Parker Potter is a former archaeologist and historian, and a retired lawyer. He is currently a semi-professional dogwalker who lives and works in Contoocook.
I am a dedicated blood donor. I’ll never match my father-in-law, who is one pint shy of having donated eleven gallons, but I try to do my part.
After my last donation, I put up a Facebook post about it, hoping to inspire or remind others to give the gift of life. I received a reply from a high school friend, thanking me for my donation and telling me that she had received blood from donors like me eight times in the previous year as part of her treatment for cancer. I was saddened by her diagnosis and deeply touched by her gratitude.
My classmate’s reply also made me think about social media. I am well aware that social media platforms tend to herd their users into like-minded flocks by sending us “suggested for you” posts that mirror and reinforce our interests and beliefs. So maybe Facebook isn’t such a robust or potentially transformative marketplace of ideas. But I have found it to be a wonderful campfire. Let me explain.
One day in July of 2020, which was shaping up to be pretty dreadful, I set out on my morning walk through Contoocook, which I ironically call my “trudge.” New COVID cases had hit 77,000 a day, and Contoocook water customers were under a boil order due to some miscreant bacteria in the water supply. On my trudge that morning, I decided that I needed to do something to cheer myself up.
For months, I had admired a collection of smooth river cobbles displayed on the porch of a house along my trudge route. The cobble collectors have a mailbox on a wooden post out by the sidewalk. At another spot on my route, the town had just built a new gravel parking lot, and mixed in with the gravel, I found hundreds of beautiful little smooth stones. I picked up a handful and built a tiny stone cairn on the cobble collectors’ mailbox post. That cheered me up.
Several other things that happened on my trudge that day also cheered me up, notably the disappearance of the sign announcing the boil order. When I got home and opened Facebook, it asked me what was on my mind. In response, I wrote a post about all things I encountered on my trudge that morning that turned my frown upside down.
That post was my first Facebook “trudge report,” and I have been at it ever since. Except for the day I got a bit cranky after picking up more than two dozen discarded face masks, my trudge reports always focus on small moments of beauty, joy, or grace I experience as I walk around Contoocook. I get enough blue Facebook thumbs, red Facebook hearts, and face-to-face comments to suggest that people appreciate my trudge reports, so I keep on writing and posting them. I feel like I am sitting at a campfire telling stories to what has become a little electronic community, one that means far more to me than I ever would have guessed when I tapped out my first trudge report.
My community includes people I went to high school and college with, people I have worked with, and fellow villagers here in Contoocook. More specifically, it includes, among others, my high school girlfriend, her brother, and one of her college friends; the sister of a college fraternity brother; the wife and daughter of a beloved college professor of mine; several of our daughter’s high school teachers; a few of her high school and college friends; and the mother of one of her college roommates. I love seeing people from so many different stages of my life sitting around my electronic campfire.
My community also includes my family. Sometimes I will see something on a trudge that prompts me to tell a family story. My sister tells me that stories about my father always make one or more of her kids tear up as they remember their dearly departed grandfather. And it is not uncommon for a sibling to respond to a family story by telling me that they had never heard it before. How cool is that?
In the end, however, I suspect that writing my trudge reports has a bigger effect on me than reading them has on my audience. With the thought of my next trudge report in the back of my head, I am always on the lookout for uplifting things to report on, and they are always there to be found if I am looking for them.
Beyond that, despite the fact that writing has been central to my academic career and work life since the 1970s, I have never been more conscious of my readers than I am when I write a trudge report. That can only be a good thing.