Thomas D. Isern's Blog: Willow Creek: A Writing Journal

We've been hard-pressed to keep current with obligations, literary and otherwise, the past few weeks. Here we are again up late, or early, depending on your point of view, not because we can really catch up, but because we feel like we need to try. I've put a lot of time in with students this week, and only a little time into presentable prose. This is all right for now, although I know now that I need to keep the ideas and prose flowing, or I will be unable to rest content. I'll tell you how I know that.

I don't put a whole lot of stock in dreams, but now and then I have one I remember. For instance, late last fall I had a vivid and somewhat depressing dream. Our old retriever, Arnold the History Dog, had passed away in November. Maybe six weeks later came this dream.

It begins with me climbing out of my truck in a place that is familiar; it is a landscape in Bowman County, North Dakota. I start across a field, hunting pheasants, and then I stop, because I realize I am not carrying a shotgun. So I go back to the truck, load my shotgun, and set out again. After a little while I stop once more, because I realize I have no dog. That's where the dream ends.

I don't think this dream requires any fancy analysis. I do miss this particular dog we lost in November, but beyond that, I miss the rhythm and roles that go with having a big old hunting dog, the way he animates an outdoor life and fills a peculiar niche at home, too. So although I'm not quite ready yet, I do know I will need another big lug of a retriever in my life.

I tell this first dream just to illustrate the point that when I remember a dream, it is one I think has evident meaning.

So a few nights ago I had another one. Preceding this I had been presenting papers and making speeches at the Western Social Science Association conference in Denver, after which ZZ and I had flown to Oklahoma to address the state historical society. So speech writing and speech delivery had been much on my mind. Anyway, in this dream I am, surprise, giving a speech. I am speaking from a prepared text, one over which I have labored, but as I deliver it, I am editing on the fly. I am thinking, I could say that better, or, here's an idea I left out, and I make the changes, and keep right on reading, as if it were seamless. There is an uneasiness in the process, because I feel like I haven't got things quite as I want them, but at the same time, there is an underlying confidence--here I am delivering the goods, and I can make the adjustments on demand and keep right on rolling.

Once again, I take to heart the evident message in the dream. I feel an underlying confidence in what I have to say and in my ability to say it. As I sometimes remark to students, the second million words come easier than the first. Just give me a little time to think, and the prose flows. But there is a lot of unfinished business to be dealt with--learning new things every day, things I feel the need to tell, plus words backed up from forty years a professional historian, not to mention all the miles of travel and days of living. I need writing in my life the same way I need a retrieving dog. Because otherwise, there is a hole to fill. This sort of writing is a work in progress, always will be.

Now I imagine I hear the sound of running water. That's because the creek is finally running. Tonight is the first night since last November when the temperature will remain above freezing overnight. There will be big changes in the land by weekend. For which, let us be truly thankful.

Friday afternoon I departed for two days of travel, conducting forums on the Dakota War in Ellendale and Devils Lake. These went well, but I was worried the whole time about unfinished work at home. When we set out on Friday, I was only half finished with my presidential address for delivery to the Western Social Science Association in Denver this week.

The address must have been percolating in my mind while traveling, in fact I know it was, because on return home this afternoon I sat down and wrote right through to the end. The title of it is "Agency, Complexity, Memory: A Scholarship for Western Places." I know that sounds a little academic-wonky, and I suppose it is, but this is an address for an academic association, after all.

Anyway, the text is punctuated with snatches of popular song selected to illustrate points, as follow.

Agency: George Strait, "Amarillo by Morning"

Complexity: Stan Rogers, "Northwest Passage"

Memory: Chuck Suchy, "Saturday Night at the Hall"

Conclusion: Neil Young, "Heart of Gold"

Just what lyrics were selected, and how they illustrate the concepts I'm talking about, I'll leave to your imagination.

I was feeling pretty good about flying out of here tomorrow, with the weather forecast for another cold front. Until I checked the forecast for Denver, which is blizzard-like, the high temperature falling 40 degrees between Monday and Tuesday. Here we go.

Up at 4 this morning, stuff on my mind, so I started pouring it into the keyboard. 90 minutes and 3 cups of coffee later, I have 1000 words, and they're not bad. Two scripts I will record for Prairie Public radio, probably tomorrow.

There is serious writing to be done this week, starting with a paper that Suzzanne & I are co-authoring on our New Zealand research, for presentation to the Western Social Science Association next week. ZZ will have to write most of it, because I also have to generate my presidential address, for which at this point I have only an outline.

This week is going to require quite a bit of coffee. Fortunately, weather conditions do not tempt me to go outside and play. The forecast this week is dirty snow, snowy dirt, ice, slush, fog, snow, and drizzle. Excellent.

Today's main literary product is the foreword for a book on German-Russian foodways. Herein I play the historian, describing the migrations of the Germans from Russia, but also offer some direct comments on the historical origins of German-Russian foodways. Here, for instance, I characterize German-Russian food as farm food.

Through their intercontinental migrations, the German-Russians remained people of the land. It was land that beckoned them first to the Black Sea and later to the Dakota Territory. “Kein Schöner Land” (“The Most Beautiful Land”), one of their old folksongs says, and another declares, “Wie Schön ist das Landliches Leben” (“It’s Great to Live Out in the Country”). Anthropologists tell us that of all the agricultural pioneers of the American West, it was the Germans who most wanted to farm and stay on the land. Whereas other settlers might regard land more as a commodity, Germans considered it a patrimony, a legacy that would hold family and community together, sustaining them in physical and spiritual ways. This means two things as to the foodways of the Germans from Russia.

First, German-Russians had access to the nutritional abundance of the farmlands they had claimed as homesteads. They practiced diversified agriculture comprising field crops, house gardens, and livestock. In common with other settlers they sometimes suffered hard times—drought and locusts and all the other plagues out of the Old Testament—but over the long haul, they provided for themselves. They welcomed fresh produce when it came available, but they also knew how to preserve meats and vegetables so as to eat fairly well year-round.

Second, when it came to putting food on the table, German-Russian cooks served up plenty of calories. They were working people who did hard physical labor every day except the Sabbath, and so they needed plenty of carbohydrates. Often they worked in the cold for extended times, and so they craved fats. The German-Russian penchant for dough dishes and fatty foods—deep fried dough, for instance, is a favorite food—so often explained as a matter of frugality, is in fact more a product of considered nutritional need. People of sedentary habits might not thrive on such a diet, but German-Russian farmers did.

So, I thought, how does this go down for modern readers? Will they shy away from such fare, or will they embrace it and adapt it to their own circumstances? Here is my word to such readers.

In the 21st Century, we may make adjustments in traditional recipes and preparations to accommodate 21st-Century habits—or perhaps we should emulate our forebears by exerting ourselves more regularly! At any rate, there is nothing wrong with adapting traditional foodways to modern times. It is the nature of folkways that customs undergo adaptation and variation.

In fact, outright experimentation is in order. Each of us lives, eats, and cooks within some tradition, but our foodways need not be dictated by practices set down by some authority. A body of culinary tradition, such as that of the Germans from Russia, constitutes both a base of comfort and a platform for innovation. Cooks of the future, it is to be hoped, will find new ways to deploy knoephle and new things to stuff into their blachinda. Let this book be to them a joy and a resource.

This writing exercise has given me an appetite. Besides that, it looks like we're in for another snowstorm tonight. Are we prepared? No worries. We have a hundred pounds of bison meat in the freezer, and so much sausage and lamb and pork I've lost track of the inventory. Let it snow. Don't everybody come over to our house, we got work to do.

Much of yesterday was spent crafting an essay on the Germans from Russia—an introductory piece for a book of essays. This was a good exercise, compelling me to set straight my own basic knowledge of German-Russian history, then spike it with details drawn from experience with the landscape of German-Russian Country. I think I am done with this piece now, but I have a tough editor. I'll share a few paragraphs of it.

For one thing, it strikes me that no one yet has quite defined the environmental encounter that took place when the Black Sea Germans, coming from a Mediterranean climate, landed on the Missouri Coteau. We speak to the German-Russians arriving in the plains environment, but the encounter was more specific than that: the new home was that particular part of the northern plains known as the Missouri Coteau.

Their new homeland lay astride the Missouri Coteau, a land of rolling hills, grassy pastures, shining sloughs, and good, but not easy, farmland. The German-Russians integrated livestock into their farming operations, thus utilizing the resources offered by the land, and were more self-sufficient in their operations than most other settlers. They built homes of batsa brick, their own clay formed and dried into blocks, laid up in walls, and plastered with manure. They had big families and taught their children the virtues of hard work. When other work was not pressing, there always were rocks to pick—the everlasting residue of glacial till that had to be cleared by hand from fields and dragged onto piles. In time, innovative machine men Harley Brandner and James Bettenhausen would invent and manufacture the Wishek Disc, an implement that flexes to ride over rocks in the field.

This environmental encounter, it seems to me, should be the subject of more serious investigation.

An essay like this has to include foodways, so here is my summary paragraph on that count.

Visitors also have the opportunity to enjoy traditional German-Russian cuisine, which features, more than anything else, dough in various manifestations! Knoephle (spelling varies), ribbele, strudels, noodles, and dumplings abound. The German-Russian dessert known as kuchen, a particular favorite across the region, features a custard-like filling, often including fruit or cottage cheese, on a thin yeast dough. Fleischküchle, meat-filled fried pies, may be found for sale alongside hamburgers at a drive-in. Watermelon pickles made not from the rind, but from the pink flesh of the melon, confound the uninitiated. Arguments burst out spontaneously over the relative virtues of the wascht (sausage), head cheese, bologna, or summer sausage dispensed by this local meat locker versus that one. Purists gather annually in their garages to mix pork with venison to produce their own wascht the way they remember the old folks doing it. While doing so they may sample the traditional schnapps of the German-Russians, known colloquially as redeye, flavored with caramel and anise. German-Russians still tend their bashtan and, in the fashion illustrated by Mrs. Bettenhausen, preserve their produce, wholesomeness and thrift being complementary virtues.

Finally, I knew I had to deal with the emergence of a German-Russian public identity, which took place, it seems to me, in the 1970s. Overcoming their resentment of disparagements and slights at the hands of Norwegians and Anglo-Americans, the Germans from Russia became self-conscious in a positive way.

There was a time, beginning with the settlement era and continuing through the two world wars of the twentieth century, when German-Russian identity was an ambivalent thing. In her memoir, Along the Trails of Yesterday, Nina Farley Wishek (not herself a German-Russian), while praising the industry of the Germans from Russia, nevertheless portrays them with a sense of local color that is a bit patronizing. She features young German-Russian women in a chapter entitled, “Maids I Have Known.” Monsignor George Aberle recalls the disparagements of what Anglo-Americans called “Russian” immigrants and counters by calling them “builders of an empire” and “great heroes of the past.” Still, the dean of North Dakota historians, Elwyn Robinson, feels compelled to disparage German-Russians as clannish, illiterate, and anti-education—disparagements conclusively rebutted by Jessica Clark in her oral history of the Germans from Russia.

By the 1970s, a time of rising ethnic consciousness across the United States, Germans from Russia were ready to proclaim and own their lineage. Landmark works of German-Russian history such as those by George Rath and Joseph appeared in print. The Germans from Russia Heritage Society, a popular organization dedicated to the preservation of German-Russian history and culture, was founded in Bismarck in 1971 and publishes a historical journal, the Heritage Review. The Germans from Russia Heritage Collection of North Dakota State University provides academic support for cultural preservation through public programming and by maintaining a comprehensive research collection of German-Russian materials. The GRHC has collaborated with Prairie Public (statewide public broadcasting) in the production of award-winning documentaries, including The Germans from Russia: Children of the Steppe, Children of the Prairie.

German-Russian farmers still plant and harvest, German-Russian faithful still gather for worship, German-Russian cooks still feed their families, and German-Russian communities remain vital—sustained by history and memory in German-Russian Country.

And that is now the essay ends.

We are not exactly snowed in today, but travel advisories are out. We're staying home and catching up. Besides doing administrative work pertaining to my courses, and hanging some ceiling panels in the basement, I hope to turn out a couple of short pieces for Prairie Public and lay out the next substantial paper I need to write. If the snow stops blowing, I'll clear out the drive. In between time, we'll craft some pheasant smetana for supper. Not a bad day.

Working tonight on a little essay, likely for use as a Plains Folk column. The university is once again exercising itself on the subject of general education. I am suggesting we reference our constitutional mandate.

Constitution of North Dakota
Article VII, Section 3

In all schools instruction shall be given as far as practicable in those branches of knowledge that tend to impress upon the mind the vital importance of truthfulness, temperance, purity, public spirit, and respect for honest labor of every kind.

So I parse this out, considering what these constitutionally mandated virtues might mean for a curriculum today. As you might guess, I am particularly enamored of that last one, "respect for honest labor of every kind."

The final paragraph of the essay as it stands now reads thus:

And finally, respect for honest labor of every kind: You knew this one would be my favorite, right? And I think it was the favorite of the authors of the constitution, too, because they represented a producerist commonwealth of the northern plains. In my observation, college students today are hard-working. But they do not necessarily respect their work. They see it as a means to an end. They do not see the work itself as a good, worthy of respect. This, then, is the commanding task before us: to teach respect for honest labor of every kind.

People will think I am kidding about this, but I am dead serious.

Unless some cloud rolls in before dawn, this will be the coldest night of the winter thus far. Nothing to worry about.

Sometimes, when I have written a thousand words before 6:00am, it is a sign of a productive day ahead. Other times, it just means I'm going to run out of gas early.

Suzzanne & I do a fair bit of writing and presenting together these days, which can be quite a bit of fun. Sometimes she pads her part a little bit, can you believe that? Anyway, our current joint project is a presentation called "Memory Work: Doing History in Grassy Places." I'm not sure what you call it. It's sort of a lecture, sort of a paper, sort of performance art, sort of a hoot. We've been polishing it up for the Friday afternoon Westerners International session of the Western History Association in Denver this week.

Because this is the Westerners session, and because the relationship between Westerners International and the Western History Association has been strained in recent years, I've inserted some pointed remarks into the prologue of the presentation. For those who won't be with us in Denver, I quote them here.

Nowadays neither one of us spends any time in the saddle, but we remain lifelong Westerners, and more specifically, we are citizens and scholars of the northern plains. Besides that, we are at the point in life where we give thought to what we are doing and to what it means to be Westerners. We think about this, and we talk about it, and here is what we think.

There is a kind of understanding of a place that belongs peculiarly to those who have embraced it as a lifelong proposition, who declare themselves, and comport themselves, as people of this place. This is the understanding of the West that belongs to us as Westerners. It is not the only way of understanding the West. Scholars with their theses, artists with their imaginations, even engineers with their visions, all enlarge our understandings of this place. Nor should we allow our status as Westerners to degenerate into any sort of exclusive chauvinism, for the traditions of the West are expansive and inclusive.

We merely observe, on reflection, that insomuch as an association devoted to the understanding of the West loses touch with Westerners, to that extent it is diminished, diminished by the loss of those understandings of this place that can be generated only by people of this place, by Westerners. That is why we count it a privilege to address this Westerners International session of the Western History Association today.

The cold front blowing in tonight makes me want to stretch out in the bison chair and do some reading. I'm gonna crawl inside MacLeod's history of the Northwest Mounted Police. Night all. (Some of you might want to think about having your snowblowers serviced.)

Writing the weekly piece for Prairie Public radio sure provides the opportunity for variety. Some recent topics: Johnny Lynch and waterfowl management on the northern plains; the Babbs Switch schoolhouse fire of 1924; the Siege of Fort Abercrombie in 1862; and the naming of Christine, North Dakota, for Christina Nillson, the Swedish Nightingale.

In regard to the Siege of Fort Abercrombie--I'm also blogging about this line of research in the weblog of the Center for Heritage Renewal, framed into the center's home page, here - heritagerenewal.org

Whereas some of my radio topics seem random, leading me to refer to them as "road kill," all fit somehow into a larger line of inquiry, and some, in fact, are building blocks generated and arranged self-consciously. For instance, woven into the series in recent weeks are some pieces I am grouping under the general title, lifted from the Wall Street Journal, "The North Dakota Miracle." The eventual result will be a public lecture about the redevelopment of North Dakota; I'm working it out in public, on public radio.

The first of these workshop pieces, entitled "Our Storied Land," explores the declensionist trope in our regional narrative. The "declensionist narrative" refers to our tendency, based on late-twentieth-century experience, to assume that our part of the country is in a state of inevitable decline. It is our regional refutation of the predominantly progressive cast of American storytelling. Here's how I summed up the declensionist narrative for Prairie Public.

"The other storytelling tradition, the declensionist, is the progressive flipped 180 degrees. The declensionist narrative holds that human experience on the plains is tragic, and it's getting more so all the time. In North Dakota, our resident declensionist was the University of North Dakota historian Elwyn Robinson, with his famous doctrine of the too-much mistake. We must tighten our belts another notch every year, until we just disappear. Leaving no smile, but rather a grimace, hanging in the air."

You probably already have sensed that I don't think we are going to disappear. I do understand the declensionist narrative, however, because I grew up with it. Sometime in the 1990s I sensed that regional decline was coming to its logical conclusion, and something else was in the air. I expected a fairly gradual pace of change as regional development found a new direction. In no way did I foresee the astonishing transformations that would come with the resurgence of the petroleum industry. Nor do I think, however, that these changes are incongruous with the longer narrative of the Great Plains. Whoops, I've tipped my hand--I'll get around to these things on the air in coming weeks.

In the meantime, talk about your great sleeping weather! Is it politically correct to refer to this as Indian Summer? I don't know; guess I'll sleep on it. Night all.

Because I was planning to record a couple of pieces with Skip at Prairie Public today, I laid out my material just before going to bed last night. Spread it out on my computer desk, read it over, and knew I was ready to whip up two 500-word pieces in the morning.

This was a mistake. You don't go through your research material just before bed at night. I got to sleep just fine, but sure enough, 4:00 this morning, my eyes pinned open. So I made a pot of coffee and did the writing.

One piece was a light one, although, details of folklife are never trivial. It was about cowpokes--the iron devices fitted around the neck of a breachy cow to keep her from going through fences. That's not the one that disturbed my sleep, however. No, I woke up early thinking about Emma Bettenhauser, another of those stolid matriarchs of German-Russian history. She married a farm widower, bore sixteen children, and died before turning forty. What fixed her image in history, however, was the six photographs of her taken by FSA photographer John Vachon in 1940. That's all I'm going to say about the two pieces I recorded today, because if I start thinking about the story of Mrs. Bettenhauser again, I'll ruin another night's sleep.

Night all. This is a great sleeping night--throw open the windows!