my older brother came for a visit. we are very close, two years apart, and at the same time, very far apart. he is very cerebral and i am the opposite. but i have always loved him in spite of the tension between us.

his wife is blind, and brings a wonderful dog along with her everywhere, and they are on the back end of a huge trip out to the west coast and to kansas. after kansas, here, illinois, and then home to pittsburgh. they rented a car in kansas and had it here.

what they really wanted to do was see lots of relatives, namely my two children at home, my third down in a nearby town, my stepdaughter and family of three kids, another stepdaughter and two kids. none of this was really possible. even my own children were somewhat shy to come out and really talk about everything. but one day i decided to take him to burlington, and the wives pushed us out the door since they wanted to stay and talk things over. that turned out to be a godsend since both of them needed an ear to voice their complaints.

but my brother and i drove off on a familiar path, as it's only about forty miles to the river and we had been there before with my father-in-law. the problem was that burlington had big roadblocks and a broken bridge so you really had to know how to get to the place we were going. after about ten minutes of driving around aimlessly we found it. a green hill overlooking the mississippi, with an old settler's cabin right there and a path down into the nearby woods, which we hoped would go down to the river.

my brother, being from pittsburgh, could have had a steep wooded path at any time, but wasn't really in the habit of hiking much. he was grateful that his wife wasn't along, because the path, steep as it was, had a lot of roots and walking wasn't easy. about two minutes into the path we ran into a woman and a boy, the boy about twelve, who had just seen a snake. they were impressed. i myself figured that that snake was probably well-hidden by now, and i wasn't going to worry about it.

but as i looked around, i saw a wondrous site. water was coming down the hill toward the river in two different creekbeds, which joined right in front of us, and then it came shooting out of a cave right there as well, making a third stream which joined the first two on their relentless journey down to the mississippi. the woods enveloped us and reminded me of the hiking we did in west virginia and pittsburgh when we grew up.

the people were very friendly and wanted to know where we were from. we told them, pittsburgh and galesburg. they let us go and we walked around the cliffs; the path did not go down to the river as we had hoped. i was right that there was no snake in sight. he was right that it would have been a bad place for his blind wife to try to walk. at one point we both ducked as we came to another cave in the bluffs with somewhat slippery rock to walk on.

it was at this point that i noticed that i was a little more spry than he was. i swim every day, and walk quite a bit more than he does, i guess, while he, though he has become more careful about food, has still not really done much exercise. he is busy as a wikipedia editor these days, making sure biographies about chess masters are updated and current.

i thought this was a good thing to do when one retired. in a sense he's a very practical kind of biographer; while i like to tell a good story, he likes to make sure that wikipedia pages are up to date, have good links, and tell the truth.

back where we parked there was an old stone cabin run by the historical society, for the "iowa natives" society which has long been defunct. the cabin was restored to its original form, though, and the guy in it let me tell my story of our iowa native relative who walked 100,000 miles of the midwest figuring out how the glaciers had receded in this area. i realized that i should bring my book down to burlington and push it around a little, as it has burlington and denmark in it, and reveals a little about the history of the area.

when i walk into these history areas i seem to talk more than the guides do, as i have learned a lot, and generally my own relatives are tired of having it repeated to them. a good history docent is a captive audience. earlier in the trip we had gone to the train museum and the same thing had happened although that guy knew a whole lot more than i did about trains. i did know, though, how awesome they are.

speaking of awesome, my brother, at seventy-one, has seen my grandchildren before i have, and has managed to bring his blind wife all the way across the country, not to mention to mexico and florida earlier. as i watched him gingerly managing that path, i appreciated that. such moments will not last forever.