Find Your Own Pond: Visiting Reed Larrick

Welcome

This blog is a chronicle of life and the seasons at the New Concord Reservoir. The manmade reservoir lies about a mile and a half outside the village of New Concord toward the end of a country road lined with small farms and homes. A half mile long and about 150 yards wide at its widest point, it is bordered by forests on its eastern, western and northern shores. New Concord is a village in Southeastern Ohio, which, like its New England namesake, originally served a hinterland of small farms. Today, life in the village is shaped primarily by the presence of Muskingum College, a private, residential liberal arts college founded by Scots-Irish Presbyterians in 1837. The New Concord reservoir lies about the same distance from the village of New Concord as Walden pond lies from the village of Concord, Massachusetts. It is only about one quarter of the size of Walden, and no great works have celebrated it. While Walden is a natural pond, carved by receding glacial moraines, the New Concord reservoir required human intervention to emerge. It only came into existence a few decades ago, when the village created an earthen dam near the headwaters of Fox Creek, and its first function was to ensure a dependable source of water for the village. Neither Walden, nor our reservoir are notable for their extraordinary majesty or wildness; both exist in the midst of civilization rather than remote from it. In chronicling the days of Walden Pond, Thoreau sought to encourage us all to appreciate the ordinary natural world we live in rather than only valuing that which is remote and seemingly untouched by human hands. This blog is intended to encourage you to find your own Walden in your own neighborhood. Visit it frequently, learn from it, find peace and inspiration there, share it, cherish it, and protect it.

Friday, March 16, 2007

Visiting Reed Larrick

Pauli Cornish called me yesterday to tell me she had acquired a copy of the Salt Fork State Park book, and really liked it. I was glad she called, because I had been meaning to call her and had misplaced her number. Pauli is an 80 something year-old dynamo who restored a an old sandstone house sat above the waters at Salt Fork State Park. The Kennedy Stone House is now a museum documenting mid 19th century farm life in the Salt Fork region, and preserving the stories of the many families who once made the parklands their home. Pauli and the Friends of the Stone House museum provided many of the pictures for the Salt Fork book, and we decided to contribute the book royalties to the Kennedy Stone House museum. I wanted to get her a signed copy of the book and take the opportunity to deliver copies to a few other families who shared so many stories and pictures with us.

I was most excited to visit Reed Larrick, a 94 year old bachelor who grew up in the region, and lives alone in a small house just south of the park. We visited Reed several times this summer to hear his stories and view his pictures. And Reed is a great story teller. Unfortunately, some of his stories were so candid that we dare not publish them, for fear of offending other people. Reed's favorite activity in his younger days was raising coonhounds and going coon hunting, and his house is filled with pictures and trophies related to this activity. I snapped this picture of him this summer while he was showing off his gun--a gun he bought at J.C. Penney 75 years ago and has kept in working order ever since. He still ocassionally uses it to shoot groundhogs from his kitchen window.

It had been months since I had visited Reed. I wasn't sure he'd remember me, but he did. In fact, he let me know that he had been waiting for the book for a long time, and it was about he had about given up on it. He had told all his friends and family about it, and they were constantly asking him when it was coming out. I gave him a signed copy, and he was delighted with it. We chatted for about an hour, I took out his trash and brought in his mail. It had been a long winter for Reed, and he had not been outside in months. He told me he had to get about fifteen copies of the book to give to all the friends and family who had been asking about it. At twenty bucks a pop, that was going to cost him a sizeable sum. So when I took the trash out, I got into my trunk and gathered the few extra copies I had and left them on his kitchen table.

I had to get back to campus for some meetings, so I said goodbye, and promised to stop in soon. When I return, I'll bring him a case of his favorite beverage--Mountain Dew. If I'm lucky enough to live into my eighties or nineties, I hope I have the health and energy of Pauli Cornish and Reed Larrick.