Contrasts

July 28, 2009
New town, new library! We’re at the library in Fargo and camping in Moorhead. Bismarck turned out to be great. I really liked it. I guess it wasn’t what I expected, though I’m not really sure what that was. I liked the landscape, though I’m told that it is unusual to have things be so green at this time of year--they’ve gotten lots of rain.

We made contact with the clerk of the Bismarck Friends Meeting, so we were able to go there on Sunday and participate in a really thoughtful and interesting discussion regarding an excerpt from Quaker Faith and Practice.


Later we went to the home of the clerk and his wife, where we went out on their boat. He ran it down the river and out into the center and we floated back. Other than a motorboat that went by, there was no one else there. It was quite peaceful and very beautiful. Then we had tea and cookies on their deck and had a nice chat. It was fun!

The campground at Bismarck was the best we’ve stayed at. There was the usual problem of inadequate bathroom/shower facilities, but that was the only drawback. The tent sites were away from the RVs, nicely shaded, the boundaries were well marked, and they were large. We got to Moorhead and things were rather different. It’s just got a different vibe. The guy did put us in the back away from the highway, which was nice. It was pretty quiet, which was nice, too. But the bathroom is kind of yucky--the showers are full of mildew stains and the toilets full of rust stains. I suppose this is a difficult problem because you deal with the kind of water that you have, after all. But it doesn’t look nice and it’s not pleasant to try and take a shower in such conditions. But there’s hardly any water pressure and one of the showers doesn’t work anyway! So last evening, I went and got ready to step into the shower, turned the knob and a trickle of water dribbled out. Thinking I was doing something wrong, I tried every which way, to no avail. So I packed up my soap and shampoo, got dressed again, and stormed off in a bit of a snit. I was highly annoyed. Then awhile later Bill decided to do laundry. While we were waiting for that to be done I jumped into a working shower. Then we went back to the laundry room to put stuff in the dryer. It wouldn’t work. The only other dryer was being used and the same person had two more loads of laundry in washing machines waiting to be put into the dryer. So we loaded up our wet clothes, went back to the campsite, and hung them up in and on the truck. The office was closed by this time. This morning we got up early and used the working dryer and when he came in the guy gave us the money back that we had placed in the non-working dryer. I was just so annoyed last night. Coming from Bismarck where I had enjoyed myself and the campsite to the Moorhead campground and all of these niggly little issues was not fun. Things seem more reasonable this morning. I am still not a fan of the bathroom. But I should not have to do laundry again while I am here, so that will be one less thing to get annoyed about. The campsite is pretty nice--or at least I would’ve thought so before Bismarck. We are backed up against a couple of rows of big trees and beyond that is a cornfield. The wind was blowing pretty good last night, but we didn’t feel much of it because the big trees acted as windbreaks. So we have shade. Not sure that will be much of an issue this week as the temperatures are supposed to be in the high 60s tomorrow (!) and the 70s for the rest of the week. We will go on to Minneapolis/St Paul next and maybe have the opportunity to teach a workshop. We will see how that works out.
I was thinking about the fact that it was Sunday yesterday and I suddenly had the thought that I was homesick! I had to unpack that a little bit because Klamath Falls as a community never felt like home to me. I tend to create “home” wherever I am, so I had my house and that felt like home, but not the community. That felt more like a prison. Now I have my truck/tent and those feel like home. I have been astonished to realize how much of my life gets lived outside now. Anyway, I realized that for me, the church felt like home in some ways. Not that I was in line with the stated Christian theology. I feel like a Quaker, but not a Christian one. I recently read a book about the history of Quaker thought and found myself in the idea of a post-Christian, nonrealist Quaker. So I was not at the same place as many of the attendees of the church. But that really didn’t matter. We were all there, doing different things and being in different places, but we were still a community. It made me feel good to think about that.

Observations

July 24, 2009
Back at the Bismarck Public Library so Bill can catch up on photo processing. We can connect at the campground, and there are a couple of places to plug in, but he has a hard time seeing his screen outside--not a good way to process photos. So we come here. It’s a really nice library. For those people who don’t want to use their own computers or do not have one, there are many internet computers and then a few that are for database searches and word processing. It’s a very pleasant space. Spacious with good lighting. Comfortable furniture and air conditioning--this last was a big plus yesterday when it was in the mid 90s here. Today is supposed to be around 80. Not my favorite, but I can live with it, especially in July and especially when my friends from Klamath Falls are telling me that it’s been in the 90s there for several days with more to come. I miss the friends, but not the weather!
I like Bismarck. It’s very pleasant. The one fly in the ointment is that there is apparently some sort of pollen or something here that doesn’t like me. In Klamath Falls I suffered to varying degrees from some kind of allergy or sensitivity to plants, pollution or something. My ears would get clogged up and crackle, my throat would burn, I would cough and be congested. Once I left, I was relieved of these issues until we got here. And then yesterday they cut the grass at the campground. My throat burned, my ear got even worse and when I spoke, I could hear my voice echoing through my head. Then my wisdom tooth starting hurting. Don’t know what the deal is with that. I spent last night in a great deal of pain. Finally I took some Benadryl to try and relieve the pressure that was building up in my head and to hopefully get some sleep. It worked. This morning, the symptoms are back. The tooth pain is the worst, of course, and I don’t know just how that fits into everything. But surgery to remove a wisdom tooth--or I should say what’s left of it--is not an option, so I just have to hope that things ease up.
Other than that, though, we are having a good time here. The campground is nice and peaceful. The town itself is interesting. It’s like a suburb without the urb. There’s no city to speak of.

The center of everything seems to be the Capitol Grounds. That is where the North Dakota Heritage Center is--a place I highly recommend for anyone traveling through Bismarck. It’s very well done and informative and there is no admission charge. They also have an extensive group of walking trails on the grounds. We walked around this morning before walking over here. The one we were on had some sculptures, which are scattered all over, as well as different kinds of trees. There were markers set into the ground alongside the trail telling you the common name and the scientific name for the various trees. And there was a set of petrified logs that are apparently 57 million years old. Those were great--such a wonderful group of textures! Anyway, it looks like people come from town to walk on the trails. It’s a very nice place to walk. Lots of green and plenty of shade!
Last night we saw in the paper (after the fact) that the Lutheran Church was hosting a community dinner. I wish I would have known earlier so I could have gone and helped. It was good to see something going on, anyway. We are still waiting for a reply to the email we sent the clerk of the Bismarck Religious Society of Friends. When I googled them to find out where they are and what time they meet, I got two different addresses and a meeting time with one of them. Who knows whether this is accurate. We will try to get in touch by phone and if we can’t, we’ll try to go to the Unitarian Church. I am appreciating more and more the great job Jan McClellan does on the Klamath Falls Friends Church website. It contains the kind of current information that I have been looking for and not finding on this trip.
Yesterday was the day to have the gas gauge fixed. It decided to stop working as we left Butte and it was making Bill nervous. On the highway it’s not so bad because we know how far we can go on a tank of gas. But as we get into more urban/suburban driving, we’re not quite sure. It turns out that the floater had filled with gas and sunk to the bottom of the tank, so it was registering as empty. Mr. Lubester put a new one in and now we’re back at full.

Heritage and Tradition

July 22, 2009
I am sitting here by the pool. No one is in it yet. We had to meander around this morning looking for a place where the wifi connection would work and Bill could see his computer screen. The connection doesn’t work at our campsite--too many trees, maybe. But there are a couple of different places here where we can sit and plug in when we need to charge the battery, so that’s good.

Yesterday we went to the North Dakota Heritage Center. It’s a museum with a permanent exhibit that traces ND prehistory and history. And they have rotating exhibits in a different part of the building. It’s on the Capitol Grounds and is free. It’s very well done. We spent quite awhile in there. They had fossils, artifacts, replicas, old photographs and film, and even a few old crocheted things J The bathroom had collages of ads pertaining to bathroom things grouped by decade. That was fun to look at. The rotating exhibit was about the atomic bomb and the North Dakota connection. They had Minuteman missiles in Minot (about 120 miles north of here). The people were not in favor at first, but then for economic and patriotic reasons, they decided it was OK, even though they knew that they would not survive any kind of nuclear war! Remember that old song, “The Things We Do For Love?” Maybe we should update that to, “The Things We Do For Cash.” There was a place where they had sticky notes and a pencil for people to write their thoughts. Someone wrote that “the collective ability to delude ourselves is astonishing” or something like that. Amen.

I was getting a little foggy by the time we left. I practically live on coffee in the summer and the instant we have becomes a bit hard to swallow after awhile. We needed ice for the cooler and found a grocery store where they had a big cup of coffee for 59 cents (tax included). But we wanted a better system for coffee so we could make it at the campsite. We looked at a percolator for the camp stove, but it was small. We found a little individual cup filter for the princely sum of $15! Then I saw the strainer. You know, one of those things that you set on top of your cup or whatever. $1.99. Coffee filters on sale for 99 cents. So for $3 I solved my coffee problem. It’s my own version of a drip coffeemaker. That coffee tasted good this morning! Bill was laughing at me. However, I do think he also appreciates the new system because it means he does not have a crazy, cranky, coffee-deprived wife to drag around Bismarck J
We’re staying at another KOA kampground. As you may remember, they like to use the letter K a lot. At this particular kampground, the have a kookout on Friday and Saturday nights--ribs, chicken, hot dogs, and stuff like that. There are flyers everywhere, even on the door of the bathroom stalls. I don’t know about this. Everytime I see it, I think kook-out. Doesn’t seem very appealing somehow.

The people that own this campground have some horses in a field next to it. It was very peaceful watching them yesterday. There’s a little dog who rides around on the golf cart with the guy and he was herding the horses. Kind of amazing that such a little dog can get the horses to move so fast in exactly the direction he wants them to go! One of the horses had a great deal to say yesterday. The others were pretty quiet. I think there are 5 of them.
Bill was commenting yesterday that there doesn’t seem to be an actual city center here. There may be one and we just haven’t found it yet. But there does seem to be a bit of sprawl. Of course, Bismarck and Mandan are two different cities that seem to kind of blend in with one another. It is interesting to see how Bismarck plays on the Native American heritage and uses it as a tourist attraction. And it is a part of the state’s history. In Hardin, there was none of that. This fits right in with the tendency to glorify native cultures of the past and to ignore what is happening today. There is a romantic idea about “Indians” that involves not looking at individual cultures, but sort of collapsing everything into a Dances with Wolves kind of picture. It’s all about the Sioux 150 years ago. Native cultures as they are today are ignored or dismissed. This is a part of the identity problem I talked about a couple of days ago. It seems that for too many people--including some Native people themselves--the only way to be a true Native American is to do things in the “traditional” way. But “traditional” is a useless term. What does it mean? It means people pick some arbitrary time period and freeze it to make the argument that THIS is the true cultural picture. Native people don’t go to Harvard, they dress in animal skins and commune with nature or something. It’s pretty offensive. I mean, who among us lives the way our ancestors did 150 years ago? Why should any group of people be expected to do that? So in this part of North Dakota, they can play the Indian card to help with the tourism. Because there is no reservation or anything here which would bring people into contact with the current situation, it is easier to play on that glorified past. This is a big contrast with Hardin, where the current terrible situation is on display as you walk downtown.

Change in Time and Plans

July 21, 2009
Never mind Glendive! We got there and went to the campground. There were RVs there, but the office was locked. We waited around for a few minutes and no one came, so we left. Next biggish town on the map was Dickinson, ND, so we headed there. But Bill said he felt pretty good driving, and Bismarck was only 100miles down the road, so we headed there. Now instead of staying in a place for a few days, taking everything down, packing the truck, and driving elsewhere for a couple more days, we will stay here for a week. We are both kind of pleased about that. And this KOA is the nicest one we’ve stayed at.

After Spokane, they got steadily better. Hardin was the best at the time J But this one is better than that. The Rvs are in a separate area from the tents. The sites are big and clearly marked. There are trees everywhere. It is green and quiet. We woke up to the sound of the birds this morning, not a train or road noise. And, we are adjacent to a covered picnic area, which means that if it does rain, we can go sit there, instead of all jamming into the truck!!
I like the scenery in North Dakota better than Montana, too. Once we crossed the border, the landscape changed and there were all these little hills sticking up. There was very clear stratigraphy, visible even from the highway. I am sure that geologists have a name for these things, but I don’t know what it is. As you move east, these pretty much disappear and things get flatter, as I thought they might. Having lived in Illinois for several years as a kid, I remember the flat Midwestern landscape.
The weather is supposed to be pretty nice here for the next several days--mid-70s today--in July!!! Then low 80s. Friday will be the most unpleasant at 86ish. But the nights cool off nicely. The sky was full of puffy white clouds when we arrived.
We were tired last night so we ended up in the tent early. I fell asleep and Bill processed photos--he’s falling behind J We have given back two more of the hours we gained when we moved from NH to Portland in 1987, so we’re now on central time. Today we plan to go into town. Bill needs to talk to someone about getting the gas gauge fixed on the truck.