I deactivated my X/Twitter account (aka, Xitter), and the next night, I had a dream.
See, I have this nifty electric car that is not a Tesla but looks like one. My car and I were on a road trip. One of our regular overnight stops was a cave in a desert. I pulled into the cave, which I expected to be deserted, and was surprised to see a tractor parked inside. There was nothing remarkable about this tractor. It was an ordinary John Deere sort of small-ish tractor like those we often see on country roads in Arkansas during the farming season.
Curious, I walked around the tractor. Parked on the other side of it was a miniature Cybertruck. It was smaller than one of those little Datsun pickups from the 1970s but not as small as a Barbie Dream Car. Its windows had steel shades on the outside. It looked like a toy but functional. I took a picture but couldn’t get a signal to text it to [whomever]. I left the cave to get a signal to send the text.
Focused on my phone, I was startled when Diane Munzer Fisher tapped me on the shoulder. “Oh, hey,” I said. “You found me. There’s a tiny Cybertruck in the cave.” (I do not know why Diane would have been looking for me. We only ever see each other at college reunions and on social media.)
“Don’t steal it,” a male voice said. Diane and I turned to see a young man lying near the cave entrance, sacked out in a sleeping bag. We had not noticed him before, but he was only a couple of feet away. He reached out and grabbed my leg.
“Why would we steal a Cybertruck?” Diane asked, disdain dripping from her pores. No kidding, I thought, and shook my leg free.
The young man was blond, with a broad face. He looked like a blond Elon Musk. “It’s MY truck,” he said. “My dad gave it to me.”
Diane and I entered the cave. The young man followed us. We realized he was very young – in his middle teens at most. “My name is Wilder Musk,” he said.
The cave’s walls were now sheetrocked, and posters of Tesla and SpaceX employees papered the brightly lit interior.
“Wilder, huh?” Diane asked. She pointed to a poster featuring a woman. “As in, Elaine Wilder, the Chief of Technology and Development?”
“That’s my mom,” young Wilder said.
We realized that Elon had yet another child to add to the dozen or so the media knows about already. The man spreads his seed far and wide indeed.
I noticed a hair tickling my palate and put two fingers into my mouth to pull it out. It stuck on something in my throat. I started gagging and coughing.
“Let me help,” Diane said. After some wrestling and much more coughing and gagging, she pulled a gross, tangled wad of hair out. (Yuck.)
The apparent moral of the story [dream] is that Cybertrucks and the proliferation of Elon Musk cause hairballs.
As some of you know, I’m an activist. I’m now engaging in my activism against carbuncles on our landscapes. By “carbuncles,” I mean the egregious errors we make in plant choice, plant placement, pruning decisions, and erecting structures adjacent to plants that are innocently minding their own business when humans come charging in to muck things up.
I’ll start in my backyard.
See that functional yet attractive fence carefully erected between two trees? You can see the little crossbar where the vertical pole couldn’t reach the ground because a tree or two was in the way. Whoever erected this fence accommodated future growth—until they didn’t.
Is anyone else concerned about the person in the future who will need to chainsaw his way through that trunk once the trees die or get blown over by a tornado? That person could be killed.
I have not yet asked the neighbors what they were thinking. They are Very Nice People.
My cousin Lisa supplied incriminating evidence of another disturbing fence condition caused by a neighbor’s landscaping gross negligence.
That poor retaining wall won’t retain anything much longer because it’s trying its best to contain the roots of trees that never should have been allowed to grow there. Hackberry and black locust? More like horticultural hackery and a plague of locusts.
Sometimes, bamboo disguises itself as a religious enterprise. “Heavenly” bamboo is a beautiful scourge. Very Nice People cut it and bring it indoors, telling me, “It looks so pretty in winter!”
Yes. In winter, the birds do their best to aid Nandina domestica in its insidious plan for world domination. They die in the process. Nandina kills the birds that eat its berries. New Nandinas grow from the rotting corpses of mockingbirds, cedar waxwings, robins, and other songbirds that consume the cyanide-laden berries. This stuff is evil, through and through.
Last year, a tornado exposed an army of nandina encamped on the hillside bordering Indian Trail. The photo here cannot do justice to the scope of the invasion. Every bit of red and green is nandina. Next time you’re out and about, drive by. Like the Indians of yore, you will see non-natives marauding from the east. You can do everything to eradicate the problem; you will fail. Conscientious gardeners cannot root out nandina with poison, pickaxes, diesel, and fire. I should know. I’ve tried.
We need to drive no further than Cedar Hill Road to feast our eyes on a veritable smörgåsbord of non-native invasive species. In addition to an abundance of wisteria, visitors are delighted (?) to see English ivy, Bradford pear, privet, and—commonly seen in the wild—the effusive ditch nandina (N. domestica ‘Pretty Woman’), preening and proudly displaying her berries like some streetwalker in fishnets and a microskirt.
Without regard for decency or decorum–in fact, without any evidence of good manners at all–these invasive aliens crowd the narrow, winding road and cover the street signs. Nandina is there, of course, but also more Privet than remains in China, Bradford pears, mimosas, Asian honeysuckles (please consider using our beautiful Arkansas native yellow honeysuckle or trumpet honeysuckle instead), Vinca major (periwinkle), Paulownia, English ivy, thickets of Tree of Heaven, Photinia, Chinese tallow trees, Chinese parasol trees, and more.
Even though it is not currently smothering the hillside, we all know what this stretch of Cedar Hill looks like in July. Soon, my activist friends and I will circulate a petition to rename the area “Kudzu Hill.” Please be prepared to sign it.
Allsopp Park could serve as the poster child for the Cooperative Extension Services’s website for invasive species. Check it out. You’ll be appalled at what evils we harbor in our home landscape. My photocompanion and I took so many pictures of Asian wisteria in the park we nearly exhausted the limitless storage space on our photojournalism-issued iPhones. Here are some specimens growing about 200 feet from the ravine’s floor along Cedar Hill Road. (Note the abundance of privet, too.)
A friend from my hometown proudly posted a photo of his favorite wisteria. It is indeed gorgeous. We are publishing his photo with his blessing and giving him credit as promised. (He provided no information as to the health of the beleaguered tree strangling under the glory of the purple succubus.)
This time of year, Vinca major,the European periwinkle used as a perennial ground cover, gears up to take over unsuspecting beds in a coup that asphyxiates everything within its reach. Yes, it can hold a hillside in place. It does so at the cost of native plants, insects, and wildlife. Here’s a particularly healthy clump of it, newly exposed to lots of sun on this steep slope in Kingwood since March 31, 2023.
Not all alien species are invasive, but some scream “I DO NOT BELONG HERE” at the top of their lungs anyway. cough palm trees cough
In the category of pruning things that should never be pruned, let’s discuss azaleas. Walls of flowers are lovely, sure, but the stripes in those ranks aren’t exactly uniform. (Also, Loropetalum is not supposed to be given a flattop. I shall endeavor to find a photo at some point.)
Many of us proclaim disdain for invasive, non-native species. We generally aren’t talking about fire ants, zebra mussels, or homo sapiens sapiens; we refer to Bradford pears. “Something should be done,” we agree, nodding somberly and congratulating ourselves on our awareness of the tragedy. Then, we prune them like this just before they bloom, eliminating all the problems.
True story: I was at a local garden center last weekend – one that proudly touts its stock of native plants. It openly sells Bradford pears. WHY?!
In addition to allowing the proliferation of invasive aliens, we do active damage to otherwise law-abiding plants. Beginning in February, crape murder happens unabated on practically every block. My friend Nancy sent me this photo of an active murder scene in her backyard. When she said she had a murder, I was hoping for crows.
Humans compound their crime by allowing the proliferation of black sooty mold on the bare trunks of the murder victims. Failure to treat the pest that causes the mold spreads it like a plague, and those sadly shorn crape myrtles are plague enough.
This stand of molded and murdered crapes is enhanced by the Chinese wisteria tangled in the privet in the background. A four-fer!
This tree on Cantrell desperately waves for help after being butchered by the utility company’s tree service.
These are two in an entire street’s worth of big old oaks that got topped in the name of utility. Topless trees are obscene.
This poor Magnoliagrandiflora x torturosa tragicii var. ‘Someone Cut Off Its Head AND Stole Its Pants’ is dreadfully exposed on University Avenue.
Pruning isn’t our only mistake. I drove through a local country club recently and noticed their professional grounds crew had mulched the iris. I nearly had a case of the vapors.
To end on another travesty from my yard, I’d like to introduce you to my sweet autumn clematis. Except, I can’t. Last year, when I learned it was an invasive foreigner, I sanctimoniously ripped it off my mailbox. I replaced it with a native passionflower vine that had been growing joyously in the backyard. I hope it likes its new home. It will probably take over.
As an unrepentant activist, I’d typically invite you to a fundraiser or a rally right now. Instead, I have a different favor to ask: Please examine your gardens for criminal elements and eradicate them. Exercise responsible horticulture and good taste.
Good taste. That brings me to azaleaballs. How does one serve azaleaballs? Should they be accompanied by a dipping sauce or simply rolled in sugar?
The first English colony in New England was Plymouth. Plymouth and the so-called Pilgrims who founded it hold a special place in American lore – one that is often more legend than history. This essay will explore the events that led to the Mayflower’s voyage. Later essays will tackle more of the legend, dispel myths, and provide context for the WASP1WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.” infestation of North America.
Countless books have examined the reasons for the Puritan migration to the New World. In a nutshell, the English monarchy and the Protestant Reformation were to blame. The bloody upheavals of the Reformation and the monarchy’s on-again, off-again relations with the Pope were a perfect storm. England herself suffered a crisis of faith for nearly two centuries.
In 1517, Martin Luther’s famous 95 Theses officially started the Protestant Reformation. But less than 15 years later, the decision of King Henry VIII of England to climb aboard the separatist bandwagon was utterly unrelated to theology. He needed a male heir. To get one, he needed a different wife. When the Pope refused to grant him an annulment, Henry essentially deposed the Pope in England and declared himself head of the Church. He dissolved English monasteries and confiscated their wealth.
He removed most of the clergy from the House of Lords. He prosecuted people for treason if they refused to acknowledge the English monarch as the head of the Church of England. In the space of a few months, England was no longer Catholic. Henry divorced his wife and would marry five more times. (He divorced and beheaded his non-producing wives to speed up the process of begetting a legitimate male heir.)
Henry’s successor and only surviving son, Edward VI, died at 15. He had been England’s Protestant king for six years. Henry’s eldest daughter, Mary, was the daughter of his Catholic first wife, Catherine of Aragon. When Mary assumed the throne, she immediately reversed her father’s Protestant policies. Queen “Bloody” Mary embarked on a purge of British subjects who refused to accept the Pope. For the five years of her reign, Mary lit bonfires under hundreds of recalcitrant, outspoken Protestants. The fiery persecutions stopped temporarily when Mary’s Protestant half-sister, Elizabeth I, ascended to the throne in 1658. But when Spain threatened to invade England, Elizabeth relit the fires. She burned Catholics instead.
The Puritans wanted no part of the official English Church any more than they wanted to return to Catholicism. Elizabeth’s government enacted laws that punished people for not attending or supporting the established Anglican Church. The government executed separatist leaders for sedition. Elizabeth’s successor, James IV and I of Scotland and England, continued these policies after assuming the English throne in 1603.
To quell dissent in some measure, James commissioned an English translation of the Bible. This translation served as the official book of the English Reformation. This edition of the Bible is famous, not because of the accuracy of its translation (spoiler: it isn’t accurate), but for its poetic use of language. The Authorized King James Version is still used everywhere in the English-speaking world more than 400 years later.
In 1606, James required people to take Oaths of Allegiance to deny the Pope’s authority over the British monarch. Before he inherited the English throne, King James wrote an infamous text on witches, stoking the fires around ever more stakes throughout Britain.2Demonologie, In Forme of a Dialogue, 1597. Read more about the effects of this book and the witch fears of the time in “James VI and I: the king who hunted witches,” History Extra, website (https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/king-james-vi-i-hunted-witches-hunter-devilry-daemonologie/ : accessed 7 Jan 2024), 2013.
The Puritans strongly disapproved of the Church of England trading a pope for a monarch at its head. As they saw it, the Anglican Church was only a partial reformation of the problems with Catholicism. Anglican rituals reminded the Puritans entirely too much of the Catholic Church. The established Church of England, in their minds, had not purified itself of the taint of Catholic abuses. These Puritans advocated separation from the Church of England. They wanted a completely different ecclesiastical structure.
Some separatists wanted a church controlled by elders in a presbyteral polity. The presbyterian3Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination. structure was still hierarchical but gave power to the coalition of like-minded churches to choose the people in positions of authority. Other English separatists eschewed the notion of a church hierarchy altogether. They thought each congregation should govern itself autonomously. This congregational church polity was very popular among the most zealous separatists.
By 1607, a group of Puritans led by Rev. John Robinson had grown utterly frustrated. They chafed under the English government’s religious restrictions and decided to leave England for a place friendly to religious dissent. No English settlement had yet survived in America,4The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower. so the New World was not an option. The entire congregation moved to Leiden, Holland.
The separatists did not find their answer in Holland, though. After a decade in Leiden, the expatriated Puritan community was impoverished and saw their children becoming more Dutch than English. They wanted a place where they could be entirely English, thoroughly Puritan, and completely autonomous.
Emissaries approached the Virginia Company of London. By this point, the Virginia Company had collaborated with settlers to maintain a shaky English foothold in Jamestown. However, the separatists did not want to establish a settlement near the Anglicans in Virginia. They had fled Anglican oppression when they left England for Holland and were not eager to risk it again. Nor did they want to settle near the Dutch in New Netherlands. They already knew that the influence of more libertine Dutch culture frustrated their Puritan ideals, and they did not want to compound the problem by relocating to a Dutch-American colony. The emissaries finally obtained a land patent from the Virginia Company for land at the mouth of the Hudson River, south of the inland Dutch settlements at what is now Albany, New York.
After a series of misadventures, their ship, the Mayflower, left late in the season and arrived at Cape Cod in November 1620. The ship was considerably north of where it was supposed to be; the Virginia Company had no authority to grant land patents north of Long Island Sound. Nevertheless, the separatists decided to land. Before going ashore, they drafted an agreement for governing themselves. All 41 adult males aboard the ship signed the Mayflower Compact.
William Brewster, one of the Fennig family’s colonial ancestors, was the pastor and leader of the Mayflower Puritans. William Chilton, one of my ancestors, was alive at the signing of the Mayflower Compact but died before stepping onto land. Half of the Mayflower’s passengers would die the first winter in Massachusetts. They had arrived in November without food or shelter.
Plenty of good books about the fate of those initial settlers of the Plymouth Colony exist, so I will not cover the next ten years in detail. Suffice it to say that the legends taught in classrooms across this country are inaccurate, whitewashed accounts that ignore salient facts. The only religious freedom that concerned the Mayflower Puritans was their own; they came to establish a theocracy and quickly expelled religious dissenters. The Europeans brought immense suffering and oppression to the native population, which had already been devastated by European diseases before settlements on the mainland were successful. Between more disease and enslavement, the English quickly showed the pattern of colonial abuses that they practice even today.
The story of the peopling of North America did not start with the English. The Spanish began colonizing North America in the 16th century, but even they weren’t the first. Columbus did not “discover” an empty land devoid of civilization, governments, or a recognizable economy. English settlers did not have to hack their way through a wilderness to find arable land. Native Americans were not barbarous savages without laws, diplomacy, or philosophy.
We must understand the reason for European migration to the New World, but we must also understand what the Europeans found here and why to put our ancestral history into context.
Part 2: The Great Migration and Colonial Upheaval
Select Bibliography:
Bailyn, Bernard, The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012.
Graeber, David, and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021.
Loewen, James W., Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, New York: Touchstone, 1995.
MacCulloch, Diarmaid, The Reformation: A History, New York: Viking, 2003.
Mann, Charles C., 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005.
Mann, Charles C., 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, New York: Random House, 2011.
Philbrick, Nathaniel, Mayflower: A Story of Courage, Community, and War. New York: Viking, 2006.
Quinn, Arthur, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec, New York: Berkeley Books, 1994.
Rounding, Virginia, The Burning Time: Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and the Protestant Martyrs of London, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017.
Footnotes
1
WASP is an acronym for “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant.”
Lowercase “presbyterian” refers to the form of church government, not to the Protestant denomination.
4
The Virginia Company established Jamestown later that same year, but it nearly failed multiple times before it succeeded and was still not confidently considered successful by the time of the voyage of the Mayflower.
My dear friend and neighbor laughed like a maniac when she delivered a gift to me this morning. She’s been warning me for days that she had something special for me.
At last: ANSWERS!
“Wi-thout” – just the way your preacher says it.
Naturally, I checked with Jesus on the important issues. He said, “Apartheid and genocide are evil, racism is a scourge on humanity, there’s nothing wrong with being LGBTQIA+ (in fact, it’s perfectly normal and accepted throughout the animal kingdom), abortions should be available on demand, corporations are not people, no books should ever be banned, humans are wrecking the environment, immigrants should be welcomed and refugees should be welcomed with open arms, and everyone should all ignore all mutually consensual activity involving other people’s genitals.”
Also, he reminded me that he does not now, and never has, identified as white, Republican, or Christian.
I asked a follow-up question at the request of a friend. “Why should we worship you instead of, say, Cthulhu?”
Jesus cringed.
He said, “Don’t worship me. That’s weird and stalkerish. I just want people to stop being dicks to each other.”
Here is a construction contract for the original Henry Nichols house at the corner of 4th (called Park Street at the time) & Curran in Des Arc, Prairie County, Arkansas.
1907 Contract to build the Nichols Cottage in Des Arc
At first, I thought the contract called for construction to be completed in “Jany,” a common old abbreviation for January. However, three weeks was swift, even for the masters of yore who didn’t have to include plumbing, electricity, or modern amenities like insulation or indoor baths. I suspect it says “July” because even 115 years ago, it took six months to build a house.
Henry Isaac Nichols and Grace Pearl Reinhardt married on June 12, 1907, so they bought the property and planned the house afterward. H.W. Nesseltrager was a contractor and builder based in Little Rock. (“Plans and estimates cheerfully furnished,” according to a 1905 ad I found for his company in the Arkansas Democrat.) They bought the plans from Nesseltrager but hired someone locally to build the home.
The 1909 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map for Des Arc shows the house’s original footprint. (North is on the left in the map’s orientation.) Interestingly, the lots on the 1909 Sanborn map are numbered differently from those on the official plat of the city. On the official plat, lots 7-8 of Block 38 are in the southeast corner of Block 38, but the 1909 Sanborn map shows those as lots 6-7. (The error was corrected on the 1918 Sanborn map.)
The front of the house now faces 4th St (what was then Park St), but based on the footprint and the house numbers assigned to the lots, it initially faced Curran. The small rectangle behind the house was a shed.
I don’t know when they bought Lot 9 (Lot 8 on the 1909 Sanborn map), but they owned ¼ of the block by 1930 when they remodeled. According to my mother, her father, Shuford Reinhardt Nichols, designed the remodel in the late 1920s. Shuford was Henry and Grace’s only child. Throughout his life, he loved architecture and dabbled in it constantly. In addition to redesigning his childhood home, he built three houses for himself, all in consultation with some of the most prominent architects working in Arkansas at the time. First was the large antebellum-style house where he and his wife raised their family in Des Arc, and where my mom raised her family. It was designed by Max Meyer. Second was their lake house on his wife’s family’s Rob-Bell Plantation near Scott, Arkansas. The last was their retirement home in Little Rock, which was designed by Noland Blass, who was well known locally for his iconic Mid-Century Modern style. Both the Des Arc house and the lake house were remodeled multiple times during Shuford’s life.
The Henry Nichols cottage was expanded again after Grace died. Henry married Grace’s widowed cousin, Catherine “Feb” Harshaw Terry. I suspect the construction contract for both remodels of the cottage included extra amenities like plumbing, electricity, an indoor bathroom, and possibly even paint and paper.
Henry & Grace Nichols house, Des Arc. September 2023 (listing on Zillow)
I was 29 the first time I should have died. A century ago, childbirth killed more women than any other single cause. Broadly speaking, childbed death ranked third behind all infectious diseases and all chronic diseases but ahead of injury. Not only would I have died before modern medicine, but my baby would have. My pelvis wasn’t wide enough to allow him through. He was three weeks late and weighed more than eight and a half pounds, and I was in labor and fully dilated for several hours when the baby went into what they called “distress.” I know it’s medical jargon, but I can’t help but wonder what isn’t distressing about the birth process.
Caesarians weren’t done very often until the mid-20th century. In ancient Rome, India, and China, fetuses were cut from the wombs of dead or dying women in hopes that the child would survive. More than a millennium later, the Jewish philosopher Maimonides and a Persian epic poem separately recorded that babies were sometimes delivered surgically, but doing so was rare and survival of the mother even rarer. If she did live, she would have no more children. In 1500, a Swiss veterinarian named Jacob Nufer claimed to have performed a successful caesarian on his wife. She allegedly delivered five more children naturally.
Once sterilization and handwashing became more commonplace, surgeons refined the procedure, and more women survived. With the 20th-century discovery of antibiotics to combat infections, caesareans happened more often. By 1991, they were routine. Thank you, modern medicine, for saving two lives with my first abdominal surgery. Modern antibiotics also cured both of us of the staph infections we contracted during the birth experience.
Of course, had it not been for modern medicine, I wouldn’t have been pregnant in the first place, so there’s that.
I was 32 the second time I should have died. My doctor explained what carcinoma in situ meant, and I came out of my second abdominal surgery without a cervix or most of the rest of my reproductive organs. The “in situ” covered a more extensive area than my doctor initially thought. Cancerous cells in my uterus and cysts encrusting my ovaries spelled doom for them, although the doctor scraped the cysts off my left ovary and left it in place so as not to trigger early menopause. Years later, I read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and was grateful for her unwitting contribution in the 1950s to my survival in 1994.
At 38, I should have died again. At a regular visit for migraine management, my neurologist asked if anyone had ever told me I had a freckle in my eye. A few months later, my optometrist asked if, beyond my usual myopia, I was having trouble seeing. I told him no but mentioned my neurologist’s comment. He picked up the phone in the examination room, called an ophthalmologist friend, and said I needed an appointment immediately, preferably that day. Three hours later, that ophthalmologist told me I would lose my eye and that we could only hope the tumor had not spread into my brain.
I was still traumatized by the first cancer diagnosis. The second utterly froze me. My sister sprang into action and found that the University of Tennessee hoped to pioneer an experimental laser surgery to excise choroidal melanomas. I was the first patient in its new program. Today, I have a blind spot and a lot of floaters, but I still have a functional right eye and the satisfaction of knowing I survived a rare cancer relatively unscathed.
My paternal grandmother, whom everyone said I strongly resembled, died at 39, three months after being diagnosed with leukemia. Medicine came a long way between 1952 and the 1980s when her brother was diagnosed with the same disease. He lived to die of something else years later. Nevertheless, when I passed my 40th birthday, I sighed with relief to still be breathing.
I might have died again at 50, but I definitely would have at 52. My first bout of diverticulitis, which felled me at my nephew’s high school graduation, resolved after a brief hospital stay and a hefty dose of antibiotics. A year later, the second episode perforated my bowel. I failed outpatient antibiotic treatment and ended up back in the emergency room. After another hospital stay, another dose of hefty antibiotics, and yet another hospital admission, I underwent my third life-saving abdominal surgery. Four days later, the spot where the surgeon reconnected the healthy parts of my bowel failed. Partially digested food seeped into my abdominal cavity. I remember screaming, screaming incoherently with the intense, burning pain, and nurses trying to restrain me.
Peritonitis, which inevitably causes sepsis within 24-48 hours, killed all its victims before modern surgical techniques and antibiotics. It killed my 24-year-old great-grand-aunt Kate Reinhardt a month after her 1902 wedding. Had I not still been in the hospital, it would have killed me in March 2014.
A week later, I woke up in the ICU after my fourth life-saving abdominal surgery. The surgeon had split my abdomen in a jagged line from the old caesarian scar to a point several inches north of my belly button. I did not leave the hospital for five weeks.
The surgeon had not stitched or stapled me back together. I had to heal “from the inside out.” In addition to a colostomy bag, I had a wound vac. My surgeon told me he didn’t know whether I had enough of a colon left to reverse the colostomy. Regardless, I would not be strong enough to survive another surgery for months.
Several weeks later, my son and I walked around our neighborhood as I tried to build strength. As we climbed Oak Street toward Hill Road, I felt something pop in my abdomen just above the bag that hung from my left side. I made an appointment to see my surgeon. Despite what was evident to me, he seemed mystified that I suspected the soft protrusion from that spot might be a hernia. Yes, I had a stoma and a still-unhealed surgical incision running most of the length of my torso, but surely the integrity of my abdominal wall had not been breached. He shrugged, pronounced me mistaken, and sent me home.
I resent gaslighting. There was no way I would allow that jackass to cut into me again. I found a different surgeon to reverse the colostomy. He assured me he would repair the hernia at the same time. I was relieved to wake up from my fifth abdominal surgery without a bag. I was disappointed that the surgeon had neglected to repair the hernia, which protruded from my belly like a cantaloupe when I stood. When I asked why, he shrugged. Doctors seem to enjoy shrugging.
I hired a personal trainer. I worked to regain core strength. Another enormous hernia popped out from the lower right side of my abdomen. Eventually, it grew to the size of a honeydew. I asked my doctor about surgery to repair them both. I was uncomfortable and limited in movement because “melons” clung to my midsection. The last thing I wanted was another abdominal surgery, but this was ridiculous. “Lose weight,” my doctor told me, and shrugged. Oddly, I could find no evidence to support weight loss as a cure for hernias. Perhaps my Google-fu was insufficient for the task.
Two years later, my gallbladder had to come out. The surgery typically takes about half an hour. Because of the extensive scarring and adhesions from the third, fourth, and fifth abdominal surgeries, my sixth abdominal surgery took over three hours.
I’ve lost weight, although I still have virtually no core strength because of these impeding hernias. I haven’t tried to die recently, and I’ve been cancer-free for over 20 years. Plus, I have a new doctor who doesn’t gaslight or fat-shame me. Last week, she ordered a CT scan of my abdomen to pave the way for a referral to a surgeon to repair three hernias – I added a third one last summer. Yesterday morning, she called me with the scan results.
I’m not going to be able to have the hernias repaired yet. First, a gynecological oncologist will have to remove the three-inch tumor the scan discovered on my remaining ovary. I wish I had endured early menopause instead, but hindsight and all that.
I’m glad I got the scan. Otherwise, it might have been too late before I learned that I had unlocked the cancer trifecta achievement and that I needed that seventh abdominal surgery to save my life for the fifth (or is it the sixth?) time.
“Good thing you’re a cat person,” my sister told me earlier this year. “You need to borrow all their extra lives.”
The research into my horse thief ancestor has gotten really crazy. I know I have bored all my friends with the minutiae of this story at every opportunity, but I swear, every new document turns up more drama and bizarre stuff. Now I’m dragging other people into it – and not just people I’m related to by blood.
See, about 35 years ago, I married this guy called Skip, and since we have a kid together, I’ve spent quality research time on his family, too. Some of our friends may remember that after Skip and Matt’s mom died, Matt and I were cleaning out the books and found a missing family bible with genealogy info in it. The Bible originally belonged to a childless woman named Averilla Hollis Franck. Back before the Bible went missing, I had copied the genealogy pages and was stumped by them. The bible recorded the births, deaths, and marriages of several families. Their names were Hollis, Franck, Humlong, Luckes, and Smith.
Here’s the twist: the Smiths, who had inherited the Bible, weren’t related by blood or marriage to any of the other people listed in it. I researched them all, though, and knew the Hollises came to Kentucky from Baltimore County, Maryland.
Actually, Matt and I found THREE family Bibles that day. One of them was a Bible belonging to Fanny Gash, their 3rd great-grandmother, who was the wife of the earliest Smith listed in that previously missing Bible. Fanny’s Bible cleared up a big mystery and confirmed her maiden surname (her full maiden name was Frances Ann Gilbert Gash) and identified her parents (Bernard Preston Gash and Isabella Barr), but I hadn’t gotten any further, and I still hadn’t figured out what connected her to the rest of the people in the big bible. Gash is a relatively rare surname; besides a couple in Virginia, I found none in her grandparents’ generation. I couldn’t find her family before they reached Kentucky. I set Fanny aside and started chasing other rabbits.
My horse thief, Elisha Perkins, was born in Baltimore County, Maryland in 1697. As I dug through the St. George’s Parish records of births, deaths, and marriages in 17th and early 18th-century Baltimore County, I kept coming across the names Hollis and Osborne. I had researched the Hollis family and knew they were connected to the Osbornes by marriage a century later.
Then I noticed that some Gilberts lived along the same small stream as my Perkins ancestors right about 1700. Huh. That was interesting. Gilbert was one of Fanny Gash’s middle names. And then I found a Gilbert-Osborne marriage in the early 1700s. I wondered if that might explain Fanny Gash’s connection to the Hollis-Osbornes a century later. If I could just find her people!
Now, you may think you see where this is heading. Or, maybe you’ve leaped to a conclusion. (Don’t. Leaping to conclusions is dangerous and you can get hurt.)
It took me a while because I’m dense and was distracted by a horse thief, but I finally decided to broaden my search to see what sorts of interactions there might have been between the Perkins and Gilbert families since they lived so close together. (And just for the merry hell of it, I included the Hollises and Osbornes, because I really ought to have fleshed that out better back when I was chasing Fanny Gash.)
I’ll be damned if I didn’t find a Gilbert-Gash wedding. And then another.
In the court records, I found a guardianship case. Thomas Gash died in 1703 leaving an orphaned toddler son also named Thomas Gash. His neighbor, Richard Perkins, was made administrator of Thomas Gash’s estate, and was therefore responsible for little Thomas Gash’s inheritance. Richard Perkins was my horse thief Elisha’s father. Then Richard died, and the horse thief’s widowed mother, Mary Perkins, became the new administratrix of Thomas Gash’s estate. Young Thomas Gash and the horse thief Elisha Perkins knew each other very well as children.
I traced the Gash family, this time in the other direction. I found young Thomas’s wedding to Johannah Ashford, and then found their son Thomas who married Elizabeth Gilbert and moved to Kentucky right after the Revolution, and then found their son Bernard, who was – you guessed it – Fanny Gash’s father.
I hadn’t initially found the Gashes in Baltimore County because they were in Virginia. Yes – I had found them several years ago and not realized it.
Young Thomas’s family and some other Baltimore County people, including Elizabeth Gilbert’s family and Elisha Perkins, had gone there after Elisha’s conviction for horse thievery. Thomas (III) and Elizabeth married there and later returned to Baltimore County. I would have found them years ago if I had broadened my Baltimore County search by a generation. Elisha died in Virginia, but his son ended up in North Carolina, where he bred horses, and the Gashes went to Kentucky.
I still can’t figure out why Fanny Gash’s son ended up with Averilla Hollis’s Bible, except that Fanny lived with Averilla’s spinster sister Martha all of her adult life – at least, after her husband left her shortly after their son, Henry Bernard/Barnet/Bernet Smith was born. Martha Hollis willed her entire estate to Henry Bernard Smith.
So, no, Skip and I aren’t related, but my 8th great-grandparents cared for Skip and Matt’s orphaned 6th great-grandfather.
I’m going to be useless for the foreseeable future. I started digging into one of my ancestors over the weekend, thinking I’d learn a few fun facts about an orphaned waif who went to live with his uncle near the Great Dismal Swamp and ended up a prosperous landowner when the Carolina backcountry opened up. I had no idea what I was in for.
Over three generations – from about 1670 to 1804 – the story covers nearly every stereotype and significant historical event in the South. It starts with a criminal transported to the American colonies and ends with a will that mentions the direct ancestor of two Triple Crown winners.
The in-between is anything but boring and sedate. Across Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and both Carolinas, it’s a story of fur trading, horse thieving, adultery, multiple prison stints, prosecutions for fornication and disturbing the peace, herds of illegitimate children, Conestoga wagons, battles over inheritance, grudges, forgiveness, the Earl of Granville, a Moravian Bishop straight from Germany, wilderness explorers, the founding of Salem NC, the French & Indian Wars, murder, the State of Franklin, colonial militias, questioned patriotism, slavery, horse races, political influence including a potential run for the U.S. presidency, and a famous descendant of both the Godolphin Arabian (King of the Wind himself!) and the Darley Arabian – not to mention at least three other famous sires of what would become Thoroughbreds, Standardbreds, and American Quarter Horses.
I have never wished so much that I could plumb the depths of my aunt Laura Nichols’ equine knowledge to learn more about these famous creatures. I’m doing as much research on the horses named in John Perkins’s will as I am the people.
And every time I find another document, I find more drama.
I have two meetings, a hearing, and a doctor’s appointment this week. Other than that, I will be locked into position in front of my screen and behind my keyboard until the New Year.
You can send food, but I won’t be taking any calls. I have genealogy to do.
This is the true story of the greatest interspecies war in recorded history.
The setting is Western Australia, October 1932, so it’s mid-spring Down Under. Spring is migration season when waterfowl and songbirds fly overhead in murmurations and sharp V-formations. Australia also has a migratory bird that does not fly. Emus are large critters. When they migrate, the image that should come to your mind is the wildebeest of Africa, the caribou of the Arctic, or the bison formerly of North America. The 1932 spring migration was the invasion that started the Great Emu Wars.
A decade before, veterans of World War I had been given land in the Western Australia Outback as payment for their service. Western Australia had been threatening to secede for thirty years, and Parliament hoped that the new settlers would turn the tide. When the Depression hit, Parliament encouraged those new farmers to plant more wheat. An abundant wheat crop was growing just in time for migration season.
General Napoleon Bonaparte said, “An army marches on its stomach.” Migrating giant flightless birds discovered that wheat fields make excellent forage. They tore gaps in fences, gorged themselves on wheat, spoiled the crop with their big feet, and invited their allies, the rabbits, to run amok in the fields.
Emu
In Alfred Hitchcock’s classic movie The Birds, a character hears that birds have attacked a school and tried to kill children. Skeptical, she says, “Birds have been on this planet since Archaeopteryx, a hundred and forty million years ago. Doesn’t it seem odd that they’d wait all that time to start a… war against humanity?”
Emu Soldier
A single emu can strip a garden in a couple of hours. A handful of emus can devastate a wheatfield in half a day. Twenty thousand emus were making brisk business of acres and acres of farmland. These birds had declared war on humanity. Humanity had to defend itself.
Australian Defence Minister Sir George Pearce
At first, the farmers fired rifles to scare off the birds, but the sheer number of invaders overwhelmed them. They needed something more. So, they got an audience with the Australian Minister of Defense. They demanded machine guns like those they had used at Gallipoli and ammunition to repel the enemy incursion. And since Western Australia, where the mood favored secession, now asked for federal government help, help was politically expedient.
But the farmers were a dozen years rusty in deploying heavy weaponry. So, the Defense Minister sent highly-trained military personnel in troop transports to fight. Since this mission was as much a military action as a public relations opportunity – surely those grateful Western Australians would stop their silly secessionist talk now! – the Defense Minister also sent a cinematographer to record the whole thing. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
So, on the side of the humans: Major G.P.W. Meredith in command of the 7th Heavy Battery of the Royal Australian Artillery, two Lewis machine guns from World War I, 10,000 rounds of ammunition, and two personnel carriers in the form of Model Ts.
Maj. Gwynydd Purves Wynne-Aubrey Meredith
On the enemy’s side: an unidentified emu general and his barefoot battalions. Sun Tzu said, “A good commander is unconcerned with fame.” I’m sure this is why we don’t know the name of the humble emu commander.
Unidentified Emu Commander
Because as we will see, the emus had studied Sun Tzu. The Australians had not.
Historian Barbara Tuchman said, “War is the unfolding of miscalculations.” The first miscalculation happened in late October when the humans delayed their participation in the war on account of rain. The sun finally came out on November 2nd; the two sides could play ball. But the birds were no longer clumped in large groups that were easy to find.
Sun Tzu said, “Allow the enemy to think you foolish because their arrogance will cost them the battle.” Being too foolish to come in from the rain, the emus had spread out over miles and miles of farmland while the humans stayed dry. The emus knew exactly what they were doing.
Eventually, someone spotted about 50 emus together. Farmers tried to herd them into an ambush, but the birds scattered. History must assume that the emu commander rallied his troops by reminding them of Sun Tzu’s famous advice: “Be extremely subtle, even formless.” The birds refused to stay in formation, and their tactics confounded the Aussies.
Emu Gunner
The strategy of the emus was simple. Having read Sun Tzu, they knew that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” So, they didn’t fight. They ran away.
Running emus are difficult to target. They’re big birds, sure, but they have tiny heads. Feathers make their bodies seem bigger than they actually are, and they run 30 miles an hour. Salvos from the Lewis guns missed every single one. By the end of the first day, the humans claimed to have killed a dozen birds. Witnesses were skeptical. The cinematographer had caught it all on film. Exhausted from their exertions, the 7th Artillery decided to take a day of rest.
Two days later, on November 4th, Major Meredith received intelligence that a thousand enemy combatants had assembled their forces at a dam. A gathering like this was tailor-made for the Lewis guns. This time, the weapons could surely subdue the enemy and compel a surrender. The humans set up a single Lewis gun and aimed carefully. Staccato fire leaped from the gun, which almost immediately jammed. By the time the soldiers unjammed it, the birds were long gone.
Model T Armored Personnel Carrier with Lewis Guns (actual photo)
Another human miscalculation was believing that a Model T’s top speed was 45 miles per hour. That top speed assumes paved roads. In the unpaved fields of the Outback, the Model T could barely reach 15 miles per hour, and emus are twice as fast. Only two Model Ts were in the fray. They couldn’t keep up, and the bumpy terrain made firing guns from them impossible.
Napoleon said, “You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.” By November 6th, the fourth day of the campaign, apoplectic army observers noted that “each pack seems to have its own leader now—a big black-plumed bird which stands fully six feet high and keeps watch while his mates carry out their work of destruction, and warns them of our approach!”
On November 8th, after six days of battle without a confirmed kill, the Australian Parliament called for a cease-fire. It recalled the 7th Artillery, which had spent only a quarter of those 10,000 rounds of ammunition. Major Meredith reported that his troops had killed hundreds of birds, but the newspapers scoffed at that. The cinematographer had evidence. Word on the ground was that maybe 50 birds had been hit, and perhaps a dozen died.
Actual Newspaper Article
Western Australia was still desperate for relief. Four days after surrendering the battlefield, Parliament relented and sent Major Meredith and his Lewis guns to the Outback again.
Machiavelli said that when the enemy knows your plans, you must change those plans. Instead of one bullet for every two birds, the Aussies brought along half a million rounds this time and prepared for a pitched battle. But Sun Tzu said, “There is no instance of a nation benefitting from prolonged warfare.” Some Australian evidently stumbled across a copy of the Art of War, read that passage, and recommended that the Great Emu War should end for the good of the country. The Australians surrendered the battlefield again less than a month later, on December 10th.
Ultimately, Major Meredith reported that the 7th Artillery had fired 9,860 of its half-million rounds and killed 986 emus – one bird for every ten bullets. His numbers could have been accurate. We know this ratio is possible because a farmer hit an emu with his truck a few days after the detente. The bird’s autopsy revealed nine bullets had been in its body for about two weeks before the truck killed it.
A few months after Australia declared the Great Emu War ended, Western Australia voted overwhelmingly to secede. Secession never happened, though – probably because the people were still too busy trying to fend off guerrilla attacks by emus. Despite pleas from farmers in 1934, 1943, and 1948, the government never sent more help.
As that same character in Hitchcock’s The Birds observed, “The very concept of war with birds is unimaginable. Why, if that happened, we wouldn’t have a chance! How could we possibly hope to fight them?”
Eventually, farmers learned how to build emu-proof fences.
*This post was originally a presentation to the Æsthetic Club on 25 April 2023.
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