The creative mind lives in perpetual tension; balanced tenuously between getting things done and flying by the seat of one’s pants.

The urge to fry every food in sight as one considers the lowly salad; the wide open prairie travels alongside the captured taxi with bright yellow sealed doors and exact mileage.

The need for silence and the need for noise…it’s all a blather and a whirligig bru-haha with a crossed ‘T’ and the dotted ‘I’…a rounding up and a tamping down…

In the heart of July, a child’s westward trek to South Dakota, leaves behind the coastal waters and rolling hills as they flatten out through the roads in Ohio; traded in for searing heat, rippling grain fields, blue flax and corn in good seasons…burnt, crisping drought at other times and the odd wooden clapboard floors in small towns with ancient names. The James River disappears into dried mud.

One gas pump, a root beer float and cash only, please; a sign warns ‘last stop for the next hundred miles’; the land swallowing us gone as our car pulls back out onto the pink ribbon of highway.

Drought feels and knows…rutted mud so dried out and thick that tripping and injury awaits the child in careless flip flops, the bruised soles of small feet tell the story. The crops, struggling up against a steady prairie wind which beats back and all around a single row of sparsely planted Russian olive trees; one row of these green gems holds the line determinedly against all odds. There is nothing in any direction for the next hundred miles and we are alone.

The radio plays quietly with static, fuzzy crop and herd reports…and we watch the land out of a tired and melting window. The sun has made a half round, shifting from one side of the car to the other and the day readies to wind down.

Then…in our stupor, there rises up ahead the figure of a lone Native American runner with a long black braid…strong, striding with singular purpose along the edge of the burnt tar, at the edge of pink stone quartzite…as our single car quickly, in all that incomprehensible vast sea of prairie and wheat and sweet air…sails past and disappears into a wall of bright, shimmering, unbearable heat. The runner with singular purpose vanishes behind us.

What is fairer or rarer than a petal-strewn day in June? She launches her walk, cambric furled…breezily, easily sailing on her way…exits the cove…enters the choppy blue-shirted sea.

The brined, hurly, burly, tawny, tough and tired crowd…surging waves at the corner of University and Culver. Shimmering raging sun splashes on the metal bucketed crowd…spilling forward through the factory exit…lurching out onto the sidewalk…’shift’s over boys!’

Dodging buses and honking traffic…in a heated hurry to get home, the waters of blue swallow her up as she merges heel and toe into their thickened stream. Broad heads and barrel-chested stiffs, Irish eyes and thick rugs of reddish hair with roughened jaws…a half-hearted struggle to catch her eye as she sails by. She sidesteps the dangerous shoal…the knowing wink and the sly grin…trolling through their work grime…she sails on by, heel and toe, heel and toe, head above the fray and spray.

My people, my blood, my past unknown…dark and distant swirling waters…lost at sea…but still pulsing, connecting, soaking…a twinge of genetic memory, Irishly sung in the greening distance. Grace twitters gently above and around the thickened strand of the rowdy males…wispy tendrils at neck’s nape.

The waves break to let her pass…a lassie up against the sweat and calloused hands, the sunburned shoulders and potato whiskey minds. The day is done and spent for the crowd at the corner of University and the fire station…the sealers and plodders merge briefly with her…heel and toe, heel and toe…on toward separate paths…flowing in ten different directions where the sidewalk ends.

She strides quickly forward with a furrowed brow…as much as she would sail around the reef of choppy blue, she recognizes those strained spines which labored and struggled to carve out inch by inch, the rugged Eastern Coast of this great country and the unforgiving Western reaches. Reckless abandon with hammer and truck, lathe, song, God and drink…they still cross in waves over the street, steel booted…heel and toe…slamming over the pavement.

‘Eternal Father, strong to save, whose arm hath bound the restless wave, who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep, its own appointed limits keep, oh hear us when we cry to thee, for those in peril on the sea…’ Left foot, right foot…past and future…heel and toe, heel and toe…passing gently through the swaggering, surging crowd.

Handsome man with a thick head of hair…hardened by years of physical exertion…building a softer, safer world for his grandchildren…a quiet seabed. Chest, widened and stretched by sorrow’s lance…working and sweating out like a sick fever, the harsher memories. Forearms for an eternity lifting and tugging and dragging bags of Fleischmann’s yeast…in the bakeries, back alleys and balustrades of the rough and tumble city. The worn red leather armrests of his rocking chair, back and forth, heel to toe on that splintered porch, listening for the drone of a lonesome airplane on those summer ice-creamed afternoons.

The steel tipped and leather booted crowd…disperses like water bugs…streaming with a hurry, flurry, scurry in all directions…willy nilly with stretched sinew and aching spirit. Taut after a day’s labor…stretched weary…spent and sweated out…grimaced jaw…bent on the next destination. ‘Watch the rocks, boys…mind the shoal!’ Home, church, the bar, the game…that upstairs room…’anywhere but here boys, anywhere but here’. Heading for land…heel and toe, heel and toe..as she sails on by.

She voyages with safe passage…resting on the brawny shoulders of trawling giants; reposed on the shoulders of giants…