Wounded Knee -- iv

 

(cont. from yesterday)

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

Death

A single troop—who knows who?—tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

__________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- iii

 

What exactly happened?

But what exactly did happen on the morning of December 29, 1890?

With nothing to stop it, sound travels easily on a landscape this barren. So imagine the bleat of reveille cutting through the morning cold. It’s eight o’clock, and the sun rises magnificently, albeit late, winter solstice just a few days behind. Many of the women, some of them singing, are packing for the 17-mile trip to Pine Ridge, where they anticipate meeting relatives and friends. Children play innocently around the ragged tipis and wagons, and for the first morning in many, most have eaten well.

By Indian messenger, Col. Forsyte, the commanding office, calls the men of Big Foot’s band to come to parley directly southeast of us, at the spot where the chief’s tent stands, maybe 300 yards down the hill. Spread around the entire encampment like a huge lariat, even beyond the dozens of Indian ponies just west of Big Foot’s camp and the ravine behind it, 76 unmounted sentries, equally spaced, watch the movement. On the rise beyond the ravine and set against the horizon, a long line of mounted bluecoats wait menacingly, just in front of them, some several dozen of the cavalry’s Indian scouts. From the vantage point of the soldiers, the field seems well in hand, the position geometrically arranged to prevent escape. There is no chaos, yet.

As they were commanded, something close to one hundred men—no one knows for sure—from Big Foot’s band take their places in the council circle. Behind them, those lines of bluecoats move quickly to separate the men from their women and children.

The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the Sioux men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but to a culture created on institutional violence—a boy becomes a man by proving himself in battle—giving up one’s means to fight is giving up oneself. What’s more, they’d been promised the day before that they could keep their arms until they arrived at Pine Ridge.

Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to their mistreatment, the sometimes brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.

It is early winter, remember, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate lay beneath us here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible. What exactly happened next may be debated forever, but the trajectory of events is no more debatable than the outcome.

Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man, who considered it his duty to advise the men in council circle of their dignity and their calling. One account describes him this way: “. . .a grand figure. . .with green-colored face and a yellow nose, terrifying to behold. He wore with pride his floating crown of eagle feathers, while his costume was a wonder of wild adornments.” Some name this man Yellow Bird, while others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his eccentric look and behavior calls upon the dignity of Lakota history and culture. What he espouses is at least something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance. He tells the men not to fear. As Crazy Horse, by legend, once exhorted his men before Little Big Horn, this man reportedly cried and sang to his people, told them this was a good day to fight and a good day to die. He promises eternal life.

The sound produced in Native songs and chants begins in the front of the throat; for centuries, white musicians have been exhorted to sing from the diaphragm. The difference is startling. To white folks unaccustomed to the keening, me among them, the sound produced seems more like a shriek than a hymn. As you stand there, those Hotchkiss guns poised just beneath you, listen the medicine man’s seemingly mad music and try to stop your fists from tightening.

_________________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- ii

 

continued from yesterday. . .

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

The Scene before us

Here we are. Look around. If you stand on this hill in the summer, the heat can be oppressive; but on a good day you might be surrounded by a couple dozen tourists. That’s all. Wounded Knee doesn’t exactly border the Black Hills, and it’s not on the way to Yellowstone. It’s not on the way to anything, really. Right now you’re in the heart of fly-over America, many millions of Americans never coming closer to this shallow valley than, say Chicago. Any time of year, the twisted vapor trails of jets on their way to LAX or LaGuardia float like ribbons in the genial sky.

In the late fall or muddy spring or cold mid-winter—like that December day in 1890—it’s likely you’ll stand very much alone at Wounded Knee. Cars and trucks navigate the reservation roads that cross almost directly at the point of battle, but for most of the year a visit here is unlike a visit to any other North American historic battlefield.

Gettysburg National Military Park offers an aging but impressive Cyclorama, a remarkable circular painting, 356 feet by 26 feet, that puts visitors at the heart of the battle. Little Big Horn’s visitor’s center sells helpful interpretive audio tapes to use as you tour several miles of battlefield from the air-conditioned comfort of your mini-van. But if you want to know what you can about Wounded Knee, the only storyteller there, all year round, is the wind.

Just imagine the encampment before you, and keep in mind the despair, the poverty, and the hopelessness of the dancers. “To live was now no more than to endure/The purposeless indignity of breath,” says John G. Neihardt in The Twilight of the Sioux. Millions of buffalo once roamed here, the staple of existence for thousands of nomadic Native people, the soul of their culture and faith. By 1890, they were gone.

In North Dakota’s horrible winter of 1996, while thousands of cattle died in the monstrous cold, it is reported that only one bison perished. Once the buffalo ruled here. In all the openness all around you, the Great Plains stretching out almost forever in every direction, try to imagine what it must have been like to stand on this promontory and look over herds so large you could see the mass ripple as they shifted slightly when detecting human scent, almost like watching wind on water. That’s what’s gone. To the Sioux, the hunt was a not only manhood’s proving ground, but a celebration for the family, often opened and closed with prayer. Few 19th century wasicu could understand that the disappearance of the buffalo seemed, to many Plains Indians, almost the death of god. I don’t believe I still can, try as I might.

But if I stand here on the promontory at Wounded Knee and remind all that is white within me of grinding poverty, the exhaustive dissolution of a way of life, and the seeming death of god, I can, perhaps, begin to understand the frantic hope inspired by the Ghost Dance.

Today, right behind you, you’ll see fenced-in enclosure where a granite monument, nine feet tall, lists the names of a few of those killed here. “Chief Big Foot,” it says, and then lists “Mr. Shading Bear, Long Bull, White American, Black Coyate, Ghost Horse, Living Bear, Afraid of Bear, Young Afraid of Bear, Yellow Robe, Wounded Hand, Red Eagle,” and just a few more. Estimates vary on the number of dead buried where you’re standing, but most think 150 or so frozen bodies were dumped into the mass grave beneath the cordon of cement. No ceremony—Native or white. Just a dump.

On the other side of the stone there’s an inscription, still visible seventy years after the marker was placed where you’re standing.

        This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and                       Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre Dec.            29, 1890.

        Col. Forsyth in command of U. S. Troops. Big Foot was a great chief to the                    Sioux Indians. He often said “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He              did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many                  innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.

As Harry W. Paige says in Land of the Spotted Eagle, this isn’t the grammar, the syntax, or mechanics of an Oxford don. What it is, he says, is “writing that weeps.”

________________________

more tomorrow  

Wounded Knee i

When it came out in the magazine, it took up tons of space. I was thrilled the editor would take it because I had no idea how much interest I might drum up from an American reading public who had probably picked all the info they cared to know by way of movies that featured Ward Bond or John Wayne. But the whole story wouldn't let me go--I'm not sure why. I thought of Native American history as a subject about which no one really cared--all of it long-gone, another world.  

I sent the essay to John Wilson at Books and Culture, who had expressed some interest, and he took it. I was thrilled.

After using Ian Frazier's The Great Plains in a writing class (f0r years), I found myself  moving closer and closer to really appreciating the landscape directly west of us, a place we call "the Great Plains"--which is not universally easy to appreciate. The Great Plains story that most captured my attention was the Massacre at Wounded Knee, about which I'd known absolutely nothing.

Why not? Because the story belonged to Native America? 

No. It was our story, too. 

Go there, some voice said, just go and stand there, learn something on your own.

So I did, the day after Thanksgiving, twenty years ago. I was alone.

This is the essay that emerged.

Think of it as a tawny ocean stopped in time, a vast landscape of grass, here and there mustache-like strips of trees darkening creek beds or running along the ridges like an old headdress unfurled in wind. Today, the place where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place looks remarkably similar to what it did in early winter of 1890, a featureless, shallow valley in a seemingly unending field of prairie grass that, on a gray day, weaves itself almost inconspicuously into the cloudy sky at its reaches.

On December 28, 1890, four Hotchkiss guns—the Sioux called them "the guns that fire in the morning and kill the next day"—stood on a small, whitecap hill amid this arid ocean, all four aimed down into the camp of a Minneconjou chief named Sitanka, or Big Foot. There, three hundred men, women, and children were camped, hoping to reach Pine Ridge Agency the next day.

More than a century later, it is almost impossible to stand on that small hill and look down into the valley of Wounded Knee Creek and imagine what the place must have looked like so full of people.

But try. Today, a single battered billboard offers the only available outline of the story, the word “battle” crossed out and “massacre” scribbled in roughly above it. Otherwise, there is little to mark the spot. But try to imagine what this yawning, empty space must have looked like, a couple hundred Lakota just beneath the promontory where we’re standing, their worn and ripped tipis thrown up quickly, campfires floating thin plumes of smoke. These folks have been hungry for days—and tired, having just marched hundreds of miles south towards Chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency, where they thought they’d be safe.

But there’s more, far more. Across the ravine west—maybe a half mile away on another hill sits is a sprawling encampment of several hundred troops under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, the largest military encampment since the Civil War. The scene is remarkable. Doubtless, that many people assembled at this remote spot on the Dakota prairie has not happened frequently, if ever, since. If it’s difficult for you to imagine, just picture a campground of nearly a thousand people in tents, then cut down all the trees.

Big Foot’s people were dancers, Ghost Dancers, strong believers in a frenetic, mystic ceremony, a hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they thought Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, the Ghost Dance). And the buffalo would return. Once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

The Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance, a ritual of what Ian Frazier calls “the first American religion,” is only one of many causes which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, but for people of faith it merits a closer look.

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area, like the one in front of us now—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstacy.

Now look back down into the valley, and imagine three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu of every denomination or political persuasion shudder. To them, it seemed madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Sioux, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

________________

More to come.

Pope Donald I

In 1960, when JFK was running for President, a Roman Catholic, was running for President, an uncle of  mine went on a little speaking tour to local Protestant churches, where he'd warn parishioners what was going to happen should the war hero be elected to office: we'd no longer have a President because he would be, of necessity, a pawn of the pope.

I was just a kid, 12 years old. I remember hearing him hold forth in our church brandishing a fervent warning about our democracy descending into chaos at the hands of a man sworn in allegiance to the papacy. I remember thinking my uncle's appraisal was whacky, that he was overreacting in some way. He wasn't an embarrassment to me because by my assessment  most people in our church believed he was right even before they heard his arguments. Voting for the Massachusetts senator was like voting to turn America Roman Catholic: Rome would be calling the shots.

JFK won, and an assassin's bullet took him out of the office just two years later. My uncle, like his crusade, went off-line. 

Things have changed. Today, it's not the Pope looking to undercut the American spirit, it's a man with strange hair and a huge personality, a man who rarely sleeps, it seems, who is seemingly incapable of tempering his bravado about himself. Now, somewhere in his own Magic Kingdom,  he's got his own statue up for genuflection.  Here 'tis, a masterpiece.

Surprise!!!  Trump loves it. 

Pope Leo doesn't.

So Trump disparages Pope Leo. 

My uncle is long gone, unavailable for reference in this case.

Barring some mad quest to stay in office--with Donald, all things are possible--we're almost finished with the Orange man's madness. His time is short.

Which is why he seems devoted to finding ways to make his reign eternal, like a golden monument.

Well, some like my uncle might say, at least he's not Catholic. 

Very, very sad.

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”

It may be hard to believe but that old kid’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been around now for almost seventy years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness.

For years, our grandson would search the dark sky. “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he has to be sure that it’s up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121. Goodnight Moon is such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here in 121 seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we were completely lost in rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t completely lost—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink. For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead. An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it. Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it.

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course. But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams.

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, a blessing. God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in light of the moon. So, well, "Goodnight Moon."

That Christmas. . .and today

Maybe I was ten, as I remember, old enough at least so my feet went all the way down to the pedals. It's hard to believe, but I don't think I even tried to ride the thing that Christmas Eve. It was a cold Wisconsin winter--aren't they all?--and riding it out of the living room on Christmas Eve would have been impossible--well, improbable anyway. Even though the bike never made it out of the living room that memorable night, in every other way that gift, that year became a highlight of my life. It was totally unexpected. My parents must have done a ton of thinking to figure out how to keep that bike out of my way in the house, to keep the present hidden. 

It was Christmas, which is to say, dead of winter  outside, so getting the new bike into the house and hidden away in the living room before the after-church opening-presents ritual took some doing. How do you hide a 26-inch J. C. Higgins in the living room? Stealthily, I'm sure. 

Somehow they got me out of the house when they brought that beauty in. I don't know whose idea it was, but  that Christmas Eve jumped forever to the very top of my never-to-be-forgotten holiday seasons: the Christmas I got my first real bike.

Went something like this. It was Christmas Eve, after the Sunday School program at church. We lived a block north, so I expect that I raced home, hoping my parents would do likewise. In all likelihood, they did. I don't know that they could start the drama fast enough. 

Opening presents is an engagement that requires ritual. What you don't want is bedlam--the once-a-year joy is too good to race through. It calls for deliberation. When my sisters and I got a little older, I'm sure we were handed the mantle to distribute the goods. Back then, I think Dad took care of it. Slowly.

What I hadn't noticed was that the entire vestibule had been emptied, all those coats and jackets spread evenly over the back of the couch. Honestly, I never noticed. What I do remember is a sense of being cheated, a sense I would never have admitted back then, but something as palpable as the carols Mom had playing on her Magnavox stereo to set mood. I wasn't getting my share.

I'm sure I didn't hear a thing. It was Christmas Eve, for pete's sake, the biggie. I'm sure we worked at it--one present at a time: first Judy, then Gail, then me catching the spotlight to see what emerged when the wrapping paper came off. And I've never forgotten the palpable sense that I was getting rooked somehow, that my bounty was solely in arears, that I wasn't getting my share until finally Dad told me to take those jackets and coats off the back of the living room couch.

That's when I knew I'd smacked the jackpot. Just like that, a shiny handlebar found its way through deliberate lie of the pile of coats. There was something beneath all those things--good night! it was a bike, a full size, 26-inch beauty, shiny-new, the most memorable Christmas present I'd ever received--and I had absolutely no idea it was coming.

That Christmas remains as one of the, if not the most memorable Christmases of my life.

All of that rides back from my memory from the late 1950s, when my parents must have determined that it was time their son had a good bike, his own bike, and went out like drunken spendthrifts and bought a brand new 26-inch J. C. Higgins for their son. It was a pure surprise, a shock so full of joy I can feel it yet. Whatever pictures I had are likely gone with the flood, but I know very well what the bike looked like when I pulled it from behind the living room couch, where it had been so stealthily hidden.

All of that comes back to me now because if the dealer has it right, I'll be getting a  huge box full of another bike, this one actually a trike. It's coming today, seventy years or so later--not a J. C. Higgins, but a specialty brand made just for seniors like me who've lost some balance. One can't relive one's history, and  I won't try; but pardon me if I don't, just  now, feel a bit of the kid in me. 

Today, I'm getting a new bike. . .well, trike, and I'm thrilled.

___________________________ 

The tank was red, like the one up top, but so was the rest of the bike. I haven't a clue what happened to it, but I'll never forget the Christmas it was right there in the living room with us. 

What I did on my summer vacation

 

Oops.

The guy must have thought that someone back home would get a big kick out of the picture, that it was, therefore, a suitable souvenir of the time he spent somewhere out fighting a war some place other than his Jewish home. If you listen close enough, you can just about hear him chuckling, or maybe his buddy, the guy with the camera, who grabbed this shot when his friend leaned in to make it look like sport.

He got what he wanted, I guess, a record of his stupidity, of his callousness toward a major world religion, more Catholic than Protestant, I imagine, but just as offensive toward any and all major world religions.  

I'm not entirely sure that this soldier's being Jewish matters all that much. What he's up to is an act--giving the virgin a cigarette--that's just plain vulgar, an act so decidedly so that is to almost anyone a sacrilege. Such things happen in war, I guess, even though both sides in any conflict would much rather not have a bunch of these kinds of photos lying around awaiting publication. You can bet that this guy and his buddy with the camera thought helping the Virgin light up was a scream.

I guess you had to have been there. 

The Middle East has been a tinder box forever really, and will likely continue to be, next week, next year, next century. 

Which is not a reason to stop working for peace. Try to imagine, if you will, seeing the Middle East as something other than a tinder box, a place for instant aggression, a place for holding on to resentment as if it were a blessing, not a curse.

Some guy thought it would be a scream to stick a butt in the mouth of the Virgin. Almost certainly, he got some encouragement. Such a riot! Sometimes war can be fun. 

Sometimes peace can require another world altogether.    

Small Wonders--the Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers like this one--the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.

As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later.

There will be visitors this summer, but no Disneyland crowds. It's too bad, really--it's a wonderful monument, full of moral implications--and not changing anytime soon. 

But not forgotten

 

In a work of fiction, it's almost impossible to make a character as supremely loveable as Nebraska's Willa Cather does with the great earth-mother Antonia, in her century-old novel My Antonia. This Antonia isn't one bit divine, but her zest for life, notable throughout a childhood Cather recreates, is perfectly enchanting. If you've read My Antonia and you love the novel, as gadzillions have and do, then you probably adore Antonia, or Tony, as Jim Burden calls her in the story.

Tony is not untouched by the dark side. She is the oldest daughter of an immigrant Bohemian family struggling to make a go of it on uncooperative Great Plains land, one family of thousands, many from all over Europe, who believed that this new country was their chance to escape the bondage of poverty. For some, that dream was real. For others, just staying alive required every last stich of strength and perseverance. Some didn't make it.

Tony's father, Anton Shimerda, was something of an aristocrat in the old country. But he'd married a tyrannical woman, then lost himself in the vast expanse of treeless prairie he found himself in here, bereft of the art and music that had enchanted his soul.

Tony's father ends his life by suicide. She was just a girl back then. His death not only emptied her life of her father's presence and grace, but forced her to take over the hard, hard work of breaking ground for a sustainable life.

Still, like Jim Burden, who cannot forget her, readers can't help but love Tony Shimerda, who eventually came to town to work for well-situated town folks. What she and the other hired girls take with them is rowdy earthiness of their country ways. Off-limits to town boys of means, the country girls just want to have fun. Jim Burden's parents, in sanctified righteousness, forbid him from going to dances, where the country girls just plain shine. They're thought to be loose. 

No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.

Quite suddenly, Tony finds herself with child, and on a train to Denver, where the father, Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor on the railroad, told her he'd meet her, marry her, and raise a family. 

In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.

She can do nothing but return. With her brother, she slaves through harvest season and into winter, when one night she locks herself in her bedroom and delivers her baby boy herself. 

You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. 

If you've never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, schedule a trip sometime soon. Because Willa Cather used so much of Red Cloud and its history, the town's heart and soul is their favorite novelist daughter. You can visit the little old Catholic church where Tony eventually married the farm boy who gave her the rest of her kids. You can visit their farmhouse, the Pavelka place, north of town.

Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.

And be sure to stop at the tiny cemetery plot at the beginning of the tour. You can't miss it--it's right there along the gravel. In it stands the stone of the man who abandoned Antonia Shimerda, in real life, Anna Pavelka. 

Of course, his name isn't Larry Donovan; for the record, what's etched there in stone is "James William Murray." There's the stone all right, just where the tour notes claim it is. And here's the thing: the bottom of the stone bears this old cemetery cliche: "Gone but not forgotten."

No kidding. "Gone, but not forgotten." Every year thousands of people take that gravel road tour, and nobody forgets what Larry Donovan did to your and my Antonia. Poor James William Murray: in Red Cloud, Nebraska, so much just can't be forgotten. 

Visit sometime. Stop there at the grave and tell him he was a cad. Or worse. Good night, was he ever. Like a hundred others, tell him he's gone all right, but not forgotten.

Ashley's Prudence

William Ashley

Prudence is no fun. It's girl scout stuff really. Making sure that things are done right, done thoughtfully, prudence clears the room of wild exuberance and joy. But then learning prudence almost always is worth it.

As it was for a man named William Ashley. History has almost totally forgotten him, but once upon a time in the colonization of North America, Ashley played a significant role. It was his idea to alter the course of human events by hiring 100 adventurers to become trappers through the land Jefferson had acquired in the Louisiana Purchase. Ashley put together one hundred men he thought he could trust and brought them up here into America's frontier.

William Ashley was a point man for the Rocky Mountain Fur Company, who'd done what most other traders had been doing to trade with Native bands. Pots and pans were a hot item, as were beads, as well as other commodities were similarly beloved--guns and liquor.

Ashley learned quickly that guns could pull a good price, but a year or so after unloading rifles on the Arikara, he also learned he had to exercise some prudence in trading. A year after watching those rifles pass into Native bands, those very same rifles most definitely came back to haunt him. Twenty of his husky mountain men were killed in a rightly famous fight that took place just upriver from Mobridge, South Dakota, the first big fight between white men and red men west of the Mississippi. 

Why?--a perfect storm of reasons. First, the Arikara had already been mistreated by the legions of white men streaming into what had been their neighborhood; second, the chief's own son came back dead from hunting with the enemy, the story of his death simply unconvincing; third, some of Ashley's men had flagrantly abused some of the Arikara women; and finally, the Rees attacked because they had rifles and ammo they got from none other than Ashley himself. 

Did he learn? Yes. In his journal, he wrote, "“Trade what you can afford to lose; never trade what can be turned against you.” That's prudence, "the ability  to govern or discipline oneself by reason." Not fun, but good, smart stuff like cod liver oil. 

The Arikara were up high on the banks of the river, in a perfect position to pick off the aliens, and they did, Ashley's men taking to the river, where some drowned while others took the current downstream until they dared take cover in the bushes lining the Missouri, sometimes weeks later, or so the story goes.

Sometime later, one of those survivors, a man named Hugh Glass got in a fight with a bear, got himself sliced up like a tomato but somehow lived to tell about it. Jim Bridger's map-like memory helped him find his way around country that had to have seemed as wide and eternal as anything anyone had ever seen. Jedidiah Smith offered up a public prayer some claim to have been uttered in the very first Christian service west of the Mississippi, which happened to be a funeral.

Sometime later--not long--the stories continued to pile up. How the west was won is a book with a multitude of chapters, big as the west itself, all of which add up, for better and for worse, to our story.

 “He will not let your foot slip—

he who watches over you will not slumber; 

indeed, he who watches over Israel 

will neither slumber nor sleep.”

 

About couple of decades ago, when my family and I were being shown around the old central city of Leiden, Holland, we were taken up on some kind of ancient battlement that has stood there for centuries. 

 

Hundreds of people were about, as they say.  Our guide, a historian, was narrating the story of the ancient city from atop the battlements, which, as I remember it, was a huge concrete angel food cake.  Dozens of people were strolling on it, enjoying the sun and the Sabbath. 

 

I couldn’t help thinking about the fall one might take if one lost his or her balance or was somehow nudged off the edge.  There were no fences, no wires, no plexi-glass, and no warning signs.  If you would fall, you’d simply splat on the ground beneath it, maybe eight or ten feet, as I remember.

           

“So I’m amazed,” I told our guide at Leiden, “that there’s no wall.  What happens if people fall?  I mean, someone could sue.”

 

He laughed. “The court would say, ‘You’re a fool for falling off the edge.’”

 

I found that answer really strange because it wouldn’t happen here, and certainly wouldn’t be said. In fact, it’s possible that someone might stage a fall just to reap the dividends. We are a litigious society.

 

I don’t need to go back farther than fifty years or so in my own ethnic tribe to locate theological arguments that questioned the righteousness of insurance.  I mean, what God appointed to happen, happens, or so the tenet runs. Insurance, theological purists argued, weakens dependency on God by pushing the insured to take comfort instead in a financial portfolio.

 

Today that argument is dead in the water.  It would be impossible to live without insurance these days, a high-wire act without safety nets.

 

But Psalm 121 minces no words.  In its eight short verses, it insists five times—count ‘em yourself—that God watches over us, and he does so without blinking.  He neither slumbers nor sleeps.  He’s always there.

 

Affluence is a buffer, keeping us from need.  From when comes my help? —from my 401Ks, my retirement fund, my nest egg.  It’s probably fair to say that in terms of heat, clothing, fuel, and food, in the west at least, we’re warmly taken care of.  That God watches over us is nice, but get real and keep your eyes on the Dow Jones.

 

All of which would be true, if it weren’t for the tortures of the soul, the pain that comes from wounds within.  Far be it from me—a citizen of one of the richest countries in the world—to say that those hurts, sorrows of the heart, are more crippling than the sorrows of the flesh.  I’m in no position to judge. We’ve got food in our new refrigerator.

 

But I know something about heartache, as does everyone who’s ever lived, including the only one of us who was sinless.

 

Fat or thin, rich or poor, what remains the greatest comfort is not a good lawyer or a bountiful insurance payoff. What Psalm 121 won’t allow us to forget is that our God is always there, vigilant, caring, protective.

 

The poet can’t say it often enough. He’s there, he’s there, he’s there—and he won’t fall asleep on the job. You can’t buy that kind of insurance. The sinless one already did.

Morning Thanks--spring green

It's a whisper you can miss if you pass too quickly. Suddenly there's a long patch of emerald along the road, as if someone had forgotten to pack it away. Early April it begins to show itself because it's not fiction. It'll come if you just give it time, and its first slight promises are a themselves a blessing. See it here in the short grasses? Won't be long and they'll be challenging last year's stiffened monsters. It's coming--spring I mean. That's a promise.

It'll be awhile before the long grasses atop Spirit Mound give up to the relentless growth of new spring grasses, but if you look closely you can't miss the story. Won't be long either--

--because have no doubt! spring is on the way. It's begun it's' relentless assault on all things old and gold and lifeless, and soon enough its annual revolution will be over. But right now, it's only just begun.

Today already, it's there, but you have to look closely. It will take awhile before all that green new life secures its reign, but it will. Soon enough the whole site will be emerald.

Have no doubt--it'll happen. Always does, mercifully. Suddenly, you turn around and there's new life for as far as you can see. 

But not quite yet. It's as if no one has let last year's grasses know that it'll just be a matter of time--

But it'll happen. Always does. This morning's thanks are for a marvelous event that can't be missed--the advent of spring, a bright and colorful remedy to winter's aching cold. 

Once more, it's a'comin'.

Things are looking up. 

Morning Thanks--Copilot

Grandpa Schaap, the preacher and the little guy right there at the horse's snoot, didn't take Abraham Kuyper, the preacher/politician with him when he immigrated. In fact, he didn't even immigrate--his parents did, in 1868, left the Frisian island of Terschelling and made their way to America soon after the America's Civil War. 

Grandpa, the little guy, was born here. Abraham Kuyper was growing in prominence about then, but he hadn't achieved the stardom that he did when he became the Dutch Prime Minister in 1901.

When I found Kuyper's book of meditations, To Be Near Unto God, in English, in his library, I was greatly taken by my find because that's the book I'd  heard was so frequently lugged along with Dutch immigrants from the turn of the century--1900-1917, much beloved by those who suddenly found themselves here, aliens in a land as strange as it was huge.

One of the meditations began with the wonder of this new technology then sweeping Holland (and elsewhere too, I'm sure). Pastor Kuyper thought to reassure the flock that the telephone would not alter how the people lived, and that, in fact, the phone offered remarkable attributes ordinary people like those who read his meditations in the  newspaper should not be afraid because the Lord God of Hosts gave us blessings like the telephone for our good usage.

It would take me awhile to find that meditation, but you get my drift. Kuyper was being Kuyper, telling believers they should not be afraid of the world.

Yesterday, I asked MS Copilot to draw me a map to explain where, in 1823, the Arikara fought Ashley's band of mountain men--ninety-strong--out west on the Missouri River. I didn't realize until yesterday that that bloody fight took place close to Mobridge, SD, a place I've been often enough to know its look. MSCopilot is MS's AI. I was asking AI to do something elementary, but something I'd never asked before, to create a map.

Now let me be clear here. President Trump, who so regularly shows himself to be a fool, knows how to ask AI to do things--like that wicked cartoon of him in a red shawl looking for all the world like deity, and helping someone bedridden. You remember. I'm saying  that, regrettably, Donald Trump, who is older than I am, knows more about AI than yours truly. But yesterday I accomplished the creation of a map--supposedly accurate--of exactly where on the Missouri River that famous attack took place, and, as predicted, it did. Here 'tis.

For the record, you will not find that map anywhere else. I created it--with the strong armed help of AI. 

Kuyper was talking about the telephone, but he wasn't wrong. Innovations in technology have to be studied to be sure that the benefits they give us exceed the problems that accompany them. 

This morning this old Kuyperian is thankful for AI--wary but thankful.

Morning Thanks--Handel's "Messiah"

On Saturday night, I couldn't help but realize that I know almost the entirety of George Frederick Handel's oratorio The Messiah by heart. Don't tell anyone, but for most of the night I hummed along--not loud enough to be heard, but loud enough to for my heart to adore its familiarity.

It would be impossible to guess at how many times I've listened in, although I'm confident that the number of live performances reach nowhere near the times I've tapped into recordings. In fact, I dare to bet that with a little time I could scare up a recording or two on a long ago forsaken disk hidden away somewhere. 

I've sung along with our congregation's ritual recital of Handel's "Hallelujah Chorus" at Christmas, although I'm not a regular, less sure as I am of my abilities than I am of a hundred others.

What's more, I've heard dozens of choirs move through big chunks of the oratorio, including, forty years ago, a grade school bunch I've never forgotten, perhaps because of their insistent conductor who, I'm sure, wanted each of those kids to have a real experience with real music. It was an oddity, a painful experience and a thrill I've never quite been able to forget.

Mostly George Frederick Handel rings through my memories of houses we've lived in for the last fifty years. It wouldn't be a Christmas or Easter season if, on a Sunday morning, Handel wasn't coming up through living room speakers. We Protestants have winnowed down the number of legitimate sacraments to two--baptism and the Lord's Supper. But Handel's Messiah has a long and sacred reach. Voluntarily and of a sudden, we simply stand--all of us do--for "The Hallelujah Chorus."

Saturday night was a wonder. A mass choir of locals, with orchestra, did it all, even the arias I don't know, stem to stern. It was wonderful, as it always is, even when there's no in the chorus older than 12. It's always wonderful, and it will be again next December when I tease Alexa into finding a performance for me somewhere on line. 

A few years ago, I would have put singing through Handel's Messiah with a really good choir as a top choice on my bucket list. But Saturday night, listening in once more, I told myself that the likelihood of music coming from this aging vessel is no more likely than this ex-catcher getting behind the plate and throwing out some speedster trying to steal second. It ain't gonna happen. I'm having trouble enough just getting to my feet when the first chords of "Hallelujah" fill the place.

Every minute last Saturday night was precious, every note a blessing. 

This morning's thanks are for a big, wonderful choir, the Sioux County Oratorio, and, once again, George Frederick Handel's perfectly wondrous baroque masterpiece, The Messiah.   

Morning Thanks--BHHS '72

 

They met yesterday. I wasn't among 'em. I was invited, but the invitation came so late that I  had  no time to plan to get there; at my age, just taking off cold is something you remember achingly like The Dave Clark Five or Gunsmoke. Sixteen old folks showed up here at the restaurant in Darlington, Wisconsin yesterday, 16 members of the 1972 graduating class of Blackhawk High, my first teaching job. They had a reunion, and I didn't get my invite until late last week.

But honestly, who knows if I would have taken a day's travel if I'd have received that invite earlier. Wishful thinking on my part, although when I texted the Jeff (third from the left, back row) he told me there's another reunion planned for August. I may try. Try.

Some of these faces I remember, but certainly not all. Blessedly, Jeff named the Class of '72ers, or I'd have spent unforgiveable amounts of time trying to determine who looked like this all these years later because for me, their fresh-out-of-college English teacher, they will forever be 18 years old. 

Strangely enough I remember thinking, back then, there would come a time when I'd be 65, and they would be 60, the years between us largely indistinguishable. We'll, we're there, and have been for a couple of decades already. If I'd walk into a bait store with these gents, nobody would wonder who is the old fart with 'em.

But this morning I'm greatly thankful for them--I really am. Let me count the ways.

1-They taught me who I was and who I would be--a good teacher, a not so good coach.

2-They let me be a friend without being a sidekick.

3-They taught me that my wooden shoes were a fashion accessory.

4-They made faith bigger than I'd known it to be, not smaller.

5-They were friends when I had few. 

6-They taught me how to teach; they taught me the beauty of literature.

7-They helped me understand that they--each of them--were real people, not just faces in those classroom chairs. 

There's more too, I'm sure. The fact is, they're forever in me, in memories that rise unbidden from wherever the soul keeps them, a thousand comic operas that emerge every once in a while to be dusted off and restored.

This morning after a reunion I missed, I'm thankful for Blackhawk High School's Class of 1972, the kids that brought me to school. 

______________________________ 

The old BHHS Yearbooks are long gone in the flood that took out the goods in our bottom floor, but this old award plaque somehow made it through the mess, even though what it says is barely visible: "James C. Schaap," it says, up top, then "To the greatest play director, teacher & friend we could ever have. Blackhawk High School, "Up the Down Staircase" Cast, 1971.

Must have got in the water somehow--the wood around the tacks is shaded if you look close, but it's still readable.  

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 121

“My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth.”

When the ex-wrestler Jesse Ventura was Governor of Minnesota, the state of Iowa took a well-deserved rest from the endless mockery tossed our way by supposedly more sophisticated Minnesotans. After all, for a few interesting years, they had enough to laugh about up north.

Ventura was buff, built like a steel nail. I remember spotting a t-shirt in the Twin Cities Airport that said, “My governor can beat up your governor.”

Funny. But if I read this verse with an emphasis on my, it’s not hard to hear a similar kind of bravado. “My help from the Lord, the Maker of heaven and earth. You can’t say that. My god can beat up your god.”

Because this is holy scripture, I’ll ease up on the writer: “Maker of heaven and earth” is a classic appositive, nothing more than an adjectival phrase, a one-line vitae; the poet is interested simply in making sure everyone knows that his sacred trust is not invested foolishly.

Fine. Years before Donald Trump was anything more than a real estate mogul, Rev. Jerry Falwell, who back then had more problems with hoof-and-mouth than all the feedlots in Nebraska, told a group of “his people” that a Hillary Clinton Presidential campaign would mobilize Christians to get out and vote like no one else. “If Lucifer ran,” he said, “he wouldn’t.”

Rev. Falwell meant well and prayed hard, but it’s almost impossible not to see that a similar sentiment (“I meant it tongue-in-cheek,” he told folks later) has created divisiveness in this culture, a political and social world of “us vs. them.” To many of “his people,” Lucifer would be preferable to Hillary.

It seems impossible not to see that a species of fundamentalism (what I think!) is fomenting death and destruction throughout the world, including a baseball diamond in Arlington, Virginia, where a crazed Bernie supporter carried a semi-automatic up to the infield and started firing at Republicans. Whenever and wherever people believe they have sole ownership of the truth—of whatever kind--the opposition grows horns, a pointed tail, and cloven feet. And madmen load carbines.

When praying people read a verse like this with a swelling overemphasis on my, things can get dangerous. “My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. Where do you get yours, loser?”

That it can be misread doesn’t make the Bible any less “the Word of God.” Holy Writ is full of paradox and preposterous notions, marvelous tales, bloody battlefields, beautiful poetry, and eternal wisdom. It’s as powerful as it is dangerous.

Psalm 121 is pure praise, a tested testimony to an ever-vigilant God who neither slumbers nor sleeps, whose eye is on every last sparrow and humanoid, who is his people’s shepherd.

That divine assurance needs to be bound tightly in my heart, not in my fist.