Brooding Upon the Waters

When thirty years of untreated bipolar disorder left his father fighting for his life, Howard Schaap began to wonder how this man had fallen so far—from Minnesota’s Young Farmer of the Year to financial failure in the farm crisis to a bed in the neurology wing of Mayo Clinic. Brooding Upon the Waters is Howard Schaap’s memoir—at once deeply compassionate and searingly honest—of his father’s anguished journey. In his search for answers, Howard looks first to the landscape itself, where hard-luck fishing trips to the mud lakes of the tallgrass prairie mirrored his father’s dark moods and darkening theology. But there is also local history, where his father’s fall from grace, his manic decisions, and his political swing—not simply from moderate Republican to fervent populist, but “from someone broad-minded and warm-hearted to someone narrow and bitter”—have a precedent in American letters and history: Midwest settler Charles Ingalls, “Pa” in the famous Little House on the Prairie books. Brooding Upon the Waters recreates the stark beauty and haunting isolation of growing up on a failing family farm in the 1980s and 1990s. Along the way, Howard Schaap grapples with how these forces—as disparate as distorted theology and short-sighted financial greed—complicate his own struggle to remain loyal to the place he has always called home. Brooding Upon the Waters recounts not only a mental health crisis but also a crisis of the American Dream in the Upper Midwest, America’s lost landscape.