Faith Works 11-18-06
Jeff Gill
Mythologies of the Holiday Season
With the finale of "Dancing With the Stars," are there any big, nationally anticipated sporting events left in 2006?
Oh, right. This afternoon.
For the majority of us (not all, I know) who will be watching the Apocalyptic Armageddon-ish Activity at 3:30 pm on television, The Game will be accompanied by The Ads.
Ohio State-Michigan isn’t the Super Bowl (this year, it may be bigger), so there aren’t the specially made advertising spots with megastar cameos and wild premises. What we do have in this High Holy Day for Buckeye fans (possibly, dare we hope, to be followed by High Holy Day, the sequel, in the BCS?) is the placement before both Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Those two days, and their alcoholic cousin New Year’s Eve, make up "The Holidays." As in "Happy Holidays," "Holiday Greetings," "Best Wishes for the Holidays," or maybe "Season’s Greetings."
No, it isn’t my purpose to haggle over when the US was a more "Merry Christmas" nation or which retailers are training their staffs to say what. You’ll hear about that elsewhere this year. But the holiday season, or "The Holidays," have taken on a certain bulk rate atmosphere of their own, one that holds onto pieces of what they used to be, and smooshes in clumps of what some may ask of them.
Thanksgiving and Christmas oriented commercials used to frequently have a middle class home setting, get the grandparents and little kids together kind of feel. The paradigm is summed up by a coffee commerical so effective they bring it back some years, even with the fuzziness of old videotape. The thirty second plot is a young man back from college unexpectedly and early, whose little sibling is sweetly shushed, and who wakes up the sleeping family by brewing a big ol’ pot of java. Mom comes down the stairs wondering what the little ‘un got into, and goes from worry to delight to a hug, and the company logo.
More dominant today is "The Party" for "The Holidays." An assortment of cars, a snowy night, tasteful gifts or a bottle of wine under the arm. China on the table, surrounding a centerpiece that has the Martha seal of approval, napkin rings, and most flat surfaces have a floral arrangement in muted colors.
The bright colors come from the multicultural gathering, and the striking sweaters and waistcoats worn by the partygoers. Some ads show a largely youthful event, ethnically diverse, others a more society type gathering with few children and more grey hair, but still racially inclusive.
You can look at these developments from a number of angles. Certainly it is harder to show a family gathering with four or five distinct ethnicities present in the mix, although I know families in Licking County who would say from their own experience, "why not?" And it is surely good that older Americans can be seen in Thanksgiving and after ads without being the grandma in the kitchen smacking the hands of the turkey pickers (grandpas can still be shown as irascible and dumpily dressed, just like the 60’s, I see, and dads are still always idiots unless they’re purchasing diamonds).
What I wonder is whether this is a cause, or an effect? It could be an outgrowth of the fact that it is harder for family to get together for seasonal gatherings, sprawled across the continent as we are, making social events more the center of our holiday calendar (just try to find an Advent calendar outside of a religious bookstore).
Or it could be that retailers and advertising companies like the greater latitude that "The Party" motif gives to product placement and sales. They can point to the admitted social value of multiculturalism as the reason to shift away from family scenes to events assembled by invitation more than relation. My concern isn’t with ethnic diversity, but the idea that the heart of the season is in "elective affinities," who we choose to associate with as individuals instead of who we’re related to. I love holiday parties myself, but they’ve always seemed to me as if they are, and ought to be, secondary to family activities.
One argument against that concern is that there are people who have little or no family: do you want to exclude them from seasonal enjoyment? I could answer, in a cranky mood, that we who don’t have sleek, glossy, sophisticated friends who throw painfully tasteful parties are pretty excluded by the new ideal . . . and I’m guessing there are quite a few of us.
Another way to ask the question is: are the ads just following where society is already going, or is the business getting out ahead of us, trying to lead us in a new direction?
And if the latter, should we go?
Something to think about as you watch the ads during The Game this afternoon, kicking off The Holidays.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him your opinions about the ads o’ the season through knapsack77@gmail.com.
Friday, November 17, 2006
This is a little unusual -- i am putting up here the next *seven* "Notes From My Knapsack" columns through Dec. 31 for the Community Booster, since they are meant as a series of "Winter Scenes, Licking County," starting with 11,000 years ago or so, and the last one set somewhere in the neighborhood of right now. I'll keep dragging this series to the top even as i keep adding each new week's "FaithWorks" column that goes Saturdays in the Advocate. These stories are based on what we know historically and archaeologically, but mostly on what i imagine in the cracks and seams running through the heart of what we know. I hope you enjoy them!
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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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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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