Country Schools*

Poor things haven't seen a kid in years. They don't look as depressed as they are simply desolated, where they still exist at all. Sure, some people live in them these days, having turned them into homes; but most are long gone--the old one-room schools. Here one stands out in the country, empty of kids, empty of soul. 

I feel a little guilty snapping a picture, having caught the old place so out of sorts. It's like coming up on a dead body along the road. There's a face here somehow, or am I dreaming? It seems an act of mercy to take the color out. I don't know why, but black and white bestows at least some vagrant dignity. 

Once they were ubiquitous, hard as that it to believe. Here's the Carmel, Iowa, area, circa 1908. Ye olde Atlas claims six of these schools existed in what amounts to six square miles. Look for yourself.

Once they were greatly welcoming, I'm sure. Farms were much smaller; families were much bigger. Many more kids meant more rural schools. All six of these are long gone now, but then so are most of the kids.

My mother taught in one of these places long, long ago, mid-thirties or so, when she was a young thing just out of normal school, too young at times to handle big farm boys who walked through doors like this only occasionally, when they weren't cultivating or helping out with spring planting. I remember Mom telling me that some of the boys she had in Lakeview country school were almost her age and somewhat fearfully bigger than she was. She remembered letting one of them drive her car, some fellow named LeRoy Fritsch, long dead, I imagine. She used to shake her head in disbelief when she remembered letting him do that. I'm sure she was taken with him somehow. I've been a teacher myself.

And once upon a time, in a school just like Hoff District 80 my mother said she was having a good day, mid-winter, when in the middle of a lesson to one grade or another, something started rolling up the hardwood floor from the back, making the kind of hollow noise that edged itself into distraction. She didn't remember what she was teaching, but she remembered hearing the empty noise then seeing a marble, one of those big ones--didn't people used to call them "shooters"?--big as a chestnut.

Like I was saying, a place like this, just such a place.

She was busy with some of the others--a school like this included all eight grades--and I know she was deeply invested in whatever it was she was doing. People say she was a great teacher, and I believe it. Anyway, there she was, mid-winter, in the middle of school a half mile from Lake Michigan with a bunch of tough farm kids when a big marble came rolling up on the wooden floor. I've always thought it was LeRoy Fritsch who did it.

Without thinking, book in hand, she reached down and picked it up. It was, she said, so shockingly red hot that it seared her fingers because it had been heated on the potbelly stove. My mother rarely used bad language, but that moment could well have been one of those times when refraining was out of the question. 

Whatever she said or did at that moment, the pain and shock and disrespect never really left. Nor did it leave her son, who heard the story when he was just a little boy who loved his mom. 

I think I hated LeRoy Fritsch for most of my life, even though I never met him. Old childhood hate that keeps the name alive after all these years and both of their deaths.

You can't help thinking about it when you stand out there beside what few of these still exist--that once upon a time a place like this was full of stories, full of life.

_________________

*  Rpt from March 6, 2015, when there were, I'm sure, more than a few of these abandoned schoolhouses in the country and neighborhood.

How am I doing? Still learning. . .

That's me way over there sitting on a chair against the far wall. You're looking at the Dutch American History Museum (DAHM) in Orange City, a great place that houses a wonderful collection of Native American artifacts. For about ten years I served on the board of the museum and did numerous tours through the museum--and its Indigenous section. Health reasons prompted me to back away, and I did at about the same time the DAHM took in sufficient funding to hire a part-time administrator. 

A week ago or so, she asked me to come to museum and do a tour of the Native side of the DAHM. A goodly number of people from Landsmeer would be coming in, and she wanted me to be the docent. I told her I would--I'd be in Orange City anyway for an appointment at the hospital. I could stop by at just about the time I'd be going home. 

When people ask me how I'm doing these days, I tell them it's a difficult question to answer. If I just say good and they watch me take a step or two, with cane or walker, the image belies the facts. On the other hand, there are 78-year-olds all over who I'm sure would swap conditions. I'm doing okay, but I'm not going out for a spot on the defensive front-four. I'm doing okay, but, my goodness, how I'd love to walk a hundred yards without having to find a place to sit.

So anyway we do a little ritual lately when something like a museum visit comes along. I ask Barbara--"take the cane or the walker"? Most often she says "walker" because she knows, as do I, that the worst possible scenario is me falling, something more likely happen with the cane than the cart. 

I took the cane. Doesn't make me look so fragile, so old.

Once I got through the urologist's fun questions at OC hospital, I got in the car and went to the museum, armed with the cane. 

When our guests showed up--the firsts half of them anyway--as you might have guessed, a ton of them were using a walker. All of the first half. Every one. Not a cane in the bunch. The museum was awash with walkers, and mine was home because, because why? it suggests weakness.

I'm doing okay, all right? If you see me around, you may ask me how I'm doing, but I'll do you the favor of letting you know right now--if you ask, I'll tell you "I'm doing okay--as long as I got the walker."  

Sunday Morning Meds--Psalm 32

 

“For day and night your hand was heavy upon me.”

 

“The gift that keeps on giving,” Garrison Keilor says, of guilt.  I don’t know many Jewish folks, nor enough Roman Catholics to generalize, but my guess is that guilt likely runs as rampant among believers of all stripes as does allergies or acne or avarice—or, for that matter any of the other Seven Deadlies. 

 I’m guessing no single group or fellowship holds a patent on guilt, but here in the upper Midwest, children of the northern European Protestants—Calvinists, Lutherans, and their Mennonite friends—seem to have it in spades. 

 For three decades and more, Garrison Keilor has been trading on dark and somber types, me included.  Today, he simply needs to mention the word “Lutheran,” and his listeners know exactly the darksome tone that is about to emerge from his tales. 

 There are tons of reasons for our excesses, I’m sure, but I’ll assert one of them—the degree to which we are affected by our environment; and here, on the Great Plains especially, the excesses of that environment. 

 Everything comes in spades where I live—winter’s cold, summer’s heat, rainfall, snow, drought, hail, tornadoes, and the ubiquitous, howling wind.  It’s no wonder we’re losing population out here.  Sometimes, when a hot wind takes off your face like a ratchet, I think General Zebulon Pike was right:  this really is the Great American Desert.  For more than a century we’ve been hoodwinked by real estate crooks.  Maybe we ought to sell the whole Upper Midwest to Ted Turner and his buffalo.

 I’m wandering.  We’re talking about guilt because that’s what David is talking about in verse three, and the weather here is a long way off.

 Here’s what I mean.  In the land where I live, it’s almost impossible not to be a victim of the weather.  A friend of mine moved to California; he said whenever he scheduled a game of golf, it took him more than a year to forget that he didn’t have to worry about bad weather. Here, everything—including livelihood, much of it agricultural—is dependent on weather, and the weather is often dangerously wicked.

 It’s a form of dependency we’re forced to accept and therefore it’s hard not to believe in some higher power.  Where I live, it takes some chutzpah to be arrogant when a 20-second hailstorm can get wipe you out completely.

 For better or for worse, those who feel God’s hand in the daily regimen of life find it easier to believe.  They know that when they’re safely in that almighty hand—when He’s holding us lovingly—we feel the greatest comfort life can offer. 

 But when that hand is pressing down upon us, the sober souls of Lake Woebegone know just as surely, as did King David, that its weight is impossible to bear. 

Perhaps what people say is true:  “a guilty conscience needs no accuser.”  But how much worse it is when the accuser is God almighty.  That’s the heaviness David feels in his bones and joints, day and night, as he says.

 Unrelenting.  Laughter helps a great deal—thank you, Garrison.  But David knows, from personal experience, that the only relief is forgiveness. 

 That’s what Psalm 32 is all about.

"Where the deer. . ." ii

 

You’ll find Smith County, Kansas, in the northern tier of counties, not all that far from Red Cloud, Nebraska, much-celebrated home of Willa Cather, yet another world-famous writer, a marvelous novelist whose bountiful book sales come nowhere near to the mega-thousands who could sing along with “Home on the Range” right now, with or without a fiddle or campfire.

Once upon a time Smith County, Kansas, became the dream of a pioneer doctor named, ingloriously, Brewster Higley--huge black beard atop a pair of wide square shoulders. Just imagine this, if you can—that man sitting outside a cave he’d just sculpted as his claim, the original "home on the range," that bear of a man sitting, alone, pen in hand, scribbling down verses as they came to him, gloriously describing, unmistakably, his brand new domicile in the west.

Oh! give me a gale of the Solomon vale,
Where the life streams with buoyancy flow;
Or the banks of the Beaver, where seldom if ever,
Any poisonous herbage doth grow.

Not all verses are universally beloved.

Dr. Brewster Higley is worth a novel himself, a man with a wonderful reputation for handling dozens of patients among the Kansas pioneers and, of all things, a poet, and a pioneer doctor, some believe—and not without reason—to have been a bit too interested in drinking what he’d carried in his own medicine bag, understandably, maybe—he had five wives (not at the same time).

Dr. Brewster Higley never made a dime on the hymn to the prairie the whole world sings. Nor did Daniel E. Kelly, Brewster Higley’s friend, a Civil War vet, the musician who first picked out a tune to carry Higley’s homage to the prairie.

Historians are pretty sure Kelly and Higley deserve the credit for America’s favorite hymn to the west, but neither made a dime on their most famous creation. The thing is, the ballad became popular so fast that it created a thousand variations almost immediately. How? Because everyone sang it, and not just cowboys like Gene Autry and Roy Rogers, balladeers like Big Crosby and John Denver, just about everyone, including Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, and the Simpsons.

Tell you what. Next time you’re in Smith County, Kansas, follow US 36 to Athol, then follow the signs to the Home on the Range Cabin, where the good doctor lived after his homestead hole in the ground.

It’s the least we can do.

Home on the Range cabin

"Home on the Range"

 

Pure speculation on my part, but what I’m betting at this very moment is that all you have to do is repeat the three-word title I’m using today and whether or not you’re a musicians, those words unwind themselves in your imagination musically—I’m saying you sang the words even as  you read them, and  you did so because of such unshakeable familiarity that it’s just plain impossible for most adult Americans not to burst into song.

What song? An old hymn to the glories of the west, to the beauty and grace of our home out here in fly-over country.

“Oh, give me a home

Where the buffalo roam,

Where the deer and antelope play…”

You know the words darn well.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, our only four-term President (‘33, height of the Depression to ‘45, end of Second World War) loved America’s hymn, even though Siouxlanders of his time would have called him a city slicker. It’s tough to imagine FDR sitting in front of a roaring fire in his office and, accompanied by staff, suddenly breaking into song. But it happened and more than once, a sing-along in the Oval Office, the whole gang, including Mr. President, in the lead.

With that kind of billing, “O Give Me a Home,” in 1934 sat comfortably  atop the nation’s top-40, numero uno. Among whom? Most all of America. Your particular origins were of no consequence; no matter how far you roamed from the shadow of Statue of Liberty, you sang it. As ordinary as Iowa mud—well, moreso.

Richard Byrd, the renowned explorer, claimed he sang “Home on the Range” more frequently than he would have liked to during his lonely six-month sojourn at the North Pole, especially when his phonograph froze up, forcing him to solo with nary the help of a harmonica. Penguins don’t like us reading their old reviews, but rumor has it they weren’t all that grand. The whole world knew that the homesickness for the plains that’s at the heart of a tune the whole world sings.

Where seldom is heard

A discouraging word

And the skies are not cloudy all day.

You know. I know. We all know.

______________________

A little more tomorrow.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“My strength was sapped as in the heat of summer”

Yesterday, I mowed my lawn. I thought it would be a quick job because I’d done it less than week before. I am not one of those Dutch folk who believe that “cleanliness is next to Godliness” is found somewhere in Leviticus. But in summer, when I spend hours and hours in the basement clicking computer keys, come mid- to late afternoon I love to get outside and do some honest, sweaty labor in the vineyard of our backyard, where we don’t, of course, have a vineyard.

Yesterday, the grass out front was long enough to call in the sheep. So I mowed, and the clippings—our yard is thick with maple seed whirlybirds right now—filled up the bed of my son-in-law’s big pick-up. The rainfall this spring has been magnificent.

By late July, I likely won’t be able to walk barefoot on my grass because what’s left will be yellowed cactus points. By July, I’ll cut the lawn once every three weeks at best, and then mostly weeds, the only verdure that prospers once the rains stop.

Only once in the near-fifty years that I’ve lived here have I seen a black cloud rolling in, a storm of dust. Only once. But that day I won’t forget because it prompted fear from a memory I don’t have—a vision from the Dust Bowl that turned prairie into the Sahara not all that far west from here.

By November, 1933, dust storms had roared by for years already, in the middle of a drought that went on for ten years. People were actually accustomed to hacking up mud from their throats, to enclosing drinking water in Mason jars to keep it from turning brown, even in the house, to knead bread inside drawers drawn just wide enough to allow their hands inside.

But what came on Armistice Day that November was like nothing else.

In 1923, about two hours northwest of here, a man named A. Karstrom retired and went to town, leaving his son the 470-acre spread that made Mr. Karstrom a good living. What followed was thirteen progressively bad years and the Black Blizzard, which broke his son’s heart and back, the air an image of midnight. In the heat and dust, the farm blew away. Four years later, a new owner took over a place that hadn’t been lived and moved five tons of sand from the acreage. Five tons. That’s how dry it was just northwest of here in 1933. That’s how lifeless.

The NIV, in verse four, holds on to a bit of what the KJV used to say. “My moisture is turned into the drought of summer” has been changed to “my strength was sapped as in the heat of summer.” Sapped is the link, as if the sap, the fluid, of David’s soul has dried up by the torturous heat of his own sin and misery. What’s in him is drought, dust. When he looks up from his anguish, all he sees is a black blizzard.

His spirit and strength is as lifeless as that Karstrom farm. Even if the weather turns, he can’t move in the tons of choking dust that rises in his heart and throat.

What he needs is someone to carry away all those tons of dust, to bring him back, to refresh him with living water.

And that’s the story of Psalm 32, his story and ours. Black blizzards turned miraculously verdant by the living water of God’s own forgiveness. That’s the story all right.

Me and politics ii

In 2007 I wasn't ready to sign into anyone's campaign, wasn't particularly "political," but I loved the idea of a black man getting even close to the Presidency. Besides, it appeared that this particular  candidate had no scandals connected to him, carried a background in community organizing, and loved basketball. I'm quite sure I noticed the t-shirt in one of those pop-up ads that come unrequested from the internet, and liked the idea of this one--a sort of football jersey thing. 

I don't remember how much it cost, but I'm guessing it wasn't cheap--and it's a good one. I gambled that its subtlety would make it wearable in Sioux County, Iowa--or so I believed. After all, it didn't just blast out his name; it seemed, first of all, a jersey, and then a political statement.

In 2007 I was edging close to retirement and going over to the college gym early in the morning, along with other colleagues and other emeriti. I don't know that I would have worn that shirt to the downtown mall or a church picnic, but the gym was sparsely populated so early in the morning. I wasn't sure all my friends' eyes were even open.

I was wrong. Two colleagues ripped at me and my shirt, were not only open about their disapproval but voluble in what seemed their hate for Obama. I don't know that either of them said it in their summary anger, but today I'm quite sure their anti-Obama vehemence grew from his toleration of abortion, not his race. At least I'd like to think that was the truth. Whatever their specific motivation, I wasn't accustomed to being slaughtered in public--in front of others--by old friends who thought an Obama t-shirt an abomination, an outright sin. Ripped, screamed at, scolded--one of the prophets of doom was a woman, the other a man. Their whippings happened at different times and different spots in the gym, but both were very public. 

Their shocking fusillades made me more of an Obama supporter, but I didn't wear that t-shirt to early morning workouts again.

Just a couple of mornings later, I happened to come away from the workout with another retiree, the just-retired President of the college, who'd heard part of one of those Jeremiads. "Just thought you'd like to know," he said, whispered, as if we were behind enemy lines, "Louise and I think you're right, but it's not something I can say publicly." I was being commended.

That made me even more sure that my jersey was a good buy.

On January 3, 2008, I caucused for Barack Obama in the traditional Iowa way, by walking over to the side of the room those in charge had set off for the Obama supporters. Most of my liberal friends caucused for John Edwards, who would nosedive soon after. 

As everyone knows, that  night was a huge and unexpected win for the skinny Obama, and I still have the t-shirt. It's been a pj for all of these years so it's in great shape. 

And today, I'm a registered Democrat.