Life on the Prairie
Memories of a North Dakota Boy
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One of the great lessons in life is discovering for yourself what will happen if your tongue touches super cold metal. It’s something that is usually explained to us at a very young age, but in the end most of us choose to investigate it ourselves. When I started grade school, there was a flagpole right out in front of the school. You came out the front door down some steps and straight ahead 10-15 yards and there it was. One very cold day, out of the blue, I decided it was time for my lesson. I made a beeline to that flagpole, stuck out my tongue and presto, Mom was right, my tongue was attached to the pole. It sticks very firmly and immediately. In the absence of someone merciful who will somehow warm the pole and set you free, the only other way to quickly get free is to peel the first layer of skin off your tongue, which I did. The result was a very painful, lasting lesson in one of the facts of life. Cold flagpoles and tongues don’t mix. It is said that all over North Dakota there are pieces of kid’s tongues on pump handles, doorknobs, flagpoles, windmill frames and a myriad of other metal objects. It’s just one of those times where curiosity overcomes common sense
Our neighborhood big sister was a high school girl, Karen, who all of us boys had a crush on and all the girls wanted to be just like. As a young lady, she owned the only monkey in Steele, heck probably the only one in Kidder County (that wasn’t why we boys had a crush on her, but on the other hand, which one of us wouldn’t have wanted a girlfriend with a monkey?). Although she would have resisted classification, if you had to, you would probably have referred to her as a free spirit at a time when there were very few free spirits in North Dakota. Over the years she was gradually adopted by all of us kids as our "big sister". Karen fit the part very well. It was amazing, none of the dozen or so kids that made up the neighborhood gang ever mentioned her as a "big sister", but every one of us naturally were polarized to her over time. She whole-heartedly accepted the role that was thrust on her. I don’t ever remember her telling one of us to go away when we would come traipsing in the house, even if her boyfriend (and future husband) Michael was there. She was always there for us if we needed help or advice with something and she always kept us up to date with the latest food crazes. Whenever I think back to those days, Karen’s smiling face is one of the first images to appear. I just can’t adequately describe how important an influence she was on me in my early years.
When we were young, we would get up on a summer morning and look out the window and if the sun was shining, just smile. Who knew what the day was going to bring? The chances were better than nine out of ten that we were going to enjoy it. We would pull on our clothes, head down to the kitchen and get energized for the day. Then we were off, headed for another day of adventure. Maybe today we would conquer that tree, get that dog on the next block to quit barking and play fetch with us, finish that fort in the chokecherry patch, go eat pizza at Karen’s or maybe none or all of the above. Maybe we would find an interesting rock, make spears to fight dragons or build a racecar with those wheels we found. We went as far as our imaginations and the skills of a kid would take us. And we would love every minute of it. The same scene was repeated a thousand times all over the upper midwest in small town America. Our parents never worried if we didn’t show up for lunch. They understood we were probably too busy fighting Indians to come home and eat. They knew our stomachs would eventually bring us home, they always did. That was summer on the northern plains!
It is said that luck is when preparation and experience meets opportunity. So, if that’s true, and you are prepared and experienced and an opportunity arises, it really isn’t luck that makes you successful. But people persist in using the word luck or lucky when referring to success in their hunting and fishing excursions, when, in fact, there is no such thing. So, if you live in the outdoors like we do, you create your own luck, charisma, charm, kharma or whatever you call it. But then there are those rare times when, inexplicably, one of those words puts you in the right place at the right time and....it's magic!
If you grew up in North Dakota in the fifties and sixties like I did, you were raised in a period when hunting just wasn’t high on many priority lists. Those were simpler times, hunting and fishing had not yet evolved into the recreational industry it has become today. Hunting and fishing to put meat on the table had effectively ended forever with the end of WWII. It was a time when you could go hunting, even on a weekend, and not hear another shot. From the time our small group started hunting in the mid sixties until sometime in the eighties we pretty much had the area that we hunted to ourselves. There was no such thing as posted land and if someone did post for some odd reason, we were hometown kids and a quick stop to talk to them always got us where we needed to go. We were the uncrowned kings of our kingdom. Those were our golden years, when our love for the outdoors was born.
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About the Book
One of the things I've often thought about over the years is what keeps us in North Dakota? If you ask that question of a hundred different people you may get a hundred different answers. Although the answers vary, most have a common theme. Somewhere in their answer the word "freedom" appears. Another word that appears almost as often is "outdoors". Our freedoms and our closeness to nature fit together like a hand and glove, blending together almost seamlessly in our lives on the Northern Plains. This book is a bit of a light hearted look at our life on the plains that is guaranteed to bring back a lot of memories. What started out as a book of memories in a lot of ways became much more. It became a permanent part of my life long journey. I'm not sure it will ever be finished, at least in my mind, but here's what I've got so far! If this is interesting to you, maybe you'll capture some of what it feels like to be as free as we are and what life is like out here on the prairies of North Dakota.
About the Author
Living in North Dakota, being in the outdoors has always been a huge part of my life. My greatest claims to fame in my life have come as an outdoorsman. For instance, I once knocked down 4 ducks with one shot and to top that off I've also caught an 11+ pound walleye. The paparazzi and reporters are still hounding me. However I didn't get a lot of writing experience sitting in the duck blind. A few years ago my partners talked me into taking over the duties of writing the company Christmas letter. It's a letter we send to our clients to fill them in on company events of the past year. Writing that letter and hearing how people enjoyed it was very gratifying. Eventually the idea for a book came to me, not just as a result of the letter, but as the result of a number of experiences, the letter being the first. Over the years you send a couple letters to an editor, give a couple eulogies, write a few award winning Christmas letters, a magazine article or two, and a dozen pages or so on my family's geneology and then everyone says to you, "You should write a book!" That idea simmered in me for some time. Then about a year ago, an event occurred that brought that idea to a boil. That event was my unplanned retirement at the age of 54. I retired as a result of a 10 year battle with Parkinsons disease. My retirement ended one journey but sent me on a new one, a journey through my past that allowed me to see it like I'd never seen it before. This book is a result of that journey of discovery.