Dakota

A Spiritual Geography

Kathleen Norris

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780547527567
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"A deeply spiritual, deeply moving book" about life on the Great Plains, by the New York Times–bestselling author of The Cloister Walk ( The New York Times Book Review).
 
"With humor and lyrical grace," Kathleen Norris meditates on a place in the American landscape that is at once desolate and sublime, harsh and forgiving, steeped in history and myth ( San Francisco Chronicle). A combination of reporting and reflection, Dakota reminds us that wherever we go, we chart our own spiritual geography.
 
 

Gatsby on the Plains

“You can’t repeat the past.”
“Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!”

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, The Great Gatsby

IN THE SPRING of 1984 a woman in her early thirties said to me: “You don’t understand this town because you’re an outsider. You don’t know what it was like here twenty years ago. That’s what we want; that’s what we have to get back to.”

Beyond the shock of hearing a young woman say she wanted to recapture the earthly paradise the world had seemed at twelve, I began thinking: 1964. The nation was still reeling from the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Our involvement in Vietnam was greater than most Americans yet recognized, and escalated that year with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution and sending U.S. bombers over Laos. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act after a long and bitter struggle, but Southern blacks had to fight to be seated at the Democratic convention, and civil rights workers Schwerner, Goodman, and Cheney were murdered by white vigilantes in Mississippi. College girls like me, if we knew women’s history at all, thought that the women’s suffrage movement had ended because, once women won the vote, all its goals were obtained.

But paradise existed in a little Dakota town, where it seemed that the dreams of progress held by the homesteaders and early merchants were at last being realized. Commodity prices were good, and a federal dam project boosted the economy. New churches and a school were being built, but the boom was not so great that stability was threatened. You could still get baptized, married, and eulogized surrounded by your own.

As the woman went on talking, I felt both grief and anger. Grief, after all, is the pain of loss, and this woman was taking away both the hard lessons and the progress of twenty years; the road from Selma to Jesse Jackson’s speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention. From women in terrible isolation, beginning to doubt not their own sanity but the sanity of the “feminine” role demanded of them, to a dynamic feminism with many victories, in both law and social attitudes; if nothing else, it got women wearing more sensible shoes. Even 1968, with its assassinations and tragic Democratic convention; or the Vietnam war, or Watergate—had all this meant nothing? Would we really be better off pretending none of it had happened? Or that it had all taken place in another world, having no effect on our own?

I began to wonder where her magic boundaries lay: family? town? the state line? Even I, who have roots here, who spent my childhood summers learning to swim in the WPA pool, playing Monopoly with neighborhood children on a picnic table in my grandparents’ backyard, am to her an outsider, a serpent in her Eden, because in defining the town’s problems, I refer to the world outside it: the national economy, regional demographics. I’d spent too long exposed to the world outside to really love the town she longs to see as a Norman Rockwell portrait come to life, a triptych with neat white edges. Dad is at work, Mom is at home, and the rosy-cheeked kids are spending their allowance at the soda fountain on Main.

What she’s forgetting is that the soda fountain is gone, along with the drug store it was a part of. It’s one of several empty buildings on Main. Paradise wasn’t self-sufficient after all, and the attitude and the belief that it ever was is part of the reason it’s gone.

Change has not often been kind to the Dakotas. While Dakota boosters in the late nineteenth century predicted confidently that the population of each state would rise to a million by 1900, neither state has ever come close. The current North Dakota population is 660,000; for South Dakota, 715,000. Perkins County, which includes Lemmon, is typical of counties west of the Missouri River in that during the twentieth century its population base has been slowly ebbing away; 11,348 at the height of the homestead boom in 1910; 7,055 in 1925; 5,530 in 1945; 4,700 in 1980; and 3,932 in 1990.

Illusions of progress that allowed North Dakota to enter the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco with an exhibit entitled “North Dakota Enlightens the World” soon gave way, in the 1920s and the “Dirty Thirties,” to farm and small business bankruptcies and the hard economic realities of the Dust Bowl. Change is still resented on the Plains, so much so that many small-town people cling to the dangerous notion that while the world outside may change drastically, their town does not. Population may shrink, as it has in Lemmon, from 3,400 in 1964 to around 1,600 today, with a median age older than most of America. But when myth dictates that the town has not really changed, ways of adapting to new social and economic conditions are rejected: not vigorously, but with a strangely resolute inertia. In today’s troubled agricultural economy this translates into a death wish, and values that once served to protect and preserve the town become threats to its survival.

In the early 1980s this inertia made it hard for many rural Dakotans to recognize and respond to changing economic realities. Our town has lost many businesses in the last twenty years, but the idea that an industrial development committee should be formed seemed preposterous to many. Their attitude was: Why seek out industry? We’ve never had to do it before. Why band together to give new businesses a break? We were never given any breaks. They called the others doomsayers.

They were indulging in a willful ignorance of their own regional history. Ghost towns surround us, but the boom years beginning in the 1950s had allowed a false sense of security to take hold. We told ourselves that the process that ruined these little towns was over, that our town had a pristine existence outside of history, exempt from the dynamics of economic and social change. Given this attitude, it was impossible for us to gauge the severity of the farm crisis that struck in the 1980s.

When businesspeople did form an industrial development committee, there was talk of bringing light industry in. But aspirations were scaled down almost immediately. As in the past, several businesses were kept out by dog-in-the-manger businessmen and investors who didn’t want enterprises established by outsiders. “We have to keep the wage scale down,” one told a county commissioner. While this is an understandable concern for any small business, in the western Dakotas such attitudes have hindered economic development so greatly as to be self-defeating. The young wage earners move away.

One small manufacturing plant was created by local investors, but the committee’s efforts went mainly toward attracting small-scale businesses that aren’t likely to survive unless major employers are also brought in. We got a craft shop, a gunsmith, an upholsterer, a dry cleaner, and a shoe repair shop to replace the ones we had lost. The new cleaner folded in less than six months, but the Chamber picked the theme “Alive, Well, and Growing” for its annual banquet without any sense of irony, and many were comforted by the boosterism. There had been too much talk lately about how the town was going downhill. The economic development group collapsed not long after that, and it was several years before another one rose from its ashes.

That is not too dramatic a metaphor. Combatting inertia in a town such as Lemmon can seem like raising the dead. It is painful to watch intelligent businesspeople who are dedicated to the welfare of the town spend most of their energy combatting those more set in their ways. Community spirit can still work wonders here—people raised over $500,000 in the hard times of the late 1980s to keep the Lemmon nursing home open, and a much-needed sewer bond issue passed by a 98 percent margin—but in the long run inertia has a way of destroying not only our self-confidence but our sense of community.

Small towns pride themselves on their sense of community, the neighborliness which lack of anonymity is supposed to provide. When everyone knows everyone else, the theory goes, community is highly valued. This is evident when disaster strikes. A farmer hospitalized in early summer finds that his neighbors have put up his hay. A new widow’s kitchen fills with friends and acquaintances who bring food, coffee, memories, and healing.

But the fault line of suspicion and divisiveness exposed by the farm crisis in the mid-1980s has left wounds that have not healed, making me wonder how real community is in my town and perhaps in other isolated Dakota towns that have seen three or four generations pass.

It is a given that isolated Plains communities cannot hold on to most of the best and brightest who grow up there. After college they move on to better job opportunities elsewhere. Of course, many who come back to run a family business or ranch are as bright and enterprising as those who opt to leave, but even these people have a difficult time maintaining a normal sense of the world “outside.” They may start out regarding their isolation as a hardship that is worth enduring for the benefits of raising a family in a small town or in the country. But the isolation begins to exact an unforeseen toll, making them more provincial than they’d intended to be. They stop connecting to the world outside, except through the distorting lens of television. They drop subscriptions to national zines and newspapers. Their curiosity about the world diminishes.

By the time a town is seventy-five or one hundred years old, it may be filled with those who have come to idealize their isolation. Often these are people who never left at all, or fled back to the safety of the town after a try at college a few hundred miles from home, or returned after college regarding the values of the broader, more pluralistic world they had encountered as something to protect themselves and their families from.

As their frame of reference diminishes, so do their aspirations and their ability to adapt to change. To some extent, wariness about change is a kind of prairie wisdom. The word’s origins lie in the marketplace, as in “exchange,” and negative connotations abound, like “to shortchange” or deceive. But the sad truth is that the harder we resist change, and the more we resent anyone who demands change of us, the more we shortchange ourselves. Who could be more impoverished than the man who, on hearing news of a former teacher, exclaimed in a tavern, “That old cow? She used to make me read. Said I couldn’t graduate till I read all she wanted Well I showed her I haven’t read a book since.”

Many teachers here also seem to give up any thought of lifelong learning. More than once I’ve wondered, looking at signatures on old book cards when I worked at the library, why so many adults in a town like Lemmon stop reading. More than once I’ve been surprised to discover that people who show no sign that they’ve ever read a book in their lives, are in fact former teachers, college graduates from the days when an education was said to mean something.

Even the young here can come to view the world as static. High school students asked in the early 1980s to prepare a résumé for a mock job application replied: “Why? We’ll never live anyplace big enough to have to do this.” When such attitudes come to prevail in a town, family is still important but community may not be. Because it can’t look outward, the town begins to turn in on itself, and a schismatic, ultimately self-defeating dynamic takes hold. This is what struck many western Dakota towns when the farm crisis of the mid-1980s took hold.

Most economists regard this crisis as the worst for farmers since the 1920s and 1930s. In the fall of 1984 the Wall Street Journal ran an excellent series on the farm economy that covered agricultural lenders, implement dealers, and farmers who were going under, as well as those who had changed their operations to meet changing times and were doing well. Reading about one such successful farmer made me realize how ill equipped most farmers I knew were for adjusting to the international world of modern agriculture.

Here is an Ohio farmer:

A globe on his desk is a reminder that he must think of worldwide supply and demand, of distant politics and climates. These global factors figure strongly in his marketing now that America faces greatly heightened competition for world grain trade. Successful farmers today must have international savvy. The Richards family does. Dinner table talk is as apt to dwell on Brazil’s weather as Ohio’s. [They] subscribe to the Financial Times of London. Their bathroom reading is a magazine called International Economic Indicators.

There are farmers and ranchers here who are well informed on the world events that affect them. But many are like a family I knew: when I helped paint some outbuildings on their place and wanted to get newspaper to use as a drop cloth, I had to settle for pages from a Sears catalog. “A newspaper!” exclaimed a friend from town. “Where do you think you are!” That family went bankrupt; the husband is now working as a welder. And the insular thinking that helped to put them under continues to reign: only a handful of people have read the copies of Dan Morgan’s Merchants of Grain or Gilbert Fife’s American Farmers: The Last Minority that have been in the library for years. Some troubled farm families who could benefit from Fife’s analysis of the process by which America’s agricultural majority of 96 percent in 1790 became a minority of 30 percent by 1920 and a mere 1.7 percent today choose instead to believe in conspiracies by Jewish bankers.

More than ever, I’ve come to see conspiracy theories as the refuge of those who have lost their natural curiosity and ability to cope with change. Is it any wonder that the world seems full of strange and implacable forces to someone who doesn’t know how to look up a Zip Code, use a computerized card catalog, or even make a long-distance phone call? When my husband tended bar in Lemmon, he was often asked to place calls for people flustered by a pay phone. The night he telephoned a research library at a university in California to settle a barroom dispute about the planets is now part of local legend. He might as well have been a shaman.

The ranchers here who do keep current on issues that affect them have adopted a “wait and see” attitude toward the towns around them. They know not all of them will make it. One is more likely to find realistic economic and social attitudes among farmers and ranchers and in the tiniest Dakota towns (those with populations of under a thousand) than in larger ones.

The smallest towns have made do with so little for so long they count themselves lucky to have a post office, a gas station, a general store, and perhaps a tavern; they have no illusions that they are necessary to the farm economy. But such illusions have flourished in towns like Lemmon that are just large enough to have a merchant class and a real society to which farm people may or may not belong, depending on who and how successful their parents were and whether or not they wear their manure-caked boots into town. In the mid-1980s I watched small-town society react to the farm crisis with a volatile mixture of fear and denial, and an unfortunate tendency to blame the victim. Of course, one of the things people were busy denying is the extent to which they had become victims as well.

Several articles in the Journal series concerned the devastating effects the farm crisis was having on the economic and social structure of small towns. A prediction was made that no town with a population under 1,000 would survive as a viable economic trade center. But the news roused little interest here. As late as 1985, copies of such articles presented at local industrial development committee meetings were left on tables, unclaimed and unread. The attitude was that whatever was being said was being said by outsiders and therefore applied to other places, not to us.

When it became obvious that local farmers were indeed in trouble, and a county sheriff retired early rather than serve foreclosure papers on a relative, fears began to surface in town among businessmen worried for their livelihood and retired people worried about an eroding tax base. But no sense of community helped them face these fears honestly or directly. Instead, it seemed that the habit of insular thinking had become so deeply ingrained that many townspeople couldn’t help but turn the farmers in trouble into a new class of outsiders from which the town had to be protected. The fact that these outsiders were now neighbors a few miles down the road and no longer strangers in Detroit or Los Angeles only made people resent them more. Some even began talking as if the town didn’t need those dumb old farmers anyway, as if its survival weren’t tied to an agricultural base. “They got themselves in this mess, let them get themselves out,” was one remark I heard.

The saddest story I know was of an encounter between two “insiders,” one a longtime town resident, the wife of a retired rancher, the other the patriarch of one of the oldest farm families in the area. The man had been working desperately during what was supposed to be his retirement in an attempt to keep his son from going bankrupt. “There is no farm crisis,” the woman told him firmly in her spotless living room only fifteen miles from his farm but a world apart.

The Wall Street Journal articles had been easy to dismiss because they came from the outside world. A favorite local saying is “an expert is someone who’s fifty miles from home,” and while this has a certain folksy charm, it also reveals a smug refusal to use expert witness even when it might be in your best interest to do so. When even local families can be turned into outsiders and enemies, ministers and other professionals make easy targets. They set themselves up for attack simply by doing their jobs, organizing stress and suicide prevention workshops and support groups for bankrupt farmers. When this happened in Lemmon, some townspeople complained that the ministers were only making things worse with their negative talk.

Many teachers, doctors, lawyers, and ministers in rural towns are outsiders. And they often find that they’ve moved to a place in which professional standards have slipped over the years. Some of this is a welcome relaxation of urban standards, as simple as the bank president not wearing a tie to work. We bend the rules; that’s part of small-town charm. The danger is that professional standards will slip so far that people not only accept the mediocre but praise it, and refuse to see any outside standards as valid.

Year after year, state auditors find the same errors in the way city books are kept, recommending that “accounting records as set forth in the Municipal Accounting Manual be established.” If eventually a change is made, most likely it will be forced on us and resented, blamed on government interference. A teacher enters a student in a speech contest without checking the correct pronunciation of the many French words in his talk, and is annoyed when told that this must be done if the student is to enter a regional competition. A well-educated newcomer is hired as a church treasurer and fired a year later for trying to push her ideas on the finance committee, which couldn’t conceive of building an endowment but wanted to invest only in passbook savings and certificates of deposit, as it always had. One complaint made about her was that she came to meetings too well organized.

Such outsiders can unwittingly pose a threat to the existing social order, and if their newcomers’ enthusiasm doesn’t wear off, if their standards don’t fall to meet the town’s, and especially if they keep on trying to share what they know, they have to be discouraged, put down, or even cast out.

Small-town people know that professionals, especially those who have or seek exceptional credentials, are likely to live among them for a short time before moving on to a place where they can earn more money and advance their careers. Their differentness often shows in needs that cannot be met locally. A clergyman, for instance...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface
• The Beautiful Places
• Weather Report: January 17
• Deserts
• Weather Report: February 10
• Dakota Or, Gambling, Garbage, and the New Ghost Dance
• Patagonia
• A Starfish in Mott
• Weather Report: March 25
• Gatsby on the Plains
• Weather Report: April 14
• Closed In
• The Holy Use of Gossip
• Weather Report: May 19
• Can You Tell the Truth in a Small Town?
• Weather Report: June 30
• Ghosts
• Evidence of Failure
• Shadows ’n’ Owls: A Message from Jim Sullivan
• Cana
• Where I Am
• Star-Time
• Frontier
• How I Came to Drink My Grandmother’s Piano
• Status Or, Should Farmers Read Plato?
• Weather Report: July 3
• Rain
• Sea Change
• God Is in the Details: Shortgrass
• Seeing
• Weather Report: August 9
• Getting to Hope
• In the Open
• Blessing
• Weather Report: September 3
• My Monasticism
• God Is in the Details: Winter Wheat
• Weather Report: October 2
• Is It You, Again?
• Weather Report: November 2
• Dust
• Monks at Play
• Blue
• Weather Report: December 4
• Weather Report: December 7
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Reader’s Guide
• A Conversation with Kathleen Norris
• About the Author
• Connect with HMH