The Beekeeper's Lament (23 page)

T
HESE STORIES OF ABANDONMENT ARE ALL TOO FAMILIAR IN
North Dakota. The state’s geography is particularly well suited to collapse. It lies at the very center of North America, far from the tempering effect of an ocean, and its “continental climate” brings brutally cold winters, cruelly hot summers, wrenching winds, and often negligible humidity and rainfall. Back when Gackle was surveyed, boosters of settlement in the Great Plains—which had previously been known as the “Great American Desert”—believed that cultivation of land would bring permanent humidity to the region. Rain, they said, would follow the plow. And so thousands upon thousands of northern European immigrants moved there, lured by abundant unsettled acreage and federal policies such as the Preemption Act of 1841, which offered public land for $1.25 an acre if settlers lived on and made certain improvements to their plots; or the Homestead Act of 1862, which promised 160 acres for farmers who occupied and cultivated the land for five years; or the Timber Culture Act of 1873, which offered 160 acres if ten of those acres were planted with trees. Others came for the dirt-cheap land offered by the railroad companies that hoped to lure customers to prairie depots like Gackle.

For a time, it appeared that the boosters were right. The years between 1890 and 1928 were unusually wet ones, and the state’s population swelled with towns and farms that prospered as the nation’s demand for wheat grew. Towns with populations as small as four hundred people often boasted the amenities of much larger cities: a grocery, a hardware store, a mercantile shop that sold everything from dry goods to kerosene lamps to ax handles, a grain elevator—possibly two—a livery barn, doctor’s office, butcher shop, harness shop, and blacksmith. Also, often, a newspaper, hotel, billiards parlor, lumber yard, drugstore, restaurant, cream station, tractor and car dealer, dentist, movie theater, and dance hall—and, of course, a panoply of churches. But even in flush times, North Dakota’s climate and population were hard-pressed to support such elaborately optimistic infrastructure. The state went through a series of booms and busts in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Between 1878 and 1890, the population mushroomed from an estimated 16,000 people to 191,000. By 1920, it had grown to 647,000. It peaked in 1930 at 680,000.

In 1928, North Dakota’s luck turned. It was an unusually wet summer. Ann Marie Low, a farmer’s daughter who lived near the town of Kensal, northeast of Gackle, and kept a lively and loving diary of her times, described a near-tropical climate that summer. “Crops and hayfields were lush; mosquitoes were thick and a continual torture to us and the livestock,” she wrote. At the end of that summer, devastating hailstorms struck the central section of the state, destroying most farmers’ crops. “The rest of the summer was a nightmare of slogging through either rain or clouds of mosquitoes to salvage what we could from the land.” The next summer veered to the other extreme: the rain stopped entirely and didn’t start up again for a decade. Summer after summer through the early 1930s, the heat was unceasing. Temperatures regularly measured upward of 110 degrees, sometimes climbing as high as 118 in the shade. It was so hot that horses dropped dead in the fields and bees stopped gathering nectar. In the years that followed, North Dakota farmers suffered calamities of biblical scope—drought, hail, swarms of grasshoppers, months of winter cold during which the warmest day was ten degrees below zero. And windstorms, unceasing windstorms, bringing dust that drifted like snow and coated clothes in closets and dishes in cupboards, windstorms that came in so thick it was difficult to see even inside a house, windstorms that blew so relentlessly that on white setting hens in enclosed barns, Low reported, “not a white feather shows.”

If crops didn’t blow away, they baked in the fields, and as the lean years continued, farmers mortgaged their homes, their fields, their tractors, and even their old, wretched cows, in the hopes of staying afloat. Most didn’t succeed: more than forty-three thousand farmers in North Dakota lost their land to foreclosure between 1920 and 1934, and tens of thousands more simply abandoned their homes, farms, and businesses. The Dust Bowl eroded not only the land, but also the expectations that North Dakota’s dogged settlers had brought with them when they settled there. Historian Elwyn Robinson called this surfeit of optimism the “too-much mistake”—“North Dakota had too much of too many things too soon,” he wrote in the 1960s. “The pioneers created too many farms, too many towns, too many schools, churches, and colleges, too many counties and too much government, too much railroad mileage, too many banks, and too much debt.”

The population drain continued through the twentieth century. Profitable farms required more and more sophisticated machinery and bigger and bigger spreads. (Today the average North Dakota farm is 3,000 acres, nearly twenty times the size of the traditional 160-acre homestead.) Farmers daunted by the inefficiencies of small-scale farming or discouraged by the difficulties of making ends meet sold out to larger operations and moved to town or to Fargo or Bismarck or out of state. First, a handful of farmers would leave with their families, then a few more. Six would leave one year, three the next, seven the following. As they did, schools like the one in Gackle consolidated, teachers departed, and one by one, then in batches and bunches, counties began to revert to historic “frontier” conditions—a status defined by demographers as fewer than six people per square mile. Today large areas of North Dakota contain fewer than two people per square mile.

Only two states—Wyoming and Vermont—are home to fewer people than North Dakota; only Alaska, Wyoming, and Montana have lower population densities. Between 1930 and 2008, the nation’s population grew two-and-a-half-fold. In that same time period, North Dakota lost 45,000 residents, declining from its 1930 peak of 680,000 to just shy of 637,000 in 2009. And while the population has stabilized and even begun growing again recently thanks to an oil boom in the western part of the state, the farm population has continued to bleed. In 1950, Gackle had 600 residents. At the end of the twentieth century, the number had dropped below 300. Despite the town’s obvious (to me, anyway) rural charms, it’s no mystery why such places continue to lose people: in 2000 the average per capita income was just under $16,000; the median age was sixty-one. More than 45 percent of the people who lived in Gackle in 2000 were sixty-five or older. Just 9 percent were under eighteen. “It used to be a hopping, be-bopping town,” says Miller, but “now there are no kids. They leave for college and you never see them again.”

W
HILE MOST OF HUMANITY SWARMS TOWARD THE CITIES
, Miller makes camp in the places they leave behind. This is an ideal setup for bees, but it poses a problem for their keepers, because although the bees do most of the work, their commercial keepers still need other humans to help them move the hives and harvest and process the honey, and there simply aren’t enough. In the northern plains, humans, especially those of an age amenable to lifting fifty-pound hives, are in short supply. “I’ll hire any schoolkid who will walk in the door,” Miller says. “The problem is there aren’t any schoolkids.” Miller introduced me to his friend LeRoy Brant, who keeps his bees in Towner, North Dakota, in the summertime. Brant told me that he advertised for help in North Dakota a few years ago, offering a wage of twelve to fifteen dollars an hour. “I didn’t get one phone call for six months.” Hispanic laborers, so plentiful and controversial in urban areas today, have also proven difficult to keep around—many find it hard to leave their support network for the isolation of North Dakota.

So instead, Brant, Miller, and many other northern plains beekeeping outfits rely on labor brokers who arrange temporary visas for South African workers—mostly white Afrikaaner farmers and twentysomethings looking for adventure and relief from their country’s erratic economy. Bee guys like to hire them because they speak English and have driver’s licenses, and they also blend in well with the industrious German and Russian farmers who populate rural North Dakota. Most years, Miller imports around fifteen South Africans to tend his bees and process his honey. Some come back for successive summers and require little supervision. The green ones start in the honey house, “stapling together their fingers and boxes for bees,” says Miller. Later they graduate to processing honey, then to handling the bees. They live with two or three others in six houses that Miller bought in Gackle as the original owners decamped for less arduous pastures.

On Friday nights, most of Miller’s South Africans are at the bar, and after I settled in at the Krauses that August evening, Miller and I walked downtown to meet them. From all appearances, Dani’s Place, the town’s only watering hole, saw far less activity than the senior center next door. Shafts of late-day light streamed through the door and small windows, illuminating the dust and the beer-stained woodwork. There were five people inside. One was Dani, the bartender, who was tall, bald, and robust, with a puffy walrus mustache. The other four were Miller’s Afrikaaner employees, Willie, Wessel, Conroy, and Jacobus—“Jaco” for short. Willie, in his fifties, was the father figure of the bunch, a solid, round-cheeked farmer from the southern Cape region who was struggling to keep his land and spent ten months of the year hauling American bees to make ends meet. Jaco, in his mid-twenties, was young, blond, affable, and soft-spoken. Conroy was still a teenager: tall and sandy-haired, he didn’t say much. His half brother Wessel was twenty-one, the city boy of the group, with spiky dark hair and an edgy sociability. They had been drinking for a while, and as they ordered another round, Miller—as he is wont to do—disappeared, leaving me alone with them.

After a few awkward hellos all around, Wessel invited me to sit with him at a peeling two-top near the bar. He had just downed four shots of Jägermeister—a syrupy German liqueur reputed to contain elk’s blood (it doesn’t), and known to make people do stupid things (it does). He stacked his shot glasses as he informed me, with booming good cheer, that Miller had gone out back to talk to Barry, another South African migrant who had been coming to Gackle for years with his girlfriend Linda. Barry worked for Tommy Wagner, who farmed just down the road from Miller’s honey house. Linda worked in the honey house, and the couple lived together in one of Miller’s spare homes. Wessel lowered his voice and leaned in. This week, he told me, Linda had asked Barry to move out. Then Wessel raised his voice and leaned back and told me—out of nowhere—that he hated black people. I looked around furtively, expecting barbed stares from bystanders. But this was North Dakota. There were no bystanders, and furthermore, there were no black people—in 2000, Gackle was 99.4 percent white, and if that’s not homogenous enough, it’s also 75 percent German. Such fading prairie outposts are, for men—boys—like Wessel, imaginative reconstructions of South Africa as the creators of apartheid had wished it to be—an agrarian society of hardy northern Europeans, and not a black person for miles around. “I hate them,” he told me again, and ordered four more shots. It seemed wise to depart, so I did, extracting promises that Wessel and Willie would take me along the next day to tour some of the bee yards.

I arrived at Miller’s honey house the next morning dressed for beekeeping, but nobody else was there, unless you counted the usual straggler bees who came in with the honey and were in their death throes, wobbling across the floors and walls, clambering dizzily onto my ankles. I watched them wander the dirt parking area until Miller and Willie arrived with Jaco in tow. Wessel, they told me, had overdone it last night and was sleeping in. We gathered suits, smokers, and gloves, but as we climbed into trucks to head to the fields, the sheriff drove up, looking officious. The previous night, sometime after I left, sometime after more shots and more beers, sometime after Dani had kicked Wessel and Barry out of the bar, the two men had driven to Linda’s house. Linda had called the police, Barry had broken a phone, and then Barry and Wessel had headed back to Main Street, where they trashed a bench that had been donated to the city of Gackle by the Future Farmers of America. They’d spent the night in jail.

This was not typical behavior in Gackle, and the sheriff was not pleased, so Miller spent some time reassuring him that the Wessel problem would be taken care of. Then Miller and I headed out in his big red pickup, followed by Willie and Jaco in a huge flatbed carrying a forklift and a pile of pallets. We visited a few bee yards and as morning bled into noon, Miller and I headed into town for lunch. The usual coterie of regulars was gathered at the Gackle Community Café, and they looked eagerly toward Miller as he opened the door. Seven or eight elderly men and women were holding court at a round table near the front. Miller said his hellos, shook hands all around, and beelined to a table in the back. He sat far from the others. “It’s a seething pit of vipers over there,” he said affectionately, nodding at the group. They didn’t look very dangerous—geriatric farmers and their wives, flannel shirts and work boots and blue-rinsed curls and cooling coffee—but they appeared to have lots of free time. In this respect, Miller’s boys had made the café society’s day. It had only been a couple of hours since the sheriff stopped by the honey house, but by now the whole town knew that Wessel and Barry had gotten into trouble.

Small towns like Gackle are like beehives. They rely on a fine-tuned social balance that is, if not fragile, then at least fixed, yielding little. It was obvious that Wessel would have to go. There was simply no room for troublemakers who destroyed FFA benches and vectored unhappiness. So just as nurse bees escort sick or injured workers to the hive entrance, banishing misfits, Miller would have to devise an exit strategy for Wessel. At lunch, over grilled cheese and iced tea, Miller made up his mind. He would ship Wessel off to a beef guy he knew in Iowa—beef guys can get by with a heavier touch—to see if he could make a fresh start in a town where all the FFA benches were intact.