Hi Folks,
It’s been a few days since I wrote in the blog. It has been hot, and we are mid-stride on field prep for next year’s crop so I’ve been sitting on a tractor when I might otherwise have been writing. I tend to have profound thoughts when I’m doing mundane chores like tilling raised beds. Mundane tasks, if done with thought and intention, are not actually mundane. They are in fact profound. They are fundamental to everything human. More on this next time, but it’s a great segue to a remembrance of my Dad, an intensely complex man who nevertheless maintained a lifelong connection to the simple joys of life.
Here is Dad, at 95, stopping to marvel at some pineapple weed – Matricaria discoidea – growing in the gravel along the driveway here at the farm. Dad always had a soft spot for weeds, at least as long as they were someone else’s problem. He reserved special curses for weeds that invaded his own gardens and especially those that seemed to threaten his favorite woodlands and prairies. But if they were growing along the highway or in an abandoned lot, they were nothing but fascinating.
When I was growing up, I remember several field trips with Dad to nearby rail lines and rail stations, which often yielded county records for weedy grasses and forbs blown along by passing trains. These always delighted Dad, even if they were just waify interlopers, here today and gone tomorrow. The fact that they got to here from there via such a human contrivance was cause for much observation, thought and lecturing – about weeds, humans, history and everything connected to them. Which is a lot.
Between walks around the neighborhood and weeks-long field trips, I took hundreds of excursions with my Dad growing up, and I spent most of that time absorbing everything I could. My Dad was a botany prof, but he didn’t so much teach in the traditional sense. He observed the world around him with a keen eye, then radiated facts and philosophies based on these observations, and by example he inspired people with an aptitude for plants and nature to look at the world in the same way. He was a huge proponent of “putting your hands on the material.” He logged just shy of 100,000 unique botanical collections, with duplicates numbering in the hundreds of thousands of plant specimens, now housed in herbaria all over the world, as a lasting testament to his work of putting his hands on plants. Each and every specimen was observed – its habitat, associates, phenology, and unique morphology. Every observation added to his sense of populations, of species, of habitats and of the natural and human-influenced world. Dad’s sense of nature was built of these building blocks. The backdrop of this marvelous edifice of nature, as Dad might describe it, was the cosmos and the sweep of time.
Many people were attracted to my Dad, if they could tolerate his candor. Dad always called it as he saw it, and for people who could see the world his way, he was a magnet. He had very few filters, so what you got was his straight-on opinion. Dad didn’t mince words or sugar-coat anything.
Dad survived World War II, Korea, a bunker-busting shell, and a slug that took an inch of bone and split his tibia. He survived a Chinese prison camp, a fifty-year, pack-a-day habit (he quit at 70), countless gallons of Coca-Cola and ice cream, a triple bypass, severe diabetes, poisonous snakes, spiders, scorpions and tick bites. He survived a run-in and interrogation by Sandinista guerillas in a Nicaraguan jungle, and who knows how many encounters with gun-toting landowners on whose land he was trespassing while botanizing all across America. He survived all of it with his own brand of humility, his charming and disarming smile, and an ability to find peace and joy in trying circumstances. He died January 13 of this year, with my sister Kathleen, unquestionably his favorite person in the world, by his side at the age of 98.
My brother Milo and his son Victor, and myself and my son Max, made a trip to northeast Iowa to spread Dad’s ashes this past June. We took a canoe trip down the Upper Iowa River and placed his ashes beneath the trees along the way. He is now resting under the basswoods, hickories, black oaks, sugar maples and walnuts, and among the bloodroots and may-apples in the woodlands where he grew up. We found a patch of white pine along the river – one of his favorite trees – and some of him is there now, beneath an old pine leaning out over the river.
The rest of him is under several old bur oaks on a limestone bluff overlooking a small trout stream, just like he used to describe it from his childhood memories. There are columbines on the exposed rock at the edge of the bluff, and bellflowers. And Dad is there too, now, once again travelling through the galaxy in the company of his old woodland friends.
