Category: American Affairs

Losing a reclusive neighbor we never really met

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Moving to a new community three years ago meant meeting new neighbors, and Eastport, as we’ve found, can be a friendly place, even for us who are “from away.”

But one of our abutting neighbors was very-hard-of-hearing, as my wife discovered in attempting to talk to her, and ignored my attempts of waving in greeting. In many ways, she resembled my late asocial mother-in-law, not only physically but also in a heavy cigarette habit. Don’t know if she rolled her own, though. Still, she seemed to relish her independence and had a support system that included a few handymen I could approach with problems to address. Which they did.

We did worry about her occasional drives to the grocery or doctor or wherever. She could barely see over the steering wheel while puffing away, for one thing. And her backing out of the driveway did appear questionable. Still, she eventually returned home, apparently unscathed. I did see her one day in the IGA parking lot receiving a lot of help packing her trunk with her purchases.

I did wonder about her living in a big house all by herself, though that’s not uncommon in a town that’s largely elderly.

So flash forward to a day before what was left of Hurricane Lee was to hit town and I looked out the kitchen-sink window to see a police officer nosing about, checking her car, knocking on her door (and receiving no answer). No surprise there, her lawn-mowing and snow-removing crews got much the same.

Still, he was persistent, making repeated calls from his cruiser after trying all doors and walking around the house.

The next thing I knew, an hour or two later, was a white glove through her apple trees and the black SUV before the blanketed gurney came into focus.

Even before the obituary, an online search gleaned details that she had been born in Eastport to the manager of the local Newberry’s store and, when it closed, moved by stages to Upstate New York, and then, after college, to San Francisco before the Summer of Love and a career in banking.

And then, in retirement, she returned to her roots – from the City on the Bay, as we say, to the City in the Bay.

Her maternal side ran back to a family of Loyalists who fled to St. Andrews, a neighboring community in New Brunswick, before relocating to Eastport early on, while her paternal line was Pennsylvania Dutch by way of Virginia.

The family’s eventual obituary adds details.

~*~

In the aftermath, masked family and friends have been working steadily over two weeks to collect bags of trash and purge the house, including a colony or two of rats. (The rodents, it turns out, are well established in our end of town today – one more challenge to address.)

This also raises the question of just how much I leave to others after my own passing, and how much I need to clear out before then.

In the meantime, other questions loom, including the meaning of life for each of us.

We do wonder who will be living there next – hopefully not one more Airbnb but a real family with kids.

Onward! As I like to say.

Not that I wouldn’t love hearing the rest of her life story.

Looking for witches among the Quakers

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the first things the Puritan authorities examined for after arresting women preaching the Quaker message in America was physical proof of their being witches.

I have no idea about the specifics – and am not sure I want to know. Still, their obsession with the naked bodies strikes me as creepy, even pornographic.

After publishing my book Quaking Dover, the thought struck me that the Puritans must have seen Quaker worship as some kind of séance. Not that we were trying to communicate with the dead, but rather be open to the presence of the Holy Spirit, or Christ.

Of course, that Holy Spirit was translated at the time as Holy Ghost. Yipes! Sounds like Halloween, no?

From my perspective, Ghost is way too limiting for that Spirit, especially when Christ is seen along the lines of Logos in Greek philosophy.

It’s far more revolutionary and liberating than you’d think. One way builds religion as a kind of legal system with punishments and rewards. The other builds it as a set of relationships.

Now, to stock up for those little trick-or-treaters who will be knocking on our door. I promise not to put religious tracts in their bags, tempting as the opportunity might be.

 

There’s much more to Salem than witch hysteria

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through much of the colonial era, Salem was one of America’s ten biggest cities. In addition, it was closer than Boston to Dover, and like Dover it was settled by West Country English fishermen before the Puritan migration flooded into New England.

Salem’s first Quakers suffered some of the most intense persecution for their faith found anywhere, and they were instrumental in bringing that faith to Dover.

What I didn’t realize was that Salem was long the only Quaker Meeting in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The other early Meetings in today’s Massachusetts were actually in the Plymouth colony.

Details on Salem Meeting’s existence were scarce until I was pointed to Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.

Her study breaks off before the Salem Meeting shifts to Lynn, where it was once the largest or second largest Friends congregation in New England. And then that, too, faded from sight early in the 20th century.

Pestana’s sensitive telling of Friends through the period includes her sense of Quakers as family oriented, communal, even what she calls tribal. I would still like to see the story of what happened to Salem Friends in the industrial era, but she provided consolation for my own conclusions in Quaking Dover.

As for Salem, its unique Peabody-Essex Museum ranks in many categories in the top ten art institutions in America. It’s definitely one of our favorite destinations. Its grounds even include a reproduction of Salem’s first Quaker meetinghouse, built about the same time as Dover’s.

The Maine image versus reality

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Life as it should be,” as the billboards proclaim in welcoming visitors aka tourists, is a slick slogan ignoring the economic realities most working adults in the state face.

The recent death of a new high school graduate in our county who was about to enter the prestigious Maine Maritime Academy is a harsh example.

He was out lobstering, solo, and got caught up in his gear and dragged overboard.

More common is the hobbling together of three or more jobs, mostly part-time and/or seasonal and lacking paid benefits.

~*~

Yes, the state’s landscape can be breathtaking, especially in summer. But much of winter is brutal, as are the black flies come late spring, and we do have more than our share of trash weasels.

Just want you to keep your impression in balance.

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.