The Bismarck Tribune
09-06-06
Love song to family and dairy farm
Debra Marquart's book, "The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in The Middle
of Nowhere," is several kinds of books rolled into one, which she describes as
"byomythography." It's the autobiography of the life of an associate
professor of English at Iowa State University, coordinator of the creative
writing program there, a musician, a published poet and author.
It is also the astonishingly candid story of Marquart's growing-up years,
rebellious, driven and filled with unresolved issues with her parents. The
youngest of five children, she grew up on a dairy farm near Napoleon, N.D., a
farm her great-grandfather, an immigrant from Russia, had homesteaded.
If I were from Napoleon, I would read this book filled with nervous anxiety, lest
she touch a nerve too close to the bone, dig up some buried memory best left
forgotten and trigger my defensive mode, always ready to surface.
I would hope, however, that any North Dakotan who lucked out and found this
book would appreciate what she is really saying about us, about our state, about
the choices we have made or perhaps simply drifted into or were drafted into by
family tradition.
My only dispute with the author is her one small paragraph about North Dakota's
climate, which she describes as "very little spring, even less fall. Three blistering
months of summer packed between eight bitter months of winter." That's the stuff
big city reporters write about us, not a native who must sometimes have basked
in long, warm days in May, sunny Septembers and crisp Octobers before she
shook the dust of North Dakota out of her jeans.
She is unflinchingly honest about her life, and frequently she is rueful for the pain
she undoubtedly caused her parents. After all, she quit college to travel with a
series of bands ranging from country-western to hard rock, leading a kind of life
that can only have caused acute anxiety bordering on despair to her
hardworking, church-going, frugal parents. For long periods of time, she didn't
bother to call and let them know where and how she was.
Her relationship with her father threads its way through the entire book, and she
said in an interview that it was his death that made her put together this book,
much of which has been published in previous pieces in small magazines.
At one of the truly down-and-out phases of her life, she is hiding in a closet from
the incessant clamor of her landlord, to whom she owes several months' rent.
Her car has broken down, and she is out of a job.
Her father shows up unannounced and systematically arranges for her car repair,
fills her freezer and refrigerator with food and stuffs $200 in her hand as he says
goodbye without a word of criticism, only the admonition, "Don't tell your mother."
The hurt goes both ways. She has had three books published and has not heard
a word from her family about them. In an interview for an Iowa State University
publication, she said about this book: "I asked my mother to read the whole book
before she forms an opinion. If she does that, I think she'll see it's a long love
song to my family and to the place where I grew up."
How hard the whole family worked, all day, every day is inescapably transparent.
They raised wheat, flax, oats, barley and alfalfa. In addition, they sold chickens,
eggs, cream and livestock. They had a large vegetable garden and milked up to
75 Holstein cows.
"Dairy farming is as close as one can come to slavery and still be a technically
free person," she says, pointing out that "dairy farmers can never travel to any
destination from which they cannot return by five o'clock the same day."
While she thought of the people she knew as "austere, pragmatic, hard-working
people," she later realized that "we were hopeless romantics when it came to
land - the worst sort of high-stakes gamblers, betting the farm and all our lives
every day when we went into the fields."
Anyone who ever grew up on a North Dakota farm will recognize their own lives
somewhere in this book, and all of us should come away with a clearer
understanding of why North Dakotans are admired out in that bigger world for our
work ethic.
That the book is not merely of special interest to North Dakotans is evident by the
praise heaped on it by the likes of the New York Times Book Review and other
publications, including its selection by the fashion magazine Elle as its "Must
Read" for August, 2006.
As for me, I plan to put it on my "Must Read Again" list.
(Betty Mills, of Bismarck, is a freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate
Wednesdays.)