AirVenture 2022 | Day 3

July 20 | Wednesday was the easy, stress-free, relax and play day. We were going to visit and tour Rolette County, North Dakota.

We slept in, to about 5:30 Central time, which is 3:30 am back home. We walked over to the restaurant at 6 for breakfast and found a sign saying they would be open at 7. Back to the room, considering whether to call home and check in to see how things were going in Sonoma. Remember what time it was back home? I don’t think Catherine and Julie would appreciate the wake-up call.

We checked email and messages, Calvin watched You Tube videos about home sawmills, I looked at weather forecasts and edited flight plans, and we went back over for breakfast at 7.

After breakfast, we headed out for our first stop at the Dale and Martha Hawk Museum in Wolford. The museum contains numerous historical buildings that had been moved from the surrounding regions, and has an old schoolhouse, church, settler homes, other buildings used for a doll museum, housewares, tools and three 50’ by 300’ buildings containing old steam and gas-powered tractors and farm equipment, cars and trucks, scooters, blowtorches (1200!) and whatever else those early settlers used to farm and live in that fertile but challenging land.

I knew Calvin would enjoy the museum.

After showing him Dale Hawk’s shop, where the museum volunteers still work on the old equipment, I left him in the able care of Kathy, the museum manager. I was going up to meet Jason Nordmark, editor and publisher of the Turtle Mountain Star, the local weekly newspaper published in Rolla, about a half hour north of Rolette.

We had subscribed to the Star when we read it on our first trip to Rolette in 2002. Rolette County is one of the only two blue counties in North Dakota, and Jason’s editorial style is more of the old-time crusading reporter who investigates, reports on and holds local and state government accountable to the people they are supposed to serve. His is the type of local reporting that is so important to good governance, and that is disappearing throughout America.

I stopped in at his office on a side street off the main drag in Rolla and went in to meet him. He looked just like Catherine and I thought he would, with a desk and tables piled high with papers and file folders. I brought him a couple editions of our local paper published twice a week, which has that same local flavor of reporting for the people. He had a photo of the four daughters that he occasionally wrote about on the cabinet behind him. I felt that we had watched them grow up over the past twenty years while reading what he would write about them in the Star.

Jason includes a column by David Adler, a constitutional scholar, who explains, issue by issue, what the Constitution and the Founders intended for the future of the Untied States. He relates each article of the Constitution to the events of our time. Jason publishes his column to educate and inform the citizens of the Rolette County. I wish every small-town newspaper carried Adler’s column. The country could use it right now.

After about fifteen minutes, I could tell Jason needed to get back to work, so I left him with my unreserved appreciation for his fine work and a bag of Catherine’s peanut butter cookies. He deserved them both.

My next stop was back in Rolette, where I was going to meet our old friends and neighbors from Rolette for lunch. Rodney and Carole Johnson lived across the alley from the grandparents’ house we bought, and Rodney took care of anything that needed attention when we were back home in California.

I was early, and thought I heard the sound of an airplane and smelled kerosene coming from the airport, just a block away from the main street in Rolette. I walked over and found an aerial applicator operating from the airport. He was flying a 402 Air Tractor, and working fields nearby. I talked to the loader, and learned he lived about four minutes away and had been in Rolette about twelve years. I was glad to know young people are moving back to town.

I landed at the Rolette airport on each off my past trips to Oshkosh in the Stinson and in Paul’s 172. It was only a four block walk to the house, which was all the way over on the other side of town. We would then walk three blocks back to George’s for lunch and dinner, and to Linda’s for breakfast. It was not a lot of exercise.

The airport hasn’t been used much since the last active Rolette pilot died, so it was good to see an airplane on the ramp again.

I met Rodney and Carole at the Village Café and had a nice lunch while catching up on the gossip in Rolette. We traded stories for two hours, then I gave them a couple jars of California honey from my hives. I then headed back to the Hawk Museum to pick up Calvin.

Calvin told me that he had been through all the buildings twice, but I think that was a slight exaggeration. He was impressed by all the machinery, and when I returned, I found him in the museum office talking to Kathy. Listening to her talk about her career working for military contractors in places like the Aleutians and ten years on Midway Island was as interesting as the exhibits in the museum. Some of the stories she was telling were hair raising.

We headed back to the Rugby airport to get the 182 fueled for our departure early the next morning, added a quart of oil, and then headed back to the motel and the Dakota Farms restaurant for an early dinner, since Calvin hadn’t found anything for lunch at the museum.

We stopped to fill up the courtesy car, and found that we had burned up 12 gallons in a day and a half of running around Rolette County. I took a photo of the price of gas at the pump. $4.349 a gallon. Makes you think about moving to North Dakota, doesn’t it?

After another lovely dinner of very hearty farmer’s fare, we retired to the motel room to plan the flight to Brodhead, watch a few videos and to call home before crawling into bed.

The courtesy car was another interesting story. It was a Chrysler mini-van, and had a peculiar habit of not always starting when you turned the key. It seemed completely random, but it worried me that it might fail completely while I was running around the county.

When we got in the van Thursday morning to make the last trip to the airport, it seemed especially balky. After several tries, and a looming sense of foreboding that somehow I had wrecked the courtesy car, it started and we made it back to the airport.

I had noticed a small vice grip hanging from a rod under the dash. After parking it and turning it off for the last time, I pointed it out to Calvin, who told me that that car had a rod from the key to the switch. I had found the standby starter.

Tomorrow we will head out to Brodhead Airport, Wisconsin, and the Pietenpol and Hatz fly-in.