Geneva Jane (cont'd)

This story is similar to the last one, but it incorporates new information and is told with a focus on Geneva Jane, who is one of my favorites.

The legend of our family's arrival in the US revolves around two boys who stole a pig in Scotland, and in running from the authorities, sought shelter in Northern Ireland, whereupon they ultimately continued on to Pennsylvania. The story may be more complicated than that but that's what we have to work with. There may be three brothers. They may have stayed in Northern Ireland for longer than we'd think.

Geneva Jane and Elizabeth were the daughters of a fisherman in County Donegal, Ireland, near Londonderry. This is important partly because it's a political boundary; Donegal is part of Ireland, while Londonderry is part of Northern Ireland. Back in about 1780 it may not have mattered so much.

But even then, there were many Protestants in Northern Ireland, put there by the king for his own reasons. They survived but living wasn't easy. The rest of Ireland disliked and distrusted them. They could not go back to Scotland; there was no work or land there. Poor people were literally being squeezed off the land back in Scotland. Such was the fate of the Wallace boys who found their way across the channel. No work, no money, no land back in Scotland.

Elizabeth and Geneva Jane's father was a Crawford, and thus associated with the Scots in the north. But he fished waters that could be said to be off the coast of Donegal as well as Londonderry. One time a terrible storm came through, and he told his sons and friends to stay home; sure enough, it killed almost the whole village, and widows and orphans grieved on all sides of them. So he was known as a wise man and a survivor, at least of bad storms like that one.

This story may have been told in the family partly to explain why Geneva Jane and Elizabeth could choose to leave. There were no men to marry! Life was hard enough in their small village, living off the fisherman's catch. But they had to have something to look forward to.

Now along came two brothers, or possibly three, looking for relatives of theirs from Scotland. They'd escaped Scotland because they had stolen a pig (supposedly), and were being chased by authorities. It's possible that one of these brothers, John, caught Geneva Jane's eye. But he found his relative, and, after a short refuge from the pursuing authorities, set out for Pennsylvania. I am not sure about which brother or how many may have gone with him. Perhaps it was just him.

Actually it was in 1770 that four Wallace brothers - William, Hugh, James, and John went to America, where they ended up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. From the fact that the four went together I surmise that 1) one or two or even three were already in Ireland when John (and brother(s?) crossed the channel; and, 2) they were looking for the brother(s) when they crossed, having no money. Somehow the four brothers got up the money to go to America and did.

I would like to think that John met Geneva Jane while crossing the channel. It would make sense that the father helped with the transport across the channel, or was on shore when they landed, helping them find their way to their brother(s). She could very easily have been there, but there's no way to know for sure.  

In any case he landed in Pennsylvania somewhere, married, and had a boy. But his wife died, and he was heartbroken, presumably. He left the boy with grandparents and took the next ship home.

But he didn't return to Scotland, where there were no jobs, no land, and the law was still presumably on his trail. Instead, he went to Donegal, and found Geneva Jane. He married her (I think) and had six children, all there in Donegal/Londonderry. I'm not sure what he did, or how he got by. The youngest of the children was Robert (1796), who we are interested in because he became a patriarch of a large Walllace family in Wallace Run, near Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania.

Scot irish were leaving all the time for the new world. Northern Ireland, and Scotland, had bleak economic times, and there seemed to be easier living in the new world. For the Scots, it was even more important to be free of religious tyranny. Elizabeth had married a guy named John Scott. He said something against the Church and was thrown in jail. Elizabeth had enough, and announced she was going to the new world. When they finally released him, he could come join her in exile. Life would be no fun for him in Ireland anyway, what with the place controlled by Catholics who held grudges.

John Scott would eventually join her, and they would end up in Wallace Run. They had a daughter who married a Wallace, as Wallace Run was full of Wallaces, so they would be relatives in several ways. Elizabeth was to get a disease or condition that hunched her over badly - but she was well loved by the entire family, as was Geneva Jane by hers.

Meanwhile John Wallace had married in Carlisle, and had a son, but his wife died. Presumably heartbroken, he left the child behind, to be raised by the grandparents, and set off to go back across the sea.

But now he picked Northern Ireland, instead of Scotland, and when he got there he found and married Geneva Jane. That's why I suggested that he'd met her crossing the channel already, though I couldn't say that for sure. It would make sense that he already knew her and perhaps was even looking for her - or maybe they had corresponded? By now she was tired of an isolated fishing village, and he was worldly, having seen Pennsylvania. They stayed in Northern Ireland and had six children, Robert being the youngest, before they would decide to go to America.

John and Geneva Jane picked 1799 to go to the new world, and they settled in Cecil County, Maryland. Of their six children Robert, the youngest, would have been only about three when they moved. It was a new life, and I'm not sure of how many of the other five children went with them; some were already grown or almost grown. We know very little about these six, except for Robert, the youngest, and an older brother named John Jr. 

John's first son William, had by now grown up in Carlisle (according to sources), while the other three brothers had scattered. Carlisle was not too far from Cecil County; but it's not clear why John and Geneva Jane chose that location; they could have chosen Beaver County as her sister had. 

Of their other children, only Robert and John had any clear tracks. Robert would fight in the War of 1812, enlisting at the age of 16, and end up in Wallace Run, while John, eight years older, ended up out in a small town in Ohio. Both were familiar with Wallace Run, though; that's where their Aunt Elizabeth llived. After the war John married a local woman and moved to Wallace Run; he would have ten children.

The names Jane and Geneva Jane run down the genealogy of these Wallaces as if Geneva Jane was a well-respected matriarch whose memory would last generations. Cecil County, however, has pretty muddy tracks. I'm not sure I could tell you where exactly she was buried, or whether there were other Wallaces around to greet them when they got there.

It is hard to track down these people becuase there were Wallaces all over the countryside, especially in the mountains of Pennsylvania, but also in North Carolina, Maryland, anywhere. They were leaving Scotland and Ireland in droves. "Wallace" actually meant "Welsh" in Scottish Gaelic, but also could mean "foreigner," so virtually anyone could have been a Wallace, and could have been shoved out of the place when times got tough, for no better reason than being a foreigner or being part of a large family with not enough money to feed everyone. And though every Wallace claims direct descent from William Wallace the Great, savior of Scotland and victor over England, none them are direct descendants, as he had no sons, and though some people claim he had a daughter, that claim is somewhat spurious. Most likely the Wallaces spread far and wide were of different clans and mostly unrelated to each other, and it makes doing genealogy somewhat difficult, like tracking down Johnsons or Smiths.

There are Roberts and James and Williams and Johns all over the place, and they tend to muck things up, cloud up the genealogical waters. Doing Wallaces. we have to keep track of middle names and always know the birth year and place. So many in Beaver County alone! They're hard to untangle, and people keep associating one with the other, by some ancient convention that if they had the same family name, they had. to be related, somehow.

It was Robert's ten that did good work filling up New Castle; the first seven were boys, so there were indeed Wallaces all over the place from his family alone. Every kid came with a first name (Robert, William, John and James being most common) and a middle name which would then help you figure out which one someone was talking about. 

Their memories of Northern Ireland I think cut them off from their memories of Scotland. Very few stories remain from their Scotland days and that's partly why we've had trouble tracking down who actually still lived back there. The father of John Sr. and the other three boys was a Willliam, but one source said they thought he'd been moved over to Northern Ireland with all the other Scots. Well if that was true, how was it that he left a son or two behind to steal a pig? Answers aren't easy. And who knows about the pig? It may or may not have squealed. 

In the late 1700s Scotland had way too many people and no land, no opportunity, no jobs for the young. John and Robert at one point were driven to steal a pig, so the story goes. The authorities were after them and they took a boat of some kind over to Northern Ireland.

Life wasn't much better over there, but there were plenty of Scots there, called the Scot-Irish. Many of them were moving to America because they were settling the mountain areas and the Scots knew they could make it there. In fact, John and Robert had an uncle James who was already over there, I believe. He had settled in a part of Pennsylvania, Beaver County, that was rugged and mountainous, a little isolated. They knew they could stay with Uncle James and his kin.

They crossed the ocean I believe sometime around 1810. Robert would have been only 14 but John was 22. They'd have to make their way over to Beaver County, in the western part of the state. The War of 1812 broke out and Robert enlisted; he was barely 16 if even that. John made his way out to Ohio. I'm not clear on the order of how these things happened.

After the war Robert married a New Castle woman, settled in Wallace Run (Uncle James' valley), and had ten children. He became a pillar of the community. Several of his boys became doctors, Several of his sons became doctors. One of those was my grandpa's grandpa.

Becoming a doctor was one way of getting out of the valley, Wallace Run. In uncle James' clan one woman's parents were first cousins; her father's parents were also first cousins. I'm not totally clear on that or how that happened, but it shows that Wallaces were so common you could marry a cousin and consider them an outsider. Grandpa wanted out. He tried farming but the soil was too rocky, so he gave it up and moved out to Iowa.

His own son my Uncle Bones ended up in the deserts of Nevada and Utah. Several generations from Scotland, he no longer had the hills, the fog, the sea, anything. An outlaw spirit, is what he had left. In Scottish "Wallace" meant "Welsh" but was also used for "outsider" or "foreigner" - in fact it was used for just about anyone. Once you left, though, there was no going back.

This is true; it just happened. It occurred to me that it would make a book. I write about it because it's intense.

I was in the ER with a 7-year-old girl, cute as a button, and it occurred to me that this time we shared was very important, more perhaps to her than to me, so I got off my phone (I had forgotten my glasses anyway) and just talked to her, or participated in whatever she was doing. She had become violent, had almost killed her twin sister, and was waiting to be placed somewhere and sent away. Yet she was a beautiful young girl, on her best behavior with me, and one side of her, that occupied most of her life, she was as cute as only 7-year-olds can be.

Outside the ER room there was actually a guard, 24/7. This was lucky because at one point I was on my phone and she just darted out. The guard followed her to the bathroom and she used it, but it could have been more than that. This girl was known to just run away and had done it several times.

One notable thing about the time we shared was her love of numbers. She impressed me by doing math problems; granted, she'd just type them in to the computer and report what it said, but she knew the numbers, liked what she was doing, and always got it right. She was proud of her own success and of course I praised her a lot. When I lent her my phone, she found the sudoku app right away; that's because it has nine numbers on its little app icon. She opened it up and I taught her how to do a sudoku. Way over her head, yes, but it was notable because she was fascinated even when it was clearly too complex.

Another time she started dancing. She put a song on her ipad and just sang and danced to it. The orderlies outside the door couldn't help but smile on their way past. She had a lively spirit. Cha cha now y'all! At this point I was feeling very seventy, while she was clearly seven. I just watched and enjoyed it.

I worried about the hospital crushing her spirit. Of course it will be hard on her. I also repeated to myself, as a mantra, it's not her fault that she couldn't control her anger, or her spirit, that she would hit and scratch and run away and try to strangle her sister. They would see their mother, who loves them, and who told them she wanted them back. But they weren't coming back, and that made them angry. They'd go back to us, or to someone else, and that just didn't go over too well. And the one twin could figure it out, and could handle it; this is the way it is. You get a new home, and you make the best of it. But this second twin, she couldn't control herself. She'd hit, scratch, run away, refuse to go anywhere, resist, do violence.

I tried not to let the tragedy overwhelm me while I was there with her. I could look at her and get very depressed: poor girl, she'll have trouble where she's going; or, I could just live in the moment, be with her, be someone she knew on her path, someone who liked math and encouraged her, or who just liked her. I chose the second, obviously. Even when I argued that we are seventy, we can't handle this, I couldn't help just loving her for who she was. She's a precious soul.

Her twin, in the end, is probably better off without her. Together they find what they have in common: seven-year-old exuberance, and run with it. Together they are clearly too much for us and bad things result. Perhaps if we were younger, more on top of it, they would never have gotten close enough to each other to do anything to get her in trouble. As it happened, she almost killed her sister right in front of the social worker. We didn't have to argue for intervention. It was inevitable from that point on.

I remember the sterile feeling of an ER room. I am grateful every time I'm in there and it's not about me. Next time, I keep thinking, it will be about me. I watch the orderlies and wonder if they will be as competent when it comes to dealing with whatever breakdown I'll have, whenever it happens, which I'm sure will be soon enough. They come in pairs, delivering a heart-measuring service, or oxygen, or whatever they do. Ultimately a placement arrived and two ambulance drivers came to gather her up and take her to a place in the city.

One was a man, the other was a woman. The woman was pretty good at making her feel that it would all be ok. Nevertheless they strapped her to a kind of gurney so they could wheel her into the ambulance and take her on their way. This was their job and they knew what they were doing. She was ok with it. She knew this was coming and that it was inevitable. My wife was on the phone at that point and we told her together that she would be ok and that she'd been very good, and that we loved her. What else can you do? We love her yet we're sending her off to a hospital where she'll be alone but with other kids like her, who can't control themselves, or whose anger is just too strong sometimes. In a way, it was kind of like a milestone in her life, when she went this direction, and certain things will never be the same again. It fills me with apprehension, and a little dread, and a little sorrow of mourning for a childhood gone in the wrong direction.

Yet my last emotion is mostly just tiredness. I've had three sons in hospitals like this one, at points where I didn't know what else to do, where the hospital was the only place for them, where, if you can't control your life spinning out of control, you have to spin it right into a hospital where drugs are going to calm it down for you. And nobody especially likes those drugs, but they are what we have to deal with this. I couldn't at that point argue for anything better, and that was true for my other kids too. The memories of those experiences in those hospital environments are still burned hard into my mind's walls. Boys get off into their own minds about who they are and sometimes it's just a little too far from reality and what are the rest of us to do? Everyone has their own opinion about the value of the hospital but believe me I wouldn't be there for any of these cases if I really knew a choice, or was able to carry it out.

When they had carried her out, it was easy enough for me to just stand up, grab our things, and walk right out, back to my car. I made a comment to an information guy about finding a newspaper with brackets in it, but he agreed with me: you can't find newspapers these days; he wouldn't even know where to tell me to look. Last night, St. Patrick's Day, the hospital had been full, with what one guy called "amateurs," people who didn't know how to drink in excess; now, in the morning, it was much more empty, but the orderlies were still able to dance a little, Cha cha now y'all, in the midst of their duties. Just another day at work, getting people back on their feet and back on their way. Up on the road, I saw the ambulance as it turned onto the ramp on the interstate. It had no windows except in front. I sent my prayers through the ambulance walls. We'll see her again, and she'll be a little different.

This is a true story, to the best of my knowledge. I'm not always certain about the way my ancestors felt, but it's clear what they did, so I explore the possible reasons.

When the Civil War ended my great-great grandfather came back to Warren, Illinois, and was offered a job as literary editor of a newspaper. Warren is in the far northwest corner of the state, not far from Galena, which was the county seat of Jo Daviess County. Galena was larger, was on the river, and was considered more metropolitan. Warren was new; it had sprung up because of some local mines (across the border in Wisconsin), the possibility of a railroad coming through, and a rapid influx of settlers.

From the point of view of the newspaper, it was called The Independent, but James Walker (Leverett), my great-great grandfather, and the editor, Herst Gann, changed it to The Sentinel immediately. It is hard to glean through old issues to find the reason but perhaps it could be found with better searching. Given my guesses, I would say that the county was predominantly Republican (pro-Lincoln), not independent; the war was over and moving forward in a congregationalist spirit, it was more important to them to have the image of calling out than the image of straddling a fence.

Herst Gann was a journalist from way back. In those days that meant having every word paid for by somebody. One could make money in journalism if one could sell lots of papers and if a paper was widely distributed and demonstrably well-read. He was fine with having a literary editor but anything literary had to be well read as well. Of course one could clearly see that people were more interested in reading about local murders than reading fine poetry. Only one out of a hundred will read a poem or care about it even today; back then, in a frontier mining town like Warren the proportion wasn't much better.

That fundamental tension ran all the way through journalism in 1866 and even went straight back to Europe. On the one hand, typesetting and the printing press made it possible to make a newspaper and distribute it to hundreds, if not thousands. People bought them up and took them home and read them, soaking up the local news and opinions about national events so that they would be better informed when discussing them. They were proud of their literacy and conscious that literacy was the foundation of their democracy. Being informed voters was important to them.

As literary editor James Walker was able to both bring fine literature (written by others) to the people of the raucus mining town of Warren, and try his hand at it himself. The editor did not always sign every piece, but noticed whether people talked about it, or whether it had any effect. Herst Gann, his partner, was most shrewd at this. Both were tasked with keeping the advertising revenue coming in; they didn't rely so much on classifieds in those days, but rather went straight to the local businesses and held extended conversations in which they touted their literary goals (what service did they provide for the community?) and explained why that business would want to be associated with them. Gann was an expert at this as well. Literary is fine, he would say, as long as it fits in with our overall strategy for growth and financial survival.

Alcohol was a huge issue in the post-Civil War frontier towns. Now that there was peace, and life was getting back to normal, people were able to focus on the enormous damage alcohol had done to fronntier families, especially the women, as it ran rampant in the mining camps and frontier farms. A prohibition movement began to take shape. James Walker's older friend, an ardent teetotaller named Joel Webster Parker, was familiar with the mining camps of southwest Wisconsin, having sold supplies up there for years. He said the hops industry was moving west into southwest Wisconsin and should be stopped in its tracks, since the making of breweries would be the downfall of civilization. Those who know Wisconsin today will agree that he had a point. At the time, though, it was just an argument unfolding in the Warren Sentinel and other local newspapers.

James Walker enjoyed going to Galena, hobnobbing with local important people, getting to know business people in both Warren and Galena. He watched as his literary attempts for the most part went underappreciated or unappreciated; it was, after all, a mining town. This job would be week after week of hoping someone somewhere would read and enjoy something he wrote. Someone besides his wife and kids.

The literary argument against the newspapers was that the newspapers were prostitutes, writing more and more about what people wanted to read, caring less and less about fine literature. One might as well write one's own book, if one wanted fine literature, and stay away from the brothel newspapers. In a world where someone owns everything you say, how can you call that fine literature? Newspapers were becoming commonplace; the United States was entering the era of newspapers; more and more people were reading them. But what was happening to fine literature? It was moving to the bottom, or to the back, not fully paid for, barely read, not holding a candle to news about the local murder. Get used to being undervalued, even squeezed out when column inches are in short supply. Who reads poetry anyway? Every day you're the bastard stepchild that doesn't really belong here, but gets squeezed in on slow days when there's nothing else to say, As things. heat up there are fewer and fewer of those days. If you write poetry or literature, you're better off publishing it yourself and then nobody will buy it, and you'll starve.

James Walker gave up journalism and moved to southwest Wisconsin with Joel Webster Parker, who was able to start a merchandise store in the town of Hillsboro and employ him running teams and supplying it. Up there a brewery moved in and burned down within two years; this caused James Walker to decide that the town had unwholesome influences for his kids, and to move them up to a farm in the center of the state near Black River Falls. He would farm up there for about ten years, isolated. He would never write again, as far as I know.

The Sentinel is still around today, but newspapers are in a way different form than they were in in the late 1800's. They are like advertising inserts; most people just use them for their paper value, as for example checking their oil. Back then, if one didn't read them, one used them in the outhouse. Nowadays, we rarely even use them to check the oil.

Today all the social media titans, Musk, Zuckerberg, and Bezos, sit at the president's side. They own the information associated with your shadow; when you click "shoe" they send a signal to each other and each of your accounts is inundated with shoe advertisements. This information has combined to make them the richest men in the world, capable of buying TikTok or determining what kind of information TikTok is able to give the Chinese. What can you do besides say "no thanks?" We rely on social media to keep track of family and old friends, to tell them what we're up to, to "check in," as it were, so that they know we're still alive and thinking. I have all my books on Amazon; there is no other game in town. But I feel like my great-great grandfather, like moving to a farm out in the middle of nowhere, and living out my days free of everything except minimal contact with the outside world. Not sure that would be possible for me. Worth thinking about, though.

Sunrise over Coralville

I woke up this morning in a motel on First Avenue, Coralville and got to watch the sun rise in the hills on the Iowa River just to the east, looking back toward Iowa City. It so happens that sometime in the 1970's I was employed delivering newspapers to motels in Coralville and Iowa City, so it was a kind of coming home to me, only in this motel there is not a newspaper to be seen.

Back then, people would read them. They would drop quarters into a machine and take a newspaper out, then read it to find the daily news. These days I open up google news and read my news from a variety of sources, whatever google news links to, all free. The different organizations pester me (I actually prefer The Guardian, but don't pay for any of them), but I stay under the radar and just take what I need. It's partly because in those days I was used to all news being free to me as an employee.

I went down to this little hut down by the river which they used as a bundling house; that's what we called it. We would unload a truck at about 2 30 in the morning, and remove the wire ropes that secured them. We would then count out the bundles we needed and turn them, secure them, and put them in our truck. I had an old Suburban that was given to me to use by the boss. It had like 200,000 miles and was entirely reliable, and held lots of papers, which was especially useful on Sunday when we were doing major volume.

So these bundles, which resembled logs, would be marked by number and I'd know which one to throw on which curb, when I got way out to the suburbs in Coralville. But then on the way back, after cruising all those empty, dark, deserted streets out in the suburbs, I'd come back along First Avenue and hit all the motels. At the motels I had one of two missions; I'd either hand a specified number of newspapers to the clerk, or I'd put a slug in the machine, open it up, remove all of yesterday's papers, and put a specified number of papers in it instead. The old papers I'd bring back to the bundling house to use to wrap bundles. Or, of course, I was free to just keep one. I could take home as many of yesterday's papers as I wanted to. And I sometimes did, since I'd read the opinions or do the puzzles in the back.

It was a solitary kind of job. The other bundlers were friendly but difficult to be around - the guy next to me chewed tobacco and at three in the morning I found this kind of repulsive. But he was friendly to me; so were the people in the motels. The guy that showed me the route, the tobacco chewer, got way out into the Coralville suburbs and went the wrong way on streets, etc. and said that at 3 in the morning nobody cared and they all knew who he was and why he was doing it. It was essentially so you could maneuver around to where dropping the bundle was easier, and you didn't have to get out of the Suburban to do it. Sure enough a policeman saw us and did nothing. I was impressed and did the same when I got the route.

But one night I was out there breaking the law, maneuvering the car so I could drop the bundle, and I made some kind of mistake which caused me to run over this curb. It was rather dramatic but it was just a mistake and I could do nothing but keep on going and doing what I was doing, going the wrong way. A policeman saw it and pulled me over.

I explained to him that I was a bundle dropper and that I went the wrong way because it was 3 30 in the morning and I figured it was ok in the abandoned streets as they were. Surprisingly he said he knew all about that and in fact he'd been watching me do that for a long time; he knew the last guy but didn't know me. He was just pulling me over to make sure I was ok, because the curb-jumping was kind of uncharacteristic and at this time of night there were a lot of drunks out here doing basically the same thing. I had to laugh at that. I think he was kind of doing it just to meet me and get a scan on my general personality, like he'd feel better watching me break the law routinely if he knew who I was.

Some of the guys would get paper routes when their driving was over, so that they'd do bundle dropping 2 30-5 30 and then paper route 5 30-7. This added together made almost an income you could live on but it was a gruelling schedule. I got a school bus driving job and would work 7-8 and then again 2 30-3 30 - you can see easily that this made it hard to sleep any time except after 3 30. It was odd sleeping then and I was often interrupted, especially if I wanted to do anything else. Messing with my sleep schedule proved to be a serious error but that's another story.

Once the Pope came to Iowa and his story was all over the front page. This was important because, in making a log out of a stack of papers, your eye would fall on the same word or words repeatedly as those words came around the fold of the paper.

I'm working on a possible story for a volume on mental illness, with a theme "echoes." Well I have echoes all over the place. I have a little too much familiarity with mental illness.

Turns out the year I stopped in on my schizophrenic aunt was the same year my friend's son killed himself and his girlfriend, and a dog, thus upsetting everyone, all the survivors, all of Iowa, but particularly her, because he was her only child, and years later she'd die with dementia, and no id, and no one to care for her.

Is dementia like schizophrenia? My mom had a kind of dementia - in the end she didn't even know who we were. Here she'd raised me for many years, spent hour upon hour watching me, then what? Her mind just doesn't recognize? And then there was my aunt. She didn't recognize me either, but she'd never really seen me - but I could also tell, upon talking to her, that she just didn't do well with all real connections. Like knowing that I was her brother's son, or that my daughter wasn't my wife. She was in a good mood but pretty out of it, and it was scary.

I always thought that a killer - like the son in the above story - is almost mentally ill by definition. Like if you thought actually killing someone would be good for anyone ever for any reason, there must be something wrong with your thinking. In that case he seemed to take the life of a woman who had rejected him, so, my guess is that it wasn't a double suicide, it was a murder suicide. But on the other hand maybe people are making that part up about her rejecting him, or, maybe everyone has it wrong in general. I try to make up or find reasons why maybe he wasn't mentally ill. But things are looking bad for him, in my book, if her family says she'd rejected him. And her son - he left that son out in the truck, locked out of the house - when he did it. Who could do something like that? He must have known the kid was out there.

That year I visited my aunt was a flood year in Iowa. So, while this kid killing his ex-girlfriend, and leaving her son out in the truck, and I was visiting my aunt (I swear, not far apart in time, mid-May), it was raining, day after day, all through Iowa. As I left my aunt's house, I'll never forget - I didn't quite know my way out of town (Des Moines), but I passed over a bridge, and the water was rising very badly under it. It was scary. It was like it would envelop us all.

And it almost did, in many parts of Iowa. One friend of mine had to go way around every time she came from home to work, and I think this was a Cedar-Rapids-Iowa-City commute. One of those major roads was shut down all summer because of those endless rains.

To me, there's your echoes. They've had what, three hundred-year floods in ten years in Iowa? The water's rising under the bridge, and everyone up here on dry land is beginning to feel it.

I don't know about that story - not sure I can tie all this together. It may be a little too slippery, or even a little to real, and believe me these people I've mentioned are all real. It is quite scary being on that edge of sanity, and by the way my kids are suffering right now and I have no idea what to do to keep them from going over the cliff.

Some action is going to be required here. The wter is rising.

After a little more research I got some basic facts about the story in the below post, which is still somewhat wild, book-worthy, but now a little clearer.

One aspect of it is that my friend, the new-age woman whose only son committed murder-suicide, was already planning to move to New Mexico when it happened. She did not, as I'd surmised, go there to get away from mean Iowans. But if she was already planning to go, and he was steadily working in a place in town (Cedar Rapids) - then it would be possible for her to blame herself partly for his demise. After all, he was losing his mother, and then his girlfriend, who had apparently rejected him. She was coming to his house to pick up furniture, and had actually brought her son, thinking she'd be safe if that son was with her. Wrong.

What made him snap, kill her, kill the dog, and kill himself? I have a hard time blaming psilicybin mushrooms, though I think they've been mentioned as part of it. Mushrooms alone wouldn't make you violent. Or maybe they would. So there's a mystery there, where did that violence in him come from? Not her, I'm sure.

The other real reason has to do with the book. The author went on to be a professional writer in the big leagues, as if having the right degrees was pushing her in that direction from the start. This was one of her early works and was personal; she'd known the guy and considered him like a father, sympathetic as I am, wanting to show that something, maybe Iowa itself, drove him to it. Well I also saw him in his better days, as a sweet innocent kid, and I can still say that whenever someone goes over the edge there's always a dozen people who can't believe such a mild-mannered gentle spirit could do such a thing. We all could do such a thing, if pushed just the right way, and who knows what else was in his life that we didn't know about? I still haven't located his father, for example, don't know a thing about him.

Back to her book. She knew him as a kind of father figure, was sympathetic, went and talked to the boy (that he had locked out of the house when he did it), and the book was panned. Some very important people thought it was garbage and said so. Now I don't even ask people like that what they think of my books, because I already know what they'll say. But to her, it was a blow. She had to do better next time. She had to even eliminate all evidence of her previous failure. That's my explanation.

There's no one deliberately hiding information about what happened; it's findable though it's not easy to find it. I don't see a coverup or suppression of news articles, just news articles that are hard to find and getting harder to find every day. And I think my conclusions are right if only in a general way about her book and why I can't just read it. As a writer I consider taking on personal situations (like this one - I met the kid) - and that's a hazard of doing it. I could write a book about a writer, I think - that might be somewhat wild - but these things have to go somewhere. If it doesn't go to a grisly murder-suicide or to the mother's sad and pitiful demise, where does it go? Make the writer fictional and let it go where I take it, I suppose. Or let her just be successful, still alive, left alone, but haunted, as the rest of us are.