Off the Shelf

Virginia Watermen Families (Part 1)

2011-04-17T10:54:00.001-04:00

Aerial Shot of Ditchley in Northumberland County, Virginia (annmeekins.com)

Ditchley

Along the 1100 miles of crooked coastline delineating the Northern Neck of Virginia is a small jag of land known as Ditchley, population 70. The story of this small waterfront community encompasses both the evolution of one of the world’s most bountiful and beautiful estuaries, the Chesapeake Bay, and the evolution of an old American family. The generations of family members and inhabitants of the point have included Indians, colonial settlers, American Revolution officers, indentured and enslaved people, plantation families, Civil War commanders, farmers, and Chesapeake Bay watermen.

Dividing Creek (annmeekins.com)

Driving down Ditchley Road on an afternoon in early March the air is filled with the sound of spring peepers. There must be thousands of the tiny chorus frogs opening their throats in an unabashed primordial symphony heralding the spring equinox. The pulsing tempo of the sound is echoed in the reddening tree tips of the hardwood forests along the road, gathering their life force into another concentrated annual burst of buds, blossoms, fruit, and leaves. Farther down the road the horizon opens up into fields filled with large flocks of Canada geese placidly feeding on the remains of the fall’s harvest. Hawks and buzzards swoop watchfully above. Beyond the conifers and hardwoods edging the fields lies the broad bright blue of the Chesapeake with all of its hidden treasures.

Driveway to Ditchley

The driveway to the old plantation curves away to the left beckoning the visitor through a generous yard and gradually revealing the great house that rises serenely up through the centuries. An enormous Magnolia grandiflora sprawls over the lawn with multiple petticoat branches swaying out from a massive trunk. The magnolia is joined by a cotillion of historic trees including Black walnut, American holly, Osage-orange, and America sycamore. The majestic trees add grandeur to the grounds rolling into acres of fields and forests.

Magnolia Petticoat Limbs

Osage oranges (Doug Hornsby)

Ditchley flanked by Sycamore and Magnolia Trees

Besides the big house and the caretaker’s house to the side, there is a symmetrical pair of old smokehouses flanking the house like two faithful old guards. The smokehouses are the only remaining plantation outbuildings dating back to the late eighteenth century and both structures have pyramidal roofs.

One of two old smokehouses

The house is constructed of handmade bricks that have mellowed with age and rests in a protective nest of old English boxwoods encircling the foundation. The bushes emit a powerful, evocative scent I recognize from a lifetime of visiting old homes, it is the smell of history. This beautiful, idyllic corner of the world is where family, home, and nature intertwine for my dear friend, Virginia Lee Loudenslager Adams. Recently, I ask Lee about her family memories.

“When I was a little girl in the Northern Neck, I had the most wonderful grandparents in the world. My grandmother was a school teacher and my grandfather was a waterman. In the late fifties and sixties, my three little sisters and I would take the bus from Warsaw down to Kilmarnock where they would be waiting for us. They would whisk us right to the drugstore for sodas and milkshakes, and then home to Ditchley. Every weekend through the summer my parents would come to pick us up and we would shriek, NO! NO! and beg and plead for just one more week, and then another week, and then another. Our grandparents loved having us visit, and we never wanted to leave.”

Indeed, the family had not wanted to leave this beautiful piece of coastline for over three hundred years. Around 1650, Colonel Richard Lee of England sailed up the Virginia coast and cast his shrewd gaze over a parcel of land bounded by the Chesapeake Bay and two large tidal creeks. Lee purchased the land from the Wicomico Indians and called the area "Dividing Creek". Since 1651, the house site and the surrounding acreage have been owned by members of the Lee and Ball families, and most recently a trust established by the Jesse Ball Dupont Foundation.

RIchard Lee built a home between the two branches of Dividing Creek with a wide view of the Chesapeake Bay. He established a prosperous tobacco plantation which he left to his widow and three sons. When the house burned seventy years later, his descendent Hancock Lee built a fine brick Colonial style home in 1759, just two hundred yards from the original house site. The plantation, now known as Ditchley, was named after an ancestral Lee estate in England.

The National Historic Register's description of Ditchley notes the architectural importance of the structure. “Only a small number of houses of this quality were built in the Virginia colony and only a handful survive. Nonetheless, they have come to symbolize the grace and elegance of high-style colonial Virginia design, and have had a profound impact on American taste, inspiring hundreds of twentieth-century imitations across the country. As such, Ditchley and related works have become icons of our architectural heritage, a distinctly Virginia contribution.”

Portrait of Mary Ball

Descendants of Colonel Richard Lee include a Revolutionary War general, two signers of the Declaration of Independence, Robert E. Lee, Chief Commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, five other Confederate Generals, President of the United States Zachary Taylor, Chief Justice Edward Douglass White, and Maryland Governor Thomas Sims Lee. Lettice Lee, a direct descendent, married Colonel James Ball, a relative of Mary Ball Washington, the mother of George Washington. He purchased Ditchley in 1789. Yet another descendent of Colonel Lee and the Balls of Ditchley is my friend Virginia Lee Loudenslager Adams, who cares not one whit about history or lineage, but loves her family and the landscape of her childhood.

Front door of Ditchley

“My mother, Elizabeth Eleanor Ball Loudenslager, was born in one of the upstairs bedrooms of Ditchley in 1927. Her family lived there, but the house was owned by her cousin, Jesse Ball Dupont. When I was a child my grandparents lived in a frame house within sight of the big house. My Aunt Edie lived out on the point, and we had other relatives who lived at Ditchley. There were also several African American families who lived there who shared the name Ball. The family cemetery has graves going back to 1694. There is a little baby grave in the cemetery with a little headstone. We would always look at that little grave when we were children, it seemed so sad, and of course, there are several children’s graves in the family cemetery.”

Lee Family Cemetery

There is no trace of the homes or graves of the enslaved people that worked the property for generations. Like the Indians before them, time has folded their labors, tears, triumphs, and struggles seamlessly back into the old earth, but the history of Ditchley and the Tidewater bears testimony to their existence, and their descendants have become some of the oldest surviving families of the Northern Neck. Even Ditchley house has narrowly escaped from being destroyed by fire on at least one occasion.

“One night we were sitting at the dinner table at my grandparent’s house and there was a big thunderstorm. We saw the lightening come down and hit Ditchley. BOOM! And then suddenly, there were flames leaping out. The men got up and ran out of the house. We weren’t allowed to go, but we watched everything through the windows. They got the fire out and saved the house, but it was very exciting!”

Ditchley - West Facade

The old home was saved, a beautiful architectural relic of a time gone by. The great wealth generated by the original tobacco plantations dissipated with the generations. Continuous tobacco cultivation exhausted the soil and by the mid-eighteenth century much of Virginia’s farmland lay fallow. Plantation owners turned to other crops and livestock, but no other crop grown in Virginia created the wealth of the early tobacco cultivated during the Colonial era.

“My grandfather was Charles Flexmer Ball Jr. He knew his grandfather, who was born in 1816 and who fought in the Civil War.”

When the Civil War erupted an entire generation of Southern men joined the army or the calvary. Many never returned and those that did found that the the tide had turned irrevocably for the old Cavalier families. A new era began for both the African American and the white families, who now lived a subsistence lifestyle side by side at Ditchley; separated more by culture than by circumstance. Black and white people in the little community farmed the land, hunted, and for the first time, started to intensively farm and harvest the abundant life of the Chesapeake Bay.

"Historic Virginia Homes and Churches" (Lancaster) 1915

The Bay had always offered up an astounding natural bounty. Colonial settlers described flocks of waterfowl so large that they blocked the sun. Large reefs of oyster shells stacked like stones lay just below the surface of the water. Crabs, menhaden, rockfish, oysters, clams, shad, herring, and even salmon were there for the taking. By the 1870‘s, with the opening of the western railways during the war, trade was booming across the vast American continent. Suddenly, there was a insatiable national market for seafood, and a hardworking waterman could make a living. In 1872 the Chesapeake Bay yielded oyster harvests one hundred times larger than the current harvests. However, a life lived by and on the water could be dangerous and difficult.

“Some of our family lived in a frame house near the water at Ditchley. One of the big hurricanes blew the house over, and Father, my great grandfather, stepped out of the second story window right into the field. An oil lamp was turned over, and the house was soon engulfed in flames and completely destroyed. Everything was burned. All the family stuff and the family silver. In my grandparent’s china cabinet was a misshapen goblet that was all they had left.”

Northern Neck Shoreline

“Aunt Betty’s father and brother drowned in a boating accident on the Bay in the winter. Everyone always knew it was dangerous on the water. Everybody had a story about falling out of the boat, most of the boats had a steering stick with ropes that ran the engine, and there was many a story about falling over, catching the stick, and having the boat go in circles. They were the good stories.”

Northern Neck Coastline

There was other boat traffic on the water besides the watermen and their workboats. From the Colonial and Antebellum Eras throughout the 1920's boats continued to be the principal form of transportation for people in the region. You could travel by boat up the bay to Baltimore and Annapolis, Maryland or down the Bay to Newport News, Hampton, and Portsmouth, Virginia, or across the Bay to the Eastern Shore. In the late nineteenth century steamboats were an important part of life in the Northern Neck.

There was a steamboat wharf in almost every waterfront town, where ships stopped to load and unload goods and people in a lively flow of commerce and visitors around the Bay. People in the Northern Neck were far more connected to Baltimore than to Richmond, or other inland cities.

“My grandmother was a school teacher in Baltimore, and she came down on a steamboat, and that is how my grandparents met. They were so devoted, she would always say, “Don’t you die before me!” and he didn’t. At the funeral my grandfather said, “No one loved her children or her grandchildren more than Eleanor.“ I couldn’t stop crying. I remember walking down the lane to the cemetery at Ditchley. I wanted to be by myself. I was wracked by loss.”

Ditchley - Southern View

"My grandfather was so smart and so patient. He had gone to the University of Virginia, but his education was disrupted by WWI. He was a Chesapeake Bay waterman, and as brown as that wooden coffee table over there from being out in the sun for so many years. In the summer as children we would get up before dawn and be sitting in the wooden skiff being rowed out to the big boat by 4:30 am. The big boat was named the 'Slow and Easy', and she was tethered to a piling in the deep water outside the cove.”

Chesapeake Bay Deadrise Waterman's Boat (Greg Vassilakos photo)

“My grandfather had built, or had commissioned to be built, all of his boats on the property. His big work boat was a Chesapeake Bay Deadrise with a center cockpit. Every year he would take the boats to be hauled out on the railroad. The barnacles would be scraped off of the bottoms, and then they would be painted with copper paint. He had a wharf with a crab shack out in the water, and a net shed. He repaired his own nets, and his hands were scarred and beaten from years of working with the nets and the boats. The tips of his fingers were stained copper from dipping the nets in copper sulfate to keep them from being eaten by marine organisms."

"Before copper paint there would be a great big tar pot dug out on the side of the creek bank so you could reach under it to put wood on a fire. When the tar was heated and was thin enough you could put your nets in the pot and coat them with the tar. He would dip the nets into the hot liquid tar and then hang them over big stakes in every direction to dry every year or two. We were not allowed to run under them because we could get burnt!”

“Summer mornings at dawn the water was often so still and quiet. As the sunrise lit up the sky, my grandfather would steer the boat over to the poles where his pound net was strung. Then he would start slowly drawing the net in, draping the surplus net over the poles as he gathered it closer. As he brought it in, he would be leaning over the net, culling the catch, tossing creatures back into the bay. The water drops on the net sparkled in the early light. There would be little seahorses stuck to the ropes; and all sorts of fantastical creatures like gar fish, skates, diamondback terrapins, sea turtles, eels, and all sorts of fish. Crabs were tossed into the barrel if they were the right size.”

Pound Net (dnr.state.md.us)

“I remember the first time I saw dolphins flashing out of the water at dawn. In the shallows, the boat passed over the shadows of giant rays, sliding silently and swiftly as clouds below the surface of the water.”

Loggerhead (dnr.state.md.us)

“My grandfather caught blues, croakers, and rockfish to eat, but he thought the best eating was the blow toads or puffer toads. The Northern Puffer was little with a face like a parrot fish. They were not puffed all the time, and they had two little pieces about the size of your fingers behind their head, that was the real “Chicken of the Sea”! We all loved sugar toads because they were so sweet! They were delicious!"

“The Chesapeake blue crabs were there from the spring through the autumn. The crabs dwell on the flat channel bottoms, and in winter they leave the bay for deep offshore water. The soft crabs were all around the shores. You would look for the crab shedding floats and then the crabs under it. He would catch peelers, then put them in the crab floats until they shed. The men would pack the soft shell crabs in wet sea weed to keep them alive. The hard crabs were packed in baskets.”

“My grandfather always had lot of treats and sandwiches packed for us. When we got restless, because we were still little girls, he would stop what he was doing and take us over to a wild stretch of Bay beach where we could dig in the sand and play and swim. We swam with the sea nettles for years, but we didn’t care. He would just wait, patiently watching over us.”

Bay Beach (Doug Hornsby)

Sea Nettle or Jellyfish in early spring

Tidal Beach in the Northern Neck

“One day we were in the boat when he was taking his catch to the buy-boat to sell. As we neared the other boat he called out “Hullooo”. There was no answer. He called out again, “Hulloooo”, and then again, “Hulloooo”! There was still no answer. It was very quiet and the waves were slapping against the side of the boat. My grandfather frowned a little staring at the boat. He said, “I’ll tell you what girls, let’s go find someone else.” And he did, and just as he must have suspected, the Captain of the buy-boat was found on the floor below deck, where he had fallen through the hull and broken his neck, dead.”

“In the winter my grandfather tonged oysters. I remember watching him open the oyster shells with his sharp oyster knife. I would love to have his old knife sharpener, but it is long gone. It was wooden with a wheel and a treadle which he pumped with his foot while he held his knife against the spinning sharpening wheel. He would shuck the oyster into mason jars in his crab house. I remember he would count the oysters as he shucked them. One, and he would slip the oyster into the mason jar, two, three, four, five, all into the jar, and then six, into his mouth! Then he would start counting all over again. I still don’t like raw oysters to this day.”

“There were always eels around and sometimes he sold eels in a good market. Once I remember we were in the little skiff and he was checking crab floats for soft shells and I was just a child, dangling my fingertips in the water. My trailing fingers attracted an eel, and before I thought about it, I grabbed the eel and flung it across the boat and smacked my grandfather across the head!”

“The men would also go fishing and hunting. We would have wild goose for Thanksgiving. My great grandmother wrote a little piece for the local newspaper for years. I remember one whoops moment, when she wrote that, “Master Charles Ball got a fine goose for the table”, only it wasn’t hunting season. This didn’t even occur to her, because of course, when she was a girl growing up, there was no designated hunting season.”

Northern Neck

“My grandfather didn’t farm the land, he was always working on the water year round, and it was a subsistence life. During really lean times people would fish someone else’s pound net on the sly, and that was really bad. It was stealing the food from your children’s mouths. I remember during bad times that my grandfather would take food to some of the other families on the point that he knew were going hungry. The bay was not always abundant. There were ebbs and flows in a waterman’s life, times when the red tide came. My grandaddy was still fishing in the early seventies, and there was already a rockfish crash then, and of course, MSX killed the oysters.”

“One of the rites of passage was when you were finally a big girl, you could take the skiff around the edges of the cove all by yourself. I stood on the seat and poled around, it was a big moment. What I remember about our lives was that we were so family oriented, with Ditchley house, the field, Aunt Edie's, my grandparents, and out on the point, my great grandfather's house. We read voraciously, all of the time, when we were not outside or on the water. I remember the fireflies lighting up the fields at night, the bob whites, and the white throated sparrows singing in the holly trees in the early spring. I can remember the sound of those sparrows, and then they would go away. My grandfather and his father and his grandfather and so on, they lived their whole lives at Ditchley on Dividing Creek."

(dnr.state.md.us)

The Chesapeake Singing Cowboys

2011-03-30T16:01:00.000-04:00

The Chesapeake Singing Cowboys

Walks Along the Washington Ditch of the Great Dismal Swamp

2011-02-25T08:10:00.007-05:00

The deep amber colored water of the Dismal Swamp is tinted from the tannic acid of the surrounding cypress, gum, and juniper trees which prohibits the growth of bacteria. In past centuries ships carried barrels of this pure swamp elixir which was believed to cure illnesses. Captain Cook is reputed to have filled his ships water barrels from Lake Drummond before embarking on his world voyage. The dark, mysterious water is the most distinctive characteristic of the Great Dismal Swamp; one of the last remaining great wild places along the Eastern Seaboard.

The Washington Ditch, constructed by George Washington's Land Company circa 1768, may be the nation's oldest artificial waterway. The canal, almost five miles long and ten foot wide, was dug by slave labor to transport log rafts and drain the canal. The enslaved people who worked as lumber men lived in a vanished settlement located at the western origin point of the canal called "Dismal Town". Recently, I have been enjoying walking the trail that runs beside the ditch.

The land was eventually sold to the Union Camp Company, who constructed the road bed beside the canal. In 1973, the company donated the 49,100 acre tract to the Land Conservancy, for transfer to the U.S. Department of the Interior. The tract is now part of the 107,000 acre Great Dismal Swamp National Wildlife Refuge, created to "protect and restore" the great swamp; home to bobcats, otters, deer, birds, turtles, and one of the largest black bear populations on the East Coast.

"The Great Dismal Swamp has long been considered a place of natural beauty, mystery, and legend. The swamp is an integral part of the cultural history of the region and remains a place of refuge for people and for wildlife." (U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service)

The Washington Ditch empties directly into Lake Drummond. The Ditch is fed by several small streams, probably from springs in the swamp. Often the air has a wonderful, sweet smell. There is a deep, calming silence in the swamp, broken only by the splashes of frogs and bird calls in the forest.

The refuge is open from dawn to dusk for naturalists, photographers, bikers, walkers, and those who may occasionally feel the call of the wild ~

Better Read Than Dead!

2011-02-21T12:58:00.002-05:00

1939 Funeral Home/Library Offices dubbed "The Hereafter"

Every day many strange and wonderful stories happen in public libraries. Lives are changed. Destinies are shaped. Discoveries are made. Sometimes these stories center around the librarians.

In the winter of 1990 the library where I worked was overdue for a total renovation. The library was located in a 1917 public school building composed of several large classrooms, all outfitted with beautiful big windows, wood floors, ornate iron radiators, slate chalk boards, and millions of dust motes. The Director was concerned that the wood floor joists beneath some of the book stacks might be giving way. The determining moment came when the Library Board and the Director all went down to the classroom housing the biography collection and jumped up and down. The floor moved.

Up to that time we had adapted bravely to the status quo, as library people tend to do. The secretary worked in the former coat closet of her first grade classroom. The outreach department worked out of the former kitchen, the nonfiction books were shelved in the cafeteria, and so on. The massive old four floor brick building lacked an elevator, but sported an old wooden ramp covering the stairs leading down to the cafeteria addition. Generations of children gleefully stampeded noisily up and down the ramp to the resignation of parents and the stoic staff.

For one brief shining moment in the annals of library history, the staff took to rollerskating in the mornings before the library opened. The daring members could shoot down the ramp and then weave through the tables and stacks of the nonfiction room. If the children had only known!

The Library (source: www.librarypoint.org)

The plans called for a renovation with a capital R. The library would need temporary space for an interim library onsite; and offsite storage for approximately another hundred thousand volumes and staff work space. The town fathers, not wishing to expend any more tax payer capital than absolutely necessary, searched their collective minds for a temporary offsite location. Voila! A novel solution was found. The City had just purchased a recently vacated old funeral home in town for future court space. The library could use the funeral home!

Another co-worker and I were given a tour for planning purposes. This was my first glimpse of a mortuary establishment behind the scenes. We struggled to maintain a professional demeanor as we swung from nervous laughter to a morbid fascination and a distinct unease.

As we walked through the spaces we were able to identify some solid design advantages. There was a huge hearse garage capable of storing thousands of books. The garage was connected to the building with a ramp that was perfect for rolling book carts, as were the strangely long elevators. The downstairs viewing room could become the law library, and the director and assistant could fit nicely into the funeral director’s office suite. The chapel could be used for staff meetings, if one could creatively adapt the coffin shaped platform located at the front, a decorating challenge not normally addressed in women’s magazines. We would also have to ignore some rather disturbing past revelations in the local paper.

It seems that the chapel’s voluminous red velvet drapes, which could have outfitted Scarlett several times, had not been disturbed for many years. Imagine everyone’s surprise when a body was discovered behind some of the drapes, neatly embalmed, but apparently forgotten by some long ago busy staff member. When I gingerly peered behind these very curtains I discovered several wall vaults, presumably storage for those busy times like the plague. I chose not to investigate further.

The going got tougher as we toured the second floor. As Hunter Thompson once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.” We saw another large viewing room which could be subdivided into offices. There were more small offices and a bathroom complete with a shower and a cache of smelling salts in the closet, which could have come in handy for the rest of the tour. Next was a long unheated room, which the assistant city manager cheerfully explained had been the coffin storage room. Now, it was an empty dusty room with a strange dark stain on the wood floor. None of us chose to comment or speculate on the stain’s origin.

We passed down a narrow twisting hall that led to the back of the building, past a suitably gothic window, and ended at the door of the embalming room. My compatriot is a very calm and rational person, but when the door opened I saw the hair suddenly stand at attention on her arms. I will spare the reader the lurid details, except to note that there was mysterious equipment that made my dentist’s chair seem like a beloved rocking chair. The windows were frosted glass. The assistant manager quickly assured us the special features would be removed promptly. We decided the long counters and sinks would come in handy for the cataloging and processing department, and hastily departed.

And so the project unfolded. We wrenched the collections out of that old school building using a combination of trustees from the local jail, temporary workers, staff, and volunteers. Men heaved the law collection up through the basement windows on makeshift ramps using brute force. After we moved the massive book collections from the lower floors, we spent another two weeks staggering down the flights of stairs carrying years of stuff squirreled away by conscientious librarians.

At one point we gave up and started throwing items through the windows into the enormous dumpster positioned below. This quickly stopped when we discovered much of the town was checking out the treasures in the dumpsters, and we were risking an accidental road runner /wily coyote flattening type of incident.

Then there came a point during the several week long process when most of the trustees decided that the extra time off for good behavior really wasn’t worth this much effort. Instead, they elected to stay home in their cells, relax, and read some of their recent acquisitions. Over the next few years I would occasionally see a man in a convenience store or somewhere around town and they would look at me in horror, and then mutter, “You are that woman from the library!” Then they would hasten away, apparently terrified I would somehow force them to return to the library and work. A few of the trustees and temporary workers soldiered through the entire process, gaining the respect and friendship of staff, and a sense of solid accomplishment and belonging that I hope they carried forward in life.

So we persevered on with a constantly changing cast of characters. The sheer physical labor of a major library move can be staggering without a professional moving crew doing all of the work. We did have two library moving consultants with a tractor trailer and industrial carts who were invaluable. Moving tens of thousands of books in order, taking apart and reassembling tons of steel shelving into new configurations, and setting up temporary library spaces out of a hodgepodge of salvaged stuff is a big undertaking. However, like other momentous occasions in life, such as multiple birth or running a marathon, participating in a library move can be an empowering learning experience.

There is something wonderful about working with dozens of people on a major endeavor, brainstorming, problem solving, and sharing the simple satisfaction of hard physical labor. The move turned out to be one of the best of times of my life. Friendships were deepened, new friends were made, creativity flourished, and countless challenges were overcome by teamwork. The library staff adjusted to the changes gallantly and humorously. Slogans were coined including, my personal favorite, “Better Read than Dead!” The temporary library was dubbed the “Here”, and the funeral home the “Hereafter”.

When that enormous old school building finally stood empty a friend and I climbed up through the attic and out on the roof and sat staring out, exhausted and euphoric, into the early evening. Disturbed pigeons beat their wings furiously in the air all around us, and the old town lay far below like a faded postcard in the dusk. The river curved sweetly around the bend, edged with giant old sycamores, the bare white branches like old bones against the sky. The memory of that moment in time still burns bright and clear.

A View of Town (source: www.tripwow.tripadvisor.com)

I also recall that the former funeral director came back to visit during the year the funeral home was our temporary home. He seemed genuinely stricken at the changes, and I suddenly understood that the funeral home had been a beloved institution and the center of his life, just as the library was the center of ours. I sensed that there had been a rhythm, a dignity and a gravity in the daily operations of that building that were gone forever now.

My time there also made me think some about the funeral home business; the culture, traditions and people. One of the most capable public administrators I have known came from an old funeral home family on the Eastern Shore. C.M. Williams was unfailingly courteous, a formal and reserved gentleman of the old school. Over the years he was kind to me, and in the end I like to think we were friends. I have met several other kind and gentle funeral directors, descended from generations of funeral home families, some with historic homes and funeral buggies dating back to before the Civil War.

Often the funeral director is a respected community member such as Sid Oman who was the beloved Mayor of Chesapeake, Virginia and Elizabeth City, N.C. during his career. Many of these old families have been bought out by new chains, and like many business models, the era of the family funeral home is drawing to a close in many places. There is a third generation small town Michigan funeral director who gives voice to the profession. Thomas Lynch, poet and writer, writes humanely, movingly and eloquently about his experiences and thoughts. His books have been widely and critically acclaimed and the subject of two award winning documentaries.

The Library Director always claimed the year spent in the funeral home was her favorite, presumably because it offered a peaceful respite from the usual beehive of a busy public library. I have more mixed emotions. There always seemed to be some palpable emotional resonance of sadness in the space that made me uncomfortable.

Late one evening I stopped by to pick up a forgotten item from my desk upstairs. I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway with the red damask wallpaper, pulsing with the faint orange glow of a night light. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything. The air felt throbbing, thick, and oppressive. I made my way to the bottom of the staircase. I felt as though I was wading very slowly through high water. My heart pounded. It was difficult to breath and I felt as though I was suffocating. I gazed up at the dark second floor yawning above. I simply could not make myself climb up those stairs. I turned and left the building.

No doubt my own imagination and emotional psyche triggered my reactions, but I certainly understood when I heard later that one of the General Distict Court judges flatly refused to have his office in the former embalming room, despite a total renovation. Since that time I have gone on to move many libraries and be involved in many large building projects, but none have involved adapting a space quite as unusual as a funeral home. No project has ever rivaled that first big move for sheer audacity, magnitude, and complexity.

However, I have discovered that wherever you go, people who work in libraries are very good people with willing hearts and hands. I have learned that libraries are a lot like families. They are created with sweat and tears, worry, humor, leaps of faith, and confidence. Creating and maintaining libraries requires a bold shared vision, a lot of hard work by dedicated staff, and a great deal of help and support from many people in the community.

This year the valiant staff of the Chesapeake Public Library is looking forward to several big building projects. This spring we will be moving the South Norfolk Library to make way for a beautiful new building and setting up a temporary library down the street. In October, we are planning a month long, low budget, and creative re-adaptation of the Russell Library by staff, trustees, and volunteers. After the new year we will be moving back into the new South Norfolk Library. Once again, we will have an opportunity to utilize all of those combined talents and skills gleaned from life experiences, and to learn some new ones, because every project is unique. So, once more into the breach, dear friends and co-workers, once more, or in this case thrice more. Now, where is my rubber mallet?

The Secret Life of Snowstorms

2011-01-19T22:28:00.001-05:00

The Snowstorm

Chesapeake, Christmas Evening, 2010

“Silence in the terrible beauty of the snow and of the Sphinx and of the stars...”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

The snow is falling, wrapping the landscape in a soft white cloak. In the morning we sleep late, snuggling deeper into our beds. The highway is quiet, the alarm is silenced, and the bustling world of commerce, productivity, and motion is abruptly halted. We have entered the altered dimension of snow time.

Life is restricted to our interior landscape; cooking in the kitchen, gazing out the windows, sitting by the fire and around the table, reading, and taking long naps under downy comforters. Occasionally we take a walk through the neighborhood. The snow takes us back to an older rhythm of life, when families lived in close proximity during the long winters and life had a slower, deeper pace.

“Housed and windowpaned from it, the greatest wonder to little children is the snow.”

(The Snowman by O. Henry)

When I was a child we made snow cream. We scooped up enough clean snow to fill a big chilled bowl, and mixed it with a cup of whole milk or cream, a dash of vanilla, and sugar to taste, or just sweetened condensed milk and vanilla. Crushed frozen fruit or chocolate syrup could be added for the young snow gourmand. Winter also brought the tradition of cutting intricate and elegant paper snowflakes out of folded paper that were taped to windows by loving mothers and teachers.

The magic and joy of snow storms shine brightest when viewed from young eyes. The Snowy Day, a wonderful Caldecott Classic by Ezra Jack Keats, shows how little Peter’s urban world in transformed by a big snowstorm. Peter goes out to play and makes snow angels, a snowman, and then he pretends to be a mountain climber. Peter tries to preserve some of the magical snow by carefully putting a snowball in his pocket. The snow melts in the house during the night, but the next day brings fresh snow and happiness. One of the most important picture books of the last century, The Snowy Day was a groundbreaking work when it debuted in 1964, and the book is credited with introducing multicultural images and characters to mainstream American children’s literature.

Today, the Chesapeake Public Library catalog lists almost four hundred entries for children's books about snow, but snow has always been popular in stories for the young. In 1812, the Brothers Grimm published a collection of seventy-four fairytales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were studying and researching linguistics when they recorded and preserved many old folktales including Hansel and Gretel, Beauty and the Beast, Little Red Riding Hood, The Three Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Cinderella, the Frog Prince, and Snow White.

“Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the snow flakes were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black ebony. And whilst she was sitting and looking out the window at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty upon the white snow and she thought to herself, I wish that I had a child with skin as white as the snow, as red as the blood, and as black as the ebony wood of the window- frame.”

Hans Christian Anderson brought us the story of the Snow Queen in 1848, often considered one of his finest stories. The Queen of the snowflakes, or “snow bees” follows the snow fall around the world, but her palace is in the land of the permafrost. Anderson also wrote The Snow Man in 1861. "It is so delightfully cold," said the Snow Man, "that it makes my whole body crackle. This is just the kind of wind to blow life into one."

In the Little House Books, Laura Ingalls Wilder describes family life during the 1800's on the northern prairies with long weeks sitting by the stove together sewing, doing lessons, and reading aloud while the snow piled up even with the second story window. Her stories were my first glimpse into life in extreme Northern climates as she described a Dakota winter where blizzard followed blizzard.

“But even after Laura was warm she lay there listening to the wind’s wild tune and thinking of each little house, in town, alone in the whirling snow with not even the light of the next house shining through. And the little town was alone in the wide prairie. Town and prairie were lost in the wild storm which was neither earth nor sky, nothing but fierce winds and a white blankness.” ( The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder)

Another wonderful family film and novel, LIttle Women, includes images of the snowy weather encapsulating the cozy family life of the March family. The author, Louisa May Alcott, described one scene as, “....a little sketch of the four sisters, who sat knitting away in the twilight, while the December snow fell quietly without, and the fire crackled cheerfully within." The March family were based on Louisa's own family, growing up without much money, but with a lot of love in the old Orchard House in snowy Massachusetts.

Snow represents a break from normality and routine, an alternate reality. In the beloved children’s book The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, the door in the back of the wardrobe opens into a winter forest, blanketed in snow, alien and magical. Even without the fantastical creatures, snow is suggestive of a fantasy world, and the pure, icy evil of the Snow Queen transfixes even the most worldly adult reader.

Without the distractions and stimulation of the modern world, family and winter life in the past centered around conversation, singing, storytelling, reading, and the endless emotional nuances of human relationships. This rich interior life is captured cinematically in Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s beautiful movie, Fanny and Alexander, set in the early 1900's in a Swedish town. The extravagantly detailed Victorian rooms, the sleighs filled with fur bundled families, and the intense emotions and colorful characters of family life are celebrated in the beautiful opening scenes of this film from the far North. I thought of all these storied families over the holidays as my own family stayed home together, building roaring fires, playing Scrabble and making pots of tea while we marveled over the curtain of snow falling outside the windows.

I also thought of outside pleasures in the snow. Some of the loveliest walks of my life have been through snowy landscapes. Particularly walking through forests of conifers where the boughs are swagged and laden with snow. Once wandering through a snowy pine forest I heard strange clattering sounds. Following the noise I came to the edge of a small clearing where two large bucks, heads down, hooves stomping, battered their antlered heads against each other as fierce as any two warriors locked in mortal combat. I crouched watching through the trees for a long time. The deer were oblivious to my presence, consumed with battle lust, hormones, and power.

Growing up we spent much of our time in or by the creek that ran through the woods near our home. The moving water was endlessly fascinating in every season. In winter the granite boulders were capped with white and ice, the waterfalls frozen into glassy sculptures, the water crusty with frozen ice begging to be broken.

Although snow promises a chance for domestic bliss and leisurely strolls, it also offers extreme adventure, hardship, and survival stories. If you decide that traveling the icy roads of Chesapeake are not sufficiently exciting, then reading about those intrepid souls who pit themselves against the most severe elements can be very entertaining. There are many extraordinary books on polar explorers such as The Coldest March: Scott’s Fatal Antarctica Expedition by Susan Solomon or Admiral Richard Byrd's own account of his five months of dangerous and solitary survival in an observation camp in Antarctica entitled Alone: The Classic Polar Adventure.

Photo: Frank Hurley

Another true story that has always fascinated me is the failed Ernest Shackleton Imperial Trans-Antartica Expedition between 1914 and 1917. The ship, aptly named the Endurance, was crushed by ice packs, and the men were marooned for a year while Shackleton staged a heroic rescue by setting out in a lifeboat for help. The tale is vividly brought to life by the astounding photographic record of Frank Hurley, who recorded the entire epic on fragile glass negatives. The photographs are haunting and awe inspiring, capturing the marooned men with their glittering eyes and frosted beards, the icebound ship reduced to a sculpture, and the tiny figures juxtapositioned against the vast white wilderness. Miraculously, they survived in the arctic landscape for a year and didn’t lose a single soul. Somehow, united in the knife edge fight for survival, they fared better in the freezing wilderness than back in the civilized world, where alcohol and restless energy drove them to worst fates.

Photo: Frank Hurley

New Yorkers who found themselves stranded and angry in this snowstorm could gain perspective from one of the many historical accounts of the Great White Hurricane of March 1888. Snowfalls of over four feet blanketed New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts. The weather stations recorded eighty miles per hour gusts and sustained winds of over forty five miles per hour, which resulted in average drifts of thirty feet covering the roofs of many houses, with the highest drifts up to fifty. Engineers tried to ram trains through the drifts and only succeeded in burying entire cars and trapping passengers for days. The temperature averaged nine degrees the day of the storm. The entire Northeast seaboard was totally immobilized from Norfolk to Boston and over two hundred ships were sunk or grounded.

Ironically, it was the city dwellers, newly dependent on modern transportation such as street cars and trains, grocery stores, coal and milk delivery who suffered the most. Most farming families weathered the storms with their wood piles, root cellars, and stocked provisions the same way humans have weathered blizzards for centuries.

Hundreds died from blizzard related accidents and from exposure. The monster storm changed America forever, resulting in the construction of the New York subway system, burying underground electrical and telephone lines in New York City, the establishment of the National Weather Bureau, and even new laws regulating trash collection because of all of the incidents that resulted from debris blowing around the streets like missiles during the blizzard. SInce this storm there have been other storms just as huge, but the experience and knowledge gleaned from each new weather event has helped us prepare for the next.

Although we are better prepared in the modern world, a big snow fall still promises a time out, a time to think, a time to remember when life was different. The phrase “going north” is still a metaphor for solitude, loneliness, and quiet. For space. For room to breathe. Let it snow.

A Boy's Life: Hunting in Old Back Bay

2010-12-12T20:59:00.004-05:00

My husband and I are plummeting down, down, down at a dizzying speed via Google Earth. We are hurtling downward to the world, to North America, to Virginia, then to a small point of land on the coast, and a dock with a boathouse and a treelined inlet.

“Well, I’ll be.” My husband says quietly. “There it is, there’s the boathouse.”

We are staring at a place on the laptop screen he hasn’t seen in almost forty years. A place now called “Wash Woods” inside the False Cape Virginia State Park. In 1966, a commission recommended that the State purchase over 4,000 acres of land on a thin barrier strip between the Atlantic Ocean and Back Bay. The land was condemned over strong protests by the owners and a failed lawsuit, and just like that, a way of life abruptly ended.

Once, men were men, and men had guns, and men had dogs, and together, they all went hunting. For the past century some of the wildest and most abundant hunting land on the Eastern Seaboard has been found along the edge of Virginia straddling the North Carolina line in a life infused body of water known as Back Bay. The grass savannas, creeks, and islands are all part of the Eastern Flyway; that great annual southern migration path followed by millions of geese, ducks and other birds in an ancient journey programmed deep into their feathered DNA.

Etched deeply into the human genetic code is the drive to hunt, gather, and foray. When the autumn skies filled with thousands of birds and the air echoed with the wild calls of waterfowl, the hunting season began in earnest. During the off season, men oiled their guns and practiced shooting, carved decoys, practiced bird calls, told stories, and fantasized about bringing down birds with a single crack shot. Young boys waited impatiently for their initiation into the the rites of manhood.

For at least a couple of centuries, duck hunting has been one of the most popular sports in the South. A hundred years ago gentlemen arrived by train religiously each fall for the season in Virginia, often from as far away as Boston. The astonishing abundance of water fowl promised happy shooting for everyone. How could you miss when the air and the water were thick with birds? The gentleman hunted for sport and to escape from the tedious restrictions of civilization in their rustic lodges. Then there were the so called "outlaw gunners", who hunted for survival and profit, and there was nothing sporting in their wholesale slaughter. These men were killing machines, and singly destroyed thousands of birds that were quickly packed and sent by train to Baltimore or Washington, where they would fetch the highest prices. Finally, there were the local families, born to the outdoors and the watery landscape, and a sense of sportsmanship and stewardship over the land and water.

These days the only thing my husband takes with him for outside excusions is his digital camera and his iPhone, but that’s not how he was raised. Late autumns were spent learning about life and death in the waterways of the southern Virginia shoreline. Growing up in Newport News his large extended family were members of the Newport News Ducking Club, one of several well known hunt clubs dating back to the 1920‘s. These clubs owned thousands of acres of islands, shoreline and marsh of almost pristine wilderness in what is now known as the Back Bay National Wildlife Refuge and False Cape State Park.

The Newport News Ducking Club alone owned almost three hundred acres of the Great Marsh on Horse Island, Big Ball and Little Ball Islands. The property included two old houses on the inside shore of the mainland which served as a rustic clubhouse and a caretaker’s house. The houses could only be reached by boat or by driving down the beach for roughly eight and a half miles starting at what is now the end of Sandbridge, just beyond the old Coast Guard Station. .

When the hunting season got under way a pronouncement would be made that the men in the family were going to Back Bay, and then a well organized ritual unfolded. Groceries such as steak, eggs, coffee, bread, and other provisions were packed. U. S. Royal Hip Waders, camouflage and wool hunting clothes were hauled out of closets, still stamped with the slightly musty smell of swamp and mildew that had permanently seeped into every fiber. Milk gallon containers were filled with water for drinking and cooking. The dogs were let out of the kennels in panting anticipation of their time to hang with the men, and fulfill a hunting imperative bred into their brains, muscles, and tissue.

The jeeps must have been redolent of stale clothes, dogs, men, and swathes of cigarette smoke. Indeed, all of the manly arts were practiced in this male clubhouse environment, outside of the civilizing restraints of women and society. I can imagine my husband, a small, rather frail boy in the photos, anxiously bouncing along in the backseat in the night, straining to keep up with the older boys. There was never a question of not going, it was simply taken for granted that every boy worth his salt was in for the hunt, an unbroken code of life spanning generations.

The packed jeeps set out with their journey timed to synchronize with low tide when the sand would be packed hard enough to drive on. My husband remembers the miles of dark beach, the line of waves, and every eye searching for the almost invisible turn into the dunes just past the cypress stumps. When the turn was located, which sometimes took a couple of passes, his father would roar in a deep voice, “Hang on to the dogs, Dougie!”

Then the jeeps started spinning, grinding, pitching and rolling into the deep sand of the dunes. The churning seemed endless, tires clawing and spinning deeper and deeper in search of traction, dogs and boys rolling and falling back and forth over the seats, until with a final clutching groan the jeep mounted the dunes and spun out on to the beach forests beyond.

Then they rolled into the clearing by the old brown shingled house, hunkered down on pilings, with the sloping slate porch roof shrouded by an enormous tree. The jeep doors would open at last, and out would spill the men, cursing with gusto, the dogs panting with excitement, the boys nervous and grinning, and the endless gear to be hauled inside.

For years my husband was too young to be allowed outside by himself at night. Packs of feral pigs roamed wild through the dune forests, and could appear suddenly and kill with stunning efficiency. The pigs were the descendants of domestic pigs from the old and long abandoned settlement of Wash Woods. The ruins of a few houses and a church were reputed to have been started by shipwrecked victims. The shallow waters around False Cape, named because of it’s deceptive resemblance to Cape Henry, lured many ships to their demise and were known as one of the graveyards of the Atlantic. The old houses and church were built of salvaged cypress wood from the shipwrecks.

The only time Dougie was allowed outside after dark was to go to the dock or run down the path to the caretaker’s house next door, where the Waterfield family lived a rustic life in a house ripe with the smells of people and swamp life. There he would breathlessly pass along the bags of food and his father’s instructions to Mrs. Waterfield, to make forty bologna and cheese sandwiches for the early morning excursion. Then running, panting back to the house, the strange smells of the island people still in his nostrils, the stars glittering overhead, and the anticipation of the predawn hunt. In the background were the sounds of the wind kicking up, and the water splashing against the dock portending bad weather for men, and good weather for ducks.

Later in the chill of the early hours, quilts were reluctantly thrown off and layers of long johns and wool donned. The boys were sent out to haul the four horse powered engines out of the boat house, fill the gas tanks, and yank the cord until the cold engines reluctantly stuttered and started. The weed grass props were curved like sickles. The decoys would already be stacked in the boat like cord wood. By 4:00 AM men, dogs, boys, thermoses of hot coffee, guns, and decoys were underway in the overloaded metal john boats, poling through the grasses.

Andy, the family’s beloved labrador, assumed his position on the prow of the boat, toes and nails hanging over the edge, nose thrust forward sniffing the air, head swiveling. His eyes scanned the dark water and gazed watchfully over the rafts of ducks on the water. He was vibrating with anticipation as the boat v’d towards the blinds. Several times Andy jumped overboard when they passed too close to a raft of ducks; the temptation was simply too strong for a dog to endure. When they arrived at the blind he would take off, and inevitably return with the first duck, before they had even unloaded the guns, sandwiches, thermoses and ammunition. He was known as the “duckinist” dog.

The decoys were homemade from cork in the backyard, or recycled and repainted from earlier years. New decoys were sometimes purchased from Wilcox Bait and Tackle, still on Jefferson Avenue, or from the mail order catalogs like Hurters Hudson Bay Outfitters. To this day my husband knows his ducks. Along the water he will point out marsh ducks, which are different from open water ducks like Canvas Backs. Open water ducks stay in the deep water where they dive for food. The legs are set so far back on the body of diving ducks that they can’t walk on land, they just fall over.

Marsh ducks eat mud, nibbling and straining the bugs and other good stuff out of the mud and marsh weed. To set out the decoys, you had to know what species of ducks weren’t sociable, since you couldn’t have their decoys sitting next to an antagonistic breed of duck decoy. Everybody had a different opinion on how to set them out. “Put them in front in a pipe formation, no, over there.” “Leave a hole in the middle." "Hurry, get them set out!”

Hurry, because soon it would be sunrise over the marsh. You had to be in the duck blinds, decoys out, when the sun came up. The blinds were fashioned with sheets of plywood nailed haphazardly over a two by four frame. Earlier in the fall the boys would be sent out to bush them, cutting marsh grass in bundles and covering the blinds for camouflage. You had to hide your face against the reeds and peer out so the white of your face didn’t spook the birds.

“Here they come, get down, get down!”

You would instantly hunch down, hide your face.

Harsh whisper, “Get down, get down.’’

“Where are they?”

“Don’t look, don’t look!”

It was very difficult to get close to these ducks since they were completely wild migratory waterfowl, and very wily. They definitely weren’t hanging out at the museum pond. His father was always at the end of the blind. Ducks fly into the wind to land, so his father would always be on the right end of the blind for the direction of the wind. This ensured that the ducks would be on his side so that he had the best shot. Dougie would be in the middle as the youngest and most inexperienced hunter. There was a strict sense of safety instilled, because danger existed all around. It was second nature to the men who had been hunting since their childhoods.

When the ducks would get close there would be a hiss.

“Take’m, take’m now!”

Everyone would stand suddenly, three in a blind, and you had a split second to pick your duck, calculate the lead, and shoot. Then that concussive, deafening “BOOM” from the combined magnum shells, and the gas operated Belgium-made Browning shotguns. Like a bomb going off by your head, it would part your hair.

If you turned around and looked for Andy he would be lunging off the bank, head and eyes riveted on GETTING THE DUCKS! He had one speed, wide open, and an unstoppable instinct, GET THE DUCKS! You could scream, plead, fire the guns, blow the whistle, he wouldn’t even turn. GET THE DUCKS! Once they tried to chain him to the edge of the blinds so he wouldn’t go early and he pulled the boards off the blinds. GET THE DUCKS! Another time they tied him to a pony stake in the ground and he pulled it out with a huge plug of marsh, dragging it all out to the decoys. GET THE DUCKS! He was a duck machine.

Then after the limit was bagged, toes frozen, fingers numb, it was time to slog your way through the sucking marsh, fifty feet or so over to where the boat was hidden in a separate boat blind. The ducks were packed in burlap bags to deter any hungry dogs who viewed them as caviar and catnip rolled in feathers. Then it was time to pick their way in the boat through the marsh back to the clubhouse. The motor bogging down in the duckweed until you tilted it up, spraying duckweed everywhere, and then you were off again. Once back the men would go into the house, leaving the boys to bale the freezing water, and put the motors in the boathouse. Then everyone would take a nap.

When I asked my husband what stands out in his memory forty years later, he pauses a moment before answering.

“I think it was being with Dad outside in that landscape. There was all sorts of stuff flying around, ducks, geese, swans, cormorants, and nutria in the water. And just the thrill of being grown up enough to go. Just to be around the boats and motors and shotguns, hear the stories of the men and be a part of the family.”

When I asked him if he would like to go down to Carolina and find a way to navigate back to the house site by water, he shakes his head. Perhaps sometimes just memories are best.

Tall Cotton

2010-11-04T20:35:00.000-04:00

Old barns frame cotton crop in Suffolk, Virginia

The summer of 2010 is the hot, hot, hottest summer of my life. Around the state the corn is fried to a bacon brown in the fields. The crops are useless even for livestock fodder. The Governor declares the crispy corn an official disaster. But there is a bright, white, soft spot in this oh, so, sultry summer story.

The calendar pages flip by, and now it is October, and the weather is balmy. I am taking a Sunday afternoon drive, and as I round the corner of a country road in Suffolk, I suddenly blink. The fields are a ridiculous, improbable white. Fluffy new fallen snow white. The cotton is busting out all over white. Exploding out of those pupae- like cases, blowzy, full- blown, bloated; like a voluptuous showgirl gone to seed, or at least to a steady diet of cheese grits.

I’m no farmer, but as I gaze around I think these farmers must be in tall cotton.

A river of cotton in Suffolk

King Cotton. High Cotton. When those cotton bolls got rotten you couldn't pick very much cotton, cotton. The Cotton Club. The Cotton Blossom. Cotton- pickin. She don’t cotton to me too well. My mouth is dry as cotton. Cotton up to. It beats picking cotton. Cotton candy. We’re in tall cotton. The Cotton Belt. Cotton plantation. Cotton underwear. Girls in cotton dresses. Soft as cotton. Cotton fields. The Cotton Song. Cotton-eyed. Cotton futures. Cotton ball. Wads of cotton. White as cotton. Cottony. Cotton time.

Cotton vernacular is threaded throughout Southern dialect, but it is a foreign crop to the eyes of a girl from the Virginia Piedmont, a rolling land of corn, soybeans, and hay. King Cotton is the number one crop of the South, but it is actually only a Duke or a Squire in Virginia because the plant requires a growing calendar of 200 frost free days, a condition only found in the southeast pocket of the Old Dominion. Despite being only a marginal crop in Virginia, the cotton story is the story of the old South. These sticky seeds contain the embryo of the Antebellum era and it’s subsequent demise.

Mature cotton plant

I park the car by an abandoned house and walk into the cotton fields. I lean over and try to imagine the brutality of a life spent working from sun up to sun down, stooped under an unblinking sun, bending low to the ground plucking multiple cotton bolls off of each twiggy plant. “Jump down, turn around, to pick a bale of cotton, jump down, turn around, to pick a bale a day...” For a few moments I contemplate the real impact of the cotton story on Virginia, the South, and on so many, many souls.

In my life, cotton has been primarily about clothes and what my mother calls her "linens”. During my Richmond childhood cotton was the dress code. Every gentleman had his summer seersucker blue and white white striped suit, made of 100% pure, lightweight, breathable, cool cotton. Men carried a cotton handkerchief and women carried small lace edged hankies. Girls and women wore white cotton gloves, fastened with a dainty, little pearl on the wrist. If your slip was showing, someone could whisper “Cotton is low.”

Young girls in white cotton dresses, a Sunday afternoon 1890

White cotton and linen clothes came out after Memorial Day. Every summer we visited my Great Aunt Charleton in sleepy little Victoria in Southside Virginia. The maids patiently packed up the winter chintz and hung the white cotton summer curtains, put on the white cotton slipcovers, and shook out the colored cotton rag rugs that covered the bare wood floors. The big porch swing and the rocking chairs were piled with flowery cotton pillows. Summertime, and the living was easy, and hot, and the cotton was cool. And in those pre-air conditioned days we needed cool.

We sang old songs about cotton. Oh, I wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away, Dixieland!” or “When I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in my cradle, in those old cotton fields back home.” The cotton songs were written by the great blues musicians such as Lead Belly, born on a Louisiana plantation, and recorded by an unlikely assortment including Harry Belafonte, the Beach Boys, Elvis Presley, and Elton John. Embedded in those innocently sung lyrics are references to the dark and very disturbing history of cotton cultivation.

American blues is a musical style that originated with African-Americans working in the cotton fields of the deep South, music born out of a cross-pollination of work songs, spirituals, chants, shouts, ballads, and rhythms. Rhythm and blues are the foundation and inspiration for much of the great American music of the past one hundred years; including rock and roll, jazz, and what we know today as simply, the blues.

Before cotton, tobacco was king. But tobacco destroyed the soil, stripped the nutrients out of those coastal rich, loamy fields. Slavery was on the wane by the late 1700’s, the soil and the economy both exhausted from a hundred years of plundering tobacco farming. Then the refinement and development of the Cotton Gin (engine) used to strip the sticky seeds from the boll coincided with the wider Industrial Revolution, the invention of factory spindles and looms, and the establishment of textile mills in Europe. During the American Revolution colonists could no longer import bolts of cloth from England for clothes and it became imperative to cultivate cotton in America. In 1795, Whitney’s new cotton gin did the work of 100 men in a single day, raking the seeds out of the cotton puffs. Suddenly, cotton became a profitable crop for those hungry textile mills and the plantation became a viable business model.

Old Suffolk farmhouse.

Cotton Culture gave birth to a distinctive plantation lifestyle with its accompanying landscape, architecture, hospitality, code of honor, gambling, belles, and reckless young men; a life of great wealth for a minority class of planters; an eked out survival existence to a large class of subsistence farmers; and the diaspora and suffering of an entire race of people whose labor made it possible.

On the eve of the Civil War in 1860 the South was at the peak of its wealth as the world’s largest cotton producer. The same year saw the biggest harvest of the century: 4,861,292 bales worth over $300,000,000. Natchez, Mississippi was the richest city in the United States and magnificent homes were built or being constructed across the South. Sixty percent of the United State’s total export was cotton. The South was reaping the financial legacy of almost seventy years of cotton farming using enslaved labor. Planters in the cotton belt made enormous profits and plowed that cash back into purchasing more acreage and more slaves, in order to make even bigger profits the next year. The nouveau rich were flourishing, and cotton hubris swelled to the size of a hoop skirt.

Hot headed Southern politicians coined the phrase “King Cotton” to illustrate their argument that cotton ruled the Southern economy, and was essential to the European mills. Implicit in their argument was the necessity of slavery to cultivate the crop, an unholy union sanctified by greed.

During the war the South employed “cotton diplomacy” with planters voluntarily halting exports hoping to cause a “cotton famine” in the textile mills of England and France, and to compel England to throw its weight behind the Confederacy. This was a deeply flawed plan because the English were leaders in the abolitionist movement, plus they had stockpiles from the bumper cotton crop of 1860. Ultimately, the Confederates deprived themselves of critical capital. Later in the Civil War exports were halted because of the Northern blockades.

After the war, Cotton Culture resumed, only now the labor was supplied by the sharecropper, working for the remote hope of owning some of the wealth in what remained a cruel, feudal system. After the war, the cotton textile mills moved to the Piedmont, stretching from central Virginia down through the Carolina’s. The mills became the job of last refuge for the poor whites in a landscape and economy decimated by the war until the 1930's, when the unions forced the mills to close their doors. The cotton crop fell from grace under the rapacious and relentless Boll Weevil.

Now cotton has made a comeback in Virginia. Viewed through my car window the cotton fields look both innocent and eerily familiar framing the weathered barns and old farmhouses. The old Cotton Exchange building in Memphis has become the Cotton Museum. Cotton has become an important crop in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Three quarters of the United States crop is bound for China, where it is used for the manufacture of clothing, most of it ending up back in the United States in Walmarts and other retailers.

On Sunday, October 16, 2010, the front page of the Wall Street Journal reported that “Cotton prices touched their highest level since Reconstruction on Friday, as a string of bad harvests and demand from China spark worries of a global shortfall....It is officially the highest price since the records began in 1870 with the creation of the New York Cotton Exchange.”

Definitely some high cotton.

The Explosive Power of Printers' Ink

2010-10-10T14:31:00.002-04:00

The Jack Kerouac Alley

“The air was soft, the stars so fine, and the promise of every cobbled alley so great…” (Jack Kerouac – On the Road)

Kerouac’s soliloquy to San Francisco is memorialized in the pavement adjacent to San Francisco's landmark City Lights Bookstore. Nearby other fragments of poetry are set amidst the cobblestones of the recently renovated and renamed Jack Kerouac Alley. City Lights and the surrounding North Beach District were ground zero for the Beat Generation, and the setting of a major censorship battle and cultural clash as the decade of the 1950’s drew to a fitful close.

Kerouac Quote

In 1957, On the Road, a mania edged, full-throttled hymn to restless youth, freedom, and American individualism roared into that carefully coiffed decade. The publication of On the Road was one of those defining moments in literary history. This stunningly original work ushered in a new genre of music, film, and writing that included Bob Dylan, Easy Rider, and Hunter Thompson; reflecting the voices of a brash new generation that straddled being quintessentially American and anti- establishment.

Door into City Lights Bookstore

In September of the previous year, poet Laurence Ferlinghetti, owner of City Lights Bookstore and City Lights Press, released Allen Ginsburg’s Howl and Other Poems, and was subsequently arrested and charged with publishing obscenity. Judge Clayton Horn, a conservative Sunday School teacher, struck a major blow against censorship by ruling that the poem was not obscene, but in fact had, “redeeming social importance”. Like so many seminal works of art, Howl shockingly crashed though the boundaries of what had been deemed acceptable. The epic poem came to epitomize the Beat Generation to a national audience.

City Lights glass window reflects neighborhood

In a recent article in Slade magazine entitled, “How Howl Changed the World”, writer Fred Kaplan states that, “it’s probably hard for anyone born long after those years to grasp just what a cataclysmic impact that poem made (or perhaps any poem could make) not just on the literary world but on the broader society and culture.” The lack of inhibition and raw freedom of personal expression opened the floodgates for the 1960’s, with all of the culture clashes and polarized opinions that continue to vibrate fifty years later throughout the American political landscape.

However, poetry and scandal were partners long before the Beatniks. Lord Byron managed to lead a shockingly unconventional life expressed in his poetry, and was notably and perhaps accurately described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know.” Oscar Wilde was imprisoned for his lifestyle and self expression. Walt Whitman, arguably now America’s most beloved poet, horrified the nation with his raw, honest writings in the Victorian Era. In another part of the world, Boris Pasternak, author of Dr. Zhivago, was imprisoned by the Marxists for his poetry and fiction.

Poet's rocking chair on the second floor

The role of the creative spirit and the intellectual, liberal or conservative, is to push boundaries, explore the edge, and provoke society into re-examining world views and social mores. The nonconformist challenges our sanguine acceptance of the status quo and threatens those who disagree or fear change.

Banned books display

During the last week of September libraries set up displays to mark “Banned Book Week” to highlight the works that have been the targets of censorship battles over the years. Banned Books Week is sponsored by the American Booksellers Association; American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression; the American Library Association; American Society of Journalists and Authors; Association of American Publishers; and the National Association of College Stores. It is endorsed by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. The list of banned books is long and includes many classics such as Moby Dick, To Kill A Mockingbird, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Canterbury Tales, and The Great Gatsby. The displays illustrate the important role libraries and all citizens play in protecting the right to read and intellectual freedom.

City Lights photo of banned books display (1950's)

Over the decades, in their role as the archives for civilizations and the written word, libraries have emerged as the somewhat embattled and scarred guardians of the First Amendment and intellectual freedom. Funded by taxpayer dollars, there is a delicate tension between honoring the opinions and the community values of some users, and the philosophical principles that guide developing collections that reflect the wide range of intellectual and artistic expression.

Nearby mural with suspended book mobile

The truth is that any public library worth having contains a large number of materials that any number of people could find objectionable. In my own experience, it is difficult to know what someone might file a complaint against next. I firmly believe that each person has the right to personally reject reading or watching a work. Every parent has the right and the responsibility, to monitor what their child reads or watches. However, it is a significant and sometimes dangerous leap to assert that a book, program or film is not suitable to be read, viewed or attended by anyone else in the community, or by extension, anyone at any time.

Censorship and burning books and libraries goes back two thousand years to the recorded burning of a library in China in 223 BC. The King of England had the entire collection of the University of Oxford Library torched in 1683. During the 1930's the Nazi Party was well know for instigating public book burning pyres. The Union of Soviet Socialists Republic implemented one of the most extreme, systematic, and extensive state ordered programs of destroying libraries and books in recorded history. As recently as the 1990's all of the Albanian-langauge collections in the libraries of Kosovo were burned and destroyed under orders from the Serbian government.

The destruction of all materials considered subversive or dangerous would have brought civilization to a grinding halt. From the revolutionary Declaration of Independence; to Martin Luther’s Ninety- Five Theses; to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech; the introduction of radical new ideas and ways of thinking, and the struggle to assimilate or reject these ideas have shaped human history.

Quote embedded in alley

When I strolled down the Jack Kerouac Alley last week I noted John Steinbeck’s words, "The free exploring mind of the individual human is the most valuable thing in the world.” On the interior wall of City Lights there is a flamboyant hand scrawled poster that speaks even more directly to the importance and power of free speech. The poster proclaims, “Printers' Ink is the greater explosive." .

By the North End Shore in Virginia Beach

2010-09-19T18:05:00.005-04:00

"One learns first of all in beach living the art of shedding; how little one can get along with, not how much. " - Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Tonight there is big surf. The clouds have obscured the stars, and the darkness is full of the sound of the sea rushing in. Hurricane Earl is far off shore, but still making his presence known. The noise of the waves penetrates the closed doors and windows, filling up the spaces in the house and in my head. This is my favorite type of night at the ocean. Somewhere out there in the night the sea is a frenzy of towering waves and howling winds.

Years ago I experienced a few moments of terror on a yacht off the coast of Willoughby Spit heading for Bermuda. I learned in one heart pounding instant that a 42 ft. boat that seems big on the Potomac River is like suddenly riding a matchstick in a storm on the Atlantic. My absolute insignificance in the face of nature’s power is a humbling and terrifying lesson I have never forgotten.

"The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient. One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach - waiting for a gift from the sea." -- Anne Morrow Linbergh

The name “Sea of Atlas” originated from Greek Mythology. The Atlantic is the youngest, the saltiest, and the second largest of the five oceans, and features a fascinatingly irregular shoreline. The American coast is intricately carved with bays, beaches, rivers, juts, creeks, inlets, barrier islands, and estuaries, all hanging on the fragile, shifting Continental Shelf. Each year the alluring tug of the surf draws millions of people through the Hampton Roads region. The triumvirate of abrasive sand, saltwater, and pounding tides is the ultimate spa. Beating out the stress of deadlines, clocks, money, and traffic, the sea roughens us up, soothes, and purifies our bodies with its ancient primordial rhythms. Coastal life offers the experience of another dimension, the hypnotic allure of an endless horizon of saltwater to counterbalance the weight and pace modern life.

Virginia Beach summer scene

Like many people I have a great love and respect for the forces of the sea. On clear days the beach scene is like a beautiful Degas painting of the shore; dabs of color created by cheerful beech umbrellas, kites in the air, and brown pelicans winging along in precise formation. The sunset palette has the tender pink of a conch shell chamber dissolving into a violet haze. Near dusk on atmospheric days the silvery water and sky merge into a seamless envelope of shimmering mercury hued light.

Sunset at the north end of Virginia Beach

Growing up my family favored the Outer Banks of North Carolina. I loved the wildness of Ocracoke Island with its rugged surf, wild ponies, lonely beaches, and pirate stories. Camping at the National Park Campground for two weeks at a time I would spend hours walking, and searching for lettered olive shells, with their suggestive hieroglyphics, and elusive perfect whelk shells. At night we fished for flounder on the beach with a Coleman lantern and a symphony of insects. Sometimes we waded far out into the bathtub warm waters of Pamlico Sound, pulling the canoe behind us with a rope, and scooping up soft-shell crabs for dinner.

Sea Oats on the dunes

My uncles would head out of Oregon Inlet pre-dawn to go deep sea fishing. At night they would stand in the kitchen of the rustic old style beach house in Nags Head, and crack oysters and stories. In the 1960s Nags Head was still a remote and lonesome little corner of the world, with a row of weather beaten unpainted houses edging each side of the old beach road, and an assortment of mom and pop motels where you could cook, sleep, and hang out in a single room facing the sea.

In recent years I have come to appreciate the easily accessible Virginia Beach, especially the far ends of the beach away from the entertaining and “madding crowd” of the boardwalk. Along Shore Drive, the scenic entrance through the dune forests to Virginia Beach, is the beautiful several hundred acre Virginia First Landing State Park, constructed by an African-American Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression, which encompasses and protects much of Cape Henry.

The ocean turns the corner between sea and bay at Cape Henry. Directly across the water is the Eastern Shore and Cape Charles. These two land formations, known as the Virginia Capes, are the grand sentinels that guard the southern mouth of the Chesapeake Bay and the entrance to Hampton Roads.

Sea chart of Cape Henry and Cape Charles

The caped entrance is reminiscent to me of the Strait of Gibraltar. The entrance to the Mediterranean is marked with the monolithic Rock of Gibraltar and the flanking Jabal Musa mountain in Morocco, the yin to Gibraltar’s yang. Together they formed one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, the Pillars of Hercules, the two geological bookmarks creating a symbolic and physical portal to the ancient Mediterranean “known” world. A Renaissance legend tells that the pillars were inscripted with the warning “Non plus ultra” meaning “nothing further beyond” - an ominous warning to sailors and seafarers to go no farther.

Ignoring this ancient admonishment, Captain Christopher Newport sailed from England via the West Indies, passing by what is now Virginia Beach on his way to establish Jamestown. The three ships, the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery stopped on Cape Henry on April 26, 1607 (aka The First Landing). The travelers explored the area and erected a cross, christening Capes Henry and Charles for the sons of King James I of England. The Cape Henry Memorial, a stone cross erected in 1935, commemorates the first landing by the colonists and forms a part of the Colonial National Historical Park, although located within the Fort Story Military Reservation.

The 1881 Cape Henry Lighthouse

The cape is also home to the first lighthouse constructed in the country, the Old Cape Henry Light built in 1791, and a subsequent Cape Henry Lighthouse constructed in 1881. The scenic old lighthouse, which is open to the public seasonally, was funded by the first congressional allocation requested by President Washington. Perhaps setting an historical precedent, this first federal work project was significantly over budget, but crucial in providing a safe passage into the harbor and encouraging trade.

The lighthouses and the memorial look out over the scene of the Battle of the Virginia Capes, where the French Navy under Comte Le Grasse successfully prevented the British Navy from delivering reinforcements to Lord Cornwallis. This event set the stage for the success of the American and French forces at the Battle of Yorktown, and the establishment of a new and independent United States.

Today the Virgina Capes are linked by the Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel, the longest in the world, and considered to be one of the seven engineering wonders of the modern era. At night, seen from a distance, the bridge glitters like a rope of golden pearls strung across the throat of the bay.

Red sailboat with a freighter in the distance

The entrance to the bay also marks the area known as Hampton Roads, one of the largest natural harbors in the world. The harbor or roadstead consists of the mouths the James River, the Elizabeth River and several smaller rivers, with all of the various roads emptying into the Chesapeake Bay. Near the bridge there is almost always a ship somewhere on the horizon, and a visitor quickly comprehends that this is one of the busiest and most important ports in the world.

All day and night huge cargo freighters piled with boxes bound for Asia, South America, and Europe pass by. Small tugs busily steam ahead of barges. Pilots escort the freighters in and out, and using binoculars you can sometimes see the pilot being lifted or lowered off the towering side of the moving freighter to his waiting pilot ship. On weekends the cruise ships arrive and depart, lit up like festive wedding cakes. Often, gray destroyers and the occasional submarine surface off shore. A kaleidoscope of yachts, small sailboats, fishing, and tourist boats complete the nautical scene.

Near the entrance to Fort Story at the head land of Cape Henry, is a quiet, peaceful residential area where I am fortunate enough to have a place I can occasionally visit. The north end of the beach seems to be widening each year, probably with all of the runaway sand from downtown and points south. The City has installed wonderful walkways at intervals down to the beach, constructed with composite boards that never splinter or weather, and thoughtfully placed benches with a view of the sea.

Boardwalk by Fort Story

The last walkway on the North End borders Fort Story and winds through a beautiful grove of live oaks that are twisted from the elements into natural bonsai. When I walk through this little forest I always think of King Arthur and Merlin, since even on the sunniest of days the walk seems magical with mysterious shadows and dappled lighting. One evening earlier this summer my daughter and I were charmed to discover that someone had threaded little lights through the trees and created a fairy-like bower. A young man explained that he was staging them for a marriage proposal later that evening. The Hampton Roads region is the northern most habitat for all species of the beautiful live oaks.

There is abundant wildlife living in the dunes and scrub oaks between the beach and the houses. Little striped skinks, shore birds, butterflies, dragonflies, and red foxes appear and disappear in the thickets and sea oats. At night I have heard what I am certain is the foxes barking and yelping. By day there are usually pods of dolphin right off shore and I have read that the bay is the breeding ground for bottlenose dolphins.

A lone Sanderling.

The shore birds are a constant presence. The plump little sandpipers called Sanderlings race around the edge of the surf, their tiny legs scissoring back and forth at lightening speed. A variety of sizes and types of sea gulls mingle together on the shore including Herring, Laughing, and Franklin’s Gulls. My trusty “Peterson Field Guide to Eastern Birds” compares the large sandpiper, Hudsonian Gotwit, to a sewing machine, with its elongated skinny beak executing a fast, staccato style of sand drilling. Overhead, Osprey and pelicans soar and glide along the shore, catching the breezes and thermals easily with their huge wing spans.

"One cannot collect all the beautiful shells on the beach. One can collect only a few, and they are more beautiful if they are a few." Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Still an inveterate sheller, I comb the beach throughout the seasons. The sea carelessly tosses out its prizes strewing them randomly over the sand. I have learned in recent years that there is a rhythm and season to many of these artifacts of sea life. Shelling is usually better in the cooler months, and particularly when there are storms from the east. One week the beach will be full of moon snails, another there will be dozens of multi-colored scallop shells, and yet another clusters of skate egg cases. The Virginia beaches offer good shelling, with the possibility of finding moon snails, scallops, periwinkles, ocean quahogs, or one of several types of whelks on a good day.

"Mermaid's Purse" A skates egg case.

“Mermaid's Purses” the popular name for the egg cases of skates and rays are usually laid in multiple pairs. The eggs are laid in sandy or muddy flats or attached to seaweed. The sack is full of enough yolk to nourish the developing skate for the five to six months necessary to mature. The skate emerges about four inches long from a transverse opening at the end of the sack with the longest horns. Once the capsule is empty it washes to shore. Mollusk shells are always abundant; the Atlantic Bay Scallop, the Atlantic Callico Scallop, Atlantic Jack Knife Clam, and the Eastern Oyster.

Beached Horseshoe Crab Shell

Walking on the beach it is not usual to find the “beached” or shed shells of horseshoe crabs that have molted their shells as they mature. Horseshoe crabs are marine anthropods, a relation of some long extinct spider. In the mid-Atlantic, where they are the most abundant, horseshoe crabs spawn primarily in May and June during new and full moon cycles. Once, near Captiva Island in Florida, I witnessed long chains of dozens of horseshoe crabs mating in the shallows. Their reproductive cycle coincides with the northward migration of shorebirds, many of whom rely on the eggs of horseshoe crabs to fuel their journey to the Arctic.

Horseshoe crabs play an important environmental, economic and medical role. They are an important source of commercial bait for the eel and whelk industries, and more recently, they have become important to the biochemical industry. About two decades ago researchers discovered that unique properties found in horseshoe crab blood could be used to produce LAL, a chemical which detects dangerous bacterial endotoxins in drugs, medical devices, and even water. Horseshoe crabs, like sea salt, sea weed, mullusks, crabs, fish and even sand, have become a resource to be harvested.

Flotsam and jetsam

During winter and summer months it is common to find the dried shell cases for whelks on the beach, which resemble long parchment like vertebrae ranging from one to two feet. If the whelk did not break free of the casings at sea they will rattle when you shake the dried chain. If you open one of the discs you will discover up to a hundred tiny whelk shells, each the size of a pencil point. There are three types of whelks common to the mid-Atlantic, Knobbed, Channelled and Lightning, all identifiable by the size of the knobs and the markings. Whelks are also harvested for their meat and their shells.

Twice, I have been thrilled to spot extremely large perfect conch shells in the surf, but when I tried to extract them I realized that the fleshy orange conch was still at home, clinging half in and out of the shell, tenaciously anchoring its muscular mass between sand and shell. Instantly I retreated both times, respecting the right of the living sea creature to its beautiful home and existence.

Colored sea glass has become increasingly rare in this era of the plastic bottle and recycling. For years red sea glass was reputed to be from the old lanterns of ships that were lost at sea. Occasionally, I find a smooth blue or green piece, but usually the sea glass I find is brown, and I suspect from beer bottles. However, the lack of glass can be taken as a sign of a healthy beach, and I am pleasantly pleased with how little trash and manmade debris washes up on Virginia’s shores.

Moon Jellyfish

Other weeks the beach is carpeted with tangled sea weed, or studded with Moon Jellyfish, which grow as large as fifteen inches across and sometimes several inches high. Often you can see the outlines of a four-leaf clover like shape inside the body in fluorescent colors such as pink. The jelly is edged with over 250 tentacles that gather plankton and four oral arms underneath collect the food and bring it to the mouth. The almost white sand is the hammered remains of quartz crystals and mollusk shells, reduced down to their smallest particulate.

"I must write it all out, at any cost. Writing is thinking. It is more than living, for it is being conscious of living." Anne Morrow Lindbergh

A slender volume I have revisited at turning points in my life is Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gifts From the Sea. Anne was a brave adventurer, glider pilot, writer, and mother of six. She survived losing her first child in the infamous kidnapping and decades of marriage to the difficult superstar Charles Lindbergh. In the 1950’s Anne retreated to the sea to contemplate life during a vacation, and pen this book about mid-twentieth century life. This book celebrates nature, solitude, simplicity, sharing, and inspirational values. Anne compares the different stages of life to the shells she finds. Initially, we are all young and single shells, bivalves when we mate, and then barnacle covered clusters as we add houses, children, and the complexities of family life. Then gradually we return to our solo shell, shedding the paraphernalia of childrearing, and discover that we need less and less in life.

Like Anne, many of us discover that the sea nurtures our souls. As all of us know who live nearby, the shore line, atmosphere, and water are dynamic and constantly changing. Somehow the sea seems to sooth the innate restlessness of the human spirit with its own careless, restless, glorious splendor.

"Only in growth, reform, and change, paradoxically enough, is true security to be found." Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Ode to the Bookmobile

2010-08-21T22:11:00.198-04:00

Children gathered around the Saint Paul Public Library Bookmobile 1917
(Source: SPPL website http://www.stpaul.lib.mn.us/history/bookmobile.html)

When I was a little girl my grandfather drove the county bookmobile. For reasons unknown to me the bus was kept parked in the alley beside my grandparent’s house. I was entranced when I was allowed to reverently enter this mysterious library on wheels under the stern eye of my grandfather. This extraordinary conveyance seemed to be the best of all worlds, part gypsy caravan and part library. The bus offered the promise of new adventures, on the open road and inside the pages. I fantasized about traveling the globe, like Huck, Tom, and Jim in Tom Sawyer Abroad.

Plus, the bus was just the right scale for a child, like a house of books built to just my size. The big library buildings were fascinating, but slightly scary. This little room felt like a safe and cozy secret library. I even loved the smell and the neat orderliness of the books lined up tightly on the shelves, like soldiers standing at strict attention.

Children using bookmobile 1958
(Source: Minnesota Historical Society Photograph)

Perhaps those early memories are why I applied to an ad to be a bookmobile driver fresh out of college and a paid summer internship. I needed something quick to keep myself in beans and rice, while I searched for my first “real job”. However, just entering the old downtown library for my interview proved to be overwhelmingly seductive, with its wobbly old wicker tables and mishmash of centuries and volumes. I experienced such a powerful sense of homecoming that I stayed for almost three decades.

I forgot all about my fantasies of museum studies at Winterthur or a bohemian life in the cafes of Paris. Working at the library was a choice I never regretted. I was charmed with a life filled with books and readers, and with the lovely group of women who ran the library and their families with the same gentle intelligence, kind hearts, and fierce devotion. Thus our lives can be inadvertently shaped by a random ad and a chance encounter.

The bookmobile driver job proved to be a memorable stepping stone. The system served more than seven hundred square miles, encompassing three counties and a city. One of the counties, Westmoreland, stretched almost seventy miles from the furthest point to the library, and required a full day on the road. Early every Saturday morning, rain, snow, or sun, we were on the bus (with a nod to Ken Kesey).

CRRL Bookmobile 1970
(Source: www. librarypoint.org)

In addition to the many built-in bookcases, the bus had large storage cabinets over the driver and passenger seats, also stuffed with books to be delivered. A sudden turn or shift in direction could result in one or both cabinets suddenly opening and multiple book missiles shooting out. In fact, the whole vehicle was a traveling book bomb,


1967 Bookmobile (Source: Providence Public Library)

In those bygone, innocent days, when no one thought of background checks, DMV driving records, or requiring a commercial driver's license; my bold assertion that I could drive this bus was sufficient. I had driven a small shuttle bus one summer so I could claim some experience. The truth was that driving that old bookmobile was a leap of faith. Each week we rolled boldly through the countryside and a series of steep hills and twisting curves as we descended deep down into the Northern Neck of Virginia to the Town of Montross.

I quickly realized that the brakes on the bookmobile were largely an illusion. The bus was so heavily loaded and weighed down with its treasure trove of volumes, that once we had picked up a good speed and were barreling down a hill, there was simply no way to stop the thing. Standing on the brakes resulted in only the slightest hesitation in speed for the first twenty yards. I lived in terror that an old farmer would suddenly pull out in front of us, with a pickup truck load of vegetables or a hay wagon traveling at farm speed, and that all that would remain would be a somber mingling of corn, fodder, and the written word.

Jean remained serene, regardless of the often challenging driving conditions. It occurred to me that this Zen-like quality was probably due to the fact that she had never had a driver’s license, thus giving her the innocent obliviousness of a child in the backseat. This was just one of her many endearing qualities.

To this day I owe Jean a genuine debt of gratitude for her tutelage. Under her slow Mississippi drawl I learned many important lessons about library service. Everyone, regardless of age, education, income, or background, was treated with great respect and attentive interest. The request of the tiniest child and the circuit court judge received equal care, attention and thoughtfulness. That democratic impartiality still seems to me to be one of the most wonderful and miraculous things about public libraries.

Children wading to bookmobile (Source: Library of Virginia)

Another lesson I learned quickly under her tolerant eye was to skew the flawed notion of the librarian as the arbitrator of good taste and fine literature. The first week I loaded the shelves with literary classics, and then watched dismayed as one disappointed reader after another scanned the shelves, and then left discouraged without a book for the week. Jean didn’t need to say a word. As soon as we returned to the library I immediately reloaded the bus with the wide variety of books people wanted.

I also had a quick education in the importance of libraries in the everyday lives of many people. Each week, as we pulled up to our first stop near the town square in Montross, we could see a large, impatient crowd of what appeared to be the entire village, all waiting for the bookmobile. It took the full two hour stop for the line of people to file through the bus; returning books and selecting new ones, chatting, and showing off new babies, husbands, and injuries.

"Children with bookmobile books 1969" (Source: www.librarypoint.org)

Jean oohed and aahed, tsked, and nodded; dispensing books and that most valuable of commodities, interest and personal attention to each patron. In that pre-Internet, pre- VCR, pre-Cable TV, pre-Amazon era, the bookmobile was one of the few shows in town, and everyone came. I smiled and busily slid book card after book card into the little checkout machine with a satisfying clunk, clunk, clunk. Then I carded and shelved every book I could, piling the rest wherever I could precariously stash them.

I thought of those days recently when I heard that the library in Fredericksburg had permanently retired the bookmobile. The final run was on June 30, 2010. Those bustling days of hundreds of patrons has been replaced by branch libraries and a changed world. What I think of as "The Golden Age of Bookmobiles" is drawing to a close in many places around the country. News stories abound of iconic bookmobiles disappearing from roads and towns across America.

"Library automotive truck Washington Country, Maryland"

The halcyon days began as early as 1849 in Britain. In America, there seems to be some debate whether the first horse drawn bookmobile was trotted out in Pennsylvania or South Carolina circa 1905, but there is ample credit to go around. These intrepid librarians, filled with a missionary like zeal to spread knowledge and books through the countryside, were soon setting out to remote areas across the continent.


Bookmobile June 2, 1941 (Source: Davidson County Public Library - Bookmobile Timeline)

Over the years I have heard heart rending testimonials from famous writers and good souls how their lives were changed forever by a bookmobile visit. Stories of when a librarian entrusted a small Indian girl or a poor migrant child with a beautiful book to take home, and in that moment threw open a door to a bright new world. A world where a child suddenly became a person worthy of trust and respect, of possessing a library card, and being the keeper of a beautiful book.

Over the past few months at the Chesapeake Public Library we have wrestled over the fate of our bookmobile. Its lifeline has hung in the balance, weighed against the unyielding economic realities of shrinking resources and hard choices. The use at many stops have dwindled to a few devoted souls, and the numbers tell a story that could not be denied. So we have gathered the data, sat around the table, and pounded out a new story for this relatively new and wonderful vehicle.

Chesapeake Public Library Bookmobile (Source: www.chesapeake.lib.va.us)

We are going to eliminate all of the sparsely attended neighborhood stops, and replace them with a system of changing lobby collections for seniors, books by mail for shut-ins, and curb side service for handicapped drivers. We are going to reserve the big bus for the big results. There will be a single monthly Saturday run with two or three "Power Stops" at neighborhoods with a significant number of users. Two days a week the bookmobile will visit daycare institutions in Chesapeake that are interested in partnering with the library. These dozens of daycare centers offer the potential of 15,000 bookmobile visits by children a year.

Once a month, children in daycare centers will have a chance to climb on that magical bus, select a book, and have a library experience. We believe that all of those visits will result in some wonderful opportunities to impact young lives. As I can personally testify, through these seemingly chance encounters, the course of an entire lifetime can be changed.

Riding the Rails in Old Virginia

2010-08-01T15:50:00.045-04:00

Manassas Train Site (Source: Prince William County Website)

I grew up in a railroad town. At my grandparent’s house, I slept on the narrow cot that had been my father’s in the upstairs sleeping porch. The enormous old maple tree by the alley released hundreds of seedpods that helicoptered slowly past the windows down to the lawn, and at night the limbs threw fantastic shadows over the walls. The vibration of the trains gently shook the bed and echoed through the old wallboards. The long train whistles provided the soundtrack of my childhood.

My father was born in that Victorian house near the tracks. He was the son of a man who made his living on the train. The railroad provided an oasis of stability, keeping the big frame house full of children safe through the darkest days of the Great Depression. Later, during World War II, the job and the house sheltered the extended family, including young cousins who were refugees from the bombing of London.

In their heyday, the railroads employed tens of thousands of American men; laborers, engineers, designers, and operators. The trains efficiently moved people, freight, and livestock across vast geographical spaces and rugged terrains. You could mail a letter in Washington for delivery in Culpeper or Danville the same day. My great grandfather could load chickens early in the morning in Luray, which arrived in Baltimore that afternoon, and were on the table for someone's supper the next night. My grandmother recalled the challenges of housekeeping in the era of coal fired trains, when the entire town would be coated with a fine black blanket of coal soot.

The other side of the tracks through the window

In the nineteenth century train schedules resulted in a new concept of time. At one point in American history there were more than five hundred different time zones across the country. The railroads abolished this provincial approach. Instead of the casual reckoning of the farmer gauging the sun, men set their pocket watches to the newly standardized Eastern, Central, Rocky Mountain, and Pacific Time Zones established by the railroad companies. Across the nation, Americans became accustomed to living and working on railroad time.

The old Southern Railway was established in 1894 from dozens of tiny former lines including the old Richmond to Danville tracks, which my Grandfather would later travel on nightly from Manassas, and which had carried Jefferson Davis and his Cabinet when they fled Richmond on the eve of the fall of the Confederacy. Known as the “First Railroad War”, towns with stations like Fredericksburg, Bristow Station, and of course, Bull Run (First and Second Manassas) became key battlefields.

Manassas Junction had been established shortly before the war as a stop on the old Manassas Gap Railroad. The trains that rolled through Manassas throughout the days of my youth were Southern Railway. When I was young in the 1960’s my father would drive me to the train depot and raise the signal flag. Taking a trip on the old Southern Railway cars required that you cross between them as the tracks yawned below the clanking connectors. On my first trip alone I was too unnerved to return to my seat after dinner. I set up all night in the dining car, complete with white linen table cloths and china, watching old men play poker while courteous white coated porters refilled their clinking glasses. At times, the train crawled so slowly down the track that I watched the cows in the fields saunter by at a brisker pace.

All of this recently came to mind because I had the pleasure of an unexpected train trip. When my car broke down in June, the day before the American Library Association Conference in D.C., I bought a ticket for an economical $38.00 and caught the train from Newport News to Fredericksburg. I must confess that I enjoy the modern era of train travel.

Rail travel with Amtrak is far more efficient, although minus the linen, the china and the patina. The chairs are comfortable and roomy, and the windows large. Once past Newport News we roll by the historic Lee’s Hall Station, which was last renovated for Reagan’s Victory journey by rail to Washington, D.C. The next stop is the tidy, picturesque Williamsburg Station.

Past Williamsburg, the trains follows a scenic passage through the countryside near the James. Glimpses of Virginia’s past still slowly scroll by like an old motion picture; scenes of old wooden train depots, swamps with gnarled cypress, eerily still herons, curtains of kudzu, and narrow country lanes flanked by high summer corn.

Kudzu shrouded landscape seen through the window

Eventually, the train enters the old part of Richmond and I see Main Street Station, and the familiar outline of Church Hill where firebrand Patrick Henry delivered his famed “Liberty or Death!” speech.

All of the old brick factories and warehouse of downtown Richmond pass by, their faded original signs now part of the chic retro look of fashionable condos. Then the newly reopened Main Street Station, that venerable Richmond landmark with its great clock facing the Interstate, the site of thousands of arrivals and departures.

Main Street Station, Richmond

My husband remembers his grandmother taking the train from the Peninsula to Richmond to shop on Broad Street at Miller & Rhodes, a fashion mecca for generations of Virginia women. I feel certain that she was wearing gloves and a hat for the trip. Mention the famed Miller & Rhodes Tea Room and any woman over fifty who called eastern Virginia home from the 1940’s to the 1960’s sighs nostalgically.

I remember going with my mother as a child, taking the elevator up to the top floor, the event of dainty tea sandwiches and chocolate silk pie complete with fine piano music. Last year, the Virginia State Library actually had a tribute Miller & Rhodes Tea Room Party and Fashion Show, with many attendees wearing original millinery confections and outfits purchased from the store over several decades, and dining on the tea room’s once signature dishes.

Old warehouses renovated into condos

Looking out the train window I see scenes of my past life sliding by with the views. Past Shockoe Bottom are the silhouettes of old Hollywood Cemetery high above the James River, a veritable Who’s Who of Virginia. The winding hillside trails of Hollywood Cemetery (a National Historic Register Site) are the final resting place of two United States Presidents, James Monroe and John Tyler.

The famous 1849 cemetery is also the resting place of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis, twenty-five Confederate generals including J.E.B. Stuart and George Pickett, and more than eighteen thousand enlisted Confederate soldiers. They are joined by historian Douglas Southall Freeman, Matthew Fontaine Maury, "Pathfinder of the Seas”, Pulitzer Prize winning Virginia author Ellen Glasgow, poets, patriots, and supreme court justices; a ninety foot tall granite pyramid, angels, monumental old Magnolias and, of course, ancient holly trees.

In my childhood it was the scene of family picnics on Sunday afternoons, spent wandering through the Gothic park-like grounds learning history with a deviled egg, sepulchral art with a fried chicken leg, and horticulture with a cupcake.

Old Richmond passing by

Once past Richmond, the train enters the town of Ashland, which is neatly bisected by the tracks straight down the middle of the main street, appropriately named Railroad Avenue. If you are strolling around the town there are little pedestrian cross bridges at each block over the tracks. Ashland was established in the 1840’s by the railroad as a mineral springs resort, and each side of the track is lined with shops and charming old homes, including the Henry Clay Inn by the railroad station, and Randolph Macon College.

There is Ashland Coffee and Tea with live evening music, and some fine eating establishments including the Iron Horse for dinner, and Homemades by Suzanne for lunch fare (warning, they close early) featuring a wide range of freshly prepared Southern dishes such as crab cakes, country ham salad, and chocolate chess pie in the Railroad Side Cafe.

Once I was dining with my friend Alison in the café and she relayed a story about a local man. During WWII he was on a troop train bound for Norfolk and the European front. As the train rumbled slowly through his hometown of Ashland he leaned out of the window and tossed his boot, stuffed with a letter, into his own front yard. Presumably, he was reissued a replacement before the Belgium winter.

Old house in Ashland seen through the train window

Leaving Ashland, the train rolls through still rural Caroline County passing right by the Stonewall Jackson Shrine operated by the National Park Service. “Stonewall” actually died at the Shrine, in the former small office of Fairfield Plantation in Guinea Station. A commander chose this location to bring the wounded general because of the plantation’s proximity to the Richmond railroad. Jackson died from pneumonia ten days after arriving. His final words were recorded by the attending physician. “Let us cross over the river, and rest under the shade of the trees.”

Sunset near Guinea Station

A friend of mine recently pointed out caustically that only in the South would the death site of a rebel general be maintained by the United States National Park System, and be called a “shrine”. Touché.

Nearing Fredericksburg where I will spend the night with my mother, we pass a battlefield with another stone pyramid monument, built to memorialize some of the twenty thousand men that died in that horrendous slaughter of Union troops known as the First Battle of Fredericksburg on December 13, 1862. Strangely, the evening after the battle, when countless men lay dead and dying on the frozen field below Mary’s Heights, the sky was lit in a rare and spectacular display of Northern Lights.

Looking Up Caroline Street, Fredericksburg Train Station

Railroads also figured prominently in the African American experience. Southern tracks were laid primarily by enslaved and freed people working side by side. When the Union troops camped outside of Fredericksburg in the spring and summer of 1862, the word spread to towns and plantations in the counties south of town. Up to an estimated ten thousand enslaved people seized their destiny, and begin walking to Fredericksburg on the trails and roads from Caroline, Louisa, Spotsylvania, and Orange.

In a dramatic and massive exodus to freedom they crossed the Rappahannock to the Union Camps and a new life. Writing in the Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star on February 25, 2006, historian John Hennessey reported that: “The Union army shepherded them northward along the line of the Richmond, Fredericksburg & Potomac Railroad (some of them walking, some riding the cars) to Aquia Landing. There, virtually every day all summer, steamboats carried loads of freed people to Washington. If ever a dot on America's map warranted the label "gateway to freedom," it would be Fredericksburg during the spring and summer of 1862. "

Double-decker VRE train pulls into station

Potomac River

A hundred and forty-eight years later I embark on those same tracks in Fredericksburg on the early Virginia Railway Express commuter train after spending the night with my mother. The train is a double-decker, and I position myself upstairs on the right to watch the scenery. The journey between Fredericksburg and Washington follows the Potomac and offers several beautiful vistas of the river glittering in the morning light. I notice that the Town of Quantico has been transformed from a sleepy small town into a bustling sprawling military hub over the past few years.

Brooke Station, Stafford

We stop in Brooke, Lorton, Quantico, Alexandria, and then finally roll into the elegant Union Station, resplendent with a grand gold coffered ceiling and classical sculptures gazing serenely down into the pleasantly chaotic scene. The station is a destination worthy of lingering with cafes, shops, and even an outdoor market, but I have a quick croissant and coffee, and board the subway. I feel thoughtful and exhilarated from the hundred and eighty mile journey spanning centuries, life times, wars, and quite a lot of lovely countryside.

Passerby

The Cycle of Life

2010-07-06T23:50:00.001-04:00

“I had been my whole life a bell, and never knew it until that moment I was lifted and struck.”

“I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn’t flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.”

(Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek by Annie Dillard)

“We are here to witness the creation and to abet it.”

(Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters by Annie Dillard)

This spring I have experienced a heightened awareness of life and death. In my suburban backyard desperate struggles are being played out. One evening I am weeding bee balm by the back fence and startle a small burst of feathers into running frantically along the fence line. The young fledgling bird, probably a starling or grackle, hides behind the lillies. The next evening when I return to the garden, the little black bundle of feathers is quiet, and I avert my eyes from the silent testimony of its failed struggle.

A few days later another black fledgling is in the enclosed vegetable garden, calling insistently for its mother. After an hour of listening to the piercing cries I decide to lift it out of the garden with a clean towel and set it outside the fence, hoping that the mother will come. The fledgling sits there all afternoon, calling out loudly with precision regularity every 20 seconds. Finally the little bird hops over by the tree line, and then up on to a stack of brush. The countless calls for the mother bird have now become almost unbearable, and by early evening I decide to leave the house.

Finally, as I get into my car, I see the mother land on the branch beside the fledgling, and place something into the open trembling beak. I want to jump out of the car and demand, “Where have you been all day?” I have an overwhelming sense of relief that she has finally made an appearance. The next morning though the little bird is still there, still calling out, but noticeably weaker. I avoid that end of the yard for days afterwards, not wanting to see how the story has ended.

There are a couple of rabbits that live in our yard, wandering between the neighbor’s lawn and ours, eating clover and occasionally sampling my perennials for variety. One night I am sitting outside in the soft spring twilight and a rabbit is sitting a few feet away. Then I see a parade of very tiny bunnies, around the size of my finger; emerge from behind the rain barrels along the back of the house. They huddle under the mother nursing. I see an occasional tiny bunny leg hugging her side, and the flutter of her underbelly fur as the little bodies feed. She sits motionless staring ahead for several minutes, and then obviously deciding that this has gone on long enough, hops across the yard. The baby bunnies bounce around briefly before disappearing behind the rain barrels again.

Twice more I see the mother nursing at dusk, and once I surprise a baby rabbit in the flower bed and it hops away to crouch behind some lavender. One evening I see one of the neighborhood cats crouching watchfully by the rain barrels and I chase it away, stamping my feet and yelling emphatically. However, even as I pursue the cat down the driveway, I know the futility of pretending that I can protect those little bunnies from life or death.

Another morning I am driving to work up Cedar Road near Dominion Boulevard in heavy rush hour traffic. There, in the middle of the highway, is a Canadian goose, with a large flock of fuzzy goslings. She is frantically herding them together and turning her head back and forth watching the stream of cars on both sides. For a crazy moment I contemplate parking the car and trying to stop traffic so they can make it across, but even as I think it I know it would be foolhardy.

A lifetime of living in the country has taught me to respect the wildness of wild animals, and that human interventions frequently end in tragedy and more trauma to the animal. However, I am finding it exceedingly difficult to ignore the struggles of all of these infants for survival. No doubt it is linked to my keen awareness of my own children attempting to launch, and the possibility for beauty and danger that lie tangled at the edge of each day.

The finale to these small baby animal vignettes occurs the second weekend in June. We are driving home from Washington, DC and stop to visit my mother in Fredericksburg. As we get out of the car we hear a bleating that sounds like a baby goat. Walking to the front of the house we see a very young fawn in the yard, which darts to the backyard when she sees us. She continues calling out repetitively. The neighbors tell us that the fawn has been wandering and calling for two days, and that a mature deer was killed by a car on the main road in front of my mother’s home a couple of days ago. As we watch the fawn trots from one yard to the next continuously calling. Following several yards behind I call the National Park Service Headquarters that is located very near to my mother’s home. They are polite, but offer nothing. Another neighbor comes out to tell us the animal warden was called the day before. The warden came and left, saying that the County was not equipped to handle baby deer.

I watch as the fawn darts back and forth across side streets, still calling, miraculously missing the cars. My son appears and patiently tracks the deer as it sprints frantically from yard to yard. Eventually he appears with the fawn struggling in his arms. We wrap it in a blanket and drive to the National Park office around the corner. Inside, I politely badger the woman at the desk until a ranger reluctantly appears. He explains that they don’t have a place to take the deer. He strongly recommends that I release it and “let the cycle of life” naturally unfold.

However, I have had enough of the cycle of life this spring. I have heard too many babies calling for their mothers. The determination of this fawn to survive demands a better response. I decide that this baby is not going to die on my watch. After more polite pressuring the ranger finally suggests that we can call the Virginia Wildlife Center in Waynesboro and gives us a couple of names of people in Culpeper that are licensed wildlife caregivers. Waynesboro gives us more names. No one answers. We call Waynesboro back, then someone in Bealeton, then in Culpeper, then a helpful woman in Middlesex, who gives us more names in Williamsburg.

Finally, a woman in Williamsburg listens to our story and says, yes, we can bring the fawn and she can care for it. She mentions that she is on her way to pick up another fawn. So I move to the back seat with the deer and off we go down I-95. The fawn struggles slightly and then stops, probably exhausted. I cover her head with a blanket, stroking her neck, and she stretches out like a dog in my lap and relaxes, and I know that she is sleeping.

On the other side of Richmond she wakes up and sticks her head out. Ears cocked she listens to my husband and I talking. Then she starts licking my hand with a small, smooth tongue. She carefully licks the palm and then the other side of my hand, and then nuzzling against the palm she begins the ritual again. I feel a rush of emotion, protectiveness and that heightened sense of awareness that I have experienced before when my life has intersected with a wild animal in unexpected and wonderful ways.

I think back to several years ago. It is close to Thanksgiving and my late husband and I are kayaking off of Chick’s Beach, where we discover a large dolphin trapped in a net up against a buoy. She is laboring for breath, and has probably been struggling for some time. There is just the slow rise and fall of her body as she exhales through a blowhole. Realizing the precariousness of attempting to rescue such a large wild animal in a kayak, we go back to shore and then to a marina, trying to find someone with a larger boat to help. No one is willing to help, so we paddle back out to the buoy.

My husband reaches out and carefully lifts the dolphin partially out of the water. He begins cutting the tangled net away with his knife. We know that one violent twist of the tail could capsize the boat into the freezing water or injure one of us. The shining black eye of the dolphin is fixed upon him. The animal is still, perhaps exhausted and helpless or perhaps just gauging his actions. Finally the net falls away and he lowers the sleek body back into the water. The dolphin remains completely still in the water, almost totally submerged for several minutes while we wait, silent and watching.

Suddenly, the sea is thrashing around us. The dolphin thrusts triumphantly out of the water, hovers for seconds beside us, and then crashes back below the surface. It circles the kayak, leaping up, and streaking down. Only a few feet of water and the canvas kayak separate us from this life force of black muscle and sinew cresting on the water’s surface. We experience a sense of connection, as if the dolphin’s repeated leaps around the boat are communicating gratitude. After several moments the dolphin departs, and we watch the horizon until we are sure it has vanished back into the sea forever. Afterwards, we are exhilarated, almost breathless with the beauty and strangeness of the contact.

Back in the car, the fawn’s overtures of affectionate bonding continues until we get to the home of the licensed animal rescuer. Once there she shows us the large fenced yard, and then takes us on the back porch where several fawns are playing. Our fawn immediately checks out the others, and then comes back to lean against my leg. The woman assures me that all of the fawns are cared for and as soon as they are ready they will be released in a sanctuary nearby of 800 acres.

We leave, tired, but relieved that perhaps this time there will be a happy ending. The next evening the woman thoughtfully calls and leaves a message that the fawn is flourishing, drinking large amounts of goat’s milk, and socializing well with the other fawns. My husband reminds me of the story of the boy who walks the beach tossing the starfish who have washed up on shore back into the water. A man asks him why, pointing out that it scarcely makes a difference when the fate of so many thousands is sealed. The boy looks at him and then at the starfish in his hand. “It matters to this one,” he says, and tosses it into the water before moving on to the next.

Chesapeake Singing Cowboys

2010-06-08T23:07:00.005-04:00

Back in the Saddle

“I’m back in the saddle again

Out where a friend is a friend

Where the longhorn cattle feed

On the lowly gypsum weed

Back in the saddle again”

(Co-written by Raymond Whitley and Norman Phelps)

Click Here: Video of Gene Autry singing "Back in the Saddle"

Six Bar Cowboys on set of Rhythm Rangers (source: phelpsbrothers.tripod.com)

During the 1930’s, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers were the reigning stars of that peculiar American musical genre known as the Singing Cowboy. Recently, I learned that there was also a group of Chesapeake Singing Cowboys known as the Phelps Brothers. These Tidewater cowpokes hit all the high notes of the 1930’s, appearing in several Western movies, lunching with the stars at the famous Brown Derby in L.A., and even performing “Home on the Range” for a cane tapping President Franklin Roosevelt at the Texas Centennial.

Real cowboys did sing on the range. They sang a medley of camp songs, hymns and popular songs of the day, but nobody was listening until almost the turn of the century. Buffalo Bill’s popular Wild West Shows started touring the East in 1883, and reached their zenith around 1900 with thousands of people attending every event. Bill Cody knew how to put on a great show; complete with wild animals, sharp shooting competitions, dramatized historical re-enactments, rodeo shows, and a colorful assortment of Wild West personalities.

Audiences loved the combination of thrills and adventure in a romanticized Western setting. Cody created many of the clichés we associate with the Old West in over three decades of Wild West Shows. Familiar images such as two gunfighters facing off on a dusty street, painted Indians on horses streaking through herds of buffalo, and a cowboy’s hard living life on the range were all made famous in the Wild West Shows.

Alongside the Wild West Shows, a new literary genre appeared called the Western. The new century saw the remarkable success of the trail blazing novel, The Virginian, by Owen Wister. Set in Wyoming during the 1890’s, the story centered on a fight between the big cattle ranchers and the little guys, with frontier justice being reluctantly meted out by “The Virginian”. The central storyline is the moral tension the hero experiences caught between his horrible duty in executing the lynching, and his admiration for the courage of the thief. Woven into the plot is also a romance between the Virginian and a pretty schoolteacher named Molly Wood.

“The Virginian” was published in 1902, and dedicated to Wister’s good friend Teddy Roosevelt. The novel greatly influenced other writers, including a struggling young author named Zane Grey. Grey, who was to become one of the first millionaire fiction writers, published his bestseller Riders of the Purple Sage in 1907. He went on to write the books and stories that became the storylines for over a hundred Western movies.

The cowboy, this new American hero with his trusty steed, made the jump easily onto the silver screen. The birth of the film industry paralleled the timeline for Grey’s prolific writing career. His stories featured cowboys and gunfighters, men of action, wandering from place to place, living by a personal code of honor, and fighting when necessary to preserve that code. The first cinematic Western, The Great Train Robbery (1903) starring Bronco Billy, was silent. With the advent of sound in movies the cowboys begin singing in films. The first movie with a singing cowboy was Ken Maynard in Son of the Saddle (1930).

Soon Maynard was joined by several singing cowboys such as Gene Autry, Roy Rogers, and Michael Martin Murphy, stirring a generation of children who idolized them. Gene Autry, with his famous white cowboy hat, wrote the Cowboy Code, also known as the Cowboy Commandments, to inspire his fervent young fans.

1. Never shoot first, hit a smaller man, or take unfair advantage.

2. Never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.

3. Always tell the truth.

4. Be gentle with children, the elderly and animals.

5. Not advocate or possess racially or religiously intolerant ideas.

6. Help people in distress.

7. Be a good worker.

8. Keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits.

9. Respect women, parents and his nation's laws.

10. Be a patriot.

(In an interesting side note Gene Autry was also the composer of Here Comes Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.)

Norman Phelps Publicity Photo in 30's (source: phelpsbrothers.tripod.com)

Autry’s signature song was Back in the Saddle, a song he purchased from Ray Whitley. Ray and his fellow band member Norman Phelps composed the song together, according to the Phelps family history. The Phelps Brothers heralded from South Norfolk, Virginia, where they were a local musical phenomenon known as Norman Phelps and the Virginia Rounders.

Click Here: The Phelps Brothers Video from the movie "Rawhide".

Norman and his brothers, Earl and Willie Phelps, started out performing around South Norfolk. The boys played multiple instruments; including the fiddle, guitar, bass, mandolin, and the washboard. They sang beautiful “blood harmonies”, and had an easygoing, fun loving style. Soon the Phelps were appearing in local clubs and playing local radio stations.

In 1936, the brothers took the train to New York City to try out their luck on a bigger stage. In New York they hitched up with Ray Whitley. They performed at the Colonel Johnson Wild West Rodeo Show at Madison Square Garden as “Ray Whitley and the Six-Bar Cowboys”. Afterwards, Colonel Johnson took them to his personal ranch in Texas to learn how to be “real cowboys”. While in Texas they had the opportunity to perform for Franklin Roosevelt at the Texas Centennial Celebration. Then they were off to Hollywood, where they appeared in a series of Westerns and toured the country. In 1940 they decided to return to home, longing for Virginia, old friends and family,

Following WWII, the Phelps purchased a former hotel on the South Branch of the Elizabeth River. They settled in for the next twenty years; establishing a horse barn, a dance hall and a recording studio where they wrote and recorded numerous songs. The brothers enjoyed daily local radio appearances and even had their own weekly local television show in the 1950’s.

Although the brothers are gone now, they are not forgotten, and their legacy lives on in Chesapeake. The 12^th Annual Phelps Brothers Music Festival, sponsored by the Chesapeake Parks and Recreation Department and Beahive Promotions, will be held on Sunday, June 13, 2010 from 1 p.m. to 6 p.m. at Lakeside Park. Local bluegrass and country musicians will perform, and an exhibit will be set up with the brother’s original musical instruments and pictures. The public is invited to bring a yard chair and enjoy the music. Maybe they will even play a couple of cowboy songs in memory of “Chesapeake’s Singing Cowboys”, just right around the corner from where the boys grew up.

Of Peanut Soup & Poetry

2010-05-12T18:12:00.005-04:00

Once or twice a year my mother and I make a pilgrimage to share a cup of peanut soup. To foray into this soup with your spoon is to enter a culinary wild frontier. Peanut soup is so thick, so cloying, and so intense that I have never been able to eat more than a few spoonfuls. Forget pie eating contests, if they wanted to really separate the men from the boys, someone should hold a peanut soup eating contest.

A few spoonfuls tide me over for months, but then I get that hankering for another taste. Recently my husband took me to the Surrey House for my peanut soup fix. Even now, the texture and taste of that soup is a distinct and vivid memory.

I feel the same way about poetry. I can go through life for months contentedly reading books and articles, but then suddenly, I am compelled to seek out and read some poems. I don’t tend to read many, but the poems I do read, like the peanut soup, make a real and lasting impression.

Poetry is meant to be read aloud. I imagine Homer chanting the verses of the Odyssey. My father knew how to draw his children to his side with poetry. He knew The Canterbury Tales by heart, but he also knew what appealed to the young. We loved his renditions of the maudlin “Annabell Lee” and “The Raven” by Poe, and “Little Orphant Annie” by James Whitcomb, when my father’s voice would drop down to the softest whisper, and then he would roar AND THE GOBLINS WILL GET YOU IF YOU DON’T WATCH OUT! We would shriek the chorus together and shiver with delight. When I looked up this poem recently I discovered that it was popular at the time of its publication in 1885, and it was the inspiration for the Little Orphan Annie comic strip which was developed in 1924.

Many of the poems I learned from my father had sad overtones such as “The Little Boy Blue” by Eugene Fields about the death of a child during the night. Looking back I think that was because he learned them from his grandmother, who was born in 1865 during the final days of the Civil War, and was a true Victorian. The sentimental Victorians embraced their grief, from the custom of wearing black in mourning for a year after the death of a family member, creating sentimental hair lockets, photographing the deceased, and writing tragic poems.

Little wonder, when one considers the infant mortality rate and the diseases that ravaged families and communities. Verses gave voice to these intense emotions, losses, and memories. In the evenings families read, gathered around the piano to sing, recite poetry, and share stories. Poetry was also used intensively in the classroom when learning largely consisted of rote memorization and recitation.

Today, poetry is rarer in our lives, but no less powerful. Many of us remember footage of an older Robert Frost at JFK’s Inauguration, pages blowing away from the podium, hesitating, forced to recite from memory his moving poem “The Gift Outright”.

The land was ours before we were the land's.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England's, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by…

Even now, that astounding voice echoes in my mind when I read those words. Only four poets have read at Presidential Inaugurations, but it is a grand tradition. Poetry marks an occasion, and adds a depth of emotional and symbolic meaning which resonates beyond the moment, and I routinely weave a reading into library ceremonies.

When we dedicated the WWII Plaque at the South Norfolk Library, Raymond Harper held the audience spellbound with his reading of “That Old Gang of Mine” written about his lost friends after his return from war. His poem captured the sharpness of loss, friendship, and change far more dramatically than any speech made that day.

I was also mesmerized by the rollicking poem “We Are More” read by Canadian slam poet Shane Koyczn at the opening games of the Olympics. The words offered up a wild soulful tribute to the diverse people of Canada and reminded me strongly of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, an epic poem that continues to be treasured by each new generation seeking the essence of the American experience.

There is another Walt Whitman poem, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloomed”, that I ferret out every spring from a well thumbed family volume of collected verse. Traditionally during Easter Dinner, I insist some hapless relative read the poem, urging them to imbue the words with the great emotional intensity they evoke. Whitman penned the poem to express his grief, and the grief of the nation, at the news of Lincoln’s assassination.

WHEN lilacs last in the door-yard bloom’d,

And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night,

I mourn’d—and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring.

O ever-returning spring! trinity sure to me you bring;
Lilac blooming perennial, and drooping star in the west,
And thought of him I love…

In Fredericksburg, at the present day National Park Headquarters at Chatham Manor, Lincoln stood after the terrible Battle of Fredericksburg, and gazed down upon the town. Whitman came to Chatham too, as a nurse, searching for his beloved brother Theo while tending the suffering Union troops. There are two ancient Catalpa trees that still stand where both men once stood beneath them, the trees hollowed and resembling ancient shells of trees, but they still rain down seed pods each spring. This year I picked up a pod, and planted the seeds in my suburban backyard. I like to think that I will start the life of a new Catalpa tree here in Chesapeake, the descendent of a tree that once shaded both Whitman and Lincoln.

When my late husband’s grandfather, rather magnificently named Theodore Maximillan Nagel III, passed away at just shy of a hundred, people came from great distances to pay tribute to an amazing spirit. The bagpipes filled the gray November air around the grave, and an elegant older gentleman stepped forward to recite from memory Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Crossing the Bar”. It was a moment of raw power. Later, I had the same poem read at my husband’s service, and it was my lovely girlfriends, standing at the podium, each reading a different poem with great tenderness, that bought beauty and eloquence to that terrible moment.

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

Turns again home…

I believe that poetry is a celebration of life and of the endurance of the human spirit. Each year the Chesapeake Library is home to an “Evening with the Poets” sponsored by the Library Foundation, and hosted by C. Edward Russell Jr. This year the main event will be Friday, May 14^th at 7:00 pm at the Russell Memorial Library, complete with hors d’oeuvres in a delightful intimate setting of tables (ambience created by the dedicated Russell staff).

The evening will feature two remarkable regional poets, Tim Seibles of Old Dominion University and Jon Pineda, a native son of Chesapeake. Both men are nationally known and are truly wonderful to experience in person. So join us on May 14^th for an inspiring evening of poetry and our shared love of the spoken word, but you will have to embark on your own personal odyssey for a bowl of peanut soup.

Libraries: Beyond the Book

2010-04-29T21:53:00.005-04:00

There is wonderful line in the movie Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, based on the novel by Patrick O’Brian. The setting is during the Napoleonic Wars, and the British Captain Jack Aubrey (played superbly by Russell Crowe) is in pursuit of the Asheron, a mighty French war ship. A young sailor presents the Captain with a model of the hull of the Asheron. Captain Aubrey examines the model and exclaims, “That’s the future! What a fascinating and marvelous age we live in!”

I love this moment in the movie, because his observation captures the sentiment and excitement every generation experiences. Indeed, what a fascinating and marvelous age we live in. What an extraordinary moment in human history, with the almost instantaneous transmission of information, ideas, and dialogue between people from every corner of the globe. Information is flowing like a giant river where everyone can drink; if you have access to the technology.

For almost five thousand years, if we include the clay tablets that filled the libraries of Mesopotamia, books have represented the life of the human mind. Books have provided the physical record of human knowledge, the noblest ideas, the detailed inventories, our stories, poems, literature, and religious beliefs. For many of us, books exert a powerful force in our lives. Books are companions, illuminators, shaping who we are and what we believe. Theodore Roosevelt once said “I am a part of everything I have read.”

Historically, libraries have been collections of books and materials logically organized to facilitate access. However, if you go beyond the idea of physical collections of items to the underlying principals; the public library is a civic building constructed for the purpose of allowing every citizen a neutral public place to access knowledge, learn, think, write, create intellectual content, exchange ideas, and engage in a dialog.

A successful democracy demands an informed and educated citizenry, and the library ensures everyone equal opportunity and access to information, regardless of income or origin. In a new International City Managers Association survey, with support provided by the Gates Foundation, 22% of Americans surveyed identified public libraries as their “sole source for computers and internet resources.” Of all the people surveyed, 30% (a projected 77 million), use public library computers and wireless networks. Almost 70% of Americans (169 million) describe themselves as library users. At the Chesapeake Public Library, citizens book over 50,000 one hour computer slots every month and the demand exceeds the supply.

When I think of the writings of Aristotle and Plato, I have an image of men strolling together through the streets of Athens, engaged in lively and reasoned discourse. The Greeks created an intellectual forum which promoted education, dialog, enlightenment, and the exchange of different ideas. Democracy. This ideal is embodied by the modern public library.

"The School of Athens" by Raphael

Libraries are the public civic place for self actualization, for participating in Aristotle’s metaphorical strolling conversation with his students and colleagues through the streets of Athens. Collections of materials have been a means to that end, but not really the foundation for the institution as so many of us have assumed. Books have always been synonymous with libraries, but that doesn’t have to be the case. If books as we know and love them cease to be published in their traditional format, we still need public libraries. The delivery and format of ideas may change. The mission of free public access to knowledge, reading, learning, thinking, writing, creating, debating and exchanging ideas must continue.

This month the Library is adding three thousand downloadable e-books to the library catalog. In July, the Library will begin to add downloadable audio books as well. Patrons can download these books to their home computers and compatible e-book readers for a two week period before the item is automatically deleted at the end of the checkout period. Last year, Amazon’s sales of e-books topped the sale of traditional books for the first time. Downloadable books may be the next major wave as publishing houses and bookstores struggle with the expense of producing, shipping, and housing the increasingly expensive printed volume. I hope that the book as we know and love it will continue, but whatever format knowledge adopts, libraries will adapt.

In a recent interview with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards, he confesses to being a serious bibliophile. Richards owns so many thousands of books that he has considered “professional training” to learn the Dewey Decimal System to organize his collection. He goes on to say, “When you are growing up there are two institutional places that affect you most powerfully: the church, which belongs to God, and the public library, which belongs to you. The public library is a great equalizer.” Rock on Keith. To paraphrase another musician, Neil Young, rock and roll and libraries are here to stay.

Swamp Lit

2010-04-11T21:01:00.052-04:00

“The Lake of the Dismal Swamp” (Historic Print)

The Great Dismal Swamp is America’s most famous swamp, drawing poets, novelists, journalists, naturalists, and painters to its black, primordial waters. Some of the greatest literary names of the last two centuries have paid homage to its mysterious allure; including Edgar Allen Poe, William Wadsworth Longfellow, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sir Thomas Moore and Robert Frost. All of these writers penned vivid descriptions of the Swamp, ranging from sinister to glorious, and dismal to dream-like.

Each generation brought their own unique cultural perspective to the Swamp. In 1728, Colonel William Byrd II wrote an account of leading a surveying party to help set the state boundary line. From Byrd’s viewpoint, as the owner of the large and prosperous Wakefield Plantation, there was absolutely nothing redeeming about the swamp. Byrd, a rational 18th century pragmatist, estimated that it would take a full decade just to drain and clear the bog for farmland.

Byrd’s dismissal of the terrain as “Dismal” actually became synonymous with the word swamp. His account noted, “that whole distance was through a miry cedar bog, where the ground trembled below their feet most mightily” and they had “a dread of laying their bones in a bog that would spew them up again.”

(Photo Source: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches” by John Boyle O'Reilley)

Nonetheless, the Dismal Swamp quickly became known as one of the great natural phenomena of the new country, and George Washington, Patrick Henry, James Monroe and Andrew Jackson all made the pilgrimage to the cypress lined shores. Tales of the swamp circulated throughout the educated world; and in 1803, Sir Thomas Moore, Irish poet and British Consul to Bermuda, found his way to Lake Drummond. Moore then retreated to Norfolk to write, “A Ballad: The Lake of the Dismal Swamp”, with its famous opening refrain:

“They made her a grave, too cold and damp
For a soul so warm and true;
And she’s gone to the Lake of the Dismal Swamp,
Where, all night long, by a fire-fly lamp,
She paddles her white canoe.”

The Age of Reason had given way to the romantic sensibilities of the 19th century. Not surprisingly, the macabre Edgar Allen Poe was drawn to the swamp’s dark and sinister qualities. Poe traveled the canal, and his feverish imagination described it as “the boundary of the dark, horrible, lofty” forest. An unsubstantiated story credits him with penning parts of his most famous poem, “The Raven,” at the notorious Halfway Hotel, so-called because it straddled the North Carolina and Virginia State Line in the swamp. Poe was a known guest at the Halfway Hotel, which was the scene of many marriages, duels, and other dubious assignations.

“The Hotel at Lake Drummond” (Historic Print)

In his poem “The Lake,” Poe describes a sunset visit to the shore of a lake haunted by the ghosts of two lovers. Lake Drummond is believed to be the lake based on the physical description, with the wet cypress roots along the shoreline resembling black rocks.

“In spring of youth it was my lot
To haunt of the wide world a spot
The which I could not love the less--
So lovely was the loneliness
Of a wild lake, with black rock bound
And the tall pines that towered around.”

The dark interiors of the Swamp were rumored to have been a refuge for local and runaway slaves dating back to the 1600’s. The accuracy of stories about large colonies of slaves in the Dismal Swamp are debated by scholars, but slaves certainly sought refuge in the swamp. The waterways have been designated by the National Park Service as a site of the Underground Railway Network. The horror of slavery set against the backdrop of the menacing, mysterious landscape captured the imagination of poets, writers, and painters.

Longfellow’s poem, “Slave in the Dismal Swamp”, portrayed the suffering of humans seeking freedom. In 1856, a fictitious account in Harper’s Weekly by David Strother, told the story of the legendary “Osman,” who protected runaway slaves in the swamp. This account provided the inspiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s second anti-slavery novel, “Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp” in 1856; following the enormously successful “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”, the first American novel to sell a million copies.

By 1893, naturalist accounts began to make their appearance, such as, “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches” by John Boyle O’Reilly. The book features charming photographs of the excursion, and detailed accounts of the flora and fauna. The Nineteenth Century ended on a suitably romantic footnote. Poe’s poem, “The Lake”, captured the imagination of a young Robert Frost in 1894. Rebuffed by his sweetheart, a heartbroken Robert Frost decided to come to Virginia and wander around the swamp hopelessly until he perished. Fortunately, he was discovered, returned home, and married the object of his earlier angst.

(Photo: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches" by John Boyle O'Reilley)

Americans in the early 20th century, now in the era of the exuberant Teddy Roosevelt, set out to explore the swamp as naturalists and adventurers. The appreciation of the swamp as a rare and important wilderness area continues with volumes such as Bland Simpson’s, “The Great Dismal, a Carolinian’s Swamp Memoir” (1998), and our very own naturalist librarian Karen Kearney, with her new blog, “On the Wing.” The Great Dismal Swamp, Chesapeake’s greatest treasure, continues to provide a stunning contrast to our busy, modern suburban life, providing a deep, ancient, and primordial call of the wild.

(Photo Source: “The Dismal Swamp, Canoeing Sketches" John Boyle O'Reilley)

Betsy Fowler

Sakura

2010-03-30T16:50:00.018-04:00

from the bud

a blossom's mind is set

on falling

(Haiku by Robin Gill)

The beautiful weeping cherry tree burst into triumphant bloom for the re-opening of Greenbrier Library. I suspect Virginia Landers had a quiet word with the tree. After all, she’s been here off and on all week with her landscaping crew. Creating a beautiful Zen-like garden where the cherry holds court outside the great curving wall of glass. Tucking a pocket sized garden in each of the three window niches featuring reader’s club chairs. These gardens will be her swan song to Chesapeake.

People in Chesapeake may not know her name, but Virginia Landers has brought significant beauty into their lives. For almost thirty years Virginia has been landscaping the civic grounds of Chesapeake. In late summer the local roads are lined with lushly blooming Crape Myrtles, the City’s official tree. Virginia helped plant hundreds as part of the Chesapeake Beautification Program between 1989 and 1995. These trees in bloom are one of the most striking features of the cityscape. Washington, D.C. has Cherry trees, but the City of Chesapeake has Crape Myrtles.

Wandering around the park-like City Hall Campus on Cedar Road there are many wonderful discoveries. A small bridge and walk curve through a naturalized area connecting the parking lots and City Hall. Drifts of daffodils and snow drops fill woods that are full of birdsong. Star Magnolias and three miniature “Razzle Dazzle” Crape Myrtles spangle gorgeous blossoms outside the library. When the Fringe Tree blooms the fragrance is so heady and evocative that patrons reel into the library asking “What is that tree?”

Virginia was born to the gardening life as the child of a Norfolk landscaping family. She recalls that it was her father’s beloved Camellia bushes that first captivated her imagination. Virginia studied botany and dendrology (the study of trees) at Frederick College. Last week, she was behind the library working with her crew; kneeling, shoveling, and sowing. She rattles off the plant names in Latin, like the names of her children. She describes how the new garden will look gesturing with her hands, outlining a flowing umbrella shape as she explains how the bush will grow to fill the corner of the building.

Her hands are unapologetically weathered, brown, and capable. As a relative newcomer I ask her what grows well in Chesapeake. She responds, generous with her knowledge in the way of gardeners.

“All kinds of magnolias thrive here, and azaleas with the right partial shade and acidic, organic soil. Scuppernong grapes, peaches, not apples, it doesn’t get cold enough for them. Nandina bushes, Bermuda grass, which is the native grass, Camellias, and Chinese Holly. Bald Cypress trees do very well here; even in dry median strips, although they are a wetland plant. Butterfly Bushes, willows, and of course, Crape Myrtle, which can take the car exhausts. The herbaceous perennials often don’t do as well. This is a transitional area between zones 7 and 8, northern and southern plants will grow here, but sometimes the conditions can be difficult for each.”

She enthusiastically recommends her favorite reference source. Best Plants for Hampton Roads: A Landscape & Garden Companion (co-authored by Dawn Alleman, Ed Bradley, Laurie Fox, Norman Grose, Brenda Johnson-Asnicar, Sherry Kern, Eva Lynn Trump and Jim Williams). Virginia suggests visiting the Botanical Garden in Norfolk, which has a great horticultural shop. Although her passion is undiminished, Virginia is retiring on June 30th. When I read up on cherry trees, and their prominent role in Japanese culture, I realize what a fitting finale garden she created.

The Japanese call cherry blossoms sakura, which is also the name of the time of year when they bloom, a time to gather with friends and celebrate the beauty of spring and life. In Japan, the life cycle of the cherry blossom is emblematic of the beauty, fragility, and fleeting nature of all of life. The sakura season provides an annual reminder that life is glorious and passes swiftly, and that each fleeting moment is precious. It is a time to ponder your accomplishments and to think ahead of remains undone.

Virginia is leaving behind a wonderful legacy of beauty for her community. She has good reason to celebrate her achievements with friends as she gazes forward to her new life.

after sunset

the moon and i toast

the blossoms

(Robin Gill)

Betsy Fowler

A Sense of Place

2010-03-20T18:45:00.023-04:00

Who knows how long this will last

Now we’ve come so far so fast

Somewhere back in the dust

That same small town in each of us

(The End of the Innocence lyrics by Don Henley)

On a snowy Christmas Eve in 1945, a young man stood on board the train slowly pulling into the South Norfolk train station. Two long years had passed since he had seen his home and family.

He was just seventeen when he signed up for six years in the new naval aviation program. His father went with him to notarize the papers at the confectionary on Poindexter Street. Mr. White, the shop owner and local notary, wisely observed, “I can help get you in, but I can’t help get you out.”

The young man thought of that statement later when he was stationed in the Pacific Theater, where a series of small tropical islands was ravaged by some of the most savage fighting the world has ever known. However, he did survive the war, and the rest of the century that followed.

Raymond Harper was born in South Norfolk, a city of the first class, in March 1928. Born into a world where streetcar lines ran from South Norfolk to downtown Norfolk, where the Jordan Bridge was a symbol of modern progress, and most of the cataclysmic events that would define the twentieth century still lay on the horizon; far beyond the realm of anyone’s imagination.

In 2010, there is more to South Norfolk than meets the eye.

The old independent city of South Norfolk still lives on in the memory of many Chesapeake residents. People who vividly recall being raised in the tree lined streets running between Bainbridge Street and Chesapeake Avenue, in frame houses with generous front porches designed for summer socializing in those pre-air conditioned scorching Southern summers.

The natives of old South Norfolk recall a tightly knit community. A place where the front doors were never locked. A place where you knew and greeted everyone you passed on the street. A place where you walked down to Preston’s Drugstore at the corner of Poindexter Street, B Street, and Chesapeake Avenue for a milkshake and a visit with friends.

One of my co-workers, who grew up on Jackson Street in South Norfolk, says simply, “It was really something special back then.” And I believe her, because I have met so many people who still carry around that powerful sense of place and belonging about the old city.

Raymond Harper was one of a group of bright, high spirited South Norfolk sons and daughters who kicked up their heels, and then settled down to become many of the citizens who would shape the future of the new City of Chesapeake. Sheriff Newhart, Judge Preston Grissom, Judge Forehand, Bobby Clifton, Raymond Jones, Maury Brickhouse, and many others hailed from South Norfolk and Portlock.

Most of the old gang moved to other neighborhoods during the decades following the establishment of the new City of Chesapeake in 1963. South Norfolk, like so many other traditional American cities and towns, was ravaged in the late twentieth century by the urban migration to the suburbs and the accompanying movement of commerce to new shopping centers.

However, the old city is on the rise once again. The neighborhoods still retain many of the characteristics urban planners now know make a community livable. A walkable grid of sidewalks and tree lined streets, churches, and fine old homes, where young families still push strollers on warm summer evenings. There are green spaces such as the lovely old Lakeside Park. There is a local Historic District and a National Historic District.

There is still that unmistakable sense of place.

In recent years a new vision has emerged for South Norfolk. The City, working with local residents and business people, has created a South Norfolk TIF (Tax Increment Funding) District. The TIF is providing funding for the South Norfolk Strategic Plan, which is now underway. The Council, led by Mayor Krasnoff, and the Department of Economic Development, has approved the construction of a new public library on Poindexter Street. The library will be South Norfolk’s first TIF funded public building.

The investment in the library will play a key role in the revitalization of the Poindexter streetscape. The business world has realized that public libraries make great economic anchors for town centers and shopping areas. Open seven days a week, and most evenings, a busy public library can easily draw almost a thousand people a day, and help create a vibrant town center. Many people combine trips to the library with other errands like shopping or eating. That means library users visit surrounding businesses.

The library provides a civic presence, a source of entertainment and education, and acts as a commercial driver. Libraries also help anchor communities by providing a neutral public setting for people to meet, learn, and connect with ideas, information, and each other.

Design work is scheduled to begin next month for the library project. Seeking community input will be one of the first steps in the process. Remember that young soldier Raymond Harper? He now serves on the Library Advisory Board, and is planning on donating his extensive South Norfolk history collection to the new library. Soon people will be able to walk down Poindexter Street to go shopping, go out to lunch, get a cup of coffee, read the paper, greet their neighbors, and visit a beautiful new library. And Raymond Harper? He will be there too.

Betsy Fowler

(All photos courtesy of Raymond Harper)

Bringing Home the Bacon

2010-03-10T09:31:00.021-05:00

Exploring my new home base of Hampton Roads I make a wonderful discovery! A small Suffolk establishment, widely known to locals, called Bennett’s Creek Farm Market. As native as peanuts, pigs, and pines, this grocery store is an authentic, down home kind of place.

As part of my Tidewater cultural immersion I have been seeking out the local cuisine. Bennett’s serves it all up in a South of the James smorgasbord; with great items such as Hula Girl BBQ Sauce from Virginia Beach and Reggie’s Banana Pudding Sauce “It’s all about the Pudding!” distributed from Chesapeake.

On my first shopping foray I purchase fresh local pork chops, sausage, and bacon. Later that evening I pan grill the pork chops and serve them with bourbon sauce. Bliss! The next morning we go hog wild, so to speak, and cook up a slab of bacon, spicy sausage, brown farm eggs, and thick slices of whole wheat toast with comb filled honey (from Bennett’s as well). The bacon boldly steals the show.

I romantically envision the bacon being locally cured in a small cone roofed wooden smokehouse, although it is probably processed in a cinderblock building on a concrete pad. Chewy, salty, and delicious, it is as far removed from standard bacon as today’s catch of fresh fish is from a can of tuna. I am ruined or ‘ruint’. I immediately start planning a brunch, envisioning a table laden with this astonishing bacon, spicy sausage, cheese grits, ham biscuits, creamy eggs; you get the idea.

I imagine the menu description if this feast was served up at Emeril’s in New Orleans. “Thick rustic hand cut slabs of hickory smoked Suffolk, Virginia bacon, served with two, large free range chicken eggs, and sweet potato biscuits with wildflower honey.” Eat your heart out Paula Dean, there’s a new girl in town.

All of the recent cold weather gave me a great excuse to stay home and cook. The Library has hundreds of great cookbooks to page through and fantasize over. Some good titles for local recipes are the Best of the Best from Virginia Cookbook: Selected Recipes from Virginia’s Favorite Cookbooks I & II and Cooking the Southern African Way: Culturally Authentic Foods Including Low-fat and Vegetarian Ways. I have also ordered myself a copy of the popular Toast of Tidewater by the Junior League of Norfolk-Virginia Beach for additional inspiration.

Recently, I happened across a charming book entitled Alice Waters and Chez Panisse: The romantic, impractical, often eccentric, ultimately brilliant making of a food revolution by Thomas McNamee. This is the fascinating story of how the fresh, seasonal, local food movement in America was initiated in the late sixties by Alice Waters, a young, free spirit from Berkeley, California. Her restaurant, Chez Panisse, continues to be rated as one of the very best in the country.

A new book about food in America, Food Rules by Michael Pollan, has been receiving a great deal of attention in the media. Pollan urges us to eat healthy, wholesome food by using simple homilies to eloquently illustrate his points. “If it came from a plant, eat it; if it came out of a plant, don’t.” His earlier book, In Defense of Food: an Eater’s Manifesto, is distilled into a simple but powerful directive: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” This triplet became a mantra in my household last year (our recent foray into fresh bacon not withstanding).

There are some great local crops for the health conscious eater. I am a recent convert of fresh collards and turnip greens, old fashioned boiled and Asian sautéed; you can’t go wrong either way. My husband has proudly mastered roasting fresh peanuts to perfection in the oven, and a just cracked oyster, served with a dollop of freshly ground horseradish sauce, is my personal idea of perfection.

So let us raise a glass together to our wonderful local cuisine. Here’s looking at you Smithfield. Maybe I’ll even try the souse next time at Bennett’s.

Southern-Style Collard Greens
2 hickory-smoked bacon slices, finely chopped
2 medium-size sweet onions, finely chopped
¼ lb. smoked ham, chopped
6 garlic cloves, finely chopped
3 (32-oz) containers chicken broth
3 (1-lb) packages fresh collard greens, washed and trimmed
1/3 cup apple cider vinegar
1 Tbsp sugar
1 tsp. salt
¼ tsp. pepper

Cook bacon in a 10-qt. stockpot over medium heat 10 to 12 minutes or until almost crisp. Add onion, sauté 8 minutes, add ham and garlic, and sauté 1 minute. Stir in broth and remaining ingredients. Cook 2 hours or to desired degree of tenderness.
(Southern Living November 2009)

Betsy Fowler

La Primavera

2010-03-03T09:16:00.010-05:00

La Primavera
I am longing for spring. Looking out my kitchen window this cold Saturday morning I can feel the earth starting to rouse; sense the opening refrains to the ancient vernal symphony in the activity at the birdfeeders, the greening of the grass, and the slender stalks of the daffodils defying the recent snow squalls. Oh yes, spring is coming.

The artist Botticelli beautifully heralded the arrival of spring in the Renaissance painting La Primavera. Until I actually stood before the painting I never comprehended the grand scale of the canvas, the exquisite tapestry of small flora on the forest floor of the painting, or noticed that each of the female figures is with child.

As I grow older, passing through the seasons of my own life, I am more keenly aware of the enormous work of birth and new life; regardless of whether you are a bird, a bear, or a human being. Spring makes me appreciate anew the tremendous energy that is required to physically bear offspring, create a safe shelter, and care day in, and day out, for the relentless needs of the young; spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

This month, in the spirit of resurrection, renaissance and spring; the library staff and the community are banding together to re-create the Greenbrier Library. No additional funding for renovation projects is available during these lean times, but the work needs to be done; so we are rolling up our collective sleeves, wading in, and making do. Staff and volunteers have already begun ripping down the peeling wallpaper and cleaning out the debris of two decades. The Sheriff and Public Works has graciously loaned us a hardworking crew of trustees and a good hearted supervising deputy to help library staff paint and move several tons of steel shelving, collections, and furnishings.

In the theme of La Primavera, the Greenbrier Library makeover will be our first “green” project. The “new” shelving and fixtures are being recycled from the Walden Books that recently closed at the Greenbrier Mall and the Dillard store that closed at Chesapeake Square Mall. We are also doing some creative re-adaptation of old existing fixtures. The “new” carpet is recycled fibers and tiles from warehouse remainders from a large commercial project. Shelving and furniture no longer needed by the Library is being re-purposed by the Chesapeake Public School System.

The Greenbrier project is also about rethinking how we provide customer services. We will reopen with a single new adult service desk downstairs to conserve our most precious resource - our staff. Staff will be scheduled to “rove” the building to help patrons as needed. We will feature a new collection layout designed to maximize the natural light, and the views to the golf course, from the wide curving plate glass windows on the rear of the building. The use of light and color, signage produced by library staff, and a new floor plan, will all encourage library patrons to enjoy the collections featured on the new recycled display shelving. All of the computers and tables will be grouped with reference services on the second floor for work and quiet study.

We are planning to open the doors on Monday, March 22nd. So do plan to come and visit! However, you may not see me, because I am hoping to complete this project on schedule, and then perhaps, perchance, to steal away for a day or two and revel in the wonders of spring.

“The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home. First with brooms, then with dusters; then on ladders and steps and chairs, with a brush and a pail of whitewash; till he had dust in his throat and eyes, and splashes of whitewash all over his black fur, and an aching back and weary arms. Spring was moving in the air above and in the earth below and around him, penetrating even his dark and lowly little house with its spirit of divine discontent and longing. It was small wonder, then, that he suddenly flung down his brush on the floor, said ‘Bother!’ and ‘O blow!’ and also ‘Hang spring-cleaning!’ and bolted out of the house without even waiting to put on his coat.

(The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham, Chapter 1, “The Riverbank”)

Passion for Reading

2010-02-23T12:44:00.004-05:00

On a recent cold weekend I slipped into a Friend’s of the Library book sale almost surreptitiously. When I first became a librarian I thought that being surrounded by books at work would slake my fierce bibliophile appetite. Clearly, I underestimated the depth of my passion. Thirty years later I still bring armloads of library books home, buy second hand books, order still more off of Amazon, and shop the discounted books at Barnes and Noble. I pile books up by my end of the couch, the bed, tuck a bookcase in almost every room, and keep a spare one in the car.

I am comforted by their presence, like silent friends that ward away loneliness, boredom, and ennui. I am compelled to stockpile unread volumes, like people hoard food or money, in case of an emergency, when one could suddenly be deprived of fresh reading material.

Years ago my husband and I were travelling in Mexico and forgot to bring along reading materials. We were desperate for something to read in English. We read the back of the toothpaste, an aspirin bottle, a brochure; anything and everything we could find. It was like being deprived of brain oxygen. Never again!

A leisurely perusal of the book sale yielded up some treasures. A copy of Answered Prayers by Truman Capote, a book I have always intended to read. Another classic title, Virginius Dabney’s Virginia: Writings about the Old Dominion. I wonder idly if Virginius’s mother somehow ordained his destiny by her baby name selection. The Backyard Bird Watcher by George Harrison, the birder not the Beatle. A slender volume entitled Favorite Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Later that evening I dabble like a literary dilettante in my pile. Read a stray poem to my tolerant husband, stare at photos of bird stations, and glance through Tom Wolf’s introduction to what he terms the “epitome of the species Virginius” Dabney. Alternately, I read e-mail, check the weather, and peruse The New York Times on my iPhone.

When I talk to non-library users they always sound surprised that people are still using the library, as if Google and Amazon should have rendered the institution obsolete. The truth is that libraries are busier than ever. Last year more books were checked out per capita than any year since the Great Depression. Even before the recession the library business was booming. We are living in a remarkable time in history, a great information renaissance with access to breathtaking amounts of knowledge and data, and the unprecedented opportunity to exchange ideas and create new knowledge with people worldwide. Books, television, movies, databases, web resources, audio books; they are all part of the great life of the mind, and each format stimulates, compliments, and deepens our interest and understanding of the world. Perhaps Emily said it the best:

“The pedigree of honey
Does not concern the bee;
A clover, any time, to him
Is aristocracy.”