Dappled

I write some of these things so I don’t forget them.  I write some of these things to get stuff straight in my head.  I write all of this stuff for my own bemusement or solace, to keep it handy in one place, and to clear space in my head for other stuff to straighten out. 

There’s been a bunch of straightening recently, about words and what they mean.  What they mean today.  What they meant yesterday and, by “yesterday” I mean the 1800’s.  Illinois, Wisconsin, Iowa and California joined the union in 1818, 1848, 1846 and 1850 respectively.  Those are the four states under whose laws I have lived.  I have only been in the Supreme Court building in one of them.  Knock on wood.

Speaking of woods, is there a better place to read and write or think and stroll through than a mid-latitude forest?  If there is, I ain’t found it yet.  You enter and are enveloped in the kinship of existence.  Trees towering over you, bushes hoping for sunlight and flowers bursting out of the soil like fireworks.  Fallen leaves cushioning your stride while bees, bugs and birds go about their business.  Squirrels chattering, and deer and foxes rustling away round these parts, with nothing big and scary to worry about like out west.  You cannot help but feel connected and contemplative and joyful. 

Perhaps Vlad the Impaler just needed more walks in the woods.  Discuss amongst yourselves. 

On the topic of straightening, last year the Iowa Supreme Court straightened out how words in the Iowa Constitution are to be interpreted in State v White 987 N.W.2d 1 (Iowa 2024).  The Court explicitly held that interpreting the Iowa Constitution requires using the meaning of words as they were commonly understood when the constitution was adopted in 1857.  The ruling was a pretty big deal, in one of those difficult cases about whether someone who was convicted of doing something awful had a fair trial.  A  4-3 majority decided he did not, because the adult on trial could not “confront” two child witnesses, as the word “confront” would have been understood in 1857.  The Justices who dissented did not take issue with originalism as a construct, but with its application in the case.  

In the end, juries and fair trials (and top of their class public defenders) are our best hope for justice so, I took note of the ruling at the time (for reasons not necessary to the story, Iowa and United States Supreme Court blogs have been on my reading list the past few years).  With Iowa's clear instruction on constitutional interpretation, I offered up some perspective on the only sentence in either the United States or Iowa constitutions that has the word “truth” in it.  No kidding, that word only shows up once in either the United States or Iowa constitution … and it ain’t the one bathed in argon at the National Archives.  So now there just happens to be a copy of Webster’s 1828 dictionary in a box in the basement. 

Whether I need to drive back to SCOI or SCOTUS is yet to be determined, but I know the way to both, so that takes some of the worry out of the equation.  Not much of the worry, given the “equation” is anything but equal.  One guy v. national corporation, with all the high-powered, well-connected lawyers you could imagine not on the “one guy” side. 

Someone once told me the David v. Goliath fable and I believed it because … well, you kind of have to if your father was a shoe salesman before being handicapped by TB and your mother passed away from cancer when you were in high school.   David.  Aragorn.  Ernie Banks.  Huge believer still, even if dear ol’ Dave’s rock toss was an order of magnitude fairer fight, several orders of magnitude speedier than litigation. 

Somebody has to do the heavy lifting for truth in the public realm if the republic stands a chance.  Who better than some determinedly simple Midwesterner?  You know why newspapers cannot escape liability for defaming you (yes, you) just by slapping an opinion label on what they publish?  Because an Ohio high school wrestling coach named Michael Milkovich spent fifteen years, with three trips to SCOTUS, to make that the law of the land.  As a former high school baseball coach on throwing shoulder 2.0 myself,  I am not confident David’s rotator cuff could have survived fifteen years of slinging rocks.  But … reading, thinking, writing and periodic long drives to stately buildings so a newspaper can't publish something false about you (seriously, you) and refuse to correct it?  That’s doable.  Whether it results in journalism we can all have more confidence in and stronger democracy is yet to be seen, but it's all public service, to me.  Challenging corporate arrogance?  Village administrating?  Volunteer firefighting?  Same.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the woods.  Muir Knoll.  A little north of Bascom Hill on the University of Wisconsin campus.  Overlooking Lake Mendota. 

Year two of law school about to start for Colin.  We walked around campus, through the law building, up Bascom Hill and over to Muir Knoll.  A lunch and reading spot, he notes. Then, down a hill, through some gorgeous woods dappled in light to the lakefront path.

We have walked together in much bigger and much farther-flung forests.  The Tetons, Yosemite and Olympic National Park among them.  But this walk is different.  He will always be a son, but those other walks were much more father / son.  I got us to those other forests, knew some of them well, and led the way.  But not this walk.  He is out front.  These are his woods, and I am a guest in them.  He knows them like I know the path up to Pinyon Peak or the way to Cloud’s Rest.  To say it is good to see a son in law school walk joyfully and familiarly through woods on campus is to grossly undersell the word “good”.    

Not a word about any case, or class, or worry.  Just a walk in the kinship of the woods, recorded only in the breeze whispering through the leaves, and here. 

Just Colin, Marcia and me.  And my number one hero dear ol’ dad, in spirit.   

Truth.