My friend Ken Muggli in Glen Ullin is a horologist–he spends his days fixing clocks, selling clocks, and selling movements for clocks through the internet.  It’s amazing what technology has done to boost the economy of rural North Dakota. 

Like many native North Dakotans, Ken moved out of state for a while.  He worked for Boeing in Washington state, but he came back.  I got a letter from him today explaining why.  Let me share some of it with you:

Being born and raised on a farm in North Dakota was the foundation for the rest of my life; a good foundation, for a good life based on responsibility, hard work, and much pleasure.  I think of myself as being extremely lucky to have been associated with farm life in rural North Dakota as a boy.

After the Viet Nam war I ended up on the left coast, where I spent over 30 years.  Although I lived and worked in the city, I was still a farm boy at heart.  I didn’t fit in the city; my heart ached for the open prairie of North Dakota.  I longed to eat chokecherries, wild strawberries, wild plums and search for the nests of ground-nesting birds like the Meadow Lark (the state bird of North Dakota).  I missed the adventure of searching for game, big and small, deer and antelope, fox and coyotes.  Ah, the good times…

I flushed a grouse only to see a falcon capture it in fight:  the grouse exploded in a cloud of feathers.  I saw a golden eagle capture a jackrabbit.  The rabbit was so heavy the eagle would gain a little altitude with each down-stroke of its wings but then lose virtually all of the altitude it just gained, almost dragging the rabbit across the field.  I watched the eagle struggle off for a quarter of  a mile before it landed to dine in private.

While I was away, I missed the creeks (cricks) with their ash trees, buck brush, bull-berry bushes and scoria hills.  All of these experiences and many more memories are the sum total of my childhood.  They were recalled with pleasure, retold at family gatherings, occasionally shared with others. 

I always had fun telling the city folks about how the snow banks in North Dakota were black when I was a boy.  They would look at me like I had three heads.  Black snow!  Nonsense, they would say!  But farming practices were much different then.  Half the land was maintained in what was called summer fallow.  After the harvest the stubble was tilled under, leaving the surface highly susceptible to being picked up b the winter winds and deposited on the snow banks–thus the black snow.

Some farm work was pure drudgery and not much fun for a young buckaroo.  On the other hand, breaking and riding my own horse, moving cattle from one pasture to another, operating farm equipment–these were some of the experiences that bring back many pleasant memories.  Childhood was a mixture of responsibility, adventure and great freedom. 

My parents allowed my brother and me a great deal of latitude to explore the world around us:  time to be boys.   We trapped mink, weasels, fox and coyote in the winter.  I had the pleasure of catching poly-wogs, frogs and garter snakes, small turtles, thirteen-stripe ground squirrels and fishing in the creek for bullheads.  

In the summer I especially liked mowing hay; watching the hay fall over the sickle bar was mesmerizing to me.

I loved exploring, looking for anything that was different.  I loved the clay buttes with their myriad of interesting things like semi-petrified wood, mica, strange concretions and traces of coal.  My brother and I found a human skeleton halfway up the side of a very steep clay butte.  This person was on a ledge, complete with a well-rusted pocket knife and a pipe for smoking tobacco.  Oh!  The stories that person could tell about life on the prairie of North Dakota.

I truly appreciate the experiences I had growing up in North Dakota.  So, why did I come back?  For the memories…

Tempus Fugit,

Ken Muggli

www.dakotaclockworks.com