A Place Called Context
Time in Situ
In the Midwest, time is much like it is anywhere else but for the minutiae: a limping orange barn cat, a cold chill wind in the space of a blaring down sun, and a sunset that marks the end of too few hours in which to cram all the work we’d intended. It is a neighbor’s death, for neighbors can be neighborly in Iowa, and we miss them when they’re gone. It’s heavy winter snows and late spring rains, the admixture of moistures deluging our rivers and streams and rotting the fields, flooding the plains. It is family and friendships, corn mazes and pumpkin patches. Time comprises our rural concoction of pleasant places in open spaces in Iowa, alongside far too many friendly faces, and what some would consider to be a staid provincialism. But it’s not. It’s merely here, and here is home.
Essentially, the where is here as it is there, and there is no where where time is not. Time bleeds out here (as it does there), aches in the pain, shocks in the dying. It rolls in on itself, time, clangs through memories, clumps across forgotten spaces tarred with lack. Like a thing un-held, like a fighting breath, like a misspent love, time eels away, furtive in its passing.
Today, the wind skeins my hair and chills my skin, inspires me to consider a cup of homemade hot chocolate and computer time on the sofa. Today, a landscape of sensation will cup me in its hands and warm me. And the chickens will need to be fed.
Time is here and time is there, and it melds at the intersection of Place.
The Something of Iowa
Here in Iowa there is not much something. Instead, other matters matter: field corn statistics and the price of beef. It’s here where cattails in ditches grow brown, rivers loll on, rolls brown in ovens and green tractors roll across brown fields of field-ready corn and soybeans, in Iowa.
Iowa is literary, literally. Take Iowa City, for instance, a town of writers and the epic Iowa Writers’ Workshop; maybe you’ve heard of it. Louise Gluck was there, and John Irving. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Others. (Flannery O’Connor learned to write there, or perhaps before; we cannot be sure.) This is something.
Voting too matters in Iowa, in this speck on the map, what some risibly call a “flyover” state. The rough-callused hands that hold a pen in those white-divider cubicles were taught to hold a steering wheel at an ungodly young age; all hands on the tractor’s deck! Cautionary tales, cautionary tales—Iowa—uncouth, small, shouldn’t-matter, Iowa. Oh, we are something.
Outside, fields sprout corn and corn borers, insects of destruction, weeds and seeds of weeds, in the black-brown earth, deep rich humus of Iowa, o’ Iowa, strong where the price of beef matters.
Nature in Iowa in ditches in trees on hills grown strong by rivers that matter, all something. Brown cattails black humus green corn and rainbows on hills over trees touching ditches against the bluest of blue skies where the price of beef matters and overall is something.
Everything That Rises
These hills, these hills, and so much green. But beneath, what lies here, tells the story. From the area of the Manson Crater (named for its location near Manson, Iowa), soft water emerges, unlike the state’s naturally hard water. Tens of feet underground in a twenty-four mile diameter lies what geologist Nicholas Short described as “shocked quartz” grains and breccia with a melt matrix. The answer for this anomaly seems to be an impact event of sometime past, likely a meteorite now covered by many feet of glacial till.
When speaking of Colorado, Ellen Meloy said, “This land was born at the center of old.” Iowa, too, sprang forth when her loess slipped ahead of sliding glacial sheets (it seems), up and over ice-carved hills, down dugout valleys, into craters pocked by landform upheavals and hydro-thermal events. Born at the center of old, these bluffs and ridges; birthed by a mighty rising, a melt-down shift, is this land.
Branches bow in the late afternoon breeze, water glints and curls. The old railroad bridge sweeps long in its history and the bronzed beams deck the wide winding river. This is the Cedar, so called because of the red cedars that line the shores.
One of its sandy peninsulas bears driftwood and a few scrubby shrubs. Trees in their mid-fall turning have been dusted with the talc of leaf-abscission; shades of browns rim the riverside here and there. Soybean fields in Iowa are being harvested this time of year, and the orange and black beetles, Harmonia axyridis, proliferate. Their food source, soybeans, is off to market.
Some hay fields, once cropped with alfalfa, lay dead beneath a cloak of glyphosate in preparation for next year’s reseeding. Iowan Monarch populations have fallen off by nearly ninety percent in the last two decades, and in 2014, half our honeybee population disappeared. Is the answer in our developing tiny drone bots to pollinate the crops after our heavy agricultural hand has turned nature on its ear? The trees are more forgiving than their fruit.
The black and gray and romping blue of this living water expands my horizons along with my hopes. The only death here is the trunk directly across from me and the trunks further down that lose their footing against the constant running of a slowish river on an earth filled with such. Half these shore-bound trees may be gone in fifty years, and a river widens.
The sky is often the same though never identical: blue with white appointments blown like the river, calmly along. A jet’s pencil-thin contrail cannot compete, is tawdry and weak. This is not unusual. Nature is the great artist, and humankind plagiarizes the master.
Browning of the ground-weeds has begun too, the expected seasonal maturation. The rocky shore, the muddy shore, the sandy flats—geological ambience that frames my days, and me, here where everything that rises, converges.
It Ends at the Beginning
It all comes down to context. My hills may be your plains. My winter may be your summer. And every new view freshens into visions—a miracle on [fill in my/your address].
A New Zealand friend brags about how warm it is there, how she plans to go swimming on one of my twenty below zero wind chill factor days or what a wonderful walk she took across one of the many inactive volcanos while, here, 8 ½ x 11 size snowflakes smother my world with wonder. She gloats over subtropical temperatures and complains when the weather drops below 50F or rises above 70F. Yet they have sharks, I tell myself, but even the shark attacks have been minimal across the years. So I try not to compare, try to consider context: we have snakes and coyotes, recent bear and jaguar sightings. We have rip-roaring tornados and barn-flattening derechos. We have rolling hills and trails by the miles. This, I tell myself, is adventure; this likewise is a worthy framework of place.
Most importantly, environment can only impinge externally; I do the rest. I am the rest. I make my own decisions, and my decision is to love this place, this context, and my fleeting moments situated in time.
__
[First appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Blueline]
Time in Situ
In the Midwest, time is much like it is anywhere else but for the minutiae: a limping orange barn cat, a cold chill wind in the space of a blaring down sun, and a sunset that marks the end of too few hours in which to cram all the work we’d intended. It is a neighbor’s death, for neighbors can be neighborly in Iowa, and we miss them when they’re gone. It’s heavy winter snows and late spring rains, the admixture of moistures deluging our rivers and streams and rotting the fields, flooding the plains. It is family and friendships, corn mazes and pumpkin patches. Time comprises our rural concoction of pleasant places in open spaces in Iowa, alongside far too many friendly faces, and what some would consider to be a staid provincialism. But it’s not. It’s merely here, and here is home.
Essentially, the where is here as it is there, and there is no where where time is not. Time bleeds out here (as it does there), aches in the pain, shocks in the dying. It rolls in on itself, time, clangs through memories, clumps across forgotten spaces tarred with lack. Like a thing un-held, like a fighting breath, like a misspent love, time eels away, furtive in its passing.
Today, the wind skeins my hair and chills my skin, inspires me to consider a cup of homemade hot chocolate and computer time on the sofa. Today, a landscape of sensation will cup me in its hands and warm me. And the chickens will need to be fed.
Time is here and time is there, and it melds at the intersection of Place.
The Something of Iowa
Here in Iowa there is not much something. Instead, other matters matter: field corn statistics and the price of beef. It’s here where cattails in ditches grow brown, rivers loll on, rolls brown in ovens and green tractors roll across brown fields of field-ready corn and soybeans, in Iowa.
Iowa is literary, literally. Take Iowa City, for instance, a town of writers and the epic Iowa Writers’ Workshop; maybe you’ve heard of it. Louise Gluck was there, and John Irving. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. Others. (Flannery O’Connor learned to write there, or perhaps before; we cannot be sure.) This is something.
Voting too matters in Iowa, in this speck on the map, what some risibly call a “flyover” state. The rough-callused hands that hold a pen in those white-divider cubicles were taught to hold a steering wheel at an ungodly young age; all hands on the tractor’s deck! Cautionary tales, cautionary tales—Iowa—uncouth, small, shouldn’t-matter, Iowa. Oh, we are something.
Outside, fields sprout corn and corn borers, insects of destruction, weeds and seeds of weeds, in the black-brown earth, deep rich humus of Iowa, o’ Iowa, strong where the price of beef matters.
Nature in Iowa in ditches in trees on hills grown strong by rivers that matter, all something. Brown cattails black humus green corn and rainbows on hills over trees touching ditches against the bluest of blue skies where the price of beef matters and overall is something.
Everything That Rises
These hills, these hills, and so much green. But beneath, what lies here, tells the story. From the area of the Manson Crater (named for its location near Manson, Iowa), soft water emerges, unlike the state’s naturally hard water. Tens of feet underground in a twenty-four mile diameter lies what geologist Nicholas Short described as “shocked quartz” grains and breccia with a melt matrix. The answer for this anomaly seems to be an impact event of sometime past, likely a meteorite now covered by many feet of glacial till.
When speaking of Colorado, Ellen Meloy said, “This land was born at the center of old.” Iowa, too, sprang forth when her loess slipped ahead of sliding glacial sheets (it seems), up and over ice-carved hills, down dugout valleys, into craters pocked by landform upheavals and hydro-thermal events. Born at the center of old, these bluffs and ridges; birthed by a mighty rising, a melt-down shift, is this land.
Branches bow in the late afternoon breeze, water glints and curls. The old railroad bridge sweeps long in its history and the bronzed beams deck the wide winding river. This is the Cedar, so called because of the red cedars that line the shores.
One of its sandy peninsulas bears driftwood and a few scrubby shrubs. Trees in their mid-fall turning have been dusted with the talc of leaf-abscission; shades of browns rim the riverside here and there. Soybean fields in Iowa are being harvested this time of year, and the orange and black beetles, Harmonia axyridis, proliferate. Their food source, soybeans, is off to market.
Some hay fields, once cropped with alfalfa, lay dead beneath a cloak of glyphosate in preparation for next year’s reseeding. Iowan Monarch populations have fallen off by nearly ninety percent in the last two decades, and in 2014, half our honeybee population disappeared. Is the answer in our developing tiny drone bots to pollinate the crops after our heavy agricultural hand has turned nature on its ear? The trees are more forgiving than their fruit.
The black and gray and romping blue of this living water expands my horizons along with my hopes. The only death here is the trunk directly across from me and the trunks further down that lose their footing against the constant running of a slowish river on an earth filled with such. Half these shore-bound trees may be gone in fifty years, and a river widens.
The sky is often the same though never identical: blue with white appointments blown like the river, calmly along. A jet’s pencil-thin contrail cannot compete, is tawdry and weak. This is not unusual. Nature is the great artist, and humankind plagiarizes the master.
Browning of the ground-weeds has begun too, the expected seasonal maturation. The rocky shore, the muddy shore, the sandy flats—geological ambience that frames my days, and me, here where everything that rises, converges.
It Ends at the Beginning
It all comes down to context. My hills may be your plains. My winter may be your summer. And every new view freshens into visions—a miracle on [fill in my/your address].
A New Zealand friend brags about how warm it is there, how she plans to go swimming on one of my twenty below zero wind chill factor days or what a wonderful walk she took across one of the many inactive volcanos while, here, 8 ½ x 11 size snowflakes smother my world with wonder. She gloats over subtropical temperatures and complains when the weather drops below 50F or rises above 70F. Yet they have sharks, I tell myself, but even the shark attacks have been minimal across the years. So I try not to compare, try to consider context: we have snakes and coyotes, recent bear and jaguar sightings. We have rip-roaring tornados and barn-flattening derechos. We have rolling hills and trails by the miles. This, I tell myself, is adventure; this likewise is a worthy framework of place.
Most importantly, environment can only impinge externally; I do the rest. I am the rest. I make my own decisions, and my decision is to love this place, this context, and my fleeting moments situated in time.
__
[First appeared in the Spring 2016 issue of Blueline]