Travel on the Gravel

Weblog for Tom Isern, Great Plains historian, co-author of Plains Folk^TM

Welcome to Travel on the Gravel, weblog of historian Tom Isern published in association with Plains Folk^TM enterprises.

Seasonal Fare

26 August 2008

What plenty! We have an avalanche of produce. This evening we visited the garden and quickly came back with what we needed for a huge stir-fry—cabbage, peppers, onion, beans, turnip, zucchini, herbs—and then finished off supper with a slice of apple pie, made from our Macintoshes. Between those and the hybrid crabs from our Centennial tree, we put up 21 quarts of pie filling and something like that amount of applesauce, plus a crockpot of apple butter, over the weekend. And oh yes, after supper this evening we picked a bowl of huge strawberries. Well, it’s just indulgent. These seasonal fruits, too, are reminders of another season of abundance—the season of fall suppers. Over at the Center for Heritage Renewal, we’re updating the fall supper listings, getting ready once again to draw attention to this wonderful ritual so characteristic of the northern prairies. In my personal email comes an invitation from Don Reierson to attend the Nora Lutheran Church Lutefisk & Meatball Dinner, over east of Gardner, this September 14. And in the mail comes a postcard (shown at right) giving more details. Although the calendar at our house is pretty cluttered, we may just get over there to Nora again. It’s a dandy event. If you haven’t gotten into this regional tradition, then ask around, or check out local bulletin boards, or peruse the listings posted by the Center for Heritage Renewal. Get out and dine with your neighbors. It’s good for all of us.

Buckets & Barrows

22 August 2008

We’re back from an extended tour of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, visiting all the grandkids & family, doing a little research. Now we’re hustling to get ready for the teaching terms next week, and also dealing with a looming garden surplus. This evening after running the dog I started bringing in buckets of apples, Macintoshes, windfalls from the powerful south winds of the past two days. There will be some canning this weekend, with more buckets and wheelbarrows of produce coming in.

On a Narrow Edge

7 August 2008

Summer came so late this year, and now we teeter on the narrow edge of high summer, about to slide into Indian summer. Who says there are four seasons, or only four seasons? I know that certain aboriginal tribes in Australia discern many more seasons in the year. Here, we lack adequate names for the distinctions among periods of the year. Come about now each year, the end of the first week in August, things change palpably. The evening light is beautiful, not just the horizon of dusk, but the long light that makes a stubblefield glow and makes a windrow cast a shadow ten times its height. This year, too, the sense of things is different, as the agricultural landscape looks more and more like Iowa, full of corn and beans. Now the evening light plays with corn tassels. And the sensual smells are overpowering, with the corn in tassel and the wheat ready to swath. At the height of summer, so evident in sight and scent, I feel us sliding over into the next season. Turtle doves are flocking wherever there is feed and water. Finches are stoking up. Myself, even while harvesting the garden’s produce, I become more interested in looking to the next year, manuring and composting and constructing beds. Fishing would be a good idea, I think.

Lindaas Barn Dance

6 August 2008

What a grand night in Elroy Lindaas’s loft on July 19! We drove over for the dance, accompanied by most of the members of this year’s NEH summer seminar on the Great Plains. Elroy almost forgot to do the butterfly, but I let him know that some of the guests were expecting it, and he obliged. The music, the light, the shadows on the rafters, it was just a grand time. I shot some video and posted it at the Great Plains Seminar YouTube site. Here’s this year’s schedule for the Lindaas Barn Dance.

Recent Reads

5 August 2008

A long lapse in writing here, and so much I could write about, but I'll begin with a few notes about recent reading. Here are a couple of works picked up in a McNally Robinson store in Winnipeg.

Palsson, Gisli. Travelling Passions: The Hidden Life of Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2005. Originally published in the Icelandic language by a firm in Reykjavik; translated into English by Keneva Kunz.

Raffan, James. Emperor of the North: Sir George Simpson and the Remarkable Story of the Hudson's Bay Company. Toronto: HarperCollins, 2007.

The Palsson biography of Stefansson caught my interest especially because of the North Dakota connection. The future Arctic explorer and anthropologist spent years of his boyhood near Mountain, North Dakota, where the family resided in a log cabin. The cabin may still stand; I can't tell for sure from the caption in the book. Stefansson attended the University of North Dakota--not for long, but long enough to establish a legendary reputation as a prankster. His landmark explorations and studies in the Canadian Arctic took place in the early 1900s; subsequently he took up residence in New York and enjoyed the lively intellectual and social scene of Greenwich Village, until marrying and settling into a teaching job.

The Raffan biography of Simpson, with its magnificent canot de maitre on the jacket, drew my attention because of Simpson's importance in the development of the Canadian West under the Hudson's Bay Company.

The two books have much in common. Both treat larger-than-life figures famous for their travels in the Canadian wilds. Both Stefansson and Simpson were hardy, ambitious, and self-promoting. The greatest commonality between the two biographies, though, is that both dwell upon the personal lives of their subjects, specifically their relationships with women.

In the case of Stefansson, Palsson draws heavily on a recently discovered trove of personal letters between Stefansson and his fiancé-but-never-bride, Orpha Cecil Smith, and also other correspondents. The biographer details Stefansson's relationships with several women, but most particularly his liaison with the Inupiat woman, Pannigbluk, with whom he had a son. The tone of the book is neither scandalous nor condemnatory, but the situation offers the opportunity for searching considerations about colonial relationships.

In the case of Simpson, Raffan delves into the multiple liaisons of the indomitable Scot with native and mixed-blood women, in addition to his eventual marriage to his 18-year-old cousin. Simpson is known to have fathered children with at least eight women.

These are both strong biographies with lots of human interest; I'll put them into the bib for my Canadian history course. Poring through them this summer, though, reminds me of the pleasure of deliberate reading for no good reason. It seems that so much of my reading is on command, with a task at hand; on my desk right now are a book to be reviewed for a historical journal, two book manuscripts to be reviewed for university presses, and a lengthy proposal to be reviewed for a Canadian granting agency. And still, my thoughts keep drifting to the new Richard Gwynn biography of John A. Macdonald that I'm reading for no particular or pressing reason. . . .

Heritage Video & Image

5 August 2008

Quite a few of my travels in recent months have been parcel to the work of NDSU's Center for Heritage Renewal. Framed into the home page of the center is another weblog, "Heritage Renewal," which follows the course of this work. It frequently provides links to Heritage Video, the YouTube repository of the center, and Heritage Image, the Webshots repository, whereby the center makes video and still images available to the public. Recent additions to this body of material include still images and video of Syttende Mai observances at the Henrik Wergeland monument in Island Park, Fargo; still images and video of Living History Day at the Cavalier County Historical Museum, Dresden; and still images and video of the mile-long network of tunnels underneath the campus of the Grafton State School.

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