Safely home again

I got back home earlier this afternoon. (No thanks to the endless anti-virus "updating" - which slows my computer and sometimes crashes it if I try to do other things while it's updating, and the Blogger "downtime" - I'm posting several hours after my arrival home).

Break was good. I needed to get away from the heat for a while. (They're referring to an expected high of 105 for tomorrow as a "cool down." Wait, what?).

I hated leaving my parents' town last night. First of all, of course, I hate leaving family. But also - a cold front had come through, it was in the upper 70s with a north breeze, the light was beginning to take on that more golden quality that it does as fall approaches (which seems to come faster, even at the less-than-10-degrees of higher latitude they are at compared to me).

It FELT like time for school to start up there.

We got to the train station a bit early - Amtrak, as is common, was running late. We sat together in the car for a while and talked and watched people walking back from one of the local farmer's markets. Somewhere, probably one of the apartments nearby, we could hear someone practicing trumpet. It was sort of peaceful, in that end-of-summer college-town way.

(It's funny how different a college town for a large, mostly-residential school and a smaller, mostly-commuter school are. One thing I really regret about the place I am at is that we don't have a "campustown" - that little block of cheap restaurants and used bookstores and sometimes "gift shops" that actually started life in the early 70s as head shops - that seem to exist on every other campus I've been a part of. (Well, OK. Akron didn't really have a campustown...it was a farther walk. But they still had the cheap restaurants, and they had the Greek Orthodox Church with its Thursday gyros-lunch.)

Then again, there are things I don't regret about leaving a large, "progressive-minded" northern campus for a smaller, southern school. (One big thing being the sort of Annoying Busybodies who will stop you in line at the grocery to inform you that you really only should be buying local produce, or some such thing. The sort of "the personal is ALWAYS political" thing that drives me up the wall. Here, I find far, far less of that. And pamphleteers. I don't see many pamphleteers here and I'm grateful for that.)

I read on the train up and back. (I do carry knitting with me but after dropping a needle once, and having to get down into an awkward position to search under the seats in the roomette...I decided I prefer reading).

I finished the big Moundbuilders book; I learned quite a bit I didn't know before. (There are Moundbuilder sites in Oklahoma! Including one at Spiro that is apparently either open to the public, or where people can arrange for tours. Maybe that's my fall break trip?) I don't know how well-grounded the author's speculations on culture are; he seems to suggest that there was initially a fairly egalitarian society where the people of importance were the ones who were good hunters or whatever, and these gradually gave way to chiefdoms as population grew, and as war became a more common thing. (War becoming more common, presumably, because the higher populations competed for the good hunting/fishing/gathering areas) and that agriculture came later. Also, he talks about how the higher-ups in the society (apprently assumed based on where they were buried) did not seem to lead a life that was much richer materially than the common folk...and that there wasn't division of labor; there were no "craftspeople" per se, everyone was mainly employed in getting food and shelter and things like beadmaking from shells was done in the winters when people rested, and there weren't dedicated beadmakers...

As it turns out, casting about this evening for the "next" non-fiction to read, I find I have another book about the Moundbuilders on my shelf...specifically, about the Trempeleau mounds in Wisconsin. (It's called "Buried Indians"). I remember now that I bought it from the University of Wisconsin Press table at the last big conference I was at. (I have a habit of buying lots of books at conferences, and then sort of forgetting about them. Part of it is that the book tables are a welcome break from the talks and sessions and trying to socialize with people that I don't know well at all, but part of it is the 20% discount most presses give to conference purchasers....and the fact that they are "unusual" books often not available via Amazon or other common suppliers). So I think I'll read that next, to contrast it with the other book.

I also read Thomas Fairchild Sherman's "A Place on the Glacial Till." This book was a Christmas present several years ago; I saw it in a catalog and asked for it. He writes from the perspective of his home in Oberlin, Ohio - which is maybe 60 miles (? I think) west of where I grew up. He addresses the natural history of the area (and to some extent, the human history - he talks about the Native tribes that lived in the area, and some of the early settlers).

It was interesting in that I could visualize some of what he was talking about. As I said, where I hung out growing up was somewhat east of where he is writing about, but his writing made me think of the big sandstone ledges at Virginia Kendall State Park, and how it was always cool and quiet there even in the height of summer, and if I remember correctly, there was some Eastern Hemlock (the conifer tree, not the poisonous herb) growing there, which I now know to be a more northerly species that is maybe a little out of place, even in Northern Ohio.

He has a chapter on the "Western Reserve," which is the old name of the general area where I grew up (Oberlin is at the very western edge of it; Hudson was towards the east). These lands were so named because they were part of the "Western Reserve" lands (that is, held "in reserve") by Connecticut - for expansion, or to be doled out to veterans of the Revolutionary War. I had forgotten, or perhaps never known, that the western area of them were known as the "Firelands," because they were given as sort of a consolation prize to people from Connecticut who had their homes there burned by the British (as part of Benedict Arnold's treason).

Probably not the greatest "prize." While Sherman hypothesizes that during the times of heavy Native occupation of the land (most of the Native people had been wiped out by European disease, probably brought by fur trappers, before the Euro-American surveying of the area) the area was probably more open and pleasant, because the people living there cultivated the land and may have used fire as a land-management tool, by the late 1790s, the area had grown up to dense forest. (The "forest primeval" of much of Eastern North America was probably not as "primeval" as Longfellow imagined it...the Hypisthermal period and Native American farms and villages before European arrival would have probably had the land more cleared)

In fact, one of the surveyors wrote in his notes: "entered a g-----d d-----m Bad Willow Swamp." Heh. Having struggled through some Ohio and Michigan forestland in my highschool and college "natural history" days, I can see where he was coming from there. (I find the whole idea of the surveying expeditions fascinating: they couldn't even, in the early ones, perfectly fix the longitude lines. And they were going off into areas that in some cases, no European person had ever even seen...and yet they did it, and the GLO (General Land Office) records exist, and they're actually fairly accurate*)

*(In most cases. There are some incidences where the surveyors apparently made up the information they sent back, rather than slogging through the area...or else, they falsified stuff to make some lands look better and others - maybe lands they wanted to claim - look worse. But buy and large they seem pretty solid, and there have even been maps of pre-1820s forest types generated from the data)

Another interesting tidbit, the sort of thing that sticks in my magpie brain: the town of Euclid was either near or part of lands deeded to the surveyors as payment. They chose the name - and named it after (as Sherman says) "their Master Geometer."

All in all, it was a happy and thoughtful read, and made me a bit nostalgic for the times I had growing up in Ohio. (And now I wish I had paid better attention to stuff. I never really looked at the glacial till that formed much of the basic soil in my parents' garden. And I never paid as much attention to the geology of the area as I might.)

Sherman also philosophizes a bit, talking about time and place and Thoreau's idea that the Creation is all times and all places, happening now, and not just some idea imagined to be in the dusty past.