RENDEZVOUS
                   by Eugene Hutchinson Mallory 2


     I was born in Iowa that green and fertile land that lies
between the mighty Mississippi and the wide Missouri.

     Green and fertile as it is, it was molded by the mile high
ice of glaciers and is in truth a land of winter. Nevertheless I
put down roots in that land.

     In mid life I pulled up those roots and left for California
by that road of no return and the fateful bridge at Blair.

     I have lived for many years in this California land of
sunshine and earthquakes. Now, I am only days from beginning the
fourth and surely the last quarter century of my life.

     I sometimes wonder if when the California days are done I
could find a way to rendezvous with other Iowan dispossessed.
Could I see the buffalo belly deep in the tall grass prairie,
could I hear the prairie chicken calling as they forage around
those mighty hoofs. Would I feel on my shoulders the sudden
coolness of the darkening sky and look up to see the unknowable
millions of the passenger pigeons as they circle in their vain
search for a place where they can land unmolested. A place where
they could breed and nest for one more time before the dark and
endless night of extinction falls upon their kind. They will not
be at the rendezvous. The last of that for the traveling race
died a pitiful prisoner in a cage.

     Back to the buffalo will there be a furtive Indian at their
heels, his flint tipped arrow ready. Behind the Indian a
frontiersman in greasy bloodstained buckskin his long rifle at
his shoulder. His tobacco stained mouth writhing in silent
curses at his luck two targets and one shot. Shall it be the
buffalo or the Indian. He lusts for the blood of both.

     I shall not keep that sad rendezvous of the dispossed.

     I must believe that the land beyond the California years is
a land of summer and I cherish the old Iowa wisdom that any fool
can make it in the summer time.