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AMY SMITH LINTON

Bloggetty Blog, life Blog...

New Adventures

6/19/2024

4 Comments

 
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Roman Emperor Hadrian ruled from 117-138. One of the things he's remembered for is the wall* that he had the Roman army build across the top of England.  

*Classic "Build the Wall" strategy: the alleged purpose was to keep the barbarians out (didn't work btw) but in practice, very useful in keeping the Roman army busy and out of Hadrian's hair.
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So the wall is around 1800 years old, and stretches 73 miles from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. The Roman fortifications included a steep ditch to the north of the wall, and, every mile, a milecastle where troops were on station, and between each milecastle, two watchtowers.

For some of those miles, of course, the structures no longer exist—Imagine having a neat stack of beautifully quarried blocks just SITTING there century after century. Of course the rock was repurposed by the locals.
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Why, you might ask, is she telling us this? Because since I was a young reader, I have wanted to visit Hadrian's Wall. 
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Using a big birthday as an excuse, I packed up my kit and betook myself to Corbridge, a little bitty village in the heart of  Northumberland in the north of England.
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The bridge over the river Cor.
I went solo—a decision for which I was profoundly grateful on Day 2 of my walk, when the unending descents and ascents of slippery rock staircases were certainly NOT on the menu when I'd tried to lure my friends to come along.  
​
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John and Allison from York, trail friends, climbing a slippery slope.
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There's a lot to unpack for me about the stretch of doing something quite new without companions. It was profoundly rewarding to—like any 2-year-old will say—accomplish this myself.  ​
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I hiked around 28 miles across three days. ​
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I lost count of the stiles, the stairways, the sheep, the suspicious cattle.
​It's a polite walking culture in the UK, and I was not the only solo woman on the trail. I slept soundly in very pleasant accommodations (Thanks Joe "Puma" Froehock for the recommendation of Mac's Adventures!).
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Mac's Adventures comes with a neat-o phone ap. Yes, that orange blob is me, side-questing.

Conversations were struck up.
Vistas were admired.
Inspiration for book two was discovered.
Complaints and old-man noises were made.
​I checked my heart-rate kind of a lot. 
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Shelter was taken during the inevitable rain (ask me about my Tyvek rain skirt!). ​
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Sandwiches involving watercress were eaten al fresco with sheep as audience.  KT tape became a trusted pal. 

And it was over all too soon.

Knock wood my physical plant and my pocketbook will allow a repeat.  Maybe the Cumbria Way walk. Or a bit of the 670-mile-long South West Coast Pathway? Jeepers. Wait, the Pilgrim way to Lindesfarne—ooooh.
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This hike was sandwiched between a few days in London and Newcastle. Not enough armchair adventure? Find me @amysmithlinton on Instagram for more about the trip.


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Veteran's Day

11/8/2021

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<Insert sound of fife and drum>
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Does anyone else see a saluting soldier sporting a tricorn hat?  Respect from above the treeline.




This day was formerly known as Armistice Day, marking the end of the "war to end all wars" back in 1918. 
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Buck and Betty

5/25/2021

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My Grampa Navy -–– called for his career –– had two brothers who died young. One was a handsome rogue, killed, as the story goes, in a bar brawl over somebody else's wife.

The other brother was a hero, a fighter-pilot who died during WWII when his plane crashed over the Everglades.
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Uncle Buck and Aunt Betty around 1940.
I have no reason to doubt that Grampa Navy told the truth, or that Mumsie and her sister remembered the family histories any differently than they were told, but it's the nature of stories to evolve.  

The name of Grampa Navy's grandmother, Hepsie Vaughter, as case in point. So researching the genealogy, I took both brothers' stories with a grain of salt.  

Focusing on Uncle Buck, the nice brother (how very East of Eden that seems), I searched for his fighter pilot records on Ancestry, the National Personnel Records Service, the National Archives, Folds5, casualty lists, et cetera, all to no avail.

Of course I only knew that he was likely born in Tennessee or Georgia, sometime around 1910. That his name was really George. I knew his parents' names and those of his brothers. But George Wheeler is a common name.

So I went to the basics: the census. Grampa Navy was born near Copperhill, Tennessee. His father was born in Ducktown, Tennessee and worked the Burra Burra Mine as an acid man. (Dang!)
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1920 Census details
My sister and Mumsie stopped by Copperhill to visit kin on their way south in the 1980's.

​Sarah said the place was dire: the hill of copper laid open by mining, the land as barren and dead as the surface of the moon, effluent pumping through those hollers, cars abandoned in weedy front yards.

Decades later, the whole area was transformed for the Olympic Games, the river channeled and remodeled into a kayaking and canoe course, and the mine terraformed back into something human-scaled. 
All of which explains why Grampa Navy and his family moved to Miami. I only knew it happened when he was fairly young, and sure enough, there they are. 

The little family of five sprawling across two pages of the US Census of 1930 1930: Dad a construction worker, Mom at home, George –– Uncle Buck! –– a truck driver at 20, son Ed (teen Grampa Navy!) a 17-year-old theatre usher, and 13-year-old future no-goodnik Dennis not employed.  
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With these birthdates and places of birth for both Grampa Navy's brothers, Ancestry.com. led me to Uncle Buck's 1934 marriage to Ina Pearl. Otherwise known as Aunt Betty, for which we can't blame her.  In Mumsie's version, anyhow, she was Betty by nature, Betty by name.  

And there the trail went cold for me. The mystery of Uncle Buck's death remained unsolved (or at least undocumented) for years. In a 1938 city directory, he's selling insurance, living in what later became Little Havana.

​In the 1940 census, he and Betty are still in Miami. He's a tire service man, and they have Betty's 10-year-old niece Nina, plus a boarder, Orban Strickland, living with them. Looking at the handwriting, I speculate whether Orban is related to neighbor Hokes Stickland, a neighbor.
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The censuses (I pause here to look up how to correctly spell more than one census. Censuses it is, but censusses is also acceptable, as is a plural census) from after 1940 have not yet been made public, so I needed to seek elsewhere for intel.

​Opinion among my elders varied, but they thought Uncle Buck's plane went down in 1944.

I kept poking at the question and –– thank you Dawn N for the assist –– Newspapers.com eventually turned up the goods. 
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A later article in the Miami News corrected the location of the plane crash to Melbourne Florida rather than Melbourne Australia.  It's an understandable mistake, especially as the crash occurred during the height of the Guadalcanal Campaign in the Solomon Islands on the other side of the world. Plus, it was a Miami paper, so Melbourne might have seemed veritable Antipodes.

I'm satisfied. I'll call Uncle Buck, a Naval airman, a war hero. I don't know his rank yet, but I don't believe he was at the wheel. Melbourne, Florida, by the way, is located north of Miami on the east coast of Florida, not very close to the Everglades, but it's at least the same state as the family legend. It might even count as the Bermuda Triangle.

There's so much left untold from the paper record. It's interesting to note that Hokes Strickland, his former neighbor, is among the pallbearers. I consider Aunt Betty, so cheerful in these sepia toned images with her young husband, widowed at 34. The good news is that after the war, she married again and is carried away by the tides of time. 


Memorial Day Update May 2021

Thanks to alert reader, Ken H., I got hold of the official Navy accident report.

​A training flight out of the Banana River Naval base (we race our sailboat on that section of the river each December!) crashed on landing after the failure of an engine. Five survivors, seven fatalities. The survivors paddled to shore in an inflatable lifeboat.  

As I read it, G.R. Wheeler, Uncle Buck, was not the pilot. He's listed as an "AS," an aviation equipment specialist, acting as "NFO" a naval flight officer on the plane. An NFO, as the inter webs inform, was often a specialist in a weapons or sensor system. A tragic accident, but still, as Guy, the nice guy at accident-report.com said, they gave their all, which makes them heroes. 
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Book Clusters: The London Blitz

10/29/2019

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Sometimes, the bookshelf is stocked with wide-ranging topics. Other times the books seem to form clusters. Maybe it's just a question of what's interesting: a rash of murder-mysteries, a brace of biographies, a deep delve into orbital mechanics.

Or perhaps just luck of the draw. 

​For the past year or so, I have read many stories about the London Blitz and also about the  female spies of World War II.
At the risk of insulting our collective historical memory, let me review the Blitz.  

In around 1939, the Nazis were marching pretty handily across Europe, invading Czechoslovakia, Austria, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, the Channel Islands, toppling governments and sending whole populations of people to work camps.

Basically setting the platinum standard for European evil.

The British kept fighting (on the beaches, on the landing fields, etc., etc...) and in the late summer of 1940, Hitler sent a bomber to  London.  

It might be that the pilots got a bit turned around and only accidentally dropped a cartload of bombs on London's East End. It might be that the Germans were retaliating for a British raid that killed German non-combatants.  

In any case, the German bombs landed in the heart of the city, destroying houses and killing civilians.  Churchill responded by sending a fleet of bombers to hit Berlin. The British succeeded, and then did it a second and third time –– to the disbelief of the Germans, who thought nobody could get to Berlin.  

Naturally, the Germans were outraged. Hitler vowed that if the British wanted to drop bombs on German cities, well by gum, the Germans would drop ten times as many on British cities.

So then began the Blitz –– the German bombers targeted civilian sites, landmarks, population centers, night after night. Tens of thousands of civilians died. Hundreds of thousands were hurt.  

​The bombardment went on without much stop until the following May, when thankfully, Hitler was distracted by the sparkly-sparkly toy that was Russia.

The Blitz was meant to terrorize the British, but instead of losing heart, the Brits dug in their heels. They sent their kids to the countryside, hunkered down in Tube stations,  and continued to do business in a bombed-out city.

​It was "Britain's finest hour," not the least because with the Germans focused on civilian targets, the Royal Air Force caught a break to rebuild their fleet.

Talk about stiff upper lip. 
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This historical moment –– the bombing of civilians and the endurance of those citizens –– is sadly not unique to the British. It's happening right now, of course. Terrible things happen again and again. 

With the Blitz, I suppose part of the pleasure is knowing that it ended. And that the bad guys did not win. With this setting, I've been enjoying a whole host of novels and the odd non-fiction volume.  

Here's a trio of recommendations: 

In Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, the Blitz is the catalyst for the heartbreaking love affair at center stage.

The novel begins in a grey and tired 1948 and runs backward, tracing the fates of four Londoners to the flash-lit beginning in 1941.

Amazing period detail, wrenching emotion, and astonishing characterization makes me wish I'd written this novel.


From Connie Willis, a pair of double-decker novels called Blackout and All Clear are set in the Blitz and focuses on how ordinary people survived it.

In Blackout, historians from Oxford in 2060 travel back in time to observe the Blitz firsthand. As one might expect, their expedition into the past goes awry and they are unable to return home.

All Clear continues the story to its suspenseful conclusion. It's not for everyone, this cement block's worth of story, but it's among my favorites. It juggles multiple storylines with humor, pathos, and a dollop of historical facts for a long immersive experience.  
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Everyone Brave is Forgiven by Chris Cleave turns out to be an examination of the variations of bravery –– from the courage of battle, to the strength to simply keep carrying on –– shown by a handful of Londoners.

Based loosely on the story of the author's own grandparents, the novel is engaging and bittersweet.  I gobbled it up over a weekend.
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I haven't yet had my fill of Blitz stories –– and espionage-by-women tales, the topic for another day –– if anyone has recommendations?
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Independence Day

7/2/2019

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My favorite line from the Declaration of Independence? 

It's not how "we hold these truths to be self-evident" –– even though that is one of the neatest summaries of all time (all are created equal, with the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness).

Nor is it how governments "derive their power from the will of the governed," which is likewise very elegant.

That initial section endures and continues to inspire.
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​No, the part I enjoy most is where the reasons for the rebellion from Britain and its king are set out in full and querulous detail. It's a laundry list of offenses, including my personal favorite:

"He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation."*

This is just one of a couple of dozen of reasons that the 13 states agreed to start the Revolution.  You can feel the outrage and exhaustion –– though it was written mostly by Thomas Jefferson, the whole document was agreed to by committee.

Committee-approved!

Booyah!

Sadly, other complaints against the King (like this one: "He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or incur miserable death in transportation thither.") didn't make the cut. How different a Republic it would have been had that one made it.  

Committee-disapproved!

Sheeeeit!

​

*Don't recognize these lines? That's okay. National Public Radio broadcasts the Declaration in full every year and you can read the whole thing in a careful ten minutes or so.. Here's a link to our fantastic National Archives transcription. 

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Genealogical Eavesdropping

5/14/2019

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The internet is one supersized overshare.

Along with the thousands of selfies and blogs about piffle, plus all those YouTube videos about optimal application of eyeliner, surviving the Apocalypse, cleaning scallops using a shop vac, and SO much more, sites beyond number offer deliciously random information to the careless researcher.

And by careless, I mean "easily distracted."

​By which naturally, I refer to myself. 


I was on the track of my namesake 3x gr-grandmother, Amy Cole Hall. She lived mostly in Pennsylvania, but also in Litchfield, Connecticut. ​
Amy Cole Hall
Amy Cole Hall (with cat) and her daughters and possibly a sister or two.. .
Somehow (and it's always a bit of a click-mystery) I ended up on someone else's compilation of documents pertaining to their ancestors, the Sturdevants of Luzerne, Pennsylvania. Naturally, I started reading. The Sturdevants connect to another branch of my family, but I didn't know that at the time.

Oh the eternal difficulty in resisting the temptation of other people's letters...

An exerpt from a letter 14 Oct 1842 from Dr. George Lane Keeney to Salmon Keeney, quoting from a letter from brother Seth: "My wife has been counting up while I notched a stick, and we find we have (9) nine living children, 4 girls and 5 boys."*

Does this seem –– um –– peculiar that a married couple needed to notch a stick to count their living children?

The internet link to the letters is here.  

Also among the paper-trail of the Sturdevants is what might be some of my new favorite letters* of all time. Anyone who commits words to paper is aware that the record will live on; it's kind of the point of putting words on paper, right?

I made a sound recording of one letter –– both for the interest of clarity, as the grammar and spelling was irregular, but also because it was fun to voice those words. 

*My previous all-time favorite letters? A series of wonderful schadenfreude-inducing Christmas newsletters from a certain childhood friend's unhappy wife (oh! how I looked forward to those each December! Even after their divorce, I kept getting these little masterpieces of misery bedecked with images of holly and jolly St. Nick! I should be more ashamed to enjoy them, but she had such a way with passive aggression!) 

In any case, herewith the letter 7 June 1842 from Asahel Keeney to his brother Dr. George Keeney.

It's a brutal catalogue of local gossip. Burn baby, burn.
There's another letter to their sister, Amy Keeney Hall –– not my Amy, but of interest anyhow –– mentioning that poor pitiful Phebe Wilson, who "quit hur husband to keep from starving."  Brother Seth writes "we callculated to have visited you this fall but my health prevented If I live untill another fall I will be sure to visit."

​I hope he had the chance. 
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The Big Parks Trip: Capitol Reef National Park and Pipe Springs National Monument

8/29/2018

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During our 9000-mile trek around the western US, we learned a few things about Utah.
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The Fremont in Capitol Reef National Park.
Pipe Springs National Monument
Windsor Castle at Pipe Springs.
First, it's got zillions of acres of dramatic desert scenery and otherworldly rock formations.

​One ranger-led evening program included an entertaining slide show where the audience was invited to guess: Mars? Or Utah? It was harder than you might expect.
Second big thing about Utah? Mormonism.    

What we don't know about the religion would fill a library. (Just for the record: our ignorance extends to nearly all branches of belief. We are non-denominational like that.)

But thanks to the Big Parks Trip, we do know why there are orchards at Capitol Reef National Park, and why the fort at Pipe Springs was built.


Here's my abbreviated version of the history: Back in the day (mid 1800's), when Mormons were facing persecution in the eastern US, Brigham Young led his followers into the Utah Territory, where they could practice their religion without oversight or interference from the government.  Since, naturally, the territory was not yet a state.

Long story short, the conflict between faith and state came to actual war between Young's followers (the Nauvoo Legion) and the US Army. 
It's no surprise then, that Young would encourage his people in self-sufficiency and plan for what felt like an inevitable return to open hostilities with the government.

Mormons went into the desert to start farming.  Taking advantage of the water in the Waterpocket Fold (that's what the 
cognoscenti call that 100-mile long wrinkle in the Earth's crust), farmers planted apples, pears, peaches, apricots, cherries, peaches, almonds, and more.

These orchards are part of the "historic landscape" that visitors to the Fruita Campgrounds in Capitol Reef can still enjoy today.
Fruita Campgrounds, Capitol Reef National Park
As in, one can wander around in the orchard and eat apricots to one's heart's content.

3000 or so fruit trees are maintained by the National Parks Service (the last settlers moved out in the 1960's after selling their land to the Park). An earthly paradise.


And likewise, the Mormon ranch at Pipe Springs is a National Monument. Halfway between Zion National Park and the Grand Canyon, Pipe Springs served as a stop-over for early tourists out west.

My historical summary: For time immemorial, local Kaibab Paiute people came here on their annual circuit. At the end of winter, this little oasis was full of rice grass and small game. And for time immemorial, the Paiutes moved along for better hunting and gathering as the seasons changed.
Then the Europeans showed up.

To be fair, according to the story we heard, Mormons settlers arrived in November.

They didn't know someone was already calling the Springs home.

They didn't understand that the rich grazing they found for their cattle might not last forever.

They didn't realize the life-or-death impact their cows' overgrazing would have on the Kaibab Paiutes.
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​Luckily for the Mormons, these particular natives were not a warlike lot. Between small-pox, TB, and starvation, the local population of natives dwindled pretty rapidly. 
By 1905, there may have been something like 90 tribe members left.

So why the fort? And why the telegraph line?

It was, so we heard in our tour, part of Brigham Young's strategic line of retreat in case the US government took up against the Mormons again.

Young would head south to Mexico if things went –– you know –– South for him. 

The fortified ranch house ("Windsor Castle" was also a handy spot to hide plural wives when the federal marshals came looking for proof of polygamy.  
Deseret Telegraph
Drought and ongoing federal prosecution of polygamy (check out the Edmunds-Tucker Act of 1887 for some stimulating thought on church vs. state) put an end to Mormon ownership of the ranch. 

It became a National Monument partly because Pipe Springs offered a way-station between the Grand Canyon and Zion National Park, Today, the water rights are split between the Kaibab Paiute Tribe, the National Parks Service, and a group of descendants of the cattle farmers.

​The Kaibab Paiute (now numbering 200 souls) would still like to have the spring back, by the way.


​Ironically, of course, when the states came into being, Pipe Springs ended up in Arizona rather than Utah. Which is another thing we learned about Utah. 



Additional References
​

https://www.kaibabpaiute-nsn.gov/KPTCEDS.pdf
​https://www.everyculture.com/multi/Le-Pa/Paiutes.html
http://itcaonline.com/?page_id=1166
https://heritage.utah.gov/tag/the-paiute-tribe-of-utah
https://www.deseretnews.com/article/865574356/A-visit-to-pioneer-oasis-Arizonas-Pipe-Spring.html
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The Big Parks Trip: This Is NOT Where  Close Encounters of the Third Kind Was Filmed.

8/21/2018

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On our 9000 mile tour of the western US, Captain Winnebago drove and moi –– his trusted Snactition –– ran the maps. Except for this one time...
Bear Butte, South Dakota
We had just spent a couple of halcyon days at what turned out to be one highlight of the highly-lit trip –– Custer State Park.

We aren't fond of the historical figure, but his namesake chunk of land in the Black Hills of South Dakota? Really wonderful. More about that anon.
But to the point. From Custer, our next destination was Badlands National Park in North Dakota. More or less due north.

Parked between the two spots is the axis mundi of motorcycle fans: Sturgis, SD. Biker bars and black tee-shirts. Not to our taste. 

Take the western route around Sturgis, and you can get to the Devil's Tower National Monument.  Take the eastern side, and you pass a state park named Bear Butte.

​Captain Winnebago has a dry sense of humor.

​He rarely indulges in age-12 bathroom jokes, unlike some others he could mention, but after perusing the map, he was unable to stop calling the place Bare Butt State Park.  
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We had to go to Bare Butt State Park.  How could we not?

Like so many serendipitous moments while traveling, this came out of nowhere and delivered what we hadn't even thought to expect.
Devil's Tower Postcard
The Devil's Tower was on the Big List of Parks.

To be honest, I'd kind of thought of doing a mashed-potatoes and gravy dinner before heading to the Devil's Tower.

Maybe, you know, start intoning the five notes (re mi do do si), to get us in a Devil's Tower kind of mood.

But if you've gone off in search of America, isn't it just too too much to visit something just because of its movie reference?

​A Spielberg movie no less?

Still, it was on the list, and I didn't actually notice that we were going to drive the opposite way round Sturgis, such was the joy of hearing Mr. Linton say "Bare Butt State Park" again and again.
Like Devil's Tower, Bear Butte is an incongruously tall mountain in the midst of the high plains. It's mysterious and magnificent. However, Bear Butte is still in use as a spiritual center of Native American culture.

​Unlike nearly everywhere else we went, Bear Butte State Park was staffed by Native Americans, managed by Native Americans, and visited largely by Native Americans. 

I grant you, one day of hiking does not an expert make. But there's plenty of data for me to form some theories.
Considering how enormous the Great Plains turned out to be, it's heart-breaking to see what dusty little corners are left for the First Peoples. 

Oh, I know, it was war. But more than that, it was the dreary series of treaties and small pox blankets and  "assimilation" campaigns. Heavy sigh.

Bear Butte State Park has a trail up the mountain. It's a pilgrimage for some: climb the Butte for prayer, for a vision quest, to commune with the ancestors.  

On the lowest section of the trail, offerings of tobacco wrapped in colorful cloth hang from the trees.  

Signage along the way advises visitors to the park not to clean up the scraps of tee-shirt or bandana fabric tied to the branches of the trees.

These things are not trash.
Bear Butte, South Dakota
Bear Butte, South Dakota
Nearly everyone we saw –– the shirtless dark-haired boys pelting down the trail at top speed, the elderly ladies in skirts assisting one another uphill, the dressed-up middle-aged couple wheezing asthmatically, the young family way way up the trail carrying their littlest up the ladder-stairs –– looks to us as if they don't need to be reminded of the mountain's significance. ​
Bear Butte, SD
Before reaching the summit, there's a saddle where you can look for miles in every direction. You can see four states, though the big colorful Rand-McNally lines are not quite visible.

If you were watching, you'd probably be able to see enemies approaching for a long time before they arrived.

​The wind blows right up the Butte from all directions. It's eerie. And beautiful.
Climbing Bear Butte, SD
And it reminded us, for the next six thousand or so miles, that these astonishing natural wonders we treasure were also sacred ground for cultures that came before us. Even if people stopped leaving fabric gifts tied onto the branches like Tibeten flags, fluttering to the heavens.​
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Then folk do long to go on pilgrimage*

4/15/2018

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*I love that phrase, which goes something like, "In April...then folk do long to go on pilgrimage," from the opening sentence of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

In the interest of brutal honesty and over-sharing, inside that ellipsis? Those three dots contain an entire universe of wordy wordy words that may have in played a pivotal role in my decision NOT to pursue graduate work in English.
As a young student, I heard the Middle English version of the prelude to The Canterbury Tales  once and was interested –– my word, how German it sounds! And it's almost comprehensible! Wow, 600 years later and the language is so different!

The second time it was quoted at me, I began to find the thing tiresome.
Amy Smith Linton
The third time, I realized quoting the opening lines of The Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English was a painful dating stratagem of people in my chosen field of study. The idea being, perhaps, to stupefy and render the object unconscious.  
In case you think I am being over-dramatic, I give you a YouTube video (Go on, I double-dawg dare you!) of the poem.

You can imagine the performance when combined with a certain brand of collegiate earnestness and ardor.
 
PS: Yeah, by the way, "Old English," which is what you might think this guy is speaking? That's what people spoke before 1066 AD.

​Geoffrey Chaucer was writing around 1400 AD. If you were to make this rookie mistake when someone is fervently quoting Chaucer at you at an English department event, you might never escape the lecturing. 
Still, April is a time when folk DO long to hit the road.

Springtime itchy feet.

​Questing for sunny beaches or the last few downhill runs, going for the peak cherry blossoms or those first bulbs poking heads out of the mud. 
Rock Iris
Each trip worth a Tale.
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I Don't Always Waste Time On the Internet...

1/16/2018

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But when I do –– oh heckydoodle, who am I trying to fool?  Whole chunks of time are left bleeding and helpless in my wake.
I'm not sure even if "waste" is a strong enough verb. "Ravage"? "Murderize"? "Squander"?

But there is so much see –– and do –– out there in the vasty dark of the internet. 

Such as, for instance, Google's Arts & Culture selfie app. Thanks a whole heck of a lot, NPR for featuring this on the Two-Way.

Way to lead me down a primrose path!

The idea is that you snap a selfie and then Google –– bless its mighty brain –– searches for matches among its many images of art.

It's nearly instantaneous, and you get a couple of matches, which are...

Huh. Anna Eleanor Roosevelt? O-kaaay. 
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Meanwhile, on the other side of the room, my sweet skipper was innocently trying to watch the World Championships of Darts on BBC America.  

Is anyone surprised to know that not only is he glued to the television, but he knows the rules of the competition?

And so his 65% facial match is to Robert Louis Stevenson, not an unattractive fellow who certainly shares a certain mustachey something with Mr. Linton.


And with no one else handy in the living room to help me slaughter time, I turned to the way-back files.

​I knew I've been scanning photos for a good cause...


​My sister the artist as a chilly young offshore sailor of course matches a lovely painterly portrait.

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And a photo from the Sunfish Worlds awards ceremony from sometime in the 1990s gives Jeff this match-up with a Union general who has a fantastic moniker: General Manning Ferguson Force.

I wonder if his buddies said things like "Oh, he's a Force to be reckoned with."?




I'd like to be bigger and better than this, but I just kept hoping to find a more flattering match for my own face.

Time, I will not pretend, was laid waste in the mostly fruitless effort.  

​Portrait of a Man Dressed as a Shepard, Sigh. Portrait of the Danish King Christian. Heavy sigh.
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Fine fine fine.  I didn't go so far as to put on make-up, which I hope explains why me and King Christian both look a little, um, fatigued.


Still, even when I went way, way, way back, to the passport photos that didn't turn into my first passport –– kind of a funny story. I was pretty sure I had been adopted after the passport office rejected my application MORE THAN ONCE –– guess who Google says I look like?
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And what does Eleanor have to say?  

I hoped she was the one who said, "If you don't have anything nice to say, sit here next to me."  

(Nope, Alice Roosevelt Longworth.) 

Instead she offers a non-piffling message from the wide reaches of Google herself.
Courage is more exhilarating than fear and in the long run it is easier. We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering the strength to stare it down.  
From 
You Learn By Living, ​by Anna Eleanor Roosevelt p 41
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