Paula Pederson's Blog, page 7

Pioneer Parents, Canada, and the Klondike

 

Miner’s camp at the head of the Yukon River during the Klondike Gold Rush from the Canadian National Archives 1 May 1898 courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

A massive movement of people to the Northwest took place during the 19th century. As my Danish immigrant father, Hans Pederson,  forged his way through Canada to an Alaskan mining camp during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898, my mother’s Ukrainian immigrant grandparents, the Tokaruks, and her parents, the Huchulaks, claimed their homestead in Andrew, Alberta, Canada. Having crossed Europe, the Atlantic Ocean, and then much of the North American continent by railroad, the promise of free forested land meant more to these  pioneers than the considerable risk of searching for gold—if they even knew about the gold.

Years later in Seattle, my father told Linck, his biographer, that he and his partner pulled their belongings on a sled over the mountains until they reached the Yukon River mining camps. He didn’t tell Linck that the trip probably too three months. Lungs seared with each breath. Tearing eyes froze eyelashes. Wet feet brought frostbite. Pederson and his partner labored slowly, encountering howling winds and crashing ice. They ate cold beans and fatback bacon. Dysentery, scurvy, or spinal meningitis stopped half the prospectors. Others became disoriented by snow blindness.

The ice finally heaved its way to extinction in May. The thaw brought mud and rain. The prospectors who had readied their rafts left for the treacherous trip down the Yukon River rapids to the mining camps. Of the 100,000 who prepared to go, my father and his partner were among the fewer than half who reached a mining camp.

 

 

 

 

 

A Maine Squirrel Saga

 

Small rural red squirrels seem smarter, nimbler, and more destructive than large gray ones, in my limited experience. A Maine red squirrel family moved into our camp before we got there this spring. We saw mother on the counter, caught her in a Havahart trap, and released her 20 miles away. The next morning two  babies ran across the floor, zipping right under closed doors like mice. I caught them, also using peanut butter crackers as bait. Their preferred food seems to be house wiring. Sometimes you never know they are there until your house catches fire.

We heard squirrels chattering  in the trees all summer, and this fall they’re back. We’ve seen one in the bath gathering insulation for a nest. We hear them running across the ceiling and between the walls. Years ago I thought they were cute.

We’ve hired a “critter catcher” who uses Havahart traps and bait for his catch and release program because Maine is humane. So far he has pointed out that we also have two skunks living under the house.  These critters all go for peanut butter crackers, but skunks will also follow miniature marshmallows toward the entrance of the Havahart.

One skunk took the bait on his nocturnal rounds. Without incident the critter catcher carried him off the next morning, the cage covered with a blanket to avoid unduly upsetting the skunk. Larger spring traps have been  ordered for the wily squirrels, but so far they just keep taunting from the treetops.

I’ve read that red squirrel litters range from three to seven. I wonder what the count will be by next spring.

 

 

 

Pioneer Viking Rune Stones

Rune Stone, Denmark Wikimedia commons

Rune stones with etched inscriptions, dating from the Viking age, are found all over Scandinavia. No one has truly figured them out.

My Seattle father, Hans Pederson, a Danish immigrant, died when I was one month old. I soon left Seattle and have spent much of my life on the East coast of Maine. So with northern coastal lore in mind, I recently went to a talk on a local rune stone found 60 years ago near Popham Beach, now held in the Maine State Museum.

Geologist Scott Wolter described how linguistics, history, and geology have converged to allow an understanding of the mysterious symbols on these stones. While Scandinavian Vikings honored fallen warriors with stones, prevalent by 1100, several hundred years later, pagan inscriptions began to give way to Christian symbols by the Renaissance around 1400.

The first American runic stone was found under the roots of a toppled tree in Kensington Minnesota. Why Minnesota? Wolters book, with co-author Richard Nielsen, archeologist The Kensington Rune Stone: Compelling New Evidence provides a fascinating explanation of this mystery. A glacier moved the stone near the river that moved it—probably around 1362. European Knights Templar, the first North American pioneers, inscribed these stones. They settled in the Minnesota area to escape religious persecution. They would have  predated Columbus or any other explorers.

Wolter’s talk boggled the mind as he presented his information in a rapid-fire staccato. Judging by the symbols on the rune stones near Popham Beach Maine, these stones probably date back to the Kensington Minnesota rune of 1362, not back to the Vikings 300 or 400 years earlier.

The scholarship is thorough and complex, and like most controversial ideas, threatens the status quo as well as other competing  theories. Books on these topics are available on Amazon.

Critics continue to scoff. Many maintain that these “rune stones” were merely etched with random inscriptions by a bunch of hippies.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Those Birthdays Keep Coming

courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

 

For his eightieth birthday, a friend gave my husband a T-shirt. The words emblazoned across the chest read, the older I get, the better I was.

No, no, no. keep going. Reinvent yourself. Deal with the infirmities as they arise.

Remember Betty Friedan? She wrote The Feminine Mystique fifty years ago. (Dell has produced an anniversary edition.) “Shake off the shackles of your vacuum cleaners and get out of the house,” Friedan told women. Now that it has been fifty years, of course some women would just as soon open the front door and head back in. Anyway, Friedan gave the movement a name. F-E-M-I-N-I-S-M.

Several years later, Friedan wrote The Fountain of Age. (Simon and Schuster, 2006) This book celebrates old age as an opportunity for new beginnings. New contributions. Pleased when a group of Harvard physicians invited her to join them in a study or aging, Friedan found Alzheimer’s Disease to be the new beginning they most wanted to study.

Sons, daughters, grandchildren. Don’t write us off. I, for one, write. (Three books—one published this year, two languishing in the storeroom.) Blogs and Facebooks. I’m not the only one. I know of a ninety-two-year-old woman who has recently written a book called, Still Boy Crazy at Ninety.

I adore my grandchildren. Their creativity, their fresh outlooks, and their joy renew me as I watch them explore the world and grow. But sometimes they’d just as soon savor each year a little longer before it passes forever. On his fifth birthday my grandson told me, “I don’t want to grow up. I want to grow down.”

I hope you see fine possibilities ahead even if you don’t have a birthday cake like the one above.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Poet Learns

 

I learn by going where I have to go

 

Theodore Roethke          1908-1963 American Poet

Western Immigrants Battle Native Americans

 

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

 

The welcome peace after the American Civil War brought only tragedy to the Native American Indians of the West. The September 2016 Delancey Place blog features the book, Citizen Sherman by Michael Fellman. 

 

With the North-South war behind them, Generals Sherman, Grant, and Sheridan turned their energies to battling the Western Indians.

The buffalo-hunting warlike Indians were directly in the path of the transcontinental railroads—keys to the planned Western expansion. General William Tecumseh Sherman stated to general Ulysses Grant, “We are not going to let a few thieving, ragged Indians check and stop the progress of [the railroads], a work of national and world-wide importance.”

The army guarded the developing railroads to such an extent that Indian raids could no longer slow construction. Encroaching pioneer settlers joined the army in slaughtering the buffalo, the Native American food supply, as well as assassinating their young warriors. Disease and starvation reduced the remaining Indians  to dependency and ultimately, to reservations.

Army casualties were light during these battles; fewer men were lost than in an average Civil War battle. “It is all moonshine about the great cost of the war,” Sherman bragged to a friend in 1875.

 

 

Pre-World War II China

Cookie, Amah, Paula, and Mom ready for a rickshaw ride in Shanghai

 

Prior to World War II, we lived in the Far East where my adopted expatiate father worked for the Standard Oil. In the photo above, we’re about to take a rickshaw ride through the flooded streets of Shanghai—Cookie in Amah’s lap on the left, and me in my mother’s lap on the right. Rickshaws were fun, I thought back then, but I’ve recently learned more about rickshaw drivers, or pullers, in the April 19, 2017 Delancey Place blog states otherwise. It features a selection from The Search for Modern China, by Jonathan D. Spence. 

Everyday life was a struggle for survival for most Chinese in the 1930s. Few could afford to marry, and among those who did, many had to sell their children, or watch them slowly starve. The country was increasingly ready for a revolution.

“China’s hundreds of millions joined scores of their fellows at 4:00 a.m. or earlier, waiting in anxious groups with their tools to see if any work would come that day. Most such men died unnoticed after brief, miserable lives. Some of them ‘escaped’ to the factories or became human horses, pulling two-wheeled rickshaws through the crowded streets of China’s cities. These rickshaw men were constantly exploited by racketeers, and returned after each backbreaking day to grim tenements, where they slept in rows, packed side by side, in spaces just vacated by fellow pullers who had returned to the streets.”

Life was no better for poverty stricken country peasants. “Few of the wealthier farmers went to the expense of mechanizing farm work, even when machinery and fuel were available. Nor did they invest much in draft animals, since the wages paid to a hired laborer per day were the same as the cost of a day’s fodder for a single donkey. The man could be laid off when the need for him was over, but the donkey had to be fed the sheltered for the whole year.”

Such is often the fate of the world’s powerless.

Maine and Virginia Pioneers 400 years ago

 

Photo Credit; Wikimedia Creative Commons, Attribution Peter Isotalo

 

The Historical Diaries notes a 1622 letter from immigrant Sebastian Brandt from Jamestown Virginia. Almost in passing, he writes of his wife’s and brother’s earlier deaths. Illness kept him from “travel up and down the hills and dales for good mineralls of golde, silver, and copper. He seems to have died soon after sending his letter.

Maine, considered a part of Virginia at that time, was settled before Jamestown, Virginia in 1607 when Sir George Popham led a group of pioneer explorers to what is now midcoast Maine . But after just one winter spent on the gale buffeted ledges where the firs marched down the rocks to the  bitter Atlantic, the colonists decided this northernVirginia was too cold. They built a ship, called it “The Virginia,” and sailed back to England—thereby allowing the Jamestown colony to claim that they were the first permanent settlement on the East Coast.

Maine started a seafaring tradition on her coast that continues to this day. In the heyday of sail, the state boasted 250 shipbuilders. The wooden boats they build today still hold more cachet than their modern fiberglass replacements.

Street Art in Kuala Lumpur

Graffiti worth a second look

Bespoke Traveler

Travel writer Arman Shah goes in search of graffiti in Kuala Lumpur and finds these artistic murals by the Klang River.

Photo courtesy of Arman Shah

The seed of intrigue revolving around the graffiti scene in Kuala Lumpur (KL) was first planted in me one Tuesday afternoon at work, when I was researching on art-related activities to engage in at the Malaysian capital. I was flying there from Singapore for a business trip, and I wanted to make sure that I fully utilized my time doing productive things – as opposed to being cooped up in the hotel room like the dull young adult who I’m (hopefully) not – when I wasn’t attending any work event.

I remember Google producing a list of articles about street art in Malaysia, and after a few clicks of the mouse and a thorough ingestion of the various features and their accompanying images, I…

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Immigrants, Diversity, and Medical History

Franz Eugen Kohler, kohler’s Medizin-Pflanzen Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

North America is filled with Immigrants

Although our pioneer forebears all came from somewhere else, we Americans  often consider ourselves to be the greatest in the world at everything. But as our population diversifies, we have learned that we are not.

I go in for complementary medicine. Massage. Meditation.  Acupuncture and Qi Gong. So I perked up when I read the following article. BIO-PIRACY: WHEN WESTERN FIRMS USURP EASTERN MEDICINE. Raj Choudhury and Tarun Khanna, Harvard Business school professors, examine the history of herbal patent applications, and challenge the stereotype that Western firms are innovators, while emerging markets are imitators.

Carmen Nobel, senior editor of Harvard’s Working Knowledge, begins her July, 2014 article: “In May 1995, two scientists at the University of Mississippi were granted an American patent for the use of turmeric to treat flesh wounds. Soon thereafter, an Indian research organization won a lawsuit challenging the novelty of the patent. As it turned out, Indians had been using turmeric as a wound ointment for thousands of years. The United States Patent and Trademark Office revoked the patent in 1997. Patents are supposed to be novel, but patent offices know little about the novelty of herbs.

I sprinkle turmeric and cinnamon on my family’s cereal. I take a daily turmeric capsule. Along with eating copious amounts of fruits and veggies, I swallow black elderberry syrup for coughs, and drink green tea.

I hope that these mysteries help my health. What are your favorite home remedies?