The Berkeley Thanksgiving

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Roger Gosden

It will be missed by no one on this side of the North Atlantic that Thanksgiving Day 2016 falls on Thursday. Yet, some Virginians mindful of another tradition already had their Thanksgiving a fortnight ago. They resent the hegemony of Massachusetts for the celebrated day because historical records prove they have precedence.

Thanksgiving memorial plaque

Thanksgiving memorial plaque

The claim originated in a 1619 voyage of 36 men onboard the Good Ship Margaret out of Bristol, England. It was a tub of only 35 feet, somewhat shorter than twice the length of my office at home, and yet it sailed across a stormy ocean for ten weeks to the Chesapeake Bay. After the last storm had flung itself on the vessel, the exhausted mariners steered it into the King James River to anchor off the appointed land, which became known as the Berkeley Hundred and is today the Berkeley Plantation.

The ship’s master, John Woodlief, had returned to England after surviving the Starving Times of 1609-10 at Jamestown Fort, some 25 miles downriver. It says something about him that he left home comforts to go back to the Virginia wilderness, and when he

Berkeley Plantation House

Berkeley Plantation

returned he was wiser than on the 1607 voyage which conveyed a mixture of idle gentlemen and press-ganged paupers, neither of whom were well-prepared for the rigors ahead. He recruited craftsmen with skills needed in the fragile colony they would help to build. His ship was filled to the gunwales with clothes, kitchen utensils, tools, weapons, Bibles and beads to trade with Indians, and a great many groceries—8,000 biscuits and loaves, 160 lb butter, 127 lb bacon and horsemeat, 60 bushels of peas, 20 bushels of wheat, 6 tons of cider and 5 ½ tons of beer (healthier than water).

The sponsors in London instructed Woodlief to hold a solemn service of thanksgiving as soon as they arrived at their destination. The prepared formula read: “We ordain that this day of our ships arrival, at the place assigned for plantation, in the land of Virginia, shall be yearly and perpetually kept holy as a day of Thanksgiving to Almighty God.”

Another Good Ship Margaret arrives November 6, 2016

Another Good Ship Margaret arrives November 6, 2016

A manuscript recording their voyage and first thanksgiving was lost until Dr. Lyon Tyler of the College of William & Mary rediscovered it in an old archive called the Nibley Papers in the New York Public Library. Virginians like to point out not only their claim for primacy, but that Thanksgiving Day was first instituted as an annual religious observance, unlike the one-off feast enjoyed by the Pilgrims at Plymouth, MA, with their new buddies from a local Indian tribe. Unfortunately, the Berkeley rite stopped after an Indian Uprising in 1622 until 1958 when the current owners of the property reinstated it.

The Berkeley Thanksgiving was celebrated this year on Sunday November 6. Large numbers of families spent most of the day at the estate under blue skies because the Indian summer was pushing back the advance of fall. Below the old plantation house in a

Re-enactors who struggled to sound English

Re-enactors

meadow that rolls down to the waterside, there were games for families, food and craft stalls, replica encampments, a corn maze, candle dipping and doll making, parading and dancing, music and magic. We watched a re-enactment of Captain Woodlief and his men landing from a replica of the good ship and giving thanks for a safe passage. Nearby, Indians cheerfully stomped a Friendship Dance to the rhythm of drums, although I wondered if their ancestors were horrified to see Englishmen on their turf. The crowd joined in the Pledge of Allegiance (hand on heart), sang the National Anthem and, finally, the history of Berkeley was retold by the present owner and one of Woodlief’s descendants.

Even a cynical observer of seasonal festivals would agree this was a happy scene of people united in pride for their country and history. Who could imagine under that blue sky there were dark thoughts lurking behind smiles? But soon after we went home we cast votes in the General Election, which beat down memories from two days before and replaced beautiful unity with ugly partisanship. Something to think about when I say:

happy-thanksgiving-typography-black-no-background-2400px

 

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Carving for the Ages (Petroglyphs)

Posted on November 6, 2016 by Roger Gosden

A slab of yellow sandstone larger than a dinner plate lay at the foot of an old maple tree close to a woodland trail in the Allegheny Mountains. The shadow of an inscription on its flat face made me pause for a closer look. It read:

billymemorial

There are several hundred cemeteries dotted across the county, but few of them are “official.” The county resists zoning laws, so private landowners can bury the dead in their own backyards. Casualties of war, especially the fallen enemy, were not always honored with ceremony or laid in consecrated ground but rolled into a hastily dug grave where they moldered from anonymity to invisibility. But if the memorial stone marked Billy’s grave, he had not been buried carelessly.

Federal troops were known to be stationed there during the Civil War. Probably they were involved in the fierce engagement with the Confederate Army at Droop Mountain in November of that year that swung in their favor. Perhaps Billy was mortally injured in the fight, or maybe he died of measles, which was claiming victims in both armies.

soldiers-gravestoneTo examine the lettering on the hard stone, which was probably made with a knife point, is to realize this was a tenderly made memorial amidst so much suffering and misery. Billy has long gone out of memory, and would have disappeared from notice if his platoon merely tied two sticks to make a wooden cross, but carving a rock gave the young man a greater longevity, at least in name. Had the inscriber chosen a softer rock, like my father’s first headstone, it would not be legible for long, but deep gouges in the stone preserved Billy’s biosketch for 150 years.

On an ancient route across a rocky plain in Anatolia, and near the town of İmamkullu, a Hittite paused to carve a boulder over 3,000 years ago. The images are worn but you can see a princely soldier and a god, as well as incomprehensible hieroglyphs. Petroglyphs are found the world over from prehistoric times, and if you want to leave a memorial to posterity never leave it in ink or paint, but carve it on rock. Hard rock!

I mused about Billy’s gravestone while I chipped away at a boulder on our property, some twenty miles across the county. It’s hard to explain the impulse for my first rock carving, although the boulder offered a flat, vertical surface decorated with several species of lichens with a mossy seat on top. It is beautiful, and it was irresistible even for a virgin of the rocks.rockwoodcarving72dpi

If I was an accomplished rocksmith with time on my hands I might have carved a noble, sphinx-like head of a Shawnee brave, because this was the tribe’s hunting ground. My ambition was far more modest, the mere cutting of eight letters under the eye of James Alexander Thom, a family member who carves wood when taking time out from writing historical novels. I won’t add my signature or even my initials, preferring the carver to remain anonymous and somewhat mysterious like Billy’s inscriber.

When the cerebral effort of design is finished and the repetitive work of execution begins, a different part of the brain seems to kick in. As the rational region relaxes, the imagination can take over for dreaming to the noisy accompaniment of chipping. I wonder if anyone will stop to ponder the inscription in future centuries and millennia? I guess they might need a translator to read the word, “ROCKWOOD.” And I try to imagine what will those people will look like and how much the environment will have changed. The struggle to look forward probably stretches the imagination as much as when they try to look back at me, or I try to picture the Hittite.

When I returned to Billy’s gravestone I met the landowner Tom, whose family has lived on the mountain since they came as pioneers in 1830. He restores old log cabins transplanted on the back of a big flat-bed truck from across the Alleghenies, even as far away as Pennsylvania. Billy may have known one of the cabins because it used to stand on Droop Mountain. They are far more comfortable after renovation with a new tin roof and stone chimney than for the families who built them, and make attractive rental properties for visitors. Few cabins survive on their original sites because wood quickly rots when they are no longer cared for and the roof falls in, whereas castles and cathedrals quarried out of rock in the mother country of Tom’s ancestors will endure for eons. Without conservationists like him there would be fewer testaments to the lives of struggling pioneers.

After chatting about how the logs were cut and chinked, I asked him about the memorial stone on his land. I could tell from his changed demeanor that he had news. “It’s not the original! After lying there so long, someone stole it fifteen years ago.” He found a stone to replace it and carved the tribute to Billy from memory. “It’s a pretty good replica,” he told me.

The memorial says something about the carver again, the second time around, but I blush at the notions expressed sometimes about Appalachian mountain men by ignorant outlanders. As an afterthought Tom said, “It’s a pity it wasn’t too big to be carried away,” which brought my boulder to mind.

Next Post: Thanksgiving at Berkeley Plantation

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A Third Parent contributes her Mighty Mites (Mitochondria)

Posted on October 29, 2016 by Roger Gosden

Two biological parents are enough for any baby, aren’t they? Maybe not: sometimes it’s better to have two mamas.

The media have hyped a story that broke in September about a boy who was conceived by “mitochondrial replacement therapy.” His parents had lost two previous children to Leigh syndrome, a rare but severe condition affecting the brain, nerves and muscles caused by mutations in mitochondria, the mites that energize every cell inherited from our mothers’ egg (never from our fathers’ sperm). Less than 2% of the boy’s mitochondria were damaged, which was well below the 18% threshold for disease. An anonymous egg donor has given him the prospect of a full and healthy life.

Mitochondrial transfer

Thousands of tiny mitochondria fluorescing brightly in a human egg and its moon-like polar body

John Zhang, whom I knew when I worked in NYC, led the clinical team and is director of a fertility service that is popular there among Asian Americans. But he carried out the procedure in Mexico where, according to reports of his words, there are “no rules (for assisted reproduction).” That statement was as responsible for the media furor as the procedure itself, and he may regret playing into the polemics of conservatives at a time when Mexico is considering legislation for assisted reproduction. Ahem!

His “breakthough” probably put noses out of joint in a Newcastle team in my mother country because they have done the painstaking research work. The UK has often been at the forefront of reproductive technology (clinical IVF, Dolly the cloned sheep, etc.), and has a well-respected system for ethical review (HFEA) which, admittedly, delays the launch of new treatments such as this projected to help 10-20 British families annually. The Geordies should have been first, but were scooped.

Two methods exist for switching mitochondria when a prospective mother carries a harmful load of mutations in her mitochondria. Zhang chose the spindle method in which maternal DNA is transferred to replace the nuclear DNA removed from a healthy donor egg before it is fertilized with her husband’s sperm. Only one of the five embryos thrived in vitro, but after placing in the uterus it conceived a healthy pregnancy.

In the 1990s, a New Jersey clinic transferred small fractions of cytoplasm from donor eggs to improve the quality of eggs for patients who repeatedly failed with IVF treatment. None of the women were carrying mitochondrial mutations, but the clinical team had a hunch that eggs often fail to develop if they are under-energized, but can be boosted with an infusion of fresh mitochondria. After treatment resulting in 17 viable pregnancies with two of the girls missing an X chromosome (Turner’s syndrome), the FDA set a bar too high for the program to continue.

There are now reports from other countries of imminent births after mitochondrial transfer, and these too are said to aim at improving embryo quality instead of correcting a genetic fault. And in Boston a company is offering an expensive treatment (‘Augment’) for improving fertility by transferring mitochondria from a type of ovarian stem cell that some of us doubt exists (my recent critique is available on request).

These therapies have been called ‘eugenic,’ which is a word that makes us shiver, but if they are safe and effective and purely aim to restore a healthy population of mitochondria, need we worry? Some commentators have called the boy in Mexico a GMO baby, but that’s strictly inaccurate, because the mitochondrial genome containing a mere 37 genes and 0.0005% of the nuclear DNA was switched, not chemically altered. Moreover, there is no basis for concern about transmitting his new mixture of mitochondria to future children, although a girl treated likewise could and that possibility requires deeper study. We can’t be sure how her mitochondria would segregate in the bottleneck when eggs inherit tiny numbers of them, possibly creating a very different mix compared to her grandmother and donor, even the remote possibility of bringing back the former disease to her descendants.

Robert Hughes coined the expression Shock of the New for a TV documentary about modern art, but it is an apt expression for public responses to the ongoing revolution in fertility treatment. I imagine hands lifted in horror after every new development is announced, but it would be a hard person who condemns joyful parents by saying their healthy children “should never have been born!” The arrival of healthy babies quenched most opposition to IVF in the 1980s, and I predict the same for the next generation of therapies provided they meet the same standard of ethics and safety.

Human fertility has been said to be the prerogative of God or the gods. The Ancient Greeks had a hoard of myths, and woe betide gods or mortals who broke the reproductive code! Hera was the patron of marriage and childbirth, yet she covered the shame of being raped by Zeus by marrying him. She ate lettuce to improve her fertility, probably because its white sap resembles semen, which is something to think about next time you are served a salad.

One of her sons was Hephaestus. The virgin goddess Athena fled when he lusted after her (he was ugly), but spilled his seed on the ground, which caused Gaia, the Mother of the Earth, to conceive Erichthonius (“Eric” for shorthand). Athena made no biological contribution to Eric, but she was the object of desire and necessary for his conception, and afterwards she helped to bring him up. She was the third parent, and no less for that.

Eric looked so monstrous that he alarmed people and they tried to conceal him (depicted by Peter Paul Rubens). The Greeks were pondering extraordinary conceptions long before we added a third parent by  surrogate pregnancies with IVF or mitochondrial transfer. They posed the question whether a parent is defined by nature or nurture, but the answer is, of course, nature and nurture, and three parents can be better than two.

Next Post: Rock Carving for the Ages

 

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Feast of the Animals

Posted on October 4, 2016 by Roger Gosden

The Feast is held today, October 4. I don’t mean a feast of animals like a medieval banquet crammed with meaty dishes, but an ecclesiastical “feast” offered for animals, for blessing them and wishing them health and longevity. It commemorates Francis of Assisi.

Ah, there’s a saint worth the name! Even non-Roman Catholics like me will bow reverently to that Voice of the Poor and Patron Saint of Animals.

saintfrancis_openclipartAlthough today is the official saint’s day, it was celebrated by congregations last Sunday. Brave clergymen (or clergywomen in some denominations) allowed pets to be paraded along the naves of their churches or cathedrals to a station for blessing, praying silently there will be no dog fights or “accidents.” The scene we imagine is rather droll but has a serious intent. Whatever our religious beliefs and observances, if any, it’s a ritual worthy of the calendar to remember the services animals render to us, and be thankful for the ineffable beauty of nature that inspired Francis:

canticle

Pet parades are as much for the children as for their animals. Children open their hearts more to animals than we adults, or at least until we reach out to them again for companionship in our graying years. Parents give pets to kids for many reasons, but rarely for the life lessons that animals can teach them.

The first lesson they taught me was to leave wild animals be. As we didn’t have a dog or cat, I created a “zoo” with rodents, reptiles and beetles captured in local woods and fields, and threw in some exotic insects to impress my friends. It was a far less ambitious collection than the menagerie Gerald Durrell kept on the Island of Confu when he was growing up in the 1930s (My Family and Other Animals). But the baby tortoise I brought home from Greece (when it was still legal) died soon afterwards, and we buried it in the pet graveyard at the bottom of the garden. I felt guilty for shortening a life that might have continued for many years, even to this day, but its death was sacrificial for others because I never kept a wild animal again. A tortoise was one of Gerry’s first casualties too, and although he launched a famous zoo it was founded on the principle of conserving endangered animals rather than for entertaining humans.

The next lesson was far more subtle and is seldom taught at home or in school because words for the hardest fact come thick and slow. A child’s dilated sense of time gives her or him a false scale on which to gauge life’s arrow: Grandpa and other elders seem to have existed forever, or from the remotest dot beyond the ken of the very young. Measuring the arc of time for growing up and growing old is impossible without experience, but a pet’s lifespan can be observed from beginning to end (unless it is a donkey).  A puppy or kitten given to a child in infancy has traveled its entire existence before the end of grade school, and a hamster races through life in barely two years. Knowledge of the compressed lives of animals offers a scale for comparing with human histories, and gathering the uncomfortable realization that we too have an expiration date. When the natural lifespan of other species is apprehended, a death “full of years” is understood as the way of nature, and neither a tragedy nor a cause to Rage, rage against the dying of the light (Dylan Thomas).

The last lesson was about that final passage, which of course we dread anyone should confront prematurely like my little tortoise. Our anticipation of reaching the end of life’s arc is a price we pay for a rich cognitive life, and, although some people have faith that the rainbow reaches down to gold in the earth, it is mostly regarded otherwise. Animals are spared that anxiety, except perhaps at the final moment.

My favorite saint passed away after completing his life’s work at a ripe age for his era and, I like to think, without pangs of anger and regret. There is a story that the closing words of his famous canticle praising “Sister Death” were added on his deathbed while singing with two of his closest brother friars. I wonder if he chose the feminine adjective as a comfort word to convey the peace of a tender sister instead of fighting the passage from life, as if it were an adversary. As far as we know, he yielded to nature like the animals he loved, and went gentle into that good night.

New Post: Two Biological Mums but One Dad

 

 

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A Root to Cure Evils (Ginseng)

Posted on September 25, 2016 by Roger Gosden

A police informant reported a horde of vegetable roots drying in the sun outside a home in Randolph County, WV. This is not the kind of news that makes headlines or pricks up ears, but to our friend, a law enforcement officer at the Department of Natural Resources, it was a vital piece of intelligence. That was in the 1980s, soon after the West Virginia Legislature passed a law banning the harvest of wild ginseng except between September and November by permit or with the landowner’s agreement. The officer flew a helicopter to spy with binoculars over the backyard of the suspect’s home. Sure enough, there was a golden heap of uncertified roots and rhizomes two months ahead of the “seng” season. The ginseng buyer busted, he had his booty confiscated and was charged with a heavy fine, but the sengers (poachers) who dug in the forest laid low.

If you watch Appalachian Outlaws (The History Channel, 2014) you might imagine our forest tracks blink with red and blue lights and the mountains echo to sirens and gunfire. In the first episode of the series (all I had patience for between incessant ads), a poor mountain man, Greg Shook, heads out of Georgia for the moist, rich soils on the north sides of West Virginia’s mountains where he heard there is plenty of seng. He evades landowners in private woods and stalks federal lands, stumbling into an illegal grove of cannabis where he narrowly avoids getting shot. With luck, he will dig enough seng to sell to kingpin Tony Coffman or the incomer Corby “The General” Patton. If the story convinces you that outlaw sengers lead thrilling lives fleeing from threat to peril, you will be disappointed to hear from our friend who told me it is a gross perversion of reality, even by the low standards of reality TV.

Hampshire Gazette, 1787. Historic Deerfield Library

Hampshire Gazette, 1787. Historic Deerfield Library

Seng has been harvested from American forests since colonial days, and for time immemorial by native tribes. It supported a thriving export industry to China in the 19th century, and still supplements local incomes. Since Asian ginseng became virtually extinct in the wild, the variety growing along the Appalachian chain is now heavily picked. In our county alone (Pocahontas) 259 lb was declared last year (2015) out of 8,103 lb throughout the state. The average price that year was $410 per lb, and in some years it rises above $700.

No wonder our neighbors keep secret the whereabouts of ginseng. It crouches low on the woodland floor with four or five of five “prongs” reminiscent of beech leaves, and now, in the midst of seng season, a small bunch of red berries catch the eye at the center of the rosette. When sengers dig up swollen rhizomes and filamentous roots they discard the green top and bury the berries under leaf litter to generate new plants. But they never come back the next year because ginseng takes a long time to mature, and harvesting plants under five years old is illegal. I know of no other small woodland plant that is longer-lived: those evading the senger can outlive him, and their longevity is not much less than some trees. As a general rule of nature, plants or animals that grow slowly, mature late and age gradually are not very productive—they don’t need to produce seeds quickly or abundantly to sow posterity because time is on their side. Their strategy worked well until human harvesters came along and stripped entire slopes of these precious vegetables.

Ginseng’s reputation for promoting human longevity, endurance and sexual potency started in China, like so many other ancient notions and philosophies. But does it hold up in an age of science? Hard evidence is hard to find, although there are over 7,000 research/ review articles listed in PubMed. Admittedly, most papers are published in obscure journals based on animal studies or in vitro experiments, and the rare clinical trials of any worth struggle to raise ginseng out of the basket of “alternative therapies” to the shelves of conventional medicine. Like research on other “botanicals,” there is too little attention to batch variation and potential toxicity.

Most serious scientific attention on this plant is focused on saponins (“ginsengosides”), complex, steroid-like molecules which are so-called because shaken in water they make froth. The anti-oxidant, anti-inflammatory and immunostimulatory activity found under lab conditions suggest that ginseng might render some beneficial effects on our physiology and pathology after eating it fresh or steamed, and at the very least I expect it blesses the hearts that believe in it. Its very name has a healthy glow, even at the end of a “ginseng cigarette” (though healthy cigarettes sound like an oxymoron and may not contain the said herbal).

Ginseng. Courtesy C.C. Flinn

Ginseng. Courtesy C.C. Flinn

It takes its name from Schinseng, meaning in Chinese “essence of the earth in the form of man.” If you stretch your imagination, the baggy rhizomes look somewhat like the body and legs of a man. Many old cultures have interpreted in nature divine signs created for our good, like red centaury (for purifying the blood), toothwort (looking like a tooth for toothache), and so on. Dr. Paracelsus popularized these beliefs handed down from Galen, and they persist as folk remedies and in alternative medicine. All I can say after quickly reviewing the science is that ginseng probably does no harm, which is the elementary ethic of healthcare (primum non nocere), but as for doing good and extending our lifespan, the jury is out.

I saw an old man climbing our slopes towards a plateau on Middle Mountain carrying a trowel and a knapsack under his arm. As he bent to dig in the soil, his shaggy, grey beard flowed over the collar of a heavy green coat which had a hole under an arm. I stood watching, wondering.

There are three categories of needs and wants in our lives. First and foremost is the need for something to love, which should be free, and I pondered whether the old man’s love was for our woods and mountains where he roamed as a boy. The second is our need for water and healthy food, which should always be available and affordable, and I guessed from his appearance that he was poor, if not starving. Last and of least importance is our want for luxuries, which are more expensive than the rest but unneeded, and I mused that the forest-gatherer hoped to make a little profit to bring some joy home, perhaps for a nip of whiskey before bedtime or a cheap gift for his family. I could have challenged him because he was trespassing in our woods when the season for ginseng was out, but instead I waved.

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