The little trip west--xii

Looks pastoral enough, don't you think? Well, looks can deceive, as they say.

The whole business starts a day's travel away. A cow, a Mormon Bessie in fact, steps away from a saint's wagon and stumbles into a gathering of hungry Lakota. They dispatch and therewith devour her with the kind of meal they hadn't enjoyed in ages.

That Mormon on the trail was furious. When the Lakota offered him a horse to salve his wound, pick of the fleet, that wasn't enough. The method of putting out little fires along the trail put whatever the affair in the hands of the Indian agent, not the military.

The angry Mormon went to the military, where justice was handed over to a young turk named Grattan, who'd claimed a hunger to duke it out with Indians. Grattan led a company of cavalry into the Brule village. The headman, the chief, Conquering Bear, who was angry, came out to parley, turned back to his people, and was shot dead.

Grattan and his men lose. Badly. Ain't pretty. Not at all.

A year later, a day's ride back east along the Platte, just a few miles north of Ash Hollow, a commander named Harney, a Tennessean, took 600 cavalry with revenge in their souls into a camp of 250 Brule Sioux. The night before, Harney had moved troops around the encampment to surround the Brules, who, when they discovered their predicament, went off. The shooting--the killing--began. Wasn't pretty. Not at all. Same butchery, a year later, but now it's white guys wielding their Bowie knives. Eye-for-an-eye, scalp for a scalp.

Of the 250 Brule, 87 were dead and 70 women and children were captured. It's the battle by which Harney earned his Indian name, or one of them, "Woman killer."

Today a sign on the highway tells the story and gives directions where the slaughter took place. So I hunted for it on gravel roads. If there's signage out there, I missed it; but by my calculations, the Battle of Ash Hollow took place somewhere around here on Blue Water Creek.



If I had told you none of that, you might think I took this placid shot--as well as the one at the top of the page--because the meandering Blue Water Creek seemed such delight out on the western plains of Nebraska, just off the Oregon Trail. But if I tell you that right here horrifying atrocities took place that I'd rather not talk about, if I'd tell you that right there beneath those trees blood was let in a fashion far beyond imagination, and it was accomplished by white men, young men, most of whom had likely grown up in some church, then the picture looks different, doesn't it? It's chilling, even in the heat of August. Trust me. I was there.

Harney and his men couldn't forget the Grattan Massacre that went on a year before, just like the Sioux could not forget the Massacre at Blue Creek in September of 1855. It was, in many ways, the beginning of the Great Sioux Wars.

Think of this: way out east, significant books were being published--Leaves of Grass, Walden, Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, and Uncle Tom's Cabin, all of them in or around those years.  Just up the road, hundreds, maybe thousands were camped in the palm of the most beautiful hills Oregon travelers had seen since they left Independence, Missouri.  

Wouldn't it be nice if the story we could tell was all about beauty?

Did I mention Harney's men took brand new rifles into battle, long guns whose rifling inside the barrel put a spin on brand new bullets that thereby traveled perfectly straight for a half-mile or more? Great stuff for killing.

Or how about this? Did you know that the tallest peak in the Black Hills was named after "Woman Killer," who was also dubbed "The Butcher." For many years climbers loved the awesome view above it all from Harney Peak.

His name was removed in 2016. The Black Hills loftiest lookout was given another name: Black Elk Peak. Changing whims. Changing ways.

There are no ghosts at the site of the Battle of Ash Hollow. I looked. I sat there wondering whether someone might appear. You may think I'm crazy. Maybe you'd be right. 

But neither is the story or its people really gone, are they?

A little trip out west--Ash Hollow

So the man who "discovered" it, some say--discover being a deceptive word right here--was, historians say, Robert Stuart, a Scottish-born, Canadian-American explorer who was actually travelling west to east, Oregon to St. Louis. He was, as most white men out here were back then, engaged in the fur trade, an employee of the Pacific Fur Company. What he wanted to do was establish a continent-wide trading network. We're talking way, way back here, a year before the War of 1812, in fact. 

Of course, way, way back is deceptive too because a there's a cave on the edge of of one of the many hills here that's home to artifacts that date back hundreds, even thousands of years. Robert Stuart, bless his soul, didn't discover Ash Hill, Nebraska. Thousands of indigenous people had known about its sweet grasslands and pure water, and Stuart didn't happen to come along way, way long ago; Native people had been there for centuries. Robert Stuart just happened to be the first Euro-American, the first white man. White man's privilege has its own vocabulary.

What Robert Stuart stumbled on in 1811 is a gorgeous valley that must have paradise to him, as it was to a half-million other Euro-Americans who followed the trail west to Oregon after him. After two weeks of hard travel through the Great American Desert, from the Missouri River west all the way to Ash Hollow (named after an ash grove deep in the valley), just think of it this way: you've been forever in absolutely nothing but cornfield. Nothing, Zilch. Okay, maybe, here or there, a spray of cottonwoods in a river gulch. Otherwise, nothing.

Then, suddenly, you run up the Platte to find this spacious valley between breathtaking hills and incredibly clear water, lots of it--and, oh, yes, abundant grasses for the livestock. Ash Hollow was the Garden of Eden, so beautiful that hundreds of covered wagons thought of the place as a vacation spot.

At Ash Hollow, you can almost still see the haze of campfire smoke from literally hundreds of covered wagons put up for a short stay. Even if as many as 400,000 people took the trails west, you'd be hard pressed to find any of them who didn't stop and take a rest at Ash Hollow. May well have been White America's very first public campground.

The state of Nebraska has more than its share of Oregon Trail wagon tracks still visible in its long plains, but few of those originals is as well-defined and sculpted as those at Ash Hollow. You can see the swails from the air. Sometimes wagon trains would spread out for four or five miles wide, but some geographic areas funneled the intercontinental travelers, as Ash Hollow did, especially a hill that covered wagons had to go scale--as they would, held back by safety ropes hand over hand. Historians claim no pilgrim ever died at the place people call today Windlass Hill, but the ruts they left behind are still sweat and bleed. 

Thousands never made it--Rachel Pattison among them, a young bride, just 18 years old, whose life was choked away by cholera. She's buried here, along the road in Ash Hollow Cemetery. 

Something mythic in proportions is in the air here, in the long plains and sharp valley around Ash Hollow. There's something immensely heroic--all those families moving west through all kinds of danger, many left behind in a thousand graves, most of which weren't as reverently placed as Rachel Pattison's. 

It took a world of gumption, a soul exploding with dreams of yet a better life. Traveling the trails west took everything anyone had in them, all the strength and will and spirit. For the most part, they were pioneers, not people of standing or wealth, people who didn't have much at all but gumption. If they would have been well-heeled, they'd have stayed out east. It's remarkably easy to stand on the hill at Ash Hollow and mythologize, even lionize those who passed this way behind mules or oxen, getting dinner only from whatever wildlife they could find.

Look at 'em--they're heroes. There's no end to the postcards.

American history is no easier than the story the trails still tell through long lonely passages and dozens of gorgeous places like Ash Hollow. Those wagon ruts mark the path of strong men and women. Getting here took everything a family had, even, at times, life itself. It's a joy, an inspiration to stand up on a hill above Ash Hollow with "America the Beautiful" ring like an anthem through the wide emerald hills all around. 

But American history is a book with many chapters. More tomorrow right here at Ash Hollow.

A little trip out west--x

A couple of weekends ago, for a couple of hours along the Union Pacific lines, I couldn't help being astounded by clockwork and the sheer number of trains passing by, one after another after another, on their way east, like this one, heavy laden with coal, while, not twenty feet away, the empties were returning with a steely clatter. 

The sheer size of this country, our country, and its immense appetites, still strikes awe in me. This heavyweight processionals DID NOT QUIT. Huge trains, hundreds of cars long, each of car perfectly sculpted with piles of coal created so similarly that no human hand could have shaped the cargo or shoveled the cars full. Somewhere west, massive coal deposits were being cut out of the earth and loaded on to boxcars that carried all that coal--where? out east somewhere. Out east, period. 

I'm not as green as I should be. I believe in climate change only because the science types I know and trust tell me it's absolutely true, people who understand and also see this creation around us as belonging, first and foremost, to Him (upper case). If they tell me we have a major problem, if they're scared, I worry. 

What little I know about coal is that it isn't nice and it's not the fuel of the future--or at least so my friends say. It's quintessential fossil fuel, and it's not clean. So I'm out there on the Oregon Trail where freight train after freight train are lugging mountains of coal somewhere east, and I'm thinking about fat cat American appetites.  

I've got a friend, happens to be a pastor, who's a train aficionado, loves 'em, sits here, outside, and just can't help but smile when our local BSNF rumbles by. I asked him about what I couldn't help notice on, of all things, the Oregon Trail. Where's all this sinful coal coming from and where is it going?

It's Powder River Basin coal, he said. The only thing I knew about the Powder River was that once upon a time it was maybe the last stronghold--certainly the last hunting grounds--of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne people. I didn't know it was full of coal.

Forty percent of America's coal is loaded on those freights because forty percent of America's coal originates in open pit mines cut out of the earth in the Powder River Basin. You might be surprised to know--as I was--that the state of Wyoming produces more coal than any other state in the Union. Trump famously rallied coal miners, didn't he? But I don't think he was anywhere near the Powder River Basin.

But what little I knew of coal suggested to me that it was evil, that the world is going to be far better off when it stops using fossil fuels, right? With that flimsy base of knowledge, I watched those trains almost ritually passing and shook my head because all those trains made it perfectly clear that weaning ourselves from coal wasn't going to happen tomorrow. There were simply too many trains, too much coal, too great a need. Shame, shame.

But my preacher friend made clear to me that Powder River coal was just about the best kind of coal we can burn. It's low sulfur content make if far, far less harmful to the environment. The truth of the matter is that nobody even bothered to mine that low-sulfur stuff until environmentalists raised cane about its Appalachian cousins, which is far, far more dirty. So it's only recently that these immense trains ran up and down the trail 24/7. 

Okay, the pathetic environmentalist in me says that Powder River stuff is not so sinful after all. But where really does it go? Well, all over for starters.

Just so happens, as you can imagine, that the Oregon Trail is the beginning of the pilgrimage--make that plural because, as you can see, it does go all over. 

Even here--Edgewater Power Plant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, burns Powder River coal. I had no idea. 

Thirty years ago, I used to get up early on Saturday mornings, drive out here, pull on my waders, and fish right off the shore because 'twas rumored that the power plant emitted warm water into Lake Michigan, warm water the salmon loved. Now that may have been true. I may have caught one or two on those Saturday mornings, but then I'm even less a fisherman than I am a train buff.

The thing is, I know this place. I've been there, right there, often. So the endless processional of low-sulfur coal from what was once prime buffalo country, the Powder River Basin, ends up being burned just down the road from the town where I was born and reared. 

Amazing, I thought. I was burning that coal. I was using fossil fuel ravaged from the landscape out in Montana. It wasn't just some yahoo who thought wind turbines or solar gardens somehow less manly. I was the red neck.

The news, announced in May of this year, is that by 2023, power from the Edgewater plant, Sheboygan, Wisconsin, will come from wind and solar sources. No more Powder River coal. 

Which means no more open pit mining and no more Union Pacific freights pulling endless cars full of low-sulfur coal. 

That's what I learned on the Oregon Trail.  

A little trip out west--ix

Let me explain.

That BNSF engine is pushing, not pulling, hundreds of empty cars--pushing. Way, way, way up front--you can't see it--a couple of Union Pacific engines are pulling this huge rig too.

Now look down the track. See those lights way down there? That's another UP engine pulling yet another couple hundred cars (I didn't count--seemed like closer to 200) every last one of them poured full of coal. I took that picture, as well as the next two--

8884 here is the engine behind the faraway lights in the picture above.

And this big bertha (two of them) is the one whose rear end shows up in that picture at the top of the page. Truth is, I stepped out of the car (you can see the road just on the other side of the tracks) and sat there for five minutes max. I stopped because I couldn't help notice the trains coming, fast and furious. every five minutes, it seemed--each eastern-bound monster lugging a mountain of coal, while the west returners were empty. Made me wonder how many cars were lined up at the coal fields because those trains just kept coming. And going. Leaving Wyoming full to the brim; returning like a string of tin cans. Made me wonder about just how big were the coalfields.

I'm in western Nebraska, following the Oregon Trail. Once upon a time, the trains did too, Union Pacific pounding in the golden spike at Promontory Summit, Utah. Once upon a time hundreds of Chinese workers laid track right here for a hundred thousand passenger cars with big fat steam locomotives out front. Like Big Ben here.

Right there in rural Nebraska, it's impossible not to think about the rugged 400,000 who'd made the danger-filled trek west in prairie schooners, and the Natives who watched them, then swore there would be no more. You can't help wondering what it must have been like for those who'd never seen a train before to suddenly witness the beast bellowing away in the garden. 

We're half a continent away from Concord, Mass, but I can't help thinking of Henry David Thoreau, who witnessed the iron horse stampede through the neighborhood of Walden Pond:

When I meet the engine with its train of cars moving off with planetary motion,—or, rather, like a comet, for the beholder knows not if with that velocity and with that direction it will ever revisit this system, since its orbit does not look like a returning curve,—with its steam cloud like a banner streaming behind in golden and silver wreaths, like many a downy cloud which I have seen, high in the heavens, unfolding its masses to the light,—as if this travelling demigod, this cloud-compeller, would ere long take the sunset sky for the livery of his train; when I hear the iron horse make the hills echo with his snort like thunder, shaking the earth with his feet, and breathing fire and smoke from his nostrils (what kind of winged horse or fiery dragon they will put into the new Mythology I don’t know), it seems as if the earth had got a race now worthy to inhabit it. 

That's Thoreau, with his Harvard education and his literary ambitions, describing his overwhelmed senses in a chapter titled "Sounds"--while a train runs by on the brand new Fitchburg Railroad in the early 1850s.

In rural Nebraska, there I stood beside monster snakes criss-crossing the plains in places where you need only step out the car to see ruts from untold covered wagons. Crazy Horse and his warriors made life perfectly miserable for them. I can't help but wonder what he and his people thought of this "iron horse" bellowing smoke behind an awful song? When they saw this monster railroad violate their hunting grounds, they had to know something just as huge about their lives was coming to an end. 

Standing there beside the railroad on the Oregon Trail, it's hard to think this great American story as contrary as the Civil War, but it was: both were stupendous, even selfless efforts, daring deprivation and death. They were immense and bloody human undertakings that offered heroism and horror in sometimes equal portions. A half a million people in this country--1837 to 1869-- crossed the American wilderness in ox-drawn wagons risking death at the hands of what they considered "savages," not to mention the ravages of nature herself, for the dream of ease gold strikes promised.

And then the railroad.

After 1869, this very Union Pacific paved the way, ancestors of these very monster engines delivered more people on the way west, the pilgrimage countless times easier aboard that iron horse.

If the cloud that hangs over the engine were the perspiration of heroic deeds, or as beneficent as that which floats over the farmer’s fields, then the elements and Nature herself would cheerfully accompany men on their errands and be their escort.

Okay, I've read too much Thoreau. 

Today--see above--what they carry is coal. More on that tomorrow.                                                                                                                                                     

Labor Day

 

She remembers sitting up on the wagon and hearing the cobs bang, remembers horses going up the field pretty much on their own as Ma and Pa picked ears and flung 'em off the bangboard. Remembers, she says, how the sharp edges of a thousand corn leaves could cut up your arm but good.

She remembers bringing a load home from the field at night, in the dark. She was just a girl, but she remembers one winter when they finished picking corn on New Years Day! Believe it?

Remembers coming into the yard, tending horses, unhitching them from the wagon, following them to the barn; remembers how they'd roll around in barnyard dust; remembers hanging up halters just so, so that the next day, when, once again, you went back to work in early morning darkness, it didn't take you half a day to untangle ‘em.

All of that she remembers in a memoir she wrote describing her life on a farm, a childhood in sweat and dirt and manure that reads a bit nostalgically because she delivers all those memories with a homey gaiety. Handpicking corn was hard work: that's what she wants her children to know once she goes. But it was noble, honorable. That's true too, and they ought to understand as much.

She remembers that first single-row corn picker, a blessing that freed the whole bunch of them from having to spend fall and half the winter trudging through wet and cold to get it all out. My goodness, how things moved faster with that miracle-worker. Finally, they could retire those husking gloves in the barn with other tools mechanization made obsolete, a museum left happily behind.

She remembers all of that as if those were “the good old days,” but she knows better than to say it. She's doing what most every old gent and missus ends up doing in the face of change they'd rather not make, telling her children that way back when, Grandpa's life--and Grandma's too--had lots more dignity than she has today, alone, over there in the Home. 

She's bringing back what's no longer retrievable, an era no one hopes ever returns because today you’d be out of your mind to pick forty acres of corn by hand. No fool would.

The worst, she says, was having to go back to that full wagon after chores, after milking, after taking care of the horses, after supper. It was nighttime, she says in this spiral bound book she wrote, but all that corn had to be shoveled off the wagon. Hard, hard work. Shoulders ached too, don’t you know?

That's what she remembers, and that's what she remembers fondly, not because it was fun, not because it was a joy, but because finally, dead tired, you could lay yourself down, flop out on your bed, and fall to sleep in a flash because the job got done. 

There's no other way to describe it, I guess, even though, she remembers, you start the whole back-breaking job again the next day, and it's not over until it's over. You're back at it before the sun rises.

All of that she told me. All of that is in the xeroxed, spiral-bound book she gave me, the book she wrote herself. She wanted her children to know what life was like way back when she was a child.

Covid-19 has taught us to honor Labor Day in a new way—or it should. A whole new assembly line of workers now seem suddenly perfectly essential: meat-packers, grocery store clerks, mechanics, hospital dishwashers. It’s never been a problem to thank police and fire fighters, nurses and doctors and all kinds of first responders; but Covid has forced us to honor people who’ve never made more than minimum wage but suddenly have become irreplaceable—nurses aides in old folks homes. And now, teachers.

How we’ve worked has changed immensely in the last century, but Covid has forced us to see an arsenal of ordinary people with whom, literally, we can’t live without it.

Thank you. This year, this day, Labor Day, is all yours.

There’s more to the story. There are things I’m not telling you.

After chapel in the Home, we used to have coffee with the woman who wrote out her whole life story. There she’d sit along with a table full of other seniors, most of them older.

When I returned her book, I told her I’d really liked it—and I did. “What a great thing to do,” I told her, “to write that book and leave it here behind for the kids.”

She waved her hand as if slapping off a bug. “Ach, they don’t care,” she said.

“C’mon,” I said.

“Don’t come see me neither,” she told me, “none of my kids. They don’t bother.”

It wasn’t the first time that bitterness showed its face on hers.

“They live here?” I said. I didn’t know her family.

“Couple of ‘em,” she said. “But they don’t come by. They don’t care. They’re too darn busy.” Shrugged her shoulders. “It’s about all they do is work, all of them.”

She caught me with that line.

None of the 90+ year olds around the table were quite as free to say how anxious she was to leave this life, and she was the only one who still lived in independent living. Every week she’d remind us.

I don’t think Max Weber was entirely out of line when he claimed capitalism had its origins in a Calvinist mind. He created a phrase that may well be more precious to Siouxlanders than silver and gold— “a Protestant Work Ethic.” Which is to say, ours. We’ve got it, and we’re not afraid to admit it, even to flaunt it.  

But then there’s this:

We love free stuff, the more the merrier; but it’s passing strange that the one thing in life that’s offered freely is something we want so badly to work for and to earn—salvation.

That line is not mine, but I’ve used it often because of the catchy irony that traps most of us when we hear it unrolled.

It's Labor Day all right, a holiday meant to celebrate work and those who do it because such things need to be celebrated.

Psalm 90 means different things when you’re thirty or when you’re seventy, but the truth of the gem from verse 17 seems ever rich: it starts this way in the King James, “Let the beauty of the Lord be upon us”—first, the beauty of the Lord, and then, resultingly, “establish the work of our hands.”

It’s a new school year too, an extraordinary year which will make demands no one has imagined. What better time to say, on this Labor Day, no matter if you’re teaching Max Weber or picking corn, “establish the work of our hands,” and again, “yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.”

____________________ 

"Labor Day" also published in In All Things.

Reading Mother Teresa--The School at Motijhil

“If you have faith as small as a mustard seed, 

you can say to this mulberry tree, 

Be uprooted and planted in the sea,’ 

and it will obey you.” Luke 17:6 

After 20-some years of with the Sisters of Lorato at the Entally Convent, after two years of waiting, sometimes impatiently, on the will of her superiors, after just a four long months of medical instruction at Patna, Mother Teresa, dressed in what might well be considered a shoddy sari, the wardrobe of the poor, walked out into the streets of Motijhil, a place whose name translates “Pearl Lake,” but, in 1948 at least, was anything but.

Today, guidebooks say, Motijhil is an almost middle-class suburb; but back then it was a bustee, a slum, a desolate place full of refugees from the starving countryside. India – and Calcutta specifically – was suffering through the after-effects of World War II, immense poverty and starvation, and a glut of country folks looking merely to stay alive in India’s cities. People lived in shacks, had little food, and lacked the wherewithal to send their children to school. Motijhil was no “pearl lake,”; the only source of water something putrid and sewage-filled. In 1948, Motijhil was infested with “the holes of the poor.”

But ministering to the poor in those holes is what Mother Teresa claimed Jesus himself had called her to do, and, once ready and able, she walked into the world of hunger and sickness and starvation as if charmed by none other than the Holy Spirit.

From the local priest, she obtained the names of several families who made their often windowless homes in the neighborhood and told parents that she was about to start a school for refugee children right there within reach. Starting a school seemed without question the right alternative for her, having been a teacher herself for so long.

“Tomorrow,” she must have told them. “Tomorrow, I will begin teaching.”

That she had nothing – no blackboard or chalk, no slates, no pencils, no tablets, no books – seemed of little importance it seems. “Tomorrow,” she must have said, “have your children there ready to learn.”

That night, she returned to an old folk’s’ residence maintained by the Little Sisters of the Poor. Likely as not, she lay awake for hours, dreaming of what was to come.

What was to come was peculiarly her dream, not the dream of most of us. Right there beside a stinking pool, right where she had directed those parents, the next morning, bright and early, she found five little children waiting for her.

So she started beneath a tree, this odd European woman in a third-rate sari and dusty sandals. “I took a stick and used it as a marker on the ground where the children sat,” she told her biographer. “We began right on the ground” {34}.

Mother Teresa was no first-year teacher, and the children who showed up that day, on the first day of a school with a dirt floor, were not part of her first class. But somehow I can’t help but think that, if she were still alive today, she could remember each of those five faces, each of the children who’d found their way to the school beneath the tree from the holes of the poor.

Somehow, I can’t help thinking that that afternoon, after school, when Mother Teresa spent an hour or so walking back to the old folks’ home where she was staying, she was praising God, praising God on high.

POWs--ours and theirs and his

Your German may be better than mine. Take a shot, but I'll tell you that all of this translates into a request from a WWII German soldier to Heinrich, a relative or friend, telling him he really doesn't have to send care packages to the American prisoner of war camp in Algona, Iowa where the writer is imprisoned because, well, he's got just about everything he needs right there.

Don't get me wrong. The Algona POW camp was no resort, no B & B. If you were inside, you didn't walk away, as this prisoner's drawing illustrates.

But just beyond the barbed wire lay unending miles of Iowa countryside, where hundreds of small, family farms were operating, where land was being worked. If you were lucky--and most of the prisoners were--you got released every once in a while in a work crew because some farmer out there needed help with harvest or anything else, for that matter. In fact, the camp sent prisoners out on work details so often that those "Gerrys" built up friendships so strong that, when the war ended, and the prisoners were shipped back to Germany, some vowed they'd return when they could, and, guess what?--some did. 

Every one of these actors are Nazi prisoners of war. Okay, some are in drag, but there were no women in the camps, so if they wanted to stage some kind of drama or a Christmas play, they had to make do. You've seen pictures of Dachau and Auschwitz--these pictures bear any resemblance?

I spent some time in the local cemetery on Tuesday. A high school teacher asks me every September if I'll talk a bit about some of the fallen vets whose graves stand together in a special section. I normally include a story about a veteran named Alvin Jelgerhuis, who came back from the South Pacific theater alive, barely. 

On December 21, 1944, Alvin lost his twin brother, Elmer, when Elmer's B-29 went down on a bombing run into Manchuria. A Japanese fighter pilot drove directly into them. Everyone was killed. The two of them had gone into the service determined to stay together; the army allowed them one provision, that they would never go on a mission in the same plane. When Elmer was killed, his brother chose to stay in the service. He could have gone home.

Later, Elmer was shot down too, then taken to a Tokyo Prison camp, where he suffered every kind of horror and lost 100 pounds. Not much of him was left when the war ended, but he was alive.

Before I left for the cemetery on Tuesday, I read up on Japanese war camps like the one Elmer suffered through. They were perfectly terrible, wretched, abominable. Japanese POW camps established death rates seven times that of infamous Nazi camps. Seven times. To call the treatment of Allied GIs hellish feels like cliche. Life was unimaginable. 

I'd visited the Algona Prisoner of War Museum a couple of months ago, got a tour of the Christmas Nativity the prisoners sculpted and constructed 75 years ago. You can read about it here--or listen. 

But early Monday morning when I read about life in Japanese war camps I couldn't help drawing the immense contrast. Do it yourself. Read this note from an ex-German soldier:

I cannot be a counted among those patriotic citizens who believe America is "a Christian nation." I've spent far too much time with Native American history to baptize our story. I was in the South the night MLK was murdered. I believe Black Lives Matter.

But the difference between what I saw at Algona and what I read of Tokyo is as clear an argument as anyone can make that the very foundation of American justice is cut from something good, something just and something merciful, something approximating WWJD.

Last night I was devastated by an article in the Atlantic about our president. "According to sources with knowledge of the president’s views, he seems to genuinely not understand why Americans treat former prisoners of war with respect."

FAKE NEWS, Trump says. 

I can't help but remember what he said about John McCain, a Vietnam era POW, who was not a hero because he was captured: "I like people who weren't captured."  

And I can't help believing those "sources" are wrong. I wish I could.

The Test at Winona Lake

"It was a test," he told me, after pulling me aside. "It's a story I thought you'd like, a story I wanted to tell you." We were in the den, a couple rooms away from the jabbering coming the family reunion that had grown up around the visit of this distinguished uncle and aunt from California.

My uncle was an accomplished academic who had become a college president after receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry and, during the war, working on the Manhattan Project. He'd always carried himself with a level of sophistication that distinguished him from anyone else in the family, even though he was born and reared just down the road. He was an old man now, retired. He took me aside because he knew his nephew, also an academic, liked stories and even wrote them. We were well out of earshot of the rest of the tribe so he didn't seem particularly furtive, nor should he have been. 

"This was way back when I was courting your Aunt Trudy," he said. Let's give the moment an approximate date: maybe 1935, give or take a year or two. 

"Your grandpa told your Aunt Trudy that he believed it might be nice if her boyfriend--that's me--would accompany the family to Winona Lake, to some Bible conference--lots of singing and speakers, a rambunctious bunch of believers for a staid Christian Reformed preacher like your grandpa." From his chair across from the front window, he tried, not hard, to hold back a smile. I was sitting on the piano bench. "Jim, you know, maybe, something about Winona Lake?" he asked.

I did. My father took us, his family, to Winona Lake once when I was a boy. Some family went along, including a couple of cousins my age, all Christian Reformed children of warm and pious parents. We knew what it was like to feel "power in the blood." Like our dads, all of whom were vets, we loved singing "Onward Christian Soldiers"--that's number 449 in the old hymnal.

But what happened under the tent was unlike anything we could have imagined. Scrambled end punctuation on the stemwinder's every sentence was so strange that we doubled up with laughter. "Hallelujah!" some crazy just down the row would yell, and we'd try to hold it in which only made it worse. 

"Grandpa Schaap," I said, "my grandpa the preacher, went to Winona Lake with the family?" I said.

"And me with," he said. He was trying to tell it straight, but a smile undercut his resolve. "It was a test," he said, and he was serious. "That's what it was--it was a test." He shook his head. "Your grandpa Schaap never asked me a thing about that weekend, didn't talk about it on the way home even, and it never came up in any conversation thereafter." He shrugged his shoulders. "It was a test."

"And you passed?" I said.

He shrugged his shoulders, chuckled a bit. "I married his daughter," he said.

Uncle Roger was raised in the Reformed Church, six miles away in another wooden shoe village named Cedar Grove. What's more, he'd gone to Hope College, not Calvin. But I couldn't help thinking that the test wasn't a tribal thing. Grandpa himself had gone to Hope. It was bigger.

"Your grandpa never brought it up, and for years it seemed to me to be something of a puzzle. Why did he want me along?"  Broad smile. Huge smile. "It was a test," he said, and then, "I should get back to the other room." He bounced his wrist on his knee. "I told myself that Jim would like that story," he said.  

He was right. It's stuck with me so fast that forty years after Uncle Roger told me I'm telling you. It came to me when I was reading Steve Mahonnet-Vanderwell's September 1 piece on The Twelve, about "concentric rings of purity" and his own "tangled relationship with evangelicals."

And then, too, Michael Sandel's essay in yesterday's NY Times, a regular Jeremiad on "disdain for the less educated" as "the last acceptable prejudice." Uncle Roger's story came to me as a  grandpa of college-age kids making decisions about goals and calling, and considering my own preferences, my wishes, my dreams for them in a culture and a nation that is very surely at risk of breaking up. 

It's difficult for some of us--for me, at least--to fight the very pride that did in Adam and Eve, to try to hide our discomfort, even our disdain for those who are not within our own "concentric rings of purity." Not showing that discomfort is one thing; it's even harder not to feel disdain.

"It was a test," my Uncle Roger told me. He'd come to realize what Grandpa had created was a test of his soon-to-be son-in-law. It was all about pride, as so much of our lives tends to be. 

Real Estate

Here's what I was thinking one Saturday morning 13 years ago.

Yesterday, I stood in the heart of what Iowan's call a section of land, only two farms left within its parameters--one far east, the other far west, a mile of shorn fields between them. I'm a half-mile from the roads that square the fields, but I'm alone, no trees to speak of either. Just about every acre of land around here is off limits to hunters, so I'm always a little leery of being seen on early mornings with a camera--some land-owner might think I'm culling his pheasants. 

But it was early, and only an occasional car moved by on the blacktop north. I was alone in the middle of all of that land, as visible, I suppose, as the cottonwood stumps I was hunting. I was there for the dawn.

I was thinking about how I'll never feel exactly what my father-in-law does about the land. His deep regard is a respect only those who've spent their lives as a part of its seasonal movements can have. I'm was born and reared a townie. On clear mornings, I think the land is beautiful--any season. But I don't hazard out in storms. I like its lines, and I'm awed by its dimensions; but my home is the parlor--well, maybe the basement.

One lesson I've learned about Native people is that my father-in-law is more like them than I am, not because they farm the land but because they regard it with equally abiding respect. To both of them, the land is a someone. To some, in fact, that someone is divine.

To me, the land is a grand palette for God's artistry. But to those who really live on it and with it, it's not just a perfect backdrop. It's much more. It's someone in their lives. It lives and has its being. It has personality and character.

I'll grant you that it's silly to think of a single "Indian mind." But out here in the west at least, a Native regard for the land--which does not necessarily mean "the environment"--is far deeper and more profound than most of us realize. To most white folks today--farmers too, agri-businessmen--the land isn't really someone, it's real estate.

Navajo history--like so much Native history--includes a horrible period of forced relocation, the "Long Walk" from their homelands, to the Bosque Redondo, a place called Ft. Sumter, where they and some Apache neighbors were told by Washington to settle down and start farming like good, industrious white people.

That awful relocation was a horrific failure--pestilence and starvation reigned; so with the Treaty of 1868, the Navajo people were permitted to return home.

"Home" is and was, back then, the land they inhabit yet today, the largest reservation in America, high-plains, desert land most Midwest sod-busters consider impossible to farm and would tell you as they're driving past. But it is a land of enchantment, as New Mexico says, and it's theirs. It's where they've lived and loved and had their being. It's where they've lost and won. It's home.

I think it was Faulkner, a Mississippian, who once said that the great difference between white Northerners and white Southerners was very simple: "we lost."

Same with the Navajo. The Long Walk isn't ancient history, and it doesn't stick in the Native consciousness simply because of horrific mistreatment and suffering. For a time, they lost their land. It was taken from them. They were displaced. It was grabbed violently and unjustly. And along with it went a way of life. We took their land and their culture. Most white folks might well say, "Get over it," just as Yankees tell Georgians or Mississippians.

What I've learned from Native people is "they lost." That story doesn't just go away.

When we were Gallup in August, we visited a Century 21 office, where we learned that not all that much land was available in and around Gallup, NM, because so much of it is either government- or tribal-owned.

There's something about that I like. So much is reservation around McKinley County, New Mexico, that there simply isn't much real estate.

That's what I was thinking yesterday, in the middle of a beautiful section of land not all that far west and south of town. 

A Sabbath with the Spirits

Among the Natives of the region, it was a hot spot, a greatly famous landmark thought to be inhabited--well, haunted really--by odd, little spirits sufficiently abhorrent to make them wary enough to stay away. And that's why, when Lewis and Clark came up the wide Missouri one hot summer day, August 24, 1804, once they heard the story, they decided to hike up north a ways and investigate. They were somewhere in the vicinity of the mouth of the Vermilion River, somewhere around here, when the Omahas told them about little foot-tall demons. 

Here's how their Journal entry goes (in their one of a kind spelling):

"Capt Lewis and my Self Concluded to visit a High Hill Situated in an emence Plain three Leagues N. 20° W. from the mouth of White Stone river, this hill appear to be of a Conic form and by all the different Nations in this quater is Supposed to be a place of Deavels or that they are in human form with remarkable large heads and about 18 inches high; that they are very watchfull and ar armed with Sharp arrows with which they can kill at a great distance; they are said to kill all persons who are so hardy as to attemp to approach the hill; they state the tradition informs them than many indians have suffered by these little people and among others that three Mahas Souix Ottoes and other neibghouring nations believe this fable that no consideration is suffiecient to induce them to approach this hill."

Sunflowers had the run of the place on Sunday afternoon when we visited again, took the half-mile hike up to the top:

 

That's Spirit Mound, way in the background. We'd been up top before quite often and had never run into little demons, but the hike is worth the time once you get up top and realize that right there, not all that far from home, William Clark and Meriwether Lewis didn't even have to get out the glass to see something they'd never seen before, their first jaw-dropping view of a sea of bison.  

Spirit Mound, an odd little blemish on an otherwise featureless prairie, is not man-made, but a construction of Niobrara chalk, remnant sea shells--not a lie--of another time, an age when the entire region was the bed of a huge inland sea. 

It's a vigorous hike but not demanding. The afternoon was a bit warm with a good wind, but our little foray up Spirit Mound was more than sufficient to raise a sweat. While we were there, some real runner ran up and down the trail--twice! Left me panting just to watch.

I didn't jog a foot of it, but I dare say the trip is as good for the body as it is for the soul. 

It's a beautiful place, oddly undistinguished, little more than an weird prairie pimple--a mound, certainly no mountain and barely a hill; but it has a history that haunts a bit when you hike to the top.  Still takes your breath away.

Stops you cold with the immensity of the inescapable truth that this world around us, fashioned by a loving sculptor many moons ago, is as rich with story as it is abundant in awe. 

You can do worse on an almost perfect Sabbath afternoon, so this old couple ended with a selfie, our very first in 48 years. (Pardon my hand there on the left. We really don't know what we're doing.)

Reading Mother Teresa -- Pride

Pride brings a person low, 

but the lowly in spirit gain honor. 

Proverbs 29:23

A famous 16th century woodcut by Pieter Brueghel, one of a series based on the Seven Deadly Sins, features mirrors, lots of them, because the moral of story is all about pride. Ours. 

Human pride is often considered the first of what are traditionally called “the Seven Deadlies.” Up front in the old Brueghel print is a woman admiring her reflection while simultaneously clutching something resembling a knife in her other hand. There is a monster in the center foreground who is so taken with himself that he admires even his nether parts. Yet another appallingly grotesque monster – human face, claw-like arms, and extended wings like a cicada-killing wasp – licks his chops delectably at his own image, offered to him by a strange nun-like woman who is gesturing magnanimously, her robe barely covering a reptilian tail.

There’s more to the woodcut – believe me. 

But then, I suppose, there’s no end to the extent of human pride in all of us, pride that bowled over Eve first, then Adam, both of whom wanted more, despite the heavenly garden.

The English language has a thousand synonyms for pride, it seems. Lordly – see it? Or even more exotic, baronial. To be proud is to be high-minded, high-mettled, high-handed, high-plumed, high-flown, or high-toned. There’s arrogance, audacity, aloofness – and we say of some overbearing prigs that they’re “putting on airs.” What we feel when we’re around them is contempt, disdain in the sheer insolence of their pomposity. Lots and lots of words.

I’ve said enough. The fact is, pride belongs not to them, to others, but to us, to all of us. The human condition, life after the fall, makes the cardinal rule of the Christian life – to love others more than we love ourselves – nigh unto impossible.

When her immediate superiors, one after another, gave Mother Teresa permission to leave the convent and follow Jesus’ own voice in the slums of Calcutta, she was left with one more petition – to the Holy See. This is how she wrote Y.E. (Your Eminence):

In all sincerity I admit that I possess no virtue and have no merit; it is a mystery to me how the Good God wants this from poor me. All these years of my religious life, I have been quite happy as a member of the Institute of the Bl. V.M. [Blessed Virgin Mary] and the thought of leaving it breaks my heart. Why Almighty God calls me now to this new life I do not know, but I want to do only His Holy Will without any reserve, whatever the cost be. (116)

I admit it. I find such abject humility hard to believe. We are – all of us – such bloody victims of pride that believing someone could actually expunge the most deeply-embedded sin of human mind and soul is almost beyond me.

But it’s worth noting that believing Mother Teresa’s selflessness was the required first step in the judgments made by each one of her superiors, from her mentor to the Holy See. They had to believe that there was no ego in her vision, no pride in the peculiar mission she was convinced she had been directed to by the very voice of Jesus.

And, not without some lingering doubts, not without some hesitation, they did believe her.

Along with her letter to the Holy See was a cover letter from the archbishop, who wrote a kind of recommendation for her and her unique petition. Among other things, he wrote, “I believe her to be,” he said, “very mortified and very generous” (117).

Mortified – isn’t that a ridiculous word? It’s almost impossible for me to believe that anyone today would ever use that word to recommend someone else – “mortified.”

Here’s the rub. That descriptor, I’m sure, is probably exactly what the Holy See wanted to read. What’s more, if you believe your Bible, it’s what God wants – our mortification, the death of the old man of sin. Be ye mortified, the Bible might well say. Be ye mortified.

What He God wants is impossible, isn’t it? Humanly impossible, given our arrogance.

By grace alone.

A little trip out west--viii

 

Listen, this is Believe It or Not stuff.

But first an old story you might have heard.

There's a guy, an old soldier maybe, some poor soul left behind on an otherwise deserted Pacific island (swap oceans if you'd like). Poor guy's been on his own for fifty years, sole occupant of this tiny island otherwise overlooked. 

One day finally, someone drops by, first visitor in all those years. The visitor is astounded at the city the old guy has built. He had nothing else to do for fifty years, I suppose, so he built himself an entire town.

"There's my post office," the old guy says, "and right there's my town hall. And right up the block here--see the steeple?--that's my church." Broad smile. Proud. 

Mr. First Visitor looks down the other direction, where he's spotted yet another steeple. He points, draws his eyebrows, shrugs his shoulders, as if confounded.

"Oh yeah," the old man says, "that's the church I used to go to."

Where two or three or gathered, someone's pretty likely to leave.

If you think I'm talking about your church, lighten up a bit. When first I heard that story, I heard it from Jewish folks talking "temple." I'm not kidding.

You're not likely to believe this Little Church. It's in a town so small the only gas station is Standard Oil, and that's gone too.

Keystone, Nebraska, is barely a village--but then it wasn't in 1908 either, when its newly settled citizens, blessed with an almost divine civil spirit, built The Little Church. Not mega, believe me, so small you can almost throw it in the back of the van and take it along home. Put a choir inside and there'd be no room for a congregation; you'd have to pipe in a preacher if you wanted a sermon. Some people, I'm sure, have bigger sheds. Five miles away beside the lake hundreds of travel trailers make this look like a water closet.

Seriously, The Little Church is nowhere near fifty feet, stem to stern, front to back--no, front to front. Yeah--"front to front." Here's the thing: this little church has done something for the ages by sweetly combining whole congregations--whole denominations--for the very first time since Luther's Reformation. Seriously. On one end there's an altar for the Catholics, who need to hold mass come the First Day of the week. 

Turn around, and on the other end of the sanctuary stands a pulpit for the Protestants, who need sermons more than wine and wafers. The Little Church is a spiritual switch-hitter. Okay, both sides meeting together could create a problem, but that won't likely occur 'till Kingdom Come. For this time being at least, The Little Church belongs to everyone.

Kevin Costner, years ago, became Iowa's favorite adopted son, when, in Field of Dreams, he said. . .well listen in for yourself.

Keystone, Nebraska, is close enough to Nebraska's big Lake Mac to pick up more vacationers these days than it has since The Little Church was built, but only the truly devoted townies would mistake Keystone for heaven. 

But it testifies to something beautiful anyway.  The Little Church stands in a broad field of green grass cleanly cut. No gravel anywhere because there's no need for a parking lot. It's just this darling little church, a block up from the blacktop that zooms in and out of town. The Little Church is a tiny place, but you can't miss it. 

And you shouldn't. It is its own kind of heavenly place, a shelter in the time of storm, a little palace of peace, a taste of heaven.

I'll admit to my sin. I too was skeptical. I too figured this little church too good to be true, so I left town in a scramble rather than tour Keystone, rather than look around. I didn't want to know if there was yet another church someplace around the town, the church people used to attend. 

I'm not saying there isn't, only that if there are two churches in Keystone, Nebraska, I don't want to know.

Visit Keystone sometime if you're anywhere near to Lake Mac. A visit to The Little Church--just to know it's there--will do your heart a blessing, just plain-old good for the soul. 

A little western tour--vii

 

Found it. 

Here 'tis--the rightfully proud stone of Lieut. G. P. Cather. Here lies a hero. 

His wife wanted his remains here, in the States, and here, where he grew up, the rugged plains of southern Nebraska, a cemetery near a burg named Bladen. Oddly enough, his mother wanted whatever was left of his mortal coil to stay in France, where he'd been buried soon after he fell, on May 28, 1918. Or so says the stone.

It's maybe the finest stone in his area of the cemetery and includes a bronzed portrait, as you can see.

Lieut. G. P. Cather

AUGUST 12, 1883

KILLED IN ACTION

AT THE BATTLE OF

CANTIGNY, FRANCE

MAY 28, 1918

CO.A 26 INFANT FIRST DIV

I came to see much more than a graveyard, but finding this Cather's stone was a major motivation for all the driving. I'd been reading Cather's 1923 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel One of Ours because I never had read that book before; and because I knew it had been both highly prized and heavily scorned. I'm sure the list of Pulitzer winners contains some others that have turned out not to be yawners, but this novel--about the "war to end all wars" was scorned by many, Hemingway and a dozen other heavyweights, for being, well, too--how should I say it?--soft. 

What all agree on is that Willa Cather, G. P's first cousin, is the prototype for Claude Wheeler, the protagonist of One of Ours; and that Cather was gifted with a story because she found a harvest of material in a stack of correspondence G. P. kept up with his mom back in Bladen. 

Which is not to say One of Ours is creative non-fiction. It's a novel that carries a load of created by her own imagination. She's writing a World War I novel, having never spent a moment a mud trench. Before the war, she'd been to France, loved it immensely--and that love is in the novel; but the scenes of battle she created are drawn from her ample imagination.

That, of course, may be why Hemingway hated One of Ours. Having been in war himself, he grew impatient with people who tried their hand at painting a picture of war when they had no history. Knowing Hemingway, he may have despised it because the novelist was a woman. That's not at all out of the question. 

This man, Grosvenor Phillips Cather, wasn't so much a ne'er do well, as he was someone who her cousin Willa decided simply hadn't found himself. Like Wheeler's, G. P.'s marriage wasn't peachy, and he seemed somehow to lack the sense of duty to farm, not the strength or the ability. What he never felt, not until his death was a true sense of calling, the kind of selfless commitment to anything really. He was floundering, as was his marriage. He wasn't a kid when he died. You can do the math yourself, but he was 35 years old, commissioned as an officer when he went in.

What Willa does with Wheeler is give him cause. She granted him a blessed epiphany amid a sense of calling he felt down to his soul for the first moment in his life. The action that war provides, he believes, has given him something he'd never once experienced in his life, a sense of a vital community with his blood brothers out there in the life and death trenches.

Claude Wheeler is killed in action just a few minutes after looking at the horrors of war all around him and realizing that alongside the heroic fighting men in his unit, he'd become somebody, not because he'd been heroic but because he was part of a selfless bunch of stubborn boys who risked everything--and often lost it all--for each other. The war both killed him and made him a man.

We tend to think of the literature of World War I as bloody awful, its power created not by the heroism of its warriors but by the abundant absurdity of all that useless death. Think of John Dos Passos or Siegfried Sassoon. 

Willa Cather's story is about a different vet, one who discovered something rich and true about himself a moment before a bullet caught him.

Up there on that bronze portrait of the doughboy, just to the right of his cheek is the line "For his country." Of that, I'm not so sure. Claude Wheeler wasn't thinking of Old Glory painting the breeze over the fruited Nebraska prairie. His joy, his epiphany was in the unforeseen revelation that, at that moment, between life and death, he was likely never more selfless, more committed to those around him, the boys of war, boys become men.

I enjoyed Willa Cather's One of Ours, but as I stood there at G. P's grave, I couldn't help but love the story of her story even more.