| Walter Wangerin Jr. & Outspoken |
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Dispatch # 7 Yesterday's ride carried me from mile 228 to 317, one short of 90 and not quite a century. I began in a fog which misted my glasses ("You can't be optimistic with misty optics.") then covered them with running drops of water. Fortunately the early road was straight, with a shoulder white-lined. Suddenly the sun was out, the day both Easter-bright and spacious, and I a rider on the long hard shadow of my bike and myself, which preceded me westward. From a low marsh off to my right, my passage raised three sandhill cranes, gabbling and gobbling a gossip's annoyance as they swept into the air. Frequently I see a solitary heron standing sentinal at the edge of some water. At about noon a hard whistling cry caused me to look toward a mown field. There, aground, was a very large bird, its markings a mottled brown, its head's height close to my kneecaps. I stopped and led my bike in the bird's direction, but it did not spread its wings and fly. It walked away, watching me. That was sign enough for me. I didn't go closer, but gazed at that glittering eye gazing back. What are you? An eagle? A hawk? Nature keeps absolutely its own counsel. Mute are such meetings between its plumed senators and curious people like me. No: I have no idea why the great bird did not fly, whether from woundedness or from willfulness. Good Brenda Engelby is my partner on the road. She drives a brown van on pretty much the same route which I cycle, and meets me at points we've pre-arranged, every 25 miles or so. Here for me come juice and chocolate, fruit and rest. Yesterday she found a dead-end in my itinerary and came back to warn me before I lost perhaps 12 miles to-ing and fro-ing a false trail. She, too, sees the things I do on country roads, and yesterday admired an Amish farmer plowing behind eight horses, four in front, four behind, as many bottoms to the plow as the width of the horses side by side. Too, she saw Amish children in bright clothing playing outside a one-room schoolhouse. Brenda's experience reminds me of William Blake's poem, "Nurse's Song": When the voices of children are heard on the green "Then come home my children, the sun is gone down "No, no let us play, for it is yet day [And here is how kind-hearted Brenda would answer] "Well, well, go & play till the light fades away And last night Thanne and I were together, sleeping in the cubby-hole of this RV, and waking to the rinsed weather and the broad green lawns of a farmer's yard, a grove of trees to one side, a large shed, and cornfields to the other. Married 34 years. She sits here now, in this blessed morning, while I send you messages; and this is the peace of being well-married: it is the presence alone that comforts. We needn't make extreme protestations upon meeting one another again. Rather we take up domesticity where we left it off at my departure; we let the atmospheres of home surround us even away from home, and all is well again. We did talk long last night. News, you know. But to work at our various occupations, side by side and quietly, is companionship enough and peace for us both. Sometimes romance and all its physical expression is presence alone: that we are here, together. And now I am struck by the differences of these two silences: for between my spirit and the spirits of this natural world, silence is a kind of occlusion, a crystal wall. I admire with my eyes an "otherness," after all, the beautiful bird aground whose spirit I cannot hear, with which, therefore, there is no personal or particular communication. But between my spirit and my wife's, love has banished the walls, and silence is a door wide open and ever waiting even our unconscious exchanges. This silence is airy passage constantly from Thanne's deep heart to mine and back again. It is a good day today! Peace to all your spirits, too. Walt |