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Hidden in Plain Sight

CHAPTER 1

I first met Sally some thirty years ago when we were both college students working at the tourist trap that was the historic little town of Medora in Southwestern North Dakota. Harold Schafer, a rich soap manufacturer, bought the small town situated on the edge of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park. The town had always existed for tourism and had supported several families who ran the two motels, a cafe, the Cave Bar bar built under a antique railroad car, and a log cabin that sold agates. Schafer acquired the diverse businesses and renovated their uniqueness into identical tourist trap trinket stores along a boardwalk. Years later, the company biographer wrote that the Schafers saved the town from extinction rather than the truth of how he avoided paying concession fees levied at similar government parks.

Harold Schafer built dormitories and a kitchen attached to a tent that he called a cafeteria and he employed a staff of fresh college boys and pretty girls at minimum wage. To promote the old west flavor, all the summer help had to buy western uniforms so by the time the uniform, room and board were deducted, the employees left after Labor Day with damn little. The only people who earned any money were the commuters like Sally who carpooled from neighboring towns. The first year, the manager was Mr. Schafer's obnoxious brother-in-law and the last year I worked, it was managed by Ed Schafer, Harold's son.

In the early years, Harold Schafer and his newest wife would lead a western parade that consisted of themselves and a wagon with a sign advertising the "Pitchfork Fondue " each weekend. All the college kids were required to stop making beds, waiting tables, washing dishes, mangling sheets and mowing lawns and line up along the boardwalks and cheer the couple. The Schafers were extravagant show-offs and donned leather leggings, ornate costumes and huge hats, and they'd whoop and wave their hats like they are a wild-west show. The purebred Arabian horses were so loaded down with silver encrusted saddles and decorated riders that it was impossible for them to prance so they would plod down the two-block parade route.

To me waiting tables felt like prostitution. As little food and drink whores we needed to convince the customer we are happy to see them and persuade the boring that what they have to say is important. In a matter of minutes, we must express love and make the "John" obligated. Everyone jumped to serve anyone dressed in the latest fashion because faddists need stranger approval and on an unconscious level, the waitresses profited from the addiction. It was not only prostitution, but a little protection racket also - if a non-tipping customer returns, not only will he not get his smile, charged premium prices for cut rate liquor, or wait forever for refills on his coffee, but also he can wait to get served at all. The alms-giving can hardly be called voluntary. The waitresses who did the best would stand very close to the men and they universally hated waiting on the women. While we waitresses pulled down good incomes, the kitchen staff, maids, and store clerks were supposed to smile as part of their lowly jobs - more the homely wives than the prancing mistresses and it wasn't fair. I was the only waitress who gave part of my tips to the kitchen staff and the other waitresses disapproved.

Everyone working in Medora hated waiting on Schafer's brother-in-law, Mark. Gossip said he was made the manager as part of the divorce settlement and he was extremely rude and liked the world to know that he was boss. When the dreaded creep would enter the Hotel, a shoving match would ensue in the kitchen until the weakest girl would lose her balance and be shoved into view and thus forced into involuntary servitude. No matter what one did for the lordship, he would be loudly dissatisfied. If you were stupid enough to bring two pats of butter he would yell that you were wasting money, but if you brought one pat he would yell that you were making the place look stingy. It was all a big show to be noticed but it was at the expense of underpaid innocents. One day I was very unlucky and got stuck waiting Mark's table and he had yelled so loud and so long about how there was too much ice was in the water that I burst into tears in the kitchen. I bit my lip and took out the salads, but he screamed, "Any idiot knows that you bring the soup first."

When I was whispering an account of my ordeal to Sally washing dishes in the kitchen, she said "I hate bullies, do you want me to spit in his soup?"

Sally Gustine was a plain, big boned young woman with acne, large callused farmer hands, overgrown feet and an oversized head covered with unruly hair. Her teeth were painfully crooked and she covered her mouth when she laughed but she was very possibly the wittiest person I had ever met. She reminded me of the lowly agates - the homely rock that when cracked open would sometimes reveal silhouettes of objects or landscapes. Each rock is like nature's little Rorschach, a true philosopher's stone.

That first summer was the beginning of our friendship. We became roommates because we were working our way through a nearby teacher's college and were both willing to live in a low-rent unfinished basement. Sally worked part time jobs all over the campus and rode the bus fifty miles to Medora on the weekends to work. I had stopped going to Medora to work. After Harold Schafer's son Ed took over the management, waitressing pay diminished because he instituted a no-tipping rule. Any tips left on the tables were thrown into a jar that Ed confiscated. Every evening he would pick up the tip jar and with a friendly wave, he would say, "thanks for the beer money, girls." and I quit when he fired a girl for sticking her tip in her shoe.

Sally wasn't all that good at telling jokes but she was very observant and could accurately recount the details of some small incident with such accuracy that it would make you laugh. Sometimes she crossed the tact line. I noticed people either loved or hated her. I'd say her major fault was that if something was on her mind, it was on her lips and many times her outspoken opinions made her enemies. Poker was a game that would have been impossible for her to play because her attitude could usually be seen by looking at her expression. She also had a way about her that antagonized authority and if I had to define it, I would have to say it was that she lacked deference, a tragic flaw in a any minority who doesn't "know their place". Pompous people seemed to inspire her wit. If something struck her as funny, she blurted out her observation without discretion for she never learned the art of social lying that keeps culture running smoothly. Sally once confided that sometimes a truth she read or heard made her scalp crawl the way music did for other people.

I had been raised in a family that was abusive to me. Like many others who had found their childhood unbearable, I majored in psychology. My father was a weak, selfish man who felt child rearing was woman's work and believed his contribution to parenthood consisted of bestowing the sperm. My mother was a Jehovah Witness religious fanatic who labeled most things as sins. She was addicted to her religion, reading and rereading Watchtower publications and quoting verses for every occasion. She had given up any original thought in favor of the "truths" of the inspired word and was not only frightened but also fascinated by the prophecies. She was thrilled that we were in "the very last days" and she was picked for eternal life. In her child rearing, she demanded perfect obedience because she knew the only righteous path to salvation was to spend her time and energy in Kingdom interest and to save her children by scaring us into compliance. In the "universal war" where Satan has declared war on Jehovah we were automatically on one side or the other and if you were not doing Kingdom work you were on the side of the devil. When my teacher gave me a bead necklace for my birthday, my mother threw it away. Birthdays are evil because someone other than Jehovah is being worshipped. Christmas was evil because thousands of years ago someone worshipped the sun on December 25th. Saluting the flag was worshipping your country and a sign that you belong to Satan's kingdom rather than God's kingdom. I was so shy of people that I didn't want to attend Kingdom Hall meetings or accompany my mother on her missions and she saw my reluctance as the work of the devil in his conspiracy to destroy the Jehovah's Witnesses and I became her enemy.

I don't know when my mother first started hating me and began her campaign to ignore me. There were six children in our family and years later at my father's funeral, I looked through the family picture albums and saw there were no pictures of me after about age ten. I was only a fair student even though I loved to read. I found books that interested me and I would read and study them and give the assigned work only the cursory attention it took to get passable grades. If I disliked my teacher, I would give them the minimum, but if I liked a teacher, I occasionally tried to impress them with some observation I had gleaned from my renegade reading. My mother did not approve of my reading anything other than Watchtower publications.

My brothers and sisters sought my mother's approval by ridiculing me and I became a loner. There were plenty of incidents of physical abuse because the rod was not spared, but it was the day to day cold, critical contempt that wore me down until I became shy and withdrawn. Though I never got any praise, I could avoid condemnation by working constantly.

Sally too, was a loner and very smart in a obstinate way. She was a very hard worker but not a great employee because she would balk at orders that didn't make sense to her. She confided that she felt that her controlling mother hated her and said that every statement she made became an argument. Sally lived with constant criticism and she was given daily affirmation that her birth was an imposition, not a gift. Sally had very little for possessions. She said her first new dress was for high school graduation and that she hated it because her mother picked an out-of-style shirtwaist in the style her mother liked. She said she liked her dad because he was soft-hearted. When I first met Sally washing dishes at the cafe, I asked her why she didn't waitress instead and she said, "I don't know how. I've never been in a cafe before."

In those days, it was still possible to work your way through college and both Sally and I had many jobs. Sally's mother had opened her mail when she got her Medora job application and said, "If you don't want to work at home, don't expect any money from us" so Sally just made do. She was a little on the messy side. I tried to help her to dress better, but whatever clothes we bought at the secondhand store always looked disheveled and no hairstyle seemed to suit her, so I gave up on trying to help her improve her appearance. We would often amuse ourselves by singing tunes into our lint brushes. Sally's favorite was I Was Not a Nazi Polka. She loved how everyone was so innocent after the fact. I would solo on Sally Was a Good Old Girl because it described Sally so well - selling term papers to people too lazy to do their own work, offering to buy sandwiches for students who asked her to steal at the student union. Even though she had nothing herself, she was extremely generous with other people. She was always an unconventional thinker and one time she confessed that she had the highest score in her class on the IQ test given in the sixth grade. We discussed many things including religion and settled on apathetic agnostics. If there was a god with a plan that directed human behavior, it was none of our business. IT was unconcerned about man's activities since pograms, purges, genocides, holocausts went on without interference so we didn't care about what IT was up to either. When we graduated, Sally took a job teaching and I received a grant and continued my education. Through the years Sally and I kept up a sporadic Christmas letter writing contact.

CHAPTER 2

My ex-husband and I met in graduate school and stayed married three years. The marriage ceremony was in the courthouse with school friends as witnesses. Larry and I got along fine until my papers began to be published and his were not, and then he became critical of everything I did even complaining about how I ironed his shirts and about the food I cooked. In our relationship, I continually gave him support and encouragement but he never could reciprocate in kind and saw me as a competitor not a partner. When I was chosen as part of a team to help cult victims readjust, Larry was jealous and what was left of our marriage crumbled. Some of his friends made bigger career leaps than I ever did and he stayed friends with them, but in his mind there was something humiliating and castrating about being eclipsed by a woman. I worked hard to try to make him feel good about himself and minimize myself but it wasn't enough. He wanted high school attitudes - a return to the times when we girls would act dumb around boys so they would like us, a pretty cheerleader, not a fellow player.

After graduate school I won another grant and moved to Minnesota and enrolled in the University of Minnesota's doctorate program. My thesis, Jehovah Witnesses Mental Abuse of their Children explained the introduction of phobias as a tool for indoctrination. I was thrilled when it was published in the Journal of Psychology. Through loans, grants, and teaching fellowships, I finally became a psychologist. I have my private practice, and volunteer work at The Center for Victims of Cults, a private non-profit organization working with over 1000 victims residing here in Minnesota. Contrary to public belief, powerful cults did not disappear after Jonestown but became more sophisticated and more subtle.

Psychologically, man dislikes moral ambiguity and fears that he may make the wrong decision so he will relinquish his freedom of choices to a dictatorial religion. All people share a number of fundamental psychological needs that can be met by religion. People need to feel connection and inclusion in some group. They need to feel good about themselves. They need to feel effective in protecting themselves from danger and influencing important events in their lives and religion can give the illusion of some control. Finally they need to have some form of understanding of the world and of their own place in it. As long as religion is practiced in moderation and teaches tolerance, it can be quite harmless. Any religion, even mainstream, that tries to make people phobic is unhealthy and insistence that the members relinquish their free will is a recipe for disaster.

One of the richest and the most megalomaniac cult leaders is Reverend Moon. America's founding fathers, who recognized the need for separation of church and state, are wrong according to Sun Myung Moon who said in a speech on May 17, 1973 to Unification Church leaders, "when it comes to our age, we must have an automatic theocracy to rule the world ... so we cannot separate the political field from the religious ... separation between religion and politics is what Satan likes most." Because Moon believes in the amalgamation of religion and politics, he involves his organizations in a wide variety of extreme right wing Republican groups for many years. He sent hundreds of his followers to demonstrate at the National Prayer and Fast for the Watergate Crisis in support of Richard Nixon. He is happy to pay huge speaker fees to ex-President Bush. Moon owns UPI and The Washington Times subscribed to by political conservatives and more biased than even Fox News. Moon, who got his start as a gun manufacturer, was a major contributor of money and guns to the CIA trained contra forces in Nicaragua and publicized the Nicaraguan Freedom Fund on the front page of The Washington Times. Although Moon is considered by most to be quite insane the political right is happy for his contributions.

People believe that it is hard to be taken in by a cult but they would be surprised at the intelligence of converts. In fact, cults target talented people because they are most useful to the organization. Like all con artists whose greatest assets are their looks and their ability to act, recruiters convey a "humanness" that fosters trust by the victim. Often using effusive praise and flattery a member will befriend a potential convert. An elitist mentality is often fostered in members by telling them they are special contributors to a higher purpose. The more information the recruiter learns about the victim the greater his chance of manipulating the person. Once the victim tells of his hopes, dreams, fears, relationships and job interests, the recruiter will often introduce the person to another member with similar interests and background. Thought reform is a subtle and sophisticated group dynamic of deceiving and manipulating the victim into willingly making prescribed choices. Feeling he is still free to make choices, the convert becomes dependent and conforming and loses his autonomy and individuality. The more insubstantial the version of reality the more threatening is the unbridled flow of ideas and censorship is the defense mechanism of collective denial. Compliance with the group often extends further than acceptance of the groups views to include participation in the attack on deviants.

Group conformity dictates that members show only the good side of the organization and suppress any negative feelings so members do not raise embarrassing questions or attack weak arguments. Loyalty to family and friends is transferred to the cult. All destructive groups not only seek to confuse with unclear and conflicting messages but believers are also trained to block criticism through denial, rationalization, justification or by avoiding critics. That is why once a person adopts any belief system, it is very hard to change them, they are using the confirmation bias that looks for anything that confirms their beliefs and ignores any evidence that does not. In fact, one of the things about human beings is, they like to justify what they did. When a friend says to them, "hey, did it work?" humans say to themselves, at some kind of unconscious level, "I spent money, I took time, I went somewhere, [it] must have been a rational decision, therefore I'd better say it worked."

Cults also rule by fear: they teach that the apocalypse is just around the corner and members are made to be phobic about the threat of expulsion from an elite corps of mankind participating in the most important acts of human history. For control, members of cults are limited in the information they can know. Destructive organizations control information by having many levels of "truth", and allow inner officers to know slightly more than the general cult population, while all are subservient to the leader. Everything is controlled from the top. Members are not encouraged to be friends because allegiance should go up to the leader, not across to peers and they are encouraged to spy on each other and report improper activities to leaders. They cannot make important decisions without first asking their superiors. The early honeymoon feelings of community that are exhibited at the beginning later become deliberately replaced with feelings of stress, guilt and anxiety about performance. In every destructive group I have studied, fear is a major motivator and each group creates not only an outside enemy but also terror of punishment by the leaders. Unlike organizations that recognize a person's freedom to choose, mind control groups do not recognize any legitimate way to leave or oppose them, in fact they preach that to oppose them will cause terrible things to happen. Outsiders objection to the group's activities is seen as persecution and serves to increase commitment to group goals and inherent righteousness of the group. A destructive cult will always make its members phobic and will always do whatever it takes to preserve itself. In extreme cases if it is trapped, it will kill its members rather than succumb, i.e. Jonestown.

The most obvious sign of conversion and loss of liberty is a radical, dramatic, sudden personality change. A person may have been politically liberal for years and is suddenly staunchly conservative, he may have preferred rock and roll music but now thinks its from the devil, he may have been religiously neutral but is now devout and divides his life as before or after "God has come into my life" or "since I have accepted Jesus as my savior". Members of a cult may strike an outsider as spooky because members have the same odd mannerisms, clothing styles, and speech inflections as they model the personality of the leader.

Demanding obedience, leaders in destructive political and religious groups show an extraordinary willfulness. Addiction to power is a mental illness characterized by the desire of certain people to control others, to make them controllable, to foster their dependency, to discourage their capacity to think for themselves, to diminish their unpredictability and originality, to keep them in line, to help them avoid the inconvenience of life by transforming them into obedient automatons. Determined to have their own way, destructive leaders are intolerant of any criticism or other forms of narcissistic injury. Mr. Daniel Goleman said in his book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths, The Psychology of Self Deception, "People with a desire for power do things for the sake of making an impact on others and exercising authority solely for the taste of power. They have little tolerance for interference and bristle at challenges to their opinions. High power leaders respond well to ingratiating subordinates...the leaders high in power motivation sought fewer facts from other group members and were offered fewer proposals. Once the leader expressed his views, members fell in line, deferring to him."

After Adolf Hitler's rise to power, thousands of psychological experiments on the "influence process" were conducted studying the remarkable power of behavior modification, group conformity and obedience to authority. We must remember that the Nazi people were ordinary people convinced that they were doing good things and that they were an elite society - a master race. Hitler alone was just one small man, but with many eager followers. The average humans indiscriminate and unquestioning obedience to authority was demonstrated by Stanley Milgram in his 1965 study that showed how ordinary people would deliver greater and greater voltage "shocks" to experimental victims at the command of the lab-coated researcher. Even though many hated what they were doing and agonized over their victim's agony and pleas, they still fulfilled their duty to the authority telling them to shock the entirely innocent other person. Not one of the forty subjects in the study quit shocking the victim even when the victim was screaming.

As a student of cult behavior, the Christian Fundamentalist movement's leadership scares me. The movement grows through the power of hate and fear. They hate faggots, dykes, feminazis, niggers, kikes, spics, chinks, commies, towelheads, tree-huggers, intellectuals, liberals, evolutionists, planned parenthood and believe people are poor because they are inferior. They know precisely what they're doing, just like any greedy bully does. They know that a small, powerful group can rule through rewards, fear, rage, and intimidation. It's a little like how the South managed to avoid Reconstruction - they didn't have the numbers, but they had the pure thuggish hatred on their side. Anton Chekhov said, "Love, friendship, respect, do not unite people as much as a common hatred of something." And like the Nazis storm troopers belt buckle slogan Gott Mit Uns (God is with us) they claim to know God's will. The power takeover has been determined. Members are encouraged to take over local elections and churches distribute voting guides to their members. Academically not only are the textbooks and curricular materials attacked, but also the libraries of the country are plagued by the loss of their liberal and non creationist scientific books as charismatic Christians "lose" books and pay for them in the hope the library can not replace them or at the very least will keep the idea off the shelf for the time it takes to reorder and process the replacement. To prevent the influence of reason, tolerance, or unapproved ideas, parents are encouraged to homeschool.

Invariably the leaders are moralistic bullyboys who presume to "know" God and are more concerned with vengeance than the welfare of society. Fundamentalist leaders see themselves as agents of God in a war. Pat Buchanan said at the 92 Republican convention that "we are in a religious war much like the cold war." Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority combines phobias with anti-semitism and says that the "anti-Christ" is on the earth and is probably a Jew. Richard Viguerie, a major fundraiser and strategist for the Religious New Right said, "We've already taken control of the conservative movement. And conservatives have taken control of the Republican Party. The remaining thing is to see if we can take control of the country." Paul Weyrich, director of the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress, said, "We're radicals working to overturn the structure in this country...we're talking about Christianizing America." Coalition on Revival, an agency of the Southern Baptist is agitating to transform the United States into a fundamentalist Christian state. The leader of COR, Dr. Jay Grimstead, says the strategy to establish a "kingdom of God" is to first take over city councils and school boards and elect sheriffs and county officials. COR urges members to run for office as Christians without acknowledging their connection to COR or their real agenda. Whether by publishing lists of approved candidates at elections, silencing intellectual dissent through biblical inerrancy claims, intimidating educational institutions by attacking curricular materials and indoctrinating children early in Christian schools, freedom of thought is reduced. In their own minds, they feel they are doing good. Perhaps it is not so crazy to believe that the Christian Right would feel that everything is acceptable in a state of war and that separation of church and state was a mistake on the part of the founding fathers. The merging of the power of a corrupt government with the persuasion and indoctination techniques of religion is a formula for disaster as theocracies are seldom benign. The only factor that could make it more wicked is to add the ethics of organized criminals.

The history of group mania is an interesting one. Charles Mackay's Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds says "Men think in herds, it will be seen that they go mad in herds while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one." Religion taken to the madness level was to blame for the Crusades, the Inquisition and the Holocaust.

CHAPTER 3

Sally showed up at my office early January of 1995. At first I could make little sense of what she was saying. She paced the room and her conversation jumped from topic to topic. She didn't seem to be able to form complete sentences or to arrange anything sequentially and it was obvious that she was in great distress. When she finally began to slow down I asked her, "How can I help you, Sally?"

"Is there some kind of test to see if someone is paranoid schizophrenic cause that's what they say I am?" she asked.

I told her the most reliable test was the Present State Examination (PSE), a long series of carefully worded questions designed to bring out the symptoms of various mental illnesses. I told her I would be glad to give the test to her but I told her it was somewhat rare for the disease to appear for the first time in a person in their mid forties. Most mental labels were pretty arbitrary; wealthy people are commonly labeled bipolar while a poor person with the same symptoms will be called schizophrenic.

Sally proceeded to tell me that she had been hospitalized and she then showed me her hospital bill and I needed only a quick glance at the volume and potency of the neuroleptic drugs that had been administered to know that there was some wicked medicine going on.

"Did you become lose touch with reality?" I asked.

"Yes"

"There are lots of reasons people become psychotic besides schizophrenia - from drug abuse to Post Traumatic Stress to even psychotic depression." I told her.

Unfortunately, psychiatrists are quick to administer anti-psychotics despite the dangers of these powerful drugs. The effectiveness is exaggerated and they are very dangerous to brains, actually causing cavities in the ventricles that fill with cerebrospinal fluid. When the World Health Organization in the 1970s compared schizophrenics' recovery rates in the U.S and in nations too poor to afford the latest psychopharmaceuticals, it found that a Third World patient was exponentially likelier than an American one to regain sanity. The study followed patients for five years and it found that 64% of the patients in the poor countries had good outcomes, versus 18% in the rich countries. Because the psychiatric profession raised so many objections, the World Health Organization repeated the study in the 1980s and found similar results. In 1979, Canadian investigators offered an explanation on why neuroleptic drugs make people more biological vulnerable to psychosis and may even cause psychosis. In response to the blocking of dopamine activity, the brain tries to compensate by increasing the number of its dopamine receptors, thus becoming supersensitive to this neurotransmitter. Once a person's brain undergoes this change, then he or she is at very high risk of relapse should the drug be withdrawn. As the Canadian investigators concluded: "Some patients who seem to require lifelong neuroleptics may actually do so because of neuroleptics."

It was the start of my vacation when Sally showed up and I invited her to spend the next two weeks with me at my cabin. She had always been such a strong person, so I was professionally intrigued not only by her drug maltreatment but also the path she had taken to become hospitalized in the first place. I told her it would be just like old times when we would hide out from our parents during the holidays. I had never seen Sally in such a fragile state and I seriously worried that the massive doses of drugs may have caused her permanent brain damage.

We left her old pickup at my house and we headed for my lake cabin, a luxury I have never regretted buying. Holidays were always difficult time for me so I was actually glad for the company and while Sally waited in the car with her dog, I went to the supermarket and bought groceries for a traditional post Christmas dinner. On the drive up to the cabin, I did most of the talking about nothing in particular because I could see conversation was a strain for Sally. By the time Sally and I got to the cabin, we were both so tired we unpacked the car and went to bed. During the night, I could hear Sally pacing.

I left Sally sleeping in the morning and took her little mutt dog, Collateral, for a walk in the woods. She was a goofy looking, small black dog and I could identify a little poodle blood from the curly hair and by her face, but the rest was a guess. Sally had said she named the dog Collateral "in case they needed her for loans at the bank", but she said it was ironic because the dog was her most precious possession.

When the dog and I returned, Sally was making coffee and crying. I asked her what was wrong and she said, "I'm just so grateful that you will listen to me. No one else will. When I was labeled crazy, people started treating me differently. Everything I say is tainted. Even an old withered woman in a wheelchair stuck in the corner at the nursing home shitting her big paper diaper has people still whisper around her, 'At least her mind's still good'."

"Go ahead and tell me anything you want to," I said.

"I guess it all starts with the stealing of my bees, and got worse when I moved to Mott where I was robbed over and over and over" she said. " If I tell you I think the whole town is conspiring against me does that confirm that I am paranoid schizophrenic?" asked Sally.

"Well, it is unlikely that a whole town would share the same goals enough to band together to target you. Feeling persecuted is a frequent symptom of paranoid schizophrenia. If you feel you had been robbed repeatedly, you might make the leap that all people were a threat. It is a common device for self protection. Humans cannot stay in hypervigilance for long periods of time."

"Why do you say 'If I had been robbed'? Don't you believe that my bees were stolen?" Sally demanded. "My brother said he didn't believe I had been robbed either. Nothing I say is valid. All my life I have tried to tell the truth but now everything I say is a lie or a reason to laugh at me."

Because of her high anxiety, I changed the subject and I tried reminiscing about the past, hoping she would enjoy some of the things we laughed about in the past. I'm a pack rat and to divert her attention, I dug out a few of her old Christmas letters and I started to reread them to her. Sally was a free, independent spirit of the type the sixties produced. She never cared about money probably as a reaction to her upbringing, and it set her free to move on as soon as she lost interest or became disappointed in anything or anyone.

CHAPTER 4

"Why did you become interested in bees?" I asked.

Sally said Brian had a few beehives on the farm and she would help him with them. "When I decided to become a beekeeper, I thought it would be a peaceful occupation without the politics that go along with working for other people. Surely a pound of food was a pound of food." Sally said.

"I found out differently. Like in so many blue-collar occupations, women are not very welcome in the beekeeping ranks. Racists love 'nigger' jokes and sexists love 'dirty' jokes. I always left the room when beekeepers got together. For example, their attitude towards women showed in their moniker for the Mondale presidential ticket as "Fritz and Tits". No matter what females accomplished in life, women were all "tits" in their eyes, so I avoided them. One beekeeper once told me that I was a 'guppy in a shark tank'."

I had to go back to my office to catch up on some correspondence so I asked Sally to spend the day describing Mott, North Dakota for me. I promised to be back before night. I gave Sally a legal pad and she wrote in the same opinionated manner that had gotten her in trouble much of her life:

There are two theories of who the town was named for. One says the community was named for Lillian Mott, secretary of founder William H. Brown, a land developer who platted the town site of Mott. Another story claims the town was named for a railroad immigration agent named Charles W. Mott.

Like large areas of the state, Hettinger County and all the counties adjoining it were settled by Germans. The Germans were perfect "bottom-line" managers who could wrest the most from this unforgiving but free-for-the-taking land according to immigration officials who advertised the land only in German publications. Most Germans that settled in North Dakota were Germans from Russia whose fathers had been first in line for the free land Catherine the Great had confiscated from Russian farmers to give to her kinsmen. In the early days, families were huge with up to sixteen children to work the fields.

When North Dakota was settled, towns sprang up every ten to twenty miles so that even with horse transportation, farmers were within a days ride of commerce and railroad towns also grew every ten miles so that steam driven train engines could refill their water reservoirs. With its good location on the railroad route, the river for irrigation, and a little chicanery that assured its appointment as county seat, Mott grew more than the other small towns in that remote part of North Dakota. An arrogance developed that disdained the other neighboring small towns and shunned new business that tried to move into the area and compete. Land and buildings were not sold to any business rivaling the townsmen and naturally the town stayed stagnant and then began to shrink. It seemed to die in spasms. Things would stay the same for several years, then one business would fold and two or three others would quickly follow as though failure was infectious.

The economic base was farming and North Dakota's rural towns were founded to serve agriculture's needs and they all suffered from low farm prices, from the invention of large farm tractors and implements that enabled fewer farmers to farm vast areas of land, from government programs that removed land from production. In the late 80's, Hettinger County got a transfusion of economic blood from the introduction of the government program called CRP or Conservation Reserve Program, another government program that paid farmers not to farm. Hettinger County had more acres of land in CRP than any other county in the state although the purpose of the program was to take poor land out of production and Hettinger County had excellent farmland. The boost to the wildlife population, especially the pheasant, was an added benefit and Mott saw an opportunity to become a community for friendly killers. They erected a huge pheasant sign on the outskirts of town, stocked up on dog food and shotgun shells, raised prices at the cafe and the motel and waited for the hunters. For a couple months, Mott would become crowded with strangers. The bars did a good trade even though the arrogant sportsmen would humiliate the bartenders by ordering imported beers, mixed blender drinks, or water native to someplace other than the sink. The butcher shop offered to skin and gut the birds for a couple dollars. The strangers would complain about everything - the accommodations, the local yokels backwardness, the overpriced, meager selection of food. From all over the United States, they showed up in Chevy Suburbans, Ford Broncos, and Jeep Cherokees, all with dogs, thousand dollar guns, Eddie Bauer clothes, and all pretending they were sportsmen.

The pheasant can't fly very far and with dogs to flush them from the tall grass, it was like shooting chickens in a coop. Two against one is bully-fun. The pheasant was doomed from the time the game and fish department first started trying to introduce it in the twenties. Blowing snow would suffocate the bird that was native to a moderate climate because the pheasant could either put its tail to the cold winds and freeze from having his feathers reversed or he could face the wind and have his nostrils fill with snow and suffocate. Sportsmen laughed at how stupid the pheasant was compared to the native prairie chicken that burrowed into the snow. The pheasant was imported strictly as a sport bird for hunters and the introduction was unsuccessful until the thirties when farms were abandoned and the pheasant found cover and winter protection in the idle land. Through the years the population of the game bird fluctuated with the weather until CRP provided acres and acres of grass to cover and protect their nests and to supply winter protection and then the numbers grew. The CRP is also good for bees.

The town of Mott is a typical example of Midwest decline and decay. The main street is four blocks of vacant storefronts interspersed by stores run by fools thinking they just had to hang on and things would change. The real employer in the community is the government. In addition to the school and post office, the town has an Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation Service Office to administer farm programs and dispense subsidies; a Farm Home Administration office to offer low interest loans to farmers; a branch of the National Guard; an office of the Game and Fish Department; a state education office; state social services office, county social service office; and the county courthouse stocked with divisions of incompetent bureaucrats in love with their red-tape power.

The sheriff is a son of a bitch. He spends all his hours on duty reading Soldier of Fortune and Penthouse magazines, lifting weights and cleaning guns. He was one of the 40+ adolescents who would trek down to the Sturgis motorcycle rally every year to show strangers what a tough, "hard liver" he was. His deputies were his fat, lazy brother-in-law, his fat lazy friend, a young fat guy that had been in trouble for obscene phone calls and window peeping, and a young, comely divorcee to do the paperwork. Very little patrolling went on in the county, but it hadn't always been so.

Several years earlier, the city cop's health had failed, so the town fathers gave the job to his wife, Mary. Although she was officious, Mary did do herjob and indiscriminately stopped people for any infractions. One fine summer day, Lenny Messer, the retarded son of Larry Messer the local butcher, was showing-off and speeding down main street so Mary pulled him over. Lenny, who had never learned any self-discipline from his parents, got mad, pushed Mary against the car breaking her finger, and spit in her face. Mary filed a report, even went to court, but when all things died down, Lenny was still driving around and Mary was out of a job. The Messer's bragged at the bar about sneaking over to Mary's house and letting the air out of her tires. The city decided to disband the city police office and shift the funds to the county sheriff's office and all the important business people were relieved.

The only visible growth is the cemetery and the nursing home. The nursing home too is a government subsidy since most of the residents had artificially impoverished themselves so they could ride the government glory train to the graveyard.

CHAPTER 5

Some therapists feel that to refuse to talk about trauma is to prolong the pain while other feel recovery is quicker if trauma is suppressed and the victim moves on. Sally had come to me asking to talk, so it was obvious that she did not want to repress but expressing herself was traumatic and difficult. I noticed that her speech was slow and halting, most probably a result of the administration of massive anti-psychotics.

I suggested that she write down what happened if she found it so hard to talk. I stocked up on groceries and dog food and I left her at the cabin for the week. When I returned the next weekend she had filled several legal pads with an account of her beekeeping experience:

I started out by buying three beehives from Sears the year I drove the bookmobile. I first met W. H. Woodworth when I purchased some bees from him to fill the hives. He got a pretty good price for the bees. I think he felt that hobbyist were more enthusiastic than intelligent and since they usually ask a thousand questions and disturb him a hundred times, he could just add on a hidden hundred dollar consulting fee.

Woodworth is a talkative guy and when I picked up the bees he told me he'd been in the bee business for forty years and had seen a lot of bad years. He said "I've been tempted to declare bankruptcy several times because beekeeping is harder than a lot of other agricultural enterprises - so many more things can go wrong with bees than say, wheat. If it's too hot the flowers dry up, if it's too cold, the bees won't fly. If it is windy or rainy the bees don't fly.'"

Woodworth said that most beekeepers are gamblers hoping for the good year that will come along and put them on their feet and that is the addiction of the business. The expenses seem to get higher every year and the price of honey rises and falls with government programs, imports, and supply. He said he used every possible way to cut expenses in the bee yard and still was struggling.

The next year I went to work for Woodworth. He exemplified the adage that the "stingy man spends the most." He underpaid his workers until only poor workers remained, shortchanged his bees food supply until they had too small populations to harvest much nectar when summer finally arrived, and continually moved the bees around looking for better pasture and stressing the bees even further. He made hive nucleus boxes that were so narrow they fell over and queen mating boxes of Styrofoam that the wind blew away. He was always inventing something and trying it out on 1000 hives instead of a sample and most were miserable failures or no improvement over what was available. I believe he wanted to be famous in the bee world for inventing something because he was always dreaming up some new techniques or appliances.

He hired drunks and druggers and people with problems of one sort or another, so I was in "oddball" heaven. He always had new employees because he treated people like his bees. Though he was a tiny man, he was a bully and had a touch of criminal to him. He sold honey that was supposed to be under government storage and I suspected he burned his honey warehouse when all the non-operating vehicles and forklifts that had wintered outside for years were towed in that winter.

It didn't take me a full season to see that honey production wasn't particularly challenging and was primarily an occupation of moving boxes around and either putting them on or taking them off, but I liked the spring work of raising queens in the south. Woodworth bought unhatched queen cells instead of queens from the Fletchers of Zavalla, Texas and I was interested in making cells.

The second year, I went to Texas and worked for Bill Fletcher and his brother. He, too, deprived his bees and employees of fair payment for work and I wasn't learning much new there. Most of their equipment was falling apart and patched with tarpaper and duct tape. The queen mating units were downright dangerous because scorpions found a natural habitat between the marshmallow soft, wet pressed wood covers and the tarpaper repair liner and when the lids were picked up, big and little tails went up like flags. Zavalla was a little dump of a town that still practiced segregation.

The next queen season, I headed for northern California and started visiting queen companies that had ads in the bee magazines. I got a job with Cliff Thomas, a most natural beekeeper, who gave his bees what they needed when they needed it and his bees flourished.

Cliff was one of those rare, lucky people who find something they love doing and do it very well. Everyone else I had worked for in the bee business had been so worried about every penny and cheated their bees and their employees in every way they could and here was a man who was gently giving his stock as much feed as they could eat and they were producing bountiful bees for packages and big fat queens for their mothers. Often as not, Cliff didn't have the time to worry about money and checks would blow around in the cab of his messy truck filled with old pipes and wet cigar stubs. I had always thought money was the last reason to do something and I liked that Cliff didn't worship it.

When I think about the business of queen-raising, I think of Cliff. He said, "timing and attention to details is everything in queen raising and the package business." A bee package is several pounds of bees and a queen in a screened box that is sold to beekeepers to replace their winter loss or to start new hives. To supply the amount of bees needed to fill the packages, hives must be booming with population at the same time as the queens have hatched and mated; however if the hives are too prosperous, they will swarm and there will not be enough bees left to remove from the hive to stock the packages. A lot of elements have to be just right to raise an excellent queen. The finest queens are probably natural swarm queens and the worst ones are probably emergency queens that a hive raises when their queen is destroyed. In order for a queen to be prolific, she must be raised from an egg or a very young larva, not a larva that is too old. When a hive raises a queen in an emergency situation, the bees are in such a panic about losing their mother that they start queens from too old a larva and since these are the ones that hatch first they will destroy the better queen cells. Essentially what queen raisers do is create a queenless hive and then supply as young a larva as they can to that hive and let the bees raise queens. The bees need fresh pollen, continuous feeding of a thin sugar syrup so they feel that the nectar flow is going on, a huge overcrowded population of young bees that can produce royal jelly, and no chance to make their own queen. All of this takes an incredible amount of concentration as each queenless hive is given new queens to raise every few days, the already started queen cells are moved above a hive with a queen, and others are reaching maturity and need to be removed at the same time. Not only are cells being raised, but at the same time queens are getting ready to hatch and must be each given a tiny, well fed hive and accompanying bees to take care of the virgin queen until they can mate and return to start laying eggs. While all this is going on, the queenless hives have to be inspected regularly for queen cells because the bees can move eggs and start their own queens. I had fallen in love with this occupation because the challenge of raising exceptional queens and juggling all the components that went into making them was a goal that probably would always be just out of my reach and would keep me interested. I would have stayed another season but his wife hated me.

I saw an ad for a queen company in Hawaii and went to work there for a season. Unfortunately, although I may have been in paradise, I saw very little of it because I worked six days a week and didn't know anybody. This was another "bottom line" company. No matter how good and natural some of the Hawaiian beekeepers were, some haole white guy would always be their boss and I couldn't wait for the season to finish so I could start doing things my own way. All the beekeepers except Cliff took everything they could get from the hive, even digging out the combs flanking the sides - robbing the bees of their hard work and making them live on inferior feed. Some even captured the pollen that the bees so desperately needed to raise their children. They were managers who hated their workers - underpaid them in the only way they could - typical bottom-line managers.

CHAPTER 6

The first year on my own, I built equipment for queen-raising and went to Southeast Texas to sell queens and cells to the beekeepers who wintered there. A beekeeper in my hometown was killing his bees off for the winter and I asked if I could 'borrow' any hives that hadn't already starved to death and I found forty hives still alive in the snow. I had made a loan at my local bank to build queen and cell equipment, buy hive equipment and I used up most of the rest of the loan to move to Texas, to rent an old trailer house and to buy feed for the bees. To lure the 'bottom line' managers business, I priced my cells and queens lower than the going rate. I traded queens and cells to Woodworth for extra bees and feed. The feed was watered down and any bees I bought by the pound were underweight and all the brood (unhatched bees) I bought was usually on trashy frames and a lot of homemade frames that Wilson was trying to weed out of his hives.

That first year I made no money, but came back to North Dakota with 160 hives. To live, I worked again part time for my neighbors who buried telephone and power cable and as I dug ditches, I thought about bees.

The second year things started better for me because I had my own bees to work with instead of buying from Woodworth. Again I sold a few thousand cells to beekeepers for $1.00 and they used some cells to start new hives and some were put into mating units and after they were mated were sold for $5.00 or more. I also sold some queens but it was so very labor intensive that I was working outside all the daylight hours and grafting larva for new queens at night. That year there was a lot of yellow jasmine in bloom and the pollen from it is poisonous. Eggs would turn into larvae but would die before hatching. The queen larva also would die after the cell was formed and I lost a lot of cells. The other queen raisers removed their cells early and incubated them but I left them in the hive until the last possible day. Because the bees destroyed the dead cells, my average of queen cells to grafted cells was low, but my percentage that hatched was excellent compared to the other queen raisers in the area.

Woodworth came over with questions about how to do various things to raise his own queens and I would tell him because I knew he could never be too successful in the queen raising business because the secret of good queens was generosity. Although Woodworth was trying to raise cells, he was still buying a lot of cells from me and selling the hatched queens as his own. One time I said, "I don't tell you everything."

What did surprise me was that as soon as I filled the initial orders, some stealing started. A couple of bars of cells disappeared first and I thought it was a guy from South Dakota who seemed to have a lot of time to come visiting. Because I believed in excellence, I threw any runty or undersized cells in the garbage and I had caught the old geezer taking some out of the trash. The South Dakota guy also constantly complained about not being able to get good help and his employee said he would only get paid for actual hours worked and this "bottom line" manager would deduct time driving between yards, lighting smokers, etc. and would forget things always to his favor, and the employee said he could work 5 days a week, 10 hours a day and only get paid for 20 hours a week. A thief is a thief and I suspected he was the culprit.

I would catch queens, put them in a populated but queenless hive and the next day, five or six queens would be gone. I kept an accurate count of the queens because I had orders for them. Cells were also regularly disappearing. As soon as it was daylight, I would be in my back yard to gather the cells of the right age, brush off the bees, cut the cells off the bars, count them and get them packed up for the customers who came at eight. Some mornings the hive covers would be loose and cells would be gone. Because these were very populous hives, they could propolis or 'glue down' the covers within a hour of being disturbed.

Another time, I was at a mating yard and when I got back, nearly all the bees had been shaken out of the queenless hives I used to raise queen cells. When I questioned the neighbors, they said they had seen two pickups in my yard, but they didn't pay too much attention because vehicles were always stopping at my house.

One other odd thing happened that year. Because queen raising is so much labor, I was having trouble feeding all the separate mating yards. Using a Wilson technique that I hate, rather than fill each little can in each of 100 little boxes spread around, I put out a barrel of sugar syrup, a method of feeding I called "slop feeding" because even though many twigs and things that float are put in the barrel, the bees get to fighting or their wings get wet and a lot are drowned. The method was a type of "robbing", a bad practice to get started. The next morning I went back to the yard to put cells in the mating units and there was no syrup, no dead bees in the barrel, and no bees in the mating units. I gathered all the little boxes up, restocked them with bees and moved them to a new location.

When I got back to North Dakota, I moved to Richardton and put out 360 hives I had made up. Collateral was born next door on the same day that the Chevy garage burned. Times were tough in little dying towns and its good to be insured. I was looking for bee equipment to buy because I had been renting honey supers from the Woodworth's at inflated prices. When I went to an auction near Mobridge, South Dakota, police were mingling in the crowd because most of the better equipment that was supposed to be auctioned off was gone. One of the beekeepers there was Jim Stallman who was buying the bee business in Mobridge. I visited with Stallman and his father because they often stopped by in Texas to visit even though they bought cells from another queenraiser. There was very little of any value left to sell at the auction.

I was still looking for equipment and went to Devil's Lake North Dakota following an ad in the Bee Journal. I worked for five hours sorting frames and boxes to try to find something in good condition until finally a man said 'I have some better stuff over here' and behind the shed was all the boxes with the same name branded on them as the lousy equipment still left at the Mobridge sale.

I made enough money from honey that second year to buy new honey supers and to buy my own extracting equipment so I no longer needed to pay exorbitant rental rates. Although honey provided over half my income, it was the queen raising that captured my heart and I thought and planned how I would do it the next year.

The next trip to Texas, I moved to a different location outside of Wells, Texas and I just gave my number to the beekeepers from the southwest North Dakota area because I was still suspicious of the tightwad from South Dakota that cheated his employees. Setting up mating units for the virgin queens is a very labor-intensive job because each miniature hive has to be made up with feed, bees, a cell and they must be distributed widely to enable the virgin queen to find her own home. Because other bees or the resident virgin will kill an intruder if a virgin goes to the wrong hive, queen mating boxes are most effective if they are widely spaced in brushy areas where the virgin queens have reference points. I was behind in my work, so when a customer, told me that he had hired help that he didn't need at that time and that I could employ him to help me, I agreed to pay him for the week it took to set up my mating units. This young man was an absolute disaster and even though I stressed the importance of gentleness when setting down the mating units, he must of slammed the little boxes down because very few of the cells on his side of the yard hatched and I found cells laying on the bottom of the units when I went to catch queens ten days later. It's important not to disturb the mating units until the queen is mated because the workers are nervous when a virgin is in the hive and will "ball" her - pile on her like a heap of football players and kill her. I didn't know what a bad job he was doing until too late.

Anyway, one day I and my young 'helper' stopped at one of the Mom and Pop gas and snack stores that dot Texas and the kid walked to the back of the store and started visiting with a fat man and I said "How do you know someone a hundred miles from home?" and he said that they had been in drug treatment together. The fat man was a Baptist minister that had problems with prescription drugs, and my hired help had crack problems.

In order for a hive to raise queens, the bees must be tricked into thinking that they should prepare to swarm. As most beekeepers want their queens much earlier than would be natural, the queenraiser has to have very populous hives very early in the season so he will generally take bees or brood (bees before they hatch) from other hives and add them to hives to force the hive to an overcrowded condition so that the bees would ordinarily make swarm cells. Because only young bees produce royal jelly in abundance, the hives have to have young bees added continually. Although I was again losing queens and cells, I kept my head enough to keep trying. When I went to an outlying yard to get additional bees for my queenless hives, the bees had been shaken out and the full outside honey frames were replaced by empty homemade frames with reddish colored propolis. Because my frames had either a yellow or a brown propolis tinge from trees indigenous to my home state, I questioned the red color. In addition, the thieves' truck had backed up in the yard to turn and I always drove through to turn. When I got back home, I told my landlords about the theft and a few days later they came over and told me that their son, who drove a logging truck, had seen two red pickups in that yard but he hadn't said anything because that Sunday he had seen the same pickups in my home yard. The Stallmans from Mobridge, South Dakota had been over on Sunday. I went to a location where some of their hives were and looked in a few and saw some of the same red propolis on his frames.

I stopped at the small ma and pa grocery store where my cokehead help had recognized the fat man and was telling the lady about the frame switch and the store owner said the Stallman Company always put bees in a field behind the store. I asked permission from the landowner to go back and look for my cells. I was one of the few queenraisers who made their own cell base by dipping wood forms in beeswax. Since most queenraisers use plastic or purchase heavy wax cells that can hold up to shipping, I knew I stood a good chance of recognizing my own work. Then I thought that I should get someone to look with me because even if I found my cells, it would just be my word against a big company. I called Woodworth but he said he couldn't come until the next day. The following morning, he and his lovely wife showed up and I showed them the tracks in the yard and then the yard with the new set up hives, but there were no cell cups of any kind in any hives. Woodworth said "Did you get a picture of them?"

The next day, I went to the County Sheriff's office to make a report and a young officer took the report down and asked me if I knew where the Stallman company stayed and when I told him the name of the Lufkin motel, the young officer said, "Oh, that's a big drug hangout". The young man wrote down my account of the theft and said someone would be out to look at the tracks, the foreign frames in my hives and to talk to my landlord's son. I waited two weeks and when no one showed up I called the Sheriff's department, and they told me that the report had been "lost".

I drove the fifty miles to the courthouse and they seated me in the anteroom of the Cherokee County Attorney's office. I could clearly watch the county attorney as he made several phone calls, left and got coffee a few times, and read a magazine but I just waited and waited. I was patient. When I finally got to tell my story, the county attorney didn't bother to write it down. I insisted someone come look at the tracks and talk to my witness. Several days later when a cop finally came to see me, the tracks had been rubbed out, and he said the fact that the beekeepers were wearing beekeepers veils meant that my witness's identification of the vehicles meant nothing if he hadn't seen their faces. Unluckily my witness was known by the cops for various drunk escapades and for beating up his girlfriend.

I had been friends with the people at the gas station for several years and when I told them about my treatment, they convinced me to talk to the sheriff of Angelina county and I told him about my thefts.

I was pissed. The next time cells were missing, I headed out to Stallman's yard to look for them. I stopped at the grocery store for coffee and as I drove up, the fat Baptist minister left the store. When I stopped at the landowners place to ask permission to go on his land, he said "You better not, they're back there now". Before I had time to leave, the Baptist minister came from their bee yard and all of a sudden it occurred to me that the minister was always at the store and was probably their lookout and why would you need a lookout for bees? I went to catch queens and kept turning the whole business over and over in my head. Why would this big bee company keep stealing from me? They had thousands of hives and their own semi truck to haul them while I was the smallest person around.

Even though Woodworth was unscrupulous, I didn't have anywhere else to turn. I told him about my new theory and I said "It's more than just stealing, it's drugs".

Woodworth blanched and his wife turned and walked away and stood by a hive with her back to me. After a long silence, Woodworth said, "Why don't you put some cocaine in his hives and get him in trouble if you hate him so much."

The next day Bill Fletcher drove up to chat which was unusual because this was such a busy time of the year. Within minutes, the three generations of Stallmans drove up with separate vehicles and wanted to talk to my witness in order to "clear this up". I started arguing with them and said there was no need to talk to any witness because they didn't even bring the red vehicles that were in my yard on the Sunday my witness saw the vehicles. Stallman started calling me a "lying bitch" and worse, so I left and went behind the trailer to finish feeding and then I decided to unload on them some more and I went to the front and Bill was laughing with the Stallmans.

Toward the end of the season, my hives were so strong that I asked Bill Fletcher to bring over some honey supers and offered to split the honey as I was afraid the bees would swarm on me. Bill helped me put the honey supers on most of the yards. When the time came to pull the honey off, Bill was too busy and brought a trailer for me to pull the honey off myself. I couldn't believe my eyes when I got to the yards because nearly all the yards were stripped of bees although there was still a laying queen so the bees couldn't have swarmed. I had noticed my home yard had been acting strangely and leaving the hives in the late evening, but I had been too tired to follow them. It was after the natural nectar flow was over and the bees were inclined to "rob". I believe the thieves had put out bait honey in a screened box and after the bees had robbed for a time, they put a bee escape board on the top that lets the bees in, but not back out of the screened box. In their frenzy for free honey, the worker bees emptied out of the hive. The only hives left that were still full strength were the ones I hadn't taken Bill to. Because it was warm and a lot of bees were close to hatching, I did not lose everything but the hives were too weak for a good honey crop that year.

I tried going to Texas one more time. I moved to yet another area thinking that if I was more isolated, I would be left alone. Emory was on the outskirts of a well known bass lake, Lake Fork. There was a grocery store, a Dairy Queen, two dirty shops with an assortment of odd sundries, a cafe, a laundromat, several bait shops, and a hardware store. While I was there, another grocery store tried to get started, but it was robbed every weekend, and finally closed up. I asked my landlord why the cops didn't do anything and my landlord said the old grocery store was owned by a drug dealer and he didn't want competition. The whole town knew the cops were dirty and everyone looked the other way. I wondered if there was anywhere honest people could be safe in Texas.

It was a cold, bad year and I was a little too far north to raise many queens. Once, I came to a mating yard and found all the mating units overturned and obscenities like 'Suck my Cock, Cunt' and 'Whore' spray painted on the road outside the gate and arrows pointing to my beeyard.

When I got back to North Dakota, I ran into Woodworth at the Baker Boy donut shop and he said, "How did it go for you this year?"

I said, "O.K. except the cows kicked over a bunch of mating units." Wilson ducked his head and laughed.

I started wintering my hives in the winter of 1988. The first year, I lost half of my hives, but the next year, I took larva from the best hives to raise queens and my survival rate increased. This was the same time that the bee world was in an uproar over the internal mite and everyone was trying a variety of techniques to try and rid their hives of this parasite. Woodworth's son called to see if I wanted to buy a miticide through him, but I said I didn't believe in continuous doctoring for people or for insects. Breeding for resistance seemed much more logical to me, let the bees seek their own balm. Like the great gardener Ann Lovejoy said, "If something is so sick you need chemicals, throw it out".

When I first started raising queens, Cliff Thomas gave me five Carniolian breeder queens as a gift to get me started. The Carniolian race of bees comes from a mountainous area of Yugoslavia and is hardy enough to survive the winters and smart enough to quit raising young during the winter. Not only does the cessation of brooding in the winter save energy because they can let the temperature of the hive drop, but cessation of brooding stopped the continual larval stage the mite needed to reproduce itself and perhaps the mite needed a higher temperature than the Carniolians used in the winter. Whatever the reason, I knew I didn't have the internal mites because my hives flourished and the other beekeepers hives dwindled - maybe the mites were like the parasites that attacked cattle and were present all the time, but only flourished if the host was stressed or maybe it was a combination of wintering and feeding honey and sugar instead of the cheaper corn syrup. I remembered the Hawaiian outfit telling me queens died when they used the cheaper grade of corn syrup in making the candy that goes into the queen cages. The mites had appeared at the same time everyone quit using sugar and switched to corn syrup and a poorer grade of feed could stress the bee gut.

Unfortunately, staying in North Dakota didn't stop the thefts. Sometimes the bees would be shaken out and my new, excellent frames would be replaced by poor comb or Woodworth's homemade frames. When Woodworth's son called one time, I said I was sick of getting his father's frames and he said, "You must have gotten them when you bought brood from Dad." I said, "I threw those out the first year".

After that I started getting frames with California number brands on them instead of the distinctive homemade ones. Sometimes the honey would be gone and my supers would have angle iron marks made by an extractor that extracts honey a box at a time rather than a frame at a time the way I did. Sometimes the best hives would be shook out. I didn't know what I could do to prevent the thefts. The state of North Dakota had a law requiring registration of yards and ownership identification signs in each beeyard and this information was available to anyone. When I didn't put my name on the outside of my hives, the state threatened me with prosecution.

The next year I hid enough hives to survive and I also removed my honey as soon as a super was full so they wouldn't be so tall and tempting. The thefts continued. Many times the better hives would be stripped of their bees. If the yard was well hidden, I would find circles drawn in the dirt road at every field entrance so that my truck's direction could be monitored and I remembered Don Grinder telling me about police using that as a surveillance technique. One time a highway patrolman stopped me for speeding and he said, "Where were you?" instead of "Do you know how fast you were going?"

The phone too was different. Whenever I would call a number different than the few family members I often talked to on the phone, the call would never go through the first time, but instead there would be a dead space and then the dial tone. The call would usually go through the second time. To be robbed over and over for six years would make anyone paranoid, so I quit talking about my bees on the phone. In fact, I think I lost my spontaneity somewhere along the way. I couldn't relax but was always patrolling.

In 1991, the warehouse I was renting in Richardton was sold. I had to find a new place, so I moved thirty five miles south to Mott, buying a house and warehouse at an auction sale. I hoped things might change in a new area, for it was no way to live, to worry constantly and to dread seeing what might be missing every time I drove into a beeyard, to watch my rearview mirror continually to see if someone was following. I just hated to give up and let the criminals beat me, because I just loved those bees.

CHAPTER 7

When I came to the cabin for the weekend, Sally had calmed down slightly. I told her that the weekend was a time to rest and that she couldn't talk about Mott or bees and should try to relax. I had brought a few old Monty Python videos to watch, but Sally's sense of humor was gone. On Monday morning, I left with instructions to tell me about the people of Mott.

The first Mott people I met were Fred and Marge Everhart. I was eating at the Poolside cafe when Fred and Marge sat down with me and started a conversation. Comical Fred formerly ran an antique store but now did furniture refinishing and painting. He also did magic shows for birthday parties. I told them that the warehouse I was renting in Richardton was being sold and that I was looking at the house and metal building that was to be auctioned that weekend. They said that they were the neighbors just up the hill. I was very impressed with their friendliness.

As soon as I moved to ott, Fred and Marge threw a potluck "welcome to the community" party for me. In fact for the first year I lived in Mott, people were very friendly unlike most towns I'd lived in. Fred and Marge were often my companions and Fred was fun to be around. Fred did a little house painting and he would show up at the cafe with his clothes covered with paint wearing a tattered, moth-eaten sweater with his boots untied and flopping.

Fred had a lot of free time and would drive around looking for antiques in abandoned dumps and walking in the fields searching for Indian arrowheads and he was sadly and hopelessly addicted to gambling and drinking. When Fred needed a drink, he didn't go to a bar to socialize, but instead he would sit on a section road and drink himself into a stupor. I knew Fred was intelligent and well read because there wasn't any topic he didn't know something about, but most of the townspeople erroneously thought he was a fool.

Marge Everhart was Fred's opposite and they seemed to be at constant war. While Fred was a drunken loafer, Marge projected a professional image. She ran a regional education office, one of the middle layers of government bureaucracy that North Dakota cherishes. Although Marge's job consisted of supervising the special education teachers of five small schools, she pretended to have a lot of work and she always worked on Sunday afternoons. Marge was perfectly groomed, had an air of class and sophistication, and was adept at manipulating and managing people. She was a beautiful woman, a generous and witty hostess and she usually organized any social events in the town. Fred and Marge would have loud public battles and sometimes they would go for days without talking. They also had times when Fred and Marge were like newlyweds and would hold hands and whisper conspiratorially.

Fred was good friends with Bob Pestal and he often joined the coffee group in the morning. Bob was the minister for the Lutheran church and a ringer for Ichabod Crane. Washington Irving could have been describing Pestal when he said, "He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels and his whole frame most loosely hung together." I liked Pestal because someone told me he prayed that the pheasants would not suffer during hunting season. Like many computer nerds, although he was lavish with himself and his hobbies, he was stingy about spending money on the necessities of life. As a minister, he was welcome at dinner time and he and his wife abused the tradition. Pestal seldom came to my house because he was deathly afraid of dogs, even Collateral. Pestal often forgot his billfold when he came to the cafe so I contributed there.

The Luithles were my other neighbors. John Luithle spoke with a heavy German accent even though he had been born in America seventy years ago. Like so many Christian Fundamentalists, they longed for everyone to operate on faith and obedience and saw the public schools, libraries, science and thought as a threat to God. They liked scaring themselves with stories about the antichrist, the coming apocalypse, and people wandering around with 666 on their foreheads. The old couple embraced their paranoia as devotion to the inerrancy of Scriptures; they turned fear and superstition into an asset. People avoided social dinners at their house because Sarah Luithle loved the unusual. She pickled strange vegetables, tried out strange recipes like vinegar pie on her guests and in general most of the main dishes were a guess because she canned all her meats.

The Luithles were preoccupied with their health and were always rushing to keep appointments with chiropractors, hydrotherapists, massagers, and herbalists. Medical doctors would tell them they were in good health for their age and would dismiss their allergies and neuralgias so they would go for a second opinion. John scheduled a general checkup at Mayo Clinic and was disappointed that after three days of tests, the only ailment discovered was defective tastebuds. To ward off rheumatism they wore copper bracelets, to forestall aging they followed diets that excluded the most basic of foods, to stay healthy they vacationed to uranium mines.

I also became friends with Diane Morrell who delivered my mail. I liked her spunk because she had raised her three boys on her own. Diane would stop for coffee and talk about her current romances. I think most middle-aged people still "looking for love" are sad and should get a dog. I despised her youngest son who was still living with her. She pampered him with money and a nice car and neglected to discipline him. She always stuck up for him when the school called. He wanted to be a cop.

CHAPTER 8

The Pheasant Cafe was the town's social center and Fred and Marge were always stopping to ask me to go to coffee. Soon after I moved to Mott, Fred made a crudely lettered sign saying "Home of the Bee Lady" and posted it below the oversized pheasant on the outskirts of town and I admit I was flattered. Fred would give me things he found in the dump and I would feel obligated and buy them presents. Marge often talked to me about Fred's drinking and gambling and I started recounting my bee thefts and it was good to have a friend to talk to.

I visited with the Luithles, too. They seemed interested in my bee business and asked to go out in the field with me and I took them once. In addition to Mr. Luithle's daily stops, whenever I had visitors, they would drop by, and I thought they were terribly nosy, but they were old and didn't have many friends.

Coffee at the cafe was predictable. The recurring topics of conversation were welfare and how those lazy people were living off the system, how the "new agers" and liberals were destroying Christian family values, how the women's movement was ruining the family and how foreigners were taking all the jobs. Some of the people that whined the most were the big farmers who owned enough land to displace twenty farm families and who put land under all their kids names so that subsidy ceilings could be avoided. A great many of the morning coffee klatch had gotten their excellent farmland put into CRP, a program designed to protect marginal, erodible land, not to provide an income for idleness. Others hid and manipulated their incomes so that their college kids could get Pell grants that should have gone to smarter, poorer kids. There was plenty of talk about family values, none about business or government values or just values and honor in general. When they talked values, they only meant anything dealing with sex like traditional roles for women, abortion, homosexuality or Clinton's sex life not their Bible given right to dominate the earth.

After I moved to Mott, the thefts of my bees still continued. I had decided that the fight to keep in the bee business was fruitless and I should look for some other way to make a living. I considered starting an antiques store/bed and breakfast and started going to auctions. I had asked a few people to look out for strangers in my beeyard and there wasn't much more I could do. The yard I had taken the Luithle's to had the honey taken off and the empty boxes put back on and the bees were shaken out.

Fred told me that I should tell the county sheriff about the thefts but I didn't like him because he had a reputation as a bully. One day at coffee, Marge introduced me to the district Highway patrolman and encouraged me to tell him about my theft problems. He asked me why I hadn't reported it to the local county sheriff and I said I had had experience with dirty cops in Texas and I didn't enjoy watching their smirks. He said, "Lady, this ain't Texas."

That night I went home and wrote a six page letter about Texas and bees and drugs and had Marge Everhart photocopy it and I sent it off to the highway patrolman. Reverend Pestal stopped over to visit and I gave him a copy of the letter to read and he read it so fast, I asked him if he had seen it before and he said Marge had showed it to him. The highway patrolman never responded to my correspondence but after the letter people started treating me differently.

I hoped to start a bed and breakfast in my two-storied farmhouse that fall. Certainly there must be some hunters who would prefer a clean bed to the smelly motel. I scraped and papered all the upstairs bedrooms and remodeled the bathroom, tearing out the walls, replacing them with beaded board and added a claw foot tub. I was still working on the bathroom when the Hettinger county attorney called to ask if I would have room for his friends, the district attorney from Fargo and his relatives when hunting season opened. I hoped to be done with my remodeling by then and agreed to provide housing for them. When my guests arrived, Marge was visiting and she smiled and winked at the Fargo district attorney and I was appalled that a middle-aged woman like Marge was flirting with such a young man. When it came time for them to leave after three days, they asked me what they owed me and I said, "I really can't charge, first because the bathroom isn't complete and secondly, because I'm still not licensed. When you called, I thought I'd be ready and there wasn't time for you to make other arrangements, so I'll just let it go."

Even though I told him it was "on the house" he asked several more times what he owed me but I just refused to quote a price. The three men had stayed three days and left $20 on the table. At coffee time at the cafe that morning, I overheard someone at the next table mention bed and breakfast and since I was the only one talking about starting one I listened a little closer and I heard talk that an unlicensed bed and breakfast was going to be prosecuted. The Chamber of Commerce listed people in the town who had extra bedrooms for rent during hunting season and I had listed my name with them, but I never got any referrals.

When Diane stopped by one day, she asked where my hives were because she would watch for bee trucks when she delivered mail. I was by now suspicious of anyone who wanted to know where my hives were and didn't tell her. I told her I was going to sell out my remaining bees and I thought I could get a good price from a bee breeder for mite-resistant bees. I had written the state agriculture department for internal mite inspection because I needed the verification of a disinterested third party. When the inspector showed up, I took him to my remaining yards and also gave him a list of the California brand numbers I had found on my frames. He promised to research the owners of those brands and help with the thefts if he could. I waited two months and finally wrote to ask for the results. Then I wrote again. Then I called. Although the inspection was done in July, I didn't get mite-free verification until February and I was told to contact my local authorities with my theft problems. I did a very bad thing and lied. I casually mentioned to Diane that I had a cure for the internal mites and that it didn't cost much.

Diane said, "You should market it."

"I can't because it's available in any grocery store and they would recognize it by the smell. Besides, its so incredibly cheap."

I know it is wrong to lie. The commercial miticides are expensive and not very effective, and most "bottom line" managers would believe more in a magic potion than they would in benevolent management and natural selection, so I was curious what would happen if I baited a hook. Within the week, a beekeeper from Nebraska stopped to "visit". There were long silent stretches because I didn't know what to say to him. Finally, I told him I had to get back to work and as I went into the warehouse, I covered a container of Golden Marlin, a fly poison, and he smiled and left. Another old druggie beekeeper, Keith Newton, also showed up though I hadn't seen him in three years. A hunter from Minnesota stopped to ask about a room and proceeded to tell me how he had invented a little thing that made him rich. That weekend, I went to the neighboring town to get groceries and "ran" into Ron M****r who was visiting his parents and he invited me to coffee. At coffee, he talked about how he had discovered a way to triple gas mileage by adding some small piece you could find in any junkyard. When I teased him about his paranoia he said that he wasn't paranoid anymore because he had friends in high places.

Late that fall, I moved half my few remaining hives to my front yard and half to a yard across the road that I could see from my upstairs window. I cruelly let them sit in the blizzards with no protection, not even wrapping them in tar paper like I usually did. If I could only have the few hives my backyard could support, I wanted natural selection to pick the winners.

That Christmas season, Marge invited me to go shopping with her. The mall in the closest large town is small and after I finished shopping, I set out to find Marge but I couldn't find her anywhere. I sat and waited in the center seating for three hours. Finally Marge showed up and said she needed to stop to get groceries. We went to Buttreys and near the entrance was the magazine display and the store office. She stopped to browse in the magazines so I looked through the magazines on decorating. Marge said, "They have no right to charge that much for a magazine. Shove it under your shirt."

My shock was replaced with the theory that maybe Marge shoplifted, but I dismissed it as too impossible. Marge was a leading educator in the state and had been appointed to several boards by the governor. Within minutes Marge's nephew came from the office and I was surprised that he did not even acknowledge me although they had both gone to college together and had both been in a wedding together.

As we drove home, Marge asked, "If you could have anything you desired for Christmas, what would it be?"

"I'd want my bees back," I said.

"A person can be too good for their own good," Marge said

That same Christmas season, Esther Hummel who lived a couple miles down the road, hosted a Christmas coffee party for the neighborhood. Esther decorated her whole house and as she led the tour through the rooms, Marge said, "Now don't steal anything, Sally."

I was so taken aback and so offended that I was speechless. I could not understand how Marge, who was supposed to be my friend, could be so insulting. That was twice within a week that stealing had come up in her conversation.

When Esther showed one bedroom decorated in a duck motif, I asked her if she had any old duck decoys which could be quite valuable. Esther said she had some old ones in the shed. I talked about her antiques and said I had books that listed values and she suggested we get together after Christmas and go through some of her things. As we visited, I told her about my thefts and Esther told of having her larger arrowheads and some jewelry stolen.

There were other things about Marge that I had chosen to ignore before. Once Marge bragged about getting money for an imaginary knee injury when her family staged a rear end collision when she was visiting in California and I was appalled and told her so. Another time a truck selling new furniture came to town. I hated all thieves and I went to the courthouse to report it to the cops, but they were all out of town that day, a rare thing since they usually slept at the courthouse all day. When I mentioned the furniture truck to Marge, she said, "They have invoices. Furthermore, what business is it of yours?"

CHAPTER 9

When the position of Hettinger County Superintendent of Schools for the 1993-94 school year was advertised in the paper, Marge suggested I apply for it. The job only required a bachelor degree and was a two-day a week job with few duties and a small salary. I was very surprised when I was hired. The first day I started working as Hettinger County Superintendent, I asked to see the budget. I had a $10,000 supply budget when all the county superintendent ever needed was an occasional typewriter ribbon and stationery. Even with that bloated budget, part of the job was to solicit funds to conduct the county MATHCOUNTS and Spelling Bee competitions. As the MATHCOUNTS entry fees were due soon after I took the job, I had the auditor send a check in and the next week the paper printed that my office was the only county office operating in the red.

When I put in an invoice for a subscription to the weekly Hettinger County papers for records of school board meetings and to maintain school history records, Roy Steiner the county auditor, refused to order it and I argued that with a $10,000 supply budget, I didn't see how a $20 request was unreasonable. Every encounter with Roy was a confrontation and I could feel a cold hate whenever I was in his presence. When I had to go to his office, he would ignore me and I would just stand by the counter with my head down pretending to read until he would deign to wait on me.

I soon found out that the $10,000 was to order all the supplies for the county through a school consortium. Since my office was part time and small, it looked better financially and the bonus was that Roy sloughed off some auditor work on someone else. Soon after I started, everyone working for the county ordered kitchen garbage sacks and when they admitted that they wanted them for personal use, I told them that I wouldn't order them. The promiscuous blond secretary said sarcastically, "Why, is it too much work for you?"

I said "No, I won't steal for anyone."

Because the supplies were ordered through the school superintendent's office, they were delivered there too. When I first started work, several boxes of surgical gloves were delivered to my office and when I asked where they went, they said Roy used them for butchering.

The days when I was at work, strange things would happen at my house. Small, stupid things would disappear. My automatic garage door had begun to open at random times, so I always shut the power switch off and many times it would be on when I came back from work. One drizzling day, I stopped to pet my dog Collateral when I got home and her hair was wet even though I had left her in the house. Sometimes vehicles would follow me and go fast when I went fast, or slow down when I did. Almost invariably the license numbers would begin with ND or be a number followed by an A or just numbers while most state licenses were three letters starting with C or D followed by a number.

My supply room at work overlooked the street that the Butcher shop was on. One of their sons was a beekeeper and the other was the retarded one that got the policewoman fired. Once I'd seen Roy Steiner, the county auditor, carrying a package from a salt feeder behind their hives when there was no reason for a salt feeder to be there because the land was in CRP and supported no livestock. The local drug dealer with the "Heady" bra on his vehicle spent his free time at the butcher shop. I saw a constant flow of vehicles with ND on the license plates stopping and I often saw the Sheriff's patrol car there too. Fred was a frequent visitor and said he went to get bones for his dogs.

Even though Hettinger County was losing population and its tax base at an alarming level, somehow the courthouse received funds to buy an elaborate, sophisticated computer system in 1994. I refused to attend the Christmas party for the courthouse but I heard the food committee order lobster, crab, shrimp and steak and arrange the open bar for all the employees in the courthouse. When I asked where the money for this excess came from, the secretary sarcastically told me "the pop machine."

From the very beginning, I had trouble getting mail out. Schools would not get notification of workshop letters or agenda items and would call demanding an explanation. I quit mailing from the courthouse but letters would get lost from the post office too. People at the courthouse not only wouldn't talk to me, they would get up and leave the room when I entered. It wasn't much better downtown. At the cafe when I ordered a beef sandwich, I got gristle and fat on dry bread. At the gas station, the customer at the pumps came out from paying, saw me waiting in line, and went back in for fifteen minutes, blocking the pumps. People would turn away when I would nod a greeting.

When the state officials were doing their yearly audit at the courthouse, I cornered one of the auditors to ask about the supply budget. Rather than being excited about the possibility of corruption, he evaded my questions and kept turning the conversation back to the contingency fund for school competitions that I had to raise money for. The books were a mess and no one could tell the status of their department because the books weren't divided up by agency and no one ever received any financial statements.

When the county auditor took travel expenses for the Mathcounts winner's trip to Bismarck out of the contingency fund and overdrew it by $14, the paper again published that the Superintendent of School's office was overdrawn. It was my obligation to collect contributions to pay for the MATHCOUNTS and Spelling Bee competitions. I hated begging for money, so I decided to make up a guide to the landowners of CRP, all those lands set aside by the government as highly erodible and the preferred nesting area of pheasants. Although Hettinger County had highly productive land, it unexplainably had the largest percentage of land in CRP in the state.

I spent all my free time working on the atlas. During hunting season, the town sold chances on prizes. I planned to go to the city council and get their mailing list of the prize lottery purchasers to solicit sales. Reverend Pestal was a member of the city council and offered to make mailing labels for me and anyone else in the community that could use them. After several weeks, I asked Pestal for the list but he said most of the names were illegible.

I stayed away from the Norton, the Sheriff. The Hettinger Co. Sheriff's department spent most of their time on the third floor or at the Messer's Butcher Shop. Norton and his deputies ignored me so I was surprised when he stopped in my office and started telling me that Charles Manson would never have been allowed to join the Nazi party and that the time would come when the streets of America would run with blood. I had been pretty sure that Norton was part of the lunatic fringe before, but now the fact that a man of his caliber was not only armed but also in a position of authority scared the shit out of me.

By November, the stress was showing on me. I was getting more and more calls complaining that schools were not getting letters, I no longer went downtown for coffee, I was isolated at work, and strange things continued to happen at my house. Dumb things would disappear and reappear again. I had purchased the porch columns from the owner of an abandoned house and when I called her to ask if I could buy the baseboards, the owner agreed to give them to me and a few days later when I got to the farmhouse, the baseboards that had survived 20 years of abandonment were all broken. When my sister called one day, I mentioned that I had to drive to Buttrey's to get the brand of dog food Collateral liked and when I got to the store that brand's shelf was empty. When I ordered some books on antiques, the check was cashed but I never got the books. I can't name one thing that went right.

In early spring, I gathered up the twenty-five front yard hives that had made it through the howling winter and moved them to a another location for the week or so it would take them to get reoriented before I could move them to their permanent location behind my house. The next day, I took sugar syrup out to them for spring stimulation and they were already gone. At the gate were fresh Doral cigarette butts. I moved the remaining twenty hives from across the road into my backyard.

When it came time for the county spelling bee, I went to the store to arrange for cookies and milk for the break and the storeowner told me I would have to get the milk directly from the distributor who unloaded at the Butcher Shop. When I went to inquire at the butcher shop, I saw an ashtray full of Doral cigarettes.

I shared my office with two women who ran a government funded program designed to teach retarded people to be self sufficient, but all they ever seemed to do was hot glue things together and bake box cakes. Although the job was advertised as one full time position, it had been split into two part time jobs held by Elroy's niece and her friend, the wife of the county treasurer. Rather than functioning as a forty-hour worker, the two women came to work at the same time and the county got a 20 hour work force and paid twice the pri