Tomatoes, red pepper, goat cheese, and sunflower seeds with a homemade vinaigrette
Author: Jnana Hodson
In downsizing to a remote fishing village in Downeast Maine, this eclectic writer feels everything's coming together.
Kinisi 172
Baby pewter of her mind
that Chagrin Falls furniture maker
using really nice hinges
Answers I wish I’d given at the time
My favorite time in my public presentations for my book Quaking Dover have come in the question-and-answer period at the end.
Still, a few questions have caught me off-guard, stimulating my thinking in the days after. Here are a few to date, along with a few more points I’d like to develop in public conversation.
~*~
Why did the Puritans go so viciously after the Quakers? Or was that the other way around? Carla Gardina Pestana in her Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts did remark that the Quakers seemed to go out of their way to make trouble, even after they had achieved some concession from the Puritans. I’m left agreeing that Friends were so critical of the Puritans because they felt the Puritans hadn’t gone far enough in their revolution. A description of Quakers as a radical fringe of the Puritan movement further suggests that connection.
How could you sleep at night after writing about some of the horrendous things that happen in the book? At the time I glibly replied a martini before going to bed helped. For a more meaningful answer, I would go back to the experience of dissecting a frog in high school biology, the way I learned to bring an imaginary Plexiglas screen down between me and the formaldehyde amphibian before I gagged and puked. It was a skill I found useful working as a newspaper editor – the emotional distancing that many other professionals find essential. You know, like a mask. I think of one surgical nurse I knew who had no problem with open-heart surgery, for instance, but when she saw the movie All That Jazz and the retractors went to work on the big screen of the theater, she vomited.
The Puritans in context. While they come off as villains in my book, they were far less hostile than the Virginians. There you could be executed if you missed three public worship services. At least one Quaker died after being severely whipped and thrown in a prison cell. There may have been further atrocities per Kenneth Carroll.
Richard Waldron in context. What were his redeeming qualities? He is a complex and largely unexplored figure in early American history.
I don’t intend this to be the “final word” on the topic but rather a starting point for some deeper discussion and inquiry. Inclusion of the ways faith i.e. religion is a core but often neglected/overlooked aspect of personal and public life can add to our comprehension. In the colonial era, especially, religious identity and political affiliation were practically one.
Working against a deadline. If it weren’t for the Dover400 anniversary opportunities, I’d still be researching. The big book remains to be written, if anyone wants to pursue it.
~*~
I am interested in other provocative questions, so fire away if you wish.
As for Underground Railroad connections?
While Quakers were active in the Underground Railroad for fugitive slaves, the practice wasn’t universally embraced within the Society of Friends. In fact, much of the illegal action across the North was undertaken by evangelical Protestants who even created the altar call at revivals to enlist fellow workers.
Yes, it’s one more story in the American experience that needs to be better known, in all of its gritty reality.
As I describe in Quaking Dover, the Cartland family farm in Lee is believed to have been a stop on one of those lines to freedom. While documentation of such participation is rare, escaped slaved turned abolitionist Frederick Douglass was a frequent visitor to the farm, and like also its small Quaker meetinghouse and school.
The bigger question would be how did the fugitives get that far and where did the route head from there? Not everyone along the way was sympathetic, after all. Newburyport, Massachusetts, for one, was downright hostile and thus an unlikely place to jump ship. As for Portsmouth or Dover?
Establishing reliable yet invisible connections every ten or 20 miles would have been quite an accomplishment. What prompted households to risk everything to the moral cause? They were, after all, a threat to a vast economic system and its wealth.
It’s one more another interesting twist to develop in future research through New Hampshire.
Refreshing our salmon pens
Sunrise County – more formally, Washington County, Maine – and neighboring Charlotte County, on the facing waters in New Brunswick, are the center of some serious salmon farming. Cooke Aquaculture, a pioneer in the field, is a major employer in both places.
Without getting into the surrounding controversies, millions of salmon are shipped to market from these farms and are one reason the protein-rich anti-oxidant species is no longer a luxury item for most people. It’s a surprisingly healthy option, if you’re so inclined to investigate.
The local enterprise has even spawned Eastport’s annual Salmon Festival over the Labor Day weekend, which includes narrated boat trips to farms in our coves, typically clusters of 16 pens, and explanations of their care. Some locals describe the event as drawing an NPR kind of crowd, in contrast to our Pirate Festival the following weekend, which may be seen as more of a NASCAR following or its biker equivalent. (Please stay tuned.)
What I’ve found fascinating this summer is the flock of working boats busy around two of the farms in our fair city. The pens have been vanishing!
The reason, I’ve been told, is that every few years, the pens and their nets need to cleaned and repaired. And then they also lay fallow for a season or two.
Don’t know about you, but I’m impressed. Each pen starts out with a million and a half baby salmon. Maybe more.
And the filets we get do make for some impressive sashimi – raw fish that are a favorite in Japan, expensive in restaurants, and surprisingly easy to make at home. If you’re interested, check out some recipes online. My between-the-lines improvised sauces remain delightful, at least as far as me and my sons-in-law are concerned. (Pardon the English there, I’m yielding to their generation. Those boys really can skin a fish, by the way.)
From here, we’re most curious to see about how Cooke’s efforts at oyster and mussel harvests from our waters are also progressing.
The advice to eat local remains a spiritual discipline, as far as I’m concerned, not that it’s always practical where I’ve lived.
Now, what’s on your plate tonight?
As summer winds down
Reconsidering a nest for alternative social progressive witness
One of the sides my Quaking Dover presentation for Cape Cod Friends awakened in me was a nagging awareness that some of the elements that encouraged social progressive action could also be used to sustain reactionary conservative activism from the other sides as well.
This could be seen especially in the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of the Roe decision, the result of a long-term resistance movement, where reactionary forces could claim a victory.
Quite simply, both side have deep roots, perhaps unlike the middle.
My big question now is what makes one morally superior to the other.
The answers, I suspect, can be quite humbling. As well as a point of common engagement.
Why can’t I just eat?
We’re at some kind of barbecue. A social setting, quite possibly extending from our Smoking Garden. I keep trying to put something on my plate – a sampling of this, a portion of that – but things keep spilling to the ground. Maybe I even miss my plate altogether. You’re trying to offer me something extra special you made, but even it fails to reach my mouth. But instead of being angry, you’re quite sympathetic and understanding, as if you know I’m sick or getting there.
Attention, please!
Are you a fellow blogger? Or did something else grab your notice here?
Let me confess that in playing creating titles for posts at the Red Barn, I’ve undergone a shift from the strict rules of writing newspaper headlines back when I was a professional journalist. For the record, I wrote hundreds of thousands of those, even while fixing the texts that followed or placing stories on the many pages I designed, all under a ticking clock and backlog.
One of the things I’ve discovered in blogging is that the title can stand on its own without having to quote from the text that follows. Instead, it can be a tease or even the first sentence of what then follows rather than a summary.
For another, it can be as long as I want. Not just up to ten counts or so of lettering on each of three lines, for example, which might turn out to be three to five words. Haiku looks easy in comparison. In blogging, the title might even be longer than the text that follows. Could you even summarize your post in a handful of words and still seduce readers? That was the newspaper challenge.
What we’re doing here seems all rather liberating or even lazy.
Not that it’s any less difficult.
Now, what grabs you next?
‘Camp,’ as New Englanders say
Jnana's Red Barn 