Note to self (link moved) --
http://www.globalministries.org/about-us/origin-and-legacy-of-the-common.html
http://www.disciples.org/MissionAlignmentCoordinatingCouncil/ModelForConversationNarrative/tabid/337/Default.aspx
Monday, October 13, 2008
Sunday, August 03, 2008
Disrobed In the Public Square – Urbanscapes 2008
Denison University First Year Program
Jeff Gill
Oxford is home to the original “Town and Gown” controversy.
From the 11th century roots of English college life, students were semi-monastic participants in religious life, so like monks and brothers in most monasteries, they wore robes that marked them as part of an intentional community.
Even as academic colleges grew more and more distinct from their monastic and seminary origins, the robes and hoods remained both useful and decorative in the vast drafty cathedral-like buildings, their uniformity across the quadrangles and cloisters mixing with the subtle flash of brightly colored linings, marking which school or institution was their scholastic home.
The rights and privileges carried by monastic establishments in the medieval period continued under royal charters that usually gave them exemptions from local authority. Local court jurisdiction and the ability to penalize students and faculty were limited, leading to growing resentments of people “who aren’t from here” by the folks who grew up and worked around the college precincts.
“Town and Gown” may rhyme, but they once were put together mainly to describe the two sides in street riots, conflicts that included death and dismemberment in medieval Oxford. The gowns slowly eroded into the 20th century as the style became more of a symbol, until the 1960s when the obligatory wearing of the short remnant robe was ended.
Today’s students at a Denison don’t wear any kind of academic robe other than at graduation, with faculty (some) wearing regalia (partially) at certain campus events through the year (occasionally). In the village, students once may have been quickly and readily recognizable by their style of dress, even if not a uniform garb, but no longer.
Clothing that a college student would wear is just as likely to be seen on a Granville grandmother or traveling tourist at a sidewalk café; the uniform of non-conformity is widely adopted, so the ability of any one person to spot another person from a distance and think “college student” is non-existent. A local high school kid, a young adult from a neighboring town on an errand, or an entrepreneur between conference calls can all be in similar clothing.
If everyone is dressed the same in the public square, then we have equality and collegiality, right? Recent concerns and questions lead us to shake our heads “no.” The distinctions between classes and cohorts may have visually narrowed, but the knowledge that inequalities and injustices still exist in economic opportunity and social mobility leads to an ever more careful parsing of glances and intonations. How much weight can “a look” carry? When other means of non-verbal communications are limited, quite a bit.
How we look at how people look at us is also framed in our assumptions about what they are likely to think about us. Sensitivities about what we wear are no longer rooted in whether we have a tie or a dress on, or if we are in our “dress clothes” or “work clothes.” There is less today for others to be “looking at,” focusing now on our faces, our skin, our own gaze back at them. This can be a vulnerable way to feel looked at, more personal than assumptions about “you’re a worker,” “you are wealthy,” “you are out of place.”
Granville has long wanted to be seen as a place where “all are welcome.” In such a location, no one would be “out of place.” With rapid population growth in the surrounding area along with increased tourism bringing many new faces to the streetscape and public square, there is going to be a certain amount of “visual sorting” going on no matter how welcoming the village may be.
“Do I know you? Are you someone I’ve met? Do I need to greet you, or can I keep moving?” These are questions that come to mind in a public social activity, propped up by social conventions like the Midwestern “hello” to strangers or the Northeastern “never make eye contact with strangers” assumption. Clothing and accessories used to be social lubricants, allowing the Town and Gown to slide easily past each other without a glance, friendly or not.
Those markers and signals are gone, and a certain uneasiness is all that remains in their place. Direct communication, personal relationship – those would be the gold standard, the ideal for building community and weaving together the streetscape at the foot of College Hill. TV time and commuting and technology have so far only worked against adding more interaction between students and staff and faculty and the residents of Granville.
Town and Gown may have more need of community with less obvious distinction separating them, since they do have different schedules and timetables and priorities in many ways. Understanding what has changed, even just about how those two aspects of our village see each other, may help us envision what we need to do to see each other afresh – then we might be better able to make the intentional effort to relate.
Denison University First Year Program
Jeff Gill
Oxford is home to the original “Town and Gown” controversy.
From the 11th century roots of English college life, students were semi-monastic participants in religious life, so like monks and brothers in most monasteries, they wore robes that marked them as part of an intentional community.
Even as academic colleges grew more and more distinct from their monastic and seminary origins, the robes and hoods remained both useful and decorative in the vast drafty cathedral-like buildings, their uniformity across the quadrangles and cloisters mixing with the subtle flash of brightly colored linings, marking which school or institution was their scholastic home.
The rights and privileges carried by monastic establishments in the medieval period continued under royal charters that usually gave them exemptions from local authority. Local court jurisdiction and the ability to penalize students and faculty were limited, leading to growing resentments of people “who aren’t from here” by the folks who grew up and worked around the college precincts.
“Town and Gown” may rhyme, but they once were put together mainly to describe the two sides in street riots, conflicts that included death and dismemberment in medieval Oxford. The gowns slowly eroded into the 20th century as the style became more of a symbol, until the 1960s when the obligatory wearing of the short remnant robe was ended.
Today’s students at a Denison don’t wear any kind of academic robe other than at graduation, with faculty (some) wearing regalia (partially) at certain campus events through the year (occasionally). In the village, students once may have been quickly and readily recognizable by their style of dress, even if not a uniform garb, but no longer.
Clothing that a college student would wear is just as likely to be seen on a Granville grandmother or traveling tourist at a sidewalk café; the uniform of non-conformity is widely adopted, so the ability of any one person to spot another person from a distance and think “college student” is non-existent. A local high school kid, a young adult from a neighboring town on an errand, or an entrepreneur between conference calls can all be in similar clothing.
If everyone is dressed the same in the public square, then we have equality and collegiality, right? Recent concerns and questions lead us to shake our heads “no.” The distinctions between classes and cohorts may have visually narrowed, but the knowledge that inequalities and injustices still exist in economic opportunity and social mobility leads to an ever more careful parsing of glances and intonations. How much weight can “a look” carry? When other means of non-verbal communications are limited, quite a bit.
How we look at how people look at us is also framed in our assumptions about what they are likely to think about us. Sensitivities about what we wear are no longer rooted in whether we have a tie or a dress on, or if we are in our “dress clothes” or “work clothes.” There is less today for others to be “looking at,” focusing now on our faces, our skin, our own gaze back at them. This can be a vulnerable way to feel looked at, more personal than assumptions about “you’re a worker,” “you are wealthy,” “you are out of place.”
Granville has long wanted to be seen as a place where “all are welcome.” In such a location, no one would be “out of place.” With rapid population growth in the surrounding area along with increased tourism bringing many new faces to the streetscape and public square, there is going to be a certain amount of “visual sorting” going on no matter how welcoming the village may be.
“Do I know you? Are you someone I’ve met? Do I need to greet you, or can I keep moving?” These are questions that come to mind in a public social activity, propped up by social conventions like the Midwestern “hello” to strangers or the Northeastern “never make eye contact with strangers” assumption. Clothing and accessories used to be social lubricants, allowing the Town and Gown to slide easily past each other without a glance, friendly or not.
Those markers and signals are gone, and a certain uneasiness is all that remains in their place. Direct communication, personal relationship – those would be the gold standard, the ideal for building community and weaving together the streetscape at the foot of College Hill. TV time and commuting and technology have so far only worked against adding more interaction between students and staff and faculty and the residents of Granville.
Town and Gown may have more need of community with less obvious distinction separating them, since they do have different schedules and timetables and priorities in many ways. Understanding what has changed, even just about how those two aspects of our village see each other, may help us envision what we need to do to see each other afresh – then we might be better able to make the intentional effort to relate.
Monday, July 28, 2008
Flipping Through the Pages of Time, Slowly
“I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept…only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”
- Charles Darwin “On the Origin of Species” (1859)
Imagine a vast book, with pages the size of Ohio, and even larger. Look at the edge of that volume, laying flat, with sheaves of edges layered one above the other. You can almost sense the piled narrative hidden within, pick up on the heft and depth and duration of the story to be told.
Lay that book out upon the landscape, with the illustrations and lines of text receding into the distance. You peel back the cover and begin to read—from the most recent description of events on the first page before you, down to the beginning of the plot far below.
In terms of geologic books, then, one “murder” mystery of pre-history is the riddle of mass extinction. The fossil record shows repeated episodes through deep time where large numbers of living creatures simply vanish. Their rocky remains are buried in earlier, or deeper strata, but are nowhere to be found in later stratigraphy, the geologic layers closer to the surface.
Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick? That’s the question, after a fashion: Who, or what, did the deed?. Much consideration and interest in recent years has been given to a large weapon and the single assassin. Who killed the dinosaurs? Well, there’s strong evidence that an asteroid hit Earth about 65 million years ago, leaving an impact crater near the Yucatan peninsula called Chicxulub Crater. Many geologists and paleontologists who study “macrostratigraphy,” the way the layers of sediment tell their immense story, think the Chicxulub event led directly to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species, right down to snails and plankton. Through the course of time, there have been dozens of other continent-wide extinction events, with at least five in the last 500 million years (just the last chapter or two as a geologist reads).
Shanan Peters ’98, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to look at the wider story of mass extinctions, and started doing a body count—remember, you can only read this book from the end back to the beginning, from the surface to the earlier depths. His research has unearthed, if you will, some significant findings, and earned him equally significant recognition as one of geology’s rising stars. In fact, just last year Peters received the Hodson Award of the Palaeontological Association of Great Britian, given annually to a paleontologist under the age of 35 who has made a significant early contribution to the science.
Peters knew, starting with his work as a Denison undergrad with professors like Ken Bork, that there were places around the globe where earlier layers gave the careful reader a peek ahead, or actually back closer to the start of the story. Through his graduate work at the University of Chicago and a post-doc at the University of Michigan, he got a look at parts of the narrative revealed in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, around the globe to India’s eroded strata, and off into desert regions of Egypt.
Along with the glimpses into the deeper past, he was working to find new approaches to “quantifying the rock record”— to read between the lines, in a way, using chemistry in the rocks and details of the smallest fossils embedded there to figure out just what happened when 75 to 95 percent of the plants and animals on the planet seemed to suddenly vanish.
Peters’ work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, led to a report published in June by the noted science journal Nature, which says not that the butler did it, but that what appears to be sudden and dramatic extinction events may be the result of something as slow and steady and inevitable as the rise and fall of sea levels.
Peering directly at the make-up of the sediments themselves, Peters is able to show whether fossils are embedded either in material made substantially from the breakdown of shells and skeletal material during their cycle of life and death, leaving behind much silica -- or are primarily the aftermath of simple sediments washed down from the land.
A broad inland continent wide sea, like the one once spreading across the central United States, will drain and change as tectonic plates push up and when climactic changes lock up more polar ice, further lowering sea levels. As the seas dry up, the animals and plants, from the largest shark to the smallest shrimp or algae must move, or die, and sometimes both. They disappear quickly from the fossil record, but as a result of processes that take long stretches of time to play out.
Under the title "Environmental determinants of extinction selectivity in the fossil record," the study looks at the chemistry and make-up of the pages of time themselves, and fossils embedded there serving as virtual page numbers. With the help of a global compendia of marine animal fossils complied by Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, those page numbers help compare the chemical traces of ocean levels to "shifts in shallow marine environments that play out over the space of an entire continent," Peters observes. Page by page, through 4,000 samples from over 500 American sites stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Peters' analysis looks back through Darwin's "imperfectly kept" record of geologic time in sedimentary layers, showing how the rise and fall of the earth's oceans can readily account for the mass extinctions as they occur again and again over millenia.
Peters is quick to point out that there are still asteroids and volcanic eruptions in the story, and biological factors of evolution like competition and disease play their part. “This work links them and smaller events in terms of a forcing mechanism, and it also tells us something about who survives and who doesn't across these boundaries,” Peters explains. “These results argue for a substantial fraction of change in extinction rates being controlled by just one environmental parameter.”
With concerns over global climate change and ocean levels high in today’s world, Peters research into the deeper reaches of earth’s history also carry a current relevance. Extinctions today and sea level rise may leave a mark on the earth that will be studied in ages to come – we hope.
“I look at the geological record as a history of the world imperfectly kept…only here and there a short chapter has been preserved; and of each page, only here and there a few lines.”
- Charles Darwin “On the Origin of Species” (1859)
Imagine a vast book, with pages the size of Ohio, and even larger. Look at the edge of that volume, laying flat, with sheaves of edges layered one above the other. You can almost sense the piled narrative hidden within, pick up on the heft and depth and duration of the story to be told.
Lay that book out upon the landscape, with the illustrations and lines of text receding into the distance. You peel back the cover and begin to read—from the most recent description of events on the first page before you, down to the beginning of the plot far below.
In terms of geologic books, then, one “murder” mystery of pre-history is the riddle of mass extinction. The fossil record shows repeated episodes through deep time where large numbers of living creatures simply vanish. Their rocky remains are buried in earlier, or deeper strata, but are nowhere to be found in later stratigraphy, the geologic layers closer to the surface.
Was it Colonel Mustard in the library with the candlestick? That’s the question, after a fashion: Who, or what, did the deed?. Much consideration and interest in recent years has been given to a large weapon and the single assassin. Who killed the dinosaurs? Well, there’s strong evidence that an asteroid hit Earth about 65 million years ago, leaving an impact crater near the Yucatan peninsula called Chicxulub Crater. Many geologists and paleontologists who study “macrostratigraphy,” the way the layers of sediment tell their immense story, think the Chicxulub event led directly to the extinction of the dinosaurs and many other species, right down to snails and plankton. Through the course of time, there have been dozens of other continent-wide extinction events, with at least five in the last 500 million years (just the last chapter or two as a geologist reads).
Shanan Peters ’98, an assistant professor of geology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, wanted to look at the wider story of mass extinctions, and started doing a body count—remember, you can only read this book from the end back to the beginning, from the surface to the earlier depths. His research has unearthed, if you will, some significant findings, and earned him equally significant recognition as one of geology’s rising stars. In fact, just last year Peters received the Hodson Award of the Palaeontological Association of Great Britian, given annually to a paleontologist under the age of 35 who has made a significant early contribution to the science.
Peters knew, starting with his work as a Denison undergrad with professors like Ken Bork, that there were places around the globe where earlier layers gave the careful reader a peek ahead, or actually back closer to the start of the story. Through his graduate work at the University of Chicago and a post-doc at the University of Michigan, he got a look at parts of the narrative revealed in Montana’s Rocky Mountains, around the globe to India’s eroded strata, and off into desert regions of Egypt.
Along with the glimpses into the deeper past, he was working to find new approaches to “quantifying the rock record”— to read between the lines, in a way, using chemistry in the rocks and details of the smallest fossils embedded there to figure out just what happened when 75 to 95 percent of the plants and animals on the planet seemed to suddenly vanish.
Peters’ work, funded in part by the National Science Foundation, led to a report published in June by the noted science journal Nature, which says not that the butler did it, but that what appears to be sudden and dramatic extinction events may be the result of something as slow and steady and inevitable as the rise and fall of sea levels.
Peering directly at the make-up of the sediments themselves, Peters is able to show whether fossils are embedded either in material made substantially from the breakdown of shells and skeletal material during their cycle of life and death, leaving behind much silica -- or are primarily the aftermath of simple sediments washed down from the land.
A broad inland continent wide sea, like the one once spreading across the central United States, will drain and change as tectonic plates push up and when climactic changes lock up more polar ice, further lowering sea levels. As the seas dry up, the animals and plants, from the largest shark to the smallest shrimp or algae must move, or die, and sometimes both. They disappear quickly from the fossil record, but as a result of processes that take long stretches of time to play out.
Under the title "Environmental determinants of extinction selectivity in the fossil record," the study looks at the chemistry and make-up of the pages of time themselves, and fossils embedded there serving as virtual page numbers. With the help of a global compendia of marine animal fossils complied by Jack Sepkoski of the University of Chicago, those page numbers help compare the chemical traces of ocean levels to "shifts in shallow marine environments that play out over the space of an entire continent," Peters observes. Page by page, through 4,000 samples from over 500 American sites stretching from the Appalachians to the Rockies, Peters' analysis looks back through Darwin's "imperfectly kept" record of geologic time in sedimentary layers, showing how the rise and fall of the earth's oceans can readily account for the mass extinctions as they occur again and again over millenia.
Peters is quick to point out that there are still asteroids and volcanic eruptions in the story, and biological factors of evolution like competition and disease play their part. “This work links them and smaller events in terms of a forcing mechanism, and it also tells us something about who survives and who doesn't across these boundaries,” Peters explains. “These results argue for a substantial fraction of change in extinction rates being controlled by just one environmental parameter.”
With concerns over global climate change and ocean levels high in today’s world, Peters research into the deeper reaches of earth’s history also carry a current relevance. Extinctions today and sea level rise may leave a mark on the earth that will be studied in ages to come – we hope.
Friday, February 22, 2008
DenMag L&F issue
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Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [first unused draft]
How would you feel if you were digging through a large crate for, say, a “major award” and didn’t find anything (not even a lamp shaped like a leg)?
Then you find out later it was what you only thought was packing material, the little white peanuts, or straw, or blocks of foam, that actually had value. Ow.
If DNA can be compared to the leg lamp, then Jeff Thompson, assistant professor of biology, is working to get people to take a look at the stuff Ralphie and his dad would just toss aside. Instead of “excelsior,” the stuff is called “histone,” and histones may not only play a role in building DNA, but as proteins themselves, actually interact with this building block of life to build and repair chromosomes. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes are made of in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ‘07, Arzu Arat, Lindsey Bostelman ‘05, and Andrew Keller ‘06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), gets repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named “DNA Repair.”
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of the genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. If DNA is the blueprint of life, histones work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
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*thanks to a note from Jeff Thompson –
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Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [take two]
If DNA is the blueprint of life, “histones” work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
Biology professor Jeff Thompson is showing students how to work with histones, and manage their ability to repair damage that comes with the wear and tear of everyday life. This mundane maintenance process within the cell sounds unremarkable, until you realize that repair and rebuilding processes running out of control is better known as – cancer.
Histones not only play a role in building DNA strands, but they are proteins themselves, interacting with the building blocks of life to build and maintain the inheritable genetic blueprint of an organism. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material that makes up those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ’07, Arzu Arat ’08, Lindsey Bostelman ’05, and Andrew Keller ’06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), is repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named DNA Repair.
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. That’s where histones and other proteins draw out the details that may fit into the broader strokes sketched by DNA.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
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Who Are You Callin’ a Dwarf Planet?
Astronomers are not known for their combative nature.
Long nights glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, or even longer days analyzing data from giant dish antennas, can leave them sleepless, but usually not feisty.
The gloves came off recently at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), when a panel announced a new definition of “planet” which left out Pluto, relegating the once ninth planet to the status of “dwarf planet.”
In a nutshell, the IAU definition sounds pretty straightforward, starting with orbiting a sun (remember, this is not just a definition for our neighborhood, the Solar System), and having enough gravity to become a sphere, but then they said a planet should “clear out its neighborhood.” This isn’t some cosmic block watch program, doing citizen arrests of graffiti artists, but a cosmological process where dust and sky junk is gathered by a regular orbit into tidy heaps, or better yet, moons.
Pluto has been known for some years to have a small moon, Charon, and the Hubble Space Telescope has added Nix and Hydra to Pluto’s realm. What makes Pluto unique by any standard is the vast, irregular orbit dipping down into Neptune’s neighborhood and looping off towards the Oort Cloud, taking some 250 years for a full lap of the Sun. Add in that the orbit is essentially unpredictable into the future, and you have a wild set of variables. A NASA mission called New Horizons launched last year will reach Pluto in 2015, but some worry the craft may be doomed by the amount of junk still floating aimlessly in the neighborhood, because it hasn’t been cleared.
Which brings us back to the IAU, which used this fact as grounds to, as some said, break the hearts of every child and adult who as a child had a map of the Solar System on their wall or mobile of the planets hanging from the ceiling. Even the canine Disney character, created in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the “newest planet,” howled when the IAU declared that Pluto was no longer a planet.
Mike Mickelson, professor emeritus of astronomy at Denison, passed along a comment from a colleague saying “science does not advance by authoritative pronouncements.” Dr. Mickelson and others have passed around a petition asking the IAU to reverse their proclamation, and allow the regular processes of science to work out a definition through study, research, and publication of proposals. They point out that Jupiter does not qualify as a planet under the new definition, since the neighborhood of Jupiter looks like a salvage yard on a Monday, space clutter-wise.
All agree that there is a bright spot in this whole debate, overdramatized by some as the “Great Pluto War.” The new discussion is not so much about yellow dogs or ninth planets, but a chance for greater awareness of the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune which turns out to have a pretty large population, and a number of objects larger than Pluto, such as 2005’s discovery, Eris, which was last closest to the Sun in 1700. Sedna, with an orbital period of 12,000 years, may be as large or larger than Pluto as well.
For astronomers interested in the Kuiper Belt, or real estate investors with an outer planets portfolio, these are boom times during the “Great Pluto War.”
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Lost, and Found
Internet search engines often have a short line at the top of their “results page” telling you that the following information was recovered in something like “1.8 seconds” and there are “114,838” hits that match your search terms.
“Impressive,” rumbles Darth Vader.
Yes, a computer search for information has a force all its own, taking precision and accurary and moving with what seems beyond light speed swiftness through a dimply imagined ocean of bits, bytes, and file names.
On the other hand, if you type “lama” instead of “llama,” the sheaf of references dumped onto your screen will be utterly different, just as one misplaced punctuation mark will get you a “404 Not Found” or something entirely different.
You can be literally lost in the profusion of information, what some commentators call “datasmog.” The totality of information available on-line is amazing, and only manageable (so far) with tools that demand ruthless precision or return only what we know to look for, with the fringe benefit that you can hyperlink your way into unexpected fields of view, but related to the entry point you started with.
A crucial element of a more traditional library experience is the very fact that it is, in fact, limited. That limitation is comforting in many ways, even if the idea of something less than everything isn’t what modern life tends to value.
When you enter a collection, a campus library or museum archive, there is the strong sense of selection wrapped around you. Librarians and archivists know that the idea that every volume on the shelves was carefully picked and preserved is less than true; contingency and randomness leak in, but the presence of some overarching ideas and ideals is very real – the needs of undergraduate researchers, special areas of strength, a cultivated taste that has years more development than your own.
This may work against libraries in some ways, since we’re told by the culture in so many ways that our tastes and desires are absolute, but when confronted by a new challenge, there is an innate human desire to look to one side to see how an experienced hunter chases and catches the game, knowing that our ignorance might leave our bellies empty.
In the same way, we have a voice inside that wants at least a little direction, preferably from a wiser and more wily head. We know that book jackets and magazine covers, and now web pages, are carefully gamed and plotted to lure us to consume, and when a particular sort of content is needed, we need a trusted guide to take us to the moment of capture.
But there’s also a growing sense that a particular kind of guided serendipity is both fun, and useful. We want to find the thing that we didn’t know we were looking for, which can come through hyperlinks on webpages, no doubt about it; that isn’t quite going to work when we’re unsure of what we’re looking for in the first place. There’s a kind of affinity of things and objects cultivated by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, walking the stacks and thumbing the indexes, which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on-line.
The 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” got into ventriloquism by going to the library for a book that wasn’t there for a skill he was learning, but a book on ventriloquism was, so he signed it out. Asked after his win what the original book was about, he admitted “I don’t remember.”
Looking up some information on Frances Slocum, a girl abducted and adopted before the American Revolution by Native Americans out of Pennsylvania to my native Indiana, I found a number of books describing the amazing life of Mississinewa, as she became known. One of the books pointed me to the 70 volume set of Thwaites’ transcriptions and translations of the “Jesuit Relations,” letters of the 17th century from the frontier of the New World to missionary supervisors back in France and Italy. Flipping through those weighty, leather-bound books faster than I realistically could have scanned on-line (where the do, also, usefully reside), I found notes about ball games played for the entertainment of their black robe visitors, which pointed me to further works a few shelves over about seasonal practices of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, which led me to my first look at the ancient Newark Earthworks, sprawling across the valleys just east of Denison.
This was a decade before I first laid eyes on the mounds themselves, but the chain of connection that made me aware of them is still alive and vital in my mind a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, I struggle to reconstruct the chain of links that got me to an interesting article just yesterday. Was I reading that on the CNN website? No, wait, there was this thing in the newspaper’s on-line version that . . .
The very speed and subtlety of how one makes links with virtual information can undermine our ability to process and internalize what we’re learning, or maybe just consuming. As an informational consumer, I wonder how many “empty calories” I’m stuffing my mental diet with, never building up much lasting muscle or sinew, just buzzing off the intake and hungry soon for more.
I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s as true a statement as any of us can ever make. What I do know is that there are some ways of finding what I don’t know that I’m more sure to know later; that libraries and printed volumes aren’t the best way for me to check what the percentage of Americans who never read a book in a year is (just went on-line, that would be 1 in 4, he moaned), but if I want to drawn into my awareness how people learn to read and value it as adults, I’ll want to turn from the Wikipedia entry on Piaget and go to the stacks.
* * *
* * *
Indiana Jones Denied Tenure
If Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. were to go up for tenure at Denison as a professor of archaeology, his colleagues would doubtless have a number of hard questions for him about field methodology, use of sources, and publications.
The board of trustees, though, would likely want to know: “What did you do with the Ark of the Covenant?” Because it could lie hidden somewhere on our campus . . .
If you saw the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you may well recall that along with inappropriate relationships with students and daughters of colleagues, Indy rarely ended up with the “artifact” he was after in the first place (nor do you ever see him on his hands and knees for hours, in the sun, scraping off soil layers). The end of the first tale, set in 1936, saw US government agents assure Professor Jones (someone must have given him a position) that the ancient Biblical golden box, lost in the fall of Jerusalem, was in secure hands, studied by “top men.”
The “top men” were probably named Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, as the closing sequence shows the Ark of the Covenant being nailed into a crate and wheeled off into a vast government storage facility. But as it disappears into the towering aisles, a tantalizing clue is visible: an accession number for the National Archives, # 9906753.
Just a few years later, a major portion of the National Archives were brought to Denison University for safekeeping, fearing the possibilities of Nazi Germany raiding Washington DC itself from the sea, or at least bombarding the nation’s capital by ship and inflicting a blow on our country’s morale. The location where the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were hidden has never been officially revealed, but is generally considered to have been Fort Knox, Kentucky.
The rest of our national heritage, including items like the George Washington papers, the Northwest Ordinance, and Henry Ford’s grocery lists, came to Granville and went up the hill to the basement of Swasey Chapel, where crates and boxes were piled high and packed tight.
Could anything from those days have been left behind? Heather Lyle, university archivist, doubts it. “We don’t retain any items from those days other than the records of our arrangement with the federal government,” she says.
What if someone had crept in and stolen a particular item from the trove? Were there armed guards? “There were soldiers and officers in training on campus all during the World War II period, but no armed guards that we’re aware of.”
The number on the crate containing the “lost ark” is not in our record-keeping system, either. But isn’t that what you’d expect? What if some on campus during those dark days thought the Ark too valuable to let return to the thoughtless hands of civil officials? Might it still be here, carefully hidden?
And imagine the latest sequel: “Indiana Jones and the College on the Hill,” with love interest Jennifer Garner, and wacky sidekick Steve Carell.
* * *
* * *
Mindprints
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page
Somewhere between an image in a book and a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
The parchment Declaration of Independence that nestles into a high-tech frame at the National Archives is a very different experience from reading the text of Jefferson’s words and a list of signers on page 27 of the class text. Out into the hills and hollows of the thirteen colonies, how did Americans in late 1776 and early 1777 first encounter those startling words?
Their experience would be similar to the one enjoyed by many Denison students last fall thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled. Important works on human rights and liberty are the special focus of this collection, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the selections brought to Denison included an early printing of the Declaration, a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350, and the first publication of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in book form.
When President Dale Knobel gave a lecture on the role Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” played in the early republic, and how that impact was echoed in the slow, steady spread of Lincoln’s formulations across American understanding of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” listeners could pass around the room – carefully! – versions that were exactly what the first audiences received on their release.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, who was an honored Civil War officer in his youth and hired Alger Hiss as one of his last law clerks in the early 1930’s. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (where it sails to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past the survival of his reputation.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View
When some fellow says to the disgruntled Alfalfa, after George Bailey steals his girl in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the fateful words “Did you know there’s a pool under that floor?” – we know it’s only a matter of time before the pool is revealed, with the only question being who will fall in (answer: everyone).
Even without a gym floor hiding it, pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the lines and the drains and the bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there is something shocking about the sloping, slanted void that gapes within the edge.
It isn’t the pool that you see, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on. The tiles are geometric and discrete, and you step away, not towards.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building. Somehow the idea of a pool once below us will likely continue to intrigue, and provoke.
* * *
No Propellers
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
Lost & Found – Mindprints – DenMag edit2 08
* * *
Gadgets for Gnosis [144 wds.]
Not so very long ago, boys built crystal set radios from kits ordered off the back of pulp magazines, girls drew architectural renderings with colored pencils bought at the art store off of courthouse square, and philosophy professors built . . . logic machines, from home-brew motherboards out of wires and switches.
Professor Maylan Hepp's Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine looks like an artifact from centuries ago in this day of solid state electronics and silicon chips and flash memory of 5G in your shirt pocket. Well, the last century, anyhow. Logic problems in philosophy, for those who got beyond “Socrates was a man, all men have hair; therefore, Socrates had hair,” can get incredibly complicated. Before algorithms powered your handheld gaming device, this was one way to test out sets of propositions – and like that crystal radio set, Dr. Hepp built it himself.
* * *
What’s a Syllogisiac? [157 wds.]
If you were a student of Professor Maylan Hepp in the 1950’s, you didn’t have “The Sims” on your laptop, a calculator in your cell phone, or even a mainframe computer to run problems of symbolic logic. You would learn how sets and symbols and propositions would operate by Dr. Hepp’s guidance through the switches and lights of his own, home built Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine.
The properties of propositional and predicate logic allow mathematicians and philosophers to manipulate variables in ways that can be done swiftly and easily on modern computer programs. Just 50 years ago, these means were still only visible in sci-fi movies (and were still bigger than Robbie the Robot). To mechanically run through a series of permutations without a room full of blackboards and a box of chalk, Hepp’s Syllogisiac was the only way at Denison to manipulate such problems until the arrival of the first computer systems in the late 1960’s.
* * *
Mindprints [untouched – 210 wds.]
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page [edited to 146 wds.]
You can talk about the Magna Carta of 1215 from a political science text on the birth of civil rights, and you can go to the National Archives in Washington or a couple of cathedrals in England to see the original sheepskin manuscripts.
Somewhere between an image in a book or a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
Thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation based in Jeffersonville, Indiana that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled, members of the Denison community had the chance to literally pick up and consider a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350. It was a version like this one that brought the meaning of human rights and liberty into the daily workings of the English legal system, the basis for American democracy today.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock [edited to 180 wds.]
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, an honored Civil War officer when young and had Alger Hiss as a law clerk when an elder statesman. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father, OWH, Sr., was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (so preserved to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past fame’s survival.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View [edited down to 160 wds.]
Pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the submerged lines and bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there’s something shocking about the sloping, slanted void. It isn’t the pool that you normally look at, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building.
* * *
No Propellers [didn’t change – 137 wds.]
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is [will change when I know what your picture is! – now 293 wds.]
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
* * *
Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [first unused draft]
How would you feel if you were digging through a large crate for, say, a “major award” and didn’t find anything (not even a lamp shaped like a leg)?
Then you find out later it was what you only thought was packing material, the little white peanuts, or straw, or blocks of foam, that actually had value. Ow.
If DNA can be compared to the leg lamp, then Jeff Thompson, assistant professor of biology, is working to get people to take a look at the stuff Ralphie and his dad would just toss aside. Instead of “excelsior,” the stuff is called “histone,” and histones may not only play a role in building DNA, but as proteins themselves, actually interact with this building block of life to build and repair chromosomes. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes are made of in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ‘07, Arzu Arat, Lindsey Bostelman ‘05, and Andrew Keller ‘06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), gets repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named “DNA Repair.”
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of the genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. If DNA is the blueprint of life, histones work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
* * *
*thanks to a note from Jeff Thompson –
* * *
Stuff, and the Stuff of Life [take two]
If DNA is the blueprint of life, “histones” work for the construction engineering department, working out details and repairing small errors as they creep in below the level of the architect’s interest.
Biology professor Jeff Thompson is showing students how to work with histones, and manage their ability to repair damage that comes with the wear and tear of everyday life. This mundane maintenance process within the cell sounds unremarkable, until you realize that repair and rebuilding processes running out of control is better known as – cancer.
Histones not only play a role in building DNA strands, but they are proteins themselves, interacting with the building blocks of life to build and maintain the inheritable genetic blueprint of an organism. Once thought a mere structural prop in the nucleus of the cell, histones play a significant and active role in the life of the cell over time.
It turns out that “chromatin,” the material that makes up those squiggly X’s and Y’s called chromosomes in our cells, needs ongoing maintenance just like your roofing shingles or garden wall. Histones direct DNA and other proteins how to fold themselves together into chromatin, like a travel consultant teaching you how to get one more sweater into a tiny piece of overhead luggage, but in this case the luggage is actually built by how the material is folded together. This molecular origami, like packing on a long trip, has to be done and redone, and each time becomes a new opportunity for improvement, or disaster.
Using the simple structures of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Thompson and student research assistants Ashley Albrecht ’07, Arzu Arat ’08, Lindsey Bostelman ’05, and Andrew Keller ’06 looked at how the impact of ultraviolet light, which damages strands of DNA (and is why you need to put on your sunscreen), is repaired by processes tied back into those histones. Their work together was published in the journal aptly named DNA Repair.
As molecular biologists and genetic researchers successfully sequence genomes for plant and animal species, including humans, they’re realizing that the complexity of genetic code in DNA still isn’t enough to build the entire living being. Just as a building has a blueprint, there also are reams of documents specifying materials, colors, and how many gallons per flush that are printed alongside the drawings. That’s where histones and other proteins draw out the details that may fit into the broader strokes sketched by DNA.
This is current, exciting research in molecular biology, and students under Prof. Thompson’s guidance like Ariel Lee ‘08, Natasha Strande ’08, and Jon Mecoli ‘09 look forward to packing their bags for opportunities in other, larger labs, first for publication as undergraduates, and soon to pursue graduate work. Their first steps into unfolding the mysteries of cellular processes began here at Denison.
* * *
Who Are You Callin’ a Dwarf Planet?
Astronomers are not known for their combative nature.
Long nights glued to the eyepiece of a telescope, or even longer days analyzing data from giant dish antennas, can leave them sleepless, but usually not feisty.
The gloves came off recently at a meeting of the International Astronomical Union (IAU), when a panel announced a new definition of “planet” which left out Pluto, relegating the once ninth planet to the status of “dwarf planet.”
In a nutshell, the IAU definition sounds pretty straightforward, starting with orbiting a sun (remember, this is not just a definition for our neighborhood, the Solar System), and having enough gravity to become a sphere, but then they said a planet should “clear out its neighborhood.” This isn’t some cosmic block watch program, doing citizen arrests of graffiti artists, but a cosmological process where dust and sky junk is gathered by a regular orbit into tidy heaps, or better yet, moons.
Pluto has been known for some years to have a small moon, Charon, and the Hubble Space Telescope has added Nix and Hydra to Pluto’s realm. What makes Pluto unique by any standard is the vast, irregular orbit dipping down into Neptune’s neighborhood and looping off towards the Oort Cloud, taking some 250 years for a full lap of the Sun. Add in that the orbit is essentially unpredictable into the future, and you have a wild set of variables. A NASA mission called New Horizons launched last year will reach Pluto in 2015, but some worry the craft may be doomed by the amount of junk still floating aimlessly in the neighborhood, because it hasn’t been cleared.
Which brings us back to the IAU, which used this fact as grounds to, as some said, break the hearts of every child and adult who as a child had a map of the Solar System on their wall or mobile of the planets hanging from the ceiling. Even the canine Disney character, created in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh discovered the “newest planet,” howled when the IAU declared that Pluto was no longer a planet.
Mike Mickelson, professor emeritus of astronomy at Denison, passed along a comment from a colleague saying “science does not advance by authoritative pronouncements.” Dr. Mickelson and others have passed around a petition asking the IAU to reverse their proclamation, and allow the regular processes of science to work out a definition through study, research, and publication of proposals. They point out that Jupiter does not qualify as a planet under the new definition, since the neighborhood of Jupiter looks like a salvage yard on a Monday, space clutter-wise.
All agree that there is a bright spot in this whole debate, overdramatized by some as the “Great Pluto War.” The new discussion is not so much about yellow dogs or ninth planets, but a chance for greater awareness of the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune which turns out to have a pretty large population, and a number of objects larger than Pluto, such as 2005’s discovery, Eris, which was last closest to the Sun in 1700. Sedna, with an orbital period of 12,000 years, may be as large or larger than Pluto as well.
For astronomers interested in the Kuiper Belt, or real estate investors with an outer planets portfolio, these are boom times during the “Great Pluto War.”
* * *
* * *
Lost, and Found
Internet search engines often have a short line at the top of their “results page” telling you that the following information was recovered in something like “1.8 seconds” and there are “114,838” hits that match your search terms.
“Impressive,” rumbles Darth Vader.
Yes, a computer search for information has a force all its own, taking precision and accurary and moving with what seems beyond light speed swiftness through a dimply imagined ocean of bits, bytes, and file names.
On the other hand, if you type “lama” instead of “llama,” the sheaf of references dumped onto your screen will be utterly different, just as one misplaced punctuation mark will get you a “404 Not Found” or something entirely different.
You can be literally lost in the profusion of information, what some commentators call “datasmog.” The totality of information available on-line is amazing, and only manageable (so far) with tools that demand ruthless precision or return only what we know to look for, with the fringe benefit that you can hyperlink your way into unexpected fields of view, but related to the entry point you started with.
A crucial element of a more traditional library experience is the very fact that it is, in fact, limited. That limitation is comforting in many ways, even if the idea of something less than everything isn’t what modern life tends to value.
When you enter a collection, a campus library or museum archive, there is the strong sense of selection wrapped around you. Librarians and archivists know that the idea that every volume on the shelves was carefully picked and preserved is less than true; contingency and randomness leak in, but the presence of some overarching ideas and ideals is very real – the needs of undergraduate researchers, special areas of strength, a cultivated taste that has years more development than your own.
This may work against libraries in some ways, since we’re told by the culture in so many ways that our tastes and desires are absolute, but when confronted by a new challenge, there is an innate human desire to look to one side to see how an experienced hunter chases and catches the game, knowing that our ignorance might leave our bellies empty.
In the same way, we have a voice inside that wants at least a little direction, preferably from a wiser and more wily head. We know that book jackets and magazine covers, and now web pages, are carefully gamed and plotted to lure us to consume, and when a particular sort of content is needed, we need a trusted guide to take us to the moment of capture.
But there’s also a growing sense that a particular kind of guided serendipity is both fun, and useful. We want to find the thing that we didn’t know we were looking for, which can come through hyperlinks on webpages, no doubt about it; that isn’t quite going to work when we’re unsure of what we’re looking for in the first place. There’s a kind of affinity of things and objects cultivated by Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, walking the stacks and thumbing the indexes, which doesn’t happen in quite the same way on-line.
The 2007 winner of “America’s Got Talent” got into ventriloquism by going to the library for a book that wasn’t there for a skill he was learning, but a book on ventriloquism was, so he signed it out. Asked after his win what the original book was about, he admitted “I don’t remember.”
Looking up some information on Frances Slocum, a girl abducted and adopted before the American Revolution by Native Americans out of Pennsylvania to my native Indiana, I found a number of books describing the amazing life of Mississinewa, as she became known. One of the books pointed me to the 70 volume set of Thwaites’ transcriptions and translations of the “Jesuit Relations,” letters of the 17th century from the frontier of the New World to missionary supervisors back in France and Italy. Flipping through those weighty, leather-bound books faster than I realistically could have scanned on-line (where the do, also, usefully reside), I found notes about ball games played for the entertainment of their black robe visitors, which pointed me to further works a few shelves over about seasonal practices of the Great Lakes Indian tribes, which led me to my first look at the ancient Newark Earthworks, sprawling across the valleys just east of Denison.
This was a decade before I first laid eyes on the mounds themselves, but the chain of connection that made me aware of them is still alive and vital in my mind a couple decades further on. Meanwhile, I struggle to reconstruct the chain of links that got me to an interesting article just yesterday. Was I reading that on the CNN website? No, wait, there was this thing in the newspaper’s on-line version that . . .
The very speed and subtlety of how one makes links with virtual information can undermine our ability to process and internalize what we’re learning, or maybe just consuming. As an informational consumer, I wonder how many “empty calories” I’m stuffing my mental diet with, never building up much lasting muscle or sinew, just buzzing off the intake and hungry soon for more.
I don’t know what I don’t know. That’s as true a statement as any of us can ever make. What I do know is that there are some ways of finding what I don’t know that I’m more sure to know later; that libraries and printed volumes aren’t the best way for me to check what the percentage of Americans who never read a book in a year is (just went on-line, that would be 1 in 4, he moaned), but if I want to drawn into my awareness how people learn to read and value it as adults, I’ll want to turn from the Wikipedia entry on Piaget and go to the stacks.
* * *
* * *
Indiana Jones Denied Tenure
If Dr. Henry Jones, Jr. were to go up for tenure at Denison as a professor of archaeology, his colleagues would doubtless have a number of hard questions for him about field methodology, use of sources, and publications.
The board of trustees, though, would likely want to know: “What did you do with the Ark of the Covenant?” Because it could lie hidden somewhere on our campus . . .
If you saw the movie “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” you may well recall that along with inappropriate relationships with students and daughters of colleagues, Indy rarely ended up with the “artifact” he was after in the first place (nor do you ever see him on his hands and knees for hours, in the sun, scraping off soil layers). The end of the first tale, set in 1936, saw US government agents assure Professor Jones (someone must have given him a position) that the ancient Biblical golden box, lost in the fall of Jerusalem, was in secure hands, studied by “top men.”
The “top men” were probably named Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, as the closing sequence shows the Ark of the Covenant being nailed into a crate and wheeled off into a vast government storage facility. But as it disappears into the towering aisles, a tantalizing clue is visible: an accession number for the National Archives, # 9906753.
Just a few years later, a major portion of the National Archives were brought to Denison University for safekeeping, fearing the possibilities of Nazi Germany raiding Washington DC itself from the sea, or at least bombarding the nation’s capital by ship and inflicting a blow on our country’s morale. The location where the Declaration of Independence and The Constitution were hidden has never been officially revealed, but is generally considered to have been Fort Knox, Kentucky.
The rest of our national heritage, including items like the George Washington papers, the Northwest Ordinance, and Henry Ford’s grocery lists, came to Granville and went up the hill to the basement of Swasey Chapel, where crates and boxes were piled high and packed tight.
Could anything from those days have been left behind? Heather Lyle, university archivist, doubts it. “We don’t retain any items from those days other than the records of our arrangement with the federal government,” she says.
What if someone had crept in and stolen a particular item from the trove? Were there armed guards? “There were soldiers and officers in training on campus all during the World War II period, but no armed guards that we’re aware of.”
The number on the crate containing the “lost ark” is not in our record-keeping system, either. But isn’t that what you’d expect? What if some on campus during those dark days thought the Ark too valuable to let return to the thoughtless hands of civil officials? Might it still be here, carefully hidden?
And imagine the latest sequel: “Indiana Jones and the College on the Hill,” with love interest Jennifer Garner, and wacky sidekick Steve Carell.
* * *
* * *
Mindprints
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page
Somewhere between an image in a book and a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
The parchment Declaration of Independence that nestles into a high-tech frame at the National Archives is a very different experience from reading the text of Jefferson’s words and a list of signers on page 27 of the class text. Out into the hills and hollows of the thirteen colonies, how did Americans in late 1776 and early 1777 first encounter those startling words?
Their experience would be similar to the one enjoyed by many Denison students last fall thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled. Important works on human rights and liberty are the special focus of this collection, based in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and the selections brought to Denison included an early printing of the Declaration, a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350, and the first publication of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in book form.
When President Dale Knobel gave a lecture on the role Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” played in the early republic, and how that impact was echoed in the slow, steady spread of Lincoln’s formulations across American understanding of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” listeners could pass around the room – carefully! – versions that were exactly what the first audiences received on their release.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, who was an honored Civil War officer in his youth and hired Alger Hiss as one of his last law clerks in the early 1930’s. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (where it sails to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past the survival of his reputation.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View
When some fellow says to the disgruntled Alfalfa, after George Bailey steals his girl in “It’s a Wonderful Life,” the fateful words “Did you know there’s a pool under that floor?” – we know it’s only a matter of time before the pool is revealed, with the only question being who will fall in (answer: everyone).
Even without a gym floor hiding it, pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the lines and the drains and the bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there is something shocking about the sloping, slanted void that gapes within the edge.
It isn’t the pool that you see, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on. The tiles are geometric and discrete, and you step away, not towards.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building. Somehow the idea of a pool once below us will likely continue to intrigue, and provoke.
* * *
No Propellers
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
* * *
Lost & Found – Mindprints – DenMag edit2 08
* * *
Gadgets for Gnosis [144 wds.]
Not so very long ago, boys built crystal set radios from kits ordered off the back of pulp magazines, girls drew architectural renderings with colored pencils bought at the art store off of courthouse square, and philosophy professors built . . . logic machines, from home-brew motherboards out of wires and switches.
Professor Maylan Hepp's Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine looks like an artifact from centuries ago in this day of solid state electronics and silicon chips and flash memory of 5G in your shirt pocket. Well, the last century, anyhow. Logic problems in philosophy, for those who got beyond “Socrates was a man, all men have hair; therefore, Socrates had hair,” can get incredibly complicated. Before algorithms powered your handheld gaming device, this was one way to test out sets of propositions – and like that crystal radio set, Dr. Hepp built it himself.
* * *
What’s a Syllogisiac? [157 wds.]
If you were a student of Professor Maylan Hepp in the 1950’s, you didn’t have “The Sims” on your laptop, a calculator in your cell phone, or even a mainframe computer to run problems of symbolic logic. You would learn how sets and symbols and propositions would operate by Dr. Hepp’s guidance through the switches and lights of his own, home built Syllogisiac 406 Logic Machine.
The properties of propositional and predicate logic allow mathematicians and philosophers to manipulate variables in ways that can be done swiftly and easily on modern computer programs. Just 50 years ago, these means were still only visible in sci-fi movies (and were still bigger than Robbie the Robot). To mechanically run through a series of permutations without a room full of blackboards and a box of chalk, Hepp’s Syllogisiac was the only way at Denison to manipulate such problems until the arrival of the first computer systems in the late 1960’s.
* * *
Mindprints [untouched – 210 wds.]
Henry David Thoreau walked along a Cape Cod beach, picked up an ancient flint arrowhead in the dunes, and thought: mindprint.
Looking at the pattern of flake scars on the surface of the stone tool, the notched base where sinew once bound it to a shaft, and Thoreau saw the traces of a mind, left as distinctively as the whorls of a fingerprint.
We might call an object of material culture an “artifact” following archaeological or sociological usage, but “mindprint” is useful for turning our attention to the person, the human influence made visible long after the life has ended.
An artifact is a thing, an object, an item that can be lost -- a mindprint has a life and story and vitality of its own, one that can be recovered and found, even time and again.
Look through these mindprints, and trace out for yourself the path of a life, the remnant of an idea not quite forgotten. Think with the minds that shaped this stuff, and feel them squeeze out some new realizations from your own brain.
Then look at some of your own stuff, in drawers and on shelves or stored in bins, and ask “What kind of mindprints am I leaving behind me as I go?”
* * *
A Turn of the Page [edited to 146 wds.]
You can talk about the Magna Carta of 1215 from a political science text on the birth of civil rights, and you can go to the National Archives in Washington or a couple of cathedrals in England to see the original sheepskin manuscripts.
Somewhere between an image in a book or a sealed case in a museum is the everyday reality of most important documents.
Thanks to the work of The Remnant Trust, a public educational foundation based in Jeffersonville, Indiana that provides books and manuscripts which can be touched and handled, members of the Denison community had the chance to literally pick up and consider a Latin manuscript of the Magna Carta from 1350. It was a version like this one that brought the meaning of human rights and liberty into the daily workings of the English legal system, the basis for American democracy today.
* * *
Dr. Holmes, not Sherlock [edited to 180 wds.]
Oliver Wendell Holmes is a famous US Supreme Court Justice, an honored Civil War officer when young and had Alger Hiss as a law clerk when an elder statesman. But he was OWH, Junior.
His father, OWH, Sr., was once the famous member of the family, writing a poem while a medical student at Harvard which led to saving the USS Constitution in Boston Harbor (so preserved to this day), and continuing both in medicine as a faculty member of the new Harvard Medical School, and as an essayist known as “the Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.”
His satiric and insightful pieces helped turn “The Atlantic Monthly” into an American institution, and made Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.) an early media celebrity. His fame was so great that a young doctor in London, idle while waiting for patients, named his literary detective “Sherlock Holmes” as a tribute; so great, he had fan letters from distant exotic places like . . . Mt. Vernon, Ohio. His response was momentous enough to warrant framing, which preserved the letter long past fame’s survival.
* * *
A Vision, Swimming Into View [edited down to 160 wds.]
Pools have a way of hiding in plain sight. They’re wide open, but the water is deceptively . . . translucent. You can almost, but not quite, see the submerged lines and bodies in motion. Take out all that water, though, and there’s something shocking about the sloping, slanted void. It isn’t the pool that you normally look at, but the surface. Take away the surface, and there’s something quite different going on.
For years people heard that Cleveland Hall once had a pool, which was now . . . that’s where the stories get various, and interesting. A hidden room, a coal bin, a nuclear power plant, a myth. During the first stages of renovation, the myth idea is clearly ruled out – there was a pool, it had been sealed over and walled off, and now . . .
Well, now it will be filled with pea gravel and make up the solid foundation of the newer, larger building.
* * *
No Propellers [didn’t change – 137 wds.]
Somehow a beanie has become a joke, like a red foam nose or glasses with a plastic mustache dangling. Why?
Yarmulkes and skullcaps are still worn for special purposes as distinctive head covering, and ball caps for seed corn or sports teams are acceptable wear indoors today where grandma or mom would have slapped our hats off a generation ago. None of this has helped the humble beanie get respect.
When Don Howland stepped on campus in 1948, he got a freshman beanie. That’s how the seniors knew who to sneer at, or help. Some of the class of ’52 may have long before tossed or lost their freshman beanie, but Don kept his as a memory of campus life, and that well-tended headgear now has a proud place in Burton Morgan Hall in Alumni Affairs.
* * *
A Center That Really Is [will change when I know what your picture is! – now 293 wds.]
If you ride the elevator up to the fourth floor in the Samson Talbot Hall of Biological Science, even the button reminds you: “Haubrich Student Resource Center – Rm. 409.”
Step into the glass-walled room nearly filled with a broad conference table, and you see all the signs of student labor and leisure cluttered together across the chairs and tabletop. You tend to see first, though, the lynx (stuffed) that is eyeing you quite quizzically.
Or hungrily.
To one side is a white-board with diagrams of chemical compounds, echoed by a tall model of a DNA double helix. That’s in good company with a copy of “The Double Helix” laying on a corner of the table near boxes of books that range from collections of B.C. comics to a copy of “On Food and Cooking” blurbed by Bobby Flay.
Students are often working in teams on projects in this room, which has truly become a center in Talbot, where many such designed spaces end up on the periphery of student awareness. The eclectic nature of the objects in the cases and on the shelves, or piled invitingly for browsing, has doubtless helped to lure students into this space; that eclectic nature is also at the root of the dedication, marked by a plaque to Robert R. Haubrich and his 26 years of teaching at the college “by the generosity of former students.”
A bracket fungus, grey with preservative and age, reaches back beyond even Bob’s era of teaching, signed “Class in Lower Cryptogams – 1907” with names like Orcutt, Mather, Ashmore, and Wickenden. Enlivening the history of science, and provoking curiosity in science itself is the Haubrich legacy, anchored by a brass monkey contemplating a human skull in the pose of Rodin’s “Thinker.”
* * *
Licking County CVB Magazine 2008
* * *
Fragile Strength Makes Lasting Beauty – National Heisey Glass Museum
Glass is a significant part of human civilization, from over 4,000 years ago to your last look out a window today.
In ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), across the Roman Empire, and for the earliest American colonists, glass making by heating and blowing and shaping the red hot fluid into a stable, brittle form has always been a highly respected, even magical art.
For Licking County, glassmaking industries have long been part of the landscape, and the summit of those achievements is visible at the National Heisey Glass Museum, on Sixth Street near downtown Newark.
Part of the Veteran’s Park series of historic structures, the museum is located in one of the area’s rich heritage of Greek Revival style buildings, dating to 1831 and moved onto the present site in 1973. The Heisey Collectors of America, Inc. own and operate this museum next door to their neighbors, the Licking County Historical Society.
Collectors of the HCA have donated or loaned the 4,500 objects which were made by the distinguished A. H. Heisey & Co. glassmaking firm between 1896 and 1957. You will find on display every imaginable color and form that a piece of glass can take, arranged to show the craftsmanship, originality, and quality that have long been associated with the Heisey name.
Augustus Heisey was born in Germany, home of many American pioneer glass artisans. He fought in the American Civil War including on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, and following the war began his career, culminating in the firm which bore his name. Hand-blown glass was the particular specialty of the Heisey company, and the unique quality that also led to the firm’s demise, with the importation of mass produced machine-blown glass from overseas in the 1950’s.
What machine-blown glass can’t offer is the fine detail and exquisite lines of what Heisey collectors seek, and why so many come to view the collection in Newark. Etched, cut, and colored, glass goes through thousands of degrees of heat that goes for a short time into cherry red, back down through glowing yellows, to the enduring hues placed in the crystalline structure by minerals and chemicals baked into the substance itself . . . meaning that when you return a century or two from now to see the National Heisey Glass Museum again, the colors in bright sunlight will look just as they do on your visit this year.
A 25 minute movie on Heisey Glass is available to visitors during museum hours; they are closed Mondays, and for hours on other days, call 740.345.2932, or check www.heiseymuseum.org.
* * *
Little Gears Turn Big Minds – The Works
At the corner of Newark’s First Street and Scheidler St., a piece of industrial history houses a wide range of not only historic artifacts, but also a vibrant home for cultural activity, community engagement, and education.
The Scheidler Machine Works building went up in 1861, at the heart of Newark’s industrial birth, a three story shop for fabricating steam engines. Local businessman and industrialist Howard LeFevre saw it empty and abandoned in the 1980’s, but could see potential in the solid brick walls and historic neighborhood, once the Ohio & Erie Canal route through the city’s south side. He had ridden the electric interurbans as a boy, helped build a national infrastructure through interstate transportation, and knew personally the inventors of fiberglas and other pioneers of modern technology.
Why not a museum of technology, from the first flint tool makers of Licking County, through blacksmiths and glassblowers to Reinhard Schiedler himself, and on to education for children and families in the technology that shapes our world today? Hands-on exhibits and working displays of what builds the world we live in, where kids could turn a crank and see an entire workshop spring to life?
Mr. LeFevre’s dream has expanded to become an “Ohio Center for History, Art, & Technology,” with status as a Smithsonian Affiliate museum since 2002. The LeFevre Courtyard hosted his 100th birthday party in 2007, and from the newest art on display to ancient Native American artifacts, The Works is born anew almost every day.
Tuesdays through Saturdays are daily glassblowing demonstrations -- an unforgettable demonstration of unimaginable temperatures, skillfully handled and unbelievably shaped to become everything from elegant pitchers to simple, squat pumpkins. The Art Works Museum hosts a variety of different exhibits through the year, along with the various artisans to put on workshops and living history demonstrations.
To find out what wheels are turning at The Works when you visit, check www.attheworks.org, or call 740.349.9277. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
* * *
Rooted in Licking County
William Dawes rode just a horse behind Paul Revere, galloping on the road to Lexington and Concord (you know, “one if by land, two if by sea”), and unlike the more famous silversmith and patriot, Dawes actually made it to Lexington.
His descendants made it into the Ohio Territory, helped to found Marietta College, and went into a range of fields, such as Charles Dawes, who was vice-president of the United States and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Charles had a brother, Beman Gates Dawes, who married a vivacious young woman named Bertie Burr who won a medal for lifesaving and loved the outdoors. Beman and Bertie built a family around his work building up the Pure Oil Company, and they built a legacy around their family home south of Newark, “Daweswood.”
Among foresters and arborists and plain old lovers of trees, Beman, the quiet Dawes, is the famous one. He and Bertie founded an arboretum in 1929, inspired by the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, Illinois, home of Arbor Day. They began with trees they planted around their house. Inviting “tree dedicators” like brother Charles, his close friend Gen. John Pershing, and other notables of the 1920’s and 30’s became a way to help the general public, not just their friends and family, identify with the cause of replanting an Ohio landscape that was still nearly cut bare of forestation.
The Dawes Arboretum now extends far beyond the original groves, still the heart of TDA’s 1,700 acres. Hiking trails and auto tour routes wind for miles across a rolling landscape looking across the valley of the Licking River’s South Fork.
Their motto is “Dedicated to increasing the love and knowledge of trees, history and the natural world,” and this dedication is rooted in the preservation of old growth trees, for nurturing unique species brought for experimental purposes to central Ohio, and to new ways of appreciating the diversity of a natural landscape.
A carefully manicured Japanese Garden, complete with Zen garden of raked gravel and standing stones, nestles into a hillside where further up, a Holly Grove with many different evergreen shrubs grow to remarkable dimensions. The southern extent of the grounds features the words “Dawes Arboretum” in hedge lettering so vast they can be clearly read by passengers heading for a landing at Port Columbus Airport, and in the northern reaches, a newly constructed wetlands zone allows plants from Ohio’s earliest, post-glacial landscape to return and flourish.
Your visit to the grounds of this beautiful arboretum can be as long or short as your schedule allows; their Nature Center will soon undergo extensive renovations, just one part of an ongoing plan of improvement and interpretation for the general public. A Gift Shop is part of the main office area with items of particular interest to birders.
The gates are open from dawn to sunset every day of the year, except New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with free admission to the grounds. For detailed information about Visitor Center hours and special programs, call 800.44.DAWES, 740.323.2355, or click www.dawesarb.org. you can reach the Daweswood gates at 7770 Jacksontown Rd. SE (Ohio Route 13) six miles south of Newark and four miles north of the Rt. 13 exit off I-70.
* * *
This Land Is Your Land
The Licking Park District began life as an organization in 1989, when interested citizens and the county commissioners authorized the establishment of a board of park commissioners. Their job, then and now, is to acquire, preserve, and present the natural wonders of this diverse county to the residents and visitors of Licking County.
Over 1,400 acres in almost a dozen sites are now held as a public trust, maintaining open space and natural areas while residential growth edges out of Columbus, our state capital, towards Licking County. The commissioners and staff of the LPD also watch over and maintain the county rails-to-trails network.
Headquartered at Infirmary Mound Park on Lancaster Road, Ohio Route 37, you can find out what’s going on where around the county system by calling Park HQ at 740.587.2535, or checking the always interesting park district website, www.lickingparkdistrict.org.
One of the newest features of the LPD is their William C. Kraner Nature Center, located in the southeastern corner of Licking County, on Fairview Road just off of Linnville Road, towards Flint Ridge State Memorial. This nearly 3,000 square foot facility contains displays and exhibits for all ages, with a primary focus on children.
Opened in 2001, the staff continues to regularly update the material out for hands-on education and play. The Nature Center is on the southern edge of the Taft Reserve of LPD, whose 425 acres extend north all the way to Flint Ridge Road, with trails for hiking and, like many of the trails in the LPD system, for horseback riding as well. A hike in the Taft Reserve will take you on a loop past Native American mounds built over two millennia in the past, and back to computer stations in the center where the latest information on migratory birds and plant species is just a click away today.
The William C. Kraner Nature Center is free and open to the public Tuesdays to Sundays from Noon to 4:00 pm and other times by special arrangement; the entire building is handicapped accessible. To contact the Nature Center itself, call 740.323.0520.
* * *
CVB Finds a New, Old Home! [322 words]
Licking County is one of Ohio’s largest counties, and contains the largest complex of ancient geometric earthworks in the world.
When the award-winning museum at the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks needed refurbishment after thirty years of service, great minds thought alike, and saw a chance to put the hub of visitor services for the county there.
The Ohio Historical Society, owner of major portions of the remaining Newark Earthworks, continues as an active partner, while the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau staff and volunteers offer a warm welcome year-round.
Already, visitors from many states and even a few foreign countries have dropped by and been glad to have a friendly face to greet them. Knowledge of the upcoming nomination of the earthworks as a “World Heritage Site” recognized by the United Nations has kept visitation growing.
A new museum display with interactive exhibits and a number of artifacts related to the area will open this spring, and a dedication ceremony with participation by Native American representatives will officially open the already busy space.
Office space and informational displays for the diversity of Licking County visitor experiences is located in this new facility at the Great Circle, but it’s actually just the center of a large, ever-growing circle of communication and connection to a national and global travel and tourism market.
Just as visitors brought materials from distant cultures, like copper and mica and seashells, in exchange for natural resources such as the multi-colored flint of ancient Licking County 2,000 years ago, today we offer the cultural and economic diversity of today’s landscape as an experience our visitors can take home with them.
If they want to buy some handmade baskets, decorative glass, or even pieces of Flint Ridge flint to take home, that would complete a circle of sorts, wouldn’t it?
And the new Great Circle Visitor’s Center, home of the CVB, will be the center of that circle.
* * *
Licking County Courthouse [91 words]
From 1809 to the present, four courthouses have stood on the "public square" at the heart of Licking County. A new brick building in 1815 replaced the original log structure, which was then supplanted in 1832 by an attractive building which burnt down in 1874. Today's Courthouse was erected in the French Provincial style popular in 1876, just in time for the nation's centennial; a fire in 1879 led to a magnificent restoration whose West Courtroom on the second floor is admired to this day, and the iconic central clock tower.
* * *
Fragile Strength Makes Lasting Beauty – National Heisey Glass Museum
Glass is a significant part of human civilization, from over 4,000 years ago to your last look out a window today.
In ancient Mesopotamia (modern day Iraq), across the Roman Empire, and for the earliest American colonists, glass making by heating and blowing and shaping the red hot fluid into a stable, brittle form has always been a highly respected, even magical art.
For Licking County, glassmaking industries have long been part of the landscape, and the summit of those achievements is visible at the National Heisey Glass Museum, on Sixth Street near downtown Newark.
Part of the Veteran’s Park series of historic structures, the museum is located in one of the area’s rich heritage of Greek Revival style buildings, dating to 1831 and moved onto the present site in 1973. The Heisey Collectors of America, Inc. own and operate this museum next door to their neighbors, the Licking County Historical Society.
Collectors of the HCA have donated or loaned the 4,500 objects which were made by the distinguished A. H. Heisey & Co. glassmaking firm between 1896 and 1957. You will find on display every imaginable color and form that a piece of glass can take, arranged to show the craftsmanship, originality, and quality that have long been associated with the Heisey name.
Augustus Heisey was born in Germany, home of many American pioneer glass artisans. He fought in the American Civil War including on Little Round Top at the battle of Gettysburg, and following the war began his career, culminating in the firm which bore his name. Hand-blown glass was the particular specialty of the Heisey company, and the unique quality that also led to the firm’s demise, with the importation of mass produced machine-blown glass from overseas in the 1950’s.
What machine-blown glass can’t offer is the fine detail and exquisite lines of what Heisey collectors seek, and why so many come to view the collection in Newark. Etched, cut, and colored, glass goes through thousands of degrees of heat that goes for a short time into cherry red, back down through glowing yellows, to the enduring hues placed in the crystalline structure by minerals and chemicals baked into the substance itself . . . meaning that when you return a century or two from now to see the National Heisey Glass Museum again, the colors in bright sunlight will look just as they do on your visit this year.
A 25 minute movie on Heisey Glass is available to visitors during museum hours; they are closed Mondays, and for hours on other days, call 740.345.2932, or check www.heiseymuseum.org.
* * *
Little Gears Turn Big Minds – The Works
At the corner of Newark’s First Street and Scheidler St., a piece of industrial history houses a wide range of not only historic artifacts, but also a vibrant home for cultural activity, community engagement, and education.
The Scheidler Machine Works building went up in 1861, at the heart of Newark’s industrial birth, a three story shop for fabricating steam engines. Local businessman and industrialist Howard LeFevre saw it empty and abandoned in the 1980’s, but could see potential in the solid brick walls and historic neighborhood, once the Ohio & Erie Canal route through the city’s south side. He had ridden the electric interurbans as a boy, helped build a national infrastructure through interstate transportation, and knew personally the inventors of fiberglas and other pioneers of modern technology.
Why not a museum of technology, from the first flint tool makers of Licking County, through blacksmiths and glassblowers to Reinhard Schiedler himself, and on to education for children and families in the technology that shapes our world today? Hands-on exhibits and working displays of what builds the world we live in, where kids could turn a crank and see an entire workshop spring to life?
Mr. LeFevre’s dream has expanded to become an “Ohio Center for History, Art, & Technology,” with status as a Smithsonian Affiliate museum since 2002. The LeFevre Courtyard hosted his 100th birthday party in 2007, and from the newest art on display to ancient Native American artifacts, The Works is born anew almost every day.
Tuesdays through Saturdays are daily glassblowing demonstrations -- an unforgettable demonstration of unimaginable temperatures, skillfully handled and unbelievably shaped to become everything from elegant pitchers to simple, squat pumpkins. The Art Works Museum hosts a variety of different exhibits through the year, along with the various artisans to put on workshops and living history demonstrations.
To find out what wheels are turning at The Works when you visit, check www.attheworks.org, or call 740.349.9277. Closed Sundays and Mondays.
* * *
Rooted in Licking County
William Dawes rode just a horse behind Paul Revere, galloping on the road to Lexington and Concord (you know, “one if by land, two if by sea”), and unlike the more famous silversmith and patriot, Dawes actually made it to Lexington.
His descendants made it into the Ohio Territory, helped to found Marietta College, and went into a range of fields, such as Charles Dawes, who was vice-president of the United States and won a Nobel Peace Prize.
Charles had a brother, Beman Gates Dawes, who married a vivacious young woman named Bertie Burr who won a medal for lifesaving and loved the outdoors. Beman and Bertie built a family around his work building up the Pure Oil Company, and they built a legacy around their family home south of Newark, “Daweswood.”
Among foresters and arborists and plain old lovers of trees, Beman, the quiet Dawes, is the famous one. He and Bertie founded an arboretum in 1929, inspired by the Morton Arboretum outside Chicago, Illinois, home of Arbor Day. They began with trees they planted around their house. Inviting “tree dedicators” like brother Charles, his close friend Gen. John Pershing, and other notables of the 1920’s and 30’s became a way to help the general public, not just their friends and family, identify with the cause of replanting an Ohio landscape that was still nearly cut bare of forestation.
The Dawes Arboretum now extends far beyond the original groves, still the heart of TDA’s 1,700 acres. Hiking trails and auto tour routes wind for miles across a rolling landscape looking across the valley of the Licking River’s South Fork.
Their motto is “Dedicated to increasing the love and knowledge of trees, history and the natural world,” and this dedication is rooted in the preservation of old growth trees, for nurturing unique species brought for experimental purposes to central Ohio, and to new ways of appreciating the diversity of a natural landscape.
A carefully manicured Japanese Garden, complete with Zen garden of raked gravel and standing stones, nestles into a hillside where further up, a Holly Grove with many different evergreen shrubs grow to remarkable dimensions. The southern extent of the grounds features the words “Dawes Arboretum” in hedge lettering so vast they can be clearly read by passengers heading for a landing at Port Columbus Airport, and in the northern reaches, a newly constructed wetlands zone allows plants from Ohio’s earliest, post-glacial landscape to return and flourish.
Your visit to the grounds of this beautiful arboretum can be as long or short as your schedule allows; their Nature Center will soon undergo extensive renovations, just one part of an ongoing plan of improvement and interpretation for the general public. A Gift Shop is part of the main office area with items of particular interest to birders.
The gates are open from dawn to sunset every day of the year, except New Year’s, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, with free admission to the grounds. For detailed information about Visitor Center hours and special programs, call 800.44.DAWES, 740.323.2355, or click www.dawesarb.org. you can reach the Daweswood gates at 7770 Jacksontown Rd. SE (Ohio Route 13) six miles south of Newark and four miles north of the Rt. 13 exit off I-70.
* * *
This Land Is Your Land
The Licking Park District began life as an organization in 1989, when interested citizens and the county commissioners authorized the establishment of a board of park commissioners. Their job, then and now, is to acquire, preserve, and present the natural wonders of this diverse county to the residents and visitors of Licking County.
Over 1,400 acres in almost a dozen sites are now held as a public trust, maintaining open space and natural areas while residential growth edges out of Columbus, our state capital, towards Licking County. The commissioners and staff of the LPD also watch over and maintain the county rails-to-trails network.
Headquartered at Infirmary Mound Park on Lancaster Road, Ohio Route 37, you can find out what’s going on where around the county system by calling Park HQ at 740.587.2535, or checking the always interesting park district website, www.lickingparkdistrict.org.
One of the newest features of the LPD is their William C. Kraner Nature Center, located in the southeastern corner of Licking County, on Fairview Road just off of Linnville Road, towards Flint Ridge State Memorial. This nearly 3,000 square foot facility contains displays and exhibits for all ages, with a primary focus on children.
Opened in 2001, the staff continues to regularly update the material out for hands-on education and play. The Nature Center is on the southern edge of the Taft Reserve of LPD, whose 425 acres extend north all the way to Flint Ridge Road, with trails for hiking and, like many of the trails in the LPD system, for horseback riding as well. A hike in the Taft Reserve will take you on a loop past Native American mounds built over two millennia in the past, and back to computer stations in the center where the latest information on migratory birds and plant species is just a click away today.
The William C. Kraner Nature Center is free and open to the public Tuesdays to Sundays from Noon to 4:00 pm and other times by special arrangement; the entire building is handicapped accessible. To contact the Nature Center itself, call 740.323.0520.
* * *
CVB Finds a New, Old Home! [322 words]
Licking County is one of Ohio’s largest counties, and contains the largest complex of ancient geometric earthworks in the world.
When the award-winning museum at the Great Circle portion of the Newark Earthworks needed refurbishment after thirty years of service, great minds thought alike, and saw a chance to put the hub of visitor services for the county there.
The Ohio Historical Society, owner of major portions of the remaining Newark Earthworks, continues as an active partner, while the Convention and Visitor’s Bureau staff and volunteers offer a warm welcome year-round.
Already, visitors from many states and even a few foreign countries have dropped by and been glad to have a friendly face to greet them. Knowledge of the upcoming nomination of the earthworks as a “World Heritage Site” recognized by the United Nations has kept visitation growing.
A new museum display with interactive exhibits and a number of artifacts related to the area will open this spring, and a dedication ceremony with participation by Native American representatives will officially open the already busy space.
Office space and informational displays for the diversity of Licking County visitor experiences is located in this new facility at the Great Circle, but it’s actually just the center of a large, ever-growing circle of communication and connection to a national and global travel and tourism market.
Just as visitors brought materials from distant cultures, like copper and mica and seashells, in exchange for natural resources such as the multi-colored flint of ancient Licking County 2,000 years ago, today we offer the cultural and economic diversity of today’s landscape as an experience our visitors can take home with them.
If they want to buy some handmade baskets, decorative glass, or even pieces of Flint Ridge flint to take home, that would complete a circle of sorts, wouldn’t it?
And the new Great Circle Visitor’s Center, home of the CVB, will be the center of that circle.
* * *
Licking County Courthouse [91 words]
From 1809 to the present, four courthouses have stood on the "public square" at the heart of Licking County. A new brick building in 1815 replaced the original log structure, which was then supplanted in 1832 by an attractive building which burnt down in 1874. Today's Courthouse was erected in the French Provincial style popular in 1876, just in time for the nation's centennial; a fire in 1879 led to a magnificent restoration whose West Courtroom on the second floor is admired to this day, and the iconic central clock tower.
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Marking The Sky
Few landmarks, or skymarks, and those mobile
in the terrain of the heavens.
Small, yet bright,
sun & moon, stars & planets,
zodiacal constellations pivot
with polished, imperceptible grace.
(swath of white sweeping past by season)
Marking days, and nights, and spots on the horizon,
sealed with piles of earth.
From mound to mound, an arc traced
only through time, moment by moment nearly still,
season by season flung back and forth.
When you let go the solid grip of time
and drift through those movements and cycles,
there is a new apparent stability,
a steadiness in motion,
a glimpse of inescapable absolutes
even harder to see and feel
than an orbit or equatorial band.
Visible, all the same;
contained within every sunrise,
and each starlit, moonpierced dusk.
Few landmarks, or skymarks, and those mobile
in the terrain of the heavens.
Small, yet bright,
sun & moon, stars & planets,
zodiacal constellations pivot
with polished, imperceptible grace.
(swath of white sweeping past by season)
Marking days, and nights, and spots on the horizon,
sealed with piles of earth.
From mound to mound, an arc traced
only through time, moment by moment nearly still,
season by season flung back and forth.
When you let go the solid grip of time
and drift through those movements and cycles,
there is a new apparent stability,
a steadiness in motion,
a glimpse of inescapable absolutes
even harder to see and feel
than an orbit or equatorial band.
Visible, all the same;
contained within every sunrise,
and each starlit, moonpierced dusk.
Thursday, January 25, 2007
Praying on Asphalt
An Introductory Handbook on Prayer
-- Prayer
This side of the Garden of Eden, prayer hasn’t changed very much.
The experience of praying, speaking directly to God, whether silently inside our head, out loud under pressure, or joyfully in great assemblies, is not essentially any different than it was for Abel or for Deborah, to Ruth or her great-grandson David, or between Priscilla and Aquila on the preaching trail.
In fact, the strange and mysterious sense that flows through the Biblical account of the Garden of Gethsemane is that prayer for Jesus, in his earthly ministry, was not qualitatively different than it is when we are on our knees, at a turning point in our lives.
But we are haunted by the ghost of a thought that we are somehow farther from the sources of communion, more distant from the fountains of grace than they were in the deserts of the Holy Land. We know that our modern levels of distraction, the pervasive reach of media, the murk of “data smog” can all keep our brains buzzing, our tongues a’flutter, and our ears itching. We think, and we think we think it without pride, that we are different.
We are not. The television is not more diverting than watching the sky to see if rain will finally come to save our crop, the government expects “an average of 18.7 hours per taxpayer” to fill out a 1040 but they don’t come and steal our donkey, and you don’t sleep three generations to a room, four to a bed. Prayer was both possible, and hard, in the Old Testament and Colonial America, and you can pray with power and consistency today just as well.
-- Prayer Now
So if prayer is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, why does it seem so out of fashion? One reason is that we’ve largely stopped teaching it, in seminaries and in congregations alike. Since the scriptures report that the prophets had to strip naked in the marketplace and smash crockery to get the people to pray in Judea 3000 years ago, odds are there’s long been a tendency to let prayer, like most hard work, slide. Call that tendency sin, and you see why the problem keeps cropping up.
And that’s the main reason we slip past the praying we can and should do. It is, make no mistake about it, hard work. Like building a stone wall, hammering out a tool in the blacksmith’s forge, or writing exactly the right sentence to communicate an idea clearly. Each tool, each piece of raw material, must be carefully assessed, put in place, and adapted to use, and the mind and body (remember sin?) keeps looking for the shortcut.
Like pottery or calligraphy, there is no shortcut. Or to quote Yoda, “There is no ‘try.’ Only do, or do not.” Which is where the convenient excuse of distraction comes in.
How do you pray? The beginning steps are actually quite simple, and effective, as long as you don’t confuse getting started with going on. If you learn stretching exercises, you will be more healthy and fit – if you use them to prepare for further exercise. If you just stretch out, and never walk anywhere or work out or whatever, you not only won’t get fit . . . you’ll probably stop even doing the stretching.
-- Pray in Worship
The first step in a healthy prayer life is going to church. Yes, I said go to church and worship. Most of the prayer is provided, by others or in the service materials, in the singing and the fellowship. Praying alone is important, but it can be the hardest way to start. Jesus says to do it, but he doesn’t say it’s where you should begin.
Here’s a hint while you’re there: take note of how much of the typical service is prayer. Listen to the words of what’s sung, by you or others: prayer. In the Bible readings: very often, prayers. The Psalms are pretty much all prayers (we’ll come back to that). Introducing or concluding any of the other active parts of the service, like offering and communion, is prayer.
Plus, most preachers will tell you that even when their sermon is not directly framed in prayer language, that’s what the message is in essence. An overheard prayer, so to speak.
If you’re keeping track, that’s basically the whole service except for announcements. And occasionally them, too. So go to church to get started in prayer.
-- Prayer Happens (if you let it!)
What will happen next is that phrases and echoes of the songs and hymns and anthems, bits and pieces of the doxology or pastor’s prayer or the readings will stick in your head, and keep coming back. That’s part of what Paul talks about in Romans 8: 26-7. One of the mysteries of prayer is that the initiative of prayer is with God (Col. 4: 2-3), who has opened the door for communion with us through Christ, and in the Holy Spirit can “stir us up” to prayer even when we’re not planning on it.
The larger mystery is that God has given us the freedom to say “no,” that our prayers not be forced or coerced, but free offerings of our heart. With a simple “yes” to God’s purposes, the heavy lifting and high-impact communication is done for us. Check Genesis 28: 10-17 to see that at work!
-- Prayer Is Not On Backorder
So grab ahold of those scraps of prayer that keep rattling around in your head from worship. If you were attentive through the service, you heard quite a few different takes and approaches to prayer, so why did the chunks stick that you’re hearing as if on a loop in your brain? Likely there’s a reason, and that gives you a starting point to talk to God.
Can I ask God questions? People really do wonder about such things, which tell me they haven’t read the Psalms lately (let alone Job, but that’s for later). Questions like “who will win the playoffs?” or “where will I find love?” are more “gimmes” than questions, and those seeking a better prayer life do well to avoid the gimme list approach.
But you can find models for prayer; you can find prayers you can just pray for yourself (no plagiarism policy in praying, I’m happy to tell you) by reading some of those 150 outcries to God. To roughly paraphrase, right in the pages of your Bible people ask “God, what were you thinking?” and “Lord, you’re joking, right?” Even “Hey, God, you promised, remember?”
There are of course great hymns (fancy word for prayers set to music) to faithfulness and steadfastness and God’s absolute trustworthiness. What you don’t need to fear is feeling left out of the game if you’re not feeling that way about your relationship with God today. Like the weather in Ohio, if you don’t relate well to the language of one Psalm, turn the page. You’ll find your place soon enough.
And the great prayers of the church are still cedars in Lebanon and pillars of heaven. The prayer Jesus taught when his disciples said “Lord, teach us to pray,” is found at Mt. 6:7-13, and Lk. 11: 2-4. The traditional ending that we use in church comes from Jesus’ ancestor David, and his prayer in I Chr. 29: 11-13. Whether you use that conclusion, say debts or trespasses or sins, these words are holy to us from their Source, and through use by our ancestors in family and in faith.
Note well, though, that Jesus says “pray then like this,” not “just keep praying this prayer, folks.” Jesus says “like” this, a pre-eminent model and example.
-- Prayer Is Portable
We did call this “Praying on Asphalt,” noting that for many, time in transit, commuting to work or school or just stuck in traffic, is a huge block of time that offers many a chance to pray. If that’s alright . . .
Is it alright to pray behind the wheel? Was it OK to pray while working like a donkey, flailing grain in a hidden threshing floor, like Gideon? Did Paul pray while driving a thick needle through hides in the agora of Corinth, working as a tentmaker? Wasn’t the Woman at the Well praying while doing the hardest labor of her day, carrying water back to her home?
Did John Wesley pray on shipboard crossing to Savannah? Do you think Francis Asbury spent time in prayer on horseback covering distances that still stun historians today during the Revolutionary era? Can you pray while driving? Point made, I trust.
Now, can you really pray while playing the radio, flipping through the satellite channels, thinking about grocery lists, grabbing the papers off the passenger seat when traffic comes to a halt (or slows)? Whether at home or even in church, the nets and snares of sin can grab us and pull us off course. Intention and commitment are important anywhere, just as you can’t really truly communicate with your children about their day at school while watching TV and thumbing through a book. If your kids know it, assume God knows it too.
For many, the car can truly be that prayer closet Jesus speaks of in Mt. 6:6, where distractions can be kept at bay and the cell phone is out of range. The Bible on CD plays just as well as Robert Ludlum or Danielle Steel novels, and with the average commute of 30 minutes in Licking County, you can “read” (hear) the whole New Testament in seven weeks and the entire Bible in less than a year. You’ll hear quite a few prayers of others in those 66 books from Genesis to Revelation, too.
-- Prayer Is Not Just Talking
We all have friends or loved ones we can be silent with, I hope! There’s a huge difference between being quiet (“Hush, dear, Daddy’s working – be quiet!”) and being silent with someone we trust and are comfortable around. Talking, sometimes, can actually mess up a perfectly good moment with those we love.
Silence is not a state we are naturally comfortable with as 21st century Americans. To give them their due, Job’s friends were silent with him for three days, and only gummed up the works when they opened their mouths. The powerful scene of the Risen Christ in Galilee at the end of John’s Gospel is introduced by a silent Peter and the Apostles sitting quietly together on the shore of the lake, until Simon the Rock said, “I am going fishing.” (Does this imply that fishing is a form of prayer? Some commentators say “yes”!)
How can we be prayerfully silent with God, waiting for whatever comes next in God’s time? One way the historic church has practiced is called “the Jesus prayer,” growing out of Orthodox Christian practice of Russia and the even more ancient Coptic Christian church in Egypt. Using Luke 18: 13 as its base, the prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The practice of this prayer is to inhale while focusing on “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” drawing in blessing and glory and promise from God’s creation, and then to exhale through “Have mercy on me, a sinner” offering up our sin and brokenness and everything that should leave us. This simple prayer not only goes back to the Gospels, but comes to us through Alexandria and Constantinople and ageless monasteries atop Mount Sinai and on the shores of the Red Sea.
An even more simple version of this prayer is pray Jesus’ name, “Jesus” as you breath out, “Jesus” as you breath in. Some still ask, “Is that prayer?” Ask two people in love if simply saying your Beloved’s name to them is a conversation, a communion. Silly question, isn’t it?
-- Just Prayer
So where are we so far? If you want to explore this strange form of communication the Church calls “prayer,” you can 1) start with worship, where prayers are offered up for the taking and others pray around you and for you and with you.
2) The prayers from worship give you cues and starting points for your own offerings to the God who made us, loves us, and wants to save us for Eternity. It may be a verse of a song stuck in our head, a phrase from the prayers of the community that just won’t shake out of your frontal lobe, or it may be the sight of the usher kneeling at the altar when simply returning the offering plates. But that lasting imprint is God telling you (Rom. 8:26) where your prayers might fruitfully go.
3) Those prayers can work themselves out anywhere, emphatically including your car. Anywhere you can carve out a space and time for reflection, is a possible place for prayer.
4) Prayer is not just a “piling up of words” as Jesus reminds us (Mt. 6:7), but communication, even that root meaning of “communion.” Prayer is being in contact with God, and if over 90% of our communication with each other is non-verbal, then how much more so with the One who already knows our inmost thoughts? Prayers like “The Jesus Prayer” of Eastern Orthodoxy Christendom can take us beyond verbal prayer to prayerful communion.
There are surely those times when we need words, if only to find our way in the darkness we create for ourselves in confusion and slefishness. The acronym “ACTS” is a longstanding watchword for public prayer, helping those who are called to praying out loud, on behalf of a gathered community, to trace the steps of a) Adoration, or praise of God, b) Confession, where we admit our failings and shortcomings in the light of a just and mighty Lord, c) Thanksgiving, for the saving acts of God in Christ and the witness of the church to share that Good News. And in any prayer, you really can’t properly move to d) Supplication until you’ve put what you’re planning to ask under the light of those first three. A supplicant is one who knows they ask for that they cannot provide themselves, and have no right to claim on their own. We have the best, truest supplications when we have offered our adoration, confession, and thanksgiving to God who gives us life and all good gifts.
-- Prayer Opens the Door
What is beyond that door is God, and all God has prepared for us, in Time and Eternity. This brief outline, to pick up an earlier example, really is just a set of stretching exercises. Once you’ve got those down, you’re ready to build up the Body of Christ with the works of love and mercy: intercessory prayer for those in need, prayer protection for God’s servants, bearing one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2). This is advanced work, and you will enter into those efforts when God calls you to it, and shows who you will be working alongside of in that vineyard.
Colossians 4: 2-3 sums up this little handbook for starting out in prayer very well (in RSV translation): “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving; and pray for us also, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ.”
An Introductory Handbook on Prayer
-- Prayer
This side of the Garden of Eden, prayer hasn’t changed very much.
The experience of praying, speaking directly to God, whether silently inside our head, out loud under pressure, or joyfully in great assemblies, is not essentially any different than it was for Abel or for Deborah, to Ruth or her great-grandson David, or between Priscilla and Aquila on the preaching trail.
In fact, the strange and mysterious sense that flows through the Biblical account of the Garden of Gethsemane is that prayer for Jesus, in his earthly ministry, was not qualitatively different than it is when we are on our knees, at a turning point in our lives.
But we are haunted by the ghost of a thought that we are somehow farther from the sources of communion, more distant from the fountains of grace than they were in the deserts of the Holy Land. We know that our modern levels of distraction, the pervasive reach of media, the murk of “data smog” can all keep our brains buzzing, our tongues a’flutter, and our ears itching. We think, and we think we think it without pride, that we are different.
We are not. The television is not more diverting than watching the sky to see if rain will finally come to save our crop, the government expects “an average of 18.7 hours per taxpayer” to fill out a 1040 but they don’t come and steal our donkey, and you don’t sleep three generations to a room, four to a bed. Prayer was both possible, and hard, in the Old Testament and Colonial America, and you can pray with power and consistency today just as well.
-- Prayer Now
So if prayer is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow, why does it seem so out of fashion? One reason is that we’ve largely stopped teaching it, in seminaries and in congregations alike. Since the scriptures report that the prophets had to strip naked in the marketplace and smash crockery to get the people to pray in Judea 3000 years ago, odds are there’s long been a tendency to let prayer, like most hard work, slide. Call that tendency sin, and you see why the problem keeps cropping up.
And that’s the main reason we slip past the praying we can and should do. It is, make no mistake about it, hard work. Like building a stone wall, hammering out a tool in the blacksmith’s forge, or writing exactly the right sentence to communicate an idea clearly. Each tool, each piece of raw material, must be carefully assessed, put in place, and adapted to use, and the mind and body (remember sin?) keeps looking for the shortcut.
Like pottery or calligraphy, there is no shortcut. Or to quote Yoda, “There is no ‘try.’ Only do, or do not.” Which is where the convenient excuse of distraction comes in.
How do you pray? The beginning steps are actually quite simple, and effective, as long as you don’t confuse getting started with going on. If you learn stretching exercises, you will be more healthy and fit – if you use them to prepare for further exercise. If you just stretch out, and never walk anywhere or work out or whatever, you not only won’t get fit . . . you’ll probably stop even doing the stretching.
-- Pray in Worship
The first step in a healthy prayer life is going to church. Yes, I said go to church and worship. Most of the prayer is provided, by others or in the service materials, in the singing and the fellowship. Praying alone is important, but it can be the hardest way to start. Jesus says to do it, but he doesn’t say it’s where you should begin.
Here’s a hint while you’re there: take note of how much of the typical service is prayer. Listen to the words of what’s sung, by you or others: prayer. In the Bible readings: very often, prayers. The Psalms are pretty much all prayers (we’ll come back to that). Introducing or concluding any of the other active parts of the service, like offering and communion, is prayer.
Plus, most preachers will tell you that even when their sermon is not directly framed in prayer language, that’s what the message is in essence. An overheard prayer, so to speak.
If you’re keeping track, that’s basically the whole service except for announcements. And occasionally them, too. So go to church to get started in prayer.
-- Prayer Happens (if you let it!)
What will happen next is that phrases and echoes of the songs and hymns and anthems, bits and pieces of the doxology or pastor’s prayer or the readings will stick in your head, and keep coming back. That’s part of what Paul talks about in Romans 8: 26-7. One of the mysteries of prayer is that the initiative of prayer is with God (Col. 4: 2-3), who has opened the door for communion with us through Christ, and in the Holy Spirit can “stir us up” to prayer even when we’re not planning on it.
The larger mystery is that God has given us the freedom to say “no,” that our prayers not be forced or coerced, but free offerings of our heart. With a simple “yes” to God’s purposes, the heavy lifting and high-impact communication is done for us. Check Genesis 28: 10-17 to see that at work!
-- Prayer Is Not On Backorder
So grab ahold of those scraps of prayer that keep rattling around in your head from worship. If you were attentive through the service, you heard quite a few different takes and approaches to prayer, so why did the chunks stick that you’re hearing as if on a loop in your brain? Likely there’s a reason, and that gives you a starting point to talk to God.
Can I ask God questions? People really do wonder about such things, which tell me they haven’t read the Psalms lately (let alone Job, but that’s for later). Questions like “who will win the playoffs?” or “where will I find love?” are more “gimmes” than questions, and those seeking a better prayer life do well to avoid the gimme list approach.
But you can find models for prayer; you can find prayers you can just pray for yourself (no plagiarism policy in praying, I’m happy to tell you) by reading some of those 150 outcries to God. To roughly paraphrase, right in the pages of your Bible people ask “God, what were you thinking?” and “Lord, you’re joking, right?” Even “Hey, God, you promised, remember?”
There are of course great hymns (fancy word for prayers set to music) to faithfulness and steadfastness and God’s absolute trustworthiness. What you don’t need to fear is feeling left out of the game if you’re not feeling that way about your relationship with God today. Like the weather in Ohio, if you don’t relate well to the language of one Psalm, turn the page. You’ll find your place soon enough.
And the great prayers of the church are still cedars in Lebanon and pillars of heaven. The prayer Jesus taught when his disciples said “Lord, teach us to pray,” is found at Mt. 6:7-13, and Lk. 11: 2-4. The traditional ending that we use in church comes from Jesus’ ancestor David, and his prayer in I Chr. 29: 11-13. Whether you use that conclusion, say debts or trespasses or sins, these words are holy to us from their Source, and through use by our ancestors in family and in faith.
Note well, though, that Jesus says “pray then like this,” not “just keep praying this prayer, folks.” Jesus says “like” this, a pre-eminent model and example.
-- Prayer Is Portable
We did call this “Praying on Asphalt,” noting that for many, time in transit, commuting to work or school or just stuck in traffic, is a huge block of time that offers many a chance to pray. If that’s alright . . .
Is it alright to pray behind the wheel? Was it OK to pray while working like a donkey, flailing grain in a hidden threshing floor, like Gideon? Did Paul pray while driving a thick needle through hides in the agora of Corinth, working as a tentmaker? Wasn’t the Woman at the Well praying while doing the hardest labor of her day, carrying water back to her home?
Did John Wesley pray on shipboard crossing to Savannah? Do you think Francis Asbury spent time in prayer on horseback covering distances that still stun historians today during the Revolutionary era? Can you pray while driving? Point made, I trust.
Now, can you really pray while playing the radio, flipping through the satellite channels, thinking about grocery lists, grabbing the papers off the passenger seat when traffic comes to a halt (or slows)? Whether at home or even in church, the nets and snares of sin can grab us and pull us off course. Intention and commitment are important anywhere, just as you can’t really truly communicate with your children about their day at school while watching TV and thumbing through a book. If your kids know it, assume God knows it too.
For many, the car can truly be that prayer closet Jesus speaks of in Mt. 6:6, where distractions can be kept at bay and the cell phone is out of range. The Bible on CD plays just as well as Robert Ludlum or Danielle Steel novels, and with the average commute of 30 minutes in Licking County, you can “read” (hear) the whole New Testament in seven weeks and the entire Bible in less than a year. You’ll hear quite a few prayers of others in those 66 books from Genesis to Revelation, too.
-- Prayer Is Not Just Talking
We all have friends or loved ones we can be silent with, I hope! There’s a huge difference between being quiet (“Hush, dear, Daddy’s working – be quiet!”) and being silent with someone we trust and are comfortable around. Talking, sometimes, can actually mess up a perfectly good moment with those we love.
Silence is not a state we are naturally comfortable with as 21st century Americans. To give them their due, Job’s friends were silent with him for three days, and only gummed up the works when they opened their mouths. The powerful scene of the Risen Christ in Galilee at the end of John’s Gospel is introduced by a silent Peter and the Apostles sitting quietly together on the shore of the lake, until Simon the Rock said, “I am going fishing.” (Does this imply that fishing is a form of prayer? Some commentators say “yes”!)
How can we be prayerfully silent with God, waiting for whatever comes next in God’s time? One way the historic church has practiced is called “the Jesus prayer,” growing out of Orthodox Christian practice of Russia and the even more ancient Coptic Christian church in Egypt. Using Luke 18: 13 as its base, the prayer is “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me a sinner.” The practice of this prayer is to inhale while focusing on “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God,” drawing in blessing and glory and promise from God’s creation, and then to exhale through “Have mercy on me, a sinner” offering up our sin and brokenness and everything that should leave us. This simple prayer not only goes back to the Gospels, but comes to us through Alexandria and Constantinople and ageless monasteries atop Mount Sinai and on the shores of the Red Sea.
An even more simple version of this prayer is pray Jesus’ name, “Jesus” as you breath out, “Jesus” as you breath in. Some still ask, “Is that prayer?” Ask two people in love if simply saying your Beloved’s name to them is a conversation, a communion. Silly question, isn’t it?
-- Just Prayer
So where are we so far? If you want to explore this strange form of communication the Church calls “prayer,” you can 1) start with worship, where prayers are offered up for the taking and others pray around you and for you and with you.
2) The prayers from worship give you cues and starting points for your own offerings to the God who made us, loves us, and wants to save us for Eternity. It may be a verse of a song stuck in our head, a phrase from the prayers of the community that just won’t shake out of your frontal lobe, or it may be the sight of the usher kneeling at the altar when simply returning the offering plates. But that lasting imprint is God telling you (Rom. 8:26) where your prayers might fruitfully go.
3) Those prayers can work themselves out anywhere, emphatically including your car. Anywhere you can carve out a space and time for reflection, is a possible place for prayer.
4) Prayer is not just a “piling up of words” as Jesus reminds us (Mt. 6:7), but communication, even that root meaning of “communion.” Prayer is being in contact with God, and if over 90% of our communication with each other is non-verbal, then how much more so with the One who already knows our inmost thoughts? Prayers like “The Jesus Prayer” of Eastern Orthodoxy Christendom can take us beyond verbal prayer to prayerful communion.
There are surely those times when we need words, if only to find our way in the darkness we create for ourselves in confusion and slefishness. The acronym “ACTS” is a longstanding watchword for public prayer, helping those who are called to praying out loud, on behalf of a gathered community, to trace the steps of a) Adoration, or praise of God, b) Confession, where we admit our failings and shortcomings in the light of a just and mighty Lord, c) Thanksgiving, for the saving acts of God in Christ and the witness of the church to share that Good News. And in any prayer, you really can’t properly move to d) Supplication until you’ve put what you’re planning to ask under the light of those first three. A supplicant is one who knows they ask for that they cannot provide themselves, and have no right to claim on their own. We have the best, truest supplications when we have offered our adoration, confession, and thanksgiving to God who gives us life and all good gifts.
-- Prayer Opens the Door
What is beyond that door is God, and all God has prepared for us, in Time and Eternity. This brief outline, to pick up an earlier example, really is just a set of stretching exercises. Once you’ve got those down, you’re ready to build up the Body of Christ with the works of love and mercy: intercessory prayer for those in need, prayer protection for God’s servants, bearing one another’s burdens (Gal. 6:2). This is advanced work, and you will enter into those efforts when God calls you to it, and shows who you will be working alongside of in that vineyard.
Colossians 4: 2-3 sums up this little handbook for starting out in prayer very well (in RSV translation): “Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving; and pray for us also, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ.”
Friday, November 17, 2006
Winter Scenes, Licking County
a six (well, it ended up being seven) part series covering a few millenia in our neighborhood
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Notes From My Knapsack 11-19-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part One
They had trudged step by step through the frost-clumped grass, thawing a bit during the height of the sun in the grey sky.
From the wide waters and marshes running south, their path climbed up and then back down into a wider valley, where the waters tending toward the rising sun.
The hunting across the wide waters had been sparse, with little cover or slack water for the game animals their hurling stones and spears best brought down. These ponds and gravely swales were growing up in high sedges and grasses, and fringes of cedar showed green around black still pools.
With the long spear in hand, the strongest of the family walked far ahead of the group, who drug their poles and bundles in a tight, ready to defend mass. They had seen no other people for weeks, but there were big cats and bears with swift reflexes that could suddenly appear from behind a blunt hill.
When it happened, it was a sudden and unexpected event of a good sort, too rare, he thought. A mastodon nearly twice his height, looking away from him while grazing at water’s edge, the breeze into his face and away from the creature’s trunk.
A quick hand signal, instantly understood, to the party behind him freezing them into stillness; a zig-zag forward to a carefully chosen position with room left for fast retreat; a rush forward and a thrust behind the ear, deep into the head.
The great tusks never even swung back in reaction, just a vast exhalation and a shuddering slump to the ground, front knees, almost to the back ones, and then an earth shaking thud to one side.
Another stone knife from his pouch was in his hand before the fur had ruffled to a stillness, and with a wary eye, almost not looking, a careful slash across the neck and a leap backwards.
With no further motion from the dead beast, he stepped back into the huddled embrace of the forelegs, and cupped his hands beneath the slowing flow of blood. A lifted motion to the sky, and then he drank reverently, tasting warmth and life flowing from the hunted to the hunter.
All the rest came up quickly and set to their tasks, familiar with elk and moose, but with broader motions and more effort on this immense carcass. Some to the hide, others began removing more tender accessible cuts of meat as they were revealed. The liver was pried out of place beneath the first ribs lifted up, and slices were shared around for quick energy to the remaining tasks.
One such task was a decision, not greeted happily by all, but accepted. Their bags were still heavy with dried meat from the plains west of the wide waters, and nuts were stuffed everywhere they could go. The major portions of this kill would be cut into moveable, retrievable parts, with a few savory roasts put to cook and be carried where best for travel, in their bellies.
As the feasting went on, the portions would be weighted and sunk in the deep, cold waters of the nearby pond. If the hunt to the east did not go well, if they journeyed even north to where the ice still stood tall on the land, but game animals did not choose to let themselves become theirs, then they could return to this place in the spring, and know there was yet hope. A scraping here and there, and the solid meat below could be eaten without much illness after hard roasting. Then they would all gain even more strength from this animal’s gift, and then return west to the wider plains, more welcoming in the long days than in the time of snow and wind.
Last of all, after camp was broken, the poles and bundles packed, the wide, tusked skull was sunk atop the cache of meat, watching for their return and perhaps, if willing, to warn off interlopers. Eyes closed to this world, but tusks bending toward them as they saw the whole disappear below the water’s surface, even now catching the first flakes of snow.
That duty done, they gathered themselves into journeying order, and set of to the east, towards the rising sun. They would not pass this way again.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he had the honor of being involved in the recovery and study of the Burning Tree Mastodon in 1989. Tell him what you think as these seven winter scenes of Licking County unfold to knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 11-26-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Two, 2000 years ago
With the setting sun, basket loads after basket load of earth had settled down into place on the steeper slope of the mound.
Green tufts touched with brown fringed the circle ringing a now high circle. Twice her height at the center, she thought, with another layer of building, working, burning, and burying.
They still sing the songs of the Bear-talker, laid deep within the heart of the family mound. So many generations ago, no one recalls even whether the first singer was a man or woman, just the seer of seasons and wearer of the heavy brown hide. From that bear mask came the words of direction and guidance, still among them, but the earlier voice growing old and cracked, then suddenly younger and higher after the log tomb was set deep in the earth, and the first house of song was built and used and set aflame to conclude the singing.
Now this place of regular return was raised high above the surrounding terrace overlooking the rivers. Long house after long house had taken shape, sheltered the sacred ceremonies, and been lit from their own fire within, until the cool ashes could receive a new coating of turf.
Three cycles of the Moon’s full measure along the eastern horizon had passed since then, long before any living memory, but the People still recalled Bear-talker and the songs of this confluence.
She walked the now well-worn path down to the meeting of rivers where the right clay could be clawed, assisted by deer horn picks, from the banks. Dozens more trips in company with many dozens of sisters and brothers would be needed to close the work, but tomorrow would see the last singing. Their return would come at the same time as a shroud of yellow green covered this latest working on the family mound.
One of the new singers was walking a path pounded round and about the sharp cone of the earthen mound. There had been talk of some clans ringing their family burial mounds with an encircling wall of soil, one opening only to the warmth of spring’s sun. She suspected that a path about the mound was being danced and sung into a foundation for such a shape made of earth, and that their baskets and deer bone hoes and antler picks would be at work on another task if the snows held off.
This year’s harvest in the gardens had been rich and full, so if the singers told them to join a new working to honor this mound, they would all happily join in. The ring of wooden posts, set in a circle back on the plain above the meeting of the rivers, marked a series of spots along the eastern hills that foretold the return of warmth and longer days, promised each year after the celebrations and songs were offered up.
Reaching the clay bank, she quickly began to chip slabs of the malleable earth into her basket. Are there to be yet more shapes on this cradled plain, beyond the mounds and protective circles they had already built? Larger circles, squares, ovals, octagons?
Others it would be to make such a choice, but many there were who would honor the urging, since the People had gained so much in seeds and food and preserved supplies, ground and dried. With this surplus had come measurers, and distributors, and watchkeepers; among them came the shaman leaders and sacred architects.
If they asked for shapes and signs to be written across the landscape, then all would join to complete the work, pivoting on the anchor point of Bear-talker’s mound. Many generations might see their work, and sing their songs, to the rhythm of steady feet along the paths of construction.
So did the Sun pivot down to the darkness, and echoed by the Moon swinging easily into the sky above the growing earthworks.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to these scenes through knapsck77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-3-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Three, 1500 years ago
It was time to head west, toward the setting sun. All the game worth hunting had led the way, and even most of the plants were shriveled and bent to the west as well, silently saying "look to where I grow now, not where I have been found in the past."
The growth of numbers among the villages of the People, a long drought, and a restlessness that defied easy explanation, all combined to bring about a wide agreement: we shall move to the west. The years of these valleys have ended, and our time in the well watered valley of the Great Father of Waters is coming. This is what nearly all believed, and many had acted on.
They stood, the two of them, on a high ridge with a wide view of the expanse that spread to the hills beyond, a level space below inscribed with shapes well known to them from years of ceremony, and gently rounded at each corner with age. To their right, invisible in the growing darkness below, was the Long Road, guarding in two parallel walls the pilgrimage path, echoed the angled course of the greater White Way path in the skies above. Now they would walk a longer path, but without ancient walls to guide them.
No more would they carefully fire with torches these ridgetops, when the soft breezes from the south agreed with all the intruding signs of woody plants and strange weeds saying "Set us aflame now, set free the long grasses." In days to come, far from their inscribed prairie and familiar eastern horizon, they could but guess at the Small Cycle and Great Cycle in the moon’s migrations. Their travels would be guided by the sun, and those movements, simpler and more understandable in a strange land, could give them some brief solace.
Crops may yet grow each season, but the thinning of bad fruit and the careful harvesting of the strong would be done by the animals at browse and the wind’s whimsy, not their own hands.
And the mounds of their ancestors would climb no further to the sky; in fact, they would settle and soften into rounder forms.
These were the worries that kept a significant number of the People in this now dusty valley, but the need to find food and return to the camps of their kindred overcame the ties to place and scene.
Could they begin again, or would their children, setting a first chamber in the earth, and raising year by year or generation by generation the layers of homegoing moundbulding? How many generations worth, how many Great Cycles of the Moon would it take to lift their new family resting places as high as these?
A doe dashed past them, unseeing their stillness and running through their upwind side. She was not right for culling, and no weapons were at hand, but she was a sign more than possible meal. She ran due west, straight into the eye of the setting sun, in the direction they knew they must go.
Were they the last to depart? A few sheltering clans were to the north in the bog lands, hunting birds fattened for their own migration, and so also were a few looking for a last kill near the salt licks, at the high marshy valley to the south.
But the valley below them was dark, a strange sight when fires fringing the great ceremonial enclosure had long been a nearly year-round scene.
All the light was now to the west, dimming in the sunset, but still quivering with promise through the bands of high cloud. It was to that light they turned, and walked even more quickly away from where their ancestors had lived and built and reflected on the skies, for time out of mind.
They left only their ancestral mounds and earthworks behind, and the memory of those they left buried there carried easily with them.
As they walked into the dusk before them, behind, unseen, the moon rose in the northwest, and followed them on their way. In fact, the moon would soon go before them.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-10-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Four, 234 years ago
There was a path up the ridge as they plodded east, which surprised Chaplain Jones. The Shawnee guide Duncan had engaged back at their town (Chwlagatha, he thought it was called) told them, in his easy French and broken English, that the valleys beyond the heights east of the Scioto were empty. Rarely hunted, and lived in by none.
When he had been asking about the rough maps of areas beyond Goshagunk, White Woman’s town, in the taverns around Fort Pitt, they said only Christopher Gist had been through that area some twenty years ago and more. When Col. Bouquet had closed the chapter that was Pontiac’s Rebellion, and asked for the captives first promised to Croghan at the Fort Quiatenon negotiations, he made his show of force on the edge of this territory.
But the captives, many who returned unwillingly (and escaped on the road back to Fort Pitt), were handed over by Mingo and Delaware and Wyandot from villages to the north and south. This territory between the Scioto and Goshagunk’s Muskingum Rivers had no stories among the returnees, and little marked on the maps.
David Jones had long felt the pull of the places on the maps where there were no marks. His Baptist congregation in Freehold, New Jersey had raised him up as a preacher in their dissenting tradition, a strong voice among the Presbyterians that surrounded them.
Governor Franklin spoke often of the rich lands to the west of the Alleghenies, and while Rev. Jones knew he thought they were good lands for those he wanted out of his colony, might it not be good for them to move and make an early claim?
There were few in the Freehold Baptist community who were eager to pioneer beyond the Ohio, but they were willing to stake their pastor for a season of missionary work among the Indians, and perhaps to scout out a land of promise. It could come to that.
With a small hop to shift the heavy packs, they came across the ridge to the path, thin but visible, that steeply sidled down the far side. Duncan was farther ahead, chatting in simple Shawnee with their guide.
As he picked his way down the slope, Jones reflected that some God has gifted in certain ways, and others are called in directions they must go. Hours and hours in the Miami and Scioto valley campsites he had struggled to learn a few words of the native tongues, and Duncan appeared to pick up their speech by absorption, just with a few words said and the response was on his tongue without thought.
He would always have to think carefully about each word, Jones acknowledged to himself, and to God. And that meant he might be a fine preacher to his own people, but he would never be a missionary to these tribes. So much for that part of his calling.
The other commission he saw fulfilled all around him. These lands, less settled for whatever reason, could quickly open up to farming and trade. Hardy and adventurous people would find a good living in these level terraces above the wide, winding rivers and soft ridges east and west.
No, the Freehold Baptist Church would not come as a group. He had realized back at Fort Pitt, and as they floated down to Fort Washington and Losantiville, that few of those in New Jersey would welcome this life. But there were still, almost every month, Welsh brothers who came to this land who were looking for something more than apprenticeship or hiring out in others’ farms. They might want to come here, and build a church of their own.
He was ready to go home himself. This frontier life was more to his taste than most, but only in measured doses. He would return, he was sure, but he wanted to get back to Freehold.
Gov. Franklin’s father, Benjamin, and others were writing and speaking of freedom for all in the colonies, from the Atlantic coasts of New Jersey to this nameless valley and beyond to the Mississippi. Rev. Jones wanted to see this "father of waters," but not on this trip. He was heading home, but as he looked around at the hills sheltering around him, he could almost imagine those who would find their home here. And he would lead them.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-17-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Five, 1801
Stadden lifted his rifle quickly to his shoulder, and then slowly swung it down again.
Nothing.
He had seen dozens of fat deer, and not a few plump turkeys, easily trotting by him while he swung an axe, closer to the cabin on the Licking River. He and Ratliff and Hughes had staked out different ends of the "bowling green," the broad flat opening below where the three rivers of the neighborhood came together into what the local Indians called the "Lick-licking." Hughes scowled whenever they came near, muttering about his father’s death back in Virginia up the Monongahela, and kept his hand near his belted knife.
Stadden saw no harm in those he had spoken to, though his hand to knife or gun would have been as fast, or even quicker, than the more impulsive Hughes, if there was any real threat.
Now he was working along the banks of the south fork, well above the confluence, miles from home, and he had seen no deer for hours.
Soon Baby Jesus would have been born eighteen hundred and one years ago, and while they saw little enough of preachers, his wife would like a good dinner and a special few days of rest with this year’s end. He was intent to find more than a young stringy buck or a few geese for the table.
Stadden had been working his way along from stand to stand of tall, nut-rich timber where he could circle in close, the wind in his face and away from his dinner.
Each, in turn, was unaccountably empty of deer. It was getting too late in the afternoon to bleed out a kill and carry it back to the encampment, and he may just have to hope for a wild turkey along the way.
Then he saw a movement up the banks, along the edge of the second terrace, where the river’s valley ended and the wooded plain stretched back to the hills. Side stepping up the bank, watchful for sticks and large dry sycamore leaves that could make his step a sound, he came to the brink, edging his hat and one eye over the verge. There stood a cluster of deer as fine as he could want – oh, Stadden thought, if I could fire just two shots one after another, without having to reload down that long, long muzzle.
Ducking back down, he slid back along the slope, to come up at a better angle to the herd, maybe even giving him a chance to take that second shot, if he could reload fast enough. Looking over again, he saw they had not spooked, but just started a slow, measured trot away from him as a group. Hunched and trotting himself, he began to shadow the herd; he felt like a wolf on the hunt, almost on all fours himself.
Then he looked up, and stood up, startled. They had disappeared, completely. The deer had been working upslope to a small, broad hill, but then were gone. Cautiously, watching the ground which was solid underfoot, and the trees which spread high above, Stadden kept on walking silently, now upright, to the hill’s edge, and stopped.
He had seen mounds throughout the district, but nothing like this. He stood in a gateway, a mouth open wide, where the hill revealed itself to be a vast, high wall, a moat within at the wall’s foot, and curving left and right, disappearing into the distance.
Just before him was the herd of deer, cropping the level space not far within the unexpected enclosure. One looked up at him incuriously, and went back to feeding.
He could have dropped one, two, even three by staying in the gateway and reloading in place, the deer trapped within. Or protected. It felt like that, somehow.
So he did not fire. He stood with them, and stared, and drank in this mysterious sight. Then Stadden turned and headed home.
Not a half-mile from the bowling green he dropped a twelve point buck who stepped right into his path and dared him to shoot. He did, and the sound called out the others who came and helped him with the cleaning out as darkness fell. The preparing and cooking went so quickly that he did not think to tell his wife about what he had seen until the next morning.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-24-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Six, 1860
Civil War, they said. Odd to think that even Americans could fight brother against brother, as they had 200 years before in England. Was Abraham Lincoln another Oliver Cromwell, or more King Charles the First?
Mrs. Dille walked quickly along the sidewalk bordering Courthouse Square, her basket weighing down one arm held out to the side, so she could watch for knotholes in the planks. Since she moved to Newark ten years ago with her once widower husband, she privately thought of mud as the defining characteristic downtown, but would never say so to Mr. Dille.
She knew full well, from frequent retellings around the fireplace at home, how muddy and malarial the heart of the city had been, and how much work he had put into beautifying the space between the frame building and the busy roads on four sides.
These "botanical gardens," as he called them, were raised with many wagon loads of fill, and dotted with strong young saplings sent as cuttings through the post from his many correspondents in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington.
Washington. Few conversations anywhere, let alone in Newark, did not touch on the recent elections and the remarkable victory for Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Remarkable, that is, to everyone but Israel Dille, who had been assuring skeptical listeners for weeks that his candidate and not the Little Giant, Sen. Douglas, would be elected President of the United States.
Even decades after he had served as mayor, most still called him "Mayor Dille," or judge or even general, and while he had no current title, everyone knew that when it came to Ohio politics, and particularly the new Republican party, Israel Dille’s hand was on the levers that powered the locomotive.
Perhaps that was a poor image, given that they had lost years of savings in speculation on a rail line to Licking County. He had bounced back quickly, and their home east of the square, while not as grand as "Elmwood" north of town (soon to be subdivided as Hudson Avenue, they said), but was comfortable enough.
At least when it did not have three or four unexpected guests in it, which was rarely.
They had not the funds for live-in servants (or the space), so she had quietly slipped out to scour the markets for a few more items to fill out the next day’s menu. Having married into respectability, she still was pleasantly surprised by the graciousness of shopkeepers and merchants at such an hour.
She wondered sourly if they, too, hoped for a job in Washington from the new administration. Surely Mr. Dille, who had good reason to expect, let alone hope, would not move the family at this time. The girls just married, and young Willie at home (Mr. Lincoln had a son William, too, she had heard); though Will already spoke of joining the Army to put down any rebellion against the Union.
Some grim faced men in the parlor at home had spoken of armed resistance even to swearing in Mr. Lincoln, and that legislatures in slave states were even now considering seceding from the rest of the nation. Mr. Dille calmly discussed such things far into the night with bishops and senators, congressmen and cart drivers, any of which might be leaning against the mantlepiece when she returned to the house.
He had hinted to her of the possibility that the president-elect himself would be passing through by rail some night soon, and may be pausing at their house. The usual twinkle in his eye doubled at that thought, she could tell.
For his sake, she hoped so, but who knew how to entertain a president-elect? If Mr. Lincoln spoke from the train’s rear rail and then rode on to Zanesville and Wheeling, she would be content to see him and that be all. If he came to the house, she would not apologize for anything, but push aside the stacks of old newspapers and flint arrowheads and mastodon teeth, and simply say "Mr. Lincoln, would you have sugar in your tea?"
As she stepped onto her porch, she wondered as the knob turned: who would be their guests tonight?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-31-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Seven
Harry was his name to many, and he answered to it, but his own name was a secret that few knew, and none nearby.
Twelve years and more he had lived in this area, first as a farmhand up from the Ohio River, and then . . . well, then an assortment of things. Nothing that ever lasted long, but that was as much his own restlessness than jobs coming to a close.
By now, he had lived in Licking County longer than he had anywhere else, though with less mark on the official records, little things like driver’s licenses, leases, a name.
He owned very little, but he was proud of owning no record of lawbreaking. Some of his acquaintances along the riverbanks would resort to a few acts of foolishness to seek out the warmth of the jail, but not Harry.
Once he had owned a bicycle, but after the tires went flat he left it leaning gently against a downtown dumpster. It had been handy enough, but his knees didn’t swing up and back as easily as they once did.
His chief possessions were a blue tarp he found blowing down Main Street one day, and a sleeping bag devoid of holes that a kind-faced young woman had given him one night. He had carried a blanket roll with a patchy, zipperless sleeping bag for years, until a conversation on a bench had ended with her return later that evening with the bag he now used.
She was a Denison student, and was working on a project of some sort, Harry thought. He hoped she got an A; that’s what he would have given her. It felt right to take it because he had helped her, so it wasn’t charity. The idea that he had helped someone get a college degree amused him greatly.
Between the odd jobs, the stray work here and there, and canned goods from the Family Dollar, he was content. There was a clinic, they said, on down along the river bank and up the way by the old Children’s Home, but he hadn’t been there yet. If his foot started hurting real bad again, he might go.
For now, he had a camp down among the out-thrust tree roots, well above the water but far below where decent citizens (what his father would have called them) might stumble on him washing up or cooking or just sitting and watching the ripples.
With the rising of a slivered, silvered moon (last quarter, he thought, feeling in his pocket for the Old Farmer’s Almanac that was his annual extravagance), the ripples were clear even after darkness was solid and set.
Not far behind him was where the B&O Roundhouse used to be, and further upstream the old Wehrle ironworks; nearby the stones only he and few others knew were part of the long-gone Ohio & Erie Canal, pacing the Licking River on down past Hanover to Black Hand Gorge. Strange, he thought, to navigate so often by where things used to be, but so much of his life was like that. He laid out his kit each morning as he had in rented rooms and even in homes he once owned, and he got up and followed a schedule no longer expected of him.
What he had never been good at was living in a world that was not yet, but could be. It really shouldn’t be that much different than imagining how things had been, working from just a few clues of brick and block. There were suggestions around about of how things might be, like the student girl had asked him about, and he could live into those hints, too. He wasn’t a river, stuck in the same course for thousands of years. Perhaps it was time for a change.
It would be a new moon, and a new year soon, and he might try again to leave the river bank for good. For now, the moonlight, the owls in the limbs above and the herons picking through the snags below, all felt like home.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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(...and a kind of postscript that ran two days before deer gun season opened here in Ohio, as my Faith Works column in the Newark Advocate on Nov. 25, 2006:)
FaithWorks 11-25-06
Jeff Gill
With slow, irregular movements, he worked his left leg around to a better position. He had been up in this tree stand since Orion began to dip down to the western horizon.
That constellation was striding across the sky when hunters first crouched silently waiting for dinner in these woods. Thoughts like that were why he hunted, the opportunity to get out and away from all the noise and buzz and just, well, think thoughts. Even pray sometimes.
He didn’t pray that God would send him a big buck; somehow, that felt wrong, like praying (which he knew he didn’t do with the regularity he ought) when the Browns were down by a touchdown. What he did feel coming up and out of him as a natural, effective prayer, was that he would be careful, that he would be safe.
And praying that no half-wit with a new shotgun would stumble his direction, either.These woods were full of deer; the challenge, he thought, was just not to scare enough of them off by accident. So he wore his blaze orange along with a full kit of camo, he had a rain barrel that sat out back for all the washing of his hunting kit, which was stored in a special bag that hung in the shed away from the house. He didn’t use special scents, which the gear stores were full of, he just worked at keeping his own scents to a minimum.
His homework through the year of tracing the paths through the leaves, watching the deer stroll by without a motion on his part, setting out a bit of salt, placing two tree stands, all came down to this week.
It really was a spiritual discipline for him, and he tried to use it as one, with time set aside for silence and reflection offered to God along with the hunter’s preparation routine. This very moment was a prayer of sorts, with God all around, and he trying not to distract his mind and spirit into the opposite direction.
No, you couldn’t hunt God, but he also had come to the realization over the years, and a few bucks of his own, that you can’t capture this moment with a gunshot, either. When everything comes together, you already know that the end result will call on him to do the hard work of hanging up, bleeding out, and carrying away, the check station and the butchering and the packing away of the venison. There is an intersection of the preparation before and the intention to follow of which the right shot at the right time is only a part.
Whatever the deer’s role in all this was from God’s point of view he wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that God definitely didn’t honor the wasteful and cruel dropping of a deer and leaving the carcass to rot in the woods; and God surely didn’t honor the carnage along the highway of roadkill, either.
If the deer was used well and not shot just as living target practice, there was an integrity in the act that fed back to you. That’s as far as he’d figured it out, but he did know that God sure let them reproduce at crazy rates, and it was hunting, disease, or roadkill for most of them. His freezer was full from bow season already. If he got a deer today, there was a food pantry his church worked with that would end up with the result.
Haze in the east was shimmering, barely at the level of starlight but stretching across the sky opposite the exit of Orion the Hunter. He saw his breath, and thought "what an amazing thing that is," even as he worried about letting that plume show too well.
Crystals of frost, blossoming on branches just below his stand, almost grew fast enough for him to see them expand. How weird it is, he thought, that if this were going on right outside my window, and I was standing in a warm spot with a mug of coffee in my hand, I wouldn’t have the patience to stand still and witness this.
On that thought, he caught a blur of movement, a hop, and then slow, steady movement on four hooves, almost moving right at his perch. If they turned left, he wouldn’t need to shift the gun at all, just a lift and pull. If they turn right, the adjustment he had to make would certainly spook them right off into a trot.
There were three, and they paused, just out of what he considered his range. Muzzles prodding at downed logs, shifting brush, then starting upright, looking around, nearly looking at him. They are beautiful creatures, he thought. He was thankful for them as they were, and he would be thankful for one of them as food for the hungry, while the other two ran away. He would be thankful, as he was thankful right now for this moment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share your story of where you hear God with him at http://webmail.windstream.net/agent/MobNewMsg?to=knapsack77@gmail.com.
a six (well, it ended up being seven) part series covering a few millenia in our neighborhood
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Notes From My Knapsack 11-19-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part One
They had trudged step by step through the frost-clumped grass, thawing a bit during the height of the sun in the grey sky.
From the wide waters and marshes running south, their path climbed up and then back down into a wider valley, where the waters tending toward the rising sun.
The hunting across the wide waters had been sparse, with little cover or slack water for the game animals their hurling stones and spears best brought down. These ponds and gravely swales were growing up in high sedges and grasses, and fringes of cedar showed green around black still pools.
With the long spear in hand, the strongest of the family walked far ahead of the group, who drug their poles and bundles in a tight, ready to defend mass. They had seen no other people for weeks, but there were big cats and bears with swift reflexes that could suddenly appear from behind a blunt hill.
When it happened, it was a sudden and unexpected event of a good sort, too rare, he thought. A mastodon nearly twice his height, looking away from him while grazing at water’s edge, the breeze into his face and away from the creature’s trunk.
A quick hand signal, instantly understood, to the party behind him freezing them into stillness; a zig-zag forward to a carefully chosen position with room left for fast retreat; a rush forward and a thrust behind the ear, deep into the head.
The great tusks never even swung back in reaction, just a vast exhalation and a shuddering slump to the ground, front knees, almost to the back ones, and then an earth shaking thud to one side.
Another stone knife from his pouch was in his hand before the fur had ruffled to a stillness, and with a wary eye, almost not looking, a careful slash across the neck and a leap backwards.
With no further motion from the dead beast, he stepped back into the huddled embrace of the forelegs, and cupped his hands beneath the slowing flow of blood. A lifted motion to the sky, and then he drank reverently, tasting warmth and life flowing from the hunted to the hunter.
All the rest came up quickly and set to their tasks, familiar with elk and moose, but with broader motions and more effort on this immense carcass. Some to the hide, others began removing more tender accessible cuts of meat as they were revealed. The liver was pried out of place beneath the first ribs lifted up, and slices were shared around for quick energy to the remaining tasks.
One such task was a decision, not greeted happily by all, but accepted. Their bags were still heavy with dried meat from the plains west of the wide waters, and nuts were stuffed everywhere they could go. The major portions of this kill would be cut into moveable, retrievable parts, with a few savory roasts put to cook and be carried where best for travel, in their bellies.
As the feasting went on, the portions would be weighted and sunk in the deep, cold waters of the nearby pond. If the hunt to the east did not go well, if they journeyed even north to where the ice still stood tall on the land, but game animals did not choose to let themselves become theirs, then they could return to this place in the spring, and know there was yet hope. A scraping here and there, and the solid meat below could be eaten without much illness after hard roasting. Then they would all gain even more strength from this animal’s gift, and then return west to the wider plains, more welcoming in the long days than in the time of snow and wind.
Last of all, after camp was broken, the poles and bundles packed, the wide, tusked skull was sunk atop the cache of meat, watching for their return and perhaps, if willing, to warn off interlopers. Eyes closed to this world, but tusks bending toward them as they saw the whole disappear below the water’s surface, even now catching the first flakes of snow.
That duty done, they gathered themselves into journeying order, and set of to the east, towards the rising sun. They would not pass this way again.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, and he had the honor of being involved in the recovery and study of the Burning Tree Mastodon in 1989. Tell him what you think as these seven winter scenes of Licking County unfold to knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 11-26-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Two, 2000 years ago
With the setting sun, basket loads after basket load of earth had settled down into place on the steeper slope of the mound.
Green tufts touched with brown fringed the circle ringing a now high circle. Twice her height at the center, she thought, with another layer of building, working, burning, and burying.
They still sing the songs of the Bear-talker, laid deep within the heart of the family mound. So many generations ago, no one recalls even whether the first singer was a man or woman, just the seer of seasons and wearer of the heavy brown hide. From that bear mask came the words of direction and guidance, still among them, but the earlier voice growing old and cracked, then suddenly younger and higher after the log tomb was set deep in the earth, and the first house of song was built and used and set aflame to conclude the singing.
Now this place of regular return was raised high above the surrounding terrace overlooking the rivers. Long house after long house had taken shape, sheltered the sacred ceremonies, and been lit from their own fire within, until the cool ashes could receive a new coating of turf.
Three cycles of the Moon’s full measure along the eastern horizon had passed since then, long before any living memory, but the People still recalled Bear-talker and the songs of this confluence.
She walked the now well-worn path down to the meeting of rivers where the right clay could be clawed, assisted by deer horn picks, from the banks. Dozens more trips in company with many dozens of sisters and brothers would be needed to close the work, but tomorrow would see the last singing. Their return would come at the same time as a shroud of yellow green covered this latest working on the family mound.
One of the new singers was walking a path pounded round and about the sharp cone of the earthen mound. There had been talk of some clans ringing their family burial mounds with an encircling wall of soil, one opening only to the warmth of spring’s sun. She suspected that a path about the mound was being danced and sung into a foundation for such a shape made of earth, and that their baskets and deer bone hoes and antler picks would be at work on another task if the snows held off.
This year’s harvest in the gardens had been rich and full, so if the singers told them to join a new working to honor this mound, they would all happily join in. The ring of wooden posts, set in a circle back on the plain above the meeting of the rivers, marked a series of spots along the eastern hills that foretold the return of warmth and longer days, promised each year after the celebrations and songs were offered up.
Reaching the clay bank, she quickly began to chip slabs of the malleable earth into her basket. Are there to be yet more shapes on this cradled plain, beyond the mounds and protective circles they had already built? Larger circles, squares, ovals, octagons?
Others it would be to make such a choice, but many there were who would honor the urging, since the People had gained so much in seeds and food and preserved supplies, ground and dried. With this surplus had come measurers, and distributors, and watchkeepers; among them came the shaman leaders and sacred architects.
If they asked for shapes and signs to be written across the landscape, then all would join to complete the work, pivoting on the anchor point of Bear-talker’s mound. Many generations might see their work, and sing their songs, to the rhythm of steady feet along the paths of construction.
So did the Sun pivot down to the darkness, and echoed by the Moon swinging easily into the sky above the growing earthworks.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to these scenes through knapsck77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-3-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Three, 1500 years ago
It was time to head west, toward the setting sun. All the game worth hunting had led the way, and even most of the plants were shriveled and bent to the west as well, silently saying "look to where I grow now, not where I have been found in the past."
The growth of numbers among the villages of the People, a long drought, and a restlessness that defied easy explanation, all combined to bring about a wide agreement: we shall move to the west. The years of these valleys have ended, and our time in the well watered valley of the Great Father of Waters is coming. This is what nearly all believed, and many had acted on.
They stood, the two of them, on a high ridge with a wide view of the expanse that spread to the hills beyond, a level space below inscribed with shapes well known to them from years of ceremony, and gently rounded at each corner with age. To their right, invisible in the growing darkness below, was the Long Road, guarding in two parallel walls the pilgrimage path, echoed the angled course of the greater White Way path in the skies above. Now they would walk a longer path, but without ancient walls to guide them.
No more would they carefully fire with torches these ridgetops, when the soft breezes from the south agreed with all the intruding signs of woody plants and strange weeds saying "Set us aflame now, set free the long grasses." In days to come, far from their inscribed prairie and familiar eastern horizon, they could but guess at the Small Cycle and Great Cycle in the moon’s migrations. Their travels would be guided by the sun, and those movements, simpler and more understandable in a strange land, could give them some brief solace.
Crops may yet grow each season, but the thinning of bad fruit and the careful harvesting of the strong would be done by the animals at browse and the wind’s whimsy, not their own hands.
And the mounds of their ancestors would climb no further to the sky; in fact, they would settle and soften into rounder forms.
These were the worries that kept a significant number of the People in this now dusty valley, but the need to find food and return to the camps of their kindred overcame the ties to place and scene.
Could they begin again, or would their children, setting a first chamber in the earth, and raising year by year or generation by generation the layers of homegoing moundbulding? How many generations worth, how many Great Cycles of the Moon would it take to lift their new family resting places as high as these?
A doe dashed past them, unseeing their stillness and running through their upwind side. She was not right for culling, and no weapons were at hand, but she was a sign more than possible meal. She ran due west, straight into the eye of the setting sun, in the direction they knew they must go.
Were they the last to depart? A few sheltering clans were to the north in the bog lands, hunting birds fattened for their own migration, and so also were a few looking for a last kill near the salt licks, at the high marshy valley to the south.
But the valley below them was dark, a strange sight when fires fringing the great ceremonial enclosure had long been a nearly year-round scene.
All the light was now to the west, dimming in the sunset, but still quivering with promise through the bands of high cloud. It was to that light they turned, and walked even more quickly away from where their ancestors had lived and built and reflected on the skies, for time out of mind.
They left only their ancestral mounds and earthworks behind, and the memory of those they left buried there carried easily with them.
As they walked into the dusk before them, behind, unseen, the moon rose in the northwest, and followed them on their way. In fact, the moon would soon go before them.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-10-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Four, 234 years ago
There was a path up the ridge as they plodded east, which surprised Chaplain Jones. The Shawnee guide Duncan had engaged back at their town (Chwlagatha, he thought it was called) told them, in his easy French and broken English, that the valleys beyond the heights east of the Scioto were empty. Rarely hunted, and lived in by none.
When he had been asking about the rough maps of areas beyond Goshagunk, White Woman’s town, in the taverns around Fort Pitt, they said only Christopher Gist had been through that area some twenty years ago and more. When Col. Bouquet had closed the chapter that was Pontiac’s Rebellion, and asked for the captives first promised to Croghan at the Fort Quiatenon negotiations, he made his show of force on the edge of this territory.
But the captives, many who returned unwillingly (and escaped on the road back to Fort Pitt), were handed over by Mingo and Delaware and Wyandot from villages to the north and south. This territory between the Scioto and Goshagunk’s Muskingum Rivers had no stories among the returnees, and little marked on the maps.
David Jones had long felt the pull of the places on the maps where there were no marks. His Baptist congregation in Freehold, New Jersey had raised him up as a preacher in their dissenting tradition, a strong voice among the Presbyterians that surrounded them.
Governor Franklin spoke often of the rich lands to the west of the Alleghenies, and while Rev. Jones knew he thought they were good lands for those he wanted out of his colony, might it not be good for them to move and make an early claim?
There were few in the Freehold Baptist community who were eager to pioneer beyond the Ohio, but they were willing to stake their pastor for a season of missionary work among the Indians, and perhaps to scout out a land of promise. It could come to that.
With a small hop to shift the heavy packs, they came across the ridge to the path, thin but visible, that steeply sidled down the far side. Duncan was farther ahead, chatting in simple Shawnee with their guide.
As he picked his way down the slope, Jones reflected that some God has gifted in certain ways, and others are called in directions they must go. Hours and hours in the Miami and Scioto valley campsites he had struggled to learn a few words of the native tongues, and Duncan appeared to pick up their speech by absorption, just with a few words said and the response was on his tongue without thought.
He would always have to think carefully about each word, Jones acknowledged to himself, and to God. And that meant he might be a fine preacher to his own people, but he would never be a missionary to these tribes. So much for that part of his calling.
The other commission he saw fulfilled all around him. These lands, less settled for whatever reason, could quickly open up to farming and trade. Hardy and adventurous people would find a good living in these level terraces above the wide, winding rivers and soft ridges east and west.
No, the Freehold Baptist Church would not come as a group. He had realized back at Fort Pitt, and as they floated down to Fort Washington and Losantiville, that few of those in New Jersey would welcome this life. But there were still, almost every month, Welsh brothers who came to this land who were looking for something more than apprenticeship or hiring out in others’ farms. They might want to come here, and build a church of their own.
He was ready to go home himself. This frontier life was more to his taste than most, but only in measured doses. He would return, he was sure, but he wanted to get back to Freehold.
Gov. Franklin’s father, Benjamin, and others were writing and speaking of freedom for all in the colonies, from the Atlantic coasts of New Jersey to this nameless valley and beyond to the Mississippi. Rev. Jones wanted to see this "father of waters," but not on this trip. He was heading home, but as he looked around at the hills sheltering around him, he could almost imagine those who would find their home here. And he would lead them.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-17-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Five, 1801
Stadden lifted his rifle quickly to his shoulder, and then slowly swung it down again.
Nothing.
He had seen dozens of fat deer, and not a few plump turkeys, easily trotting by him while he swung an axe, closer to the cabin on the Licking River. He and Ratliff and Hughes had staked out different ends of the "bowling green," the broad flat opening below where the three rivers of the neighborhood came together into what the local Indians called the "Lick-licking." Hughes scowled whenever they came near, muttering about his father’s death back in Virginia up the Monongahela, and kept his hand near his belted knife.
Stadden saw no harm in those he had spoken to, though his hand to knife or gun would have been as fast, or even quicker, than the more impulsive Hughes, if there was any real threat.
Now he was working along the banks of the south fork, well above the confluence, miles from home, and he had seen no deer for hours.
Soon Baby Jesus would have been born eighteen hundred and one years ago, and while they saw little enough of preachers, his wife would like a good dinner and a special few days of rest with this year’s end. He was intent to find more than a young stringy buck or a few geese for the table.
Stadden had been working his way along from stand to stand of tall, nut-rich timber where he could circle in close, the wind in his face and away from his dinner.
Each, in turn, was unaccountably empty of deer. It was getting too late in the afternoon to bleed out a kill and carry it back to the encampment, and he may just have to hope for a wild turkey along the way.
Then he saw a movement up the banks, along the edge of the second terrace, where the river’s valley ended and the wooded plain stretched back to the hills. Side stepping up the bank, watchful for sticks and large dry sycamore leaves that could make his step a sound, he came to the brink, edging his hat and one eye over the verge. There stood a cluster of deer as fine as he could want – oh, Stadden thought, if I could fire just two shots one after another, without having to reload down that long, long muzzle.
Ducking back down, he slid back along the slope, to come up at a better angle to the herd, maybe even giving him a chance to take that second shot, if he could reload fast enough. Looking over again, he saw they had not spooked, but just started a slow, measured trot away from him as a group. Hunched and trotting himself, he began to shadow the herd; he felt like a wolf on the hunt, almost on all fours himself.
Then he looked up, and stood up, startled. They had disappeared, completely. The deer had been working upslope to a small, broad hill, but then were gone. Cautiously, watching the ground which was solid underfoot, and the trees which spread high above, Stadden kept on walking silently, now upright, to the hill’s edge, and stopped.
He had seen mounds throughout the district, but nothing like this. He stood in a gateway, a mouth open wide, where the hill revealed itself to be a vast, high wall, a moat within at the wall’s foot, and curving left and right, disappearing into the distance.
Just before him was the herd of deer, cropping the level space not far within the unexpected enclosure. One looked up at him incuriously, and went back to feeding.
He could have dropped one, two, even three by staying in the gateway and reloading in place, the deer trapped within. Or protected. It felt like that, somehow.
So he did not fire. He stood with them, and stared, and drank in this mysterious sight. Then Stadden turned and headed home.
Not a half-mile from the bowling green he dropped a twelve point buck who stepped right into his path and dared him to shoot. He did, and the sound called out the others who came and helped him with the cleaning out as darkness fell. The preparing and cooking went so quickly that he did not think to tell his wife about what he had seen until the next morning.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-24-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Six, 1860
Civil War, they said. Odd to think that even Americans could fight brother against brother, as they had 200 years before in England. Was Abraham Lincoln another Oliver Cromwell, or more King Charles the First?
Mrs. Dille walked quickly along the sidewalk bordering Courthouse Square, her basket weighing down one arm held out to the side, so she could watch for knotholes in the planks. Since she moved to Newark ten years ago with her once widower husband, she privately thought of mud as the defining characteristic downtown, but would never say so to Mr. Dille.
She knew full well, from frequent retellings around the fireplace at home, how muddy and malarial the heart of the city had been, and how much work he had put into beautifying the space between the frame building and the busy roads on four sides.
These "botanical gardens," as he called them, were raised with many wagon loads of fill, and dotted with strong young saplings sent as cuttings through the post from his many correspondents in Boston, Philadelphia, and Washington.
Washington. Few conversations anywhere, let alone in Newark, did not touch on the recent elections and the remarkable victory for Abraham Lincoln of Illinois. Remarkable, that is, to everyone but Israel Dille, who had been assuring skeptical listeners for weeks that his candidate and not the Little Giant, Sen. Douglas, would be elected President of the United States.
Even decades after he had served as mayor, most still called him "Mayor Dille," or judge or even general, and while he had no current title, everyone knew that when it came to Ohio politics, and particularly the new Republican party, Israel Dille’s hand was on the levers that powered the locomotive.
Perhaps that was a poor image, given that they had lost years of savings in speculation on a rail line to Licking County. He had bounced back quickly, and their home east of the square, while not as grand as "Elmwood" north of town (soon to be subdivided as Hudson Avenue, they said), but was comfortable enough.
At least when it did not have three or four unexpected guests in it, which was rarely.
They had not the funds for live-in servants (or the space), so she had quietly slipped out to scour the markets for a few more items to fill out the next day’s menu. Having married into respectability, she still was pleasantly surprised by the graciousness of shopkeepers and merchants at such an hour.
She wondered sourly if they, too, hoped for a job in Washington from the new administration. Surely Mr. Dille, who had good reason to expect, let alone hope, would not move the family at this time. The girls just married, and young Willie at home (Mr. Lincoln had a son William, too, she had heard); though Will already spoke of joining the Army to put down any rebellion against the Union.
Some grim faced men in the parlor at home had spoken of armed resistance even to swearing in Mr. Lincoln, and that legislatures in slave states were even now considering seceding from the rest of the nation. Mr. Dille calmly discussed such things far into the night with bishops and senators, congressmen and cart drivers, any of which might be leaning against the mantlepiece when she returned to the house.
He had hinted to her of the possibility that the president-elect himself would be passing through by rail some night soon, and may be pausing at their house. The usual twinkle in his eye doubled at that thought, she could tell.
For his sake, she hoped so, but who knew how to entertain a president-elect? If Mr. Lincoln spoke from the train’s rear rail and then rode on to Zanesville and Wheeling, she would be content to see him and that be all. If he came to the house, she would not apologize for anything, but push aside the stacks of old newspapers and flint arrowheads and mastodon teeth, and simply say "Mr. Lincoln, would you have sugar in your tea?"
As she stepped onto her porch, she wondered as the knob turned: who would be their guests tonight?
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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Notes From My Knapsack 12-31-06
Jeff Gill
Winter Scenes, Licking County – Part Seven
Harry was his name to many, and he answered to it, but his own name was a secret that few knew, and none nearby.
Twelve years and more he had lived in this area, first as a farmhand up from the Ohio River, and then . . . well, then an assortment of things. Nothing that ever lasted long, but that was as much his own restlessness than jobs coming to a close.
By now, he had lived in Licking County longer than he had anywhere else, though with less mark on the official records, little things like driver’s licenses, leases, a name.
He owned very little, but he was proud of owning no record of lawbreaking. Some of his acquaintances along the riverbanks would resort to a few acts of foolishness to seek out the warmth of the jail, but not Harry.
Once he had owned a bicycle, but after the tires went flat he left it leaning gently against a downtown dumpster. It had been handy enough, but his knees didn’t swing up and back as easily as they once did.
His chief possessions were a blue tarp he found blowing down Main Street one day, and a sleeping bag devoid of holes that a kind-faced young woman had given him one night. He had carried a blanket roll with a patchy, zipperless sleeping bag for years, until a conversation on a bench had ended with her return later that evening with the bag he now used.
She was a Denison student, and was working on a project of some sort, Harry thought. He hoped she got an A; that’s what he would have given her. It felt right to take it because he had helped her, so it wasn’t charity. The idea that he had helped someone get a college degree amused him greatly.
Between the odd jobs, the stray work here and there, and canned goods from the Family Dollar, he was content. There was a clinic, they said, on down along the river bank and up the way by the old Children’s Home, but he hadn’t been there yet. If his foot started hurting real bad again, he might go.
For now, he had a camp down among the out-thrust tree roots, well above the water but far below where decent citizens (what his father would have called them) might stumble on him washing up or cooking or just sitting and watching the ripples.
With the rising of a slivered, silvered moon (last quarter, he thought, feeling in his pocket for the Old Farmer’s Almanac that was his annual extravagance), the ripples were clear even after darkness was solid and set.
Not far behind him was where the B&O Roundhouse used to be, and further upstream the old Wehrle ironworks; nearby the stones only he and few others knew were part of the long-gone Ohio & Erie Canal, pacing the Licking River on down past Hanover to Black Hand Gorge. Strange, he thought, to navigate so often by where things used to be, but so much of his life was like that. He laid out his kit each morning as he had in rented rooms and even in homes he once owned, and he got up and followed a schedule no longer expected of him.
What he had never been good at was living in a world that was not yet, but could be. It really shouldn’t be that much different than imagining how things had been, working from just a few clues of brick and block. There were suggestions around about of how things might be, like the student girl had asked him about, and he could live into those hints, too. He wasn’t a river, stuck in the same course for thousands of years. Perhaps it was time for a change.
It would be a new moon, and a new year soon, and he might try again to leave the river bank for good. For now, the moonlight, the owls in the limbs above and the herons picking through the snags below, all felt like home.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; respond to the scenes of Licking County long ago through knapsack77@gmail.com.
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(...and a kind of postscript that ran two days before deer gun season opened here in Ohio, as my Faith Works column in the Newark Advocate on Nov. 25, 2006:)
FaithWorks 11-25-06
Jeff Gill
With slow, irregular movements, he worked his left leg around to a better position. He had been up in this tree stand since Orion began to dip down to the western horizon.
That constellation was striding across the sky when hunters first crouched silently waiting for dinner in these woods. Thoughts like that were why he hunted, the opportunity to get out and away from all the noise and buzz and just, well, think thoughts. Even pray sometimes.
He didn’t pray that God would send him a big buck; somehow, that felt wrong, like praying (which he knew he didn’t do with the regularity he ought) when the Browns were down by a touchdown. What he did feel coming up and out of him as a natural, effective prayer, was that he would be careful, that he would be safe.
And praying that no half-wit with a new shotgun would stumble his direction, either.These woods were full of deer; the challenge, he thought, was just not to scare enough of them off by accident. So he wore his blaze orange along with a full kit of camo, he had a rain barrel that sat out back for all the washing of his hunting kit, which was stored in a special bag that hung in the shed away from the house. He didn’t use special scents, which the gear stores were full of, he just worked at keeping his own scents to a minimum.
His homework through the year of tracing the paths through the leaves, watching the deer stroll by without a motion on his part, setting out a bit of salt, placing two tree stands, all came down to this week.
It really was a spiritual discipline for him, and he tried to use it as one, with time set aside for silence and reflection offered to God along with the hunter’s preparation routine. This very moment was a prayer of sorts, with God all around, and he trying not to distract his mind and spirit into the opposite direction.
No, you couldn’t hunt God, but he also had come to the realization over the years, and a few bucks of his own, that you can’t capture this moment with a gunshot, either. When everything comes together, you already know that the end result will call on him to do the hard work of hanging up, bleeding out, and carrying away, the check station and the butchering and the packing away of the venison. There is an intersection of the preparation before and the intention to follow of which the right shot at the right time is only a part.
Whatever the deer’s role in all this was from God’s point of view he wasn’t sure. What he was sure of was that God definitely didn’t honor the wasteful and cruel dropping of a deer and leaving the carcass to rot in the woods; and God surely didn’t honor the carnage along the highway of roadkill, either.
If the deer was used well and not shot just as living target practice, there was an integrity in the act that fed back to you. That’s as far as he’d figured it out, but he did know that God sure let them reproduce at crazy rates, and it was hunting, disease, or roadkill for most of them. His freezer was full from bow season already. If he got a deer today, there was a food pantry his church worked with that would end up with the result.
Haze in the east was shimmering, barely at the level of starlight but stretching across the sky opposite the exit of Orion the Hunter. He saw his breath, and thought "what an amazing thing that is," even as he worried about letting that plume show too well.
Crystals of frost, blossoming on branches just below his stand, almost grew fast enough for him to see them expand. How weird it is, he thought, that if this were going on right outside my window, and I was standing in a warm spot with a mug of coffee in my hand, I wouldn’t have the patience to stand still and witness this.
On that thought, he caught a blur of movement, a hop, and then slow, steady movement on four hooves, almost moving right at his perch. If they turned left, he wouldn’t need to shift the gun at all, just a lift and pull. If they turn right, the adjustment he had to make would certainly spook them right off into a trot.
There were three, and they paused, just out of what he considered his range. Muzzles prodding at downed logs, shifting brush, then starting upright, looking around, nearly looking at him. They are beautiful creatures, he thought. He was thankful for them as they were, and he would be thankful for one of them as food for the hungry, while the other two ran away. He would be thankful, as he was thankful right now for this moment.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio. Share your story of where you hear God with him at http://webmail.windstream.net/agent/MobNewMsg?to=knapsack77@gmail.com.
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