Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy

Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy

Published by the University of Minnesota Press, April 2009

Available: Zandbroz, Barnes and Noble, Amazon

Readings: Zandbroz, April 16, 6:30 pm

Fargo Library, April 29, 7:00 pm

A Witness on the Home Front

 

 

 

The pace and tone of the narrative in “Westhope: Life as a Former Farm Boy” matches the overall tempo and character of farm life, with its acts of sowing and reaping, of birth and re-birth, and in hard times, of foreclosure and moving elsewhere.

 

 

It may be difficult for texting, Googling, video-game playing, and other techno-saturated readers to slow down to Hulse’s natural storytelling rhythm. But for those willing to move into Hulse’s relaxed and insightful realm, “Westhope” may prove to be an antidote to a world that seems, at times, to demote old-style values such as: a day’s pay for hard day’s work, the neighbor helping neighbor attitude, or the idea that the soul can be refreshed by the solace nature offers. There is nothing like the telling of a compelling farm and small town story to introduce the reader to possibilities of existence outside of frenzied postmodern parameters.

 

For those who have lived close to the land, they will recognize the truths Hulse tells. For those without this intimate knowledge, his story, as the son of multi-generational farmers—men who seemingly revered the hardscrabble life of family farming—is instructive, as is Hulse’s appraisal of economic practices that have led to the destruction of small-town main street and the depopulation of the Plains.

 

 

To put it simply: Hulse knows where family values and food come from; he doesn’t chide those who understand the importance of character building; he understands the labor intensive process of crop production; and he understands the purity of character that such envrions can create in its community members, along with the impurity of character that confounds the mix. He has first-hand knowledge of the independence of mind that characterizes Dakota-made individuals, and he tells their stories with the dignity and grace they deserve. He acknowledges that his “good fight is for the survival of small farms and rural communities.” His hope is that his book “speaks well of small town life.” Assuredly, it does.

 

Hulse references writer Kathleen Norris, author of “Dakota: A Spiritual Geography,” as he presents his subtle yet often straight forward economic and social arguments. Both writers analyze forces at work in rural life, but Hulse’s overall observations ring somewhat more true to the Dakota spirit and mystique than Norris’s, who after returning to South Dakota from New York in the 1970s became something of a tireless critic of small towns and rural folk, suggesting, in part, that their insularity had largely negative consequences.

 

 

Hulse makes no such harsh judgments. I believe this is because his childhood love of prairie people and their “place” soundly inform his adult respect for (and understanding of) his Westhope compatriots. He doesn’t grumble much about their shortcomings since, among them, he experienced “the good life.”

 

Memorable images from Hulse’s childhood forays on Westhope’s Main Street include a Saturday night treat: a bottle of “chocolate-flavored Coke with some toasted cashews tossed in.” He describes playing hide and seek using the lilac bush by the Masonic Temple as an undercover spot, which was soon to become “another hideaway where juveniles could smoke (and occasionally share with me) their Salems and Winstons and Old Golds.”

 

 

Before television, this Main Street was abuzz with farm families who made their weekly trek into Westhope to socialize, but after the ubiquitous box made its appearance, “many didn’t feel the need to visit one another as much, even though cars made visiting easier than in the horse-and-buggy or horse-and-sleigh days.”

 

 

As Hulse vividly denotes the mom and pop businesses disappearing on Westhope’s Main Street, his observations are tinged with sadness. Yet, he is hopeful that a revitalization of rural life is possible, and luckily, for anyone interested, he offers a series of prescriptives.

 

Written in a series of memoir-style essays, some intensely personal, others more historical and analytical, the reader is introduced to a North Dakota tuberculosis sanitarium, where several Hulse family members were treated. San Haven was “a fortress” that “oozed eeriness: an institutional complex with buildings of brick, fieldstone, or stucco, a water tower, and evergreens, visible for perhaps ten miles.”

 

 

The writing in this section is poignant: “Guilty skeleton-ghosts search among the rubble of sad memories at the San. Graceful rainbows appear other places, other times.” One of the memories is the eleven-year institutional isolation of a Hulse uncle whose wife “had a child about half the way through his hospitalization” though there was “no conjugal contact.” We witness his pain and the pain of those he loved as he underwent “grisly” procedures including the “removal of ribs, a few at a time in the hope that this surgery could collapse infected portions of a lung and thereby halt the spread of TB.”

 

In the section “Rocks Taking Root,” he describes, after living in Fargo for many years, his search for “connectedness” to his homesteading great-great grandfather. A walk down a prairie trail near the North Dakota/Canadian border yields this: “Suddenly, I saw two large, brown eyes, and equally oversized ears. A fawn had risen from its grassy-weedy resting place and was watching me. Later, I compared my experience to that of Adam’s—me, attempting to name what I saw. The face of innocence? Of peacefulness? Or was it the face of conscience asking me why I’d been away so long?” Hulse uses nature as metaphor, connecting the natural world to questions of ultimate human concern.

 

Additional topics discussed amid the discerning narrative include: populism, Cargill’s monopolistic market influence, Ojibwe and Irish mythology, transgenic crop varieties, and Avon products. Leaving the complexity of multiple topics aside, “Westhope” is essentially a story about a son whose memories of his mother, father, ancestors, and friends are forged during a life of wandering away and returning, of rebellion and reconciliation, of remembering and forgetting, and most of all, of loving and forgiving.