When I’m walking around the little track above the basketball courts down at the Rapid City YMICA, I don’t wear any head phones or ear buds.
I don’t listen to music. I don’t listen to podcasts. I don’t listen to news reports. And I don’t hustle up to the rigorous shouts of some recorded workout guru urging me to pick up the pace.
If that’s the way you speed walk through your workout, cool.
Me? I walk and I think.
And as my stride accelerates to a barely aerobic pace, so does my thinking. I fall into the easy rhythm of what I consider to be a pretty good workout, of body and mind.
Today, as it happened, I walked my way into a memory of Gov. George Mickelson and the eggplant. Or maybe it was the rutabaga. It was 34 or 35 years ago, so odd veggies can get mixed up in the hazy produce bin of the mind.
But wait, it wasn’t the eggplant or the rutabaga at first. The veggie memory came later. At first I was thinking about Mickelson and the back door of his office in the state Capitol Rotunda and how I got a couple of after-hours quotes for a news story by banging on that back door.
That memory inspired another recollection as one step followed the other on the track. This memory was about the time Mickelson asked me about mixing cockle burs into my bran flakes. And my memory went on from there to the letter of apology the big guy once wrote me (the only written apology I’ve ever received from a governor). And then about the time he and I took a bike ride around Pierre, so I could write a column for the Rapid City Journal.
Gunwale or gunnel, those northern pike were nice
With some ignition points like that, the mind can really take off. And mine really did. It got busier then my feet with Mickelson memories as I walked around the track (19 times for each mile), occasionally stepping to my right to pass a slower walker, occasionally brushing the iron railing to my left in order to give a faster walker room to pass.
And the memories and images walked along with me, including one of Mickelson standing in a boat with his son David, both of them grinning and holding two nice northern pike on a stringer draped across the gunwale.
Mickelson — a lover of sons, boats and nice northern pike — wouldn’t mind, I think, if I allowed myself a brief digression here to note that these days “gunwale” is often spelled and pronounced “gunnel.” Its origins go back hundreds of years, however, when fighting ships had guns mounted on or near or through the top plank, or “wale,” on the side of the vessel.
I’m pretty sure Mickelson would have appreciated that story. He was a good and patient listener, which can be an unusual quality for an important politician. And he was a good talker, too, especially about things like hunting and fishing.
I wrote about his outdoors passions back in 1987, when I was taking a few years off from traditional news work to publish my own outdoor tabloid. The picture of Mickelson and David with their pike filled the front cover of the May edition of Kevin Woster’s Dakota Outdoors. And the story inside explored Mickelson’s love for hunting and fishing and other outdoor recreation.
A few years later, I used that love to coax Mickelson to come to the back door of his office and give me some quotes for the news story I was working on for the Rapid City Journal, probably near or past deadline.
That was back when the Journal, the Sioux Falls Argus Leader and the Aberdeen American news all had full-time staffers in Pierre, all year. It was also back when security was a bit less rigid at the Capitol than it is these days.
Imagine a governor answering they door when you knocked
It was also before you could reach people by cell phone or email or text. So I was in a bit of an after-hours quandary, looking for a Mickelson comment as editors back in Rapid City were waiting for my story. After trying whatever numbers I could without luck, I drove by the Capitol and saw the governor’s vehicle parked in the lot.
So I went in to find all the doors to the governor’s office, as expected, closed and locked. But I figured he was in there working. And at that time, there was a sort of back door off the Rotunda that opened into the governor’s main office. I knocked on the door and called something like: “Governor. It’s Kevin Woster. Want to know where the walleyes are biting?”
As I recall, I could hear the thump-thump-thump of his heavy footsteps — the kind a guy who stood 6-foot-4 and weighed, as he liked to say, “an eighth of a ton” — would make. Then Mickelson opened the door, grinned and said something like “Hey, come on in.”
Imagine that today, somebody pounding on the door of the governor’s office after hours while the governor was inside working. Probably wouldn’t work out quite as well for the door knocker as it did back then.
We had a chat, the governor and I. Not a long one. But long enough to talk briefly about walleyes and briefly about my news story. I got my quotes. And we both went back to work.
And then there was the eggplant, or maybe the rutabaga
That tended to be the way it was with that guy.
Open. Accessible. Inquisitive.
And speaking of inquisitive, there was the thing with the egg plant, or rutabaga.
Mickelson was in line in buying some groceries at DakotaMart in Pierre. The woman in front of him had some produce on the counter, which Mickelson was examining. I was in the next aisle over, looking on.
This is the way I remember their exchange:
“What do you have there?” Mickelson asked the woman.
“That’s an eggplant (or maybe rutabaga),” she said.
“How do you cook it?” he asked. Or maybe he said: “What do you do with it?”
Either way, she explained. He listened, intently, smiling, nodding.
Egg plant or rutabaga, Mickelson was fascinated by the vegetable and by the woman’s explanation of how to cook and eat it.
And now, on the subject of eating, there was that time when he asked me about my breakfast choices.
“Are you mixing cockle burs with your bran flakes these days?” he asked when we saw each other in some news situation.
It was hard criticism to hear, but it was the truth
He was referring to my news writing and/or column writing, which he and his Press Secretary Gretchen Lord Anderson both felt had a bit of a nasty edge to it at the time. Gretchen, a former reporter herself, had brought it up before that, noting that it was clear that my personal life was affecting my work.
And not, she said, in a particular good way.
That was a hard thing to hear. And hearing it could upset a person. I’m pretty sure I got upset. But it came from someone I respected, and someone who had always treated me with respect. And also, what she said was true, about me and my journalism at the time.
I was going through a divorce, you see. Or maybe I had just gone through it. Either way, it was pretty hard to hide the misery in my personal life, either in the way I looked and spoke or the way I did my reporting and writing.
Edgy is one thing. Nasty is another. And allowing the anguish in your personal-life to shape the tone of your professional-life work is bad news for a newsman.
With the cockle-bur comment, delivered with about half a grin, Mickelson was expressing his unhappiness with some of my writing, and the unstated-but-implied wish that I do better. But the way he delivered the comment also said: “I understand. Take care of yourself.”
He was thoughtful enough at that point of weakness in my life not to lean on me too hard. But there was another time when he did. I can’t even remember what it was about or where we were at the time. But he came down on me pretty hard, and the exchange it prompted between us was sharp and unfriendly.
A day or two later I got an envelope in the mail with a hand-written apology and comments about how much he respected me as a journalist, even when he disagreed with something I wrote, as he had in this instance.
I can’t see an apology like that from a governor to a journalist happening today. Oh boy, can I not see it.
Oh, and then there was that bike ride around Pierre
I was thinking about that, too, as I glanced down from time to time at my old black-and-orange Saucony XT-600 “running” shoes moving on the track in a cadence that appeared surprisingly efficient, considering that I was paying more attention to my mind and my Mickelson memories than to my stride.
Mickelson’s time as governor ended prematurely and in tragedy, of course, when he and seven other South Dakotans committed to bettering their state died in an airplane crash coming back from a business trip out of state. I’ve spent plenty of time thinking and writing about that crash over the years, lamenting those lost, wondering what might have been different here in South Dakota had they all lived.
But those weren’t the memories of Mickelson that walked with me around that track. They were happier recollections about a man inclined to share his good nature with others.
Which is how we ended up on that bike ride around Pierre, at a pace that was usually less than aerobic but well inside our comfort zone for conversation.
When he wasn’t talking to me, he was calling out to people along the way, speaking loud enough to almost cover the creaks and groans of his slightly overburdened bike and the occasional clunk as he shifted gears.
He seemed to enjoy the ride. And I loved it, not just because it gave me material for a Journal column, but also because it offered a personal glimpse of our governor and his humanity.
I can’t imagine anything I could have heard through a set of headphones or ear buds while walking around that YMCA track could have been better than that.
