Asides

Why do they call it Good Friday?

Easter on the prairie, 1949

Good Friday? As a boy, I wondered why they called it good? What was so good about getting killed? As a ten-year-old in the 1950’s, I took certain things for granted because adults didn’t encourage questions about basic assumptions. And besides, we lived on a farm and I had other, more immediate things to do—like feed the chickens. That’s just the way things were.

Our family shopped in the Minnesota village of Janesville, population 1,100. It had a stoplight, a town cop, a volunteer fire department, a public school and one of every necessary commercial service: grain elevator, drug store, coffee shop, gas station, furniture store-funeral home, hardware, dentist, doctor, veterinary, butcher, beer joint, five and dime, feed and hatchery. There were three active churches: Trinity Lutheran (Missouri Synod), St. Anne’s Roman Catholic and St. John’s Episcopal.

Janesville, 1950’s

In those days, your particular denomination defined you and your associations socially much more than it does today. Your church reflected your ethnic origins, beliefs, state of spiritual salvation (as seen by others) and whom you might marry. The German immigrants and their children attended Trinity Lutheran, the children of Irish and Polish immigrants went to St. Anne’s and the Yankees, like my family, belonged to St. John’s Episcopal. Ecumenism wasn’t in anyone’s lexicon and a “mixed marriage” was an anathema, a kind of cultural treason that could get your exiled from the family.

The Missouri Synod church was a particularly strict and conservative sect. When boys were invited to join the town Scout troop, the Lutheran pastor said “no!” because—God forbid—his boys might come into contact with Catholics! To keep the children faithful, the church had an elementary school (grades one to eight) conveniently located across the alley from the public school. We farm kids lived on adjacent to each other and rode the yellow buses to our respective schools.

During recess on winter days, we public school boys took on the ‘Dutchies’ (for their ancestry) in epic snowball wars across the alley. We organized. Those with the strongest arms threw and the rest of us packed ammunition. It didn’t matter who threw first. The tribal response always came in force and dense salvos of hard-packed snowballs flew back and forth. Sooner or later, someone laced snowballs with pebbles. Tears and blood followed. When the bells rang, the day’s war ended and we returned to classes gloating over our victories. Later, we boarded the buses and sat with the foes we fought so viciously earlier in the day. No one held a grudge.

Despite our sectarian prejudices, Lutheran, Catholic or Episcopal, we reverenced Christmas, Holy Week and Easter. That said, we had no ecumenical services until after Vatican II, and then only on a limited basis. Instead of ecumenism, and despite the narrower opinions and preferences of that time, we gave each other space to observe holy days and ceremonies without interference or criticism.

St. John’s Episcopal Church

Everyone celebrated Christmas in a cheery  and quasi-secular way but Good Friday felt different. It passed as a subdued afternoon, as if a storm brooded, and adults said little and children were shushed. Whether by custom, ordinance or informal agreement, Janesville shut down between the hours of noon and three o’clock. The bank, drug store, five and dime, grocery and even the bar closed to observe the hours when Jesus suffered on the cross and darkness covered the land. Many of us sat in our respective churches, our altars bare, the crosses draped in black veils and listened to the Gospel lesson about betrayal, death and forgiveness—the same Scripture in each church. During these hours of sober self-examination rose the prayers asking forgiveness of our sins.

Now, looking back from a half-century on, I know our differences in ancestry, ethnicity and prejudice blinded us to what we shared in common. Maybe that’s why it was a good Friday. In those three hours, we were of one spirit in reverence for something we held in common even if we refused to recognize it. These days, three hours of publicly shared and reflective silence could help us all see something greater good we share lying just beyond our immediate prejudices and passions.

A Slice of Humble Pie

Thanksgiving occupied a special place in the year  on our Minnesota farm and marked the end of the crop year. During the eight months between April and November, we tended the fields; tilling planting, cultivating, harvesting and then plowing. Every day, we minded the sky for the perils of the season—late spring frost, heat waves and drought, cloud bursts and flood, hail storms and early snow. Any one of these could wipe out a season’s labors. Most years, we sprinted through two months of fickle autumn weather as it slid from summery to wintery, picking corn, plowing stubble and culling the livestock before freeze-up and snow. After Thanksgiving, we relaxed a while.

Sometimes, snow on Thanksgiving

Our first on-farm Thanksgiving occurred in 1947 and the last one in 1997. I was four years old that first year when my mother roasted a goose and cooked the garden vegetables she raised. November snow fell early. Five acres of corn remained unpicked and the stubble stood plowed. Both must wait until spring. The cars didn’t start for several days. Yet, my urbanized New Jersey parents were grateful. They pulled up stakes that April to go farming in southern Minnesota despite the absence of agricultural experience. They were still in their twenties and still immortal.

We lived in a draughty house in need of paint. Rusty barbed wire fences kept livestock away from the house. Small hillside fields bordered with weeds ringed the slough in the center of things. A line of woods marked the winding river half a mile away. Nothing about this place predicted prosperity. But come it did. Drainage and tiling turned the slough into rich bottomland. Contoured fields arrested soil erosion, check dams formed small ponds and the woods improved under professional management. Wherever he could, dad planted trees and created niches for wildlife. Year by year, the farm became more productive of corn and wheat, deer and pheasants, songbirds and ducks.

The family at Thanksgiving

My mother shone in glory on Thanksgiving amid the roasted turkey, green tomato mincemeat pies topped with hard sauce, roast carrots, mashed potatoes, silky gravy and cranberry sauce. Cousins and aunts from town joined our table and afterward the adults played bridge and children played Monopoly and Parcheesi. For many years in the 1950’s,  the television station ran The Wizard of Oz on Thanksgiving. We loved the tornado scenes.

As my siblings and I grew up and married, our spouses and children replaced the cousins around the table. But some things didn’t change. November is still the grayest month in Minnesota—cloudy, cold and damp. At times, depressing. On Thanksgiving mornings, Dad and I still went outside to do some light chores, such as splitting and hauling firewood while mother, sister and wife finished preparing the food. Out came the good china, the monogrammed silver and crystal. These familiar roles and routines gave as much comfort as the food. A confirmation. We knew who we were, where we were and why we were thankful.

Abundance– a bumper crop

When all was ready, we bowed our heads and dad said a grace over the important things. Then the platters and bowls circled the table and our plates vanished under piles of mashed potatoes, slices of turkey, peas and smooth gravy. Looking out of the windows, I saw our newly plowed fields stretching to the river. Sometimes snow dusted the furrows and sometimes not. Yet the cloudiness never dampened our gratitude. We had the fields, the palpable connection, the umbilical between our livelihood and abundance.

We celebrated the last on-farm Thanksgiving in 1997. Mom and Dad were retired, no longer immortal but as lively as ever and wiser for their experiences. Arthritis crippled my mother at 80 but she was still a game chef. Dad and I still went outside to finish some chores, fewer now than in years past.

The boy formed on the farm

Thanksgiving, between helpings of turkey and pie, I realized this was the last time I would sit at this table and see the furrows, black and rich, awaiting spring. Gazing out and across the fields, I saw for last time the farm as it had formed me. Come spring, a crew would seed the fields with prairie grasses and plant clumps of oaks. This pleased dad but I felt melancholy—like the death of a friend—the permanent loss of intimacy with the living soil that had long sustained us.

Was I thankful? Yes, always! But I was more than thankful. I felt grateful and my gratitude grew from our intimate relationship with the soil. Dad thought of loam as magic stuff, a community of organisms that, with the sun, released life-building nutrients to produce fields of corn, soybeans, wheat and alfalfa. He held the soil as in a trust. Now, he was retiring the fields he retired.

Gratitude comes with humility and humility comes from recognizing you aren’t so self-sufficient that you don’t need the aid of anyone or anything. We are all part of an interdependent web of life. Our soil neither promised nor gave us a crop unless we collaborated with its organisms to produce it. We were married to the loam and tended it so it could tend, feed and sustain us.

The last harvest — 1997

I said a bittersweet goodbye to the farm that Thanksgiving. After 20 years, I still miss the palpable fulfillment of feasting in sight of newly plowed fields dusted with snow. I still miss feeling connected to a plot of soil I worked to produce corn, soybeans and wheat. I miss the spontaneous gratitude that comes when we were spared the worst of the weather. Or, if we were  struck, gratitude for our recovery from it. Most of all, I miss the sense of life living with the land and not off the land. And with that, I miss the simple joy of life lived knowingly along the tenuous margins of security. Thanksgiving on the farm taught me humility that prepared me to be grateful. On this day, a slice of humble pie still satisfies the soul.

Whose Spittin’ Image?

Father and son

People who knew my father often said I was the ‘spittin’ image’ of him. And there was some truth to that. We walked with similar gaits, we were similar about the eyes, though his were blue and mine were brown. Beyond that, however, we diverged. Dad was an extrovert while I enjoy solitude as much or more than company. Since the advent of DNA tests, ‘spittin’ image’ takes on a new meaning.

For a long time, I ignored the offers to send my DNA to the genealogical company to learn about my ancestry. My family tree is well-documented back to England in the 1630s. I recall my shock and disbelief when I discovered my father’s earliest ancestor (Abraham Newell) and my mother’s, (John Livermore) arrived in Boston on the same ship. They were English Puritans fleeing the persecution of Archbishop William Laud. They must have become acquainted during their three-months voyage before landing in Boston and going their separate ways and intermarried Puritan descendants in New England and New York. The last immigrant to marry into my family came from England in 1814. My parents married in 1941, uniting two families who voyaged together 305 years earlier.

Samuel Searl 1796-1875

I gave in, ordered the kit, spit into the tube and sealed the sample inside its mailer. Why am I spending $79 for this? I wondered. What can it tell me about my ancestors that I don’t already know? I sent it off, confident of the results: a preponderance of British DNA with soupçons of French from the invading Normans and maybe a drop from the marauding Danes.

With surnames liked Searle, Christie, Livermore, Baldwin, Cook, Eliot, Stewart, Smith, Wheelock, Wood, Douglas, Taylor and Warren, I had no doubts my family originated with the English and Scots. Searle is one of the commonest of English names–like Anderson in Minnesota. My extended family tree included only one set of Dutch ancestors and that one very recent. We came from what was called ‘good Yankee stock,’ a phrase better fitting the bull of highland cattle. What they meant was, we were white Protestants from Britain or maybe the Netherlands.

The Results of DNA

Six weeks later, when the email with my results arrived, I opened the link to see a colored pie chart before me. Things aren’t always as they seem and neither am I. A large lemon wedge—41%—said West Europe (France, Netherlands), an apple green wedge—19%—said British (English, Welsh and Scottish), and a gray wedge—40%—said ‘Other.’ That’s me? Not what I expected!

And what’s in the ‘Other?” That category included 18% Irish, 11% Scandinavian, 7% East European and 2% (possibly) Italian. In the State of Minnesota, it’s useful to claim some Scandinavian ancestry. Call it street cred. Besides, it’s good for my marriage since my wife’s great-grandparents emigrated from Norway.

What does this mean in the end? Or doesn’t it mean anything?

John W. Jennison 1865-1952

Regardless of what the DNA tells me about my past (and it’s fun to speculate and wonder), my identity is determined by where I live, whom I live among, the language I speak and the cultural norms that guide my thoughts and actions. You and I are creatures of the present time. Our strains of DNA entered our family lines long before recorded history when the coastlands and rivers were the crossroads for traders and raiders, for people seeking refuge from other groups or finding good land for crops. The Saxons, Frisians, Franks and Gauls settled in Britain before the collapse of Rome. Migration and trade after that deepened the mixture. The various genetic strains represent peoples and cultures that, like yeast in bread dough, are invisible but inextricably bound up with the mass of flour and water.

Unless our ancestors and immediate family lived in extremely isolated communities, it’s probable our DNA contains many contributions from varied sources over time. Were it possible (and I wish it were), you and I might look back in time to see our common ancestors and their struggles or even the moment when they received the genetic link that binds us now. I know that moment was there—is there—but we can’t see it.

Janette Christie Searle 1917-2000

 

How you and I see each other has more to do with culture and language than invisible DNA. Yes, we may notice differences in racial traits at first but, unless either of us is a bigot, we aren’t likely to linger for long on skin tone or the shapes of eyes and noses. We will be listening to expressions of values, ideas, opinions, humor among many other traits. You and I will know the other by our demeanor; whether we smile or glower, act kindly or harshly, with modesty or egotism. These things will quickly tell us whether we are apt to be friends.

I have no idea where my most ancient origins began. My veins don’t run with the ‘pure blood’ from any group—and it’s likely yours don’t either. Though we are free to interpret our past as we choose, there is at least one over-riding lesson we can draw from our DNA. Racial purity is a lie.

You and I probably share a relationship much closer than we may suspect because it isn’t obvious on the surface. But if we pay attention to our DNA, we can’t sustain the fiction that we are so different from others as to put them in a separate category. There is no ‘other;’ there is only ‘us.’ Our DNA makes us children of many fathers and mothers; at the level of our DNA, we are the ‘spittin’ image’ of each other.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“Just call me Jane”

To most people, June 6 is D-Day but, in my family, it’s Mom’s birthday. Born Janette Elizabeth Christie in Montclair, New Jersey, she would be 100 today had she lived. Why do I pay special attention to her birthday 17 years after she died?

At Simmons College.

A century mark is a reminder of our connections forward and backward through time. My mother knew people who had fought in the Civil War, and sailed on schooners; her father gave her rides in open cockpit biplanes, and she watched men walk on the moon. She grew up at the end of WASP era of social prominence in her grandmother’s Victorian house where domestic servants cleaned, cooked, gardened, and kept an eye on her. Her family ‘summered’ by Lake Piseco at the Irondequoit Club in the Adirondack Mountains where she learned to fish for trout and shoot a rifle. A bright student, she skipped a grade, spent her 13th year in France with her aunt and uncle, and returned home, a francophone. Thanks to her grandmother’s generosity, she graduated from Simmons College, a private institution that prepared women for the professions. She chose library science, and her peers chose her as president of the student body. Although she graduated with highest honors, we knew nothing about that until we wrote her obituary.

Warm air, sun, thawing ground, April 1947.

“Just call me Jane,” she said as her introduction; Janette Elizabeth appeared only on legal documents. Jane is a solid, everywoman name that fit her well. It doesn’t sound snooty and pretentious, like Janette. She married in 1941, and passed the war in New Jersey. Afterward, she, my father, and her brother bought a farm in Minnesota, although neither man had any experience. She agreed to this—provided the house had central heat and an indoor toilet. Over parental opposition, they pooled their life savings and bought–sight unseen–280 acres of eroding fields, sloughs, cut-over woods, a sluggish river, and shabby buildings.  On April 10, 1947, Jane, my Dad, my sister and I arrived in Minnesota at the play they called ‘The River Farm.’ Never did I hear her utter a regret over trading the wealth and status of Montclair for life on a Minnesota farm.

Jane shocking oats for threshing, 1950.

She kept the farm accounts, cooked, raised children, drove tractors as necessary, fed lambs with a bottle, gardened, and canned vegetables. She hosted meetings of the University’s Home Extension Service. Jane knew who she was and easily made others comfortable regardless of their background. She wasn’t afraid to ask questions of better-informed farm women with 9th grade educations. Jane simply engaged them where they were and went from there. She made fitting in look easy, focusing on values rather than possessions. After she died, we discovered fine silver and crystal I had never seen stored in the basement. It was like her to think the silver platters from Tiffany’s were out of place in a Minnesota farmhouse.

The cousins come for Thanksgiving

We all remember our mothers for their meals—famous as acts of love. Jane excelled at mince meat pies, gravies, and was a whiz at turning left-overs into new meals. Ever frugal, she made Christmas ornaments and gifts to save money. But she valued culture and, on Sunday afternoons, she listened to the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Besides the St. Paul Pioneer Press, she read the Saturday Review of Literature, worked crossword puzzles, excelled at Scrabble, and read literature. A grammarian, she made certain her children knew when and how to use ‘who’ and ‘whom,’ ‘lain’ and ‘laid.’ She loved Winnie the Pooh, and sprinkled her conversations with phrases like “a little smackeral of something.” A hopeful and intuitive person, she told me, “Don’t plan anything, something good might turn up.”

The legislator’s advisor, critic, and editor.

Whether it was nobless oblige or not, she quietly set about serving others without notice or  condescension. She catalogued books at the county library, organized a library for a law firm. As a Civil Air Patrol officer, she served as the squadron’s administrative officer. Ten years after we arrived, the voters sent my father to the Legislature for 12 terms, and Jane became his advisor, critic, strategist, and editor without dropping her other chores. Later in life, she read stories to children at the local library. She filled her life with many roles: wife, mother, grandmother, librarian, advisor, and reader. She was many things to many people but to everyone she was always herself. A simple plaque on her kitchen wall aptly summed up her life: ‘Bloom Where You’re Planted.’

Jane lived at The River Farm for 53 years until her death in October 2000. On that bright autumn afternoon, she lay in her bed, looked out the window, and her spirit drifted across the fields to the river and into the trees beyond. We buried her ashes in the woods near her mother, brother, and aunt. Later, my father joined her. It is a quiet opening on high ground where woodland phlox bloom in June, and song birds call.

Jane reading a letter on the porch.

“Just call me Jane” was her calling card. She planted her life at The River Farm, and bloomed with values, virtues, mores, and manners that she gave as gifts to her children. Her presence was a gift of unmerited grace, and pausing to recall and celebrate Jane is like a Pentecost, a moment when the fires of love, compassion, and grace rest on us like tongues of flame.

Happy 100th Birthday, Jane!

Murmurations—the undertones of life

Several years ago, at a high school reunion, I ran into a classmate I hadn’t seen in decades. The intervening years had done their work of addition and subtraction on our features. Although I couldn’t register his face, I knew him from the timbre of his voice when he said, ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’ From deep in the pool of memory came a spark of recognition. His voice rose from the undertone of high school memoires, part of the on-going drone of young adults trying out their identities. We were never close friends but I recognized his voice as part of the murmuration I had ignored in the moment.

Sounds may well be among the most durable of sensations. While in the womb we hear our mother’s voice. I KNOW that voice, the change in pitch, and after my birth, the hummed tune, the hushing sounds, the cooing as I was coddled and nursed. I don’t think anyone loses this though the memory has no distinct image or event. So it is with many things we fail to notice clearly at the time. Yet, later in life, a sound, a voice, some chance thing brings recognition of some experience I forgot or a fragment I never knew before. Life is a fabric woven with the soughing of sounds barely heard yet recorded and recalled.

I look forward to the murmuration of spring as living things emerge after the deeper silences of winter. The whisperings pull me back to other times. Snowmelt triggers boyhood memories of winter dripping off the eaves over my bedroom. A steady, throbbing, plip-plip-plip of melting snow seeming to match my own pulse. Out in the pasture, the plip-plips had gathered to gurgle through tunnels under the snowbanks. Miniature rivers ran to the creek in the pasture and became a rushing sound that joined the river overflowing its banks with a burden of ice floes crashing one into the other.

Soon after the snow left, but before the grass greened, when the first dandelions opened fuzzy blossoms, the bees busied themselves by day. Their murmurations as they collected nectar among the petals promised warmer days ahead. Bees speak softly and I rarely heard them as distinctly and acutely as the songs of cardinals, robins, and orioles. The murmur of bees was a base note, a simple sentence punctured with the exclamation points of birds. While the yard is drab from winter’s ravages, the sound of a Minnesota bee in late March reassures me spring is nigh. When I stop to listen, I hear them in various places at the same time. It isn’t simply their sound arrests me; rather, I am in thrall to the eidetic memories connected to their murmurings.

The undertones of murmuration sometimes brings rumors of trouble and danger. Anyone growing up on the prairie know the mumble of distant thunder. Sometimes the tone is so low, we feel it as a physical vibration through the soil. Grumbling thunder may mean nothing at all, or it could herald disaster. The thundercloud always contains both salvation and destruction. Saving rain falls in dry seasons, disastrous floods or tornados come in wetter years. Long before they arrive, I know them by their mutter.

I am, and we are, a bundle of memories and emotions whose residence lies far beyond the powers of cognition. We can no more manufacture and recall some of them then we can see our faces without a reflecting surface. And of the senses, our memories of sound and the echoes of susurrations long-ignored remind me of a past that isn’t really the past so long as sounds retain the power to bring memories into the present. It’s impossible to be conscious of all things in a single moment. Yet, by some miracle of our creation and evolution, our ear and mind record much of what passes without notice. When a murmur, a voice, a susurration registers, it fills me with a sense of homecoming. I find it useful to think of these things as sound buoys that guide me through the fogs of life. They warn me of the rocks and shoals, capes and harbors of life’s voyage. All these things are stored in an emotional attic, ready for release as a warm memory or sharp warning, as essential as breathing.

 

ns-47Sound is something it’s easy to take for granted. Like the air I breathe, I take it for granted unless something stands out in the sound cloud around me. Then, maybe a noise I hear in isolation, triggers a memory. At once, the present moment dissolves, and I’m inside a past moment; it’s a spark of time as fresh and real as the original. These reverberations of the past never erode or rust or lose their power. They’re visceral, eidetic, and so penetrating that important parts of my life, my very soul, was shaped by them. It may be that my individuality and yours are defined as much by echoes as by fingerprints.

Living in Oaxaca, Mexico, I wake about 5:30 each morning to the sound of roosters crowing from atop a nearby house. While this may annoy some sleepers, the rooster’s crow transports me back to childhood. It’s morning once more on the farm. The eastern sky blooms and the first amber light washes across the field, infiltrates the oak tree outside my window, and falls across my bed. Roosters and daybreak are inseparable. The bravado of crowing foretells a day of unforeseen possibilities. On a farm, there is the plan for the day, and then there is what really happens. The cock’s crow reminds me of possibilities and pitfalls to come.

My beautiful pictureYou may laugh, but I will swear it is possible to hear corn growing. I know I did on humid, July nights, when no breezes stirred southern Minnesota. Lying in bed, I heard the faintest of sounds outside, as if someone were tearing paper slowly and carefully to make no noise at all. But something was ripping in the lower fields. It was the sound made by leaves of corn splitting their sheaths as they unfurled in the muggy darkness. It was a ‘green noise’ that often lulled me to sleep when nothing else could.

Our hogs filled an important place in my childhood soundscape of hums, thuds, crashes and swishes. Their guttural voices were as integral to my world as the acres of oats and corn, the woods, and the prairie river. Grunting hogs sang contrapuntal base notes to the roosters’ shrill falsettos. Pigs often carried on in a low, soft hum punctuated rosies-litterby a squeal. They usually fed at night, and took turns eating at the individual feed boxes covered with metal lids. In sixes and sevens, they nosed up the lids, then grunted contentedly as they smacked on ground oats and corn. When sated, each pulled his snout from the lid and it fell with a ‘clunk.’ Many nights, I fell asleep listening to grunt, smack-smack-smack, grunt. Clunk! This rhythm lasted until I left for college, and Dad sold the hogs. For a long time afterward, on visits home, I unconsciously listened for them and, when I didn’t hear them, knew a part of me was no longer resident there either.

The prairie wind is a maestro of sounds and moods, depending on the month and weather. A March wind has a wet smell, and roars through the bare oaks about the house ahead of a warm front. It’s a fickle wind that often produces a late spring blizzard more often than bluebirds. At the season’s other end, a November gale through these same oaks blusters like a bully, heralding the on-set of cold and darkness. In between, the wind often My beautiful picturewhispers ‘sweet nothings’ to leaves on a summer’s eve. Like great compositions, the wind may use a caesura, a full stop amid a storm, and in the fragment of silence, I can hear an individual drop of rain fall from a leaf and strike the ground with a fat ‘plop.’ The wind talks. For those who listen, there is much to be learned from the wind.

Farm life wasn’t completely cut off from the larger world. During the 1950s, we depended on AM radio (WCCO-Minneapolis) and the rural telephone to Janesville, six miles away. In those days, the radio gave us farm market reports, ball games, soap operas, the New York Philharmonic concerts, the Jack Benny Show, and CBS News. Static on AM radios also told us more about the weather than the Weather Service. Faint static meant a distant and possible thunderstorm. As static increased in intensity and frequency, so did the storm probability. Our telephone (a wooden box with a crank and speaker) connected us to a party line of 12. We knew who got calls by the pattern of rings. More than that, however, the phone was our Doppler before there was Doppler. In stormy weather, the a ‘ping’ on the phone meant lightning nearby. Frequent ‘pings’ meant the storm was nearly upon us.

We lived about three miles from the former town of St. Mary but only the church remained. In the 1950s, early on Sunday mornings, I heard the peal of its bell as the local Catholics My beautiful picturewent to Mass. As the rural population thinned, the diocese closed the church, and it fell victim to time and neglect. I last saw it on a summer evening, shuttered but humming with the sound of bees swarming about a hole in its eaves. Only the cemetery remains but, somewhere in the heavens, the reverberations of that bell continue to ripple toward eternity.

It’s a fact that most farmers can tell you the make of tractor solely by its sound. I grew in a neighborhood of green John Deere and red International Harvester models. The Deere’s two-cylinder engines made a distinct ‘pop-pop-pop’ sound and folks called them ‘Johnny Poppers.’ International’s produced a deep, steady growl. We owned small, gray Fords that rns-plowingpurred. Yet, despite the make of tractor, their sound faded quickly with distance. Some of my deepest memories are of twilight on spring evenings, hearing my father whistling Broadway show tunes as he tilled a field for planting. As sure as the sun came up in the east, I knew his restless soul was utterly content and he wanted nothing more than to make the brown, prairie soil ready for seed.

You may think of the country as a quiet, tranquil place. It is tranquil but never silent. A farm and its countryside are filled with sounds. As a lad, I heard them distinctly because I had few distractions. Each echo, hum, reverberation, crash, jingle, swish, roar, and vibration held meaning. Some brought pleasure, others warned of danger or accompanied pain. Yet each played a part in who I became, and who I know myself to be. Sounds are visceral, indelible, and as much a part of myself as my DNA. Many things combine to make us humans, but I think our individual identities a made, in part, by a distinct sound-cloud of memory and meaning.

 

 

Fishing—It’s seduction by another name

The allure of trout
The allure of trout

I fish. I fish because it’s been a predestined part of my life since the age of two when my Dad gave me a book; Trout, by Ray Bergman. Published a couple years before my birth, it is a literary classic on trout and how to fish them. In the fly-leaf, my 23-year-old father inscribed his hope we would fish together someday. And we did. For 62 years.

Fishing fills me with wonder because it is ancient and yet still an essential foraging skill in certain parts of the world. In my life, however, fishing is an art, the subject of literature, and imbued with romance. Trout bedazzle me with their cunning beauty. Red and black spots speckle the bronze sides of the brown trout, and the mottled green-black sides of the brook trout are intensified by the contrasting red and white trim of their fins. Brown and brook trout are beautiful creatures of such allure as to weave a spell over those who seek them. I’m hooked.

Trout draw me to the stream and I’m enthralled with the life living along it. A day of fishing infuses me with the sound of running water, and the shrubbery twitters of warblers, thrushes, and catbirds. I see more clearly when blinded by light, broken and refracted on the riffle of water sliding over the shingle of limestone. Delicate mayflies, ephemeroptera, rising from the water’s film, mating and dying, tell me trout may soon feed with carnal abandon. And most of all, I’m enchanted by the trout themselves. The world as they see and know it intimately is a world I can’t enter, except through imagination.

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Home waters beneath the limestone cliff

Our home waters is a half-mile of a spring-fed stream in southeast Minnesota. For more than 60 years, my father and I fished this stretch of water flowing along the base of a sheer, limestone cliff where delicate harebells and ferns grow on narrow ledges. A hundred or more feet above us, ground-hugging junipers lean over the cliff like curious gargoyles. Our stream chuckles sibilantly over limestone shards, and gurgles around blocks of stone in the deeper pools beneath the bank. This is where Dad and I first fished together, and where we last fished together.

Dad fished methodically
I learned by watching Dad fish

Early on, along these banks, he taught me the rudiments of fishing. In my first years, Dad fished close by me and, if he hooked one, handed his rod to me so I could learn to play the trout and bring it to the stream bank. Sometimes he stood behind me, his put his hands on my arms, and guided my cast so I learned the timing in setting the hook. If I was too slow, the trout spit out the fly. If I was too quick, I jerked the fly from its mouth.

Beyond that, there was only so much a father could teach a young son, and only so much a youth was willing to learn directly from his old man. Dad fished methodically, patiently working the water before moving farther. From watching him, I learned to cast rhythmically, lay a tiny fly on a spot 25 feet away, and gauge how the currents would affect the drift of my line and fly. After that, I had to learn and develop, by trial and error, my personal style of fishing.

Fishing together, separately
Fishing together, separately

We fished together but separately, keeping several hundred yards of stream between us. When either of us hooked a trout, he or I whistled an alert so the other could watch and enjoy what we hoped was a spectacle. On difficult days, when trout were few, we stopped to compare notes on what flies worked best, or in where in the stream—riffles, pools or deep runs—the trout seemed to be skulking. Or we talked about the type of rises we saw—the lunge into the air after a caddis, the subtle suck that pulled a mayfly under, or maybe subsurface foraging of emergent insects. Wooing a trout entailed fashioning an approach—upstream or down, a particular fly—floating or sunken, a lair—riffles or pools. Out of consultations were memories made and bonds forged.

I taught my daughters as dad taught me

Decades later, I took my daughters to this stream and taught them fishing the way Dad taught me, then released them to fish on their own. I still see my oldest daughter, red hair pinned up, overalls rolled above her knees, standing in a mountain stream catching one rainbow trout after another. And see my youngest daughter showing off the prowess she honed while working summers on a Wyoming dude ranch. They validated everything I learned from Dad and taught to them.

The anticipation of fishing gives nearly as much satisfaction as fishing itself. The rod, the line, the fishing vest retain residual scents of fish oils and sunlight. A week before the opener, nothing is pleasanter than checking the waders, the boots, flies, and the net. Within these simple tasks lie memories if not stories of other days. Nothing bonds fishermen together like shared memories and tales well told. Some fish stories we tell are true but there are others stories we tell because we wish they were true. And in telling them, they acquire a kind of truth that need not rely on facts.

The seduction
The means of seduction

In the end, whether fishing for food or for sport, I think the idea of fishing and the act fishing constitute a form of seduction. Getting the trout to rise to a fly made of feathers and silk requires great skill. The good cast is an act of physical grace, and choosing and presenting an irresistible fly is the craft of the heart. Like any good seduction, there is a hook hidden within an attractive proposal. But there is an unanswerable question: Who is the seducer and who is the seduced? Is the seducer the exquisite trout that calls the fisherman to the stream to spend his day casting in hope of a conquest? Or is the seduced the trout that falls for the fisher’s proposal, the artificial fly? Like so many pleasurable seductions, both parties share a willingness to seduce and be seduced. And that, perhaps, is the allure of the stream.

 

 

Minnesota Weather—It’s Mythic Enough

Do you write off a mythic account as an entertaining  yarn, a bit of folklore or a campfire tale? In other words, does a mythic story lack truth? Minnesotans love to talk about their weather because it is truly mythic in its reality.

Mythic comes from mythos, a Greek word for allegory, narrative, and parable. In ancient times, mythos was used to explain complex, unknowable aspects of life—truths that defied explanation solely by logos—the Greek word for reasoned discourse, an account or an opinion. Minnesota’s well-earned reputation for its weather is truthful when recounted as both logos and mythos.

Halloween Snow totals 1991
Halloween Snow totals 1991

My state lies in the crosshairs of three major climate systems: moisture streaming north from the Gulf of Mexico, cold fronts barreling southeast out of the Canadian Arctic, and a gentle Pacific flow off the Rocky Mountains. At any moment, any two of them may collide over the state. Non-Minnesotans think our weather is hyped, a fairy tale, like unicorns or Paul Bunyan and his Blue Ox. It’s true, we brag about our weather to non-Minnesotans, especially around the benighted hot-house souls living in warmer climates. We do it for effect. Our reality inhabits our mythic weather stories.

Today—November 18—is a perfect example. I woke at 7 a.m. to the loud rumble of thunder and strings of cloud to ground lightning, then a heavy downpour that swept floating islands of oak leaves down the street. When the rain stopped, hail plinked against the windowpanes and rattled on the wooden deck like peas in a can. The sun almost shone for a few minutes before heavy mist wrapped us in gray droplets. Sleet hissed as it fell on the leaves. An hour later, the snow began; first as a light flurry, then a heavier fall driven by the wind.

At this time yesterday (2:00 p.m.), the temperature stood at 58° F., the sun shone in a clear sky, and I mowed the lawn for the second time this November. Now, the lawn lies under a pallid sheet of snow, the temperature hovers at 34° F., the northwest wind howls at 35 mph with a wind chill of 21° F.

Today’s storm, like so many November storms , follows the southwest to northeast track of its many predecessors. As the Gulf moisture glides north, it is shunted northeast when frigid Canadian air slams into it over western Minnesota. As I write this, a blizzard with eight inches of snow, and counting, pummels the farms and villages west of Minneapolis. Roads are closed and the plows have pulled back. The plume of heavy snowfall is shifting northeast toward Duluth. For there, it will drift up the North Shore of Lake Superior and bury my cabin under a foot or more. This snow may last the winter. There is a stark magnificence in the North Country’s first snowfall. How I wish I could see it!

Blizzard. No school today.
Blizzard. No school today.

We cherish our blizzards because they test us and we survive them! They’re terrifying if we’re caught on the highway but we feel especially cozy and blessed in our homes. Blizzards leave us with eidetic memories. My favorites are those of my childhood on the farm. Heavy snow meant no school and no chores. I was 10 the year we had six blizzards in succession. They all started the same way. Mild temperatures on Monday and Tuesday, then light snow on Wednesday, heavy snow on Thursday, and white-outs on Friday. Drifts of four-five-and six feet piled up in the windbreak behind the house. They rose across the roads like mountain ranges. No one moved.

The 'Cat' clears the way.
The ‘Cat’ clears the way.

The county plow struggled to clear a lane by Saturday or Sunday. When it cleared the road, Mom raced to town for a week’s worth of groceries. I went to school on Monday, and things went back to normal until Wednesday, when the snow began again. This pattern repeated itself all of February and into March. We had so much snow the county hired bulldozers to buck the drifts rising eight and 10 feet. Dad hired a ‘Cat’ to clear our 400 feet of driveway—only to have it drift in again. I wondered at a world reshaped by the night wind—and I loved it!

Great Armistice Day Blizzard
Great Armistice Day Blizzard

The elderly of the ‘Greatest Generation’ still remember the Armistice Day Blizzard of 1940. The day began clear with temperatures in the 60’s. Hundreds of men went out hunting ducks and pheasants in their shirt-sleeves and light jackets. Temperatures plummeted, from the 60’s on the 11th to the single digits by the next morning. Without warning, heavy snow—at least 16 inches in Minneapolis—moved in driven by 60 mph winds. When the storm blew out, 49 people lay dead, many of them hunters. This isn’t a myth.

Halloween blizzard 1991
Halloween blizzard 1991

Fast forward a half-century to the Great Halloween Blizzard of 1991. It followed today’s storm track. That evening, I took my girls trick-or-treating around the neighborhood. We left in a snow flurry and came home an hour later, scuffing through leaves and an inch of snow. How novel! We woke the next morning with 18 inches of snow on the ground, and a total of 28 inches by the time the storm ended two days later. Hardly anything moved for days, and the snow stayed until April. This is a memory, not a tall tale.

Is Minnesota weather mythic? Yes! But it’s not a legend or a fiction. It’s our reality. We don’t create myths to describe the weather of our state. That is isn’t necessary. All need to do is look out our windows and report on what we see. That’s mythic enough.

 

 

 

Waiting, Hoping and Wondering

As a boy, I waited eagerly for many things. Waiting generated anticipation, hope, and impatience for time to pass swiftly. Waiting tested my self-control, and I learned to distract myself from the object of my attention. When you are a boy, and you think a day of waiting is an eternity, it helps to have something else to do.

Despite summer’s many delights on our farm, I longed for mid-October. Nothing delighted me like the shorter days, colder nights, the half-harvested fields of corn, the frost on the grass, and the pastel sunsets. Why? Because the seasons for hunting pheasants and ducks began in October. At the age of 13 or 14, I had no qualms about taking the lives of sentient creatures. I waited for glorious day when I could blast them out of the sky with a single shot.

Pheasant season opened in mid-October, and on that day my mother prepared lunch for the usual gang of hunters. Besides my father, there was John, our banker; Irv, who ran the feed mill, and his son Buddy; Doc, our dentist; Ed, the retired forest ranger, and me. We gathered in the house about 11 a.m., filled our plates with sloppy Joes on a bun, potato chips, a pickle, and a soda or coffee—the traditional opening day lunch. The dogs—two Weimaraners, and a setter—waited outside.

Our clock struck noon. Time to go. We heard muffled ‘booms’ in the distance where other hunters shot at birds. Each of us shrugged into our canvas hunting jacket, picked up our shotgun and stepped outside to start the ‘drive’ or sweep across the fields. Dad organized everyone so two men walked the sides of the cornfields and the rest of us spread out between them with the dogs.

State law limited each hunter to killing three rooster per day, and no hens. Holding our shotguns across our chest at port arms, we crashed our way into the cornfield. I heard the flutter of wings, followed by ‘Hen!” No shots. Then another flutter and the ‘BOOOM!’ of someone’s 12 gauge. And so it went all one opening afternoon in the mid-1950s. We spent hours working through each cornfield and weed patch where pheasants hunkered close to the ground.

I was about 15, and our gang had hunted most of the farm, and were walking back toward the house for coffee and cookies. We walked seven abreast across a hayfield, each man about 50 feet from the next. Easy walking there because the alfalfa was barely ankle height and offered no real cover to hide a bird. The afternoon was about spent, and so were we. We walked along, talking, with our guns slung casually over our shoulders. Suddenly, a rustle of wings. Cackling. A rooster shot out of the alfalfa at the far left end of our line. It flew six feet off the ground and 30 feet in front of us. The pheasant’s wings beat frantically, its neck stretched straight out, and its bronze feathers gleaming in the late afternoon sunshine. Pheasants always appear easy to kill on the wing.

“I got ‘em!” Ed yelled. BOOM! but the bird kept flying. As the rooster flew along our line, each of yelled, “I got ‘em!” BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! As the terrified bird flew faster. One by one we fired until the cock reached the right end of our line, soared upward a few feet, cleared the top of some brush, and vanished in our woods. Nary a feather did we touch. We stood in place, mouths agape. No one said anything. Then Ed laughed, a sneezy, nasal laugh. A laugh of self-mockery. We caught it and laughed until we wept, laughed until we gasped for air. The bird made a fool of us all. It was worth waiting for.

Besides pheasants, I waited for the ducks. Waterfowl fascinated me until I was obsessed with them. When I could, I stalked the riverbank in hopes of flushing a mallard, or went over the ridge to a pothole hoping to bag at least a blue-winged teal. The greatest prize, however, would be downing a Canada goose.

At that time, the Canada geese were non-existent in our area. The only ones we saw were the northerners migrating south ahead of the Canadian winter. Some men I knew spent a lot of money to hunt them farther west. That was out of my boyish league. Someday, if I waited, I might afford it.

I bagged all the geese I could ever want one November day in the late 1950s. A steel gray overcast covered the sky and the chilly north wind foretold wintry weather ahead. Dad and I were picking the last of the corn when I heard something and looked up. High above us, I saw a skein of geese winging south. Then another line of geese, and another.

All day, hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of geese passed over our heads. I wanted to hunt, then and there, but they flew too high to reach them with my shotgun. Hour after hour, they moved in long undulant lines, in skeins of rippling birds honking, cackling, and muttering as they rode the the hard north wind. They traveled in large flocks of Canada geese, snow geese, blue geese, and the smaller brants.

I had never seen so many geese before, nor have I seen that many in the years since. Each year I waited and hoped I might see such a migration again. Before going to bed that night, I stepped outside in the windy darkness. They were still there, high up, calling, cackling, honking on ahead of the winter gales. It was a moment of wonder that has lasted a lifetime.

Silence and Solitude

In our present moment of the Presidential and Congressional campaigns, we try to shut out the noise, the claims, the counter-claims, the lies, the half-truths, the unsupported claims. We all just want it to end. Political campaigns, as existential torture, lead us to yearn for an imagined age, simpler and quieter than the present one. We say we want silence and to be left alone—solitary.

Silence and solitude live as natural partners. Inner and outer silences have their counterparts in inner and outer solitudes. Until a century ago, the world’s peoples enjoyed true silences and real solitudes more than now. Most of us live in a world of noises, voices, and sounds. Daily, other people invade our private space physically, mentally, and emotionally through the television and internet. Where do we find silence? Most of us get out of town and head for a national park, a lodge, a retreat. However, even the wildernesses of national parks and forests pulsate with sounds, voices, disturbances. Where are true silence and solitude?

I think of silence as a personal attribute, a capacity innate to each of us. The way in which we use and work with our sense of silence shapes an aspect of our personality. When I’m truly silent, I find the important, intimate words to direct toward others. When I’m angry, troubled, or perplexed, I unconsciously try to avoid inner silence. In my fear, I don’t want silence because it is the place within where I must release control over my life. Sometimes I’d rather not let go.

In the course of life, I’ve encountered silence in many forms and guises. I’m not referring to the absence of sound in a chamber, the dead air of nothingness in an abandoned house. That’s external silence. I’m speaking of internal silence and solitude.

When the cry of the oppressed goes unheeded, I hear silence. When I suppress my outrage at injustice, I hear silence. When I fail to rebut the lies about others, I hear silence. When I rationalize my indifference to the poor, I hear silence. This is the silence of my own evil.

There are also positive forms of silence. When my being is silent, I hear my heart beat; it beats as a rhythmic organ of my body, and it beats with the truth of my being. It’s hard to hear the inner heart when I focus chiefly on my needs. I need solitude to hear the small quiet voice of my conscience. Within deep silence, it’s possible to let go of external things and see myself as I am with greater clarity. This is the silence feared by dictators, totalitarians, and oppressors. It is the silence outside the claims of state and ideology. Our inner silence isn’t and can’t be under external control unless we permit it.

I’m an introvert who hungers for silence and solitude. Both are sources of my energy and direction. My extroverted friends find their energy and direction through associating with others. Their sense of silence and solitude differs from mine. American culture treats extroversion as ideal, a social good. Our extroverted society often treats introverts as asocial, and reacts to our and solitude with suspicion because they believe the silent, solitary ones are hiding something. We aren’t hiding anything—we are being ourselves.

Thomas Merton mediated on silence and solitude. In The Wisdom of the Desert, he wrote of the early Coptic Christian monks—the Desert Fathers—who “…sought most of all … their own true self…” He elaborated this theme succinctly in his meditation, Thoughts in Solitude: “The solitary life, being silent, clears away the smoke-screen of words that man has laid down between his mind and things. In solitude we remain face to face with the naked being of things.”

For this, we need silence. Silence is the soul of solitude, it is the fullness of sound where listening is more potent than hearing. In silence, I hear the voice of my being, my true self. In silence, I know I am more than the persona reflected for the benefit of others. My silence, your silence, they are a presence, a tangible yet invisible attribute we share with the entire cosmos. Our inner silence possesses weight and gravity that anchors us inside ourselves. We all feel the silence at times. It is the ground of our being.