MIKE PETERSON: A SELF-BUILT, AMERICAN-MADE PARADOX

You don’t know Mike Peterson.

You think you do.

Those who have encountered the community resident of 36 years, or have heard about him, know him as a rough-around-the edges, inked-up, crass character who’s been on the business end of both punches taken and punches thrown, who years ago started his own construction company here in Freeman — Peterson Construction — and who has been known to rant and rave about various conspiracies, although he’s not a conspiracy theorist.

“Because they’re not theories,” he says.

Just ask him about 9/11, JFK, the Bird Flu or the CIA and FBI’s involvement in crop theft in the late 1970s …

And Mike Peterson is a self-described a–hole, but “the nicest a–hole you’ll ever meet,” largely because he’s been heavily influenced by the hippie culture of the late 1960s and 70s, and has softened over time.

It’s a paradox to be sure, but so is the self-made, hard-nosed former California ironworker who grew up in an isolated world where crying wasn’t allowed, who along with his wife, Joette, raised six children in the Freeman community. He’s a patriot who takes issue with the government and an atheist who makes wooden crosses with his hands to give away.

To understand those things is to begin to gain a better grasp of the man whose softer side includes a world of poetry, music, woodworking, art and literature, and of love for all.

And he believes he doesn’t have long to live.

Peterson is 61 years old and doesn’t think he’ll make 64. Twenty-two years of health issues — including Lyme disease and psoriatic arthritis, an autoimmune condition that attacks otherwise healthy tissues and organs — are taking their toll and wreaking havoc on his crippled body, abused by years of hard living. And in 2023 he nearly died from Parsonage-Turner syndrome, a rare neurological disorder that produces severe pain, weakness and numbness in upper limbs that even Mayo Clinic has rarely seen. It paralyzed both of his diaphragms, and it took the winter for Mayo to figure it out.

“It was a syndrome and the care was time — a year-and-a-half of sleeping in a chair,” he says. “Put me to the edge, bro. And the chance of relapse is good. If I had a choice between wrestling a bear or relapsing, I’d take the bear any day. Losing your lungs is miserable. It’s unbelievably scary.”

Given all of that, today, Peterson lives in a constant state of discomfort and is dealing with the unwelcome side effects of drugs prescribed to him to treat inflammation that make him manic.

“I’m weird to begin with, you know?” he says. “I’ve always ran on five TV channels, which isn’t right, but now I’m running on 1,000 because of the Prednisone. It’s miserable.”

Cannabis oil and marijuana help level him out, as does the softer side of the man that is every bit as powerful as the Mike Peterson people think they know. And he’s eager to get back to the Mayo Clinic this month for further treatment — a world-famous health care facility that will be his final resting place. That’s because Mayo has accepted his offer to donate his body for study when his earthly life is done — and what a life it has been.

AN IRON FIST

Tough circumstances lead to tough living, and that is the world into which Mike was raised.

Born to Bob and MaryAnn Peterson in Spokane, Wash. in 1963 with ironworker blood in his veins, Mike grew up a younger brother to Starla, and by the time he was 14 years old, their parents had divorced. That’s when he moved to California to live with his granddad in the Redwoods — 27 miles of gravel off the 101 without another sign of life.

“I was raised hard — really hard,” says Mike, who never did graduate from high school but later earned his GED. “Next thing you know I was on my own.”

Mike found himself working iron out of a Sacramento-based company building skyscrapers, bridges, tunnels, nuclear cooling and geothermal towers big and small. It was work that further hardened his rugged exterior.

“The trade I was in, you’re working with the hardest men you’ve ever met in your life,” he says. “It’s all mob and corruption.”

He used drugs, ran drugs and got involved “in a lot of bad sh-t.” He watched people die — including a construction worker who drowned in diesel and a woman who passed away in his arms following a bad accident in heavy traffic — and says he should have been dead himself multiple times over.

Being an ironworker was tough, tough stuff, Mike says.

“There’s a reason I made $60,000 a year in 1980.”

Who’s to say what might have happened had Mike not met Joette Jensen, a young woman from Freeman who had found her way to Sonoma to train horses. As he writes in his first-person account that accompanies this story, Mike was living in his truck while on a jobsite north of San Francisco when he met Joette, and the two were married in 1987.

But things didn’t really start changing for Mike until he took a 20-foot fall off the side of a building in San Francisco and crushed his back — a nail in the coffin of his time as an ironworker.

In need of some time to level out, and with Joette dealing with a case of homesick blues — “she’s a 100% Freeman girl” — the two left California and moved to South Dakota.

“Two surgeries later,” Mike says, “and we never went back.”

DISCOVERY

Part of what has made Mike who he is is his deep-seeded connection to the outdoors — specifically as a bow hunter. It was a skill he learned from his granddad, and he shot his first deer on the southeast slope of Mount St. Helens one year before she blew. He eventually started guiding hunts in areas targeting primarily bears, but also turkeys and occasionally pigs in the back yard of one of his neighbors who lived down the road in Sonoma, Robin Williams — yes, that Robin Williams.

“Hunting is heritage,” he says. “It’s in your blood.”

While Mike returned to the Pacific Northwest every year to guide bear hunts after moving to South Dakota, the Petersons were settling in as Midwesterners. They were new parents to April, and five more children would follow: Darci, Dayna, Briar, Chet and Rijji.

The halfway-across-the-country move came with a significant amount of culture shock.

“I grew up with the sound of a foghorn — on the ocean — where people were different,” Mike says. “Around here, if you’re different you’re weird. Out there you can be whatever the hell you want to be and be accepted.”

Anyway, Mike, Joette and little April initially settled in on a farm near Joette’s homeplace south of Freeman and both farmed full-time for about a year and a half. That’s when they found a 40-acre farm for sale near Tyndall and took it, moving from Hutchinson to Bon Homme County and commuting for work — her on the farm and him as an emerging teacher.

Even though he didn’t think he was smart enough for it, Mike earned his secondary teaching certificate in Pierre before taking a job as a counselor at Springfield Academy, where he taught kids building skills and started the World of Work program — something he would go on to do at McCrossan Boys Ranch, as well.

“It was a freakin’ show, man,” Mike says, a reference to the challenges that go along with working with troubled youth and managing his own, deep-seeded demons. There’s little question that his years as an ironworker had produced PTSD, which is why, to this day, he deflects with humor and positive energy. It’s a defense mechanism, he says, “100%.”

Mike says he found great reward in his work at both Springfield Academy and McCrossan.

“I started out teaching them how to read a tape,” he says, then taught them small projects with World of Work, “and the next thing you know we’re building houses for Habitat for Humanity.”

It was — and is — one of his life’s greatest hits.

“I’ve built skyscrapers that reached the clouds,” he says, “but teaching gang kids how to build houses was the most rewarding thing I ever did in my life.”

But teaching wasn’t paying the bills, so Mike went back to one of the things he knew best — something he was made to do: construction.

Initially, most jobs he took were in the Sioux Falls area, but as his children grew up through the public school system in Freeman, Mike started making more connections with the local community. In 1998 he started Peterson Construction and, two years later, after Joette’s dad passed away, they returned to Joette’s home place to make another new life for themselves.

It’s the eclectic world they continue to live in to this day.

AWAKENING

One look inside the Peterson home, which Mike built in 2000 after a massive clean-up job on the property, will tell you all that is important to the Petersons’ existential existence. Walls are filled with framed family photos. Hunting trophies overlook the dwelling, including kills made by Joette, who Mike says became a far better hunter than him. There are also trophies won by Joette at arm-wrestling competitions that she dominated on her way to becoming one of the best in the world. And out back, a deck overlooks the tree-heavy yard, which Mike built as a replica of the blueprint used for his home overlooking the ocean back on the West Coast.

Animals are everywhere — sheep, goats, lamas, horses, cattle, pigs, chickens, ducks, geese, turkeys, peacocks, guinea hens, cats and dogs. There’s a huge garden plot used to grow potatoes and tomatoes, targets for hunting and a zipline for fun, a pond and a firepit.

Joette farms full-time and Mike is resigned to a slower life.

“I want a pet bird,” he says. “She wants 300 more sheep.”

And, so, Mike’s sanctuary is his shop, attached to the house as if it were a garage. And it’s a mess.

Mike Peterson digs through scraps of wood he uses to carve into meaningful pieces.

There’s a popcorn machine, dart board and split wood he burns in his stove. Tools, extension cords and an acoustic guitar, bear skin and hunting trophies next to a flag that reads “Don’t Tread on Me,” another of the Confederacy and a third promoting the Second Amendment that says “Liberty or Death.” There’s a walker and a wheelchair to assist him when he has trouble getting around, body be damned.

And there are scraps of wood everywhere and evidence of the kind of building he has settled into since turning Peterson Construction over to his sons and their families — tables, mantels and knickknacks made mostly out of wood from the cedar trees that infect rural pastures.

“Cedar is beautiful, soft, volatile, piss-you-off wood,” says Mike, who uses it to make hearts, birdhouses and pyramids to scale — “the weirdest s-hit you’ve ever seen.”

But it is his small, handmade crosses that hold the deepest meaning — funny for somebody who chooses spirituality over religion and has never gone to church. His connection to animals and the earth is strong — reflective of the one religion he most subscribes to, animism — and he believes all living creatures have souls, and that we will all one day become one with the planet.

“I’ve been a spiritual person my entire life — spiritual in a way that is different from people who go to church,” Mike says. “I have nothing against church; it’s a great thing for communities and brings people together. But when that church starts tearing another person apart because they are different, I don’t dig it.”

But those crosses he makes matter a great deal, especially the one he gave last year to Freeman resident Wyona Hofer while she was in hospice care — a symbol of Christianity and eternal reward with which she was buried.

“That little cross made me cry,” he said. “It was the most monumental thing I’ve ever built — even bigger than the handrail across the TransAmerica Pyramid in San Francisco, because I took a natural resource and turned it into something that put somebody to heaven, and that’s f—ing heavy.”

And he himself is not afraid to pass from this world to the next.

“Dying is going to be the most peaceful thing you ever do,” he says. “I’m here to tell you.”

He doesn’t want an obituary or a marker of any sort, but he wants people to know two things:

1. “I had a pretty bad hand, but it was a great hand; and,

2. “I want this town to know who I was and what I am so folks can understand that I’m not this a—hole atheist that people made me out to be. That is on my bucket list.”

In the meantime, Mike will keep being Mike and embrace the softer side that began to emerge, ever so slowly, following his marriage to Joette and their decision to make the Freeman community their home, and he will keep fighting against the health issues that really started increasing in severity two years ago.

“My body is beyond a piece of s-it,” he says. “I’ve lost all the nerves in my back, I’ve got no muscle, I can’t lift my arms, and my legs are going catatonic,” he says. “I went from a fine-oiled machine to a person who couldn’t even beat his way out of a wet paper sack. It’s been tough. I was top rooster; now I’m the bottom hen. And not being able to work is hard. To take nothing and to build a house is one cool accomplishment.”

But Mike’s got his music and his writing and his cedar, and he takes care of himself as best he can. He quit drinking years ago — his preference was vodka and ice — and tries to avoid sugar and processed foods.

“That’s key,” he says.

And Mike’s got his softer side leveling him out as he reflects on a complex, rewarding hard life well lived.

“I have always wanted to do what’s right, but I don’t always do what’s right,” Mike says. “I don’t always listen to myself all the time, but I try to. Good thing I don’t, because if I did, I wouldn’t have no damn fun at all.”

He’s much softer today than he was in his prime, largely because “I’m not tough enough to be an a–hole anymore.” Or maybe it’s because he’s watched his children grow into accomplished adults; Darci is at a high-level job with Verizon in Georgia, April is a victim rights advocate in Madison here in South Dakota, Dayna tends bar in Menno and trains horses — just like her mom — Briar farms with his father-in-law near Sioux Falls and is involved in Peterson Construction, just like Chet, and Rijjy works at a salon in Huron.

He sees all of their lives — and the lives of his 14 grandchildren (and two on the way) — through a lens that refracts quiet comfort despite constant physical pain and love for everybody despite a hard edge that has marked his life.

And speaking of marks, Mike’s body wears symbols of who he is and where he’s been — tattoos, most of which he inked himself. There’s Mount Rushmore on his right pectoral muscle and the Statue of Liberty on his left, a two-fingered peace sign on the inside of his left forearm, a compass on his right hand, and trees — lots of trees.

He’s “up with the chickens and in bed with the owls,” which gives him time to listen to music, read, write and work with his hands.

Mike will continue to visit Mayo in Rochester, Minn. as needed — “if anything goes wrong, get your a– to Mayo,” he says — and he lauds other medical professionals who have served him well, including Dr. Jay Allison at Freeman Regional Health Services, whose praises he sings.

Mike has never tackled his hard past with counseling and never will.

“I don’t need therapy, dude,” he says. “I’ve got a fishing pole.”

And he lives with no regrets, “except maybe a few.”

There’s that paradox again.

But that’s Mike Peterson.

And now you know.