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Years ago, there was a very good book by Edmund James Burke, called Connections, which detailed many interesting connections between different things.
The other day, I wrote about seeing 3 bald eagles picking at the carcass of a young deer that was killed when the hayfield next to us was mowed. No eagles since then, and as I write this, the field is being baled.
Where I live (Loudoun County, VA) was, in the early history of the country, "the breadbasket” due to the amount of grain and the number of water-powered mills.
Now the connection:
In the 1940s, the main crop was orchard grass and several large mills were built nearby to extract the seeds. Purcellville, VA — near me — was along the railroad and contained several large mills to process the orchard grass.
It turns out that orchard grass seeds were the best material for safely packing shells and armament to be sent to Europe during WWII. Since Belgium — which had been a big producer — was overrun, the seeds were used to grow new grain in England. I have read that you can still see Loudoun County orchard grass there.
The mills have been renovated and one is a high-end restaurant now. The railroad track is now a bike path.
What unexpected connections are near you?
(Edit). Thanks to @She for pointing out that it was James Burke.
Also, one like is from a certain fat finger. I can’t figure out how to remove it.
Discussion (4)
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One of the things I miss since the passing of Mr. She almost four years ago is the absolute certainty that, anywhere we went, we would run into someone with whom he had a connection.
So, a couple hundred feet from the summit of New Hampshire's Mt. Washington, in the dark, and on a bitterly cold and blizzarding Thanksgiving weekend many years ago--absolutely awful climbing weather--we spot the very first person to be seen since we left the base hut after breakfast, one who's gone up another route, but is coming down on ours. The only other person crazy enough to be out on that day.
"Frank!!" He shouts. "Bill!!" (or whatever it was) responds my dear husband. Turns out they were both charter members of the Explorers Club of Pittsburgh, many decades earlier.
Then there was that wedding we attended, at which one of Frank's former students was being wed. (He was the sort of college professor who got invited to dozens of such events, one whose students regularly credited him with forming their worldview and turning themselves around on the ideas of commitment, marriage and family. A remarkable number of those marriages have lasted, produced children, and are now on to the next generation.)
I didn't think we had any "connection" with anyone other than the bride at this particular one.
Silly me.
Turns out, at the table we'd been assigned to (entirely randomly) we were sitting next to a couple, one of whom was also related to "Cousin Butchie" (on Frank's mother's side) at the time a Monsignor at the Vatican.
As I've mentioned often, in 1986, Frank and I moved out into the country, near the small town of Claysville, Pennsylvania. There we were, one day long ago, at Sprowls Country Hardware--a local institution and the place you went when you needed to buy anything from a couch for the living room to a washing machine to a well pump to a tractor part--and Frank and old Dick Sprowls were chewing the fat.
Guess what!! They were related too!
I guess it's a gift. As is the ability to quickly ferret such things out in conversation. Although I consider myself fairly gregarious and social, neither is a gift I really have, at least in quite such an intimate way.
I miss it.
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People die on Mount Washington. You were insane to be there in the dark, in a blizzard.
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I offered this a while back.
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Oh, don't I know it. And I never allowed the late Mr. She to forget it. I'm not sure it still holds the record, but for a very long time, the highest winds recorded on planet Earth were recorded at the summit of Mt. Washington in the 1930s--more than 230mph.
It didn't seem all that bad when we set out in the morning of November 18 (edit: it might have been the 19th), 1978 though. We'd just had breakfast in the hut at base camp and listened to the incredible news from Jonestown about the 900 people dead. I've never been able to hear the phrase "drink the Kool-Aid" since, without feeling sick. (Yes, I know it was actually some other sort of chemically-assisted sugary drink laced with cyanide, but "Kool-Aid" is the association everyone makes.)
Mr. She was a pretty experienced mountain, rock, and ice climber (I do think ice climbers actually are insane), having climbed quite a few "fourteeners" in Colorado and elsewhere, and Mt. Ranier in Washington State several years previously, and he did get me down safely. I've thought sometimes of returning and scattering his ashes in Tuckerman Ravine (I think he'd like that), but I haven't got around to it yet.