A Thousand Questions

 I'm thinking this morning of Town Creek. It begins in Pennsylvania near the tiny town of Rainsburg and flows from north to south 36 miles to Oldtown, Maryland, where it flows into the Potomac River. The Potomac can be easily forded at Oldtown. It's not very deep there.

If you were a slave fleeing the South before the Civil War, you could follow a stream like Town Creek up into Pennsylvania. In the absence of maps, it was a way to move north, and most of it can be waded, which helps cover tracks. You would also have a clean water source.

My ancestors lived along Town Creek, just over the Mason Dixon line in Pennsylvania. In one instance, documented in The Chaneysville Incident, by David Bradley, they discovered a group of 13 runaway slaves who had committed mass suicide on their property, rather than be taken back to Virginia. Those suicide victims are buried in the Imes family graveyard along Town Creek, in plots marked just with the local shale.

If the escaping slaves committed suicide, it follows that they must have known they had been discovered and were going to be captured. This means that my family must have had to stand up to bounty hunters. Dead bodies were as valuable in the South as live ones, because of the terror they would inspire.

My great-grandmother was an Imes, a direct descendant of the patriarch who would have had to make decisions in the days of the Underground Railroad. I was three when my great-grandmother died, and although I met her I have no memories of her. Second-hand I learned that she was hard to live with. She suffered from intense anxiety and projected the worse outcome for every small thing. My uncle told me that her favorite expression was "Hit's a carshun." Translated, it means "uh oh."

It's not a leap to imagine that the Imes family had a streak of anxiety in the days of the Underground Railroad. They were less than three miles from the Mason Dixon. Helping runaways of any kind must have been a fraught exercise for them.

Today I am imagining the conversations that must have occurred in that farmhouse along Town Creek. What's right? What's wrong? What can we do? How will we be held responsible? How will this impact our family? Do we really want to involve ourselves in this?

For people who (perhaps) projected the worst outcome, this must have been excruciating.

This is not to minimize the 10,000 times worse situation of runaway slaves. I'm only speculating on how my particular family might have reacted to the situation they found themselves in, situated on a stream that flowed from north to south, ending across a wadable river from Virginia.

I want to overhear those conversations in that farmhouse. I want to ask Aaron Imes a thousand questions. I want his courage in the face of atrocity. How did you do it, family?

I'm saying this because something has changed in America, and something has changed in my neighborhood as well.

In America, we have slid back into a dark era. Many people have lost autonomy over their very own bodies.

And in my neighborhood, three blocks from my house, this:

EXHIBIT A: RIPA Center

My friends, this morning I want to step back in time. First I want to go see the Imes family and ask them a thousand questions. Then I want to go to see Anne Johnson, circa 2008 and tell her that her cocky, cheeky, snarky belittling of the Christian Right completely minimized the damage they could do -- not just in matters of women's reproductive freedom, but in a larger and more sinister plan to control lives, ALL lives, on behalf of the wealthiest elites.

I feel like Town Creek has come to my doorway in Haterfield, New Jersey. Do I have the courage to be an Imes, anxiety be damned?

Gods help me. Gods help us all.

In Which I Sternly Reprimand My Deceased Ancestors

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" In Goddess We Trust! They should put that on money, along with Sojourner Truth.

You would hardly know this is a Pagan website these days, but it still is. If anything, the current state of our nation has entrenched me deeper with the Gods, Nature Spirits, and Ancestors.

It is the latter that I communicated with a few days ago. It wasn't pretty.

It's not often I get to the county where my mother's people resided and are interred. Usually I biff right past it on my way to my dad's county deep in the mountains. But Monday morning found me in Mom's neck of the woods, after having seen my sister play a concert with the municipal band.

I regularly visit and venerate my Johnson ancestors, as they were tough, resilient, Grand Army of the Republic slavery-haters. And supremely loving and wonderful folks as well.

Mom's family, beginning with Mom and going back through time, were racist, Confederacy-loving slave-owners with money but no scruples. Nevertheless, I purchased some shiny stones from Michael's and went to decorate their graves. (Shiny stones are better than flowers. They last longer and are pleasing to the Nature Spirits.)

My first stop was the cemetery where my great-grandmother, grandmother, and parents are buried. It is locally known as Rose Hill Cemetery, but it was created to inter the Confederate soldiers who perished at the battles of Antietam and South Mountain. Said soldiers were dug up from their mass graves on the battlefields by a wealthy local asshole landowner, and re-interred in a new, prominent spot in my home town.

EXHIBIT A: THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS, AKA ROSE HILL CEMETERY

Once this monument to white supremacy was established, all the area's families that had owned slaves promptly bought plots there. Hence three generations of my kin, including -- to my chagrin -- my dad.

First I went to my parents' grave. As I recalled it, they had those little markers on the ground with name and birth/death date. Imagine my surprise to find a big-ass gravestone that had to cost a pretty penny! After texting my sister, I found that my dad had ordered it after my mother died. I guess the carvers didn't get around to making it until a few years after Dad's death. It took me aback. During his lifetime, I couldn't get my father to buy a decent suit to wear to church. And here was many thousands of dollars worth of neglected gravestone, already dirty. (Sis never visits.) I put some shiny stones on it, shaking my head. I would have been glad to clean my parents' house while they were alive, but keeping their expensive headstone grime-free is not on my bucket list.

I didn't scold my parents, grandmother, or great-grandmother. (The latter two are buried nearby.) But when I got to the older churchyard further out in the country, I took the people there to task. If only the stones heard me, maybe that's a good thing.

EXHIBIT B: GREAT GRANDFATHER

These are the generations that actively owned slaves. In particular need of a stern rebuke is this couple:

EXHIBIT C: FOR SHAME!

John Brinham supervised the smelting of iron on South Mountain, which depended upon the labor of more than 300 slaves. A researcher of color did her master's thesis on the conditions of this labor, and it was horrible. I won't even go into detail, I'm so mortified by it. Nor is Mary Hanna off the hook, because her father owned people too and even doled her out a few to run her household and care for her children. (I think my rich aunt must have erected this stone, it looks to be so modern in aspect.)

Here's what I told the ancestors:

"Well, y'all, I'm not gonna lie. I'm ashamed of you. But you gave me life, and as luck would have it, I have been given an opportunity to teach children of color in a fine school. I can't hope to work off all your bad karma in just 20 years, but maybe if I help enough minority students it will mitigate the considerable damage you did over generations."

With that I scattered the obligatory stones, took some establishing shots of the stones' locations, and hoofed it on out of there, wishing desperately that I was treading the familiar turf of Dad's people's graveyards.

We venerate our ancestors for giving us life, but if they don't otherwise deserve veneration, we should be morally obliged to compensate for their bad behavior, if possible. I haven't the financial means to seek out descendants of my ancestors' slaves and offer reparations, but I really try to be a good teacher and help my students prepare for a world in which, although they are not enslaved, they still face momentous obstacles to success and safety.

It's important to know who your ancestors were and what they did with their lives. You might need to do some work for them in the apparent world.

And then there are the stone-cold idiots who are actually undermining the good deeds of their ancestors. Here I am talking about the scum of the Earth bad people who fly Rebel flags, not knowing that their forebears fought and died with the Union Army. You see this shit throughout Pennsylvania and northern New Jersey. It's a disgrace.

So at least I know what my people did. And in the peaceful moments at my outdoor shrine, I never seek to talk to them. I do think about them, though, and often. Especially after a hard day at school. Especially then.

Lessons Learned at Four Quarters Farm

Hello, there, chappies! It's me, Annie of the Appalachians, slinging more words your way! Catch 'em, share 'em, collect the whole set!

My three long-time readers will know that the biggest hurdle in my personal life has been the loss of my ties to the Appalachian farm that was in my family for ... oh ... thirteen or so generations. Really. I have an ancestor who died in 1778 whose grandfather lived in those parts.

At just about the same time that the last generation of Johnsons were dying out or moving away from Polish Mountain, a campground called Four Quarters Farm opened at the other end of the Zip code. It was quite a joke at the time, because Four Quarters started out as a completely clothing-optional place. (Options have been scaled back but not abandoned at present.)

It's no coincidence that I started camping at Four Quarters the same year that my family sold the homestead. What is a coincidence is that Four Quarters Farm is for Pagans ... and I had become Pagan.

When I go to Four Quarters Farm, I meditate on the loss of my farm, the lack of Appalachian identity in my children, the loss of family and friends and anchor. This is the Great Work that I still have to do to find peace in my life: I've got to stay connected to the land even with the loss of ownership.

This year at 4QF, my friend Maebius came and was pretty much game for any silly endeavor I proposed. So I persuaded him to go hiking with me off site to a state forest trail that I recalled from my youth. (There are some very gorgeous hollows in those mountains, but they're hard to get into and out of.) We set out in search of a drop-dead gorgeous hollow that used to be easy to find on a well-marked trail. But that was 20 years ago. The trail isn't even marked any more. We discovered this only after hiking into a wicked thicket of new growth woods and stinging nettles.

We weren't lost, but we couldn't find a consistent path back out of the hollow. It was slow going. Thankfully we did have a nice pure stream at our side.

As we made our way down along the stream, back toward where I parked, we began noticing interesting topography. There were ornamental shrubberies grown wild. Rock walls abandoned. Masonry foundations in the middle of the woods. The area had once been populated. Now it's woods.

Maebius said, "Nature has really reclaimed this place."

This comforted me immensely.

The long-gone residents of those long-gone homes were no doubt kin of mine. They're probably buried up in Chaneysville. But their homes, yards, barns, bridges ... lost, all lost.

So, too, will this be with my great-grandfather's land. Once the kinship tie is broken, and the property owners are absentee or foreign, Nature moves in. There's a stubborn grove of locust trees where my great-aunt Belle had her magnificent garden. Carpenter bees have eaten the barn; it was torn down this year. The pastures are growing in because only deer are grazing them.

Appalachia is still under attack by mountaintop removal mining and fracking, but at least in the little patch where I came up, Gaia has moved in and is reclaiming. Now that no Johnsons live along Johnson Road anymore, I beseech Her to expand Her reach.  Let there be trees. Let there be woods. Let the roads grow in and the timbers crumble. Let the mountain forget us all. It was born in the days of the dinosaurs -- what do we matter to it, after all?

Gaia, take back what was yours, and thank you for letting us borrow the mountain for awhile. We didn't leave very much behind. Bright blessings to You.

Eulogy for My Favorite Uncle

My uncle Foggy died yesterday. He was not born with the name Foggy, but after a bully called him that one day in his youth, he and my dad and his friends liked it so much that it stuck. Even my grandfather called him "Fog."

He was the product of a teenage indiscretion that led to a hasty marriage ... the marriage lasted almost 60 years. He grew up in Appalachia and was part of what I call the Appalachian diaspora. At about age 20 he married and moved to Cleveland, Ohio. There he raised a family and worked a series of white collar jobs until he was the age I am now. Then he got laid off for the last time. He moved back to the mountains, moved in with my grandparents at the family farm, and helped out as they got older.

In an era not known for six-footers, Foggy was 6'4". He towered over everyone in the family. Maybe that's why the nickname stuck, because we always teased him about what the weather was like up there. When I was a little kid, he would lift me up on his shoulders, and it would be like riding a giraffe.

Foggy and I had tons of fun together. He was my favorite uncle, and the one I spent the most time with as a kid and young adult. Because he was living at the family farm, I saw him frequently. He was always a talkative person, and as he spent more and more time alone after my grandparents died, he became extremely long-winded when I would visit. Still, I loved him. He was quick to laugh and had a keen wit. He loved satire and had no problem poking fun at Appalachia. He was a good cook.

When Foggy left the workforce, he did some pretty rigorous hiking with my cousin. Stuff that I sure would be hesitant to do at this point in my life. He backpacked the Appalachian Trail and hiked along the shoreline of Lake Superior. He traveled across the country numerous times, by car and rail and plane. In this picture he is already well into his 50s, maybe flirting with 60, and he sure didn't get to that spot by some tourist tram.

Most of all, he was self-taught. He attended less than a semester of college, but he was very well-read. Okay, so he specialized in the Civil War and read all those Louis Lamour Westerns, and all that James Michener stuff, but he always had a book in his hands.

I have an old journal here in which I recorded some of our adventures at the family farm when I was in my late teens. We had some rip-roaring good ol' times, especially when we were lubricated with vodka gimlets.

After my grandparents died, my dad and his brother got all of us nieces and nephews to agree to let Foggy live out his life at the family farm, rent free. There was never anything put into writing. It was what I thought of as a blood obligation. Foggy's work history was spotty, and he took his Social Security early, so he had a very limited income much of the time. Even so, he kept up the house and the property. He mowed more grass than my grandfather ever did, and between him and my cousin, the place actually improved instead of rotting, which is what many other similar properties have done.

It was such a fabulous feeling to be able to go to the family farm, see it so neat and well-maintained, hike its woods and fields, and have a cocktail and chat the night away (or, actually, listen the night away) with Uncle Foggy.

There were plenty of kinfolk up in those hills who would have welcomed his company, but for some reason, voluble Foggy didn't socialize much outside his immediate family. In his loneliness he listened to talk radio, and that habit led him to Rush Limbaugh. He fell under Rush's spell, and that became a game-changer in our relationship. I found that it wasn't as much fun visiting the mountains if I had to hear about welfare deadbeats and feminazis. The "Rush-talk" about the social safety net was particularly galling, because if not for that Social Security and our good will agreement regarding the farm (and his own children's generosity), he would have needed far more social support than he got.

Old age closed in on Foggy, and once again he was lucky. I have an able-bodied male cousin who was able to care for Foggy at the family farm, thus lengthening the years that our family held onto the farm. It was only two years ago that the situation became untenable, and wowsa, my sister and cousins closed in to put the farm up for sale and grab the ducats post-haste. I didn't have enough money to buy the place, since some local fellow had been eyeballing it for years and was willing to shell out our asking price, in cash.

The last time I saw Foggy was in November 2011, just a few months before the closing on the farm. In farewell I gave him a huge hug and tried to hide my tears, because I knew it was the last time I would see him in the apparent world. By that time he had drifted into deafness and away from Rush, so he was more like a benign elder version of the rip-roarer he'd been at 60.

Foggy was a very talented cartoonist, and if any of us had known how to get into that business, he might have made something of it. I've shared one of his best pieces here before, but my sister had one that she put up on Facebook that I'd forgotten about. I wrote the poem, and he did the drawing. The artwork is a nod to both me and my sister, since she likes Canadian geese and has a favorite yellow sweater. I can date it to 1981 or thereabouts, so it's pre-Rush, and very un-Rush, in its sentiments.

The poem reads:
We Johnsons are a merry clan
Who seem to lack a Master Plan.
Ambition's made of sterner stuff,
Although folks find us smart enough.
A day of rest's a day well spent.
Just getting by makes us content.

May the Gentry of Sidhe welcome his spirit. May he have found the Summerlands. May he play forever as a happy child, with my father and the faeries of Pan. Now my ancestors have all departed, and I am the elder. It's daunting.

But there's some rip-roar left in this gal, yep.

Floyd H. "Foggy" Johnson, 1926-2013.

Occasional Photo

My computer is more than ten years old. It has been overhauled a few times, but it overheats and runs slow. Built for obsolescence, it is a veritable dinosaur.

Therefore, over the summer, I'll be posting some photos here to preserve them for the mists of time. This is one that was taken in 2011 in Bedford County, PA. Many generations of my family are buried in the same churchyard. The stone says Johnson, but the two behind it, Lashley, are also ancestors.

Computers start from scratch and are molded by their owners. People start from ancestors and are molded by legacy. Blessed be those who went before.

Tape Recorder

I'm sure you've noticed that the modern-day yard sale is chock-a-block with VHS tapes for movies you'd just love to own if you had

A. the space to store them
B. a device that plays VHS tapes easily
C. the time to watch movies
D. all of the above

For instance, I just had a yard sale, and I have an entire set of Shirley Temple movies that I inherited from my mother and just can't bear to put at the curb. When I say a set, I mean every doggone thing Shirley ever appeared in, including a collection of "Baby Burlesque." That little girl worked her butt off!

But this is beside the point.

Another item I have in abundance is audio cassette tapes. Oh, not "The Best of Dean Martin" or "Elton John's Greatest Hits." I have video cassette tapes my sister made in the 1970s ... of my grandparents talking.

My maternal grandmother had a memory that would rival any elephant's. I have a tape full 90 minutes long of her reciting poems and stories she learned as a young girl, back in the days before radio, out in the country where vaudeville never penetrated. Some of the songs on the tape are ancient ballads that came over on the wooden ships.

One problem: I didn't have an audio tape player.

Or so I thought.

Yard sales are marvelous things in that you root through the house looking for stuff to sell. In that process of rooting, I found a beautiful, wonderful audio cassette player that I didn't even know we had. I also found the big stack of photographs that went missing!

Back to the cassette player. Gifted with this relic of a bygone century, I snapped in the tape and started listening to Grandma saying her poems and singing her songs.

Ah, the abundant "r" sounds of the Appalachian accent! And the casual double negatives, the abundant use of "ain't," the additional syllable at the beginning of a phrase that has disappeared from our tongue. ("And when we went a-huntin', my father led the way.")

My daughter The Heir asked me to turn off the tape. She never met her great-grandmother, but Heir said she could hear my voice in the elderly Appalachian lady.

I pressed Heir: Was it the accent? No. What, then? The spirit.

My grandmother loved to recite poetry, she threw her whole joie de vivre into it. So do I.

Bardic grandmother, I salute you. Thank you for the gift of poetry and ancient song. May I be worthy of the gifts you have given.

And may the tape recorder never break down, because I don't have a clue how to transfer this aural wealth of history into the new media.

Where Pilgrimage Takes Me

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored!" Everything's hunky dory here today ... so far. Alpha is curled up in her cat basket, Beta is out under the tree waiting for a baby bird to fall from a nest, Decibel the parrot is unusually quiet. Heir is at work. Spare is puttering about the kitchen. And I, Anne Johnson, am here to entertain you! Good times, good times.

Since America is such a melting pot, people tend to think of themselves as being "from" somewhere, even if their families have lived here for generations. Until recently, I've been as guilty of that as anyone else. I've always loved telling people I'm "Scotch Irish."

Then one day recently, I found myself by a pretty little stream with nothing in particular to do, and I began to consider where I'm really from and what I should call myself based on my ancestors' "points of origin."

I'm Appalachian.

So far back as I can trace, three lines of my dad's ancestors were living in Appalachia a dozen generations ago. Long enough to outlast an Old Testament curse! So far back as I can trace on my mom's side, a German named Peter Mittelkauf arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Morehouse from a place called the Palatine in 1740. He moved straight to Western Maryland, not stopping first in Chester County, PA as Mom's Scotch-Irish ancestors did.

Dad's kin probably win the prize for longevity of occupancy in Appalachia. And what rich names appear in the family tree! There are Mountains and Kennards (sure sounds French to me), Tewells, Imeses, Bennetts, Martins, and (of course) Johnsons. There are Lashleys, which back in the day would have been pronounced Locks-lee.

Conservatively, if I were to book intercontinental, I would have to visit France, Germany, Scotland, and England. And in none of these places did my ancestors have anything going for them -- otherwise they would have stayed put. Where they did stay put was Appalachia. Ten generations. Twelve generations. Fourteen generations (the hardy Bennetts).

I am the first of my family to leave home and live elsewhere. Even my sister still lives in Appalachia.

Therefore, when I think of connecting with Ancestor, my thoughts do not wander to Stonehenge, but rather to Hopewell Township, PA. I like kilts and bagpipes excessively, but given a choice I'll go with a basement bluegrass band first. In fact, bluegrass music bears out my point. It is a coherent melding of African, Scottish, Irish, and English rhythms, melodies, and instrumentation. It is uniquely American music.

You could argue, of course, that probably a thousand generations of my ancestors lived in Scotland. Maybe they fought with Robert Bruce at Bannockburn. Well, that would be a point of pride indeed. But still I would have to return to one fact: At some point, recognizing the immense danger and strong possibility of death, my ancestors climbed on little rickety wooden ships and braved the fierce Atlantic. Then, although life was no bowl of cherries in the fortress hills of Appalachia, they settled in and stayed. And loved it.

Where are my ancestors from? Appalachia. Where do I pilgrimage? Appalachia. Hail the hills and valleys, hail the creeks and cliffs. Hail the spot that will be my grave among my people.

Now, you say, "Anne. Wait a minute. You're chucking the whole of history and settling for a mere 14 generations?"

Okay, scrap that! Let's get serious about this ancestor piece!

Come, all of you reading this. We are all siblings. Let's do the deep ancestor crawl! Off we go to East Africa, to the Afar Valley, to Kenya and Tanzania. There to meet the bored gods that unite all humankind in the cradle of Homo sapiens.

Is that too far back? I don't know. I like thinking of all of us as one big family. It's true, they say. Still, I think I'll let someone else sort out that family tree. And once they do, they can find me on Polish Mountain, sticking little American flags around Joseph Bennett's marker. To me, that's pilgrimage.

How Wise Are Those Skeletons?

Welcome to "The Gods Are Bored," walking this world with an aching heart and a worried mind! Which makes me human, right?

Over at The Wild Hunt, guest blogger Caroline Kenner posted an interesting essay about the role ancestor worship should play in our search for the divine. I most certainly agree with Caroline when she writes that one Ritual on October 31 is not enough, and that we should always recognize Ancestor when performing Work.

Caroline brings up an interesting point that sparked much further debate. What do you do if you're the first person in (perhaps) 70 generations to worship as a Druid? Aren't you going to anger those 69 generations of Christians who engendered you?

Sometimes people who change praise and worship paths have trouble with living members of their families, let alone the spirit of Granny, who ran the Baptist Sunday School for 45 years.

My grandfather was an ardent Baptist himself. He helped to found a church in Cumberland, Maryland.

(As an aside I'll say that I found it insulting that the pastor of that same church didn't even know Granddad at all when Granddad died. It's like someone preached George Washington's funeral who had never heard of the U.S.A.)

I often invoke my beloved grandfather when doing Work. It would never occur to me that he would object to my way of worship. This is because I hope that in Spirit, all divisions are resolved.

If we believe in life after death, then can we believe that the Afterlife is as segregated as Sunday morning, with each religion having its own heaven, surrounded by trenches and barbed wire? Some faiths would have us believe this is so. I don't buy it.

What are the goals of Ancestors? That we respect them, seek to know them, and behave in ways that shower goodness upon them. If we know that we had evil ancestors (who doesn't?), we can elevate them by having higher moral standards. If we had good ancestors, we should strive to be like them.

I won't venture a guess as to what my grandfather would say about my change in spiritual path, if he still lived. But he's beyond the grave. Where beings are either wiser than here ... or far more miserable.

So let us feel that in the Afterlife, if not in life, all bored gods ... Goddess ... God ... Thunderbird ... intermingle happily with all Spirit. Ancestors walk with us because we are of Them. The deities we worship should matter far less than the content of our characters.

Bless you, Granddad. I love you still.