Pronounced shuh-NEE-bull, this is a fascinating word I stumbled upon while in the midst of thrilling research into the history of the United States Postal Service. It would seem that in 1904, a small, ragged army of put-upon coal miners executed a coup of sorts in the Wisconsin village of Shaniebuhl. (Do not bother looking for it on a map. There is no way of knowing if it still exists, much less if it's still in Wisconsin.) Their intentions were egalitarian, their methods Soviet, their success, apparently, absolute.
By all accounts formerly an unassuming town off the beaten path and most likely destined for disintegration from the cold shoulder of the railroads, Shaniebuhl became a magnet for America's disaffected and disenfranchised laborers. In droves they shambled to the sparse Midwestern nowhere, buoyed by their hopes of the life unyoked, coal-blackened men and their teams of unlettered children and their wives with tired shoulders, strained backs and exhausted breasts, proud people all, and all submitted to the dream of a fair shake.
Emboldened, Shaniebuhl seceded from the United States and became a sovereign nation. The United States hardly noticed.
In Amish communities, when someone renounces the faith and leaves for less restricting pastures, their names are forbidden to be spoken. So it was with Shaniebuhl. Its name and address was erased from the continental 48. They were assiduously omitted from the census of 1910. Surrounding municipalities were surprised to find their jurisdictions suddenly bordered not by Shaniebuhl's slight territorial reach, but as if by nameless void. When the Eisenhower Interstate Highway System begridded the nation four decades later, a not unsizable portion of Wisconsin was intentionally exempted from coverage.
The practical implication to the larger world was that, short of traveling there, (if they could even find it), kith and kin of Shaniebuhl residents had no way of contacting them. Their letters were all returned as undeliverable. The interior Postal vernacular quickly adopted the word "shaniebuhl" to indicate a town that has no official existence.
A peculiar footnote to this tale is that the number of shaniebuhls documented by Postal historians has greatly increased over time, with exceptional proliferations at certain moments in the nation's history. Conscription, for instance, is a sure way to geometrically multiply formally nonexistent communities strewn invisibly throughout America. Imagine this land! these constellations of islands, unabsorbed, endowed by cowards, lying we know not where in our very midst!
9.7.09
Plippis
An unblossomed bud, after Sister Agnes Plippis (1822-?), late of the Anglican Community of St. Margaret in Grinstead, England. For the majority of Sister Agnes's life, her green thumb was a thing of legend. "Where 'ere she walks," an Anglican broadsheet, The Golden Angle, proclaimed in the Spring of '64, "the earth warms and billows in verdant majesty. Sunflowers shoot enormous, tall and wide from the alighting bounces of her naked soles. As she but fondles a withered, starved shrubbery, blossoms of every variety seem to cascade from the palm of her hand, and the whole of the plant is restored as if by a divine breath to heartiest verdure."
Sister Agnes's faculty for horticulture was so extraordinary that in the winter of 1867 the church set about investigating her for possible canonization. It was around this time that she fell headlong in love with a notoriously impious (and married) landscaper whose company was called "The Haw Haw Gang." (As the most learned of my readers are no doubt aware, a haw haw, or ha ha, is a fence or bank stuck between slopes, or a ditch not seen until approached closely, employed in English gardens to fend off nosy beasts from spoiling tended land.) Abruptly a fallen woman, the church's investigation was dropped, Sister Agnes was exiled from the Community of St. Margaret, and was promptly abandoned by both her lover (who would later suffer a tragic accident, himself, involving a hoe) and her divinely imbued green thumb.
It is no wonder, then, how an unblossomed bud became known to Grinsteaders as a plippis. The real question is why would God be such a taunt and jackal as to give Agnes preternatural gifts and ruin her with one of them: the gift of passion? But, silly me, doesn't He do that kind of thing all the time?
Finally, on the macabre side of the ledger, we have the legend of Agnes's interment--or lack thereof. No one can say precisely when the unfortunate Plippis expired, and therefore what I am about to report is the wildest conjecture, but it is said that Sister Agnes went unburied into eternity, left to rot and melt again into the soil, like any plant removed from the light.
Sister Agnes's faculty for horticulture was so extraordinary that in the winter of 1867 the church set about investigating her for possible canonization. It was around this time that she fell headlong in love with a notoriously impious (and married) landscaper whose company was called "The Haw Haw Gang." (As the most learned of my readers are no doubt aware, a haw haw, or ha ha, is a fence or bank stuck between slopes, or a ditch not seen until approached closely, employed in English gardens to fend off nosy beasts from spoiling tended land.) Abruptly a fallen woman, the church's investigation was dropped, Sister Agnes was exiled from the Community of St. Margaret, and was promptly abandoned by both her lover (who would later suffer a tragic accident, himself, involving a hoe) and her divinely imbued green thumb.
It is no wonder, then, how an unblossomed bud became known to Grinsteaders as a plippis. The real question is why would God be such a taunt and jackal as to give Agnes preternatural gifts and ruin her with one of them: the gift of passion? But, silly me, doesn't He do that kind of thing all the time?
Finally, on the macabre side of the ledger, we have the legend of Agnes's interment--or lack thereof. No one can say precisely when the unfortunate Plippis expired, and therefore what I am about to report is the wildest conjecture, but it is said that Sister Agnes went unburied into eternity, left to rot and melt again into the soil, like any plant removed from the light.
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