Flames Along the Asquamchumaukee
A Portfolio of Autumn Images from Wayne's Mind, Heart and Home
Flames Along the Asquamchumaukee
This morning Kodi and I took our usual short walk around the house and gardens. It has become the standard for beginning our day. Kodi sniffs around and finds the spots where he chooses to send his P-Mail.
When our son Zach was a little boy he would laugh and point at our beloved Siberian Husky Boof sniffing a rock and say “he’s checking his P-Mail!” and when Boofie lifted his hind leg, “He’s sending P-Mail!”. We’d laugh and usually scope out a spot to send our own as well . . .
Boof was a wonderful dog, who was really a wolf in disguise. Once, when our dear friend Lynn visited us, she accidentally let him out of the house off-leash. Boof promptly went next door to our neighbor Linda’s house and wiped out her entire chicken coop in about 2 minutes. Our friend Lynn was devastated but good-neighbor Linda took it in stride. We paid to replace the chickens and she chose to replace them with rabbits instead. Two years later, when Boof escaped again, he went through the rabbits in about the same amount of time. Linda was not happy, but she didn’t blame Boof, it was just his nature after all, but she was no fool either. This time she replaced the rabbits with bee hives. I still laugh when I think of her setting up her beehives and saying to herself, “Let him try these critters on for size.”
Nowadays, with Zach living out in the town of Mancus, Colorado, in the four corners region, and with Boof gone to that great cosmic chicken coop, it falls to Kodi - my adopted white shepherd - and I to perambulate the morning constitutional.
I miss my boy like crazy, but I am grateful for the companionship of Kodi. Not a day goes by that I don’t marvel at the extraordinary bond between we two-legs and our four-legged canine cousins. Every dog has its own personality yet somehow, with relative ease, they just manage to get us.
Kodi has this way of listening to me that has me convinced that he understands at least some of what I am saying. He looks at me and tilts his head as if to ask “are you sure?”
This morning the conversation revolved around the effects of cold nights on the garden. So we walked around the house and picked out the various patches that might yield a bit more if we covered them at night for the next few weeks.
A late-planted “Pickle” of cukes that we sowed in an old cast iron tub recently retired from the second-floor bathroom of my Sears & Roebuck Bungalow has been growing like crazy in the warm early weeks of September but is now showing signs that the colder nights may terminate their potential, so we decided we would try covering them at night with an old sheet, likewise a few spots where tomatoes still flourish.
For those aficionados of the English language who recognize that a “Pickle of Cukes” is not the correct collective expression for a group of cucumbers I’ll confess that - in an act of cross-species larceny - I adopted the collective noun for sea cucumbers as there is no official collective noun for most groupings of vegetables. A sea cucumber, on the other hand, has a collective noun, a “Pickle”. A Sea Cucumber is actually an animal, found on the sea bed. You have to admit that a vegetarian collective noun for a worm-like critter that crawls along the seabed is a bit of cross-species larceny in and of itself ironically.
So, with shorter days and cooler nights, I decided to present a small gallery of autumn images for your enjoyment.
I hope you will forgive me for this rambling (and perambulating) lead in. Here are just a few of my images gathered into a gallery celebrating the bittersweet moments heading into winter.
Maple Ablaze At Sunset
Montage created from images captured in Rumney NH over a three day period. Golden Maple sapling glows in the light of a sunset over Stinson Mountain. Only one original edition of 5 prints of this image is created, signed, dated and with a certificate of authenticity Printed on fine art paper with archival inks. This image, and all ther others here, is available as a signed original or an affordable unsigned open-edition print.
For a signed original of this image, click here.
For an unsigned open-edition print of this image, click here.
About Flames Along the Asquamchumaukee
A movement has developed here in the north and central parts of New Hampshire to restore the Abenaki name of the river now known as the Baker River. Renamed during the colonial period for Lt. Thomas Baker who led a savage attack on a peaceful village of Pemigewasset Indians, killing and scalping old men, women and children, while the men were out hunting in the Stinson Mountain area. It breaks my heart to think about the men who returned home to the village that night.
Nearly 100 years later another group of Abenaki hunters would capture two men along the Baker River. One of them John Stark. Who would become one of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War - the Hero of Bennington a battle that helped turn the tide of the war. During almost a year among the Abenaki, as a prisoner, he was treated with - according to him - “great kindness” and eventually adopted into the tribe at the orders of their “chief” (no such word existed among native peoples prior to the colonial era.) Eventually Stark was released and when the Revolution began he organized a militia and led them into battle in what is now known as the “Battle of Bennington” where he would shout the famous words “Live Free or Die” to rally his troops.
It falls to us to wonder if his love of freedom came from his upbringing or his year as an Abenaki, living free.
Reclaiming the Asquamchumaukee
New Hampshire Secrets Podcast: Reclaiming Asquamchumaukee - John Stark and the People of the Dawn.
John Stark is New Hampshire's greatest military hero. In this podcast you will come to learn that Stark not only had a soft spot for the Abenaki people but that soft spot may very well be the reason we live in the United States of America today and not England. Host Wayne King makes the case for respecting both the Abenaki and John Stark by restoring the name of the Asquamchumaukee River.
Listen here: https://feeds.podetize.com/ep/DXDAvhI2h/media
By the way, Asquamchumaukee is sometimes spelled with only one “e” at the end. Either way is presumed to be correct. After all, the chances are that the word was first committed to writing by someone who had little or no formal education.
A Veggie Collective
Let’s create collective nouns for veggies! Use the chat function here on substack to send your ideas for great collective nouns for your favorite veggies.