Sherry Chandler

From Ange Mlinko, “Conversion Comedy” in Poetry, March 2008:

Once you suggest the origins of music lay in the necessity of drowning out the cries of sacrificial victims, I start listening for them — the cries — under my own singing.

From Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (Norton, 1994, originally published 1949)

Church was our town—come together not to kneel in worship but to see each other. God was our Host, we were guests in His House, the altar flowers were fresh and fragrant, and if it was Communion Day the cloth was starched and white and the silver cup out of which every one drank was shining. And though we willingly listened to the sermon if it was not too long, and felt a deep flowing sense of togetherness when we sang the Doxology, we were there also to mend the little broken places in our knowledge of each other.

********

Must winds that cut like blades of steel

And sunsets swimming in Volnay,

The holiest, cruelest pains I feel,

Die stillborn, because old men squeal

For something new. “Write something new….”

*******

No, no! My chicken, I shall scrawl

Just what I fancy as I strike it

Fairies and Fusiliers, and all

Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl

Across my verse in the classic way

And sir, be careful what you say

There are old-fashioned folk still like it.

__Robert Graves, 1918

*********

Perhaps the greatest obstacle to staging a Shakespeare comedy is the awe in which we have come to hold his work. Max Reinhardt felt obliged to stage a huge spectacle for his stage productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and in the 1935 film even though he cast a batch of American Movie Stars in that. While many of the choices he made were inspired–Mickey Rooney as a manic Puck with an obstreperous cackle, Jimmy Cagney as Bottom–he miscast Dick Powell as Lysander. The massive production tended to overwhelm the comedy.

* * * * * * *

Comic book and graphic novel adaptations have fared no better–the Classics Illustrated version ignored the verse of the play–and Shakespeare employed far more rhymed couplets in MSD than in any other play. Charles Vess tried to adapt it to graphic novel form but felt overwhelmed–probably because he was so influenced by Arthur Rackham and other Victorian illustrators–and ended up doing an MSD metafiction with Neil Gaiman in his Sandman series.

*******

In his webcomic Pibgorn Brooke McEldowney adapted the play using characters from his mainstream comic 9 Chickweed Place to supplement his comic fantasy saga cast. He adapted many of his female characters to traditionally male roles; one major conceit is that the play is set in a 1930s “Athens City” theatre district which is a thinly veiled New York. Art Deco skyscrapers abound so that they nearly become supporting cast members. Allusions to the Ashcan School of American Art culminate in a direct copy of Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks. McEldowney manages to evoke nearly every trope of 20th C. Broadway comedies/musicals and Hollywood adaptations of same along with film noir and pre-code movies and cartoons.

*******

Much of this adaptation ponders the role of women in 20th C. America–the power they had gained before WWII, before the Depression, before the repression of the ethics code. This fits very well with the concerns of the play with the tension between male power and female resistance–is Pyramus a tyrant or a lover–or both? Hermia and Helena gain power in the Wood they never could have in Athens, and when Chickweed’s Gran is cast as Egea, with the power of life or death over her recalcitrant daughter, it points up just how much power 20th C. American women gained.

But the most dynamic bit of casting is the fairy Pibgorn as the pwca Robin Goodfellow. This allows for a love triangle between Puck, Titania (the succubus Drusilla with short black spitcurls–Betty Boop as Mae West?) and Oberon (Geoff, the mortal pianist as underworld boss–his acetylene-blue eyes burning under the shadow of his fedora). McEldowney also matures the changeling Indian prince into a haughty handsome youth, the perfect boytoy for Titania and fitting rival for Oberon, so there is a second interlocking love triangle in the fairy realm.

There are sly allusions throughout the adaptation to numerous 20th Century comedies, romantic, screwball, fantastic. Solange the Chickweed Siamese colorpoint accompanies Puck so often that Bell, Book and Candle’s Pyewacket rises in the magic circle. The girls who work in Titania’s nightclub The Wood form a Busby Berkely chorus line–clothed only in pink thistledown– to help the Prince sing their mistress asleep. The Prince himself, who could be a cross between the pop star Prince and Cab Calloway, with a dash of Valentino, finishes the number with a bit of slide dancing and a slow striptease. For me, this evoked all three of the Cab Calloway/Betty Boop cartoons. Then he enjoys a Code-flaunting love scene with Titania. They apparently do everything short of kicking that gong around.

* * * * * * *

But Puck has already seduced Oberon after she delivered Cupid’s herb–a passion-flower? — and they wind up in bed for a post-coital tete-a-tete as he outlines his plans to get the changeling away from Titania. Puck’s frustration and jealousy complete the movie-oriented genre which Shakespeare’s plays helped inspire. She is a working class girl to Oberon’s criminal overlord and is fated to win his love, according to the conventions of the best screwball comedies of the 20th Century. All of the dancers, Titania’s fairies, the rude mechanicals/chorus girls and Puck are solidly working class in contrast to the aristocracy–the theater and nightclub owners.
Bottom is also female–probably the only time the ingenue plays that role–and she is another fairy, Oognat,–the musical reference is typical of McEldowney, who is also a professional musician; she may also evoke a certain G. Herriman character. McEldowney even manages to make her transformed ears exude a certain je ne sais quois so that one can understand why Titania could be so taken with her charms. The scene where the succubus’ serpent tongue twines about the delicate tip of a gracefully tapering ear is inspired.

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Pibgorn archives are available through subscription to mycomicspage.com.

Charlie Whitt, our diligent Flatwoods South Shore reporter, has drawn my attention to this story, filed by Frank Lewis in The Portsmouth [Ohio] Daily Times:

The feud over the Indian Head Rock has been taken to the next level.

Greenup County (Ky.) prosecuting attorney Cliff Duvall has subpoenaed Portsmouth Mayor Jim Kalb to appear in Greenup County Court to testify before a Greenup County grand jury on March 28, at the Greenup County Court Annex.

“We have the Antiquities Act here in Kentucky, that involves things that are registered under that act through the University of Kentucky,” Duvall said. “It’s a Class D felony, and in Kentucky, that carries one to five years. That charge will probably be the most applicable. There isn’t any monetary value that anybody could put on it.”

Kalb said receiving the subpoena was not a surprise to him.

“I got a call from my office a couple of days ago, saying that a member of the Scioto County Sheriff’s Office was there to serve me with a subpoena. I kind of suspected that it would be over the rock,” Kalb said.

…

Does Duvall intend to call Steve Shaffer, the man who spearheaded the retrieval of the rock last year?

“If he chooses to. Let’s put it that way,” he said.

Shaffer, of Ironton, the main authority on the history of the rock, told a recent gathering of Scioto County school administrators there were five main theories as to the real history of how the now-famous carved face got on the rock.

“One is that in 1851, messages were placed on the rock, likely by early pioneers to mark the low-water mark. The second is that a quarry man carved it with a metal tool. Theory No. 3 is that a band of robbers used it as a marker when they buried their loot nearby. The fourth theory is that it was carved by Native Americans, and that theory began in an account in the 1891 edition of the Portsmouth newspaper. And the fifth theory is about a 100 -years-old. It says a boy named John Book, a prominent member of Scioto County society who was killed in the Civil War, carved it,” he said.

…

Kalb isn’t backing down on the issue, and is standing firm on his belief the rock belongs right where it is.

“The rock belongs in Portsmouth. It’s a logical place for it. This is not a case of Kentucky wanting to display it, it’s a case of them not wanting Portsmouth or Ohio to have it,” he said. “This is an important part of Portsmouth history, and if the rock is on display, it will be for both sides of the river to enjoy. If it’s Kentucky’s intent to put the rock back in the river, that should be a crime in itself.”

On an unrelated note but just because I saw it in the headlines, Scioto County where Portsmouth is located, went for Clinton in yesterday’s primary.

The Clinton campaign toured Ohio over the last month with former President Bill Clinton coming to Shawnee State University on Feb. 25, accompanied by Ohio first lady Frances Strickland.

Scioto County Democrat Party Chairman Randy Basham credited Strickland and the Clinton campaign sending Bill Clinton to Scioto County with pulling off the election for Clinton.

“It was good when Ted Strickland got Bill Clinton down here to speak on behalf of Hillary. Hillary did come to Lawrence County, and a lot of people from here went there to see her,” Barnett said.

Maybe they could get Bill to come down and arbitrate this rock dispute.

Late in 1780, a workman dug up some big molars on Robert Annan’s farm in New York. A few miles away at West Point, General George Washington was encamped with the Continental army and on one December day he and some fellow officers decided to take a sleigh ride over to get a look at this find.

As Stanley Hedeen reports it in Big Bone Lick (Univ Press of Kentucky, 2008), Annan describes the visit like this:

His Excellency General Washington came to my house to see these relicts. He told me, he had in his house a grinder which was found on the Ohio, much resembling these.

This rather terse account was enhanced by that of Washington’s aide-de-camp, Colonel David Humphreys:

he recounted that Washington had told the story of a man who had observed the extraction of molars from an incognitum skull at Big Bone Lick: “when they raised up the Head out of which they took the Teeth, …it reached up to the middle of his Face.”

I’m more than a little pained, reading these accounts, by the casual way these guys dug up these “relicts” and carted them away. Not only did they make their way back to the East Coast, so that Washington had a tooth and Jefferson had some samples, but they also found their way to England and to France. Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing and these guys had no concept of evolution. Some thought the bones those of a giant human, others that it was some huge carnivore made extinct by Noah’s flood.

That the molars looked like those of a carnivore — having according to Annan

protruberances, rising in a pyramidical form, the perpendicular height of the highest of which was about an inch and one tenth

—confused these early scholars and curio collectors. Because they also found huge tusks at Big Bone Lick, many people argued that this creature was some big elephant but the molars were not at all like those of an elephant. Okay, they said, the tusks are from elephants and the molars are from hippopotami. But, said others, both elephants and hippopotami are tropical animals.

Then once upon a time the climate must have been much warmer here.

Still others thought that once they explored further on this continent, they were bound to find these giants, be they humans or elephants.

It took Thomas Jefferson to ask the obvious question:

Wherever these grinders are found, there also we find the tusks and skeleton; but no skeleton of the hippopotamus nor grinders of the elephant. It will not be said that the hippopotamus and elephant came always to the same spot, the former to deposit his grinders, and the latter his tusks and skeleton. For what became of the parts not deposited there? we must agree then that these remains belong to each other, that they are of one and the same animal, that this was not a hippopotamus, because the hippopotamus had no tusks nor such a frame, and because the grinders differ in their size as well as the number and form of their points. That it was not an elephant, I think ascertained by proofs equally decisive.

Similar skeletons having recently been found in Siberia, Jefferson posited a “cold-adapted, elephant-like animal with a circumpolar distribution,” a Wooly Mammoth.

By 1783, George Rogers Clark writes to Jefferson that all the fossil pieces that were lying around at Big Bone Lick had been carried away.

So popular was this idea of the Mammoth that it became a patriotic rallying cry for the young nation:

In contrast to the European nations that perceived their cultural legacy in the classical ruins of Greece and Rome, American nationalism soon came to be expressed by the relics of the mammoth in the New World’s unspoiled landscape …an early icon of American patriotism.

At The New Republic, John Judis makes the case for Barack Obama as The American Adam:

Looming over all of American history–but particularly the country’s formative years–is the Biblical figure of Adam, the only person, according to the West’s major religions, to have lived unburdened by what came before him. As literary critic R.W.B. Lewis wrote in 1955, in his wonderful book The American Adam, early generations of Americans became captivated by the idea that they could create a future without reference to the past. The revolutionaries who fought for America’s independence saw themselves as breaking not only with the Old World but with history itself.

…

In his Studies in Classic American Literature, which appeared in 1923, D.H. Lawrence identified the celebration of the new and the rejection of the old as “the true myth of America.” According to this myth, Lawrence wrote, America “starts old, old, wrinkled and writhing in an old skin. And there is a gradual sloughing of the old skin, towards a new youth.” The myth of America as Adam runs through our country’s literature–from Walt Whitman’s self-description as a “chanter of Adamic songs / Through the new garden the West,” to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby to Ralph Ellison’s invisible man. And it reemerges periodically in American politics–usually during times of upheaval or discontent.

…

Obama’s youthful unlined face, his exotic name, and his unusual upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia by a white mother and grandparents, black father, and Indonesian stepfather contribute to the sense that he can give the United States a fresh start. He is like Herman Melville’s Adamic hero, Billy Budd, a foundling who was “happily endowed with the gayety of high health, youth and a free heart” and “looked even younger than he really was.

I would like to pause here to point out that, though Billy Budd may have been presented as a type of the American Adam, he did not come to a good end, nor was he presented to us as a viable role model because he was just too naive to live. Nor, though he was the center of a considerable mancrush, did he manage to act as a savior.

Not arguing that Barack Obama is either innocent or naive. Just talking about the full resonance of the analogy.

Oh well, cynical old Melville was the spoiler in the myth of American exceptionalism, and so, apparently, am I:

Of course, as New York Times columnist Gail Collins has remarked, some voters are repelled by a promise of fundamental change. “Women–especially older women–are often politically risk-averse,” she writes

Well, there’s the teeth drawn from my vagina dentata, pitiful thing that it is anyway, all dried up with age. Just a Grinch by definition (to mix my metaphors), just slavering to steal Christmas. After all, if Gail Collins says it is so, it must be so.

Here’s an interesting statement to make about a type of Adam:

Former Connecticut Senate candidate Ned Lamont said of Obama, “I’ve fallen for him.”

And so did we all fall for Adam if I remember my Genesis. Seems like there was something about getting thrown out of Paradise, maybe some angels with flaming swords.

It may be true that I’m just an old crone, or perhaps a Lilith, a spoiler in the charmed circle of Eden, but women don’t have too much reason to get het up over the Adam myth. And I do believe that the definition of insanity is to keep doing the same thing over and over again in the belief that you’ll get a different result.

Huckleberry Finn was a type of the American Adam but he had to light out for the territory. Jay Gatsby was another, mooning over the blue light at the end of Daisy’s dock. How the flaming swords have diminished but he still wasn’t able to regain his paradise.

Overall, I’d say the Adam thing hasn’t worked out too well for us. We have exceptionally and innocently committed genocide, slavery and miscegenation. We have innocently raped a continent from sea to shining sea. We are now innocently consuming most of the world’s resources with a whole world economy depending upon our maxing our our credit cards.

I’ve had it with innocence. I’m ready for some hard-eyed realism. Maybe with a few laugh wrinkles around those eyes.

Afterthought: I would like to reiterate that I am not necessarily anti-Obama. But I see another version of sexism in this article. And that does make me mad. Afterthought the second: And anyway, wasn’t it the Bushies who said they didn’t have to worry about boring stuff like history and reality? Afterthought the third: I forgot to mind my manners and say that I found this article by way of War and Piece.

Update: If giving is an indication, Kentucky will go strongly for Obama. Not that it will matter much in May. He’s gotten considerably more in campaign donations from Kentuckians than all the other candidates combined. Interestingly, Ron Paul has outstripped John McCain here in the Bluegrass State.

We who were born in the South called this mesh of feeling and memory “loyalty.” We thought of it sometimes as “love.” We identified with the South’s trouble as if we, individually, were responsible for all of it. We defended the sins and the sorrows of three hundred years as if each sin had been committed by us alone and each sorrow had cut across our heart. We were as hurt at criticism of our region as if our own name had been called aloud by the critic. We knew guilt without understanding it, and there is no tie that binds men closer to the past and each other than that.

— from Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream (Norton, 1994, first published 1949)

When Lillian Smith wrote these words in 1949, I was 4 years old so that, by definition, I grew up in a world very different than the one she’s describing. In my world, the struggle to end racism was more open, thanks in part to people like her. Socially and geographically, my experience was also very different.

Kentucky was a slave state that did not leave the Union. Instead it split internally so that the old saw about “brother against brother” was often literally true here. Take what may be the most famous example, George D. Prentice,¹ a poet who was editor of The Louisville Journal and an ardent abolitionist but whose son died fighting with the southern cavalry under General John Hunt Morgan.

Kentucky saw none of the great slaughtering battles on its soil. Instead the war was fought here as an insurgency by raiders like Morgan and by others not quite so legitimate. In an insurgency, it’s often hard to distinguish friend from enemy. Richard Taylor’s novel Sue Mundy addresses the way betrayal leads to betrayal in such an atmosphere. (Addendum: See By Neddie Jingo! on brother against brother.)

And last, but most significant for my experience, Kentucky was never economically dependent on huge populations of field slaves. Slaves themselves were a cash crop in Kentucky, extra “stock” sold South to feed King Cotton. Read your Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Or, for that matter, come to the Kentucky Derby and sing a verse of the now bowdlerized “My Old Kentucky Home,” once also called “Poor Uncle Tom, Good Night.” Here’s some of the verses you won’t sing:

The day goes by like a shadow o’er the heart,
With sorrow, where all was delight,
The time has come when the darkies have to part,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;

A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, ’twill never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.

Weep no more my lady
Oh! weep no more today!
We will sing one song for the old Kentucky home,
For the Old Kentucky Home far away.

Not exactly a glorious Southern heritage, a slave pining for the paradise that was slavery in Kentucky, but one that leaves the state with a very small population of African-Americans, especially in rural areas. So that, in the part of Owen County where I grew up, there was not even an Aunt Sally tucked into a little cabin out of the way somewhere. You had to go to the county seat, Owenton, to see a black face.

My father, who was a building contractor, had one black hand in his crew for a while. He didn’t come in the house and eat with us but then neither did any of the white crewmen. “Dillpickle” Whitney was known as a smart-aleck but nobody in my life felt inclined to do more than laugh at his audacity. Scorn enough in that laughter, perhaps, but I didn’t realize it then. (No particular scorn in the nickname, however. Many men had nicknames where I grew up. My own grandfather was called “Hick.”)

When our consolidated county high school was integrated without incident in 1959, Dillpickle’s son Billy was one of three six African-Americans in our freshman class. We, the last of the war babies, graduated a whopping 73 kids in 1963. Billy Whitney became our star basketball player without much comment that I ever heard. Georgia Green Stamper tells the story here. Our basketball team was called The Rebels, by the way, and still is. Our mascot was a Confederate soldier.

So I grew up with lots of tales of Southern sympathy but innocent of the kind of racism Smith describes in her memoir. I did not experience the kind of epiphany described by John Crowe Ransom’s granddaughter, Robb Forman Dew, on Maud Newton’s blog:

Among other things, I wanted to understand the surprising bit of meanness I had seen my grandmother display one summer afternoon when she and I were sitting on the front porch waiting for the horse and wagon that belonged to the black “vegetable man” who made his rounds of Natchez neighborhoods almost every day.

He was late that afternoon, and she had gone inside, but I waited still, because it was thrilling and exotic to me to have our vegetable selection brought to our door by a man driving a horse and cart. When he came into view, there I sat, and I waved and called to him to stop. I ran inside to alert my grandmother, but she had heard the jangle of his wagon and I turned and followed her until all at once she came to a dead stop when she spotted the vegetable man standing on the porch outside the screen of the front door.

It’s an incident that has haunted me all my life, even though I don’t remember exactly what she said, only that she berated him for being there, at her front door. Her voice and the words she said were stunningly harsh. So cruel, in fact, that I was frightened and also imagined that the man, in turn, would fly into a fury on his own behalf. But he backed down the stairs, literally with hat in hand, mumbling apologies, and he brought a selection of string beans and mustard greens and Kale around to the kitchen door where she met him again, still so angry that she said no more to him than to get out of her yard. He left the vegetables in a heap at the back door as a gift, and I don’t know if she ever bought anything else from him.

I experienced what you might call a more normal form of American racism, and so I had a gentler slower more intellectual awakening. I never had to see anyone I loved turn mean in quite this way. But I was warned that any venture forth to the really good schools of the North would see me ostracized for my accent and I did experience incidents like this in the years when I lived in Chicago:

Certainly I felt unappreciated and suffered my share of personal angst growing up within my immediate family. I had no idea, however, that I was universally misunderstood until I moved from Louisiana to Columbia, Missouri, where people actually asked me if in the South we had worn shoes when we went to school. At a dinner party my host turned to me suddenly and asked if it was true that the normal Southern diet was made up mostly of pork fat and greens. I was just married and only twenty-one years old, and so dumbfounded that I didn’t even realize the man meant to be rude.

Such experiences pushed me to identify Southern, to feel a bit of the fraught “loyalty” that Smith describes. To quote from Dew one more time:

To have loved people who were compromised by the nature of their society as well as whatever other demons besieged them is one of the remarkable conditions of being Southern.

Although anybody living in Louisiana or Alabama would no more consider Kentucky Southern than they would John Crowe Ransom’s Tennessee, I am nevertheless more at home in the world of Faulkner and O’Connor and Warren than in that of Hemingway or Updike.

So I have been making a big deal lately about identifying with The Other.² I will even admit to identifying a bit with Randy Newman’s Rednecks, though the vocabulary makes me feel antsy:

Now your northern nigger’s a Negro
You see he’s got his dignity
Down here we’re too ignorant to realize
That the North has set the nigger free

Yes he’s free to be put in a cage
In Harlem in New York City
And he’s free to be put in a cage on the South-Side of Chicago…

You can never take a Newman lyric at face value; he deals in compromised narrators. He gives voice to the voiceless, but it’s a voiceless we’d just as soon not have to hear. We often feel a little soiled just listening. Still, as By Neddy Jingo discovered several years ago, reading The Redneck Manifesto, rednecks see themselves as the last group in America it’s still politically correct to despise. “Class,” says Neddie. The culture wars are all about class. We’ve said it here, too.

Where does that leave me in dealing with my Confederate forebears? Or the members of my family who identify redneck. Stuck in ambivalence I guess.

Pity the human who feels no ambivalence. His name is Bush.

___

¹Prentice was a Northerner who married a Southern woman. He’s a bit like Lincoln in that. I am wondering this morning if a case can’t be made that Lincoln’s marriage is somewhat emblematic of the whole culture war in the United States, a troubled but valuable union. Who knows how much calculation may have gone into Lincoln’s allying himself with the South this way. He did not want to go to war. But, for whatever reason, he was more or less married to the South. Mary Todd, whose family became her husband’s enemy, must have suffered terribly during the Civil War. Yet, it seems to me that history seems downright eager to heap comtumely upon her, to fault her for adding to Lincoln’s burden rather than standing stalwartly at his side.

²In How Publishing Likes Its Southerners, Maud Newton has another take on David Payne’s Oxford American article that started me off on this kick, including tales of Richard Ford (a man whose work I’ve not read) that set my teeth on edge. On this same subject, it’s worthwhile reading Robb Forman Dew’s post in its entirety for her explanation of why she doesn’t write about the south.

The battle escalates!

And it makes the NYTimes:

PORTSMOUTH, Ohio

An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just — was.

Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute …

Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

With slideshow. Though it seems biased toward the Ohio side, it’s got some great pictures of the rock.

And Charlie, they didn’t even give you and me credit for our great coverage of this item.

I’ve spent most of my life in territory marked out by the Licking River on the east and the Kentucky River on the south and west (it curves), both of which flow north and debouch into the Ohio on the north. The Ohio is a huge river, receiving drainage of a large part of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky before it reaches Cincinnati, where it swells to nearly a mile wide. It was a major thoroughfare for western migration and how to get across it still figures into any planning for a drive north.

It was with considerable interest, then, that I learned recently that both the Licking and the Kentucky Rivers are a million years or so older than the Ohio. As is Eagle Creek, a considerable stream that meanders through Grant and Owen Counties where I grew up and where my family now lives. Eagle Creek forms the northern border of Owen County as the Kentucky River forms its western border, and I spent a good part of my childhood in, on, and around these streams.

Eagle Creek and its bottoms are so important in the settlement and economy of contiguous counties that my friend Georgia Green Stamper says that when her pioneering family found land on the banks of the Eagle, they saw no need to go further or ever move again. (You will find this story and others about the Hudsons of Eagle Creek in Georgia’s book of essays, tentatively titled You Can Go Anywhere and due out soon from Wind Publications.) My own family didn’t live on the creek itself but on Elk Creek, a feeder stream for which the Elk Creek Winery is named. Occasional plans to dam Eagle Creek to provide water for the urban areas of Scott and Fayette Counties have always met huge protests from local farmers.

You can see the current Lower Eagle Creek Watershed below. I found the map and pictures of Eagle Creek here. The gray area at the top of the map is the Ohio River. The Creek curls back around into Owen County actually it arises in Owen County south and east of Owenton, travels east into Grant and then curls back around west and into the watershed area you see here. That is the part I lived nearer the headwaters.

According to Stanley Hedeen in Big Bone Lick. The Cradle of American Paleontology (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), plate tectonics threw the Cincinnati Arch (or the Lexington Peneplain) up out of the Ordovician Sea. At that time, say 4 million years ago, the area was a “rolling flattish surface,” somewhat like the Bluegrass Region that is a part of the Arch that wasn’t scrubbed by glaciers. The Old Kentucky and Old Licking Rivers, which even then flowed north, were formed by it’s drainage. About two million years ago, as the map below shows, these two rivers joined somewhere around Hamilton, Ohio, and continued northward perhaps into the Erie Basin or perhaps into another preglacial river, the Teays. Meanwhile Old Eagle Creek may have flowed into the Kentucky at the current site of Big Bone Lick (in Boone County).

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from James T. Teller, “Preglacial [Teays] and Early Glacial Drainage in the Cincinnati Area, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana,” Geological Society of American Bulletin 84 [1973]:3679, and Frank R. Ettensohn, “The Pre-Illinoian Lake Clays of the Cincinnati Region,” Ohio Journal of Science 74 [1974]:215.

You can see the extent of the Cincinnati Arch in Kentucky in this map from the Kentucky Geological Survey. That horseshoe (ahem) around the Ordovician defines the Bluegrass Plateau.

And this is the way things stood until the first of the Pleistoscene Ice Age glaciers, the Pre-Illinoian, started pushing south. That devil really tore up jack. It was like a big dam coming down from the north. It filled up the Old Kentucky River and all the other north-flowing streams draining between Cincinnati and the Appalachians and turned them into lakes. And as the lakes overflowed into one another, voilá, the Ohio River. You can see from the map below that the peculiar curve of the Ohio in northern Kentucky is pretty much the same as the curve of the glacier. The glacier also pushed up some pretty big hills out of what once was the plain around Cincinnati.

The Pre-Illinoian covered Big Bone Lick and pushed Eagle Creek southward into approximately its current bed. The Ohio cut its present channel as the glacier retreated.

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from Louis L. Ray, “Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology of the Glaciated Ohio River Valley—A Reconnaissance Study,” U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 826 [1974], plate 1

Through it all, though, Big Bone Lick stayed put. Somewhere in all the glaciation, it formed its own drainage stream, Big Bone Creek, and it was always a site that attracted mammals to its salt spring. Hence its name. It has also attracted Native Americans and colonists who distilled its salt, tourists who sought the healing powers of its waters, amateur paleontologists, including Thomas Jefferson, who carried off its fossils, and most lately, creationists who wanted to build their museum beside it to make some kind of point. Fortunately, that last scheme was thwarted.

No particular reason for telling all this except that it fascinated me and maybe illustrates the magnitude of change we may see as the globe warms. If you want more information, visit Kentucky Geological Survey’s Fossils of Kentucky and other links on the page.

Update: Harry says he’s already getting hay fever over there in England and links to this article in the Telegraph:

Traditional British winters no longer exist and spring should be brought forward because the seasons have changed so much in recent years, according to the curator of Kew Gardens.

While long, hard winter freezes which were once commonplace are now gone, trees traditionally seen as harbingers of spring are awakening months early.

Dr Nigel Taylor, curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, said the changes were significant this year because they had affected hardy, woody plants, not just bulbs.

English Hawthorn, also known as May for flowering in that month, was already in leaf in late January, two months early. It may now flower before the end of this month.

Both Blackthorn and Common Ash are already in flower. Daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops are also early this year according to the gardens’ latest data.

So. I got all that rant about Obama off my chest yesterday and woke up this morning feeling considerably more charitable toward the man. Obama is fine and I’m proud that he’s a Democrat.

But I am annoyed by the odor of sanctity that has grown up around him as though he were some sort of secular saint.

Well, maybe not so secular. A Hindu physician and naturalized American of my acquaintance was offended by Obama’s declaration of Christianity. He saw it not so much as Obama’s defending himself against the Astroturf accusation that he’s Muslim as a cave-in to the religious litmus test for any political candidate in the United States. Not every citizen in the country thinks just being Muslim, or even atheist, is treason. And the Founding Fathers were against any kind of religious test for politicians.

And I am becoming very annoyed with this whole Kennedy mystique, what one might call the Sword in the Stone test.

It’s incredible to me that nearly 50 years on, we’re all still looking to John F. Kennedy as our model of a hero-king.

I was sixteen years old when Kennedy was elected, and though I had kept my head about Elvis and Ricky Nelson and James Dean, I was madly in love with JFK. My father, who had lived through World War II and had more idea of the Kennedy-family history, was not so enamored but I only saw that as one more reason to hold him in contempt. I was a teen-ager after all.

Now I’ve become my father.

Even John F. Kennedy was not John F. Kennedy.

This same Hindu physician is wont to rant at me that the United States is sorely lacking in leadership. Well, I can’t argue with that. And I realize that that is what we’re all looking for in Obama, a hero who can inspire us the way we like to think we remember JFK did.

But while I think politicians are do very necessary work and are held to an unrealistic standard, I am becoming more and more convinced that leaders do not often come from among the politicians. Or the soldiers for that matter. Leaders come from the people. And they do not necessarily look like heroes. Men like Martin Luther King, Jr. Al Gore (post politics). Women like Susan B. Anthony. Rosa Parks.

It takes, as Hillary Clinton so infamously said, a politician like Lyndon Johnson to implement a dream like Martin Luther King Jr’s. But it’s wrong to expect politicians to be the heroes.

Look where that got us with George W. Bush.

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Third thoughts department: Here’s an interesting look at Obama’s Kenyan roots. I’m not real sure what to make of this but apparently Kenya is more than just an exotic backdrop to Obama.

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Fourth thoughts: Sometimes I think most of the pundits and media types would rather have any man, be he black, white, or purple, than a mature woman for president.

Thanks to Rebecca Clayton at Pocahontas County Fare for finding out that another creationist museum seems to have financial troubles:

DALLAS, Texas (AP) — A Texas museum that teaches creationism is counting on the auction of a prehistoric mastodon skull to stave off extinction.

The founder and curator of the Mt. Blanco Fossil Museum, which rejects evolution and claims that man and dinosaurs coexisted, said it will close unless the Volkswagen-sized skull finds a generous bidder.

“If it sells, well, then we can come another day,” Joe Taylor said. “This is very important to our continuing.”

Heritage Auction Galleries says the skull is estimated to be 40,000 years old, and projects it will fetch upward of $160,000. The artifact discovered in La Grange in 2004 is believed to be the largest of its kind, Heritage spokesman David Herskowitz said….

Claims on the museum’s Web site include that Noah took dinosaurs aboard his ark….”We’ve struggled so long here just to keep this thing going,” Taylor said. “We’re kind of losing interest. You can just tread water for so long.”

As Rebecca said, it’s a case of natural selection. No ark in sight to rescue these drowners.

Though I hate to think of a mastadon head going on the auction block to keep this place open.