North Dakota Slow Time

Crazy Cloud/Mother Quilt explore North Dakota "deep time" in the Mothership.  Memory, poetry, family roots connect in a solitary campout in Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora, NoDak. Images and sounds from North Dakota Historical Center in Bismarck add to dreaming and understanding. 


WHAT IT IS WALKING, WALKER

            0530 hours

            20 October 2015

            Cottonwood Camp

            Theodore Roosevelt National Park

            Little Missouri River

            Medora, North Dakota

The Mothership isn’t exactly the 2-Step,

Crazy Cloud. It’s a Dodge Ram 3500.

Steak tacos and Mexican Rice for dinner.

Museum in the morning before heading West

And maybe a walk at first light, before sunrise.

How it is with Storypath/Cuentocamino.

Shut down everything but the road

For the notebook and discovery within.

The books I carry in my backpack

Blessing the other in all ways. Cameras

as another set of eyes.

Emptying the ears with sage
Coming forth with the invocation of music

Iris DeMent sings the poems of Akhmatova

And the plains will never be the same.

Badlands be ancestral storyline. These

Trackless woods and the on board library.

South of the Corps of Discovery,

We read the winter journals of Meriweather Lewis 
In the wonder of knowing the homecoming story. 

It can be done, except in notebook narratives. Alone here,

Karen and I. The only ones here.

Campground five miles in from Ranger Station.

No hookups. No water. Solar power.

Lewis and Clark winter in Mandan,

1804 turns into 1805. Almost 100 years

Will go by before any will remember.

Roosevelt arrives in 1883 for a buffalo hunt,

Invests in cattle, operates two large ranches.

Maltese Cross and Elkhorn. Buffalo

Almost gone, Roosevelt will create

Five national parks, 51 national bird reservations,

Four national game preserves

And 150 national forests. Earth Lodge People,

Hidatsa,Mandan lived here nomadically

For 500 years. Hidatsa learn about corn

From the Mandan. These two combine

With Arikara Nation to the South.

TheSmall Pox will arrive in 1837.

This is the contact point—the way

It was told to me. The day Death

Came and stayed. In the Mandan

Origin Story:  Lone Man was walking along

And became aware of himself.

The land was new where he was going.

Here on the Little Missouri River.

In 1845, Mandan and Hidatsa move 40 miles

Upriver to form Like-A-Fishhook village.

Arikaras join them in 1862. The government

Forces them to Fort Berthold in 1885.

Today that nation is known as Three Affiliated Tribes.

This is called walking in sagebrush before sunrise.

This is the notebook in the Mothership in song.

My people, conscripts and loose ends from Denmark,

Will migrate north working their way from Bismarck.

The story will be told as a new deal. Lights will come one.

Fracking will come into the vocabulary

And be hailed as creating employment,

Fracturing bedrock using a slurry of sand,

Chemicals and water to extract oil.

Spilled frakking fluids will be mentioned in brochures

as being more dangerous than spilled oil.

Oil is cheaper to collect than natural gas

So they burn off excess gas until a way

To build collection infrastructure I found.

Gas flares in 24-hour facilities light up

The dark skies of North Dakota. Stars are out,

Too. First light from the East.

My God it’s beautiful. Fingertips freezing.

Jim Bodeen

Mothership Log