HOME TO HALL HILL
The Capitol Ltd left Washington at 4:15 p.m. on Thursday, June 23rd. I was seated next to a Chinese guy who told me his name was Carlos, which he thought about briefly before telling me, a pause I noticed without deciding what it meant. He was a very nice guy and quite open and friendly. He even put on a mask when he heard that I was trying to avoid Covid. No one else on the train had a mask on. He had just graduated from high school in Washington. His father runs an engineering company in China and when he saw that Carlos was completely inept at mathematics by competitive Chinese standards and that the competition in China would eat him up, sent him to the United States for middle school and high school. Carlos discovered that he was already two years ahead of his fellow Americans in math and he suddenly became a math whiz. Apparently he has done quite well in school here and is going to Drexel in Philadelphia next year to study science. I asked him how he would fit in when he went back to China and he seemed quite confident that he would do well. For one thing, his English will be really good at that point.
He was on his way to visit a school friend in Chicago and was especially eager to have a window seat so that he could see the hills and valleys of West Virginia and Maryland and Pennsylvania. They were beautiful. Until dark, as we followed a stream through the low hills, the steep forested slopes were beautiful.
We didn‘t see many people and the area seemed to be quite poor with houses apart from each other in the hollows of the mountains. I assumed this was coal country where the mines, now threatened by other sources of energy, were what supported people, but we didn‘t see any signs of coal or coal mines. Sitting in the train I didn‘t know what state we were in and it didn‘t matter to the land or to me.
I did discover that I was riding right through Cumberland, Maryland, surrounded by mountains and the home my friend John Koegel whom I had always thought lived in a Cumberland, Maryland on the Atlantic coast. I thought of him as I rode through, imagining that he might have attended the church in the photograph.
I slept well, my first overnight on a coach seat reclining chair. Carlos spent the night looking at his cell phone and by morning was exhausted and slept the rest of the way to Chicago. It was chilly and I had offered him a sweater which he refused. By the time we got to Chicago we were only a half hour late.
By morning we had passed through Pennsylvania, which I assume was mostly farmland. Indiana was certainly flat farmland. But unlike North Carolina each of these farms had a silo beside the barn and a farm house close by and looked quite prosperous.
As a boy I had visited my mother‘s childhood farm in Buffalo, Illinois, and played in the barn and watched, Fred Hall, my grandfather pump water from a well in the yard and then spin a bucket of water over his head, round and round, without spilling a drop. Fred was born on this farm and inherited the farm, but wasn‘t a farmer at heart. He wanted to be an engineer but his eyesight wasn‘t good enough.
He was an avid photographer and had a couple of Kodak cameras with big bellows that he took hundreds of photographs with which he must have developed himself and then put into large photo albums. Many of the photographs were of relatives at family gatherings. My grandmother Patsy was a local girl with seven sisters and many of the photographs were of her family.
Maybe in an attempt to escape the farming life, but certainly with the intention of getting rich, Fred mortgaged the family farm and invested in a local factory with the promise that he would become wealthy. Instead, the stock market crash of 1929 swallowed up all the investments in the promised factory and from then on a bank owned his farm and he was a tenant farmer, getting half of the income from the farm.
The whole family suffered through the Great Depression in genteel poverty, unable to live as well as before. My mother Alice Wynne and my Uncle Gene became school teachers. My mother was frugal for the rest of her life, never able to shake the effect of sudden poverty. And I grew up on powdered milk and Campbell’s chicken noodle soup when in America.
So the trip through to Chicago on Friday the 24th reminded me of my Grandparent Hall‘s farm. But Friday afternoon as we went through Wisconsin there was a gradual shift to a new landscape with many more evergreens .
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 