Part I THE ROAD TO PRYOR, MONTANA 1 Inklings Show your servants the deeds you do; let their children enjoy your splendor! PsalmS 90:16 They were inklings, I realize now. Flowing in the material world, they came whispering. I believe they were sent from God. The messages lodged in my soul and mind, tenacious as loss, tenacious as memories of beauty. They had the potential to shape my future. The earliest was Mom. Jane Seiler Grathwohl often walked, carrying me, around her yard. She stopped to admire tall white lilies, held me to their wide faces to smell them. She wiped yellow pollen off my nose. Newly wed Jane and Larry Grathwohl bought a home on a dead-end street, Laura Lane, in Norwood, Ohio. They took frequent evening walks, seeking nearby parks where they could take the children they anticipated bringing into their lives. They discovered an Indian mound a twenty-minute walk from their home. Two distinct cultures, named by archeologists Adena (800 BCE to 100 CE) and Hopewell (100 CE to 500 CE), had built hundreds of burial and ceremonial mounds throughout the Ohio valley. What the builders called themselves is unknown. Unknown to Jane and Larry was how the mound would shape my future. To me, Laura Lane was no dead end. The mound was located on the highest point in our neighborhood. Fenced as a small park, it was one of the few mounds that had been left undisturbed. Norwood had built the town's two water towers behind it. Whenever it was my turn to suggest the destination of a frequent family walk, I always chose the Indian mound. Its conical grassy hill was almost as high as a one-story house. Maple and oak trees had taken root on it. It was quiet and cool at the mound, even in the humidity of summer. As we walked around it, Mom reminded us not to climb on it because it was special. "Maybe some people were buried in the mound," she said. "Let's pray for them." My sisters, Regina and Susan, and I stood close to Mom and said the usual Catholic prayer for the dead, "May their souls and all the souls of the faithful departed rest in peace. Amen." We knew the prayer by heart because we prayed it before every meal as Mom and Dad recalled their deceased parents and six sisters and brothers. We extended to these unknown dead the reverence we had for family members. I realize now that my parents nurtured my sense of wonder here as they encouraged respect for the mound. I learned that mystery coupled with quiet and beauty evoked a sense of the sacred. This place wasn't "church" by any stretch, but here in nature and ancient human ritual there was a kind of holy presence and power. It appealed to me, perhaps more than church. The mound ignited my imagination. I felt an affinity with the people who had built it and must have had their homes in what was now our neighborhood. Back on Laura Lane, walking to school and passing friends' houses, I pictured the children of the Mound people playing under the trees in yards or peeking out from behind the bushes that hedged sidewalks. In addition, the mound and its people recalibrated my sense of history, gave me a human story here that was older than our family stories of grandparents coming to the Ohio valley from German and Alsace-Lorraine regions. It was a story older than America, older than Columbus, and closer to home than stories of the first Thanksgiving and Pocahontas. All this was a child's small awareness, but it bestowed a respect and reverence for the original peoples of this continent. It hinted at the sacred inherent in nature. It would help guide my life and ministry among the Crow and Northern Cheyenne in their ancestral homelands we call Montana. Grandpa, Mom's dad, also lived with us in the Laura Lane house. He had lost a leg in an accident at work. Using a cane and an artificial limb, he navigated the house slowly, and often sat out on the front porch. He had an endless supply of peanuts for the squirrel that lived in the tall oak a few feet from the porch steps. My sisters and I sat on the steps, placing a peanut as Grandpa directed at the base of the thick trunk. In a swirl of tail, the peanut disappeared. Next peanut a few inches out from the trunk. It soon disappeared. A little closer to the steps. Gone. Then I put a peanut on the toe of my shoe. We all sat very still and silent. Squirrel suddenly leapt from the tree to my shoe, snatched the peanut in his mouth, leapt to my knee, then my shoulder, ran across the back of my shoulders, and leapt from my other knee back to the tree. Wide-eyed, breathless, thrilled, I turned to Grandpa. "The squirrel ran on me," I shouted to him. I ran into the house to tell Mom. I realize now the squirrel's feet left a trail of prints not only across my shoulders, but in my being. The feel of wild, of squirrel became part of me. And I felt so lucky. It was my first lesson in how to enter into the world of other beings, beings beyond our control. Every summer, Mom and Dad scraped together enough money to take us all to the Cincinnati Zoo. Over the years, the zoo had gradually evolved from smelly buildings of caged animals to more spacious, sometimes open-air settings that sought to mimic the animals' natural habitats. Monkey Island, surrounded by a deep moat, looked like a playground, complete with hills, a maze of tunnels, trees, and hanging vine swings. Tropical birds flew in large rooms thick with greenery. An alligator lazed in a miniature swamp. One stone building didn't fit the pattern. It was small, with an orange pagoda-style roof and heavy wooden doors we pulled open slowly. The floor was polished stone. The air was cool and hushed. Light filtered through small windows. It felt almost like a church. In front of us were two bird exhibits and the birds were all dead. They'd been stuffed and mounted as if in a natural history museum, not a zoo. Dad and I stood together, looking at three large, lovely birds. Softly blue-gray with rosy breasts, long tapered wings and graceful tails, they resembled mourning doves. Dad told me they were not doves but passenger pigeons and the very last one, Martha, had died in this zoo on September 1, 1914. He pointed to a painting. "That's Martha," he said. Dad told me that once there were more passenger pigeons than any other land bird species in the world. There were billions of them. They lived in forests throughout eastern North America and migrated in flocks so large they darkened the sun like an eclipse. Billion meant very little to me but I could imagine huge clouds of birds obscuring the sun. I could imagine that, although it was only an imagined thought. I realized they didn't exist anymore. Not even one. I continued to stare at dead stuffed birds. Among them was Incas, the last Carolina parakeet, who died in Martha's death cage on February 21, 1918. These bright green, yellow, and orange birds once numbered in the millions. I tried to apprehend the loss of two entire species. Especially the passenger pigeon. No more passenger pigeons, anywhere. How could this happen when there had been so many? Alexander Wilson, the father of American ornithology, visited a passenger pigeon breeding area near Shelbyville, Kentucky, in 1806. He documented that it was several miles wide and stretched forty miles through the forest. In a single tree he counted more than one hundred nests. People in the region reported that the songs of passenger pigeons rang through the trees, sounding like hundreds of sleigh bells. In 1813 John James Audubon recorded a migrating flock that filled the sky as it flew overhead without diminishing for three full days. The Native Peoples of Canada refused to hunt nesting passenger pigeons until the young were able to fly. They attempted to keep European settlers from disturbing the easily approached brooding flocks. Instead, the Europeans armed themselves with guns, clubs, stones, and poles to kill the birds. Deprived of their food supply as Eastern pine, beech, and hemlock forests were destroyed by settlers to clear the land, the birds had learned to eat farmers' peas and oats. Eventually young pigeon became a table delicacy and market demands drove the constant slaughter of the birds. Throughout the 1870s tons were packed in ice and shipped from nesting areas in the Catskills to New York City. They were sold for about fifty cents a dozen. Netters using bait could snare up to 250 dozen birds in one grab. Pots of burning sulfur were placed under roosting trees, dazing the birds, causing them to fall to the ground. Hundreds of pigeoners, relying on telegraphed information and traveling by train, followed flocks as far as a thousand miles. At a nesting site near Petoskey, Michigan, pigeons were netted, shot, and clubbed to death at a rate of 50,000 birds a day, every day, for five months. And then the pigeoners went home, changed out of bloody, feathered clothes, and sat down to dinner with their families. In some places, up to 180,000 birds were taken in a single day. On May 11, 1947, the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology erected a stone monument to the passenger pigeon on a bluff along the Mississippi River that overlooks one of their former flyways. On a bronze plaque below an image of the bird it reads, this species became extinct through the avarice and thoughtlessness of man. And perhaps through desperation. For farm families struggling to feed themselves, the swarms of feeding pigeons were yet another threat, perhaps even evoking the biblical plagues. It's possible that no one imagined that such a large multitude of birds would ever disappear completely. But by 1880 their decline was continuous and accelerating. In the 1890s flocks of a few hundred were still being sighted, and then shot or netted. Attempts were made to breed small captive flocks, but failed. The last reported wild bird in Wisconsin was shot in September 1899. The last reported wild bird on the entire continent was shot on a farm near Sargents, Ohio, by a fourteen-year-old boy on March 24, 1900. Martha died alone in her cage at approximately 12:30 p.m. in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was twenty-nine years old. The continent's symphony of bells fell silent forever. News of Martha's death shocked the nation. She was frozen in a block of ice and sent by train to the Smithsonian, where she was stuffed and remains today. It was the first time Americans experienced the finality of extinction of a species. People began to realize the importance of conservation efforts to protect wildlife. The country saw firsthand the need for policies and laws to preserve habitat and control rapacious killing of wildlife for sport or food. I didn't know all this history as a child but, strangely, the extinction of the passenger pigeon became an ache in my heart. In school we learned about the extinction of other birds and animals like the flightless and amiable dodo. I felt sad, even though we were told the dodo was stupid, almost as if it deserved extinction. Today, most scientists warn that we are currently in a Sixth Great Extinction, caused almost exclusively by human actions: destruction of habitat, economic pressures, overfishing, poaching, and climate change. We live amid a crescendo of extinctions. Knowing this, the sight of Martha and her story returned to haunt me. She was and remains the tangible horror, loss, and evil of human-caused extinction staring us in the face. When I was twelve, we moved from Laura Lane to a Cape Cod-style house on a quarter acre of land on Blue Rock Road in White Oak, another Cincinnati neighborhood. Mom loved the house. Dad relished the expanse of land. He immediately set about growing grapes for wine and cultivating a large organic garden. One night in our new home, Mom nudged me awake from a sound sleep. "Judy," she said, calling me by my given name, "come here. I have something to show you." Puzzled, disgruntled, I stumbled behind her into the bathroom. She stood at the window and pulled open the towel curtains she had made. They were white with large yellow butterflies. Unable to afford real curtains, she had designed and made these. "Look." We leaned together over the white wicker clothes hamper and peered out the window. There, bright against the night sky, the full moon glowed like an immense lantern, as if alight from within. Our tar-slick garage roof, long needles of the pine tree, metal strands of Dad's grape arbors, and dewy grass all shimmered in its light. Everything was aglow, everything awash with light. Including my mom and me. "I just didn't want you to miss the beauty," she whispered. "Now we can go back to bed." She, with Dad, was my best life teacher. After almost fifty years of being a Franciscan Sister, I learned that beauty for Franciscan theologians and philosophers is the ultimate and most intimate knowing of God, another name for God, the name for God. Saint Bonaventure and Blessed John Duns Scotus teach that the beauty and diversity of creation nourish us through suffering and loss. When we've run out of purpose, when memories of war sicken us, when Earth is attacked with unparalleled savagery for coal, gas, oil, timber, and profit, when poverty runs rampant and extreme wealth for very few soars, when friends betray us, and everyone we love lives far away . . . then, still beauty endures, and helps us make it through. Like God. Mary Jane Grathwohl, my mom, was the first to teach me that. She gave me a method for growing in knowledge of God. Here's what you do. Wake up. Get up. Pull aside any curtains. And stand there in the dark, in the beauty. The following winter, I tore into the kitchen as if driven by the last gales of the snowstorm that had engulfed the afternoon. I saw Dad at his little homemade desk in the corner of the dining room, opposite the kitchen door. I stopped in the doorway; snow from my boots dripped on the blue and yellow linoleum. "Dad!" I began. "How was school today, Judy?" he asked, looking up from paperwork. "Not school, Dad, but the Queen Anne's lace out there on Frey's hillside pasture. You know, right behind the new apartment building." He nodded. "Dad, all the winter killed flowers with the snow on them. It's beautiful and I don't want to forget that sight. I'm afraid I will, though." Excerpted from This Wheel of Rocks: An Unexpected Spiritual Journey by Marya Grathwohl All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
