Back to Mary's Cafe, as it served as Center's social center--that was fun--in the Forties and Fifties. Her first cafe had been over where the Ole Ellingson house was, behind their big store, behind where the post office now sits, but that was long before I became part of the village fabric. The one I knew had its front door at the southeast corner, a horizontal window punctuating the front, beneath which sat a bench. Upon entry we read large colored auction bills, farm and estate, the rural equivalent of garage sales, and public event notices, mainly for dances, a town's Firemen's Ball (annual fund-raisers) or someone's wedding dance (free!)on the south fiberboard wall.
Straight ahead were stacked glass cases forming a high barrier next to a pass-through to the long kitchen past the cash register. The cafe area was a backward L, the cash register with its bowl of toothpicks at the end of the short leg, near the door. The kitchen filled out the rectangle. As I've said, the top of the big L-shaped public area was closed off for a small bedroom-bathroom where Mary and Joe lived. The backward-L-shaped counter had red vinyl-topped stools good for spinning on and irritating Mary. Against the north wall were three or four plywood booths stained dark brown, with small mirrors at table level where we leaned over and primped. Down the cafe's middle sat small circular cafe tables with those popular heart-shaped twisted-back cafe chairs. We thought those were rather flimsy then, as boisterous teens would; but now they're costly reproductions so that I'd cherish the originals that disappeared from Mary's and Bloomfield's Corner Drug Store. At the rear in front of the piano was a circular dining room table with wooden chairs. Yes, the place was noisily crowded when it was full, after basketball games or during dance intermissions, but we were more patient then. Ordinarily, Mary and one helper managed, mainly a waitress who could also cook, Katherine Krause, Helen Brockman, Vie Ballard ones I recall. Sometimes a third was required or an adult customer would pitch in, for most of us knew what to do from sheer familiarity as we bought ice cream cones or wanted pie a la mode or asked for Orange Crush (in its splendid dark brown ridged bottle) or Nehi grape or creme (I'm using my choices).
The glass-stainless steel pie case hung on the wall above the stainless steel ice cream case for convenience, a sugar-wafer cone holder at its side. Next to it on a shelf was a Campbell Soup display with a plug-in stainless steel container like the one for the malt mixer somewhere in the same vicinity. (Dad was partial to thick chocolate malts.) This busy wall faced the main counter, the long part of the L. Under the counter hid various supplies from silverware to big jugs of catsup and mustard, a tin of sugar, a paper bale of napkins, for some reason fascinating me. Catsup and mustard bottles, the napkin dispenser, salt and pepper sat in regular groupings on counter and tables. I've already said the bright red (probably supplied by Coca-Cola) pop cooler was at the rear by the bedroom door, as was an oil stove necessary in winter.
Returning to the front door, right at entry on the front wall was a Wurlitzer glory, that rainbow music maker we fed coins generously, its arched front in cobalt blue, emerald, ruby, lemon, orange, glowing jewel colors that, depending on the model, might change and shift up and down or even bubble gloriously . Holding ready stacks of thick 78s or smaller 45s with the big holes, the jukebox, technically an Automatic Coin-Operated Phonograph with a Southern black slang name, mainly had Hit Parade favorites, country-western for tawdry bars, rock unthought of until Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock" in my senior year, 1954. Then, as now, most radio time was given over to music, especially BTV, Before Television. However, we were cushioned in pleasantly obtuse niceness culturally, not yet stressfully besieged by nerve-jangling urban din, atavistic tribal thumping, simplistic nursery-rhyme obscene snarls, tedious adenoidal whines. So we fed in our dimes or quarters to punch the red plastic buttons on the jukebox menu holding songs like Perry Como's "Chi Baba Chi Baba (My Bambino Go to Sleep)" or "No Other Love," Doris Day's "Que Sera Sera" or "Secret Love," Kitty Kallen's "Little Things Mean a Lot," the McGuire Sisters' "Sincerely," Vaughn Monroe's "Riders in the Sky," Frankie Laine's "Jezebel" or "High Noon," Teresa Brewer's "Music Music Music," Kay Starr's "Wheel of Fortune" or "Bonaparte's Retreat," Dean Martin's "That's Amore," Patti Page's "The Tennessee Waltz" or "How Much Is That Doggie in the Window?" Dinah Shore's "Buttons and Bows," Bing Crosby's "Far Away Places" or "Now Is the Hour," Peggy Lee's "Manana," Nat King Cole's "Nature Boy," instrumentals like "Skokiaan" or "Dragnet"--well, just look up the Hit Parade for the Forties and Fifties. We would agitate for our favorite songs, but the Hit Parade commanded the air waves (by its sales polls apparently), and that's what the jukebox guy brought. (The pool hall next door also finally got a jukebox, but it had more of that tawdry, needs-sinus-surgery country western than straight popular, naturally.)
Now that I'm back at the front door, I'm at the stacked glass candy counters, behind which on a shelf were vertical clipped potato chip and popcorn holders, the grouping our version of the Quick Fix Snack Bar. At the top in the cases nested cough drops, the bearded Smith Brothers with honey, wild cherry, black licorice more popular than menthol, the orange boxes of Luden's Honey-Licorice, the Sen Sen for smoker's and drinker's breath, the green or white packaged Wrigley's spearmint or peppermint gum, other gums like Clark's Teaberry, bright yellow Juicy Fruit, Yankee blue licorice-flavored Black Jack, thin flat Chiclets, Beeman's, Bazooka Bubble Gum. Below, Mary kept occasional novelties like Wax Lips or Mustaches, Nik-L-Nips, small wax bottles of sickeningly sweet fruit syrups, candy cigarettes (I think the packaging imitated Lucky Strike), and my favorite, rippled-clear-glass boats/locomotives/cars filled with pastel cardamom-scented pellets, why I prize that scent in my spice collection. (The Easter popularity of our top novelty, marshmallow peeps, didn't start until--when else?--1954.) A popular flavor, licorice came in black or red twists, as chewy pipes, or in boxed gumdrop Black Crows or capsule Good & Plentys. Other small candy boxes held crusty brick-red Boston Baked Beans (peanuts), Milk Duds, Junior Mints, Red Hots. Some candies came in rolls, square or round, of waxed paper or foil wraps like Tootsie Rolls, Reed's Butterscotch, Root Beer, or Cinnamon, Life Savers in various flavors, powdery Necco Wafers, or my category favorites, chewy peanut-butter Kits (taffy) or Walnettos. She had Cracker Jack boxes with their little prizes and loose Jawbreakers and Root Beer Barrels and naturally stocked Sioux City's Palmer Company chocolate-crushed nut-covered cherry mounds, Bings and Twin Bings, and the small LaFama candy bars (still in production except the LaFama is boxed, not in bars, now). Two popular bars in separated sections were Bit-O-Honey and the relatively rare Seven-Up with its seven different flavored sections in one bar. Mom liked Pearson's Salted Nut Roll and toffee Heath Bars (she also liked peanut brittle at Christmas). I liked any cherry bar, Walnut Crush, Power House, Peanut Cluster and something similar to it with maple flavoring, and Forever Yours (now Milky Way Midnight), all discontinued in their old forms. Like me. Don't remember what Dad favored with his sweet tooth, maybe Snickers. I think he was more partial to his malts and pie a la mode. Mary's sugar pile stocked many others, always the various Hershey bars, Almond Joy, Milky Way, Snickers, Mounds, Mars, Butterfingers, Baby Ruths (named for Grover Cleveland's daughter, not the ball player), periodically 5th Avenue, Clark Bar, Three Musketeers, Oh Henrys. Obviously, this tooth-destroying section was the cafe's children magnet, collecting small change in great quantities.
And that was Mary's Cafe, discounting her back room and basement storage and kitchen details. I had been deflated in exasperation when, for the second time, I invested two hours on this entry and then lost its earlier version to the ether by a careless mouse click, as happened the other day with an entry on Center's grandmothers, still to be rewritten. I know how to "Save," but, when I'm busy writing and looking up background on the Internet, it's easy to hit the wrong X before I've finished the entry, a major computer feature we all dread. It brings out my Grandpa Koftan language when I'm trying to stay peaceful. While I'm mentioning him, I got Christmas-card notice that his cousin, Emil Kaftan, with the original family name, up in a Tyndall, SD, Good Samaritan Home is 104 and still likes to keep busy the way he was the last times I've seen him at 101 and 102, tearing up cloth for rug-weaving, as his daughter, Patsy, reports. Beyond my imagination.
December 2005 Archives
Boreas has returned, waving the treetops at me. It is 11:27 a.m. and 21 with a wind chill of 7, but I'm warm enough. I just finished candying some pineapple, dried cherries and cranberries supposed to be cherry-flavored, dates, blueberries, and toasted my last pecans. The dried-out dates, pecans, the last of the frozen huge blueberries were from the large quantities I get from our food co-op, which last quite a time for a singler like me. The rest I bought yesterday after I went into sticker shock again at the prices of candied fruit. The maraschino cherries I candied last year were not to be found; in their place were candied cherries at $7.79. I am cheap. So I'm concocting my own version of my favorite sour cream fruitcake, and now I have to wait for the egg whites to warm to room temperature. I also made myself a blueberry-banana-yogurt smoothie for lunch and sauteed two boxes of mushrooms and some onions for a pizza tomorrow. I love the pizza dough my Hitachi Automatic Home Baker (breadmaker) makes, for which I use half wheat flour, half white, with wheat germ. With six tiny stents corkscrewing open blood vessels on my heart, I do ordinarily eat good food, the opposite of fast food. The fruitcake is merely a seasonal weakness and one I share with my brother-in-law. And for all the fruitcake ammo jokes, mine are moist.
So I'm warmed up with my kitchen--should have the computer out there--as I think of the socially warmest place in Center in the 1940s and 1950s, Mary's Cafe. It was warm on a day like today anyway, because she rose early to bake her popular pies and then, in winter, to prepare possibly a large stock pot of soup, though she had Campbell's Soup for use anytime. Mary Ellingson was a relatively tall, happy woman with an infectious laugh who enjoyed her popularity and could share gossip with the women and dirty jokes with the men while deftly keeping the busy place in motion. Her husband, Joe, once a barber, was a grumpy old loafer with a cane who sat out on the front bench in the warm seasons, monitoring town traffic. They had a wooden trailer out back where they had reared their three daughters, Mae (Bogner), Pauline (Grant), and Gladys (Covolik), married with families when I was a child. Mary and Joe lived out of a back bedroom-tiny bathroom walled off from the cafe proper. I called her my second mother because, when Mom, a country school teacher, was down at Wayne Normal (State Teachers College) for summer school, Mary looked after me from across the street, Dad too busy to do much watching. Town women at the time felt perfectly free to watch over or scold or spank any children, part of the larger all-one-big-family village webwork, and Mary felt even freer with me. She's the one I went to with questions, with or without Dad's permission; and once, when I tripped over a rock and cut my knee badly on a broken 7-Up bottle so that it looked like a split sausage, I ran shocked over to her, and she wrapped it in a cold, wet towel and wiped my tears while Dad got the car to take me to Dr. Kohtz in Bloomfield. She and Mrs. Ernie Sandoz, Minnie, who lived across the street from us and was as diminutive and genteel as Mary was big-boned, hearty, and sometimes brusque, were the only two older women who insisted I bring them May baskets and the only two, accordingly, to chase me and catch me to kiss me soundly, though Mary had to run around Dad's gas pumps a few times to do it. She also said I would end up a movie star, a very bad prediction but highly pleasing flattery for a shy little boy.
Her cafe with its brick-imprinted tin front painted white sat next to Freddie's Store, our biggest supermarket I have dealt with before, both directly across Main Street from Dad's filling station-garage. Freddie's was at the north end of the central block on the west side, the Post Office anchoring the other end; Dad's place was on the east side, where my brother-in-law still has his welding shop, though the buildings have changed several times over the decades. The space between Mary's and Freddie's was too small for only a small child to squeeze into, but the south side of Mary's had a small alley between her and the next-door bar-pool hall, one of several narrow alleys we whooped through, though her side had a row of spearmint under her kitchen windows--coincidentally as Mrs. Sandoz had along the front of her house. Brushing against it set off the scent, and I loved chewing the leaves.
I hesitated about naming Mary's Cafe Gossip Central because, assuredly, Mom brought home plenty when she worked at the county courthouse, but my main hesitation was about Dad's shop. Very much like Nathan Detroit's "The Oldest Established Permanent Floating Crap Game in New York" in Guys and Dolls, Dad always had card players. Initially they were in the front office part, playing over the counter, usually cribbage but sometimes euchre or pitch with Grandpa Luckert; later they migrated to the back of the garage around a cable-spool table, then card table, all of which meant Dad's pockets usually held plenty of change. Anyone from a small town knows men are gossips quite as much as women, sometimes more so. And bawdier about it without lowering their voices to whisper in moral shock. Considering that Dad would come home at noontime for dinner--city people lunch, their dinner our supper--and tell me whom I danced with the night before at, say, Bloomfield or Niobrara, I'm inclined to want to nominate his place for the title. For now we'll leave it at Mary's.
Ma Cain served meals at the hotel, and Mabel Ellingson did some short orders like frying hamburgers at her husband's--Charlie Ellingson's--little bar with its single gas pump out front at the south end of Main Street; but if you wanted a hamburger--for a quarter then--with maybe dill pickles and onion or, at another nickel or dime, even lettuce and tomato or not, pop at a nickel and then--gasp!--a dime in corrugated Nehi bottles out of a red cooler full of iced water, or the best pie besides what our mothers made and several kinds my mother didn't make like wonderful sour cream raisin or date cream or lemon merengue or pecan, not to mention the usual apple, cherry, pumpkin, peach, best a la mode, of course, the scoop of ice cream a nickel extra: if you wanted those, you went to Mary's. She made a really good tuna salad sandwich, which I liked better than the egg salad. The entrees were listed on the menu, written daily, also on a chalk board, I think, as she served hamburger steak, hot beef sandwiches, boiled ham, turkey, pork chops, roast beef, chicken fried steak, with her own mashed potatoes and then canned vegetables like peas or carrots or corn. But she also was constantly searching for novelties, so we all first had corn dogs there, skewered hot dogs fried in a cornmeal dough. She served good sundaes in heavy tulip dishes--I liked the Hershey chocolate syrup liberally drizzled--and better banana splits in heavy boat dishes.
She had the food monopoly, even though some of the courthouse people and, of course, traveling salesmen ate at the hotel. I was forbidden to go into the pool hall, a place of vice out of The Music Man, except to ask Dad something or retrieve him--a teetotaler but an avid billiards player--if he was across the street there, though ordinarily he would take his coffee breaks at Mary's. But I'm making the point that her place, open for longer hours than the hotel, was the communal eating center and morally safe in a town where the Drys regularly, indignantly outvoted the Wets--how times have changed--as to whether the bars could be open after midnights or on Sundays.
She also had an upright piano in the back corner topped with an orangeish velour shawl with knotted fringe, on which sat senior photos of her daughters and two large stuffed horned owls she could set rocking with "The Blackhawk Waltz" or any of the other sheet music in her piano bench. Elaine LaFrenz (Darling--just celebrated their 50th anniversary) could likewise play up a storm with showy, catchy piano solos like "Nola" or "The 12th Street Rag" or "Kitten on the Keys" or for happy singing sessions led by Mom, a lovely alto with Ethel Merman vocal power, who did a wonderfully hammy "Chloe." We'd move the big circular table and its chairs back and gather around, reading over Elaine's shoulders when we didn't already know the lyrics, but "Beautiful Ohio," "The Missouri Waltz," "Ain't We Got Fun," "Bye Bye, Blackbird," "The Dark Town Strutters Ball" most of us knew. Those pre-Mitch Miller singalongs would happen most often in the summertime after choir practice when everyone was warmed up and it was a slow night at the cafe, which soon attracted listeners magnetized by the music.
Ooops. It's time to go make the fruitcake. I'll get back to the cafe and its floor plan next time.
NOTE: This entry forwarded as an e-mail from my sister is the reference in the opening P.S. of "Country Roads." I had earlier copied it, ostensibly the creation of Mike Kappel, the husband of one of my sister Sue's classmates, but somehow lost it into the ether. Mike and Judy live in a fine house dug into a hillside in the country west of Yankton, SD. So I'll put that e-mail in again under the "Borrowed" category because I did not write it, but I did admire its doughty Great Plains spirit. It is another version of what I meant to demonstrate with my ice storm anecdote.
"The Category 5 Blizzard...
Here in the Northern Plains we just recovered from a historic, may I even say a "Weather Event" of "Biblical Proportions" with a terrible blizzard that dumped up to 24" of snow with 50 mph winds that created a whiteout beyond hurricane proportions, that broke trees in half, stranded hundreds of motorist[s] in near-lethal snowbanks, closed all roads, isolated scores of communities, and cut power to tens of thousands of people.
George Bush did not come . . .
FEMA staged nothing.
No one howled for the government.
No one even uttered an expletive on TV . . .
Nobody demanded $2,000 debit cards . . .
No one asked for a FEMA trailer home . . .
No national news anchors moved in . . .
We just melted snow for water, closed Interstate 20, sent out caravans to pluck people out of snow-engulfed cars, fired up wood stoves, broke out oil lanterns or camp lamps, and put on an extra layer of clothes.
Even though a "Category 5" blizzard of this scale has never before overtaken the region this early in the "blizzard season," we know it can happen, we know how to deal with it ourselves, and we didn't even give the blizzard a name.
Everyone in South Dakota is fine."
Before I wander into today's topic, I have to put my P.S. on the front bumper. As any good readers will have recognized, the borrowed entry about the recent Great Plains blizzards contrasting the Can-Do hardiness here with the recent Katrina-Gulf Coast disaster had a number of unmentioned factors. We do not like bureaucratic governments, most definitely including our state power players as well as the arrogant feds, but floodwater is not snowy solidity, our houses were not invaded by the snow, let alone venomous snakes and toxic molds, not everyone has wood-burning stoves (as we did coal furnaces in my childhood), and other differences can be cited. Nevertheless, I've always admired the self-reliant attitude of a weather-battered region much like New England but with farmland instead of quarries and forests. ( I once tried a poem likening my area to New England.)
So--I'm not a fan of John Denver's except for his Oh, God movies with George Burns endearing as the title deity at the end of his big cigar. But the song title fit my subject with its "yesterday," even as the West Virginia mountains do not match my Knox County landscape when I was growing up. I have driven the roller-coaster, winding Appalachian Mountain roads behind sludge-slow lumber and coal trucks, in front of apparently moonshine runners out of The Dukes of Hazzard outracing sheriffs, slamming around the curves. Northeastern Nebraska roads were not that spectacular.
More important, they were not paved. Only the federal highways, in our corner U.S. 81, 20, and 275, had asphalt, with the exception of Nebraska 14 from U.S. 20 through Verdigre into Niobrara, courtesy of an old drunk who was a powerful state legislator, deftly pork-barreling a paved road to his home even as a high-hill section of it kept sliding down into the Niobrara River close to his town. But we ordinarily drove on gravel.
Gravel takes some getting used to, especially when it's put down thickly and tires act akin to hydroplaning. Further, when fresh gravel was being applied to the eroded washboards and mudholes, a large ridge was dumped at one side, about two feet high, which ridge road graders would then work gradually across the roadway. Hit that ridge with a front wheel, and expect the front wheels to be ditchbound without some alert, strong steering. When I was learning to drive, coming up a steep ascent to make a sharp right turn onto the Bloomfield highway, Dad didn't think I was turning sharply enough, wrenching the wheel away from me, so that we hit a gravel ridge and lost control, rolling over three and a half times down the steep grade, with an empty bottle gas cylinder banging around in the rear seat. We boys had early gravel lessons, learning the hard way on our bicycles long before earning our driver's licenses, gravel being even trickier for those thin tires. Jackie Brockman wiped out as we biked down the big, long hill immediately east of town, wrecking his knee as an object lesson. Gravel burns, nasty stinging abrasions, from falls were common.
To compensate for driving over the dusty, skittering product of ancient Ice Age eskers, pasture boulders and gravel pits with Pleistocene fossils common in our area, winter driving in ice and snow was easier, else why would cities strew gravel on their skating-rink streets? Gravel roads also meant that snowplows would gouge out gashes that became muddy obstacles as they rammed snowplow-wide paths, no pavement to give a grinding-noise caution. Along those often single-lane paths through high drifts, occasional small areas were widened as some mountain roads still are, as I saw in Glacier National Park, where you have to wait for the other person before you navigate the single lane. Ironically, the shelterbelts of, usually, five parallel tree rows, encouraged in the Forties meant that east-west roads especially had high drifts from our prevailing north winter winds. Snow fences, common then, also had the safe effect.
Simply gravel on earth, those road surfaces sponged up water, mud sometimes almost as slippery as ice and considerably deeper. The diagonal shortcut from Plainview to Norfolk runs through spring-fed pastures (Aunt Lizzie made me pick her cattails from the marshy ditches). When I was going to Norfolk Junior College, I became acquainted with the whompetty whomp of that road's large sinking sections; I also regularly got flat tires, another gravel-road hazard, easier to fix in those days but nuisances. Today, from small towns dying and feeding their remnants into Norfolk's big-franchise centers like Wal-Mart and Home Depot, the heavy traffic speeds over the level, albeit much-patched oil, oblivious to the spring-water ditches of cow parsnip, queen-of-the-prairie, and cattails and the wet haying pastures with lavender liatris (gayfeather) spikes.
State 13 between Creighton and Center, with its 13 bridges--the State Highway Department didn't suffer triskaidekaphobia, obviously-- in 11 miles, carried on a constant back-and-forth conversation with the Bazile Creek, a mere brook at the Creighton depot but a very respectable creek providing boys wet summer pleasures and winter skating by the time it reached Center. When the Bazile flooded, it tended to wipe out the steel bridges, including the one at the very edge of town, between Clarks and Danahers, on the old road to Verdigre (a very big deal, the bridge deposited, half buried in silt, a half mile north), and a couple on the road north to Niobrara, though that section of 13 stayed fearfully along the west side of the northbound Bazile (which ultimately empties into the Missouri) except for three bridges, one immediately north of Center, one at Pat Frazier's, one by Maiden's Leap. The Bazile flooded any sections of the road lying low at its side after major thunderstorms with heavier downpours than our hills could absorb. As mentioned previously, this was before farmers put in dams to catch the runoff and ran irrigation pipes from the creek. Today the Bazile is mostly shin deep except after very heavy rains.
I can attest to those 13 bridges, many on curves, because, coming home from NJC one moonless night, I knew only that I lost steering after the stop sign at the east edge of Creighton. (Dad discovered the next morning a bolt on the steering column sheared off.) Whenever I see one of those Errol Flynn/Tyrone Power/Douglas Fairbanks swashbucklers--swashbucklers were our Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl or Master and Commander: Far Side of the World back in the 1930s-40s-50s--or the Horatio Hornblower series I'm fond of and see someone spinning a ship's wheel, I am reminded of that night, rather, very early morning of no other traffic, when I had to spin the freed-up steering wheel until it caught with a lurch, every one of those bridges, notably the ones on curves, a special challenge.
For that matter, the road to Verdigre was a similar challenge but without many bridges, just lots of hills, constant curves, often a combination like the right-angle one that dropped steeply at the turn, off which Don Buerman sailed into a tree, his girlfriend and future wife, Virginia McManigal, smashing into the windshield in those days of no seat belts, so that we all went from intermission at a dance in Center out to the bloody site. We thought Neal Sandoz an Indianapolis candidate because he could cover those nine hair-raising miles to his Verdigre girlfriend's (also later his wife) in 11 minutes, I think it was. The only section of that old road remaining is immediately west of Center for about five miles until it runs into the bland new asphalt one of long, straight stretches. (And it begins in Center a block south of the original.)
I should add, in contrast to today's approaches, then State 84 from Bloomfield to Verdigre and State 13 from Creighton to Niobrara, crossed at Center's main intersection, where Dad hung the lonely crossed strands of colored bulbs at Christmastime. Another footnote is that 13 from Creighton through Center to Niobrara was often cited as one of the state's most scenic drives, mainly because of the curvy, hilly roads among the oaks, ash, elms tracking the Bazile. All our roads today are paved, straighter, duller, safer, the landscape darkening with the weedy greenblack eastern red cedar woods spreading across the pastures.
Roads held their own kinds of adventure back then. Not quite like Dad and [Great] Uncle Joe Koftan going up to North Dakota to follow the wheat harvest down or off to Yellowstone in the Twenties in their Model T. I know they didn't have many roads--Dad said something about cutting across the land--and certainly not many filling stations so that they carried their own gasoline, tire repairs, tool kit--but I will be forever sorry I didn't ask him more about it, now that I've been all over Wyoming and the rest of the West on our asphalt comfort trails. That oversight gravels me.
The one place and time when winter overwhelmed me was in North Dakota when I taught at Minot State 50 miles from the Canadian border. North Dakota is entirely too close to our annoyed, colder neighbor and should move down a couple of tiers. The Great Plains sweep from Saskatchewan and Alberta straight down to Mexico, a huge corridor for winds to whip up and down over the biggest aquifer on earth from Nebraska southward. It is mostly hilly prairie, which some have suggested should be returned to the native bison, not to mention the Native Americans, except that Scandinavians and others established huge granaries of wheats and corn, sorghum and millet, later soy beans, and are not likely to give up their Breadbasket. (One of several Nordak surprises were the maroon flax fields around Strasbourg, Lawrence Welk's hometown.) North Dakota has the Missouri River valley for its major hilliness. Its Turtle River Mountains would not make respectable hills farther south. I think wind erosion has left most of the state so flat that on my first visit, running low on gas, I learned welcoming lights are deceivingly distant. I could see Jamestown 17 miles away, and I learned later that one should never try to head for ranch yard lights, ordinarily miles from the roads though clearly visible. That is the sort of geographical caution North Dakota is, even as I think its west-end Badlands as handsome as Texas' Palo Duro Canyon near Amarillo. Its Badlands are not as big as South Dakota's les mauvaises terres a traverser, "bad lands to travel across," which the New York Times once laughably located in the Lakota tribes' sacred Black Hills, though perhaps the two North Dakota sections put together might be. Teddy Roosevelt did his Charles Atlas transformation from puny youth to pugnaciously robust man in those Badlands. So North Dakota does have its scenic attractions as well as the historic, with, e.g., Fort Union at the junction of the Missouri and Yellowstone, almost in Montana, built by John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company in 1828, and Fort Lincoln, with its Custer house and Mandan village.
When I digress, I digress, but I did want to be fair to the state whose winters produced the Air Force cartoon booklet that irritated all the Chambers of Commerce, "June, July, August, and the Rest of the Year." (North Dakota has two of the three strategic air bases protecting the United States on the north, the Great Circle Route from Russia in the Cold War days.) I should say first that a perfect summer day is from my North Dakota summer memories, temperatures in the high 70s, low 80s, warm sun against brilliant blue, and sweater time the minute the sun went down. But, as I discovered in my three years there, winters did indeed last from the end of September into May, well after Mom was writing that the lilacs had bloomed. My pharmacist here, also from a northeastern Nebraska small town, wanted to reminisce recently about our country winters of snow from November to April, but I couldn't forbear one-upping him with North Dakota. We could date the various storms in the frozen layers like geological strata, never having any January thaws or chinooks. I learned differences did exist among zero, -10, -20, and -30, though any lower didn't make any difference at all. I learned immediately what a head bolt heater was and had to keep my car, Jeremiah, plugged in even in its garage and certainly in the college's open parking lots, which had meter-like electrical outlets for that purpose. As a bachelor and New Kid on the Block, I was regularly given night classes at the air base 13 miles north of Minot and took very seriously the recommended emergency precautions--blankets, candles, sand, matches, food, extra winter clothing--not only against the fatal cold but the swift blizzards with nothing blocking their horizontal fury blasting down from Canada. One night, after my Humanities class, I came out, got in, grabbed my parking brake handle to release it, and it broke off in my hand like a goblet stem. I knew unprepared motorists regularly froze to death; the frozen death count in my last year there, one of the I've-got-to-get-out-of-here factors, was 27, as I recall. And we all knew about the two construction workers caught at the edge of Minot itself in a blizzard who survived only by tearing up their car seats and burning that and newspapers in their construction helmets to keep alive.
A huge irony of the large Air Force population was that virtually all of them had license plates from Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida. (And knowing Northerners were frequently stationed down south meant the armed services had, as usual, perverted senses of humor.) A North Dakota winter was the most drastic introduction to snow and ice these drawlers could've imagined. Minot is built along a steep-sided, wide canyon of the Souris (Mouse) River, split its east-west length by that stream. Main Street has an incline of, say, 65 degrees, a hellish place for a driver's test, as I discovered. The major highway, U.S. 83, not only has steep North Hill and South Hill but, like other street crossings, a high-arched viaduct over the river. Warned, when I saw a Deep South license plate headed for any of those trouble spots in snow-packed or icy conditions, I detoured and found another way.
One of the topics while we ate boiled eggs in the Student Union during coffee breaks was the fascinating Halingdahl syndrome, from the Norwegian city of such long winters that "stir crazy" was inadequate to describe the citizens' wintry claustrophobia. As explained to me, any social occasions were excuses to erupt in Viking violence from snowbound frustration. (Minot was largely Norwegian but very ethnic, with not only other Scandinavians but Russians and Greeks. How enough of the warm Mediterranean latter ended up there with their large Greek Orthodox church I never learned.) So brawls and stabbings enlivened Halingdahl weddings, I was told. Albeit about Indiana, William H. Gass' title story from his short story collection, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, seemed ominously close to the Halingdahl syndrome and not that far removed from Aiken's story I mentioned in the last entry, the fatigue of hard winter descending to wrathful depression and manic behavior.
When I seemed to be catching the contagion, I fled--to Illinois, as the job hunt turned out. It was the only time I felt winter scaring me irrationally, especially with the mortal cold, as lethally silent as carbon monoxide. With two stretches of over 30 miles of no towns on the highways between Center and Minot, I actually feared trips home or back. I could give a very strong answer to the city's motto hanging over Main Street, "Why not Minot?" But that was then, and now I wouldn't mind living in the warmer Snow Capital of Buffalo, New York, at all. How rational is that!
P.S. I was told then "Nordak" was a detested nickname; it never seemed derogatory to me but useful and in the American habit of abbreviating anything possible. Minot State College is now Minot State University, and my friendly Geek--their company name--who heals my computer ailments is from that city.
Omaha set a record at 1 degree last night. "Hace muy frio." (I'm trying to restart my Spanish study.) I understood my sister's e-mail about their power outages and the farmers' plight when I read this week's Bloomfield Monitor, with Bill Skrivan's story that, after a heavy day of rain, then freezing, they had at least 18" of snow with wind, enough to take down many power poles and lines. And farmers now aren't like my grandparent's or aunt's farm, with those unheated bedrooms and nights of my childhood.
It reminded me of Omaha's 1997 ice storm. According to the National Weather Service, 85% of our trees were damaged, with $60 million for clean-up. Such deadly beauty. The trees and bushes--for that matter, the buildings or anything outdoors--looked like Disney special effects for the Ice Queen, extravagantly encased in tinkling, clattering glass glittering in the cold sunlight. Most side streets were impassable, blocked by fallen trees and limbs, so that I was heartsick viewing the destruction from the bus windows. After clean-up the blocks of ruined trees looked like photos of war zones. Sections of the city were without electricity for over two weeks. All the motels and hotels were full of people from those sections. My apartment complex had no electricity for only three or four days. My Center and grandparental farm background made it simply another novel experience. I have camping gear, including a 10-volt battery lamp and a white gas stove, though I didn't get around to using the stove, leery of fumes. I don't mind eating cold canned goods, whether cream of mushroom soup, creamed corn, or pineapple, a habit since high school; nor did I have to worry about anything in the refrigerator spoiling when the contents would've been colder sitting out. I took those three kerosene lamps I mentioned Mom had always insisted on plus some pillar candles on plates into my bedroom and shut myself in, knowing those would all provide enough heat, especially the lamps with their hot tall glass chimneys. I distrust candles, extinguishing those before I did any sleeping. Had my battery radio, my books, my comforter and quilts, and felt like a kid again, tucked cosily in my bright, warm little box for the siege, however long it took. Mom brought me up to be pragmatically self-reliant, and those childhood experiences left me better prepared than my neighbors, who fled to friends and relatives who had electricity.
Weather is a prime concern here, and I retain my parents' farm backgrounds on the topic, proud as I was of being a townie--from a village of, usually, 150 plus or minus--but, hey, the county seat. The weather not only affected my grandparents and other farming relations but Dad's business, relying as it did on farmers. And in a village the size of Center, we knew all about weather as we listened to the frogs croaking along the Coulee Creek after rains or the blizzard howling a school closing. Consequently, weather consciousness is so ingrained that the Weather Channel is probably my most watched TV channel and the first program I watch in the morning, the last at night, as I track the forecast changes when I've never had to worry about the cattle or the corn or drought or flooded fields or the grain-flattening storms. I suspect I'm much more conscious of the natural world anyway than the cityborn.
For instance, I was thinking about the differences between rain and snow recently. Rain always announces itself overhead, whether a light patter or a drumming downpour; the traffic sounds change as vehicles splash through water. (Traffic sounds act like railroad schedules for me: when I lived in a curve of the Interstate farther west, I knew the time of day by the sound of traffic.) On the other hand, snow is always silent. My roof doesn't tell me anything. I go to sleep and wake to a white world, any sounds like traffic distant, muffled by the snow. Writing about it reminds me of my college English teaching days with Conrad Aiken's famous short story, "Silent Snow, Secret Snow," as a 12-year-old boy goes mad, the world increasingly silenced for him by rising drifts of imaginary snow.
The only sound with snow is, of course, the wind. Because I live on the top floor of our building on top of one of Omaha's higher hills--my floor actually was blown away by the 1975 tornado just before I moved here--I certainly know how the wind shifts, cooing or howling around my aerie, and I judge its force by the trees swaying. I do like the Latin names for the winds: the north wind is Boreas, the south Auster, the east Eurus, and the west Zephyr. Boreas brings down the frigid Canadian air, the Alberta Clipper, but Auster brings up most of our warm moisture from the Gulf. Our Great Plains storms result from the two clashing over us, a bit like the Greek gods in Homer, creating havoc below. But that's what keeps us hardy and wary, right? Stay warm.
My sister sent an e-mail that Center had had no power for three days, but many were much worse off on farms and in South Dakota, with power lines and poles down from the recent blizzard. Bloomfield High School was closed for the week. My sister and brother-in-law and one son grilled and fried on the deck, outside, for hot food and played cards and Yahtzee, though my nephew was bored by the second day without television. Their wood-burning furnace didn't work properly because it depends on an electric fan. I had seen Weather Channel excerpts of the blizzards from North Dakota and Minnesota down to Kansas and Colorado, several Interstates shut down, people stranded and taken in by homes and churches. As if, after the hurricane season, people thought nature would give them a break.
When I grew up, with the power plant in Creighton then as now, we joked about our power going out whenever a bird sat on the line between Creighton and Center. So it was no great surprise and an oddly creative period when we had no electricity for two weeks during the blizzards of 1948-49. In my decrepitude now, winter keeps me in fairly easily, but I was outside in the winter almost as much as in the summer back then, and I preferred snowtime over sweltering heat to the extent of having a better winter than summer tan and frostbite at least two or three times a season. Only one family had an electrically run coal furnace then, the leading family socially, the county attorney, wife, and daughter; their immaculate basement was where we bobbed for apples or played rainy day games. Like us, the rest of the town had coal furnaces and usually basement coal bins, large floor registers to stand over before they got too hot. Likewise with stoves: Petersons and perhaps a few others had electric stoves, but Dad sold bottle[d] gas to many, and that's what our kitchen stove used. I'm not talking camping stoves with little propane or white gas tanks. Smelly Skelgas (propane) came in slender four-to-five-foot cylinders and sat in holders outside, copper gas lines running into kitchens. Consequently, we had working furnaces and stoves whereas Keith Peterson was reduced to shoveling coal manually during the day, the three of them staying overnight with various friends. They also had to rely on others for hot food, though I think Keith used a camp stove.
Sue complained in her e-mail how dark it was. Mom taught me to never, never be without kerosene lamps (now it's colored, perfumed fuel from Shopko), which I was used to on my grandparents' farm anyway. She had three, and I have three. Aladdin lamps, with the much brighter but more fragile net wicks (like net cotton condoms), came later, I think, on the farm. We never had those. But that didn't matter, because my always creative dad rigged up a headlight dangling from the dining room chandelier, connected to a car battery on the table, which headlight was as bright as anyone could wish for. We were all readers--the folks subscribed to several magazines then--and we played cards and Monopoly and did crafts, the usual hobbies. That was the winter three-deck canasta, a glorified rummy, was the craze, the only card game I did well at and so the only one I ever liked. We didn't have television then, just the wonders of imaginative radio silenced; movies were out of the question, only in theaters then, no cassettes or DVDs or Netflix or Blockbuster.
The three stores ran out of staples such as bread, milk, and eggs, the latter hoarded. The women saved starter in fruit jars, even giving some to others, the way sourdough is made now, saving some yeasty dough and feeding it to keep it fermenting for the next batch of bread. I think we had powdered milk; condensed or evaporated milk substituted just as I use those today if need be. Though we didn't yet have freezers to stock, most women canned, as Mom and Grandma did, so we had fruits and vegetables in our basement fruit cellar besides the store canned goods.
With snow up to the telephone lines, streets and roads usually impassable and blowing shut as rapidly as they were opened, who needed to go anywhere? We didn't have electricity, but we had heat, light, cooking, baking, and entertainment we were used to. And no school. We didn't have school for days and weeks, though occasionally we townies were summoned by the school bell to trudge up the hill so the superintendent didn't get behind too far on snow days. We mainly fooled around for a couple of hours and huddled over the furnace grates. I do recall we got to play with microscopes. Most of our students were rural, so I'm talking at most a dozen townies, if that, for the second-floor junior-senior high. I don't think the little elementary students were expected when few sidewalks were shoveled, and we walked in the streets after the state road graders had passed through or Dad had talked a bulldozer into opening the side streets. This is, after all, the winter when Dad was one of those responsible for seeing that stranded livestock got fed by Army weasels or airlifts dumping hay bales for the frozen animal clusters that could be spotted. We have photos of the highways, single lanes through drifts higher than cars. Even major highways had single-lane sections: we had some kind of basketball tournament at Plainview that winter, some trucks stalled on U.S. 20 in a long cut at the west edge of town, and we had to transfer from cars on the town side to a Neal bus from Creighton after sliding past the stuck trucks in order to be bused back to Center. But people expected and prepared for weather better then, chains customary (even I knew how to put those on the tires), extra blankets always in our car, candles, flashlights. People now think like teenagers: they're somehow impervious, invincible, weatherproof in their SUVs. T'ain't so, McGee.
Children, especially boys, had chores then just as farm youth always have had. In the summer I maintained the lawn and garden; in the winter I had to shovel snow, the only part of glorious winter I disliked, mainly because we had a narrow walk out to a very big cemented clothesline area, about the size of two single-car garages set lengthwise, in the back yard on the north side where drifts were highest. The big front porch and front sidewalks took a fraction of the time the clothesline did. My dog enjoyed it much more than I. I was also responsible for keeping the furnace fed and removing the ashes. (The clinkers were good for making those coal gardens, mixing salt, liquid bluing, water, ammonia, and coloring the fantasy results with food colors.) Otherwise, we made snow angels, built crude forts, ice skated on the wind-swept frozen creeks, and did plenty of sleigh riding down Schoolhouse Hill a block from me. And my dog, Jigger then, and I romped whenever Mom let me. It was a serendipitous vacation and adventure, no hardship at all, not scary like North Dakota much later when I was teaching at Minot State.
Postscript: Mom and all the other proper women were furious, given the grocery store shortages, when the first trucks into town, after the roads were finally opened, were beer trucks. Our kind of scandal. Times have most definitely changed.
Writing should be as easy as baking. The past three afternoons, I've made sequentially pumpernickel and two loaves of my wheat bread variation of Aunt Myrtle's recipe, rosemary bread, and double chocolate biscotti, all except Aunt Myrtle's new recipes, the rosemary especially good enough for Show and Tell. Of course, this is aside from the usual kitchen havoc of burnt fingers and flour fallout. It's also economical, healthy, and creative, if time-consuming--which is why stressed-out sorts spend money on fast food or prepackaged supermarket quick fixes or overpriced restaurants. Retirement has its smug virtues.
Writing is not that simple. I just read Chris Baty's No Plot? No Problem!, which claims writing can be, to the extent of tapping out a 50,000-word semblance of a novel in 30 days, using a few tricks but mainly producing the same kind of disciplined daily output that six-hours-writing-a-day John Le Carre practices. Baty's novel writing is intentionally worry free, without wondering if the yeast is outdated or the herbs gone stale. Simply that Nike slogan: Just do it.
So, according to Mitchell Symons' That Book of Perfectly Useless Information, 111,111,111 X 111,111,111=12,345,678,987,654,321. Similarly, I have long been fascinated with the Fibonacci sequence which produces the spirals of pine cones, sunflower seeds, the chambered Nautilus, as well as the Golden Mean/Section, recently used in molded acoustical tiles in Omaha's new Holland Performing Arts Center. (The Fibonacci sequence is simply adding two successive numbers to get the next one in sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, etc.) As a word person utterly uninterested in the current Sudoku craze, I am still intrigued by number mysteries, by any mysteries, actually, well beyond my lifelong reading of mystery writers such as Dick Francis and Tony Hillerman. Occasionally I even become reinterested in simple everyday mysteries like how my peace plant converts the winter sunlight streaming in my kitchen's south windows into chlorophyll green or how my bubbling yeast gasses up my bread, but mostly I prefer the human or, better, the cosmic in astronomy and archaeology. The wallpaper on my brand-new computer is Stonehenge set on the Salisbury Plain against a beautiful blue sky with some wispy curling cirrus clouds. I watch every documentary I can about the site, as well as about Ireland's Newgrange or the Orkney's Maeshowe, those extraordinary astronomical clock structures built by humans 5,000 years ago, mysterious sites we will never fully comprehend, sun- and moon-oriented. Stonehenge persists in producing new discoveries every decade, it seems. Newer versions of these human mysteries occur in Central America's Mayan structures and, as enthralled me recently in a documentary, New Mexico's Chaco Canyon. I have been to mysterious Chaco, long before work in the 1990s, the Solstice Project, revealed the hidden equinox and solstice architecture and road system memorialized in three Fajada Butte petroglyphs. All of these sites weigh on me as the winter solstice approaches, not only a niece's birthday but the celebratory season co-opted by much later Christianity, as it deliberately took over other notable mythological/astronomical occasions.
So cosmological concerns keep me from fretting too much over my own mundane mysteries, such as why I can deliberately park off to myself and return from the matinee or bookstore to the parking lot to find my pickup surrounded by friendly vehicles who could easily have chosen other empty spaces. My pickup is much more social than I am. Or how I can snag a pocket on anything protruding such as a rocking-chair arm or drawer handle or crumple up throw rugs by walking across them (the latter is genetic: Dad did the same, so it became a father-son joke). Or why I have trouble writing.
I would much rather puzzle over, say, the mystery of Billy Hillberg, a very smelly character of my childhood who lived in a shack along the Bazile Creek west of Center, my hometown. No one liked to be downwind of him when he came into town in his old flannel shirt and dirty overalls, a burlap bag once used for potatoes slung over his back, tied by rope, into which he put his few supplies and many catfood tins. Unshaven, grey bearded, democratically pugnacious, old hightop shoes shuffling along unhurried. Usually I was forbidden to go near his place, but Marlo Holmes, two grades behind me, cultivated an acquaintance with him, their family store where Billy usually traded then. That's how I got to tag along once, only once, with Marlo and some other boys to see a fabled junkyard in and out of the house, narrow trails up and down on dirt through piles of old furniture and metal objects stacked higher than our heads to the rear living area with its old cast-iron cookstove on which sat pans and skillets, chairs, table--I don't remember a bed but know one had to be somewhere, up in a loft? No electricity, no plumbing (faucets, toilet), no heat other than the cookstove. Billy had rigged a cable across the creek with a sling chair that could be pulled along hand over hand, by which he could cross regardless of how high the water was. ( In the 1940s-50s the Bazile ran much higher than today, occasionally flooding destructively, before the farmers were building dams to catch rain runoff or running pipes for irrigation.) I think Marlo, who loved gadgetry and was good at it, liked the cable chair best. As suggested, Billy kept cats, several, which didn't mind his unbathed smell at all and purred around his feet and meowed across the stove (sleeping in the skillets) and out of the junkpiles. In fact, when he ultimately didn't show up for his usual weekly shopping for two or three weeks, Dad and someone else had to look into his absence. Poor old Billy was dead and eaten grotesquely by his cats. What mystery lies in Billy? As I found out decades later, Billy was from one of the better, fairly well-to-do area families with brothers and sisters somewhere and, the biggest surprise, had a college education. So why did he turn from that to a hobo subsistence? Now, there's an abiding mystery.
