Old Duluth
            for Louis Jenkins

We still walk down the hillside
where bedrock surfaces
like the back of a huge gray pike
come to glare at you
before it breaks your line.
A raven alights on top of a white pine
then flings himself off,
while a cottontail springs away
through the clearing where teenagers
leave their empty vodka bottles.
Everything that enters through my eyes
arrives at my brain upside down
which is how the lake
has become the sky at last.
Here’s the very trail we used to take
to come and listen and laugh
when you were alive, and here
is the end of it. I look down
into the future, and there’s the past
rising up one last time.


“Old Duluth” by Connie Wanek. © Connie Wanek. Reprinted with permission of the poet. (buy now)

In the Northern Hemisphere, today is the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest-known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. Many of the most ancient stone structures made by human beings were designed to pinpoint the precise date of the solstice. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Some ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires. In ancient Egypt and Syria, people celebrated the winter solstice as the sun’s birthday. In ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even wars were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

 Today is the birthday of author Edward Hoagland (books by this author). Hoagland was born in 1932 in New York City and grew up in New Canaan, Connecticut. His father was a prosperous lawyer, and very straitlaced, and after high school, Hoagland literally ran away to join the circus. He tended the big cats for the Ringling Bros' Barnum and Bailey Circus, an experience he turned into his first novel, Cat Man (1955), published when he was just 23. His father had tried to stop publication, fearing the novel would ruin the family’s reputation and sully Hoagland’s sister’s chance of marrying, but it didn’t work, and the novel was published to great acclaim. Hoagland was in the Army at the time and only found out about all the hubbub when his superior officer approached him and said, “Private Hoagland, do you know your picture is in Time magazine?”

Hoagland wrote another novel, The Circle Home (1960), and then started traveling. He took a series of trips to Africa and Alaska, which he called “the top hat of the continent,” and started writing ruminative essays about travel, nature, and humanity’s role in the universe.

Edward Hoagland’s books include The Peacock’s Tail (1965), Children Are Diamonds (2013), and Sex and the River Styx (2011), in which he writes, “I’ve been publishing books for forty years, and I don’t have a fastball anymore, just a knuckleball, spitball, and other Satchel Paige stuff.”

When asked why writing about nature matters, Edward Hoagland answered: “Because people will want to know what those wild places were like when there are no more wild places. There will be no more wild places! There will be national parks that will be like glorified zoos. But there simply will not be wild places.”

The Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock on this date in 1620. They had in hand a charter to settle in the Virginia Colony, which at that time stretched up to the mouth of the Hudson River. Bad weather had forced them off course, and they first landed on the shores of North America at Cape Cod. Because winter was imminent and sea travel was dangerous, they decided to stay where they were rather than set out again for the Virginia Colony. The problem was that their settlement contract specified Virginia. So they hastily drew up a new charter, which they called the Mayflower Compact, promising to create a “civil Body Politick” with “just and equal laws” that would be loyal to the English king. Every adult male had to sign it before he and his family were allowed to go ashore. Most people spent the winter on board the ship, while a few intrepid souls went ashore to begin building some shelter.

The settlers’ new home was not uninhabited wilderness, of course. The region was home to the Wampanoag, which means the People of the First Light. At that time, as many as 40,000 Wampanoag people lived in 67 villages in the area. Their numbers weren’t apparent to the English settlers at first, because the Wampanoag spent the winter living farther inland, in valleys and forests. In the spring, they returned closer to shore, to fish and plant crops. Over that winter of 1620, the Pilgrims occasionally glimpsed a Wampanoag person, but the two parties didn’t meet formally until March 1621. They made a treaty with Ousamequin — known to the English as Massasoit — to establish peaceful relations. One man, named Squanto, had lived in London as a slave, and he agreed to live with the Pilgrims and show them how to plant native crops.

About 15 years later, those who came from the original colony and spread into Connecticut massacred the Pequots living in southeastern Connecticut.

It was on this day in 1913 that the very first crossword puzzle appeared in a newspaper. It was the invention of a journalist named Arthur Wynne, who worked for The New York World. He called it a "Word-Cross," but the typesetter made a mistake and called it a "Cross-Word" and the name stuck. Early on, the editors found it difficult to avoid making errors in the puzzles, so they decided to drop it. Hundreds of addicted readers wrote in to protest, so it was reinstated after one week.

In 1924, two men named Richard Simon and Lincoln Schuster decided to set up a publishing house, and as they were casting about for ideas of what to publish, they decided to try a book of crossword puzzles. That book sold half a million copies in less than a year. The book's success launched a worldwide crossword puzzle craze and helped put Simon & Schuster on the publishing map. The enthusiasm for crosswords also helped to drive up the sales for dictionaries and encyclopedias. Libraries were forced to ration the use of reference books. By the end of the 1930s, most daily newspapers featured crossword puzzles. One of the last newspapers to do so was The New York Times, which finally began printing a daily puzzle in 1950.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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