From Frank Lloyd Wright to bison, from more ghost towns to insane juxtapositions, and from general hilarity to even more barbecue, we’ve been having a grand adventure! Pull up a seat and enjoy some it along with us.

Serious culture in Bartlesville

Those of you who have known me for a long time probably remember Cathryn Delude. We worked together for a few decades at The Writing Company and did a lot of great work together. I vividly remembered that Cathryn grew up in Oklahoma, and I kinda remembered that Bartlesville was part of that conversation. (Cathryn and I met through solar energy; her father worked as an executive in the oil business. She now lives in Santa Fe.) Bartlesville is ALL oil, home to Phillips Petroleum.

It turns out that Cathryn had indeed lived in Bartlesville through 6^th grade. She told me about a Frank Lloyd Wright high-rise building there: the Price Tower. Both her doctor and her dentist had offices in that building. It is Wright’s only completed skyscraper.

Thanks to booming oil, by 1926 the HC Price company had become the largest welding contractor in the central US. In 1952, the Price family visited Frank Lloyd Wright at his Taliesin home in Wisconsin, and they became buds and tossed around ideas for doing something together in Bartlesville. Wright had designed the tower in 1929, but it not been built. In 1956, it opened in Bartlesville.

Finding the building requires zero effort. It is among the tallest buildings in town, and since it was built one-story at a time around a core of elevator shafts with each floor cantilevered against the core, there are no rectangles and precious few right angles.

We pulled into the parking lot to check it out and discovered that lo and behold, in addition to housing offices and condos, it was also now a hotel: The Hotel at Price Towers.

DeMarco, the guy at the front desk, was super nice. We looked at a bunch of rooms. They were all different and all ridiculously cool. The price was reasonable (thanks to a Hotels.com deal). How could we not stay there!

The second floor is a museum of the building’s architecture. The furnishings, while not original, are all re-created in the style of Frank Lloyd Wright. The artwork on the walls are reproductions of the original drawings. Damn, it was cool!

Several years ago, I had the good fortune of facilitating a couple of meetings at a Frank Lloyd Wright-designed retreat center: Wingspread in Racine, Wisconsin. (Hi Lynn and Mary Ann!) From jaw-boning the maintenance people there, I learned how challenging Frank Lloyd Wright-designed buildings can be to operate. The Price Tower did not disappoint.

DeMarco first put us in a room on the 13^th floor. (The elevators, BTW, were original and very slow.) The room was cold, but it had a stand-alone space heater. The space heater didn’t work. Then we tried to wash up for the night. We ran the sink. No hot water. We ran the shower a while. No hot water. Our morning showers seemed questionable, so I went back to the front desk. (Indeed, we learned, 13 floors is a long way for hot water to flow.) We changed to the same room on the 7^th floor where we finally got some warm water. Unlike the first room, this one was stifling. Steam hissed regardless of what we did with the thermostat. Plus, the TV wouldn’t work, so no evening news. (Frank Lloyd Wright had nothing to do with the TV not working.) Despite the crisp outside air, we slept out of the covers, and we were able to enjoy an almost-warm-enough morning shower.

We loved the adventure of the place. We would stay there again and recommend it to others (with caveats). When we left, we told DeMarco of our adventures, uncritically and without expectations. He graciously discounted the room for us. All-in-all, an exquisite adventure!

Home, Home on the Range

From Bartlesville, we entered the Osage Nation. In the middle of the territory, we drove north from Pawhuska into the Tall Grass Prairie, a 40,000-acre preserve now managed by the Nature Conservancy. We went to see the bison – 2,000 of them.

Traveling in the off-season is the best of the best. As we drove, we were practically alone in the prairie. When another vehicle did pass, we could see the approaching dust cloud for a few miles. We saw lots of bison from a distance and a goodly number from pretty close. “Pretty close” was as close as we wanted to get!

Bison, we learned – all 2,000 pounds of them – can jump 6 feet vertically or 8 feet horizontally … from standing! Plus, they can run 35 mph – more than twice what I could run for a very short distance in my physical prime decades ago. I ain’t messing with no bison! 

When we finally arrived at the Visitor’s Center at the end of the road, we met Elmer. He had retired from American Airlines, where he worked on maintenance and test flights. Volunteering at the crazily remote Visitor’s Center was his idea of a dream job. He drives 90 miles from Broken Arrow, OK twice a week to be there, and he stays over at the bunkhouse when the opportunity avails. Elmer is yet one more soul who we could have stayed and jawboned with for days. What a gem!

Juxtapositions

The dictionary defines “juxtaposition” as “two things being seen or placed close together with contrasting effect.” 

We are in Oklahoma. Cathryn (the only person I know well from Oklahoma) and I met through solar energy. Rebecca and I have driven through endless miles of oil “pump jacks.” We are in the heart of oil country!

Then we came across a lone but large wind farm. Seeing a wind farm alongside a pump jack gives me hope. 

Sadly, despite the vast sunny, openness of the prairie, we have not seen a single solar field.

My “Inner Sociologist” wonders what the landowner endured to put in that wind farm!

More in the Endless Stream of Inhumanity

A theme is emerging from My Inner Sociologist: human beings, sadly, have the capacity to be grotesquely inhumane: Slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, Separate but Equal, the Holocaust, etc., etc. As a species, we are not nice to our fellow humans. 

On Friday, we visited the National Memorial to the 1995 Oklahoma City Bombing, our first taste of home-bred domestic terrorism. The perpetrators blew up a truckload of ammonium nitrate fertilizer killing 168 and wounding 680, including many, many children. They were anti-government radicals. How different are they and their ideas from the January 6 perpetrators … and sadly, the most radical of the members of the Freedom Caucus? I have a hard time clearly grasping the distinctions.

A Real-Deal Surprise Museum

Think about it: If you were staying two blocks from the “American Banjo Museum,” wouldn’t you think it might be worth a visit? And wouldn’t you think it might be sort of hokey but vaguely potentially interesting? We did, and it wasn’t! In fact, it was amazing, and we are thrilled we went. Who’d a thunk it!

When we showed up, we entered through a room with a bunch of different kinds of banjos for visitors to play along with instructional videos. I picked up a 5-string and put on the John McEuen clawhammer video. (For those of you who don’t know, John McEuen was a founding member of the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band and one of the best banjoists and musicians EVER! Taking my first-ever banjo lesson from him totally rocked … even if I did not exactly master the technique.)

Upon leaving the front room, I commented – to no one in particular – how wonderful it was to take a banjo lesson from John McEuen. Lucas Ross, who is closely affiliated with the museum, happened to be standing right next to me. He had a banjo over his shoulder and agreed with my assessment. He was leaving for a gig, but not before informing us that he was the banjoist who played for Kermit the Frog’s animations. WOW! How do you get better than Kermit? In fact, as we head east from here, we will probably pass through Leland, Mississippi, Kermit’s birthplace. What a thrill!

The museum itself is pretty simple: a lot of videos of banjo history and banjo players, and A LOT of unbelievably beautiful banjos. According to the ladies at the Chickasaw art gallery next door, their collection of banjos is worth more than $1.5 billion dollars. (Yes, B, not M!) I believe it. I have never seen anything remotely like it. Lucas’ favorite is the one donated by Steve Martin, which happens to be the one gifted to him by the Kennedy Center when he won a Mark Twain Award. Steve Martin inspired Lucas to take up the banjo.

I think my favorite part was the video of the national chain of clubs from the ‘60’s called “Your Father’s Mustache” that were music clubs featuring Dixieland-ish banjo music. My father and grandfather loved them; my folks and I went to the Your Father’s Mustache club on Bourbon Street in the ‘60’s when I was an undergrad at Tulane; my grandfather used to bring their paper mustaches to us as children from their clubs in St. Louis and Chicago.

The memorable part of the museum was the banjos themselves. I have no clue how they built such a collection: hundreds of banjos, one more beautiful and historic than the next. 

Next time you happen to be in Oklahoma City, don’t miss it! There is nothing hokey about it.

Oh Yeah, We Got Us Some BBQ and Other Eats Too…..

One last public service announcement…

If anyone lost a lower bridge, it’s in the pull-over at the eastern entrance to Osage Nation in Bartlesville. We left it for you…

Darn. I’ve done it again! I called this blog entry “Finding ‘There.’” I know we are in Tulsa, but I am still not sure what or where “there” is. 

Here is some stuff I do know: We have spent the last few days in Tulsa with Bob Dylan (The Dylan Center*); Woody Guthrie (The Guthrie Center*); Bahati Brown, the awesome interpretive guide at the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center; and Amy and Chris Cojeen (along with Amy’s sister, Sarah) at the Muscogee Nation’s River Spirit Casino Hotel). We had a gorgeous drive here along the Oklahoma Illinois River, which brought us through Tahlequah, Oklahoma and the Cherokee National History Museum. WHEW!

• Yep. The obvious question is what in the world is the Bob Dylan Center doing in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Bobby Zimmerman was born in Duluth, Minnesota and raised in Hibbing. He started becoming Bob Dylan in 1959 and took on that persona for real in 1962 in New York City. After visiting Tulsa, he liked the Guthrie Center (which is indeed Woody Guthrie’s home), so he decided to house his archives in Tulsa under the same roof. It is SO FREAKIN’ Dylan!

Four Days in Tulsa

Our Tulsa planning was pretty good: Greenwood and the Tulsa Massacre, Woody Guthrie, and some sight-seeing. (The presence of the Bob Dylan Center surprised us.) The planning for our lodging proved to be a real waste of time thanks to our good friends Fred and Cindy Clark and their good friends Chris and Amy Cojeen from Norman. (In case you are interested, Fred and Cindy are Tanner’s parents. Tanner was an undergraduate roommate of Allie’s and became one of our adopted kiddos. Tanner now works as a Native American lawyer based in Anchorage. Fred directed the Office of Tribal Relations for the US Forest Service before he retired. Chris is an Oklahoma-based archeologist, so he and Fred became good friends.) Chris also has a bit of an affinity for Oklahoma’s Indian casinos. Thanks to the casino’s generosity toward Chris’s affection for gaming, we have been unbelievably comfortable in our cozy 20^th-floor 1,600-square-foot, 2-bathroom, 3-TV suite. It sure beats the Super 8! Amy’s sister Sarah was hanging with them too, so the five of us thoroughly enjoyed Tulsa together.

The Bob Dylan Center

There is something discombobulating about celebrating the work of Bob Dylan in Tulsa. Tulsa is a lot of things, but it ain’t Minnesota and it ain’t New York. Discombobulation notwithstanding, the Center is terrific. It is in the same old one-block-long warehouse building near the Greenwood neighborhood as the Guthrie Center.

Rebecca and I have arrived at a weird age. Museums are places that memorialize the past. A Bob Dylan Museum does not: it memorializes our lifetimes. It’s bizarre how much of our lives are now appearing in museums. I guess we are old. Good for us.

There were great moments at the Center. Seeing Dylan’s guitar. Reading about his friendships. Seeing him perform at the Monterey Jazz Festival. Reading personal notes from George Harrison and re-visiting the brief life of the Traveling Wilburys.

Maybe it is because we lived the history of Dylan’s life along with him, or maybe something else, but after a couple of hours, we were ready for Woody Guthrie.

Spending the afternoon with Woody

Communing with Woody for the afternoon gave me the chills. He is the music I love. He is the America I love. He is the optimism and love for his fellow humans that I love. Woody’s music resonates with me in every way. Seeing his instruments and the handwritten originals of his lyrics humbled me. Were I Bob Dylan, I would have wanted my archives handled in the same way that the curators of Woody’s center displayed his life and his work. It was a fantastic experience!

Preparing for the Tulsa Massacre of 1921

It’s amazing how much I never learned in school. I never heard of the Tulsa Massacre. I never learned about lynchings. What little I learned about the Trail of Tears, I expect I learned from my own reading and from visiting the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina when I was a child. I knew virtually nothing about horrors our country has visited upon others.

Interestingly, the first museum we visited on this trip was the Air Force Museum in Dayton. The tour of that museum starts with Auschwitz, a journey through the Nazi death camps, and a celebration of the troops who liberated those camps, enabling them to record the history for posterity.

I can relate to the death camps of WWII. My father served in the war. My stepfather fought in the war and lost his entire family to the death camps. I am personally close to the horrors human beings can bestow upon other human beings.

I was not prepared for the stark similarities between the Nazi death camps and the horrors to which we Americans have subjected our own fellow citizens. We had the first inkling of the emotionality at the Mosaic Templar Cultural Center in Little Rock. Sadly, I knew too much about some of the racist horrors in Little Rock. I had studied Jim Crow in college. At Mosaics Templar, I learned about the legalization of segregation in Arkansas through the Tillman Bill of 1891 that called for “the forcible separation of the races into different cars while traveling on the railroads of Arkansas.” Segregation was not a social practice; it was the law. Plessy vs Ferguson in 1896 tried to temper the horror through the bogus concept of “separate but equal.” Not until the courts’ ruling in Brown vs the Topeka Board of Education in 1954 did the systems of America start to make moves toward working for all people. (FYI, the concept of “making America great again” turns my stomach. Was that American greatness?)

The hatefulness of people came very close to home in October 1958 in Atlanta when anti-Semitic racists bombed The Temple – the Hebrew Benevolent Congregation – on a morning when my brothers and I were planning to attend religious school. It is a surreal juxtaposition when I see the images of Little Rock and Tulsa … and Birmingham and Charleston and Buffalo and Pittsburg, etc., etc., etc., etc. … to think that those same lunatics were gunning for me too.

By the time Little Rock’s Central High School was integrated in 1957, I was in fourth grade in Atlanta. I remember Governor Orval Faubus calling out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent students from entering the school. I remember Eisenhower calling out the 101^st Airborne Division and activating the Arkansas National Guard to escort the Little Rock students into the school and uphold Brown vs. Board of Education.

Then I vividly remember the next move in that chess game. Instead of breaking federal law, the good people of Little Rock closed Central High for a full year, depriving its young people, both black and white, of any education whatsoever. Private schools sprouted like weeds so those children of families with resources could continue their education. Those without resources got slapped down even harder.

Closing the public schools terrified my parents. We prepared for the worst. My brothers and I tested and interviewed at a private school. Had the Atlanta schools closed to prevent integration, we had the private school in the wings. Fortunately, the Atlanta schools did not close, and I will always remember the first day of school in 1962 when Grady High school became the first public school in Georgia to integrate. Despite a parking lot filled with police and news cameras, we did so peacefully. That memory represents yet another moment of “privilege.” My family had the presence of mind and the resources to prepare for a private-school education. Fortunately, we never had to exercise it, and I have been a committed defender of high-quality public education since.

I remember visiting downtown Atlanta during a Klan convention and encountering any number of white-robed Klansmen. I remember Klan cross burnings at Atlanta’s Stone Mountain. My good friends Bill Travis and Harry Kuniansky and I used to visit Lester Maddox’s Pickrick Restaurant on Saturday afternoons to collect and read the hate literature he distributed there. I vividly remember the embarrassing term of Lester Maddox as Governor of Georgia because I spent the summer of 1970 – my first summer after graduating college – as a Gray Line tour guide. One of the stops on my tour was the Georgia Governor’s mansion. Lester knew me by name. Always the restaurateur, he would greet me with me with a “Howdy Kenny. Howdy Folks. Welcome to Georgia. We are mighty proud to have you here.”

I remember all of those things, but principally as abstractions. Other than receiving a phone call early one morning that the Temple had been bombed and we should not attend religious school that day and being part of the first public school integration in Atlanta, I was a naïve child. Racism and hate did not really touch me. It is through these experiences on trips like this one, way more than half a century later, that the emotion of these moments makes its way into my soul.

The Tulsa Massacre of 1921 and the Greenwood Rising Black Wall Street History Center

Up until 1901, Tulsa had been a modest western town. In 1901, almost overnight, Tulsa became the “Oil Capital of the World.” As oil flowed, so did money, and Tulsans got rich … both White Tulsans and Black Tulsans. The Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa because known as Black Wall Street. Businesses thrived, including Black-owned banks. Black Tulsans had a seat at the table … for a fleeting instant. Much like the horrors of Kristallnacht 17 years later, everything changed overnight on May 30, 1921. 

On that day, a 19-year-old Black man named Dick Rowland got onto an elevator with a 17-year White girl named Sarah Page. Something startled the young woman, so she screamed. She first said that the young man had assaulted her, but then later changed her story. One day later, on the afternoon of May 31, the Tulsa Tribune ran a story headlined “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in Elevator.” By 9:00 that night, 400 White men had formed a mob to lynch Dick Rowland. In Greenwood, 100 Black men came together to defend Rowland from the lynching. By that time, the White mob had grown to over 1,000. By 1:00 A.M., fires had been set throughout the Greenwood neighborhood. The mob prevented fire crews from fighting the fires. By 11:00 A.M. on June 1, the governor declared martial law and the Greenwood neighborhood was rubble.

That such a horror could take place is dreadful enough. That virtually none of us learned about it until only a few years ago amplifies the horror. Not even Tulsans learned about it, much less Atlantans, New Yorkers, or Los Angelinos!

George Santayana wrote “Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.” The ubiquitous WWII holocaust phrase is “Never Again.” Regardless, we will never actualize our full humanity until we recognize and reject the ability of humans to exercise unthinkable brutality upon other humans. Any effort of the MAGA right wing to suppress education, no matter how uncomfortable, is an unthinkable disgrace, and none of us can allow it to happen!


PS Gotta get the ‘Cue in..

Barbecue at Oklahoma Joe’s. Damn good, especially the brisket. If it seems like overkill, it is, but splitting one BBQ plate per day or less, is manageable. Oklahoma Joe’s has banners, much like the Boston Garden: Poultry and Barbecue Sauce Champions in Memphis; Best Sauce on the Planet Champions in Kansas City; Pork Champions, Brisket Champions, and Grand Champions in Lynchburg. Like I said, damn good!

The Ozark Mountains are surprisingly gorgeous. We are having a really good time, just traveling and hanging out. We are engaging extraordinarily nice people … some of whom, it seems, might talk for days if we did not find a way to staunch the flow. Despite our lust for adventure, we could not bring ourselves to visit Branson, Missouri; it just seems like one of the most intensely unpleasant places on the continent.

Northwest Arkansas reminds me of Pigeon Forge, Tennessee if Pigeon Forge were coupled with a cool college town. Pigeon Forge sits in mountainous country just north of the Great Smokey Mountains National Park. It has a deeply unreal quality to it. It is a center of wealth and economic vitality in an otherwise economically bleak region for only one reason: the unbelievable success, business acumen, and community-mindedness of Dolly Parton. But Dolly’s wealth and influence pale alongside the success, wealth, and business acumen of Sam Walton and the Walton family. Northwest Arkansas – the western foothills of the Ozarks – is Walmart Country coupled with Tyson Foods, JB Hunt Trucking, and Fayetteville, a cool college town, the home of the University of Arkansas Razorbacks. 

The Ozark Mountains are backwoods: cabins and old homesteads and quilts and jelly and country stores. The cities of northwest Arkansas –– Fayetteville, Bentonville, Springdale, Johnson –– are just the opposite. They offer the best the US has to offer … to those who manage to get their fingers into the largesse pie. New subdivisions sprout as if planted with genetically modified seeds. Brand-new malls and strip malls line the roadways. The Museum of the Ozarks is beautifully curated, new, and totally free, a gift of the city of Springdale. Alice Walton’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art is also free and home to a memorable collection of American art. The beautiful walking/biking bath around Lake Fayetteville is not only well maintained, but in our 1.5-hours there, we moved over for a Department of Public Works sweeper and a leaf blower. The maintenance is impeccable, all supported by tax dollars.

Our time at the University of Arkansas seemed typical of our travel style. We googled “Museums at the University of Arkansas.” The search revealed a cool-looking museum of archeology. Google maps sort-of took us there; it led us to an area in the ag-portion of the university with a bunch of modest newish-looking sign-free buildings connected by empty parking lots. (It was January 3, so school was not yet back in session.) We wandered around a few of the buildings until we encountered a maintenance crew. They directed us to the “museum.” 

Once inside, we encountered no one, so we found the rest rooms on our own. Once relieved, a really nice woman appeared and asked if she could help. We explained why we were there. She let us know that the museum was not open to the public, and the collection of artifacts was not accessible. She also offered to see if anyone might be willing to spend some time speaking with us. Since Rebecca had left her phone in the car, and the car was several parking lots away, we said we’d be back in a few minutes, after we retrieved the phone and moved the car.

Five minutes later, we learned that the museum curator would be happy to meet with us … in 45 minutes … and in the meantime, the state archeologist would be happy to meet. We could not possibly have had a better time!

Dr. Mel Zabecki, the state archeologist helped us immensely with our effort to distinguish between antiquity and the modern era: ancient cultures, pre-Columbian Mississippian Mound Cultures, modern native nations indigenous to Arkansas, and modern nations that moved through Arkansas to Oklahoma as part of the Trail of Tears. She also reminded us of the sensitivity required for a non-native professional to stay authentically and mindfully respectful of the indigenous. The really good news is that despite the enormity of the task, she seems genuinely committed to doing the best job she can. Thank you for your time and insights, Mel. We loved our time together and cannot wait to share the book you gave us with our horticulturist grandson!

Dr. Mary Suter, the museum’s Curator of Collections, brought us into the heart of the collection. She literally knows every piece … and there are many thousands of them. There are fossils, bones, tools, artwork, iconography, and pots and vessels from throughout the world. When I naively asked if she had any favorite items, she politely assured me she did not … and equated the question to asking a parent if he/she has a favorite child. We could have stayed in that collection for days, but we literally felt guilty about taking up so much of her time … despite her amazing willingness to spend the time with us.

Mel and Mary, you are both fantastic professionals and have filled us with joy!

The following day, Wednesday, we braced for a day with the Waltons: Bentonville and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The similarities between Dolly’s Pigeon Forge and Sam’s Bentonville stayed relevant. The northwest corner of the state is wealthy and unashamed.

Crystal Bridges is a really credible museum, but nothing about it blew my mind. It is great for the region, and the region deserves nothing less.

One aspect of Crystal Bridges and Bentonville disturbed me. I do not want to indict or be too woke, and I have a data point of one day: January 4, 2023. Subdivisions, booming construction, and all other signs of prosperity notwithstanding, we have seen no people of color (other than the Hispanic road crews and construction workers). The whiteness feels more like Vermont than Vermont. Are there truly two racial worlds in northwestern Arkansas? I don’t know. I am not sure I have ever seen anything quite like it. I wish I had more knowledge and more wisdom. Something is weird. That is the best I can do.

So be it. Northwest Arkansas is about to be history. We leave on Thursday for Oklahoma and Cherokee Nation.

During our time in Bentonville, we visited the Museum of Native American History, a little gem of a museum. It is the first Native American museum we have visited that drove home the complexity of the history we are about to engage. North American Native American “history” entails the “Paleo” period (14,000 – 10,000 years ago), the “Archaic” period (10,000 – 3,000 years ago, the “Woodland” period (3,000 – 1,100 years ago), the “Mississippian” period (1,100 – 650 years ago, and the “Historic” period (650 – 200 years ago). After that, we are in modern-ish history. The Indian Removal Act under Andrew Jackson that resulted in the Trail of Tears took place in 1830, less than 200 years ago. “Tribes,” “Nations,” and modern US history are all blurring together. We are about to dive into that world. Our naivete is overwhelming. Stay tuned. I’ll bet we learn A LOT of really interesting stuff!

Oh yeah, one last thing, we ate the best ribs of the trip so far at Wright’s BBQ in Johnson and then thoroughly enjoyed sone genuine Arkansas catfish at the Flying Fish in Bentonville. (I have TWO Billy Bass trophies in my basement. If I donate both of them to the Adoption Center, I get two plates of fried catfish. Despite all I have just said, it might be worth another trip.)

The day before yesterday, we made it to Jones’ BBQ in Marianna, Arkansas.  Yesterday, we ate at Sims BBQ, a classic joint in Little Rock. Today, we feasted at Whole Hog Cafe, another Little Rock classic.

Jones’ was perfect in every way. Sims was scrumptious; the barbecue was saucy and at the perfect spot between chewy and tender; the collard greens had a palate-tingling bite. Whole Hog is surrounded with trophies from various competitions; the beans had a great sweetness, and the green beans burst with flavor. We adored Jones’; we loved Sims; we’d go back to Whole Hog in an instant. 

My takeaway: trying to rank great BBQ joints is an absurd and ridiculous philosophical exercise. I think the appropriate Latin expression is “reductio ad absurdum.” Another common manifestation of the same absurdity has to do with debating the number of angels who can dance on the head of a pin. The Wikipedia explanation describes the exercise as “wasting time debating topics of no practical value, or questions whose answers hold no intellectual consequence, while more urgent concerns accumulate.” (Actually, I am not sure any more urgent concerns are accumulating, but why split hairs?)

Good is good. My old friend Little Jack O’Connor, a North Carolinian and BBQ aficionado, shared this thought: “Why anyone would argue over Q is beyond me as I find each variation delicious and worthy of celebration, but there are some finicky people in this world.” He couldn’t be more right.  It’s like asking which is better: Beethoven’s Ninth, Rhapsody in Blue, or ‘Tis a Gift to be Simple. In fact, they are each perfect.

Between Rebecca and me, we usually get one order of ribs and one of something else: pulled pork, burnt ends, rib ends, brisket, or whatever. We each get a side of slaw. I get greens (either turnips or collards). She gets some sort of beans. Like the barbecue itself, the sides all differ, but I just don’t have the capacity to rank them. They are simply delicious.

Don’t get me wrong, some of the stuff people call “barbecue” really is crappy, like those fall-off-the-bone par-boiled chunks of not-at-all-meaty cardboard you might get at a chain restaurant like Applebee’s or Chili’s. But they are not BBQ joints. They are just mediocre-to-lousy chains. As we travel small-town mid-America, we sometimes (though rarely) have no choice but to eat in one of those mediocre places. When we do, we order salad … usually a simple house salad … and that’s it. 

A barbecue joint is a different beast, loaded with character and overseen by insanely proud pit masters who really care about the quality of the product they serve. Just so you can feel assured, any barbecue we write about on this trip will be from a bona fide joint. We might find a few definable differences, but mostly I expect we will savor the flavor and appreciate the uniqueness.

Jones’ Barbecue

Jones’ Barbecue is purported to be either the oldest continuously operating Black-owned restaurant in the US or west of the Mississippi. (I have no idea how to find out if either is true, but I prefer the “in the US” version.) It was also the first James Beard Award-winning restaurant in Arkansas. It is a joint’s joint: two tables, mostly take-out, and way the hell off the beaten path on a residential road in Marianna, Arkansas in the southeastern part of the state. (GPS rocks!) James Harold Jones Sr’s grandfather started the business in 1910. (He goes by either James or Harold and has no real preference). He is now 77 and fighting a congestive heart condition. He runs the business with his wife BJ. He has a pitmaster who helps him tend the fire and the smoker. James and BJ hope their son will take over the business one day, but he is the basketball coach at a high school in Pine Bluff, so his time at the restaurant is limited, at least for now.

A few years ago, Jones’ smokehouse burned to the ground. In short order, the community came together and rebuilt it. They barely missed a beat.

Jones’ does not have a menu. They hickory smoke 10 or 12 large Boston Butt roasts for about 12 hours every day (100+ pounds) and serve pulled pork in bulk or on white bread sandwiches. We ate ours with a fork instead of white bread. They were out of cole slaw. We didn’t care. The meat was tender and moist, and the flavor was total perfection.  We liked it so much we had seconds!

Marianna is close to practically nothing. It is well worth the trip!

Epilogue: Planning this Road Trip … or Going Whole Hog

When we first conceived of this trip, “pandemic” was not part of our everyday vocabulary, and “Covid 19” did not exist. My really good friend and cooking compadre in New Orleans, Jon Kardon, had sent me an article from the website Eater.com about a guy named Rodney Scott, a Black pitmaster from South Carolina who specializes in “whole hog” barbecue. (At least I think it was Jon who sent it. If it wasn’t, it could have been.) A road-trip theme started to take shape: We were going to tour the southeast in search of Black-owned BBQ joints that specialize in cooking whole hogs.

At about the same time that the pandemic took hold, I came across an article from Bon Appetit about a guy named Howard Conyers. He too is a South Carolinian and Black pitmaster who cooks whole hogs.  Add to that repertoire the fact that he is also a Ph.D. Mechanical Engineer from Duke with a specialty in Bioelasticity who works as a rocket scientist for NASA. The story was getting more and more interesting.

If you want, here are some links.  The 2018 article from Eater.com about Rodney Scott is entitled “Whole Hog Is an American Tradition – So Why Is It Stuck in the South?”  The 2020 article from Bon Appetit is “This Rocket Scientist Is Tracing Black Ingenuity Through Barbecue.” You can get to Howard Conyers’ website by clicking here. At the very least, they inspired me!

For two years, road tripping for the sake of road tripping just wasn’t going to happen. During that hiatus, we got interested in more exploration, specifically learning more about the Mound Builders of the pre-Columbian Mississippian Civilization – how can we know so much about other ancient cultures, but not our own? – and the Tulsa Massacre and the Trail of Tears, two of our country’s most horrific holocausts.  

Combining them made sense, so here we are. Keeping them separate for the sake of a coherent blog, I am realizing, may not be so easy. We hope we have learned enough about writing a blog that it is not a disaster and about managing Covid that we stay healthy!

Cairo, Illinois was one of the most memorable places we visited on our drive down the Mississippi five years ago. We visited it again this morning. If it has changed, it is even more dilapidated and sad than it was then, but that may not be possible. It is already dilapidated and sad to the max.

Rebecca and I have been discussing why it is in the shape it is in. She thinks racism is the primary cause. I think racism plays a significant role, but that evolving technology and the vagaries of geography are also key drivers. The cause is one thing; the effect is another: Cairo is a dilapidated ghost town.

The ex-city sits at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Ohio Rivers, right at the tip of the peninsula formed by the confluence. It is the lowest point in Missouri. By my reckoning, it marks the beginning of “The Delta” region of the lower Mississippi. (The Delta does not begin, as legend has it, at the Peabody Hotel in downtown Memphis, 100 miles-or-so to the south.) From Cairo to the Gulf, the countryside is flat as a pancake with countless thousands of acres cultivated in cotton and soybeans. For the Bob Dylan fans among us, US Highway 61… the Blues Highway … runs near the Mississippi all the way to the Gulf; it is good to be revisiting it!

Through much of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, Cairo was a hub of riverboat and ferry activity followed by railroad activity. Bridges displaced ferries. Railroads displaced riverboats. In 1927, the Great Flood decimated Cairo. By the 1950s, the economically whiplashed white residents of Cairo would hear nothing of the city becoming integrated: they filled in the city swimming pool rather than allowing Black swimmers alongside White. Today, the city sits almost vacant. The iron sign to the “Historic District” leads to nowhere. The once elegant houses sit derelict, often in ruins.

Visiting Cairo feels important. It is a living reminder of what social and economic decay look like. Everything in our world is capable of reaching that level of decline. We need to work together to ensure that our entire society does not crumble like Cairo.

Cardiologist’s dream? Cardiologist’s nightmare?

We had hoped to find someplace to have breakfast in Cairo. There is literally nothing there. So we kept driving along Highway 61. 

In Sykesville, we hit paydirt: Lambert’s Café. Man, where do places like this come from? It turns out, we learned, Lambert’s has three locations: Sykesville, Missouri, Ozark, Missouri, and Foley, Alabama. They all appear to be identical. It is your basic southern meat-and-three restaurant on heavy-duty steroids. As the signage says, it is also “home of throwed rolls.” WTF? Just as the slogan says, they distribute their yeast rolls (delicious, I might add) by hurling them across the full expanse of a 250-seat room at waving customers eager to get pelted. We ordered a half-slab of ribs with slaw and turnip greens and white beans with hog jowl and cucumber salad. (Hog jowls, it turns out, are thick slabs of crispy bacon.) The food was good; the servings generous. But that’s not all. In addition to the regular barrage of rolls, servers also show up regularly with large bowls of extras: fried okra (for which I have a pathetic weakness), potatoes & onions, macaroni & tomatoes, black-eyed peas, apple butter, and sorghum syrup. I suspect there’s more, but that is all that found their way to our little corner. The servers scoop all you can possibly eat as often as you like for no additional charge. We had salad for supper seven hours later. 

Following Lambert’s, we finally arrived at our first destination: Blytheville, in the northeast corner of Arkansas. There is really nothing I can say to make Blytheville interesting, though there is a nifty well-preserved old Greyhound Bus Station that the Internet says is a visitor center but was locked up tight when we arrived. Other than a few blocks of mostly abandoned downtown buildings along a “historic” strip, a closed Air Force Base, and a bunch of chain restaurants, tire stores, mid-brow motels, and a Walmart at the intersection of Highway 61 and I-55, Blytheville simply isn’t anything. There is, as they say, no “there” there. No biggie that our first stop in Arkansas revealed little of interest to us. Tomorrow is another day. We drive to Marianna, Arkansas for a midday meal at Jones’ BBQ, a James Beard Award-Winning BBQ joint that might be the oldest continuously operating black-owned restaurant in the US. It appears to have two tables. We have to leave Blytheville early because it opens at 7:00 a.m. and closes when it sells out of barbecue, often we read, by 10:00. It’d be a real bummer to get shut out after driving more than 1,500 miles to get there.

Please pardon the lack of precision.  I just titled this blog entry “Getting There.” The imprecision lies in the fact that we do not yet know what or where “there” is. We just think that we are sort-of headed in the right direction.

Our goal is to eat lots of BBQ while we explore Native American history (The Trail of Tears) and African American history (The Tulsa Massacre). We plan to start hunting for “there” once we get to northeastern Arkansas, around Blytheville. (Don’t worry, we are not familiar with it either.) “Getting there,” however, is complicated: there are no Mississippi River bridges or crossings for almost 100 miles, from I-155 in southern Missouri to Memphis.

What we do know so far is that there is a Visitor Center in Blytheville at the old Greyhound Bus Station and that the oldest black-owned restaurant in the US is the James Beard Award-winning Jones BBQ in Marianna, Arkansas, about 1.5 hours south of Blytheville. Once we have jawboned the folks at the Visitor Center and filled our tummies with some of Mr. Jones’ Q (the joint has been in his family for 150 years), I expect we will be a little closer to knowing what “there” is and in what direction to go to find it.  At least we hope so!

In the meantime, our trip has taken a few expected and a few unexpected turns. Fortunately for us, Rebecca’s niece lives in Geneva, NY, an easy day’s drive from home, regardless of whether home is Vermont or Massachusetts.  She and her husband are always gracious hosts, so they are our first and our last stop on our driving adventures. Thanks guys. We appreciate the hospitality and kindness a lot!

From Geneva, we had planned to take in the Corning NY Glass Museum and the Curtiss Aviation Museum, but the weather tripped us up. The amazing cold snap of Christmas 2022 was bearing down on us with snow and sub-zero temperatures predicted. We decided to hustle our way out of the Great Lakes Region and get someplace where we could stay snug.  Thus, our two-day relaxing trip to my brother’s home in Columbus, Ohio turned into a one-day trip complete with a few hours of lake-effect snow south of Lake Ontario. Thanks for the nice lunch, Bruce and Whitney. It was good to see you.

From Columbus, we’d planned to spend a couple of days with my old friend Cap and his wife Tay, visiting the Air Force Museum at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and eating classic Dayton food. We succeeded.

Cap and I worked together in 1973 at the “Legend of Daniel Boone,” an outdoor drama in Harrodsburg, Kentucky. For two months, we sat next to each other at the make-up table. I was his understudy. I played Michael Stoner, Boone’s best friend and sidekick. Cap played Jeremy Jones, the comic lead. Cap was a graduate of the Ringling Brothers Clown College and to this day remains one of the best comic actors and funniest people I have ever known. It’s amazing: two months of working together, and 49 years later we remain really good friends, thrilled to see each other in the rare occasions when that can happen.

Cap planned our dining: Night #1 at the Pine Club, a funky Dayton steakhouse and staple of low-brow beefy cuisine. Cap loves it and insisted that we cannot miss it. Tay almost did not join us because she hates the place so much. As we approached it, she kept repeating, “I hate this place.”  Apparently, she is not alone. When we arrived, other people expressed the same sentiment. In fact, there was a whole sub-element of people there who adored hating the place: “It is too dark”; “It is too loud.” Their sentiments did nothing to counteract the reality that because of a University of Dayton basketball game, the wait for a table was 1.5 hours. Since we were all hungry, we left and found a quiet, uncrowded brew pub instead, where we got to hang out for hours. Too bad Cap got a $68 parking ticket for overstaying his welcome. (I paid for less time than Cap but got off scot-free. Maybe the Massachusetts license plates helped.)

Meal #2 was a southern Ohio must: Skyline Chili. If you know Skyline, you know what I mean. If you don’t, you’ll never understand. A “Coney” is a tiny hot dog smothered in spaghetti, cheese, and their one-of-a-kind chili. How does something like that ever become a regional staple? I’ll never know, but it does.

When the Cincinnati Bengals played in the Super Bowl last January, Cap helped me find a recipe for Skyline chili. I made a giant pot of it. In addition to the usual chili ingredients, there is also a ton of other stuff, like allspice, cloves, and a heap of unsweetened chocolate. Let me know if you want the recipe. I’ll send it to you. They guard it pretty carefully, so it’s not so easy to find.

Our time with Cap and Tay was energizing and great fun! Our day at the U.S. Air Force Museum was far more somber. We stayed all day, saw about half the museum, and walked three miles. The museum houses many hundreds of aircraft in giant, very well curated hangars.

The very first exhibit pays tribute to the liberation of the German death camps at the end of World War II. You enter the WWII exhibit through a replica of the main gate into Auschwitz with its iron-work slogan, “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work sets you free.” That gut-wrenching initiation stays with you through America’s wars and the remarkable resources we have poured into defending ourselves and killing people. Neither Rebecca nor I could hold back the tears when we unexpectedly encountered the “Bockscar,” the actual B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. The emotionality of the moment literally hurt.

The Air Force One that carried JFK to and from Dallas is there and open to the public. We stood at the spot where LBJ was sworn in as President and at the spot where seats and a partition were removed to make room for JFK’s coffin. I get chills just writing these words.

For some inexplicable reason, I wanted to see a U-2 spy plane. I vividly remembered the Cold War moment in 1960 when Francis Gary Powers was shot down while taking high-altitude photographs over Russia. Damn. We couldn’t find it. It was as if the plane itself had made itself invisible. Then, as we sat for a few minutes in an upstairs café, there it was, hanging right next to us. That’s one helluva spy plane! Even in a museum it could make itself disappear.

As we left, we made the obligatory gift shop stop. I was proud of us. We bought nothing … which made the day a total financial winner: the museum is free. You definitely get your money’s worth. We bought nothing because there was nothing we needed to buy. There were, however, two things I would have bought had I not already owned them: the classic baking soda-powered diving submarine and the water-pressure-powered rocket. They were essential purchases for the grandboys a few years ago. Nothing else seemed even slightly interesting.

From Dayton, we got a small taste of what “there” might feel like at the “National Underground Railroad Freedom Center” along the Ohio River in Cincinnati. Since “there” has everything to do with BBQ, Native American history, and African American history, we could not pass it up. The Center is a mix of interpretive material and film. Oprah introduces the film experience. She obviously has invested a good deal in the Center with great effectiveness, creating a world-class experience. 

The view from the Center looks south, onto the Ohio River and northern Kentucky. We were standing on one of the spots where escaping slaves, upon crossing the river, could feel their first inkling of freedom as they made their way to Canada. The stations and conductors of the Underground Railroad come to life. The humanity of the slaves sings. Our tears flowed freely as we wondered how human beings can be so cruel and, simultaneously, at how heroic and brave other human beings can be to save the lives of and protect people they will never know.

It is that “there” that we are so looking forward to discovering.

Winter break started for us about 10 days ago, on November 30, when we trudged our way by plane, train, and automobile across the US … car to the Burlington airport, airplane to Portland, light rail to the Portland Amtrak station, rail to Eugene where we met up with my brother Joe, then pickup truck to Florence, arriving 20 hours after we left home. We spent the next week with Joe and his partner Marsharee … a major story unto herself. (We have all been friends for over 50 years. She decided to sell everything in Atlanta and head to Oregon to move in with Joe. What the hell. Why not start fresh at 74!!!!)

We did the usual Oregon coast stuff: hiking in the rain, hanging out with friends, and eating really well: salmon, crab, oysters, ribs, etc. After a chill week with Joe and Marsharee, we rented a car in Coos Bay bound for Grass Valley, CA to visit Rebecca’s son and daughter-in-law, Aaron and Lisa, who just bought a house and moved there from Illinois. But a visit was not to happen. Lisa’s father died in Florida at about the same time we arrived in Oregon. We did, however, get to take a spectacular drive, down the southern coast of Oregon and the northern coast of California before heading east at Fort Bragg, named after Braxton Bragg, the same slave-owning Confederate general as Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

Here are two moments from that drive. One: The redwoods in Jedediah State Park in the northwest corner of California compare well with other astounding redwood groves, such as the Avenue of the Giants and Muir Woods. Thanks to some light rain, we had the Stout Grove totally to ourselves. If everyone had at least one opportunity to experience a redwood grove in solitude, the world would be a better place. Everything about it is humbling: age, scale, beauty, ecology, patterns, natural sculptures. If being in a redwood grove is within your grasp, do it. Period. The biggest tree we saw measured 20-feet at the base, a couple of feet shy of the width of a 2-car garage.

The second moment was a little more thought provoking, or at least it was for My Inner Sociologist.

When we drive, we go slow, pulling over for more time-conscious drivers to pass. We stop when we get tired … but always before dark. In remote areas, we have to be deliberate because lodging is not always nearby. (We love traveling in the off-season because we don’t have to worry about reservations; every motel has room and is happy to see us.) By early afternoon, we realized our destination would be Garberville, an inland town on Highway 101, about 175 miles south of the California-Oregon state line. We had stopped there on earlier trips, so we kinda knew it. There’s not much to it, a few run-down motels, a few over-priced motels, and a couple of places to eat. 

We checked out all of the under-$100 motels, and none of them passed muster. (One clerk would not let us check out a room before renting it, and the other showed us a room with hair remaining on the toilet seat. Our bar is not very high, but those were clearly not going to fly.) One of the pricier options looked a lot like the lower-priced options, so we didn’t even check it out. The new Best Western would work in a pinch, but surely we shouldn’t have to spend $150 for a damn motel room in Garberville. We had one more option: The Northern Inn in Redway, about 2 miles to the north. Homerun!

Damien, the owner/clerk, won our hearts. The room was not only clean and comfy, it also had no carpets … which is a real selling point in our eternal search for cheap but clean motel rooms. Damian was proud of his new floors and even noted that he would mop the room we looked at if we wanted another. Damian may have carried a waft of cherry tobacco wherever he went, and the whole exterior made it pretty obvious that cannabis was fully encouraged around Redway, but the room had no smell whatsoever. Just a good, clean motel room at the right price. We had found a home. Damian noted, by the way, that Redway had been the heart of California pot growing for a very, very long time.

Now that we had a bed, we had to figure out how to fill our bellies. We had three options right in Redway: pizza, burgers, or a tavern. The tavern, the Brass Rail, shared a parking lot with our motel. Choice made.

We arrived as the place opened, at 5:30. Stella the Bartender was getting ready for the evening. The cook, however, did not arrive until 6:30. Oh well, we thought, time for me to have a cocktail and for us to play a game or two  of cribbage, so we waited.

The Brass Rail became a living example of the glory of My Inner Sociologist. From our first moments until the last, the place teemed with stories. I could have stayed for hours if not days. But we were headed south to see Rebecca’s son. There was no time to turn over the sod to reveal some of the gems hiding beneath the surface.

First, we learned a little about Stella. She had grown up in Redway, then moved east to attend boarding school at Phillips Andover Academy in Massachusetts … only one of the most prestigious boarding schools in the US. She’d lived in Boston and New York, then returned home to Redway to tend bar. The trigger for our conversation had been the bouquet of fresh-cut flowers behind the bar. They were a gift for her 30^th birthday. What did Stella do with her prep school education? Had she attended one of the Ivies, gotten an MBA, then gone to work for a hedge fund? Was she an “eastern elite” dropout, eager to return to the scrappiness of the western forests? Was she escaping something or running to something? All I learned is that she was smiley and friendly to everyone and she poured an OK drink. Anything is possible.

As we played cribbage, the bar started to fill. The patrons were of all ages and all levels of dress and dental care, from gleaming pearlies to jagged browns. We had discovered a real-life Cheers. Everybody knew everybody. Everybody was friendly and in a holiday spirit. Everybody seemed to have a story. 

We felt totally at home and comfy by the time Bruce the Cook arrived. He made suggestions about Rebecca’s gluten intolerance. We had gluten-free chicken wings, a lettuce-wrapped burger, and salad. The food was exceptional, the kind of place I could eat in every day. Bruce had learned to cook somewhere. Something brought him to the Brass Rail every evening at 6:30. I’d love to tip a brew with him. He seemed like a really good guy. I’ll never find out.

The preppy-looking guy at the bar was going back home to Houston for the holidays.  He’d be staying at his parents’ house, which would be OK, but a little constricting. At least he’d have his own room. What in world brought him to Redway? Everyone seemed to enjoy each other’s company without pretense or façade.

By 7:30, the place was almost full of people and chatter. A small group made their way to the pool table. As I might have expected from Brass Rail patrons, they weren’t hustlers or sharks. They weren’t even good pool players. They just wanted to shoot a game together. They appeared to have a great time.

At the end of the game, one of the women – middle-aged and rough at the edges ­– stopped to talk with Rebecca and me … not for any reason or provocation: we were at the Brass Rail, so we were friends.  Within seconds, we learned about her son who had committed suicide a few years earlier. Oddly, we had just been with a good friend in Oregon whose son had also committed suicide years ago. The conversation did not catch us off guard. She was sad and emotional, but not inappropriately so. She just wanted to talk, so we listened. (Such moments bring out the very best in Rebecca!) It was a human moment, but without depth. We listened, and then we left. We never explored. There was so much more to learn.

Fortunately, we did get a small bit of affirmation before the end of the encounter.  She asked where we were staying. We told her we were right next door.  She asked how it was. We said we were very pleased with the cleanliness and the comfort of the room.  She was happy to hear that.  She’d had “some moments” in the past with Damian, she explained, so all’s well that ends well. Maybe our presence helped to mend a damaged bridge.

I loved our evening in Redway. It made me realize how eager I am to resurrect this My Inner Sociologist blog. It has been dormant since we left the Mississippi River, well before the pandemic. There are just so many people to meet and stories to hear.  Stay tuned.

Down the Mississippi #13

 Dedicated to Pat the Waitress

Dottie’s Café

Dubuque, Iowa 

Thank you, Pat!

You etched yourself into our memory by creating a non-stop smile that totally defined our trip.

 

It’s the Mississippi River, you dumb shit!

South of the Headwaters and north of Minneapolis, the river is gorgeous, but not particularly dramatic. A Visitor Center lady somewhere around Brainerd or Baxter, Minnesota drove that point home. Obviously a newcomer to her job, her eyes went blank when we started asking her questions about “the river.” Her lack of anything particularly satisfying or useful drove us away pretty quickly. As we left, we wondered aloud if she actually knew that she was welcoming visitors to the headwaters region of the Mississippi River, the grandest river on the continent. Her lack of passion and knowledge stuck with us.

A few days later, we passed through Dubuque, Iowa. We had just spent a wonderful day with friends visiting the Potosi Brewery and Dickeyville Shrine in Dickeyville, Wisconsin. The beauty and mystique of the river had imprinted itself.

Dubuque was a pass-through town. Nothing had grabbed us that we particularly wanted to see or do, so a simple walk seemed in order. While most of the motels we stayed in served breakfast, the Lumberman’s Inn in Dickeyville didn’t. By the time we arrived in Dubuque, we wanted a meal. Dottie’s appeared.

Dottie’s Café is a classic café/diner just west of the river. We showed up between breakfast and lunch, so business was slow.

Our waitress was a dream: crusty, curt, rushed, and bright-eyed. By the end of the meal, we’d become chatty. Our conversation defined the rest of the trip. It went like this:

Kenny:                     “We are in the middle of an epic drive down the river.”

Pat the Waitress:      (with a big sparkle in her eye) “Oh, what river would that be?”

Memories of the dim-witted Visitor Center lady in Minnesota slapped at Rebecca and me.

Kenny:                     “Oh. There is a river right behind your building. Are you aware of it? Do you know its name?”

Pat the Waitress:      (with a quick smile and perfect eye roll) “That would be the Mississippi River, you dumb shit!”

“That’s the Mississippi River, you dumb shit” became the calling card of the trip, every time we laid eyes on it, regardless of circumstance.

You became the soul of our trip, Pat! You also helped us stay attuned to an amazing amount of other funny and weird shit … on a near-daily basis. Here is a smattering of images and stories.

 

Paul Bunyan’s Toenails

Bemidji, Minnesota is way north in the north country. It marks the line between the Mississippi Headwaters and the Boundary Waters between the US and Canada. Paul Bunyan and Babe welcome visitors to town along the shores of Lake Bemidji, which is officially part of the Mississippi River.

The Visitor Center that Paul and Babe lord over is like most of the others: clean, with decent coffee, interesting people, and plenty of bric-a-brac and local lore. This one also has one of the better collections of curling paraphernalia we found. In fact, it had the only collection of curling gear we found.

Giant tributes to giant folk heroes inevitably lead to striking moments that humanize these larger-than-life icons. After all, since Paul wears clothes, don’t they need to washed? Since he has hair, doesn’t it need to be trimmed and combed?

Why, then, might it come as a surprise that he also needs to trim his toenails … or so the tray of nail clippings in the Visitor Center so informed.

Muscatine Sunrises and Farewell Fair Maiden

If a road sign pointed out the location of a historical marker, we stopped. A lot of them were just boring, some were vaguely interesting, and most were generally informative. A few were hilarious.

The marker at the Mark Twain overlook in Muscatine, Iowa inspired our trip. We randomly stopped there a few years ago on a drive from Omaha to Chicago. We saw the marker and the Great River Road Scenic Byway sign just about simultaneously. I said, “Let’s do it.” Rebecca said, “Yes. Let’s.” We did, even if the planning took a few years. Thanks, Mr. Clemens.

Maiden Rock, a high bluff overlooking scenic Lake Pepin in Wisconsin, south of Minneapolis and north of La Crosse prompted us to draw a distinction between “historical” markers and “hysterical” markers. Imagine the “splat” the “beautiful young Sioux girl” must’ve made upon “precipitating” herself over the precipice. It’s nice to know ­– in a schadenfreude sort-of way – that even pre-European Native American families were whacko enough to screw with young folks’ minds!

 

Toot! Toot! I’m Strong to the Finish Cuz I Eats My Spinach….  Popeye the Sailor Man Lives!!!!

Not only does he live, he is the raison d’etre of Chester, Illinois, a tiny river town about 65 miles south of St. Louis that would seem to have nothing of real value if not for being the proud birthplace of Popeye and his pals. Popeye himself greets visitors at every entrance to the town, and a map guides even the uninterested to statues of Wimpy and Olive Oyl and Bluto and Brutus and Swee’ Pea and every other character you can think of.

“Spinach Can Collectibles” is a museum, curio shop, and mecca for Popeye-philes. We managed to while away an hour or two there, mesmerized by the sheer volume of dumb shit. We listened courteously as the proprietor/owner explained how she and her husband had acquired so many thousands of pieces of Popeye memorabilia. (They really care!!!)

I’ve known a few people in my life who are world-class talkers. One of my more irreverent descriptions of the female versions of these people is that if we listened for another 10 minutes we would know everything knowable about their menstrual cycle. They put the concept of “TMI” into a covetous position of importance.

We listened courteously while visiting Spinach Can Collectibles and Chester. I cracked the occasional joke. There was little, if any, discourse. We had a truly great time.

 

Making America “Great” AGAIN

Chester also came to define a significant part of mid-America along the Mississippi Valley: the horror of Trumpism.

We detoured about 40 miles east from Chester to visit Rebecca’s birthplace, Carbondale, Illinois. She has not been back for oh, something like seven decades. (Just in case you are interested, we stopped at the County Courthouse to get a copy of her birth certificate. You never know when you might need a notarized birth certificate. It was 45 minutes and $4 very well spent!)

That area, we realized, is Trump-loving coal country. The first signs appeared as we drove east, toward Carbondale. Coal trucks lined a side road heading toward the river patiently waiting for their turn to unload their load onto a barge. We are not sure, but we think the coal went from there to China where it can be burned with fewer environmental restrictions, thus further degrading our only planet and our only habitat.

When we returned to Chester the next day, we became astutely aware of the endless string of coal trucks rolling through town on their way to the barge loading facility. The Popeye lady angrily explained what we were watching: The mines are a few miles north of Chester; the barge loading facility, a few miles east. The trucks roll ­­–– heavily and noisily –– through Chester all day every day. Since neither the mines nor the loading facility are within the city limits, the truckers pay nothing to the town to help fund the wear and tear on the roads. That burden rests with Chester’s business owners and residents, who also get to endure the traffic, noise, vibrations, and smoke in addition to the potholes.

While the Popeye lady was not overly happy with the civic irresponsibility of the mine operators, others in the community were. Between Chester and Carbondale, we saw a telltale sign.

We passed Frank’s Real Bait Shop, a general store and bait shop advertising shad guts and leeches along with milk, eggs, bacon, crickets, minnows, and beer. I, of course, needed to check it out; Rebecca rolled her eyes, arched her back, and stayed in the car. The most interesting part was the old Chevy parked beside the shed sporting a bumper sticker that identified an apparent point of political pride for the driver. It read, “Deplorable.”

The message made me think of a couple of signs we had seen a day or so earlier while passing through the hamlet of Grand Tower, Illinois. As we drove, I glimpsed the signs. They caught enough of my attention that we stopped and turned around. (They had escaped Rebecca’s notice entirely.)  The left-hand sign read, “Congratulations President Elect Donald Trump. Let’s keep the coal rolling and the people working.” It noted its sponsors, Congressman Mike Bost and Jackson County Board Member Dan Bost. The right-hand sign thanked the Knight Hawk Coal Mine “for our jobs in the coal industry.”

“Misguided,” “Thoughtless,” “Mean-Spirited,” and “Heebie-Jeebies” are but a few of the thoughts that ran through my mind then and now. My inner voice is actually much, much coarser, angrier, and more alarmed, but I work hard to keep it at bay … usually unsuccessfully.

Race Car Toilet
Harlan Malone was a Trump supporter too. I know because he told me so when I asked. He assured me that things in America had to change. We had too many lazy, no-good people living off government handouts, and we had a government that was so screwed up that those people made more money by not working than they would make by working. The diatribe continued for a pretty good while.

Despite his political leanings … and the fact that Rebecca was somewhat appalled by the way he treated his female employees and his attitude toward women in general … I found him amusing and clever. After all, who else would think to mount a stripper’s pole-dancing pole in the middle of the pimped-out school bus that he calls his “party bus” or host “Harlan Malone’s Topless Gospel Choir.” To be honest, I really liked him!

Harlan owns a terrific restaurant called the “Blue Biscuit Café” that is directly across the street from the BB King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi, another one of our short detours away from the river. We visited it with my brother Joe who drove with us for about a week. (The Museum, by the way, is exceptionally good but a full description will have to wait for another day.)

The food at the Blue Biscuit was just what you’d hope it would be for a totally funky restaurant in the heart of the Delta directly across the street from the BB King Museum. No complaints! Harlan was the icing on the cake. About the time our food arrived, he walked to our table, pulled out a chair, turned it around so he was leaning over the back, and proceeded to spend the next hour or so regaling and entertaining us … including a full guided tour.

The tour included the Men’s Room … located to the left of the Women’s Room since women are always right. (See why Rebecca has some doubts.) Like most Men’s Rooms, it had a urinal and a toilet. In this case, however, the urinal was a trough made from an old galvanized beer bucket, and the toilet was fully outfitted with a steering wheel and rear-view mirror, I guess to keep the patrons entertained while they waited.

 

You thought the answers were “Lombard Street” and “Hannibal, MO,” you dumb shit!

Here are the questions: 1) What is the crookedest street in the U.S.?  2) Where was Mark Twain born?

From our seat, the crookedest street in the U.S. ­– Snake Alley ­– is Burlington, Iowa’s greatest claim to fame. As soon as we pulled into town, everyone assured us we had to see it. Understanding why is easy: it has FIVE curves and covers 275 feet! WOW!!!!! Lucky for us, that one is now checked off the bucket list. When you plan your trip to Burlington, you simply cannot afford to miss it!

Unlike Snake Alley (shall we say “underwhelming”?), Florida, Missouri ­– Sam Clemens’ birthplace 20 miles west of Hannibal – was memorable and moving! Clemens did not move to Hannibal until he was 4. Mark Twain State Park in Florida, MO is one of the finest we visited, and the interpreter, Marianne Bodine, ranked with the most interesting and knowledgeable of all we encountered. Great work, Marianne, and our trusty Ford, “Mr. Bixby,” proudly wears his Mark Twain State Park decal, right along with the decal from the crossroad in the Delta where Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil …. for real!

That’s enough for now. This blog entry is long enough. But the pause is arbitrary. There is A LOT more dumb shit yet to come!

 

© 2018 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #12

Chapter 1: Planning for a long car trip such as ours requires commitment. Some of the planning is predictable, like how much underwear to bring and how to pack for three climates without over packing.  Some of it is unexpectedly challenging, like what hat(s) to bring.

Rebecca settled on her “Mass Audubon Society” hat. I brought my Red Sox hat: the season had not ended; they were in 1st place; and a World Series was not out of the question. We both “knew” that as soon as we connected with The Great River Road in Minnesota, “Great River Road” hats would abound. From what I can tell, The Great River Road is the longest scenic byway in the U.S. It parallels the greatest river on the continent. It is 600 miles longer than Historic Route 66 and probably 1,000 miles or more longer than the string of Pacific Coast Highways. We found hats from state parks, Lake Itasca hats, hats from museums and tourist centers, but not a single hat branding The Great River Road.

The Red Sox lost to Houston. The foam lining in Rebecca’s Mass Audubon hat sagged and then fell out in a clump. Our hat situation was getting dire.

Chapter 2: Ste. Genevieve, Missouri is a ridiculously sweet little river town. We arrived on a free ferry that runs between Modoc, Illinois and Ste. Gen (as the locals call it). The deckhand on the ferry told us about the Inn where we stayed: the Inn St. Gemme Beauvais. It was so nice (and because I had some work to get done), we stayed for three days. Jan and Cathy Brans were grand innkeepers; the breakfasts were astounding; the afternoon wine and hors d’oeuvres provided a touch of elegance.

The full walk around downtown Ste. Gen takes about five minutes, and the Visitor Center … like many Visitor Centers on our route … had a terrific short video about the town. We bought a few books, read lots of literature, and befriended the kind women working there.

We also fell in love with the work of a bunch of the local artists, especially Sam Conlon, a 21-time rag football world champion (which we folks not in the know think of as “hacky sack”), who uses a cutting torch to craft art from discarded steel. She calls her work “painting with fire,” a perfect encapsulation of her energy and passion. We also loved learning about the Ste. Genevieve Artist Colony, where such luminaries as Thomas Hart Benton summered and taught. It was there in the 1930s that classical American artists started painting like Americans instead of Europeans. Deep in the Depression years, those artists adopted a growing faith in the “worth of the common man,” portraying “local people with respect and local places with regard for their unique qualities.” Their influence helped move art from the “domain of the privileged” to the realm of “everyday American lives.”

It was there, in the “realm of everyday lives” that our consternation about our hats resurfaced. As we lamented to one of the Visitor Center ladies that we had not encountered a single Great River Road hat … or t-shirt or hoodie or anything else for that matter … she gave me a Great River Road keychain and kindly suggested that we “go talk with Deb; she’ll make one for you.”

Deb Says Sew is a small shop on the main highway just outside of Ste. Gen, next door to the local McDonald’s. It is a museum of branded wear for local schools, sports teams, clubs, dance studios, etc., etc., etc. Deb Stoltzer greeted us with a smile and fashionably tattered jeans, told us that business was better than she ever would have expected, listened as we told her about our hat search, ratcheted her attention up a notch when we suggested a potential business opportunity, then spent the next 45 minutes or so searching catalogs for the ideal hat blanks. Fortunately, she and Rebecca were on the same page. I wandered through the shop and read some news stories on my phone, knowing that any contribution I tried to offer at that point would be of no avail. Plus, I had no clue that there could be so many different catalogs with so many different styles of baseball caps. It was a bit overwhelming. I felt a lot like “a guy.”

Deb ordered some caps for delivery the next day. Back at the inn, I Googled some Great River Road logo images, made a pdf file, and sent it to Deb. The logo appears on highways from Minnesota to Louisiana; it appears on maps everywhere, including most state maps; and it is affiliated with the government. Since I reckoned that my tax dollars paid for it, the idea of a copyright issue never entered my mind.

The next day, after I finished my work and as Deb was embroidering our hats, Rebecca and I did some touring … the kind of touring that made us want to take this trip.

Chapter 2A: Kaskaskia, Illinois: While the geography of the river is complicated, some parts of it are pretty simple: the Mississippi runs through Minnesota and Louisiana. Other than those two states, the river defines the boundary between states, with Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi to the east, and Iowa, Missouri, and Arkansas to the west. Kaskaskia, Illinois is an exception. Despite being part of Illinois, it is a tiny dot of land on the west side of the river, surrounded on three sides by Missouri. Roughly two hundred years ago, it was the first Illinois State Capital and a thriving center of commerce. I am not sure which moved first, the capital or the river, but they both have. The capital is now in Springfield, and the river flows to the east of Kaskaskia. Kaskaskia appears on the map as a teeny weeny anomaly that consists of a church, a small museum, some farmland, some pecan trees, and 14 people, 2 of whom we can say with confidence are very nice. (We did not meet any of the others.)

When we arrived, Denise was mowing the grass behind the church, and her mother Viola was gathering pecans. They were thrilled to unlock the old church, and I suspect they would have been pleased if we had stayed all day. They were proud of their little piece of the planet despite its surprising isolation. I also suspect that Kaskaskia is not as much of an anomaly as I think it is. As rivers change course, many communities must become isolated on the “wrong” side. I wonder how many change their geopolitical affiliation and how many become separated from their local seat of government. I seriously doubt that many governors or state officials visit Kaskaskia; the closest bridge (south to Chester) and the closest ferry (north to Modoc) are both about 20 miles away.

We left Kaskaskia with pocketfuls of delicious fresh pecans … a practice that began there but did not end for many, many miles.

Chapter 3: Deb finished our hats. They were perfect. She wouldn’t charge us for them in hopes they might turn into a regular flow of business. We hugged, left, and have been wearing them since.

We made our first sale a few hours later when the lady from the Ste. Genevieve Visitor Center ordered a few. Our second sale came a few days after that at the Visitor Center in Tunica, Mississippi, the Gateway to the Delta. Fortunately, we have not yet filled those orders. We really do not want to get into any trouble or fight any unnecessary legal battles, especially over the $20 or $30 windfall the hats might bring.

Chapter 4: One of the first things you see from Route 61 driving into Vicksburg is a gigantic Mississippi River towboat, The Mississippi. It looks like it should be in the river, but it isn’t. It is on dry land, part of the Army Corps of Engineer’s Lower Mississippi River Museum. The museum is superb, but it does not have much to do with our hat saga. Faye Wilkinson does. She was staffing the front desk as we entered. She also sits on the Mississippi River Parkway Commission, the organization that oversees the Great River Road.

Faye did not notice our hats on first glance. We made our obligatory initial inquiry about the whereabouts of the rest rooms, after which we started our tour of the museum. I had to interrupt the tour for a conference call with a client. As I asked if there might be a quiet place for a call, Faye noticed my hat.

The “Wow!” Where’d you get that hat?” did not have a ring of warmth to it. In fact, it might have even been a tad hostile. It certainly did not have the genteel lilt you might expect from a refined woman of Vicksburg. “We had it made in Ste. Genevieve,” I replied. Then a ranger escorted me to a quiet room where I could make my call.

The rest was up to Rebecca. She’s a master.

An hour later, after my call ended, Rebecca and Faye were busy jawboning and smiling at the museum’s front desk. Faye had learned all about our trip. She wanted to be part of our blog notification list. She wanted to learn more about my career of writing about water. She even said she’d be interested in my coming to speak about our drive at a meeting of the Mississippi River Parkway Commission. From all indications, she was intrigued by the prospect of hats and clothing branded with the logo of the Great River Road.

The Great River Road, we learned from Faye, has lost all government support. The signage is under state control … and expense. There is no maintenance budget since all of the roads that comprise the Great River Road are U.S., state, or county highways. We weren’t surprised.

We have been surprised, however, to realize how few people do what we have done. Driving the length of the Mississippi River just seems so obvious. If folks drive Route 66 or the Blue Ridge Parkway or California Route 1 or Skyline Drive or the Natchez Trace, why not the River Road? What it may lack in mountains and surf, it more than makes up for in bluffs, vistas, personalities, music, food, history, and art.

I hope Faye follows through on her invitation for me to speak with the Mississippi River Parkway Commission. I’d love to confirm the importance of their work by regaling them with a few stories that might help trigger some passion and creativity.  The GRR needs some bling: branded tchotchkies folks can sport to let others know where they have been.

Sit tight and stay patient, Debbie. We might be selling lots of hats yet! And if any of you readers happen to need some personalized embroidery as you pass through Ste. Genevieve, definitely pay a visit to Deb Says Sew. It’s gotta be the best in town!

© 2018 Kenneth Mirvis

Down the Mississippi #11

Seven and half weeks after we stepped into the headwaters in Minnesota, our Mississippi River drive has ended. We spent Monday afternoon among sport fishermen in Venice, LA, where the River flows into the Gulf of Mexico. Then we found a B&B in Buras, LA for the night. Our hosts were Nicole and Red Maurer. When we arrived, Red was out fishing. He has chronic physical and brain injuries from his work helping to clean up the BP oil spill … for which BP has not paid victims a cent. While we waited for him to return, Nicole baked a crabmeat-stuffed flounder for supper.

The place, the food, and the company created a storybook ending to a perfect drive. It set the stage for the real work: writing about and making sense of this unbelievable adventure.

From the headwaters to the Gulf, we’ve seen thriving towns, beautiful vistas, ghost towns, poverty, racism, the economy, enlightenment, the river (over and over and over again), history, architecture, artists, nut cases, chefs, and musicians. Every single day has been an adventure.

I am thrilled by the prospect of making sense of this sensory onslaught, but it will not happen overnight.

Stick with us. All of the stories that did not have time or focus to get written can now start coming into play. We are excited to start the process of reliving it.

After a few days in New Orleans, we head to ….. damn …. we don’t really know. We haven’t thought that far ahead. We’ll keep you posted as time allows.

HOPE YOU ALL HAD A HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

© 2017 Kenneth Mirvis