Joliet, Ill., to Kearney, Neb.

We started driving at nine in the morning, quickly leaving behind the crowded roads of Chicagoland.

Water towers are prominent features of the midwestern landscape, and traditionally the municipality that owns the water tower will paint its name on the side. Stuart, Iowa, has updated this tradition: a large white wind turbine had “STUART” painted in large letters down the tall tower.

We stopped at a rest area west of Des Moines, and as I looked out at a large field of corn I couldn’t help comparing the ecological characteristics of corn fields with lawns. Both crops cover large areas of North America (one source says that lawns cover more land area than any other single crop). Both crops are raised as monocultures that require huge amounts of chemical fertilizer and chemical controls for weeds and pests. Considered from the point of view of ecological science, both lawns and corn fields support a low density of species; and the “insurance hypothesis” predicts that lawns and corn fields will be relatively vulnerable to changes such as drought, invasive species, pest infestations, etc.

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Above: Corn field near a rest stop west of Des Moines

As we drove by the Adair wind farm on Interstate 80, we could see a highway rest area with a tall white monument in front of it. As we passed it, we realized it wasn’t a monument at all: it was a wind turbine blade standing upright.

We decided to stop in Omaha for dinner. Carol found what sounded like a good restaurant, McFoster’s Natural Restaurant, using her smartphone. When we got there, we realized we had been at that restaurant some years earlier. At that time, the restroom walls had been covered with stickers, so Carol stuck one of her own stickers on the wall: a yellow spiral with the words “Urine Charge, Take Life Full Circle.” Alas, the restrooms had been renovated, and all the stickers were gone.

As we sat eating dinner, a couple in their early twenties walked in. The woman was saying to the man, “Yeah, I don’t know if you’ll like this place, but it’s my favorite restaurant. If you don’t like it, we can go somewhere else.” When they were out of earshot, Carol said aloud what I had been thinking: unless they were brother and sister, the man had better at least pretend that he liked that restaurant. As we were walking to our car, we saw them coming out of the restaurant; they both seemed to be in a good mood.

We had a long way to go, so we got in the car and kept driving west, into the setting sun….

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Above: Wind turbine on Interstate 80 in Nebraska

 

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Above: Sun setting over a Nebraska soybean field

Macedonia, Ohio, to Joliet, Ill.

I got up at 6:30 and went to the gas station across the street from our motel to buy a newspaper. They stocked three, and I got a copy of each — the Akron Beacon Journal, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and USA Today — and went to the Bob Evans restaurant to spend an hour eating breakfast and reading newspapers.

The lead paragraph of one of the front page articles in the Beacon Journal declared: “Amid sirens and cheers, the 77th Annual All-American Soap Box Derby kicked off its weeklong festivities with the opening ceremony Monday.” I remembered seeing a small black trailer hitched to a car in the parking lot outside our motel, with a sign that Kara’s something-or-other soapbox derby team. Sure enough, just as I was coming out from the restaurant, the car and trailer drove past me. Someone had taken white chalk and written on the side of the trailer: Honk for Luck!” I was walking so I couldn’t honk, but I silently wished Kara (whoever she may be) the best of luck in the world championships.

We left Macedonia and drove along Interstate 80 until we reached Illinois Route 53 — also known as Historic Route 66 — and headed south a dozen miles to the Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie. Midewin was established eighteen years ago on what used to be the old Joliet Arsenal. The prairie is still being restored by the National Forest Service, which maintains huge seed beds of native prairie plants, protected from deer by nine foot high fences. I stopped to look at a bed of Wild Bergamot (Monardo fistulosa) in full bloom.

Seed beds, Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Above: Seed beds with Wild Bergamot (Beebalm) at Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

We walked along an access road lined with trees to get to the trailhead; stopping to eat some perfectly ripe mulberries. It was hot and humid, too hot to walk in the sun. We headed down Prairie Creek Trail, one of the few shaded trails at Midewin. When we emerged from the woods an hour later, the sun was partly blocked by clouds, but it was still too hot. I walked slowly, paying attention to the birds — that was my excuse for walking slowly. Carol pointed to a Ring-necked Pheasant walking along the trail behind us. A Sedge Wren called from the top of a shrub. A bright blue Indigo Bunting landed on a fence, not fifty feet from me.

Carol walked faster than I. She disappeared out of sight into the shaded access road. I stopped and turned to look out over the prairie and the woodlands. Even though I could hear the constant rumble of trucks along nearby Interstate 55, I felt as though I were far from that world.

Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

Above: Midewin National Tallgrass Prairie

After we checked in to our motel in Joliet, we went out to eat at a little Chinese restaurant in a half-abandoned mall. That big empty mall parking lot resembled the tallgrass prairie in an eerie, slightly sinister way — the way the Fetch of Irish folklore resembles a living human being.

Mall in Joliet, Ill.

Above: Mall in Joliet, Ill.

Fredonia, N.Y., to Macedonia, Ohio

We had a short drive today because we are visiting relatives this afternoon and evening. We got an early start, and as we were driving along we realized that it was a perfect beach day: hot, but not too hot, sunny, a light breeze. So we decided to go to the beach in western Pennsylvania.

Presque Isle, Penna.

Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

There are miles of beaches on Presque Isle, just north of Erie, with sand, seagulls, the occasional seashell, and reasonably warm water. If you’re willing to walk five minutes, you can get away from the crowded swimming beaches and have long stretches of sand pretty much to yourself.

Carol stood at the end of a low concrete wall, presumably there to control erosion, and looked across Lake Erie. If you looked carefully, you could just see a few big buildings on the opposite shore shimmering through the humidity.

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Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

We walked for over an hour on the beach. There were lots of small flat stones that were perfect for skipping, and I managed to skip one stone seven times before it sank into the water. We saw lots of interesting driftwood, too, and someone had built a couple of lean-to structures out of big pieces of driftwood, sort of like the forts kids build in the woods.

Preque Isle, Penna.

Above: Presque Isle, Penna.

It was pretty idyllic.

Stow, Mass., to Fredonia, N.Y.

We left Stow, Massachusetts, at nine o’clock this morning. Stow lies on the edge of the coastal plain of southeastern New England, and we drove west through the hills of central New England, into the Berkshire Mountains, through the Taconic Mountains of New York, up the Mohawk River valley through the dramatic gap between the foothills of the Adirondack Mountains to the north and the Catskills to the south. I said goodbye to the last little foothills along the freeway.

Mohawk River valley

Above: The Mohawk River along Interstate 90, looking north towards the last of the Adirondack foothills.

We will see no more mountains — nothing but plains and rolling land — until we reach Wyoming, some 1,500 miles from here. We stopped at a rest area near Waterloo, New York, and already the landscape began to look like the Midwest or the Great Plains: a big field of legumes, a line of trees in the distance, some farm buildings, and a big outlet mall on the other side of the interstate.

Nine Foot Road, Waterloo, N.Y.

Above: Farm off Nine Foot Road, near Waterloo, N.Y.

When we got to Fredonia, N.Y., where we will spend the night, we took a long walk from our hotel to the campus of SUNY Fredonia. Although the university was founded in 1829, it obviously saw a big building boom beginning in the 1960s, when lots of big bland institutional brick buildings got built. I imagine it can look pretty bleak in the long gray winters, but everything was beautifully green today.

Fredonia obviously has a big student population. Lots of the attractive older houses in the center of town have been split up into student apartments, and we saw lots of evidence that this is a university town: a peace sign in a window, a poster proclaiming allegiance to Bob Marley, and a lovely garden with a handpainted sign that read “GROW FOOD NOT LAWNS.”

Garden in Fredonia, N.Y.

Above: Garden in Fredonia, N.Y.

Gosport Harbor

Gosport Harbor is protected by several islands connected by breakwaters: Appledore Island to the north west, then Malaga Island, Smuttynose Island, Cedar Island, and Star Island. The boundary between Maine and New Hampshire goes through the harbor; Star Island is in New Hampshire, and the other islands are in Maine. Here are three photos of Gosport Harbor, taken from Star Island over the past week:

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Above: Sunrise over Smuttynose Island (at left) and Cedar Island, Friday morning at about 5 a.m.

 

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Above: Looking across the harbor towards Appledore Island, Thursday morning at about 5 a.m.

 

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Above: West end of Smuttynose Island, late afternoon on Friday — the brown house (left of center, near the horizon line) is perhaps the oldest still-standing house in Maine.

“Excellence in Teaching” handouts

I’m currently leading a workshop called “Excellence in Teaching” at the Lifespan Religious Education Conference, held at Star Island Conference Center in New Hampshire. The class itself is experiential, and I won’t be able to translate it to this blog. But here are two handouts that may be useful to others:

Handout: Developmental stage theory for UU religious education

Handout: Multiple intelligence theory

Children and fantasy

Quote from yesterday’s New York Times, “Urban Legends Told Online” by Farhad Manjoo, p. B7:

“Jacqueline D. Woolley, director of the Children’s Research Lab at the University of Texas at Austin, has found that children are far more capable at distinguishing reality from fiction than perviously thought. ‘By the time they’re 9, they’re at adult levels,’ she said.”

That tallies with my observations of children in religious education settings. Children as young as 6 begin to be able to make distinctions between fact and fiction, and yes, by 9 years old they are probably at adult levels.

Sleepy Hollow Cemetery

I took a short trip to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, Mass., today to pay a visit to the grave of my favorite Transcendentalist. The bronze plaque that marks her grave reads:

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
1804-1894
A Teacher of three generations of Children,
and the founder of Kindergarten in America.
Every humane cause had her sympathy,
and many her active aid.

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One of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody’s protegees was Lucy Wheelock, the founder of Wheelock College. My mother attended Wheelock College to train as a teacher, and learned from Lucy Wheelock herself. I learned some of my teaching skills from my mother, so Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was the teacher of a teacher of one of my teachers.

While I was there, I walked over to Author’s Ridge to walk by the graves of the most famous Transcendentalists buried in Concord: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Louisa May Alcott. Tourists had piled small stones, pennies, and twigs on top of and around their gravestones.

Thirty years ago, no one piled stones or pennies on the authors’ gravestones. When this first started happening, it annoyed me, and I’d clean off the gravestones of all that litter. But now this act has become a part of New England folk culture, and you will not only see stones placed by tourists on the graves of famous people, but also stones placed by people on the graves of their family members. Now I leave the stones and twigs, although I still stop to sweep off the pennies, because the copper dissolves in New England’s slightly acidic rain and discolors the gravestones.

I wonder if this act of placing small stones arises out of some deeply-held religious memory in Western culture. These look like small cairns to me — in ancient Greek religion, Hermes, the god of travelers, dwelt in cairns — though gravestones don’t mark a physical path, they can mark a spiritual path.

My second favorite Transcendentalist is Louisa May Alcott. Her grave had no pennies (she’s worth more than a penny, I guess), but people had piled stones and twigs around her headstone with her initials — she’s in a family plot with a main gravestone, then all the family members have small stones with just their initials — and the flush stone with her full name that was installed later. Someone had left her a note, now in tatters from exposure to rain and sun, and unreadable. In the past, I’ve read other notes that people have left for her, saying how much her books have meant to them. I think about it this way: casual tourists can leave stones without any forethought; those whose lives have been changed by Alcott’s books think to leave a written memorial.

Grave of Louisa May Alcott

Above: Louisa May Alcott’s gravestone, Author’s Ridge, Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Concord, Mass.

I couldn’t figure out who some graves get stones, and some don’t. Lidian Jackson Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s second wife, had stones piled on her gravestone, but Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s wife, had none. As much as I like Lidian Jackson Emerson, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne strikes me as the more impressive of the two women. Before she was married, Sophia Peabody pursued a career as an artist, something unheard of for women in early nineteenth century America; she was an intellectual, though somewhat overshadowed by her older sister Elizabeth, and part of the Transcendentalist circle. Does Lidian fill more of an archetypal role in the common religious imagination of New England folk culture? Or is it simply that the people who would value Sophia Peabody Hawthorne as an artist, and intellectual, and a symbol of early feminist consciousness are not the type of people who leave stones on graves?