This page is more-or-less under construction, but my brother and dad and I took a trip to North Dakota this fall. Bo in sunflower field. See the little tree? Fields. That's the same tree as in above photo. 9/23/05 So Bo has asked me to write something about our trip to North Dakota with Dad. Everyone asked me “so why, again, are you going to North Dakota?” as if it not only required a reason, but that the reason was both forgettable and vaguely puzzling. I fell back on Dad’s explanation “to experience negative space”. The great void. The black hole of the United States. As if North Dakota was like the space below children’s beds; if you put something there, people will forget about it eventually. But this was a trip to celebrate the negativeness of North Dakota’s space and both Bo and I were interested to find out what might have been forgotten by the masses. Our great-grandfather homesteaded a bit of land there in 187*. He crossed an ocean and half a continent, built a house and barn, tilled the soil, raised a family, and played a mean piano. As we drove northwest from the Twin Cities the landscape opened up and it seemed as though God had taken hold of the edges of North America like a gigantic blanket and given it a good shake. As the blanket rippled and rolled God said, “Stop! Now stay” and there lay the great North American prairies, static oceans of soil and grass. Now the grass has been replaced by corn, soybeans, and sunflowers. As you move further into North Dakota time at eye-level seems to slow down, but the clouds speed up, as if compensating. The sky is in constant motion with the constant wind. The people stay in one place as the earth moves under their feet and above their heads. I also think North Dakota was given a few more thousand feet of sky and a more direct path to the sun. If one was to dance in the fields, one should waltz. One artist’s trick, or technique, is to capture the same subject in different seasons, different times of day, or from different angles and study how they differ. North Dakota is perfect for this purpose; the light is constantly changing. They say that you cannot step into the same river twice because the water is always moving; in North Dakota the wind is always blowing, so there is something about the place which is always changing, but the land is very, very steady. It’s the great irony of the Dakotas. All the restless teenagers want to get out, feeling like they’re stuck in the same place, trapped, without sensing that the place they’re standing is changing second-to-second. But the constant earth and constant human companions give the place a history. Little that is tangible is changed and we drove to the house where our ancestors stayed, to the shed our great-grandfather built, to the road our grandfather walked down to school and past the intersection where his faithful dog would wait for him to accompany him the rest of the way home. And then there was the tree. A lone cottonwood standing resolutely on the horizon across from the Hakala Homestead. We played the artists’ game of photographing it from various angles and in various light. It was probably standing there when our grandfather was growing up. It was bent slightly to the east, buffeted by the ever-present west wind.