"My Ten-Year-Old Mother"

I had a dream once, before I was a teenager, that my mother turned into a ten-year-old girl right before my eyes. I saw her through a keyhole, on the edge of a place I wasn't allowed to go. Suddenly, she motioned to me, to follow her up a dusty stairwell, to go find hidden objects in the attic that beckoned to us both. We were about the same age then, my mother and me, the year of the dream somewhere around 1990 but set back in time around 1960.

We were in the place she had grown up in, an old house next to some railroad tracks in southern Indiana. Every night I ever stayed there, trains came through and woke me up in my sleep, and I'm sure this dream was full of the sound of wheels clunking on steel, at night, right outside the window. The house was huge and built just after the Civil War by my mother's people, North Carolina Quakers and Irish coalminers. Like so many of those old houses, especially the bigger ones, the twisting corridor leading upstairs was shut off by doors on both ends, mostly to prevent a draft, but after decades of disuse, to effectively close off the past and let the things stored there gather the dust they needed to be important to us again.

I was bored and poking around the house that day, the day I had the dream. I tried to open the door and go upstairs, where my grandmother warned us never to go. She caught me. I tried again. She got annoyed and told my brother and me to sit down at the dinner table (my somewhat Southern, part-Indian grandmother, named Virginia after the state, a trace of the old accent surviving on her breath). She had lost most of her toes to diabetes, so she scared us by taking off her socks and showing us her feet, telling us not to walk upstairs where she couldn't go after us, and to have pity on an old woman. (When she died, her two surviving toes poked out from underneath the sheet on the hospital bed in a funny Churchill-like flourish, a sign, we thought, of victory and peace). Then, after she'd scolded us, she gave us chocolate milk and told us both to go outside and play.

That night, I think, was when I dreamed about my mother walking up those steps. She was ten, then, and beckoned to me through the keyhole to open that door, against my grandmother's wishes. She had pigtails, a big gap in her teeth, and wore a polka-dotted dress, pure 1950's elementary school fashion. She could have won a part in To Kill A Mockingbird with Gregory Peck. (In my dream, something about the whole house became residual and Deep Southern.) Looking through the keyhole, I saw my ten-year-old mother all in black and white, her hands motioning me to turn the knob and come see what was up there, to not worry, that she would be my mother one day and approved of this adventure.

I turned the doorknob. She walked around the bend in the stairs at the bottom of the landing, just as I came through the doorway, then went on ahead of me. I looked up. She stood there at the top, keeping away from me, silhouetted against an overexposed background. I climbed the dusty, dirty stairs, she disappeared behind a closed door, and I found a basketful of old black-and-white photographs where she had been standing. For a second, I thought she had become the photographs. Then I looked through another keyhole. She was in her room, writing or drawing something with a crayon on paper, delicately and dreamily, I thought, not looking at me anymore. I had no idea what she was drawing, but the image of her was so intense, I woke up right away.

A year or two later, when my grandmother died (I was about thirteen then), I found out what that drawing was.

I remember nothing directly about my grandfather. He died when I was three. He was a sign-painter and postmaster, a talented small-town Midwestern artist. Though he was too old to be a fighting soldier during World War II, he painted U.S. and British warplanes in New Guinea and Australia. I think he became a religious man only after the war, when he came back to Indiana and married my Baptist grandmother (a pleasant but, as my mother remembers, less humorous person than her husband Gerald). During the war, he kept an address book of Australian girls he was fooling around with and probably could have married. He brought back two lockets holding photographs of one of them. In New Guinea and the Philippines, photographs show him painting pictures of buxom, flirtatious, blond nurses, the propaganda of their breasts somehow reminding soldiers to "take their atabrin" and quinine, treatment he ended up taking for the rest of his life after contracting malaria in New Guinea.

His family had been Quakers from Carolina, big-eared blacksmiths, ruddy long-nosed square-jawed carpenters, people who worked with their hands. So did he. One evening around 1960, I guess, he sat my mother against a windowsill in Indiana, put his hand on her chin and tilted it down a ways, told her to close her eyes, then picked up a charcoal pencil and started to draw. In the picture he made, she had pigtails and was wearing a polka-dotted dress, a mischievous, happy girl lost for a moment in reverie. My grandfather was a funny man, but I think he must have been immensely thoughtful, too, having lost his father at age thirteen, at the height of the Great Depression, to a coal mine, and his own thirteen-year-old son to sickness, on his birthday. I wonder if he didn't make a portrait of my mother after her brother died, to console her.

I never saw the image until a few years after the dream, when we were cleaning out the old house, getting ready to sell it out of the family for the first time since it was built in the 1870's. Upstairs, my parents found old tintypes of the blacksmith I was named for (we had never seen his face), hundreds of black-and-white photographs in baskets, crayon drawings, enough napkins and stamps to buy a car or pay for a funeral, silver coins from Australia with Queen Victoria and George V on them, a machete brought back from the South Pacific, a "safari hat," lewd pictures of Filipino tribeswomen. Then, in what had once been her bedroom in the attic, my mother tore a tacky picture out of a tacky frame and discovered a beautiful hand-made drawing of herself stuffed in behind it, signed by her father and used as matting. She blacked out and almost fell down the stairs.

Just as I had dreamed it, a ten-year-old girl had been hiding in the attic all along.

A story and photograph by Stephen Jesse Taylor (USA) ©2011

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The Pine Hills gorge is a small but jaw-droppingly steep canyon, twelve miles southwest of Crawfordsville, Indiana, that forms part of one of the weirdest landscapes in the Midwest. The gorge, and the Sugar Creek Valley as a whole, is so unusual compared to the wider landscape of cornfields and soybeans surrounding it that it seems like something from much farther north or west. Carved by a series of creeks from ancient layers of Mansfield and Borden sandstone, the gullies and small canyons that dot the area are astonishingly beautiful. But the beauty of sandstone is a weird, challenging beauty.

The sandstone itself was a byproduct of the fossils and plant matter left off here a few million years ago, when Indiana formed part of the ocean bed. The glaciers that later flattened about half of the state left this spot mostly untouched, though surrounding land was scoured almost featureless. The gorge is a place shaped more by water, alternately violent and gentle, than by the mammoth brutality of the great ice sheets.

Its stony soil is mostly unsuitable for deciduous trees. What grows here instead is what botanists calls a "relic colony," the only stand of white pines in Indiana, located so far south of the normal limits of this species that the sight of them is a sweet jolt to the eye. The typical experience of walking in the mostly deciduous Indiana forests (beautiful as they are) during the winter is one of silence, or the crunch of boots underfoot. At Pine Hills, among evergreens, the air is alive with the sound of wind and water. The water-carved landscape is literally beneath the horizon of monotonous row crops that characterizes most of central Indiana. But that fact alone is one of the beauties of Midwestern landscape, where topographical variation is often underneath the ordinary line of vision, down toward sea level and the world of water, in gullies and creek beds and drainage ditches, coming into and leaving human vision in a flash as we shoot across the landscape in a car, or in the case of caves, remaining completely hidden until they are sought out.

The sandstone gorges along Indian and Sugar Creeks are steeped in unusual folklore and history, inspired by the fear and awe this place has evoked for hundreds of years. It is the only landscape I know of within an hour's drive of where I live that exemplifies what the aesthetic philosopher Edmund Burke said about "sublimity": whereas the picturesque is just pretty and the beautiful is only uplifting, the sublime is powerful because it has the capacity to literally kill you, to draw you out of yourself and toss you into in true mystery. The Romantic poets Hoelderlin and Novalis and Shelley went crazy not because of beauty, but because they stepped across an indefinable line into sublimity, which pulled them out of themselves and threw them into shadier territory, where they stopped functioning as "normal" human beings and came into contact with something dangerous, even maddening, possibly fatal, far beyond mere beauty, which bored them. The word sublime has lost that older meaning it had for the Romantics. Its etymology notwithstanding, it no longer gives a sense of being "on the edge of things," in a borderland, at the gateway to difficult, challenging and unknown spiritual terrain. Though both might be full of wonder, a frightening cave is sublime, a cupcake is not. These photographs are about the meaning of "sublimity," and about one place where I felt some inkling of the sublime.

When the pioneers first came into the sandstone bluff country in the Sugar Creek Valley in the 1820's (not that long ago), they called the area around the gorge on Indian Creek by an old place name, probably derived from the Miami Indians: "The Shades of Death." The Miami had lived here for generations, and at some point in their history, before Europeans came, they fought a horrific losing battle in this gorge or in the woods around it. Of six-hundred Miami warriors, all but twenty were slaughtered.

The forest was a "black forest" then, pure old-growth, so thick and deep that light barely touched the ground. To newcomers, used to fields and clear-cuts and towns, it would have been a frightening and bizarre place. But some people found it homey. An Irish immigrant, Alexander Weir, who came here around 1820, bought land on Sugar Creek because it reminded him of the rough, stony country of County Galway on the west coast of Ireland, where he was from. For years, a large tract of land in southwestern Montgomery County was actually known as "Bally Hitch", after Weir's birthplace, an Irish village called Ballynahinch.

The first federal land surveyors described the area as "broken country," third-rate land, mostly unsuitable for farming, but a few settlers ventured onto it because it was so cheap. Around 1830, a murder took place in an isolated cabin near the Indian Creek gorge. A woman known only as "Mrs. Rush" got tired of her husband's brutality toward her. One night, while he slept, she stuck a hatchet through his skull. An all-male jury in Crawfordsville, twelve miles away, acquitted her of murder, even though they knew she was guilty, and the judge actually commended her action. But grisly stories about deeds done at "The Shades of Death" apparently helped keep people away from the area for years.

In 1911, two unusual brothers, Frank and Lawrence Hasselman, came here and began to buy up land around the gorge. The Hasselman brothers were city people from Indianapolis and had been given a good education, growing up in Indiana when it had more writers per capita than any state but New York. Though they were native Hoosiers, they were the grandsons of James Blood, the first mayor of Lawrence, Kansas, who had once crossed paths with the mad abolitionist John Brown when Brown was decapitating his enemies in "Bleeding Kansas" on the eve of the Civil War. Their mother, Ida Blood, was one of the first female graduates of the University of Kansas and her son Lawrence Hasselman was probably named after the town.

But as many Hoosier stories go, things that began well ended in tragedy and madness. Frank and Lawrence opened a dance hall and campground on Sugar Creek, next to the Deer's Mill covered bridge. Between 1911 and the mid-1920's, the Hasselman brothers purchased all the land around the gorge on Indian Creek, which they operated as a private park called Pine Hills. They led tour groups, picnickers from Indianapolis, and botanists and geologists on hiking trips into the canyon, to see the white pines and extraordinary rock features like "The Slide," Honeycomb Rock, and three high sandstone "backbones" (one named for the devil, one for a turkey, one for an abandoned mill). Tourists carved portraits of the devil into the six-foot-wide backbone that bears his name, alongside a carving of a passenger pigeon, a species that once darkened North American skies for hours but lives on here only in stone. The Hasselmans started an experimental farm on the edge of the property (both brothers had degrees in science), and part of the land briefly became a state agricultural experiment station. Some of the trees were logged. The whole character of the place began to change.

Then Frank died in 1924. Lawrence, who was described as a "cultured, educated gentleman" but the less sociable and talkative of the two brothers, closed the park to visitors. He went off to live alone in a cabin in the woods, reveling in the isolation of the place. Apparently he dabbled in spiritualism, a common fad in the 1920s, when even well-educated people like the poet William Butler Yeats were trying to dig deep into life's mysteries with the help of "mediums" and alternative spirituality. Whether Lawrence Hasselman actually went insane is not clear, but stories began to go around the neighborhood that there was a mad hermit living in the hills next to the gorge. Between 1930 and 1934, according to one story, "the hermit of Pine Hills" believed he was being pestered by a malevolent witch, who lived somewhere back in the sandstone gullies and came out to walk in "The Shades of Death" and mess around with Lawrence Hasselman, who had brought people into the place. Hasselman lived here until 1937. Concerned family members finally took him away. They sent him to the Central State Hospital, an Indianapolis mental asylum known as the "Seven Steeples." He died there in August 1950, far away from his home next to the gorge.

The only real witch in the hills, of course, is water. The sight and sound of it are truly a force of magic. It is hard to imagine that a man who lived here permanently would not have been affected and transformed by it, slowly but completely, in the same way that ancient layers of sandstone, the fallout of old oceanic life, have been shaped into remarkable, breathtaking landforms by the coaxing power of the creek. What the Miami and the pioneers called "The Shades of Death" became a state park in the 1960's and was given the family-friendly name "Shades" (Pine Hills is a remote nature preserve next to the park), but the force of the sublime still lingers on here, greater than mere beauty. Amid the susurration of white pines and the rush of snow-melt on a warm February day, I felt a power leading me into something deeper than beauty, something more truly surprising and interesting and complex, jolting and seductive at the same time. It is something difficult to encompass on film or to accurately express with words, but it needed a tragic story and some tentative photographs from experience to convey.