And, before we knew it . . .

MINNESOTA, LAND OF MANY LAKES
You keep going north and north wondering when you’re going to run out of America. Minnesota has thousands of kettle hole lakes made by glaciers and we made a beeline for one of the most famous, Itasca Lake near Bemidji, where Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe are celebrated in overlarge papier-mâché. Itasca encloses the headwaters of the Mighty Mississippi before it becomes so mighty, and is by far the most popular park in Minnesota. Old Man River’s 2500 miles to the Gulf of Mexico begin tenderly, as a trickle across a line of stepping-stones out of the lake. Oh, how they looked for this little 50 foot passage, and after 300 years of wrong guessing, their struggle ended when Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, led by Ojibwa chief Ozaawindit (Yellow Head), finally discovered the river’s source in 1832. Of course Truman went for a dip to commemorate their success. Itasca has a fabulous visitor’s center, cool bookstore and a 1906 lodge that cheerfully serves a great waffle.

That waffle stuck with me even further north into our Flickertail State. A destination eagerly anticipated by me for many reasons

NORTH DAKOTA, LAND OF MANY COUSINS
Badlands, Lewis and Clark, Teddy Roosevelt, buffalo, and best of all, an auntie and first cousins! Maybe you have some too, or even grew up with a few. For me, raised in California with two brothers only, relatives were exotic, faraway companions. But when I called my cousin Lyle for directions, he told me that I would soon be reaching territory “where you’ll be protected by family.” This profound concept of extended family as a supportive unit was the greatest comfort and was later seen demonstrated time after time: in an entire kitchen table of laughing women sharing dna and irony, or watching a lovely dawn mist appear over the Sheyenne River with my cousin and speaking of family things, or the essential moment in the Tolna cemetery, surrounded by carved family names—Willis, Haas, Price and Dahl—when my aunt and many cousins made a circle, held hands and sang my mother’s favorite hymns as we buried her little memory box next to the graves of her mom and dad.

Although Renie, who died this Easter, is buried in Texas, she was born and raised here, married and started a family in this pioneering land located so far to the north that it tickles Canada, and will be remembered here by a gravestone, as well as in California where she spent another thirty years of her life. The memory box lovingly gathered photographs, letters, her books of poetry, a braid of her hair and other precious mementos of her life there. What about you? Where would you like to leave your name? The warmth of the family feeling I found in North Dakota has settled permanently in my bones and I am so grateful to my family for providing those memories.

Life wasn’t easy for Dakotans living in a land where temperature extremes range from –50 to +120 degrees and water was a sometime thing. But sales pitches from railroad-produced pamphlets reached out to Oslo, Kiev, Dusseldorf and London with invitations to a better life as Americans. These new citizens brought their innocent dreams to an arid land that could include claim jumpers, fence wars and Indian raids. Their homes would sit isolated a mile apart on perfectly square half-sections of free farmland (320 acres after 1909), and often would be a soddy until a wooden farmhouse could be built. Soddy’s were like igloos, one room made from cut blocks of sod complete with snakes, mice and bugs, but cool in summer and warm in winter. Cows and goats would often graze on the roof, but it was the merciless wind and isolation that so often drove women mad.

You had to “prove up” or keep your land under cultivation for five years and pay a $16. fee before you were granted full title, and thousands did it. By 1911 their zealously taut fences were up and tall schoolhouses with bells were sited five or six miles apart, preferably on a hill if they could find one so children could find their way from farm to school in all weather. There was a constant hunt for teachers and seekers often had to settle on someone barely older than the students. Sturdy churches were proudly erected, like the pristine Sigdal Lutheran Church where I literally stumbled upon my great-grandmother Guro Eikom Thorbjornson-Hensrud’s grave. This proved the immigrants were Americans for keeps.

But “keeps” had to depend on a livable environment. Their shelterbelts of poplar, oak, chestnut and Russian olive were planted on plains that were treeless because the subsoil didn’t have enough moisture for tree roots to thrive. Those trees and their truck gardens were often watered by hand, the produce, in addition to the sale of eggs and milk, to provide a reliable weekly income. These pioneers were so tough, but bitter weather, dry summers below ten inches of rain, cruel winters, hail the size of baseballs weighing 1 ½ lbs apiece, locusts, cyclones, prairie fires set by lightning bolts, floods, hurricanes, plagues, but most of all, drought, forced so many to their knees, pick up their dreams and move further west.

THE BADLANDS
These were the things I was thinking about while clambering over badlands trails at stunning Painted Canyon in Teddy Roosevelt National Park near Medora, North Dakota. TR recovered his health here starting in 1883, and had built two ranches—the Maltese Cross and then the Elkhorn—where he led the strenuous life he loved. The buffalo were gone by then and other wild game was disappearing. Conservation became a major concern for him as he observed the destruction brought on by overgrazing and subsequently established the US Forest Service, national forest land, five national parks and 51 National Wildlife Refuges.

Not only TR’s footprints were here, but also those of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark when they over-wintered with the Mandan-Hidatsa-Arikara tribes in the winter of 1804-5 as part of their remarkable 8,000 mile, 28-month Voyage of Discovery. Here they found Sakakawea, the captured Cheyenne girl, now on the money, who not only accompanied them, but saved their lives many times over. The explorers often said that without the shelter, supplies, good will and generosity of the many Indian nations met as they traveled, they couldn’t have survived. Truman and I later crossed their path again at DeSoto Wildlife Refuge in Iowa along the Missouri River, and will pick it up again next year in Montana and Washington.

SOUTH DAKOTA—MT. RUSHMORE STATE
The sculptured faces are the same, oddly delicate from a distance, but the site itself is greatly changed with a new “Presidential Walk” that brings you up close and personal enough to check their noses for nests. Thomas Jefferson’s image is least like the original man but who’s going to quibble with an eleven-foot-wide eye? There was a big fuss when someone spotted a mountain goat gamboling up impossibly steep rocks at one of the Needles, a next-door mountain. It was all so much like the movie set but where’s Cary Grant when you need him? The newly enlarged facility was crowded with foreign visitors—mostly Asians and Germans and everybody with an ice cream cone…me too.

This was the beginning of the loop home. We had traveled 3,500 miles so far and had just about as many going back. There was a long, long drive down through the Black Hills and into the Pine Ridge Reservation along Route 40 through Hermosa. A washboard road–-only two cars in 60 miles—but the land itself is beautiful. It suddenly falls away into the eroded craters crowded with monoliths in badland topography, while the earth crust is soft and green and dignified with vistas of faraway mesas placed with a designer’s hand. Closer up, red-winged blackbirds and piping willets hopped through sunflowers and flowering clover on the roadsides. As reservation communities like Red Shirt come in view you know what you’re going to see and prepare to become sad.

SIOUX COUNTRY
The most unbelievable poverty…like a Palestinian refugee camp…old wrecks of trailers or shacks surrounded by dozens of rusted car husks in dirt yards—rusty shrubbery, someone called it. Each little hovel was flying an American flag. The only signs of prosperity were in Pine Ridge itself, whose buildings and businesses are heavily subsidized, like the Sue Ann Crow Building. This is named for the popular young athlete who died in a wreck just after she had endeared herself to her community through the force of her skill and personality.

I saw no subsidy from Budweiser, however, which remains the conduit through which most of the personal cash, checks and money orders belonging to the people disappears. I think they should get with it, don’t you? A treatment center at least. Even Philip Morris displays a little humanity these days. Indian death from alcoholism is four times the national average, and the rate of fetal alcohol syndrome among their children is thirty-three times higher than for whites. SIDS, teen suicide and lung cancer in Indian households provide epidemic death statistics far greater than in other groups.

I was reading Ian Frazier’s book “On The Rez,” featuring terrific historical and modern information that centers on the Oglala Sioux tribe. You’ll be angry and sad too when you read it. His book, Larry McMurtry’s “Crazy Horse,” and Mari Sandoz’s “Crazy Horse: The Strange Man of the Oglalas,” give thoroughly researched and well-written narratives on this incredible part of American history.

By the time Crazy Horse was murdered, about the age of 35 at Fort Robinson on September 7, 1877, and with the assistance of some of his own tribesmen, he had already become a legend to his people. They needed heroes who remained true to the culture and traditions that formed the precepts of their fathers. His feud with Red Cloud (long-time negotiator for prime reservation space and reclamation for the stolen Black Hills) had reached heated proportions because of Crazy Horse’s insistence on non-compliance with the white man’s terms. Now, the unbroken spirit of Crazy Horse has become a Thunderhead Mountain sculpture with some anatomical problems and fifty years of effort on the part of Korczak Zolkowski and team, with many more years to go. The sculptured arm of Crazy Horse points to Pa Sapa, the sacred Black Hills stolen from the Sioux 125 years ago through broken treaties when gold was discovered there. Will they get them back?

No one knows where Crazy Horse is buried, but I did find Red Cloud’s burial site outside of Oglala at a Catholic cemetery filled with Native American graves—some as simple as two bare wooden sticks fashioned into a cross. Red Cloud’s grave was definitely more monumental and draped with fresh colors and other tributes. If it had been up to him the reservation would have been located close to Laramie, Wyoming, where ancestral hunting grounds lay. The army kept trying to haul them east of the Missouri River. Pine Ridge and the Black Hills was somewhere in the middle, pleasing no one.

Listen to what Frazier says in his book, “Great Plains” as he sums up white American doings:

BUFFALO OR BISON?
Same animal, trust me. Bison is the scientific name, buffalo is a nickname, a modification of the French “les boeufs.”

Directly or indirectly, man trimmed a population of 40 or 50 million large animals to a few hundred scattered survivors in only a few years. Then sorry, he has since mounted another massive effort to bring the buffalo back from extinction. So now there are more than 100 thousand buffalo roaming national parks and public preserves or in private herds throughout the US. In the spring of 1871 buffalo seemed to move northward in one immense column nearly fifty miles in width while grazing on nutritious gamma grass of the Great Plains. Buffalo are cud-chewers with four stomach compartments like bovines, and they have similar mating patterns.

After the usual dominance battles between bulls the herd separates into cow-calf--from 20 to 70 animals with the babies in the middle, and older bull groups—from 5 to 20 animals. The kids have “play groups” and nurse for about 8 to 12 months. They can live to the age of 40, but most die of accumulated stress over a lifetime of about 15 years. I saw small herds in North Dakota, larger ones in the Black Hills of South Dakota and look forward to seeing many more moving further west next year. They always draw a crowd but may be cranky…you just don’t want to irritate a thousand pounds of nasty temper…do not approach with peanuts!

NEBRASKA RANCH LIFE
Rest and reunion at the Circle 5 with Dana, Lon, Reed and Quinn…Jessica having just been enrolled at BYU Idaho for her freshman year and Cole busy in Lincoln as a rising sophomore at NSU. Went with Dana to a USDA job site 150 miles away where Truman and I enjoyed a two-day scientific assessment of soil and plant life range conditions on a computer-selected site. Dana taught two range conservationists the required exacting procedures while I took some photographs and kept out of the broiling sun and right next to the water cooler. We were entertained at lunch by the holstered gun-toting ranch owner, a colorful character who happily chatted for 45 minutes out in a 101 degree sun. They’re tougher than you and me.

Back on the ranch we attended a calf branding…always alarming but necessary on a big cattle ranch like this…the speed is blinding--from the roping, dragging, branding, cutting of horns and testes and immunization shots to protect them from disease--an average of 90 seconds. Ropers in Stetsons and ball caps sat on dignified horses whose composure complimented their rider’s skillful work while dust and smoke rose, lariats whirled and anguished cows and their beseeched calves bawled pitifully.

The boys entertained us with amazing demonstrations of calf-roping one evening. How have they learned all this? Speed, skill, exact precision equals rodeo fame and their eyes are on the prizes. The family left to gather a few of those and Truman and I pushed on into Iowa.

IOWA—THE HAWKEYE STATE
Slept coolly in air conditioning used for the first time overnight at the DeSoto National Wildlife Refuge/Wilson Landing State Recreation Area right smack on the wide Missouri River. Long, long walk along its banks looking for some of the 200 thousand snow geese that land there every year, but too early yet. Saw barges and was tortured by biting flies aplenty…hot and sticky too…water red with iron. Drove three hundred miles through pretty Iowa, its rolling hills covered with neatly lush rows of corn and soybeans flashing by, just as Grant Wood showed us. We flew on a carpet of corn as far as the eye could see—on into Illinois as well. On the other side of the state we found another great river, but this time the Big Muddy was a lot bigger than its beginning headwaters in Minnesota.

ILLINOIS — LAND OF LINCOLN
Prosperous farms widely spread and accessorized with HUGE silos and accompanying bins. The hammer was down and before long the Mississippi River was in view. We drove up to the large Mississippi River Palisades State Park located along the Great River Road. Ignoring being eaten alive by clouds of soft grey mosquitoes and biting flies, I got some nice photographs and made a sketch of the river with its déjà vu reconstructed steamboat steaming perkily down current. At Kickapoo State Park in eastern Illinois I took a day to finish some of the ten books I was in the middle of and catch up on my journal entries.

It’s time to list some of the amazing things seen along America’s byways:

INDIANA, THE HOOSIER STATE
Oh, boy. Some days you just shouldn’t get out of the RV. No luck at all in Indiana, from the unmanned Welcome Center to the cranky Visitor’s Center in Bloomington; from the closed TC Steele Historical Site to the unrangered Yellowwood State Forest; from the rude clerk at Brown County State Park to the “not much going for it” Starve Hollow State Recreation Area in the Jackson-Washington State Forest; from the ABS danger light on my dashboard to the thirty dollar a night camping fees with nothing to photograph or see! Yikes, get me out of here. But first, a word about Indiana Limestone for my Corcoran friends.

The Limestone quarries have to be sneaked up upon because they are strictly off limits to tourists. True ever since the movie “Breaking Away” came out causing a rash of quarry accidents by erstwhile swimmers, hikers and the athletically challenged. The Corcoran Gallery has thousands of cubic feet of the stone as columns and trim, as does the Empire State Building, the Pentagon, the National Cathedral, the Biltmore Estate, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the Naval Academy in Annapolis and practically every college and university in the United States. Born 330 million years ago with marine sediments in a shallow sea in south-central Indiana, the limestone was first quarried in 1827 with a rock-splitting technique still used with modern tools today. 1929 was the zenith of American stone architecture and Indiana furnished 12 million cubic feet for the construction. Versatile because it has no grain and can be cut and carved in any direction, the buff or grey colored stone can be found about 30 feet down in the earth. Eight foot deep slices are cut with belt saws and removed to a depth of 20 feet or more. A typical block weighs about 21 tons and measures 5 feet by 6 feet by 10 feet in length. This is before it is delivered for finishing by skilled artisans at the mill before reaching its final building site.

I did find a quarry…behind a parking lot and between two motels but it was worth the struggle.

THREE BEARS FARM
Closing in fast now on the end of the trail, Truman and I enjoyed the reviewing of Kentucky horse farms, the marvelous Route 79 North out of Charleston, WV on the velvety Jennings Randolph Highway (when WVA says that a freeway ends in ½ mile, they mean it and never repeat themselves), and even being chased by rain showers over the Appalachians and the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia. Once again, after a long voyage, it was so good to emerge from those hills into the lovely blue-green valleys of home. Three Bears had been thoroughly watered by almost constant rain so nothing green had died. Meanwhile, Truman and Gracie were reunited and our normal pace and habits begin to reinstate themselves. As I set down the wonderful and/or terrible things I saw this summer I try to remember the wisdom of the Kabala that says, “To contemplate truth without sorrow is the greatest gift.”

The summer of 2004 will be the last and longest tour for the Landscape Project when Truman and I head for the far west and the final ten states of the journey.

Lots of love,