This week’s column coming at ya from sunny Florida. Yup, we’re still here with the nieces meeting princesses, getting splashed by Shamu and risking our lives navigating through the masses who have also decided to celebrate Thanksgiving with Mickey and friends.
This is adventure when you’re 4 and 7 and 10.
Back home at the ranch we had a few
adventures of our own…
Sunday Column: Sometimes nature gets a bit too close
By Jessie Veeder
12-1-13
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com
Today I’m roaming around the house, cleaning and packing and paying bills, getting ready to head out on a family trip to Disney World.
A destination dubbed “The Happiest Place on Earth.”
Outside my window, on the other side of the hill, bulldozers and blades are scraping off snow, native and non-native grasses and cutting into the nearly frozen earth, pushing and flattening and re-imagining the corner of pasture across from the grain bins to make way for what the oil industry is now calling a “Super Pad.”
I knew this was coming.
We’ve talked about it and negotiated it a little, giving it the nod of approval because having three or four pumping units together on the same pad pulling oil from several directions under our ranch and our neighbors’ will mean less roads and less surface damage to the rest of our place and the homesteads that surround us.
The less impact the better has been our motto.
If it’s possible, we fight for it.
I know now for the next several months I will be listening to the sound of progress. I will hear my dogs bark at the sound of machinery they think might be coming down our road, but is really just passing by or pushing dirt. I will watch the landscape transform a bit and then the horizon will follow…oil derrick up, reaching to the sky, then another, and another.
Oil derrick down, then a pumping unit, then another, then another.
And there they will be for thirty or some years, pumping, pulling, coaxing oil from the ground, each passing year becoming a more familiar fixture on this old place.
This weekend my uncle was at the ranch for deer hunting season. As he was getting ready to head back to Texas, Pops brought out a couple folders that contained stories about the history of this ranch in anticipation of our upcoming 100 year celebration.
In 1915 my great grampa Eddie staked his claim on this place. He got married and headed off to war. When he arrived back in Bear Den Township he proved up his claim, planting some trees, flax and wheat, building a barn and putting up fences.
Over the course of his lifetime he would watch his crops grow, his wife die and his children make their own mark on the land he laid claim to. He would meet a couple grandchildren and serve them his famous buns, tell them jokes and scruff their hair before leaving them all behind in death to do what they will with the place.
With the red barn and his old house.
I sat on that couch and looked at the old photographs.
100 years might as well have been forever.
We are not made the same these days are we? Do we have the same grit and guts that it took to survive in tar paper shacks through blizzards and prairie fires and forty below?
I listen to the sound of the bulldozers up the hill and know that in the next thirty years I’ll be a witness to more changes to this landscape than my parents and my parents’ parents ever saw in their lifetime.
I have mixed feelings about being that sort of witness.
Great Grandpa Eddie went half-way around the world to fight, to be free to break up this earth to feed his own family.
I doubt he ever took a trip to Florida.
And so I can’t help but feel a bit undone and displaced today, that instead of watching over that dirt I’m preparing for a trip to a fantasy land, leaving this little plot of earth to change forever as I fly away for a bit…
Driving a familiar highway a few week’s back I was reminded of my former life.
Between the white lines that led me on a straight, flat stretch east across the state and back again in mid-November, I was greeted by passing pickups with blaze orange caps resting on the dash.
Suddenly I was five years old sitting on the passenger’s side of my dad’s pickup, back when pickups didn’t have back seats, barely tall enough to see that landscape as it stretched out before me, bringing us closer and closer to the ranch for hunting season.
When I sat down to write this column that ran today in a couple newspapers in my home state, one out east, one here in the west, it was going to be about the time in my life my family didn’t live on the ranch and how I used to take every chance I got to be my dad’s sidekick, to crawl in the passenger’s side and take that five hour drive to gramma’s.
For harvest.
For cattle shipping day.
For hunting season.
I was going to tell you all about the time when I was five or six when that pickup broke down on a lonely stretch of that highway in the middle of a nasty blizzard, before cell phones and gadgets that connect us and make us safer.
It was the first time I remember staying in a hotel. I called it an “apawtment”
I couldn’t say my “R’s.”
I didn’t know the difference between an apartment and a hotel.
I didn’t know the level of my dad’s anxiety, having a kid out on a stretch of highway, broke down, no heater, no help, in sub-freezing temperatures.
And I didn’t know that it was likely my parent’s couldn’t afford a breakdown, let alone an impromptu hotel stay.
All I knew was that I was on an adventure.
But as I sat down to recall what it was like to climb in the passenger’s seat as a happy little girl and attempt to measure time in miles, the story I wanted to tell transformed from my recollection of a breakdown on Highway 2 to the realization that the sum of my life is made up of a string of memories, stretching long and straight between tall grass in the ditches and appearing before me like that highway moving off toward the setting sun.
Coming Home: Childhood homes bring back ghosts no matter how long we’re away
by Jessie Veeder
12-24-13
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com
And now, an afternoon text chat with Husband.
Me-“I just fell off a ledge and into a snowbank in front of a thousand cars on Main Street.”
Him-“Bwahhahaha”
Him again-“I mean, omigosh are you ok?”
Me-“And a pop blew up in your pickup.”
Him-“Now that is not funny.”
Me-“And your windshield wiper broke off.”
Him-“You’re back to your car only.”
Me-“I cleaned up the pop.”
Him-“I need that pickup functional”
Me-“Relax, I think you can fix the wiper…”
Me again-“I think.”
You know Husband’s building a garage? Yeah? I’ve mentioned that right?
It’s a massive project. For the past month or so, each weekend the men in my life are up there crawling around, nailing things to other things, coming in for a beer, a Diet Coke or a sandwich or something. Every weekend I’ve been making enough soup or casserole to feed them at the end of a long cold day spent way up there, too far from the ground and too close to the sky in my opinion.
And every weekend it’s been kinda shitty weather. You know, because we wait to do these sorts of projects until it is certain to dump snow or ice on us at any moment.
Why would a person build a garage in the summer when the weather is warm and a guy could get a little sun on that white belly? That would be too practical.
No. We wait until winter when it’s kinda chilly and kinda icy and terrifyingly dangerous to be lifting rafters up 22 feet and then dangling from them like damn monkeys.
So every weekend I tell them to be careful. I plead with them to watch their step. I contemplate the cost of fashioning them all with full-body helmets. I wonder how many mattresses I would have to buy to cover the area around the entire circumference of the garage with the thought that if they’re plummeting 22 feet to their immanent death and there’s a nice pillow top waiting for them at the bottom, perhaps they’ll only break a leg and not their necks.
Maybe I should invest in giant trampolines.
Anyway, point is, I hate this project. It’s dangerous and it’s making me crazy.
Now I know life is dangerous, I have terrible depth perception. Just the other day I whacked myself in the lip with the phone in an attempt to answer it. Once, I bent over to pick something up and I nearly knocked myself out on the kitchen table.
Needless to say, I do not go on the roof of that garage.
No, I stay inside and sweep or make cookies or paint or stain something. Sometimes I go outside to pick up nails or boards or things that could get buried in the snow or possibly impale my dearly beloved on his inevitable trip off the roof.
For the past few weekends my sweet mother-in-law has been coming over to to keep me company and to organize the mess that is her carpenter son and his wife who seems to have an aversion to the vacuum cleaner (unless it’s a special occasion).
So on Sunday I worked on putting rock up on a wall in our kitchen, a project that has been in limbo for a good six months or so. And while I was mixing mortar, climbing up and down the little ladder and making up new cuss-word combinations, my mother-in-law was downstairs organizing tools in our basement workshop.
There’s a special place in heaven for this woman, I tell you what. And when this house project is finished, when the damn tiling and painting and sanding is complete and the basement is transformed from a workshop into a livable space, I’m going to pour my mother-in-law a strong margarita and then I’m going to pour one for myself and we are going to drink it while I make an appointment for a manicurist and then another appointment for a therapist.
Because last Sunday when I was upstairs trying to get giant rocks to stick to the damn wall, my mother-in-law was in the basement putting away the paintbrushes when she looked up to see her oldest son, my husband, plummet from the sky, past the window and to the hard, frozen ground.
She dropped her paintbrush, clutched her chest and ran up the stairs past me in a frenzy, saying something about how “the guys came off the roof…I mean, they fell. He fell off the roof,” as she flung open the door and ran outside to assess the situation.
And I followed her in a panic, calculating the amount of damage a fall from 22 feet could inflict in the 3 seconds it took to get my body outside to find my father-in-law, standing up but dazed and bleeding a bit from his eyebrow where his now-missing-glasses dug into his face.
And then there was my husband, slow blinking, covered in snow, but standing upright, thank God, standing upright, moving his eyes from the giant frozen hump of dirt that broke his fall up to the demolished scaffolding ten or twelve feet in the air where they were standing just seconds ago before it gave out, sending them slamming hard and quick into the ground while, T, my brother-in-law, stood helpless below them.
It wasn’t a 22 foot fall. Ok. Just about half of that.
I stood in front of my husband and looked him in the eyes, probably doing the most annoying thing a person can do to someone who just experienced major head-to-ground impact. I repeated, “Are you ok? What happened? Are you ok? Oh my gawd!” about thirty-seven times before his slow blinks got a little faster and he could begin to answer me.
“Guess we didn’t put enough screws in,” he said as his brother brushed the snow off his back and my mother-in-law searched for her husband’s glasses.
“Shit,” I said.
“Yeah, shit,” he said.
“Come inside now for a minute,” his mother said.
But these boys, they don’t listen. And, with a few house building projects under his belt, this isn’t my father-in-law’s first plummet from a roof.
So they ignored the women’s pleas of “Taking a break. Having a sandwich. Assessing the head-injury situation” and they put up a new piece of scaffolding, this time with a proper amount of screws, and continued on with the damn shingling project, barely skipping a beat while the women in their lives stood with hands on hips trying to catch our breath and slow our palpitating hearts.
And now I’m researching what kind of money I can get for my right kidney. Because I’m going to sell it so I can hire professionals with harnesses and body armor to finish this damn garage.
It’s either that or giant trampolines.
If you need me, I’ll be in my office Googling “Tequila IV”
There are many best parts of living back at the ranch.
The familiarity of it all, the nostalgia of the things that surrounded me as a kid growing up wild.
Watching the sunrise out the big windows in the morning and the deer come out from the trees to water in the dam.
Endless trails, endless unexpected adventures.
Endless expected adventures.
And endless ways to test my patience, my capabilities, my creativity and my muscles.
But the best is simple.
The best is that I’m surrounded by all of these things…the big blue sky, the old oak trees, the bullberries, the tall grass, the big red barn, the cattle and the horses in the hills.
I’m surrounded by these things that I love, but I love them even more because I’m also surrounded by family.
And family, above all of it, is our greatest gift.
Coming Home: “Miss Veeder” once more with sister back in town
by Jessie Veeder
11/17/13
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com
I don’t want to know what tomorrow brings, how it all turns out, how we might, at the end of it all, be rich or poor, lonely or surrounded, fine with it all or disappointed.
I don’t want to know the count of the stars in the sky or if they might fall one day.
I don’t want to know if this is it or if there’s more, because what is more than this?
At the end of the day all I want to know is the way the sun cast shadows and makes the manes on the horses glow like haloes in the pasture outside my window.
I want to know this. I always want to know this…
And the crunch of the leaves beneath my boots.
The smell of the sage.
The red on the berries, a gift of color that stays with us through winter.
The sound of the breeze bending the bare branches and how there’s no such thing as quiet when a heart beats.
No.
I don’t want to know the length of a good life or the minutes in forever or how it could, how it will, end.
I only want to know that golden light, the light that makes angels out of horses, and warms your face under your hat after a day’s work.
I want to know this light as it blots out the stars and makes for us a day.
And in that day and the days that might follow, the things that don’t matter, I don’t want to know.
It makes no difference, except one thing.
The thing that makes all the difference, that thing that holds on as that sun rises and sets.
The thing that I know like the light on your face.
You are loved. You are loved.
Every day you are loved.
I
And now I bring you last night’s dinner conversation:
Pops: “Man, there was a lot of truck traffic on this road today, hauling back and forth all day long. Must have some big project over there.”
Husband: “Yup.”
Pops (mixing his mashed potatoes in with his peas): “Now Jess, that’d be a business right there. Set up a food stand at the approach, sell some sandwiches or something, you’d make a killing.”
Husband: “Yup.”
Me, to Husband: “Hey, remember when we drove that big loop there to the south and there was that woman selling burritos out of her car…haha, she just had a big piece of neon tagboard taped to her trunk that said: “Burritos: $5″ or something.”
Pops: “I once saw a guy by Williston with a sign on his car that just said “Steaks.”
Husband: “That seems like a gamble to me.”
Me: “Man, there’s some weird stuff around here, you know, when you think about it. Like the couple that goes from town to town selling bonsai trees. I see them everywhere, like all the time, in every town. I mean, how many cowboys or oil field workers are in the market for a bonsai tree you think?”
Pops: “No. Burritos seem like a better business model.”
Husband: “Yup”
Me: “And have you seen the guy with the knife stand in Williston. Just sells knives. That’s it.”
Husband: “Yup. Think he’s in New Town now.”
Pops: “Wonder if those are good knives?”
Me: “Or that big bus that comes through town that just sells stickers. Has all those flashing lights. There’s always a line at that place. How much money can you make off stickers?! ….I guess, when I think about it, there are a lot of trucks with inappropriate stickers around here. At least they know their market…”
Pops: “Yeah, they’re on the trucks with the balls hanging off the hitch. You know what I’m talking about, right. Like truck nuts. Know what I want to do with those when I walk by?”
(Never seen ’em? You must live in a higher-end neighborhood.
Click here if you’re curious.)
Me: “Oh gawd, what?”
Pops: “I want to saw them off and replace them with like, little balls.” (shapes finger and thumb to demonstrate size.)
Husband: “Yeah?”
Pops: “Yeah, like, I’d do it indiscriminately, just walk by and replace ’em where I see ’em. It would be like an epidemic.”
Husband: “Hahaha, you’d be like the ball bandit.”
Me: “Do it in the winter, those southern boys will think it’s shrinkage.”
Husband: “Good Lord Jessie.”
Me: “What?”
Pops: “Pass the salt.”
This town we drive to for groceries and work, it buzzes and hums and creaks and groans and crashes and grows and creeps in on the neighbors and the wheat fields and cattle pastures every day.
And it’s filled. Filled to the brim with industry and progress, locals and non-locals, passers-through, brilliant minds and lost souls, people looking for a place and people who’ve found their place long ago.
It consumes us. This oil industry. The way that it kicks up dust. The way it brings wealth and eats up the landscape and changes the horizon. Some say it’s bad. Some say it’s good. Most understand that nothing comes without a price.
Nothing is simply black or white.
I allow myself to ponder it because it’s fascinating and it’s my life.
And the world seems to be pondering it too, grabbing for the stories so that they might be the mind to reveal some sort of hidden truth in the one place in America the economy is booming. The one place in America small towns are bursting at the seams.
The one place in America there is an abundance of hope that if we can all just keep working we might pull ourselves up and be able to take root and stay planted or grow wings and fly the hell out of here.
Me, I’m on the side of the roots.
So I spend my days telling my story and listening for others’. What I see in Boomtown, what I think we look like–mothers and men, children and teachers, fifth generation farm families and oil industry professionals, young men with big plans, good men gone bad, bad men starting over and women on their own, leaders and preachers and helpers and people in need, lonely people, happy people, fed up people, inventive people, people in love, people who’ve lost and people who will. not. give. up. My best friends, my husband, these kids’ future–this is not what the world gets to see in the headlines.
Between tragic car wrecks and the dramatic stories that beg to be told of the nameless men who’ve arrived in the wild, wild west in search of their cut of black gold there are people, people like us, building lives and drinking beer, meeting up for a movie, holding open doors, buying steak for dinner and loving each other.
Coming Home: Living in a town of labels, assumptions
by Jessie Veeder
11-10-13
Fargo Forum
http://www.inforum.com
Download my song “Boomtown” on iTunes
or listen at
www.jessieveedermusic.com
Watch: Jessie Veeder’s Boomtown
The sun has started waking us up earlier. A funny little phenomenon called “Daylight Savings Time” made it that way. We moved our clocks back on Saturday night and woke up at 6 am on Sunday, watching the sun come up over Pots and Pans, waiting for some light to help us assess the recent neighbor call regarding a cow (or three or four) out in a pasture by the highway.
I remember when moving the clocks back meant moving the hand on an actual clock. I look around my house and I realize I don’t have an actual clock anywhere. Our clocks blink blue numbers on stove tops and microwaves, on telephones and digital temperature gauges and cellphones, computers and iPads that are smarter than us and don’t even need a human hand to remind them to change. They are programmed to know.
They do the same when we cross the river into Mountain time, switching swiftly and we gain an hour. Switching back and we’ve lost it.
I’ve spent that last few days looking at those clocks, the one on my phone and the one on
the stove I haven’t managed to change yet, and saying ridiculous things like:
“What time is it really?”
“So, it’s 9 o’clock but it’s really 10 ‘o’clock?”
“It’s 6 am but it’s really 7 am?”
“Man, it gets dark early.”
“Man I am tired.”
“Man, I miss that extra hour of light at the end of the day.”
But what’s in an hour anyway? It’s not like the changing of the clocks changes time. There are still 24 hours in these days and the sun still does what it will do up here where the earth is stripping down and getting ready for winter.
Daylight Savings Time, moving the clocks, adjusting the time, is just a human’s way to control things a bit. Moving time forward in the spring months means farmers and ranchers and outdoor enthusiasts get to stay out under that sun, working on the tractor, chasing the cattle, climbing a mountain, until 10 o’clock at night when the sun finally starts to disappear.
Moving the clocks backwards in the fall means we might drive to work in the light and get home in the dark.
It means a 5 pm sunset and a carb-loaded dinner at 6. It means more conversation against the dark of the windows, more time to plan for the things we might get done on the weekends in the light.
It means I went to bed last night at 9 o’clock and said something ridiculous like “It’s really 10.”
But it wasn’t. It was 9.
Because we’ve changed things. (Although I still haven’t changed that stove top clock).
I lay there under the covers in the loft and thought about 24 hours in a day.
10 hours of early-November daylight.
If I closed my eyes now, I thought, I would get 8 good hours of sleep.
I wondered about that hour and what I could do with an 60 minutes.
A 25 hour day? What would it mean?
Would it mean we could all slow down, take a few more minutes for the things we rush through as we move into the next hour?
Five more minutes to linger in bed, to wake each other up with sweet words and kisses, to talk about the day and when we’ll meet back at the house again.
Three more minutes to stir cream into our coffees, take a sip and stand in front of the window and watch the sun creep in. A couple seconds to comment on it, to say, “What a sight, what a world, what a morning…”
Four more minutes in the shower to rinse away the night.
Two more moments in front of the mirror to make my hair lay straight and my cheeks blush right.
An extra moment or two for the dogs so that when I throw them their food I might have been given some time to extend that head pat and ear scratch and stick fetching game.
Six more minutes on my drive to town, listening to the radio, the weather report and the school lunch announcements while trailing a big rig with out cussing or complaint. I have an extra hour after all. What’s six more minutes to me now?
Fifteen more minutes for lunch with a friend, a friend I could call for lunch because I have sixty more minutes now and the work can wait.
Five minutes more for a stranger on the street who asks for directions to a restaurant and then I ask her where she’s from and she makes a joke about the weather and we laugh together, a little less like strangers then.
Then, when I get home, eight more minutes on my walk to the top of the hill, to go a little further if I feel so compelled, or maybe just sit on that rock up there and watch it get darker.
Four extra minutes to spice up the roast for supper or stir and taste the soup.
One more minute to hold on to that welcome home hug.
Three more minutes to eat, for another biscuit, to wind down and visit.
And four more minutes to use to say goodnight. To lay there under the blankets, under the roof, under the stars that appeared and be thankful for the extra time.
So what’s in an hour really? Moments spent breathing and thinking and learning. Words spilling out that you should have said, or should have kept, or that really don’t matter, it’s just talking.
Sips on hot coffee cooling fast.
Steps on your favorite trail.
Frustration at dust while you wipe it away, songs hummed while scrubbing the dishes or washing your hair.
Broken nails, tracked in mud, a decision to wear your best dress tonight.
Laughter and sighing and tapping your fingers on your desk while you wait.
Line-standing, hand-shaking and smooches on best friends’ babies as you pass at the grocery store.
Big plans to build things, to change things, to move. Small plans for dinner or a trip to the zoo.
A phone call, an answer, an “I love you too.”
It’s not much, but the moments are ours to pass.
And those moments, they move on regardless of the clock and the hour in which it’s ticking.
Although not many people have clocks that tick anymore.
I suppose that’s just one of the many thing time can change…
Meanwhile, back at the ranch... 