Tag: Indiana

Lost and found in the woods of Lampkins Ridge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

VO showing the grave sites of two infants at the edge of his ravine: one stone left, the other one, dating to early 1800s, stolen …

~*~

I see now, 50-some years later, there’s actually a public-access trail around there.

~*~

Further to the east was Brown County, with its rugged geology, state and national forests, and a large state park, making it Indiana’s outdoors destination. It definitely feels like stepping back in time. I have memories of hiking and camping there as a Boy Scout, even before my explorations during the time covered in my return to the university.

Hiking trail photograph by Kgirischandra  via Wikimedia Commons.

 

Panorama views by Elizabeth Nicodemus via Wikipedia Commons.

I had friends who lived in log cabins, which remain in widespread use in the southern part of the state.

 

 

 

No question, my Indiana years were special

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As I’ve been seeing in this sweep through my journals, not all of my experiences in Bloomington wound up in my poetry and fiction.

Back when I switched my college major from journalism to “something that would expand my mind,” as one influential editor advised me, I chose political science because so much news coverage focuses on government and its impact. Somehow, I fell under the spell of Vincent Ostrom, especially his federalist perspectives of a compound republic and ground-upward rather than top-down action. My earlier posts reflect how this turned into a personal relationship, even before I was invited to join what’s now known at IU as the Ostrom Workshop.

His wife Elinor, better known to us as Lynn, was just beginning to teach at IU when I was an undergrad and I didn’t find the opportunity to enroll in her courses. (The fact the department scheduled her classes at 7:30 am was an additional problem for night-owl me, as I was as the time.) Despite obstacles erected because of her gender, she soon became a popular teacher and by the time I returned to campus, was a rising star. What I saw on my return was how naturally she functioned as the central figure in running our collaborative workshop, and how utterly amazing she was all around. It should be no surprise that she became not only the first woman but also the first political scientist to win the Nobel Prize in economics. Yes, the dismal science.

While I have never run for political office or served in a governmental role — I’m of the camp that believes doing so would compromise the neutrality or objectivity at the heart of serious journalism — I have carried many of the lessons from that training through the remainder of my life.

One is the ability to critically read a text, period. It serves well in literature, theology, proposing a course of action, as well as editing. A corresponding step then asks which assumptions can be relaxed or even removed from the paper under examination.

Another lesson involves management and associative structures. Many similarities exist in operating public, for-profit, and non-profit organizations. They are what make a civilization function. They were especially helpful when I was navigating the steps in the management ladder of corporate journalism in my moves to come.

The next question regarding any field of organization, of course, is how do we make it work better?

~*~

In this review of the experience, I’m surprised to see a parallel in the youthful enthusiastic personnel at the Workshop to the idealistic newsroom staff in my novel Hometown News.  Most of the events shaping that book, be warned, come in the years ahead.

~*~

As I look back, I see how crucial this year-and-a-half became in my life.

My evolution from yogi to Quaker began, for one thing, though an overlap would continue for another year or two.

Through a circle headed by three very fine poets, my personal voice in that vein took shape, accompanied by appearances in literary reviews across the nation.

Kat and I settled into a life that was largely pleasurable and fulfilling. I’ll leave the details for you to decipher in my novel Nearly Canaan. The middle novella in The Secret Side of Jaya, “Miller at the spring,” was also inspired by this period but written 40-some years later and recast in the Ozarks.

There was a curious semester when Nicki and Kat were enrolled in the same weaving class in the art department. Did my ex-lover know my wife was a classmate? Eventually, they became acquainted and that led to a face-to-face of the three of us, allowing me some resolution to the past.

And I felt freer to move forward.

~*~

Vincent had grown up on a mink farm near Mount Baker in Washington state, and he was quite encouraging in our move to the Northwest. Living in the interior desert, I would finally understand the intricacies of water legislation and management, which had been one of his specialties. Another arose from being a writer of the Alaska state constitution, a place that also had close connections to Washington state.

After packing up and moving westward, I never returned to Indiana, apart from the brief drive crossing on the toll road in the north on our return to Ohio after the Pacific Northwest.

I’d say the book was closed, yet the writing and revision were actually still ahead.

~*~

From Spiralbound Hoosier, with commentary from now.

 

Right under our feet or the hill

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

As my journals record, my return to southern Indiana took me well beyond the college campus. I’ve already mentioned my explorations of the wooded Leonard Springs and its cave system just beyond our house at what was then the fringe of the college town. Let me remind you that my Thistle Finch editions blog has free PDF downloads of the related chapbook of my resulting poems as well as a photo album I put together from online gleanings to refresh my memory.

Related photo lookbooks slash storyboards are Ghost Towns, Iconic Farmers, Mills by the Springs, and Wonders Under the Ground, assembled to assist in my revisions for what is now “Miller at the Springs” in my novel Secret Side of Jaya.

Poetry chapbooks originating in this period include Cornflower Eye, Blurring Into Smoke, and Green Wonder, all available as free PDF downloads,

I did encounter a lot in a short year-and-a-half, even beyond my paying employment. I do would how my writing would have evolved if I had been able to remain in place.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

 

Back to a personal refuge

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

A recent post here told you of my early encounters with the Leonard Springs. The then largely unknown wooded ravine soon served as a kind of personal refuge for me just beyond our house. It became a microcosm of something much larger in my emerging awareness.

For the chapbook of poems originating in those explorations as well as a supporting photo album, go to my Thistle Finch editions free digital bookstore. Do take a look.

Welcome to another Rabbit Hole on the Internet.

The backstory’s beginning to look presciently ominous for today

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my revisions of the novel Daffodil Sunrise into a more sweeping Daffodil Uprising, I added backstory involving Indiana politics and efforts to extract personal wealth from one of its state universities.

Considering the current effort of the governor to seize control of the school’s board of trustees has me realizing my dark imaginings were all too naïve.

We know what one-party rule did in Germany and also in the Soviet Union.

In my book, the administration had little interest in listening to the students, much less in responding to their needs.

You can bet that will be a renewed breakdown ahead.

It’s a heavy awareness to carry, but it’s one I’ve shared 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Indiana sometimes shows up as a symbolic state. It’s not just a “crossroads of America,” as it likes to tout itself, a blending of North and South or balancing East versus West. It’s an anomaly even in the Midwest, where it’s the only state not bearing an Indigenous name yet it’s named in supposed homage to the Original Peoples – INDIAN-a.

With a capital called INDIAN-apolis. Or Naptown, as it’s known in other parts of the state.

Not that there are any tribes remaining within its boundaries.

It’s not as industrial as Ohio or Illinois nor as agricultural as, say, Iowa or Minnesota – feel free to counter that with hard data, I’m just running on gut feeling here.

And just what is a Hoosier, anyway? There are theories, but it’s certainly not like a buckeye or hawkeye or badger or the Bluegrass State bordering its south or Prairie State on its west or Great Lakes State on its north. You can get a picture in your mind with those.

In short, it rather strives to appear just average, or maybe a level just below. Somehow, that’s what fuels its role as a symbol of America itself, especially the Bread Basket sprawling largely westward, even though it’s rarely in the spotlight, except for Indy 500 week, and even that reflects an earlier glory.

That wasn’t always the case, though. The place gave birth to some leftist progressives over the years as well as some vital inventors. It also gave us the likes of journalist Ernie Pyle, jazz lyricist Hoagie Carmichael, actor James Dean, radio storyteller Jean Shepherd, basketball great Larry Bird, rocker John Mellencamp, late-night host David Letterman. But no U.S. president.

Early on, it had a heavy Southern influence, especially as Quaker families fled the slaveholding economy of North Carolina, as I learned after taking up genealogy and uncovering my roots.

It also has some distinctly different regions, including the once dominant steelmaking crescent along Lake Michigan adjacent to Chicago; the hardscrabble rolling forests and quarries of southern Indiana; and the flat agricultural belt in the middle.

I got to know it first by family camping trips and Boy Scout overnight hiking excursions. Yes, in the southern tracts of the state. We also had journeys when my great-grandmother decided to visit from Missouri or central Illinois; her son and his wife lived in a dreadful corner of Indianapolis and served as the relay point. Later, I finished college, again in the rustic south, and returned four years after as a political science research associate.

I must admit my angst at what’s been happening politically and socially, even though the Indianapolis Star was always a pretty dreadful archconservative voice, proof for me that “liberal” journalism has always been in the minority.

~*~

Not that the state hasn’t had an artistic presence. Just think of the artist Robert Indiana of the iconic LOVE image (born in New Castle).

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut nailed the state for me, though other writers of note include Booth Tarkington, Theodore Dreiser, Ward Just, New Yorker regular Janet Flanner (from Paris), and young-adult superstar John Green. The poets Clayton Eshelman, with his collection Indiana, and Etheridge Knight also have had strong careers.

For my part, my novels Daffodil Uprising and What’s Left are both based in an imaginative reworking of Bloomington – I do play with geography, making the Ohio River a lot closer to Indianapolis, for one thing. My novel Hometown News could also be placed in the upper half of the state, though its setting is more generalized.

My poetry chapbook Leonard Springs definitely reflects the cave country around Bloomington.

I anticipated remaining there much longer than I did, but fate intervened. And after that, I’ve never been back, except in my memories.

 

Before you start your car, thank this auto pioneer 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When we think of many of the technological advances that impact our daily lives, we usually don’t know the names of their inventors, even when we know the businessmen who got wealthy as a result. Elon Musk did not invent the Tesla, for instance, nor did Bill Gates invent the internet or Henry Ford, the auto. The list is actually a long one.

Consider John William Lambert, mentioned in a previous Tendrils.

I remember visiting an early coworker and, upon seeing an old car with an impressive Lambert name in brass across the radiator sitting at an open garage door, I asked, “Ann? Is that car any relation to you?” She replied that her grandfather used to make them but otherwise conveyed no knowledge that he had been so prominent a figure.

Here are ten facts from his life.

This was the breakthrough vehicle.
  1. He invented the first practical American internal combustion gasoline automobile in 1890 in Ohio City in Van Wert County, Ohio, where he tested it on the village streets early the next year. It was the Buckeye gasoline buggy, a surrey-topped three-wheel runabout with one seat. It had a three-cylinder, four-stroke engine.
  2. In 1891, that horseless carriage became the first automobile offered for sale in the United States. Priced at $550, it attracted no buyers.
  3. Undaunted by the buggy’s reception, he turned his attention in 1892 to making stationary gasoline engines for farm and industrial factory use.
  4. Lambert’s base of operations was the Buckeye Manufacturing Company, which he had founded in 1884 as a farm implement manufacturer and moved in 1892 to Anderson, Indiana.
  5. His experiments with drive-train technology led to the Lambert friction gearing disk drive transmission. The gradual, or gearless, transmission became a signature feature on all of his future cars.
  6. His next attempt at an auto line came in 1895 with a model called the Buckeye. It was a four-wheel modification of the buggy but failed to find buyers.
  7. His first marketing success was the Union, released in 1902. About 300 of the tiller-steered cars were sold.
  8. In 1906 he introduced his first Lambert, establishing himself as one of the more successful automakers of the time. Production peaked from 1907 to 1910 with 2,000 cars a year.
  9. Buckeye Manufacturing, which built the cars, had moved by 1905 to Anderson, Indiana. The Lambert Automobile Company was one of its subsidiaries. Touting its Lambert Friction-Drive Automobiles and Trucks, the Buckeye factory mass-produced Lambert’s cars, gasoline engines, and auto components as well as fire engines, railroad inspection vehicles, and steel-hoof tractors before closing in 1917. At its height, the company had more than a thousand employees.
  10. Lambert held more than 600 patents and died in 1952, age 92, in Anderson.
At its prime, the Lambert came with 15 layers of hand-painted color.

 

How relative is time, anyway?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Let’s consider fourth place, as far as length in time. That is, realizing that I’ve been dwelling in Eastport four years now strikes me as a bit of a shock. I’m finding it difficult to make sense of the fact, at least in light of earlier landings.

Quite simply, I’m still settling in here, even if it’s in my so-called sunset years. And, yes, I’m still feeling this is it, a very suitable end of my road, even if I am being greeted by name by people I don’t recall knowing, this is in sharp contrast to earlier locales.

For perspective, those shorter spans were in my early adulthood: Bloomington, Indiana (four years in two parts); Binghamton, New York (1½ years, in two parts and three addresses); the Poconos of Pennsylvania (1½ years); the town in northwest Ohio I call Prairie Depot (1½ years); Yakima, Washington (four years); a Mississippi River landing in Iowa (six months); Rust Belt in the northeast corner of Ohio (3½ years); and Baltimore, my big-city turn and turning point (three years). You’ve likely met many of them in my novels and poems.

Looking back, each of those addresses was filled with challenging turmoil and discovery, soul-searching yearning as well as glimmers of something more concrete and fulfilling just ahead.

In contrast, my longest period of living anywhere was Dover, New Hampshire (21 years), my native Dayton, Ohio (20 years), and Manchester, New Hampshire (13 years).