Ancient Acts
I live in ferryland. No, not that magical place where rainbows are a daily occurrence. Well, okay, it is kind of magical here and coincidently, we do get our share of rainbows. But I’m talking about ferries that transport your vehicle across the water.
The closest ferry is just two minutes down the road from my house and runs twenty-four hours a day. You want to get across the bay at 3 am, they’re there for you. It’s an amazing service, and it’s free! Another few kilometers down the road, a second ferry carries cars across the river. Upriver twenty, thirty kilometers from that one, is another one. Down river there are four, I think. Maybe more. The ferries are, for the most part, cable ferries. My husband once tried to explain exactly how they work, but I clicked off halfway through his explanation. I have my own theories what goes on underneath those ferries. But more about that later.
The point is these ferries are a daily part of my life. I’ve been using them consistently for almost a year. One day as I sat on the other side of the bay, waiting for the ferry, it suddenly struck me how ancient the tradition is of ferrying people across water. I don’t know the history of our ferries, but I do know people have been poling, pushing and pulling their way across rivers and bays for centuries. An ordinary, everyday act had morphed into a ritual that connected me to the ages.
Continuum. That ancient line of activity and memories we carry inside. It’s everywhere in our lives, even if we don’t acknowledge or recognize it. I attended a local concert the other week, where young girls, dressed in their kilts, performed highland dances. Again, I was struck by the thought that those dances had probably been performed thousands of times for hundreds of years.
And then there are the storytellers. That’s right. Us. Telling stories and recreating the world to fit our perceptions. Talk about an ancient act that connects us to the past as well as carrying us into the future.
So here comes the question. Aside from storytelling (too easy!) are there activities in your life tied to an ancient process that has carried over into the present? Since I’ve started thinking about all this, my list keeps growing. But maybe that’s more a reflection of my lifestyle than anything else. Hmm, come to think of it, I have been living in a basement the last few months, and basements do resemble caves.
Speaking of caves and such, my theory on how the ferries work shouldn’t come as a surprise. I have one word for you.
Trolls.
25 comments:
I love ferries. We have been known to drive miles out of our way to use a ferry. Trolls ~ for sure. Then they live under the bridges that too often replace the ferries.
I don't do this but one of my neighbors hang their clothes out on a line to dry. I think it's against a bylaw in our city but I'm not complaining.
Nice post, Kate :)
I love to fish and we have a camp on Caddo Lake which is a natural lake and was once the site of an ancient Native American tribe. Story goes there was an earthquake during the time many of the men left to hunt. When they returned, the women and children were gone and it's place was a lake! Often when I cast my line, I think about the ancient peoples who lived there and fished the same banks. Those who hollowed out the borthers of the trees I sit beneath to make pirouges. There's a wonderful connection to the past beneath those cypress, and I believe it's part of the reason I grow so refelctive on the end of that pier.
You had me at FREE :) Nice post Kate. Makes me wish I lived near water again.
Kaelee,
Clotheslines! Yes. I need one, must put that on my to-do list. The smell of clothes dried outside triggers something inside all of us, I think.
Liz,
Ithink you've blogged abut your camp before, haven't you? It sounds like a very special spot. Visiting the lake is one of your family traditions, isn't it? And fishing, now there's an ancient act. We have sturgeon in our waters, which is a prehistoric fish, I think. If it isn't, it should be. Sturgeon are huge and scary looking.
Rogenna,
Yes the free part is incredible, isn't it? A few years ago, the provincial government tried to shut down a lot of the ferries and ended up with an uprising on their hands. People around here love their car ferries.
Love the post, and love the idea of trolls pushing along those ferries. I think that water is so much a part of our continuum that it begs mentioning. It's odd that we need it to survive, and yet have lived beside its inedible partner (saltwater) for eons.
And hanging laundry out to dry should never be discouraged in a time when we are so preciously guarding our resources.
Mermen trolls perhaps? With big fish tails to propel the ferries!
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Mermen trolls! Josie, you have taken my theory to a whole different level! Wonderful idea.
Hi Kate,
I like to think that breastfeeding my kids reconnected us to an ancient continuum that had been disrupted for the 2 generations directly ahead of mine. Not sure if there were other breaks before that, but I lined up with the cave mothers.
How about Facebook where we're back to illustrating and documenting our lives on a wall? :-)
I used to take the ferry home from work in NYC to Hoboken sometimes when we lived there. It was so much nicer than the bus through the Lincoln Tunnel, but it added a bit of time to my commute.
Trolls! Obviously.
Kate, the only thing I can think of off-hand is knitting, crocheting and sewing. Since the dawn of time, women in every culture have brought colour into the world through dying and spinning yarn, weaving, sewing and knitting. As we became stationary rather than nomadic, women decorated their homes as well as their bodies with beautiful creations.
Kate, I loved reading about your ferries, too! I guess if that's a way of life you'd better not be prone to seasickness. ;-) You make a wonderful correspondence to ancient rituals. You almost had me on this one, but then I realized it's almost June, when our wild raspberries will be ready to harvest. And in October we have paw-paws and walnuts. So I'm going to have to go with foraging. :-)
Love reading everybody's input on what we brought forward. Maybe the past is where I get my desire to have goats. I just want to fence off my yard and have 3-4 of the little ones.
Mary,
As a person who once owned upwards of twenty-two goats, trust me, you DO NOT WANT GOATS! I have a long list of goat stories, and none of them end happily!
Foraging. I wondered if anyone would think of that one. Throughout history, women were traditionally foragers - a fact that advertisers use to their advantage when setting up stores - while men were hunters. Women will enter a store and browse. Men will go in, go straight to what they need and get out.
Lots of ideas here I didn't think of. Breast feeding being one of them. How could I have overlooked that! And knitting or weaving and spinning. I used to have a four harness loom. I spent more time threading it than actually weaving, though.
I love ferries. One of our still to do holidays is to take the string of ferries from Washington up the west coast to Alaska and then dotting all along the Aleutian Islands to the end at Dutch Harbor. Not free though.
Peasant foods connect us to our roots. Drying, pickling and salting food to preserve it is very old. We make pickled herring and all sorts of veggie pickles and chutneys. Once a year I make salted pressed meat from an ancient recipe. It can sit in brine for months. Our food dryer is always busy - right now it's beef jerky. And I forgot, candying - fruit peel and flowers to preserve them.
I enjoy baking bread from scratch. Flour, yeast, liquid and salt are the main ingredients. Working the dough is satisfying and I can get a lot of writing done while waiting for it to rise.
I haven't made any in awhile. Guess I'll have to put that on my list for things to accomplish over summer vacation.
I'm still stunned by what Kaelee said about hanging your clothes out to dry is against a bylaw.
I can't think of anything better than hanging my clothes out in the sun & fresh air. I hate having to use the dryer in wet weather.
Wow, ferries and FREE! THat is so cool! We don't have ferries here, wish we did.
Lovely ideas, Kate. Trolls are so mystical (and sometimes not very nice) that I got a little shiver reading your thoughts. I live in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains and we're lousy with "the old ways." We (well, not me, exactly, but some others) play instruments like the dulcimer and the zither. Can't you just see old Braveheart himself zithering away to pass an evening? We're of Scotch-Irish descent and we tell tales and do strange things like only planting certain seeds in the dark (or the full) of the moon. I have a good friend whose brother-in-law earns a very good living as a blacksmith. I have no idea how to spin or churn, but my grandmother did, and I do SO wish I had listened more closely to her tales and learned the old ways. Not because I need them for me to survive, but I could have helped THEM survive...and that would have been a very good thing indeed.
Like Carol, I'm of Scotch-Irish descent--a Kentucky girl. A couple of years ago, my husband and I were in a dulcimer shop. Something about the sound connected with me in an ethereal way that I can't explain--it was like it touched my soul. For Christmas, he built me a dulcimer, which I now play. No one else in my family plays, but I know without a doubt someone did.
I know this blog is past it's due date, but I just wanted to say some of your stories sent a weird chill up my spine. Thank you so much for sharing your experineces with connections to the past. This subject turned out way more interesting than I anticipated!
A little late to the party, but I'm so glad I came. This is such a wonderful post, Kate. I also love the supernatural ambience that surrounds bodies of water, and the way so many of our daily activities are connected to the ancient world. Next time I hop on my favorite ferry way out on Long Island I'll think of the trolls!
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