Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

“. . .but must be controlled by bit and bridle

or they will not come to you.”

 Just a few years ago, Bernie Ebbers, who is, according to Forbes, “perhaps the most powerful American businessman ever to face a criminal trial,” was found guilty and went to jail, his sentence yet to be determined.  His crimes?—securities fraud, conspiracy, and filing false documents.

 On hearing the verdict, Ebbers hugged his wife and step-daughter, and then cried.  His lawyer continues to plead his innocence.

 Bernie Ebbers was a celebrity entrepreneur who turned a small, long-distance company in Mississippi into one of the largest communications providers in the world, WorldCom.  He was WorldCom’s CEO from 1985 to 2000, and, when his company’s stocks were flying, his personal worth reached close to a billion.  Today he’s dressed in a yellow uniform provided by the state. 

 The government’s case was that, faced with a more grim business future than he’d seen in years, Bernie Ebbers cooked the books. In decisions that involved millions of dollars, he flat-out lied. 

 I feel closer to Bernie Ebbers than I do to Kenneth Lay, the other CEO who was, several years ago, deeply discredited by gigantic financial fraud, who presided over the power giant Enron before its demise.  I feel closer to Ebbers because I know where he went to church when he was a boy. I know the songs he sang in Sunday School.  We learned our catechism out of the same books. We are both hyphenated-Dutch and were reared in the Reformed faith.

 What Kenneth Lay and Bernie Ebbers share, in addition to the notoriety that has come from the demise of their businesses and their having been colored by accusations of deceit, is this alarming truth: they both taught Sunday school.

 The purgative power of tragedy, Aristotle said, was that we suffer, all of us, when basically good human beings fall on their faces, not because of what others do to them, but because of what they’ve done to themselves. We see ourselves in those people because tragic stories begin in good hearts. 

 A significant part of me hurts for Bernie Ebbers—not because I believe him to be falsely accused or convicted, not because I don’t regard his crimes as evil. I find myself in him, even though my sourest weaknesses don’t include greed.

The second half of verse 9 of Psalm 32 bites and bites hard.  God is speaking, as David hears him, and what he says is that too often his own people can be mulish.  Without a bridle, we go where we damn well please, even good, good people.  Too easily, maybe, we bray like that mule in Jeremiah, “sniffing the wind in her craving—in her heat who can restrain her?” As Spurgeon says, “We should not be treated like mules if there were not so much of the ass about us.”

Today, I hope—and I should pray—that Bernie Ebbers has been jerked back to a path he knows well, one that’s straight and narrow. 

But in its tragic dimension, what his story and his fate make clear is that I too—too often—require a steel bit through the teeth.

Wish it weren’t so.       

Prairie du Chien

The Winnebago are right down the road, the Omaha a stretch farther. The Santee across the river. The Dakota up river in South Dakota. But was it always that way?

 For the record, the very first white men to set foot on the place people know of today as Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (flip Iowa, and you'll run into it) are a couple of names familiar to people over there on the Mississippi, Louis Jolliet, a fur trader, and his side kick Father Jacques Marquette, a missionary who rather liked the sightseeing and exploring that came with his travel package.

Again, for the record, the year the two of them came down the Wisconsin River to its confluence with the Mississippi was 1673, which makes Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, a little river town that sits right there today, the second oldest white colony in the Badger state. “Well,” you ask, “who was number one among the Cheeseheads?” The Packers, of course, or at least Green Bay, just a couple of decades after the Puritans stepped off the Mayflower and on Plymouth Rock.

Okay, you say, but what has that to do with us? Well, anyone who wants to know anything about the region's most awful 19th century horror, the Spirit Lake Massacre, which took place in 1857, way over here, hundreds of miles west of Jolliet and Marquette. And now you're wondering what the heck Inkpaduta, a Santee Wahpakutee, a Dakota Sioux and his warriors were doing at Lake Okoboji, a century before the roller coaster. How'd that murderer get here to the neighborhood anyway? He and his warriors just arise from the ground like poison sumac.

The answer has to do with that little Wisconsin town, Prairie du Chien. In 1825, almost 200 years after Jolliet and Marquette, a slew of Native people pitched their tents for talk with the white men in blue coats. “Who?” you ask. Easy: Sioux, Chippewa, Menominee, Winnebago, Sac & Fox, and Ioway, in other words, oodles of teepees.

And why right there? Because, like Sioux City, Prairie du Chien sits close to the confluence of two wonderful hi-ways: the Wisconsin and Mississippi Rivers. 

And what was discussed? The future. Specifically, from a white man's point of view--how to stop the Injuns from killing each other? The answer won't surprise you: We'll keep them out of each other's hair. We'll give them each a homeland--not a reservation (that would come later), but give them each their own place to hunt buffalo and fish and trap beaver, or so the white men promised. 

So once upon a time in 1825, at a place that would someday be called Prairie du Chien, the whole upper Midwest--from eastern Wisconsin to western Iowa got segmented, not into states, but into regions where each tribe ran its own affairs.

Fair enough--right? Keep all those wild Indians racing horses, chasing buffalo, and out of each other’s hair. For the record, here's the segments drawn up by the gang at the signing of the 1825 Prairie du Chien Treaty: most of what is Minnesota goes to the Sioux (think Inkpaduta); most of Wisconsin to the Chippewa or (today) Ojibwe; most of Iowa to the Sac and Fox (think Black Hawk) and (wait for it) the Ioway.

The land where I'm sitting today, and the land where it's likely you are, was, at the time of the Spirit Lake Massacre, meant to be in possession of the Sac and Fox and Ioway, not the Sioux.

So then where were the Ioway when Inkpaduta and his band were way down south and west on the Little Sioux River?

 They were putting down roots in eastern Kansas or Oklahoma, on something people started to call “reservations,” where you'll still find some of them today.

My goodness, "reservations"? you ask. Who on earth came up with that idea? 

Need a little hint? Wasn't them. 

My first Ash Wednesday

Fifteen, maybe twenty years after I left the southwest corner of Wisconsin, I went back to look over the land, something I hadn't done while I lived and worked there. I'd been to Galena, IL, at night, only to scout some opposing basketball team; I had no idea that the old river city would become one of Illinois' finest tourist attractions.

I had no idea that the kids who sat in my classes could well have been great, great grandchildren of the original "badgers," thus named for their profession--the iron miners who dug out pits that still, here and there, litter the region. I sort of knew that those miners were a tough crew, a whole world apart from the Dutch Calvinists among and from whom I grew up. A number of those kids came from family-owned cheese factories that turned out the Swiss and brick I learned quickly to love, gifts for this young Turk teacher, still wet behind the ears, barely older than their kids. But I'd never taken the time to see where they'd come from. I was writing a novel. . .

Made me angry, being back there, driving past the high school, looking in the windows where I used to hold forth, disappointed with myself,  I hadn't really gone off-road during the two years I spent in Lafayette County, WI, whose claim to fame was having no stop lights. I hadn't gone up and down gentle hills authored by countless rivers in a hurry west to the Mississippi, Dubuque little more than a half hour away.

In those two years, even though I lived a half-hour from school, I'd never taken the time to see where my students came from. I mean, I knew that some kids were milkers and some cheesemakers, but I'd never seen the dairies where they'd spent their childhoods, storybook places in those rolling hardwood hills of America's Dairyland.

Truth be known, for me, at least, it was a hard sell to think of them as Christian believers. When your origins never wander all that far in a sturdy corral, defining characteristics are as bold as they are clear. It's not a surprise, I suppose, that on Ash Wednesday, when the Catholic kids came back from lunch with dirt rubbings on their foreheads, I had no idea what was going on and trouble not bringing the matter up. So many strangely dirtied.

"What's goin' on?" I must have asked someone or another, pointing up at my untouched forehead.

And it had to have been a treat to one or two of them to field that question, put the teacher in a desk and strong-arm the podium. "Can you imagine, Mr. Schaap has no idea it's Ash Wednesday." 

If I'd have unloaded on them, quoted from my catechism, done a Calvin thing, or simply rehearsed the reasons for the glorious Reformation, I'd have convinced them that I was nuts. I could have done that, but instead asked for their forbearance and that they not consider me as dingy as I must have seemed.

Some, as I remember, didn't wipe off the dust, so it stayed there all afternoon for me to see and judge--my Calvinism made me good at judging--and I remember thinking Bobby Westgaard?--the baddest kid in town has a dirty cross up there on his noggin? You got to be kidding. What kind of hocus-pocus religion would offer him the sacrament?'

In truth, I wasn't much older--four years--than they were, just as much a kid, maybe more. I was 22 years old, in love with my students, but innocent as Young Goodman Brown. 

Last night, that whole first Ash Wednesday and its scrapbook of memories came back as I watched my fellow congregants receive the imposition of ashes, as the action is traditionally called. 

I'm not bragging about this, but the imposition my students left on their foreheads fifty-some years ago, and my own naivete, my idiocy about it, left its own indelible mark, something I couldn't help but remember as people left the front of the church, the same dirty old cross on their foreheads. 

Fifteen, maybe twenty years ago, I went back to southwest Wisconsin in part because I wanted to see up close where they lived, where they came from. 

There was so much I had to learn. 

"Something there is. . ."

 

Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

Thus begins one of America's all-time favorite poems, "Mending Wall," by one of its all-time favorite poets, a New Englander named Robert Frost, who wanted to sell an image of himself as a country bumpkin, when he wasn't an "awe-shucks" sort of guy. He was cagey as a red squirrel, tricky and quick enough not only to take on something as formidable as a stone wall, but wily enough to start with a dorky pun.

"What, pray tell, "doesn't love a wall" but "sends the frozen-ground swell under it"?

Why "frost" of course, as in upper case "Frost." Not funny? Okay, but maybe the most beloved pun in American literature.

Neighbors get together annually to rebuild the stone fence that separates their yards, to replace the stones that have fallen throughout the last year. The teller of the tale, Frost, can't help but wonder whether the world wouldn't be a better place without fences, while his neighbor stoically repeats a maxim he likely inherited from his grandpa: "good fences make good neighbors." If we don't know where you start, and I end, we got trouble in River City --"good fences make good neighbors."

Stone fences are a rarity in our neighborhood. About 150 years ago, barbed wire became all the rage--no annual rock replacements had to be made after all, and once the barbed wire is up, that's it--aside from occasional repairs. A bundle of barbed wire isn't all that comely, but the lousy stuff did more than its share to win the west, even though it didn't show up until after the Civil War. 

Not until 1874 did an Ohioan named Joseph Glidden patent an invention which became the industry standard, twisted wire with locked in barbs. Barbed wire made it possible to section off the unending cattle range the Great Plains once were, a space so wide-open cowboys used to wonder whether the world had an end. Barbed wire kept cattle and the neighbors both in--and out. 

A barbed-wire fence gave the property dimensions and kept the sheep out of the tomatoes and raspberries. During World War I, barbed wire demarked those bloody trenches in France. Buchenwald, Auschwitz, Bergen-Belzen, Dachau--they were all drawn and quartered by barbed wire. 

Today, it's coming down. Confinements and feedlots have replaced pastures. Sioux County, where I live, is the #1 hog producing county in the U. S., but you could take an all-day ride around here and not spot a pig even though there are as many as two million.

Robert Frost was right about there being some ambiguity. This morning, as I sit here over the keyboard, the wind is howling. The sun is shining, so there's no blizzard a'comin'--not right away at least; but I just finished reading David Laskin's The Children's Blizzard, a painful recitation of the stories of the children caught in crisis in a monster blizzard, right here, throughout our very region in January of 1888. Hundreds of children were out in that blinding blizzard. Many never returned home.

But some of those that did, like their parents who went after them, stayed upright and kept chugging through impossible winds and snow because as they crossed their fields to find their kids, they kept hold of wire, of barbed wire, confident that if they held fast to the prickly stuff they'd often enough strung themselves, they'd eventually stumble their way to something that offered safety. Gives new meaning to "Good fences make good neighbors."

Dang Frost doesn't tell you what he thinks. He follows these two gents as they repair their stone walls, while arguing--not strenuously or angrily--about limits, about traditions, about the privacy of private property. 

Something there is that doesn't love barbed wire--it's ornery and prickly and twisted, but once upon a time, in a storm, it was a blessing.

 

Today--on my birthday

That's my father. He's holding me. I'm not a reliable judge of such things, but I was likely six months old or so, maybe less. I discovered this picture a week ago or so, while sorting through the flotsam and jetsam the flood left behind, the flood that sent us fleeing from our country place and into the senior housing fortress where we now live. 

I don't recognize the background, so I'm guessing it's somewhere close to where we lived in the spring of 1948. My two sisters were already creating havoc in the neighborhood when I came onto the scene, exactly--today--78 years ago. 

His tie is a little bold, don't you think? --almost Native looking. I don't think Dad ever walked into a room and overwhelmed the place, not that he would have wanted to. He was mild-mannered and thoughtful, by nature not judgmental, just about as good a father as I could have wished. At his funeral, a dozen people--maybe more--told me my dad was a saint. They weren't kidding. 

He's been gone for a decade or so, passed without great drama, in a quiet, saintly fashion. As a believer, he was top-notch without being showy--that tie isn't like him. I think it's fair to say that he honestly tried to be the best human being he could because he believed with all his heart that's what Christ wanted of him and all of us. 

We split loyalties when it came to politics. Where his ardent Republicanism came from, I'll never know. He was inescapably conservative but never mean, never Trumpian. I was in high school when I met a housewife from Madison, WI, whose husband, she told us, was in Selma, marching for racial justice with Martin Luther King. It was 1965. That revelation just floored me because she was so ordinary, probably in her fifties, no commie radical. For me, that iced it--MLK wasn't the leftist enemy Dad thought he was. There was more to the story.

Dad lived in a world where one's lot in life was determined by personal responsibility. Those who sweat through it, succeeded; those who didn't, did not.  I don't know that Dad ever had a sense of what "Jim Crow" meant, or the legacies of slavery. He probably knew more about Calvinist theology than he did about American history.

It's sometimes hard to admit that I have become him far more than I once might have guessed. Even when I thought his shadow wasn't around, it was--and still is. I'd love a trike right now--something I could ride through the trails all around our new place. On Saturday, I went out to a bike shop with such specialties, got myself an intro to biking for people with my infirmities. When we talked price, I balked--after all, what would my dad think of his son putting that kind of money into a fancy trike with an electric motor? He wouldn't have said no--he wasn't judgmental; but his hesitancy had its own language. He still has a hand in every major decision I make. 

A couple years after his death, I was suddenly struck with the perception that he might never have quite understood his son's fiction, novels and short stories. Neither of my parents were readers; neither had any penchant for imaginative literature. Dad might have found it difficult, if not impossible to realize that when his son created a father in a story or novel, that father wasn't necessarily modeled after his own. I know he disliked Home Free, my first novel, because he believed people who read it and knew him somehow mistakenly figured the opinionated, crusty old Dutch immigrant father was somehow him. Nothing could be further from the truth.

So, I've been working on a collection of my stories, published through the years, a collection with plenty of explanations and sources, a collection that speaks to them, explains where ideas come from and how those ideas become transformed into the "felt life" of fiction. 

About heavenly libraries I know absolutely nothing, and they--Mom and Dad--are both long gone. How can I write it for them?

Like I say, Dad may have departed this life some time ago, but that doesn't mean he's left the scene. Nor Mom. There's a lot of her and a lot of him I hear when their voices sound within me. 

This morning--the 17th of February 2026, is exactly 78 years since I left Sheboygan Memorial Hospital adorned with this.

Long ago, birthdays stopped being "fun," but my getting another year and salvaging that old picture up top reminds me that today, as always, I have much to be thankful for.

For Presidents' Day

 

[An old Small Wonders piece celebrating President U. S. Grant. You can listen to the five-minute podcast here or read it below.} 

You'll find it just over the Mississippi, next door to Dubuque. The rolling hills all around hide the place, so when you drop down into Galena, Illinois, it feels like a discovery. It’s a 19th century gem where 85 per cent of the buildings are restored and listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Galena, Illinois, the whole of it, is a museum.

Nine Civil War generals once called the place home--not bad for a stop on the river. Eight of them you'll have to Google, but the 18th President of these United States, 1869-1877, is a name you’ll recognize. His presidency is probably less memorable than his command of the Union Army during the Civil War. General Ulysses S. Grant fought Robert E. Lee and took sword at Appomattox, and promptly, boldly, and respectfully gave it back. As a warrior, he was a generous man.

As a commander he was indefatigable, as a strategist determined, relentless and disciplined. But when the smoke cleared, he championed charity and grace that was much harder for others to give than it seemed to be for him. He faced the horrors of war head on just as he faced peace once the war’s canons went silent. A lion and a lamb somehow co-existed in the soul of Ulysses S. Grant. Go figure.

Late in life, when he was suffering from throat cancer, President Grant became a writer when Mark Twain convinced him the world could be a better place if he’d sit down and record his memories. That was a dumb idea, but Twain wouldn't take no for an answer. When a few of Grant’s published essays brought rewards, Twain made offers he couldn't refuse. U. S. Pres number 18 put just about every bit of what strength he had left into the story of his considerable legacy. 

Not long before those memoirs were finished, the New York World published a story that claimed Grant's memoirs were entirely ghost written. While Grant's friends may be asserting that it's his work, the piece said, a nation should not be fooled by the "false idea. . .that he is a writer. He is not." 

In his massively detailed biography of U. S. Grant, American Ulysses, Ron Chernow refutes the charge by describing how hard Grant worked to finish that memoir, even though he was dying. 

Seems to me you need only to read a letter Grant wrote to the grandmother of James Birdseye McPherson, the second-highest ranking Union officer killed during the war. McPherson died at the Battle of Atlanta, and when General Grant, his boss and friend, heard the news, he fell hard into deep and reverent sadness. McPherson was beloved by his troops, a close friends. 

Our nation grieves for one so dear to our nation's cause. To know him was but to love him. It may be some consolation to you, his aged grandmother, to know that every officer and every soldier who served under your grandson felt the highest reverence for his patriotism, his zeal, his great, almost unequaled ability, his amiability and all the manly virtues that can adorn a commander. 

And then this: "Your bereavement is great,' he wrote, "but cannot exceed mine."

That's not just gorgeous style, that’s heart spilling hurt over the page.

Frederick Douglas, the most prominent African-American of his time, said this of our 18th President: "To him more than any other man the Negro owes his enfranchisement and the Indian a humane policy. . .He was accessible to all men. . .The black soldier was welcome in his tent, and the freedman in his house." 

If, like me, you thought President U. S. Grant was a hard-nosed general who never escaped the shadows of a bottle, a dim-witted President who didn't drain the swamp when he dang well should have, just drop by Galena, Illinois, sometime, a darling and remarkable old place; visit Grant’s home, spend an hour at the museum--little Galena has a thousand reasons to be proud of its most famous native son.

As do we.

---

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 

Do not be like the horse or the mule,

    which have no understanding

but must be controlled by bit and bridle

    or they will not come to you.

The University of Kansas Natural History Museum, Lawrence, Kansas, is, at least temporarily, the final hitching post for Comanche, a horse who, for decades, may have been America’s most revered and certainly was most recognized steed, despite being dead. 

What fresh troops discovered once the dust settled at the scene of the famous 1876 Battle of the Little Big Horn was 200 of Custer’s men dead, and one horse, Comanche, still alive, a fourteen-year-old buckskin gelding injured and therefore not hustled off after the battle as so many others were by the conquering tribes.

 I’m not sure anyone ever thought of disposing of the injured animal—perhaps not.  Whether or not he could ever run again, Comanche was simply too stark a symbol.  So he was taken to Fort Riley, where he died, and was lovingly stuffed by the best taxidermist in Kansas, an employee of the museum where Comanche still (after a fashion) stands.

Thousands filed past him (his upright remains anyway) at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago.  Rumor had it that Comanche was General George Armstrong Custer’s own mount (not true).  Custer’s favorite horse, Vic, either died on the hill where Custer himself did, or else was snatched up by the conquering foe.  Among Native Americans, legend has it that a Santee Sioux named Grey Earth Track ended up with Vic, a thoroughbred, after the battle. 

Should you care to visit Comanche, you’ll find him enclosed in glass and wearing his cavalry blanket and saddle.  In the century+ which has passed since the Columbian Exposition, visitors have dwindled to a trickle, I suppose.  So it goes with legends.  The case once had a brass plaque proclaiming “Sole survivor of the Battle of Little Big Horn.”  In the Sixties it was, quite thoughtfully, removed at the request of Native Americans. 

That Comanche is still standing is understandable, given his legendary status—the last mount from an epic battle, the only thing left breathing at Little Big Horn.  He remains, I’d say, a symbol of the rough-hewn history of the American West, and he is what he was—a horse.  For more than a century, no animal was as significant to life on the Great Plains as the horse—to the Sioux, to the cavalry, to the settlers. 

King David had no idea that the horse would be as important to American culture as it was, historically.  Warring tribes he knew, but he had no notion of Sitting Bull or South Dakota.  Maybe we shouldn’t indict him for so unequally yoking the horse and mule in verse nine.  To old-timers who remember farming pre-John Deere, horses still hold special favor, after all.

I’m missing the point, of course.  Verse nine isn’t about horses; it’s about us, and animals, and what separates us—human understanding.  We’ve got it, and they don’t, despite our nostalgia, our tributes, and two or three centuries of Great Plains history. 

What makes us human—among other things—is understanding, the ability to think through our own actions.  What’s at stake is wisdom, not horse sense.  We’ve got to use it, but what the verse suggests is that too often we don’t. 

Custer didn’t.  But he’s not the only one.  All too often, neither do we.

That’s the point, I guess.

February Cold

In all the years I've spent traipsing around the neighborhood, I've occasionally got out of bed with the expressed purpose of trying to get pictures that will recreate sheer cold. They're useless, of course. Who would want to use a winter picture that makes people shiver? Put something like this up in your family room and guests will reach up to button their sweaters.

How about this one?--the sun coming up over the Big Sioux. Somewhere out there, not quite visible, sits Hawarden, shivering. There's something in the lay of the fog maybe that makes the point. It's very cold outside, and I've got my hunting gloves on, the ones with individual fingers.

By my estimation, this is the best short from the morning of February 15, 2010, although I don't think it sends chills--could have been taken almost any time of year.

It's always nice to have company, especially on forgettable, cold February mornings; but getting this crows well requires a wildlife photographer who's a quicker draw than I am. 

I don't believe that I was, this morning, thinking about trapping February cold in my camera. But it's hard to warm up to the record I came home with.

I don't need to say, it's here. You can like a picture like this one, but who on earth would like to have it up for months at a time. 

 

Today, 16 years later, the temperature will push all the way up into the low 50s. This kind of cold looks almost beautiful from a distance. 

From a distance. 

Nurse Eliza Müller, Hero

By today's standards, she wasn't a nurse. She lacked the formal training young men and women take these days before they get to the hospital floor. We have to be able to trust them because we are what they do. Even though Eliza Muller--be sure to get that umlaut above the u--never underwent the requisite training a nursing degree requires today, have no doubt about the testimonies her patients gave once the war was over: Eliza Müller--with an umlaut--was a nurse. "You betcha'" as they say in Minnesota. She was a nurse for the ages--and a hero in a fleeting, bloody moment of time at which  there were very, very few.

Truth be told, we know very little about her childhood, her family, even where she was born and reared. We can trust that her parents' circle of friends were well-established in the 1830s, when she was born. Her community--far out east--was German-American; but unlike those who were moving into central Minnesota in the mid-19th century, her family, like that of her husband, Dr. Alfred Müller who was, officially, the appointed surgeon at Minnesota's Ft. Ridgely. 

If you've never heard of Ft. Ridgely, you're not alone. It's greatly overshadowed by its much bigger and more ballyhooed big brother, Fort Snelling, which stands amid Minnesota's Twin Cities right there on the Mississippi River. What remains is not much more than a skeleton at Ft. Ridgely, which is not a reason not to visit.

So Dr. Müller and his capable wife, our hero, fell into treachery in the summer of 1862, when hundreds of marauding Dakota warriors determined their lives would be worth living if and when they killed everyone in the neighborhood--man, woman, and child. So they tried.

And they did bloody well. Most authoritative sources forward a death toll of 350 or so dead settlers, even though historically the toll has ranged to as many as twice that number, all in a matter of less than a month. 

You're saying  you never heard of such a thing, and it wasn't that far away? You're not alone. This nation is 250 years old this year. They'll be no end of fireworks, but don't expect to hear much at all about the 1862 Dakota War. It ain't pretty and it really doesn't have heroes. 

Save Eliza Müller--with an umlaut. Tell you what, let's just call her Nurse Eliza Müller because she tended the wounded graciously, assisted her husband's surgeries, and with him did the triage so necessary when little skeletal Ft. Ridgely suffered not just one but two separate assaults from the angry Dakota warriors that vastly outnumbered those trying to stay alive behind the fort's stone walls.

This Ft. Ridgely wasn't constructed to hold off a military siege--there were no walls, no palisades, no watchtowers for sharpshooting guards. It was--still is--wide open. Everything's exposed. When bullets and arrows flew, there was no shelter, so when people say that Eliza Müller showed divine grace under fire, they weren't making things up. 

Only an idiot would say that the 1862 Dakota War had no heroes. There were dozens, I'm sure. But the darkness that swept over the Minnesota River Valley for several months in 1862 leaves just about all the selflessness deep in shadow. 

And that, or so it seems to me, is reason enough to remember Eliza Müller, with an umlaut. When you finish at the Fort, go east for a block or so to the oldest section of the cemetery. Won't be long and you'll find a memorial, from the state, to Nurse Müller's memory. Take off your hat. Maybe leave a flower. 

She's a nurse. She's a hero.

**“In memory of

Mrs. Eliza Müller,

wife of Assistant Surgeon A. Müller, U.S.A.

Her valor and her devotion to the care of the sick and wounded soldiers and refugees during and after the Sioux Indian outbreak of 1862

will forever be cherished

in the hearts of a grateful people.”**

  

Remembrance

I'd seen her over there on the opposite side of the gym, a cheerleader, pretty as a picture, tall, even statuesque, leading her side of the gym against ours, mine. I think there may have been something of a giant-killer in me--I'd like to date her because she led cheers for our rotten rivals. Besides, she had great legs.

The kid that put me up to asking her out was a lineman from our football team, who'd already gone over to the dark side to date another young lady from the Cedar Grove Rockets, a young lady who'd conspired with him to get me to call her cousin, Gail, who would be--or so I was assured--most certainly assent to the big question, if I'd have the guts to ask.

One night, I called from a phone booth downtown with the lineman, my teammate, riding me like some wallflower. "Do it now, Schaap--call her. She thinks you're going to--call her! Call her now!"

It was one of those situational things--her people had been talking to my people to get the arrangements down, as if the whole thing was fearful political diplomacy. I was assured--and I believed it--that should I actually call her, she would most certainly say yes. 

Which didn't mean there wasn't any drama. As I remember, we stood outside that phone booth forever, him pushing me. I was scared to death. To me, she seemed a class act, no floozy, and I'd never, ever talked to her. Her dad owned a downtown grocery store. This was serious dating. I was a junior in high school.

Bob the offensive guard wouldn't let me out of the phone booth. It was a riot really, but that didn't mean that I wasn't shaking when I finally dialed in the number he gave me, even though the outcome was never in doubt.

She said yes, and the two of us were a thing for the rest of our high school years, despite our dueling allegiances-: twice-a-week dates, Friday night after the ball games, Sunday night after church. Tight as a class ring.

She determined it was in our own best interests not to go to the same college, so we didn't. I don't remember fighting about her declaration, but I bought in, so we went to school 500 miles from each other. 

I wonder, sometimes, how long she held on to the letters we wrote to each other because they went out almost daily from my dorm room. Today, I'd love to see what I wrote, not because I want to track the health of what was by then a true long-distance relationship. I'd love to read them because my first year at college was a garden of significant moments in my life. 

Our relationship, by that time almost three years old, didn't weather the distance. Mostly, the breakup was her fault. She conceded that she had started to chase some guy from her school once springtime warmed things. I'd stayed relatively true. When summer came, it was awkward and often distressing, but we stayed out of each other's hair.

The lights hadn't totally gone out, however, and in a manner I don't remember exactly we started to stumble into each other's arms again later in that summer, enough so that when our junior years began, we were tacitly a thing again.

The whole relationship had become, almost without our noticing it, far more serious, even if less dramatic--engagement, marriage. Nothing solid, but fairly serious discussion.

Then, one night, I was the one unfaithful. I told her what I'd done. Some friends said I was crazy for being truthful, but I was, maybe because I wasn't altogether sure of going where we'd begun to aim ourselves--I don't know.

That was it. The relationship ended on a river bank with a discussion that darkened fast. I brought her back to her apartment that night, and I never, ever saw her again. We'd spent the better part of four years together, four years that ended with my confession. I shed no tears, but neither did I understand myself or my behavior. I called someone, I remember, and asked about seeing someone at Pine Rest. Never did.

Yesterday, Super Bowl Sunday, an old friend called to tell me his sister, who has become a good friend of the cheerleader's sister, that the girl I used to love looking at across the gym was gone. She died last week, had Alzheimer's, I knew by way of the same pipeline. 

The image of my old girlfriend lying somewhere--I didn't know where--in some institutional bed, eyes open but speechless, her family visiting even when they knew nothing was registering in their mom or grandma--that image was almost paralyzing. I even wrote a story about it, just to be able to put it away.

Last week, she died. I don't know where. I have no idea how many people were mourning her death. Did she have children? I don't know. 

So much of her life is so far out of my reach that it just seems wrong not to remember. I had good friends in high school, but once upon a time none of them knew me better than she did. I'm sorry she died. I'm sad for those who grieve.

My wife and I have been married for 54 years. I never once dreamed about the woman who died last week--not once; but is it wrong for me to tell this story or to feel that something of me died with her? 

I wish her children--if she had some--and her husband--should he be yet alive--to be blessed with grace and peace as they walk through the scrapbooks they will share together, blessedly, throughout this week. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

 “I will counsel you and watch over you”

Procreation may well be humanity’s major interest in any relationship between the sexes, the perpetuation of the species; but marriage has other great benefits, to say the least.  One of them is lessons in how we see.  

I’m not interested in some gender war, but I’ve found—through fifty-some years of marriage—that my wife and I perceive things in different ways.  Let me say it more bluntly:  often as not, my wife and I see different things in different ways.

Years ago, she told me she didn’t trust one of my acquaintances.  I had no idea what she was talking about.  “His eyes,” she said, as if the answer were thus apparent.  

No clue.  “What about his eyes?” I asked her.  

“Just look at them,” she said.

Didn’t help.  I still didn’t get it.  The guy remained a friend, but not quite as close, not because I’d saw clearly what she had but because of what she had, and I trusted her.  

It struck me then—as it has since—that men and women perceive things in different ways. I’m no anthropologist, but here’s the way I came to understand the differences.  A woman’s perceptions have been sharpened by the necessity of centuries of defensive maneuvering they have to do, living, as they do, among predatory males.  

I know, I sound like an evolutionist. But consider this. My wife and I are not, nor were we ever, in the same weight class. I’m not a violent man (ask her), but for all of our lives together my wife has had to eat, drink, and sleep with someone so wide of girth that he could, should some madness attack, break a significant number of bones in her body.  

That’s never been true of me. I’ve never lived with someone who could so easily hurt me, but what I’m saying is that most women do.  That her perceptual strengths differ from mine—and that she’s inherited perceptions in her DNA that aren’t my own—seems to me quite obvious.  All I’m saying is this: we don’t always see the same things, and part of the reason for that is that “male and female created he them.”

The God of the Bible is beyond gender.  Our assessment of the Trinity includes the designation “Father,” of course, and the Bible speaks of him as a male most often.  As the creator and sustainer of the universe, he—make that God—has never really had to think defensively.  Maybe his perceptions are closer to mine, not my wife’s. I’ll never know that, of course, and I’m not about to lose any sleep because I don’t.

The NIV translates the second half of verse 8 of Psalm 32 this way: “I will counsel you and watch over you.”  That’s just fine with me.  But I prefer the King James’s “I will guide thee with mine eye,” a divine eye hovering somewhere around, all. the. time.  

Reminds me of that eye in Poe’s famous short story, “The Tell-tale Heart,” the eye that wouldn’t let the murderer alone. It also brings to mind the invisible eyeball in Emerson’s “Nature,” that odd image Waldo creates to document his vision as he was crossing what he calls “a bare common.”  

“I will guide thee with mine eye.”  There’s something memorable about that image.

“Male and female created he them.”  God’s perceptions, I’m sure, include both of ours—mine and hers.  And if that’s true—and I’m sure it is—then I have no reason to fear, no reason not to sleep in his care and love.  

Poe in the Loess Hills

Here's a stumper: what has Monona County, Iowa, to do with Edgar Allen Poe, the nightmare poet lurking in dusty old lit books? 

"Poe--Onawa?" you ask. "Why, nothing," you say.

Go to the head of the class.

Poe the brooder never came any closer than West Point, NY, but his ideas--one shady one at least--made it all the way out here, even if he never darkened a Siouxland doorway. 

Answer me this: what has Winona to do with Monona, just a quick trip south? 

"Ah," you say, "Both have Indian names--indigenous females, in fact."

Well done. We're on a roll.

Now, what has the character "Minnehaha," in Longfellow's "The Song of Hiawatha," have to do with Winona and Monona?

"All three are sweet Indian maidens," you say?

Yes, and, well, they all die. 

Because no one knows ye' ancient legend that gave rise to a story about this 'Monona,' most history nerds guess--yes, guess--that the story behind Monona county's name was told around the campfires of pioneer white folks, not the Omaha. White folks made up the story, including Monona's death when, heartsick, she tosses herself from the towering banks of the Missouri. White folks made up the whole thing.

Twenty years ago Pipestone, Minnesota, stopped putting on "The Song of Hiawatha," a love story that ends when death strikes the sweet Minnehaha, another beautiful young Indian maiden. Ms. Minnehaha takes no leaps, however. Fever and hunger does her beleaguered heart in. 

Pipestone had been staging the Hiawatha pageant for sixty summers, when, in 2008, they hung up the headdress. Why? A bunch of reasons, but one of them was that the Hiawatha saga--so popular a century before--seemed corny and condescending when acted out by white-faces. In 1855 "The Song of Hiawatha" was not only a best seller, but a cultural sensation. Everyone knew the story, everyone. Wasn't that way 150 years later.

Three legends of the American West, three places and three names--all ending with death, sweet and beautiful women dying.

What has this to do with Mr. E. A. Poe? Poe preached this horrifying idea that if a poem wanted to be beautiful, then it had to have death, because death makes a poem or story beautiful, especially the death of a  young woman. Hence, his own poems, like that prophetic raven repeating "Nevermore" on and on and on.

In a neighborhood that would be called "Monona County," white folks were still arriving decades after The Trail of Tears, but those rough-and-tumble pioneers somehow preferred sad stories of lost love, of heartache and grief amid the huge stretch of their wilderness home. There was plenty of horrors in Minnesota and the Dakotas back then, but for their stories, it seems they preferred Hiawatha to Red Cloud's War, fantasy to real life. 

We still may.   

Quoth the Raven, "Evermore."

from the Native world

All things are the work of the Great Spirit. 

We should know that he is in all things: 

the trees, the grasses, the rivers, the mountains, 

and all the four-legged animals, and even the winged people. 

And we should also know 

that He is above all things and all peoples. 

Black Elk, Ogallala Sioux

~   *   ~   *   ~

Black Elk, who witnessed some of the most significant moments of 19th century history--Wounded Knee and Little Big Horn--was a Lakota visionary and holy man known for his explanation of Lakota religion in John Neihardt's telling in Black Elk Speaks, perhaps the most widely known text on Native religion. 

Seriously, in Sioux Center

 

And all of what's here is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Lou Van Dyk, a former teacher and colleague who was just about the lone Democrat in Sioux Center, Iowa, forty years, or so, ago. He used to say that Dems met for their caucuses in a phone booth. Lots of people don't even know what a phone booth is anymore. Be advised, it's tiny.

Yesterday on our way to the Sioux Center Library for a meeting of the Dems, I asked Barb to take a shot at how many protestors would be there for a march--RIGHT HERE IN SIOUX CENTER. She chose not to answer. I told her, honestly, I thought the march against Trump and Ice and Evil itself might be 25-people big. 

Imagine our shock when we drove up and saw a crowd my son-in-law (and others) estimated at 375-400. That's not a figment of my imagination. And while it may not have been last week in Minnesota, it was bone-chilling cold out there. It warn't no picnic, is what I'm saying. But there were literally hundreds-strong.

What followed was the biggest, wildest Dem caucus I can remember.

So there, Lou. Thanks. 

And just in case some can't identify the subjects in the photo above, they're seniors and have been seniors for a long, long time, even residents these days of senior housing. 

Yup, we were there. What a joy.

My home church

Fred and Audrey weren't there. As long as I remember, they lived first door west of us and walked to church like we did, coming in through the north door rather than the main entrance to the south. Fred wore a cigar or a cigar butt between his lips, learned to talk with the dumb thing stuck in the corner. Like so many men in our church, he was a builder of some sort. When I-43 came in, linking Milwaukee and Green Bay with four-lanes, that highway changed the village, making us a bedroom community of descendants of the Dutch immigrant people who'd come more than  a century before, the people who started the church, way back when.

This time, we came in through the south entrance--now substantially larger with a kind of coffee room for chatting after worship. We sat 3/4 of the way back, enough for me to see almost immediately how many souls were no longer there. 

Art and Nell weren't there either. They lived just across the alley, where a couple of apple trees graced a back yard that included the biggest garden on the block. Their son and I got caught smoking upstairs in their garage which became thereafter the greatest crisis of my childhood. Art is at the heart of my first novel, or at least a man much like him. But, like I was saying, he and Nel weren't there either. 

The Smieses weren't there either, nor were the Bloks or Uncle Allie and Aunt Dorothy, nor Trudy, their daughter, although she's still a member, I'm told. Turkey Den Hollander wasn't there, nor was Glen, his son, my age, and Glenn's wife Sally, who was always someone my mom proudly referred to as a relative--just exactly how, I don't know.

There were a couple of Gabrielses and Hendrickses and Veldbooms I recognized, some of whom recognized me as a former son of the congregation. Everyone wasn't new. If I'd dream a head of hair on some of those shiny pates, I could make out one or two faces from my childhood, but let me just tell it straight here: a whole lot of people in the Oostburg CRC weren't there. The souls who were--many of them at least--were not people I knew or remembered.

Maybe ten rows of chairs stood up in front of what pews are left in the sanctuary. I suppose those chairs marked some kind of compromise in worship design. The old blonde benches--padded way back when--still marched from the chairs to the back. When I was a kid, someone carved their initials on the arms at the far end. My dad was livid. I had my suspicions about who vandalized them--those benches were new when I was in grade school--but I don't remember if the powers-that-be ever determined the criminal culprit.

So yesterday, by choice, my wife and daughter and I, home on the lakeshore for a family gathering, worshipped in the church of my childhood, which is what it was, and is, and always will be, I guess, even though by all the empty spaces where people I knew and loved should have been, it was perfectly clear that it wasn't home anymore; even though I'll never forget playing in its empty walls, running upstairs to look out over the unfinished sanctuary from two little closets way up high; even though my Grandpa Dirkse was the chair of the building committee when the place was being sculpted; even though the great, looming cross at the front of the sanctuary was donated by Grandma Dirkse, donated after grandpa's heart attack. It was no longer still my home church, even though I still am suspicious about the kid (he's just about 80 today) who carved his initial in a whole row of brand new pews, even though I remember Glenn Den Hollander or Bob De Smith (Bob senior) cracking open those fancy windows on the west side to let the air circulate through a bit (it could get mighty hot back then on the lakeshore. It would take some wrangling before air conditioning.)

It's no longer my home church, but it's still a church, still home to many others, most of whom I didn't know. 

Some years ago, my home church asked me to speak at their birthday celebration--150 years. I did, a little fearfully for I was never a preacher, always a story-teller. I wrote a rambling narrative about the marriage between my own history and the church's story and hoped it would be okay.

I think it was. I felt good about it that night at their birthday celebration. The audience was likely made up of the same people that were, yesterday, to me at least, strangers, but what I'd told them seemed to me to please them.

Maybe I should have gone to church elsewhere yesterday--we could have. Maybe I should have considered that birthday party my last tango in the church where I grew up. 

Maybe. 

We sat in front of a guy a decade younger than I am, a Gabrielse, who appreciatively shook my hand when worship ceased. "How old were you when you baled hay for my dad?" he asked me. 

Baling hay for his dad was a joy. His dad was a wonderful boss, I remembered. So did he.

Then again, maybe it was a good choice. The absences hurt, but our Sunday morning in the church where I grew up wasn't without its moments, like baling hay for John Gabrielse. "I was just a kid," his son, also retired, told me, "but I remember."

You can't believe everything a writer says, of course, but I think it was Thomas Wolff who titled one of his novels with a phrase that's had a much longer after life than the novel itself--"you can't go home again."

Let me just say, after yesterday, "Yes, you can." It may be a little painful, but yes, you can.