I was at my high school reunion last weekend.

I had an absolute blast.  It was an utterly wonderful time, in just about every possible way.

Of course, any gathering of mid-fortysomethings is going to have its share of bad news.  Up until last year, we’d lost a total of six classmates out of 251; the usual stuff, really – a suicide, an Air Force crew chief who died when his C5 crashed in the run-up to Desert Storm in 1990, a couple of freak illnesses, an accident or two.

Then, we lost five classmates in one year; a fall, a couple of unspecified illnesses, and one who died of cancer.  The streak concluded with two deaths in one day, last May 17th.

One of the classmates who died that day was a guy named Dwight Rexin.

I met Dwight in tenth grade.  He’d been in my hometown’s Seventh Day Adventist school up ’til then.  Like a lot of parochial-school kids who come to the public schools, even in those simpler days, Dwight seemed like a bit of a fish out of water.  He was extremely smart – indeed, he was one of very few high school kids I’ve met, then or since, who could have made a serious claim to being an intellectual.   Blazingly well-read in history, sci-fi, political science and a slew of other areas, trying to keep up with Dwight in an intellectual conversation was like trying to waterski behind a cigarette racer; at the beginning, you just held on and tried not to get too embarassed.

Or at least I did.  And as it happened, Dwight was embarking on a bit of a quest himself.  Seventh Day Adventist school could be fairly called “sheltered”; he knew little of pop culture, the music of the day, and the stuff teenagers did just because they were teenagers, even in that simpler and less frantic time.  Not that I was any kind of party vegetable – indeed, I had exactly one beer in high school, which may have been one more than Dwight had.  But I knew music backwards and forwards; I was working at the radio station, I was a pop-culture vacuum cleaner, and I, like Dwight, enjoyed tying little pictures into bigger pictures.  Seventh Day Adventist kids weren’t supposed to go to movies, or dance, or do any secular music.  But he was relaxing some of the rules; I introduced him to Tom Petty (he liked), Bruce Springsteen and the Clash (not as much) ; I cast him as the evil magnate in a one-act melodrama I directed my senior year, which I always thought was ironic, starring in a play before, I think, he’d ever attended one.

Back then, there were two crowds in summer school at Jamestown High School; the ones that had to be there, since they’d flunked a required class, like English or Biology or Government, and the ones that wanted to be there, either to get ahead on required classes or to escape taking the Government class from one particularly boring and disdained teacher (who will remain unnamed, although any Jamestown High School grads from the era on this thread will know who I mean).  A small crew us us – Bob Martin, Dove Boe, Dwight and I – were in the latter crowd.  So in the summer of 1980 – 31 years ago this week, as luck’d have it – we spent six weeks in a sweltering classroom taking our Government class.

It was a fun time for the subject.  The 1980 election was shaping up, and at this point was still a close race.  I was, by the way, a liberal.  Not an especially articulate or well-informed one, but still outspoken and not a little arrogant.  I would have probably been a famous leftyblogger had I been born twenty years later.

But I digress.  All of my assumptions redounded with lefty “conventional wisdom”.  In early June, I’d gone to North Dakota Boys State, a mock government put on by the American Legion, and wandered my way into being a state party chairman.  I wrote a platform that might have made Paul Wellstone walk into Jesse Helms’ office to admit maybe the left had gone too far and totally ruined the younger generation.

So when we had to give our final presentations, I did some sort of giggly treacle on foreign aid.  Passable work – I got an A, but then I always did with social studies like history, geography and government.

And Dwight cut loose with an hour-long,  Buckleyesque jeremiad on the entitlement pyramid, on the need to get government out of peoples’ private lives, on what the Tenth Amendment really meant, on the links between cartel capitalism and big “progressive” governments like Carter’s…

…that, frankly, I found offensive.  I questioned him sharply; he responded even moreso.  Shot down all my objections without breaking a sweat.  Left me angry (in a civil, intellectual sort of way) and frustrated…

…largely because, although it’d be years before I admitted it, he was right.    At that time of my life, I wasn’t one to casually admit even a badly-thought-out premise of mine was wrong.  I was a teenager, hey?   I had always associated conservatives with icky things – just like the media raises young “progressives” to do to this day.

Dwight and I were also college classmates; we worked on our college newspaper together.  And as my journey from right to left started, and then accelerated, it was Dwight who was my sounding board, my mental test lab for all these new ideas.

I’ve credited a number of people with helping push me down the road as I wandered away from liberalism and, gradually, became a conservative; my first radio boss, Bob Richardson; my college English prof, Dr. Blake, who acquainted me with Solzhenitzyn and Dostoevskii and O’Rourke and Paul Johnson and the other great minds that led me to where I am.

But Dwight?  He was the first peer of mine, the first guy in my age group, who ever seriously challenged me.

I last saw Dwight in 1993.  We met for a couple of beers when I was in Portland, Oregon on business.  I was recently married, with two brand-new kids; he was a systems analyst at Nike.  We talked techology, and family, and caught up on classmates since the 10 year reunion.  He never came to the 20 or 25 year reunions, for whatever reason.  I’d hoped he’d make this last one; I’d hoped to let him know some of the stuff I’m writing in this post.

Anyway – rest in peace, Dwight Rexin.

I spent the weekend in North Dakota, at my class reunion.

More later this week, hopefully.

In North Dakota, at least in my lifetime, all flooding west of the Red River is compared to the Great Flood of 1969.  That year, pretty much every major town in the state – Fargo, Grand Forks, Jamestown, Minot, Bismarck – was inundated with runoff from record snow and rain falls.  It was the standard by which all subsequent floods – 1981, 1997, and the past couple of years along the Red, Missouri and James – have been measured.

And none of those floods, not even 1969, holds a candle to what’s projected for Minot – where my mother, incidentally, lives, although thankfully on very high ground – and other communities along the Souris River in coming weeks.

The highest flows ever recorded on the Souris are approaching a city whose defenses are destined to be over run. Can the city hold?

Dikes currently in place, recently improved greatly to combat high flows, are now expected to disappear under the traveling torrent. The amount of water flowing with a vengeance down the Souris River Valley is forecast to inundate Minot to a level seven to eight feet higher than the catastrophic and benchmark flood of 1969.

Picture a flood eight feet higher than the highest flooding ever recorded in your riverfront town.  Eight feet.

Saddened with that horrific knowledge, officials announced during a late afternoon press conference Monday that very little can be done to stop the powerful onslaught. Massive secondary dikes that were built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to save much of the town from the previous high on the Souris this year fall far short of defending against the impending and rapid rise of the Souris.

My mom’s house is already crowded with refugees from the earlier flooding.  It’s going to get worse:

Mandatory evacuations were ordered Monday for all evacuation zones within Minot. Mayor Curt Zimbelman said all affected residents and businesses must vacate those areas no later than 10 p.m. Wednesday. Within minutes of the announcement residents once again began the laborious and hastened work of moving out of their homes for the second time this year.

“It’s a sad day in Minot,” Zimbelman said at the end of a press conference Monday.

Although Minot was always Jamestown’s hereditary sports rival – cake-eating bastards that they were –  my prayers do go out to them.  This sounds just awful, with water flows triple that of this spring’s already-bad floods:

“It’s pretty easy to get to 23,000 cfs, which is bearing down on Sherwood as we speak,” said Alan Schlag, Monday. Schlag is a hydrologist for the National Weather Service in Bismarck.

For comparison purposes, the previous peak flow at Sherwood this year, one which caused great concern at all points downstream, was a mere 8,860 cfs.

“Basically, Canada is pouring the coals to releases from dams. Rafferty is wide open, Alameda upped to 1,800 Monday and Boundary was at about 5,000 cfs,” said Schlag.

How bad is it?  Bad enough to get a roomful of North Dakotans – classic Scandinavian and German passive-aggressives (I can say that, I’m one of ’em) who let loose in full pent-up fury that’d shame a roomful of big-haired Long-Island Italans when dealing with government at any level – to sit down in a daze:

The crowd at Monday’s City Hall press conference sat in stunned silence, followed by a few brief murmurs, when it was revealed that releases into the Souris from Lake Darling Dam would be ramped up to “16 or 17,000 cfs by Thursday.” Minot’s existing dike system laborously protects against 10,000 cfs. The previous high release for Lake Darling prior to this flood event was less than 5,000 cfs. Numbers all along the Souris are similarly stunning, shocking and, ultimately, saddening.

I’d been planning on going there this summer.  Sounds like I’d best bring boots and a shovel.

3-5 inches of snow in parts of North Dakota today.

Let’s go over how the weather in the Twin Cities is really just the same as it is in the Northern Plains again?

If you are down and about the downtown Minneapolis gallery scene anytime soon, stop by Circa Gallery (210 North 1st Street) and see the current exhibition, by Barbara Gilhooly.

I was at the opening last Saturday.  So was “Briana”, whom I do not know, but who brought a much better camera than I did, and got a great series of photos of the whole exhibition.

Barb is, by the way, a high school classmate of mine.  And she’s been making a living as an artist pretty much the whole time.  Check it out.

And congrats, Barb!

Via the NWS, there’s a storm brewing over God’s Country:

COLDER AIR MOVING SOUTHEAST FROM SASKATCHEWAN WILL RESULT IN RAIN CHANGING OVER TO ALL SNOW OVER WESTERN NORTH DAKOTA THIS MORNING AND THEN OVER NORTH CENTRAL NORTH DAKOTA BY AFTERNOON. THE COLDER AIR WILL REACH CENTRAL AND SOUTHERN NORTH DAKOTA BY THIS EVENING.

THE PRECIPITATION WILL BE IN THE FORM OF ALL SNOW TONIGHT THROUGH WEDNESDAY ACROSS ALL OF WESTERN AND CENTRAL NORTH DAKOTA.

THE COMBINATION OF THE VERY STRONG WINDS COINCIDING WITH PERSISTENT FALLING SNOW WILL RESULT IN VERY LOW VISIBILITIES.

THUS A BLIZZARD WARNING HAS BEEN ISSUED FOR ALL OF WESTERN AND CENTRAL NORTH DAKOTA WITH THE EXCEPTION OF SOUTHWEST NORTH DAKOTA.

ANTICIPATED SNOWFALL AMOUNTS WILL BE HIGHER FOR THOSE AREAS MAINLY NORTH AND EAST OF THE MISSOURI RIVER. BY WEDNESDAYAFTERNOON…THE HIGHEST SNOWFALL AMOUNTS WILL RESIDE OVER FAR NORTH CENTRAL NORTH DAKOTA ACROSS THE TURTLE MOUNTAINS WHERE 10 INCHES OR MORE OF SNOW IS POSSIBLE. FROM MINOT TO HARVEY AND INTO CARRINGTON EXPECT 4 TO 8 INCHES OF SNOW. 2 TO 4 INCHES OF SNOW IS POSSIBLE ALONG A LINE FROM WILLISTON TO GARRISON…BISMARCK TO JAMESTOWN AND SOUTH TO WISHEK TO ELLENDALE. 1 TO 3 INCHES OF SNOW IS LIKELY WEST OF THE MISSOURI RIVER.

Hopefully it stalls over the Red River and doesn’t arrive in Minnesota ’til Tuesday.

Caught this in the Jamestown newspaper from a couple of weeks ago.

Jamestown’s Bruce Berg scored a hole-in-one at Hillcrest Golf Course on Thursday.

Not bad for being ten days after his seventy-somethingth birthday.

Congrats, Dad!

Meanwhile back in my hometown of Jamestown, ND, they’re getting ready for more flooding, as the two reservoirs north of town fill to records.

Now, Jamestown is built at the confluence of the James River – the world’s longest non-commercially-navigable river – and Pipestem Creek.  Both rivers drain a huge basin in central North Dakota (and South Dakota as well) into the Missouri River.  Given their huge watershed, both rivers are fairly sensitive to fluctuations in water supply; in the eighties, during a very dry period, the James barely flowed.  On other other hand, before the James was dammed up in the ’50s, a wet season could leave Jamestown half-submerged. (The Pipestem also flooded, in 1969, leading to another dam in the seventies).  So in theory, Jamestown should be flood-proof – unless it’s been a very wet winter and both reservoirs are nearly full.

Suffice to say it’s been a very wet winter:

Jamestown and Stutsman County should prepare for the same combined releases as they did during the 2009 floods, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which changed its forecast for the James River and Pipestem Creek Friday.

The corps’ had originally estimated releases of 1,800 cubic feet per second. The new forecast recommends building emergency levees to handle combined releases of 3,200 cfs from Jamestown and Pipestem reser-voirs — the same level the two dams released at the peaks of the 2009 flood.

1,800 to 3,200 cubic feet per second.  Bear in mind the usual combined release from both dams is about 30 cfs.

According to the corps, the 0.5 to 1.5 inches of precipitation received in the James River Basin this week changed the situation and now reservoir pool levels could exceed 1997 levels, according to the “most likely” forecasts. The upper range of forecasts indicate reservoir pool levels could reach the same levels as in 2009, said Col. Robert J. Ruch, Omaha district commander for the corps.

It’s going to be another flood-prone year throughout the upper Midwest.

This is a closed-circuit message for the readers of this site who graduated from Jamestown (ND) High School in 1981.  The rest of you can rejoin this blog with the next post.  Thanks.

’81 people – the artist formerly known as Ruth Newman is starting work on the 30 year reunion.

If you’re a classmate, there’s a Facebook group, and/or an email address if you’d prefer.  I won’t post ’em here, but send me an email at “feedbackinthedark” which is at Yahoo dot com, and I’ll get you the info.

I’m already looking forward to it!

A high school classmate of mine who lives in the “exurbs” north of Fargo writes:

Just a note that if you’re interested in listening to local flood coverage in Fargo, below is a link.My daughter is out again sandbagging today.Many volunteers and homehowners are exhausted, many others still eager. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers.Thanks – [redacted]

Wish I could get up there.  I’m banking energy and vacation time in case Saint Paul and Newport flood again.

This one blows my mind; all you Jamestown natives who read the blog will get it.

On Tuesday, the city’s airport was closed due to flooding:

The airport is on the high ground.  The airport remains closed to fixed-wing planes today.

This, just in time for the blizzard, as the flooding in the lowlands of the James Valley (which I wrote about yesterday) kicks off.

And it is kicking off in earnest; apparently the “worst case” forecasts show both the Jametown and Pipestem dams rising to within a foot of their emergency spillways, even as the Army Corps of Engineers increases outflows from the dams to compensate for the recent rain and massive melt-off.  Over that level, and the dams’ll release directly into the rivers without any regulation, pushing the normally-sluggish (and already-swollen) James way over its normally-ample banks.  The Corps of Engineers is working on building temporary dikes, and  sandbagging is reportedly underway.

(Via It’s Good To Be In N.D. the only Jamestown-centered blog I can find)

A few weeks ago, I noted the 43rd anniversary of the greatest blizzard of my lifetime, the Great North Dakota Blizzard of ’66. 

Of course, all that snow had to go somewhere.

The Army Corps of Engineers had put up a dam on the James River – the longest un-navigable river in the world – in the fifties, which put a stop to the frequent floods that had plagued the city when that shallow, muddy river had gotten even the faintest surge of water.  But Pipestem Creek – which joins the James in Klaus Park, on the west side of Jamestown, under the Fort Seward bluffs, a place that was the city’s original reason to exist since its days as an Arikara camp since time immemorial – had no dam at the time.  And so the spring runoff pushed the Pipestem – and the James, south of the confluence – over their banks.

I was three at the time.  Dad spent a couple of nights sandbagging.  I remember worried conversations about the sandbag line protecting downtown (also our neighborhood, although our house was on higher ground) being more fragile than people would have liked.

And best of all?  I remember the National Guard putting its command post or supply dump or something across the street from our house, in the yard in front of Trinity Hospital.  Skids of sandbags, trucks full of sand, front-end loaders and, best of all, an amphibious DUKW “Duck” truck congregated there, with streams of guys coming and going at all hours. 

A few years later, the Corps finished a dam over the Pipestem.  And that was the last flood Jamestown saw.

Until now. The immense snowfall this year – more than the usually-dry state, more famous for wind than snow, has seen in a generation – is causing flooding even in Jamestown.

Of course, as a blizzard pounds the state, the flooding is everywhere.  An ice dam on the Missouri River, at its confluence with the Heart River, is  hbacking up water into Bismarck and Mandan.  The National Guard and, believe it or not, the Coast Guard tried to blow the jam open earlier today; we’ll wait to see what happens.  In the meantime, another huge ice jam north of the city threatens to let spill another deluge into Bismarck.

Of course, Fargo is frantically sandbagging against a crest that is  supposed to be higher than 1997’s epic flood; in Grand Forks, which was largely destroyed in ’97, the crest is expected to be competitive with the epic of 12 years ago.

All the while, a blizzard is thrashing the state.

There are times I miss the place.  I wish I could be there now.

…are greatly exaggerated:

The North Dakota Department of Transportation announced on Tuesday afternoon that the westbound lane of Interstate 94 from Mandan to Dickinson will remain closed tonight through Wednesday morning until the road can be cleared. Blowing and drifting snow with heavy accumulation will continue to create hazardous driving conditions in the westbound lane throughout the afternoon and evening.

At this time, the eastbound lane of Interstate 94 from Dickinson to Mandan will remain open but will remain under a No Travel Advisory, unless conditions continue to deteriorate. Motorists should be alert to changing conditions.

I love the smell of freeway closures in February.

Smells like…

…real winter!

I wrote last year for Veteran’s Day about the history of the North Dakota National Guard from the Spanish-American War through Iraq.

There was a bit of current history I’d missed; Jamestown’s National Guard company (renamed again – it’s now the 817th Engineer Company (Sapper), specializing in minefield clearance) has done its second tour in Iraq (the first was almost four years ago, as Company B/141st Combat Engineers). 

And I’m happy to relate…:

Soldiers of the 817th Engineer Company (Sapper) are tentatively scheduled to return from their one-year tour of duty in Iraq to Ft. McCoy, Wis., from June 1 to 8.

Nobody died in action this time; on its first tour, the 141st lost four killed in action.

Anyway – welcome home, from a long-time expat!

My dad doesn’t remember this – but I do.

We were driving down Sixth Street Southeast in Jamestown, heading toward the tracks.

Dad was listening to the radio (tuned in to KEYJ, naturally) in our old Mercury.  It was bright and clear outside.

And the announcer led with a story about “Martin Luther King” being shot.  It’d be absurd to say I knew what was going on – but I remember being familiar with the name.  He’d been on the TV a time or two.
And it seemed pretty obvious it was an important story.   I obviously didn’t know why – I was still probably ten years away from meeting my first black person.  Jamestown North Dakota was pretty white, back then.

More people remember.

First things first. My dad, Bruce Berg, has a book coming out in the next week or so. I think it’s called “Heard It Now And Then”, and it’s an anthology of his best guest editorials from his 25 year archive of material for North Dakota Public Radio.

And I was surprised to learn that it’s actually his fifth book. Common Grounds, his first, is probably the best-known; his history of Jamestown’s old ball park touches heavily on the glory years of North Dakota amateur baseball, when the league was a stop on the Negro League circuit. In one fabled story, a team of North Dakota all-stars – half of them Negro League stars like Satchel Paige and company, the other half locals – swept the Major League All-Stars, who were passing through by train on their way to Japan for an exhibition series. It’s all in there. Anyway, he’s had others; Writer’s Block, which is a sort of combination geneology and collection of peoples’ reminiscences about the city’s history a collection of his Jamestown Sun columns, and a novel (whose name eludes me, and is self-published so it doesn’t show up on Google).

So congrats, Dad!

In news that may or may not be related, Dad’s asked me (as well as my brother and sister, among others) to write and send him things we remember about the city. I’m not sure if this is for another book project, or just for his own edification – either way is just fine.

But, appearances notwithstanding, I don’t have a lot of time for writing stuff; my “me” time is usually from 5:00 to 6:15AM every morning.

So in the interest of simplifying my life and doing the job, I’m going to add them into the blog, here. They’ll be posted under the category “Five Ate For Owe Won”. If you’re not into Mitch Berg’s self-indulgent reminiscences (or if you’re just a joyless harpy), just scroll on down.

I do, however, invite Jamestown people (you know who you are) to leave comments, elaborations, or what-have-you. (I will most likely be much more ruthless than normal about excising off-topic or dumb comments).

So there you go!