Independently Speaking By Brent Olson

Sunrise

I’m going to write about sunrises.

That wasn’t Plan A. I have about 600 words of Plan A written, many of those words along the lines of “and another thing, by God.” I think I’ll save them for a time when there’s a chance people might actually listen to what I have to say.

I switched to Plan B because Sunday morning I got up, snapped a picture of the sunrise, and posted it online. It was a nice sunrise. Since I’ve seen somewhere north of 15,000 sunrises through my east window, it would have to be a little special for it to make enough of an impression on me to take yet another photo.

Still, it was just a sunrise. But after I put it online, hundreds of people noticed and gave me a thumbs up. It made me think that perhaps people needed a sunrise.

I had a visitor comment once that my great-grandparents had a finely honed esthetic sense, to homestead in such a beautiful spot. That made me laugh, because I think they built here because the slough meant they wouldn’t have to carry water for the livestock. 

When we first moved to this place, the slough was a shallow wetland covered with cattails and alive with ducks and other wildlife. During the 1930s, it was completely dry, and neighbors had driven the full length north to south in an old touring car, with guys sitting on the fenders shooting at the pheasants they flushed. 

Those days were gone by the time we moved in. I vividly remember a night spent splashing through knee deep mud chasing our Siberian Husky, Nikita, who was engaged in a running battle with a raccoon. I’d heard that if a raccoon could get a dog into deep water, it would sit on his head and drown him. I don’t know if that’s true, but even if it was, Nikita could apparently take care of himself. After an hour or so of combat, he finally came to my increasingly frantic calls, and we went back home.

Due to the wonders of drainage and climate change, the duck slough is gone, replaced by something the plat books call “Olson Lake.” Now it’s too deep for ducks and too shallow for fish. I have an old spotting scope on my desk, something our son used to sight in his rifle for long distance shooting the first years after he got out of the Marine Corps. On winter days, more often than not, I can use it to scan the whole expanse of ice and snow and see nothing alive, except perhaps for the barn cats lurking on the bench outside my window, waiting for me to stop fooling around with writing and give them some food.

I can’t blame wildlife for not hanging around. This place is an acquired taste. I’ve spent decades inviting people to come and visit, and I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who’ve taken me up on it. I try not to take it personally, because when I think of some of the beautiful places my wife and I have visited, from Monument Valley to the Faroe Islands, they’ve been pretty empty as well. For some reason, “beautiful” and “a damned hard place to make a living” seem to go hand in hand. Shoot, when I was a kid 10,000 people lived in Big Stone County. Now there’s half that many, and I bet about 1,000 of them are somewhere else in January.

I had a shot glass of Welsh whiskey to the left of my keyboard as I wrote this, and it’s almost gone. The cats are getting more insistent, and I could use something to eat myself. The sunrise is long gone, but tomorrow there will be another one.

So, there’s that. Because sometimes you just need a sunrise.

Copyright 2026 Brent Olson