Adventures in Sugarland

We backed the boat into the water. Toxic algae bloomed along the shoreline. A thick skin of bluish-green foam gurgled on the surface. Near the sandbars, streaks of neon green swirled in the water like northern lights.

A kettle of turkey vultures huddled in the gloom by the swim beach. A pair of pelicans disappeared into the fog. The spillway, a quarter mile from the dock, washed out in the haze, its shape held like a distant memory.

The North Dakota Department of Environmental Quality set the reporting limit for microcystin at 8 micrograms per liter (µg/L). Above 8 µg/L, the dangerous toxin can kill a full-grown cow and cross the blood-brain barrier in humans. The last water sample we collected at Homme Dam contained 29,300 µg/L, over 3,500 times the reporting limit. The highest recorded levels in the state.

At the end of the dock, a tribute to my high school friend is spray-painted in faded black letters. Two weeks before I defended my dissertation, he was killed by the SWAT team in West Fargo, facing charges for meth and stolen handguns.

The same chemicals that have ravaged the Great Plains with algae blooms and meth labs rumble into my county by the trainload. Red phosphorus, white phosphorus, hydrophosphoric acid, and ammonium nitrate are shipped into the region to replace nutrients depleted from dead, dysfunctional soils. Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building with some of the same fertilizers. And I cannot count the number of friends and cousins I’ve lost here to addiction and violence. The friends I barely recognize now, out there in the sugar fields.

We grow many things in the Red River Valley. North Dakota is where we planted the most nuclear bombs in the country, our wheat and sunflower fields pocked with Minute Man missile silos. It is where we grow biofuel corn and McDonald’s French fries. Toxic algae blooms and profit margins for General Mills and PepsiCo.

In a landscape devoted to monocrop agriculture, we grow food deserts. I am one of the 45% of rural North Dakotans who live in a food desert. Nearly all my lunches come from the gas station.

Around here, the unrivaled king of cash crops is sugar.

I’m not sure anyone around here could tell the true story about how Sugarland became Sugarland.

The sugarbeet has come a long way since its noble origins in the United States. America’s first beet processing factory was constructed by abolitionist Lydia Maria Child and her husband in New England in 1838. Their goal was to root out chattel slavery by dismantling the sugarcane economy. Although the Childs abandoned their farm by the 1840s, the sugarbeet has had remarkable staying power.

Today, over half of the nation’s sugar comes from sugarbeets. And nearly half of the sugarbeets grown in the US are planted and extracted along the chipped tooth border between North Dakota and Minnesota.

At my first soil health workshop, the keynote speaker declared that in the Red River Valley, there is only one political party. Not Republicans. Certainly not Democrats. Only American Crystal Sugar.

In the monotheistic kingdom of American Crystal Sugar, we learn to worship the sugarbeet.

On the way to Fargo, a billboard featuring Jesus is dwarfed by the smokestacks of American Crystal Sugar. The tagline “Jesus, I trust in You!” next to an image of Christ and the call numbers for Christian public radio.

This is Sugarland.

It’s not as sweet here as it sounds. It’s a landscape where the trucks bulge with beets and the highways are slicked with mud. Where gargantuan equipment tears through black fields to extract over thirty tons of beets per acre. Where the Red River is lined with American Crystal Sugar factories that process 150 pounds of sugar per second, three billion pounds a year. Where the vice president of my board of supervisors runs a thirty-thousand-acre farm and starred in a documentary about his family empire called Sugarbeet Mafia.

Maybe you are familiar with the region through Louise Erdrich’s novels. Or perhaps you remember the scene in the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, where Steve Buscemi clutches a bullet hole in his cheek and buries a million dollars under an ice-scraper in the snow.

Buscemi’s scene was shot in the ditches near my parents’ crumble-brick farmhouse. Ditches that I cut and carved with bulldozers, making roads for $9 an hour with my uncles and cousins. Ditches where I never found a satchel filled with ransom money. Ditches where today I lead students to collect seeds from the last remnants of the tallgrass prairie: big bluestem, stiff goldenrod, Indian grass, prairie smoke.

From thirty thousand feet, my home in flyover country looks like a patchwork quilt. Fields cut into sharp rectangles. Sunflower yellow. The lush green of corn stalks and soybeans. Amber waves of grain. But on the ground, the blanket metaphor frays and unravels. Nothing more than a wishful mirage.

The ritual sacrifice of the prairie ends with winters where nothing grows. Where what we grow is not food, but scarcity. Huge fields left bare. Howling winds that blow contaminated topsoil into our rivers. The once biodiverse prairie transformed into what ecologists now refer to as the “black desert.”

Not everything that happens here is easy to trace back to sugar. Like the EPA’s term for the farm runoff that we cannot track to specific fields, some things are best understood as nonpoint source pollution.

Here’s one.

This summer, my Uncle Bear had his throat removed. His cigarette-tarred trachea sewn shut. A special cover he wears at night to keep the horseflies from getting inside him. A hole in his neck big enough to drown in the shower, even if he keeps his mouth shut.

The last thing my Uncle Bear said to me before the doctor dug out his voicebox was “I ain’t gonna fight you on this anymore.” He said it in the cab of his pickup. Said it while we stared off at a bend in the Park River. Said it after some shit went down between him and the guys who work with me. After I asked him “What’s it gonna take so we don’t gotta go to war?”

Two weeks later, I watched a black bear swim across the Red. The undertow current that pulled the fishing boat hidden by the still-life surface of the water. The September sky puffed with clouds. The banks spiked with the bone-white skeletons of cottonwoods.

The bear did not begin as a bear. She began as a log.

She became a bear when my fishing buddy Dick clocked her fuzzed ears. When Mike spotted her nose tilted above the clouds that floated on the surface. When I rasped: “Bear!”

I’ve never heard the story of how my Uncle Bear became a bear, no matter how many times I’ve asked my aunts and uncles to tell it.

Except, maybe it isn’t just one story. Maybe it’s a river of stories.

The log that turned into a bear climbed the west bank of the Red and shook dry. She leapt west into a North Dakota bean field.

The most dangerous thing we grow here isn’t the algae blooms or the meth labs. Isn’t the diabetes or heart disease. It’s the apathy.

I’m not sure anyone around here could tell the true story about how Sugarland became Sugarland.

Part of the trouble is that I was raised in a town where the most popular bar was called The Alibi. The kind of place that breeds storytellers who are not in right relation with the truth. The kind of place where we begin each telling with a disclaimer:

This is a true story. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

Maybe you remember this from the title card in Fargo. The claim to truth that allegedly convinced a Japanese woman, Takako Konishi, to travel from Tokyo to Minnesota in search of Buscemi’s buried ransom money. How, the story goes, she died of exposure searching for that bag of money in ditches crusted with snow.

The facts of Konishi’s death are more complicated than the stories we misreported and repeated like a lie we wanted to believe. The way a lie can grow from a grain of truth. How she really was found dead by a hunter in Minnesota, her frozen body leaning against a tree. How the Bismarck police really did report that, before she died, she visited their office carrying a hand-drawn map and repeating a word that sounded like “Fargo.” How sometimes “this is a true story” is the first lie we tell. And sometimes we cannot tell the difference between a true story and the one we want to believe.

Here’s one that’s true.

At an artist residency in Central Oregon my sister joined me on stage to tell back-home stories about what sugar and monocultures have written on the land. 

The screen behind us displayed a photo of bare fields surrounding our parents’ farmhouse. Fields eroded by howling winter winds. Thick swirls of soil in ditches crusted with snow.

The familiar image to anyone from the northern Great Plains was alien to most folks in the audience. They could not see that just offscreen was the home my sister and I were raised in. The house built brick-by-brick from a cinder-block kit ordered from a Sears catalogue in 1906. Each brick smeared with sunbaked soils and clays, a tri-colored tribute to the land.

“Does anyone know what we’re looking at here?” I asked, gesturing toward the photo of the bare fields.

“The bottom of a lake?” A woman offered. “It looks like it could be the bottom of a dry lakebed.”

A smile broke across my sister’s face.

“Technically, you’re right,” I told the woman. “Today, it’s a sugar field. But that sugar field, the whole Red River Valley, was once a glacial lake.”

The audience chuckled when I added, “And don’t be fooled. It’s a color photo. Monocultures sometimes just look black-and-white.”

After the talk, my sister asked if I remembered the time I tried to run away through those same muddy sugar fields.

“You must’ve been thirteen. It was right after dad got diagnosed with MS,” she said. “Sometime that spring.”

She wanted to know if I remembered the cold shimmer of mud. The way the rain-soaked land sucked the shoes off my feet. How our parents watched from the porch as the land swallowed me up. As I army-crawled back to the ditch. As I stood on the gravel, stared off toward the line of cottonwoods on the horizon, like a row of broken teeth. She wanted to know if I remembered how that morning, rainwater flowed through the bend in the old creek. The creek our neighbor’s have plowed for generations. The old creek converted into tillable acres.

“Yeah,” I said. “I remember.”

She told me that she first dreamed of prairie while staring off into the same sugar fields. 
“I remember sitting on that old bent-frame trampoline in the yard,” she said. “Remember the migrant laborers hoeing beets and speaking Spanish. The drone of pesticide planes that buzzed our house. The taste of mothballs and burnt garlic from the pesticides that coated our throats.”

“I sat there and imagined what came before the sugar fields,” she said. “I guess I’m still imagining what comes after.”

In the early nineteenth century, an explorer named Alexander Henry set up camp near our home and marveled at what he saw: grasslands tall as a man on horseback, thriving communities of Dakota and Anishinaabe peoples, bison as far as the eye could see. 

In Henry’s journal entries, the contemporary of Lewis and Clark described the vibrant colors of the prairie and the violent economics of the fur trade, with carcasses left to rot and “the stench about camp being so great from the quantities of flesh and fat thrown away.”

Sugarland is a strange place to call home no matter where you’re from. 

My office at the Walsh County Three Rivers Conservation District squats on the banks of the Park River near Henry’s historic camp. Down the road stands The Alexander House, the roadside motel and liquor store that pays tribute to the nineteenth-century explorer. Referred to as the “Ax House” by locals, the motel features a sign portraying Alexander Henry in a coonskin cap, a rifle cradled in the crook of his arm. The words “Alexander House” written in a font that resembles cut logs. 

The once endless grassland Henry described has been plowed, poisoned, and plundered into an imaginary landscape. A landscape my sister imagined while staring off into the sugar fields. Gone are the enormous bison herds. The bear overhunted for fur and fat. The stands of tallgrass reduced to the ditches and dwindling cattle pastures. 

Today, we have lone bears and the Sugarbeet Mafia. The wanton slaughter of wildlife replaced by the wasteful exploitation of soil. In 2023, American Crystal Sugar ordered farmers to leave nearly 10% of their beet crop to rot in the fields. With unseasonably warm temperatures, another fifty-thousand tons of beets rotted in the beet piles this winter. 

The cost of sugar goes far beyond the grocery bill. Far beyond the subsidies and tariffs that artificially inflate sugar prices in the Farm Bill. The rot festers in the strange language games we learn to speak with all that sugar on our tongue.

American Crystal Sugar no longer refers to harvest season. They call it “the campaign.” The language of politics and war is fitting in a landscape filled with buried histories of violence. A place where the bottles of Pepsi and boxes of Cinnamon Toast Crunch do not list the names of our dead. Do not list the microcystin levels in our water. Do not explain how my home county lost over 50% of its topsoil since 1960. How the Dust Bowls haven’t stopped here since Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962.

A spoonful of living soil contains more microbes than there are human beings on earth. But a spoonful of sugar helps the apathy go down.

The most dangerous thing we grow here isn’t the algae blooms or the meth labs. Isn’t the diabetes or heart disease. It’s the apathy.

Apathy is the opposite of “love medicine,” the kind Louise Erdrich described in her debut novel. Apathy corrodes and corrupts worse than sugar in the gas tank. Becomes a lie agreed upon. Like the better-than-sex cake we serve at Lutheran potlucks. The saccharine dessert that has a lot more to say about the quality of sex in a monoculture than the quality of the cake.

The year before I left for graduate school, a young guy I knew got sucked out of his pickup and drowned in the Park River. It happened on Easter down by my Uncle Bear’s place. Two months later, his body washed up a few miles downriver near the sandbars at Homme Dam.

Homme is a tricky word to pronounce if you’re not from here. Over the years, I’ve heard many outsiders pronounce Homme “home.”

Sugarland is a strange place to call home no matter where you’re from. When I left to pursue a PhD in English, the question I got the most was: “What are you going to do with that?”

It’s a question I’ve been asked dozens of times. A question familiar to anyone who has believed in stories hard enough to devote their whole life to reading them, writing them, hearing them, telling them: What are you gonna do with that?

Today, I consider this a real question. What am I going to do with it?

What can any of us do when what we have is a story? When what we have is a river of stories.