Back Home Again....

I'm sitting in a Panera Bread at Jefferson Point in Fort Wayne, IN. Connect info at the bottom.

Wrote the following at an ISM Historic Site earlier today:

"I am sitting quietly, alone, looking into the garden of the Gene Stratton Porter Historic Site, a garden Gene started and was recreated under the last curator’s hard work and guidance. Too late in the year for wildflowers and the songbirds have to compete with motors on boats racing around Sylvan Lake. But the air is still a peaceful one. Clouds in the sky but blue shows through the fluff and even sunshine breaks through for a few moments at a time. My laptop is on a concrete patio table behind the Wildflower Wood Cabin that Gene had built after her Limberlost dried up to the point she could no longer study wetland birds and moths. Chipmunks are scurrying around behind me, and a young rabbit is nibbling away to my left. At least 5 species of birds can be heard in the canopy above…. Most are at mid-level canopy, though as I walked down from the parking lot, past the grave site of Gene and her daughter Jeannette, hawk startled and shot up from the ground to the high canopy.

I’m here because of family. Families motivate individuals within them. In my case they have and continue to motivate me to move on. After only an hour or so today I felt compelled to come to the quiet and heavenly scented place that a woman from a hundred years ago who intrigues me carved from the woods by this lake, albeit a man made lake."

Okay back to the present at the coffee shop. My older boomer brother was the one I had the argument with... amazing how the kid inside us can pop out so easily. It just takes the right trigger. My brother wanted me to defer to him as I would have as a kid unless I wanted "pounded." But as a woman in her late forties no way, no how I'm deferring to anyone! Especially not my stupid fart faced brother. (Sorry guess I'm not acting very mature either.) Anyway... childhood wounds can so easily surface at times. I wonder what our wounds our "cohort" shares and which trips our angry switch in a lot of us. Certainly not the selfish classification that I don't think we deserve. Nor the refusing to grow old with grace crap. Where do they get this stuff? I guess the whole society is just so competitive that many folks have bought into the we have to war with each other mentality. If we are busy fighting with each other we can't put that energy to work positively and concretely. For example... a late-boomer friend, Wes, who runs the Austin group turned me on to Freecycle. Check it out. It is the posted link for this entry. Won't make an entry tomorrow, maybe Monday.


Speed test for wireless (download isn't too shabby):

2004-06-05 19:51:24 EST: 1182 / 355
Your download speed : 1211356 bps, or 1182 kbps.
A 147.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 363886 bps, or 355 kbps.

Purdue or Per Don't

I'm at The Village Coffee House in West Lafayette, IN and it is a slow connection (see below), but a most tolerable environment... And the coffee is good. Purdue is wireless but I'm not sure that I will be here long enough to make it worthwhile to register as a guest and get a passworded account.

2004-06-03 11:49:30 EST: 81 / 99
Your download speed : 83043 bps, or 81 kbps.
A 10.1 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 101852 bps, or 99 kbps.

I'm here at the heart of my journey. I'm writing a book on Gene Stratton Porter an Indiana writer who worked one hundred years ago. As is so often the case society makes images of people conform to expectations rather than reality and that is certainly what happened with her. She's known as a racist curmudgeon, and unfortunately she did write some things that were not at all appreciative of diversity... but we all reflect the culture we are indoctrinated into and "Heavens to Betsy" (I'm practicing my covert blending techniques) give her a break this was the midwest of 100 years ago... KKK country -- compared to her neighbors she was absolutely enlightened. Anyway I am intrigued by her business strategies, her natural history studies documentation of then disappearing (now gone) wetlands, and her influence on the environmental movement so I am "back home again in Indiana" and busy making contacts with curators, archivists, and editors as well as visiting friends and family... and writing up a storm. Not sure where I will head next... depends who is home and where I can find a free place to crash. I'm currently staying with the woman I studied with in graduate school... a wonderfully eclectic woman named Myrdene. Her most recent edited volume is linked above. She is one of the best minds on the planet. I encourage anyone who can read such intensely rich text to read her work, if you can't make it through that though, read volumes she has edited.

I'm off to work.

June already... My 99 year old neighbor says the passing of time just keeps speeding up. Wowza... and there is always more to do. I'm brainstorming all sorts of simply mad and totally obscure ideas on the road as I'm driving. And stopping and talking to friends I don't get to see even half often enough has been quite stimulating as well. I'm currently thinking about how to "help" a process along. When I was chatting with my friend Barbara (with whom I stayed when I stopped in Lawrence, KS), who is the director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. I suddenly had the realization that the most critical omission of women in society is in the area of women's knowledge. We need a cultural repository for women's information. Of course there are the women's studies programs across the country but so much of what we women know we have to rediscover each generation as there is no one place that women consistently pass through in life. I think there need to be regional (or better yet) local centers where women can stop in and find out about women's stuff whether it be woman-centered history, health, writing, art, design, technology, spirituality, politics, economics and the like... but that are not feminist nor academic based. Hmmmm.... Of course this also relates to my Gene Stratton Porter research that I'm doing while I'm here... in addition to just writing my little heart out.

Anyway... I'm in Illinois now and trying to decided where I want my first of many stops in Indiana -- my old stomping grounds -- to be. It may be Indy, W. Lafayette, Bloomington, Sylvan Lake, Ft. Wayne, Columbia City, Geneva, South Bend.... who knows? It will depend on where I can find the best place to write and do research.

Right now I'm at a hotel in Effingham, IL that I got a deal on by stopping at a rest stop Tourist info stop on I70 which was staffed with a visitor services person who found me the closest place I could stay with wi fi access and that had a great discount promo going. Smart State policy on Tourism to get people to stay in the state. If she hadn't have been there I'd have driven another hour when I was really too tired to drive just so I could get to Indiana that was my goal destination for the day for no particular reason.

The speed test here showed pretty good connectivity:

2004-06-01 07:32:42 EST: 1934 / 626
Your download speed : 1980889 bps, or 1934 kbps.
A 241.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 641943 bps, or 626 kbps.

Time for coffee.

“Dodge City… Mr Dillon Mr Dillon… there’s been a…Oh how thrillin’!” Sorry taking just a bit of license with a Late Boomer memory. Or, “Toto, I don’t think we’re in Colorado anymore…”That’s right… Kansas. I’m at at the Dodge House Hotel and Conference Center enjoying brunch and free wi fi connectivity. It is certainly a smart business move. I’m visiting towns and places I never would have stopped in without the incentive of free wireless internet access. Actually…the restaurant here doesn’t really have wireless access but the hotel does. Smart small towns will set themselves up for cutting edge technology asap and reap the rewards.

Speed test results from the lobby of Dodge House:

2004-05-30 14:05:11 EST: 470 / 209
Your download speed : 482033 bps, or 470 kbps.
A 58.8 KB/sec transfer rate.
Your upload speed : 214520 bps, or 209 kbps.


Might as well stay well behind the storm and stop and try to note the wonder of yesterday’s drive.

Santa Fe was a very nice but very quick stop. I suppose I’ve been jaded by the wealth of western treasures available in my hometown… fantastic scenery, artists and writers everywhere, dramatic vistas, skies that can take your breath away, and the intensity of light and vivid color. The O’Keeffe Museum changes exhibits on June 1 so I may well stop again on the way back. I had considered checking out a Labyrinth in Pueblo, CO, but no way was I going to drive into storms so I cut across CO 10 through what I can only describe as gorgeously desolate country. Then I fell down hill into Kansas.

Started the day with Pearl Jam singing about thought police to get the karma consumer mentality of Santa Fe out of my head… and northern New Mexico is a land of Rock and the scenes do Roll… so it seemed fine. Then I found that little virtual heaven in what may well be the “the most remote town” in America after listening to Peter Gabriel’s Passion… the soundtrack to “The Last Temptation of Christ.” It is my very favorite driving CD. But when I began to get tired I popped in some B52s. Today, as I drive into the Bible Belt I just had to hear Annie singing about her “Missionary Man.” And of course I have been listening to the Beatles tell me that “We’re on our way home.” I’m having fun and learning too. World culture is coming, like it or not. For me it is good to hear tables of blue haired ladies talking about satellite service and cloning… even if they do say, “Oh it is over my head.” Speaking of blue hair… I can’t wait until I’m gray enough to have electric blue highlights in my white hair. Our Gen is going to give the phrase Blue Haired Old Lady a whole new meaning.

Haven’t really had time to catch the news but I hear significant Watergate Characters (from the good side) have died. Kids from this century will soon think of Watergate the way we thought about The Teapot Dome Scandal. The more times I cycle through the same things from the differing perspectives that accompany different stages of life the more I understand the importance of generational knowledge.

Time to get going again.