The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere
By Debra Marquart, Counterpoint, 2006

      Debra Marquart’s memoir — ostensibly a story about herself— is fit neatly between images of her father. Near the book’s beginning, Marquart returns to her ancestral North Dakota home for her father’s funeral, and at the book’s end she once again confronts her father’s death. In between, Marquart looks forward and backward, examining her family’s roots and her own attempts to distance herself from familial traditions. Marquart was a rebellious girl, but having reached maturity she understands how essential her ancestors and the place they lived were to the formation of her character.

      Marquart reaches far back for the under-painting of her family portrait; the essential elements of her family history lie long prior to her forefathers’ settling on the North Dakota plain. The Marquarts had experienced some of the harshest of European environments. Ethnic Germans who fled the Rhine valley after the French revolution (they were royalists who might not have survived the post-revolutionary bloodbath), they ended up on the steppes of southern Russia, where the farming was difficult and the government was frightening, but at least there was a lot of land.

      Given the family’s history on the steppes it’s not surprising that they felt at home on the expansive grasslands of the American plains. Farming was not easy there either, but Marquart’s great-grandfather was very good at it. By the time of his death in 1937 he was hailed as the “Wheat King” of Logan County, and his farmlands stretched wide. Marquart’s grandfather and father became, in turn, stewards of the land, and Marquart herself grew up on the family farmstead.

      The responsibility required by the land is immense. Marquart writes of a farm childhood circumscribed by chores. Dairy cows had to be milked every morning and evening; dairy farmers, Marquart recalls, could never travel so far from home that they couldn’t make it back by five in the afternoon. Farm kids worked hard, either because they were being groomed to one day take over the business, as was the case with Marquart’s brother, or because their parents simply made them work hard, as was the case with Marquart. In any case, farm kids had to work hard because their families depended on them. The land was unforgiving, and every bit of available labor was required to coax a saleable crop from the soil.

      Marquart was no lover of farm life. From the beginning she knew she wanted out of the claustrophobic German community, an insular place that had released almost no one to the outside world other than Lawrence Welk (who was, perhaps not unexpectedly considering the tight knit of the community, Marquart’s distant cousin). Her rebellion at first took the standard course for teenage farm kids; she flitted around town, smoking a lot and fooling around with construction workers who were just passing through. But eventually she pushed the acting out to an anti-farm extreme: she joined a heavy metal band and toured around the countryside in an unreliable van. Her father was understandably upset.

      Life on the road turned out to be not so much easier than life on the farm. Lack of money, nasty living conditions, an unwise relationship with a married guitarist, and a whole host of bad choices made Marquart ultimately understand that life is tough all over and that her parents weren’t necessarily fools if they had given up dreams of living off something other than the land.

Marquart eventually matured and found a stable life away from North Dakota (even if she only made it as far as Iowa). Her life as a college professor was almost as mystifying to her parents as her life as a heavy metal musician, but at least it came with a steady paycheck (although her father was persistently uneasy about those three months of being “out of work” every summer). With the childish pangs of young adulthood behind her, Marquart could at last contemplate and appreciate the history of her family and the land they farmed.

      Like Tara Bray Smith’s excellent memoir, West of Then, Marquart’s story explains how geography can stand as both a metaphor for the soul of a family and as a very literal force in the definition of that soul. Smith’s story takes place in Hawaii — and her family has fallen in a way that Marquart’s hasn’t — but in her case, as in Marquart’s, the land and the power of family history pull her back to the ancestral homestead no matter how badly she wants to stay away.

      Marquart’s memoir is poetic and emotional. Her prose sometimes threatens to float away in a flurry of metaphors and verbal balletics, but for the most part she remains grounded and clear-eyed. Her genealogy is exquisitely researched and powerfully presented, and her self-assessment is critical and uncompromising. The Horizontal World is a loving and engaging portrait of a family, and as such it is a wonderful appraisal of a place that most of us know very little about.

Copyright 2006 Ad Media Inc.