Jesus walks the LakeTrail

A stretch of the Lake Trail along West Lakeshore Drive. Photo by Jake Kurtz

It’s a blessing and curse of getting old. I walk through Sunset Park as a comfort with conjured memories: swimming at the steps. Shorty’s bait shop, marina and beer oasis. Sandlot and pee wee baseball at Bradford Field. Drinking Cokes with Dan Statz at the Little Store wasting summers away, and others who aren’t here anymore.

To think of the Cobblestone Inn and Ballroom open again restores a picture I created of my youth. It makes me look forward. It’s a respite from our sour state — they would crucify the Christ if he were an immigrant knocking on your door asking directions these days, I’m thinking. Didn’t mean to shoot him but he didn’t look right and talked gibberish. Nobody else is around except for the dog. You think about your step more nowadays, and you get into a bit of a zone. It must be what makes jogging worthwhile.

When I look up walking east a figure with long flowing hair is backlit, like a halo, no kidding, against the sun and the illuminated waves. As you get closer he has a long beard and walks with the weight of the world on his shoulders. It’s Jesus. He could have walked on water from the Big Island. That would have detoured him from petting the dog, who senses his redeeming spirit.

He’s been crucified a hundred times if not a thousand. He wears a tattered sweatshirt under his old coat. He says it sure is windy. “Can’t you do something about this weather?” I asked him. He couldn’t make it out but laughed and walked past us going the opposite direction, like he does on Sunday mornings. They called him Joe when they called him at all. He walks like Jesus to me.

That was weeks ago, cold and nasty. The weather cleared up. Thanks be. The wind died down. If I saw him I would thank him. I would remind him that we sure could use a shower about now. And then some.

I might, without verbalizing it, suggest that he look after my friends. They are fewer and older by the day. I go under the knife for a hernia, from my former life as a body builder, and you’re not positive you will come back after they knock you out. Doctors have become part of my future, and I would appreciate a little help with patient advocacy.

That’s just the physical side of things.

There’s the psychic toll that all the voodoo hokum is taking on Iowa.

A whole lot of people are made to feel that they don’t belong here. If you don’t buy in to the dominant culture repressing queers while fathers dress in drag for the homecoming skit, you might as well pack for someplace else. Jesus knew the routine. It’s that sort of attitude that makes you not want to see someone down by the lake.

I confess to having looked up home prices near Mankato. Gov. Tim Walz, a retired Army Guard staff sergeant, talks like Hubert Humphrey and brags about not bullying people. Everything was too expensive, because people want to move to Minnesota and all that socialism.

It was just a fantasy. Blessed are the poor, for they live in Iowa. I was born in Storm Lake. I grew up in Sunset Park. We moved back here because it is home, and we can afford it. I had an official tell me at city hall that we were not “positive” enough about The City Beautiful (code for not buying into incompetent authoritarian ways) and I came unglued. Occasionally the thought of it fills me with dread, which evolves into a certain rage.

I could use some guidance on that front, as well. It may take tongues of fire.

If I see him again I might ask: We were born in Shangri La, the eden of the Americas. How did we mess it up? How did we make people like us, reared along wide streets with catfish at the bottom, think they are victims? Who is crucifying whom? Could you do something about it? He can’t change the weather, maybe, but he can set some matters straight if it isn’t too much a bother. After all, Jesus hung out with 12 bachelors and a woman of the night when he went fishing. I’ll keep on walking. The dog will show me the way.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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Chuck Offenburger: Iowa Boy Chuck Offenburger, Jefferson and Des Moines

Barry Piatt: Piatt on Politics: Behind the Curtains, Washington, D.C.

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