August 6, 2018 Travel notes

Strategically disguised, you might say Appearing to Disappear, like the stick bug in my poem, I rumble anonymously down the two lane roads of Ohio in a faded black Chevy Tahoe. The front fenders and hood are red because the previous owner rear-ended somebody and have been replaced. This vehicle was generously loaned to me by my brother-in-law and is in fairly good shape, although the steering feels a bit loose and the brakes a little soft. Generally speaking, however, I am cruising along in appropriate style. Low fields of soybeans alternating with cornfields, both heavily subsidized by the government, glide past, as well as gracious lawns on both sides of the road, often centered by a church. The churches are named as you might expect, for the most part, The Church of Christ, Church of the Nazarene and so forth, interspersed with spare, rectangular, no-nonsense structures such as Freedom Church. These arouse an ominous connotation in me. I wonder where compassion ranks in their catechism.  Normally I am inured to billboards and roadside directional signs, and only notice these frequent churches with idle curiosity. Then a sign with a big arrow: SOUTHERN OHIO COONHUNTERS catches my eye. Whoa! I start reading the church marquees more attentively, some of them blinking digital red lights: JESUS NEVER PROMISED YOU A ROSE GARDEN BUT HE WALKED THROUGH THE THORNS FOR YOU or, MEN’S CORNHOLE . . .  What?! I didn’t catch the last word. MEN’S CORNHOLE CHORALE?Later I learned that Cornhole is a game where you throw a sack of corn kernels through a hole. I recall Faulkner’s character Popeye used a corncob for other, more nefarious, purposes. The atmosphere causes a strange sensation in me, at once nostalgically familiar and ominous. The unspoken command could be: BELONG, OR ELSE. But I release the paranoid streak in me like a moth flying from the porch light into the night. It is humid. The sultriness crushes one’s anxiety right out of you.  

I think back to yesterday, as I sat in a plastic rocker on the patio, watching the dog Lucy, a lab mix of some sort, sniffing at something the size of a small plum hopping and buzzing in the grass. Closer investigation revealed a Catydid—four times the size of a bumble bee, fat and black with slivers of lovely green in its body, and pitifully thin wings. They were everywhere, in the throws of their death agony, having crawled from years of incubating in the ground to fly, mate, reproduce and die. Human evolution has reversed the cycle. It would be nice, though, to go out pogo-ing around with a hardon like a jackhammer. 

As I’ve been reading through the books I picked up at Rev John Rankin’s house the other day, I realize history here offers many inspirational heroes. One must realize that the events of the Underground Railroad, which went on for twenty years before the Civil War, are ongoing today in somewhat different forms. For example, I picked up an oral autobiography of a free black man named John Parker. His account reached book form through the efforts of two men, unknown to each other at first, but who became good friends. One of them was trying to unearth primary source material from the era 1845-1865 and came across an obscure, hand-written and almost illegible account of Parker’s life, taken down by a professor named Sprague, from Morehouse. This intrepid archivist fairly trembled with excitement as he read the account. He ultimately teamed up with a civil-rights lawyer in Cincinnati and together not only brought the gripping story into publication but also managed to have Parker’s house, on the banks of the Ohio and just down from Rankin’s house, declared a historical monument and worked to have it restored. I intend to go back there today, having read this book. Parker was the product of a slave woman and a white member of Virginia aristocracy. He was sold into slavery and torn from his mother at age eight, shackled with an old man and forced to walk to Kentucky. It aroused a murderous hatred of slavery in the boy, and his account is a compelling tale of his many battles for freedom, becoming an expert blacksmith and foundry worker, patenting inventions along the way, gaining his freedom, and spending years working his foundry by day in the busy ship-building village of Ripley and making night-time expeditions across the Ohio river to rescue slaves making their way through the Underground Railroad eventually to  Canada and freedom. Many good people, white and black, populate this book and John Parker emerges as an inspiring human being among many who fought on the side of life.

Overall, I’m more filled with this inheritance of right-minded people than I am with the fearful ignorance one can see in Trump’s tweets. Just to compare, for example, the elegance of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, or Obama’s judicious, statesman-level analyses of current events, with Trump’s scurrilous and vulgar tweets confronts us with our need to speak out and act as clearly as we can—with each other and through any way possible. Touch the earth tenderly. We are part of the wave of life. We live to sing with eyes wide open, even if it’s to celebrate a Catydid buzzing around in a death grip like a nugget of coal streaked with emeralds. Everything’s depending on us. To be truly human. Singing and dancing is our sacred obligation to all forms of life. It is our primal and sacred function. Don’t just take my word for it. Check out the thousands of years old Chinese poem, The Source of Bitterness, in Technicians of the Sacred, in which all animals, from stags to tigers, come to man as they approach death, because man has the custom of the dance. Performers don animal skins and antlers and dance for the dying animals to celebrate their lives and fulfill the human obligation to them. —gene