July 12, 2001

Plains Folk: Traveling Highway 81

Tom Isern, Professor of History
North Dakota State University

This new book by Jerry Wilson, "American Artery: A Pan American Journey" (published by South Dakota Magazine and Nebraska Life Magazine) is a little disappointing. As the title indicates, it’s what used to be called a travel narrative and these days is often called a road book. The subject is Highway 81, the forerunner of Interstate 29.

I read much of it while making a long drive up the road that is its subject, and as I read, I thought about why the book was unsatisfying. Then I wondered, too, whether I should write about a book that was a disappointment, until I realized that the shortcomings of a book may signify shortcomings of thought and attitude in our part of the country, these American plains, and may be worth noting.

Here are some admissions of bias at the outset. I have lived and worked and traveled a lot on old 81. Currently I reside just about right on it in West Fargo, N.D., and frequently choose to travel it, rather than I-29, when going north or south. In what seems now like a previous life I worked my way through college pumping gas (for as low as 11.9 cents a gallon) at a venerable service station on 81's route through Lindsborg, Kan. (subsequently bypassed by the interstate). I have favorite watering holes on 81 from Texas to Manitoba. How can a book about such a mother road take a wrong turn?

First, there’s the matter of attitude. Wilson infuses the work with a gauzy we-are-the-world rhetoric rooted in pop ecology and social protest. I’m prairie green and a cultural liberal myself, and so if his rhetoric grates on me, then you can figure it’s a little too heavy-handed.

Travel narratives are organized around some sort of quest. The narrator is looking for something, something important to him. Then he returns to tell what he found, and how it has changed him. Wilson says he is looking for "the soul of the continent" and "the heartbeat of America." He returns to announce, "Never again can I forget that my residence is Planet Earth, that I am brother of all the men and women"--you get the idea. It’s attitude. I’m not just a prairie boy, I am the world.

Second, there’s the issue of depth, or lack of it. Starting in Winnipeg, the author races south to Panama in a 1980 Omni. If you’re doing a state a day, you miss a lot, and what you get may be half-baked.

The section on North Dakota is illustrative. It seems the writer got all his background information from an informant in Grand Forks, and that collaboration produced an amazing assemblage of misinformation. All right, it’s a pet peeve of mine that people in the Flickertail State cannot identify a flickertail gopher, but this section also tells us that German immigrants Americanized faster than Norwegians, that livestock can’t live here because it’s too cold, that Sioux peoples in the state don’t object to the Fighting Sioux logo, and of course, that North Dakotans are nicer than people in, say, Texas.

The chapter on Kansas works Dorothy and Oz into the first sentence.

Oh, the book has its moments. The sketches of bois-d’-arc furniture maker Bud Hanzlick (in Kansas), of the inscrutable Snake (on Monument Hill,Oklahoma), and of Branch Davidian Amo Bishop Roden (at the compound site in Texas) are great. They show how good things can be if you slow down, listen, and treat people and places with wry affection. Which is good advice for all of us.

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Source: Tom Isern, (701) 799-2941, tom@plainsfolk.com 
Editor: Gary Moran, (701) 231-7865, gmoran@ndsuext.nodak.edu 

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