Tom Isern

A dangerous storm has swept in today, a harsh coda to a two-day chinook that caused us to let our guard down. It puts me in mind of a favorite ballad of mine for the season, “Young Charlotte.”

This short item from the Fargo Forum of 11 December 1916: “The towns of the state seem to have taken up well with the community Christmas pageant idea.” The “idea” of a Christmas pageant—the phrasing intimates that in 1917 Christmas pageants were not traditions, but a new thing, catching on.

“Terroir” is a term deployed by wine enthusiasts often with more mystique than precision. There is a sort of magic by which the environmental qualities of a particular place are supposed to pass through into the aesthetic virtues of the wine.

It was a lovely spring morning when we arrived early for Sunday services at Bethany Church, in Tanunda, South Australia, in the heart of the Barossa region. I inquired after the congregational president, who was up in the loft, preparing to ring the bells.

In a meeting on campus a few days ago, along with many of the best and brightest at NDSU, interviewing a candidate for a high position in the university, I asked the question often on my mind these days as a senior dude at our land grant university, the people’s college, as we used to say. Is higher education, college learning, I asked, fundamentally transactional, a matter of contracts and credentials, or is it relational, a matter of mentorships and relationships? I’ll tell you later how that came out.

I cannot recall a conversation with Brother Placid Gross that was not a delight. He is, foremost, a man of faith who made his final profession under the rules of St. Benedict in 1967. Ever since, as a monk in Richardton Abbey, he has been known as Brother Placid. He was born and baptized, however, in 1935 as Aloysius Gross, one of the sixteen children of John and Magdalena Gross of Emmons County.

We will arrive in the Barossa at peak jacaranda. Reviewing the sentence I just spoke, I realize I am speaking gibberish as far as my neighbors in Dakota territory are concerned. So I’ll explain.

People in Larimore a century ago recognized their veterinarian, Dr. Hermann M. Eisenlohr, by his black derby hat as he came up the street. Figuratively, too, he wore many hats, and was a truly colorful local character.

The waterfowl hunters of Dakota Territory were mainly townsmen, who ventured into the countryside and returned with ducks and geese to distribute among neighbors. These middling folk shared the venatic landscape with a more effete and elite class of hunters who traveled in style.

The first newspaper notice of the City of Saginaw, the railway hunting coach of outdoorsman and author William B. Mershon, is in the Fargo Argus of 6 September 1883. Described as “plainly but elegantly fitted up,” the Saginaw carried nineteen hunters, their dogs, and equipment. “Dogs and guns were to be seen everywhere,” writes the reporter. “The coach seemed a hunter’s perfect paradise.”