Settlers Township 2006, at dawn

 I'm a slow learner.

It took me a couple of years to discover the bare, naked truth about photography--that it's all about light. When I got home on January 14, 2006, twenty years ago to the day, when I brought up the files I'd shot that early morning east of Canton in the hills along the Big Sioux, I knew when I got to this one was an epiphany. I hadn't really understood. This shot--someone's back yard in the dawn's early light, a Midas touch it gives to even a guy's backyard. 

Why shoot a fence post  and barbed wire? Because the lighting makes it interesting. Dawns themselves are beautiful, sure--but dawn is just as much a king for what it does to the things in its momentary orbit--"momentary" because what anyone who's ever taken the time to watch knows, won't be long and this bath of beauty will have vanished. 

Twenty years ago, by way of the Sioux County's most beautiful township, there was this recognition in me, something I'd never really understood before--that photography was all about light.

I never dreamed these photographs would get of my computer's memory, but here they are, not because they stop the show but because they're part of my an education that goes on yet today.

Like I said, I'm a slow learner.

One more thing. Here's another from that morning, not far from Inspiration Hills, just field grasses in a momentary shower of morning light.

I'd never done it before, but just this morning I asked AI to have a look at this one and make it pretty. Here's what AI did with this picture.

Amazing, isn't it? The power AI has is breathtaking. It's entirely understandable why people are at once both charmed and scared silly.

Here's what it did to the shot at the top of the page:

Then added: "The enhanced version is ready now — the golden light is richer, the mist softened, and the trees glow with warmth and depth. It feels like a peaceful invitation to linger in the quiet beauty of the moment. If you'd like, I can add a scripture, seasonal verse, or turn it into a greeting card or event backdrop."

Just amazing.

Twenty years ago in the Doon cemetery

[This post has been snatched from a longer introduction to a short story I wrote a decade or more ago, an intro from a collection of short fiction I've been working on, slowly, for years, a book of short fiction that features those stories as well as the stories that brought each of them to life--to answer questions like, "Why did you write that story?"] 

In January of 2006, on an icy cold Saturday morning I went out at dawn to get a a picture or two in a country graveyard. I headed out to Doon, where the cemetery hugs the rolling hills of the Rock River, a setting that offers a graveyard even more wordless gravitas. I can understand why Feike Feikema wanted to be buried there, looking down at his beloved Doon to the east, and across fields of corn and beans to the north, fields that, even in winter, don’t shed their spacious grandeur.

I wasn’t looking for Frederick Manfred's grave because I knew where to findit. It was cold—January—and I was looking for a shot that would feature the long shadows laid across stripes of snow and columns of stone by  the morning sun—just looking for something touching, to get something visually stunning.

That’s when I stumbled on the burial site of a woman whose story I would know absolutely nothing of if I’d never read the novel The Secret Place,  a novel I bought four decades before, a novel that changed my life.

I knew that good people felt used by that novel, even though the young woman buried beneath the marker where I stood probably suffered no abuse at all from Frederick Manfred, years later, when Manfred's novel was published. She was already here. She died in childbirth.

I met that woman, a prototype, in the pages of that novel. She died at just 21 years of age, the stone says, way back in 1920. But that morning, it seemed to me that I knew her, or at least of the woman beneath the stone; I couldn’t help wondering how many people on the face of the earth, even among her own descendants, had any inkling of her story.

“We shall meet again” the stone says, in mossy text.

I stood there beside her grave, sorry that she’d died so young, and sorry too that Feike Feikema caught all that rage from the town he loved when he was just trying to tell a story that was, in part, her story.

But I was also thankful for a story that made that very burial site alive with this even bigger story I’m telling, I guess, a sprawling story that will end only when the sun sets forever over the open spaces of a landscape Frederick Manfred loved and called Siouxland, a real tome that won’t be finished until the very last story of this broad land has finally been told.

There they were, in death, the two of them, the novelist who’d used her for a story that had changed my life, and the woman he’d used.

What would they say to each other? That's what I dreamed in "January Thaw,"
a story about stories.

You can read the story here.

Amazing Grace

It's a long story, but then most novels are. I  won't bore you with the background of Romey's Place; but I will say this: in it's first draft, that novel ended in a cemetery in the Netherlands, where the protagonist bawls in exasperation and anger at the grave of his father, who had suffered a massive heart attack, in Holland, a long distance from home. Romey's Place was no "feel good-er." It had been rejected by some of New York's finest, who were kind but unanimous in their assessment that it wasn't quite what their list was after. I was in a pickle unlike anything I'd ever been in.

I was in the Amsterdam for a three-week Dutch Semester through the college where I taught, and it was great. Loved it. I'd taken two books along to read because both were real winners with the evangelical world I was in at the time. One was A Vocabulary about Grace, by Kathleen Norris, whose personal story in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography attracted me--most of her life lived far, far away from her grandmother's place in far northwestern South Dakota. I read her Vocabulary in the Netherlands. Loved it, too.

The other was a book whose author I'd come to know personally but not well, a young-ish non-fiction writer who'd scored well with some other titles, but really hit the big time with What's So Amazing about Grace? Loved it, too. 

Those two books about grace were so convincing that when I left the Netherlands and came back home, I had determined the first draft's old cemetery climax missed the point because too much of Romey's Place was about grace, not rage. When I get back, I told myself, I was going to write that novel over again, changing to first person and dumping the Dutch graveyard. 

If you stay up on the evangelical news, you know where this is going.

Last week, Christianity Today announced what Philip Yancey--What's-so-Amazing-about Grace-Philip Yancey--asked them to, I'm sure. You can read there what both he and Janet, his wife, offer in explanation. It's news that soured hundreds of thousands of readers, like me, men and women who were wonderfully arrested by that book and the steady stream of more and similar headliners he's turned out since.  

Philip Yancey told me and others once upon a time that he was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over, regaling evangelicals for having lost its way, illustrating that very point with the heart-felt stories of Christians who haven't. If you're looking for a score, think of him this way: conservative in his appraisal of the basics of Christianity, but progressive with respect to contemporary issues. 

Yancey hails from a Southern family steeped in the world of Sunday school and Bible camps, a family that carried with it the notion that Martin Luther King was a political agitator and integration was not at all biblical. His own Damascus Road experiences had to do with walking away from the cultural values that still haunt America's evangelicals, especially its Southern crowd. I remember him confessing his frustration with writing books, one after another, that criticized sharply his most loyal readers. I remember him telling me he wished he could write fiction. 

I'm guessing, right now, some might well assume that all those books about grace were hollow because of his illicit relationship with a woman other than his wife, a woman who was herself married. 

The last time I saw him, he stopped me in the Denver airport, he and Janet on their way to some speaking engagement, if I remember correctly. But I can't say I knew him, knew the persona his work created for him, of course, but not him. I'm shocked and saddened by what happened, but--just shoot me!--much more sad about his Parkinson's, announced some time ago. 

I can't help but think of it this way: Phillip Yancey, a fallen servant of the Lord, knows better than most what's so amazing about grace. What he's forgotten, I'm sure a forgiving Lord will remind him in a way He likely hadn't before.

Tonight, at prayer time, I will remember him and Janet--and the others affected by his fall from grace.

Years ago--I think I was in college then--my mother called me and told me--tearfully, I remember--that a preacher in town had run off with the organist. It's a cliche, I know.

The thing was, this sinner wasn't our pastor. He preached at another church in town, not hers, not ours. I didn't even know the guy, and I'm not sure she did either. 

She cried, and when I asked her why, she just said for what his sin told the whole community of believers. For her, it was a disaster to see one of the righteous fall. She was right, I'm sure. 

But I will not forget that I have Philip Yancey to thank for teaching me more about what's so amazing about grace. I'm sure Philip can learn once again, as we all can and must.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

 “you will. . .surround me with songs of deliverance.”

 To my mother’s chagrin, I was never as talented as she was when it came to music.  She would have loved me—and her daughters—to be able to sit at the piano and create the joy she created right there all through her life. 

 But for me, no go.  She made sure I took lessons for years, but today I can’t plink out much more than “chopsticks.”

 Several years ago I wrote a play in commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the college where I teach.  Somewhere in early summer of the year before, when I was belly-deep in the writing, I was struck with the notion that this play I was working on should end with music, a specific chorale anthem titled “O Lord God,” a Russian piece my sister used to sing adoringly, years after she’d left the college choir. 

I loved that anthem, not only because I knew it stayed so tenaciously with my sister, but also because I knew it had also been a favorite of college choirs throughout those fifty years. 

But I also loved it because the piece tells a musical story.  It begins in deep anxiety and begs the Lord to listen to her prayers, offered with daily diligence. And then, suddenly and remarkably, as if out of nowhere, the music’s trajectory simply soars in thanksgiving:  “I will sing to the Lord as long as I live.”  A real musician would know how to describe what happens technically, but it doesn’t take a professional to experience that, gloriously, the prayers of the petitioner have been answered. 

Because I wanted that music to end the play, I listened to it time and time again when I was writing, so often that today even a novice like me could direct it, I swear. 

At the college’s fiftieth anniversary celebrations, the play was staged a half-dozen times.  I didn’t attend every performance, but I every time I was there I was moved as deeply as I ever had been at the deliverance story of “O Lord God.”

Many hymns are songs of deliverance, the Christian life beginning, or so it seems to me, in thanksgiving.  What happens in Psalm 32 is what happens in the lives of all believers:  once we come to know the miracle of grace, once our quaking bones have been delivered from the load of our sins and miseries, once we apprehend the love of God for his creations, we can’t help but sing, even the monotones among us. Grace makes our “chopsticks” sound like Bach.  Really, all our greatest hits are songs of deliverance.

I sat there in the blessedly darkened theater and cried three times, every time the play ended, cried at the incomprehensible clarity of music, something that can’t be explained really, but certainly can be experienced.  I’d try to tell you what exactly it is that the music adores, but I can’t.  There are no words.  The only way to hear it —and understand it—is music.

That’s why verse seven of Psalm 32 is such a wonderful line.  David makes a perfectly understandable claim here.  The story of his life isn’t over, but the victory has been won.  He’s sinned, he’s confessed, and he’s been forgiven. 

“You are my hiding place,” he says, my comfort and my joy; you are my habitation; you are where I live.  And you surround me—as if this whole world were the superb salesroom of some eternal electronics store—you surround me with songs of deliverance.  Not stories—songs.

 Wonderful.  Let the music begin. 

If you have four minutes, here's the hymn.

lThe Children's Blizzard --1/12/1888

Podcast? -- Listen here.

A January thaw is what all of us look forward to right now, a breath of warmth that reopens our hope that someday soon April will return, a day like Wednesday. What seems heavenly is, instead of cold-of-winter days, maybe three of forty degrees. And no wind.

Heaven comes to Siouxland.

That’s the relief people felt early on January 12, 1888, when most of those who’d put down homesteads had just arrived.

Here’s how David Laskin describes that morning:

Everyone who wrote about January 12 noticed something different about the quality of that morning—the strange color and texture of the sky, the preternatural balminess, the haze, the fog, the softness of the south wind, the thrilling smell of thaw, the “great waves” of snow on the prairie that gleamed in the winter sun.

And then this: “The one aspect they all agreed on was the sudden, welcome rise of temperature.” A January thaw, a morning to remember, but a balmy prelude to horror.

Laskin’s book, The Children’s Blizzard, tells the story. When that strange warmth suddenly lifted, hundreds of people, most of them children, perished in a blizzard that made prairie skies dark as night and created massive drifts in winds that drove crystallized snow into your face so ferociously it filled up what flesh it didn’t tear away.

Seven miles east of Freeman, South Dakota, five boys died, lost in the unremitting blast of snow. Three of them were Kaufmanns--Johann, Heinrich, and Elias. What they and two other boys intended was simply to get to safety at the Graber house, a quarter mile east of the school, Ratzlaff #66. The wall they hit was a zero-visibility blizzard.

The victims’ families were all “Schweizers,” German-speaking Mennonites booted from Russia, who’d come to the Dakota Territory with fifty other families seeking the religious freedom they’d looked to find for 200 years--and the opportunity to live a good and safe life. None of them had it easy; sometimes their children would alternate attending school because families didn’t have shoes enough to go around.

But there was promise here in Dakota.

Then came “the Children’s Blizzard.”

Those five Freeman boys just disappeared; and even though search parties went out the next morning in the swirling remnants, no one found them until three days later, on the Sabbath, when a man spotted an arm jutting from a snowbank, an arm belonging to the eldest Kaufmann, Johann, who was likely holding up a coat to shield the younger boys from the killer.

They ended up two-and-one-half miles southeast of Ratzlaff #66, buried by the blizzard, just forty feet from the farm house of the man who found them.

The story goes that man went to church with the news that Sunday. I don’t know if he interrupted worship. I don’t know what they might have been singing, but I can guess how hard they prayed.

No one knows precisely how many people perished in that massive blizzard. Most estimate the grim death toll at somewhere near 250.

It all began with a sweet January thaw that quick as a fox descended into madness. At Valentine, Nebraska, the temperature was 30 degrees at 6 a.m., six degrees at two in the afternoon. 14 below at nine that night.

Somewhere out in south central Nebraska you’ll find a highway marker that tells that neighborhood’s chapter of the story, but there’s nothing up at all east of Freeman, where five boys died. There’s no sign, no story, only endless rows of corn and soybeans. Even the farms are gone.

All the way from Russia, those Schweizers carried with them an old Mennonite hymn, something with a first line that went like this: “Wherlos und verlassen sehnt sich oft mein Herz nach stiller Ruh”—“When I’m lonely and defenseless,/my heart longs for rest and peace.”

Maybe that Sunday, that old favorite was the one they went back to, all of them. If not that Sunday, surely the next.

Might. . .and Right

 “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world. . . that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

It's an amazing thing, really, how quickly our culture has transformed into  what it is today, under Trump, a culture that has bought into "the politics of power." That quote up there is from Stephen Miller, who is perhaps the foremost Trump advisor, a man who told CNN in an interview this week that some of us, at least, read or heard with unending chills. 

“These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time,” he said, and he may be right about that. The truth is no one has said it openly for at least a century. Miller and Trump are bringing it back, in Venezuela most recently, Greenland next, then Cuba and Columbia and who knows how much more while we're at it, if their word is sound (that's questionable, of course). The entire population of Greenland, about 55,000 or so, aren't begging to come under the giant thumb of the King of the Big Macs, but that doesn't matter. Might makes right, and we've got the biggest and richest oligarchs in the world, and they'll sweep in and simply take over.

Manifest Destiny we once called an earlier version, when, post-Civil War, all that frontier land lay unoccupied from the Mississippi west. It was as if God almighty had determined it somehow impossible to imagine how the entire North American continent wasn't, well, ours because--do it yourself--just look at the continent--could it possibly not be that God intended it all to be ours?

And what could stop us from becoming what Stephen Miller would like us to be? Only an election defeat for the MAGA forces come November. And how will that change things? 

Try this: In a government in which Trump doesn't have ultimate might or weight or power, Congress will investigate whether Kristi Noem and the boss himself are right in their knee-jerk reaction to what happened yesterday in Minneapolis, that someone will bring them up for investigation for taking the life of this woman--

Renee Nicole Macklin Good, who was shot by an ICE agent as she drove her Honda Pilot down the street in front of her house. Noem--and Trump--called her "a domestic terrorist," an "agitator."

If MAGA goes down in November, someone or other will investigate the incident instead of making a snap judgment that appears to be contradicted by eye-witnesses as well as phone videos taken of the shooting, the murder. If MAGA goes down in November someone will determine what happened and whether all those little ships blasted out of the ocean were carrying fentanyl to our shores, or whether the entire Venezuelan enterprise wasn't really, from the get-go, about drugs, but oil.

Ours, Stephen Miller seems to say--our oil, and if you don't like it, I'll punch you in the face. Just remember--we got bigger guns. That's the rule of thumb now.

Nothing to do with Matthew 5. Nothing.

Where are we going?

To my knowledge, Stephanie Ruhle broke the story. 

That's silly language in the Trump era--as if anyone was needed to be the lead reporter concerning news made by our President, who makes his own news, really doesn't depend on anyone to get it from him, just spills it when and where he will.

But it was Stephanie Ruhle who was the first to get an admission from the King that he'd consulted the oil company muck-a-mucks before his Venezuelan adventure (it killed 60 or so military on loan from Cuba, I guess, but then that's not worth noting really, Cubans being commies).

He told the billionaire oil magnates among us, that he was going to pull of stunt that they needed to be ready for. Once it was over and all the troops were home and okay, he called them again. 

I don't know that there could be a more clearly outlined characterization of the Trump autocratic character. He did not talk to democracy's reps, the men and women we voted in to do the work of governing--none of them, either party; the people he talked to are the ones with the yachts, the filthy rich. 

He's not our President, he's their President. 

Why is that impossible to see?

Young Queen Victoria is a good movie, worth your time. It's set during the mid-19th century, of course, when the English aristocracy, and monarchy, was scared half to death of the bloody mess of the French Revolution, as well they should have been. The masses have every right to boil in anger when the power is not just primarily but overwhelmingly in the hands of its Elon Musks. 

True then, and true now.

Seriously, do we have to take Greenland before his cult signs off?