Of Quiet Walks

Of Quiet Walks                       

By John W. Vander Velden

The sun pierced the dense canopy of hardwood leaves, like bright diamonds high overhead, sending shafts of brilliance through the forest’s twilight. They walked silently, hand in hand, for the moment required no words, and no words could express the moment.  Too seldom they came to this place.  Too seldom they separated themselves from the hurried world.  Each time they walked these places, both made a silent vow, deep within their individual hearts, to return soon.  But the magic of this sacred world fades with miles, with days, with work, and worry--with life.  It will be years before they would tear themselves away from all life’s demands and return for the peace found in no other place.

Cooler beneath the trees, than sun soaked open places.  Quiet as they strode the hillside among the great columns of ancient hardwoods.  They moved cautiously, silently, alone, far from busy traveled trails, beyond the reach of other’s voices.  Even the songs of birds high above, a rare interruption to their ears, as they strode here in the quiet primal forest, and breathed the musty scent of last year’s leaves at their feet.

They shared more than the common love of this special realm.  They shared a life.  Years built with each other, home and family.  A slow evolving of one plus one becoming greater than two, as time’s binding one to the other.  Many years of shared living, building a combined past.  The melding of two people bonded in ways neither expected. Of finishing each other’s sentences.  Of sharing common thoughts. Of children now grown. Of together finding courage, to face an unknown future.  Of long quiet walks--together.

These things fill their minds as they wander the cathedral made by God himself.  They do not understand the whole of it--for the whole of it too complex for mere mortal minds. They understand that they are part of something larger, but do not see exactly how they fit.  For them it is enough to accept.  Accept the moment, accept the life they shared, accept each other--as imperfect as they are.  Comforted knowing that they have found acceptance, in each other--in their God.

Clarity comes here in the virgin wood, as they wander within the shadows of ancient trees.  The daily hectic world is pushed aside.  Bills and bosses do not exist--here.  They share these moments with only themselves and the God that they know is everywhere.  They will add this day to their fondest memories of quiet walks. 

(418 Words)     10-1-2016

7-1-2023

Summer, Sand, and Flowing Water

Summer, Sand, and Flowing Water

By John W. Vander Velden

 

On summer’s hottest day, as sweat covered I trudge under ordinary obligations, I consider the season.    Some find summer unpleasant, but like each time of year it has its moments.  For there are those days when the air feels thick the moment I step out on a morning that is more than warm and a haze hangs in the air, proof of the intense humidity.  But summer is summer should we expect less.

On those intense days I remember the summers of my youth.  And when I think of hot days of the past, my years in central Florida stand out.  Sweltering heat and humidity the watch words of that country.  Often our escape to the cool creek enough to make the time pass as we splashed in the shallow water.  We learned quickly about rattlesnakes and cotton mouths, where they could be likely found and avoided those places.  The sandy space, that, with a bit of my older brother’s engineering became our island, was the center of our games and imagination’s adventures.

Even so we had to cross a marsh to get there, and dangerous things lived in the marsh.  A few scrounged cement blocks and some long boards strategically placed along a woven wire fence formed a makeshift bridge separating us from the ooze and the slithering critters.  Eyes open, always.  Pay attention to everything around you.  We often saw the gaping snow white mouth of the moccasin but never nearby.  Strange it was not the snakes that drove us away from that small piece of paradise.  In our play, we thumped a bee tree.  And as “Poo Bear” will tell you, “you can never tell about bees”.  Whether it was anger or a desire to protect their hoard, I could not say, but they drove us out, most impolitely.

It was weeks before we gathered enough courage to venture back.  Though we discovered our folly the island had lost its appeal, and we found other places, safer places, easier to reach places, at that.  But it is that small bit of an island a sandy place that I remember best.  And when I long to escape the hottest days of summer, sometimes my heart returns there.

(369 Words)  7-27-2017

Storms

Storms                            7-9-2017

By John W. Vander Velden

 

For each must face storms, and it is then they reveal their true selves.

 

“Life is not just a bowl of cherries.”  Providing you like cherries in the first place.  OK, what’s not to like about cherries? But the point of the quote, we have heard hundreds of times is, things do not always go the way we would like.  For each must face storms.

Finding my large barn door in the neighbor’s, field reminded me of other times and other storms.  Yes, there were several weather conditions that have shook my life to one degree or another, but they were not the only storms I have faced.  It’s life.  My world, like anyone’s, has endured storms.  Meteorological, physical, emotional, and all other traumatic times which are part of living.  There are times when I would have wished to escape the difficulties thrust into my life, but I caught my breath and did what needed to be done.  Sometimes just pushing through it, I have found myself so engaged I really didn’t think about the storm’s aftermath until later.

But there are storms that haunt me to this day.  Their memory lurks in the recess of my mind, jumping out from their hiding at inopportune moments.  Those times I remind myself that everyone faces those types of storms…it helps knowing that I am a survivor, as are you.  Storms sometimes leave scars.  But not all those marks are visible.

It is how we deal with the storms we face that show the material from which we are made.  Do we stand and whine, or roll up our sleeves and deal with the aftermath.  There are times when fatigue and frustration stand in my way of cleaning up yet another mess.  But I take a moment…or a day perhaps…to gather my breath so I can charge forward once again.

Each storm takes a little out of me.  But the effort demanded to “deal with it” adds something I did not have before.  Life is filled with storms…no two the same.  Storms provide the nexus to part of my growth as a man. 

I have endured another storm, and know that it will not be the last.  I will take the safeguards I can to minimize the damage that will occur, knowing full well I can not prevent it all.  As for today, I will tend to the cleanup and repair of last week’s wind.  I will give my best…and that will be enough.  Perhaps, just perhaps, I will be strong enough, when I face my next storm.

Of Sweat and Soil Part 6: A Place of Their Own

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 6:  A Place of Their Own

 

By John W. Vander Velden

 

I began this series describing what we found here on this farm on Redwood Road.  If you have read the pages between that description and this part, you have just a bit of understanding of the mindset of Nel and Jacob Vander Velden.  They had spent almost 24 years in pursuit of their dream…more than half their lives.  Dad at forty-seven surely must have wondered if the window of possibility neared closing.  He was never a patient man, and as the year count of his life grew his impatience did as well.  Some might say that impatience drove him from his homeland, impatience drove his return from Florida, impatience led to the purchase of this farm.  

I would disagree. They saw hope and possibilities, even among the broken and discarded.  Dr. Burke’s farm offered a way to at last reach out and almost touch the dream.  For the dream lay ahead, beyond the tumbled down fences, beyond the worn buildings, it would be what they could make out of this clay they found.  It took years and determination, endless hard work and sacrifice, but in the end it was possible. 

I know this part of the journey first hand, for I became a full time member of the team.  I witness each step forward and back, and shared in the sweat and blood given without regret for that dream’s success.  I witness the semi load of milk cow’s arrival.  The herd purchased from a farm near Indianapolis.  I also helped load most of those same cattle and several of our own over the first months at this farm.  Cows destroyed by incomplete repairs to the milk system, done by inept workers.  That disaster and crazy weather nearly caused the dream to be stillborn.  Only the immeasurable aid of those that believed in our family were we able to hold onto this small piece of Marshall County.  Five families, that came before us, had gone bankrupt on this farm, but the Vander Veldens would not be number six.

But commitment and self-sacrifice at last gave the dream its life.  There were good years and in those we advanced…buildings and silos stand testament to our growth. Over the years, the value of crops rose and fell, but milk was our buffer.  If figured by the hour, dairying might not seem worth the effort, but twice a month a check comes, and with care the bills will be paid.  

Like I said in earlier portions of this story, mom and dad were used to doing without.  It was that willingness that made everything possible.  Their last years were financially successful.  But just when everything began to fall at last into place, dad became ill.  In 1982 he was diagnosed with MS, and he fought that disease, like everything else in his life, with all he had.  It can be understood that depression comes with a disease that steals your abilities little by little.  A disease with chronic muscle and back pains.  Dad dealt with that as well.  And though we did our best to help him, we could not really understand what he went through those last twenty-three years of his life. 

In his last years he envied those who had better ground than our little patch.  I told him it was ours and we should be grateful.  But these last years I have come to understand…more.  This farm is unforgiving.  This season’s mistakes haunt you for years to come.  Should we judge someone who would like land that was less hard to farm and gave more in return?  For the soil on Sunrise acres is hard, hard to till, hard to harvest, and just plain hard the rest of the year.  You do not farm Teegarden Clay, you go to war with it.  Maybe dad felt he had settled, that the dream was not really reached.  Who can say? 

Whether he became victor of victim in that war I can not say, but dad fought the battle with honesty and integrity.   He gave it all he had to give…we all did.  But as I walk among all the building we built these forty-five years, I measure myself against the man I respected most, and find myself lacking.  But perhaps I am not the one to judge, and with time others might see things differently.  For I, like my father, and his father am merely man of sweat and soil, no more but certainly not less.    

 

(744 Words)  4-22-2017

Of Sweat and Soil Part 5: Beginning Again

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 5:  Beginning Again

By John W. Vander Velden

My Uncle had found a farm in the LaPorte area needing a farmer.  Dad flew from Jacksonville to Chicago and then to South Bend.  It was the first commercial flights he had taken.  I was not yet ten but when he returned and I knew we were going back to Indiana.  I remember leaving Florida, leaving William Coughenour, who we, the kids, only called “Boss”.  Not out of submission or disrespect, for he was the closest thing to a grandfather I have ever known.  I do not know how I understood even at that age that life was about changes, about those we meet, friends we make, places we know, that they are sometimes left behind, but I did. 

We could not go directly to our new home.  The Baughmans that had farmed the Morrison farm for thirteen years could not move to their new farm three miles down the road as early as expected.  All our things loaded on the tarped Dodge remained in my aunt’s and Uncle’s driveway for weeks.  Their farm was out of the school district we would attend, so dad drove us to school and back each day.

It was cold.  Perhaps not exceptionally, but it had been 80 degrees our last day in Florida.  Though we found the snow was exciting, an old friend to which we had returned, we had little ability to deal with it.  The old house, parts dated to 1860, on the Morrison Farm, did not have central heat, and the Segler Oil Stove might have been sufficient for Florida was not up to the task.  I could see daylight through a hole in the wall in what would become the bedroom I shared with my older brother.  Brrrrrrr.

But the buildings were in good repair and ready for the work my father had come to do.  With time we adjusted to the different climate.  The Landlord, eager to please their new tenants, did much to fix the house.  New doors and storm windows and siding made the old place look presentable.  Central heat came many years later.  But we settled in and though things remained tight, dad began climbing the ladder upward one rug at a time.

Farming was very different in the sixties.  So were farms for that matter.  The Morrison Farm had hedge fences.  Rows of thorny trees, Osage Orange they were called.  No kin to the citrus for Florida. There had been a time when the hedges were trimmed twice a year, but that had been long before we arrived on the scene. The unruly thorny rows divided the main part of the farm into small fields.  During our tenure the wild tall overgrown hedge rows were taken out one after the other.  I remember the hours of “root picking” we spent trying to pick up all the debris the bulldozers missed.  Osage Orange roots do not rot quickly and could cause problems with the equipment, rotary hoes in particular.  By the time we left the land lay wide open, a half mile by half mile space of fertile land.

To us kid it seemed we had been separated from Indiana for eons.  But in the under three years little had changed and dad farmed pretty much like he had before the southern migration of ‘59.  Making hay with an A-C roto-baler, was meant for limited labor, and that worked in Westville and it worked the first years back.  But loading the barn by rope drawn hooks was tedious and hard.  A bale elevator upgraded that part of the operation and a square baler followed when I became old enough to drive a tractor.

The barrel roof barn had thirty-two stalls, and dad milked as many as forty.  We carried the milk to the bulk tank by hand, until we could acquire a step-saver, a machine that hauled the milk through a clear plastic hose.  Though things remained tight all those years, dad gained ground step by step.  Paying for equipment, getting a new tractor, larger silage wagons, a new forage harvester, and a pull type combine was added to the list of purchases.  He was progressing and through that progression the dream returned to life.

Perhaps it was when my uncle purchased his own farm in the mid sixties that a new urgency built with in my father and mother.  But the dream was yet out of reach.

Life went on and finally the time came when dad and mom felt they could begin the search for their own place.  It was 1970 and they met with several realtors, searched ads, and went to see many farms.  When they, at last, thought they had found a farm within their budget, after countless trips to the Walkerton area and to bankers ETC, in the 24^th hour the deal fell through.  By chance a family friend knew of a farm not two miles from the one they had spent more than two years trying to acquire.  That was how they met Dr. Eldon Burke, a college professor.

In comparison to the failed attempt, all the legalese was a walk in the park.  On my birthday in 1972 dad signed the papers and could say that he and my mom were buying their own farm.   

(877 Words)                  7-1-2017

Of Sweat and Soil: Part 4 The Florida Years

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 4:  The Florida Years

Florida was a great place for kids…then.  I suspect in many ways it still is.  But this isn’t about the childhood I had, it’s about the road my parents took.

It was almost exactly eleven years since my parents had come to the United States that they migrated again.  Yes, it was the same country…but…  The weather alone would have been enough for Florida to claim a foreign status to the Northern Europeans.  And the people there spoke English, but once again it was not exactly the same.  Phrases and slangs were unique to the South.  But overall we fit into the culture…for the most part.  Though there were parts of the “Culture of that age” which I still abhor to this day…parts my family never participated.

Again for dad things were very different.  The “Ranch”, the 500 acres of mostly swampland and pine trees, was not the dairy farm we had left.  We had two cows, which dad milked by hand in stalls that stood outdoors.  We began with Brahma and Brahma mix cattle.  I recall one that had long horns that stood straight out like a Texas Longhorn.  I remember one cow that injured her back jumping out of the cattle truck, the wound never completely healing.  Most of the cattle were mean enough we gave them wide berth.  For a time the ranch had an old ford pickup.  We would ride in the back while dad poured feed off the tailgate as it drove through the pine grove.  The animals running up behind to be first to gobble up the treats.

The weather in central Florida had little in common with Indiana.  Strange though winter “lows” might dip only into the twenties, yet coats were as heavy.  I suppose the difference from summer’s intense heat to winter’s frost drove the need.  But I remember the crazy intense summer afternoon thunderstorms that swept through around two o’clock. It was in Florida my older brother became a hunter and the September Hurricane Donna tore through the state, my youngest brother James was born.

Hoping for a little extra cash for his growing family, dad built two large hotbeds in the lot next to the house.  I remember a small red International cub tractor and the transplanter that he and my brother Jerry rode as they placed the thousands of green pepper plants between the machine’s moving fingers.  I was to run behind and fill in the ones that got missed.  I couldn’t keep up very long.  Peppers must not have done well for the following year the hothouses were replaced by a field of watermelons.  All the work resulted in a truck load of the green fruit.  Dad parked on a busy intersection but sold few.  Most of that truckload of melons came home and were, over time, fed to the pigs.  With those fed, those given away, and those our family devoured, none went to waste.  I never had a taste for watermelons, maybe that’s why.

Dad was the first in Alachua County to grow corn for grain.  At least as far as I know he was first.  A few others raised corn for silage, but he was told Florida was no place for field corn.  He bought a two row planter and planted in February…imagine that.  It was difficult to find a corn picker, but a one row Minneapolis Moline snapper was found at last.  You picked corn in the summer…August maybe.  The corn so dry…hard to imagine with the humidity of the place…that what we knew as corncribs were not necessary.  He shoveled the corn from the wagon to bins made in a pole barn.  I remember walking past that stored corn and hearing the crackely-crackle of the weevil feeding on the bright orange ears.

Dad ground feed after dark, because it was all hand labor and the days were too hot.  Things did not go well for him in Florida, a place too hot for a working man to work the way he wanted.  Maybe if he had stayed things might have turned around, but in two and a half years all the gains he had made since 1948 had dwindled away.

On February 20^th 1962 with the old 49 Dodge truck loaded to the hearth, we left Florida, the friends and connections, and even the Coughnours behind.  For dad, it meant starting over in Indiana. 

(737 Words)

Of Sweat and Soil Part 3

Of Sweat and Soil

Part 3

By John W. Vander Velden

 

I do not know what thoughts passed through my parent’s mind when they got off the train in LaPorte, Indiana that October day in 1948.  My Aunt Agatha and Uncle Cornelius Koppert met them as they arrived.  Also, by chance, Rev. Victor Fronie, the pastor of St. Paul’s Evangelical and Reformed Church, happened to be at the station that evening.  He would be our family’s pastor all the years we lived in the LaPorte area.

Frank Scholl needed someone with a strong back and a willingness to work.  He found both in my father.  I know little of those years he worked for the Scholls.  They lived in a small house next to Scholl Hill on Division Road.  Dad was provided with an old Willy’s Jeep to drive the four miles down Scholl Road (see the pattern here) to the Oak Ridge Farm, where he worked with my Uncle.  Perhaps being surrounded by everything new and different, they might not have notice how difficult those first few years were.  But they learned the language.  For though they had taken English lessons in Holland, it seemed, as dad said, “A different English” than what was spoken in America.

They felt, in many ways, isolated.  Separated from most of their family, and living within a culture they did not fully understand must have left them reeling, if they had time to notice.  But it was a start, and hope lay on their horizon. Their first born, Gerard, named after Dad’s father, came in those Scholl years, as life progressed.  In late 1951 or very early 1952 dad’s first break came in the man named William Coughenour. Dad had been no more than a hired man at Scholl’s, but began farming on his own as a tenant for Mr. Coughenour on his farm near Westville.

Three more children came the years they lived on the Westville farm.  I was born first, soon after they had moved there, followed by Joyce in 1955 and Dorothy in 1956.  As a child growing up, the country life was the only thing I knew.  Access to the fields and woods and time spent watching the minnows or tadpoles in the ditch a part of my memories of those years.  We sledded down the hill across the road from our house in the winter, and I taught myself to ride a bicycle.  And I remember my parents hard at work, mom at home and dad not so far away, usually within sight.  I remember a cold hard winter, 1957 or 1958.  The Coughenours wintering in Florida trusted my father to run things.  The snows stacked, the roads closed, even a tractor couldn’t cover the half mile between our house and the dairy barn on Joliet Road.  Dad cut squares of plywood and tied them to his boots, snow shoes he called them, to walk over the deep drifts to tend to his work and the cattle’s needs.  The National Guard came with a helicopter to bring food to the families trapped by the snow and cold.  It was the only time my father rode in such a machine.  They picked him up when he had reached the other farm, brought him and two boxes of groceries, landing across the road from our home.  Of course when they left, my father had to trudge across the half mile of fields once again to the dairy barn.

I do not know what my parents thought of those years, but it was a beginning, a real beginning.  They slowly built up the things that made up a farm.  Dad’s first farm equipment his first cattle these came during those years.  They were progressing…moving forward but their dream was no more than some faint glimpse beyond even their farthest vision.

But things changed, life does that you know.

Dad had the greatest respect for Mr. Coughenour and learned so much about farming from the gentleman.  The feelings were mutual, for when Mr. Coughenour retired to a ranch in North Central Florida, he convinced my father to go along.

I was in second grade when we loaded all we had on a 49 Dodge truck in the late fall of 1959 and moved to Alachua, Florida and a very different life.

(707 Words)