Dakota Beacon

“If only we had done that” -- Herald economist Ralph Kingsbury says that is what Minnesotans are saying about thrifty ND taxpayers who put oil tax receipts away for a rainy day.  Kingsbury wagged his finger at Minnesota: “Living on the come has never worked before; why expect it to work now?”

Minnesotans may be under too much strain.  Thunder Cloud Jose Rodriguez bit the mayor of Hibbing while trying to rob him.

“We have a sort of ‘banana republic’ in part of our state that won’t allow the people to vote” --  the Spirit Lake Sioux were referring to the Standing Rock tribal council.  The Spirit Lake tribe wants UND to retain the Fighting Sioux nickname and logo.  So much so, they are seeking a legal injunction to prevent retirement of the name; they are also contemplating a ballot initiative to allow a statewide vote on the issue -- a backdoor way of giving the Standing Rock members a chance to vote.  You thought the nickname was dead, right.  Well, maybe not.

I’m clearly in the wrong generation.  I thought Black Eyed Peas were a deli item, and I didn’t know who Fergie was.  Now, I know better -- the Peas are a hip hop group and Fergie (Stacy Ferguson) is their singer.  She is married to actor and Minot native Josh Duhamel.  Bottom line: the Peas flood relief concert in Minot drew 16,000 fans and was expected to raise $1.5 to $2 million.  There never has and may never be another event quite like that in Minot.

I was planning to wait until year-end to select the most muddled ND editorial of the year, but the wait won’t be necessary, a September Forum editorial is already the clear winner.  The editorial is about a Plains Art Museum festival featuring “street art” -- little else is clear.  The Forum concluded the PAM “tarnishes the freedom of a rebel art form” which “needs to be free, daring and driven by the counterculture,” not confined to rules devised by a museum.  We learn street art should respect property rights, but needs a “sense of freedom.”  What that might be was left for another day.

A few years ago, western ND people would have jumped at school bus driver jobs paying $13 to $19 an hour.  Not now, when commercial drivers earn $60-80,000 a year.  It’s not just the bus pay that’s discouraging -- driving conditions have never been worse.  Roads are crowded, damaged and constantly in reconstruction.  In some areas, buses are only able to maintain schedules by having special pilot cars lead them through construction zones.

They look like hugely oversized mobile homes -- they can be180 feet long, perhaps 25 feet wide -- dozens of them spread over many acres.  You are looking at a “man camp.”  A particular camp can have 500 residents.  They are part of the changing complexion of western ND described in “MAN CAMP: Oil play life in N.D. not for everyone,” an article by a Martha Irvine, AP National Writer.  She creates a dreary picture of the dangerous, lonely lives of men working in the oil patch.  Most are from states where jobs are scarce -- often they are men maintaining families elsewhere and trying to clear up debts.  

Another article describes the death of two young Texans in a head-on crash north of Dickinson; another the death of a Kansas man who rolled a water tanker, yet another is about the sentencing of a Colorado truck driver for a road rage incident on the Ft. Berthold Reservation.  The oil boom brings excitement and wealth for some, but banal lives for others.

Oil patch Infrastructure grows: Tribune writer Lauren Donovan described oil unit train loadout facilities under development in Fryburg, Dickinson and Zap.  Unit trains have 110 cars that can be loaded and moved out within 12 hours.  They are favored by railroads because they allow extremely high train utilization.  Such trains move grain and coal in ND, but are now being extended to oil.  Loadout facilities are large investments, for example, the terminal in Fryburg (25 miles west of Dickinson) is estimated to cost $40 million and provide 25 fulltime jobs.  At Belfield, just north of Fryburg, a Denver oil company is constructing a $90 million natural gas plant.

Eva Scott was a popular 15-year-old Halliday ranch girl who rode horses since she was three. She already won many rodeo awards and was saving money for college.  Eva was kicked by a horse she was breaking for a neighbor, a freak accident which started a tragic sequence of events leading to her death from a blood clot.  The detail of the tragic story will leave you with wet eyes.  But there was something else to take from the Dickinson Press story -- something to celebrate.  

We live in a coddled world with rulemakers who solemnly micromanage our lives.  But in Halliday, a young girl joyfully, fearlessly tackled an unbroken horse.  Life has risks, this outcome was sad, but the picture of a cowgirl courageously doing something she loved is not.  She was thrown from a horse and got back on.  Her parents see it too, she was buried in Marshall and they said, “It’s a very wide open, peaceful place and that’s what she liked.”

Columnist Lloyd Omdahl usually furnishes an insider’s view on ND politics.  However, a recent column lamented the lost summer of 2011.  Farmers, campers and gardeners -- they all hated the cold spring and rainy summer.  Omdahl’s tomatoes died, one planting after another.  But he said there was a shining exception, cucumbers; he deemed it “the year of the cucumber.”

Five Fargo-Moorhead architects were asked to describe the local architectural style.  Conclusion: there isn’t a local style.  They agreed that local design was traditional, pragmatic and conservative -- dictated more by climate, which “can be like Texas in the summer and Alaska in the winter,” and resulting building costs.  One architect said F-M reflected trends in other areas, only “we’re just about 10 years delayed.  We can only take people as far as they want to go.”

Stock up on pasta -- prices are rising.  The main ingredient in pasta is durum wheat and ND is the nation’s largest producer, but this year’s crop will be only 40 percent of normal.  ND Ag Commissioner Doug Goehring says flooded durum fields will cause a global ripple.

DAKTOIDS: “That’s a lot of hours in the barn” --  reaction from a colleague when former South Dakota farm kid Chad Greenway received a $41 million contract with the Minnesota Vikings . . . Grace Her Many Horses is Rosebud Sioux Tribal Police Chief and has a master’s degree in sociology from SD State.  How is the degree relevant to her job?  In a two-week period, her office responded to three suicides and 17 attempts . . . The maternity center at the new Jamestown Medical Center sweeps central ND -- on Labor Day weekend, babies born had homes in Carrington, New Rockford, Ellendale and Lehr, as well as Jamestown.