The Language of Cottonwoods by Clay Jenkinson

Author:Clay Jenkinson [Jenkinson, Clay]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781646631001
Publisher: Koehler Books
Published: 2021-04-26T13:00:29+00:00

I have sealed up what’s left of my kung pao chicken. The breeze in the cottonwoods is heavenly and hypnotic. I could not be happier if Eve walked barefoot into camp with a Granny Smith apple. Venus is quivering above the western horizon. Was that a low rumble of thunder? Time will tell. I feel sleep pulling me out of the moment. But I know, as Thoreau put it in the last sentence of Walden, that the sun is but a morning star.

The Heart of Everything That Is

If you open an atlas to a map of North America, it is immediately clear that North Dakota is at the center of the continent. It may be tucked up in the forgotten attic of the United States, but it is at the center of North America. North Dakota is a more or less rectangular state just below the forty-ninth parallel, equidistant from the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. From a geometric perspective, it would be better if the eastern boundary of the state were a straight line instead of following the sinuosity of the Red River of the North, but that is water under the bridge now. Even so, nobody gazing at the outline of the state for the first time doubts its essential rectilinearity. From a Native American or center of the continent point of view, it would have been more appropriate if the state were a perfect circle of 70,762 square miles and all the states and provinces on its perimeter had to bend around it. Make it a circle, call it Dakota (it’s only “North” in the lower 48), and let the state motto be “The Heart of Everything That Is.

Most Americans have a dim view of North Dakota, to the extent that they think about it at all. Most don’t. It’s the least visited state and it is the last visited state. I once called Raven Maps (headquartered in Medford, Oregon) to ask when they would be releasing their map of North Dakota. Their large, highly detailed, handsomely tinted landscape maps of the world, the United States, and individual states are the most beautiful I have ever seen, distinguished as much for their artistry as their cartography. They wrote a one-word reply, “Last.” And when the big laminated map finally arrived in its magical cardboard tube, I had to admit it was pretty dull. Mostly green lowlands, with a few score of miserable looking prairie lakes—potholes really, and the pale blue scar of Lake Sakakawea across the northwestern sector of the state. If you want to see a great Raven Map, try Utah or Colorado or California or Montana. If you want to see relatively dull Raven Maps, go to Iowa and North Dakota. Ain’t enough contour, ain’t enough sublimity, ain’t enough American West to make the North Dakota Raven Map interesting. Farm country.

So how does a dull, mostly flat state that produces wheat and sunflowers and cattle and potatoes differentiate itself from 49 others, most of which are

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