Drinking from the World Cup

I was mad, again, after the last US World Cup performance. I say “again” because I’ve felt this way before about US soccer before but even more so about the game of soccer as it continues to take root in US—I almost said “American,” as if we had a monopoly on that term—soil.

I think I’m well-positioned to discuss US views of soccer for a couple of reasons. I cut my teeth on baseball as a young child, fell in love with basketball as an adolescent, and feel religious charisma about football as an adult. However, I also played soccer in high school. For four years. Without learning how to make a move with the soccer ball. They put me in goal with my hand-sports background, but I didn’t really understand that position either.

Then in college, I went to England and regularly watched the BBC’s Match of the Day where I regularly saw people do things with soccer balls that I had never imagined, running and contorting with the ball dancing on their toes, orchestrating passes I couldn’t imagine, (I’m mixing sporting terms) and shooting pin-point lasers past goalies launched Spiderman-like through midair. It truly could be a beautiful game. So I understand what the game can look like though I am by no means a connoisseur.

I also understand what the average American fan does not see in the sport. This skeptical attitude is typified by the recent commentary I heard from the disembodied egos that sally forth on talk radio. One of these males caught in permanent adolescence mentioned how he wouldn’t cross the street for an MLS game, but he could appreciate the fair weather fan support of the World Cup; how soccer couldn’t hold a candle to NFL football, but it was a feel good event akin to the Olympics. I thought these statements were true as far as they went but also typical of a certain American-centrism or even arrogance.

But perhaps I’m being a bit unfair still. What is it culturally, I wonder, that prevents soccer from being passionately embraced in the US like it is in much of the world? What is it about American—sorry, US—soil that produces such putrid soccer plants?

The lack of scoring is no doubt an issue, especially for my generation (X) and younger. We like scoring and a lot of it. We have the NBA to blame here generally and Michael Jordan specifically. I remember when Jordan went off for 63 against Boston, for example, but try to forget that the Bulls as a team lost that game and the series, that it wasn’t really even close, because the Bulls were the far inferior team. Besides, eventually Jordan made the Bulls a champion with his scoring (This is a lie). Today, too, the biggest stars are the scorers, the players that can take over a game, the players who don’t seem to need a team: Kobe, Lebron, D-Wade. (Note: Kobe has won championships on near-All Star teams; D-Wade barely won one when he had Shaquille O’Neal and a significant supporting cast who were summarily sold off after they won, and Lebron hasn’t come close with his supporting cast of pick-up players). Still, the scoring—and the scorers—are what we want.

Yes, soccer, too, focuses on the stars, and the best players can weave and dance through the lines of defenders and then celebrate their own genius. However, the supporting cast invariably gives rise to those goals, with the fullbacks and defenders doing we-know-not-what in the back row, passing the ball across the field and back across the field and then up to the midfielders and back, like an incredibly slow and lethargic foosball game. But if the so-called stars in soccer can go entire games without scoring, are they really stars? Consider Wayne Rooney in the current World Cup. Proof enough that soccer is not dependent on individuals, on momentary, shooting stars.

In the background of this issue of stars and scoring, though, is control. We Americans like control bordering on dominance. Note that the three major sports are all hand sports where the ball is held or controlled closely in the hands. In football, “turnovers” including “fumbles” and “interceptions” are the most cataclysmic events and the ones that can get you benched the quickest. Of the three, baseball depends on loose balls perhaps the most, and even then the ball is held for most of the game and the best pitchers have the most “control.”

By comparison the control in soccer is much more haphazard. Yes, the best players seem to have the ball “tied to their toes,” but any game that celebrates “a good touch” is not predicated on control. Pin-point pitches in baseball are by necessity more precise than fifty-yard passes in soccer because they’re hand-based and not foot-based.

And so we come back to my consternation with the US soccer team’s last performance where they seemed out of control, discombobulated, and uninspired. It wasn’t just that they didn’t score; it was that for most of the game they seemed unworthy of scoring. They didn’t play well enough as a team which didn’t give rise to chances for individual scores. There were too few chances. It was as if Kobe Bryant didn’t take a shot in the championship game.

This led to a feeling that I, as an American, loathe: a sense of fate or predestiny, a sense that one individual could not overcome the forces facing them. I knew Landon Donovan could not suddenly break loose for five goals, and this angered me. Above all it is this sense of fate, I want to argue, that makes soccer repugnant to the average American fan.

An equal but opposite sense of fate exists in any given soccer match when one team outplays the other but for one mistake, when the worse team scores a goal or the referee makes one poor call and the better team loses. Again, this adds a sense of unpredictability about soccer, a democratic element to soccer, that we in the US really can’t stand.

This democratic element is really an interesting one. American football, some have said, is the ultimate team sport, where each player must do his part to achieve the end goal of a play. Each player must know all the plays and his small part in each of them, but the division of labor is clearly drawn between the “skilled” players, those who handle the ball, and the “unskilled” players, who almost never handle the ball, and also extreme specialists who only get on the field only for a couple of plays a game.

By contrast, soccer is much more democratic. All the players, including the goalie, although he does have specialized skills, must have a similar package of skills. There are no “unskilled” players and no absolute specialists. The players must play as a unit, as one organism all the time or suffer breakdowns that can mean goals and therefore losses.

The supposed “team” element of football continues onto the sidelines, with umpteen coaches and specialists, and up into the press box, with more coaches watching cameras and analyzing statistics. It’s a technological sport, dependent on dead time between plays for slow motion replays from several angles, and aslo dependent on instant replay for its most important officiating calls, which offer more dead time for replays and, most importantly, commercials. In short, soccer is not dependent enough on technology, on commercials.

Finally, there’s the military implications of soccer. I’m tempted to say that we want the same thing from our sports teams that we want for our army, our government: control, dominance, shock and awe. Remember the first “Dream Team” of USA basketball? The All Star team that decimated the likes of Angola, reasserting our dominance in our own sport? It was a moment in Olympic sport, I think, when the average American fan, the forty-year old in extended adolescence, breathed a collective sigh of relief.

It was a moment not unakin, I want to suggest, to the first Gulf War, when we could track the progress of the US army into Baghdad throughout an evening telecast and watch as our smart bombs were guided, video game-like, into key military sights of the Iraqi capital. Very rewarding.

We’re not interested in soccer, I’m saying, because it’s not our sport. We didn’t think it up, we don’t own it, we can’t dominate it. It’s an establishment sport, played by the original colonizers in countries with often deeper, richer histories than our own; it’s a guerrilla sport, played by the colonies in countries much more impoverished than our own, where any street kid could conceivably kick a ball around and become the leading player in the world.

But still, US fans stick around to watch the US in the World Cup just in case we would rise to world dominance. That is what the average fan is interested in: transcendence. Then, when the US falls apart against Ghana, the average adolescent fan gets angry, wonders why soccer is such a stupid sport.

After 9/11, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek called the United States to truly join the world community. He claimed that US shock that something like 9/11 could happen here, to us, was exactly the point: that we had spent too much of our time in recent history insulating ourselves from the world, pretending like we were immune to world problems, had not been active enough throughout the world trying to make sure that something like 9/11 would not happen anywhere rather than just trying to make sure it didn’t happen here. In some ways Zizek’s essay, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” tried to do the same thing in politics that Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac did in ecology: try to move us from “conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it.”

I’m not sure that the World Cup doesn’t give us the same opportunity in sport. This year, we came to the table of the world’s sport with a worthy offering, equaling the result of several global soccer powers including England. The fact that we bowed out of the round of sixteen with little resistance should not make us so much mad about our lack of success as it should make us humble before the game, humble before the powers that must coincide to achieve success at the game, and simply grateful to be a member at the table.

At the Casino

As we pulled in, I suddenly thought, “I’ve got to give my kids the talk.” Admittedly, this strategy was a sort of afterthought, a last second emergency Hail Mary justification after the sudden realization as to what I was doing—taking my three video-game-loving kids, 4,6, and 9 to a casino with flashing lights and ringing bells. We were on the way from Lake Mille Lacs to Grandpa and Grandma’s house and we needed to stop to eat. Mille Lacs Grand Casino loomed to our left like a Minnesotan Taj Mahal with a stoplight for easy access, and a ready buffet: no waiting, no picking from a menu, no grease-laden kids’ meals of mini corn dogs, French fries, and soda. But cheap—and therefore a no brainer. I didn’t give a second thought to what I was doing until we pulled into the parking lot and I looked with my mind’s eye into the windowless hall of wonders. What was I doing?

I think I’m right on the watershed of, well, opinion or judgment or popular attitudes of Christians toward gambling. Cards were never an issue in my household like they were in others, but it was understood that gambling was one of the great evils of the world. Las Vegas was sin city and I would never go there.

Today, of course, things have changed dramatically. There is a casino a half hour from where I live—and soon there will be a casino one hour from where I live, and there’s one two hours and three hours and four hours. In popular culture, “what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas” has made its way into the vernacular. I know CRC people in good standing who see an evening at a casino on par with having a six-pack of beer: acceptable in moderation and with limits.

But I’m old enough to say I have qualms about the carnival atmosphere that my children are about to experience. They’re ripe for the wonder of it all. So I prepare my speech.

A note about where we’ve been and where we’re going. We’ve just spent three days at Izaty’s resort, a pretty nice resort on Lake Mille Lacs. And by pretty nice I mean a place with a golf course, a pool, a bar and hotel. I mean villas on the lake; I mean employees with lawn mowers and weed whackers daily prowling the grounds for awry blades; I mean fifty yards of shoreline in perfect bluegrass and Bermuda. Wonderful. We had stayed in a three bedroom townhouse. We had taken a golf cart down to the docks to go out to fish. All on the grace of a relative’s relative.

We’re going to grandpa and grandma’s house. They’ve loaned us the boat, which my dad bought after he sold our farm equipment and went trucking for Bayliner, buying it directly from the company for cost, a seventeen-and-a-half foot fishing boat. Now, they live in Breezy Point, a town that grew up from a resort, in a modular home, not on the lake. They live on a fixed income. I’m pulling the boat; the kids are in the old model Toyota Sienna with my wife. Thus, I can’t give them “the talk” in the car.

So we go in the front door. The entry has a hotel check-in to the left; ahead is an open hall with the typical flashing lights and games and gaudy carpet. We find a map on the left wall with a red “you are here” dot. We can walk straight through the gaming hall and find the restaurant on the right. Or we can drive around to another entrance and hope to access the buffet more directly. Who am I kidding? What casino is going to be set up so that you don’t have to walk past the gaming machines?

We plunge ahead. I would put blinders on the children if I could. Avert their eyes—an excellent parenting strategy I’m sure.

The shiny slot displays include wolves, pirates, exotic—though surprisingly conservatively clad—women. It’s a hall of escape, promise, myth. It smells. Cigarette smoke makes my daughter pull her shirt over her nose. I’m shocked, too. No smoking laws don’t extend to casinos. No doubt it makes sense to let addictions grow together, I think. But of course, this is no doubt a tribal decision. A tribal sovereignty issue.

I was right about cheap. $28.81 for a family of five. Less than a Pizza Ranch buffet.

We no more than find our seats before son number one has to go to the bathroom. On the trip out I begin tallying: one man with a walker; another with a cane; a lady dragging a foot like a peg leg. That’s just on the way to the bathroom. On the way back, I see a woman with her ankle wrapped with a standard ace bandage, the appendage hooked in a crook of the slot machine so she can pull the handle and keep her injury elevated too.

While my wife aids one of our sons at the buffet line, I hold the table and think of what I will say during “the talk.” This is a place that draws in poor people, I will tell them, largely blue-haired retirees on fixed incomes without hobbies, people who shouldn’t be here. And working class men and women who feel trapped by life and are willing to throw their lot on fate for a chance at escape. They watch Fox news. Or CNN. They don’t go to church. Or do. They live in Raymond Carver short stories.

When the kids return, I launch in. “This is a place that people come and throw away their money because they think they can make more without doing anything,” I begin, catching the eyes of a woman at the next table. Suddenly, I think I’m caught in a Flannery O’Connor short story. That I will necessarily caricaturize these people. That I like this cheap food. That my judgments necessarily judge me.

No, there’s a bigger reason for this and other casinos’ existences. I’ve heard casinos called the latest chapter in the Indian wars: that tribes use their sovereignty to target the sitting ducks of American culture. Then again, casinos are about jobs in notoriously jobless areas. Then again, Lake Mille Lacs has a carefully monitored industry in Lake Mille Lacs itself. Then again, I would dare to wager that 0.00 Native Americans work at Izaty’s Resort. Then again, I’ve heard rumors that tribes are not the only ones benefitting from casinos, that there are powerful individuals and management groups making beaucoup bucks behind the scenes.

I think about the people I’ve witnessed. Is this handicap day at Grand Casino, I wonder? Is it stereotype day? I think, this is the underbelly of the American economy, where the dispossessed draw in the dispossessed to dispossess them and repossess themselves. With certain powerful individuals looming like mysterious specters behind the scenes.

Then I think, why am I so judgmental? Why isn’t the casino experience akin to drinking a six pack of beer? What do I know about the woman in her fifties at the adjacent table and the man with her, wearing a Marine Corps hat? What if this great hall, half full with the elderly handicapped is something quite different? Maybe this hall is the new Salvation Army, with its army of cripples and castoffs of society?

I am in a Flannery O’Connor story and Mille Lacs Grand Casino is transforming into the kingdom of heaven before my eyes, a gathering of the poor and downtrodden.

Before we eat, I squint hard and deliver the softest version of “the talk” that I can, still catching the eyes of the woman at the next table, as if she’s listening in, shocked at my tale, my judgment. I don’t back down; I warn my children and direct them to the problems that can occur in the hall of wonders.

Eventually we all have our meals. My youngest son gets barbecue sausage, broasted chicken, green beans and carrots; my other son gets breakfast; my daughter gets a combination of breakfast, chicken and mashed potatoes and gravy; my wife has a regular Thanksgiving dinner; and I have the barbecued sausage, cabbage and stuffed peppers. Because we are on vacation, my wife lets my children have the pop of their choice. So much for health.

Because of the nature of the buffet, we’ve gotten our meals at different times and have started in eating at different times. With all that’s happening with our plates and in my mind, we forget to pray. So much for consistency.

Flannery O’Connor, eat your heart out.

Morning Thanks--the Delafield Lutherans

I honestly don't know if it's true, but the church ladies of the long gone Delafield Evangelical Lutheran Church of Delafield Township, Jackson County, Minnesota, swear--on a bible even--that the smash hit Church Basement Women, a long-running and oft-toured theater piece (an original and two sequels, in fact) was created from material they gave the playwrights in a wonderful little documentary film titled Delafield.

At least that's what they told me yesterday. Straight-faced too. Of course, they're Lutheran women, so lying is out of the question.

We met them yesterday at Windom American Lutheran Church, for lunch--not in the basement, but you get the picture. We'd watched the film the night before with some good folks from Leota Christian Reformed Church, where a sobering discussion occured afterward because the documentary itself is a lament, not only for the passing of a church, but the virtual passing of the rural way of life in the Upper Midwest.

The Delafield church disbanded in 1998, when it look at itself and realized it had far greater past than a future. The pastor says, on the film, that she asked the children to come forward for a children's sermon, but none came. There wasn't any. Most of what she saw before her was silver-haired. It's a blessedly loving documentary created by a son of the congregation, and it was especially moving in Leota, Minnesota, where the good people lost their elementary school just last year. When you lose your kids, you lose a future. We didn't pass out Kleenex before that film went on, but it would have been kind of us to have done just that.

The country folk of Delafield gave their old Lutheran church away, and if you're ever travelling down I-90, past Jackson, Minnesota, all you need to do is lift your eyes to the hill on the south side of the road, where that church's steeple still sits proudly against the horizon. Today, it's the tallest building in a tourist stop (not trap either--trust me).

Anyway, what we'd set up for the bus tour we're on is a meeting with those very sweet country Lutheran folks who star in the documentary that gave birth to all the comedy. We'd meet them, we said, the very next day at the Lutheran church in Windom. Honestly, I thought it would be a highlight of our little pilgrimage through rural southwest Minnesota, a place where few tourists stop to smell the prairie roses.

It was everything I imagined--and more.

When we pulled up on the east side ("you better use the east side because we got vbs going on, you know"), those Minnesota Lutherans wandered outside the door to greet the frozen chosen Calvinists right off the bus. There they stood like some silver-maned welcome wagon, and once our people filed off the bus, they were greeted, open arms. Yes, open arms. I'm not making this up. Actual hugs.

I'm not kidding. I saw it with my own eyes. Those Lutherans and our Calvinists hugged each other even though they'd never laid eyes on us before, and we'd seen them only on a vhs tape. Like old friends. Like family. It's true, I swear. I'm not lying. Hugged. I got pictures.

All of that was late Tuesday morning. We've still got several days to go on this trip, and I don't dare to say it aloud really, but the truth is if we have a moment more precious than that one--all that hugging--can you believe it?-- right there on the front step of the Lutheran Church, I'll be one shocked pilgrim. And lunch too yet. My lands.

It was a very, very good moment. Garrison Keillor wouldn't believe it. What I'm saying is what he claims about Minnesota Lutherans is way off base. And those fine playwrights who've created those plays about Lutheran Church women?--they wouldn't believe it either, all those free hugs between strangers right there at church. It happened sure as anything.

What an incredible blessing. Good enough this morning, for morning thanks.

For sure, don't you think?

The Back Story on a Tremendous Fish

“I caught a tremendous fish,” begins the speaker in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem, “The Fish.” And so did I catch a tremendous fish, last Friday night. But for every tremendous fish—well, not every; there’s something called beginner’s luck, where some novice will sit down with a monstrous hook, ancient line, and his grandfather’s pole and reel in a tremendous fish on his first cast. Huh! What a great time he will think fishing is—until the next time he catches a tremendous fish, twenty years hence! No, for many tremendous fish that are caught comes a tremendous input of time, wasted time some would say, of waiting and praying.

I perfected the latter skill as a young lad. I prayed for fish, nearly wept and prayed. As my bobber danced along the rocky dikes of Lake Shetek I appealed to the Almighty, “Please, please let the fish bite! Please, please, PLEASE!” watching my line intently, willing it under with my faith in His answer. I also tried looking away, thinking maybe God liked to answer prayers when you weren’t looking, to add to the surprise.

I also tried incantations, rhymes that integrated my dad’s theories about the habits of fish. One went something like this: “Walleyes, walleyes, come to shore, so my life won’t be-such-a bore.” I should have tried something a bit more like “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble,” but what did I know about incantations or their effect on the hidden underworld that is a lake?

I’ve only started to realize how fishing spurs the imagination as I listen to my son talk. By this time in my life, I’ve read enough fishing magazines to think I have a sense of how fish work, and so now I craft our fishing spots and techniques around my own theories: fish into the wind because the wind drives baitfish up on shore; fish current because game fish will lay just off the current and wait for baitfish swept downstream by the current as easy pickings; fish the inside turns of points rather than the points themselves because this is the part of structure that will hold fish, etc. It’s all faith—or very nearly faith. Still, it sounds like surety, and so I can extend my son’s patience by spewing such a theory: “This hour before sunset is the best time to fish.”

“Why dad?”

“Because this is when fish like to feed.”

“Maybe we’ll catch a hundred.”

Other times he’ll make up a scene that he thinks is occurring underneath the surface of the lake: “Maybe they’re just all swimming around my minnow deciding who’s going to bite it first!”

Yes, it very well could be. I really have no idea most of the time.

All of this type of experience—prayers, theories, transactions of intergenerational knowledge—is behind a “tremendous fish.” During just the late afternoon and evening of my tremendous fish, we had casted and retrieved, jigged, bottom bounced, drifted, and trolled away time. Sunset had forced us to retreat to lighted bobbers: hollowed out plastic bobbers that have a thin battery inside which you can turn on so that your bobber produces a warm glow when it’s too dark to see it on the surface of the water any longer. With our lighted bobbers and minnows we were catching all the walleyes we wanted—10 inch “cigars,” walleyes just past fingerling stage when they’re easy pickin’s for northern pike.

Then my bobber went out, as in, it stopped working. Perhaps some water from my fingers had adversely affected the battery, perhaps the battery was wearing out, perhaps lights aren’t meant to be inside bobbers and fisher people are meant to go home to their spouses. Whatever the case, mine got finicky and I couldn’t make it stay lit. I took the little metal cylinder that was the light and pushed and pulled it, stuck my fingernail into several crevices to trigger the on-off switch, and got it lit several times only to have it turn off again when I screwed the top back on. Once, it even was lit all the way through the air on a beautiful cast, only to go out upon impacting the water. Finally, I got it to stay lit and cast it out as far as I could from the boat.

The bite had stopped. Our steady diet of “cigars” had completely disappeared; only a flicker of light remained on the horizon; the adolescent walleyes had gone to bed.

Another theory that I’ve heard is that walleyes bite at night, especially under moonlight. We were a week past a full moon, although I had tried out that theory last week with no success. Still, I’m easy prey for the fishing theory that says, “Just a little longer; wait a little longer and you will be rewarded.” It’s this theory more than any other that makes fishing unpopular with spouses. All this was on the backside of tremendous fish.

When my little light got blurry because it had been carried below the surface of the water, however, my faith had been rewarded. I reeled line to make sure when I set the hook I didn’t just pull against my own loose line, alert the fish to my presence and have him spit out the bait. No, I reeled up so that when I set the hook, I felt his (her) weight at the other end.

“Is it a better one?” my cohort Kevin asked.

“I think so.” Never count your chickens.

There was more weight there at the end of the line, yes. I was just hoping for a keeper to add to the one keeper we already had, a fifteen-incher, the unwritten minimum length for walleyes. My pole was bent and bobbing as the fish shook his head. I could hear regular metallic clicks from the drag on my reel, which meant it was giving some so that my line wouldn’t break, and I expected it to fully sing when the fish neared the boat, realized his predicament, and made a run to get away, but for the most part the fish came right toward the boat as I reeled.

“Do you need the net?” Kevin asked. I tried to remain noncommittal. Still, it was heavy.

“Yeah, I do.”

It lightly shook one more time and then there it was on the top of the water, a wide silver slab that Kevin dipped with the net.

“That’s a big fish,” he said. I wish he’d have said “tremendous”; it’s more poetical.

“I bet it’s twenty-four,” I said, already moving on to measurements.

“It’s bigger than that,” Kevin said.

The first odd thing about the “venerable” fish in Bishop’s poem is that the speaker tells us, “He didn’t fight./ He hadn’t fought at all.” It was the same for my fish. I’ve had two-pounder’s fight harder. It hadn’t even made one run, just held back as I reeled and shook its head a time or two.

How’s that for complacency and entitlement? Had he learned it was pointless to resist? Was he a fatalist? Or was he just old and tired or perhaps fat and out of shape, a fish equivalent of a couch potato who didn’t have it in him to do more than shake his head a time or two? After all, he was the only fish out hunting right now, no doubt preying on perch and other fish whose eyesight is notoriously bad, gobbling up a quick meal of easy pickings. Maybe in the dark he just couldn’t see us and he got disoriented from what was happening.

Then again, what was I looking for? If I was looking for a fight, a legendary struggle to tell the grandchildren about, then why was I fishing walleyes which are anything but notorious for their fight. Was I out here simply for my own ego?

Bishop’s fish—or the fish in her poem—is a survivor. He’s “speckled with barnacles” and “infested/ with tiny white sea-lice.” The speaker looks at his “frightening gills” and thinks of his miraculous innards, culminating with his “pink swim bladder/ like a big peony,” and finally notices “that from his lower lip . . . hung five old pieces of fish-line . . . with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth.” Surely, a fish story, I think, though I have caught a couple of fish that had one old hook in their mouths, and once Kevin had his line bitten off three times before he finally caught the northern that was doing the biting. When I filleted the fish, I found the three lures in the fish’s stomach and gave them back to their owner. Still, the five-haired beard is no doubt poetic license, but Bishop’s rendering makes me think that my fish, too, is still grandiose for not fighting. There’s still something wise here, still something impressive in the large, never-blinking eyes, the laid back girth of the golden sides.

I removed the hook which was lightly embedded behind his tongue in the arrow point of his white plastic gill apparatus and held him by the external slit in his gill just under his mouth.

“You wanna measure him?” Kevin asked. There’s a yardstick-like sticker on the side of the boat for just such a purpose. I stepped over a bench to get near it and held it up. You’re supposed to measure walleyes from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail pinched together. Once you have the measurement you can find a chart that will convert the length to a weight. I carefully put the nose at zero and stretched the tail out, propping up his underside with my hand so he wouldn’t sag. The tail, spread out, reached to the 27-inch mark before he wriggled out of my hands onto the aluminum back bench and then over into the space between the orange gas tank and back of the boat. He was in a tight corner, but shaking himself to move. Sure, now he fights. I had to move the gas tank in order to get him out, then held him up again quickly to the measuring stick.

“I’ll give you 27 ½,” Kevin said.

Yes, it’s all a matter of measurement.

“Do you want a picture?” he asked.

“Yeah, could you?” I said. “Oh, what about the flash?” I asked. This would be a cellphone pic and it was now after ten o’clock.

“Oh, I’ve got an app for that,” he said, smiling. “This thing’s got everything.”

And so I presented the fish, and smiled, and Kevin’s phone, a “Droid,” flashed weakly; then he leaned back for a wider angle and I presented it even more Vanna White-like, extending the tail against my leg with my empty hand.

“I’ve gotta put it back, right?” I asked, sheepishly.

“It’s up to you,” Kevin said.

Consensus around serious walleye fishermen is that you should put the biggest fish back. Big walleyes are almost always females and produce an incredible amount of eggs—many more than small ones. Also, since big ones are not the best eating, unless you’re going to mount one on your wall, you should put them back. Thus, Minnesota instituted a law last year that allows you to keep only one walleye over 20 inches. It allows for one “trophy fish.”

I didn’t know off the top of my head what 27-inches translated into for weight. I knew that 29-30 inches approached 10 pounds, but even then I don’t think I want a dead fish on my wall forever and ever. No, if I was going to keep this fish it would be to eat it. Walleyes taste good. At 27-inches this would be like a Thanksgiving turkey: it could feed a whole family. We like to eat fish at our house: battered in Shore Lunch and pan fried; eaten in a corn tortilla with lime, onions, cilantro, cabbage and salsa as a fish taco; panfish kept whole and deep fried and eaten with rice, with my children eating the eyes, which get crunchy in the deep frier; larger fish broiled or grilled with lime and salt and eaten Thai-style in lettuce wraps with noodles and herbs and peanut dipping sauce.

In short, when I bring fish home, I’m a . . . producer of sorts. I hesitate to say “producer.” The hunter-gatherer enterprise is simply a lot more hit-and-miss than that. There are few sureties, which is why you need prayer and theories. In fact, coming home with fish seems more like the gift of fate than anything, producing a feeling in the producer of humility, of being in the right time at the right place when providence smiles. But when you stay out late, past the time when it’s beautiful and comfortable to fish, when the light is gone and your bobber doesn’t work and the mosquitoes set in en masse, and then you come home and your wife says, “Did you catch anything?” and you say, “No,” and she says, “Then why’d you stay out so late?” there’s no possible answer. But when you pull out a 27-incher, she says, “Wow!” Problem solved.

But there’s another strike against me as producer in catching fish in the great outdoors. Toward the back of the Minnesota Fishing Regulations handbook, several pages explain the dangers of eating fish. “Most fish are healthy to eat,” the page begins, to assuage any fears from the get-go. “But any fish (store-bought or sport-caught) could have contaminants such as mercury and PCBs that can harm human health—especially children and fetuses” (74). I have no idea what PCBs are, but they sound scary. I do know what children and fetuses are, and I’m not too keen on producing mercury and PCBs for them in the fish I catch. For the modern would-be hunter-gatherer, this represents another factor at odds with our would-be hunting and gathering, a different kind of fate with a different kind of expression on its face.

Later pages give guidelines for the same group of child-bearing women and children when it comes to eating fish: Panfish—one meal per week; walleyes under 20-inches—one meal per month; walleyes over 20-inches—do not eat (76). Well, I guess that solves it. What’s the point in staying out late to catch a 27-inch walleye that fights like a log and is carrying mercury death in his muscles? It’s a matter of measurement and pictures. (Incidentally, for “other adults,” eating panfish is “unrestricted,” and all other species of fish are “one meal per week,” so I could go ahead and ingest the mercury myself if I so desired.)

So Bishop’s poem doesn’t give you the backlog on the “tremendous fish,” a backlog that might make the ending of that poem even more powerful. Near the end of the poem, the speaker, after admiring the “great grunting weight” of the fish for some time, and after looking closer to find his “five-haired beard of wisdom” and realizing both what this fish has survived and that now it’s in the speaker’s boat, is overcome by a tremendous feeling. “I stared and stared,” the speaker says,

and victory filled up

the little rented boat,

from the pool of bilge

where oil had spread a rainbow

around the rusted engine

to the bailer rusted orange,

the sun-cracked thwarts,

the oarlocks on their strings,

the gunnels—until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!

It’s somewhat surprising at first that Bishop turns our attention to the ugly little boat, to the sheen of oil it’s left that certainly has a rainbow tint to it as it lays on the water but which is anything but glorious, anything but pristine. Still, this poem teaches us not underestimate the power of beauty, either of the survivor-beauty of the “venerable” fish or the unexpected location of rainbows, which still may still “shine out” to us from the most unexpected places.

But after this transformative power has spread over everything, comes the final line: “And I let the fish go.” After all that back story, after all that conquest where others had failed to conquer, the tremendous fish goes back in the water, without so much as a measurement or a picture.

I, too, let my tremendous fish go. I rested him in the water with two hands, one under his body just behind his gills, the other on the tail. I eased him back and forth, letting the cool water run over his gills and restore him to alertness, if he ever was alert, this lethargic old-timer. Eventually, I saw one of his ventral fins flutter, but when I began to let go he lurched to port, still imbalanced, so I kept easing him back and forth until he righted himself, like a boy on a bike, and then slowly he swam away and down into the depths again, out of reach of the flashlight beam.

Victory did fill up the little boat, I suppose. I had had my hands on a tremendous fish, had overcome the great urge to possess him, and had given him back to the lake, back to the smiling if tainted providence from which he’d come. Everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow. And so, as the darkness deepened and stars peaked through the canvas of cloud overhead, since neither of us had anything pressing in the morning, we decided to stay out just a little bit longer.

Minnesota Fishing Regulations 2010. http://files.dnr.state.mn.us/rlp/regulations/fishing/fishing2010.pdf>

Death of the Lawn?

It happens every year. In fact, by the testimony of the unused bags of “Fall Weed and Feed” in my garage, it happens twice a year: I contemplate the state of my lawn, watch the spread of clover and dandelions and weigh whether or not I should put down the recommended chemicals that will magically choke the weeds and fertilize the grasses—correction, grass, singular: as per the suburban lawn usual, my lawn is predominantly made up of Kentucky bluegrass, which may or may not be a native of Kentucky.

But the issue of lawns has swollen in my mind to being almost unmanageable. On the one hand there is the tradition of lawns and what they signify. I have a sense that in my parents’ generation, lawns meant a great deal. I get this from a number of sources. When we used to drive around the countryside, my father saved his encomium for the most well-manicured farm places: carefully tended flower beds, newly painted buildings, and newly-mowed straight-lined lawns. “This guy’s a good operator,” he’d say. “Always has his place just like a park!” We, too, mowed our lawn carefully, often in diagonal lines, which my parents found the most attractive.

I see this same tradition in our next door neighbors to the south, high school contemporaries of my parents, who mow their lawn at a ratio of two or three times to our once. They have a bird bath, a stone eagle, and an American flag as part of their carefully constructed landscaping, and I once had to trim one of my trees because it “messed with” his flag. It was true enough, just totally not in my line of thinking on these sorts of things.

What makes me think about lawn care again is that these neighbors, on one of their mowing expeditions have mowed well into our lawn—at least two full swipes, a total of eight or so feet. I’m wondering if this is a message. Is it a hint? “Mow your lawn regularly or I will?” Is it pity? “Those poor Schaaps are so overwhelmed—we’ll help them out a little bit!” Or is it simply pragmatics: they have a rider, we don’t; therefore it’s easier for them to mow our lawn.

Then, too, there’s the issue of the denigration of our bluegrass monoculture. Clover is spreading like a plague; the first spring dandelions arched up their straw necks and poofy heads in alarming numbers; a colony of succors formed a small forest around one of our trees. I even found unidentified white flowers blooming where an old flower bed used to be.

What might the neighbors be saying?

I’m made all the more paranoid because a neighbor across the road approached me in the coffee shop the other day.

“You’re not going to turn me in for breaking the Sabbath, are you?”

I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Sunday afternoon I said to my wife, ‘Is it worse thinking about it or actually doing it?’” A fair point, I thought. It turns out he was talking about our other neighbors across the road who care not at all about dandelions and so have a regular field full of them. “I knew they were gone to the lake so I filled my lawn tractor up with a tank of spray and started spraying.” He grins sheepishly. “I sprayed three whole tanks full before I was done.”

It’s funny but also a type of insult. I take notice.

I’m tempted to say this lawn critique is dated, but that’s not quite true. Not long ago, friends of ours were talking about lawn practices. They were commenting on one gentleman whose habit of mowing his lawn at night, with a flashlight, resulted both in crooked lines in his lawn and whisperings from his neighbors. “Of course,” the story ended, “he had more problems.”

Clearly, the two are not unconnected: a lawn poorly cared for signifies a soul in disarray. That’s what I’m afraid of.

The American lawn is not, of course, without its critics. For example, in Steve Martin’s “The W.A.S.P.”, a satire of the ’50s family, the father initiates his son into the adult world of ownership by classifying his own lawn as a luxury item:

A luxury item is a thing that you have that annoys other people that you have it. Like our very green lawn. That’s a luxury item. Oh, it could be less green, I suppose; but that’s not what it’s about. I work on that lawn, maybe more than I should and pour a little bit o’ money into it, but it’s a luxury item for me, out there to annoy the others. (19)

The Minnesota writer and prairie champion Paul Gruchow let his lawn grow and got turned in by his neighbors. The county agent came by to tell Gruchow he had to mow his lawn on the authority that otherwise he would be spreading noxious weeds to his neighbors. Gruchow asked him about the different plants which had grown up in his lawn, some of which were native prairie plants. The agent didn’t know what they were and just stuck by his demand that Gruchow mow his lawn, leaving Gruchow to bemoan the fact that if county agents don’t know what’s what in the plant world, who does?

Then there’s the environmental effects. Among other things, run off from lawns is notoriously implicated in the insane algae blooms in Minnesota lakes that turns the waters aqua and makes them unswimmable.

I also simply don’t trust the smell. It smells like cancer. I’ve seen the signs posted on my neighbor’s professionally treated lawns—from companies like “TruGreen” and “ChemLawn”; thank you, a lawn that is chemically green is not truly green, and I want a grass lawn, not a chemical lawn—that warn small children to stay away. What’s the difference in my bag fertilizer, even though the bag proclaims “zero phosphorous,” but warns me to wear gloves and long pants and to burn them as soon as I’m through with them (okay, it says “wash them”), and to keep the “drift” away from people and “desirable” plants, and make sure it doesn’t wash off into storm sewers? Coupling these warnings with the nature of drop-spreaders—surely the most imprecise technology since all the technology invented to plug runaway oil wells on the ocean floor—and it seems a recipe for disaster.

“Don’t go on the lawn for a while,” I’ll tell my children, “I just put poison on it.”

My solution to everything is to sow my lawn down in a mixture of prairie grasses and let it grow. I’ve approached another neighbor who’s a biology teacher and he’s in agreement. So’s the neighbor two doors down who mowed his lawn three times total all last summer, though he raised the potential difficulty we might have in finding the kids. We’d quite literally have to beat the—well, grasses to find them.

But imagine not only the flora but the fauna on such a lawn. In the morning I could step out on my patio and shoot a pheasant rising from the blue stem without leaving my own property. Okay, so that’s its own distortion.

In any case, I don’t think it would fly with the town council. Runaway grasses would no doubt decrease “curb appeal” and unbeautify our tidy little town.

Still, the trend may be in my favor, though it may take a while to reach Edgerton. Buffalo grass has begun replacing Kentucky blue grass in some western locales. Even the Minnesota Twins move from the Metrodome to Target Field seems to be in my favor. Early in Target Field’s young life, a kestrel perched atop one of the foul poles and caught and ate all the moths it could. Last week, a squirrel came out on the field, prompting chants of “Let’s go, squirrel” from the crowd. The TV announcer remarked fantastically and sarcastically, “Eventually we’ll have deer out here. Moose. Bear.”

And I say amen.

Martin, Steve. WASP and Other Plays. Samuel French, 1998. Web. Google Books. 2 June 2010.

My morning thanks

This morning's Writer's Almanac quotes the poet Linda Pastan, who talks about her insane passion to write. "I often write poems in my head to distract myself during hard times," she wrote somewhere. "Years ago, after a car crash, while I lay waiting for the ambulance, I actually finished a poem I had been working on, determined not to die before I had it right."

Now that's insane, I think. But then again,it's not yet five in the morning, and while there are no flashing lights that I know of on their way to the basement here, most the world would say, I'm sure, that I'm just as crazy.

Last night I finished reading the manuscript of an ex-student, who decided, long after taking my class (where he did not necessarily distinguish himself), that he wanted to write a novel. I took up the job reluctantly--I've read enough student fiction in the last six months, as a matter of fact--but once I started, I had his novel finished in just two nights.

The truth is, it has more than its share of errors, but simply to read it was a blessing to me because I know only too well what kind of commitment it takes to sit down and write a 200-page novel, for better or for worse, and what kind of hope just doing it requires.

"People without hope don't write novels," Flannery O'Connor once famously wrote, and she's right. But then people without hope don't put on roofs or do root canals either. In a way, that line feels a bit presumptuous because people without hope don't plant tomatoes either or put out fires or even sweep the front porch.

I may be myopic about all of this, given the fact that I'm here and there isn't a bit of light yet outside my basement window, but I believe her nonetheless because I know Pastan's lunatic impulse--it's something about trying to make meaning, trying to make sense. That's what O'Connor is testifying, and it's why I'm here now.


This ex-student's first-draft novel has a brightly engaging plot line; it brings into question important issues, it's set securely in time and place, and it has memorable characters. But what thrills me as much as anything about holding it in my hands is just holding it in my hands. What he's trying to do is nothing more or less than make sense of what seems sometimes senseless.

Getting novels published is nearly an impossible task these days, and the mere fact that he wrote this whole story out is wonderful. Honestly, there are many reasons to love the work, but the real story of the novel, to me at least, is that he did it at all--and that's the great gift, the blessing of the manuscript that sits here beside me.

May he continue to work, to try to make sense, in the light of the Caribbean sun, where he lives, or in the early morning darkness, even in the fervent anticipation of flashing lights.

This morning I'm thankful for his gifts.

The Bakery Conversation

I got sandwiched in a conversation on my Saturday morning bakery run. In the back of the Edgerton Bakery, rolls and loaves of fresh bread were coming out of the oven and needed to be sliced, so that left one high school girl to work the counter up front for a whole line of customers. Outside it was windy and raining lightly, a hard drizzle, and the temperature was in the mid forties. Miserable. We were in the middle of a string of cold, rainy, early May days, still shaken from the long winter past but daring to hope for a 75-degree day that we might stretch ourselves collectively and tell ourselves again why we’ve chosen to live here. That kind of day was nowhere in sight, however, which left us feeling uncharitable and almost unjustly persecuted.

“So much for global warming,” a man to my left began.

“Like those Minnesotans who are for global warming,” another answered across my person to the first speaker. Pause without response. “There are a group of Minnesotans who say they are in favor of global warming.”

“Oh, in favor of global warming? Ha ha. Yeah, we could use it about now.”

Oh, boy. Here we go. Global warming, Barack Obama, Mexican immigration. I always feel at risk in conversations like this. Like I should pipe up with a good liberal arts perspective to balance the scales. Then I think, it’s easier not to say anything. To listen.

“Hope this doesn’t mean it’s gonna be like last summer.”

“It never did get warm.”

“I think we had six hours of 90 degree weather.”

“All summer.”

“All summer.”

We live on a ridge in the middle of the continent. The nearest ocean is days away, but we’re far enough east of the Rockies that aridity—real drought—hasn’t been a serious problem since at least the ’80s (knock on wood). Winters are often brutal; so, if our winters would turn into the typical winters of, say, Kansas City, life would be seemingly easier in southwest Minnesota. It’s not bad logic, just self-interested.

“But it’s as a whole that the earth is warming.” Sarcasm.

“Ha ha. Yeah right.”

“Well, 2001. 2001 was the hottest year. But since then it’s been down.”

I’ve heard that that there was a bit of a push of “global cooling” in the 1970s. Seems incredibly ironic that ideas could change that fast, even though today that ’70s thinking has been discredited by the scientific community. Still, in middle America it makes one even more wary of new global theories, especially when they get associated with a particular type, a particular politics.

“But that’s not what they want you to believe.”

“Nope. That’s not what Al Gore wants you to believe.”

“And he’s made a mint off this thing.”

“Oh, millions.”

I had a Prof in college who lauded Al Gore for his work on the environment long before An Inconvenient Truth. I’d never thought about the fact that he’s probably made money off of it. It’s a tough jab to parry. As soon as someone stands to gain personally from an issue—see Halliburton and the war in Iraq—pure motives are shot. The Marxist critic Frederic Jameson has said that “ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics,” another tough jab to parry, that we sit around and talk about the environment because our money enables us to do so. In a more complete form, Jameson’s quote runs like this: “My observation of these things in the West—is that ecological politics tend to be bourgeois politics, that lower-class people are interested in other issues that are sometimes incompatible with ecology” (Jameson, Buchanan 79).

“So how d’you like hauling hogs?”

The conversation turns. Or does it? One of these men used to be a long-distance trucker, it turns out, but now he hauls hogs shorter distances—hundreds of miles instead of thousands of miles, or, perhaps more likely, thousands of miles instead of tens of thousands of miles. I would bet the farm that he also listens to talk radio—thus the information that “2001 was our hottest year”—and his general acerbic skepticism. He doesn’t know me, identifying my place in the line by saying “That guy in the yellow coat is the end of the line,” when someone asks.

The other gentleman is a shirt-tail relative of mine through marriage. Story is that he knocked up my cousin—one of those cousins about 30 years older than I am—and had to get married. His wife, who often asks about my parents, I’ve talked to many times; never to him. He may know me but doesn’t acknowledge me, nor I him, an older, never-talked-to relative. By his clothes, he, too, is “a working man.”

I won’t enter this conversation because I have no “street cred” with these men. Though I’ve lived almost my whole life in the community (I defected for four years of college in the city), though I’m the son of a farmer (I’ve defected to a career in higher education), and though “my issues” are really also their issues (the integrity of the landscape, economic viability on small farms), I’m now part of the academic establishment that is theoretical and therefore impractical, liberal, and distant. Or I’m afraid that’s how I might be perceived if I jumped in with a comment such as, “But gentlemen, your socioeconomic status also predisposes you to the conservative rhetoric that makes you pawns of the global capitalist establishment.”

No, if I’m to enter this conversation, I must do so from a practical route, one that proves that I have local knowledge and that I can apply any theoretical knowledge pragmatically. I must enter the conversation on their terms and engage their way of life.

I don’t. I hold my tongue and think of my roll order.

It’s well nigh impossible to think of doing things other than the way we do them. Even as oil spews into the Gulf of Mexico and threatens ruination upon a way of life along an entire coastline, it’s hard to think of a model of life that doesn’t revolve around oil. Anyone who asks us to do that threatens a way of life, and there may be nothing more religious than the collective idea of “a way of life.” That is, if Al Gore’s interest in global warming can be questioned as “bourgeois politics,” these men’s interest in driving over the idea of global warming as so much road kill is equally a type of socioeconomic politics.

It strikes me that, in this bakery line in the midst of a reluctant spring in the middle of the continent, this is a question, ultimately, of faith. Not quite religious faith, though there are ties, but faith in a story.

I don’t know that one can call belief in one’s own system, one’s own way of life, “faith.” If faith is being “sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” then “faith” in one’s own way of life is not really faith, it’s something else. That is, one quality of faith, it seems to me, is that it’s a bit nonsensical and beyond self-interest.

There are those who believe in the “gospel” of global warming, or—to fashion it as “good news”—the “gospel” of a green earth. I read about one such woman who had herself sterilized to make sure the carbon footprint she left was small.

On the other hand, however, what strikes me about the global warming story is that it does encourage us to think beyond self-interest, to think of the small group of islanders in the pacific who can’t afford to lose six inches of coast; to think of the loss of creatures due to the shrinking of already narrow temperature bands within which those creatures can survive (note: I’m resisting the politicized polar bear; think instead “human being”); to think of living in a way that doesn’t mean plugging something in, flipping a switch, turning a wheel, throwing away. And that’s hard. That takes imagination. And faith of a sort.

On the landscape of the Middle West and West, the worst kind of mistake can be misplaced faith, even though our history is full of such misplaced faiths: the myth that rain would follow the plow comes to mind, among others. No, although myths have driven us out here and although we cling to our favorite myths, we’re tremendously skeptical of new myths. We stick to what we [think we] know.

And so I leave without opening my mouth once. I leave to sort out for myself myths false and true, to think about how to engage myths in bakery conversations, how to unify disparate elements of environmental politics around a central myth. In an increasingly fragmented world, that common vision seems more and more illusory. Once again, this is where faith enters the picture. Faith gains its strength from the Biblical vision of what might be, of a land flowing with milk and honey, of a holy city where Christ himself is the light. Of course, even these visions and how one interprets them and makes them to serve political ends can lead to controversy, which gets at another quality of faith: while it can be political, it cannot only be political; while it can have a vision of an end goal, that end goal must be fluid and not set in stone; while it can and should have earthly ends in mind, it must also have the mind of heaven.

When it comes to the global environment, then, I’m sure of what I hope for and certain of what I do not see. Now to get that into a bakery conversation. . .