Small Wonder(s): Robin of DeSmet

It's a stretch--I admit it--to think of Robin Hood as a hero somewhere out here on the Great Plains takes some suspension of belief.  Yes, Dakota warriors could do magic with a bow and arrow, something to rival the jaw-dropping artistry of the fabled Robin of Locksley. But somehow the hero of the woodlands would be out of place without trees, on a horizon that never ends amid a sea of grass rolling in like the swells of an ocean. The plains just ain't the place for Robin Hood.

But we can try. Maybe we can think of him emerging, angel-like, from a broad field of 12-foot hybrid corn. Suddenly, there he is in green leotards, and his whole band of ruffians. He steps out of that corn like Shoeless Joe and Moonlight Graham in Field of Dreams. Friar Tuck is with him, as is Little John and his entire merry band.

Okay, it's still a stretch. Perhaps we can take Sherwood Forest out of Robin Hood, but you can't take Robin Hood out of Sherwood Forest. Which is not to say it hasn't been done. Here's the story.

Robin of Locksley, our hero, was born as such in a novel by Sir Walter Scott, an Englishman--a Scot actually--who published a ton of novels in the early decades of the 19th century, at a time when a novel was, well, a very new thing. That novel, Ivanhoe, did much to make the Middle Ages popular by way of the old themes of romantic lore: adventure, love, and war, a can't miss combo--and, oh yes, seasoned with a little jousting.

What I'm saying is that once upon a time Robin Hood, of Sherwood Forest fame, was just as much a hero here in Siouxland, as he was in merry old England. 

Hark.

Years and years ago, a Norwegian bachelor farmer--or someone kin thereof--a man named Old Sheldon, knocked on the cabin door of a distressed young mom on the South Dakota prairie. Think of him as a guardian angel in bibs, a straw hat, maybe a corncob pipe or a chunk of chaw in his grizzled cheek. His nose is beet red, and when he doffs that hat he's bald as a buzzard, two handfuls of old-man hairs sprouting hither and yon. 

Old Sheldon has a bag over his shoulder, and when that distressed young mom lets him into the cabin, he shuffles in and simply dumps out the contents.

But first, a word about this young mom. Her husband just learned the affliction he's been working so hard to fight is not ever going away. When they were first married, he risked life and limb in the bitter cold to get what he and the neighbors needed, riding through a blizzard the likes of which we only rarely see hereabouts. Both hands and feet got frozen and never really regained the strength the man once had. 

And now they were told not to expect a miracle. 

What's more, she's pregnant. This young mom who already has a little one, is fighting off a bout of morning sickness not unlike the ravaging stomach she had to live with the first time around. And it wasn't convenient, this pregnancy; it wasn't something she would have chosen, not with the worry she's had to take on about how the family is going to eat. 

Think of her as miserable. You may because she herself wrote that the day Old Sheldon came with that bag over his shoulder, she was "particularly blue and unhappy"--her words. And she had reasons. She was blue--worse than blue. She was downright miserable.

Old Sheldon flips that bag from over his shoulder and--get this now--dumps out the contents right there on the floor of her cabin, an entire collection of Sir Walter Scott's Waverly novels, as popular as Harry Potter back then, throughout the English-speaking world.

Chances are, that distressed mom is someone you know. Her name was Laura Ingalls Wilder, who would have to get somewhat older before she would, like Sir Walter Scott himself, write a whole sack full of novels. But, as you know, she did.

I don't know that we think enough about guardian angels. How about a nomination for Old Sheldon? When he stuck that straw hat back on his bald head, you could have seen a halo.

Or how about this? There's a pile of novels on the floor of the cabin. Laura Ingalls Wilder forgets her morning sickness for a moment because out of the cracks between those old books, a cover or two or three open mysteriously so that, in camo leotards and a goofy little hat, the guy stands up tall as the Jolly Green Giant, a quiver over his back holding arrows for that bow over his shoulder. 

It's Robin. You bet it is. Robin of Locksley, a guardian angel right here on the Plains, a hero.