Blue Highways: St. Michaels, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

What's in a name?  What's in my name?  In this post, I'm going to be a little self-indulgent and reflect on the meaning of the name Michael.  It seems that if names are any indication of what we are supposed to represent, both St. Michaels and I have a lot to live up to.  To see where St. Michaels is located, the map will be your guide.  At right is the state flower of Maryland, the Black-Eyed Susan.  Photo by Lorax, found at Wikimedia Commons, and used under the GNU Free Documentation License.

Book Quote

"On the way was St. Michaels, 'the town that fooled the British' by inventing the blackout.  During the War of 1812, word reached the citizens that a night bombardment was imminent.  Residents doused all lights except candles in second-story windows and lanterns they hung in treetops.  British gunners misread the lights, miscalculated trajectories, and overshot the town.  The trick preserved numerous colonial buildings, including one home where a stray cannonball fell through the roof and bounced down the stairway past the startled lady of the house."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 15

St. Michaels, Maryland. Photo by Acroterion and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

St. Michaels, Maryland

The blackout story is interesting, but I want to focus on the name of St. Michaels, Maryland.  Part of the reason is personal.  My name is Michael.  But part of the reason is a curiosity of mine.  Michael has been one of the most enduring popular names for boys.  But for the life of me, I don't understand why.

Of course, there is the religious connection.  A long time ago, when I first discovered that names could mean something (before that, I thought Michael was just Michael), I discovered that Michael is a Hebrew name, and not only that, but the conjoining of two Hebrew words: micha and el.  Micha means "in the likeness of" or "like" and el means God.  So in my first understandings of my name, I was, mistakenly, pleased to note that my name meant "he who is like God!"  I was able to lord it over my lesser-monickered friends until looking again, I was puzzled to find that it was actually a question: "Who is like God?"  I didn't understand it at the time.  My friends never bought my argument that I was like God anyway.

The question only makes sense when you attach the name Michael to the most important entity associated with it, the archangel Michael, the most important angel in the Judeo-Christian tradition.  Along with two other archangels, Gabriel and Raphael, Michael is a major figure in Judaism, Christianity and Islam.  In Judaism, Michael is the protector of Israel and identified as a "prince of the first rank" of angels.  He also identifies himself as a commander in the army of the Lord.  In the Christian tradition, particularly the Book of Revelation, Michael defeats Satan in heaven and as a result, Satan is thrown down to earth.  Michael is also identified as the angel that will herald the second coming of Christ.  He is considered the patron saint of healing and the prince of the Seraphim.  He is seen to have four main offices: to fight Satan, to rescue souls at the hour of death, to be the champion of God's people, and to bring souls to judgment.  In some variants of Christianity, like the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, Michael is practically synonymous with Jesus Christ, and the Mormons believe that Michael is Adam in his heavenly form.  Michael is also mentioned in the Koran as Mikail, one of the archangels along with Jibreel (Gabriel), where the prophet warns that anyone who is an enemy to God, his angels and messengers, and Jibreel and Mikail, will find God as their enemy.

Thus, Michael serves as a sort of heavenly reality check.  If one sees the name Michael as a question, "Who is like God?", the answer is expected to be "nobody."  Thus, Michael is supposed to remind us of both the power and majesty of God while at the same time revealing to us that nobody can be like God.

Certainly the story of how I got this name, the name of the first among the angels, does not fit with the implied majesty of Michael.  I was adopted at two years old.  At that time, people were calling me "Mike."  I had gotten used to that name and so for my adoptive parents, changing it was out of the question.  But my mother didn't like "Mike" and therefore used the formal version of the name, "Michael."  In other words, my parents didn't put much thought into the name.  They didn't name me after the archangel, or because of the symbolism of the name.  They simply took the diminutive name that I came with and formalized it.

I wish that I could live up to the name always, but like most people, I have my times when I perhaps imperfectly resemble a fuzzy copy of Michael's strength, loyalty, courage, and majesty.  There have been other times when I more accurately resemble something quite different. In a way, it's difficult to live up to the name of someone who carries the power of God and reminds us of what we are not.  Perhaps that's why, at least in English-speaking nations, we don't name any of our children Jesus.  Who can live up to that?  People do name their children Joshua, which is probably closer to Jesus' actual name in Aramaic.

If you're named after something archetypal, something that calls to mind the most noble and perfect of human natures, does it mean that there is an unwritten or unsaid expectation that you live up to those ideals?  By extension, if you live in a community named St. Michaels, or any of the many other communities named after Biblical or holy places, was there an assumption that the citizens of those places will embody such principles?

I believe that the answer is yes but not necessarily overtly.  We give children and places such names because we all strive to be the fullest of what we understand humanity to be.  Yet we all know that nobody can live up to ideals that we set for ourselves.  That's why they are ideals.  All of us are often less than ideal.  But, except for a very few, we wish and we strive to be good people.  We can even argue that those who are often not good people, who may even seem eveil, may be trying to reach a sort of perfection only they can understand; one which puts them very far apart from the rest of us.  I can never truly be my name, Michael, in the historical, literary and religious meaning of the name.  But I can be "Michael."  In other words, I can do the best I can to be a good person and live up to I expect of me.  And when I fail, I can always ask "Who is like God?"

Musical Interlude

When the Saints Go Marching In is a gospel and jazz standard.  The line that appeals to me is the one that says "how I want to be in that number, when the saints go marching in."  It is performed by the incomparable Louis Armstrong in this video, with a number of other very fine musicians.  I like to think that if there is a celestial orchestra, Armstrong and the other passed musicians will be jazzing up the heavenly arrangement.

Here's an extra video of Dave Brubeck's Take Five.  Brubeck was a jazz piano icon who just passed away a day or so ago and will certainly be part of that great jazz arrangement in the hereafter.

If you want to know more about St. Michaels

Baydreaming: Saint Michaels
Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum
Town of St. Michaels
Wikipedia: Saint Michaels

Next up: Tilghman Island, Maryland

Blue Highways: Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is making his way through southern New Jersey, and finding a little bit of the South there.  I use the opportunity to reflect on what makes the South, the South.  To see where Millville and Bridgeton sit as we begin our trip westward and back to the beginning, go to the map.  The illustration at right is by Bob Hines, hosted at Wikimedia Commons, and is of the New Jersey state bird, the American goldfinch.

Book Quote

"As the pine belt disappeared, the state took on a Southern cast below Millville, an old glass-making town on the Maurice River flowing through the exposed silica deposits of lower Jersey.  Near here, the first Mason jar was made.  Outside of Bridgeton, the Southern aspect showed plain: big fields of soybeans, corn, cabbage, strawberries, and fallow fields of dusty brown, and slopes of peach and apple orchards.  Black men worked patch farms, and with cane poles they fished muddy creeks of the lowlands where egrets stepped meticulously through the tidal marsh."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 9

Downtown Millville, New Jersey. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

There is a difference in the South.

I'm not sure exactly what that difference is.  Maybe it's the light.  In the North, the light seems either really really hot and intense, at least in the summer months, or cold and harsh in the winter.  That is, if you see the light at all in the winter - when I lived in Milwaukee we would often go a month or two with gray, overcast skies.  In the South, especially as you get closer to the Gulf Coast, the light takes on a muted aspect, and it seems like the colors, especially toward sunset, become pastels.

Maybe it's the land, which takes on a rural aspect.  Certainly there are large cities in the North, but the South has been and will be known primarily for its agriculture.  I think that perhaps an offshoot of this idea is also based on ethnicity.  When I lived in the North, the African-American population was mostly found in the cities.  Once you drove into the country in the Midwest or Northeast, the farmers were mostly white or the farms were large cooperatives or corporately owned.  But in the South, African-Americans are much more represented in the rural populations, and as owners and workers of farms.  Perhaps this has to do with migration - in escaping slavery, and later the hardships of sharecropping as well as looking for well-paying jobs, many African-Americans moved north to the factory jobs in the cities.  This created a population that moved into cities and stayed and that only reconnects with its farming roots perhaps when some people from the North come back to visit their extended Southern families, many of whom have roots and branches that still farm as a way of life.

Maybe the change is in the stereotypes that we have of the South.  Who hasn't heard a version of the "sleepy South?"  Who doesn't take note of the different accents one finds there.  Who doesn't note the change to primarily country music and Christian stations on the radio when one crosses the imaginary line (the Mason-Dixon line if you will) that demarcates the South from the other parts of the nation?

Perhaps it is the food?  The slow-cooked comfort food, with those qualities that we consider Southern.  Barbecued, fried, often with vegetables, like okra, that those of us in the North have never tried.  Grits, biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Collard greens and fried chicken steak for dinner.  Good, wholesome and often artery-clogging food.

It might be that the change is also in pace.  To me, the North seems busy.  People constantly moving, meeting, getting places.  They bark orders and arrange things on their various communication devices...smart phones, IPads and other tablets.  In the Northern cities, people put on headphones and crowd the rest of the world out with music from their IPods and MP3 devices.  In the downtowns of places like Chicago and New York, the clattering of the subways and elevated trains create, at least for me, moments of loud distractions as they rumble overhead and underneath, squealing to a stop with the scratchy announcement of loudspeakers, and then rumble off again, sparking away into the distance of tunnel or track.  But in the South, the days seem to go longer, especially in the summer.  My one experience of living in the South, in New Orleans (which admittedly is Southern and yet not Southern but in this experience I think it is very Southern), the night brought more quiet.  I could hear the insects even as I sat on a porch outside my home.  In fact, where did I ever sit on a porch in the evening regularly other than in the South?  The smells of night-blooming jasmine filled the air.  Music, actually played and not filtered through cords and earpieces but actually transmitted straight to the ear, seemingly such an important part of the Southern soul, filtered out of houses where someone practiced, or out of clubs where bands entertained.  The days were often hot and lazy, leading to a sort of lethargy of body and reflection of mind.

I don't really want to paint the South in one broad brush, just as one can't paint the North accurately in similar strokes.  The differences abound from Georgia to Louisiana, from Florida to Tennessee.  A people and place cannot be captured in a few words as there are complexities and regionalities and all of those things that make us all individuals, each deserving of notice individually in our own right.

Yet it is our tendency as humans to avoid the complexities and generalize.  We want to make things simpler in order to grasp only the essences of what we need to know.  And for that reason, we can point to the pace, and the food, and the rural, and other aspects of the South that jump out at us, or are reinforced in other ways, so that minds so capable of grasping the most complex ideas don't have to work as hard.  This is a danger, as if we oversimplify, we run the risk of dismissing a whole region based on isolated facts, or making too much of cosmetic differences instead of celebrating our whole country.  As we know tragically from history, over and over again, generalization can lead to some very bad consequences.

Yes, there is a difference in the South.  And I like a whole lot in that difference.

Musical Interlude

I first heard R.L Burnside in New Orleans, on a CD that had a re-mixed version of his song Miss Maybelle.  I really liked it.  We think of the South as a bastion of country music, but the south is also the birthplace of jazz and the blues.  R.L. Burnside was one of the the last of the old-time blues players who took the Delta blues and made them even more raw by electrifying them.  I wish I had seen him live in New Orleans before he died in 2005.

If you want to know more about Millville and Bridgeton

Bridgeton Area Chamber of Commerce
City of Bridgeton
Glasstown (Millville) Arts District
Millville Chamber of Commerce
The News of Cumberland County (newspaper)
Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center of Millville
Wikipedia: Bridgeton
Wikipedia: Millville

Next up: Othello, New Jersey