The mission was simple: go on out there and gather some shots of the longest river in America, the Missouri. What I'm working on is a chronicle of tales, all of which have at least something to do with the river somewhat affectionately and aptly called "the Mud."
Once upon a time, the Missouri was a wily rebel that would flood, sometimes violently, almost every year, sometimes more than once. For the most part, a series of hydroelectric dams hog-tied the river (although it flooded badly two years ago now). The picture above doesn't really fit the bill or finish the mission because it's the wispy steam of an ox-bow, a narrow little lake the river left behind when, willy-nilly, it chose yet another path one forgotten spring.
I got there just in time to catch a bit of that steamy pond and a couple hundred mud hens, who were far too busy to be concerned about that hooded guy up there on the bank.
For the record, here some of them are. It was a gorgeous spot, and I was there all by my lonesome, which is always the way to celebrate the dawn. Cold?--yes. First time the mercury dived beneath 20 degrees this fall. I had left my gloves in the truck. My fingers complained.
Clouds had begun to form when I headed south to a place I hoped I'd find river access. Google Earth suggested there was a boat ramp down from a town called Little Sioux, but I'd have to find my way there. Thankfully, I did.
The sun was up high enough that it lit up the far shore of the Missouri, as well as the ground beneath my feet. But it did so only when that cloud bank--isn't it beautiful?--separated enough to let the sun muscle through. Right here where the Little Sioux River empties into the Missouri--that's the spot I wanted to see. Because the sun was so dodgy, I took a ton of shots, trying to get one where the morning sun bathed the whole scene, or else didn't at all, which isn't bad either.
You can't help but feel a little carpet-bagger-ish with a camera in hand. Here you are, trying to snatch away a bit of beauty from a place and a time that's almost sacred in its dappled silence. But then, it's not that there isn't more beauty to be had. If I was on my way there right now, I know I'd be welcomed, offered, once more, the elements of worship.
It was a gorgeous day, but I'd come to visit at this spot for a reason. I'm not saying it's holy ground--the whole boat ramp area is a rutted mess. It's likely that I'm the only soul who's visited all year long who knows the story. There's no historical marker, although I've seen them at less significant places so honored in the region.
Right here, at this place, Father Christian Jacob Adriaan Hoeken, a Dutch Jesuit, was once buried, with others, after malaria struck a steamboat named the St. Ange, the angel, as it came up the Missouri from St. Louis. His good, good friend, Father Pierre-Jean De Smet, yet another Jesuit missionary, gave him last rites and was part of the burial detail. Father Hoeken, church historians like to say, was the first missionary to baptize a Native child west of the Mississippi. De Smet was as great as the legends that grew in his wake declare him to be. Father Hoeken was 43 years old.
Couldn't get enough of the place, really, and I was there at moment the whole landscape could not have been more nicely, more reverently, dressed.
There's a statue of Father Hoeken in Pierre, South Dakota, but you'll have to hunt for it. His remains eventually found a more permanent home when they were taken from here and brought, honorably I'm sure, to Saint Stanislaus Jesuit Seminary, in St. Louis. When the grounds of that seminary were sold, those remains were reinterred again at the city's Calvary Cemetery.
I can't help but think that De Smet and Hoeken would sit silently through this early morning pilgrimage of mine, silently and smilingly. It's okay, they might well say, for me to honor this spot, as long as I remembered, with them, that this world was not their home.
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| Father Hoeken, Pierre, SD |
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