Blessings

July 30, 2009
Hard to believe another month is almost over! July flew by. It is normally my least favorite month of the year because it is pure summer. This year, it hasn’t been too bad in the weather department. I have had days when I am too hot. But then I find some shade or jump in the shower in the evening when it cools off. Sleeping weather has been excellent! Of course, jumping into the shower here is not quite as nice, since there is mildew everywhere. We know they don’t clean the bathrooms each day because Bill has noticed the same beer bottle in the men’s bathroom for a few days now. He was in there at 5:30 in the morning the other day having a conversation about how yucky the bathroom is with some other guy. The guy said that he had been thinking about stopping in Bismarck, but he came to Moorhead instead. Too bad for him. Bismarck was great. This is the worst campground we’ve been in.
I am happy this morning because my friend, Karen, emailed me and said the workshop on Celtic blessings she did was a success. To read more about what she is doing, go to her website at www.faith-writer.com
Her blessings are really special and she does a great job with her workshops so that people can learn to write their own. It’s a beautiful and unique way to let people know how much you care about them.
We had a little rain yesterday afternoon and night, but the showers were scattered enough and light enough that the tent did not leak. That’s good. Chance for more showers today, but the good thing is that it will only be in the 60s. Klamath Falls is in the 100s and the pollution is building. I am grateful to not be there!


We tried to walk around the trail of the Minnesota State University Moorhead trail at the science center where they are restoring the tall grass prairie habitat. We did a bit of one trail, but then the mosquitoes came out and since Bill and Heather seem to be very flavorful to mosquitoes, we had to leave. But while we were there it was lovely--very quiet and peaceful. It was a real reminder to pay attention. You look out over the prairie and see grass which looks like a sea of green. But when you’re close, there are wildflowers all over. I enjoyed it.

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.

Heartbreaking Hardin

July 20, 2009
We’re on our way from Hardin, Mt to Glendive, MT. We spent the weekend in Hardin. It was depressing. It was a study in contrasts. Downtown was in pretty sad shape, with lots of empty storefronts and a few businesses valiantly trying to make it. There were Native men wandering around or lolling around in doorways, clearly intoxicated. It was sad and reminded me a lot of Kotzebue, Alaska. This is unfortunately not uncommon in areas around reservations. Alcohol and drug abuse is far too common. It affects all ages and women and men, of course, just as it does with any other group of people. But there is, in Alaska at least, a problem among Native men. Some have written about this as a problem of extended adolescence. This makes sense if you consider the circumstances. There is much talk about Native people having to walk in two worlds. To some degree we all have to do that. But the situation is a little different when you are coming from a village and have been brought up to expect certain things. You are probably not going to live a total subsistence lifestyle, but sometimes hunting season means you will miss some school. School is, in any case, not valued by some people. And if you go too far, you may get some negative feedback from others in your community. I remember talking to a classmate in my Inupiaq Eskimo language class at UAF. She was talking about the new head of Alaska Native Studies in a very negative way. I was confused and asked her why she was so upset. It seemed to me better to have a native woman at the helm instead of the white guy that was there before. She looked at me and sneered, “She’s not Native, she went to Harvard.” Ok, then. It’s no wonder people suffer from identity crises when there seems to be no place for them. You need cash now, no matter where you live, so subsistence can be a part of your life, but you’ll probably have to do something else, too. And then if you try to further your education, you get dissed by people in your community. I will point out that the young woman who was so dismissive of this professor was at college herself. But the University of Alaska Fairbanks is not Harvard. I would have liked to have known exactly where the line was that made you no longer a real Native person. Anyway, I don’t know much about the specific difficulties faced by people in the Crow Agency, which is just outside of Hardin, but I am sure there are many.

We went to the grocery store and I was appalled. You read about this stuff, but I think that, with the exception of Kotzebue, where very high prices are to be expected, I have never seen this kind of thing in person. A container of oatmeal that I am used to paying around $2 for was over $4 and a box of the packets was over $5!! Cheese puffs and pork rinds were, however, available for less than $2. Junk food was abundant and cheap. Real food was expensive. For people living in a very depressed community such as this, such a situation will only make matters worse.
As we drove downtown the first evening we were there, we saw these banners hanging on lampposts.


One simply said, “Welcome.” One said, “Catch the Spirit.” The last one said, “Welcome to Hardin. It’s a great place to be.” It seemed pretty pathetic, really. It did not seem at all like a great place to be. In the weekly paper there were 3 job listings--all with the county. I am not sure where people would work. There’s the grocery store and a little cluster of fast food outlets--complete with casinos, which seem to be everywhere in Montana--gas stations and motels. There are a few businesses downtown. Mostly there are empty buildings. There was a coal fired electric plant across the street from the campground. Some people must be doing somewhat well, because there was a mix of run-down kinds of homes alongside more kept-up places.

And of course, there is the brand new shiny prison built just off the main road in town. The barbed wire sparkles in the sunlight. It sits empty. This is why they want to bring in the prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. They have the beds, they say, and they want the jobs. But I am not sure who would get those jobs, even if the prisoners did go there. Probably not the people of Hardin.
The last day we were in Butte, we were talking to one of the people who works at the campground. He and his wife travel each summer to a different KOA to work. We asked him what he thought of Butte. He said he liked it, but there were problems. Young people were leaving and not coming back. His opinion was that Butte is dying. I thought it was a good point. It applies to Hardin even more. It was sad to see.

Teeth and Community

July 16, 2009
Spent most of the morning at the dentist’s office waiting for Bill. The other day he had a crown fall out of his head. He saved it and looked up how to fix it. Couldn’t find the cement. Just as well. He started having pain--pretty severe pain--shortly thereafter. Finally he called around to see if there was someone who could put the crown back in. He found a person who could fit him in this morning--Robert Wilcox. So we arrived, he filled out the paperwork and we waited. After what seemed like a very long time, I figured that there was something happening, but probably not a simple recemeting job. Sure enough, he came out and said that the dentist told him that he was really uncomfortable putting the crown back in because the problem was with an adjacent tooth. There was a small hole there that was somehow managing to drain well enough to avoid infection, though Bill has had some pain and discomfort in that area in the past. Anyway, he was concerned that if he put the crown back on, it would block the hole and an abscess would be the result. Bill explained to him that he could not afford to have any extensive dental work done right now, so Dr. Wilcox came up with an alternate plan that was actually somewhat cheaper than recementing the crown. I guess it is pretty much the beginning of a root canal that will have to be completed at a later date. Bill is just pretty happy to have the pain gone. And Dr. Wilcox gave him a bunch of stuff and a note to give to the next dentist. And a prescription for an antibiotic, just in case he needs it. He did say to keep the crown because it’s a nice one (!) that is worth between $750 and $1000. Once this other tooth is fixed, it can be put back again.
As I was waiting there for him, I was amazed at how happy everyone seemed. It is a dentist’s office after all. I have not been in many of those, but I do not believe I have ever seen such a group of cheerful people in such a setting before! It was clear that these people cared about one another. The receptionists were asking very specific questions about people’s families, trips, the hay crop, and other things. It was plain that they keep up with one another’s lives. It was pretty nice to watch! One of the big topics of conversation this morning was that Town Talk is closed this week because the owners have gone fishin’. The people in the office were, however, willing to put up with Safeway doughnuts so that they could have a great time fishing. As one woman said, “I’m glad they went fishing. They work really hard.” Everyone agreed wholeheartedly with that sentiment. A patient actually brought the doughnuts as a gift. I guess that I never considered a dentist’s office to be a place where one would witness community, but I saw it there today.
Tomorrow morning we leave for Hardin, MT. I have no idea what to expect, so I have decided to expect nothing and see what I get! Might as well embrace surprise!