Yesterday (Sunday, August 25, 2024), our family accepted the invitation out to the Bohemian farmstead of the Suchy (pronounced “Sue-Key”) family, not too far south of Mandan in Morton County, North Dakota, northern Great Plains, North America. These broader descriptors of geography are warranted, as Chuck, the farmer-rancher-musician unpacked a bit of oral history for me in narrating a bit how his Bohemian grandfather came to this place from said Bohemia (today’s Czech Republic), and decided to invest in this place to make a life and family.

I thought I’d give just a bit of my own sensory perceptions from what I remember in the drive to the rural Suchy stead. One rolls up the raised and ditched approach (that has the genuine bumps here and there). Beyond the island of thick trees and brush set in front of a hill in this Bohemian valley (lots of Bohemian chain migration entered this place — yes, legit, like you’re reading Willa Cather’s My Ántonia), one cannot view much. Until you get not through the clearing, but into the past. We drove up in our 2022 vehicle, and entered through the arched clearing: it perceptively felt like we were at once time traveling back to decades past, into historic Bohemian diaspora global migration, all while knowing this informed how one moved and moves about the landscape, step by step, in the present.

Chuck and his wife Linda live in a modern A-frame on the Suchy stead, and a historic row of lilacs separate their modern home with the historic Suchy residence (which Chuck uses as, among other things, his studio).

The night prior (Saturday, August 24, 2024), Chuck and family played their annual August event at the rural and historic Bohemian Hall. The Bohemian Hall isn’t too far from the Suchy stead. It’s position in the landscape has restrictive or non-existant WiFi/5G (or whatever is beaming through and to all of the individual super computers we gaze at way too much). So when one sits and listens and watches and a few dragonflies zip in between the viewer and Chuck and company playing on the north elevation of the historic free thinkers Bohemian Hall, a bison stampede of historic thought rolls through the brain and body. Thoughts of how much the top soil has witnessed. Not just with the arrival of historic Bohemians. But much prior, with First Nations. And thousands of years prior at the edge of the glacial advances and retreats.