The great garden give-away ~ August 24, 1995

David Heiller

Last week I asked Hazel Serritslev, who work; at the American, if she needed any green beans. Hazel is 74 years old, so she qualifies for garden give-aways.

Hazel said yes, but she was going out of town so she wouldn’t have a chance to use them.

No problem. I called Leone Schultz of Finlayson. She is 89, and this is the first year that she hasn’t had a big garden. She said yes, she could use the beans. She stopped in to pick them up on Friday, August 18, and said a sincere thank you.

A little broccoli to put-up, eat-up
 and give-away. And there will be more!

“Can you use some tomatoes?” I asked. She said she could, and this Friday she will stop in again and pick up some tomatoes, if I remember to bring them.

Palmer Dahl stopped in on Sunday to drop off a screwdriver that he had re-ground for me. Palmer is 86, so I figured I could pawn off some vegetables on him.

But he is a man of simple means, and more blunt than Hazel and Leone. (No offense, Palmer, but you have to get up pretty early in the morning to beat those two women in the politeness game.)

He walked through the garden with me, and pulled up some weeds that he had a fancy name for. I forgot what he called them. When Palmer walks through a garden, he sees the weeds first and the vegetables second.

“You put a lot of work into this garden,” he said, which is a big compliment from Palmer. Unfortunately, he only went home with one kohlrabi. He even seemed a little leery of that. He’d never tried one before.

On Sunday night, Cindy and I rode our bikes over to the home of a neighbor, Steve Hillbrand. Steve gave us a tour of his garden, which is a vast one. He has a rutabaga that I estimate at 10 pounds. Cindy said it’s six. I’m trying to get him to bring it to the Rutabaga Festival this weekend.

Steve has second plantings of beans and peas coming up. There are tiny broccoli that he planted on July 27. If they make it, fine, Steve said.

Glorious beets!

If not, that’s OK too. It’s a good attitude to have when frost sometimes hits on August 22.

Steve always has extra vegetables that don’t get used. He doesn’t worry about them going to waste. They get composted and turned into next year’s soil.

Steve also has a patch of corn that is untouched by raccoons, based on the fact that he has three strands of high voltage electric fence encircling it, not to mention a guard tower and .50 caliber machine gun.

Steve sent us home with two pretty yellow summer squash that look like giant gum drops. He had a fancy name for them, but darned if I can remember it. Cindy will fry them up into something delicious.

Names aren’t important to me when it comes to gardens.

More and more tomatoes to eat, put-up
and give-away. If David had the chance
to sell something, he always gave it away...

What’s important is the joy of seeing things, lots of things, grow. Many things go into this. Working the soil, making it rich and sweet smelling. Watching plants get bigger almost before your eyes. There’s a lot of joy in pulling weeds too. We all have a little Palmer in us.

Then harvesting begins, early at first, like the snap peas that you mostly eat off the vines, and the raspberries that get made into jelly, and the new potatoes that you steal from the mother plant.

And then the big harvest comes, which has people like me scrambling for little old ladies and Norwegian bachelor farmers to give the extras to.

Actually, it isn’t a desperate act to give away vegetables. It is fun and rewarding. It’s fun to share the bounty of a good garden. It is rewarding to give, to share, to hear a thank you, especially when you know that what goes around comes around, and some day somebody will be trying to load you down with a 10 pound rutabaga and you’ll be thanking them. Gee thanks.

There will be plenty for everyone from this year’s gardens, which are exceptional. We’ll put up all that we can use, and eat vegetables every day, and work real hard, and wonder why we planted such a big garden, and give away the rest, and plant a bigger garden next year. That’s something to be thankful for.

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.

Look out for Murphy—he’s at it again ~ August 7, 1986

David Heiller

Last Tuesday was Murphy’s birthday. You know Murphy, of Murphy’s Law fame. He celebrates his birthday every few weeks here at American Publishing.

Two months ago, he had a grand birthday celebration in our basement. The sky darkened like dusk, and an inch of rain fell in half an hour. Murphy was sitting in the drainpipe to the rear of the building, so that the rain water couldn’t go through. It flowed over the rear door sill, and into the basement, where we have $12,000 worth of paper stored. It pooled up under the presses, formed lakes over the drain.

Tuesday was layout day for the paper. It was a long jigsaw puzzle. All done by hand. Unless of course Murphy was around for the day, then all bets were off!

I took off my shoes and shirt, and dug into the ground outside, while the rain soaked me. I found a broken tile of clay drain pipe, where Murphy had been dancing. After an hour, the water finally started flowing through, the lake in the basement receded, and Murphy with it. But he got one final word in. I was standing on the wet cement floor with bare feet and reached up to shut off the overhead light with its pull chain. A shock of electricity jolted me. That was Murphy’s goodbye.

Murphy visits places like the American on their busiest day. The newspaper is put to bed on Tuesday. Most everybody stops their other work here for a day to get the paper out. The phone doesn’t stop ringing. People bring news in. Stories get typeset, ads get designed, pages get laid out. Columns get written. Deadlines get met, just as they have since the first American was printed 72 years ago.

It’s the kind of atmosphere Murphy thrives on, like during that flood two months ago.

This was the front of the
Askov American. David's sister
Jeanne came for a visit, luckily
Murphy took a little time off for that!

Tuesday of this week, Murphy struck again. He rode a bolt of lightning down to the roof of the American, blasting away a foot of the chimney, sending bricks all over. Then he slipped over and knocked our three-phase power out, so that our presses and typesetting machines wouldn’t run. He also knocked out our phone system, and burned up the electric meter. On his way out of town, he stopped to visit Misi DeRungs, convincing her to have her baby, meaning that her mother, Mary Meier, would have to abandon her typesetting job here to be with her daughter.

Things are back to normal now, at 11:15 Tuesday morning. We are behind schedule, but maybe that’s all Murphy wanted for his birthday present today. The power is back on, we have a substitute typesetter, one phone line even works. The paper will get put to bed on time, although a little past its normal bedtime tonight.

Still, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. Murphy knows that if anything can go wrong, it will go wrong, and at the worst possible time. He always has the last word.

Time to catch more sheepshead ~ August 30, 2006

David Heiller

I found the answer for sheepshead.

Cindy and I have been debating that fish for a couple years now. She doesn’t like them, and I do, kind of.

Fresh water drum, aka sheepshead
Taste: nasty. Texture: mushy
Smell: heinous and everlasting.

“Why don’t you bring me back some sunnies?” she’ll ask when I come home with a stringer full of freshwater drum. That’s the fancy name for sheepshead.

“I wasn’t fishing for sunnies” I’ll say.

“What were you fishing for?”

“Bass.”

“Why don’t you bring me some bass then?” “I didn’t catch any bass, I caught sheepshead.”

“And why is that?”

“Because that’s what I caught.”

That kind of ends it, until the circular conversation returns, as it seems to do.

That’s the thing: The river is teeming with sheepshead. Way more than the good old days. My theory is that one of their favorite foods is the zebra mussel. The river is now full of those pesky things, hence the river is full of sheepshead.

I could throw them back, but I feel like I’m doing my good deed taking them home and using them. The martyr syndrome is close to the surface in the Heiller clan.

He knows how to catch bass, but he brought home sheepshead.

I’ll admit they are not the tastiest fish, but I fry them and eat them anyway. The smell it leaves in the house, that’s not so great either. And the tidbits of fish that stick in the sink or go into the compost bucket make their presence known a day or two later.

All this brought war to Heiller Territory about three months ago. That’s when Cindy declared our kitchen a Sheepshead-Free Zone. We argued a bit, but I could see she was serious. “Pick your battles;” I always say. So I moved to the grill on the deck and grilled the sheepshead there. They weren’t bad either, and as long as the wind was blowing from the right direction, Cindy was happy.

I even pickled a batch, and they got decent reviews.

But now I’ve got the sheepshead solution. My brother, Glenn, found a smoker at the end of someone’s driveway when he was visiting Mom a few weeks ago. It was heading for the landfill, and Glenn had heard me mulling the idea of smoked sheepshead, so it was a perfect fit.

First I called John Holzwarth for advice. He seems to know a little bit about everything, and sure enough, he had some good tips: Mix the brine till it floats an egg. Rub a little brown sugar on the fish. Use hickory, Dave, and cut it when the sap is up.

He taught small children how to catch sunnies 
in the river... but he brought home sheepshead.

I did all those things. Took out every sheepshead in the freezer. Cut the pieces up, soaked them good. Let the fish dry, sugared it up. Lit the charcoal, laid the pieces in the Charbroil H2O Smoker, filled it with hickory, and smoked it for about six hours.

It looked pretty, all golden brown. And the flavor: delicious! Well, Mom thinks it’s a little too salty, and it could be smokier. I’ll give her that. Powerful smell too, Cindy noted, the smell that follows you around if you don’t wash your hands with soap and water after eating a piece.

I gave a little piece to Rosie the Dachshund, and she liked it too, although it gave her a slight sneezing fit. Cindy said she wasn’t sure if the dogs were going to eat it or roll in it.

“That’s an insult;” I said.

“No, that’s sheepshead;” she replied. She’s got a sense of humor, that woman.

Guess I better go fishing soon.