Standing Bear of the Poncas -- i

[Would you care to see it, this statue of the Ponca chief Standing Bear is on display in the nation's Capitol, where it stands among a host of other notables. Standing Bear was a civil rights advocate long before he or anyone else knew what exactly that meant. Through his intense commitment to the land of his forefathers, he was able to exact American citizenship for himself and his people at a time when Indians were thought to be wards of the state, what they had been since the first white man came to the continent. 

The story of Standing Bear belongs in a category with story of Rosa Parks. It is a great American story. 

I'm telling it in four segments. You can listen to this first chapter here: 

https://www.kwit.org/post/story-standing-bear-part-1 .

KWIT, in Sioux City, is telling the story in conjunction with the Avery Brothers, who have used their billboards to draw attention to the Native American history of the region.]

To be sure, there was a good reason for the Poncas to cut the deal they did with the strange emissary who showed up one day from Washington. He’d come to let them know that “the Great Father” wanted the Poncas to move from their homeland on the Missouri River, to Indian Country, what would become Oklahoma, to a place where, he claimed, they’d be safe from raids by larger and more warlike neighbors.

That argument was, for the Ponca, not total garbage. The Poncas were warriors, but they were few in number when compared to the Brule Sioux. What’s more, their culture was not as nomadic. They’d put down roots on the Niobrara River, literally and figuratively, planted crops long before white men determined agriculture was what they wanted all Native people to do.

The Poncas had no desire to leave home, but escaping suffering was nothing to sneeze at, so they cut a deal. It was January, 1872. Supplies were scarce, as was food, so they told this stranger that they’d agree to his demands if, first, ten Ponca chiefs could go south to see if it was a place they could abide.

If it was a good land, they might agree, but only if they could visit Washington themselves to talk with the Great Father about a move they didn’t want to make.

What those 10 chiefs found in Indian Territory was ground impossible to farm, and residents who seemed to live without hope. “We did not wish to sink as low as they seemed to be,” Standing Bear, one of the ten chiefs said. We’re not moving.

That’s when they were told they had no choice.

In a hotel room in a border town in Kansas, Standing Bear decided they were leaving Indian Territory, bound for home, directionless. “Let us go anyway,” he told the others. That night, eight chiefs left the two others, both sick, and walked on railroad tracks north, confident of somehow finding their way back to the Niobrara, two entire states away.

Eighteen days later they reached the Nebraska border, feet so bloody they left footprints on the floor of the Otoe tribal agent. Their suffering had been immense. It was late March before they reached the Omahas, their relatives and friends.

On March 30, 1872, Chief Standing Bear stood in the offices of the Sioux City Daily Journal and handed the editor a letter recounting their suffering and their unjust fate. The editor published that long letter the next day and told his readers that the Ponca’s story demanded attention from “any persons in this country who believe that every human being, however humble, is entitled to the same justice claimed for themselves.”

Other neighbors wrote letters directly to the President, protesting the Ponca’s treatment and the demand that they remove themselves from their traditional home and move to Indian Territory, a place that looked nothing like the earth where their ancestors lay. That letter recounted the Poncas’s painful, 500-mile journey across rivers and streams in March. We “have been thirty days getting back as far as the Omahas, hungry, tired, shoeless, footsore, and sad at heart. Please answer at once, for we are in trouble,” their letter to the President said.

The answer they received was waiting for them when they returned to the Niobrara. That man had asked his Washington superiors himself. “Removal of the Poncas will be insisted upon,” he was told.

Soon, painfully, those eight chiefs and 500 Ponca were told in no uncertain terms that the question of whether they would live in Indian Territory had been determined. All of them, young and old, every Ponca in the villages along the Niobrara River—they all had to leave for Indian Territory. Those chiefs had already suffered their own “trail of tears,” but there would be yet another, this one much worse, much harder, much bigger, and far more heart-rending.

"Why They Loved Him"

It's a provocative title, intriguing, because to me, understanding how it is that good, good people find Donald Trump so appealing remains the mystery of the Trump era. I like Joe Biden. I voted for him (by mail), but the truth is, I could have been faithful to any number of Democratic candidates this time around. I was pleased to hear every one of them speak.

But I'm not madcap bonkers about Biden, not as crazed as Trump's panting fans, not obsessed or bewitched, willing to risk Covid just to welcome him mask-lessly on a cold airport tarmac. What on earth makes Bible-toting evangelicals buy into a grotesque storyline that a cabal of heinous Democrats and RHINOs, plus some Hollywood star types, and any number of "elites" (of whom I must be one, I guess) gather together ritually to kill children and drink their blood? QAnon anyone?

But let's leave the madness out. Why do ordinary people slavishly pull on their MAGA caps or hoist Trump flags for a Trump flotilla? On that subject I read because I just don't understand.

An opinion piece in the New York Times some time ago made some limited sense. It doesn't explain the evangelical swoon, but abortion IS the Trump card there--and I understand. I don't fall in line, but I understand. If Democrats are baby-killers, as my five-year-old son said of Obama in 2008 as he crawled into my lap, I get that. I don't agree, but I do understand.

In "Why They Loved Him," Farah Stockman, an editor at the Times, took a close look at a man named Tim, who, like dozens of men and women she'd interviewed, lost his job and his way of life by way of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, when thousands of blue-collar jobs went south to Mexico and made fatter cats out of men who had been loaded already.

"A machinist named Tim," she claims, "carried his steelworker union card in his wallet for years after the factory closed, just to remind himself who he was." NAFTA didn't simply steal his job, it robbed him of something far more important--identity. "Tim grew up in a union household. His dad had been an autoworker; his grandfather, a coal miner." He lost his job, AND he lost his way of life.

That Tim would drop his own, generations'-old commitments to the Democratic party, a party that, he said, once stood up for the little guy, and instead surf a big orange wave behind a man with weird hair who promised to bring those jobs to boarded-up main streets all over the rust belt makes good sense. Men and women like Tim have every right to say, "Give me back my life." It wasn't only the living wage those steelworkers wanted returned, it was a loving community, a way of life that gives meaning and order to any of their/our lives.

What resonated with me was that union card, something he couldn't and wouldn't toss. Somehow that union card meant more to him than the unemployed or underemployed guy he saw when he looked in a mirror. Enter Donald J. Trump.

I've been helping a World War II nurse--she's a century old--write her memoirs. She's Lakota. She tells me that the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty essentially "unmanned" her grandfather. When he signed onto the treaty inaugurating the reservation system, everything changed. No longer would the buffalo roam through the heart of their lives, their culture. As long as he could remember, he'd been nomadic--the Lakota had never cities, even towns. Reservations changed everything.

To understand the significant social problems of our reservation, my Lakota nurse told me, start there--with a way of life entirely erased by way of an inky thumbprint, a way of life ended forever.

What Trump offered Tim and so many others is hope, as Stockman says, "false hope, but false hope is better than no hope at all." 

But it was false hope, as Tim--I do hope--has now perhaps come to understand.

The title of the article takes the past tense. In two weeks, we'll see.

Morning Thanks--not just any Puritan preacher

Somehow, or so it seems, this portrait catches what I can't help but believe was the true Jonathan Edwards, the justly famous Puritan divine and one-time President of Princeton University. His eyes seem fixed, but there's nothing haughty or haunted about them. He appears not to be hectoring anyone, but listening, something only accomplished by capable men and women.

His lips are thin, which might signify the kind of tightness one always associates with Puritans; but they're not arched into either smile or frown. Instead, his whole face--his eyes are slightly widened--makes him appear healthily attentive. He wants to know, wants to learn. If Puritanism is the sneaking suspicion that someone somewhere is having a good time, as H. L. Mencken so famously said, this Edwards at least does not appear "Puritannical."

And he wasn't, though he was. For better and/or for worse, he will always be perceived as preacher who ranted on "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," perhaps the only sermon right there in the canon of every high school anthology of American lit. And "Sinners" was his--of that there's no doubt. Edwards, more than any other Puritan prelate, awakened spirituality in the hearts and souls of his countrymen, and he did it, oddly enough, in a soft, almost feminine voice. He was no Billy Sunday, no Billy Graham, no Jerry Falwell. He didn't preach like a locker-room coach, or attempt to mimic the greatest pulpiteer of his time, George Whitefield, whose traveling salvation show packed city squares up and down the colonies.

The story goes that when he actually preached that sermon, parishioners might have found it difficult to hear, so quiet and unassuming was Edwards' voice. However, some claim that no one couldn't listen because the quality of his ideas--"There is nothing that keeps wicked men at any one moment out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God"--somehow resonated with the sleepy moral consciences of New Englanders who, in their quest for material gain, hadn't quite yet lost the cultural memory of what they all still recognized as their own "total depravity."

And thus, Jonathan Edwards "awakened" American's first "Great Awakening," which explains why the quintessential Calvinist theologian--none better during or immediately after his era--so honorably sits on display (or at least did, some years ago) in the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College. Quite simply, Edwards lit 'em up big time. From the pulpit, he lacked the crusading presence of a George Whitefield, but not the theological fervency, and he surpassed absolutely everyone is pure intellect.

As a brand new high school English teacher, way back when, I tried turning my classroom into Puritan meeting house, men on one side, women on the other. I borrowed a choir robe from the music department, put a cross up on the podium (probably not a Puritan affectation!), and told the kids that when I'd enter, I wanted them in austere silence before I'd deliver the most dramatic moments of "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," which I then did, yelling and screaming like a third-rate tub-thumper.

I had it all wrong. Edwards didn't scream out the horrors he wanted to use to introduce his people to their own dark and sinful selves, he let what he said do that work, rather than how he said it.

When I met with a bunch of them last year, a half-century later, some of them brought it up and broke into laughter. That's okay. They weren't derisive. What's soothed my soul was that they remembered the wild-eyed preacher at all.

I wanted them to understand this moment in their own American history because it was so powerfully formative, even if "the Puritan era" can be and has been blamed for just about every social ill from which this culture of ours suffers. And, I suppose, I wanted them to understand me, their first-year teacher, who, at 22 years old, was still wrestling with the twin towers of Edwards' faith, and mine--the sovereignty of God and the depravity of man.

That's a biggie, whether we're talking 17th or 21st century. 

How about this?--Jonathan Edwards on Donald J. Trump. Oh my, that's a sermon I'd attend.

This morning, this old Calvinist gives thanks for a theologian of towering intellect and significance in the American story, a famous Calvinist divine named the Reverend Jonathan Edwards.

The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.

Been a while since I've heard a sermon like that. Maybe that's good. Maybe not.

Monkey Mind and Mine

 

Monkey Mind

When I was a child I had what is called an inner life.
For example, I looked at that girl over there
In the second aisle of seats and wondered what it was like
To have buck teeth pushing out your upper lip
And how it felt to have those little florets the breasts
Swelling her pajama top before she went to sleep.
Walking home, I asked her both questions
And instead of answering she told her mother
Who told the teacher who told my father.
After all these years, I can almost feel his hand
Rising in the room, the moment in the air of his decision,
Then coming down so hard it took my breath away,
And up again in that small arc
To smack his open palm against my butt.
I'm a slow learner
And still sometimes I'm sitting here wondering what my father
Is thinking, blind and frail and eighty-five,
Plunged down into his easy chair half the night
Listening to Bach cantatas. I know he knows
At every minute of every hour that he's going to die
Because he told my mother and my mother told me.
I didn't cry or cry out or say I'm sorry.
I lay across his lap and wondered what
He could be thinking to hit a kid like that.

 by Steve Orlen, from The Elephant's Child: New and Selected Poems

This poem too--I like it, not because I have some memory of abuse, because I don't. But this Writers Almanac poem opens up the crap shoot that growing up is--really, that life is. Who knows what sticks in our minds and souls? Nobody. Nor does anyone know why. On the basis of some undefinable permutations, some impressions and perceptions from each of our pasts simply won't die but knock around in our conscious minds as if they had their own life, which they apparently do.

 Little more than a week ago--and I wrote it here--I got up early in the morning in an unfamiliar cabin and heard, from my own feet, the sound of my grandfather's slippers shuffling over the kitchen linoleum in our house fifty years ago. My grandfather died when I was six. In what crack or crevice did that memory hide for all those years? And why did it stay? 

He knew one joke, or at least the Grandpa in my mind knew only one joke. He likely knew more, but my five-year old memory held on to just one. So a couple walked into a railroad station, looking to get away. "Two to Dulut'," the guy says. The station manager thought the guy was kidding. "Well, tee, teetle, ee." He thought that was blindingly funny, and I laughed along, obligingly.

There's nothing particularly untoward about those memories or my grandfather, but the sound of his slippers was there as if I'd just heard it yesterday. It just happens that last week, for the first time in my life, I was in Dulut'.  Of course, Grandpa's knee-slapper showed up. 

Nothing about his funeral has stayed. I have no memory of it. Or do I? Perhaps some morning, brushing my teeth, some artifact will emerge from whatever primordial ooze holds the catalog of our strange impressions and perceptions. 

In "Monkey Mind," some thorny issues of a whacking he have never really left the narrator's consciousness, even become obsessive. He remembers being swatted unjustly for what he's always assumed was simple, childhood curiosity. Made no sense. Today, he's old enough to understand all of that, but he can't forget, he can't. The whacking has hung in there from the day it happened so long ago, even though today his father is dying.

I'm a victim of all of this too. I suppose we all are. Not only that, but I can't help but wonder what injustices I inflicted on my own children--and have likewise forgotten. The old man likely remembers nothing of the events which haunt the kid. What don't I know about what I said or did when my children were simply curious--or simply kids? Maybe I'd rather not know.

A mind's storehouse of memory is a curious mystery. Even a little scary. What makes "Monkey Mind" a poem, what makes it art, is not it's soaring beauty. This morning this odd little story awakened in me an otherwise forgotten moment of my own life, as, I'm guessing, it did yours.

"Monkey Mind" belongs to Stephen Orlen, but to me and, if I'm right, to you too. It's ours. 

That makes it good.

Reading Mother Teresa--Possession

“Hear my prayer, Lord, 

listen to my cry for help; 

do not be deaf to my weeping. 

I dwell with you as a foreigner, 

a stranger, as all my ancestors were.” Psalm 39:12 

There is, within me, more than a smidgen of my grandfather’s DNA, more than a pint or two of his fulsome, brooding Calvinist blood. I think of him often really, a man so driven by the depth of his own sinfulness (he was really a good man) that he would take a kind of perverse pleasure in recounting the darkness of his soul – as in, “if I had one thing to do with my salvation, I’d burn in hell.” That kind of thing. Complete with tears. 

He likely had a family background in the old Dutch conventicles, those hotbed small groups where intense devotions ran so emotion-laden that their house meetings became, in no small measure, the church. Some people believe that house churches are the wave of the future. Good night, they have a history, a past – intense meditations for intense sinners whose long prayers in an intimate circle stretched on endlessly. Grandpa had a heavy dose of that.

Back then, in the early years of the 20th century, I don’t think he was unusual. In most churches there were more Harry Dirkses per capita, I’m sure, than there are today. That kind of exhausting, abject confession promised and likely delivered abundant blessings. After all, the finest means by which to glory – seriously! – in the marvelous grace of God almighty was to lie prostrate on the floor in abject selflessness. Grace, for even lowly me!

By all reports, that was my grandpa. It’s easy to parody.

But I’m saying that sometime he’s in me, too. Maybe more than sometime. Maybe far more than I care to admit.

My mother, his daughter, always wished to be Pentecostal, to speak in tongues, to be ever closer to the Lord than she was, no matter that her son thinks she’s dang well close enough. Her son thinks such unquenchable longing is almost a disease. For someone who talks constantly about the love of God, it sometimes seems to me that she’s ever an arm’s length away, maybe even farther.

She wanted “Blessed Assurance” sung at her husband’s funeral because she knew he never shared her more tremulous faith. My father never worried much about his salvation, even though he was, as most who know him would say, something of a saint. She’s never quite understood his confidence because she was never herself so blessedly assured. If she were, the drama would be over; and I think greatly liked the drama.

Her son can giggle about all this, but what I’m confessing this morning is that, like it or not, I’m still my mother’s son – and my grandpa’s grandson. And I feel it most when I read something like this from Mother Teresa: “Why must we give ourselves fully to God? Because God has given Himself to us." 

Just blows me away. That logic is so airtight that its undeniable truth makes mincemeat of my feeble attempts at being faithful. She is so absolutely right. Just to be sure, let me say that there are no tears here – I’m not my grandfather’s clone. But the way Mother Teresa says what she does here casts a long, sickening shadow over my sinfulness. I admit it.

See, there he is – Grandpa Dirkse,  ye olde Calvinist. In the flesh.

“I live for God and give up my own self, and in this way induce God to live for me,” she wrote. “Therefore to possess God we must allow Him to possess our soul” (29).

Wow. Let me tell you, on that one I’m in the cheap seats watching--even maybe, once in a while, wishing too.

What you see is what you get

 

The thing about October is that, on a good day, just about everything is beautiful. Okay, part of the reason this shot strikes me as attractive is lighting. Had the day been rain besotted, had the woods not been mottled by dark and lurking shadows, this plain old maple leaf would likely draw nothing but flies. If that. But the sky was clear, the sun was bright, and the season itself provided that glorious rusty yellow. 

Or this. A bouquet of aspens, tall as naked ladies, a bevy of them amid some maples, all of it way down there beneath us somewhere.

By rights--or so it seems--the autumn of the year shouldn't be so beautiful because if this shot witnesses anything, it's death and decay--"death and decay in all around I see," but, gulp, it couldn't be more beautiful. People go "up north" almost any time of year, but fall trips call out the thousands because in October the world is an art gallery, full of masterwork accomplished by the Master Artist. 

I forget how the line goes, but it's operative here too--"success is 90 percent sweat and ten percent talent" (maybe the numbers are off, but you get the picture). Photography requires some skill, but the most significant component of any slough of great pictures is being in the right place at the right time. And what I'm saying is that, in a bright October sun, plunked right in the middle of the woods in some northern clime, you're there. You've got to try really hard to screw up on autumnal glory. Just fire away. 

Here's a shot I knew the moment I looked was going to be a winner.

So let's review the facts. It's October, the leaves on those hardwoods absolutely could not be more flashy--factor numero uno. Secondo?--the lake is calm tonight. If there were any more of a ripple, this shot wouldn't be this shot. Three: the sun is dying in the west, bathing the world in its own glorious gold glory. Four: I'm there. I'm not inside the cabin reading my email.

Five: the distance between me and the other side of the lake is perfect. If the channel was just twice as wide, the stretch of all that glorious color wouldn't cover the water like it does. Six: I got a camera in my hand. 

What I'm saying is that beauty is only partially in the eye of the beholder. You see it when you're permitted to. I was, right here, outside a cabin at a Minnesota lake, the passive recipient of grace. Sure, I had a camera, even if it was only my phone), but the Creator of heaven and earth served me up this delicious autumnal salad. All I had to do is click the shutter.

Fall is a blessing, the grandest momentary reprieve we could ever be granted. How sweet it is of the Creator to soften the blow, how tenderhearted. If I were standing right there today, just a few days and some untidy winds ago, what that camera would see would be absolutely nothing like this. 

That's the story. "Not what my hands have done can save my guilty soul"--or something like that. It is, really--it's very much like grace itself, all this beauty is. 

Yesterday, it was there in spades. Today, it's gone.

For just a while, thank the Lord.

Father Baraga

You've got to go a long ways to find a sandy beach along Minnesota's north shore. On almost any beach, the hard and humpy stuff roiling beneath your feet looks and feels a whole lot like lava--which it is, surprising as that may be with not a mountain in sight. Hardened lava, basalt, is unforgiving and almost impossible to walk on--if you're into your 70s anyway. It's pretty much unforgiving. 

"There's a cross just up the beach a ways," some friends of our told us. We'd rented a cabin on the north shore, a little ramshakle thing built in the 1930, but it stood right on the beach, a rocky beach, the one in the picture. 

"A cross?" I said.

They'd hiked up there earlier in the week. "Some priest who came to minister to the Native people," they said. They'd forgotten his name (they're our age). 

I know enough about missionaries and medicine to conjure a story out of some stone cross up the beach somewhere, in all that basalt, even if I'd never heard this story. Father Jean deSmet, a Belgian Jesuit, had blessed Lakota people with whatever medical help he could during a terrible reign of cholera and become much beloved. Andrew and Effa Vander Wagen, native Hollanders, gained blessed acceptance among the Zuni they came to serve when, in 1898, the meager medical provisions they had brought with them created inestimable good will. Besides, Effa was a nurse. Narcissa and Marcus Whitman had tried valiantly--and tragically--to help people deal with a plague of mumps that killed far too many Cayusas in Washington.

The mix of medicine and missions invested in a granite cross just up the rocky beach--a Catholic priest, a suffering people--was more than enough to get me up early to have a look.

Father Frederic Baraga (and, yes, there's a commemorative statue in Grand Rapids, Michigan) was coming over to the north shore of Lake Superior because he'd heard the Chippewa people (Ojibwe) were suffering--thus, at least, the story goes. He and his friend Lewis, a Native, took a birch-bark canoe forty miles across Lake Superior, a trek that would have been 200 miles by land, to get to the north shore. It may be difficult to extract history from myth, but it's not hard to imagine the two of them in a canoe, waves rising, finally coming to shore on a trip during which Father Baraga spent, literally, praying without ceasing.

And so the story goes that Lewis, who did most of the paddling, looked over at the land warily--nothing but basalt, nothing but stony shoreline capable of crunching the canoe. Father Baraga, with the confidence of Jesus himself, assured Lewis they'd be all right and directed him to carry on to sidle up to the shoreline. 

Divine intervention?  Judge that as you will, but by luck or Design they'd rowed up to shore at the inlet of a small, calm river where the landing was somehow manageable. Today, "Cross River" is so named for the wooden cross the two of them erected to signify the blessed answer to prayer. 

All of that happened in 1847. The birch logs they used for the wilderness cross they erected back then was long ago replaced by granite, still there, just up the beach from the cabin where I'd slept the night before. 

And, yes, someone placed a bouquet of fall mums at the base of that cross--purple as the robes of royalty, as if to remember--or not to forget. I am thrilled to report that two bouquets graced that cross that Saturday morning. 

Father Frederic Baraga, "the Snowshoe Priest" fluent in six languages, came to America from Slovenia in 1830, and once crossed Lake Superior on a very treacherous forty-mile passage in a birch bark canoe to a surprisingly easy landing on shore of a land that would become Minnesota ten years later. He came to help a suffering people.  

The story was too good not to tell, but the mums were, for me at least, a special blessing. 

A few moments from the North Shore

 

At dawn's first blush, the world is magical. Fall colors create a cartoon world that slowly becomes even more showy, more outlandish with every passing minute. The plains have an earthiness that's wondrous, maybe especially at dawn. But "up north," as they say, during the gaudy days of late fall, there's barely any room on the palette for the wide and amazing spectrum of bright color. 

So, once you get back your balance, you start to take aim rather than simply firing away. 

Takes some time. For a while you're punch drunk amid the glory all around, but once you regain footing, you don't just look, you see. We're "up north," on Minnesota's glorious North Shore, and while--or so people say--the oaks and maples have already been undressed for the season, bright yellows take over the stage.

Everywhere you look there's something glorious.

Soon enough, even though dawn's Midas touch has lifted, absolutely everything says "praise." 

"Abide with Me" is partly a lament. But fall colors like these give a whole new meaning to "change and decay in all around I see," because change and decay colors the world around. 

Moses was in the desert when he determined God would accept alternatives. So rather than speak to the rock to produce water, he hit it. I'm guessing that if he'd been here instead, he wouldn't have doubted at all. 

"The bedrock was created during the Midcontinent Rift," the science says, "a failed rift which occurred some 1.1 billion years ago. As the continent sundered, magma and lava flowed upward, which cooled into the present-day rock of the Duluth Complex and North Shore Volcanic Group." 

That's the textbook answer. Not for a moment would I doubt that "the continent sundered." 

But what I know is the hands that created this immense bouquet of fall color--even though so much of the extravagance was gone just a day or two later--those hands clearly fashion artistry that can't be assumed to be anything but divine.

Hearts filled with gladness

Just in case you missed it, here's a poem from Writer's Almanac of last week, a poem I found absolutely joyful. 

An Apology for Using the Word 'Heart' in Too Many Poems
by Hayden Carruth

What does it mean? Lord knows; least of all I.
        Faced with it, schoolboys are shy,
And grown-ups speak it at moments of excess
        Which later seem more or less
Unfeasible. It is equivocal, sentimental,
        Debatable, really a sort of lentil—
Neither pea nor bean. Sometimes it’s a muscle,
        Sometimes courage or at least hustle,
Sometimes a core or center, but mostly it’s
        A sound that slushily fits
The meters of popular songwriters without
        Meaning anything. It is stout,
Leonine, chicken, great, hot, warm, cold,
        Broken, whole, tender, bold,
Stony, soft, green, blue, red, white,
        Faint, true, heavy, light,
Open, down, shallow, etc. No wonder
        Our superiors thunder
Against it. And yet in spite of a million abuses
        The word survives; its uses
Are such that it remains virtually indispensable
        And, I think, defensible.
The Freudian terminology is awkward or worse,
        And suggests so many perverse
Etiologies that it is useless; but “heart” covers
        The whole business, lovers
To monks, i.e., the capacity to love in the fullest
        Sense. Not even the dullest
Reader misapprehends it, although locating
        It is a matter awaiting
Someone more ingenious than I. But given
        This definition, driven
Though it is out of a poet’s necessity, isn’t
        The word needed at present
As much as ever, if it is well written and said,
        With the heart and the head?

Changing seasons

Just one of the great joys of E.B. White's classic personal narrative, "Once more to the Woods," is this sense he feels, returning to his childhood haunts at the cabin, that no time has passed. It's overwhelming with him, and nearly blinds him, until that last famous line, to the sobering (that's understatement) fact that time hasn't stood still and that his own mortality is very real.  

I felt something of that this morning, when, lying awake in bed in a familiar cabin, I looked up at the window curtain and seemed to remember so vividly being here before (and before and before and before) and was struck by the illusion that I hadn't left this place 12 months ago now, hadn't started a new school year, hadn't traveled to New Mexico to scout out options, hadn't played with my grandchildren, hadn't visited our folks, hadn't witnessed a new football team at a school I've been at for more than thirty years.

I'm sitting at a table where, to my left, a gorgeous northern Minnesota lake is rippling with a soft wind and growing more silvery since the sun has now finally determined to move up. It's like no time has past.

But it has.

My mother watched her car drive away yesterday. My niece, who retrieved it from the home where Mom lives, told us that Mom had to come outside to watch, partially because that car carries some memories of her life with the man who bought it, several years ago, memories that didn't leave with the Buick, but somehow were as much a part of that car as its engine, its transmission.

But there's more. That Buick is a symbol, whether it's in her parking spot at the home or in our driveway--where it will be soon--500 miles west. That car is a symbol of her ever-shrinking mobility, of the ever-decreasing size of the radius of her own life. She can't get in and go anymore--and she shouldn't. 

It was the right decision, getting rid of it--all her children agreed and even she did. But that doesn't mean that she doesn't understand painfully that when it left the oval driveway in front of the Home, when it went down the street and left her vision, that it wouldn't be back. The tether that keeps her there, at the Home, is now far shorter than it was, even though she didn't take that Buick any farther than a half mile to a grocery store.

The car is gone. She's more dependent on others now for some things she considers necessities, and her world has grown infinitely smaller.

Somehow, her son, I can feel at least some of that pain; and I feel it the same way E. B. White felt it when he watched his son pull on those wet shorts and felt nothing less than mortality tightening its grip on his own vital self.

The fact is, sadly, time has passed since the last early, dark morning I woke up here in a sweet little cabin in northern Minnesota. My perceptions lied to me, as did White's. Life itself has stretched itself between those early mornings.

And I am as mortal as he was.

All of that may well amount to an even greater reason for me to enjoy the morning, the fall colors all around, the lake, which now has a chop in a wind that's picked up.

The oaks, I discovered this morning, have already shed most of their bright red leaves. But the ones that I see, still clinging or there on the floor of the woods--I'll try to treasure, I promise, this morning, even more.

_________________ 

Fifteen years old, this one. Mom's been gone for a half-dozen years. But this morning, 15 years later, just thought I'd say we're off to northern Minnesota. Again. 

Some of Narcissa's story

The haven't changed, of course. it would take behomoth earth-movers to rid the landscape of these great chunks of mountains, not that we wouldn't do just that if some bloke discovered gold in them thar' hills, in which case we'd carve them up like Thanksgiving turkey. 

Most of the Nebraska, alas, is fly-over country, even if you're in a mini-van. I can't count the times I've heard people talk about the place as "so endlessly boooooring." Because the landscape is featureless, coming up on these petrified beasts still invests the traveler with the kind of hope that the pioneers wrote about feeling when, here, they took to their diaries and journals. 

They're really something. Still are. They're sandstone and hard clay, and they're changing, even as we speak, wearing away actually. But when you're coming up the trail, east to west, you can't help feeling, when they appear, still miles and miles away, that you're actually getting somewhere. 

It was somewhere out here, those gargantuan monuments on the horizon, that I discovered Narcissa Whitman, wife of Marcus, the doctor, a couple most every Washington kid discovered in their fifth grade state history courses long ago. Marcus Whitman may well have been the first white man who who aimed his wagon at the west coast, believing--just believing--that he could bring a wagon full of whatever across the mountains--and then did it! 

And his wife. Yes, he brought a woman with him. Can you imagine?  In the early decades of the 19th century, the frontier, most American thought, was absolutely no place for a woman, at least no place for a lady. The very idea of a female in all that vastness was almost obscene, worse, inconceivable. It was wrong, not just thoughtless but abomination. No right-thinking man would be so thoughtless, so uncouth. 

Marcus Whitman did, and Narcissa, who was his wife of one day when they left upstate New York for St. Louis, loved it, loved every rough-and-tumble minute of it. Not only did she make it through the plains, she tore through the mountains to arrive at the Oregon Territory, which then belonged, in great part, to the Great Brits. Not only did she make it, but she loved it, and told her family so in journals and letters that were published back east. She loved every minute of it.

My health was never better than since I have been on the river. I was weighed last week, and came up     to 136 pounds. I think I shall endure the journey well - perhaps better than any of the rest of us.

Consider it a honeymoon--Marcus and Narcissa were newlyweds, after all, a man and a woman toggled together to fulfill a requirement of the missionary agency who sent them west--missionaries, after all, had to be married. Both of them wanted to be missionaries, both of them were on their way to a single life, both needed a spouse to answer what they considered to be God's call. So they got married. And, wonders upon wonders, it worked, ah, passionately. There were sparks. There was fire. Yup.

I have such a good place to shelter - under my husband's wings. He is so excellent. I love to confide in his judgment, and act under him, for it gives me a chance to improve. Jane, if you want to be happy get as good a husband as I have got, and be a missionary. Mary, I wish you were with us. You would be happy, as I am. The way looks pleasant, notwithstanding we are so near encountering the difficulties of an unheard-of journey for females.

Not only did she make it to Oregon aboard the wagon, she insisted--can you imagine such a thing?--she insisted on riding horseback whenever she could, and loved it. Side-saddled, of course. After all, no lady would ride astride (it's a sin even to think of such a thing). She even wandered away from the wagon train now and then, because what she was seeing, she seemed to understand, was magnificence no white woman had ever seen before.

Not only that, but Narcissa Whitman, a newlywed in what one might well call an arranged marriage--I hardly dare to say it--got pregnant on the trip. That's right, got herself "in the family way," which means, well, I don't have to spell it out, but I will anyway: it means she and her husband were sporting out there in the all that wild country. Can you believe it? 

I first met Narcissa Whitman's story out near Ash Hollow, Nebraska, on the way up to Chimney Rock and all those welcoming monuments, where a highway sign tells her story--well some of it.

But this morning I don't want to go to the sad-and-sorry, heartbreaking stuff. I want to stay here at a place where Narcissa and Marcus and their traveling companions all saw the sights for the very first time, where they pulled their wagon along a trail she told her readers was just as comfortable as any road back east. 

I like to imagine of her, sidesaddle, on one of the horses she rode to do her own precious brand of touring, out here, riding right up to Chimney Rock herself, just to see it up-close and personal. I like to think of her romping around this country, but girding her loins right then for what she had to know was coming now--the virtually impassable Rockies. 

She made it. They all did. As did the wagon. They did something no one had ever accomplished before, right here on a path you can still follow without any more crowds than they ever saw. Amazing. Imagine her here, wearing the boots she bought before she left, men's boots. Imagine her here, in love, her own imagination firing with the wonders of what she knew in her soul was God's own creation. Just imagine.

Yes, there is more to the story, epic failure and sadness; but I found her here along the way in Nebraska, along the Oregon Trail, riding through the prairie grass, and for now, at least, that's where I want her to keep her.  

Masks and kids

 

According to The Christian Century, Axios reports that despite the images of college kids partying away, not wearing masks or social distancing, their behavior appears to be far less callous than it might seem. Polling indicates that Generation Z is working to get their friends to take the warnings seriously. They are "willing to make short-term sacrifices so that we can get back to something resembling prepandemic life."

The doubters, it seems, are elsewhere. Like here. Last week, the Orange City Christian School determined that students would not be required to wear masks, even though at most schools in the area, masks are required at least for some students (in my grandson's elementary Christian school, masks are required for fifth through eighth grade students). The OCCS board's determination, which garnered them a story in the Des Moines Register--it's news, after all--was occasioned by a public warning from area hospitals that argued for more vigilance. 

For a week or so, Sioux County sat at the number one position in the state for the number of cases per 100,000 population. Today--I just checked--were #2.  A Friday ago already, local hospitals gathered public and private school administrators and made it clear that something had to be done. OCCS's sudden notoriety might well have been averted had they not argued that, in the board's opinion, masks do more harm than good.

That argument made OCCS an outlier. They argued that masks make communication difficult, which it does, and they said masks create a false sense of security, which may also be true. But when they went on to argue that improper mask use can lead to further spread of the coronavirus, an uncommon argument, they went out on a limb.

And then, almost impossibly, the board claimed they highly recommended masks anyway, despite all that horror, just wouldn't require them. Does that make sense?

The unavoidable conclusion is that, at least from a distance, it seems there are more Trump supporters on the board than not. I don't have to remind you that he doesn't--or didn't. 

Alas, all of this went down before the POTUS and his circle caught fevers, before what looks for all the world like a super-spreader happened right there on the White House lawn, where neither Trump nor most the other Republican crowd had donned masks. 

I don't know what my grandson thinks about having to wear his mask in fifth grade. He was here yesterday for Sunday dinner, and when we talked about it, he didn't complain. But then, really, who likes wearing masks? I don't. I don't like seat belts either. But today significantly more than 200,000 Americans have left empty spaces at family tables because of the reach of an evil virus. 

I don't know that it's fathomable yet, but the immense hit evangelical Christians (OCCS made headlines in great part because the word "Christian" is in their name) are taking from their bizarre political dalliance with our President appears to me, right now, to be almost beyond measure. 

Reading Mother Teresa--Ambassador of Joy

“Shout aloud and sing for joy, people of Zion, 

for great is the Holy One of Israel among you.” Isaiah 12:6 

There’s something so elemental about Mother Teresa’s success that when you witness it, you’re shocked at its simplicity. “Every Sunday I visit the poor in Calcutta’s slums,” she wrote in letter. “I cannot help them, because I do not have anything, but I go to give them joy” (27).

Ambassador of Joy.

Because she had nothing in her pockets, she didn’t have to refuse beggars. Quite simply, she had nothing to give them except joy, which is, of course, a marvelous gift – and very, very expensive.

Great cheerleaders don’t win ball games, and everyone knows you can’t reverse malnutrition with a smile, fight disease with sheer happiness, nor deliver people from hapless poverty by a winning personality.

Some significant criticism of Mother Teresa and her work begins with that knowledge, the assessment that just being nice isn’t enough. That criticism is understandable.

But it can’t deny her gift.

What Mother Teresa brought to the poorest of the poor, and gave away freely, was essential for life: she brought them joy – joy as a synonym for love. In the same letter, she tells the story of a mother whose family suffered immensely, a woman who “did not utter even a word of complaint about her poverty,” a woman who begged Mother Teresa to return: “Oh, Ma, come again! Your smile brought sun into this house” (27). 

Mother Teresa brought that family the sun.

I don’t have neighbors so deeply impoverished. I don’t know anyone who doesn’t know from whence his or her next meal will come. Those sad children with extended bellies – you’ve seen them in a ton of photographs – live somewhere in a world other than my own. I’m a long ways from Sudan and all the way around the world from Calcutta.

But then, I suppose, darkness has a thousand faces.

And I can, just as nimbly as she did, lug in the sun, even as she did.

Or could, if I wanted.

Up North

We're going again--up north, next week. After a hiatus of a half-dozen years--we now live sort of "out in the country already," even think of our new place as a kind of vacation home"--we're motoring north next week, where, we hope, the seasonal colors are good and ripe. 

When you're retired, the absolute joy of "getting away" just isn't quite as blessed, but we're both looking forward to waking up in the morning in a whole different world, this one.

All these shots are from this week, up north, fifteen years ago.

 

Small Wonders--Visit the Castles

On a single visit to Lemmon, South Dakota, you can see the whole world. Seriously.

You want joy? Once a summer they put a tent up in Lemmon—a beer tent—for a town festival. A whole lot of people celebrate with a whole lot of beer, so many people and so much beer the town sells a souvenir t-shirt with “I got bent in the tent,” across your chest.

You can buy that t-shirt any time of year, too. It’ll stop traffic. Even if people don’t ask, they’ll wonder, may even dream. “I got bent in the tent.”

But there’s more to the world. Right downtown Lemmon, an entire city block is petrified wood that's sculpted into shapes and figures so strange they’ll make you believe you spent far too much time in that tent, even in January.



Mid-Depression, a dreamer named Ole S. Quammen hired thirty or forty unemployed working stiffs to scour the land 25 miles around, land of a long-ago forest whose trees ever-so-slowly had turned into stone. Haul that petrified wood to town, he told them, and we’ll shape it into wishing wells, waterfalls, and pyramids.

Three-quarters of a century later, all that ancientness hasn’t aged much, and, quite frankly, the whole city block looks just as goofy as it ever did. All that being said, you can’t drive by. Just can’t. It’s a Twilight Zone of petrification. Lemmon’s got odd, all right. 

Up the road at a place called Slim Buttes, a cavalry attack on a Lakota camp turned into a bloody rout when 150 troops came up on a band of Lakotas the army called "hostile," even though most of the Natives wanted only to get on with the life they’d always led.

It was September, 1876, a few months after Little Big Horn. Captain Anson Mills had his men out scouting for food when they ran into a camp and attacked, even though their orders were to avoid engagement.

But after Little Big Horn, no U.S. troops were in much of a mood for peace. Some Sioux escaped the surprise attack by running up into the hills and taking refuge in a gully. Twenty troops volunteered to go get them. You can imagine what happened. When it was over, Mills’ troops cleaned out the Lakota larger and had their first big meal in weeks.

Compared to the battle at Little Big Horn, Slim Buttes was little more than bloody and ugly. Those Lakota who made it out alive went hungry. 

Let me tell you, today Slim Buttes--people call them "The Castles"--is just as gorgeous as it was in 1876. Their alabaster cliffs rise like a fleet of winged ships from a Dakota prairie where "the deer and the antelope play"--and pronghorn. Wildflowers carpet the grasses, while tall clouds sail like a tribute over the buttes.

We’re up in the far, far corner of South Dakota. There are no crowds. If you know the stories, the silence all around makes the whole world seem like a theater.

Thirty years before the battle, right here the famous Lakota warrior Crazy Horse spent a night or two amid the castles with a lovely woman who was a wife to someone else--let’s just call it a little camping trip. When her husband showed up at the tipi, Crazy Horse looked up the barrel of the man’s rifle and took a bullet in his face that left him with a permanent snarl. The woman he’d loved out here left with her husband. 

Crazy Horse, the man astride a mountain in the Black Hills--you can visit the monument, see if from miles away--that Crazy Horse lost face here because among the Lakota there was nothing noble about taking another man’s wife. He had to earn honor back again—which he did at Little Big Horn.

Likely as not, you’ll be alone at Slim Buttes' wonderful castles. You can sit and watch and listen out there all by your lonesome. I stopped by on a worshipful Sunday morning. Place was dead quiet. I hiked around a bit, found a stocking cap just off a path—camo outside, fluorescent orange inside. Nice. I took it home—a souvenir. I didn’t didn’t get a t-shirt, nor did I get bent in the tent. Not really. Still got the cap.

It was just something to be there amid the Castles that morning because I swear, just outside of Lemmon, South Dakota, amid all that petrified wood, if you know the stories and stand up high enough amid those magnificent buttes, you can see most all of the world right there, all around.