Gymanfa Ganu

Every year about this time, the old Welsh church in Beavercreek mounts its wonderful day of singing and praise.

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The Gymanfa Ganu (guh-mahn-vah gah-nee) “or sing gathering” is a festival of song and worship. It’s a tradition kept at Bryn Seion church since 1935, though the custom of Welsh 4-part singing goes back much further than that. The Welsh have prided themselves on their gift of song since at least 1176, when Welsh King Rhys ap Gruffydd held a festival of poetry and music. Doubtless the Welsh were singing well before then, since it’s unlikely they burst into song only for King Rhys. Wales has never been a sovereign state in Britain, and its language and customs waned under English dominance. But in the 19th and 20th Centuries, like many national traditions at the time, Wales underwent a renewal of ethnicity which has continued to the present. Though the numbers of Welsh descendants in America are not huge, they are enthusiastic in their embrace of the tradition of choral expression.

The little Welsh church in Beavercreek was built by an immigrant congregation in 1884. It’s a tiny building that houses a tiny group of worshipers today. But once a year, on the fourth Sunday of June, its walls strain to contain the voices of a hundred or more people who come together for the purpose of raising their shared song.

They begin after church service in the morning, and though most of them have not sung together since the previous June, if at all, they assemble a wondrous harmony. The Gymanfa director, who comes to Beavercreek as a guest, guides the singers through their parts, and then leads them into the harmony. It is stunning. Those of us who are not singers, but only admirers, gather outside under a tent where we are encouraged to hum along, or to attempt the Welsh words from books provided.

Understanding the words of the hymns is not so important, really. You do not have to know the words to know the heart that carries them.

The singers sing from 1:45 until 4:00 in the afternoon. So much worship requires some sustenance if the singers are to continue into the evening. They must be fed! The Gymanfa program modestly states, “After the Session, join us for Tea at the Beavercreek Grange.” And, indeed, the Welsh for this tea break is te bach: a little tea. Do not be misled by this disingenuous term. This is as little a tea as one might serve to the entire Welsh Guard on the day when their Colonel of the Regiment comes to visit.

For the modest sum of $5, one enters the Grange Hall to see tables groaning under a spread of sweets and savories that causes the eyes to bulge.

It’s not only the eyes that get large. Let me try to describe the terrible duty we faced: these tables were arrayed with plates of muffins, lemon squares, Welsh cakes (of course Welsh cakes!), lamb and leek tarts (I cannot describe these other than to say, it is worth a trip from wherever you read this to partake the lamb and leek tarts), one-bite brownies, tiny quiches some of Lorraine and some with artichoke centers, sliced cheeses, artichoke nibbles, roasted red pepper and basil sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, cream cheese sandwiches (I suppose I do not need to say there was never a crust in sight), little berry tarts, cookies of lightness and sugar, rhubarb tarts, pecan tarts, chocolate tarts, tarts filled with something creamy… and all of it decorated and sprinkled and sugared so fine… you can see that by this time, your chronicler was becoming less able to distinguish the treasures before her. There was so much I could never have sampled. I tried. I sent Richard back for more Welsh cakes. All of this was accompanied by a grand silver bowl of limeade, a great glass jar of lemon water,

and cauldrons of strong hot tea. I do mean cauldrons. The tea was served from nice china teapots by the nice Welsh ladies, but it was seen to be brewing behind them in enamelware canner vessels, an endless river of hot tea and milk poured out of gallons. Gluttony is a sin I am told. If so, it carries its own punishment. How we groaned.

Following this small tea, the singers and others repair once more to the church where they begin again at 6 o’clock, lifting up their joyful noise until, at last, all must make their way home in a weary excess of holy utterance.

It is late now, and I am still filled full.

Not Your Mother’s Percolator

I admit, pictures of holes in the ground are probably not very interesting to most readers. But at this stage of the project, we grasp to what signs of achievement we can. This is a Perc Hole.

It is meant to tell you how fast water will run through your soil. Why, you might ask? This explanation is for those folks who have never faced construction of a new septic field. Guess why you might want to be assured water will run out the bottom of a hole in your soil? It’s done all around the country: a hole of certain specifications is filled with water of a certain amount, and the hole must drain within a certain number of minutes. So, our perc hole awaits its moment. Soon the County will send an official here to make certain we will have a proper means of expressing ourselves.

Ceci n’est pas une pipe

One more sign of The Project: this may look like a picture of some old pipe sticking out of the ground, but I can tell you, it was a very expensive pipe to get stuck in. It is a (picture of a) 545 foot long pipe intended to bring water to the surface. The pump that will do so, and its surrounding well house aren’t there yet for bureaucratic reasons. The water at the bottom of the pipe is sufficient to irrigate our pasture and gardens if we can secure the water right to go with it. That business is drifting in its papery way from one desk to another in the Watermaster’s office. Until we hear the result of our application, we don’t want to invest in the pump. Water right: large pump; no water right: small pump. So, in the meantime, we have this attractive item sticking out of the ground behind the barn.

Here’s a view of the process of putting it there.

You can imagine how it attracted the attention of the neighbors, grinding and spewing all day for weeks on end. One of them showed up with a forked stick, to offer us advice. By then there was water all over the place. Fortunately, he confirmed the site was wet.

The drillers found themselves in a mess of geology. They had the well logs of nearby holes for reference, but seemed to have been taken by surprise as they drilled through successive layers of sandy gravel overlaid by rock and other materials, and then more gravels. They were delighted to work through solid rock when they found it, and made good headway with the hole and the pipe lining. Then, inevitably it seemed, the drill would bust through the rock into sand and gravel, and the hole would collapse, and the poor fellows would pull the pipe out and pump in concrete to make rock where there was none. Then, boring down, they would find the drill running alongside a fissure through which all their concrete had run away. It took them weeks to make a hole they had planned to finish in days.

It sparked our interest in the ground below. We had known, from publications the County provided when we moved out here, that the surface soils are what is known as Jory Clay Loam. That’s a red soil, just short of clay. The loam rescues it from being actual clay, though there are times in the rains when it’s hard to tell the difference. It can be slick as goose slicky or, by August, as hard as adobe. What was coming up from the well hole, though, was nothing like JCL. It was ground up basalt from the look of it. We cast an interested eye toward Highland Butte, rising just to the north of our back door.

I had thought of it as a high spot. A hill. A good place to walk to for a summer lunch. But when I looked into it a little, it gave me a thrill to realize we are camped on the slopes of a long quiet volcano. Ages ago, at the turn of the Quaternary Period (about 1,800,000 years ago), this area was one fine hotbed. No sheep ruminated in pasture grass then. No mules wandered the woods. No hens chuckled behind no barn. This was the beginning of the Pleistocene Epoch, the time of “The Great Ice Age.” Think of Columbian Mammoths but no human hunters as yet. In Asia, Homo erectus had not yet tamed fire. If you were part of the early Pleistocene fauna, you might have found it comforting to snuggle up to the neighborhood shield volcano for a warm-up: your back to a glacier and your toes to a lava vent. There were almost 100 vents in the area of the northern Willamette Valley, coughing up a flow now called the Boring Lava. The Boring lava was mostly basaltic flow rocks, with amendments of tuff breccia, ash, tuff, cinders, and scoriaceous phases. They are light-gray to nearly black, more on the lighter side, and are given to columnar jointing and flow structure which in places results in platiness of the rock. That platiness is what caused the well drillers such troubles. Through the joints ran gallons of fill material.

I’d have preferred to have more scoriaceous phases. Scoriaceous is a good word, and I’d like to be able to use it more. Merriam Webster tells me:

Main Entry: sco·ria
Pronunciation: ’skor-E-&
Function: noun
Inflected Form(s): plural sco·ri·ae /-E-”E, -E-”I/
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin, from Greek skOria, from skOr excrement — more at SCATOLOGY 1 : the refuse from melting of metals or reduction of ores : slag
2 : rough vesicular cindery lava
- sco·ri·a·ceous /“skor-E-’A-sh&s/ adjective

Alas, we are stuck with columnar jointing and platiness here and not so much of the scoria.

All those volcanoes were not erupting simultaneously. But they would have been going locally and off and on throughout the area. They were not the Mt. St. Helens kind of eruption. Because the flows did not always move far from the vents, geologists believe the lava was viscous, not runny, and that the eruptions were not explosive but ongoing.

The USGS says, “The surface of much of the Boring lava has been weathered to depths of 25 feet or more. The upper 5 to 15 feet commonly is a red clayey soil that retains none of the original character of the parent rock. Most of these lavas constitute a vast plain and are thought to have originated in Highland Butte and associated smaller vents. Highland Butte is located about a mile south of the area in sec.9,T.4S,R.3E.” (They ask that, if I use their information, I give credit to USGS/Cascades Volcano Observatory. The online source for the information is: http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/Oregon/Publications/Bulletin1119/boring_lava.html)

See the bold type? That’s us, even down to the red clayey soil.

Here is a map of Boring Lava vents in our area. Down at the bottom, number 73, is Highland Butte.

In case you wondered, and everyone does, the Boring Lava is named for W.H. Boring, a resident of the timber town now known as Boring, Oregon. The townsite, originally called Boring Junction, was platted in 1903 and the Boring Post Office established in March of that year. Residents of Boring make the most of their faintly humorous town name. I suspect old W.H. had more going for him than his surname would suggest: he built the community’s first school on his homestead acres.

It’s amazing what you can learn looking down a 545 foot pipe.

This is a view of our Highland Butte today, in its setting of farms and forests, with few hints of its violent past. If you could see over the line of trees to the right of the Butte, just about where the slope runs into that dark green line, that would be our place.

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Machines You Have to Love

It may run like a deer,

but it drives like a tractor. No one had thought of power steering when they built our 1949 Deere 40. It’s noisy and cranky, and is pretty much a transmission on tires, but a person has to admire a machine with more service years than my own. Look out, folks, I’m about to mow!

If I can just get an arm around the steering…

It must really itch!

I think of this every year as I see lambs with little horn buds grow real horns that push through the skin and hair of the skull. Boy, that must drive you nuts, I think.

This little ram is cute enough to show off all on his own,

but what I was trying to get a picture of was really the close-up below:

That’s head hair still attached to the end of the little horn that has grown out. I suppose if it’s all you know, it’s all you expect, but it makes me cringe to think of it!