tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-15665691069874986772024-03-14T00:34:37.627-07:00JOHN HANSON MITCHELLHerewith an assortment of various published and unpublished essays, excerpts from works in progress, and nature notes.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-39980465030920511632014-01-21T12:03:00.001-08:002014-01-21T12:03:54.257-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
SCRATCH FLAT CHRONICLE:<br />
<br />
Martin Luther King Day was clear and relatively warm, with a fresh snow. Early that morning a flight of snow bunitngs flitted past, and there were flocks of blue birds and robins in the forest edges around the fields. We were off to the local coasting hill to do some sledding around midday..<br />
<br />
The snow was perfect, and two of the children had constructed a low jump and were skidding over the top and launching themselves wildly into the air before crashing into the snow on their backs -- only to get up again and do it all over. The sun was warm, and below the hill the woods had taken on that grey green cast of early winter, a perfect day, a timeless New England winter scene, with all the cliches of health and home and a fire crackling in the hearth. <br />
<br />
And yet.<br />
. <br />
<br />
In spite of the fact that this was a school holiday, out of however many children there are in this town there were but six on the hill that day, including two in my own family, which means that there were in fact only four children out on what was the easily finest outing day this season, and a holiday to boot..<br />
<br />
What happened? Where are all the children? Trapped by some electronic Pied Piper? Imprisoned in a sunless mall? Grounded by angry parents? Depressed? Sick?<br />
<br />
What hope can there be for such a people??<br />
<br />
.</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-26128962808037767462014-01-16T08:52:00.003-08:002014-01-16T08:52:53.239-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
A few years ago the ecologist E.O. Wilson developed a theory he called biophilia. His idea was that human beings are inherently drawn to nature and that furthermore, they appreciate above all a landscape that features a view over water, a cleared stretch of open land dotted with trees, and a forest or hills in the distance. He points out that throughout history, from the earliest palaces and villas to contemporary corporate structures, designers will create environments with these features, even if they have to remake the original terrain to do so.
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<br />
In fact, landscapes of this sort are increasingly rare. Some of the finest natural vistas, which once inspired artists have been spoiled by commercial development. With this in mind, over the past few years, I have been traveling around seeking out areas that exhibit all the qualities that the painters of landscape have used as models.
Long views of this sort can still be found even in sections of modernizing Europe. You find them in the Roman Campagne, where Salvator Rosa, who was among the first landscape painter worked, along with later artists such as J.M.W. Turner and Thomas Cole. You find them in southern France, especially around Provence, which inspired the French Impressionist painters. They still exist in sections of Holland, where the Dutch landscape painters worked in the 17th century. And they can also be found in England, in the Fens, for example, the region favored by the landscape painter, John Constable.
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<br />
You also can still find good views throughout North America, where painters were the first to recognize the elements of the sublime in wilderness sites and subsequently popularize them. The first of these wild vistas, much despoiled now or at least reduced, were the views over the Hudson River to the Catskill Mountains, painted by Thomas Cole in the mid 1800s. Cole was joined by other artists, such as Frederick Church and Asher B. Durand who were grouped together to create what is known as the Hudson River School.<br />
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Some of the artists in this same group moved west later in the 19th century and began to portray views of wilderness, the Rockies in particular. In fact it has been theorized that it was the work of these landscape painters that softened the generally blind, commercial, winner take all American public for an appreciation of wilderness. The end result was the creation of the National Park System, the first such preservation project in the world.<br />
<br />
Inspiring landscapes can be found on a smaller scale in New England, the view of the great Oxbow of the Connecticut River, for example, which was painted by Thomas Cole in 1830. Coastal New England also has some good viewscapes, such as the Newburyport marshes, which were painted over and over again by the Luminist artist Martin Johnson Heade. On an even smaller scale, you can find inviting views around Old Lyme, Connecticut, an area characterized by small fields, low hills patterned with laurels, the Connecicut River to the west, and salt marshes along the Long Island Sound coast to the south. This was the region favored by a small group of early twentieth century American Impressionists known as the Lyme School.
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<br />
Ironically, considering the density of its population, New England has hundreds of lesser-known vistas, such as the view across Lake Champlain from western Vermont to the often clouded Adirondacks, or the small farms and villages of the Hill Towns in central Massachusetts.<br />
<br />
After years of poking around searching for places of this sort, I found another one of these scenic landscapes not half a mile from my house in Littleton, Massachusetts. Coming into town from the east, along the Great Road, you pass through the so-called Gateway to the town, which offers a fine rural idyll of hayfields and pumpkin fields, with low hills to the north and south. Approaching the town center from the west, once you clear a small, unappealing strip mall, you break out into the rolling fields of the area known traditionally as Scratch Flat. The land here stretches across the cultivated fields of two working farms and sweeps up to a forested ridge on the east, a view that might have been a subject for someone like Camille Pissarro, who favored rural aspects and country scenes.
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<br />
The other good view can be found on the town beach at Long Lake, especially at sunset. This small body of water is much appreciated for its recreational opportunities, swimming and boating and the like, and is made all the better by town regulations passed back in the 1950s, which discourage the use of high powered motor boats. But the other feature is the view across the lake to the forested banks and the low glacial ridges. Unlike most of the small lakes and ponds all across New England, the shores of Long Lake are generally unhoused and wild. Three quarters of the banks are now protected from development, either by the town, or by the New England Forestry Foundation, which owns property on the western banks. The small town beach lies on the eastern shore, and the few houses that dot the northern shore actually add to the view by offering a few understated focal points.
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<br />
I daresay any of the landscape painters of the past would appreciate the vistas here. John Constable would love the roiling cloudscape that sometimes churns up over the green hills beyond the lake in late afternoon. The Hudson River School painter Jasper Cropsey would appreciate the fiery colors of the trees on the western banks in autumn. Any of the water-loving French Impressionists, including Monet or Renoir, would love the stillness of the lake on summer evenings, and would also no doubt appreciate the colorful little moth-like sails of the boats that tack here and there on sunny days, not to mention the coves of florid water lilies on the southern banks.
The fact is, if you look around with a sharpened eye for such things, one can find the elemental and even
mythic landscapes that E.O Wilson and art historians have written about right here at home in the town in which I live --- you don’t have to travel the world to find such views.
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<br />
The question is, how many other people who live here, or in any other forgotten little corners of New England small towns, actually see landscape? There are those who look out over fields and forests and see only commercial possibilities. Henry Thoreau wrote, with only a hint of irony, that he had traveled much in his life --- in Concord. With a little luck and help from the various town boards, if these viewscapes are saved, I might be able
to say the same.
</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-61732886083339645582014-01-13T13:49:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:49:02.787-08:00All the World in a Vernal Pool<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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On a warming afternoon toward the end of March last spring, I heard the first calls from a population of wood frogs that collect in a series of vernal pools on the northwest side of my property. Their duck-like quacking, along with the appearance of the mourning cloak butterflies, and the spearing heads of skunk cabbage in the local swamps, is a reliable indication of advent of true spring. But the last few years have been uncertain. Dry spells have become more common even in spring, and for whatever reason, the pools have been drying out earlier than usual, threatening the year’s crop of frogs. Last spring was the worst of these of these years.</div>
<br />
The season started well enough; the snows melted, the ice went out of the pools and the wood frogs arrived on schedule and began calling. By April I could see the little clouds of jellied eggs floating freely or attached to submerged twigs and branches. But around mid April the rains ceased and we entered into a dry spell, coupled with some strange unseasonably high temperatures. The pond edges began to shrink. The heat and drought continued into May and soon enough, it looked like the pools would dry out even before the eggs hatched. <br />
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I’m not sure of the legality, or even the wisdom of what followed, but I set out on a campaign to rescue at least a segment of the population. I have three different ornamental pools in my garden, two of them heavily vegetated, and one deep enough to maintain cool waters. So little by little I began collecting eggs from the vernal pools and moving them to my own pools. I had help in this from a willing five year old. Three or four times a week we would carry a net and buckets to the vernal pools, scoop up a mass of eggs and carry them back to the garden. We continued this rescue operation all through M<br />
<br />
And all the while the heat and the drought, wore on and the pools dimished day by day, foot by foot, leaving a surround of wet vegetation. Nonetheless at some point during that month some of the eggs hatched; I could see the little tadpoles in the deeper water, the boy and I would wait and watch for wriggling ripples in the still waters, and scoop them out with the nets. These too we carried back to the garden pools. <br />
As the vernal pools dried, our rescue operation began to take on a bit of a desperate maneuver. By June, with still no significant rain, the center of the pools were no more than mud puddles, teeming with wriggling tadpoles. Beyond these pools in the drying leaves we could find multitudes of dead tadpoles.. <br />
Finally as far as we could tell, there were no more struggling tadpoles in the former pools the mass of some, they were all either saved by us, or dead. <br />
Meanwhile the ones we had rescued thrived. Slowly over the month of June and early July the tadpoles grew legs. The only way to check their progress was to net them and watch the growth of their legs and the slow shrinking of their tails. Happily there seemed to be fewer and fewer in the nets when I scooped them out. --- presumably a good sign. They were making their way out into the wild world. <br />
In late summer, along with the usual adults that seem to appear at the end of summer each year. I began spotting tiny wood frogs, more than I usually would. Presumably our rescue had worked.<br />
I see a metaphor in all this. Without our intervention, that season’s crop of local frogs would not have thrived, thereby decreasing, however slightly the number of wood frogs in the world. The adults who originally laid the eggs, will probably return to their native ponds this year, and the year after. But in an increasingly warming planet, and the associated odd vagaries of the weather, who knows how long that population would last. So our efforts, for the time being, were justified.<br />
But in a sense, the world is a vernal pool. The climate is warming, habitats are disappearing worldwide, populations of wild things are shrinking, and there are no god-like giants roaming the earth to scoop us up and carry us to a better, more sustainable planet. <br />
In effect we are the only ones who can protect ourselves. <br />
<br />
<br />
</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-61706674690991676432013-10-23T12:25:00.002-07:002014-01-13T13:38:12.999-08:00Excerpt from the Preface for An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YgMdX8lms1w/UmgipbIBXRI/AAAAAAAAB8Q/ItqF2zvdnIo/s1600/Eden_cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-YgMdX8lms1w/UmgipbIBXRI/AAAAAAAAB8Q/ItqF2zvdnIo/s1600/Eden_cover.jpg" /></a></div>
<br />
<em><br />
Excerpt from the Preface for <em>An Eden of Sorts: The Natural History of My Feral Garden</em></em><br />
The Vicarage Garden <br />
<br />
Some years ago I inherited an acre and a half plot of earth in a region of low, rolling hills dotted with extensive forests, a few farms and orchards, and a developing suburban area to the east, towards the city. This was by no means a spectacular piece of property. It was originally an apple orchard that stretched from the marshes of a brook to the east, westward over a low hill to a level agricultural area known locally as Scratch Flat, a tract of land that had been in cultivation for over a thousand years, if you include Native American history. The apple orchard was cut down in the 1920s to make a horse pasture, and after the horses died and the family moved West, the property had grown up to white pines.<br />
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On the west side of the hill, beyond the forest, there were two working farms, and just across the road to the east there was another farm, this one abandoned and characterized by a series of overgrown pastures that dropped down to the slow, north-running stream with a wide floodplain of cattail marshes.<br />
<br />
The pine forest was a dark, foreboding place...<a href="http://www.amazon.com/An-Eden-Sorts-Natural-History/dp/1581571720/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382555414&sr=8-1&keywords=Eden+of+Sorts" target="_blank">read more in my book, An Eden of Sorts</a>.</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-41112638140105595702012-07-31T14:01:00.000-07:002014-01-13T13:26:49.211-08:00An Excerpt from my new novel: The Last of the Bird People<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">This is the story of a tribe of peaceful hunter gatherers, but after they are uprooted from their valley, where they had lived quiety for generations, they become more wild and violent. This incident occurs during their exodus. The story is related by an old man.</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Book is available on Amazon, etc. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">One day we came to a large pond surrounded by grasses and
the curving trees Tracker called cabbage palms.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Lying on the banks we saw five or six animals that looked like huge
salamanders, some the size of a man or woman.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>I recognized them as members of the same species of demon I had
encountered on the trail by the big river. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For a variety of
reasons, mainly because I did not want the people to know that death was even
then stalking me, I had not mentioned this to anyone, not even Chanterelle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Randall took a few of the dogs and led Watson, Chanterelle,
and some of the women through the brush with the spears and bows ready to hunt
these animals.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I wanted to tell him to
hold off. I wanted to announce that I had made a pact with one of these
creatures, and perhaps they knew of this agreement .<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But I said nothing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Randall was becoming a good hunter by then, and moved very
slowly as he approached. When the hunters were close they all sat down and
watched for a while, and then crept forward, holding back the dogs and making
sure those immense salamanders stayed asleep.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>When the hunting party was no more than a few paces away, Randall
indicated through sign that each of the hunters should pick one salamander.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Then they and the hunting dogs charged out
from the brush and speared those hideous looking beasts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">The spear throws and arrow flights were true, and the
spearheads entered the chests of those creatures just behind the forelegs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dogs grabbed the meaty fat legs and tails
and refused to let go even though they were swung left to right by the twists
and turns of the speared beasts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
monsters thrashed and lashed with their dense fat tails and attempted to flee
to the pond waters but the people were wild now in a hunting frenzy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Randall himself was the wildest among them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He charged from one monster to the other,
heaving them back onto the shore by their tails, and yelling at us to do the
same.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But, unlike the deer or the
woodchucks of our valley, these vicious slashers refused to give themselves up
to us willingly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They twisted around in
their pain, taking on more and more spear jabs, and attempting to bite us or
knock us back with their tails, even though they were gravely wounded. They had
huge long jaws with row upon row of sharp teeth, the fore teeth long and spear
like, and one of them caught the hunter Tuttle and tore her calf.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Others thrashed their tails madly in defense
and one of them tripped Watson, who fell into the melee and began slashing left
and right with his brush spear, laying great bloody gashes in the struggling
beasts, while they attempted to bite him. Randall saved him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He charged in among them and speared the
closest of them and kicked the others away, or grabbed their huge tails and
heaved them off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Those hunters were all mad with the kill now. We had never
experienced such a hunt, and there was a violence among the women I had never
seen before.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chanterelle, my own granddaughter
was growling and barking with the dogs, yipping and jabbing left to right at
the eyes of the fighting beasts and kicking them to keep them from the waters.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">At one point, the largest of the beasts struggled into the
pond water and having lost her judgment in the wildness of the hunt,
Chanterelle snatched out her skinning knife and plunged in after him. She
caught his snout under the jaw, drew back his head and began slashing at his
throat, even as he rolled and twisted in the reddening, blooded waters.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Randall dove in after her without any weapons
at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He waded up to that great
thrashing beast and with his bare hands held its snout shut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It continued to thrash wildly and beat the
waters with its tail, but it could no longer bite, and little by little under
the repeated strikes and slashes of Chanterelle’s knife it succumbed, rolling
upward to reveal its yellow-white scaled belly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">Back on shore the other beasts were losing ground.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of the six we had seen on the shore, two made
it back into the depths of the pond. But slowly, one by one, the others died
there on the banks, although it took a long time for them to give up.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">The hunters sat down then, shaking and dazed.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The dogs panted and lay watching their kill,
as if to make sure they had finished their work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The hunters whistled for us, and everyone
came down to the shore to see this slaughter.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">We never in all out history of hunting and food gathering
had had such a struggle with any animal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The wrath of these creatures, the violence and defense that they put up
was heroic, and it was only then, as they lay dead around us on the bank that
we thought to ask Randall what they were.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">“These,” he said, “are the alligators I told you about back
in the valley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From now on we will be
seeing many of these animals and they are very good eating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Worth the struggle,” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Courier New", Courier, monospace;">That much was true.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
butchered those alligators, cut the meat into strips and roasted the strips
over the fires.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-70934652552568253302012-05-09T14:34:00.002-07:002013-10-23T13:00:53.009-07:00The Last of the Bird People<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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An excerpt from my forthcoming novel, published June 2012<br />
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<br />
The Last of the Bird People<br />
<br />
FOREWORD<br />
<br />
by Terilla Brown<br />
<br />
The Disappearance of Minor Randall<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
This book is an explanation of the abrupt and mysterious disappearance of the former Harvard anthropologist Minor Randall, an affair that caused a stir in academic circles in the late 1920s. It also recounts, among other things, what appears to have been a violent confrontation between a roving band of itinerant people and a local vigilante group in South Florida, an event. which, I believe, must have been covered up by authorities at the time.<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The discovery of the evidence for all this came about quite by accident.<br />
<br />
In the late 1990s, I was doing research for Dr. Lawrence Millman at Harvard’s Peabody Museum on the survival of an ancient ceremony involving a ritual “bear language” that had been used by the Innu of Labrador. While I was there, I ran across a file concerning an otherwise obscure associate professor named Minor Randall, who worked in the department of anthropology and had apparently gone missing in the late summer of 1928, shortly after he was dismissed from the university. Included in the file was a seemingly irrelevant typescript of a legal deposition given at a pre-trial hearing at the Everglades City Court House in Florida, during the last weeks of May in l929. It was not obvious, at first, why this document should have been associated with Professor Randall. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The hearing was connected to some sort of conflict that had occurred earlier in the month on the Tamiami Trail involving a posse or a vigilante group and a band of people, possibly gypsies, whom the posse had been searching for. Exactly what had happened was unclear, but it was obvious that there had been an armed encounter between the posse and the purported “tribe”, which had been moving southward through the interior of the Florida Everglades, apparently living off the land. <br />
<br />
The story was implausible, containing as it did, several incongruous situations and events, and I began searching through other records in the file to see if I could find out why the deposition was included in the folder. After a little more digging I discovered other papers — mainly internal memos from people in the department —that indicated that Minor Randall may have been involved in the Florida incident. <br />
<br />
One of the most interesting — and unlikely — leads came from a series of news stories concerning a primitive “tribe” of people in the Swift River Valley in central Massachusetts. In the late winter of 1856, newspapers all across southern New England were reporting the presence of a traveling band of people described in some accounts as gypsies. The group first appeared around Bourne, at the western end of Cape Cod. They were seen again north of Kingston, Rhode Island and they spent a week or two around the Great Swamp, within the town of Easton, in Massachusetts. By late spring, they turned north and entered the Swift River Valley, which, before it was flooded in the 1940s to create the Quabbin Reservoir, was a vast empty quarter of wooded hills, streams, and swampy bottom lands. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
The most complete accounts of this so-called band of gypsies appeared in the Daily Eagle, the paper of the now extinct town of Greenwich, which was dismantled to make way for the reservoir. According the story, which appeared in the 1857 August 27th edition, two different local farmers happened upon the group in two different locations. <br />
<br />
There were about twenty people of all ages in the band, including babies, children, and old people. One family had a horse and wagon, but most were on foot and were accompanied by a large pack of mongrel dogs. Many of the people, men and women alike, had shoulder-length hair and were dressed in motley, the women in long skirts and blouses, the men in patched trousers and collarless shirts. The children were barefooted and wore loose smocks, “much soiled” as the article reported. There were said to be four or five “colored” families, and there was also, the newspaper said, a mix of Indians and whites — a blond woman with a group of tow-headed children, a few red-haired Irish, Azorean Portuguese, and couple of Yankee farmers and their families. The group was led by a gypsy “queen”, a large woman in a florid turban who answered most of the questions put to her in broken English. The others held back and pretended not to understand the questions. <br />
<br />
One of the local land owners had discovered the band camped in his woodlot and asked them to move on, which they did without argument or explanation. Who they were, where they had come from and where they were going, was never detailed in any of the official records or newspaper accounts, and by the autumn, all reports ceased. <br />
<br />
The last shred of evidence of the wandering band appeared nearly seventy-five years later, in 1905, also in the Daily Eagle. A short notice in the November 16th edition claimed that two hunters had discovered a young girl, a “wild child”, sleeping in a rock cranny on Soapstone Hill, far from any human habitation. The family of one of the hunters took her in and was feeding her, the story said. No further information appeared in the records. <br />
<br />
Then suddenly, starting in September 19287, evidence of the band reappeared. Clipped together in a separate sheaf, I found more stories that threw light on the situation, including the critical piece of verification — the transcript of the deposition, which contained the curious story related by the deposed, the man who called himself Jon Barking Fox.<br />
<br />
Once I pieced together all these documents, I determined that Randall must have allowed himself to be “captured” by this roving mixed-race band, which by that time — the late 1920s — had been living incognito for generations in the Swift River Valley.<br />
<br />
Situations of this sort were actually not an uncommon phenomenon, even in the mid twentieth century. Similar social groups, such as the Jackson Whites in the valleys of the Ramapo Mountains, New York, or the so-called “Raggies”, who lived on Mount Riga in Connecticut were also surviving in isolated, self-contained situations. Most noteworthy as far as this story is concerned, was a renegade band of Seminole Indians who had cut off all contact with white society in the early 1900s and had moved into the inaccessible regions of the southern Everglades, supporting themselves by hunting and plant gathering. <br />
<br />
The Swift River Valley people had also reverted to an earlier tradition and were also surviving by hunting and plant gathering, which is what originally interested the anthropologist, Minor Randall. They had also reversed traditional sexual roles. The women hunted, and the men were responsible for food preparation and child care, even going so far as to suffer birth pangs while their wives were delivering. <br />
<br />
Although there appears to have been some conflict within the tribe, the Bird People, as they called themselves, were peaceable, retiring, and non-violent. Their main objective was to remain unnoticed by settled American society. In fact, they believed that the “Wasichu” — their name for anyone not of their band — could not see what did not move. They thought they were invisible. Had it not been for the development of the massive reservoir project in their valley, they might have gone unnoticed for several more generations, although eventually modernization would have caught up with them. <br />
<br />
Or maybe not. Unlike the other isolated societies, the Bird People were nomadic, they moved — silently, stealthily, and constantly — destroying all evidence of their existence before leaving one hunting camp for another. <br />
<br />
***<br />
<br />
I learned that Minor Randall was a former student and protégé of the pioneering American anthropologist Franz Boas at Columbia University, who was a bit of a maverick in the field of cultural anthropology. Randall was also an associate of other luminaries, such as Margaret Meade and Ruth Benedict, and the Eastern Woodland Indian specialist Frank Speck, who was also a student of Boas at Columbia. After graduation, Randall worked as an assistant for Boas doing field studies on extant Woodland cultures, mainly a band of Seminoles in south Florida that had cut off contact with the local whites. <br />
<br />
Randall apparently fell into a controversy with his department head at Harvard because of his involvement with events surrounding the construction of the Quabbin Reservoir in the Swift River Valley. <br />
<br />
The area around the valley was one of the last extant wild tracts of land in the Northeast, dotted with isolated farms, a few towns, and thick, unpeopled forests in between. <br />
<br />
It was partly because of the sparse human occupation in the area that the Boston water companies selected the site for construction of the reservoir. In May of 19287, the town of Prescott was disbanded and officially struck from the records of cities and towns of Massachusetts in order to begin the work of clearing the region for the reservoir. Over the next five years, all seven towns in the Swift River Valley were abandoned and razed; 7,500 bodies were disinterred from the local graveyards; trees were cleared from the valley floor, and the Swift River and three other streams in the valley were dammed to back up the waters to create the reservoir.<br />
<br />
In the early autumn of 1928, a project surveyor working in the Rattlesnake Brook area in the northern valley found a homemade arrow with a chipped quartz point not far from a hemlock grove on the north-facing slope near the brook. He turned the arrowhead over to his crew boss, who passed it up the chain of command. After some delays in the upper echelon, it was delivered to Minor Randall for analysis.<br />
<br />
The Rattlesnake Brook Point, as it came to be called, was a mystifying object. For one thing it was related to projectile points used by Pokanoket tribe in the Cape Cod region during the Contact Period, in the seventeenth century. But it had a number of anomalies which confused Randall, not the least of which was the fact that it was attached to a freshly-stripped hickorywood arrow shaft and was fletched with the feathers of a red-tailed hawk. It was clearly the work of some contemporary individual who had made a lot of arrowheads and knew how to knap stone.<br />
<br />
Randall was sufficiently inspired by the workmanship in the arrowhead to do more research. He spent several weeks hiking in the remote, as yet unsurveyed sections of the valley, searching for more artifacts. At the end of this period, he discovered a deerskin cap decorated with grouse feathers. Later that fall, in the mud beside Rattlesnake Brook, he found the barefooted print of a child. He subsequently came to believe that there was a group of aboriginal people living somewhere in the valley. <br />
<br />
It was at this point that Randallhe got himself into trouble.<br />
<br />
He took the information to his department head and asked his superior to join him in a campaign to have the area declared a sanctuary, or at least declared off limits, until they could find out who it was who was living in the valley. Randall's superior not only refused his request, he covered up the evidence and, after some further squabbling — much of which appears to have been related to the recalcitrant nature of Minor Randall himself — began proceedings to have Randall taken off the project. Ultimately he was removed from his teaching position.<br />
<br />
This act only served to encourage the ambitious young anthropologist. There appears to have been some more wrangling between Randall and the Harvard officials, and then, in the summer of 1928, without telling anyone where he was headed, and armed with notebooks, trinkets, and enough food and gear for the next three months, Randall set up camp in one of the wildest as yet unsurveyed sections in the northern end of the valley. In the autumn, most of his gear was found by construction workers on the Quabbin project. <br />
<br />
He himself was not seen again. <br />
<br /></div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-31958038460624197102009-12-08T13:29:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:36:15.357-08:00Lost in The Stars<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On warm summer nights when the smell of the river marshes below the house would fill the air and dusk had long since faded out, we would sit on the front porch, watching the fireflies flashing in the hayfields to the west. My family—uncles, aunties, distant cousins, friends of cousins, cousins of friends of cousins—would sit and rock and talk about crops and dogs, horses, and hot weather. The air was thick then, and summer had its grip on us, and sometimes, it seemed to me, the very house would lift from its foundation at these hours and float suspended above the drying grasses and the fields to the north where the corn rustled in the evening wind. <br /><br />On nights such as this, as the fireflies ascended, my old father would often reminisce about his years in the Orient, and as winking stars of light rose in the fields below us he would retell yet again the old Japanese folktale of Princess Firefly and recount stories of the traditional firefly festivals that took place all over Japan in his time. <br /><br />I was lost in the mystery of all this and would be swept into some vague, almost timeless suspension of disbelief. It all seemed so real, even though my father was telling the story of a firefly that was in fact a princess in a kingdom inhabited by insects. I was too young to know it was not true. <br /><br />And often on those hot nights, as children have done for a thousands year, my cousins and I would descend from the porch with kitchen jars and sweep the grasses, catching the flashers and carrying them around in the jars like mystic lanterns. <br /><br />Timing seemed everything to me, even then. Why did the fireflies flash at certain intervals? Why did they quit flashing periodically, and why did some of them never take to the air and perch low in the grasses, emitting a long, sustained light?<br /><br />It was only later that I learned that there was a dark side to the luminous display taking place in the fields below the house, and that all the bright poetic legends and folktales had an element of truth. Out there in the real world of the grassroot jungle, the lights that so inspired the folktales and festivals were in fact all about sex and death. <br /><br />Fireflies flash to attract mates, and it is for the most part the males that we see on summer nights. Shortly after they reach adulthood, usually around late June in New England, as dusk falls, the males launch themselves in the air and patrol to-and-fro across open areas, flashing a semaphoric signal to female fireflies, who lie below, watching. There are as many as thirty different species of firefly in New England, and the males of each species have a set pattern of flashes, which the female can recognize. <br /><br />Below in the grasses, females spotting a potential mate light up with a sustained flash. The male blazes back, the female lights up again, and, after a series of exchanges, the male descends to locate his mate. Sometimes more than one suitor will fly down and the firefly princess will be surrounded by a company of suitors, each flashing handsome signals. But fireflies, it appears, are discreet denizens of this untamed complex world. Once the couple has found each other the lights go out and they mate. <br /><br />All is not love in the world of fireflies, however; there is also the question of sustenance. There is one species of firefly that makes use of the flashing repertoire of males to attain a meal. These carnivorous femmes fatales lie low in the grass and watch plays for the signals of other species of males flashing above. They imitate the flash pattern, and thereby draw the unsuspecting male down to his demise. <br /><br />But all that is science. When you are ten years old, and it is night, and the sparking stars of fireflies drift over the hay fields, and the wind is in the corn, it is all a half-lit poetic mystery.</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-89148884061133219392009-12-08T12:41:00.000-08:002009-12-08T12:47:25.060-08:00dinner with the arch cookThe Ecologue<br /><br />Dinner with the Arch Cook<br /><br />Thanksgiving traditionally marks the end of the harvest in New England, but in fact harvest festivals of this sort take place around the world, and probably have been a part of human culture ever since agriculture developed --- about seven or eight thousand years according to archeologists. Hunting and gathering cultures generated their own particular rituals, which reach back even further, all the way back to the beginnings of human evolution. <br /><br />But what about cooking? How did human beings ever manage to invent the idea of capturing fire and then subjecting the catch of the day, whatever that may have been --- to broiling on the coals of a controlled fire?<br /><br />I had dinner a few weeks ago at the Rialto Restaurant, in Cambridge with a man who is, in a sense, the primordial authority on cooking, the Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham, who has been considering these matters over the course of his work with chimpanzees and preliterate cult ures. He is author, most recently, of the book Catching Fire: How cooking made us human. Wrangham’s thesis in the book is that the act of cooking, a practice that may be almost a million years old, is what shaped us into human beings. According to his theory, the human ability to cook food had a major effect on the physiology of the primates he terms the “habilines” which is to say, the general group of free ranging, tool using bands of prehumans who roamed the African savannah over a million years ago. With the control of fire and the development of cooking, everything changed. The disparate, loose bands of habilines became more cohesive as they gathered together around a central cooking fire. Food was shared; and the division between the sexes widened, as male hunters separated from women plant gatherers. Even our looks changed. Teeth became smaller, and internally, the human gut shortened, since cooked food is more easily digested than raw food. In the end, what emerged from these early cooking fires was Cro-Magnon Man --- which is to say us.<br /><br />Given Wrangham’s thesis, dinner that night at the Rialto turned out to be an ironic affair. Cooking itself has evolved dramatically since those early fires with meals consisting of tubers and freshly killed meat, seasoned at best with ash and sand and grilled on coals. The act of preparing food for a table has evolved into an art, with a variety of practitioners, some of whom like painters and musicians, have developed a signature style. Likewise, cuisines have developed around the world, most of which were associated with certain regions. Now, with the access to cross cultural traditions, the art of cooking has crossed borders and chefs have invented new styles. One of these new styles is a drift towards uncooked foods. <br />The dinner at the Rialto was a special event, attended for the most part by serious foodies from around Boston, most of whom were as interested in the menu that night as the speaker. The table I was with was an eclectic mix including a bio-chemist, an epidimologist, and the editor of an arcane journal devoted to Renaissance interpretations of Classical Greek and Roman literature. In spite of the diversity of métiers the conversation before the event was mostly about food.<br /><br /> The chef at the Rialto, Jody Adams, (who, incidentally, was an anthropology major at Brown University before she became a chef) prepared an ironic three course dinner for that evening’s event. The irony arose from the menu she chose to present. It consisted of a presentation that leaned more towards raw food than cooked food. The first course included Duxbury oysters and Taylor Bay scallops, present with rolled cucumber with avocado and hibiscus. Second course was a seared tuna with a sprouted quinoa, garlic yogurt, raw beets, and dukkah,a mixture of nuts seasoned with Middle Eastern spices. The only fully cooked dish was the desert, a cinnamon apple terrine with brandied cream. All this was served with another uncooked, but perennially popular item, three pairings of European wines, including a 2005 Cotes du Ventoux. <br /><br />The menu recapitulated Wrangham’s thesis, raw food, to seared food, to thoroughly cooked and spiced desert.<br /> <br />Dr. Wrangham grew up in Hertsford, just north of London, and like many of his generation, fed on bangers and beans when he was young. And although he could hardly complain about Ms Adams menu he had a lot to say about raw foods that night. According to Wrangham (although not to the raw food faddists) cooking improves the availability of nutrients of food, which is one of the keys to the evolutionary success of the human species. <br /><br />As Wrangham pointed out at one point, as he sampled the lightly cooked tuna, “We are what we cook.”John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-55933397289634765202009-12-08T12:17:00.000-08:002014-01-15T15:15:43.674-08:00THE ROSE CAFE: LOVE AND WAR IN CORSICAThe Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica<br /><br />In 1962 I was living successfully disguised to myself as a student in France. In the spring of that year, I went out to Corsica to have a look around and ended up staying. I worked there (as an illegal immigrant) for the next nine months at a cafe and auberge on the north coast, eavesdropping on the conversations and intimacies of the diverse company of islanders and wanderers who ended up at the auberge. Forty-five years later, I wrote a book about the events that occurred there. Below are a few excerpts.<br /><br />Posted by The Rose Cafe at 2:05 PM 0 comments<br />Sunday, December 23, 2007<br />The Rose Cafe: Love and War in Corsica<br /><br />The Island<br /><br />The year I turned twenty was living successfully disguised to myself as a student in Paris, not doing very much about anything to advance myself in life and not caring very much whether I did or did not. In early spring that year, suffering from the after-effects of the interminable gray of the Parisian sky, I went down to Nice, where I had lived for a while the summer before. Here, I fell in with an international group of sometime painters and students such as myself who were biding their time in the little warren of streets and squares in the old city on the eastern side of the Baie des Anges.<br /><br />One of my friends there was an aspiring writer named Armand, who was the child of a local White Russian family who had lived in Nice since the time of the Great War. Armand had a German girl friend named Inge, and in early April, the three of us made trip out to Corsica to have a look around.<br /><br />I had been living in Europe for over a year by then, first in Spain and then in France, on the Riviera. Up in Paris, I was enrolled in an independent study program at the Sorbonne, and most of my friends were either French or part of a loosely associated international group involved in the same course. The fact is, however, we rarely went to class. Education took place in the cafés, in particular in a certain bar near Saint Placide where we gathered each day to argue over literature, art, and politics, as if we knew what we were talking about.<br /><br />Like many young Americans in Paris in that era, I had in mind that I would somehow be miraculously transformed into a writer in Europe. My intention, such as it was, was to escape from my predictable life in the Untied States and leave everything I knew behind. In some ways the plan was a success. I didn’t know a single American in Paris; most of the people I associated with did not speak any English, and I had effectively disappeared into the European student community. But my notebooks remained empty.<br /><br />Then, in April, I went out to Corsica.<br /><br />We took the ferry to Calvi, on the north coast, and then drifted eastward along the shore to the town of Ile Rousse, where we found a small auberge known as the Rose Café, set on a tiny, red rock island half way out a long causeway that led to a slightly larger island called Ile de la Pietra. The place had a decent restaurant with a terrace overlooking the harbor and a few dusty bed chambers above the dining room. We took rooms and set out on foot to explore the hills of the interior.<br /><br />The Rose Café was utterly unassuming, a two-storey building with a red-tiled roof and two French dormers, a wide stone terrace, a pillared verandah, and an interior dining room with a cool bar in the back. Behind the main building there was a rocky promontory that dropped down to a narrow cove, bounded on the north by a small, rocky island, which was surmounted by a seventeenth century Genoese watchtower, one of many that were constructed along this section of the coast to keep the multiple invaders at bay. Set in a nook on the southern side of the cove, just behind the restaurant, there was a one room stone cottage with two small windows.<br /><br />Since there were people staying in the upper rooms while we were there, I was assigned to the cottage. It had a narrow bed, a rickety table and a candle, and not much else. But it was perched high above the cove, and all night I could hear the surge of the waters below, the dark cry of sea birds, and the ominous howl of the local winds streaming over the mountains and valleys of the interior.<br /><br />I came to like the setting at the Rose Café and would sometimes forego the daily expeditions of the ever-energetic Armand and his companion and simply spend the day lounging on the terrace of the café, talking to the local people and walking into town in the late afternoon to take a drink at one of the three or four cafés that surrounded the dusty town square with its pillars of old plane trees.<br /><br />True to form, Armand and Inge grew restless after a few days and decided to move on. I stayed. The pace suited me, I enjoyed the gossip of the people from the town who came out to the café everyday to stare at the harbor and spend the night playing cards. I liked them. They seemed to have no ambition other than to live from one day to the next and enjoy whatever small pleasures happened to present themselves. I liked the view across the harbor to the maquis, the wild impenetrable scrublands of the island, scented with a wealth of resinous arbutus, myrtle, rock rose, and clementine. I loved to watch the bright little fishing boats set out each day to fish the nearby banks. I loved the lizards that collected around the terrace lamps at night, and the dawn song of birds from the high ground across the cove from the cottage.<br /><br />In the end, I fell into a strange, perhaps unhealthy, lethargy at the Rose Café. I would rise early and take a café crème and a fresh-buttered baguette on the terrace above the harbor. Later in the morning, I would slip down to a tiny pebble beach in the cove below my cottage for a morning swim, then a morning nap, then a midday meal of local fish, another nap, another swim, a walk to town for coffee in the square, an aperitif at the bar, dinner, and then a deep dreamless sleep, lulled by the susurration of the sea in the cove below. I would sometimes awake in the mornings there and have to figure out where, exactly, I was, who I was, and what I was doing in this place. I was in a state of suspended animation.<br /><br />It was a good place. You could easily lose yourself there if you so desired, forget that you ever had a past, or a future for that matter, and simply fall into that idyllic condition the locals called the sweet do-nothing, la dolce fa’ niente. For hours, for days, finally for weeks, I simply paced through the uneventful days, swimming and sleeping and staring across the harbor to the green slopes of the hills rising up to the, jagged snow-covered peaks beyond.<br /><br />In spite of the languorous nature of the environment, however, in spite of the bright weather and the slow and easy-going pace of the people, there seemed to be some latent story in that place, some powerful, perhaps tragic, history that was not spoken of by anyone, but which seemed to manifest itself in the ironic contrast between the brooding, snow-capped mountains above the harbor, and the light-filled, festive air of the coastal community. I don’t think I had ever been in such a powerful setting before.<br /><br />I could not say that I was entirely conscious of any of this at the time. I was merely living day to day there with no plans and no ambition. All I know is that, suddenly, feverishly, I began to write. Night after night in my narrow stone cell I began to fill the notebook that had remained empty for over a year.<br /><br />One evening, after I had been there for two weeks, the boss, le patron, drew me aside and poured me a small glass of a local marc and began to question me about my plans for the next few months. I explained that I had nothing definitive in mind as yet.<br /><br />“You have not the papers for France?” he asked.<br /><br />“Passport, I have.”<br /><br />“No I mean working papers, you have none?”<br />“No, I’m student, here, I have a student card only.”<br /><br />“Doesn’t matter,” he said. “You want a job? Spring is coming. It’s going to be the busy season. You can cut fish for us, sweep up, do the dishes. I’ll teach you some sauces. It’s not real work in any case, so the fact that you have no papers ---”.<br /><br />He shrugged.<br /><br />“We’ll pay you a little something at the end of the season, plus room and board. Nobody out here cares,” he said.<br /><br />“Sounds interesting.” I said “But are you saying that it’s not exactly legal?”<br /><br />(Possession of working papers was an important issue among the poverty-stricken group of international students with whom I traveled.)<br /><br />He stared out into the black waters beyond the terrace and then looked back at me, tiredly. “You understand, Corsica is not --- how shall I say it --- is not well known for its allegiance to the laws of the continent. ”<br /><br />He lifted his left shoulder, tilted his head, and smiled regretfully.<br /><br />He was a sleepy, unambitious man from Paris who wore the black rimmed glasses of a Left Bank intellectual and always needed a shave.<br /><br />I didn’t know much about Corsica at that point other than the usual clichés. Inasmuch as Corsica is known at all, it is known for its vendettas, and its notorious underworld connections, and also as the birthplace of Napoleon. More to the point though, I didn’t know anything about the Rose Café, or its environs, or the people who hung around the café. But it seemed to be a place where any migratory bird of passage, such as myself, any refugees from any of the world’s miseries, either personal or political, could settle briefly to rest and feed and enjoy themselves before flying onward to nowhere. I decided to take the job. Why not? I was running out of money, and in that particular year the American draft service had been sending me ominous notices requiring me to register for military service to fight in an escalating little conflict in Viet Nam in which I had no particular interest and whose origin did not seem to me entirely logical. I was young and apolitical and had perfectly pleasant friends in Europe who described themselves as communists --- enemies of the people where I had come from. Corsica seemed a fine place to wait things out.<br /><br />I went back to my old haunts in Nice to pick up my things and ran into Inge. She had left Armand in some isolated mountain village after he had decided that they must --- they absolutely must --- hike Monte Cintu, the highest peak in Corsica, even though there were still heavy snows there.<br /><br />We had dinner and went out dancing at one of the local night clubs. Inge was about my age, nineteen or twenty, and had black hair and wide blue eyes and many older gentleman friends with smooth tans who wore silk cravats and hound’s-tooth jackets. I was never sure what, exactly, she was doing in Nice since she never seemed to have any money of her own.<br /><br />We ended up that night in a café where there was an old fashioned band that played Eastern European music. There were some local White Russians there and expatriate Hungarians with handlebar mustaches. The band played old waltzes and polkas, and then an older woman in an evening gown rose and sang “Dark Eyes” and a long and sad Czardas, a lament for her homeland. Grown men took out their handkerchiefs and wept, and when the band played the Hungarian national anthem, some of them stood up, hands on their hearts, longing for some mythic older order that had been replaced by the all too real disorder of the current state.<br /><br />At one point, while Inge danced with a tall Hungarian with his hair cut en brosse, I went outside alone and leaned over the rail above the bay. The night air was warm, and I could smell the Mediterranean and hear the pitch of the sea and the sad music from the café. I looked out at the black waters beyond the lights of the harbor and was suddenly very happy to have fixed a place for myself.<br /><br />Two days later I took the night ferry back to Corsica and stood on the afterdeck watching the lights of France sink below the horizon.<br />Posted by The Rose Cafe at 5:47 PM 0 comments<br />wild boar<br /><br />Back in the kitchen that evening Jean-Pierre was preparing a civet of wild boar, one of the island specialties. He had been marinating the chunks of boar meat in wine and vinegar laced with cloves and juniper and mashed garlic, and he was now mixing together a sauce of onions, more garlic, carrots and celery with what seemed to me a very generous helping of eau de vie. Periodically he would dip up a spoonful to taste the marinade. His eyes would assume a vague unfocussed look whenever he was tasting anything, and he would stand staring at the smoke-blackened wall behind the stove as if reviewing a beautiful landscape.<br /><br />Island cuisine has four recurring staples, wild boar, seafood, chestnuts, and sheep’s cheese, the best known configuration of which is a farmer’s cheese called brocciu. Local wines, most of which were made from grapes grown on Cap Corse, just northeast of the Rose Café, were favored by the islanders, although less respected by French tourists, except for a few rosés and a very good muscat, also from Cap Corse. Periodically, usually at some quiet midday meal, when there was no one around, the staff would sit down to a long meal and on these occasions Jean-Pierre would bring out an unlabeled bottle of a light-colored red made from a grape known as the Sciarcarellu which was local to Corsica and produced a wine that had, as so many local products did, a hint of the flowers of the maquis.<br /><br />All these commodities had their seasons. Autumn was the best time to hunt and eat the truly wild boars. But in the interior of the island there were many feral pigs, and these hunters would bring into the markets at any season. Like their conspecifics, the wild pigs would feed on roots and tubers and the aromatic vegetation of the maquis, which gave their flesh a unique flavor that was decidedly different from any farm-raised hog. In autumn, the people would round them up and slaughter them to make spicy pork sausages called figatelli, that were coveted by locals and visitors alike.<br /><br />Jean-Pierre, who was the chef and owner of the Rose Café, had worked briefly as a journalist but had left France with Micheline for Mexico, where they attempted to live for a time with the mountain-dwelling Lancandon Indians. Things hadn’t worked out as they had planned, so at the recommendation of a well-placed uncle, Jean-Pierre went to cooking school in Burgundy for a while. Before finishing his course he and Micheline gave up on this new career and came down to Corsica to raise goats and make cheese. That didn’t work out either, and somehow they found the money to acquire the Rose Café.<br /><br />As far as I could tell (I cannot say that I had a refined palette in those years) Jean-Pierre was a decent cook. But he had what I believe was either a local, or perhaps unique, custom of quickly braising almost everything in local olive oil and herbs of the maquis, finished with a splash of wine. The process would send up a fragrant thyme-scented cloud in the kitchen that would set my mouth watering autonomically, like a Pavlovian dog. Occasionally, he and Vincenzo would out do themselves and prepare some elaborate local dishes, quail in a mint sauce, for example, or a boar haunch baked in Cap Corse muscat, or veal or boar with a sauce of bolete mushrooms.<br />Posted by The Rose Cafe at 2:00 PM 0 comments<br />The Rose Cafe<br /><br />Just before the dinner push, I walked down the narrow path to my room behind the restaurant to get a clean shirt. Standing on a promontory above the cottage where I lived, his arms folded over his chest and one leg cocked forward, I saw the German guest they called Herr Komandante. He was a portly man, dressed now in a blue-striped bathrobe and white espadrilles, and his thinning sandy–colored hair was wet and slicked back from his high smooth forehead.<br /><br />“Been for a swim?” I called.<br /><br />“Yes. And now I shall prepare for my dinner,” he said.<br /><br />“Jean-Pierre has done a good rabbit fricassée,” I told him.<br /><br />He considered this silently, nodding. One of his pastimes here was eating.<br /><br />“And what fish?” he demanded.<br /><br />“The usual,” I said. “But Vincenzo has just come in with a big grouper.”<br /><br />“Good,” said Herr Komandante. “I will take that grouper. Grilled. And I shall begin with a plate of urchins, or perhaps the fish soup, and also a green salad,” he added. “You will tell Micheline, please. I will have one salad. Chestnut flan for the desert.”<br /><br />“I will tell her,” I said.<br /><br />“And coffee.”<br /><br />“Yes, of course.”<br /><br />“And I will take my digestif on the terrace this night,” he said as an afterthought.<br /><br />People at the Rose Café used to mock Herr Komandante behind his back. It was said, among other unfounded rumors, that along with his love for food and sun he had an eye for young boys. But I suddenly felt a wave of compassion for him, here alone on a French island, a German in the midst of a people with long memories, isolated by language and culture, and seeking only to enjoy a few sensual pleasures. Who could blame him.<br /><br />Back in the kitchen, the evening meal was in full swing. Chrétien and Micheline were rushing in and out, shouting for plates. Jean-Pierre was sweating and smoking, the ash salting his standard dish of grilled rascasse, a spiny red fish that he would season with myrtle, bay, rosemary, and other herbs brought in from the countryside. Micheline had started to spout her Sunday litany of complaints about the idiosyncrasies of certain diners; Vincenzo shifted his pans at the stove like a timpanist, and his wife, Lucretia, who helped on busy weekends, wandered in and out periodically, talking loudly in patois, and contributing little more than gossip about the diners.<br /><br />I filled a copper tub with boiling water from the stove and prepared for the evening onslaught, and soon the dishes were coming in one load after another like wounded soldiers from the front --- first a table setting of soup bowls, then a few smaller plates, then some dinner plates, and forever, like foot soldiers, the silverware.<br /><br />There was a perennial shortage of settings at the restaurant; it was not the cooking of Jean-Pierre and Vincenzo that slowed the service, it was the lack of plates and silverware. I had to wash, dry and return settings as soon as they came in or there would be nothing for the guests to eat from. It was not so bad on ordinary nights, but sometimes on weekends, in the rush, the flood of plates and the swirl of dirty water and the outcry from Chrétien and Micheline for more plates came on relentlessly. No one was proud at the Rose Café. When a backlog built up and the main courses were served, Jean-Pierre himself would wander back and wash a few of his pots, so would Vincenzo.<br /><br />In due time, as the departure hour for the ferry grew nearer, the incoming stream dwindled, as it always did. Chrétien sat in the corner for a few minutes, drinking a coffee and gossiping about the diners, his long legs stretched halfway across the narrow kitchen. Micheline brushed back her hair and goosed Jean-Pierre as she slipped by him with a tray of desserts, and then Vincenzo loomed behind me in the washroom door with a small glass of marc, which he set on the stone sink.<br /><br />“Drink up old man. It’s over for the day,” he said.<br /><br />Now, in the quiet darkness of the terrace, the geckoes emerged and waited in the little pools of lamplight on the white stucco walls, snapping at insects. The few lingering guests sat with their chairs pushed back, enjoying a coffee or a glass of marc and the night air coming in off the harbor. Herr Komandante stepped out from the warm interior of the dining room and stood at the edge of the terrace, gazing outward at the black wall of the mountains beyond the harbor, his hands jammed into the side pockets of his blazer. A fishing boat came in, its lights fragile against the vast darkness of the water, and slowly, one by one, the guests disappeared.<br /><br />We were alone with the sharp perfume of salt air and the high black screen of the night.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-29348605723012336882008-10-29T11:45:00.000-07:002008-10-29T11:48:16.250-07:00time and the tidesThe Ecologue<br />by John Hanson Mitchell <br /><br />Time and the Tides<br /><br />Throughout the autumn this year the great tide of the stock market receded and rose and fell back again to record lows. Whole fortunes were lost, banks failed, investors fled for safe ground and found nothing, stocks and bonds ebbed again and slipped seaward, and even the safe islands of money markets eroded away. But in mid October I went out one morning and saw a great river of gabbling blackbirds flowing over the fields of Scratch Flat where I live, just as they have every year at this time for the past two or three thousand years.<br /><br />Frost came late this year, the roses bloomed in the garden in early October; everywhere in thickets and field edges little flitting bands of Savannah sparrows appeared and disappeared, and as I often do, I hauled a chair over to a sunny corner along the western wall of my property and fell asleep in the warm light, the sound of wind, of the last meadow crickets, and the cries of jays and crows all around me in the air.<br /><br />The next day, the market fell again to record lows.<br /><br />I planted tulips and daffodils and put in two new inkberries in the back garden near a sunny bench. I smelled fox and nannyberry that day, and over on the north side of the property, from a little hollow in an oak tree, I heard the singular, bird-like chirp of a grey tree frog – the last frog call of summer. There was a green frog in my fish pond again, a new one that replaced the old bull frog that spent the summer there and then left one rainy night back in September. Spring peepers had been calling earlier that week. They’ll sound off almost any month of the year. One year I heard them in mid winter, during the January thaw.<br /><br /> Suddenly the market flooded upward. Buyers rushed in and it rose higher. Then the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, said something the people didn’t want to hear. The tide fell.<br /><br />Later that week I saw the last monarch butterfly, one of the few migrating insects. The little red meadowhawks, a species of dragonfly that shows up each year in autumn, were everywhere over the garden, alighting on the withering tomato plants, sunning themselves on the remnant flower stakes where late the last cosmos bloomed. One of the dragonflies landed on my hand while I sat dully in the garden in my place beside the wall, half dreaming of Michoacan, and the Oyamel fir forests of northern Mexico where the eastern populations of monarch butterflies over-winter.<br /><br />I noticed the next day that the euro began to fall. Federal treasury bonds fell too, not a bad sign if you happen to have T bonds I was told. The euro fell again the following day, and then again the day after that. It occurred to me that if things continued in this way I might be able to afford to get back to the gardens at Villa Lante in Italy, a place I had been thinking about for some time now. Then I met a financial adviser at a wedding party. He told me that it is not necessarily a good thing that the dollar falls against the euro. I’ve forgotten just why.<br /><br />Down by Beaver Brook one day in mid month I saw an otter. I thought at first it was a log drifting downstream but it dove, then rose again in front me. Otters are intelligent and curious, so I squeaked and whistled and it stopped and looked over at me, treading water as it drifted with the flow. I squeaked again, and it chattered back at me, and suddenly dove, leaving a series of expanding concentric rings in the black waters.<br /><br />The market fell.<br /><br />Robins were everywhere on the north side of Scratch Flat. Every morning, I walk there and see the flocks. They chatter and cluck and cross from one wooded patch to another. Somewhere in the density of the wooded thickets there must be stands of old crab apples, or Russian olive maybe.<br /><br />On a warm sunny Saturday in mid month I saw green darner dragonflies passing over the gardens, right on schedule. They’re migratory, like the monarchs, and move through with clocklike regularity. Green darners on the 12th of October. Monarchs around the 5th. The blackbird flocks anywhere between the 10th and the 20th. The last of the meadow crickets around the end of the month. You could almost tell the dates by these little comings and goings.<br /><br />On October 23rd. the same day that the juncos arrived, I noticed that the golden hope of hedge funds went into a steep rushing water fall. All the fast money that defined the recent gilded age of high finance ebbed offshore into the indifferent sea. Stocks followed suit and plunged again.<br /><br />The next night it rained, that warm autumnal rain that brings out the morning smell of old leaves, and moldering earth. A spring peeper called around dawn, and later that afternoon high above, I heard and then saw, a huge barking flock of snow geese headed south for the Chesapeake. <br /><br />They’ll be back on April 12th.<br /><br />Where the market will be on that date is less predictable.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-63556362263849066442008-01-11T13:31:00.000-08:002008-01-11T13:34:56.765-08:00scratch flatLocation:<br /><br />The place is a square mile of anomalous land, characterized in the main by farmlands and woodlots and a long snake-like, slow moving stream that winds lazily through wide cattail marshes. Sometime in the early nineteenth century, for reasons that are recorded only in local folklore, the tract came to be known as Scratch Flat, although in our time, if you ask anyone about its location you will draw blank stares.<br /><br />Scratch Flat lies thirty-five miles west of Boston, Massachusetts and is set down in a vast region of low, rolling hills east of the Appalachians known to geologists as the Nashoba Terrane. If you care to look it up you can also find it on the US Department of the Interior Geological Survey map of 1966 in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Westford</span> Quadrangle for Massachusetts, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">Middlesex</span> County, 7.5 series. Or you can experience the place in person by following the state highway known locally as the Great Road, which runs northwest from Concord, Massachusetts through the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Nashobah</span> valley and thence northwest to southern New Hampshire and the rising ground known as <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Monadnock</span>. You can also see it, or part of it at least, if you are driving north or south along the great ring road that circles Boston known as Route 495. Look west after you pass the exit for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Groton</span> and you will see there a low hill, very like a whale. That hill lies more or less on the eastern edge of the square mile.<br /><br />Superficially, at least, from a driver’s point of view, the landscape here is generally pleasing. If you follow the Great Road west and you will cross over the winding cattail marshes of Beaver Brook. West of the brook you will pass over the low rise of a wooded drumlin and drop down into a flat of cultivated lands. There were six working farms in this section thirty years ago, but now only two remain, although lined up one after the other, like the fast food joints of less fortunate communities, you will see three <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">farmstands</span> selling --- in season --- local produce. North of the Great Road the land rolls up to a wooded ridge where the last bear in this region was killed in a hemlock grove in 1811. Northwest of this woods, behind a working dairy farm is a lake that was the site of one of the best Indian fishing weirs in the region for as many as ten thousand years and which now demarcates, roughly speaking, the northern end of the tract. The western end is marked by a stand of larch trees, the south, by a ring of low hills, and the east is bounded by the winding marshes of Beaver Brook.<br /><br />Until l995, Beaver Brook was a wild country of reed canary grass, cattails, and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">unhoused</span>, wooded banks. Development has now invaded the uplands along some sections, but if you the canoe the interior of the marshes in mid June when the grass are high, you can still get a sense of the wilderness that characterized Scratch Flat over its fifteen thousand year history. Somewhere along Beaver Brook the old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Pawtucket</span> man known as Tom Doublet maintained a fish weir. He inherited the weir from his father, who, according to the local histories, was killed at the spot by a party raiding Mohawks sometime around 1632. Tom Doublet was a major player in the King Philips War in 1675, but after the war, as a result of an insult from the General Court, he reportedly cursed the land just east of the brook. The farms in that section, and plans for three major economic ventures, two of them backed by international funding, have failed at the site. The farms of Scratch Flat, by contrast, survived well into the 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">th</span> century. Some have been continuously cultivated since agriculture first moved to the region.<br /><br />I came into this country in 1974 and began walking the square mile tract the day I moved in. It was all farms and fields then, and woodlots where you could find ironic beds of daffodils, old peonies, foundations, stone walls, cairns, and the skeletons of model T Fords. The hay fields were ill-tended, the woods were littered with the remnants of time and it was clear that this was a country that had once been lived in, had once been cultivated, perhaps loved, or more likely, simply used, first to grow food for the Puritan families who settled here in 1676, then to grow food to sell to those Puritan families who had settled so densely that they no longer had land to grow their own food. In fact, the land had already been cultivated, as I learned, for some three or four thousand years before the Puritans arrived. The original natives of the place had developed a primitive form of agriculture that required only that trees be felled on a given plot of suitable land. The brush and trunks were burned or used for <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">wickiups</span>, and the land between the stumps was broken with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">clamshell</span> hoes, planted to corn, beans, and squash and then and watched over by women and children posted to keep the crows and raccoons away.<br /><br />I learned too that this area had once been the site of a village of Indians who, under the tutelage and protection of one John Eliot, the so-called prophet of the Indians, had converted to Christianity. They cut their hair, stopped sending their women out to menstrual huts each month, began to wear shoes and learned to sing hymns in Algonquian. In exchange, they were granted – outright – a tract of land some sixteen miles square, the northwest portion of which included the aforesaid Scratch Flat. The grant, as with so many later treaties, was temporary. In 1675, with the advent of the uprising of King Philip, the Puritans went to war, and the presence of Indians, even Christian Indians, was unnerving. One morning, the peaceable Indians, believing themselves under the protection of Christ and his vested associate, John Eliot, were rounded up, roped by the neck and taken to a stockade in Concord. After that they were deported to Deer Island in Boston Harbor for the duration of the war. It was February, they were ill-supplied with food and eked out their days digging clams and plucking mussels from the rocky shores. Very few of them returned to Scratch Flat after the war save for a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, the purported <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Saunk</span>, or female chief, of her remnant people. Sarah lived to a very old age and died in 1735, whereupon she turned the land over to a pair of cousins form Concord, thus ending the eight to ten thousand year sojourn of Asian people in that section of the northeastern coast of the land now known of as North America.<br /><br />Following Sarah’s death, even before actually, Puritan families from nearby Concord, <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">Groton</span>, and the coastal town of Ipswich began to settle in the area west of the Beaver Brook. The glacier had left behind a deep layer of alluvial soil in that section of the community, and in time the place acquired the sobriquet, Scratch Flat. There are two theories on the origin of the name. One is that the soils and the farming was good and the settlers there were forever scratching the soils with the plow. The second is that for a few years in the eighteenth century a strange cutaneous itch affected those living on the flat and they would appear in the town, constantly scratching themselves. I dug all this out from a popular history of the town written in the late nineteenth century. In my time, I only met one old farmer who even remembered the name: “They don’t call it that no more” he said .<br /><br />By the turn of the nineteenth century, there were some six working farms on Scratch Flat plus a working poor farm, an early version of a town supported social program that cared for wanderers and homeless. The farmers were Yankees of English origin, most of them having come over from Kent in the early seventeenth century, and having some familiarity with fruit cultivation, established apple orchards in the region. By the turn of the 20<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">th</span> century, immigrant farmers from Greece and Italy began buy up some of the farms. By the turn of the twenty-first century there were only two of these farms left, one run by one of the oldest Yankee families in the town and the other held by a hard working Greek family. The last in the Greek line was a ninety –two year old man from Sparta named <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Tasso</span> who ran the place with his grandniece. In general, by the late twentieth century, the fields had languished, had grown up to birch and red osier dogwood and alder and eventually, one by one, lot by lot, had been sold off for housing. Now some of the thousand year old farms support immense <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">palazzos</span> with <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18">faux</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19">Palladian</span> windows and two to three floors of rooms, most of them empty, most of the time. Scratch Flat for all intents and purposes had disappeared.<br /><br />But who cares, really? Why bother to spend twenty five years digging for the deep and singular history of this otherwise unremarkable stretch of farmland and woods?<br /><br />I came up to New England out of family that had very deep roots on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. I spent summers there, dragged “down home” as my exiled parents referred to the region even after thirty years absence. My strongest memories of that section of the world were of summer nights on old front porches, the hooting of owls, and the slow, languorous conversation of the family and friends who would gather every evening, to rock and smoke and chat. Stories would begin like a small stream and then head for the sea, gathering many tributaries and asides and counter stories until they came to the shores. When the tale was told there would be a silence, except for the creak of the rocking chairs, followed, after decent interval, by the beginning of another story. All this was tedious business for a restless ten year old, but it had its effect. Looking back I realize now that there was not one story recounted on those summer nights whose action was played out independent of land. Nothing was free from the bonds of setting. Stories would take place in a given section of named territory, an intimate, known part of their world, which, having been named, carried with it a full burden of associations, of history, of other stories and events. Nothing that lived, neither dog, nor horse, nor human existed independent of place.<br /><br />By the time I got to the town in which Scratch Flat is located, the vicissitudes of the mid twentieth century had wreaked havoc. A major highway Route 495, had sliced through the town; small tracts of housing had been built in the forested lands, good fields had been lost, the orchards, which were once the mainstay of the economic life of the community, had been plowed under. Only on Scratch Flat was there any active agriculture. In town, at a small shopping plazas wherein lay a grocery store selling produce from Florida and California, the local people were not certain where Beaver Brook was, were not aware of the fact that there were still otters there, let alone <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">sora</span> rails, let alone the deep Indian heritage that was at the foundation of the town. No one sat on front porches in the evening --- there were no front porches. No one told stories. No one had stories to tell save, perhaps of accounts of places they had come from, The older farm families whom I later met, did have some tales. But to find out about them I had to make phone calls, go to their houses and, at an appointed hour, sit in an enclosed living rooms --- sometimes with the counter stories of the omnipresent television competing. I had to work to draw out their tales. They still farmed, still had perhaps a love for the land, but the were in effect a displaced people --- not displaced by war, as with the Indians, or the immigrant families who were moving in. They had been displaced by their own culture, by our own culture. American mobility got the better of their psyches, and they felt, they were living as aftereffects.<br /><br />I was too, of course. So were my parents. Faced with the economic realities of the Depression and the opportunity of work, my father sold his family farm and fled to New Jersey and spoke of “down home” for the rest of his life. I was set free after a certain amount of requisite education and began wandering – in the American style --- living abroad, living in the cauldron of New York City, living in the remnants of wilderness in the 1960s, and then finally in the 1970s, living on Scratch Flat.<br /><br />Ultimately, Scratch Flat was an invention. A creation, or recreation of my own version of the mythic center. In time this singular tract of land, with its deep historical shadows, its farms, and its resident wildlife became for me a metaphorical hunting ground. One book was not enough to explore the hollows and empty quarters and people that seemed to characterize the place. I spent two years living in an unheated cottage sans electricity to get closer to the story of the land. I wrote a book about the natural history of my own back yard while I was living there. I used to the old Christian Indian village that was located on Scratch Flat to explore the question of the meaning, origin, and uses of the curious Western concept of private property. I used Scratch Flat as the jumping off point for a pilgrimage to Concord in which I undertook an exploration of the whole idea of place, of whether who we are has anything to do with where we are, or where we are from. I even explored the curious interconnection between the Renaissance Italian gardens and the invention of the American wilderness by constructing a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">pseudo</span> Italian garden, complete with hedge maze, on land, which, according to twenty-first century American law I am told that I actually “own” (whatever that means).<br /><br />In short, I became a traveler on my own land and I never got very far beyond my own square mile myth. But at least I found a place.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-90254881217049199812008-01-04T10:47:00.000-08:002008-01-14T15:21:50.144-08:00Indian Summer<a href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R4vubt1Gi4I/AAAAAAAAAFI/4GVKClawJj0/s1600-h/light+steps.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5155476358381865858" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R4vubt1Gi4I/AAAAAAAAAFI/4GVKClawJj0/s320/light+steps.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>An excerpt from <em>Indian Summer</em>, a novel in progress.<br /><br />The characters in this story live outside of the constraints of linear time. In this scene, Mary Louise Dudley, an accused witch who lived in the 18<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">th</span> century, tells a folk tale to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Bulkley</span> Emerson (1818-1861), the retarded brother of Ralph Waldo Emerson.<br /><br /><br /><br />Journal Entry, November 27, l96l<br /><br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">Bulkley's</span> favorite story: Mary-Louise has told it to him maybe twenty-five times. He knows it by heart but insists on hearing it tirelessly.<br /><br />"It was a long time ago on a Sabbath morn and all the people were to church save a little herd boy and his sister. And as they were tending their flock in the green hills didn't they catch sight of something moving in the shadows of the ravine and then while they two did watch, out flowed a long cavalcade a' fairies. They wound through the wooded hollow and snaked among the knolls and disappeared all to the north. And weren't they all in antique jerkins and long gray cloaks and little red caps and some in bright waistcoats with polished brass buttons and all with their wild untamed locks shooting out and they had spindly legs and long little noses and eyes that <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">glimmed</span> like water jewels. And didn't they sing an ancient music and some did walk and some did hobble and some did go upon the backs of tiny shaggy horses, all <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">spackled</span> and dun. And didn't the little herd boy call out and say:<br /><br />`Where are ye <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">ga'n</span>, little <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">mannie</span>? and who be ye?'<br /><br />And wasn't there an old <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">glinty</span>-eyed one among them all dressed in harlequin, and he didn't he turn and say<br /><br />`Not of the race of Adam be we. And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">Angleland</span>.'"<br /><br />"Not of the race of Adam be we," <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Bulkely</span> echoed. "And no more shall the people of peace be seen in all England."<br /><br />"But one stayed back in the shadows of the ravine," said Mary-Louise. "A large thing in ivy clothed."<br /><br />"And all hairy with fur."<br /><br />"All furry and shaggy. And he lived all alone in the <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">wildwood</span> and dells, all alone by himself, an 'e was <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">ni</span> man <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">ni</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">beastie</span>."<br /><br />"The Wild Man of Greenwood..."<br /><br />"The Wild Man of Greenwood, and he <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">ga'ed</span> all in green..."<br /><br />"And he fed little lost children..."<br /><br />"And he spake to all saints and to spirits and <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">ghosties</span>..."<br /><br />"And he danced by the moon?"<br /><br />"Na Bulk, he did <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">na</span> dance, and thou<br /><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">knowest</span>' it well."<br /><br />She tousled his shaggy head and kissed his forehead.</div>John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-14063343824464174942008-01-01T15:35:00.000-08:002008-01-01T15:37:13.290-08:00The MIllThe year the war began we were living in an old grist mill with a stonework dam and a big pond behind it where mink patrolled the banks and frogs kept me awake at night. It was one of the noisiest places I ever lived. You were never out of earshot of the sound of rushing water there --- a heavy and roaring in the spring freshets when a great fall of brown and silver pond washed over the dam, and a thin, icy trickle at the end of January when nothing but a narrow stream of water spilled through the rocks.<br /><br /> I moved there in late February when the ice was rough and one of my first introductions to the nature of the place <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">occurred</span> when I fell through the ice one afternoon skating on the stream above the pond. It was shallow and muddy and there was no harm done, and I skated home with wet socks. But this minor adventure marked the beginning of the spring breakup.<br /> <br /> By early March the ice loosened and the waters of the dam began to roar, a sound which reached full crescendo by mid April, about the same time that the frogs began to call. The duck-like quack of the wood frogs calling from the surrounding forest was always the first, but spring peepers made up the bulk of the early spring chorus. This was followed in April by the long trill of toads, and then the twang of green frogs or pickerel frogs, and then the bird like call of the gray tree frogs in June, and then, finally, in July, the full chorus of jug-of-rum calls from the resident bullfrog population. These carried on for the whole summer, and their nightly calling filled the sultry air; there was not a room in the mill that you could escape them.<br /><br /> This was an obscure little mill at the bottom of a dead end road on an obscure little stream that fed into and unrecognized river whose only claim to history was that the American Impressionist painter Child <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">Hassam</span> once did an oil of its only bridge. I lived there with my brother, who was the one who had rented the place, and as soon as the weather warmed, I began poking around the stream bed and the pond shores. One day on one of these outings, I found a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">leghold</span> trap, which, somewhat ungraciously, I sprung. I had seen the little darting forms of mink along the pond shores and hated to think of them struggling bravely there so close to the water's edge. Green herons used to stalk the shores as well, once an osprey dove down into the middle of the pond, and came up empty, and shaking its feathers, and one evening I heard the distinct, pumping call of an American bittern. Barn swallows nested in an old unused section of the mill building, and every evening in summer they would skim over the pond waters along with tree swallows and bank swallows.<br /><br /> Summer was the season of the turtles as well as swallows. I'd see many painted turtles; once in winter I saw a wood turtle swimming under the ice, and periodically I would spot the great primordial head of a huge snapper who lived there and whose children, presumably, I found later in the year in September, dashing along down the middle of the little dead end road. Fat bodied water snakes patrolled the shallow waters, and periodically I was able to catch the fine tuned little ribbon snakes that hunted along the pond shores.<br /><br /> But always in the background of these little discoveries there was the sound of running water. By mid September the flow dwindled to a steady, narrow stream that cut through the race and barely arched over the stonework. But with the coming of the autumn rains, the waters increased. Leaves drifted over the dam, the swallows had long flown south, and one by one the other birds disappeared from the pond and the dam. Last to go was a little phoebe that nested in the mill under some eves. It hung around until December, snatching insects on the sunny side of the building. <br /><br /> The frogs were long quiet by then, and nightlong now we heard only the rush of the waters, and the occasional night call of a goose, or the caterwauling of barred owls from the swampy woodlands beyond the pond.<br /><br /> There was a late northeaster that autumn that broke off a new passage in the dam so that the waters ran out with more force than ever and by winter, the pond used this breach as it main course. With January, everything stilled down into silent ice, and before the spring break up, I moved on.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-38779149147610967872007-12-29T13:11:00.000-08:002008-01-14T15:19:36.713-08:00Cross-lot Walking<a href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R4vt791Gi3I/AAAAAAAAAFA/CBiBWOSywvI/s1600-h/fence+woods.jpg"><img id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5155475812921019250" style="DISPLAY: block; MARGIN: 0px auto 10px; CURSOR: hand; TEXT-ALIGN: center" alt="" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R4vt791Gi3I/AAAAAAAAAFA/CBiBWOSywvI/s320/fence+woods.jpg" border="0" /></a><br /><div>JOURNAL OF A CROSS-LOT WALKER<br />by John Hanson Mitchell<br /><br />In November of 1853, Henry Thoreau went for a walk from Concord up to the town of Littleton to pay a visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's brother Bulkley, who was living with a family near the town center. Since he walked all the way, it is likely that Thoreau resorted to what he termed cross-lot walking, that is, he cut through farms and privately held woodlots without regard to property lines and avoided, as was his custom, roads much traveled by.<br /><br />Although he does not give us the route, it is likely that he walked up from the center of Concord, crossed through the wild Estabrook Country and then perhaps followed the old Great Road for a mile or so. Just south of Nagog Pond, he probably left the road and circled up through the fields and woodlots on the western slopes of the pond bank, property which in those days, was owned by a fmaily named Tenant.<br /><br />According to old maps, this area was open land in Henry's time, what the town called mowings, and since this whole territory had been owned outright by private individuals under English and American law since 1736, in order to get to his destination, Henry had to trespass, not an uncommon custom for him, one might even say a regular pastime.<br /><br />This habit of cross-lot walking is a passion I share with Henry. The area south and west of Nagog Pond, which he passed through back in [date] is all wooded now, except for a small mowing just west of the Nagog Pond. Some years back, I learned that this same tract of land was the probable site of a seventeenth century village of Christianized Indians. These people, probably members of the local Pawtucket tribe, having spotted, as they believed, the arrival of a new and powerful deity in their land, converted to Christianity and as a result were granted some sixteen square miles at a place called Nashobah, about thirty-five miles west of Boston. Under the direction of John Eliot, the so-called Apostle to the Indians, the Christianized Indians set up a village of pole-frame houses and traditional wigwams, planted apple trees, cleared fields for agriculture, cut their hair, ceased dancing, and settled in to live like Englishmen.<br /><br />According to the legislative powers of the General Court in Boston, the land, known as Nashobah Plantation, was granted to the Indians outright (never mind the deep irony of the fact that it was their land in the first place). Within the boundaries of the tract, the Indians owned their own houses and property and, with permission of the General Court, were permitted to buy or sell plots of land. But twenty-five years later during the King Philip's War, in what amounted to a prelude to the treatment of the Nissei at the outset of World War Two, the inhabitants of Nashobah were rounded up and sent to Deer Island in Boston Harbor, where, over the succeeding winter, many of them succumbed.<br /><br />After the war, a few of the survivors of this ordeal struggled back to the Nashobah area to live out their time. The last survivor was a powerful woman named Sarah Doublet, who died, feeble and blind, in l736, under the care of two tradesmen from Concord named Ephraim and Elnathan Jones. By way of payment for her care, Sarah Doublet granted the Jones’ the rights to the five hundred acres that she had held, the last remnant of the sixteen square miles Nashobah Plantation.<br /><br />That transfer marked the end of Indian land tenure in that part of the world and the beginning of the new era in land use history. Sara and her people would have held their land in common and would have made decisions as to its use communally, by consensus --- which, ironically, was a pattern that was not uncommon in England in the seventeenth century. But in the space of little more than fifty years this system of holding land in common would be subsumed by the concept of private property. Within another hundred years, this new system would oversweep the entire American continent and replace the idea of land held in common. It was a uniquely American phenomenon, new even to the conquering English and French.<br /><br /><br />This Sarah Doublet, the original "owner" of the tract under the English system, had black eyes and a lurid blue image of a bear tattooed on her left cheek. She would have tied her long black hair in a knot, fastened with a band of silver, and she dressed in a decorated moose skin skirt and buskins, with a blue shawl over her shoulders and a beaded blue cloth around her waist. Like all the women of her group, she probably wore thongs of moosehide around her ankles and in winter, and sometimes also summer, she greased her skin with bear fat to the keep the cold or the insects at bay. Periodically she would paint herself in blues and reds and don cloaks made of bird feathers or robes of furred mammal pelts, all hung about with heads and clawed feet, and the striped tails of raccoons and skunks, and the whole arrangement made fast with a belt made from the skin of milk snakes and copperheads. She fixed pendants of swan's down or shells in her pierced ears, placed a bird wing headdress in her hair, and strung herself with shell necklaces and ropes of wampum, and perhaps --- all this is conjecture --- an amulet at her breast, a winged thunderbird, or the carved image of A'pcinic, the horned water monster who lived in the depths of the pond below her village.<br /><br /><br />After Eliot came, after she accepted Christianity, she would have ceased to wear bangles and sparkles and fanciful animal skins, would have cast aside her bird wing headdress and her swan's down earrings. She would have become modest, would have lowered her eyes, prayed, sung the strange descant chanting hymns that she and her people would sound out during services.<br /><br />By the l650s, having translated the Bible into Algonquian, John Eliot and his associate, Daniel Gookins, set about establishing a series of villages wherein his converts, his "poor blind Indians" as he called them, could live in peace --- provided of course, they cut their hair and prayed to the proper God. They began in 1654 with a small congregation at Natick, just west of Boston, and by the late 1650s they had secured seven villages of Christian Indians, "praying towns" where Eliot’s "praying" Indians" could live in peace and harmony. One these tracts, a holding of some sixteen square miles was located northwest of present day Concord in a region of fertile uplands, and well-watered intervales. The actual village was located between two ponds wherein lay "manie good fishes and planting grounds".<br /><br /><br />This English idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, was actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The term originated in the English feudal system when all land belonged ultimately to the Crown. Those who lived on feudal lands were obliged to perform duties, such as military service or farm work or provide crops or meat to pay for the right to use the land. Land held with the fewest strings attached became known as fee simple. The idea of land as property did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone, you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it, you did not actually own the ground. But in the seventeenth century land came to be seen as an object of quantity, something that, in theory at least, could be sold.<br /><br />By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land, pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf, began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private, outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This is the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly-held lands --- meadows, open fields, and forests --- were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.<br /><br />In the new England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the English soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished. The Jones family who took over the Nashobah property after Sarah died would have assumed the property in its entirety in fee simple, and when they died, since they owned it outright, they could pass it along to their heirs.<br /><br />By contrast, Sarah's people would have viewed the land as a common resource, controlled, but not owned by the Pawtucket people. Territory was defined, and periodically redefined by tribal members. Generally the boundary would have been a natural topographic feature such as a watershed, or in the case of Nashobah, the land between two ponds. The territory would have been under the somewhat loose control of a powerful figure, or sachem, a "king" as the English phrased it or even a "queen" a saunk. Among the Eastern Woodland people the social structure was a complex hierarchy which was not too far removed from the proto feudal system that existed in England before the coming of William the Conqueror. At the head of the group was the sachem and his wife, or wives. This man, the equivalent of the lord or earl in English culture, was in control of a certain territory, a tract of land which was defined by natural boundaries and comprehended by all those tribes and bands in the general area. Periodically, at a great council, the sachem or saunk would divide up his or her territory and assign certain areas to certain families for hunting, or fishing, or for agricultural use. No one owned any of this though, not even the sachem --- he or she merely controlled the rights of use, the usufruct of the region. In return the sachem was given a tribute each year by the people below him, a certain number of bushels of corn, for example.<br /><br />Within this territory, or "kingdom", small bands, extended family groups, or tribes, had rights of use of a planting field or hunting grounds, fishing weirs, or berry picking areas. But they did not in any sense own the land in these areas, and after some years they would abandon "their" fields anyway and move on to another area. All this was somewhat ill-defined, so that any individual who wanted to collect sedges near someone else's fishing weir could do so. Anyone would wanted to dig groundnuts or collect bark near someone else's berry picking grounds could proceed. Furthermore, at certain times of year, in certain places, the controls were relaxed and people from various tribes would gather with other bands, usually around good fishing sites. For example, in Sarah's time, the falls of the Merrimack at what is now Lowell was under the control of the great sachem Passaconway (who, it is said, lived to be l07 years old and whose father was a bear). During the spring runs of anadromous fish, villages from all over the region would gather at the site to share the bounty. They all acknowledged a mutual right to use the site for a specific purpose, even though the falls were in the territory of Passsaconway.<br /><br />In England in the years just before the Pilgrims arrived, life centered around the village. The village centered around the church, and the houses were clustered on either side of a central road that led to other villages of similar design. Beyond the cluster of housing lay the agricultural lands and beyond them, in certain areas at least, the greenwood or the wild heath which, by the seventeenth century had been much diminished from earlier times in English history when the dense forests of oak, beech, and ash covered the lands between the villages.<br /><br />This basic pattern, which varied from county to county and in fact was far more complex than this basic form, had its antecedents in feudalistic society and its step child, the manor house, which developed in the sixteenth century. The feudalistic system in England was refined and perfected (if those are the proper terms) with the arrival of William the Conqueror. In its most basic form, a village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by planting fields within a surround of pasture, and beyond this the wildwood. Under the feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety the underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders surrendered whatever rights of ownership they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their land, their source of livelihood.<br /><br />By the time of William, the social system was well established. At the bottom of the were the serfs who actually belonged to other individuals and worked the land. Next up the line were the cottars or cottagers, who were responsible for small holdings, then the villeins who farmed as many as fifty acres or more. Above them were the thanes, who drew rents in kind from the villeins and who were in turn responsible to the earls or lords who were in turn responsible to the king.<br /><br />In a typical feudal holding by the time of William, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech and ash. Some sixteen to twenty families would live in the village, about six cottars or so, maybe nine villeins, and the thane. All told there would have been about two hundred people in the town. The system worked communally. These families would have owned a number of plows between them, possibly as few as seven or eight, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fish ponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the edge of the village, was one long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today, flying over England, would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure. This great open field was ploughed in strips which were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. This pattern, known as a furlong --- a standard furrow's length--- came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley and peas, and were altered on a three year system of rotation allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each villein planted and harvested his own crop on a given amount of land, but it might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf --- essentially the equivalent of a slave --- you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land and the distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.<br /><br />Surrounding the cultivated lands were the pasture lands where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but were not divided into lots. Beyond the pasture lands was the wildwood, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage and here also, up until the coming of William, they hunted deer and boar for their larder.<br /><br />William, as Anglophiles to this day will attest, at once altered this primordial feudal system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon system was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Villeins, serfs, and cottars who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or worst of all, killing deer --- his deer mind you --- were severely punished. Their hands were cut off, their ears cropped, and in some instances, they were put to death. William's ruthless protection of his resources altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it was heavily used by the peasants. It was customary for them to pollard the trees of the woods and to allow swine to uproot native vegetation in their search for nuts and roots, for example. Removing the peasants from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the people of the region.<br /><br />(There is an interesting, albeit tragic, contemporary twist to this in the recently privatized forests of Siberia. Formerly the state would drive out and sometimes even kill individuals attempting to exploit the state-controlled forests. Now it's up for grabs and one of its most important predatory inhabitants, the magnificent Siberian tiger, is on a swift path to extinction.)<br /><br />Under William the Conqueror's feudalistic system, rents for lands were paid in kind, that is you supplied a certain amount of grain to the earl each year according to the amount of land you were using,. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, depending on your land holdings. You applied each year to renew your holding and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top, the serfs or cottars at the bottom, and various tenants and lords in the middle reaches --- from the Crown, all titles flow, as the phrase has it. The system was not just designed to control land of England. It was also a convenient way of raising an army. The lords owed allegiance to the king, and the villagers could pay their rents by military service. When the king called to raise an army, you joined. So did your lord.<br /><br />All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims came to the new world and the old tenure system requiring payment in kind or in personal services faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company in what was called common socage, which is to say the rights of use of the land could be paid in rents, rather than knights' service to the King. Common socage was actually not an unknown form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England.<br /><br /><br />But even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter what king sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants would continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private property system even into our time. With advent of feudalism in much of Europe the allodially-held lands were placed under the protection of a powerful lord. But in England, and most especially in Kent, the allodial system was maintained even after William's time. As a result when the seventeenth century Puritans began taking over the Indian lands of New England, they understood perhaps better than any other invading culture of the Americas, the rights of Indian title to those lands which the Indians were cultivating.<br /><br />Civil Wars, regicides, interregnums and the Puritan exodus to the New World notwithstanding, the seventeenth century was an active period in English history. Not long after the Great Migration to the Americas began, in 1660, Parliament passed a statute switching all existing tenures into common socage so that an annual rent could serve as payment for land and not personal service.<br /><br />There was more to come though. At the beginning of December in 1664, while Sarah Doublet was living at Nashobah, two men at the upper end of Drury Lane in London were reported dead and two physcians and a surgeon were sent in to determine the cause. There had been rumors abroad that the dreaded plague had returned to Holland and the authorities wanted to make certain that it did not reach England. The physcians inspected the bodies and found "tokens" of the sickness upon the bodies of the dead. The case was dutifully reported to the parish clerk and the weekly bill of mortality printed the news the following week.<br /><br />Over the next month cases began to appear with more regularity in the different parishes: twelve in St. Giles by the tenth, twelve more by the twenty fourth. Seventeen cases in Saint Andrews between the third and the tenth of January, twenty-three more by the end of the month. Slowly, parish by parish, the number of cases mounted until by the end of June, 1665, as many as a thousand people were dying a month in some sections.<br /><br />Finally, on September second in l666, a fire began in the crowded warrens of inner London and spread quickly among the small shops, churches, and livery halls. By the end of the day it was still spreading, and by the morning of the second day it had jumped deeper into the city. For four straight days and nights the conflagration raged through the maze of streets and shops, and when it ended, finally, it had destroyed an estimated 13,200 houses, some 87 churches, and 44 livery halls. The whole city lay in ruins, commercial centers and administrative buildings smoldering. But within a few days the plague numbers diminished and by the end of that autumn the disease had died out.<br /><br />The ashes of the Great Fire had hardly cooled before two architects, Christopher Wren and John Evelyn appeared before King Charles ll with plans to rebuild London on a grand scale, based on contemporary town planning principles. London at the time was a hive of narrow streets and crowded wooden structures. Two of the major thoroughfares, Thames Street and Threadneedle Street were only eleven feet wide. The lanes, alleyways, and walks were lined with a multitude of houses that crowded one upon the other in such profusion that the inhabitants rarely saw the sun and lived ever in an "unwholesome" shadow. In order prevent this dangerous development pattern from reoccurring, after the Great Fire a series of acts were passed that established four house types and sizes, all to be built of brick and laid down with minimum safety requirements about party walls and overhanging jetties.<br /><br />Anyone living here in the American wilds of Utah who proclaims grandly that his land is his to do with as he would still has to contend with the end result of the Great Fire of London. Like it or not, we live on top of the past, under the English system of common law, and these early English codes, organized to protect the safety of the people, were the prototypes of zoning acts and land use codes and were as much a part of the traditional roots of American land use law as the Fifth Amendment. One could argue that the Fire Building Acts were a curtailment of the rights of private property, (so much as they existed in the England of 1666) and so they may have been. But the end result of the meeting Wren and Evelyn with the King was not only the creation of the London that is so beloved by the international visitors of our time, but the beginning of zoning, which, as many still argue, was the end of freedom.<br /><br /><br />The meeting of a native American tribal people who lived by hunting and gathering and practiced swidden agriculture, as opposed to a culture such as the English which tended to fix itself in one place for centuries was the source of confusion and eventual conflict between the two groups. The understanding of land, of the universe even, of these two cultures was almost diametrically opposed. Within twenty-five years after the Puritans settled in Boston game began disappearing from those regions where the English dominated. Within thirty five years, there were serious squabbles between the two cultures, many of them over land, and within fifty years, in 1675, there was an outright war. Perhaps it was inevitable.<br /><br /><br /><br />By the seventeenth century the English were beginning to believe that land could actually be owned as one would own a thing, although even in the freedom of the new world to which they had retreated there was still a strong concept of common land and public use of land. A purchase of Indian land for example did not necessarily mean that the Indians could not hunt or fish on that land, even though it was now "owned" by the English. Conflicts over hunting and fishing rights, over trespass and the like, came later in history, after the English had established agricultural lands. The Indians basically didn't get it. At Nashobah, for example, several of the laws of behavior had to do with protection of private property. Indians could not use, without permission, a Englishman's canoe. They were required to knock before entering a house, and of course, they were strictly forbidden to steal. All of which suggests that there was a lot of stealing and borrowing without asking, and a general lack of regard for boundaries and privacy.<br />Eliot's original documents granting the lands of Nashobah to the Christian Indians are a mere broad description of the place. But in l686, after the village was supposedly deserted, the General Court hired Samuel Danforth to actually survey the land. Mathematical surveying as we know it had came into use in the l620s when Edmund Gunter invented a chain 66 feet long divided into l00 links, each 7.92 inches long. Surveyors on the ground would lay marks at regular intervals called stations, and at the angles, points or corners. Danforth would have walked over the Nashobah tract with a team, carrying instruments known as rods, or poles, and Gunter's ringed surveyor's chain. Using these tools, he and his partner would have marked off the rough land from point to point, using wherever possible, enduring natural features such as large boulders or bodies of water, although they also used larger trees.<br /><br />The actual boundary lines of the Indian lands at Nashobah are much discussed in the historical records, mainly because the various English towns began arguing as to which town laid claim to which section of the original tract after the village broke up in l675. The bounds continue to be argued over today among the mappers and boundary watchers who have an interest in this part of the world because it is believed to be part of the vast corridor of sacred Indian lands that run -- more or less --- from the valley of the Concord and Sudbury Rivers out to the singular peak of Mount Wachusetts. Generally, records agree that the Indian lands of Nashobah consisted of a square of four miles to a side, roughly, beginning at a point near the two ponds, and running west northwest for four miles, north for four miles, east, and then south to the original point.<br /><br />All this, the larger territory of the village, is now developed into two or three towns, depending on whose markers and whose research or whose original deeds you are reading. At various points in history, and still today, Groton, Acton, parts of Ayer, and the nearly the whole town of Littleton laid claims to the original site. But most of the tract, it is now agreed, was in the town of Littleton, which was established in 1714.<br /><br />By 1736 Sarah's tract was all in private hands and remained so until 1988. Then in l990, through a curious series of events and coincidences, the tract began a slow, legal evolution back into common land. Two elderly women donated some ninety acres of the original village holding to the local land trust, thus opening up one section of the old village site to the public. Then in the mid 90s another section of some 113 acres just to the west came up for development, and inspired a small group of people to rise up to save the land as open space. Then finally, the core of the place, the sacred geography of Sarah Doublet's final five hundred acre tract held by the old curmudgeon, came up for sale.<br /><br /><br />The fate of this last five hundred acres of Indian land now lies in the fickle hand of American land law. But if the past is in any way prelude, by rights it should go back into common land, as it was in Sarah Doublet's time, before the English came along with their curious ideas of holding land as property.</div>John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-66246463510214227752007-12-29T10:17:00.000-08:002007-12-29T10:19:52.723-08:00Winter Solstice, 2007December 22:<br />Heavy snows after two storms<br /><br />December 24:<br />Deer attack on garden. Virburnums, arbor vitae, mahonia, and hollies attacked. Stringing deer fencing.<br /><br />December 28:<br />A warming rain. A flock of robins feeding on bittersweet.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-58399900714083824632007-12-28T15:31:00.000-08:002007-12-29T09:44:27.773-08:00Solar Origins of the BullfightThe Sunday bullfight on Easter Day is said to be a command performance for Sevillian society. There are many mantillas in the old style, traditional spotted frilled dresses, much make up, and gleaming hooped earrings, and elaborate Goyesque fans. The arena is packed on this day and there is a restless air of excitement spinning through the stands. The majordomos always arrange to get the best matadors for the Seville corrida as well as the wildest, most dangerous fighting bulls from the Miura or Romero fincas. Watermen pass around with pottery jugs of water, begging gypsies mill outside the Roman amphitheater with blood red carnations, and the arena is filled with the sound of brass bands playing off key over and over again the old bull fight favorites, such as El Gato Montes. It’s all a civilized, polite and save for certain bloody rituals soon to follow a gentile celebration. But it has ancient roots, tinted with sacrifice, death and rebirth out of a cold earth.<br /><br />On Easter Sunday, the crowd waits, the tension builds, the band plays on, and then into the center of the arena, the gladiators appear, dressed for the occasion in their bright, “suits of light” as they are called, holding high their weapons. They are followed by lank, padded horses and high-speared picadors, and the grand procession circles the arena, salutes the majordomo, and then retires behind the barricades. The procession has all the elements of some high church ceremony.<br /><br />Just before the gates open to allow the bull into the ring, a quiet tension settles over the crowd. A silence descends and waits in the air like a crouched cat. And then, suddenly, out into the bright light of the bullring, the hunch-shouldered black Minotaur charges, his great spearpoint horns swinging, his coat glistening coat and his bright hoofs gleaming.Following this spirited entry, the sacrificial rites begin. Altar boys in the form of arena workers, or “wise monkeys” scurry here and there in their blue coveralls and red bandanas, the acolytes and monks, in the form of the light-footed banderilleros and the heavy horsed picadors, circle and dance, and then, the high priest himself appears,, the trim, sword-bearing killer of bulls. He walks with the grace of a cat. Straight backed, slippered, and gleaming in his suit of lights, a feminine, ballerina-like killer, light footed and deadly. He starts with the great red cape, tests his victim with nonchalance, as if he himself could never be killed by the snorting, horned Minotaur, who by this time charges down on him again and again, head lowered to better hook his opponent.<br /><br />Having tested his victim, the matador priest ends this act of the drama with a swirling flourish of his red cape and the acolytes move in to weaken and enrage the beast. The banderilleros place colorful barbed darts in his shoulder, ducking and dodging his horns, as they do so. Then the horse-borne picador lances the bull’s neck muscles as he charges again and again into the sides of the padded horse, occasionally lifting it off its feet. And then finally, with the beast prepared for sacrifice, his priestly nemesis returns, this time with the sword and the small cape called the muleta. There follows now the final dance of death. The bull continues to charge, continues to attempt to kill, until finally, standing side ways, his sword lined up on his arm, the killer priest, shakes the muleta and the bull charges in for the last time.<br /><br />The matadores, the good ones, kill cleanly, going in over the horns and spinning away just before they are hooked. The huge dark Minotaur, staggers, sways, and then collapses in the sand in the yellow sun of the afternoon. And the crowd, if they are pleased with the sacrifice, will call for a reward. The altar boys cut the ears, sometimes even the tail, from the sacrificed beast, and then, still cool and collected, as if he had not himself faced death in the afternoon, the matador struts around the ring, bearing his awards aloft, and then exits, his work completed.<br /><br />Little wonder that this primal rite has been the subject of much literature.<br /><br />The bullfight is now a much-despised ritual, a brutal, even barbaric, event in the eyes of the modern world, and I suppose, in the end, it’s indefensible. But in my callow youth, I used to attend these rituals with an almost religious zeal. I was caught up, even then, in the richness of ancient rituals and old primal gods and goddesses, and I perceived the bullfight in historical terms.<br /><br />As far as sacrifices go, especially when compared to the mass human sacrifices of the Aztecs and other Mesoamerican cultures to appease their sun good, this one was balanced. For one thing the sacrificial animal, while fated to die no matter what, still has a chance to defend himself and even do some damage to the priests and their acolytes.<br /><br />For most of the twetieth century, it was believed that the Spanish corrida evolved from the bull cults of Crete, and the story of the Minotaur and the Cretan bull leapers. According to the accepted history, originally promulgated in the early 20th century by the English archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, the Minoan culture was associated with the bull worship and part of the ritual associated with this veneration involved a dangerous dance of death in which young athletes, men and women alike, would leap over the horns of a charging bull, sometimes arcing over the horns and the bull’s back in elaborate somersaults. Evans believed this ritual was associated with the story of Theseus and the Minotaur and the famous labyrinth at Knossos.<br />Of all the labyrinths and mazes of the ancient world, the most famous, and the one that has lent its name to many maze traditions, was the Minoan labyrinth at Knossos on Crete. The structure may have existed in some form as early as 2000 BC, and there is some indication that the Cretans may have borrowed the idea of a vast, internal, citylike maze from the earlier Egyptian labyrinth at Crocodilopolis at Lake Moeris. The Cretan maze was essentially a complex of winding paths deep in the interior chambers of the walled city. Here the Minoans practiced the sport of bull leaping, which was an important aspect of the Minoan bull cults of the period. Young men and women would dodge or leap over the horns of a charging bull as a part of one ceremony. The bull or, Taurus, of King Minos, is the origin of the story of the terrible Minotaur, who lurked in the depths of the maze. The word labyrinth is derived from this palace; Labrys is a double headed ax, and the interior rooms where the bull cult ceremonies would take place was called the House of the Double Axes. Here captives were trained for the dangerous bull leaping sport that gave rise to the legend of Theseus and the Minotaur.<br /><br />According to the Greek myth, the maze at Knossos was designed by the craftsman Daedalus. It was an elaborate and complex series of paths, and once you got inside, you could not get out without a guide. In the center, lived the Minotaur, a being with the body of a man and the head of a bull, or vice versa in some versions. In either form he had an insatiable appetite for human flesh. The Minotaur was the unfortunate offspring of the wife of Minos the King of Crete, Pasiphae, who, in one of those sweet revenges so common in Greek mythology, was tricked by Poseidon into coupling with a white bull.<br /><br />The son of King Minos had been murdered by the Athenians and as retribution for this crime, every nine years, Minos decreed that a tribute of seven young men and seven maids must be sent to Knossos for sacrifice. The young people were then sent into the labyrinth constructed by Daedalus to be eaten by the Minotaur. The King of Athens at this time was Aegeus, whose son was the hero, Theseus. Early in his heroic career Theseus offered to join the troop of young people sent off to Knossos and vowed to slay the monster and put an end to the tribute. Over his father’s objections, he sailed off, but before leaving Athens, Theseus told his father that when the ship returned, if he had been victorious, he would hoist a white sail. If he had lost, his crew would raise a black sail.<br /><br />During the review of the sacrificial victims before the king at Knossos, Theseus was spotted by the king’s daughter, Ariadne, and the two fell in love. Ariadne gave Theseus a sword and a ball of thread, and on the appointed day of the tribute, Theseus attached the thread to the entrance and entered into complex pathways of the labyrinth, working his way deeper and deeper through the dark hallways, spinning out the thread behind him. At the center of the maze he encountered the Minotaur and a great fight ensued. Theseus killed the Minotaur, followed the thread back out to the entrance and then fled Crete, taking Ariadne with him.<br /><br />The story has the sad ending of many of these mythological tales, however. Instructed by a dream, Theseus deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos and sailed for home. But as he entered the harbor, he forgot his promise to signal and sailed in with the black sail raised, the traditional color of the sails of Greek vessels. His distraught father, believing his son dead, threw himself from a cliff, thus giving his name to the Aegean Sea.<br /><br />There was more to come, though. The enraged Minos had Daedalus and his son, Icarus, imprisoned in his own labyrinth. Here, the ingenious Daedalus constructed wings with feathers and wax and the two flew off to freedom. But, even though he had been warned not to fly too high --- or too low --- the ecstatic young Icarus, with typical teenage exuberance, soared ever higher and came too close to the sun. The heat melted the wax that held the wings together, and he crashed into the sea and drowned.<br /><br />Arthur Evans freely interpreted the wall paintings of bull leapers he uncovered at Knossos as evidence of these legends, attributing the story and the bull cults to the indigenous Cretan culture with no influence from contemporary Greek or Egyptian ideas or myths. But the newest argument, most recently put forth by the archeologist J. Alexander MacGillivray is that the bull images on the palace of Knossos have to do with the sun and are in fact images of the constellations, and the bull leaping frescoes represent Orion the Hunter, confronting the constellation Taurus, which contains the Hyades and the seven sisters, the Pleiades. The leaper, MacGillivray argues, is the hero Perseus. He somersaults over the back of the bull to rescue Andromeda who had been chained to a rock to be sacrificed to a sea monster.<br /><br />According to MacGillvray, the configuration of stars described on the walls would occur at the end of the agricultural year in ancient Eygypt, Greece, and Crete. The images of the bull leapers served to recall the astral calendar and were used for both time keeping and navigation. Furthermore, the recurring image in the Cretan art of two rising steep peaks which Evans interpreted as the horns of the sacred bull were a known contemporary symbol for the horizon in Egypt. MacGillivary argues that both the Greeks and the Egyptians strongly influenced the Minoan culture, and that the horn imagery is actually a solar calendar. The twin peaks mark the two solstices and the valley marks the equinox. Furthermore, the famous double ax symbol that occurs throughout Cretan art and which, incidentally, is the origin of the English word labyrinth (from the Greek word for double ax labros) symbolizes, according to MacGillavray, the equinox. The vertical shaft, in the center of two equilateral triangles represents the equality of day and night.<br /><br />Actually there is an even earlier solar interpretation of the bull cults and the story of the Minotaur. In 1905 a German scholar, basing his theory on his translations of early Greek place names, believed that the Minotaur was a stand-in for the sun, and the monster’s mother, Pasiphae, was the moon. To trace the wanderings of the stars astrologers used the labyrinth in which the famous Theseus story plays out.<br /><br />Whatever the origins, the tradition of bull leaping, as did so many Cretan customs, spread from Knosos and was adopted by other European cultures. During the eight centuries of the Spanish War of the Reconquest (711-1492 A.D.), the knights, Moors and Christians, weary of killing one another, would occasionally allow themselves a respite; but in order to avoid boredom, and also to release their pugnacious instincts, they would compete in hunting the wildlife that still existed on the Iberian lands. Deer and other equally docile animals were easy prey, and while a cornered bear or boar would occasionally put up a fight, it was never a challenge for such valiant knights. However, the scenario changed every time they faced the Iberian bull.<br /><br />This beautiful and awe-inspiring beast, with its unique noble bravery would, when provoked, rather die fighting than flee - in essence, transforming the hunt into an avid exchange in which the bravest warriors could bring to light their courage. Perhaps a nobleman with an entrepreneurial spirit thought about capturing several of these horned beasts, taking them to the village, and recreating the thrill of the hunt so that the knights could demonstrate their skill and win the admiration of their subjects. Thus, in a remote corner of Medieval Spain, the beginning of what today is the national Spanish spectacle of bullfighting was created.<br /><br />The first historic bullfight, or corrida, took place in Vera Logro, in 1133, in honor of the coronation of king Alfonso VIII. From that point on, history is full of instances in which kings organized corridas to commemorate important events and to entertain their guests. After the Spanish War of the Reconquest, the celebration of corridas expanded throughout Spain and became the outlet where the noblemen demonstrated the zeal that allowed them to defeat the Moors. Even the Emperor Charles I in Valladolid in 1527, and later King Philip IV took part in the lancing of bulls in the bullfighting arenas.<br /><br />The spectacle is still with us today, in dimished form. But generally speaking the ancient pagan roots are forgotten or overlooked. Better not to consider the fact that in Catholic Spain, the most important of Christian of holy days is celebrated by the ritualistic killing of a bull in order the assure the smooth workings of the cosmos.John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-72193752543099372142007-12-23T13:19:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:24:31.381-08:00The Death of Mr. Smith<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
The Death of Mr. Smith<br />
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Just for the record it should be said that Mr Smith was not the warm, chatty local shopkeeper whom all the people loved. This Mr Smith was polite, but laconic; he would answer your questions in monosyllables, with typical Yankee reserve. He dressed everyday in a hound’s-tooth coat, a pressed white shirt and an out-of-fashion tie from the 1950s, and he wore steel rimmed glasses perched at the end on his thin nose.<br />
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Nor was the fare that Mr Smith sold in his little general store anything remarkable: canned food, dry cereals, milk and eggs, and candy, and in spite of the fact that the town was known for its orchards, dairy, and produce farms, not a single item that was grown locally. The shop was cool, under lit, and had dusty wooden floors worn down by a hundred years of use. Also always open. Everyday, even Christmas and Sundays, Mr Smith was there, with his minimalist greetings and his thank very much and goodbye. Try as you might, you could not get any gossip from Mr Smith.<br />
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The town in those days seemed to be characterized by eccentric shop-keepers, Across the street from Mr Smith there was a hardware store that never, at least not in the time that I lived there, opened its doors to the public. Its shelves were lined with dusty screwdrivers, saws, hammers, and various cans of motor oil, glue, and paint. And if you shaded your eyes and looked in through the plate glass window, just inside the entrance, in front of the aisles, you could see a new 1950s Pen Yan motor boat, its fresh varnish gleaming in the half light, its brass fittings polished. The story was that the store had been kept by two brothers. When one of them died, some ten years earlier, the living brother closed the shop and maintained it just as it had been when his brother died.<br />
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There was a country store in the town that still sold penny candy, and there was an ice cream stand associated with one of the dairy farms that drew people all the way from Boston, some thirty-five distant. People came to the town in summer for the ice-cream and the corn and pumpkins from the five working farm stands. They came in autumn for apples; they came in winter to ski, and in spring they came to look at the flowering orchards and watch the horses that were pastured there.<br />
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Given this diversity of foodstuffs and entertainments you would think Mr Smith would have given up years ago. But in fact children regularly stopped in to buy candy from Mr Smith, and the locals were forever stopping in to get things they had forgotten to pick up at the main grocery store in the town, which kept normal nine to five hours and closed on Sundays. Mr Smith was the only show in town after hours. ---nine in the morning to nine at night behind his counter in his hounds-tooth coat and his pressed shirt. <br />
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All this was long ago, forty years ago. Around that time a highway came through the community, and rammed through two of the best working farms and an orchard. A couple of new gas stations opened near the interchange, and then one day a sign appeared in the window of Mr Smith’s store. “Closed due to illness”. <br />
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Not long after that, either from an obituary in the local paper, or maybe just gossip, I learned that Mr Smith had died.<br />
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The shop closed permanently. The building remained empty for a year or so. Traffic increased on the highway. A chain convenience store came into the town, which stayed open from seven to eleven.. The grocery store expanded. A chain hardware store opened Two farm stands closed. Three new banks opened, one of them an international corporation. A multinational computer company constructed a plant in one of the local pear orchards, and then one day a sign for a lawyers office appeared in the window of Mr Smith ‘s former store. And nowadays, over in the burying ground on the west side of town, Mr Smith lies in his grave, still silent.<br />
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Coming in March, 2008</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-24754310665859884142007-12-22T13:15:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:25:26.466-08:00How the Common Came to Pass<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Winter 2006-2007<br />
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<em>In the loveliest town of all, where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses, where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about…where the lawns ended in the orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky… from Stuart Little by E.B. White </em></div>
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Stuart Little would have loved the little rural towns between Connecticut and the Canadian border. Back roads in this section of New England still exhibit remnants of the old English version of the town common—a central green, a meeting house or church at one end, and a surround of high white clapboard structures on the other three sides, with pastures and forests beyond. Just the sort of place E.B. White’s wandering mouse hero enjoyed. </div>
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The vernacular settlement pattern known as the common is—or more accurately was—an excellent model of community conservation of green space, an example of mutually accepted preservation without debate or vote. The common was once a cultural fact of life, it was what you did if you wanted to lay out a village, and it was an ideal that still endures in the American psyche. The image appears everywhere, from Christmas cards to ads touting wholesome family life.</div>
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The archetype of this idealized town has its roots deeply planted in English history, but in North America it is unique to New England. In its most basic form, the English village (from the Old French term vill) was no more than a collection of houses, barns, and outbuildings surrounded by cultivated fields and pasturelands, with a forest beyond. Under the old feudal system the whole of this was under the management of the lord, who was responsible for the safety of his underlings who had gathered themselves together under his protection to save themselves from the raiding armies of invaders, such as the Vikings or Normans. Small landholders in this system surrendered whatever rights they may have had to the control of the lord in order to protect their croplands, the source of their livelihood.</div>
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In a typical feudal holding, some two to three hundred acres around the vill would have been cleared from the native forest of beech, ash, and holly. About sixteen to twenty families would be living in the village—all told around 200 people. The system worked communally. The families would have owned a number of plows between them, and they would have had teams of oxen, also shared, to pull the plows. They may have had community fishponds on the local streams, and weirs, and even a water mill. The fields, which began at the forest edge and ran to the border of the village, consisted of one, long, open stretch. The patchwork division of small fields and pastures that you see today in England would come later in the seventeenth and eighteenth century with the acts of enclosure.</div>
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This great open field cultivation was ploughed in strips that were roughly ten times as long as they were wide. The design, known as a furlong—a standard furrow's length (220 yards)—came to pass because of the difficulty in turning a team of oxen. The long strips of arable land were planted to grains, barley, and peas, and were altered on a three-year system of rotation, allowing some strips to lie fallow in any given year. Each family planted and harvested its own crop on a given section of land, although the strip a family cultivated might not be the same piece of land each year. Under this system, fields of different quality would be equitably distributed among the farmers over a period of time. Unless you were a serf—essentially the equivalent of a slave—you would be guaranteed a certain amount of land. The distribution of these arable lands was decided each year at a meeting known as the annual allotment.</div>
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In addition to the great fields, each family would have maintained, close to their house, a small privately cultivated plot for a garden, and a yard for hens and geese and a few fruit trees.<br />
Surrounding the cultivated fields of grain were the pasturelands, where each day the herds of cattle, sheep, and goats were driven out to graze. These lands were also held in common by the village but not divided into lots.</div>
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Beyond the pasturelands was the forest, which was held, in effect, by no one. Here the local peasants went to gather nuts and firewood, here they turned out their swine to forage, and here also they hunted rabbits, deer, and boar for their larder. This so-called waestland, or wilderness, was the dark forest of European myth and folktale. It was the known domain of goblins and witches and hideous imaginary creatures, as well as all-too-real escaped criminals and robbers, such as Robin Hood. It was, in effect, the opposite of the comfortable, managed, public space of the common.</div>
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In 1066, William the Conqueror, as Anglophiles will attest, at once altered this primordial village system and refined it to his liking. One of his earliest violations of the traditional Anglo-Saxon structure was to declare the forest his private hunting domain. Locals who were discovered in his greenwood collecting faggots, digging out rabbit warrens, or, worst of all, killing deer—his deer mind you—were severely punished. William’s ruthless protection of “his resources” altered the ecological makeup of the forest in those areas where it had been heavily used by the peasants. In fact, excluding people from the forest may actually have had a beneficial ecological effect, at least around the villages, but it was not good for the local peasantry.</div>
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In the time of William, rents for lands were paid in-kind. That is, you supplied a certain amount of grain to the lord of the vill each year according to the amount of land you were using. You rendered unto the lord a certain amount of work each year, or military service. You applied each year to renew your holding, and the terms of your arrangements were set. Rights of use of land formed a great theoretical pyramid, with the king at the top; the serfs, or cottars, at the bottom; and various tenants and thanes, villeins, earls, and lords in the middle and upper reaches. “From the Crown, all titles flow,” as the phrase had it.</div>
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All this more or less came to an end about the time that the Pilgrims and Puritans came to North America. By this time, in the mid-1600s, the old tenure system requiring payment in-kind or in personal services had faded. The King granted the lands of the Massachusetts Bay Company common socage, which meant that the rights of use of the land could be paid in rent rather than grains or firewood, or knights’ service to the King.<br />
Common socage was actually not an unusual form of payment for land in Kent and also in East Anglia, where many of the Puritans came from and where the feudal system had less of a footing than in other sections of England. Even before this time, peasants in England were able to maintain certain rights under what was known as the allodial system, which had been in practice as far back as the Roman period elsewhere in Europe. This held that no matter who was in control, no matter which king or queen sat on the throne, or who was lord, the peasants could continue on their traditional lands. There were no laws stating this, it was simply a reality, but it was such an enduring one that it has been at the root of the private-property system even into our time. It was from this concept that the idea of the common began to erode.</div>
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This idea of holding private property in fee simple, that is to say, as the absolute ownership of a piece of land that can be bought and sold, is actually a fairly recent development in legal history. The idea of land as property, something you own, as you would a book or a piece of furniture, did not come into full use until the eighteenth century. Before that, in English law at least, what you bought and sold was land held of someone; you bought the right to live there, or the right to use it. You did not actually own the ground.</div>
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By the eighteenth century in Britain, the common rights associated with land—pasturing cattle, for example, or cutting timber or turf—began to give way to a rigid set of regulations based on private outright ownership of property, and the tradition of the common began to fade. This was the same period as the Acts of Enclosure, when some six million acres of commonly held lands—meadows, open fields, and forests—were transferred into private hands by parliamentary approval and were hedged and fenced for private gain.</div>
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Here in New England, even though the idea of the commons was still ingrained in the colonial soul, the concept of the private plot, of each man as lord of his own manor, flourished in the wide-open spaces of the New World. Within a few decades of settlement, in communities such as Plymouth and Sudbury, the great fields and the pasturelands, and even the wild forest beyond, switched from common land to private holdings.</div>
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Nevertheless, the primordial idea of a public green space, a commonly held tract of land at the heart of the village, has endured. And although sadly diminished, the old town commons can still be found by anyone willing to shun the superhighways and poke around a little on back roads. </div>
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As one of the characters tells Stuart Little, “A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel too fast.”</div>
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John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-41720760749946598172007-11-09T13:03:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:25:48.058-08:00The Flight of the Wren<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
On any given morning between May 5 and May 10, I can step out in the garden and hear, for the first time in a year, the incessant, even frenetic, trilling of the house wren. They come in with the south wind, usually on a clear sunny morning, and go out, with far less flourish, on the northwest wind five months later.<br />
The male is the first to arrive, and he goes around “his” land (which according to twenty-first century legal documents is actually “my” land) stating his presence in no uncertain terms. He’s been here before, and he knows his way around.<br />
The female arrives a few days later. And after a certain amount of ritual, and restatements of territorial boundaries—none of which I can follow—she will begin work on a nest in a palatial birdhouse I have set up in back of the garden. The two of them spend the spring and summer there. Flitting around, getting angry, and hunting through the shrubbery for spiders and caterpillars.<br />
Bird aficionados are not supposed to like wrens. They’re noisy little devils, for one thing, and they have some very nasty habits. Once they’ve crammed their bulky stick nests into whatever convenient crevice they can find, they range around their property pecking the eggs of other nesting birds, almost out of spite, it would seem. Furthermore, they are not—how shall I say—the most beautiful bird in the backyard. They are patterned with a few dark stripes against a dull wood-colored brown background, their belly is whitish, and they have a mean little decurved bill that looks like it was designed for surgical purposes. Nor are they loyal mates. Once they have set up housekeeping, and the female is incubating the eggs, the male patrols his territory seeking other females. Given all this, they have not endeared themselves to those who seek wholesome metaphors from the world of birds—even their semi-musical trilling becomes tedious when you hear it every minute or so throughout the daylight hours.<br />
In spite of all this I am partial to wrens. I like their spunk. I like their cocky little tails and beady eyes, and the way they get mad at anything in their path and begin whispering and chattering at cats and dogs and even people.<br />
But mostly what I like about wrens is their predestined willingness to undertake marathon flights from the cold gardens of New England and Canada, south to Florida, and even beyond into Central and South America. It seems somehow unfathomable that these tiny packages can summon the energy to fly all the way down a continent and back up in the course of a year, select mates, and then go about the business of raising children, only to turn around and go back south again in autumn.<br />
Sometime in the summer, I don’t know when exactly since they slip out quietly, the wrens leave my garden. They fade from the sunny borders and move back into the shady woods, where they spend the late summer and early autumn feeding low to the ground, no longer singing and assuming, a certain hardworking, businesslike effect. Perhaps they need to lay low in this manner. They have a long trip ahead of them.<br />
Although a few individuals may hang around the northern woods until November, most house wrens begin their mass exodus in September. Like many land birds, they move south in fits and starts; and, like many migrants, they run into hardships all along the way. Storms carry them far out to sea. Head winds batter them, cats eat them, and, along with a growing number of birds nowadays, wrens crash into things at night. Fifty years ago these obstacles were radio towers, water towers, and the skyscrapers of cities. Now the birds have to contend with the proliferation of cell phone towers as well.<br />
Somehow, through all this, through pure atavistic drive and that unstoppable wren energy, they make it.<br />
Wrens are not long-distance migrants in the manner of swifts or nighthawks, or even warblers and hummingbirds. They generally only go as far south as Florida. But it is that lack of limelight, that businesslike, dogged manner, that I like about them. They’re working birds, energetic little sparks of life in a hard rock world.<br />
I daresay they will never to become extinct. JHM</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-1063044225081933842007-10-29T12:59:00.000-07:002014-01-13T13:11:04.505-08:00<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
EL LOBO<br />
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R22HOFMrnLI/AAAAAAAAAAY/4aBGOrL7u3I/s1600-h/whiteboy.jpg"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5146918625137630386" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_cTPOvHTCYOM/R22HOFMrnLI/AAAAAAAAAAY/4aBGOrL7u3I/s320/whiteboy.jpg" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto 10px; text-align: center;" /></a><br />
Some years ago, I inherited a Jack Russell terrier, who for some reason promptly choose me as his boon companion in his otherwise circumscribed life . If I went for a walk to the hemlock grove behind my house, he would join me, sometimes tagging at my heels, sometimes ranging out ahead of me in ever widening gyres, and poking his black nose into every hole, log hollow, rock crevice, tree crevice, leaf pile, brush pile, puddle, and pit he could find. In the garden he was also there. If I was in the process of digging a hole to plant a new tree, he would stand beside me, ever at alert, his head cocked, watching my work intently. If I deserted this task and moved over to clip a hedge he would trot behind at my heels. Waiting. And if ever I was on my knees with my hands deep in the good earth ---- about at his level in other words ---- I would hear his snuffling, and glance over. There he’d be, cheek to jowl, eyes fixed on the ground, ears perked forward, ready for some action. In time I taught him to dig out weeds, and even trained him to dig holes for tulip planting.<br />
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His other work with us was to protect the property from intruders which, to his dogly mind, were legion. There were known to be bears, wolves, foxes, wild ungulates, and all manner of unidentified species lurking in the forest beyond the garden wall. We ourselves could not always see these beasts, and we often wondered why, on some otherwise quiet afternoon, he would charge out from the porch and race along the top of the stone wall barking furiously, as if holding at bay a primordial herd of invading mammoths or a rangy pack of dire wolves from the time when this little patch of earth was all forest and swamps.<br />
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One afternoon, while I was working in the garden, I heard my companion barking furiously in the woods beyond the back wall. Nothing out of the ordinary really, except that he would return periodically to my side, circle my ankles and charge out again into the alien forest to resume his barking, which I noticed had a slightly different, more frenetic (if that’s possible) timbre to it. It occurred to me that he had treed something, and after a while, I went out to see what it was. It turned out he was holding at bay the largest, wildest coyote, I have ever seen.<br />
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Most of the coyotes that periodically cross this property are skittish things that tentatively flit over the walls to feed on compost. If they see you, or hear you, or even think they see you, they fade into the forest. But this animal was a fearless Goliath, and he was standing his ground ---- a great gray and brown furred, wolflike thing with a wide head, his forelegs propped on a low rock, staring back at this little canine poseur who circled at safe distance, yapping furiously. I realized, if he so chose, he could step down and with one snap, do away with my loyal companion. So I stepped forward and waved my arms.<br />
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Rather than dash away, the coyote merely sauntered off indifferently, took a stand on another boulder and turned to stare. The dog charged after it, circling and barking with even more ferocity, having presumed, I suppose, that he believed he had got the better of this devil dog. I called him off with a whistle and clapped my hands to scare off the intruder and returned to the garden, the dog at my heels.<br />
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We saw this coyote on several occasion after this event. We sometimes saw him standing on a wide stone wall that runs along the west side of the property, the morning sun gleaming off his gray -gold fur. Another time we saw him saunter across the yard, glancing over at the house periodically, straight–legged, and spoiling for a fight. He became a commonality. He even earned a name: el Lobo. We actually came to appreciate him for his wildness.<br />
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It was about this same time that I learned that his wolflike appearance was no accident. New genetic studies on the origins of the Eastern coyote seemed to indicate that, genetically, they were far closer to the original New England wolf, a sub-species of the red wolf, than they were to the simpering, little coyotes of the West. He and his like had returned to their native forest habitat along with the bears, fishers, bobcats, white-tailed deer, other denizens of the primordial forest that grew back in New England after the region lost most of its farmlands.<br />
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Twice over the following year, the Jack Russell stood el Lobo off again. Once at the stone wall next to the garden, and once when, for no apparent reason, he appeared in the middle of the vegetable garden among the tomatoes plants and the chard, glaring back at the house. On both these occasions, alerted by the barking of my assistant, I was the one who ultimately drove him away.<br />
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Later that winter, however, there was a third stand off.<br />
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We had a big, disorganized group of people at Christmas Eve dinner that year. Late in the evening, one of the guests went out on the porch and found the Jack Russell by the back door, his head hanging low, in apparent defeat. He walked in, slowly, an almost unheard of gait for him, and we noticed that he had a bloodied shoulder and that his unbounded, unstoppable energy seemed to have drained out of him. I gathered him up and found deep bite wounds all around his shoulders. Within a half an hour we had him bundled and raced him off to a nearby animal emergency center which, having determined that he had been badly mauled, sent us off to the Tufts Animal Hospital [rose, do you know the proper name for this place??] in Westborough.<br />
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This begat an ironic night drive through darkened landscape of rural New England, when all the world was stuffed and sleeping off the full dinners of Christmas Eve. The dog was admitted and the vet, a refined gentleman from one of the southern states said he was not sure the dog would survive the night, but that they would do what they could.<br />
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We drove home and waited for the dreaded call. When it came, around seven, we were informed that he was still alive.<br />
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He lived through the second night. The entire staff, having heard his story began rooting for him. He rallied, lived through the third night, and was released a week later, much battered, barely able to walk, but still counting himself among the living.<br />
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At his exit interview from the hospital, the vet explained that he had been picked up and shaken by a large animal, probably a coyote, but that he must have put up a very good fight.<br />
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“I imagine,” he said in his lazy drawl, “ that he must have got in a few good bites.”<br />
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Maybe he did. After that night, the woods were still. The great horned owls began calling in the hemlock grove in late January. In February the snows began melting back slowly, and by March, the wood frogs began calling from the nearby vernal pool.<br />
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But, after that terrible Christmas Eve, we never did see el Lobo again.</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-18677450838581371582007-10-29T12:00:00.000-07:002014-01-15T15:14:26.692-08:00Entroit: The Rose Cafe<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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“… you are astonished that I don’t feel willing to leave a country so miserable as ours; but I cannot help it. I am as much a production of this island as its green oats, and its rose-laurels; I must have my atmosphere impregnated with the perfume of the sea, and the exhalations of its mountains. I must have my torrents to cross, my rocks to climb, and my forests to explore; I want space—I want liberty…”<br />
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Alexandre Dumas<br />
The Corsican Brothers<br />
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“Whatever shall we do in that remote spot? Well, we shall write our memoirs. Work is the scythe of time.”<br />
Napoleon Bonaparte</div>
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John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1566569106987498677.post-18306334499451875702001-12-11T13:32:00.000-08:002014-01-13T13:34:19.425-08:00Bygone Birds<div>I grew up in a town famous for its old trees and gardens and also for its birdlife. There was a landscaped hillside visible from my bedroom, and one of my earliest memories is of the vast rolling chorus of robins, doves, and thrushes, and the unidentifiable (at least to me) squeaks, squawks, chips, buzzings, and peeps that on spring mornings would pour in my window like a waterfall.<br />
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I never thought about this great choral expression; it was just there, part of my world.<br />
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My family had come north from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, and, on summer visits to the rural settings of the old family farms and town gardens, the dawn chorus of birds was equally loud—as was the daylong winsome calling of the bobwhites and the noisy barking of crows in flocks that would dip across the cornfields. At night on my cousin’s river farm, I lay awake listening to the dark quock of night-herons sounding out from the riverbanks, and by day we lived with the eternal circling cries of ospreys. I even used to see bald eagles there, a rare event back then.<br />
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After that I lived in deep woods in northwestern Connecticut, where there were vast migrations of wood-warblers each spring and fall. That was owl country; the odd caterwauls of barred owls rang out from the nearby swampy lowlands in autumn and again in spring. I would hear the ghostly whinny of the screech-owl all through the summer, and the deep booming of the great horned owl on late winter nights, along with other shrieks and calls. Also on summer nights there, I used to be awakened by the mysterious night song of the ovenbird, along with the shrieks and snarls and cries of things I couldn’t identify—probably bobcats.<br />
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When I first moved to Massachusetts thirty or so years ago, I lived in an old house surrounded by farms. Each spring, the scrubby pasture just north of the house was loud with the calls of prairie warblers and blue-winged warblers. All along the brushy edges of the property, yellow warblers and yellowthroats nested. The indigo buntings would be singing madly by June, and every day the woodland edges were pierced with the sharp call of the great crested flycatcher.<br />
I used to see kingbirds in a nearby orchard; while the woods to the west, just beyond the garden wall, were alive with the songs of veeries, wood thrushes, ovenbirds, and black-and-white warblers, as well as ruby-crowned kinglets and parula warblers. And east of the house, hay fields dropped down to the marshes of Beaver Brook in a series of terraces, over which barn swallows and tree swallows coursed from dawn to dusk. Wood ducks, hooded mergansers, marsh wrens, green herons, and even the occasional bittern and sora rail used to appear in the marshes from time to time.<br />
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At dawn last spring, I heard the song of a black-billed cuckoo. That got me thinking about local birds. How long ago had it been since I last heard a black-billed cuckoo in the yard? For that matter, how long had it been since I had heard the plaintive dawn song of the wood pewee? Or the night wailing of the whip-poor-will? This year, other than the music of black-billed cuckoo, and one ovenbird, plus the usual array of garden birds such as blue jays and song sparrows, it was a silent spring. Furthermore, I have revisited most of the places I lived in the past and have noted the same phenomenon. The woods and fields have gone to development, and no birds sing.<br />
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All this is anecdotal evidence, but it’s a story you hear over and over. And now the facts of a massive worldwide decline of birds are everywhere in the scientific news. The whole class of aves, a group that evolved from dinosaurs some 160 million years ago, for a variety of reasons, is at a low ebb.</div>
John Hanson Mitchellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08505916630977861389noreply@blogger.com0