Quintessentially Midwestern

My father passed away over a year ago. But the gifts keep coming.

At 87, Ron Dierwechter packed a lot of years in his life, and even more life in his years. The last of the great rural renaissance men, he left behind an astonishing archive — part physical, part digital.  

Despite the remorseless blows of Parkinson’s and steadily failing vision, he collected and catalogued letters, deeds, journals, photos, awards, speeches, performances, emails, videos, 8-millimeter films and various other items from decades of travel on multiple continents. 

He did that for all of us. Some of it is about local life stretching back to the 1890s, when my great-grandfather, Lewis, unloaded a wagon in Storm Lake to start a new farm north of town.

No longer able to work as a local surgeon or a global humanitarian, my father became an archivist if not quite a historian. The histories “hopefully will come in the future,” he once told me.

I was in my beloved hometown of Storm Lake last week, visiting my indomitable mother, Jewell, who has packed a lot of remarkable life in her own many years. After searching in the archive, I came across one of the many letters I wrote when I was younger.

It was dated Aug. 18, 1989, and posted from Guangzhou (old Canton). I had just arrived in China as part of the inaugural cohort of Harvard University’s WorldTeach program. We were delayed several months due to the bloody Tiananmen Square uprising in May. 

One of my new WorldTeach friends? A guy named Tim Walz.

Memories are slippery things. I did not grasp this one all at once. “Tim Walz?” I said to my wife last month, “That name is sure familiar.” As his biography soon spilled out, I realized my old teaching friend in China was now in the news. 

We lost touch long ago. But I started to piece together fragments and thought maybe I’d find a confirmatory letter or two after I dived into my dad’s archive. I did.

My pure joy was muted only by the sweet sadness that dad did not live long enough to see it.   

On Aug. 18, 1989, sitting in a youth hostel in Old Guangzhou, I wrote my parents about the boat trip we took up the Pearl River Delta to Guangzhou from Hong Kon — a real “slow boat to China.” I then discussed my first few days of orientation:

The “normal” things you would think characteristic of this adventure are all present. Most of the teachers are Easterners, and so on. One guy, Tim Walz, is from Nebraska and he’s so nice and quintessentially Midwestern.  

I dashed off many letters that year and likely discussed Tim again as I recall we met up when I later visited Guangzhou, where he was teaching. I was stationed in a smaller city well north of him and would travel to the Big City every few months to commiserate with other WorldTeach colleagues — and eat pizza rather than dim sum.  

It was an emerging, pulsating city on the move, changing by the minute. The world was changing, too. While I was in China, the Berlin Wall crumbled. Nelson Mandela walked back into freedom. We were all so excited, so young, so hoping to make a small mark in a big world. 

I discussed an outing that several of us took that same day, Aug. 18, 1989:

Today we [including Walz] became part of China's transportation system. The dominance of the bicycle is so important that I can't stress it enough. Trucks of all kinds, despite their desire to plow through the streets, are restrained from doing so precisely because the sheer density of human beings on bikes overwhelms them. The trick naturally enough is to stay somewhere “in the middle” of this moving blob. One does not venture into intersections alone as certain death awaits — for those foolish enough to try!  

Supposedly, we were on a quest for a movie theatre light years from the hostel. We started in good faith but blew it off after “the moving blob’ turned us the wrong direction. What could we do? We were on Renmin Road (“people” road) and the people decided to turn towards the south. We ended up nearly in the countryside at a medical college eating noodles and green stuff with a guy who kept insisting that he had an uncle in Arizona. Anyway, it was interesting to crash through the city on bicycles.

As a young man, 35 years ago, I found this guy from small-town Nebraska “so nice and quintessentially Midwestern.” Nice enough to register his name with my parents in far-away Storm Lake. Few other names survived. His did.

Today I remember Tim as jovial, relatable, positive, energetic and gregarious. He was up for adventure yet flexible enough to shift plans on the fly — to end up “nearly in the countryside at a medical college eating noodles and green stuff.”   

Character is a deep thing, not easily reshaped by sudden shifts in the weathervane. Yet it is visible if you care to look.  It does not surprise me to see where he is now.  

But I really owe the memory to my father, who in his autumn years wanted, like George Bernard Shaw, to be “thoroughly used up” and hand a “splendid torch” to future generations. 

And so he did.

Yonn Dierwechter is a Storm Lake High School graduate and is a professor of urban studies at University of Washington, Tacoma.