The Inside Story in Greenwood (previously owned by Edward and Anne Wedler) maintains a good collection of books by local authors. I picked up Allison Mitcham’s Prophet of the Wilderness . It is a biography of Abraham Gesner (1797-1864). Gesner is perhaps best known for the invention of a new fuel ‘kerosene’. He also wrote the first treatise on the geology and mineralogy of Nova Scotia. From Mitcham’s title, Gesner was a prophet about the future of the wilderness, in this case, Nova Scotia. Although he also conducted significant field research in New Brunswick. My blog title is a wordplay on how we can profit from this landscape.
On Friday, I arranged for a meeting with Celes Davar (Earth Rhythms) and Ed Symons (Community Mapping at COGS). The broad topic was experiential tourism and the different methods for telling our stories. What is the role that maps and mapping can play?
This sent me off in a slightly different direction. I am less interested in telling stories that can be consumed by the visitor, but rather the stories which we share between residents of this landscape.
For example, I have been checking the writing and life of David Manners. Yesterday, I received a note from the library that soon I will be able to read his second book, Under Running Laughter.
Last night at the Centrelea Cinema, there was a showing of Dracula (1931), featuring the actors Bela Lugosi and David Manners. It was wonderful to be in a community hall, being served popcorn, and able to watch an actor who had spent time, here in the community in the ’20s.
But the real story is as follows. Not only had a small group of citizens arranged the film series, with Dracula as the kick-off event, but they had arranged for the technology and the movies to be available. AND, before the main feature, there was a screen welcome to the Centrelea Cinema and a short cartoon. How does that happen? How do those skills reside in Centrelea? What other skills reside in this empty space or ‘wilderness’ called ‘rural Nova Scotia’?
Acknowledgements
To Ed Symons and Celes Davar for a fruitful conversation. Please check earthrhythms and codsounds web sites. To Anne Crossman and Nancy Godfrey for the movie night in Centrelea. Edward Wedler for editorial and graphics skills.
Footnote
From Henry Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
‘In my short experience of human life, the outward obstacles, if there were any such, have not been living men, but the institutions of the dead. It is grateful to make one’s way through this latest generation as through dewy grass. Men are as innocent as the morning to the unsuspicious… I love mankind, but hate the institutions of the dead un-kind’.
See Brain Pickings February 24,2019 for the larger context.
References
Allison Mitcham. 2018. Prophet of the Wilderness. Nimbus Press.
Brain Pickings. February 24,2019
Ernest Blair Experiment 