Cornfield Soul

School chairs not only ones in which we learn

2005-06-15T11:46:00.000-07:00

Tom Savage, my barber, died a year ago this week. Cancer got the better of him.

Tom wasn't my barber for very long, only about a year-and-a-half, but I saw pictures of his cabin ravaged by a summer windstorm and then pictures of it rebuilt. We discussed county politics, exchanged the details of family histories and vacations. It may not sound like much, but my disappointment that he won't cut my hair again is a testament to the unspoken bond that develops between a man and his barber.

Indeed, after I discovered Tom no longer was in business, I procrastinated on getting a haircut for three weeks. My wife finally dragged me into one of those new fast-food hairstylist chains. You know the place, one where the unnatural sharpness of florescent light bears upon you as a girl barely out of her teens (or a middle-aged woman wishing she were in her teens) bounces around with a scissors to the beat of some technopop dance track, a song made with synthesizers instead of actual musical instruments.

The stylists' talk of pregnancy and who is the cutest guy on the soaps wasn't inherently wrong in itself, but for me it was an alien world. I might as well have plopped down on Venus without a spacesuit; the place was suffocating.

For you see, like Samson, a man cannot let just anyone cut his hair.

Part of a boy's education about what it means to be a man comes when sitting in a barber's chair. A wise man knows that through adulthood a part of him always remains a boy; the monthly visit to one's barber is like checking the compass to make sure you're still on course.

• • •

My first barber, Jim, didn't much like me. I was only two and couldn't sit still in the chair. One warm summer night, when the men stepped outside for a reprieve to en-joy the sunset, I remained in the chair, the sheet draped over me pinching tight at the neck.

Growing bored, I began spinning around in the barber's chair as fast as I could just to see how much speed might be built up and to discover how much time would pass before I got dizzy. The men came in while was doing this, and I was scolded thoroughly.

Every visit after that, though, Jim always gave me three or four quick spins around the chair if I sat still while he cut my hair.

When I was six, my parents moved. Like a dog passed on to a new owner, my dad needed a while to take to Herb, our new barber. One month, Dad and I even trekked back to Jim's for a haircut.

But Herb remained my barber for nearly 12 years. And in his shop, as I waited for him to finish the haircuts of my dad and the other men, I first learned of newspapers. Though Herb's magazine stack contained the previous year's issues of outdoors magazines and a tattered copy of "Tom Sawyer," he always had that day's metro paper on hand.

Through that paper, I discovered there was a greater world out there than the small farm and village that was my home. The outside world, I also learned, was one full of deceit and violence. Yet, as I read of astronauts who might die in space, of a president lying to us and of boys not much younger than my father dying in a distant jungle, I always could look up and amid the warmth of Herb's water radiator, the heavy scent of Brylcreem and the men's talk of family and friends feel comforted.

• • •

My next barber, Norb, is my favorite of them all. Perhaps that's because he was my barber during college, those uncertain years when a boy breaks from the tether of his parents. Amid the headiness of new, fantastic opportunities that a boy realizes, accepting the responsibilities of career, wife and family is more frightening yet as essential to his existence than anything he's faced before.

Norb always was fond of telling how he cut the hair of both John F. and Robert Kennedy. While each Kenn-edy ran for president in 1960 and 1968, they stopped in my college town of River Falls, Wis., for a rally. John entered Norb's shop mainly for the photo op. But when Norb was done with him in the chair, John announced it was the best haircut he'd ever received.

When John left the shop, a secret service man told Norb that the senator had never said that before to any barber.

John must have meant it. Eight years later, when Robert was in town, he stopped into Norb's shop and told him his older brother, John, had recommended him for a haircut.

That's quite a tribute to Norb in more ways than one. Norb, you see, was an officer in the county Republican Party.

• • •

Norb also liked to tell allegories. More than once I read between the lines and used his advice. The one time I didn't follow it, though, I broke up with a girl I'd been dating for a year-and-a-half.

After I got my first job, I'd still drive past 30 miles of cornfields once a month just to have Norb cut my hair. And, even though I lived in such far off places as New Mexico, whenever traveling home to visit my parents I'd be sure to block out time to get to River Falls, just to have Norb cut my hair.

Norb is retired these days. Herb died about eight years ago of cancer. Jim passed away from the earth before I'd even entered adulthood. I bid them, and Tom Savage, all adieu.

And in the meantime, like many of Tom's former customers, I'll be letting my hair grow a little longer for awhile.

(originally published June 15, 2003)

Getting your knees in the dirt for strawberry picking yields more than brimming pail

2005-06-13T15:29:00.000-07:00

June offers a great treasure for those feeling disconnected in our asphalt-laden, electronicized world: berry picking. There is nothing quite like getting your knees into the dirt and picking strawberries yourself.

All begins well; you've turned picking into a family event, which your grandparents view as a nostalgic excursion and readily join. The day you select is a perfect June morning of clear blue skies and a gentle breeze. Ice cream pails swing in your hands.

Long rows of plants full of bright berries greet you. Kneeling at the first plant, the plump and fleshy strawberries, all of the most vibrant red you've ever seen, surprise you. You can't help but eat the first dozen berries picked.

But the knees soon strain as you pick in silence. The sun burns your bare arms and neck (now you understand why your grandparents wore long-sleeve shirts and hats despite the heat), and your back brims with pain.

About this time, you start appreciating that modern technology can bring berries from Mexico to anywhere on the globe any time of the year. But this is cheaper than the grocery store, you tell yourself. More important, the supermarket won't let you eat the pickings.

So you go back to work, and as the pail fills, the soreness in your back becomes oddly bearable. The sun rises higher in the sky; bluebirds fly overhead. You're thinking strawberry shortcake tonight.

The pail fills, and you turn back. You can't believe how much field you've covered, that you've been picking this long, that your fingers are so stained from berry juice.

Joining you, your grandparents break into a friendly argument over which is better, freezer jam or cooked preserves; Grandpa argues for jam's fresh taste, Grandma for preserves' low sugar content. Privately, you've got to side with your grandfather on this one.

And then you smile. Raspberries come in July.

(originally published June 13, 2004)

Finding moral roots in a strawberry patch

2005-06-12T05:04:00.000-07:00

U-pick berry operations are on the decline as people increasingly shift away from their agricultural past. It's much more convenient to buy some little wooden baskets or cardboard crates of berries already plucked by someone else.

For convenience and even Midwestern thrift, I do that myself. But every June in those days when I was growing up on the farm, my neighbor Bill Bertram would go pick his own strawberries.

I couldn't understand why. But then the other day as hiking along a lush river, I found a rare wild strawberry plant, its fruit as red and fat as a thumb that's been hit by a hammer and weighing heavy on the bush. As the heat of sun warmed my cheek, I delicately turned the fruit over in my hand and started thinking of it plopped atop shortcake or ice cream, crushed into jam spread across toast and stuffed with dozens of others in a warm pie. Had I a little sugar to sprinkle atop the berry, I might very well have plucked and eaten it.

***

Finding a wild strawberry is whole different matter from working your way through a patch in the blazing sun and humidity, though. Even Bill said getting to the patch during the early morning, when the air remained cool and the sun hadn't fully ascended in the east, was best.

Still, he usually got a child-like glimmer in his eyes whenever talking of strawberry picking, as if somehow getting in the dirt again was like regaining his innocence. No, it wasn't his innocence so much as his sense of wonder and discovery, which also runs deep in our human roots.

After all, we need to question and experiment to survive.

***

One of the great discoveries of those growing strawberries in Iowa is that our berries tend to be sweeter than those from the West or South. Blame it on our extremes in temperatures. Strawberries prefer moderate temps that don't hover far from the 60s.

Our extremes also make for better berry picking. Some u-pick operations spread corn stalks and mulch around the plants to survive winter, which in summer keep our shoes from sinking into the wet dirt.

Plucking strawberries, like staying on the straight and narrow, is no easy task, Bill always said, but it's worth it.

***

So many of our morals and values derive from agricultural societies that existed for millennia. Some ponder why modern man has turned his back on those beliefs.

I'd suggest it's not the devil's work but a cultural shift. Not so long ago, most Americans and Europeans worked on farms; these days, farmers are a small minority of the population.

So what happens when we turn from the soil and the barn to the asphalt and the office? What happens when our hands do not raise and can the food we consume but instead labor in other endeavors so that we don't know how milk comes to be in a plastic jug or peas in a tin can? Can the phrase "milk and honey" mean as much when one never has to worry about its availability?

This weekend, I'm heading to a strawberry patch to find out.

(originally published June 12, 2005)

Brothers, truth, community pride and your courthouse

2005-06-08T11:32:00.000-07:00

His chest tightening, my brother gaped at the county courthouse as we drove past. "That's where they take you, when you've been bad, and decide how long you'll stay in prison," I whispered to him. He was five and I just old enough to know enjoying seeing him afraid was wrong.

He gulped. "What kind of bad things?"

"Stealing, fighting, killing others." A team of sheriff's deputies escorted a prisoner in an orange jumpsuit, shackles and handcuffs toward the courthouse. "Say, didn't you steal a couple of cookies last night even though mom told you to stay out of them?"

His eyes widened. "You won't tell anyone, will you?"

I nudged his side with my elbow. "Don't worry - I'd never do anything mean like that. Not to my brother."

• • •

The county courthouse we passed was not unlike those found across Iowa or any other Midwestern state: At the center of a town square, fronted by a flagpole and statue of a Civil War hero, the building of neoclassical design with tower in the center and columns at the front.

Entering the courthouse usually meant taking a stairs to reach the "first floor." Inside, you'd find murals and mosaic tiles and a rotunda.

That courthouses - such stodgy designs by today's standards - were built to be imposing was no accident. They signaled the power of law and of government by the people. The records they held were marks of the truth, committed to paper for all eternity. A courthouse was the community's pride.

Most Iowa counties have built three generations of courthouses. Johnson County is no different. Our earliest pioneers constructed Iowa City's first courthouse two-stories high and out of brick; it burned to the ground in 1856. The county erected a brick replacement the following year, but it was condemned in 1899. James Rowson and Son assembled the existing courthouse for $135,000; a dedication ceremony, featuring bands, balloons and a parade, was held 102 years ago today for it.

• • •

Courthouses were so important to a community's self-worth that brother often fought brother for the right to locate it in a town.

Consider Hardin County. In 1853, the village of Eldora was named county seat. But the neighboring town of Steamboat Rock thought the courthouse should be placed within its borders and forced a countywide vote on the matter. Steamboat Rock lost.

The next year, the village of Berlin also got a countywide vote to move the courthouse there. Berlin lost, too.

But the third time is a charm. When Point Pleasant challenged for courthouse bragging rights in a countywide election the very next year, it won.

After the votes were counted, sealed and delivered to the county courthouse, however, someone broke in and destroyed the ballots. Point Pleasant blamed Eldora residents for trying to usurp the election; Eldora blamed Point Pleasant residents for getting rid of evidence that proved the election had been fixed.

Ten years later, the battle of where to locate the county seat was decided, appropriately enough, in a courthouse. The Iowa Supreme Court named Eldora the winner.

It did not end there, though. Iowa Falls soon offered the county government $32,000 towards a new courthouse if it were built in that village. Eldora residents quickly launched a fund-raising drive and countered with $40,000.

And like so many other decisions in American courthouses, money finally settled the matter. Eldora remains Hardin County's county seat to this day.

• • •

Other communities took a more direct approach in moving their county seat.

When the Sioux County village of Orange City wanted the courthouse but the town of Calliope would not give it up, things got ugly. On Jan. 22, 1872, about 80 bobsleds from Orange City and another town descended upon Calliope. The raiders cut a hole in the log courthouse and hauled the 5,000-pound safe containing all of the county records to Orange City.

An election that November rubber-stamped the heist's results. But Orange City didn't build a courthouse until 30 years later.

• • •

My brother and I first entered a courthouse while on a field trip. We went to a small, rural school; when grades 1-6 got on the bus, there still were empty seats.

He was petrified of going, pondered feigning sickness the day of the trip.

"Don't worry," I told him as we lay in our beds the night before, "they're going to see how long other people who did bad things will go to prison. We're just there to see how it works. They won't know that you're the one who hit the baseball through the living room window."

"Yes," he said sotto voce, "but what if somebody tells them them while we're there?"

• • •

For proof that Big Brother can't happen in America, all one has to do is walk into a courthouse. Presuming understaffed clerks and secretaries had the time, they'd have a difficult go finding a record in the overstuffed storage rooms. Land, marriage, probate and criminal files represent decades of paperwork.

Indeed, courthouse records frequently pose nightmares for genealogists. In the 1800s, courthouse fires often resulted in the loss of records. Sometimes rodents made a mess of now browning paper.

To create a sense of permanence and stability, communities by the early 1900s constructed soaring courthouses out of marble, granite or limestone. Image was important. But such buildings were difficult to heat and suffered awful acoustics. Adding on to them as counties grew often resulted in odd and ugly constructs.

And some counties, desperately needing more space but seeking to save money, built charmless, modern facilities looking more like a hastily constructed community college than symbols of strength. Placed at the edges of town, the only things Iowan about them are the flag out front and the surrounding cornfield.

But we're a mobile society. We don't have time for bobsleds lugging 5,000-pound safes on Interstates 80 or 35. In fact, you can go to prison for doing so.

• • •

When my brother and I got home that evening from the field trip, he whapped me with his book bag.

"What'd you do that for?" I growled.

"You lied to me! The lady at the courthouse said they don't put little kids who take cookies or accidentally break windows into prison!"

And hence the value of the courthouse reared itself once again: With the truth comes power.

(originally published June 8, 2003)

A thing of beauty graces the skies: Our place in this universe

2005-06-06T15:25:00.000-07:00

We've lost something by not having to rise at the crack of dawn to get a head start on the farm chores. We no longer witness the sky's slow shift from indigo to blue as the rising sun lifts night's shadows from the Earth.

On Tuesday, though, many will rediscover dawn's grace as they wake early to watch a rare event: the transit of Venus.

It's been 122 years since the morning star crossed the mighty sun, certainly a once in a lifetime event. Fortun-ately, if grey conceals the heavens, we'll get another chance in 2012. Miss that one, though, and we'll have to wait until the 22nd century.

Iowans will be able to see the last 20 minutes or so of Tueday's transit. Once the entire sun ascends the horizon, look for a tiny black dot upon its lower quarter. Be sure to don welder's glasses.

•••

As the third brightest object in the sky, humanity long has worshiped and been fooled by Venus. The ancient Romans considered her the goddess of love and beauty, adopting many of the Greek myths of Aphrodite.

Venus is a mysterious world thanks to its thick cloud cover, which accounts for her brightness by reflecting a great amount of sunlight. Some thought she might be tropical. Not until the last quarter century did we really understand what she looked like. Despite her allure, she is a hellish world of intense heat and acid rain.

Venus, more correctly, is love gone bad.

•••

The transit ought to re-mind us of our place in the universe. Though Venus will be but a speck upon the sun, its nearness to Earth actually makes the planet appear 30 times larger than it really is compared to our star.

And Venus is Earth's virtual twin in size.

(originally published June 6, 2004)

Lessons in building a load/mow of hay

2005-06-05T06:30:00.000-07:00

By about this time of the year, those farmers who still grow alfalfa have cut their "first crop" of hay.

Learning how to build a load of hay used to be an important lesson in many young boys' lives. As a loader passed over a windrow of cut alfalfa, you'd use a fork to pile up the hay from one end of the wagon to the other then go back and forth over and over again until no more could be piled on. Knowing how to keep a level pile and how to fork the hay to ease the lifting were vital. So was the patience and tenacity to do it in the heat.

It's why corn is a lot more preferable to harvest.

I was born too late for that, though the lessons my dad learned when working the fields with horse and fork were translated to the modern reaping of hay. Though he says I came up with the idea (I always correct him - he taught me), stacking in a hay mow required alternating the bales so for one line the short sides pointed one way then in the next row the other; after laying on level, you'd start on the next, lining the bales in the opposite direction so they interlocked and wouldn't fall on you later.

To have sturdiness later, you've got to spend most of your time on the underlying structure. It's a lost lesson.

(originally published June 5, 2005)

What objects would you want to be remembered by?

2005-06-01T11:40:00.000-07:00

If you could choose just five objects to be remembered by, what would they be?

The question is hardly trivial. Indeed, it's one that many people down the ages have pondered.

After all, the objects with which we surround ourselves tell much about our lives. Since they will outlast us, they may be the best shot at immortality we have.

• • •

An old friend conducting genealogical research recently discovered a photograph of my great-great-great-great grandmother. The photo intrigued me not just because it was the first picture I'd ever seen of Nancy Place but also for the few objects she chose to have set around her.

At her feet is an Irish setter. To her side are two porch chairs, used by her husband and she. To another side is a rocking chair, apparently pulled from the house behind her. Then there is an axe and a hoe, her husband's implements.

The objects form a sort of still life in which she is at the center.

I do not know of any tales about her setter, what she and my great-great-great-great grandfather talked about (if they talked at all) while sitting on those rocking chairs, have no idea what vegetables he took the greatest pleasure in raising. For that, I am the poorer.

But I do know much about what guided them through their days together.

• • •

The picture reminds me of an old painting by the Dutch master Jan Van Eyck, "The Marriage of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami." The painting serves as a wedding portrait of the Italian merchant and his bride, but unlike today's photographs of such events that show only smiling, perfectly groomed faces, it surrounds the couple with several symbolic objects: a carpet and slippers, a rosary on the wall, a little brush beside the bed, fruit on the window sill.

It is as if we are paying a visit to the Arnolfini home.

We learn much about the Arnolfinis through these objects. The fruits on the window ledge stand for fertility and the Renaissance belief in man's fall from Paradise. Discarded shoes signify the sanctity of marriage. Another symbol is St. Margaret, the patron saint of women in childbirth, whose image is carved on a chair back.

Art long has been a way to preserve a bit of our beliefs and personal stories. The pharaohs inside their tombs included elaborate paintings that told of their exploits. Archeologists use them today to create an outline of what life was like thousands of years ago.

• • •

Even today, high school seniors often select a prop that hints at their unique personalities: a basketball for the athlete, a musical instrument for the band student, a hat for the bohemian. Years later, a quick glance at the photograph shows classmates something far more than a youthful face.

Those who understand the power of image and what it connotes are keen to surround themselves or their clients with the appropriate prop and scenery.

Should there be any surprise that during the last presidential election George W. Bush and Al Gore wore virtually the same colored suit, always over a crisp white shirt, brightened only by either a power red or a federal blue tie? Or that those stumping for the new Homeland Security Department did so with an American flag or pictures of firefighters and police officers behind them?

In the age of television and the 15-second sound bite, becoming cynical about such iconography is easy enough.

Yet, we should not fault the image-maker any more than those who respond to such images.

After all, if we were not moved in some way by the pictures of saluting children and amber waves of grain, the image would not have been used.

Self-awareness of what evokes emotion and passion in us may be just as important as the ability to reason through an argument.

• • •

What five objects would you chose to be remembered by?

Most of us make such decisions subconsciously, I suspect.

A columnist from Sioux Rapids recently sent a family snapshot so her photo could run with the op-ed. It showed her, her husband and their two children sitting on a picnic table in a verdant backyard, cornfield and big sky behind them. Her husband, an army reservist, wore his military fatigues. One of the children had the logo of a recent NFL playoff team on his shirt.

It was just a snapshot, a quick family portrait taken with a Polaroid.

Or was it?

• • •

Gazing upon the grainy picture of my great-great-great-great-grandmother, I try to imagine what message she left for me from decades ago.

Was the dog a sign that friendship and loyalty were respected? Is the pair of porch chairs a symbol of fidelity and companionship that comes with marriage? Does the axe and hoe represent their constant struggle with nature to survive? Or perhaps they show the tools one needed to find a balance with nature in order to survive.

And passing the framed pictures of family in my hallway, I wonder what clues to my life and our times those images may hold for my great-great-great-great granddaughter.

I only can hope they offer the right lessons of life, should she choose to look for them.

(originally published June 1, 2003)

Victorians mean more than wealth

2005-05-30T13:33:00.000-07:00

Though built as a sign of opulence, today a Victorian house stands for something far more significant. Indeed, true Victorians were raised more than a century ago, and that they still stand at all says much.

Most of us associate such homes with San Francisco, but they were built all across Iowa and the Midwest as well. Our cities along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers - Keokuk and Council Bluffs most notably come to mind - are dotted with these grand old dames. But they're even here in Iowa City and out in land-locked Fairfield.

These days, lovers of Victorians spend years re-storing them, convert them into beds and breakfasts so the rest of us may indulge ourselves for a night, and seek national historic registry to prevent them from ever being demolished. These efforts arise from a love for those ornate homes with their elaborate floor designs, so different from the simple farmhouses and ranches in which many of us grew up. The whimsical coloring of a Victorian's exterior balances its interior elegance.

Why, calling a Victorian home is like living in a full-scale dollhouse.

•••

What is most remarkable about a Victorian home is its bulwark quality. Oftentimes the mansard tower rises like a castle turret. The walls, often made of redwood, mahogany or the finest oak, remain sturdy.

For frontier Iowa's pioneers, who would patch together a quick shelter out of sod and rough-hewn wood, then a year or two later, once they'd earned a little from their first harvest, would buy lumber and build a slightly more permanent structure, a Victorian must have meant more than wealth, however.

It was a statement against the very forces of nature that caused their log homes to lean, their unshingled cabins to leak, the boards placed across dirt floors to buckle.

Just as a family's plow would split open the earth and force it to bear fruits so they might survive in the continental wilderness, so a Victorian with its foundation permanently planted in the soil signified a mighty great of the elements.

•••

Not too far from the farm where I grew up, a couple of sections away and out near the railroad tracks stood a Victorian house, built back in the 1870s by the son of Mathias Sutherland, our township's first white settler.

For all those years, the stalwart Victorian remained horridly vulnerable amid the unending sky and summer corn. Whenever seeing it, my hair bristled at the thought that it had endured for all those years without a twister's banshee roar toppling it. Sometimes as the school bus paused at the tracks, I'd ponder if perhaps its time was near.

In the late afternoon glow, cold, purple shadows fell across the side of the house askance from the sunlight as the other remained bathed in warmth. It ironically had outlasted even the name of the man who built it. Then the bus would bump over the tracks, passing the old dame, its glass windows steely with shadow and light.

The house still stands to this day.

•••

Victorians came in a variety of styles - Federal, Greek, Gothic and Italianate houses were common in the 1850s. Second Empire, Eastlake, Queen Anne and Neo-Classical styles were popular from the end of the Civil War until the early 1900s.

Often, as is typical of us country bumpkin Americans, we mixed styles, preferring to assert our individualism through preferences and tastes to some pre-ordained sense of aesthetics established by the elites.

Like those pioneers who broke new ground despite the scourge of grasshopper, blizzard and dust storm, that stubborn refusal to yield manifested itself in the very structures that some chose to live.

It is ironic that such homes today are associated with being priggish, prim and even prissy.

(originallypublished May 30, 2004)

Spend a few hours staring at the sky

2005-05-29T14:17:00.000-07:00

The days finally have grown warm enough to gaze for long hours at the sky. Of course, there are amateur astronomers who brave any weather to locate a specific star or galaxy for those few short hours it is visible on a January night, and sometimes I have been among them. But there is a grander and ironically more personal perspective that one gains by taking in the whole sky as it covers the Earth.

Often during childhood we've reclined on a slope and as staring at the clouds above, pondering such questions as what are clouds made of, why do they float and why is the sky blue. Science now offers such answers. Yet, even in adulthood, resting upon a knoll still can raise our sense of wonder.

Here on the Great Plains, we have an added advantage. There are no mountains as out West or high hills like in the East to block our vista. When we gaze upward, the great enormousness of the sky surrounds us, making the stretches of corn hugging the good earth miniscule in comparison.

***

I recommend resting on a knoll during the early morning hours, when the stars still puncture the black sky with light and the moon reigns great and noble over it all. Though right before our eyes, stars remain elusive, out of hand's reach. Even if we could magically grab one, it might not be there. The brightest star, Sirius, is so far away that its light takes 8.5 years to reach us; what we see low on the horizon is how the star looked in 1996. And Sirius is among the closer stars.

Eventually, the stars begin to fade. They're still present; the earth just has turned far enough that our side of the world begins to face the sun. Its glare, every second equal in energy to a year's output of every one of our largest power plants, washes this small planet in ambient light; amid it, we could no more see the stars than we might a firefly in front of a searchlight.

Slowly, as our small section of the world comes to fully face the sun, a red then orange glow covers the horizon. Dawn spreads over the homes of men.

A blend of notes fills the morning sky as life awakens. The smell, too, of the world changes while the dew evaporates.

As the sun rises, burning the hillside, the breeze grows warmer. Life begins to quiet as the heat slows our muscles and the young ones have been fed. We can hear our breathing again.

***

Fair warning: There are those who will say you have wasted time reclining upon that knoll. Such people often are more concerned with money and other man-made fabrications that quantify existence, like a child madly insistent upon naming all objects. How can staring at the sky be measured with green bills in a wallet, electronic blips on a computer screen or pencil marks in a ledger?

Such people spend too much time looking in the wrong direction. As Rachel Carson wrote, "It is a wholesome and necessary thing for us to turn again to the earth and in the contemplation of her beauties to know of wonder and humility."

***

Of course, one cannot contemplate forever. It's best to rise once the sun ascends fully into the sky.

Before doing so, look to the ground beside your head, though. There may be an ant looking up at you from its tiny mound.

Perhaps it has been sitting there all morning, too.

(originally published May 29, 2005)

Planting values, character in the next generation

2005-05-25T13:39:00.000-07:00

Every April, my father with the heel of his workboot dug at the black soil around a cut cornstalk. Kneeling, he'd scoop the upturned dirt into a hand, examine it.

As he opened his palm, the dirt sifted across the air like a swarm of gnats falling to earth. "It's almost ready," he said, "maybe a week off."

Only seven years old, I stared blankly at him.

He motioned for me to come down to his level. "Go ahead, pick up a handful," he said. "Roll it around in your fingers, feel its texture. And remember it. Next week we'll check it again, and you'll see how different the soil is."

And he was right - a week later it was drier yet more pungent. That morning, my father hooked up the plow and started another season of planting.

• • •

Such a scene has been repeated between father and son for thousands of years before it happened to me. The crops were different but feeling the dirt in one's hands always was a necessity for people. It meant the difference between starvation and a bountiful harvest, between boyhood and being a man.

Farmers sometimes relied on other methods to tell when they should plant: a river's depth, the stars' position, an almanac's forecast. In Iowa, farmers waited for the return of golden plover before planting; the hardy little songbird flies 20,000 miles roundtrip from sub-Arctic Canada to Argentina then back again, stopping to rest in Iowa roughly the last week of April.

But that's not always the perfect predictor. As occurred this year in Iowa, rain can turn fields into bogs, delaying planting.

And the later planting comes, the more the anxiety. It means lower yields, a greater chance of crop loss from wind or late summer drought. A late harvest raises the other bookend of threats, such as an early freeze.

But rarely does a farmer ever see a perfect season; it's almost always too wet or too dry somewhere along the way. The moral: Take it day by day, week by week.

• • •

Iowa's earliest farmers planted these crops by hand. They "broadcast" or scattered their seed in the air as walking across the field. It wasn't until the 1870s that quality mechanized planters came to Iowa.

That resulted in surplus crops of wheat, barley, oats and rye. Then in the early 1900s, Iowan scientist Henry A. Wallace developed a variety of hybrid corn. His crop was perfect for the landscape and transformed it.

Raising corn was quite different from raising wheat. Corn had to be planted later in spring and harvested later in fall. It required a new feel for the soil.

Corn also grew best in perfectly aligned rows. Staying on the "straight and narrow" became a matter of pride for farmers.

• • •

Before the days of modern farm machinery, boys learned to plow, plant and harvest when quite young. From a father's point of view, there was no better way to teach his son how to set goals and the value of working hard to reach them.

Such character traits as strict morality with a just sense of obedience, social and public duty gave a man direction to live by. And as with any successful spiritual or political movement, it promised reward for such labor and self-discipline.

Indeed, as the fictional farmer-hero Jurnjakob Swehn says in the 19th century book "Letters of a German American Farmer": "My dear friend ... you see how it all came true for a kid off the sandy land of Hornkaten in Mecklenburg who dreamed of having two herds of cows as he moved out into foreign parts. Now we have plenty of everything, plenty of land and livestock.

"And it all cost plenty of sweat."

• • •

As the number of people growing up on farms declines, such values are not easy to instill in youth. Until a boy experiences the joy of keeping a straight line or knows that life depends on sensing the minute ways dirt can feel in his hands, how could he understand the value of a strict morality?

Yearning for some type of truth, many now turn back to the earth, but not as a farmer does. Instead, they herald nature in its original condition.

Iowa's farmers and their urban descendants were quite thorough in overturning the state's original prairie. Less than 0.1 percent of tallgrass stands remain.

Some of it exists in pioneer cemeteries. The state's first farmers typically picked plots of purple and yellow wildflowers with green grass and flashes of white mint for their final resting places.

There is a certain irony that almost all that remains of the prairie holds the bones of the very people who broke the wide plains into wheat then corn fields.

• • •

These days my father no longer farms, and my livelihood depends upon computer chips and the electronic flow of information.

But every once in a while when taking a walk, I like to kick at the dirt with my foot and scoop up a handful of it, just to see if it's ready for planting.

(originally published May 25, 2003)

Recalling where we came from

2005-05-23T07:40:00.000-07:00

This decade, Iowa technically became more "urban" than "rural." Though the farms have grown fewer and larger, the state at its heart is grange country. And they hardly anymore are the fabled pictures of a red barn, running windmill and a dozen different breeds of animals so often shown in children's books.

There is one constant: Since the first day Adam was condemned to toil the red earth, life on a farm has consisted of extremes. Summers grow so hot that a man's body seems to melt as working while winter numbs exposed skin within seconds. And a few, brief weeks between those seasons often are most vital to success: The soil must be neither too moist nor too dry in spring, and the crop can be neither undergrown nor too ripe in autumn. To the urban passerby who sees a field of ripe corn swaying in the breeze or the farmer's wife lugging a basket of strawberries into the house for hulling, the troubles of those who till the land are well masked.

Ironically, as we migrate to our concrete form of Eden a new extreme is created: modern man's disconnection from the Earth and correspondingly the fount of ideas from which we struggle to make choices today.

(originally published May 23, 2004)

Deciding against preemptive strike on discovered snake

2005-05-22T05:27:00.000-07:00

While hiking along the Iowa River the other day, I decided to cut through grass in need of mowing. The trail formed a U, with the bottom curve washed out.

I only got halfway through the grass when I froze.

A snake, a light stripe running down its brown back, lay half curled like a scythe. I hadn't heard it slithering my way, but as we stared at one another, its whispered "Sssss!" sounded like a thunderclap.

We each stood our ground, a foot apart from the other, it unwilling to take on a creature as large as me, I unwilling to gamble against its speed and neither of us willing to turn our backs on the other.

My heart pounded loud enough that I couldn't hear the wind blowing the grass tops in great swells. The heat of the sun on that otherwise pleasant day only grew as sweat trickled down the back of my neck. I wished for a good hoe.

***

Iowa pioneers killed snakes by the thousands during our state's early years. Throughout May, settlers frequently reported snakes sunning themselves in field furrows or the paths cut through the grass between cabin and road.

Often when pioneers cleared land or went grubbing, a concealed snake would bite. Cows and dogs also were frequent victims. There simply wasn't enough room for snake and man.

While rattlers, blacksnakes, blue racers and the common garter proved too resilient to be wiped out, in time persistent pioneers did significantly reduce their ranges.

***

Sometimes pioneers found bull snakes in their cabins, ironically curled against shelf-laden Bibles. I suspect a few settlers found some cosmological significance in this juxtaposition.

There also are accounts of strapping young farm hands who grew hysterical in the presence of snakes. Such men weren't cowards. Most of us have an instinctual repulsion at the sight of snakes. It runs deep in our evolutionary history, and other primates have the same reaction.

Thanks to the power of reason, we fortunately can overcome - or at least control - our fear. It's a matter of learning about them, of spending time near them, even if they're still on the other side of the glass. We don't have to like snakes, just acknowledge that they're not inherently evil.

After all, while a serpent did tempt in the garden, humanity of its own choosing bit into the apple. Man, not snake, is responsible for our fall.

And the pride that won't let us admit we have no one to blame but ourselves is the most dangerous evil of all.

***

These days, snakes aren't the threat they were in pioneer times. As we've modified the landscape to fit our needs, we've wiped out the habitats many native species required for their prey to thrive; some of them consider our suburban lawns and cornfields great wastelands.

I doubted the snake in the grass before me was poisonous; certainly I'd have heard if a venomous snake were common in the area. And it was only a couple of feet long at best. Still, a black V under its eye that ran to the mouth gave it a sinister appearance, like Darth Vader's mask.

But I had scared this snake just as much as it had me. The notion of striking it with a hoe suddenly seemed as repulsive as the snake itself.

***

The snake and I had to end our standoff, though. My hope was that if I didn't move, it wouldn't be startled and strike.

After a few seconds of waiting for me to attack, it made a fast break into the grass. Perhaps if I would have lived 150 years ago, I'd have come back for it and its brethren with hoe in hand.

But there was no point other than to later pound my chest. After all, it just wanted to be left alone.

(originally published May 22, 2005)

Iowa’s greatest hero offers hope from our imaginations

2005-05-18T19:13:00.000-07:00

This month Iowans celebrate the birthday of our greatest native son - Captain James T. Kirk.

Although yet to be born, Kirk is the first earth commander to successfully reach the edge of the galaxy and return (he did it twice), and the first earth commander to reach the galaxy's center. He successfully repulsed V'Ger, Nomad, the whale probe and the doomsday machine before they reached earth, prevented various potential wars with Romulans, Gorns, Klingons and a variety of other alien races, is the youngest starship captain in history, and is the only cadet to ever beat the "no-win" Kobayashi Maru test (he reprogrammed the test software). He also was involved in 17 different temporal violations, but they all were for the better.

Wait a minute, you say, Captain Kirk was born in March - it says so right on the memorial marker in downtown Riverside!

Well, not so fast. Accord-ing to an archive kept at the University of Manitoba, Andrew Main's detailed analysis of stardates, "Stardates in Star Trek FAQ," argues that Kirk was born May 7 - not March 22 as the Riverside marker records.

And Main should be taken seriously. He's developed software that will help you calculate stardates for any day (http://startrek.dialcom.com.pl/htmls/dg_prog.html).

• • •

I'd sometimes gaze up at the night sky and wonder as a child at the myriad of stars stretching around me. Just what was out there?

Watching Walter Cronkite each night on television tell of war, murder, corruption and disease, I confidently believed there had to be something better. Or at least something different.

And if those worlds were-n't as well off, perhaps we could do for them what we weren't doing here on earth: Helping others improve their lives.

There once was a "Star Trek" episode in which a child sat against a tree watching the night sky, dreaming of starships and adventures as a falling star flashes past. I once was that kid.

Somehow I think Jim Kirk was, too.

• • •

That James T. Kirk should be born in Riverside is fitting. The University of Iowa long ago constructed an observatory near the small village.

Kirk also is an intriguing mixture of this area's political philosophies. He possesses Iowa City's liberal views regarding tolerance, diversity and the Prime Directive (Don't interfere with those cultures less developed than you.). Yet, he frequently acted like the conservatives who make up Iowa's farm country: He had no problem violating the Prime Directive if it meant bringing freedom to op-pressed sentient beings or to prevent a perceived threat to the Federation.

But Kirk's Riverside connection goes deeper than that. There is the isolation of rural life, of being too far away from anyone to talk to. All day long, there is nothing upon the horizon but empty fields and open sky. At night, there is only the solitary light of a distant farmhouse.

But in the starry sky, the lights are many.

• • •

None of the filmed "Star Trek" shows or movies ever indicated Captain Kirk was born in Riverside.

The writer's guide for the original series did say he was from Iowa. And in Star Trek IV (the whale movie, for non-fans), he admitted "I'm from Iowa. I just work in outer space."

Riverside decided to snatch this claim to fame in the 1980s, and now several Star Trek books and the series' official Web site, www. startrek.com, lists Riverside as Kirk's birthplace. The village offers a gate marking his birthplace, and there's a stone monument beyond that.

But nowhere in the series is Captain Kirk's birthdate ever given as March 22. That's actually the birthdate of William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk. But alas - the University of Manitoba archive aside - March 22 has been listed as well on the official Web site as Kirk's birthdate.

• • •

Captain Kirk is by far more a man of our century rather than the 23rd. His personality traits are a humanist version of the cowboy. Kirk is self-disciplined and possesses immense willpower. A man of duty, he won't be intimidated or bullied. He has a sense of right and wrong, is chivalrous and of deep conviction. He is courageous, brave and fearless in the face of imminent danger, a man of honor and of great dignity (indeed, he never sulks or whines about unfair situations). Decisive, he thinks on his feet and is loyal to his friends.

Yet while riding through the stars, he is tolerant, compassionate and merciful. He thinks of others before himself.

And he possesses a wry sense of humor. You'd have to, growing up amid the cornfields and then wandering the stars in the craft that could blow a planet to smithereens.

• • •

So what does Kirk's life tell us of eastern Iowa's future?

It says there still are farms in Iowa even in the 23rd century. When Kirk ad-mits he's from Iowa, he's teasingly called "farm boy." His face turns red. Like many Iowans, he's silently ashamed of his unsophisticated, agricultural heritage.

If Kirk is small town, that means Iowa City's urban sprawl has not yet reached Riverside in 2233. County officials no doubt still are developing the North Cor-ridor 220 years from now.

When 17, Kirk leaves for Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, maintains an apartment there, then retires to the Rockies. His brother, Sam, moves to the planet Deneva. Yes, Iowa still suffers a brain drain problem in the 23rd century.

Kirk also is able to quote everyone from Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence with eloquence. So Iowa still has a darn good education system, too.

• • •

Near the end of Army basic training, I found myself running out of energy at the 40th pushup of our 2-minute P.T. test. To pass, there were an improbable four pushups to go in about 20 seconds.

The drill sergeant leaned into my face. "Not going to make it are you, Bignell?" he said. A sly grin eased across his swarthy face.

My arms strained not to collapse as I thought of the embarrassment I'd be to my fellow soldiers. I imagined my father and brother and uncles shamefully glancing away as I returned home, kicked out of bootcamp. I heard the laughter of every girl who'd turned me down for a date, of every bully who'd mocked me.

Then I thought of Captain Kirk. I knocked out 10 more push-ups before the P.T. sergeant shouted "Time!" through his megaphone.

• • •

May 7 or March 22, what does it matter? As a history professor once proclaimed during a lecture to my freshman class, "The dates mean less than the impact a man has on the world."

Or in this case, is it "will have"?

SIDEBAR: James Kirk Facts

• Name: James T. Kirk

• Serial Number: SC937-0176 CEC

• Date of birth: March 22 (or May 7), 2233

• Place of birth: Riverside, Iowa, Earth

• Heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Captain Garth

(originally published May 18, 2003)

Unintended consequence of the war against silence

2005-05-16T17:32:00.000-07:00

There's a certain peace in hiking to a distant spot amid the woods, or even a field, to a place where the only sound is the wind rustling through oak leaves or corn tassels, accompanied by the quick buzz of a dragonfly on its way to a pond.

Plenty of such locales exist; anyone who says otherwise hasn't spent much time in the Southwest desert, the Rockies or even a roadside in rural Iowa. But such places are becoming increasingly rare. At one time, we could live in a place where other than the shuffle of our feet, the sounds of nature were all that we'd hear for hours on end.

"Soon silence will have passed into legend," sculptor, painter and poet Jean Arp wrote during the early 20th century. "Man has turned his back on silence. Day after day he invents machines and devices that increase noise and distract humanity from the essence of life, contemplation, meditation ... "

•••

We are conducting a war against silence - a quiet, secret war, at that. There are the obvious battleships such as interstate highways and housing developments, but these behemoths ironically can bring their own moments of peace, through the noise-free car and a room of one's own that we would not find if thousands of us were forced to bicycle at the same time to and from cramped apartments.

No, the war against silence runs much deeper than those superficial contentions.

Real noise comes from 24/7 cable television reports full of the power-hungry advocating violence and of angry hosts searching for ratings. It comes from flashing ads and pop-up boxes when we log onto the Inter-net. It looms, like a semi-truck speeding from behind, in elevator and shopping Muzak. It interrupts our sleep and meals with telemarketers' phone calls. It is a flyer stuck to our windshield.

It is anything that distracts us from peace of mind by attracting our attention to the irrelevant and meaningless. Unlike a passing dragonfly, its four thin wings fluttering rapidly as the blue body darts past, noise offers no delight.

•••

While our own silence can be appalling and is all too common, being able to take refuge in a world of quiet for at least a few hours a day is a necessity.

We must, for some time, let ourselves reside in the real rather than the artificial promises cast about in noise.

"What is meant by 'reality'?" Virginia Woolf once mused. "It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road ... now a daffodil in the sun. ... It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech ... (It) is what re-mains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge ..."

•••

Noise's aim is to wear us down. Like Chinese water torture in which a drop is splashed against our heads over and over and over, we are bombarded with distorted objectifications of political thought, Viagra ads and art devoid of purpose except to fill space.

Such detritus soon becomes dangerously addictive. We hunger to know about the next stupid idea "they" came up with, begin to wonder if we somehow are sexually incomplete, soon believe that if a thing challenges our understanding of the world it must in some way be subversive.

But humans are remarkably resilient. We become media savvy, adopt cynicism to ward against the noise.

And that is the unintended consequence of all the clamor: We lose our sense of intimacy with the world around us. The field and patch of woods becomes dull; the dragonfly's lazy wanderings are viewed as a waste of time unworthy of our attention.

In that dark moment, our world grows increasingly small - far smaller than any new street or row of houses ever could make it.

(originally published May 16, 2004)

Where having 'no regrets' can lead us

2005-05-15T15:15:00.000-07:00

Back in fifth-grade, Billy Honecker proudly told the whole class that he had no regrets. Of course, he was young, but all of us felt a little guilty about something. Abbie felt sorry about hitting her sister during an argument. Jimmy apologized for lying to his mother about doing some chore when he hadn't. Wendy wished she'd invited a classmate to her birthday party.

"What a bunch of sorry saps," Billy exclaimed as we sat about our rural school playground, growing a little gray in mood as if we were in a confession booth. "Your little sister probably deserved to be hit," Billy said. "And you didn't get caught telling a little fib, right? And who cares that four-eyed Charlie feels sorry for himself because he didn't get invited?"

He marched off, stood atop a knoll and gazed into the distance, as if to get a better view of the horizon. He reminded me of a bronze statue, that hero standing perfect and cold above everyone else.

As we grow taller and older, I suspect our sense of regret often expands. It covers not jut the bad stuff we know our parents wouldn't be proud of but those poor decisions we made, the ones that left us in a lesser state. I don't mean choices that kept us from landing a better job or ruined a date but those that seemingly protected us but only hurt the ones who love us.

Mom and dad can reprimand us for sibling fights and not doing chores without personally feeling hurt. But leaving out Charlie, just because he's the butt of jokes, would make most parents anxious about the job they'd done.

Jimmy gazed with awe at Billy's apparent strength of will, then watched him descend the knoll and head toward whatever vision he saw in the cornfield. Petals from the schoolyard's magnolia tree fluttered about him in the wind like snow.

I didn't believe Billy, though at the time I couldn't put why into words. Now I know: How could anyone never have regrets, unless he lacked a conscience?

(originally published Sunday, May 15, 2005)

Know your family's past — your future depends on it

2005-05-11T17:06:00.000-07:00

This week marks an important holiday in my household. Syttende Mai - Norway's Independence Day - falls on Saturday.

For my Norwegian wife, about the only holiday of any more importance is Christmas. For me, being mainly of English descent, I shudder at the notion of Norsemen having any freedom whatsoever, I see Vikings storming my ancestors' shores, burning villages and looting churches.

But all of that is in the past. Besides, what's important now is familial bliss.

• • •

Recently, after reading Mark Salzman's novel "The Laughing Sutra," I'm reminded of how important a sense of the past and of family history can be to one's identity. Salzman tells the story of an adopted Chinese boy who has no idea who his biological parents are. With no sense of where he came from, the boy finds himself isolated.

Statements such as "Your grandfather was just like that" lack meaning in a world where habits and behaviors are not definably inherited or learned. This week, that knowledge particularly strikes me as my wife, being adopted, only knows for certain that her heritage is Norwegian.

Understanding the past strengthens our sense of who we are today. Consider Alex Haley's obsessive search for his roots. For Haley, a descendant of slaves, it was a catharsis.

• • •

Indeed, whenever I find a situation before me overwhelming, I invariably think of my Bignell ancestors who first came to the New World. Having suffered through a series of devastating grain crop failures in 1840s England, they loaded a ship with few possessions and no money to forever leave behind the land, family and friends they knew.

On their journey, violent storms whipped across the Atlantic; the youngest children were tied to the ship mists so they would not be blown overboard. Certainly if they could survive that, I can weather whatever life in our convenience-oriented modern times throws at me.

After arriving at a Canadian seaport, my ancestors were content to farm the land for the next five generations, first taking on wheat then cornfields. Despite the disasters that propelled them across an ocean, despite their travails in coming here, they knew what mattered: a piece of land to raise their children and to grow old upon.

Their small pleasures came from family and the satisfaction that their labors would ensure the continuation of that happiness. It's a lesson I always remind myself of whenever my head begins to twitch with the notion that I'm not moving up the corporate ladder quite fast enough.

• • •

The past also can tell something about where we're headed. The present, after all, does not occur in a vacuum. It's predicated on what we did yesterday, last month and the year before.

Our decision to ignore others' feelings about our actions often only leads to tragedy - our failure to predict Sept. 11 or to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict largely is based on viewing the past as a series of dates and facts rather than an ocean of passions and emotion lapping at the shore of the present.

Of course, there also is the biological advantage of knowing one's past: various ailments and diseases often prove hereditary. In my case, each first son of every third Bignell son, for at least the past five generations, has fathered twins (Which I'm told can be quite a bundle). So far, my wife and I have elected not to have children.

Guess which son I am in the family line.

• • •

If you haven't looked at your family's past, you ought to.

Yes, there might be some embarrassments (Everybody's first cousins married one another in the 1800s, OK?), but in those stories also are great tales that hold the secrets of who we are and who we ought to be. Even the most seemingly dull lives carry such truths.

Indeed, my great-great-great grandmother raised 12 children, but on her grave are words about perseverance and loyalty that reach into the 21st century for their wisdom: "Having finished Life's Duty she now steadily rests."

(originally published May 11, 2003)

Combating that cycle of fear-loathing harming us all

2005-05-09T13:21:00.000-07:00

There was something odd about Matthew Fisher, I thought back in second-grade. He was a nice kid, yet nobody really got along with him - except for me.

Matthew possessed a good sense of humor and a boy's love of adventure that turns a cornfield into a jungle. If you dropped your books, he'd kneel and help you gather them together; if you forgot your lunch money, he'd share his fish sticks and cupcake with you.

Maybe it was his darker complexion, jet-black hair and slight squint, I surmised one day, but that didn't make sense. There were classmates with pointy chins, goofy big ears and blackened teeth who had more friends than Matthew.

We most enjoyed playing "Star Trek" together. The jungle gym became our starship. Matthew always wanted the role of Mr. Sulu, which I did consider a little odd but was fine by me so long as I, a Midwestern farm boy, got to play Captain Kirk.

Even in those days of learning basic multiplication and the world's continents, I had a hankering to write. After penning one space adventure, I let Matthew read it, knowing he'd be appreciative. He liked it and asked if I'd write another, this one about Mr. Sulu.

I scratched my head. Why would anybody read about anyone but Captain Kirk?

•••

The original series of "Star Trek" had less to do with swashbuckling and special effects than politics, but there was just enough of the former to lure a kid who didn't know any better. At worst, the messages could be quite overt - about overpopulation, slavery and bush wars - but at its best, the themes were quite subtle.

Most notable was the bridge crew. Sure, an all-American boy from Iowa ran the ship. But surrounding him was an Asian helmsman, a black communications of-ficer, a half-alien science officer, and a Russian (our Cold War enemy!) navigator. On the decks below was a Southern doctor.

Considering this, hanging out with Matthew Fisher hardly was odd to me. On my favorite show, white people and Asians worked together as friends all the time.

•••

Matthew's father had served in Vietnam in the late 1960s and married a woman from Saigon. When his tour of duty was up, she came with him stateside.

How out of place Matthew's mother must have felt in the middle of a small farming community settled generations before by Germans and a couple of Irish families, thousands of miles from her family homeland, from which only bad news spilled nightly out of Walter Cronkkite's anchored reports.

One autumn day in second-grade, a classmate suddenly parted from his friends, who stood behind some low shrubs, and accused Matthew's "people" of killing his uncle. Matthew just remained quiet, his pupils dilating just as did Captain Kirk's crew's when confronted by a monster. He tensed.

"That's stupid," I said. "His dad fought in the Army."

The accusatory boy smirked like a wolf that knows its prey is weakening and said, "He's even worse - a traitor to his own people!" Then the boy walked away, though later in the day some of his friends called me a "gook lover" when the teacher wasn't looking.

•••

A few days ago, I met with members of the University of Iowa's American Sign Language Club to talk about the newspaper. I hadn't felt so uncomfortable in years.

Unbeknownst to me, many of the club's members were deaf. So, the club president said she'd sign. As she did, the majority of the club watched her - not me.

Having participated in de-bate and forensics through high school and college, let me tell you that there is nothing more disconcerting to a public speaker than the audience not making eye contact with you. That sense of being ignored, no matter how much you modulate your voice or gesture or try to make eye contact is disconcerting. I was thrown out of my realm.

And in retrospect, I'm quite glad for that.

They weren't ignoring me, of course. But knowing what it feels like to be the odd man out every once in a while never hurts any of us.

•••

The night before, a new friend of mine walked across the Pentacrest to his classroom, where I was to give a presentation about newspapers and diversity. Hani asked me, "Why do some people have to put others down for their color or religion?"

"Fear," I said, a bit to his surprise.

Rewind back to second grade. After the confrontation with the boy who'd accused him of being a traitor and murderer, Matthew told me he hated him.

And all of these years later, I understand that in truth what was odd about Matthew: He was a boy of good conscience who fell into the trap.

(originally published May 9, 2004)

'May 8' more than a mere brunch for mom

2005-05-08T05:57:00.000-07:00

It's certainly fitting that this year Mother's Day falls on May 8. Today also is the 60th anniversary of VE day, marking the end of war in Europe.

But our story begins many years before, in France.

***

During World War I, a mother of a future Iowa Citian lost three sons when Germany invaded France. But her son-in-law, a member of the Presbyterian clergy, survived two years of frontline battles.

His friend, also a minister, traveled to Tahiti to do missionary work. While there, he wrote a book about the history of the missions on that group of islands.

Perhaps more mothers would have lost sons in the Great War if not for the help of other nations. Tahiti and other French Polynesian colonies sent 1,000 men to defend the Allies. When America joined the war, 2.5 million doughboys landed to the cheers of French.

More than 50,000 American mothers lost their sons in France during 1917-1918.

***

The move to establish Mother's Day as a national holiday in America had been underway for many years before World War I started. President Woodrow Wilson finally proclaimed the second Sunday of May as "Mother's Day" in 1914.

During the 1920s, Mother's Day became a way to honor those women who had lost sons during war. The Society of War Mothers held ceremonies at Arlington National Cemetery that drew large audiences, great leaders and front-page headlines.

***

The Allies' post-war mistakes only fueled German hatred and led to rise of Adolf Hitler. The world soon found itself at war again.

American mothers sent millions of sons and daughters to rescue Western Europe from tyranny. Sixty years ago today in Paris, one French student, who had lost three uncles in the previous war, celebrated the Allied victory at a parade.

When one GI's jeep paused for a second during a procession down the Champs Elysees, that student, Paulene, jumped in.

***

American mothers also sent their children to Tahiti so it would not fall into Japanese hands. Five-thousand Americans established a supply base there in the verdant paradise that the French painter Paul Gauguin had made famous.

***

Paulene eventually married and they migrated to America. They settled in Iowa City, where he taught at the university.

She grew to love Iowa's black soil, which reminded her so much of the dirt from the land where she'd grown up. She grew to love the annual corn crop, which she later wrote of in a poem: "Corn grows green/Corn grows gold (echoing) - gold - gold - gold .../In the silence of the plain/between reflecting groves/it whispers its incredible gospel."

***

By the mid 1970s, Paulene was widowed and retired. She had not become a mother. So she set about traveling the world, seeing all the places she dreamed about as a child back in France.

When arriving in Tahiti, she carried a book, written by her father's friend, and shared it with the local clergy. They celebrated her arrival, showing her around the islands.

And then they asked her if she'd like to adopt a baby.

***

Paulene accepted their offer. She had wanted to adopt a child for some 20 years.

On Easter 1977, she adopted a three-month-old daughter. They returned to Iowa City, where Paulene discovered first-hand what motherhood means.

***

Among Gauguin's paintings of Tahiti are those of a mother and child, in which he captures the warmth and tenderness of their bond amid the lush foliage.

Many of his other works showed the affect of missionaries on the island people.

While living on a stipend from a Parisian art dealer, he died at his home 1,000 miles northeast of Tahiti - on May 8, 1903.

(originally published May 8, 2005)

Moving to find new hope: A new version of an old story

2005-05-04T16:08:00.000-07:00

Only wide swaths of knee-high grass for as far as the eye could see met them.

Upon picking a place to stake a claim, German and Scandinavian immigrants to Iowa usually found just enough wood along the creek to hobble together a cabin. But prairie chickens lived along the tree line, the cow could feed all day on tall grass, and the land ran flat, perfect for growing wheat.

And so Iowa's earliest pioneers began to break the land, turning over the black dirt to the sunshine, making a living in a new country where merchants and government officials often spoke a language they did not know. But out upon those open plains, there was opportunity.

And that meant hope.

• • •

The first time my bride-to-be and I crossed the length of Iowa was on our way to New Mexico for a new job. It was a 28-hour trip to Las Cruces, a town just a few miles from the Mexico-United States border.

Heading through the Plains, the world's dimensions shifted. We were used to Minneapolis skyscrapers and Wisconsin hills that soared 1,200 feet above sea level. As the land flattened, so did the silos into stout granaries. The sky grew big around us.

People still crisscross and head to Iowa to find their fortunes. The direction these years is not from the east or north, though, but the southwest.

During the past 50 years, Iowa's Hispanic population has exploded, growing to more than 60,000 today.

Only Germans - at 115,000 between 1850 and 1900 -arrived at a faster rate and in larger numbers. In Johnson County alone there are more than 2,700 Latinos, nearly twice the number as a decade ago.

The majority come from Mexico.

And they hold untapped wealth. Indeed, during the 2000 presidential primary, candidate George W. Bush released a 60-second Spanish-language radio spot in Iowa aimed at Hispanic voters.

• • •

Like immigrants decades before them, Hispanics ventured to Iowa because they dreamed of something better. Many entered through the Southwest hoping to make enough money so they could return to Mexico and start a small business.

But just as happened 150 years when Welsh immigrants thought they'd earn enough money in mining to make them rich men upon returning to Britain, most Hispanics discovered the United States offered more than better wages. Both groups stayed.

"I find this town, Des Moines, and I said this is the town that I need for my family," Guadalajara-born Jesus Aguayo told The Des Moines Register a couple of years ago. Today, he is an Amer-ican citizen and his daughters attend college.

When William Parker in 1848 built Story County's first cabin, it measured a mere 12 by 14 feet and had neither roof nor floor. Years later, he wrote in a letter of how a year or two he built a better home. "I have now two hundred and thirty acres of land," he added, "all fenced except eleven acres."

• • •

I'd been led to the Southwest by a college friend living in El Paso, Texas, during the recession of the early 1990s. "Send out a couple of resumes," Mark said. "They're desperate down here for people with your skills. And you'll love it in the desert - it's totally alien to the Midwest."

So I sent out a couple of resumes.

A week later on Thursday, I received a call from a man with a thick Spanish accent from New Mexico. He offered to do an interview on the phone. We talked for 45 minutes. He asked if I could start Tuesday.

And so my wife-to-be and I packed a moving van and headed for where the streets have no name.

• • •

For many Hispanics settling in Iowa, language is the greatest barrier. Unlike pioneer times when students learned English by force, schools offer ESL programs to ease the transition. Though beneficial, such classes rarely orient kids toward college.

The children of immigrants always bridge two cultures: At home, they speak Spanish, but at work, in the supermarket, at school, English dominates; in Mexico and with their parents, the world moves at a slower pace, one of "manana," but in the United States, the clock's fast pace rules; south of the border, Monday is Cinco de Mayo, commemorating the 1862 defeat of French invaders, but on the Plains it is a marketing ploy of Tex-Mex restaurants.

So it also was in the desert Southwest - where as much as 65 percent of the population has Mexican roots - this split between two cultures, trying to mix, trying to preserve heritages yet giving up some of the old ways, all so that the future will remain bright.

Our first weekend in New Mexico, Mark took us across the Rio Grande into Juarez. Here was a Third World country less than an afternoon's drive from my home. We watched Mexicans ferry across the river, rowing from dilapidated plaster buildings toward glass skyscrapers that reflected sunlight. Upon reaching the American shore, they scrambled to blend into the cityscape, too many of them for the Border Patrol to capture.

Those who are caught and returned to Mexico usually try again, Mark said.

• • •

I wonder if any of those people we'd seen that day ever made it Iowa. My wife and I eventually did, though New Mexico with its purple mountains rising out of the yellow desert floor was a gorgeous place to live. But Iowa City held the lure of better wages, better hours, better educational institutions - better opportunities.

If any of the Mexicans were successful, they're probably doing what my father did as a young man to save up enough money so he could buy his own farm: working in a meatpacking plant. Hispanics and Asians now dominate the labor forces of Midwestern meatpacking.

It's an industry, ironically, that has come full circle, starting in the early 1900s as an entry-level job for immigrants, rising to a high-wage industrial job for the native-born such as my father, and becoming in the last decade an immigrant job once again.

Today, though, the immigrant to Iowa looks out upon cornfields instead of prairie grass, and very little of the land remains unturned.

But there still is opportunity.

And that means hope.

(originally published May 4, 2003)

Even during peaceful walks at night, we need our points of reference

2005-05-02T14:19:00.000-07:00

As summer nears, the yearning to take a walk at night grows.

For some, there is something disconcerting about stepping into the dark, as if monsters lurk there, waiting to pounce upon us from behind the bushes. But for me, the world at night abounds with peace. A walk into the unknown, after all, is largely a long stretch of quiet, punctuated with an occasional flare of discovery.

I took many such jaunts when I was younger and back on the farm. The evening's warmth always soothed my skin; after several minutes, I'd glance over my shoulder at the farmhouse, seeing its dimness beneath a rising moon, and then turning back to the woods before me, catch the nearby village's glow. I'd shift directions and head for it.

Crossing the alfalfa field, reduced to stubble by last week's haying, my eyes kept a close watch for gopher holes; though excitement at the sudden freedom reverberated through me, I had to maintain discipline so as not to catch my foot and twist an ankle. Crops give the false impression that a field is flat, but it really is quite uneven, as any pickup drive tossing your stomach around while fording one will attest.

Occasionally in the quiet, a squawk and rustle reveals some wild animal. There is a certain danger. Usually, a raccoon or a fox will scurry away, but catch it by surprise while it's dining on carrion and you could be bitten. And, of course, you never want to sneak up on a skunk.

Such alertness sometimes punctured and drained my stamina. Reaching a woodline, I'd rub my face, try to wipe the tiredness from it. Fortunately, a small depression lay beneath one wide oak tree - even in the dark we must have our points of reference.

If I was yawning too much, I'd aim for that and curl in its soft grass. Then I'd gaze up at the stars, watch them flicker as my lids grew heavy and my breathing fell into a lulling rhythm. Then the night softened, as if it were angels' hair.

(originally published May 2, 2004)

Discoveries made during spring walk

2005-05-01T14:52:00.000-07:00

In spring, the brightness of the sun brings to light many strange things that have been buried under the snow and dead grass all winter. Oddly enough, I spotted a butterfly wing the other day in the yellow weeds that lined a fence separating subdivision from cornfield.

The wing's bright orange, bounded by jet black lines, lay punctured on a grass blade, its flitting about in the wind a mockery of once was. How those colors might have remained vibrant so long baffled me, but a thing need not be young to possess vitality.

I turned the blade over to examine the wing, imagined how not so long ago it fluttered and darted about like a court jester amusing and entertaining children; maybe even their pet dog chased after it.

But as with all of us, the time must have come when a cold autumn wind flung the butterfly off course and into the blade. Or perhaps a cruel child caught it, and enthralled with his sudden power plucked the wing, then when bored let the debris go whirling about in the gust until settling in those weeds.

Like a tide, the seasons - and passing generations - advance and retreat, though. Indeed, at one time, a young poet's work is first published, only to become an entry in a dusty old book. Everything eventually waits to be rediscovered.

(originally published May 1, 2005)

The thrill of being an active character in a story

2005-04-27T06:35:00.000-07:00

With apologies to D.B. Weiss.

My torso swung to the side as I jumped out of the bullet's way. Even before a foot touched the floor, I let out one then two shots, each round carefully placed so whether the black-suit ducked or leaped, he was sure to be struck.

Once again my aim did not disappoint. Then, leaning forward, I slid into the elevator, began the descent to the final floor. With several secret documents tucked under my left arm, I wondered what last ploy the counteragents would use to stop me.

Just as my knees passed the ceiling, I saw him pop out of a blue door below. "Wait - wait," I told myself, and then I fired. The bullet struck the overhead lamp, splicing it from the ceiling. As my elevator settled on the ground floor, the glass light struck the counteragent's noggin.

He collapsed in a heap. I sprinted to my red getaway car and once safely inside, swiped the back of a wrist against my brow, mopping away the sweat.

• • •

The above events really did happen. In fact, they occurred several times, usually two or three times a day, during the autumn of 1984.

A college freshman, my summer romance had ended with the promise to stay friends. So rather than moping after class thinking about her, I became Agent 17 at the campus video arcade, playing two or three rounds of Elevator Action, infiltrating building after building, pilfering important files and incapacitating dozens of bad guys.

Exactly what information I stole, who I gathered it for and what impact it had on ending the Cold War never concerned me. What mattered, though, was that for a long while I lost myself in the game.

For when the baddies swarmed about Agent 17, my heart pounded faster. As he scampered down the hallway, my senses remained at the alert for ambushes. When he leaped into that getaway car, a cocky grin slashed across my face.

It was a bank of sensations I only got from "real life" experiences.

And though an avid reader, it was similar to just one book I'd ever opened.

• • •

That tome was "The Monster at the End of the Book." It starred lovable, furry old Grover, the Sesame Street muppet. I got the book in first grade for Christmas and was so enthralled that I forsook opening my other gifts for a second reading.

The plot went something like this: Grover knew there was a monster at the end of the book (That's what the title warned him, anyway). He didn't want you - the reader - to reach the last page, because he didn't want to meet the monster.

So he tried tying the pages together, nailing them shut with boards and even erecting a brick wall as he implored you not to continue to the end of the book. But each time you turned the page, his ropes and boards and walls came crashing down.

Turns out, though, that Grover is the monster at the end of the book.

By bending the conventions of storytelling, the book held an intriguing appeal. Grover had all the speaking parts but really wasn't the narrator. Failing at each page, he wasn't a hero. He acted more like a villain, trying to prevent the reader from reaching the book's end. Indeed, the reader virtually was a character in the story.

Though only the early 1970s, the author of that book was on to something.

• • •

A few short years later, programmers wrote the script for Pong, the first true video game that bounced into America's living rooms. There wasn't much to Pong, though it certainly was more fun (and exhausting) than table tennis.

Part of the thrill came from controlling the blips and dots across the television, itself an enticing device that for little more than two decades forced us to sit mindlessly in front of seemingly amazing moving pictures and laugh tracks. Through television, we could experience other lives - even perfect lives - vicariously. But with Pong, we could control the very pixels that made up those images.

Soon video games evol-ved. There was Asteroids, in which we protected our tiny, triangular spaceship from random polygonal space debris. Then Missile Command in which we protected whole cities from nuclear destruction. And Tank Battle, in which we actively sought and engaged enemy tanks.

Via video games, we weren't just space cowboys or generals but racecar drivers, Luke Skywalker, frogs, even Italian plumbers.

Or in my case, Agent 17.

• • •

My college freshman roommate didn't like video games.

"Why waste your money on them?" he said. "A quarter only gets you three plays. That's how many minutes? Two if you're lucky."

"It's an investment," I said. "Like stocks, you lose a little learning your way around. Pretty soon a quarter goes a whole 30 minutes."

He just grimaced, waved me off. His father ran a potato farm. Unlike cornfields, you can't hide and sneak up on others among squat potato plants. I figure he lacked imagination.

"So what do you do for fun?" I asked.

He pulled a "Choose Your Own Adventure Book" off a shelf. "Read one of these. Now that's fun."

• • •

Visiting my preschool nephew recently, I was struck how he'd grown out of the need to knock over stuff. If I built a house out of his blocks, at 14 months he'd slap it with an open palm and watch the pieces scatter.

Sometimes he smiled as doing this, but mostly a look of utter amazement crossed his face. He couldn't believe the power of his own hand.

Little kids smash things all the time. Psychologists say they're exploring. Specifically, they're coming to understand the concept of cause and effect: If my hand crashes into Object A, then Object A will fall (or even become Objects B, C and D).

Much of our lives are spent attempting to understand cause and effect relationships. As we age, our explorations just become more complex: What happens if I test my parents' rules? How will that cute girl respond if I say or do this? What happens if I smash these two subatomic particles together at accelerated speeds?

• • •

Soon - right after meeting Shelly in English 102, I think - Agent 17 fell into my past. As with most video games, the story line was plot-driven. And like working an assembly line, you can go through the motions only so many times.

No, something more was needed. A writing teacher would say it was character development. All of us enjoy vicariously living out another life, but it doesn't compare to the real thing, in which we learn and grow.

But sometimes it is fun to slip back into that two-dimensional world where I save the world from alien in-vaders and plaster the counteragents with an efficiency that would make even James Bond jealous.

(originally published April 27, 2003)

We're all in a club of connecting

2005-04-25T04:33:00.000-07:00

In the old days - before the 1990s - if you wanted to talk with someone else in the world, shortwave radio was the way to go. "Hams" would sit in basement cubbyholes or dark attic corners and with the turn of a dial and its accompanying whir connect with someone across town or on the opposite side of the world.

Some used Morse code, which required learning a series of slashes and dots then tapping them out over the airwaves.

There still are ham radio operators all over the world and clubs even here in Iowa City. But there are fewer hams. The Internet now connects everyone to 4.8 billion Web sites, and cell phones place a pocketsize personal radio transmitter/receiver in all of our hands.

I remember how people laughed in the early 1970s at the "Star Trek" notion that computers positioned on desks might be linked so we could communicate with another. "Why would anyone want to do that?" one third-grade classmate with her new, popular Toni Tennille haircut asked. "Besides," my teacher chimed, "if you ever want information, there's always a library!"

Today, chat rooms, instant messaging and e-mails abound. I guess more of us are inherently lonely than the popular realize.

•••

During junior high, one of my science teachers was an amateur radio operator.

Wanting to spread the joy of his hobby, he formed a club. I joined. The exoticness of escaping the isolation of all those cornfields surrounding the family farmhouse certainly was a lure for this 13-year-old. It all seemed simple - just learn Morse code so we could pass the operator's license test. Then I'd be off connecting with people all over the world and helping to provide emergency information to regions devastated by hurricanes and tornadoes.

So after school Mr. Purvis brought the club to a school auditorium backroom where the cement walls kept out all of the noise. I'm certain the low cast of light as we sat around a rickety table reminded Mr. Purvis of his own basement ham shack.

I myself liked all of the fuse boxes, piping and wiring lining the walls; it reminded me of a spaceship from science fiction. Besides, the backroom was a place most other students weren't allowed.

And with all of those fuse boxes, piping and wiring lining the walls, there was good reason - the principal soon told Mr. Purvis it was too dangerous of a place for students to be and we'd have to relocate.

•••

Morse code is a learned skill. It's easy enough to memorize by looking at a book, but hearing it is a whole different matter.

I simply couldn't keep up with all of the slashes and dots that Mr. Purvis tapped out. Besides, my parents probably couldn't afford a ham radio anyway, so I sort of dropped out.

Which was easy enough to do because Mr. Purvis just couldn't find the right place to relocate our listening and sending training.

•••

Not that he didn't try to keep us interested in amateur radio. All through high school he'd recruit and rerecruit us into ham radio clubs.

So between ninth and tenth grades I spent time as a hired hand helping our elderly neighbor with haying just to save up money for a shortwave radio.

Mr. Sumner couldn't figure out why I was willing to work so frequently at his farm on top of all those chores there were to do on my father's. Besides, we argued a lot about politics - he was right of Sioux City, but for some reason I kept thinking he'd listen to reason. I suppose he figured the same of me.

I'd discover years later that somehow he whittled out of my father about my saving money to buy a shortwave radio. That impressed Mr. Sumner. In a forerunner to today's National Teach a Child to Save Day, he starting hiring me regularly and even paid a little better.

But he never asked about the shortwave radio I wanted and would buy that Aug-ust. Mr. Purvis never in-quired about us getting our operator's license, either.

Both just were content with providing an opportunity to work hard for a goal.

•••

I didn't listen to ham radio operators on my short wave. Instead, I discovered the BBC, the CBC, Swiss Radio International and Deutsche Welle. Radio Kiev appeared next to the Voice of America on the dial, and there was something intriguing about hearing two entirely opposite versions of the same news event.

It was sort of like listening to Mr. Sumner and my-self argue in the haymow about the intricacies of supporting Iran or Iraq during their war of attrition.

•••

In the end, neither Mr. Sumner nor I were right about either Iran or Iraq. Radio Kiev proved less popular than Voice of America. And computers positioned on desks are more widely used than libraries. It's a far different world that most of us imagined (minus "Star Trek"'s creators, of course).

But constants remain. Most of us long for communication with others like us. We seek connections, which the Internet has made easy to achieve as we trade learning Morse code for Windows.

And we form clubs - sometimes to keep alive an old hobby that kept such dreams of connections going.

(originally published April 25, 2004)

Don't give up what everyone else wants

2005-04-24T07:53:00.000-07:00

Iowa ranks among the least expensive places to vacation in America, according to an AAA report released a few days ago. Fifth lowest to be exact, with the average daily cost of food and lodging for a family of four a mere $189. That places us among such exotic states as Nebraska (a mere $5 a day cheaper than Iowa), North Dakota, Kansas and Oklahoma.

Hawaii, in stark tropical contrast, is the most expensive, at $518 a day.

Of course, Iowa hasn't been a travel destination since the mid 1800s, when we were the frontier. Even Bing Crosby's No. 1 song "Sioux City Sue" didn't help much.

Movies did, however. These days, Iowa's major destinations are the bridges of Madison County and Dyersville's Field of Dreams. This is not to disparage them. They stand as symbols of lost America, monuments to a past that most gave up when relocating to suburbia after World War II (listen to another Crosby hit, "San Fernando Valley").

Indeed, Iowa's biggest destinations are the Amana Colonies and venerable Kinnick Stadium.

What makes Iowa so charming and livable is that we don't have glitzy travel spots.

Which means we get slighted.

***

Iowa native and Midwest Living editor Dan Kaercher agrees. Last summer, he traveled the state and Midwest to find those unique spots others really should see.

"You don't have to go thousands of miles to see stuff," Kaercher told The Associated Press.

Next month, a book about his trip, "Best Of The Midwest: Rediscovering America's Heartland," will hit bookstores. Iowa Public Television plans to highlight Kaercher's trip in several half-hour shows this winter.

Among Kaerchner's Iowa favorites? The Great River Road and fruit pies in small town restaurants. In Chicago, he recommends stopping at the Art Institute to see Iowa native Grant Wood's "American Gothic."

***

Look through any major metro paper's travel section, and you'll eventually read an article about visiting Chicago -- and Hawaii, Orlando, Fla., Las Vegas, Napa Valley, Calif., New York City and Paris. Not Iowa, though.

In fairness, though, Lewis and Clark's travels along Iowa's portion of the Missouri River have received some attention, and The New York Times has given accolades to Iowa City for being, well ... for being like a little piece of the big city in Iowa -- except we're peaceful with much less traffic.

I wonder: Do Iowa City's features stand as symbols of a lost Gotham?

***

From my balcony window on the outskirts of town, I see that the neighbor farmer plowed the middle third of his cornfield this week. Out west of town on the naked fields that stretch from here to Des Moines then beyond to Omaha, Neb., farmers have applied lime and fertilizer, started tilling and planted oats.

It's out there where "real" Iowa rests. And when non-Iowans stop amid those great stretches of farmland, they're really not certain where to go.

Most think the best thing is to hit the interstate and keep going. That's what Mike Martin, the production manager for the musical "Stomp" did when his show recently stopped in Ames. Martin drove two hours north and visited the Spam museum in Minnesota, he told The Olympian (Olympia, Wash.) paper. Then he came back and did the show.

Noted Martin, almost apologetically, "If you're going to see the world, you might as well see it."

***

Martin should have checked with Travelocity, which collected 30,000-plus nominations to compile a state-by-state list of places and events that "... help people try true local flavors," as the travel company's editor-at-large Amy Ziff told the Mason City Globe Gazette last week.

What 10 spots made Iowa's list?

A family-owned hamburger shop, open since 1936, in Ottumwa. The Danish windmill in Elk Horn. Davenport's Community Art Resource Tank, which offers art workspace for beginners. Cantril's Dutchman's Store, a grocery and market like those that existed during the 1940s in all small towns. The Franklin County Fair, which features grandstand events, pioneer farming exhibits, sarsaparilla and homemade ice cream. Gray's Lake Park, where people can canoe, kayak, run, hike and bike. Adel's Sweet Corn Festival. Burlington's 1890s-built Snake Alley, which "Ripley's Believe It or Not" calls the "Crookedest Street in the World." Mt. Vernon's Lincoln Café, described as "familiar and welcoming."

Locally, the Devonian Fossil Gorge made the list. "It's a great place for kids to explore and climb," Travelocity says.

No theme parks and no casinos got mentioned. But good food, friendly service, outdoor activities and historical places did.

Such places, one might say, encapsulate the soul of who we collectively are.

***

None of this is too different from what makes Cape Cod or Wisconsin's Door County so attractive. Of course, they've got an ocean and a Great Lake going for them -- and marketing.

These days, though, many don't want to travel to such places. They're crowded with a lot of traffic. Dissatisfied travelers seek an alternative.

May I suggest Iowa?

(originally published April 24, 2005)

A lamb’s best friend at times of burnt offerings

2005-04-20T13:55:00.000-07:00

Truth is, I only became Jimmy Doyle's friend because of a crush on his sister.

So when he asked me to hang around with him that afternoon at the county fair, I jumped at the chance like a wolf ambushing passing prey. Jimmy and I both were in sixth-grade, but Kathy, she was an eighth-grader.

She showed no interest in fawning over me, though, so I was stuck with him.

The problem was he'd entered the wrong kind of livestock in the fair. Though we lived in dairy country, his father persisted in raising sheep.

I was showing cattle, Holsteins to be specific. But little Jimmy Doyle and his sister Kathy were off in the sheep barn.

• • •

Being of English and Scottish heritage, my ancestors raised sheep and wheat. When they came to America, their interests turned to dairying and cornfields, though they kept an occasional hen house and hog.

One strain of Bignells and Rands went to Australia, however. I have distant sixth cousins, now known only by email, who own large sheep ranches near Perth.

So respect for such creatures probably ran in my blood. Hanging out with Jimmy, I imagined myself operating a large sheep ranch (with Kathy at my side, of course). But such daydreams ended when I tried to figure out how I would break to my father that we were selling all the Holsteins in favor of Hampshire sheep.

• • •

Though there are 300 different varieties, Hampshires are your standard, idealized version of sheep: white with black stocking legs and dark, open faces, utterly mild dispositions. When you see a cartoon sheep or buy a stuffie lamb for Easter, you're getting a Hampshire.

Frankly, I didn't know much about sheep back then. But I laughed when Jimmy tried cracking jokes and was content to sit and talk in that hot, dusty barn while most of his fellow 4-H club members wanted to run around the fairgrounds. If I stayed with him, then Kathy was sure to cross my line of sight.

So I played along whenever Jimmy and his fellow 4-Hers started talking sheep. But ewes, woolcaps, spinning counts - for a kid who'd only thought of lambs in terms of nursery rhymes and something herded by Bible characters, this was all foreign, like going to Italy.

And then they started talking about mutton.

"What's mutton?" I said.

They looked at me like I'd fallen off a large rock.

"You know," Jimmy said, "lamb meat."

"You mean you actually eat those poor things?"

"Sure. In soups and gyros and there's rack of -"

I grimaced. "I thought you just kept them for the wool."

"Well, mainly, but ..."

No buts about it ... Jimmy, his fellow 4-Hers, his family - even sweet, pure Kathy - were lamb killers.

• • •

That people eat old dairy cows too old to milk never crossed my mind as murderous. It was the natural order of things. My father did it without any remorse as did my grandfather and I'm sure my great-grandfather before him.

Perhaps my sudden queasiness came from all those images of lambs as burnt offerings. They are the creature of sacrifice through which sinful men tried to re-claim their innocence. I al-ways envisioned sheep quietly grazing in the field as the lark sang. Then some sinful herder would swoop one up, and though bleating like crazy, it would be tossed upon the coals or butchered with the thrust of a sword.

Lambs are the defenseless of the world. All they're concerned about is eating grass in the pasture.

They stand no chance against the lions of this world.

• • •

In North America, we don't have to worry about lions. But there are coyotes, even in Iowa. Though mal-igned a bit too much, they still will go after spring lambs in pasture.

This was a problem even with the Doyle's flock. So in the late 1970s they bought a pair of expensive Akbash dogs, imported from Turkey. Akbash dogs typically are white, muscular and long-legged, sort of a cross be-tween a mastiff and a hound.

Jimmy took one of the Akbash with him to the fair. He said with some of the sheep missing, it got lonely.

That's because Akbash think they are sheep. When the pups are born and raised in the sheep barn, they literally bond with them. Why? Because the dogs are good, relaxed guests. They're easy for the sheep to accept. But should something threatening appear in the pasture, the dogs' protective instincts kick in.

The Akbash truly are lamb's best friend.

• • •

One of Jimmy's fellow club members started laughing at me. "What kind of sheep farmer is your old man that you don't know what mutton is?" he said.

I swallowed hard, tried to think of a good explanation as Kathy walked away with some ninth-grade boy.

That's when Jimmy kick-ed his friend in the shins. "Shut up," he said. "His father just started raising sheep. They used to have dairy cows."

"Oh," his friend said. "I didn't know."

Jimmy glanced at me, winked.

At that moment, Jimmy and I became the truest of friends for years to come.

SIDEBAR: Iowa’s Sheep Industry

You may be enjoying an Easter ham today, but Iowa plays a significant role in the nation's sheep industry. There are about 250,000 head of sheep and lamb in the state, roughly 4 percent of those in the nation.

Believe it or not, that's ninth best in the country (Texas, California and Wyoming are way out front). The largest concentrations of sheep in Iowa are found around Kalona, Colfax and Manchester, where local sales barns are located.

(originally published April 20, 2003)

Feeling young and easy again, thanks to another man's vision

2005-04-18T06:12:00.000-07:00

My family's old barn, I discovered this Easter, is going in for a makeover. The parents have retired from farming and are selling off bits and pieces of the homestead to suburbanites trying to get back to their country roots.

I half suspected the barn soon would be demolished to make way for another man's castle. The call from my parents breaking the news would be a sad one indeed, I knew. But nostalgia can't stand in the way of progress - or my elderly parents' continued good health, which such land sales ensure. Perhaps a bottle of Scotch ought to be kept for the occasion.

A boy's barn is no trifling matter. As Dylan Thomas wrote in "Fern Hill," "And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns / About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, / In the sun that is young once only, / Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means." The barn is the center of a farm, the place where work is done, where laughter is had, where lessons are learned.

Driving past two new ranch houses on what used to be our farm's cornfields, the stacks of lumber outside the barn first caught my attention. A new door made of fresh oak wood covered the central entry leading into the mow, and the dormers that I'd dumped thousands of hay bales through sported pane glass windows.

"What on earth is going on with the barn?" were my first words upon entering mom and dad's house. Forget the "Hellos" and "It's good to see you."

Our old cow dogs, a little slow from arthritis, followed my dad and I as he showed me what was under way. Someone had bought our barn - and was remodeling it to be their home.

I consider it an apt gift at a holiday of resurrection.

(originally published April 18, 2004)

Closing the time needed to cross those empty spaces

2005-04-17T19:38:00.000-07:00

Iowans didn't learn of the Civil War's start - the April 14, 1861, Fort Sumter attack - until April 18, 1861. Imagine not hearing about the events of Sept. 11, 2001, or that John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, until four days later.

These days, journalists hold vigils near deathbeds, waiting to send the quickest report live via satellite or to post immediately on the Internet. Newsmen must fill the seemingly long gaps between turning points in an event, their broadcasts like a walk across an empty field. Those who tune in only hope to catch the reporter as he's reached a fenceline where his direction must change.

***

Back in Civil War days, three ways of spreading news, gossip and the latest New York City fashions dominated.

It might be carried by foot. This included delivery of the newspaper, a postal letter or simple word of mouth.

Or the news might come via telegraph, which was fairly instant between sender and receiver, but then all of us had to wait for the receiver to distribute the news.

There also was the train, if you were near a station, that is. While not a communication tool, it mechanically quickened how soon that postal letter or word of mouth might travel from one town to the next.

***

Pioneer accounts are filled with the joys of receiving a letter from distant family or an old friend. People poured over newspapers word for word. But newspapers were different then; in small towns across the nation they told of who visited whom for dinner and what each attendee wore at the last elegant ball. It's not that there wasn't "news" to report - it's that other things mattered more than they do now.

Readers simply were trying to fill empty places.

Imagine a life where for most hours of the day the only thing in sight other than family was a field stretching into the horizon. The bleakness must have grown crushing in autumn when only the yellowed stubble showed, then almost unbearable in January as snow gripped the land, the wind lifting ice particles off it as if sand curling a shifting dune. During the day, only the chimney smoke of distant farmhouses offered a break in the expanse; at night, only a pinpoint of light remained.

Those lights might as well have been stars.

***

We couldn't literally close the empty space those fields created, but we decreased the time needed to cross them.

Radio and telephone came first. Though instant in transmission, they remained incomplete - unlike a newspaper or magazine, there are no pictures. But the sound of another's voice carried so clearly across the wind remains comforting yet today.

Television followed a generation later. It offered instant news with pictures. Less than two decades later, cable allowed a wider range of topics to be discussed for more hours of the day. But television is like shouting across the field to a mute - we know he sees and hears us, but there can be no response.

The Internet arrived half a generation after cable. It now instantly brings to audiences those items that are too insignificant for television to cover. It gives all of us megaphones to shout at one another across the field.

***

These days, the speed of communication increases not with every generation but several times intragenerationally.

No less than 10 years ago, readers had to wait a full 24 hours for their newspaper to be updated. As around the clock television threatened to make them obsolete, newspapers even in the smallest Midwest towns created Web sites, updated regularly to bring news to audiences. While that has been going for a few years with wire stories on national, world and sporting events, many papers these days now also provide local news updates every few hours.

What impact does this have upon our lives? Perhaps a society once starved for information has too much of it. But the issue doesn't seem to be quantity so much as quality. We may be bombarded with reports on the latest celebrity murder trial and what someone thinks of 50 Cent's chart topper, but what about the stuff that really matters?

And just what is that stuff?

I pose this test: Would we cross a field to tell someone else about it?

(originally published April 17, 2005)

Looking for someone to be a friend? Go fly a kite

2005-04-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Every time the kid tossed his kite into the air, it'd fly back in his face. Sometimes he'd get lucky, though, and it'd only slam into the ground then somersault to his ankles.

Though laughable in a Charlie Brown sort of fashion, I couldn't help but feel sorry for him. It's not because I was a nice kid, either. I wholeheartedly believed even at 10 that sometimes the best way to grow is by making a mistake; there's no harm in scraping your knee if you learn something from it.

But the kid was taking it on both knees and both elbows, over and over. Having flown kites by myself for some time, I understood what he was going through.

• • •

At 7 a.m., precisely, I'd lay my kite out. There only were a few short minutes before the school bus arrived, so I rushed through a face washing and bowl of Captain Crunch each spring morning, just so my time could be maximized nine hours later - at 4 p.m. - when the day's studies were done and there was just me, the brilliant blue skies and a good breeze.

Not much time remained until dinner; after that, darkness fell. And there was the struggle of getting the kite aloft in the first place.

But once the kite rose in the air, all the trouble was worth it. I'd imagine myself a paraglider, soaring like a bird across the wide earth, the whole horizon before me, riding currents and thermals, the wind my road.

Checking the line, inspecting for tears, ensuring the sticks were securely attached - each morning it put me in the mood for several hours of good, solid daydreaming.

• • •

Tossing a kite into the air and hoping the wind catches it usually leads to disaster.

The trick is to lay the kite lines on the ground. Then at waist level in front of you, hold the line handles parallel to one another. The lines then have to be pulled taut and the kite pushed upward. Jerk the handles back, and the kite rises. Return your hands to the starting position and use quick tugs to help the kite ascend. A smile is guaranteed.

Now just try doing that by yourself.

• • •

But I did, over and over. Usually my father was busy in the machinery shed or with the livestock. My only sibling was six years younger, and he didn't grasp the intricacies of launching a kite. Being on a farm, the nearest neighbor boy near my age lived three miles away.

So it was me alone.

I devised several elaborate schemes. One was to place the kite on two stacked hay bales so when pulling the lines taut the wind would take it. Usually a stick caught on the twine.

Or the kite might be positioned in front of a fan. Plugging in the extension cord while holding the lines taut proved fairly difficult.

A running start also was tried: Push the kite into the air and run from it. Sometimes out on the fresh-tilled cornfield you could outpace the breeze, and the kite would catch an air stream.

Ultimately, though, the real challenge was not to stomp on your kite in frustration when none of those methods worked.

• • •

A lot of kite-flyers are loners, not at heart but by circumstance. One such man was Iowan Samuel Cody. Born in 1867, he soon became the best horseman, roper and marksman around. When no one believed someone from Iowa could posses such skills, he told people he was from Texas.

This created problems whenever he met a Texan. They could hear right through his accent. He soon took to kite flying.

Inventing his own special model, he tried selling it to the British military. A train of them, he said, could lift an observer in a wicker basket, giving a commander the advantage on the battlefield.

The British didn't believe him. But they were impressed with his marksmanship and offered him a job training the troops how to shoot.

He turned down the offer and proceeded to fly across the English Channel in a 13-foot boat drawn by one of his kites. That got their attention. A long and mutually beneficial relationship followed.

In fact, a famous Cody war kite recently was sold at Sotheby's.

• • •

One of the neat things about kites is how they bring people together. In Iowa, Burlington, Mason City, Sac City and Grinnell all hold kite flying festivals or competitions. On the Internet, kite enthusiasts exchange information about the best places to fly kites when they travel to various spots about the globe.

So what on the surface appears to be a solitary activity actually isn't. Making your kite loop and dive may not require another person, but like a jazz soloist improvising, it sounds better when others play along and an audience listens raptly.

Is it any surprise then that jazz greats like Bix Beiderbecke, Glenn Miller and Al Jarreau either hail from or spent formative years in Iowa? An old kite flyer like Samuel Cody would get it.

• • •

Unfortunately, the kid didn't.

So I walked over to him, just said "hi." He whispered "hi" back.

"Hand me your kite," I said.

Perhaps because the kid was a couple of years younger, he did. I set it on the ground, and his eyes got big. Maybe he thought I was going to stomp on it.

"Hold the handles in front of your waist," I said.

As he did, I pulled the lines taut and pushed the kite upward. "Jerk the handles back!" I said, and suddenly the kite was aloft, this yellow diamond gliding across the blue sky.

We looked at each other and smiled.

Will we remember old lessons on journey ahead?

2005-04-11T05:34:00.000-07:00

Though barely rising through the layers of winter's dead brown leaves, its meaning was unmistakable. The cluster of five purple petals marked the first wildflower I'd spotted this year during walks along the Iowa River. Clinging to the slope leading out of the river valley, it meant spring really was here.

Pausing, I kneeled before it. The solitude of a nature hike allows one the luxury of satisfying curiosity.

It smelled sweet, though I could not place exactly what like. Not sugary like a confection, not citric as a bite of fruit, but something ... youthful.

It was the scent of spring itself.

• • •

There may be no better words to describe spring than those from a literary work whose opening lines a high school English teacher made me memorize as graduation approached. I can recall them to this day:

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote

"The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

"And bathed every veyne in swich licour

"Of which vertu engendered is the flour ..."

So begins the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," a seminal English work containing some of the best short stories written. My teacher had the class memorize various sections of the book as Chaucer wrote them in Middle English, a language some 700 years old just different enough from Modern English that we have trouble reading it.

A rough translation in 21st century prose:

During April, whose sweet showers pierce March's dryness to the root and bathe every plant's vein with water, by whose power flowers are produced ...

Somehow, the modern version doesn't sound quite as melodic.

• • •

But the beauty of spring hasn't been reduced any the less for it. There is something invigorating as one steps through the first warm day of April: sunshine caressing the cheek and bare arms, the flashes of green bursting through the ground and across the branches, songbirds cheerfully filling in their old friends of tales from the winter's journey south.

In spring, we also seem to lose our heads. It's a time of falling in love, when the soberness and cabin fever of winter must give way to lighter pursuits.

It's a time of beginnings. Farmers sow their fields with corn seed. Buds slowly unwind into leaves. And wars, too, often are launch-ed in late spring - the crops are in, the rains have ended, weeks of warmth are ahead ... yes, for every metaphorical cliché of spring being the start of life, the season has brought much death and sorrow to humanity as well.

What was it that Pete Seeger once sang? "When will they ever learn?"

• • •

Chaucer's tale is about travelers on a pilgrimage to a holy site in England. It's a common enough occurrence at this time of the year with Easter, Passover and Arba'in converging as they do. For safety - it was the Middles Ages, after all - the pilgrims agree to travel together.

To pass the time, they tell one another stories.

Through the various tales, we learn different lessons. Each is as full of symbolism and morality as a spoiled child's Easter basket is stuffed with candy, your understanding of the world fattens with each passage.

It's a delicious book to read.

• • •

I did not pluck the purple cluster of flowers. There was no need to deny someone else from enjoying them. So long as my memory is strong, its simple beauty and pretty scent remain for me to recall.

I believe the diminutive bloom was a phlox, but I've never really taken the time to learn such things. For some reason no one ever asked me to memorize that. Or perhaps a teacher had required it, and it's just been a long time passing.

A lesson forgotten or missed?

Moving up the trail, I pondered such things. The quiet of a nature hike allows one the luxury of such ruminations of past and present. For "Life," Soren Kierkegaard once said, "must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward."

Perhaps by next spring, more lessons of long ago will be recalled - if only so we may move forward rather than repeat cycles.

(originally published April 11, 2004)

Finding balance at a time when only extremes 'matter'

2005-04-10T09:40:00.000-07:00

These days, some would have us believe that only the extreme catches anyone's attention. Movies and books must be shocking. On television we watch extreme sports and extreme makeovers. The latest computer chip is dubbed "Extreme Edition."

But there's a value in being in the middle, of finding one's balance and center. Sometimes it's just a matter of understanding place.

We've entered such a season. Though buds have barely formed on most trees, the grass has greened, finally vibrant after months of winter's cold blanket. Businesses downtown have propped their doors open, but few have yet turned on the air conditioner.

People walk a bit slower than a month or two ago. There's no need to get out of the cold, but the deep humidity that causes us to fall into slumberous, trancelike steps hasn't arrived.

Sunglasses have replaced the stocking caps and scarves, but sweatshirts haven't quite made it to the back of the closet; we tie them about our waist in case the day should suddenly cool.

The weather deceives us until we step outside. From the window, that light waft in the tree boughs beneath the brilliant blue skies appears to be a warm breeze. But the air remains cool and dry enough that depending on where one stands, the breeze either can soften the sun's intensity or bring a shiver, and sometimes both just minutes apart.

***

Finding balance, though, is more than attaining comfort. It's a matter of livelihood. We've entered that season of planting, when the plows and planters emerge from their sheds. Knowing soil temperature and soil moisture can affect planting depth and spacing. If the soil remains too dry, germination suffers.

It's akin to ideas. Go to one extreme, and no new thoughts flourish.

One might say the same of the harvest. The corn kernel has to be at the right moisture level. Too high, and the corn rots in storage. Too dry, and yields drop from stalk lodging and insect feeding.

Ideas suffer from the same dilemma. The thought not long mulled over quickly grows sour in the public arena. The one kept too long breaks the flow of discussion.

Hamlin Garland, who popularized the term "middle border" to describe Iowa and more broadly the Midwest, possessed a sense of symmetry. Describing how he wrote his first sale in "Boy Life on the Prairie," he noted, "With a resolution to maintain the proper balance of rain and sun, dust and mud, toil and play, I began an article descriptive of an Iowa corn husking, faintly hoping it might please some editor."

An unobtrusive work, it pleased many readers, too.

(originally published April 10, 2005)

Eagles overcome great odds, achieve the magnificent

2005-04-06T14:52:00.000-07:00

Spring's first buds popped along the thin branches of downtown Iowa City's trees last week. Barring a cold snap, it means the days are limited for seeing Iowa's most spectacular aerial show: Our bald eagles.

Oh, they'll still be around this summer. But once leaves spread out from tree tops and ground shrubs, they're difficult to spot.

It's a good weekend to get over to the Mississippi River, maybe Credit Island Park or the Rock Island Arsenal bridge in the Quad Cities.

• • •

The bald eagle, unique to our hemisphere, is apt for the American experience. Recognizing this, Congress chose it as our national symbol in 1782.

But eagles were not always so admired. Ben Franklin preferred the turkey because eagles scavenged, and this didn't seem fitting for a noble nation.

Meanwhile, the eagle, like immigrants facing poverty, dust storms and unchecked contagions, faced great challenges. Massive logging across the East Coast and Midwest destroyed eagle habitats. Hunters decimated remaining populations in search of plumage, to prevent the raptors from preying on chickens and out of a belief that eagles carried small children away.

After World War II, pesticides took their toll. Winter counts of bald eagles during the 1960s averaged less than 4,000 eagles in the lower 48.

• • •

But like the American movie archetype, the eagle is wildlife's Comeback Kid.

After DDT was banned and an endangered species list was created during the 1970s, the population grew fourteen-fold between the Kennedy and Clinton presidencies.

The Midwest drove much of this increase. More heavily wooded Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan now boast nearly a third of all eagle-nesting pairs in the contiguous United States.

Success there and similar local efforts have caused eagles to spread down the Mississippi River corridor.

And though nesting eagles had disappeared from Iowa during the early 1900s, they now can be found in 54 counties, primarily along rivers. There now are about 130 nesting pairs in the state.

• • •

Eagles particularly like Iowa winters.

Congregating along the Mississippi River, which doesn't freeze over, they have a plentiful supply of gizzard shad and other fish. At the annual Eagle Watch in Clinton, 2,500 eagles can be seen during early January.

When winter is mild, eagles roost more readily on inland rivers and lakes, particularly next to reservoirs where fish get knocked dizzy as water shoots through a dam's gates. Red Rock Lake and the Saylorville Dam particularly see nesting pairs.

• • •

Here's what you'll see at any of those spots: An eagle perched on a bare snag hanging over the water or maybe in a tall dead tree on a point of land. For a long while, it gazes at nothing, and then suddenly the bird swoops over the river.

Soaring upon the wind, its high and broad form magnificently circles overhead. If lucky, you'll catch it playing a game of tag with another eagle as they invert themselves to flash talons at one another.

Then, gliding a hundred feet above icy blue water, the eagle's eyes - sharp enough to read the print of this column from a football field away - glances down.

It dives.

A split second before striking the water, the eagle brakes, wings ablaze, casting a broad shadow over the waves, and the readied talons snatch a fish. In another instant, the eagle jets upward to rejoin the thermals. It circles back to a nest.

• • •

Eagles are creatures of the hearth. Each year, eagle pairs return to the same nest, repairing and expanding it.

In Iowa, the largest eagle nest on record was 10 feet wide, 20 feet deep and weighed two tons. The pair who created it weighed a mere 9 to 16 pounds.

They overcame great odds and achieved the magnificent.

(originally published April 4, 2004)

Saving season, years more important than an hour

2005-04-05T12:16:00.000-07:00

The oddest thing happened last night: An hour disappeared from our lives.

If like most others across Iowa this morning, you're groggily trying to rectify why the VCR clock and your wristwatch say 9 a.m. even though the sun is higher in the sky than it should be at that time of the day.

Don't worry. After a couple of months, you'll adjust.

Or if you're like Chuck and Irwin, two bachelor farmer brothers who lived up the road from where I grew up, you just ignore the whole ordeal. From their point of view, the cows didn't practice daylight-saving time, so why should they?

• • •

Once a week, Chuck and Irwin would go into town. They'd sit on a bench in front of the café, a half a foot apart, Chuck wearing a beaten seed cap, Irwin a new one, both of them dressed in denim, work boots and gray hair. Though breathing in heavily punctuated wheezes, they smelled surprisingly clean in their button shirts, pen and notepad sticking from front breast pockets, as if they'd dressed up for the occasion. Still, their eyes always struck me as sullen, as if wondering what kind of cruel joke life had played on them.

They talked of people leaving town, of corn prices, of girls they knew long ago, of the general doom befalling our small town and the Midwest. Sometimes, one would rise and buy the other a soda; typically they took turns doing so, but neither spoke of any formal arrangements toward this end. Should one fall behind a week, though, it was sure to cause the slighted party to privately complain about the other being cheap.

For them, time didn't mean too much, unless it cost money or honor.

• • •

Daylight-saving time is a very old idea, so that Chuck and Irwin didn't follow it always struck me as curious.

The notion of skipping an hour began in the United States during World War I, mainly to save fuel by reducing the hours we'd need to use artificial light. Some states and communities observed daylight-saving time between the wars, but most dropped it like a jug of wood alcohol in a Prohibition police raid. Of course, during World War II rationing occurred once more, and so it was reinstituted nationally.

Chuck and Irwin grew up during World War II, so I figured daylight-saving time would be ingrained in them, just as my great aunt, raised in the Depression, always patched clothes even though her husband had a high-paying job as an electrician.

As the cliché goes, old habits are hard to break.

• • •

Apparently, Chuck and Irwin had decided daylight-saving time was a bad habit that they'd resolved to quit.

It just didn't match the rhythms of their lives.

Unlike city life, which re-volves around the artificiality of the clock, farm life - for a couple of bachelor brothers, anyway - followed the seasons. The increasing daylight of spring meant planting. The warm, long hours of summer were for cultivating and repairing. The weakening sunlight of fall meant harvesting. And the cold, dark hours of winter were for catching up on one's rest.

Perhaps that was why Chuck and Irwin never complained about Leap Year: It made sense to them.

But ask them about daylight-saving time, and they'd tell you it was worse than those crooked politicians sitting at the statehouse because of bought-off votes.

In fact, they added, the Russians practiced daylight-saving time. Khrushchev needed to improve productivity one year, they said, so he adopted daylight-saving time and moved the clock back an hour - at 5 p.m. when workers' shifts would have ended.

And true to their Amer-ican spirit, if you looked at a clock in Chuck and Irwin's house from April through October, it was an hour be-hind.

• • •

But old Chuck and Irwin may have been on to something.

A University of British Columbia study done about a decade ago found that traffic accidents rise by 8 percent the Monday after clocks spring ahead. That lost hour of sleep makes a difference.

Though it's only anecdotal evidence, during my first years as a reporter on the police beat, the number of traffic accidents I wrote about the week after we changed our clocks in April did indeed increase.

And I'd thought my editor was nuts when he first told me to come in a half-hour early the Monday after we sprang forward.

• • •

These days, Chuck and Irwin no longer farm. Chuck sits in a nursing home, and Irwin passed away a couple of winters back.

Myself, I haven't been back to the farm in a few seasons, but this Easter plan to return. I'm hoping the weather will be warm, so I can take my four-year-old nephew for a walk, show him all the trees I used to climb, give him some tips on how best to see the pheasants that nest at a sparse end of the woodlot.

I'd also like to pause for a minute in the cornfield's stubble, gaze off at the horizon where Chuck and Irwin used to live, and imagine their cows still grazing in the pasture even though every other farmer on the hill already had herded theirs into the barn for milking.

And I'll also take a second to ponder how it is that the years so easily disappear from our lives.

(originally published April 5, 2003)

Deadly tornadoes challenge our strength of will

2005-03-30T13:05:00.000-08:00

Now is the time to get ready for 7:30 p.m. June 9.

That's the midpoint of Iowa's tornado season, which begins this week. Though tornadoes have been recorded for every month in Iowa, their numbers pick up in April as currents of warm and cool air clash across the spring prairie. During the last 102 years, the month of May has seen 593 tornadoes and June 639; the number slips in July to less than half that number.

Tornadoes also like to strike in the early evening. Half of all recorded tornadoes occur between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m.

But tornadoes are more than numbers, even in this day of advanced warning systems and buildings constructed from steel. For as the sky grows deathly green and utterly still, we always glance upward, our hearts beating as we wonder what the next few minutes hold.

It's a moment when we realize we're not entirely in control of our fate.

• • •

Survivors of the 1882 Grinnell tornado, the state's second deadliest twister, recalled the beginning of their storm with vivid detail.

"An hour or more before sunset, the northern sky was hung with conical, downward-pointing clouds, the like of which none of us had ever seen," the local newspaper wrote a few days following the June 17 storm. "After sunset, and even after darkness was gathering, the western sky half way to the zenith was lurid and brilliant and unearthly - an ominous sight which fascinated while it filled one with ill-dread.

"Almost ere the brilliant apparition in the west had disappeared the storm broke. It was accompanied with a roaring like thunder, or perhaps more like rumbling of a dozen heavy freight trains. Chimneys, trees, houses, barns began to fly like leaves. People took to their cellars."

A hundred people died in the storm.

• • •

These days, death from a tornado occurs about once every other year in Iowa. Armed with radios and televisions and storm sirens, people usually can find cover quickly enough.

But sometimes the tornado still surprises us.

Not so long ago, on May 15, 1968, a Charles City woman went to pick up her husband at work. As she reached his parking lot, a man jumped into her car and hollered that she was driving right into a tornado.

Looking up, she saw only a massive black wave roaring toward her.

It was an F5 tornado, the "finger of the God," twisters that are blocks-wide with speeds topping 260 miles per hour.

The tornado lifted her car 15 feet into the air and held it suspended there for several terrifying seconds before setting it back down. Though none of the windows were broken, all four tires had popped. Thirteen people died in the storm, the last time an F5 struck Iowa.

Today, people in Charles City regard the tornado with a tinge of gallows humor. They have to - the twister damaged all of the town's churches but left the bars unscathed.

• • •

Fate has a way of catching us in its whirlwind. We can resist it for a while, but eat the right foods, avoid cigarettes or exercise regularly and the cancer gene's tidal forces still will swirl us away. Or an accident blasts our loved ones and us un-awares, reminding us that we cannot escape. But resistance remains important. Without it, there is no ad-vancement, no progress, only resignation. And without hope, we no longer are human.

• • •

The deadliest twister Io-wa ever saw occurred more than 140 years ago: the Comanche tornado of June 3, 1860.

It tore half way across the state, starting at 2 p.m., not ending until after midnight, sometimes rising into the air and sparing entire towns as it did with Cedar Rapids, but still killing 134 people in its path.

South of Eldora, the tornado utterly destroyed two homes. As one newspaper of the time reported, "The very corn growing in the fields is torn out by the roots, and the ground looks as though the locusts of Egypt had made a devouring march through the country."

The carcasses of livestock lay strewn across the field. A mother died, and two children were so crushed that their features were beyond recognition.

"To look at the ruins of the two houses," the newspaper reported, "one would suppose that it was an utter impossibility for a single individual to escape a certain and terrible death."

And yet, out of 13 people who were inside, seven lived.

They mourned the loss of their loved ones. And they picked up the debris and rebuilt their homes.

They had to. It was the only way to maintain their dignity and strength.

(originally published March 30, 2003)

What if you spent 70 days a year in a vast wasteland?

2005-03-28T14:32:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I attended a modern art exhibit that featured the same videotape played on a series of televisions, except each set was from a different era. The image on the 1950s black and white appeared blurry, especially along the screen's edges; the early 1960s black and white offered a crisper picture; the late 1960s color set returned to the blur standard, though not at the edges; the 1970s color eliminated all haziness; the 1980s color set was smaller.

And while seeing each incremental technological ad-vance intrigued me, as noticing the soap opera video playing I couldn't help but think that for the most part, there just isn't much on television worth watching.

•••

That the first color televisions rolled off the assembly line 50 years ago as spring began certainly is ironic. Stuck inside during winter's gray skies and harsh cold, television is almost a meaningful entertainment option. But during spring, when the world comes alive with green grass, flower blooms and even rainbows, there hardly seems a reason to sit inside.

And yet we do. The average American spends 70 entire days out of a year watching television. Seventy days!

Just what are we watching?

•••

What did people do before there was television?

I'm just "young" enough to never have lived in a time when there wasn't television. Sort of like today's infants, who will grow up in a world that always has had the Internet.

Among my parents' prize purchases during my preschool years was their first color television set. Like the rest of America, they were transitioning from black and white to living color. It cost them more than $300, which was a much greater percentage of one's income in 1967 dollars than 2004 dollars.

But the neighbors marveled. Until they got their own - one step above ours.

Not that there was much to watch back then. Just three networks and maybe an independent station, if you were lucky. Then public television hit the airwaves.

And what shows were on? CBS was the hick network in the 1960s with "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres." ABC was the edgy WB of its time, which meant there wasn't anything worth watching. There were a lot of westerns that followed the same plot every week on every program. Ditto for cop shows from the 1970s, then ABC got jiggly with "Charlie's Angels."

•••

Though television still remains a wasteland, I'd never advocate removing it from the home. Major news events - man stepping on the moon, the hostages returning home from Iran, the Challenger explosion, the World Trade Center towers collapsing - all carry more impact in pictures than words, especially if seen live.

And there is exceptional theater, such as PBS's "I, Claudius," or documentaries where the visual imagery better expresses a concept than words, such as Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."

Television even can be a bonding experience between the generations - say parent and child enjoying "A Charlie Brown Christmas Special" together.

•••

But could that 70 days a year in front of the television be more meaningfully spent with family and neighbors?

How many great books have gone unread because television provided an easy, lowest common denominator storyline?

How often have we forsaken a simple walk into the great outdoors, pulling in lungfuls of fresh air as the sun's warmth danced across our skin, and heard songbirds share their tunes as we caught a glimpse of a rabbit or white-tailed deer scurrying into the cornfield or underbrush?

(originally published March 28, 2004)

It's not 'How will the world end?' but 'How will we live today?'

2005-03-27T05:33:00.000-08:00

On this day that Christians around the world celebrate resurrection, I find myself thinking of an old Robert Frost poem, "Fire and Ice." "Some say the world will end in fire,/ Some say in ice," the poem begins, but it's less about apocalypse than the here and now.

What provokes such thoughts is my coming across, as watching the snow fall earlier this week, a picture of a devastating fire in Linn Grove that occurred today in 1911.

You can't see the faces of Linn Grove residents in the picture, but you know there's a sense of stupefaction upon them. It's the way they mull about the smoldering ruins of what were five or six buildings, as if bystanders at a fatal car accident. I imagine them numbed by the destruction and trying to make sense of what happened.

Fire long has been an enemy. Prairie fires frequently swept across Iowa's pioneer farms and settlements. One settler, recalling those early days of our state's history, wrote that families always slept "with one eye open" until winter's first snow.

•••

Perhaps it's the sudden freedom spring's warmth brings that causes us to toss caution to the wind as if it were so many sparks. I remember from childhood a young couple that like so many of their ancestors before them started a farm. As always, it was hard labor, sweat and much sacrifice. But each year the corn grew tall.

One spring, though, the husband began an affair with a woman from a nearby town. Perhaps they were happier together; I know too little to judge them.

But I do know the results. The wife left with the children. The divorce forced the sale of the farm. Many ashes were left.

As Frost wrote, "From what I've tasted of desire/I hold with those who favor fire."

•••

There's a strong argument to be made for the world ending in ice, though.

Iowans living through the Black Blizzard of Jan. 12, 1888, which covered the state and left dozens of people dead, certainly would have thought so. Myra Hamann was 11 when the blizzard hit, and later wrote: "Around 4:30 p.m. the Black Blizzard arrived with unpredicted speed and violence. Enormous amounts of snow and dust, driven by winds up to hurricane velocity, created an instant blackout. The temperature began dipping to subzero marks. The lowest reading for the Hawkeye State stood at 42 degrees below, observers noted. The storm pounded Hohenzollern most of the night, piling snowdrifts estimated at 15 feet deep, which remained until the spring thaws set in.

"The morning of Jan. 13, 1888, brought sunshine and bright blue skies. The wind was calm but the bitter cold held its grip for sometime."

Then there's the famous Armistice Day Storm of 1940. Blinding snow, driven by 50-80 mph winds, covered three entire states. Thousands of pasturing cattle perished in Iowa; 154 people died across the Midwest.

Even today an ice storm minus the winds and snow paralyzes. With so many de-pendent on electricity for heat and clean roads for our groceries, downed power lines and glazed streets can leave us in a condition that's arguably little better than our pioneer ancestors.

•••

Some men never need to leave their houses to destroy themselves. I think of another neighbor from childhood, a bitter elderly man whose only real companion was his farm dog.

He could have his moments of kindness, but most thought it best not to encourage them the few times he did come to town. He might then converse with you, and that inevitably meant listening to his tirade of how Jews controlled the economy, of how African-Americans were parasites on the system.

Most thought it was best to stay out of his way as he moved slowly about, his face perpetually glowering, but I sometimes wonder if that was the wisest choice. As after a blizzard, was it not best to dig out and lend one another a helping hand until warmth returned?

And Frost's poem does conclude, "... I think I know enough of hate/To say that for destruction ice/Is also great/And would suffice."

•••

No, there is nothing ironic about thinking of "Fire and Ice" this last weekend in March.

For today really is less about the past or the end of the world - it's about the rebirth that occurs in our lives when we choose to live with desires in check and with our hate vanquished.

(originally published March 27, 2005)

We can change our world — just ask Iowa’s veterans

2005-03-23T18:38:00.000-08:00

I laugh at those who say a lone person can not change the world.

True, the complexity of world problems is so great that each of us often feel caught in an immense knot that cannot be loosened. And yet, a simple look at any of our family histories will show several ancestors who opted to unravel the string rather than succumb to the tangle.

In my own family are tales of immigration to avoid starvation, of surviving ocean storms, of breaking furrows across an untamed land that has become the most powerful nation on Earth. These stories are not uncommon in any American family. They simply are all too often forgotten.

That perhaps is the strongest argument for learning history - and I don't mean just the dates and politicians' names listed in textbooks. We must know our past to give us strength for the future.

• • •

Iowan shoe salesman William Underhill is one such example. When World War II broke out, Underhill became a bombardier and a member of the 15th Army Air Corps in southern Italy. He flew an incredible 50 missions.

But he tempted fate one too many times. On Underhill's last mission, his crew was shot down behind enemy lines.

He did not give up. With the help of the Polish underground, he avoided capture. After the war, he became chairman of Iowa State University's speech department.

When lost in a hostile, foreign land, he must have learned something about the importance of communication.

• • •

Somehow, despite many different periods of military service, most of my family always missed war. My brother and I, both Army veterans of the 1980s, didn't go to Gulf War I. During the height of the Vietnam War, a drafted uncle instead sat in Korea. The month the Civil War ended, a great-great-great grandfather was conscripted and spent the next several weeks guarding railroad tracks in eastern Kansas.

I am not disappointed by this lack of heroic, wartime military service. Each of us were, in a sense, a victim of time and perhaps good luck.

Many others were not so fortunate.

• • •

Iowa's famous Sullivan Brothers are one such example. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, all five of the Waterloo natives enlisted on the same day. As two of them previously had served in the Navy, they hit the seven seas together; with a little pleading and cajoling, they were assigned to the same ship, the U.S.S. Juneau.

In November 1942, the Juneau went down in the South Pacific. Four of the brothers died in the initial explosion that sunk the ship. The fifth, despite being wounded the night before, made it onto a raft where he survived for five days before succumbing to the ocean waters.

The Navy's notification to Mr. and Mrs. Thomas F. Sullivan that all five of their sons were missing in action has become legendary. Many now incorrectly believe there is a "Sullivan Act" that prevents brothers from serving on the same ship or in the same unit. Congress never has passed such an act, nor has any president ever signed such an executive order.

But the deaths of those five courageous brothers still reverberates in our collective mythology about war.

• • •

The most heroic act many of our ancestors performed was persisting. Their unrelenting labor and simple acts of kindness along the way allowed families, armies and nations to flourish.

I think here of my great uncle, a simple man who served as a foot soldier in Patton's Third Army while it crossed France in 1944-45. Though involved in firefights, he never was injured. He never single-handedly overran any machine gun nests. He never captured 21 Germans with an unloaded pistol.

When asked about the war, he will say his strongest memories are of the shared camaraderie felt with those in his company. The image that stands out the most for him, though, came after his unit helped break through German lines during the Battle of the Bulge. Upon relieving the besieged Americans, he offered his canteen to a soldier who hadn't had fresh water to drink in two days.

My uncle said he will never forget the look of gratitude in that man's eyes as handing the canteen to him.

That look must have made an impact. Years later, he took my orphaned mother into his home and raised her as if she were his own daughter.

And once, as a child while walking along a cornfield with him to see if we could spot pheasants, I called him "grandfather."

• • •

There are many others who touch lives simply through their kindness and their perseverance.

Iowan Ruth Miller was in nurse's training in 1941. Upon finishing, she joined the Army, and throughout the last year of the war in Europe, served just behind the front lines in France and Germany.

Ames native James Bowman volunteered for the Army Air Corps and went on to become a Tuskegee Airman. His service in the African-American corps of fighter pilots helped break down barriers against minorities in the armed services.

Neither Miller nor Bow-man were heroes in the John Wayne sense of the term. But I suspect many men across America were long thankful of Miller's care and many African-Americans looked up to Bowman and his fellow airmen for challenging prejudice.

They made a difference simply by refusing to give in when the knot appeared as if it could not be untied.

They are our truest heroes.

(originally published March 23, 2003)

Iowa’s greatest hero offers hope from our imaginations

2005-03-22T13:42:00.000-08:00

Note: This piece originally was published in May

This month Iowans celebrate the birthday of our greatest native son - Captain James T. Kirk.

Although yet to be born, Kirk is the first earth commander to successfully reach the edge of the galaxy and return (he did it twice), and the first earth commander to reach the galaxy's center. He successfully repulsed V'Ger, Nomad, the whale probe and the doomsday machine before they reached earth, prevented various potential wars with Romulans, Gorns, Klingons and a variety of other alien races, is the youngest starship captain in history, and is the only cadet to ever beat the "no-win" Kobayashi Maru test (he reprogrammed the test software). He also was involved in 17 different temporal violations, but they all were for the better.

Wait a minute, you say, Captain Kirk was born in March - it says so right on the memorial marker in downtown Riverside!

Well, not so fast. According to an archive kept at the University of Manitoba, Andrew Main's detailed analysis of stardates, "Stardates in Star Trek FAQ," argues that Kirk was born May 7 - not March 22 as the Riverside marker records.

And Main should be taken seriously. He's developed software that will help you calculate stardates for any day (http://startrek.dialcom.com.pl/htmls/dg_prog.html).

• • •

I'd sometimes gaze up at the night sky and wonder as a child at the myriad of stars stretching around me. Just what was out there?

Watching Walter Cronkite each night on television tell of war, murder, corruption and disease, I confidently believed there had to be something better. Or at least something different.

And if those worlds weren't as well off, perhaps we could do for them what we weren't doing here on earth: Helping others improve their lives.

There once was a "Star Trek" episode in which a child sat against a tree watching the night sky, dreaming of starships and adventures as a falling star flashes past. I once was that kid.

Somehow I think Jim Kirk was, too.

• • •

That James T. Kirk should be born in Riverside is fitting. The University of Iowa long ago constructed an observatory near the small village.

Kirk also is an intriguing mixture of this area's political philosophies. He possesses Iowa City's liberal views regarding tolerance, diversity and the Prime Directive (Don't interfere with those cultures less developed than you.). Yet, he frequently acted like the conservatives who make up Iowa's farm country: He had no problem violating the Prime Directive if it meant bringing freedom to oppressed sentient beings or to prevent a perceived threat to the Federation.

But Kirk's Riverside connection goes deeper than that. There is the isolation of rural life, of being too far away from anyone to talk to. All day long, there is nothing upon the horizon but empty fields and open sky. At night, there is only the solitary light of a distant farmhouse.

But in the starry sky, the lights are many.

• • •

None of the filmed "Star Trek" shows or movies ever indicated Captain Kirk was born in Riverside.

The writer's guide for the original series did say he was from Iowa. And in Star Trek IV (the whale movie, for non-fans), he admitted "I'm from Iowa. I just work in outer space."

Riverside decided to snatch this claim to fame in the 1980s, and now several Star Trek books and the series' official Web site, www. startrek.com, lists Riverside as Kirk's birthplace. The village offers a gate marking his birthplace, and there's a stone monument beyond that.

But nowhere in the series is Captain Kirk's birthdate ever given as March 22. That's actually the birthdate of William Shatner, the actor who played Kirk. But alas - the University of Manitoba archive aside - March 22 has been listed as well on the official Web site as Kirk's birthdate.

• • •

Captain Kirk is by far more a man of our century rather than the 23rd. His personality traits are a humanist version of the cowboy. Kirk is self-disciplined and possesses immense willpower. A man of duty, he won't be intimidated or bullied. He has a sense of right and wrong, is chivalrous and of deep conviction. He is courageous, brave and fearless in the face of imminent danger, a man of honor and of great dignity (indeed, he never sulks or whines about unfair situations). Decisive, he thinks on his feet and is loyal to his friends.

Yet while riding through the stars, he is tolerant, compassionate and merciful. He thinks of others before himself.

And he possesses a wry sense of humor. You'd have to, growing up amid the cornfields and then wandering the stars in the craft that could blow a planet to smithereens.

• • •

So what does Kirk's life tell us of eastern Iowa's future?

It says there still are farms in Iowa even in the 23rd century. When Kirk admits he's from Iowa, he's teasingly called "farm boy." His face turns red. Like many Iowans, he's silently ashamed of his unsophisticated, agricultural heritage.

If Kirk is small town, that means Iowa City's urban sprawl has not yet reached Riverside in 2233. County officials no doubt still are developing the North Corridor 220 years from now.

When 17, Kirk leaves for Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, maintains an apartment there, then retires to the Rockies. His brother, Sam, moves to the planet Deneva. Yes, Iowa still suffers a brain drain problem in the 23rd century.

Kirk also is able to quote everyone from Shakespeare to D.H. Lawrence with eloquence. So Iowa still has a darn good education system, too.

• • •

Near the end of Army basic training, I found myself running out of energy at the 40th pushup of our 2-minute P.T. test. To pass, there were an improbable four pushups to go in about 20 seconds.

The drill sergeant leaned into my face. "Not going to make it are you, Bignell?" he said. A sly grin eased across his swarthy face.

My arms strained not to collapse as I thought of the embarrassment I'd be to my fellow soldiers. I imagined my father and brother and uncles shamefully glancing away as I returned home, kicked out of bootcamp. I heard the laughter of every girl who'd turned me down for a date, of every bully who'd mocked me.

Then I thought of Captain Kirk. I knocked out 10 more push-ups before the P.T. sergeant shouted "Time!" through his megaphone.

• • •

May 7 or March 22, what does it matter? As a history professor once proclaimed during a lecture to my freshman class, "The dates mean less than the impact a man has on the world."

Or in this case, is it "will have"?

James Kirk Facts
• Name: James T. Kirk
• Serial Number: SC937-0176 CEC
• Date of birth: March 22 (or May 7), 2233
• Place of birth: Riverside, Iowa, Earth
• Heroes: Abraham Lincoln, Captain Garth

(originally published May 18, 2003)

Iowa offered Laura Ingall's family chance to survive

2005-03-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

There's something about spring that gets me thinking of Laura Ingalls Wilder. Maybe it's the anticipation of blooming wildflowers like those that she and her sisters run through in the opening sequence of "Little House on the Prairie." Or maybe it's that my ancestors settled only a few miles from the house in the big woods that the Ingalls later left, just before the spring thaw.

Mostly we think of Laura living in Walnut Grove, Minn. But she spent time as well in Iowa, near Burr Oak. It's known as her "missing years," because she rarely wrote about that time.

•••

There's good reason for Laura to not have spent any ink on those days. In the summer of 1876, grasshopper plagues wiped out farmers throughout Minnesota. Then the Ingalls' infant boy, Charles Frederick, died.

That fall, as the burr oak leaves yellowed across the Iowa bluff town, the family avoided destitution when a friend offered them a job running the hotel he owned. Ma, Mary and nine-year-old Laura spent most of their time with the daily chores that the hotel demanded - cleaning, cooking, laundering, baby-sitting.

Faced with the financial stress of doctor bills, rent and groceries, the Ingalls sold some of their belongings in Burr Oak. As homesteaders, they'd received free farmland and always had grown or hunted most of their own food.

Crushed by poverty, the excitement of Burr Oak only tormented them. The village served as a major crossroads, with more than 200 covered wagons passing through every day, heading to new lives and opportunities both West and South.

•••

Burr Oak plays a special role, though, in understanding Laura and pioneer times. It's the only one of her childhood homes that remains on its original site.

And in a small brick house, not far from the hotel where the Ingalls toiled, Laura's third sister, Grace, was born the spring after they arrived. Laura's pa, who did not like working in a hotel, became a partner in a grist mill and spent his days grinding crops the farmers brought in from their wheat and corn fields, helping him to earn a few more dollars.

Homesick for the freedom that farm life offered, Charles brought his family back to Walnut Grove soon after.

They'd spent only a year in Iowa. But it allowed them to survive and to regain their footing in an uncertain world.

•••

The Ingalls would return once more to Iowa, again for tragic reasons.

In 1879, after the family had settled in De Smet, S.D., pretty, blonde-haired Mary became severely ill and suffered a stroke. Blindness re-sulted.

Two years later, the Dakota Territory partially paid for Mary to attend the Iowa School for the Blind in Vinton. For meals on the trip there, the Ingalls ate fried blackbirds, which that summer had destroyed the family crops. Laura then worked 12 hours a day for a mere 25 cents basting shirts to help pay her sister's tuition.

Though harsh by today's standards - the 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. school day was rigidly structured and spills during mealtime were met with punishment - many considered the facility progressive. It was co-ed, and corporal punishment was prohibited.

Mary excelled in music and even earned a perfect mark in "deportment," or conduct. But financial strains and bouts with illness hurt Mary's marks and even kept her out of classes for some time. She finally graduated in 1889 at the age of 24.

•••

Laura's life as presented in "Little House on the Prairie" wasn't all that close to reality. A few episodes - the premiere when the Ingalls leave Wisconsin for Kansas and the episode in which she and Almanzo marry - are fairly accurate. But Laura's tales couldn't easily be stretched into 200 hour-long episodes.

Indeed, Laura didn't have a brother named Albert. And when Mary returned from the Iowa School for the Blind, she never married or had a child.

But fictionalization didn't damage the series' value or quality, for the show remain-ed true to the lessons and themes of Laura's books.

Ironically, of the few episodes that recounts a real incident - "The Lord is My Shepherd," about the birth and death of Charles Frederick before the Ingalls come to Iowa - was one Laura chose to never write about.

(originally published March 21, 2004)

When spring's first flower blossoms

2005-03-20T05:14:00.000-08:00

There's something sweet in spying the first spring flower upon a meadow or beside a cornfield as taking a quiet walk. Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with greenhouse-grown flowers. But when the first prairie phlox or April violets with their heart-shaped leaves emerge, we can be certain that gaunt and gray winter is behind us.

And a flower that rises from the Earth's pungent soil, like dawn's first glow or the smile on a face, only brightens its bed of sallow grass.

Close to this time last year while ambling along the Iowa River, I came across spring's first violet. My hand thrust down to pluck it, so I might bring it back to my wife as a token of affection, as a symbol that its beauty and hope re-minded me of her during my walk alone.

But as my fingers curled around the petals' base, I paused, stuck in a minor Hamlet moment.

Pull the flower, I told my-self, and I deny someone else who later might come this way a flash of beauty. Pull the flower, and a bee loses a meal. Pull the flower, and fewer bloom next spring. "Sweets to the sweet" but at whose expense?

Perhaps if it had been a meadow full of blooms rather than a single blossom, the problem would not cause such affliction

But the desire to show affection ran deep, and even my wife had more than once gently advised me to not overthink a situation.

I sighed. If "overthinking" isn't my nature because we do not possess such a thing, I still was perfectly satisfied choosing it as a way of life.

So my hand withdrew, and I walked on, deciding to change my course.

The greenhouse would not be too far out of my way.

(Originally published March 20, 2005, as "A decision when spring's first flower blossoms")

Irish in America offer temperament for all to live by

2005-03-17T16:19:00.000-08:00

There's something special about the Irish in America, which probably explains why so many celebrate St. Patrick's Day as if it were a holiday.

Some say it's a good reason to drink, and if you're going to drink, it might as well be with someone who knows how, like an Irishman. An Irishman would say being Irish is a good reason indeed to drink.

And that fatalistic attitude is what makes the Irish so great. Should it come as any surprise that Murphy's law - "What ever can go wrong will go wrong" - was devised by Murphy and not an Alberti or a Honecker?

Or as playwright Oscar Wilde once wrote: "An Irishman has an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains him through temporary periods of joy."

• • •

The Irish were among the first Europeans in Iowa. During the Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s, entire families came.

A promise of possibility lured many of these immigrants to the frontier. An 1841 edition of the Philadelphia Catholic Herald proclaimed Iowa "The Garden of America" and "The Eldorado of the West," a place where land could be bought for $4 an acre, making frontier life worth the travails.

Over the next several decades, tens of thousands of Irish came to Iowa. They dug lead from mines and plowed the prairie earth into furrows.

And for the mere opportunity to feed themselves, many paid in blood. James Donahoe and his wife, Ann, both born in Ireland, came to Pocahontas County in 1856. Two of their children died from disease. One boy was found shortly after he returned from the grasslands checking traps set to catch prairie chickens.

Such suffering has led the Irish to be a practical people in America. A case in point, this Irish proverb: "A lock is better than suspicion."

• • •

Being of English and Scottish descent, as a kid I got along better with classmates who had Irish surnames than those boasting a German or an Italian heritage. The Yoders and Roccas of my farm town tended to be bullies.

But the Doyles and Quinns had good-natured heads on them that acquiesced to practicality, yet yielded a sense of humor when well-laid plans just didn't work. Or as the sofa pillow little Jimmy Doyle's mother had embroidered said, "A silent mouth is melodious." But then she did have nine kids.

Of course, ethnic stereotypes are merely that; there are many good Germans and Italians and any number of rotten Irishmen. But I like to think there are certain characteristics passed through a family (my wife and my mother both agree that all Bignells are bullheaded, for example). Perhaps there is some quality in my family line that connects well with the kind of Irish families who settled the Midwest.

My great-great-great-great-grandmother, Martha, immigrated to North America from England with her husband, George Bignell Sr. When he died in his early 40s, leaving her with eight children to care for, she remarried within a year. The new husband was Irish. They had six more children and lived four decades together.

What attracted Martha to George also must have attracted her to the Irish immigrant who became her husband. And for better or for worse, part of Martha's genes are mine.

An Irishman would say "for worse," but he'd be grinning as well.

• • •

The Irish had to be tenacious in Iowa.

In 1856, John Rourke, James Maher, Patrick Conlan and other Irish settled in Island Grove, a village in Emmet County. A gang of outlaws lived on Island Grove's southside. Disguised as Indians, they frequently raided the homes of these early Irish settlers. One day, Patrick Conlan was among those from whom goods were stolen.

With only his revolver, he forced them to return his belongings.

The outlaws left the area soon thereafter.

• • •

The Irish ought to be bitter people. Because most practiced Catholicism, they were much reviled in our nation's early, Puritan days.

One fatherless Irish family immigrated to western Iowa during the Civil War from Ireland's County Westmeath. Five young adult children accompanied the mother. As traveling, the oldest son was killed, merely because he was Catholic. After that, at least one of the family members stayed awake at night holding a gun.

More than 150 years later, their family farm still stands in Monroe County, near St. Patrick's Church at Georgetown.

Their tolerance and perseverance is testament to another Irish proverb: "The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind finely."

• • •

This Tuesday in Iowa, the Irish will celebrate their heritage. Some towns, such as Emmetsburg (the self-proclaimed Emerald Isle of Iowa) and Melrose (where street signs boast names like Shamrock, Kerry, Kells and Trinity), plan festivals.

Chances are you'll have little trouble finding someone right here in Johnson County who is Irish with whom to enjoy the day. Nearly 1 in 6 Iowans claim Irish heritage. As little Jimmy Doyle's dad would say, "We're like crows in a cornfield."

So on Tuesday raise a mug to the Irish in Iowa and to then to the Irish everywhere.

And as you do, be sure to repeat this grand old Irish toast: "May the Lord keep you in his hand and never close his fist too tight."

Amen.

(originally published March 16, 2003)

What light bulbs go off when saying a genius' name

2005-03-14T08:53:00.000-08:00

I asked some Iowa Citians buying beauty products this week to say the first thing that came to mind when hearing the words "Albert Einstein." The most common answers:
•Genius
•E=mc2
•Science
•Crazy hair
•Light bulb

All lovers of science are cringing right now. Why? Without question, Albert Einstein is the most influential scientist from the 20th century. His theories of relativity entirely upset the old paradigm, established by Isaac Newton, for understanding the universe. Einstein's theories led to X-rays, microwave ovens and lasers. A letter he wrote to President Roosevelt spurred America to invent the atom bomb, which in turn established us as the ubersuperpower after World War II. To sustain our status, we set foot on the moon as humanity entered the age of space exploration, which has allowed us to better grasp the universe's deepest mysteries.

And yet, very few people understand Einstein's theories or how their ramifications ripple into virtually every aspect of our lives.

Why bring this up on such a pleasant spring morning? Because today in 1879, Einstein was born in Uln, Germany.

•••

During 1905, Einstein published four papers that changed the world. Among them was the "Special Theory of Relativity," which brought a fresh view of space and time to science.

Essentially, Einstein described the behavior of motion for objects when they travel close to or at the speed of light, which is roughly 186,000 miles per second. This is all very difficult for most of us to understand simply because we don't travel that fast. Still, his descriptions hold true for us when we're driving only 75 mph down Interstate 80.

Among those concepts was naming time as the "fourth dimension." Or as Einstein explained, "An attempt at visualizing the Fourth Dimension: Take a point, stretch it into a line, curl it into a circle, twist it into a sphere, and punch through the sphere."

His fourth paper linked energy (E), mass (m) and the speed of light (c), to show that a small amount of matter can be converted into a large amount of energy. This gave birth to the famous formula E=mc(squared). Several years later, he extended his theory to gravity and acceleration.

Einstein certainly was a genius. But he didn't entirely explain how the universe works. If anything, he created all kinds of mind-boggling paradoxes.

For example, how could one twin be several years older than the other? Simply send one sibling on a really fast spaceship and leave the other on Earth. Because time slows as one approaches the speed of light, according to Einstein, when the rocket returns in say 50 years, the twin aboard it will not have aged as much as the twin who stayed on Earth.

•••

Einstein has three major scientific connections to Iowa, so far as I could discover.

First, many health care professionals at the University of Iowa have attended or worked at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine (and vice versa). The college is the Bronx, which boasts concrete rather than dirt and cornfields.

Secondly, Hans Albert Einstein - Albert Einstein's son - is a prominent figure in the mechanics of sediment movement and water flow in alluvial rivers; the Iowa Institute of Hydraulic Research, located on the University of Iowa campus, published a book by Hans' second wife about their life and what it meant to live in the shadow of a father who everyone thought was the smartest man to ever live.

Third, Captain James T. Kirk, who will be born later next week 224 years from now in Riverside, commands a starship that travels faster than light, which violates Einstein's Theory of Relativity. Even as the Enterprise accelerates toward the speed of light, the G-force alone should smush Kirk and crew into the bulkheads like tomatoes.

•••

A lot of Iowans (many of whom were Germans) had crazy hair in 1879. Among the popular styles for wo-men was long braided hair that fell to the thighs. Split curl bangs were a must. Flowers adorned the cut.

Einstein's hair tends to frizz out, as if he'd stuck his finger into a light socket a few minutes ago and gravity was pulling it back down.

Or maybe he just didn't comb it. After all, Einstein remained keen on breaking what he described as "the chains of the merely personal" so that "wishes, hopes, and primitive feelings" wouldn't restrain his intellectual thinking. Simply put, he did not waste time pondering the relative merits of shampoos and conditioners.

•••

Einstein, alas, had nothing to with the light bulb. That was Thomas Edison.

Which brings us full circle.

(originally published March 14, 2004)

When hate seeps into our lives

2005-03-13T08:27:00.000-08:00

At 7 a.m. today, 141 years ago, the weather was fine for a bunch of boys from East central Iowa as they moved out onto the Louisiana river plains. The 24th Iowa Infantry had been gathering for several days with regiments from Ohio and New York, preparing to take Shreveport, Louisiana's capital during the Civil War.

These young men, used to open prairies bearing some of the world's richest soil, found themselves occupying the swampy southern end of that state, with almost nothing but semi-tropical bayous separating them from the gulf. After weeks of fighting their way down the Mississippi River, some leaders assured them this would be the decisive battle to end the war in the Western Theater: The Red River Expedition.

• • •

As the South won early victories, during the summer of 1862 a call went out for Iowans to take up arms. With hot winds at their backs, men from Johnson, Linn, Cedar and three other counties left the wheat and oat fields, the city smitheries and mills, and crossing the Iowa and Cedar rivers, converged in Muscatine.

Like the crops most of them had planted only a few weeks before, many of these volunteers were seedlings in adulthood and the art of war. For several weeks, they drilled, practiced shooting and ingrained themselves in the army way of life.

They also learned to objectify Southerners, or the "Rebs" as many of those soldiers referred to the Confederacy in diaries and oral accounts given later in life. Such objectification of the enemy is necessary for a military force to succeed. After all, killing another man only comes easy to those who have lost their moral bearings. As psychologists found after examining adolescents who had killed their classmates during the 1990s, the shooters exhibited no sense of right or wrong.

But one cannot be morally wrong if the enemy is the incarnation of evil.

• • •

None of this is to say the boys of the 24th were not brave or that they did not fight a just cause. Sometimes war is the only resort to stop a Hitler or a Napoleon.

But the common man serving in such armies and navies does not fight Hitler or Napoleon. Instead, he takes up arms against another common man, perhaps someone with a wife back home, maybe someone who only a few months before spent his days raising wheat and oats or working in the blacksmith shop and grist mill.

• • •

By the eve of the Red River Expedition, the 24th had valiantly proven itself many times, at the Battle of Champion Hill, in the siege of Vicksburg, during Gen. William T. Sherman's march on Jackson, Miss. You can tour those battle sites today at the Vicksburg National Military Park. There's even a monument to Iowa's fallen on a park tour road.

• • •

"If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is a part of yourself," author Herman Hesse once said. "What isn't part of ourselves doesn't disturb us."

What was it in Southerners that a Northerner could hate? Disloyalty, possibly. While the Confederacy saw itself as maintaining state's rights and hence personal liberty, the Union thought the South had broken its mutual pledge to give "our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor."

There was the notion of progress. The Confederacy fought for tradition, even believed it upheld the best values of their British forefathers. The North stood for industry and social change, such as the ending of slavery.

But such ideas mean little to the man parted from his wife and the comfort of his fields. To achieve true objectification, the "Reb" became cruel, barbaric. Thomas Nast's drawing "Southern Chivalry" shows a Confederate soldier holding the chopped off head of a Northern soldier and others scalping Blue Coats for trophies.

They showed men who'd lost their moral bearings.

• • •

Spring 1864 proved to be dry. The air grew cold at night with water in the expedition's buckets freezing three-quarters of an inch deep. The boys of the 24th burned fences of abandoned fields to stay warm. Then the roads turned dusty, coating them as their feet kicked up the red clay. Even after a hard rain in late the afternoon of March 24, the muddy roads quickly dried by the following morning.

A diary kept by 27-year-old James A. Rollins, of Wilton, primarily notes weather, if he received a letter from someone, where he camped, and mostly how far he marched - 6 miles one day, 15 miles the next, then 17 miles. By March 31, the men had walked 290 miles.

They feared guerillas who picked them off in ambushes then disappeared into the undergrowth; sometimes in a whirlwind of hate, they took revenge, with Co. I burning two plantations on April 3. When rations ran low, teams foraged for food; sometimes they took local farmers' cattle and oats for meals.

Even amid such destruction, affirmations of the positive remained. There is a spring to Rollins' writing when he receives a letter from his wife. And he records observations that only an Iowa boy might notice: "The country looks fine but none of it farmed" and "Camped ... on a small Bayou Country generally good and very level most of it farmed."

• • •

The expedition did not end with Shreveport's capture. River levels remained too low for boat traffic, and miscommunication left the Union's attack forces uncoordinated. Eventually the 24th would loyally follow Gen. Ulysses S. Grant east. The regiment would boast many great heroes.

But the divisions of that war remain today. An Electoral College map is proof enough.

The source of this division certainly isn't the 24th's battles with the Confederates. Their story merely is one of many about how common men get caught up in history's winds of hate.

(originally published March 13, 2005)

Iowa celebrates birthday of James Dean of jazz

2005-03-10T16:22:00.001-08:00

Today is the 102nd birthday of my all-time favorite Iowan: Bix Beiderbecke.

Outside jazz circles, Bix doesn't hold the same name recognition as Duke Ellington or Louis Armstrong. But in the few recordings this young cornetist made, he played a vibrant, pure tone that always transcended the mediocre tunes being worked with.

And for any musician of any genre, that's quite an accomplishment.

A short life cheated Bix of deep, lasting fame; he died at only 28. But the way he blew that horn and so badly behaved during those few brief years is what endears him so greatly to tens of thousands of jazz fans.

To put it in contemporary terms, Bix was the James Dean of jazz.

East of Eden

Born in Davenport, Bix irritated authority from the very beginning. At the age of two, he could pick out tunes with a single finger on the piano, his pitch perfect. Enrolled in music lessons, he played tunes from heart rather than reproduce them from a score; his instructor got so upset that he quit on Bix.

In 1919, Bix heard his first record by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, sort of the Bill Haley and the Comets of its day. Hooked, he borrowed a classmate's horn.

Without any formal training, he developed an un-orthodox of fingering, something that studied musicians of his time despised.

Then, in August of that year, Bix wandered down to the Davenport waterfront where steamboats from New Orleans docked. Hearing Armstrong perform, Bix realized what he wanted to do in life. He wanted to play jazz and bought his own horn.

This did not go over well. Most of white America considered jazz "jungle music," and Bix's middle class parents would have nothing of it. When he started doing poorly in school, they sent him east of the Iowa cornfields to a military-styled prep school in Lake Forest, Ill.

It was the best mistake his parents could make.

Rebel without a cause

Lake Forest is just 35 miles from Chicago, which in the 1920s was becoming the center of jazz. Bix spent his nights listening to Armstrong and King Oliver, and met a young songwriter named Hoagy Carmichael.

Bix soon was expelled.

With only his music, he traveled to New York then around the Midwest playing in orchestras and bands. Audiences reacted coolly at first to him; trouble reading the scores prevented him from learning numbers, but once he picked them up, he outshined his band mates.

Bix's break came in 1924 when he joined the Jean Goldkette Orchestra in Detroit. But the recording director disliked Bix's style, which was hot jazz, an ensemble improvisation with soloing and a fast pace that made it easy to dance to. Frustrated, Bix left the band after two months.

During spring semester of the 1924-1925 school year, Bix enrolled in the University of Iowa. He majored in music but wasn't interested in fulfilling various academic requirements. Then he got into a bar fight downtown with a football player.

Bix lasted a total of 18 days in Iowa City.

He drifted around, playing with such future big band greats as Red Nichols and the Dorsey brothers.

Eventually he rejoined the Jean Goldkette Orchestra. It was then that Bix's true brightness shined.

Giant

But it had little to do with Goldkette.

A contingency of the orchestra, including Bix and Jimmy Dorsey, often gathered to play jazz the way they liked, as a small ensemble with a lot of improvising and soloing. Those qualities virtually define jazz, which is why the formal big band sound isn't always considered good jazz; its akin to Pat Boone singing "Tutti Frutti."

In 1927, the small ensemble laid down several classic jazz tracks. Critics often list one of those tunes, "Singing' the Blues," as among the greatest jazz recordings of all time.

When Goldkette dissolved, Bix and band mate Frank Trumbauer joined the Paul Whiteman orchestra. The Beatles of its day, Whiteman popularized jazz for white audiences, particularly with a recording of George Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue." Bix had reach-ed the pinnacle.

But Whiteman's high expectations and controlling personality clashed with Bix's schoolboy spirit and independent genius. Bix grew unhappy and quit.

During the last two years of Bix's life, his health deteriorated greatly thanks to bootleg gin. Suffering delirium tremens and a nervous breakdown, he spent a lot of time in hospitals trying to recover.

When out, he performed with such future jazz greats as Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw and Gene Krupa. Many wanted to play his 1926 masterpiece, "In a Mist," with him.

On Aug. 6, 1931, unable to shake a cold, Bix died during an alcoholic seizure. The official cause of death: edema of the brain.

How good was Bix? Carmichael, in his autobiography "Sometimes I Wonder," wrote how once after a gig he and Bix stopped on a cold night along a lonely country road. They took out their horns and played: "Clean, wonderful streams of melody filled the dawn, ruffled the countryside, stirred the still night. I bolted along to keep up a rhythmic lead while Bix laid it out. A wind drove autumn leaves around us. Bix finished in one amazing blast of pyrotechnic improvisation. He took his horn away from his mouth, as if a sleepwalker's dream."

Bix was poetry.

(originally published as "Iowa celebrates 100th birthday of James Dean of jazz" on March 9, 2003)

Forget Martians; how will we handle a ‘new’ truth?

2005-03-07T04:02:00.000-08:00

The Martians are coming! The Martians are coming!

Or at least Mars got very close to Earth - on Aug. 27, 2003, the closest it's been for almost 60,000 years. In H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds," the Martians wisely selected such proximity during their orbit to invade Earth.

A few decades later, Orson Welles adopted the novel into a radio play that frightened a whole lot of Easterners far more than did the recent blackout.

These days, we know Mars probably wasn't inhabited by anything more dangerous than bacteria. The little green men of yesterday now are the Greys, allegedly of the star system Zeta Reticuli.

And they scare the bejeezus out of a whole lot of people, too - even right here in Iowa.

• • •

Just two summers ago, Ed Williams was combining his wheat near Iowa City when he discovered a crop circle. The stems lay clockwise with a herringbone weave. A 60-foot diameter ring surrounded this circle.

At first, Williams and his brother, an airline pilot, thought it was caused by the weather, perhaps micro-bursts, or strong winds that sometimes crash planes. But 60 feet is way too large for a microburst.

A pair of Iowa State University agronomists also examined the formation. One argued it was man-made.

Crop circles also have been found in Iowa during the last decade at an Arlington cornfield and a Nevada soybean field. Their origins also remain mysterious.

• • •

Skeptics blame crop circles on elaborate hoaxes or rare natural occurrences such as plasma forces. Undoubtedly, some are hoaxes. Their elaborate designs, however, leaves many wondering.

At the beginning of the 21st century, polls show a majority of Americans believe that at least some UFOs are alien spacecraft. Though espousers of such views once were ridiculed, more than a century of strange aircraft in the skies and motion pictures about extraterrestrials have shifted views.

Among the earliest recorded sightings in Iowa is from a Sioux City area farmer during March 1897. While tilling his field, an airship hovered over him before descending. The airship tried to capture him, but he got away.

In 1947, a few days before a flying saucer allegedly crashed in Roswell, N.M., a bus driver in Mason City witnessed an elliptical craft flying toward the city. Four similar-shaped objects followed. A few minutes later, he saw 13 more craft at an estimated 1,200 feet.

And during October 1995, an Iowa City man near town saw two white aircraft close upon each other at a high altitude. They then flew toward another sparkling object that approached them at a fast speed.

• • •

I've never seen an UFO, though I've always wanted to. I briefly attended school in a Wisconsin farm town that was the site of a flying saucer flap in the 1970s. The neighbor girl, who was a classmate friend, and her no-nonsense mother claim a flying saucer almost abducted them.

As a news reporter, I once was scared crazy by a silvery object in the southern New Mexico sky during the early 1990s. Though my first panicked reaction was to get the heck out of there, some irrational notion that this would be a great scoop forced me to drive toward it. The dang thing turned out to be a blimp monitoring drug trafficking along the Mexican border.

That also turned out to be a good story, just not the one I was looking for.

But such is the problem with flying saucers. No one who wants to see them ever does.

• • •

Which doesn't mean at least some UFOs aren't alien spacecraft, the physics of interplanetary travel aside. I've talked to plenty of sheriff's deputies and American Gothic farmers who stand by their tales of brilliant lights, cattle mutilations and crop circles.

One former Iowa City man even says he and his son were abducted. While traveling through Wisconsin in 1988, John R. Salter said he inexplicably drove onto the wrong road. His next recollection was of standing outside his pickup truck, sur-rounded by several Greys. The aliens escorted his son and him through the woods to a flying saucer in a secluded clearing.

The aliens examined Salter and his son, injecting an implant through the elder's nostril. After being returned to their truck, the Salters watched the saucer rise above the treeline and disappear.

• • •

Sometimes we're shaken from our routines as the circularity of our orbits form strange conjunctions. Those moments force us to rethink our schema of the universe.

"But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited?" Johannes Kepler asked as pondering his theory that planets circle the sun rather than the Earth. "Are we or they Lords of the World? ... And how are all things made for man?"

Undoubtedly, most UFO sightings are hoaxes, dreams, panicked reactions to test aircraft and even swamp gas. But what if some of them, say even just a couple are something from out of this world?

How would it change the way we view the universe and ourselves? Would our religions crumble? Would we see our politics as the petty bickering it so often is? Would we panic, uncertain of the fate that awaits us as for the first time in literally hundreds of thousands of years we become the technologically inferior species on our planet?

Would governments transfer the realization of this to the way we treat other nations on Earth?

Interestingly, in Wells' book, not fear but a lack of knowledge was the invaders' undoing.

Bacteria killed the Martians.

(originally published Aug. 24, 2003)

Distant edges as seen from the middle

2005-03-06T05:29:00.000-08:00

March serves as an in-between month, neither fully winter nor spring, that time of pent-up buds, a point midsemester when we find ourselves halfway through the textbooks.

And so in my elementary classroom of many years ago, we often found ourselves no longer able to look at the seemingly unending math problems before us. We needed a distraction, a puzzle more intriguing than 83.3 x 71.4.

We found it in puddles. Thanks to melted snow and cold rains, an array of them dotted the playground and neighboring cornfield. A trickle of water down the sloping asphalt interested us the most, though, as a shallow bank of snow had forced the stream to collect in a miniature pond. Gradually the water worked its way around the barrier, taking the path of least resistance toward a roadside ditch

So we set our small bodies to building up the snow dam, to stemming the ceaseless flow, organizing our activities while some - because of their age or height or smarts - asserted themselves as leaders. Even with mittens on, hands grew chilled as we gathered snow from grassy areas; feet and pants legs became increasingly soaked as we brushed up against the stream. Crisp air filled our warm lungs, though, invigorating us while we placed our chunks of snow. Some of us even created smaller dams up-stream to slow the flow.

Then finally, as recess neared its end, we paused to stare at our creation - a four-foot high wall of white stretching halfway across a parking space, perceptibly collecting water. Reflecting the gray sky, the lake seem-ed to be a deep abyss from which our insubstantial faces peered back at us.

Pioneers sometimes began their journey west in March. It, too, was an in-between month for them; if Iowa's wintry weather remained at bay, they could reach their destination in time for spring planting, meaning food could be on the tables next autumn. The tall grasses had not quite sprung up yet, allowing them to make good time if the ground stayed hard.

Their diaries describe the plains first as a large meadow, something they could comprehend, then as a great desert, for its deceptively flat and calm terrain appeared virtually lifeless. It was an error, on their part; while the rainfall wouldn't support the forest of trees they'd become accustomed to out East, the soil beneath them proved to be among the world's richest.

How those early travelers must have suffered, pressing against the wind, their collars pulled up as a vista of brown grass stretched into the horizon before them. As evening approached, they'd stop to put up for the night, shooting a rabbit or a prairie chicken for their dinner. Once darkness fell and the comforting scent of campfire smoke wafted about, they might sing or tell stories. These small figures, encased by the dark, realized all they had were one another.

Of course, a few did stay, building towns on the emigrant trail to California, that supposed paradise of unlimited opportunity and wealth.

And for those who did continue on and reached the coast, they found another seemingly desolate span before them, the great barrier of the Pacific Ocean.

Perhaps at night as the campfire began to die, some of those pioneers stared at the abyss that is the sky. The stars amid that depth and mystery, accompanied the moons' hypnotic motion, must have appeared deceptively calm.

For centuries, many could not conceive of the universe larger than our solar system. The stars, they concluded, sat on an invisible sphere that circled our Earth. In the early 1900s, scientists realized those stars formed a galaxy, the Milky Way, of which we primarily saw one spiral arm. By mid-century, astronomers realized our galaxy was only one of millions.

We stand today at the edge of this new frontier, our astronauts barely having waded into the black sea.

Infinity boggles our minds. Perhaps trapped between birth and death, two finite points, we have difficulty thinking outside of that framework. Indeed, "the infinite" is the subject of mystics, of New Agers staring at the phantasmagoric oom, of mathematics seemingly gone awry when we're told in grade school that numbers have no beginning and no end, that zero is just a midpoint. The infinite is faceless, mindless, a mystery too great to grasp.

And so upon entering it, we quantify, give names, take measurements, establish outposts. We project our hope into the spatial and temporal unknown, then lay out plans to tame the wilderness and work to see those efforts come to fruition.

We need the unknown, another problem, which we've never addressed before, to solve. It's not the puzzle's solution, though, but how we fit the pieces together that matter. They tell us who we are; they give us purpose. It's nice, too, if the puzzles have edges, so we can better feel our way around to a denouement.

And what of those puddles back in our playground, of the dam we created to stop the ceaseless water? Our young minds, convinced a limitless future loomed before us if only we could break from the four walls in which bleak March had imprisoned us, found themselves fascinated by the great sky reflected in that sheen of water.

As the recess bell rang and the children ran for the school building, one of us always stayed behind at the puddle, still staring. Then, before breaking into a run himself, he'd stomp his feet into the puddle, just to prove to himself that the bottom was still there.

(originally published March 6, 2005)

Will we remember old lessons on journey ahead?

2005-03-05T19:03:00.000-08:00

Though barely rising through the layers of winter's dead brown leaves, its meaning was unmistakable. The cluster of five purple petals marked the first wildflower I'd spotted this year during walks along the Iowa River. Clinging to the slope leading out of the river valley, it meant spring really was here.

Pausing, I kneeled before it. The solitude of a nature hike allows one the luxury of satisfying curiosity.

It smelled sweet, though I could not place exactly what like. Not sugary like a confection, not citric as a bite of fruit, but something ... youthful.

It was the scent of spring itself.

• • •

There may be no better words to describe spring than those from a literary work whose opening lines a high school English teacher made me memorize as graduation approached. I can recall them to this day:

"Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
"The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,
"And bathed every veyne in swich licour
"Of which vertu engendered is the flour ..."

So begins the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales," a seminal English work containing some of the best short stories written. My teacher had the class memorize various sections of the book as Chaucer wrote them in Middle English, a language some 700 years old just different enough from Modern English that we have trouble reading it.

A rough translation in 21st century prose:

During April, whose sweet showers pierce March's dryness to the root and bathe every plant's vein with water, by whose power flowers are produced ...

Somehow, the modern version doesn't sound quite as melodic.

• • •

But the beauty of spring hasn't been reduced any the less for it. There is something invigorating as one steps through the first warm day of April: sunshine caressing the cheek and bare arms, the flashes of green bursting through the ground and across the branches, songbirds cheerfully filling in their old friends of tales from the winter's journey south.

In spring, we also seem to lose our heads. It's a time of falling in love, when the soberness and cabin fever of winter must give way to lighter pursuits.

It's a time of beginnings. Farmers sow their fields with corn seed. Buds slowly unwind into leaves. And wars, too, often are launched in late spring - the crops are in, the rains have ended, weeks of warmth are ahead ... yes, for every metaphorical cliché of spring being the start of life, the season has brought much death and sorrow to humanity as well.

What was it that Pete Seeger once sang? "When will they ever learn?"

• • •

Chaucer's tale is about travelers on a pilgrimage to a holy site in England. It's a common enough occurrence at this time of the year with Easter, Passover and Arba'in converging as they do. For safety - it was the Middles Ages, after all - the pilgrims agree to travel together.

To pass the time, they tell one another stories.

Through the various tales, we learn different lessons. Each is as full of symbolism and morality as a spoiled child's Easter basket is stuffed with candy, your understanding of the world fattens with each passage.

It's a delicious book to read.

• • •

I did not pluck the purple cluster of flowers. There was no need to deny someone else from enjoying them. So long as my memory is strong, its simple beauty and pretty scent remain for me to recall.

I believe the diminutive bloom was a phlox, but I've never really taken the time to learn such things. For some reason no one ever asked me to memorize that. Or perhaps a teacher had required it, and it's just been a long time passing.

A lesson forgotten or missed?

Moving up the trail, I pondered such things. The quiet of a nature hike allows one the luxury of such ruminations of past and present. For "Life," Soren Kierkegaard once said, "must be understood backward. But it must be lived forward."

Perhaps by next spring, more lessons of long ago will be recalled - if only so we may move forward rather than repeat cycles.

(originally published April 11, 2004)

When our streams go forgotten

2005-03-04T12:23:00.000-08:00

During the past week what little snow there was around Iowa City melted away. It was another light winter, which made for easy driving and a little less strain on our backs from sidewalk shoveling. Until the spring rains arrive, the proverbial jury is out on whether too little snow will mean drought this summer.

But we did lose something thanks to the dry winter: the fast, wonderful rise of our creeks as cold meltwater flows into them.

•••

Those of us fortunate enough to live near a creek when growing up discovered it one spring day during grade school. We'd always known it was there, had heard our parents talk of it. Maybe during summer while aboard a combine with our father, we'd glimpse the distant, blue sash that ribboned ever onward through the amber corn.

Eventually we reached an age when our parents let us amble alone into the fields or parks and explore. One such warm, April weekend I followed an amazing stream of cottony down that parachuted in windrows across the sky, leading me to my farm's waterway. The down sailed from a cottonwood that clutched the creek's high bank, and I sat beneath the tree, pretending snow was falling.

As the days grew longer and increasingly warm, I returned, listening to the lark's repeated song of lyrical five notes as watching the stream drawl southward.

•••

By summer, we found the creek an extraordinary place to escape the open yard's constant wind. Sometimes we'd bring a book and read under the cottonwood. Other times we'd toss sticks into the creek, examining them as they moistened, rocked, then overturned while the poplar leaves upon the opposite bank flashed and dazzled and above me the cottonwood leaves danced.

As the sun slowly arced overhead, we watched the trout swimming in the stream, listened to the frogs croak from their muddy crevices, poked at the turtles curling into their shells, squished the stream's sandy bottom between our toes. We grew to understand the cottonwood, the fresh water and the caddis fly skimming its surface like a child knew the warm embrace of his parents. Thanks to winter's forced absence, from year-to-year we saw all the creeks' strange and wondrous changes, like how its course veered a little to the east and how the cottonwood rose a couple of feet.

•••

The creeks of today are not the ones with which we grew up.

Today, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources warns us to eat only so many fish from various streams. Stinking green muck fills many creeks by late August as high phosphorous runoff encourages algae blooms. We must be careful at even the clearest of streams as they flow into ponds and lakes that routinely test positive for E. coli and fecal coliform bacteria.

Though there are 70,000 miles of streams in Iowa, few of us rely upon them anymore. We use water treatment plants and deep wells to provide our water. Our streams remain hidden beyond the roll of a cornfield or an apartment building.

But that doesn't mean we don't need them.

•••

When autumn arrived, we'd bid farewell to our imaginary friends - the trout, the frogs, the wild walnut trees, the turtles - and gaze sadly as the water rippled onward, fallen leaves flitting downstream upon its surface, to a wide, shallow bottomed river that we'd never seen for it was far away.

Then, one October as our feet crunched through the dry grass, the branches bare and silhouetted in the distant, setting sun, we looked hard at our refuge. Next spring, our parents said, we'd have to start helping around on the farm, get a summer job. A cold wind slapped our body, and we sensed it might be the last day of Indian summer, that there would be no more going to the creek.

We paused for a moment, took in a deep breath and watched the clouds purple above the orange sun. We plucked a stem, scraped off its head between our fingers. Finally, we tossed it down and walked languidly back to the house.

(originally published March 7, 2004 as "What we lose when our state's streams go forgotten")

What if you spent 70 days a year in a vast wasteland?

2005-03-03T04:19:00.000-08:00

Many years ago I attended a modern art exhibit that featured the same videotape played on a series of televisions, except each set was from a different era. The image on the 1950s black and white appeared blurry, especially along the screen's edges; the early 1960s black and white offered a crisper picture; the late 1960s color set returned to the blur standard, though not at the edges; the 1970s color eliminated all haziness; the 1980s color set was smaller.

And while seeing each incremental technological advance intrigued me, as noticing the soap opera video playing I couldn't help but think that for the most part, there just isn't much on television worth watching.

•••

That the first color televisions rolled off the assembly line some 50 years ago as spring began certainly is ironic. Stuck inside during winter's gray skies and harsh cold, television is almost a meaningful entertainment option. But during spring, when the world comes alive with green grass, flower blooms and even rainbows, there hardly seems a reason to sit inside.

And yet we do. The average American spends 70 entire days out of a year watching television. Seventy days!

Just what are we watching?

•••

What did people do before there was television?

I'm just "young" enough to never have lived in a time when there wasn't television. Sort of like today's infants, who will grow up in a world that always has had the Internet.

Among my parents' prize purchases during my preschool years was their first color television set. Like the rest of America, they were transitioning from black and white to living color. It cost them more than $300, which was a much greater percentage of one's income in 1967 dollars than today's dollars.

But the neighbors marveled. Until they got their own - one step above ours.

Not that there was much to watch back then. Just three networks and maybe an independent station, if you were lucky. Then public television hit the airwaves.

And what shows were on? CBS was the hick network in the 1960s with "Beverly Hillbillies" and "Green Acres." ABC was the edgy WB of its time, which meant there wasn't anything worth watching. There were a lot of westerns that followed the same plot every week on every program. Ditto for cop shows from the 1970s, then ABC got jiggly with "Charlie's Angels."

•••

Though television still remains a wasteland, I'd never advocate removing it from the home. Major news events - man stepping on the moon, the hostages returning home from Iran, the Challenger explosion, the World Trade Center towers collapsing - all carry more impact in pictures than words, especially if seen live.

And there is exceptional theater, such as PBS's "I, Claudius," or documentaries where the visual imagery better expresses a concept than words, such as Carl Sagan's "Cosmos."

Television even can be a bonding experience between the generations - say parent and child enjoying "A Charlie Brown Christmas Special" together.

•••

But could that 70 days a year in front of the television be more meaningfully spent with family and neighbors?

How many great books have gone unread because television provided an easy, lowest common denominator storyline?

How often have we forsaken a simple walk into the great outdoors, pulling in lungfuls of fresh air as the sun's warmth danced across our skin, and heard songbirds share their tunes as we caught a glimpse of a rabbit or white-tailed deer scurrying into the cornfield or underbrush?

(originally published March 28, 2004)

Fenceposts provide not a wall but a guide to life

2005-03-02T11:24:00.000-08:00

About this time each year, after the snow melts but before the green of spring arrives, the ubiquitous fencepost appears stark and forlorn upon the prairie.

Like people passed each day on the street, fenceposts always have been there, marking boundaries. But in the barren landscape of March, they rear up from the horizon, bumping into our line of sight.

To some, a fencepost is but an obstruction, an indifferent object marking boundaries and dirtying the landscape.

Such people do not understand fenceposts.

• • •

Every spring in a never-ending project, my father would haul planks and post beams to the edge of our land and engage in a day or two of fence building. At first I merely accompanied him, but somewhere around the age of 10 I began to help construct the fence line.

I grumbled at losing my childhood freedom, for fence building consisted of hard work. It involved slamming a posthole digger into the earth and pulling up pungent black soil heavy with roots. After the hole reached just the right depth, the post would be plopped in then pounded yet deeper with a sledgehammer.

Sweat beaded off my father's temples as he carefully swung; bad aim could split the post or bash the hammer against one's foot.

Each post had to be a specific distance apart as well or the planks wouldn't be long enough to nail into them. Sometimes a boulder or stump stood in the spot right where a hole had to be dug.

When finally done, we'd stand a ways back in the cornfield's stubble and for a long while admire how that fence stretched across the plain, each post fresh and sturdy with youth.

• • •

Some decry fences, saying they symbolize divisions of property and wealth that cause fights. I suspect they really are talking of walls. In New England, fences like that of Robert Frosts' "Mending Wall" typically are made of fieldstone. They have a bulk to them and seal out views.

My father would say fences prevent fights. Cows don't understand property lines. And whenever two farmers work adjacent fields, they'll often stop, lean against a common fencepost to share the latest gossip, trials and tribulations. The post marks a spot where they can share common bonds.

For them, the fence is no more a wall than the village well or the office drinking fountain could be.

• • •

I suppose that's why my father laughed when one spring while digging a posthole, the rebellious teenager in me couldn't help but recite to him Frosts' line "Good fences makes good neighbors."

• • •

During long walks taken through the fields, I watched our fenceposts slowly age with each passing year.

Sometimes, the posts withstood great indignities, such as when the ground swelled, lifting them just enough that the planks strained and cracked against them. Other times, storms pressed against a post until it leaned too far in one untenable direction.

Should the plank come off a post, it weakened the others. Each fencepost stood solitary across the field but depended upon the one next to it for support and strength.

Not all posts suffered. Some became the perch of meadowlarks who, splaying their breastplate of gold, would sing for a mate. As knots loosened in the wood, some became nests for bluebirds.

Other times, vines of multicolored blossoms wreathed around the pole.

A fencepost could be violated, a fencepost could be celebrated. But each told its own story.

• • •

During college while helping my father repair a worn fence we'd erected long before, when my only concerns were baseball and dreamy adventures in the stars, I asked him for advice about a girl I loved.

"The problem," he said, "is in how you're trying to solve your dilemma."

Oh great, I thought, some more of my father's obtuse wisdom. I decided to humor him and asked what he meant.

"Well, take this fence," he said. "It's going to be 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart. How many posts do we need?"

"That's easy. Ten."

He grinned, shook his head at my mistake. "You need 11. Your error is in counting things rather than the spaces between them."

• • •

Old-timers say hedge fences last two years longer than those made of stone. My father always preferred to make fences out of wood, however, even though wind and rain tend to destroy them sooner than either the shrub or rock varieties.

As each of my father's fenceposts neared its end, the grayed and weathered wood often would not budge for it had became firm in the ground. It frequently leaned slightly to a side as the planks upon it bowed with age. The weeds grew elbow high, nature returning to swallow it back up.

Then, after a long winter and once the ground thawed, my father would shovel the earth away from the post's base, pull it up and plant a new one nearby. A new generation of fenceposts replaced the old, serving the same purpose as before, suffering the same affronts and witnessing the same joys, all connected by stalwart planks that formed a thin meandering line into the horizon.

(originally published March 3, 2003)

Our capricious March

2005-03-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

March remains a finicky month, tottering between winter's cold depths and spring's warm hope.

Some years, Mother Nature just can't decide. A March cold snap during the 1960s dropped Iowa's temperatures to 35 degrees below zero while a blizzard dumped 48 inches of snow, leaving the cornfields' cut stalks and snow fences buried. But a March 1987 heat wave put most of us in shorts and swimsuits as the mercury rose into the 80s.

While a few days almost every March tend to veer toward those extremes, mostly it all just averages out. More often than not, the month is certain to serve up a Western wind with rain, that either melts the holdout snow or waters the grass for a greener April. And gradually songbirds return from their Southern homes, deciding Iowa is a good place for them to raise children, too.

For most of us, though, the days of March ring a bit like those bowls of porridge Goldilocks fussed over - though we're more likely to find helpings that are too cold rather than too hot or just right. But day by day, even with the interloping ice storm or snowfall, the bowl warms just a little more.

(originally published March 1, 2005)

Strive to avoid oversimplification

2005-02-28T17:23:00.000-08:00

"Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler," Albert Einstein once quipped.

It's sage advice: Getting to the kernel of a concept is to understand its essence. To find a thing's inherent nature through scientific, mathematical or philosophical discourse - or an array of countless other investigations - is part of the human journey.

But to see only the kernel's outline serves no one, except maybe our personal egos.

•••

As infants, we don't see so well. Newborns have 20/600 visual acuity, improving to only about 20/100 by six months.

The result: Babies can see lines on a piece of paper, or grasp contrasts. When it comes to noticing textures, however, they're not so good.

Research in face recognition indicates infants largely rely on outlines and basic features when identifying a person. Perhaps one of the appeals of cartoons later in life is that the simplified forms are easier to follow.

At about 24 months, most infants gain 20/20 eyesight. But by then, we're psychologically comfortable with looking for outlines. Does sensing the details require a new level of maturity?

•••

There's no doubt simplification serves us well.

Back during elementary school, my younger brother and I used to do our homework at the kitchen table. Shortly after supper had been cleared, textbooks, worksheets, colored pencils, calculators and crumbs from the latest cake or brownie mix Mom had baked covered the table. If the weather was nice, getting all of that schoolwork done turned into a race against sunset.

"What's 3 times 9?" he asked me one of those May evenings. He always had trouble with his nines.

I decided to show off my superior, seventh-grade learning. "Twenty-five plus the square root of 4."

"No, really, what is it?"

"That's what it is - figure out the square root of 4 and add 25. It's an axiom."

"I don't care!" he said, practically snarling as he stomped a foot. "I simply want the answer!"

•••

Language research indicates we rely on the edges of words to read. Even though a word may be misspelled, if the first and last letters are correct, we usually don't notice. At the very least, we can read the line without taking a second look.

Try it:

Alomst evrey wrod in tihs sentnece is miseplled.

•••

This dependence on outlines apparently runs deep into our primate past.

Scientists have found they can get chimpanzees to relate letters to objects: press a "g" on the screen and get a "grape." Press "b" and get a "banana." Press "q" and get nothing.

Try to teach a chimp to spell, though. The brightest can do a few three-letter words. Ask them to press "g" then "r" then "a" then "p" and finally "e," and they get it all wrong. Wanting a grape, they screech and bounce off the walls.

However, have them press a button that says "grape" as a single word on it, and they do it with ease. Over and over, in fact.

Which is why phonics advocates are so maddening. We just don't learn how to read by dissecting a word into various parts. Prefixes and suffixes are the exception - but in those cases we're talking about the be-ginning or the end of a word, or its outline.

One thing phonics is good for is learning how to pronounce some words. But plenty of people can read at an advanced level without knowing how to pronounce a word. Simply put, being able to pronounce and spell a word doesn't mean you know its definition.

Thinking so, however, is akin to seeing only the kernel's crown, and believing it's all there is.

•••

Simplification, when correctly applied, streamlines our lines. But all too often we get by with the outline, with the oversimplified version. It's often sufficient. After all, we don't need to know the names of all the streets we cross on our drive home, just when to turn.

All too often, however, such routes no longer serve us. A detour is needed. New paradigms must be constructed.

Henry A. Wallace was one man who devised a new paradigm. Recognizing that the way crops were grown with 1800s methods meant there would not be enough food to feed the world, he examined how corn might be genetically improved to offer larger yields and be resistant to insects. Learning a love of plants from George Washington Carver - an African-American scientist at the time of Jim Crow laws - Wallace developed hybrid corn, rewriting agriculture and the Iowa economy for the 20th century.

Herbert Hoover was another such man. In 1914, he accepted leadership of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. Using business models that dumped profit for humanitarianism (Hoover even refused a salary for himself), he kept alive hundreds of thousands of children in that war-occupied country.

Curiously, Hoover fell from grace because of his inability to break old paradigms when a crisis called for doing so. Franklin Delano Roosevelt instead offered the New Deal and defeated Hoover in the 1932 election.

•••

Today in America, we face many challenges to the old paradigms. As free-will beings, we face them every day.

Will we strive to make everything as simple as possible but not make the error of oversimplification?

History will tell.

(originally published February 29, 2004)

Blizzards tested our humanity

2005-02-24T14:17:00.000-08:00

That the word "blizzard" was coined in Iowa should come as no surprise to this state's residents.

While those east of the Mississippi River certainly are not immune to dizzying snowstorms in which winds whip past 35 miles per hour and visibility is reduced to mere feet, something in the character of a prairie settler allowed him to find a special moniker for this fury. As blizzards tested our humanity, pioneers realized it was a storm in a category all of its own.

Legend says Spencer's Lephe Wells Coates read a story about a violent-tempered Mr. Blizzard in her Free Baptist paper. During a nasty snowstorm in 1866 she remarked "My, this is a regular old man Blizzard of a storm." A state newspaper later repeated the term.

But there's more to Iowa's snowstorms than a cute story.

• • •

In 1870, when men got around by horse rather than car and roads were not plowed because they were only mud paths broken through the brush, blizzards could not be easily escaped. With no satellites to track weather patterns, storms surprised settlers like lions ambushing prey in the bush.

March 13 of that year was one such disaster. That morning, the men of rural Hillsdale took advantage of the warm weather and went into town. By noon, the sky had clouded, and a bitter chill had descended. Though just reaching their destination, they decided to turn around.

"Big flakes had split up into a million little pieces and were coming at us stinging and slantways," one man in the party later wrote. "Every second it was growing blacker and thicker and colder."

Most of the men made their way back home as a group. But two left a mere 15 minutes later. Three days passed, after the storm had dropped temperatures to 35 below zero, and search parties were dispatched.

Both men - brothers - were found frozen to death in snow drifts.

• • •

Today, blizzards are at worst an annoyance. On occasion, ice storms leave some without electricity, but most of us warm up some hot chocolate, flip a switch to light the fireplace and from the vantage of an easy chair watch the snow swirl outside.

Indeed, the New York Times editorialized last week that the snowstorm hitting the East Coast "brought a sense of peace that momentarily overshadowed thoughts of war and terrorism."

With our modern building materials and massive power grids, we rejoice in the slowing of life that blizzards bring. We've conquered nature. Humanity's violent tendencies remain, however.

• • •

Near the end of the Civil War, brothers Joe and Kiren Mulroney and friend Henry Archer volunteered to deliver food and supplies to Union troops stationed in Estherville. A blizzard came upon them New Year's Day 1864, but they marched onward, knowing the soldiers would starve if the cargo did not reach them.

"The mercury was frozen solid and the thermometers was down to half a hundred below," one pioneer wrote, "and the howling, cracking, biting, whirling snow was so dense in the air that they could not see the length of a sleigh and team."

When the three men happened upon a cabin in the middle of the storm, the family let them in. They cut off Kiren's shoes, stockings and trousers. Both legs were frozen from the kneecaps to the toes.

After resting, the three men continued on their mission. Together, they got the food to the troops.

• • •

My father once told me a story about the blizzard of 1956, when he was only a child and helped rescue a cow half-buried by snow. I shiver whenever thinking of that tale, not so much from the story itself which is frightening enough, but from the way my father, always so strong and silent, told it with passion and precision, as if it were the one event that shaped his life.

The week had been mild enough, so the cattle were left to graze in the pasture. Unexpectedly one October night, like a stampede of white devil horses, the storm swept onto the Great Plains, instantly deluging the land in harsh winds and several feet of snow. Through the darkness and blasting winds, my grandfather and two of his sons, one of them my father, herded them back into the farmyard.

But as daylight broke, a lone bellow resounded across the cornfield, growing weaker with each cry. They waded through three-foot drifts toward the cow, until reaching the struggling brown mass. Caked with ice, its breath felt cold and it smelled dry like parched dung, but grandfather was insistent; no cow would die from his lack of trying to save it.

So they dug out the animal and then a path across the pasture, harassed at every shovelful by straying snow, and pushed the cow until it reached the barn. A companion, grateful to see its friend returned, licked the ice clean off. The cow survived.

• • •

My grandfather didn't need to save that beast. She wasn't worth that much money.

He just didn't want to see it suffer, just as Joe and Kiren Mulroney and friend Henry Archer didn't want to see their nation's troops suffer. They were willing to sacrifice because they couldn't live with themselves if they didn't.

Those prairie blizzards challenged their humanity. Such a test, where the stakes are our very souls, indeed deserves a word all of its own.

(originally published Feb. 24, 2003)

The dangerous possibilities of daydreaming

2005-02-22T16:06:00.000-08:00

Thursday's warm weather left me longing for summer, which is why I kept hoping some meteorologists would predict snow for the weekend.

The streams of snow melt and tossed gloves were just a tease, I knew - winter is far from over - and the sooner it passed the better. There was work to be done, and spending the day looking out the window like a dreamy schoolboy in May was no way to spend company time.

During my drive home, thoughts of summer days as a young child weaved in and out of the tasks that I had yet to do: pay the cable bill - walking along a dirt road past towering corn stalks - stop at dry cleaner - listening to the bugs' concerto in early evening - attend library board meeting - finding shapes in the clouds - mail nephew's birthday present.

That jarred me back into focus. It was his birthday, and somehow the ever-re-sponsible uncle had forgotten to mail his present. I'd have to explain it in a phone call.

•••

Being 5, he didn't seem to mind that his present hadn't arrived on the appointed day. He was just excited to hear that one was coming.

But then there was a moment of silence, and he got to what really was im-portant: "When are you going to visit so we can go for a walk together?"

His voice reminded me of my brother's at that age.

•••

During school vacations, my brother and I spent most of our time ambling through the fields, indulging in discovery and play.

A typical summer's day began with awakening to the ascending whiteness of a new dawn; our internal clocks always seemed to sense the birth of a new morning, as if we were missing out now that darkness had fled the earth.

Sleep is sweet, that much I always will admit, but even to this day I rise with the first break of light to witness a world that others slumber through like hibernating bears: the gradation of colors from gray-blue to vermilion then to orange as the sun climbs the sky, the tuneful dialogue of songbirds gathering for their shared meals, the layers of warmth that fall over the bedroom with each passing moment.

Then, just as we heard the first languorous footsteps downstairs and the aromatic brew of coffee, my mother would call for us to awake.

We'd change quickly and hurry to the barn. It was not the work, however, that churned our eagerness but the creatures we'd meet on the way.

There was Jerry, the old tomcat who always sat by me as I mixed the calves' bottles of powdered milk and water, waiting for his dish when I was done.

Then there was Farley, our cow-herding dog who'd accompany us on the walks to and from the calf pens. And finally the calves themselves, an ever-rotating lot whom I could trace from birth to shed to pasture to barn, friends that we followed through life.

After washing the calf-slobber from our hands, we'd join our parents for breakfast, always a hearty affair of eggs and bacon, pancakes or waffles slathered in butter and maple syrup, cereal and toast, milk and juice; then coffee, always coffee, but only for the adults.

As my father drank his cup - he liked it hot and black - he'd outline his day, which often consisted of fieldwork or some task revolving around the cattle. Once he left, the day was ours to do with as we pleased.

•••

And what days they were!

We'd trail along the dirt road leading past the corn through a wilderness of green that rose daily, discovering deer prints left the night before in the soft soil, or the butterflies whose patterned wings rival in beauty any painting to come from an artist's palette.

Sometimes we'd stretch out in the field father left unseeded that year and watch the panorama of clouds reshape themselves across the brilliant blue sky.

All seemed far away: the thumbnail farmhouse, a distant tractor's drone, the tufts of clouds suspended on the horizon. Out there it was a whole new world, and if you fell into the prickle of extremely tall grass, a truly unique one as well: one in which the insects grew in size as they flicked past you, the buzz of their wings a high-pitched whine; in which the scent of loam, of plants decayed and of plants growing from such death, surrounded you; in which the minute taste of salt swathed across the inside of your mouth actually could be sensed now that you were not bombarded by a million other distractions competing with your own body, with your very being, for attention.

•••

Our father never approved of such ramblings. For him, they were fraught with dangerous possibilities; he often asked us what would happen if we were lying in the grass and run over by a tractor because the driver - meaning him - could not see us? The way his pupils sharpened in fear showed us this was a serious concern.

We never answered his almost certainly rhetorical question.

We honestly were too flattered to think of one.

•••

Must some of us be responsible so others can dream?

If talking of children, the answer is obvious. But what of adults? Is there any space for daydreaming in our harried lives?

Hanging up the phone, the weather reporter noted that more above-average temperatures were on the way.

It appears we don't have a choice in the matter.

(originally published Feb. 22, 2004)

'The Song of Iowa': Fairest tune of all the West?

2005-02-15T04:49:00.000-08:00

"Words make you think a thought. Music makes you feel a feeling. A song makes you feel a thought." - E.Y. Harburg

Harburg would know. He coauthored some of the 20th century's most significant songs, including "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" and "April in Paris."

Unfortunately, lost to history is what Harburg might have thought of "The Song of Iowa," our state anthem. Written in 1897 by Civil War veteran S.H.M. Byers, "Song of Iowa" is not the most creative piece - it's sung to the tune of "Der Tannenbaum."

Yes, you read right, our state song is based on a Christmas carol.

•••

Dentist Tim Hartsook wants to change that. Hailing from Independence (appropriately enough), Hartsook has called for the creation of a committee to garner nominees for a new state song.

He dislikes the state song so much that last year he even offered to donate $1,000 to get the contest going. "I just want it to be something Iowans can be proud of," he told The Associated Press.

His problem with "The Song of Iowa"? It doesn't rouse sentiment and love for the state when played at sporting events, like say Wisconsin's state song "On Wisconsin!" - which, curiously enough, some Iowa high school bands play at basketball games.

Didn't somebody tell them we haven't been part of the Wisconsin Territory for more than 150 years now?

•••

Blame Maryland for our state song.

During the Civil War, the Confederates captured Byers, and he spent several months in a Richmond, Va., prison. Each morning, a Rebel marching band passed his window. One of the songs they played was "My Maryland" - written to the tune of "Der Tannenbaum."

Fast forward to 1897. The night after Byers wrote "The Song of Iowa," he asked a French concert singer at the Foster Opera House in Des Moines to sing it. The performer did and got a standing ovation.

So he kept singing it. And he got more standing ovations.

A year later, E.Y. Harburg was born on the East Coast.

Finally, on June 30, 1949, "The Song of Iowa" officially was adopted as our state anthem.

•••

Many think "The Iowa Corn Song" is the state song.

Thank God they're wrong. Would you want our state song to start off "Let's sing of grand old I-O-Way, Yo-Ho, yo-ho, yo-ho"? And for all of you from Illinois, no, it's not sung to the tune of "Yo-ho, yo-ho, yo-ho, the pirate's life's for me."

Hartsook says it's a corny tune. And on that count, he's absolutely right.

One need only look at how "The Iowa Corn Song" came about: A delegation of Za-Ga-Zig Shriners (yes, those guys with the funny fez hats) went to Los Angeles in 1912 for a Shrine convention. While there, they decided - much like Hartsook today - that Iowa needed a rousing song of honor. And, of course, it somehow should advertise our state's chief product: corn.

Worse, it since has become Iowa State's fight song.

Which is not to say that "The Iowa Corn Song" isn't fun to belt out. Who doesn't enjoy reaching one's hands as high into the air as they can go and roaring "That's where the tall corn grows!"?

Besides, acting like drunk Shriners is a healthy release.

•••

So what about "The Song of Iowa"?

It says we're the "fairest State of all the West." But not the East? Of course not. Maryland is, so the song speaks to Iowan humility.

It does have a few "yonders" in it. That's a little jarring to modern ears, but "sunset's purpling line" is moderately evocative.

It mentions corn. That's always good.

It boasts of "maids ... (with) laughing eyes." Sure, why not?

It concludes that "Thou'lt not forget thy patriot sons" even when all other people and governments have. That's noble.

OK, OK, so Hartsook is right: It's a pretty uninspiring song.

Did I hear someone in the back shout, "Lousy, too!"?

•••

Maybe it is lousy. But it is our song.

No doubt, it appealed to Iowan lawmakers because "Der Tannenbaum" was a common folk tune among the state's many German immigrants. Even if you didn't know or understand the words, you at least could hum along.

But a good song - a really good one - should make you not just hum but feel a thought.

Here's some words to make you think: Would you rather have a state song inspired by a prisoner of war yearning for home or by Shriners on vacation in Los Angeles?

(originally published Feb. 15, 2004)

Lessons of romance via books

2005-02-14T03:37:00.000-08:00

A post-Valentine's Day confession: Whenever dating girls in my premarriage days, I always snooped among their bookshelves.

Their reading selection - or lack of it - was a good indication if I should call for another date.

But I didn't look at titles, though a bevy of literary classics certainly scored more points than paperback romances and vampire short story collections. No, I was examining her relationship with books.

• • •

Shortly before entering grade school, I came down with an illness that left me hospitalized for two weeks and forced me to take penicillin daily for the next three years. To keep healthy, outside play during winter was forbidden.

So after school lunch each day, I'd trudge back to the classroom and stare out the window at my friends building snowmen, playing games of tag as they skidded along the ice, laughing as they stuck out their tongues and caught falling snow.

One day as glancing at the clock to see how much time was left of this torture, my eyes caught the great array of books lining the back wall. They'd always been there - for some reason, I'd just never noticed the possibilities they offered.

To get my mind off the kids outside, I walked to the back of the classroom and browsed the titles. There were books about dino-saurs, about being an astronaut, about winning the Indy 500, about how my favorite football team won the first Super Bowl. I pulled a volume from the shelf.

That day I discovered you are never truly alone when you have a book in your hands.

• • •

The best thing about dating a reader is you always have something to talk about. There never are any awkward quiet moments; you simply open conversations by saying "So, what are you reading these days?"

That, however, is when it gets tricky.

In my freshman year of college, during a first date with a girl named Shelly, she told me about her latest read, Charles Dickens' "Great Expectations." With each passing word, her face and gestures grew increasingly animated, and her angelic voice took me away like a sweet lullaby.

"Have you ever read Dickens?" she said suddenly.

I thought of the excerpts a doddering old professor had forced on my class that semester before and nodded.

"What did you think of him?"

"Well, he was a little long-winded," I said. "His descriptions seemed awfully verbose and not to lead anywhere."

Shelly's eyes widened. She crumpled her napkin, tossed it on her plate and harrumphed.

That night I discovered criticizing a book someone loves is a lot like spitting on her baby.

• • •

A true lover of books knows there is much more to the enjoyment of reading than a good author.

No, there also is atmosphere.

Little else rivals the comfort of reading a book while nestled in a cozy chair on a rainy evening. A little Col-trane plays softly on the stereo while a cup of coffee lets off steam on the end table.

Then there is that beautiful sound of pages turning, like water lapping against a shore as you and your be-loved walk hand-in-hand in-to the sunset.

• • •

I remember parking out on a lover's lane with Lauren. Silver moonlight bathed the cornfield in the valley below with silver. Our hearts beat fast as we snuggled. Earlier that school year she'd broken up with her long-time boyfriend who'd been cheating on her. But she was still lovesick for him.

Then Lauren pulled away, said we couldn't see each other anymore. She was going back to him.

Getting over her wasn't too difficult. Lauren didn't have much time for books.

• • •

Some who possess books are not readers. This pretension reminds me of the wealthy who collect tomes to appear well-educated.

So when scanning my date's bookshelves, I'd always quickly note which were half-pulled out from recent use. Others were too long and stuck over the shelf's edge; how she arranged them and how bookends were utilized - as decoration or for their actual purpose of keeping books standing in a straight row - told me how she organized other aspects of her life.

Melissa alphabetized her books by subject and then by the author's last name. Her Day Runner was just as meticulous. Beth's tomes lay scattered around the living room, most of them half-opened. She usually withdrew from a couple of classes every semester.

But no matter how the volumes were kept, there always was a great affection in my heart for the girl who chose an apartment in part because of the space available for her bookshelves.

• • •

For those who love to read, books are old traveling companions. If my date bothered to use a bookplate, what was written on it told scores; it was as if that girl's best friend had whispered to me some secret about her.

Always of special interest were which pages she'd dog-eared or left small white tatterings to mark special passages that had given her pause. It told me something of what she was thinking.

One day about 11 years ago, I peeked a look at such a passage marked with a shred of paper as she finished fixing her hair. Turning to the page, I found these words underlined: "Strength and dignity are her clothing, and she laughs at the time to come. She opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue."

As her footfalls left the bathroom, I quickly shut the book and slipped it back on the shelf. But I knew that girl was a keeper.

This August, we'll have been married 13 years.

(originally published Feb. 17, 2003)

Look to the stars, post-Columbia

2005-02-10T05:21:00.000-08:00

The loss of the space shuttle Columbia hit me particularly hard, but I think what hurt more were the calls in the aftermath for an end to manned space flight.

That's because if all would have gone as expected, I wouldn't be writing this column.

Instead, I'd be piloting a craft far superior to the space shuttle between the planets right now.

• • •

As a boy, I grew up in the dawning of the space age. At three, with millions across the globe, I saw the first pictures of space broadcast from an orbiting craft. At four, I followed Apollo as it circled the moon. At five, I watched a man step for the first time onto that distant world.

And each time during the next two years that humanity set foot on the lunar surface, this farm boy looked above the stalks in our cornfield at the moon, just to see if he might glimpse our astronauts up there. Maybe I'd catch a glint of sun off the lander or their ship as it quietly orbited in the lunar sky.

Talk was we soon would have an orbiting space station. Development of a spaceship that could fly like a plane was proposed; this "shuttle" would ferry men and construction materials to the Skylab station and then a base on the moon. These would be launching pads for a manned mission to Mars, probably by the early 1980s.

Most astronauts were fighter pilots, I'd read. After a few years learning to fly in the Air Force, I could enter the astronaut program in the early 1990s. I studied maps and travel books to locate Cocoa Beach, Fla., which was where my future home would be. All the astronauts lived in Cocoa Beach.

I wouldn't be spending much time there, however. By the mid 1990s, we'd be building that permanent base on Mars and traveling to Venus and Jupiter. Those were long flights, and I was going to be on them.

• • •

It was not to be.

Two disasters prevented me from ever becoming an astronaut.

In fifth grade, school eye tests discovered I needed glasses. Back then, fighter pilots and astronauts didn't have four eyes.

The other calamity was far more insidious. It was the American people's loss of interest in the space program.

Some blame it on NASA getting dull. Some say because the Russians gave up on going to the moon, we felt no urgent need to keep going.

I say it was a lack of imagination.

• • •

A professor in college once told me the best way to learn about a person is to look at his checkbook. He was right - hobbies and vices have a way of creeping into our wallets.

The Seventies were tough times economically. Twice there was oil rationing, and inflation burned up a dollar's value as if it were dry grass caught in a prairie fire. Priorities had to change.

Unfortunately, America's priorities weren't particularly forward-looking.

There were many then, as there are today, who didn't share the excitement of exploring. They didn't understand the words of Thomas Jefferson when he sent Lewis and Clark west on the Corps of Discovery: "Those who come after us will ... fill up the canvas we begin."

Some said that space travel brought no return on the dollar for the investment, even though the Apollo missions advanced computer technology, the food and textile industries and even resulted in smoke detectors now mandatory in most buildings.

Others said the money ought to be spent on helping the poor, on curing diseases, on feeding the hungry.

I have no problem with abandoning all space travel if the money would be allocated for that. But the simple fact is it's not.

• • •

If anything, much money is spent on personal weaknesses that often result, if indirectly, in child poverty, illness and malnutrition.

A case in point: Gambling.

For the most part, it is harmless entertainment. But a few years ago while in Wisconsin, I calculated gambling's cost in a newspaper column. Enough money was spent on reservation casinos, racetracks and the state-run lottery annually in Wisconsin that 36 new high schools, with swimming pools and auditoriums, could be constructed each year to house 1,200 students.

Since not all school districts were that large, and since elementary schools and junior high buildings typically did not need to be so lavish, each school structure in that state could be replaced once every 12 years. Wisconsinites - like Americans everywhere, in-cluding Iowa - made their choice. They selected gambling over education. They chose it over child poverty, medical research and feeding the masses as well.

There's more. Each American consumer in 1997 spent an average of $292 annually on alcohol and $251 on tobacco, according to the Monthly Labor Review. That sends yearly spending on two products - of which one typically is among the leading causes of many mortal ailments - into the billions.

Don't tell me we don't have the money.

• • •

Americans are a courageous people who possess a special generosity and friendliness known the world over. But we Americans have selfish streaks as well. At our worst, we forget about the plight of others so it will not interfere with personal pleasures.

But in our hearts, most of us wish to do the best.

The loss of Columbia and her crew struck hard because all of us lost a symbol of hope, a hope that lives inside us, even when we push it far to the back. Improving the lot of others is the highest calling of any human being, and we must always believe that someone is there to help or we risk losing the very will to live.

The Columbia seven's lives were sacrificed in the quest to improve our quality of life. They represented the best part in each of us, and when they died, so our faith in humanity also was challenged.

Perhaps, though, if we gaze above the corn stalks at the stars once more, we will see lights that inspire us to those greater heights.

(originally published Feb. 10, 2003)

One small way of getting back to nature

2005-02-08T17:35:00.000-08:00

For the past few days I've had to scrape ice and snow off my car - and have been gleeful about it.

Such a chore may seem like an odd thing to make one happy. No one wants to stand in the cold, building up a sweat as chips and flakes fly back into the face. And often if snow is piled upon the windshield, it's piled around the fenders and tires, meaning you're going to step into a drift and get wet feet.

I don't concern myself with such unpleasantries, even look forward to them. Some of my colleagues tell me it's a subconscious desire to return north to my childhood home of Wisconsin, where winter starts and ends about a week earlier and any given day can be 10 degrees colder than Iowa City. But having lived for a couple of years in southern New Mexico, where T-shirt and shorts can be worn from Valentine's Day to Halloween, I safely can assert that all Midwest-ern winters pretty much are the same north of Interstate 80.

•••

In all truth, having to scrape ice and snow off the car makes me feel better about myself. Through the workday, I sit upon a cushy chair either in an air-conditioned or suitably heated office. At night, I've got more cable stations that can be surfed through in a half-hour, a lengthy sofa with extra padding and a fully stocked refrigerator. If I get bored, there are more than 3 billion Web sites to surf.

It's a comfortable life - a life that most of us lead.

And there's not really a reason for me to even park my car outside; I've got a garage.

So why fight prairie winds as gingerly straddling a drift to clear a stubborn layer of frost off a windshield?

As a Valentine's Day gift this week, should my wife set an appointment for me to see a psychologist?

•••

To truly appreciate the challenge of scraping snow off a windshield, people need to watch how their vehicles' glass changes with the seasons.

There's a pattern to it. In spring as the weather begins to warm, the windshield usually remains clear, offering an uninhibited view of dawn as the sun first reddens the horizon. By midsummer, though, as humidity soars, we have to wipe a layer of dew off the screen, sometimes even turn on the de-frost to evaporate it. The dry days of autumn leaves it clean again, but then slowly the dew returns and freezes, ebbing with Indian summer, but with each week growing thicker, until it becomes winter's full-fledged ice.

There's a rhythm to this, and a suggestion that despite our high tech thin-plate windows that keep us snugly warm when inside, we are not so far removed from the natural world on the outside.

And returning to that plane of existence, if only for a few minutes each day, isn't so bad.

•••

It's not so bad primarily because it offers challenge. And challenge is what drives humanity.

Anthropologists say Mother Nature nearly wiped out Homo sapiens some 70,000 years ago. As the great ice sheets covered Eur-ope, the Sahara expanded, reducing game and plants for our ancestors while isolating family groups. There may have only been about 10,000 or so humans left. That's about as many students as attend the University of Iowa during summer.

One day, a band of humans hemmed against the Red Sea decided to take matters in their own hands. With water levels low, they island hopped to greener lands on the Arabian Peninsula. From there, humanity spread along the coasts of the Indian Ocean and then inland along river channels, ultimately claiming Europe and North America as the glaciers retreated.

With each step taken, we challenged all Mother Nature threw at us: drought, monsoons, wild animals, floods, disease, poor soil. Today, at least in the modern West, we're barely bothered by the natural world.

But in all of that time, imprinted deep upon our genes, was a desire to face and overcome challenges, if only so we could be comfortable.

•••

This perhaps is why we still hold competitive sports. Why we turn presidential campaigns into horse races. Why some call for us to settle the moon and Mars, though space is the most in-hospitable and challenging of environments.

It's why a baby's first step is a milestone. Why the first word and graduation from high school is so meaningful, though both have been done millions of times.

The struggle itself is the thing. Should we fail to overcome hurdles because of a character flaw, it's tragic. Should some demonstrate foolish ways of mastering obstacles, it's comedy.

•••

Sometimes when I chisel ice off my windshield, one leg standing in snow up to the knee, somebody in his or her perfectly clean and warm SUV barrels out of a nearby garage and snickers while driving by.

But I don't complain about the ice or the snow or the cold. It's unseemly to do so, not Midwestern. After all, hearing someone from Atlanta whine about a half-inch of snow from a freak storm makes all of us think, "You ought to try living here, buddy!"

But we shouldn't boast about the weather, either. That would take the edge of our minor victory.

(originally published Feb. 8, 2004)

‘The day the music died...’

2005-02-03T15:46:00.006-08:00

Today is the anniversary of "the day the music died."

It was on Feb. 3, 1959, that a small plane carrying rock stars Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper crashed near Mason City. After playing the north Iowa gig in their Winter Dance Party tour, the trio was en route to Fargo.

The events of that night always have caused me to pause. And after they were immortalized in Don McLean's heartfelt "American Pie," who wouldn't they touch?

This year, however, those deaths ring a little more deeply with me. My wife and I just moved to Iowa and somehow being in the same state as where the crash occurred makes it all that more poignant.

I know the story of Buddy Holly's death almost by heart: How the Beechcraft Bonanza they flew on allegedly was named "American Pie," of how nobody knew the plane had crashed until the next morning when it didn't show up in Fargo, of how it was found on the Albert Juul farm, of how the plane dug a furrow through a cornfield's stubble before piling up against a fence.

I know these details because my mother told them to me every time she heard a Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens or Big Bopper song on the radio while I was growing up. She had watched them perform only a few days before when the Winter Dance Party played in Eau Claire, Wis.

A long, long time ago

By 1959, rock and roll was on the decline. Elvis was in the army. Record companies had domesticated the genre and were releasing music whose downbeat boasted Pat Boone.

Buddy Holly was trying to stay afloat in this musical quagmire. He'd just released "It Doesn't Matter Anymore," and that January began the Winter Dance Party Tour in Milwaukee with his cohorts.

On Jan. 26, the trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, played the Fournier Ball-room in Eau Claire.

My mother was just a high school freshman that year, but when Buddy Holly came to town, there was no way she wasn't going to be anywhere but at that show. Even more challenging than her age was that the show was on a Monday - a school night.

Worse, it lasted until 10:30 p.m., which was curfew. Like Cinderella trying to beat the midnight chimes, how was she going to get home without missing part of the show?

Fortunately for her, her best friend had an older sister who had a boyfriend who had a car. The older sister struck a deal: Pay for my boyfriend and me to get in, and you've got a ride.

My mother said it was the best $1.25 she ever spent.

By today's standards, Buddy Holly looks cool because he's retro. But back then in his black horn-rim-med glasses, he was considered a geek.

What made him cool was the passion he put into his playing.

"Now do you believe in rock'n'roll?" McClean wrote a decade after the crash. "Can music save your mortal soul? And can you teach me how to dance real slow?"

Holly and Valens and Dion spoke to my mother, her friend, and all of the other teens at Fournier's that night. I can see them kicking off their shoes and digging those rhthym'n'blues.

Bad news on the door step

A couple of days after Eau Claire, the Winter Dance Party saw what a real Midwest winter is like. They were stranded in Appleton, Wis., on Feb. 1 when their bus broke down. With no heat, they burned newspapers in the aisle to keep warm. One of the band members suffered frostbite.

They made it to Green Bay that night, however, and played. Then they flew to Iowa and performed at the Surf Ballroom at Clear Lake on Feb. 2.

That evening - a Monday - Holly, Valens and the Big Bopper decided to fly ahead for a little rest and to get the musicians' costumes dry cleaned. The rest of the party would take the bus, which meant a long, cold ride across the wind-swept prairie.

Richie Valens won a coin toss to get a seat on the plane.

Shortly after 1 a.m. on Feb. 3, the plane took off from Mason City Municipal Airport. Just a few miles later, it quickly lost altitude. The plane slammed into the ground at 170 miles per hour.

My mother didn't find out about Holly's death until she got home from school that night and turned on her radio. The local station was playing "That'll Be The Day," "La Bamba" and "Chantilly Lace" - her favorite songs - over and over. Her exuberance ended when the disc jockey told the unhappy news.

"The lovers cried and the poets dreamed. But not a word was spoken - the church bells all were broken."

Miss American Pie

I've never been to the cornfield where Buddy Holly lost his life. Maybe some day I will go. Each year a Winter Dance Party festival is held in Mason City, and mourners gather at the crash site to pay their respects.

And every year the newspapers and television stations in those towns where Holly performed that winter retell the story of what happened and show blurry black and white photographs of their sock hop. Whenever I see pictures from Eau Claire, I look for my mother in them.

I've never seen her, though she has a clipping from some years back that she says shows her friend's older sister. A smile brighter than a summer's dawn covers the girl's face as her hair whirls with her hips in beat to the song Holly belted out only a few feet away.

And each time I think of that face, I remember those immortal lines: "Do you recall what was revealed, the day the music died?"

(originally published Feb. 3, 2003)

Lowest common denominator sank the captain

2005-02-01T04:27:00.000-08:00

One of my childhood friends died recently. If it's any consolation, most of America is sharing in the grief.

Captain Kangaroo - Bob Keeshan in real life - died Jan. 23. Weekday mornings from 1955 to 1991 on CBS, then public television, most preschool children started their day with the captain and his cast - Mr. Green Jeans whose contraptions always fell apart, glasses-wear-ing Bunny Rabbit who always tried to trick the captain out of carrots, Mr. Moose whose knock-knock jokes always ended with the captain being showered in dozens of Ping-Pong balls.

Two generations grew up with Captain Kangaroo, and as they changed, so did elements of his show. There was the black and white version that Baby Boomers watched; back then, a younger Keeshan wore a big sea captain's coat with oversized pockets and broadcast from the "Treasure House." Then came the color version for Generation Xers - the one I watched - where a more mature Keeshan wore a red blazer and broadcast from the "Captain's Place."

At the core, though (gathering from my talks with "older" colleagues), Captain Kangaroo was the same walrus-mustachioed, slightly rotund, doddering old friend with the Dutch-boy haircut who read stories and entertained children no matter what the year.

And he always was quite real. Why, his house and Mr. Green Jeans' barn could be just down the road, beyond the next cornfield.

•••

No educational instruction occurs in a moral vacuum. In history class, the covering of specific wars, personalities and political events implies they carry greater importance than the ones left out. Stories in reading and English courses each offer a lesson, even if simplistic. Science and health classes carry curricular limitations because of political storms stirred by belief-sensitive winds.

Television is little different. Broadcasts seethe with our cultural values.

A question raised by Keeshan - and later Fred Rogers and Jim Henson - was whether we should allow television to appeal to the lowest common denominator and hence reinforce in children the worst of our society's values, such as violence as a means of solving a problem.

Their conclusion was that children appreciated having their intelligence challenged and that adults need not talk down to youth.

It's why Captain Kangaroo always started the show by saying, "Good morning." He wanted it to seem as if he were talking only to you.

•••

From a marketer's perspective, Captain Kangaroo just didn't cut it. He couldn't draw the viewers and was slashed to a half-hour then reduced to a once-a-week appearance each Saturday during his last days on CBS. Maybe if he would have had laser beams and foul-mouthed fourth-graders, the show could have survived.

Instead, public television picked him up for a few final years. But with cable's ever-expanding buffet of children's shows, even PBS had to move on. Perhaps if Keeshan had added explosions, Ninja-style kicks and a puppet that could be sold as an action figure, the show could have gone on.

But the program didn't encourage anyone to violence. It didn't persuade kids to attempt dangerous stunts. It didn't sell any sugary breakfast cereals.

It did increase the telling of knock-knock jokes among preschoolers, though.

•••

Everyone has a favorite memory of Captain Kangaroo. Some enjoyed the stories he read. Others recall how they learned to tie shoes from a skit involving Bunny Rabbit. I myself liked repeating "Abracadabra, please and thank you!"

These days, I find that too few people say "please" and "thank you" in public discourse.

•••

Ironically, Captain Kangaroo's undoing was his very strength: He wasn't edgy.

Keeshan moved through his show at a leisurely pace. For many of my generation, it was a pleasant relief for sleepy heads too often suffering through family turmoil.

Keeshan found teaching some very basic life lessons was most important. Play fair. Share. Tell the truth. Say "please" and "thank you." Be kind to your parents. Follow the Golden Rule. And along the way, have some fun.

They're good lessons to learn. Looking at the news in a recent paper, there are a number of people who probably should have watched Captain Kangaroo.

But alas, the lowest common denominator won. The Ping-Pong balls just kept falling and falling and falling. He went off the air.

Rest in peace, old friend.

(originally published Feb. 1, 2004)

Why we should(n't) follow our team captain

2005-01-30T10:22:00.000-08:00

"Have you forgotten who's the team captain?" my grade school classmate Billy Honecker shouted at us as when we told little Linda Dawn to bunt toward third. He wanted her to hit the ball high to left field, but some of us knew she didn't have the strength to get it past second.

The team members huddled at the backstop.

"Look, her best bet to get on base is to hit it toward third," Wendy said. "Their weakest thrower is on third."

Billy shook his head.

"If she knocks it to left field, Scott can make it to home plate."

"She can't hit it that far," Wendy said. "She'll just knock up a pop fly that they'll catch for an easy out."

Billy's lips pursed tight. "I was named captain, and I say she should hit it to left field. Quit selling her short."

"No one's selling her short," I said. "We're just being realistic."

That's when Adrienne stepped forward. The western sky behind her was starting to cloud over as the corn tassels wavered in the growing wind.

"If we don't quit fighting among ourselves, we'll never win," she said.

I found myself torn. But having confidence in Linda being able to do her best ap-pealed to my sense of romanticism, in much the same way as Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" does today.

"Let's give Billy's call a try," I said.

So Linda hit a pop fly, which was caught by the shortstop.

That's when the ninth man in our lineup, cross-eyed Colin, came up to bat.

"Hit it to left field," Billy shouted. Wendy and I rolled our eyes.

Adrienne sneered at us.

"If we lose, it'll be all your fault," she said.

So I cheered Colin on to hit the ball hard. For some reason, though, he still struck out.

Maybe I just didn't cheer loud enough.

(originally published Jan. 30, 2005)

The lightweight joys of soup

2005-01-27T18:29:00.000-08:00

This past week's double whammy of cold weather and school-closing flu actually has been good for Iowans. It's reminded us all of the joys of soup.

Soup is an underappreciated food, relegated at best to the role of appetizer. In summer, cans of it sit at the back of cupboards, waiting for winter's return.

The healing power of soup rivals any home remedy. Indeed, chicken broth was prescribed by physicians more than 2100 years ago in ancient Greece.

In the late 1970s, a medical study demonstrated that chicken broth promotes the flow of air and mucus in nasal passages and clears up congestion better than control liquids of hot and cold water.

During the next decade, researchers identified an amino acid - released when cooking a chicken - that actively thins the mucus in the lungs. If chilies, garlic, and spices are added to chicken soup, they further loosen phlegm and act as expectorants.

Of course, such findings are enough to turn anyone off to soup.

But the real power of soup, I suspect, has less to do with air flow and amino acids than the image of your mother quietly entering your room, where as a child you lay miserable and sniffing in your bed. She's carrying a tray of buttered toast, 7-Up and the only thing you really can consume just then: a warm bowl of chicken soup. And better than even the best nurse at the best hospital ever possibly could, she pats your head, fluffs up your pillow and offers soothing words of comfort.

It's chicken soup for the soul, as they say.

Soup goes way back in human evolution. Stone Age men quickly invented it after discovering fire (necessary to warm the broth) and after developing stone tools for cutting (necessary to slicing meat and chopping herbs for the soup). Scientists say Neanderthals probably enjoyed soup as far back as 80,000 BCE. Neanderthals, by the way, lived during the Ice Age.

Just imagine their delicacies: mammoth gazpacho, sopa de reindeer, alphabet soup (which consisted only of the letters U, G and H).

When modern humans entered Neanderthal territory, we likely learned soup-making from them. Guess the Neanderthals weren't so dumb, after all.

But soup isn't just ingrained in the genes because it benefited us during our evolution. No, soup is essential to the obtaining of higher ideas, such as liberty and abstract art.

In 1777, as George Washington's troops winter camped at Valley Forge, the ragged band avoided starvation thanks to soup. Faced with hardly any food in the army stores, the camp cook mixed tripe and peppercorn with boiling water to feed the ragged band. Thus was born America's famous pepperpot soup.

The revolutionary army survived the winter, and we all know what happened after that.

A few years later, Thomas Jefferson would contemplate soup in his essay "Observations on Soup." Like soup, itself, this piece is much underappreciated and rarely mentioned in his biographies. But he did write it.

Unfortunately, part of soup's bad image can be blamed on Iowan Herbert Hoover. During the Great Depression, lines at soup kitchens ran long. After that experience, Americans really didn't want soup if they had a choice.

But in 1961 Andy Warhol came to soup's rescue. His 32 Campbell's Soup Cans turned a run-of-the-mill grocery store item into high art. Somehow, Warhol saw what Jefferson had recognized more than a century-and-a-half before: There's more to soup than just hot water and some flavoring.

What they saw was the sweetness in one of life's most simplest pleasures.

These days, a lot of Americans are worried about the lagging economy and impending war. Those who look farther out see looming environmental dangers.

We need an occasional simple pleasure to lessen the load.

So whenever you start feeling down, reach into your pantry and remember what William McKinley (a much underappreciated president) cried out at a news conference in 1897: "What this country needs is a good 10-ounce can of condensed soup!"

Tastes, er, sounds, good to me.

(originally published Jan. 27, 2003)

When politics and neighborliness combine

2005-01-25T13:23:00.000-08:00

I didn't have to know where I was going. Last Monday night, I simply followed the stream of cars through my neighborhood.

They all were headed to our caucus location, despite the cold and even though the next morning was a work day. I decided this year to attend the Democrats' caucus, figuring the voting method and array of candidates would make it far more interesting than the GOP's.

Apparently, others had the same thought as me. Though I planned to arrive with 10 minutes to spare before the 6:30 start time, I found myself at the end of a line 75 people long.

It wasn't poor organization at work. The elementary school gym holding my precinct's caucus already was full and, during the next several minutes, another 75 neighbors got in line behind me. The precinct anticipated record turnout - maybe 150 people at best. We had 271.

•••

No one seemed to mind. Neighbors talked about what their kids were doing and how the Hawkeyes did this year.

But the conversation inevitably turned to politics as we advanced toward the registration table: "Did you read the article on John Kerry in The Atlantic Monthly?" "Do you think Kucinich's health care plan has a chance?"

And then something would distract us, maybe a school child's cute piece of art or writing, like "Snowflakes are white like vanilla cream." We marveled over our children's imaginations and creativity.

Then came a sobering return to politics: "You know, I'm afraid for my kids' future."

•••

Somehow we all found room in the gym. The collective bodies warmed the huge space so that we soon took off our coats and jackets, and piles of them everywhere quickly competed for space.

Conversations about home, family and jobs continued as we waited patiently for all to register. Some sat quietly. One elderly lady was smart enough to bring a book.

Fifty minutes later than originally planned, the precinct chairman tapped his gavel. For a moment he surveyed the gym, looking at all the people packed closer than stalks in a cornfield, and said, "I'll take this as a sign that people are real happy with the job George Bush is doing."

And then he announced that the caucuses were a 32-step process.

•••

Though I'd explained to the national media in a dozen interviews during the week leading up to the event how the Democrats' caucuses work, there is nothing quite like going through one to fully grasp what it's all about.

There's one thing my colleagues would have discovered if they could have participated: It's only partially about expressing one's political views.

Supporters of each candidate were asked to go to a specific corner of the gym so a count could be taken. Once we got there, it was a matter not of counting but of introductions. "Hi, I'm - " "Oh you work in that building! I've always wondered what they did in that there."

Finally we got around to nominating and electing a preference group chairperson and making the count.

•••

My candidate garnered 90 of the 271 in attendance. We could send three delegates to the convention.

We gazed out on the other candidates' preference groups. Dick Gephardt, Dennis Kucinich and Wesley Clark weren't "viable" candidates as they had to have at least 15 percent of the total crowd.

Then our preference group chairwoman an-nounced that if we could get 15 more supporters, our candidate would get a fourth delegate. We had a half-hour before the final count.

"No problem," said one woman, "two of my neighbors are for Gephardt." She zoomed across the gym toward their corner.

As did just about everyone else. Kucinich and Gephardt and Edwards folks got together to see if they could combine forces. They swooped upon the Clark camp and the undeclareds to find supporters. Those in the Kerry and Dean corners did so as well.

Suddenly, the room was abuzz with talk about the war, about NAFTA, about No Child Left Behind, about the cost of health insurance, about the space program.

•••

And then came the gavel. Time for the final count.

The woman returned from the Gephardt camp with five people in tow. A few Kucinich supporters also joined us, under the agreement that one of them would get to be a county delegate - a chance for Ku-cinich's issues to be heard and placed on the platform, but a vote to move our candidate along. It was a compromise, sort of like agreeing who will prune the shrubs on the property line.

As the final count was taken, our conversations turned back to seemingly more mundane issues: which neighbor had a son in Iraq, about the plant closing in West Branch, about our kids' homework, about how little our pay raises were after the new payroll taxes, about how one guy's company was hoping to bid on a high-tech NASA project.

Because this caucus - just as it was for our Republican brethren across the street - was more than a political event. It was a neighborhood gathering. A block party at an elementary school.

And that's community building at its best.

(originally published Jan. 25, 2004)

Downtowns define our cities

2005-01-20T06:25:00.000-08:00

If any part of a city defines a community, it is downtown.

For some places, that's not good news. Their city centers are a collection of boarded windows and drug dealers, a place for the most downcast of the poor to reside.

But even as malls bloom where cornfields once stood and freeways offer easy access to safe but soulless suburbs, time and time again people fret over the fate of their "downtown." Revital-ization efforts and grass roots efforts seek to rescue many from oblivion.

What should a downtown be? As City Manager Steve Atkins pointed out during the Optimist Club of Iowa City's meeting earlier this month, coming up with a consensus is difficult to say the least. And while he re-ferred to downtown Iowa City, he could have meant any downtown in the United States.

At the heart of all such issues is a romantic vision of what the community's center should be. Main Street, after all, is an American icon.

Two images remain prominent in our imaginations. Both were created by movie companies.

First is Disney's Main Street USA, which can be ex-perienced at the Magic Kingdom in either California or Florida. The turn of the century storefronts (which maintenance crews repaint each night) border brick streets, Victorian lampposts, park benches and water fountains. Shoppers may travel by foot or trolley to their destination. Whenever communities talk about beautifying their downtowns, they invariably mean this Disney dreamscape.

1950s small town America

The second vision is that of 1955 Hill Valley from the movie "Back to the Future." Built on a Universal Studio back lot, Hill Valley's quaint downtown centers on a town square with the courthouse at one end. A theater, diner, gas station, record store, bank and other businesses line the adjoining three streets. Whenever communities discuss what their downtowns should offer, they invariably mean those conventions we associate with 1950s small town America.

It is the downtown I most dream of. Growing up in the late 1960s, my family shopped weekly in the little town of Durand, Wis., population 1,500. Durand isn't much different than most small towns in Iowa. Its Main Street looks much like the one painted on the hardcover version of Garrison Keillor's "Lake Wobegon Days."

Each Thursday night - which was payday back then - Durand's stores remained open into the evening. My parents' sojourn usually began at the grocery store, which boasted a whole eight aisles.

Perhaps because of shopping there in my formative years, I disdain warehouse-sized supermarkets. After all, just how many salad dressings or kinds of Captain Crunch does a man really need? I'm shopping for groceries, not surfing the Web.

Being overwhelmed, ironically, is what made downtown Durand such a great place to be on Thurs-day nights. We weren't inundated with products, though, but with friendship.

Everyone went downtown Thursday night. If you needed clothes, the sales clerk at Skogmo's was certain to remember your size. If you wanted one of those newfangled color televisions, the hardware storeowner knew exactly what model black and white you were replacing. Teachers chatted with students lined up at the theater, old classmates ran into one another at the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, and the waitress at the Durand Café didn't have to ask what kind of pie you wanted for dessert.

Enter Minneapolis

While walking once with a friend though Minneapolis' downtown skyways, I was struck by a similar atmosphere. He worked at an office housed in the old WCCO-TV studios. Within a few blocks was the coffee shop where the girl remembered he didn't need extra room for cream and the Kinko's boy could recite the title of the last report he'd had photocopied.

But the vast number of people my friend didn't know - and never would, for that matter - also impressed me. He boasted that more people came to downtown Minneapolis each day than lived in the entire city.

They're a lot like all those salad dressings at the mega supermarket, I thought.

I don't mean to criticize Minneapolis; a lot of old friends and college acquaintances that I've lost touch with over the years probably work there. And places like downtown Minneapolis are necessary in a global economy.

But so are places like downtown Durand.

And that ultimately is what each of us wants from our downtown. The Disney-scape and Hill Valley stores are nice, but they're just the vinaigrette upon what really matters: a bowl full of friends who care about us, maybe even with a few odd seeds tossed in for flavor.

Downtown is about community, and people who worry about their Main Street primarily fear that loss of center in their lives.

(originally published January 20, 2003)

'Excuse me, is there a windmill or potato field nearby?'

2005-01-18T14:24:00.000-08:00

The troubling aspect of telling people exactly what you think is they usually respond in kind.

Such is the dilemma Iowa faces thanks to the caucuses. Not just the national, but the world media has descended upon our state to see who our Democrats will pick to run for president against George W. Bush.

Though New York and Washington and Atlanta and Los Angeles and London journalists are fairly good at maintaining their objectivity when reporting the presidential race, we also can read between the lines and get a sense of what people from far-flung places think of our state.

It's an interesting array of images.

•••

Consider this report from a Des Moines colleague: When one national television chain rolled into town, they asked if there was a windmill nearby that they could report in front of. When told no, they asked if there was a cow.

Perhaps the most notorious image is the New York Times editorial that described Iowa as a "quaint" state in arguing that we shouldn't play such a big role nominating the president.

Or there's this snippet from a New York Times op-ed, noting "... the great distances of flat highways that stretch between campaign stops." Mmm ... evocative.

Then there's political pundit Charles E. Cook Jr., who noted in an op-ed defending Iowa's status as first-in-the nation, "Although some of these people lack the sophistication of the East or West Coast, they often display common sense and maybe have a hypocrisy meter that is as sensitive as anywhere else."

•••

"Wait, I don't care what those guys think of us," you may say.

Don't lie. It's unbefitting of an Iowan to lie.

You do care.

"... social approval and disapproval affect virtually everyone's feelings about themselves, even those individuals who steadfastly and adamantly claim that their feelings about themselves are not affected by other people's evaluations," ac-cording to a Wake Forest University study published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin's most recent issue.

Added Mark Leary, lead-author of the study, "People underestimate the degree to which they are influenced by others. It's hard to know why, but part of it may be the American ideal of marching to your own drummer. We grow up thinking we shouldn't be affected by what others think."

Or in Iowa's case, where 10 different candidates have been trying to get us to like them for the past year, maybe too many of us have seen social approval taken to the extreme and can't imagine ourselves remotely being like that.

•••

Among the problems with the media imagery is that we hail many of those same items as state icons. We're proud of our cornfields and windmills, but we don't exactly like to be associated with them.

Existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote in "Being and Nothingness" (take that for sophistication, Charles E. Cook Jr.,!) that the psychological problem of another looking at us is that we lose control of the ability to define ourselves.

Indeed, we don't mind preserving windmills to recognize our heritage, but once a journalist gives a report in front of that icon, others presume it's not our past but our present. Though most Iowans have little to do with the farm anymore, the image makes us farmers - and raises all of the uncomfortable stereotypes that may come with such a label.

At least no national reporter has asked if there's a potato field nearby.

(originally published Jan. 18, 2004)

What would you want to see if you were about to go blind?

2005-01-16T17:04:00.000-08:00

Anytime I stop in a bookstore, whether it is the fancy new Barnes & Noble in Coralville or the musty shelves of downtown's Northside, I keep an eye out for the name "Grant Foy." I'm not sure which section it will be in, whether I'll stumble across it in a magazine rather than a book or whether I'll even see it at all.

Grant was my one of my many college roommates; while certainly among the quietest, he also ranked as the most interesting. He also shared something with many Iowa Citians: a love of writing.

He filled gads of notebooks with observations and thoughts, which I never minded having piled around the dorm room because it put me in a good mood to pound out that next article for the student newspaper.

His writing certainly was in more romantic surroundings - rather than spend hours covering dry meetings as I did, he'd go on hikes to the nearby dam, maybe to a farmer's cornfield on the outskirts of town, occasionally even to the busiest main street bar, pen and notepad in hand, and write.

Sometimes I fancied that trapped inside him was a ghost that desperately needed to speak and so compelled his hand to move across countless empty pages.

Sometimes I doubt I'll ever see Grant's name on a book spine. You see, Grant was not a writer precisely but a diarist (as though a novelist, poet or journalist were the only way one could exist as a writer). Not even that term is entirely accurate, though, because his subject matter wasn't exactly himself but what he saw and thought of it.

***

I can't speak much of what was in his notebooks, for as a fellow writer (though a more utilitarian sort), I respected the privacy of a closed cover. Writing is a work in progress, and to look at any draft but the final one that the author presents is akin to watching your first date dress.

But I could tell by inadvertent glances at Grant's paper that his writing was not the same sentence repeated, and that it sometimes consisted of long paragraphs and other times of a sentence fragment.

Grant didn't write with a career in mind or for money. Nor was he a navel-gazer. Writing can help us better understand ourselves, of course, but like Meriwether Lewis who kept logs while he blazed a trail across knew territory, Grant's words were not principally about personal devils but the journey itself.

For him, writing merely served as a way to make sense of the world, to place contacts in the eyes to eliminate reality's blur. I suspect that's the case with many writers.

Indeed, as Canadian Humorist Stephen Leacock once said.

"Writing is no trouble: You just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself - it is the occurring which is difficult."

Grant once told me he used writing as a way of forcing himself to remain aware of the world about him. It's a quality more of us should aspire to. Too often we do find ourselves buried in the mundane dregs of work, school or what passes these days as entertainment.

Upon hearing abstractions, too many of our reactions tend to the extremes of a knee-jerk tirade or an indifferent shrug rather than a careful consideration of the notion itself.

"The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself," Albert Camus wrote.

His words apply to the unpublished writer, too, for what kind of a society no longer takes time for what is most important?

***

Helen Keller once asked people what they would make sure to see one last time if they knew in only a few hours they would go blind.

An intriguing question. I would want to see my wife's smile, a tassel of corn waving in the breeze and lakewater rippling against a shoreline.

So what would you want to see?

Or hear? Or touch? Or smell?

And do you shrug indifferently each day that these things pass before your eyes, content with the belief you will not go blind in a few hours?

Grant didn't. And though I may never find his name on a bookstore shelf, he's my hero because of it.

(originally published Jan. 16, 2005)

Seed catalogs teach patience

2005-01-13T05:28:00.000-08:00

About this time in January an odd periodical begins to show up at homes across the Midwest: seed catalogs.

In the middle of Iowa's coldest month, spring gardening may sound like the most distant of our concerns. But as the old adage goes, we most want what we cannot have. And for a few months at least, green and a balmy warmth won't be seen in these parts.

Growing up on a farm, catalogs from companies such as White Flower Farm, High Country Gardens, Henry Field's, and the king of them all, W. Atlee Burpee Seeds, would arrive daily by mail during mid-January. My parents had stacks of them, and they read them for pleasure as if they were children who'd just been handed the Christmas catalog.

It is easy to see why: Each page brimmed with bright pictures of flowers, melons, vegetables, corns from sweet to ornamental to popcorn, all in prime form as if blue ribbon winners at the state fair. Why, there were more varieties in those few pages than ever appeared at our town's largest supermarket or greenhouse.

Enticing descriptions accompanied each picture - "Tastes like it's been brushed with honey!" "A carnival of colors!" - and just for my utilitarian father, I imagined as a child, those delights were followed by words such as "Quick drying ears ... Good disease resistance."

Serpents in the garden

Reading those catalogs, you almost could feel the dirt in your hands, could see the array of colors growing around you, could breathe in each fragrant bloom. Indeed, as the snow piled up outside and the wind dropped to temperatures below zero, cozying up in an easy chair and clinging to every word wasn't difficult.

But one always had to read seed catalogs closely, for amid that garden of delights were serpents.

I remember my parents buying sweet peppers because they were "fast growing." Both recalled how as children they loved having the tangy orange slices mixed with salads, and their eyes grew dreamy. And so, like children impatient for cookies to finish baking, they ordered a "fast growing" variety from Burpee, all in hope that their cravings would be met a couple of weeks earlier.

But within a month of planting, they discovered that "fast-growing" was just a euphemism for "fast spreading." Soon the sweet peppers sprouted all over the garden, elbowing out squash and carrots, strangling tomatoes and tulips, threatening the sweet corn and yams. They battled all summer long to keep this new weed from taking over the garden and the next spring dug up the peppers so they wouldn't take over the bed.

Indeed, little descriptions such as "mildew-resistant" probably meant the plant would succumb should we have a wetter than normal season. "Drought-resistant" really meant the plant wouldn't last if we had a less than average rainfall.

Seed catalogs, I also discovered, were a great way to learn Latin.

Vocabulary booster

Most catalogs offer both the plants' common and botanical names. Consider the sunflower. Its Latin name is Helianthus annus, meaning "annual sunflower." "Annus" is Latin for "annual," "heli" referred to "sun" and "anthus" to "flower." Such knowledge helped get me through fifth grade vocabulary tests: It was an easy guess that "heliocentric," or "sun at the center" referred to the scientific theory that the sun rather than the earth was at the center of the solar system.

"How'd you know?" my friend Kirby asked me when he got it wrong on the test.

"Seed catalogs," I said smugly as he did a double take and scratched his head in confusion.

Almost as exciting as reading seed catalogs was receiving the packets that had been ordered. An illustration showing what the seeds might look like that autumn covered the front of each pocket-sized envelope. It was akin to staring at a pie set on the window sill to cool.

As the days of summer passed and gardening turned into a chore that just didn't seem worth it when cans of peas and carrots were so readily available on grocery store shelves, the dog-eared seed catalogs found themselves at the bottom the magazine rack. Eventually, though, if one were patient enough and put in the necessary hours toiling over garden rows, the flowers bloomed and the vegetables ripened, sometimes not looking quite as nice as those pictures we drooled over in January, but smelling and tasting just as good as we had imagined.

Then, after we'd stuffed ourselves on the bounty, there was the sweet satisfaction in knowing that all of our hard work had paid off.

And to think, it all began on a frigid winter day with a vision planted by a simple seed catalog.

(originally published Jan. 13, 2003)

A simple question for us all: To dance or not to dance?

2005-01-09T20:21:00.000-08:00

Wearing a white empire-style gown and a necklace of pearls, Claire Addison looked resplendent that night. She twirled around once in her kitchen before us, holding the full skirt above the ankles with a pinch of her fingers.

In high school at the time, I'd just dropped off my girlfriend, who was to babysit the Addison's children. She gasped at the dress; "It's so beautiful, Mrs. Addison," she said.

Claire beamed as her husband, decked in a black tux, put his arm around her. It was their anniversary, and he was taking her to a ball at a fancy hotel in thebig city to celebrate. She'd been talking about it for weeks.

They (and I, too) were about to leave when a knock at the door interrupted Claire's last-minute instructions abot the children. Winter's longering chill filled the kitchen as Mr. Addison opened the door.

The neighbor farmer, Mr. Corby, stood ont he dark porch, almost out of breath. "Luke," he said, "I'm sorry to bother you, but my cows are out. They're all over the neighborhood - could you help me round them up?"

Earlier that year, a creek had flooded after a warm spell; that night, an embankement where a fence stood gave way. The cows had found the hole. We would have to sweep nearby woods, and it might take an hour or more to make sure we had all of the cattle.

Mr. Addison held in a sigh, and I caught his eyes glancing surreptitously to the window. There wasn't a light on at a singlefarm across the cornfield. If Mr. Addison helped, he would need to shower again and redress. A couple of hours might pass, and by then it would be late. He turned around and gazed at his wife.

Her eyes fell downward.

Then he looked at Mr. Corby, stood straighter for a moment, and I swear his heels seemed to dog ino the floorboards.

"Actually, John, we were just ..."

But then Claire unhooked the pearls from her neck ad stepped to her husband's side. The kitchen light warmed her face. "We'll help," she said. "Give me a moment to change."

Did Mr. Addison make the right decision? I suspect so, becuase if he would have immediately jumped to Mr. Corby's assistance, hewould have shown ehere his priorities truly rested and failed a test. But satisfied with his answer, Claire knew she and her husband also had another test to face. She gave the right answer, too.

If there is to be any disappointment inthis tale, it must be caused by those who would have chosen to dance that night.

Originally published Jan. 9, 2005

Celebrate our heritage through prairie restoration

2005-01-04T18:10:00.000-08:00

One might say we've just lived through Iowa's bicentennial.

Two centuries ago, on Dec. 20, 1803, France gave an immense swath of continental America to the United States in the Louisiana Purchase. Though President Thomas Jefferson was criticized for the $15 million payment to Napoleon, it was a pretty good deal. It came to about 4 cents an acre.

In today's values, that would be like buying all of Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana - plus good-sized chunks of Minnesota, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana, Colorado, Wyoming and Texas - for $250 million. Contrast that with the 4.5-acre proposed rain forest-aquarium for Coralville, valued at $180 million.

Of course, back in 1803 most of the purchased territory was unexplored wilderness. The primary reason for the land deal was to secure the port of New Orleans and Mississippi River for the United States. Fur traders already had described much of the purchased prairie as a great desert.

•••

A few months after the territory was purchased, Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark's famed Corps of Discovery up the Missouri River to find the fabled Northwest Passage.

They crossed what is modern day Iowa's southwest edge. What the corps - and the pioneers who soon followed - saw was chest-high grasses waving beneath the wind.

Before white settlers arrived from the East, 25 million acres of prairie covered Iowa, making up about 70 percent of state's total acreage. Today, a mere 30,000 acres - about 0.1 percent of the original range - remains in prairie.

Most of the land was broken into fields, which gave Iowa a grand agricultural heritage we should be proud of and celebrate.

Today, of course, farmland is slowly being turned over to asphalt and manicured green lawns. Yet one more heritage is passing on to another.

•••

But urbanization, running at a fast click as subdivisions rise in Iowa City, Coralville, North Liberty and Tiffin and across the North Corridor, still allows us to reclaim part of what was lost after the Louisiana Purchase.

We can return roadsides, as is the case on Mormon Trek Boulevard, to prairie. We can return our yards to this state as well.

Doing so offers many benefits. Prairie wildflowers are natural water purifiers; their deep root systems filter toxins, resulting in a cleaner water table. They preserve our native wildlife as well. Many birds, butterflies and other animals feed only on native plants; monarch butterfly caterpillars, for example, rely entirely on milkweed to survive.

Ultimately, prairie restor-ation saves work, especially around the yard. A patch of prairie grass and flowers requires much less mowing and raking than a manicured lawn.

Of course, the neighbors may not like it. Many people still carry the notion that the only nice lawn is one yielding crew cut Kentucky Bluegrass - a foreign import that ought to rankle every true blood patriot.

•••

What would a yard in native prairie look like?

It would be full of asters, black-eyed Susans, blazing stars, butterfly milkweeds, white and purple coneflowers, little bluestem (a grass), monardas, purple prairie clover, and prairie dropseed (another grass).

On summer nights it would offer a concert of chirping and buzzing insects.

During the day, for those willing to explore, it would yield the stunningly beautiful (and harmless) black and yellow striped agriope spider, its webs connecting the varying plant leafs.

•••

Surprisingly, a lot of prairie enthusiasts aren't tree hugging college students in Iowa City or history buffs but farmers with soul.

An uneasy relationship always has existed between farmland and prairie in Iowa. This summer, for example, many farmers were forced to crop dust their fields so aphids wouldn't destroy soybeans.

Unfortunately, the pesticides often drifted onto prairie restoration areas, wiping out insects and upsetting the ecosystem.

Some farmers, of course, see only the bottom line and care little about land that provides no saleable crops. For them, it's cornfield or bust.

But many enjoy their deep relationship with the land and the environment, holding great respect for life's interconnectedness and what surprises it yields. They know the power of mother nature, of how in a few minutes wind and hail can destroy a season's crop, of how if it holds out on rain for a single day can mean the difference between bounty and drought.

They understand there's more than "x cents an acre" to life. They're the ones with soul.

And we urbanites in our air-conditioned homes and half-acre lots would be remiss to forget that affinity.

(originally published Jan. 4, 2004)

Family, home resurrects quiet appreciation of life

2004-12-26T15:53:00.000-08:00

Holidays remind us of the value of home - for even if we do not experience the coziness of family gathered in the living room, perhaps about the Christmas tree or with the Menorah lit in the window, we take great joy at finally returning to our own cabin, where the noise of relatives disappears and peace can be found.

Such silence struck me a few weekends ago when visiting my brother. As the family genealogist, I drove my 5-year-old nephew around the county to show him our ancestors' old haunts, at least on the patriarchal branches of the tree. His parents appreciated the quiet.

So did I - once we reached the cabin that our great-great-grandfather had built. He'd settled in one of the last places west where you could build in a woods before the whole continent opened onto a sea of grass.

No trace of the cabin exists these days but its foundations, and only the remnants of a fence guided us along the overgrown trails to its wooded burial place. I recalled it in better shape - my great-uncle, a man with a Walt Whitman beard, lived there into his 90s, and I remember briefly visiting him as a child, when the house stood on its last splinters.

Chunks were missing in the stones that formed the cabin's base, and swatches of wily shrubs concealed most of them. Tucked into a hollow, only the occasional rustle of evergreen boughs and our own breathing could be heard.

As my nephew crawled about the stones, thinking it a grand adventure (he must have fancied it some great fort), I kept my mind on more practical, adult matters: A cabin there must have been quite wet - but I soon saw the builder was ingenious enough to ward against that; the foundation sat on a rectangular area raised slightly higher than the rest of the forest floor. Their lawn probably was leaves and roots rising out of the dirt, or at least the woods had reclaimed it.

***

Out on the windswept plains, the only timber most pioneers could find outlined the occasional creek. Some-times when a homesteader claimed his stake, for lumber he'd simply dismantle his wagon that very first night he arrived.

"In every case the pioneer's first thought was to prepare a home," wrote Mildred Sharp in a 1921 recollection of her days as a young girl with homesteading parents, now collected in the Iowa History Project. "It would be a dwelling place for his family, a fortress against the Indians, a nucleus for civilization. Under these conditions building the cabin came to be an event of great importance and produced a thrill of pleasure that could hardly be understood by those who had never suffered the same privations."

Of course, such structures hardly compare to our houses of today with several bedrooms, formal dining rooms and finished basements. Indeed, when Robert Lucas, Iowa Territory's first governor arrived in Iowa City during 1839, he set up his headquarters in the lodging room of our town's most commodious cabin: An attic reachable only by ladder through a small opening in the floorboards.

***

When my nephew grew tired of defending the hollow against the barbaric hordes, we headed back up the trail.

I imagined my great-great-grandfather as a young man, his family on Christmas morning eating corn bread and bacon (a delicious baked bean recipe survives from my great-grandmother who grew up there, but I do not know if it's her own invention or a tradition she continued). They shared presents - likely simple gifts such as a rag doll for the little girl, a sled for her brother, made or stuffed with the pine wood and needles nearby.

A great noise of joy must have filled that cabin.

(originally published Dec. 26, 2004)

When the deceitfulness of riches proves unfruitful

2004-12-21T11:51:00.000-08:00

My mother had warned me not to expect too much for Christmas that year. Overhearing my parents' conversations, I understood that milk prices were low and that the cash crops had barely paid for thoughts. The low, hesitant tone of my mother's voice also told me she was a little ashamed to tell her child such a thing.

I suppose it's also why we didn't put up the Christmas tree the first week of Decem-ber as our family always had. Whenever my younger brother or I asked about the tree, my mother would quickly look busy and say we just didn't have time that day but maybe we'd put it up on the weekend.

Then, seven days before Christmas as my brother and I watched a television holiday special in the living room, we suddenly realized that both of us were staring at the picture window where the tree always stood.

I decided enough was enough. "Hey, let's go get the Christmas tree," I said to my brother.

His face lit up.

•••

Being 11 years old, I was just young enough to do something so audacious. My brother, being five, didn't yet have enough self-restraint to talk me out of it.

So we crept up the stairs and quietly opened the attic door. Our parents had purchased an artificial tree, which was all the rage. I suppose there was something neat about a tree that always stayed green, left no needles on the carpet and so easily folded into a compact box. It also lacked any scent and didn't appear like any evergreen I was familiar with; I guess some market sudy determined that the Manitoba fir is a maximum number of shoppers' ideal of a Christmas tree.

To a kid, though, even an artificial Christmas tree is preferable to none at all.

So while our mom worked in the kitchen, we slid the tree box down the stairs. I showed my brother how he should match up the colors on the branches' hooked end with the color slot on the tree pole. After that, we fluffed the twigs and needles to give the boughs body.

Scrambling back to the attic, we started looking for the ornaments. Being farmers, my parents had a simplistic idea of what should go on a tree; a string of lights and glass bulbs were good enough. I found the lights tangled in a large ball atop an old armoire, and then my brother said, "Oh, no."

He gazed forlornly at the floor. The box holding the glass bulbs lay upside down.

Kneeling, I turned the box over but knew just as he did that the bulbs probably were shattered. Sometime during the past year, they must had fallen off the pile of boxes. Sure enough, only three of the 18 had survived the crash.

•••

"What're we going to do?" my brother said. "We can't have a tree Christmas tree with only lights."

I glanced away, trying to think of something comforting to say. My eyes settled on the small attic window, the only form breaking the white glare the tip of a distant pine that stood near the cornfield.

And then it came to me.

We tossed on our snowsuits, rubber boots, stocking caps and mittens and went outside. My brother and I collected fallen pinecones in a paper bag. Inside, after mom had discovered our assembled tree, she gave us some brown thread from her sewing basket. The two of us carefully strung the thread around each cone's pith and attached them to the boughs.

We had a Christmas tree of lights, three glass bulbs and several, wonderfully scented pinecones.

•••

That winter, quite a number of dairy farmers, including two of our neighbors, went out of business. My father remained determined to hang on, though, and the next spring milk prices rose. Then a drought hit the West, and my father got a good price for his alfalfa, soybeans and corn.

Still, my parents didn't talk with any glee when a Nebraska cattle rancher paid us twice the going rate for 200 hay bales that November. They knew how close they'd come to folding just a year before.

Our Christmases got better, too; for a few years, our parents lavished gifts upon my brother and I as if to make up for the one bad year.

But that single difficult Christmas taught me a powerful lesson: The cares of this world and the deceitfulness of riches does prove unfruitful.

And that was among the greatest gifts I've ever received.

(originally published Dec. 21, 2003)

Cracking eggs - and prices - this holiday season

2004-12-14T12:05:00.000-08:00

Among the many skills for which I particularly admire my mother and my wife is their ability to gracefully crack eggs.

Nimbly holding the white oval in their fingers, they'll tap it once against a bowl's rim and before the sticky yolk spews out, raise the two part shell so all that's inside plops instantly upon the flour. Then with a slight twist of the thumb, half of the shell slips into the other, as if pieces of a matryoshka doll set.

In home economics, I also learned how to crack eggs, except my brownies and omelets usually included some tiny shell fragment. After my army days, I determined that one could literally crush the egg open, and if quick enough with the wrist, the yolk and its white would hit the target - without any shells and without any of the egg's inside sliming one's hand.

It was brutal, but these days so is the price of eggs.

•••

Since May, the cost of eggs has risen sharply. By November, supermarket prices for Grade A eggs reached a national average of $1.20 a dozen - a third more than a year ago - the Agriculture Department says. Some Boston supermarket chains are charging $1.79 a dozen.

That's sort of good news for Iowa. As America's leading producer of eggs, our state delivers roughly 1 of every 6 of the nation's table eggs.

Driving the prices is a tight supply of eggs and stronger demand. Con-sumers eat more eggs on av-erage than a decade ago.

Consumption tapered beginning in the 1980s when scientists questioned whether eggs contributed to heart problems. Wholesale prices fell dramatically, and some farmers went out of business; the number of egg producers in Johnson County alone fell from 104 in 1992 to 65 in 1997, the most recent year for which the Iowa Agricultural Statistics Service has available numbers.

But when a 1999 Harvard study concluded that a daily egg did not contribute significantly to heart disease, consumers started frying more than just bacon while restaurants offered new breakfast sandwiches featuring eggs. The protein-heavy Atkins and South Beach diets also have gained in popularity, further boosting egg sales. Meanwhile, avian influenza struck European chickens, providing the United States with an opportunity to in-crease its foreign market share.

Iowa's farmers now are churning out 30 million more eggs a month than a year ago.

•••

The downside for consumers is that higher egg prices will hurt bakeries, restaurants, college cafeterias, public schools and companies that make egg-based products such as mayonnaise and salad dressings. Eggs also are an important ingredient in many easy-to-make food products and baked goods, meaning that consumers can expect to see higher prices at grocery stores.

Because Iowa is a center of egg production, we may be buffered from the most severe increases. Still, chain restaurant prices for dishes often are standard across the nation, so if egg prices remain high, expect to soon pay a little more, even here.

It probably won't be enough of a price hike to keep us home. Though there is something to be said for making one's own omelet or cookies from scratch - assuming you don't have any eggshells in them.

•••

For the serious minded, the numbers raise a question: Will higher egg prices boost the state's declining rural economies, considering most production facilities are located in economically weak regions, such as Estherville, Lenox and Sioux Center? It certainly will help, but the state's diverse agricultural economy, which shields against a total crash should a lone crop or livestock suffer, also prevents a single crop or livestock from raising prospects too considerably.

Meanwhile, new federal regulations require egg farms to reduce the number of hens per cage; meeting those demands as farmers expand production may offset some of the profit gains.

They might be wise not to.

For the moment, tight demand is proving beneficial; some New England egg producers, for example, say they're being paid the highest prices in half a century.

Overproduction, after all, has been the bane of farmers trying to get a good price for corn, milk and sugar - so much so that the federal government is compelled to subsidize farmers and even pay them to take cornfields and other land out of production.

•••

Sometimes, when driving and getting hungry for an old-fashioned cake like my mother once made or the Norwegian krumkake my wife stirs up each Christmas, I imagine them at work on their masterpieces: setting out all the ingredients, pouring an unmeasured amount of sugar and melted butter into a bowl, then cracking an egg open over it.

At that point, my mind usually gets stuck in a feedback loop as I ponder the secret of their method: Is it better dexterity? Greater confidence in their abilities? A sixth sense?

Perhaps, like today's consumers, it's simply a more relaxed attitude toward the egg.

(originally published Dec. 14, 2003)

When our familiar patterns face change

2004-12-05T17:29:00.000-08:00

Back in fifth grade when studying "world" history, an astonishing revelation came to me: People didn't always use crop rotation.

It sounds mundane, I know. But the notion that you have to switch which plants grow in your field from year to year just came naturally to this farm kid. One year corn towered over the field behind our house, by late summer blocking the long vista to the woods along the creek; the next year, it was squat soybeans then the following spring alfalfa or oats, which upon reaching maturity undulated like a sea against the shore of our lawn.

Medieval Europeans figured out this simple system of renewing the soil because some crops pull large amounts of nutrients from the dirt. It transformed their lives. Before then, serfs grew whatever they liked on the land and let livestock graze it when fallow.

• • •

Crop rotation marks cycles that can last three or four years. It's a subtle symbol of tradition's strength in rural areas. All of us recognize monthly moon phases and the annual play of seasons, but crop rotation goes beyond that. The corn behind my house rose the summer before third grade, the one before seventh and the one before 11th. Mathematicians may delight that those are prime numbers (meaning they're only divisible by two numbers). Every year, the "largest" prime is found; so far, the largest is 6,320,430 digits long and was determined just last year.

People didn't always know about prime numbers, either. Euclid "discovered" them in 350 B.C. But they also altered people's lives, though more ours than the ancients. We use them in computing and cryptography.

• • •

Much of life, interestingly, is a puzzle to be solved. As toddlers we must grasp language. As school children we tussle with social hierarchies. By our teen years, it's romance and the other gender. In adulthood, it's the politics of the work place. In the farm field, it's outguessing the weather.

For each of these, we turn to models. What does the older sibling, classmate or colleague do? We plow through experts' books and hear consultants speak. We gaze up at the sky and know that certain clouds and the feel of the wind from a certain direction signal rain.

Some despair this fact of existence - and our puzzles can at times be frustrating to the point that one turns red. Though the rest of the world moves along, fear of change rules some people's day.

Such fright isn't necessarily of the future but of the repudiation of what we've become comfortable with. Once the puzzle seems to make sense, changing means new solutions must be learned. I know. Corn should have grown behind my house when I was a junior in college because that's the pattern I'd learned.

But that year my father changed up the crop rotation and the field lay fallow. The soil needed more nourishment. That wasn't too difficult to grasp. After all, there always is one larger prime number to discover.

(originally published Dec. 5, 2004)

Thank cold weather for our livelihood

2004-12-03T17:53:00.000-08:00

This past week, winter's first real snows fell upon Iowa City. To the fanciful at heart, crunching footsteps across the white is a bit like returning to the Ice Age, that time when humanity relied on mammoth and flint spears to survive. A snap of cold wind crystallizes your breath, and you really do wish for a thick fur to pull over your head.

Some scientists say we've never really left the Ice Age, that we're just at the cycle's warm end. For the past 1.8 million years, the snows and glaciers have charged then retreated across the Northern Hemisphere 17 times.

Indeed, just 100 centuries ago - barely a fraction of the time that the earth has been around - huge glaciers dipped into north central Iowa until finally melting and creating the landscape we know today.

•••

Sometime around 13,000 years ago, the Des Moines glacier lobe stalled in the region as the climate temporarily warmed. Meltwater floods washed open valleys to the south, creating glacial lakes.

As the water evaporated and drained off, our state's greatest inland river basins - the Iowa, Boone, Des Moines, Big Sioux, Rac-coon, Skunk, Little Sioux and Winnebago - formed.

The enormous ice sheets departed Iowa some 5,000 years later, leaving flat tundra covered by a muddle of clay, sand, gravel and boulders. Out of the west, wind blew glacial dust, also known as loess, across much of southern Iowa, forming the soil upon which we plant our corn and soybean fields today. Along the Missouri River, some loess piled into bluffs.

But 10,000 years wasn't enough time for the meltwater to flow out. In north central Iowa, some of it settled upon the plain in swamps. The state's earliest settlers drained those wetlands, making the land good for farming and villages. Pio-neers created the channels that Mother Nature was still working on.

•••

But good farmland and the rivers our cities now hug is not all the last Ice Age left us.

The state's northeast corner remained uncovered by glaciers, allowing the Iowa Pleistocene snail to eke out a living for more than 400,000 years in that part of the world. It's very existence to-day relies upon rocks that the last Ice Age's cold crack-ed open; thousands of years ago, meltwater drained into the fissures and froze be-neath the ground, creating a habitat that's still frigid even in our summer's heat.

For the Iowa Pleistocene snail, no bigger in diameter than a shirt button, it's perfect quarters. Unfortunately, it's a shrinking environment. The snail can only be found on 37 algific talus slopes in Iowa and Illinois.

Its existence is as dependent as ours is on what the Ice Age left behind.

•••

As glaciers did not cover all of Iowa during the last Ice Age, humanity was able to subsist below those mountains of compacted snow. More than 200 Clovis and Folsom points - stone tools of flint from before 10,800 B.C. - have been found in Iowa.

Living near streams or rivers, these first Iowans ate deer and small mammals, fished and picked berries - not unlike many of the first pioneers as they waited for their first crops to rise from the fertile soil. But Stone Age Iowans also hunted large game such as mammoth, mastodon, caribou and an extinct form of bison.

Some conjecture that these early humans caused each of these giant beasts to become extinct, just as modern Europeans exterminated passenger pigeons and dodo birds. Perhaps. Most likely the dramatic shift in climate did in these creatures. Could an Arctic polar bear, after all, survive in modern Iowa?

In any case, Stone Age Iowans did not know of guns, axes and plows. Such tools allowed humanity to prosper only in the Ice Age's aftermath.

•••

Mother Nature may yet have her way with us, though.

Most gaps between glac-iation have lasted only 8,000-12,000 years. We're overdue for another Ice Age.

Following a cooling of average temperatures from 1940 to 1975, many scientists and environmentalists predicted during the '70s that the 18th Ice Age was upon us. These days, though, apocalypse takes the shape of global warming.

Ironically, if we are warming the earth, that nightmare may help us avert the next onslaught of glaciers. Perhaps the question before us is which will be the lesser of two evils: adapting to a cold planet or to a hot one?

As you enjoy your coffee while the flakes swirl on the window's other side, it is something to contemplate.

(originally published Dec. 7, 2003)

Learning a new language in their new world of Iowa

2004-11-30T12:21:00.000-08:00

In a small basement room tucked at the back of West Liberty's library, five of the city's newest residents met two Mondays ago. They've come from Colombia and four very different parts of Mexico, but all five have one thing in common - the desire to learn English.

Low voiced and hunched over their desks as if having trouble seeing the page, each adult in turn reads from a journal, an assignment to explain in ingles what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner the day before. It's 6:15 p.m., and each one of the adults already has put in a full day's work.

"Today is Nov. 16, 2003," one reads, "It is 8:30 in the night. For breakfast this morning, I ate cookies. For lunch I ate enchiladas. For dinner I ate eggs, beans and toast with butter."

J.D. Munoz, still decked in his McDonald's managers uniform, stands in front of the class. He leads this session, one of four sessions that Muscatine Community College offers weekly at the library. He corrects their pronunciation and tense, partially in English, partially in Spanish: "8:30 at night," he says, "8:30 in the morning, 3:30 in the afternoon."

The student who'll read next mouths his journal entry as Munoz elaborates. A yellow-covered "Photo Directory of American English" sits next to his paper.

After each journal reading, Munoz also is quick to tell them "good job" and point out what they got right. It seems so minor telling them he was impressed that they used "ate" instead of "eat," but each of his students' faces brightens. One of them crosses out a word in his notebook and scribbles another one in the meager space above it. They listen a little more closely to the next journal reading and smile when he uses "ate" instead of "eat."

•••

Not too far into the class, the students hear a guest speaker, a young woman in her 20s. A native English speaker who grew up amid southern Iowa's cornfields, she's studied espanol for several years.

Still, her face blushes as she begins speaking in Spanish. She talks at a moderate pace, obviously trying not to stumble over her sentences. Sometimes an English word, such as "which," slips into a sentence.

The students listen politely, their eyes growing larger when she slows, like parents waiting for a child to say the word that the meaning of the whole sentence hinges on.

Later, she looks away, trying to think of the word, a long "uh -" breaking her speech. The students lean forward, resisting the temptation to blurt out the word they know must come next.

She will not learn, after all, by being given the an-swers.

•••

Most of the students wear hooded sweatshirts, beat-up caps and blue jeans. One used to be a newspaper reporter in Mexico City. For a woman from Colombia, Thursday was her first Thanksgiving in the United States.

Munoz tries to explain the holiday. "It's about being with your familia," he says. The students give him knowing nods.

"And the pilgrims," he adds. Some of the students' brows furrow.

Later in the class - it goes 21/2 hours until 8:30 p.m. - they'll learn something about the American farm of the 1930s by reading "Charlotte's Web." Besides expanding their vocabulary and understanding of English grammar, it'll help them better grasp the rural history of the state they've moved into.

The young woman passes a handout to the students when Munoz tells them to take a short break. As the students rise and accept the handout, they do not say gracias.

They say "Thank you."

(originally published Nov. 30, 2003)

Finding something to do now that yard work is done

2004-11-16T11:36:00.000-08:00

Right about a week before Thanksgiving, the yard work ends. Usually a few hard freezes and the first snow put a stop to it. If not, as is the case this year, we simply run out of things to do about the yard.

Oh sure, there's always something: oil the gate hinges, rake the few leaves that have flittered in from a neighbor's lawn, hang the Christmas lights early. But the main tasks of our outdoor work - mowing, raking, gardening - are over. Besides, the sun lets off too little warmth on a Saturday afternoon to make such puttering anything more than a chore.

Gradually we accept that the next few months will be spent inside, with only a few breaks for shoveling snow. Most of us pray there only will be a few breaks.

•••

Every once in a while I talk to someone who lives down South. Upon discovering that I reside in Iowa, he'll invariably say, "You must get a lot of work done, having to spend so much time inside."

Ruminating for a moment, I ask, "Why's that?"

"Exceptionally long winters - you can't go out in the cold, right?"

Now, I suppose we Mid-westerners do spend a little more time inside during winter than other seasons; cabin fever is a documented psychological condition. And many times I've seen my father on a cold winter day, staring out the picture window at the sky graying over the cornfield, hands behind his back.

Just as the snowflakes begin to swirl, a smile would swing across his face. He suddenly had something to do.

•••

"Old school," some would call me father and others like him: A man who believes activity alone is not enough. Instead, it must be productive, with a tangible, measurable result.

You can rake leaves be-cause leaving them on the ground encourages weeds. You might rake leaves be-cause a green lawn is a sign of middle class self-respect.

Yet the real, subconscious reason most men like my father rake leaves is because it requires planning with a clear beginning, middle and end.

Our efforts must begin with a strategy. From which corner of the yard will we start? How many piles will we make? How far apart will those piles be to minimize our labors?

Undermining our work, like a villainous story character, the wind blows leaves off our pile, forcing us to redouble our efforts, or to reorganize our piles in a way that minimizes our losses.

Realizing a short time later that our last pile has been bagged, we wipe sweat off the brow with the back of a wrist and as muscles ache lean against the rake handle then gaze at what we've accomplished. Our eyelids flutter. We've exhausted ourselves enough that a nap is in order.

•••

Call me "new school." Or more aptly "all school." I've come to believe that activity doesn't demand constant planning or work to be useful when the activity is seeking knowledge.

Of course, that's a difficult concept for many to accept. Poor reading rates, lowest common denominator television programming and the profusion of recreational options in our society imply that leisure for many does not equal learning. Further, if learning doesn't lead to dollars, then it's not worthwhile.

For me, though, stumbling across a Web site about the stars nearest our sun offers the chance for a tantalizing journey. I probably won't ever use this information, unless somehow finding myself at a cocktail party full of astronomers.

Frequently, though, I find myself leaning back in my executive chair and staring at the map of our stellar neighbors - Alpha Centauri, Barnard's Star, Wolf 359 - and thinking the strangest thoughts: From which corner of the map should I start clicking onstars to discover their location in constellations and potential planets? How many stars should I bother to visit, as most in our galaxy are unremarkable dim, red dwarves? How will I be able to keep track of "where I've been" if some stars are skipped?

Every once in a while as these thoughts cross my mind, especially on a brisk November day, I'll quick glance at the window.

Each time, a smile fills my face. I now have something to do.

(originally publisher Nov. 16, 2003)