May 14, 1998

just spent some vacation time in North Dakota. Bismarck is a place like so many other in this country -- kinda small town, kinda conservative, very white. The soul of this community is indelibly tattooed on me.
   Since I was going home, I decided to read the book, Dakota, by Kathleen Norris. The author is a New Yorker who spent summers as a youth in Lemmon, South Dakota and, by virtue of inheriting her grandparents farm, moved to Dakota as an adult. Culture shock? I think so.
   I read a review of this book by a Dakotan before I bought it in www.amazon.com. The review was very critical of Norris for the potrayal of Dakotans as isolated, and narrow minded. I think that is a misreading of the book. Norris is at times critical of place and people., but, if anything, sees Dakota as an enriching experience even in its isolation.
   "My move from New York City to Western South Dakota changed my sense of time and space so radically I might as well have gone to sea. In journeying on the inland ocean of the Plains, the great void at the heart of North America, I've discovered that time and distance, those inconveniences that modern life with its increasingly sophisticated computer technologies seeks to erase, have a reality and a terrifying beauty all their own."
    This description is very recognizable for anybody who has lived in the great American interior which is home to more livestock than people. Many more. "A person is turned inward by the sparseness of what is outward and visible in all this land and sky." Inwardness is definitely the emotion which Dakota brought to me.
    But the Dakota which Norris describes is not the Dakota which I know or grew up with. I was a town kid and knew very few rural people. My isolation was less severe, an my inward journey less profound.
    The subtitle of this book is "A Spiritual Geography". Norris is of my generation. She grew up Christian, threw her hands up in frustration and became a skeptic in the 70's. This book describes her return to the church. This return is unusual since it was in large part due to the gift of Benedictine monks and the monastic way of life. Norris is a lay minister in the Presbyterian Church.
    This book was really about the spiritual geography, that inward journey. Dakota was just a backdrop or a metaphor for her return to spirit. She is doing what so many of the baby boom generation are doing. Having encountered emptiness, she seeks meaning. She just happens to find it in a more traditional way than, for example, the New Age route.
    Because this was Norris' personal book, I was left dissatisfied. I wanted to see more of me in this book set on the Dakota prairie. Sometimes the rancher/monk comparisons felt forced.
    Sometimes they were right on. She said that monks attempting "to do the little things peaceably and well -- daily things like liturgy or chores...have a lot in common with the farmers and ranchers....Both have a down to earth realism about the subject of death....(R)ecalling our mortality can be a healthy realism in an age when we spend so much time, energy, and money denying death.....One who keeps death before his eyes conquers despair."
    It may sound morbid, by I find it enlivening and fairly common among people of the plains. On my trip to Bismarck I had at least four conversations with people my age who were were discussing their own deaths in an easy comfortable way. Maybe when you find yourself on the prairie at the mercy of the elements, it allows you to look at your life from the perspective of death backwards in time. Life never looked sweeter.