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Giants in the Earth

This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.

The word for today is "epiphany"—that moment in the dark reaches of the mind when a light flicks on at two in the morning, and we understand the calculus problem we have been struggling with, or capture just the right image for the poem, or know that it is really love.

Years later, we remember these epiphanies and relive them, as I remember a prairie epiphany from almost thirty years ago. Miss Sue was a college freshman in the flower child sixties. She had come here from Long Island. One day over coffee I discovered that she had never been west of the Mississippi River, had never been in any place out of sight of human habitation. There was always a street or porch light or a lit window to say "you're not lost, not alone. We're here."

So, my family took Miss Sue west to the prairie on a camping trip, just to show here what the night and stars looked like with no human lights showing. We set up her pup tent apart from ours and went to sleep. The next morning, I discovered that Miss Sue had not even gone inside her tent, had sat all night listening to the call of the brooding prairie, the wind, watching the bright stars move in their tracks, unable to break the spell.

Miss Sue's epiphany became mine. I had taught Rolvaag's pioneer novel Giants in the Earth perhaps ten times in a regional literature class and had always assumed the title referred to the sturdy immigrants who conquered the American prairies. Watching Miss Sue, I suddenly knew that Rolvaag meant something else, too. His immigrants had come from small farms in Norway, a land full of elves and nisse and trolls who played tricks on humans—they soured milk and stole baby goats. What they found on the great American prairie were not elves, but giants, the great elemental forces of nature which run unchecked on the plains: the giants of fire and wind and distance daring the pioneers to come out and fight. Instead of elves and nisse, there were "giants in the earth."

That's how my student became my teacher, and showed me the giants which still live in this river valley.

Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by Augustana College, Rock Island, Illinois.

Community
Beginning 1995, historian and folklorist Dr. Roald Tweet spun his stories of the Mississippi Valley to a devoted audience on WVIK. Dr. Tweet published three books as well as numerous literary articles and recorded segments of "Rock Island Lines." His inspiration was that "kidney-shaped limestone island plunked down in the middle of the Mississippi River," a logical site for a storyteller like Dr. Tweet.