“I see you as an old salmon,” said a long time artist friend to me recently. “It’s like you have an internal drive taking you upstream, over dams, against the current. I don’t know where you going, and you may not know where you’re going. You’re headed somewhere, though, and you want to get there before you die.”

Don Sherman, the long-tenured prairie artist could just as well be likened to an old salmon himself. We’re both in our mid-70s, and both of us are time challenged and driven. And like he suggested, do we really know where we’re headed?

No, I’m not new at this. Nor is Don. We’re somewhat retired, meaning we are now going where our soul and creativity takes us. My break with mainstream reality began with the death of my wife of 32 years, although I had given my publisher fair warning months before, that my time was near. Now, years later, some of my friends scoff at me, and one blatantly said, “You don’t know a damned thing about being retired.”

An image from the last one percent of prairie.

Recently, in the midst of several errands before heading off for a weekend showing at an arts and wine fair in Cannon Falls, two friends invited me to join them for lunch. More of the same. Eventually one said, “I get tired just reading your posts. Don’t you ever slow down?”

Maybe not. My thoughts go back to an incidental meeting back when I was 62. Some consider this a magical age and jump at the chance to jump on SSI with an early retirement, I stopped at a barbecue joint and bar to talk to the owner about advertising in my country weekly. Four guys who were around my age were having an afternoon beer on a summer day that would have been perfect for sitting in a boat angling for bluegill in a quiet bay. They rode me pretty hard about not joining them, that life was much too short to be working, and that I was 62 for God’s sake. Within a year all four had died of natural causes. All much too young. Did idleness play a role? Inactivity? Not having some mission?

My Listening Stones Farm yields some fine images, including a smokey sunset.

A dear friend who recently hit the magical age of 70 still performs his incredible music, and is wont to take a break when playing. He is engaging, with a broad smile during his performances. An artist friend in the outer suburbs told me last week she’s doing just what she’s always wanted to do. “I do it here in the summer, and we go back to India for the winters and I do my art there as well.” Then, there’s my fellow salmon … Don Sherman. Apparently I’m not alone. Somewhere in each of us there seems to be a magical drive. And we’re certainly not alone. Idleness won’t kill us.

My woman friend, Mary Gaftgen, says I sometimes wear her out, yet in our time together this year we’ve road-tripped to New Orleans, Nebraska for the Crane migration, Alaska for a week to visit her brother and his wife, to Eastern Washington to visit her old college roommate, and we leave in a few days for the Boundary Waters. This doesn’t include our nearby day trips, nor the week I spent in Ontario fly fishing on another wonderful Tim Holschlag adventure. Nor does it include a European trip to visit my son, Aaron, and some former foreign exchange students. Add some art shows in there as well. So, yes, there is a retirement aspect.

Near Juneau a canoeist returns from a jaunt in the bay.

I’m thoroughly enjoying life. Not long after my wife’s death I entered a bounce-back marriage that didn’t take. Yet, my ex-wife was quite nurturing and encouraged me as I began working on my prairie art imagery. My work centers around the last one percent of the prairie, the vast 99 percent forever altered into commodity agriculture, parking lots and such … land that as a prairie prior to European immigration stretched from Canada to Texas, and nearly the breadth of the two mountain ranges. This has led to many juried art shows, one-person exhibitions, and a spot in the annual Upper Minnesota River Arts Meander, where hundreds visit my home farm studio over the first weekend of October.

Is this swimming against the current? Is there something soulful within urging the mission forward? Is it a fear of idleness? Of death? Of not lending some importance to the act of being an integral part of the human race?