Dr. Donald Calvin Page (1949-2019)

My older brother died on Saturday after a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease. He finally won the war and is resting in peace and joy in his Heavenly Father’s arms.

Donald was two-years-old when I was born. He was one of the few constants in my childhood as our minister father moved us from one church to another and even from one country to another. Growing up, we lived in Shelby, Michigan; Elmira, Illinois; LaPrairie, Illinois; Amman, Jordan; DeTour Village, Michigan; Edinburgh, Scotland; DeTour Village, Michigan, again; Lake City, Michigan; and Schoolcraft, Michigan. Actually, Donald started college when we moved to Lake City and doesn’t have much of a history there, but he lived with my parents at Schoolcraft while earning his master’s degree.

Donald was a typical Page in many ways. Aside from being a committed Christian and having a strong work ethic, he also exhibited the other two dominant Page traits: a belief in higher education and a love for travel.

On the education front, Donald received a master’s degree from Western Michigan University and a PhD from the University of Michigan. His degrees were in communication, with an emphasis on television and film production. Between college and his master’s degree, he worked for a television station in Lansing, Michigan as a cameraman.

After receiving his PhD, Donald took a teaching job in the Department of Communications at Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. He told me at the time that he planned to teach for five years and then he’d try something different—perhaps producing documentary films—for the next five. He expected to change positions every five years or so because he wanted to be challenged and to keep learning.

Fast-forward to 2017, when Donald celebrated forty years on the TSU staff. When I reminded him of his five-year plan, he laughed and said there was always something new to learn right where he was. I’m sure he would have taught for many more years if his Parkinson’s hadn’t forced him to retire in 2018.

Already widely traveled, Donald’s biggest regret near the end was that he wouldn’t get to visit some of the other places on his list. His final trip was to Japan in March with my brother Gordon and nephew Ian. Donald’s Parkinson’s created complications on that trip, but he was glad he had done it.

Shortly after Donald’s return, he fell and ended up in the hospital and eventually in a nursing home. He went downhill quickly after the fall, and I’m grateful for his final relief from pain and from the helplessness that he experienced these last few months.

Although I will miss Donald, I’m happy for him.

Death is swallowed up in victory. Halleluiah!

Christmas Wishes

I make my own Christmas cards, often using a photo I took during that year’s vacation. My card for 2019 highlights one of the reliefs on the outside of the Helsinki Cathedral in Helsinki, Finland. I used only the nativity scene, which you can see in the first picture. But the reliefs also told the rest of the story, as you can see from the second photo showing Christ rising from the dead and coming out of the grave.

Few churches in the United States tell the story of Christ’s life on their façade where it witnesses to those passing by. Even stained glass windows usually face inward so that you have to be inside to see them clearly.

To some extent I understand why American churches do it that way. A church is where we hear God’s Word preached and receive the full power of the message through that Word. Those who already know Christ are comforted and strengthened in their faith by seeing the story as well as hearing it.

But it wouldn’t hurt to share the message on the façade, as well.

Have a blessed Christmas.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Dealing with Religion

Creating Esther is written for a secular audience, but religion was a part of both the Native American culture and the white culture that officials tried to implant at boarding schools. So some mention was necessary for authenticity.

Yes, some Native Americans were Christians by then, but it was still an anomaly. And the boarding schools did not understand how to integrate Christianity into the local culture. Since I wanted to show a realistic picture of what it would be like for most of the children attending the Indian boarding schools in 1895 and 1896, I had to include the conflict between Ojibwe religious beliefs and Christianity as taught by the boarding schools. My challenge was to be sensitive to Native American religious practices while remaining true to my Christian beliefs.

In the end, I decided to show the conflict between the two without resolving it. Here is a passage from the protagonist’s first boarding school Christmas:

“What is Christmas?” Ishkode asked Mrs. Hansen. “Everyone talks about it coming next week, but what is it?”

“It’s the day Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus.”

Even though Ishkode had been attending chapel every Sunday for three months, she still didn’t understand who Jesus was. Sometimes he sounded like Wenebojo, who was born of a human mother and a spirit father. But she had asked a minister after chapel one day, and he said Wenebojo was not Jesus.

Now Ishkode rubbed her forehead. It was too confusing.

Actually, the book even shows the negatives about how the boarding schools practiced and taught Christianity. The Christianity I found in my research is not the Christianity I find in my Bible. I’m sure many of the teachers and administrators were sincere, but they were also misguided.

Boarding school staff tried to convert the Native American students by forcing religion on them. That approach doesn’t work in life, and it doesn’t work for fiction writers, either.

So use a soft touch when writing about religion.

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I took the photo at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabe Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan while on my 2015 research trip.

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This post is a revision of the December 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Language Issues

The characters in Creating Esther speak two languages, which makes the work harder for me as the author. At the beginning of the book, Ishkode understands some English but speaks and thinks in Ojibwe. Once she reaches the boarding school, she still thinks in Ojibwe but is forbidden to speak it. So how do I distinguish between the different languages without confusing my readers?

The second issue is how to write the dialogue and text when Ishkode and her friends speak or write English. At a conference I attended several years ago, a speaker said that broken English and grammar errors tell the reader that the character is unintelligent, even when that is neither the reality (to the extent fiction reflects reality) nor the message the author intended to convey. The speaker said the better option is to keep the character’s English sentence structure and vocabulary simple at first and to make them more complicated as the character learns the language. Good advice, and something I may not have thought of on my own.

I bought a number of books to help me bridge these language barriers, including two scholarly studies on how students acquired English language skills in the boarding schools, two basic books on Native American sign language (which I ended up not using), and two Ojibwe dictionaries. But although they gave me some help, I had to figure it out myself.

So what did I do?

I made Ishkode a quick learner who had been attending the reservation day school for several years before the story opens, which allowed me to start her with a basic command of English. Since all of Ishkode’s narrative thoughts would be in Ojibwe,however, they could be more complex than if they were in English. So although I had to simplify the dialogue, I didn’t have to simplify the narrative.

I still needed to signal which language my characters were speaking when there was dialogue. I solved that problem by specifically stating when people were speaking English in Part I (on the reservation) and Part II (travelling to the boarding school), which tells the reader that the rest of the dialogue was spoken in Ojibwe. I reversed the process for Part III (at the boarding school), which mentions when people are speaking Ojibwe. And yes, Ishkode and her friends do defy the ban on speaking Ojibwe.

As far as I can tell, I succeeded in distinguishing between the languages without confusing my readers. My beta readers all followed the story, and none of them mentioned any problems with how I handled the language issues.

But it wasn’t an easy puzzle to solve.

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This post is a revision of the November 24, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Naming Fictional Locations

I got spoiled when writing my first middle grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, which follows a Japanese American girl living in California during World War II. There were plenty of good memoirs with detailed accounts of what happened to the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during this relatively short period. More importantly, several of them traveled from Berkeley, California to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California to the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert as my characters did. So it was easy to set my story in real places and know that I would have all but a few minor facts correct.

I couldn’t do that with Creating Esther. The story is set in 1895, but the first off-reservation boarding school opened in 1879 and some existed until the late 1900s. The history goes back even farther when on-reservation boarding schools are included. That’s a very long period, and things change over time. Most of the memoirs I have are from the mid-20^th century, and they give little insight into the boarding school world of 1895. And although I have some earlier memoirs, those are short on details. I couldn’t find enough information to set my story in any particular school during the relevant time period without the risk that someone would find significant factual errors.

That means I had to create a fictional school using what is universal and making up details consistent with the ones in the memoirs. So that’s what I did.

But creating a fictional school meant I needed to make up a name, too.

The last three words in Dewmist Indian Boarding School were easy to come up with since that is what all of them were called. Well, some included “Industrial” after “Indian,” but the name is long enough without that. The challenge was to come up with something creative and unique for the first part of the name.

I discarded a few choices before deciding to play with the letters in the word “Midwest,” which is where my school is located. First, I tried reversing it, but Tsewdim isn’t easy to say or remember. So I switched the first two letters of that attempt and came up with Stewdim. But that didn’t seem very memorable, either. And Westmid is too obvious.

In the end, it came down to two choices: Mistdew and Dewmist. I chose Dewmist because it flows together better. As you can see, I simply rearranged a word and got a name.

But maybe you want a more fanciful explanation. Here’s one that I came up with after the fact. Dew and mist are temporary, dissolving when the sun comes out. The acculturation process at these boarding schools was also temporary, dissolving when the students went back to their reservations. Actually, some attributes stayed with them, but the schools couldn’t beat the Native American culture out of their residents.

And that’s a good thing.

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The picture shows the East Building of the Shawnee Indian Mission boarding school in Fairway, Kansas, which Roland and I saw on vacation in 2013. The building is typical of the dormitory and school buildings at the various Midwest boarding schools.

Writing Outside Your Culture: Naming Characters

As mentioned in previous posts, the main character in Creating Esther is an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school in 1895. The practice was to “civilize” the students by giving each of them a traditionally white name. So I had to find two names for my protagonist—an Ojibwe name and a “white” one.

One way that superintendents and teachers chose white names was to compile a list from the Bible and assign the next one. Running through some Biblical names in my head, I settled on “Esther” because it just sounded right. But there was another reason, as well. By the end of the book, my protagonist has made some decisions that put her on the path to saving her people, which is what the original Esther did. My Esther will do it less dramatically and as one of many forces, but the concept works.

Coming up with an Ojibwe name was more challenging. I started by going to one of those baby naming websites and looking for Ojibwe girls’ names. I liked “Keezheekoni” because it supposedly means “burning fire,” and my protagonist has a fiery temperament. Unfortunately, based on the sources I found, it appears to be hard to pronounce.

There was an even bigger problem. While most of the baby name sources list it as a Chippewa name, a couple list it as Cheyenne. Worse, I couldn’t find any of its roots in either A Dictionary of the Ojibway Language by Frederic Baraga or A Concise Dictionary of Minnesota Ojibwe by John D. Nichols and Earl Nyholm. So even though I liked the look and the purported meaning of “Keezheekoni,” I ended up rejecting it.

But the meaning worked well for my story, so I checked both dictionaries for the Ojibwe word for “fire.” Father Baraga’s dictionary listed “ishkote,” while the more modern one used “ishkode.” One letter different, but which is correct?

They probably both are. Ojibwe was originally a spoken language with no written equivalent, and the people who tried to write it down used various spellings. In Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood, author John Rogers says that his new baby brother was named Ahmeek, meaning beaver. But the Concise Dictionary spells beaver a-m-i-k.

In the end, I decided to go with the more modern spelling and name my protagonist Ishkode.

I used a similar process for naming my secondary Ojibwe characters, leafing through the dictionaries to find words that had suitable meanings while being relatively easy to pronounce. For example, the antagonist is named “Waagosh,” which means “fox,” and Ishkode’s older sister is “Opichi,” which means “robin.” I relied on those same dictionaries for the words Ishkode uses for her parents and grandparents.

Notice the emphasis on the word “relatively” above. Because the names come from another language, none of the pronunciation is easy. But I wanted to be as authentic as possible, which ruled out using English words, like naming a character “White Feather.” So I put a pronunciation guide at the beginning of the book, and hopefully it’s close enough.

Because even character names should be as realistic as possible.

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This post is an expansion of the October 27, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Writing Outside Your Culture: The Importance of Group Names

When writing outside your race or culture, it is particularly important to avoid labels that unintentionally disparage the race or cultural group.

My second middle-grade historical novel, Creating Esther, is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. My first dilemma was whether to use “Indian” or “Native American.” I didn’t want to offend anyone by using the word “Indian,” but that was what Native Americans were called at the time of my story, and every boarding school had “Indian” in its name. For historical purposes, that was the best choice. But was it acceptable?

One of the stops on my 2015 research trip in 2015 was at the Grand Portage National Monument, where the exhibits in the Heritage Center answered my question about using the term “Indian.” A sign near the entrance stated:

Although the term “Native Americans” was once considered more acceptable than “Indians,” today most Indian people in the United States—including Grand Portage—refer to themselves and their families as just that: “Indians.” In the exhibits here in the Heritage Center we have used “Indians” or “Native people” more or less interchangeably.

My second question was what to call the tribe itself. The legal name is Chippewa, and that is the name I was familiar with when growing up in Chippewa County, Michigan. But most tribes call themselves Ojibwe (or Ojibwa or Ojibway). Then there is Anishinaabe, which is the older version. Again, I’ll let the exhibit at Grand Portage provide the answer, which you can read in the photo at the head of this post.

Based on those exhibits, I ended up using “Indian” and “Ojibwe.”

When writing historical fiction outside your culture, it is important to balance historical accuracy with sensitivity to the group’s feelings. Sometimes history has to win out, but think carefully about your choice.

And sometimes it’s as easy as asking.

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The photo shows a sign in the exhibit area at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

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This post was repurposed from the July 28, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part II

My research for writing Creating Esther wasn’t limited to documents. I also dragged Roland along on a trip through Ojibwe country in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota to visit museums and reservations and the shells of former Indian boarding schools.

It isn’t always possible to take research trips to the sites in our fiction, but it has always been worthwhile for me when I had the opportunity. And this one kept me from falling into the pitfalls created by regional differences.

I already knew, of course, that different tribes had different customs and ways of life. But I didn’t know that a few hundred miles could make a difference within a tribe.

The main elements of Ojibwe life and history were the same at each location. Every exhibit we saw referred to the Ojibwes’ seasonal way of life: collecting maple syrup in the spring, fishing and berrying and planting gardens in the summer, harvesting wild rice in the fall, and hunting in the winter. (Actually, fishing and hunting took place all year long, but they were more predominant at those times.) Families moved from one place to another for these seasonal activities but tended to return to the same spot every spring, every summer, every fall, and every winter. In all regions, the members of the tribe also had the same clan system (although not always the same clans) and the same teachings passed down through their oral history.

But they didn’t all live in the same type of birch-bark housing.

Before we left, I thought all of the earlier Ojibwe lived in birch-bark wigwams with the rounded shape shown in the museum exhibit above. On the research trip, I learned that the construction materials varied somewhat depending on the season. Woven birch-bark mats covered the frame in the hot summer months, which allowed the wall coverings to be raised so that air could circulate through the lower part of the frame. In the winter, the walls were insulated with moss and the floors used a radiant heating system.

All of that was helpful new information, and none of it surprised me.

What did surprise me was that some Ojibwe used a birch-bark teepee during the winter. We saw no evidence of this in Michigan or Wisconsin, where winter dwellings were built using the wigwam shape. But that changed when we got to Minnesota. A guide at the Mille Lacs Indian Museum told us that the teepee shape keeps the dwelling warmer. (Since heat rises, the smaller air space near the ceiling would keep more of the heat down by the floor.) During the warmer months, there were no regional differences—all dwellings were built as wigwams. But the winter shape seems to have been modified as members of the tribe moved farther west and closer to the plains Indians, who lived in animal skin teepees.

I’m very glad I took that trip and learned about Ojibwe regional differences. They don’t show up in the book because I kept the settings in Wisconsin and Michigan. But without location research, I could have gotten it wrong.

And I’d rather be true to the culture.

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I took the first picture at the Ziibiwing Center of Anishinabek Culture and Lifeways at Mount Pleasant, Michigan, and the second at Grand Portage National Monument in Grand Portage, Minnesota.

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This post was repurposed from the September 22, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana Chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Researching CREATING ESTHER, Part I

My research for any historical novel begins with reading as many first-person accounts as I can. This is especially important when writing outside my culture, as is the case with my newly released middle-grade historical novel. Memoirs are usually the best source, although diaries, letters, and contemporary newspaper stories are also good.

As I said in my last post, Creating Esther is about an Ojibwe girl who goes to an Indian boarding school at the end of the 19^th Century. There are plenty of memoirs about the Native American boarding school experience, but few come from the right perspective. Most took place several decades later, when the students knew what to expect. Others came from the male perspective or that of a white teacher.

The three most helpful memoirs were (1) three essays by Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin), which can be found in her American Indian Stories; (2) No Turning Back: A Hopi Woman’s Struggle to Live in Two Worlds by Polingaysi Qoyawayma (Elizabeth Q. White); and (3) Red World and White: Memories of a Chippewa Boyhood by John Rogers (Chief Snow Cloud). The Zitkala-Sa essays tell about her experiences as a Native American student and teacher shortly before the time of my story, but they are short on details. No Turning Back begins at about the right time and provides a few more specifics, but it spans a number of years and is written by a woman from a different tribe than my protagonist. Red World and White gives a reasonably detailed look at Ojibwe (Chippewa) reservation life around the right time but gives little information about the male author’s boarding school experience.

I also read a number of academic books about the Native American boarding school experience or the Ojibwe tribe. Putting all this information together with what I learned from location research, I believe I have portrayed an accurate picture for my readers. But it wasn’t easy.

Next month I’ll talk about the location research that helped me understand the broader picture.

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The photo at the head of this post shows one of the abandoned buildings from the Mount Pleasant Indian Industrial Boarding School. I took the picture on my research trip in 2015. And before you ask, I wasn’t intentionally trying to make it look old. Somehow I set my camera to grayscale and didn’t notice it until later.

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This post was repurposed from the August 25, 2016 post I wrote for the Hoosier Ink blog sponsored by the Indiana chapter of the American Christian Fiction Writers.

Creating Esther

After numerous submissions to publishers and agents, I decided to self-publish my second middle-grade historical novel. Once that decision was made, it took over a year to get it out there, primarily because of problems with the cover. The first cover designer I hired was over-committed. Then, after I found somebody else to do the front cover art, medical issues slowed the process down. But I’m happy to announce that Creating Esther is now available for purchase from Amazon and other retailers, and you can also read it on Kindle.

Here is the back-cover blurb.

Twelve-year-old Ishkode loves her life on an Ojibwe reservation, but it is 1895 and the old ways are disappearing. Can a boarding school education help her fight back, or will it destroy everything she believes in?

And don’t get confused when you see the author’s name. I use Kaye Page for my middle-grade fiction.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to repurpose former blog posts from when I was researching and writing Creating Esther. I’m not fool enough to claim that they aren’t intended to promote the book, but I’m also smart enough to know that my blog readers desire—and deserve—more. By giving you insight into my writing process, I hope to educate and inform my readers about some of the tougher decisions a writer has to make—especially when writing outside her culture.

Next week I’ll start by describing my reading research.

Story Over Message

I’ve been reading Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. It’s an easy read for a book published in 1719, but many passages are mini-sermons. That may have been the fashion in the 18^th Century but bores today’s readers—or at least this one. Fortunately for me (and unfortunately for Defoe), those sections are easy to identify and skip.

Many authors—including me—want their books to convey a message. My first two middle-grade historicals have protagonists who come from different cultures than I do. I wanted my readers to understand two seemingly contradictory but very real truths: (1) that we are all the same under the skin and (2) our cultural heritage is an important part of who we are and should be celebrated rather than suppressed. But if I had stressed that, my readers would have decided the books were dull and put them down before the message sunk in. Or they would have skipped over the lectures. Either way, the message would be lost.

So what’s a writer to do? I try to make the story primary and the message secondary. Think of Aesop’s Fables and fairy tales. The tortoise beat the rabbit because he worked steadily and didn’t slack off. That’s a message, but we remember it because of the story. “Beauty and the Beast” teaches us that it is what is inside that matters but, again, we remember the message because of the story.

I’m not saying you can’t have a message in mind when you write your book. I do. But without a compelling story the message will never get heard.

The same is true for other lessons. One reason I write middle-grade historicals is because I believe it is important for today’s children know about their history. But my readers want a story, not a lecture. When I wrote Desert Jewels, I wanted to show everything that the Japanese Americans went through during World War II when they were forced to leave their homes and move to internment camps. Unfortunately, that goal was unrealistic. There were some events and circumstances that I couldn’t weave into the story without bogging it down, so I had to leave them out. I probably still left in a few things I shouldn’t have, but hopefully the story is strong enough that my readers will forgive me for those slips.

By the time I sent Creating Esther to my middle-grade beta readers, I was doing better. However, I still wanted to show everything about how my Ojibwe protagonist lived before she went to a white-run boarding school, and that goal was unrealistic, too. This time I had the sense to ask my beta readers to point out those passages that sounded like lessons, and they did. The final version either reworked those parts or left them out.

Fiction isn’t a textbook or a sermon. If it is written that way, readers will put it down. And they should.

So if you want your readers to learn something new, put story over message.

Brushing Teeth and Cleaning House

In the last two weeks I saw several of my old colleagues from the Indiana Writers’ Consortium and had a good time visiting with them. During the six years that I ran the IWC blog, I wrote many posts that I never reprinted here. Now that IWC has disbanded, I’m trying to change that. Today’s post originally appeared on the IWC blog on September 18, 2013.

Brushing Teeth and Cleaning House

People look at a picture of a toddler cleaning a toilet and say, “Cute.” Replace the toddler with an adult, and they say, “Who cares.” Fiction works that way, too.

Every scene in every novel—or in any type of writing, for that matter—must have a purpose. In fiction, the scene should either develop a character or move the story along. Everyday details that do neither make the story boring.

I don’t want to read about a character’s morning routine. In fact, I assume it’s pretty much like mine. He gets out of bed, uses the toilet, brushes his teeth, takes a shower, gets dressed, and so on. You don’t have to tell me any of this.

As mentioned above, however, there are two exceptions. I’m willing to pay attention to details that show me something interesting about a character or advance the plot. But even then, I only want those details that make the point.

The mere fact that a protagonist brushes his teeth every morning doesn’t tell the reader a thing. But if you show him brushing them exactly 100 strokes, we might conclude that he is obsessive. And no, I don’t want to count every single one with him.

As a reader I don’t usually care to intrude on a character while she is getting dressed. But I’m interested if she gets up at two o’clock in the afternoon, rummages through the dirty clothes hamper, and pulls on a pair of rumpled jeans and a stained T-shirt without taking off her pajamas. And if she goes to the store that way, so much the better.

Similarly, I don’t usually like to watch the protagonist clean her house. Still, maybe you want to show that she’s a cleanliness freak who wrestles with every piece of heavy furniture so she can pull it out and clean behind it, a sloppy person who only dusts the furniture that is in direct sunlight, or a bored person who cleans an already clean house because she has nothing else to do. Even those characteristics may not matter to the story. If they do, show us the details. But if they don’t, leave them out.

You can also use otherwise mundane details to move the plot along. Maybe your protagonist cleans house and discovers the murder weapon just before the police knock on her door with a search warrant. Or maybe the antagonist injected the tube of toothpaste with poison and the protagonist is one step closer to death every time he brushes his teeth. One caution in the second situation, however. You probably don’t want the protagonist to know he is being slowly poisoned, but the reader needs at least a clue. Otherwise, you can’t count on the reader staying with you until you reveal all.

Do you have Facebook friends who tell you every routine detail about their day? I hide those people from my news feed, and you probably do, too. Nobody wants to read about mundane things like brushing teeth and cleaning house. Not usually, anyway.

If it doesn’t aid the story, leave it out. If it tells me something I need to know, make it interesting.

Because excessive detail creates a book readers won’t finish.

Drama on the Erie Canal

As I work on the first draft of my Erie Canal book, Muddy Waters, I have been looking for circumstances and events to bring tension to the story. There are plenty of opportunities for drama, but they are created by humans rather than by nature. The canal was shallow, the current was sluggish or nonexistent, and boats were always close to the banks, so realism eliminates icebergs and hurricanes on the high seas.

Realism does, but humor doesn’t. Many songs of the day made fun of the sedentary waterway, and the then popular “The Raging Canal” was one of them.  Mark Twain added his own voice by paroding “The Raging Canal” in Roughing It. He was no poet but was the consummate humorist, as you can tell from “The Aged Pilot Man.”

“The Aged Pilot Man”

On the Erie Canal, it was,

     All on a summer’s day,

I sailed forth with my parents

     Far away to Albany.

From out the clouds at noon that day

     There came a dreadful storm,

That piled the billows high about,

     And filled us with alarm.

A man came rushing from a house,

     Saying, “Snub up your boat, I pray

Snub up your boat, snub up, alas,

     Snub up while yet you may.”

Our captain cast one glance astern,

     Then forward glancéd he,

And said, “My wife and little ones

     I never more shall see.”

Said Dollinger the pilot man,

     In noble words but few,—

“Fear not, but lean on Dollinger,

     And he will fetch you through.”

The boat drove on, the frightened mules

     Tore through the rain and wind,

And bravely still, in danger’s post,

     The whip-boy strode behind.

“Come ‘board, come ‘board,” the captain cried,

     “Nor tempt so wild a storm;”

But still the raging mules advanced,

     And still the boy strode on.

Then said the captain to us all,

     “Alas, ‘tis plain to me,

The greater danger is not there,

     But here upon the sea.

“So let us strive, while life remains,

     To save all souls on board,

And then if die at last we must,

     Let . . . I cannot speak the word!”

Said Dollinger the pilot man,

     Tow’ring above the crew,

“Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

     And he will fetch you through.”

“Low bridge! low bridge! all heads went down,

     The laborimg bark sped on;

A mill we passed, we passed a church,

     Hamlets, and fields of corn;

And all the world come out to see,

     And chased along the shore.

Crying, “Alas, alas, the sheeted rain,

     The wind, the tempest’s roar!

Alas, the gallant ship and crew,

     Can nothing help them more?”

And from our deck sad eyes looked out

     Across the stormy scene;

The tossing wake of billows aft,

     The bending forests green,

The chickens sheltered under carts,

     In lee of barn the cows,

The skurrying swine with staw in mouth,

     The wind spray from our bows!

She balances!

She wavers!

Now let her go about!

     If she misses stays and broaches to,

We’re all”—[then with a shout]

“huray! huray!

Avast! belay!

Take in more sail!

Lord, what a gale!

Ho, boy, haul taut on the hind mule’s tail!”

“Ho! lighten ship! Ho! man the pump!

     Ho, hostler, heave the lead!

And count ye all, both great and small,

     As numbered with the dead!

For mariner for forty years

     On Erie, boy and man,

I never yet saw such a storm,

     Or one ‘t with it began!”

So overboard a keg of nails

     And anvils three we threw,

Likewise four bales of gunny-sacks,

     Two hundred pounds of glue,

Two sacks of corn, four ditto wheat,

     A box of books, a cow,

A violin, Lord Byron’s works,

     A rip-saw and a sow.

A curve! a curve! the dangers grow!

“Labbord!—stabbord!—s-t-e-a-d-y!—so!—

Hard-a-port, Dol!—hellum-a-lee!

Haw the head mule!—the aft one gee!

Luft!—bring her to the wind!”

“A quarter-three!—‘tis shoaling fast!

     Three feet large—t-h-r-e-e feet!—

Three feet scant!” I cried in fright

     “Oh, is there no retreat?”

Said Dollinger the pilot man,

     As on the vessel flew,

“Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

     And he will fetch you through.”

A panic struck the bravest hearts,

     The boldest cheek turned pale;

For plain to all, this shoaling said

A leak had burst the ditch’s bed!

And, straight as bolt from crossbow sped,

Our ship swept on with shoaling lead,

     Before the fearful gale!

“Sever the tow line! Cripple the mules!”

     Too late! . . . There comes a shock!

Another length, and the fated craft

     Would have swum in the saving lock!

Then gathered together the shipwrecked crew

     And took one last embrace,

While sorrowful tears from despairing eyes

     Rain down each hopeless face;

And some did think of their little ones

     Whom they never more might see,

And others of waiting wives at home,

     And mothers that grieved would be.

But of all the children of misery there

     On that poor sinking frame,

But one spoke words of hope and faith,

     And I worshipped as they came;

Said Dollinger the pilot man,—

     (O brave heart, strong and true!)—

“Fear not, but trust in Dollinger,

     For he will fetch you through.”

Lo! scarce the words have passed his lips

     The dauntless prophet say’th,

When every soul about him seeth

     A wonder crown his faith!

For straight a farmer brought a plank,—

     (Mysteriously inspired)—

And laying it unto the ship,

     In silent awe retired.

Then every sufferer stood amazed

     That pilot man before;

A moment stood. Then wondering turned,

     And speechless walked ashore.

__________

NOTE: It took me forever to get the poem’s formatting correct. I hope it shows up that way on your computer.