(first published, January 2006 in the Grand Forks Herald newspaper)

 
My nephew, Jamie and I recently took a trip to Carrington, North Dakota. The purpose of the trip was to visit my older brother David and his family. There are two cherished traditions in the Nelson family. The first tradition is that we rarely take over night trips and the second is we can be a little late. Jamie and I honored one tradition by making the 320 mile round trip plus visit in just twelve hours. We failed to get a late start however and left promptly at five in the morning.

I started the morning with a rather strange new habit-salt water irrigation. My wife has advised me to gargle with salt water when I get a cold. Some of my co-workers come to work when they’re sick so everyone can see how brave they are and to spread their germs. I now have a cold and so have been trying out Lisa’s home-spun salt remedy with a little twist. Seems that people are rinsing our their nostrils with salt water to remove cold germs. I purchased a cattle syringe recently and had just finished this disgusting little hygienic exercise prior to Jamie’s arrival at our home. The trip to Carrington went by quickly as we visited in between stops for coffee.

We found David at his new shop answering the constant stream of phone calls. Dave has an office adjacent to the shop so we sat and talked tractors and farming of which our conversations mostly consist. Dave told us an interesting fact. Case/IH sells the highest concentration of auto-steer units in North Dakota and Western Minnesota. The auto-steer combines a GPS unit and an override for the tractors steering for reduced spray overlap and very straight rows. No, we’re not lazy around here but there is a reason for all of those sales. David said the auto-steers sold in North Dakota are the base models while western Minnesota prefers a more accurate model. It makes sense because North Dakota has vast stretches of land where an auto steer removes much of the fatigue from one mile stretches of land. Meanwhile, western Minnesota farms a lot of rows crops like sugar beets that really benefit from the increased accuracy of a system that spends all of those expensive inputs more efficiently. There’s also the matter of staying in between Minnesota’s rows of corn or beets versus reducing spray or air seeder overlap in North Dakota. My brother Dave would never tell you but he really helped introduce GPS mapping and auto steer in the region. He went from café to restaurant educating farmers about this space age technology when most considered the height of agriculture technology to be a laser trailer when ditching. I’m always in awe of him but I may be a bit biased.

Jamie and I drove home through New Rockford, Sheyenne and Devils Lake without missing even one used machinery lot. Dave told us a lot about the Garrison Diversion so we had plenty to talk about on the way home which is where we arrived at five that afternoon just twelve hours after we had begun. Some traditions are just too good not to honor.
 

I have a cold this week and the weather had been cold this week, that’s ironic, maybe even mildly amusing. The truth is there is little for me to laugh about as each time I cough, my lungs feel like Velcro being pulled apart-the long way. If you could graph the point at which I am least able to withstand winter’s cold temps (axis x) and the point at which winter is coldest (axis y) then that would be point “z.” This week was point Z.

First off, let’s not get discouraged. I could see folks questioning their own sanity at living in a place where we get weather like this week’s blizzard which was named Coyote. Coyote-class blizzards don’t visit that often and quality of life should not be based using this storm as the norm. It did really suck, however. Lisa and I were trapped at home all day Wednesday but we had plenty of corn for heat and a few movies to watch so at least that was nice. I did try to plow the road but I should have tried to get my pick-up stuck instead because then I could have at least claimed some success. I decided to wait for the county plow to come through and it succeeded in turning the three-foot drifts into a powdery cement which hardened as soon as it hit the ditch. I did have to shovel out the pick-up, which caused me to breathe deeply which brought back the Velcro-being-pulled-apart-the-long-way feeling in my lungs that was almost mind-altering in the depth of it’s pain.

This brings me back from the outside cold to the cold inside me. I get lots of colds each winter but have been able to fight them off using Zicam cold remedy. The cold I have right now obeys no earthly rules nor does it bow to formulas created in some apothecary‘s laboratory. I have changed my morning schedule to include forty-five minutes of Kleenex work and some truly inspired hacking. The coughing involved with this cold is of the type that if I had enough guts, I could probably just pass out from my efforts but instead I fall just short and end up with a terrible headache. I do enjoy sympathy for this horrible cold and Lisa made chicken soup with our super-hot, home-grown peppers that was fantastic. It neither killed me nor cured me but it did make things better for a bit. I am drinking plenty of fluids, sleeping a lot and found that I could tell my myself, “I’m sorry but you have a virus instead of a bacteria so there’s nothing I can do for you” just as well as a doctor and so that’s what I’ve done.

“Z” used to be an abbreviation for deep sleep, those were the good ole days. From now on, it is simply the point at which cold and my inability to resist it intersect in one fantastic coughing, sneezing, shivering, shoveling, drug-resistant moment in time.

(Lisa and I would like to offer condolences to the family of Jon Stimac who died in a motor vehicle accident this week near Thief River Falls, Mn. I knew Jon as a very conscientious route driver for sanitation pick-up, Lisa knew him better and said he was a great guy. When I was a kid, a neighbor told me you could tell a lot about a person by whether they waived to you or not while meeting on the road. Jon always waived)  GN

I like beer- it’s a passion, an indulgence and the empty bottles make a nice collection. Ben Franklin (for those of you with the appropriate grade-school education to know of Ben Franklin) is often quoted as saying that “beer is proof that God loves us.“ I realize that some people may be reading this at a time of day when breakfast or brunch may be a more appropriate conversation and to those I apologize. However, it must be five o’clock somewhere so lets talk about the Volkswagen of refreshments as I tell you about my love for beer.

My personal history with beer is as follows: I started off with Old Milwaukee, then progressed through increasingly cheap beer until I reach Milwaukee’s Best somewhere in the late 80s. The best compromise between taste and cost was Miller Lite until I embraced Busch light as I embraced my wife, Lisa, who was then a Busch Light drinker. Busch Light was perfect for me at the time, I was more interested in volume than taste and the can fit well in my hand. My first date with Lisa was spent on her mother’s deck. Lisa’s mother, Jeanette, (you know her as Mother Walseth) asked me that first night if I’d like a can coozie to insulate the beer from my body heat and I told her I was offended that she thought a beer would go cold in my hand. Jeanette and I have been best friends since even as I’ve since graduated from volume to quality which is where lies the heart of this story.

I always thought people who were particular about their beer where snobs. I would never become part of that finicky bunch swishing beer around and smelling it prior to the first swallow. Then I thought about it, most of the better beers were just made with better ingredients. Its like cookies or brownies, aren’t the home made ones made with better ingredients better tasting? I then began my experience/experiment with better beer.

I’m a home town boy and that extends to my home state. I decided this was a good starting point in my effort to school my beer palette and got lucky; Schell’s Beer. Schell’s is brewed in New Ulm, Minnesota and I’ve yet to find a variety they bottle anywhere short of delicious. Some of the varieties are seasonal but they’re all made like you’d expect a Minnesotan to make them-labor intensive with particular attention paid to consistency. One of the guys I work with loves the Firebrick brew so much that one of his family members occasionally imports a few cases to Northwest Minnesota for him. During the last shipment, Kyle granted me a six pack which should have been enjoyed one a time but was greedily drank by myself in one sitting.

I’ve found the organic beers particularly good. I think many people see “organic” and they think of sandal-wearing hippies brewing beer constantly yet showering rarely. Organic is simply a better product, raised without chemical that gains it’s flavor from a variety of natural influences such as the soil, natural fertilizer (you know, manure), better quality water, etc. One of my favorites is Samuel Smith which is produced in the United kingdom. It’s expensive but some places sell single bottles so you can have a taste without breaking the bank which plays into that whole “quality versus quantity” idea.

So many of the beers I like are Pilsners. I questioned this attraction until I found “Okocim” beer. I did a little research and found this brewery got it’s start in 1845; just three years after Pilsner was created in nearby Bohemia (present day Czechoslovakia) . The roots of this beer answered many questions about my personal tastes as I am half Bohemian. The beer is brewed in a section of Poland that saw little of World War II and so the original brewery still stands and brews on a regular basis.

You may notice the absence of my impressions on the taste of beer. I am not an expert, I just know what I like. I don’t eat a cracker between beers to cleanse my palette or any of that high brow stuff. In the end, maybe it’s not the beer as much as the environment in which it‘s drank. I mean really, has any beer tasted better than a twelve pack of 3.2 from Carpenter’s Corner (a bar in service since 1936 just west of Thief River Falls, Mn) on a hot afternoon?

Dear Dave,

I want to start this letter out with a little about heating with corn. First off, I just checked our electricity bill and we’ve used about 2000 less kilowatt-hours this month as compared to last year. Bear in mind that we were already using one corn stove last year and that this years numbers have gone even lower with the addition of a second stove. I have also gone from using four blankets and three cats to stay warm on the couch to basically one blanket and cat-optional (although it’s still usually three.) By the time heating season is done, we will have used about 240 bushels of corn which has always been pretty inexpensive and stands to become even more so in the future. Corn prices got pretty high last spring but came down by the time we purchased (and sold, unhappily) our corn. I still believe in corn-based ethanol but time marches on and it seems that cellulosic ethanol has exited the laboratory and may be produced on a large scale in the near future. The price of corn will always rise and fall, but cellulosic ethanol makes heating with corn appear very attractive. I guess we’ll just have to compare next years electricity bill to this years to get a better indication.

How are things in Carrington, Dave? We spoke a couple of times since my last letter and life out there seemed much like life around here-frozen. This has been the most consistently cold winter in quite a few years. I’m interested to see what sort of spring will reveal itself once it begins to thaw. One benefit of the cold was that it trapped all of that moisture and gave us time to consider how we will handle the excess moisture. I plan to get that cattle out on leftover corn stubble before it thaws, then retreat to our sacrifice paddock and feed hay until things dry up. I’m sure farmers around Carrington are as concerned about spring work as are the boys around here.

I was thinking about chores this week, Dave. Chores are those tasks which you finish each day but are never truly done. They are not towering accomplishments, but taken as a whole, chores are the things that make a household or business work well. I think chores have even more to do with how kids turn out as adults. When we were young, chores would have been cleaning calf pens, feeding the cattle or mowing the yard. We learned how to make these somewhat boring tasks better by talking to each other, listening to music or making a game out of the task. These acquired skills are quite useful as not everything in life is exciting-particularly a job. I think that thirty years ago parents made their children do chores because they were good parents. Today, parents will give out an occasional chore so that they believe themselves to be good parents. Where we once defined ourselves by our responsibilities, we now only take them on for show-something learned as children. Maybe we think that an easy life is a gift to our children and a sign of progress; the truth is this gift of ease will become a burden to them once they exit the world created by mom and dad.

I know I’m preaching to the choir, Dave, but there are others looking over our shoulders. Most of them will be singing right along with us, but there may be a few just mouthing the words.

You’re little bro’

I had a message in the comments asking about the song Nicolena. Please leave me an email and I will try answer any questions.