1.
CENTER IS A PLACE where people only end up. Socked in south-central North Dakota, located in the middle of Oliver County, Center is a stone’s throw from the 100th meridian, the rod of aridity that cleaves America between the luscious greens of the East and the mottled browns of the West. My hometown is where great trapeziums of buttes begin to break against the wash of sky. It’s the small county seat and the only incorporated town. Center is where farmers begin to get supplanted by ranchers. Fields flow into mines; it is where dust kicks up. Center is an ecotone, a transitory region of change. As the town motto reminds visitors, “It’s better in Center.”
There is no stoplight in Center, no grocery store. Such necessities as milk, Hot Stuff pizza, and two-liter bottles of Coke are purchased at the Corner Stop, the one gas station in the county. When I was small, growing up in a trailer house on the south side of Center, it took me all of ten minutes to pedal my bicycle across town to Grandpa and Grandma Brorby’s. I went to the one school in the county with the same twenty-two other students in my grade—a lopsided division of six girls and sixteen other boys. There are two bars, a bank, a courthouse, and the small Coal Country Community Health Center on Center’s main street. There are three churches but not even a motel.
As a child, though, my world didn’t feel small. I played baseball and spent my afternoons with Grandpa Hatzenbihler fishing for bluegills or picking tart chokecherries. I wandered the grassy banks of the small Square Butte Creek, a squiggly stream that eventually empties into the wide Missouri River, looking for muskrat, heron, or beaver. Sometimes I’d spot a coyote loping in the distance.
The prairie I grew up on teaches you to notice, to pay attention—the yolk of the sun as it slides across the dome of sky, streaking the world orange and indigo, the swish of grass in the afternoon breeze, the screech of a grackle.
During the “golden hour” on the prairie, the North Dakota palette reveals the subtle differences between ocher and umber and sienna.
And North Dakota can also be biblical in terms of the weather—hailstones hurl from the sky, rain floods fields, tornadoes rip across the hills, blizzards kill cattle, heat chars crops.
To the west of Center, a large dragline lumbers on as it breaks the soil, ripping lignite coal from underground.
The men in Center fill the pews on Sunday, and on Monday are back at the mine or at the power plant, digging in the ground, heaving coal into large boilers, sending electricity to eastern North Dakota and western Minnesota. The men call Oliver County God’s Country—a land filled with ring-necked pheasants, deer, red-winged blackbirds. It’s Eden, it’s brimming, it’s full of life. But each Monday, and every day after, the men stumble into the two bars, their sooted hands grip cold beer, warm whiskey.
Each year North Dakota ranks first in binge drinking. High schoolers sneak bottles to hidden bonfire parties, someone shoots off the road, is memorialized by a flowered wreath and, if they were nice, a crude wooden cross, on a cottonwood tree on Highway 25, just before crossing the county line.
Drinking is a way to numb the pain, the dissonance, the sound of the dragline, the rumble of the boiler. The blasphemy of the work that lies ahead.
THE STORY OF NORTH DAKOTA is then the story of self-destruction. Everything leaves North Dakota full and comes back empty. The only way I’ve understood my home is by getting out, escaping its crushing weight, watching the destruction, now from the outside.
In childhood, when I escaped to the hills with my tackle box and drawing paper, I told no friends. I kept it a secret, like a coal burning in my gut. Boys liked playing smear the queer, king of the hill, and cowboys and Indians. I played, too, to fit in, hurled my body against other small-boned bodies atop lumpy snow mounds. I was reminded by my father that Brorbys never tap out.
But the prairie I escaped to was a supple whirlwind of grass tilting in the wind, a symphony of sage-grouse song. Beaver tails slapped the water. I would cast spoons for northern pike in the Square Butte Creek. When the casting became boring, I pulled out my sketchbook and pencils and traced the bend of the creek against the white paper.
I tried to create the world I wanted rather than the world as it was—a world of broken lignite and all-too-often broken people.
On the playground, I asked friends to play tag or an imaginary game of pirates. Instead, the other boys sized one another up, divided into two lines, and threw footballs. They ran back and forth across the asphalt playground, slammed the ball hard against the ground when they scored a touchdown. I watched, from a distance, wondering where I fit into the place I lived.
I still cringe when I say I played with girls, since I was constantly called a girl because I wanted to create my own games. I wanted room for my imagination.
Throughout elementary school, on Halloween those boys dressed like police officers, firefighters, and football players. I dressed, not as Barbie, but as Dracula, or a wizard, or a pirate.
Even then, I wanted a larger world.
My classmates played a preconceived game in a world that was preordained for them—chase a ball under Friday night lights, grow into men who dig coal from the ground. Save for the Mexican cruise you’ve always wanted. Retire when your body begins to break.
There was something I, too, craved in that landscape, something soft, something I couldn’t see in the human-made world. So, I headed for the hills where badgers roamed, where pheasants tucked into marshy grass. There was diversity to the natural world that I could not find in my hometown. He’s a dreamer, he’s not a hard worker, he doesn’t want to play football.
2.
THE PRAIRIE IS A TAPESTRY of intermingled roots woven together. One hundred acres of prairie may support over three thousand species of insects. Yet, when overlaid with extractive economies, it becomes simple, reduced to bloodless words: flyover country.
When you grow up knowing you come from a place no one visits, your dreams settle for staying put, for digging in the earth, for doing the act you’ve been trained to do: make your money by destroying the world. Though you don’t see it that way, you become a pawn in someone else’s story, a story of That’s the way it is, this is the way it has to be. The illogical violence wrought upon the prairie is propelled by powerful men destroying lives to line their own pocketbooks.
And yet, the prairie, like memory, is powerful, too: it is a collection of single, varied grasses woven into an interlinked tapestry that secures soil in place. That’s how I think of this book, like the woven roots of a symphony of grass.