Turns out, finding oil on your land is a little like winning the lottery. 

Everybody dreams they'll win the lottery, but most all lottery winners soon come to rue the day they bought the winning ticket. 

Friends expect freebies. The winners' job becomes meaningless. Their daily life loses focus. Distant cousins materialize overnight. Offspring squabble over their money. Calls come in from worthy causes the world over. 

So, too, with the discovery of oil North Dakota has won the lottery. The state's once abandoned western counties now bustle like California during the gold rush of 1849. 

Of course to hear North Dakota politicians tell the story the state is prospering like no other because the politicians, in their infinite wisdom, "created a friendly business climate." 

North Dakota's entry into the Miss American contest chirped on national television that her state is "leading the nation out of the recession," implying that North Dakota has pulled itself up by the bootstraps and the rest of the nation should follow its virtuous example. 

Pure baloney. 

State budget problems? Unemployment? Solved. 

All you have to do is find billions of barrels of oil. Just win the lottery and your state will prosper.

Yet, winning the oil lottery is as dangerous as winning the regular lottery, perhaps even more so. 

People are dying. 

Traffic accidents in western North Dakota are way up. Crime is way up. Drilling for oil is risky. The oil patch is a dangerous place!

A way of life is dying. 

Rent and property values have risen so fast that many elderly locals on fixed incomes in western North Dakota towns such as Williston and Dickinson have been forced to leave town. 

Today in formerly sleepy towns of western North Dakota, you have to lock your car when you run into the station for a cup of coffee. The roads, almost all roads, have been ruined by the large equipment. Volunteer fire departments don't answer calls. Fights break out in the long lines at the gas station.

Some western North Dakotans have gotten rich, others have not simply because somebody sold the mineral rights to their land decades ago. 

Nothing breeds more discontent in a neighborhood than a random and seemingly unfair influx of wealth. 

A newspaper editorial in Western North Dakota recently argued that the region should be declared an economic disaster area. Cap the drilling, the writer stated, or we will be overwhelmed!

Circulation of the smartly-written, courageous editorial was soon quashed by the publisher of the newspaper. We can't come out against progress! 

It is well-established that winning the lottery is one of the most destructive things that can happen to a person. 

Yet everybody thinks when they win it themselves, they will be the exception and will survive, even thrive, with their newly-found millions. 

It never, ever works. Ever. 

Why should an entire region that has won the lottery be any different? 

Oil field investors constantly worry that the mighty feds will stop the drilling due to the possible effect of fracking (high pressure fracturing of the rock which contains the oil) on ground water quality. 

Who is anybody kidding? Do you think the Environmental Protection Agency is going to simply call a halt to the exploitation of the biggest domestic oil find in decades? 

Think again. Money is at stake, and when money is at stake, the people with the money eventually get their way. 

So, fracking is safe. By that, I mean fracking is safe from long-term interference by the feds. The political pressure is as high as the pressure required to frack a well. 

Whether fracking harms well water may never be objectively known. The truth will likely spend decades buried beneath a blizzard of checks from lobbyists. 

As a small-town booster, I am always thrilled when economic activity awakens long dormant communities. 

We always hope for a factory, or a visionary entrepreneur, or something to descend from the sky to rescue us from our century-long economic decline. 

The discovery of oil underfoot would seem to be a boon on all counts. 

However, winning the lottery can be too much of a shock, whether it be to the mental make-up of a grandmother on social security or to an entire stagnant region that discovers it is sitting on a sea of black gold. 

Those of us in Minnesota small towns might think twice before getting oil envy. 

Rather than wait for a winning ticket, we might relish the opportunity to write the next chapter of our economic history at a rate we can handle, control and enjoy. 

 

Provocative Korean-born violinist Hahn-bin pranced and preened his way across the wood floor of the North Dakota Museum of Art in Grand Forks last Sunday as a part of the NDMA's annual concert series. 

"American classical music audiences are half asleep," the unusual prodigy said in a recent interview, adding that it is the performer's obligation to wake them up.

From the time Hahn-bin dramatically threw off the black silk veil which concealed his face as he advanced toward the stage, there were no naps to be had.

Half geisha, half mime, half Mick Jagger, half Vladimir Horowitz, tiny Hahn-bin's enormous stage persona consumed the room. 

That adds up to four halves, which is about right. 

The test of a classical musician, to me, is his or her ability to suppress the hacks and wheezes of audience members in the late stages of tuberculosis who drag themselves to the concert hoping to be healed. 

Hahn-bin waved his bow like a wand over the January crowd and healed the sick. As he stretched thin the most quiet, yearning phrases, not a creature stirred, not even the uncomprehending infants brought by doting parents to absorb Hahn-bin's genius by osmosis. 

Classical concerts in this country are stiff, high-church affairs. People forget that 200 years ago, classical music was the rock music and audiences came to have a good time. 

A common source of discomfort for all present is the constant anxiety over when it is appropriate to applaud. 

No matter how stirring a movement, according to etiquette you aren't supposed to clap until the third movement has concluded. 

But at many concerts, some hick from the sticks who somehow made it through the screening process feels moved by the first movement and innocently starts to clap. 

Other rubes follow, and soon a smattering of applause threatens to shatter the dignity of the occasion. 

The snoots, who are too busy being snoots to actually hear the music, glare at the the rubes and stare them into silence. Snoots live for such delicious moments of superiority. 

It is class warfare, and it has divided our country for decades. 

Well, Hahn-bin had an announcement made before the event: The right time to applaud is when you feel like it. 

You could sense the relief in the room, at least amongst we rubes. 

But the stress level soon rose again as Hahn-bin's pianist approached the stage dressed head-to-toe in black leather and sporting a theatrical feather mask. 

It got higher as the be-veiled Hahn-bin himself swooped in with an exaggerated sense of drama.

Good grief, I thought. He's going to have to be pretty good to pull this off. 

But pull it off he did. 

First, Hahn-bin pulled off his veil, revealing stunning theatrical make-up that made the audience gasp. 

Then he pulled it off with energetic and inspired playing that turbo-charged the difficult but familiar classical pieces on the program. 

My suspicion that Hahn-bin took inspiration from Mick Jagger was confirmed when his second costume change featured a shirt printed with dozens of Rolling Stones logos. 

Sometimes Hahn-bin laid on the floor. Other times he stomped on the floor to accent a phrase. Sometimes he sat in a cushy chair. And one time he ended up standing atop the piano.

I checked the piano afterwards. Hahn-bin's big boots made tiny scratches in the finish. You don't stand on a piano without making scratches, I discovered once in my own home after some dinner guests left. 

But Hahn-bin probably will be allowed to leave scratches wherever he wishes. Maybe they'll have him autograph the scratches with permanent marker. 

Classical music concerts can be trying. Usually, given the difficulty hearing unamplified instruments from a distance, it is best just to stay home and listen to a recording. 

But at the old wooden museum, Hahn-bin's rich tone flowed over the small but capacity crowd like melted butter. 

Hahn-bin is only starting his career. He recently debuted at Carnegie Hall and showed up on the Today Show. 

The chance to hear his talents in a small venue will soon vanish. 

Hahn-bin's next trip through Grand Forks will probably bring him to the big auditorium with cushy, sound-absorbent chairs where I once strained to hear his great teacher, Itzhak Perlman play. 

More seats, more money, less reward. 

Those of us in the crowd last Sunday were lucky indeed. We saw a rising star up, close and more personal than we would have at Carnegie Hall. 

 

 

In the New York Times this past week, Princeton University Professor Hendrik Hartog wrote about the old days when families took care of elderly people. 

His conclusion: The arrangements whereby Grandma had the side room in the house were "only occasionally happy."Elder care one hundred years ago was, according to Hartog, "a very dark world." 

My own grandmother cut short her education at St. Cloud State University in the 1920s after she got a letter from home that said she was needed to care for her aging parents. 

"When I got in the front door, I slammed my suitcase down on the floor," she told me later. "It was a bitter pill to swallow."

Her career dreams over, she married my grandfather at age thirty. Over the next ten years, she bore six children and took care of her mother, who was in diapers, and her father, who was insane. 

Eventually, they shipped her father off to the county poor farm. But Great Grandma remained in the third room of the three-room house, an invalid, cared for by Grandma, for over a decade. 

The good old days! 

And welcome to our future. 

Nobody wants to talk about it, but there is no plan in place to finance care for the huge wave of older people who are coming along and coming along fast.  

At a conference on the topic last week at the Hubert H. Humphery Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota, I heard more indignation and despair than hope. 

The first speaker, a reporter from the New York Times, told her grim story of managing her own mother's care on the East Coast. In the end, to find a nursing home that wasn't a hell hole the family forked over $14,000 per-month. 

The second speaker, from California, congratulated Minnesota on being the AARP's highest ranked state for long-term care and wondered aloud how we are going to keep it up.  

The third speaker, Lucinda Jesson, Gov. Mark Dayton's Commissioner of Health and Human Services, cheerfully reported Minnesota's plans for financing long-term care in the future. 

As far as I could tell, the plan is to run a big public service announcement campaign to encourage people to buy long-term care insurance!

But first, they need to find long-term care insurance companies which 1) have an affordable product and 2) aren't on the verge of going broke from selling plans they can't back up!

Oh, there are other parts to the plan. 

"Families are our hidden resource," Jesson chirped cheerfully. 

"We need to encourage personal responsibility," echoed legislators on a panel, defaulting to the political mantra of the moment. 

Translation: Y'all better get ready to change Ma's diapers.  

The excellent nursing home system in Minnesota, particularly in rural Minnesota, was built for several good reasons.

First, people couldn't adequately care for the frail elderly in their homes. Women, who did the bulk of that work, wanted and needed careers of their own.

Second, because most adult kids moved off the farm to the suburbs to work, many older people were left back home with nobody to give them care. 

Finally, caring, trained professionals do a better job of changing Ma's diaper. Although there is still potential for failures and abuse, in a professionalized, well-regulated system, those chances are fewer. 

Our eldercare system worked. Now, thanks to the short-sighted politics of "all taxes are bad," it is wobbling. 

Today, our short-sighted, whiny and greedy generation seems to think they are going to retire, play golf for about fifteen years and then ascend directly into heaven. 

Even the few wise people who save for the nursing home have put away only a fraction of the funds needed.

Here's betting that a public service campaign to get people to save for assisted living or the nursing home will utterly fail. 

Nobody thinks old age will happen to them.

The solution? 

It is time to go back to the old days. By that, I mean forty years ago, not eighty. 

Just as our visionary ancestors banded together in the 1960s to build the nursing home system we benefit from today, we need to band together to build an even better system for our parents, and not so long after that, ourselves. 

We need to build an eldercare system worth living in. 

And, we need to do what our less-prosperous but smarter ancestors did: Raise taxes on ourselves for the purpose.  

If we don't, you’d better get ready to change Ma’s diapers or wave $100 bills in the face of some schmuck off the street who will.  

Bergeson is studying rural long-term care under a two-year fellowship from the Bush Foundation. 

 

The last thing a kid needs when he gets in a little trouble or doesn't get as much playing time as might seem right is to have his parents turn into his free defense lawyers. 

"My kid would never do that," seems to have replaced "Well, you'd better go take your lumps," in the parental phrase book, even on the smallest matters.

The two phrases are worlds apart. The first develops life-long whiners. The second may create actual adults. 

Instead of getting parental support in their effort to develop character, teachers, principals, referees, coaches and school board members get attacked by parents who don't realize the damage their knee jerk advocacy does to their kid's character. 

Of course, not all teachers, principals, coaches and referees make the right calls. Some make boneheaded mistakes. Even the best sometimes make bad judgements. 

In extreme cases of unfairness, of course the kid needs defending. And bullying by other kids should never be tolerated as a "builder of character." 

But small instances of unfairness such as a bad referee's call should be viewed as an opportunity to teach a valuable lesson. 

Welcome to the world, kid. 

Life is not fair. We love you, but you're going to have to take your lumps.

Thirty-some years ago, I attempted to play high school baseball.  

Despite my obvious talents, I was left off the varsity squad. I was certain a grave injustice had been committed. 

I went home and complained. My parents gave me a good ear. That's it. No call to the coach, no angry visit to the principal. 

So I was put on the B squad. There, I sat on the bench. My athletic gifts rotted on the vine. Game after game I sat on the bench. 

I ended the year with six at-bats. I had three hits. That's a .500 average, better than Joe Mauer in a good year. 

Oh, the pain and bitterness! The injustice!

A couple of years later, I played again. The opposite happened. I was put in center field every game. And I stunk. I batted .167, worse than Drew Butera. I dropped more fly balls than I caught. 

It was clear I never did have much talent. The first coach was right. 

Through it all, my parents displayed the perfect attitude: Supportive indifference. 

We love you, here's your supper, see what happens tomorrow, baseball doesn't really matter that much anyway. 

There are times when young people need a good lawyer. If I am threatened with prison for something I didn't do, I'll want a feisty one. 

But for small injustices with adolescents, it is more valuable to use the instance of unfairness to teach a lesson in character. 

As much fun as it is to watch pro baseball managers lose their cool and kick dirt on the umpires, former Twins manager Tom Kelly, a genius at developing scrappy young talent, had it right. 

Under Kelly's regime, players were not to argue with the umpires. If an injustice arose, Kelly would do the honors. And he usually passed. Kelly once went nine years without getting kicked out of a single game. 

"You can argue with the umpires after you have become the perfect player yourself," Kelly told his team, knowing full well that the perfect baseball player doesn’t exist. 

No player was immune from Kelly's rules. 

The lack of on-field arguments made the Twins a slightly less colorful team to watch. But Kelly's rules developed an adult, team-first attitude which resulted in two championships in five years. 

Tom Kelly was a tough, cranky old codger even when he took over the team at the tender age thirty-six.  

Prima donnas never stuck with the team, no matter how talented they were. Whining was a sure ticket to Toledo. 

Not all players meshed with Kelly. Talented Red Sox slugger David Ortiz didn't blossom until he got out from under Kelly's thumb. 

The players who excelled under Kelly were the mediocre ones, players who needed discipline and practice to improve. 

Randy Bush was probably the best example. Kelly knew Bush was limited, but also knew that when the right time came for Bush to pinch hit, he'd be ready and he'd play smart. 

As a result, Twins fans have many good memories of Randy Bush. 

Bush could have whined about his lack of playing time. Instead, he accepted his limitations and put together a tidy little career. 

For some reason, I doubt either Tom Kelly or Randy Bush's mommy and daddy ever ran to the principal to complain about lack of playing time. 

Twas the day after Christmas, but it could have been October. No snow. Mid-forties. A perfect day for cutting firewood. 

There stood a big dead ash tree about 100 yards from the house that's been bugging me for a couple of years, so I decided to go after it. It alone could heat the house for at least two weeks!

To get at the tree, I had to clear away a path through the buckthorn and prickly ash. When I reached the big tree's base, I realized the saw might not be able to take the whole thing and even if it did, I couldn't tell which way the monster would fall. 

So I went up six feet and cut off the half of the tree which was clearly leaning. Boom! It shook the ground with a deathly thud as I ran the other way. 

The lower six feet of the butt log was rotted and full of dead ants, but higher up the wood was in great shape. 

When I cut a cross section, I realized: This is one old tree. I shut the saw off to count the rings. 

The green ash was a sapling in 1894. The wood in the heart of the tree was at least 115 years old. 

The rings tell a story, but it is difficult to interpret. 

For the first forty-five years of its life, the tree struggled, barely reaching six inches in diameter. 

Then, when the 1940s hit, the tree sprung out of its doldrums.

Something had changed. The rings expanded to more than ten times their previous width. The trunk swelled by leaps and bounds. 

What happened to cause the explosive growth? 

The tree stood 50 yards from the swamp. I do know that in the 1930s, they dug a county ditch to drain the swamp, which then became a corn field throughout the Depression. 

Did the tree lose its source of water? Is that why it grew so very slowly? 

It looks as if the tree took off when the rains returned and the beaver dammed up the county ditch.

However, the vigorous wide rings were confined to one side of the tree. Why would the tree grow only on one side? Was it because the tree was tilted? Was it because the other side was shaded by the other half of the tree? 

Then, in the past twenty years, the rings tightened again. The tree clearly wasn't getting as much moisture. Or nutrients. Or sun. Or something. 

I sawed a cross section of the tree to take inside for closer scientific examination. 

However, I am neither equipped nor inclined to perform scientific examination. So, I stared at the wood slab and philosophized.

The ash tree was a marvel. Unlike most saplings near the swamp, it escaped the beaver. Over its century of life, it escaped windstorms, chain saws, hungry deer, bull dozers and other hazards.

The tree was a wispy adolescent sapling when William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896. 

When my great-grandfather Ole Johnson cleared the land to farm, he let that little ash tree be. 

When my grandfather mined the drained swamp for the peat it contained, he left the ash tree alone. 

When my father harvested ash from the swamp for firewood, he left the big old one at the swamp's edge.

When I built trails through the woods as a teen, I went around the big ash. 

Location, location, location. The key to the tree's long life was its fortunate location completely out of the way of humans, steel, engines and progress. 

When I first sawed the thing down, all I saw was 10 days of fuel. 

After the tree fell, I saw a history book. It felt irreverent to use the tree for firewood even though it was stone dead. 

My sudden respect for the tree and my ring-counting reverie delayed the fate of the fallen trunk for exactly one day. 

The next afternoon, practicality set in. The freshly-sharpened saw sunk through the trunk like a hot knife through butter. 

The wedge popped the chubby cobs into fours with just a few swings. 

That night, the first eight of the chunks went into the outdoor wood stove. As the temperature fell and December returned, the wood kept the house toasty. 

I still have the slab. 

But the rest of the tree, with all its history and nobility, will be reduced to ashes.

If it is any consolation, it will go out in a blaze of glory. 

 

The use of the New Year's holiday as a chance to get one's behavior under control by making resolutions just shows how firmly habit holds us in its iron grip. 

I wonder how many people will dig through the dumpster at noon New Year's Day for the cigarettes they tossed twelve hours before. 

Most people don't even try to break their habits, New Year's Day or otherwise. 

I will not be giving up coffee, probably my most entrenched addiction. Can't go a day without it. 

Rather than give up my bad habits, I am trying to crowd out bad habits with new, more healthy habits. 

In the search for new and better habits, I have been reading the book Blue Zones by Dan Buettner. 

Buettner and his team traveled the world studying areas where people live to an unusually old age. He and other scientists tried to discover what the people in these so called "blue zones" do differently.

My favorite: The people in these locations eat nuts. Daily. It is their snack of choice.

This one is easy since I love cashews, almonds, peanuts, macadamia, and sunflower seeds. It will be no problem to keep a bag or two in the pantry. 

My second favorite: They get sunshine. Most of the blue zones are in sunny climates and almost all of the 100-year-olds in those areas take advantage of the sun by getting out every day. 

So, when it gets gloomy in Northwestern Minnesota, it is probably necessary for one's health to go to Arizona. I can live with that. 

Also, the healthiest people drink very hard water. In Costa Rica's blue zone, the locals can get 100% of their daily dose of calcium from their water. 

Ah, that's music to my ears. I remember how good the water tasted out of Grandma Bergeson's tap in the old house.  

Never mind that the tap was encrusted with minerals. Never mind that the sink had to be de-rusted every week. That water was great. 

Other healthy habits aren't so easy. 

Many of the long-lived societies drink goat's milk rather than cow's milk. It is well-known that goat's milk is easier for humans to digest than cow's milk, but have you ever tried the stuff? 

Whoa. If you've ever smelled a goat, then you taste the goat's milk...let's just say the connection is obvious. 

Not all of the habits are dietary or climate related. You have to have a good social life, too. That's why Minnesotans don't make the list, I suspect.

In societies where people live a long time, they get together to visit every day. For at least an hour!

In Sardinia, it is a nightly glass of wine at about five o'clock. In Okinawa, they actually have neighborhood groups which gather every evening just to visit. 

In rural Costa Rica, older people are honored members of big clans that live together in small quarters. 

Socializing, it turns out, is essential to good health and a long life. 

Getting together just to gab is a tough one for me. Living in the woods, I could, if I wanted, go days without getting to town. During the winter, sometimes it is easier just to stay put. 

And I certainly am not about to get in the car and go to town unless I have some excuse. You at least have to pick up milk. 

Another commonality: Purposeful manual labor. Many of the 100-year-olds in the blue zones still cut their own wood. Most garden. Others still walk to the market, sometimes daily. 

Yet another huge factor in living to a ripe old age: A daily sense of purpose. People who live to be over 100 in these regions, when interviewed, all knew what their job was every day.

That job didn't have to be difficult. It could merely be cutting some wood, preparing some food, herding the sheep or tending the great-great grandkids. 

But the 100-year olds had work to do, some contribution to make. They didn't have to wonder why they got out of bed in the morning. 

Here is where our culture has some bad habits to overcome. 

We idealize retirement. We long for idleness and quiet. We store away our older people with other older people. We tend to our nuclear family first and ignore the clan. 

These are mistakes. 

To live a rich, long life, we need to feel needed by people around us.

 

Right up to the end. 

 

 "You know, somebody should get him on tape telling all those stories," you hear people say about some local wag.

"Someday I just want to set up a video camera have her talk for an hour," others announce. "When she's gone, all that history will just disappear."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Most wanna-be documentarians never get around to recording the storytellers and the old-timers. 

And maybe it is for the best. When somebody actually drags a tape recorder or video camera in front of old-timers, the results aren't always that great. 

People freeze up in front of a camera. Or, they change their tone. 

Or, they start telling the truth. 

"Well, I am not sure if they shot 500 ducks, maybe it was more like 80," the suddenly careful storyteller tells the camera. "But it sure seemed like 500." 

Well, that's no fun. 

A while back, a public radio reporter called to ask if I knew of any good local storytellers. 

Boy, did I ever. We have an all-star cast. But getting them on tape would have been a trick!

We never figured out how to do it. 

You know what? I think we should just forget this whole idea of getting storytellers on tape. Nobody will listen to the tapes, anyway. And if they do, the humor will likely get lost in translation. 

Instead, when the moment happens, just sit back and let the old-timers and yarn spinners tell their tales. 

That's what went on around the fire before electricity changed everything. That's how people got through the winter, by telling tall tales by the fire. 

Let's go back to those days. Just hear the story. If you want, learn the story. Study the timing. Practice the accents. Take notes if you must, but only after you get home. 

Then tell the stories yourself if you think they are worthwhile.

But don't ruin the moment by trying to preserve it while it is happening. 

Look how many spontaneous pudding-all-over-the-face moments are ruined when some historian just has to run and get a camera. 

It is like trying to repeat a spontaneous party that turned out to be an utter blast. It never works. 

As a friend of mine says, "you can't press rewind!"

Same with stories. They have to just happen. You can't send out invitations. 

Humans were made to tell stories over and over around the fire and pass them down through the generations. 

The only thing which gets in the way is when somebody writes the stories down. That ruins everything. 

Once written down, stories can freeze into dogma. People start thinking the tales actually happened.  

Once written down, stories lose their whimsy. The tales either become lifeless, or, what's worse, they get turned into doctrine. 

Soon, professors start poking at the stories like they might probe a cadaver. Grim-faced theologians pore over the written words as if they are finite numbers in the largest math equation ever. 

But if left unwritten, stories continue to improve with the telling. With each retelling, the good storyteller leaves out a few inconvenient facts, polishes off some of the rough places, improves the timing, cleans up the sequence of events, adapts the story to present circumstances. 

As the story slides slowly towards fiction, you might think it would have less value. But the opposite is true. As it is polished, a story's point becomes more vivid and clear. That's why they're called stories and not news reports. 

Stories are improved versions of what happened. 

One legendary local storyteller, who a neighbor claims "could have made millions as a sit-down comedian," is so good that when he starts in, people start texting others to get their butts down to the bar. 

However, when too many people show up, he gets uncomfortable and clams up. It is almost as if he thinks somebody's going to report him to the authorities for stretching the truth. 

Local storytellers should relish their role. They are the keepers of our myths and the distillers of our folk wisdom. 

And when they start in, it is wise to just shut up and listen. 

 

As bizarre as it sounds, research shows that the more affluent a society, the less content its people.  

In tribal jungle societies, there simply is no depression. Their languages have no word for it. 

A recent study of Old Order Amish in Pennsylvania found their depression rates to be one-tenth that of the general population. 

So, what do we do, move back to the past? 

According to Dr. Andrew Weil, whose recent book Spontaneous Happiness explores the subject of contentment, we can tackle our discontent by changing our diet, increasing our time outside, exercising and finding ways to be around other people. Often. 

Oh boy. That last one is tough. I mean, aren't other people the problem? Isn't solitude away from the irritations of other people an ideal condition? 

 

Not if I want to be content. To be content, it appears as though we have to move back in time towards the conditions under which our brains developed.

We were made to be in clans that hunt and gather outdoors, prepare healthy food together and constantly jibber with each other. 

Sounds like work. 

Discontent is a particularly bad problem in the Northern Hemisphere about the time of winter solstice, according to Weil. 

But, he adds, that's natural! In an interview with NPR, Weil claims that our instinctive impulse in the dark times is to eat lots, sleep lots and hunker down in preparation for the rough months ahead. 

 

Part of our problem, he says, is we expect to be happy all of the time and that just isn't natural. 

When I have traveled to poorer countries in sunny climes, I have noticed a lot more happiness. The people laugh, holler, hug and kiss all the time!

It is almost irritating. Don't they know how bad they have it? It sure doesn’t look like it through the window of the air conditioned bus. 

People who lived through hard times in our area look back and say, "we didn't know we were poor."

 

Well, they were. 

Yet, most of them have pretty good memories of those days. Neighbors helped neighbors, there was lots of good food, frequent gatherings, always people, people, people. 

People of that time were closer to subsistence, nearer to the daily struggle for food that our brains were developed to endure. 

What is just as important is they struggled together. Daily. They helped each other thresh. They butchered together. They borrowed cups of sugar. They bartered and traded. 

And that was just the start. Way back, when crisis hit they raised each other's kids. Neighbors and relatives delivered each other's babies, harvested each other's crops, washed and prepared the dead for burial, took care of the elderly, hosted indigent cousins for months, even years. 

The bulk of the communal labors fell on the women, but men worked together, too. 

Tough times, yes. But those tough times created just the atavistic dependence on clan that makes many of our brains purr with contentment. 

The settlers who didn't do well often were far away from other people, removed from social contact and isolated from the clan. 

These days we are prosperous enough to maintain separate existences, hide in our houses, hunker down in front of our computers, munch on bad food bought ready-to-eat and turn on the gas fireplace with a remote. 

We barely participate in our own survival! 

When disaster hits, we pull together and, for a time, at least, we have fun recovering, sawing up the fallen trees, clearing the mountains of snow, helping each other out. 

It is when we pull back into our little cocoons again that post-disaster depression hits and hits hard. 

According to Dr. Weil, we all can benefit from a little stress and a little tension. 

But it has to be healthy tension. 

A blizzard is about right. It pulls people together. But the drifts will melt. Spring will come. 

Floods are too damaging, and not just to property. Our area has discovered that truth the hard way. Floods cause too many long-term scars. 

My survival tension comes from the need to have firewood. However, I have so much cut that it really isn't tension at all!

So, in this time of relative prosperity, I'll have to just hunker down, enjoy my warm house, stare at my computer and wait for somebody to come over to borrow a cup of sugar. 

 

So far, we've had what old-timers call an "open winter." 


An open winter, if I understand the phrase right, means you can move about
outdoors without attaching boards or tennis racquets to your feet.


If there is any snow at all in an open winter, there's not enough to blow or
shovel. 


Snowmobilers are frustrated by the openness of our winter thus far, but the
ice fisherman seem fired up.   


My main temptation is to start sawing firewood. In particular, I just took a
walk and realized that there are hundreds of ash trees on the farm that are
ready for "harvest." 


Although it is sacrilege to saw down a live oak tree for the purposes of
fuel, ash trees grow fast and are kind of a weed anyway. 


That's how I justify sawing down live ash trees to burn. 


It's just like the hunting specials on TV where they see this big elk and the
pro hunter announces in a sanctimonious voice that it is time to "harvest
this beautiful animal" as he cocks his rifle and drools. 


The pro hunters on TV don't slaughter the hapless beast. No sir, they
"harvest" it, which, they imply, is sort of paying the animal a real tribute.


I mean, wouldn't you rather be stuffed and hung on a wall when you are in
your prime than suffer the indignity growing old and scruffy and dying a
natural death in a ravine out in the boonies where nobody will ever
appreciate your beauty? 


The ash trees on the farm are at their peak. They'll just get scruffy and
rotted and broken down if left to their own devices. By "harvesting" them for
firewood at their peak usefulness, I actually perform a virtuous act. 


In an open winter, you can just lay those ash trees around the plowed field
down on the frozen ground and saw them up in minutes. 


When it gets cold enough, you can split the biggest cob of ash wood with one
swing. Pop! apart it goes. No worry about slipping on the ice on the follow
through. 


In an open winter, it is easy to get around with machinery. Gas caps and
wrenches don't get lost in the snow. It is easy to gather the cobs of wood. 


After the ice thickens, you can get out on the swamp and really make hay
while the sun shines by cutting down the ash that have died along the swamp's
shoreline in the recent wet years. 


Finding a good source of firewood is like discovering oil on a small scale.
Free fuel! The prospect warms the heart of any human still connected to our
ancestral past.


If the winter stays open, exploring the woods, bogs and swamps becomes easier
than at any other time. You don't need a sleigh to go over the river and
through the woods in an open winter. 


On the open ice, you can inspect beaver houses and the swan nests up close.
During the other three seasons, such features remain in the distance. During
snowy winters, they are buried.


I don't own ice skates any more, but the huge, smooth sheets of ice that have
formed over the local potholes and lakes make me tempted to try to find a
pair. 


No boundaries! You can skate for miles along the shorelines of unexplored
swamps. No audience! You can fall without humiliation. 


Another open winter pipe dream: Wouldn't it be fun to hit a golf ball on the
bare ice and see how far it travels? I am sure its been done, but one day I
want to do it myself. 


I would also like to hear the sound of a bowling ball rolling across the
smooth ice of a frozen lake on a still day sometime before I get harvested. 


One great irritation of a normal waist-deep-in-snow winter is the lack of
mobility. People spend thousands of dollars of gadgets and machines to either
clear the snow or move across it. 


Even when you use machines to move across snow or walk on the plowed paths,
there's still a good chance you'll break a hip or hit a culvert. 


In an open winter, that major irritation is missing and all kinds of
adventure becomes possible.


In fact, if the winter stays open, there may be no reason to go to Arizona.
There will be plenty of fun to be had here.










 

Those interested in the survival of small towns often cite one solution: We need to get our young people to stay. 

However, according to the authors of the book "Hollowing Out the Middle," which examines an actual small town in the Midwest, small-town schools prepare and encourage their best students to leave.

In fact, there is great pressure on high-achieving rural students to get out of town and make something of themselves. 

"You go make it big," the small towns seem to say to their academic and sports stars, "and then those of us back here in the small town will bask in the glory of your success on the big stage." 

Meanwhile, students who are most likely to stay in the small town aren't treated with as much respect while in high school. Little is done to train them for the jobs, some of them very good jobs, available locally. 

By encouraging the achievers to leave to make it big and by ignoring those who are probably going to stay, small towns unnecessarily speed their own decline. 

Right now, northwestern Minnesota has jobs going begging. Just to the west in North Dakota, thousands of jobs on the oil fields are vacant. 

The skills needed for these jobs tend to be in the field of what is called "applied engineering." 

To be hired at a good wage, one doesn't necessarily need a four year degree. However, a couple of years of training in the field of engineering helps a great deal. 

However, seldom do high school kids, particularly those who are likely to stay in the small town anyway for whatever reason, even learn about this possible career path right under their nose. 

Instead, the "stayers," as the book calls the group, feel ignored and shunted aside in favor of their high achieving classmates, those who get in the paper for everything from sports to speech to music contests. 

The "stayers," those who are going to spend their life in the small town, are made to feel like losers. 

And yet the "stayers" are the people we expect to step up and run our towns, run for office, start new businesses and volunteer to do the work. 

Now, some organizations are finally reaching out to middle school students to get them to understand career options that will enhance their lives even if they remain in the small town. 

Other initiatives help students by allowing them to work with local companies while they are still in high school so they know what is available for them right in our region. 

My own experience jibes with the arguments of "Hollowing Out the Middle."

From the very beginning of school, I was expected to achieve. I guess I did, but it wasn't that difficult when everybody was doting on you. All you had to do to get your picture in the paper was roll out of bed. 

Meanwhile, a large swath of our class was consigned to the non-college path. They got less attention. 

However, just because people weren't on the college path (often because they were born into the wrong small town caste), didn't mean they weren't driven, disciplined and talented. 

Several classmates I really admire simply jumped the rails. They fought their classification as "non-college," bettered themselves through education, became nurses and now ably serve their community. 

Others always had native intelligence, even if it wasn't applied to schoolwork, and found a way to apply it in the difficult field of modern farming. Their ability to building their own machinery, use the commodity markets to hedge their bets, plan their crops to spread their risk approaches genius. 

I admire these people because, although they received some vocational education in high school, they weren't given the attention and approval doled out so liberally to the college-bound crowd. 

It is these determined "stayers" who keep our small towns afloat. They are fighters. And, despite the signals they were sent in high school, they are winners. 

I am the exception. I jumped the rails in a reverse direction. I was supposed to go out into the big world and make the small town proud.

Instead, I returned because I love the life. 

People still wonder what's wrong with me. 

If small towns want to grow and thrive, we have to value those who stay, train them, offer them encouragement and approval. 

We can't send the message that if you stick around the home town, or return, that you have somehow been defeated.