Kevin Koch - The Thin Places: A Celtic Landscape from Ireland to the Driftless

The Thin Places

A Celtic Landscape from Ireland to the Driftless

Copyright 2018 Kevin Koch. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3982-1

hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3983-8

ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3984-5

Manufactured in the U.S.A. 08/28/18

For my parents, Frank and Ermina Koch,who rooted me in the Driftless Land but gave me a Celtic name.

And for Marlene and Sharon,who have charted the course to Tr na ng

The silence of the landscape conceals vast presence... The earth is full of soul.

John ODonohue, Anam Cara

The Thin Places: A Celtic Landscape from Ireland to the Driftless has brought together several important threads of my life, from my love of my own home landscape in the bluffs above the Upper Mississippi River to my adopted landscape of Ireland, both of which are mere corners of the sacred earth.

But none of the above developed without the help and guidance of many people.

My wife Dianne is an amazing woman, as my lifes loving partner and as a scholar. She was my first reader/responder as these chapters developed and a copy-editor later on. Dianne was also gracious in sending me forth to live in Ireland not once, but twicefor four months in 2012 and two months in 2016. Im sorry I forgot to tell her that the snow blower has an electric-start cable.

Loras College has been unwavering in its support for this project. President Jim Collins and Provost Cheryl Jacobsen approved my appointment as Ireland Study Abroad Director in Spring 2012, and they along with an anonymous alumni donor awarded me the John Cardinal OConnor Chair for Catholic Thought in 2015-2016, which offered me both the time and the finances to travel throughout the American Midwests Driftless region and Ireland. Im fairly certain that I am the only recipient of the annual award to have submitted reimbursement expenses for guided mountain hikes.

Many other colleagues and friends deserve my thanks. Dana Livingston taught me how to see the prairie, when all I previously appreciated was the woods. My English Department colleague Andy Auge encouraged me to connect my interest in the Driftless Land with Irish Celtic studies, and has been generous with advice and support ever since. My students enthusiasm for their own nature-based writings kept me refreshed.

A special thank you to my daughter, Angie Koch, who designed the Ireland and Driftless Region maps that adorn the following pages.

In Ireland, the faculty and staff at the Dun Loaghaire Institute of Art, Design, and Technology (IADT), our partner school for the Loras-Ireland study abroad programhave been helpful and supportive as well. I particularly wish to thank the ever-gracious Professor Michael Murphy, who made me feel at home upon first setting foot on Irish soil. I also wish to remember Professor Barry McIntyre, a hill-walking partner and friend who passed away during the writing of this work.

Finally, a thank you to all of the people I interviewed and bothered for follow-up responses here in the Driftless and in Ireland. You have become a wide network of friends to me.

No doubt I have overlooked others whom I should have thanked.

Sacred landscapes are connected hill by hill and valley by valley, even across the oceans. The support of friends and family is no different.

I have been coming to this perch above the Mississippi River at my home in Dubuque, Iowa, to greet the sunrise eight times a year: the equinoxes, solstices, and the four Celtic feasts midway between each of them. Today is the spring equinox, and an orange glow is blotting through the purple above the eastern bluffs. The sun will be rising in ten minutes, giving me time to sip my coffee and listen for the return of spring birds.

When the sun crowns and burgeons and lets loose from the horizon, it will be a portal that I step through to a Celtic past and a spiritual present, linking places and people and time. Through and back and through again, whichever side I land on when the sun turns yellow-white is where Ill stay till the next passing.

Ireland or the Driftless Land of the Upper Mississippi Valley.

Several years ago, I led eleven Loras College students from Dubuque on a study abroad semester in Dublin, Ireland. My students took two courses from Irish professors and two courses from me, one of which was called The Nature of Nature in Ireland, exploring how people encountered the natural environment throughout Irish history and prehistory.

I had cut my teeth in such studies of my own landscape. A native of Dubuque, Iowa, my personal and writing interests lay in the Driftless Area of the Upper Mississippi Valley, a rugged 20,000 square mile region of northeast Iowa, southeast Minnesota, northwest Illinois, and southwest and central Wisconsin that the glaciers repeatedly bypassed. As such, it is a land of river bluffs and rock towers, steep hills and twisting valleys in the midst of the glacially flattened Midwest. It, too, has a deep, rich story of human interaction with the natural environment.

As the semester abroad came to an end, my students and I gathered one last time in our Dublin classroom. Look, I said, youve been studying the history and landscape of Ireland for four months. But next week we will be back home again. What will this semester abroad mean in the long run? What will you bring home? A bit of Ireland, no doubt. But bring back new eyes for your home. Where you live has a history, too. Like Ireland, your bedrock was formed under ancient seas. Glaciers pummeled it or swept around it, leaving it flat or bluff-ridden. Native Americans arrived about the same time that Paleolithic tribes arrived in Ireland as the glaciers retreated. Modern tribes flourished on the land and then were massacred and displaced by Euro-American invaders, much like the Irish endured centuries of English occupation. Pioneers tore and tamed the land with the plow, and merchants built cities along the rivers and where the trains passed through.

Your home landscape has beautiful scars to trace, just like Irelands. There are sacred lands with stories asleep in the woods and in the rocks.

And thus this project was born. Having encouraged my students to bring back new eyes for their home landscape, I endeavored to do so myself.

Coming home, I brought new eyes for the loca sacra, the sacred local.

My sunrise perch is at the Julien Dubuque Monument, the gravesite of the French-Canadian who arrived at these steep limestone bluffs and valleys along the upper Mississippi in 1788 to mine lead alongside the Meskwaki tribe. Two decades after his death in 1810 and immediately after the 1832 displacement of the Meskwaki, immigrant Irish lead miners followed in turn. They and immigrant German shop keepers soon established a river town and named it Dubuque.