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| Tahquamenon River, Upper Michigan |
I've gone into detail in past postings about family/DNA "energy stamps" across vast areas. The idea that we as individuals, families, and clans are tied to places in which we have never been; where out ancestors or relatives have lived in the past for long periods of time. Life's experiences---great and small, good and bad---form a geographic/meta-connection. These types of DNA energy imprints upon the earth form something of a DNA grid. Unless an individual is entirely materialistic with no folk spirituality at all, the places in which our ancestors or relatives have lived in the past means something! If we visit those places for the first time, we have come back home. This is a bit different than deja vu in which you experience something which you can connect to from a previous experience or perhaps even a previous life; either a literal place or somewhere which reminds one of a place, person, or experience. There's some conflation, but a meta-geographic connection is something different.
Ultimately, my own meta/geographic connections are only important to me/us. I'm just trying to encourage others, presumably chiefly folk-neopagans, to devote some thought to this in order to develop the concept further. This could take the form of storytelling for example. Even if a person is not directly blood-related, if they were of the same culture, they could still adopt--on a certain level--the "story" of another family... especially if that family followed a similar path... a shared history. This may sound like a funny thing to say, but I can say from experience that there are places where one could pull up a couple of fold-up chairs on a high point and tell another of a long family/clan history while literally "pointing" in the horizon at various related locations. That is if anyone could take some time out from their busy lives and the "sports and entertainment" culture to actually sit down and listen for a short while.
If the past, present, and future are not intertwined, then we have nobody to blame but ourselves. They are interconnected at all times, we just lose sight of it. One location which so much defines my family's origin is a group of small villages, the largest being Loveno. It's located on the edge of a valley and tributary river to the Val Camonica and the prominent Oi River.... called the Val Paisco. Part of this village-group connects to vast grassy hillsides from a high plateau on the Val Camonica side to the east, while another part of it lays on the edge of a much more closed-in, steep, and wooded Val Paisco to the west. Driving westward through the dense forested Val Paisco perhaps eight miles, the dense dark road opens up like heaven to a vast lowland surrounded by far off mountains. There you would see the the small beautiful town named Schilpario, which is actually in the Bergamo province (Orobie Alps) and they speak a slightly different dialect of the Lombard language than the Brescia province (Val Camonica).
Many of the words are slightly different despite the short trek. For example, on the Camunian side the word for family is "famia" (different than the Brescian "famija") while on the Orobie side the word is "famèa." It's like a subtle tribal affiliation, and we must look at it from the standpoint of history, back many centuries. For that long period of time, centuries, while they politically belonged to numerous different nations, small "tribal" differences remained in place, such as the difference in dialect. Certainly there were marriages between Camuni and Orobiesi, for example between people in Loveno and Schilpario, but the bride (in most cases) just adopted the subtly different ways of their new "tribe" so to speak. This is a place where time has stood still, and old ways remain in place. One paternal great-grandmother of mine, named Theresa, was born here in these relatively remote Alps at about 1870. Her parents were not born in "Italy," but in the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom... a colonial possession of the Austrian Empire.
Despite being a relatively short distance from major cities--such as Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia--the rugged, mountainous, and sleepy Val Paisco was much more in tune with the vast underpopulated regions of the east Lombard Alps. Again, a place where old traditions die hard. Metaphorically-speaking, I would compare the relationship between urban Milan and the east Lombard Alps with the relationship between San Jose, California and the nearby mountainous county of Santa Cruz. So close, yet so far away. Theresa eventually joined her children and grandchildren in Hurley, Wisconsin sometime in the 1920s. Hurley had a history of Lombard and Venetian immigrants going back to the late 1880s. She must have felt at home in the rural town and within the community surrounding the old St. Mary's Catholic Church. Although the Hurley-Ironwood (Upper Michigan) area would essentially be flatland in comparison to Loveno, the eighty-mile long Gogebic Mountain Range was right nearby.
Remarkably, the tradition of mining those mountains was the same here as it was in the mountains surrounding the Val Camonica. Also the same, the mining had largely diminished there just as it had back in the Val Camonica. Hurley had once been a major and wild "frontier town" in the late 1800s, housing many miners, and crawling with vice. Even Al Capone himself was impressed with the local operations, of which he wasn't able to penetrate himself; finally just agreeing to co-operate with the local black marketeers as they smuggled liquor down from Canada through Hurley and other locations in the Northwoods. With the decline of mining and the advent of Prohibition, the town started to dry up. Only the local long-standing community remained. However then (and even today), Silver Street, which had been ground zero during the old mining and vice days, still remained a haven for bars and topless dancing. There are tours for anyone interested in that part of local history.
Sometime in the 1940s, one of my grand uncles, Frank--a nephew of Theresa--moved with his family to Brisbane, California... which was something of a "mini-Hurley" back then. The vast majority of the residents were of California-Dust Bowl heritage. In other words, they were of the millions of people who had migrated to California from Oklahoma and north Texas during the 1930s. Brisbane was their real hot spot just south of San Francisco, wth many "country western" bars along Visitacion Avenue. One such bar/night club was the semi-famous 23 Club. That local culture was going strong as late as the early 90s. Frank's move to Brisbane was the start of a long-standing family connection to the town. As amazing as it might seem, Brisbane is surrounded by San Bruno Mountain, part of the major Santa Cruz Mountain chain; and there was a large mining company in the industrial part of town, quarrying stones along one part of the mountain. The quarry has largely slowed down, but there is still a company which operates there.
Although small, Brisbane had long been well known for heavy industry. For decades, materials were brought in on train tracks from the nearby railroad which ran along the San Francisco Bay. My great grandmother, whom I never knew, had actually visited Brisbane on at least a couple of occasions. Apparently she believed in keeping the family clan together, or at least not wanting them to lose touch. Not surprising when considering that she had come from a culture in which nobody ever seemed to lose contact, unless they migrated to some faraway location like Chicago, Toronto, or Buenos Aires. The meta-connections between Loveno, Hurley, and Brisbane---and strongly considering the strong circumstantial-similarities between all three locations---is overwhelming for me. The fact that one person--Theresa--was present in all three locations, only further bolsters this DNA-connection!
I would like to encourage others--Neopagans, folk-polytheists, Asatruar, spiritually-minded genealogists and ethnologists, etc--to take another look at their own family history with new eyes relating to this "meta-geographical" concept. This isn't about "me," but I think this example hopefully can give others an impetus to take that further examination of their own family history. What does your family's Meta/DNA "grid" map look like? Are there some almost-eery "circumstantial-similarities"--not necessarily directly related to your family--present between those locales? I would especially like to encourage Asatruar or Odinists, who have been the chief driving force behind the folk-neopagan movement in recent years. Many really impressively know their local and family history, so maybe we can raise the bar on this. I think those meta-geographical connections/grids are real. I can feel it. There are connections--between various seemingly unrelated locations--which are far beyond mere faded memories. Find them!
While becoming, we discover, we already are
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Since I seem to have adopted the 89-mile Tahquamenon River as sort've a sub-theme here, I wanted to just follow up on it a bit. Windows 10 started featuring an image of it just today. Somewhat coincidentally, it's located in Upper Michigan.
Tahquamonen River
Tahquamonen Falls
Lower Taquamenon River Michigan
Michigan Interactive
A tour of the Lower Tahquamenon River in Chippewa County Michigan by fishweb.com
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