197 / 365 – Shelter

DUANE HARMANSON

They started putting in shelterbelts around here around the time of the war, if I remember that right. It was after all the drought — we had years of it, even more than just the dust bowl years that got all the attention. It had been dry so long the soil would just blow away if you turned it. My dad would see a dust cloud blowing off one of the neighbors’ fields and he’d say, “There’s what’s left of Ed’s money, just blowing away.”

My dad put in one of the first shelterbelts around here. A line of ash, a mile long, north to south, along the west side of our land, where it’s most level there. Course it wasn’t long after that he bought up the neighbor’s section when he moved out, left for the West Coast.

It’s still there, though the trees are dying now. A lot of guys around here, they’re taking out the shelterbelts now. They get in the way when they’re putting chemicals down. The sprayers are wider now, and they don’t want to be turning them all the time. I let mine stay, especially that first one. My son, he wants to pull it up and I say, it’s going to die soon, just let it die. It held this farm together for fifty, sixty years. Leave it be. I’m sure once they’ve got the farm paid off they’ll tear them out. They’ll say, “Look, the trees are about dead now.”

What they don’t pull out, they’re dying out. They’ve got this beetle, the emerald ash borer, working this way from northern Minnesota. I little green beetle from Asia. I studied up on it and I guess it came over in wood, packing material. All that cheap stuff we like to buy from China, got your cheap tree-killer, too. This globalization, shipping things all over the world, instead of making them at home, it’s going to ruin us all. Of course it probably kept my farm in clover for a long time. We were shipping grain all over the world. But it’s coming back to haunt us now.

196 / 365 – Vacuum

FINN TILLARY

She is vacuuming again. She vacuumed last night, and also the might before. It’s a beautiful late-summer day and the breeze is blowing just gently, gentle lulling gusts. The house should be open, open to the season while it’s friendly. Instead she has all the windows closed and she is vacuuming. It’s an old chrome canister vacuum, we’ve had it forever, and it screams like a jet-engine. Sometimes I think I can tell the state of her mental health by how often she drags that thing out of the closet. Last night it was the whole first floor, even the front parlor where no one goes anymore, where no one ever has gone, The day before that it was the whole goddam house.

I’m sitting out on the old swing under the ash tree. It’s a perfect summer afternoon. The fields around the house are in wheat this year, and they’re rustling in the light breeze, little ripples that swirl and circle like water in a pond. The most gentle rustling on the light pulse of the breeze. It would be almost peaceful, if there weren’t the groans and growls of that damned vacuum going off from time to time.

I don’t remember her being so relentless with it when I was younger. I said, “What are you doing? You just vacuumed yesterday!” She said, “It’s dusty in here.” The place is spotless, but she thinks there must be some dust somewhere. And she’s gonna get it. She lives on the prairie where the wind blows all the time and it’s summer and the windows should be open. It’s a beautiful day. And it’s not dusty. You want to see dusty, I’ll take you to Afghanistan and you can see dusty.

On the bad days, when I first got back, I’d be up in my room, feeling like I was going to blow over if I had to talk to anyone, and she’d come bursting in with that thing, jabbing and thrusting at the dust in the room with that grinding nozzle. I screamed at her and she couldn’t even hear me over that thing. One day it was really bad, I had the windows shut, I didn’t even want any daylight, and she blew in there with that thing. I threw her out, screaming. I don’t think she knew I was in there, the look she had on her face, like a frightened cat. But the next minute she had her composure. “Finn Tillary! I need to vacuum in there! This house is a mess!” I don’t know, the scream of that thing, it really got to me. I was hiding in the corner. I had the door lock. I thought, ‘If she busts in here, we’re really in trouble.’

So now I sit outside. It’s better out here, since I can’t get her to stop.  The house is immaculate. I’m not sure what dust she thinks she hasn’t gotten yet, but there’s no machine is going to get it. My grandmother, she lived with us for a little while. She spoke Norwegian to herself sometimes, when she was muttering. She called the old vacuum a stobe-suger. I don’t know what that meant. I was just little, I used to think it meant “stab-sucker.” That’s how my mother uses it, vacuuming back and forth, day after day, jabbing with the nozzle into dark corners. I don’t know what she’s stabbing at but she sure can’t seem to kill it.

195 / 365 – Border

FINN TILLARY

Once I drove Kate up to the border. It was my sister’s wedding, the reception. A warm summer afternoon, the sky a royal blue, with just a few brushstroke clouds at the horizon. A perfect day for a perfect wedding and my sister was being a total bitch. She wanted me to make a toast, after the best man, because the best man wasn’t going to do it right. And she wanted to tell me exactly what to say about how they were such a great pair and we were happy to bring our families together and some crap like that, some bullshit I would never say. So I said to Kate, “Let’s just get out of here,” and we got in my old pickup and snaked through all the cars parked along the drive and the county road and got out of there. She tried to get me to stay, and that probably would have been a good idea, since I have to hear about this practically every Christmas and Thanksgiving, but I just couldn’t. I had already made sure her new husband had arrived at the wedding standing up and on time.

I wasn’t trying to go to the border. I wasn’t trying to go anywhere. I was on a county road and it was one of the ones that keeps going through and after awhile I had slowed down and was looking at her again. She was in a very simple but very nice dress she’d gotten in Chicago and she was leaning back against the door post of the truck and giving me that smile, that smile that says ‘I am not going to say anything even though you’re acting stupid and driving me crazy.’ That’s what love is, I think, when someone will do that for you. I shouldn’t have let that go so casually. That’s the stuff you say wedding toasts about.

After awhile I realized the road was going to end soon by the cemetery that’s practically up on the border. And I slowed down and said, “We’re almost to Canada.” And Kate said, “I’ve never been to Canada.” I couldn’t believe she’d never been to Canada, it’s right in our damned backyard. The road ended at the cemetery, an old one that must have been from a church that blew over sometime a long time ago. There aren’t any new stones. It didn’t look like anyone had cleaned it out in a good while. The border was about a hundred yards further up, across a field that had just been mowed for hay. The ground was dusty on our shoes. Then we came to a little patch of dirt and the furrows and tracks from the machinery ran at perpendicular. Just a change in the pattern.

I said, “That’s it,” and pointed. She said, “That’s the border?” I said, “Yeah.” She said, “There’s no fence.” I said, “Well, there aren’t fences, just because there’s a line on the map. Nobody out here needs to be kept on one side of the other.” She stared at it a long time. I said, “You should step across and then you can say you’ve been to Canada.” And I thought, but didn’t say, “And nobody will bother you for never getting out of your own damned back yard.” Because she did look beautiful and she was trying to be nice.

194 / 365 – Dust

FRED VANEK

The dust billowed up like that. Swirls, shaken loose from the land. I watched them from down in the dry creek beds where I tried to find shade. I watched them and tried to read them. Troops moving down the dry and dusty summer roads? A convoy of trucks, Russian trucks, moving west now? Or Germans in retreat? Once the whole horizon to the north seemed to flare up with yellow dust, the line where the earth and sky met growing vague and then disappearing, as if the whole earth was turning to dust and blowing away forever. At the edge of a town a few nights later, where a man let me hide in his chicken coop and he brought me an end of dark bread, after the sun had set and it was dark, and he drew a picture of what I think was a tank, with a stick in the dirt. He pointed off to the north and then at me, questioning. I shook my head and pointed east. He drew another and another shape in the dirt next to the tank, like circles, lots of them, and then he scratched them out. He was talking the whole time, telling a story I couldn’t know, but I thought it was that there had been a big battle of German and Russian tanks and the Germans had been wiped out.

I had traveled by night, but the days were getting longer. I watched the sky, the dust. It seemed to billow up everywhere. The Soviet army was coming. I had to stay ahead of it. It was like some kind of monster coming, devouring the farms, the plain. Or a giant machine that would harvest the parched crops and the dead land one last time before it was burnt over forever. Everyone was afraid in the towns I visited. I had thought they would see my uniform and shoot me. Nobody likes a deserter. But everywhere I went, the farms I passed near, the villages I skirted, people offered me food, or a place with straw to curl up for awhile. The days were long enough now I had to travel in open daylight. Still, the billowing dust seemed close behind.

193 / 365 – When You Get Older

DIANE LOOYSEN

We were shopping in Devil’s Lake this weekend and the store already had Christmas decorations out. Not even Halloween yet — they still have an aisle for candy and pumpkins. And then aisle after aisle with tinsel draped down from the ceiling and sparkling balls and lights and signs saying “Early Christmas deals” or something. I’m glad my kids are grown and old. I wonder how much stuff people have to buy now.

When we were young, my grandmother used to kind of tut-tut over all the presents we got, which was hardly nothing compared to what you had to give your kids when mine were young. She told stories of how, when they first came to the Dakotas, Christmas might be a little candy and a toy made by her Pa, or some ribbons to put in her dress or her hair. Well, times change don’t they. She remembered the days, after they got settled and they had their land mostly plowed and they had a house made out of wood, they build two grand new stores right on Main. One was the Boston Store, and one was the Chicago Store. When I was little the Boston Store was the plumbing store, same as today, with someone upstairs, a real estate agent or something. I wondered why the plumber’s building said “Boston Store.” The Chicago Store was where the furniture store was, but when I was a girl they had a fire and the top of the building caved in and so the brick where it had said ‘Chicago Store 1901’ isn’t there anymore. And now it’s just a vacant lot full of weeds. But my grandmother said when they used to come into town on a Saturday afternoon in the fall, the streets would be getting dark but the windows of the Chicago Store and the Boston Store would be brightly lit and full of things, a doll, a toy train set, Christmas tinsel. And she would imagine what it would be like to live in town and have things like that, like they had in Chicago and Boston. She thought living in town must be like Chicago and Boston. And then her father told her, No, those were big cities, where things in windows and houses were fancy but the streets were crowded and dirty and people could hardly afford those things. Much better to live out on the prairie where the air was clean and a family could live healthy and right.

She told me that for a long time growing up she dreamed about going away to Chicago or Boston. But then she met Erik Looysen, he was my grandfather, and they started their own farm, and she never did. Not even when she had moved off the farm and into town in Newcastle, when Newcastle was still a town. She said, “Sometimes you get older and you realize you don’t need to do things like that any more.”

I thought of her this weekend, looking down those long aisles of bright red and pine green decorations and things in big boxes. I hope my daughters aren’t out shopping in those aisles already. Sometimes you get older and you realize you don’t need to do things like that any more.

192 / 365 – Summer’s End

FINN TILLARY

There’s a cool in the air tonight. It’s not the hard nip of an October morning, but it’s there in the breeze that whispers through the windowscreen and makes the curtain billow up. I can hear rain softly falling on the maple outside the window, the branch that ends it arms out to the roof of the house and the dormer for my room and scratches at it from time to time. Like it’s saying, “Hey, I’m about to lose my leaves. Pay attention.”

Summer’s passing and I don’t feel like I noticed it was even here. I guess they’re not like what summer meant for most of my life up until now, what it hasn’t been since that summer right after college, when Kate and I packed up and wandered around Europe for three months, just going where we felt like. Before I enlisted. Even though I worked every summer growing up, it still felt like that. The days were long enough for work, with still enough left over kicking up your legs or pushing off into the lake in the canoe and enjoying the late afternoon or tearing off after some wild-hair idea. This summer, it was like I forgot to do that. Somehow I got too busy trying to work, or trying to get away from all the noise in our little apartment in Chicago. Maybe this is something that we’re meant to say goodbye to, now that we’re older. Like my dad says, you don’t get anywhere lying around all the time and watching the sun shine.

Fall was always my favorite season. I know it’s the season when things are changing, dying, but it seems like things get new then, when the air turns sharp and the days shorten and the winds start to blow harder out of the north and you know you’re going to be seeing a lot of people, hanging out with people indoors, since there isn’t anywhere else to be. But Fall was always good after a long summer. I don’t feel ready for Fall. I’m not excited about like I’m supposed to be.

I’ve met a lot of older guys who’ve talked about the years going faster and faster and you can hardly keep up with them. Maybe that’s all this is. Life spins faster and you either spin with it or you get out and stop. I don’t know what happens if you stop.

191 / 365 – Seduction

SARAH BERGMAN

The first time I went into the cafe it was to take pictures. Since we’d come here I was walking around, kind of in a daze. Had I really done this? What was I going to do here? I had gotten a job to teach a class of photography down at the community college by Devil’s Lake. But after I got Leah up and off to school, I was alone all day. Wandering around the couple of blocks of downtown like a ghost.

I could see through the windows, the curve of the bar, the chrome rim to it. The chrome barstools. There were so many things in the room that looked like they had been frozen from the 40s or 50s, like the old chrome clock or the wooden and metal placards with those stupid sayings on them. Not the kitschy ones like they make now that are all ironic. There was one for an cream separator machine. Another one for a brand of gasoline. And calendars, six or seven of them hung up from the 1980s. It must have been closed a long time, and everything was just set in place like they were waiting for the owner to come back and open it back up. The vinyl in the booths was covered in dust but it had this faded look that I thought would photograph well. I could imagine a series of photographs, probably with the colors emphasized to look like old polaroids. I could picture them on a wall in one of the little failing galleries in Boston where I used to show things. So I thought, this would be my project.

It took awhile to find the owner. There was a ‘for lease’ sign in the window but the agent whose name was on it was long gone. I found out that the building’s owners had a farm just south of town. The flower shop next door and the plumbing business were the only places paying rent, and that wasn’t doing much more than covering taxes. They hoped it wasn’t going to need a new roof soon, because they might close it up then. I drove out to see them and they just gave me a key to the place.

I decided to take my time. I went there a lot, over a few weeks, seeing what the light was like at different times of day, like in the early morning when the sun crested the row of storefronts across the street and streamed into the windows. Or at midday when it shone from overhead. Or in the evening when the light cast reds and browns from the brick building across the street, the old theater, and the light played long shadows across the counter and up the walls above the grill. It was dusty in there and I tried not to disturb it at first. I found I liked it in all kinds of light. I just liked being there.

And my idea of what I was doing slowly changed. I stopped imaging the scene in these dusty Polaroid colors or in black and white. I wanted to see it crisp and new. I imagined it with people in it, talking. Having conversations that I wasn’t having with anyone. For awhile I thought about painting it so that I could have it look all spruced up, just empty and waiting for people. I wondered how much work it would be. Then I imagined actually having people in there.

That was right around the time my mother called and said they wanted to give me some of what I would inherit when they were gone. It wasn’t much, but it was more than I would ever save up, especially out here where it was impossible to find a job.

It took me over. I had fallen in love with it. Only someone as stupid as me would have imagined it full again of people and then said, “I want to bring it back to life.” And think she could do it, with no experience in running a cafe. I just knew something about seeing people happy. I wanted to see people happy, relaxed, enjoying themselves in a place. Maybe because I wanted that for myself. It’s like this place cast a spell on me and said, “I can be the place where you find this happiness you want.” I don’t know if it’s really made me happy — it’s made me worry, morelike. But it’s been better than sitting at home.

 

190 / 365 – Jellyfish

FINN TILLARY

There was a guy in my unit who was a diver. I mean, he didn’t dive for the Army, but whenever he had any leave, he was off somewhere to go diving. The guy was from Iowa, a farm boy too. He was older than me — in for more than ten years. Didn’t go to college — most of those guys didn’t. Straight from high school into Army and then diving. Didn’t have a family or anything.

I said, “You went into the wrong service. You should have joined the Navy. Then you could probably do it every day.”

He said, “Yeah, but who from Iowa goes into the Navy? Most people haven’t seen water bigger than their stock pond.”

He a picture of himself in all this gear — a black suit, tanks, mask, that mask for the oxygen. Almost like a space suit, except it was him somewhere in the South Pacific. He showed it to me one night while we were out having beers. I said, “You should do a promo for the Navy, for people in Iowa, and you could walk out of a stock pond in Iowa.” He didn’t think that was as funny as everyone else. I said, “You could be holding a string of fish. Then people would sign right up. Everyone likes a better way to fish.”

He always talked about diving whenever we were off duty. Over meals in the canteen. My friend Craig who roomed with him said he talked about it in the dark to put himself to sleep. If we were out with other people, he’d pull that picture out and tell a story about a dive somewhere. He liked that picture. It was like his whole personality was wrapped up in scuba gear. I said, “I thought the South Pacific was all warm and tropical. This looks like you should be swimming with Polar Bears.”

He said it was because of jellyfish. He’d gotten stung somewhere once, Australia or something, and almost died. I didn’t know anything about jellyfish. I thought maybe they just stung real bad or something. He said that if he’d gotten stung worse or there’d been more of them, he could have died in five minutes. You didn’t want to get him talking about jellyfish. After diving, it was his favorite topic. If you got tired of hearing about diving somewhere or what kind of tanks to use or how deep he had been, you’d steer him onto jellyfish. I used to know a ton about jellyfish, way more than I ever wanted to know.

He told me they were taking over the oceans. He said they had always been a problem in warm places like Australia, where you couldn’t swim in the ocean in the summer on the north because they were so thick you’d die in five minutes in the water. But now they were taking over everywhere. He said the Black Sea was full of them — they were killing off all the sturgeon. Nobody was going to be able to get caviar any more. He said someone had told him there was an area off the coast of Africa where they were so thick it was like a wall of poison jelly the size of South Carolina. He said when they were having the Sydney Olympics a huge school of them appeared out in the ocean right where they were going to have the swimming part of the triathlon. I guess they have to swim in the ocean. They thought all the triathletes were going to get killed. Then this huge swarm, like the size of a small city, suddenly disappeared. This guy was always talking about jellyfish like that, like they were the monster in some kind of zombie movie. Maybe it is that bad, I don’t know. I’m up here and there’s no ocean for a thousand miles in any direction. I don’t exactly have to worry about them.

I said that to him once and he said, “Oh, but you’re making a new home for them.” He talked about the dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi. I’d never heard of that, but he said it was a huge area where the Mississippi went into the Gulf of Mexico, where there was so much fertilizer runoff and other chemicals from the river that nothing could live. There was no oxygen in the water for fish or crabs or whatever else lives out there. Except jellyfish, I guess. I guess they can slow down or something so they can survive where there’s not enough oxygen. So huge swarms of them are forming out in the dead zone in the gulf. He said, “Just wait till they come near shore during Spring Break some year. Then everyone’ll know about it.”

I said, “Well, I don’t know if the runoff is that bad from where I’m from, but anyway it flows north. The creeks where I’m from drain into the Pembina and then into Red River, and they all flow north. Into the Hudson Bay. The Arctic Ocean.

He said, “Just wait. Pretty soon they’ll be jellyfish clogging Hudson Bay, too. The Arctic ice is melting. Who knows what will grow up there?” It was like he was rubbing his hands together, all excited at the prospect. That’s what this shit does to people.

189 / 365 – Encircled

FINN TILLARY

People don’t know North Dakota, except they fly over it and they look down and they see nothing. Brown maybe, and a grid of roads. I guess that’s what a lot of people think of as empty. When I was in the army, I’d be out with guys and if I said anything good about North Dakota, they’d say, “Man, I don’t know how you could like it. What’s out there? I’d at least want to see a big building, or a mountain or a hill or something.”

It’s open, but it’s full. I’ve known guys can’t deal with the opposite — a big city, or being surrounded by big mountains. Maybe that’s me, too. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t live in Chicago. My dad once had us all out to Colorado for the big ski vacation. Everybody got new ski gear, all kinds of bright blues and yellows and oranges and we packed all this stuff up in the van and drove it all the way to Grand Forks, and unloaded it and checked it in and bounced through three flights — there to Chicago and then to Denver and then to some little mountain town, I don’t remember. And then we had to pack up all our bright new gear into a little car that was way too small and head up to a resort. And my dad was getting agitated the whole time, and the whole week we were there, he was on a short fuse. Blowing up at everyone after he had a drink or two in the evening. That’s when he still drank a lot. I had never skiied before but I was learning and Ben was learning and Christine was complaining the whole time because she kept falling down in the snow and thinking she’d broken something. And I thought, Man we all have this nice stuff and for what? We all hate this.

After we got back, my dad apologized, one of the rare times he ever did that, and said he thought being circled by all those mountains made him feel trapped, like an animal or something. I thought he was crazy, but I thought he was crazy a lot in those days.

After that, the only place he ever wanted to go for a vacation was Florida. Hit balls around a bunch of golf courses and not be cold. He thought that would be great bonding for us, if I would go out with him and a bunch of other old rich guys every day and hit balls around. I think Ben did it for awhile. By that time I couldn’t stand doing anything with him. I’d try to make up some excuse, like I had a basketball clinic or the work was really stacking up at the shop, so I couldn’t go. Usually he wanted to go in the winter, which is basketball season anyway, so it worked out. And I could say, hey, it’s more important for you to go sit on your ass in the warm sun that to drive through a snowstorm to watch your son play basektball. And it was. But I didn’t care.

188 / 365 – Morning Light

FINN TILLARY

We slept in these dorms that were containers. Modular units, shipped over, all the same inside. A lot of the guys I was with were reservists, a little older, so they had older kids. A lot of them had pictures of their families and drawings up on their walls from their children. I had a little snapshot of Kate that I taped to the wall, but the wall got hot during the day and after awhile the tape didn’t stick. I’d come back at night and it would be on the floor and I’d spent five or ten minutes trying to press it on just right so it would stay up there, right above my head. After awhile I gave up. My mother had her whole class make me cards, which were really just stick-drawings of people and rabbits and dogs and notes that said things like “Thank you Corporal Tillery!” or, “We miss you! Come home soon!” Which of course I didn’t know anyone so how could they miss me. But I was glad to have them. The container didn’t have any windows, so taping them up on the wall above my bed made it feel like I had windows.

In the mornings in the summer I’d step out and the sun would strike you. You forget, you’re up high, the light is different. It’s a pretty barren place, Afghanistan. Like the desert. People think North Dakota is like that, empty and barren, nothing in it, but you haven’t seen anything until you’ve been to Afghanistan. Some days I’d get out and in that harsh morning sun, I’d look at the burned hills and mountains and think, “We’re fighting over this? Let ‘em have it. Maybe the reason they live up here is nobody wants it.”

I was just on the base most of the time, until the end. Parts of it were old, but so many more soldiers were coming in they had to build on it. Somebody told me it was built by the Americans, after World War II. Then the Soviets had it. Then after the attack on New York, we took it over again. You’d think we’d learn something by being there so long and still not controlling anything.

The base is so huge, it’s like a city, practically. People come and you can buy things there. They try to cell you cheap stuff, like copies of movies, or computer games. One guy had things he would unwrap from old cloths. He had a big ceramic vase, or an urn, I don’t know what it was. Painted in blue, Chinese. He said it was old, some dynasty I never heard of. He insisted I buy it. I thought, “I don’t even own a bed, not really, and he thinks I should have this vase.”

At night planes and helicopters flew in and brought the bodies of soldiers, brought them in from around the country where units were fighting. They’d ship them out from there back to Germany and back to the US. We had to line up along the roadway and salute as they passed. Whenever the planes came in they’d ring and you’d have to get dressed up and go out. I’d have been working all day, fourteen, sixteen hours, and trying to catch a little sleep and then we had to go out and stand there. It made me feel lucky that at least then I didn’t have to leave the base. Of course it made me more frightened later when I had to go out. I’d stand there and think about the guy, or the woman, who was passing. Think about their family back home. You sent them off and now they’re not coming back. Just a folded flag and maybe a medal or some nice words that probably lost their feeling as they passed along the chain from the unit back to whoever it is goes out to tell people their son or daughter is dead and their whole world is fucked now. In the winter it was freezing when we were out there, standing with snow pelting us in the dark. But we had to stand there and salute anyway. Most of us were glad to do it. You have that feeling, “I’m glad it’s not me.”

Back in Chicago some people asked me if it made me wonder what we were doing, was it worth it being there. It didn’t. Standing there, saluting, watching the bodies, freezing when it was winter, I didn’t think about much of anything except that I wanted to go to sleep. And I was glad it wasn’t me so I could sleep. The only times I wondered what I was doing was when I stepped out of the container in the morning, into that harsh sunlight, and looked at the dead hills and the barren country and think, “What are we doing in this godforsaken place?” It was just in the morning.