JUNE 9, SUNDAY

TWO WORLDS: LIBERAL OUTSIDERS

On Saturday Susie and I drove on the to Laurel Community Center that is close to where Todd and Susie live. My mother, I think, as a young woman taught in an easily accessible one room school in Illinois with all the children in different grades mixed together. Then local elementary schools were built with separate classrooms for each class with children still walking to school. Fifty years ago both of these community centers were active elementary schools but at some point school consolidation picked up and children were taken in yellow school buses miles to the closest consolidated school, with consolidated middle school and high school. The abandoned elementary schools became community centers. The easily accessible abandoned high school at Marshall on Blandenhassett Island became artist‘s studios. We were visiting the Laurel Community Center to observe Junior Bio Blitz, a day of activities for eager children to introduce them to the plants and insects and animals of the mountains around them. This time the teachers were outsiders, people who had come to the mountains to escape the city but people with liberal values. Flag Pond was a rural community with few outsiders and bear hunters with hunting dogs. Madison County is mixture of these traditional mountain people, with a homestead near Susie‘s place with buried barrels housing chained hunting dogs beside the stream and non traditional outsiders with liberal ideas about the environment and global warming who are trying to escape city values. It is an odd and uneasy mix.