I had to make a quick trip up to the Altenburg Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum to go over details for my Last Generation presentation this weekend.
It gave me a chance to do some scenic sightseeing. This is the tiny gravel road leading to Tower Rock. The leaves are getting ready to do their color thing. They should be in full show in a few more days, just in time for Wife Lila to see it. She’s flying from St. Louis on Cape Air, so she’ll be low enough to see the foliage from the sky down instead of from the ground up.
The river’s up
The river’s up, and the water swirling around Tower Rock has a lot of debris floating in it. I thought was was going to get to shoot a video of a huge log getting sucked into the beginning of a giant whirlpool, but it escaped the whirling waters. Then, just as quickly as it formed, the whirlpool dissipated like a funnel cloud pulling back up into the clouds.
Piles of persimmons
Mother’s favorite tree overlooking The Rock has been dropping persimmons like crazy. The ground is a carpet of sweet goo and seeds. The ladybugs, bees, yellow jackets and butterflies are having a field day sucking up the sweet nectar.
Normally I would have gathered up all the fruit worth saving, but reader Carol Lincoln Skowbo messaged me the other day that her neighbor’s tree leaves a mess of persimmons in her yard and asked if we wanted any. You can guess the answer. In the last week, we have been on a persimmon mashing binge. Carol and Mother have been baking all kinds of concoctions with the pumpkin-like pulp, and it has all been good. I’ll go into more detail in a later post.
Beauty in all directions
There is beauty everywhere you look at Tower Rock: look down and and watch bugs crawling over orange ornaments; look out and see the Mississippi River swirling around the rock the natives called “The Demon that Devours Travelers;” look up and see a gossamer tapestry of clouds.
Altenburg Hardwood Lumber Co.
The late afternoon sun highlighted the sprayers playing over huge stacks of logs at the Altenburg Hardwood Lumber Company. The logs are trucked in from all over the region.
I have to compliment the drivers of the log trucks: every driver on that road has been nice enough to pass my bicycle with plenty of room to spare. Some of the guys will give a friendly toot and wave as they go by.
Red cattle on green grass
We were coming up on the “golden hour” just before I hit Hwy 61 north of Fruitland. I liked these cows well enough that I drove on until I could find a safe place to make a U-turn.
When I looked at them, I thought of a comment in an ancient Reader’s Digest. An oil company was trying to convince a farmer that they should be allowed to drill on his land. “Just think what it’ll be like to look out over your fields and see lights of all colors winking back at you. What would be prettier than gazing out at something that’s like a huge Christmas tree?”
“Red cattle on green grass,” the laconic farmer replied. “No sale.”
Seelitz, in eastern Perry County, was a short-lived town near Altenburg. It was one of the seven colonies established in 1839 in the Saxon Migration.
Gerard Fiehler from the Lutheran Heritage Center and Museum walked me back to where a memorial stone contains the names of some of the earlier settlers. You’ll notice that many of the dates are from the first two years of the settlement.
The Rev. Martin Stephan was the leader of the movement. He and his followers, with a communal treasury of $88,000 (you can see the chest it was kept in at the museum), landed in Wittenberg with the goal of farming about 4,500 acres of land that resembled what they had left in Saxony, Germany.
Despite all the difficulties, the Saxon immigration was the start of the Lutheran Church – Missouri Synod, which was established in 1847.
