Grandma Helen was a tender soul who rarely said no to any of her grandchildren.

She was kind-hearted (though she did spank my sister when she heard her say a swear word out in the garden), and we grandkids thought that was a license to ask her anything.

O…

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This world values physical presence and appearance.

There’s some importance there, given that so much of life has moved online and become virtual. But the twis…

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On December 1, 2013, I went into the Metrodome1 to see the Minnesota Vikings play against the Chicago Bears, I checked an item off of my bucket list, and thought that if we only lost within 10 points, I’d be pleased. Friends had gone to the Arizona Cardinals game weeks earlier and it had been a dismal slaughter.

This hadn’t been a good year for the Vikin…

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They had been having a splendid time.

Summer was tipping towards fall, the sky a soft blue, laced with wispy clouds that competed with the hazy smoke on the horizon. California and Canada were on fire again, but the open highway stretched before them in inviting silence.

He loosened his grip on the steering wheel of his truck, the tension flowing out of his muscles as the tires slapped in rhythm against the asphalt. Fence posts whizzed by, the rolling South Dakota landscape turning golden as the harvest season crept closer. Reddish brown Herefords and black Angus cattle spotted the landscape, following one another to watering holes ringed in white alkaline mud.

She reached up and tugged at the corner side window of the truck just a bit, angling it more sharply inwards to pull in more of the outside air, directing it to her face. It had been a hot day, and the truck was stifling.

They rode in silence, having given up on getting a steady radio signal. The rushing air filled the car with its own music as each relaxed back into the vinyl seats, thinking about the vacation they’d had, savoring the memory while still looking forward to getting home.

The scenery in Florida and on the drive back had been magnificent, and the truck had held up well as it wound its way through the hills and mountains of their latest adventure. It was the time of year when families were preparing for school, leaving things a bit less crowded for other tourists. Trees were starting to turn to fall colors, yet a few stubborn wildflowers had stuck around. The sun set late enough that they could enjoy the gorgeous purple and orange sunsets as they pulled into the campgrounds along the way. It wasn’t too dark, but the light show was spectacular.

It was the perfect overlap of summer and fall, all the best parts at once.

She had purchased several booklets of full-color printed postcards from the places they’d visited. She preferred the imagery in those cards, the harsh colors overlaying photos that looked like drawings, bound in thick plastic spirals. She patted her purse, sitting next to her on the truck’s bench seat. It was heavier now, thanks to those postcards, but she was excited to show them at the next Ladies’ Aid meeting.

Her husband, on the other hand, was a photo buff.

One whole cupboard in the camper was dedicated to his photographic gear. His top-quality 35 mm camera, complete with a tripod and several lenses, had made it easy for him to shoot eight rolls of film. He was already calculating how long it would take to develop them as slides and invite the Iversons over for supper and a vacation slide show. A smile broke across his face as he thought of some of the great shots he’d managed to grab. He glanced in the rearview mirror and was struck by the open beauty of the buttes they’d passed.

He glanced at the clock on the dashboard, ticking away. His stomach growled, and he realized it had to be getting close to supper. They’d have to pull over and have a quick bite to eat in the camper if they didn’t reach their next campground soon enough. Perhaps they’d delayed too long at the last scenic overlook.

Wait a minute.

There shouldn’t have been any open beauty in that rearview mirror.

His foot mashed down on the brakes, and she slammed into the dashboard, bracing herself at the last minute. The wheels screeched, and the back of the truck wobbled a bit from side to side as it careened to the side of the road. He pulled off the pavement as best he could with what little shoulder there was, tipping dangerously at an angle.

She looked at him with big eyes, one hand on the dashboard while the other rubbed the knee she'd banged on the glove compartment during the sudden stop.

“What in the world?!”

He smacked his open hand against the steering wheel, cursing a bit as he grabbed at the door handle, pulling at it a few times before the door opened up. “Where's the camper?!”

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But let’s get to the desecration stuff.

1. The Greenpeace protest that ruined the hummingbird.

In 2014, Greenpeace decided to take a dump on these ancient treasures, damaging the Nazca lines to make ze…

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However, whenever I go on a road trip, particularly in my old vehicle, my prayers are very strong and very much about getting there and back again. I never make the assumption it will happen without prayer first, my vehicle is that old.

This is the story of the Three …

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Parts from this post originally ran on March 13, 2007, and May 4, 2012. It has been edited and reworked with additional content added.

Leon, Nicaragua—birthplace of the revolution with murals celebrating it at every turn—has a giant cathedral that wasn't supposed to be there.

The cathedral was built by mistake.

A huge, gorgeous, Baroque mistake. The cathedral was intended for Panama, but somehow there was a mix-up in two sets of plans and construction began in  León, Nicaragua. Panama got stuck with the smaller building.

My first missions trip to Nicaragua was in 2004, but by 2011, my last trip after having seen houses, a church, and a farm built by our teams, I could see the heavy impact of tourism in general in the country.

The once sparse beach with minimal development had turned into a place where American and European "eco tourists" could feel good about themselves for traveling without realizing the irony of how much their demand had impacted the place they thought they were seeing untouched. Sprawling patios and construction to make them feel comfortable on the beach as they lounged in expensive bikinis and wet suits replaced what had been a simple slab covered by a basic roof and palm fronds, frequented by children running around trying to sell the jewelry they'd made.

It wasn't just the beach that had changed.

Momotombo, the volcano we hiked up in our t-shirts and shorts and cautiously hiked down (one fellow slid down, ripping out the entire back of his shorts on the sharp volcanic rock) was an empty place of echoes at the time, requiring a paid armed guard, an off-duty police officer, to come with the group for protection.

But now it is featured by the hip world travelers and their selfies on Instagram as a must-visit place, complete with "surfing" down the side and recommended expensive hiking gear to use.

The huge cathedral has always fascinated me on the trips to Nicaragua. It is the largest cathedral in Central America.

For eight years, I photographed its worn walls, the lions that guard the front, the thick red wooden doors. Such massive walls and arches. I’ve sketched the cathedral more times than I can remember. Each of my trip journals have a drawing or two of the cathedral gracing the pages.

It’s just down the street from Italian Pizza (now also a hostel) which is owned by a Lebanese man the group stayed with. We ate there every night, until he built a kind of hotel at the edge of town better suited for large groups.

"Breakfast is between 7 and 7!" he'd say in his thick Middle-Eastern accent, and then chuckle with us. He ran a strict schedule.

Or "would you like chicken or chicken for dinner, Julie?" he'd say to me when we were back from a day's work, and I'd laugh because he knew. His chicken always had a hint of cinnamon and was delicious.

The great lions guard the front of the cathedral.

The square in front of the cathedral was almost always full of activity. People selling, beggars hoping for something.

One mid-summer trip, our small group was in the plaza with hundreds of other people. A Catholic celebration of some sort was going on, and a man dressed in a strange costume spun and danced in the dark, fireworks spraying off of him and shooting about and above the crowd. He was a blur that glowed in the rich dark noise of the square, vendors calling out and people shouting.

I couldn’t help but think how unsafe it was, and how much fun I was having. A firework exploded just above our head.

Down the street from the cathedral, on the other side of Italian Pizza, we witnessed a small but violent demonstration one year. Students pelted the home of a university president with rocks and small explosives—perhaps fireworks, not sure—and we were unnerved. It is difficult not to be, when the mural across the street from where we stood in the doorway of the restaurant made it clear being American might not be a good idea.

The cathedral is like a place marker, so huge that it is a landmark used as a reference point for directions. “The ice cream shop is two blocks from the Great Cathedral,” you might be told. It is a geographic anchor.

The top of the cathedral is open for limited touring, and it takes a spry person to clamber through the narrow stairways to get to the top. Don’t step on the domes when you’re up there; they can’t take the weight. And don’t take the basement tour; you won’t see catacombs and all the things you might imagine to be lurking beneath such a building. Instead, you’ll have a short tour down a hallway with a low-ceiling that ends with a plaque dedicated to the poet Rubén Darío. It all makes even less sense to you if you don’t understand the mostly-Spanish tour guide.

The tour of the roof, however, is magic. The view of the city spread out below gives order to the sometimes crazy cobblestone streets. The hot wind whips across your face, much stronger than the feeble breezes at ground level.

But, alas.

Up high on the roof, there was a window resembling the Microsoft logo. It made me think that Bill Gates and Microsoft, like Kilroy, had been there.

"Bill Gates is taking over the world," I joked to a friend as we picked our way carefully across the roof.

MS Vista, long gone as an operating system by now, means "view" in Spanish. That is what a window does, provides us a view.

In 2012, I didn't go to Nicaragua with the rest of the group. I hadn't realized how, in 2011, it was the last trip; we really never realize when something is the last at the time. It only occurs to us later.

The last time I was home. The last time I saw someone.

I never went back to Nicaragua. After eight years, life had changed. I do remember that in August of 2012, my feeble 20-year class reunion reminded me of all the plans I had for my life back when I was graduating from high school. I thought that I would have achieved and become a lot of things. I was sure that by the time that 20 years went by, certain things would have happened.

They did not.

Another ten have gone by since, and they still have not.

“I know that you have plans,” God seems to have said, “but I’m going to build your life on the plans that I have instead. Mine are much better.”

My plans went to Panama, I guess, and in their place, a huge cathedral of dwarfing proportions is being built. It seems to be all scaffolding and stone chips right now, and it certainly is taking a long time. It’s become a point of reference in my life, this change of plans.

“That was when I was changed,” I might think. “When the ground was broken and the foundation was started, that is when it all started.”

You have no idea how close Panama is to where you are right now, but don’t worry. The cathedral is not a mistake.

[My sisters, niece, and two grand-nieces recently took a road trip. This is our story.]

Weeds poked up through the rocks in the steep dirt driveway that led to the cabin in the northern Kentucky woods. A van full of six women slowly crunched its way up the narrow drive, crushing the smaller stones under its tires with no small amount of noise. The leader of the group wisely parked the vehicle by backing in next to the cabin so that a fast escape would be easy.

What did she know that the rest did not?

A cozy living space with sofas and bunks, draped in buffalo plaid blankets, brought out all the oohs and aahs as the women piled into the cabin. They felt prepared, both in food supplies and knowledge of concealed carry laws.

The cabin was supposed to have a view. It was late and the sun was dropping much faster than it did back home, thanks to a different latitude and time zone. Distant sounds of thunder lightly rolled across the darkening sky, and a bright splash of lightning from miles away could be seen now and then.

Wisdom would say to wait until morning before exploring the woods of northern Kentucky, especially if you were a flatlander with no knowledge of the area. Yet the beginning of the path near the cabin was faintly visible and all six women threw wisdom aside. It was a lovely night outside, and that warm air beckoned.

Within a few feet, the trail veered sharply upwards, growing steeper and less distinct with each step. One small flashlight and a mobile phone was all that was showing the way as the sun had officially dropped far below the tree line. Thick clay, made slick from recent rain, only added to the difficulty.

“I better not blow out my knee again,” one of the women said, though at least two others were thinking it.

Concentrating on finding stones and sticks for footing on the steep, slick path, no one heard the sound at first. Lost amongst the rustling of the women scrambling to stay upright, grabbing at saplings and bushes in the dark hoping it wasn’t poison ivy or a chigger convention, the thuds and cracking sounds went unnoticed.

Until they stopped to catch their breath. In the silence filled with wheezing and regrets at bad choices, a cracking sound could be heard. It sounded as if a giant was jogging toward them, breaking the kinds of twigs and branches they were using as their lifeline to haul themselves up the steep hill.

“Do they have bears here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s Bigfoot.”

“Why would you say such a thing?”

The cracking noise grew closer.

“We need to get out of here. Whatever that is, it doesn’t sound like it’s out for a leisurely night stroll!”

Turning to head back to the safety of the cabin was the first good idea the women had had in a string of bad ideas leading up to that point, but as any hiker knows, going downhill is actually harder than going up. The slick clay hill only made it worse, and soon, in a panic, the women were tripping and falling as the noise grew closer.

And now it had a peculiar smell. Whatever was bounding towards them in the woods reeked, a mix of fetid body odor, Doritos, skunk, and rot.

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Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
—“The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats

The center. The middle. The place of least extreme, the spinning point, the tack, the rudder, home.

Where is the center?

For the continent of North America, it’s Rugby, North Dakota (or, as claimed by others, Center, North Dakota). For the center of the nation, it’s near…

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“Do we have our current road atlas?” I asked as a friend and I set about packing up the truck for a week on the road.

Sure, I have a phone.

Sure, it has Google Maps.

Sure, it’ll keep us on the fastest route avoiding closures and tolls.

Sure, we’ll use it at times.

But I neither trust the phone to work in…

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My friend frequently regales me with tales from the men’s locker room at the gym. I’ve written about it before.

The latest saga was about how the guys come out of the steam sauna in the locker room, nude, dripping wet, and proud.

“Gross,” is all I can say. “Are they proud that they survived the heat of the sauna?”

“I guess.”

“Pathetic. They haven’t lived un…

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While in Minnesota for Christmas, we stopped at the Angry Trout Café in Grand Marais. It was nice inside, but not what I’d consider a fancy restaurant by any means. Four of us ate there, ordering three meals total. Two were fish and chips, one was chicken and chips. Three of us had small mugs of hot/lukewarm chocolate.

I felt a pang of concern, even before we got the bill, just from glancing at the menu. It wasn’t just the sky high prices ($15.50 for chicken strips and fries?), but the very in-depth explanation of service charges instead of tips.

“That’s so that everyone gets an equal amount,” my mom said. And I understand that’s probably it, but the extreme clarification that it wasn’t a tip, but was instead a service charge had me wondering if there weren’t additional reasons (tax? bookkeeping? yet another brick in the crashing economic wall?).

When the bill arrived, it was $90.

$90.

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My sister needed to pick up some sheep she’d purchased, and so the three sisters headed to New Mexico in a pickup truck with a portable trailer in the back. It was going to be a hard drive there and back again.

It wasn’t until a Coffee Cup truck stop in South Dakota that I could relax, for despite multiple stops in Pierre, that w…

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It was like an ugly gash that cut across the Great Plains through the southwest, a dark blotch centered on Kansas and stretching up and over, landing hard in New Mexico.

This was the late 1960’s and 1970’s, and cattle were dropping like flies.

I’m talking about cattle mutilations.

In the files released by the FBI to the public, 130 odd pages of memos and newspaper clippings, you’ll find a September 1976 article from Oui, a men’s pornography magazine, because no stone goes unturned by the FBI.

Ed Sanders, the author of that article, grabs the reader by informing him that, in the past three years, more than 1500 cattle in 22 states have been killed, mutilated, and had their blood drained with various body parts and organs removed. The surprisingly lengthy article goes on to feature just about every gory detail and every speculative explanation possible.

Nudie photos, and then an article about cattle mutilations. There’s some congruency there.

Sanders, who also wrote The Family, a rather creepy book about Charles Manson, had earlier acknowledged to crime writer Alexander Cockburn that he’d received a cow’s tongue in the mail for his research efforts to share the world of cattle mutilations with lonely men.1

There were apparently many cow’s tongues to be had.

“In the late summer,” Cockburn wrote for a 1975 Esquire article, “a Colorado rancher found a blue plastic valise on his land. In it were a cow’s tongue, an ear, and a scalpel.”

Cockburn and Sanders were a little late to the game, though the stats had increased by the time they picked up their pen. The party had started long before their comprehensive articles.

A year early, in August of 1974, the Daily Tribune out of Hastings, Nebraska, had gone straight for the jugular: “Are UFO sightings and mutilations related?”

Among the slain cattle, the article included the death of a Quarter Horse, and a local resident informed the reporter that since the event, the “doors are locked and guns are loaded.” Intermixed with sightings of strange unidentifiable objects in the sky were descriptions of helicopters that seemed out of place.

How much of a gap is there, really, between aliens and G-men?

A year after the Daily Tribune article, the mutilations trudged on, as did the stonewalling from authorities. In 1975, public frustration that the FBI would not get involved created pressure for Senator Floyd Haskell to bring it to Congress to try to move the needle and investigate the mutilations.

In the September 3, 1975 edition of The Denver Post, editor Charles R. Buxton ran a short column entitled “Cattle Deaths And The FBI,” expressing a similar frustration and a disdain for the excuse that there was no legal reason or jurisdiction for the feds to get involved.

“If the FBI will not enter the investigation of mysterious livestock deaths in Colorado and some adjacent states, then Sen. Floyd Haskell…should take the matter to Congress for resolution,” he wrote. “There is already federal involvement. Consider this: Because of the gun-happy frame of mind developing in eastern Colorado (where most of the incidents have been occurring), the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has had to cancel a helicopter inventory of its lands in six counties. BLM officials are simply afraid their helicopters might be shot down by ranchers and others frightened by cattle deaths.”

Buxton drew attention to the killing and mutilation of animals happening in other states, suggesting there was a jurisdictional reason because the incidents were spread across a chunk of the nation and crossed state boundaries. “If there is a pattern to the incidents it would seem that the broadest possible study of them is indicated.”

Sightings of Army helicopters, threats to the local newspaper editor in Brush, Colorado, and a general sense of fear had created the potential for a shoot-first-question-later situation. Why didn’t someone do something?

Yet an August 29, 1975 memo later made public revealed that Sen. Haskell had, indeed, put pressure on the FBI and not just Congress. In a letter to Special Agent Theodore Rosack, Haskell emphasized that the mutilations were causing a great deal of fear in people.

“In virtually all the cases, the left ear, left eye, rectum and sex organ of each animal has been cut away and the blood drained from the carcass, but with no traces of blood left on the ground and no footprints,” Haskell wrote. He asked Rosack to look into it, if for no other reason than the ranchers were arming themselves to protect their livestock, families, and themselves. It was no small thing that 130 mutilation cases reported to local officials in the previous two years in nine states across the nation.

States like North Dakota.

On January 21, 1975, in a memo to the director of the FBI from the Minneapolis Division, law enforcement indicated they were worried about mutilations of animals in Minnesota, North Dakota, and South Dakota.

“For the information of the Bureau, animals, mostly livestock, have been reported as mutilated in the three-state area of this division and parts of their bodies missing. The parts listed as missing have been the sexual organs, ears, lips and udders, and in some instances, the blood from the animals was considered completely drained. No evidence of value ever located at the scene.”

According to the report, the state veterinarian said it was foxes.

Maybe foxes carry blue plastic valises.

McHenry, Dickey, Foster, and McIntosh counties, those western cattle lands, made the news in the region. Farmers found the animals, but no footprints or vehicle tracks, according to a January 1975 article in the Bismarck Tribune.

Part of the problem of ascertaining how the animals had died was that the ranchers in those western counties didn’t always find the dead animals soon after death. Western North Dakota is vast, rolling, and empty, like most of the places these mutilations occurred, and ranchers didn’t keep precise tabs on their herds every day. This made autopsying the slain animals difficult. There was a time factor.

A horse that had died in McIntosh County was unique in that its body was found relatively soon after its death. Dr. Ivan Berg, a veterinarian at NDSU, concluded it had died of dysentery, since a fox couldn’t kill a horse but could certainly feed on it after it had died. On the horse’s body, there was no indication of surgical or clean cuts as some ranchers had claimed when finding their mutilated livestock. For officials, this one case seemed to be a neat conclusion to all of the cases.

North Dakota Crime Bureau Chief Agent Richard Hilde assured the readers that they were “satisfied that the deaths were natural,” pointing out that the state officials in South Dakota had reached similar conclusions. “I’m completely satisfied at this point that we do not have a maniac or cult on the loose.”

I might have left it at that, except it happened to my grandfather’s cattle.

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Once, when I was younger and had more cartilage, when I had no foreknowledge of all but one other family member blowing out their knee, when invincibility still seemed possible, I was an aggressive—though polite—skier.

But now, nearing age 50, I frequently make decisions about physical tomfoolery by calculating my insurance …

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