Help! Limber Jim is Lost by Karla Stover

       
  
     Until the early 20^th century, the eastern portion of Indiana consisted of 13,000 acres of swamp and wetlands, and streams that flowed into the Wabash River. Parts of the swamp smelled like sulphur, prompting the name, Loblolly Marsh, based on a Miami language word. Miami-Illinois is an indigenous Algonquian language formerly common in the United States, primarily in Illinois, Missouri, Indiana and western Ohio. The wetlands’ mixed vegetation supported a rich biodiversity needed by local and migrating birds and insects, as well as other animals.

     However, when European Americans arrived, they described the area “as a “treacherous swamp and quagmire, filled with every plant, animal and human danger known — the worst of such locations in the central states . . . a vast forest and swampland legendary for its quicksand and unsavory characters.” One of those unsavory characters was Jim Corbus. Corbus went hunting one day and the spry fellow, sometimes known as Limber Jim, got lost. Friends went hunting for him with the rallying cry, “Limber’s Lost.” Reports vary as to whether Jim was ever found, but the name, “Limberlost” came to mean the swamp, which the European-Americans saw as an ideal place for farms, once the swamp was drained, of course.  For the next 80 years, the Limberlost was used as farmland. Then, in 1991, local citizen Ken Brunswick established "Limberlost Swamp Remembered," and a group organized to restore some of the wetlands.

     Meanwhile, in 1874, while the Limberlost  was being drained, twelve-year-old Geneva (Gene) Stratton moved to Wabash, Indiana with her parents and three unmarried siblings. Four months later, her mother died and from then until her marriage to Charles Porter, she lived with relatives. Gene's father and her brother, Leander, taught her to appreciate nature, and she roamed freely around the family farm, observing animals in their natural habitats and caring for various pets. Her particular interest was birds. She was also attending school on a regular basis and became an avid reader. At home, her sister Florence began teaching her banjo, violin, and piano. To complete her education, a local art instructor gave Gene private lessons. With so much going on, it's no wonder she `was unable to finish the last term of her senior year. In fact, because she was failing her classes, she decided to quit school altogether.

     In 1884, twenty-year old Gene took a trip to Sylvan Lake, Indiana, where she was attending the Island Park Assembly, a Chautauqua gathering. A Chautauqua "was an adult education movement in rural parts of the United States and included entertainment and culture by way of speakers, teachers, musicians, entertainers, preachers, and specialists of the day." There she met a thirty-four year old druggist named Charles Dorwin Porter. Two years later, they married.

     The Porters had only one child and by most accounts, Gene” took pride in her family and maintaining a home.” However, but she “opposed the restrictive, traditional marriages of her era and became bored and restless.” Since she had never lost her interest in nature, she began writing about it and selling articles to magazines as a way to earn her own income. In 1895, the Porters moved into the Limberlost cabin and Gene spent hours exploring, photographing, and sketching the swamp. In addition to her nature articles, she wrote a number of novels. The most successful was Girl of the Limberlost, published in 1909.  

     The Limberlost cabin was just one of many homes the Porters lived in, including one in Hollywood. Gene wasn’t happy with the various film adaptations of her books, so she started the Stratton-Porter Production Company and made her own movies. Eventually, various production companies turned eight of her novels into movies, the last made in 1927. 

     Gene Stratton Porter died in 1924. Among her lasting legacies was her early and outspoken advocacy for nature conservation. She supported efforts to preserve wetlands, such as the Limberlost Swamp, and saving the wild elk at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from extinction.   

   

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Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking

In the early morning of March 14, 2018, exactly 139 years after Albert Einstein’s birth, the renowned physicist Stephen Hawking passed away peacefully at his home in Cambridge, England, at the age of 76. That he lived to such an age, and that he accomplished so much in his time, is a remarkable achievement.

In 1963, Hawking, while a graduate student at Oxford, was diagnosed with a rare early-onset slow-progressing form of motor neurone disease, which eventually robbed him of all motor functions, including the ability to use his voice. The following year, he became engaged to Jane Wilde, a friend of his sister. Hawking later said that the engagement gave him "something to live for,” since the doctors’ predictions of a very short and unproductive life induced a deep depression. The two married on the 14th July 1965, determined to face all obstacles in their way.

Hawking is most famous for his work regarding black holes, celestial objects so massive that nothing, not even light, can escape their clutches. Based on Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, Hawking, along with Robert Oppenheimer, Sir Roger Penrose and others, advanced our knowledge of the behavior of the Universe.

Their work suggested that, upon the collapse of a massive star, when it runs out of its own internal nuclear fuel, it undergoes a sudden shrinkage under the pull of its own gravity.  They predicted that the outcome of this collapse, as implied by Einstein’s theory of gravity, to be a space-time singularity: an infinitely dense and extreme physical state of matter, ordinarily not encountered in any of our usual experiences of the physical world. A massive star, millions of miles across, would collapse to the size of the dot in the letter ‘i.’

Einstein himself strongly opposed such an idea and conclusion, and for a long time, not much progress occurred in this field. It took the genius of Stephen Hawking, among others, to find that Einstein was in error, and that star collapse and singularity do happen. Thus, in the later 1960s and early 1970s, the study of quantum theory and gravity was revived.

Hawking was a regular visitor to Canada. The physicist permitted The Stephen Hawking Centre in Waterloo, Ontario, to bear his name.

“Remember to look up at the stars and not down at your feet. Try to make sense of what you see and wonder about what makes the universe exist,” Hawking said of the meaning of life. “Be curious. And however difficult life may seem, there is always something you can do and succeed at.”

Mohan Ashtakala is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," (www.yogazapper.com) published by Books we Love (www.bookswelove.com)

How to be 4 years old in a modern world

http://bwlpublishing.ca/authors/claydon-sheila-romance/

If you have read my books you will know that they often include children. Sometimes the hero and heroine are their parents, sometimes not; sometimes they are integral to the storyline, sometimes not; but whatever their role, writing about them is a joy. While I frequently have to wrestle with the main characters, children are more straightforward. Portraying their emotions is easy. It doesn't matter whether they are happy or sad, excited or curious, angry or frightened, their language is always simple and direct.  They are not introspective. They live in the present and rarely worry about what other people think.

I was thinking about this the other day as I worked on the as yet unnamed sequel to Remembering Rose, because the same children will feature in that, and while I was thinking my phone rang. It was my almost four year old granddaughter calling from Hong Kong. Why was she calling? Because she wanted a bedtime story! So I dutifully exchanged my phone for my tablet and complied, not once but twice. I read a Charlie and Lola story, and Superworm. The previous week we read Stick Man. Then we said goodnight and I returned to my writing. It was only later that I registered how very different her childhood is to mine and to that of her parents and even her older cousins.

At almost four years old she is multiracial (Chinese/English/Irish), multicultural (she has already lived in 3 countries and been totally immersed in their cultures (England, Australia and Hong Kong). She has visited mainland China, Wales in England, Paris in France and Dubai. She is also multilingual (English, Mandarin and Cantonese) and will soon attend an International School where she will also learn French. She has attended 4 different nursery schools, all of which had a rainbow mix of children  from across the globe, and the wonderful thing is, that to her, all this is normal. Far from confusing her, it has enlarged her world so that she is confident and friendly, and interested in everything around her. What she isn't, is introspective. Just like the children in my books, she lives in the present and very definitely doesn't worry what other people think. Sadly she might in ten years time because that is what teenagers do. Until then may she continue to enjoy her life as a very modern four year old who thinks asking for a bedtime story on Skype is normal, and I'm looking forward to the day when she decides to read to me across the miles instead.