Eagles Mere Inn and 'Hurricane' Irene

Well, we are sitting out Hurricane Irene (now downgraded to a Tropical Storm according to the BBC website) in the ease and comfort of Eagles Mere Inn in the Victorian settlement of Eagles Mere, with the Eagles Mere Lake.  

Eagles Mere seems to us rather like Betws y Coed (famous for Swallow Falls) in Snowdonia – a very pleasant, upmarket Victorian town, of charm and with a picturesque quality.  Like Betws, which was very popular with Victorian honeymooners, Eagles Mere has long been popular as a tourist destination.  An early attempt at glassmaking, using the sandy bottom of the lake, failed, and left it as a very charming Victorian resort. The rather splendid museum, arranged by a Smithsonian scholar we were proudly told, has a photograph of a train arriving on the specially built narrow gauge railway.  Although the line is  no longer in evidence, the picture shows the train is as packed as those trains which arrived at Rhyl, Colwyn Bay, Llanfairfechan and those little holiday resorts on the North Wales coast inn their Victorian heyday - in this case ,  packed with later nineteenth century  American men and women getting away from it all, to sit on the porches of the hotels, and enjoy the walks around the lake.

In summer it was the kind of place where the family came, to enjoy cool fresh mountain air, while men laboured in the hot city and visited at the week-ends.  There was an inevitable decline, but a lot of thoughtful investment and working via trusts and associations has made this a very pleasant, though socially restricted, place to come for a holiday. 

The consequence is that it is just a very attractive place to come and spend time in late Pennsylvanian summer sunshine – children and families with small children come to enjoy warm sunshine, a small sandy beach on the lake, with typical American lifeguards and protected swimming area, walks around the lake, cycling, canoeing, all in the midst of an area known as “endless mountains”.

We have found it just so very relaxing, not least because of the very friendly hospitality and excellent food at this small B & B type inn.

Hurricane Irene is a different proposition, and clearly offers issues even in this part of Pennsylvania. Justin Webb opens his reflections of America as the BBC correspondent -  Have a Good Day -  both with the news that his mother was a Quaker, and a reminder that America is a big country.  Consequently it has big weather systems.  People not only die from bears, cougars and alligators, but from being caught in the huge weather systems – tornadoes, ice storms, and hurricanes -  which impact on this amazing geography.  We ourselves have some experience of this. When we were on holiday in Florida as a family, many years ago,, we were there in a Tropical Storm, and our roof fell in (as a little girl, Angharad came to complain, and believing she was having a nightmare told her to climb into bed with us and go to sleep; it wasn’t until the morning that we found a huge piece of plaster on her bed! 

There is a Quaker Meeting in Forkville, possibly a forty five minute drive away. In different times, we would have certainly visited it.  However, the wind was gusting, and I have heard too many reports after storms where someone was killed by a falling tree, and I wondered what was so vital that they ventured out in difficult conditions.  Just as well we stayed in, for within a short time we were receiving news of the road blocked both north and south, and people having to make reservations to stay an extra night.  We found an opportunity to just go down to the lake, just to get some fresh air and see the lake under different conditions. This is about as close as we felt we needed to get!

Tomorrow our friends Marcia and Tom come and collect us, and we go slightly further north.

A holiday in North Wales

Before starting our term of service at Pendle Hill, we are currently enjoying a brief holiday in North Wales – North Wales Pennsylvania, that is!  Just down the road is Gwynedd Meeting (pronounced gwined as opposed to the Welsh gwineth – where the th is voiced, as in this and that).  The area abounds in Welsh place names, given by the settlers who arrived here in the seventeenth century from North Wales – especially from the Dolgellau area.  That story is told very well in the Quaker Heritage Museum in Dolgellau, in the UK – see

                                            http://www.discoverdolgellau.com/en/explore/go/quakertrail.aspx

It is also recorded in the one of the panels of the Quaker tapestry

see:

                                    http://www.quaker-tapestry.co.uk/the-exhibition/photo-gallery/

Gwynedd Meeting Pa has a splendid website, and you can find more on this at

                           

                                                         http://www.gwyneddfriends.org/History.htm

As for us, our connection with North Wales started when we came over here as chaperones as part of a youth exchange programme between North Wales and Chester Friends and Gwynedd Pa Friends.  We came some seven years ago or so, and kept in touch with people here. It is very good to meet up with these friends, who, with typical American generosity have made us feel so welcome.

Pennsylvania is a very lovely state. I am sitting on the raised deck of our friends’ house.  Albeit modest by local standards, it has a sloping back garden which runs down to a stream, and is surrounded by trees.  Squirrels chase around the tree harvesting the hickory nuts, and pair of humming birds visit the runner bean plants trailing around the rail every morning. The other morning, when I was sitting quietly, one came extremely close to my head, flapping its wings just a few inches from me.  At one point I was sure I felt it investigate my hair with its beak.  The bird feeder sees a host of colourful birds never seen in the UK.

Tomorrow we go to Eagles’ Mere Lake, further north in the state, and stay in a quiet B & B by a lake. 

Expectations

A few weeks ago, I tried to draw a diagram of my expectations of our forthcoming term in Pendle Hill to try to map out the complex set of expectations I have for our forthcoming period of service.

There is the business of living in America, which itself is multi-textured and multi-layered.  There is something deeply fascinating about this remarkable, generous, open hearted people, who imbue their country with its optimism, its willingness to support individual success and achievement, its can-do attitude.  In recent years there has been a darker sense of this county: liberalism seems in retreat and in intellectual and philosophical disarray.   It will be interesting to see firsthand how Americans of all political persuasions view themselves and their country.  And for me, if politics is about power, what do Quakers really have to say about that?  We often talk about ourselves “speaking Truth to power” – what might that mean for my life and work?

Having a chance to encounter American Quakers will be fascinating.  Generally Americans seem to be a more God-fearing people – unapologetic and unselfconscious. Other Quaker Resident Friends have noticed that American Quakers share these characteristics, and do not have the reticence of British Quakers who, for a number of reasons, find themselves far less willing to use a language which recognises God’s providence in their lives.  (http://thefriend.org/article/a-serious-search/)

We will be particularly interested in meeting Friends from a variety of Quaker traditions. The power of silent worship has been at the heart of our Quaker experience; it will be fascinating to meet Quakers for whom extended silent worship is not their Quaker experience, but who remain resolutely Quaker. 

Meeting an international group of people, as always, will be a source of learning.  But we will all be striving to offer each other a sense of community.  It is this decision to commit ourselves to living in community, with all the nuances of what this might mean, which will be a fascinating source of exploration and discovery.  When we were first married we lived and worked in an international community in a Mission School in Tarsus in Turkey.  That simplicity and sense of mutuality, even when it was difficult and extremely hard, has never quite left us.  And given the issue of sustainability in our last Yearly Meeting Gathering  in August (http://www.quaker.org.uk/files/Britain-Yearly-Meeting-Epistle-2011.pdf) how can our way of life, as a couple,  be made more sustainable? How can we more deeply engage in community?

There is an irony in travelling across the Atlantic to consider these questions, but Quakers do not expect to live lives of abstract perfectionism, rather responding to insight and revelation as they are offered.  If religion is about a binding (possibly from ligare – to bind or connect – cf ligature) , then I hope to be more tightly bound to  my religious community as a result of this experience.

I am looking forward to the beauty of Pendle Hill.  The pictures on the website are ravishing.  We have both stayed at Woodbrooke, and found it just a physically lovely place.  Our own home area is an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. 

                                                

But our “six inches of ivory” does not compare with the grandeur of American scenery. And I think the sculptured loveliness of Pendle Hill grounds will offer a quite different kind of beauty.

Above all, this is an act of service.  Quaker service, rightly discerned, leads to transformation. For me, this service holds out the possibility to encounter, engage with, and dance with divine presence – to become more aware and more appreciative and more affirming of God’s presence in my life.

Gerald