Skinny John

by: Stephen J. Tully

Some folks spend their entire lives wearing hats that don’t fit.  It’s nobody’s fault – the universe applies no calculus in selecting her casualties.  There’s no malice aforethought. Some head shapes are harder to accommodate than others. That’s all. Milliners describe this unfortunate reality as the law of improbable contours, or warped melon syndrome.  The list of potential causative factors leading to craniometric dissimilitude runs long. Mismatched genes can distort a baby’s noggin. So can the scrunching and squeezing of a difficult childbirth. Then there’s the endless variety of potential head trauma we face while driving cars, walking on icy sidewalks and dating the daughters of professional wrestlers. One false move and bam! Our crown is out-of-round.  So don’t blame the hat makers.  How are they supposed to anticipate and accommodate every anatomical outlier? The attempt would surely bankrupt the entire industry. Then none of us would have hats. Winters would suck. On the other hand, some folks fit comfortably into the first hat they crouch under. One such man was Desmond “Skinny John” Hagenveld. His hat was a visor. From the moment he first filled its bill at age six, he knew, with immediate and firm conviction, he was going to be a newspaperman.

Skinny John grew up in a small farming community in southcentral Ohio. The town, originally named Collins’ Station, lay within a broad floodplain nestled along the northern bank of the Ohio River.  The area had originally been inhabited by the Adena Culture, ancient Native American mound builders who disappeared two millennia ago. From roughly 1000 CE to 1655 CE, the site fell within the wide-ranging patchwork of villages known as the Fort Ancient Culture. Tranquility reigned for the peace-loving sedentary corn growers until the tribes of the Iroquois League consolidated power and began prosecuting a ruthless campaign of tribal cleansing. Then the Shawnee and Mingo moved in and took turns visiting the site to hunt and trap. Enter the Europeans. First the French, then the English. Natives and settlers, unfamiliar with each other’s cultural expectations and taboos, began exchanging transgressions, which quickly escalated to mutual violence. Things got really heated. War ensued. The white team, led by Mad Anthony Wayne, beat the red team, led by Chief Blue Jacket, in a sudden death playoff in 1794 (the Battle of Fallen Timbers).  In the Treaty of Greenville (1795) the Ohio tribes agreed to give up all their land claims and clear out. For the most part they did – except for a few stragglers who hid out in the woods for several decades.

Collins’ Station was established in the early nineteenth century by a group of hearty Irish immigrants. They were six families who formed a corporation, purchased a land grant from the US government comprising six hundred and forty acres of the aforementioned riverfront property, and set off downriver from Pittsburgh in a flatboat flotilla. They arrived on June fifth, 1822 and commenced clearing the land and constructing rough-hewn dwellings for each family. They named the town after the group’s de facto leader, Fergal Collins. 

Fergal had won the confidence of the group back in Donegal when he returned from a religious retreat saying God had chosen him for a special purpose.  Initially his co-workers at the local distillery were skeptical. Fergal had a reputation as the company’s best customer. Eventually he was able to satisfy doubters that the divine visitation, as described, was not the product of a drunken camping trip.  People began referring to him as “The Prophet.” When his supervisor at the distillery fired Fergal for excessive absenteeism six of his co-workers resigned in protest. As a sign of appreciation for their show of faith The Prophet made them honorary disciples and suggested that they grow beards and start wearing sandals.  They agreed. Fergal delivered a fiery sermon in which he compared himself to Moses and promised to “lead the faithful away from the suffering and spiritual bondage they faced in their village and into the land of milk and honey that lay in the Canaan across the sea.” The six disciples pledged their fealty and collective life’s savings to The Prophet. Eight months later, as described above, they had arrived in the promise land, with their families in tow, and were hard at work converting their purchased slice of alluvial Ohio into a religious sanctuary, Collins’ Station.

Though the disciples were confident that their spiritual sojourn had been endorsed by none other than the supreme underwriter himself, the exact nature of The Prophet’s special purpose remained a mystery.  No one asked questions – yet. The Prophet reminded his neophytes, each of whom had left a cushy job at the distillery, that “faith alone will sustain the faithful.”  Somehow this line of reasoning went unchallenged and the sanctified brethren labored on, month after month, season after season, for two full years. Gradually, like Saul, the scales fell from their eyes. Faith diminished - as hardship and privation increased. It was pretty much a 1-to-1 ratio of inverse proportionality. The settlement came under increasingly frequent poaching raids, usually conducted while the men were away, by a small group of Indian opportunists. They wouldn’t hurt anyone – they’d just dash in, steal some food, and then dash back out into the forest. The women became traumatized. Husbands returning from hunting trips were greeted by hysterical spouses. Men’s hands throbbed from slapping the sense back into their wives. Food stores dwindled down to nothing and the whole settlement faced starvation.

Critical mass had arrived. Mutiny filled each hungry heart. A disgruntled mob cornered Fergal. Emotions boiled over. They tied him to an elm tree and demanded he reveal his special purpose. He refused. They vowed to beat the special purpose out of him with a bullwhip. After just two lashes Fergal confessed that he had lied. There was no special purpose. He hadn’t been visited by God. The whole thing was a fabrication. He had invented the story as cover - to justify the latest in a long series of unexcused absences (benders) from work. The lie simply snowballed from that point. The problem lay in the fact that so many people believed him. They considered him a prophet. Fergal became intoxicated by his elevated status.  He was sorry.  “So let me get this straight, there is no special purpose?” one settler inquired. Fergal answered, “No.” “So, we can probably discount any possibility of further visitations?” asked the same interlocutor. Fergal rolled his eyes, let out a deep sigh and shook his head “no.” “What do you mean, no!” demanded the inquisitor. “I meant yes,” replied Fergal, “Sorry, I got a little confused.” “So you admit this has all been…” ”Yes,” screamed Fergal, “Jeez, can you not understand plain English? Are you that soft in the head? I tricked you, Ok? Try to let words soak in… you imbecile. I…tricked…you!”   After tying a large rock around Fergal’s neck and chucking him into the river the families abandoned the settlement and made their way back upriver to Pittsburgh. They sold the land grant at a considerable loss to a Norwegian immigrant named Morten Nystrom and booked passage back to Ireland.

Morten Nystrom was a twenty two year old bachelor who had plenty of money to burn and no qualms about burning it.  He had been raised by his father, Heinke, from the age of five. His mother, Ilsa, met an early and unexpected demise when she contracted an unusually severe case of food poisoning after eating an improperly cured batch of T?rrfisk (dried fish) at her younger sister’s wedding reception. Heinke was devastated. Ilsa had been his childhood sweetheart – his first and only true love. His easy-going, gregarious demeanor changed overnight.  He became sullen and withdrawn. Lifelong neighbors and friends who had revelled in his playful, happy-go-lucky charm were saddened by the brooding, antisocial new Heinke.  One after another, all along the main street of his village, behind brightly colored shutters fronting brightly colored houses lining the shore of the ancient fjord, folks slowly cut ties with Heinke. He became the local hermit-weirdo.  Despite the fact that he never stopped caring and providing for young Morton - his life lacked joy.  

However, depression has a shelf life. Shattered lives tend to find new purpose. Eventually, after several dark years passed, Heinke crawled out of his funk and found a new group of “friends.”  He met them in Oslo during an extended visit to one of the city’s seediest houses of ill repute. Two prospective “investors” approached him in between assignations with a proposition that would turn his failing timber business into a colossal cash cow.  All he had to do was help launder money for an underground Norwegian gambling syndicate.  Heinke went all in. By the time Morten turned eighteen his father was Norway’s fourth wealthiest citizen. 

The Nystroms, father and son, travelled freely and widely. Young Morten embarked on a globetrotting tour in the summer of 1824 that took him all around Europe, then by fast schooner to South America, and finally to North America. He came to Pittsburgh to visit a secular commune he had read about in a New York newspaper.  Apparently the transcendentalist community, calling itself “The Hillock,” gained a notorious reputation as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah West. Located dangerously close to Pittsburgh, a mere fifteen miles to the south, the “locus non grata” sent a wave of panic through the southwest corner of the Quaker State. Mothers warned their children, and husbands, to give it a wide berth or “suffer the fiery fate of those lost to prodigal debauchery.” All of this talk intrigued young Morten so he chartered a carriage and visited the little Nineveh first-hand. Though he planned to stay a single night, he immediately fell prey to the seductive charms of The Hillock and extended his tarriance a solid month. He couldn’t get enough.

Upon returning to Pittsburgh, Morten became firmly committed to founding his own utopian commune based on free love and artistic expression. Happenstance sent the homeward-bound Irish ex-disciples his way.  Morten purchased the deed to Collins' Station dirt cheap. Title in hand, he sailed back to Norway and pitched his idea to every young bohemian or dissident who would listen.  In less than a month Morten had enlisted forty-four shiny new volunteer-adventurers. The group wasted no time putting his plan into action. They immediately booked passage, sailed across to the Atlantic, floated down the Ohio, and arrived in Collins’ Station in August, 1827. The Nord-niks immediately fell in love with the place.  As an expression of collective joy, and as is customary when asserting ownership, the utopian revelers re-named the hand-me-down settlement “Lekeplassen,” meaning “The Playground.” 

Lekeplassen benefitted from having a wealthy spoiled-brat benefactor as founding father. Morten happily bankrolled the whole endeavor. He paid for food to be brought in by flatboat and ended the Indians raids by agreeing to feed them as well.  Since the Irish had cleared the land and built six rather comfortable dwellings, all of which were left standing and semi-furnished, the workload for the rag-tag bunch of Norwegian drop-outs was exceedingly light – right off the bat. When they got bored and needed a break from indiscriminate fornicating they dabbled at various craft-making activities like wood-carving, weaving and pottery. Life was a veritable adult summer camp for the newly-arrived libertines. They wrote poetry and crafted necklaces made from buckeyes harvested from nearby trees. They swung on vines (Tarzan style) and built bonfires around which they danced, as did the growing number of Indians who wandered in from the surrounding woods. The Shawnee-come-latelys introduced the colonists to smoking hemp, which caught on fast and became an integral part of their everyday lives.

 Every once in a while a flatboat came drifting downriver carrying a family of immigrants, typically Irish or German, bound for Cincinnati, Louisville or points beyond.  What the pioneers-in-transit beheld as they scudded slowly past the colony left them mesmerized.  The clearing opened up along the north shore revealing groups of half-dressed and fully naked Lekeplassen Norsk and vagabond Shawnee loitering languorously along the riverbank. The air was filled with the rank smell of burning hemp emanating from the generously packed pipes they passed amongst themselves. Some were laughing, others were coughing out smoke that rose in great plumes above their uncoiffed heads. From the vantage of the raft-bound transients-turned-voyeurs, the women were barely distinguishable from the men, despite the pervasive nudity. Both had long hair, both wore buckeye necklaces and headbands, both engaged in the same behavioral misdemeanors, and both shared a preponderance of common anatomical features – especially when viewed from behind. As the families floated away, making their slow escape down the dark, tree-lined river, they realized the true gift of what they had witnessed. God sent them this glimpse of depravity to underscore the dangers they faced in setting out for the frontier. There were certain aspects of civilization one must carry with them, that one must dedicate themselves to preserving, so as to avoid “going savage.”