Rockabilly Highway Revival

I ain’t got no matches

but I gotta long way to go

ridin’ Highway 45

from Jackson to Tupelo.

Legends singing in my ears,

center line ticklin’ my undergears,

strummin’ my rumblin’ ride along

like a Legendary Gilbert solo.

I slow my pace through Selmer;

check to see if the local crews

are lightin’ up Latta Ford Garage

where Perkins put on his blue suede shoes.

Rockabilly riffs careen off all

the city road lamps and the concrete walls.

Highway 45 is a fault line with

a whole lotta shakin’ goin’ through it.

Elvis played at Bethel

before he was ever crowned the King,

but Latta was more crowded with

Boggs and Black and Davis singin’,

LittleJohn capturin’ magic vinyl,

the times were a-changin’ and  tunes going viral.

The waxin’ moon lazy in the night

hypnotized by the driving swing.

The sun rises warm in the mornin’

over the city sleepin’ like a child.

Walls painted into LP covers–

larger than life and just as wild:

two lookin’ off in the distance;

Headless Falcons meanin’ business;

never knock ole Blind Alfred down

at the Rockabilly Highway Revival!

---

NOTES

1. “I ain’t got no matches…” Lyrics from Cal Perkins’ famous hit “Matchbox”

2. Highway 45 runs between Jackson, Tennessee (hometown of Carl Perkins) and Tupelo, Mississippi (birthplace of Elvis Presley)

3. Legendary Rich Gilbert is featured on one of the Selmer Rockabilly Highway Murals painted by Brian Tull. There are now three murals done by Brian Tull ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdOBQCI8-g4), one finished in 2009, the second in 2012, and the third in 2023. 

4. The Latta Ford Company in Selmer:  it’s likely he [Perkins] shot a quick glance left to see if anything was happening at the Latta Ford Motor Company. He had been there often. The owner, Earl Latta, staged one of the best music jams for miles around right there in the spacious garage of his Ford dealership. A good picker could just show up on a Saturday night and count on playing with some of the best musicians anywhere, always in front of a large and enthusiastic crowd. (From Discovering Carl, by Shawn Pitts in Southern Cultures. Vol 23, No. 4,  Winter 2017)

5. “Blue Suede Shoes” was written and recorded  by Carl Perkins in 1955 and recorded by Elvis Presley in 1956.

6. “A Whole Lot of Shaking Going On”: written by Dave “Curlee” Williams (and sometimes credited to James Faye “Roy” Hall.)  It was first recorded by Big Maybelle, but made famous by rockabilly superstar Jerry Lee Lewis.

7. In 1954 Elvis Presley came to Bethel before he became known as the King of Rock and Roll. This was his first performance outside of Memphis. 

8. One of the most iconic images of the twentieth century, as far as the documentation of local music making is concerned, is a 1949 photo of a big jam at the Latta Ford Motor Company—presumedly for Ford’s 1950 new model year rollout. Of the 21 musicians visualized on the stage, 7 are distinguished members of the McNairy County Music Hall of Fame: Stanton Littlejohn, Arnold English, Elvis Black, Waldo Davis, Arlis “Bo" English, Carl Perkins, and Pecks Boggs.(http://www.trailofmusiclegends.com/class-of-2018.html)  

9. Stanton Littlejohn recordings that he did at his house for Carl Perkins and other budding musicians in this emerging music genre in the 50s

10. The driving swing: Rockabilly is one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music. It dates back to the early 1950s in the United States, especially the South. As a genre, it blends the sound of Western musical styles such as country with that of rhythm and blues, leading to what is considered "classic" rock and roll. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockabilly)

11. The sun rises: The best-known examples of rockabilly music are the songs recorded for the Sun Records label; the label's roster included Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, and Jerry Lee Lewis.

12. Two looking off in the distance refers to Tull’s second mural featuring Legendary Rich Gilbert and Eileen Rose

13. The headless Falcons (Phil Hummer and the White Falcons) refers to Tull’s first mural in Selmer: 

14. The name of the third Tull mural was”Always Lift Him Up and Never Knock Him Down”, the title of a song sung by Willie Watson and written by Blind Alfred Reed:

15. The annual Rockabilly Festival in Selmer is called The Rockabilly Highway Revival.

The Inevitable Then

The Inevitable Then

For Waverly, Tennessee

When the train derailed

in downtown Waverly,

some children wondered

how such thunder

could erupt on a perfect starry night. 

Some people thought

an aftershock

from the Parsons quake

a week before

was conspiring to keep the town awake.

The domino tumble

of twenty four cars

turned dystopian

the humble idyll

and among the wreckage two dragons lay,

bellies filled

with liquid gas

ready to belch

each a fountain of fire

at the blink of an eye or break of day.

The shock was raw,

dust still settling,

the railway blocked,

downtown covered

by boxcar carcasses sprawled in a spree.

The tanker shells

lay like possums,

quiet as gravestones

toppled by time,

eerily buried in the twisted debris.

The long night

turned to morning,

and the fog dispersed

like a crowd grown impatient

as hope grew stronger with the brightening light

that the very worst

had been avoided.

With two fire trucks

standing by,

the way was cleared to clear the site.

With chain and hammer,

courage and skill,

crews and cranes

set to the labor

of the layered intricate untangling,

ever delicate

with the dragons,

even daring 

to drag one off

the blockaded rails inch by inch.

The air was frigid

as was the hose-water

keeping the sleepers

drowsy with cold

until the hazmat team arrived.

The breeze turned warm

the next afternoon,

an abrupt about-face

of 30 degrees,

and the sun was an omen in the sky.

Twenty minutes

before the transfer,

checking the vitals,

all signs go.

Then the then. The inevitable then.

At 2:48

a vapor trail

was spotted seeping 

from the sleeper…

The liquid gas boiled in an instant!

A massive fireball

visible for miles

unleashed a heat scythe,

an incinerating ripple

devouring mercilessly all in its radius,

extinguishing the lives

of the noble sixteen,

leveling buildings,

flinging shrapnel

over the town in a firestorm mania,

hundreds injured

flooding the burn units,

ambulances speeding to

Atlanta, Cincinnati,

a 20-foot crater, the grand finale.

Where to place

the blame for this?

The engineer

who failed to release

the brake that wore the wheel down

that sent the train

catapulting

like so many

bowling pins,

a strike on downtown Waverly?

Or the transport chief

who cooled his gas

to liquid fuel

and poured it all

into a tanker with a single wall?

Or Mother Nature’s

negligence

to let slip through

her winter net

a balmy day to trigger the blast?

Or that human 

tendency

that once the initial

threat has passed

to let one’s guard down a little way?

Or none but this:

and that is, to live

by learning is

a way of sorrow,

slow tracks laid toward a better day?

NOTES

---

— At about 10:30 p.m. on February 22, twenty-four cars of a 92-car Louisville and Nashville Railroad freight train derailed in the downtown area of Waverly due to a wheel disintegration due to a brake left engaged.  Among the debris were two tanker cars carrying liquefied petroleum gas (propane, or LPG) in what proved to be inadequate single-walled containers. Two days later, on February 24,  hazmat units came to transfer the liquid propane from the wrecked tankers.  This day turned out to be significantly warmer than what it had been the previous few days. This warming trend is a possible culprit in creating propane instability. A vapor leak was noticed right before beginning the transfer, and before anyone could even react, the leak triggered a BLEVE (a boiling liquid expanding vapor explosion), a massive explosion that destroyed nearby buildings, killed sixteen people, including the police chief Guy Barnett and the fire chief Wilbur York, wounded over 200 others, and left  a 20- ft crater, impacting federal hazmat procedures far into the future, including the creation of FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency). 

— An aftershock from the Parson’s quake: According to the USGS, there was a magnitude 2.2 earthquake 8km north of Parsons, Tn at 6:06PM on February 15, 1978.  Parsons is roughly 40 miles sw of Waverly as the crow flies.

The Dream of the Old Proctor Lynching Tree

The Dream of the Old Proctor Lynching Tree

Russellville, Kentucky

——————————————

Listen, I will tell of a terrible dream

that came to me in the crux of the night.

The air was still as a sealed tomb,

heavy with drench-heat, thick with dread.

A deep-throated moaning moved through trees,

serpent agile, sharp as a spear.

Sweltering anger in anguished swirling

flooded the space between star and field.

I looked to see the source of the sound,

thinking to find such roiling thrum

coming from a crowded company;

instead the lament, in its manifold layers,

strenuously issued from one three-trunked cedar,

gnarled and poor on the old Proctor knoll, 

crying out to a quiet heaven

and this is the tale it mournfully told:

“My birthright was to be a life-bearer,

to wave my green as a guarantor of hope.

A lightning tragedy turned my trunk triplet–

made me poster of the Person-Three God.

In this I was life-sign, a witness to love.

How then followed such a grievous foul-curse–

fated to harbor the hanging of men?

O, the first was a scoundrel, I freely confess,

Archie Proctor, proud on the drink,

murdered a Crafton in a cold-blood stabbing.

An angry mob impatient for action

stole the prisoner from the nest of his cell

along with his father in the chaotic flurry, 

and soon saw the duo dangling beneath me;

the crowd crying “justice!”, smug to be judge.

It is not for these my night-howls seethe

and interrupt so rudely your sleep.

No, my indignation insists

on bringing to light a worse violation

in the rolling valley of Russellville

where John, Virgil, Joe, and John 

were mob-murdered without mercy

by a crude posse of law-imposters

who lynched them on my begrudging limbs.

The fatal affair began with a feud.

Rufus Bowder, a black day-laborer

fought and killed Mr. James Cunningham, 

wealthy landowner, white and connected,

when their disagreement turned into duel.

Cunningham swung a hitch-ring to silence

Bowder, knocked over, groping for balance, 

both pulled pistols, both fired point-blank,

both men struck by the bullet of the other.

The white man dies. The wrong man survives

and goes into hiding. Grim were the days

after the War, the white presumed innocent,

the black figured guilty before asking facts

to illumine the story wherever it would lead.

Rufus Bowder was marked with a bullseye

and a lynching-fever spread like fire.

Sheriff Rhea arrested Rufus

and sent him to hide in the cemetery,

and then on a train to another town

to save him from the search party

frothing into a lynch feeding-frenzy.

The conflagration of rage and gall

roared unchecked into the jailhouse.

Four unfortunate men with flimsy

charges brooding ill-time behind bars

became the scapegoats, powerless, scared,

rough-handled, led to be lynched on me.

John Boyer, brother-in-law,

had helped Rufus during his hiding,

bringing him updates, being his eyes.

For this kindness, now called a crime,

he was deemed worthy of death.

John Jones cared enough to come

over to town on the afternoon train

when he’d heard talk of Rufus’ trouble

joining his brother, Virgil Jones,

around the table of the True Reformers,

a mutual help society that met

and reaffirmed support for Rufus

declaring the facts to prove self-defense,

and raising cash to help the case.

For daring solidarity

they were deemed worthy of death.

Tippler Joe Riley had no tie

to the unfolding Bowder affair.

Joe had landed drunk in jail 

having fired a gun without forethought 

in the open air outside a bar.

Wrong place, wretched timing,

he was deemed worthy of death. 

With hands bound behind their backs,

the four were led to the lynching tree

like Jesus carrying the beam of his cross

forced to march to the menacing skull.

At my feet, with fearful eyes,

buffeted by the brutal mob,

four men without hope in the world,

looked at each other, then up at me,

up at silent heaven’s stare,

down at the ground in grave despair.

If I could have cut myself 

down that moment, I would have done it–

anything to rob the thieves

of their foul satisfaction.

But I remained immobilized

and rued the limits of the real, 

arms outstretched to hold their string. 

They took Joe first. The others forced

to watch the noose strangle his neck,

to watch the horror of his writhing

until the merciful moment of death.

John Boyer followed. Jones brothers wincing

at the macabre brazen killing.

Such unthinkable sick theater:

Virgil sees his brother seized,

noose slipped round the neck he loved,

the vicious heave, revolting snap,

vibrant eyes flickering to vacant.

Virgil erupted in a violent outburst,

and O so briefly broke away,

began to kick and bite and flail

until they knocked him to the ground

and wrapped a rope around his neck,

dragged him back below the branch

picked for him on which to be hoisted,

the last to suffer and suffering the most.

On him they pinned a hasty placard

warning others the unwritten order

still remained intact despite

the tantalizing promises leaching

out of the wounds of still raw war.

A camera snapshot became a postcard

leaving me immortalized. 

Rufus’ fate was fixed in the law-court;

three trials later, the verdict was life

in prison. The Governor granted reprieve,

commuted his sentence to ten years served.

Rufus returned to Russellville,

his family waiting to welcome him home,

he came by railroad, but dead in his coffin,

tuberculosis having taken his life

(or so it was the authorities said)

to seal the tragic saga with sorrow

on sorrow–save one small thing to console me:

Rufus would never know the noose.”

I awoke relieved this revelation

was nothing but a nightmare terror.

The morning air was absent birdsong,

scattered clouds, the morning sun

filtered through the frightened branches

of the weeping willow at my window

painfully scratching at the pane 

as if to tell me, as if it knew

this dreadful tale of its distant kin

was more than dream, more than the dark

could ever hold back of what had been.

NOTES:

ON CONTENT

The three-trunked cedar tree “on the Nashville Road just outside town” is called the “Old Proctor Tree” because Arch and Dink Proctor were hung on it in 1896 by an angry mob thinking the Proctors would elude justice for the murder of the Crafton brothers.  (https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Proctor-3119)

The story of the lynching of four innocent black men in Logan County on July 31, 1908 is thoroughly explored in the in the excellent  PBS film Parties Unknown (https://www.wkyupbs.org/bypartiesunknown/the-film/). 

The SEEK Museum in Russellville, Kentucky (Struggles for Emancipation and Equality in Kentucky, and formerly known as The West Kentucky African American Heritage Center) is a conglomerate of exhibits, historic buildings and a research center in Russellville's Black Bottom Historic District. One of the buildings, the 1880's Cooksey House, hosts an in-depth exhibit that continues to bear witness to this tragic affair for future generations to remember and learn from.

A helpful website from the University of Kentucky that documents the story of racial violence in Kentucky is https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/273734e859fb43bd9cb770735a793857

ON STRUCTURE

The Dream of the Old Proctor Lynching Tree is intentionally modeled after the famous Old English poem The Dream of the Rood.  Anglo-Saxon poetry commonly featured the rhetorical device of an inanimate object talking.  The “rood” is the Old English word for “cross”, and the poem is an account of the poet relaying a dream in which the cross appeared and spoke to him about the death of Jesus.  The poem is preserved in the 10th century Vercelli Book (an ancient anthology of Old English prose and verse) and a portion of the poem is inscribed on the 8th century 18-foot high Ruthwell Cross in Scotland. The Dream of the Rood is one of the oldest pieces of surviving Old English poetry.   It has 156 lines.

The Dream of the Old Proctor Lynching Tree is written to imitate the structure of the Rood poem and uses the alliterative verse style of Old English poetry by strictly using the four-stressed line, with an alliterative connection in every line between one or more of the stressed syllables in the first half of the line with one or more stressed syllables in the second half of the line, and this in varying combinations from line to line. This poem also has 156 lines.

As a nod to the inspiration of The Dream of the Rood, and as a token of honor to the four men in the poem who are unjustly lynched, I intentionally inserted four homophones of “rood” throughout the poem.  See if you can find all four (hint: two are embedded in larger words)

I Wrap Myself in Elizabethtown

I Wrap Myself in Elizabethtown

For Elizabethtown, Kentucky

---

I wrap myself in Elizabethtown,

a winter trench coat cinched at the waist

by Interstate Sixty-Five, and I

am warm in a classic American story

with a glass of bourbon in my hand,

toasting the past and an inclement sky.

This warm fleece lining, a Lincoln wedding,

Thomas taking Sarah Bush Johnson

to be the step-mom of little Abe,

the boy who would grow to know storm

as his legacy. The tough outer fabric,

Gabardine, resistant to even the most

insistent of gloomy cold-rain forecasts

is made of hybrid automobile economy:

windshields, brakes, and the durable frames

of Ford-150s. And now two EV

battery plants: insurance against

the fickle clouds of the marketplace.

Starlet Jenny Lind alone sang

chic epaulets onto these shoulders

from the steps of General Custer’s home.

The pocket flaps, sleeve loops,

        collar hooks, such painstaking detail

all sewn in miserable conditions

by the ruthless machine of the Civil War.

All wars are default designers,

fashioning the future with slashing cut,

following up with bind and backstitch.

The genius of the back vent slit

makes for ease of movement among

the many downtown historical markers

preserving the ballad, promoting the brand.

Fastened to the inside collar

right between the shoulder blades,

in the place of the dry clean only tag,

there is a cannonball in the wall

marked by an arrow mounted on

Eric A. Bates Attorney at Law’s

whitewashed office in the center of things,

sacrament of General John Hunt Morgan’s

mission to burn the train track trestles

and stop the flow of Union supplies,

merely a hiccup in the march of the blue coats.

We know the ending, the wrap-up in tissue,

packaged, mailed to the neighborhoods of freedom.

The trench coat, now a fashion piece,

was born for war, and from war’s ravages

found a way to reinvent itself

into an icon of the runway model,

now for a dash through a winter squall,

now for a fancy night on the town,

dinner at Waters Edge Winery & Bistro,

craft ice cream afterwards at The Dreamery,

bundled up warm for a late walk-around.

NOTES

—Thomas Lincoln married his second wife Sarah Bush Johnson in Elizabethtown on December 2, 1819.

—Two electric vehicle battery plants are being built in Elizabethtown.  The first is scheduled to open in 2025. The second, originally scheduled to open in 2026, is now delayed.

—Swedish opera sensation Jenny Lind on tour with PT Barnum performed on the steps of the Pusey House (where General Custer had once temporarily lived) during a stagecoach stop through town.

—The cannonball in the wall is a famous tourist feature of downtown.  Originally fired by Confederate General John Hunt Morgan’s troops when taking Elizabethtown on route to sabotage a major train supply route for the Union, the cannonball lodge in the upper story of the Depp building, which later burned to the ground in 1887.  The cannonball was recovered by town resident Annie Nourse. Years later, when a new building was erected on the spot, the cannonball was placed in the wall as near the spot of its original embedding, and now adorns the law offices of Eric A. Bates.

—Waters Edge Winery and Bistro and The Dreamery are fine eateries in downtown Elizabethtown today.

---

Paradise Cafe

---

The clock on the cafe wall stopped

the instant AJ relinquished her

last breath into a patient company

of air molecules crowding around

her hospice bed in the next town over, 

having waited late into the night

for her final precious particles

to rise and mingle in their midst, 

to join their invisible vigil through

which, later that morning,

shafts of sunlight fell like eschatology,

spotlighting flying flecks of dust

as the true rebels of the moment

and prophets of what one day must come.

How her soul must have leapt the chasm

of dead things and fled with a sparkle

into the paradise of life with the skip

of a school girl waving goodbye,

leaving behind sweet smiling eyes

that loved turning strangers to friends,

and hands that carried joy to tables,

feet that wore a faded path

all the way to the kitchen and back

as bare as pacing Secretariat’s

patch of earth down at Claiborne Farm,

each of them wearing a triple crown.

Wife, mother, entrepreneur,

who somehow turned the tallest

three story building in the world

into a warm concession of love.

Now in her memory Lee becomes

the memory maker for lovers 

and travelers, for the aged 

and sages finishing their races,

for steaming Pho worthy of Saigon,

all with transatlantic alchemy–

as if someone could miniaturize

the Eiffel Tower, as if a gathering place

could become sacred by layers

of breath exchanged and overlaid

(Cane Ridge without the pageantry),

life soaking the floorboards, coating the banisters,

so that when a virtuoso French tourist

showed up and brought the old piano to life,

dormant air from a thousand lungs began to burn,

awakened within the colorful walls

into a thunderous dancing line

like pounding thoroughbreds at the turn.

NOTES

1. Paradise Cafe on Main Street in Paris, Kentucky, serves oriental food, has overnight rooms, and is the tallest three story structure in the world according to Ripley’s Believe it Or Not.

2. Paradise Cafe is owned and run by Lee Nguyen. AJ; his beloved wife and restaurant partner, died on April 11, 2011 from cancer.

3. Famed racehorse Secretariat lived and trained at nearby Claiborne Farm.

4. There is in fact a 20-foot high miniature model of the Eiffel Tower in downtown Paris right across the street from Paradise Cafe.

5. The Cane Ridge Meeting House is a historic church building near Paris built in 1791 and was the site of a historic revival meetings in August of 1801, the most famous meetings of the Second Great Awakening.

6. The Paradise Cafe Facebook page has a video that captured a French tourist customer playing the restaurant piano with great verve and skill.

7. Bourbon County is one of the leading producers of thoroughbred horses in the world.

Wall of Water

Wall of Water

Portsmouth, Ohio

---

i.

January’s rain refused to relent.

Twenty two days straight

the Ohio River gorged itself

on winter storm, its swollen belly

bloated within reach of breaching

the 1907 floodwall. Portsmouth

held its breath to no avail.

She fell before the swarming horde 

of the whole watershed’s invading host.

A seventy-four foot roll of river

surged through sewers, tossed manholes

like a juggler with plates, cascading

over sandbags stacked atop

the impotent wall under a wall of water.

ii.

The cold and hungry refugees 

at Washington School hailed the late

arrival of rescuers. Pregnant Bessie 

Tomlin and her three children

bumbled into Walter Chick’s 

wobbly boat, and off toward Waller

they rowed, when a rogue wave capsized 

them into the freezing flotsam wash.

Bessie emerged frantically shouting,

“Save my baby! Save my baby!”

Chick grabbed little Alberta just as

Bessie was pulled back under the surface,

succumbing to the numbing cold,

holding her breath under the wall of water.

iii.

A river is a fickle lover,

promising some young city her future,

then all too soon in psychotic rage,

void of pity, swamps her to ruin,

battering with a two-faced bludgeon:

stripping away, then smothering.

The cruel cold shoulder plunders

priceless treasure and last night’s trash

without a hint of discrimination.

And after the unceremonious shove

it covers everything in mud,

suffocation under a foot of silt–

a lover undoing the city he built

wall by wall under a wall of water.

iv.

Chastened by underestimation, 

The Citizens Flood Defense Committee

(if there is such a thing) began

The “It Can’t Happen Again” campaign

(if such a thing can be) and called

The Army Corps of Engineers

to erect yet another wall.

The rebuilt city trusts again,

the battered lover returning home

before the bruises have faded away,

remembering 1884,

remembering 1913. So, 

rivers will be rivers, won’t they?

Loose blouse flapping in the breeze,

flinching at the passing freight train 

whose rumble sounds like distant thunder.

Clouds look menacing in the east,

gathering like a pent up wall of water.

v.

With the spent sky shut down,

the river slunk back to its banks.

A full week after Bessie’s drowning

someone found her rag doll body

at the corner of 10th and Waller,

only a block away from where

she had tumbled from her rescue boat.

Something familiar about her fall.

Recently she had jumped ship

from her tumultuous mess of a marriage.

Word was out that William abused her

and she had finally had enough. 

Brief her free air out from under

his control, only to stumble into

more of the same, another hell

with a different name, a choking wall of water.

vi.

Like a kitchen maid turned princess,

the wall is clothed in magnificent murals.

Art, the archaeologist of story,

removes the sediment layers of progress

with every tender layer of paint

portraying Portsmouth history.

Robert Dafford brushes back time

undoing the crime that undid the city,

returning exiles and exhuming bones,

Isaiah’s promise! Ezekiel’s vision!

The Boneyfiddle parade begins in

the east at the site of the ancient mounds

and ends on Grant bridge (no longer around).

Portsmouth no longer is holding its breath!

Finally a floodwall to hold the river—

not by the strength of its concrete mass—

by becoming its equal and opposite force,

canceling the miscreant by making it carry

the bier of her whose glory was greater.

The baby daughter in Bessie’s arms,

lifted up into the storm 

is riding high atop, above, beyond the wall of water.

---

NOTES

1.Rain began falling over the Ohio River watershed on January 5, 1937 and continued for 22 consecutive days. On January 27, the Ohio River crested at 74.23 feet, exceeding the flood stage by more than 12 feet. As a result, the city of Portsmouth was dramatically flooded and more than 35,000 residents were left homeless.

2. The 1907 floodwall was built to protect up to a 62 foot flood stage.

3. Bessie Tomlin was Portsmouth’s single fatality in the 1937 flood. People found shelter in schools across the city awaiting rescue.  The refugees at Booker T. Washington School, including Bessie and her family,  had been without any food or fuel for a day and a half.  Rescue boats finally arrived Monday, January 25. While Bessie, her three children, and her mother-in-law among others, rowed away from the school, their boat capsized.  Everyone was quickly retrieved, but rescuers lost sight of Bessie. She emerged moments later lifting her 18 month daughter Alberta above the swirling waters. Fireman Walter Chick was able to grab the baby, but Bessie went under again and disappeared.  She was pregnant at the time of her tragic drowning and had recently left her abusive husband.  https://sciotohistorical.org/items/show/45

4. Construction began in June 1940 to construct a floodwall and levy system that would withstand a 77.1 foot flood stage. This new wall was 20 feet high and 2000 feet long . 

5.  Among the many flooding events that have happened throughout Portsmouth’s history, the floods of 1884 and 1913 stand out as particularly severe.

6. In 1993 the Portsmouth Floodwall Murals Project began.  Using Carl Ackerman’s collection of Portsmouth history photographs, muralist Robert Dafford and his team of talented painters proceed to paint 52 murals of Portsmouth’s history in chronological order stretching east to west.

7. See Isaiah 43:5-7; Ezekiel 37

8. Boneyfiddle is the name for Portsmouth’s downtown business district.

9. Site of the ancient mounds refers to the first panel of the floodwall, a depiction of mounds in southern Ohio long before western explorers came to the new world occupied by Adena, Hopewell, and Fort Ancient cultures.

10. Grant Bridge no longer around refers to the Ulysses S. Grant Bridge, demolished in 2001, which is featured on the final panel of the main floodwall.

The Real Thing is Back in Town

The Real Thing is Back in Town

Coolville, Ohio

---

“Ask me if you want to know the way to Coolsville.”

–Rickie Lee Jones

---

Torching accusations and frosty rebuttals

seethed and sludged down social channels

angry and muddy as the flooded Hocking 

collapsing bridges, eroding roadways,

forcing Hamlet’s famous question.

Coolville considers dissolving into Troy,

dissolution on the November ballot,

a solution adding to its sea of troubles.

Neighbor betrays long-beside neighbor, 

friend loses sight of friend in the feud.

Had septic trumped sewer, or the chief of police

restrained his restraining, or the mayor

turned out to have his own well, 

would factions have ever formed 

and faced off in this Facebook uncivil war?

Voices protest the insolence of office.

The office rebuffs the proud man’s contumely.

By internal fission the village is doomed

but for the swell of a will to survive;

votes arrive in favor of staying the bodkin,

staying a village, of facing the stain and strain

of the quarrel, passing the test,

choosing to invest what capital remains

in chasing what settlers once held in their dreams.

Well the real thing come and the real thing go

Well the real thing is back in town.

NOTES

The epigraph is from Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 hit song Coolsville.

Torching accusations and frosty rebuttals: Coolville is 4.8 miles south of Frost township and 3.5 miles west of Torch.

The flooded Hocking: State Route 144 was rerouted around Coolville in 2006 as a result of landslides that occurred on the banks of the Hocking and Ohio Rivers in 2005 and 2006. Because of the damaged bridge and nearby damaged roadway along the east side of the Hocking River, SR 144 was rerouted south of Coolville on County Road 59 to a new bridge over the river.

Hamlet’s famous question is “to be or not to be?” It begins Hamlet’s soliloquy in Shakespeare’s play of the same name, Act 3, scene 1.  Other words and phrases that borrow from this same speech are sea of troubles (l.8), the insolence of office (l.16), the proud man’s contumely (l.17), and bodkin (i.20).

Dissolve into Troy: The Athens County Board of Directors placed the petition to dissolve the village of Coolville on the November 2022 ballot.  If successful, Coolville would be absorbed by Troy Township.

Factions have ever formed and faced off:  Dissolution advocates charged village government officials of various abuses of power and promised a lowering of utility bills.  Village officials denied such accusations and claimed dissolution advocates of spreading misinformation on social media.

Had septic trumped sewer: Current utility rates have been impacted by a village loan to convert the village from septic systems to sewer after many of the septic systems were found to be untenable.  Critics say village residents were not consulted about the loan (as reported by Sam Stecklow)

Restrained his restraining: One hot button for dissolution advocates stems back to the controversial arrest of village resident James Semour by Police Chief Scott Miller.  According to Athens Messenger May 19, 2023, Seymour is currently suing the Police Chief for use of excessive force.

Had his own well: Journalist Sam Stecklow also notes that a former mayor resigned in 2016 amid accusations that he stole water from the village. See https://athensindependent.com/water-politics-and-bad-blood-fuel-coolville-dissolution-vote/

Staying a village: The petition for dissolution failed on a vote of 84 ayes and 125 noes.  See https://athensindependent.com/coolville-votes-to-remain-a-village/

Chasing what settlers once held in their dreams: An article in the Athens Messenger, March 28, 1872, entitled “Troy Township” (page 9) offered this optimistic editorial on the future of Coolville:

“What the future of Coolville may be, after the railroad shall be pushed down the Valley, is hard to estimate.  Should her enterprising citizens see fit to turn their attention to manufacturing and should they have capital within themselves to invest in that way should they so desire, Coolville may soon reach an importance that her early settlers never dreamed of as possible.”

Well the real thing come: the poem concludes with 2 lines from Rickie Lee Jones’ 1979 hit song Coolsville.  Although this song has nothing to do with the real Coolville, Ohio, I find the resonances prophetic and poetic.

---

Excerpts from the Fifth Codicil to the Last Will and Testament of Michael L. Benedum

Excerpts from the Fifth Codicil to the Last Will and

Testament of Michael L. Benedum

Bridgeport, West Virginia

---

         I.

How time

and heat

and pressure,

these unchanging

elements of

the earth,

press the

little ones

long dead—

algae, plankton,

minute creatures

of the sea—

into machine

elixir, making

crude money 

for wildcatters

finding hiding

places under

capstones,

tapping their

flush stores

for more

heat and

more pressure,

pushing forward

the engine of

industry 

fueled by 

unquenchable

lust and greed.

    II.

When Claude

was twenty,

his parents 

proud, and he

at work 

fiddling with

invisible bonds

for visible war,

the Spanish Flu

unhinged his

intricate

chemistry,

and he, like

the ancient

fossils of fuel,

lay down in

the sediment

and, too,

fed a slow-

burn contagion

of fire.

  III.

Michael Late

was forty nine

at the time

he lost his son,

and in the top

one hundred

of American

money elite.

His fertile basin,

where virtue

slumbered, a

sprouting seed, 

yielded up

a reservoir,

his rich reserves

under Providence-

pressure looking

for relief.

Good conscience

drilled a gusher

that pooled slick

upon the rung

below—West Virginia’s

sick and poor—

before the coming

of the common

leveler of

mankind,

stern and cold, 

irresistibly

reunited son

and father, 

pressed together

where once there

was, but now no

more, a sea.

NOTES

1-Michael Late Benedum was born in Bridgeport, West Virginia in 1869.  He amassed a fortune in the oil drilling business, starting out as a “wildcatter’, one who explores for new oil reservoirs.  He started the Benedum-Trees Oil Company which owned multiple oil leases in West Virginia and went on to discover the vast Yates Oil Field in Texas. By 1957 Benedum appeared on a list of the 75 wealthiest Americans. Benedum’s son Claude died from the Spanish Flu in 1918 at the young age of 20 while working for the US Army on chemical warfare projects.  In 1944 Benedum founded the Claude Worthington Benedum Foundation to provide philanthropic grants in West Virginia and Pittsburgh, his native and adopted home areas.  Through 2009 the Foundation had awarded approximately $365 million dollars in grants.  At the end of 2014 the Foundation had assets of $367 million. 

2-All words in italics indicate words or phrases taken directly from Michael Benedum’s final will written in 1957, two years before his death in 1959. See https://benedum.org/about-us/mr-benedums-will/

3-Crude oil comes from a process wherein ancient marine life, both plants and animals, die and sink into sediment where they are covered over and remain trapped until they are eventually baked and pressed into oil and gas over a slow process of millions of years, which eventually starts rising up through porous layers of earth until finally gathering in reservoirs under impassable shale-capstones, both in its liquid (oil/petroleum) and gaseous (natural gas) states.

4-Now no more a sea. See Revelation 21:1 in the Bible.

Survival Fugue

Survival Fugue

Somerset, Pennsylvania

---

i.

Before the Nicely brothers hung

side by side on the double gallows

in the jailhouse on East Union street,

David pleaded with Sheriff McMillan

bargaining for pardon, or at least life in prison,

offering in exchange some piece of information

on Umberger’s murder. A man in a cage

can play nice when life is on the line.

The will to survive is a wild west gunslinger,

the worse the chances, the more clear-headed,

the more dangerous his trigger finger,

which may suffice under circumstances

until the trap opens, the dull thud sounds twice.

ii.

Before their forty bodies atomized

in a fireball of defiant glory,

that terrible slam into the lair

of two old dragons silent over

scarred fields of waving grass,

they food-cart rammed the cockpit door!

With hunters turned into the hunted

at the posse roll-call let’s roll,

sounds of screams and breaking glass,

the torturous route of 93 

ended in an upside-down dive 

into the Somerset countryside,

all its hostile options spent,

as too any thoughts of survival

paling beside the sacrifice

called to foil such evil intent.

iii.

Before the fourth evening went,

nine men down in the flooded mine

willing survival in a pocket of air

pumped from the surface through a six-inch shaft,

pipe-clanged hope through thick pitch black.

Minutes turned hours turned battering despair

with the ram of ingenuity and grit,

heroes above drilled through smothering rock

 a birth canal with a stubborn bit,

and nine men from the watery tomb

were yellow-cage carried up and delivered,

gulping in the fresh cold air,

faces Wild Bill Hickok etched

having laid down their Dead Man’s Hand,

alive to see the sunrise cast

a silhouette over Somerset town,

the pale sky crossed with vapor trails,

the first cars passing quietly by

Historic Somerset County Jail.

NOTES

A fugue in music is a structure which introduces imitative parts at staggered intervals creating an intricate harmonic whole.  I like Stephen Johnson’s elaboration:  a substantial piece in which the subject, countersubject, plus all the contracted, stretched and bent versions of both, plus the tail-pieces, are combined and recombined, in a regular, carefully contrasted formal scheme, to create a dynamic texture in which each voice is ‘first amongst equals’: each part formed from the same basic material, yet each making its own independent contribution to the musical argument (from https://www.classical-music.com/features/articles/what-fugue/).

1-Historic Somerset County Jail has a unique double-hanging chamber in which the Nicely brothers were hanged for the murder of Herman Umberger in 1891.

2-See the letter David Nicely wrote to Sheriff R.S. McMillan pleading for a deal at https://www.tribdem.com/news/19th-century-killer-s-letter-found-donated-to-somerset-county/article_294c767a-b8a0-11e9-adde-5be5bb5c67e7.html

3-On the infamous day September 11, 2001 one of the four hijacked planes by al-Qaeda terrorists crashed 14 miles outside of Somerset into a grassy field that had once been a strip mine operation (with its two massive dragline excavators abandoned on the property). Flight 93 was brought down by the heroics of the passengers who, upon learning of the fate of the other hijacked planes, banded together to breach the cockpit and thwart the mission of the terrorists, encouraged by Todd Beam’s iconic cry “let’s roll!”. 40 innocent people were killed in the crash.

4-Read the cockpit recorder transcript of the last 27 minutes of Flight 93 here: https://www.nps.gov/flni/learn/historyculture/cockpit-voice-recorder-transcript.htm

5-Nine miners were trapped for 77 hours in a flooded tunnel of Quecreek Mine five miles outside of Somerset from July 24 to July 28 2002.  Read about the dramatic rescue story here in which all nine miners were successfully rescued: https://www.pennlive.com/life/2019/07/nine-for-nine-the-quecreek-mine-rescue-in-2002.html

6-Wild Bill Hickok was one of the most renowned gunfighters of the American West.  Having been victorious in many a duel, his luck ran out during a poker game in South Dakota in 1876, where he was shot in the back of the head by a fellow gambler while purportedly holding in his hands two black aces and two black eights, a combination called the Dead Man’s Hand.

---

What Matilda Wanted

What Matilda Wanted

Port Matilda, Pennsylvania

---

Given the choice,

I would rather

float than fall

through life, Abbas 

Ibn Firnas

over achieving Atlas,

kite on a string

than a swinging

wrecking ball, 

all of that 5o-foot wingspan,

nothing of dense silica.

I’d rather hover

than hurtle.  Gravitas

is overrated, muscle 

an albatross.

And while the brick

boasts such endurance

under pressure,

over air it is out

of options, 

plummeting

like a scandal, like

a Wall Street sell-off,

a suicide note

found after the

fact. A feather, 

however,

has time, oscillating

in the uneven descent,

to take in the view,

to consider what there

is to do. A glider

riding the ridge lifts 

bellowing up Bald Eagle’s 

flanks can stay aloft

for hours on end

without an engine,

without fuel,

skimming atop

the troughs of air

like water striders

tiptoeing across

Laurel Run. Forge 

me magnesium

instead of iron, 

ballet shoes over 

steel-toed boots,

translucent skin 

on brittle bones.  

I reject the 

rolling stone, 

the packed gunpowder

in the chamber

of power,

the concrete 

divider at the split 

in the road.

If you must name a town

after me, forego

adjectives

that might not come true.

Cut me in half with

a railroad track

that takes away as

much as it brings back

in the easy manner of wind.

Pin my legacy on

a small Gypsy Vanner,

and I will be happily

carried along in 

the shadow of mountains

away from the asphalt

of aspiring cities like 

Pittsburgh and Philly.

Instead of a mantle,

a basket of apples. 

Better than an Esquire’s 

heavy overcoat,

give me instead,

won’t you, please,

Mr. Rogers’ sweater.

NOTES

Abbas Ibn Firnas is credited as the first human to achieve sustained flight. In 875 AD at the age of 70 Firnas constructed his own flying machine with a bamboo frame, covered with a silk cloth and sewn-in eagle feathers.  Witnesses say he stayed aloft 10 minutes but had a rough landing in which he was injured.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWyphm72Tq4

50-foot wingspan: Glider planes can have different wingspans according to class.  The Standard Class wingspan is 15 meters or 49.2 feet (from the FAA Regulations handbook).

Dense silica: The McFeely Brick Company, started by the grandfather of the famous children’s TV host, Mr. Rogers, had a plant in Port Matilda until 1958.  They made vulcan silica fire bricks for the inner lining of glass-melting furnaces and incinerators.

Bald Eagle’s flanks: Seven or so miles from Port Matilda stands Bald Eagle Mountain. Its geography is well-suited for created ridge lifts, making it a prime spot for glider flying. At the base of the mountain is the Ridge Soaring Gliderport.

Laurel Run is a tributary of the Lackawanna River than runs through Port Matilda.

Magnesium is one of the lightest commercial metals, while iron is one of the heaviest.

Railroad track: Port Matilda is built along the Nittany and Bald Eagle Railroad, a line that is part of the North Shore Railroad System.

Gypsy Vanner: A few miles of east of Port Matilda the Buffalo Run Farm specializes in breeding and raising Gypsy Vanner horses. http://www.buffalorunfarm.com/

A basket of apples: famous in Portilda is Way Fruit Farm featuring a wonderful variety of fruit harvests, not the least being apples. https://www.wayfruitfarm.com/seasonal-fruits

Esquire’s thick overcoat:  In 1850 Squire Clement Beckwith formed the town-plot of Port Matilda, naming the fledgling town after his eldest daughter Matilda. The title of Squire recognized his role as a Justice of the Peace for many years.

Won’t you please:  a nod to the introduction song composed and sung by Fred Rogers for his children’s TV show Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. https://misterrogers.org/videos/wont-you-be-my-neighbor/

Here Where Once a Thick Patch of Woods

Here Where Once a Thick Patch of Woods

enchanted the corner at the end of our street

with the look of wild, with the feel of deep country,

with the sense of presence pressing down 

on you paused at the stop sign, jolts of joy

whipping through open windows

on shade-cooled wisps of dampish air–

where once on a fair winter afternoon

returning after a long while away, I was

shaken by the shock of seeing the whole lot

ramshackle-shorn, trees torn from their

stunned stumps now numbed in silence

after the blitzkrieg of lumberjack chain

saws spitting their life-meal into the wind,

dropping the proud towers in a matter of hours,

dragging them to an ignominious end–

now stand on this bright summer day

waves of foxglove sentries, tall and straight,

brave companies of rebel stalagmites

blanketing the field, having fled in mass

the colorless caves of the bleak underworld,

called to rise by the cry of tree roots under siege,

responding the moment the call was received,

but arriving too late, after the massacre,

and now on mission to regather honor

by standing unmoved beneath beating sun-glare,

purple and white uniforms luminescent

in their unwavering vigil, filling the space

where once evergreen branches lifted

their up-raised palms in praise,

now in their stead and for their sake

the foxglove bells from every stem

ring silent tribute to the beauty that once

stood this ground, mingling with sky

until the last hero fell in defeat,

here where once a thick patch of woods

enchanted the corner at the end of our street.

Something Living This Way Comes

Something Living This Way Comes

Across the derelict field

in the narrow track of pressed grass

where earlier his footsteps crossed,

there sprung a trail of wild flowers,

each impression bursting with

kaleidoscopic color: poppies,

lupine, foxglove, beardtongue,

bluebells ringing something 

living this way comes!

A cluster of cows belly down 

in the mud-shade refuge 

of the old oak rose up all at once

like hoisted sails at the rustle

of his pass-by, bellowing a greeting 

and rubbing their rumps in revival of feeling.

The moment he entered my room

curtains billowed and snapped at the edges,

scent of dryer sheets sweetening the air.

A fly stopped buzzing as light 

through the maple tree outside the window

painted its leaf shadow in crisp animation

upon the age-pocked peeling wall.

When he took my hand, my fever fled

like a stray dog at the throw of a stone,

a light rinse cycle washing me clean

where everything old, while remaining,

was now more itself than each at its start,

the weary cracks of fracture channeling

actual laughter unraveling the dark.

The Town that Saved Christmas

The Town that Saved Christmas

Wellsboro, Pennsylvania

---

How breath can stretch the molten glass to twice

its rounded size with but a gentle blow,

an output ribbon machines exponentially grow

as spittlebugs do their myriad-globed disguise

to meet demand as World War Two denies

Lauscha fruit a Woolworthy way to flow,

dragging fragile Christmas Spirit low,

the blowpipe bent, the furnace fire dies.

But embers rise as will the glass again,

answering dark by turning from the light

bulbs to the beautiful orbs silver-swirled,

birds, snow scenes, manger birthing in

Wellsboro by the Canyon, shining bright,

Christmas Ornament Capital of the World.

NOTES:  

1. The title comes from a 2018 article by Ed Byers entitled Wellsboro: the Town that Saved Christmas (https://pawilds.com/wellsboro-the-town-that-saved-christmas/)

2. In the 1920s Corning Glass developed ribbon machines to automate the production of glass ornaments that are still used today.

3. Spittlebugs are froghopper nymphs that hide themselves in foamy bubbles that they make by sucking juice from the stem of a plant.

4. The English sea trade blockade of Germany in World War II ended all hope of Lausche, Germany exporting its world famous glass Christmas ornaments to America through Woolworth distribution channels.

5. Corning Glass purchased a defunct plant in Wellsboro in 1919 to to blow glass light bulbs for Edison/Wellington who were working to light up New York City.  When the opportunity came to manufacture glass Christmas ornaments, Corning was able to use this infrastructure to achieve this end.  Soon they were producing upwards of 300,000 ornaments a day.  Eventually in addition to producing balls, they made ornaments of all shapes (called small Fancies and Large Fancies)--tops, oblongs, pyramids, diamonds, reflectors, bells, icicles, teardrops, trees, lanterns, and pinecones.

6. Wellsboro sits on the doorstep to Pennsylvania’s Grand Canyon.

7. Corning Glass partnered with Max Ekhard’s company Shiny Brite (among others) which added decorative exteriors to the ornaments and distributed them nationwide.

8. Wellsboro’s nickname is the Christmas Ornament Capital of the World.  This heritage is celebrated annually as Christmas on Main Street on the first weekend of December.

9. The form of this poem is the Italian sonnet.

The Square Deal Feeds the Circle

The Square Deal Feeds the Circle

Binghamton, New York

---

Life on a circle sees things come around 

again. There is no escaping its chase of you.

The only question: which is faster—the furious hound

you released a circumference ago, or your two

slow legs?  The kismet of living in time is war

(or peace), the sown reaped as surely as the dropped shoe

will fall and the stopped fall will thud on the hard floor

of George F. Johnson’s six antique carousels

delighting greater Binghamton today, and what’s more,

all still free of charge, as Johnson’s legacy will

insisted: and this a glimpse into his circle-feeding

back in the day his company shod soldiers—a sales

volume that bred success. He was bent on treating

his workers well: health care, wages, house subsidies,

parks, theater, swimming pool, menagerie-wheeling

merry-go-rounds, sure that any one of these

would make company families feel that they belonged.

In time the circle turned, as did the great economy’s

boon into bust. With Endicott Johnson loyalty strong,

they divided the diminished pot, eating dandelions

and singing loud the company anthem Marching Along

        Together. When the union sent their agents trying

         to organize, Johnson met the crowd with tears

in his eyes.  The workers finally voted not to buy in.

A capitalist caring for his work force?  The cynic hears

nothing but manipulation. But the circle

does not lie.  Until he died the turning years

were kind to him who engineered the Square Deal,

and even though decades later entropy

would take the company down and away, its fertile

influence even shaping nascent policies

of fledgling neighbor IBM.  Round and round

the heavily lacquered horses have carried this same esprit

de corps forward through time.  The old headquarters now

a church.  Homes inhabit the Sunrise and Century suite.

Kindness in orbit: from children rising up and down

in the merry calliope carnival sound to the steady beat

of soldiers marching in the terrible taking of high ground

long ago, the best of soles cushioning their feet.

NOTES:  

This poem is written in terza rima hexameter. A natural reading of the poem, which nearly sounds like prose, betrays the reality of the strictly adhered to structure.

See transcript of NPR’s radio broadcast The Legacy Of George F. Johnson And The Square Deal at https://www.npr.org/2010/12/01/131725100/the-legacy-of-george-f-johnson-and-the-square-deal for much of the information below:

1. Of the fewer than 170 antique carousels remaining in the U.S. and Canada, six vintage Allan Herschell originals are in Greater Binghamton, originally purchased and set up by George F. Johnson, owner of the Endicott Johnson Corp, a local shoe manufacturing company. Because of the uniqueness of these carousels and the incomparable circumstances of their survival and existence, all six are placed on the New York State Historic Register and the National Register of Historic Places.  They are in the following parks:  Ross Park, Recreation Park,  C. Fred Johnson Park, George W. Johnson Park, West Endicott Park, and Highland Park.

The well-loved George F. Johnson, 1857-1948

2. Johnson called his employee benefits program “the Square Deal”, an early example of welfare capitalism.To give you a taste, new employees at Endicott Johnson were given a copy of a pamphlet called "An EJ Worker's First Lesson in the Square Deal." It read, in part:

"To the new EJ worker: You have now joined the happy family in the square deal. If you are faithful, loyal,

and reliable, you will earn a good living under fair conditions. You are indeed a part of the company.

Remember that you are cared for when sick, medical and hospital services are yours, privileges of many

kinds are yours. Your friend, George F. Johnson."

This sign can be seen today entering Johnson City

3. During the good times, Endicott Johnson would host band concerts in the park on Sunday evenings, according to Gerald Zahavi, who wrote Workers, Managers and Welfare Capitalism. The final song was "Marching Along Together." Endicott Johnson workers and managers took the song as a sort of anthem, a symbol of the bond they felt between labor and management.

4. During a severe economic downturn, Johnson came into the factory to make a speech, according to former worker Earl Birdsall. Birdsall recounts Johnson saying: "My friends, times are rough. But I'm gonna tell you one thing. We're not gonna lay nobody off. We're all gonna work, take what little we got and share. There are lots of dandelions on the hills and fish in the rivers so we'll have to live on that." 

5. A union vote was scheduled for early January 1940.   During union negotiations former Endicott Johnson worker Elmer Knowles remembers “And [Johnson] went down and he parked his car in the parking lot and he tried to talk to us on the loudspeaker. And I'll never forget there was tears in his eyes. He drove away in tears.” More than 15,000 workers had a choice of voting for or against unionizing.  80 percent of the workers voted against the union.

6. The former central headquarters, located on the eastern edge of Johnson City, has been converted into a church. In the autumn of 2016, New York State Homes & Community Renewal entered into a development agreement with Affordable Housing Concepts and Libolt Construction to gut rehabilitate the former Sunrise and Century buildings into a pair of affordable housing sites. (Wikipedia: Endicott Johnson Corporation).

---

The Cave of Great Galleries Gutted

The Cave of Great Galleries Gutted

Cobleskill, New York

---

The wide underground wonder,

cavernous over inked water,

secret, yet marked by a rumored-about

blowing rock, was found out by Howe

when Millicent the cow lingered near the cool

hidden mouth of the Cave of Great Galleries

one stifling afternoon, pleased to stand still

in the chill of freed breezes having wound

their torturous circuit up through

the labyrinth of New York’s long becoming.

The siren song of an echoing drip-drip

wooed explorers further down-step-down

toward mysteries waiting in the karstic

dark beyond the Lake of Venus,

a troglobite-guarded dangerous trek

with the poor-patch light from whale oil lamps

swallowed up in the pitch-black maze 

of tunnels damp in their musty wet 

where blinking eyes set back in shadows

looked out on the bold frontier

of a brand new world buried in the old.

Older still run the veins of greed that can 

undermine wonder for the money in the mud.

The clamor for limestone, for all it could ground—

now that the wheat fields had fled far west—

fueled the rock quarries filling the vacuum.

Fragile caverns without tourist traffic

were easy pickings to scoop up more profits;

a ready-made mine for the mineral extractors;

convenient space for machines to maneuver in;

a clear head start over other surface diggers

clogged in layers Howe’s waters had conquered.

Rock masterpieces million-year slow-etched were

wrecked into piles for the ravenous market,

stalagmites, stalactites snapped into rubble,

erasure of flowstone, the crystals of moonmilk,

chandeliers, draperies: luminous treasures  

having just come to light were as quickly eclipsed,

plundered at Ramsey’s inimical pleasure, 

draining the numinous back to the abyss.

NOTES:

The following historical excerpts are taken from The Remarkable Howe Caverns Story by Dana Cudmore, The Overlook Press, Woodstock, NY, Copyright 1990 and can be found on the Howe Caverns official website at https://howecaverns.com/history

Prior to the arrival of the German Palatine Settlers in the Schoharie Valley in the early 1700s, the local Native Americans knew what they called “Otsgaragee” or “Cave of the Great Galleries.” In historical records, there is some disagreement as to this translation, which suggests the Native Americans explored deep into the cavern. A second translation is “Great Valley Cave,” which may be more accurate, as many believe the Native Americans’ superstitions may have kept them from exploring the cave.

Little was known or remembered of Otsgaragee by the early 1800’s when Lester Howe, his wife Lucinda, and their three infant children – Huldah Ann, Harriet Elgiva and Halsey John – settled in the valley east of Cobleskill. The location of the cave entrance had been lost to history, but there was talk of a mysterious “Blowing Rock” – a strange rocky ledge from which a cool breeze of air emanated on even the hottest days.

There are several different accounts of the caverns’ history, but the most often told (shortened for the touring public) is that Howe found the cave by accident on the 22nd of May, 1842. On many hot summer days he noticed his cows pastured in this same spot, not on his land, but land owned by neighbor and friend, Henry Wetsel. When Howe approached his herd, he began to notice the temperature getting cooler. His dairy herd had gathered near the cave’s hidden entrance to feel the cool air coming from below, and Howe had indeed found the mysterious “Blowing Rock” and gave credit, in particular, to a cow named “Millicent” for helping with the discovery. Howe then entered the cave with his neighbor Henry Wetsel.

Howe opened the cave to eight-hour public tours in 1843, and, as business grew, a hotel was built over the entrance. The caves soon became an international sensation which equaled Niagara Falls as a New York State travel destination. When the Albany and Susquehanna Railroad ran their track through the town in 1864 a station was opened there and a small community grew around it.  

When Howe encountered financial difficulties, he sold off parts of his property.   Howe eventually lost his property to local businessman Joseph Ramsey. A half dozen stone quarries operated in the town of Cobleskill in the late nineteenth century. One of them, less than a mile west of Howe’s Cavern, alone employed 400 men. When tourism fell off late in the century Ramsey turned to rock quarrying and destroyed much of the lower cavern in the process. What remained of the cave was saved when the property was sold. Howe Caverns reopened to the public in 1929. Secret Caverns opened nearby that same year.

The Frost of Legend Lengthens

The Frost of Legend Lengthens

Shaftsbury, Vermont

---

The Vermont mountains stretch

extended straight, save for dark

scowling Glastenbury local

Indians say is cursed,

whose shadow of pent-up lore

crawls up Buck Hill Road fall mornings

leaving the bright air cold 

with the memory of the missing.

Middie Rivers, lost like a lone

actor on a gloomy stage,

swallowed whole in a flash by

the forest he knew best,

knew too well for any earthly

use the line where man leaves off

and nature starts, and never

over-stepped it save in dreams.

Paula Weldon in her red

sweater, wondering what 

to face or run away from, 

wandered into oblivion,

deep in woods ten miles

from a railroad station, as if to put

forever out of mind the hope

of being, as we say, received.

Little Paul Jepson, tired of waiting,

set out for the nearest boundary

to escape across, abandoning the car.

His mother’s cries fell unheeded

everywhere they looked in the 

place that is silent all day long.

Where had he been and 

what had he been doing?

Frieda Langer, on the shore

of Somerset Reservoir, 

a weekend explorer of the deep, 

returned to camp for a change

of clothes to change places

with the Glastenbury ghosts.

Oh it was terrible as well could be!

Unlike the others she was found

months later, her bones

surfacing in protest, a voice

for all the anonymous who 

have turned over in our graves.

The frost of legend lengthens

through these personal silences,

disappearing by mid-day but

returning in the eerie dawn.

Now they tell us don’t wear red

when walking in these woods.

I know wherever I am, I shall not 

lack pain to keep me awake.

NOTES:

1. “Shaftesbury is located in the heart of the region known as The Shires of Vermont. It is one of the very first towns chartered in Vermont and is known  today for its bucolic views and peaceful nature.” (https://shaftsburyvt.gov/come-to-shaftsbury/discover-shaftsbury/).

2. The story of nearby Glastenbury Mountain is rich with legend.  The mountain boasts its own ghost town also named Glastenbury, destroyed by a flood in the late 1898 due to erosion by cleared trees for charcoal production. The local Indians avoided hunting on the mountain due to what they saw as a dark presence.  Between 1945-1950 4 people mysteriously disappeared around this mountain:

• November 12, 1945: 74-year-old mountain guide and hunter Middie Rivers right after 4PM, walking slightly ahead of a group of other people.

• December 1, 1946: 18-year-old Paula Weldon, sophomore at Bennington College, wearing a red sweater, disappeared after walking toward the mountain. This incident resulted in a massive manhunt and included the first ever search and rescue operation by a helicopter. It also led to the formation of the Vermont State Police.

• October 12, 1950:  8-year-old Paul Jepson, accompanying mother while she was feeding pigs at a local farm, left the car in which he was waiting and wandered off into the woods never to be seen again. Dogs tracked him for a few miles and lost his trail.

• October 28, 1950: 53-year-old Freida Langer, disappeared while camping near the Somerset Reservoir (on the eastside of the mountain). Her remains were found a year later by hunters.

3. The famous American poet Robert Frost bought a Dutch colonial stone house built in 1769 in South Shaftsbury and moved his family there with plans to be an apple farmer, after leaving a teaching post at Amherst College. He found it easier to write when he was farming, according to Frost biographer Jay Parini. He and his family lived there for nine years, with Frost winning the first of his four Pulitzers during that time, the collection entitled New Hampshire.

"I have moved a good part of the way to a stone cottage on a hill at South Shaftsbury in southern Vermont on the New York side near the historic town of Bennington where if I have any money left after repairing the roof in the spring I mean to plant a new Garden of Eden with a thousand apple trees of some unforbidden variety," wrote Frost in a letter to a friend on Oct. 23, 1920, according to Parini's book, Robert Frost: A Life.  (from https://www.wbur.org/news/2018/05/21/robert-frost-museum-vermont)

4. All the italicized lines in this poem are direct extractions from Frost’s poem New Hampshire from the Pulitzer-winning collection New Hampshire that he wrote while living in the Shaftsbury house:

1. The Vermont mountains stretch extended straight (l.215)

2. Like a lone actor on a gloomy stage  (l.46)

3. He knew too well for any earthly use the line where man leaves off and nature starts, and never over-stepped it save in dreams (l.379-381)

4. Rather what to face or run away from (l.397)

5. Deep in woods ten miles from a railroad station, as if to put forever out of mind the hope of being, as we say,

   received (l.40-43).

6. The nearest boundary to escape across (l.255)

7. The place is silent all day long (l.191)

8. Where had he been and what had he been doing? (l.56)

9. Oh it was terrible as well could be (l.60)

10. An explorer of the deep (l.93)

11. Turned over in our graves (l.62).

12. I know wherever I am, I shall not lack pain to keep me awake (l.241-243)

Norwich Rising

Norwich Rising

Norwich, Vermont

---

The first settlers

in their log-hewn huts

ducking the winter of ‘65

were flour, 

strained by hard life in the woods,

sifted through the sieve 

of generations past,

their severe stares posing  

stiffly in black and white,

silent on the rough stone mantle.

All-purpose flour they were,

mixing with the rain, 

the snow, long swaths of grey sky,

the Ompompanoosuc river, 

forming such a sticky stretch of promise,

salted with the courage of furrowed eyes

grown used to staring down the dark

with nothing but clenched fists

and a hard-beating heart.

A town remains a lump in a bowl

until loves drenches the whole of it,

until the yeast of sacrifice seeps into the round table,

a willingness to slice life up for life,

as Sir Gawain chooses Lady Ragnell,

in choosing honor chooses well,

a riddle answered, the riddle applied,

and follows the best of all surprises,

Norwich rises like a pregnant belly–

something deep within her pushing 

outward toward the audience of stars;

Norwich, ready for the oven’s fire,

as many times as time would ask

in order to become flesh and blood,

to move beyond Ma Walker’s vigil

haunting the halls of Norwich Inn

into the joy of brick and mortar,

a name place with legends of her own to spin,

where hand-made telescopes dare unclothe

the sneak of the moon across the sky,

where Merlin’s magic is finally exposed

behind the glass in delectible rows

of perfect pastries side by side,

where the fruit lies content in its bedded pie,

the smell of fresh bread casting its spell

on the unsuspecting  passerby.

---

NOTES:

1. The first settlers reached the area in 1763 and began to clear the wilderness and erect the first hand-hewn log buildings, wintering over for the first time in 1765.

2. The King Arthur Baking Company was established in 1790 and  headquarters in Norwich.  World-famous for their flour products, King Arthur hosts a destination bakery in Norwich and baking schools in Norwich and in Skagit County, Wa.  They are an employee-owned company who take seriously their mission to inspire connections and community through baking. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/

3. The tale of Sir Gawain and Lady Ragnell is a delightful read.  Wikipedia gives this helpful overview: The Wedding of Sir Gawain and Dame Ragnelle (The Weddynge of Syr Gawen and Dame Ragnell) is a 15th-century English poem, one of several versions of the "loathly lady" story popular during the Middle Ages. An earlier version of the story appears as "The Wyfe of Bayths Tale" ("The Wife of Bath's Tale") in Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, and the later ballad "The Marriage of Sir Gawain" is essentially a retelling, though its relationship to the medieval poem is uncertain.The author's name is not known, but similarities to Le Morte d'Arthur have led to the suggestion that the poem may have been written by Sir Thomas Malory.

4. Norwich has a public giant outdoor clay wood-fire pizza oven that was recently rebuilt as a community project, led by Richard Miscovich, author of From the Wood-Fired Oven and sponsored by King Arthur Baking Company.  See the story at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8pGuq3OfKec.

5. There is a persistent town legend that Norwich Inn is haunted by the ghost of Ma Walker, the owner of the inn in the “roaring twenties.”

6. Telescopes of Vermont: Norwich residents father and son Fred and Russ Schleipman have recreated the Porter Garden telescope first developed in 1920 by Russell Porter, the father of amateur astronomy.  Their meticulous copy of the original with updated optical instruments has resulted in a limited production of 200 telescopes at $125,000 each.  Learn more at http://gardentelescopes.com/index.html.

Upbeat Downbeat on the Common

Upbeat Downbeat on the Common

Whitefield, New Hampshire

“Music turns the world upside down” —Michael Portillo

______________________

Up and down Main Street

hand-scrawled placards summon  

Come to the Promenade Concert on the Common!

A cornet suddenly cuts the still

with the punch of a near-ripe plum,

gun-start for a dance on the grass,

neighbors and friends passing a lazy 

afternoon with a strawberry supper.

Under cover of the white bandstand

the august Whitefield Amateur Band

swings upbeat in dapper hats,

quick-tap toes, thrumming downbeat,

air thick with summer heat,

scent of raspberry off the moondance rose,

September drenched in wide blue sky–

an upside-down lake filling up the windows 

that ring the Grand Resort nearby,

itself ringed round by hills and mountains

echoing back the lively strains 

of The Little Log Cabin in the Lane

and Goodbye Liza Jane.

Hours pass, and frogs and crickets 

join the pulse of the early night 

coursing  through the heart of Whitefield,

once a parcel no one wanted,

very last of the English towns

where, in Pine Street cemetery, 

Varnum Blood lies in his place

with an upward pointing finger

sculpted on his tombstone face,

while several rows across the yard 

Henry Lane lies in repose

under another moss-stained stone

with a carved finger pointing down.

Reverberating bandstand sounds

chase away any loitering clouds,

room for the lonely moon up high

to cast its spotlight down to find 

a couple kissing in the crowd, 

gently swaying, keeping time

to the rhythmic beat of Baby Mine.

---

NOTES:

1. Bandstands were a common feature in towns and parks across England and America in the second half of the nineteenth century, offering a stage for public concerts and other gatherings.

2. “Promenade Concerts” were those where much of the audience stood around and listened.

3. Popular in the day were the “cornet bands” (brass bands with percussion).  See below the 1874 Mason Cornet Band as an example. 

4. The Whitefield bandstand was erected in 1875 and it was dedicated, according to town records, "with an appropriate amount of ceremony." An unattributed newspaper writeup in the possession of the Whitefield Historical Society offers some interesting information about the bandstand. "Whitefield Amateur Band," said the account, "offered lively entertainment. In dapper hats, the band offered promenade concerts and an occasional 'strabbery supper', fining members 25 cents for any 'disturbances.' A later band was formed in 1907 with 15 members offering summer concerts on the common every Saturday night." –Eileen Alexander,  Coos County Democrat, February 23, 1999.

5. Whitefield is known for its Victorian architecture. Many buildings from the 1800's remain today including the Mountain View Grand Resort, completed in 1866. 

Mountain View Grand Resort and Spa, Whitefield, New Hampshire.

6. The songs referenced in the poem are popular tunes from the 1870’s in America.  The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane (music and words by Will[iam] S[hakespeare] Hays), 1871.  Good-Bye, Liza Jane, 1871.  Baby Mine (words by Charles Mackay, music by Archibald Johnstone), 1878.

7. Kim R. Nilsen, A History of WHITEFIELD, NEW HAMPSHIRE 1774-1974.  According to this book, the parcel of land (that is now Whitefield) was "left over" after boundaries had been established for neighboring towns and was later referred to as "the land that no one wanted."  

8. Whitefield was the last town to be established by the English provincial government, just two years before the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Whitefield was chartered on July 4, 1774, exactly two years before adoption of the Declaration of the Independence.

9. http://newenglandfolklore.blogspot.com/2013/11/strange-gravestones-of-whitefield-new.html.  Check out this link to see the upward pointing finger for Varnum Blood  and the downward pointing for Henry Lane in Pine Street Cemetery.

10. For much of the information above, and much more, see the Whitefield website Town Heritage tab at https://www.whitefieldnh.org/home/about-us/pages/town-heritage.

Music Passes From Ear to Ear

Music Passes From Ear to Ear

Farmington, Maine

---

Music passes from ear to ear,

along the streets, year by year, 

a stretched band that bunches 

the shirred pleats of time’s heavy curtain

opening and closing on the ever changing stage.

Childhood memories age and slip,

loose and rattling in their assigned spots.

Forgotten lines, broken props,

ambivalence heightens in the eldritch light 

of Nordica Auditorium’s night

where local ghost hunters

whisper and wait for particles of the past

to reassemble in mysterious

bursts of breezes up sleeves

and knocking noises up in the rafters.

Hear him come, the first Town Clerk,

Maine’s Handel, old man Belcher,

harmonies drift down from the balcony

carrying the voices of Pierpole’s children,

perfect in pitch singing the Psalter.

Here she comes, Farmington’s Diva,

Lilliana whispering now that she’s dead,

enough her soprano arias still

echo across the song halls of Europe, 

Violetta and Elsa, Isolde and Venus

in obdurate encore under the stars.

Hear the strains of the professor playing 

piano playing Liszt playing Beethoven 

playing a walk through the countryside

into the storm and out again.

Every age is a city on a fire,

Pleasant Street choking on smoke 

in the burning of what is passing away,

leaving behind an altered world,

the allegretto, the shepherd’s song,

the  legacy of the chrysalis

for all who will not dull the sound,

who will not close their eyes to this

nor muff the ear to dampen down

the music of the march that must be made

by time’s inevitable town parade.

---

NOTES:

1. Nordica Auditorium is a theater in Merrill Hall on the campus of the University of Maine at Farmington, which carries a folkloric reputation for being haunted by the ghost of the famous opera singer Lilliana Nordica who was born in Farmington in 1857.

2. Supply Belcher is an important early figure in the history of Farmington.  He was well known as a composer and choir director and was rumored to have taught music to the children of an important local Native American leader named Pierpole.  He published a collection of his compositions called The Harmony of Maine in 1794.  He became Farmington’s first Town Clerk in 1798.

3. Farmington-born opera sensation Lilliana Nordica took Europe by storm in the late nineteenth century, well remembered for roles such as Violetta in Verdi’s La Traviata and for Wagner heroines such as Elsa, Isolde, and Venus.

4. I appreciated watching an on-line performance of Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony by Music Professor Stephen Pane of the University of Maine at Farmington .  There are five movements in the symphony. The movements in order are allegro ma non troppo ("Joyful Feelings Upon Arriving in the Country"), andante molto mosso ("By the Brook"), allegro ("Peasant Merrymaking"), allegro ("The Thunderstorm"), and allegretto ("The Shepherd's Song After the Storm").

5. The town of Farmington was nearly destroyed by a catastrophic fire in 1886 that raged down Pleasant Street.  The fire was started by a spark from a train.

6. Perhaps Farmington’s most famous historical citizen is Chester Greenwood who invented  earmuffs in 1873.  The city holds a parade in honor of Chester Greenwood Day every year on the first Saturday of December.

To Fall into Gallop

To Fall into Gallop

Bangor, Maine

---

The earliest stories peg Paul Bunyan

a seven-foot muscle-bound marvel in plaid.

But now his feet leave lakes in their wake, 

head in the clouds, whole forests sheared

with one devastating sweep of his axe,

the mountain tops tickling Babe’s blue belly.

I once saw a Big-Leaf Maple leap 

from sprig to tree in a single spring,

a six-foot stretch in a three-month span,

gulping in the sunlight’s glare

as a galloping thoroughbred sucks in air,

the racetrack thundering at the final turn,

steady crescendo from start to end,

swelling as cotton left out in the rain,

as discontent can pressurize

into a volatile midday mob 

incensed at Emery’s editorials,

throwing his press out the fourth-story window,

a rotating aerial accelerating into

the merciless cobblestone waiting below,

       not far from where now sits a house

       surrounded by a bat-winged gate

         where Stephen King once churned out novels

         at a rate of two thousand words a day, 

     burgeoning sales in the hundreds of millions,

       mimicking the stampede of lumberfeet

        that once roared through Bangor’s port

         like a wild horde of mares in heat.

The tumbling rock, the launching rocket,

all of it wanting to fall into gallop. 

Even the trotters are out breaking records--

Nelson at Bass Park in Ninety-One.

I wonder how they’ll tell his story, 

gathering together  their children’s children,

how in mid-race he began to rise

pulling his sulky up into the skies

over the northeast Penjajawoc woods,

pureeing the low-lying clouds into mist

with the powerful kick of his air-whipping hooves.

---

NOTES:

1. The more fanciful versions of Paul Bunyan find their roots in the work of William Laughhead, and in particular can be traced to a promotional pamphlet he produced for the Red River Lumber Company in 1916.

2. The mob incident described in this poem happened in August of 1861. The provocative editor of The Democrat was Marcellus Emery.

3. Stephen King lived in Bangor from 1979 to 2016. See the picture of his house below.

4. Bangor was a key lumber export city in mid-nineteenth century, with 150 saw mills along its river, and 150 million lumberfeet annually passing through its docks by 1860.

5. Nelson (see below) was a world class trotting harness race-horse that clocked a world-record mile time on the half-mile Bangor horse racetrack at Bass Park in 1890.

Stephen King’s house in Bangor, Maine from 1979 to 2016.

Nelson the world class harness racing horse.