the earthwitness journal - Comments

Marshall Massey comments on Tender Mercies

Marshall Massey — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 11:46:04 +0000

Tyrone, my health is fine; my blogging's on hold while I finish writing a book. I do intend to return to blogging eventually.

I appreciate your concern.

tyrone ferrara comments on Tender Mercies

tyrone ferrara — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 15:08:32 +0000

Dear Friend

Looks like Marsha Freeman is getting her wish.

I noticed that you no long blog. I pray that all is well with you.

Marshall Massey comments on Images from Iowa (Conservative)

Marshall Massey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:36:50 +0000

Actually, our yearly meeting gathers every summer at Hickory Grove Meeting, on the grounds of Scattergood School, just a few miles east of West Branch. That's yet another of the old nineteenth-century meetinghouses. Richard Nixon's grandmother is buried there.

Hoover, though, belonged to the Five Years Meeting branch of Friends, not to our Conservative branch. The Five Years Meeting branch had gotten caught up in the Holiness Revival movement during the late nineteenth century, and was, by Hoover's day, a world of hymn singing, altar calls, and come-to-Jesus sermons. Despite the old-fashioned look of Hoover's meetinghouse, it was a world closer to what people nowadays call evangelical Protestantism than to traditional Quakerism.

Marshall Massey comments on Across the Hocking Hills

Marshall Massey — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 11:26:12 +0000

Thank you for the bits of background, Ellen!

Ellen Martin comments on To the Spoon River

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:43:02 +0000

Oh, Michael and Newman aren't in mine, either, certainly not Newman, but they furnish good allusions. Anyway, I couldn't risk teasing you at this point, even though I half expected clarification "down the road." I had a little fun, and I hope not too much fun, commenting from time to time As I Read, and not After. I am relieved that your feet and ankles and everything healed at all! We ask so much of them, and think of them so rarely. I think your working compromise with the car was very sound. You saw what you could and kept to fairly slow speeds and frequent stops throughout. And your eye for geology helped you see the land more readily than many of us would be able to.

Ellen Martin comments on Images from Iowa (Conservative)

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 08:33:39 +0000

At Hoover's Birthplace in West Branch near Iowa City, one finds, not only the spacious beginnings of restored native prairie, but also the old Meeting House that Hoover's family went to, preserved near the homestead cabin he was born in. A beautiful piece of carpentry, like the one pictured above. If only Hoover had had the openness or imagination to discern that all the strategies that had worked so well for him before, whether making money or feeding Belgium, were not working after 1929. Not that I would want to exchange FDR for Hoover, but that one knows a great deal of needless suffering, and a sad period of depression for Hoover himself, ensued. (Which didn't stop him from retiring to the Waldorf Astoria.)

Ellen Martin comments on Across the Hocking Hills

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:34:25 +0000

The iron furnaces of the Hocking Hills were abandonned when the Mesabi Range deposit in Minnesota was discovered. The soil had been acidified by the smelting process and charcoal making, and what patches of level land there were, had been rendered unfit for a decent vegetable garden. Both people and land got poor fast. Then the Depression arrived, and the New Deal people called the county and said, we're making a Forest in the Hocking Hills. The county people said there were no trees there. That's ok, said the New Deal, we'll build the park, and the trees will come. And by god that's what happened. FDR sent out CCC guys who cleared paths (which damage lines of landscape but preserve everything around it), built picnic tables and piers into the tiny reservoir lakes, and planted trees. At first they planted ridiculously unlikely exotics, but in March '07 I was assured by a lady in charge of much of the Wayne Forest that they've been planting only native and attested trees since the 80s. The 80s!! No great greed without some local intervention. This was all expounded at a meeting of the West Virginia Native Plant Society.

Ellen Martin comments on A Crossing Between Worlds

Ellen Martin — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:13:53 +0000

I drove up and down rte 23, first through and later around Circleville, between Detroit and Huntington, WV, where Lee taught. A little ways above Circleville is the roadside Renick's Farm Market, which has expanded from one booth in the 50s to a large room which offers fresh local produce, local packaged items (baked goods, canned vegetables, honeys & jams), and some imported beverages (I frankly like being able to buy good old straight sugar-water Jarritos soda from Mexico here). They have a big corn maze at Halloween and then close till spring. They sell a lot of corn for people to eat. It's a mixed-use place that gives one hope.

Few people realize that SE Ohio is Appalachian. Thanks for pronunciation of Adelphi. There's a town in WV, New Canaan, pronounced "kuh-NANE." That suggests not just a dialect, but the pronunciation of a familiar place name by someone who lived in relative isolation but certainly read their Bible, and thus had never heard Canaan pronounced, but could see in reading that it had two 'a's in it.

Sometimes the good places to camp in such places, are there but not evident. They've been preserved, but are not on the main line. Or the main line no longer takes one to them, as the old "desire lines" would. M-12 in Michigan, of course, is one of the nicest desire lines in the country.

Marshall Massey comments on “Going Naked for a Sign”

Marshall Massey — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:49:35 +0000

Thank you for these kind words, Ellen!

Marshall Massey comments on To the Spoon River

Marshall Massey — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:47:42 +0000

As it turned out, my problem was not one that elevating my feet would solve. I had bursitis of the ankles, an uncommon condition (which is why the Galesburg physician didn't figure it out), in which the burses (which connect bone to tendon) were inflamed because they were being worn out faster than my body could rebuild them.

It wouldn't have happened when I was younger, but my 56-year-old body just did not stand up to stress as well as I'd expected.

I was not fully healed until six months or so after the walk ended.

Michael and Newman, by the bye, are not in our Quaker pantheon. No disrespect intended, but that's how it is.