Willa's wolves

It's not hard to see how a kid like Willa Cather, 150 years ago, could have seen this painting--Sleigh with Trailing Wolves by Paul Powes--and have it and its story stick with her all the way into adulthood, especially if you know the story.  The story shows up in My Antonia, somewhat uncomfortably since the story it tells is Russian in origin and has little to do, most believe, with the story of a childhood friend of Cather's out there in the tough sod of southwest Nebraska.

Visit her hometown sometime--Red Cloud, Nebraska--and you'll find that painting in all its gory darkness hanging in the Cather museum. It's scary. It features a pack of hungry wolves soon to devour just about all of a wedding party, a legend worth retelling, maybe, on snowy nights before a roaring fire.

Two slashes rip through the old painting from sheer old age. The canvas grew so taut it pulled itself apart. But those rips don't blunt the horror of the story and the danger in the scene, even if you find it difficult, like I did, to imagine a pack of man-eating wolves devouring bride and groom and a few others.

I have no idea of the size of the Russian wolfpack, whether or not, as they did here,  the sheer number of animals nearly fell off a cliff decades ago. They did here--wolves, like bison, went nearly extinct until aggressive wildlife management pulled off the kind of magic that replenished the bald eagle. 

While I haven't forgotten the Powes painting nor Willa Cather's storytelling, that painting never kept me up at night like it must have her because I've never been any where near a pack of wolves, never heard their snarls. My Wisconsin boyhood barely mentioned them. What few there was of them were in residence a civilization away, "up north." It's likely, however, they weren't strangers around Red Cloud. Willa knew.

A little history here. The horse was introduced to America's First Nations in the 17th century, and like the Apple computer and indoor plumbing, a horse changed everything, made Indians better hunters, and increased their standard of living making trade easier and making things like pans and guns and liquor lots cheaper. 

Horses made hunting easier, a slam dunk in fact. Europe's rich and famous signed up for wagon trains or railroad trips into buffalo country. Think of it--old country gentlemen blasting away at bison while sitting in fancy English saddles or in plush passenger car luxury, never even getting their hands dirty.

Those millions of buffalo changed the way of life among wolves like those lusty killers in the Red Cloud painting. For years, white big-game hunters and Native entrepreneurs went hunting, if you call that hunting: shooting bison by the dozens then leaving meaty carcasses in the sun all over the Great Plains. Wolves went plum loco over the mountains of spoils left there to rot. Imagine, all of a sudden, filthy rich wolfpacks, fat and silly.

"Yep, Junior, those were the days," some wolf historians might tell the youngins', "--gold necklaces and dream cars, vacation homes on the Missouri, and universal health care. We had it made."

But when the buffalo went the way of the do-do bird, the good life for the American wolf went south so fast that whole packs suddenly went hungry enough to try to knock off wedding parties as if it were snowy northern Russia. 

It didn't happen, not out there in western Nebraska at least, but it could have  because out there on the Republican River, sometime earlier lived the biggest bison herds in the west. Who knows how scary those fat and ugly wolves might have grown?--and all of it, right about the time Willa Cather was a girl on the plains. 

All of that makes the story even scarier. 

Rooted music

What she told me--and what I have never forgotten--was how what she was taught affected what she was. Her parents were pure Zuni, in thought and culture and religious practice. Therefore, her going to a "Christian" school meant she had to forcibly unlearn what her Christian teachers taught her.

And that was difficult; it was traumatic, not because she had to shift priorities and allegiances (that too!), but because she simply loved her parents, who were widely acknowledged as leaders in the pueblo because they were just plain good people. They worshiped in traditional ways, danced the traditional dances, ran the races of her people; her parents were neither impure nor immoral. They were good, good people, and every one said so, said exactly that. She was blessed to have such good parents. But the Christian school in her life made it clear--chapter and verse--that her parents, despite their goodness, were flat wrong. 

And that criticism had an even greater eternal dimension because, or so she was taught, some day her parents would be forever cast out from the glory which is to come to those who believe in the white man's God. There's a Hell after all. Stakes were high. Stakes were forever.

She was Zuni and she was Christian when I spoke to her, but that doesn't mean that she'd forgotten what her education, a half century before, had taught her. That's why she told me the story. She wanted me to understand.

Last night I listened to a fine high school, 70+ piece symphonic band from Rehoboth Christian High, Gallup, NM, the school where she'd attended 70 years earlier. I've got a history there too. I wrote a book for them, stories about families who'd been part of that school's mission for more than a generation, stories like hers. 

But even before that, my Grandpa Schaap was a member of the denomination's "Heathen Mission Board" a century ago; in fact, a great uncle of mine, Grandpa Schaap's first cousin, was one of the place's earliest missionaries, Rev. Andrew Vander Wagon. 

The unintended shaming explained to me one night in her front room was something my people--my family, in fact--spread abroad in New Mexico to Navajo and Zuni alike. Last night, that fine group of young musicians shaped a presentation that included an open confession of sin, when an administrator from RHS made clear that the mission, close to 150 years old, had at times failed the people it had come to serve--and failed miserably.

But what the kids spread abroad in the concert was beauty, and what was spectacularly clear, at least to this concert-goer, was that the denomination of which I've always been a part could not be more proud of any blessed accomplishment it has done in its own 150-year old ministry than what has blossomed so dearly in the high desert of New Mexico, where Rehoboth, today, is a blessing to the people, both colonizers and Native, who live there. It took a long time to understand that the most effective ministry may be little more than a ministry of presence.

It was all in the music, the whole story, and it was beautiful. 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

“I lift up my eyes to the hills--

where does my help come from?” Psalm 121:1

Car-makers know something about the American public that no one else does: to wit, that we all secretly long to stretch our legs in the wide-open country of the Great Plains. Why?—I don’t know, but automobile ads very frequently seem to feature “the country”—more specifically, the rural Midwest and Great Plains.

Makes sense, I suppose. According to the U. S. Census, the states with the longest average daily commutes are New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Illinois, and California. Backed-up freeways don’t sell cars. Where is commute time least? You guessed it: South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Nebraska.

What sells cars is the mythic backroads adventure—SUVs, four-wheeling, mud-defying pickups, even though very few of us ever do any off-roading. What sells cars is the perception of escaping bottlenecks, fast food, strip malls, and wearying eight-lane metro traffic. What sells cars is the siren song of getting away.

In that sense, the psalmist is just like everybody else: he lifts up his eyes to the hills. He wants to get away. A place on the lake, maybe a river—that’ll do it. Doesn’t need to be big either, just a cabin, and I’m outta’ here.

It may well be a version of the old “grass is always greener” argument, this verse. From the day-to-day grind of our lives—same faces, same cluttered desks, same blasted lunch counters and restrooms—we simply want release.

We fantasize. I remember dreaming of living near mountains. Then, we did. But grading papers is grading papers, and we never got up there, even though those mountains were close. The only times I took note of them was on my bike, riding to work, when they seemed as much a dream as they ever had been.

Fifty years later it’s still in me, this yearning to look to the hills. Spinal stenosis has kept me from a weekly pilgrimage that had been the joy of my life for the last several years, Saturday morning country wandering. I could be in one of those ads.

God doesn’t dwell in some hand-hewn log cabin in the hills. He doesn’t even weekend there. He got a place at the lake all right but no Airstream or fifth wheel. Yosemite is as gorgeous a place as you can find on earth. Jasper, the Big Horns, Yellowstone, the Canadian Rockies—even the words get me itchy. He’s there too, but he’s not just there.

The psalmist must have felt it too because the first line of this beautiful psalm of praise and joy is a confession, I think—I lift up my eyes to the hills, as if he’s there somewhere, as if God is in residence at Custer State Park. When we get tired or bored or stymied, we all want to go somewhere we’re not.

But the hills won’t do it, and I’ve got to remind myself those little Saturday trips don’t bring me home.

My help doesn’t come from the hills. My help comes from the Lord.

Barbed wire

 

Used to be iconic--maybe it still is. Used to be that wherever you look there you'd see it--barbed wire. It got brought to the Plains states in the mid-to-late 19th century, and caused at least one war (Johnson County War) when the cattleman, accustomed to unfettered drives, suddenly ran into the new resident homesteaders. Whoops. Trouble.

In most cases, the homesteaders won the day, much, I suppose, as they had won the day against the Lakota from the Missouri River--and before that from the Big Sioux--west. Good fences make good neighbors wasn't a song sung only by Robert Frost. Thusly, up went fences. And barbed wire, most all of it, today, in lousy shape.

Our fourth

 

I'm going, Saturday, and I'm not even leaving town. This will be our fourth actually, two in Sioux City, but also a real stunner right here in Sioux Center, Iowa, amidst a populace that ranks among the most Republican in the state and the country. If there are more marchers on Main on Saturday, the place to look would be the cemetery; there'll be a tsunami. 

And I'll tell you why we're going--because this morning's six o'clock rant on Truth Social takes on NATO once again, his least favorite organization--now, today, because they're not getting on the Don's bandwagon to help him with his troubles in the Straight of Homuz. Surprise, surprise. He's done nothing but bad mouth NATO since he came down the golden elevator. Besides, what we're up to is not a war, right?--it's an "excursion." It was his decision alone to start up the horror. Didn't ask the people or the people's reps in Congress. Didn't gather our long-time friends, just decided himself--along with his trusted cronies--that we'd take an excursion into Iran, annihilate whoever got in the way, pummel the heck out of their world, then leave with dozens of oil tankers in our/his back pocket--oh yeah, and on the way out leave behind a half dozen Trumpian beach resorts for the rich and famous. 

He wants to be king. 

And then there's this. Yesterday in Minnesota, the state pressed a lawsuit to force ICE to release materials pertinent to the deaths of two people who got in the way of the ICE. Why? Because Don's government has refused to do that--and refused to do the necessary investigation themselves. Why? Ask Don.

He wants to be king. Period.

And then there's publicly and brutally penning another zinger when Robert Mueller died, the man who ran the government appointed special prosecutor's office looking into Russia's involvement into the 2016 election. That the Don didn't like him is understandable, but for a man who prates about religion to say what he did ("I'm glad he's dead"), for the leader of the free world to be what he is, never stops being chilling. 

Here's David Brooks: "The selfish tyrant attaches himself to only those others who share his selfishness, who are eager to wear the mask of perpetual lying."

All of this is predicated on the lie about the 2020 election, which the Don --and his disciples--will never admit: that he lost. Sixty-some court rulings said clearly that he did.

He wants to be king. Let me count the ways.

No, I'll quit. 

It'll be our fourth--and our second in Sioux Center. 

See you at the cemetery. 

Reservations Lessons ii

(Continued from yesterday--an old essay originally written for and published in the Seattle Pacific University magazine.)         

Then I asked his wife if she too was changed that morning, the morning her husband came home and cried and claimed to be. Her eyes rose just for a moment, she looked at me, and simply she shook her head. The detailed story he'd just recited led me to believe that what had happened that night was a Damascus Road thing—once and forever. It wasn’t. I simply didn't realize there would be more stories, but there were.

I liked the man; he’d led the worship upstairs not long before. His eyes were fervent and honest, full of repentance. But those eyes must have been seemed just as trustworthy before, when, certainly, he was neither fervent nor honest—nor trustworthy.

Some of those who fall--most of them, I imagine, if they know the truth--know very well what they're doing. They understand that what they do will affect those who love them. This man had been reared in the home of a wonderful mother, a faithful believer, the real subject of the interview, the woman whose story I was assigned to write—and another of the women who sat beside him that night.

She was the matriarch. Navajo people tell me their families are deeply matriarchal. If that’s so, she was every bit the queen. With eleven children of her own and dozens of grandchildren, she told me that today, nearly seventy, she spends lots of her day in prayer, prayer she’d learned from parents who’d come to know the Lord by way of a mission with its own deeply flawed past.

Abiding faith lends a visible glow to what otherwise might be plain old stoicism, a glow of hope rooted in destiny. It seems to me that men and women of real faith convey a gravitas that strengthens all of us. In that way too, she was a queen. I was privileged to sit beside her.

That night, the stories had been real, heartfelt, no pretension. The hard fought lessons of faith had been a blessing.

Still, it was dark when I left the church and its people behind. It was dark, and I felt my own foreignness, and maybe just a bit of the hurtful legacy of what my people have done to those with whom I’d just been sitting.

Just a few miles down the road, up on the ridge to the west, flashing lights streamed through the darkness, signaling something painful still a mile away. When I came closer, smoke wafted across the four-lane highway. Something was burning.

Reservation homesteads have a certain consistent appearance. The Navajos carve out homesteads somewhat distanced from each other, even though they live in extended family clusters. Often there are trailers or pre-fab homes, sometimes a kind of contemporary hogan and even

So great is our need of a Savior. All we, like the sheep of the reservation, have gone astray.

It's a painful lesson in smoke and darkness and emergency lights, a lesson once again--once again--once again, especially for those of us who are repeat offenders. It’s nothing more than a basic lesson in sin and forgiveness.

Somehow all of that, or so it seems to me now, is a story in the tight weave of a tattered Navajo blanket, my grandfather’s, that hangs here on my wall, miles from the reservation.

Reservation Lessons - i

It wasn’t terribly late, but it was dark over the reservation that night, scattered lights here and there where Navajo homesteads glitter against the vast reaches of the uncluttered desert landscape. A ridge of mountains to the west was barely visible, and, I'll admit it, for a white man somewhat unsure of himself in Indian territory, I wasn’t feeling totally at home.

I was returning from an old church basement, where I'd been sitting with a half-dozen members of a large Navajo family, listening to them--mostly Grandma--tell her story, a story rich with love and grace.  I was on assignment: write stories about elderly Navajo Christians and their relationship to a century-old mission boarding school, Rehoboth, just east of Gallup.  And I’d been listening.

What Anglo Christians like me are discovering these days is that the story of any North American Indian boarding school, no matter how righteous in intent, cannot be told in triumph or joy.  Those histories are heavily burdened with real pain.  One prominent Navajo leader, a Rehoboth graduate, told me that the attempt to teach Native people a new way of life, as all boarding schools once intended, carried an unmistakable corollary.  Indian kids learned, even if it were never stated, that their culture of origin, in this case, the Navajo way of life, had to be left behind.  Kids learned, he said, that the values with which they were reared, and the families that taught those values, were essentially worthless.  That lesson was criminal, a sin.  Today, we call it a kind of abuse, cultural abuse.

My own grandfather was on the “Heathen Mission Board” of the denomination he served and of which I am still a member, the Christian Reformed Church in North America.  For thirty years in the early 20th century, the Rev. John C. Schaap, a deeply pious man of God, supervised the operation of the Rehoboth boarding school, a school that has—as do all Indian boarding schools—a deeply troubled past.  Here in my study hangs an ancient and tattered Navajo rug, a gift to him, years ago, for his long service on that Board.  I too am part of this story.  But then, it seems to me that all of us are.

    That Sunday night, I’d worshipped in an old church, the very first my denomination had built on the reservation, almost a century ago.  With twenty people or so, we’d brought praise and thanksgiving to God, prayed and sung old gospel hymns—in English and Navajo.  Then, along with just a few of the folks, we’d retired to the cool of the basement, where for three hours or so, I asked questions and listened to stories.

I don't know that I've ever heard a man's confession of adultery before and then turned to look at his faithful wife, who, it seemed, wouldn't address me or him or even what he'd just confessed with her eyes.  It was a moment I won't forget.  He’d told me a long and tearful story about coming to terms, a few years back, with what he’d become—too much drink, too many drugs, too much unfaithfulness.  It was an immensely moving testimony. . . . .

(finish tomorrow)

 

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“. . .sing, all you who are upright in heart.”

 My father once gave me the end of a novel.  I was struggling along, trying to figure out where that story was going, when he and my mother came to visit, went to church one Sunday, and sang, with the entire congregation, the old Fanny Crosby hymn “Blessed Assurance.”  The image of him, face aglow, became the last scene, the one I was looking for.

 So when he died, just a few years ago, something in me wanted that hymn sung at his funeral.  I wouldn’t have asked for it, because I was afraid that the reasons for me wanting that hymn would have been more related to my work, my writing, than who he was, even though part of the reason I was so taken by him that Sunday was his effortless joy in affirming that Jesus was, in fact, his.

 Miraculous?—I don’t know how to gauge miracles; but when I talked with my sister about the shape of Dad’s funeral, she said she’d told Mom that the hymn we ought to sing was “Blessed Assurance.”  There had to be some divine intervention there, don’t you think?

 So we did—at the memorial service for my father we sang “Blessed Assurance.”  Well, most people did.  I didn’t.  I couldn’t.  But I loved it, even though I’d never been particularly taken with the way it swings, well, tediously, through the chorus.  But you don’t have to like something to love it—and to feel heaven and earth moved.

My father had died rather quickly.  He wasn’t young, and when he fell carrying a box—he and Mom were planning on moving—a wicked series of cause-and-effects eventually took him, no more than a month later. 

But it was only then that I came to believe what my mother told me—that Dad had been in the early throes of Alzheimer’s, that his condition had manifest itself in many ways, some of which we discovered when going through his things.  He was a banker who prided himself on keeping books, but his checkbook was a disaster, corrections scratched in monthly, sometimes for outrageous amounts.  He couldn’t keep it anymore. Must have been very vexing for him, but he never mentioned a thing.

Some boxes he’d packed were a jumble.  My wife looked at one of them strangely, and said she was sure she could see he was losing it—kitchen utensils with socks and clothing items.  Made no sense.  My father was always organized.

But my mother’s stories were most convincing.  He couldn’t sing anymore, she told us.  My parents had sung together as loyally as they’d daily meditated on the Word.  When I was young, they used to face off and play table tennis, Mom usually winning.  Eventually they grew out of that and into Rummicube, but no matter what else they were doing, they always sang together, my mother at the keyboard.

That he couldn’t—that, in those last weeks of his life, he lacked the wherewithal to put word and voice together—had to be immensely painful.  Millions of people die everyday in more difficult pain, perhaps, than my father ever felt, even in dying; but I can’t imagine how he suffered, not being able to sing.

So this verse feels like my father, today.  “Sing,” David says.  Sing.

I’m not sure my father looks much different today than he did that Sabbath when he gave me the final scene of a novel.  But I’ll grant you this, there’s even more joy on a face that just won’t ever stop shining. 

 

The bottom line of this historical highway marker claims the sign was placed there in 1956. I was nine years old. As I remember, it was south and east of town, closer to Cedar Grove than it was to Oostburg, along what was once state highway 141, but what has been blessed today with a more historical name--the Sauk Trail. 

Some Sauk, some Fox, some Pottawatomi, some Ho-Chunk or Winnebago--they were all there on the lakeshore in 1847, at least remnants thereof, most of them by that time reduced to begging, indigents, according to my great-grandfather's obituary, victims of a rapacious western movement of Euro-Americans, many of them, like my ancestors, immigrants.

The first book I owned I bought from Prange's Department Store in Sheboygan. Most likely, that was close to 1956. That coffee-table sized book cost all of three dollars, I think, but it documented and described Indians, Native Americans, not just the tribes that were on Wisconsin's Lake Michigan shoreline, where I grew up, but all kinds of Indians. I loved it. Paid for it myself--I think my parents were proud really. 

I never forgot the highway sign. Mom and Dad likely piled their kids in the car--an old Mercury--and went south down the highway, maybe on our way to Milwaukee, when Dad spotted that flashy new highway marker he'd read about and decided to pull over. 

I'm almost positive no school class ever taught me anything about the Phoenix disaster. When I was a boy in the Christian school, there were only two histories that really counted much: national history (the Tea Party, Washington on the Delaware) and Reformation history (Luther, Calvin, Knox, etc.). When I was a kid, I don't know if any teacher I ever had considered Sheboygan County history to be history at all. 

All I ever knew of the Phoenix disaster was from this sign. No one talked much about it as I remember, and while there were many in local communities who could trace their ancestry back to some long-gone Phoenix disaster survivor, I couldn't, nor did I lose a relative that cold November night in 1847. 

But the story stayed with me, found a permanent place in my heart and soul, and when first I was given the assignment to write a short story--I was a sophomore in college--the very first story I wrote was something about the Phoenix disaster.

Close to 300 Dutch emigrants had left the Netherlands months before, bound for rural Sheboygan County, Wisconsin. They'd boarded the steamship Phoenix for the last leg of the journey, stopped for a time, just north at Manitowoc, then departed, middle of the night, for the Sheboygan harbor. They were within sight of the city lights--that close!--when a boiler blew and set the wooden ship aflame. Most of those on board had one last choice--to drown or burn. The lifeboats were a joke. Who on earth cared for these people, after all? They were just a bunch of lousy immigrants. 

When, a few years later, I decided to try to gather a sense of my own roots (Alex Haley, Roots), I started on my very first book project. It was 1976. I was a college teacher. My idea?--to read local histories of Dutch Reformed areas, find stories I liked, and try to write them to learn to write fiction. 

The first story I wrote with that collection of stories in mind was the story of the Phoenix disaster. In a way, ever since I was nine, ever since I read that highway sign, I couldn't help but think that somehow, for someone like me, a kid with a Dutch name, who grew up on the lakeshore, that story in some mysterious way belonged to me.

A story in yesterday's Sheboygan Press claims that a local scavenger took a State Historical Society diver along to look over what he'd considered a log when he'd earlier taken a Dutch researcher to the place, a couple miles out, north of Sheboygan, where the Phoenix was thought to have gone down. The expert now claims that the log is not a log, but a smokestack, almost assuredly from the Phoenix. It's been lying there in cold Lake Michigan waters for 175 years. Amazing!--and wonderful.

I just hope some kid in the neighborhood will take notice of all of this, do a little homework on the story, and then allow it a permanent place in the library of his or her soul, which is where you'll find mine.

The story of the Phoenix disaster is bigger and broader, deeper and wider, than even a Lake Michigan horizon at dawn. It begs unanswerable questions, critiques our prejudices, puts us into the kind of stillness that reminds us to think eternally. 

__________________________ 

The story "The Heritage of These Many Years" appears in my first book, Sign of a Promise and Other Stories, 1979.

A circle of stories

An old essay from the time I put together a book for Rehoboth, a century-old Christian mission and school in Gallup, New Mexico. I don't have a picture of the picture--wish I did!--but the story is worth telling again.

An old mission institution like Rehoboth Christian School eventually accumulates a museum of cast-offs. Upstairs in the old Mission House, in a four-by-six library, itself likely a gift, a whole shelf of books are marked "Grand Rapids Christian High." Cast-offs.

For close to a century, supporting churches and families—even schools—have given away old books, old knick-knacks, unused furniture, and what not else, to the mission, designated for years to “our Indian cousins,” the description the denominational magazine used to keep white folks like my parents and me, “back east,” in touch with the enterprise.

Not long ago, I stayed in the Mission House, where I noticed a print in my room, a painting, the only ornament on the wide wall south, across from the bed. It’s a slightly impressionistic rendition of what appeared to be a country road in England or Holland, some exotic European country villa nowhere near the gorgeous Southwest backdrop that takes your breath away when you step out any door at Rehoboth.

An odd print for this place, I thought—a strange way to decorate. A room in the old Mission House really ought to feature some breathtaking desert landscape.

When I looked up close, I realized it was not a print. Run your finger over the canvas, and you’ll notice that someone painted it.

So, for a night or two, I simply assumed the painting was some Easterner's spare bedroom wall-hanging, something someone like me couldn’t gather the wherewithal to chuck, even though it was of little value to anyone. “Send it to Rehoboth,” he told himself, years ago. “Maybe someone there can use it. It's a real painting, after all."

That’s why it’s here, on this old wall, so out of place I told myself—it’s somebody’s cast-off gift.

There's a name in the lower left-hand corner. “M. Vander Weide - 51,” it says, the number, I’m guessing, a reference to the year it was painted.
Okay, someone sent a painting to his Indian cousins, a painting his grandma had done maybe ten years before she died. Couldn’t throw it out, I told myself, so he sent it to Rehoboth. Sure—that makes sense.

*

The next morning, in Window Rock, I prayed aloud over a breakfast I shared with three others—Mr. Herbert F. White and his wife Sarah, as well as their son, Fred. And as I did, Sarah White whispered grace like a soft alto line, as if my own words, my prayer, were the melody. It was beautiful. Then we ate breakfast—and talked, about life, about Rehoboth, about the saving grace of the Lord.

Mr. White’s own father was a Navajo medicine man, a good man, a loving father, his son says, remembering, even while he was apologizing for what he considers to be his fractured English. As a little kid, he says, he didn’t know a word of English until he came to Rehoboth Mission School.

Rev. Jacob Kamps visited his hogan one day in the mid-1930s. He says he didn’t remember any white man ever having come into his place before—not one; and even though he knew no English, this Rev. Kamps, in fractured Navajo, told his father—the boy picked up a bit of it anyway—that his son, his only son, should be going to school at Rehoboth.

Six or seven years old, this boy was, soon after, trucked—well, wagon-ed—off to the mission school—and once there, was left behind. “This was something totally new,” he told me, remembering that day. “I didn’t even have an idea what a school was going to be.” He was going to get an education, an education his father wanted for him.

“I went right away to the dormitory, and Miss Van was there—she was the matron,” he told me over blue cornmeal pancakes. “And the late Miss Van—she treated me just like a mom,” the mom he’d never had. “Her welcome was so great,” he said, it was as if she was saying “come to my house. I don’t care what color your skin is, you’re my child. And from there on,” he said— “I didn’t feel any harm. I felt welcomed.”

But there’s more. Miss Van, he said, used to spread her arms out and act like a train—he made a whistling sound just as she had so many years ago, mimicking her. “And all of the students would follow her,” he told me, as if they were boxcars following the engine all around the dormitory room where the boys slept. She was putting them to sleep.

And now, if you’re still with me, you’re likely already putting the stories together.

*

That afternoon I met an elderly white man who knows almost as much about this mission as anyone still alive. I was telling him parts of this great story, when I asked him who this Miss Van was.

“Why that was Marie Vander Weide,” he told me.

“M Vander Weide,” I thought, lights going on in the dimness, the woman who painted that odd little impressionist image of some quaint European village, the one that hangs on the wall in the old Mission house, the very place where Herbert F. White remembers, with joy, his very first taste of fresh cow’s milk.

All of that history sits beside me now, right here at Rehoboth, as I attempt to tell the story, the precious history of believers, in obedience, trying their human best to love as the Lord commands, to bring his saving love to kids who were, often as not, scared to death, far from home in an incredibly strange, whole new world, bringing the gospel in outstretched arms and silly train whistle.

Marie Vander Weide’s oil painting hangs across the room, where it shines a good deal brighter today, as if it were aglow in the radiant bronze patina of a perfect New Mexico dawn. That painting is nobody’s cast-off. It’s priceless.

And I feel blessed to have been the recipient of an entire circle of stories.

Farch again

It's a mess--the weather that is. 

Sunday, it was so awful that all around town church was called off. Northwest winds swept out of Alberta as if chased by ICE, and snow fell, three to five. Now listen, we've had 70-degree weather three weeks ago. To be assaulted/insulted by yet another weekend blizzard--we've had a few this season and they're almost predictably come on Sunday (the Devil's doing it!)--was hard to take. Yesterday, Tuesday, the high never cleared freezing, and the low shouldn't be spoken of in polite society. 

Now hold on to your seat. Today--Wednesday--the thermometer will supposedly climb to 50, Friday 60, Saturday 70, Sunday 80. Seriously. Sometimes you just can't help but wonder how on earth those sodbusters made it out here. Now you know why just seeing the buffalo herd far away over the hills at Broken Kettle makes me soul sing. Through the millennia, they figured out the way to live out here where the weather always comes in spades.

There aren't a ton of photographs in my files from Farch, in part (and I hate to say this) because beauty is hard to find right about now. Give the green an inch or two in a few weeks, and the awakening will be beautiful. New snow makes the world virginal, but by March bridal gowns have become a cliche.

You do what you can. These are from March 21, 2009, fifteen years ago. Given the circumstances, I think I did okay. I'm a couple of miles out of Hawarden on the banks of the Big Sioux.

And, sure enough, here's the dawn, the Big Sioux running like liquid gold.

 Tell you what--let me just drop a small herd of buffalo in here for your and my mental health. I know, I know--it's not Farch and there are no bison west of Hawarden. But sometimes they can be so wonderful. See 'em down there on the ridge of a hill.

All's well that ends well.

In praise of Minnesotans

 

You can listen to this on a podcast:  https://www.kwit.org/featured-programs/2021-10-04/the-nobel-cheese-prize-sinclair-lewis-in-minnesota

The birthday of Sinclair Lewis is now a bit behind us, but in his honor, I thought I’d sing the glories of a Sinclair Lewis 1/3 pound cheeseburger, served up with pickle and fries at the Palmer House, downtown Sauk Center, an old hotel that's not changed its features for more than a half century and fronts on Sinclair Lewis Street. I'm not kidding. Just down the way a few blocks, you can find the Sinclair Lewis home and on the south side of town, the Sinclair Lewis Interpretive Center. All true. Google it.

The Sinclair Lewis Cheeseburger

I can’t help but think all that glory is a bit ironic. Sauk Center's somewhat favorite son didn't much care for the codgers who peopled his hometown, or any Midwestern small towns, for that matter. The book that shot the moon for him, Main Street (1921), sold phenomenally and led, eventually, to Lewis's receiving the Nobel Prize (1930), the first American to win. Nothing to sneeze at.

In high school, I was forcefed Main Street. Hated the book. Not even sure I read it. Made no sense to me, largely because the book is acidic satire I wasn’t smart enough to see. What I do remember is how much "Red" Lewis despised his own, even people I knew in my own midwestern small town. He had reason, I’m sure: small towns can be death on individuals who are individuals. Lewis was tall, gangly, unathletic, and not much to look at. People say his father, the town doctor, never understood him. Those kinds of ingredients are not a recipe for success.

With weekly visits to a place called Lake Woebegone, Garrison Keillor celebrated his own Minnesota boyhood and Minnesota culture for years, and a audience from across the nation dialed in, belovedly. His 30th anniversary celebrated with a traveling show held in a bunch of small towns, to which he invited folks to bring picnic baskets and lawn chairs. Minnesota sweetness.

Mr. Keillor sports with his people, Mr. Lewis knifed ‘em.

The very idea of lawn chairs and picnic baskets would be anathema to Sinclair Lewis, Minnesota's Nobel Prize winner. He'd rip and tear at the backward souls who showed up. 

But today, this Iowan believes Minnesota can laugh at itself and love itself, almost simultaneously; and that's why I admire the place. Anyone who can be at home with a place called “the Gopher State" has to have a sense of humor. Minnesotans all buy truly Minnesota-thick winter gear--caps, jackets, vests from Bemidji Woolen Mills.

Not only that, but they wear all that Gopher gear with pride, arrogance even, whether or not their names are Olie and Lena. In the movie Fargo, the Coen brothers, great Minnesota filmmakers, worked the archetypes lovingly with a small-town cop named Marge Gunderson, who, in a cap with earmuffs, taught the nation how to speak Minnesotan, don’t you know?

So you’re wondering about that Sinclair Lewis cheeseburger—thumbs up or thumbs down? Listen, it wasn't half bad, served up on a hard roll too yet.

What's more, I can’t help but think there's some poetic justice in the fact that Sauk Prairie, Lewis’s home town, honors its Nobel Prize-winning novelist with a fat cheeseburger.

That is so Minnesotan. Got to love ‘em.

_________________________ 

The real reason I pulled this post out of mothballs is I wanted to extol a recent op-ed in the NY Times by Tom Friedman. It's very long, but perfectly wonderful and unflinchingly moral. If you want to understand what President Trump doesn't understand (and never will, read--or listen to--this convincing essay that explains "neighboring," something the world needs to learn. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2026 /03/15/opinion/columnists/minneapolis-ice-trump-neighbor.html 

Old friends

Took me years before I knew that the Luxembourgers just down the road hailed from a country so small it wasn't greatly more spacious than Plymouth County, where a whole slew of them put down roots in the 1870s. Hard to imagine. 

It would take little more than a couple of hours to chase all the way across the country if you were visiting the Netherlands these days, distances being so short-circuited. Used the be stories circulated about relatives from the old country getting here to northwest Iowa and then asking nutty questions like "We go maybe to Niagara Falls tomorrow, you think? --and then the mountain with all those Presidents?" --travel agendas beyond the imagination. The size of things in this country is what they couldn't figure or imagine, that it would take them most of the day just to get east to Dubuque.

When the pioneer Luxembourgers' wagon trains crossed the state in 1870, travel time was two to three weeks, including over-night-ers to rest their trusty oxen. One can only imagine how spellbinding endless prairie must have seemed to them, how mysterious the eternal horizon must have seemed. One pioneer liked to say that when he arrived at this far corner, there was only one tree where eventually there would be a village named Orange City. 

All of which makes a single story more memorable than it might seem at first-telling. A man named Jacob Koster put down roots in a place to be called Sioux Center--right there in what is Central Park today. Koster came from southeast Minnesota to land they believed available--as long as you weren't Yankton Sioux. 

A mammoth cottonwood in Central Park ranks as one of the biggest--and likely oldest--in the entire state. I like to believe Jacob Koster planted it, but cottonwoods don't need us to plant them. That particular monster, however, marks the spot where the Koster decided to homestead.

Koster himself, or so the story goes, spotted somewhere south a column of smoke one wind-still morning, then saw it again and again days later, all of which fired his curiosity. Neighbors? Indians? One morning his curiosity got the best of him, and he decided to have a look, make it an adventure--took the whole family with him.

Must have been a hovel like the one his family lived in, chunks of sod set against a bit of a hill, a refuge from wind and rain maybe, but a refuge for all manner of critters as well. The Kosters spotted it maybe five miles from their own sod house. 

There they sat, some distance away in the wagon, when suddenly a woman stepped out and drew back the blanket that served as a front door. She was alone. 

Cautiously, Koster brought his wagon closer until she heard a foreign sound, someone nearby, and looked up, frightened.

Both of them fell into dead silence. There they stood, Jacob and family on the wagon, the woman dropping the pail she carried into the prairie grass. 

"Jacob?" she stammered, still as stone.

Silence spread out like the open prairie.

"And you are Yentje?" Koster said. 

Maybe he stepped down from the wagon. We don't know. I don't think he hugged her, both of them non-huggers of stolid Dutch stock. But they knew each other. Miracle of miracles, they knew each other.

The history book says the two of them had immigrated to the States at different times in different groups, Yentje and her family going to southern Iowa before coming farther northwest. Jacob, who we might just call an old boyfriend of hers, had arrived in America and moved west with another group of Hollanders, where--out in the middle of endless grassland--they stumbled into each other, both of them with families of their own trying to make do in this huge new world.

True story? It's one of those that, if it isn't true, should be. Two old friends, close friends, meet serendipitously--but blessedly--on endless Siouxland grasslands.

I don't know if the Luxembourgers have their own similar story, but if they'd like to borrow this one, they should feel free. Out here on the edge of the plains, it makes everyone smile.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 32

“Rejoice in the Lord and be glad, you righteous. . .”

 All day long that summer day, an intermittent screech would come crashing through the open basement window of my office. A son of the man who used to live next door—before he died several years ago—was cleaning out his father’s three-stall garage, one old two by four at a time. The next day, out front, there stood a pyramid of junk, which attracted me for some shady reason, but I did my best to stay away.

 I couldn’t see him from where I sat, but I heard every last armful of trash come down on the pile whenever he’d emerge from the shadowy interior of the old garage. What made the job worse was that his father was an ace tinkerer. I’m not sure whether he was, by nature, a pack rat, but his father’s ability to fix anything meant that nothing lacked value.  It was a huge job, and my guess was that his son would be at it again on the morrow.

 I found the whole operation scary.  The detritus one accumulates throughout life is incredible. When we retired, we moved out of town and into the country where the massive prairie sky is a daily—and nightly—art museum. It was great, but moving wasn’t. And now, once again, we moved—this time back into town for --  hurts to say this – senior housing. Every move requires tossing things, determining what’s junk and what’s not..

Here in my office, I’m surrounded by stuff I wouldn’t think of tossing, stuff that will be just so much junk to my kids.  Maybe I ought to buy one of those little guns that produce lettered plastic tape and label everything—“this is a pin I got when I was asked to read an essay at a commemoration of 9/11—a year later.”  Who would ever know otherwise?  And who—well, no one—would ever care?

I’ve got two shelves of old Dutch books, some of which come from my grandfather and my great-grandfather, preachers in the old days. There are others, a dozen at least, that I bought for almost nothing at an auction. Some of those were printed before the American Revolution.  When I’m gone, will anyone care? —or will those ancient texts simply be returned to another auction, where some anxious fancier will gleefully buy them, and put them carefully on another bookshelf until she dies—an endless cycle.

That next door junk pile reminded me, all too clearly, of my own life, a thought that would never have entered my mind 25 years ago, but now, as I approach eighty, may well be all too haunting.

 By human standards, it’s impossible to deny that life is tragic; there’s no escaping the grim reaper, after all.  Everyone must die. Count on it. All things must pass. Today, I sat at a coffee table with a man who was told just this week that he has pancreatic cancer. All of us, seniors, will go; he sees it coming more clearly.

Someday, my books, my baseball trophies, my ergonomic keyboard—it all must go.  Even my wife, even my children—we all will die.

 Like so many Bible verses, it’s altogether too easy to pass over the triumph that sounds at the end of Psalm 32. “Rejoice,” King David the forgiven says. “Rejoice in the Lord and be glad.” It’s not a whimper or a whisper. It’s a shout because what needs to be routed is the despair we all come heir to as flesh weakens and spirits collapse before a rectangular hole in the ground.

 Rejoice, David says, as do all believers—“Rejoice and be glad.” Rejoice in His love because the Lord, the almighty tinkerer, makes all things new, even the junk next door—and the pile here in my heart. 

 Rejoice and be glad because God our Savior never tosses out a thing. 

On Hegseth's "sphere sovereignty"

I'm thinking I was in college before I ever heard someone with theological chops put two words together into a phrase with some chops of its own--"sphere sovereignty." I remember learning that "sphere sovereignty" was a phrase worth knowing, in part because it originated in the quite sovereign rule of a Dutch preacher/politician named Abraham Kuyper, a man who was spoken of in very high-regard-ish tones.

I wasn't the greatest student back then, never was really, so let me tell you what I remember of "sphere sovereignty": it was a good thing, a good, good thing because it set boundaries by making the claim that the institutions of society each had their own separate domain and calling, their own private property. Thus, the Christian school I attended as a boy was not run by the c0nsistory of the church, any church--it was "parental" Christian education because a stratagem of the Calvinism at the base of our faith ruled clearly--"Kuyper said it!"--that the church had its own "sphere" of influence, as did the school. While the same men (not women back then) could be members of the local Christian school board and members of the church consistory, one of those organizations should not run the other. 

Why? Because sphere sovereignty was a principle of life, or thus saith Abraham Kuyper, who, I learned, gives us Reformed-types our marching orders. When Kuyper created a university--the Free University--he named it what he did because it was free from entanglements of any political or ecclesiastical entity. In it's sphere--the sphere of education--it was sovereign--or free.

"Sphere sovereignty" might have created some heft at Dordt College midway through the 20th century, but it's never been slung around on a banner or proclaimed on a t-shirt in the U. S. of A, never, that is, until Pete Hegseth, Trump's Secretary of War (their language, not mind). 

Hegseth's form of Christian nationalism has its own take on "sphere sovereignty," and what he and his cronies say doesn't set forth the kind of liberty and diversity at the heart of the doctrine's original application. In other words, what Secretary Hegseth and other Christian nationalists (who often brandish the word "Reformed" too) are selling isn't what I heard for the first time in 1966 just a few blocks down the road from where I'm sitting.

As Justin Bailor, from Calvin University, writes in a recent column in World, 

. . .it is Christ who is sovereign over all, and not any institution or any particular Christian–whether preacher, pope, or prince. A proper regard for the origins, essence, and purpose of sphere sovereignty reveal it to be a theory of limited government, and even more than that a theory of social diversity, cultural pluriformity, and civil liberty. It is as such opposed to all forms of tyranny.

There's no room therein for Hegseth's noxious Christian nationalism. 

Thus saith sphere sovereignty. 

Updike's fortunes

 

I'll tell you, there's some astonishing familiarly to this shelf. At one time or another, I must have had just about every one of the books, or at least most. No more. My guess is that they were among the books I unloaded when I left my office at the college. I don't think they were ever home in our country place, and they certainly didn't come along to Woodbridge, the place we now call home. Where they once stood proudly, today they're gone.

In that way, I guess, their disappearance takes the same track as the work of John Updike does in the culture these days--he's simply not as hot as he once was. Critics far sharper than I am claim that some of what's there--the Rabbit foursome--won't disappear from American literary consciousness, nor will short stories still taught in Intro to Lit classes--you may remember "A & P," one of the most popular short stories in American literary history, or "Pigeon Feathers"--if I had that story anywhere here today, I could read it again and fawn embarrassingly about the Christian faith so beautifully evident at the end of that story.

Aspects of Updike's work, and his confession/profession in interviews--posited his deeply felt Christian faith. However, my mother would absolutely never considere him a "Christian writer." Nobody did sex as dreamily as he did--or as horridly. Nobody looked so closely without blushing. No world-class writers spent more time or interest in the male anatomy as did John Updike. 

And that itself may be one of the major reasons that his work has fallen out of favor with many of the mainstays of literary culture--if there are such folks.

My introduction to him came in an English class at Dordt College, when a brilliant but nutty professor named Meeter chose to bring in a copy of Couples he had been perusing and to read a hot passage--steamy and forbidden--in class, in public, standing right up in front, behind the podium. I'm not making this up. He wanted us to hear some torrid sex because he wanted his good Christian students to be as perfectly appalled as he'd been when all those gymnastics came alive on the page before him. 

Didn't work. I wasn't appalled, I was fascinated. I got interested in John Updike, out of class for sure. 

I'm no expert but it seems that Updike may have been one of the first to feature full frontal nudity in mainstream literature, as many writers broke down bedroom doors to bring us up close and personal to the act most of us crave. My literary hero at the time, Frederick Manfred, spent goodly hours watching nakedness do its thing. It was the late 60s, and lots of taboos were falling. Honestly, the only question I was asked that had real oompah when I interviewed for a job at Dordt, some years later, was "Will you teach dirty books?" a question that was so facile it answered itself. Imagine if I'd said yes!!!

Updike's disfavor today come at the hands of the "Me Too" movement as well as people tiring of white male writers. Today, some roll their eyes at some--if not all--of his fervid sexuality finding it altogether too, well, male--and too, yes, Protestant. And prurient. 

Still, I really, really admired the character Rabbit from Rabbit Run, and I'm quite sure--I hope I'm not being sexist here--that in Rabbit John Updike created a very real American character, a young man of his age, as was  John Updike himself, and, to be sure, at least one of his greatest admirers, me. 

Time changes things--that's maybe one of the best moral lessons I can pull from all of this. Thanks, Merle Meeter.