The Middlewesterner

REST IN PEACE JIM SCHMALTZ RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA

Just yesterday I heard from a friend of the Schmaltz family that Jim Schmaltz of Rugby, North Dakota, died on June 17, 2006, at the age of 78. I had interviewed Schmaltz at his home north of Rugby in January, 2003, on the very first trip of my Vagabond journey. Since that time he contracted West Nile Virus and never fully recovered from its effects. I'm sorry to hear he has died. He was a good man. As a small tribute to his memory, I am reprinting here what I wrote about my visit with Schmaltz. Rest in peace, Jim Schmaltz.

Jim Rocheleau and I drove north out of Rugby to see Jim Schmaltz on land he's farmed all his adult life. Schmaltz helped to found the Germans from Russia organization in North Dakota, and the chapter in Rugby (which has recently disbanded). Schmaltz is a man with a large voice and expansive gestures. Though he speaks German, you wouldn't say he speaks it with a German accent; rather his is the high, tight speech of his fellow North Dakotans: they don't talk like Canadians here, exactly, but you sure wouldn't confuse them with Texans either.

Schmaltz talked to me about the migration of Germans from Germany to Russia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and about their migration from Russia to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the rights promised by Catherine the Great to the German immigrants started to be revoked by Czar Alexander and open persecution followed. Perhaps the fortunate of these Germans from Russia migrated to the United States; of those who didn't, some were shot, some were exiled to Siberia, most traces of them were erased from the Black Sea area they'd settled originally.

Schmaltz's grandfather ended up farming south of Rugby; his father farmed south of Rugby too. Life was not easy for those who immigrated to the extremes of the North Dakota winter. Schmaltz told a variation of the story I'd read in the Rugby Centennial book, about his grandfather and the local priest traveling by sleigh on a clear day when a fierce blizzard suddenly blew up. Schmaltz said they freed the horses, turned the sleigh box over, and took refuge in its protection. Next day neighbors or relatives saw the tongue of the sleigh sticking out above the snow and freed the men who had been singing hymns all night and praying to keep from falling to sleep, falling into the sleep that would mean death by freezing. In the bright light of the following afternoon, they were freed from the snow that had buried them, that had imprisoned them, that had protected them.

Schmaltz's father helped him get established well north of Rugby among the French and Norwegians there. "I had a friend among the Norwegians," Schmaltz said, "a fellow who was half French. He told me one of the leaders in the community said when I moved up here: 'Well, we've got to be careful now, we've got a German from Russia up here amongst us.'" Schmaltz farmed the place anyway, and now his son Jeff works the land. Schmaltz still helps out: "I don't know if he needs me but I have to do it, I can't sit in the house and watch him work...."

We sat in the house drinking coffee and talking with Schmaltz for three hours. His family's story will be important for me in understanding the life of Rugby and Pierce County. Like so many others in Rugby, Schmaltz opened his house to me, opened his heart, his life, and shared his understanding. How do you say Thank You for such a gift? I don't know. I suppose that the best I can do is write the truest account possible of the Germans from Russia in Pierce County.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA - MARCH 13, 2006 AT THE HAALAND HOME

I did a presentation

about my Vabagond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby at 1:45 p.m. on Monday, March 13. I came in at the invitation of Sam Thomas, my new friend from Towner, North Dakota, who volunteers at the Haaland Home and helps arrange the Monday programs. Activities Director Lisa Oksendahl was on hand to greet me and a group of twenty-five or more of the residents gathered in an informal setting to hear me speak.

After a general description of my project, I focused my presentation on Rugby materials - excerpts from journals of previous visits: having breakfast at the Sale Barn Cafe with Therese Rocheleau's father, Clayton Olson; visiting Jim Schmaltz at his farm north of Rugby and talking about the Germans-from-Russia who settled in North Dakota; and visiting Edna Rocheleau's house for a birthday party. Edna was hosting a party for Jim Rocheleau's uncle Richard Rocheleau. Edna used to work at the Haaland Home. Jim Schmaltz is now a resident of the complex, having been brought low by the West Nile virus. Even Clayton Olson is a step slower and a stone deafer.

After my presentation, the residents shared their sense of the region [see here], most notably the loss of the smaller communities. Towns which used to have schools, three banks, two grocery stores,  three car dealers, and two cafes are now almost ghost towns, some houses still being occupied but the businesses gone.

When I asked which adjectives they would used to describe the people of the region, the first I heard was "hardy." If you want to live in North Dakota, you have to be tough. Second, I was told that people here take care of each other. When I asked why they said that, I was told it's because most of the people here are good neighbors. When I asked for an example, an old woman recalled harvest-time of her first year of marriage, when her husband was badly stricken with illness and unable to bring the crops in. One Sunday all the neighbors in the area showed up and did the harvesting.

After the presentation I had coffee and cookies with the residents in the lunchroom, and my tablemate George Kraft shared further information with me about the Germans-from-Russia. And we talked. The combined age of the three fellows that Sam Thomas and I were sitting with was not 300 years, but it was dang close. Those fellows from North Dakota - they're tough!

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA, MARCH 13, 2006 ON PAYING ATTENTION

I watch. I record

what I see. I weigh the meaning of details as if reading tea leaves. It means something - all this means something. But what?

I have to show up. I have to watch. I have to record the details of our lives. I have to probe for what it means.

It may mean nothing. It may mean everything. On any given day, you do not know what you'll be given, but you know you'll be given something. That's how things are - an opaque mass of detail until you can discern the pattern. As I was leaving Dairy Queen a little while ago, two girls with dyed hair went in. Hair dyed so obviously black, one of them; the other such a drab and uniform wood-stain color. I mistook them for high school girls. Later I was parked in front of the grocery store and those two girls parked their car on the street nearby, walked the half block to the call center, and went in to their jobs making or taking phone calls. The sign on the window of the building says the call center is "Now Hiring."

To see pattern, to have anything be more than an interesting detail, I suppose you need more than one point of reference. Which means you need to stay long enough to see the same thing at a different time; or you need to move and see the same thing from a different perspective.

Which means I show up, I watch, I make my notes. I ponder the meaning of it all. Sometimes I have to shake it all off as more than I can apprehend. Sometimes a little meaning glints at me. You never know which it will be - that's why you have to show up and pay attention.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS DOWNTOWN RUGBY ON SUNDAY NIGHT MARCH 12, 2006 - (4)

On Sunday, March 12, I spent part of the evening in my car parked on Main Street in downtown Rugby. What do you see of a community upon a random evening, and what does it mean? We don't always know, but we take the notes. This is a report of one such evening in one such community.

8:18 p.m. Two more women

hurry to the theater. I suppose if there is only one theater in town, showing one movie, you arrive when you can because it's the only show in town.

There are at least fourteen cars park on the other side of the street now, and at least two on this side, this Sunday night, Rugby, North Dakota, here at the far edge of the middlewest.

8:21 p.m. A fellow comes out of the theater and changes the movie poster in the display case out front. He does his work, then goes back inside. He comes out with a long pole; he's going to change the information on the marquee now. He takes a letter down, puts a letter up. The lights on the marquee, like we ourselves, keep up the pretense of motion - on the marquee, in the reflection, in the reflection of a reflection.

I've seen the sme maroon Dodge Stratus at least four times now; the Dodge Intrepid behind it, at least twice.

The tiniest flake of snow melts on my window and gathers light, and that that instant I see the cop come through the intersection just to the south. I'm here just doing my job, and he's doing his.

I'm going back to the motel now, content that all is right with the world - the lights in the theater marquee keep dancing; the cop keeps making his rounds.

One of the fellows comes out of Jester's Lounge, gets in his pick-up, and drives away to the north. Another fellow gets into an SUV and drives away in the same direction. The cop comes through the intersection again just then, and follows right behind. A bit of snow dances in the street.

You can sleep in peace.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS DOWNTOWN RUGBY ON SUNDAY NIGHT MARCH 12, 2006 - (3)

On Sunday, March 12, I spent part of the evening in my car parked on Main Street in downtown Rugby. What do you see of a community upon a random evening, and what does it mean? We don't always know, but we take the notes. This is a report of one such evening in one such community.

I keep expecting to see

the cop. Instead, the rumble of a couple of pick-ups coming through, going north, going south.

From where I sit, I can see the lights of the theater; and I can see them reflected in a window across the street; and I can see the reflection reflected in a window of the building right in front of me. What is reality, one wonders. Is it the lights on the marquee; is it the reflection in the window; is it the reflection of the reflection? Or is it the darkness beyond the edge of light?

The flags on a pole at the corner just south of here seem to be flapping hard, from east to west.

It is a few minutes after 8:00 p.m. now. A couple of cars get parked across the street. Several people - a couple, then a family with four children - hurry to the theater. The young adolescent girl looks happy to be here, hurrying across the street, a few minutes late for the Sunday Night Movie. Three more people arrive and scurry through the dance of snow to the theater.

Some of the vehicles I've seen, I've seen more than once. Time is not linear, but laps us like waves coming ashore. Up the street and back, those pick-ups. Farm boys come to town, and they don't know what else to do, so they do what farm boys do.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS DOWNTOWN RUGBY ON SUNDAY NIGHT MARCH 12, 2006 - (2)

On Sunday, March 12, I spent part of the evening in my car parked on Main Street in downtown Rugby. What do you see of a community upon a random evening, and what does it mean? We don't always know, but we take the notes. This is a report of one such evening in one such community.

Two boys in leather jackets

walk south on the sidewalk along my side of the street, walk rapidly as if a bit of chill pushes them along. Are they going to the movie? It's about 7:50 p.m. now. The movie starts at 8:00 p.m.

I believe there must be another tavern down the street, across from the theater - a man goes in, another man comes out. Snow dances in the street, like Female Dancers at the Overtime Bar.

A long-haired teenager in parka and stocking cap walks south on my side of the street, stepping quickly, holding close to the building to stay out of the wind. You wonder what it's like to be young and different in Rugby. To be young and different in any of these middlewestern towns.

A couple of boys come out from between buildings across the street; they're on bicycles, and ride for a bit on the empty sidewalk before moving out into the street. Then they disappear around a corner. You wonder what it is like to be of an age that you don't realize this is no more meaningless than any of the rest of it. We're born, we live, we die. Sometimes we get to drink a beer before we go; usually we have to pay taxes; sometimes we get to see the Female Dancers showing what they got. Then we die. You want it to mean something, you so damn much want it to mean something.

Cars come up the street; cars down south. The lights of the theater dance as reflections in store windows. Then a Central Ag Consulting pick-up parks right next to me, blocking my view of everything. It's like dying: you're there, but you can't see anything. The driver goes across the street to the bar. I move my car down the street for a better view of the proceedings.

Oh, yes - Jester's Lounge is directly across the street from the theater, next to an insurance agency and a second-hand clothes store. What's with the insurance agents? Is there some law that there have to be as many insurance agents as taverns?

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS DOWNTOWN RUGBY ON SUNDAY NIGHT MARCH 12, 2006 - (1)

On Sunday, March 12, I spent part of the evening in my car parked on Main Street in downtown Rugby. What do you see of a community upon a random evening, and what does it mean? We don't always know, but we take the notes. This is a report of one such evening in one such community.

It's 7:30 p.m. I'm sitting

in my car on Main Street in Rugby, North Dakota, a Sunday evening in March. Wazz up?

The wind picks up the dust of snow and twirls it.

The cop goes west across Main Street behind me. The cop goes east across Main Street in front of me.

The lights on the marquee at the theater create a sense of movement on the street: the moving lights reflect off the windows of stores up and down Main.

An SUV and a pick-up drive north on Main Street. A sedan goes south. A sheriff's deputy comes from the west and turns south at the stop sign.

The wind picks up the dust of snow, swirls it, and it dances.

Off behind my left shoulder, across the street, the Overtime Bar is open for business. There's a pick-up and a van parked in front. There is a sign out front, too, advising us that March 17th will be Men's Night: Female Dancers. We know what that means.

I wonder how many little girls ever dream of growing up to be Female Dancers for Men's Night in a small bar in Rugby, North Dakota, or anywhere else for that matter. What did those women say when they were in grade school and they had to report on "What I Want to Be When I Grow Up?" What does life come to that they end up here, showing their titties to a bunch of drunken men? What goes wrong that it comes to this?

The wind picks up the dust of snow in the street and swirls it. The lights from the theater dance off windows up and down the street. The night grows darker, colder. This is North Dakota.

There's an H&R Block office right next to the bar, so we can pay the wages of sin; and next to that is the Senior Center. Go one more door to the American Family Insurance office. Let's think about this: four buildings clumped together - the tavern, the tax man, the old folks, the insurance man. All we seem to be missing is the church and the undertaker, huh?

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL WALKING AROUND RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 11, 2006 - (3)

Saturday evening, March 11, 2006, I set out to walk the outermost streets of Rugby just as the sun set, on the theory that one might learn things at the edge that he can't at the center. This is my report of that walk.

Big Jim Rocheleau helped build

parts of the grain elevator along the tracks that divide Rugby, a couple of the newer towers. That was some years ago. He tells about the construction foreman hanging by a rope tied to one leg and dangling upside down a hundred and forty feet in the air so he couple nail a header-board into place. The two newest towers were built more recently by a crew of Mexican workers who labored twelve hours on and twelve hours off in alternating crews. Back at Oakwood Inn, four guys occupied each room of the south wing - two of the fellows from the day crew slept in each room at night; two of the fellows from the night crew slept in those same beds during the day. It's called "hot-bunking," and I'd earlier heard about the practice in letters sent by a miner from Wisconsin working at Gardine, Montana, in the 1920s.

By the time I turned to walk south along the east edge of Rugby, night had come on. There is another cemetery out there at the eastern edge of town. This must be how we define ourselves, in relation to where we lay our dead. As I headed south now, street lights showed the way. Where melted snow had been flowing in sheets, now it was starting to freeze, and where it froze, to become slippery. So a fellow had to watch his footing. Overhead, Orion was hunting. I kept walking. The sky got darker.

I turned back to the west when I reach Highway 2 at the south edge of town. Yes, I knew that this route would take me right past the Dairy Queen. And I knew if I went past Dairy Queen I'd have to stop and have a Blizzard. This was, after all, North Dakota. Blizzard. Get it?

When I selected my communities for this Vagabond project, I required that they have a weekly or twice weekly newspaper, a public library, and an historical society. I didn't think about it then, but maybe I should have also required that each community have a Dairy Queen. I like my ice cream. I get that from my dad. Several of the communities do, by the way, and in those which don't, well, I find my ice cream.

So I did have a Blizzard in Rugby. I ate it at a booth in the DQ while watching the courtship rituals of the local inhabitants. That is to say, there was a high school boy in a booth nearby, and a high school girl across the table from him. Mostly I could see that the boy liked to talk and the girl liked to flutter her flirting eyes. I don't know if the girl understood just how powerful the flirting flutter was; and I'm not sure the boy across the table was aware of that power, either; he seemed more interested in himself than in her. Perhaps that's why it's a ritual, so that we remain pretty much blind to it. That the emperor has no clothes is obvious only to someone who doesn't know the emperor, huh? That perhaps this girl is interested in this boy is not obvious to the boy, but to the old bear watching the two of them.

I finished my Blizzard and traversed the short distance from DQ, a block to the east of Highway 3, back to Oakwood Inn, a block to the west of Highway 3. I had walked the perimeter of Rugby. It had taken exactly two hours at my relatively leisurely pace. Beyond the clear division between North Side and South Side and the snow melt's uncertainty, I'm not sure yet what I found on this walkabout. Perhaps it is too soon to have opinions.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL WALKING AROUND RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 11, 2006 - (2)

Saturday evening, March 11, 2006, I set out to walk the outermost streets of Rugby just as the sun set, on the theory that one might learn things at the edge that he can't at the center. This is my report of that walk.

There was a lot of mud

and water wherever I wanted to walk, even on the road in places. Water in Rugby doesn't seem to know whether to flow east or west, north or south, so it often just pools. If you look at a map of the region, you'll see why. At the south edge of the county, the Sheyenne River comes through, taking water east to the Red River, which flows north to Winnipeg. To the north of Rugby, just beyond the county line, the Ox River flows west into the Salyer Wildlife Refuge where it joins the Mouse River. The Mouse comes down out of Canada, where it is called the Souris, and flows southeast through Minot, turns back to the north at Velva, and flows into the Salyer Refuge and from there back into Canada where it appears to join the Assiniboine on its way to meet the Red River in Winnipeg, which is headed north to Lake Winnipeg. The Willow River, still farther north of Rugby, flows west into the Salyer Refuge; the Cutbank River flows east, coming into the Salyer Refuge from the west.

If you stood at the headwaters of the Sheyenne southwest of Rugby and spit good and hard in the other direction, that would run to the Missouri River. Stand at the far edge of Pierce County anywhere else and spit, and that would end up in Lake Winnipeg via one route or another, what didn't simply pool and evaporate. It is any wonder that the water in Rugby stands around indecisive, unsure of where to go? You can see it as you walk about town, how sluggish the melted snow.

I had to walk out of town, pretty much out past the edge of town, to find a street at the edge heading back south. A grain elevator stretches along the railroad tracks from Main Street well to the east of Main Street and keeps any street from crossing the tracks. Does the lack of streets crossing the tracks suggest that someone, at some time, didn't really like the idea of the North Side mingling too much with the South Side? I suppose we can't speculate as to intent, yet I've found only three places in Rugby to cross the tracks. To the east of Main Street, the only place is back out in the country, I think.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL WALKING AROUND RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 11, 2006 - (1)

Saturday evening, March 11, 2006, I set out to walk the outermost streets of Rugby just as the sun set, on the theory that one might learn things at the edge that he can't at the center. This is my report of that walk.

Walking around Rugby. I mean that -

literally. It was about 5:00 p.m. on Saturday, March 11, 2006. I set out to walk the perimeter of Rugby, the western-most streets, the northern-most, eastern-most, and I would come back to my motel room along Highway 2, which is pretty much the southern edge of town.

Someone recently observed to me that the world is a different place entirely when you walk it, compared to when you drive it. I know that. William Least-Heat Moon knew that in Prairy Erth. Walking is de rigueur in this business of deep history.

It had been a warm day; the snow and ice were melting. Water ran in sheets on the asphalt. All dirt had become mud and some of the mud was sloppy. On the west side of Highway 3 as I went north, I saw an inventory of mobile homes and pre-fabs and RVs. Everyone, it seems, wants to be some place, but not everyone is exactly sure where. The sun was in the far west and the rays of light were long-grained and slanted. I walked.

Farther north, and at the western-most edge of town, I found a large cemetery, big enough to need three entrances. It's a good cemetery: people are dying to get in. Someday I will have to spend several hours there looking at tombstones. Seems I spend half my life wandering cemeteries, trying to de-code the dead. You might say that walking and reading tombstones are my hobbies. My darling would call them "obsessions."

If you know much about Rugby, you know that, historically, the railroad tracks divided the community into North Side and South Side, and the division was cultural and economic as well as geographical. The division remains, in that the houses on the north side of town are smaller, less ambitious. The yards are more prone to automotive reclamation projects. Maybe the streets are narrower. Maybe the economic boat of the North Side residents was not lifted on the tide of the Bush tax cuts.

Rugby's water treatment plant is at the very north edge of town. Where they put the sewage plant tells you who has clout and who doesn't. The race track is on the North Side; so is the industrial park, anchored by Rugby Manufacturing and a smaller business, Samsara Cues, which makes cue sticks - very expensive cue sticks, sticks that cost as much as or more than Dick Cheney's 28-gauge shot-gun.

On the very northeast corner of Rugby a state-of-the-art, 136-bed law enforcement center and jail is being built; it will house the sheriff's department and the county's prisoners, and will take in prisoners from other parts of North Dakota, and perhaps even from other states. Think of it: to be sentenced to jail in North Dakota for the winter; talk about motivation to get yourself rehabilitated.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL: RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 10-12, 2006 - (3)

After breakfast on Sunday

I go into the lobby at the Oakwood Inn and sit there reading the paper, watching the news on TV, having coffee with Therese and Big Jim and Clayton - all of us are sitting there. I've been away for two and a half years, yet it is like coming back to family. It is like being swaddled with community. I go away, go about my business, and when I come back, these people are still here; their stories are still interesting; their lives are continuing. Things change - a son in Iraq; a daughter and her husband and their daughter have moved back to Rugby. Things stay the same - Big Jim still drives truck; Therese still spends most of her day taking care of the motel; Teddy is still the handyman, mowing lawn in summer, scooping snow in winter, and whatever else needs to be done. Clayton still gets out and walks, though now he uses a cane instead of a piece of lathe with orange paint on one end of it. Teddy and Clayton still rib each other. Big Jim still tells stories.

This is a lesson: whatever else is going on in the world, however things may seem to crumble, in Rugby life goes on as it has gone on. Big Jim and Therese Rocheleau and Therese' father Clayton and Ted the handyman keep doing what they need to do. It is something you can depend on: here in the middle of the North American continent, in the very geographical center, things continue. It is worth the 722-mile drive back to Rugby just to see that the center holds.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL: RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 10-12, 2006 - (2)

It's Saturday morning,

March 11, 2006, and Clayton Olson and I are up to our elbows in breakfast at the Cornerstone. He's having #4, the eggs, hash, and toast; I'm having #5, sausage patty, eggs, and pancakes, just like in Curlew: Home, p. 13. Big Jim walks in and joins us. They call him Big Jim because he is, well, a big fella. You could call him Big Red, too, if you thought you could get away with it. What he has left of his hair has a reddish cast to it. Male pattern baldness is taking the rest.

Big Jim likes to tell stories. Yep, he has barely sat down and ordered his food and already he's telling one. He's a truck driver, and he hears a lot of stories on the road so always has one to tell. He's a good truck-driver, keeps a good log, and can make deliveries on time that other drivers often miss. Unlike a lot of North Dakota truck drivers, he doesn't mind taking loads to the east coast, so he has work.

We finish breakfast. Clayton thought he should buy, that it was his turn. I take Clayton back to Oakwood Inn and all of us go about our separate business. Jim and his son-in-law will be going ice fishing in the afternoon. I go back to my room and write.

On Sunday morning, Big Jim takes Clayton and me to breakfast at the Cornerstone. Jim is buying today.

Jim tells us about the ice fishing. Says I could have come along and not gotten worn out running out to check the tip-ups. There weren't many fish biting. Another fellow out on the ice was catching fish, but Jim says he was putting hot dogs and sausages on a big hook and pulling in these large northern.

Clayton says, "That fellow was just kidding you."

"No, no," Jim says, his hair a bit more reddish with the devil in him, "that's what he said he was using - hot dogs and sausages. We just had the wrong bait."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL: RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA MARCH 10-12, 2006 - (1)

I arrive in Rugby

on Friday afternoon, March 10, 2006, and pull up to the office at Oakwood Inn. Therese Rocheleau is on duty - she is always on duty, or nearly so - and she checks me in. We sit in the lobby and have a cup of coffee, then another cup, and catch up on the news. Big Jim is on the road, expected back Friday night or Saturday; Jim drives long-haul semi. Therese's dad, Clayton Olson, is staying at the motel again this winter with his big dog Ufdah. Jim and Therese's son who had been talking about joining the Marines when I was here three years ago did join the Marines. He's a loader in a tank crew stationed at Camp Falluja, Iraq, right in the heart of trouble. Therese talked to him in January. She says her son tells Jim things he doesn't tell her, and it's probably just as well because she worries.

Clayton Olson comes out of his room and into the lobby and joins us. Clayton is movin' kinda slow these days. He says some mornings it takes him an hour to get loosened up so he can move at all. Arthritis. He's about 80 years old, you know. He has his cup with him and has coffee with us.

Teddy, the handyman about the place, stops in to say hello. He mentions that Big Jim is going to cut down those cottonwoods that dropped a big limb on me the last time I was here. How big was the branch? It was all two big men could do to move it. When it broke lose, it didn't make much sound. When I looked up, the sharp end of it was about four feet from my head. I was fortunate to get out of the way of the worst of it - a small cut on my forehead, a scrape on my abdomen; the chair I had been sitting in, bent and ruined; the table I had been writing at, tipped over. The corner of my tent behind me got a small tear.

I had just been writing about how those cottonwoods talk, talk, talk - I hadn't even finished the sentence when the limb came down on me. Lesson: If you're gonna talk about cottonwood trees, don't be sitting beneath one.

We have coffee, then Clayton wants to take me to supper over at the Cornerstone Cafe. I remind him that he bought me breakfast the last time: it is my turn. And with that understanding, we head to the restaurant.

Clayton thinks the soup and salad bar will be enough supper for him. He gets himself a bowl of clam chowder and a salad. I order the BBQ ribs. Umm-good. We talk, Clayton and I. He moves a little slower than he used to, and he has gone a little more deaf than he was.

When I drop Clayton back at the motel, we agree to go to breakfast in the morning. I do a quick drive through downtown, just to be sure Rugby is there as I remember it.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA - MARCH 11, 2006 - (3)

On Saturday, March 11, 2006, I went to downtown Rugby, North Dakota, to the depot where Amtrak stops to load and unload passengers morning and night. I wanted to see the train as it came through. You don't get to see that in every town, and Amtrak doesn't stop in every town it goes through. This is a report of what I saw.

A young lady comes into the depot. Her shirt says she belongs to Senor Frog's Surf Club. Senor Frog's surf has to be an awfully long way from this centermost point on the North American continent. The woman wanders about the station then goes back outside.

The young lady of the grey sweats calls Amtrak for "Train Status." I don't know what she is told, but she sighs deeply when she sits down after she hangs up. Even veteran train-waiters get the blues. She re-opens her book. We may be here for awhile.

I'd like to ask her where she is going, but I don't. I feel like a scientist who wants to stay out of the experiment so as not to affect the results. If I change one little thing here, now, I change everything, the whole world.

I know, I know, my mere presence here changes everything. You change the scene simply by showing up. Nothing will ever be the same. I know that. I try to factor that into my observations.

I am here to learn what a place like this smells like - the old tiles on the walls, the wood window frames, dust on the hot radiators. I'm here to see the shine of the wood on the benches in the waiting area - a shine not polished on by some cleaning person, but worn into the wood by the touch of many people. When you touch a piece of wood that has been touched and touched again and again down through the genereations, sometimes you get an electric jolt. You touch all those who have ever touched this, a spot of wood worn smooth and bright. You touch that woman waiting for her mother's body to arrive on the train. You touch the soldier going off to war. You touch the wife who will be left behind, baby in the crook of her arm, as she sits beside her man and her man sits beside his duty. If you listen carefully, you can hear the hub-bub of the busy depot, crowded with passengers waiting to get on.

The push and shove of ghosts here, that's what I hear as the train pulls into the station. It's coming from the east, from Chicago, heading west, towards Seattle. The girl with the grey sweats and yellow jacket goes outside; the conductor has come down out of the train and she gives him her ticket. The girl belonging to Senor Frog's Club shows her ticket to the conductor, too. Her black-haired, goateed boyfriend kisses her good-bye.

The train pauses for what - three minutes - no more. A family gets off, mom, dad, and three littles ones. The two girls get on.

All aboard!

STeeee - the brakes release.

It's only a block away and the engineer sounds his warming, the train whistle. Coming through!

And then it's gone. The train out of sight and only a rumble.

Then it's not even a rumble any more.

I was here. I saw it. It is gone.

It is still here in my heart.

That's why I came.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA - MARCH 11, 2006 - (2)

On Saturday, March 11, 2006, I went to downtown Rugby, North Dakota, to the depot where Amtrak stops to load and unload passengers morning and night. I wanted to see the train as it came through. You don't get to see that in every town, and Amtrak doesn't stop in every town it goes through. This is a report of what I saw.

There are six sets of rails at trackside north of the depot. To the east, across Main Street and on the other side of the tracks, stands a big grain elevator, one of those giants of the prairie. There used to be a railyard here for the Great Northern Railroad, back when rail was king, if you remember those days.

Inside the depot there is enough noise that I'm not sure I could even hear a train approaching. There is the deep growl of a furnace running somewhere in the building. The pop machine starts up and redoubles the roar. Something electronic beeps somewhere behind a closed door.

That young lady waiting to board the train is reading a book. She does not appear anxious or bewildered but composes herself with the assurance of a veteran waiter of trains.

The old greybeard sitting in my seat makes these notes, looks out at the tracks under grey sky, goes back to hen-scratching. It's as if I am waiting for this old building to tell me what it knows. And it won't. Oh, there are several photos up around the lobby, related to Rugby and railroading, and they have captions: they show us a younger damsel of a depot; they show me a rotary snowplow digging a train out after a blizzard; they show me a group photo of the volunteers who restored the depot.

Half an hour before the train is expected, a young man makes an appearance - black hair, a black goatee, black jacket. He walks in, looks around, walks back out. I don't see him walk away, however, so I'm assuming he has walked towards the west end of the platform to wait for the train outside. I'm sitting inside, very warm, waiting for a train, too, but actually waiting for nothing. I came here without expectation, to see what might be revealed; and I might find that the universe is not sending me a message this morning, that there is nothing happening, that this is just a train station holding on in a small town on the northern plains, and either there is no story to tell or the story is so common it doesn't need telling. I sit here anyway and continue to watch, continue to wait. If there is a story here, and I'm meant to tell it, I have to be here to see it unfold. Ninety-nine percent of the time as you wait and watch and hope, nothing happens. Sometimes the story is that there's no story, just the dull drab light on a grey day, the refrigeration unit on the soda machine kicking back in and filling the place with noise. The young woman waiting for the train uses the ladies room. Heat rolls out of the modern radiators along the walls and I am plenty warm. The world holds its breath. She comes out of the bathroom, that young woman, puts on her yellow and blue jacket, looks at the clock. This day is just like any day. It's twenty minutes yet til the train is expected.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA - MARCH 11, 2006 - (1)

On Saturday, March 11, 2006, I went to downtown Rugby, North Dakota, to the depot where Amtrak stops to load and unload passengers morning and night. I wanted to see the train as it came through. You don't get to see that in every town, and Amtrak doesn't stop in every town it goes through. This is a report of what I saw.

It's a frosty morning, but mild for North Dakota, you might say. Yesterday the sun was melting snow here. This morning's light is filtered through clouds.

She's a grand old dame, the Rugby depot - restored and kept up, yes; scrubbed and painted and clean; but old. Inside, the terrazzo floor is cracked near the entrance to the lobby; the varnish of the wood in the windows is cracked the way an old lady wrinkles.

Keeping a station agent in Rugby has been a struggle. Ultimately, of course, the question of Amtrak's survival is yet to be answered. In th short term, the Rugby station remains open - even as the station at Devil's Lake seventy-five miles to the east was closed a few years ago.

The station is open for business on weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. The building is unlocked and the lobby is open for an hour or so before and after the evening train is due at 10:30 p.m. week nights, and the same both morning and evening for trains on the weekend.

A sign posted in the passenger area reminds us that the station remains open on the basis of tickets sold - "so buy your tickets in Rugby" is the take-home message. A newspaper article has been posted on the south wall which notes that 1319 tickets were sold out of the Rugby station in 2004, compared to 8077 for Minot, 4130 for Grand Forks, and 4105 for Fargo that same year.

The station got unlocked just as I was arriving in the half-light, the lobby lit and the caretaker just leaving. A sign had been taped to the ticket window noting that today's train is running about forty minutes late and should arrive about 7:50 a.m.

I have nothing but time. And trains run behind schedule; it's their nature.

A young woman comes into the waiting area with a big suitcase and a carry-on, coat and purse. She's wearing a grey sweat-suit. At one point she makes a call on her cell phone to alert someone of the train's late arrival.

From the outside it is easy to see the station as imposing, made of dark brick with a cement foundation. Some of the wood at the roof-line does need a coat of paint. And a few bricks from Minnesota Ceramics which make up the walkways have broken or are missing. North Dakota winters are hard on everything. Winter is hard on the people too, but it makes them tough.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (8)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond: Well, you know what the other side of "determined" is? Stubborn. We think we're determined Germans and some people think we're stubborn Germans.

I have interviewed 165 people. Everyone of them had a story. In Smith Center, I stayed at a bed and breakfast. On Thursdays they had a brunch. The woman who runs the place said, "Come down for this." I went down and there were five women having brunch, and they all had a story to tell me. Immediately after the brunch, of course, I went upstairs and wrote down everything I could remember. The last story was so interesting. She said, "What's your town in South Dakota?"

I said, "Redfield."

She said, "Oh, my God, that's where I'm from."

Her great-grandfather and two sons came from Sweden to Redfield, South Dakota, and put in crops and built a house. The next spring he told great-grandmother to come and bring the rest of the children - he thought there were six other children, but he had left her pregnant, so there were seven. She put them on the boat, got them to New York, put them on the train, arrived in Redfield, South Dakota, at three o'clock in the morning. She lined the children up on the benches in train depot, and she and the oldest boy set out. They knew where the farm was from great-grandfather's letters, and they were going to walk at night from the depot out to the farm. Which they did. When they got out there, the horses were not in the barn and the house was empty. Great-grandfather and the two oldest boys had taken the wagon to town to pick up the family and bring them to the farm. When the wagonload of family got back to the farm, great-grandmother had breakfast on the table. That was their arrival in Redfield.

It is so amazing: everyone has a story to tell - either about their life here, or about how they arrived here.

Well, thank you for sharing your stories with me. It has been very nice to spend time with you.

Audience: Let's give him a big round of applause and invite him for coffee and cookies.

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (7)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond, continued: I spent a day riding with a farmer harvesting his wheat in Smith Center, Kansas. A thirty-foot cutter bar on the combine. I've never seen anything like it. The whole combine was beyond my comprehension. That's how they do it - the fields go on and on, big fields. A farmer won't have the whole field; he'll have just up to here. And I said, "Well, how do you know where the line is?"

He said, "Oh, you see that white post out there in the ditch? We go by that. I farm over to the post on my side; he farms over to it on his side. We don't have any problem with it." I wouldn't have figured that out. He had to tell me.

Then he told me this was a new combine, the first year he'd run it. The first or second day he had it out in the field, it just stopped. It shut itself off and it wouldn't start. There was a code on the dashboard, a code number. He had a cell phone and he called the John Deere dealer in town and said, "It turned itself off and it won't start up. This is the code. What's the matter?"

The dealer said, "I'll get back to you." He looked it up in the code book and called the farmer back and said, "The combine thinks it's time to take a break. Every six hours, it shuts down for fifteen minutes. Get out and stretch your legs."

Audience: What is your nationality?

Vagabond: I'm a lot of German on my dad's side. Montag is Mon-tag, which is Monday in German. And on my mom's side, I think I'm mostly horse thief. Allens - Scottish and Irish and German.

Audience: There are a lot of Germans-from-Russia in this area.

Vagabond: Yes, a lot.

Audience: This is the point of the triangle in North Dakota, Rugby - the triangle for Germans-from-Russia settlement here. Dickinson over to maybe Wahpeton, and up to Rugby is the area they settled. There aren't many in the northwest and northeast corners of the state.

Vagabond: It's interesting that my Ohio town, Eaton, has a community of Germans-from-Russia who came to settle there.

Audience: My grandfather was a German-from Russia who came to Rugby. He was a blacksmith. He walked seven miles to Rugby every day, and back. Seven miles one way and seven miles back.

Vagabond: One of you said North Dakotans were hardy people. They are hardy people.

Audience: That's for sure.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (6)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Audience: I dare say somebody will be upset about the ladies coming to Overtime Bar. That always happens.

Audience: I'm  surprised they actually got that through.

Audience: I've seen the uproar in every other town.

Audience: It might not happen.

Vagabond: Well, it's happening Friday night. Today is Monday. So you've got five days. I'm going to be gone by then, but I'd almost like to come back and see what that would be like - naked girls in Rugby, North Dakota....

Audience: It may show up in the paper that they're run out of town.

Vagabond: Last Saturday morning, I went to the train station just to see Amtrak come through town. Two girls got on the train, a family got off. The train stopped for what - ninety seconds. I sat in the lobby for an hour before it got here, looked at the pictures and what-not, watched the train come in and watched it go out. We don't have that everywhere. That's something special here.

Audience: The president of Amtrak was coming through on a private car one time, and he wouldn't get up to greet the people at the station to see him. The mayor of Rugby, Dale Niewoehner, raised a lot of heck, and Amtrak came back with a camera crew, to apologize, and interviewed people in Rugby. The mayor was really upset this guy couldn't get up to greet the crowd. So he's quite a mayor.

Vagabond: One of the things I find is that there are a lot of people in the world, and a lot of writers, who don't have much appreciation for what goes on out here between the 84th and the 100th Meridians. This is pretty much the fly-over zone for them, and they don't know what we do and they don't know how we do it. So one of the things I'm doing is visiting factories and so on. I spent a day riding with a guy who runs a rendering truck operation. We went out and picked up dead animals and took them to the rendering plant in Norfolk, Nebraska. I described that in enough detail that the reader could probably smell what I was smelling. So many people in the United States don't know where meat comes from; they think it comes wrapped in plastic. It doesn't come wrapped in plastic. And raising meat has its less pleasant aspects and perhaps pople should know about those unpleasantries. So I want to tell what it is we do and how we do it.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (5)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond: Do you have any questions for me about my project or the people I've talked to? Some day all this will be a book. My wife says sometimes she thinks I have so much fun doing the research that I'll never finish the book - and she might be right. I am having a lot of fun with the research. I have interviewed 165 people so far for the project. I'm expecting to spend perhaps another five years going to all the towns again and again - probably a total of eight or nine weeks in each of the twelve towns, which is a lot of time away from home. Sometimes my wife appreciates that. Sometimes she says, "Aren't you going out of town pretty soon!"

Audience: You said you sat on Main Street in Rugby on Sunday night and watched for an hour. What did you see? We see nothing.

Vagabond: Well, how many people know that the Overtime Bar is going to have Female Dancers on Friday night?

Audience: I can't believe that it would actually be allowed.

Vagabond: I saw that and wondered how it comes to this, dancing naked in Rugby. I saw snow swirl and dance in the street. I was sitting across the street from the Overtime Bar, facing west and looking south, and the lights from the marquee of the theater came off a window across the street, so I could see them straight to the south and in reflection. The cop came through three times. The third time, two people had just come out of Jester's Lounge and got into their vehicles. He came through the intersection just as they pulled up Main Street, so he was able to follow them up the street and make sure they were driving straight and narrow, which I believe they were. And the snow swirling - did I tell you about the snow swirling in the street?

Audience: The theater is open on Sunday night and I was thinking maybe people were out?

Vagabond: There were a lot of people out. I think there were twenty-two cars parked in front of Jester's Lounge, not all of them for Jester's Lounge. I saw a lot of people run across the street to the theater. So that's an important place in town. The bars are important, and the theater is important.

And that's about all that was happening.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (4)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond: What are some other qualities of the people here?

Audience: Honest.

Audience: Ambitious.

Audience: The people here have "character," which covers a lot of the qualities.

Audience: Hard-working.

Audience: Friendly.

Vagabond: That's the first adjective I got when I came in here. I met Lisa, the Activities Director, and we were talking and she said, "The people of North Dakota are friendly."

Audience: You asked that question, "Why do we say we help each other out?" Why do we say that?

Audience: We're neighbors. We know them and when they get sick, you go to help them. We're neighborly.

Audience: I think one think this town does a lot is when a member of the community becomes ill or has a tragedy, this community is constantly putting on pancake breakfasts and other benefits. These are listed in every bulletin for every church. It's always free-will. You have different groups putting things on. I think sometimes people don't always know what to do to help in these situations, so often they bring food. Bringing food when somebody dies. Raising money through food. Whatever.

Vagabond: The first thing I have concluded about the middlewest is that food is love. If people want to show you that you're welcome, they feed you. That's pretty much the same from Rugby, North Dakota, to Eaton, Ohio, from Alexandria, Minnesota, to Maysville, Missouri, and Smith Center, Kansas - all across the middlewest. It might also be true in Kentucky and New York, but I know it's true here - I've experienced it.

Audience: When there is a tragedy or something happens, people don't even ask, they just come and do. The first year we were married my husband got caught in the power take-off. It was the fall of the year and we didn't have any hay home yet or anything. He got home from the hospital and there were all these farmers in the yard hauling the hay home. We didn't now it. We didn't even have a telephone for somebody to tell us. All of a suidden, they were there. This was a Sunday.

Vagabond: That's the story I hear in every community. And they say it's not just our neighbors - if a stranger is coming through town and his car breaks down, it will be five minutes and someone will be there to see if they can help.

Audience: But if you go thirty miles out of town, out in the middle of nowhere, then no one will come. The closer you are to town.... I don't know what it is.... The closer you are to town, the more apt someone is to help you.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (3)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond: At home I like to say that a traffic jam is three cars at the intersection.

Audience: Yes. If you are trying to get on the highway here and you have to wait for five or ten cars, it's like "What's going on?" - at 5 p.m., ten cars going by.

Audience: It's the atmosphere of a small community. I like the feeling of safety here. I wonder how many of us locked our doors when we were growing up.

Audience: We still don't.

Audience: Yeah, it's real safe here.

Audience: Cars - we never lock our cars. We know nobody will take it.

Audience: It's a safe feeling. And for our children it's a safe feeling.

Vagabond: There is no one trying to snatch them off the sidewalk as they're coming home from school.

Audience: And there are neighbors nearby. The children can go there if they need to. You don't have to worry.

Audience: When my oldest went to college the first time, he went to Bismarck, ND. Oh, my gosh, that was something - we were so scared for him. In Bismarck, of all places.

Audience: I just think of going to the Mall of America [in Minneapolis, Minnesota]. We went there on vacation. I got so tired of all the people. Now I like a crowd now and then. Don't you think that's part of it?

Vagabond: The peace and quiet and the pace of life?

Audience: What I found out when I first got here: you come to North Dakota, you go into a lrestaurant, and most North Dakotans will turn around and size you up, to see if they know you. That's very rare in Phoenix or Texas that people will look up to see who you are. I find it's very rare when I meet someone from North Dakota that I don't know somebody they know - I may not know them, but I know somebody they know. You're not a stranger anywhere.

Vagabond: What about the characteristics of the people of this area? What adjectives would you use to describe the people here?

Audience: We're hardy.

Vagabond: Yes - I would say if you're going to make it in North Dakota, you're hardy. Now, why do you say that?

Audience: Well, we help each other when it's needed, like we ought to.

Vagabond: And you say "hardy" because...

Audience: We survive the good years and the bad years.

Vagabond: Tell me about how people help each other here.

Audience: I worked in the hospital for twenty-two years, and I farmed. Had a family and everything. You just keep on working day after day.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (2)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Vagabond: How would you answer the question "Why are you here?"

Audience: Well, my daughter is here, that's why I came up here. To be close to my daughter.

Vagabond: That's one of the most common answers - family. Another common one is "job - my work brought me to this place." [To Sam Thomas in the audience:] Your work brought you to North Dakota; you are originally from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Then once you got here you couldn't leave, and we'll have to find out why that happened. Others of you - why are you here?

Audience: I married into North Dakota. My husband's family came up here from South Dakota and saw all this beautiful hay land and moved up here. And I married him.

Vagabond: So you married into North Dakota?

Audience: 1944.

Vagabond: The rest of you - why are you here? Those of you who served during World War II got to see the whole world. You could have picked some place else, yet you chose North Dakota. You came back here. Why?

Audience: I was in the service for three years and I was all over the United States.

Vagabond: And you came back here and have lived here since?

Audience: I ranched twelve miles out of town. I wanted to ranch. I ranched twelve miles east of here.

Vagabond: So you came back to do what you wanted to do for a livelihood.

Audience: This area has all the things you really want - good family, good living conditions. It's just a terrific community.

Audience: I'm one of a younger generation and people ask me: what are you here for; what do you stay in Rugby for; why don't you want to go onto bigger and better? This is my home. I like it because there are no so many people and because of what it has to offer - it is a quieter life. We can walk out our back door and be in the country. It's a good place to bring up your family; it's the surroundings here; it's nature. My husband loves to fish and hunt. That's probably one big reason why he stays here, because he loves to fish and hunt. In North Dakota, the hunting is right out your back door. Fishing is an hour away. There's a sense here that you belong to a community. It's close-knit. We don't have to deal with the hub-bub of traffic to get to work. The quiet. You know people here; you can talk to them. Living in a big city where the hub-bub is doesn't do it for us.

To be continued....

A CONVERSATION AT THE HAALAND HOME RUGBY, ND MONDAY, MARCH 13, 2006 - (1)

On Monday, March 13th, I made a presentation

about my Vagabond project at the Haaland Home in Rugby. I described the the origin of the project, the scope of it, and the way I am going about my exploration of the middlewest. And then I read to the folks gathered in front of me from my Vagabond journals, emphasizing some of the Rugby materials I have gathered. After I completed my talk, I opened the floor to questions and comments. This is part of the conversation that followed.

Audience: Some of our towns are disappearing. They were here for a reason, and now they are disappearing. They were approximately seven miles apart so you could travel the distance and make it home with a team of horses. A good portion of the people here were from those smaller towns. People from the smaller towns move into the bigger ones - that's what is happening right now.

Vagabond: Did Barton, ND, used to be a bigger, more thriving community? What happened?

Audience: The roads, the cars.

Vagabond: People could travel farther?

Audience: Barton wanted to be the county seat. They guys from Rugby gave the guys from Barton some whiskey on the train into Rugby to vote on where the county seat would be located - they got whiskey if they would vote for Rugby. Barton used to be the county seat. They gave the fellows liquor on the train to vote for Rugby, that's what helped.

Audience: At one time there were three banks in Barton. It was bigger than Rugby. Five elevators.

Audience: What about Knox?

Audience: Three elevators, a grocery store, banks. All gone now.

Vagabond:  That's what we're seeing across much of the middlewest - the outlying towns are shrinking, the schools are closing down, consolidating, going into the school in the county seat pretty typically. A lot of people are unhappy about it. I know that in Iowa the powers-that-be say that in ten years there will be no more than 100 school districts. That's one for every county, plus an extra one for Des Moines, I suppose.

In some places, the counties are consolidating, so two counties will have one courthouse, one sheriff's department, one health service in the two-county area. One of the communities gets the consolidation; the other community gets smaller.

Audience: How big was Drake in earlier days?

Audience: Oh, it was 2000.

Vagabond: And now?

Audience: Oh, it went down quite a bit - it used to have two hotels. Restaurants. There isn't anything there now. They went down a lot. We had three car dealers at one time in Drake. I worked at one of them for twenty-five years. And now there are no car dealers - one burned down, and the other ones were torn down.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 21, 2003 - (23)

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.

Schmaltz's father helped him

get established well north of Rugby among the French and Norwegians there. "I had a friend among the Norwegians," Schmaltz said, "a fellow who was half French. He told me one of the leaders in the community said when I moved up here: 'Well, we've got to be careful now, we've got a German from Russia up here amongst us.'" Schmaltz farmed the place anyway, and now his son Jeff works the land. Schmaltz still helps out: "I don't know if he needs me but I have to do it, I can't sit in the house and watch him work...."

We sat in the house drinking coffee and talking with Schmaltz for three hours. His family's story will be important for me in understanding the life of Rugby and Pierce County. Like so many others in Rugby, Schmaltz opened his house to me, opened his heart, his life, and shared his understanding. How do you say Thank You for such a gift? I don't know. I suppose that the best I can do is write the truest account possible of the Germans from Russia in Pierce County.

***

LEAVING NORTH DAKOTA: JANUARY 2003

A dirty tooth of snow, heartbeat, frozen
sound. The approaching headlights are so far
away. The early morning sky is like
an airplane with wheels set for landing,
lights on, hung like a planet in the east.
Invest nothing, you lose nothing. If you
lose, lose big. There are ghosts on the landscape
behind me, like a flash of blizzard snow,
like the fog of one's own breathing - enough
to make us grieve for what we've lost, for what's
been taken, been taken and not put back.

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 21, 2003 - (22)

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.

In the afternoon Jim Rocheleau

and I drove north out of Rugby to see Jim Schmaltz on land he's farmed all his adult life. Schmaltz helped to found the Germans from Russia organization in North Dakota, and the chapter in Rugby (which has recently disbanded). Schmaltz is a man with a large voice and expansive gestures. Though he speaks German, you wouldn't say he speaks it with a German accent; rather his is the high, tight speech of his fellow North Dakotans: they don't talk like Canadians here, exactly, but you sure wouldn't confuse them with Texans either.

Schmaltz talked to me about the migration of Germans from Germany to Russia in the late 1700s and early 1800s, and about their migration from Russia to the United States in the late 1800s and early 1900s when the rights promised by Catherine the Great to the German immigrants started to be revoked by Czar Alexander and open persecution followed. Perhaps the fortunate of these Germans from Russia migrated to the United States; of those who didn't, some were shot, some were exiled to Siberia, most traces of them were erased from the Black Sea area they'd settled originally.

Schmaltz's grandfather ended up farming south of Rugby; his father farmed south of Rugby too. Life was not easy for those who immigrated to the extremes of the North Dakota winter. Schmaltz told a variation of the story I'd read in the Rugby Centennial book, about his grandfather and the local priest traveling by sleigh on a clear day when a fierce blizzard suddenly blew up. Schmaltz said they freed the horses, turned the sleigh box over, and took refuge in its protection. Next day neighbors or relatives saw the tongue of the sleigh sticking out above the snow and freed the men who had been singing hymns all night and praying to keep from falling to sleep, falling into the sleep that would mean death by freezing. In the bright light of the following afternoon, they were freed from the snow that had buried them, that had imprisoned them, that had protected them.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 21, 2003 - (21)

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.

Each year the Moms' Club

has to do one public service project in the community. One project was gathering winter coats from the community and dispersing them to those in need. The group has established its own once-a-week pre-school using the various expertises of the moms in the group to enrich their children's learning experience. The most recent project involved putting together "overnight bags" for children taken from their parents and placed in foster homes. Businesses in Rugby were "overwhelmingly generous" in helping fill the overnight bags with necessities such as tooth brush and tooth paste, comb, soap, etc. The Land's End Company donated forty bags. When prepared, the overnight bags were turned over to the county's social services department to dispense as the need arose. For its efforts, the Rugby Moms' Club recently won its organization's "Most Outstanding Chapter" award. Tammy served a year and a half as the chapter's president and has now let go of the reins and works as a member of the group rather than as its leader. "It's hard to let go of control," Tammy said, "but I'm learning."

As Tammy didn't grow up in Rugby, she brings an outsiders view to the discussion of the issues facing the community. She doesn't wear the blinders that the rest of us have when we live all our lives in a community. Yet sometimes because she is not native she is not privy to why things are the way they are. This is a tension - between accepting and being accepted, knowing and not knowing - that may be common in all the Vagabond focus communities, and indeed across all of rural America generally.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 21, 2003 - (20)

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.

Wanda seems to be a wise,

a sophisticated, a humble woman. Of being widowed, she says the first year is the toughest: "We are not prepared to be alone." Friends and neighbors, she notes, are quick to offer support, but it lasts only for two weeks or so, then they go on to help the next person who needs it and you are left to wrestle your own grief. When her husband died suddenly some twenty years ago - he was not yet sixty - she asked the doctors for a moment alone with his body in the hospital room. "I told him I'd be along shortly," she said. "But that's not how it has turned out." She continues to live and give in Rugby. And she was not content to tell me her story only, so Wanda called her next door neighbor, Tammy Fossum, and invited her over for coffee and conversation with me.

Tammy was the impetus behind the founding of a Moms' Club in Rugby. She met her husband Randy through her work in the trucking industry when she was living in Grand Forks. Discussion over the phone and via fax turned from business to things more personal and romantic and soon enough they married. When Tammy moved to Rugby, it wasn't long before she found that the Rugby natives in her circumstances - the stay-at-home moms with small children - already had support systems in place, family and friends, and they had little time left to welcome a newcomer who felt awfully alone in her new community. Convinced she couldn't possibly be the only one in Rugby in her predicament, she wondered what to do. On the internet she found information about the Moms' Club and got instructions from the national organization on how to go about founding a chapter in Rugby. She scheduled a meeting for interested moms at the library and found plenty of interest. Soon the group had a charter and bylaws and a president - Tammy herself. Soon they were meeting in the basement of Tammy's house because there was no other space available in Rugby where the noise of all the women's children would be welcome. For the safety of its members, the national organization has a rule against chapters meeting in private homes, a rule Wanda felt she could bend because "I haven't met anyone in Rugby I wouldn't be comfortable inviting into my house."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 22, 2003 - (19)

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.

Yesterday at 8:15 a.m., as planned,

I met Wanda Nielsen at her house. She greeted me with coffee and warm crumb cake. I think that in Rugby, as across much of the middle west, food is love. Wanda is a widow. She is wise and she is giving. I'd been told she is Rugby's "bird lady," and so she is. You can see the bird feeding stations just outside the window of her breakfast nook, and a bird bath with heated water that stays open even in the below-zero temperatures of Rugby's winters. Soon enough three bossy blue jays appeared at the feeders, all of them wanting to be in charge of business, then came a chickadee feeding upside down. As we talked of her interest in birds, Wanda mentioned that in spring Baltimore orioles come through Rugby; when she hears of their first appearance she'll put quarters of an orange in the back yard. If she has six or eight pieces of orange out there, she'll have six or eight Baltimore orioles feeding at them. Wanda has taught a lot of Rugby people about birds - Boy Scouts and school children and senior groups and just about anybody who asks her. Her interest spills out and she has to share it. The American Birding Association lists Wanda's phone number for its members looking for more information about birds that summer in Rugby or that pass through in spring and fall migrations. People can call her with questions and sometimes they can get her to lead them on bird-watching expeditions to the J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge north of Rugby.

Wanda is a transplant to Rugby from Iowa. She was born in Des Moines. Her father was a sheriff there, he was killed in the line of duty when Wanda was four years old. Wanda attended Iowa State University, which is where she met her husband. He was studying in the Food Sciences program. They married and she followed him to Rugby. They raised a family in Rugby while her husband operated the Rugby Creamery. The business had been owned by the Nielsen family since 1915. When it was sold in the latter part of the last century, that was the end of the independent dairy in North Dakota - Rugby Creamery was the last of them.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 21, 2003 - (18)

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.

Dale offered, on tape, that

sometimes Rugby can be a hard place to come into - it can appear closed to outsiders, a little cliquish, which is a complaint similar to what I've heard in Ripon, Wisconsin, from outsiders coming to live in the city. In addition to not having grown up in Rugby, when Dale started his funeral home in the 1970s, he was setting himself squarely in competition with the Anderson Funeral Home, which advertises "Quality Care with Quiet Dignity Since 1921."

Dale and I talked some about the need to say Thank You in both our business and our personal lives - he thinks this has become something of a lost art. We talked about the need to create and maintain relationships with those who have power over the things that are important to you - in his case, keeping Amtrak service in Rugby. He recalls that a fellow called him for help when Amtrak was ready to discontinue service to Devil's Lake, some fifty-six miles east of Rugby along Highway 2. Dale had to tell him: "It's too late. This isn't something you can do anything about now, you needed to be working on it five years ago."

Dale has served sixteen years on the Park Board and sixteen years on the City Council, in addition to his time as mayor. He is not only an advocate of keeping Amtrak healthy in Rugby, but also of keeping Rugby healthy. He admits, however, that if he had the answer to the problems of small towns in rural America, he'd be in big demand. He thinks that if it is to succeed in the future, Rugby needs to do a better job of marketing the wonderful resources it has. The intersection of Highways 2 & 3 where Rugby sits is a prime location that has yet to be taken full advantage of.

You come away from a visit with the Niewoehners full of enthusiasm for Rugby, yet with an understanding that there is much to be done as the city heads into the uncertain future that is promised rural America.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 20, 2003 CONT'D - (17)

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.

I met Dale and Marilyn Niewoehner

yesterday afternoon at their apartment above the funeral home. They live in a museum - quite a collection of elephants of various sorts which belong to Marilyn; of ocean-liners, which belong to Dale; and various other obsessions sprinkled in, including a collection of most of the translations of Gone With the Wind. Dale and Marilyn salvage architectural features from old buildings, so you'll see stained glass windows from a church, doors from a school, etc.

I interviewed Dale in his capacity as the most vocal advocate for keeping Amtrak alive and well in Rugby; in his capacity as mayor of the city; and to talk about his family's story in North Dakota.

Marilyn prepared a wonderful supper for us, chicken baked with rice, broccoli, salad, ice cream and a Rippin' Good cookie for dessert. The salesman for one of Dale's suppliers lives in Ripon, Wisconsin, and brings the Niewoehners cookies from the cookie factory there, just eight miles from my home.

Dale has his obsessions - Amtrak service to Rugby, ocean-liners, old bells, old fountain pens. Marilyn has her obsessions - sewing, a collection of sewing machines, reproductions of women's clothing from 1860-1907 that she sewed herself, elephants, Gone With the Wind. The Niewoehrners showed me their apartment, Dale showed me the funeral parlor on the first floor, both of them took me to the old Presbyterian church next door where Marilyn runs her business selling embroidered goods, "Em-broideries." She also has the Victorian Dress Museum in the former Episcopal church the Niewoehners own, where she displays the forty dresses she has sewn, some of them award-winning reproductions. At one time the Niewoeh-ners also owned the Methodist church in Pleasant Lake but they've since sold it.

When I return to Rugby I will interview Marilyn for her perspective on life in Rugby, for she comes to the topic as an outsider and one who doesn't seem to accept the accepted wisdom. Dale introduces himself to new people in town as Rugby's "trouble-maker." Both Dale and Marilyn appear to bring passion to whatever they do, enthusiasm for what Rugby has to offer, and - having come into the community from outside - perhaps a bit of distance that those born and bred in the city can't manage.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 20, 2003 CONT'D - (16)

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.

Earlier in the day yesterday,

I'd gone into downtown Rugby to get some supplies. I walked around the streets for awhile. And while the temperatures had moderated considerably, it was still cold enough I didn't want to walk for long, but drove the length and breadth of Rugby to get a sense of how it lays upon the land. You have to admit this is a community made by the railroad, the way a river town is made by the river. Here the tracks run right through the heart of downtown. Back when Rugby was founded, the railroad had the power to create communities like Rugby, the power to determine which settlements thrived and which died.

*

At breakfast yesterday, I sat at the Cornerstone Cafe lost in my own thoughts. I was pulled back into the room with suddenness when I heard an old fellow behind me say: "And that's what you had to do when you had no money." I'm sorry I'd missed what he'd said before that - these Rugby people tell a good story.

Later, I heard a woman say: "I don't feel sorry for them. They don't feel sorry for me either."

And this exchange. One woman said: "I want to tell them 'we love you, we just don't want to talk to you;'" another responded: "My children were strange too."

*

I stopped to see Matt Mullahly at the newspaper this morning, then spent an hour and fifteen minutes at the library. I went to the Lions' Club meeting at noon as the guest of Lila Brossart of KZZJ Radio. Lila is the only woman in North Dakota who is sole owner of a radio station, and I'll want to do an interview with her on a future visit.

On my way downtown this morning I stopped to see Don Sobolik to thank him for all his help. He is back at work and feeling better. I also stopped at Pamida and bought $20 worth of 90-minute tapes (14 tapes), as I seem to be running out. I don't know why?

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 20, 2003 CONT'D - (15)

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.

One of Rocheleau's stand-out moments

in the legislature was during debate on a bill about auctioneering that he was opposed to. When it came his turn to speak, he rose up and said his piece entirely in the chant of an auctioneer. Nearly thirty years later he could repeat the chant for me. The words rolled off his tongue rhythmically, punctuated by the auctioneer's up and down and pause and burst. When he finished for the legislature, there was absolute silence in the chamber. No one knew what to say - time stood still for that moment. Then a thunder of applause from all corners of the room. "Even so," Rocheleau said, "everyone voted 'Green,' I was the only 'Red' vote." A few days later the Governor waved him over from across the street - "Oh now I'm going to get it," Rocheleau thought. He walked across traffic to take his licking. "I want to commend you on that speech," the Governor said. He praised Rocheleau's chant and Rocheleau wondered how the Governor could be talking about it as if he'd heard it. "I was on the phone with a legislator," the Governor said. "The fellow held up his phone when you started so I heard the whole thing."

Jim and Jerry Rocheleau talked also - the afternoon wasn't an interview so much as it was a discussion, family talking over Sunday dinner, over cake and ice cream. Jim and Jerry brought my sense of the family's life on the farm forward a generation. They are only slightly younger than I am, so I was hearing the North Dakota version of my childhood.

One thing that Jerry said which stands out: "There are no trees out here, we are used to seeing the horizon, so we are wide-open and a little untamed. When we go east and end up among all those trees, we feel confined. When a fellow from the east comes out to North Dakota and sees our horizon, he feels naked."

[Since this interview, Richard Rocheleau died after a battle with lung cancer. See "In Memoriam," here.]

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 20, 2003 - (14)

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.

I went to Edna Rocheleau's house

yesterday at 2 p.m. for a surprise 81st birthday party for Jim Rocheleau's uncle, Richard Rocheleau. I got on tape four hours of conversation with Richard Rocheleau, Big Jim, and Big Jim's brother Jerry, who farms north of Rugby.

It was a family experience not unlike what I'm used to - grown children and grandchildren intermingling, a great pot of scalloped potatoes with ham and ground meat, a tuna and macaroni hot dish, salads like you'd see at an Iowa picnic.

As Richard Rocheleau was Jim's dad's brother, his experience of the world would be similar to that of Jim's dad. Rocheleau (Richard) talked of growing up in those hard days, of serving in the Navy during World War II. He was on board his vessel as far as Hawaii where he and several other sailors whose names began with "R-O" received strict orders to get off and stay in Hawaii while the ship and everyone else on it went off to battle. Rocheleau spent most of his Navy career not far from Waikiki Beach.

When he returned to North Dakota, he was home only a week when he realized how lonely his existence was - in the Navy he'd grown used to the hustle and bustle of humanity around him. Yet his father talked him out of re-enlisting. Rocheleau thinks he missed his moment to break free of North Dakota right after the war, and he might regret having missed the opportunity. Once you start putting down roots in a place, once family has its hold on you, Rocheleau thinks, that's where you'll stay, you can't get away.

Rocheleau served three terms in the North Dakota state legislature. He was an auctioneer and an inventor, he farmed, ran a tree moving business, removed stumps. He removed stumps right up until last year and thinks the hard work and exercise kept him fit. He pats his tummy and says: "Now I've gone soft."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 18, 2003 CONT'D - (13)

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.

9:30 a.m. I just got back

from breakfast at the Cornerstone Cafe. I bumped into Richard Blessum there; he insisted on buying breakfast for me. I expected it after talking with him yesterday: he'd said he wanted to buy me a meal. We talked some about farming while we ate. He just this past year sold his farm to the man who'd been cash-renting it all these years. The fellow had resisted buying the farm in the past but the current low interest rates made buying attractive. Blessum said the fellow now farms 30 quarter sections (or a total of 4800 acres), some of which he owns, some of which he rents. Land it would have taken five or six men to work fifty years ago is now handled by one farmer.

A fellow came in with his wife and sat down in a booth near us. He told Blessum: "You know what I ate last night? Lutefisk. Oh, I love that. I'm a damn poor German. I should be Norwegian."

*

4:30 p.m. I spent from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. this afternoon with Duane Baillie, talking about Baillie's Drug Store and the pharmacy business. I got about an hour and fifteen minutes of our conversation on tape, it should be good material.

It's interesting: when I asked Duane about the characteristics of the people in Rugby, he said "hard-working" and "progressive," but he didn't say "modest." However, he didn't tell me on tape about the important award he'd won this past year for service to the community, which is presented to only one pharmacist in each state or Canadian province in a year. The list of his contributions to the community takes quite a long time to recite, but he waited until the tape recorder was off to tell me! So - modesty is a trait. Baillie thinks this kind of service is what good citizens do when they are in a position to. He says he didn't do these things out of "duty" but because they needed doing. I suggested that he may be like a fish in water, which no longer perceives the water as something separate from itself; that perhaps he is no longer in a position to see what duty is, he just does it.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 18, 2003 CONT'D - (12)

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.

I stopped at the motel office

on my way back to my room yesterday afternoon. I was talking with Therese and Teddy the maintenance man when Big Jim's truck rolled into the parking lot - the tractor part of the tractor-trailer, at least. He was just back from his run to Nebraska and Iowa hauling rocks. "In Nebraska, they've got to get their rocks from Montana," Jim observed. "Nebraska rocks aren't good enough. In Montana, they haul their rocks from Nebraska. That's job security for me."

You might talk to Jim Rocheleau only five minutes before you recognize you'll need a bull-dozer if you're going to keep yourself dug out from under his stories. He hadn't even kissed his wife hello yet and already he'd told three jokes. He did kiss his wife, we did get introduced, I got invited to a surprise party Jim's mother would be throwing on Sunday for Jim's uncle's 81st birthday. "It'll be lunch and supper," Jim predicted, "there'll be plenty of food. On the farm my mom cooked for four big hungry farm boys and all the hired help and she hasn't learned to make small recipes yet."

Characteristics of middle westerners? I don't ask, but Jim offers this: "My mother is so tight she can squeeze a nickel and end up with a dime."

Jim and Teddy started talking about the work they'd done tearing out a piece of concrete in the Rocheleau's house across the street from the motel, a place where Jim bumped his head when going to the basement. "The fellow who had the house before us started tearing it out," Jim said, "but he stopped when he ran into the concrete re-inforcement." Jim and Teddy wanted me to see that it was a great adventure getting that concrete out of there; Therese wanted me to know how much grey dust settled onto everything on the first and second floors of the house while Jim and Teddy were banging on the concrete. I think she wanted me to know how much dust they stirred up and wanted to make Big Jim feel guilty about it, but I don't think he did.

Jim and I talked about making hay and about hauling hay. In Iowa when I was growing up, we put up high quality alfalfa for our cattle. Here in North Dakota, they harvest grass out of the sloughs and feed that all winter. One slough that Jim and his father and brothers harvested was fifteen miles from the home farm. Another - harvested only once, during a drought - was thirty miles away. "When we were working in the fields," Jim recalled, "my mother would bring meals out to us, otherwise we'd waste half an hour driving back and forth."

Jim told me about the custom-built truck his father bought to haul the loads of hay home. "The fellow who built it spent $200 on telephone calls just to get all the transmission and gear ratios exactly right," Jim said. You could engage the PTO to start the chain that pulled the load of hay onto the tilted flat-bed and at the same time put the truck in reverse: the truck would back under the load of hay at the same speed the hay was being pulled onto the truck. The Rocheleaus could haul a lot more hay with this truck than their neighbors could with their rigs for tractors, so they hauled hay for the neighbors, too. "The driver's seat in that rig was sweet," Jim remembered. "The passenger seat was just a foam pad and the front end suspension was real tight like it was in trucks back in those days. When we hauled hay for the neighbors, they'd want to ride along. There I'd be driving along just as nice as you please and in the passenger seat the fellow would be bouncing up and down, up and down. It got so they'd just ride out and show us where their hay was and when we got the first load home they'd jump out of the truck and let us haul the rest of the hay on our own. They'd had all the bouncing around they could stand."

"I really loved that truck," Jim said. "I really hated it when it caught fire and burned up on us."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 18, 2003 CONT'D - (11)

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.

You can't imagine

sitting with a fellow who can recall from memory all thirty-one buildings in the Prairie Village, in their proper order and with highlights of their contents. Blessum has had plenty of opportunity to see the buildings over the years, including helping with school tours in May when as many as 800 kids will tour the museum.

"I remember one of those kids was opening and closing drawers in a cabinet at the general store," Blessum said. "I thought he'd open and close every drawer in the place. I said 'Say, did you find the one with the mouse in it yet?' Well, that stopped it. He didn't open another drawer."

Before I left him, I asked Blessum what he would identify as the characteristics of the people of Rugby. "Friendly" is the first trait he listed. He said visitors to the museum have told him they couldn't believe how friendly the people of Rugby are.

The second characteristic: "The people here are willing to do most anything for you." I have to agree: Blessum let me pick at his brain for six hours. It was 3:30 p.m. when I left.

*

I got myself something to eat at the Cornerstone Cafe – an open-faced roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy and dressing. Comfort food. And a fellow needed some comfort. The weather forecasters were promising temperatures to nearly 20 below zero and winds approaching 50 m.p.h. and a little snow mixed in just to keep everybody nervous. As I ate, I could see the wind shaking the traffic signs, I could see snow blowing and drifting across the highways, I could see the light disappearing from the western sky and a grey pall of darkness approaching like sadness. What did I come to Rugby in January for? For this, just this, a Great Plains blizzard. The wind slapped me hard as I walked out to my car after my meal, the wind slapped me like it meant business. Yet by morning I saw that it was just a lot of empty bluster. Oh, it was cold, sure, but the wind has died and there was hardly any new snow. If the wind blew 50 m.p.h. during the night I didn't hear it shake the building.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 18, 2003 - (10)

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 18, 2003
At 9:30 a.m. yesterday I was at Richard Blessum's door to interview him, and he was at his door to let me in.

As I put in a blank tape to start recording the fourth hour of conversation, I told Blessum that my interview with him was now longer than than one I'd recorded with Richard Lavik the day before.

"Should I call Lavik and tell him I beat him?" Blessum wondered.

My full interview with Blessum runs to nearly five hours, not counting the times he put his hand over the microphone or when we shut off the tape to talk about stuff he didn't want "on the record."

Blessum was born in 1926; with the exception of his service in the Navy, he has lived all his life in the Rugby area. When this North Dakota farm boy first saw the ocean, he said to a more experienced Navy fellow: "Would you look at all that water...."

The other fellow said: "Yeah, and you're only seeing the top of it...."

When he returned from service, Blessum married a high school sweetheart and took over his father's farm north of Rugby. Blessum and his wife have three sons, all of them living now in Washington state. Blessum's wife died a few years ago.

Blessum became heavily involved in the Geographic Center and Prairie Village Museum when he moved off the farm in the 1970s. He has been on the board of directors of the organization ever since, and until a few years ago he was "curator" of the museum, a job which put him in charge of day-to-day operations.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 16, 2003 - (8)

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.

At 2 p.m. I met Don Sobolik

at the Cornerstone Cafe as promised. Don used to own the Cornerstone. He'd come to Rugby from the Red River valley of eastern North Dakota to manage the restaurant, then after a year or so he was given the opportunity to buy it, which he did. The business started to consume his life. Wanting to start a family, he realized he'd have to choose between having children and running the restaurant: he chose to leave the restaurant business, which is when he got involved with the Chamber of Commerce job he now holds. When the position opened up, Don was the only one of the board not otherwise employed so he said he could cover the office temporarily. After six months, the board still had not hired a replacement; Don said "if you're not going to hire somebody else, give me the job permanently" and they did. He has been doing the work ever since, the past two or three years.

We sat at the Cornerstone Cafe, Don and I, we sat talking. I had a cup of coffee, and cherry pie with ice cream. Don sipped a glass of water, he was still a little wonky recovering from the flu. Many of the old fellows in Rugby come to the Cornerstone about 2 p.m. each day for coffee and talk and maybe they shake dice for a quarter, I couldn't testify one way or the other. "You've got to talk to him," Don said, pointing at one fellow, "and him," he said, pointing at another. "And here let me introduce you to Bill Paterson - his father and grandfather are the ones who built the marker for the Geographic Center that sits outside the restaurant." I promised Bill I'd be interviewing him about the building of the cairn.

When I left the Cornerstone, I stopped at KZZJ radio a block or so to the east along Highway 2, to see about an interview I was supposed to do. I walked in the door at the station to find Don Sobolik there already, paving the way for me. Bruce Allen took me into a studio and recorded an interview that would be used the following week. Radio is always more painless than I fear it will be. I stood at the microphone, Bruce asked me a question or two, and easily I filled several minutes of air time without pausing to catch my breath. This - from someone who sees himself as a person who doesn't talk much.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 16, 2003 - (7)

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.

One story Lavik told

that I didn't get on tape was about the 1963 murder of a Rugby policeman. (I hate it how people seem to wait to tell the really good stuff once I've got the tape recorder packed away.) The murder occurred in a back alley downtown. Big Louie and his crime partner had pulled up behind one of the buildings along Main Street. The way the buildings were set, Louie's car was in a "box canyon" and when the policeman saw the car back there, he knew it was trouble. Big Louie had been in trouble before, he'd always been a bully and a petty criminal. "Yoo-hoo, boys," the cop reportedly called out, "come on out." Big Louie and the other fellow came out and when they saw the cop car had them boxed in one or the other of them shot the cop and shot him again and again. The criminals emptied one gun into the body on the ground, then took the cop's own piece and shot him again and again with that gun, a total of fifteen times. Then for good measure they shot up the buildings around them. They moved the cop car out of their way and took off. Road blocks were set up. Big Louie ran into a road block trying to enter Minot, west of Rugby. Louie's car had the back seat taken out and that made a cop suspicious enough that he took down the make and color of Louie's car and the number on his license plate. ("If you're going to steal merchandise," Lavik informed me, "you take the back seat out of your car so you can get more stuff in it.") A dentist who had been getting ready for work as Louie and his partner were shooting up the buildings had seen Louie's car. He hadn't had his glasses on, still he could see that it was a small car, reddish or pink in color. Big Louie drove a car of similar description and soon enough the cops put two and two together. When they arrested him, Big Louie broke into tears: "I can't go without my teddy bear," he told the cops. "Let me get my teddy bear...."

"How many bullets do you think you have to put into one cop before you get locked up for good?" Lavik asked me. "Big Louie went to prison. He got paroled, and later he died in a house fire. His buddy got paroled too, I don't know what happened to him."

The murder was written up in one of the "true crime" magazines, Lavik told me. A secretary at the Rugby school has a copy of the magazine. "You know I always thought they embellished those crime stories when they wrote them up," Lavik said, "but this one was word-for-word a true account of what had actually happened." I asked Lavik to get me a photocopy of the article for my reference. What he wants is a copy for himself of the actual magazine, but he isn't optimistic that he's going to find one.

Then Lavik remembers: "A few years before this murder, a bunch of us kids were out playing softball in the park. Big Louie's car drove up. Out came one big tree of a leg, then the other. Big Louie was walking towards us and we were trying to pretend that we didn't see him. Ha. We knew he was trouble. He wanted to play ball with us and what choice did we have. He batted and we chased the balls he hit, that's how he played ball. When he got tired of it he thanked us and drove off. Whew. You know I was worried the whole time I'd never get to grow up and become a school superintendent."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 17, 2003 - (6)

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.

I arrived a few minutes late

to interview Richard Lavik, who'd been a school superintendent in several places in North Dakota from very shortly after he graduated from college until he retired two years ago. "In North Dakota you can retire when your age and years of service total 85," Lavik told me. "You can stay longer but your retirement benefits don't get noticeably better. Teachers pensions aren't the best pensions in the world."

I'd been told Lavik has "a dry sense of humor." After spending four hours talking with him, I'd say instead that he has a sly sense of humor. "This is my Norwegian grandfather," Lavik said just as straight-faced and sincere as you can imagine. What he'd handed me was a very old photo of an Indian, dark as the earth, holding his pony at attention, a dog in the background.

"That might be your grandfather," I said, "but he's not Norwegian." On the back of the photo it said in pencil: "Running Rabbit."

I got three hours of conversation with Lavik on tape.

He is especially knowledgeable about the history of the schools and churches in Rugby and throughout Pierce County. His real Norwegian grandfather came to Rugby about 1919 and started the Rugby Tailoring Company. His father ran a dry-cleaning business on Main Street, where Lavik helped out as he was growing up. "We dumped our spent chemicals in the alley back of the building," Lavik said. "The alley was dirt, not paved. You didn't think anything about it back then. You couldn't get away with that these days."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 17, 2003 - (5)

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.

The biscuits and gravy

Clayton wanted to order have been all sold out so he settles for hashbrowns and toast and sausage or bacon. I order my usual - two eggs, two pancakes, two sausage patties. I end up giving Clayton a copy of my memoir, Curlew:Home, then later in the afternoon as I'm talking to Therese Rocheleau she says "Dad must be reading your book already. He said that this morning you ordered the same breakfast that you ordered on page 13 of the book...."

We talked over breakfast, Clayton and I did, about the project that brought me to Rugby. He enlisted the help of our waitress and others in the cafe to start a list of the people I should talk to. When we pushed our empty plates away, Clayton insisted on paying for my breakfast. I didn't want to try arm-wrestling the tab away from him because I know that, while these old fellows no longer have the strength they used to, slyness trumps strength every time. (When he bought me breakfast, that's when I knew for sure I had to give him a copy of my book.)

We stepped into the hallway of the sale barn and Clayton introduced me to the main auctioneer at the place, Ron Torgerson. I may have to do a piece on the sale barn, and Ron Torgerson would be at the center of it. I got his phone number. Clayton introduced me to a cattle buyer and farmer ("I'm a farmer first"), Ken Mattern, who gave me his phone number and his cell-phone number. Clayton and I watched cattle sell for a few minutes. A younger fellow was doing the auctioneering early in the day, selling the less desirable cattle, the old cows and those not properly finished.

"Watch those two buyers standing there at the edge of the ring, off to the side," Clayton told me. "When one of them makes a bid, he barely moves his hand." I watched. I saw a hand make just the flicker of a movement, he'd bid on the cattle in the ring. Another buyer sitting front and center with a little bit of plank table in front of him just barely nodded his head; he was bidding too. It was flicker of hand versus the slightest nod of head til one of the fellows looked away - the bidding was over - "SOLD!"

I gave Clayton a ride back to the motel, he invited me into the office to meet his daughter, and I had to sign my book for him.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 17, 2007 - (4)

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.

I rose yesterday about

5:15 a.m. and wrote in my journal for nearly three hours. About 8:30 a.m., I called Don Sobolik, my contact at the Rugby Chamber of Commerce, and touched base with him. He agreed to meet me at the Cornerstone Cafe about 2:00 p.m. He was still feeling under the weather from a flu that had put him in the hospital, you could still hear it in his voice. I called Richard Lavik to set up an interview. He suggested meeting at 1:00 p.m. I said I had an appointment at 2:00 p.m. and an hour wouldn't be enough time for the interview. He said he didn't know what he'd talk about any longer than an hour. I set the appointment for 10 a.m.

Then I decided to go to breakfast at the Cornerstone Cafe. As I stepped out of my room, so did the fellow from next door. He had a piece of lathe with orange paint on one end of it, he used it as a walking stick. He had on a pair of insulated cover-alls. He was going to walk the several blocks to the Rugby sale barn for breakfast at the cafe there, as he often did on sale day, Thursdays. He said if I liked good food in a place that wasn't very fancy, I should have breakfast at the sale barn too. Turns out the fellow's name is Clayton Olson, turns out he's nearly 80 years old, turns out he's the father of Therese Rocheleau, the woman who co-owns the Oakwood Inn motel with her husband Jim. I cleaned out the front passenger seat of my car and gave Clayton a ride to the sale barn. He seemed a little reluctant to take the ride, almost as if it is less than moral to accept a ride from the new fellow in town when you could just as well walk in a temperature of twelve degrees below zero.

Clayton is from the Brookings, SD, area originally but bought a farm and re-settled somewhat east of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, where he still lives. He is staying in Room 31 at the Oakwood this winter at the urging of his daughter. The room has a kitchenette and when it became available Therese invited him to stay the winter there so he didn't have to be cutting and splitting wood all winter to keep himself warm on the Minnesota farm.

So Clayton is in Rugby, I'm giving him a ride to the sale barn for breakfast, we're talking about books. He likes to read, especially Louis L'Amour novels. There's a fellow from northeastern North Dakota who also writes westerns, Clayton tells me, "I can't remember his name, but he's no Louis L'Amour...."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 16, 2003 - (3)

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.

Later DK says her youngest brother

is 23, he's an electrician, and he built his own house. "You've got to start young and get yourself settled," she says, with - I think - admiration.

I point out that she wouldn't have been to California, Florida, and Washington state if she'd have followed her own advice about staying put and starting young. "You're right," she says. "I had to get out of here for awhile."

Yeah, DK's siblings stayed in Rugby. One of her brothers farms with her father. A couple others farm, too. A sister married a farmer, a brother loads trucks for a trucking company in town, another works at the hospital in Rugby, DK cuts hair, her youngest brother is the electrician.

"What's the average price for a house in Rugby?" I ask. The fellow who runs the Rugby stockyards has come in now and is waiting patiently while DK clips and re-clips my beard trying to get it to look decent. DK looks over at the fellow from the stockyards, asks him "What is the average price for a house?"

"$50,000" is what they agree on. "Not that all the houses in Rugby cost that much," DK says. "I bought one for $15,000."

DK might be done with my trim. "What do you think?" she asks me.

"If you're happy with it, I'm happy," I say. I know just from talking to her that she doesn't let her customers out of the barber chair until she's satisfied. "I'm proud of every hair cut I give," I think she'd say again if I let her.

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNAL A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 16, 2003 - (2)

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.

I stop for supplies

at the grocery store in downtown Rugby, then I cross the street to DK's shop: "Barber and Styling" it says in the window. DK is 44, a woman with dark hair put up ("it would be turning grey if I let it"); she is finishing a trim for an older gentleman whose hair might have had a red tinge once, now it's more the color of an old man gone grey. "She'll just have to comb it out if she doesn't like it," DK says of a cowlick on the back of the fellow's head, a turn of hair that doesn't want to lay down properly and she can't make it. Haircut done, she and the old fellow are looking at a collection of black and white photos. From where I sit, the people in the photos look like they're dressed for the 1950s, and it's real, not retro. DK and the old fellow talk familiarly of the people in the pictures. DK has a charm and a tenderness that's not necessarily apparent on the surface.

Soon enough she turns and says to me, "Well, come on..." and she ushers me into her barber's chair. "How do you want it cut?" she asks. I think she recognizes that my style is no style. "Do you want it trimmed up over your ears?"

"I tell the woman back home to make me look like a well-groomed mountain man - not that she listens," I say.

DK gives me a look and starts to work. "I have to like the haircuts I give before I'm done with them," she says by way of re-assurance.

DK was a farm girl who had an itch to see what was out there in the big wide world. She couldn't be satisfied doing what everybody else did. As soon as she finished high school in Rugby, she spent some time in the National Guard in Georgia and the Carolinas. She headed out to California for ten years, to Florida, to the state of Washington. "I don't know why all the men I ever ran into were losers," she says without bitterness. You get the sense that if she'd found a good man out there, she'd never have returned to Rugby.

"Why did you come back?" I wonder.

"Family," she says. She is one of eight kids. "I'm sort of the black sheep, you know. I had to get out of here and see the world. My brothers and sisters were happy staying here." What's the difference between her and her siblings that she had to get out of North Dakota? "I don't know," she says, "I couldn't tell you."

To be continued....

NOTES FROM THE VAGABOND JOURNALS A VISIT TO RUGBY, NORTH DAKOTA JANUARY 16, 2003

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.

*

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.

*

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....