Author: Jnana Hodson

In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.

Can a seemingly random note change known history?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Somewhere in the past I heard about a kind of public journal that wasn’t overtly personal but carefully recorded by devoted individuals. News items, witty thoughts, chance encounters, weather observations might fill them.

Recently, I came across one of those, the Record Book Kept by Daniel C. Osborne (1794-1871), Quaker and Banker. The copy was online at the Friends of Allen County’s website – the highly regarded genealogical center at the public library in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

What especially interests me is that he was a member of Dover Friends Meeting in New Hampshire. His entries provide fresh insights on the life of the congregation and the broader community, both the subjects of my book, Quaking Dover.

A record book, as this one demonstrates, is a collection of random accounts the individual found fascinating or significant. Daniel’s, for instance, has entries on the manufacture of watches in U.S., John Jacob Astor’s will and estate, the popular vote for president 1848, the wife of president Franklin Peirce president-elect, population of the states 1855, English Bible translations list, executions for murders, steam boat accidents and Atlantic Ocean steamers lost, even the royal family of England – most of those notations are on distant events – but they accompany family genealogies and other things closer to home.

Daniel, a son of Marble and Mercy (Nock/Knox) Osborne, operated an iron foundry and was later president of the Strafford Bank, now part of TD Bank. He lived in a Georgian Colonial style home his father had built adjacent to the Quaker meetinghouse, where Daniel continued as an active member while the congregation aged and declined.

These entries note visitors from other locations to Dover Friends Meeting, perhaps all of them in traveling ministry.

Although his penmanship was impeccable, I’m not confident in my ability to decipher it clearly. Even so, I find his records filling in details I’m not sure I’d uncover otherwise. The family genealogies, for instance, have details otherwise lost from the Quaker records when an individual “married out of Meeting,” was “disowned” for other reasons, or moved from the area.

The accounts of deaths, mostly around Dover but sometimes including U.S. presidents, the Marquis de Lafayette, or soldiers at Lexington, Massachusetts, also name neighbors who weren’t Quaker. Perhaps they were even involved in business dealings with him. Notations in the margins point to a surprising number of suicides and, especially, drownings. One 53-year-old man was killed by his own father. Mention of the passing of Quaker evangelist Joseph John Gurney reflects the branch of Friends that Dover followed while that of Congregational minister Lyman Beecher indicates an openness to religious liberalism.

Notations of family marriages point to a much broader interaction of Dover Friends with fellow Quaker families in Rhode Island than I had suspected, including the Wilbur family, prominent in a schism in the yearly meeting, through no blame of their own. I’m guessing it’s because so many attended what’s now the Moses Brown School in Providence.

I wasn’t expecting this tidbit.

Of special interest to me is this notation, “10th mo 22, 1864. Israel Estes of this City, died this day, aged 64 years. He was a lineal descendant of Joseph Estes, who died in Dover Neck in 1626, coming over with Edward Hilton, in the first vessel, and had lands assigned to him as early as 1631.” If true, it would add another person – and, obviously, eventually a wife – to the settlement before the Puritan invasion that multiplied the frontier settlement now known as Dover. As the history stands now, Thomas Roberts was the only other person who arrived with Edward, and they were followed a few years later by brother William Hilton.

It would also place the origin of the surname in America at Dover rather than Massachusetts.

Well, that’s what I get in a first sweep through the record book. I suspect there’s much more to glean.

The old Regulator

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Yes, time marches ahead. I can’t count the number of times I rewound and reset this before Quaker worship in Dover each Sunday, or First-Day, in the old parlance. Some Friends said the ticking kept reminding them, “Slow down, slow down.” Others found the sound disturbing.

It’s hard for me to believe my book Quaking Dover has been published more than a year now.

 

Ten recent tools that greatly changed carpentry jobs

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Remember, not everyone who carries a hammer is a carpenter.

Apart from the Amish, who often are master carpenters, today’s tradesmen are indebted to these advances:

  1. Rechargeable batteries for all those power tools.
  2. The Sawzall. Top of the list. Any project working on an older house requires getting through earlier construction. This chews right through the mess.
  3. Oscillating multitask tool. The Sawzall’s little sister. Chews through the finer details. It’s like the equivalent of laparoscopic surgery that doesn’t leave huge scars.
  4. Carbide blades. They go right through nails and screws and greatly outlive their earlier incarnations. Think time of constantly replacing the blades as well as the time and cost.
  5. Laser-light “stick.” (And before that, the retractable metal measuring tape.) Look, our contractor’s working with 1/16-inch tolerances. Accuracy counts, especially when dealing with hand-hewn beams and posts from nearly two centuries earlier. He’s trying to get a plumbline precision to preserve the earlier let’s-hope-it-works construction.
  6. Laser level indicator. This one really blows me away. Place the small device where you want and it shows an appropriate line all around. I have no idea how you’d accomplish the measurements otherwise, but they can be crucial. Especially when we’re dealing with everything that’s overhead.
  7. Structural fasteners. They’re engineered to be superior to earlier long screws or bolts. I guess it’s kind of like those zip-ties I’ve come to rely on in gardening, but I’m told this is huge.
  8. Cell phone, including Internet access. You know, YouTube advice, as well as ordering online or by phone, calling consultants, even checking on the status of other participants in the project. Not all of those calls are personal, not that I’d begrudge a hard-worker there.
  9. Clear plastic sheets and zipper strips. A lot of dust and whatever goes flying around, after all. Keeping it rounded up is definitely appreciated, especially as we’re trying to live in the same house. Add to that the power vac. Maybe it’s a guy thing, but these are amazing. Even with water.
  10. Dumpster. I’m starting to see having one outside our house as a kind of status symbol.

Status symbols? We could do a whole other Tendril about those pickup trucks and trailers or the guys’ preferred brands.

Source: Mostly Adam Bradbury.

Acid test novelist: Ernest Callenbach (1929-2012)

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I’m not big on sci-fi, but the 1975 utopian novel Ecotopia looks rather prescient in that vein considering so much that’s happened in the years since.

The book came out just before I relocated to the Pacific Northwest for what turned out to be four years, but it springs from a recognition of how much the region stands apart from the rest of the nation. It’s a state of mind as much as watersheds and mountain ranges.

As an expression of hippie mindset, I find it more expansive than, say, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Fine carpentry, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Jesus was a carpenter, after all, surrounded by fishermen and their boats. Maybe he built a few to float, too.

the curve of the deck – sheer
ours noticeably higher at the bow
than even the stern

while the crown with its sides
for water runoff

a dutchman
a piece of wood
cut in
to replace a rotten section

ditto in our home

Weatherproofing the new exterior came next

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We now faced some related decisions, beginning with the kind of roofing.

Our preference was for standing seam metal, but we were concerned about the price. It would, however, allow for a lesser roof pitch, and that would give us more headroom, and that was in addition to its added durability.

Asphalt shingles may be less expensive, but we live in a heavy winds-prone town. The forecast seems to have gale warnings every other day, at least for small craft out on the water. After a strong storm, the streets and yards are littered with blown-away shingles, even from new houses.

As I said, living beside the sea exposes us to a lot of wind.

~*~

The next decision involved the color. There were more standard color options than I’d thought from casual observation.

We liked bright red and the bold cobalt, at least for homes out in the country, but ours is tucked into a tight neighborhood and we wanted to continue to blend in. Our goal was something subtle but still classy. The color of the metal would also determine the shade of trim we would be applying later, maybe around the foundation, too.

We settled on a pale blue, which we find is common around the neighborhood.

There was far more to do up there than we could see from the street, and far more steps than simply putting the metal sheets down.

With condensation as a consideration, a vapor barrier went up. Strapping and rigid-foam insulation boards were fitted and secured. A weather-resistant fascia went around the trim. As did flashing.

And finally, we had the metal roofing itself.

After several setbacks from bad weather, Adam and Keith worked like maniacs over the weekend to have it securely in place before a hurricane-force storm – and then Christmas, a storm of a whole other nature.

~*~

As for the exterior walls, new cedar shake shingles were a given.

Haunted by a big bad Wolfe in a white suit

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

“You’ll be the next Tom Wolfe,” one creative writing prof promised me. I loved the guy’s flashy writing and, for the most part, his subject matter.

Where he eventually rubbed me wrong was his consternation that no big novel of the hippie era had appeared. There, he kept ringing as a prompt for me.

Part of his hook for me was the fact that my dream job in the newspaper world would have been as a columnist, especially one like Hub Meeker’s State of the Arts in the Dayton Journal Herald. Arts journalism was, alas, a shrinking field, along with the more general community columnist, like that paper’s Marj Heydock or Binghamton’s Tom Cawley.

Wolfe had briefly been one of those, at the New York Herald Tribune.

The bigger part, of course, was about that novel. He was dismissing Richard Brautigan’s unique voice altogether and others, like Gurney Norman, John Nichols, Tom Robbins, who rode the vibe.

Wolfe was also snidely suggesting that he had been the one exception, with his Electric Acid Kool-Aid Test, which really wasn’t a novel and predated the blossoming of the hippie movement.

His idea of the Big Hippie Novel reeked of the misguided quest for a Great American Novel.

Quite simply, there were too many strands of the movement to fit into a single book. Political or social action, anti-war witness, civil rights, gender equality, environmental awareness, organic and vegetarian foods, intentional community, group housing, alternative education were all part of it, even before the sex, drugs, rock’n’roll, hair, fashion, or slang.

These other factors would come more fully into play when I revised Daffodil Sunrise into Daffodil Uprising, and Hippie Drum and Hippie Love into Pit-a-Pat High Jinks.

I’d like to think of those books as nominees for the Big Hippie Novel distinction.

Wolfe’s charge also overlooks the outstanding nonfiction books that reflected the experience, such as Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

Moreover, I still feel that many of the difficulties in the current political scene arise from a failure to clearly understand the demons raging from the Vietnam conflict, both for those who fought in the army and those who fought the unjustified war itself.

So here we were, struggling through disco without having faced the lessons of either the hippie outbreak or the Vietnam disease. Hippie had become a dirty word, and many who had been happy to be one were no in psychological denial. It was something nobody wanted to relive either, apart from maybe Woodstock.

As others have observed, an ignorance of history carries a heavy price.