On a Prehistoric Quarry

 

In early August, 2023, I traveled to the Dunn Center, North Dakota to view the Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry, a place where prehistoric Indians mined flint for use as arrowheads and hand-tools.  Flint was extracted from the quarry, as well as other sites in the vicinity, beginning around 9500 BC and continuing until about 1600 common era when lithic weapons and tools were supplanted by metallic trade goods.  Readers impatient with the many meanders and detours that characterize this narrative may proceed straightaway to the sections on the flint quarry at 26 to 36 inclusive.

1.

“Tonight, I sleep in Vegas!”

One of my law partners likes to gamble in Las Vegas.  For him, the place has an aura of fascination and delight.  And, on several occasions, when his flight to Las Vegas departed mid-afternoon, I have heard him say those words, always with excitement and happy anticipation.

I like Montana and, so, before dawn on the day of my road trip, I thought to myself: “Tonight, I sleep in Montana!” – that is, the Big Sky country with horsemen against the horizon and buttes with crests of crumbling red rock above herds of cattle and a distant fringe of mountains on the blue rim of the world.  But, in fact, I was driving west not to Montana, but to a place forty miles or so from the border with that State and, therefore, in North Dakota.  “Tonight, I sleep in North Dakota!” doesn’t have quite the ring of excitement and glamor as Las Vegas or, for that matter, Montana.  And, “Tonight, I sleep in Dickinson, North Dakota” is even more distinctly inferior.  

2.

I left my home in Austin, Minnesota at 5:44 a.m.  The air was pale with light diffusing from no particular source, the kind of pearly and dim glow in the sky that you see in Iceland in mid-summer or Norway when the heavens can’t quite become dark try as they might.  But this glowing white void was built from fog, dense clouds trapped on the ground.  In my town, where there is a slaughterhouse, this is a carrion-mist, smelling of flame and rotting flesh.  Particles from great fires burning in Manitoba and Alberta tainted the air with a stink like an ash-tray.

Later, the mist lifted and the sky, still suffused with a pale glow, became opalescent, veined with high-floating blue-grey clouds.

3.

On the radio, a newscaster read a report about a vast fossil whale unearthed in the Peruvian desert.  The creature, named Perucetus colossus, is described on the basis of very incomplete fossils: thirteen vertebrate, four ribs, and a hip bone.  The skull of the creature (and its tail) were not unearthed and, so, we don’t really know what the animal looked like.  (Reconstructions online show a billowy sort of sea-shrew with a tiny pointed head, albeit on a vast scale – the animal is supposed to have weighed, on average, 180 tons, making it larger and more massive than modern Blue Whales.)  The Peruvian fossil whale’s bones are very dense, unlike the skeletons of modern whales, but similar to the osteology of modern manatees (sirenians).  To maintain its enormous body-weight, the animal is surmised to have drifted about like a zeppelin in shallow salt-sea lagoons eating sea-weed or possibly shell-fish and other bottom-dwelling creatures; some paleontologists think the animal might have eaten carrion as well – it was likely not a filter-feeder since modern-day manatees don’t eat in that way.  The colossal bones were extracted from a vertical wall in quarry cut into the Ica Desert – three years work was required before the massive ribs and vertebrae (with hip) could be removed from their matrix of rock and taken by semi-truck to Lima.  

An animal said to be closely related to Perucetus colossus is Stellar’s Sea Cow.  The Sea Cow is now extinct and, indeed, has been thought to be defunct since about 1768.  During Vitus Bering’s “Great Northern Expedition”, the explorer visited the Commander Islands, a desolate Arctic archipelago between Russian and Alaska in what we now call the Bering Strait.  Large buoyant mammals lived near these islands, creatures similar to dugongs or manatees (sirenians), but much larger.  These sea cow were about thirty-feet long.  Stellar, a naturalist on the expedition, drew sketches of the animals and made notes as to their behavior.  The Sea Cow were too buoyant to be able to submerge completely and floated on the surface of the cold sea.  Today, this kind of remnant population is called a Dead Clade Walking – in other words, a species that had become so inbred due to the implosion of its population that it could survive for a few generations but would certainly become extinct.  It is speculated that Aleutian natives may have hunted the animals close to extinction and naturalists now think that the Sea Cow population was probably less than 2000 individuals when first encountered in 1741.  Of course, the explorer’s first contact with the animal was hostile – the Russian seamen tried to kill a female that was nursing an infant.  The animal’s hide and blubber were so dense and leathery that lances couldn’t penetrate the sea cow.  The female, enraged by the attack, rammed the whaling vessels and stove in their sides.  Finally, someone got a harpoon into the sea cow’s flanks and they dragged the struggling animal to the shallow water where the explorers surrounded it and hacked the animal to death with their steel bayonets.  The Stellar Sea Cow was gone by 1768, probably not due to human hunting, but simply because the population was too small and weakened by inbreeding to sustain itself.  However, people sometimes claim to see them – whether these are real animals or ghosts of some sort is unclear.  (The last sighting was 1963).  Vitus Bering, the leader of the expedition that discovered the Sea Cow, didn’t do much better – he died of scurvy in December 1741 and is buried under a plank of weathered timber somewhere on the Kamchatka Peninsula.  

4.

After a long and slow stretch of freeway construction, I pulled into the Northfield rest stop.  The truck parking lot was congested with semi-trucks, a village of them nose-to-nose and side-to-side.  Mist was still rising from the wet fields and I saw truckdrivers in the toilet, looking somewhat dazed as they brushed their teeth or gargled with mouth-wash.  Seven big trucks were pulled up along the entrance to the rest stop and, when I merged back onto the freeway, there were six trucks parked on the exit ramp as well.  I don’t know why the place was so crowded.  When you travel, you encounter many mysteries.

5. 

I saw the sun rise at the Rest Stop but only indirectly.  A stand of big and old trees glowed with golden radiance high above the ground; the sun was lapping against the crowns of the trees while all remained shadowy green with dangling vines and dark underbrush crouching at their base.

6.

I stopped twice for gas, at St. Cloud, Minnesota and, then, Valley City, North Dakota.  The North-South Continental Divide is marked by a freeway sign a little east of Valley City: 1450 feet.  But there’s no hill, no ridge, no there there, just soft-looking pillowy and rolling prairie.

7.

Jamestown occupies several valleys along a watercourse.  The terrain breaks into ravines and curiously shaped hills under the field of force exerted in this dry country by the river.  The biggest hill is trapezoidal-shaped with sharp edges and seems man-made although I think this is unlikely.  There are other bluffs shaped like ziggurats and step-pyramids.  It’s as if the landscape is trying to erode into badlands but remains held together by its frail skin of prairie grass.  

8.

My cousin, Johnny M– lived in Jamestown around 1980.  I was about a year out of law school when he attended Thanksgiving at my parent’s house in Eden Prairie.  (I can’t recall the reason he was at this meal.)  Johnny M – told us that he was working as an ambulance attendant, an EMT, with his rescue vehicles garaged in Jamestown.  I asked him about his credentials – at the time, I was working on a case involving malpractice asserted against an ambulance driver who had crashed his vehicle into a ditch while speeding away from an accident scene.  Johnny M – explained the way that ambulance technician licenses were issued in North Dakota.  I asked him about the radius for service – he said it was almost two-hundred miles and, then, he regaled us with stories of hair-raising drives in titanic blizzards.  Distances were immense and he wasn’t always able to keep his casualties alive during the lengthy drives across the empty and windswept prairies.  When he remembered people that he had lost, his eyes teared-up and his voice quavered a little.  Since, at that time, I knew a little about IV drips and pain medication and subjects of that sort, he and I exchanged some technical notes.  I was showing off for my family members, displaying my knowledge of Johnny M –‘s trade, and he enjoyed being the center of attention, avidly answering all my questions.

Two decades later, he died in California.  He was working as a motel clerk and living in one of the rooms of the lodging that he managed in some remote part of the Mojave Desert.  I learned that Johnny M – had never worked for the ambulance service in Jamestown, North Dakota nor anywhere else.  Everything that he had said over that Thanksgiving dinner was a complete fabrication.  In fact, he had spent his time in Jamestown bartending at the local VFW.  

I attended Johnny M –‘s funeral.  The obsequies took place in St. Peter, Minnesota.  St. Peter was once the headquarters for a “mud show,” a little circus that toured the Midwest and many circus-people were buried in the cemetery.  Before the ceremony, I walked with my four-year old son through the graveyard, pointing out tombstones carved like clowns, or big-top tents, or, even, elephants.  Johnny M had been cremated and his remains were in a small cherry-wood box set like a birthday cake on a folding table covered with white linen.  My son later asked me: “Was Johnny a midget in the circus?  How did they get him into that little box?”  

9.

It’s about 186 miles from Fargo to Bismarck, North Dakota.  (I suppose serious trauma cases would have to be taken to Fargo from Jamestown – but that’s only about sixty miles.  Fargo is the largest city in North Dakota, now with about 120,000 people and it has the best health care services.  So a simple look at a road map should have caused me to doubt Johnny M –‘s claim of 200 mile drives across the frigid prairie).  Almost all the exits are marked “No Services” – they are just off-ramps from the freeway without any towns nearby.  The ramps lead up to the overpass with its concrete deck ending in both directions gravel section roads ripped up by the heavy wheels of grain trucks.  At some “No Services” exits, there are odd assemblies of passenger cars, invariably empty with no one around for miles, sometimes three or four vehicles parked neatly on the shoulders of the gravel roads.  From the elevation of the overpass, you can see to the yellow-blue horizons, across acres of soybeans and corn dotted here and there with prairie pothole lakes, defeated looking shelter belts tracking across the plains parallel to the barbed wire fence-lines, but no people in sight.

10.

Slate-blue lakes nudge up against the freeway and, in several places, the lanes cross the water on causeway berms.  The countryside is green and lush for North Dakota, particularly in August.  The water in the lakes seems high and, in some cases, has crept up onto the meadows around the lakes, partly drowning agricultural pole barns – one of them with a barn-red facade casts a long bright reflection across the waters from the inundated edge of the lake.  

At Mile Marker 231, a height of land overlooks miles of fields and elliptical grey lakes embedded in rings of tall green reeds.  The land is empty.  There’s road construction and, for a thousand yards, both west-bound lanes are closed so traffic is conveyed over the shoulder of the road, grated with rumble-strips designed to jar sleepy drivers awake when they stray off the right-of-way.  The car rattles more or less continuously and, if I were drowsing, the highway would have knocked me awake.

11.

Up to the Missouri River crossing between Bismarck and Mandan, the great West has whispered its presence in the strange flooded-looking lakes without trees at their edges and the raw-looking breaks around the water-courses, sloping pyramids of grassy hills among knuckle-shaped knolls.  But, beyond the bridge on the Missouri, the West begins unmistakably – an elegant serrated butte (I think it’s called Crow Butte), shaped like a moored battleship, rises against the horizon.  The Mandan Indians who lived here in comfortable and elaborately built earth-lodge villages occupied terraces on the east bank of the Missouri.  Their towns looked across the water, here about a hundred yards wide, to steep bluffs with knife-edged ridges.  God, it was said, had completed the land to the East of the river, but had left the West bank unfinished, a wasteland were wild nomads and dangerous beasts lived in the rubble of badlands.  

12.

A storm is congealing above Dickinson.

“Instinctively, he glanced upwards with a seaman’s impulse.  Above him, under the gray motionless waste of a stormy sky, drifted low, black vapors, in stretching bars, in shapeless patches, in sinuous wisps and tormented spirals.  Over the courtyard and the house, floated a round, sombre, and lingering cloud, dragging behind a tail of tangled and filmy streamers – like the disheveled hair of a mourning woman.”   (Joseph Conrad: from The Outcast of the Islands.)  

13.

The broad roads and empty lots in Dickinson, the scrub trees planted to shade sidewalks, the haphazard commercial buildings made from stacked cement blocks, the town’s western nakedness with space intervening in incomplete neighborhoods, an absence, it seems, of any kind of zoning so that dwellings and businesses rest where they are fallen as if from the sky – all of this is dim, out-of-focus, unclear.  Only the sky with its black wall-clouds has any sort of clarity.  Above the dark, broken city, the clouds shout with thunder and proclaim themselves masters over the day as the town’s walls and roofs and parking lots all slip into foggy gloom.  Then, the sky opens up and everything vanishes in the deluge.

14.

I am running with others through ankle-deep froth, the streams sliding over the Walmart parking lot, fountaining upward under the impact of the falling rain hammering car tops and sidewalks and rattling on the metal roof of the big store.  Inside, the sliding doors are all grey with the downpour and the entry is misty with concussed water.

Under the roof: tumult, a deafening clatter overhead.

15.

I don’t recall what I had gone to Walmart to buy, possibly something to drink and breakfast for tomorrow.  But the downpour kept me inside for a half hour or more and, at last, with the rain still falling relentlessly, I made my way to the car, pretty much drenched at the end of my dash.  The downpour had spun the town as if on a record-player, directions were all confused and I couldn’t see beyond a few feet in front of my bumper.  So I made my way to the hotel slowly, creeping along the streets all disorganized by the chaos of falling water.  The turns were unfamiliar and I couldn’t orient myself although the hotel was only a couple blocks away.  At last, I saw the sign, looming overhead suddenly in the waterfall pouring down from above.  It was another wet sixty feet from car to hotel door.  

16.

Is there anything more melancholy than a western town in a rainstorm?  The dry drainage ditches suddenly become rivers and the alleys flood and, because it is ordinarily very arid, the city seems unprepared, even humiliated by this revelation of rain pouring out of the sky.  I recall being in Cheyenne, Wyoming once after a ten or twelve hour drive across terrain that had become increasingly dry and empty and, at last, we had reached our destination and left the hotel, after checking in, to find a place to eat and, during that quest, the heavens opened up and drowned the city.  The thunder-burst was brief but followed by a grey interminable drizzle and Cheyenne looked smashed, exhausted by the downpour.  We found a pizza joint and ate there while the rain decorated the plate-glass windows with snail- and spermatozoa-shaped drops of lightless water and, across the way, a neon-sign showed a bucking bronco flashing between three or four poses with the cowboy’s back broken, it seemed, by the horse’s ferocity, his limp figure always arrested in mid-flight from saddle to cactus-land, and, nearby, another tavern displayed a martini glass framed by green-yellow neon tubes from which little bubbles were rising like balloons at a children’s birthday party.  You see these things and the wet sidewalk and the pick-up trucks churning through mud-colored puddles and your only response is grief – you have so far, driven so many miles, and this is your reward?  It brings tears to your eyes.

17.

The next morning the skies were gray and big puddles exhibited the places where the parking lots and streets were uneven, slumped a little.  The storm’s savagery seemed spent but, when I went outside to my car (it was about 7:00 in the morning) I found that the air was still congested with drizzle, rain persistently falling although mostly invisible except for the perforations it made in the puddles.  The air was cool, but not particularly humid – it seems that it can rain here with the drops falling through air that remains somehow dry.

18.

It’s 30 miles from Dickinson to the exit at Theodore Roosevelt National Park and I drove on the freeway, windshield wipers whisking raindrops off the glass, to that place.  The freeway passes through the badlands.  Suddenly, the rumpled green prairie breaks apart and there’s a rim of eroding bluffs that forms a rampart over the badlands.  Below the malpais wall, the landscape is shattered into an endless series of clay mounds separated by cistern-like hollows, everything slumped down into repose, heights washing down to become low places and the low places sometimes heaped up into barren knolls studded with rocks and clawed open by water to reveal seams of lignite and red scoria.  I parked at the visitor center on the freeway and hustled out through the rainstorm to take a picture at the overlook.  The clay turrets and ditches were all draped in smoky-looking fog and, now, rain was falling harder and more persistently.  A man with wet eyeglasses and a soaked shirt showing his breasts told me that he loved the badlands and thought them beautiful in all weather.  I agree with him.

20.

There’s more to Medora now than when I first saw the place 33 years ago.  Uniform-looking wood commercial structures line the main street.  On the hill, the palatial Chateau de Mores adorns a terrace with a backdrop of ornate-looking gravel bluffs.  A smokestack, all that remains of the packing plant built here by the French prince whose chateau stands on the hill, remains erect and defiant over a warren of concrete pads, broken like river ice, marking the industrial site.  The sentinel at the National Park entry kiosks joshes with me when I purchase Senior Annual Pass.  She needs to see my driver’s license to verify my age.  “You could you have dyed your hair grey to get the pass,” she says.  She’s probably a volunteer; her hair is crisp white.  Old age is in my joints, the soles of my feet, my intestines, my weary heart – the streaks of grey at my temple are least of my worries.

21.

The loop road is closed at the 24 mile mark.  This is okay with me.  The badlands are very monotonous, the same fractal landscape of eroded clay on all sides of the road along the entire route.  The hills are wet and they leak slicks of excremental-looking grey-yellow mud over the curves in the narrow two-lane loop road.  At all scales, the badlands look the same – a water- and wind-sculpted specimen of clay pile and trench three foot by three foot is the same in form and texture as a sample of the terrain that is a mile or two miles square.  Some wild horses with muscular statuesque bodies stand near the roadway.  The rain doesn’t seem to bother them; rather they are invigorated by the water spraying out of the sky.  I pass a burning lignite vein, ignited by lightning either last year or a thousand years ago – the little concrete bridge hangs like a balcony over an indentation in the mud hills that is charred black.  “Burning lignite,” a sign proclaims: “Do not report.”  

22.

In the Summer of 1864, General Alfred Sully led a column of 3000 troops armed with several mountain howitzers west to drive the Sioux (Lakota) Indians out of what is presently North Dakota.  Sully’s expedition was in retaliation for the Minnesota uprising of the eastern woodland Sioux that had occurred two summers earlier in 1862 near Mankato.  After some minor skirmishes, Sully caught up with the Indians at Killdeer Mountain where they were encamped.  Battle was joined on July 28, 1864 with the army shelling the Indian village while Lakota cavalry made attacks on the flanks of Sully’s force.  Sully was afraid to order an advance into the Indian village and was content to repel the Lakota sorties against his column.  Later, when the village had been abandoned, Sully attacked the empty campsite.  By this time, the Lakota had withdraw into the ravines and pine-covered heights of Killdeer Mountain where they could not be followed without risking heavy casualties.  (Indian accounts claim that some of their people escaped through the Medicine Hole, an abyss atop the ridge of Killdeer Mountain where a cave system supposedly offers passage into the Badlands twenty-five miles to the West.  This story seems implausible and the Medicine Hole when finally sounded proved to be only sixty or seventy feet deep with lateral tunnels all blocked by rockfall.)  

Sully continued in pursuit of the Lakota and encountered the natural barrier of the Badlands, a malpais twenty miles wide and one-hundred miles long.  By this time, the army was running out of provisions and Sully made the decision to advance into the eroded wasteland in the direction of the Little Missouri River – his plan was to cross the badlands and reach the Yellowstone River where his column could be re-provisioned by military steamers plying the waters of the Upper Missouri and its tributary the Yellowstone.  

The badlands were difficult terrain for Sully’s column, “hell with its fires burnt-out,” the general said.  In some places, the canyons, as he described the passages between the clay buttes, were so narrow that men with shovels had to widen them so that the mountain howitzer could be dragged forward.  The Lakota attacked, but without much conviction, mounting a series of small ambushes but refusing any general engagement.  At last, Sully reached the relatively open prairie adjacent to the braided stream bed of the Little Missouri.  About five-hundred Lakota warriors climbed to the top of a square butte over the river and taunted Sully’s army.  In effect, they demanded that the soldiers follow them into the labyrinth of dirt ravines and small, jagged clay knolls.  Sully ordered his artillerymen to fire on the lofty square butte and, after a brief cannonade, the Indians scattered.  

This was the Battle of the Badlands waged mostly to the east of Medora in the eroded hillsides but continuing for a few days westward along the Little Missouri.  Sully claimed that he had killed 311 Lakota warriors and wounded another thousand.  The Indians didn’t recall any casualties at all in the fighting which took place at long range and was mainly ceremonial, brief attacks that melted away when the troops returned fire.  How many Federal troops died in the fighting? – some accounts say ten, others 13, but more recent assessments are that the army suffered some minor casualties in the form of wounded men, but no fatalities.  Thousand of rounds were fired and cannon balls whizzed through the air, but almost no one seems to have been hit.

23.

I’m back on the freeway driving east toward Dickinson an hour and ten minutes later. Every half-hour or so, a band of heavy rain falls, amplifying the drizzle until everything in the landscapes turns white with splashing water.  At Dickinson, I stop at the Walmart where I was trapped the night before and get myself a parka with a plastic hood.  I need to be better prepared for the weather.  Then, I drive thirty-four miles north to Highway 200, one of the three or four principal arteries that cross North Dakota along its east-west axis. 

24.

Midway between Dickinson and Highway 200, the road descends into a valley rimmed by green and yellow hills, a thousand treeless hills comprising the prairie. Killdeer Mountain, a long slab of pine-covered ridge is twenty-miles away but not visible in the wet, congested air. The Knife River cuts through here, a mile or so south of Manning, the hamlet in the bottom of trough-shaped valley.  The river is just a meandered stream here, six or seven feet wide, flowing limply between banks cut though the sod.  Manning seems a miserable place, barren with half-dead trees wilting over trailer-houses and pole-barns.  The town is shown on the map, but too small for the gazetteer index in the Road Atlas to provide any population information.  (Wikipedia says that it’s population was not recorded in 2000, but that a 2020 survey claimed that the place had 48 people living in it.)

25. 

Two years ago, I tried to drive this highway (22) from Killdeer, pop. 683, to Dickinson.  A bad accident between an oil-industry truck and a passenger car blocked the highway below the big hill that separates Manning from the intersection with 200.  Ultimately, I had to retrace my way toward Killdeer since the highway was totally impassable – the only vehicles coming down from the crest of the ridge were those in the queue that had given up on the road and were turning back toward Killdeer.  The detour to Dickinson, my destination for the night, was along another highway, a two-lane blacktop that ran through completely deserted terrain, buttes and hollows where there weren’t even any cattle grazing.  Along the way, aliens came down from the heavens, arrested me with their force fields, and subjected me to various types of invasive probes.  This happened within a celestial dome that was the color of fine Meissen chinaware.  I reached Dickinson a little after sunset with only about forty minutes unaccounted-for time.  On this trip to the Knife River Flint Quarry, I saw a spray of highway patrol lights downhill from the ridge above Manning and thought to myself that history was repeating itself, that the road would be blocked due to an accident with multiple fatalities and that I would have to detour to the highway on which alien abductions occurred.  But the spinning lights signified only a traffic stop for speeding and so I was able to make my way to the intersection with 200 and drive east toward Dunn Center.

26.

Why was I going to Dunn Center (pop. 223)?   This is a story that offers many opportunities for recursion, that is, one cause leading to another and another in a long, prosaic succession.  But I’ll resist the temptation to turn this section into a novel.  It suffices to say that my close friend and mentor, Terry Dilley died and, those of us who admired the man as a teacher, formed a non-profit organization in his memory.  On an annual basis, this group presents a symposium open to the public, generally a scholarly lecture.  For this year, we decided to invite a State Historical Society archaeologist to speak to our group and other people attending the lecture about the Grand Meadow Chert quarry.  This is a location in Mower County where I live where 8.8 acres of strangely pock-marked terrain mark a site where Native Americans dug pits to extract cobbles with chert (flint) cores.  In Mower County, the layer of cobbles containing flint begins about a meter below grade.  Chert retrieved from the fields was worked into various lithic tools including hand adzes, scrapers, and arrowheads for a period of about nine-thousand years.  Plans are underway now to mark the site and develop some trails so that visitors can better understand the meaning of the hundreds of round pits hidden now in wooded terrain.  (The woods prevented this last remnant of what was once a much larger site from being plowed into oblivion.)  Tom Trow (who will speak to our group) and Dan Wendt published a paper on the Mower County site, The Grand Meadow Chert Quarry beginning at page 75 in Volume 77 (2020 The Minnesota Archaeologist printed by the The Minnesota Archaeological Society.)  In that essay, an excellent description of the workings near Grand Meadow, a village about 22 miles from Austin, there is good photograph and account of the much larger flint quarry near Dunn Center, North Dakota.  Trow and Wendt’s description of the Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry begins at page 92 of their essay and includes a very good (color) photographs of the rather desolate and lunar-appearing craters in North Dakota.  On the basis of that article, I decided I would drive out to Dunn Center to see the site, a trip that I could combine with a visit to my son and grandchildren in Fargo.  

I understood that the Lynch Quarry as it is called is on private land and so I used the computer to research how I could secure access to the place.  In the original application to federal government for national historical status designation, the quarry’s address was unlisted and descriptive features as to its location had been redacted, presumably to prevent looting.  (The quarry was said to be rich with surface artifacts – the Indians carried their kits of hand-tools to the quarry, extracted chert and worked it at the site into new equipment, abandoning the old knives and lance-point et. al. at the pits.)  However, a website associated with National Park System carried news of an event, attended by many local people and tribal representatives at the Lynch Quarry – this was in 2012 when the quarries were provisionally opened to the public.  A phone number was posted on the web site.  I called the number about a week before my visit, but no one answered.  A recorded message implied that I had reached the park headquarters at Bismarck – the site is generally under the aegis of National Park Service division that administers the remains of the earth lodge villages in which the Mandan and Hidatsa people lived on the Missouri River north of present-day Bismarck.  (One of these large towns about thirty-five miles north of Bismarck marks the confluence of the Knife River with the Missouri and, at this place, Lewis and Clark acquired the services of Sacagewea, a Lemhi Shoshone woman living with a trader, and, of course, the guide that led the explorers westward to the Rockies and, ultimately, the Pacific Coast.)  The phone message encouraged me to call another number for more information about the quarry.  I made that call and a woman answered.  She was a volunteer at the Dunn Center Historical Society and was very friendly.  She encouraged me to visit the museum where there was a fine exhibition about the Lynch quarry.  I asked her whether I could visit the quarry site.  She said that I would have to contact someone named Gail and gave me a phone number for that woman.  I called Gail who answered the phone with the words “Lynch family” – this was apparently Gail Lynch the proprietor of the ranch land on which quarry is located.  She sounded a bit skeptical about my venture and didn’t seem to know where Austin, Minnesota was located.  “One-hundred miles south of Minneapolis and St. Paul,” I told her.  Her voice brightened a little – like everyone in North Dakota, she has children and other kin living in what she called “the Cities.”  Nonetheless, I detected a hint of suspicion in her voice.  Rather reluctantly, she told me I could come out to see the quarry on the date that I proposed.  “How do I find it?” I asked.  She gave me an address and I told her I could use maps on my cell-phone to guide me to her ranch. We agreed upon a time convenient to her.  (I had wanted to come in the morning because it is a long drive from Dunn Center to Fargo at the other end of the State.)  She said one-o’clock pm and, then, amended the time to 1:15.  I thanked her and said that I would see her then.  

27.

It was raining intermittently when I reached Dunn Center, collection of small houses on a tic-tac-toe grid of eight or nine intersecting roads.  A brick church with a stubby steeple stood above a few sorrowful-looking shade trees and there was a squat grain elevator, really just some boards tacked together to form the sort of old granary that you often see on farms in this area.  The largest structure in the village was the cheerless brick dormitory of a nursing home with a few metal chairs standing forlorn in the drizzle next to the arch of a wicker bower intended as refuge from the sun but, of course, useless against rain.  Of course, there was no sun shining when I came into town at about 11:45 am Mountain Standard Time.  The scatter of buildings, without gas station, café, or general store (some boarded-up brick huts where the roads crossed may once have served those purposes) had seen better days – a few of the houses were abandoned and there were wrecked cars succumbing to tall prairie grass, metal skeletons corroding on the edges of lawns.  The hamlet appeared naked to the sky, its blemishes and scabs and abscesses all cruelly apparent, and the streets and homes, even in the drizzle, were sun-struck, paralyzed, and parched-looking.  The historical society was the main, and most viable, enterprise in the village, two hulking pole-sheds made of yellow-painted metal standing at the dead-end of “Museum Lane”, a gravel road that ran between half-dead cottonwood trees and a stand of lilac bushes.  There is more history here, apparently, than there are people.   

Several pole-barn doors seemed to afford access to the museum buildings, but all of them were locked.  A log cabin with mud plastered between square cut logs stood next to the parking lot, part of a row of small structures comprised of a rural schoolhouse, a small chapel, and the white lathe facade of a frame timber shack containing (as I later learned) the counters and cubby holes from a tiny post-office and a bank teller’s booth next to an open metal vault. I didn’t see any windows opening out to the parking lot, but there must have been some kind of embrasure through which the museum’s inmates could peer since a woman materialized on a porch above some wet wooden steps and beckoned to me – they don’t get many visitors here and she was loath to let me get away.  

The pole barn’s interior was brightly lit and the big open room was partitioned with eight-foot tall walls comprised, mostly, it seemed, of shelves.  On the shelves, there were antique dolls, pots and chinaware, corroding weapons, old hats and shawls and tailor’s mannequins wearing 19th century wedding dresses and mourning weeds.  Several of the alcoves made by the partitions were themed – one was tightly packed with chalky-looking baptismal fonts, white altars with elaborate filigree woodwork, uncomfortably ascetic pews, big church bibles on oak lecterns, candelabra, and racks of choir robes, all of this posed against window frames full of lightless stained glass; another recess was full of legal artifacts, old abstracts and land deeds atop heavy-looking desks and tribunes with gavels; a third enclosure displayed dental chairs and horrible surgical instruments, tongs and speculum, serrated saws, and cruel forceps.  A profusion of old cars, buggies, tractors, plows, and bicycles clogged the center of the room where the Knife River Flint Quarry exhibit took pride of place, a kiosk made from flimsy pegboard on which printed articles about the site dangled down in looseleaf notebooks affixed to the walls; some of the displays were a bit like posters made for a High School science fair – columns of text interspersed with newspaper columns and old, faded photographs.  In the pictures, some young people, appearing a bit scalded by the sun, stood in knee-deep excavations crisscrossed with grids of stretched string.  A couple of glass cases held stone tools, each entrapped in a small white box and marked with a tag as if displaying a price, although expressed in enigmatic ink characters that were midway between numbers and letters.  The flints were burgundy colored with veins of lighter yellow and seemed to be translucent – if you could hold them up to the light, the sun or the florescent tubes overhead would shine through these autumnal leaves of chipped flint, illumining their glassy facets.  I saw arrowheads, some scrapers and cutting knives, possibly about sixty artifacts under glass, each separately labeled in their individual boxes.  Some other, more ornate arrowheads, were glued to the cardboard posters.  

An old woman shadowed me as I walked through the museum.  Now and then, she chirped a comment in a high, girlish voice.  I told her that I had called earlier in the week and, perhaps, spoken to her.  No, she said, it wasn’t her but the other woman who was sitting in the small closet-like office next to the gallery, stooping over a computer screen to which she was making tentative adjustments on a keyboard.  An old man holding some sort of hand tool was looking over the shoulder of the lady at her computer.   He seemed to be mute.  My guide led me outside and opened each of the antique structures transplanted onto the pasture next to the parking lot.  The small rooms smelled of mildew – I saw the inside of the chapel, the one-room school room with a picture of George Washington next to the chalkboard, and, then, the stick-built shack with the bank teller’s booth and the post office cubbies marked with brass numbers.  A dull, lightless drizzle dripped out of the grey skies.  The old woman opened the other machine shed for me and I wandered about inside between wagons and hearses, a huge thresher with steam boiler and a smokestack like a locomotive filled a quarter of the big pole barn and there was a small crop-duster airplane parked against the wall’s metal panels.

“Is this the County Seat?” I asked the woman.

“Oh no,” she said. “Manning is the County Seat.”

An old man with a unruly white beard was standing next to a dog outside the pole barn, making measurements using a folding ruler to make measurement’s of a locked door’s width.  He was chewing sunflower seeds and spitting out the husks. The old man said that his name was Leonard and he had come from Killdeer to measure the door so that it could be replaced.  I didn’t see anything wrong with the metal door but the old man assured me that it had failed and had to be fixed and that he was a jack-of-all-trades (but master of none) and that his dog was named “Shocker.”  The beast seemed to be a mix of various belligerent breeds with a broad chest and squat short legs that were hinged to the outside of the dog’s shoulders and hips.  Shocker was built four-square like a box and ambled along the wet sidewalk, now and then, lifting his leg against the flower boxes.  The old man said that the dog had come up to sniff him when he was wintering in Phoenix and that, although the beast was ill-tempered, he was a bit ornery himself and so there was some sympathy between the abandoned pooch and himself.  Shocker licked his chops with a long, flamboyantly red tongue.

The old man said that his grandfather’s World War I uniform was on display in the museum.  We went back inside and the lady at the computer begrudgingly left her work station and talked to the jack-of-all-trades.  They dickered about the cost of replacing the door.  The woman who had led me on the tour said that Gail’s farm was about two-and-a-half miles out of town, a short and easy drive to the East.  She asked me if I had gone to the Wildlife Refuge at Lake Ilo, also two miles away but to the west on Highway 200 on the road out to Killdeer.  I knew that many flints had been found near Lake Ilo where a much smaller quarry had been partially excavated along the watercourse.

“They’ve drained the lake,” the woman told me.  “It’s completely empty.”

“Why did they do that?” I asked.

I had seen a tangle of trees standing in the rain about a quarter-mile to the south of the highway and noticed a sign pointing to the wildlife refuge and that, I supposed, was where the lake had been drained like a bathtub with mud flats standing stark and empty in the drizzle and the mud, I thought, would be flecked with prehistoric stone tools lying in the puddles and ooze.

“You know,” the old woman said, “I don’t exactly know why they drained the lake.  But drain it they did.” 

She looked at me a little indignantly as if implying that I doubted her story about the lake being drained.  

“Interesting,” I said.

Then, the old man who was a jack-of-all-trades and a citizen of Killdeer was next to me again and asked if I wanted to see his grandfather’s World War One uniform and I replied that this was most interesting to me and, so, we went to a corner of the museum where there were daggers and bayonets and some gas masks hanging on the pegboard, newspaper articles yellowed and illegible except for their headlines celebrating long-ago Veteran’s or Armistice Day festivities.  The olive-grey World War One uniform looked like something a boy scout might wear and the garment was displayed on an effeminate-looking store mannequin with peach-colored skin and a square smooth jaw.  The uniform was adorned with some lapel pins on the grey-green coat. The mannequin was something salvaged from a bankrupt haberdashery in Dickinson, undoubtedly fifty years old or more and the bland, well-shaved features of the figure seemed a bit fey.  

“His name was Steffen,” the old man said.  “A nasty ole Cherman.”  He pronounced “German” with a slight tongue-roll so that the initial consonant sounded like a “ch.”  He seemed to be imitating the way the actors spoke on Hogan’s Heroes.

“A very tough guy,” the old man said.

“I bet,” I replied.

I said I had to get out to the Lynch Flint Quarry. 

“Oh, Gail,” he said.  “An interesting woman.”

He asked me for my name, where I worked, and the town from which I had come.  After I told him my name, he said: “Oh, so you’re a Cherman too.”

“I guess so,” I said.

We were standing outside at that time, next to the sodden lilac bush, and Shocker was pacing up and down on his bandy legs and growling a little at the drizzle dampening him.

28.

I had a forty-five minutes to kill before going to the quarry, said to be five minutes from town, and so I decided to retrace my route two miles or so to see the spectacle of the lake that had been drained like a bathtub.  I found the lane leading south a quarter mile to a knoll from which I could see the earthen embankment of a dam apparently impounding a little stream incised into the sod and flowing in meanders across the empty, treeless prairie.  (This was the Knife River.)  The lake hadn’t been drained and was where it was supposed to be, backed up into a long, stringbean-shaped lake behind the wedge-berm of the dam.  I supposed that maybe the hard rain of the day before had replenished the lake, but this didn’t seem likely to me.  Brush along the side of the lake and showed me that the borders of the body of water had stayed in approximately the same place for many years.  A kiosk displayed some information about prehistoric people who had visited this place and camped along the river and some sketches showed Indians squatting in front of wigwams and men knapping flint into tools.  Apparently, many elegantly crafted arrowheads and adzes had been found here and there was a report posted about an excavation conducted next to the water maybe forty-five years ago.  

The dirt road was mucky.  I stood in the rain and took a couple of pictures of the desolate and barren heap of packed earth impounding the river and the long crooked reach of the lake speckled white with raindrops pimpling the surface of the water.   

Then, I carefully steered my car to Highway 200 and continued east, past the road leading to Dunn Center and, then, to 95th Street, two and a half miles from the town and, also, exactly where it was supposed to be.  

29.

The Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry occupies ranch land owned by the Lynch family.  Specifically, Allan and Gail Lynch were the proprietors of the place – Allan, a robust-looking fire-plug of a man, died in 2015.  

A modern house that would not be out-of-place in Bloomington or Chaska, in other words, a typical suburban rambler, stands at the end of a rutted gravel driveway.  A few old trees are backed-up against the house and four outbuildings are grouped around a square yard where the utility pole stands.  The outbuildings consist of a brick and timber barn, a machine shed, and two smaller storage structures, apparently metal pole barns.  The place is tidy and feels sheltered, tucked against a sloping hill that rises to a long, treeless ridge above the meander of a creek where open water might glint in the grass if the sun were shining.

The route from the two-lane State Highway runs straight to the north over a bump of embankment that was once a railroad grade.  The quarry site is marked at the driveway to the house by a sign that names the place and depicts two stone arrowheads pointing to the corners of the lettered board.  A hundred yards north of the drive-way and sign (on the east side of the section road), three white-faced long-horn cattle stand in the rain grazing in the high wet grass running along the barb-wire fence-line.  The horns of these animal are slick with drizzle drops and shaped a bit like bicycle handlebars.  

30.

I park in the grassy yard defined by the outbuildings and walk across the wet grass to the house.  An elderly lady with short hair and glasses invites me inside, telling me not to worry about my wet shoes.  The home is spacious with an open design, at least in the entry, living room and big kitchen area that I can see.  Some counters are stacked with cans and other groceries and I see some correspondence, probably mostly bills, piled on the counter top.  A large bottle of Johnny Walker Red whisky sits on a credenza in the living room where a big window opens onto a deck under the shade of one of the old trees; everything outside is a green blur, smeared by moisture on the glass and the falling rain.  

A circular dining table with papers on it and several loose-leaf notebooks stands between the entry and kitchen.  On the center of the table, a wicker basket holds polished flakes of chert.  Apparently, this flint has been processed through a rock tumbler and it has a rich caramel color, like root beer – the stones are glassy and have an organic-looking texture; although the image is distasteful, their color also resembles a scab over a big open wound, a glazed, wrinkled semi-translucent brownish-red flake.  Gail Lynch asks me to sign a guest registry.  It looks to me like someone from Tennessee visited the site about two weeks earlier.

I sit at the table and chat with Mrs. Lynch for about 45 minutes.  Half-way through our conversation, one of her daughters calls and they make plans for a visit on the next morning, Saturday, or, possibly, on Sunday after church.  It would be rude for me to eavesdrop and, so, I step into the foyer and stand by the front door, reading a couple of photocopied hand-outs that my hostess handed me when I sat down at the table.  (After greeting me at her front door, Gail asked if me if I wanted a cup of coffee, an offer that I declined.)  Mrs. Lynch’s son works in the oil-patch but he stays at the ranch most nights; I presume the bottle of whiskey belongs to him.  The longhorn cattle with their endearing, strangely clownish white faces are his “pets”, I’m told.  I hear Gail say that she doesn’t get down to Bismarck much anymore – “only once a month for my hair appointment,” she says to her daughter.  This is pretty characteristic of North Dakota.  People will drive 150 miles one-way to get their hair cut, two-hundred miles one way to eat Chinese food or a pizza.  (My mother told me that ladies in Albion, Nebraska where she lived as a girl would often travel to Omaha to get their hair styled – a round trip of 270 miles on two-lane blacktop before interstate freeways, which don’t go that route anyway, were built.)

After about ten minutes, the phone call is done and I return to the table, taking my place across from Gail Lynch with the wicker basket of polished flints between us.  She hands me a post card on stiff paper with an aerial shot of the quarries appearing as innumerable dimples in the green grass.  A “J”-shaped body of water, lies just to the east of building site marked on the card by a circular island of trees concealing the house and outbuildings.  A railroad right-of-way, abandoned and overgrown runs diagonally across the upper corner of the photograph: the section road that I know to be marked as 95th Street crosses the train-track embankment.  A single tree, green and casting a green shadow, stands in the curlicue of meadow enclosed by the loop of the creek.  On the inverse of the postcard, an  shows 9 Native Americans at the quarry.  In the foreground, a dignified man wearing buckskin is showing his son how to knap the flint into a tool.  A digging hoe, fashioned from a bison scapula lies between the man and the boy.  The child is imitating his father and both of them hold round cobbles that they are about to strike on the chert in their hands.  In the background, three men are digging in a pit.  These Indians wear breechclouts.  A figure that looks like a woman is also striking at a stone in her lap with round rock and another child is leaning forward to watch her work.  One man is deep in a crater and almost invisible – just his head peaks over the edge of the hole.  Another man is raking at the ground, also using a bison scapula to push the earth aside.  On the other side of the picture, two wolfish dogs are fighting over a bone.  A small map shows the range of Knife River Flint (KRF) distribution – an orangish patch shows an oblong area stretching from Alberta across Montana and as far south as eastern Colorado to the border with the Oklahoma panhandle.  This is the area where KRF is the primary lithic resource and found in great abundance.  A yellow cloud superimposed on the map display the maximum known distribution of chert from the quarry, an area extending farther north into the Great Plains of Canada and east all the way across the Midwest to Ohio.  (I recall seeing beautiful heirloom examples Knife River Flint excavated from Hopewell and Adena burial mounds in central Ohio.)  The post card is a sort of souvenir, not suitable for mailing, and it is bright emerald green on both sides, the color of the verdant prairie when well-watered in early Spring or after a deluge of the sort that I experienced the preceding day.  The aerial image of the quarry workings seems to have been made by a camera-mounted drone.  The picture shows mostly treeless prairie, cratered with the little mine-works, and some narrow, shelter-belts around the building site forming a letter “L”.  

Mrs. Lynch tells me that people in the neighborhood thought the innumerable grassy pits on the land were “buffalo wallows.”  But, later, excavations established that the holes represented the remains of a huge flint quarry, a mile long and a half mile wide, comprising hundreds of acres.  As she tells the story, her family heroically resisted temptations to mine the land for bituminous coal used, then, for gasification.  An oil well operates under the quarry land but the production company agreed to use slant-drilling to reach the pocket of petroleum so that the prehistoric site would not be disturbed.  An application was made for protected status, but this process took many years and involved various frustrations and set-backs.  (I gather that there are numerous smaller flint quarry sites all over this area, all of them on private land and that other property owners were hostile to having the Federal government exercise any oversight over them – I think the fear was that if the Lynch quarry was recognized to have historical significance, the other smaller quarries might also fall under the purview of government management.)  The National Park Service operating the Knife River earth-lodge villages on the Missouri took over some administrative functions on the site and there was a grand opening attended by over 200 people and representatives of some of the tribes in full regalia.  Gail thought that this happened in 2016 or 2017 but, from my research, I knew that the event was in 2012.

“Allan was still alive then, right?”  I asked Mrs. Lynch.

“Yes, he attended the opening, of course,” she replied.

“So, I think it was in 2012,” I said.

“You’re probably right,” Mrs. Lynch responded.

She didn’t seem too enthused about taking me out to the quarry.  I had to ask her a couple of times and, then, she shrugged and told me that the grass was very high and there really wasn’t much to see.  

“But I would like to take a look,” I said.  “Can you show me how to drive out there?”

“Oh no,” she said.  “You’ll have to follow me in your car.  There’s a gate and you have to go across a pasture.”

Mrs. Lynch said that managing the quarry allowed her to meet many interesting and friendly people.  It was a great pleasure, she said.  One of her favorite guests was a full-blooded Chiricahua Apache Indian named Doyt.  Sometimes, Doyt would come and sit in the meadow next to the quarry and meditate for hours.  He told her that it was a very peaceful place and that he could sense the spirits of the prehistoric people all around the quarry.  

“I feel them as soon as I come over the railroad crossing,” Doyt said.

He added: “They are very good spirits.  If they were bad spirits, you couldn’t stay here.  They would have killed you long ago.”

I thanked Mrs. Lynch for her family’s stewardship of the quarry and, at last, persuaded her to take me out to an overlook over the ancient mines.  

31.

Flint-knapping is a dangerous hobby.  Flints can be razor-sharp and they are brittle, unpredictably fracturing under blows from hammer stones.  On May 24, 2023, a study was published in American Antiquity under the title “The Injury Costs of Knapping” (Nicholas Gala, Stephen J. Lycett, Michelle R. Bebber and Metin I. Eren, all in the anthropology department of the University of Buffalo.)  The results of this study were startling.  A survey conducted with data from 173 avocational flint-knappers revealed that almost all of the hobbyists had sustained some sort of injury, Gashes requiring trips to the emergency room were common with about half of the injuries suffered to the finger and hand.  Five percent of the flint-knappers were hurt when fragments of chert flew into their eyes.  One poor bastard somehow lacerated his testicals – exactly how he accomplished this is not explained.  William Henry Holmes (1846 to 1933), a pioneering anthropologist associated with the Smithsonian Institute hurt himself so badly experimenting with flint-knapping that his left upper extremity became completely disabled, a tragedy for Holmes because he was also a skilled painter.  There’s no reason to think that prehistoric people were any less prone to injury when making lithic tools and, of course, they didn’t have safety goggles, gloves, access to Emergency Rooms and antibiotics.  We can imagine, therefore, that over 11,000 years more blood was spilled at the Lynch Knife River Flint Quarry than on many major battlefields, more gore probably in the aggregate than at Custer’s Last Stand.   

32.

Knife River Flint (KRF) is formed when low-quality coal in the form of lignite mineralizes into silica, a kind of glass.  Although local people told me that the flint was moved by glaciers from the Kildeer Mountains, this seems incorrect – KRF is formed in situ in lignite beds.  (The presence of lignite, of course, represented a threat to the site. Modern studies of the Lynch site began around 1970 when the area was surveyed by University of North Dakota archaeologist in advance of the establishment of coal gasification plants in the county together with pipeline technology for transporting natural gas to other distribution centers.)  KRF is described as “coffee” or “root beer” colored but develops a white patina with time.  The chert is valued because it flakes predictably and retains a sharp edge over time.  There seems little doubt that the stone had esthetic qualities to those who mined it and was often retained, apparently, for heirloom or ceremonial purposes.  KRF was widely distributed over an area described to comprise variously 3.7 to 4.8 million kilometers.  The amount of the substance extracted from the quarries in Dunn County is estimated at 640 million tons of stone.  Archaeologists estimate that quarrying at site involved the expenditure of 522 man-hours per year for 11,580 years.

33.

American Indian archaeology recognizes four broad epochs: the Paleoindian period was from 11,000 BC to 6,000 BC.   Archaic, often divided into early, middle, and late phases, is considered to represent a time period from 6000 BC to the beginning of the common era.  The woodland period, also divided into several subdivisions in time, lasted from year one common era to about 1000 AD.  The Plains Village epoch is considered to have lasted from 1000 to 1600 common era.  

Lithic tools are dated by style, the earliest and most elegant examples being Clovis points (and Folsom points) from the early Paleoindian era. Tools can also be dated by the degree of patination as well as by associated artifacts, for instance, hafted bone tools used to scrape open the mine pits – objects that can be carbon-dated.  Geological strata can also be assessed to determine the age of tools and other artifacts embedded in the soil.  Analysis by style and carbon-dating and stratigraphic record show that the periods of peak activity at the Lynch quarry were the Paleoindian era (11,000 to 6000 BC) and mid- to later woodland epoch (that is 400 to 1000 AD).  The availability of metal tools via trade after 1600 ended the quarrying activities in Dunn County although there is anecdotal evidence of Indian bands periodically camping at the site, possibly for religious reasons, as late as the 1840's.   Curiously, there are no early archaic tools found at the Lynch quarries, but, as it is said, the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence – most likely there are tools from this period, but, however, buried in the substrate in areas that have not been excavated.

34.

The Knife River, by tradition, is named after “stone knives” that came from this area.  The existence of quarries in Dunn and Mercer County along the Knife River and its tributary, the Spring River were reported in 1936 in The History of North Dakota (Lewis Crawford) but detail as to the location of the extraction sites seems not to have been known.  A pioneer farmstead was located on the ridge over the quarry – that site may also qualify for National Historic Site protection.  The site is said to consist of the ruins of a farmhouse and some outbuildings with a “characteristic artifact scatter” radiating from the central premises.  What those pioneers thought of the cratered landscape near their home is unknown.  

There are 25 historic era sinkholes in the southwest corner of the central Knife River quarry – these are relics of coal mining shafts and readily distinguishable from the smaller and more uniformly distributed pits made by the Indians.  In 1975, a team of archaeologists from the University of North Dakota conducted the only actual archaeological excavation undertaken at the quarry.  The UND workers used a backhoe to open two exploratory trenches, each about 15 feet long and six feet deep.  This work revealed that the pits visible on the surface of the site are superimposed on several layers of earlier pits buried in the sediment.  Some pits seem to have been opened repeatedly.  The density of surface pits is 20 to 30 per acre but there is evidence for many older pits now concealed under the surface excavations.  The soil is soft, readily mined, alluvial sand that is laden with fist-sized cobbles of flint in a matrix of white calcified stone.  The flint cobbles were dug out of the pits, most of them located between about a meter and a meter-and-a-half under the surface.  Cobbles were processed on the site by being taken to so-called anvil stones and struck twice with a “hammer stone” – if this operation was performed properly, a flint core was broken from the cobble in which was embedded.  The Indians performing this task struck the cobble once with the hammer stone against the anvil and, then, rotated the cobble 180 degrees for a second sharp blow that freed the chert inside the stone.  The ground between the pits is thick with abandoned tools that had lost their efficacy and lithic debitage from the flint processing operation.  There are many smaller quarries in Dunn and Mercer counties (for instance 13 in the bed of Lake Ilo alone)  but none are so well-preserved as the Lynch Knife River Quarry Site, a location that is essentially uncontaminated and intact.  The “type site” characterizing KRF is the Lynch Quarry.

35.

Papers describing the Lynch Quarry call it a “prehistoric supermarket” where stone tools were made and traded.  Since excavations at this location have been extremely limited only two excavating tools have been uncovered – a bison rib abraded from digging and the tine of an elk antler.  (An elegant hafted bison scapula was found intact in a pit made at Lake Ilo when the body of water was drained to repair the old WPA-era dam.)

Eleven-thousand years ago, the climate in this area was much cooler.  Glaciers still sprawled white and ungainly atop the Killdeer Mountain ridge and the higher elevations above what we now call the Spring and Knife rivers.  Solid and impassable glacial lobes walled off the land to the north creating a landscape replete with cold pothole lakes and barren cobble-stone alluvial plains were intricately braided rivers flowed.  Huge animals roamed the steppes and the ravines were dark with forests of dwarf evergreen.  At that time, the watercourses eroded the sides of the streams through the flint-bearing cobble and someone discovered that there was a semi-translucent glassy stone with sharp edges embedded in the rocks.  By about 3000 BC, it’s clear that the biface adzes made from the flint were no longer merely functional but “approaching a symbolic form” (to cite the 2008 NHS study published about the quarry).  People recognized the hand tools as bearing cultural significance, as being expressions of an esthetic.  If you see these things today, they will stir something in the primordial recesses of your mind – you will sense that these stone tools are somehow integral to your imagination and that you have dreamed of them and wielded these weapons against the monsters in your imagination and that your hand yearns, as it were, to touch and hold such objects.

Archaeological sites are said to be valuable with respect to the number of questions that they can potentially illumine.  In this respect, scholars say the Knife River Quarry owned by the Lynch family is of “incalculable value.”  Issues that remain to be determined are these: how was access to the site controlled?  Did certain groups claim authority over the site?  Did the expeditions that mined flint here come expressly to gather lithic resources (so-called “direct access”) or was their work at the quarry embedded in other activities (“embedded procurement”) such as gathering nuts, hunting, or religious pilgrimages?  How were the mining groups organized and what were their demographics with respect to age and gender?  What was the religious or spiritual significance of the site?  Can the site answer questions about migration patterns and intercultural exchange? 

36.

Gail shrugged her shoulders as if to repel the falling rain and climbed into her white Suburban.  She let me back my car into position to tail her.  Then, she drove through the farmyard to a big gate.  With her car idling, she clambered out of the Suburban, opened the gate, and swung the metal bars aside.  Then, she returned to her vehicle and drove a few car lengths beyond the fence-line.  Closing gates is important on ranch land.  Again, she got out of her Suburban and yanked the gate shut, returning to the vehicle to drive up the hill toward the bare ridge of land overlooking the sloping terraces above the creek that ran, more or less, in curves and twists toward to east.  

We drove through waist-high weeds to a couple of ruts and followed those to a flat shelf on the hillside.  Gail turned and drove cross-country about two-hundred feet, again turning to point her car down the slope.  I followed and could see that the landscape was indented with dozens of pits, some of them about waist or chest deep.  Getting out of my car, I went to Gail’s window.  She rolled it down in the spatter of falling rain.  

“Can I walk around a little?”  I asked.

She looked at me skeptically but said that this was fine.

She told me that Allan had marked the so-called anvil stones, that is places where the flint was broken out of cobbles by cracking the egg-shaped rock on the harder granite boulders.  Allan had driven metal stakes into the ground and I could see them scattered about the terrace gently tilting down to the white meander of the stream.  By the anvil stones, Allan had also found many heavier harder cobbles used to knap the flint into points and sharp edges.  Those are called “hammer stones.” 

Rain blown across the prairie sprayed my eyes and made my glasses opaque.  I walked on the narrow, overgrown ridges of debitage between the pits toward several of the metal stakes, apparently fence posts designed for barb wire enclosures.  Some black and brown cows stood in the lea of the shelter belt running up the hill about a hundred yards away.  At the post, I found a telephone directory-sized rock with chip marks on it.  There was another grey yellow rock, more flat, nearby.  I prodded the second rock with my toe and found that it was a big wrinkled cow pie.  If there was flint debris on the surface, it was invisible to me because of the tall grass.  As far as I could see to the south and east, the terrace was cratered with innumerable pits, all of them crowded together so that as you walked, your way was over knolls of debris piled up around the holes.  Some of the pits were deep enough to retain water during the dry season and I saw that the vegetation cupped in those holes was darker and more exuberant, little bushes that probably were colorful with berries at other times of the year.  The plain carved into holes and ditches was lightless under the grey sky and the rain was flung at me by the wind and the grass rustled and twitched on the narrow ledges between the craters.  For some reason, I recalled words that I had heard spoken many years ago about bright blue eyes and the wind sweeping free across the North Dakota prairie.  I slid down into one of the craters to see what it would feel like to stand in the pit.  The slope was gentle and, after a thousand years, eroded into a gentle angle of repose.  The edges of the hole came up to my shoulders and the grass was wet and matted underfoot.

In truth, there wasn’t much to see.  I zigzagged back to the vehicles stopping at the little platforms between pits where Allan Lynch had stabbed fence-post markers into the prairie.  Reliably, there were battered-looking stones under each post.  At the cars, I thanked Mrs. Lynch for her hospitality, being brief because when she rolled down her window, the rain invaded her Suburban.  I said I would follow her down the hill and, then, be on my way back to Fargo.  She nodded.  I told her that I would email her a copy of the write-up about her quarry in The Minnesota Archaeologist.  She nodded again.

We crept back down the hill, passing the cows in the shade of the shelter-belt and, again, she opened the gate.  After I had gone through the gate, I watched her in my rear-view mirror as she closed the gate and made sure that it was secure.   

37.

A time-zone change complicated my travels.  Dunn Center observes Mountain Time – that is, it is an hour earlier by the clock in that town than Fargo or for that matter Bismarck.  (The line demarcating CST from Mountain Time zigzags through Western North Dakota, crossing the Interstate around mile marker 97 – 97 miles from the border with Montana.  Central Daylight Time begins near the Mercer County line, about 25 miles from Dunn Center.)  Gail Lynch told me to come to her home at 1:15 in the afternoon, that would Mountain be Daylight Time and, of course, I complied with her request.  However, this meant that, in fact, I was meeting her at 2:15 CST, fairly late in the day when you consider that I had to drive several hundred miles to Fargo after our conversation.  And, in fact, I didn’t begin my return to Fargo until about 3:00 Mountain time (or 4:00 pm by clocks in Bismarck and Fargo.)

Highway 200 traverses abandoned country.  It’s 48 miles to Beulah, the next town of any size, and I was anxious about fuel.  My tank was about half-full, but there were no gas stations in sight, nothing in Dunn Center or Dodge or Halliday or Golden Valley or Zap.  The blacktop runs along a ridge overlooking the Spring River, a narrow channel of water flowing in a trough between treeless hills.  The road skirts the towns which lie a half-mile or so off the highway, tiny places fortified it seemed by cheerless shelter belts. Rain fell in brief blinding spurts, intervals of downpour in the midst of the soaking, scarcely perceptible drizzle that continued without respite.  Sometimes, a truck came at me sloshing over the wet road, squeegeeing water up on my windshield.  It wasn’t unpleasant to drive in this persistent falling mist, but it wasn’t pleasant either, and, after so many miles, I felt disembodied advancing from nowhere to no place in a colorless wet cloud.  Out in the country, I knew there were missile silos that had once been armed with nuclear weapons, but were now deserted.  The nukes weren’t gone; they had just been removed and were now hidden on submarines, I supposed, patroling the Arctic and China Seas.  

38.

Zap sits aside from the blacktop state highway, hidden by a stand of small evergreens.  From route 200, in the rain, I couldn’t see anything, although I presumed that there were a few houses at an intersection in the town, an RV park according to a sign on the highway, and, maybe, a bar or brick municipal building.  There never was much to Zap –it’s got 210 people now, down from 225 (by attrition) at the time of the notorious Zip to Zap riot.  I thought that I should take the bypass into town to inspect the place but I had two-hundred and fifty miles to travel and, so, I let the town, if there was a town, slip by as I made my way toward Beulah.  

In early May of 1969, college students at North Dakota State University (NDU) promoted the idea of a “Zip to Zap” over Spring Break.  In several articles in the college paper, the writers said that it was too far (and too expensive) to go to Fort Lauderdale or the other places where students partied over the Break but that a “Zip to Zap” might well be feasible.  May is a hard-luck month in North Dakota – it starts with blizzards and ends in deep, festering mud; the sun may shine wanly during the day, but, at night, the temperature falls below freezing.  For some reason, Zip to Zap got traction and students began making plans to spend the weekend in the tiny village.  (There was wide-spread unrest on college campuses at that time due to the Vietnam war and the rumor was that out-of-state agitators, said to be “hippies and cowboys,” were planning to descend on the village to loot and destroy it.) 

Chuck Stroup, a student at North Dakota State University (NDSU), wrote that partygoers could work on their tans, not on the beaches in Florida, but on the banks of the scenic Knife River.  (The confluence of the Spring and Knife Rivers is several hundred yards south of the four or five streets that comprise Zap.)  Cryptic ads appeared proclaiming that there would be a “Festival of Light and Love” in Zap and that people should gather there on the weekend of May 9, 1969.  Stroup wrote that “a full program of orgies, riots, arrests, freakouts and brawls is being planned.”  Wham-O, a toy manufacturer who was promoting a gadget called the “ZipZap”, released some advertisements announcing the festival and pictures of the town’s mayor, Norman Fuchs, playing with this toy appeared in Associated Press news releases.  The locals saw an opportunity to cash-in on an influx of visitors and so they stocked up on ground beef – the plan was to market “Zapburgers – and kegs of beer.  

Everything began affably enough with big crowds of kids, almost all of them from Grand Forks where NDSU is situated.  The kids had driven 300 miles and were in the mood to party.  Mayor Fuchs was photographed shaking hands with a couple of dudes holding beer cans and wearing natty caps.  Fuchs is wearing a tee-shirt lettered Zap N.D. or Bust. Estimates of the number of students that converged on the town vary, the figure stated is usually between 2000 to 3000, although my guess is that these estimates, as is always the case with mass gatherings, are much higher than the actual census of revelers in town.  In any event, as the crowd increased, the proprietors of the town’s two bars doubled the price of beer, an opportunistic act that outraged, at least, some of the kids. (There’s a grainy TV interview in which a young man wearing a stylish fedora like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon complains about the bars, one of them called the Big Dipper, raising the price of beer to 50 cents.) Nonetheless, Fuchs drank beer with the mob in the Dipper, emerging after midnight to find that the village’s main street was thronged and that a big bonfire had been lit – the visitors had ripped down part of an abandoned building and lit the timber afire.  A photograph shows a lean boy, outlined in the bright light of the bonfire, apparently leaping over the flames.  Fuchs panicked, presumably fearful that the hamlet would be burned to the ground, called the governor and, by dawn, the National Guard with loaded guns and fixed bayonets were patrolling Zap’s four or five blocks.  (In fairness to the kids, temperatures fell below freezing and there were no accommodations anywhere in the village; the students were cold and, probably, lit the fire for warmth since the town’s café and two bars were mobbed and there was no place indoors to escape the frost.)

I’ve searched for pictures of the riot and its aftermath.  Some photographs show what seems to be a looted general store; the windows are broken and the sidewalk in front of the little false-front building is covered with potato chip bags, beer cans, and candy-wrappers. A couple of shots show the bonfire with a ring of spectators stretching back into the darkness.  One photographs is captioned: “Student forgives National Guardsman who stabbed him at Zap, North Dakota.”  The picture shows a crowd of young people within some kind of well-lit public building.  I think the picture is miscaptioned: I don’t see any National Guardsman in the photograph and there is an attractive woman looking up and gesturing at the camera in the center of the tightly packed mass of young people.  Two other women are visible in the picture.  If there were women or girls at Zap on May 9, 1969, they aren’t apparent in any other pictures that I have seen.  By and large, North Dakota females were too smart to attend this folly.  Other pictures show a cordon of Guardsman walking down a desolate street, the ashes of the fire on the road underfoot.  One picture shows a hippie peeking out of a garbage can hand-lettered in white paint: ZAP CLEAN. 

Although there were claims of outside agitators, it’s not certain that anyone other than kids from North Dakota, primarily from NDSU, attended this party.  Rumors of private flights chartered from Berkeley for instance don’t seem to have checked-out.  Time heals all wounds.  On the fiftieth anniversary of the riot (if that’s what it was), four- or five-hundred people gathered in town, drank beer, and marched up and down the three-block Main Street for old times’ sake.  Back in 1970, a nondescript city hall was built on the lot where the abandoned building was ripped-up for firewood.

39.

In the endless trove of videos on YouTube, there’s an ad for ZipZap.  The Wham-O toy is a soft brick of styrofoam attached to a fifteen foot elastic band.  The eight-inch loaf of styrofoam can be cast out as far as thirty feet, and, then, retracted on the elastic band.  The advertisement shows two nerds casting the styrofoam cube at one another.  Apparently, the purpose of the competition is to score points by hitting your opponent.  It seems idiotic, but, also, fun in a meaningless sort of way.  The contestants dance around each other, snapping the styrofoam back and forth. At one point, a cute girl with ponytails plays.  There’s a crowd of spectators in a lightless, colorless void – one of them is eating a CLARK candy bar.   

40.

With the National Guard in pursuit, vandals from Zap fled east on 200 to Beulah and, then, Hazen.  The cops set up checkpoints and made arrests.  I reached Beulah at about 5:00 CST rain still filling the air.  Beulah is a more substantial town, about 3000 souls, and the Knife River Valley is deeper here, rising in terraces above the watercourse.  South of the town, a sign directs traffic to the Coyote Coal Mine, apparently the largest lignite mine in the world.  The workings aren’t visible to me from State Highway 49, running straight south to Interstate 94 across North Dakota.

When I stop for gas, Clay Jenkinson, a PBS celebrity in North Dakota is talking about the movie Oppenheimer on the radio.  I went to school with Jenkinson at the University of Minnesota.  I think he was a year younger than me.  He was in the English Department when I studied there and I recall an awards ceremony extolling Mr. Jenkinson as an outstanding student and scholar.  An old professor, probably gay, said that his literary insights showed vision “as clear as his bright blue eyes and as free as the North Dakota winds blowing across the prairie.”  It was an odd encomium and I have always remembered it.  (I suppose I felt more than a little unseemly envy with respect to the handsome blonde boy who was my competitor, I suppose, in the English Department.)  Jenkinson went to High School at Dickinson, North Dakota and, somewhat predictably, ended up as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford.  He had a distinguished academic career and, during the mid-nineties, developed a Chautauqua presentation in which her impersonated Thomas Jefferson and addressed audiences in the manner of that president and statesman.  No doubt his interest in Jefferson was based upon that president’s connections to the State through the Corps of Exploration, the Lewis and Clark expedition, a historical theme that is central to North Dakota’s sense of itself.   Clay Jenkinson returned to North Dakota when was fifty and has lived in Bismarck since that time, writing and publishing a number of books about both Jefferson and North Dakota.  From photographs, Jenkinson remains handsome but broader and wider than I recalled him.  At least, I recall him; I’m sure he has no idea that I even exist.  

41.

People say that when you cross the Missouri, the humidity slaps you across the face like a wet towel.  This is true.  It was raining in the west, but the air seemed somehow dry between the cold rain drops.  At the freeway rest stop east of Bismarck, I inhaled warm vapor.  

Later, the clouds dissolved and some high feathery clouds, like the wings of drowned angels, appeared in the twilight overhead.

42.

I checked into a hotel in Fargo and had supper with my son, Martin.  The next morning, I took Martin and my two grandchildren to breakfast at a place called “The Shack” on the north side of Fargo.  The enormous brown and grey shell of the Fargo Dome on its asphalt prairie dominates that part of the city.  Before Covid, a breakfast omelet with coffee cost nine or ten dollars; the prices are now about $14.99.  As you grow old, the world seems increasingly expensive and out-of-joint.

We went to the Fargo Air Museum, two big metal machine sheds with planes hanging from the ceiling or sprawled across the concrete floor.  This is not the sort of thing that interests me, but, perhaps, the children might find it intriguing and, I think, it’s good to share as many different kinds of experiences as possible with young people.  Many early aviators, of course, perished.  A replica of the Wright Brothers kite with its balsa wood struts and wire cables hung overhead.  The Air National Guard flyers in North Dakota are called “The Happy Hooligans” and they have a distinguished combat history.  A wall of dog tags, glittering like the scales on a fish was on display – casualties, perhaps, of foreign wars.  

43.

We killed time at Trollwood, a public park on Fargo’s north side.  A playground with swings and climbing bars is bedded in a heart-shaped tract of yellow sand.  In a slight indentation in the lawn, some wooden ramps curve up to an arched bridge.  The monument looks like a theater set and, in fact, this is what it is – before moving to an indoor auditorium, a children’s theater company used to put on plays with people seated around the ramps and bridge in pews set into the amphitheater walls.  The pews are gone but the pedestals and curving ramps and the bridge, suitable for Three Billy Goats Gruff remain in place.

Four large boulders form a square in the middle of the Frisby golf course.  The alluvial plain on which Fargo sits is deep with forty-feet of black soil washed down from the great plains in Canada and there is no natural rock anywhere within a hundred miles.  So, the big liver-colored boulders had to be brought to the site to form the four corners of the square on the lawn.  The rocks mark a potter’s field associated with a county poor-house that once stood here but has been torn down.  Within the boundary defined by the boulders, those who died at the poor-house are buried in unmarked graves.  Some boys fling the flying disks of their frisbees over the poor-house graveyard and, then, march over the buried dead to take their next shots.  

My granddaughter has somehow fallen off her swing.  Time to go.

44.

My father, the son of a poor Lutheran minister called to a parish in central Nebraska, thought it was a privilege to travel.  When he was a boy, his pastor-father went to Estes Park every Summer where he preached at a youth retreat in the mountains.  It’s hot in the sand hills of Nebraska and the summer camp in the pines at 8,000 feet was cool, at least at night and before midday.  As a sign that his family was comfortably middle-class, my father loaded wife and kids into the family sedan and we drove west each summer for our vacation.  My father liked traveling in theory, but he was very high-strung and too many calamities can befall the wayfarer and, so, our trips were shadowed by his anxiety and anxiety’s brother, anger.  Each of us was supposed to keep a journal of our travels so that we could remember the places that we had gone and the sights that we had seen.

Later, when father took my son on his family vacation, he required that the little boy write several paragraphs each night chronicling his adventures.  This summer when my son, Martin, took Hannah and Lucas on a trip to Kansas City and returning through Omaha, he asked the children to write an account of their vacation for me to read.  I read these sheets of paper at Trollwood in Fargo, sitting on  a bench while the children played on the swings and climbing bars.

As you can see, I come from people for whom nothing exists unless it is written down.

45.

Before leaving town, I bought a gift certificate at Target to help finance the grandchildren’s school clothing and, then, drove on the freeway two hours to Cold Spring.  It would have been more convenient to stay in St. Cloud, but the motels that I typically used were booked solid. 

Cold Spring is west of St. Cloud, located about eight miles away.  For some obscure geological reason, there’s a range of wooded hills rising in a semi-circular ridge around St. Cloud.  Exiting the freeway, the State highway curved and twisted among evergreens that parted, now and then, around small green lakes fringed with cattails.  Dead trees stood at the margins of the forest and shone as reflections in the water like pale marble columns.  My impression was that the highway to Cold Spring rose continually and that the town stands on a forested height of land – but this is an illusion, in fact, I think the town’s elevation isn’t significantly higher than St. Cloud.  

Granite built Cold Spring and evidence of this industry is everywhere evident.  Fist-sized chips of granite line all the roads and are used as mulch around bushes and shrub-trees planted as landscaping.  In the park, a bike rack is chiseled from three or four tons of handsome (grave monument quality) stone – the front wheels of the bikes sit in slots in the impassive, sleek boulders.  The municipal park has not one but two band shells on opposite sides of the greensward – the place is called “Granite Landing.”  The band shells aren’t erected from whitewashed siding and wood planks as in most towns but cyclopean walls of stacked rock.  Granite Days, the town festival was underway, and the Granite City Ramblers were playing Texas Swing tunes on one of the bandshells, musical notes echoing in a sepulchral way off the huge boulder walls.  The music sounded like it was coming from within a cave.  Food vendors were selling fried feldspar and gneiss on a stick and, in a petting zoo, you could run your hands over various grades of granite, some polished to a silky mirror-like sheen.  The local convenience stores were built of rock like medieval castles.  

46.

The River Inn in Cold Spring is a two-story frame building next to an apron of concrete sloping down to the Sauk River.  The entry and lobby have rustic features simulating a lodge up north.  A bear, hewn from timber and sculpted by chainsaw, stands at the entry next to some mounts of trophy fish.  The rooms in the Inn are themed, although I didn’t know this when I made my reservations.  A college girl working at the front desk told me that I was in the Old Flint room on the first floor and handed me a card-key.  As I walked down the corridor, I passed The Playroom – Better Play Nice, The Sewing Room, The Old West, and Back to the Fifties.  In Old Flint, the black-out curtains were decorated with a pattern of agates and chert.  The comforters on the two queen beds were embroidered with rock-hound hammers and the chest-of-drawers had arrowhead-shaped handles.  Light switches were also arrowheads embedded in the wall, swiveling up and down to control the lamps.  The lamp shades were decorated with images of hand adzes.  On the wall, behind the TV, there was a framed picture of a quarry full of great slabs of granite under a spider derrick.  The TV rested on grey-green boulder, albeit one made of hardened plastic and the easy chair was also a heap of rocks on which stony pillows were piled.  In the bathroom, there was a granite counter and a toilet lid made of solid stone that was exceedingly heavy and hard to lift and I thought that if were to let that rock oval slap down on the ceramic bowl the whole toilet would shatter into pieces.  Arrowheads were printed on the shower curtain in geometric patterns and actual lance-points and lithic hand tools were displayed under glass in case next to the Flintstones’ easy chair.

My flesh felt soft and perishable in the stony room and, after a few minutes, I fled outdoors.

47.

A bike trail led across the busy highway into town and ran next to the river.  A few hundred yards from the River Inn, there was a dam with curtains of water sliding down its concrete surface.  The Sauk River had found other ways around the dam and several chest-high waterfalls were gurgling and splashing among the heaps of broken boulders flanking the dam.  Upstream, lily pads floated on the lagoon impounded behind the concrete wall and the threads of falling white water were dim, braids of silver in the funereal gloom cast by tall pine trees standing on river banks.  Some Hispanic men and their girlfriends or wives were casting fishing lines out into the lagoon and the air was moist and smelled of mud and dead fish and from the Granite Days festival in the nearby park I could hear a polka band, or maybe a mariachi ensemble, whooping and chattering over a drum thudding like a heart-beat.  

48.

Lawyers for the Reinsurance Association of Minnesota (RAM) used to have an elegant, granite block office in Cold Spring.  It was always a pleasure to take depositions at the polished red granite table in the conference room.  The granite was cool to the touch, so cold in winter that it froze your fingers. When I was a young man, I defended many fire subrogation cases against RAM’s lawyers and came to Cold Spring often, at least a half-dozen or more times.  The law firm’s logo was an image of a beautiful spreading tree in front of the stony mausoleum of the office.  But, by now, the tree had withered and fallen to the ground, a victim of several violent storms, and the letterhead had to be changed.  Nothing lasts forever.  But the granite walls of the law office and the three-ton table of polished stone will remain here for thousands of years.

In those days, granite was still being extracted from quarries visible from the highway into town.  The tall masts of the derricks at the quarries could be seen from the road.  I always wondered how those things worked.  A central timber, like a ship’s mast was secured by twenty or so cables bolted to boulders circumferential to the upright wooden column.  Another timber stood at a 45 degree angle to the central mast.  Most of these things were abandoned at the time that I glimpsed them in the thickets next to the highway and I never saw one of the derricks actually hoisting slabs of granite.  The web of cables like guy wire around the central mast looked fragile, although I suppose that these metal stays and their heavy anchors were, in fact, extremely strong.  But the mast and cable assembly were like spider webs woven over square-cut pits and pillars of grey and red granite.  Either the good granite was played-out or had become too expensive to ship, and I don’t know that anyone builds from ashlars of granite any more, and, so, the industry seems to be mostly defunct and the mining equipment has vanished.  Cold Spring’s principal industry today seems to be poultry processing and there were several sinister looking compounds of metal and concrete buildings on the edge of town, heavy set sheds with fat metal tanks next to them.  Turn-over is high at these places and big signs written Spanish and Laotian characters advertised job opportunities.  

49.

I bought some broasted chicken at a gas station and carried the little cardboard box back to the River Inn.  In the hallway, I passed The Sun Porch, The Dog House, Cinema with a ticket-shape plaque on the door (Admit One), and Grandpa’s Tool Shed.  (How would you like to stay in a room themed after “Grandpa’s Tool Shed” – do you get beat there with a belt or a switch?)  My room, notwithstanding the fiction that I have previously advanced, was called Wishin’ I was Fishin’.  The queen beds had comforters on which large, smiling earthworms were embroidered.  Tonight, you sleep not in Vegas and not with the fishes, but with the bait.  On the wall, a three-dimensional picture showed two muskies grinning with their hard bony jaws at one another in a murky underwater pool.  If you looked at the picture from the right angle, the fish seemed to lunge at you – otherwise the blurred image just caused me headaches.  The lampshades were fishing hats with their rims adorned with red bobbers.  The plastic shower curtain was covered with stylized pictures of fish.  And so on.  

50.

The next morning, after sleeping with the fishes, I drove back to Austin.  Just outside of Cold Spring, the road passes a small kidney-shaped lake with a stockade of lance-tipped reeds around the water.  Probably, this pool is what remains of a granite quarry.  In the center of the lake, big fins of pink and bluish-green granite extruded from the water.  For some reason, the scene looked like a landscape in a 19th century Japanese wood-cut, delicate and, yet, substantial at the same time.

51.

I pass a long warehouse building with a showroom annexed.  A sign advertises “granite counters” and “slab viewing”.  The granite under the soil is no longer extracted to be cut into blocks for courthouses or cathedrals or the hellish walls of the penitentiary at St. Cloud, as heavy and grim as guilt itself, but, instead, shaved into polished slices to be installed as kitchen counters in McMansions in the suburbs.  

52.

Off I-94 near Annandale, a Burger King sits among trees and ravines that seem to have been used as a waste-dump.  Burger King, the Home of the Whopper, was founded in 1954, the year of my birth.  On the internet, I read that most of these restaurants are doomed and will be closed in the next year.  It’s been a lifetime, but all good things must come to an end.

At the Annandale Burger King, two people were working and, of course, service was very slow.  Because I had to use the toilet, I ordered from the front counter.  Another older couple came in from the parking lot, also to use the restrooms.  Their order was botched and the counter-girl told them that they had no coffee, had just run out, although it was only about 9:15 in the morning.  When you are served at the counter, the girl gives you a cup to fill at the fountain machine at the side of the dining room.  There was no ice dispensed by the machine and the soda pop was flat and sour-tasting.  Just as I was about to complain that there was no ice at the machine, a wet avalanche of ice cascaded out of a cooler in the kitchen, depositing a crumbling glacier of cubes in the center of the passageway next to the take-out window.  Not just people but things and places grow old.  The quarries are abandoned, the tools lost, and the people scattered.

August 21, 2023