Voices of the Valley is a publication from the UND Writers’ Conference. Sandbagger News has written 3 essays, published between 2017-2019, about harm reduction and the direction of our sandbaggin’ spirit. Two of them are available right here. Please enjoy.
The Hill of Three Waters:
Red River Dreams of Quietico-Superior
The factual claims made in this essay are supported by two incredibly interesting books: “A Land Set Apart” by R. Newell Searle and “Keeper of the Wild” by Joe Paddock.
Oh, Hill of Three Waters, I feel you from here, on the edge of existence in misty perfection pitched, twisting tales of the great continental drainage ditches. What starts as water hauling from the heavens with it innocence ends in this living, silver wilderness of blue-green rivers crissed across unending beds of moss insisting only on its isness.
But no raindrop you meet will ever want to believe that the fate that’s found to be fit for it might be flippantly picked by a transient destiny whistling its spit on some hooligan wind or the vagabond breeze.
For thee, my old cousin of rock and topog, though lay you there low among the lost Mesabi peaks are now the tallest bone of the mountain corpse below, jutting up crumbled from dark stone buried and forgotten by time long ago. Because of you, the waters flow the ways they know.
A raindrop falling on your northern face would join the feeding streams trickling into Red Lake, then slowly press their way westward to me, the muddy Red River of the flat country, to roll the roar north toward the big Hudson Bay, forever for the open, cold, ferocious Arctic Ocean’s endless day.
A raindrop falling on your western face would not take long to make its way to the banks of the great Mississippi River, which would swiftly deliver with ravenous steam any stream from the north to the sea of the south out the mouth of the glorious Gulf.
A raindrop falling on your eastern face would trickle directly to Superior Lake, slosh between the great passage of the Saint Lawrence Seaway, weaving east as it goes to its inevitable new home in the wild and far-off Atlantic Ocean.
Oh, Hill of Three Waters, how does it know from which path to come from or which way to go? The people of my valley are in deep need of learning from one such as you, who has seen it all from the rise and fall of the dead Iron Range halls, to glaciation and – for now – the colonial malls.
Well, everybody knows lakes think in prose, but rivers live much more melodically in poems. So grab your paddles, homies; pull up a stump and listen close, to the story of the Boundary Waters wilderness, yo.
– – –
Backus & the Roadless Buyouts
“I’ll miss E.W.. One cannot be in harness with a team mate so long without missing him.” – Ernest C. Oberholtzer
Among the merchants of mercilessness who came to the northlands after the fur trade was one most ruthless fruit from the pioneering vine who would dedicate his life to turn the boundary waters into a water storage basin for his hydropower empire – Edward Wellington Backus, suburban Minnesota boy and U of M dropout turned infamous millionaire lumberman during the years preceding the Great Depression.
In one of Backus’ favorite memories, he strapped on snowshoes and trudged 200 miles through the lake country to survey a place he hoped to purchase: the Koochiching Falls on the Rainy River on the Canadian border. The beauty of the scene as Backus always described it is gripping and undeniable, but it is unknown whether he enjoyed this view as much as would have the legions of unborn generations who would, because of him, never get the chance to see it.
Backus owned an island on Rainy Lake near International Falls, where he and his wife would nurse their professional relationships by entertaining distinguished guests in a lavish resort-style atmosphere designed to earn them political favor. But less than a 10-minute canoe ride away, in full view of a smaller island on the same lake lived someone who would haunt Backus till the very end of the lumberman’s life: the small, humble Harvard graduate from Iowa named Ernest Oberholtzer. “Ober,” as the locals knew him, would live rich in friendships with his white and Anishinaabe neighbors here for nearly 80 years.
In 1925, Backus submitted a proposal to the International Joint Commission (IJC) of the United States and Canada, which oversaw the complex management of the Quetico-Superior boundary waters ecosystem, to build a series of dams that would harness the rivers and waterfalls for hydropower and the transportation of felled trees. The dams, however, would also raise the water levels of vast swaths of the watershed causing devastating widespread destruction of private property and public wilderness, for the benefit of Backus’ business alone. He even argued that the government should pay for it – but leave him in sole control of the lake’s water levels.
Ober, assisted by a group of environmental lawyers meeting secretely in Minneapolis basements, raised $500 to purchase a transcript of the IJC meeting so they could build an argument against Backus’ plan.
During the 9-year period while US and Minnesota legislators deliberated the merits of Ober’s alternative, the “forcible and fortunate” Backus engaged in activities that at the very least must be considered of extremely bad taste. These political strategies included threatening newspaper editors to whom Backus sold paper and buying a popular outdoors magazine to offer free advertising to private interests in exchange for political capital. Under the guise of a rent receipt, Backus even tricked his landlord – a widowed woman whose child had just died – into signing away all her rights and grant him a perpetual lease to exploit her land rent free until she died too.
One of the most dishonest moves of the Backus campaign was to organize a grassroots group of local hunters and conservative environmentalists, then submit a formal complaint against Ober’s plan on the group’s behalf, without informing the
membership. When Ober secured himself an opportunity to address the group in person, the members found out what the Backus organizers had done. That night, before ejecting the Backus supporters who founded the group, the grassroots club voted unanimously to support Ober’s alternative.
During his first summer in the Quetico-Superior, Ober canoed more than 3,000 miles. More than a decade later, at the height of the controversy, he still averaged 500 canoe miles each year on reconnaissance missions with his friends, scouting out locations that would be affected by Backus’ plans and interviewing local people about the impacts they would experience.
In 1927, Ober correctly predicted a devastating flood caused by what he called the “unpardonable arrogance” of Backus’ irresponsible manipulation of water levels in the Rainy Lake watershed. Instead of allowing such waste and destruction, Ober believed, the public ought to set aside the entire area as an “international park” between Canada and the US dedicated to peace and wilderness preservation.
The Backus threat was finally eliminated by the US Shipstead-Nolan Act of 1930 and a similar act passed in the Minnesota legislature three years later that applied to state lands. Both outlawed the destructive, wasteful consequences of Backus’ dam plan and delineated regulatory zones providing for scientifically informed multiple uses of the land for the public’s benefit.
In the heat of the Depression, Ober agonized over the $4,000 debt held by the Quetico-Superior Council. Backus, on the other hand, had driven his businesses into more than $40 million in debt. After persistently losing a series of lawsuits against him, Backus was kicked out of his own company, who he then led a very public campaign against, blaming his predicament on a vast conspiracy of east coast bankers seeking to corrupt the Minnesota economy.
True to character, Backus never gave up. At the age of 73, he flew to New York on a doomed business trip, where he died alone in his hotel room of a heart attack, abandoned by the floundering empire he built.
County governments in northeast Minnesota also suffered during and after the Great Depression. Lake, St. Louis, and Cook counties, for example, were considering selling land to the US Forest Service, which wanted to expand the Superior National Forest. But to the counties, losing land meant losing future opportunities to develop taxable property. Additionally, years of mistrust between the federal agency and local communities created friction which threatened to bloom into a full-blown controversy as big as the Backus problem. Resistance grew as the possibility that the government might condemn private property and force buyouts in the wilderness area seemed more likely.
Meanwhile, the automobile began to transform the concept of outdoor recreation by suddenly empowering millions of Americans with the ability to visit national parks and forests. Hardline preservationists didn’t want any roads or development to penetrate the silence and solitude of the canoe area. The USFS wanted some roads to better provide emergency fire control services. And private extraction and power companies wanted their own roads with which to carry out the land’s valuable natural resources.
To represent them in the 1947 deliberations of the county land deals, the Quetico-Superior Council – with conservation allies like the Izaak Walton League of America – hired Sigurd F. Olson, writer, outfitter, and retiring dean of the Ely Junior College. “Sig” traveled extensively through the US and Canada, canoeing and philosophizing with important political stakeholders to garner their support for the Council’s mission of reimbursing the counties fairly for the land sale that would allow them to consolidate the roadless area in the national forest.
After long, stressful arguments about the price of the land and the government’s mode of payment, the committee devised an acceptable reimbursement program. This decision, the Thye-Blatnik Act of 1948 set a bold new precedent for the Forest Service – buying out private homes and resorts for the sake of environmental conservation and recreation was not only feasible, but now one of the agency’s mandated priorities.
– – –
Aerial Invasion
“Before a solution was found, the question of aircraft would involve every major level of government, the courts, individuals and organizations through the nation, and the President of the United States. In Ely, it would set neighbor against neighbor and friend against friend in the bitterest battle the Quetico-Superior country had yet seen.” – R. Newell Searle
Prohibiting roads in the canoe area succeeded to deter further development and reduce visitation pressure on the wilderness. But at the end of World War II, residents of the northland began hearing more and more commercial airplanes flying over the boundary waters. Soon, the immensity of their impact was apparent. Resorts hired float-plane pilots to fly clients out to remote lakes, where easy visitation put heavy pressure on even the most remote corners of the wilderness.
One of the members of the underground group in Minneapolis that helped Ober deflect the Backus threat was a lawyer named Frank B. Hubachek. He believed banning aircraft in the roadless areas would reduce the impact on the environment and thereby better ensure the sustainability of the current canoe-based tourist economy. Or, Hub wrote, the local tourism industry might “open the wilderness areas, skim off the cream in a few years, eliminate the wilderness permanently, and then relapse into a minor and mediocre tourist trade.”
Both Ober and Sig mobilized on the aircraft issue, traveling to garner support and formally requesting the President of the United States to declare an executive “no fly zone” over the roadless areas of the Superior National Forest. While conservationists awaited a response, resort owners continued to build up their businesses in the wilderness areas.
At the time of the aircraft deliberations, Ely struggled economically. Since its founding by members of the extraction industry in 1884, Ely has suffered from a dominating influence of competing corporate and federal interests. The mining, logging, and power companies that provided the community with jobs also supplied a great deal of public services to support the workforce, but they were still owned by corporate outsiders who would never live there themselves. Likewise, the USFS may have been mandated to operate in the public’s interest, but many of its decisions affecting local communities were still made by bureaucratic outsiders in Washington, DC.
Therefore, the frustration of the Ely Chamber of Commerce, which championed mining and tourism industries most of all, was not unexpected. One of the group’s leaders, local restaurant owner John Smrekar worked hard to keep the airspace open for fly-in resort tourism. Smrekar’s challenges eventually put the case before the US Justice Department to decide if the President had the authority to enact airspace restrictions for the sake of wilderness preservation after all.
Smrekar’s political strategies during this time were strongly reminiscent of Backus’ underhanded attempts to sway public opinion with dishonest communication. Smrekar, with his current allies in Ely, formed what they called a grassroots organization of community support and used it to distribute lies about the Council’s long-term management intentions for the boundary waters. Other evidence reportedly suggests Smrekar even forged a judge’s signature on an important legal document to evade the new restrictions.
Responding to the personal and political smears Smrekar had spread, Hubachek wrote a full-page ad in the Ely Miner newspaper refuting, with evidence, all the claims made against him and the Council. When confronted and challenged to provide evidence to
the contrary, Smrekar disappeared. In the end, he failed to show up to a scheduled debate at a radio station he had agreed to participate in with Sigurd Olson. Sig didn’t even have to drop the mic for everyone to know who won.
Soon thereafter, in 1949, President Truman authorized the executive airspace restriction over the Superior National Forest roadless areas. Residents were given a two-year grace period before the so-called “air ban” would take effect, and its opponents used this time to express their protest. Some resort pilots brazenly boasted their disregard for the new rule by claiming they would fly in 1952, despite the ban.
Just two days after the new rule’s implementation, a pilot working for a resort owner named Zup called himself in to authorities just before he took off, so the federal district agent could witness the rule’s first violation. As Zup expected, federal agents confronted him, and he eventually brought a case to Washington challenging the legality of the executive air ban. When the federal judge ruled against him, Zup demanded an exorbitant settlement amount from the Forest Service should they wish to buy his property and close his operations in the protected areas.
While they waited for a result of the appeal, Zup and friends made hundreds of illegal flights to their resort, even advertising them via the US Postal Service. Their disrespect for the executive order attracted the attention of the FBI, which eventually investigated, seizing a plane and fining one pilot in the process.
Having lost the ability to fly to his resort in the roadless area, Zup invested in a failed attempt to build a wider waterway between there and the nearest road – a plan which included dynamiting portages and fundamentally altering the nature of the river system to allow the passage of motorboats in places where only canoes could go before.
When that became too expensive, Zup decided he wanted a road in the roadless area. Before selling out to the Forest Service, Zup petitioned to use an existing old railway path as a private road to better access his property. He also filed suit against a lumber company for use of one of their old private roads – but both times, the courts, unsurprisingly, denied his request to use a road in the roadless area.
As his options collapsed, Zup resorted to the most militaristic depiction of the controversy thus far. Behind the wheel of a “weasel” – a semi-amphibious military vehicle used to transport troops up the D-Day invasion beaches of World War II – Zup illegally drove straight up the waterways transporting goods and guests to his resort while, in the words of scholar R. Newell Searle, consequently “churning the portages into muddy ruts.”
Finally, Zup brought a bulldozer up to the USFS fence, broke the locks on the gate, and drove through to blaze himself a path through the roadless area.
Soon after, Zup again approached the gate, this time with a van full of guests, when he discovered the agent on duty had repaired the locks on the fence and parked his truck across the entrance. In full view of his customers, Zup threatened to kill the federal agent at the gate with a crowbar. Sidestepping authority, Zup broke the locks again and drove his guests around the agent’s barricade through the roadless area to his resort.
Zup’s appeal case against the air ban was not aided by these violent actions. Though his partners soon sold their properties to the Forest Service, Zup held onto his land until the 1960s, when, as authorized by the Thye-Blatnik Act, the USFS finally condemned and closed Zup’s resort for good.
This set a precedent which would guide the federal agency’s management of the other 72 national forests under its jurisdiction. Now, the Forest Service’s mandate to consolidate the roadless areas in the boundary waters had been supported by the courts, and this could encourage the agency to consider using such tactics elsewhere.
– – –
Treaty for the International Park
“We should not let an early choice of phrase kill a worthwhile proposal because of the failure to admit the possibility of change.” – Sigurd F. Olson
Once the US had succeeded to repel the Backus threat, establish roadless areas in the Superior National Forest, authorize the USFS to buyout private businesses in the wilderness area, and prohibit private aircraft over the protected lakes, the controversy remained far from resolved.
For Ober, the current protection of the Quetico-Superior wilderness area was merely the prototype of his grandest vision: an expansion of the restricted multiple-use area to include the entire 11-million-acre watershed system constituting the internationally managed peace park of his dreams. Thus far, the managers of Ontario’s Quetico Provincial Park also seemed interested in preserving their natural resources. When the US had started buying up private property in the boundary waters, the Canadian governments suspended land purchasing around the Quetico, too – matching management practices in the meantime, until a stronger international agreement seemed more feasible.
But by the early 1950s, Ontario grew more resistant to attempts to turn the Quetico Provincial Park into a federally co-managed international space. Reasonably, they felt entitled not to give up their responsibility of the wilderness area and any attempts of federal authorities to wrest ownership of the land from them seemed arrogant and unfair.
Once again, Ober and Sig went to work, writing the draft of a treaty they would give to the Canadian federal government to propose to Ontario. But this time, Ober and Sig held disagreements over the fundamental mission of the Quetico-Superior Council. Whereas Ober still had hopes to protect the 11-million-acre wilderness, Sig believed it necessary to compromise and focus on keeping the 2-million acres of the currently protected Quetico-Superior.
After arguing over six different drafts, Ober and Sig came up with something the Canadian federal government was happy with, but they still needed to convince Ontario to cede control of their park to the federal coalition, which seemed increasingly unlikely.
Based on the geography and relative lack of roads in the Canadian territory, the people of Ontario had virtually no access to the Quetico park, without first driving into the US and entering across the border by water from the south. Meanwhile, wealthy resort owners in the US had easy access to the Quetico, and reports of some of their unsustainable practices made Ontario residents naturally resentful of their American counterparts, who would seem to benefit disproportionately by the creation of an international park.
In the end, Ontario refused the treaty, and future hopes of protecting the entire 11-million-acres of Ober’s dreams were dashed. Ontario did, however, sign onto an official agreement between the province and the USFS regarding future management of the combined wilderness area. This agreement imposed no binding regulations on either side, other than the promise to let each other know if they planned to make any changes to their management strategies that could influence the shared ecosystem.
To ensure this promise was upheld, the governments established the Quetico Superior International Advisory Committee, which convened its first meeting at Hubachek’s house on Basswood Lake in the early 1960s. By then, the conservation movement had come a long way. But another fear of Ober’s was just beginning to be realized: the boundary waters had become overrun with visitors, despite the air ban and roadless areas.
Reportedly trashed with beer cans, picnic supplies, and discarded gear, the campsites in the boundary waters were barely livable. In 1964, the historic 4-Mile Portage was lined with dozens of abandoned automobiles, broken boats, and wasted equipment. The Forest Service knew it had to find another way to limit visitation to the wilderness or risk losing it altogether.
It’s solution: prohibit motors in the roadless areas, which would mean sacrificing the visitorship of motorboatists for that of canoers only. Talk of this decision elicited explosive reactions from some local resorts and outfitters with invested interests in using motorboats in the boundary waters, while other outfitters invested more in canoe tourism were better prepared for a motor ban.
No matter where people stood, the controversy was bitter and painful for all involved. The Wilderness Act of 1964 and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Act of 1978 officially outlawed motors in most of the roadless areas, while other visitation limitations (like permit requirements) further reduced pressure on the wilderness.
Though Ober would never achieve his dream of creating an international park the significance of which the world had never before seen, what he did was much more subtle than that – and perhaps none the less important.
As Ober got older, he tragically began to lose control of his mental and physical capabilities. Near the end, he could neither walk nor speak, but he still managed to communicate a little with hand gestures. But one day, while being pushed in a wheelchair down the street in International Falls, an Anishinaabe woman approached Ober and said “Boozhoo, At’sokan.” Amazingly, despite his condition, the two carried on a complete conversation in the Ojibwe language, though Ober would never speak again before his death at the age of 93.
When Sig gave the eulogy at Ober’s funeral, he described his old friend and ally as the ultimately inspiring “canoeman.” Adventure was certainly a pillar of Ober’s life, but his biographer thought Sig was more so a canoeman himself – while Ober, at heart, was a teacher.
Ten years later, at the age of 82, Sig strapped on snowshoes and left his house for the last hike of his life. Found in the typewriter on his desk the day he died was his final message, “A new adventure is coming up, and I’m sure it will be a good one.”
Drawing from its century-long history of controversy, the adventure to manage the Quetico-Superior wilderness is one that promises to last for a long time to come – requiring the rise of a new generation of conservationists with the vision of Ober, the persuasiveness of Sig, the persistence of the sandbaggin’ Red River, and the wild unity of the one and only boundary waters.
---
Red River Dream
"Gaa wiin daa-aangoshkigaazo ahaw enaabiyaan gaa-inaabid." (“You cannot destroy one who has dreamed a dream like mine.")
– Anishanabe proverb
Oh, Hill of Three Waters, do you dream what I dream? Are the plights of tomorrow as grim as they seem? Trials behind and pitfalls below, my Superior’s fine, But how fares your dear friend the old Red of the North?
One hundred years passed between the second largest flood in the history of the Red River Valley and the first in 1997. Each event was a grand reminder of what little control people hold over nature. Each inspired immediate activism and community-wide camaraderie the likes of which the people had never before remembered feeling.
Similarly, one hundred years have passed since the first deliberative gathering of stakeholders in the boundary waters attempted to reconcile their differences and compromise on difficult management decisions. But by most accounts, that first public summit merely made people’s opinions more divisive. Meeting but failing to inspire mutual respect for one another, the actors only managed to become more combative, adding to the struggle of the last century.
Not a single person who attended the first deliberative gathering in the boundary waters is alive today – yet the many of the very same stakeholder groups, corporations, and institutions are active in the controversy still. Nor does a single drop of water remain of the original Rainy Lake watershed that Ober dreamed of protecting when he first came to Minnesota – and yet the boundary waters themselves, remarkably, remain.
Oh, Hill of Three Waters, could it be I’m mistaken? They say you’re fenced off by a mining operation. Well never you fear, a fence might stop a deer, But rain will be seeping as deep as it dares, And rapids be running with never a care…. While the wilderness lives, Earth and heaven are near.
Sandbaggerizing:
Home, High Water
By Billy Beaton
Voices of the Valley 2017
I) The River
I was three years old when the Red River flooded and the National Guard told my family to leave home. I was too little to remember, but I've heard the stories all my life of mighty sandbaggers, superhero people who appeared out of nowhere like bees upon a bed of flowers to build levees, rescue neighbors, and do their best to help out under the worst conditions.
My parents, it seemed, had lived through something amazing and must have become who they are now because of it. What I had to learn had never occurred to me till recently – I could be a sandbagger myself, carrying the message of my mythological ancestors who did the impossible as naturally as the Red Lake River pours into the Red at Grand Forks.
As I fall asleep on Sandbagger Street, I imagine the sound of rushing water growing stronger in the yawning dawn. Rancid water bubbles up through the manhole covers in the gutters. It takes out the roads, the phones, and all hope of saving anybody’s homes.
Clouds appear, dropping night upon a lightning-ripped sky. I see cracks expanding on the sandbag wall, tall structures tumbling down, water wondering where gravity will have it go now.
Newsmen claim Hell has come again.
Sometimes, on a real gutpunch GFunk morning, my waking thoughts are darker than what my nightmares can concoct. Memories poison my present and frame my past in disaster. Images of dead friends in my head. Christian collapsing in the grass. Evan’s dad finding him bloodied in bed. Calling an ambulance for an ex-girlfriend. Covering Alex’s shift at work because he’s dead. Vestiges of shock I thought I’d finished with.
No dream is worse than the reality of Andrew Sadek, a North Dakota college student whose body they found in the Red River, with a bullet hole in his head and a backpack full of rocks.
Police caught him selling $80 worth of marijuana and threatened him with up to 40 years in prison. They persuaded him to go undercover, seek out drug dealers, and participate in recorded transactions on the shaky promise of reducing his charges.
When Andrew was murdered, his mother found out about his involvement as an undercover agent. Now she’s working on legislation to reform the use of confidential informants so that low-level marijuana offenders aren’t used as pawns in dangerous drug deals.
Our friends at Students for Sensible Drug Policy and the UND Psychedelic Club are trying to find ways to help. Perhaps my harm reduction friends are some the new sandbaggers of today’s flood of social confusion.
If so, taboo is our rising water.
II) The Road
Mathodi puked billowing black smoke into the frosty spring break air, and a circle of sandbaggers cheered in the melt mud morning grass. A long awaited March dawn welcomed us with winded leaveless trees and crispy breakfast cold. Six of us prepared to set out on a 10-day adventure from the Red River Valley to the Colorado Rockies for camping, conversation, and sandbaggin' with friends.
Mathodi is the Sandbagger News Van, a 1983 GMC Vandura "Mystery Machine" with more built-in ashtrays than seatbelts. It electrocuted our captain Gari a couple times while he tried to fix a few things under the hood. But the smell of gas in the black smoke meant Mathodi would roll. The Sandbaggerizing had begun.
We sandbaggers discovered each other in Grand Forks and slowly began to let ourselves in on our people's ancestral secrets. Sandbaggers can do anything if they do it together. But most of all, they need rising water.
The certainty of the road's impending challenges mattered less than the truth that we would face them together. We found ourselves moving, as though on our way to the sandbag wall to satisfy some sacred purpose. Our destination mattered none whatsoever.
About 150 miles from the geographic center of North America, Mathodi and the sandbaggers pulled off a highway into star-pocked prairie darkness.
Overlooking the Missouri River north of Bismarck are the ruins of a 500-year-old Mandan village, abandoned when smallpox came to the Great Plains. We walked between the earthen lodges, now overgrown mounds casting moonlight shadows on the hill, and layed above what may once have been the roof of somebody's house centuries ago.
The sound of the river and the shining trillion twinkling stars experienced each other on that hillside with us as it had with others long before. We sang songs and cried laughs into the calmly night sky, which watched and offered windsong back in reply. We shared stories of friends we'd lost to overdoses, suicide, drinking & driving, house fires, domestic violence, and bad advice.
I asked the young man who brought us to the Double Ditch village that night about his dreams for North Dakota.
"I want to die here," he told me, "at home in the room I was born in."
It's where he'll raise his family. It's where he'll work. But being at home won't mean he'll be sitting around. He intends to leave that room looking better than it did when he showed up.
Mathodi hadn't made it through the Deadwood city limits before breaking down the next morning. Something near the front tire snapped as we crept up a bumpy slope into the Black Hills. Had we not been slowed to 25 mph in a construction zone when we hit the final pothole that sealed our fate, it surely would have broken later -- perhaps as we approached a sharper turn on a steeper slope a roll away from oblivion.
The police who arrived to direct traffic around us were remarkably kind and pointed us to the bus stop from which we could hop on a shuttle back into Deadwood to camp. We pitched our tents in a dry patch of grass littered with thawing dog droppings and spent a bumpy, cold night in a place we never meant to be.
Sometime during our 8-hour hike along the busy highway to pick up Mathodi the next day, our suspicions were confirmed. If there were any point to the sandbaggerizing, this was it. Maybe forgetting the difference between work and play could make the difference between life and death.
In Colorado, we spent half our time in an international food market buying things like cockroaches and octopus that we ate around the fire at Cherry Creek Campground.
One morning, I strolled toward the camp showers to charge my phone and eat a Poptart. Inside I found a stranger doing exactly the same thing and was surprised to hear he had also just arrived from North Dakota.
He and a buddy hauled a couple motorbikes all the way down in the back of their pickup for a spring adventure.
You gotta get away from the places you love sometimes, we decided -- especially home. How else could you ever return with something everybody needs?
III) The Lake
The boy walked slowly up the long shady drive to the small house behind the trees. Gang-sign graffiti covered its four walls and boarded windows. A massive pit bull stared from the porch as he ascended the stairs. The man emerging from the dark doorway held a shotgun at his side.
The boy held out his hand, and the colors of the medicine wheel spun together in a cosmic manifestation of spiritual energy, as honest hand drum laid beat to soulful Ojibwe poetry all the way up to the street.
"That's a wrap!" Tom cried, scratching Ogema behind the ears. "Or a rap. Maybe both."
Thomas Barrett brought us to this quiet corner of the Red Lake Nation to film a video to accompany his Ojibwe-language hiphop music. Young Marlon stepped down from the porch to wash the red, yellow, black, and white paint off his palm.
Rodney packed the unloaded shotgun away and turned again to look inside the house he grew up in. Mosquitoes floated in through the frame where the back door once stood. Shattered glass and squatters' clothes littered his old bedroom. Used syringes hid scattered on the kitchen floor.
"Zagidiwin," Tom growled. "Love."
In the backyard, I filmed Marlon dancing in his people's ancient regalia. No matter how many mosquitoes covered his exposed skin, he would not stop dancing until we asked him to.
Bug bites are worth getting when you're trying to empower your people. Most Red Lakers I know would take a lot worse.
Our roles in serving our home are supposed to change as the environment changes around us. All we oughta do is encourage the ones that involve more dancing than misery making.
One day, before I'd ever even heard of Red Lake, I was packing up to bolt out of class as usual, when I decided to introduce myself to our guest speaker, Red Lake Department of Natural Resources biologist Jay Husbey.
He taught us about the collapse and recovery of the Red Lake walleye population in the 1990s, and I thanked him for sharing his amazing story with us.
"Well if you wanna learn more about it, come on over any time," he said. "We'll show you around."
So instead of studying for finals that semester, I drove to Red Lake with a friend to interview fisheries managers, tour the Red Lake Nation fishery, and realize that the community's connection with it's spiritual ecology and their actions to empower it are something to admire.
We never finished editing the footage we created that weekend, but the friends we made on that first visit have become people I have trouble imagining my life without.
The day we met Tom, we spent some time drawing signs for his music video, “Rezolution.” Then he drove us around the Red Lake Nation, interviewing his friends and film them holding the signs we made.
In Redby, a small crowd gathered near the fishery building. The annual ice fishing derby was wrapping up, and soon they would judge the grandest walleye pulled out of the ice holes that morning.
I squinted when Tom told me to drive out onto the lake.
"Are you sure, dude?" I knew as a white man I would never go fishing on lower Red Lake. But how ought I feel about walking on top of it?
"Drive," he said again, pointing to the bumpy snow-plowed paths on the frozen surface.
My red 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee Sharon and I have been many amazing places together. But no morning drive has been more meaningful to me than that short trip across the ice.
We parked, and I almost slipped a dozen times trying to get my camera out of its bag.
"Hey," someone shouted behind me, "no white guys allowed!"
I turned with an uncertain expression on my face.
"Just kidding!" he laughed. It was former tribal chairman Floyd Jourdain standing with Tom's dad. Both held signs in our video that read "Honor the Treaties" and "Sobriety is Tradition."
Tom's mother Karen, whom I had never met, appeared and spoke to me with words I will never forget.
"I'm so glad you're here," she promised. I was too.
We returned from Red Lake to the Sandbagger House on a hockey weekend. I made it into the driveway before they closed off the road in front of our house and 11,000 people streamed out of the arena across the street.
In front of the building on a high pedestal is a statue of Sitting Bull mounted on a horse. He was a Dakota hero killed by federal officers in a standoff at Standing Rock 127 years ago. His people taught Tom's people to play the hand drum.
There's a heavy chalkboard we leave messages on sometimes standing in our yard by the driveway. I wasn't surprised to see it had been kicked over on a night with so many college kids in the street. If it weren't so heavy, I'm sure it would have been stolen long ago.
"One People," it read that night, in the four colors of the medicine wheel. I stood it right and went inside, catching a glimpse of the mounted man above the crowd across the parking lot.
Hearing shouts and liquored laughter, I glanced out the window. A group of young men loped ahead of their shivering dates on the sidewalk in front of our house. All wore the same image of Sitting Bull's face on their sweaters. None questioned the friend who kicked the chalkboard over once again. Most laughed. I smiled, too.
IV) The Call
I'd never seen the Empire so flooded with people. MeiLi Smith stood above them on stage like a sandbagger looking down from the edge of a trembling levee. She directed Faded, a film about kids we grew up with who have become casualties in the war on drugs. Some died a few weeks after graduation. Some died later. Some are in jail or addicted to things they can't get treatment for.
The rest of us realize that nobody seems interested in helping the younger generations understand substance abuse with any real sincerity. If we allow "just say no" to control the conversation, the taboo will never break, and we'll never get well again.
"Your stories will change lives," MeiLi reminded our fallen friends that night at the Empire. They already have.
A video we made of the discussion panel following her film screening won a contest from the Newseum Institute in Washington, D.C., and MeiLi and I got to travel there to be interviewed about harm reduction in North Dakota.
I wondered if I ought to have changed out of my ratty old sandbagger shoes as we walked into the glorious Newseum with the other assembled student filmmakers. We ate lunch in a boardroom overlooking the Capitol Building and Pennsylvania Avenue. A sign on the balcony said people used to keep their slaves in pens under the street there when they visited Capitol Hill.
Gene was a gracious host, and I'm so grateful the Newseum had earned a grant to fly us all out to meet each other. We had much to discuss and another video to make together.
I asked if I could record a little video of my own while the group chatted.
"Well," he smiled, "it'd be hard to say, 'No pictures' in the house of free speech."
Downstairs in the impressive Knight Studio, each group prepared to share their stories on camera. While they played our video, I counted the lights on the ceiling and wondered if my story would have played itself out this way had the stories of some of my friends not ended the way they did, too soon, because of something as simple as somebody losing count of the number of drinks they had.
I can't remember just how I answered Gene's questions, but I know I said something about communication being both the problem and the solution when it comes to reducing substance abuse. When people’s grandparents feel they have to hide their addictions, we’ve got a big problem.
Leaving the Newseum feels like walking out of freedom's front yard. You're amazed at what it's become, but you wonder what it will be when you come back. I crossed the street wondering what they'd be saying about harm reduction in the big pointy building down the avenue by the time I visited again.
V) The Cliff
A year has passed since the sandbaggers spent spring break on the road with Mathodi. Twenty have passed since water amassed in the coulée banks and poured through the storm drains to drown Sandbagger Street in front of our house.
Our next-door neighbor Brad remembers the ‘97 flood. He was living in the basement at the time and lost everything he owned.
“But when the stuff was gone,” he told me the other day, “I wondered if I really needed it.”
If your idea of recovering from the flood was to run out and buy a bunch more new stuff, then he’d say you didn’t get the message. It was a gift to stand in uncluttered homes with room enough for once to know that all we’d need we’d never really lose – the people we love and our ancestral roots.
Brad worried about the newsman’s tendency to sound almost boastful of our community’s altruistic instincts, as if people elsewhere wouldn’t come together as we had in the face of emergency.
"People come together everywhere," he said. We should be proud of it not because we have it, but because we can share it.
As of this writing in March, the ND House of Representatives approved Tammy Sadek’s confidential informant reform bill with unanimous consent. Upon approval by the Senate, the governor promised to sign Andrew’s Law into effect and celebrate harm reduction as a tool to reduce drug use in our communities.
When I dream today, it is of waking up beneath the sandbagger banner, stepping out into shin-high rising water, and tromping over to join my friends on the sandbag wall to scheme up some impossible plan and help save the town.
As an old sandbagger once told me, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but I’m doing it. I don’t know what I mean, but I mean it.”
So if you’re driving along one lonely night and suddenly see the Sandbagger News Van flying off the cliff, pay us no mind. We’re just sandbaggin’ ourselves off somewhere we oughta be – either at the bottom of the valley or someplace high among the far off stars.
THE END