For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune by Clay S. Jenkinson (review)

The essay, that long-neglected art form of the late nineteenth century, is alive and flourishing in a couple of places few might have predicted.

In North Dakota.

In a newspaper.

Clay S. Jenkinson offers a fascinating collection of his work in For the Love of North Dakota and Other Essays: Sundays with Clay in the Bismarck Tribune. Like any collection of essays, it is not to be read at a single sitting, more to be dipped into as the mood strikes, perhaps even skipping around.

The thing that is most likeable about this book is Jenkinson’s modesty and frequent bafflement over great issues and life in general. After making a deep, serious argument in support of the Keystone Pipeline, for instance, with evidence so clearly put forward that a reader is free to use it to get to a different conclusion, Jenkinson admits in an afterword, “I may be full of beans.” It would benefit every opinion writer to have those words tattooed on the backs of his or her hands.

Perhaps few have ever accused the Bismarck Tribune of being a great newspaper, but it has done a fine thing in breaking the mold of what’s appropriate on its pages. Jenkinson’s columns are considerably longer than that of a standard column, and much more dependent on scholarship. They take us outside day-today concerns and into thinking about issues like wilderness preservation and examining our emotions.

One of my favorite pieces, “Killing a Red Fox on the Way to Kansas,” begins with the writer running over a fox. His ruminations take him through the road death toll of both animals and people, the perhaps too large gap we establish between humanity and “the rest of creation,” King Lear, Hamlet, and our tendency to devalue human life that is far away. It is an exciting trip that is very much worth taking.

Every bit of Jenkinson’s book is solidly grounded in North Dakota. The journalist details the reasons not to live there all so lovingly it sounds almost like a tourism pitch. A piece on the recent Bismarck-Mandan floods is well reported for fact (he spots the governor and first lady on the sandbag line) and feeling (he is eloquent on the sense of community the battle against the flood engendered).

He loves North Dakota and especially its Badlands with a deep passion. The thing that makes this book so good is that he convinces the reader that his passion is absolutely well founded.