A man named Ree

 

It's there. I know it is. I saw it. Took me a while to actually notice it specifically--I mean, there are other names carved into this healthy peace of Sioux Quartzite, but it's there. I drew a light circle around it so you can pick it out--the name of Joseph Nicolet, the French Renaissance man (geographer, explorer, astronomer, and who knows what else?). It's right here at Pipestone National Monument, just up the road a couple of hours.

Here's shot I found on line. You can't miss it. 

Just plain hard to believe that Nicolet was in Minnesota before there was one, before almost any other white guy--1838. There had to be more, of course, but Joseph Nicolet, explorer extraordinaire, was there at Pipestone National Monument before you could buy a pipe.

As was George Catlin, explorer and artist, a man who left two jobs behind out east, where he'd been a barrister, a lawyer, as well as a portrait artist who turned a buck or two by putting famous people's faces on canvas, suitable for hanging.

Catlin said that one day in Philly he met some Native people and was, well, mesmerized. There's no mention of where the vision came from or when, but what he said he'd suddenly determined he'd been born to do was go west, young man, and paint portraits of every last tribe, today yet, if not yesterday. Must have been a striking vision. 

If you've ever been to the Pipestone National Monument, Catlin's portrait (circa 1838) requires a second look. No trees, just a massive outcropping of pink quartzite, rising from the grassy prairie like an ancient shipwreck amid the sea of prairie grass. 

Catlin documented the place by staying around for a spell, observing rituals, and putting them on canvas, just exactly what the Yankton Sioux warned him not to do What happened around all that red stone was none of his darn business after all. But that Philadelphia vision had to had nailed him. He stayed around anyway, left his brushes out, and he left behind was a gallery of work documenting life here almost 200 years ago.

Nicolet has his monument and you can Google dozens of Catlin's stolen drawings, but the real hero is rarely celebrated, Struck by the Ree, the lead signatory of the Yankton Sioux, who traded 11 million acres of tribal land for peace. "He's a hero?" you ask. Well, when it comes to Pipestone National Monument, yes, because what was included in that massive deal did NOT include pipestone.

A Yankton Sioux chief called Ree would not give it up and thus saved it for its use as a source of soft, pinkish stone for making pipes, which are, remember, instruments of peace. 

Struck by the Ree is buried in Greenwood cemetery, which you can visit--it's just up the road from town and just past the 1858 Treaty monument. Just drive in. His stone is huge. You can't miss it. 

He saved the place and all that soft, open-grained stone--it's called Catlinite. Isn't that just the story? But the man who deserves more credit that Nicollet or Catlin is Yankton Sioux, a man called Struck by the Ree. 

Yet another reason

We were in the Netherlands and with our kids, who were, well, just kids, big enough to understand most of what we were seeing, but just kids on the lookout for McDonalds any chance they could get.

We'd decided on the Open-Air Museum in Arnhem, another version of Iowa's Living History Farms, the kind of place where life, in many ways, hasn't changed. Men and women dressed in their era's standard wardrobes still plow with horses and chase chickens around the yard.

David and I were in what we'd call an old-fashioned "general store," where the clerk, a round and jolly big-bearded fellow wearing a broad denim apron looked up at us and said, not asked, "You're Dutch, aren't you?" 

It was his job, of course, to engage the wanderers, but it was an unexpected question and a good lead. "Yah," I said, "Dutch-American, however, five generations in."

"What's your name?" he asked.

I told him.

"Schaap???" he said, and then, quickly, "--you're Jewish."

We're not Jewish, but we'd just come from a visit to another museum, this one at Westerbork, the last stop for Dutch Jews before being shipped, by train, to Auschwitz. It was a stunning visit I've never forgotten, as was this. These Schaaps are not Jewish.

Sometimes that moment is haunting. Like yesterday, when Secretary of State Rubio gave us all the administration's fourth or fifth explanation for taking up military action against Iran. If I have this right, what he said goes something like this: We started military action because we knew that Israel was going to; we knew also that when they did start blowing things up, Iran would retaliate, not just in Israel but around the region, including our bases and people. Let's be clear, he might have said, we did not start this. We are only protecting our interests. This is not a war of aggression. It's all defense.

True? What is "true," in Trumpworld, always requires discernment. 

But Rubio's explanation comes uncomfortably close to confessing that we're Netanyahu's big, no-brained brother--or sister. We're at war in the Middle East because Netanyahu was going to be? We're his handy-dandy palace guard. We show our teeth when he says, "get em." Consider us Israel's lapdog, his hand-maiden.

It's not easy to say that these days. Harvard's student body protested the endless death in Gaza, and Trump sued them for being anti-Semitic, when the percentage of Jewish students and faculty on the Quad is as high as it is anywhere, save Columbia, who also took their licks.

It's tough to say what I just said. Do it publicly, nationally, and you're an anti-Semite, a bigot.

But if Rubio's latest explanation is the right fit, something about the arrangement really, really stinks. 

Music gives a soul to the universe,

wings to the mind,

flight to the imagination

and life to everything.” — Plato

Strangely enough, a midwife--and not his mother--baptized Antonio Vivaldi the moment he was born. Those who speculate on such things claim tiny Antonio might have been sickly, while others point to an earthquake that hit Venice just then, an event that may have traumatized the new parents. And then there are those who say that his mother rushed things along and thereby devotedly consecrated her new baby boy for the priesthood.

If that's true, she was successful because her son became a priest, a musical priest, at a small church (for Italy and Venice)--this one, Chiessa Della Pieta, a gorgeous place long ago connected to the Devout Hospital of Mercy (Ospedia del Pieta), an orphanage for abandoned street kids, where Vivaldi wrote and taught music for thirty years--and where the young women he taught performed that music. 

It seems a dream today, but we were there for a concert some years ago, right there  in the very church. It was a pure blessing to sit where his students performed, and listen to his Four Seasons, done with a sextet of strings and a harpsichord, by musicians who throughout the text appeared to speak to each other through the movements of the music, to gift each other with the beauty they created.

I think he was right about music--Plato, that is: "music gives a soul to the universe." It opens us into believing that there's reality above our own, it makes us smaller than we might want to think of ourselves and fills us with a joy that isn't our own.

That Vivaldi concert came to mind--maybe I should say came to my soul--on Saturday night at another cathedral, this one also storied, a magnificent creation pioneer Luxembourgers right here in the neighborhood built a century ago as tribute to the God they worshipped. St. Mary's stands atop the highest hill in Sioux County, where its twin towers insist on being seen from miles away. It's a church, but it's also a monument that reveals the story of a people who came to the unbroken ground of Siouxland prairie and simply insisted their God be worshipped in the kind of magnificence and beauty they remembered at home.

Saturday night St. Mary's was the setting for a candle-lit concert by a quartet of strings whose artistry and accomplishment, to my mind and my soul, was no less a pure blessing as that concert we attended in Vivaldi's Venice. The music--familiar show tunes--may well  have lacked the heft of The Four Seasons, but the concert itself, its artistry and grace, accomplished by extraordinarily good and local musicians, in an atmosphere redolent with devotion and worship, will be, at least to me, just as memorable as Vivaldi's work.

We're at war again in the Persian Gulf. The news promises more of the same.

What we heard in church on Saturday night was an alternate vision for human kind, music that "gives a soul to the universe" and out distances the world of fiery anger and brutish belligerence, a reality vastly more important than military strength--candle-lit life, not death.

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Many are the woes of the wicked. . .”

 Maybe so.  Maybe not. 

Proportionally, in this world do the wicked suffer more or than the righteous?  I’m not sure.  Some forms of suffering the righteous undergo, in fact, aren’t even background music in the lives of really bad people.

 But that’s a topic for another time.  Give me a minute or so to brag up my granddaughter.

When, years ago, my son and his girlfriend came to a relatively congenial parting of the ways, it was tough on him.  My guess is that it was tough on her, too, but I know it was tough on my granddaughter, who’d come to nearly worship the ground her uncle’s girlfriend walked upon.

How does one explain a break-up to a four-year-old?  Her father told her what she had to understand was that people changed.  That seemed to help.

The next day, at day-care, she ambled up to her teacher with the news that her uncle wasn’t going with his girlfriend anymore. 

 “Oh, really,” the teacher said. 

 “Well, you know,” Jocelyn said, deadly serious, “people change.”

 Her teacher told Jocey’s mom that she had all she could do not to laugh.

 I don’t know that Jocelyn told her teacher a truth she’d totally digested, or if her mind was acting like a tape recorder; but if she understood her father’s explanation, then I’m pleased because at four years old she’s arrived at the level of wisdom that some (many?) don’t achieve until much later, if ever.

We’re talking about wisdom here, I suppose, and today’s passage brings to mind the word wisdom because I’m not so sure as David is that he’s exactly right about the claim he so brashly offers us.  In my world, the wicked aren’t always woeful; sometimes, like it or not, they prosper.

We don’t have to look all that far to find an entirely contradictory appraisal right here in the Psalms—in 73, famously, the plight of the wicked looks a great deal different:  “They have no struggles; their bodies are healthy and strong.  They are free from the burdens common to man; they are not plagued by human ills.”  No woes there, no not one.

The Bible, it seems, is probably a whole less squeamish about contradiction than its readers are.  What seems true in one verse seems a whole lot less so just down the block.  How do we make sense of such things?

 Eugene Peterson, in his “Introduction to the Wisdom Books” in The Message, claims that “the Psalms are indiscriminate in their subject matter—complaint and thanks, doubt and anger, outcries of pain and outbursts of joy, quiet reflection and boisterous worship.”  It’s all here in this book.  “If it’s human,” he says, “it qualifies.”

 The richness of this immodest claim is not that it is forever true.  The essential joy of what David claims about the woes of the wicked is the rich human happiness he feels in forgiveness.  About the specifics, maybe he’s not to be trusted; after all, he sings a different song later in another concert. 

 But about the big picture, he’s on the money—and the big picture in Psalm 32 is the triumph of forgiveness.  About that, there’s very good reason to brag. 

Ashes at Lent

As far as I know there was no sign that begged passers-by to take a handful along and bring it home.  He says himself that he did what he did so that when he returned home he could tell the story. Maybe we should consider those ashes something of a souvenir of his visit to Buchenwald, a concentration camp as bad or worse than any of the others with memorably horrifying names. Just a week or so later, he'd visit Dachau. More horrible? How does anyone compare horrors anyway?

Buchenwald was his first visit once the war was over and cleanup had begun. It's difficult to imagine how anyone could be unaffected by what the troops found.  

In the center of the camp was the crematorium, surrounded by a high stone wall. Unwanted prisoners, the sick and the maimed, were brought to this building at night and as soon as they stepped inside the wall they slid down a chute into the basement and were killed instantly. An elevator took the dead bodies to the main floor, where they were cremated. I counted five ovens in the crematorium. Human ashes were dumped on a pile outside of the camp.

This is the way he wanted to remember in his diary. Now, here's the act: "I took a handful of human ashes out of one of the ovens and sent it home to tell the story."

Home, eventually, was here. It's an odd to think about, but I can't help but wonder whatever happened to that little pile of ashes he grabbed from the pile. He sent it home, he says. Did he include, in his letter to his wife, an explanation of what it was, or did he wait to get home to try to explain? Even eye-witnesses couldn't believe what they saw, what they'd seen, dead bodies like cord wood, fifty boxcars stacked with shrunken bodies ready to be shipped somewhere even more hideous. Where? How might he have 

The chaplain's own remains have been in residence at a local cemetery for years and years, as have those of his wife. When he died, did his children find that jar or sack or whatever he kept those ashes in? Did they know? Did he tell his children the story? How? When? Maybe some years later, he simply dispensed with them himself when he started to feel as if the story lost currency--or when he realized he no longer could muster the strength it took to tell the story? When he himself passed away, did his wife hold on to the ashes or drop them in his office wastebasket?

It's Lent. A week or so ago, many of us wore ashes across our foreheads as if to recite aloud the OT passage about "dust to dust." I couldn't help thinking about that vial of human ashes the chaplain sent on home to tell the story, in part because we use ash and not dust to adorn our foreheads. Ash, I'm told, is more adhesive. 

It's not the same really--I mean using Buchenwald ash, or ash from any other human source. It's not easy to find hope in a cupful of human ashes taken from a pile outside a crematorium. If that kind of human ash were the stuff of the forehead cross, it would bespeak the sins of others more so than my sin, than my mortality, than the brevity of my life. Wouldn't be Lent exactly, or would it?

For me at least, it's difficult not to wonder just where the ashes he sent home could be today. 

Then again, the best guess is that they've simply disappeared into the dust from which they'd come.

"Whose Glory Fills the Sky"

But as I was saying, yesterday it was the second verse of "Christ  Whose Glory Fills the Sky" that stopped me. 

Dark and cheerless is the morn
unaccompanied by Thee;
joyless is the day's return,
till Thy mercy's beams I see,
till they inward light impart,
glad my eyes, and warm my heart.

 Again, the good Rev. Wesley's intent is not a chore. What he's saying is that morning's opening moments--the hour or so before dawn--is "dark and cheerless" if it opens on its own, outside of the redeeming love of Christ. Only if "Thy mercy's beams" are present can my eyes be made glad and my heart be warmed. Beauty is in the Son, not the sun.

For a moment--correct me if I'm wrong--a dawn, even a knock-out gorgeous dawn, isn't a metaphor or a symbol. It's not much of anything if I don't have Jesus. 

I don't care to quarrel with Charles Wesley, with his theology or his poetic talent. But when we sang that second verse, I was struck by how perfectly understandable the spirituality of the hymn was, there, on display: this world's darkness is cheerless without Jesus. I get that. I understand.

But let me try to put it this way: a dawn is gorgeous only if I know the Lord. 

Traditional Native religion would have some trouble understanding the dualism there, the strange sense that white folks require a God who stands somewhere outside the dawn to make the dawn the dawn. Traditionally, they might want to say that God is dawn. He's also rocks and trees and skies and seas. God is the great mystery of life itself, the Great Spirit who lives and breathes in all things, including those shaggy bison. We honor that God when we honor the Missouri River and don't ruin it with pipelines because that river isn't a symbol or a metaphor. 

But then, I think everyone could agree with Wesley's spirited final verse:

Visit then this soul of mine,
pierce the gloom of sin and grief;
fill me, radiancy divine,
scatter all my unbelief;
more and more Thyself display,
shining to the perfect day.

 One of the peculiar results of 19th century mission work among First Nations was its somehow surprising successes. But, if you were Native and if you believed that all of life is religion, then picking up another form of religion wouldn't be particularly troublesome, would it? Sure, we'll become Christian, some said. What's the fuss?

 

For a time, this morning, as I wrote these words, the sky outside my window a gorgeous peach stole lay along the shoulders of the eastern horizon, a soft orange that faded into yellow, then to blue up high before the sun made its grand debuted. Now, long swaths of sunlight stretch over the fields east to west, scattering darkness. It's Midas time--everything wears a bit of gold. This morning's cloudless dawn is not glamorous, but it's beautiful.

"Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" a wonderful hymn, and I'll sing it joyfully again soon, I hope. Wesley's a wonder, isn't he? 

But he's not the psalmist:

The heavens declare the glory of God;

and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech,

and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

There is no speech nor language,

where their voice is not heard.

Wesley's good, but I'd like to believe that David got it right.

Whose glory fills -- i

 

Charles Wesley wrote something like 9000 poems in his life--can you imagine? It's a wonder he slept. Nearly 6000 were hymns. Even today, his work is all over the hymnbook--yours, mine, and the folks down the street. His brother, John Wesley (two of the 18 Wesley kids), became more famous as an itinerant preacher who had a hand in begetting the entire movement called Methodism.

If Charles thought it difficult to live with his sibling's celebrity pulpiteering, his envy certainly doesn't show in his work. Give a listen: "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing," "And Can It Be," "O for a Thousand Tongues to Sing," "Love Divine, All Loves Excelling," "Jesus, Lover of My Soul," "Christ the Lord Is Risen Today," and "Rejoice! the Lord Is King!"--all Charles, all his work, and there's hundreds more.

John Wesley is an important historical figure in the history of Protestantism, but brother Charles' creations are still sung hundreds of thousands of times every Sunday. Not bad for a kid brother.

We sang one yesterday, an old fave some consider as beautiful as anything Brother Charles ever wrote. "Christ, Whose Glory Fills the Skies" is a paean to Jesus, the light of the world. Its stunning poetry is rich and thoughtful. You can sing "Christ, Whose Glory" without thinking about the path it takes through life; but if you listen to the praise his poem creates, it's easy to see why the old hymn won't soon be laid to rest. 

Christ, whose glory fills the skies,
Christ, the true and only Light,
Sun of righteousness, arise,
triumph o'er the shade of night;
Day-spring from on high, be near;
Day-star, in my heart appear.

The major motif is clear enough--Jesus, the son is Jesus the sun. Just as dawn--I'm sitting beside it right now--chases away darkness, so the Son sweeps hope and joy and life to a darkened world. What's real and what's symbol are sweetly entwined.

But in church yesterday it was the second verse that stopped me. 

(A little needle-picking theology tomorrow)

Great-grandpa

I'd become convinced before that night that whatever ills had befallen, I was vastly more capable of crying than I'd ever been, tears for no apparent reason. Check that--not "for no apparent reason," but for reasons that seemed unlike any ordinary reason for tears. Just did more of it. I didn't think I was depressed about being crippled, nor was my condition such that I absolutely couldn't determine what kind of future I--and we--would have. What I recognized about myself was that I just shed tears more easily than I had before the stenosis (and what the heck is "stenosis" anyway?). 

Maybe there was a cause/effect thing going on here, I thought--the stenosis somehow made me shed tears, froze something in my heart just as it had frozen something in my legs and in my balance and made me look soused when I walked, which I couldn't really do at all without a walker.

I cried a lot--not about my condition, not because I'd won a badge that hung from the rearview, not because just getting in an out of our Subaru was a dangerous challenge, an event I hadn't yet accomplished without sinking like a baby in a high-chair.

Not only that, the phone call I'd just taken didn't pass along news that was at all surprising. I knew our granddaughter was about to have her baby, our first great-grandchild, knew that baby was going to be a little girl, and knew the pregnancy had gone extremely well. I was no more surprised about her birth than I was concerned. Everything went great, my wife told me when she called.

"And what was the name again?" I asked. My wife wasn't altogether sure herself--"It was 'heaven' spelled backwards," she said, "and I don't know how to say it exactly." That would take a while. But that's the headline that night: "You're a great-grandpa!!!" 

So I cried. Wasn't scared a bit, wasn't worried. I was 76 years old, but I couldn't remember the last time I actually wiped tears away tears of joy, and that's what they were--tears of joy. 

And lo, it was good. It was very good. Dang right. I'd been at Heartland Manor for three days. I needed 'em maybe--tears of joy. 

Heartland was my third hospital in about a month--two stints just up the road, a week an hour away in the city, and now Heartland Manor, when the hospital staff determined that my condition would require more than the kind and level of care I could get closer to home. I'd just then become a resident of a home that was that for people--some younger, some older--who mostly had conditions I couldn't help thinking had gone farther south than mine.

Anyway, there I lay in my little hospital bed, wiping away tears of joy, when a nurse came in. Dissembling wasn't an option--my eyes were smeary and I was sniffing. 

"What's the deal, Jim?" she said and stood right over me, blessedly, as nurses do.

I told her, and just like that something in me squeezed another half-dozen out. Voice warbled, nose ran--I was a mess. Tears of joy.

Here's the story: she cried too, which only guaranteed that this blessed spell I was in was going to keep leaking waterworks.

Another nurse just happened by. "Tell her, Jim," nurse #1 said, both of us squeezing Kleenex. "Girl or boy?" she said. 

"Girl," I said.

"And what's her name?" she said, reaching for the box.

"I don't know," I said. I didn't. "H-e-a-v-e-n spelled backwards or something."

That's when Nurse #3 dropped by, having noted all the commotion. Just like that a quartet of blubbering sobbers started singing, all of it, all of that wet stuff sprung from sheer joy. 

This fourth bawler had heard the name before. She pulled a pen from her garb, grabbed some paper from somewhere, and spelled it out in big blocks: "N--E--V--A--E--H," she wrote because she didn't want Great-grandpa to be a fool should the new mom call. She hung the baby's name up above the tv.

I stayed at Heartland Manor for two and one-half months. Still can't believe it. And I told my wife when finally I could get in and out of the car without spilling all over the driveway, that it wasn't good for my marriage to be there that long because I fell in love at least a dozen times.

It's true. Let me tell you about the night my wife called to tell me about the baby--our great granddaughter, the first. 

Don't mind my sniveling.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“. . .but must be controlled by bit and bridle

or they will not come to you.”

 Just a few years ago, Bernie Ebbers, who is, according to Forbes, “perhaps the most powerful American businessman ever to face a criminal trial,” was found guilty and went to jail, his sentence yet to be determined.  His crimes?—securities fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents.

 On hearing the verdict, Ebbers hugged his wife and step-daughter, and then cried.  His lawyer continues to plead his innocence.

 Bernie Ebbers was a celebrity entrepreneur who turned a small, long-distance company in Mississippi into one of the largest communications providers in the world, WorldCom.  He was WorldCom’s CEO from 1985 to 2000, and, when his company’s stocks were flying, his personal worth reached close to a billion.  Today he’s dressed in a yellow uniform provided by the state. 

 The government’s case was that, faced with a more grim business future than he’d seen in years, Bernie Ebbers cooked the books. In decisions that involved millions of dollars, he flat-out lied. 

 I feel closer to Bernie Ebbers than I do to Kenneth Lay, the other CEO who was, several years ago, deeply discredited by gigantic financial fraud, who presided over the power giant Enron before its demise.  I feel closer to Ebbers because I know where he went to church when he was a boy. I know the songs he sang in Sunday School.  We learned our catechism out of the same books. We are both hyphenated-Dutch and were reared in the Reformed faith.

 What Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers share, in addition to the notoriety that has come from the demise of their businesses and their having been colored by accusations of deceit, is this alarming truth: they both taught Sunday school.

 The purgative power of tragedy, Aristotle said, was that we suffer, all of us, when basically good human beings fall on their faces, not because of what others do to them, but because of what they’ve done to themselves. We see ourselves in those people because tragic stories begin in good hearts. 

 A significant part of me hurts for Bernie Ebbers—not because I believe him to be falsely accused or convicted, not because I don’t regard his crimes as evil. I find myself in him, even though my sourest weaknesses don’t include greed.

The second half of verse 9 of Psalm 32 bites and bites hard.  God is speaking, as David hears him, and what he says is that too often his own people can be mulish.  Without a bridle, we go where we damn well please, even good, good people.  Too easily, maybe, we bray like that mule in Jeremiah, “sniffing the wind in her craving—in her heat who can restrain her?” As Spurgeon says, “We should not be treated like mules if there were not so much of the ass about us.”

Today, I hope—and I should pray—that Bernie Ebbers has been jerked back to a path he knows well, one that’s straight and narrow. 

But in its tragic dimension, what his story and his fate make clear is that I too—too often—require a steel bit through the teeth.

Wish it weren’t so.       

Prairie du Chien

The Winnebago are right down the road, the Omaha a stretch farther. The Santee across the river. The Dakota up river in South Dakota. But was it always that way?

 For the record, the very first white men to set foot on the place people know of today as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (flip Iowa, and you'll run into it) are a couple of names familiar to people over there on the Mississippi, Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, and his side kick Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary who rather liked the sightseeing and exploring that came with his travel package.

Again, for the record, the year the two of them came down the Wisconsin River to its confluence with the Mississippi was 1673, which makes Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a little river town that sits right there today, the second oldest white colony in the Badger state. “Well,” you ask, “who was number one among the Cheeseheads?” The Packers, of course, or at least Green Bay, just a couple of decades after the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and on Plymouth Rock.

Okay, you say, but what has that to do with us? Well, anyone who wants to know anything about the region's most awful 19th century horror, the Spirit Lake Massacre, which took place in 1857, way over here, hundreds of miles west of Jolliet and Marquette. And now you're wondering what the heck Inkpaduta, a Santee Wahpakutee, a Dakota Sioux and his warriors were doing at Lake Okoboji, a century before the roller coaster. How'd that murderer get here to the neighborhood anyway? He and his warriors just arise from the ground like poison sumac.

The answer has to do with that little Wisconsin town, Prairie du Chien. In 1825, almost 200 years after Jolliet and Marquette, a slew of Native people pitched their tents for talk with the white men in blue coats. “Who?” you ask. Easy: Sioux, Chippewa, Menominee, Winnebago, Sac & Fox, and Ioway, in other words, oodles of teepees.

And why right there? Because, like Sioux City, Prairie du Chien sits close to the confluence of two wonderful hi-ways: the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. 

And what was discussed? The future. Specifically, from a white man's point of view--how to stop the Injuns from killing each other? The answer won't surprise you: We'll keep them out of each other's hair. We'll give them each a homeland--not a reservation (that would come later), but give them each their own place to hunt buffalo and fish and trap beaver, or so the white men promised. 

So once upon a time in 1825, at a place that would someday be called Prairie du Chien, the whole upper Midwest--from eastern Wisconsin to western Iowa got segmented, not into states, but into regions where each tribe ran its own affairs.

Fair enough--right? Keep all those wild Indians racing horses, chasing buffalo, and out of each other’s hair. For the record, here's the segments drawn up by the gang at the signing of the 1825 Prairie du Chien Treaty: most of what is Minnesota goes to the Sioux (think Inkpaduta); most of Wisconsin to the Chippewa or (today) Ojibwe; most of Iowa to the Sac and Fox (think Black Hawk) and (wait for it) the Ioway.

The land where I'm sitting today, and the land where it's likely you are, was, at the time of the Spirit Lake Massacre, meant to be in possession of the Sac and Fox and Ioway, not the Sioux.

So then where were the Ioway when Inkpaduta and his band were way down south and west on the Little Sioux River?

 They were putting down roots in eastern Kansas or Oklahoma, on something people started to call “reservations,” where you'll still find some of them today.

My goodness, "reservations"? you ask. Who on earth came up with that idea? 

Need a little hint? Wasn't them. 

My first Ash Wednesday

Fifteen, maybe twenty years after I left the southwest corner of Wisconsin, I went back to look over the land, something I hadn't done while I lived and worked there. I'd been to Galena, IL, at night, only to scout some opposing basketball team; I had no idea that the old river city would become one of Illinois' finest tourist attractions.

I had no idea that the kids who sat in my classes could well have been great, great grandchildren of the original "badgers," thus named for their profession--the iron miners who dug out pits that still, here and there, litter the region. I sort of knew that those miners were a tough crew, a whole world apart from the Dutch Calvinists among and from whom I grew up. A number of those kids came from family-owned cheese factories that turned out the Swiss and brick I learned quickly to love, gifts for this young Turk teacher, still wet behind the ears, barely older than their kids. But I'd never taken the time to see where they'd come from. I was writing a novel. . .

Made me angry, being back there, driving past the high school, looking in the windows where I used to hold forth, disappointed with myself,  I hadn't really gone off-road during the two years I spent in Lafayette County, WI, whose claim to fame was having no stop lights. I hadn't gone up and down gentle hills authored by countless rivers in a hurry west to the Mississippi, Dubuque little more than a half hour away.

In those two years, even though I lived a half-hour from school, I'd never taken the time to see where my students came from. I mean, I knew that some kids were milkers and some cheesemakers, but I'd never seen the dairies where they'd spent their childhoods, storybook places in those rolling hardwood hills of America's Dairyland.

Truth be known, for me, at least, it was a hard sell to think of them as Christian believers. When your origins never wander all that far in a sturdy corral, defining characteristics are as bold as they are clear. It's not a surprise, I suppose, that on Ash Wednesday, when the Catholic kids came back from lunch with dirt rubbings on their foreheads, I had no idea what was going on and trouble not bringing the matter up. So many strangely dirtied.

"What's goin' on?" I must have asked someone or another, pointing up at my untouched forehead.

And it had to have been a treat to one or two of them to field that question, put the teacher in a desk and strong-arm the podium. "Can you imagine, Mr. Schaap has no idea it's Ash Wednesday." 

If I'd have unloaded on them, quoted from my catechism, done a Calvin thing, or simply rehearsed the reasons for the glorious Reformation, I'd have convinced them that I was nuts. I could have done that, but instead asked for their forbearance and that they not consider me as dingy as I must have seemed.

Some, as I remember, didn't wipe off the dust, so it stayed there all afternoon for me to see and judge--my Calvinism made me good at judging--and I remember thinking Bobby Westgaard?--the baddest kid in town has a dirty cross up there on his noggin? You got to be kidding. What kind of hocus-pocus religion would offer him the sacrament?'

In truth, I wasn't much older--four years--than they were, just as much a kid, maybe more. I was 22 years old, in love with my students, but innocent as Young Goodman Brown. 

Last night, that whole first Ash Wednesday and its scrapbook of memories came back as I watched my fellow congregants receive the imposition of ashes, as the action is traditionally called. 

I'm not bragging about this, but the imposition my students left on their foreheads fifty-some years ago, and my own naivete, my idiocy about it, left its own indelible mark, something I couldn't help but remember as people left the front of the church, the same dirty old cross on their foreheads. 

Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I went back to southwest Wisconsin in part because I wanted to see up close where they lived, where they came from. 

There was so much I had to learn. 

"Something there is. . ."

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Thus begins one of America's all-time favorite poems, "Mending Wall," by one of its all-time favorite poets, a New Englander named Robert Frost, who wanted to sell an image of himself as a country bumpkin, when he wasn't an "awe-shucks" sort of guy. He was cagey as a red squirrel, tricky and quick enough not only to take on something as formidable as a stone wall, but wily enough to start with a dorky pun.

"What, pray tell, "doesn't love a wall" but "sends the frozen-ground swell under it"?

Why "frost" of course, as in upper case "Frost." Not funny? Okay, but maybe the most beloved pun in American literature.

Neighbors get together annually to rebuild the stone fence that separates their yards, to replace the stones that have fallen throughout the last year. The teller of the tale, Frost, can't help but wonder whether the world wouldn't be a better place without fences, while his neighbor stoically repeats a maxim he likely inherited from his grandpa: "good fences make good neighbors." If we don't know where you start, and I end, we got trouble in River City --"good fences make good neighbors."

Stone fences are a rarity in our neighborhood. About 150 years ago, barbed wire became all the rage--no annual rock replacements had to be made after all, and once the barbed wire is up, that's it--aside from occasional repairs. A bundle of barbed wire isn't all that comely, but the lousy stuff did more than its share to win the west, even though it didn't show up until after the Civil War. 

Not until 1874 did an Ohioan named Joseph Glidden patent an invention which became the industry standard, twisted wire with locked in barbs. Barbed wire made it possible to section off the unending cattle range the Great Plains once were, a space so wide-open cowboys used to wonder whether the world had an end. Barbed wire kept cattle and the neighbors both in--and out. 

A barbed-wire fence gave the property dimensions and kept the sheep out of the tomatoes and raspberries. During World War I, barbed wire demarked those bloody trenches in France. Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belzen, Dachau--they were all drawn and quartered by barbed wire. 

Today, it's coming down. Confinements and feedlots have replaced pastures. Sioux County, where I live, is the #1 hog producing county in the U. S., but you could take an all-day ride around here and not spot a pig even though there are as many as two million.

Robert Frost was right about there being some ambiguity. This morning, as I sit here over the keyboard, the wind is howling. The sun is shining, so there's no blizzard a'comin'--not right away at least; but I just finished reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard, a painful recitation of the stories of the children caught in crisis in a monster blizzard, right here, throughout our very region in January of 1888. Hundreds of children were out in that blinding blizzard. Many never returned home.

But some of those that did, like their parents who went after them, stayed upright and kept chugging through impossible winds and snow because as they crossed their fields to find their kids, they kept hold of wire, of barbed wire, confident that if they held fast to the prickly stuff they'd often enough strung themselves, they'd eventually stumble their way to something that offered safety. Gives new meaning to "Good fences make good neighbors."

Dang Frost doesn't tell you what he thinks. He follows these two gents as they repair their stone walls, while arguing--not strenuously or angrily--about limits, about traditions, about the privacy of private property. 

Something there is that doesn't love barbed wire--it's ornery and prickly and twisted, but once upon a time, in a storm, it was a blessing.

 

Today--on my birthday

That's my father. He's holding me. I'm not a reliable judge of such things, but I was likely six months old or so, maybe less. I discovered this picture a week ago or so, while sorting through the flotsam and jetsam the flood left behind, the flood that sent us fleeing from our country place and into the senior housing fortress where we now live. 

I don't recognize the background, so I'm guessing it's somewhere close to where we lived in the spring of 1948. My two sisters were already creating havoc in the neighborhood when I came onto the scene, exactly--today--78 years ago. 

His tie is a little bold, don't you think? --almost Native looking. I don't think Dad ever walked into a room and overwhelmed the place, not that he would have wanted to. He was mild-mannered and thoughtful, by nature not judgmental, just about as good a father as I could have wished. At his funeral, a dozen people--maybe more--told me my dad was a saint. They weren't kidding. 

He's been gone for a decade or so, passed without great drama, in a quiet, saintly fashion. As a believer, he was top-notch without being showy--that tie isn't like him. I think it's fair to say that he honestly tried to be the best human being he could because he believed with all his heart that's what Christ wanted of him and all of us. 

We split loyalties when it came to politics. Where his ardent Republicanism came from, I'll never know. He was inescapably conservative but never mean, never Trumpian. I was in high school when I met a housewife from Madison, WI, whose husband, she told us, was in Selma, marching for racial justice with Martin Luther King. It was 1965. That revelation just floored me because she was so ordinary, probably in her fifties, no commie radical. For me, that iced it--MLK wasn't the leftist enemy Dad thought he was. There was more to the story.

Dad lived in a world where one's lot in life was determined by personal responsibility. Those who sweat through it, succeeded; those who didn't, did not.  I don't know that Dad ever had a sense of what "Jim Crow" meant, or the legacies of slavery. He probably knew more about Calvinist theology than he did about American history.

It's sometimes hard to admit that I have become him far more than I once might have guessed. Even when I thought his shadow wasn't around, it was--and still is. I'd love a trike right now--something I could ride through the trails all around our new place. On Saturday, I went out to a bike shop with such specialties, got myself an intro to biking for people with my infirmities. When we talked price, I balked--after all, what would my dad think of his son putting that kind of money into a fancy trike with an electric motor? He wouldn't have said no--he wasn't judgmental; but his hesitancy had its own language. He still has a hand in every major decision I make. 

A couple years after his death, I was suddenly struck with the perception that he might never have quite understood his son's fiction, novels and short stories. Neither of my parents were readers; neither had any penchant for imaginative literature. Dad might have found it difficult, if not impossible to realize that when his son created a father in a story or novel, that father wasn't necessarily modeled after his own. I know he disliked Home Free, my first novel, because he believed people who read it and knew him somehow mistakenly figured the opinionated, crusty old Dutch immigrant father was somehow him. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, I've been working on a collection of my stories, published through the years, a collection with plenty of explanations and sources, a collection that speaks to them, explains where ideas come from and how those ideas become transformed into the "felt life" of fiction. 

About heavenly libraries I know absolutely nothing, and they--Mom and Dad--are both long gone. How can I write it for them?

Like I say, Dad may have departed this life some time ago, but that doesn't mean he's left the scene. Nor Mom. There's a lot of her and a lot of him I hear when their voices sound within me. 

This morning--the 17th of February 2026, is exactly 78 years since I left Sheboygan Memorial Hospital adorned with this.

Long ago, birthdays stopped being "fun," but my getting another year and salvaging that old picture up top reminds me that today, as always, I have much to be thankful for.

For Presidents' Day

 

[An old Small Wonders piece celebrating President U. S. Grant. You can listen to the five-minute podcast here or read it below.} 

You'll find it just over the Mississippi, next door to Dubuque. The rolling hills all around hide the place, so when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels like a discovery. It’s a 19th century gem where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, Illinois, the whole of it, is a museum.

Nine Civil War generals once called the place home--not bad for a stop on the river. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, is a name you’ll recognize. His presidency is probably less memorable than his command of the Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant fought Robert E. Lee and took sword at Appomattox, and promptly, boldly, and respectfully gave it back. As a warrior, he was a generous man.

As a commander he was indefatigable, as a strategist determined, relentless and disciplined. But when the smoke cleared, he championed charity and grace that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He faced the horrors of war head on just as he faced peace once the war’s canons went silent. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, President Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if he’d sit down and record his memories. That was a dumb idea, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. When a few of Grant’s published essays brought rewards, Twain made offers he couldn't refuse. U. S. Pres number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his considerable legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

In his massively detailed biography of U. S. Grant, American Ulysses, Ron Chernow refutes the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish that memoir, even though he was dying. 

Seems to me you need only to read a letter Grant wrote to the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he fell hard into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, a close friends. 

Our nation grieves for one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just gorgeous style, that’s heart spilling hurt over the page.

Frederick Douglas, the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of our 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was a hard-nosed general who never escaped the shadows of a bottle, a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, just drop by Galena, Illinois, sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit Grant’s home, spend an hour at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

As do we.

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