There was a time when I had next to no experience of the rural life of my home state, North Dakota. During college years (1968-1972), I had learned to stack bales on a wagon and to make a haystack with the bales on the rolling hills above Lake Lida, for farmer Cliff Hanson, but that was in Minnesota. As a child, I had no hankering to live a rural life either, or even live in a small town. I would come to have experience of rural life.
After college graduation in December 1972, I accepted a position as a replacement teacher in Neche, North Dakota, for January 1973. I remember getting off the Greyhound Bus in Pembina and hitchhiking into town with a very beautiful but forlorn woman who knew Neche first hand and knew the address where I had quarters with another teacher. I never saw her again but her kindness in helping me out is not forgotten. I enjoyed my students but felt totally detached from the community and was not even sure there was a community. Fellow teachers left Neche to have a social life in a neighboring town at a bar. I thought then I was not meant for life in a small town.
When the quarter at Neche public school ended, I returned to Fargo-Moorhead and went to work in a farm store where I worked with another young man, Dennis Gerger (a friend from Moorhead State University). He lived in Barnesville, Minnesota, where he was raised on his father's very prosperous farm. As a town kid, I had to admit small talk with farmers was a stretch for me. I was selling them plow shovels, harrow teeth, and harvester blades with only a mental image of the equipment the part fit into.
Dennis on the other hand knew exactly what the part was. He was into history and sparkled when he talked about his family heritage. His ancestors were German immigrants to Russia at the invitation of Catherine the Great because of their agricultural acumen. Later in time, his grandparents had fled the Bolshevik revolution of 1917 for the United States.
I remember attending Dennis's marriage to Julie in southeastern North Dakota. I did not think I was headed for small town life such as Julie and Dennis knew. I married that summer myself to a sweetheart from Carrington, North Dakota, Jean Bronaugh.
Even though I would go to law school in 1974-1975 at the University of North Dakota, I would end up in really small town North Dakota as a rural English teacher. At the end of first year law, I was busted up having worked two jobs in addition to attending class with a really low grade in Property Law and seemingly little prospect of finishing my professional degree. Wife Jean had to do almost all the child care and housekeeping when our first child Kendra was born that year while I kept going out the door to work or to the law library and class. We did not have an easy year to say the least.
Fortunately after the harshness of first year law, I was asked to interview for a position teaching English in a rural village, Grace City, North Dakota. It was the best thing for me it turns out as I came to know the land which is my home state and to garden prodigiously (until wife Jean could not stand canning another thing). The people of the school district were welcoming and kind. We joined the local Lutheran Church and I served as a trustee and Sunday school teacher. The three years in Grace City for me were very heartening.
At this point in time, it has been years since I physically lived in North Dakota. The keepsakes I have are the poems that capture for me the experience of the land, the people, and the the thoughts and feelings of living on the great plains in my native state.
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