Hope Sisk

Fear.

Joan McKinzey knows it well. She knows it can stop time. She knows it can take root in your memory, keeping you from ever moving forward. She knows because a violent attack while walking home from a party in the 1970s nearly killed her. But the fear from that attack might have done worse.

“I’m sure he thought I was already dead,” McKinzey remembers.

Although she was stabbed multiple times and suffered a collapsed lung, she managed to escape her attacker and run to a neighbor’s house. The neighbor called an ambulance.

A man stands in line at a Dairy Queen, wearing a Vietnam War veteran hat. Jacob Ryun doesn’t know him, but he steps forward, extending his hand for a handshake. In his palm is a medallion – a gift for this veteran and a symbol of their connection.

“Mail call!”

A voice rings out in a banquet room where more than 100 veterans are passing around stories of their military service. Their feet are tired from the journey that started before dawn at the Bismarck airport. But their minds and memories are youthful again in this space of shared experience and unspoken understanding. Murmurs of delight follow the mail delivery from table to table, a tradition on the Western ND Honor Flight journey.

Jeff Holzer scrolls through photos on his phone: a quiet country road, a dirt-floor room, colorful pots hanging above an open-fire kitchen and the concrete blocks of partially constructed walls.

“They’re building. They want a new structure, a new house up. They know power’s comin’,” says Holzer, the operations manager at Capital Electric Cooperative.

In November, Holzer will lead a group of 12 volunteers from North Dakota’s electric cooperatives to bring power to the agricultural community of San Luis Palo Grande in north central Guatemala.

This fall, Chase Dauenhauer will wake up each morning in his home off Bismarck’s River Road to the idyllic view of orange pumpkins streaming through his yard. His neighbor, Dave Pearce, knows the scene well. Every September through October for 43 years, it marked the start of a meaningful day’s work.

As students across the state settle in for another school year, North Dakota voters will decide whether to fund the food that fuels them.

If passed in the November general election, a constitutional measure brought forth by a citizen-led coalition – Together for School Meals – would require state funding for daily school meals. Measure 2 would provide one free breakfast and one free lunch each school day to every student enrolled in public schools and public charter schools. Private and tribal schools may also opt-in for the program.

Anyone who grew up watching “Tom and Jerry” understands the basics of a cat-and-mouse game. The cat devises a new scheme. The mouse finds a way around it. Then the chase begins again.

I dragged two suitcases full of everything I owned to the terminal desk of a California airport in 2013. My one-way ticket to North Dakota was a promise to myself I would seek the adventure I felt I needed. I was looking for something, but I didn’t yet know just what it was.

Before the military service or statewide public service, community service shaped Brian Kalk’s values.

Growing up in Bottineau, with a father employed by North Central Electric Cooperative, Kalk was inspired early to improve the quality of life for his neighbors. Cooperative values run deep in his story.