We are all migrants on this continent, even many of our First Nation peoples whose following of natural food ways resulted in the creation of winter and summer camps.
As White immigrants who arrived here fleeing persecution, poverty, and oppression and seeking something better, we tend to think of ourselves as exceptional and ahistorical -- a country full of "firsts" -- while at the same time being obsessed with the concept of "home."
Yet the internet, that glorious, fast, invisible tool that sends information, our thoughts, and visual depictions of our lives flying around the globe, is by no means the first highway of new ideas in the U.S.
That badge of honor MIGHT be said to belong to the Erie Canal, opened in 1825.
This new super highway was quickly flooded with those headed west, as it was a relatively flat and quick route that avoided crossing the Appalachian Mountains. It is said that more migrants and immigrants used the Canal to move into and across the western frontier than any other means.
Among those headed north and west in the mid-19th century were many escaped slaves, as well as others who just didn't "fit" where they were -- the queers, the radicals, those who wanted something other than the Puritan, male, patriarchal state.
The Underrground Railroad ran strongly along the canal with critical junctions in Syracuse, Rochester, and Niagara as gateways to Canada. These cities became known for their abolitionists, who also fomented other radical, social justice oriented movements -- including Utopianism, Mormonism, and Feminism. Enveloping all of these movements was the Second Great Awakening, a period of religious revival that was so strong in western and central NY along the Canal that it became known as the "Burned-Over Diistrict." Without access to many trained clergy, individual laypeople created an evangelical air of "extravagant excitement" -- leaving the impression in many others that religion was a mere delusion -- all seeking the path to "go home" to the Lord.
Among those who had his beginnings along the canal was L. Frank Baum, noted author of The Wizard of Oz and a large number of fantasy books, born in Chittenango in 1856. A small, family-run museum alongside the canal exemplifies our obsession with Oz, Dorothy, the Wizard, the Witches, and of course the yellow brick road.
The scene I best remember from the cherished movie version of this book is at the end, when we are back in black and white from our Technicolor fantasy and Dorothy is waking up in bed surrounded by family and farmhands -- all of whom had become characters in her fever dream. "There's no place like home," she is chanting/mumbling as she awakens from her unconscious. There's no place like home.
As an adopted person and in spite of my wonderful adoptive family, I too am a person who will always be yearning "to go home." But as so many have said - from German-Jewish refugee philosopher Hannah Arendt, who spoke of the need of the persecuted Jewish people to carry their libraries with them, in their heads, as they fled pogrom after pogrom; to current musicologist and musician Rhiannen Giddens, who speaks of the power of music to allow us to carry our ancestral homes in Africa and the Middle East within us as we flee and fly -- the only homes we have are those we carry within us.
One more reason for raising readers, writers, musicians and artists, and for developing rich, complex arts and cultural sensibilities in our selves and our communities.
#arts #culture #eriecanaltrail #bikeride #Oz #home #community
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