Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

North Dakota doesn’t have a native son who became president. I think the only president who ever lived in North Dakota was Teddy Roosevelt.  We have clasped him to our collective bosom, however, and his only presidential library is due to be built about 4 blocks from my house, on the former rodeo grounds at our local college.  The Theodore Roosevelt Center At Dickinson State University website tells us:

“Theodore Roosevelt established two ranches in the badlands of western North Dakota: one called the Maltese Cross seven miles south of the Northern Pacific Railroad (1883) and the other called the Elkhorn, 35 miles north of the village of Medora, North Dakota (1884). Roosevelt never owned a single acre in North Dakota. Like most other ranchers in the badlands, he was a squatter on lands that still belonged to the public domain or the NP Railroad. The Maltese Cross (Chimney Butte) Ranch had already been named by the time he invested in it. He named his second ranch the Elkhorn after he found the horns of two male elk interlocked at the site. The elk had been butting heads in a struggle for primacy when their horns became locked. Unable to extricate themselves, the elk died of starvation. This appealed to Roosevelt, who regarded life as a Darwinian struggle.”

“At the Elkhorn Roosevelt ranched and played cowboy, went on long solo horseback rides, often for many days at a time, and hunted for elk, mule deer, white tail deer, and other quadrupeds. He also grieved for his mother and his first wife Alice, who died together in New York City on Valentine’s Day 1884. In fact, at the Elkhorn TR wrote the only tribute he would ever pen for Alice, who died two days after giving birth to Roosevelt’s first child Alice. He also wrote parts of two of his 35-plus books at the Elkhorn.”

The plan is to rebuild the Elkhorn Ranch house next to the library. For that purpose, large cottonwood logs have been collected from the area, and local ranchers are encouraged to donate logs to rebuild the 60 x 30 foot cabin. A builder from South Dakota has been hired to build the cabin by hand using only tools that were available to Roosevelt’s builders. You can see some of the logs that have already been hauled to the grounds.

It will be quite a job, and I look forward to seeing progress on the cabin when I drive to work each day. The Legislature set aside many millions of dollars to build the library, as long as the TR Center could raise 3 million more. They have a ways to go, but are optimistic that the library and the cabin will both get finished.

If you could design a presidential library for any president, what would you do?

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

North Dakota is noted for honest elections and ease of voting.  You don’t need to register, and all you need in order to vote on Election day are one of the following:

• ND Driver’s license
• ND non-driver’s license ID
• Tribal ID

My paternal grandfather told me that he voted for Warren Harding the first time he could vote. He also told me he never forgave himself for that, and voted for Democrats from then on.

Husband will vote before he travels to the reservation on Election Tuesday. I will sneak away from work sometime during the day to vote.  I don’t plan to listen to election results, but will turn on NPR in the morning to hear the results. I won’t be able to stand the suspense.

What are your Election Day plans?  

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota.

We drove to Minot last Wednesday to attend the Norsk Hostfest and hear Emmylou Harris perform.  We have lived here for 28 years and never once attended the Hostfest. It was quite an experience.

The Hostfest is a celebration of all things Scandinavian, and is a major trade show, community reunion, cultural celebration, and entertainment venue. I counted more than 200 vendors of food and crafts. About 55,000 people attend annually. Tourists  come from the Scandinavian countries to  attend. It has all the kitsch you would expect (hence the Rosemaled toilet seat and the Cream of Lutefisk Soup), really wonderful Scandinavian textiles and arts, comforting food, and music all over the place.

The bigger concerts like that by Emmylou are held in “the Great Hall of the Vikings” which is a hockey arena that also serves to show livestock during the ND State Fair. In the various halls named after Scandinavian capitols are smaller stages  where various groups play traditional and modern music. There is adequate space for those who want to polka. Hardanger fiddlers, Danish folk musicians, Norwegian Country-Western stars, and Meti musicians play in the hallways and staircases. We missed hearing Ragnarokkr,  who bill themselves as Vikings with Guitars. Outdoors are demonstrations of Viking games, crafts, and arts. Many people are in costume. People in troll costumes wander the hallways.

The food is interesting.  You can sign up for a six course dinner prepared by fancy chefs imported from Norway, or else visit the food booths. Most of those are sponsored by local Lutheran churches. You can get potet klub, lutefisk and meatball dinners, lefse, Finnish beef stew,  sandbakkels, and aebelskiver.  There is a lefse making competition that lasts 4 days. Nordic Ware puts on cooking classes. My favorite was the class that taught how to make traditional Viking fare like kale porridge with smoked herring. For some reason, the Germans from Russia were selling Kneophla soup and brats, and there were a couple of places to get baklava and gyros.

Artisans teach classes in making Arctic flutes, making Sami bracelets and rings with spun pewter, felting, knitting, making your own wool using a drop spindle, weaving, and carving a Dala horse.

I suppose this pales in comparison to venues like Ren Fest, but Hostfest has its own charm. It is local and international, sophisticated and silly, all at the same time.  I like that one of the Minot banks had a booth where you could write a cheque for cash even if you were from out of town and had your account at a different bank. I like that people were encouraged to go up to strangers and say “Hi, and where are you from” in the hopes that the stranger was a Mystery Viking who would give you $100  I like that many people have been at every Hostfest  since it started 39 years ago, and many people stay for the entire 4 days. Emmylou was in good voice.  We saw an honest to goodness whooping crane in one of the prairie potholes south of Minot on the trip there. The weather was sunny and warm. It was a good day.

Describe (or invent) a festival that you would go out of your way to attend.   

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

I have had some pretty stressful weeks at work lately, mainly due to the seriousness of some of my cases, and I have neglected to look around me for humor. Humor is an essential component of my self-care.  A conversation with my husband last night provided me with some giggles, and I  wanted to share it.

My husband and I don’t get out much. We seem to be constantly busy with gardens, cooking, or cleaning the house. I work until 7:00 pm three nights a week.. We are tired by the time Friday rolls around, and, quite honestly, we live in a small community where we know lots of uncomfortable truths about many people and/or their relatives. It doesn’t make us the most popular couple in town.

When we meet people and they find out that we are both psychologists, the usual remark is “You two must stay at home and analyze each other all the time”.  Well, we certainly don’t do that. We have lots of conversations, though. I realized last night as we were talking that some of our conversations would probably sound positively bizarre to most folks.

Husband has an undergraduate degree in Philosophy from the University of Wisconsin. He is a deep thinker and has a myriad of interests outside of psychology.  At one point last evening he was talking about “Health care justice and its relation to Constitutional Monarchy” (I think we were talking about the Canadian and British health care systems). He then scampered to the history of political philosophy, described a history of the Second World War he was reading by John Lukacs (not George Lukacs the Marxist, he was careful to point out), and ended the evening with the pronouncement “The French Revolution was not universally blessed”.

Taken out of context, I think this all sounds terribly funny. It also would confirm to many of our town folk that husband and I are more than a little odd. We both had a good laugh last night when I pointed out what egg heads we sounded like. I hope tonight’s conversation can give me the giggles, too. It has been a hard week.

What’s your conversational style?

Shoreline of Lake Sakakawea by David Becker CC BY 2.0  via Wikimedia Commons

Today’s post comes from Renee in North Dakota

I have little experience with lakes, despite being born and raised in Minnesota. Rock County is one of about three counties in Minnesota with no natural lakes. We have gravel pits south of Luverne that have been turned into fishing holes, and where I caught my first sunfish with my dad. My dad loved going up to Lake of the Woods to visit his uncle and catch walleye, but I was seldom involved on those trips, so I had very little opportunity to enjoy the delights of lake life. In my imagination, a real lake is one surrounded by trees and quaint summer homes with docks leading down to blue water and little boats.

I now live in a part of the country with no natural lakes. We have dams out here, little ponds on dammed up little rivers that have been stocked with fish. People love to go fishing on them, except now that the blue-green algae season is upon us. They also have “lake homes” on some of them, which usually turn out of to be mobile homes set on grassy plots with no trees for miles. Many of these dams were built  by the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation  in efforts to control flooding and improve agricultural irrigation and water supply. The grand example of our “lake” here is Lake Sakakawea, formed by the Garrison Dam.  According to Wikipedia:

” In order to construct the dam, the US government needed to purchase 152,360 acres  in the Fort Berthold Reservation that would be flooded by the creation of Lake Sakakawea. These lands were owned by the Three Affiliated Tribes, who had been living there for perhaps more than a millennium. Threatened by confiscation under eminent domain the tribes protested. The tribes achieved remuneration, but lost 94% of their agricultural land. in 1947, when they were forced to accept $5,105,625, increased to $7.5 million in 1949. The final settlement legislation denied tribes’ right to use the reservoir shoreline for grazing, hunting, fishing, or other purposes, including irrigation development and royalty rights on all subsurface minerals within the reservoir area.  About 1700 residents were forcibly relocated, some to New Town, North Dakota. Thus Garrison Dam almost totally destroyed the traditional way of life for the Three Affiliated Tribes.”

The lake is big and butt ugly.  There are no natural beaches. The 1300 miles of shoreline  are rough and abrupt. The depth can change suddenly  from 10 feet to 70 feet. Sometimes when the water is low you can see the roofs of buildings that were submerged when water filled the dam.  It is the largest fish hatchery in the world. I was fishing there a couple of weeks ago with fishing-fanatic friends. All I caught was a tiny perch and the trolling motor.  My line was wrapped so tightly around the motor we had to head back to shore and go home. People here think this “lake” is just wonderful. They call it “the Big Water”. I want to yell at them “That is not a lake. It is a big tub of water with fish in it”!

The Corps of Engineers recently decided to give many thousands of acres of shoreline back to the Three Affiliated Tribes. These are the tribes husband works for, and the families of many of our native friends were displaced and lost land when the Dam was built. There is a certain amount of anxiety in the campers and fishers about this. The Tribes are trying to reassure everyone, saying that people will still have the same access to the lake.  It interests me how differently people see the lake. Some see it as a sportsman’s paradise. Others see it as a constant reminder of trauma and loss. People in communities down stream depend on the dam to keep the Missouri River from flooding their homes. I see it as a fake, a sham. I admit I also depend on it, as it is our city’s source of really good water. The lake leaves me conflicted. 

What is your favorite lake (or fish) story?