After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Branning wanted to volunteer in some way, possibly for a New York organization. Ultimately, he decided to join the Peace Corps and leave the farm for a while in the hands of two people, his wife and a respected friend and right-hand farmhand.
Robert Branning, 69, just returned from being gone - from his wife and Apple Creek Country Club home - for two years and two months in Romania
Seeing the world
By VIRGINIA GRANTIER
Bismarck Tribune
Roger Branning, 69, of Bismarck, has been to hell, or thereabouts. He was on his second day of sitting in a fishing boat on Devils Lake with friends, and he doesn't even like fishing, and they hadn't had a single bite, and there was nothing to do, absolutely nothing. Branning, a marathon runner, world traveler, engineer, builder of motels, engineer, farmer and a hyper hater of inactivity, almost couldn't take it.
He didn't say it aloud, but he vowed to himself that if he ever got off that fishing boat, he'd never get on another.
"I don't like to fish. I'm too impatient to fish,"he said.
His fishing-boat vow, years old now, still holds. He returned to shore and real life, as he sees it.
Sometimes that means leaving home - for longer than two days. Branning just returned from being gone - from his wife and Apple Creek Country Club home - for two years and two months in Romania.
About a week ago midnight, he arrived at Bismarck Municipal Airport after completing his Peace Corps assignment there.
The couple, married almost 47 years, didn't gush about his return. Both of them like having adventures, sometimes together, sometimes apart, and chapters like a Peace Corps stint are just a part of their lives.
His wife, Shirley Branning, a retired University of Mary education professor who watched over the couple's 700 tilled farm acres while he was gone, says it's nice that there's someone to talk to and share decision-making. But she is feeling some discomfort about adjusting, about losing the freedom of having her own schedule. There were lonely moments, but she said everything clicked. She didn't even have a flat tire during his absence.
"We're both very independent,"Shirley Branning said. "We don't share a lot of the same interests."
She took him to the opera one time and he fell asleep.
He likes sports, hillbilly music and working on the farm -a profession he took up after many professions in 1989, decades after leaving a farm childhood behind.
"He does it all, from seeding to harvesting," Shirley Branning said.
He runs it - and he runs to and from it.
Their farmland is about 10 miles from their house. When he was training for marathons, he would run to the farm, work on the farm all day and run home at night after a hard day in the fields, said Branning's brother, Willis Branning, 67, a Dakota County comissioner in Minnesota.
"He's always been adventurous,"Willis Branning said. "He has less than no fear."
Willis Branning said his brother took off for the Gobi Desert by himself, flew to India alone to explore; and this April, using accrued vacation time, he took a knapsack, camera and a GPS unit and took off traveling through Europe, then across the Mediterranean to Morocco, then on to Italy, Hungary and Romania.
Willis Branning said when his brother gets something in his head, he does it.
Shirley Branning said they met when he was 15 and she was 14 growing up northwest of Jamestown. He remembers he was talkative, hyper, great at math and wanted to be at the forefront of everything. They started dating the last year in high school, but didn't want to get married until they finished their education.
After they did marry, they would move 15 times in 15 years, live in France and Germany, and raise two daughters along the way as he, a North Dakota State University grad, worked as an engineer for various companies and the U.S. government.
After retirement, he got involved in building Super 8 Motels. He also started running to lower his high blood pressure instead of taking medication. It worked, and he ran the Boston and New York marathons. In 1989, in his 50s, he decided to go back to his childhood roots. With land they started acquiring, the Brannings started farming. Shirley Branning said his scientific and technical farming approach is respected in a farming neighborhood that might otherwise have responded in other ways to an older guy getting on a tractor and calling himself a farmer late in life.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Branning wanted to volunteer in some way, possibly for a New York organization. Ultimately, he decided to join the Peace Corps and leave the farm for a while in the hands of two people, his wife and a respected friend and right-hand farmhand.
Shirley Branning didn't want to live that far from the grandchildren, so she wasn't interested in joining him. But she would visit him twice.
She said she wasn't worried about him, knowing he could handle about anything - except that "he doesn't cook worth a darn."
When Willis Branning heard his brother was joining the Peace Corps, it went over like a yawn.
"Really,"he remembers saying nonchalantly.
Roger Branning spent most of his time in four central Romanian villages that had a total population of about 6,000 people. The mayor, who oversaw all four villages, had 16 employees. But there were only six desks. So the employees rotated using the desks.
Willis Branning said his brother found a country that reminded him of their childhood on a North Dakota farm. Hayfields were cut by hands with scythes and raked by hand with rakes that had handles fashioned from tree limbs. Cows were milked by hand. People did their own butchering.
Roger Branning said there were few cars. Horse-drawn wagons were used to haul goods and farm crops. The village roads were paved, but had many holes, he said.
But there also are circa-1600s monasteries that are memorable architectural sites.
Branning became involved in school improvements, improving Internet and e-mail access for the villages and giving farming advice.
There weren't lawnmowers; no lawns to mow. Most households in the area had chickens in the back, a Christmas pig butchered for the holidays, and a cow. Cows were walked daily to a community pasture. The cows knew where home was, and for the evening trip home, would stop at the appropriate gate in the village. Some cows would bellow until a member of their respective household let them in.
Branning said about 30 percent of the young people leave to find jobs in western Europe. They end up being the hotel maids, strawberry pickers and such.
He lived for seven months with a family that had a small store in the front room of their house, selling bread, pop, chicken feed and other items, that was open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. He already misses his Romanian friends. They gave him a going-away party, grilling meat over beds of corncobs that are used as charcoal.
But he's glad for Shirley's home cooking again. In Romania, he had a grilled cheese sandwich maker and mainly lived on the cheese sandwiches and cereal.
The Romanians tend to eat a lot of salads with salad dressings he hadn't exprerienced before and had trouble getting down. He's not a salad guy.
But he said the Romanians have a home brew called Tuaca that would take away some of the salad pain if he drank a little of that first.
(Reach reporter Virginia Grantier at virginia.grantier @;bismarcktribune.com.)
