Old and new memories of North Dakota ~ August 18, 1994

David Heiller

My mother, my wife, and I took a trip to Sherwood and Mohall, in northwestern North Dakota, last week. Mom wanted to visit her aunt Clara, who is in a nursing home in Mohall.

An old Schnick photo from North Dakota.
David's grandma, Stella is holding the
horse on the far right. Aunt Clara is the
youngest one in the front of the photo

Cindy and I wanted to see Clara too, but more than that we wanted to see where Mom was born and raised. We wanted to get a feel for the place, and we did.

Mom took us to Sherwood first. We drove along Highway 28. She was looking for the house where her mother lived. She had stayed there when she was a girl, and rode the school bus to Sherwood. “There’s nothing here now,” she warned.

Mom told us again how Grandpa had come out here from Minnesota and worked the harvests. How he met Grandma. She told us lots of stories about the old days on this trip. Trips back home are good for that. You don’t feel so foolish asking all those questions.

David and his mom admiring a field of sunflowers
 on the North Dakota Road Trip.

Mom slowed the car. Several huge anhydrous ammonia tanks were on the west side of the road. Their company slogan read: Where the customer is the company. She thought that was where her grandma’s house had been. “That’s it, sure it is,” Mom said.

When farms die in North Dakota, they get plowed under and turned into grain fields or fertilizer plants. You don’t see many weathered old farm houses and broken-backed barns like you do back here.

We toured the high school where Mom had graduated in Sherwood in 1934. She had attended an even smaller school in the country, Eden Valley, but she was the only senior there, so they let her take part in commencement at Sherwood. She was 15. She had skipped a couple years, because she was smart and because it was convenient for the school.

It wasn’t such a good idea, Mom said in retrospect. She was shy to begin with, and that didn’t help any. She received a college scholarship, but never really considered going.

While Mom and Cindy toured the school, I talked to the superintendent. They have 150 kids in grades K-12. He makes $35,000, he told me with a touch of pride. He teaches two classes, and is elementary school principal. The high school principal teaches five classes a day. We could use that philosophy back home, I thought.

Then Mom took us to the house in the country where she grew up. Amazingly, it was still standing, probably because it served a new purpose: a granary. It stood next to a larger house, but that too looked vacant. A new house stood on the other side of the property, as if trying to stay as far away as possible from the old ones.

Mom showed us the creek where she played. She pointed out her cousins’ house a mile away. She would walk across the fields to play there. A big gravel pit now stood in the way.

We drove north. Mom’s back field bordered Canada. A herd of cattle grazed there. They looked the same as American cattle. Everything looked the same. Fields of wheat and sunflowers. Oil wells bobbing up and down like giant birds.

A different perspective

From the Schnick family photos.

That afternoon we saw the modern side of the country with my cousin, Aaron, and his wife, Margaret. He’s retired, but he helps his son farm. He showed me some wheat that wasn’t ripe yet. It had been planted using a no-till method. Both parents and son feared an early frost. That would hurt the harvest, and their income.

Some things will never change. Farmers in North Dakota worry about the weather just like farmers in Minnesota.

They worry about the Soo Line train strike too, which is in its fifth week. Trains connect most of the towns in North Dakota. They run next to big elevators, which every town has.

Trains are important to moving grain to market. With a train strike, the elevators will stay filled up, and farmers will have to truck their grain to a new storage facility. It’s one more thing to worry about.

Everything is grain in Mohall and Sherwood. Some green fields looked soft enough to sleep in. Some were a rich gold. Some had swaths of barley lying in rows, cut and ready for huge combines to gobble them up.

Farming is done on a grand scale there. Aaron showed me one tractor, a John Deere 8850 with a 370 horsepower engine. They had two seats in front. “One is for the banker,” Aaron told me with a wry smile.

Things have changed since Aaron came home from World War II in 1946. Back then 25 families lived within three miles of him. Now there are two families. That doesn’t seem like a good change, Aaron said, but it’s the reality of making a living on the land.

His son farms 16 quarter sections. That’s 2,560 acres. And he does it without any help, except for his wife and Aaron. His equipment is huge, the combines and tractors and trucks and chisel plows, cultivators and grain dryers and augers and hoppers, sprayers and harrows and rock pickers and dirt packers. And more.

They’re expensive too. Like Aaron said, there’s a front seat for the banker. I wondered if Aaron’s son was better off than his father had been 50 years earlier. You could see that Aaron and Margaret wondered too, when their faces clouded up with worry as they talked about this and that.

Farming isn’t as simple as it was when he and Margaret started. It’s more stressful now, with high priced equipment and high interest.

Then back home

Fern and me in North Dakota.

Before we left on Saturday, we went to the nursing home to say goodbye to Aunt Clara. She looks like my Grandma Schnick. I was reminded how much I missed Grandma.

At the nursing home I met another resident, Alma Neubauer. She is 93. Her mind is crystal clear. She knew my grandma and grandpa well.

She told us about going to a basket social with my grandfather. She was just a girl, but she had so much fun. He bought a girl’s basket, but the girl was too stuck up to sit with him, so he asked little Alma to sit with him, and she did. “He was a big old homely bachelor,” she said about my grandfather. That made us all laugh. I could have talked to her all day.

But we had to move back to the present. We drove 530 miles back home. Past the fields of grain, and the huge combines. Past the bright yellow fields of sunflowers. Past hawks on hay bales, and deserted missile silos with chain link fences around them.

The wide open spaces slowly closed in with trees and swamps and farms that looked tiny compared to their neighbors in North Dakota. Where old memories and new realities reside.