Tag: America

INTO THE GREAT PLAINS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

To grow a leafy tree requires more than thirty inches of rainfall or its equivalent each year. If you drive west across the United States, you can cross an imaginary line that passes through the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, and beyond it deciduous, or leafy, trees are quite rare. Soon, so are conifers, the evergreens. Irrigation becomes a fact of life if you want to raise food or flowers or even a lawn.

The Great Plains eventually pass into desert – and you might be surprised to discover that most of Oregon, Idaho, and Washington state is actually desert. The rainy belt is little more than a thin band along the Pacific-facing side of the Cascade and Olympic mountains.

Quite simply, it’s a different world from the one most Americans know.

~*~

As for the Great Plains, let me recommend Kathleen Norris’ Dakota. It’s a unique and marvelous book.

 

ABOUT THE TIME WE’D THOUGHT WE’D HEARD IT ALL, SOMETHING WOULD COME UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One thing about being in the news business was how much that we covered was more or less routine. Yes, there were the variations on the given theme, but you could easily fall into a formula in covering them. Think of elections or a football game, for instance. Somebody wins, somebody loses, and you quote from both sides.

There would also be developments that simply fell outside the realm of what we’d covered, and when I started out as a journalist, community tastes were stricter than what now fills the coverage. Pedophile priests and sexually abusive parents, for instance, were never mentioned. Ditto, the private lives of politicians. And pit bull dog attacks were way off in the future.

Not so now, and it’s one of the reasons I burned out editing the low-life stories. After all, not even Hustler magazine would have touched much of the grossness that was now appearing even on the front page.

My goals in journalism were far loftier than soft porn, even in a courtroom setting.

~*~

Still, I was surprised how many times I felt I’d seen and heard all the basic stories, only to be hit by something that seemed completely new.

One of them was the arrest of one of our sportswriters on charges of pimping. Ouch! A professional with children? Somebody we knew?

And then the other day a report took that a couple of steps further.

Seems a man responding to an advertisement for a “social-type service” went to a local motel room only to be met by the woman, as expected. But there he also discovered another man and a pit bull dog, neither of them anticipated on his end.

In the ensuing events, as the story goes, the customer was beaten and robbed before escaping and being chased bleeding and naked by the pit bull into the parking lot before a phone call from the front office summoned police. (There was also something about brass knuckles that were tossed aside in the fray, but let’s stick to the basic outline.)

I keep wondering about the old “honor among thieves” code among outlaws. Aren’t there supposed to be some strict standards of behavior involved? Even among crooks, doesn’t a double-cross draws contempt, as does betrayal? In the case of prostitution, for instance, doesn’t that mean the pimp remains out of sight – or better yet, out of the room? And no dogs, unless they’re part of the, uh, proclivities of the john?

For the record, prostitution was not among the charges mentioned in this case. I raise the issue here more in the theoretical sense of illicit dealings. We could as easily substitute drug purchases or any number of other monetary exchanges. Remember, basic standards are assumed or the economic trade falls apart. Nobody would answer an escort-services listing if this was common practice.

So here we are with the new twists being the presence of the second man and the chase by the pit bull, only to find the ultimate recourse falls back on the police and criminal justice system.

As I said, it’s not your everyday news story. I’m left wondering how we would have handled such a police report in the “old days” or whether we would have published it at all. Or even if things like this even occurred back then.

LEONARD SPRINGS: WHAT’S HIDDEN UNDERFOOT

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One set of my poems of return, discovery, and loss is centered on the Leonard Springs which were hidden a half-dozen miles from the university I attended in my first sustained leap from my native Ohio.

On my return, we lived at the edge of town rather than on campus, and the springs were in a ravine just over the edge of our view from the kitchen. Few knew of their existence. Now, as I find online, they’re a public park and treasure.

~*~

Much of southern Indiana sits atop a thick limestone bed, some of it quarried for the construction of large-scale buildings worldwide. Over the ages, the bedrock has been riddled as slightly acidic water chiseled passageways and cave systems below the ground surface. Learn to read the landscape with this awareness and you come to recognize the widespread karst features, including sinkholes where cavern roofs have collapsed – some could easily hide a large truck or even a barn. There are also the sinking streams that vanish back into the earth as well as open mouths concealed in fields and forests that would swallow an unwary trespasser. So this hardness is laced with underground mystery and motion.

I already possessed some familiarity with this terrain from childhood camping and hiking trips, and had even crawled through some small caves in nearby state parks. Commercial caverns had also instilled an awareness of the otherworldly character of underground chambers and passageways. But this time, as I now lived off-campus on Leonard Springs Road, far to the other side of town, I was newly married and free to explore. After residing and laboring in the foothills of Upstate New York, the Pocono Mountains of Pennsylvania, and the flats of what had once been the Great Black Swamp of northwest Ohio, I had come back to Bloomington as a research associate. This sojourn would be all too short – a little more than a year and a half, though not by design – but long enough to acquaint me with the hardscrabble backcountry and its peculiar character.

Our garden sat in one sinkhole, and our waste water probably flowed into another (there’s no accounting for our landlord’s septic system). While I’m not a caver (as many spelunkers prefer to be called), I did become intrigued by the meandering channels beneath the meadows and woodlands beyond our house. From what Roger Pfingston writes more recently of his neighborhood on Stouts Creek, a similar locale a few miles to the north, I can suspect that much of the Leonard Springs terrain has since been ripped up and developed into housing.

What I leave, then, are field notes of the layering I experienced then, and a testimony. The poems in Green Repose present these. For your own copy, click here.

Green Repose 1

FAREWELL TO THE SWITCHBOARD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

At the office, we had the farewell to the switchboard operator who’d been replaced by the new phone system – someone who had been there when I arrived two decades earlier.

Oh, the weird calls we’d get, the ones she usually screened yet some still managed to slip past her.

The woman from California, “Can you tell me what state New Hampshire’s in?” and I wanted to reply, “How the hell did you get this number?”

All of the ones wanting to know my opinion, as if it mattered.

Or the drunks or the individuals convinced of this conspiracy or that. Especially late at night.

As the publisher told one, “What do you think this is, a call-in radio show?”

Listen. We’ve got work to do, rather than yap. Piles and piles of work.

~*~

Oh, my, the telephones! They become a chorus of their own in my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News

NEW ENGLAND CITIES AND TOWNS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 9 Comments

In New England, you live in either a town or a city. There are no townships or being “out in the county,” as I’d known elsewhere. And the counties are relatively insignificant, at least politically; they’re largely for a court system, jails, and record-keeping.

Part of my confusion when I first moved to this corner of the country was an assumption that “city” and “town” both meant “urban,” with some population density and a central retail and commercial district. But that’s not always the case. In fact, some seem to be entirely rural.

Additional confusion can be caused by looking at maps and seeing dots representing settlement and then assuming they’re towns. Gilmanton and Gilmanton Iron Works appear, for instance, but they’re both in the town of Gilmanton and are separated by miles of forest. The community of Groveton is in the town of Northumberland. The city of Laconia includes the enclaves of Weirs Beach and Lakeport. A city or town may have a number of distinct neighborhoods or villages, sometimes with separate post offices or Zip codes. And so on.

Our cities and towns are geographical spaces differentiated by their form of government. Cities are managed by a mayor and board of aldermen, while a town relies on a three-person board of selectmen. Population? Some of New Hampshire’s 13 cities are quite small, while a handful of its 221 towns rank among the largest localities. The form of government is a local choice.

Except for the towns that have opted for a ballot-based alternative known as SB 2, the residents of New Hampshire’s towns gather on the second Tuesday in March for Town Meeting Day, a celebrated exercise in democracy where everyone gets a say, at least if the moderator’s on top of his or her game. They’ll tackle the warrant articles – the agenda published in advance, including town and school budgets and bonding – and also elect new officials.

In a few towns, the entire event’s wrapped up in a half-hour, while others stretch on for hours or even demand additional sessions. The ones that get quite heated may explain why Town Meeting Day’s held in winter.

~*~

Winged Death 1To see more of the region’s unique character and calendar, click here.

A FEW REFLECTIONS ON JURY DUTY

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I discovered at the time … coming off two days of jury duty. More emotionally demanding and exhausting than I would have suspected.

Also, more Quaker dimensions, beginning with my use of affirmation, rather than swearing to an oath, as well as listening intently to the quiet minority.

Getting other jury members to open up personal sides was worth it. A heating-and-cooling guy from a far corner of the county was a real hoot: 61, a scarf that made me think he was gay … turned out to be a biker married 31 years. Also thought he’d be the one pushing for not-guilty findings; instead, he was the last one to back off the second conviction and probably swayed the holdouts to go for the conviction on the first.

At lunch: “Maybe I should go over and visit some of my buddies across the street.” The retirement home? “No, they’re too young for that. The House of Corrections.” Mostly failure to meet child support payments. “How are they supposed to pay up if they’re incarcerated?” Good point.

If you’re called, remember. You won’t know what to expect.

ROADSIDE RECIPE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Originally it was three lines, but this is what I read:

Now hiring fried clam strips chicken tenders.

(Well, I always wondered about their scallops. But now we know who tenders those chickens. Or is it strips those clams?)

Yes, this definitely puts chicken tenders in a new category.

POINT NOTED

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Few Friends in unprogrammed (or “silent”) Meetings of our size would admit that we need a pastor. Not for a sermon or vocal prayers, mind you, but simply to provide all the behind-the-scenes counseling and comfort, as well as some administrative oversight. But it’s true.

The job of clerk as envisioned is one of a chairman/moderator. As it turns out is something altogether different. We have no chief administrative executive, and that creates a vacuum, especially if Friends in the meeting fail to step up to do their share of community service.

As one former pastor from another denomination quipped, watching our clerk be besieged by questions in the few minutes before we settled in for worship, “You need an office manager.”

Point noted. That would be a step in a useful direction.

ALL THE EXTRA TOUCHES ADDED UP

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another of the nation’s once-remarkable papers was the Des Moines Register. It assumed a thoroughly statewide focus, with locator maps pointing out where many of the communities were and an amazing ability to note where anyone mentioned in a national story had ever lived anywhere in Iowa. The front page had an old-fashioned, authoritative appearance with a prominent, staff-produced editorial cartoon and block-letter capital-letter banner headline. I appreciated the frequency of national and international stories that carried the byline, “Combined Wire Services,” meaning a copy editor had spent several hours comparing Associated Press, United Press International, New York Times, and other dispatches to glean details to rewrite into a more comprehensive report. All of that, of course, cost money.

Statewide newspapers began cutting back as the costs of distribution soared, combined with a recognition that nearly all of the advertisers – the principal source of revenue – were aiming at only the major metropolitan area.

It wasn’t just statewide coverage, either, that has been curtailed. Most of the biggest papers have since shuttered their foreign offices and cut back on national reporting, as well.

You can as easily say they’ve cheapened the product, but that’s a longer term issue.

~*~

For a surreal, playful, and often gallows-humor trip within one young and ambitious newsroom, pick up my novel, Hometown News.

Hometown News