A COVID-19 Spring, Featuring Beauty, Hope, and Ticks

Each year, Spring comes tiptoeing in the door, then jumps in fully with both feet, often dragging Summer in close behind. We on the northern plains know better than to trust it. We know that Spring has left the door open wide and might just as easily hop back out, giving Winter enough room to throw around a blizzard or two in a show of strength, or perhaps to blow frosty air over the budding trees, dust the fledgeling grasses and shoots with snow, and leave us all muttering, even though it’s exactly what we know to expect.

However, when warm weather does come back for good, we all rejoice, knowing the door has been firmly shut against the frigid air, and that’s the moment when two things happen: the ticks come out, and the turkey buzzards return.

When I lived in Ireland, the natural world in North America was a topic that inspired awe and trepidation. Whirling wind storms that could lift a house from its foundation, snakes, venomous spiders, tiny insects that feed off blood and leave disease in its wake, blizzards, bears, bison, mountain lions: all horrifying or fascinating, or both, depending on who was interested. Ireland, in contrast, felt as safe as a feather bed wherever nature was concerned. The worst things a person could encounter were a badger or a slick mountain side. Now, I don’t want to encounter a testy badger or get washed out to sea by a freak wave, but the lack of venom and man-eaters made a walk in the country pretty nice.

But back to the main concern. Yesterday, I found three ticks on me, so it must really be Spring this time. One was crawling up my pant leg, one was navigating the hairline at the nape of my neck, and one was probably shaken from my clothes before it landed in the steep basin of the bathroom sink.

They’re unwelcome little buggers. They show up just when the weather gets nice enough to stretch out on the grass and let the sun warm your poor, winter-worn limbs. They’re like sand in your bathing suit, grit in your picnic sandwich: just there to make a nice time not all that nice after all. If they serve a purpose, I have yet to learn it.

Turkey buzzards are similarly unwelcome, in my mind. Bulky, hunched creatures, hulking in gangs at the tree tops, They float silently over the houses, scouring the ground below for dead rabbits, squirrels, birds; finishing off the evidence of a harsh winter or a skilled house cat. My neighbor, a wildlife biologist, calls buzzards “nature’s vacuum cleaners,” and “super cool.” I’m sure they are, and I know they fit beautifully into their ecological niche, but dang are they creepy. Perching in our neighbor’s tree, they stretch out their huge black wings in the sun and stay like that, looking unsettlingly like vampires about to swoop in for the kill. My children love them. The toddler calls them “birdies.” Hmm. I know they won’t harm people, but I still get an urge to scoot the little ones indoors whenever they start their ghoulish circling (the buzzards, not the children.)

Nevertheless, here they are, the ticks and the buzzards, harbingers of change, whose presence announces joyfully to the world that the deep days of winter are behind us, at long last. They might as well be prancing through meadows, calling out that it’s spring! It’s spring! It’s spring! And if you don’t mind, they’d like to take a few sips of your blood, or chow down on some half mummified bunny leg from your yard while doing a fantastic Dracula impression.

I know there’s a COVID-19 thought about hope in here somewhere. Just give me a minute - I haven’t had my coffee yet.

…a minute…

…coffee…

Ok, here’s what I’ve got. On the northern plains, even in the twenty first century, we are often at the mercy of nature. We are used to waiting, months at a time, for the break that gives us our best days. We are a people who endure with hope, and a people adept at embracing the moment when good things finally come our way. We have to be! The dang climate won’t let us be otherwise. Northern plains people have (generally speaking) an astounding drive to get out and enjoy themselves, to tidy a flower bed like nobody's business, to produce a bounty of canned salsa from a patch of soil, to lounge on a boat and soak in every ounce of warmth that comes their way. Summer is our goal, a land of milk and honey that we have crossed the desert to enjoy. But there are a few speed bumps that nature provides us in the forms of critters mentioned here, and we have to negotiate those, too.

COVID-19 isn’t just a speed bump on the way to summer. This is more like a mountain. We’ve been joking that North Dakota people are great at social distancing and isolation anyhow, but who thought that this year would provide so much of it? The backyard barbecues, pool parties, neighborhood kids knocking on the door - there’s so much about spring and summer that gets us out of ourselves and into community: life-giving, heart-filling community. It seems unjust that we might miss it all this year. It’s starting to feel like we probably will, a winter that will last far too long.

Ticks and buzzards, those bearers of disease and flying momento mori that show up each year have always shown up. This year, if they decided to stay indefinitely, I wouldn’t be shocked; 2020 has been that way. But they won’t. They don’t. 

Eventually we will be able to wander among the hills and grasses without considering Lyme disease. We’ll say, ‘I’m glad they’re gone,” and “Isn’t this nice?” It will feel so good. (Except for the mosquitos, but I don’t want to think about them just yet.)

The COVID-19 curve will, God willing, eventually flatten. A vaccine will be developed. Some day we will be able to gather together again, to embrace our friends and family, kneel side by side in prayer, and to use the same ketchup bottle as everyone else at a party, willy-nilly, as if touching it couldn’t kill someone! What carefree abandon! What ease. What everyday, ordinary joy.

We will make it through this wintery solitude and past the hulking shadows that may remain afterward. Such good things are coming again and, oh, won’t it be wonderful when they do?



Note: This blog post doesn't feel finished, but here we go anyway 

Into the West

 We left by 9 am and rolled out of town in the orange glow of an autumn morning, heading west. We crossed the Missouri River, passing a flatbed truck piled high with hay bales. The fields on the west side of the river that divides North Dakota in two were the bright gold of early fall. Tall, fat jellyrolls of hay dotted the landscape, topping small hills or set in glacial depressions, like they had become stuck there. The sky above us was blue, blue, blue, except for the little puffs of white cloud here and there. Rolling yellow hills for miles and miles and the hard road in front of us.

We turned off the interstate at Beulah and the road rollercoastered onward. Sunflowers, dry, hanging their black heads in droves along the road, their leaves drooping as though they’d just missed out on something big.

To the left of the road was an old red barn, with white letters that announced ‘The Ideal Farm.’ It certainly looked ideal, tucked into a hillside. A white, broad front porch and a window nested in the eaves – maybe from the 1920s? Trees shaded the yard, their leaves turning from summer green to yellow, and a pond curled around the property, tapering towards a cottonwood. A black bull lay warming itself in the morning sun, lines of muscle visible beneath its skin. Up and then down a sharp hill, we went into Beulah – coal mining country, power plant country, cowboy country.

Main Street Beulah is full of shops, bustling with cars and pedestrians, a sure sign of a town untouched by big box stores or shopping malls. Two cars in a row had dogs that stuck their heads out of windows to woof at passers-by. A sign of the nearby oil boom, once empty lots now hold RVs, an occasional Airstream trailer, sometimes a real honest-to-goodness trailer.

At the Country Kettle restaurant downtown, a help wanted sign sat in the window. Concrete grain silos ten stories high loomed over the road. The train tracks sit behind it, and the trains rumbling through town send vibrations that move right up through your legs and shake the bones in your chest.  Inside the café, the tables were nearly full. A grey-haired man sat in the sunshine with two white-haired people. His t-shirt boasted ‘oil field scum.’ His narrow face was deeply lined and he let out a curse word or two at considerable volume. At the next table, a young woman cradled a sleeping newborn. The waitress left a carafe on my table – the coffee was good and strong. I drank it black and eavesdropped as people leaned across tables to talk.

“How many grandchildren do you have now? Is it fifteen?”

“Well, I sure hurt my hand bowling last week. Look at that finger! It didn't always bend that way.”

“The special today is fleischkeuchle. It’s a steak wrapped in pastry and fried. People around here like it. It’s different.”

“What do you hear from your mom these days?”

“Well, my Vernon, he’s a picky one. He eats toast, French fries, chips… oh, and steak, of course, and ribs…”

After three cups of coffee, a walk around town brought me to flat fronted shops. I wandered around a bit in a dollar store that stocked tomatoes, zucchini and squash, piled on the floor beneath the 99c greeting cards. 

An old car dealership sits crumbling at the end of Main Street, just before the houses start lining the road. A Chevrolet sign is still out front, and concrete parapets on the roof spell out Oldsmobile. Inside, it looks as though dripping water has ruined the roof and ceiling, caused the tiles to drop down onto the showroom floor, where they sit, crumpled from the fall, next to an old maroon sofa and chair. In front of the plate glass window, a dead bird lays on its back, drying in the sun.

The husband’s interview, the reason we came to town, lasted for two hours, and I spent the time walking around Beulah’s dusty streets, over the train tracks, past the new gas station and houses with neatly trimmed lawns. One house looked the way my neighborhood in Bismarck used to – an old bungalow with a huge elm tree arching its branches over the yard, a layer of dust covering the steps, and an old wire fence tracing its way around the property line. Old Dakota style, maybe a hundred years old, and it made me miss the houses that stood where the hospital parking lots are now.

Once we got on the road (after stopping for knoephla soup in a tiny café near the highway), I kept noticing the dust. It went from yellowish brown to scoria red pretty quickly. We rolled past Dickinson and the natural gas flares burning next to the highway. We saw oil rigs nodding on farmland, trucks and semis barreling past, a huge metal sculpture of geese over a sunset. As we aimed westward, the landscape changed from rolling farmland to the cut lines of buttes striped with black lignite coal, bluish gray bentonite, yellow and red scoria.

Why the romance of heading west? Don’t you feel it when you hit the road, heading west from anywhere? Maybe it’s all tied up in old western movies, in the line ‘go west, young man,’ in the idea that the frontier is still out there, dusty and wild and free. I even felt that way whenever heading west in Ireland –to Kerry, Galway, Connemara or Donegal – a surge of excitement in the chest: a feeling that, as the landscape becomes more rugged, so do I.

Badlands, and Medora – dusty. Dust on the car, dust on your legs, dust in your nose. Oh, and there are the cowboys, strolling down the street. Oh, and there’s a rattlesnake, crushed dead on the road by a passing car. We’re in the west.