Reconstruction 7.2 (2007)
Return to Contents»
Here / Casey Clabough
I shall have to . . . trace my story from its small beginnings up to these recent times when its ramifications are so vast that any adequate treatment is hardly possible.
Livy, The Early History of Rome
When the virus of restlessness begins to take possession of a wayward man, and the road away from Here seems broad and straight and sweet, the victim must first find in himself a good and sufficient reason for going.
John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley
<1> I am standing, only just arrived but already sweating, beneath a late-morning end of July sun, in a newish-looking housing development at the circular dead end of Grossnickle Court, off Biggs Ford Road in Frederick County, Maryland, gazing westward, toward the river valley of the Monocacy and, beyond it, long Catoctin Mountain, hazy in summer. Like you, I might be anywhere but I happen to be here, now, in this eastern part of southern North America, standing where pavement turns to grass and then, beyond, a field of hay, thick, but carrying in its near spent green the inevitable hints of late summer’s harvest brown. "Here" is usually something we take for granted but its simplicity of connotation ever blurs in our minds its inherent insinuations of both position and time. The traveler asks himself, "How do I get there from here?" or, measuring the position of the sun against his fatigue, suggests to his companions, "Let us stop here for the night and resume our journey at dawn." It may also refer to a minute topic or specific subject, as in "Here, I must disagree with you"; yet, more dynamically, it may too demand action: "Come here!" Beyond, in all these things, the word embodies an affirmation of life, of being, now. To the one who, uncertain of our presence, calls our name, we reply, "Here."
<2> "Here" is the bashful and more shadowy companion of "place." As with here, the idea of place, any place, remains one of our most basic yet slippery of concepts: it is a space with boundaries but its limits may be definite or indefinite; it might be construed as an abstract mental or spiritual location, "There is a place for you in my heart," or a literal blank domain, "This is the place where you write your name"; it may also refer to a small particular occupied spot, your finger touches the place where your head hurts, or a point someone has achieved or come to only to then lose it, as in this essay, "I’ve lost my place." Place is irrevocably wedded to context, for the space your body occupies is a place, but so is the earth and what scientists call the solar system. And, at once more abstract and more central, it is also a proximity of yearning, of desire; as the writer Wendell Berry says, "The mind still hungers for its earth, its bounded and open space."
<3> Most humans of the twenty-first century seem to be attempting to get somewhere: a better place to live, a specific place in their lives, or perhaps just a place to call their own - a place to come to. Americans, at this particular place in time, exist in a civilization that goes to great lengths to try and tell them where they are, where they should be trying to get, and when - the answer to which always seems to take the form of an emphatic "Now!" Most humans of the twenty-first century live amid numerous manufactured signs and markers - bright, loud, subtle, and subliminal - to tell them where they are, or where they are supposed to think they are: road names, county lines, city limits, property boundaries, and the like. These are the markers of our own time, seeking to position us in relation to other acknowledged and collectively believed in places of the present. Yet, their very attachment to this particular era ensures their general irrelevance in determining or directing us to the places of times long since bygone, the signs of which have passed, faded, or never were. Dwelling upon and surveying the here of long ago invites other, at once more fundamental and abstract, determinants of place and direction to coalesce and lend themselves, drawn back reluctantly across time, like ghosts revisiting the places they once haunted.
<4> Walking some distance into the field of tall alfalfa and orchard grass there comes into view before me, toward the river called Monocacy, a rough line of woods. That the field, having stretched away from grass, asphalt, and houses, should, in its turn, dissolve into trees is essential - as basic and obvious as it must seem - to understanding this place in the present, as well as the more recent past. Landscape is a story that fields and trees help tell, though the form and content here in eastern, southern North America and most of the world over have long been influenced if not dictated by humans, most notably the people of the past four hundred years, though the comparatively sparse earlier populations had their own distinct narrative styles as well. Before the arrival of Europeans nearly all of this particular area would have been covered in forest, except for the few open places that had been burned over, the result of flames set loose upon dead wood or dry grasses by lightning, or native hunters and gatherers easing their tasks with sporadic soil-enriching burnings, usually along rivers and creeks. Though the people some all Indians and their forebears had frequently passed through this place, it is believed for now that they never lived here for any significant length of time, camping for a while perhaps as they journeyed through, onward or homeward in the midst of seasonal expeditions bent on game and forage. For better or for worse, most often for the worse, to know the land for what it is is to know the people who have trodden upon it, broken it open, and rearranged it to their ostensible advantage, ordering it into some semblance of a system believed to help facilitate survival or, more recently, the gross acquisition of the material goods of others.
<5> Since the greatest man-made changes to the landscape are the more recent, to understand what I am looking at is to trace the more proximate human catalysts of change. The transition of this area from a forest to what is before my eyes now began with the arrival of colonists from the Germanic states of northern Europe in the early eighteenth century. To realize, in turn, the manner and assumptions of these people in their relation to this place is to know something of their reasons for coming to it. Groups of Germans began journeying to North America in earnest in 1683, arriving to the north in the colony of Pennsylvania, lured by embroidered British propaganda of great opportunity in the "New World" and the very real religious tolerance of the utopian thinker and colonial proprietor William Penn. By 1709 there were nearly fourteen thousand of them peopling mostly what would come to be the more western central counties of Pennsylvania, and they would be followed by Scottish Presbyterian families and other English-speakingfolk generally dissatisfied with life and conditions in the British Isles. Although German men brought with them numerous trade skills - among them were blacksmiths, mechanics, shoemakers, watchmakers, gunsmiths, butchers, and cabinetmakers - that helped build and support village and county economies, they and their families often were viewed with suspicion by their English-speaking neighbors - convenient objects of the old archetypal human fear and hatred of that which is different. Writing in 1725, James Logan, Provincial Secretary of Pennsylvania, reported that the Germans "come in crowds, and as bold, indigent strangers from Germany, where many of them have been soldiers. All these go on the best vacant tracts and seize upon them as places of common spoil . . . Many of them are Papists - the men well armed, and as a body a warlike, morose race." Foremost in the minds of Logan and others were the cultural differences of the Germans, which, coupled with their large and able numbers, presented a perceived threat to the otherwise dominant English element of the American colonies. Years after Logan’s warning, distrust of German settlers lingered. As Benjamin Franklin fearfully theorized, "Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion?" Taking Logan’s uncongenial caricature a step further, Franklin emphasized the distinct possibility of a hostile cultural takeover - a "Germanization" - by "aliens" of a divergent "complexion." Inherent in Franklin’s disconcerting rhetoric is his portrayal of the Germans as an implacable separate race, resistant to change, and probably engaged in the conscious undermining of their rightful English masters.
<6> The upshot of such cultural hostility, the search for greater social freedom, and the lure of cheaper land, led Germans southward from the Pennsylvania counties along the Cumberland Valley, generally following the courses of mountains and rivers and the old trails of Indians that strayed along their ridges and banks. In March of 1732, Charles Calvert, the fifth Lord Baltimore, desirous to create a kind of strategic buffer for the English colonists of eastern Maryland against the Indians on the frontier, had offered two hundred acre tracts between the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers to willing families with the assurance that they would not have to make payments on the land for three years. Pennsylvania Germans were quick to inhabit the land and it was along the Monocacy River or Frederick Valley (between the only two villages existing in western Maryland at the time: Monocacy, the site of which remains uncertain, and Fredericktown), where I am standing now, that my own ancestors recorded their first extant land deed in 1742 on a portion of river front property that was part of a nine thousand acre tract called Monocacy Manor, a landscape that would appear strange to our eyes now, where old growth brooded amid a shadowy canopy and the lush grass of the rare open areas had never felt blade nor plow.A place all but lost to family memory, a distant legend even in the time of my great grandfathers, who carried with them to their graves a story that cannot be retold.
<7> Having abandoned the field for the shade of the woods, I discover, under a swell in the ground, beneath a thin layer of dried leaves and dark humus, a buried pile of large rectangular river rocks. They could have been carried from the field, heaped along the edge so as not to hinder plow nor hoe again; or, more likely, since they are uncommonly flat and uniform on all sides, they were used as part of a rock foundation, the piled building blocks of a barn, a home, of lives. The hewn beams that rested on these rocks have long since passed beneath the forest floor, as have the feet that once walked upon them. But I am here and you are here. Here, we are. Enter with me these buried legends, brush away the damp clinging leaves and soil. The rocks piled here were not moved by one man. Lift with me these stones from the earth. Let us raise them into sunlight.
<8> Though the isolated life of the German settlers existing in this bucolic area was certainly difficult, such hardship was not completely unknown to their experience and history. The Roman historian Tacitus had described the people of the Germanic tribes as living "scattered and apart, just as a spring, a meadow, or a wood has attracted them." But of exactly how they existed here, how they came to shape this place, more must be said. Upon arriving at the place they planned to raise a house, the ground to become "here" or "hier," as they called it, trees were cut, logs squared, and fit into one another to form a rectangular shape over a foundation of flat-shaped rock, precisely of the sort I discovered, carried from the best potential field site or a nearby stream. The logs were then chinked, usually with wet, clay soil. Roofs and floors consisted mostly of wooden planks hewn by a whip-saw. Often a family would live in a primitive lean-to while the cabin’s preliminary construction sped along, perhaps aided by neighbors if they were fortunate to have any close enough. Refining the structure, openings were cut for doors and windows, which were then attached with driven wooden pins. A chimney of flat rock and clay was raised through a hole cut in the roof. All this work conspired to create what William Eddis, an English official who traveled to the Frederick County area in autumn 1772, called "a rude construction."
<9> For settlers, the archaic or visually wanting manner of their home was of little moment. Necessity and survival were their primary concerns. Accordingly, the Küche, or kitchen, was the first room completed, after which attention would turn to the barn, essential for the livelihoods of crop storage and livestock, and, later, if time allowed, adorned with hexes, Distelfinken, and other symbols of German custom. Sometimes the barn was even connected to the kitchen, the primary subsistence structures joined by an umbilical cord of wood. The other rooms, and perhaps an ice or spring house and smoke house, were built in due course, along with strong beds, benches, and tables, held together by driven wooden pins, smoothed with an adz, and painted by firelight with bright depictions of tulips, birds, and other traditional Bavarian designs. China plates and eating utensils were rare; the food container of choice usually was a carved wooden bowl, the drinking vessel a conveniently shaped gourd, the utensils carved of wood if they were used at all. The brief time between dinner and sleep generally was spent reading in the heavy family Bible, hinged with brass or iron clasps, consulting the almanac for the forecasts of sun and moon so crucial to planting, and educating the children. During the day, boys who did not work in the fields usually followed the Germanic tradition of learning a trade, the inherited knowledge passed on, the young acquiring the ways and wisdom of a land foreign to them that remained their point of cultural origin - a place hardly any of them would ever see.
<10> Settlers would try to build close to a natural spring, but if the land did not permit it a good branch of Dogwood, Peach, or Witch Hazel could be employed for the purpose of dowsing for underground water, after which a primitive well would be dug. Shortly after arriving, even while the house was built, settlers would go about the business of clearing land and planting crops. Corn, wheat, and other vegetables were sown around the stumps of cleared land, which usually were left to rot rather than toilsomely uprooted. The rest of the tree provided firewood, and the rocks that inhibited plowing were carried out of the field and used to build fences and foundations. If a family enjoyed the unlikely good fortune of having a mill somewhere within a twenty mile radius of their home, corn and wheat would be ground following the harvest, the miller taking his share in payment. But this was a rare luxury early on. Pork and corn were the most common foods at the table, the pigs running wild in the woods, feeding on nuts, roots, and an assortment of other organic matter. Those that were large enough usually were slaughtered during winter’s first cold spell, over a two day period, which, if one had neighbors, might take the form of a community event, the killing and cleaning occurring on the first day and the following morning devoted to the cutting of the various parts. As with building, the harvest, and various other tasks, working together made the killing, cleaning, and dividing of the pig all the more swift, efficient, and enjoyable.
<11> The pig was a fundamental part of several dishes, including Leberwurst, Pfannhase (boiled pig juice mixed with cornmeal), and ham, which was buried in ash in order to preserve it. Prepared in suspended pots over the fireplace or even down among the flames, traditional German meals like Schnitz und Knöpf and Sauerkraut und Speck retained their popularity among the settlers. Women struggled to bring variation to the table and families constantly looked for ways to diversify their menu. If they had the seed, settlers were quick to plant fruit trees. Germans were particularly fond of making cider or brandy from apples, and they used other specialized agricultural techniques they had brought with them from Europe, employing crop rotation and fertilizing their land with the droppings of livestock. In late summer they watched closely for the time of harvest, the weather studied as farmers walked their furrows at dawn, grasping the wheat to weigh its teeming, testing golden kernels with their lips. Families generally helped one another at harvest and once a local mill was established, each family would have their appointed day for the purpose of grinding their corn and wheat, the coarse or left over parts of which could be retained to feed livestock through winter.
<12> Men and women alike worked hard and occasionally their tasks overlapped. Among their more common responsibilities women daily swept the dirt yard around the house with hickory brooms, their short gowns allowing the dirt to collect about their ankles without soiling their clothes. Women also generally were responsible for sewing, making lye soap from animal lard, and composing many a family’s beautiful fraktur drawings, which recorded genealogical information and significant dates among colorful borders. With the family’s constant toil, clothes wore out quickly and women were constantly working wool, flax, or yarn - or some combination of the three - into garments, blankets, and other useful material. Much of this kind of work was performed in the evenings by the fire since other artificial light remained a luxury. Animal grease could provide an inexpensive source of light though it carried with it a strong, usually unpleasant, odor. Candles were very expensive and the majority of folks usually went to bed at nightfall amid the utter dark, save perhaps the distant pale glow of the evening star or a gleaming moon, and the soft sounds of a nocturnal landscape peopled but little, the nearest neighbor perhaps miles away, falling asleep quickly after a full day of labors upon which their livelihoods depended.
<13> All this unfolded, just as things are unfolding now, more than two and a half centuries ago in a portion of western Maryland, of eastern North America, called the Piedmont, an Italian word that means "foot of the mountains."Although there are several new suburban developments in this area, there lingers enough farmland, planted mostly in corn and potatoes, to imagine it a sparsely populated, rural landscape. The fecundity of the ground ensured the area’s relatively rapid clearing and settlement during the eighteenth century. As William Eddis explained in his letters, "The richness of the soil, and the salubriety of the air, operated very powerfully to promote population." By the time of the American Revolution, most of the flatter or rolling areas had been transformed from great forests into finely cultivated fields. J.F.D. Smith, a Scotsman loyal to England who was imprisoned at Frederick - or Fredericktown, as it was known then - during the war, described the land as "heavy, strong, and rich, well calculated for wheat, with which it abounds, this being as plentiful a country as any in the world."
<14> The enduring richness of the area does not stem from the soil itself but rather from the ground’s close proximity to the river, the primal shaper and architect of the valley, rising and falling over the course of centuries, carrying things away and bearing them here, ever rearranging what is. Although their crops grew well here, few of the original German settlers who came to the region in the seventeen hundreds stayed indefinitely. Moving for various reasons at different times, they swept on like the waters, further west, to distant lands as unmolested as these had been before the first man brandished his axe in the crisp morning air. My own ancestors left this place for the Smoky Mountains at the end of the eighteenth century and, like the disappearing current flowing in the Monocacy on the morning of their departure, no token remains of the manner of their passing, nor its reason. Like the water here, now, they passed on, the mystery of their leaving given way to the silence of their absence - the air’s sudden quiet in the faded wake of a creaking wagon wheel, the last rustle of a leaf.
<15> I descend deeper into older woods and then below the humid trees, down to the moist coolness of the river, the scattered stones of its sandy shore. The Monocacy is murky, brown, and sluggish, despite the wet summer. Many of the trees along it here look like more than a century old, left in peace to grow for what in our time is considered a long time, a venerable age. Whether it passes in the sudden contracting span of a wink or with a slow deep exhalation, short or long, truncated or enduring, the here of the present remains determined by our being in it, which in turn derives from a long series of others’ existences, of which we are the present remainders. And if we cannot know entirely the manner of their being, we can at least attempt to trace their journey to us, to walk in their footsteps toward ourselves. And so this place - what at one time was to become here, what then became hier, for my ancestors - will soon be left by me, as it was by my fathers of two centuries ago, to itself and others who will know it by different names; the stories of who I am, who we are, ever bearing us away on the journeys whose final destination is the domain where existence fades, which is also that misty country that serves as the embarking point of others. Time wanes even as we linger, the undisclosed interval collapsing amid the hesitation that is our nature. Though only just arrived, my departure is at hand. Walk with me then for a while, in the footsteps of others toward myself, ever leaving even as we arrive. Let us pass together as others have, neither going nor coming, but here for a moment and gone, the spent instant our invisible wake, the nothing of space now empty . . .
Return to Top»