Travel on the Gravel

On Sunday afternoon the 4th we'll be launching another "Great Books of the Great Plains" series for Communiversity at the Zandbroz. I'm looking forward to discussing Kathleen Norris and Nevil Shute. For details go to the website of the Center for Heritage Renewal, which organized this year's series.

I'm a sucker for this sort of thing. Alongside the Gackle school is this mega-oriole, a reminder of the days before school consolidation. Nowadays the Gackle-Streeter teams play under the name "Firebirds." The Gackle mascot, however, was the oriole. Next time I'm in town I'll have to find out who was the artist who created this ornithological monument.

It was a cold one outside, but a good night inside the Gackle school, as about a hundred people gathered last night for the kick-off event of the Horizons program. Organizer of the event was the energetic Mary Conrad (seen at right with Logan county agent Lance Brewer, who exhibited quite a bit of energy himself!). It was truly a pleasure to be with a crowd of people taking an active and determined interest in the state of their community. After a fine soup supper (I went for the Knoephla the second time around), we had a wonderful conversation in the library. I expect to hear much more from the crowd in Gackle.

Tomorrow afternoon, Saturday the 27th, I'm headed for Gackle. Mary Conrad invited me on behalf of the people involved with the Horizons program there. It's a delight to be involved with their kick-off event, starting with supper at 6 at the high school, thence adjourning to the school library for the program. I'm supposed to speak on the topic, "The Promise of Life on the Dakota Plains." Sounds like the folks in Gackle are intent on realizing the promise.

This is the time of year when usually I get to brag about how tough we are in North Dakota, but the mild winter is taking away all such bragging rights. With the heavy snows in the central plains, and the ice storms on the southern plains, North Dakota so far seems pretty wimpy. We had no significant snow until New Year's Eve, and then barely enough to get my skis out, and none to amount to anything since. So, what shall I write about here? Well, I never did finish sharing the great images from the Australian junket of August, so here goes. The images here are of prickly pear, the American cactus introduced to Australia as emergency cattle feed (I wrote about this in a Plains Folk column), run amuck in the Australian countryside, and eventually brought under a semblance of control through the introduction of biological controls. Still, prickly pear, which grows to prodigious size in subtropical parts of Australia, remains a picturesque element in the landscape there. Its pads are the size of baseball mitts, and its branches tower ten feet high. Truly, when this introduced plant was rampant, it must have made the country downright impassible. I haven't heard whether any Australians avail themselves of prickly pear fruit for jelly, but I'll bet dingoes and other wildlife, like coyotes in North America, eat the pears.