Monday, October 28, 2013

Autumn in Mean Pete's Colorado

I got a new iPhone last week, after I took a spontaneous swim in Turtle River near Grand Forks, North Dakota. While the river spit me out, it fried my cell phone. That's all right. It was an old, flip-top cellphone and I'd been needing a new one though I was too cheap to do the deed on my own.

So now I've been enjoying the camera on the new Iphone, and here are some pics from the area around where Mean Pete carries out most of his nastiness. The foggy ones were taken today, Monday, October 28, while the others were taken on a crisp, sunny autumn day last week, along a trail I bike on. I've gotten a lot of ideas for books while traipsing and riding my mountain bike around these hills, so I thought I'd share a few of the pics.

Autumn Fog Settles Over the Neighborhood Here on Mount Milner

 Old Sodderberg Ranch.

 A little mule deer buck in the neighborhood. (One of many!)
 Fall foliage on the Colorado State University Campus

Thursday, October 17, 2013

Mean Pete Brings the Ipad to the Hinterland!

That's me and my aunt and uncle, Wayne and Ginny Meyer, in their home outside of Edinburg, North Dakota. Don't we all look like I've just brought home our very first television set, circa 1945? Or laid out plans for indoor plumbing?

Mean Pete's always been a ham.

Sadly, Uncle Wayne and Aunt Ginny are some of my last remaining relatives in North Dakota. Lots of memories of some colorful family characters up this away, and I hope to start writing about them all soon.

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Mean Pete's In North Dakota

Mean Pete's on sabbatical in North Dakota, his home state, the rural regions of which look more like a Rob Zombie movie every year. I've seen some great locations for a new slasher flick: NORTH DAKOTA CHAINSAW MASSACRE!

Anyway, I'm tooling around, visiting some of my old haunts, scribbling notes for a memoir, the working title of which is NORTH DAKOTA GOTHIC. I think the above pic would be a great cover photo, though I didn't take it.

Some travel-inspired memoir notes coming soon...

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Chuck Haga Says Goodbye



A writer I've long considered the Ring Lardner or Damon Runyon of North Dakota, my home state, is retiring from the Grand Forks Herald newspaper after 40 years of writing on deadline for both the Herald as well as the Minneapolis Star Tribune. His name is Chuck Haga, and you've likely never heard of him if you've never read either newspaper. 

That's too bad. You've missed out on some fine writing. 

Chuck Haga might have written for a relatively small, regional newspaper when he wrote for the Herald, but his columns, features and reporting on that "large, rectangular blank spot in the nation's mind," as Eric Sevareid, another North Dakota newsman, once dubbed mine and Chuck's motherland, transcended their roots every bit as much as, say, Alice Munro's short stories transcend her rural Canada. 

I'm not saying Chuck deserves the Nobel Prize, which Ms. Munro just won, but if it were up to me--yeah, I'd give it to him. 

I started reading the Grand Forks Herald religiously back in the 70's and 80's because of Chuck's funny, humane columns that were written with Steinbeckian heart and bucolic simplicity. They related even to me at thirteen, fourteen, fifteen years old. How extraordinary for this hayseed wannabe scribe to find a “real” writer from my hometown writing about this dreary backwater and making it much more than a blank spot on my own consciousness! 

Chuck made North Dakota in general and the Red River Valley in particular, seem like a real place--like Huck Finn's Mississippi and Ahab's big, chilly North Atlantic. My provincial home country with its long, cold, bland winters and its ice fisherman's and hockey player's one-dimensional reality was given the same sort of significance as Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.

The dimension of Ray Bradbury's Mars...

Having early on found Chuck Haga's newspaper work meaningful as well as entertaining and artful, I've over the ensuing years sought out other newspaper writers to my great enjoyment and enrichment. I can honestly say that I've learned as much about the world and the craft of straight-forward writing from Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Liebling, Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, and Mike Royko, just to name a few other newspaper writers whom I admire, as I've learned from the novels of, say, Ernest Hemingway.

And I have Chuck Haga to thank for that.

Funny how just because a guy or gal writes on deadline on pulp newsprint, he's less esteemed. Well, it ain't right. If you ever get a chance to read Chuck Haga's flowing columns about real people in a real place, you'll see that it is so.

I hope Chuck isn't really retiring but that he's merely leaving the Herald to start a brand new writing career. Or maybe to collect his columns into one, big, fat, entertaining book.

For a sample of Chuck's writing, click here to read his farewell column in the Grand Forks Herald.