Category Archives: Farm

Hidden Doors

11 Saturday Nov 2017

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Hidden pocket doors at the Chapman farm Oct 2016  We reoccupied the farmhouse in October of 2016, after sixteen years of renting the house to two other families. We could not continue to rent the house to others when many major repairs and updates were required. We decided to live at the house a good share of the time while we work on it, enjoy the farm environment, and appreciate the memories made in the only house that my parents ever owned.
The first task was to remove the wall-to-wall carpeting from the main and the second floor. The main floor carpet was approaching thirty years of use; the second floor included carpets that were threadbare after fifty years and more. Nothing was salvageable from these carpets or their pads. Underneath were the original Southern yellow pine floors, hard, durable, and needing refinishing, which would wait until other tasks were completed.
The second task was one that had waited through years of my wondering curiosity—discovering what was hidden in the walls between the three living rooms on the main floor. One room serves as a dining room, one as a living room, and the last as a library, with a small half bath carved out of its corner. The walls between these rooms were thicker than normal in their construction. Vinyl folding doors had separated the rooms, and those doors had been added before we first occupied the house in 1963. They were obviously not original to the 1915 design. The last renters had removed those vinyl doors as they began to fall apart.
I verified my first suspicion, that the wall between the living room and library contained two heating channels for the second floor, justifying its larger size. I suspected that the other and thicker wall, between the dining and living rooms, had once contained pocket doors that matched the five-section ladder door design throughout the rest of the house. It was not likely that they were still there. Prying the plywood cover off of the door jam revealed the answer. There had been pocket doors there, and they still were there, pushed back into the pocket and covered. One rolled out easily, just as it had originally. The other rolled out a few inches and stopped, resisting to roll farther. They both were covered with dust, after their exile for sixty years or more., but underneath the dust was a beautiful finish, just waiting to be cleaned.
I surmised that the reason someone had hidden the doors was due to the failure of the one door to roll properly. There was no other evident problem with it. My son-in-law Au arrived soon after I had discovered the doors. He grabbed a flashlight, found an easy-to-reach adjustment mechanism, borrowed a screw driver and did a little adjustment, and that door worked perfectly, like the other. No mechanical problems defies Au for long.
How often do we give up on solving a problem before we’ve made a sufficient effort to find an answer? How often do we substitute something that is of poorer quality for something that just needs a little adjustment? How often do we live with something that is unsatisfying before we return to something that is beautiful and durable? How often do we hide doors instead of opening them? Oh, the lessons! The lessons keep rolling out.

Maintaining the Bridges

06 Monday Nov 2017

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old iron bridge 1   The Middlefork of the Vermilion River bisected the 320 acres that my father farmed during most of my childhood. It was originally a natural river, lined with old growth forest, meandering through highland marshes a few miles downstream from its source, until it was dredged to drain those wetlands and provide rich tillable soil. Many trees were chopped away to clear that land. The outlines of indigenous people’s lodges and hogans still showed near some of the springs that lined the river.
The river would have been a barrier to travel from one high riverbank to the other, but a fifty feet long bridge with steel girders and a wooden deck had been built soon after the dredging. The bridge made crossing the river possible with our farm equipment.
The river flooded regularly in the spring, filling the old floodplain and carrying off many of the boards from the bridge deck each time. We carefully replaced the deck and kept the bridge painted and in good repair. We drove the truck, tractors, implements, and heavy wagon-loads of hay, straw, and grain across that bridge. It had just one lane, but that was all that was needed. The cattle used it. We often walked to it to observe the Great Blue Herons and the small river mammals from a distance. As a small child I watched my brother and our next-door neighbor swing from its girders like monkeys, until I was old enough to test my own courage and strength.
We learned to drive tractors and trucks early in those days, and one of the most important lessons was learning how to drive across the bridge. Emphatically we learned to drive across it slowly and carefully. Not to catch a protruding iron harrow tooth or disk on the iron railing. Not to shake or damage the bridge.
Leaving that farm when I was sixteen was leaving my childhood behind. The man who took over the lease was known as a go-getter, a fast mover and shaker. True to his reputation, a couple of months after he took over the property, rushing across the bridge with his tractor and plow, the bridge collapsed with him and his tractor on it. He narrowly escaped serious injury. From then on he had to take the long route around the county road to get from one side of the farm to the other.
We have to be respectful of our bridges. They have the capacity to carry us where we need to go, to provide a route that is direct and useful. They require care and maintenance and some consideration of their appropriate use. They make possible a short-cut through the shared experiences of many generations.

The Deafening Silence

05 Sunday Nov 2017

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Nathan, Sullivan and Tulip May 2017 (2)   Midsummer, Jan and I were at the farm with Nathan’s two Golden Retrievers, Sullivan and Tulip, while Nathan was attending a reading conference. This was their first visit to the farm, and the open space and new surroundings obviously stimulated their already super-energized spirits. Sullivan at two and a half years has just begun to settle down into his young adulthood; Tulip at one year is nowhere close to settling down. Jan regards her as a classic case of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.

They seemed to enjoy their first experience of the farm. At home in Burlington they have a good-sized yard to romp in, and are surrounded by the noises of the neighborhood, the street traffic of busy Agency Street and the nearby HyVee grocery and shopping areas. They rarely see such wide-open spaces.

I tried to keep their routines as typical as possible. In Nathan’s absence I knew that they were missing him, and this was the first time that they had spent a significant length of time with me. Knowing that they usually stayed the night with Nathan in his bedroom, I brought them into our bedroom, instead of shutting them in their kennels. No surprise then that in the middle of the night I was awakened by Tulip actively nuzzling me, whining, and wanting to go outside for her usual duties.

I put her and Sully on their long leashes and headed them downstairs and outside through the south porch, out onto the lawn, expecting them to act as usual, randomly running and tugging in all directions. At first they did as I expected. Then they both slowed down and came back to my side, sidling close to my legs, still as can be, and looking up past me toward the sky, where the stars were shining on a clear moonless night.

This was the time of night, or very early morning, when the crickets, katydids, and locusts are silent, no toads are croaking, and the birds have not yet begun to herald the dawn. Perhaps the dogs could hear something. I could not. I listened for the sound of coyotes or racoons or the smaller creatures of the night, but I could not hear any rustling of any kind. Ordinarily the wind makes noises in the trees on that rise on which the house sits, but on this night the wind was still.

I cannot read the canine mind, and should leave that to our granddaughter Symphony, who seems to have the knack. But, to all appearances, both Sully and Tulip were in awe of the silence and the sky, and not a little afraid of this new and unfamiliar world that is so deeply silent, so unfathomably infinite. Smart dogs.

 

July 13, 2017, Tornado Warning!

27 Friday Oct 2017

Posted by in Events, Faith, Farm, Miracles, Nature, Prayer

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funnel cloud photo
Two previous storms did significant damage to our Chapman farm near Paxton. The first came from the southwest, around 2000, and ripped a roof off a lean-to shed on the west side of the corn crib, and laid that roof on the ground next to the then-new machine shed. That wind also toppled half of the concrete block south wall of the three-car garage. Brother David and I spent a week dismantling the rest of that lean-to, learning how our father had built it with heavy timbers and 7-inch nails, and making ourselves more tired than we could remember. We hired the repair of the garage.
The second storm, five years later, brought a straight-line wind from the north, that blew a window out of the master bedroom, irreparably damaged the vinyl siding on the north side of the house, blew down the large hackberry tree between the house and the old shed, which our father had built out of full-dimension lumber from the original 1860 farmhouse. That shed stood undamaged, but the power lines supplying it came down with the tree. The wind also toppled half of the north wall of the three-car garage. I cut up the tree, except for the massive four-foot diameter trunk. For the rest of the work I hired the Sutton brothers.
Since last October Jan and I have worked regularly to clean, fix, rehabilitate, and refurnish the 1915 foursquare house. It’s been a lot of work, and much remains to be done before we call it finished. This July we looked across the broad river valley west of the house and saw a dark wall cloud coming ten miles away that the weather radio warned us about—a tornado was coming, located between Elliot and Melvin, headed our way. We saw it at a distance as it formed a perfect funnel and began to raise a debris cloud from the ground. The next twenty minutes passed like lava, as the storm clouds seemed to stand still. Jan and I headed for the basement, taking our warning radio and cell phones with us. While Jan took a seat in a camp chair in the inside corner of one basement room, I watched the storm approach through a ground-level window in another basement room. I watched the tornado coming and a second funnel forming alongside the first.
Of course I prayed, thanking God for the relative safety of a full basement with thick brick walls that had withstood storms on this “hilltop” for a hundred and two years. If the rest of the house would be removed, and Jan and I could survive, then I would be even more thankful! In the face of that tornado, we could willingly say goodbye to the house even with the precious memories it contained. There was nothing between us and the two funnels, as they appeared to be missing our neighbor’s farmstead by a few hundred yards, still heading straight toward us.
Wall clouds and funnels are extremely interesting to watch, as well as terrifying. My heart was pounding and my excitement level jumping as I watched the bases of the two funnels dance, away from each other and toward each other, in a powerful tango. When they were about a quarter mile away, still coming slowly, and I was ready to abandon my post by the window for the safety of the other room with Jan, I saw the two tornado funnels move into each other and lift off the ground. As if one funnel canceled the other, within seconds they lifted from the ground and disappeared into the black cloud above. The house was peppered with dime-sized hail, small branches, dirt, and light field debris.
A few minutes later, as the rain continued but the winds began to subside, we moved upstairs and watched the darkest clouds move farther to the east. The tornado warning continued over the radio, but, to my knowledge, no significant damage was done. We looked around the house and the yard, and there was still work to be done, but it was not the work of picking up the pieces.

Never-Ending Corn Rows

15 Sunday Oct 2017

Posted by in Citizenship, Faith, Farm, Growing up

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cornfields  From the middle of the cornfield the tall rows seemed to go on forever. Walking down the rows, reaching up to pluck and shuck the corn by hand, hearing the endless rustling of the dried leaves and stalks in the chill breeze, perhaps an eight-year-old boy could be forgiven for thinking the task would go on forever. The John Deere Model ‘A’ pulled a green wooden wagon, into which we boys pitched the ears of corn. I sometimes undershot or overshot, earning the ridicule of the older boys. Would this job never end?
I was enthusiastic in the beginning, not knowing what I was getting myself into. Reaching the row’s end I had the momentary hope that now we could stop. But we had many more rows to cover, and soon we were lost in the middle of the field again. We were just opening the fields, so that the combine could have the room to be pulled into the fields and along fence rows, but to a little boy the half-mile rows seemed endless.
Only a few years earlier no combine was available, and teams of horses pulled the wagons through the fields. That was as unimaginable as having to do the whole field by hand. Someone else with a longer view might say that this was an easy job now. We should appreciate the new machines that made the task so easy, but all I could feel was the sense of being lost in the middle of cornfields and having to walk for miles, stripping one stalk at a time, throwing at least a million ears of corn into a wagon, believing that I would never again sit at a supper table.
Sometimes the feeling returns. I am a little child, trying to do tasks of faithfulness one stalk at a time in the middle of an endless sea of corn, thinking that an end and a reward are beyond belief. Someone else must see a larger picture, someone who has been around awhile, who knows what corn is good for, how much each bushel is worth in the scheme of things.
Are we all small children in a huge field, finding the job is well beyond us at times? Then at last we come to the end of the row, and the sun is getting low, and Dad says it is time to head for the house and supper.

The Extravagant Transformation of Hamilton Oaks Farm

06 Thursday Apr 2017

Posted by in Farm, Growing up, Gullibility, Learning from mistakes, People

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farm windmill

In 1955 our landlady summoned my father to fly from Illinois to Asbury Park, New Jersey, where she lived. She wanted to show him the registered Angus cattle that she planned to buy in the showplace farms of New Jersey. She planned for the farm on which we lived near Paxton, Illinois, to become such a showplace, to breed and sell registered Angus cattle. Of the sixteen farms in Illinois that she inherited from her physician husband, the 320 acre farm that we leased would be the most suitable, in a highly visible location along a busy state highway, with many acres suited to pasture and hay but not grain production. After five years of leasing, my father had proven capable of caring for a herd of a hundred beef cattle that produced many calves and a significant income every year, and he had cleaned up the farm, replacing the deteriorated fencing and taming the previously out-of-control weed population.  She would call the farm “Hamilton Oaks,” honoring her late husband and referencing the twenty-acre oak grove behind which the farm buildings sat. She wanted my father to buy a fifty percent interest in the registered cattle, as they already shared half interests in the rest of the farm production. He could not commit to that new expense, having no extra savings to spend, but she made it plain that he must agree to her proposal for the farm conversion itself, if we were going to stay there.

The next two years would see a flurry of activity. An old barn was moved about two hundred fifty yards to the west side of the bluff above the river valley, and it, along with a second old barn, was renovated with stalls for select cattle. A new pole barn, 120 by 60 feet, was built to serve as hay storage and shelter next to new concrete feedlots on the site vacated by the old barn, on the east side of the bluff that opened to the major pastures that lay in the river valley to the south and east. Large earth movers scraped topsoil from the farm lots to level the entire top of the bluff; the earth movers covered the whole area with hundreds of tons of gravel excavated from the river valley, providing plenty of mud-free parking and work areas. The banks along the entire half-mile length of the river, piled on both sides with dredging mounds left forty years earlier, were smoothed to provide additional pasture.

A new deep well was drilled, providing plenty of fresh water for the growing herd of cattle. Every building was repainted and renewed, except for the house in which we lived. Sided with asbestos shingles, the house had uneven interior walls suggesting an old story-and-a-half log cabin underneath, expanded with a turn of the century addition of a living room and a third bedroom above it, accessed through a hallway that had been more recently converted into the only interior bathroom. The outhouse still stood in a corner of the yard; it was especially useful when the plumbing and septic system balked, which was often. An oil furnace sat in the small rock cellar under part of the house. We had inside plumbing and central heat for downstairs; we could not complain.

Board fences replaced the woven wire fences around the farm lots visible from the highway, and we spent many weeks painting those new fences white. Masons built a large ornamental concrete block gateway to the farm, and the “Hamilton Oaks” sign, five by six feet, with the image of a black Angus bull prominently displayed, arose on one side of the entrance.

The registered cattle began to arrive from New Jersey in cattle trucks. The prize bull alone cost $5000, much more than our annual income. He was overly fat and barely able to move, as was fashionable in the fair judging circuits of those days. Twenty-five expensive cows came with him. We pored over their pedigree papers, impressed by the extraordinary names and titles given to each one. Naturally, as a harbinger of things to come, the surly bull had no interest in the cows that came with him.

Boxes came filled with fancy leather show halters, curry combs, brushes, and a large barley cooker. Several weeks of feeding cooked barley was supposed to add a fine sheen to the black Angus hair. (We didn’t grow barley.)

Our landlady gave me a registered Angus calf, Prince Something-or-Other, that had a misshapen head. I was ten years old and had just begun to take part in 4-H, and Prince was my project for the year. My oldest brother was working his way through college, and he took a year off to help during the year of construction. My middle brother was finishing high school, and also working to earn money to start in college, so the success of the enterprise fell to some extent on my successful competition in the fair and cattle show circuit. I attended the Farm Extension Service cattle judging school, and learned what I could about how to prepare and show my steer. For the next four years I went to the 4-H fair, earning “B” ribbons for my steers every year, a long way from the Grand Champion prizes so coveted by our landlady. She thought that two men and two boys would have plenty of time to show cattle during summer fairs, but that was not the case, nor did the registered bull cooperate, so we relied on the unregistered herd to provide the 4-H projects. Artificial insemination was becoming available, but she did not want to pay for that when she had already paid so much for an award-winning bull and everything else.

The farm looked like a showplace, not up to New Jersey standards, certainly beyond ours, but there was no market for her registered cattle in our area. After five years she was ready give up, sell the herd at rock-bottom prices, and get rid of us. After we left, no one painted the fences, no one raised cattle, and the “Hamilton Oaks” sign was taken down.

 

Getting the Lead Out

04 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by in Caring, Events, Farm, Gullibility, Health, House, Learning from mistakes, People

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paxton-chapman-farmhouse

My father was inhabiting his house by himself, after Mother’s death, and it was time to simplify things, like fancy window dressings and shelves of collectibles gathering dust. A few years passed before we arrived at a stage when my one visit a month could provide just enough time to sweep and dust and finish laundry, so that he would have an easier time doing what he needed to do by himself. Part of that process was replacing the sheer curtains and drapes with mini-blinds. My brother generously supplied the mini-blinds for sixteen large double-hung windows. They looked neat and they were versatile for providing light when needed and privacy when it was needed.

After ten years there by himself, and the loss of his driver’s license, the day finally came when he could no longer live there. It was a sad day, and we had to stop at the end of the lane for him to take a long last look, before we moved on to Burlington, where he would live at my house.

The question remained—what would we do with the property? Larry Schwing had worked with my father for years, and he had gradually assumed more of the responsibility for the farm until he was the full-time tenant farmer. The income from the farm would accumulate and provide what was needed for my father’s eventual move to assisted living and then nursing care. The house could contribute in the same way. We cleared the house of furnishings, held a sale of the items that would no longer be needed, and prepared for renters. The Larry Magelitz family arrived just when the house was ready. It would provide a comfortable home for the couple and their two little boys. Their life there went well for their first several months, until routine blood tests showed warning levels for lead in the little boys. It was a small indication, but there is no safe level for lead in children, and we were all upset that we had exposed them to danger in the old house.

We arranged for lead testing throughout the house. There were many painted surfaces, plenty of places where peeling paint and other materials could have been the source, but none of them showed a positive test for lead. Finally, the relatively new mini-blinds were tested, and the surprise came. They were saturated with lead, and the dust from their painted surfaces showed the positive results we had been searching for. The new mini-blinds from China were the source. There was no inspection or restriction of lead on anything that was being imported in the country. We quickly stripped the house of every set of blinds and sent them to the landfill. After a thorough cleaning, the Magelitz family was able to live there until a new job took them away. Another young family soon took their place, and, happily, they could enjoy the house for eleven years without fear of lead contamination. My parents always enjoyed the young families that lived nearby as their neighbors. We knew that they blessed the use of their home for these families and would want them to live there in safety.

Those Poor Dead Rabbits

17 Tuesday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Farm, Growing up, Learning from mistakes

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Raising rabbits was the occupation and 4-H project that was handed down from brother to brother to brother in my family, like the outgrown clothes. I was the third in line, and around the age of nine or ten I inherited the population of twenty to thirty New Zealand white rabbits.  With them came the hutches that my oldest brother had made—a single hutch, a double hutch, and a dandy triple decker with three pens on each level. The triple decker not only had woven “wire cloth” floors like the others; underneath the wire, it also had a tin slanted floor that allowed rabbit feces to roll down the ramp and out the rear to form a nice pile behind the hutch, handy for carrying to the garden that was next to it.

Every couple of years we went down to the Okaw Valley Rabbitary and bought a couple more to keep our population from getting too inbred. We had two or three breeding seasons a year, and most of the rabbits became dinner for our neighbors, although once in while someone bought live rabbits for their own breeding programs or pets.

Taking care of rabbits was relatively simple. I fed them morning before school and after school with Purina Rabbit Chow and occasionally hay and green leafy vegetables, put water in their coffee can waterers, refreshed the salt block in each pen occasionally and some fresh wood to chew on, so they’d leave their bed boxes and the hutch itself alone, kept the hutch clean, and provided shelter, straw, heat lamps, and unfrozen water in winter. When the time was right I put a male into the hutch with a female and watched them go at it, putting one and one together to get more than two, as farm kids learned more than math in those days. Then when the female started to nest with her own fur, I prepared to count the babies, because there wasn’t much else to do but watch the mother care for her brood or not.

When the cute  little rabbits ate their way into being big rabbits, I learned to slit their throats quickly, skin them and hang their pelts to dry, and butcher those rabbits for the fine meat our neighbors and we enjoyed. I don’t remember what we sold them for—maybe a couple of bucks apiece, about as much as the rabbit chow cost to feed them probably. I kept records for the 4-H project book every year, and I don’t think we ever made a profit that would match the amount of work involved.

When the weather was good, of course I played with them, took them out one by one and played in the grass or the garden. As I enjoyed the stories of Peter Rabbit and all of his kin, I never considered that I was the mean old farmer who would mercilessly put them to death. It was just the expected cycle of things.

My most embarrassing rabbit moment came in the last 4-H Fair where I exhibited a pair of rabbits as usual. I had always gotten a first place blue ribbon. Only my pair in that last year was two females, because I had sold or butchered all my young males. I figured two sisters was as much a pair as a male and female, but the judge did not agree. I had to be satisfied with a red ribbon, and face my competitors who thought I could not tell the difference.

Why did the rabbits come back to haunt me in my dreams years later, after I had given up raising rabbits and moved on to theology and philosophy? I would dream that I had forgotten to feed and water them, neglected to put up the corrugated sheet shelter that protected them from ice and snow, starved them to death, let them freeze, and the dreams would not just come once; they recurred. Not night after night, but every few weeks the rabbit dream recurred. If I was not the irresponsible, neglectful person while I had the rabbits, I certainly was when I got rid of them. They came back to haunt me, and remind me that diligence and attentiveness were required if I was to care for living beings. I was about sixteen when I gave up rabbit culture. The last time I dreamed of rabbits was about fifty years later.

Farm Worker Ministry

05 Thursday Jan 2017

Posted by in Caring, Church, Citizenship, Farm, People, Small town life, Suffering, Volunteering

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Circledance

I was elected to represent the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ (UCC) at the Illinois Conference of Churches (ICOC) in 1976. I considered it an honor and an opportunity to work on the ecumenical relationships that I hoped would deepen as the years progressed. As it turned out, the ICOC Forum where we served was mostly an opportunity to be informed about what the leaders of the denominations in Illinois were doing, not to exercise any influence or activity ourselves. I stayed on, learning what I could. At the end of my four-year term, I had decided that the place of real ministry, where I might contribute, was an arm of the ICOC, called the Illinois Farm Worker Ministry (IFWM). There the denominations, including the Roman Catholic Church, were cooperating in providing a ministry to people who needed and deserved it—the mostly seasonal farm workers in Illinois, although many who formerly followed seasonal crop needs had “settled out” and adapted to work opportunities in various locales in the state. I asked for a place on the Illinois Farm Worker board and received it for the next two terms until 1988.

The Farm Worker Ministry gave support to organizing efforts of farm workers on the national level and in the state, provided resource people for several locations where workers had found more or less permanent work and homes, served both spiritual and material needs as we discovered them, and, after the Immigration Reform and Control Act was finally signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, supported the educational and citizenship qualification efforts of thousands of Illinois residents. The capable leader of IFWM was Olgha Sandman, the wife of my mentor in the UCC, Robert Sandman, and soon an equally important mentor to me as well. We worked alongside farm workers to improve conditions in their work and for their families. That included such matters as documenting the use and abuse of pesticides and the exposure of people to chemicals that would harm them.

Olgha made every possible effort to bring her board members into close contact with farm worker leaders and people. We visited sites in Onarga, Princeton, and elsewhere, where farm workers were gathering, organizing, and needing services. We met and worked with scores of wonderful, hard-working, non-citizens and new and would-be citizens. The dedication of so many people who had come to work, make a living, and settle down, was evident as those who had come or been brought into the country without papers or permanent papers before 1982, and had stayed here for at least five years without any legal problems, took advantage of the classes to learn English and familiarity with US history and government. There were many who could not provide the necessary proof of their work history or long-term residency who were just as qualified by character as those who succeeded at that time, but those were the limits of the 1986 legislation, and no efforts since then have made such an opportunity possible again.

As communities of farm workers have continued to mature, most of their leadership has emerged from among their own ranks, and many of the various regional groups that used to provide a ministry have declined, including the IFWM after Olgha’s retirement. The need for people to advocate with them and on their behalf has not declined. Various industries and employers have continued to bring people into the country without papers and to employ those who are here, without the legal support or rights of citizenship, therefore taking advantage of their status to provide low wages, no benefits, and poor working conditions. In the end that has not been an advantage to either the immigrants who have come for a better life or to the rest of the workers in the country already, whether they were recent immigrants or not.

We could do much better and much more for hard-working people who come for a better life. The willingness to welcome such people has been a tradition of this country for centuries, before and after “legal papers” became an issue, receiving the vast majority of our ancestors. We have also seen the persistent practice of getting other people “to do our work for us,” and “to do what we are not willing to do,” and “to do what we have not enough skilled and knowledgeable people to do.”  

The fraction of people who have come in recent decades is much smaller than most of our history, and the people who come have proven to be less dangerous than those who already live here. A variety of paths to new citizenship are appropriate, and the church always has a duty to provide hospitality to the stranger and sojourner. Having an opportunity to know and work with farm workers leads most of us to the same conclusions.

Dangerous Domestic Disputes

12 Thursday Nov 2015

Posted by in Caring, Church, Farm, guns, Small town life

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Chicago Old TownApart from random reckless hunter’s shots and target practice on my car traveling through inner city neighborhoods at night, and the occasional shots through the parsonage windows that occurred at Tilton, Minonk, and Burlington, one bullet hole apiece, the only serious threats occurred as I tried to moderate domestic disputes.

At Tilton I learned that domestic disputes provide the most common setting where guns come out.

I was making a regular pastoral visit to an aged grandmother, whose several children lived within a few blocks of her house. She informed me that her daughter was going through a terrible ordeal and needed my help. The daughter had no phone, but she was home. Could I go and talk to her? I could and did. Talking to daughter and grand-daughter together, they explained the abuse they had endured and the sense of despair and hopelessness they felt. Where could they go? In the midst of that conversation, the husband came home early and drunk, and before I had a chance to say anything more than hello, he held a gun on all of us. Forty years later, I do not remember much of what I said, only the feeling that these could be my last moments, and the resolve to be calm and non-threatening, as I explained that I was a pastor, there to help all of them and not to take sides. His gun could only make things worse for him and for those he loved. Gradually he lowered his gun and began to cry. How it happened, I never did know, but over the next several months that family survived intact, that husband stopped drinking, and eventually they became active in the church.

In another situation a father held his gun on me when I came with his daughter to his house to take her children away from him. They had lived together for several years, but the daughter had resolved that her children’s well-being and her own required that they live on their own.  Only with repeated assurances that he could still see the children regularly, and no threats about legal actions or custody, did he give up his threat to use his weapon and kill everyone.

When I later agreed to serve as a volunteer chaplain for the city police department, the first instruction dealt with the dangers of domestic conflicts. The police trainer noted that officers wanted to have chaplains with them in family disputes to shift the focus from law enforcement to peaceful resolution. They felt more secure when the chaplains could join them, but they warned us that these situations remained volatile and unpredictable. They didn’t have to tell me.  In the months that followed, twice more I wondered if I would make it out alive. Years later, in another town, when I received another request to serve as a police chaplain, I decided that I was dealing with enough stress without adding that to the list.