Category: American Affairs

As if his Merrymount antics weren’t enough

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Other than the broken wedding engagement, I’ve seen no hints at Thomas Morton’s sexual orientation, as if such distinctions were even worthy of notice back then in colonial New England. But, as far as I’ve found, he never did wed.

Beyond that, I’m left feeling the Puritans were afraid the Quakers would lead to something similar to Morton’s scandalous presence a few decades earlier.

His Merrymount settlement was, I’m convinced, a significant moment in early New England history that few people know about, one sharply at odds with the resulting Puritan image. It was, you know, a kind of hippie commune with friendly relationships with the Natives. Not that Friends would have engaged in dancing, much less doffing their clothes, around a maypole. As well as perhaps many of the other things that cause a lot of people to congregate on Salem, Massachusetts, this time of the year.

Let’s just say it heightened the tensions.

If you don’t know about Merrymount, my book Quaking Dover offers an introduction.

 

How many flights to Europe each night?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

While watching a meteor shower last summer, probably two jets a minute overhead, I was surprised how big they still looked or the fact that we could hear them at all, considering they may well be five to seven miles above us, and then many miles away before disappearing.

How many passengers and how much freight a day? And then, how much coming the other way? And how many military?

Within the U.S. every day, there are 2.9 million passengers and 45,000 flights – not all of them commercial.

Think, too, of the number of diseases that could be carried from one continent to another or some other social upheaval.

It averages out to 46,500 passengers U.S. to Europe a day, or nearly 2,000 an hour. The United Kingdom and Germany are the leading destinations.

Surprisingly, U.S. to Central America flights predominate over the European traffic.

Altogether, 44 airports in the U.S. and Canada have nonstop flights to 41 European airports.

Each day has between 355 and 435 flights in one direction, up to 117,000 seats for sale – roughly 5,000 an hour.

So they’re rarely flying to compacity.

 

Older than it seems

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Dover: where New Hampshire started. Leading to the second-oldest state in New England.

And then? Dover was already 200 years old when the textile mills took over the town.

Note, too, that Dover’s mills predate the more celebrated ones at Lowell, Lawrence, and Manchester on the Merrimac River.

It was hardly a fringe settlement in terms of action.

More twists on the Portsmouth-Dover rivalry

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The two small cities that emerged on the New Hampshire side of the Piscataqua River ultimately found themselves rivals.

While Dover, hidden upstream, developed earlier and had much of early Maine on its side, Portsmouth took on its own character.

Portsmouth had a harbor, for one thing, and as waters upstream became polluted with sawdust from the mills, along with the clearing of forests miles inland from the banks, Dover’s wharves and landings faded in importance. Its goods were relegated to small local vessels called gundalows, which could maneuver the shallow waters, and then repacked into larger ocean-going vessels rather than continuing directly.

All of that then had Portsmouth emerging as the focus for trade, connecting it to towns up and down the Eastern Seaboard and beyond rather than anything much inland.

The center of Dover, meanwhile, kept creeping upstream from its waterfront origins at Hilton Point. Its outlook turned increasingly up-country, powered by the waterfalls along the Cochecho River and the mills, along with farming and timbering.

It was a common pattern in New England, so I’m told. The merchant class of the harbor settlements kept informed on activities along the coastline and destinations overseas but knew little to nothing of what was happening just five miles inland. The inland points, for their part, had little interest in distant locales.

By the time of the American Revolution, Portsmouth boasted of some impressive Georgian houses owned by wealthy seagoing merchants, some of them signers of the Declaration of Independence. (The squalid, roughnecked, red-light neighborhoods that went with all that seagoing were left more unspoken.) Dover was far more modest, about 50 years away from emerging as a major textile manufacturing center, with the red-brick mills.

George Washington visited Portsmouth but not Dover. You get the picture.

The character of the two communities continued to diverge after that, and they still do. Today, Portsmouth is driven in large part by tourism, both as a destination and as a stopping off point for almost all of the motor traffic in and out of Maine. In contrast, Dover sits quietly to the north, though the new bridge at Dover Point makes the place more accessible.

~*~

The other two towns of New Hampshire’s first century also had different personalities.

While Hampton sat on the Atlantic coastline, it lacked a harbor. Nor was it inland enough to have the waterfalls to power manufacturing. Its base remained agriculture.

Exeter, further inland, did have the falls but somehow also took on a more cultured tone. It’s a story I anticipate hearing of more.

~*~

I was often puzzled that so few folks in Portsmouth knew anything about Dover, just a dozen or so miles away. Not so for Dover residents when it came to Portsmouth, the smaller of the two.

That just may be changing, however, with the downtown renaissance in Dover and the increasing commercialization and crowding of Portsmouth from the funky, artsy edge we so enjoyed just 30 years ago.

The one thing that hasn’t changed from the late-Colonial era is that Portsmouth remains more monied. Some of that, at last, just may be migrating northward, toward family-friendly Dover.

Next door to the Dover Quaker meetinghouse

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When I first became active in Dover Friends Meeting in the late 1980s, a group of members and attenders seriously explored the possibilities of creating a  cohousing project. Their minutes filed in the meetinghouse could provide the foundation for a fascinating master’s degree exposition, but the wide range of differences in the participants’ needs and dreams proved to be too diverse to accommodate into joint action. Perhaps economic resource differences also came into play. On my end, I was single but had to consider what might happen if I met the ultimate partner and she had six kids. Ahem.

As it was, when I finally met and wed the almost perfect woman, she came with two marvelous daughters and a German mother-in-law, plus she needed or at least dreamed of and deeply desired space for a large garden. My ultimate party obviously would have required much more than a single bedroom with kitchen privileges.

Still, when I looked at what was then the Stringfellow house next to the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, I mused about how it might have evolved as the Friends shared housing project.

Maybe, as I’ve later learned, I wasn’t that far off target.

Better known as the Osborne-Cartland house, this was built by one prominent Dover Quaker and later owned by others with Friends’ connections.

In fact, it’s one more place the celebrated poet John Greenleaf Whittier likely stayed in his many visits to Dover, thanks to his Cartland cousins.

And it had carved off a slice of the original meetinghouse property.

Yes, it plays into my new book, Quaking Dover.

By the way, I should note that it suggests a Quaker neighborhood around the meetinghouse.

Between it and the Isaac Wendell home I recently posted about across Central Avenue was the Stephen Hanson house where Saint Joseph Roman Catholic edifice now stands. Hanson was somehow prominent in introducing manufacturing to Dover and built the house with his wife, Lydia Brown, after razing two smaller dwellings.

Wish I could show you what they, too, built.

An awakening awareness from a Native perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The realm of religion can certainly express our highest aspirations as well as manifest some of our darkest fears, as I feel I’ve examined in my new book Quaking Dover.

In my research of early New England, for instance, I see too clearly how often the differences between the Calvinist Protestants known as Puritans led to violent clashes with the French Roman Catholics to the north, as well as the other way around. (Not that I’d expect it to have differed if the Anglicans/Episcopalians had been in charge rather than the Puritans.)

Through their mindsets, the English, in their negotiations with the Indigenous tribes, crudely failed to acknowledge intricacies of decorum or ceremony that included food and dancing. Not so the French, whose missionaries to the Natives established bridges between the Native and Christian faiths. The priests even lived in tribal villages.

More critically, the English failed to impose the moral standards of their faith in their transactions with the Natives. Fair trade rather than widespread cheating would have been a start.

~*~

Where I’m now living, reciting the rosary is an important ritual among the local Passamaquoddy, especially at wakes and funerals. One late tribal leader was also a deacon and has left notes of his efforts to his blend Native religion and his Roman Catholic teachings. I’m hoping that some of this will find publication.

What’s the hold?

Are there comforting commonalities of rosary with chanting or even drumming? Or, from my end, might something connect to the long-lost art of Quakers who preached in “tones,” otherwise called sing-song?

Considering a young cousin’s ability to mimic one minister’s exhorting preaching style I encountered among Ohio’s remaining Wilburite Friends, I’m left wondering how much of the Quaker’s messages was formulaic and how much original, either way an emotional outburst not found in academic sermons and homilies delivered from a pulpit.

I suspect there’s a lot to be learned through what Quaker Douglas Steere called “mutual irradiation” when we do what’s sometimes called “listening in tongues” here.

It doesn’t always have to be about religion, either, though it may underpin much of the historical thinking.

One fascinating new voice from the Indigenous view is Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Her websites – lbrooks.people(dot)amherst.edu/thecommonpot/ and ourbelovedkin(dot)com/awikhigan/index – continue her presentation.

I believe we can all be enriched by participating in such sharing.

 

Our fair little city has its tribulations, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Heaven forbid I give anyone a false impression of the place I’m now residing. With all of its isolation from much of the rest of the nation, Eastport can be way too small for many people, though for a few others that adds to the appeal, even in the depths of a very long winter, which for some of us has a charm all its own.

For a sense of our life, find and then stream the Northern Exposure television series, and throw in a demographic that skewers heavily toward retirees and too many summer people, many of whom we’d love to have year-round. We’re not even as faraway as Cicely’s Alaska, either.

One of the unanticipated dramas is at the local government level. While Eastport is organized as a city, our ruling council has had more than its share of friction going, well, far back, as reflected in the ongoing turnover of our city managers and police chiefs. Last I heard, the assessor/building code inspector was also open.

Pay scale is only part of the problem.

Council meetings are often reported, in print and by word of mouth, as contentious, so much so that one member was forced off the council altogether after obscenity-laced outbursts, another fine councilor resigned in utter exhaustion, and one resident once again started recall petitions after being cut off in public discussion.

There are good reasons a popular bumper sticker does say “Don’t New York My Eastport.” However you want to interpret it. I hope it doesn’t include poetry in our monthly open mic sessions.

Not only is there a tension between the born-and-raised here locals and those of us who are from away (PFAs), or those who pinch pennies and those who see investing in the future, the tension can be seen between paying the bills now versus long-term vision.

~*~

One bit of contention that came up since my moving here has been the painting of a downtown crosswalk by a volunteer group. Their color scheme was a rainbow, emblematic of their identity. I thought it was great, in part because drivers wouldn’t be able to overlook it. Safety first, right?

But then the blowback came, and the council backtracked.

I can understand the opposition, which saw the colors as a partisan statement, something I would resent if someone were in turn to paint a crosswalk in some kind of Trump support. Perhaps, more neutrally, a sexual abstinence outside of marriage stance? These were, in other words, gut-level issues that led to a slippery slope or the proverbial can of worms.

Not that there are easy solutions.

~*~

I’m not about to run for city council or the school board – we need younger blood than I’d offer, and someone more focused on detail than I’d muster these days.

But I’ll certainly back others who are willing to embrace the challenges openly.

How long did wooden ships last?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

In one recent historical society presentation looking at locally constructed ships, we learned that a working span of 50 years or so “was a long time” for such vessels.

Many went down at sea, of course, and captains routinely expected to lose a proportion of their crew to death on each extended voyage.

I suspect hard numbers are hard to find, though I’m curious.

Besides, are there really as many retired boats propped up in yards and boatyards around here as there are people? Sometimes it seems that way.

And I can think of the remains of three sailing vessels that are visible at low tide.

So here I am, out on the waters for the better part of the week on a 152-year-old schooner, assuming that the odds are in our favor.

Wealth and fine housing along Midcoast Maine

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

So much of what you see driving along is picture-perfect New England, reminding me of Cape Cod, if you’ve ever been there. Or maybe looked at a coffee-table photography book or colorful regional wall calendar.

As admirable as I find it, the landscape also stirs up a tinge of depression when I consider all the wealth this represents along the Seacoast well up into Maine these days. No home in neighboring Portsmouth, New Hampshire, for example sells for under a million, no matter how modest. And then there’s all the new construction, too. Even a half-million for a new condo in what looks to me more like fancy tenements. What a leap from the $13,000 waterfront home one friend bought there 35 years ago!

Moreover, as I think about all of the poverty and decay in much of Maine up my own way, I’m stuck wondering:

Who can afford this?

Just what’s their secret to living?

What’s wrong with being elite?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As an editor on newspapers where, in an attempt for excellence everyone was giving of themselves totally (many unpaid hours of overtime, etc.), I was always appalled by the charge of “elitism,” which comes to mean “give me mediocrity – not the truth, but pleasantry” – from the same people who would not accept such standards in their professional football quarterback or automobile.

In many religions, however, the “world” of common subservience and society or what some today are more accurately seeing as “empire” is ultimately a mortal trap. In spiritual practice, then, only total effort is acceptable in seeking a holy transformation of this life. If only we can rise to even a portion of it.

As an ancient New England hymn reminded, “Broad is the way that leads to death / and many trod thereupon / but Wisdom shows a narrow way / with here and there a traveler.”

I see that lyric, by the way, as the root of Robert Frost’s road less traveled.

When I ask what’s wrong with being elite, I’m not talking about social status or wealth but something more elusive – something much more humble and loving.