Not to remain a child

Museum display hoppers from the Homestead National Monument

The worst grasshopper visitation we had was in July, 1876. One Sunday morning father and mother and I went to town to church. The small grain had been harvested and the corn all along the way was a most beautiful, dark green. When we were about a mile from town a slight shade seemed to come over the sun; when we looked up for the cause, we saw millions of grasshoppers slowly dropping to the ground. They came down in such numbers that they clung two or three deep to every green thing. The people knew that nothing in the way of corn or gardens could escape such devastating hordes and they were very much discouraged. To add to their troubles, the Presbyterian minister announced his intention to resign. He, no doubt, thought he was justified. 

I was pretty small at that time and didn't understand what it all meant, but I do know that as we drove home that afternoon, the cornfields looked as they would in December after the cattle had fed on them--not a green shred left. The asparagus stems, too, were equally bare. The onions were eaten down to the very roots. Of the whole garden, there was, in fact, nothing left but a double petunia, which grandmother had put a tub over. So ravenous were the pests that they even ate the cotton mosquito netting that covered the windows. 

Lucy Hewitt, "Early Days in Dawson County."

So devastating were the grasshopper plagues of the 1870s that lots of people, whole families, pulled up stakes from the wonderful northwest Iowa soil on which they'd lived, and hightailed it back east to wherever they'd come from. Once the clouds of hoppers descended, for three years running, getting any kind of crop was nigh unto impossible. 

Northwest Iowa, obviously, wasn't the only world to be overrun. The plague spread far and wide over the Upper Midwest, but it did seem especially terrifying here, a possible reason why this particular area was "settled" later than almost any neighborhood in any direction of the region.

So, who cares? Grasshopper plagues are long behind us, right? With modern farming methods, hoards of hoppers is a horror of the past. 

I'm no ecologist. I don't understand how such phenomena come and go. There are those who can explain such things, I'm sure.

I do tend to side with Cicero when, every morning, I look out over the fields west and north and east from my back window: "Not to know what happened before one was born is always to remain a child." 

I'm reminded of something Fred Manfred told me years ago, how one night after milking he sat out on the back step of the Feikema home and looked out over the fields behind them. "There's got to be stories here, stories I don't know." 

There were, of course. He found some because there always is more to know. 

I'm not thankful, this morning, for grasshoppers; but I am thankful for stories that give life and breadth to the world just just off the step outside my window.