Finding Private Ryan

A field trip to God’s Country

by Patrick J. Shanahan
06/16/05

There is a scene early on in "Saving Private Ryan" that sticks in my mind. It is when the mother of the three slain Ryan boys stands at her Iowa farmhouse kitchen window, watching apprehensively as a traveling cloud of dust on the horizon signals the approach of a vehicle coming on down the dirt farm road. Not just any vehicle. An army car filled with men coming to tell her that her sons are dead. This scene invokes a lovely sense of “America that was” just prior to irredeemable tragedy and sadness. You know, the sense of “a simpler time,” of an unpaved land. The America of “if you build it they will come.” The almost mythical nostalgic America that seems in danger of extinction, if it ever truly existed. I believe that Steven Spielberg used that scene to represent not just a personal end of innocence, but a nation’s.

And yet…..maybe it’s not so mythical after all.

On a recent Sunday morning after church, my beautiful wife Karol, my daughter Cathryn, and I piled into the car and headed down the road to Karol’s cousin’s daughter’s high school graduation party. We took the usual route down to Jordan, but found a bridge out on the road to New Prague, and, in the complete absence of any detour markers, had to take series of estimated turns on the country roads of south central Minnesota to find our way. This is beautiful and serene country. Not table-flat like the farm country of Northern Illinois or Indiana, but a land of lush green gentle swells of farmland cut by meandering stream valleys and punctuated with majestic oaks. The cows were lying in the muddy shade on this bright and sunshiny day, while the farm dogs flew out of the ditches to chase us down as we drove past.

We took a series of guesses in the general direction that should get us to New Prague, but pretty soon each turn began to look just like the last, and the traffic got thinner and thinner. Then out of nowhere appeared a cute little church on a cute little hill. Around a cute little bend we drove and came, strangely enough, upon a baseball field. With baseball players. Not boys. Men. Playing baseball. In the middle of the corn. We had stumbled into the hamlet of St. Benedict which, until that moment, I had not known to exist. Had it not been for the aluminum bats I would have assumed we had stumbled into "Field of Dreams." Taking advantage of the opportunity to straighten ourselves out, we pulled over and hollered to the on-deck fellow if he could point us to New Prague. He was delighted to help. A big strapping farm boy in his early 20s, he had a boyish grin gracing a shy face as he outlined a combination of lefts and rights that would get us to where we needed to be.

Southern Minnesota is dotted with these crossroads hamlets, signs of a pre-automated era. There is always a church, a bar, a general store (often a run-down convenience store with inoperable gas pumps) and a grain elevator. And usually a small smattering of weathered houses. St. Benedict disappeared behind us as quickly as it arose and true to our ballplayer’s prediction we arrived in New Prague within minutes. We met up with Grandma Elaine at Klemmer’s restaurant, and then headed off on the next leg of our adventure. I noted as we drove to Montgomery that we were on the “Czech Memorial Highway.” “Diversity” in this part of the state means people of German, Bohemian, and Czech ancestry living peacefully cheek by jowl, with the occasional Irish family providing local color.

After Montgomery we left Le Seuer County (home of the Jolly Green Giant!) and entered Rice County. The road we turned onto was no longer paved. You know you have officially entered the boonies when the dirt road you are on has a County Road designation. We turned right from our dirt road onto another dirt road, and there, about a mile down the road up on a rise, was Cousin Randy’s farm. As we flew down the road with dust kicking up behind and no paved surface within miles, it struck me that perhaps Private Ryan’s land did still exist. Maybe just the car models had changed. Maybe the rest of us have had our faces too buried in our computers and game boys to notice.

When we got to Randy’s farm a goodly crowd had already gathered for food and visiting. Many in the crowd were Karol’s relatives. But there were also a whole bunch of farmer-neighbors. As with all true farmers, they were uncomfortable with formality. Their hair was awkwardly wetted down and slicked back, while their over-ironed sports shirts and vintage sansabelt slacks betrayed their frugality. The farmwives looked just a little too plain and worn down. As if they had no time for primping. Anybody who thinks being a farmwife isn’t a full time job-and-a-half hasn’t known a farmwife.

Everybody, related or not, looked pretty much the same, except for the adopted toddler son of the local Lutheran minister. This young boy was clearly from Africa, his deep black skin a wonderful and telling contrast with the pale and too-red faces of the German-American farmers.

In addition to farming 430 acres, raising a dozen or so steers and a passel of chickens, Randy also moonlighted as a seed-corn salesman. He and his neighbors talked about the weather (with a seriousness unknown to most of us) machinery, seed, and such. This was it. This was the week’s slack time. A couple of hours on a Sunday afternoon.

I spend a lot of time writing about politics and public policy in a way that sometimes seems parochial. I’m sure that many of the men and women seated at the tables eating barbeque and desert bars are on the other side of the political aisle. This is, after all, the home of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. But the older I get the more I believe that culture matters more than politics. Culturally, these folks are bedrock. They fervently believe in the things that made America great: hard work, self-restraint, love of country, fear of God, honesty, frugality, self-reliance, and no whining! I fear that a growing segment of our nation rejects these bedrock cultural traits out of hand. More and more I see the political wars in which we engage as being surface manifestations of the culture wars.

Several of the older men around the tables with me had fought in World War II, though they don’t talk about it much. They were the Private Ryans. They fought for more than just their dusty farms connected by dusty roads. They fought for God, and country, and freedom. They fought honorably and came back to raise their families in freedom as they had been taught to do. To answer the Tom Hanks character in the movie, they earned it.

This simple Sunday trip reinvigorated my faith that Private Ryan’s country hasn’t vanished. Private Ryan himself is still around if we take the time to look for him. He’s actually not that far away. He’s in Kilkenny, Minnesota. And he’s also still deeply embedded in the American character. If we choose to look for him. We just need to forget about politics long enough to seek him out, to nourish him, to cultivate him, and to defend him. It seems the least we can do.