April 26, 2003
This is the time in spring when it's lovely to drive across the northern part of the middle west. I am headed west for a week in West Point, Nebraska; and then for another week in Redfield, South Dakota. I will be staying at my parents' house in Hampton, Iowa, tonight. Here in Wisconsin, now, moving west, there is a faint green gauze in the trees where I cross the Wisconsin River on Highway 82. There is a green thatch of grass. The bare fields soak up sun. The smell is of earth turning toward life beneath a blue pulsing sky.
We know spring is coming, we've already seen it in Smith Center, Kansas, in Columbus, Ohio. We who live farther to the north know that our clock runs a little behind time, but spring is coming.
When spring arrives, it's like we've opened a box, a present for another year. We don't know what we've got but we know we've got something, and today it's lovely here in the middle west.
Perhaps the middle west is a river, perhaps I dip my cup again and again into the changing river, in this place and that place, sunlight off the water brightening my understanding - what it is we've come to, in this place, in these times.
In my memoir, Curlew:Home, I have already spoken of the qualities of my parents; they are not unlike the rest of middle westerners. In their dignity and determination, their hard work and humility, they are like a lot of rural men and women in this part of the country. I will spend the night with them and enjoy their hospitality again.
I cross that rise on I-90 in western Wisconsin as I'm heading west. Who says we don't have mountains? All the bluffs revealed in one suddenness, they push towards the Mississippi, shrouded in the haze of distance and disappearance. Perhaps middle western beauty is quiet, not flashy; perhaps it comes in modest portions, not in large gulps; perhaps it is quaintly spiced, though not blazing. Perhaps it comes and goes, comes and goes, and so we appreciate our glimpses of it.
In Minnesota, sunlight on trees in a draw along the Interstate: the branches shine as if they have been dusted with snow, though of course they haven't been. It's as if there is a skein of light along the creek.
On this Vagabond expedition, I may have to examine the need I've had to go to Canada, to the end of its roads, to the edge of its extremes. Yet now I'm happy to set my vision on the most ordinary of the middlewest. What has changed that I now feel the need to know this common place? Is the journey, perhaps, as much about me as it is about the middlewest itself?
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April 27, 2003
In our strength is our weakness. Each vice is the other side of its virtue. Too much of a good thing is not a good thing. The center is the extreme of something. The middle of the middle is someone's margin.
Now I've left my parents' house late on a Sunday morning. We shared a breakfast of biscuits and gravy at the local restaurant. Humble food. Extremely modest prices. Where else can you get half an order of biscuits and gravy for $1.25. Coffee for 65 cents.
I am headed west on Highway 3, towards Sioux City and supper with the poet Phil Hey and his wife Terry. Along the way, I may go out of my way and stop at my brother's grave a few miles from where I grew up.
I suppose we know a little more of life and death out here in this country because we see more of life and death. Not only is family close and important, but we raise livestock for slaughter, we see the rise and fall of the seasons, we see everything going back to soil, we see soil being turned for another year. Such knowledge can make a man sober and tight-lipped, humble, calm in the face of uncertainty. We are not surprised by much because we know everything goes 'round in its great circle. What we have seen we know we will see again. What we would run from, we know we take it with us. Tomorrow is yesterday made new. Yesterday is an old tomorrow.
We know patience because we know pace - the march of the seasons teaches us patience, the planting and cultivating and harvesting of corn and beans teaches us that, the baling of hay in the heat of summer for cows that will need it in the dead of winter. Sunrise. Sunset. The moon's waltz across the sky. The slow turn of everything. All these teach us patience.
In addition, we have learned that we are not in charge of the cosmos, and we accept that. If the corn is going to grow, we need rain; we can pray for rain, we can work hard, we can even curse the sky, yet in the end our fate is out of our hands. This, and the very wideness of the sky itself, helps us to stay humble. We control what we can, we accept the rest.
To be continued....
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