Blue Highways: Dover, Delaware

Unfolding the Map

When William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) relates the story of the Chief Justice's ghost on the Dover village green, it causes me to ponder a bit on the sometimes thin separation of our world from that of the dead.  Should you want to see where Dover is located, say a little prayer for those who have passed on and see the map.

Book Quote

"On the village green in Dover, citizens successfully buried the ghost of Chief Justice Sam Chew in broad daylight.  Around 1745, the judge's shade developed a nocturnal penchant for meditating on the common and beckoning to passersby.  His honor's whangdoodle began to keep the streets empty after dark and tavernkeepers complained.  So residents dug a symbolic grave on the green, and, in full sunshine, tolled bells as clergymen spoke the restless soul to its peace."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 13

Downtown Dover, Delaware. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Dover, Delaware

Recently, here in Albuquerque, we celebrated Dia de los Muertos or Day of the Dead.  A day that we in European traditions have turned into a celebration of spooks and ghouls, of treats and tricks, and of costumes and candy is now mostly celebrated by little kids on parade at dusk while their parents keep a watchful eye on them.  Halloween is a sanitized holiday, the original purpose of which was to highlight the rending of the veil between our world and the spirit world, but  has been lost in commercialization and the bottom line of candy sales. 

The origins of Halloween are therefore obscured.  Perhaps an amalgamation of different Roman and pagan holidays, the day was usually marked as the end of the harvest and also, according to Celtic traditions, when the door to the Otherworld opened and spirits and sprites could join us here in ours.  Later, after Christian influences on the holiday, children went around to ask for cakes and other treats to offer as prayers to lost souls.  Of course, there are only echoes of that left in our Halloween, where it's all about the candy gained and consumed.

But the Hispanic cultural tradition has kept a bit of the original intent of the day alive.  In Albuquerque, families take time to come together in feasts.  They gather together to spruce up the gravesites of their families and leave fresh flowers and other mementos.  Ofrendas, or altars, dedicated to the memories of friends and loved ones are constructed in homes and adorned with food and mementos important to the person or persons being commemorated.  The ofrendas are often garlanded with marigolds, which are believed to attract souls to the altar where they may consume the spiritual essence of the food left as offerings and hear their living relatives talk about them.

The symbols of the day are calaveras, or skulls.  These are fashioned out of sugar and decorated in fancy and floral patterns and used to decorate for the holiday.  Catrinas are also brought out.  These carved figures usually depict a skeleton lady who represents someone from a higher class, a reminder that while riches may separate us on this earth, there is no difference between us when it comes to death.  We will all live our lives and die, and be reduced to the bare elements of what we are.  Skin and flesh, then bone, then dust.

My wife and I, after years of attending, had an opportunity to participate in the Marigold Parade, which over the past few years has become an Albuquerque tradition.  The parade features individuals and groups, dressed up with faces painted like calaveras, marching with grim faces (because death is grim) in a macabre procession that is at once somber and at the same time joyous.  The parade not only celebrates the thin veil between life and death, but also the follies of the living.  This year, small makeshift floats lampooning the 1% vs. the 99%, and other national and local politics, were mixed in with floats (usually the decorated beds of pickup trucks) remembering people who have passed on.  Because it is Albuquerque, a center of "lowrider" culture, the end of the parade featured lowriders, some equipped with hydraulics, filled with skeletal drivers and passengers in a strange, motorized death procession.

Like my feelings about unexplained phenomena, which I've written about in this forum in the past, I've always wanted to be able to believe in spirits and ghosts.  As a scientist, I am taught only to believe in what I've been able to observe, and to even question that.  On that score, I have never observed a ghost.  I've tried - I've visited supposed haunted places, including dragging my wife on our anniversary up to a haunted hotel, the St. James, in Cimarron, New Mexico on our anniversary weekend.  The strange smell of cigar smoke in our hotel room that was unaccounted for wasn't enough to convince me (though the always accommodating clerk told me that I was probably smelling the ghostly poker game in the card room around the corner).  Like most people, I wonder what happens when we die, and if our spirits and essences just disappear into the universe, or whether there is something beyond this life that we can look forward to, as many religions promise us.

But on the other hand, the thought of restless spirits roaming around, never finding a place of peace, is also quite disturbing.  If there are ghosts tied, by some unfulfilled longing or unfinished business, to a place or location where their sole purpose is to haunt until the end of time, then their existence seems sad to me.  They can't move on, and they are trapped in a kind of loop.  They are never able to leave that place and therefore, they never find the peace they desperately crave.  Isn't death supposed to be an eternity of peace after a lifetime of toil on this earth?

In a similar train of thought, my wife just reminded me of an interesting concept.  We read a short story once about a waiting room where souls of dead people are trapped as long as their names are spoken on earth.  In this vision, the people who are unknown are able to truly pass on because they are forgotten.  Those that seek fame and fortune, through vanity or other reasons, are those that remain in the waiting room purgatory.  If we are continually tied to this earth by how we are remembered, then maybe we aren't doing the dead a favor at all.  Maybe we, who must comfort ourselves and deal with our grief of those departed, actually are complicit in their inability to achieve rest.  What if they resent us for this?  What if they just wish that we would forget them so that we can move on, and in the process let them go where they need to be?

That's why, out of all the traditions, I like New Orleans' tradition around death the best.  Steeped in Christianity, it still maintains some of the non-Christian elements that make it special.  The deceased are mourned for a period, usually the first part of a jazz funeral.  Once the coffin is blessed however, a huge party breaks out.  The dead are "going home."  We have mourned, now we can be happy for them.  They've left the toils and cares of this world behind.  If anything, the dead should be grieving for us poor souls left on this hard rock to complete our own journeys.  They've finished theirs.

Musical Interlude 

My wife and I do a global music radio show on KUNM, and we did a show based on the Day of the Dead.  What follows is a mix of over 30 songs that are around the theme of life and death.  All you have to do is click on it and play.  Yes, that's me and my wife, Megan Kamerick, in the picture.  Enjoy!

Death and Life from mhessnm on 8tracks Radio.

If you want to know more about Dover

City of Dover
Delaware State University
Dover Post (newspaper)
Downtown Dover
Kent County and Greater Dover Convention and Visitors Bureau
Wikipedia: Dover

Next up: Somewhere on the Delaware Shore

Blue Highways: Forest House Lodge, New York

Unfolding the Map

A venture into the forest can be a transforming experience, regardless of the moods of the forest on any particular day.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) wanders into a forest and eventually seeks out the warmth of the Forest House Lodge roadhouse.  While we sit with him for a few moments at the bar with a Genessee Cream Ale, I'll reflect a little on my love for the forest.  If you want to get lost in an Adirondack Forest, enter underneath the boughs and push past the brambles to the map.  Watch for poison ivy!

Book Quote

"The forest became heavier, sky darker, mountains higher, settlements further apart....I was at the heart of a great wilderness second only to the Northwoods of Maine in the eastern United States.  An occasional woodsy gift shop or burger stand built like a chalet did not prevent the forest from being pervasive, ominous, and forbidding; nor did they quiet the strange cries of birds from the dark hemlock.  Then a cold rain blew down, turned to hail, then eased to a drizzly fog.  It was early afternoon, yet headlights vanished after twenty yards as if the damp extinguished the beams.  Birch, alder, conifers - nothing but trees and water and fog for miles.

"East of the village of Blue Mountain Lake, dominated by a bluish hump of the Adirondacks, the road descended to a small building - part house, part tavern - snugged against a wooded hill and surrounded by vaporous mountains.  The mist glowed orange from a neon beer sign.  The building, white clapboard trimmed in red with a silvery corrugated tin roof, was the Forest House Lodge.  In fact, it wasn't a lodge, but something even better: an antique roadhouse.  The roadhouse - institution and word - has nearly disappeared from America."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 6

I'd love to have found an image of the Forest House Lodge, but alas, I couldn't. Here's a picture of the Adirondack Museum, nearby in Blue Mountain Lake. Photo at < a href="http://www.art.com">Art.com Click on photo to go to host page.

Forest House Lodge, New York

LHM sets up his stop at the Forest House Lodge by contrasting the gloom of the forest with the coziness of the roadhouse.  I will come back to this theme a little later.  In the interim, I'd like to share with you why I love forests, even if they are dark, gloomy and scary.

I grew up in an area that was heavily forested.  I say "was" because over the years, as the lumber company in my hometown went from being a locally-owned corporation to a subsidiary of major corporations such as Boise Cascade and Georgia Pacific, and as shareholders began to demand more, a cycle of greater cutting occurred.  The logs that exited forest logging roads on trucks got smaller and smaller.  It will take many generations for the redwood forests that I grew up in to regenerate themselves.

However, when I was young the forest was a big place, and even if as an adult I can see how much we've lost, it is still a big place, especially when I stand on the side of the road at the summit of Seven Mile Hill and look out over the tree-covered mountains toward the coast.

It was in these forests that I learned the beauty of nature.  If you've never experienced late afternoon in a Northern California forest on a sunny spring or summer day, you haven't experienced one of life's pleasures.  On the ground level, the light streams through the breaks in the leaves and leaves a diagonal dappled pattern on the forest floor.  Insects buzz, serving as a break in the silence save for the rush of a breeze in the leaves.  Above, the light shining through leaves that are just opaque enough to allow a little light through turns those leaves a brilliant green.  The radiant blue of the sky above contrasts just right with the greens of the forest.  The dried leaves on the forest floor have their own, woody and loamy scent.

I even loved the forest in winter.  A redwood forest in winter, some would say, is a pretty miserable place.  Cold and misty, you get chilled to the bone while water droplets from the trees fall onto your neck and travel down inside your shirt, along your spine, and deposit themselves in your underwear.  The deciduous trees have lost all their leaves, so everything seems barren despite the leaves still present on the conifers.  There is perpetual fog, partly because the trees themselves create their own ecosystems and therefore create the fog that lingers around their treetops and the rain that nourishes their roots.  The forest carpet of dead leaves is wet, like a sponge, and hideous looking huge mushrooms, most likely poisonous, spring up everywhere.  Yet, even in this environment, I was happy.  The rivers ran full, often with salmon swimming to their spawning grounds.  The air smelled fresh and clean.  When we had a cabin, the wet outdoors meant lazy days indoors by a fire.

Regardless of the time of year or the circumstances, when I'm in the middle of a forest it seems like a living being.  I don't just mean that there are lots of trees, plants and animals that are all living and dying in their individualities.  I mean that taken all together, it is as if I am standing in the midst of a large, living, breathing being.  It is hard to describe, and if you're concentrating on some task, you're bound to miss it.  But if you stand and listen, and open your mind, you can feel the spirit of the forest.  My father, who for all his faults could have moments of extreme transcendence, used to tell me to "listen to the trees," and we'd sit in silence.  I think that in those moments that he was tapped into something larger than himself, me, and all of us that have confined ourselves to a narrow range of our senses.

And this sounds a lot like what LHM describes in his quote - this sense of the forest as something larger.  For LHM, however, he feels a need to escape it.  Let's do a little thought experiment.  Let's imagine that LHM is traveling not in 1980 but in 1780.  Ghost Dancing is not a van but a carriage of some kind, perhaps a stage, drawn by horses and a driver.  While LHM dozes and muses in the carriage, the forest outside broods and darkens, an energy that can't be understood but can be felt.  It's cold.  After a long time of travel, the carriage descends into a valley and at the bottom is light, warmth, food and drink and a little mystery and intrigue.  The roadhouse.

LHM writes the roadhouse is disappearing from American life.  I would argue that it has just reacted to the more mobile American way of life.  A roadhouse originally offered both food and lodging, along with entertainment and gambling, but now you rarely find a place that is not a hotel that can offer such amenities.  It makes sense that when society relies on horse or foot-powered transport that all of the amenities needed by travelers is concentrated in one place.  That is probably why they were considered to be a little disreputable, as Wikipedia puts it.  It seems to me that the function of the roadhouse, in the modern age, has split among multiple types of establishments.  Hotels, restaurants, casinos, and nightclubs all offer individualized parts of the roadhouse.  Interestingly enough, those establishments that offer all of those things are now considered upscale, and called resorts.

In Europe, one can still find remnants of what we would consider the roadhouse, though more reputable.  I've read that in parts of Europe, such as Germany and Austria, one can go for a hike in the mountains and forests, and find establishments serving food, drink and even lodging at various points along the way.  I wish we had more of this concept in the U.S., along with the right to traverse private property as is common in places like Sweden.  Such privileges would make even more forests available to the common person, might encourage more healthy outdoor activities, and would certainly get me out in the mountains and forests more often.  Thankfully, I still have my own little corner of a forest in the form of thirteen acres in Northern California.  Even though I hardly get there anymore, it is nice to know that this small slice of forest, a part of a disappearing forest that once covered much of the western United States, is still there for me.  I can still tap into that energy that connects us with something larger than ourselves.

Musical Interlude

In this post, I'll include two songs.  The first is Redwood Tree by Van Morrison and I thought the song captured some of the feeling I had about my own redwood forest and my love of forests in particular.

The second song, Roadhouse Blues by The Doors, is a modern reference to the checkered past of that particular American institution.

If you want to know more about Forest House Lodge

I couldn't find much on the Forest House Lodge Bed and Breakfast, which the former roadhouse has become.  Here's some information on Blue Mountain Lake, the community in which it is situated.

Adirondack.net: Blue Mountain Lake
Adirondack Museum
Indian Lake Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Blue Mountain Lake

Next up: Somewhere on the Hudson River

Blue Highways: Viking, Minnesota

Unfolding the Map

We continue to ride with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) into western Minnesota, past the town of Viking and its sunflower crops.  Don't they look beautiful!  Let's stop and peruse them for a while, giving ourself an emotional lift and allowing us to appreciate beauty in the world.  To see where these sunflowers grow, please, look at the map!

Book Quote

"Near Viking, tall stalks from the sunflower crop of a year earlier rattled in the warm wind.  For miles I had been seeing a change in the face of the Northland brought about because Americans find it easier to clean house paint out of brushes with water than with turpentine.  This area once grew much of the flax that linseed oil comes from, but with the advent of water-base paint, the demand for flax decreased; in its stead, of all things, came the sunflower, and now it was becoming the big cash crop of the Dakotas and Minnesota - with more acreage going each year to new hybrids developed from Russian seeds - because 'flower' is a row crop that farmers can economically reap by combine after the grain harvest."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 10

Metal scarecrow in Viking, Minnesota. Photo by "matchboxND" and hosted at DB-City.com. Click on photo to go to host site.Viking, Minnesota

Did you know that the image at left symbolizes a type of terrorism?  Neither did I!  I use the word terrorism in jest, really, because the sunflower is a component of what is called "guerilla gardening," in which bands of eco-warriors head out on International Sunflower Guerilla Gardening Day to plant sunflowers in neglected and blighted cityscape plots.  Not only do the plants brighten the area but if there are toxins in the soil, the plants often soak up those toxins, and provide a natural way to help clean the environment.  Maybe instead of terrorism, we could call it "elationism."  I can imagine the happy warriors of the guerilla gardening movement heading out with their seeds, trowels and water to wreak havoc on blight through floriculture.

In fact, I can think of no better way to brighten up anything, because I don't know about you, but I cannot remain in a funk if I look at sunflowers.  There's just no way.

Throughout my childhood, I knew that sunflowers existed, but weren't grown very much where I grew up.  There were some in isolated gardens, but I didn't get much exposure to them.  The only thing I knew about sunflowers was all wrapped up in the packages of seeds that my friends would buy at the store.  They ate and then spit them, so that sunflower seed shell carcasses littered the ground around their feet.  I tried them, and while they had an interesting flavor, I didn't think all the work of splitting the seeds to get the little morsel of nut meat inside was worth the effort.

So it wasn't until I moved, and particularly when I moved to the Southwest, that I really got exposed to sunflowers.  Suddenly they were everywhere I looked on warm summer days.  The coffee shop around the corner had a whole row of sunflowers growing alongside its adobe fence.  Gardens always seemed to have a section of sunflowers.  On my drives to Lubbock when I was teaching, I would pass by a scattered field or two of sunflowers in bloom.  And whenever I looked at them, no matter what the circumstance, my spirits would lift.  When my spirits were high, the sunflowers affirmed that I felt good about the world.  When my spirits were low, the sunflowers would take me briefly out of dark places and remind me that there was beauty and light in the world.

The sunflower is also full of natural mystery in its beauty.  Look at that picture of the sunflower above.  Notice the spiral pattern in the middle.  The sunflower is actually not one flower but a group of 1000-2000 small flowers called florets, and the spiral pattern of these florets in the center follows a mathematical sequence called a Fibonacci sequence, where each successive spiral consists of florets that are the sum of the florets in the two spirals before.  According to Wikipedia, there are usually 34 spirals in one direction, and 55 in another, though they can be bigger.  Mathematics aside, I just look at that pattern and it puts me in wonder of the complexity and the beauty of the universe, as if a supreme power put a Spirograph on the world in the form of a yellow living thing of beauty.

Sunflowers have made a roundabout trip from and to the US.  They were probably among the very first crops cultivated by Native Americans, perhaps even earlier than corn.  They eventually made their way to Europe through the explorations of the Spaniards, who took the seeds back to Europe.  They eventually made their way to Russia where refinements in hybridization led to cultivation for the mass production of oil and food.  It was then that these new hybrids were reintroduced to the United States and planted for mass harvest in the upper Midwest.

In my previous post, I speculated about how Scandinavians in the upper Midwest could come to be known for their industriousness, their dourness and their quietness, so much so that they make fun of themselves for it.  The land, I surmised, with its long harsh winters and hot blazing summers probably takes a lot of mental energy to exist, coupled with the hard work of farming.

But the planting of sunflowers as cash crops makes me wonder if these perennial beauties, growing anywhere from six to twelve feet high, provides a lift to people who live there.  I can imagine, just for a moment, a taciturn Norwegian Minnesotan farmer, going out to his work on a summer morning before the weather gets too hot, stopping at the field of sunflowers he has planted.  In those moments, I imagine his dour look relaxes as he gazes on the sunflowers, and a brief smile appears before he gets to the hard work on another morning.

Musical Interlude

I'm giving you a sunflower double shot, today, Littourati.  For those of you that like some rock, I'm going to give you the Grateful Dead's China Cat Sunflower/I Know You Rider.  It seems like it would be a great road tune, especially going through the sunflowers of Viking.  The second is a jazz fusion tune by Freddie Hubbard called Little Sunflower, with vocals by Al Jarreau.  Enjoy!

If you want to know more about Viking

What can I say?  It's a small place.

Wikipedia: Viking

Next up: Thief River Falls, Minnesota