CSI Epistemology

It came to me suddenly why we're enamored with all the CSIs and SUVs (or SVUs, as one of the Law and Order franchise is labeled), with all the Criminal Minds and Mentalists and Psychs. I was reading Stephen King's short story, "Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption" in which he turns the premise of those shows on its ear. King does this almost too easily really: he sets up motive, evidence, and outcome for the main character to kill his wife and her lover. Everything points to the main character's guilt except for one thing: he didn't do it. The lesson, I suppose, is how easily we can be deceived, how easily the truth can be made a lie.

Meanwhile, of course, the above shows' collective premise is that "the evidence never lies." In fact, I think that was the slogan of the head agent in the original CSI: Las Vegas--that is, the head agent two head agents before the current head agent on that show. Since the time of that head agent, these shows have proliferated like none other, all of them with this premise: the evidence doesn't lie.

Oh sure, Psych and The Mentalist have added more peripheral evidence like psychology, and my wife's favorite show, Castle has even added a writer to emphasize, perhaps, that violent crime is always wrapped up in a story, but at base they're still all about the truth of 20th century epistemology: the evidence never lies.

Because that's what these shows are about: objectivist, scientific, logical positivist epistemology. In a world where people get bludgeoned to death nightly, at least we can follow the trail of bread crumbs that becomes so clear and overwhelming that the perps will confess every time. They are shows, really, about trails of bread crumbs. And in this way they are somewhat logical positivist and naturalistic: the universe they set up is determined and I suppose just in a mechanical sort of way. It is also an amoral world filled with little joy or true festivity, where the best we can hope for is the capitalist dream of some property and some parties.

It wasn't always this way. Remember the trend of supernatural cop shows, epitomized by the X Files? That spat of Twilight Zone spinoffs even included Baywatch Nights. Notice. It didn't last. With the loss of Lost a couple of seasons ago, logical positivism and "the evidence never lies" seems to have triumphed completely. The idea that human characters can navigate a more unpredictable world based on virtues and our sense of a larger story than evolutionary science seems to have bitten the dust.

On the horizon now, however, is the Inception spinoff Awake, where the lead character can't tell his real life from his dream life. The premise of Awake is no doubt driven by psychology, but it's no Lost. In fact, it looks like it's kind of revisiting Descartes "Evil Genius"--how will the main character know which world is true? Perhaps by recognizing his most "clear and distinct perceptions," the foundation for Descartes cogito ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). In the end, if the show bends toward this kind of answer, it will fall into the camp of enshrining our logical positivist epistemology.

Mass culture is a fascinating thing. Our collective impulses tell us how our moral and, even more to the point, our epistemological compasses--how we've conditioned our minds to think--are oriented. While the challenge of postmodernity has put some terribly interesting stories in front of us, like Lost, in the largest category of mass culture we still seem to tend toward the modern, a tradition which stretches at least from Descartes to CSI: the evidence never lies.

Ah, but it does and it can. But a bigger truth than logical positivism can break into the world and reorient it to a larger, less tyrannical truth. What can be a bigger truth?

The Word.

My Cankle

I've said things like, "It reminds you that you're alive," and "Everybody should sprain their ankle at least once in their lives." I guess I stick by that claim: spraining your ankle is one of the most intense things a person can do, where "intense" means "overloaded with sense experience, in this case, pain."

Ankles may be evidence that a certain level of pain is built into the fabric of things. Ninety-eight percent of the time, ankles allow us to be dextrous and lithe, enable an incredible combination of power and grace on a beautifully willowy structure. Still, while there may have been no curbs in the Garden of Eden, there was uneven terrain. Where uneven terrain and ankles meet, sprains are sure to happen. Research shows that sprains happen at only a slightly higher rate in "athletes" than in other people. Okay, I made that up. Still, I do have anecdotal evidence: the same week I sprained my ankle playing pickup ball, my wife's coworker stepped missed a step in a dark garage to the same result. Sprains happen. To anyone.

But ankles sprains heal. This, too, may be evidence of creational design to sprained ankles: the wonder of how bodies repair themselves. I'm not sure what's been stretched or pulled, what's wrenched away from bone under the skin of mine. All I know is I've had one "cankle" for over a week now: the injury has accumulated fluid that reminds me to take it easy. Of course, as my physical therapist wife reminds me, I also want to get that swelling out of there if I want to return to normal function. This is a problem in my creational vision: who would've told Adam and Eve to "RICE" their ankles--Rest, Ice, Compress, Elevate?

Well, what do you think they talked about with God on their walks through the garden? How the creation--including their bodies--worked.

Age also threatens to dampen my theory. I'm into this sprain a week and am frankly a bit worried about bounce-back. Of course, this, too, can be explained by the garden: I am, realistically, on the clock for this body, and so perhaps I'm mending slower. Still, I'm not willing to say our new bodies won't include the possibility of sprained ankles: they're too good in that creaturely sort of way. And I stick by my claim that they intensify life.

Here's how I know: over a week later, the moment it happens remains indelible in my mind. We were down by one at 10-9, meaning if they scored--game. My player, a good shooter, had the ball. Their post came out high for a ball screen. I trailed my player on the dribble, and my teammate slid into position to stop the drive momentarily while I could recover, meanwhile the screener was rolling toward the hoop. I jumped to try to block the inevitable pass and came down on my teammate's foot, forcing my ankle to ninety degrees. I felt the ankle bone hit the floor and an internal "pop" so famous to ankle sprains.

Maybe not the repeated slow-motion close-ups the camera loves to provide of twisted and broken leg injuries, but you get the picture.

Then--I'll admit it--I writhed in pain like I was dying. I laid there and beat the ground, bit my thumb, pounded the floor--all the unmanly things I could think of besides crying.

But I wasn't dying. In fact, according to my own personal ankle philosophy, I'd never been more alive, nor would my body let me forget it. So I laid there with my philosophy: "Everyone should sprain their ankle at least once in their lives"; "sprained ankles let you know you're alive."

I understand that there's something flawed about my logic; I understand that equating pain with being alive is somewhat of the logic of cutters. Still, I stick by the idea because of the wonder of creation, because the idea of escaping a painless universe into utter bliss seems more akin to nirvana than to something as real and intense as the fine-strong leg joint known as the ankle-bone. And even as I think of "perfected bodies," I'm nervous about our vision of them as floating through walls, of our tendency to see them as more disembodied than embodied. There's something wonderful and earthbound about how the ankle allows us to push off, to turn a corner, to leap however finitely, and, yes, even how it allows us to come up against boundaries. With ice on my ankle, I've been reminded of those boundaries now for the past week.

If that's what ankles and their spraining means--boundaries--then here's to boundaries.

Racial Linsanity

It's a good story in the same way the Yankees losing is a good story. It's a good story for the same reason that the Mavs winning the title last year was a good story. Of all the professional sports, the NBA can feel the most scripted, the most predetermined. And in a league where players are anointed as the next big thing as teens and preteens, no one saw this coming: that an undrafted second year player from Harvard would suddenly burst on the scene and almost single-handedly resurrect a multi-million dollar franchise.

So it's a cinderella story, make no mistake, and that means that what we love about college basketball--that any hardworking, no name team might have their "shining moment" (wow basketball fans love cliches)--has made it's way to the next level.

I personally haven't evaluated Jeremy Lin's game. In fact, I've only seen a handful of highlights, including a game-winning three pointer against the Raptors. Of course, no one needs me to evaluate his game. But this is another truth about the NBA and it's style of play: not only are players to "produce" within the individualistic, one-on-one set ups that the rules have been built to foster, these players are to do it in a way that makes a highlight reel, in a way that can be described as a "style."

The greatest "stylist," in this sense, was Michael Jordan, or that's the cliche that people believe. Arguably, Bird and Magic were as good if not better stylists; and I've no doubt people like Pistol Pete Maravich and Oscar Robertson were probably better stylists still though they come before my time. People think Michael Jordan was a stylist when he was just physically dominant, arguably the perfect basketball body--for a certain type of basketball. Jordan was that combination of size, strength, quickness, and athleticism that came together to make a special player, no doubt. Sure, Jordan added to this package by honing a jump shot that was often above average; Jordan played defense in a league where you don't have to; Jordan knew when to dish to his white jumpshooters camping at the three-point line. In short, Jordan did the right things to make himself a legend, he worked at it.

But what I want to argue is that the physically dominant player has had a monopoly on the NBA for far too long. The type we've been looking for, the Jordan type, is only one style of play, one style of player. Now, it was interesting for a while because we kept wondering "who the next Jordan" would be: Vince Carter? Nope. Kobe? Kind of but we can't love Kobe because of his high pedigree. Lebron? An improbably athlete come out of the ugliness of Cleveland and then disses that city and can't win anyway.

So it's no wonder that people aren't sure what to make of Jeremy Lin. Even though he must be a one-on-one player, he's not that kind of one-on-one player. He's not transcendent that way.

And he's Asian.

Saturday Night Live did one of the funniest race-line crossing skits of all time last night, exploring the stereotypes that exist in the NBA--and in America--regarding white, black and Asian (http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/linsanity-postgame-cold-open/1386272/). Four sportscasters, two white and two black, were evaluating Jeremy Lin's game. While three of the announcers could throw around all the Asian stereotypes they wanted, when the one white guy tried to join the fray with black stereotypes, he got shouted down and then fired.

Unfortunately, most people, I think--most white people anyway--will read this skit as the double-standard that blacks are allowed, which is precisely missing the point. No, most often white people can't "join the fray" with black stereotypes because they most often don't get the historical and structural part they have played and continue to play in what often remains a divided America when it comes to white and black. Of course, as is shown in the skit, this so-called "race card" can be played as a card to justify bad behavior on the part of individual blacks.

But the point of the skit is how, while we're aware of and sensitive to black stereotypes, we're not aware of our stereotypes of Asians. Thus, the skit goes so far as to dub over an interview of Jeremy Lin (yes, he speaks English; he was born and raised here) with an English translation that includes references to kung fu moves.

No doubt people are buzzing about the skit this morning. However, this is nothing new. Frank Chin, editor of an Asian-American Literature anthology called The Big Aiiieeeee!!!!! has written about how mangled our sense of Asian-Americans is--filled with ideas of bizarre cultures based in superstition, harsh discipline and collective goals that are thought of us un-American, but also individual stereotypes of the Asian skillset that sets Asian-Americans apart as truly other: exotic and quirky but ultimately somewhat weak and easily marginalizable.

And so, predictably, people won't know what to make of the skit. But Jeremy Lin is still the best story in the NBA--perhaps in sports--this year because he breaks so many of our preconceived notions. He's the hope for pickup players everywhere, breaking the stronghold of the pre-ordained players with only one type of skillset. But he's also a wrench in the works of the conversations on race in America, bringing to light another group that has been here since the beginning--Asian-Americans--but who still often get written out of the American story because we've dubbed them "other."

Another Story of Belonging and Exile?

My dad remembers the days when bands used to come to small town dance halls in southwest Minnesota. Jazz bands these were, and they came to places like Hatfield, which today has a population of 56. Back then, though, in the late forties and early fifties, when there were no hotels around and money was scarce, the patrons would house the bandmembers over night. Someone from the neighborhood of my grandpa’s farm had gone to see the band, then taken them home and put them up for the night since there were. Late in the afternoon of the next day, after sleeping off the night’s festivities, the band went swimming in a pond in the hills adjacent to my grandfather’s farm, where he came upon them. My dad remembers my grandpa laughing to, as they say, beat the band when he returned to the farmhouse. The band members were black and probably the last thing my grandfather expected to see, skinny-dipping in the hills above Champeperdan creek.

I grew up on the same farm in the same hills, hills that were really low rises on a vague plateau. When I was school age, the adults took turns driving the neighborhood kids to the local Christian school in a van we bought together for just such a purpose. It was on this van—first a pink 60’s pill and then a more hearty two-tone 70s almost-conversion van—that I listened to the older kids talk about what was important in the world: sports and music. Friday Night Videos had just been invented and junior high glory was to stay up past the news to catch a glimpse of the real world of music. And what we saw blew our little minds. In many ways the wonder of the "Billy Jean" and "Thriller" videos probably sealed the success of MTV and VH1 at least through the year 2000. It was that powerful, that good. It changed the lives of rural teens forever.

But it didn't end with Thriller. A couple of years later, Prince dominated the radio waves with Purple Rain and generated buzz in the school van by his bizarre costume at the Grammys. When someone on the school van bought his album, it also helped to put our libidos on fastforward: even rural white preteens could figure out what his muse was.

In short black music--no, the absolute genius of black music--continued to make its way into southwest Minnesota and to impact our lives well after my grandfather's revelation above the Champeperdam.

But if Prince moved our nether region, Whitney Houston moved our ideals. Or rather, siren-like, she could move us from our ideals with regard for nothing else but her voice. If beauty is truth, we thought--okay, I thought--this is truth; she could have been singing gobbledy-gook and it wouldn't have mattered. We would follow.

I'm a sucker for Whitney Houston songs; I can't deny it. Also undeniably, at least for a time, Whitney Houston was the voice of America. Just witness her national anthem at the 1991 Superbowl: this was the best America had to offer--the glittering gem that all the seismic upheaval of hundreds of years of American conflict had produced, Zora Neale Hurston's "mule of the world" transformed into its ultimate diva and, in that anthem, spokesperson.

My own personal Whitney Houston siren-song is "The Greatest Love of All," a sappy hymn to self-love that embodies everything the eighties stands for: shameless self-serving self-promotion wrapped up in a package of sham religion. If, as Jamie Smith argues, the political and entertainment worlds are more entwined than we should ever dare think, "The Greatest Love of All" is a perfect example of political ideology packaged for popular consumption. It should have been Ronald Reagan's theme song; that a black woman sang it is pure, calculating, evil genius. Nonetheless, to hear it sung is to disregard all of that. As the key changes climb, our collective spirits and individualist hopes soar with Whitney, the realities of the life around us be damned.

But now two of these 80s icons, and both of them black, are dead. Perhaps, we might argue, "The Greatest Love of All" wasn't enough for Houston, just as starting with the "Man in the Mirror" wasn't enough for Jackson. Meanwhile, other 80s icons blaze or fizzle on: Madonna, albeit somewhat hamstrung, performed at the pinnacle of pop success, the Superbowl; and U2, despite Bono's broken back, completed the most successful world tour in history.

What accounts for the difference? Was it personal flaws that left these black superstars unable to cope with the dizzying heights of stardom? This is what shock-jock radio would have us believe with the taunts of crack-whore being tossed Houston's way--and in essence not just Houston's way, but black America's way.

It's a bit silly for me to return to my grandpa's experience as a sort of parable for America, perhaps, but I can't resist. While the genius of black music in America has left us all with a revelation of sorts--whether real, true awe or a somewhat confused shaking of the head--white America returns home from the revelation, landed and therefore more rooted to the place and, more importantly, to the defining American story.

What happens to the black band swimming in the hills? Who knows? Who cares? Black icons, no matter how successful, are not landed, either literally, like my grandfather, or figuratively landed in the American story, as was the case with both Jackson and Houston.

Sure, there's other things to consider, including the dizzying heights of superstardom that almost no one, white or black, deals with well. But, while I'm the fourth generation to live in southwest Minnesota, while I was changed by the creative genius of two pop icons, they were pushed to the fringes of the American story and are now dead. And I'm afraid to tease out the implications about what this means for the larger story of placed and displaced in America, about the continuing story of belonging and exile on the American continents, about the continuing story of white and black.

But at least let me note that the beauty that we all benefited from for a time has passed out of the world, and that the implications of that passing remind us that in too many ways the continuing story of America remains a tragedy.

Midnight Callers: 12 o'clock and all's well

I felt presided over.

They were just outside our window on the north side of our house, just over our heads. By the sounds of them, one was roosting in the neighbor's pine across the road, though I can't imagine that as a good place to roost, and one was even closer, probably up around the electric pole that marks the boundary with our neighbor to the west. They were close. I was tempted to get up and shine them, just to see their gold-ring irises grow large in the light.

No doubt they were a mated pair, one with a slightly deeper hoot than the other, but both rhythmically hoot-hoo-hooting as if catching up after a week's separation.

How to interpret these two icons of the night, calling to each other at veritable midnight? Eerily foreboding? Love birds hung over from Valentine's day?

Assurance. And that sense of being presided over.

I've heard these owls--or owls with the same pattern of hooting that I'd roll the dice and call a great horned owl--here before, seemingly yearly, stretching back for I'd guess about four years. I'm also not sure about an owl's lifespan, but either way, hearing them again is good sign: either hunting is good enough to produce long life or it's good enough to produce offspring.

But why do I care? Aside from the novelty of a winged predator out my window, the calls of these owls connote something much deeper. Hearing them gently hooting to each other tells me that some network of sustenance that I don't see persists on planet earth, and that, it seems to me, is good for all of us.

I'm reminded of the rabbit problem that developed last spring in the neighborhood. Our beans got stripped, denuded to bare stalk by a brood of young Peter Cottontails. I killed one with a pellet gun and swore I wouldn't do it again, then proceeded to knock off two more. Still, no doubt there's a decent business to be done in rabbits around town for those on the upper rungs of the food chain, but I haven't helped things any. Next year, I'm determined to sacrifice a few beans.

If it means I get a chorus of hoots next midwinter, it'll be worth it.

The Dissolution of Western Culture

I’m not sure that either of the voices on the talk radio show I was listening to knew where to go. The news story was this: three men in England were killed while trying to protect their business from looters; they were struck by a car and killed.

First, I was sure the target was to be the looters—the no-good, over-entitled, low-class hooligans who just wanted new gadgets and so were raising havoc in one of the most civilized of nations on earth.

However, the men were Muslim, so the conversation turned on a sound bite. A brother of one of the victims was quoted as saying he would find the people responsible for the act and cut their heads from their bodies.

Then the line was, oh, but this is that peaceful religion we hear about. Pure sarcasm. They couldn't defend the victims because of that line from a grief-stricken brother.

Or could they? The conversation turned to the most purchased item in the riot areas: baseball bats. Apparently, the problem--and the selling point of the segment--is the laws against gun ownership in Great Britain: if the men had only had—that is, legally owned—guns, they could have stopped the car. So in an odd way it was about the looters after all and, as far as I can tell, it was a fantasy situation of sorts for a certain type of gun owner to be in: a time and place where they can take things into their own justice-wielding hands and stop that car coming at them.

Except “they” were Muslim, and so the fantasy got muddied.

This talk show also mentioned certain race-based crimes at the Wisconsin state fair, as if both events were part of the growing need for responsible gun-owners in society.

***

Today, I was privy to a multicultural birthday party. Well, the party was really very American: American food, presents, singing “Happy Birthday,” and cupcakes. What was multicultural was the families: one Asian, one Anglo; one Laotian-American, one Dutch-American. No. Two American families of different racial make-up; both immigrants; one third-generation, one first-generation.

However, certain strands of the different families cannot communicate; they absolutely do not “get” each other. One struggles to imagine life elsewhere and names so hard to pronounce. So for him I latch onto a narrative I know he’ll love: one of the women present has recently been reunited with her dear friend after 35 years; she had all but completed her degree in medicine in her home country, but fled before receiving her diploma, lest the communists should detain her. Here, because of language barriers perceived and real, she has been a CNA.

“So you gave up everything for freedom? Of course, I suppose I would too,” he says.

He does love the narrative. Because it speaks of freedom and because it speaks of the greatness of western culture and democracy which has taken her in. This is the narrative of his life, whose brother was killed in Korea, whose ideal it was to join the Army band, who lives on stories of the Navy Seals.

The other strand was mad at me for giving the narrative. For pre-packaging it for his consumption. For the way he made the story about him and his country. For him not understanding so much about the nuance of the situation, of the individual sitting before him. For a lack of respect for otherness, for the greatness that can come from elsewhere and be lost here. For a lack of humility before the gift of country and the diversity that continues to make it strong.

Trying to translate this kind of divide always leaves me at an utter loss for words. (Well, almost.) What makes me really fearful is the larger context. He has said to me earlier in the morning, “Yeah, it’s terrible times we live in, isn’t it? Course it’s kind of exciting, too, to see everything break up like it is. Like those riots. It’s already starting. And it’s coming here—it’s already here. Did you hear about that deal in Wisconsin? It’s here, it’s already here.”

Ditch Gifts

We live on the edge of town, below the last shoulder of hill that climbs out of the valley where the Rock River and Chanarambie Creek court before they join their waters forever and ever a mile south of town. There’s a scant half-mile between the two creeks where Edgerton is built, a ridge of land that falls off at the end of Edgerton’s mile or so length and climbs up toward regular Buffalo Ridge height directly to the north of our house.

Our position leaves us quite sheltered from a direct north wind, but the typical Northwester funnels down a black top that leaves us vulnerable to its whimsy. Thus, every year I find tumbleweeds rolled down from the wild Northwest Territories and trapped in the various nooks and crannies around the house, a real Wild West existence.

Perhaps it’s this wind that brought some more welcome guests to our road too. Our neighbors to the north moved to their house when the original tenant, their mother, moved to the rest home, Edgebrook, a couple of years ago. They moved from the farm and brought a farm mentality with them: in the fall they overpower unwanted trees with John Deere tractors; in winter, they pile up snow into epic and haphazard mountains; in spring, the dandelions take over. And they don’t care. Truth be told, I really don’t either, ex-farm boy that I am, but others do. One day last summer the dandelion family’s next door neighbor confided to me in the coffee shop, “I think they were camping and I had just sprayed my lawn, so I filled up another tank of spray and let ‘er have it.”

To little avail. This spring the dandelions were back unabated.

But so were other guests. After the dandelion boom—bloom—two large bushes of yellow sweet clover grew out of one side of the railroad tie retaining wall that keeps the hill on their side of the road. In hindsight, I blame what happened on the sweet clover. Sweet clover comes in a bush. It’s big and impossible to miss. Yes, at this time in the summer it gets wispy yellow flowers on the ends of its leaves, little fingers of gold that are nice but not gaudy. What’s coming in the fall is less nice. Sweet clover gets tangly and brown. Perhaps it even turns tumbleweed and spreads its seeds around that way—I’m not quite sure. Whatever the case, sweet clover suggests a wilder heritage than we want in an Edgerton striving for a suburban look. So it was perhaps inevitable that something would be done about it.

However, on the other side of the retaining wall another visitor sprang up, a more welcome visitor. It’s a repeat visitor, too, which is one reason why I caught it early. Our road is like a frontage road. It runs alongside the larger black top that mounts the hill to Fey Industries, but then our road bends along the hill—“Terrace View Avenue” it’s called—to the line of houses along our street. Rounding the corner after some random pee wee baseball game, the visitor’s yellow witness first caught my eye, but, alas, in the busyness that is children’s activities, even in the summer, I had no time to verify whether it truly was or not.

Returning home one evening, though, the yellow witness had grown and was caught momentarily in the headlights; it was only too apparent that our friend was back and that it was time to check it out. “Is that butter and eggs?” I asked my children.

And just like that, we had to know.

We first learned about butter-and-eggs at Pipestone. Up the road from Edgerton, in Pipestone, lies the only National Monument that I know of within an eight hour drive. Pipestone National Monument is not really a monument at all, not like the Washington Monument, a phallic symbol pointing to the sky, symbolizing I’m not sure what even though I have my suspicions. No, Pipestone National Monument is simply an outcropping of rock, a very unique kind of rock, in the midst of the wide sea of prairie. The red rock outcropping that bursts the sea of prairie here as well as down the Buffalo Ridge at Luverne and east near Jeffers—where Natives took advantage of the sheer, flat sheets of red rock to write some of the history and culture of their people on what we’ve come to call petroglyphs—is not jasper, as they dubbed it in the town that’s misnamed for the rock, but Sioux Quartzite, a rock that can be quarried and turned into official looking buildings like county courthouses that are centerpieces of Luverne and Pipestone, but not easily. However, at Pipestone, a special kind of Sioux Quartzite, a layer that’s much softer than the hard yet brittle rock, is laid bare. This band of rock is softer, with a soapy feel to it. It’s much more malleable and therefore more desirable for shaping into pipes, the central unifying instrument in Native cosmology, and other small trinkets and talismans, like the humble and therefore supremely important turtle. The outcropping of pipestone, then, became a quarry, but more importantly became sacred ground to which the Lakota and tribes from all across the continent came to quarry the stone and fashion the artifacts so important to their world. The stone, the natives say, is the flesh of the ancestors; it’s their gift, a means of making peace.

At Pipestone, somewhat miraculously, the government—no doubt prompted by gentle and wise souls both native and white, or, more cynically, perhaps in order to pacify natives—saw fit to preserve this outcropping of rock and call it a monument. Oh, there is a short cliff where Pipestone Creek dumps its waterfall until it becomes a trickle in the dryness of late summer, and there’s a small interpretive center complete with workshops for native craftsmen, but Pipestone National Monument by in large allows the landscape—the prairie landscape with a small outcropping of rock—to be the monument.

We go to Pipestone National Monument maybe twice a year. When my wife works and I’m tired of the kids asking if they can play the computer, we find a guidebook to wildflowers or two and head down the road for a short hike through the monument. Although a host of burr oaks have taken root and obscure the cliff line that once was visible at Pipestone, the park has a native prairie plant going, complete with seasonal burns to insure the prairie’s health, and a trail leads through the prairie and to the different mining sites along the rock ledge. As the prairie flowers bloom throughout the year, park employees mark the different blooms with simple labels.

For me, Pipestone preserves something else sacred to natives. It preserves—or resurrects—the prairie. Walking monument trails was precisely how we discovered prairie wildflowers and tall grass prairie grasses. The easiest for me and my children to name and remember, because of its soft yellow and gold complexion, and its wealth of blooms surrounding a long stem, was called butter and eggs.

Therefore, back at home, as we round the corner in our road, when I ask, “Is that butter-and-eggs?” I’ve created all the stir I need. “Let’s go check,” my daughter urges. She’s a notorious fan of evening and late night excursions like this, whether to check on a plague of slugs on our hostas or a midnight meteor shower of blessing. I grab the flashlight and we cross the street, a total of no more than thirty yards.

Somehow, under the bright rays of the flashlight in the growing darkness, the flower is even more brilliant, a torch in the gloom if you will. The plant is about two-thirds bloomed, the blossoms opening around the stem in the manner of a holly hock, but on an eighteen-inch scale. The blossoms themselves remind me of the snap dragon, the gauzy outside of soft buttery yellow leading to the bright gold yolk center. At least a half dozen blossoms are poised to open in succeeding days, a rich blessing to a neighborhood aspiring to controlled grass and shrubs. (http://www.minnesotawildflowers.info/flower/butter-and-eggs)

The beauty of butter-and-eggs is innocent. That’s why I say that without the daring bushiness of the sweet clover, the butter-and-eggs may have avoided notice. However, the sweet clover was too daring a flagship for the prairie, and doomed these advance guards too.

I was working outside when I subconsciously heard a grinding sort of noise, lawn mower-esque but a little too grindy even for a lawn mower. Because one is accustomed to hearing several different pitches of lawn mowers, weed wackers, leaf blowers, and edgers, as well as a dozen kinds of saws in any given neighborhood, I paid little attention to the noise.

Until I realized it was crawling across the road in slow motion, right next to the railroad tie retaining wall. My neighbor, astride a red Farmall reconditioned for lawn service, was pulling a tank of spray and letting a 10-inch swath of lawn edge have it with whatever death-chemical she held in the tank.

I didn’t grow up knowing environmental or political action. The butter and eggs mean something to me and do little harm or pose little threat to a lawn that is at best an afterthought to my neighbors anyway. However, it never occurred to me at the time to run across the road and stand in front of the butter-and-eggs, to finally catch my neighbor’s eye amidst the grinding of the machine and to yell at the top of my voice so she’d hear me, “Hey, don’t spray these—they’re my kids’ favorite.” Rather, I chalked it up to a lost cause and hoped that the innocent flowers would somehow avoid her death-swath.

Two nights later, at our neighborhood float meeting, too little too late, I asked her, lightheartedly, “Hey, did you spray my butter-and-eggs?” An uncomprehending stare. So I explain. “I saw you out spraying yesterday along the road. I noticed those big sweet clover bushes were gone. Did you spray some yellow flowers on the other side?”

“I chopped down those bushes,” she tells me. “And if there were flowers on the other side, they’re dead now!” she crows.

Three more days, and her swath is completely brown, the length of the road. It is, in two words, absolutely ugly. Will the butter and eggs return next season? Considering the amount and apparent power of the chemical sprayed on them, I doubt it.

***

“And for all of this, nature is never spent.”

As I said, our road first acts as a frontage road to a larger blacktop. In the space between the roads where they run parallel, there’s a small strip of land that the homeowners on the other side of the road are expected by the city council to keep looking sharp—that is, they’re supposed to mow it. It’s July and two of my neighbors have been away or busy as the weather turns sweltering. After three days of not mowing, certain grasses are shooting skyward like a rash of fireworks. It took me twenty-five years of living on the tall grass prairie, but I’ve learned about what grasses show up when the weather gets hot and withers the imports. Then the native grasses, with their immense root systems fit for just such weather, are resurrected: the puffed out heads of switch grass, the arrowheads of Indian grass, and the purple-stained crow’s feet of big bluestem, the prince of the prairie.

One evening, at dusk, I walk through this swath of grass to confirm my hopes. Indeed, big bluestem predominates, another tall grass prairie advance guard seeking to regain its dominion, but mixed in is another surprise, another treasure: a lesser known grass, sideoats grama grass is in full bloom, with its feathery seed heads hanging down, combed to one side, the yellow specks of pollen still visible between them, like a girl whose hair is strewn with flowers.

And so one gift replaces another. In the roadside ditches, the tall grass prairie still lurks, biding its time, waiting patiently to unwrap its riches.