Coming together in Fargo

Christian Century, July 30, 1997 by Stewart W. Herman

The city of Fargo is proposing to allocate bonuses on a sliding scale of merit among the engineers and other employees who worked so hard to keep out the flood; Moorhead may follow suit. Thus what might have remained a gift, in Hyde's strict sense, would be reciprocated rather than passed on. It seems that communities re-energize themselves by retrenching in the calculated, predictable patterns of exchange. There is certainly less strain in doing business with wants which are negotiable and can be satisfied through exchange, rather than facing up to needs which are not, and can be answered only through gifts.

The gift economy is like flowering plants tucked away in the desert. Like them, it lies dormant, dessicated by the exacting winds of normal reciprocity, but kept alive by a steady flow o f voluntarism and other public manifestations of gift-giving. Then a flood brings it to life, and it puts forth a prodigal abundance of blossoms, for a short and glorious moment. The gift economy cannot last because it puts an inordinate strain upon a community, even one that is as richly endowed with social capital as are Fargo and Moorhead. Privileged, then, are those of us who witnessed this dramatic transformation in social relations. Its passing is both a relief and a cause for mourning.

Between

It was a good garden, but I wanted it moved from its plot uphill to the pond's edge

so I could work by the water -- which was so beautiful: green glaze shimmering away toward some distant

willows -- and near the house a marsh bridged the shift from dry to wet, erasing

seams, the ground going softer, then spongy, then sunken but still visible through a crest of reeds

where cattle shambled hip-deep and ducks churned -- all the swimming and flying and walking things

met, it seemed to me, in that marsh, grazing and gulping.

And I wanted to transplant my garden into that turgid soil against all sense; burying rootlets of kale, leeks, squash among the muscular grasses, the wild seeds --

and so I stood awhile like that, passing my hands through the shallow, imagining the joy of whole days

kneeling between those solid and fluid worlds; all day dipping and lifting.

Bagged

Cerebral palsy come today to take our daughter's clothes. Two years it took to call then go below alone last night to rouse the condemned cartons, heavy each a soul, and bid them join the prostrate bags my wife

had filled by day. I helped the driver load the sprawling sacks into the bursting backside of the seething August truck. Before I knew I threw one unencumbered by whose flesh in flight then smothered my contempt.