"Grandma Los" from CRC Family Portrait (i)

Here's the first half of a story I wrote about Hattie Los forty years ago. It's one of 35 feature stories I wrote for The Banner, a weekly magazine of the Christian Reformed Church. Generally, I asked friends and acquaintances for possible subjects, then interviewed ordinary people they'd recommend, men and women, old and young from all over the continent, members of the CRC. "Her story is a chronicle of American history," I wrote. It was and is. I've never forgotten the stories she told me, always treasured them.

_______________________ 

The living room of Hattie Los's home is little more than a cubicle; the ceiling is low and the dark brown paneling shows that someone has tried to make one­hundred-year-old plaster walls look suburban. It's the kind of place where you might guess a great­grandmother would live--there's not a right angle in the house.

Grandma Los lives alone, but the room is crowded with chairs--straight chairs, a captain's chair, maybe a rocker, a sofa, and at least one big soft one in the corner opposite the TV stand. All the chairs are for Sunday, of course, for that one hour after church when her children, and their children, and their children's children drop by for a '' goodie.'

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Paint-by-number landscapes line the walls. "Pete did those," she says. Pete was Mr. Los. He died just a few months before their sixty-third wedding anniversary. There's a card from President Ford on the china cabinet, framed, a picture of the President pasted on. "That was for our sixtieth," she says. "Cut the picture out of The Banner." Hattie Los smiles continuously, but when she talks about her Pete, her smile brightens even more. "He's dead now, two years. He's where he always hoped he'd be someday," she says.

Just outside of Grandma Los’s kitchen window stands a massive oak, strong and dignified, its gnarled branches and twigs grown in a thousand crooked angles; yet, somehow, all together, they create a nearly perfect circle above the thick, proud trunk. It's an old tree, full of stories probably--if trees could talk--stories of how the men once laid the brick that makes your tires grumble when you drive down the main street of Delavan, Wisconsin. It's a scrub oak, a second-class oak, the kind of oak that's not as clean, perhaps not as pure, as its cousin oak trees. But it's straight and strong.

Oak was once the wood of the people. Few midwestem families had kitchen tables that weren't cut from open-grained oak. Hard wood. Wood that could put up with years of coffee, dinners, coffee, suppers, generations of milk-spillers, entire lifetimes. Grandma Los's scrub oak is that kind of oak. In early October it ignites as if set afire by a natural torch, turn­ing yellow and orange and brown in a spectacular ritual that only Grandma Los could recount exactly. As beautiful as it is in the late spring, its green leaves un­furled in the warm southern breezes, autumn is the scrub oak's showcase.

Grandma Los--almost everyone calls her "Grandma" --is, in her own way, not so much different from that big oak outside her window. She's over eighty now, brimming with stories. She doesn't get out to church anymore; but she listens to tapes of four sermons every week, two from the local preacher, two from her son in Michigan. Her rheumatoid arthritis has swelled her joints, all of them, with stiffness, and her lumpy hands portray her lifelong battle, her fingers thick and angular like the branches of the scrub oak. "But I do just fine," she says, her left hand patting the arm of her wheelchair. "Aspirin keeps the pain down," she says, smiling, as always, "and I don't feel it at all like in the old days." She raises her hands in front of her face, touching her fingers pointer to pointer in a kind of gesture. "When I was fifteen, I spent three months bed while it just spread from one place to another. “Couldn’t even get up.”

Later, she and her husband had nine children. "But you know," she says, "that whole time I was never bothered by it, not until I was close to fifty. Nine children. Pete on the farm. All the kids. “And I was just as active as anybody. That's a miracle."

Hattie Los had to be active. Her story is a chronicle of American history: a South Dakota childhood, her parents an immigrant Frisian couple, the Logtermans of Springfield; married before she was twenty to Peter Los, son of a good, middle-class merchant from Leiden, the only member of a strong family to feel any urge for the adventure of a new country. "I’ll be back in five years," Pete had told his family when he left in 1911. 

Then came the war. Then he met Hattie. He finally did return, but not until after World War II, when both mother and father had recently died. There was no medicine during the Nazi occupation.

______________________________ 

Tomorrow, the second half of the story of Hattie Los.

More Los memories

What's left of an old country church, Purewater, SD

Peter Los was a city boy in the Netherlands. He'd never lived on a farm, didn't know how to milk a cow or harness a horse. 

I asked him [a former neighbor] if I could go along to America when he was going back. It all sounded so good to me to work in the big fields with horses and machinery and to milk cows and feed hogs and gather eggs by the pail full. He said I would be welcome to go along.

That was Pete Los's vision. His life began in Holland, but his story begins with emigration. "There was not much future for me in Holland, as Father and Uncle Koos were quite young yet and jobs were very scarce at that time. . . .I promised my sisters I would come back in five years. A promise I did not keep." 

There was little horror on the voyage over. It was 1911, not 1845. On deck, he says, people played shuffleboard. He says he ate too much, in fact--or at least ate more than his body required since did no heavy lifting all the way over.

After leaving the coast of England we did not see any more land until we arrived at New York. It was a wonderful sight! We arrived in the evening and all those lights from those high buildings made a wonderful sight. We did not leave the boat until the morning. Next was going through the customs. I had nothing of value so it did not take long.

What's clear from his memoir, as well as Hattie's, is that when the two of them died they had riches untold, even if their bank account hadn't grown all that much. Occasionally through their many years of marriage, they owned their own home; but for most of their married lives, they rented, first this place, then that. They married in Springfield, SD, lived for a while in Purewater, SD, then all the way out west in Ripon, CA, where they determined they missed the plains and moved back to Springfield. When the ground dried to dust and grasshoppers ate the onions right out of the ground, they moved east to Delavan, Wisconsin, then tried Pease, Minnesota, for a year and a winter when they were so totally snowed-in that they went back to southern Wisconsin. 

I think I hit them all. Oh no, late in life--Alto, Wisconsin, too.

But treasures?--nine kids, seven delivered with little help from anyone, just the two of them--Pete and Hattie. Hattie always wanted to be a nurse and got good at birthing, helped mothers down the road deliver babies. "She had functioned about a dozen times as a midwife for neighbors and friends," Pete remembers. "In our own family, she even did her own midwiving for the last seven of our nine kids," and then he adds, "only with a little help from her husband." If it could have been a one-person maneuver,  it's hard to imagine that Hattie would not have managed the whole business herself. 

She picked up midwifery at Purewater, when, with the help of the Rosebud reservation doctor, she helped out a neighbor. They were living in a chicken coop right then. "This really wasn't too bad," she writes, "because it was a two room chicken coop."

One of theirs, Etheleen, arrived at Purewater on the Sabbath, in a blizzard. They hadn't gone to church. How she tells the story is perfectly disarming. 

We spent the day reading Bible stories, singing hymns, and visiting together. After supper we put the children to bed at eight because they had to go to school the next day. By nine we had a new member in our family! Etheleen had arrived. She was a beautiful big baby. I am sure she weighed at least ten pounds, but we didn't have a scale to prove it. 

Then she explains what happened often when she remembers her babies: "Soon she was dressed and snuggled in my arms, so Dad and I went to bed and got a good night's rest."

Amazing.

Late in life, Dutch relatives sent them two tickets to fly to Amsterdam. Pete says flying was "a wonderful experience, one that we will never forget."

There was about a hundred passengers. It was not long and we were away from mother earth and above the clouds. It looked somewhat like we were traveling a hundred feet above snow covered prairies of South Dakota. . . .One thing they do on these jets is feed you plenty. We had a big supper right away, and going east it was soon dark. . . .When it was midnight in Darien, it was breakfast time already on board the jet, and a few hours later we were in Schiphol. . .

Pete died in 1978, Hattie in 1989. I spent an afternoon in her kitchen in 1981, almost forty years ago. Their Xeroxed memoirs, bound in plastic, move blessedly through lives that began in the last years of the 19th century and create, together, a delightful museum. 

Maybe it's a blessing to know that we won't be around to see how people read through our lives a century hence, what wonder and surprise they'll feel--how they'll smile at the memories of their quaint ancestors.

I hope they do. I hope they can. In life, I hope I smile as much and often as did Pete and Hattie Los. It was, after all, a two-room chicken coop. 

Morning Thanks--Grandma's stories

"Life is not as predictable as a river," she says, and she grew up along the Missouri, long before that muddy outlaw was dammed up and thereby forcibly restrained. "A river may change its course from time to time," she writes, "but it always ends in the ocean." About that she's right, when it comes to rivers at least; but right about her family's life too. 

Her grandma had stayed behind in Holland, in Friesland, when her husband, Paytrus Tjeerdsma, left for America. Her grandma had reasons--her seven children were married and had children of their own in Friesland. Leaving was quite unthinkable. But when her widowed daughter, with whom grandma lived, remarried, the river took a sudden turn. Grandpa had been begging her to leave the old country and join him in South Dakota. 

But "before definite plans were made, a persistent sore throat had to be checked by the doctor--cancer. Instead of greeting his wife in the adopted land, Grandpa received the traditional black bordered envelope that gave him the sad news that Grandma had died." 

The deliberate way of telling the story may seem callous, but you've got to remember that no one ever taught Hattie Logterman Los how to write stories, and she didn't have much practice. In rural South Dakota in 1910, there was way too much hardscrabble life to live. She was close to 80 when she lifted the pen to put all of that life down onto paper. No one ever taught her how to create a scene or build drama. What you get on the pages of her memoir is instead raw material, the real thing. 

Grandpa Logterman's daughter Dora "worked out" with a neighbor family, which was fine with Dora. But Dora wanted more. She liked the neighbors and their family, but she wanted to be more American, Hattie says in her family memoir, so she "took a job caring for the family of an 'American,'" someone without wooden shoes. This particular "American" owned the grocery store, where "she learned to do things 'the American way,'" Hattie says.

Dora's exercise in multi-culturalism did not banish her from the tight circle of Hollanders from which she'd come. Hattie describes what happened next to that Dutch-American couple in that American store: "There were two young men who seemed to have a greater hunger for candy and cigars. One was. . .Jacob Logterman." And then this: "Jacob had need of a girl like this." 

You know how it is.  A guy has a need. A man gets to a certain age, a certain time in life, and he comes to know that he got to get someone to help with chores. You need to get a wife like you need to get a haircut. 

But there's more:

But, was she interested in him? She seemed happy when she sold cigars to him, but was she just a good clerk? Finally, he could stand it no longer. He asked her if she would go to a barn dance with him. To his surprise, she said, 'yes.'"

Then, this: "To the surprise of both of them, she had never danced a step in her life!" That may be overstatement. After all, Dora Tjeerdsma was Dutch Reformed.

Unmistakably, Hattie Logterman Los, who never really tried her hand at writing, turns up the art a little anyway: "Jacob proved to be a concerned teacher, and few students could match Dora's interest in subject matter and her 'school master'."

That's as close as we'll get to heavy breathing. But that's okay.

All that deliberate high-stepping clearly had consequences: "This proved to be such a successful thing that Jacob decided he should be able to win this young lady." What follows is right down the river bed. "Three months after that first date Jacob decided it was time to 'pop the question.'"

Forty years ago, I sat in Hattie Los's kitchen 500 miles east in Delavan, Wisconsin, and listened to her tell the story. The picture I took back then has her posed as if reading the very same memoir I spent hours with yesterday. Forty years ago I was writing a series of portraits of members of the denomination I'm still a part of, and Grandma Los was suggested as a subject by her preacher. She was, he told me, "Grandma Los" to everyone in church. 

The church matriarch, I thought--sure. Back then, every church had one. Maybe, if blessed, more than just one. 

That's what put me in her kitchen forty years ago. That's why yesterday, I spent my Sabbath afternoon reading her story again, first time after all those years, and loving it just the same.

The river of her life flowed into the gracious arms of her savior. Hattie Logterman Los died nine years later, in 1989. But this morning's thanks are for a story that never really left me, a story of faith and life. 

Sunday Morning Meds--Remembrances

“. . .you thought I was altogether like you.” Psalm 50

When I was a kid, my uncle—a most distinguished uncle—came to visit. I was in high school, and he took me golfing. I’d swung golf clubs since a neighbor put his old set in the junk; but my family was not the country club set. Going to a course would have been, well, out of the question—spendy and even a bit frivolous, I suppose.

After nine holes, he wanted to ride out in the countryside around town where I was then growing up and he had, maybe three decades before. His career had led him afar from town, and it was great joy for him to reminiscence while touring the haunts he’d probably never forgotten but hadn’t visited for years.

“Now go out west of town,” he told me, and I did. He wanted to follow the river, the Onion River, because he said he and his friends used to have so much fun out there. “There,” he said. “See that path through the field?—if you follow that road, you’ll come to our swimming hole.” He was overflowing with memory. “Great place—we used to have so much fun.” He was lost in memory.

Right then I was the same age kid he was remembering, and I remember thinking it odd that he could be so emotionally attached to a bend in the river I’d never even seen, even though we’d both grown up in the same neighborhood and I’d walked parts of that river myself, trapping and duck hunting.

Years before I was alive, there’d been spectacular fun at that spot I’d never seen, a spot no one I knew ever frequented. He knew the world I’d grown up in, knew it intimately; but the place he knew was seemed to me to be a different country altogether.

Sometime ago already, a friend of mine who also grew up in the same little burg, came back here on the edge of the Great Plains where both of us lived. He was depressed because his elderly parents had decided to move. He was afraid his last “home” might well be his last.

I know that feeling. When my parents left the house in which I grew up, a similar emptiness descended, even though they were simply moving to an apartment across town. Years before already my distinguished uncle had prepared me for that leave-taking when I couldn’t help witnessing his reverence for a river I knew, but a spot I’d never visited.

The town my uncle knew wasn’t the place I was growing up back then, nor is it the town this friend of mine doesn’t want to forget. We’re all part of the diaspora, which means none of those burgs is the one that exists in the here and now. The gulf which divides reality and perception is sometimes unfathomable.

I suppose we fashion a whole host of worlds within our own perceptions. I suppose—and this is scary--the God we fashion isn’t necessarily the one who exists through time and eternity. In Psalm 50, a psalm that’s really shocking in places, here’s yet another line to make us sweat a bit: “you thought I was altogether like you.”

He's not. He's forever more.

The liturgy of dawn

The heavens declare the glory of God;

    the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

2 

Day after day they pour forth speech;

    night after night they reveal knowledge.

They have no speech, they use no words;
    no sound is heard from them.

Yet their voice goes out into all the earth,
    their words to the ends of the world. Psalm 19

Numbering our Days

What I should do is pay with a credit card. That's what the world does these days, uses plastic for just about everything. I'd handle transactions more quickly and avoid what happens all too regularly lately, become a bumbling old fool who can't work his fingers like he used to.

A Number One, a Whopper meal. I was an hour and a half from home, I was hungry and hurried, and I hadn't yet eaten anything for supper. It was already after eight. Run in, grab a Whopper, sit there, chow down, and get on home--that's the plan. If I was younger, I could eat the blessed thing while driving, but what I love about Whoppers is all that juicy stuff, half a salad on a bun. Some wet chunk would have most certainly ended up on my shirt. I ate in.

Cost $7 and change, something like that. My wallet's full of bills. I pull it out my wallet. It's full of bills. I try to shuffle through quickly (I'm in line), but my fingers stumble, turn to clay. What I need is a five and a couple of singles, but what I come up with is a twenty and three ones. I drop the three to the counter top, jam the twenty back in (it won't go easily), and once again flit through options. It takes me forever to find the five back, but I get it, hand it to him. pick up the ones and do the same.

The guy's the boss. You can tell. He's maybe thirty, got tattoos up and down both arms. And he's practiced at patronizing. I know because I gave the too many ones. "Here you go, sir," he says, giving one back. "Sometimes they stick to each other, don't they?"

I'm a foot and a half from the grave. 

And it hurt badly because yesterday wasn't a good day to be aging. I didn't intend to watch the hearings, told my wife I wasn't going to, but ended up catching arduous glimpses every once in a while. 

What did I see? I couldn't help thinking it was a horrible day for Joe Biden--and maybe Bernie Sanders too. What was distressing was that Robert Mueller, a man who took a bullet for his country and has served it bravely and selflessly throughout his life, was an graying old man. He could not keep up. It took him forever to figure out what cards to play. His fumbling through that 450-page report of his made clear that a man his age could not play in a league with all those quick and mouthy pols on both sides of the aisle. 

There he sat, fumbling and bumbling. "Can you repeat the question?" became a mantra, a chorus. He had trouble hearing, trouble remembering, trouble understanding, and trouble responding. He seemed to an anxious world to be a man whose time had come and gone. 

It was painful to witness because Robert Mueller didn't deserve being treated the way he was. 

An old friend sent me an email last night. We couldn't be farther apart politically, but he anguished with me about what we'd both seen. I'm 71. He's 70. Mueller is, he said, "a fellow veteran and statesmen who was frail, used and abused. Today was a disgrace."
 
Yesterday, a better man than either of us or anyone in that room was scourged through agonizing hours of questioning by men and women vastly more interested in what he could say than they were in him. He got bamboozled, as old folks do. He stood there at the counter and couldn't operate his wallet. 

Some years ago already, I walked into the student union on campus and started up the long, wide stairway toward my wife's office. Just then a kid came down the stairs, his feet flying down the steps in an artful fashion that reminded me of what I could do once myself. I recognized in his elegant stairway dancing that such footwork was a couple decades behind me.

I'm just a kid when it comes to aging. My father-in-law doesn't really know it himself, but he passed his 100th birthday last month. What he used to tell us, more often than he knew maybe is that "it isn't fun"--aging, that is. 

Regardless of what you think of Donald Trump, what was difficult to witness on TV screens all day long is the toll of age, an old man painfully muddling along, powerless to stay with the program. 

Robert Mueller is everything Donald Trump isn't.

My friend is right.  It was sad, a disgrace.

Small Wonder(s)--Fur Trappers descending the Missouri

I'd say it's morning, mid-summer in the calendar year. You know the type: a slight haze lies over just about everything. All seems veiled, the horizon barely discernible. What shrouds everything isn't fog, but a wet glaze you can feel against your face. I'd say, likely as not it's July.

Two men sit in a cottonwood canoe, in no particular hurry. They're toting a bundle of furs downriver, right here on the Missouri. A slight wind carries smoke from the man's pipe out behind him in a silver ribbon. 

The man's not dressed like a trapper. His flouncy pink blouse makes him look more of a dandy than a mountain man--and that hat would be a joke if history didn't tell us it had a name and a story. It's "a freedom hat," a stocking cap--a toque, this Frenchman would call it, that at one time--at his time--veritably proclaimed his assertion of liberty. It's a "liberty hat," circa 1820, its roots in rebel gay Paree, and it's worn with pride, here, on the American frontier by an icon, the fur trapper.

The canoe rides low in the river because the catch has been substantial. A kid is hanging over the bundle, smiling happily, and why wouldn't he? It's a golden summer morning, their trek into the wilds has been successful, and the two of them are bound home or somewhere to sell the bounty. A tranquil July morning on the Missouri River. You know the type.

Fur Trappers descending the Missouri is without a doubt George Caleb Bingham's most famous painting. It catches river trapping lore as fittingly as a coonskin cap or a Bowie knife. Bingham's famous painting rode the back cover of the American Lit anthology I used through twenty years of teaching. Always loved it because it seemed so, well, home. Those two are right here, after all, on our Missouri River.

But the painting wasn't always named that way. Bingham titled it Fur Trader, Half-breed Son, a title thought by some to be scandalously un-p.c., the word half-breed not to be spoken in mixed company. Fur Trappers descending the Missouri is far more heroic than Fur Trader, Half-breed Son, and vastly less embarrassing.

But I think it's helpful to know what George Caleb Bingham intended. He meant that kid in the middle of the canoe--he gave him jet black hair, after all--to be the son of Native American woman, the Frenchman's wife maybe, then again maybe not. While the term half-breed and the original title risks offense, it also defines the moment in 19th century river history when Euro- and Native Americans got along in almost every way--royally, if I can use that word in a painting all about liberty. 

And then there's the third canoe character, the cat, a black cat, ears perked, watching the artist maybe, and seemingly not in the least nervous or worried about being aboard a cottonwood canoe with nothing on either side by Missouri River. A cat. I wish you could see it. A black cat on the Missouri canoe.

Now you might think--I certainly did--that there was no excuse for George Caleb Bingham to put a cat on the canoe, no reason but one: Bingham was a cat-lover. 

Whether he was or not is immaterial. Turns out Sioux City, Iowa, likely had a multitude of cats back then because every last steamboat to come up river needed mousers lots of them. River vessels of all types and sizes hosted mice and rats by the dozen, even hundreds, enough to chew up through cargo and push the ships belly-up. 

Even fur trappers needed cats because mice could hide in indiscernable cracks and destroy a year's furs without breaking a sweat. Cats were put to work, even canoe cats. They weren't doled handouts. Bingham's jet black feline looks arrogant up there in front of the canoe, but then most cats are. 

And they had a right to be. If those two guys behind were all about liberty, someone, after all, had to remind the viewer that liberty didn't come without cost. Someone had to tend the bounty, be sure all those goods made it home. 

It's all there in a famous old painting, an image that feels at home right here, despite all the years and the change. Somehow, it's still right here in the neighborhood. If you want to be particular, Bingham's particular school of painting is called luminist, because its landscape is so tranquil in the generous morning light. 

Maybe. But who cares? We know that morning is neither unique or rare, because Bingham's particular morning is still here, still ours.

Small Wonders--Land of the Cottonwoods

Cottonwood, LaFrambois Island

Maybe you've heard. As unlikely as it seems, trees may be our saviors. Researchers somewhere have determined we could plant 2.5 billion acres of new trees without losing an inch of farmland or even cutting back on urban sprawl; and those billions of trees--deep breath here--can sweep up and away 200 gigatons of the carbon we create, carbon that's warming us dangerously. As Margaret Renkl said in a recent Times Opinion piece, "Planting trees. . .could go a long way toward saving us from ourselves."

If that's true, and if we do start, then I hope--I really do--that more than a few are cottonwoods.

Now, I know some people--farmers mainly--think cottonwoods are just xxl weeds. I get that. Cottonwoods grow as fast as hybrid corn, yield a wood so soft it's hardly worth burning, leave yards full of trash in almost every season, and, out here at least, sometimes look martyred to the wind, their branches broken and bent, victims of never-ending Great Plains weather wars.

In winter, they're naked as jay birds, looming giants in the grove. Speaking of winter, cottonwoods haven't a clue about seasons--they snow in summer, leaving fussy cotton-ny trash over everything. They're messy as two-year olds, even the ancients, the ones so barrel-chested they take up the whole yard.

Whether, as a species, they Hoover-up carbon is a question I can't answer, but in many ways cottonwoods were long ago already our saviors out here, where, often as not, they were the only tree--the only visible outline of anything--like a huge upturned buoy in an ocean of grass. Native people turned cottonwood groves into prayer rooms. Wherever two or three poplars are gathered, wagon trains considered them rest stops: there had to be water nearby.

Cottonwoods do best near water. A friend of mine who knows such things, once told me that cottonwood seeds require a good soaking to germinate, need floods in fact, do well in them, can't live without them. On LaFrambois Island, east of Pierre, you can't miss dozens of newly-planted, three-foot cottonwoods, each preciously fenced in. Ever since the Missouri's dam system controls flooding--mostly--those baby cottonwoods need to be planted, not created as they'd been for thousands of years.

Did I mention the bark--amazing stuff, beautiful in its own gruff way, thick and ribbed and rumbly. Woodcarvers peel it away from dying cottonwoods because it carves up sweetly, soft as clay almost, I'm told.  

Big blue stem doesn't reign over Siouxland as it once did. Today, corn and soybeans cover the earth. Nothing that grows up from our blessed Loess soil is as thoroughly native as our cottonwoods, the trees that tower above farm groves, the stand-alone giants ones that look like royalty across otherwise empty fields, the broken figures whose battered branches best tell the stories of the plains. They're heroes.

Buffalo loved rubbing their sides up against that that unmistakable furrowed bark. Sometimes lonely cottonwoods in all that prairie land would be flooded by a moat of buffalo fur three feet deep, what was left behind when an endless herd rubbed up against it.

There's one growing in our flower garden right now--three feet tall maybe, a single buggy whip of a tree, a little quaking aspen cottonwood. Really should go. Really should get pulled. It's not supposed to be there. Really, it's a weed.

But it's a weed with a history, a weed that wants a chance to grow. And we need trees. Researchers claim they're our best shot against global warming. Besides, look at what they've done for us. 

Might as well hold back the wind. Might as well draw the curtains on all that open sky. Might as well let that little cottonwood alone. Let it be, just let it be.  

Small Wonder(s)--The James Gang

For the record, the Rock Island Express the boys hit that night was eight cars long--four coaches, two sleepers, and two baggage and express cars. It had left Council Bluffs late afternoon, at five, on a run to Chicago. Oddly enough, the last sleeper was full of Chinese students on their way to colleges out east. It was July 21, 1873.

The thing is, no one had ever even imagined the idea that a bunch of tough guys would stop a train, stop it in its tracks, shoot up a storm with the guns in their hands, get on board, and go from seat to seat demanding people's cash and whatever else they spotted. What happened that night, 65 miles east of Des Moines, was the very first train robbery in American history; and it happened just outside of Adair, Iowa, at a spot you can visit yet today, a place where an immense railroad engine wheel is set in the earth in memory of a wild and nasty thing that happened right there that night.

The sun's going down at 8:30, but there's plenty enough light for an engineer with his wits about him to spot a line of track that's bent out of shape by someone or something. When John Rafferty saw trouble coming, he threw that monster into reverse and stopped all that tonnage as fast as he could, thereby playing into the hands of the James boys.

Just one word explains a scrapbook full of wild west 19th century behavior. It's four letters long, and names a bright and shiny object that stole a nation's attention--gold. Frank and Jesse James got the word that the Rock Island was carrying lots of it from Colorado. Gold is what they were after that night.

But it was coming later. Wrong time. Wrong train. 

No matter. That heist, right down the road, stunned locals and shocked a nation. Who would have believed "six large, athletic men dressed in KuKlux style" could bring a monster railroad to a stop, rob it blind, and kill good men? It happened. Engineer Rafferty died that night, thrown out when the engine ran into a bank and flipped. 

There was no gold, but when the James gang tallied the loot, they'd still grabbed a couple thousand and change, not bad for more fifteen minutes of violent crime. And they'd made history, put "the James Gang," all caps, across the covers of a dozen dime novels. Stopping that Rock Island Express put them on a fast track to mythic glory, Robin Hood and a prairie band of merry men.

There's more to the story. Jesse James was a kid still learning to shave when Bloody Bill Anderson's gang of Confederate guerrillas committed unspeakable atrocities in western Missouri. Jesse was of one of 'em. He was in it when Bloody Bill slaughtered Union soldiers and sliced them up like butchers do. Little Jesse James a bushwhacker who carried out unspeakable atrocities in a place where the Civil War created conflicts that were always neighbor against neighbor. 

The greatly fabled Jesse James was raised bloody, sired in conflict, reared by war. He'd learned to rob trains long before even he had the idea. When he should have been in Sunday School, he was scalping the enemy. 

For years Jesse James got more ink than almost anyone out west, but people rarely read the whole story.

When Robert E. Lee handed his sword to General Grant at Appomattox, the war ended, but not all the violence did. Some washed up here, outside of Adair, in July of 1883, when a gang of thugs stopped the Rock Island Express. 

No one could have guessed.

Sunday Morning Med--Burning Questions

“My tears have been my food day and night, 

while men say to me all day long, "Where is your God?"

Almost fifty years ago, when my alma mater called to ask if I’d be interested in leaving Arizona and coming back to Iowa, I never really considered not going. I loved high school teaching because I loved high school kids; but I understood that if I were ever going to write, I’d have to teach in college, where there simply is more time.

When I taught there, Greenway High School was brand new, on the edge of a northern suburb of Phoenix. I’d been hired precisely because I was a Christian. I was also male, experienced, and newly outfitted with a masters degree--those were also factors. But, illegal or not, I got the job on the basis of my faith. The district interviewer, a man named Bill Sterrett, was a Christian too. That’s another story.

           

Only two years later, with a college teaching offer in my hand, I decided to leave. When I told Mr. Sterrett, I got scorched. He looked up from behind his desk and shook his head. “Why would you want to go there?” he said. “Everybody there is just like you.” He slapped that desk lightly with his hand. “Here, you’re really different.”

           

Mr. Sterrett died several years ago, but that line lives in echo chamber that is my soul because he was right. We’re not talking about the difference between Vanity Fair and the Celestial City—there’s far too much manure in the air to make any heavenly claims about up here in Siouxland.

But living out my allotted years in a burgeoning new suburb of a huge metropolitan area would have made me a different person than my spending those years in what was, back then, an ethnic conclave huddled against the winds on the edge of the Great Plains. I chose a wooden-shoed monastic life, and, as Frost would say, that choice has made all the difference.

I say all of that because in my many years here I’ve never been anywhere near someone who might say to me, sardonically, in my distress, “So, Jim, where the heck is your God?”  Hasn’t happened—and likely won’t. I am surrounded by a cloud of believing witnesses. All of my friends go to church.

Had I stayed in urban, public education and American suburbia, I’d know people who might well ask me the very question that burns in David's soul. Some of them are still friends. Last summer I got an email from an old Greenway buddy, a “jack” Mormon, who wouldn’t let the silliness of my faith rest, in fact, because he’s quite adamant about having lost his long, long ago.

But I’ve been cloistered for almost five decades, and those few voices who might mock my faith are accessible only on-line. That doesn’t mean I don’t hear those burning questions. They rise, instead, from inside me somewhere. 

But what I’m wondering this morning is this:  if I’d have stayed in a more diverse neighborhood, would the voices I would have heard supplant the ones I now do, the ones from inside? What would be the pitch of my own personal faith had I spent my entire working life in the Valley of the Sun?

           

Questions like "Where is your God?" are here too, even in the cloister, packaged in the same taunting voice David heard, just not spoken aloud. That voice, that burning question, is here too, even in a cloud of witnesses.

But I’m thankful, very thankful, that God almighty has given me, as he did David, a faith that won’t let me take those voices to heart, even though I hear ‘em. Only by grace, can I come anywhere near to holding a faith equal to that task.  

Pig-Headed in Hog Country

Let me tell you a story:

Ten, maybe fifteen years ago, I was in line at a grocery store, behind two Hispanic men checking out. The clerk—a high school girl—got frustrated because her customers had trouble with the English language. That she was annoyed was obvious.

When those two Hispanic men walked away, she muttered something to us—the white folks back in line—words spoken loud enough for them. “Learn the language,” she growled. And then she said something like this: “When you come here to our country, learn the language or go home!”

I would have liked to tell her that 180 years ago, there were Native Americans all around here who gave Iowa its name but now live in Kansas and Oklahoma because we thought their land was ours for the taking.

We have a history of prejudice.

I would have liked to tell her that on Armistice Day, 1918, an angry mob made Rev. John Reichardt stand on a coffin and kiss the flag, while a band from a nearby town played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” On the coffin was written “The Kaiser—now ruler of Hell.” When the show was over, Rev. Reichardt was ordered out of town. His crime was using the German language in German-speaking Zion Evangelical Reformed Church of Lowden, Iowa. Because he spoke German, he was a criminal.

Even Iowans have a history of prejudice.

I would have liked to tell that grocery store clerk that once upon a time Iowa-born terrorists planted a bomb beneath a Reformed Church parsonage, and actually burned down the New Sharon Reformed Church and the Peoria Christian School. Those bombers were too hate-filled and plain pig-headed to know the difference between the word Dutch and the word Deutsch.

I would have liked to tell that young lady that we have a history of prejudice.

I would have liked to say that almost assuredly, her grandparents or great-grandparents needed help shopping in LeMars or Rock Rapids, wherever they’d go, because they didn’t know the English language. And that as late as the 1950’s, men and women on the streets of Orange City or Sioux Center still used Dutch, a half century or more after the immigration from the Netherlands stopped for the First World War.

I would have liked to tell her all of that, but I didn’t. However, I did write up that story and sent it to the Sioux Center News because I wanted to remind all of us that we certainly do have history of prejudice.

But my grocery store story doesn’t end there. There is one more chapter.

The morning after the letter showed up in the paper, the manager from one of the town’s stores called me. It was early, eight in the morning. She identified herself, someone I knew from church. Then she said, “Jim, I need to know who that check-out was. I have to know."

I told her the clerk wasn’t an employee of her store. She wasn’t.

Still, to me that call was a blessing.

I couldn’t help remember that story today because bigotry needs to be confronted and condemned, whether the perp is a high school grocery check-out girl or the President of the United States.

We have a history of prejudice, a history we’ve created and suffered; but like that grocery store manager, we don’t have to tolerate it. We can fight it. We can call it ugly, call it wrong, and call it sin. 

Because it is.

A Gallery from the card

Like our back yard, the shots stored on my memory cards get to be a mess if they're not tended--all of kinds of stuff gets mixed up. It's time I pick some weeds to see what's there.

Like this--a rather immodest sempervivum (I read that off the tag--"hens and chicks" for us non-Latinites) suddenly grew a stem that seemed embarrassingly phallic, then--of all things--that strange stiff appendage sprouted blossoms still blooming today.

Not only that, but when all that fuss was examined by a close-up lens, what turned up was nothing less than a birthday cake. My wife's birthday was last Sunday (sorry, no pics). If I'd only have known, I could have put one on the cake I didn't make or buy.

But who knew that within that little flower a full-blown birthday cake, complete with candles, sat gloriously lit.

This is a cottonwood or a mountain aspen. I'm no expert. But it's growing like a weed in a flower bed out back. I really should pull it but I can't. We don't have many trees to start with (we love our open view of prairie), and this thing is more of a grassland native than I ever will be. It deserves to live, don't you think?

Someday it could be a monster, like this one.

Someday this ancient gnarled veteran will be back, illustration for an essay not yet written.

Here's something iconic. Love the shot. This is a Great Plains portrait--wind and wire and endless grass, and at the heart of it the abandoned steps of an old country church.

Barbara told me there was a night sky I shouldn't miss--this one. We've had more than our share of incredible skies lately--morning, noon, and night; but few beg a story like this one: three characters. Why, I don't know, but the one on the left seems a woman or girl standing. Then there's something or someone like Java the Hut, tended by a less forbidding serf behind her or him or it. Don't like the story? Create your own.

This magnificent hardwood stands on a small Oklahoma Ranch and is tended by the Angus you see presently leaving its immense shadows. Isn't it amazing?--a tree's tree.

Stumbled on this a week or so ago, when a road was flooded and I needed to cross the Big Sioux farther south. Always wondered where Giants in the Earth was set--exactly, had to be around here somewhere. There will be a Small Wonder about this one sooner or later.

I visited Greenwood, SD many times but never found Struck by the Ree's gravesite, which lots of travel books said was really something. It is. Here's where the old man was buried. Myth has it that Lewis and Clark took him in their arms when he was brought to them, a newborn. They wrapped him in an American flag and proclaimed this baby would be a peacemaker, which he was. Read the inscription.

This morning, as I type, the morning sky is hazy from all the moisture, daily rain. But it's also clear, which is unusual this summer. We've been treated to some incredible skies as of late, some monstrously beautiful, others just plain scary. 

An old planter meant to hold a crowd of flowers every summer. This summer--none. Off to the right is the remains of a home picked up and moved a half hour away. What's left is the foundation and some riff-raff, a wreck. I took a picture or two, but it's too painful to show, even here. They were neighbors, the two of them, grandparents. Several years ago, he became a victim of early onset Alzheimer's. Mercifully, he left this vale of tears a couple months ago already. Some stories hurt so bad that it's tough to go there. This is only their old front yard, a planter that always held living color.

For some reason, they wouldn't miss it for the world--strawberry day, which includes a trip to the fields, where the three of them (and me) pick a couple of flats' worth. This year they were thick as apples, tons of them. Then we come home, where the grandsons pluck 'em and Barb cooks up souffle and strawberry soup--and a whole bunch of strawberry muffins. Strawberry Day has become, blessedly, a tradition.

Drives me plain nuts to have to watch 50 high school kids at a place like this--an overlook along the Badlands loop, where we end up every July when I accompany a church youth group on an excursion into the reservations of South Dakota. So much bad could happen, and I'm getting so dark old. I can't handle it. 

But let me just end with a dawn, a spiritual place to stop--and begin.

Shot just last week from our back porch.