For Henry and Toni Van De Stroet

A dozen years ago, I spent a wonderful day in far western Sioux County with an elderly couple who'd lived most of their lives on land that borders the Big Sioux out there, Henry and Antonia Van De Stroet. I chose them because their land is the most beautiful land in the county; and that day we covered it most of all of it. I heard all the stories the two of them dared tell a writer. There were times in my life when I simply fell in love with subjects. That day, I left the Van De Stroets totally stricken. 

Henry died a year ago, but last week Antonia--Toni--followed her husband of 69 years. She was 90 years old, in a home in Inwood, Iowa. It's a personal thing, I suppose, their having granted me the privilege of their whole life together, a story that never saw the light of day because the project didn't get the funding it required. The two of them gave me a wonderful day.

So here's the story I wrote back then, for Henry and Toni. They're gone, but the story isn't, and neither is that gorgeous land along the river, a place I lovingly called "the Van De Stroet Peninsula." 
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 When white folks came to northwest Iowa in the late 19th century, they squared the landscape with crisscrossing mud roads that turned the broad, flat land into a grid. Of the 23 townships of Sioux County, 19 are perfect squares.

But the Big Sioux River doesn’t give a hoot about straight lines, so the townships at the county’s western edge are, as a result, jagged as sin. The worst of the sinners is Settlers Township, in the far northwest corner. Four-square Sioux Township, Settlers’s immediate neighbor east, makes Settlers look like something the dog dragged up: a jagged, upside-down, barnacled fish hook of a township, whose heart was carved long ago when the Big Sioux decided to take a huge left turn.

Just a mile later, it turns west to grab an extra half section or so of what would otherwise be good South Dakota land. Then it snakes southeast, bobs and weaves a little, then, remarkably, sets a course nearly straight east for almost four miles before turning south once more, like a good river should. All of that makes Settlers Township something of a peninsula, a big thumb of rolling bluffs and river bottom people might just as well call "the Van De Stroet Peninsula."

The 1908 Sioux County Atlas doesn’t list John Van De Stroet among the property owners of Settlers Township. In fact, it doesn’t list many Dutch names at all. Hundreds of Dutch names are printed in on the flat townships farther east, where the only hills are the ones that appear, mirage-like, a long way off—get up to them and they’re gone. It makes sense that Dutch immigrants, accustomed to perfectly flat land, would have felt at home on a ripple-less landscape.

The original settlers of Settlers Township weren’t Vander Brinks; they were Swansens and Jensens, Christiansens and Thormodsgaards, who took one look at those bluffs and the river valley and saw home—Norway, Sweden.

Today’s it’s different. Take a hike up to that beautiful bluff along the Big Sioux’s left-hand turn; pick up a dandelion or a milkweed from pasture ground, and let the seeds fly hither and yon from that spot, a hundred feet above the river bottom. Even if those seeds catch a updraft, most of them will come to earth on Van De Stroet land.

In 1920, when he was sixteen years old, John Van De Stroet, with a friend, left the Netherlands for America because, as he told his son Henry, too often he ate what was in his bucket as he walked to school in the morning, not because he was as hungry as any other 13-year-old boy, but because, for him and his family, hunger was a way of life. John Van De Stroet believed America would be a place of no more hunger.

Just ten years after arriving, John was farming two places in Settlers Township--and he'd married Effie, a wife he’d found just across the section. Ask their descendants to see a picture of those handsome newlyweds. Put John in a tux, lower Effie’s neckline a bit, toss in a little mousse, and even today the two of them would hold their own in Brides magazine.

Henry, their first born, came along in 1929, at just about the time when the cattle his father raised on that beautiful land brought just six cents a pound. But John Van De Stroet knew both poverty and hard work. Mid-Depression, he bought a half section of land, a mile west and a bit north of Fairview, SD, a place the Van De Stroets now call “the home place,”--just $40 an acre. Of that half section, 140 acres was work ground, the rest bluffs and pastures, a chunk of land that was a good deal cheaper, back then, than the flat land in the middle of the county. Even today, if you stand somewhere out on that land or just pass it by, you know that in Sioux County the Van De Stroet peninsula has no rival in sheer beauty.

Up and down the county’s western boundary, the Big Sioux’s meandering long ago created hills and bluffs that suggest the buffalo commons of the Great Plains. That a farmer, even today, can make a healthy living off the flat land east of the valley is almost a given. But the fluid lines of those bluffs and hills are gracious, even feminine, like a woman lying on her side. The valley of the Big Sioux, the Van De Stroet peninsula, is like nothing else in the county. It’s simply gorgeous.
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Tomorrow, Henry and Toni.