The Good Old Days

Jelle (yell'-a) Pelmulder was the founding father we'd all love to claim. He was one of the four adventurers who loaded themselves and their gear into a prairie schooner and left the Pella, IA, area to have a look at wide-open country in the far corner of the state, where, it was said, wonderful grassland was not only open for settlement but also big enough for yet another whole Dutch kolonie. When they returned, it was Jelle who showed off a collection of grasses and forbs that made the land-locked itchy swoon for this far-off prairie dreamland.

In just a few years, Jelle was appointed Clerk of the Circuit Court of Sioux County, a position in which he served, most honorably, until retirement. 

Just eleven years after the first white settlers arrived, Jelle Pelmulder lost his wife to smallpox, a killer not at all rare at the time.

"Although the smallpox vaccine was developed in 1796," the museum note says, "Dutch Calvinists opposed vaccination as they thought it thwarted the power of God."

Let me do some editing. "Although the vaccine was found to be 99 percent effective in controlling Covid, the Dutch of Sioux County opposed vaccination as they thought it thwarted the power of Donald Trump."

That's where we are, 150 years later.

Approximately 70 percent of the county is unvaccinated. Approximately 70 percent of the county voted for Donald J. Trump.

Four Pella adventurers exploring Sioux County

Small Wonders--Suzette LaFlesche

He was a little man with a huge broom beard, a sort of wispy-looking gent, white hair, lots of it all around. His name was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a man as close to celebrity status as anyone in late 19th century America. One night in 1879, Longfellow waited--not patiently--for the guest of honor to appear at a party in her honor at the lavish home of yet another of America's rich-and-famous. The gathering was a big deal, a big, big deal.

When finally she showed, the wizened Longfellow went almost speechless. The story goes that the great poet, an icon already in his day, reached for the woman's hands, took them greedily in his own, looked into her eyes and went silent with shock and awe. When finally, he could speak, he did, loud enough for all partiers to hear: "This is Minnehaha," he said with the heraldic fervor.

Today, 142 years later, Longfellow's exuberance requires context. Fully 24 years earlier, Longfellow had published the American epic, Song of Hiawatha, a book-length poem written in a metric called trochaic tetrameter-- 

On the shores of Gitche Gumee,
Of the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood Nokomis, the old woman,
Pointing with her finger westward,. . .

a wild-eyed gallop of a rhythm only an English teacher could love.

In that massive tome, Hiawatha, perhaps the first "noble savage" to appear on American paper, falls madly in love with a Dakota princess named Minnehaha. Alas, their love is as star-crossed as was Romeo and Juliet's. The princess dies, but then--thank goodness--their love is eternal.

Try not to giggle. "Hiawatha loves Minnehaha" was hot stuff in 1879, and had been for 25 years already. The whole nation heard the great poet say what he did right there at the door to the party.

Longfellow's Minnehaha was in actuality a young Omaha woman, born in Nebraska, named Suzette LaFlesche. That night she wasn't dressed in buckskin. She wore no beaded breastplate and hadn't smeared her face in war paint. Ms. LaFlesche was dressed like any other New Englander, and while the old poet might have wanted to see his own creation in Suzette's eyes, she was nothing of the sort.

Suzette LaFleshe was the oldest child of Joseph Iron Eye LaFlesche, the last recognized chief of the Omahas. She'd received her primary education at the Presbyterian boarding school on the Omaha reservation. But when she wanted more education, she had been sent out east to a fashionable finishing school for women in Elizabeth, New Jersey. She was no stranger to Euro-American culture.

During Standing Bear's trial in Nebraska, Suzette LaFleshe had been the designated translator for the Ponca chief. The two of them were, in fact, distant relatives.

Eventually, she married Thomas Tibbles, the newspaper reporter who'd brought the Ponca's sad story to light. Together, the two of them had appeared before Congress to testify on the plight of Native people across the land. Together, they continued to testify throughout their lives.

In 1891, she and her husband went to the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota to investigate the origins of the Wounded Knee Massacre. For some time, she lived in Washington D. C., where her husband was a news correspondent. She compiled, in her lifetime of some 47 years, her own extensive list of essays and reports on Native America, for whom she was an undying advocate. She was known by her Omaha name, Inshata Theumba, translated as "Bright Eyes."

Like her younger sister Susanne, Suzette had every opportunity to leave the reservation. She and her husband could have lived a soft and famous life out east. She could have determined to stay somewhere establish a home anywhere in America and attend endless fashionably exclusive dinner parties. Instead, like her sister, she never for a moment lost her commitment to her people and advocated for them and all of America's First Nations for the rest of her life.

Thomas Tibbles and Bright Eyes moved here to Bancroft in 1902 to live among her people. She died there on May 26, 1903.

In truth, she was nothing, really, of Longfellow's precious Minnehaha. But the old poet was right in one way--Suzette LaFleshe was royalty in every possible way.

Sunday Morning Meds--The Rivers Form

 

But at your rebuke the waters fled,

at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;

they flowed over the mountains,

they went down into the valleys,

to the place you assigned for them. Psalm 104

To record all of this, there would have to be a helicopter running for centuries on solar power, I suppose. It could be positioned almost anywhere; but I would choose some place on the eastern edge of the Rockies, where I’d position that whirlybird a mile high or more and start the camera rolling in time-lapse mode.

One can only imagine. An endless sea shakes out waves rhythmically, when suddenly, unperceptively at first, a mountain begins to emerge, jagged, triangular. Years pass, and that single peak is surrounded by a host of siblings, all rising until that sea forms waterways that rush with tidal-like power. There are no Badlands. The whole landscape is water—or ice.

We’re a long way from the Plains, from the flat land, but if that camera pans east, it catches the way the water bellies down over a region where there are no silhouettes—or none so startling as the peaks beneath us, now hugely revealed.

We don’t have that big of a camera, so the helicopter sallies off in that direction, where the water levels out and recedes from land, then falls into crevices, cracks, and fissures, and ten thousand lakes in a place someone will call, an age or three from now, Minnesota. A vast network—a spider web—of rivers push the land into valleys and settle in, as permanently as anything can in nature.

It’s time-lapse photography, but the phenomenon is stupefying. All that water settles into routine, that mass of chaos into order. The Badlands appear.

That’s what the psalmist sees. There, to the east, the Mississippi widens, while beneath us the Missouri, the Mud, spatters on south. Everywhere from this height, myriad meandering tributaries have formed, like lifelines on your hands. And it all works. Land has been called into being from a vast sea, and that immense space is veined with life, with water.

I know scientists who would laugh at the film we just shot because the whole process didn’t happen like that. There were vast seas all right—and there were frozen, vast seas. There was an ice age or two, and immense bulldozing glaciers. And there was mystery.

I don’t think the poet has it right, scientifically. The psalmist knew little of research, had no clue about glaciers or aquifers. But when he sat in his helicopter and recorded what he saw, the images arranged themselves in such a way as to form the face of the Creator right before his eyes. That much he’s got dead-on.

There’s a place someplace south of the Badlands where locals say Crazy Horse is buried. No one knows for sure, but the story goes that his favorite land was a ridge of pines that stands like a refuge amid the open, short-grass prairie, a neighborhood more emerald than anything around it. To get there, drive forever on a gravel road—and then just imagine. Follow rivers until you see the beauty he did.

Because the heavens declare the glory of God, all nations hear the sermons. Psalm 104 is how the psalmist thinks about the preaching God does in land and sea all around. What you see is his sermon.

I, for one, am blessed by what he sees of God’s own world around him, and thankful for his gift, in part because I know what’s in the poet’s heart and soul—because I think I’ve seen at least part of what he sees and hears of the Creator.

Morning Thanks--our tomatoes

And so, now, the world turns. What began as a weakling plant amid a thousand others on temporary shelves in a tent thrown up purposely for the task of selling such plant starters; what slowly grew--now and then a little helpful watering--nursed along by our devoted vigilance; what made us fret through withering summer days with little rain; what required the kind of weeding that made us cuss, once more, at Adam and Eve; what started out so lowly and fragile has grown into a giant bearing shot puts that fill up our kitchen counters. We've gone from dreaming about BLTs to rolling our eyes. Happens every August.

Soon enough, it'll be salsa, then spaghetti sauce. Meanwhile, I'll down cherry tomatoes one after another, like candy, until enthusiasm wanes and the remnants are left outside clinging piteously to aged abandoned vines. It's harvest time with the tomatoes. In the next few days we'll have so many we won't know what to do with them. 

Next year, fewer plants, I'll tell myself, and next year, late May, back in the plants tent, I won't be able to help myself. I'll plant as many those garden boxes will hold, and the whole blessed ritual will begin anew.

Anyway, this morning's thanks are for yesterday's harvest. Right now they're as beautiful as they are abundant--as tomorrow's and the next day's and the next, and etc. 

When it rains, it pours. Please pass the bacon. 

Remnants from Babel (ii)

In the community, just exactly what happened in the middle of the 17th century, about the time of the Mayflower, is barely remembered. Various explanations exist, but none of them are particularly convincing, except this--the change in the order of worship or the demonstrations of piety was significantly dangerous to have created disorder, then frustration and anger, and eventually a schism. 

Normally it's the conservatives who walk away, not the liberals, who find it much easier to live with change. And thus it was for the Russian Old Believers, who sometime in the 1660s got fed up with those ungodly changes the church was implementing--putting up three fingers instead of two--fundamental practices that have now, all these years later, become the signposts of the precious old religion. Because that's the way my grandfather did it"--that sort of thing.

Among Alaska's most fascinating immigrants are the Russian Old Believers, who have retained their original Slavonic language, almost entirely unspoken elsewhere in the world, along with a significant portion of the old way of practicing their Orthodox faith. That they've done so is amazing, of course, but not significantly different from the way that the Old Order Amish folks here and wherever they've gathered around the world have been somehow capable of flourishing despite living at least a century apart--maybe because of that separation!

As a people they've put some miles on. Originally Russian, their story maintains they were chased out for their beliefs. They literally walked until they felt safe, and that definitive hike brought them from Russian into China, where they lived happily until 1948, when the new communist regime determined all foreigners had to leave. 

When they left China, many went to Brazil or Uruguay, staying together however in communities they built with their own hands, always practicing their traditional faith, including, if you can believe it, four or five-hour worship services every Sunday. They had some trouble practicing their Christmas rituals in the middle of summer, enough to make them look around for another place to call home.

Home became Alaska's Kenai peninsula, where today they live in communities all their own. There is, as you can imagine, a schism operating today among them. Some attend the church which has a priest, the others do not and will not, having gone without clerical leadership since the 17th century. The imposition of a ruling class among the faithful, they believe, is some sort of sacrilege.

But in other ways these Russian Old Believers remain viable as a faith-driven fellowship. Nothing is as important to them as the quality and character of their Orthodox faith. The long history of discrimination and prejudice, their long history of suffering, has given them the tenacity required to live so decidedly separate from the world.

That conversation in the bakery was quite amazing. The young woman showed no sign of discomfort as we talked about her unique dress. Her mother was along, as was her daughter. It was Saturday night, so when she talked about her people and their faith, I couldn't help ask, "So if we wanted to come to church with you tomorrow, where would we go?"

She waved off the question with a smile. They worshipped she said at Homer, several hours away. It would be ridiculous.

"Homer?" I said. "We were just there."

"Oh, the church is really hard to find," she said, as if our attending would be difficult, if not impossible. "It's a long way from Homer even."

It wasn't difficult to guess that Old Believers weren't into evangelism.

But they were charming and fascinating, as Old Order Amish are, fierce in their beliefs and the necessity of their sequestration from a world they've seen for 300 years as holding values at odds that threaten the old ways of faith. They drive cars and trucks, use iPads, and live well, having picked up fishing and boat-making in a region given to such enterprise. They're not poor--you can tell by the rich satins their women wear, beautiful clothes they are very proud to wear. 

Faith is a wonderful thing. And sometimes strange. 

Remnants from Babel

 We waited in a grocery store line behind a couple whose dress suggested some kind of tribal affiliation I didn't recognize or understand. The man, like this one, wore a great bushy beard. He had the look that said he was not afraid of work. But at what? I guessed farming. 

His wife was caped like this woman, and her dress, similarly, had nothing in it of camo; it wasn't meant to hide. They certainly weren't Muslim but neither were they some odd Alaskan Mennonite sect. No Old Order Amish I'd ever seen dressed in such gaudy flamboyance, as if she were insisting on, rather than resisting, attention. 

I didn't ask them. Could have, but didn't. I'd never seen any one dressed quite like that and told myself they could simply have been a bit eccentric. You can't help thinking rural Alaska has more than its share of folks who want nothing more than their privacy, to live off all kinds of grids. 

The two of them paid for their goods and left. Nothing in their behavior toward the clerk or the bags of groceries they lugged out suggested fervent religious legalism, but I couldn't help but judge their dress to be some kind of religious statement. Seriously, they looked Depression-era, a couple Dorthea Lange might photograph--except for classy opulence of her dress--and the hood. It was no burqa. 

At our second grocery store stop, three women and their children--the girls at least--were similarly dressed. Considerably younger, these women were meticulously made up, so much so they reminded me of rural South African white women, who surprised us at roadside stands in the wilds, hair and make up worthy of some magazine feature. 

Like them, these Alaskan women were quite glamorous, long, dangling earrings, eye shadow, lipstick, make up, each of them hooded like this woman by the same vibrant prints of their fulsome, silky dress. They were not trying to cover their beauty; they purposed to be glamorous, but in their own unique way. This store was busy. No one else in line looked anything like them. It was clear they were dressing their way for a reason.

This time I asked. "Your dress--it's very beautiful. It's part of your religion?" 

Young woman, maybe five kids. Getting them all into the car was requiring more attention than she cared to give, but she smiled at me, nodded, and said something I didn't understand, something about there being so many beautiful colors to choose from. 

Let it go, I thought, and did.

Then, yet another line, this one in a bakery, put us beside yet another woman dressed and hooded in a flowery print, this one younger, maybe thirty, if that, dressed to kill--or die for. 

She heard us talking and interrupted us. "You're tourists?" she said, the kind of question that made it clear she was interested. We did the ordinary salutations, and then I asked again, same question--"Your dress is beautiful. It's meant to indicate some specific faith?"

"Orthodox," she said, and a smile. She seemed more than grateful to have the opportunity to talk with tourists, or so it seemed. She took the occasion to say that she was Russian, although born here. She was with her mother, who looked very eastern European, a tiny woman in a head scarf. Her mother was also born here also, the daughter told us, in the States, in Oregon. She had never learned English, still spoke her own Russian.

Fascinating. 

There's some difference of opinion on the whole Babel story. God saw that men were attempting to create something of an approach to the heavens, so he pulled a fast one and gave the workers each a separate language, creating a mess which ended construction of the place overnight, when the workers could no longer speak to each other. I'm quite sure when I first heard the Babel story, way back when I was a boy, the curse of languages was thought to be a result of sin.

May well be. What a curse that must have been for a bunch of working stiff suddenly incapable of saying "pass the wrench." And yet, for us, what a blessing. God could have made us all members of a single church, could have us all worship the same, dress the same, eat the same meats or vegetables, carry on in the same language. 

But he didn't. He gave some to be Kenyans, others to be Japanese, still others to be Bolivians, and more to be Americans, as many as 650 separate languages spoken in the world today.

For a few years in the 90s, we had a handful of Russian students at the college where I taught. I found them fast talkers, fun people, but more than willing, it seemed, to bend the truth. None of them dressed like the women I'd seen in just a couple of days in Alaska, purposeful dressers who were unlike any I'd ever seen or met, as notable in a crowd as Old Order Amish or some Islamic sects, but unlike them, remarkably attractive. None of the women were shy in dress. They were not trying to hide.

But who were they? I had to wait to get home to find them. They're called Russian Old Believers. 

More tomorrow.

Morning Thanks for a Midsummer Night

 

It was a perfect night for outdoor theater, and the fare couldn't have been more fitting--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare's magic tomfoolery right there on stage before our eyes and ears, the bard at his goofiest on our own mid-summer night.

It was, as advertised, a scaled-down version, meant to cut away much of the silliness that's only silliness, so that's what's left is nothing more or less than the silliness of the plot: fairies armed with magic dust to make both men and women fools. Like Hamlet, Midsummer Night's Dream includes "a play within the play," but this one is madcap madness by a cast pulled directly from keystone cops. It's laugh-a-minute Shakespeare, and if you can't follow the dialogue, no matter. Soon enough some bananas thing will happen right before your eyes. You'll get it. Just don't be afraid to laugh out loud.

The woman I was sitting beside--the woman I normally sit beside--had her own reason for fun. She was one of the two women chased madly by love-poisoned suitors in a performance of Midsummer Night long, long ago--I'll not give the number but will suggest that the tally goes beyond a half-century.

No matter, she was in this madness herself all those years before, and while much of the score back then had departed her memory, there was enough of the practices and the performances to enchant her once again, not simply with the nuttiness afoot in Shakespeare's greatest folly, but her own role, so long ago, in the circus.

I couldn't help liking it too, thinking of her, 17 years old, dressed out like an ancient Greek maiden and pursued by lovesick men. Cute. It was.

Sometimes you just can't help but give thanks for sweet diversions like the madness of a Midsummer Night.

Brooks on family

A study published in 2010 found that parents in the U.S. are about twice as likely to be in a contentious relationship with their adult children as parents in Israel, Germany, England and Spain

David Brooks leans in to a perception that seemed new to me in yesterday's NY Times, the sense that the American family is falling apart. He's not the only one to say it, I suppose, but as someone whose tussles with parents are somewhere behind me--and someone who doesn't presently feel all that much animosity from our children--the claim that the divide between parents and children in this country is somehow catastrophic is not only new but somehow shocking.

Times change, he says, and so do definitions. What is considered abuse today was relatively commonplace in earlier eras--like corporal punishment in school. Such shifts stem from a new sense of family: once upon a time, he says, it was a tightly organized society of mutual obligation; families thrive on obligations, what we owe each other and need to give up to get along. Today, obligations are simply assumed to be restraints on personal freedom; families are "launching pads" for your and my identity quests. People don't ask themselves what they can do for their family, but what can their families should do for them.

I think the world of David Brooks' ideas and opinions, but I wasn't convinced of the depth of darkness he sees in American families. And then he unloaded with some horrors:

Terrible trends are everywhere. Major depression rates among youths aged 12 to 17 rose by almost 63 percent between 2013 and 2016. American suicide rates increased by 33 percent between 1999 and 2019. The percentage of Americans who say they have no close friends has quadrupled since 1990, according to the Survey Center on American Life. Fifty-four percent of Americans report sometimes or always feeling that no one knows them well, according to a 2018 Ipsos survey.

You can't file through all of that and not feel some pain and heartache. It seems he's not wrong: for reasons he tries to uncover, we're suffering a level of alienation from each other that is clearly verifiable.

Then he comes outs himself in a way one doesn't find in a year of op-ed pieces: "I confess, I don't understand what's causing this." To admit what he does is humbling and helpful.

He doesn't say it, but his final paragraphs suggests that if we'd like to, it wouldn't be all that difficult to understand the enormous and stupefying (to some of us) attraction of a religion like Q-Anon because, like any religion, it demands "my soul, my life, my all." It restores responsibilities and negates rights. 

Q-Anon brings people together with a mantra, it outfits them with a uniform, gives them a common language, creates a common enemy, and blesses its adherents with an eschaton that feels unquestionably holy.

But Brooks isn't exploring the intimacies of Q-Anon or blaming Donald Trump, he's only documenting a phenomenon he's outlined--the alienation that plagues us, even though--and maybe because--we are the richest nation in the world.

Finally, in one deft line, he "maybes," toys with a possible religious answer to our aloneness by quoting Richard Rohr: " if we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it."

How he concludes seems a century away from "turn your eyes upon Jesus," or any of a thousand other Sunday School tunes, but in substance it's not much different.

David Brooks is always worth reading.

TSC to the rescue

Okay, tell you what--let's start here: it ain't going to happen. The man here celebrated (why don't we call him the MHC) simply will not re-choose his battle-worn running mate because EXVP leaked out on him on January 6th, when the EXVP presided over the Senate confirmation of an election that, for the MHC, went south, despite his endless belly-aching. Should the MHC run again 2024--however unlikely that is--he will not enlist the EXVP to come along side and bootlick as he so sweetly did before. EXVP jilted him. Period. EXVP is out. There's no reason to keep the sign up. It's an anchronism. 

But the sign I can't help but see daily, stays. Drives me nuts.

So the MCH + EXVP is not going to happen, even though the guy down the road (GDR) might well call the whole thing his fondest dream (HFD). So here's the story: the GDR keeps HFD up along the road, even though the insurrection is already half a year in the past and the election which fifty or sixty judges ruled valid ended last November. Pathetically, the sign, HFD, is still out there proudly lauding the MHC and the EXVP. Sick. Really.

 

It's out there every day I drive west into town. Every day. Every night. If I could not see it, I'd be blessed; but I can't not see it, because I can't help but think--as I have for four long years and more, that the ticket HFD continues to celebrate just about ran our country into the ground. What's more, it seems the air is slowly seeping out of the GDR's FD. It's a lost cause, and a damned one at that.

 

However, I wouldn't doubt that GDR feels less likely to pull up HFD and do away with it. After all, he's got an investment in HFD. With his blasted HFD, the GDR has been preaching the glory of the MHC the for more than a year. I can't help but believe the GDR is even more taken with HFD now than he was when he first put it up, a year ago. "In your face," he says, every time I drive by. "Stick it, buddy." He's talking to me--or at least HFD is. And he ain't going to quit.

I wish it weren't true, but I can't look away. HFD obliterates everything else so completely that I can't help but think--and I'm not happy to admit it--that his devotion is as passionate as my derision. Okay, let me come clean here--my hate is as intense as his love.

Up until yesterday, all I saw was the blasted sign; but yesterday I saw the GDR for the very first time. I'd never seen him before. He was retrieving his mail and crossing the highway. He's thin, angular, seemed almost human. I almost pulled the pickup over on the shoulder because while HFD is always planted sturdily in his yard, I'd never really seen the GDR. And there he was, in the flesh. 

What flashed through my mind was a verse from the Bible, the decalogue--you know, Exodus 20, the Sixth Commandment (TSC). Thank goodness for a conscience.

When TSC appeared (imagine a small plane pulling a sign across the sky) a still small voice reminded me that what my instincts were toying with was way, way, way out of bounds. 

Here's my confession of sin: yesterday, TGR was saved by the TSC and so was I.  

Now if I could only dig out HFD.

To be content

It might be fanciful. No one who was there was alive when the book was written, but let's just assume that the writer did her homework and wasn't making things up. I don't doubt for a moment that she researched the ritual; it wouldn't have been impossible to find out what, exactly, was said at something as important to the Omaha people as a naming ritual--and this child, after all, was the headman's daughter, Suzette LaFlesche, daughter of Joseph Iron Eye LaFlesche. 

Just before she goes into the tent where she will meet the head-dressed priest of the Omaha's religion, Suzette's mother prays: "I desire for my daughter to walk long upon the earth. I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

The line sticks with me for some reason, perhaps because it would be difficult for me to imagine any mother I know to bring her son or daughter before the God and ask of him a similar request: "I desire her to be content with the light of many days." 

Her praying for blessing is as universal as the dawn, but what most of us want in and from our children--and grandchildren--is to be exceptional in some way, to win, to succeed, to rise to the top of the ladder by buckling up her bootstraps and taking on the world. We want happiness, sure, but we want it to come by way of success. We'd like action, not passivity. 

We want our children to win, not just get along. It seems a peculiar petition, to ask God to bless our kids with contentedness. Cows are content. I couldn't help thinking that that Native mom's request didn't seem at all natural. We thrive on competition, as does nature itself. 

You don't have to be an evolutionist to know the truth of natural selection. When wolves get hungry, they eat whatever they can bring down, the animal that is slowest or weakest. Only the strong survive, right? 

Two small colleges exist side-by-side out here in the northwest college of Iowa. They are remarkably similar; in fact, only a native knows anything about their differences--and those differences are almost entirely historic, back there somewhere in a history that neither care much about. They both sell themselves and attempt to be "Christian" colleges, and both struggle in the present climate, demographic charts dangerously pointed at a smaller and smaller student base. 

I once told the President of one of them that I thought it would be not only gracious but prudent for the two colleges to think about sharing facilities and faculty when it was possible. He shook his head. "Competition is good for both of us," he said. 

And he's likely right, at least partly right. That's what I was thinking about--how important competition is to our way of life and how odd it would be to hear a loving mother asking God to bless her daughter with being content. 

Case in point?--the world's attention is set in Tokyo right now, the Olympics, where competition is measured in hundredths of seconds, where the difference between taking home the gold and going home a loser is can be shown only on photograph taken at a finish line. 

Stories galore emanate from any Olympic competition. There's the shocking story of Linda Jacoby, a 17-year-old swimmer from Seward, Alaska, hardly a swimmer's haven, to win the gold in the 100 breast-stroke. And there's the incredible story of Simone Biles, the marquee Olympian representing the USA, whose body simply wouldn't do what it supposed to do, what it had practiced for so long and so hard and so competitively for years already, refusing to twist the 2 1/2 times it was supposed to, hampered by a condition gymnasts call "the twisties." 

When it happened, she failed and quit, not because she failed but because she understood that what was in her wasn't going to be enough to bring her to the excellence that's typified her routines for so long. 

Was it a physical problem? She said no. It was a mental problem. Her failure was spectacularly newsworthy because so completely unexpected. She's made of tough stuff, after all. She's practiced her life away. She's accomplished things on the mat that thousands of others could only have dreamed of. Then, she feels "the twisties" and pulls on her sweats? Really. 

There is no question that competitions sharpens us, toughens us, makes some of us champions. But Suzette LaFleshe's mother wasn't letting her daughter down by asking God to help her be content. Being able to live with yourself is no small blessing. 

Consider this too--when Simone Biles didn't finish that 2 1/2, she didn't run into the locker room and bawl. She pulled on her sweats and went right back out to cheer on her teammates. We should be proud of the strength of her contentedness.

Morning Thanks--An Alaskan Gallery

Indigenous Alaskans

Sea Lions (look closely)

Generic Alaskan landscape

Generic Alaskan landscape (2)

Alaska's state bird--from the pigeon family

May as well be Alaskan state mammal 

Captain James Kidd, 17th century explorer

The death of Captain Kidd

Denali--what we could see of it

So much awe and beauty all around

Glacier

Denali resident grizzily

from "The Spit," Homer

So much beauty, so much space, so much awe. 

Morning Thanks--an odd cemetery

It's little more than a roadside stop, and, unfortunately for us, it was mostly closed up when we stopped--the gift shop and church at least. The grounds were open and greatly mysterious without having done any research.

In northern Minnesota, we'd once traveled through the Red Lake Ojibwa Reservation with a man who called the place home. One of the places he brought us was to a cemetery where loved ones did the deceased the honor of building little houses over their gravesites, almost like you see here. Without more information, it was difficult for me to understand what was going on because the little cemetery--still accepting newcomers, obviously--seemed goofy, something of a toy village.

The place is called Eklutna Historical Village, not all that far from Anchorage, home of the oldest building (origins somewhat unknown) in the region, the church--

a Russian Orthodox Church. The combo seemed incongruous--a strange and unique cemetery that reminded me of Red Lake but was obviously arranged around a Christian church.

It is what I couldn't help thinking it was--a hybrid mix of cultures. The 600-year old place belongs to Native people, the Dena’ina Athabascans, who were visited long, long ago--1840s?--by Orthodox missionaries from Russia. Some folks still worship in the church (a newer one, actually), but the graves are covered in an ancient, Native way, with brightly painted "spirit houses" intended to provide shelter to the spirits of the dead, a notion, I'm quite sure, they didn't pick up from Christian missionaries.

Loved the place, even in its inelegance. It offers witness to the kind of cross-cultural melding that can and does take place among diverse peoples who refashion themselves to the shapes of new inspirations, new faith. The Denai'ina Athabascan people worship in a Christian church but bury their loved ones in a way that predates--by hundreds of years perhaps--the traditions of the missionaries.

Loved the strange place because I couldn't help noticing the redolence of hope is simply all around. That redolence of hope is always worthy of our thanks.

Sunday Morning Meds--Awesome

They who dwell in the ends of the earth 

stand in awe of your signs;

You make the dawn and the sunset shout for joy. Psalm 65:8

Just exactly what are "the ends of the earth," I suppose, varies with whoever recites the line. To some, it's here, the far northwest corner of a state known primarily for corn. To others, it's some woebegone corner deep in the darkest corner of the Amazon rain forest or some unreachable height in the Himalayas. Having just left Alaska, I'd suggest any of the hundreds of rugged wilderness places we just left fit the bill, despite the fact that Alaska is where, ironically, the "ends" of the earth may most closely approximate the earth's very beginnings. 

Alaska doesn't have to cordon off its wildernesses because they're not likely to become "developed," as we say. If the place were to be somehow affixed to the western edge of the lower 48, we call San Francisco the Middle West--it's that vast. If January temperatures weren't enough of a hinderance, the dark night of midwinter would be cause enough to stay away. 

Because it is so formidable, the place is draw-dropping. It's difficult to imagine anyone not being silenced at a thousand turnouts along Alaskan highways. The landscape devours whatever the human imagination can conjure; it's so huge it seems endless.

The Denali guide that drove us through the park proclaimed joyously that the passengers in her bus were blessed like few others--maybe 80 percent of those she takes through never see "the mountain," McKinley/Denali itself. We did, some of it anyway; the tallest peak in North America is only rarely left bare naked by clouds that bedeck its peaks. It's here in all its pomp and circumstance--or at least this is what we could see of it. 

It's hard to be prideful when you're almost anywhere in Alaska. The world is not only big, it's magnificent, so huge it rescues the word awesome from the cliché it's become. Hundreds of thousands of silenced tourists are somewhere in Alaska right now, as there will be most of the year, even mid-winter, and lots of them, right now, are just stunned.

And what of the aboriginals, the real locals, who sit and stand imaginatively, the heathen of old-fashioned mission hymns? What did they know about creation's magnificence, and when did they know it, the folks Captain Kidd stumbled on in his remarkable travels?

If we believe the psalmist, living in the daily presence of all of that glory, it may well be that they believed and knew more than we might believe or even imagine about the Source of all the magnificence around them. 

Faith begins, Calvin said, in the kind of awe that Alaska wears as work clothes: "It begins when we come to grips with the hard lesson that we're not much at all when we stand somewhere in the bold, magnificent presence of God."

And He said, “Behold, I make a covenant. Before all thy people I will do marvels such as have not been done in all the earth, nor in any nation; and all the people among whom thou art shall see the work of the Lord, for it is a fearsome thing that I will do with thee. Exodus 34:10.

In Alaska especially, it's just plain difficult not to recognize that this world is not our own, that we belong to it and to him, the Creator and Redeemer. 

Even the ends of the earth magnify his name. Pull over sometime and have a look yourself.

 

Sunday Morning Meds--

Guide me in your truth and teach me,

for you are God my Savior,

and my hope is in you all day long. Psalm 25

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass just thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me from a memory that will not die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there at that spot is pain and anger, and the incident that triggers it happened decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. That night, she cried herself to perilous sleep, nearly refused to go back to school the next day, and wouldn’t eat for a weekend. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did; she’d once been a middle-school girl herself.

Why that incident rises specter-like from mowing a certain section of backyard is Twilight Zone-ish, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable: it’s anger, no, rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid who kicked her out and the kid’s parents, and that hate found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to college, marriage, a career, and is today the mother of three. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do her parents, who themselves are as proud of their kids as we are of ours. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father, by a memory I do not control. I get mad.

Not long ago I visited a classroom where students had been required to read stories I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned as colorfully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories was like turning back the pages of an emotional journal I don’t keep but was kept for me by something mysterious in my heart or soul—I don’t know which.

There’s a great deal of shame in Psalm 25, and not a whole lot of trust. Of shame, David wants less; of trust he’s claims he needs so much more.

The roads we travel get planted with IEDs, some of which we bury ourselves. When I go captive to some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit to deal with the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, in our minds and hearts, more considerable darkness than I might know.

“Guide me in your truth and teach me,” David says, “for you are God my Savior,/and my hope is in you all day long.”

Even when I’m cutting my lawn.

 On vacation, "north to Alaska." If I can, I'll send some pix!

The Prospects from Prospect Hill (iv)

 

It's formidable but obscure, prominent but hidden, memorable, but somehow forgettable--much ado about very little maybe. Most of Sioux City has absolutely no idea it's there, even though it sits at a place that once offered reverence. When I dropped by, no one else was around. I was likely the sole visitor all day, despite perfect sunshine. 

The fine monument celebrates three men no one in town remembers, men who embarked on a mission that departed a Sioux City that, back then, thought of itself as the doorstep to a wildly dangerous frontier--"Rev. Sheldon Jackson, Rev. T. H. Cleland, and Rev. J. C. Elliott."

Sadly, Preacher Eliot doesn’t Google well. Cleland went up to Alaska, but is remembered for his commitment to education, higher education here in the lower 48.

This Sheldon Jackson may be forgotten in Sioux City and on Prospect Hill, but the man wrote his own story elsewhere, most specifically in Alaska. No, he didn’t win the west for Christ as promised, but “the flying horseman of the Rockies,” as some called him, gave it a heckuva whirl.

 Sometime before his seminary days at Princeton, Sheldon Jackson, a blue blood if ever there was one, got himself called into Christian missions, which was, mid-19th century, as adventurous an occupation as any. When he was turned down for the foreign mission field (he was slight, not much over five feet tall, and a bit pale), he ventured out to a frontier inhabited only by Indians and mountain men with fur hats and huge knives, what the church called “exceptional populations.”

 After his first miserable year among the Choctaw, he kept going west by horseback, railroad, Conestoga, and, when necessary, on foot, planting churches wherever he went—like Johnny Appleseed, sometimes one a day.

 When Jackson arrived to start a church in Grand Island, mosquitoes were so heavy that an hour before the very first meeting a man with a smudge smoked them out of the building. But they returned with a pitiful vengeance and the few who’d gathered, and Jackson himself, threw up their hands and left, but not before electing an elder or two and putting down a foundation for a frontier church.

Jackson traveled to whatever open spaces still existed, eventually to Alaska, meanwhile birthing Christian fellowships and bringing what he considered "development" to the Native people, doing what he promised when he and his two cohorts prayed so dutifully up on our own Prospect Hill. The Reverend Sheldon Jackson went out to "win the west."

To say he traveled extensively throughout Alaska is comic understatement. On one of his trips, he met Capt. Michael A. Healy, the first and only African-American to captain a Coast Guard ship, a man known as “Hell-Roaring Mike.”

 An odd couple if there ever was one, the two of them saw the starving Aleuts and Inuits, men, women, and children who were dying, literally, by way of goods and ills sold to them by colonizing white men.

 I am not making this up. Captain Healy and Reverend Jackson literally saved indigenous people from starvation and death by buying domesticated reindeer from the Siberians, and then--no one thought it possible--bringing dozens, eventually hundreds, across the perilous Bering Sea and the Gulf of Alaska on a ship named Bear, then introducing them into the land of the Inuit and Aleuts, not simply for food, but for use in a thousand ways, not unlike Great Plains Native people using every square inch of buffalo.

Give folks a reindeer, and they'll eat for a week--how does that old line go?--give them a herd and they'll create an industry.

The Reverend Sheldon Jackson preached the Good News, but also he delivered goods that let people live. 

He’s one of the men whose name is etched on the Prospect Hill memorial, First and Bluff. You can see for yourself any time you feel tugged up the hill. As far as I know, he never preached a sermon in Sioux City, but he left a mark. Just thought you might like to know.

Tromp up there sometime. You’ll love the view.

Sunday Morning Meds--Hidden Faults

“clear thou me from hidden faults” Psalm 19:12

Whenever I mow a certain patch of grass in my backyard, thirty feet west of our back door, an incident comes back to me that some lingering memory in me will not let die. What I feel when mowing the grass right there is shock, anger, envy, and pain. And the incident that triggers it happened decades ago.

When my daughter was in middle school, she was quite unceremoniously booted from the clique in which she’d been running. That night, she cried for an entire day, nearly refused to go back to school, and wouldn’t eat. Her father didn’t understand. Her mother did—she’d once a middle-school girl herself.

Why that incident rises specter-like from my mowing a certain section of backyard is Hitchcockian, I suppose; but what I feel at that moment—every summer weekend—is embarrassingly identifiable—it’s anger, no rage. Even though the mower is roaring, a certain junior high girl flashes her fangs from my memory, while her parents smile innocently. That’s what I see. I’m fine when I get to the sidewalk.

My daughter, our oldest child, was suffering, and her father, himself a child as a parent, was only beginning to understand that about some things about which he couldn’t do a blasted thing. I hated both the kid and her parents, and that hate apparently found a place in my memory to settle permanently.

My daughter went on to high school, college, marriage, a career, and mother of three beautiful kids. The girl who tossed her out is married with kids, too. I don’t hate her any more than I do our friends, themselves just as proud grandparents as we are. But every time I mow a certain patch of grass—I swear it!—I get dragged back to a painful moment in my life as a father by a memory I absolutely do not control. Makes no sense.

Not long ago I was visiting a classroom where students were required to read some stories I’d written. In preparation, I looked those stories over, not having read them for some time. When I did, what returned, as fully as my weekly mowing pain, was my state of mind when I wrote certain passages. No one else on the face of the earth would recognize what I felt, but reading those stories were like turning back the pages in an emotional journal I don’t actually keep but is nonetheless mysteriously kept for me by something in my mind or my heart or my soul—I don’t know which.

Maybe I’m going too far here. Maybe what David intends in this prayerful petition is simply that the Lord clean out those sins he’s not aware of, those sins of omission. We all have those too, at least I do.

But when I become captive of some spooky part of my own sub-consciousness, I can’t help but be amazed at the sheer power of the human mind and spirit, and of the depth of our darkest memories. There’s more going on than we are aware of, Horatio, even in our own minds and hearts.

"Whatever’s there," David begs, "clean it up."  Whatever I’m forgetting or missing or not acknowledging, make it shine, Lord. Forgive me. That’s what’s he’s saying. "Make it shine."

Prospects on Prospect Hill (iii)

 

The "Five Civilized Tribes" on the Trail of Tears weren't dressed in breech cloths. Some wore suits and dresses. They'd been neighbors--even friends--of white folks moving into the Southern states for some time, more assimilated into American culture than you might imagine. But they’d become, as all Native people were to white folks, "in the way," so President Jackson and his own Congressional hostiles moved them out to what would become Oklahoma. Of the 15,000 Creeks, 3500 were buried on the trail.

They’d all come from Dixie, where they’d owned the land they’d farmed and were often wealthy enough to own slaves they brought with them to Indian Territory. Homesick and heartsick, slaves and slave-holders alike were soon impoverished. The Omaha people lived in fear of being deported; Poncas and Northern Cheyenne flat refused, chose death instead.

A man named Alexander Reid, a graduate of Princeton, took a teaching position after seminary and was sent to the Spencer School in Indian Territory, a school for Choctaw boys. In the years before the Civil War, Reid got to know an ex- slave couple named Wallace and Minerva Willis, who had belonged to a Choctaw slave holder, but were given to Rev. Reid for employment at the school.

I would never have heard of Alexander Reid if it weren’t for Sheldon Jackson, one of the three names inscribed on Sioux City’s Prospect Hill, First and Bluff. Sheldon Jackson’s first position after seminary was at that same Spencer School. That’s the only link there is to our own Prospect Hill monument, but when you stumble on stories this good, you just have to tell ‘em.

Old Wallace and Minerva Willis were pure delight to school boys, who loved to hear their "plantation songs," the spirituals they took along from the cotton fields. After supper, the Willises would sit together out on their porch and sing through a repertoire Rev. Reid himself grew to admire so greatly he took down lyrics and melodies because he didn't want those great melodies forgotten once Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva stopped singing altogether.

When Reid's wife died, he left Oklahoma and returned to New Jersey, where one night he attended a concert by the Fisk Jubilee Singers--all "plantation songs." When it was over, the Fisk choirmaster told the audience where they'd be singing over the weekend, then noted that what the choir had offered that night were all the songs they knew. If people decided to attend another concert, they shouldn't be sad to hear the same songs. That’s all they had, he said.

Alexander Reid sauntered up later and told the singers he knew songs as beautiful as anything he’d heard. From memory, he taught them a few melodies from Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva, including pieces called "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot," "Steal Away,” and more.

You’ve heard them maybe?

For decades, ethnographers have insisted that "Negro spirituals" were less "spiritual" than they were lightly disguised, heartfelt slave dreams of freedom. 

I'd like to think those ethnologists are right, that "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" may be as much a wish for freedom as it is for heaven's glory. Whatever import may be in those call-and-response lyrics--"comin' forth to carry me home"—the history records that the Fisk Jubilee Singers began including Uncle Wallace and Aunt Minerva's blessed melodies in their concerts, including the concert they gave later in England for Queen Victoria.

From an evening hymn on the porch of two beloved Choctaw ex-slaves in Indian Territory, all the way across the pond to the royals at Buckingham Palace, "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" became one of the most beloved melodies in world musical literature.

I don't know that we can tell that story often enough or hear those hymns, all about the triumph of hope on each of our own Trails of Tears.