Director's Journal
[Disclaimer: The views expressed in this Director's Journal are solely those of Michael Luick-Thrams, Executive Director of the TRACES Center for History and Culture, based in Saint Paul/Minnesota, and the Burr Oak Center for Durable Culture, located in Turin/Iowa. They may or may not be views shared by TRACES Board of Directors members, TRACES or Burr Oak staff or interns, or others involved with either project. They do, however, reflect the experiences and inner workings of the projects' Executive Director, and thus affect the scope and quality of their impact.]
Wednesday evening at the Burr Oak Center's Big Blue, Turin/Iowa - 2 June 2010
As I sit on the deck behind Big Blue, this barn-like house we are slowly, steadily converting into a home, the darkening Missouri River Valley is quiet save for a soft chorus of wetland frogs, newly nascent crickets and a stray grain truck speeding past this sleepy village at the foot of Lost Hill.
Larry, exhausted from an upteenth day of gardening, poultry nursing, rabbit raising and a long list of other daily tasks, fell into bed about 9 o'clock. Kira, our first summer intern, left for her native Omaha for her Wednesday church-choir practice, and will return late tomorrow morning. Thus, I sit here alone, on this clunky deck overlooking some 23 kilometers (15 miles) of table-top-flat river bottom, stretching to Nebraska's bluffs on the other side of the distant Missouri River.
Like Larry, my nearly-50-year-old body is feelin' the daily grind required to convert this acre-plus piece of Iowa land and the two, previously foreclosed houses on it, into something new and transformative. For my part, I spent a hefty chunk of the late afternoon weeding by hand and hoe the river-valley land around the White House, while Larry continued to spread peat-moss mulch and newspapers on the beige Loess Hill silt that surrounds Big Blue. As I stopped to pick up too many disembodied doll heads, abandoned Christmas candle holders, shards of broken cake-plate glass, ownerless Match Box cars, unidentifible animal-bone bits, burned-out Coke cans and scads of other "artifacts" of a dying industrial culture, my mind focused on other images, from other times...