Source: Ah, Autumn!

Years ago I walked into the office of my little country weekly one morning after a trip to Boston to find laying across my organized chaos a long black tube. Instant curiosity got the best of me and I quickly unscrewed the cap to find a beautiful antique bamboo fishing rod complete with both tips.

“Where did this come from?” was my question for a co-worker.

“Some guy dropped it off. He said you’d know who it was from.”

So began a long mystery, for there wasn’t a clue. No note. “Some guy” isn’t a vivid description, even in Minnesota where vagueness has evolved into a cultural art form. Whoever the mystery man was he would have to know me well enough to know that I was a fly fisher and had an appreciation for such a work of art. Later in the afternoon, I took the fly rod from the case and rigged it up with a five-weight line and laid out some line. While my practiced, piston-like casting doesn’t lend itself well to bamboo, which performs so well with an easy and rhythmic motion, there was quality in the workmanship. This was a fine rod.

The bamboo …

Perhaps it was two years later while cooking hamburgers along the Minnesota River for CURE’s annual River History Weekend with Jerry Tilden, he lifted his spatula from the grill and said, “Say, did you ever find that package I left in your office?”

“Package?”

“Years ago my father-in-law owned a hardware store, and he had hung this old fly rod up over the fishing gear. When the store sold, Dixie and I brought it home and tacked it up in our house. It has been there ever since. When we decided to downsize and move, I brought it over and left it in your office,” he said, smiling.

A gracious and caring man, Jerry Tilden was diagnosed with cancer seven months ago.

Dixie is the missus, who I have known for years. Through her I met Jerry. As I was reading through his obituary this week I realized how little I knew about him, of all the civic groups and community boards he was not just a part of, but in all was cast in a leadership role. No, I didn’t know that side of Jerry Tilden. The side I knew was of his stepping forth as a constant volunteer. The side I knew was of his kindness and care. I also knew of his work as a Master Gardner, and of his basement dedicated to the propagation of his vast gardens along the Minnesota River in the Montevideo flood plain. To me it was ironic that a man who didn’t need a nursery had such a wide assortment of flowery gardens right next to one of the more notable nurseries in the river valley.

Yes, there were the burgers. We cooked them together for several years for the CURE event on a grill he transported himself from Bill’s Supermarket in Montevideo. Me? I mainly manned the grill. Jerry? He was multi-tasking, cooking burgers one second, then the next making sure the potato salad was in the right place, or running to assist his beautiful Dixie with some task. That was the Jerry Tilden I knew.

Then there was that Sunday morning when I received a frantic call from a nearby Chamber of Commerce woman who asked if we could quickly put together a canoe trip on the river, that there were three Hollywood actors in town who had expressed interest in doing a paddle. A call was put through to Dixie, who said the canoe trailers were set up and ready, to just come by for the key. Phone arrangements were then made and my “river truck” was aimed toward Montevideo. Dixie met me at the door with one of her beautiful and encompassing hugs, and handed me the keys. When I got to the garage under their Main Street office, there was a flat tire on the trailer.

“Dixie,” I said over the cell phone, “where can I get a flat tire fixed in Monte on a Sunday morning?”

She didn’t know, but said Jerry was on the way down to help. He drove up before I could ring off. Using a jack from my river truck, we easily removed the tire. “Let’s put it in the car,” he said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Should I come along?”

“Just stay here with the kids,” he said, because my two exchange students were along for the adventure. Meeting Hollywood actors obviously offered more excitement than homework. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

Pai, Hanna and the actors pose with Nicole Zemple … a trip made possible with Jerry Tilden’s switch job!

Indeed, it didn’t take him long. We positioned the tire and secured the lug nuts and let down the jack. That’s when I noticed the color of the wheel. It didn’t match the trailer, and it was obviously a different tire than we had taken off moments before. “The service station have a spare?” I asked.

Jerry Tilden smiled. “Nah, I just took it off my trailer. I’ll get the flat fixed tomorrow.”

That was the Jerry Tilden I knew. That’s the Jerry Tilden I’ll miss, the man I wish I had known better.

Life didn’t go as planned one morning this week.

Too much running around, along with a neat and new “art fair” in town in the afternoon, made for a rather inefficient day. Plus, Rebecca had a meeting about two hours from here and pulled in near dark, so getting the gear up and ready for our annual butchering the chickens “day” simply didn’t happen. Oh, we were up early and eager, then looked at one another and made an almost unspoken consensus before Rebecca verbalized an obvious truth, “I don’t think we’re ready, or can be ready, in time to get much done.”

A fine reprieve, for from the moment I rolled from bed I had my eye on our prairie, for we awoke to a dense fog. On one of our last beautifully dense fogs I had a meeting in Redwood Falls and cursed myself on the entire drive down. I love fog, although not driving through them. One of my favorite fogs in my lifetime was in the Sand Hills of Nebraska, a day when the rolling dunes of fenced grass became a dreamy landscape. I’ve long lost my boxes of Kodachrome slides, though I can recall many of the images. One in particular was of a white horse by a willow, both in front of a distant red barn just visible in the mist, all dreamily captured in muted and mellow grayness.

Yes, we have a richness of color in our prairie this time around.

By the time of our decision the sun had risen to give our prairie a glistening sheen. Partly from the remnant moisture from a brief shower from the night before, and party from a dense dew. With the scheduled pressure off, I took my camera to wade into the dampness where the grasses and forbs mostly towered over me. We have an amazing growth in our prairie.

We also have good color in our prairie this year. Last year we grew weary of the constant quilt of yellow. Oh there were occasional peeks of purple, and a persistent white prairie clover here and there, yet the dominant color was yellow.

Our shy spiders were deft and creative.

This year, though, we have no complaints. Lavender bee balm pokes throughout, and so do many other colorful blossoms. While my focus has been on finding interesting individual plants, and in particular photogenic composition of parts of those plants, as well as the quality and color of light, these past few days my attention has been drawn to an overall colorful palate of our prairie.

The threading tied the prairie forbs together like a natural quilt.

This was where I was mentally on this morning when I began to notice the threading of our prairie. It all began innocently enough, for as I walked through the partially regrown path Rebecca had mowed through our grassy jungle I found gateway after gateway blocking my progress. I found that these creatively spun spider webs would collapse beautifully, opening just like a gate, if you pulled on a strand off to one side. This was no less amazing than the immense number of webs and threads spun throughout. Single strands were drawn between leaves of one plant to another, and in other places, more ingenious geometric forces were obviously at work. At one point I turned, and with the back light from the sun and the definition provided by the beads of dew, I realized I was literally surrounded by what must be millions of spiders, all hopeful of capturing an unaware gnat or mosquito.

While it is fun to watch the acrobatic flight of the many swallows we have flying over the prairie on any given summer evening, we were equally amazed one day late last summer when Rebecca noticed the thousands of dragonflies buzzing over the canopy of the prairie. Perhaps we should add those amazing spiders … all obviously much too shy to show themselves on this cool, damp summer morning.

Using the web strands in the composition was interesting and fun.

Continuing down the path, I kept making photos here and there of various flowers, and as I did I realized I simply couldn’t take a picture that didn’t include some spiderous threading somewhere in the image. So I began to play with the light and dew, using the threads as parts of the composition. A little further along I came upon two of those iconic full spun webs, which with the dew and the light from the rising sun, sparkled like a jeweled necklace awaiting the adorning of the neck and bosom of a fortunate maiden!

Later I climbed our septic mound for the height and shot a few frames I hoped would more clearly define the immensity of the threading and webbing I had discovered on my foray.

A multi-jeweled necklace awaiting the neck and bosom of a maiden …

When I came into the house, I suggested that I had learned how grassy prairies were held together over the eons. It wasn’t the bison herds, nor the vast jungle of rooting from the prairie grasses and forbs, nor the lightning fires refurbished those matted slopes. No, for it was plainly obvious the entire biome from the High Plains to the towering and forested Appalachian Mountains, from Saskatchewan flats to the piney hills of Texas, had been sewn together by an incredible group of shy Arachnids.

While this captures a small portion of our prairie, on this morning our entire eight acres seemed threaded together by the hard working spiders throughout!

Indeed, it had been my good fortune to have just witnessed the vast threading of the prairie, stitching together that vast quilt of grasses and native flowers beneath the deep, blue skies!

Pepper Gumbo!.

Holistic Transformtions.

No Words ….

Tracks in the Snow.

Forging Ahead.

Of a Winter’s Solstice.

Canary of the Prairie.