This is where it started: my first visit to the first community: Rugby, North Dakota, January, 2003. Why does one go to Rugby in January, you ask? If you want to see what a town is made of, you have to see it in the tough season, as well as the sweet, and January in Rugby is the tough season.
January 16, 2003
Of course the poet believes the world is as he says it is. The poet names, and in naming he creates the world as it will be. He also observes and thinks what he sees is what the world is. I have set forth now as the Vagabond - naming and seeing, hoping to paint the world as it will be for me, as it is, the middle western part of it.
I am struck again: how this journey is process, not product; more expedition and exploration than destination and explanation. A way of knowing rather than the knowledge gained.
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A lot of what I'll have to say will be about light, I suppose; about how light owns us, guides us, marks us; about how light lays on things, on the roughness of that field, on the smoothness of this court house; about how light comes and goes morning and night, marking our days and our years, and the generations.
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Along Highway 2 east of Lakota, North Dakota, a heap of trees on open ground. Is this a windbreak torn out, trees piled up roughly for burning? There is so much wind in North Dakota, so few trees, why would anyone tear out any trees at all, ever? The wind has won this small battle.
The landscape in eastern North Dakota is as flat as any army cot made up by the star recruit. The fields are covered with a thin layer of snow like a dirty sheet.
It was nine degrees below zero when I came through Fargo a couple hours ago. Now the radio plays "Country Boy Can Survive." Is that a promise or a prayer? We are in the middle of the country here, if we are anywhere.
Within ten miles of Rugby I'm noticing the landscape now has its ups and downs, turn and roll, rise and fall. This country is a little more ragged than the area of northwest Iowa where I grew up, yet by comparison to the land farther west it is flat indeed. I recognize it as farm country.
It's a grey winter sky. Yet the sun is bully enough to push through the haze, to turn the snow cover to brilliance.
To be continued....
I do like reading about January this time of year!
Posted by: Dave | August 26, 2005 at 11:26 AM
Dave--I have a friend who, when he travels, never takes a book with him about the country he is seeing; instead he takes a book about a country the opposite of the one he is visiting. I think he likes the sense of being in two places at the same time, just as we can have summer and winter at once.
Posted by: Tom Montag | September 08, 2005 at 12:14 PM