Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 90

“. . .they are like the new grass of the morning—

though in the morning it springs up new, 

by evening it is dry and withered.”

“This is a harsh world,” she told me when I sat down for coffee. “It’s an unforgiving nice environment.” She was talking about the place where she’d lived all of her life long, south central South Dakota, on the Rosebud Reservation, north and west of Valentine, Nebraska.

Her family had come there by way of a famous government plan, the Dawes Act (1889), created by a man who, like most of us, believed in the near-redemptive power of private property. Henry Dawes’s declared that by giving Native folks their own chunk of reservation land, they would gain pride from that ownership, despite the fact that owning land was mystifying to many indigenous folks; second, Dawes and "Washington" felt that allotting reservation land to Native people—and giving them the freedom to do with it what they will—would end the whole tribal system and finally civilize the Indian.

Most historians concede the Dawes Act was a miserable failure that collapsed by way of sheer corruption and graft. White folks took advantage of Native ways and took control of thousands of acres of land originally given to the tribes. On the Rosebud Reservation, it might be hard to discern who the sorriest victims were—the Brule Sioux who lost the land, or the idealist settlers, who naively assumed all they needed to do was put up a soddie and plant some trees and they’d be on their way to the American Dream.

It’s short-grass prairie, where if the almost seasonal droughts don’t get you, the hoppers likely will. She wasn’t at all wrong, I’m sure--the world she lived in was harsh and unforgiving.

One story she told me I’ll never forget. Some great uncle and family moved to the Rosebud, to a vacant spot, from Iowa, where he’d farmed before. He planted corn, just as he always had. Spring rains came and were a blessing, she said. By July 4, the corn was better than knee-high. Life on what was then the frontier was proving promisingly sweet.

One afternoon a blast of wind rose from the south. The temperature had already reached 100 degrees, and that scorching wind—you can know its ravages only by having experienced it—all by itself flattened the entire crop. No tornado. No hail. Just a hot wind and the whole crop was gone.

“The very next day,” she told me, “my uncle put his kids and all his belongings in the wagon he’d rode in on, and left Todd County, South Dakota." He gave the horses a snicker—and they were gone. In the morning there was a promise; by evening it was gone. Everything was dry and withered.

Here in Psalm 90, Moses isn’t talking about the prairie or the harsh open spaces of the Great Plains. He’s talking about us—our aspirations, our lives.

More than anything else, he’s talking about time and the cold hard fact of death, of crops, lush and green, flattened by a searing southern wind.

When you think about it a bit, our lives are like that corn: here today, gone tomorrow. This week I'll be 75 years old. For me at least, all of that has never been more true. 

I know--there’s little that’s sweet about such sentiment. But it’s the undeniable truth. And the truth. . .well, you know the promise the John 8 offers, to all discouraged settlers.

Just too cool

It seems that over in Afghanistan, the used-to-be Taliban aren't thrilled with office jobs in town. Ain't much joy in middle-managing. The pay is better, I'm guessing, but a guy sort of comes to miss sleeping out under the open sky, toting big guns, and, once in a while, bringing down the enemy. Sure, it's rough and the pay ain't that good, but you're out there on your own, you know? You don't have ask to pee.

A guy gets tired of market food. "Life was simple and free during jihad," one former sniper said. "All we had to deal with was making plans for attacks against the enemy and for retreating."

Warn't no need of building things, just ripping things up was all the work involved. Nobody depended on you either. You didn't have to empty wastebaskets or deal with uppity women or crying babies. Life was good.

You just miss it, you know? I mean, you know--late nights around a campfire, jawing away, telling stories, dreaming about bringing it to our women. Out there, it was a man's world. If you wanted to attack, you did--or didn't. Nobody bossed you around. Nobody punched in or punched out--it was all about just being bad boys.
Now, you do the same things every day, and if people have no food, it's a problem I  got to take care of. These days, you got to find a public restroom.

Home, home, on the range. Sing it, boys.

All of that's kind of standard fare, I guess. A. B. Guthrie wrote novels, plenty of them, but a couple sing to the very same tune, even though the characters wouldn't know a Muslim if, midday, one'd walk up to the campfire. The Big Sky lays open the great joy of Bridger and Boone and all those coonskin-capped strappers who wandered the wilderness in search of furry pelts. They lived wild-and-wooly lives under that big sky. Some lived, some died, but mostly they lived lives some men work hard to relive in spendy adventure packages. A whole lot of us would rather be hunter-gatherers than middle managers, rather hunt buffalo than bust sod, like that painting up top says. 

Another Guthrie novel, The Way West, charts the path of families who embarked on an adventure that would, they believed, end in the promised land of Oregon. In order to get there--and they do, and it's a wonderful novel--they need one of those men in coonskin caps. He's the only one who can guide them, and he's the centerpiece of the novel in large part because while he is a John Wayne, he's blessed with a huge heart and a triumphant soul. 

In Native America of that era, a warrior became a headman for two reason not one--not just because he was brave and daring and proud, but because when he returned to camp he made sure everyone had something to eat. He heart was proud and big. 

There's something in the bawling those Taliban are doing these days, something downright silly and comic-book funny. But there's something I understand too, because it resides in many a soul in many a far off residence. Doesn't matter color or race or religion, pardon my giggle, but the very idea of those buckaroos visiting the toilet around the corner of the office is just too cool.

"The Taliban used to be free of restrictions, but now we sit in one place, behind a desk and a computer 24 hours a day, seven days a week," one of them said. "Life’s become so wearisome; you do the same things every day."

Just too cool. 

The choice we face

On Tuesday night, I was happy to hear Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders put our whole political mess into perspective. "We have a choice," she said. "We can choose normal, or we can choose the crazies." 

Yup, that's sure enough what she said. 

Blackbird Bend

Karl Bodner's Blackbird Hill

More than a couple of centuries have passed, so I can't imagine that some guy with a baseball bat is going to come by and break my leg. The goons, I hope, are long gone. 

So let me just call it the way I see it. Chief Blackbird--yes, I know there's a fine casino named after him, as well as a bend in the river--Chief Blackbird was Tony Soprano in braids and a blanket. The man ruled--I mean ruled--Omaha country, a chunk of Missouri River land that stretched from Yankton to Belleview and more, both sides of Big Muddy.

That's no small pickins. Took some doing, I'm sure, to rule the roost. It was, I'd guess, an entire kingdom, not to mention the fact that just before 1800 there were a couple thousand Omaha people. That's the world the man ruled, and rule he did.

He'd established his powerful reputation in war, frequent battles against every other band along the river--Pawnees, Ponca, Otoes, Kanzas. When he was a boy, he was captured by the Sioux--and escaped. Seriously. 

Chief Blackbird never lost any sleep on account of the encroaching white man. When the French or the Spanish came up or down the river, he soon enough determined the only way to deal with the onslaught was to beat the foreigners at their own game. There was, back then, good money to be made and goods to be won in beaver pelts and buffalo hides. All right, he might have said, let's find a way to cut a deal. 

Along the way, he picked up some nastiness. Blackbird, like any other mafia don, liked nice things and wasn't afraid of flaunting it. He was a wheeler-dealer, and when his starving people started smelling graft, they weren't about to take it--big chief or no big chief. 

His white traders told him he ought to take care of business, then handed over a medicine bag of arsenic. "This stuff'll take care of things," those white men told him, snarling out a smile, I'm sure.

Blackbird was in over his head, and he knew it. To hold on to what he had, he thought it just might be helpful to cast a spell and register some mysterious power. So he did. He used that arsenic like a banana clip, told people who'd opposed him that soon enough they'd get their due, swore to it. And then, shockingly, they keeled over not long after he told them they would. Wasn't a magic show either, just arsenic. Suddenly, Blackbird had big medicine; his power only grew. Blackbird became a prophet. 

And so it went until he met an enemy arsenic or gunfire wasn't going to best. The Omaha, like every other tribe up and down the Missouri, had no defense against an enemy that crept in without a sound and carried no rifles or any visible means of aggression. In silence, the enemy came in like an invisible mist, crept up and over the land in a way that left the Omaha people dead or dying.

The process grew all too clearly in just a few months. Six days or so after the fever began, people died of systemic shock--the entire body shut down. Often, those able to live through it were left blind, horribly scarred. Mercy killing was not uncommon. Warriors went into battle simply because they preferred to die with dignity. 

Smallpox took the Don. Blackbird came down with the disease--who knows how? He had no magic to fight it. 

He was buried up above ground and above the river, at a spot where today a memorial in his honor sits along Highway 75. His lifeless body was strapped to his horse, just the way he wanted to be, eyes over the river below watching for traders coming up the Missouri.   

Four years later, Lewis and Clark pulled ashore and climbed the hill to pay respects. Blackbird's mound must have been really hard to miss. 

In death, of course, he was not alone. Researchers estimate that as many as 1500  Omaha died.

He fell to a curse not even the godfather could escape. 

Something about grace

Verne Gagne (right)

I wonder now, all these many years later, whether watching WWE with Dad wasn't good for me. What it did, undoubtedly, is shake the sweet Christian soul developing in me. A thousand "Jesus Loves Mes" could be deleted by an single hour of pro wrestling. To me, its naked flamboyant aggression felt like sin, even if wasn't, even if my dad was, well, in his own way, addicted.

When I remember watching Gorgeous George or Dick the Bruiser go at it in the ring, some great wrestling star against some poor, no-name stooge soon to get his bell rung, I think of what I felt right then as sin. Yet, there I sat, beside my sweet and righteous dad, the preacher's kid, who was deliberately hiding his fascination from mom, who hated what it was her husband--and her son!!!--were watching. She greatly preferred hymns from the TV room than grunting excesses of pro wrestling. As a Christian and a woman, she found the whole enterprise, not to mention Gorgeous George, repulsive, vulgar. 

So did Dad--well, sort of.  

There were heroes too, like Verne Gagne, who, come Sunday, could have sat beside us in the pew--or in front of u s. Verne Gagne was quintessential goodness, a man who would win by putting his victims to sleep rather than the hospital. I was just a boy, but I remember thinking Dad could rationalize his sneaky peaks simply by watching Verne Gagne step quietly into the ring. Among the bad boys, Verne Gagne was a saint.

I don't remember much about our neighbor, Flick. He lived right across the street, but when his face appears in my memory I'm intimidated. I'm not sure why really, but the only conversations I remember between the two of them concerned wrestling. Out on the street, a goodly distance between us and the kitchen, the two of them would rehearse the great moments from the last show. 

Flick ran a business, the phone company, I think, and because he did he came off as the boss whenever my dad dropped over to chat. Flick made more money than Dad did, which meant something; and he and his wife, on Sunday, walked in the opposite direction we did on their way to the Presbyterians, who, you know, had only one service on the Sabbath. By their fruits ye shall know them, after.

Flick the Presbyterian loved wrestling and had himself the kind of personality that would have made him a thing in the wring. Everything came out, volume-wise, at a ten. A little stubby maybe, Flick was thick as a fireplug and he talked so loud you'd spend half the time looking to see who else might be listening in. For good Christians like my folks, his language took on a little salty once in a while too. What can you expect from Presbyterians?

So, Dad and Flick would go at it, a comedy routine. They both loved it. Dad maintained, quite elegantly, I'm sure, that pro wrestling was humbug, the whole business just plain fake. No one ever got hurt on the mat. They were all wonderful athletes who knew how to fall and how to make money. Who would win and who would lose was drawn up off stage long before anybody slipped into a satin robe. 

Flick, full volume, claimed the opposite. Wrestling was not managed, baseball was. The Boston Braves had pulled up the franchise and moved to Milwaukee. Dad loved to listen to ball games. He used to  score 'em. After the ninth, rows and lines pencilled in across the page recorded who got the round-trippers, and the hits that drove in runs. Once the final pitch smacked the mitt, he could hand you the box score. 

Flick claimed baseball was the real hoax, the whole mess set up ahead of time. Now, pro wrestling--that's nothing but muscle on muscle. Dad would shake his head. He never won, but were the two of them in a ring, by the second round my dad's Verne Gagne would have taken some hits from Flick's Dick the Bruiser.

All I knew, as a six or seven-year-old was that Dad was somehow transfixed by what he claimed to despise. It was clear too that he was much more comfortable watching pro wrestling if Mom was having coffee with her neighbors. 

Today, all these years later, I can't help thinking it was good for me--this sparring Dad did out on the street in front of our house, a comic ritual argument that left both of them giggling. It was good for me to see my dad argue righteousness that he couldn't quite manage himself. 

Verne Gange, Dick the Bruiser, Haystack Calhoun, and, of course, Gorgeous George--he loved 'em, even though he knew darn well he shouldn't. 

Somewhere in the mix it seems to me there's a story about grace.

Dick the Bruiser

   

Little Sioux, Saturday morning

If it wouldn't be for the skeletal branches up top here, you wouldn't know that the land wears a ermine quilt, and the temp is well below freezing. The tufts of seed clumps might well seem like leaves. For a moment, I thought I might be witness to a sun stack, the kind of phenom when successive layers of clouds form burniing morning chimney. Didn't quite happen, as you see. 

The optical illusion here is created, I think, by the sense that the tawny background is vastly closer than it actually is. That's some kind of shelter buildiings for animals in the foreground; it's not a toy or something I photoshopped in. There really is that much snow on the ground. Because the trees are just now catching the sun, I stopped to shoot. Somehow it's a freakish shot. But the colors are blessedly rich and, check for yourself, oddly similar to these:

The O'Brien County Prairie Center keeps a half dozen buffalo, and I can't not stop to see if I can get some epic shot. That morning, I got this--the kind of picture people use for church directories, Ma and Pa nicely posed, hardly primpted. I'm always on the lookout for snowy bison and had hope on Saturday, but there these two sat atop an unseemly pile of stuff. Still, it's a nice background, and the two of them do look posed in a churchly sort of way.

This is close to what I wanted to get--the immensity of billowing white land right now. This isn't fresh snow--it's at least a week old; but a week of really cold temps keep it almost pure. In this picture, my trusty camera admits that truly big shots, no matter how hard it tries, are really hard to come by.  Here's another.

The hills along the Little Sioux River are elegant right now--or at least they were on Saturday morning; but this shot, like the former, doesn't show it. I still find it hard to capture the beauty of big land and big skies in a place like this. It's all really gorgeous, a bride of land. I just can't get it in the camera. 

And then there's this guy, in color, too, although you wouldn't guess. I must have a couple dozen shots of this old solitary oak, big as life, out there on the hood of the hill. Even when there is no color, its perseverance is worth recording. 

And this, finally, is what forms the area--the Little Sioux. I've spent far too much time with the Spirit Lake Massacre, 1857, a kind of beastly prelude to the Dakota War of 1862. This whole scene, this whole valley, was ruled by Inkpaduta, a Wahpakutee headman (Santee Sioux), who engineered a killing spree of pioneers on and around the Iowa Lakes.

He didn't want anyone to tell him what to do--white or red. He felt himself a victim of injustice because a white man had killed his brother and his brother's family, but there was no justice for such a heinous deed. Soon, in fact, there'd be a bounty for killing Indians.

That white people were moving into the neighborhood was no excuse for him to carry out the butchering he and his band did. Inkpaduta was not a nice man. No one should even try to assert he had his rights or whatever. There were other tribes and bands right here before his people arrived. They chased them out too. Other Santee bands wanted nothing to do with Inkpaduta even before his mad killing spree.

Anyway, this was his world, his land, his home. Even though I'm armed with nothing more than a camera, I'm always conscious of this being the world he loved, the land of Inkpaduta. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 90:4

 

“For a thousand years in your sight

are like a day that has just gone by,

or like a watch in the night.” 

When my father died, the poet Scott Cairns sent me a poem he’d written at the death of his own father. Like no other poem I know, it offered consolation—and still does. Countless times I’ve sent it on to others who’ve lost parents or friends. It’s titled “Words for a Father,” and it begins with “and,” as if we’re probably overhearing some ideas that have been brewing in our heads for quite some time.

“And this is the consolation: that the world
doesn't end, that the world one day opens up
into something better. And that we
one day open up into something far better.”

He’s talking about afterlife, of course—our visions of the eternal, of heaven. None of us know a thing about what the afterlife will look like, but our differing views (streets paved with gold, good fishing, no more wind) all share the same basic conviction: there, things will be better. That much for sure: things will be better.

Then he visits a vision of things, narrating carefully one possible sense of dying:

Maybe like this: one morning you finally wake
to a light you recognize as the light you've wanted
every morning that has come before. And the air
has some light thing in it that you've always hoped
the air might have. And One is there to welcome you
whose face you've looked for during all the best and worst
times of your life. He takes you to himself
and holds you close until you fully wake.

There’s no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, only a sweet light and a single, strangely familiar face, a maternal God whose welcome is a blessed, wordless calm.

And then the lines that seem most memorable to me—or certainly were in those days following my father’s dying.

And it seems you've only just awakened, but you turn
and there we are, the rest of us, arriving just behind you.
We'll go the rest of the way together.

What hurt me most at my father’s death was the sense of his being gone, alone, the rest of us seated in the church he’d attended his whole life, all of us, his entire family. To the terror of that emptiness, Scott’s poem is sweet and grand relief, profiling eternity by promising us all—my father and his included—that a thousand years in God’s sight are like nothing at all. Nothing. We’ll be there soon ourselves.

That, is comfort.

This winter count(s)

It's called a "winter count," a buffalo hide painting from the Kiowas, the note says, who, like other plains Indians, created a pictoral history to notch their story--their stories, I guess I should say. The etched in image at the top of each of those vertical bars tells reminds the band of that a year's most prominent memory. 

Sadly enough, a century later in Orange City, Iowa, we've got no way to explain what each of the skeletal line drawings is meant to signify. One of them features a man in a black hat--maybe that was the year the Black Robes came around, white man's medicine, the big news of the year.

That sprawling buffalo hide is called a "winter count" because it registers the years, the winters. Let me translate: I'm just a couple of weeks away from celebrating my 75th birthday. Should you ask, I'd say, I'm "75 winters." If you make it through an Iowa winter, you done something of note, brother or sister.

This morning, just outside my window, it's -2 degrees. We're expecting a high of 14, which, for the record, would be significantly warmer than yesterday. 

I can't say enough about how beautiful this winter has been--I mean plenty of windswept drifts perfectly manicured and sturdy as sculpture in the cold, cold air. We've had a week of radiance, the hoarfrost turning the a dusty, dirty rural world into something from Disney. 

But it's been cold. Oh, my, has it been cold. Here's the back yard.

Men and women my age should be shooting pictures of organ pipe cactus somewhere around the Lost Dutchman Mine, not a few dead handfuls of grass against a sea of alabaster. 

Anyway, these pics are not my "winter count," but this morning, as frigid as yesterday's and likely the next, I'm here to say that this winter counts. 

Sheesh. Even the cat has cabin fever. 

Morning Thanks -- What it is I believe

a winter sparrow

The Puritans, who talked more about work and vocation than almost any community before or since, articulated a helpful idea that Eugene Peterson later termed "vocational holiness." The idea is that we are sanctified--made holy--not in the abstract but through our concrete vocation. 

That's from a book titled Liturgy of the Ordinary: Sacred Practices in Everyday Life, written by Tish Harrison Warren, who happens to be an Anglican priest, someone you may know, either by her books or by the fact that she contributes regularly to the op-ed pages of the New York Times.  

We're reading Liturgy of the Ordinary, together, not because it's number one on some evangelical book circuit, but because it was, well, around. I'm not sure who of us picked it up. It's seven years old, so it's not hot stuff anymore, although I'm quite sure it was when it was published. Neither or us remember buying it, but, for sure, both of us could have.

Christian holiness is not a free-floating goodness removed from the world, a few feet the ground. It is specific and, in some sense, tailored to who we particularly are. We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation.

The "message" of the book--it is a "message" book, even something of a how-to, is that being a believer means tuning the liturgy of your life--your work, your leisure, even your petty burdens--into ever ready Godliness. What it seeks to devour among believers--and this is a believers' book--is the idea that Godliness is basically the province of the church. All of life is religious is the sermon she's honing throughout.

We grow in holiness in the honing of our specific vocation. We can't be holy in the abstract. Instead we become a holy blacksmith or a holy mother or a holy physician or a holy systems analyst. We seek God in and through our particular vocation and place in life. 

As we were reading this just last night I stopped right there and told my wife that I knew all of that and believed it--knew it and believed it for a long, long time, for most of my life, in fact. I don't remember learning it. I can't point to day or a week or a college class and say, "That day--that day in catechism I came to understand the truth of "holy vocation." I just know it, and when I read it last night--I mean the paragraph I just quoted--I was struck with a sense of the fulness of a blessing. 

There are scribblings in the book, markings from my pen and Barbara's pencil; but it's clear that neither of us ever finished reading Liturgy of the Ordinary. It's our book, and it somehow simply showed up so we decided to read it, and it has been good, maybe because we so heartily agree with what she says, maybe because her dogged determination to make brushing her teeth, reading her e-mail, even arguing with her husband into vital "spiritual" work is often, well, entertaining. It's a book that makes you smile.

But this morning as I move ever closer--two weeks away--from my three-score and ten + five birthday, I just want to repeat what I told my wife-of-50-years last night. "I know all of that," I said, and this morning I'm thankful that I do.

This morning's thanks is for nothing more or less than a worldview, something really, really basic that's forever in me, something I learned somewhere along the line, something I've come to believe, heart and soul and mind. It's who I am. 

Josephine Donovan's Black Soil -- ii

(continued from yesterday)

In a blizzard reminiscent of the famous Children’s Blizzard of 1888, a boy dies when the kids are sent home as the snow begins to fall. Then, when the blizzard unfurls its anger, Little Benny Hurd leaves the Connors kids--his own home is in another direction. Sadly, he never gets there. His body is found once spring melts the snow that took him. The puppy he’d been given by one of the Conners kids earlier that morning was still wrapped in his jacket, and like the boy, dead. His grandparents leave Siouxland. Not everyone is made of tough enough stuff.

Benny Hurd is not the only one to go to his death on the prairie. Ms. Donovan gives a hundred pages to the story of Johann Hoepner, an aristocratic young man from Germany, who is escaping the military draft. Johann is just what Nell so desires more of—he’s upper class, well-educated, and can speak seven languages. A sweetheart back in Germany awaits his signal that a new home awaits her in a new land.

But things don’t work out well for Johann Hoepner. The land is a stern taskmaster, time passes and he doesn’t appear able to escape the mud soddie people helped him build when he came. Finally, when the woman he loves stop writing, Johann ends his life beneath a cottonwood.

Nell is heartbroken, not only because the community lost one of its own, but also because his death kindles once more her grievous fear that this place can kill, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

If there were a church fight or two, the novel could well have been written by a Dutch Calvinist of the era. There isn’t. The Connors are Roman Catholic, and Nell is bountifully religious, close to God, constantly in prayer. For years, Nell insisted that when their foster child, Sheila, was of age, she’d be sent back east for the kind of education her children were sadly missing. It’s her dream. It’s the vision that allows her to live out here at the edge of the frontier. But when that time comes in Sheila's life, the young adoptee decides otherwise.

Nell’s heart and will are broken. Her only comfort is that all of this is somehow, unthinkably, God’s will. She goes alone to her bedroom, bearing the burden of what she believes to be her failure, then lies their quietly, admitting no one, seeing no one.

She needs, as all of us do, to tell herself what her catechism has taught her to believe, that in this as in all other things she must be reconciled to His indomitable will. Her fighting spirit is of no avail; she must accept fate. Her anger went out like the lightning as the storm abated. She gets up from her bed with a feeling akin to that she experienced after the birth of her children here in this room—she had been in the valley of the shadow for a while, but she rises to the heights again.

And again she says, “It’s God’s will.” And with that, “Nell bathed her face, combed her hair, changed her wrapper, and rattled up some custard pies for the men’s dinner.”

Sheila’s decision is to follow a man who loves her, a Native, Wild Goose, a Yankton of mixed blood from regions just west. There’s a racial story here too, a complicated little mystery that opens up at the end of the novel.

But the novel’s heart has less to do with race than it does with place. Wild Goose, the Omaha who loves Sheila, may well be more of a symbol than a human being, because when Sheila leaves with him for the west, for deeper and even less “civilized” frontier. Late in the story, her Nell and Tim discover that the child they left when she was abandoned is of mixed blood herself. Nell’s loss couldn’t be more profound, not because Sheila is Native, but because Sheila's going back to Massachusetts, to civilization, had been manna to Nell's hungry soul. When she meets Wild Goose, her future is determined.

What her daughter’s decision determines for Nell Connors is that a good life can be had here too, on the prairie, in a fledgling community of ethnics who fight at the drop of a hat, a stolen pitchfork, or some silly sleight.

And then there’s the railroad. It’s come to town for the first time, creating a celebration like none other. To Nell Connors, it's a kind of redeemer. Once upon a time, it had dropped them off at the far edge of civilization, dropped them off where the rails no longer lay. Once upon a time it had loosed them from the life they’d once lived, left them in an unwelcoming world, a sea of grass where as far you could see, there was nothing at all.

The railroad renews her, establishes a link with her childhood and an established community with good schools and endless opportunity. When the railroad comes to town, drawing together the old and the new, the story ends because Nell Connors finds herself ready to settle down.

Black Soil is not a great novel. Donovan’s powers of description occasionally shine in glorious portraits of the prairie beauty that belie Nell’s great fears; but Donovan wanders through several characters’ perceptions with an annoying omniscience, and the perils of the prairie—grasshoppers, prairie fires--are what one might expect.

Still, for those of us who live here, Black Soil is a great read, even if it’s not great literature. Black Soil brings us back to a time we do well to remember. Life wasn’t easy. Farming wasn’t always a business, blessings came few and far between.

That we don’t know our own history allows, even generates a certain a species of arrogance. To read Black Soil today, 150 years after white folks like the Collins came to Siouxland to seek a better life is humbling, something to think about when you pass a tractor and a planter this spring, something to consider when you look up and down endless rows of corn and beans stretching into a horizon that never ends. 

Josephine Donovan's Black Soil -- i

Tonight the Dutch-American Heritage Museum (DAHM)will host a discussion of Black Soil (1930), Josephine Donovan's novel of early Sioux County, a book full tales of the very first of the Euro-American pioneers to create a life right here between the Big and the Little Sioux Rivers. This review (tomorrow too) appeared here three years ago, but still covers the subject. The truth is, I enjoyed Black Soil even more this time through. 

The DAHM has a few actual original corn stalks
from those early years.

You sometimes wonder—or at least I do—if there will come a time when Sioux County, Iowa, has enough hog confinements. Industry is the name of the game here; the descendants of all those Dutch Calvinists could write primers on how to work, how to farm, and how to make money.

Confinements sit on every available hill, more than any other adjacent county, but then agriculture is a huge business here, empowering everything, keeping life afloat and a culture intact. It’s difficult to imagine the region in its wild, pristine state, almost impossible to think of the natural world as an antagonist. There’s hail and even a tornado or two; there are still almost unendurable winters, like this one may be; and torrid summers still create hot winds that once upon a time laid standing corn to waste in just a few days.

But to think of this world outside my window itself as some untamed wilderness, as a powerful force to be conquered is simply not possible in day when the best cabbed tractors are steered through the fields by satellite technology. In many ways, we’ve subdued the earth and done the Lord's bidding.

Maybe that’s why it took me half a novel to determine the central conflict when I started into reading Josephine Donovan’s Black Soil, her engaging rendition of the perilous settlement of this corner of the state, a region Fred Manfred named “Siouxland.” It’s just hard, 150 years later, to think of what she calls “the prairie” as a bleak and pitiless enemy.

But once upon a time, it was. Once upon a time, grasshoppers darkened the sky and devoured just about every living thing, engorging whole sections, mile after mile of farmland, making the earth seem to crawl. Once upon a time, the devastation they created brutal poverty no descendent can begin to imagine. Once upon a time, prairie fires ritually consumed the region. Once upon a time, life-and-death drama occurred on October stages all over the region. Once upon a time, white folks were scared to death of the Native people their own new homesteads unkindly dispossessed.

If you’ve read Giants in the Earth, the Rolvaag classic, nothing in Donovan’s Black Soil is going to be new or visionary. The gender differences are classic in what some call “Middle Border Lit”: men like Per Hansa and Tim Collins love the adventure, love opening the earth and making it abundant with row crops. Meanwhile, in a whole series of novels about homesteading, women felt abandoned beneath the eyes of a gargantuan sky on a land so bare there seemed no place to hide. What’s more, frontier life required abandoning families back home, meant endless sweat and none of the blessings of life in established communities back east.

Nell Connors, the woman at the heart of this 1930s novel, is just such a pioneer woman. She’s neither Dutch nor Luxembourgian, traditional Sioux County ethnics, but, oddly enough, Irish Catholic and a Yankee. Her roots are back east in Massachusetts, where she remembers visiting the most honorable Dickinson family in Amherst, including the ethereal Emily, whom she remembers as a poet.

Nell Connors is married to Tim, a wonderful man with a huge heart, a man not well suited to build the farming life at the edge of the frontier. He doesn’t lack ambition, but he’s not dedicated to making the work—or farming--as a profession. His eye is elsewhere. More than once I’ve heard old Iowa men talk about brothers who were sent off to school for the ministry or education once it became obvious to Ma and Pa that they didn’t have the wherewithal to farm. Tim Connors doesn’t either.

But it’s not her husband’s skewed predilections or laziness that brings Nell Connors grief; it’s the unspeakable realization that her children are walking off to school in bare feet and, once they get there, receiving a third-rate education, at best, in a world where it's far more important to milk than read poems.

It’s the sheer force of “the prairie” that she fights, that makes her wonder if Siouxland can ever become a home. When she sees a boy with artistic talent return from working cattle “out west,” swaggering as if he were little more than a chaw-spewing cowhand, she feels and fears the overwhelming power of open spaces. “A sadness came over Nell Connor as she walked back to the house,” Donovan writes. “Does the country make the man, or the man make the country?” Nell Connors’s fear is for what her children won’t have, what they’ll never experience, what they’ll miss out here on the hard-hearted Siouxland prairie.

The Dutch fare well in Black Soil. The novel is set somewhere near Primghar, where the locals watch Hollanders arriving in hoards at the western reaches of the county (“the Dutch are coming in thicker than hops!” someone reports). The Dutch, Nell says, are exceptionally clannish, more so than the Germans and the Luxembourgians; but they keep their towns and themselves clean and tidy, just like their farms. They work hard, and, in the novel at least, the occasional Hollander who wanders away from the colony and into foreign Siouxland regions always makes a good neighbor.

(More of Black Soil tomorrow)

Me and L and C--vii

It's -5 right now. The cold somehow finds a way to creep in. I'm in a fleece vest over a long-sleeve shirt, my warmest pair of sweat pants, and heavy wool slippers. Behind me, the furnace is roaring. Soon, I'll grab a coffee and light the fireplace.

Long, long ago, it is said, the people didn't have any such comfort. In fact, on mornings like this one, some died from cold, just froze to death--often the elderly and the very young. The people loved the world they lived in--spring, summer, and fall-- but winter meant death and disaster. They counted their years in winters.

Although they were unaware of being watched, someone outside of their circle saw the children and the old ones dying, and determined that the beings he knew of on top the mountain, those beings, dangerous as they were--the Fire Beings--were gifted with what the people needed, something warm and deep, whose rich voice and bright colors would even be of benefit. The people needed fire. He resolved to get some.

Who was that silent friend? It was Coyote. That's right--coyote. He could be reckless and even dangerous, as some of them knew, but he was somehow just the one who could save the people.

So Coyote climbed the mountain until he found the Fire Beings. There they were, seated comfortably around the flames--monsters, vicious and terrible. Coyote knew that if he were to grab some of that fire, he'd have to do it when they weren't suspecting him. He waited and waited, studied their behavior until he figured he'd have the best chance--the moment they were changing guard. When next that happened, Coyote grabbed a lit stick from the roaring blaze and took off running. He ran and ran and ran though forest and valley, through endless trees and flowing creeks. He tore down the mountain, the Fire Beings in a pack behind him, so close they singed his tail. Even today, the very tip is sooty black. 

But Coyote had friends, like Chipmunk. So when it became clear to him that he could run no farther and no faster, he handed that stick of fire to Chipmunk, who took off like a meteor. But the Fire Beings didn't quit. When they got up close to Chipmunk, one of them drew his clawed hand over Chipmunk's back which explains those dark lines down Chipmunk's body.

When Squirrel got the firestick, the Fire Beings bent its back and tail with their strength, but Squirrel passed it along to Frog, who soon lost his tail. Still, Frog got it to Wood, where the Fire Beings stopped on a dime because they couldn't grab the fire from Wood.

And that's how Coyote stole fire from the Fire Beings and saved the people from dying in winter. 

On August 12, 1804, the Corps of Discovery spotted a four-legged they didn't recognize on the west side of the Missouri. Clark called it a Prairie Wolf. A couple men went to shore to try to get it--but didn't. Couldn't. They couldn't find him-- blame thing got away. 

That was the first time any Euro-American had seen the real wily coyote.

Native people knew all about them, of course. The coyote were wily, and you didn't want to cross them. Still, sometimes they did really wonderful things, like the time, you know, when they brought fire down the mountain to the people who were dying in winter. 

In ten years out here on the edge of town, we've seen only one coyote. But we know they're here because sometimes at night, when the windows are open. . .well, you know, they're out there.

Sunday Morning Meds--Dust to Dust

“You turn men back to dust, saying, 

‘Return to dust, O sons of men.’” Psalm 90:3

 

I received a note, five years ago now, from a couple who claimed they wanted my help. She was dying of ovarian cancer. She’d kept a journal throughout her life but had continued to write during her affliction, thinking about issues she was facing immediately, issues of life and death. She and her husband wondered whether I might help her—and them—bring something together in book form. Lots of people appreciated her e-mail reflections, they said; many urged her to collect them. “They should all be in a book,” people told them.

The cancer was terminal. Since the verdict had been handed down, the two of them—with a little help from a financial benefactor—had decided to do their own “make-a-wish” adventure and travel to places they’d always dreamed about. They’d had four kids—two of them were in college, all of them in their late teens and early twenties. Extensive travel hadn’t been an option earlier in their lives. They’d chosen to live frugally, in a fashion they would have called, themselves, “stewardly.”

But Sharon was dying, and there were things she wanted badly to see, places she’d always wanted to go. So for a year or so they’d lived almost nomadically, and she’d kept that journal, pages and pages long.

Would you help us? they said. Her reflections would make a good book.

I get dozens and dozens of such requests, and it’s always painful to have to tell people that I can’t—or won’t help. I could have spent every moment of my writing life helping people with their own great stories or writing those stories myself. I could have done that and never once seen a publication or made a buck. Everyone has a story—everyone. But most of us don’t care to read everyone else’s.

But something about this story seemed especially compelling, so I told them I’d like to meet them and have a look. I did, and I took the job on. That was six years ago, and finally, maybe a month or two from now, the book will be published.

That it’s taken a long, long time is attributable, in a way, to the fact that the project is—and has been from the very first scribbling—a labor of love. I don’t want to appear angelic, but it’s unlikely that I’ll ever make a dime on the book. Nor will they.

And that’s understatement. Sharon is gone, of course. Three years ago already, her cancer took her. The book includes her final jottings, as well as the detailed plans she’d made for her own funeral. Sharon’s earthly musing is history.

Last week, while we were on vacation, another e-mail note appeared in my in-box, a note I didn’t read until yesterday. Sharon’s husband, Dennis, has cancer himself—I knew that. I didn’t know how bad. Yesterday’s e-mail made clear that his condition is terminal. It’s lung cancer, a killer. He never smoked in his life.

An old friend of mine once told me her preacher/father loved to do funerals because he felt he never held people’s attention so fully as he could when he read Psalm 90 with a coffin—open or closed—set conspicuously in front of the sanctuary. “Dust to dust the mortal dies,” the old song says. Not just Sharon, but now, shockingly, Dennis too—and, lest we forget, you and me. What is inescapable about Psalm 90 is inescapable about life: it ends, for all of us. That’s everyone’s story.

_______________________ 

This one appeared here not long ago, but I'm working through Psalm 90 and decided to run it again. It's in Sixty at Sixty. 

Morning Thanks---The flutter of snowbirds

Two degrees outside right now, but no wind. I just gave my morning, bird-seed  blessing, both hanging feeder, as well as a couple of handfuls down on the snow. Soon enough, the action will begin.

I'm not sure where they all hang out when they're not battering each other for their fair share of food, but in five minutes or less they'll flock down here for breakfast, juncos always first. They fly in first and sit in a wiry bush a few feet away from the feeder. They're the only ones who dare come that close when the humanoid is still out there dishing out goodies. 

Juncos are an odd member of the several bands of birds that will soon show up because they are, for reasons all of their own, the least intimidated by me--I can sit up close to the window to snap a picture, and they don't immediately take wing--no big deal. While I don't seem to be of danger to them, they're forever intimidated by their cousins, the sparrows who always come in a bunch. As Shakespeare may have said it, "they come not as spies but in battalions" (that's Hamlet, and it's about sorrows, not sparrows). 

The juncos are the only bunch (save blue jays, who clear the deck when they arrive) with clearly distinguishing features. They come by puffy, round sugar cookies, the vanilla frosting covering their feathery bellies. Something in their constitution forbids scrambling for a position on the feeder; they're land bound, only scavenge down beneath on the snow, so I leave a couple handfuls primarily for them, even though they're quickly shooed away by the more hostile tribes.

Some people call them "snowbirds" (not to be confused by temporary residents of Arizona) because, hard as it is to believe, their presence here outside my window is occasioned by the cold weather most all of us despise. They nest somewhere up north, I'm told, which doubles my reason to care. On the other hand, researchers have determined that they're well-prepared for winter--adding feathers that increase their almost incidental weight by a full thirty per cent. 

Who counts such things, I don't know, but those who do speculate that there are 600,000+ of them extant in the US of A. When a bunch is around, you can call them any of a variety of plurals--a chittering, a crew, a flutter (which is more than a little onomatopoetic)  or maybe just a host, although their numbers outside my window is not sufficient to earn that last title. Maybe a dozen or so--a flutter. 

They're trusting little souls really. You gotta love 'em. I'm a world away from St. Francis; I doubt they'll be alighting on my shoulder any time soon, or, Disney-like, chirping on my ear, but they're sweet to have around and I hope they hold the same regard for the humanoid. 

This morning--and just about all these winter mornings--I'm thankful for the snowbirds, and, I'm humbly guessing, they're quite similarly thankful for m

"Ohio"

Mementos of the era

There's much about it that's mythical, that goes beyond the memorable syncopation and opening guitar riffs and into something much bigger, so big, in fact, that Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young undercut their own hot item, a song titled "Teach Your Children," by releasing "Ohio" as quickly as they did. 

They put it on the market when "Teach" was still climbing, virtually assuring the earlier cut would never reach the heights it might have if they hadn't released "Ohio" when they did. Whether or not they ever actually sat down and decided to release "Ohio" as immediately as they did isn't clear, in part because "Ohio" was, well, epoch-making--and they seemed to understand it themselves, even as they made the recording. "Ohio" was, to them, and to millions of others, including, back then, a much younger me, something more than music. 

The story is worth retelling. In the most hideous confrontation between the National Guard and the anti-war movement, four seemingly innocent Kent State students were shot dead when the Guard opened fire at a campus protest. There was, in early May of 1970, a sense, at least among some young people--including me--that the anti-war folks were gaining ground. The war simply had not been showing signs of ending. Body bags by the score were still coming back from a place most American people couldn't have pointed out on a globe. The anti-war movement was growing.

So the story goes that David Crosby, who died just last week, showed Neil Young the duly famous picture of Mary Ann Vecchio kneeling over the body of a kid who was shot just then, a picture as famous as any of the era or even of the century, for that matter. 

Young took a look at the picture, grabbed his guitar, and went out into a stand of trees somewhere close. In an hour he created a line of music, or so the story goes, and brought it back in to Crosby, who immediately--seriously, immediately--reserved studio time yet that night. Thus, Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young created, released, and marketed an anthem that became something even more than music, a lyric that, like the iconic photograph, came to embody the entire era, the era in which, I confess, I grew up. 

Tin soldiers and Nixon coming
We're finally on our own
This summer, I hear the drumming
Four dead in Ohio

"Ohio" didn't mess around. Nixon is right there, first line, just before "four dead in Ohio." They didn't try to be artful. If art requires allusion--something more than meets the eye--"Ohio" isn't art. "Ohio" is testimony.

Those students were shot on May 4. Just a few days later, the call went out--May 10, --to gather in DC for a huge student protest. I was still in bed, my last semester in college, listening to early morning news on a clock radio my parents had given me before I left for college four years earlier. What I heard was that student protest groups were calling kids from campuses around the nation to come to the nation's capital on the tenth of May for a giant anti-war protest of what had gone down at Kent State University, four kids shot dead. There'd been no protests at Dordt College, in the heart of a region that was and still is impossibly Republican. There'd been a gathering in Central Park in support of Nixon--he was, after all, the President, almost a divine right thing.  

Gotta get down to it
Soldiers are cutting us down
Should have been done long ago
What if you knew her
And found her dead on the ground
How can you run when you know?

When I heard the story about a gathering in DC of college students from the entire nation, I told myself I had to go, and so I did--three of us left in a VW bug for a trip that would take us half way across the continent and far, far away from northwest Iowa, literally and figuratively. No college funds were spent. I don't know that the three of us would have had the backing of any other souls on campus. But we went.

All of that was 1970, more than a half-century ago. I'm almost 75 years old these days, but when I hear those almost savage opening lines of "Ohio," I can't help but think that my decision to go, back then, was just as driven as any in the wake of Kent State, just as immediate as Crosby, Stills, Nash to Neil Young's inspired tune. 

It would take two years before Tricky Dick went down in infamy via a break-in at the Watergate Hotel. Just before his demise, he shellacked the South Dakota peacenik, Sen. George McGovern, winning all but 18 electoral college votes in the 1972 Presidential election. Then Nixon's Presidency unraveled. The whole era returned last week, with the death of David Crosby.

That death returned all of us who remember to what truly seemed the anti-war's own battle hymn, the days when America's Vietnam War efforts were ending. Neil Young's "Ohio" simply is the age. It simply is.

It runs for three minutes or so. You don't have to listen to it all, but for my sake tune in to those first verses. You're not just hearing music, you're hearing history. 

The Calliope Raid II

The return of the Orange City roughnecks in one of the oft-told tales from Sioux County's past. My mothere-in-law, who was old enough to know him, used to tell me that you had to take anything Charley Dyke wrote with a grain of salt. 

Anyway, I'm reading from Charley Dyke's telling of the story in The Story of  Sioux County. If you don't like the story, pick a fight with him, not me--I'm only the voice.

 

 

The Calliope Raid I

Among those Sioux Countians who like stories from the past, an all-time favorite is the how a bunch of Hollanders from all over the county--Orange City, Hull, and Rock Valley too--got together early one winter day, January 22, 1872, took their sleighs across the county, strong-armed a safe containing the fledgling county's organization papers, and brought the goods to Orange City, where, today, the wonderful County Courthouse stands and all the official business goes on.

Was it all legal? My word, no. It was an insurrection, a heist--not a bank heist, but a armed rebellion that worked.  

Was it righteous? Depends on who you ask.

All of that was almost exactly 150 years ago, time to lament or celebrate--depending on your point of view.

A world of alabaster

For about a week, this square inch of Siouxland where we live has seemed a fairyland. We pride ourselves in having really good ground out here, the best in the state. Our work ethic plays second fiddle to no one, and we're close enough to the Plains to land some of the most beautiful skies on the continent. But for plain old raw beauty, you look elsewhere, right?

Not so. 

The place has been almost heavenly for most of the week--seriously. Deep morning fog envelopes everything in ermine, cottony fluff, so much so that there's nothing left unredeemed. And it stays. It's very fragile, but it's just as beautiful the end of the day as it is in the morning.

 Sunlight has been rare, but lack of color lends its own fairy-like mystery to things. 

Meanwhile, everything is bearded. Wherever you look, there's Santa Claus. . 

 

It's a fairy-land, all right. Just a touch of sun or wind and the whole fantasy is felled. 

That kind of deep frost has kept us in its favors for almost a week, enough so that a man or woman can almost forget what's real--the world all around, a wonderland of alabaster.