The Trapper -- a story (i)

It's been a long time since I ran a story on the blog, even longer since I've written one--fiction, actual imaginative literature. 

When the Schaap family--a new baby had just arrived--moved back to Iowa in 1976, a portion of my motivation was to be able to find time to write. I'd loved high school teaching, but I'd come to understand that every ounce of my creativity was going into class preparation, trying to find ways to make material quite naturally uninteresting to 17-year-olds into wonder-filled moments of growth. Getting a college job, I believed, would allow me to write, and I wanted to write. I didn't know what exactly, but I wanted to write.

The Roots phenomenon (Alex Haley) was huge back then, and I had special reasons to be affected by Haley's searching in genealogy. I'd left northwest Iowa with little interest in ever returning, largely because I felt victimized by an altogether too wholesome sense of self-righteousness shared by just about everyone I knew. Like  nothing else, I'd wanted out just six years earlier; six years later, I was returning. 

There had to be more to the story, had to be a better story, I thought. But what was it? 

Those questions, the questions posed by Alex Haley in Roots, became of interest to me. I wanted to know more about how these Dutch-Americans (me included) got to be where they were--morally, culturally, religiously, spiritually. 

One night, out with my wife's folks somewhere south of Ireton, my father-in-law pointed out the land his parents rented when they were married and began farming. We happened by a cemetery with few stones just a few miles away. I got out of the car, walked through the place, read what I could, then asked. Neither Mom nor Dad knew really, but speculated--it's residents were mainly children--that some kind of plague or fever had run through the neighborhood--so many kids had died.

It was surprising and sad that no one knew the story, a story of true anguish and grief among people overflowing with religion. I couldn't help wonder how things went back then, early years of the 20th century.

I wanted to write, and I wanted to know the story, my story really, the story of a people I'd come, sometimes angrily, to identify as "my people." That's when it struck me that I could learn some things about writing simply by reading the stories of immigrants to America, stories like my own family's. I'd read, find a good one, then try to write it. I had relative confidence I could create landscapes and even develop characters into something multi-dimensional. What I didn't know was how to define a story--what is a plot actually. 

In 1977 I began writing short stories based on anecdotes I'd read hither and yon, wherever I could find historical record of what it must have been like for deeply religious people, my people, to leave home behind and wander into a new land.

We were in Sioux County, so my parents-in-law recommended Charles Dyke The History of Sioux County. Great advice. 

This story< "The Trapper," is unapologetically dark. But it's one of my very first. 

~  *  ~  *  ~  *  ~

Smid jerked around, as if some eternal drums had unex­pectedly stopped. He stared at the farm behind him, feeling for the gun with his right hand. No, he hadn't forgotten. He pulled the pistol from his coat pocket, hearing Klassens echoes through the windstill morning. 

"Don't shoot de verrekte beesten, Smid, use de fork. But if you must, just vonce, ja, ant in de head. An' be sure to go early. An' skin dem too yet vonce de zame day." 

Evert Klassen commanded much more before he left his hired man alone. Sitting aboard the buggy, right hand on the reins, his left arm slicing the air, he seemed to be preaching as he left the yard, while his wife and five children, bundled against the damp, late fall air, sat still as sleeping birds behind him. All Smid remembered now was the business about the trapline--use the stick, not the gun, stretch them tight, flesh them clean, and don't mar the pelts. As if he didn't know all that already. As if this was the first morning he had walked Evert Klassen's trapline. 

Adriaan Smid replaced the pistol in his coat pocket and watched the thick column of smoke gush from the chimney of Klassen's homestead. Ten years ago, before Smid had come, the house had been constructed near the lean-to and dug-out that Klassen had built when he first settled in eastern Sioux County. The house was strong and func­tional, sentried by sapling elms that pushed higher into the clear air of the flatland with each passing spring. It was a warm place. It was a good place. Adriaan Smid would have liked such a place himself, but it wasn't God's will. 

He stood another moment, watching the quiet homestead, still thinking. Very little, for that matter, seemed to be God's will for him, if he dared to say it. "Go to Sioux County," he had read in the little fliers passed around in Pella. He had prayed about it-ja, he had prayed about it. Then he had silently walked away from the carriage-maker, just as he deserted the bakery in eastern Wisconsin, looking, hoping, like all the rest, to catch a dream, to work hard and become successful, to have his own land, a farm, a wife, children, to be respected, an elder in a good church. 

His overshoes made dark tracks through the gauze of frost that stretched over the flat grazing land. The path ran straight as a tow-rope back to the barn he had left not long before. "Early, Smid!" Klassen had said, so Smid dropped the pitchfork and picked up the forked stick, just as Evert would have, when he could begin to make out the outlines of the house through the barn windows. 

He turned back and marched on towards the river. There was no sun, but to the east the sky was colored with the promise of sunrise. He kept walking, moving north to where the Floyd snaked through the prairie grasses, cutting a gash into the land that made these acres undesirable to the first homesteaders. Within months of those early arrivals, any trees that had grown along the banks of the Floyd were stacked into woodpiles or notched and tiered into walls for some early cabin. Once trees were gone, no one wanted these acres, for frequent sloughs spotted the adjoining fields, making farming impossible-at least, so people said. But Evert Klassen had taken the bottom land. He was tough and bristly like a horsehide brush, and he made the land work for him. He was a deacon in the new church, and in less than ten years he could afford a hired hand. 

(to be continued)

Morning Thanks--Brule'

I'm not sure exactly what to call it--part pageant, part museum, and part rock concert. Whatever Brule' is, it's marvelous entertainment, enriching and overpowering, in large part because the music ("contemporary Native American music" they call it themselves) features a driving beat that's somehow, also, meditative in a New-Ageish way. It has something of the Dave Clark Five, something of the singers and drummers of any of dozens of powwows around the continent, something of the religious character of most Native music. 

I tuned in when I was given a CD as a gift from a teacher--and former student--for visiting her classroom twenty years ago. I'd never heard of it or him or them, a group created (quite literally) by an artist named Paul LaRoche, who had been adopted as a child and had grown up in Worthington, Minnesota as the child of a white couple who'd never bothered to let him know that, by birth, he was a Lakota from the Lower Brule' reservation in South Dakota. 

He says his discovery of his origins led him away from the disastrous path his life was on as a rock musician and into a deep investigation of heritage that he's still on. It's a family enterprise, his daughter playing flute, his son on drums. The reception for what Brule does on stage has grown through the last decades. He says they used to dream of playing Rapid City; today, they do their thing around the world.

Some time ago already, they added fancy dancers, which makes a Brule' concert unlike any other really--an experience. 

And one more thing--it's actually a bit of a church service, La Roche himself a missionary for the gospel of reconciliation, a message he's not at all shy about preaching, in large part, he says, because he's spent a lifetime trying himself to do that tough job in his own life, trying to bring healing to the breach which separates the two cultures so vividly his.

Brule' is a blessing. I'm greatly thankful for the Sabbath they created once more with a stunning show. They were at Arnold's Park on Sunday night, and they were, as always, great, playing before thousands out on the green. 

Memorial Day--in Memory of Pvt. Edgar Hartman

 Hon. Edward Voigt

181 House Office Building
Washington D. C.

Dear Sir,

Edgar J. Hartman a member of the Machine Gun Company, 58th Inf. Was instantly killed on Oct. 6, 1918 on the Vesle River close to Ville-Savoy. He was a member of my platoon but was in another squad about 300 yds to the left of my squad of which I had command in a sunken road leading to Ville-Savoy they were dug in the banks of the road. We had just finish a barrage of 15000 rounds for a covering of our infantry's advance across the Vesle River. They were fired upon by German one-pounders immediately after our barrage and according to the Corporal's information to me he was instantly killed in the Argonne forest. I wish to assure Mr. Hartman's folks that he was a member of my squad in a little skirmish a few days before this engagement on the Vesle River and he was a most trustworthy man and when transfered to another squad I sure felt his loss to my squad. I can assume then that he died a "Hero." Hoping this information will be of value to you.

I remain

yours truly

Leo B. Zastrow

Mr. Zastrow says October 6, but that's likely wrong. The official notice of his death claims the day he was killed was August 6, 1918. He hadn't been in France long, but then the rest of this country's fighting troops hadn't been there all that long either. 

Apparently, his death went un-noted for some time, because that official notice didn't come to my grandmother, his sister, until June 20, 1920, almost two years after the worried time she must have begun to think the worst. 

In March of 1919, six months after Armistice Day, she was still trying to write him. "Dearest Brother," her letter says. "Am making another attempt to have you hear from me. I have now had eleven of my letters returned to me but none the past month so will send something in search of you."

There's more: "We have been unable to find any trace of you up to now, nor received anything from you since your field service card reached us on August 7th." 

And then she adds some news on the chance this letter will succeed where eleven others did not. She knew he'd love to hear the news from home.

"We are all well and have a fine baby girl 3 mos old awaiting your return. Will write more when I learn whether or not this reaches you."

That baby girl was my mother.

On September 5 of 1919, Grandma received a note from the Treasury Department, indicating she was "the beneficiary of insurance in the amount of $5000 issued by the United States Government to your brother, Hartman, Edgar J., who died on the ______ day of _______, 19 __. "To be determined" is typed in above the empty spaces.

The nearest I can guess is that sometime this week, my grandma's only sibling, her brother Edgar, my great uncle, was killed instantly by bombardment in a road bed trench, somewhere in the Argonne Forest. I'm sure he wasn't alone. 

I don't know the date, but sometime this week, exactly 100 years ago, just a few weeks after getting to the battlefield, when he was likely hunkered down in ditch being pounded by German artillery, in the twinkling of an eye he found himself awakened to a silence that marked an absolute an end to war. 

His cemetery stone, says August 6. Whatever the date, he died, a hero, 105 years ago. 

Sunday Morning Meds--from Psalm 42

As a deer longs for a stream of cool water,

so I long for you, O God. I thirst for you, the living God;

when can I go and worship in your presence? Psalm 42 1-2

The Ghost Dance, one of the saddest religions of all time, a frenetic hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation, swept up Native life throughout the west in the final years of the 19^th century. 

 Wovoka, a Piute holy man, saw the original vision, then designed the ritual from his own revelations. Erect a sapling in an open area, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, which was, back then, outlawed by reservation agents.  Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious, to witness to your humility. Some warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness to their selflessness. 

Then dance—women and men together—dance around that sapling, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude, dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges.  Dance into frenzy.  Dance into religious ecstasy.

 If they would dance, Wovoka claimed Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and knew their deep suffering. When he’d come, he’d bring the old ones with him, hence, “the Ghost Dance.” The buffalo would return, and once again the people could take up their old, beloved way of life. If they would dance, the dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, the white people. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, their thirst assuaged, their sadness comforted. 

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.”  It was that simple and that compelling a heavenly vision. 

As a white Christian, I am ashamed to admit that in the summer of 1890, the desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the death of a culture, created a religion that played a tragic role in the massacre at Wounded Knee.

It’s easy for many of us to read the opening two verses of Psalm 42, the song of man or woman in exile, as if we’ve actually felt the thirst David is talking about.  But it’s helpful for me, a white Christian, to know the story of the Ghost Dance, to understand how thirstily Native people looked to a God who had seemingly left them behind. They were dying, both spiritually and physically. They felt that abandoned.

Thirsty four-leggeds in the opening lines of the song would make sense to Native people; they would have understood the opening bars of David’s song. 

What’s at the bottom of this lament is God’s horrific absence. Humankind has all too abundant a history of abject, dire need.

I’m not at all thankful for the story of the Ghost Dance, or even of David’s desperation recorded here in this memorable psalm. But I am comforted in the knowledge that when my bootless cries seem to disappear into the wide-open spaces of the plains where I live, I know I’m not the first to feel abandoned--even a poet/King "closest to God's heart" felt the strangling clutches of despair. We are not alone--

The gift of grace in the near despair of the opening lines of Psalm 42, or so it seems to me, is, once again, that neither you nor I nor the person down the street suffering far more than we are is ever really alone. 

WIP

 Okay, I bought in. It doesn't turn miracles, but once in a while some dreaded species of thistle comes victim (mostly) to its considerable incisors. I'm not sure it's any more valuable than our already existing weaponry, but when it pulls out a root at least you don't have to bend over (for the ten-thousandth time) to get the evil out. For the record, it's not just Grandpa's.

When we bought out in the northernmost suburbs of Alton, Iowa, the lot we bought was an acre, an entire acre. We've got no pony, no sheep, no Holsteins, and riding Toro, so it's up to me to keep the mess under control, no thanks to Eve and that lousy snake.

Everyday I'm out there now, tending the garden (sounds so scriptural). I have trouble remembering what I did with my time before warmth crept slowly and breezily back into the region. The ground squirrels lunched on my muskmelon plants. The newest batch is now sealed up behind two walls of defense. Once those plants get to adolescence, I'll let 'em go.

Yesterday--and the day before--I pulled a ton of wild parsnips out, carefully, I might add after the book claimed it to be nearly lethal: "Wild parsnip sap contains chemicals called furanocoumarins which can make skin more vulnerable to ultraviolet radiation. Brushing against or breaking the plant releases sap that, combined with sunlight, can cause a severe burn within 24 to 48 hours." Sheesh.

This morning, most of are out, but you can bet they'll be back. Neither my sidekick or I can figure out where on earth it came from. Last year it wasn't there; this year there's half an acre (that's hyperbole). Just like the forces of yet another foreigner--some kind of Japanese grass the book claimed just awful. "Go cut it out," the book said, or words to that effect.

If you look close right now, it's a horror out back. But if you don't, it's beautiful. The cone flowers will be wonderful in a week or two, but any prairie fool can grow coneflowers. The columbine on the east side are perfectly beautiful right now, but no one sees 'em so here they are--some anyway.




If I look down on what appears to be an emerald sea behind the house, it looks great. Three inches of rain one night did wonders. Right now, just about everybody out back and in the flower garden, the plants who get charity from the owners once in a while, is baited-breath waiting for more.

Still, it's gorgeous. This morning, just before dawn, I saw a white flash move along the Floyd River, a white-tail, running along full-tilt. It's a garden out there. Almost enough to make me forget about Adam and Eve. Mostly, from a distance, I saw the garden.

It's a works-in-progress. This afternoon I'll be out there somewhere again because what's out there is a works-in-progress, as are we. 

Will on the Middle

The idea, of course, was that freshman students had to learn how to research and how to present their research topics. "The term paper" was a huge assignment in English 101, a course now defanged somewhat by AI, I'm told. We're talking about Prof. Schaap's English 101, years and years ago, when "the term paper" required a number of standard features: it had to be ten pages maybe (I don't remember), had to have footnotes from five different sources--I don't remember the whole list, but when I look back at what I just wrote, the assignment makes me feel like the grim reaper.

Oh, yes, and this--in my class, no papers on abortion. At the Christian college where I taught, my chances of getting well-researched papers in support of legalized abortion were simply non-existent. And at the other end, among evangelical kids the anti- argument was something akin to cliché. Besides, most of them had already written some research project on Roe v Wade. 

George Will, who is most certainly not a lib, makes the claim, yesterday, in the Washington Post, that the Supremes have pulled off some magic with their decision to destroy the 50-year-old decision to legalize abortion. By tossing the whole messy quarrel into state courts and state assemblies, they've altered the landscape in ways few might have foreseen. Because the decision-making is not federalized, a whole new landscape has appeared for what we might well have considered the most difficult cultural issue we face. "An ambivalent majority," he says, "is permanently troubled by the irresolvable tension between a woman’s claim of personal autonomy and the inviolability of personhood."

That there are no easy answers--except to those on either side of the stretched ends of the debate--means that we will have to fashion a new approach in the company of those who have been silent or at least less driven by their own arguments (except MAGA legilatures, like Florida's). "The 11 months of political fermentation since the overturning of Roe have revealed the necessity of politics, which is the business of accommodating differences," Will writes. In order to create law, we must take on the hard work of creating consensus.

Because we do, he says--and here's what I appreciate about the piece--there may be the real possibility of an emerging middle, a let's-get-along side, neither radically opposed to abortion, nor radically driven by "a woman's right to choose" no matter when.

George Will is a conservative's conservative, someone who's always praised "that government that governs least." What he is after is what's there in the title of his WaPo op-ed: "Ambivalent about abortion, the American middle begins to find its voice."

I for one will be thrilled if he's right and, once again, neighbors can talk to neighbors, siblings can talk to siblings, pros can talk to antis. Wouldn't it be grand if people on both sides of political issues that demand serious discussion win out over so much petulant demagoguery.

Maybe it's just a dream.

Is he right? Is some kind of middle core of the American electorate beginning to find its way back to strength? We've now clearly established that we can fight. Can this country even begin to assert that maybe, just maybe, we can learn once more to get along?


George Will thinks so, and I can't help but like what he's teasing.

Standing in the Need of Grace

David Brooks' gracious tribute to Tim Keller in Tuesday's New York Times was the kind of deep lament that manages to bring light into and through the darkness. Brooks' praise is unequivocal: "one of the most important theologians and greatest preachers of our time," he says, even though his judgment is based on characterization that begins with a goofy metaphor: "Tim Keller was a recliner."

Dozens, maybe hundreds readers of "The Twelve" know Keller and/or his writing far better than I do. The only theology I read comes up when the book club to which I belong ventures occasionally into "the queen of the sciences." That I don't read much, not even pastoral theology, you will note amply from what I'm about to say.

I don't remember the title of the Tim Keller book I did read, because I had the general feeling--a kind of yawn--that most of what I'd found there I'd known already. His was a familiar voice, a thorough-going Reformed voice that took the revelations of this world as seriously as the revelation of the Good Book.

One line in David Brooks' eulogy stuck hard and fast, however a line he located in a book the Kellers wrote together, The Meaning of Marriage. Here's how Brooks uses that salient line:

The only way forward is to recognize that your own selfishness is the only selfishness you can control; your self-centeredness is the problem here. Love is an action, not just an emotion, and the marriage will only thrive if both people in it make daily sacrificial commitments to each other, learning to serve and, harder still, be served. “Whether we are husband or wife,” the Kellers wrote, “we are not to live for ourselves but for the other. And that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage.”

I'm of the age when looking back is less difficult than looking ahead. Whatever OT prophet ever had a footing in my soul long ago departed, I've never been much of a king, and, nowadays, if I'm at all a priest, think Friar Tuck. 

But I'm old enough to recognize truth when I see it, and the Kellers' injunction that "we are not to live for ourselves," most certainly hit a Calvinist chord in my soul. After all, there are mornings down here at the keyboard when I can't help but wonder if I have spent too much of my time and myself watching letters my fingers tap out on the screen, trying to determine whether I was a good Dad or an absent one, whether I might have been a more devoted writer than husband. I don't need the Kellers to awaken those soulful questions, but Brooks eulogy, once again, most certainly did and does.

It seems there is no end to the mirrors in Pieter Bruegel's depiction of Pride in his series of woodcuts on the Seven Deadly Sins. The female personification, who appears in each of the "sins," seems here, in "pride," incapable of looking at anything other than her own image. The ogres use the mirrors to admire themselves too, their own nether parts. 

Bruegel throws in a peacock too, but that fan of feathers isn't the species of pride the Kellers are documenting. That pride is, simply enough, our tendency, unremittingly, to put ourselves first. It's the original sin, isn't it?--Adam and Eve cashing in on the splendid promise for what the Satanic snake sells as greater glory. It's all about what we want--me first. It's all about what lights our passions--no, my passion. That's depravity that's both human and total.

It seems to this Calvinist that we're all victims and perps, we're all sinners, finally. Black and white and red and gold, grandpas and grandmas and grandkids, gay and straight and queer and whatever new identity was born this week and I missed.

The real sin is all of ours. "We are not to live for ourselves but for the other," or so spoke the Kellers, "and that is the hardest yet single most important function of being a husband or a wife in marriage." Yea, surely, and the most identifiable function of being human.

Which is why all of us, every last one is standing--and not even upright--in the dire need of grace.

Morning Thanks--three little girls

an earlier extravaganza--there were more kids last night!

The thing is, if you want to grab a good seat, you've got to park somewhere in the next county--that many people. College commencements pack the place, but all that pomp and circumstance has nothing on the annual Christian school extravaganza, where the first trick is getting a seat, and the first act is simply getting the entire bunch--600?--up there on stage, just getting them there.

You can't discount the importance of test scores in any school evaluation, but what last night's immensity made clear is that something really good is going on at Sioux Center Christian School, not just because the music was "Christian" or the outline for the evening explained the inspiring paths the entire bunch had explored throughout the calendar year, but because simply keeping 600 (?) kids in some semblance of order without balls-and-chains and three or four cat o' nine tails requires inner discipline rare these days or any. All those kids sat and stood on command. All those kids sang their hearts out, oldest and biggest and tallest right down to towheads. An amazing feat. If orderliness is a virtue, that growing student body seemed pretty much without sin. 'T'was impressive.

Couldn't help thinking of the building's namesake, B J Haan, once a dynamo dominee, who single-handedly kept Hollywood out of Sioux Center, but then turned his attention on the local Christian school, then barely scraping by, made it a requirement for his church, suffered some losses thereby, but somehow saved the school, an old world idea for the new world. Last night, we were seated in a facility sometimes called "the beej," in his honor, and he would have loved it, maybe especially because his grandson, nickname BJ, is assistant principal.

I'll admit it. The annual SCCS extravaganza isn't my favorite production, and we have just one to go. We've been there, steady as she goes, since our oldest grandchild, married for a year now, was in kindergarten. Her brother is a seventh grader, which means we're veterans. 

We've seen a bunch. For a time, whoever did the program bought goofy shows from the local Christian trinket store, Bible cartoons. Thankfully, that's history. As of late, the entire operation seem more substantial, more an outgrowth of the primary objective of any school--education. Last night's didn't have any bearded Noahs four-feet tall. Last night's was impressive. 

One little girl--first-grader maybe, stood right up front. Clearly, she found focus difficult--autism, maybe? She pretty much stayed in the place assigned her, but it was clear throughout that she was preferred to stay in her own world. Once in a while, sometimes, her gestures matched those of the children beside her. She was special.

But so were the two first-grade girls beside her, both of whom didn't miss a beat, sang joyously throughout while the sweetheart beside them pretty much stayed in her own little world. To me, it seemed they were perfectly at home with her shenanigans. It was as if they were giving her leave to do what she wanted and be where she wanted. They just kept on singing. 

I'm never all that thrilled about attending the annual musical spectacle, but last night's was a joy. Just getting them all on stage is a first act that's hard to follow. But this morning I'm thankful for the show put up by three little first-graders, two of whom gave the other space to be her and never missed a beat, never once went off script. The show was great, but they were beautiful.

The garden at river's edge

By the time I get to the river--it's a mile hike--I'm almost wasted. Thus, the angle here. 

That's not true. I'm just trying to be creative. 

Took a hike yesterday in an afternoon so divine you might well think the cosmos had transformed itself into the new heavens and the new earth. Once I came close to the river, it was apparent that I'd picked the right Sabbath for this little sojourn because the cottonwoods and the ash along the river were splashed with this glorious stuff--Dame's Rocket, it's called. And I'm supposed to dislike it.

I wish I didn't know that I shouldn't like this stuff-- hesperis matronalis, if you want to get technical about it. It's as invasive as the runny nose in a pre-school, maybe worse. But, my word, does a mass of Dame's rocket light up a river bank. 

Turnout was wonderful, but not extraordinary. Two years ago the flow of pinkish-purple made the river look shallow. They were everywhere, a Fourth-of-July celebration a month or so early. They ran in magenta mobs back then; this year they were only teams. But then, I may have been about a week away from full display.

People in the know about such things explain that Dame's rocket somehow escaped people's gardens, where they'd held down a beloved place for hundreds of years. These days, they're out of the closet, and down by the river, at least, they're legion. 

And, yes, they may remind you of phlox. They're certainly just as beautiful and just as beloved in the evening, when their fragrance is released (some people think they're an aphrodisiacs--and no, I didn't take any home). But to phlox they're no relation.

Anyway, the word is, they've left a thousand garden plots to populate places where wildlife carry their seeds along to unceded territories (or so the story goes). Yessiree, they're hearty:  those lugged-along seeds have no trouble finding a place to open up shop. 

I'm supposed to believe, supposed to testify, supposed to confess that all that blessed periwinkle is a plague, a creeping abomination. That's what I'm supposed to say. So I did, right? But it's oh, so painful, even for a Calvinist. They're just too pretty.

When I walked out of the trees, I walked through choruses of Dame's rocket all around, as if the path through the grass was a cathedral aisle. Honestly, there was so much color nicely scattered on both sides that I couldn't help thinking of a wedding. Want to avoid that huge flower bill for something upcoming? Just tie the knot at the river, surrounded by all kinds of trumpeting magenta.

Or, sad thought, a funeral. 

Right now, to sit in the company of all that color is to abide in a cartoon. They're not native, and they are invasive, but you're going to go under siege, you could do much worse than a big, bright battalion of Dame's rocket.

Sunday Morning Meds -- Psalm 42:1

“As the deer pants for streams of water,

so my soul pants for you, O God.” Psalm 42:1

I’m not sure what I’m about to say is instructive or merely attention-grabbing, but one can die from thirst in four days, even if all you’re doing is praying.

At the end of my career, classrooms were strewn with water jugs in all shapes and sizes, some monstrous. Students toted their water everywhere. Even in church, in the middle of a sermon, millennials of all ages take out bottle and grab a swig as if the numbers on their internal clocks tick dangerously close to 92 hours. I just don’t get it—but I’m not of their generation.

I’m guessing none of us—heavy water drinkers included—know the extremity of the opening line of Psalm 42, but then neither do I. I can’t remember a time in my life when. . .

Wait a minute. I used to bale hay. Just about every memory haying is in the barn, where, by noon, temperatures would soar in dusty, cob-webbed corners of ancient hay mows.

Today, close to sixty-some years later, I start buying lemonade come June. Often, after working out back, I chug it because I'm hot--and thirsty. The truth is, I haven’t bucked a bale in half a century, but whenever I drink lemonade. I remember slipping wet quart jars out of insulated paper bags, screeching off lids, and chugging cold lemonade right through a dozen ice cubes.

Still, only a few of us know the extremity of the comparison here—of thirst that rages into outright panting. And I’m not among them. I’ll never forget pouring down ice cold lemonade in a hay mow, but I was nowhere near dying, even though at twelve I may have thought so and probably acted like it.

We don’t know that David wrote Psalm 42, but some believe he did; what’s more, some like to think he wrote it when his son, Absalom, was threatening his father’s life. Whether or not that’s true, the heft of the psalm’s opening simile has little to do with our not packing a thermos. Water jugs have nothing to do with Psalm 42.

What David is saying—if indeed he is the author—is that he passionately thirsts after God because God seems nowhere to be found. That’s the kind of thirst at issue.

On a particularly dark day for us not all that long ago, we took a walk around town. When we passed some houses of people we knew, I couldn’t help but recount the troubles each of those families were going through too. Maybe it was my problems that made me calculate tribulations—I don’t know. But I did, sadly. Racked up other people’s problems as if to take the edge off mine perhaps.

I’d just read a little from Calvin, specifically a line in Book I of the Institutes: “Without certainty of God’s providence life would be unbearable.”

Certainty is one fine blessing, but not everyone gets it. What's worse, certainty can be it's own kind of sin. But that night, I was a lot less confident than Calvin.

Psalm 42, long a favorite of many, is all about chugging certainty even in desperation, about knowing God is there, even when we’re sure as heck he’s not. A wonderful passage from Isaiah is a heavenly promise; the story from Acts does nothing but bring smiles. But Psalm 42 is the gut-wrenching plea of a man who finds himself alone and outside.

The thirst here is for nothing in a jug, for something a whole lot more than lemonade. The thirst here is for living water in the parched soul of someone who’s wandering in a desert where there’s nothing more than hot sand and maybe a cactus.

A lot of folks know that thirst, even David the King, David the poet, David the man closest to God’s own heart. Even he knew what it meant to pant.

It’s always nice to remember we aren’t alone, isn’t it? Seems to me that’s the blessing of Psalm 42.

Morning Thanks--Irresistible grace

AP photo

Long ago, I recognized the story line, as did many others. His was a path I recognized. Paul Schrader was not the first artist born and reared in a Dutch Calvinist milieu, not the first to stamp the dust off his or her feet when they leave but somehow, continue to hang around. 

Can we count Piet Mondrian as a member of such a coterie? Strictly Reformed upbringing, moves into art--high art--an early pioneer of the abstract, whose work somehow carries the imprint of the theological world he could never quite leave.

Or Van Gogh, who left the church but could never, would never, walk away from the God he'd been brought up to love and respect. He once told his brother, “I am still far from being what I want to be, but with God's help I shall succeed.” Is that cliché, or a confession of faith. You decide.

And then there's Peter DeVries, a novelist some consider the finest humorist of the 20th century. Walk away?--you bet. But lose something of the cosmic dimensions of the Calvinism with which he was raised? Not really. Just read reviews sometime. Better yet, read the novel people say is his masterpiece, The Blood of the Lamb. There may well be some sputtin there, but no spoofing.

Fred Manfred honestly never believed he left, but the families who stayed in the pew certainly assumed he did with all that sexual horseplay and no decided trek into real sanctification, his last novel a quite forgettable No Fun On Sunday.

I met Paul Schrader once in a bar just off campus from the literary conference where he was a featured guest, at the college, Calvin, from which he'd graduated (as did DeVries and Manfred, by the way). I don't remember much about that night, with the exception of the fact that I regretted terribly that my son, who'd attended that conference with me, had decided to hang out somewhere else. He was a Shrader aficionado.

A couple of days ago, the Associated Press titled an article about Paul Schrader with a headline that held, at least for me, no surprises: "Paul Schrader can't shake his Christian faith, even with his late movie, 'Master Gardener." To those of us who know his background, that's an old familiar tune.

Is Master Gardener worth seeing? I don't know. It opens Friday. My guess is that, despite the AP's headline, it won't feature some stirring kumbaya. The plot features a reformed (small r) gardener who has left a horrendous past (a hit man) and is now gardening for a socialite who uses him for other forms of private entertainment. If this is a revival piece, be prepared to get dirty in the process.

It's the bigger story that grabs my attention, even though Shrader is by no means alone. I don't care if Master Gardener doesn't pass your heresy test or mine, it's the trajectory of the larger story that grabs my attention and love; it's the God haunted-ness Schrader seems to suffer. He can't kick Him because He won't quit Schrader--and that's not my judgment alone.

So this morning I'm thankful for Paul Schrader's vain attempt to leave the faith. And more. I'm thankful for grace that is always, always, always bigger and wider than even our most theologically calculated estimations. Grace casts a heckuva wide net, goes after who it will, and is not subject to our human judgments.

I'm thankful this morning for the trajectory of the life of Paul Schrader and, much more, for the constancy of grace, grace we might just call irresistible.

Morning Thanks--what he left us

It's what we inherited, part of the inheritance, a tiny part of it anyway. But yesterday it was sheer blessing.

Ten years ago, I built (!) and put in garden boxes out back. I'm not in the slightest bit handy. Dad Schaap was, as was Dad Van Gelder; but I inherited none of that.

 Here's what happened--

Three sides of one of the boxes rotted, leaving me (and our back yard) in shambles. I had to build another (ten years later), and certain parties in our house really wanted something taller, requiring less bending. 

I won't humiliate myself by telling how long it took for me to do what had to be done, but when you don't know a 2x4 from a 2x8, and nothing is what you say it is anyway (2x4s are really 1 3/4 bv 3 3/4--0r something like that), just walking into a lumber yard where men sport arms like Goodyear tires, it's, well, intimidating because I just know that the only retired prof in the place is sure to say or do something ridiculously stupid. 

Years ago, I took a temp job at a lumber yard that happened to employ a guy I grew up with, a perfectly mindless job, sticking a load of lumber into bins marked by their dimensions. At one point he looked at me, "You like working with wood?" he said. I was totally unaware anyone would.  

Anyway, we've got a backyard mess, and I've got to do something about it. Bite the frickin' bullet, I told myself. Besides, Barbara would be bringing home tomato plants from her weekly visit to the market. 

I measured the rotting 2x10s one more time--four feet by ten feet. Checked the basement for the right nails/screws (they're hybrids--I don't know what to call them), grabbed the case my father-in-law's drill inhabits, put it all out there, and took to the streets, to the lumber yard. 

Went remarkably well. If I acted stupid, the help were kind enough not to howl until I left. They put the lumber in the pickup. I drove home, carried the lumber around back, laid it out, and went back to retrieve the goods, opened up the case, grabbed the drill, and realized the thing was loaded with the same bit I'd used ten years ago--same drill bit. I hadn't used that blessed drill for an entire decade.

This morning (trumpet fanfare please), out back, there stands a brand new plant box, ready for our tomatoes, and taller than the old one--not tall enough, but taller. I can't help thinking I'm a man.

When finally the thing was finished, I grabbed Dad's drill and returned it to its case, same old bit still there in its teeth. Dad Van Gelder died a bit on the far side of 100 years old, and he left behind a quiet lifetime dedicated to family, farm, church, and once in a while a game of snooker or a stringer of sunnies. He left my wife a unique DNA and much, much more, including, to us, a battery-operated drill I rarely use. But yesterday I couldn't have done what needed to be done without that drill. Battery still had juice too, but I wouldn't have been in trouble had it run dry. He left us a charger too.

There's a whole world of things we inherited from him, including, I can't help but mention, a quiet faith. He let others play Jeremiah. 

But this morning's thanks are for that drill and what it represents, so very much more he left behind with us and for us. Oh, yeah, the bit. That too. 

Tulip Festival again!

In case you're wondering (and just down the road hundreds are--and praying too), right now, this morning, the sky is gray, not threatening-gray, just gray. While Orange City would greatly prefer something cloudless, they know well-and-good not to expect it. Some years are blessed, some are near-disasters.

It's Tulip Festival time again, and even to me these days, that title takes on the upper case. For decades we lived twenty minutes away in Sioux Center, where business acumen long ago learned to turn a dollar. Compared to Orange City (and most residents do) Sioux Center has the bucks, if for no other reason than they have the Wal-Mart. All things being otherwise being equal, Wal-Mart long ago established Sioux Center as the financial hub of Sioux County capitalism. Last week's guest, by the by, was Ron De Sanctimonious (as the Orange Man calls him) who visited Pizza Ranch. For a moment or so, he is reported to have looked in the direction of Orange City, but even the pose was political. 

Orange City spends its energy and spirit of its citizenry, Dutch or not, on its Tulip Festival. If the sky clears there'll be thousands of visitors this year, just like last--tens of thousands.  

The weather? Lookin' pretty good, really. So happy you asked.

Maybe a thundershower out of the blocks, Friday maybe grab a sweatshirt, but Saturday, the biggie, just about perfect, almost exactly what the Chamber of Commerce ordered up. Ought to be good. Ought to be fun. 

I spent most of life in Sioux Center being downright haughty, nose in the air, about OC's Tulip Festival--a bunch of grown men and women square skipping in wooden shoes down Main Street, as if our grands' grands ever even thought of such things silliness. Dancing was verboten until the 1950s, for pity sake. All that TF goofiness for what?--for money. Talk about selling your birthright!

Having moved much closer to the festival, I've been born again when it comes to tulips. What OC wants to foster for itself is a personality drawn from any of hundreds of old world villages. It's far less concerned with making money and pouring concrete (not that it doesn't). The vision of the community's movers-and-shakers is to be something akin to a European village, a place where you can sit in the park and maybe have a glass of wine with friends (well, maybe not wine). Sioux Center has a state highway through the heart of town--it's good business. Orange City's heart is a park overflowing with heavenly manicured tulips. (Some just a bit over the hill, but there's no end to the color!)

I've seen, even become part of, the herculean effort required to bring in tens of thousands of people, then host them--keep their hunger abated, their senses raptured, and, more than anything, keep them smiling, as if Orange City is, well, a dandy, happy place, even if none of them ever hanker to wear wooden shoes. Orange City has civic pride Sioux Center would die for, and the Festival generates it in abundance. To channel Hillary, it takes a village--hundreds of volunteers--to do the Festival.

Still, the whole thing is mostly silly. What long ago made towns like Orange City and Sioux Center hum and tick and prosper was rich, rich land drawn and quartered by incredibly hard-working people with an ethic that grew out of something very few of them could identify anymore, but still operates--something I'd shamelessly call Dutch Calvinism. 

That theological heart is something mostly bypassed amid the tulips and the street scrubbing--mostly bypassed and mostly forgotten. At worst, Tulip Festival tinkers around with the trivial. But what I've also seen is that the tulips create a mind that deliberately does what it can to evoke the past in a manner that keeps the past alive--and that's noble. 

So, yup, I'm going. Even though most of my Sioux County past was in Sioux Center and I live in Alton, I'll be in OC. If you'd like to tell me I'm wrong, I'll be on duty at the museum, a place named--guess what?--The Dutch American Heritage Museum. We call it the DAHM.

Have a great time. Remember, Friday, you may need a sweatshirt.

Morning Thanks--an old hymn

Horatius Bonar (1808-1889)

Old songs--old hymns--sling me back to my childhood like nothing else. Sometimes I find myself going over lines from the oldies without having called up titles or first lines--they're just there and I'm singing them. It's as if they've actually got their own channel or station or url, where they play 24/7, while I spend most of my time at other websites. They surprise me, as if I'm forever in a musical game of hide-and-seek.

Last week it was "Conquering Now and Still to Conquer" rising from back yard prairie grass. All of a sudden I'm singing "Not to the strong is the battle, not to the swift is the race" and thinking about a Lakota hide painting. Very strange--another mark of old age? Maybe I shouldn't be admitting these things publicly.

Sunday's transcendent moment was the shocking appearance of another oldie, this one in our worship service, "Not What My Hands Have Done." The moment the organist started in (we very rarely sing it anymore), some element of memory sang along. To say I remembered the text understates the experience. That old hymn put me into a state of mind I remembered. It wasn't as if I remembered a certain Sunday morning. I remembered the old hymn because I remembered something I thought I'd forgotten--how long ago I thought about the lyrics.

Not what my hands have done
can save my guilty soul,
not what my toiling flesh has borne
can make my spirit whole.
Not what I feel or do
can give me peace with God,
not all my prayers and sighs and tears
can bear my awful load.

The bare-bones confession of the first line suggests we're going straight to the confession booth: "now what these hands have done." I'll admit it today--there were sins aplenty in my early years, and the first line does a lot more than suggest that me and Lady Macbeth had some bloody hands in common.

But that's not the focus of the hymn. It's more than what I did wrong; it's what I can't do right. "Can save my guilty soul" blindsides you if you're expecting bald-faced confession. The line is confession, but it's not a confession of sin as it is an abject confession of helplessness, which is a good deal worse. What these hands have done is absolutely nothing, because there's nothing these hands can do to "bring me peace with God." Nothing. Zilch. Nada.

So I'm standing in church, and singing the old hymn, and suddenly I'm telling myself I was born and reared as an unrelenting Calvinist. The sorrow Horatius Bonar headlines in this old hymn is rather typical, I've read, of the man's "pensive reflection," of his pessimism. "Not What My Hands" is a praise song, but it's hardly jubilant, even though those opening lines are aimed at nothing less the beauty of grace. 

For me at least, something in the brooding darkness of the words was sad, wistful maybe. They brought me back to a time when I'd thought about them in exactly that way, fearfully: there's just nothing I can do to bring me peace with God, "not all my prayers and sighs and tears can bear my awful load." Yup. Amen to that.

And yet--I'm sitting there in church last Sunday, singing--I told myself I wouldn't trade my childhood for anyone's. Not that it was all peachy pleasant; I had good reason to believe I too, back then, carried an "awful load." 

But I couldn't help being thankful for picking up adult ideas from the lyrics of an old 19th century hymn: it's all about grace and "not what my hands have done"--or didn't do. 

I'm not sure I'm still fully capable of the promise of the last verse. At 75, I still haven't developed an "unfalt'ring lip and heart to call this Savior mine." That lip of mine is still faltering.

But I can't help but believe (a Calvinist phrase really, don't you think?) that I'm getting there, thanks, in no small part, to childhood hymns that pushed me to be an adult about what amounts to the central questions of our existence here on earth and in what the Lakota call "the Spirit world" to come.

I don't know how to put a handle on all of that other than to say this morning I'm thankful for having, once again, sung an old hymn I wouldn't call my favorite, but would claim to have formed me, maybe more than I can even explain.

L and C and me -- Cruzatte

If you've ever seen the President, you've seen the Secret Service--they're the deadly serious guys with big shoulders, men and women whose eyes Hoover-up whatever scene the Pres is walking into.  They look like Marines, and it's likely some of them are. Think of the Corps of Discover as the Secret Service, or a couple dozen first-team, All-American linebackers, gifted at reading what's going to happen with the next snap up river, a 19th century burly gang of Eagle Scouts. 

William Lewis gave Meriweather Clark the recruiting job, and Clark did most of the drafting at St. Louis during the winter of 1803. He didn't pick up just anybody from the applicants. Guys he wanted had to know their way around-and-through a wilderness. They had to be single--no hitched-up husbands need apply. Good health was required of course, and if you wanted a job going where few white men ever had, you had to handle firearms as if they were appendages. 

Those St. Louis recruits were the heart of the Corps of Discovery, but once in a while Lewis and Clark picked up a ringer out from the transfer portal--men like Pierre Cruzatte, a one-eyed trapper, big and rangy, and blessedly multi-lingual. The man knew more languages than you're average CEO today--fluent in English, French, and Omaha, as well as the lingua franca of the whole Louisiana Purchase, sign language. 

It seems in poor taste to call Cruzatte a "half-breed," but let me just open up that designation. Pierre Cruzatte's father was a Frenchman. We may be talking about our world here, but before 1803 that world, for the most part, belonged the French. His mother was an original non-hyphenated. She was Omaha. Such couplings weren't at all rare among the fur traders, and to Lewis and Clark Cruzatte's mixed-blood lineage undoubtedly seemed an unforeseen blessing, as he turned out to be.

Maybe the best way to imagine the 1804 Missouri River is to head out to Springfield, South Dakota sometime--it's not that far. Go south too the river, where you'll find a little city park. Go on and get out of the car then and stand as close as you can to the wide Missouri. It's a long way to the west bank, and there's more than one path through the grasses in the shallows. Sometimes people, yet today, call the river "braided," right there, because it is. All you have to do is stand there to realize how tough it must have been to determine which braid you want to follow, upstream or down.

Pierre Cruzatte, the one-eyed, rangy half-breed, knew his way around and through the Missouri. He'd been up river often, knew the currents, knew the landmarks, knew the way to get where Lewis and Clark wanted to go. And when he got there, Cruzatte knew how the heck to talk to the people who'd long ago been there. He could read the river the way an apt woodsman reads trees. And, it goes without saying that he knew how to get off a boat, head out into the trees or grassland and come back with a fat deer slung over his back--or whatever else the whole bunch of them could eat that night. 

Cruzatte was a free agent Lewis and Clark picked up for a song. Didn't take long and they named him a private, stuck him, right then and there, in "The Army of the Missouri."

Oh, yes, there's this too. Pierre Cruzatte, the beefy, half-breed linguist, a water man par excellance, came with a fiddle too. Lewis and Clark got him for a song, and you know what else--he gave them one or two himself. That's right. On top of everything else, Cruzatte was a musician, after a fashion any way. Don't know exactly how he'd have done with Vivaldi in Venice . 

But there were times on the river, moments when the whole bunch of them--all those rangy secret service guys, tanned and hot and beating off mosquitoes, got up on their feet and danced--yes, danced--to what their man Cruzatte fiddled up for them. I'm not making this up. There were times when the Native people all around, absolutely loved seeing all those paleface, uniformed linebackers shake a tail feather.

They were all interesting guys, the whole bunch; but you got to love the multi-lingual, one-eyed, river man who knew how to get what needed to be got out of a musket and third-rate fiddle.  

SUnday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 90

“…establish the work of our hands for us—

yes, establish the work of our hands.”

 

The bike path east of town cuts diagonally through tall fields of corn that sometimes buffer prairie winds and sometimes channel it. In July, when the temperature is at 100 degrees, that narrow corridor is a wind tunnel. Back when I used it daily, I fought prairie winds all the way down, then sailed along when I came back to town.

 

Really dry corn makes all kinds of noise. Its leaves get stiff and curl up lengthwise, then crack against each when they get bullied by wind. I’ve never been a farmer, but I’ve lived beside 12-foot corn most of my life, and I know when to get worried. Back then we hadn’t had rain for far too long. Weeks before already, I stopped mowing when our lawn turned to toast. From a distance that section of corn along the bike path still looked emerald, but up close it was smacking and cracking.

 

The man who planted those particular acres of tall corn died that summer. My wife told me about his death weeks after it occurred. I’d missed it myself. Had I known, I would have gone to the funeral. Once, years ago, that man told me I ought to write a book about his life. I should have, but never did.

 

Cantankerous and quarrelsome, he deserved his story told. We’ll call him LeRoy and protect his memory, not because he was ever an innocent. His wife left him after a couple decades of what must have been horror. For a time, fistfights with his son were public spectacles. Once, a neighbor’s sow wandered on his yard, and LeRoy shot it dead, then called the neighbor to pick it up. That afternoon, the neighbor called the radio station to nominate LeRoy for “Good Neighbor of the Day.” The whole town laughed when he awarded the distinction.

 

For a time, LeRoy went to the same church we did. A friend of mine told his buddy, a Lutheran, that our church would pay for their new building project if the Lutherans would take LeRoy off our hands.

 

Thanks but no thanks, the Lutheran said.

 

There’s more. Lots more. There should have been a book. He was never a saint. Some considered him a crackpot. Worse.

 

Later in his life, he mellowed, thank the Lord. I’m sure there were moments when he wished he hadn’t been what he far too often was.

 

The day I heard that Leroy died I took that bike path east of town in withering heat and felt his absence because it bothered me, strangely enough, that there was no one around to worry about his toasted corn. LeRoy would have, but he couldn’t, and he wasn’t.

 

I felt somehow responsible, if that makes sense. LeRoy always liked me; I’m not sure why. He didn’t like a lot of people, and he wasn’t shy about preferences. When I rode my bike through that tunnel of tall corn and heard its leaves cracking, I felt sad because I told myself he ought to be there to worry, a farmer’s right and privilege.

 

As all of us worry—about a bunch of things. When it comes to worry, most of us have fields of too-dry corn. 

 

I’ve got no crops to worry about, no cattle to feed. But I’ve got my concerns.

 

Like Moses, and like LeRoy, I’m sure, I often pray that God almighty will establish the works of my hands—establish these very words I’m typing. Don’t let ‘em dry in the hot sun. Keep ‘em growing and keep ‘em green, even in the heat. Make ‘em better than they are.

 

Moses’s agonizing concern arises from a heart estranged, someone whose thirsty soul has been languishing in the eerie darkness of an eclipse, God himself hidden away as if totally absent. What Moses is asking for is what he does with his hands in that wilderness where his people are serving a sentence, what he does from day-to-day, his work, his toil, his care—that all of that be blessed. That’s all he wants, as do most of us. Bless it, Lord. Bless it all. Bless it, please.

 

What he wants is good corn for a hungry world, something of his to flower gloriously even  though it’s in a cracked pot. “Establish the work of our hands,” he says. “Please, establish the work of our hands.”