My initial visits to eastern Maine back in the early 1990s shocked me with the prevalent poverty. I thought I was in West Virginia. A harsh reality is often overlooked between the picturesque coast and the wilderness adventures in the north.
That awareness has been amplified after moving Downeast. Many rural homes are surrounded by debris, everything from boat hulls that will never sail again to earthmoving equipment that has gone to rust to a row of cars that would otherwise qualify as a junkyard.
Here’s an extreme case.
Maybe they thought they could salvage something of value?
Bangor, a 2½-hour drive from Eastport, is our closest metropolis this side of Canada. And getting there or back can be a bear in winter. Oh, yes, you need to keep your eye out so you don’t hit a bear. There’s even a lodge along the way that touts the services of a bear-hunt guide.
The city itself is about the size of Dover, New Hampshire – roughly 30,000 population, but unless we cross the border to St. John, New Brunswick, it still has the closest:
Interstate highway.
Major hospital and specialists.
Airline flights.
Mall and many big-name, big-box stores.
Daily newspaper.
Array of ethnic restaurants.
Cineplex.
Synagogue.
Greek Orthodox church.
Toyota dealer.
Smaller Ellsworth, gateway to Acadia National Park, is about the same distance to the south. It also offers some respite as a civilized alternative.
The keel is all that’s left of the four-masted schooner “Dorothy.” It makes a puzzling figure in the waters of Shackford Cove, regardless of the tide. I had supposed it might have been a section of a rail track used at one of the four shipyards that once lined the shore. On a really low tide, this is how it looks up-close.
I’m guessing the keel flipped over, yet all of the iron rods are still impressive. The work of blacksmiths, no doubt.
Been in the same position at least as long as the old-timers around here can remember.
no piano sounds more like transactions of harpsichord or organ this postulation halfway finishing business drafts describing new goods so you want to tell what’s Kosher with jottings of what remains pressing all kinds of mental jumping about, on the way of continuation just writing and writing, the notes falling all in due time polishing or dashing to editors or agents or Winona in response to a beautiful letter hopefully corresponding to annals and her invitation to follow through on an earlier intent to respond to queries sent off to my overseers and elders, this exercise easily, now, back to you, so what’s playing next
I know that everywhere you go, everybody seems to have their nose stuck in their cell phone, oblivious to just about everything going on around them. You know, the bubble people.
Or, where I’m now living, they have those phones up in the air taking pictures so they can look at what’s in front of them later.
Oh, my. What a world.
As a writer, I’m supposed to be active on all platforms as a matter of marketing , but as many others are discovering, those venues rarely lead to book sales or loyal readers. Let’s be honest.
I’ve toyed with some of them, but drifted away, even Twitter.
My primary social medium is here at WordPress, blogging. I know how to manage my posts easily. The Reader feels to me like a real mailbox, with dispatches from around the world – postcards, letters, clippings. As for you?
For that matter, I’ve never quite “got” Facebook. It’s cumbersome to navigate, most of the content feels like gossip cluttered with advertising, and I don’t like having to sign in to see what should be public information for local retailers, schools, or public events.
Still, living in a small town, I’m finding that’s where the local “party line” is, and checking in regularly is essential. I still have qualms about the bigger corporate picture, with its shadowy agendas.
Recently renewing contacts with folks from my ancient past has also had me turning to FB.
What’s surprising me, though, is the gap between those who are active in a social medium and those who are “members” but rarely or even never check in.
It’s not just FB. Even email accounts. I suspect many of my contacts are that way, too. Hello! Anybody there? Did you get my message? When was the last time they posted or commented? Take that as a clue to their presence … or absence.
The numbers, then, might not be nearly as big or influential as they’re boasted.
Meanwhile, I keep falling down these Internet rabbit holes, pursuing arcane information.
Where are you spending your time online? Or even elsewhere?
Massachusetts Bay authorities are in an anti-Quaker frenzy even before two small groups of Friends set forth for Boston in 1656. Fifteen in all, they meet a harsh reception from the Puritan leadership, even banishment on pain of death, but return anyway, some after having an ear cut off. Their one haven is in Rhode Island, a colony founded by Roger Williams and augmented by Anne Hutchinson’s followers, who had almost ousted the Puritans from their governance of Massachusetts only two decades earlier.
Some of the most intense persecution comes down in Salem, north of Boston, already the second largest city in the English colonies, where a small circle of newly converted Quakers boldly holds firm. By 1658, their influence seeps into New Hampshire at Hampton and Dover and across the Piscataqua River into today’s Eliot, Maine. In 1659, a Dover court fines 15 residents for non-attendance at the Puritan services, and one of them is specifically convicted of having attended a Quaker meeting. Six of the surnames are among those active in the earliest surviving Dover Friends records four decades later. Most prominent among them is Thomas Roberts, one of the town’s first two settlers and later the colony’s governor.
This occurs before Quaker missionaries William Robinson and Marmaduke Stephenson are arrested three weeks after visiting Piscataqua. It’s possible that William Leddra and William Brend were here the previous year, before their apprehension in Salem on their way back to Boston, or perhaps Christopher Holder and John Copeland, before that, in 1657 – that would be a plausible reason for some Dover residents to be worshiping “after the manner of Friends” by early 1659.
Three of the four Quakers hanged in Boston had visited Dover. Mary Dyer was the exception.
Early Friends activity along the Piscataqua is confirmed in early 1660 when Anthony Emory, an innkeeper and ferryman at Sturgeon Creek in Eliot/Kittery, was fined and disenfranchised on charges of “entertaining” Quakers. His ferry route connected to Bloody Point (Newington) and Hilton Point across the Piscataqua River. Whether Emory had merely transported the Quakers as passengers or allowed them to stay at the inn or been more active in welcoming them is unclear, but his independent streak was well established. He was a signer of the Dover Combination before moving to Eliot/Kittery in 1649, where he was fined five pounds in 1656 for “mutinous courage” in challenging the authority of the town’s court. The disenfranchisement was too much. He sold the property on May 12, 1660, to his son and relocated with his wife to the Quaker stronghold of Portsmouth, Rhode Island.
The earlier controversies over the ministry of the town’s church had no doubt left dissenting locals, joined by eccentrics, whom the itinerant Quakers then galvanize into an assembly. Quite simply, Dover is out on the frontier of English settlement and relatively far from the Puritan mainstream.
Significantly, Robinson, Stephenson, and Leddra are among the four Quakers hanged in Boston in the years before three women arrive in Dover in 1662 and are whipped out of town, an event that has long been considered the start of Dover Friends Meeting. Traditional histories even say there was no Quaker presence in town before that. Instead, I’m certain the women and two male companions arrived to nurture a previously gathered circle.
Three Quaker women are whipped out of town, December 1662.
~*~
How dangerous are they? Here’s a brief life story Stevenson wrote a week before his execution – that is, just days after being in Dover.
In the beginning of the year 1655, I was at the plough in the east parts of Yorkshire in Old England, near the place where my outward being was; and, as I walked after the plough, I was filled with the love and presence of the living God, which did ravish my heart when I felt it, for it did increase and abound in me like a living stream, so did the life and love of God run through me like precious ointment giving a pleasant smell, which mad me to stand still. And, as I stood a little still, with my heart and mind stayed upon the Lord, the word of the Lord came to me in a still, small voice, which I did hear perfectly, saying to me in the secret of my heart and conscience, “I have have ordained thee a prophet unto the nations,” and, at the hearing of the word of the Lord, I was put to a stand, seeing that I was but a child for such a weighty matter. So, at the time appointed, Barbados was set before me, unto which I was required of the Lord to go and leave my dear and loving wife and tender children; for the Lord said unto me, immediately by HIs Spirit, that He would be as an husband to my wife and as a father to my children, and they should not want in my absence, for He would provide for them when I was gone. And I believed the Lord would perform what He had spoken, because I was made willing to give up myself to His work and service, to leave all and follow Him, whose presence and life is with me, where I rest in peace and quietness of spirit, with my dear brother [William Robinson] under the shadow of His wings, who hath made us willing to lay down our lives for His name’s sake, if unmerciful men be suffered to take them from us. And, if they do, we know we shall have rest and peace with the Lord for ever in His holy habitation, when they shall have torment night and day.
So, in obedience to the living God, I made preparation to pass to Barbados in the Fourth month [June] 1658. So, after some time that I had been on the said island in the service of God, I heard that New England had made a law to put the servants of the living God to death if they returned after they were sentenced away, which did come near me at that time; and, as I considered the thing and pondered it in my heart, immediately came to word of the Lord unto me, saying, “Thou knowest not but that thou mayst go thither.”
But I kept this word in my heart and did not declare it to any until the time appointed, so, after that, a vessel was made ready for Rhode Island, which I passed in. So, after a little time that I had been there, visiting the seed which the Lord had blessed, the word of the Lord came to me saying, “Go to Boston with thy brother William Robinson,” and at His command I was obedient and gave up to His will, that so His work and service may be accomplished. for He had said unto me that He had a great work for me to do, which is now come to pass. And, for yielding obedience to and for obeying the voice and command of the everlasting God, which created heaven and earth and the foundations of waters, do I, with my dear brother, suffer outward bonds near unto death.
And this is given forth to be upon record, that all people may know who hear it, that we came not in our own will but in the will of God.
Given forth by me, whom am know to men by the name of MARMADUKE STEVENSON, but have a new name given me, which the world knows not of, written in the book of life.
~*~
His tone and content are quite different than that of the leading Puritans of the time.
Jnana's Red Barn 