Morning Musings Beneath a Struggling Sun

So already, on the last morning of February, I set out to walk between weekend rainstorms. The air was damp and clean; the sun kept seeming like it might break through the thin, blue-gray cloud cover, though I knew from the weather forecast that the clouds would prevail. But I was upbeat, cheered by both the persistence of the veiled sun and the birdsong emanating from every winter-bare tree and bush--a great Sunday morning soundtrack.

I'm not usually out this early on a Sunday morning, but my husband Scott was determined to draw with the Edinburgh crowd--that is, the international online group of figurative artists that's based in Scotland. That meant that the two of us were up and done with breakfast by 7:00, so that by 8:00, he could be in his studio ready to start drawing today's model, who was Zooming in from Copenhagen.

As I set out toward the salt marshes, I was thinking about my walk around Squantum two days ago. In particular, I was thinking about what I'd learned about Squaw Rock upon my return home. Mostly, what I'd learned raised more questions than it answered. 

• I'd looked up "Squaw Rock," and learned that there was also such a thing as "Chapel Rock" and "the Chapel Rocks."
• I'd learned something that the various sources agreed on--and that was about the presence of "a 200 million year old ancient glacial deposit known around the world as the Squantum Tillite"--whatever that is.*
• I'd learned two stories about why the "big rock" is called Squaw Rock.
  

As I thought about these things, I was also noticing winter's retreat. The Old Sailors' Pond ice was melting, and the hope of ice hockey was disappearing with it.

So as the sun and I kept walking along, I thought  about how the sounds of scraping hockey sticks and yelling boys had been completely replaced by the trills, chirps, and whistles of so many birds. Or had they? Had I even heard those winter sports sounds this year? The more I thought about the course of this COVID-shaped, temperate winter, the more I was sure the ice on the pond had never become thick and sure enough for ice hockey to be played even by masked young athletes.

But then my mind was back to Squaw Rock. When I'd told Scott that there was such a thing as Squantum Tillite, he'd told me that when we'd visited Squaw Rock on New Year's Eve day, he'd thought it was made up of lots of rocks all set in some kind of clay--and therefore wondered if Squantum Tillite was the name of the conglomerate rock he'd noticed. He was right**: I'd been too busy looking at the graffiti to look at the rock on which it had been painted.***

"More geese than swans now live . . ."

But what was most on my mind as I got closer to the marsh was the lore about how Squaw Rock got its name. The same source that sent me researching Squantum Tillite also explained that "The legend states that an Indian Squaw threw herself to death at this site, but that has never been confirmed." What bothered me was where this story came from, if it wasn't true.

In fact, that naming story was the only one I knew until I came upon the following explanation last Friday afternoon in a Quincy Historical Society pdf***** about the naming of many Quincy landmarks: 

"A very early Algonquian-speaking Native American people who lived on Squantum told stories of a most awesome male/female spirit named Musquantum. It was said that the male named Musquot dropped the rocks that formed the dwelling place (the chapel) for his wife Squanit, as well as one rock which is said to be in her likeness. Tales of these two scary personages continue to be told to Indian children living in Southern New England."

Silence at the Starting Line

Still at the marsh, I thought back to what I'd learned when I checked out the etymology of "chapel" last Friday afternoon: in 17th century English, the word was used to refer to places where religious worship of any kind took place. So Squanit wouldn't have needed to be Christian to have the word associated with her dwelling place.  But what actually happened at her chapel? Since she was a spirit, did she inhabit the chapel to which others came to worship her--or was it she herself who worshiped other spirits in her dwelling place, perhaps joined by fellow worshipers?

So why the story of the suicide that I'd originally heard? Through my internet exploring, I discovered that there was at least one other Squaw Rock in the United States to which the story of the suicide of a despondent "Indian maiden" was attached. That reminded me of a similar story I'd heard many times about Lake Penneseewassee in Norway, Maine: allegedly another Native American maiden had thrown herself into its waters because of her broken heart. 

My mind went back to Louise Erdich's Love Medicine, as it often does when the topic is attitudes toward indigenous peoples--and how we like to imagine "other people" generally. In particular, I thought out the chapter called "The Plunge of the Brave," in which Nector Kashpaw finally accepts $200 to pose nude for an ambitious woman painter. He's shocked by the resulting painting, which bears the same name as the chapter and is later hung in the Bismarck, North Dakota capitol: she painted him leaping from a cliff to "Certain death" (125). That's when he understands that " the greater world was only interested in my doom" (125).

Do people like this kind of subject matter generally? Which people? And who are their choices for who should be plunging, jumping, or leaping to their deaths? I mean, do we think about Virginia Woolf walking into the river with her pockets full of rocks the same way we think of these nameless dead Indians whom we've been told, or shown, couldn't take it anymore?

I know: it was kind of a strange topic to be turning over in my head while walking the streets of Quincy on a temperate pre-spring morning. But it's interesting to think about a place like Quincy, with its various place names and their derivations, and its perpetual interest in writing and sharing its own history. The questions of what's "old" and what's "original" are perpetually raised by the very idea of Merrymount Park, where so much encounter between native and recently arrived people took place--and now where a whole other group of relative newcomers, many of Asian origin, are making themselves at home, but not always with the blessings of those who were here before them.

* Quincy, Mass. Historical and Architectural Survey. ARCHAEOLOGICAL OR HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE. Dorchester Street. http://thomascranelibrary.org/htm/439.htm.  

** I include this paragraph about Squantum Tillite, in part because it includes so many words I've never seen before in one paragraph. (Carto, S. L., & Eyles, N. (2012, March 16). Sedimentology of the Neoproterozoic (c. 580 Ma) Squantum 'Tillite', Boston Basin, USA: Mass flow deposition in a deep-water arc basin lacking direct glacial influence. Sedimentary Geology. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0037073812000796.) 

             The Squantum ‘Tillite’ (c. 593–570 Ma) consists of thick (up to 215 m) massive and crudely-stratified diamictites conformably interbedded with subaqueously-deposited conglomerates and sandstones within a thick (~ 7 km) Boston Basin fill which is dominated by argillite turbidites. The Squantum Tillite was first interpreted as being glacigenic in origin in 1914 because of the presence of diamictites; argillites were interpreted as glaciolacustrine ‘varves’ with rare ice-rafted debris, and conglomerates as glaciofluvial outwash. More recently these have been shown to be the product of deep marine mass flow processes with no glacial influence, yet because of its age equivalence with the deep marine, glacially-influenced Gaskiers Formation, the Squantum Tillite is still seen by some as supporting evidence for a widespread ‘Snowball Earth’ event at c. 580 Ma. New sedimentological work confirms that conglomerate and sandstone facies are deep marine sediment gravity flows genetically related to massive (homogeneous) and crudely-stratified (heterogeneous) diamictites produced subaqueously by downslope mixing of gravel and cobbles with muddy facies. Rare horizons of ‘ice rafted debris’ in thin-bedded and laminated turbidite facies interbedded with thick debrites show a weak but positive correlation of lamina thickness with grain size, suggesting these facies are non-glacial co-genetic ‘debrite–turbidite’ couplets. A significant volcanic influence on sedimentation is identified from reworked lapilli tuff beds and reworked ash in turbidites. The depositional setting of the Squantum ‘Tillite’ appears to be that of a submarine slope/fan setting in an open marine volcanic arc basin receiving large volumes of poorly-sorted sediment on the mid-latitude active margin of Gondwana. No direct glacial influence is apparent. 

*** Ophis. (2019, June 21). Chapel Rocks. Flickr. https://www.flickr.com/photos/ophis/48102285483/.  

**** Douglas Harper. chapel: Search . Online Etymology Dictionary. https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=chapel.  

***** Quincy History pdf from the Thomas Crane Public Library: http://thomascranelibrary.org/sites/default/files/1989.3.pdf  

*(6) Erdrich, L. (2001). The Plunge of the Brave. In Love medicine: new and expanded version (pp. 122–145). short story, Perennial.