Monday, October 30, 2006
How I Spent My Summer Vacation
by Donny Charles
Hittin’ the Road
We left Mayer July 25th headed for the midwest to attend the wedding of a dear friend and hang out with old buddies in Ohio for the month of August. We have a couple of ‘gas money’ gigs at the front and back end but basically this is a vacation and we’re ready. Deb is particularly ready to see things that are green.
The first night we stayed with Jerry & Karen Page in their cool new place outside of Albuquerque. They ran the Prescott Folklore Center for many years and are old friends from “May in the Mountains” days on the ranch. We played some tunes, bought a banjo case and Karen fed us up good for the road.
We would need it. Let me say that neither one of us is overly fond of the I-40 drive twixt Albuquerque and Oklahoma City. It is stupidly hot, we have no AC and we get absolutely no relief until we hit the Arkansas line. Not that much there either.
The good news is that after 15 hours of driving (something we try hard not to do much of anymore), we’re staying in Fayetteville with Kelly Mulhollan & Donna Stjerna of Still on the Hill. These are two of our favorite people and favorite musicians. They are powerful artists with a marvelous vision and their enthusiasm is infectious. They were just releasing their new Toucan Jam kid’s CD, “A World of Music”. This is just a beautiful record; they are producing the kind of music you can raise healthy children on and their adult work is killer too. Kelly’s “Never Ending Conversation” has been in regular rotation at our house for about a year.
The next night we spent at my cousin Sarah’s in Bowling Green. She and her wacko Kentucky husband Harvey have built the world’s greatest pool house, the inside of it smells like a cedar forest and is one of the most comfortable places we have ever stayed.
On Friday evening we played the Eden Song Concert Series in Cincinnati. Eden Park has this beautiful outdoor bandshell that we got to share with Wishing Chair, guitarist Brian Henke and some great local talent. We stayed with our good friends, Pamela Temple and Spencer Funk. Pam DJs for WNKU out of Newport and she and Spencer make up a very fun band called Wild Carrot.
Did I mention yet that all this time it has been stupidly hot! We’ve simply traded our 100+ degree dry heat for the sweltering discomfort of 95 degrees & 90% humidity. The kind of heat that keeps you just moist enough so that your skin starts to turn to soil and grow stuff.
The Hunsicker Affair
Now the whole excuse for this vacation has been to attend the wedding of one Oscar Aaron Hunsicker III, late of Cuyahoga Falls. Oscar is one of the first people I met in 1970 when I went away to college at Ohio Wesleyan in Delaware, Ohio. We’ve been friends ever since.
So Osk is marrying his high school sweetheart, Barbara, on the 40th anniversary of his having told her that he loved her. How sweet is that? Sweet enough to get written up in the Akron News as a feature story. This was THE most anticipated mid-life wedding the world has ever seen, people came from all over the country to attend. Oscar had a grin that just wouldn’t stop while the rest of us just leaked.
Sally Godfrey of the Winchester Godfreys, another one of my oldest friends, was in attendance as was Oscar’s old roommate Gene Ward. We had many adventures together as young hippie wannabes and it was cool to get to see them both.
One adventure included going down to the Southern Ohio Folk Festival in the spring of 1971 where we saw Pete Seeger play to a coliseum full of folks that would have done ANYTHING he asked them to do that night. I had never seen such charisma and, come to think of it, haven’t seen it since.
It was on that same trip that I bonded with southern Ohio in general - hilly, backwoods country. Athens is home to Ohio University and has always attracted the artsy/craftsy crowd; it was hip back then and it’s still hip. There is also a deeply rooted hillfolk contingent, many of them ancestors of the first pioneers in that country. It’s just the right mix of hippies and bubbas for my taste.
Athens, Center of the Known Universe
We spent the bulk of our time just outside of Athens with our friends Ron Hosenfeld and Betsy Beebe. They live off the grid in much the same manner as we did on the ranch so this place always feels right to us and has the advantage of being inhabited by some of our dearest friends. Ron has done all our promotional pictures for years, he’s now ‘retired’ (whatever that means). Betsy kept us in good health by feeding us the best fresh produce from her wonderful garden.
Their house sits on the edge of a cliff so that when you exit to the rear deck, you are suspended in the trees. It’s a magical setting. We spent the bulk of our time messing around in Ron’s new shop. Deb made things out of wood and discovered her inner cartoonist while painting the shop doors in bright, whimsical images. I played around with mangling iron in the forge and recalled that I really do love that work.
All during this trip we are in contact with communities of folks doing things they love to do and do well. Enjoying good music, good art, good homemade food. This rubs off on you and that’s just another reason I love to go back there.
We leave Ron & Betsy’s at the end of August, much to our dog Yippy’s dismay. She loves their place, has the run of the woods, and can earn valuable wildlife credits at what she refers to as ‘Southcamp’. The night before we left she was honored at a solemn awards ceremony where she received her Squirrel, Wren, Deer and Turtle badges.
Hunting Buckeyes
We headed north to Charm, Ohio in the heart of Amish country and a house concert at the Hazlett’s. Toby & Denise are a pair of back-to-the-land-ers homeschooling their kids on an ‘english’ island surrounded by the Dutch. Their kids are quite talented and shared a song they had written and it’s still in our heads. We sing it to Yippy.
The Hazletts put us up in a wonderful cabin on the property with an outdoor shower and an outhouse (we love this stuff!) and, after the show, I was decompressing on the porch around 1AM when I heard a horse and buggy come trotting hard down the road. Them Dutchmen can party some too.
The show was great fun and some old friends, Mark & Janet Bokenkamp and Jim & Mindy Ingalls, were in attendance along with their families. Jim is an old horseshoeing buddy and Mark is one of this country’s finest blacksmiths. He made the rings for my first marriage and I have always blamed him personally for its failure. He takes it pretty good.
We stayed with Mark & Janet and their two girls the next night then went to visit an old music buddy, Bob Bellamy, at his farm and studio in Bucyrus. Bob and I were in several bands together in the old days and he remains one of my favorite playing partners. He and Wendy Barlow are a wonderful hammered dulcimer and harp duo, they have a number of great instrumental CDs out featuring American standards that are worth checking out. Bob and his son Ben regaled us with some duets that they have worked out, passing the tradition on.
Hoosierland
Now we head for Crawfordsville, Indiana to spend several days with my brother, Steve, his wife, C.J., and daughter, Caity. Steve is the editor of the Wabash College Alumni magazine and an extremely talented writer, musician and photographer. We do a lot of giggling when we’re together. They are currently being completely consumed by their horse herd.
Deb had booked us a gig at Coffee Grounds in Terre Haute. C.J. and Steve came and took pictures while our friend, Ashley Drake, who has just moved from Prescott to Indianapolis, surprised us by showing up. One of Ashley’s earliest memories is being bounced on her dad’s knee to “Mama Start the Fire”; train `em early I say. Proprietor Pete Wilson and his wife Jackie provided us with a good night’s sleep in their OWN bed, a biscuits and gravy breakfast, some great stories and a couple of new traveling mugs full of good coffee.
Getting from Terre Haute to Fairfield, Iowa was the only time we took the interstate on the whole trip back home. The rest of the time we took the ‘blue highways’. The pace is more relaxed and you get to skip the whole interstate culture.
Coffee in Paradise
Fairfield, Iowa was a surprise to us. Such a small town with so many choices of good food and culture. We played at the Café Paradiso in front of a stunning mural depicting the Oracle at Delphi on a great sound system to a wonderful listening crowd. It’s a tough life. Steve, the proprietor/coffeemaster, and I talked late into the night and Meret, foodmistress, kept us plied with all the necessities for life.
We awoke early Sunday morning to a dropped-sky rain and the best cup of coffee ever and that includes Kona coffee in Kona. Fairfield is the home of the Mahareshi Mahesh Yogi’s (he of Beatles fame) University of Management, it’s a magnificent arts town with a great community that all seemed to be gathering around Steve’s coffee at the Paradiso that morning. Lots of interesting folks to talk to, many of whom look 10 years younger than their chronological age. Perhaps it’s the Ayurvedic diets.
When the crush at the Cafe got to be too much we motored westward on US highways through Iowa, stopping in Fairbury, Nebraska for the night. Our goal was to travel home avoiding the interstates for Labor Day weekend, we’re not too concerned with time at this point. The next morning we went looking for breakfast in a town too busy rebuilding its downtown to have anything open on Labor Day. So we headed west hungry and missing Steve’s coffee with the vague notion of going by Republic, Kansas - the town my great grandfather left in a covered wagon in 1907 to seek his fortune in New Mexico.
I’ve had pieces of a song in my head for many years that includes a line about my grandpa’s mother being “…buried back home by the Republican River/In the country that she loved the best.” Grandpa used to tell the story of going back to Kansas as a boy to attend his mother’s funeral and having to ride with his brother in the hog car because they couldn’t afford seats on the train. He said he had never cared much for pork since.
Kansas
We took the northern route through Kansas. Driving through Kansas is not normally Deb’s idea of a good time. Our last crossing occurred a decade earlier to the south - endless miles of granaries sailing the horizon like ships on a vast sea of devolving agriculture. It involved the unsuccessful dodging of Prairie Chickens that would hurl themselves at our bumper, leaving a wake of feathers drifting behind. Their suicidal tendencies caused us to look them up in our fieldguide, where it says “uncommon and very local”. Go figure. But this time Kansas showed us a hilly, sometimes treed country with rivers and tidy towns nestled along their banks.
We stopped in Belleville first. Nice little country town with a square, a closed eatery, and a siren going off for no particular reason we could discern. Then we drive on a series of dirt roads to Republic - one church, one feedmill, closed cafe, and the smell of folks at home cooking meat. We visit the Pawnee Village on a butte west of town then back-track through town to hunt for a cemetery. We stop to ask the only person we have seen, an older gentleman who describes himself as “retarded, I mean, retired”, if there is a cemetery in town. He allows as how there is not, I ask then where do you bury your dead people and he says they’re scattered around here in the country, who ya lookin’ for? I said Charleses. He said well you just passed Mike Charles’ house back there on the corner and the old Charles place is out on the highway a couple miles and Mrs. Charles still lives there and come to think of it Mike and the rest of the family are probably out there right now. You can’t miss it.
The Homestead
So we drive by the old homestead and we know it’s the old homestead ’cause it says Valley Point Farm - Charles Homestead - 1868 in stone. There’s a tall guy about my age in the woods beside the house burning brush and he waves as we do the slow drive-by. Deb says we oughta stop, I say these people are Charleses and we might be there for awhile. But we’re here now says Deb. Yeah and I’m thinkin’ they’ve probably got food!
We pull in the driveway, I get out and the tall guy in the woods comes toward me as I advance toward him. “Are you Mike?” I ask. “No, I’m John” says John. “My name is Don Charles” says I and John’s eyes get big and he says “That was my Dad’s name” and I might have said “Mine too” before he said “We sort of look alike, don’t we?”
And we do. I can’t recall the pleasantries exchanged next because I was busy hunting and finding the parts of him that seemed to match up with parts of me. I think he was doing the same thing. Then his brother Mike comes out, shorter but with similar features and sporting the same goat-like growth I have on my chin. I recite my patriarchal lineage, John & Mike go through theirs, and it turns out our great-grandfathers were brothers.
Now I swear we did our best not to invite ourselves to Labor Day lunch but we ate good anyway. Ostensibly we went inside to view family pictures normally housed in the attic but brought out earlier that day. There we see pictures of people we know - Grandpa in his dress hat & Grandma, Great Grandmother Charles, Uncle Kamp, Aunt Louise and Aunt Lucille - all taken at the farm years ago. We meet Jean, Don’s widow, John’s biologist wife, Mandy, and their eldest son, Hayes, who’s at Kansas State in Manhattan studying cerealogy.
The farm occupies the V between two rivers east of Republic. The country rolls gently and the soil looks fertile - mostly corn, beans and alfalfa in small family farms. Nothing much else going on in the area and it particularly lacks that voracious sense of growth that we know and so love in the West. This is truly rural country.
The old house is beautiful with big trees around it and a barn and outbuildings in the back. John said it was traditionally the uncles’ job to keep the grounds clean and that was what he was doing when we drove by. He and Mike and a sister, who died several years ago of leukemia, all grew up there and deeply loved the place. If work is love made visible (and it is), it shows.
There are some other things showing as well. I was struck by their obvious love of the land but also their love of family history. They were proud to be part of a Welsh pioneer family, one that had stayed on the land. They love telling stories, have a great sense of humor, an obvious love of learning and they all sing in the choir. They also have good table manners. And in the manner of good country folk they ’scraped’ together an 8 or 10-course meal featuring Mike’s meatloaf and finishing with Mandy’s Friendship bread - there wasn’t a thing on the table that wasn’t outstanding. We oughta eat like this all the time.
They also don’t show their age. I would have guessed both John & Mike as the same age or younger than me. Later in the afternoon, after we had taken a couple of pictures standing in front of the house and the homestead sign, Mike took us to the cemetery where our great great grandparents, the original Welsh immigrants, are buried. It’s on a lovely little rise looking down the valley.
We Gotta Go Now
We left them with CDs and the promise to return. When he learned we were musicians, Mike told us about an old opera house in Concordia that does shows and he knows the woman that used to book it and wouldn’t it be fun for us to play there. These are my kind of people. They seemed legitimately pleased to have met us and to know that the Tom Charles line is alive and well.
Now perhaps it’s the fact that this occurred on the way home from a six-week vacation where I got to visit a number of seminal friend and family communities as well as get introduced into vibrant new ones. Or maybe I was listening to the voices of the ancestors I carry around in my head or just listening to my wife for a change. But I did a good thing, reached out a little and got paid back in a currency of great value to me. And I feel where I come from a bit more deeply.
We crossed the Republican River drainages all the way out of Kansas and camped at Prairie Dog State Park on a lake whose fish jumped and slapped the water with moonlight. The geese honked their way through the mist the next morning and so did we.