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IN THIS ISSUE

• We come to the end of Amy Wilson´s story
• Dick Monaghan muses on the effects of meditation
• Zvonko Springer describes a world heritage park in Yugoslavia
• Pat Moore sends an essay about a familiar belief
• Carol Shoemaker, Marilyn Magid, Pat Moore, and Zvonko suggest sites

FROM THE ARCHIVES

Here is the conclusion of the story by Dalton Deedrick´s aunt, Amy Wilson:

THE WORLD ISN´T SO BIG

We always got up early. Once Daddy got up and lit the fire, no one could sleep anyway. He called us all, starting at the oldest and going right down to little Nettie. He called out the time, often sang a song or two, and in general made such a noise that you might as well get up. Chores were always completed before breakfast, and that morning Daddy and Marv were out at the barn a long time. When they finally did come in, they looked happy and sort of superior.

After breakfast, Daddy said, "Lou, I want you to take a loaf of your fresh bread and a pail of milk over to the covered wagon this morning. You little gals can all go, but you must not stay longer than five minutes."

Lou stacked the dishes in the pan and we all combed our hair, taking turns with the comb. I had to be helped because my hair was long and curly and seemed to get so full of tangles that sometimes I couldn´t hold back the tears when the combing was going on. Daddy said I had a tender head, but the others said I was a bawl calf about it. Soon we were ready to go, Lou carrying the bread and Nell the milk. Nettie and I hippity-hopped along, first in front of them and then behind. We jiggled Nell a bit once and slopped a little milk, but not much.

The flap at the back of the wagon opened before we got there and the man got out, all smiles, and said, "Hello, girls." We shyly gulped, "Hello," and stood behind the wagon.

"Look in the wagon. I´ve got something to show you," he said. "You first." And Lou, bread and all, climbed in. Nell set her pail of milk on the ground and was right behind her, and so was I. The man picked Nettie up and put her in too.

There we stood, crowded together in the back of the wagon, the four of us looking with disbelief at the pretty lady lying on the homemade bed in front of us. In her arms she held a tiny bundle that squirmed and squealed, and when she uncovered one end of it, the wrinkled red face of a little baby looked at us.

"Whose is it?" asked Nell, and I think now what a funny question to ask.

"It´s ours!" boomed the man´s voice behind us.

"How old is it?" Lou, face shining, had dared to put a finger out to touch the baby´s cheek.

"Only one night old," said the pretty lady softly, as she covered the little red face up again.

"Come on, gals," called Daddy. He was standing at the back of the wagon too, and lifted us down. "Thank you, ma´am." There was a catch in Daddy´s voice as he said it.

"Come back again," called the lady as we went away.

What a wonderful week that was. Every day we went to the covered wagon, and every day Daddy let us take some small present with us. One day it was a chicken roasted to a turn; another, vegetables from our cellar; sometimes butter, and always a five-pound pail of fresh milk. Every day we saw the baby and she didn´t look so wrinkled and red now. She looked beautiful, and one day we all got to hold her - just for a minute.

The pretty lady had us each tell the name we liked best and she said we would choose the finest one for the baby. I wanted to call her Dixie and Nell thought June was best. Nettie sided with Nell, because she always did, so Lou sided with me for the name Dixie. But we didn´t know for sure what her name was until the day they were going to leave.

Daddy had told them not to hurry, but to get rested up for the road ahead, but they were impatient to be on their way. The men had greased the wagon wheels, and Daddy, who was a pretty good blacksmith, put a shoe on the lame horse and he wasn´t lame any more.

The last morning the men carried two sacks of oats and a sack of potatoes over and put them in the back of the wagon. Then they caught two hens and put them in a crate and tied that to the back of the wagon too. Daddy said the hens were a present to the baby from the little gals. Nettie and I though a doll would have been better, but we only had one doll each and we couldn´t bear to part with them. Besides, the hair had come off mine, and some of the sawdust had come out of Nettie´s.

Lou and Nell and Nettie and I stood crying at the back of the wagon. It seemed so sad for our new friends to be going away, especially the baby. Now we would be lonesome all over again.

The pretty lady was crying a little too, but she held the baby up for us to see, and smiled even as she was crying. "We will call her Dixie June," she said.

Then the covered wagon moved slowly down the dusty prairie road, headed for the Peace River country. That night we were all sad and Daddy said, "Don´t feel so badly, gals. The world isn´t so big, and sometime you will see the baby again."

Over 20 years later I went as district nurse to a remote corner of the Peace River Block. I had been there less than a week when I got my first call to go out on a maternity case. It was late fall, full moon, and a few inches of snow lay on the ground. The young man who came for me drove a spirited team hitched to a bobsleigh. As we drove back the seven miles to his homestead, we had lots of time to talk. He told me his name was Brown, that his wife was 22 years old, and that this was their first baby. His mother-in-law was staying with them for a few weeks so his wife wouldn´t be left alone, but they hadn´t expected the baby quite this soon.

We arrived at the log cabin shortly after midnight, and at 4 a.m., Mrs. Brown presented us with a five-pound baby boy. While I attended to the mother, the grandmother bathed the baby. She was most insistent on doing it. Then as we drank coffee and breakfasted on home-cured ham, eggs, and home-made bread, she told me why.

"When the baby´s mother was born, I gave her her first bath," she said. "She was a bit premature too. We were moving to the Peace River country then, and she was born in a covered wagon. Our team was played out, and I was played out. The ´flu epidemic was raging and we were just plain scared. We camped for a while by a farmhouse, people with the same name as yours, nurse. They were good to us. In fact, the little girls named my baby."

And they called her Dixie June! The world isn´t so big!

Dick Monaghan reflects further on

MEDITATION

Continuing my thoughts on meditation, it has occurred to me that probably it is not the best choice for a job interview:

"Sir, what are you doing?"

"I am becoming one with my outgoing breath."

"Uh, fine, but what does that have to do with your applying to be a cart-wrangler at Safeway?"

"An unwrangled cart is a destination not yet achieved."

"Don´t you want to know about the job benefits?"

"´Jobs´ and ´benefits´ are worldly delusions incompatible with knowing one´s true self."

"They are, however, compatible with food, clothing and shelter."

"I must yield, temporarily, to the demands of the corporeal world."

"How do we know, if we hire you, you won´t just spend your time staring off into space and letting the carts pile up in the parking lot?"

"I shall view each unwrangled cart as a soul lost in churning chaos. My mission shall be to return it to the shining world of order, where it will await the next shopper with delighted apprehension."

"You´re hired."

"Do I get a coffee break?"

Zvonko Springer describes a visit to

PLITVICA LAKES NATIONAL PARK - WORLD HERITAGE

We visited the Plitvica Lakes after the Croatian Home Defense War of the 1990s was over. Plitvica Lakes area was liberated during the Croatian police and military action code named "Tempest" early in August 1995. In a concentrated action, this region has been cleared of all remaining hostile elements: all kind of mines and explosives, arms and other dangerous caches on the grounds as well as in the dense forests. All waters in lakes and brooks were also checked - even many caves (some new ones were discovered too) as well as all the waterfalls of the park.

It had been some 40 years since our last visit to the park. In May of 1998 we went to the Plitvica Lakes and stayed one night in one of the two open hotels, the Bellevue. We took the electric streetcar and started our trip from the Upper Lakes, as we would be walking mostly downhill to the Lower Lakes at the end. The Lower Lakes are smaller and are squeezed between steep cliffs forming a gorge. Starting from the Upper Lakes, we arrived after a couple of hours at the largest of the lakes, the Kozjak. There we boarded an electric-driven boat and enjoyed a scenic ride to the end of the lake where at Kozjacke Drage we found a large recreation area, a restaurant, and several shopping stalls with local food products. From there we continued our walk along the Lower Lakes, finally reaching the Great Falls of Plitvica River. The whole tour takes about 4-5 hours, depending upon how much one is harassed by time.

Water plants between the trees

I would like to explain the origin of the name of "Devil´s Garden" ("Sejtan basce" in Turkish) found on earliest known maps. The rather vague outlines of the lakes shown on the maps drawn in the 17th century refer to the Plitvica region as "Devil´s Garden". At that time the region of Lika was occupied by the Ottomans (Turks), and after the liberation, the Plitvica region became part of the restless and insecure military borderland of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy. The epithet "devil" appears understandable to a certain extent, although the name does not seem to have been used by the local population. Here´s a legend recorded hundreds of years ago:

"A sultry oppression sat over the fields and mountains for months. People and animals, meadows and gardens yearned for refreshing, gentle rain. The Crna Rijeka (Black River), ordinarily a cheerfully babbling stream, dried up. The people´s prayers and pleading were all in vain, as the skies showed no mercy on them. But then the Black Queen with her glittering entourage appeared in the valley. The people cried for help, asking for water, without which they would all perish. And the Black Queen took pity on them: with great thunder and lighting, heavy rain began to fall in an instant, bringing life to the people and animals, fields and meadows. The rain poured and poured, and the waters began to grow, until they formed the lakes as we see them today."

Ljiljana and Zvonko in front of 40m-high waterfall

Water has always enjoyed a mythical quality, especially in the karst area, and it would be difficult to find more reason and justification for such legends and myths anywhere than in the Plitvica region. Today the Plitvica Lakes are located on one of Croatia´s major roads, and instead of a "devil´s garden", Nature here offers another kind of garden - an abundant fantastic hydrographic karst phenomena. The gardener - karst - has created many beautiful scenes in Croatia, but nowhere perhaps as beautiful as at Plitvica. The oldest descriptions and more or less precise maps of the lakes are no more than two hundred years old. The first travel lodge (known locally as the Imperial Lodge) was built in 1862 by the border guards, while the first 28-room hotel was built in 1896.

Scientists visited the area for the first time in the early nineteenth century, and the earliest initiative for establishment of a national park to cover the Lake District was made in 1914. Together with several other valuable areas in Croatia, the lakes were proclaimed a national park in 1928. The law to that effect was rather inadequate, providing for its periodic extension (which was not done), so that the national park was not finally and permanently established until 1949. Thirty years later, in 1979, UNESCO placed the Plitvica Lakes on its World Heritage List, thus recognizing its importance for world culture.

The Plitvica Lakes are situated in eastern Lika, between Mala Kapela and the Licka Pljesevica Mountains. The two largest lakes take up some three-fourths of this area: Kozjak - 81.5 hectares, and Prosce - 68 hectares. The greatest depths have also been recorded in these lakes: 46m in Kozjak and 37m in Prosce. Together with ten smaller lakes between them, these two lakes form the Upper Lakes group. Downstream from Kozjak are the four Lower Lakes. Many large and small cascades connect the lakes, with the difference in height between the highest (Prosce) and the lowest lake (Novakovica Brod) amounting to 135 meters. The greatest height difference is between Galovac and Gradinsko Jezero and the highest inter-lake waterfalls between Galovacki Buk and Prskavci is 25 meters.

The greater part of the lake´s water comes from the Crna and Bijela Rijeka´s streams (Black and White River) which meet, forming the Matica (Mother River) before entering Proscansko Lake. Lake Kozjak receives Rjecica (a rivulet) at its southern edge, and out of it starts the flow of Korana River. A little below the last lake, there is the 72-meter-high waterfall of Plitvica Stream, which plunges into the Korana River with other numerous water cascades at the point called Sastavci (name implies coming together of waters).

Spraying waterfalls

Though the Lower Lakes occupy a much smaller area than the Upper Lakes, all natural characteristics of the two groups, especially the landscape features, justify this popularly and scientifically made distinction. The Upper Lakes have dolomite beds (Triassic dolomites), on which surface erosion produces a "normal" relief with the usual stream-made depressions and sloping sides. The terrain around these lakes and parts of the cascade beds are covered with woods.

The Lower Lakes have limestone (Cretaceous) beds and are therefore situated in a canyon cut by a river at a time before the lakes were formed. Though the canyon is not very deep (70 - 80m), its steep sides give the lakes a special atmosphere and picturesque quality. Limestone and dolomites come into contact in Kozjak, as one can see on its different shores, with the western dolomite shore being much more indented. The Upper Lakes are situated in a richly articulated relief, but the canyon of the Lower Lakes is incised into an undulating plateau that continues down with the Korana River.

The fast growth of travertine is found by comparing first measurements at Plitvica with those made a hundred years earlier in 1855. These comparisons show that the lakes and their cascades are very young phenomena. The carbon C-14 isotope dating method shows that the oldest parts of present-day cascade beds are no more than 40,000 years old. It has also been established that there was no travertine formation between 6000 and 22,000 years ago.

Travertine of over 40,000 years has been found in Plitvica, in locations above the present cascades and waterfalls. This "old" travertine represents the remains of earlier barriers, formed under favorable temperature conditions that prevailed here during the interglacial period. Travertine is a soft and porous rock (can be cut with an ax, and is also light, thus was often used as construction material); it erodes easily, and the freezing of water in its pores helped to speed up the crumbling process. Thus the canyon itself is a relief form created during the cold periods.

Particular features of Plitvica are caves in travertine cascade beds. They are, of course, much smaller, but they offer an interesting view of the tissue and structure of travertine. Several such caves are found in the waterfall zone, where cascades come down from Prosce and Ciginovac to Okrugljak, like Kostelceva Cave (16x6x6m) which is found at the upper edge of the Plitvica brook waterfall.

Over three-fourths of the national park area is wooded, and the rest is made up of meadows and fields belonging to the villages and hamlets. The forests are crucially important for the survival of the lakes, since much of the forest substratum is dolomite rock. Without the forests, the rocks would quickly erode on the surface and begin to fill the lakes with debris, which would also damage the fragile cascade beds made of travertine. Such a process has already been responsible for the filling of a small lake at Plitvicki Ljeskovac, which is no longer there, but which older maps still show.

The forests of Plitvica are among the best preserved in Croatia. The main tree varieties are beech, fir, spruce, and Scotch pine. The best preserved natural forest complex is found in the park´s northwestern corner, at Corkova Uvala (Cove), where there are over 80 hectares of almost untouched primeval forest of fir and beech at an altitude of 860 - 1028m.

The present-day settlements of Plitvica are only a little over two hundred years old. There is archaeological evidence of occasional habitations even in prehistoric times, during the Yapod (ornaments of an Illyric tribe) and Roman times. There is also evidence of medieval Croatian administrative structures (zupe = districts) and feudal estates belonging to the Kurjakovic and Frankopan aristocratic families (relics of a hospice, church and tower dating from the 12th and 13th centuries at Gradina). Occasional Turkish raids from the 15th century interrupted the continuity of medieval life. The full- scale Turkish occupation continued throughout the 16th and the greater part of the 17th centuries (until 1689). Even this was not a peaceful period, as Croatian army units launched frequent attacks and offensives reaching deep into the Ottoman-held territory.

RECOMMENDED WEB-SITES:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plitvice_Lakes - general, very informative.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plitvice_Lakes_incident - Incident in the Croatian Home Defense War 1990 - 1995

http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/98/gallery - large pictures collections.

http://outdoors.webshots.com/album/89349914fFdlRk - visitors´ pictures.

ED. NOTE: For Zvonko´s pictures taken in the park, go to http://members.shaw.ca/vjjsansum/or

http://nw-seniors.org/stories/tspinF-21.html

Pat Moore sends this story by an unknown author:

WHEN I WAS A KID

When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up.

They walked 25 miles to school every morning, uphill both ways, through year-round blizzards, carrying their younger siblings on their backs to their one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a straight-A average despite their fulltime after-school job at the local textile mill where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way I was going to lay that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they´ve got it!

But now that I´ve reached a ripe old age, I can´t help but look around and notice the youth of today.

You´ve got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a Utopia! And I hate to say it, but you kids today don´t know how good you´ve got it!

I mean, when I was a kid we didn´t have the Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the library and look it up ourselves!

And there was no e-mail! We had to actually write somebody a letter, with a pen! And then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

And there were no MP3s or Napsters!

If you wanted music, you had to go to the record store and shop for it yourself! Or we had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and mess it all up!

You want to hear about hardship?

We didn´t have fancy stuff like call waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called, they got a busy signal! And we didn´t have fancy caller ID display either!

When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was - it could be your boss, your mom, a collections agent - you didn´t know! You just had to pick it up and take your chances!

And we didn´t have any fancy Sony Playstation videogames with high- resolution 3-D graphics! You had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens; it was just one screen forever! And you could never win - the game just kept getting harder and faster until you died!

Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater, there was no such thing as stadium seating - all the seats were on the same level. If a tall guy sat in front of you, you watched his hairstyle!

And sure, we had television, but back then that was only a few channels and there was no onscreen menu! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! And there was no cartoon network! You could only get cartoons on Saturday morning.

We had to wait ALL WEEK!

That´s exactly what I´m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You´re spoiled!

You guys wouldn´t last five minutes!

SUGGESTED WEBSITES

Carol Shoemaker sends the URL for a remarkable painting. She writes: It is unbelievable how much work went into this painting. You can click on any face and instantly get more information and history on that person than you could dig out in a library in three months or google in a week:

http://cliptank.com/PeopleofInfluencePainting.htm

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Carol also suggests this site to which we can all relate, baby boomers or not:

h http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49GavdGWtac

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Marilyn Magid sends the URL for a video of an early Johnny Carson show:

http://www.milkandcookies.com/link/138148/detail/

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Pat Moore forwards a site that measures your memory for faces:

http://www.bbc.co.uk:80/science/humanbody/sleep/tmt/instructions_1.shtml

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Zvonko Springer sends the site for a Snopes report on a college exam question:

http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp