The Drive to Arizona

Thursday, October 17, 2013: Day One...

The drive from Bloomington, Minnesota to Kadoka, South Dakota took me southwest along U. S. Highway 169 until I linked up with Interstate 90 westbound.  I stopped for mug of dark roast at River Rock Coffee in Saint Peter, where Cassandra attended school at Gustavus Adolphus College.  While doing so I passed Treat Site History Center that Cassie and I promised ourselves we'd visit some day while she was attending school.  We have yet to do so...  But for the marketing efforts of Wall Drug and various other tourist traps along the way there would be precious little to look at other than 380 miles of rolling prairie.  The picture above is of a rise covered with a variety of iron sculptures.  Uh...thanks.  I called it day when I reached Kodoka.  We stayed there in July of 1999 while I rode with my brother Steve for two days of his American Lung Association Big Ride from Seattle, Washington to Washington, DC.  It has not changed much.  By the way, if the picture on the Kadoka website reminds you of scenes from Paul Verhoeven's 1997 classic Starship Troopers, that's because the movie was filmed in the area.  

Where in the World is Eclectic Breakfast?

Waldo is right here...

At Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Prescott, Arizona, USA.

Michael Brady, MA, CPP
Director of Campus Safety & Security
Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University
3700 Willow Creek Road
Prescott, AZ 86301
928-777-3333 dispatch
928-777-3738 desk
928-442-6867 cell
bradym3@erau.edu 

How I got here and what I saw on the road between Minneapolis and Prescott will be detailed in a series of future posts.  In the mean time I still have unpacking to do...

Another Guest Post At The Eclectic Breakfast

My father, Larry Brady, aged 79 years, is very fond of telling stories...

My grandfather Owen Brady and my aunt Patricia one cold North Dakota day the 1930s

For Christmas of 2012 he made a gift to the family of these memories from his early life in North Dakota.

One of the thoughts that has been floating through my head as snow arrived in Minnesota was the way children were taken to school in those days.  I was too young to go to school but I do remember riding with our dad in a kind of shed on skis, with a little stove to keep everyone warm.  I really don't remember going to school as much as the ride home.  I think I remember him talking about next year when I would be in school.

Another memory that keeps coming back is about a time Mom and Dad left my sisters on the farm to take care of my younger brother Jimmy while I got to go to Devils Lake with them.  We didn't leave Devils Lake until after dark.  I got to sit on front with them.  Our mom was unhappy about something and Dad was trying to cheer her up - he was very happy about something else.  When we got home Dad had to go out to the barn to milk the cows and do the chores.  They had bought me a pair of white farmers gloves in town.  Mom let me wear them as I went out to the barn to help with chores.  Being it was dark I ran into the barbwire fence and got blood on my new gloves.  I can remember crying a lot, not because of the scratches but because I got blood all over my new "farmers gloves."

The last memory on the farm was when Dad was so sick he couldn't get out of bed.  There was a snowstorm but Mom thought she should call someone to come to the farm to get Dad to a doctor.  Dad said not to that.  Harvey Rice, the mailman, would be along any minute and eh would get the help that was needed.  Dad was taken by sleigh to the closest train station to be transported to the Veterans Hospital in Fargo.  I was told they had to put my Mom and Dad in the mail car.  It was heated. But he could not be in the regular part of the train because they didn't know why he was so sick.  That all happened during the winter of 1939-40, which started a whole new life for all of us in the little town of Crary.

Jimmy and I loved Crary; our sisters didn't feel the same way.  I didn't mean for this to end on such a dark note...but that's the way memories go.

Days of War, Nights of Love

I feel their pain but I cannot commit to joining them where they are...

This very special and challenging book was a gift from my dear friend David, whose life much more closely adheres to the philosophy championed in this earnest volume.  Days of War, Nights of Love: Crimethink For Beginners by CrimethInc is like reading about a different species; an uncannily familiar species we might admire despite its awkward alien-ness.  Its angry anarchic, rejectionist, contrarian prose exhorts us to an garbage-grubbing interstitial life at the margins subsisting on the leftovers and leavings of modern, capitalist, industrial society.  Were we all able to return to the egalitarian, communitarian, small group societies the authors aspire to we would find ourselves in a hunter-gatherer economy with no technology more sophisticated than "stone knives and bear skins."  Call me bourgeois, but I kinda like the internet, iron, penicillin, and beverages extracted from coffee beans grown on other continents. Still, we should endeavor to understand and learn from the authors' pain, ennui, and weirdly compelling aspirations.  They're not wrong...exactly...they're just 10,000 years too late to put up or shut up.  Damn you, agriculture, Bronze Age, and civilization!

The Terror: A Novel

By Dan Simmons, master storyteller...

Anyone who has read Dan Simmons' classic Hyperion Cantos, or his more recent Ilium and Olympos will tell you this gifted author knows how to spin a yarn that is completely realized, utterly uncanny, and amazingly literary.  Of all Simmons' writing talents the one I enjoy the most is the way he draws deeply upon classic, modern, and popular literature, culture, and traditions to inform his story.  In the Hyperion Cantos he called upon Roman Catholicism, medieval history, and The Wizard of Oz to color his canvas.  In Olympos and Ilium a future earth is shaped by the Homeric epics and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In The Terror: A Novel, Simmons uses the history of the ill-fated Franklin Expedition of 1845 as his stalking horse.  The story of the Sir Franklin’s lost expedition to find the fabled Northwest Passage is horrifying enough, but to the crushing ice, bitter cold, endless night, numbing hopelessness, privation, want, exposure, the stench of scurvy, gangrene, and suppuration that actually occurred, Simmons adds A Monster stalking the ice intent on their destruction.  Simmons summons Edgar Allan Poe to make scenes of shattered bone, torn off limbs, and freezing sprays of blood magically surreal.  To call it Master and Commander Meets The Thing would be glib, but such a description might get you into the ballpark visually.  This wickedly clever mash-up of historical fiction, arctic exploration during the age of sail, and horror chilled me instantly and left me so for all 766 pages.

The Terror is one of those novels you can't quit reading for fear the story will leave you behind. I knew the Franklin Expedition ended badly but loved being dragged into Simmons' even more hopeless version.  I’m glad I did not read it when it was first published in 2007.  Those were especially dark days in our house and this horror story would have made the gloom even worse.  Five years on I didn’t want this carefully crafted world to end, leaving me to find my own way back to a safe and slightly banal reality.

In The Terror, Simmons is a gory-minded storyteller with a heart made of grinding shards of ice.  Not for the squeamish, but I loved every minute of it.  The Terror is bloody, brilliant, and bloody brilliant.