It is the beginning of September and the goldenrod is lovely in Michigan. It is in full bloom about two weeks or three from when it will be in St. Louis. And I am captivated. I have visited Michigan on two subsequent weekends, for a funeral and for a reunion. 

Often when I have watched the goldenrod bloom in Forest Park in St. Louis–I enjoy it, which is the main thing–but I have often made mental notes to come back by with my camera. But then when I get around to it, sometime in October, the goldenrod is beyond its golden-ochre peak and is in its brown-white seed phase. Of course it is still beautiful in an elegiac sort of way, but it now no longer elicits that sharp electric feeling of anticipation.

So, this morning when driving from the retreat center on the banks of Lake Michigan into the countryside to visit some friends at their church and have lunch, I was taking it all. There were vast swathes, even whole fields, of goldenrod. I began conspiring as to where on my way back I might stop to take a photo. 

Alas my way back was not quite the same as the way there, but there were still patches of goldenrod, this time around agricultural fields. It was just a matter of waiting for a road with a grassy shoulder near one of the patches and then check my rear view and stop. 

And so I did.

And wow. There were goldenrod against a field of newly made wheeled bales of straw. There was a telephone line cutting diagonally across the scene which would provide some nice perspective and a large electric pylon. And as a crowning glory there was an endless flotilla of small clouds in a blue sky

I began my standard procedure of taking one or two individual shots to nail down my settings. Then I fixed my focus and turned off the autofocus and began taking shots while panning the scene in order to stitch them together later into a panorama.

I was completely absorbed.

It was then that I looked up and noticed the large pickup truck that had pulled up in front of my car facing me. It was not close, but it was not in an encouraging position. I bent down to take one more solitary shot of a straw wheel and the pylon. And, then, jarred a little, I decided the better part of safety (it was not valor) required going and talking to the men in the truck.

“Hey, bud. Watcha doing?”

“Taking pictures of the goldenrod.”

“What’s a goldenrod?”

It was then that I noticed the iPhone held up to record me. That might have elicited the first squirt of adrenaline. The man flicked his cigarette. The white haired man sitting next to him, big and silent and not smiling, seemed to be his father.

“Ah, those are those yellow flowers there….Uh, I am from down south and I was just taking some pictures of the colors.”

The driver pivoted his smartphone and took a picture of my license plate.

“So you folks like to come up from the south to take pictures of people’s property, huh?”

“Ah, it’s very pretty property. It’s a nice day.”

Or this is the sense of how the conversation went. I became a little muddled and there were bits in the middle that were somewhat repetitive. And then to wrap things up and make my exit I said.

“Well, you all have a nice day. I am headed back to Muskegon.”

And then I did.

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There was no sign of any weapon, no words of threat, no obvious words relating to my otherness in that place with my brown skin and long hair, but there was a sense of menace. I know it because while I continued my drive the adrenaline was now a tap that was completely open with a gushing stream. And as I type this just over an hour later, I can still feel its effects in my chest receding like a great wave.

While I was driving, I began to think of some of the different things that I might have said.

I might have said that I was fully within my rights to take pictures, being on the shoulder of a public road. Very wisely I did not. A soft answer turneth away wrath. 

I began to think through other the dynamics that the interaction may have contained.

It occurred in that liminal space in Michigan where lakefront resort real estate bleeds into farmland, where the influences of wealth eddy into the backwaters of rural and small town poverty. The gentlemen may have legitimately been concerned about some sort of surveyor from the south eyeing up their land.

They may have though I was someone from south of the big Detroit city, the opposite pole of their portion of Michigan, geographically and politically

In truth, I don’t know.

One of the few things I have learned in life is that it is a good practice to resist the urge of receiving impressions from a few broadly painted strokes and then use one’s feelings or imagination to paint in the details. That is the art of stereotype that may distort and impugn.

But how was I to think about it all? How was I to think of the fact that, judging from the yard signs in that part of the countryside, that it is very likely that they will be voting for the same candidate that I will be voting for come November. 

I think that part of the reason for the heightened impact of the encounter were the rather sharp juxtapositions it contained. When drinking in such an amazing afternoon, and I do sort of drink in all the beauty, it was like having the glass knocked from one’s hand.

And, yes, in the weekend prior I had been processing the past. I had been being bathed in the love and kind regards of people I knew in the missionary community in Pakistan. People who knew my brothers, who were friends with my mother and father–who knew what they were like, who knew me as a precocious little boy. In truth, I may have reverted to the innocence and tenderness of that little boy a bit. It was a bit of a bump back into the world as it is.

And, then, I was returning from morning church with a sermon about entering God’s rest and a church-full of kind folks from the same bit of countryside who warmly greeted me. And then directly from lunch, from visiting dear friends in their home with their sweet children.

I don’t know how to parse it all.

But for now I have resolved to drink in beauty all the more, to enter that rest described so well in the sermon more fully, and to continue to work and play in the world, while keeping a wise, but child-like heart.