And mighty glad to be home.

Meanwhile, I have begun studying the book of Revelation. Is it the fifth or the sixth seal that has now been opened on the northern plains? If locusts descend upon Langdon or Linton this summer, we'll know for sure that it's the end time.

To be far, far away and incapable of being even minimally useful during one of the most intense fortnights in modern North Dakota history has been one of the most difficult experiences of my life. Throughout our voyage, I have thought of the helpless frustration of families of soldiers whose sons and daughters are in harm's way at the other end of the planet, or soldiers in end-of-the-Earth postings helplessly worrying about their wives, children, siblings or parents back in flooded, blizzarded North Dakota.

My daughter, my mother, my closest friends and my house are high and dry. For all of us, that is the main thing. But not the only thing.

I've been devouring what

e-mail, CNN International and quick, but informative, phone calls can provide about the state of things in North Dakota.

My friends have warned that I will need to shovel my way into my house - not for the first time this winter.

Half a dozen times in two weeks I have lectured about Theodore Roosevelt's conviction that the credit in life belongs not to the critic, "but to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred with dust and sweat and blood." These lectures have been delivered by a man whose face is marred principally by Caribbean sunburn, who is not anywhere near the arena, but rather on a cruise ship listening to round two of a shipwide karaoke contest.

Time to rethink my life. Again.

We undertake journeys to see other places and other cultures in order to learn something about ourselves.

Here's what I've learned.

1. Timing is everything. There is nothing wrong with a Panama Cruise - it's thrilling, the trip of a lifetime - but when Bismarck is enduring its only significant post-Garrison deluge, and Fargo is hanging on by a thread of sandbags, one's only true duty is to be on hand to contribute one's might. To be absent is to be worthless - and in a sense meaningless.

The fact is - and in this I do not think I speak only of myself - that I have spent most of my life on the periphery, peering in with a bewildered and semi-detached bemusement. Life is not something I live, but rather mostly observe. And yet I feel pretty certain that this is the only life I am likely to get.

2. If home means anything, then home is the place you go when there is nowhere else to turn, when you need the deepest infusion of love and place and security, when the most fundamental issues are at stake. And in return for that, when home needs you, whether it is bypass surgery or cancer or the flood of 1997 or 2009, you get yourself there as quickly as possible and do whatever you can. On those occasions when home is synonymous with community, the American dream finally means something more than prosperity and property.

3. Leadership in crisis is important, and we have seen it in the response of the mayors and councils of Fargo and Bismarck, in the initiatives of the governor and in the style and substance of our three superb national figures, but the plain truth is that almost all of the credit belongs to the countless thousands of unnamed, but not nameless, individuals who have filled and hefted sandbags, taken each other in in extremity, patrolled the dikes, performed what the poet William Wordsworth called "little unremembered acts" for perfect strangers. The North Dakota heroes of 2009 have a common name: "Anonymous."

When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled America in 1832, what impressed him most were the voluntary associations and the nongovernment initiatives of the American people. When something needed to be done, Tocqueville wrote, people just turned up and set to work. Unquestionably, that spirit is still alive on the plains of North Dakota 177 years later. Democracy at its best is a spontaneous act.

The last two weeks have shown North Dakota at its finest. There is something so noble and meaningful in the way people just turned up at the Bismarck Civic Center and Fargodome merely because there was a thing that needed to be done, because they loved North Dakota and did not want to see it hurt. We all yearn all of our lives to be part of something larger than ourselves. These moments seldom come. When they come they redeem everything.

4. Perhaps North Dakota is a windswept, uncool, isolated, backwater place far from the hot corridors of American life, but it is absolutely superb in a crisis. The simplest Katrina-North Dakota comparison fills you with pride until you want to burst. Still, we must not embrace this moment in smugness or a sense of superiority, but with the dream that life in all of America could still be what North Dakota has been in the last two weeks, violence-free, un-looted, ego-less, profoundly responsive, a common experience in the fullest finest sense of the term.

To have missed that is to have missed everything, even if my basement and window wells prove to be dry as Sahara. There is no crepe suezette or fruo fruo drink - or even wonder of the world - that can measure up to that.

I am so glad to be coming home.

(Clay Jenkinson is the director of the Dakota Institute, a Distinguished Visiting Humanities Scholar at Bismarck State College and the lead scholar of the Theodore Roosevelt Center at Dickinson State University. You can reach him at Jeffysage@aol.com.)