ConserveLand Blog

Sitting at the really terrific Susquehanna Greenway Symposium yesterday I was oddly reminded of Sam Gamgee’s famous conversation with Frodo Baggins about “the stories that really mattered,” probably best known now from the Peter Jackson movie “The Two Towers,” but quoted here from the original Tolkien:

“I don’t like anything here at all,” said Frodo, “step or stone, breath or bone. Earth, air and water all seem accursed. But so our path is laid.”

“Yes, that’s so,” said Sam. “And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs, Mr. Frodo: adventures, as I used to call them. I used to think that they were things the wonderful folk of the stories went out and looked for, because they wanted them, because they were exciting and life was a bit dull, a kind of a sport, as you might say. But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end. You know, coming home, and finding things all right, though not quite the same – like old Mr. Bilbo. But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?”

“I wonder,” said Frodo. “But I don’t know. And that’s the way of a real tale. Take any one that you’re fond of. You may know, or guess, what kind of a tale it is, happy-ending or sad-ending, but the people in it don’t know. And you don’t want them to.”

“No sir, of course not. Beren now, he never thought he was going to get that Silmaril from the Iron Crown in Thangorodrim, and yet he did, and that was a worse place and a blacker danger than ours. But that’s a long tale, of course, and goes on past the happiness and into grief and beyond it – and the Silmaril went on and came to Earendil. And why, sir, I never thought of that before! We’ve got – you’ve got some of the light of it in that star-glass that the Lady gave you! Why, to think of it, we’re in the same tale still! It’s going on. Don’t the great tales ever end?”

“No, they never end as tales,” said Frodo. “But the people in them come, and go when their part’s ended. Our part will end later – or sooner.”

Past the happiness and into grief and beyond it: The great tales that really mattered and the changing roles within them that go across generations and cosmic contexts are like landscapes in that way. Those landscapes interweave love, story and memory, reminding me of the late Fr. Alexander Schmemann’s famous quote that “To love is to remember.”

And among the landscapes that really matter, I think of Jim Charles’ front porch overlooking the Susquehanna River from the Isle of Que. I was daydreaming during the Symposium of time spent with Jim, a master storyteller of Selinsgrove (that is his official title there), from where Penns Creek comes together with the Susquehanna near the island that his family has called home for generations. Meeting with Jim and his wife there last summer with my colleague Katie Faull, we were treated to all manner of stories and memories of the Isle, its floods and loves and losses, from Jim, a Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, who can remember other sites around the island where his family lived in decades past and look across at the ridge on the other side of the river and remember all the paddlings to and fro it with his sons and their clambering up and down the ridge. He is the inspiration for an idea that I keep advancing of developing a network of master storytellers, like riverkeepers, up and down the Susquehanna.

As a master storyteller of Selinsgrove (and recently retired longtime and community-centered local banker there), Jim also knows all manner of stories about the earlier history of the islands, traditions of how Conrad Weiser received it as a gift from Chief Shikellamy after claiming to have had a dream about it. There is something magical about the island, cut off from Selinsgrove by a usually narrow waterway yet in many ways a life apart, although crime and challenges from the “big city” next door have not left it untouched. Some speculate that the island’s name may derive from an otherworldly association of it by Indians with the realm of the ancestors; certainly nearby Packer Island and the mobile river community of Old Shamokin inherited by Chief Shikellamy and a mixed community of Indians, white trapper-trader-adventurers, and Moravian Christians, had been considered a sacred place, and Jim’s home island was really a part of that water-centered archipelago of place at the Confluence, connected too with the Penns Creek and Shamokin Creek watersheds nearby as well as to the Main Stem and West and North Branches of the river itself–a kind of native Venice or Atlantis from the boundary dawn of America.

There are efforts underway to reveal that archipelago in part again, in a twenty-first-century light, detailed at the symposium in projects such as the planned work on the rowing club center at the base of Blue Hill, and also the revamping of the old marina on Packer Island into a regional environmental center.

The public boat access point on Jim’s island also is one of the calls to adventure on the Susquehanna that the Symposium discussed increasing in number as part of President Obama’s Chesapeake Bay “Treasured Landscape Initiative” planning efforts. The Symposium, held all day yesterday at Bucknell, featured also a great keynote address by Dan Shilling on “Civic Tourism: The Poetry and Politics of Place” as well as important presentations by my colleague Katie Faull and great discussions on storytelling and place led by Lisa Rathje and Amy Skillman of the Institute for Cultural Partnerships. David O’Neill was there from the newly named Chesapeake Conservancy (heir to the merger of the Friends of the Capt. John Smith Trail and the Friends of the Chesapeake Gateways), an important partner with us at Bucknell’s Nature and Human Communities Initiative in ongoing work on cultural landscapes along the river. And there were well-deserved tributes to Gary Bloss, who recently left the Greenway Partnership’s directorship due to budget cuts, and all his hard visionary work.

Jim had to leave early due to a cold, but in addition to all the officials and nonprofit leaders and us academics present, his involvement (and that of others present like David Buck from the Upper Susquehanna, a valued reader of this unworthy blog) illustrated the miraculous nature of the unfolding Greenway as a network of landscapes that really matter and the stories engaged with them.

What a difference a landscape makes. I remember my now-departed mom often telling me about her memories of the school garden where she played as a child in primary grades in inner-city Chicago, at the Franklin Pierce School in the old Scandinavian neighborhood of Andersonville, near my grandfather’s farm where she grew up, next to Rosehill Cemetery with its Civil War graves, oak savanna, and significant Indian artifacts (an old ridge in the Chicago marshes).

To my mom, that school garden was in many ways a formative place, it reminds me of the memories of childhood gardens and imaginary lands in the memoirs of the Oxford fantasists Tolkien and C.S. Lewis in its apparent effect on her.

It was only years later, while working as a newspaper reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times and trying to write as much as possible on regional landscape preservation amid various assignments to cover crimes and airplane crashes aimed my way by often newly arrived city editors, that I discovered that that school garden, which since my mom’s time had been paved over and made into an asphalt “playground,” had been designed by the legendary Jens Jensen.

Jensen designed many significant parks of Chicago, and later in exile from the politics of Chicago’s parks worked in Door County, Wisconsin, a wonderful peninsula on Lake Michigan even now when overrun with summer tourists, and the place that my wife and I went on our honeymoon.

To Jensen, a Danish immigrant, the prairie of the Midwest was like the sea around his native Denmark, open and in its terrestrial embrace fostering a Midwestern friendliness and communitarian ethic in the culture of the land. Working in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, he was a pioneering ecological restorationist, associating with ecological pioneer Henry Coles and with Frank Lloyd Wright and Jane Addams among others in efforts to create a ring of forest preserves around Chicago (now the sites themselves of major restoration efforts) while also developing a unique “prairie landscape” style for gardens often featuring native plants and “council rings” evoking memories of native culture.

In fact, I was to discover as a grownup that not only had my mom’s school garden reflected Jensen’s handiwork, but the small backyard of our city house was derivative of his style as well, with its tiger lilies and mock orange blossoms and nonlinear plantings. I can still remember small details of the plants and flowers and miniature ridges and valleys of that small backyard, and gardening in it with my grandfather, such a small place but so large in memory, enveloping any recollections of the interior goings-on of our house into its four seasons.

Sitting in the Greenway Symposium, listening to Jerry Walls call on us to come out for the Susquehanna West Branch Sojourn this June with our children and grandchildren, so that they can share those kinds of connective experiences with landscapes that really matter because of the way such landscapes entwine love and memory, I realized that in our region here, amid ridges and valleys, it is the river that connects us in stories of meaning.

Landscapes and their entwining of stories in place can be small or large, and not always what we might call natural, as Lisa Rathje and Amy Skillman reminded us in an exercise at the Symposium about deep mapping–drawing a remembered map of community and then telling a story from it.

My mom always had a very positive and open engagement with life that grew from her treasured landscapes, reflecting in part her family’s engagement–through tough times in the Depression with herself as a polio survivor, and later untimely deaths of family members–with the ethos if not the practice of a small-town Midwestern Christian Science background, a spiritual background shared with some of Jensen’s family, and I think reflective of ways in which, at least in that era in the Midwest, engagement with a broad-horizoned prairie landscape (recently seized from Indians and hugely changed swiftly in living memory), wrought a certain type of spiritual reflection, as seen also in Chicago’s famous lakefront planner Danuel Burnham’s embrace of the Swedenborgian mysticism of the Ohio Valley’s historic Johnny Appleseed. There was a certain utopianism oddly running through the Great Lakes industrial belt in those days, perhaps a later reflection of that seen in the early nineteenth century throughout the Susquehanna Valley in various forms.

In part, such spiritual experience was I think an effort to find and articulate the experience people had with the landscapes they had stepped into and transformed greatly. Although for example I ended up leaving entirely Christian Science for Greek Orthodoxy in graduate school after wandering into the ethereal yet sensual interior of a Russian church in Chicago  (where I also met my wife), the notion of a “sparkle in creation” or divine energies in nature found in Orthodox tradition is echoed in some ways in homegrown American paths of spirituality, however unrealized their utopian hopes became (often tragically so). In Algonquin Indian tradition, its sense of the manitous parallels this too in a way, as do the inue in native Inuit belief (the latter in fact forging a bridge to the mainly peaceful cultural engagement of Indian and Russian Orthodox beliefs in Alaska historically, paralleling that of the Moravians and Indians in our area). Of course this sense of a sparkle in the world is seen reflected in Taoism and other global traditions as well as in Pennsylvania pietistic traditions and Quakerism; it grows in loving and remembering beyond a simplistic pantheism or theism or scientism in many traditional practices that the Anglican Lewis in his World War II-era manifesto “The Abolition of Man” labeled “the Tao,”  arguing for a kind of natural ethos running around the world in different forms.

Indeed, as much as I treasure memories of landscapes from my grandparents and my parents, and of even our own backyard and  of rundown inner-city parks, and the duney beach where we used to go in the summer in Michigan, one place and landscape that matters among the most is one both spiritual and physical, the Chicago hospital room where my mom died. There, shortly before the end, praying with me, she turned to me and said, “Forgive me for not being a better mom.”

I could only say the same back to her as a son with tears: With all the grief that I had caused her in many ways, and her own saintliness to me throughout our time together, how could she turn to me so meaningfully and ask forgiveness?

The landscapes that really matter can be as small as two people at a hospital bed.

They can be as large as the Susquehanna Greenway, or as momentous as the archipelago that is the earth.

Yet what links them all together beneath the stars is story. Its vital ingredient, however tragic, remains  the entwinement of love and memory.

“Going past the happiness and into grief and beyond it,” we glimpse as if in a sparkle the people who come and go in our roles in an ongoing story larger than any of ourselves. We feel in moments of that sparkle our ultimate responsibility for one another with the compassion and forgiveness that only landscapes that really matter can bring.