Stories of 1970s Alumni
|
Lynne Kovash (1977) |
 Tom Fricke (1977) |
Tom Fricke
On the wings of a
poet, a peasant and a professor…
A mantra for ordinary Americans
(originally
published in Alumnews, Spring 1999).
"I was sick often and had a shaman blow mantra over me. I suffered
from leech bites. I had head lice. The fleas and rats were maddening. I could
not have been more pleased with any other field site."—Tom Fricke, from his book
"Himalayan Households."
At 7200 feet up in the remote mountains of Nepal, Tom
Fricke collapsed from severe sunburn, a victim of the intense ultraviolet rays
cutting through the thin Himalayan air. When he awoke, his friend, a former WW II Gurkha soldier
named Sirman Ghale, was gently rubbing bear fat into his blistered skin with
rough peasant hands. Not far away, in the stone cabin where he lived, heated only
by a fire pit, Fricke kept a copy of Tom McGrath’s epic poem, "Letter to an
Imaginary Friend." If it weren’t for the advice of McGrath, who, like Sirman
Ghale, had become both a mentor and friend, Fricke would never have seen the
Himalayas. "If you really want to write," McGrath had told him over a
few beers at Ralph’s Corner Bar in Moorhead, "you have to learn about people." That was more than 20 years ago. But that advice was as
magical as Sirman Ghale blowing healing mantra over him.
Then an aspiring poet, Fricke took McGrath’s advice
literally, switching his major to anthropology (a 1977 MSU graduate) to gain a
more intimate insight into the human condition. He wanted to be either a writer,
or maybe a high school English teacher.
Today, McGrath is gone, dying in 1990 at the age of 74.
Sirman Ghale is in a Katmandu jail, implicated in a murder that Fricke insists
he didn’t do. "It’s all very complicated and political," Fricke said. "But
that’s were I visit him now. I can’t seem to get him sprung."
And Fricke? He’s now a 44-year-old
anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, where he recently received
a $2.8 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to establish the
Michigan Center for the Ethnography of Everyday Life. The University of
Michigan, coincidentally, boasts the top-ranked anthropology department in the
nation.
Fricke’s goal: to impose order on the disorder of the
ordinary.
Back to the poetic and prosaic
In a way, Fricke is coming home again, from the mire of academic statistics back
to the poetic and the prosaic of his North Dakota beginnings.
"The impetus for our series of
studies on ordinary Americans is precisely motivated by the lessons I
learned at the feet of Tom McGrath and Sirman Ghale," he said. "We’re looking at
a transition in American work and family that puts all of us in a world that’s
fundamentally different, and, I suppose, more fundamentally dangerous. We’re
losing our sense of community, or communitas, as McGrath put it, and replacing
that with an almost obsessive focus on the self."
During the next two years—between administrative duties and
teaching—Fricke will literally "hang out" in Richardton, N.D., a small rural
community about 100 miles directly west of his hometown of Bismarck. While
picking up on the rhythm of life there, he’ll also conduct an in-depth
"ethnographic" study (combining daily observations, informal conversations,
formal interviews and surveys) of everyday life in that nucleated village of the
high plains.
It’s part of a team effort to document the apocalyptic
changes in the culture, family and daily lives of middle-class mainstream
families who live in the 12 states defined by the U.S. Bureau of Census as "The
Midwest": Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Wisconsin, Iowa,
Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota and Minnesota. The 12 anthropologists,
sociologists, psychologists and economists assigned to the study will each spend
the next two years in rural, urban and suburban Midwestern sites.
Oddly enough, Richardton, pop. 650, matches the population of
Timling, Nepal, a remote mountain village 50 miles from exotic Katmandu where
Fricke first began his research as an anthropologist. Except Timling is about a
mile closer to the sun.
"Although physically the towns are worlds apart, the human
situation between them is strangely similar," Fricke said. "Both Timling and
Richardton are small communities marginalized and isolated by the intrusion of
modern technology and pop culture. The elders have raised big families and now
find themselves growing old alone. And what’s happening in Nepal is also
happening across the Midwest—rural communities are drying up. Fast food chains
are moving in, young are moving out."
The result: a pervasive sadness among the people left behind,
Fricke said. And the loss of a sense of belonging for the people who moved away.
Fricke’s no stranger to that phenomenon. He and his five
brothers all fled North Dakota to jobs elsewhere. His parents still live in
Bismarck.
"What’s interesting in a study like this, which is similar to
what I did in Nepal, is to document the kind of tenacious attempts on the part
of people to retain what they had or what they knew in the face of such
relentless social change."
Fricke explains a theory called punctuated equilibria—periods
of rapid social change, followed by long periods of stability, then rapid change
again. "We’re seeing these rapid changes right in front of our eyes. I want to
be there as an anthropologist to tell the stories of these people, to illuminate
their lives, to tell other people about them. It’s a great job and, I believe,
it’s perfect timing."
From the exotic to the ordinary
Traditionally gravitating to the exotic, anthropologists have never really
opened the door very wide to peer inside the lives of ordinary Americans. That’s
been left to a few novelists, poets and barroom eccentrics.
"Hey, I understand that. I spent most of my career
researching in the Himalayas," he said. "But I think it’s time for anthropology
to bring the ethnography of everyday life to the United States, where it
promises to add desperately needed concreteness to public debates about work,
family life and social policy."
In other words, making it practical.
And instead of producing a stack of sterile, statistical,
academic reports, Fricke insists they intend to write books that people will
read—ordinary people, policy makers, politicians and planners. He wants to heed
the advice of another literary chronicler of rural America, Sinclair
Lewis, who said while accepting the Nobel Prize before the Swedish Academy: "Our
American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very
dead."
"For me, it’s like refreshing the well that first got me into
anthropology," Fricke said. "I want to write a book that will bring texture to
the lives of ordinary people. I don’t want to paint stereotypes. I want to
document them as living, breathing human beings tested by change. That’s what
anthropologists are suppose to do. To tell the story of a people, to detail
their lives. "
Fricke, an Army brat, grew up nearly everywhere. But his
family roots were solidly sunk in Bismarck. "When my dad was transferred
overseas, the family always moved back to Bismarck. My grandfather farmed around
Baldwin, N.D. (pop. 39), but lost the family homestead in the early 50s before I
was born. But when I was growing up I baled hay and drove machinery on my
uncle’s farm."
Fricke showed a prophetic interest in writing about the
ordinary. Here’s an excerpt from a poem he wrote at the age of 19 called
"Driving Toward Sanger: Prophecy Fulfilled," about the last resident of that
North Dakota ghost town:
And there is the last man in Sanger
Once a farmer
Corn shaman dreaming the future
Until the medicine ran out and the land was gone
Banks and mortgages all that’s left.
He gets drunk alone
Growing older in his house on the hill,
Burial scaffold etched against sun.
…It is fall
Leaves
The color of Armageddon.
No wonder Tom McGrath took a shine to Fricke. "I started out as an English major at Bismarck Junior College, then the University of North Dakota. In 1974, UND hosted a Beat conference that brought in a bunch of name writers like Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. McGrath was there. That’s when I discovered my interest in poetry, and when I learned that one of the nation’s major figures in poetry—McGrath—taught 80 miles south. I transferred to Moorhead State right away."
As a student, Fricke worked on MSU’s grounds crew, mostly
driving the garbage truck. McGrath also hired him to do chores at his house. "I
think it was his way of helping a promising student. We had lots of long
conversations at Ralph’s Corner Bar."
Fricke still thinks about him a lot. "Even more so now that
I’m involved in this project," he said. "In particular, I think of a specific
line from ‘Letter to an Imaginary Friend’ that goes: "All time condenses here.
Dakota is everywhere.’ It’s so utterly true. The situation in North Dakota is
the human situation, a microcosm of everywhere. Communitas is the name McGrath
gave to the last communal group, on the verge of coming apart by external forces
they have no control over—capitalism, greed, management, progress. Whatever you
want to call it. He wrote passionately and specifically about the decline in a
shared sense of community."
His poetry, Fricke said, should serve as a spiritual preface
to the idea that we can only learn about the general human condition by first
understanding the concrete experiences of people in specific places. "That’s
what he did; that’s what we’re doing. It’s amazing how his ideas keep following
me."
In the land of the Buddha
Fricke’s segue to Nepal was an accident. As a graduate student, he had his eye
set on the Hudson Bay Cree Indians. But his graduate adviser opened a door for
him in Nepal, and he stepped through it.
He first landed in Nepal—the birthplace of the Buddha, a
mystical mecca where time is supposed to stop, one of the poorest and most
inaccessible countries on earth—in 1981, already fluent in the language.
The 50-mile journey to Timling, located on a narrow shelf of
land not far from the Nepal-Tibet border, starts at Katmandu with "the scariest
10-mile bus ride in the world," Fricke said. "Then the road ends. From there,
it’s a five or six day climb to Timling, a slippery ascent during the monsoon
season. But it can be a pleasant journey. On the way you can stop in villages
were the town folk will serve you bowls of thick barley beer (the consistency of
thin oatmeal) and pots of boiled potatoes."
Over the past 15 years Fricke returned to Timling
dozens of times, the longest continuous stretch of living there being about 13
months. "I figure I’ve spent a total of four years in Timling."
During that time Fricke learned that North Dakota is,
truly, everywhere.
"The people in Timling are, at their core, the same as me,
the same as the people of North Dakota. Discovering the commonality of the human
experience, and the pure joy shared from that experience, was probably my single
most important moment there. Yet sadly, that ‘circle of warmth and work,’ as
McGrath phrased it, is evaporating, like it is in North Dakota. The feeling is
palpable. Work has changed. They’re no longer self-sustaining farmers. Jobs are
in the cities. Their children move away. Even their religion has changed. In
1991 there was a mass conversion to Christianity. Their life is in constant
crisis."
Or as the simple peasant Sirman Ghale put it (taken from
Fricke’s field notes): "In the village, everybody is joined. But there (the
city) a person makes his own way, his own provisions for tomorrow’s food; he’s
alone. He builds one house for himself. And then another builds one for himself
and so on…everybody for himself. And with that kind of process the old habits
are gone, finished."
Richardton, N.D. (pop. 650)
So when Fricke started applying for grants to study ordinary Americans,
North Dakota was on his mind. He drove throughout the state, looking for a town
much like Timling, with a defined culture. He found that place, Richardton,
about 60 miles west of his native Bismarck. "It was a magical sort of place when
I was young. It has a definite German culture, and a religious one."
Driving by on Hwy. 94, you can’t miss the twin spires of St.
Mary’s Church, a Bavarian Romanesque structure built in 1909. It includes
Assumption Abbey, home to 60 Benedictine monks. Just west of town is Sacred
Heart Monastery, home to 40 Benedictine sisters.
"After stopping in the café for a cup of coffee and some
rhubarb pie, walking among the town folk, visiting the Abbey, I knew this would
be my place to study."
This is a piece of rural, mainstream America, which contains
83 percent of the nation’s land and 21 percent of its people. Over the past four
decades, farm employment in the United States dropped from just under 8 million
to a little over 3 million. The number of farms has gone from 5.8 million to 2.1
million. Only about 5 million people, less than 10 percent of the rural
population, live on farms today. And the elderly account for nearly a quarter of
the population of most rural communities.
Fricke hopes to turn statistics like these into the human
stories, stories that will change how policy makers think of rural Americans,
from child care subsidies and Social Security benefits to farm aid and funding
for rural clinics. "Statistics are good," he said. "But we are story-telling
animals. That’s how we communicate best."
It’s anthropology with the instincts of Charles Dickens,
Sinclair Lewis and Tom Wolfe.
"Rural America is filled with parents who raised their
children in towns that once beamed with optimism," Fricke said. "Now they’re
confronted with the reality that their towns are dying along with their dreams.
If you look at your descendants as rings of a tree, what happens when the core
dies? That’s what I was thinking when I came back home for my grandpa’s funeral
last year. Will the children come back? Major changes occur when family and
place no longer overlap."
Here’s what an anthropologist from Nepal, a collaborator with
Fricke, wrote in the Katmandu Post about a recent visit to North Dakota:
"Americans are said to place no value in religion, but
everywhere we went we observed many churches of the Christian denomination….We
also hear much about Americans not valuing their families as much as we do in
Nepal and throughout Asia. But in these rural areas, families seem to be larger
than in cities and they maintain strong relationships."
Maybe so. But the foreboding statistics keep ticking away in
rural America, despite the optimism of casual tourists.
North Dakota is everywhere. Some day it may be nowhere, a
Buffalo Commons bone-yard of hopes picked dry by the miasma of the new
millennium.
Could it happen? Maybe. It’s already happening in Nepal.
Fricke simply intends to narrate the process. Hope and pray it has a happy
ending.
I was a member of the Student Union Programming Board when at MSU,: Kovash recalled after she was named the 10th Superintendent of Moorhead Public Schools in 2008. "I was in the Delta Zeta sorority and worked in the gift shop in the Union. I was pretty busy in those days." But then teachers are usually busy as a matter of course. Kovash earned a BS degree in secondary education in 197?, which a concentration in language arts. Her first teaching job followed, and after going back to Moorhead State for night classes to get a Masters in special education, she was dealing with students who has learning disabilities. "You simply learned to juggle your time," no simple thing at all since Kovash and her husband Dennis were raising three children during those years.
Further classes in education administration, taken in the Tri-College program, allowed Lynne to get a license as a K-12 principal. She was an assistant principal in the Moorhead District after that and took on a variety of tasks. "Oversight from several state and Federal programs has grown greater over the years, so I got into that because we had to prepare a lot of reports." She supervised the district's program for gifted students for several years, then became the district's supervisor of planning and assessment. "You think you'd know most of what you needed to know about paperwork by then, but assessment took the paperwork into a whole new level."
Kovash learned a lot about public relations as well. "Parents are everywhere, and many of us in education have found that being involved in other public organizations is a good way to promote public schools." At one time or another, Lynne has been a member of the Moorhead Rotary, the FM Economic Development Corporation, Trollwood's Coordinating Council, MEA, and the Tri-College Advisory Committee. "I always keep my scheduler with me, wherever I go," she laughed.
As Moorhead's District superintendent, Kovash still deals with challenges brought on by such things as the No Child Left Behind mandates and the recent budget difficulties common to an economic downturn. "We find it's best to keep on our toes, and I'm glad to say that we still have very high marks from the state for the quality of our teaching and the high numbers of graduates that we send on to college."
But that is success only to be expected. Retirement is on the horizon now, but Lynne feels she still has some things to take care of before she can "rest and spend more time with my grandchildren." She looks forward to every day at the schools. "I wouldn't have done all this were it not for Moorhead State. It's where I learned to meet the demands of teaching. MSUM has been a major part of my life, both in the classroom and outside the classroom."