Steel Blue Sky

I grew up on a small farm in the middle of Florence County, Wisconsin.  There are about 4400 people living in Florence County, just over nine people per square mile.  There are no incorporated communities in Florence County, and, last I checked, no stoplights.  Our farm is located in the township of Homestead.  Homestead has just under 400 residents, and a population density of seven people per square mile.  There were five of us living on 250 acres to the west of County Road C, midway between Aurora and Fence, halfway from tranquility to solitude.  It is a beautiful place, a quiet place.

About half of the farm was cleared for hayfields or pasture before we arrived, and the other half remains forested.  There is a spring on the farm, around which a black spruce swamp has formed.  Beneath the canopy of the spruce trees, the sphagnum moss grows in a secretive green carpet.  A small creek flows past the north gate and meanders off the eastern edge of the farm to join the Little Popple River less than a mile away.  

To the west of the barn across the pasture are the pines.  When I was young, there was no understory beneath the pines.  The giant white pines and stately Norway pines formed a climax community which closed out the sunlight to the forest floor.  You could walk among the massive black and maroon pillars unhindered by brush, nothing but bedstraw and grass at your feet.  It is the solemn habitation of red squirrels and nuthatches and chick-a-dees, a place which solicits an unconscious hush and whisper.  Shafts of light filter randomly through the branches to form luminous angular columns which seem to have their own form of solidity.  

Just north of the pines is the sand forty.  For all the beauty and wonder of the varied ecosystems on the farm, the sand forty is where I am most at home.  It has no form or majesty, nothing in its appearance that I should be drawn to it… a refuge of the neglected and unnoticed.  An unassuming collection of jack pines and red oak, a sparse and misshapen hayfield with an odd island of trees in the center, a haunt of coyotes and grasshoppers.  It is here where I watch the steel blue sky each November.

This is where I learned to live, to breathe. Stone piles and timothy grass.  Bobolinks and barn swallows.  Whip-poor-wills and lightning bugs and the breathtaking Milky Way overhead.  The scent of leaves in autumn and wood smoke from the basement.  Snow drifts and hoar frost and Ursa Major rotating around the bright northern star. This is where my father raised his family. A giant oak stands behind the machine shed, overlooking the house, the barn, the pastures. Quercus. 

  

When I was a boy, the summers were solitary.  I said goodbye to my classmates in early June and would not see them again for three months.  I spent my summers with Dad.  I worked with Dad from as far back as I can remember.  Each year he taught me new things, gave me new responsibilities.  In rough chronological order, Dad taught me to stack firewood, to feed calves, to fetch the cows, to hoe the garden, to clip barb wire to steel posts.  As I grew older he taught me how to roll a stone out of the ground with a crowbar, to drive a tractor, to rake hay, to unload bales, to drive fence posts, to handle a maul and a post-hole digger.  In high school he taught me how to cut hay, to fill the silo, to clean the barn, to feed the cows, to shingle a roof, to stack lumber, to hang sheetrock, to back a trailer, to pull a calf, to handle a chain saw.  A few years back he taught me to clean the chimney.

Dad also taught me how to fish.  It was a great joy to me, summer and winter.  I loved fishing more than Dad did, but he loved spending time with me more than anything, so he almost never turned me down when I would ask.  I see that now.  We spent countless evenings fishing bluegills on silent lakes, mostly with no other people to be seen or heard.  We would weave along the shoreline in our 10 foot row boat casting into pockets in the lily pads while the bull frogs croaked plaintively.  We would fish quietly as the sky turned color and the moon rose until it was too dark to see and the mosquitoes were thick enough to drive sane people to land.  Bats and nighthawks hunted over the water as we made our way back to the truck. 

Dad also taught me to love and appreciate my grandfathers.  He created space and time for each of them.  Dad patiently enabled Grandpa Forrest to cut hay even after his reflexes had declined to the point that he would break the teeth on the cutter bar on protruding stones he didn’t see in time.  I still remember the summer Grandpa stopped cutting hay.  He had hit two fawns in the space of a week and decided on his own to stop.  Dad also called Grandpa Kriegl to do most of his welding and metal work, even though Dad was a fair welder on his own.  Most of my memories with Dad and Grandpa Kriegl together were either out on the ice jigging waxworms or making drives during deer season.  I didn’t know what a gift it was to spend those days with Grandpa.  I also didn’t think about the sacrifices Dad made to enable them.

Almost all of my memories with Dad are tied up on that 250 acre farm and the small lakes just to the south and west.  Setting corner-posts and stretching barbed wire.  Baling hay on sunny days while red-tailed hawks cruised over the windrows, searching for snakes or mice.  There could not have been a more perfect place for a shy, reflective, introverted boy to grow up, or a better man to raise one.  For all the long days we spent together, we spoke relatively little, and rarely of anything other than the work or the weather or where we might go fishing that night.  There was precious little in the way of advice but also never a single overbearing lecture or burdensome expectation.  I’ve always known my place with Dad and been glad for his authority, and he always treated me with patience and kindness and a friendship I couldn’t recognize because I had no way of knowing anything else.

There are three conversations I will never forget though. On the day of Grandpa Forrest’s funeral, Dad and I were together in the basement getting ready for evening chores.  Dad told me that his favorite verse was Romans 8:28, “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love Him.”  Perhaps the most sweeping promise in the entire Bible.  I realized then, as I do right now, how much stability a father brings to a man, even a grown man.  I, of course, had only known my grandfather in his old age and had never seen him interact with his own young children.  I also had only known my Dad as  someone of limitless resourcefulness and independence, hardly realizing how much his own moral compass and groundedness was influenced by his father. The day my cousins and I carried Grandpa’s casket from the funeral home was a day of profound grief for Dad.  On that day, as he tried unsuccessfully to hold back tears, he pointed me to an unfathomable truth that neither of us will ever fully grasp or apprehend.  Little did I know how much I would need that rock to cling to later in life.

The second conversation happened on a routine summer day toward the end of my college years.  We must have been putting the haying equipment away because we were sitting in the pickup alongside the pole shed, facing south toward the fence line where the triangle piece meets the pines.  I remember Dad telling me that he understood why I wanted to go to Africa.  He told me that he and Mom were supportive and that I had their blessing.  I think it means more to me now than it did at the time, but I do remember feeling humbled and grateful.  Both my parents lived most of their lives within a few miles of their parents.  To know that I would not be a few miles away, or a few hours even -- I had considered it, but I had not considered it from the perspective of my parents.  I think that in our silent transactions we three were all seeking a better city, the city that is to come.  As much as I have treasured every day with them, we each of us know that there is a great calling, and that whether leaving or releasing, the days and moments sacrificed will one day be redeemed, that day when all our conspiring to follow Christ will be tested and proven true.  The blessing of my father on this journey is perhaps the most precious gift he has given me.

Of course the third memorable conversation was the summation of all the advice Dad ever gave me on relationships. “Mike, women are mysterious.  You will never understand them.”  Sage advice, distilled from years of marriage, encapsulated in two brief sentences.  The whole of what I was to learn from Dad about love or romance seemed more like an unmooring and setting adrift.  At the time it felt like a pep talk from someone admitting that they were the blind leading the blind.  But now that I am older than Dad was when he gave me this pearl of wisdom, I see the wonderful truth in it.  In actual fact the woman I love is mysterious, and I am immensely glad that I will never understand her.  The things I know and understand are small in proportion to the things which remain mysterious.  And the things most beautiful and inspiring can never be reduced to knowing or understanding.  The older I get, the more I love and appreciate the mysterious unknown, especially the mystery of my dear wife.

When I was a young adult, I used to wish that Dad had spoken more with me during the turbulent, confusing teen-age years.  All the hours we spent alone together.  But as my children grew older, I came to realize what a gift all those hours were, even if there was not much in the way of mentoring as I might have thought it could have looked.  I could see the sacrifices and life decisions that went into spending so much time with your son.  I appreciated those hours more and more.  Now that my kids have graduated high school and life looks unlike anything I might have imagined, I’ve come to value what it really was that Dad gave me, a capacity for silence, a stillness that has served me so well.  

“In quietness and confidence will be your strength” said the LORD to His people.  

So often truth eludes us for lack of concentration and careful, silent meditation.  Distraction and conversation carry us away.  

“The LORD is good to those who wait for him, to the soul who seeks him.  It is good that one should wait quietly for the salvation of the LORD.  It is good for a man that he bear the yoke in his youth.  Let him sit alone in silence when it is laid on him,” goes the Lamentation.  

How does one bear disappointment or sorrow or tragedy or grief other than through silent utterances and wordless tears?  Someone trained me in the way of silence.  Someone showed me that the most beautiful and holy things can only be approached in silence, that most of the time a word unspoken is more fitting, that to be left speechless before the panorama of life unfolding is to take it in most wonderfully.

And so after all of these years, I need to thank Dad mostly for who he is rather than what he’s done or said.  I know now that all those hours alone on the water were much more than quality time.  I know that whatever might have been lost in terms of advice or direction was more than compensated for by a sense of deep reverent peace.  Even now I can see the lily pads in the fading light on the western shore of Mirror Lake.  My bobber is moving. Patiently, patiently I take up the slack… I set the hook not knowing if I will boat the great meaning of life on the other end of the line as a beautiful purple and dark-olive jewel that fits in the palm of my hand or if that boundless destiny will slowly pull me out to sea.  Either way, Dad always maneuvers the boat to put me in just the right place to make the perfect cast.

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To Dad, with love, admiration, respect, and gratitude.