The One Place I Was Happy

 

The "World's Largest Buffalo" is impossible to miss, even at night, as you travel Interstate 94 through Jamestown, North Dakota

A road sign flashed by us in the middle of an October night in North Dakota. It was 1957 and we were traveling west to Montana for my dad’s annual deer hunting trip with his uncle. The sign I saw said “James River” and seconds later, on the same side of the road, was a giant statue of an American bison referred to by the city father’s as “The World’s Largest Buffalo.”

This was my instantaneous introduction to Jamestown, North Dakota, that with 17,000 residents, was the fifth largest city in the Peace Garden State. Among its many claims to fame, Jamestown is the home of the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center which, in my biased opinion, was the finest wildlife research center in the world.

 

Northern Prairie was a dream duty station for anyone who loves wildlife

At six years old, thanks to a walk in the forest with my grandfather, I knew that I wanted to be a biologist when I grew up. At nine years old, a female mallard I shot on the Brill River in Barron County Wisconsin, carried a band on her leg. I sent the band to the address on it, and several months later a “Certificate of Appreciation” arrived from the US Fish and Wildlife Service informing me where, when and by whom the female mallard had been banded. It occurred to me that if there was an organization putting bands on bird legs I would want to work for that organization. At 9 years old my goal became the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

Throughout graduate school I sat in the library reading volume after volume of the Journal of Wildlife Management (later I called it the Journal of Metaphysical Wildlife). The Journal was filled with papers written by people named Cowardin and Johnson and Kantrud and Stewart and Lokemoen and Duebbert and others. They were each stationed at the Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center in Jamestown, North Dakota – the very same city with the world’s largest buffalo. One night in the library I made it a goal to be a biologist at Northern Prairie.

Summer 1976 with a brand-new Master’s Degree I was working for $3.00 an hour with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. A car driven by my supervisor Bruce Moss found me counting ducks at East Twin Lake in St. Croix County. Once the car stopped, David L. Trauger, the bombastic and egotistical Deputy Director of Northern Prairie rolled out of the car and began trying to awe us with his vast knowledge of everything. Something I said or did caught Dave's attention and two years later, when I was now a wildlife biologist with the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Minneapolis, Trauger brought me to Northern Prairie on loan for the summer.

My task was to work with world-famous wildlife biologist Harold Kantrud on an extensive research project he was conducting in North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, and Montana to develop a grassland classification system based on breeding bird abundance. For two months Hal and I traveled together counting birds and recording plant species over the heart of the Northern Great Plains. In mid-July 1978 when my detail to Northern Prairie was complete I didn’t want to leave. As Jimmy Buffett sings in a song about Key West, Florida, “I have found me a home.”

Later that summer, through the machinations of how government works, a position fitting my exact expertise became available at Northern Prairie and not by surprise I was selected.

January 20, 1979, with my Chesapeake Bay Retriever seated next to me in a U-Haul, and my then-wife and 2-year-old daughter leading the way in our Ford Escort, we left Hudson, Wisconsin, on the 7-hour drive to Jamestown. When we arrived in the late afternoon, the high temperature for the day was -24 degrees F. It was an auspicious start to a new chapter in my life.

After two weeks in the Ramada Inn, we found and purchased a home at 1410 11^th Street Southeast, not far from the James River sign I had seen in 1957. My goal of being stationed at Northern Prairie was complete.

Over the next four years I conducted research on sandhill cranes in Nebraska, and breeding birds along the Platte River. We did a study of bird abundance and diversity that helped bring a proposed damn on the Pembina River to its deathbed. Another study examined the abundance of diversity of breeding songbird using unique woody habitats in western North Dakota that were scheduled to be consumed by coal production.  Probably my most valuable contribution was a study of the behavior and mortality of birds at powerlines in central North Dakota. Despite the study area, the research had implications for protecting birds from collisions with man-made structures from  Switzerland, to Fairbanks, Alaska.

When I wasn’t working we were out exploring. Another daughter arrived in June 1980 and 6 weeks after her birth we were on a train to Churchill Manitoba in Canada’s Arctic. A year later we were camping in southeast Arizona. There were trips to the Turtle Mountains and to Teddy Roosevelt National Park and not-often-enough returns to Wisconsin. Mid-September brought the beginning of hunting season. First it was mourning doves and then sharp-tailed grouse and on October 1, ducks and geese became fair game. My Chesapeake Bay Retriever was ecstatic because nearly every day he was tromping across a prairie or swimming in freezing water retrieving something we had harvested. It was impossible to be happier than I was in Jamestown, North Dakota.

There are many things to hunt in North Dakota. None, however, was finer than Sharp-tailed Grouse

It was an idyllic life. I was happy as the proverbial clam then on March 5, 1983 it all came crashing down. Two months to the day after “it” happened a Stutsman County Sheriff Deputy showed up at Northern Prairie and in front of all my colleagues served me with divorce papers. Four months later we sat in the divorce court in the Stutsman County Courthouse where I learned firsthand how much “justice” there is in the justice system.

To say I was rudderless was an understatement. Because of new living arrangements I had to take my Chesapeake Bay Retriever back to my parents farm in Wisconsin and leave him there. I still dream about that dog every week. Not only had I lost a family but I lost my best friend, a curly-haired dog who lived to hunt.

Jamestown, North Dakota, with its 17,000 people, was too small a town to live in without running into a former wife who took great pleasure in reminding me often that we were no longer married. Thanks once again to bombastic David L. Trauger, now director of the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center in Laurel, Maryland, I transferred from Jamestown to a field station of Patuxent in Athens, Georgia.  There for 3 years I spent my summers in northern Michigan and my winters in the Bahamas and Turks and Caicos Islands studying Kirtland’s Warbler.  After three years of nearly constant travel (it was more running away than travel) I moved to Grand Island Nebraska, the Florida Keys, Ventura, California, and eventually Washington DC. 

None of those places were ever where I wanted to be. None of them were ever “home.”  I lived in many houses but not one of them has been home.  My home was on the pass at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge in North Dakota with my daughters watching ducks and geese pass 50 feet over our heads. Home was the forest of McElroy Park along the James River dripping with warblers in the middle of May, home was a near collision with a startled moose in the Pembina River valley, and home was a camping trip to the Turtle Mountains.

Since leaving my home on the prairie, the only other place I have been happy is at Barrow, Alaska, at 71 degrees North latitude, on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. There I am on my own, counting birds, looking for polar bears and 500 miles away from the nearest road. The habitat, when the snow finally melts in June, looks surprisingly similar to the Missouri Coteau of North Dakota.  As with North Dakota, those Arctic wetlands are teeming with birds. The sad thing about Barrow is that I am only there for a few days and then have to leave.

 

Palustrine emergent wetlands like this one are almost too numerous to count at Barrow Alaska.  Their abundance reminds me of North Dakota's Missouri Coteau 45 years ago

Dorothy, in the “Wizard of Oz” transported herself to where she was happy by clicking the heels of her ruby slippers and saying “There’s no place like home” until she was home. I don’t have that luxury and quite honestly after living under a Florida palm tree for 16 years I could never live in North Dakota again.  However, just like wolves and fishers in northern Wisconsin I may never see one, but a glimmer of joy overcomes me when I remember that the North Dakota I loved was once there providing me with happiness.