WannaskaWriter

     Archie Olson was a lifelong bachelor who worked for area farmers spring, summer and fall, then worked in the big woods during the winter cutting pulp wood, as did so many other men in the Wannaska community. Never one to rest on his laurels too long, Archie worked various part time jobs including driving a beer truck into the more remote communities of northwestern Minnesota.            One afternoon, my father was nearly six hundred miles from his home in Des Moines, Iowa, and had stopped for a bit of refreshment in a tiny little gathering log-built place in far northwest Minnesota called ‘Fourtown’ on the edge of Beltrami Island State Forest, when the beer truck pulled in to this unlikely log cabin oasis in the middle of nowhere.            Dad, seldom a disagreeable sort as stories go, sat alone at a table as the beer truck driver walked by him with a stack of beer on ...

As a column about real estate sales and transactions I read suggests, there’s more to the sale than the deeds imply, just as I wonder whenever I hear someone say they just bought ‘an eighty’ or ‘another quarter‘ somewhere. I think about the land’s back story, What is the history of the land purchased? Is it known? Do the buyers care that there was a river crossing on the land that the Ojibwe and Dakota used on their seasonal rounds before the coming of the white man? Or that beaver dams of hundreds of years ago shaped the river and creek basins and remnants of their dams can be found there nine feet below? Or that, on a walk across that field to the mailbox one day the former land owner found an octagonal-shaped barrel of a flintlock pistol of possibly the fur trade era or before? Or that marked on old surveyor maps there is a wagon trail along the sandridge and down through that quarter that followed the river bank toward Wannaska? I doubt that many new owners think about the history ...

 My friend and neighbor, Joe McDonnell, and I take yearly three day trips ‘west’ as part of an autumn regimen, traveling only the blue two-lane highways and as many miles of gravel roads as was necessary to get to our destinations. We are of the mind, that it’s the ‘journey’ not the destination that intrigues us, when most travelers these days just want to get there as soon as possible or, as a tour bus coordinator cousin of mine laments, of passengers on the bus concentrating on their smartphone screens rather than looking out the window at the area they're traveling through. Often our trips begin before sunrise here in Roseau County, Minnesota so that when we cross into North Dakota at Drayton, the sun is just becoming bright in the rearview mirror. The miles west from there are flatland miles, more of them denuded every year, erasing the definition of fencelines, horizon and sky. Miles-long windrows of bulldozed windbreaks, their roots wrenched from the soil they were planted to...

I enjoy reading a column titled, “Rural Reflections” in our local shopper, “The Northern Watch,” published by The Times in Thief River Falls, Minnesota. I find what the author writes is entertaining, informative and thought-provoking. Since I’m a writer too, (Sadly, more of an essayist than a column writer) I thought he might appreciate some feedback, if somewhat long-winded. Brevity isn’t my best suit as I tend to think there’s more to a story than what is told in brief, just as there is more than one piece to a puzzle.       I thought the article he wrote last spring about his grazing service was interesting. He moved his customer’s cattle herd onto his farm, then from pasture to pasture over the summer, correct? That idea was very intriguing. When I look at some of my neighbors cattle grazing, on what I don’t know, I think their pastures could use some rotational practices too. The whole of it always look pretty thin, void of any lush greeness save that of ...

  I grew up with big trucks the first half of my life. My family, and the words ‘dairy’ and ‘milk truck’ were almost synonymous in Iowa back in those days.     During the Great Depression, my dad got a job driving freight truck for Des Moines Cooperative Dairy in Des Moines where his two brothers worked. His oldest brother was the dairy’s General Manager and the other brother had started a milk transport and freight line between dairies across Iowa and neighboring states. I have a newspaper clipping telling of one of Dad’s trips to Chicago with a load of butter when he and his partner were hijacked by gangsters at gunpoint, blindfolded, put into separate cars and driven around the city while their truck was being unloaded of its precious cargo. They were released unharmed at their empty truck outside of town.      Like my dad, uncles and cousins, in my twenties I  began driving truck for the dairy too, though by then it’s name was changed...