A Memorial Testament to a Fellow Forager - Gisela - Who Set an Ageless Example as to What Matters

Here's my tribute to an older girl buddy who was my mentor, friend Gisela Schlueter Terrell who stunned me by dying late this spring, just a few weeks after a last e-mail passed between us. She was a librarian in the first ten years of our acquaintance, at Butler University's Irwin Library in Indianapolis, where a two-year grant had funded the opening of a Rare Books and Special Collections department in what must have been 1979. Gisela had come from the Lilly Library at Indiana University Bloomington, an hour or so's drive to the south, to stock and catalogue the new rare book room. Meanwhile I was employed as a typist and file clerk in the main cataloguing department downstairs. Apparently she saw a likely characteristic in me that suggested I needed guidance, as Gisela was a great rescuer and guide where there was any possibility of a mutual benefit. What she saw must have had to do with a colorless propriety that pervaded that bright, white library, designed with row upon row of closely set arched windows, the design of a world-famous Seattle-born architect, Minoru Yamasaki, in 1963.

The rare book room in Gisela's time was way up at the top floor of the building and was not a popular place, long and lavish as it was with ranks and ranks of stacks, ancient volumes and boxed documents behind a locking wooden door. As such it made a special refuge for a naive and impractical girl aged nineteen, full of visions of northern horizons and all manner of romance, however/wherever it happened into her grasp of a situation. The sturdy German-born librarian, with long black ponytails and teasing blue eyes, had skin as brown as ancestors from other land masses, other latitudes documented far back into time. I would talk to her of my obsessions and fears, all very abstract, and she would listen, listen and sympathize or starkly critique me in her dark European voice full of inflections and frequent snorted chuckles. Sometimes she would be swiftly harsh in her opinions, yet unfailingly discreet, as much given to scoffing as to reverence, toward me or whomever and whatever was the subject. Her judgment came of wide experience, since she had been a classroom teacher in Germany, a gymnastics instructor, an orchestra violist and music teacher, and later, in America, had been involved in 1960s political demonstrations. With two or more PhD degrees she was mentally quick in her reasoning and conclusions while gifted with strong intuition, which made her a decisive critic as well as a giver of apt suggestions where art, writing, cooking, plant propagation or a love or friendship were under discussion.

She had a little house with a quince tree, a hammock in the yard, and gardens with beans and rhubarb, root vegetables and cucumbers, strawberries and medicinal herbs such as comfrey. Off in the hardwood forest of surrounding Owen County, Indiana grew pawpaw trees and the occasional persimmon, black gum and sycamore, eastern cottonwood, black walnuts, oaks and maples and tulip trees. Ginseng and golden-seal were two scarce herbs that could be foraged there, which Gisela would harvest sparingly and sell at local marketplaces where they would be shipped off to end-users in Asia. At week-ends down at her house I tasted a green persimmon (so bitter I could taste it with imaginary taste buds seated on my teeth) and breakfasted on guinea-fowl and duck eggs from a neighboring small farm, shared in the task of making butter with a vintage glass butter churn that operated with wooden paddles inside, assisted in the hourly pressing of wild honey out of a section of tree trunk placed on the hearth to loosen the honeycomb that was hardened by December's cold, and later one June heard and saw the only Kentucky warbler I have ever encountered, a few steps away down her county gravel road.

The house, including its few acres of backwoods, was something she had just managed to buy out of earnings from the IU Lilly library half an hour's drive away. This house had only two rooms with a back bathroom, and had a root cellar which, if I remember correctly, Gisela had hand-dug under a few square feet of the main room, opening with a trap door. A rear sun porch with translucent green vinyl siding and roof was more of her own handiwork. Cats lived out on the front porch, which was open sided, but were not allowed indoors; in later years domestic geese gained residency around the entire yard and gardens, which they patrolled with shrill vigilance. In June of 1980 as a guest for my first time I spent the night in the hammock that hung from two trees, hearing no end of whippoorwill cries from the forest floor in each direction. Sultry heat, sung by cicadas with that pulsating intro and ebbing buzz that speaks to me Indiana and equivalent latitudes, a song I've yet to hear in Minnesota where by now I've lived most of my life, made up the soundstage of those summer or early-fall days. The forest's leaves, crisp and darkly green, as long and broad as shoe-soles, encircled the yard on three sides, for Gisela had left the the woods alone where ground for pathways or gardens or a bit of light and air current had not needed claiming.

Some time after I was gone away to study and live in the north, first to London, Ontario and subsequently to Minnesota, Gisela met, fell in ecstatic love with and married the son of a neighbor, Clyde Terrell, among other descriptions a pond-builder with carpentry skills, an appetite for history and back-country lore who owned a bulldozer and wanted release from an unhappy marriage. Gisela, who had known marriage, desertion and widowhood all three, destitution and hunger and a few of the personal dangers that can confront young foreigners who are obviously on their own, helped him with the process of getting a divorce, since each of the new couple had independently longed to move west to the mountains. They lived for a few years together in Owen County, then in the early 1990s left to scout Wyoming and Montana for a homestead. They found land they could buy within the Bighorn Range, in Sheridan County, Wyoming, in the village of Story, where they established a cabin and gardens and kept horses during what must have been about eleven exhilarating though financially challenging years. With the approach of 2005 Clyde, nearing the age of 70, was diagnosed with lung cancer. Gisela, as she told me last year, was 'under no illusions' as she cared for him, driving him to and from Denver for treatments, till his death on Labor Day week-end of that year.

So in this dignified aftermath of a dream pursued, met and lived, and heartbreak, and many mountain afternoons spent alone or with Clyde following trails, at trout streams and in dells below the sheerest of peaks, snow-cooled and re-baked by desert heat, and following many orchestral concerts in which Gisela played her viola for weddings, wakes or reunions, and rehearsals in donated space or lessons given in her living room, I met my old friend again after twenty-one years of irregular contact limited to phone, letter or email. This was on the third of June, 2012, as I followed her printed directions off westbound I-90, past Buffalo, nearing but not yet as far as Sheridan.

The log house where I found her was strange yet familiar, a transformation of the old clapboard shack in Indiana, having the same dark interior, jovial signs painted and hung in bathroom or kitchen, dried herbs dangling from the ceiling, and floor to ceiling book cases. Now, minimized in their midst, was also a computer. In the yard stood ponderosa pines and, out back, well-spaced aspen and narrowleaf cottonwood that provided a flickering shade.

We spent most of one week visiting, sharing evening or midday dinners that included heart of deer and bear meat pot roast (friends and neighbors had traded or given her the wild game, though she shot and dressed a deer per year on her own land for the venison as Clyde had taught her how to do) and taking car trips into the highest elevations of the Bighorn Range, seeing moose and marmot, summer snowpack, mesas, torrents within red canyons and sagebrush flatlands. All alone at the top of a Douglas fir one day I heard the song of an Audubon's warbler, the western version of our yellow-rumped warbler found east of the prairies, impossibly wistful and ringing between rock heights like the sincerest utterance of forlorn hopes.

Once as we hiked a road together I noted that Gisela, who long ago had exceeded my height by a couple of inches, but had acquired a hunch in her shoulders, now stood a tad shorter than me. But her stride made me hurry my fastest to keep up--even though she was nearly seventy years of age to my fifty-two and a smoker who'd smoked little brown cigars for as long as I'd known her. The gardens, the old sheepdog Mya and the attraction of mountain slopes not very far in the distance, a backdrop to all errands into the yard, kept her constantly stepping, striding, stooping, hauling, mixing, toting, bowing, tuning, summoning, often braving spasms of arthritis. She had grown stringy, stooped with constant busyness, on a diet centered around lean meat and her own fruit and vegetables. Her ways were the ways of our forebears on six continents.

In my mind she's a persistent survivor, to the extent that I wonder when if ever I'll accept her as a mortal human being truly dead. From most of what she ever said to me I think she believed she'd live to a ripe old age well beyond seventy, and so, had she lost the desire and outlook to attain great age, especially as a veteran tobacco user? At this stage I expect never to learn how she died, if it was sudden or long premeditated, attended by someone or in solitude, eminently influenced by Clyde's death at the same age of seventy years or coincidentally over and done with by that age.

A book I'm currently enjoying, Old Border Road by Susan Froderberg, Little, Brown and Company ©2010, has in its middle the quotable lines: "And do not the dead surely lay their claim? Perhaps more so than the living....Do as commanded or elsewise live in fear. Girl, I tell you this--death is but one less day to be afraid." And so, with the certain sense that the dead do live on inside those of us who knew them best or longest, I rest and act upon the discernments phrased by Gisela--that life is not easy, that it goes back on you just when you're lifted up by your fortunes, that mullein is safely gathered alongside highways and railway rights of way with today's pollution-control technology in cars, trucks and locomotives, that on meeting a cougar in open country you must simply stand your ground and make yourself look as big as possible.

I remember her AMC Gremlin down in Indiana, its rusting body held together by flowers and caterpillars, raindrops and other beautification painted up and down it in different colors of enamel, and the Ford Fiesta that succeeded it. I remember the days she didn't come in to the library due to car trouble, or the summer day she had to stop at every creek between Indianapolis and the town of Spencer to re-fill the radiator with a bucket. I remember the day we came upon car thieves dismantling vehicles beside a shallow pond in a pasture, and she made me stand aside while she passed them at close range to be sure they saw that she saw. (Later, they murdered her young dog Troll with a shotgun blast at close range, and were subsequently rounded up and flushed out of Owen County for good by outraged rural neighbors who showed up in a group with an ultimatum on hearing of what had happened.)

She was a person as large as all humanity, whose code of ethics and acceptance of other traditions she had pieced together from life-ways variably old and much forgotten, civilized American, native American, civilized and pre-civilized Eurasian--that is my best assessment of Gisela. But by now she's no longer in a position to argue with me...

A Sudden Obituary (a bit Late) and the Legacy in Art and Mountain Panorama

A friend of mine going back thirty-three years died, I just learned over the past week-end by accident, a year to the date that we last saw each other. Before that week in early June 2012 it had been twenty-one years since we last visited, other than over the phone. She lived in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming, and was a marvelous teacher, gardener and player of stringed instruments. A music teacher and ex-librarian, she was my mentor, without ever admitting to the decided value of the hugely varied lessons she imparted to me. I'm so far left wondering what could have happened, accident or illness, to have felled this staunch person at an age, 70, that seemed too soon.

Last summer, buoyant with my old youthful joy borne of spending time in the deep countryside with this friend (our acquaintance goes back to those years in Indiana, a state then significantly more rural than it is today) I drove from Duluth out to Rapid City, South Dakota in one long day full of lofty clouds and sun, touring in the car a ways around the Oahe Reservoir outside the city of Pierre as dusk settled. Next day it was on, via the Theodore Roosevelt National Grassland, to Wyoming in that area between Buffalo and Sheridan, where immediately the same day I began to get acquainted with new birds of the Rocky Mountain valleys: the red-naped sapsucker and the calliope hummingbird. The watercolor kit had ridden with me in the car and a profusion of hound's tongue or gypsy flower on sunlit ground (per my friend locally called the beggar's fleas) challenged me to a several-days' botanical painting effort.

The hound's tongue is a weed of pastures, not a native North American herb, yet in its peculiar fuzziness and olive drab overtone, its florets the meaty pink of a dog's dripping tongue, it seems as habituated into the nearby mountain slopes as my friend, a native of Germany, was absorbed into the high elevations of the American West. I found a patch of ground with both sun and shade where I could sit, where a specimen of hound's tongue or Cynoglossum officinale made itself available, and spent four to five days finishing the details in watercolor and gouache. The card front in its photo is shown here, with a link to where it's for sale:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/103227055/blank-note-card-botanical-watercolor?


When I think about that gypsy flower in blossom alongside a sparkling rill beneath a line of cottonwood trees, with magpies' prattle over in the sun's direction and from behind me the flattened little death-knell sound, like a screech owl without the tremolo, that later proved to be the western wood pewee, I think about our car excursions up to the passes in the Bighorns near the Montana state line, where snowbanks enclosed the two paved lanes on either side. My friend, putting in her gardens for the year's food crop, never-the-less took afternoons off to drive me with her to such places as Shell Falls and Crazy Woman Canyon; we saw miles and miles of the changing topography that makes up Wyoming including sub-alpine slopes with whitebark pines, and way below them the red rock chasms, sagebrush deserts and, partway up again in elevation, meadows dampened by snow-fed springs, a-flit with mountain bluebirds the greenish blue of a twilit sky.

I remember her explanations of the sights around us: her elderly Australian sheep dog with the bald and hanging teats and one crossed eye, formerly the property of some unnamed sheep herder who had obviously used her to commercially breed pups and almost as likely had kicked her face at some point near one eye socket. This dog had entered into a new life at the grand age of ten. Her career as a companion dog must have felt to her like a paradise, one old lady rescued and given to another to ease their joint tragedies past into vaguest after-impression. 

My friend explained runaway truck lanes I had glimpsed from the highway in another tragic story out of local news: a young transport driver fell asleep in his cab somewhere high above Sheridan or Buffalo, realized on waking that he'd lost his chance to use the emergency lane and knew he was fated to crash into the town below the heights in order to make his final stop. He dialed 911 and had the local sheriffs clear the whole route ahead of him and provided his speed and location. As predicted, with the main thoroughfare into town fully emptied of cars and trucks, he hurtled into view on schedule, missed a diagonal bend and crashed to his death into a building already vacant, the walls and roof collapsing around him. The local folk took up a collection for his widow and tiny children.

There was the day I spent mostly alone, creeping along the Penrose hiking trail, further teaching myself the local flora like the clematis folk-named sugar bowls, and somewhere along the way finding my first Lazuli bunting singing to the sunny afternoon so much like the indigo bunting of the Midwest. Eventually my friend dialed my cell phone to check that I still answered and hadn't fallen prey to any cougars or armed strangers or dropped off a precipice. One night we splurged like hungry girls with the metabolism of youth, eating three platefuls apiece of Asian buffet meat and vegetables. In her dining nook I ate roast bear and heart of venison for my first time. I learned of treating old bronchial mucous with cups of mullein tea, and vowed I'd forage my own back in Minnesota, as I have now done.

So now, more than a year later, with the western expanses of America a beacon in my memory each day I make my living in the north-central U.S., I have the gypsy flower art image to help remind me of this legacy in the person of a great critic, teacher and humanitarian, who had once beguiled me into thinking she had been born a Romany gypsy, an adoptee saved from one of the orphanages the Hitler regime set up for selective breeding. The gypsy flower might, among other things, stand for the drifter and re-colonizer in people and species the world over. She told me on the last visit that the half-gypsy girl had really been her cousin by adoption.

When I envision the future with its dire impending constraints like unaffordable car ownership and withering summer droughts taking place between floods and consequent washouts along high-country roads like those in the Bighorns, I wonder what will happen to byroads between hubs of commerce and manufacturing. Will patches of old America and for that matter old Europe and other places still flourish, visitable by ordinary folk who yearn over collective memory of them? I tend to think that they will, if at great expense in money and personal safety, somehow--maybe by bus or bike, van, wagon train or foot...

Feeling like a Queen of the Prairie

I am celebrating the great, unexpected good fortune of being able to live in the country again, as I did through childhood, at the urging of good friends an hour from Duluth--and celebrating the concept of summer everlasting in our minds, summer with its weird discoveries or epiphanies from the natural world. Maybe half a mile down the road from my new shared home is this stand, just below the road bank, of a native American prairie plant classified within the giant rose family, called queen-of-the-prairie. It will be in a watercolor which I mean to develop at its own pace.

While we in our fifties or coming into our sixties feel or see our own aging process, a wild and lesser-known plant like this one, especially one this uncommon, coming into its prime just off our shoulder speaks to us of rejuvenation, whether it's individual or community. When I first saw this plant while passing in a fast walk, I knew it by name immediately, though I'd never seen it in the flesh, only in pictures in several wildflower manuals. Some plants and animals are like that, so showily distinctive that some photo in some book instills a lasting memory.

Queen-of-the-prairie is like a pink floss or a foam on top of its pale orangey green stalk. Originating, apparently, in the northern and central prairies of the United States where there's wet soil, the plant has found its way eastward into New England by way of plantings. Down in the grasses below the inflorescence are the leaves, colonial, sharply veined and toothed, deeply lobed and golden-green. What a privilege, to share habitat with things like this that nobody contrived or apparently sowed here, it just came into being by natural process through thousands of years and holds out, where nobody may for the longest time have grazed livestock or mown hay.

Watch for the 2013 watercolor, which continues my line of native North American plant note cards. I'd halfway like to have it done right now, right here to advertise the whole set of works. But every time I get down to business at one of these, trusting a folding chair will protect me from the bite of deer ticks, I have to consciously tell myself that the project can't be hurried or the whole thing suffers. Evolution takes eons; artwork meant for its glorification should take as long as the artist's whole life support system demands, as long as the inevitable mistakes take to be found and overcome, as long as the utmost patience will bear.

I am so full of gratitude, when I stop to think, of all that's been possible and may yet be possible in my time.