Anniversary bliss

For an anniversary in 2017, I chose a place in northern Missouri, not far from the river. I wanted to get to Independence, where the Oregon Trail began. I found a little AirBandB in a place so impossible to find I had to call the woman three times to get there.

It was a little cottage on a swampy pond so full of fish that all I had to cast my bait upon the water. With the first cast, I pulled up a lug of a catfish so ugly it scared me. I didn't even pull it out. I quit. Didn't get a picture. 

It was a wonderful place for an anniversary celebration (said in jest btw). If there were an available bus, Barbara would have found it and bought a ticket home.

One early morning I found my way out to a reserve of some type and decided to see what I could see. There was an abundance of wildlife (of the insect variety) on plants in the kind of dappled sunlight that turns all the world a stage.

We're a world away from prairie landscapes, but where there's a bright dawn, there's usually something to shoot it.

 The "character" in this shot is that jagged bit of drama. The setting is plant leaves so wonderfully emerald that they virtually shine in the sun's wonderful light. My sense would be that cutting out that hunk of white at the very top would make the whole shot more perfect, but with my limited editing skills, any such attempt would put the insect's role far less "set," you might say.  Still, look at the almost fearful wickedness of that gash.

I'll just end with a cartoon. 

What I know of Douglas Wilson

It was somewhat unusual for him to come to me with his problems. I used to believe--and still do--that I would never make even a back seat in the Dad's Hall of Fame because I didn't take care to do what good dads did. 

Don't get me wrong. David wouldn't have abuse about which to complain, and I certainly didn't overtax him with horrific responsibilities. I didn't work him to death either. I was gone a lot, and, like my dad before me, I just didn't have time for him--or didn't take time. 

I'm saying all of this because it wasn't at all typical for him to come to me with the kind of problem he was carrying. He was--how can I say it?--perplexed, and I was surprised because I thought a lot of the girl he'd been dating. I suppose he suffered from his dad's profession--teaching--because I tended to know the young women who were in his social circle, and while I don't remember ever saying "get rid of her," I rarely told him what I thought of whoever he was seeing. In fact, this time, I was thrilled by his choice--the girl he'd been seeing was, in my grade book and whatever other book I kept, a real winner.

Let's just call her "Annie" because I'm risking injury in just bringing up the whole sorry tale, but let's just say Annie was a teacher's pet, if there could be one in a college class. Bright and comely, she was the kind of learner who walked walked out front of most of the others in class because of the energy she invested in learning. Didn't hurt, of course, that she was an English major; but had she been an engineer or a nurse and been as hungry in class than Annie was, I might well have suggested to David that the dark-eyed, dark-haired girl from Idaho was worth a second look. 

For the record, I didn't suggest he go with her, but I registered no complaints when he did.

Some weeks later, he came to me with some letters he pulled from his knapsack. They were addressed to him and from her father. Epistle-length, they were long treatises on the ground rules he was setting for David, my son, to see his daughter. He mentioned things like the church to which David belonged, said he wasn't thrilled with the denominational stance the Christian Reformed Church had taken with respect to women in ecclesiastical office, wanted David to know that, and set out a scenario that included David's having to meet Annie's family--her father, at least--before the relationship could grow or move any further. He requested, made it a prerequisite, for David to write him so that he could know the young man dating his daughter, know him and--how can I say it?--groom him personally.

It was nearly the end of the semester, as I remember, because there was some talk about his going to Idaho for the summer. But the letters made it clear that should he opt to spend the summer working in Idaho, he should not assume that he could,  on a whim, see Annie, because in her father's universe, dating was a evil kind of fantasy. David needed to meet her entire family before he could date Annie alone.

David didn't know how to take all of it. That's why he'd come to me.

I couldn't help it--I was angry, very angry because I thought Annie's father was, like some beast from another world, infringing on what I thought was Annie and David's whole relationship, throwing himself right into the middle of their days and nights together. And, he was making David's life miserable.

I started writing a letter to him, but it didn't feel right--and it was difficult to hold back the fire. About then, I was in Ontario for some speaking engagement, staying at Hugh and Judy Cook's place. Hugh was an old and trusted colleague and fellow writer, and Judy was a family counselor, so I laid out the whole story--not the letters--to them, looking for advice. Hugh bristled, Judy seemed less so.

I asked if they thought I should write Annie's father to tell him that David already had a father, that he didn't need another one, especially one with such horrid patriarchal sentiments.

Judy shook her head, told me I had to stay out, for David's sake. She told me that if I got into the mess it would only make David's problems worse because not only did he have to worry about Annie and Annie's father, my writing any kind of blistering note off to her father would create another whole angle that would almost bury him. Neither David nor Annie needed more to worry about.

So when I got back home, I deliberately disposed of the file I'd begun. Deleted the whole thing, and, following Judy's advice, stayed out of a problem that made me as angry as anything in my son's life.

I'm telling the whole story right now because it seems that a preacher named Douglas Wilson, from Moscow, Idaho, is making news these days. On August 14, David French, in a NYTimes op-ed piece, brought up Wilson and his views because the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, considers himself a member of Wilson's church and a subscriber to Wilson's views. That's why he questions the rights of women to vote. 

You read that accurately--the right to vote.

Read the article  yourself, or read what Kristin Kobes DuMez, who was a student at Dordt College at nearly the same time, thinks about Douglas Wilson's wildly patriarchal views.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/douglas-wilson-evangelical-hegseth.html 

When Annie went home for the summer that year, she learned that she wasn't coming back to Sioux Center--and she didn't. Dordt College was too liberal for her father's daughter. So, I take it, was my son. Her father simply intervened and ended the relationship.

All of this happened 23 years ago, but the movement Douglas Wilson created remains very much alive.

Christian nationalism really has much to commend it to hungry, fervent believers, maybe especially those believers in the Reformed tradition. But its dangers are legion, both theological and societal. I honestly believe it perverts the relationship between the believer and the world God loves. I honestly believe it's evil.

Big Bluestem.

Used to be, there were far more of them than there are of us. Tall and awkward, it grew up every summer from a thick bundle of shorter stuff at its base, like a grass skirt thicket that a host of critters thought of as home. Spindly and thin up top, Big Bluestem, the tallest of our native grasses, gets tossed around so mightily by gusty winds that not even a goldfinch can hold on. But the skinny stem doesn't break, it just waves, waves away, waves beautifully, waves like an inland sea. 

You can still find it dancing here and there in the restored prairie or in forgotten corners of the land, too steep or crooked to take a plow. You can pick up a bunch from a garden shop and plant it in your own backyard. Don't worry--it'll take. It does most anywhere. It's not picky. In fact, people who know such things claim it can still get aggressive if you let it alone somewhere, if you just let it be. A half acre maybe. Maybe more.

But here’s the thing: big bluestem waves out gorgeous tributes, but it doesn't make for great pasture. Those who know say cattle love it too darn much--some ranchers call it "ice cream for cows." Way back when, big bluestem suited crowds of buffalo just fine, but they were smart enough to graze only every other year or so because big bluestem won't stand up to constant grazing.

It's especially beautiful this time of year--late summer to fall--when it takes on its own royal robe: those long stems burn nicely into purple--and amber once the snow flies. But the truth is, beauty in native prairie is an acquired taste. Trust me, it can be as fancy as a flower shop, but it'll never be in a greenhouse. There are no hybrids, just a colorful bunch of old friends happy to be around together.

Wouldn't hurt us to remember that we'll be indebted to big bluestem for a long, long time because it once stood all around and grew remarkable roots four or five feet deep, deep and heavy roots that created our own rich prairie sod. 

Once upon a time, William Cullen Bryant described what was once our world like this:

As o’er the verdant waste I guide my steed,

Among the high rank grass that sweeps his sides 

The hollow beating of his footsteps seems 

A sacrilegious sound.

 

Still unconvinced? How about Walt Whitman, who wanted like nothing else to be "America's poet. Listen to his regards in "Specimen Days": 

As to scenery (giving my own thought and feeling), while I know the standard claim is that Yosemite, Niagara Falls, the Upper Yellowstone and the like afford the greatest natural shows, I am not so sure but the prairies and plains, while less stunning at first sight, last longer, fill the esthetic sense fuller, precede all the rest, and make North America’s characteristic landscape.”  

And let me remind you that right here in this passage, Walt Whitman is talking about home.

Ours.   

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 129

 

“They have greatly oppressed me from my youth—

let Israel say—

they have greatly oppressed me from my youth 

but they have not gained the victory over me.”

 An all-too-common story in the life of imaginative writers is a rotten childhood. Perhaps they were too contemplative, too monk-like. Maybe they were marginalized for being puny, bookish.  Their parents may have been overbearing, violent, too often absent from their lives, addicted to drink or drugs.  They lacked friends. Possibilities are endless.

 In an effort to compensate, such kids fantasize, create secret gardens, life in a boxcar, alternative worlds, dungeons and dragons. In the absence of joy, they create their own interiors, a refuge from oppression.

 What they can’t attain in day-to-day life, they make up for in imagination, and propensity for story grows abundantly.  Show me a kid who doesn’t go to the prom, and I’ll show you a budding artist.  That’s the trajectory of the theory. 

 Many towering figures in 19^th century American literature lacked fathers.  Hawthorne’s died when he was a kid.  Poe was a foster child.  A ton of writers were dissolute drinkers.  In my first year of teaching, a student asked me whether you had to be an alcoholic to be a writer. 

 But why stop with writers?  The oppressed artist is a cliché—consider VanGogh with his mangled ear and awful love life. Even when he was rich and famous, Picasso, biographers claim, was impossible to live with. 

 An artists’ graveyard is littered with gnarled wreckage.

 The “they” which begins Psalm 129 is hugely vague because there is no clear antecedent.  Who were they, anyway?  The history of revelation itself would argue, I’m sure, that the oppressors the psalmist is referring to are those heathen nations surrounding the people of Israel, starting, I suppose, with the Pharoah’s Egypt—those enemies that sought, as some still do, to destroy the Jews.

 The psalmist is a cheerleader, and this opening verse of the triumphant psalm a rallying cry:  “let Israel say,. . .they have not gained the victory over me.”  Those oppressors, ever present, even from my youth, the poet says, have not won the victory, so there. Say it after me. Shout it out. Triumphant affirmation, a tribute to a steadfast believer’s soulful strength.

 I grew up in a country where tolerance of one’s faith is a foundation for civility and civics. Unlike millions, even today, I’ve never felt even a pinch of oppression.

 The family in which I was reared was intact and loving.  I went to the prom, with a date.  My athletic jacket was thick with medals, and I was chosen by my classmates to give a speech at graduation.  I never sought refuge in alternative worlds and felt no hot breath from heathen nations. As a kid, I swear I was not oppressed. Maybe I have no business typing these words.

But my cushy childhood does not inhibit my joy at the fist-raised affirmation that begins Psalm 129. “They have not gained the victory over me.”  Whoever they is or might be, whatever sin or doubt has found its way into my own sense of reality, such darkness has not settled over my life—yet.  I’ve had it good, even today, when I’m old and half a cripple.

But what happens if the tables really turn—as they always do?  What happens if, now in my dotage, darkness begins to muster oppression? Could happen, couldn’t it?

If it does, I must remember the rallying cry of Psalm 129 again: “let Israel say—they have greatly oppressed me from my youth but they have not gained the victory over me.” 

 I must. 

My first sunset

Twenty years ago--August, 2004--I was fooling around with photographs, doing things that I never did before with what was, at least for me, a whole new technological world. I'd always loved photography, loved film, and whole afternoons in a basement dark room. I loved developing photographs in fixer baths. 

When I was in high school, I told my dad that I'd really like to go somewhere and study photography. He didn't like the idea. Taking pictures wasn't the kind of vocation he'd call a "kingdom calling." To his credit, he never really considered a photographer to be anything more than the guy who showed up at weddings and told people what to do, where to stand. 

I bought a good camera for the first time in 1976, but basically left it in a closet for many years, taking pictures of kids and family and not much more. My first digital camera was a weird thing, but then so was digital photography. I paid far, far more for it than it was worth--an ebay special. 

Then, I climbed the ladder. The camera I bought and began to use regularly was a Fujifilm, a honest-to-goodness real camera that delivered pictures like the decorated one above, with corn leaves so sharp and focused that they seem to walk into the room. 

This particular trip west of town happened at sunset. I rarely went out at the end of the day, but I remember thinking that what obsessed me back then, the awesome beauty of heavenly events I'd never really stopped to see, happened at other times. There was no reason to believe that sunsets might not offer eye-fulls of equally glorious skies. 

This August sunset proved a blessing.

In the shot above, the corn is itself a character in the story of the photograph, not just a feature of the setting. But other shots in the same folder illustrate how I was weighing the possibilities of the role of all that Iowa corn.

Here, it's farther away, hardly a role at all.

Here, even less. What I've got in the camera is a wonderful sunset, not a show-stopper, but not bad at all, and a huge Iowa cornfield. I liked being closer to the corn--that's why I chose the shot at the top of the page to turn into a marquee.

Two more. What I like about this one is the placement of the tree and the clouds, as if they were sweetly sharing the lead role. I like the grasses too.

In any retrospective of my time out in the country has to include this picture, which does not include a sunset or even a breathtaking sky. This shot is all land, but it remains, even 20 years later, a photograph that lines up with what I'd  consider the best of the best. . .I don't know why.

Just north of Lebanon, Iowa, August, 2004. This one is a keeper.

Galena's Grant

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As do we.

 

Tomorrow evening, Tuesday, August 12, at the Dutch American Heritage Museum, Orange City, Iowa, board member Abby Sitzman will present all you need to know about Sioux County's involvement in the KKK during the early years of the 20th century. Ms. Sitzman will examine some of the stories of amazing (and shocking) local involvement, as well as explain something at least of the phenomenon.  

What follows is a piece I wrote here seven years ago, when I discovered the above picture in a private museum in Peterson, Iowa. 

If you can make out what's in the background here--hills and woods--you might not believe the old street scene could be right here in northwest Iowa, but it is. That's downtown Peterson, and Peterson's just down the road, Hwy 10, about an hour east. Peterson is much older than most Sioux County burgs, largely because it sits along the Little Sioux River, and, mid-1800s, the rivers were freeways. Besides, everyone needed water. Thus, Peterson, circa 1918. 

Downtown Peterson doesn't look at all like this today, of course. For one thing, there aren't as many cars. The place just seems much smaller. Peterson may not be dying, but neither is it booming. Some of those stores are long gone, most are boarded up. It's been years since downtown was bustling, so long I'm not sure anyone who lives there remembers.

The picture itself is one hundred years old. . .well, 99 to be exact. It's an Armistice Day parade, a day of celebration because the war was over, the "war to end all wars," "the Great War." World War I was history, and the doughboys were coming home, at least those who hadn't died in France. What's in the old photograph is a victory parade. 

And it's led by the KKK. I wasn't surprised to see them here because I remembered reading long ago about the public face of the Ku Klux Klan in northwest Iowa, surprising as that may sound. What was surprising to me was the front-and-center role they played in a big victory parade. It's likely there was no Peterson Chamber of Commerce back then, no Lions Club or Kiwanis. I suppose the only social club for men was the KKK, who thought it only right to lead the celebration downtown, two by two. 

The elderly guy who showed me the picture has it up in a museum, his museum. I told him I couldn't imagine there were any African-Americans in Peterson, Iowa in 1918, and he agreed. "Oh," he said, "they found other people to hate--Catholics and immigrants."

The propensity to fear seems to be in us from the factory--our first utterance is a cry. There's hardly a time in life when we don't cower a bit in the face of something we see that's bigger than we are. Weather will do it out here on the edge of the plains, a beastly sky on a hot summer afternoon, clouds arising out west in brutal fists. 

Change will do it too in small towns especially, change of all kinds, anything to disturb the liturgy we're accustomed to and comfortable with. We cower easily, most of us. And we get handsomely proud of what we've got, what we've built, what we are. Pride comes pretty easily too, strangely enough.

But I'd like to think that hate isn't standard equipment. It rises in darkened hearts, especially when fear and pride commingle. What the orderly march these hoods created demonstrates is a commitment to orthodoxy, to us, to things staying the way they are. What it says is, nothing is going to change without a fight around here. Take note!--we're here to hold back the heathens and keep things pure.

Today in Peterson, there's no one around to lead parades--but then there are no parades either. Today Peterson, Iowa, is a museum, open only by arrangement, and there is no Ku Klux Klan.

Wouldn't it be grand if hate would die its own slow death? 

Dream on. It doesn't. Not here, there, or anywhere. Hate still meets where it always has in the heart of man, at the intersection of pride and fear.

And that intersection is just off Main, never all that far away. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 57

 “I will praise you, O Lord, among the nations; 

I will sing of you among the peoples.”

 

Strangely enough, I have but two memories of an early childhood trip to New York City, and both of them emerge from fear.  I had to be less than ten.  We visited the United Nations, because I have some kind of memory of standing in front of that building, but no memories at all of being inside.

 

What I’ve not forgotten, as I said, is two images, both from the street. In one a woman who is apparently mad is shouting and screaming wildly.  The words make no sense, as I remember; but the scene is distressing, largely because no one seems to care.  People—thousands of them—walk right past on wider sidewalks than I’d ever seen in my life.  Someone should tell her not to scream, I must have thought. But no one did, and she kept it up. Finally, we were out of earshot.

 

The other memory is also from the street—a man in a sandwich board saying “Repent” or something.  I was just a kid, but I remember being embarrassed, almost the same feeling I had when that mad woman wouldn’t stop screaming. This guy was preaching, and I knew it; but I found him and his hectoring repulsive and more than a little embarrassing.  I didn’t want him drawing such distressed attention to a faith I knew better by way of the Christmas eve programs or morning prayers over Sugar Pops. 

 

Those two memories are filed away in a scrapbook--memories of a trip to the big city.

 

Gratitude is the beginning of the Christian life—that’s what I believe; and gratitude makes us sing. No question. Gratitude makes David pipe the dawn in this psalm, or believe he can—or at least make the outrageous claims he does. Our thanks for the salvation that has come so shockingly into our lives sends us cartwheeling into the world.  “I will sing of you among the peoples,” David shouts, ecstatic, and some guy in New York in the early fifties adorns himself in a sandwich board, stands out on the street where he scares the children and the horses.

 

Our pastor often talks about an adult male in a previous congregation who wasn’t blessed with full cognitive abilities (I don’t know how to say it).  This man had a special love for a certain organist’s playing.  Whenever she’d play, he’d dance in the aisles. 

 

Maybe we all should.  Maybe we all should pull on sandwich boards or paint “Jesus Loves me” across the side of our houses. There’s a man just down the block that loves to sit outside on Sunday afternoons, his stereo cranked, the sounds “The Old Rugged Cross” being sung by a men’s quartet with bluegrass roots taking over the entire neighborhood.

 

I know David’s impulse here. I know what’s in him. He’s almost gone in his deep affection for the God who has saved him from death so often, and here, in the cave, has done it again. The Lord almighty has delivered him, and it makes him sing.

But how?  And what tune?  And how loud?  Snare drums or Native flutes?  Bold type or fancy font?  Stories or poems?  Classical or folk rock?  Johnny Cash or Mahalia Jackson?  Flannery O’Conner or Pat Robertson? 

 

The older I get, the more I think the answer is simply, “Just sing.”  Just sing and let God take care of the harmony. 

The story of a ghost town

If you want to find a sweet innocent Joe amidst the carnage, you'd have some trouble.  When finally the smoke--that's gun smoke-- had cleared, the total dead and dying was seven--three lawmen who'd come to town to arrest the Dalton-Dooley gang, a bunch who'd made little Ingalls, Oklahoma, their home; three lawmen and three locals who innocently (mostly) got mixed in with the storm of lead thrown by the gang (from the tavern) and that thrown by the law (into the tavern). 

If you're following the story here and I'm telling it plain and simple, then you may have noticed that the listing of dead that day, September 1, 1893, included no outlaws, only lawmen and by-standers.  Those lawmen were after notorious hoodlums who shot up banks and trains for a living--and a good living it was, too.

Now if you're from Oklahoma or know American history, then that date, September 1, 1893, has you thinking--"say, when was that big land rush?--wasn't that about that time too?"

Yes, it was: the lawmen raided Ingalls two weeks before 100,000 wildcat Easterners poured over the line set by the government to keep people from what was called The Cherokee Strip. Therefore, you must be thinking, as was I, that the dirty streets of Ingalls must have been dead as dust, right? Two weeks later, had to be flooded with hungry homesteaders.

Missed again. Figure this into your calendar: the line holding people back had enough holes to allow some land-hungry folks to cross it, willing to buck the law. Those people quick jumpers were called "sooners": they'd sooner break the law to  get good land.

When the government wagon rolled into town, five armed lawmen crouching in its belly, their arrival wasn't strange--it wasn't the only wagon full of strangers just then..

"Young Simmons," was a kid who twice happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. First, on Main, outside the livery. When the government men showed up, they talked with Young Simmons at the same time Bitter Creek Newcomb, one of the crooks, took his sorrel over to the livery to get a shoe tightened. Dick Speed, a Special Deputy U. S. Marshall, and father of three little boys, asked Young Simmons who that guy was, just then coming out of the livery.

Young Simmons, only fourteen, arched an eyebrow, as if Speed was a fool. "Why that's Bitter Creek Newcomb," he said, and he wasn't lying, just astonished. In town, Bitter Creek was a celebrity, and the guy didn't even know.

Dick Speed picked up his Winchester and fired a shot; for the record, that was the first shot in a night full of gunfire. 

About the time the gun shots ceased, Young Simmons caught a bullet when he departed the saloon that took all the fire. Wrong place, wrong time. 

Ingalls had made celebrities of the Dalton-Dooley Wild Bunch, living off the fat of their robberies, treating them in Robin Hood fashion, thinking of them as grade A citizens of their new little burg. Maybe  they were, but mostly they weren't.

While all of them, that night, escaped into the long, open stretches of Indian territory, every one of them would eventually meet a fate not far distant from young Ned Simmons'.

Ingalls, today, is an honest-to-goodness ghost town.

Beat up

One of the most astounding descriptions of early Orange City is the one from an early land grabber who said that when he arrived at the place those four gentlemen from Marion County had specified as home for a new colony, when he surveyed the land way out there in northwest Iowa, what was remarkable was the the vast, limitless grassland that included only one tree--one tree as far as he could see.

We get occasional reminders of the old days when fierce winds topple trees decades old, as they did a week ago--Monday night, when 100-mile an hour winds rip things up or pull up trees by snapping them off right at the roots. 

What's left in the wake is totem sculpture that would make a wonderful garden of images if we'd let them all be. But they're grotesque, even horrifying reminders of how quickly they can be shaved from sites trunks they've grown for decades, sometime centuries. There no more native here than we are. We're all immigrants.

The shot beneath here is our old house, where we lived for almost thirty years before moving out to the country. This maple was terribly scarred by dangerous winds it's suffered for decades. I once told a man from Denver, a real estate guy, that I really ought to get rid of the thing because a gallery of broken limbs made it, to me at least, almost  distorted or deformed. He shook his head. "I know people in Denver who'd give hundreds, even thousands of dollars for that maple," he said.

As  of last Monday night, the old misshapen maple will be no more.

I've lived in Alton for the last 12 or 13 years, but close enough to Orange City to feel the enthusiasm that community generates for its annual Tulip Festival--it's huge. Tons of small towns in America would give up a lot of their own history to come up with a holiday that annually draws tens of thousands of people. 

You could rally up an old rivalry by telling Orange City people that Sioux Center suffered more destruction than they did last week. Weighing the difference is not about to happen, as much joy as that kind of tallying might bring to an old, old rivalry. What is clear, however, is that Orange City lost a lot of the shade around its iconic center, a park in midtown that got beat up worse than any other street or avenue.

In Sioux Center, my grandchildren's house (just below), just off Main, got by without much  horror. The wind scooped out a dead ash root ball and made it easy to cut up, helped them along really. 

Both communities are suffering the effects of the ash borer, a cruel visitor who lays its eggs on the bark of an ash tree and sends its minions, thereby, into the trees innards, where they munch down what they can and eventually thereby starve the tree to death. Not pretty. Check out my grandson-in-law's work just over the eastern peak of the house--all dead long before the storm.

Dead ash line the streets here, as they do in Orange City, and the wind didn't blow down the skeletons because there was nothing to stop it. Both towns looked significantly worse during the week past because all those dead ash trees, or most of them anyway, didn't come down, while their healthy neighbors were tipped up and out of the ground or stripped into naked statues.

Who had it worse--Sioux Center or Orange City? As in all things, they tally pretty much the same. The storm's 100-mile winds tore through both towns, leaving its scarred footprints in every neighborhood.

Most Dutch-Americans I know are fastidious to a fault. A week later, trust me, both towns are pretty much cleaned up. 

Who was faster? A week later, I'm thinking that if  you would ask that question in some local coffee shops, you'd beg a fight.

Sunday Morning Meds (Psalm 57)

My heart is steadfast, O God, 

my heart is steadfast; I will sing and make music.

 

I need to thank Garrison Keilor for drawing my attention to this verse of Psalm 57—not in so many words, but in spirit.  I need to thank him for reminding me in an interview in Christian Century that the Christian life begins in gratitude.  The source of faith itself may be elsewhere and certainly is mysterious, but gratitude is the starting block for what ye olde’ theologians call sanctification.  “I will sing and make music” is David’s brash pledge, his testimony of how he will live.  He says it because he knows God’s promises are sure, his faithfulness will ooze into all generations, and beyond, upward and forever outward into eternity itself.

 

Here’s what Garrison Keilor said: 

 

Thank you, Lord, for this amazing and bountiful life and forgive us if we do not love it enough. Thank you for this laptop computer and for this yellow kitchen table and for the clock on the wall and the cup of coffee and the glasses on my nose and for these black slacks and this black T-shirt. . . .Thank you for the odd delight of being 60, part of which is the sheer relief of not being 50.

 

And then he said, “One should enumerate one's blessings and set them before the Lord.  Begin every day with this exercise.”

 

That’s exactly what I did for years as I began this blog, tried to begin each day with gratitude, making a discipline of thanksgiving.  Sometimes thanks comes easy as breath itself; sometimes it’s very hard work. I did it, slavishly, for more than a year.

What he said in that Christian Century interview grabbed me because I sometimes feel too much the curmudgeon as I crept into those supposedly blessed, therefore golden years.  A friend of mine once made the claim that the doctrine of sanctification—that believers, as they age, inch closer and closer to the Lord, to godliness—is really a myth.  “Most old guys I know,” he says, “are crotchety.” 

 And they are.  It’s an itch I’ve been scratching too much myself.   

 It all starts with praise, Keilor says:  “Gratitude is where the Christian life begins.”  We all ought to work at it, he reminds us.  “Begin every day with this exercise. . .”  That idea struck me as priceless, so that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do for almost a year.

But then, as I remember, in a committee meeting just a day after I wrote these words, I blew up, acted like a fool, shot my mouth off without a lick of restraint.  I’m no more an angel than I was last; maintaining gratitude with dawn’s early light hasn’t morphed me into some kind of saint.  You can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear.   

 Which is not to say, however, that a daily regiment of thanksgiving was, for me, a waste of time.  Not at all.  I’m not as great a singer as the poet/king, but every morning I lift my voice and make my own kind of music, here in front of a screen in the corner of the basement.  And for that—for my music and the source of its energy and Garrison Keilor’s sweet reminder of something I’ve always known—for all of that, I’m thankful. 

Hear my song.  

Learning to see (again)

 

Nothing but a gnarly old tree up close. A long way from the kind of landscape shots I was searching for that morning, but kind of cool, I think, and part of the catch on a Saturday morning in early August, 2009, 16 years ago, if my math is sound. I don't know why I take such pictures, but somehow the detail, the life of the thing is interesting and kind of telling. 

The Saturday I took this picture I happened to be south and west of home, parked out on a dirt road just north of the Christmas tree farm we frequented every Thanksgiving vacation to pick out a tree. That picture above is an odd one because landscape was the operative term that morning.

This is the kind of finagling that drew me out every Saturday, the opportunity to try--emphasis on try--to get big landscape shots into the camera. This August Saturday, out near the Christmas tree farm--it's some distance to the right of the trees out there in right field--I had the opportunity, or at least as good an opportunity as I was able to stumble into. The emerald world was tasseled in gold. 

Still, what is ably present (like the old stump atop the page) is often what's most memorable. In August, all kinds of sunflowers holiday up the countryside. They're legion.

What can you say?--they're legion, but they're just grand.

It's not particularly difficult to get some kind of insect on the sunflowers, but getting them in flight is a real treat. I didn't see this busy bee until I looked at the files on the computer screen, but there he is--or she. And the barbed-wire behind the subject make the whole shot just a bit foreboding. If you can't make a sermon out of that shot, you're not a preacher.

Or this. It's a story, don't you think?--I mean this craggy fence post with the errant nails. In a way, that morning I felt as if I was giving honor away, as I am these many years later by showcasing creation's richness.

I need to tell myself, all these years later, that all you have to do is look.

And here's the monarch, figuratively and literally, on a purple thistle.

Nothing here is rare or exotic. I'm guessing that I could get it all again if I headed out there tomorrow morning. 

But there's striking beauty in what's common, and photography did indeed show me at least something of how to see.