When you are obsessed with maps,
and what maps represent, you notice these things - how towns follow the railroads and the rivers, how communities today migrate towards the Interstates. You notice rivers, yes, where they go and where they don't go, and how they get there. I noticed the Sheyenne River the last time I was in North Dakota. In Rugby I had observed that the melting snow didn't seem to want to flow; it just stood there letting you look at it. So I got out my map to try and figure out why. I found that west of Rugby, the Mouse River which comes down out of Canada also flows back into Canada. North of Rugby, the Ox River and the Willow River flow into the Mouse, and hence into Canada. East of Rugby you are almost to the Red River before you find any kind of river. And to the south of Rugby, there is the Sheyenne, which starts in Sheridan County and meanders east and south and east and back north before joining the Red River. Meander is a good word - water finding its way. At one point not far from the origin of the Sheyenne, the James River also starts up. At Harvey, North Dakota, the James bends away not even five miles from the Sheyenne, bends away but then runs a parallel track for an awful distance - parallel until the Sheyenne turns east and then back north. The Sheyenne flows into the Red River and into Lake Winnipeg, and perhaps eventually into Hudson Bay. The James River flows down into South Dakota, joining the Missouri at Yankton, which joins the Mississippi, which flows into the Gulf of Mexico.
Who we are is shaped by the land and by the water, so one needs to look at the rivers if he is to understand us. Robert King knows that. His book, Stepping Twice Into the River: Following Dakota Waters,* follows the Sheyenne River and tries to gauge who we are. Who the Dakotans are, specifically. King worked on the book during the last of his twenty-three years in North Dakota; his wife had taken a job in another state and King was working one more year in North Dakota before moving, too, into early retirement. The book was perhaps King's farewell gift to North Dakota, and perhaps North Dakota's farewell gift to King.
King one day found himself standing at a lake in the center of the continent, affirming for himself that he wanted to use that final year "to discover something.... thrilled at being in the center of something." You want something to matter, and King wanted an understanding of North Dakota when he left. That night he spread out his map of North Dakota, looking at the Sheyenne:
I stared at the leisurely sprawl of its blue line, a finite river beginning in particular, taking its time and space around Dakota, and ending in particular - a little alpha, a little omega, a little territory between.
That night I promised myself I'd follow this ordinary stream I hadn't greatly noticed in a landscape I took for granted. I would read and study and, next year, discover anything that happened to be along the way, any local truth true in general.
And that's what King did.
He set about following the meander of the Sheyenne and getting to know the landscape it was part of. He started at the river's headwaters in Sheridan County - indeed he had to struggle to find the headwaters - and he worked his way downstream. Some people might say that North Dakota is a Great Empty Nothingness, and without fail they are people who have never spent any appreciable time in North Dakota. As he promised himself, King read and studied and he learned about the geology of the region, the history, the people. The lesson of geology is that where we are is a matter of when we are standing there. And like me, King spent a lot of time in cemeteries, which is where one tends to find the ultimate meaning of things. Ultimate meanings, and dates you can't seem to find anywhere else - date of birth, date of marriage, date of death.
"Life is like a river," Forrest Gump might say. And exploring a river you explore the lives of the peoples who have been touched by those waters, their histories. Rivers are quiet, generally, and talk softly if they talk at all. So sometimes King had to go off to the nearby towns in search of human truth. I wish he had done more of that. This is an excellent natural history of the Sheyenne River and a history of General Sibley's campaign against Native Americans in the region, but I would be interested in a little more of the current backstory. When he stopped for coffee in some of those small town cafes, I wish King had asked more of the kinds of questions I like to hear the answers to: why are you here, and what are the current conditions and what has been lost, and what does the future hold? Stepping Twice Into the River suffers to some extent from the same fault I found in William Least Heat-Moon's River-Horse: when one is riding on the water, it is difficult to see up over the riverbank to connect fully with the life beyond. Yet I criticize a Packard for not being a Pontiac, huh? Why am I complaining? This is a good book.
There are surprises:
"You don't know what it's like," my daughter Lynn said on the drive back from rescuing me out of the tangles of the Sheyenne bottomlands, "to watch your father, almost sixty, disappear around a bend in a canoe heading off to God knows where."
And in this case, King did have to be rescued. It was either give up and have his daughter come get him, or carry the canoe and his packs all the way downriver, because along that stretch the river wasn't going to take him.
I like that King set off without any guarantee of success. That's what it's is like when you choose to write local truths which are also somehow universal - you never know beforehand if these particulars will mean anything greater. I will sit an evening on a small town's Main Street, to write down everything that moves and muse on what it means. I will stand an hour at the depot in Rugby, waiting for AmTrak to come through and pick up its passengers, and wonder what that tells me about the world. We never know, when we set our attention, whether what we find will mean anything.
Yet, as King does, we must keep setting out attention. Stepping Twice Into the River is a model for paying attention to local materials. King knows that North Dakota is not some Great Empty Nothing. What happens in North Dakota, what happened in North Dakota, these are important, telling, human moments. To lose them is a great loss. To lose them in North Dakota, in South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Indiana, or anywhere else is a great loss.
In closing, let me point to an exemplary moment near the end of King's book. This is local writing that rises to the big truths. He is visiting a home "built in the 'Russia Ukraine style' around 1900 by Daniel Winter, a German Russian settler."
I stepped in, marveling at the thick walls, a good two feet, and how earth and water and wisps of threshed stalks could withstand the snow and winds of ninety-five Dakota winters, spring, melts, blasting summers. It would be cooler in the heat than a frame building and perhaps warmer in winter, but it was still small - I stepped it off at about 18 by 26 feet - and I tried to imagine it as my house, but cramped with how many other family members? And how far away from any others in the prairie solitude?
I thought of where we lived - apartments, old houses, new subdivisions, pits in the earth, the detritus retreats of Caddis fly - and what happened to us where we lived and after we went away. Putting my hand out, I felt the chill of the wall. This was it, my last stop, unplanned and unforeseen. I'd followed the current of a river from spring almost beyond fall through an ordinary countryside, finding a mystery here, a tension there, the truth a combination of harmony and conflict that made me almost helpless. Heraclitus went in search of himself, or at least Plutarch said that he did, and John Neihart claimed, after his rough Missouri trip at the beginning of what we call the century, that he had discovered another part of himself. I wasn't sure I'd found myself - only Everything Else.
The least a fellow can do, like King, is to look, and keep looking.
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* Stepping Twice Into the River: Following Dakota Waters by Robert King. University Press of Colorado, 2005. $19.95.
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