Category Archives: Nature

Too Much of a Good Thing

07 Sunday Oct 2018

Posted by in Nature, Patience

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whip-poor-willEastern whip-poor-wills provide an enchanting onomatopoetical tune for summer evenings whenever we are fortunate enough to hear them. Echoing through wooded valleys, their melody stirs our spirits. We appreciate the more prosaic “Who cooks for you?” of barred owls, but that familiar call is not as delightful, even to my food-oriented senses, as the call of whip-poor-wills. Among other familiar night bird sounds—the screeches and hoots of other owls, the swoosh and buzz of night jars as they dive bomb their insect prey, or the whistle of bob-whites—we find no qualified competitor.

That was my opinion for many years. When we arrived at my brother’s cabin in the mountains near Townsend, Tennessee, we were pleased to hear the call of a whip-poor-will. Having no visible neighbors within a mile of the cabin, that bird provided our welcome. With so much natural beauty around us, we couldn’t be happier for the greeting.

The whip-poor-will came close to the cabin to greet us, though we could not pinpoint its exact location. We scouted the area around the cabin, followed the trail that circled the pond, and found tracks of deer, smaller mammals, and wild turkeys. Naturally we were relieved not to find bear or large cat tracks. After a light supper and reading time with the children we prepared for bed and a big day tomorrow.

When we were ready to fall asleep the whip-poor-will again began to serenade us. That would have lulled us to sleep if the bird had been calling from a discrete distance. Instead, it had taken up residence just outside our bedroom window. Only a few feet away, the call was much louder than expected. Excited at first, we tired of it quickly when the bird persisted. I tried to quiet it or persuade it to move farther away. Dressed in mottled brown and gray feathers it blended into the darkness of the undergrowth and remained still only while I was tromping around nearby. We supposed that the bird must have been frustrated in its search for a mate, and as new arrivals we were possible substitutes. We were more than frustrated as the hours passed. The bird would not go away. During the night we finally fell asleep in the moments when the bird allowed when it too must have grown tired. We did not go insane like Mr. Kinstrey in James Thurber’s short story titled for the whip-poor-will, nor did we consider anything as drastic as he did.

We awoke bleary-eyed the next morning, not quite ready to tackle the trails and discoveries of the Great Smoky Mountains. The next night the bird had departed, and we caught up on sleep. The whole experience reminded us of sleepless camping trips from earlier years. Before my brother had a cabin nearby, we pitched our tent in a Townsend campground alongside a lovely gurgling brook. During the evening the sounds of campground activity blended harmoniously with the sound of water flowing over rocks in the brook. After quiet hours began, we heard the stream sounds as if someone had turned up the volume on an amplifier. The next night we moved the tent to a quieter campground.

The worst night of all came in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on the evening of July Fourth. A Civil War reenactment occupied the area during the day, and at night the reenactors, drinking heavily and persisting in their blue and gray roles, yelled profanities and threats through much of the night. We huddled in our little tent and worried for the safety of our two small children. Our first act the next morning was to move our tent to the farthest reaches of that campground. Meanwhile the reenactors slept late and then departed for their homes.

Even with that unfortunate night and its frustrated bird, I am sorry to hear that the whip-poor-will is becoming rare in many areas. Supposed causes for the decline are familiar—habitat destruction, predation by feral cats and dogs, and poisoning by insecticides—but the actual causes remain unproven. I would endure many sleepless nights for the opportunity to listen to a choir of whip-poor-wills.

Walls Go Up and Walls Come Down

21 Tuesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Church, Faith, Life along the River, Nature, Volunteering, Yard

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trump's wall   “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall, that wants it down.”
Robert Frost penned those lines in his meditation on neighboring titled “Mending Wall.” The poem seems to contradict itself with its other famous line, “Good fences make good neighbors.”
Burlington is busily building a new wall out of steel and concrete, a floodwall protecting us from our source as a community and a periodic threat to our central downtown as well, the Mississippi River. We may wonder how long this new wall will serve its purpose. Will it be high enough, strong enough, good enough? The designers promise that it will not hide us from the beauty of the river, and we are waiting to see.
Many of the old walls have fallen in the last thirty years. They were mostly walls of limestone, placed carefully without mortar in many cases, and gravity has gradually taken its toll. The limestone, so prevalent and so full of Burlington’s famous crinoid fossils, has been an abundant resource for wall construction. Walls served the purpose of confining the chickens, horses, and hogs, or they simply helped to clean up lots that were covered with limestone.
In June, 1992, Zion’s High School youth tackled the project of removing one such wall. The old limestone wall fronting Zion’s parking lot had shown a determination to change its position. Zion’s section was moving to the west, an inch or two a year, while next door Victoria Apartments’ section was moving to the east. Two major cracks exposed the conflict. The young people speeded up the process, adding their brawn. We fantasized the possibility of circling the wall seven times and blowing a trumpet, especially when considering the four 300-pound stones that topped the eight-foot high wall. In the end a more direct and tiring approach pulled those heavy stones down with ropes from a safe distance. It was tug of war with us on one side, the wall on the other, putting up a good fight.
After that Mathew Johnson sat atop the middle section attacking with a heavy hammer and chisel. Most of the stones needed just a nudge, for a hundred years reduced the original mortar to powder. He soon found another force at work as a million angry ants made his seat untenable. They were not happy with any of us who were destroying their dry and happy home. We further meditated on upsetting the biosystem that the wall represented, pausing often to shake the tiny defenders off our clothing, but we continued our assault. One by one we carted the stones away, loading a pickup truck several times, leaving only the foundation for another day, and leaving the northern section on our neighbor’s property to go its own way.
We admit that we did not like that wall. It had stopped serving whatever purpose it originally had. Over decades people had made many efforts to keep it intact and oppose its own desire to obey the laws of gravity. A layer of concrete smoothed over the outside of the rock, so it did not have the charm of the rear wall of the parking lot with its vines and decrepitude.
After we thought about that day of practicing our faith, we named and recognized other walls that remain in our lives. Walls without purpose are leftover from earlier ages, without honor or beauty, with defenders aplenty, but they too will succumb to the laws of nature and spirit. We have seen some of those walls fall as easily as Jericho’s, but we cannot expect to walk around all of those walls and find the same result. Some require more concerted and strenuous efforts. Sledgehammer anyone?

An Answer to Prayer

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Forest, Growing up, Hiking, Nature, Prayer

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deer & fawn
I rolled out my sleeping bag on the wooden planks of the log cabin porch at Morgan-Monroe State Forest in Indiana. Nestled in a wooded valley next to a loudly gurgling brook, the cabin was a century old, but I was barely thirteen. I felt much older because the other Boy Scouts and I had hiked twenty-five miles that day. The back-country sheds and shacks we had passed, with roaming cows, pigs, chickens, and assorted other creatures, must have been like the little farmsteads my people had come from many decades before in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Virginia, unlike the treeless prairie in central Illinois where I was born. The autumn splendor of the trees and hills surpassed anything I had yet seen.
The night was cool and star-studded, and the porch was more inviting to me than the dark interior of the cabin. Wherever we chose, we lay down to sleep. The attempts to whisper inside the cabin were just audible. They thought I couldn’t hear, and they were talking about me. They were telling a lie about something I had done, poking fun at it. It was something important to me, one of the first things in my life that I was really proud of doing. I was angry and ready to go in and set them straight. But the plank floor was too comfortable, and the stars were shining brightly, and I asked God how I should defend myself, and all I heard was the music of the stars and the distant whippoorwill.
The next morning I awoke before anyone else to a misty sunrise filtering through the trees. To my surprise there was a doe and fawn drinking from the brook barely twenty feet from the porch where I was lying. I had never before seen deer in the wild. They finished drinking and the doe wandered toward me and stopped at the railing and looked at me, our eyes meeting. Then she slowly turned and nudged the fawn and bounded away.
Life was good, and life has remained so. Some things are so beautiful that they erase all thoughts of the ugly. I no longer felt the need to correct the misinformation that the boys had spoken about me. Nor did I tell them about the deer. I just proceeded to fix the best breakfast outdoors that those fellows had ever eaten, and I said the blessing.

Showers of Blessing? September 1998

15 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Church, Faith, Growing up, Nature, Prayer, rafting, Seasons, Travel

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Milford 2  The church youth group was on its way from Burlington, Iowa, to Colorado for some camping, rafting, horseback riding, and other mountain-loving activities cherished by flatlanders. We stopped to camp on our first night at Milford State Park in central Kansas and set up on a gentle slope overlooking the lake. During the night a five-inch deluge left our campground looking like stacks of cast-off clothing after a flood. One of our teenage campers was heard saying, “If I had a bus ticket I’d be on my way home now.” Old hands at camping, of which we had only a few, said, “There, there, now, in a day or two, when we’ve had a chance to dry out, everything will look brighter.”
We had rain every day except one. Mostly we got used to it and adapted, using coin-operated laundries when necessary, and learning how to set up tents so the contents would stay dry…mostly. Every major activity that we planned, including the rafting, we got to enjoy without the rain’s interference. When rafting, the first thing we learn anyway is that we get wet. We read Psalms each morning and evening, and several passages claimed that God was in charge of the clouds and the rain. That made us wonder a bit about the messages we were getting.
We also read Ezekiel 34:26 about the “showers of blessing” God brings. The Gospel song of course came to mind. The trip proceeded as smoothly as any we had planned, either for service or for fellowship. No vehicles broke down. Everyone cooperated with few moments of tension. We kept the schedule of reservations and plans for each day. We covered 2500 miles in nine days. The showers kept us on our toes, depending on God to provide, which God did, as far as we were concerned. Getting wet unintentionally and getting wet purposely didn’t make much difference after a while.
When we got home to Iowa we found that Iowa was dry as a bone. Until the end of August it remained so. Somehow the field crops continued to grow, with just enough moisture to keep going. One of the congregation’s farmers, Don Thie, came dripping wet into the first fall choir rehearsal, and he said, “Since I prayed for rain, I guess I should learn to carry an umbrella.”
We also found that, while we were on the road, one of the church members, Chuck Murray, had installed a shower in our basement restroom, so that our overnighters, drop-in-travelers, service project workers, runners, and any other sweaty folks would have a convenient place to clean up.
So we began the fall season that year with dozens of plans that we hoped would recharge and enhance the life of our community, and we sang the old song with renewed hope, “Showers of blessing; showers of blessings we need; mercy drops ‘round us are falling, but for the showers we plead.”

Autumn Kaleidoscope, November 1, 2001, Bella Vista

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Forest, Nature, Seasons

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IMG_2081.JPG   Here in the last days of autumn I look at the variety of leaves remaining on the trees and marvel at the multiple colors. Hidden within the leaves under vibrant greens thoughout the spring and summer were all of these shades of yellow, orange, red, and brown.
This is a bright sunny day for redheads. First to arrive were the little Downy woodpecker and its mate, with their black and white barred coats. Then the large outrageous Pileated woodpecker came, appearing to be the remnant of an ancient lineage. Next came the regulation Northern woodpecker, its mate wearing a rather plain tan coat except for that fierce black triangular breastplate. All of them work with amazing determination and skill, flying straight down, straight up, perching upside down, beating their heads against the grain, finding all of those tiny moving morsels, ugly to me but appetizing to them. The redheads of course include the cardinals and the tanager, whose mate still wears a luminous green coat, which I thought she would have shed for a less noticeable coat in these woods that are revealing all of her hiding places as the leaves fall.
I wonder what the insect-eaters would do with that red and yellow centipede I found yesterday? A mean-looking creature, five inches long, scurrying with uncountable legs, with biting pinchers and stingers that intimidated me. A too close encounter would send any sensible person to the Emergency Room. Would the birds have digested it, enough for several meals, or would they have left it well enough alone? More friendly encounters occur with the preying mantis and the humble walking sticks, affixed to anything stable, enjoying the last warm autumn hours. They appear to be dead until you tease them, then they will slowly respond. At six to nine inches long, the walking sticks do resemble branches, large enough for the birds to perch.
With all of these decorated creatures hanging around, I am transported to the scene last night, when the curtains of clouds suddenly revealed themselves as no clouds at all in the northern sky. They were lights, Northern Lights, shimmering in that rare dance of sunspot rays that fills the northern sky, first with the white light, that I had mistaken for clouds, then gradually revealing all the colors of the rainbow. They danced in splendor.
In a few weeks we will decorate for Christmas, but with all that we do, and as pretty as we can -make it, how can what we do compare with the extraordinary display that is already in place for all to see? Glory to God! Glory in the Highest! And the lowest.

The Deafening Silence

05 Sunday Nov 2017

Posted by in Farm, Nature

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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.

 

Like Catnip

02 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Church, Faith, Garden, Nature

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catnip-plant  Catnip is one of those weeds that I enjoy having around. I planted some in the herb garden that I established in my yard. When I lived in Minonk and on the farm catnip grew abundantly all over the place. Once before when I lived at Tilton, I started an herb garden and tried to grow catnip. The same thing happened.
It got a good start and was growing beautifully. Then one morning I looked out and the catnip had totally disappeared. In its place was a well-satisfied tabby, new to the neighborhood. She had eaten every particle of the catnip.
Some things are just too good to pass up. Some things attract would-be connoisseurs from quite a distance. Sometimes I dreamed about being the kind of preacher and leading the kind of congregation that would be one of those things. Some characteristic would simply attract without people having to reach out and do the work of listening to other people and interpreting the living power of the Gospel. Like catnip.
The fact is that we must sow seeds with such abandon that there will be plenty of love shared and plenty of the knowledge of God available to people. We cannot hope to grow it in one small space and have it flourish.
I could grow catnip if I fenced it in, protected it, and really tried to preserve it from the cats who seem to need it. I have decided that catnip does better as a weed growing all over the place than as a protected herb, confined to one small garden spot. Even so, the Christian way of life.

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.

Sunday Evening on the Road Home, October 22, 2017

24 Tuesday Oct 2017

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sunset 2
We were driving through rain, rain that had filled two hours of the afternoon, on I-74 toward Galesburg, when we began to see the bright band of open sky on the western horizon. The contrast with the blue and gray bands of the sky above was stark. We welcomed the prospect of turning west toward Burlington. As sunset was approaching and the sun would soon be edging into that bright space, the open sky brightened into solid yellow, then startling gold. Soon the sun spread its blinding light under the blue clouds, sending golden rays shimmering across the whole landscape, highlighting the deeply scalloped row of clouds above the horizon, and fanning the bands of light in angles against the varying blue and gray tones of the clouds above.
I thought, “God’s grandeur…while all other arguments for God fail or come up short, the beauty of the earth still makes the case.”
The intensity of the gold light against the blue bands of sky increased, far surpassing any goldsmith’s skill, on a scale of magnitude infinitely greater in the whole gold bowl of the firmament. Then it grew even brighter. Our eyes had been fully occupied with the drama in the west. We were turning east into the cloverleaf onto US 34 when we saw the full rainbow spread across the eastern sky against a dark blue background. Before a moment’s thought I heard myself ask, “Who needs a pot of gold at the end of a rainbow when we have a sky full of it?”
It had been years since I had remembered that favorite poem of Gerard Manley Hopkins, “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; It gathers to a greatness….”

We faced the western sunset, as the top edge of the sun slipped below the horizon, and the fan of colors shining across the clouds out of that white blue band of open sky on the horizon began to soften gradually from blinding gold into yellow, pink, mauve, red, and burgundy against the cloud ridges of blues, purples and grays. A bright reflection of the sun’s orb appeared on the western sky above the point where the sun itself had disappeared, and remained for several minutes mirrored on the distant clouds. While the ceiling of clouds darkened overhead, the silhouettes of trees and land stood black against the western brightness.
As the colors in that band of light shaded into intensely deep yellow and red, the sky appeared to flame behind the sharp silhouettes, as if the fires on the Californian coast had finally reached and filled our midwestern skies, yet they did not alarm. They impressed with overpowering awe.
Gradually, as we approached Gladstone and Burlington, the lights above dimmed into the blackness of clouds. The clouds were still overhead, no stars could shine through, and the bright band of light blue still appeared distant, although it stretched across the whole length of the western horizon as we took in the steepled lights of Burlington’s downtown.
“And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast with ah! bright wings”

The Hidden Springs of Hidden Springs Trail

23 Thursday Feb 2017

Posted by in Forest, Gullibility, Health, Hiking, Nature, Running, Seasons

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cropped-rock-creek-wilderness-oregon.jpg

With many record-setting warm days in a row, I’ve had an opportunity to try some of the many new trails in Northwest Arkansas. On cold days I hesitate to go where I might get lost or take a long time to return to where I can rejoin Jan. On warm days I can wander. There are more than forty miles of trails and 700 miles of roads in Bella Vista, not counting the golf course paths, and there are even more miles of trails in the contiguous cities to the south, so there are plenty of places to explore.

A new favorite is the Hidden Springs Trail that navigates a narrow steep-sided valley known as the Slaughter Pen, presumably because it was easy to drive herds of cattle from the broad plain at the top of the valley into an ever-narrowing channel until a herd would be compressed into a fenced neck before the valley broadened again. A fast, full current of water pours down the creek in the center of the valley, and the developed concrete and asphalt trail runs beside the stream for more than two miles. The stream looks and acts like one of the cold cave spring-fed streams along the Current River three hours east of here, where millions of gallons pour out of the ground every day, so it is an invitation to follow the stream until one comes to the “hidden springs” that give the trail its name.

The stream joins a couple of others below this valley where I have run for years, around Bella Vista Lake and along Little Sugar Creek. Amazingly in a couple of spots all of that water disappears below shelves of limestone, and then reappears a few hundred yards farther. Along the Hidden Springs Trail the water flows on the surface all the way and pours down some three and four feet tall falls in a few places, made even more lovely by the woods and shrubbery around them. Along the base of the rocky outcrops that line both sides of the valley, bare dirt bicycle paths run, and in several places the bicycle paths run half-way up the fifty to hundred foot cliffs or even along their top edges, providing a challenge to the experienced rider. It would be challenging enough for me to walk them, when I knew no bicycles were coming down those narrow paths, but I am content to keep walking the center until I find the source of all that water.

As I explored every day I ran a little farther up the developed trail, reaching the point where the busy stream was joined to a lazy, slower stream, and following the active one in my search for the hidden springs. Since the entry to the trail lies a half-mile beyond the parking lot, and the point where the streams converge is already a mile and a half upstream from that trail entrance, my three mile daily goal was easily surpassed in the quest. The early spring flowers, birds, and critters made it interesting, so I kept going. After two more days I could see that I was finally nearing the goal, three miles from where I started, where water poured into the creek bed.

A great blue heron stalked the small turbulent pool that fed the stream, and there was little bubbling or frothing of the water, so it must have been clear of most of the chemicals that saturate the groundwater these days, which was surprising. The source of the stream, instead of being the hidden springs I sought, was a series of large concrete vessels that served the Bentonville Sewage Treatment Plant.