Plains Folk

So I think the main reason my friends in McIntosh County invited me down to speak at their chokecherry festival this year was that a few years ago, I wrote a little ballad called “The Chokecherry Song.”

I’ve been describing the community culture of berry-picking that emerged during the 1880s, focusing first on juneberries and then on chokecherries. Wagon caravans carried townsfolk, particularly young people, into the countryside to pick. Every community had its known thickets that were transformed into ritual places; press reports referred to them with affectionate familiarity.

Our unfortunately named native black charry, the chokecherry, has become a festive feature of life on the northern plains. In recent years the Grafton Farmers Market and the McIntosh County Heritage Center have initiated folk festivals focusing on these black pearls; I’m on my way soon to speak at the 2nd Annual Chokecherry Festival in Ashley. Even though my personal crop, generally so dependable, is meager in this parched summer.

There’s a sense across the country that we have made a dog’s breakfast of the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of American independence. I don’t wish to sugar-coat past developments, but I remember 1976 pretty well—perhaps because although my education at a certain land grant university had taught me a thoughtful appreciation for sour mash whiskey, my head was happily not muddled by more destructive indulgences.

Not a native of the Flickertail State, nevertheless, in the course of decades, I have acquired a complex of defensive sensitivities about it. Phrases like “Flyover Country” and “Buffalo Commons” stir the little hairs on the back of my neck. I like to think this is because they are examples of sloppy thinking, and not because I am touchy, but self-delusion is a known part of the complex I am describing.