The “Second crest” never came…no rain for two weeks, so river crest predictions kept dropping until, in fact, it would never get about 35’. I spent a few hours volunteering to sandbag a colleague’s at 3^rd St. S. in Moorhead but, as it turned out, they didn’t need it. To get to the house I had to weave around 6’ high clay piles, “contingency dikes” laid in the middle of streets. If the primary dike failed, some houses would be flooded, but the street dikes would protect the rest of the neighborhoods.

So in the end, Fargo-Moorhead only received vague damage. Despite the world’s media in town filming the dike and helicopter in hopes, I suppose, that the place would be swamped and they cold rubberneck about the poor folk in Fargo. But this is not Katrina—lots of time to get away—and the folks here are a lot more solid than the flaky folks from New Orleans who, instead of maybe trying to help, hid in their attics, raced to the sports arena or looted empty businesses while blaming the government.

Well, okay, different kind of disaster. But while Fargo may be bland, and its people staid, they don’t get all worked up over natural disasters, either. Heck, we are living in a sort of natural disaster in the Upper Midwest.

So university professors are scrambling to make up two missed weeks—Valley City State, sewer backup city, canceled the semester and will continue on-line only. It’s been a wet year.

—April 19, 2009, Fargo

The earliest spring I can remember. Trees are beginning to leaf. Daffodils blooming.

No snow for weeks; has not been below freezing for days. Almost had a bad flood, but a dry spring left it to pass by with only a “major flood,” little damage—because everything that could be damaged by a “major flood” has long been knocked down or fallen down.

Tonight was my aerobics class, but no one showed. It’s been like that on Fridays. The Wednesday class is better, usually, 7 this Wed. But aerobics is a bit out of style nowadays. Exercise is very trendy. Right now what’s hot is running, particularly endurance running. The Fargo Marathon has become an enormous hit, all kinds of ordinary folk out there training.

But I think one reason aerobics has taken a dive in popularity is because too many people were injured dong it long-term, mostly knees or stress fractures. The same thing is bound to happen to the runners—much more a physically pounding activity than aerobics. Inside, “Body Pump,” or its generic equivalent, is packing them in. This is 45-min.-1 hr. of endurance style weights-lifting. I went to one class, to see how it was like. It was pretty hard, not very aerobic. I expected to be stiff the next day, but was not, suggesting to me it was too high in reps quickly executed, and so not a great muscle builder. But it’s popular.

—April 16, 2010, Fargo

I’ve been whipping out “fact sheets” the last couple days. These are the informational sheets about each major, mailed out to inquiring high school students. I did the first set in ’84-’85. We’re updating them based on questionnaires which most dep’t. chairs didn’t bother to return. Others questioned the questions. I admit some of the questions were stupid and poorly put, but that’s what happens when you have 3 people working on one project with no one clearly in control of the final project. If I could have handled the thing alone, it would have been right. At least I didn’t have to put my name on it. I have to write all the fact sheets in longhand, first, then go out looking for a computer to type them on, very annoying, but I’m used to it.

It’s lucky I have a job. Apparently the dean, my pal, questioned Jude last week about her paying me to work there, but she noted that someone has to do the work, and they’d never find anyone else of my abilities for minimum wage. Isn’t that the truth. All said, I can’t think of a time when I’ve actually been overpaid for anything! Well, maybe a few of those rows of sugarbeets I hoed!

I’m attracted to Coleen, who comes from Thief River Falls and is a senor finance major…a mere, ok, 14 years younger than me at least. It’s not exactly my fault. Most of the women I meet working at MSU come in 3 categories: very young, married, or way too old. The difference between now and a few years ago is that at least now I make no big efforts anymore with the undergraduates, as I think it’s the very, very rare instance that anything could become of it. When I was 30, 31, 32, though, there was at least some reasonable possibility, though it never happened then either. Of course, it didn’t happen much when I myself was 17, 18, 19…etc. But we’ve plowed that ground before.

It looks as though I’ve found someone interested in canoeing the Boundary Waters this summer…. Mark seems up for it, and he’s experienced. This will be the first time in about 4 years that I’ve camped at all, much longer for canoeing. I believe the last canoe camping trip I took was about 1982. That was with Alex, before we fell out with each other (he started driving me nuts). I might have went to the Crow Wing once with Ann after that. (I wonder what happened to her? Case of mismatched personalities, that!) But nothing since. Would be nice to try the typical Minnesota wilderness experience again. Maybe I can do a story for the [Moorhead] Independent.

—April 15, 1991, Moorhead, MN

Yesterday I was able to watch the landing of the first “Space Shuttle,” the “Columbia,” and astronauts young & Crippen, because it most conveniently occurred at lunch time. How nice of them to schedule for a TV audience!

The landing was so flawless that it was boring—which it was designed to be, I suppose. It looked like a fat jet plane landing on a desert. I’m told this makes all our old splash landings, and one-time spacecraft, obsolete. I don’t doubt that the time will soon arrive when non-reusable spacecraft will be thought of as a prodigious waste of a primitive space technology.

Comments according to a local story in the Forum of local reactions seem to indicate it is a “shot in the arm’ for a U.S. tagged lately by a renewed inferiority complex (which we never have really outgrown ever since 1783, when the Revolutionary War enthusiasm wore away), and misery over nasty economic turns of the past couple years. It proves, apparently, that the U.S. still “can do it,” and is “still the best.” I wonder if it proves all that.

— April 5, 1981, Moorhead, Minn.

The older you get, the sadder life gets. At least for some of us. I walked Slade to Hornbacher’s this morning thinking how unbelievable it has turned out to be that I have basically lived in Fargo-Moorhead all my life, except for the years I lived abroad as a student, and less than two years in Grand Forks. (And even in Grand Forks, as I was going out with Julie then, I never spent a weekend). I have said before that spending my entire life in F-M is my biggest regret, even though I had good reasons for doing so. It’s just the way things turned out.

I give grades to my cooking. Usually they deserve no higher than a B. I would also give my life a B. Better than average, and lots to be thankful for, but nothing special. As I always say as well, I probably rose to the level of my capabilities. I was smart, but not that smart, and certainly not as smart as I thought I was in high school. Given that level of ability, I did pretty well getting a Ph.D. at Cambridge—although luck played quite a role in that, as I realized later and have written about before. But I wasn’t able to play that achievement into greater things, and ended up as a mediocre professor of mediocre accomplishments at a mediocre university. But that is fairly appropriate, as I think it reasonably reflects my abilities.

I don’t know what the last decade or so of my useful time in a professional career will bring, but I at least hope I’ll have a few more accomplishments before my health no longer allows it. One never can predict the future. You have to do your best to protect your health, because without that nothing is possible. Do we want to live longer? We say we do, many of us, but actually what we want is to live longer healthier. We don’t want to live longer if the last years see us unable to rise from a chair, on 10 medications and living in a world no larger than the window of our nursing home. We don’t want to live in a world in which we look forward to childish games such as the nursing home kazoo band, sing-alongs with young choir students looking for volunteer points, and afternoon scrabble. That is not really all right at any age. Okay. Maybe if you have hit the century mark it’s all right. At that age, it’s all that’s possible for nearly everybody.

And yet I consider this: at my age most of the great figures of the past were dead. (But not Ben Franklin! Not Michelangelo! Always exceptions….)

—March 20, 2016, Fargo

On Friday Kanako and I went to a science museum exhibit about pirates. In fact, it revolved around a specific pirate ship named the Whydah, a slave ship captured by pirates who enriched themselves before mostly drowning in a storm off Cape Cod. Of course, that was only one way people of the early 1700s shortened their lives by lifestyle choice—such as becoming a pirate, and pretty much guaranteeing you would not retire to old age. But even if you would not make a dangerous choice of being a sea-based outlaw, your prospects for death in a non-violent way remained high. We know infectious diseases killed most people sooner or later—particularly true of pirates who lived in close and unhealthy conditions. And we know food was often contaminated and possibly poisonous. Pirates drank rum or “grog” (rum and water) because it was safer to be somewhat drunk all the time than sick from contaminated water. (I do think this habit helps to explain why ship’s crews in these times often lost battles they should have won, or did crazy things—the crew was mostly drunk.) Violence and accidents of daily life, while they seem common now, were much more common then. It was just hard to get old in those days. So why worry about high cholesterol (if they knew what such a thing was) when you won’t be likely to die from it?

So most pirates were in their teens or 20s, and I suspect not many survived beyond 40. Certainly their lives were as hard as that of professional football players, who can’t do that demanding sport beyond about 35. Given that most men who opted for the pirate’s life—or really any sailor’s life, as it was even harder on merchant and navy ships—your attitude about goals and futures has to change. No wonder these men would spend it all carousing in pirate-friendly port cities. Why not? It’s not like you had much future to plan for. They would rob the merchant ships, but you would think it would be hard for them to see the point of the gain. What would you want to do with the money? More booze, gambling, prostitutes or whatever in port, I suppose.

Beyond that, well, I don’t think people in those days generally thought much beyond a few years. Because probably they wouldn’t be there. Certainly with very few exceptions (but always there were a few) before the 19th century, perhaps 20th century, few people would make it to my age. And those who did generally would be physical wrecks. We thought then that life was short, the body was not made to withstand more than about 50 years, and so we had to move quickly before we fell into wrack and ruin of body. Even those who led more privileged lives—I read a book about Pope Sylvester II, the pope during the turnover of the first millennium in 1000 a.d., being wracked with constant pain and on the road to death while still in his 50s—and that was not unusual for medieval man. By the 1700s perhaps life was better. A little.

Sometimes people are surprised to hear of all the capital crimes that existed in 1700. You could be executed for stealing bread, and a hundred other things. Pirates too of course knew their capture would end in hanging. But people then took crazy risks with their lives. Why? Why not? Life was short regardless of the threat. The quality of your life even as a typical person farming or toiling in the cities was not pleasant. If life is short under the best of conditions, then it isn’t so very valuable, and its end not so much to be feared. The strength of religion, the belief in a beyond, was generally unquestioned then for good reason. Because if people took stock of their rationality and looked at existence and evidence squarely—then the only response would be despair. We have developed reason, rational thinking, scientific methods of investigation to learn about life beyond superstition and emotion. But in opening each locked box inside each locked box that takes us to understanding of existence, we see more and more that what doesn’t exist is God working in our daily lives, or indeed, a presence of God at all. This for many today is despair. For people hundreds of years ago, it would have been calamity. A few brave people by the 19th century undertook to face existence on the austere plane of reason. But it must have been terrifying and melancholy. It still is.

—March 18, 2012, Minneapolis

Nous sommes descendus dans l’hotel Menzeh Zalagh! As I’ve almost felt like a stay in “Old France” here, why not a little French? I had no idea French is the near-universal second language here (colonial legacy), although certainly not everyone speaks it. A cab driver (surprisingly!) did not, and some children. The train took five hours straight through, with no stop (as is usual) at Meknes. Countryside hot and dry, parched with dry land semi-tropic vegetation such as agaves lining the bank to the rail track, olive groves, a few palms, fences of prickly pear cactus…. The dirty red and rocky soil supported groves of oranges other crops only by streams or irrigated fields.

Two things predominated the landscape—people and trash. I don’t know where the trash comes from, but it was strewn about for miles around the cities, and in spots elsewhere. The people congregate in the villages, but all along the route you could spot the occasional walker pulling a donkey, a shepherd and tiny flock, a railway workers and tent with RR logo on its side, children wandering, or people jus sitting or lying by the tracks.

In some towns clearly it was market day, with teams of people leading donkeys in stalls of produce or animals. Children are almost predominant among them—I believe I read ½ of Morocco’s population is under 15. There are no horses, only a few cows, goats and tractors, and few cars save on the main highway flanking the tracks. Perhaps these are too expensive to keep. Houses range from the posh and fancy perched on terrasses —perhaps a half dozen—to white washed stucco apartments lean in from dusty streets, or worse, worn wood shacks covered with corrugated tin held down with old car tires or rocks. That’s the two almost ubiquitous structures of the countryside.

Few things with signs on them, such as cafes or stores—perhaps no need, no tourists, no money to eat or shop at such places. The market must provide most. It’s not a wonder countries at this level of sustenance suffer so greatly from natural disasters such as earthquakes—the case of Turkey a year ago. The entire network seems so fragile, built upon human relationships instead of zoning regulations.

Rail stations, such as those of Tangier or Fez, remind me of a rural bus stop—tiny utilitarian buildings of cinder bock, with no particular design or furnishings of any distinction. To build grand trains stations is a Western phenomenon, apparently—to build anything public in an attractive or even magnificent way for the general population in Morocco seems to be held as superfluous—except the mosques, to be sure. It must be there where the country’s considerable artisanal talent is focused. That and the pleasantries of the rich or of the tourists—perhaps I this country considered to be the same thing.

The hotel overlooks old Fez, that rabbit warren of some 9,000 streets hardly changed since the days of Brother Cadfael in England. We have been put up at the “new hotel,” a separate structure only recent to the old hotel (not really—maybe a couple decades)—just opened last week, we’re told. The craftsmanship of decoration is extraordinary. The main lobby includes a magnificent frieze of tile, and doors carved in Moroccan arabesque, scavenged from the antique shops dating from the 13^th century. The domed ceiling also is decorated with hand-painted wooden tracery of medieval vintage. Of course, the floors are marble, as is the stairs, and the doors to the rooms are veneered—contrasting light and dark wood to spell a stylish “Z.” Rooms are decorated in the best fantasy of Moroccan sumptuousness, with hand-carved tables, elaborately and intricately hand-painted furniture and headboards, overstuffed poofs of chairs, and crown molding of a blue and gold arabesque. Carpets are authentic hand made Moroccan of good quality. Rooms overlook the old city, the medieval “medina.”—although it’s hard to appreciate the maze from afar.

—March 14, 2000, Fez, Morocco

I was confronted by a somewhat peculiar situation Sunday night, at a “Malaysian Students’ Dinner” to which I was invited. I sat at a table with several people, only one of whom was Malaysian. What was a bit awkward was this: one of the students was Iranian, another, Palestinian from Jordan. The Persians don’t like the Arabs. The Arabs don’t like the Persians and neither like the Americans. The Americans, of course, like neither the Palestinians nor Persians due to recent events, especially in Iran. Also, the Palestinian held a distinct resemblance to Yasser Arafat, PLO Chief.

Of course, at first things were a bit uncomfortable, and we talked trivia. But, I thought, there’s no reason for avoiding what could be an interesting and educational discussion for fear of inflaming emotions. We are all mature university students, yes? So, I launched my first salvo by asking the Palestinian what he thought of Israel.

“They’re racists,” he declared, somewhat predictably “If you are a Jew, you are a citizen the moment you set foot in Israel. Not so if you are an Arab. And that’s just one of many things.”

I didn’t know the facts of this, but I suspected it to be true; it sounded plausible I asked the Palestinian if the Persians should be considered racists for their treatment of Christians in their Moslem state. “If they do, yes,” he answered. I said that it did seem that if the Israelis treated others differently, as he said, it could be interpreted as racist. But, I started to add, we must remember that Israel was a state created on religious lines, and.…

I had no time to finish my point as the Persian man reacted to the previous comment. “The Iranians do not treat Christians differently. They are not prejudiced. The Koran says that although Islam is the only ‘true’ religion, we tolerate other religions.”

I thought that this assertion was completely ridiculous in light of some of the persecution of Christian bishops in Iran, but since I did not have the concrete evidence I could not directly dispute her allegation.

“What about women?” I asked the Iranian. “The Moslem state now forces them to wear their traditional clothing.” “Yes,” agreed the Arab for Jordan, “and they can’t hold any public offices.”

“Oh, that’s not practical,” she answered, somewhat weakly, I noticed, as if she knows she was in a weak position. “That won’t last.”

The Iranian said she “did not blame the United States for protecting its own interests,” but that the United States “supported the Shah’s government, which was corrupt.” She had apparently debated this point many times before, because she made her case strongly, noting it is true that there is corruption in any government, but the Shah’s “was totally corrupt through and through.” This was difficult to deny, although there is really no proof that it was “corrupt through and through.” I would have liked to bring up the point that the current government, which executed hundreds without trial, let the people lose whatever little they had in the current economic chaos, and defied all international norms of peace and fair-play by supporting an attack upon our defenseless embassy—and this was not corruption? But I had no chance.

“The government right now is only provisional,” she said. “We’re having elections for a permanent one!” I said I doubted the elections would mean much. “They will be fair,” she claimed. To this I found it difficult to quelch a snicker. “What about the opposition? Can an opposing candidate run? “

“Of course,” she answered. But again I was unable to follow up her rather ridiculous claim of “free and fair” elections as the Palestinian declared that the reason Americans don’t understand what’s going on in the Middle East is because our news is biased. Who? It’s an age-old argument. “Your media is all controlled by the Jews.,” he claimed, the Persian agreeing vigorously.

I could not help but burst out laughing at this ridiculous assertion. But they stuck to it like a fly to flypaper. “that will have to be proven to me,” I declared, “And here’s how difficult it is: first you must prove that nearly all of the major news outlets in the U.S., including television, are owned and managed by Jews. Then you must prove that their information is not only concentrated in a few areas, but is disseminated throughout the United States—without regard to the local paper’s control. Even then you cannot assume that an owner of a news outlet controls the use of the news in his paper. You must prove the connection.”

I added that Jews have been blamed for every evil the world has known, and the hatred was partially the cause of World War II. Now the Palestinians made an interesting and completely uncharacteristic comment. “It’s wrong to believe the Jews got to the top in their professions by being sneaky and cheating people They just work harder than anyone else the people who work hardest make it to the top.”

I was fairly astounded at this sympathetic view. But he added more. “I would like to go to the United States to work (computer science). I like the United States. And we are slowly persuading them to see our (Palestinian) side.”

The conversation was not a strong as it could have been: music as load, too many distractions. Neither, thank goodness, was there any violent anger. I enjoyed it anyway.

—March 11, 1980, Coventry, England

So what do I think, this being my journal, and my “soap box?” I begin with talking about an area I’ve touched before, noting that I hope anyone who happens to come across this journal will read it in sympathy for the meanderings of a person with as many failings, weaknesses, and prejudices as anyone else. And a life that’s neither pure nor black, as most of ours are, morally.

As for publication, unless I happen to become “famous” somehow, which is always hoped for by most of us, but seldom very likely, someone may want to publish. More likely someone will become curious enough just to read the notebooks. That leads to the question: one, the decisions to make if published, and two, the decisions to make if not.

If not, heirs to a journal like mine may either burn it, clip it to ribbons and keep all the nice bits they like, keep it all but show it to no one outside, or give it to some archives somewhere that might be curious in whole or in part.

Generally, I’d wish it to be given in its entirety to an archive that might be curious—Moorhead State’s may be—and let it go at that. It’s not likely much will come of it, but it might give the occasional student a good chuckle. But I do agree that I worry occasionally that the things I’ve written in the mood of the moment about other people will be unjust, perhaps even libelous. I may have been in a bad mood that day. I don’t want to hurt anyone, but on the other hand, I don’t like to chop wholesale at judgments I’ve made and intend to keep! In some cases, names could be changed, I suppose. As for my sometimes long mumblings about sex, various girlfriends, a few less-than-girlfriends, masturbation, AIDS, sexual appetite, and variations, well, without that, it wouldn’t be a very “intimate journal,” would it? Everybody, or at least every younger person, spends the majority of their time thinking about love and sex anyway, so to leave it out of a journal is radically misleading.

In general I don’t want to hurt others by my fleeting thoughts—but if they were turds and deserve a few lumps, well, so be it. As for “libeling” myself, after I’m gone it won’t make any difference to me, and I don’t think I owe to any possible heirs a whitewashed picture of my life. I’ll hope they do me a favor and remember me as I was, with warts.

In case of publication, all the above holds true, but I expect this will have to be drastically cut—no fool will read “unabridged” diaries of R.C.

So I hope editors choose to keep the parts judged best for their writing—I try to do my best to write as well as I can, but of course, never revise—and perhaps for some comments that can throw a light on life as it was for someone in their 20s in the 1970s, or in 1980s, as a student, a teacher, a traveller, comments on the issues of the times, what people were talking about, whatever, and how a young person typical in many ways, not typical in others, lived and thought in relation to the society of the period. That kind of thing can’t be judged now, not be me or anyone else, for the import of certain events only becomes clear in relation to their sequel (who would have thought Hitler’s 1923 “beer hall putsch” meant anything?). But censorship to protect me or emphasize some “values” one way or another I didn’t really live is not fair to me or to readers, I’d think. As there are too few honest obituaries, there are too few honest journals in print.

Death sanctifies.

— March 6, 1989, Marseille, France

The Republican party has looked almost ridiculous in its serial embrace of arch-conservative candidate nutcases: from state to state in primaries they’ve careened from Michelle Bachmann through the governor of Texas through the 1900 mindset of Ron Paul, to the head of a pizza chain, then the hideously scummy Newt Gingrich, to now the hideously conservative Rick Santorum who just today said aid for higher education needs to be cut so fewer students go to college to get indoctrinated for Obama. What concerns me is not that these nutters exist.

These kinds of people always exist, wildly liberal as well as wildly conservative. What worries me is they actually have a substantial following among regular citizens, enough that they become serious contenders for a mainstream presidential nomination. Of course, bad economic times brings out bad people, and the demagogues can find ways to connect. Hitler in the 1930s was elected, and supported by huge crowds of enchanted supporters—despite his clear, unmistakably clear message of hate and horror. In a Democracy a good share of the voters just don’t think rationally, don’t think clearly, and vote with their emotions. Lincoln saw this, but hoped you can’t fool all the people all the time. I have believed that while the American people were generally a little too conservative for me, they also generally were not crazy. (Okay, a mistake there in Prohibition, but, well.)

Today, though, I wonder if the crazy side really is gaining ascendency. I’m thinking the only thing their gaining is a good megaphone through the press by way of the GOP party they commandeered, and that we will find their message to be way out of touch with American mainstream. But we can’t be sure, can we? Only in looking back can we point to clues that might have helped us predict the future. The future is really easy to predict when it’s gone past.

—Feb. 24, 2012, Fargo, N.D.