Notes from my Knapsack 7-4-19

Notes from my Knapsack 7-4-19

Jeff Gill

 

Seeking refuge in America

___

 

It's a commonplace to say that we all came here from somewhere else.

 

Native Americans chuckle at our usual oversight, but archaeologists note that if you go back far enough, we all are migrants to Ohio.

 

Just on the eastern border of the village, thirty years ago, I helped with a dig where we found a flint tool going back to the days just after the glaciers retreated up past Johnstown and Croton, when cedar and sedge were the bulk of the greenstuff, and protein was hazardous to obtain from giant creatures padding across the sub-Arctic landscape.

 

And this December is the thirtieth anniversary of the re-discovery of the Burning Tree Mastodon, down past Heath off Ridgely Tract Road but not far from the not-yet Welsh Hills. Our excavations then and in the summer of 1990 revealed bones with flint tool cut marks, some 12,000 years in the muck of a former bog. The first marks of humanity passing through Licking County are those cut marks on rib and pelvic bones, from preliminary butchering and likely caching into a glacial pond as winter approached.

 

The cache was not accessed again, suggesting that the original hunters did not stay in the area, but were migrants, passing through. Did they get luckier later, or not survive to return? We will surely never know. Migrants often die without anyone even noticing.

 

More recently, the Welsh came to these hills; as is evident, they came here from Wales. A reputable place, perhaps, but still they crossed water and mountains to get here.

 

South of Wales, but closer to there than here, I was thinking of Italy and Italians the other day. I happened to catch a bit of "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" on TV, and there's much to connect to anyone who's moved to Granville in recent decades. The steadily increasing price of the house as the plans are worked out, the challenges faced in both site circumstances and sub-contractors, and of course the racism.

 

Oh, sorry. I mean the stereotypical presentation of ethnic types as . . . nah, let's just call it racism, shall we? But the big bogeyman, or men in this telling is the ignorance and incomprehension of the . . . Italian workmen.

 

Yes, Louise Beavers is the African American servant who bails Blandings out of a fix, and she's portrayed as somewhat hapless herself as was the racist stereotype of the time (1948), but I was struck by the almost equally unpleasant portrayal of the Italians. World War II movies hadn't quite finished flushing that bias out of the system.

 

Frankly, the scenes with the Italians made me think of half a dozen conversations I've had in Our Fayre Village with people about Hispanic landscapers and roofers. A group regarded nervously, speaking their own language, not noticing us nor we noticing them, but necessary to make the project come in on budget.

 

We need them, we virtually expect them, but we're not sure how to deal with them. There's a human sense of wanting to relate personally to them, but a barrier, a wall of sorts, that may someday come down but for now is a tangible distance between us.

 

What's going on along the Rio Grande is driven both by instability and unrest behind refugees, and the hunger for cheap or cheaper labor in front of them. Those scenes to our south are no more distant from us then 12,000 years ago is apart from us as we stand here today.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he knows we're all connected to each other and struggles with how to live like that's true. Tell him about your local connections at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.