Blue Highways: Ewell, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) takes a boat to Smith Island for an overnight stay and a fascinating conversation with Alice Venable Middleton, at the time an octogenarian who had lived over sixty years on the island.  His conversation with her reminded me of my grandmother, who I will remember in this post.  To find Smith Island and the village of Ewell, please go to the map.  The image at right is Maryland's state dessert, the Smith Island cake.  It looks like nine layers of awesome!

Book Quote

"'I have a question for you,' I said.  'Tell me what's the hardest thing about living on a small, marshy island in Chesapeake Bay.'

"'I know that and it didn't take sixty-three years to figure it out.  Here it is, wrapped up like a parcel.  Listen to my sentence.  Having the gumption to live different and the sense to let everybody else live different.  That's the hardest thing, hands down.'"

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 14

Ewell, Smith Island, Maryland. Photo by by Jenny Myers and Tim Christion and is found at their blog Tim and Jen's Wedding. Click on photo to go to host page

Ewell, Maryland

This post is going to be about my grandmother, my mom's mother named Mary Cox, that I've mentioned briefly in couple of other posts.  In the quote above LHM is speaking to Alice Venable Middleton, a longtime resident of Smith Island in the Chesapeake Bay.  He had spent the night and the better part of two days talking with her and learning about the island and in the process, her views on life.  This quote comes at the end of his interview with her and it reminds me of my grandmother.  The two women were probably only alike in a few ways - my grandmother was probably not as formally educated as Alice Venable Middleton, but they both lived their lives around fishermen in a fishing village and both seemed to have a great store of common sense built around life experiences.

My grandmother was truly, I believe, one of the last of the pioneers and as such it was my privilege to be able to listen to her stories when she was still alive.  Her family, the Hauns, were immigrants from Austria and lived in places like Michigan and Texas before settling in a remote part of Northern California where, in a little area called Branscomb, they built a little redwood lumber mill.  My grandmother grew up in this rugged area, literally hewn out of wilderness, a few miles from the Pacific coast.  Growing up in a wilderness meant that, like her pioneer forebears, she had to learn skills that would serve her well later in life.

She wanted to get an education and attend college to become a nurse, but a brief stint down near the Bay Area didn't work out.  She married a fisherman named Louis Cox and when the economy crashed in 1929, he went to work as a logger in the woods and she raised my mother and her four siblings in logging camps.  The life was difficult, but it was also something for which she was prepared thanks to how she was raised.  My mother remembers what almost seems to me like a magical childhood.  She went to school in a little red schoolhouse in the woods, and the entire redwood forest was her playground.  My grandmother kept a clean house and even in the worst of times she and my grandfather kept food on the table for their four children.

Eventually, my grandmother moved to town with her husband and four kids as the economy picked up and he was able to go back to his first occupation, fishing.  When Louis died of cancer in the early 60s, she was left widowed right around the age of 50.  Most women might have given up at that point in their lives, but my grandmother was definitely not like most women.  She went back to school and realized her dream of becoming a nurse and worked in the Mendocino Coast Hospital until her early 70s.  She bought a little house in the country where she raised horses and provided a lot of grandkids with an opportunity to ride for pleasure and in horse shows.  She made two trips to Austria to discover her heritage and remained in contact with her Austrian cousins until the end of her life.

I remember my grandmother as a stern but loving woman who did a lot for her kids and grandkids.  She was a lifelong Democrat and supporter of Franklin Roosevelt because she felt that his policies helped her family and countless others to survive.  She and I, when I got older, had lots of discussions about the state of politics.  No Democrat, in her mind, could ever hope to live up to Roosevelt and no Republican was worth talking about.  However, as liberal as she was in her economic policies, she was a social conservative.  She didn't like what she saw as sexual immorality, nor the trend of protest and drug use popular and common among the younger people of my generation and the generation before me.  She always gave me a bad time about the long hair and beard I wore then.

Yet despite her personal feelings, she never made anybody feel unwelcome.  When my friends from college came home with me, she always was extremely nice to them and would share the wonders that came out of her oven with them.  The only time I ever heard her seem prejudiced was when she told me stories about the Indians who scared her when they walked past her house when she was growing up in Branscomb.  These were most likely Native Americans from what is now known as the Round Valley Reservation.  They were often drunk, she said, and they frightened her.  When I gently suggested that the Native Americans she saw probably lived on reservations and in extreme poverty, she didn't dispute me, but she never was able to shake that early childhood memory.  Yet I have no doubt that if I had brought home a friend or a girlfriend who was Native American, or African-American, she would have been just as welcoming to them as she was to any of my friends.  I did bring home a Mexican-American friend with me a couple of times, and he was charmed by my grandmother, who said that she and the rest of us in Fort Bragg were "just backwoods bunnies."

My grandmother was living proof of what Alice Venable Middleton states in the quote above.  She had the "gumption" to live different, though the way she lived was what she knew and she didn't see it as necessarily living different but living better.  She also had the sense to let others live different.  What others did, as long as it didn't interfere with her, was their own business.  She might not have liked it or agreed with it, but she seemed to feel that people should live their own lives.  Her extended family, her kids and their kids, sometimes tested her patience, but she didn't interfere in their business unless asked.  That was "the hardest part," as Alice Venable Middleton stated it above, and my grandmother would have agreed with her.

My grandmother died at the age of 95, still living in her own home, still independent.  She was feeding her chickens when an aortic aneurysm burst and she died instantly.  We all still miss her, and most of us could use some of her well-placed and timed home-spun wisdom at times.  I credit her with firing in me an urge to travel after listening to her stories and seeing her photos of Austria.  Even in death she still serves as an inspiration to the generations that succeeded her.

Musical Interlude

This song, written and performed by Alicia Keys, was released after the death of her grandmother.  I have heard it described as being full of regret.  We all regret things that we wanted to say to our loved ones before they died.  When my grandmother died, my mother and sister were visiting me in New Orleans, and my mom was extremely upset at not having been home.  Yet my sister and I agree that my grandmother probably would have preferred it that way.  She died on her feet, feeding her chickens, and dependent on nobody.  Sure, I wish I could have seen her once again, but she went the way she wanted.  We should all be so lucky.

If you want to know more about Ewell and Smith Island

Baydreaming.com: Smith Island
New York Times interactive article: Water is Life on Smith Island
Smith Island Cultural Center
Visit Smith Island
Wikipedia: Ewell
Wikipedia: Smith Island

Next up: Oxford, Maryland

Blue Highways: Melvin Village, New Hampshire

Unfolding the Map

The Blue Highways quote below, about an elderly resident of Melvin Village who helps William Least Heat-Moon see, through her long years of perspective, that change is constant and a recurring, cyclical happening, leads me to reflect on the influence of the elderly residents of my hometown on the fabric of its social structure.  To age gracefully in Melvin Village, pass some of your precious time at the map.

Book Quote

"Marion Horner Robie had not been Melvin Village for all her eighty years; the first seven decades she was just another citizen of fewer than five hundred, although when she ran the post office, grocery and dry goods store, telephone switchboard, and the fire dispatch all at the same time, she was (admittedly) 'the big cheese.'....

"....In broad New England vowels, Mrs Robie said: 'I never planned on becoming the big cheese, you see.  It fell about that way as chance does...'"

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 11

Melvin Village, New Hampshire from Lake Winnipesaukee. Photo at the Melvin Village Soy Candles website. Click on photo to go to host site.

Melvin Village, New Hampshire

When I map a book like On the Road or Blue Highways, both geographically or cognitively, I never quite know where the cognitive topography will take me.  In this post, I am going to a place that surprises me.

It shouldn't be so surprising.  After all, LHM meets a woman who, partly because of her advanced years, has become the self-described "big cheese" of Melvin Village, New Hampshire.  To me, age really defines those who actually are the big cheeses from those are "wannabee" big cheeses or who think they are big cheeses.

With that awkward beginning, I now get to my point.  I grew up in a small town, and there one always can find those people who, because of their age, have reached a lofty status among the rest of the people in the town.  These people are the town elders, whose major accomplishments have been to live and experience and to reach a point where they can pass their experience, history, memories and wisdom to the generations behind them.  Every culture that I can think of puts older people into a class reserved entirely for them.  Somewhat removed but always sought out in case of crisis.  A recent viewing of The Seven Samurai by the great director Akira Kurosawa reminded me of this common instinct in our cultures.  In the movie villagers, tired of repeated attacks by bandits, consult the oldest man in the village to ask him what they should do.  His advice, hire seven samurai to defend the village from the next expected attack, is heeded and with the aid of the samurai, the villagers repel the attackers.

Gertrude White never had to give such advice to my hometown residents, though I had no doubt that she would have if needed.  Actually, I have no doubt that she would have led the defense if the village was attacked.  From the day I first remember her, when I was perhaps three or four, to the day that she died, she always seemed old to me.  She owned a stretch of land along Airport Road, an unknown number (to me) of acres that once served as the town airport for which the street was named.  I think I was only in her house once, however we always had some kind of contact with her.  She ran a horse riding club.  My grandmother, who was a good friend but who I believe also looked up to Mrs. White as a mentor often rode horses with her in the local Paul Bunyan Days parades.  My grandmother was perhaps 10-15 years younger than Mrs. White, but I think their shared history of growing up and living in the area brought them together and, as their ages became greater the difference between them grew less and less.

As the matriarch of the horse club, Mrs. White touched the lives of a lot of young children, mostly girls.  Our summer weekends often revolved around her horse shows, in which manes and tails tore around barrels or ripped around the track at breakneck speed with very fragile little girls clinging to them.  But I remember that Mrs. White was also heavily involved in town business and affairs, and can think of a couple of times when I heard of residents of my parents generation approaching her for advice or to learn some history about how the town handled certain situations in the past.  As she got older, her mystique, augmented by her large house, seemed to grow.  When she died, somewhere approaching 100 years old, it was like the passing of an era that we could never get back.

My grandmother, Mary Cox, was very similar.  She was something of what I considered the last of the pioneers of Northern California.  She grew up in the woods where her father and grandfather ran a small lumber mill.  She married a fisherman who turned lumberman in the depression, and then reverted back to fisherman.  She raised four children (one of which was my mother) in logging camps in the woods during the heart of the Great Depression.  After her husband died of cancer when she was in her fifties, she used it as an opportunity to get the education she always wanted but never had, and got her nursing degree.  She worked until she was into her seventies and forced into retirement because of a back and knee injury sustained while trying to hold up an unsteady and heavy patient.

My grandmother was the focal point of our family.  Our lives, especially as she got older, revolved around her.  My sisters and cousins spent afternoons after school and entire summer days over at her house riding her horses.  Family members went to her for advice, and often received blunt words from a woman who had seen almost everything in her life and knew that the solution to life's problems began with the person who was having them.  Sometimes family members, as she got older, tried to keep news from her of certain family members' bad behavior, or problems that arose within the family.  It didn't matter - she always seemed to know anyhow.  I often went to talk to her to hear first-person accounts stories of growing up and living in places and times that otherwise I would only be able to read about.  My grandmother was also, for a time, the only one of our family that had traveled to Europe, and her accounts of visiting her relatives in Austria fascinated me and fueled my own desire to travel to other places.

When my grandmother died in her mid-nineties in 2001, her passing was like the breaking of the cement that held disparate elements of the extended family together.  Her children, my mom and her remaining siblings, still come together for the holidays but the spark that fed them, my grandmother, is missed.

If you view a small town as an extended family, the influence, wisdom, history and common-sense that our elders provide is incalcuable.  It is no accident that it seems that in smaller locales that elders are held in the most esteem, and valued more.  In large cities, it is easy enough to become lost in the teeming masses, and I think that older people are often forgotten in those places where the business of life often takes precedence over the relations and the connections that we need.  Our policies, which make it harder for our older members of society to live and get by, also do not help.

I have learned, however, that there is no substitute for an older, wiser presence in our lives.  We may not agree with everything our elders say and they can be as wrong as anyone else.  I would argue that isn't the point.  When they speak with us, we are almost compelled to listen, and it is in our listening that we give ourselves the space to come to our own wisdom and solutions.  I wish I could thank my grandmother for those times that she made me stop, think, and take stock, whether or not her views were useful to me or not.  Just her presence was sometimes enough.

Musical Interlude

The Who's My Generation was originally about the younger generation telling the older generation where it could go and what it could do to itself.  It's pretty amazing that this group of older people, The Zimmers, have turned that song on its head.  Now they're doing the singing, and telling the rest of us where to go.  Good for them!

I also had to include Neil Young's Old Man, that melancholy air that shows that young people and old people often have the same needs.

If you want to know more about Melvin Village

Sorry, there's not too much on Melvin Village.

Wikipedia: Melvin Village

Next up:  Hunter's Maple Farm, New Hampshire