State by State

by Matt Weiland

  Eager to increase yield, Murphy Farms discovered that younger hogs easily catch diseases from older hogs. So their pigs were separated by age, over three periods of their brief lives (15 days, 50 days, 21 weeks), reducing the chances of passing on disease, until they reached 250 pounds—the desired weight for slaughter. This methodology increased numbers dramatically. Murphy Farms and its contractors also began to raise hogs in confined areas. Computers monitored practically everything in the pig barns, from temperature to ventilation to when a sow is ready to be mated, and if the mating was successful. The Murphy main feed mill, the largest in the USA, delivered over twenty-one thousand tons of feed each week. That improvement added to disease control and, when coupled with new feed formulations engineered through Murphy-subsidized nutritionists and technicians, helped his hog populations explode. The Murphy operation also discovered a way to goose up the number of piglet births. The average number of piglets a sow bears is less than fifteen. Murphy Farms’ specially-cared-for sows (they have separate operations for breeding and birthing) average more than twenty-two piglets.

  There are now more hogs than humans in North Carolina, and Murphy Farms has helped make Smithfield Foods, the multinational to which it was sold in 1999, the biggest producer of pork products in the world.

  All great changes tend to have great side effects, and the effects of this new super-duper hog production are altering the North Carolina land.

  Almost everything about North Carolina seems gentle. Even though the tallest peaks on the East Coast rise in the North Carolina Blue Ridge (Mount Mitchell: 6,684 feet), those mountains seem to comfort, to invite, to soothe, when compared to the Rockies’ craggy God-like insistence upon their own majesty, or the Brooks and Alaska Ranges’ operatic claim of equality with the sky and Denali divinity. Perhaps this gentility is why George Vanderbilt chose the North Carolina mountains to build the largest private residence in the country—so the mountains wouldn’t compete with his ego. Biltmore House: It’s not big, it’s large.

  Rattlesnakes can kill you, mountain lions can maim you, bears can scare you out of your wits, but not much threatens the average North Carolinian other than other North Carolinians—and that is usually behind the wheel of an SUV these days, or the point of a gun.

  Piedmont, coastal plain, mountains, all are crisscrossed by rivers. Cape Fear, Neuse, Pamlico, Haw, Eno, Pee Dee, Yadkin, Catawba. Not grand rivers, nothing like the Mississippi or the Colorado. Gentle rivers, very like the state.

  But those rivers in the East are dying. In 1996, the state’s most important newspaper, the Raleigh News and Observer, won a Pulitzer Prize for a series of articles, collectively entitled “Boss Hog,” on the burgeoning neo-pork industry, its methods, and the effects upon the state’s ecology. The largest problem was the millions of gallons of hog waste. The vast lagoons where the waste is stored—some as large as ten acres—were found to be leaking into the ground water, contaminating it with nitrates among other chemicals. The lagoons also were known to spill their contents, in good weather and bad, finding their way to creeks and rivers. The run-offs were found to increase algae blooms in the rivers, along with high levels of ammonia, which resulted in disastrous fish kills. In one case state officials reckoned that between 3,500 to 5,000 fish were killed after a ruptured dike released over twenty-five million gallons of swine sewage into the New River in Onslow County.

  I will leave the problems of odor to your imagination, but do imagine living near a multi-acre open hog sewer.

  The reporters at the News and Observer also pointed toward a troubling relationship between the state legislature, the governor, and Wendell H. Murphy, who served in the state house from 1983 until 1988. He also served as a North Carolina state senator from 1989 to 1992. The articles pointed to political contributions made by the Murphy family and their concerns, to a seeming laxity among the North Carolina General Assembly when it came to enforcing regulations governing hog farming, to favorable legislation made toward them, and to general foot-dragging about the ecological problems such practices were causing, problems that in some cases appeared to be irreversible.

  A decade later the situation has not improved. Today North Carolina’s hog population is well over ten million (the state’s human population is under nine million). Small hog farms decreased from around twenty-four thousand in the mid-1980s to under six thousand by the year 2000. According to the USDA small farms are known to produce less harmful waste, because what happens to pig poop is relatively organic in a small farm, but goes largely untreated when the waste is piled up in such vast quantities. Nitrates, copper, antibiotics, and other chemicals harmful to humans accumulate in these lagoons at alarming rates. Due to the fish kills and algae blooms and other compounded diseases directly related to corporate hog farming, North Carolina’s commercial fish populations have dropped by 60 percent in the last decade. Yet enforcement of hog waste management and violations remain stagnant. According to one study, in 1997, 88 percent of all factory hog farms had at least one permit or waste management plan violation. The study suggests those statistics were conservative.

  Once upon a time I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. A lovely river town built on high bluffs over the great Mississippi. The food there is good. But, alas, those good people suffer from a serious delusion. For some reason they believe barbecue (and for a Southerner barbecue is a noun not a verb) comes from a pork shoulder and is smothered in some sweet, tomato-based muck. Though we agree on the delectability of short ribs, we part company on practically everything else. My four years in Memphis was akin to living among beautiful barbarians when it came to pork.

  North Carolinians are fiercely attached to their barbecue. Whether its name comes from the Taino word for sacred fire pit (barbicoa) or from a French joke about how the early sailors cooked the entire beast from beard to tail (“barbe à queue”)—discounted by many historians—a tradition of cooking the whole pig over an open fire has endured. (The term “buccaneer” comes from the act of slowly curing pork over a smoldering fire—“boucan” in French—hence “boucaniers.”) North Carolina passions run high when getting down to the nitty and the gritty of how BBQ should be done.

  I am as partisan as they come and do not apologize to any man, woman, or child. The best barbecue in the world comes from North Carolina. And not just anywhere in North Carolina: from the eastern part of the state.

  I make no apologies, therefore, in stating with great emphatic zeal and extreme prejudice that a hog should be cooked over a pit, over choice wood, for at least half a day, preferably twice that long. Whole. The tender meat then should be disarticulated from the bones, skin and all, which, in this case, will be a cakewalk as the flesh has been rendered into a state of tender, moist, near-gelatinous compliance, the smell of which should cause mild hallucinations. Next the cooked meat should be chopped—not pulled, plucked, sliced, or otherwise mishandled—chopped. Then it should be mixed with a vinegar-based solution of such clarity and spiciness as to augment but not detract from the suzerainty of slowly roasted hog flesh: The beast gave up its life for your delectation. That should be honored.

  A meal, then: preferably served on the simplest dinnerware available—some choose paper plates, some just paper—to be accompanied by white bread, a mound of slaw or potato salad, corn bread (hush puppies actually, but that’s another tale), and copious quantities of sweetened ice tea. Lemons optional. Oh yes, and with plenty of Texas Pete Hot Sauce available. The hot sauce of champions.

  My brethren and sisteren in the Piedmont and the Mountains will vehemently disagree with this scenario, I assure you. But they are heathens on such matters and should be attended as one would attend a young child: They know not what they do.

  Whatever happens in this humble state, as tobacco slowly becomes a memory with banking and bio-tech taking its place at the center of things, hogs will remain nearest and dearest to our hearts. For better or for worse, pigs are us.

  NORTH DAKOTA

  CAPITAL Bismarck />
  ENTERED UNION 1889 (39th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME From the Sioux tribe, meaning “allies”

  NICKNAME Sioux State, Flickertail State, Peace Garden State, or Rough Rider State

  MOTTO “Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable”

  RESIDENTS North Dakotan

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 1

  STATE BIRD western meadowlark

  STATE FLOWER wild prairie rose

  STATE TREE American elm

  STATE SONG “North Dakota Hymn”

  LAND AREA 68,976 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Sheridan Co., 5 mi. SW of McClusky

  POPULATION 636,677

  WHITE 92.4%

  BLACK 0.6%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 4.9%

  ASIAN 0.6%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 1.2%

  UNDER 18 25.0%

  65 AND OVER 14.7%

  MEDIAN AGE 36.2

  NORTH DAKOTA

  Louise Erdrich

  “Our winters are quite cold in North Dakota. But do we ask anybody to feel sorry for us?”

  —BRENT LLOYD WILLS,

  NORTH DAKOTA GEOGRAPHY AND EARLY HISTORY

  The rare times North Dakota is referred to in the national media, we are the coldest, emptiest, loneliest, and most depopulated and abandoned state in the union. We are never the most hauntingly beautiful, sky-filled, the safest, the centeredest, most content, decentest, the Germanest, Indianest, windiest, the birdiest, the non-complainingest, the funniest, the friendliest, or the easiest place to get a job—all of which are true, or nearly true. North Dakotans get tired of the end-of-the-earth jokes and of the death knells for their state, and yet have a strange pride that they live in a place nobody else, it seems, is capable of understanding. I grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota, in the southeastern part of the state, and often visited my grandparents on the Turtle Mountain reservation, way up north beneath the Canadian border. These days I am a frequent North Dakota visitor, both to work and to stay with family. Yet I don’t know if I understand North Dakota, either. I do know that I love the place that was first loved by those indigenous to it—the Dakota, Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Anishinabe, and Cree, and later the Metis, French-Chippewa who formed a hunting and gathering culture more indigenous than white.

  The second wave of North Dakota lovers hardly saw those who came before. Nine of every ten native people were dead of smallpox and other European illnesses by the time the territory was settled, and to this day over 90 percent of North Dakotans are white. Yet the “Vanishing Americans” were the first to hear their own death knell and survive it. Today in North Dakota tribal economies and reservation populations are the fastest growing. The farmers and settlers of the second wave have seen the state change from being an ICBM capital, the world’s third largest nuclear power, to being the world’s third largest producer of durum pasta. They chose Teredo petrified wood as the state fossil, declared the state age the Paleocene, the state animal the Nokota horse, and the state bird the western meadowlark. According to statisticians, Fargo is the fourth best city and North Dakota the eleventh best state to live in, with the lowest crime rate and the greatest number of neighborhoods supportive of children. The average travel time to work is fifteen minutes. North Dakotans are extremely helpful, patriotic, self-sacrificing—the state has the seventh highest per capita number of casualties in Iraq, and a disproportionate number of those who serve are Native American.

  There are actually three North Dakotas to write about—the eastern swath of the Red River Valley, the central Drift Prairie, and the Missouri Plateau. To really get a sense of the third North Dakota, which lies west beyond Jamestown’s World’s Largest Buffalo, I suggest reading the stories of my sister, Liselotte Erdrich, or the novels and poems of Larry Woiwode, Poet Laureate of the state, who lives and farms in southwestern Hettinger County. As for what I really know about North Dakota, it is very personal and mainly about people. It is about growing up in a state that is still safe enough for children to live freely and spend their time outdoors. It is about appreciating a state that has just the right number of people per square mile.

  For many years, my Turtle Mountain Chippewa grandfather danced across the cover of the North Dakota Travel Guide. A framed copy hangs on my office wall, and I often contemplate Patrick Gourneau stepping tall and proud toward the drawing of a huge spear point. The spear bears a tiny picture of Teddy Roosevelt, who is waving his hat as he clings to a rearing horse. Grandpa is three times the size of Teddy plus the horse, which makes me proud.

  Of course the travel guide has since been updated. The up-to-date title is North Dakota—Legendary. There is still an American Indian on the cover, a young fancy dancer, plus a kayaker and a couple of cowboys. The presentation is now focused on well-known trail blazers. Grandpa’s travel guide modestly suggested to the traveler, “When You Vacation West, Spend a Day in North Dakota.” (Just a day? That’s all we ask.) The new guide says: “Now that Lewis and Clark have done all the hard work, charting and exploring the West, you get to have all the fun!”

  Thanks Lewis and Clark! I have had a lot of fun in North Dakota. Since my fun has not yet become legendary, I’d like to talk first about ditch-skiing, which isn’t mentioned by the friendly people at the tourist division.

  Invented by my father, who had grown up in Minnesota around steep hills you could ski down in thirteen seconds, ditch skiing involved a rope tied to the rear fender of the family station wagon. A child on a pair of giant wooden skis would hold the end of the rope, give her father the thumbs up, and brace herself as he started the car. Towed along at blinding speeds of six to twelve miles an hour while gulping snirt—half snow, half dirt—was a matchless winter experience. And then there was the mosquito fogger—a truck towing a tank that spewed insecticide. I am glad now to say that I only followed it once to get high on Malthion—others who waited for it every summer night, chased it on their banana seat bikes, and became addicted are now survivalists or raging fundamentalists of various types. We caught bullheads in the Red River. To clean them you nailed their heads to a plank and pulled off their skins like wet pants. There was constant skating, pick-up baseball, fort-building, tree-diving over the river, sledding in cardboard boxes, and nightly kick-the-can. And that was only childhood—when you got to be a teenager there was drinking and sex.

  Of all these forms of fun (except the last two, I suppose), ditch skiing is the one that has survived and evolved. Snow kiting is now an eco-sport in North Dakota. Just as it sounds, a giant kite is strapped to the skier and—whoosh. No need for hills. Just this year, North Dakota conservationists are making a 390-mile trek to publicize our wind energy potential. This group, To Cross the Moon, plans to traverse the state from the Canadian border to South Dakota, stopping in every town to talk about energy and give lessons in snow kiting.

  Besides the activities that were really fun but not mentioned at all by the tourism office, there are a host of attractive sites that nobody would even know about from looking at North Dakota—Legendary. There is, for instance, no mention at all of the mysterious and wonderful billboards set along our major highway systems. In simple black letters against a plain white background they offer modest advice. SMILE. BE POLITE. SAY THANKS. BE NICE. The billboard messages are surprising and seem to come out of nowhere, giving you a little nudge from beyond, as if God were a gentle second grade teacher.

  I’ve also referred to the absence of people as one of the state’s great attractions. Our world is terrifyingly overpopulated, yet North Dakota’s population is roughly the same as it was in 1920. I am not alone in finding this one of the best things about the state. In North Dakota there are between nine and ten people per square mile, and most of those live in Fargo, Bismarck, or Grand Forks. If you avoid the population centers, you can travel in a blissful abeyance of humankind. This paucity of humans is incredibly refreshing—a claustrophobe’s paradise.

  I am at present drinking a cup of tea into which I’ve dumped a sugar packet labe
led with the Minn-Dak farmers’ cooperative logo—the Red River Valley is becoming slightly hybridized by Minnesota. But most towns or cities along the eastern border have their twins—Fargo-Moorhead, Grand Forks-East Grand Forks, Wahpeton-Breckenridge. I hate to say this, and I apologize to those North Dakotans, or Nodaks, who are fond of rampant growth, but the largest cities in North Dakota are surrounded by the same sort of soul-sucking big box store urban sprawl you’ll see around any American city. Yet downtown Wahpeton is peaceful and pretty, downtown Jamestown is lovingly kept, and downtown Fargo is a treasure. The Round-Up Bar’s giant neon cowgirl and the Pink Pussycat Lounge’s huge winking cat have disappeared, but the Empire Tavern still exists and the merchants fight to keep Fargo’s fifties Grain Belt charm, while the renovated Hotel Donaldson is a surprising oasis of art and down comforters; its HoDo restaurant the Chez Panisse of Fargo.

  I ended up in North Dakota in the first place because my father, Ralph Erdrich, came to teach on the Turtle Mountain reservation and there met Rita Gourneau and fell (it is said) in love at first glance. The two were married by Father George Lyons, a formidable shortstop, who passes his days now at Blue Cloud Abbey in South Dakota. Ralph and Rita moved downstate to the southeast corner, and we lived at the edge of Wahpeton, on the Bureau of Indian Affairs campus. There, I grew up with the sky.

  Shattering, spectacular, inescapable. The North Dakota sky is a former tallgrass prairie heaven tarp that stretches down on every side and quiets the mind. In the summer, distance melts off into mirage, a jitter of shaking air on hot dust. When the sun is magnified by a dust storm it can fill the sky like a nuclear dawn. Sounds travel as far as the ear allows. Vision stretches as far as the eye can strain. Pure sky pulls you right out of yourself and yet bears down so close it seems crushing.