The Restless Traveler ii

Continued from yesterday, a short essay attributed to me but long ago out of my computer. A Canadian grad student studying the occupation of the Netherlands, asked me for the proper bibliographical data, which I don't have. I remember the incident he described, but I have no copy of any essay I might have written. 

He sent me the essay. I knew it was a piece I wrote, but I hadn't seen for 16 years.  

Yesterday I passed along the first half. Here's the second. What I remembered was the restless traveler's discomfort at the comportment of the man who told the story of the Dakota's attack on his hometown, New Ulm, Minnesota--just the way he told the story, just his demeanor. It was reminiscent of the way the German occupiers acted/spoke/behaved. He couldn't handle it.

___________________ 

Achingly, painfully tethered. By choice, right then, he would have deserted the whole bus if he could avoid pain that was closing in on him—ancient, deadly fears long ago thought put to rest, but suddenly awakened by tone and rhetoric and ethnic pride.

When we got out of the bus at the college chapel, I could see he was not to be reasoned with. Some spirit in him was out of control—and he knew it too.

“When we arrived at this most beautiful Lutheran chapel,” he wrote, “I made sure to stay in the back on a church bench, so I could escape the professor’s diatribe attack on my senses. I fretted about myself—within my own, why I do not have more patience.”

And then, “Finally he stopped talking,” the Dutchman wrote.

The retired prof had stopped because we'd entered the Martin Luther College chapel, where, serendipitously, which is to say, providentially, the college’s own fine organist just happened to show up. That man opened up that new huge organ in a fashion that no guitar and drum set can ever do. Together, we sang old hymns, even “A Mighty Fortress,” Luther’s own. It was a blessing I have not the words to describe.

But our war survivor tries—listen:

“Then the college organist played this beautiful very large pipe organ, with songs so wonderful. Peace came in my heart, and I thanked God for his patience with me, being a ‘Restless Traveler.’ Those familiar songs released my anxiety,” he wrote.

Those old hymns of faith were decidedly providential therapy. What he required at that point—and he understood it himself—was therapy.

That retired history prof never wore the black SS coat and had nothing to do with The Final Solution. He was an American, doing what lots of us do—taking pride in his heritage, including the town’s own history, which started a full century before a little madman with a paintbrush mustache.

But there’s a little more to the story of our restless traveler.

Henceforth we were transported to the Shell Brewery, where, following a short tour, we were led thirstily to their tasting room for some product research.

“We were invited to taste small amounts of different types of beer,” our restless traveler wrote, quelling, for a moment at least, his old fears and hatred. “It tasted good and put me in a mood to sing a song, song from my younger days—not quite proper for elderly Christian persons perhaps, but seemed funny.”

There’s nothing like a little sip to help you forget, maybe, eh?

But the charmer was the evening, when, accompanying some fine German drinking songs, a motley crew of masked intruders, the Naaren, ended our German dinner by pulling every last one of the weary travelers from their chairs and waltzing them into a series of hoopla dances and marches that would have sent all of our travelers reeling had they carted in a keg or two with them. Which they hadn’t, thank goodness.

Here's the way the Dutchman described the hijinks:

“A dozen characters, men and women, although whether man and woman was difficult to distinguish, were wearing wetween our dinner tables, encouraging us to join. It took me a while before I was reaooden masks and colorful costumes. They entered the hall dancing, and hobbled bdy to accept their invitation, until I secured a woman who was a good dancer. I managed to get a hold of her. Her mask was not as scary as the other ones. When the music stopped, she gave me a compliment about my dancing. It made my day.”

It made his day.

And thus, presumably, our restless traveler, so psychically stricken earlier in the day, was comforted finally, by the great hymns of the church, a few sips of good stout German beer, and a sporty jaunt with a masked intruder—a woman he managed to get hold of, he says, who then told him that for an old guy with a wooden leg, he was, by cracky, one heckuva good dancer.

That's the whole story. Let preachers of all types and persuasions do with it what they will. All I know is, that’s the way I saw it, and the way he tells it.

There’s got to be a sermon there, if we have ears.

"The Restless Traveler"

A grad student in Alberta sent me a note to ask if I could tell him where a little essay had appeared so he could include it in a bibliography. I looked, but couldn't find it. But I told him I recognized the events and specifics; I told him I remembered the original story, but I had no idea where it could be found. It was titled, the grad student told me, "The Restless Traveler." I couldn't find it, so he sent me a copy.

It's mine all right, but my guess is our restless traveler himself  picked it up in 2010 or so from this blog.

Here 'tis. And here, I think, is the man who used the essay, the interesting guy whose war memories came flooding back when he listened to a man explaining, the story of the 1862 Dakota War. It's a story I told and will never forget.

The man at the center of the photo, I think, is our restless traveler.

Somehow, I think I knew what was going on, in part, I think, because I knew the man, his history, and the sometimes stinging effects of childhood experience. He’d immigrated to Canada after the war, after the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, and not all of that experience—hiding from conscription, living in fear day and night, the hunger winter—not all of that simply sifts out of one’s life when it's left behind. If there are jackboots on the necks of your neighbors, you don’t walk away whistling.

What happened was a kindly old retired professor walked up on the steps of the tour bus and began to tell the peculiarly German story of New Ulm, Minnesota, a town that celebrates its heritage of sauerbraten, schweinhocks, and polka bands. In his defense, the old prof was German-American, not German. In all likelihood, he spent the early 40s here in the States, picking ripened milkweed pods for parachute silk in the U.S. war effort, no more a Nazi than any of the other seniors on the tour bus.

No matter. Once he started talking—even though he spoke English with no accent—he was unapologetically German; after all, his chamber-of-commerce job was to sell the town, which means to sell the local, proud German heritage. And our tourist, the man who couldn’t forget the Nazis’ snarls in his boyhood backyard, got what the Dutch might call “benauwd,” so breathtakingly claustrophobic that he literally couldn’t stand it. He couldn't listen.

This 80+ year-old war survivor had distinguished himself already as someone who could be strong-willed, to say the least. He was, after all, a man who'd climbed the Himalayas—he warn't no marshmallow. And he’d lost a leg in an biking accident—he hobbled demonstrably, but never complained.

In just two days, he'd distinguished himself clearly, so when we noticed that something was decidedly wrong with him, he was moping sort of publicly, initially at least, we rolled our eyes. But my suspicions weren’t far afield.

Here’s what he wrote in a little summary he penned of his experience on our Minnesota bus tour:

“Memories popped up about the Second World War, when German soldiers occupied Holland—us. Then when someone was going to give me a small sticker to put on my chest, it bothered me. I left the room to go outside. There was something that disturbed me, my memory in the past, when the Jews had to wear armbands with the name ‘Jew,’ to separate them from (us) whom they considered other (Germanic) Dutch people.”

I guessed it was a version of post-survival stress. Something in the kindly old professor’s mannerisms, his tone, his story, his telling of it, something in that little tourist sticker unearthed memories our own “restless traveler” might well have thought buried, and he nearly fell apart.

“He was very knowledgeable and could not stop telling his stories about German history and Indian wars,” he wrote. “He spoke while the bus drove around, to our next stop. I fretted, but I could not get out of the bus; he was driving me up the wall. I was stuck in the back of the bus and could not escape him.”

_______________

Tomorrow: the rest of the story of the "Restless Traveler."

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “Then I acknowledged my sin to you 

and did not cover up my iniquity.”

A woman came up to me at a conference and told me how much she’d enjoyed reading a novel of mine titled Touches the Sky.  I’m thankful for any readers, but the ones who sing praises bring real delight.  It’s an ego thing.

“The last chapter,” she told me, “—when I finished it, I cried.”

I can’t tell you how much that comment meant because the most indelible memory I have of having written that novel is the moment of its completion.  I’d never felt exactly that way about anything I’d written, but when I finished the final chapter and wrote those last words—“please do, please do,” I was struck with the feeling that I had poured every last ounce of who I am into those final pages..

It’s embarrassing, in a way, to say that.  The person you might meet on the street—the man you speak to when you talk to me—is not so much the human being he is as the man you hear in the words of that final chapter.  It’s scary to say that.

I used to tell my students that writers need to be flashers, willing to don and doff raincoats.  It’s a lousy metaphor, but it gets their attention—and it’s not all wrong.

Getting naked isn’t easy.  Physically, it is easy to some people—hence nudism.  But metaphorically, it isn’t easy; even those who may well consider themselves most transparent can engineer pseudo-openness to cover their own precious nakedness.  

I’m not sure any of us really knows much about our nakedness because not many of us really know who we are.  Some of us know we belong, body and soul, to our faithful Savior; that’s an identity, a real identity.  But who, really, are we?  Who am I?  That’s an essay question requiring a lifetime—actually, more—to write fully.

When David retells the story he’s singing in Psalm 32, and when he gets to very heart of the action—“I acknowledge my sin and dropped the cover-up”—it’s amazing, isn’t it, to know that literally there was no cover up in the first place?  Before God almighty, there are no flashers. There was nothing about the sordid Bathsheeba affair that God didn’t know—not the adultery or the premeditated murder of her husband Uriah.  God saw it all.  There were no secrets. Buck naked, 24/7.  

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fascination with secret sin is fascinating in itself, but, in a way, silly because God is not a TV detective.  He doesn’t need clues or even confessions to know what happened.  He knows where we’ve been, who we’ve seen, what we’ve done, what we think of what’s happened.  Before his face, there are no secrets.

The really painful part of our coming to Him in confession is the injury, the pain which accrues when our precious will shatters like our pride, when we come to know we can’t do it on our own, when we learn we must crawl or be dragged before him.  

When we give up, he smiles and nods and heals. When we come before him naked, he gives us a whole new wardrobe. What he wants, simply, is our human pride buckled before him. We have to get naked, even if there are no cover-ups.

That’s the song David is singing in Psalm 32.  

September 2009, McNally, IA

 

Warriors, 1972

Once upon a time, I had a copy of this high school annual--owned it, in fact, considered it one of my proud possessions because it legitimizes my claim that I spent two years of my life in the southwest corner of the state of Wisconsin teaching rural kids, several of them from family-owned and run cheesemakers, two great years, two years that did more to make me grow up than the four precious previous years, in college. 

It's fair to say I did well, probably exceeded my own expectations. Right from the beginning, I wanted to go to graduate school, so I lasted only two years at Black Hawk, two really good years.

 My boss that second year told me if I ever wanted another high school job, all I had to do was show this page from the '72 annual to whatever administrator was hiring. Two years and a masters later, I did and it worked. He was right.

Very faintly across the page is something written with a pen, barely discernable words--they happen to be mine. The owner of the old book must have asked to have me sign it--lots of kids did. Signing yearbooks was a big deal at Black Hawk back then. It's almost impossible to read what I wrote, but trust me, I'm thanking him, at first tongue-in-cheek but by the end very sincerely for what he'd done--and there's something mentioned about plays. I was the 11 and 12 English teacher, freshman bb coach, and play director. I also had the student paper. If I'd been married, I'd have been divorced. 

Those great years were also almost insufferable: loneliness was a monster.

But that faint scribbled note, teacher to graduate, suggests that the image doesn't come from my Black Hawk '72 annual, but his. And it does.

Two days ago we picked a monster of a package out of the mailbox's oversized bin--huge thing that cost $25 to send. It came from the kid (no longer a kid but long ago retired, he told me) who sent me a museum's worth of things about the kids (long ago retired too) from BHHS, class of 1972. 

What a wonderful gift--he even sent return postage.

Out of nowhere really, a pile of memorabilia descends on our place out here 500 miles due west.

He says the class of 1972 heard about a flood at our place last year, a flood that took a ton of stuff along when it inched back out of our bottom floor, including my Blackhawk memorabilia (like the BHHS '72 annual). 

He'd like his returned, the one at the top of the page, and that's good. 

But for a couple of days this week, I had a ball looking through all kinds of things about BHHS '72, thinking back to a time in my life that spills over with memories of me and them--all of us--growing up.

The guy who assembled and sent the museum is here in this pictre--back row, sixth from right, tall and thin, bespectacled. From all that's written here in his album, to him and about him, a kid (back then) who could have taken this high school annual, full of sweet notes, with him to job interviews--that kind of nice guy.

Trust me on that. Trust all the grads who signed his high school annual.

Anyway, Jeff, this is just to say, thanks one more time, 54 years later.

A Holy Place

 

If I wouldn't have had a guide, if I wouldn't have known ahead of time that the Sioux quartzite out there was full of ancient etchings, I swear I could easily have missed them, even though I walked right over them. Of course, I visited the Jeffers Petroglyphs in the middle of the day, and I was told that when you're there determines their relative visibility--just exactly how the sun hits them makes for significant differences. Nonetheless, I must admit that some of them I simply didn't see.

 But they're there, and about that there is no doubt. Nobody knows who did them, which is to say nobody knows much about just exactly what kind of tribe and culture was here. The pictures themselves tell us just about all we know. They were hunter/gatherers who ate and drank, loved and died, and, unless our speculation is silly, they had rituals, which implies some kind of faith. The Red Rock Ridge--what locals call the site--has likely been, and still is today, a holy place.

 Which is, to my estimation, understandable. When you stand beside ancient etchings that are, anthropologists suggest, at least 10,000 years old, when you see striations carved into the surface by a glacier that was here even before that, even the arrogant have to grab a breath. Almost all faiths, or so it seems to me, begin on the knees with a volley of stuttered breaths.

To some, I suppose, it might be tough to see a place like the Jeffers Petroglyphs as a holy place. If you stand up on the highest red rock there, you're no more than twenty feet above the lowest place within miles. Red Rock Ridge is a prairie high, really, and hardly a "ridge" at all. It's not the Royal Gorge or the Grand Canyon. There's no risk from that strange instinct some of us feel when we stand up at a precipice, an oddly suicidal urge to jump. Nope. Leap from the Sioux quartzite at the Jeffers site, and even the aged would have trouble breaking a bone.

 But if you've lived out here for awhile, it's perfectly understandable how--way back when, and even today--people continue to wander out to the site to sit and meditate. I wish it were closer to home. If you sit on that stone, surrounded by the emerald prairie, miles of open land yawning out in every direction, and realize that, long ago, men and women in bison skins sat here too, inscribing their visions in the pink rock, you'd have to say, in the parlance of the young, "whoa."

 "I'm like, 'whoa.'"

 That's really where faith begins--"like 'whoa.'" I like that.

I'm not sure a church can do that--or wants to. Some of the old cathedrals?--maybe; but today's more contemporary spaces? ex-shopping centers? new churches created to resemble skating rinks? Nah.

No matter, I suppose--as long as somehow, at some place in the liturgy we can't help ourselves from muttering, "like, 'whoa.'"

You know what I like best about Jeffers Petroglyphs? You can go there anytime. There's no fence. There's a wonderful little visitor's center, there's miles of native prairie, but there's no fence, which means, hard as it to believe in this day and age, it's always open, as a holy place should be. I'm not kidding. You could go there tonight, late, when there is nothing but moon and stars, and sit on the ridge. You could. No one would mind.

Like, "whoa."

 

I'm not sure why B is drying herself off in this illustration; she's clearly fully clothed. I'd guess this image is Sunday School art, the two of them on flannelgraph. This one is a G--for general audiences, although she appears to be conscious of the king's attentions.

David is a youngun' here, and B is barely visible in a street below. It's an interesting image, emphasizing David's being Israel's king, but it runs away from communicating anything at all about the story. It's another G-rated.

Here's a PG-13. David's mad frenzy is shown in the way he hangs onto the wall for support. I like that. But B is fully clothed. I can't help think that's cheating.

I'd call this one PG-13 too because both are fully clothed. David walking right into the bath is a nice idea, but she's bathing in her underclothes? Too sweet for an R. She looks remarkably compliant--was she?

Another PG-13. B is totally unconscious about her being in the King's vision. His being aways away, I like. He's perched up in a window frame over her left shoulder, looks perfectly at ease with ogling her, even though he's the King.

Here's an R, B is mostly naked and D is up on the next-door roof, leaning over a bit as if to get a better view. Is that his harp in his hands? B has five chambermaids, which is okay, I guess, but I've always thought of she and her husband as among the working class.

Here's another R, given the full frontal nudity. David is clearly peaking--he doesn't want to be seen even though he can't look away, and B is seeming totally unconscious of his eyes. Meanwhile, few illustrations capture his guilt; here, it's on display. He's ravaged by her body--that had to be true.

Another R--all that nudity. You have to look close, but in the building behind her David stands, a floor or two up, barely visible. I'm no expert on OT bathing rituals, but B seems completely oblivious to stopping traffic with her naked self. One of the difficult questions about the story is whether or not Bathsheba was a willing participant. This image suggests that she knew nothing of David's overheated attention.

Another R. David appears to be plotting out the sin that's already got hold of him. B is, at least, in theory compliant, conscious of her sexuality. They're both in on what's about to occur, even though she is likely unsure of the temperature of David's lust.

This is a nice shot, but it has none of the guilt and shame. Both are guilty--which is, of course, one way to read the story of their sin.

Interesting stuff.