is somewhere southeast of Grand Forks, and we are determined to save it if it takes a million sandbags.

I will also be revitalizing rural communities. We’ll be going from town to town with a John Deere Revitalizer 4650, which looks a lot like one of those big fertilizer spreaders. The revitalization should allow us to squeeze about five or ten more bushel per acre out of the grain planted in our small-town industrial parks.

I must take a brief moment to acknowledge my opponent’s efforts to convince small towns to plant crops in their industrial parks rather than letting them grow up in weeds. This brilliant revenue-generating scheme represents a major paradigm shift and has been replicated with success in small town industrial parks throughout the Upper Midwest.

Rest assured, I will never waver in my commitment to traditional values. Nothing beats traditional values-- like two for the price of one, double coupons, senior discounts, or buy one get one free. These time-honored values must be upheld and passed on!

I continue to believe that our children are our future. Scary thought, but its true. We need to invest in our future! Schools must be adequately funded. That means heat and lights, and enough computers to keep the brats so busy playing games that they don’t riot.

In fact, it is critically important that our children remain completely mesmerized by electronic devices in those crucial years before they join the workforce and finally make themselves useful. Just remember, a child clutching a bag of Doritoes in front of a television set is not joining a gang or doing drugs!

As for teachers, I firmly believe that all three of them should be well-paid. And they must be given the tools they need to do their jobs, be it handcuffs, chains, stun-guns, tear gas, whatever. We must not shortchange the future.

I will continue to be unabashedly in favor of choice. Nobody should tell others what to do! And I am in favor of life, too. Where would we be without it?

Yes, I look forward to serving you, my constituents, these next years. Wherever you may go, you can count on me taking the credit for leading you there.

October 28, 2002
In July of 1990, soon after Paul Wellstone was nominated by the DFL to run
against Rudy Boschwitz for the U. S. Senate, he stopped by the Polk County
Fair in Fertile, MN.

It was too early in the day for a good crowd at the fairgrounds. I was
working selling plants. Business was slow for me, and Wellstone could find
almost nobody to talk to on the grounds but his own staffer and editor of
the local paper.

I knew nothing about Wellstone except for that his politics were way off in
left field, he didn¹t look at all like a senator, and he probably didn¹t
stand a chance against Rudy Boshwitz¹s millions. The consensus at the time
was that Wellstone got the nomination because nobody respectable wanted it.

I decided to go shake his hand. Wellstone was friendly, of course, but so
short and funny looking that I didn¹t feel uncomfortable asking him in a
somewhat disrespectful tone, "So, what makes you think you can pull this
off?"

Wellstone laughed. He seemed happy to have an audience. He launched into one
of his trademark sermons on the spot, brow furrowed, arms going up and down,
finger jabbing the air.

He knew he was the underdog, he said, but money wasn¹t everything and gosh,
Eric, do you know what¹s going on in this country? Corporations are taking
over the farms. People are going without health care. Small towns are dying.

I was a smart-aleck college student selling petunias for the summer, an
audience of one, but Wellstone kept going as if I was a jam-packed
convention hall. Eventually he paused and asked me what I thought. How would
you run against Boshwitz? Do you think I can win?

I am sure I said nothing coherent in response, but I was charmed. Wellstone
brimmed with enthusiasm for causes which can seem so hopeless, so tired.
Plus, he had asked my advice on how to run his campaign.

As a freshman Senator, Wellstone made some unfortunate errors. He used the
Vietnam Memorial as a backdrop to protest the Gulf War, infuriating veterans
groups. He used a White House reception to hand the first President Bush a
stack of videos of citizens opposed to his policies. He stated that he
"despised" right-wing Senator Jesse Helms.

But only two years later, he received a "legislator of the year" award from
several veteran¹s groups for his advocacy of veterans causes. And after
Wellstone¹s death in last week¹s tragic plane crash, Jesse Helms would say
tearfully of his colleague that "He was my friend, and I was his."

Wellstone grew on the job, and won the admiration of people who opposed his
every idea. His earnestness was inexhaustible. His enthusiasm was
infectious.

But Wellstone¹s most lasting legacy will be with the thousands of ordinary
people--college students, cleaning ladies, security guards, waitresses,
farmers--he made feel important by treating them with the same dignity and
importance as if they were the President of the United States.

Wellstone loved the regular people, and they loved him back. They hugged him
and even patted him on the head. They called him Paul.

Yes, so good was Wellstone at making the little people feel important that
when I woke up the day after Election Day 1990 to the news that Wellstone
had indeed pulled off a victory, part of me thought that our little talk
that summer might have been the turning point.

October 21, 2002
In France, they have a handful of trains between major cities which travel
as fast as 180 miles-per-hour.

High-speed trains sound like fun, but they're not. Things go by so fast at
that speed that it makes you sick. To avoid nausea, nobody looks out the
window. You either look straight ahead or read a book.

I tried to nap, but the on-off flashes of sunlight alternating with the
darkness of tunnels and ravines penetrated my eyelids and prevented rest. It
was torture.

The trip is done in a flash, and thank goodness. The high speed removes all
fun from the journey, so it is just as well that the trip ends quickly.

The day before I boarded the high-speed train, I took a long walk in a
forest on a plateau overlooking Lucerne, Switzerland. The trails were wide
and well-traveled. There were signs giving directions to local villages. It
was plain that these walking trails were used for more than recreational
hikes.

Walking was the main mode of transport in Europe years ago. Martin Luther
once walked from Germany to Rome. J. S. Bach toured Germany on foot, giving
organ concerts wherever he found a church.

On those trails above Lucerne, I thought about the excitement of taking a
long walking journey centuries ago. Can you imagine the people you'd meet in
just one day with nobody cooped up in their fast-moving cars?

A business trip from Switzerland to Paris would take weeks on foot, but so
what. You would see every detail between here and there, talk to the locals
at every stop, hear the birds, the gurgling streams, watch the animals, see
the views.

You would learn as much on the journey as you would at the destination. You
would get exercise. With no electronic communication, problems at home
couldn't send their tentacles through the phone lines to entangle you from
afar.

And yet because you were on business, you could deduct the whole experience,
knowing that you had no choice but to travel as slow as molasses.

Winston Churchill lamented the speed of modern life. He observed that no
invention had done more to make the world ugly than the internal combustion
gas engine.

Churchill preferred horses. He wasn't big on trains, and, although he often
went up front to take the controls of the planes he rode, he would have been
just as happy if air travel had never been invented.

Churchill has a point. Gas engines make noise, cause smog, go too fast,
encourage the building of enormous roads, and, as it turns out, have an
unquenchable thirst for liquids found buried in regions of the world best
left alone.

All of that trouble for speed. But just where does all of this speed get us?
When ever I enter the suburbs of Minneapolis after months of driving in the
country, I am astounded by the breakneck pace of traffic, even on a Sunday
afternoon.

The suburbanites look grimly determined to get where they are going. So
determined, in fact, that if you get in their way and don't drive fast
enough, I've heard that they'll shoot you.

To avoid meeting that fate, I try to keep up. But what I really want to do
is ask them where they are going and why they have to get there so fast. If
we were on foot, I could do that. But in my pickup, I can only grip the
wheel, look straight ahead, and hope not to get shot.

There are advantages to high speed travel and communication. Poor Bach
returned from one of his long journeys to find that his young wife had taken
ill and died several weeks before. It took him years to recover from the
tragedy.

Speed might be helpful in such an emergency, but most of the speed at which
life moves today is unnecessary. Speedy transportation takes the joy out of
the journey, and speedy communication keeps us in constant touch with people
whose company we might enjoy more after an occasional long hiatus.

We can't go back, I suppose, but maybe we could learn to take 'er a little
slow every now and then. We might find that no hurry means less worry.
September 14, 2002
A modern proverb: No matter how low something is priced, if you buy more
than you need, you still get took.

However, the wisdom of not stocking up on sale items has not yet sunk in
with me. I can spend hours in a casino without spending a dime on anything
but food, but Wal-Mart is another matter.

I walked into Wal-Mart the other day with only one thing on my list: A
55-watt halogen bulb for my reading lamp.

I must have sensed a shopping binge coming. Without thinking, I grabbed a
huge cart. You don't need a cart to carry a lightbulb the size of a quarter.

I made it past the $37 microwaves without biting, but the men's clothing
department snagged me. First thing I saw was a rack of turtlenecks for
$7.93. Those are almost a rummage sale prices! I threw two in the cart.

Had I been thinking, I would have remembered that turtlenecks make me feel
like I am being choked. Last time I wore one, at least a decade ago,
somebody mistook me for a priest.

In fact, I have a garbage bag full of turtlenecks in the garage. I suspect
they'll sit there until the big auction after I go into the nursing home.
Do I hear two dollars for a big bag of never-worn turtlenecks?

I moved down the aisle. There were winter coats for cheap. I couldn't
remember if I had a winter coat with a working zipper at home or not--but
good grief, I might as well grab one for $45 while I am here just in case.

Twenty-five years ago when I first started buying my own clothes, shirts
cost at least $15, winter jackets of any quality went for $120, and jeans
were $25 if you didn't insist upon a cool brand.

Now, you can find clothes for less than half that price at the super duper
discount chains. But with such low prices, I buy three times as much, which
cancels my savings.

The binge continued. Can you believe--three household extension cords for
$4.98? Wow. I also picked up two of those big covered plastic bins to hold
junk for $3.99. I'll need them to store all the stuff I buy at Wal-Mart.

Now they've come out with wet towel dispensers to clean the inside of your
car. They are dampened with that polymer stuff that makes your dash look
shiny and wet, like it has been smudged with hamburger grease. The dispenser
fits under the front seat. Only $4.37. What a deal.

Vitamins were on sale. Never know when you'll run out of those. Mosquito
spray--which I know I will need next year--was on clearance. Probably a good
idea to stock up now and save.

Boxes of Lucky Charms, my favorite sinful cereal, were two for the price of
one. I grabbed a bale of white t-shirts for eight bucks. I didn't remember
until I got home that I bought a bale of white t-shirts last spring.

Did you find everything you were looking for? the lady asked at the till.
No, in fact, I had forgotten to find a halogen bulb. She waited while I ran
back and picked one out.

My total for the bulb and a few extra impulse items came to $180. Clearly,
Wal-Mart had won again.

Once at home, I nearly threw out the halogen bulb with all the bags. But I
found it, took apart the little lamp, pulled out the burned out bulb, and
tried to put in the new one.

No luck. I had the wrong bulb. What's worse, even if I brought it back, I
would still be out nearly $180.

September 7, 2002
The blissful torment of a Twins playoff run is upon us. For a
longtime Twins fan, could there be anything better? Or, when the
Twins are grasping for that last out, could there be anything worse?

I suppose it is silly to jump up and down in the living room because
some spoiled ballplayer caught a ball before it hit the ground, but
who cares if it makes sense. The masses demand opiates, and baseball
is a more harmless diversion than most.

When the Twins win, baseball provides Minnesotans with a shared
drama. Ancient societies nurtured their culture by passing down epic
poems about great hunters wrapped in loincloths.  Minnesotans chew
over ancient tales of Hrbek, Gladden, Morris and Puckett, and present
tales of Hunter, Radke and Milton.

Everybody in Minnesota talks baseball when the Twins win. Classical
radio hosts. Ministers. English teachers. I realize that the Twins
are really going places when I find myself explaining the game to
aunts.

Aunts are traditionally the last to jump on the bandwagon. When they
finally do, they want to know why. Why didn't they take that pitcher
out of there? Why did that guy swing at that ball that he couldn't
reach? Why don't they hit the ball where they won't catch it?

October baseball brings people together. During last week's games, I
spent more time on the phone than I had in a month.

A friend called from his cell phone on his combine to ask why in the
world manager Ron Gardenhire started his greenest rookie, Micheal
Cuddyer, in right field. A little later came a call from a Minnesota
expatriate driving on the New Jersey turnpike. What's the score? How
do they look? Do they stand a chance?

Cuddyer got a big hit, and the friend on the combine called back to
eat crow.

As the series gets more tense, the question "Where are you watching
the game?" becomes as important as "Where are you spending
Christmas?"  One has to make sure nobody is left out. Can you imagine
anybody having to watch Game 7 alone? How sad.

While watching, there is the problem of not causing the Twins to lose
through one's behavior.

At a friend's house, we started watching the game on the big screen
downstairs. The Twins pulled ahead 2-0 and looked in command.

Without thinking, we moved upstairs to the television on the sun
porch so we could keep an eye on the kids out in the yard. Bad
mistake. The A's scored a run and their pitcher, Mark Mulder settled
down.

Worried that things would turn against Minnesota, we ran downstairs
to the big screen. Immediately, the Twins put up four runs and looked
in complete command. Whew!

But instead of sticking with the big screen, which had so ably kept
the Twins in the lead, we went back upstairs to the television on the
sun porch for the last of the ninth.

Boom, the A's teed off on a shaky Eddie Guardado, nearly tying the
game. And, although the sun porch television was where Guardado got
the last out, who knows how many strokes could have been prevented
throughout the Upper Midwest if we had just stayed on the basement
big screen.

That's October baseball in Minnesota. Magical? Maybe. Excruciating?
Always.

September 30, 2002
Midway through the flight from London to Minneapolis, the pilot announced
that we were going to be treated to a clear view of Greenland, the world¹s
largest island.

What a sight. I put down my book halfheartedly at the pilot¹s announcement,
but when I spotted the first icebergs off Greenland¹s east coast, I sat
forward in my seat and pressed my face against the airplane window like a
kindergartner on a school bus.

From 30,000 feet, the view of the earth¹s surface is usually obscured by
haze and clouds. But the air over Greenland this afternoon was crystal
clear. Icebergs by the hundred glowed white in the deep blue waters of the
north Atlantic.

The icebergs floated out from Greenland¹s fjords. On each side of the fjords
rose rust-brown snow-capped mountains. As we moved inland at 600-miles-per
hour, the fjords turned into broad rivers. Finally, each river abruptly
ended with the sheer face of a glacier.

The glaciers, massive rivers of ice striped with gravel and rock, widened as
our plane continued inland. They eventually disappeared, along with the
mountains, underneath an endless field of perfect white.

That field of white is Greenland¹s massive ice cap, a monolith which
contains enough water to raise the world¹s oceans 22 feet if it all were to
melt. The ice cap alone covers sixteen times the area of England, and is up
to two miles thick.

From our vantage point, the ice cap was as flat as the Red River
Valley--with one exception: A tip of a mountain poked through which created
a snowdrift downwind which I figure was about five miles long.

We crossed only the southern tip of Greenland, so it wasn¹t long before we
reached the opposite side of the ice cap. The gravel-striped glaciers
reappeared, this time running west. They ended with tourquoise-colored
rivers and iceberg-filled fjords. The rusty mountains came back into view.

At the base of the mountains on the coast was a faint fringe of green, the
only green in the otherwise white and brown Greenland. On that fringe was a
meager sign of human habitation, an air strip amidst a handful of farm
houses.

Greenland¹s coast quickly disappeared behind us. Cloud cover once again
obscured the Atlantic. Yet, it was a long time after our half hour trip
across the island before I could settle back into my book.

I was beat from spending the previous few days in Paris and London. Paris,
for all its charms, is dirty, smelly and crowded. And to describe the
demeanor of the French in printable terms would be dishonest.

London is not much better. A day walking the streets of London leaves your
throat raw from diesel fumes. And the only people happy people in all of
England seem to be the elderly and the children.

Seeing the crystal clear air and empty Arctic spaces of Greenland
invigorated me, even from inside a stuffy plane. It made me want to travel
there and find out what kind of people live in the little houses around the
air strip, overlooking the massive icebergs in the harbor.

September 23, 2002
A highlight of my recent trip to Europe was visiting the cathedral of Notre
Dame in Paris and hearing its legendary pipe organ roar.

Europe¹s cathedrals are astounding. Most are longer than a football field
and taller than a grain elevator. The steeple of the cathedral in Salisbury,
England rises 404 feet. It was topped off in the 1300s.

Notre Dame is neither the largest cathedral in France, nor the most ornate.
But while other cathedrals have become little more than tourist attractions,
Notre Dame still plays an large role in the national life of France.
Thousands turn out for masses on Sunday and throughout the week.

But I was most interested in the music. I had been warned by a friend back
home that the Notre Dame pipe organ sounded, as he put it, ³like a Versatile
tractor bearing down on you at full throttle.² Sounded good to me.

Late Sunday afternoon I ducked inside and found a seat. There was a concert
in progress. The organ was quite soft, more like leaves rustling in a breeze
than a tractor. It went on at that rate for twenty minutes--rain drops,
birds chirping, and other such little sounds.

Then, the organist pulled out more and more stops. The breeze through the
leaves turned into a gust. From off to the left came a bass note which
sounded like a souped-up pickup rapping its pipes. A few seconds later, from
the right, came the sound of a Mack truck shifting down on a steep hill.

As the piece neared its crescendo, the Versatile tractors joined in. At
least three. At the same time, a thunderstorm gathered over the front altar
and a fleet of F-16 fighter jets buzzed the sanctuary. Smoke billowed out
and sparks flew from the pipes high overhead.

That is what it sounded like to me, anyway. The sounds from the organ were
everything I had anticipated for all these years, and more.

After the concert, I toured the church. The stained glass was breathtaking,
including a circular rose window at least sixty feet in diameter. I stared
up at it until my neck was sore.

Suddenly, the organ fired up again, as violently as before. Evening mass was
about to begin. A team of priests marched in processional to the altar,
staffs in hand. The cathedral was jammed.

A battle began between the priests, who had their business to attend to, and
the egotistical Notre Dame organist, who used every break in the liturgy to
let loose another angry avalanche of sound which I suspect lasted far longer
than the priests desired.

Meanwhile, the crowd of well over a thousand people milled about, as the
French are prone to do, as if nothing was going on up front. A heavy aroma
of incense, perfume, sweat and alcohol hung in the room.

As the sun set, the grand scene was lit by hundreds of candles. I snuck
around the side and got as close to the altar as I could. The singing and
liturgy was in French, of course, which only made it more mysterious to me.
Billows of incense smoke mushroomed slowly through the fading shafts of
sunlight to the ceiling eighty feet above.

Just then, I remembered: It was on this very altar where 200 years ago
Napoleon was to be crowned Emperor by the Pope. However, at the last moment,
in a move admired by Frenchmen to this day, the audacious leader snatched
the crown from the Pope and put it on his own head.

As I watched the colorful and dramatic tableau at Notre Dame that Sunday
night, that famous scene from the history books didn¹t seem so very far
away. 

September 16, 2002
Cross the border from Switzerland into Italy and the sun begins to shine.
Laundry hangs next to red geraniums from the balconies. Palms wave in the
breeze. Grandmas fling open their shutters, plant their palms on the window
sill, and preside over the busy street below.

The cheerful Italians contrast sharply with the sullen English, the surly
French, and the robotically efficient Swiss. Italians are approachable. They
greet you. If they don't know English, they launch into the universal
language of charades.

The Italians come by charades naturally. Their hands wave as they talk--and
they talk all of the time, it seems. Some stereotypes are rooted in truth.

I rode a morning commuter train into Venice. When the train stopped at a
station, silencing the squeaking and rumbling, the train car was as loud
with gabbing as a Lutheran church basement after a big funeral.

When I rode a morning commuter train from Cambridge into London, Englishmen
jammed in the rail car were--well, more sullenly quiet than a Lutheran
church at the mention of the term "fund drive."

I stayed with friends in Aviano, a small town in northeastern Italy close to
the Yugoslav border, in the shadow of the impressive Dolomite mountains.

Wednesday is market day in Aviano, which means that dozens of carts pull
into town loaded with vegetables, cheeses and fresh flowers. Other carts
have cookware, toys, gifts--one was devoted solely to socks.

The whole town comes out, including dozens of Grandmas on bicycles. Peddlers
barter cheerfully with the customers. Everybody seems to have a good time,
even those weighing out smelly fresh fish.

It is over by noon. By then, the sun is oppressively hot. Stores and banks
close daily at a little past twelve, and reopen in late afternoon. You can't
even get an ice cream cone--or the superior Italian equivalent, gelati--at
two in the afternoon.

But if you need help, you'll find it. I asked directions on the train, and
the conductor unleashed a torrent of Italian which I took to mean that I
should get off at some town starting with an M.

I lied, said I understood, and waited for a town starting with M. When one
arrived, the Italian woman across from me, who spoke no English, and who
hadn't looked at me before, grabbed my arm.

She had understood the conductor, of course, and knew that I had not. With a
firm hand, she not only pulled me off the train, but tugged me over to the
right platform for my connection, and gestured for me to stay planted right
there. She then ran off to catch another train.

Such small gestures of kindness can shape one's view of an entire country, I
find. When lost and confused in a foreign land, a helping hand from a
stranger is no less than a gift from above.

September 9, 2002
LUCERNE, SWITZERLAND--Just inside the Swiss border, the difference between
Switzerland and France was obvious. Suddenly, no litter, no dust, no grime.

A woman inadvertently dropped a plastic wrapper on the street in front of
the Basel train station. It stayed on the ground less than five minutes
before it was snatched up by a uniformed cleaner.

As I browsed the news stand while waiting for the next train, a man roared
by on a sweeper. He dabbed at my feet with a broom, pulling invisible debris
into the path of his sweeper machine.

The bathrooms at the train station were spotless. It cost $1.50 to use them,
but oh well. Switzerland isn't the richest country in the world for nothing.

I returned to my hotel one day to find a pair of maids scrubbing the
stairwell. The walls, the staircase, even the light switches. I am sure it
was the second time that week, for the place shone before they started.

The fastidiousness extends to the gardens, which remain lush and prim even
in early September, to the masses of geraniums which hang from nearly every
man-made precipice.

And then the peaks and natural precipices which tower over all of
Switzerland, the grand Swiss Alps. I had somehow imagined that since the
Alps have been traversed by man for thousands of years that they would look
worn and tame.

They aren't tame. At their heights, the Alps are raw, sheer, dangerous and
sharp, more ominous than the Rockies. Lower down, where the cliffs finally
swoop outwards enough for grass to grow, the intense cultivation starts.

Every strip of grass is valued in Switzerland. The rich green pasture land
extends to places where walking takes you up more than over. The valleys are
dark green, dotted with patches of forest. At the bottom of every one is a
little village, each punctuated by a single church steeple.

Lucerne has many church steeples, but the two on the Holtkierke, the largest
church in town, drew me inside. Given the rough stone exterior, I did not
expect the interior of the 1634 church to be so polished.

It glowed. I couldn't find a speck of dust, and I looked for over an hour.
The slate in the floor was polished, with no dust between the cracks. The
ornately carved pews--hundreds of them--shone, not a dull or worn spot
anywhere, even in the deepest crevasses. The stone pillars were whitewashed.

The many altars--each fifteen feet tall, impossibly ornate, covered in gold
leaf, shone in the sun. No dust there. I rubbed my finger inside the base of
a pew. Nothing. When the sun hit the silver chandeliers, they shone so that
they were painful to view. Who does all this polishing?

I don't know what is most impressive about Switzerland, the famous alpine
scenery, or the polish and neatness of the homes, yards and historic
buildings. The country is pristine, from the largest of its mountains down
to the light switches in the hotel lobby.


September 2, 2002
PARIS, FRANCE--The French drive on the right side of the road, but that
doesn't make crossing the street here any easier than it was in London.

Street lights in Paris are just for decoration. They turn green, red and
yellow, but the French cross at their own whim, according to rules I have
not yet figured out.

I tried my method of attaching myself to a local and crossing with them. It
did not work. I followed a young man as he scooted between the parked cars
and out into the street. He bolted into traffic, and I followed.

I lost my nerve when he bounced off a speeding Audi like it was a would be
tackler. He made it across, and I hope he gets his Heisman trophy, but I was
left behind, stuck between two lanes of traffic going schoom schoom schoom
past me inches on either side.

Finally, traffic jammed up ahead enough for me to make a dash for the
sidewalk. So much for that method.

Now, I latch on to decrepit elderly folks and cross only when they cross.
They provide good cover, although they aren't always handy when you need
them.

The ultimate nightmare intersection in Paris, and perhaps the world, is at
the Arc de Triumph, where twelve streets meet in a big circle. Cars enter
the circle, which is eight lanes wide, drive around for a while, and spin
off when they find the street they want.

I watched for ten minutes, but I couldn't figure out the rules to this
intersection, either. They didn't even bother to put up traffic lights at
the Arc, but they did provide underground tunnels for foreign pedestrians,
for which I was thankful.

People know that you are American in Paris. I don't know what it is. They
wear jeans and tennis shoes, too, so that isn't it. Americans just must
carry themselves differently.

As I was returning to my hotel last night, I scurried across a particularly
harrowing intersection. I made it across, scooted through the six inch space
between two parked cars, and jumped up on the curb where I paused to catch
my breath.

While I was pulling myself together after the latest street crossing ordeal,
a woman took my hand in a very kind manner and said, "You American, right?"
I said yes, grateful for this smidgen of kindness in a bustling foreign
capital.

"Would you like live show?" she said, and gestured grandly towards a
theater-like storefront with curtains across the door.

At the risk of being rude, I apologized, told her I really had to get back
to my hotel, and got the heck out of there.

All of this makes me wonder anew why in the world that chicken ever decided
to cross the road.

August 26,2002
LONDON, ENGLAND--If I make it out of England without getting flattened by a
speeding car, I will be lucky. They drive on the left side of the road here,
and I am perpetually looking the wrong way before I cross the street.

You can't undo a lifetime of habit in one week. I look both ways several
times, then sprint across. I doubt I will ever be able to predict what is
going to happen at English intersections, so I cross only in the middle of
the block.

The streets are narrow, and some of the sidewalks are less than three feet
wide. Despite the tight quarters, cars speed along at 30-40 miles-per-hour.
Step off the curb to let a lady with bags of groceries past, and you might
get plowed over by a speeding Renault.

To get some practice crossing streets and to ease my nerves, I picked the
tiny town of Rye in southeastern England out of the guidebook, and went
there for a day.

To reach Rye, I had to transfer trains several times out of London. Each
train was smaller and more rickety than the last. That was reassuring. I was
sure I was going somewhere sleepy and remote.

But as the old train lurched into the station at Rye, I saw dozens of tour
buses and hundreds of cars parked in a field near the station. The lovely
little town was overrun by British tourists.

Crossing the street was more hazardous in Rye than in London. The streets of
Rye were last widened in the mid-1300s, and consisted of one lane of
cobblestone. The sidewalks were at times less than two feet across.

Finally, I learned to just tag along with a local. When they crossed, I
crossed. If they waited, I waited--even if there isn't a car in sight.

The confusion over crossing the street goes both ways. When the British
travel abroad, they report the same problem in reverse.

In fact, if I get hit by a car, I will be in good company: While visiting
New York City in the mid-1930s, Sir Winston Churchill stepped off the curb
on 5th Avenue, looked the wrong way, and was flattened by a taxi.

Churchill nearly died. He spent months in the hospital. He suffered pain
from the accident for the rest of his life.

Fortunately, Sir Winston recovered well enough to lead England and the
Allies to victory over Hitler in World War II. If that taxi had been going
any faster, England might still be under German control.

Yes, it is difficult to overestimate the importance of looking both ways
before crossing the street.

August 19, 2002
In search of new luggage, I decided to do my homework, shop around, compare
the options and make a sensible choice. I settled on a duffel bag with
wheels from a fancy department store. It was expensive, despite being on
sale, but it was high quality.

Once an agonizing purchase decision is made, I want to pay the bill and get
on with my life. I do not want to chat with the clerk. I do not want to fill
out forms. I do not wish to consider additional offers.

"Do you have your Member¹s Advantage Club Card?" the clerk asked. No, I do
not, I said. I don¹t want one. I don¹t want any more cards in my wallet. I
don¹t want to be in any more clubs. Just ring me up and let me leave.

"If you sign up for a Member¹s Advantage Club Card today, you will get 15%
of the purchase of your luggage!" the clerk said, confident she was more
aware of my best interests than I. "On this sale, your savings today would
amount to eleven dollars and forty-two cents!"

Ghosts of long-dead relatives from the Depression era whispered in my ear:
"Are you going to turn this down just to get out of the mall five minutes
earlier?  That eleven dollars will haunt you when hard times come!"

But once you sign up for these clubs, you are condemned to years of junk
mail dozens of calls from telemarketers. Is the hassle worth the savings?

The pause for thought was fatal. "I can take your application information
right now, you don¹t even have to fill out a form," said the clerk, utterly
convinced that she was doing me a favor.

"Is there any cost?" I asked.

Stupid question. "Of course not!" she said. She knew she had me. She smiled
with the cold cheerfulness of a porcelain sink, clearly enjoying my agony
over a decision I didn¹t want to have to make.

I just wanted to buy luggage. Now I was faced with a smarmy clerk bent on
snaring me into a life-long relationship with her store. My male commitment
avoidance instincts kicked in. I wanted to run for the door.

But eleven dollars is eleven dollars. I sighed and said okay. The clerk
whirred into action on her computer keyboard, eager to suck me into yet
another data base.

Phone number. Work number. Social security number. Mailing address. The
implication was that if I failed to give out this information, I would not
get my eleven dollars off.

Ten minutes later, after an official welcome into the Member¹s Advantage
Club by a woman I had learned to hate, I dragged my new duffel out of the
store, beaten. 

I don¹t like giving out all that information. It¹s none of their business.
In the end, the eleven dollars was not worth the humiliation of being
pummeled into submission by a commission-driven clerk.

Next time I will just fight with the masses to get past the tabloids in
Aisle 23 at the massive discount chain. No chance of being forced into some
club there.

August 12, 2002
One thing missing in small towns: Public spaces where one can remain alone.
To maintain privacy in a small town, you have to hide in your house and
unplug your phone--and one¹s house can get  stuffy in a hurry.

The city, for all of its annoyances, offers plenty of places to hide besides
your home. Shopping malls, parks, city streets, book stores--you can hang
out for days without running into somebody you know. People-watching
opportunities abound.

I find it easier to read or write in a public place than at home. At home,
one¹s accumulated possessions conspire to pull one away from work. When one
works in a cafe, the hours seem to blissfully and productively dissolve. The
busy buzz of background noise has a narcotic effect.

Small towns usually have a cafe or two, but nobody would ever think of
reading there. The last time anybody tried that around here was in July of
1976. A hairy guy from the carnival sat up at the counter and read a
naughty-looking novel for about an hour. What a relief when he left so
everybody could quit staring and finish their pie.

So, reading at the cafe wouldn¹t work, even though I am local and not very
hairy. It would seem pretentious, something an idealistic English major home
for the summer might try.

I enjoy bringing my laptop computer to coffee shops in the city. I can sit
there and work for hours and nobody says boo. Try that in the small town and
you¹re asking to be mumbled about. What¹s he trying to prove? Suppose we¹d
better be quiet so Mr. Important can work on his memoirs.

Any attempt to concentrate would be aggressively sabotaged. Whatcha reading?
Whatcha workin on? Whatcha been up to? Spose you¹ve been pretty busy then.
What kinda machine is that?

Big city cafes have their own problems, especially now that every Tom, Dick
and Harry finds it necessary to carry a cell phone. People assume they have
a right to talk loudly wherever and whenever those things ring. When they
do, I stare angrily until they walk away. That usually works, but it isn¹t a
trick I would try on the dice-shakers at the local cafe.

Pretty tough to people-watch in the small town, too. You can sit on a bench
on Main Street and watch the cars go by on a Saturday night, but you¹ve seen
them all before and you end up waving to most of them and then you spend the
next week answering questions about what you were doing sitting on that
bench last Saturday.

This is as it should be. Small towns are cozy places. The people are
basically warm-hearted. They might gossip about you, but when you die, they
come to your funeral. En masse. Especially if there¹s good food.

Yet, sometimes I wish I wouldn¹t have go so far to sip coffee and read a
book where there¹s little chance of being noticed, or watch people whose
stories I don¹t already know.

August 4, 2002
What we wouldn¹t do in mid-winter for one day of weather as perfect as we
had last week. But if one isn¹t careful, these sterling late-summer days can
slip by under appreciated and even unnoticed.

Back when video cameras were a new thing, my aunt and uncle from California
stopped by the farm for a visit. They ran around the yard taking video, and
later we all got to watch ourselves on television, a big thrill at the time.

What we all noticed was not how fat we looked on video, or how strange our
voices sounded, but how many birds there were singing in the background.
They were loud, there were lots of them-- and not one of us recalled hearing
them during the filming.

Pretty crazy, I thought later, that it took two electronic machines--a
camera and a television--before we finally took notice of the birds that
chirp around us every day.

Now I occasionally remember to listen to the birds in the summer. Live
birds, not ones on tape. After all, it gets pretty quiet outside in January.
It makes sense to enjoy the birds while they are here.

A few years later, I went to the movie "Grumpy Old Men." It was filmed in
Minnesota, during the winter. The scenery on the film was beautiful, I
thought. Snow banks, ice on the lakes, icicles hanging from the eaves .

Then, I realized that the scenery in the movie was the same drab stuff I
complain so bitterly about those long winter months. When those same winter
scenes were splashed on the silver screen, my attitude changed.

In August, each day is filled with things to watch, smell, hear and taste.
Corn on the cob. Fresh tomatoes. Birds. Thunderstorms. Flowers. Green grass.
A Twins team in first place. All the things we miss in the winter.

Yet one¹s mind can get so cluttered with petty daily worries that all of
these good things which are smack dab in front of us fade into the
background. Wasn¹t Alice a bit abrupt on the phone? Who will I get to
shingle the roof? Am I ever going to be able to afford a new car?

Technology makes our mental busyness worse. Just when things settle down,
the phone rings. A quiet moment? Better check my email for the twentieth
time today. Oops, five minutes till my favorite show.

But the best show going is the one that is around us each day: The flowers
blooming, the birds singing, the combines grinding away in the field, the
deer nibbling on the petunias, the barn swallows dive-bombing mosquitoes.

My guess is that we¹d all be better off if we took greater notice of the
fascinating things going on around us rather than getting our stimulation
from the tube, the silver screen, the internet, or the cell phone.

Noisy modern life with its gadgets dulls our senses, distracts us, agitates
us, tempts us, removes our minds so far from the present moment that if the
Garden of Eden itself were to pop up in our midst, few people would notice.
They are, after all, expecting an important call.


July 29, 2002
The buttery sunshine of hot July evenings brings back memories of childhood
vacations, when Mom and Dad would load us up in the LTD station wagon and
head west for our annual trip.

Hundreds of mental snapshots: Of the tame chipmunks at the top of the
gondola ride in Estes Park, CO. Of the Clark¹s nutcracker birds which
snatched peanuts out of our hands when we stopped along that wild road over
Bear Tooth Pass. Of the huge goldfish in the river in Hot Springs, SD.

I recall hiking between the rust-colored spires of Bryce Canyon when I was
missing both my front teeth. There was the the time the air conditioning on
the LTD went out in Flagstaff, AZ in July. Or the time I went underwater
without my nose plugged for the first time in a Ramada Inn pool in Eugene,
OR.

There weren¹t a lot of chain motels in the 1970s, so you had to be careful.
Mom and Dad insisted upon checking if the room smelled bad before they
checked in. They turned down as many rooms as they took, which embarrassed
me horribly. 

Twenty-five dollars was acceptable, $32 a splurge. A pool was an exciting
bonus, but many of them were ice cold and unusable. I didn¹t like to swim
anyway.

A bigger treat than the pool was the television in the room. We didn¹t have
television at home, so motels were where we made up for lost time. As the
sun set over the mountains outside, our family huddled in a dark room around
a TV watching an old black and white movie.

Motels back then could be pretty rough, but every now and then we would hit
the jackpot, as we did in Lincoln City, OR in 1976. Our room, which cost
$22, was actually a suite of rooms spread over two stories with an enormous
picture window overlooking the Pacific Ocean fifty feet below.

Best memory of that stay? Watching Mark Fidrych of the Detroit Tigers pitch
against the Red Sox on ABC¹s ³Monday Night Baseball.² Howard Cosell
announced. I suspect the ocean surf roared in the background, but I don¹t
recall.

³Candid Camera² was a family favorite, and ³The Carol Burnett Show² made Mom
laugh until she cried. In Burns, OR at Uncle Don and Aunt Lois¹s ranch,
Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson got in a fight in the dugout on NBC¹s ³Game
of the Week² from Fenway Park. Unforgettable. I think we also rode horses
that visit, but I am not sure.

Never forget the time in beautiful Fort Collins, CO, when my sister and I
managed to watch twenty minutes of the racy 1970s show ³Soap² before Mom
realized what was going on and put a stop to it.

Glacier Park, Montana, 1977. No television, but I managed to get a dim radio
signal of the Twins playing the expansion Seattle Mariners. It was a Seattle
station. The Twins won behind the pitching of Geoff Zahn. I spent two hours
in the parking lot, fine tuning the radio, sitting in different positions to
make the signal come in better.

Yes, great memories of getting away from it all, refreshing one¹s soul, and
experiencing nature¹s wonders.


July 22, 2002
Had my first chance to endure the tightened airport security measures last
weekend. Getting through security isn¹t too bad unless your belt buckle
makes the beeper go, or unless your name gets pulled for the random security
check.

If you set off the beeper or get spit out by the computer, you have to step
aside and be ³hand-wanded² while another guard empties out your carry-on
bags and rifles through your things.

But I had no worries. Turns out, the security check isn¹t random at all. The
only ones who get pulled aside for security checks are old ladies with white
hair.

The government has denied that they are picking on senior women, insisting
that they do not single out people with a particular age or gender profile.
But it is common knowledge in airports these days that if you have a gray
beehive hairdo, you better get ready for a thorough public hand-wanding.

Most of the grannies I saw took the invasion of privacy in good humor. In
the Reno airport, a lady from New York stood with her arms outstretched as
the diligent security guard ran the hand wand up and down her body. Ten feet
away, the lady¹s little suitcase was emptied on a table for all to see.

The hand wand beeped. The security guard ran the hand wand all over the area
which produced the beep. Beep, beep, beep. The guard zeroed in on the carpet
knife, or whatever it was that this suspicious-looking grandma had tucked
away. 

The woman rolled her eyes heavenward, determined to endure the humiliation
with the stoicism of Joan of Arc. But the guard persisted with the hand wand
until the woman finally closed her eyes, gritted her teeth, and confessed,
³there is a metal buckle on my bra strap.²

Satisfied that the woman wasn¹t wired with explosives, the guard let her put
on her shoes and move through. ³They should just make us show up in those
hospital gowns,² she mumbled. ³I haven¹t been hand-wanded like that in sixty
years.²

The security guards, to their credit, maintain good humor, and do their best
to comfort their victims. They are, after all, just obeying orders from
Washington. If my trip was any indication,  those orders are to put a good
scare in the nation¹s old ladies, especially if they sport a hairdo that
looks like a turban.

Of course, great-grandmothers have never hesitated to use terrorism, but
they usually limit it to the ³you never visit, you never call² variety. Now,
apparently, they have become a threat to our nation¹s security. With people
on edge, this is no time to fool around.

My confidence in our airline security system grew when I saw how thoroughly
they are searching and hand-wanding elderly women. I have always thought
that bunch was up to no good. Now at least I know they are being watched.

Of course, no system is fool-proof. You know that somewhere, sometime, some
grandma will get through security strapped to the nines with explosives,
eager to strike a blow against American imperialism on her way to see the
grandkids in Seattle.

July 15, 2002
A class reunion is an event many approach with equal parts anticipation and
dread. Some just skip it, others come reluctantly. My twenty year reunion
was held last weekend. I would never miss it, although attending stirred
some old anxieties.

It is good to see everybody, but jumping back into the pool of people with
whom you endured the horrors and humiliations of ages five through seventeen
isn¹t for everyone. One might think: So much has changed. I am more content
now than I was then. Why go back?

The organizers of class reunions are usually the same ones who did all the
work for prom. They confront apathy, resistance and hostility at every turn.

If they have some dumb program, I am not going to come. Forget it, I am not
going to write down my life history for everybody to read. No thanks, I do
not care to be nominated for the hair loss award. Let¹s just have some food,
visit a while and call it good.

Others decide that, stop to think of it, the ones I want to keep in touch
with I  already am in touch with.

For these reasons, it is tough for the organizers to get an accurate head
count. Most people want to leave their options open until they get a feel
for who else is going. Skittish spouses sign up and then back out. The
rebels, if they come, just show up at the last minute.

But the indefatigable organizers soldier on, just as they did in high
school, planning for food, decorations, programs, pictures, gag prizes, and
a DJ to play favorites from the early 80s.

The event itself was fun. I was nominated for the hair loss award, but did
not win. My consolation prize was a cheap set of curlers. My single status
won me a plastic Barbie doll bride.

There was a brief class trivia quiz, which flopped. Most people want to just
forget the old nicknames. Not a soul remembered the prom theme, can you
imagine that. Our class motto was some mushy clap-trap about hopes and
dreams.

The DJ thought we were the class of 1972 and played stuff like "Smoke on the
Water" until somebody set him straight. He more than made up for his mistake
with AC/DC¹s "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap." The dance floor filled.
Selections from the works of Cindy Lauper, Meatloaf, and the J. Giles Band
followed.

In between, snippets of conversation with classmates. You still in Fargo?
Yep. So how do you like it? Oh, its fine. Yep. Pretty good, actually. Yep.
So, not a bad turnout! Nope. Not bad. Yep. Nope. Yep. Well, I¹d better go
get another barbecue here. Yep, okay then. See you. Yep. Have a good one.

Superficial conversation, sure, but that¹s about all the deeper one wants to
get or you end up in the touchy territory of divorces, chemical dependency,
loss of jobs, politics, religion and so on. There is safety in small talk.

Yep. So the reunion went pretty good. Not bad at all. Kinda fun, actually.
Good to see everybody. Yep. Good food. Probably have to go to the next one.
If I¹m around. Yep. Nope. Well, I suppose I better be going here.



July 7, 2002
Summer is when many suburbanites make their annual trek back to the small
town from whence they came, like salmon who return to the little stream in
which they were spawned.

They come armed with a catalog of their achievements at some huge company,
dropping  hints of a six figure salary and talking expansively of their
five-state territory which requires constant travel.

The natives must endure tales of children who allegedly excel at soccer,
piano, dance, and a dozen other silly busy-body activities that the children
don¹t care about and drop as soon as they can, but which give parents a
fleeting sense of adequacy.

It is easy for us hicks to be wowed by the six-figure salaries, the lavish
expense accounts, the huge homes in fancy subdivisions, the season tickets
to professional sports teams, and the soccer-playing children.

But listen to the suburbanites visit with each other, and a darker truth
emerges.

First, they start complaining to each other about their bosses. You realize
that they all have bosses. The best that can be said of a boss, it seems, is
that ³he leaves me alone,² or ³she lets me do what I want,² sort of like an
easy-going elementary school teacher.

But can they leave their obnoxious and incompetent bosses and strike out on
their own? No. They are mortgaged to the hilt on their cookie-cutter house
and pay huge payments on their SUVs. They are enslaved to their six-figure
salaries, which still aren¹t enough to allow them to shave down the $15,000
in credit card debt they ran up when they got new furniture.

Suburban corporate drones are liable to be laid off at any time, or forced
into early retirement. Companies fold. Retirement accounts disappear. The
economy changes. The five-state territory gets taken over by somebody with
better connections.

In fact, it seems to me that the lives of suburbanites are often largely out
of their control. Suburbanites have few roots, little connection to the
earth, no daily ties to a clan to help ease the pain of their humiliating
jobs. Their manic pursuit of possessions seems like an attempt to find
something solid to hang on to.

The countryside is not paradise. It is difficult to make a living here. You
put up a house, and its value immediately falls to about half of what the
house cost to build. Farming is a recipe for frustration. Small-town gossip
and small-mindedness are stifling.

But there is a quiet dignity people who live in the country which striving
suburbanites simply lack. It is a dignity of people who are their own boss,
who haven¹t sold out, who don¹t need possessions and achievement to
establish their worth.

Country people seldom have much to brag about, and must endure the tales
from suburbia in silence. But many of then know how good they have it, and
take their lack of significance with good humor.

Of course, the countryside is slowly dying while the suburbs thrive and
grow. The cruel rules of economics have little regard for the subtle charms
of country living. We  better enjoy every day out here, for soon we will be
extinct.

June 30, 2002
With all the road washouts due to the recent torrents of rain, getting
around our area has become a challenge. Detours of forty or fifty miles are
common, if you can figure out the signs.

Twice I have gotten so lost that I accidentally wormed my way miles behind
the detour signs and made it right up to the actual problem. Nice for
sightseeing, terrible for making it anywhere on time.

My problems are minor compared to people who have lost homes, businesses, or
even those who have to drive fifteen miles to get to town for milk where
they used to drive two or three.

But alas, when adversity strikes, the human spirit so often shines through.
People help people. Volunteers sandbag. Sympathizers drive for miles to gawk
sympathetically. Troops appear with big  green trucks. Grief counselors
materialize to assist disaster victims in their quest for healing and
closure.

Once things settle down, the federal government pulls out its enormous
checkbook and starts throwing around the millions. Such generosity! It¹s as
if Grandpa Roosevelt was still alive. Some disaster dollars end up in good
places, others end up in funny places, but hey, don¹t complain.

This last flood brought about a small incident which stirred me to
philosophize. As I went north on US Highway 59, I came upon a place where
the highway was underwater. Only one lane of the road was open for travel,
and the sign said simply: ³Take turns.²

How nice, I thought. Just like the schoolyard. The cars were behaving
perfectly. Two would ease slowly through the water going north, then two
would go south. It was all very orderly. There were long lines on either
side, but nobody seemed to mind. Nobody in any sort of uniform was there to
enforce the rules.

Just when I had reached the front of the line and was about to take my turn,
a white Jeep Land Rover jumped the line, roared past fifteen cars, and
splashed headlong through the water at a high speed.

What a jerk! One bad apple, and the whole system broke down. Now it was
every man for himself. Instead of two cars taking their turn from the other
way, four decided to pull through. When I pulled out, five or six cars
followed. It was chaos.

The incident disturbed me for an hour. Here we had people acting mannerly
and orderly without being forced by the law, or by the authorities, to
behave. A simple sign, ³take turns,² was all that was needed.

But one jerk ruined this beautiful example of human beings living together
in harmony. Who knows when and how order was restored.

As the miles wore on, I decided I was being a little hard on the people in
the Land Rover. Perhaps they had a medical emergency, or maybe they were
late for a funeral.

But right then, I pulled up behind that same white Land Rover. It was making
a left turn, and not into a hospital parking lot. No, the Land Rover was
hellbent for the casino. Emergency, indeed!


June 23, 2002
If you have a credit card and access to the Internet, you can place a bid on
most anything. Baseball cards, used cars, paintings, clothing, airline
tickets, grand pianos, toilet paper, you name it.

The only item I have bid on over the web is a hotel room. Last winter, I
placed a lowball bid on a room in a luxury hotel and got it for less than
what even the budget motels charge. Last week I was in need of a vacation,
so I decided to try my luck on a hotel room in downtown Minneapolis.

The game works like this: You set the dates, your preferred level of luxury,
the general area where you wish to stay, and your price. Within seconds, the
gnomes of the Internet dangle your offer in front of several hotels.

In fewer than fifteen minutes, you are informed whether your bid was
accepted, and by which hotel. The hotel which accepts your bid immediately
charges your credit card, no refunds allowed.

This time, my first two bids were turned down. Must be a big convention in
Minneapolis, I decided. Instead of limiting myself to downtown, I decided to
widen my net to include the Metrodome and University neighborhood.

Bingo! My offer was accepted. For less than half regular price, I had landed
a room at a Sheraton, which the gnomes claimed was near the Metrodome. I
jumped in my pickup and headed to the big city, durn proud of my dealin¹
smarts.

Upon my arrival, it was painfully obvious why this particular Sheraton
accepts low bids from ignorant hicks. The hotel wasn¹t near anything. No
restaurants. No shops. No parks, nothing. The Metrodome was four miles away.

No, this Sheraton was smack dab in the middle of an industrial park in
northeast Minneapolis. The hotel was a lonely island in a sea of warehouses,
trucking firms, chemical companies and other enormous gravel-roofed
buildings surrounded by acres of asphalt.

The hotel took the low bid on the room, but you should see their prices for
everything else. Local calls? Two dollars each. Breakfast? Eight bucks,
minimum. I didn¹t turn on the TV for fear of going broke.

To show their contempt for Internet bargain hunters, the hotel staff stuck
me in a room right next to the banquet hall--just where you don¹t want to be
on a Saturday night. Boom, boom, boom, a wedding dance pounded away next
door until 1 a.m.

And yes, there was a convention going on in Minneapolis, a 1950s car
gathering at the state fairgrounds. Ten thousand cars in all, about one
hundred of which were in the parking lot of my hotel. I spent part of the
evening eavesdropping on the spit-polishing codgers who had driven the gaudy
cars in from all over the country.

It wasn¹t long before I got my fill of chrome, fins, hair grease and big
talk. I took a walk. Because it was the weekend, the streets of the
industrial park were utterly abandoned. In two miles I encountered two cars
and no pedestrians. It was blissfully quiet.

In fact, if it hadn¹t been for the chain link fence and barbed wire, it
would have felt much like walking on a lonely township road back home.


June 17, 2002
Most progress is anything but progress, but the improvement in small town
gas stations in the past decade or two has been a change for the better.

If you had told me ten years ago that the time would come when I could
purchase a cappuccino at our local gas station, I would have said you were
nuts. But now I take it for granted that every little gas station in every
small town will have a convenience store with goodies galore.

Gone are the dark and dirty filling stations of old. The dusty, oil-soaked
concrete floors which sweeping could not improve have been replaced by
brightly lit tile.

No more cracked vinyl chairs and overflowing ashtrays on either side of the
front door where old men sit for hours and leer at any female who dares
enter.

Ah, the wonders of capitalism! Somebody finally figured out that women buy
gas, too, and that women will likely go where they feel comfortable. So, the
leering old men were removed--not by force, but by eliminating their natural
habitat of cracked-vinyl chairs and overflowing ashtrays.

Also missing from today¹s gas station: Girlie calendars, dust-covered
cigarette machines, fan belts hanging on the wall above the till, and the
smell of oil, gas, anti-freeze, WD-40, all mixed. Most stations have moved
their shop way out back so you can no longer hear the phfffft of the air
wrench, or the screech of a hubcap getting pried off.

There are no grease-covered attendants at gas stations anymore. The clerks
are pressed and clean, likely because they no longer fill your tank for you,
wash your windows, check your oil, anything. They¹re too busy selling
lottery tickets or renting movies.

Small town gas stations still can be a social center, but if you don¹t feel
going in to gab with the locals you can opt out by paying with your credit
card at the pump. Pay-at-the-pump is one technology which actually makes
life simpler, not more difficult. Imagine that.

And milk. What a great thing to be able to grab a half-gallon of 2% milk
after filling gas, instead of having to weave down the aisles of the grocery
store only to pick up six items on sale that you didn¹t need.
 
Some gas stations even sell fresh pizza and sub sandwiches. Locals dine at
the gas station more frequently than they care to admit. Most towns of less
than 1,000 population have never had a pizza joint. A filling station with a
pizza place in the back corner constitutes the biggest jump in the
small-town quality of life index since cable television.

I can¹t imagine that many people miss the old-style filling station, with
its smoky haze, lecherous ambiance, grumbling and gossip, bad politics,
debauched jokes and rock hard candy bars. Pizza, chips, movies, and fancy
coffee are much better.

The small town gas station, unlike most small town business, has entered an
era of prosperity something like the drug stores enjoyed back before soda
fountains went out. A glistening gas station brightens up what is left of
main street, and gives many rural small towns at least one prosperous
business to brag about other than the fancy new funeral home.


June 10, 2002
The summer storm season started with a bang last night. Much of our area
awoke to over five inches in the rain gauge, water in the basement, branches
down, big brown lakes in the fields.

As always, I left one window down on my pickup. The rain came sideways, so
the whole cab is drenched. The windows will soon fog, and in two days the
cab will smell musty.

This particular storm came from an odd direction. My house is used to strong
northwest winds, but last night¹s wind came more from the east, and it
pulled off some shingles. Apparently, every new wind direction exposes
different weak spots.

The crowns of giant old cottonwood conceal an endless supply of dead limbs
which shake loose during storms. The rotten big branches shatter on the lawn
amidst the younger twigs. Oak are more stingy, seldom dropping branches
larger than a golf club.

Despite the destruction caused by summer storms, many people just love them.
Those who leave this area often mention summer storms as one of the things
they miss.

Summer storms do put on a show. As the dark clouds gather, the gray billows
swirl and boil in what weather people might call ³tornadic activity.² This
is the stage in the storm where everybody gets up from the dinner table and
runs to the top of the drive to get a better look.

With the first roar of the wind everybody scurries back inside. The rain
hits. A few hailstones bounce in the lawn. People fret about the garden,
their car, the crops.

Next comes the lightning. If the storm hits in the middle of the night, it
is fun to lie awake as the thunder cracks and rumbles overhead, from one
horizon to the other. I used to count the seconds between the flash and the
boom. Now I just try to guess which tree got hit.

Close lightning strikes terrified me as a child. Now, they amaze me with
their raw power. Two summers ago, lightning hit a cottonwood next to my
house and spread white wood splinters out 100 feet.

If the storm strikes in early evening and then passes over, the stage is set
for a dramatic evening scene. As the sun lowers to the west, it casts an
orange glow against the towering thunderhead to the east. The departing
cloud silently flickers and flashes from the lightning within.

These enormous thunderheads, some of them which billow up to over 60,000
feet, are the closest approximation we get to mountains in this flat
country. After driving in real mountains, I am thankful that we only have
temporary ones which don¹t interfere with our straight roads.

Every so often you will see a rainbow. A rainbow¹s gaudy colors cause many
people to run for their camera. Like most natural phenomena, however, a
rainbow is probably best enjoyed without trying to capture it. Pictures are
never as good as the real thing.

Nothing wrong with enjoying a storm, even one which does damage. There is
nothing we can do to prevent storms from doing what they please, so we had
just as well sit back and enjoy the show.

June 3, 2001
June in the northland is a time of bright greens. This is what we waited for
the past seven months: Green grass, breezes through open windows, fresh
leaves on the trees, chattering birds.

Dusk lasts until just before eleven in the evening, and the sun rises well
before most people make use of it. With the last snows still fresh in our
mind, it is difficult to comprehend that the days will soon start getting
shorter.

Is there anything more dreamlike and melancholy than a cloudy June
afternoon? The farm fields are lush and silent, like massive fairways. The
blooms of old lilacs, spireas and roses make their annual appearance in the
brush on abandoned farm places, making one wonder who planted them and when.

Each June brings back the bittersweet loneliness of childhood summers. I
lived too far from my school friends to see them during the summer, except
for summer sports or the county fair.

Summer was a time for cousins, some of whom would visit the farm for weeks
on end. It seemed like every week a strange station wagon would pull up to
the house. An uncle would get out and stretch, an aunt would bustle into the
house with pans of goodies, and cousins would pile out onto the lawn.

To pass the summer days, I used a lopping shears to clear trails through the
woods for my little motorcycle. The trails were rough at first, but when the
city cousins came, they rode the trails from morning till night until the
paths were worn smooth.

Later on, the three-wheeler was the toy of choice. The best time to drive
was at sunset when you could feel the mosquitoes pelting your face, or drink
in the heavy cool air where the field roads dipped into a swampy hollow.

June was time to capture a bottle full of lightening bugs and let them light
up my bedroom for a couple of nights before they started to stink.

June was when Rod Carew would be flirting with .400, and the Twins still had
hope. Larry Hisle, Lyman Bostock, Roy Smalley, Glenn Adams and other
long-forgotten Minnesota boys of summer played like all-stars in June. They
flopped come August, but June¹s  success was sweet.

June was high season for PeeWee baseball. I biked to town for games, only to
drop every ball hit to me and get picked off most times I managed to get on
base.

Even though I never pitched, I was convinced that I would one day join Bert
Blyleven in the Twins starting rotation. Back at the farm, I pitched against
the door of the grainery until it fell apart.

June was the time to relish newly-won summer freedoms, most importantly the
freedom to sleep in until ten every day if you wanted, or to stay up late to
listen to the Twins beat up on the Angels on the west coast.

Grown-up Junes seem less memorable than those of years ago. Yet, every now
and then some sight, sound, or smell will bring me back to the timeless June
days of childhood, and I wonder if they were really as dreamlike as I
recall.

May 27, 2002
Has anybody ever figured out the driving rules for small towns? Are there
any? Are they ever enforced?

As far as I can tell, it is each person for themselves. If you live in one
place long enough, you begin to learn everybody¹s rules. When you see the
Elmer¹s yellow Malibu coming down the road, you know just what to expect.

But if you are from out of town, look out. Drive into a small town at your
own risk. Consider your life to be in peril.

Elmer doesn¹t cross intersections even if he has the right of way. He¹s
retired. The young whippersnapper in the new pickup across the intersection
looks like he¹s in a hurry. Probably has important business. So, it is
Elmer¹s policy to just sit at the intersection until things settle down a
bit, then he¹ll pull out.

Locals understand Elmer¹s driving behavior, but outsiders wait impatiently
for him to take advantage of his right of way. They honk, gesture and
yell--none of which does any good, since Elmer is hard of hearing and
doesn¹t see real well either.

Mavis creeps along at a slow crawl in her 1973 Oldsmobile, but stops for
nothing. She rolls through stop signs, onto the busy highway, back onto the
back streets, all at an excruciatingly stately pace. When you see Mavis, get
out of the way.

Mavis is a particular problem for semis which roar through town loaded with
snowmobiles, grain,  windows, whatever. She yields for nothing. You wonder
if she knows how many times she has caused the abrupt hiss of air brakes, or
inspired streams of profanity.

Oscar parks five feet from the curb, but Norbert parks with one or more
wheels on the curb. Ophelia parks parallel in the diagonal, and Matilda uses
the handicapped zone at the grocery store even though she doesn¹t have a
sticker.

The use of turn signals in small towns is completely optional, mainly
because most people don¹t decide until the last minute which way they are
turning. That¹s what stop signs are for--to give you time to evaluate your
turning options. Once you decide, it is too late to signal anyway.

One local legend used to work her way out of tight spots with her Impala by
ramming the cars in front of her and behind her until she worked her way
free. As far as anybody knows, nobody ever filed a claim against her. If you
were stupid enough to park in front of Eleanora¹s green Impala, you deserved
what you got.

Yes, it is dangerous to drive in a small town. It would be a lot safer if
all of the drivers possessed all of their faculties.

But we all know each other¹s rules. We know what to expect. If outsiders
can¹t handle a little variety in driving behavior, they should move away or
take another route.

It is a sad day when I hear that another local driver has had their keys
taken away. The local streets may be made safer, but the town loses a little
flavor.

May 19, 2002
Nothing punches me in the gut harder than when people tear down grand old
trees without adequate reason. ³Let¹s get rid of those old things,² seems to
be their motto, no matter how beautiful the old thing left them by the
previous generations might be.

My love for old trees comes in part from a firsthand knowledge of how
difficult it is to make them. Old trees are created by decades of time and
good fortune. Most die or are killed before they reach maturity.

Nobody alive right now could plant an oak and reasonably hope to one day sit
in its shade. An old oak, therefore, is priceless. You can¹t purchase one.
You can¹t make one hurry up and grow. You can¹t move one in.

We are fortunate enough in this area to have beautiful old oak, as well as
other trees which have somehow survived decades of winds, disease and human
thoughtlessness. Are they not a gift which we should appreciate and
preserve?

Okay, the old thing might be in the way for mowing. It might lean a little
to the left. It might drop  branches in a ninety-mile-per hour wind. It
might even fall over in the next strong breeze, who knows. But to take out
an old tree for those reasons is like shooting your dog  because it might
get a tick.

Yes, the pioneers had to clear the land to plant crops. You can¹t blame them
for that. They had to live. But even though their rationale for cutting down
trees is long gone, the clear-the-land impulse seems to live on.

Others can¹t seem to see beauty in a thing unless they¹ve planned, planted
and primped it by themselves. They destroy what is passed on to them in
order to take full credit for what they put in its place.

Recently there has been a move on to ³redo² old cemeteries to make the
stones straight. In many cases, old trees are taken down because they are
causing a stone to rise, or because they obscure the writing on the stone.

At first glance, this may seem reasonable. At second glance, it is insane.

Who reads those stones, anyway? At most five people per year. How many
passersby enjoy the big trees planted by the stones each year? Thousands.

Headstones are as dead as the people under them. Trees are alive. In many
cases, they were planted by the people buried on the plot. What do you think
the dead would rather have, a straight, clearly visible stone marker, or a
grave shaded by an oak or an evergreen?

If a cemetery is to be more than just a storage space for dead bodies, trees
are needed. Benign neglect often allows trees in cemeteries, especially the
tall narrow cedar, to develop into grand specimens. They are a living
tribute to those six feet below, even if they block the writing on the
stone.

Old trees in cemeteries and everywhere, like all old living things, deserve
a measure of respect. They should never be destroyed without solemn
deliberation.

Opening day of fishing season has come and gone. Whoopdeedo! Apparently
opening day of fishing season is a big deal to some people. Men, women, old,
young, rich, poor, sophisticated or crude, you never know who will be bit by
the fishing bug.

The notion of sitting for hours on end in a boat waiting for a bite is just
beyond me. And what is this "catch and release" deal? They reel in a big
fish, weigh it, take a picture--only to throw the poor thing back in the
lake? What¹s the point?

The first time I went fishing was in sixth grade. I caught six perch in the
first hour, and my companions caught as many. But the rest of the day we
just sat there. Not a nibble. I grew restless and bored.

As the sun sunk towards the horizon, I snuck over to the bridge and pulled
up the stringer to have a look at the fish we had caught that morning. But
the cable slipped through my fingers. The stringer with the fourteen fish
slowly sank out of sight. My popularity rating with my fishing companions
sank with it.

My next fishing experience came last winter. I decided I had to see what ice
fishing was all about. There must be something magical about it, I thought,
if thousands of allegedly sane people are willing to go to such lengths to
stare down through hole in the ice for hours.

So, I went out on the ice with an ice fisherman. The temperature was about
zero. He had to carve out the hole again, and scoop out the ice chips and
such. The scooping required that the door to the fish house be open. I stood
there shivering and was no help whatsoever.

Finally we sat down to stare through the hole in the ice. The water looked
like split pea soup. To provide a backdrop against which fish would be
visible in the split pea soup, the fisherman peeled some potatoes and threw
them to the bottom.

The main event was when a school of minnows darted through the soup, past
the potatoes. Now it was split pea soup with raw potatoes and minnows, a
dish which sounded even less appetizing than the green muck they served us
in elementary school.

After the excitement of the passing of the minnows subsided, I got restless,
just as I had in sixth grade. I had gained no greater understanding of the
magic of fishing. I decided to leave before I did something stupid to
antagonize my host. I had lasted one-half hour.

Although I will never be a fisherman, I do enjoy eating the fresh fish. The
combination of a fish from Uncle Orville¹s hook with spices from Aunt Ede¹s
kitchen is unbeatable. I enjoy fresh fish more than venison.

In fact, fishing generally strikes me as more dignified than deer hunting.
Luring in a big dumb Northern to the dinner table seems less barbaric than
blasting a fellow mammal into the freezer with a portable cannon.

In any event, my credentials as a Minnesotan are questionable. I was born
here. I have lived here all of my life. But I don¹t hunt and fish. Do you
suppose they will revoke my citizenship?

May, 6, 2002
The whole notion of recipes offends me. You¹d think people could pick up the
basic principles of cooking and then make up new things instead of looking
in a cookbook and repeating somebody else¹s formula. Where¹s the creativity
in recipes?

I bet recipe writers secretly laugh at the millions of sheeplike cooks who
follow their recipes blindly, to the letter, without question. I wonder if
they ever write in exotic ingredients just so they can giggle at the thought
of ten thousand people taking an unnecessary trip to the store.

People are always looking for formulas. Whip up a formula for happiness,
spread it thinly over 200 pages of paperback, invent a snappy title, jump on
the speaker¹s circuit, and presto, you¹re a millionaire whether your formula
works or not. It worked for you.

Another formula for wealth: If you can come up with bizarre uses for
household goods, you will command the ears and wallets of an entire nation.
Although people love recipes and formulas, they love to violate the rules
even more--but only if somebody important on TV gives them permission.

For instance, did you know you can use Alka-Seltzer tablets to clean your
toilet? You bet you can, according to a recent household hints publication.
Plop plop, fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is. No more expensive toilet bowl
cleaner.

Of course, Alka-Seltzer costs ten times more than real toilet bowl cleaner,
but who cares. The real fun comes from violating the directions on the
Alka-Seltzer box, or maybe from sticking it to those crooks at the toilet
bowl cleaner company.

Then there are recipes which require unexpected items. ³I¹m not going to
tell you what¹s in it, or you might not like it,² smirks the daring cook
before announcing that the tater-tot hotdish recipe she followed calls for a
can-and-a-half of Dr. Pepper.

³It ain¹t half bad,² is the response around the table. Hardly a ringing
compliment, but the cook doesn¹t mind. She¹s just pulled off her most
rebellious act in forty-seven years. Dr. Pepper in the tater tots! Her face
flushes with glee. She finally found a recipe for rebellion.

Sensible formulas, crazy formulas, useful formulas, useless formulas, people
can be moved to do almost anything if it is put into a formula.

Popular magazines are full of formulas to accomplish the impossible. Ten
Secrets to a Better Love Life! Ten Tips to Improve your Golf Game!
Advertisements chime in: Lose 10 lbs. in five days with our simple program!

You can lose weight fast with my simple, two-word program, too. It is called
: ³Eat Less.² I haven¹t had a lot of luck selling that program to magazines,
however.

To pull in the masses, your program for improvement, your recipe, has to
promise the impossible. It must be effortless, low cost, fool-proof, and
available now for seventeen easy monthly payments of $27.99.

Now that I think of it, the whole idea of being creative, thinking
independently and coming up with your own ideas, whether in the kitchen or
anywhere else, is downright dangerous. Think what would happen to the
economy if people stopped blindly following formulas!

April 29, 2002
We all know that rural areas in Minnesota have been losing population. What
I did not realize is that the rural population around here peaked in 1900
and has gone downhill since.

According to the Minnesota Historical Society, Norman County, where I live,
boasted 15,000 residents in the 1900 census, taken only twenty years after
settlement began in earnest.

Fifteen thousand is not that many people, especially when spread over Norman
County¹s vast spaces. Yet since 1900, the population of the county has
dwindled to about half that amount.

After the latest census figures came legislative redistricting. Rural
districts ballooned in size and declined in number. The suburbs of
Minneapolis and St. Paul will command a majority in next year¹s state
legislature. The suburbs now control more seats than the inner city and
rural areas combined.

That stinks. I loathe the suburbs. Every visit to a suburb fills me with
revulsion. I don¹t like suburban malls, cookie-cutter suburban houses,
suburban chain restaurants, selfish suburban values, shallow suburban
religion, empty suburban culture, any of it.

Suburbanites lack roots. They lack history. They lack civility and manners.
Suburbs lack warmth, continuity, community and a tradition of civic
responsibility.

Eccentrics and characters add flavor to daily life in the inner city and in
the small towns, but in the suburbs the rule is vanilla. Everybody drives an
SUV. Everybody is remodeling for the third time in six years. Everybody is
struggling for a promotion at some huge blob of a corporation.

Pull onto those freeways which circle the Twin Cities and get swept up in
the frenzy. What could justify such rushing and rudeness other than somebody
in labor in the back seat?

Selfishness. Materialism. Money-madness. Maxed-out credit cards. Mortgages.
Enforced conformity.

In the suburbs, if your house looks a little different, you might lower your
neighborhood¹s property values. That means the neighbors can¹t take out as
large a home equity loan to add on the new sun room or update the carpet.

So, instead of merely gossiping about your strange habits, as we would in
the small town, suburban neighbors run to the city council to get an
ordinance passed requiring you to repaint your purple house with earth
tones.

Oh, and get rid of the flower bed on the boulevard, too. We¹re not zoned for
that.

It is these boneheads who will now rule us. Corporate drones, soccer moms
and overgrown mall rats.

One ray of hope: Public service is hard work with relatively low pay.
Suburbanites don¹t like those sort of jobs. In fact, many newer suburbs have
a tough time finding people to run for public office.

As a result, many of the elected representatives of the newer suburbs are
not the brightest bulbs in the chandelier, to put it politely.

So, since we hicks are now outnumbered by the suburban neanderthals, we¹ll
have to work hard to outsmart them.

April 21, 2002

Last fall for some reason I decided it was necessary for me to purchase a
cell phone. After all, cell phones are so convenient--cheaper than a regular
phone, especially with those 33,000 free weekend minutes per month--and you
can call from anywhere!

Well, I never use the thing. It gathers dust in my glove compartment, just
like the last cell phone I had, the one I turned over to the authorities
after nearly killing myself and four people in an oncoming vehicle as I
fumbled to dial while driving.

On this new cell phone, I place an average of one call per week. Not a one
has been crucial. I have received perhaps ten phone calls in five months.
None of them has changed my life. Not a one was even remotely important.

While in Arizona last winter, I took my new phone along on a hike to watch
the sunset. Half-way up the trail, I pulled the phone out. The screen
informed me that I had a new message. How exciting! It must be important, I
thought. How lucky I am to have this cell phone.

But the trail was out of range. I was unable to retrieve the message.

So much for the hike. Forget the sunset. I knew I wouldn¹t enjoy myself
knowing I had a new message waiting for me, so I ran back to my pickup and
drove back into town.

Alas, I couldn¹t retrieve the message, even after I drove back within range
of a signal. And more messages kept appearing! Three, five, now seven. Had
somebody died? Did I win the lottery? Was the president in need of my
counsel? I needed to know!

I called everybody I knew, trying to figure out who had been calling me. But
nobody had called. Nobody had died. Nothing was wrong. And the president was
surviving without my advice, as usual.

Turns out, I had the instructions wrong and was leaving a blank message to
myself every time I checked for my messages. Sort of sad, going into a panic
when you can¹t figure out how to listen to the blank messages you have left
for yourself.

Note to the IRS: I deduct each month¹s cell phone cost. The cell phone is
what keeps me in touch with my business. It is essential that I, the owner
and grand poobah of a business, be in constant contact with my poor,
helpless employees.

Reality: My poor helpless employees never call me. Not even to say hi. They
didn¹t need me before the cell phone, why should they need me now? As a
business expense, the phone has been  a complete waste.

Cell phones are probably for very important people, or for people who need
to look important. I am clearly not important enough to need one, and using
the phone to look important only makes me look like a fool.

But please don¹t tell the IRS. I have to be able to deduct the remaining
four years on this expensive contract.

April 14, 2002
Last week, spring arrived all at once in northern Minnesota. I believe it
was last Thursday afternoon, April 11, that the weather finally fell into
line with what the weather wizards have been predicting for weeks.

Temperatures suddenly soared into the lower 60s. Within the next day, the
ice on the lakes darkened to a greenish blue. A few tender strands of grass
appeared on the south side of the house.

The mud in the driveway quickly began to firm up. Soon it will be possible
to walk all the way into the fridge with your work boots on without leaving
a trail of mud chunks on the white linoleum. Another important spring
milestone.

Earlier last week, I had hauled what I hoped would be the last load of wood.
That pile of ash was burning up fast--until Thursday¹s warm-up. That night,
I set the six remaining logs off to the side. They¹ll sit there until
October.

Friday morning I heard the chattery song of the red-winged blackbird for the
first time this season. That same afternoon, the first frogs clucked and
croaked down in the swamp.

Then there is that bird that climbs up to altitudes so high that you can
barely pick it out--and then goes into a dive. The bird¹s call gets louder
and faster as the it gains speed, tapering off as it pulls up.
Do-do-do-DO-DO-DO-do-doop is about the best description of the call I can
come up with on paper.

I don¹t what the bird looks like, and I have no idea what it is called, but
its distant call has been a bittersweet sign of the April warm-up for me
since childhood. I heard that bird for the first time this season last
Saturday at dusk.

Friday also brought the first motorcycle sightings since last November. I
spotted a big flock of Harley¹s just north of Fargo, the first of the
season. What a racket they make as they gather around the watering hole.
Honda¹s and Yamaha¹s don¹t tend to flock up like the Harley¹s do, but one or
two can sometimes be seen flitting around a couple of days after the
Harley¹s appear.

Yes, with these long-awaited signs of spring we no longer need to be jealous
of those blasted cousins in Ohio or Georgia who gloat over the phone about
their blooming Bradford pear, redbuds and dogwoods--while we sit trapped in
the utter drab of a Minnesota March.

Reports of temperatures in the 70s in southern Indiana in March can make a
Minnesotan bitter. Why must we righteous northerners suffer while the
morally degenerate people of southern climes bask in undeserved sunshine?

But after spring came last Thursday, we can say that it is our turn. The
southern climes have had their fun. As Arizona¹s temperatures climb into
triple digits and the humidity in other parts south nears body temperature,
we in northern Minnesota can relish another few weeks of perfect
working-in-the-woods weather.

We¹ll know the fun is over when we feel the tickle of that first tick, or
hear the whine of an incoming mosquito.

April 8, 2002
About once per year they call from the local nursing home to have me come in
and do some music. They keep calling me back, so it must be bearable.

They get the same old tunes every year. The residents don¹t seem to mind,
but I think the staff notices. I once slipped in a different song. After I
finished, somebody at the nurse¹s station piped up, ³You learned a new one!²
She sounded more amazed than excited.

I think I know why it is so difficult for people to visit a nursing home.
The place will make you think. Each visit to the nursing home runs around in
my head for a couple of days afterwards. Some of the thoughts are tough to
shake.

It is always a jolt to see people there whose health must have declined just
in the last months, people I know very well I saw gabbing at the coffee shop
or mowing their yards last summer.

There is the sadness of watching those whose minds have failed them in the
cruelest way: Not only have they lost their memory, but they are constantly
agitated and unhappy, wanting to go home, wanting to go to the store,
wanting to be somewhere else. There is no comforting them.
 
But, as some philosopher once wrote, where there is suffering there also is
joy. One comes with the other. A nursing home is a rich example of this
rule.

When Grandpa was in the home, he sat at the dinner table with three other
old Scandanavians. In their prime, these four probably would have greeted
each other with little more than a gruff hello. However, in their dotage,
Grandpa helped cut Clarence¹s pork chops and Oscar would guide old blind
Pete¹s hands over to his water glass. Kind of touching, I thought.

I¹ll never forget when one formerly prim and proper Lutheran Sunday school
teacher went off on a loud monologue about her fondness for whiskey. ³I used
to hide it in the back of the fridge,² she said, ³but now I don¹t care who
finds out!²

People with slight dementia sometimes have a better sense of humor than
people with all of their marbles. Like one dignified woman who tended to
wander off and eventually had to wear one of those beepers on her ankle. She
didn¹t mind. ³This,² she told me with as much pride and pomposity as she
could muster, ³is my medallion.²

For my part, I enjoy playing an old hymn like ³What a friend we have in
Jesus² at the home. If I play softly enough, I can hear a solid chorus
humming along. The old people know all of the good old melodies.

Once as I played a favorite hymn I caught the eyes of a former school
teacher whose stern demeanor used to frighten me. But now she smiled kindly
at me and sang along. She knew the words to all four verses, which didn¹t
really surprise me.

What did surprise me was when I tried to talk to her afterwards. I thanked
her for singing along, but she looked up at me blankly. It turns out she
could no longer speak. She seemed completely out of it, which made it all
the more wonderful that we had connected during the hymn.
 
Nursing homes can be depressing. They remind us of our mortality, and we
don¹t like that. Nobody wants to end up there. Yet, where else can one see
little miracles like these?

March 31, 2002
The reason we have an endless stream of interscholastic sports from
elementary age on up is that such competition supposedly  'builds character.'

Perhaps. But many parents and coaches seem far more interested in having a
winning record than in building character. Why else would they act like they
do? Why else would they yell at the referees, even at elementary school
contests?

Sure, referees make mistakes. Sometimes many. But they¹re paid peanuts if
anything at all. They do their best. More importantly, what a horrible
example it sets for children when adults act like whining crybabies.

I remember the last time I yelled at a referee. While home on break from
college, I attended a high school wrestling match. It wasn¹t going well for
the home team, and I just knew the referee was at fault. I yelled. I made up
nasty insults. People around me thought I was quite funny.

The whistle blew. The match stopped, and the crowd quieted down to hear the
latest ruling. As the referee approached the scorer¹s table, I let fly with
a long string of complaints.

The referee, who knew me from my high school glory days as student manager,
looked me right in the eye. He wasn¹t angry. In fact, it looked like he felt
sorry for me. He didn¹t say a word. But the look he gave me said, ³You¹re
better than that.²

That look shut me up that night, and for good. I felt like a fool.

Life isn¹t fair. It never will be. The sooner people of any age realize
that, the better. All we can do is do our best, all of the time, and accept
the results, however wrong. Acceptance of life¹s frequent unfairness is
called adulthood.

The perfect place to teach children this important aspect of character is on
the athletic floor. The only proper response to a bad break is to get up off
the floor and try harder. Former Twins manager Tom Kelly understood this,
and was harsh with any player who argued with an umpire.

Unfortunately, not everybody reaches adulthood. Some go through life
thinking the world owes them a fair shake. These are the people who whine
about their rights, file endless grievances, clog our courts with lawsuits
-- and yell at referees at high school sporting events.

Americans are known throughout the world for whininess and lawsuits. No
other country has so many lawyers per capita. A great Australian historian
once called American society a 'culture of complaint.'

It is time to stop this silliness where it starts: In our schools, where
children are supposed to be learning character. School boards and
administrators should take the lead.

High school coaches who cross the line from discussion to argument with
officials should be fired immediately. Who cares how many wins they have. If
they set a bad example for the kids, they¹re gone. Parents who yell at
officials should be kicked off the premises.

That¹ll never happen, of course. But at least the rest of the spectators
could turn around and stare at the crybabies. Maybe then the whiners will
catch on that they look like fools. Maybe they will, at long last, develop
some character.

March 24, 2002
What an inspiring story: An obscure bureaucrat named Peter Sausen has likely
saved the Minnesota Twins from extinction. Using a very sharp pencil, Sausen
concocted a financing plan for a new baseball stadium which all sides in the
debate have termed acceptable, even brilliant.

Sausen used a rare disparity in bond interest rates to devise a scheme which
is apparently legal, and doesn¹t rely upon any new public funds. Happiness
all around. With a new stadium, the Twins are safe.

Now some legislators want to name the proposed ballpark ³Sausen Field,²
although Sausen himself pointed out that his plan¹s success likely depends
upon selling the naming rights for the stadium to some enormous corporation
for $50 million.

So, we¹ll be stuck with Honeywell Field, or some such monstrosity, but we¹ll
have a ballpark, and we¹ll have baseball in Minnesota.

All along in this debate, I have agreed with my cranky fellow Minnesotans:
Let the greedy billionaire owners and their spoiled multi-millionaire
players go wherever they can find a populace stupid enough to finance their
excesses.

Polls have shown that Minnesotans want no taxpayer funds going for new
stadiums. Politicians have viewed a vote for a stadium bill to be the kiss
of death.

But deep down, I have the opposite view. I have always secretly wished that
the politicians, or somebody, would just get a stadium built when we are all
looking the other way. Hide the cost somewhere. Deceive us. But build the
park.

I have visited a couple of these grand new ballparks. Coors Field in Denver
is a real treat, with the Rocky Mountains as a backdrop over the center
field fence. Safeco Field in Seattle is charming, near the piers and docks.
Freight trains rumble regularly under the bleachers behind the right field
fence.

In Seattle, most taxpayers adamantly opposed building a ballpark with public
money. But after the Mariners won a big playoff series in 1996, proponents
hurriedly pushed through a bill to finance a new park.

Now, of course, all of Seattle is proud as punch of their new baseball
palace. Citizens on the street tout the ballpark¹s amenities and features
with pride.

The same would happen here. Once the new ballpark is built, all complaining
will cease. Fans will love the place. Citizens will point to our beautiful
ballpark as evidence of the superiority of our great state.

Public funding for ballparks is just crazy, of course. Why must we subsidize
the rich? It goes against every decent principle.

But think of the joy Kirby Puckett, Kent Hrbek, and Gary Gaetti brought us.
Not just baseball fans, but people who couldn¹t tell a single from a home
run loved watching those goofy characters play.

When the Twins win, the mood of the entire state picks up. The Twins give
people something to talk about besides the weather.

So, I am willing to hold my nose, look the other way, stick my head in the
sand, whatever--while the politicians and accountants scheme to get us a new
ballpark.

March 17, 2002
The spring equinox happens this week, when the axis of the earth¹s rotation
lines up exactly perpendicular to the sun.

On March 21, just as on September 21, the entire planet has exactly twelve
hours of day and twelve hours of night. Then for the next six months, we in
the northland will have more hours of sunshine than anybody south of us.

The ancients carefully observed the natural calendar. They had little else
to do for fun. They had no TV to keep them hypnotized, no city lights to dim
the stars at night, no other way to keep track of the seasons but by what
they saw in nature.

Even in our modern world, there are ways for the observant to keep in touch
with celestial rhythms.

In this flat part of the country, most roads align with the compass. At
equinox, the sun sets right at the end of the highway going west. Westbound
traffic should prepare to be blinded at sunset this week.

Of course, the sun rises right at the end of the east bound highways at
equinox, too, but that happens in the morning when sensible people like
myself are still asleep.

I once lived in a trailer house which was perfectly aligned with the
compass. On the evening of the equinox, and only on the equinox, a narrow
beam of sunshine traveled through the back window, down the hall, through
the living room, past the kitchen--and cast a dim, orange spot on the
otherwise dark wall of the dining room, 72 feet away.

In ancient times, people marked the equinox with a party for the neighbors.
They danced around the bonfire with rattles until sunrise, at which time
they ran back into their trailers to catch the beam of sunshine going down
the hall the opposite way. It was quite an event.

Nowadays, plants notice March 21 more keenly than people do. For some
reason, Morning Glory will bloom three times as much in climates where they
reach the two-leaf stage a week before equinox, when the days are still
shorter than the nights.

Morning Glory germinate in May up here, missing the deadline. University
researchers have found that you can trick the plants into thinking they
germinated before March 21 by covering them with a bushel basket for a few
hours per day during the two-leaf stage. The result? Triple the bloom come
summer.

Junebearing strawberries notice June 22, the first day of the year which is
shorter than the previous one. They stop forming blooms that very day. The
same researchers who figured out the morning glory problem used artificial
light to fool strawberries into thinking the days were getting longer all
summer. Sure enough, the plants bloomed and bore until frost.

Humans in the modern world are tuned to other calendars. The start of
baseball season is a big one for me. Others wait for the fishing opener.

But tuning into the celestial calendar every now and then might be a good
idea. What better way to remind ourselves of the utter inconsequentiality of
our daily worries?

March 10, 2002
If you ignore March, it will eventually go away. But March isn¹t easy to
ignore. It throws frequent tantrums just to remind us that we are in the
grip of the worst month of the year.

Storms, slush, cold--and funerals! March is a big month for funerals. In
fact, I think over half of the funerals I have attended in my life have been
in March. People make it through the dark winter months, but March is just
too much.

The most common cure for March madness, of course, is to follow the local
high school sports team. If tournaments were in any other month, they
wouldn¹t cause such hysteria. But tournaments happen in March for a reason:
To give thousands of desperate people a reason to live.

To spread the joy, the Minnesota High School League has divided up schools
into about a dozen classes, ranging from A to AAA to AAAAA, each with their
own champion. You have to use A¹s, because nobody wants to be class B, or a
C, or especially an F. Losing the Class F final would ruin kids¹ self-esteem
and create dozens of serial killers--thus all the A¹s.

The hysteria of tournaments so effectively combats March blues that every
town in Minnesota will soon demand to ³go to state.² Their demands will  be
granted by a special session of the Legislature. It will be a slam-dunk
proposal, as popular as those stupid tax refunds.

After all, is it fair to have a bunch of rosy-cheeked adolescents, most of
whom don¹t realize that going to state is a life-or-death matter, destroy
the vacation plans of the entire town by losing in double overtime in the
region finals?

Mom won¹t get to load up the credit card at the megamall unless Jeremy and
his mates pull off the big victory. Jeremy wants to win, sure, but his real
fear is of disappointing Mom. He remembers the pain of her calling him a
wimp after the big loss to A-F-M-J-P-R-W Comets last December.

Dad¹s even worse. He is still smarting from his senior year of high school
when his team finished with a 7-14 record. Of course, he missed 10 games due
to rules violations, but no mention is made of that. The kids aren¹t aware
that their athletic exploits are his only hope for redemption.

Take a look in the hotel lobbies down in St. Paul during tournaments, and
the obvious becomes even more obvious: High school sports are for the
parents.

Players walk around in a sullen daze, the weight of the town¹s pride on
their shoulders. They never look like they¹re having much fun. Adolescence
isn¹t much fun, anyway.

But the parents! Intoxicated by pride, adventure, shopping, and other
substances, they practically glow. St. Paul at tourney time is like summer
camp all over again, but without the rules.

Yes, a trip to the state tournament remains the single best way to make the
year¹s most miserable month bearable. Go team go. 


March 3, 2001
During the past few weeks I have had several occasions to traverse the vast
de-populated expanse of the Red River Valley, from top to bottom and side to
side. We who live here forget that the Valley is one of the world¹s unique
natural features.

A nearly perfectly flat lake bottom with rich, black soil is completely
unusual. In fact, the only place in the world similar to the Valley that I
can think of are the plains of Poland and the Ukraine.

They grow the same crops in the black soil of the Ukraine as we do in ours.
But their massive plains aren¹t table-top flat like the Red River Valley,
and there are more trees, villages, and roads in Eastern Europe than there
are here.

Although the cities of Fargo and Grand Forks have grown in recent years, I
suspect that the rural areas of the Red River Valley have less than one
tenth the population they did at their peak just before the war.

Josef Stalin killed or starved out 3 million Ukrainian farmers in order to
establish more efficient communal farms of thousands of acres. In the Red
River Valley, the same stark efficiency was attained bloodlessly through
market forces.

Despite the loss of most of its population, there is little visible
desolation in the Valley. The old buildings are generally torn down. The few
left standing add a rustic touch, and there aren¹t enough of them to make
the place look messy.

In fact, my impression is that the Valley looks streamlined and clean. I
can¹t imagine what the place was like in the 1940s when there were ten times
the farms, and when they farmed those big fields with B Allis-Chalmers and
John Deere putt-putts.

One thing missing in the Red River Valley--and I am probably the only one
who misses it--is a big cathedral. I¹ll never forget traveling on a train
through a wheat growing plain north of Cambridge, England. In the distance
loomed the massive Ely cathedral--taller than any water tower, larger than
any grain elevator, towering over a town of 900.

What a sight, and to think they built the thing in the 1400s. As I entered
the cathedral door I heard echoes of the choir practicing, and later the
huge pipe organ roared to life. High overhead, the streams of sunshine
played through the pillars and the stain glass windows.

We don¹t have cathedrals in the valley, not one. Just a few big grain
terminals, none of which have pipe organs or choirs.

Since that day in Ely, I have had the completely nutty dream of building a
cathedral in the Red River Valley. I¹d put it out west of Halstad, visible
from I-29, smack dab in the middle of a sugar beet field.

This project would cost $50 million or so to realize, I suppose. I haven¹t
talked to an architect. I know that prospects for public funding are poor,
and Ralph Engelstad is likely tapped out--but my Cathedral of the Prairie
gives me something to daydream about as I trundle along the valley¹s lonely
back roads. 

February 3, 2002
To alleviate the pain of leaving Arizona, I took a new route home. From
Flagstaff, I drove north on two-lane roads across the desolate reaches of
the great Colorado Plateau.

Flagstaff itself is a snowy resort and college town at 7,000 feet elevation.
On the city¹s north side is lonely Humphery¹s Peak. Trains rumble through
town all night. Lying in the hotel room bed, you hear each whistle twice:
First the toot from the train, then the echo off the mountain, clear as a
bell, in a different key.

As the sun rose on a perfectly clear morning following two days of snow, I
scooted around the base of Humphery¹s Peak and headed due north across the
wasteland. The mountain remained in my rearview mirror for an hour, until it
was just a white pimple on the plateau.

I skipped the Grand Canyon, saving twenty dollars. An impressive hole in the
ground, but what do you do once you¹ve looked over the edge? Unless you
bring a mule, all you can do is drive to another spot, find a place to park,
get out, and look over the edge again. A few minutes later you¹re in the
gift shop looking over souvenir spoons for Aunt Ethel.

I prefer scenery you can drive through, and I was astounded by the
relentlessly spectacular six hundred miles of back country between Flagstaff
and Denver.

Cliffs, mesas, pillars, arches, canyons. Layer after layer of rock eroded by
the eons into every formation imaginable. Red cliffs, orange cliffs, gently
rounded sandstone hills with pink and green layers. Every turn in the road
brought a new combination of color and formation--all of it, on this day,
frosted in fresh snow.

Monument Valley is an open space, almost like the Red River Valley. But in
the middle of the vast plain stands about a half a dozen vertical rock
formations, like tree stumps, each a thousand feet tall. It was eerie scene,
like a graveyard, but on such a large scale that I felt like I was on
Jupiter.

A few miles later a sign pointed to the Valley of the Gods. In the distance
I saw a forest of spectacular layered orange pillars on yet another flat
plain. I pulled over so I could gawk without rolling my pickup into a
canyon.

Photographers by the thousands attempt to capture the grandeur of this
astounding landscape. The resulting coffee table books are nice enough, but
none of them captures the dignity of the place, the haunted loneliness, the
enchantment.

There is something about enormous rocks that conjures up majestic,
dignified, serious thoughts. The formations confront you with geological
time. Not only did the layers have to build up, but then they wore down into
mountains, pillars and cliffs. This all happened well before I was born.

The previous day, I had driven through Phoenix. I traveled sixty miles of
freeway without seeing one inch of ground that wasn¹t either covered in
concrete or manicured by some landscape company. The skies were dark with
pollution. Traffic was thick. Most of that mess happened after I was born.

Those sixty miles in Phoenix exhausted me in every sense, but the six
hundred mile drive on two-lane across the Colorado Plateau invigorated me
competely. Those big old rocks and wide spaces forced me into a broader
perspective, and that is always a good thing.
January 27, 2002
The word Enron is climbing right up there with Monica Lewinsky and Gary
Condit on the list of names I could live without ever hearing again.

The press carries on with breathless indignance, as if white-collar crime is
a new concept. But corporate shenanigans have gone on forever. These
particular idiots were just stupid enough to let their greed spin out of
control.

The Enron people were a breed apart. They didn¹t just pay off the
politicians, but they bought up newspaper columnists, too. At up to $100,000
a crack. So as the company rotted from the core, Enron remained high on
journalists¹ top-ten lists of wonderful companies.

We¹re supposed to feel sorry for the employees who lost their retirement
stash. Bosh. They decided on their own to buy Enron stock. They didn¹t have
to put all their eggs in one basket. Many of them must have known what was
going on. Greed got to them, too.

Now Congress waltzes in with the grace of an elephant in high heels to fix
it all. They¹ll produce, direct and perform their usual circus of hearings.
Who can we blame? How can we write volume after volume of new regulations to
make people believe this won¹t happen again?

They¹ll find an acceptable scapegoat--preferably somebody who is dead,
broke, or both--pin it all on him, and hope the thing goes away.

The millions who have lost their shirts on this or that irresistible stock
know that Enron is not a rare exception. Business scams are a dime a dozen,
even locally. Remember the artichokes? Emu? Amway? In my garage sit
tens-of-thousands of worthless baseball cards that were going to make me
rich.

The Enron scandal is not a failure of regulation. It arises from a lack of
human decency, a commodity seldom in surplus in corporate corridors.

There are decent people in big business. Warren Buffett is one. Dave Thomas
of Wendy¹s was another. Herb Kelliher, the off-beat founder of Southwest
Airlines, is loved by employees, customers, shareholders--everybody but his
poor competitors.

You can tell the decent ones. They don¹t get a lot of press. They stay down
to earth. They do little more than offer a good product for a fair price,
over and over, year after year. Their companies grow slowly. Their stock
price never triples in one year.

The decent ones love business more than they love money. Their employees
respect them but do not fear them. They wouldn¹t take an unearned million if
it were handed them. They abide by the spirit of the law, rather than
seeking loopholes in the letter of the law. They pay what they owe in taxes
without complaint.

The decent ones get as much satisfaction out of providing good work for
their employees as they do out of making money for themselves.

And at the end of each day, and at the end of their careers, the decent ones
have a surplus of the only wealth that really matters: Integrity, and a good
night¹s sleep.

January 20, 2002
On the local news here one night a retired cardiologist suggested that, for
the good of their hearts, senior citizens should take a hike up the Finger
Rock trail in the Catalina mountains north of Tucson. He smirked at the end,
but I didn¹t catch why.

Finger Rock is a pillar-like formation near the top of the Catalina range.
It looked to me like a pretty tame climb. If senior citizens could do it, I
figured I should have no problem.

Just to be safe, I took a quart of water along, as well as two of those
yucky health bars, and a notebook for recording profound thoughts.

About one-half hour up the trail I stopped to rest, proud of how far I had
come. Ah, the wilderness! I heard some water gurgling and drifted off the
trail to find the stream.

Thirty feet in I found myself at the edge of somebody¹s yard. The gurgling
was the swimming pool cleaning itself. I wasn¹t even out of the suburbs yet.

Soon, however, the trail headed straight up. Switchbacks. Cliffs. Cactus.
Loose rocks. Dust. I saw very few hikers. I must be far beyond the senior
citizen zone, I thought.

Every couple of hundred feet I climbed, the plant life changed. The giant
saguaro disappeared, and gnarled junipers took their place.

In a dry stream bed stood a huge cottonwood, a rarity in Arizona. It was
full of yellow leaves--in January, no less. I sat on a rock, swigged some
water, choked down a health bar, and pulled out my notebook.

³The golden leaves of the cottonwood remind me of fall in Minnesota,² I
wrote. Also: ³The more water I drink, the lighter my pack gets.² Profound
thoughts indeed. I packed up and trudged onward.

Things got hairy in a hurry. I don¹t mind heights when I am walking on a
level trail. But when the trail itself slopes off sideways towards the abyss
and there are no tree roots to grab, no ledges to catch, nothing but
air--then I get nervous.

I ended up in a crab position, sliding towards nothingness. It was like
sliding down a roof. The crumbling rock ate at my palms like shingles would.
I eventually stopped sliding, but then froze in place for fear I would start
sliding again.

Now I knew why the cagey old doctor had a smirk on his face. He and
everybody else in Tucson knew it was a joke when he suggested Finger Rock
Trail for heart patients.

I clung to the rock, not knowing where to turn. Eventually I heard voices.
Help had arrived!

An fit and tan elderly couple popped around the corner. They were in their
eighties, well preserved, wrapped in Spandex. I tried to act cool and
relaxed, and said hi.

They said hi, but didn¹t stop. They politely stepped around me and went on
past, almost at a jog, loudly discussing condo association politics.

The mountain goat seniors inspired me to get on the move again, but in the
opposite direction. I headed back down the mountain, my heart thumping
faster than is safe or healthy.

January 6, 2002
Greetings from Tucson, Arizona, a city with a scruffy charm that never
disappoints. This is my fourth trip here, and I am sure there will be many
more.

Why do I like Tucson so much?

First, the sunshine. It never ends. Day after day of perfect weather. Every
morning is as pristine as a clear May morning in Minnesota. At night the air
is crisp, in the forties, and flavored with wisps of mesquite smoke.

The forecast for Tucson? Sunny and seventy tomorrow, sunny and sixty-five
the next day, sunny and sixty-eight the next, the same thing the day after
that--good night everyone, stay tuned for sports.

The mountains. Although the city itself is on a plain, Tucson is surrounded
by mountains and cliffs. From all around the perimeter of the city, hiking
trails lead deep into rocky canyons and  into forests of mighty 200-year old
saguaro cactus.

The elevation. Tucson is at 3,000 feet. At such elevations, it is my
contention that the sky turns deeper blue, the cliffs glow deeper red, the
tangerines on the trees become a brighter orange, and the distant mountains
fade to a richer purple at sunset.

The food. Down here they have fresh Mexican food, not the microwaved stuff
with rubber cheese melted on top that you get back home.

My favorite Mexican grill, La Salsa, has 9 different salsas, each made fresh
every morning. Mango, tomatillo, avocado, cilantro, and carrot salsas--in
addition to the typical tomato and onion ones. I am going to eat my way
through their menu before I leave.

Funky people. There are real hobos here, riding around on their rattletrap
bikes, their skin tanned into leather. I suppose they are the riff raff we
talk about up north, the people the cold keeps out. But I kind of like them.

Tucson draws interesting people of all sorts, from pencil-necked,
mush-minded liberal environmentalists to right-wing, red-necked, AK-47
toting bigots; from retired New York mobsters to retired Fergus Falls
farmers.

Oh, there are normal suburban type people, those who chase around in their
new cars thinking they¹ll eventually find happiness on sale at the mall for
25% off.  But in Tucson, suburbanites seem like a minority.

And there are simply no neighborhoods in Tucson that look anything like a
suburb. Even in wealthy neighborhoods the homes are stucco, low in profile,
and often obscured by masses of cactus. Nothing like Edina.

There is pollution. There is crime. There are bad neighborhoods. There is
litter, and there is a lot of traffic. Developers gulp up the desert at a
frightening pace.

But none of that stuff seems to matter. In fact, every time I visit Tucson,
it isn¹t long before I get sad knowing I will eventually have to leave.
December 30, 2001
Greetings from Amarillo, Texas. With the weather forecast looking foul at
home, and with Christmas obligations out of the way, I jumped in my pickup
and headed south in search of sunshine and warmth.

Instead, I ran into snow and ice on the Texas panhandle. Not so bad, but
these people aren¹t used to winter driving. They race along like nothing¹s
wrong--until the first pileup. Then they slow to a crawl--until they forget
that first pile-up and speed up into the next pileup.

Four pile ups today on I-40, one bad enough so I had to back up to the most
recent exit to get past the mess.

Exhausted of it all, I pulled into Amarillo. A banner outside the Super 8
announced a special deal, a double room for $35.99. Good deal, I thought, a
single room couldn¹t be any more than that.

No such luck. The clerk, clearly not one of Amarillo¹s finest, said a single
room would be $42.99. I asked about the special. Did I have to find another
person to get the reduced rate?

³Those are for double smoking rooms out back. Nobody wants those.² he said,
annoyed that I expected the promotional banner to bear any relation to
reality.

Annoyed enough, apparently, to put me in room 123. Room 123 has two doors,
he explained. If the inside one doesn¹t work, try the outside one, it should
work. The room should be clean, he added.

The door worked, and the room had been cleaned, but once inside, I saw that
the room had no window. Stupid me, I had never thought to ask for a room
with a window.

I wasn¹t about to spend the rest of this miserable day in a cave. I went
back to the front desk and asked Mr. Friendly for a room with a window. He
tossed me the key for room 131 without saying a word.

Room 131 was fine. I settled in and settled down for a nap. But just as I
started to drift off, I heard a key in the keyhole. I jumped up, ran to the
door, opened it to find a very surprised older couple wondering what I was
doing in the room they had rented.

Apparently there was some demand for a room with a window. Mr. Friendly had
also checked the older couple into room 131. I told them I regretted that I
didn¹t have an extra bed and sent them back to the front desk.

To relax, I decided to drive to the Barnes & Noble and spend the evening
reading. It was icy. I got lost twice on the way. Ambulances and fire trucks
roared to and fro, but nothing was going to stop me from getting to Barnes &
Noble.

I stopped for directions until I finally found the place. The bookstore sign
was sight for sore eyes, almost as welcome as the lights of home.

But I had forgotten. It was snowing, and this is Texas. The Barnes & Noble,
like everything else, had closed due to the weather.

December 23, 2001  MISSING

December 16, 2001
We would be so much better off if we could wipe away the baloney that has
arisen around this whole Christmas thing and start from scratch. Too much of
the hoopla has become more obligation than fun.

Yet, we go through the motions year after year, as if somebody is forcing us
to drag the plastic tree down from the attic for the twenty-third year in a
row.

Christmas parties often fill people with dread. Jam a bunch of people who
don¹t really care for each other into one room. Make up some rules to ensure
that the gift giving­which nobody wants to do anyway­is forced and
regulated.

Call it a Christmas party, and the members of this or that half-dead
community organization will show up year after year, paste on fake smiles,
and pretend to have a good time.

People invent gimmicks by the dozen to make sure that gift giving doesn¹t
get out of hand. Nothing over five dollars. We¹ll draw names. Only handmade
items this year. Make out your list ahead of time. Register at Target.

None of those games make Christmas any fun.

Somewhere in the writings of Laura Ingalls Wilder she tells about the best
Christmas she ever had. It was, naturally, when she was a young girl. At
that time the Ingalls family lived in a small cabin on the prairie, far from
anything at all. They were poor.

But on Christmas Eve, an uncle unexpectedly appeared out of a snowstorm
carrying a package filled with gifts for the children. The gifts were
simple. Some rock candy, a little maple sugar, and, most exotic of all for
the Ingalls children, oranges.

Imagine if some generous uncle tried the same trick today.

First, Uncle would watch the weather channel and find out that there was a
travel advisory. No sense traveling in a blizzard.

If he did venture out, Uncle would have his cell phone at the ready and
would call ahead to the Ingalls cabin on the way through town to see if they
needed milk. End of surprise.

Ma Ingalls would have just been to the grocery store, where she picked up
not only milk, but oranges, kiwifruit, apples and bananas in abundance.

But as Ma dragged the bags in from the minivan, Laura and the girls would
look up from their video games and be, like, so bummed. More healthy stuff.
Yuck.

Laura would have already emailed Uncle for months with her Christmas
demands. Uncle would be at his wits end trying to figure out which DVD he
should get Laura. Kids are bored by kid movies, but anything cool is usually
filled with skin and blood. Ma and Pa might not like that.

If we could start from scratch and lower Christmas expectations to zero,
things would be a lot easier. Can you imagine how much fun it would be to
have a houseful of kids jump up and down because you brought them a bag of
oranges?

December 9, 2001  Missing

December 2, 2001
There is something very good about wood heat. I don¹t care what the
thermostat reads, heat from a wood stove feels warmer than does heat from
any other source.

When I purchased my house, it took me a week to discover that I had a wood
stove in the basement. It was a little J.C. Penney wood burner. It looked
too small to heat the whole house, but once I started using it, the furnace
rarely ran.

I¹ll never forget how thrilled I was when my father decided to put a cast
iron Ashley stove in the house at the home place. That stove went in during
the mid seventies, when the first energy crisis caused many people to go
back to the fuel we have right on our farms.

I found the wood stove exciting and romantic. I read many history books as a
child. The thought that we would be burning wood just as my historical
heroes had done intrigued me.

Until Dad had me help haul wood. What a drag. Up the stairs, down the
stairs, out into the cold, then into the heat, alternately sweating and
freezing. Once you finished hauling, you had to clean the sawdust, bark, and
melting snow off the carpet.

After I left home, and not a minute before, my parents put in a super duper
wood stove fireplace. Behind it was an enclosed room called ³the wood room.²
It had a removable window through which wood could be merely tossed in.

So, baby brother had it easy, as all baby brothers do. He just had to stack
the wood and sweep the cement floor. No trips in and out of the cold, no
steps, no sawdust in the carpet.

Child labor considerations aside, not only does wood heat feel better, but
heating with wood has many psychological and aesthetic benefits.

Nothing is more cozy than sitting by the fire. A wood fire, especially if it
is visible, warms the soul. An occasional little waft of wood smoke makes
the house smell good and spicy.

Then there is the physical work involved, work I used to despise. Now,
however, hauling wood gives me needed exercise. If I have the winter blahs,
hauling wood gives me a sense of accomplishment, and gets the blood pumping
as well.

I leave the cutting and splitting of the wood to Dad. He cuts twice as much
wood as he can use, so I sneak off with the rest. I am very sure it would be
inhumane of me to deprive Dad of the thrill he gets out of sawing and
splitting wood.

I also know that my father enjoys the ritual of tending the stove,
especially when it is thirty below zero. As a child, the sound of Dad
clanking around with the stove at 4:30 am on a cold winter morning reassured
me.

Although I don¹t get up at 4:30 a.m., tending my home fire makes me feel in
control of an important part of my life. In a world where so much is out of
our hands, heating one¹s own home with wood is downright therapeutic.

November 18, 2001
Sometimes just before Thanksgiving dinner somebody will suggest that
everybody share one thing that they are thankful for. This suggestion
usually arises after everybody has been seated, when the mashed potatoes,
dressing, and gravy are already steaming on the table.

Everybody is starved. Further delay will just cause the corn to get cold and
the gravy to develop a layer of scum. But nobody dares argue with the notion
that a little suffering is necessary, probably to ease our guilt for eating
such a sumptuous feast. We¹re commemorating the Puritans, after all!

The men look down at their laps, dreading their turn, hoping this is quick
and easy and that nobody gives a sermon. The worst case scenario? Tears.
Emotion. Drama. Please, let¹s just say the table grace and eat.

Little Jeremy announces that he is thankful that the Vikings won. Oh for
cute! The humor breaks the tension, and brings much more laughter than such
a remark would normally merit.

The tension resumes when Cousin Polly launches off on what she clearly
intends to be a complete list of the good things in her life. There are only
fourteen items. Sad for her, but fortunate for the rest of us.

The steam is by now barely visible over the mashed potatoes. The surface of
the gravy has become dull and lardy. The lettuce is going limp.

Uncle Joe says he is thankful for his 8-point buck. That brings laughter,
until it becomes obvious that he was completely serious, on the verge of
tears. Somebody quickly says, ³Well, that¹s nothing to sneeze at!² and uncle
Joe looks down at his lap.

Great Aunt Nora, over for the day from Sunny View, closes her eyes and
announces, ³I am just tankful for my helt.² Her helt has been iffy for the
past ten years, but this past summer was good, and everybody agrees that
being helty is nothing to sneeze at, either.

Some smart aleck says he is thankful that we aren¹t having lutefisk, another
says something about the roads being good, and another comments about the
high hopes for this year¹s basketball team. Uncle Joe snitches a pickle, a
clear indication that things are spinning out of control.

To restore order, Aunt Molly announces the table grace, which is sung in
good harmony, and then the clinking of glasses and the clanging of dishes
begins.

The mashed potatoes pour out steam again as soon as the outer crust is
broken by the spoon. The gravy underneath the layer of lard is runny and
warm. The corn is cold, but if you mix it with the potatoes as you are
supposed to, it doesn¹t make a bit of difference.

After the first couple of bites, the trauma of the long wait fades. The food
tastes so good and goes down so easy--it makes one feel truly tankful.

PREVIOUS SCRIBING
When school cranks up in September, I sometimes feel a couple of pangs of
nostalgia. For more than twenty autumns I either clambered onto the school
bus or dragged my stuff back to the dorm.

It has been years since I felt the adrenaline of the first day of class. New
bus route. New classmates. New teachers. Old classmates with new looks. New
books. Very exciting times.

Maybe too exciting. Memories from school years are seared on my brain. Even
as my twenty-year class reunion approaches, I still have dreams that I miss
the school bus, flunk algebra tests, forget to go to class for weeks on end,
or find myself on the football field with an entire town¹s happiness on my
shoulders and no clue where to turn.

I never played football, so I don¹t know where that nightmare comes from.
But I did act in  several school plays.

Every few nights I end up back on stage with a very small role. It is the
evening of the first performance. I don¹t know my lines and I have lost my
copy of the script. I try to wing it. My improvisation ruins the plot. The
crowd leaves in disgust. The wrath of the play director awaits me off stage.

Unlearned lines are a small embarrassment compared to finding one¹s self
back in seventh grade wrapped in a skimpy afghan. All night I question: Do
you think anybody will notice that I forgot to get dressed? You try to act
as if nothing¹s wrong and so does everybody else, but you know what they¹re
thinking.

What a relief to wake up in the morning and realize that I never have to go
to school again. Never again will I have to take a test, learn lines, try to
be athletic, or search my locker in vain for clothing. Never again will I
miss a school bus, fall off the merry-go-round, or get picked last for
dodgeball.

By comparison, the daytime rigors of adulthood are minor. Death, taxes,
bankruptcy, traffic tickets, blizzards, serious illness, tragedy, loss of
hair--I can handle all those things, just don¹t make me face my English
teacher after I¹ve skipped her class for the last two months.

Some adults tell kids to enjoy their school years. ³These are the best times
of your life!² they say.

Really. Have these people forgotten the Darwinian realities of elementary
school, the merciless teasing, the cliques, the social anxiety, the fear of
not wearing the right clothes, the pressure to be good at sports you hate?
Don¹t these people have dreams at night which remind them of how  terrifying
school really was?

No, in September I wake up every morning thankful that I can¹t miss the bus
any more because I have my own in the garage. I can¹t flunk because I am not
in any classes. And I can¹t forget my lines because I am not in the play.
The nightmare is over.

PREVIOUS SCRIBING
We await the first frost. It might come at any time, and it might be both
good and bad.

On one hand, an early frost kills off a good part of the garden and can
damage some farm crops. On the other hand, an early frost kills off the
mosquitoes and brings relief to those who suffer hay fever.

Let¹s hope humans never gain control over the weather. Can you imagine the
fights if something as simple as the date of the first frost had to be
determined by the legislature, or by the county commissioners?

The big money would push for a late frost. Cargill and ADM would lobby for
late October to keep commodity prices low. Drug companies would want the hay
fever season extended so they could sell more pills. Chemical companies
would want to keep the mosquitoes buzzing as long as possible so they could
sell more spray.

On the other side, the big gas companies would object to holding the frost
off for too long. Prices might sink and jobs might be lost. Arctic Cat and
Polaris would lobby hard for an early snow, as would the powerful
ice-fisherman¹s lobby, formed to make sure the legislature keeps the ice on
area lakes a foot thick five months per year.

Farmers would push for an early frost on everybody¹s corn but their own.
Their demands would thus cancel each other out and be completely ignored, as
usual.

Environmentalists would present the bizarre argument that nature should be
allowed to take its course. Such radical whiners would be told in no
uncertain terms that this is 2001, please get your beads and smelly little
hippie children out of our office or we¹re calling the cops.

To solve the frost date dilemma, lawyers from the early-frost companies
would meet behind closed doors in a money-filled room with lawyers from the
late-frost companies.

The compromise, pleasing to all parties with pull, would push the frost date
quite late. Mosquitoes would require spray into late October. Bins would
overflow with cheap corn. Allergy sufferers would pop pills right into flu
season.

To make up for the revenues lost to early-frosters such as gas companies by
the postponement of cold weather, the late frost, when it finally arrived,
would immediately be followed by a good stiff blizzard and a month of forty
below zero. Revenues would flow. Energy prices would soar.

The first frost agreement would disappear deep into the back pages of a
popular tax rebate bill. The only debate would be: How much cash will it
take to purchase the voters¹ silence on this issue and all others--three
hundred dollars per person? A thousand?

No, let¹s be careful what we wish for. The ability to control the weather
would just give humans more to fight over, more to decide in court, more
decisions to be left in the hands of those with enough backing to twist
things to their advantage.

PREVIOUS SCRIBING
For years I have been awaiting the third volume of William Manchester¹s
biography of Winston Churchill. Manchester¹s first two volumes were
masterful, but the third volume was to encompass World War II, when
Churchill truly shone.

Manchester¹s writing is informative, but also good and gossipy. He puts in
all the juicy details. For instance, he devotes a whole chapter in his
second volume to Churchill¹s odd habits.

Churchill started drinking when he awoke, at about noon, and didn¹t stop
until he went to bed at four a.m. He wrote 56 books in his lifetime, penning
nearly all of his dazzling prose between eleven p.m. and four a.m. During
those hours, he generally switched from gin to champagne.

>From age sixteen on, Churchill¹s valet dressed him every morning. The same
servant also toweled him off after his bath. He knew Churchill was done
bathing when he heard the honorable gentleman turn a somersault in the
bathtub, blowing bubbles as his head went under the water.

If you want more great gossip, find Manchester¹s biography in a bookstore
and read the first chapter of the second volume. That chapter contains some
of the finest historical writing I have ever run across.

Needless to say, I have been looking forward to reading Manchester¹s
interpretation of Churchill¹s performance as British prime minister during
the war. Churchill wrote his side of the story, over 3,000 pages worth of
wonderful reading, but you have to take it with a grain of salt.

Well, I found out last week why Manchester has never completed the final
volume of Churchill¹s biography. He had a stroke, after which he fully
recovered his physical powers. But when Manchester tried to write again, he
could not. The sentences did not come.

At age seventy-nine, after years of hoping his abilities would return,
William Manchester, our greatest living historian, has been forced to give
up on his most ambitious project. His biographies of H. L. Mencken, Gen.
Douglas MacArthur and John F. Kennedy remain classics, but the Churchill
biography was to have been his crowning achievement.

Manchester fought under MacArthur in the Pacific during World War II.
However, the first biography he wrote upon his return from the war was of
the great American writer and critic, H. L. Mencken. Mencken was
Manchester¹s hero, and is one of my heroes as well.

Now the rest of the story: Soon after Manchester started his research,
Mencken had a stroke which took away his ability to read and write. Young
Manchester visited Mencken frequently. His purpose was to ask questions
about Mencken¹s life. Mencken could still talk.

But soon young Manchester realized that Mencken longed more than anything
for somebody to read to him. Manchester read aloud to Mencken for hundreds
of hours over the space of several years, until the old curmudgeon finally
died.

Now, through a sad twist of fate, Manchester finds himself in the same sorry
state as Mencken in his last years.

Let¹s hope some young student is reading books aloud to old William
Manchester. Sometimes its only right and good that what goes around comes
around.

PREVIOUS SCRIBING
Since that October snowstorm, when it looked like we were condemned to an
early winter, the northland has been graced by the rarest of weather boons,
a true Indian summer.

The days are almost as short as they are going to get--yet, because the
grass is still a rich green, it is almost bearable to have the sun set at
five o¹clock. When one can run around outside, one doesn¹t notice the short
days.

A reprieve. A respite. A comeback. When the billows of white powder roared
by the window three weeks ago, one would have thought autumn was over. But
here we are, back in the fields, in our shirt sleeves with a second wind,
milking a few more drops out of the season.

We know winter will come eventually. It always does. But there is something
especially nostalgic and stirring about the unexpected good fortune of an
Indian summer.

In my years watching baseball, nothing captured my imagination more than the
old ballplayer, nearly retired, in the sunset of his career, who put it all
together for one last burst of glory.

I remember when the great Tony Oliva, late in his career, with his knees
reduced to jello, hit two home runs in one game. I was too young to remember
Oliva in his glory days, but I could tell from the croak in broadcaster Herb
Carneal¹s voice that night that seeing the decrepit Oliva hit two long ones
brought back memories of something grand.

Baseball historians would point to creaky old Grover Cleveland Alexander,
long past his prime, soon to die a dissolute death, who, despite his
questionable health and state of mind, stumbled to the mound in the ninth
inning of the seventh game of the 1926 World Series to strike out the mighty
Yankees and preserve a championship for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Ted Williams hit a home run in his last at bat. Babe Ruth hit three home
runs in one of his last games. The mighty Nolan Ryan threw a no-hitter at
age forty-six.

Winston Churchill was sixty-nine before he first became prime minister, the
same age Ronald Reagan was when he was inaugurated president. Both had long
before been written off as too old. Both were seen as dangerous. Reagan was
viewed as an impulsive simpleton, and Churchill as a semi-crazy schemer.
Both had suffered years of defeat.

But both Reagan and Churchill were underestimated and misunderstood by those
who act intelligent for a living. Whatever one might think of their
politics, the persistence and resilience of Churchill and Reagan, as well as
their eventual triumph over their critics during the Indian summer of their
lives, makes for a stirring story.

We know an Indian summer can¹t last. That is why it is so precious, and so
appreciated. Winter will come, and soon. But the sight of a sunset over rich
green grass in Minnesota in mid-November is as bittersweet and nostalgic to
me as an unexpected cluster of home runs late in the season by an aging but
beloved slugger.

If you're interested in Eric's books, here's the Publishing Company  (ordering info coming)
Country Scribe Publishing
4177 County Highway 1
Fertile, MN 56540
Contact Eric via Email  ericberg@gvtel.com

Eric's second book, which is entitled STILL ON THE FARM, arrived from the
printer Nov. 29, 2001.

The book is a 190 pg paper back. It turned out very nicely, I think. It
contains 86 columns from over the past three years. It will be priced at
$12.95 in bookstores. If you order it direct from the publisher, the
price will be $12.95 (shipping included) for one book, or $11.00 per book
for as many books as you want if you purchase two or more. The $11.00 price
includes shipping as well, as long as all of the books are mailed to one
location. MN residents have to add .70 sales tax per book.
 
If you wish to have the books signed, or inscribed with any particular
greeting, Eric would be happy to oblige.  
 

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