To take the most curmudgeonly one first, if Killer Whales have legal rights comparable to those of humans (or at least natural born US citizens), do they have legal responsibilities as well—and can Tilikum thus be prosecuted for murder or manslaughter for the death of Sea World trainer Dawn Brancheau? Or will his plea be self-defense?

That’s stretching it, obviously, but one of the interesting questions posed by this case—much like the general questions that arise when we talk about “animal minds”—is where is the dividing line? This question came up repeatedly in the 1970s and 1980s with reference to all of the chimp/language studies, around which the linguistics and psychology community was sharply polarized until everyone got bored and forgot about the chimps and moved on to the more ivory-towerish questions posed by Artificial Intelligence instead. Then there’s John Lilly’s work, which galvanized a lot of people (including me) by being tantalizing, but never as much as Lilly thought it was, and Lou Herman’s work, which was a lot more detailed and orderly, but also a lot more cautious. But that these are animals with minds is no longer in question.

PETA, I have to say, has a point here. A number of observers and even some scientists have, over the decades, questioned the appropriateness of keeping dolphins and whales penned up. I remember some absolutely horrible facilities from the 1970s around Tampa where dolphins were kept in tanks not much larger than a bathtub, and a comparison to human solitary confinement in a small dark cell designed for sensory deprivation would not be unjustified. And one could argue that Sea World’s facilities, while spacious, aren’t really designed to avoid stress. In addition, orcas and dolphins are smart, like chimps and some other primates—whether they’re as smart as people are isn’t really the appropriate question. But they do seem to be smart enough to cause a great deal of head-scratching and revisions to the kinds of assumptions made forty or fifty years ago about the question of animal intelligence. This knowledge has been hard earned, by both humans and dolphins (which Killer Whales actually are, by the way—they’re a big species of dolphin). Let’s face it—we’re talking about Killer Whales (and dolphins, presumably, and possibly chimps and some other primates)—we’re not talking about anteaters, or bats, or lizards. And even if we’re not smart enough ourselves to articulate why this is, we sort of know that it’s true.

And yet, and yet…once past the obvious quandary posed by the fact that it’s PETA, who can be some of the most annoying people on the face of the planet when they put their minds to it, who are actually doing an interesting thing here, there are some other issues. First of all, legal systems take a while to catch up to events, yes, but there are already a bunch of laws on the books relating to the protection and preservation of marine mammals—although they don’t go so far as to define “slavery” as the equivalent of a large tank at Sea World.

That outfits like Sea World could see some financial hit here is pretty clear, but also irrelevant. Obviously, no one would go to Sea World to see a Herring show. Well, maybe they would—I don’t know. But there is also the consideration that Marine Parks, like Zoos, provide an educational function—and it’s not trivial. Well, maybe with the mass adoption of the internet over the past two decades a bit less so, but it’s hard to tell. There are genuine animal rescue programs. There are (or used to be) petting pools. These are fun places, but people learn stuff too–and while it’s one thing to see an animal on television or a computer screen, it’s another thing see see one in person–so to speak.

Additionally, one can foresee a not completely impossible scenario in which several interesting legal rulings result in Zoos and Marine Parks having to decide which animals they would keep, and what to do with those big tanks now that they had to let all the dolphins and killer whales go. Not to mention where all those very large dolphins and killer whales would actually go to. There are chimp retirement parks around the US—but there’s nothing comparable for marine mammals. Since many of these animals only know a life in captivity, it’s plausible that release in open water could be a death sentence. This is just one of the imponderables. Remember the Free Willy whale that there was a massive campaign to release, and which raised millions to send him to Iceland where he could be released? That didn’t turn out so well, although that certainly isn’t an argument that he should have stayed where he was. On the other hand, there are clearly cases where a return to open water, especially back to an original population, is not only possible, but seems like the right thing to do.

So this will be interesting to watch unfold–one of those dilemmas posed by modern life for which whatever the resolution, someone will be deeply unhappy. I don’t know enough law to know which way this might go, but the fact that the judge is even entertaining the possibility of letting this proceed probably seems like some sort of milestone–whether a good or a bad one depends, of course, on how this gets resolved.

But because I’m getting close to exam time, I’m trying to concentrate more on the reading, with less time for writing about the books as I go. So, these will be brief:

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself. (1999) — A little glib goes a long way. That’s how I felt by the time I reached the end of Bryson’s collected columns, written for an English newspaper after moving back to America following a 20-year sojourn abroad. Any one column was great, and Bryson frequently made me laugh out loud. The book was chucklicious. But it was also a little much, perhaps because the columns were short and, by their nature, jumped from topic to topic, which made the overall feel of the book a little manic. Had I spaced the book out over a few weeks and read just a few entries at a time, I’m sure Bryson’s charm and droll humor would’ve worked for me much, much better (because, let’s face it, the guy is hilarious!). I can see myself giving the book one of those “It’s not you, it’s me” speeches.

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. (2009) — I picked this up because it was a travelogue about two college graduates who decide to backpack across China in the mid-1980s. “Hey, let’s be Odysseus,” she and her friend decide. “Let’s be Byron. Let’s be Don Quixote, Huck Finn, and Jack Kerouac all rolled into one—except with lip gloss.” Their story turned out to be funny, tragic, interesting, and gripping. Gilman pulled me in quick, and I didn’t want to put the book not (not that I had the leisure to even if I wanted to). Gilman’s book has pitch-perfect pacing, and it reads like a good novel even though it’s nonfiction. “God knows I couldn’t make this up,” she says in her author’s note. Her post-9/11 perspective as a writer (and a more experienced traveler) gives the book extra resonance.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (1995) — This collection of essays was so good I don’t even know where to begin with it. Only a few of her essays focused specifically on place (my reason for reading), but those that do made me feel like I was in the crater of Hawaii’s dormant volcano Haleakala or in a crowded village in the African country of Benin or along the banks of Horse Lick Creek in the mountains of Kentucky. Cumulatively, Kingsolver captures what it means to be human—or should mean, anyway. “It’s starting to look as if the most shameful tradition of Western civilization is out need to deny we are animals,” she writes. The book is a paean to curiosity and wonder. “I have taught myself joy, over and over again,” she says. I constantly found myself highlighting passages, making notes, copying quotes. Kingsolver’s essays are so rich. In the final accounting,” she writes,” a hundred different truths are likely to reside at any given address.” A hundred different truths—and more—reside in this collection. Kingsolver might be the great discovery of this entire reading project.

by Marti Smith

“If all we feel is outrage, then we have not found a remedy.”- Jim Geringer, Governor, State of Wyoming, following Matthew Shepard’s death

Since I was a young girl and old enough to understand who I was, I have known discrimination. It hardens your heart and dampens your soul until you conquer the fear. Some don’t make it and commit suicide. To have the media, family, co-workers and friends tell jokes and make hurtful remarks is the life of a GLBT person. Unless you are a person of color, you likely don’t know what it is like to live a life of separation. As a GLBT person you are not allowed to do basic things like date, or attend the prom. You can’t hold hands or show affection in public for fear of retribution, or get relationship advice, or bring your boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet the parents. If you do, then you risk abandonment, ridicule, or even physical harm. There are churches who condemn us, and even reject us from attending. We are made to seem sub-human, and even demonic. You can’t experience the life you were born to live….freedom to choose, freedom to live, freedom to marry.

I had to leave a job I loved in my early career for fear of being found out. For the first half of my life I was closeted so I could keep my job. I lived in a small community that did not accept GLBT people as teachers, coaches or principals. After moving to Denver in the late ’80s, I sat in a hospital room with a gay friend (who was a terrific elementary teacher). He had been cornered by several young people who were trolling for a gay person to beat up. They beat him with a baseball bat and kicked him in the head until his eyes were so swollen he couldn’t see. For three days he was in a coma. I stayed with him until the swelling went down in his face and he wasn’t afraid someone would come back and kill him. He was a small man, and one of the kindest people I have ever known. His father was a Baptist preacher, and he was excommunicated from the family (with the exception of his sister). He thought moving to a bigger city would help.

The charge for nearly killing Mark was reduced to a misdemeanor. Those who beat him paid a $50 fine and were turned back out on the street to harm another day. Although animal abusers still don’t receive harsh enough punishments, you can get a lighter penalty for committing a hate crime against gays, even today. We are often treated as less than animals by those who are there to protect the innocent. That is the life we live, rather than the one God intended for us. For some of you, this is preaching to the choir. For others, I am glad you can’t relate. No one should have to understand it.

I once went shopping in a furniture store with an African-American (straight) male friend. He told me he was going to look at some cabinets on the other side of the room. He told me to pay attention to the store clerks. I followed his suggestion. They followed him everywhere he went and totally ignored me. It dawned on me in an instant. They subconsciously expected him to steal something. I tell you this story just to point out that discrimination has a lot of faces. It is doled out in jokes, behaviors and in other very scary ways. These are judgments…..very hurtful judgments that impact lives. My friend could not have put a cabinet in his pocket, and factually, Kevin is a terribly honest and trustworthy person. If I had children I would trust him to take care of them. He didn’t deserve that treatment, nor does any other person or group.

The truth of the matter….In the U.S., 75% of students have no state laws to protect them from harassment and discrimination in school based on their sexual orientation. In public high schools, 97% of students report regularly hearing homophobic remarks from their peers. Of the estimated 1.6 million homeless American youth, between 20% and 40% identify as LGBT. That is a huge number considering the overall percentage of GLBT people. One study revealed that 26% of gay teens who came out to their parents/guardians were told they must leave home; LGBT youth also leave home due to physical, sexual and emotional abuse. Also, LGBT youth report they are threatened, belittled and abused at shelters by staff as well as other residents. There are smaller numbers of GLBT people who are pedophiles by far than the straight population, and virtually none in the female lesbian ranks. (That is a statistical fact.)

Why are civil unions not enough for gay rights activists? The federal government accords 1,138 benefits and responsibilities based on marital status but not on civil union status. A few of those benefits are unpaid leave to care for an ill spouse, social security survivor benefits and spousal benefits, and the right not to testify against one’s spouse. The same man I told you about earlier (Mark) owned a home with his male partner. They had wills leaving everything to each other. My friend died of a brain tumor. His family sued for his half of the house and won. His partner was evicted and thrown out on the street until the home was sold…..by court order in Denver. If you are unlucky enough to find a GLBT hater judge, they have the power to punish the innocent. If someone you know thinks it can’t happen, it does.

More facts:

• There are already thousands of children living in gay couple households. The 2000 U. S. Census reports 33% of female same-sex couple households and 22% of male same-sex couple households already have at least one child under the age of 18 living at home.
• According to the American Psychological Association Policy Statement on Sexual Orientation, Parents, & Children, “there is no reliable evidence that homosexual orientation per se impairs psychological functioning. Second, beliefs that lesbian and gay adults are not fit parents have no empirical foundation.”
• The American Psychological Association states “research suggests that sexual identities (including gender identity, gender-role behavior, and sexual orientation) develop in much the same ways among children of lesbian mothers as they do among children of heterosexual parents.”
• There is no conclusive evidence that homosexuality is linked to one’s environment. In other words, growing up in a gay couple household will not “make” a child gay. Read Nature vs. Nurture: Born or Made Gay.

Why do we want marriage? Other than basic reasons like benefits and protections under the law, we just want the ability to live freely. I have been with my partner for 17 years. Like many of you, I knew in an instant…a holy one. I don’t want to harm anyone or take away anyone’s freedoms. I am no threat to the “sanctity of marriage” – in fact, I think we might give it more credibility, given the fact that about half of straight marriages end in divorce and many of the ones that survive are anything but sanctified. At the end of our lives I want to be able to have my partner by my side. If I am in an ICU we will have to sit in the hall because we are not “family.” Many GLBT people pass from this life alone.

I am thankful I was born the way I am. God gave me this gift so I could stop judging. I had a choice to love or hate. I chose love. Some days it is more of a challenge than others.

Below is a video from Mayors for the Freedom to Marry – a group aligned with the Freedom to Marry Campaign and featuring 80 mayors from 25 states – that explains why this courageous group of municipals leaders believes that this is not only the right thing to do, it’s the smart thing to do. I encourage you to watch the video and sign the pledge.

I also ask you to pass these links along to your friends, your family members and those in your various community and religious organizations. If you share your conviction in this initiative it means many more signatures and a greater momentum towards an important milestone in American social justice. If only GLBT people sign the petitition it will be ignored, and if the history of the struggle for equality in the US has taught us anything, it’s that, as the famous Solomon Burke song teaches: “none of us are free, one of us are chained.”

Thanks to the Mayors for the Freedom to Marry, and thank you for reading and supporting fairness for all Americans.

Click here to view the embedded video.

After feeding twenty-six books into my head in thirty days, I’d like to say that I’m letting my brain decompress, but I’ll be honest: I’m still reading. In fact, I have two books going right now, Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself and Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson. I want to hit up Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams and Wendell Barry’s agrarian essays, too, and I want to spend some time with David Cushman’s book on The Wilderness, Bloody Promenade. Maybe then I’ll be done. Maybe.

But there’s David Gessner’s Sick of Nature. There’s Susan Jane Gilman’s Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven. There’s George Orwell’s Road to Wigan Pier. And there’s still John Muir looming over everything, a backdrop to much of what I’ve read, as significant as the Sierra Nevadas, as significant as Thoreau and Walden.

So many books, so little time.

I’ve been cramming books into my head at an alarming rate–so fast that I literally lost count. Only after I finished did I realize I’d counted two books at #14 and so had, unbeknownst to me, finished a day early. My effort to jam in a final book before midnight on the last day turned out to be gravy, and I didn’t even know it. (I’ve since gone back in true Orwellian fashion and corrected the record–a little ironic since I didn’t get to Orwell yet, although he’s on the list.)

I’m a voracious reader, but even by my standards this reading endeavor has been grueling. But it’s also been intellectually rewarding and, just as important, fun. I even had the author of one of the books I reviewed write to say he was “pleased to see such a
thorough understanding of what I was getting at vs the BS I’ve seen in other reviews. Please pass along my kudos….” That was gratifying.

As I read these books, I was looking, specifically, at the way creative nonfiction writers write about place. So what did I learn?

Upon first reflection, there seemed to be three different ways to approach the notion of place: One could travel through it, one could be in it, or one could piece it together indirectly. For purposes of simplicity, I’ll refer to travel writers and nature writers. As you might guess, the travel writers travel through a place; nature writers exist in a space. I’ll hold off on talking about the third category for a few minutes.

Travel writers and nature writers tended to write about place in much different ways:

1) For a travel writer, a place is something to be experienced. For a nature writer, a place is to be reflected on. Certainly a travel writer may try to figure out what his/her experiences mean as he/she passes through. A nature writer might, indeed, have very meaningful experiences to reflect on, but it seems the real objective is to figure out what the place means.

2) Travel writers tend to weigh their travel experience against what they know about home. They contrast the new with the familiar. In doing so, they frequently learn something about both places, and they learn something about themselves, too. Nature writers tend to examine humankind’s relationship with nature and their own place within that larger scheme. They contrast the natural with the man-made. In doing so, they learn something about the relationship.

3) Travel writers tend to get energized by their experiences, as exhausting (and sometimes scary) as travel is. Nature writers tend to get inspired by nature but then get frustrated and/or depressed when they realize how unrelenting humankind is when it comes to pillaging the planet.

4) Travel writers tend to “show” by recounting experiences; nature writers tend to “show” by evoking mood and wonder. I didn’t read many “poetic” travel writers, but I read lots of beautiful nature writing. Likewise, I didn’t read a lot of humorous nature writing, but I read a lot of funny travel writing. (Bill Bryson falls into both categories, I think—and he’s freakin’ hilarious.)

5) Nature writers tend to value place for its intrinsic worth, while travel writers tend to value place for the experience they can get out of it. That comes across in the ways in which various writers interact with a place and communicate their reflections about it.

Those are all, of course, generalities, and they’re based on a sampling of twenty-five or so books. I’m noting the patterns that jumped out at me, but any other collection of twenty-five books read under saner conditions would, no doubt, produce different patterns for different readers.

The third category of writers I encountered created a sense of place through travel and occupation, and through experience and reflection, but the journey was the destination, so to speak. They created cultural landscapes. I’m thinking of Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln—what is Lincoln’s America and who is America’s Lincoln? Or Bill Bryson’s I’m a Stranger Here Myself—what are these crazy, quirky everyday experiences that comprise the experience of living in America? Or Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic—what do “North” and “South” look like today? Barbara Kingsolver’s High Tide in Tucson is shaping up to be that kind of book, too.

I think of the definition of “creative nonfiction” offered by Philip Gerard, a writing prof at the University of North Carolina and author of Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. He says a creative nonfiction piece must have an apparent subject and a deeper subject—that is, what’s the story about on the surface and what’s really going on, what does it really mean. It’s like plot and theme in a way. That’s exemplified in the relationship between fact and truth. The “apparent subject” might include the history, geology, geography, and ecology of a place; the “deeper subject” might turn that place into a metaphor or a symbol that relates to the writer’s inner journey. Successful pieces balance the two.

Travel pieces worked best for me when they didn’t just overload me with the apparent subject (the trip) and all the factual information that went with it. For example, Maarten Troost’s Lost on Planet China was obviously a travel book, but the focus of Troost’s trip always came back to his quest to understand the potential impact China’s awakening was going to have on the world—and on him.

Other books, like Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa gave lip service to the deeper subject (“Who am I?”) and emphasized the apparent subject (getting from this place to that place and offering background about the places as he goes).

Nature books that were most effective used the apparent subject (life at Walden Pond, the travails of a flooded wildlife refuge) as a way to contextualize the deeper subject (self-sufficiency, coping with loss).

Linda Hogan’s Dwellings almost entirely abandoned the apparent subject (the natural world) to reflect on the deeper subject (how to redefine our thinking about our relationship with the natural world). John McPhee’s grounded his Pine Barrens in the apparent subject (the pine barrens and the people who live there) and let largely left it to readers to find their own deeper subject (the importance of the barrens as a unique landscape).

As I mull over these things, I realize that they’re just convenient constructs for me to organize my thinking. I could easily look past these conveniences and set these books into conversation with each other (and with me) in other ways. For instance, I could reframe my thinking so that I could look at how writing about place helped these writers understand the human condition.

I will spend the next week and a half mulling over these and other connections between the books. I’ll step back and, like Tom Hanks’ character from The DiVinci Code, wait for more patterns to materialize for me out of thin air. Then I’ll write a long, long paper about it for my doctoral program and see if I can make some cohesive sense out of all of it.

And then I’ll start reading another book.

————

For anyone keeping track, here’s the original list I chose my books from. I’ve indicated which ones I read, and I’ve made note, too, of any book that got added in after I compiled the initial list.

Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire.

Berry, Wendell. The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry.

Bryson, Bill. A Walk in the Woods: Rediscovering America on the Appalachian Trail.

Bryson, Bill. I’m a Stranger Here Myself: Notes on Returning to America After 20 Years Away. (In progress!)

Carson, Rachel. The Edge of the Sea.

Carson, Rachel. The Sea Around Us. (added)

Carson, Rachel. The Sense of Wonder. (added)

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring.

Casey, Susan. The Devil’s Teeth: A True Story of Obsession and Survival Among America’s Great White Sharks.

Cushman, Stephen. Bloody Promenade: Reflections on a Civil War Battle.

Dennis, Jerry. The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas.

Elder, John. Reading the Mountains of Home.

Elder, John. The Frog Run: Words and Wildness in the Vermont Woods.

Ferguson, Andrew. Land of Lincoln. (added)

Gilman, Susan Jane. Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven.

Gessner, David. My Green Manifesto: Down the Charles River in Pursuit of a New Environmentalism.

Gessner, David. Sick of Nature.

Heinrich, Bernd. A Year in the Maine Woods.

Hogan, Linda. Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World.

Horwitz, Tony. Confederates in the Attic.

Junger, Sebastian. The Perfect Storm.

Kingsolver, Barbara. High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never. (In progress!)

Kohnstamm, Thomas. Do Travel Writers Go to Hell?: A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics, and Professional Hedonism.

Lopez, Barry. About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory.

Lopez, Barry. Arctic Dreams.

McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet.

McPhee, John. selections from The John McPhee Reader and The Second John McPhee Reader.

McPherson, James. Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

Muir, John. Nature Writings.

Orwell, George. Road to Wigan Pier.

Smith, Julian. Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Life and Adventure.

Tayler, Jeffrey. Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey into the Heart of Darkness.

Thomas, Emory. Travels to Hallowed Ground: A Historian’s Journey to the American Civil War.

Thoreau, Henry David. The Maine Woods.

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.

Troost, J. Martin. Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Refuge.

Williams, Terry Tempest. Finding Beauty in a Broken World.

Had the last few months not happened we’d now be anointing JoePa for sainthood. As you’ve been told so many times before, and are now hearing all over again, he was all that was good and true in collegiate athletics, a man who did things the right way, etc. The thing is, that’s a woefully simplistic commentary on Paterno and how he did business. Also, the last few months did happen. So we now find ourselves needing to address Paterno’s legacy in two parts. Let’s do the ugly bit first.

1: Paterno and the Sandusky Scandal

There is no pretending it didn’t happen. There is no excusing Paterno’s failure to make an end of it. And in my book, there is no forgiving it. Paterno, for whatever reason, abetted the actions of a serial pedophile and rapist. These are the facts of the matter.

That said, we’re dealing with human behaviors here, which means unimaginable complexity. In a comment on Brian’s post the other day, my friend and colleague Marti Smith offered some thoughts toward perhaps explaining why Paterno didn’t do anything and everything necessary to end Jerry Sandusky’s victimization of children. Her remarks were, I think, insightful and helpful, and it’s always important to understand that explaining and excusing are different things. Nobody here is excusing (except the occasional dimwit commenter or PSU alum).

Paterno’s own remarks, toward the end, illustrate the conflict he must have felt. On the one hand, what he was being told was no doubt unspeakable for a man of his generation and upbringing. On the other, men of his generation and upbringing were organizational men, and one behaved according to the rules of the system when it was transgressed. This would have been a basic assumption for Paterno, I imagine.

When that system failed, I imagine he might have reacted as I would if, sometime this afternoon, the law of gravity were to suddenly stop working. This doesn’t make it okay, though. I’d be obliged to improvise, grabbing something and hanging on, lest I float into space. And when the system failed in the Sandusky affair, Paterno was likewise obliged to improvise. He had all the power one would have ever needed.

His failure to do so resulted in what I believe is probably the second greatest fall from grace in the history of American sports culture (behind OJ – and we might well argue that Paterno’s crash was the worse of the two). He paid for his crime with his reputation and his death last night assures that he will have no chance to repair it.

2: The Saint in the Swamp: Joe Paterno and College Football

Joe Paterno won more games than any coach in college football history. And for all those decades of victorious Saturday afternoons and national titles (and should-have-been national titles) there was never even the slightest whiff of impropriety. Well, mostly. He recruited clean and brooked very little nonsense from his players (up until some off-field issues in recent years, anyhow). By the standards of big-money intercollegiate athletics Joe Paterno was Mother Teresa.

The problem with that, and accordingly the problem I have with attempts to canonize any college athletics figure, is that the system itself is corrupt to the core. I can spend quite a bit of time delineating a long list of specific indictments, but in the end it all boils down to one simple fact: revenue-generating university sports are, in every way, the antithesis of what a university should be. Universities are about cultivating minds and spirits in ways that enrich the society, that advance the store of human knowledge, that exalt the potential of the intellect to accelerate the evolution of the species.

University sports, though, breed an apartness between the star athlete and the mere student, insisting that intellectual genius bow down to the primacy of the jock. Said jock may be a genuine scholar-athlete but is in too many cases a challenge that the athletic department has to sneak through the side corridors and and back alleys of NCAA eligibility requirements. Big-money sports add literally nothing to the legitimate mission of a university and ethically they have as much place on campus as a Provost-administered prostitution ring.

None of this is terribly easy for me to think about because I love sports. I lament the state of my Wake Forest basketball team and cautiously hope that things are on the way up for my Buff football team. I watch March Madness with as much excitement as the next guy and bitch to no end about the charade that is the BCS. All three of the universities that have awarded me degrees are in major conferences (ACC, Big 12, Pac 12) and two more where I have served as a professor play D-1 in some sports. So there’s a part of me that feels like a hypocrite, and that’s a feeling I don’t care for.

But at least I recognize my inconsistencies. I’ll always remember a letter to the editor in the Des Moines Register one Sunday in the late ’80s. I was an MA student at Iowa State and the Big Peach was a ritual during my two years there. The University of Iowa had, as I recall, brought in a new president and said president was proposing some big, if not radical reforms to its athletic programs, all aimed at better integrating its NCAA sports into a proper understanding of the purpose of a university.

Reaction was swift and predictable. One Hawkeye fan wrote something to the effect of “if we aren’t careful we might end up like Northwestern.” Yes. The gods forbid that Iowa City turn out to be like those yutzes up in Evanston, who are, you know, one of America’s premier academic institutions. I do not recall any subsequent letters to the editor calling that writer out for being an anti-intellectual jock sniffer, which only added to my disappointment.

That, friends, is the context in which all eulogies for the late Coach Paterno exist. The Sandusky scandal notwithstanding for a moment, perhaps the thing that can be said for JoePa is that he was the best a profoundly corrupt system can possibly hope for. This is not mild praise, mind you, because corrupt systems corrupt those that exist within them. Still, given what I said above, it’s also like being acclaimed as the most compassionate pimp in the entire slum.

Of course, all the comment on the life and times of Joe Paterno emerge from another context, and this one is equally important. Here in America, Hollywood has crafted four boxes into which all human beings can be neatly dumped: heroes, villains, victims and pawns. You’re great, you’re evil, you’re an unfortunate plot hook or you really, honestly, do not matter. We are not comfortable with figures who cross these boundaries. Take another great, but flawed college coaching icon, Bob Knight. He is unquestionably one of the greatest basketball minds in NCAA history. He is also, unquestionably, one of the biggest bullies and most arrogant douchebags in NCAA history. Is he a genius or is he an asshole? Well, yes. Yes he is.

In the Paterno movie Jerry Sandusky is clearly a villain. For a lot of people, so are the members of the Board of Trustees. The kids Sandusky raped – victims. The university’s faculty? Its world-renowned scholars? The students who were back in the dorms studying instead out destroying things as the story unfolded? Pawns. If you’re nodding and agreeing with me, you’re one, too.

What we’ll be seeing as the mourning period for Paterno unfolds is less about a clear-minded assessment of the facts and more about crafting a narrative. Think of it as hundreds and thousands of people subconsciously collaborating on a Hollywood script for a blockbuster about the coach’s life. In order to sell it to the studio, though, we have to make sure it speaks to the deep psychological tropes by which the masses make meaning out of life. In other words, this isn’t an investigation, it’s a ritual. The audience won’t be comfortable putting a man they felt so positively about for so many decades, the grandfatherly icon meeting with students on his lawn, in the villain box. The pawn box is right out. Which leaves us with hero box and the victim box. As you read what people have to say today and in the coming days, think about this.

In the end, it’s nearly impossible to be a saint in a swamp. Too many Americans seek to iconize those who come closest, but others of us have a better solution: drain the goddamned swamp.

After visiting Nashville, Tennessee on the fourth night of our road trip, my sister, Julie, and I geared up for a day of historical site-seeing along the Natchez Trace Parkway.

Our brother, Dan, and I attempted this drive once last summer after receiving a recommendation to take the famous byway from Nashville to Southern Mississippi before cutting South to New Orleans. Not 30 miles into our trip, we crossed a park ranger who threatened us off the parkway with a ticket and authoritative scolding. Unbeknownst to us, a 14-foot yellow Penske truck is considered a “commercial vehicle” and eyesore on a scenic byway.

Though Dan could not join us on this road trip, Julie and I took advantage of having our compact Toyota Camry and picked up where Dan and I left off.

The 444-mile parkway offers various scenic sites and opportunities to learn about Southern history. We drove over (and then exited to drive under) Double Arch Bridge, an award-winning structure stretching over Birdsong Hollow in Tennessee. We snapped photos of Gordon House, one of two remaining buildings from the historic Boatmen Era of the 1780-1820s.

Among of my favorite stops was an old tobacco farm, where we saw tobacco hanging to dry inside an early 1900s barn (see photo in top right). Other noteworthy attractions include the Meriwether Lewis Historical Site, which stands over Lewis’ ashes and honors Lewis and Clark’s early-1800s expedition. Jackson Falls and other scenic stops such as Rock Spring offer short hiking paths and opportunities to explore waterfalls, wildlife and overlooks on foot.

When we stopped to refuel on gas near the Tennessee-Alabama border, a gas station greeted us with 71-cent coffee and a parking lot surrounded by mooing cows. Not even three hours south of Nashville, the local accents had changed and we seemed to have entered another world.

When we returned to the car, we opted to take a temporary break from the Natchez Trace to further explore these foreign rural towns. In fact, rural does not describe how secluded these towns are. Our road did not even provide a state sign when we crossed the border into Alabama. Instead, we saw trees, houses lined with multiple old pick-up trucks, and one desolate – and almost creepy – backroad ridden by two curious New Yorkers.

We took our final night’s rest in Tupelo, a town of about 35,000 in the Northeast corner of Mississippi. While searching for our hotel, we discovered that Tupelo is also the birthplace of Elvis Presley – a hidden attraction we could not pass up during our stay. So, on the way out of town the next morning, we made a stop at Elvis’ childhood home. As it turns out, we showed up just in time to wish Elvis a happy birthday. We found this to be a perfect evolution of our trip after seeing his name plated on Nashville’s “Walk of Fame” two nights before.

We arrived in sunny, 75-degree New Orleans mid-afternoon after leaving Tupelo. When we crossed the Mississippi-Louisiana border we counted the number of states we visited along our road trip from New York to Louisiana. We saw 12 states in six days.

We drove new highways, wore out nearly every country song on Sirius radio and learned a bit more about the history of our country. We made it to New Orleans. And, now we’re ready to begin our next new adventure as sister roommates.

#25: The Land of Lincoln: Travels in Abe’s America by Andrew Ferguson (2007)

The Lincoln Memorial looked like frost tonight. The flurry that had blanketed the lawn white earlier in the day had been glazed with rain and then turned to ice, so the whole landscape shimmered under the Memorial’s lights.

Frost or no, the Memorial still has that beacon-in-the-dark look, which is, I suppose, its main purpose. It is, as I’ve noted before, as close to a temple as we have in America. The man who sits inside has become such an icon he’s lost humanity.

I’m here because I’ve just finished journalist Andrew Ferguson’s Land of Lincoln, an exploration of the man and, in the end, a defense of that icon. I’m here for the icon, too.

When Abraham Lincoln died, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton famously said, “Now he belongs to the ages.” More than that, though, Lincoln belongs to all of us—and we can each make him into the person we want him to be.

That’s what journalist Andrew Ferguson sets out to explore in Land of Lincoln. The state of Illinois may claim that as its motto, but Ferguson discovers Lincoln’s presence in the most unexpected of places. “I wanted to know what we know about Lincoln, and I wanted to know how we know it,” he says.

Land of Lincoln chronicles Ferguson’s quest to discover the true Abraham Lincoln—the one who doesn’t belong to the ages, the one who’s not chiseled from granite and sitting vigil in a temple-like memorial, the one who’s not known just for writing “Four score and seven years ago.”

“More books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than about any other American—nearly fourteen thousand in all,” Ferguson writes, “and at least half of those books begin by saying that more books have been written about Abraham Lincoln than any other American. This book, you’ll notice, is one of them.”

Ferguson’s book is simultaneously charming and earnest. It’s hard not to be amused when he hangs out with 175 Lincoln impersonators in Santa Claus, Indiana, during their annual convention. “It began with the beard,” one impersonator explains to Ferguson.

“Talking to other Abes, I discovered that this is how it almost always happens,” Ferguson writes. “A fellow, minding his own business, decides to grow a beard. Soon, multiple people are telling him that he bears a striking resemblance to Abraham Lincoln. It doesn’t matter that very often these people are wrong. So strong is the lure of Lincoln that when people tell a man with a beard that he looks like the greatest of all Americans, he believes it.”

Ferguson goes to Gettysburg to sit in on a leadership institute’s Lincoln-themed training session. (The book Lincoln on Leadership, after all, is one of the best-selling business books of all time.) Gettysburg, he notes, has “a dazed, dull feel to it—the consequence, I suppose, of taking a scene of blood-drenched horror and unspeakable heartbreak and trying to make it a pleasant vacation spot.”

Ferguson travels to the area around Lincoln’s boyhood home where he watches a musical theater production based on the young Lincoln’s life. He visits the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, where Disney “imagineers” created a museum that creates a powerful emotional experience but somehow manages to avoid information. The primary purpose, says Ferguson, is to make Lincoln “fun.”

“Get their hearts and their heads will follow,” the imagineer tells him. “You lead with the emotions rather than the intellect. And remember, it’s not any old emotion—the emotion they feel is the one we want them to feel.”

Ferguson visits historical sites, National Parks, and museums. He examines statues. He follows the old Lincoln Heritage Trail. The Land of Lincoln, Ferguson discovers, exists as much in our national subconscious as it does in any geographical spot. This was useful for me because, like Confederates in the Attic, the book becomes a portrait of a cultural landscape.

The supporting cast proves to be highly colorful. Ferguson meets people cult-like in their devotion to Lincoln. He talks with Lincoln scholars, Lincoln collectors, and even Lincoln critics. “Who could object to Lincoln?” Ferguson asks. “He seems too big even to have an opinion about.” Yet when the National Park Service installed a Lincoln statue at its Civil War battlefield park in Richmond, commemorating a visit Lincoln made to the city in April 1865 when the city surrendered, controversy erupted.

Throughout, Ferguson continues to ask, “Who is Lincoln? Why is he important to us today?” He never draws firm conclusions but instead presents a wide array of evidence for readers to consider—just as he himself considers it, too.

“What if Lincoln the man was, as I’d come to suspect, unknowable, as most men are 140 years after their death?” he writes. “And what if the icon—big, grand, unmistakable—is more real than the much smaller, custom-fit Lincolns that each of us creates for ourselves?”

Serious in its goals but light in its tone, Land of Lincoln successfully weaves together history, travel, cultural studies, and even memoir to sketch a thoughtful portrait of one of America’s most known—and perhaps least knowable—figures. Land of Lincoln doesn’t try to debunk any myths but instead tries to figure out how the man grew into myth. Both have value.

Ferguson finishes his journey on the steps of Washington, D.C.’s Lincoln Memorial. “It’s the unavoidable Lincoln,” he says. “Anyone who wants to understand the Land of Lincoln has to account for it.”

That’s why I’m here tonight. I’m accounting for it. I come here two or three times a year, in fact, and I always make it a point to see what Lincoln has to teach me.

Juxtaposed against the experience was a stop earlier in the evening at the new Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial. Prior to that, I’d visited the National Holocaust Museum to see an exhibit on Nazi propaganda. I was chilled to realize that Hitler, King, and Lincoln all really do belong in the same league when it comes to their skill as communicators, although they employed those skills for very different purposes. I’m still, I admit, wrapping my head around that.

To start the day, I visited Ford’s Theatre, a site Ferguson skipped, but a place I wanted to visit so I could see the newly installed exhibits in the theater’s museum and in the new museum across the street adjacent to the Peterson House (the house where Lincoln died). The exhibits are marvelous and thoughtful, but a quote from one exhibit panel in particular jumped out at me. As the Lincolns were getting ready to head to the theater on the evening of April 14, 1865, the president said to his wife:

“Mary, I consider this day, the war, has come to a close … we must both be more cheerful in the future—between the war and the loss of our darling [son] Willie—we have both been very miserable.”

Scholars spend a lot of time trying to find “the real Lincoln,” as Ferguson points out, but here was a simple quote from Lincoln himself that humanized him for me more than any scholar’s work.

I juxtaposed that against the great marble man sitting in the Memorial. It’s useful to see Lincoln as human, but ultimately, his status as an icon is perhaps more important to us—we who live in a cynical age that dismisses heroes and revels in its iconoclasm. If we’re ever to stop our bitterly partisan political bickering, if we’re all to lend a hand “with malice toward none, with charity toward all,” if we all want a good and decent future for our children, then we all need to aspire to be those very best things that America has always stood for.

Lincoln, I think, personifies that. He really does stand like that beacon in the night. We just have to get over ourselves long enough to admit that it’s okay to aspire for values that we’re usually quick to paint as quaint and old-fashioned. We have honest differences about how to achieve those things, but we’ll never figure out solutions if we don’t stop yelling at each other and decide to talk. “Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection,” Lincoln said in his first inaugural. Hear, hear!

“Maybe that’s why icons are dismissed as unreal these days,” Ferguson said. “Icons aren’t complicated enough for the wised-up world. Nuance fits the times. We can be consumed by nuance, argue about it on TV, blog about it, fill our scholarly monographs with its infinite refractions—even when, like the forest and the trees, our obsession with it obscures the bigger, unarguable facts that are plain in front of us.”

That’s what Lincoln has to say to me tonight: Aspire to be a better person. Aspire to be a better people. Aspire to be a better nation.

Otherwise, “We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope on earth.”

I’d hate for our own cynicism to be the death of us.

#24

“Historian travels to battlefields and writes about his experiences.” Sounds right up my alley. After all, I do a lot of that for Emerging Civil War, and my dissertation is going to take me in that direction, so it’s always interesting to see how other people do it.

That’s how a professional colleague of mine described Emory Thomas’s Travels to Hallowed Ground. He recommended it to me particularly because Thomas takes his son on some of his journeys, and my colleague knew that I got into battlefielding because of my daughter. Thomas’s book, then, might potentially offer some interesting ways at looking at the fields.

Thomas has a long career as a Civil War historian, with biographies of Confederates Robert E. Lee and JEB Stuart as his most notable books. He’s retired now, and to the best of my knowledge, hasn’t made a cottage industry out of tour-guiding the way a lot of the other “lions” of the field have done. If he had some thoughts inspired by visits to battlefields, I figured they’d be worth reading.

I was disappointed with the last such book I looked at, though: James McPherson’s Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg. It turned out to basically be McPherson’s excuse to write about the battle—which was, no doubt, an excellent account. But as a first-person presence in the book, he didn’t add much in the way of personal reflections or insights. He was almost superfluous in that respect (his history, and his narrative were great, though, so my disappointment only stems from what I was expecting, not from the quality of McPherson’s work).

Thomas does no better, although rather than take an extended look at a single battle, he provides shorter explorations of several battles. Each chapter is the length of a typical magazine article (and, indeed, some appeared in Civil War magazines in the mid-80s). There’s no real common thread that connects the chapters, though, other than the fact that Thomas visited there.

And for the record, his son goes on only one journey—so any hopes I had of father-child bonding experiences were pretty much shot. They travel to Roanoke Island—home of the infamous “Lost Colony” of English settlers who vanished long ago. Thomas and his son went there, though, to check out Burnside’s successful capture of the North Carolina coastal defenses. They discovered that not much had been preserved (such is still the case today). “What did you expect?” his son asks at the end, the long set-up to joke that’s not as clever as it thinks it is. “When you go looking for the remains of a battle like Roanoke Island, the most appropriate thing you can find is nothing.”

Thomas arranges his essays in chronological order, but there are such vast gaps in the chronology that their order seems almost moot. He skips most major battles­, which I kind of liked, and visited some out-of-the-way places, which I also liked.

He doesn’t quote much primary-source documentation but rather just synthesizes it all into his narratives, which read like summaries. It might, therefore, seem like the book would then lend itself as a good source for a beginner who wants a general overview of things, not too in-depth, but because Thomas leaves out so many of the war’s biggest events, his book wouldn’t be too useful for the novice. The buff, meanwhile, is going to know most of this already. The one thing he could bring to the table—his own insights and reflections—must’ve gotten left in the car as he was driving around.

The one exception is his second-to-last chapter, which focuses on an ethics-related issue from Petersburg. A photographer took a picture of a Confederate soldier’s corpse, with entrails hanging out, and copies of the photo because widely popular as a stereoscopic image in parlors across the country. Basically, a camera with two lenses, side-by-side, snapped the same picture, but because of the slightly different angles, when viewed through a stereoscope device, the images created a 3-D effect for viewers. They were all the range in the 1860s.

“That the dead young soldier and his three-dimensional entrails became items of entertainment only adds obscenity” to the lesson that “war is meaningless butchery,” Thomas says, obviously disturbed by the episode. In the 80s, with threats of nuclear annihilation still hanging over us, Thomas wondered if people would ever learn. “The human experience of history seems to show that if we are to survive, to avoid nuclear holocaust, we must do something more than watch television,” he says.

While that piece provided an excellent takeaway, the rest of the book was modest. I’m not sure it was worth the effort to track it down (since it’s out of print).

————

cross-posted at Emerging Civil War

On tonight’s episode of Modern Family (perhaps TV’s best sitcom), one of the storylines deals with what happens when a young child starts using curse words. One of America’s more prominent gatekeepers of the public morality, the Parents Television council, immediately lurched into a galloping conniption. That they haven’t actually seen the episode, and hence, have no fudging idea what they’re screeching about, is beside the point.

“It’s not suitable language for a child that young in the real world, and it’s not suitable language for a child that young on television, either.”

Turns out the adorable little child actress is saying “fudge” instead of the more vapors-inducing “fuck.”

It all feels so familiar. Like back in the ’80s when Tipper Gore and her friends got their granny panties in a bunch over things like Ozzy’s “Ultimate Sin” which, despite the hot demonic chick in the video turns out to have been a love song about “how could you leave me?” The album, of course, featured other such Satanic themes as “nuclear war is bad,” so you can understand their pique. Anyhoo, Tippy and the rest of the Concerned Responsible People^® in Washington formed the Parents Music Resource Council, a forebear to the PTC, to by jingies slap some labels on all that objectionable comment.

This was a debacle from one end to the other, but their first really huge mistake was in summoning Frank Zappa and then handing him a microphone. What followed was a first-ballot induction into the Beatdown Hall of Fame.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Then later on, they compounded their error by calling Steven Dallas, who was then the manager of heavy metal band Deathtöngue. Here’s how that went down.

Yes, well. We seem to have no fewer narrow-minded zealots than we did a generation ago, nor does our current crop of zealots seem to feel any more obligation than their predecessors did to actually, you know, understanding what they were talking about.

I’m torn. Part of me wants to encourage the PTC to shut the fudge up. But another part of me enjoys watching the self-righteous idiocracy clown itself while the world watches.

In any case, I look forward to tonight’s episode. But I’ll watch it lying down so that I won’t bump my head if I faint.

_____

Credit: Berke Breathed, Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. Little, Brown, 1987. Highly recommended.

“I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Most of you know the basics. Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s. Olympic greatness. Sonny Liston. Draft dodger. Muslim. One of the most dramatic comebacks in sports history.

Social activist. Global icon. The Greatest.

And for one working class white kid growing up in the North Carolina outback, his very first African-American role model.

Hating people because of their color is wrong. And it doesn’t matter which color does the hating. It’s just plain wrong.

No Viet Cong ever called Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali a nigger, but a lot of people I grew up with (including very close family members, I’m ashamed to say) sure did. Ali was everything that terrified the white South. He was physically dominating (with all the undercurrents that implies). He was “uppity” incarnate. He was unAmerican for refusing to go to Vietnam. He was the devil for converting to Islam. And deep down, the part that scared them the worst was this: they understood, I think, that he was smarter than they were, too.

The problem was, I never believed that I was supposed to hate him. Maybe it was my age – I wasn’t quite old enough to take offense at the Vietnam thing. All I really knew about the war was what I saw on television, and every night they’d show the number of boys killed that day in the fighting. I don’t recall thinking about this in anything like deep, philosophical terms, but if I had I imagine I might have figured Vietnam was well worth dodging.

As for the Islam thing, well, all us crackers were afraid of blacks. Especially crowds of them demanding stuff. But … even if I was young and ignorant and irrationally afraid of blacks, I wasn’t afraid of him. He didn’t seem to asking for anything unreasonable and he wasn’t hurting anybody. Maybe I thought that if we met he’d like me, too.

But I was just a kid. All I really knew was what I saw: Ali was brilliant. He was objectively the best fighter alive and he was also fun. His charisma didn’t just fill the room, it overwhelmed the entire world. You could feel it, almost tangibly, even through the little 13″ black and white TV in our living room in Wallburg, NC. He said he was the greatest and it was obviously so, especially for a smart-aleck kid from the “it ain’t bragging if it’s true” school of thought.

At home I am a nice guy: but I don’t want the world to know. Humble people, I’ve found, don’t get very far.

Today Muhammad Ali, the most famous man in the world, turns 70, and we as a nation, as a species, are better for knowing him. It’s even more certain that I’m a better person because of the courage and verve with which he lived his life.

A life that I hope is nowhere near over. Happy Birthday, Champ.

I know where I’m going and I know the truth, and I don’t have to be what you want me to be. I’m free to be what I want.

This week, the city prepared a more mild climate for another round of siblings to come through. My sister and I arrived from St. Louis just in time to enjoy a sushi dinner, check-in rush hour at a motel-style Best Western (equipped with an already-intoxicated bachelor party to greet us) and an evening walk through downtown. We visited Nashville for one day on this road trip and managed to see most of its highlights.

It’s hard to visit Nashville without learning about the world-famous Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge. First opened in 1960, this bar has seen countless famous musicians swing through its doors. Live local artists play its two stages each night, but famous country stars often stop in unannounced to play a few sets. Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings and Patsy Cline all got their start at this downtown Honky Tonk. Grab a seat when you can in this boot-stompin’ establishment. The crowd creates shoulder-to-shoulder traffic once the music starts.

Though we opted against the $31 fee to tour the entire Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, we strolled its lobby and surrounding “Music City Walk of Fame.” We took photos outside Ryman Auditorium, took a stroll along Printer’s Alley and danced on a sidewalk when we heard Carrie Underwood’s top hits piped into a random street corner.

On the way out of town the next morning, we drove leisurely down Music Row and pointed out the few recording studios and businesses we recognized among the hundreds headquartered there.

Though we did not tour inside either one, we made a stop at The Hermitage, home of former president Andrew Jackson, and Belle Meade Plantation, a famous old plantation mansion on the outskirts of Nashville. While we saw the grounds of each establishment, both hold strong historical relevance and will be on the list of places to return to for an inside tour.

Next time I return to the Nashville area, I will be sure not to leave without another visit to Franklin. This hidden gem rests just South of Nashville at the foot of the Cumberland Mountains. Victorian-style architecture houses the antique shops, art galleries and cafes that line Main Street of the 200-year-old historic district. Nearby, visitors can tour the hillside Carnton Plantation where, in 1864, the Battle of Franklin became one of the bloodiest battles of the Civil War with 8,000 soldiers killed. Julie and I could have spent all day shopping along Main Street, but pairing this with the town’s unique history made this a favorite stop along our road trip.

Government buildings are closed, the post office is closed, most K-12 schools are closed and many universities cancel classes for the day.

The idea behind the holiday was so people could focus on the good works of Dr. King.

Years ago, when I was a faculty member at Oakland University in Rochester, Michigan, students had protested the fact that campus remained open and classes, except for two hours midday, met, as usual. Top level administrators responding to student pressure decided to change the calendar and cancel classes. The only one objecting was then-Vice President Wilma Ray Bledsoe, the only African American (and, I believe, woman) on the cabinet at that time.

Wilma Ray objected because she believed students on campus would turn the day off into a three day weekend rather than join the campus in marches and other ceremonies of remembrances and study of the life of Dr. King.

She was right. MLK Day for most college and K-12 students now is just that – a three day holiday from studies. The local ski resorts, thankfully covered in the white stuff now, are having their best day of the season so far. The malls are busier, too. Many other students are sleeping in today or enjoying the pleasure of being home.

There are marches on campuses, the media has covered the holiday, but I have to wonder.

A mother I know asked her 12 year-old son who Dr. King was. He had no idea. He was miffed because his school wasn’t closed today. His cousins had the day off. None of them knew who Dr. King was either.

#21

I’m sure I’m not the only person who’s read Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and had a burning urge to go hike the Appalachian Trail. Of course, that might also have something to do with the fact that my girlfriend is heading there today to hike part of it. But whatever.

My experience with the AT is pretty limited, although the few places I’ve crossed its path are places I’ve crossed it a lot. The spot that comes to mind most is a foot bridge that crosses over I-90 in the Berkshire Mountains of western Massachusetts. I’ve never stepped on that leg of the AT, but I’ve driven under it about a thousand times.

By foot, I’ve encountered the AT most frequently at Harper’s Ferry, WV. The trail crosses the Potomac River and rises up to Maryland Heights where it vanishes into the woods before climbing even further to run along the crest of South Mountain. In fact, my favorite stretch of the AT heads into the woods at the northern border of Gapland State Park several miles north of Harper’s Ferry. I remember a misty afternoon that cast a primeval air around the trail as it climbed into leafy greenness. Rain dripped from everything. The mud glistened.

I’ve intersected the AT at the top of Mount Washington in New Hampshire. I’ve always wanted to follow it to the top of Mount Katahdin in Maine. I’ve wanted to avoid it in Duncannon, PA, where a double-murder took place in September of 1990. Because I grew up in that area, the town’s name jumped out at me when I heard about the crime on the news. It struck me with such foreboding that it still sticks to me like a bad superstition.

My girlfriend and I hiked several hundred yards of the AT over the summer at Shenandoah National Park. We were, in fact, hiking up the impossibly never-ending trail to Hawksbill Mountain. The AT ran along the top of the ridge, so we made a point to walk out to it just so we could say we did the AT—only to discover that it also ran right by the parking lot where we’d left Caity’s car. For principle’s sake, we walked the trail there, too.

It was on that jaunt that I discovered an important truth about hiking, which Bryson so perfectly articulates:

The hardest part was coming to terms with the constant dispiriting discovery that there is always more hill. The thing about being on a hill, as opposed to standing back from it, is that you can almost never see exactly what’s to come…. Every time you haul yourself up to what you think must surely be the crest, you find that there is in fact more hill beyond, sloped at an angle that kept it from view before, and that beyond that slope is another, and beyond that another and another, and beyond each of those more still, until it seems impossible that any hill could run on this long…. Still you stagger on. What else can you do?

Bryson’s book is at once clever, engaging, and chock-full-o information. I’ve read some of Bryson’s other works before—his A Short History of Nearly Everything is one of the more brilliant books I’ve ever read—but I’ve not read any of his more memoirish stuff before.

It’s not for lack of wanting to. A former NPS colleague of mine tried to get me to read A Walk in the Woods a few years ago. I wanted to, sincerely, but knew I didn’t have the time just then. She urged me to take her book; I reluctantly did so only because I knew it might be a while before I could get to it. It has sat there ever since (right next to the John McPhee reader I’d mentioned the other day, in fact).

Oh, my, am I glad I finally had the excuse to read this book. I have laughed out loud over and over.

Bryson discovers the AT almost by accident when he moves to a small town in New Hampshire after years abroad. He decides to check it out. “Running more than 2,100 miles along America’s eastern seaboard, through the serene and beckoning Appalachian Mountains, the AT is the granddaddy of long hikes,” he writes. “From Georgia to Maine, it wanders across fourteen states. Through plump, comely hills whose very names—Blue Ridge, Smokies, Cumberlands, Green Mountains, White Mountains—seem an invitation to amble.”

Bryson decides to take up that invitation, and the story of that amble becomes the premise of the book. Accompanying him is an old high school buddy he hasn’t seen in years, Katz, who is woefully overweight and underprepared. But Bryson soon discovers he’s not really ready for the mission, either. “I had never encountered anything so hard, for which I was so ill prepared,” he writes after being on the trail just a few short days. “Every step was a struggle.”

He doesn’t help his case by psyching himself out with horror stories about bear attacks, either.  “What on earth would I do if four bears came into my camp?” he frets after seeing a four-bear photo. “Why, I would die, of course. Literally shit myself lifeless. I would blow my sphincter out my backside like one of those unrolling paper streamers you get at children’s parties—I daresay I would even give a merry toot—and bleed to a messy death in my sleeping bag.”

Aside from liberal doses of humor, Bryson weaves in a lot of biology and ecology and a lot of history. He’s particularly damning of the U.S. Forest Service and National Park Service—both so underfunded that their management borders catastrophically on negligence. Best of all, though, his removal from the modern world and immersion in the natural world provide ample opportunity for juxtaposing one against the other, resulting in rich, rich reflection.

The trail itself, he says, serves as a symbol of that contrast. “If a product or enterprise doesn’t constantly reinvent itself, it is superseded, cast aside, abandoned without sentiment in favor of something bigger, newer, and, alas, early always uglier,” he writes. “And then there is the good old AT, still quietly ticking along…unassuming, splendid, faithful to its founding principles, sweetly unaware that the world has quite moved on. It’s a miracle, really.”

Bryson finds miracles all along the way, too. His sense of wonder never shuts off even when his body winds down and his spirit flags. One of my favorite descriptions comes in the Shenandoah National Park, not far from Hawksbill Mountain, in fact. It evoked my own sense of awe being in those same woods:

a broad, ancient-seeming, deeply fetching glade cradled by steep hills, which gave it a vaguely enchanted, secretive feel. Everything you could ask for in a woodland setting was here—tall, stately trees broken at intervals be escalators of dusty sunshine, winding brook, floor of plump ferns, cool air languidly adrift in a lovely green stillness….

Caity will walk through that same terrain tomorrow, although winter will have stripped the lush forest down to its bare brown bark. All the bears will be hibernating. Most of the tourists will be home, waiting for spring to invite them back to the park.

I’ll cross paths with the AT later in the week, where it crosses I-66 outside of Linden, Virginia, on its way northward towards Harper’s Ferry. I’ll be driving east on the highway, on my way south to Caity’s. She’ll show me pictures from her hike, and I’ll tell her about my favorite passages from Bryson’s book, and we’ll both want to go hiking together. We’ll wait for spring, I suspect, but when we do finally go, Bryson will come along as company—it’ll be impossible to ever hike the AT without him.

We spent almost two days exploring St. Louis, but not without first making a stop in Illinois’ capital city of Springfield. Three hours and acres of open land Southwest of Chicago, we parked Julie’s car near the state capitol building and went for a walk.

Among the small city’s greatest offering is the Lincoln Home National Historic Site. We saw the home Abraham Lincoln shared with his wife and children before moving to Washington, D.C. in 1861. White picket fences line the four-block historic neighborhood and several exhibits fill the houses and nearby visitor center. Though we did not go inside, the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum  stands nearby for those interested in diving deeper into the former president’s history.

Two hours later, we reached St. Louis to explore more new adventures:

Anheuser-Busch Brewery. After living in Colorado for three years, a state known for its abundance of breweries, I did not plan for even the world’s largest brewing company’s headquarters to surprise me. I was wrong. We toured this 140-acre complex by walking brick paved streets lined with red brick buildings. We visited the Clydesdales immaculate stable and finished the tour with two free drinks in the Hospitality Room. The Anheuser-Busch Brewery reminded me more of a small city than a brewery. And, we were happy to be the city’s beer-loving tourists.

St. Louis Arch. Few famous structures project from their cities so vividly as this 630-foot “Gateway to the West.” Opened in 1965 to commemorate one of America’s most significant historic events, the Louisiana Purchase, the Arch towers St. Louis and the city’s adjacent Mississippi River. For a reasonable $10, we rode a tram up one of the Arch’s legs to an enclosed observation platform. Just below the Arch, we saw St. Louis’s Old Courthouse where Dred Scott and his wife, Harriet, sued for their emancipation and helped spark the Civil War. While simply driving past the Arch is an experience in itself, a visit to its platform completes the trip. After all, who wouldn’t want to ride a tiny egg-like elevator up an enclosed, curved structure? I felt like I was in Mork and Mindy.

City Museum. Had we not received recommendations to visit City Museum, we might have passed this attraction. That would have been a mistake. Our visit to St. Louis would have been worth it had we only visited this adult playground. We crawled through caves, jumped in a large colorful ball pit and slid down a 10-story tall twisty slide. We even ran inside a large hamster wheel, which confirmed this as one of the most unique attractions I have ever visited. The rush of climbing through the air within coiled steel tunnels paired with hours of continuous laughter made this a top adventure of our trip.

We topped off our city visit with lunch at the St. Louis Bread Company, a cafe many now know nationwide as Panera Bread. We ate the best pizza we had eaten in a while at PW Pizza then enjoyed drinks and dueling pianos at Big Bang Bar downtown.

While we planned our trip around some of the city’s top attractions, St. Louis’s red brick buildings and clusters of restaurants also caught my attention. We did not have enough time to explore the city’s neighborhoods in depth, but another visit will be in store to do so.

#18

Most Civil War historians in the Park Service feel a little battlefield when it comes to Gettysburg. It’s the great Granddaddy of All Battlefields in North America, marked and monumented with enough granite, marble, and bronze to sink Rhode Island into the sea. Pennsylvania, being bigger and more landlocked, isn’t in such danger. In fact, Gettysburg’s location in the Keystone State, so relatively close to the major metropolitan areas of the east coast, ensured its place as Hallowed Ground—not because it represented the “High Water Mark of the Confederacy” but because it was certain to attract tourists. Lots and lots of tourists.

(The notion of the “High Water Mark” just a widely successful PR ploy basically engineered by one man in an attempt to attract those tourists and reinforce his own version of the battle history).

In Spotsylvania, where we get a sliver of the visitation Gettysburg does, we put an advantageous spin on the discrepancy: note how pristine and undisturbed our battlefield is compared to Gettysburg. In Petersburg, south of the James River, some of the rangers feel like the forgotten red-headed stepchildren compared to Gettysburg. In the Western Theater, at Chickamauga-Chattanooga, I know a ranger who refuses to even mention Gettysburg by name.

If people have been to only one battlefield, it’s usually Gettysburg. For me, it was my first, and for years most frequented, battlefield. As an elementary school student growing up in Hershey, Pennsylvania, I boarded a big yellow school bus every year for the obligatory field trip to the battlefield. It was about an hour drive or so. Once there, I clambered through the rocks at Devil’s Den, wandered through the buckshot of monuments at the “High Water Mark,” and swooned with the sheer awesomeness of the nearby wax museum. It wasn’t until I grew up a bit that I appreciated the magnitude of what the place really meant.

“More than any other place in the United States, this place is indeed Hallowed Ground,” says historian James McPherson, best known for his Pulitzer-winning Battle Cry of Freedom. He’s also author of Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg.

“I have toured the battlefield by car, by bus, on a bicycle, and on foot,” McPherson says, explaining that he’s given so many tours there he’s lost count. Hallowed Ground is his attempt to take readers along on one of those tours. “Join me for a walk on this hallowed ground,” he says.

I intentionally read this book following Confederates in the Attic as a way to bring the two books into conversation with each other. In Confederates, author Tony Horwitz explores the landscape of Civil War writ large with an immersive year-long field trip that takes him all across the South. In contrast, McPherson gives readers a much more intimate experience over a much smaller landscape.

Like Horwitz, McPherson is a character in his own story, but beyond that, McPherson takes a vastly different approach. As with Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, Hallowed Ground represents an “outer limit” of creative nonfiction. This is the boundaryland, where the first-person memoir fades back into straight nonfiction because the first-person is a nearly negligible factor.

McPherson shares some of his personal experiences on the battlefield, such as a stop by some of his students from Princeton near the monument of the Twentieth Maine on the edge of Little Round Top. The regiment had executed a maneuver that arguably saved the Union left flank. The incident was made famous for modern buffs by Michael Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning novel The Killer Angels and by Ken Burns’ The Civil War, turning the regiment’s commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, into the subject of a veritable one-man cottage industry. One of McPherson’s students had written her thesis about Chamberlain.

“As we came to the place where the Twentieth Maine fought, she could no longer hold back the tears. Nor could the rest of us,” McPherson shares. “Although I have experienced other powerful emotions while walking other Civil War battlefields, none has ever matched that April day in 1987. The world has little noted what I said there, but it can never forget what they did there.”

That’s about as personal as he gets—which is to say, not very. He’s not using the first-person perspective to reveal anything about himself. It’s just a convenient conceit for sharing stories.

He makes the reader complicit by using the first-person plural “we” at times, such as when he literally gives directions for getting from one place to another. For instance, when bringing readers to Pickett’s Charge, the culminating action of the battle’s third day, McPherson writes: “Our next stop is the jump-off point for that attack. To get there from East Cavalry field, we return to town on the Hanover Road (State Route 116) and continue west through downtown Gettysburg on Middle Street, which becomes the Fairfield Road….”

He’s equally unpoetic when he urges visitors to look around at carious spots. “A stroll around this ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy’ is well worth the time it takes to read the interpretive markers and absorb the information on the three dozen regimental monuments and the dozen or more tablets originally placed by the War Department,” he writes.

He talks about the Park Services then-plans for landscape restoration, chopping down some trees to open view sheds so that the battlefield looks like it did in 1863 when the armies fought there. The plan was to make it easier to read the ground and experience the landscape the way soldiers did. Most of that work has been carried out since the book’s publication in 2003. Such references, however, immediately date the book, making a read-through now obsolete.

That’s what makes Hallowed Ground so disappointing to me. It often feels like McPherson just phoned it in, like he needed a few bucks so he cranked out a quick book on Gettysburg. Slap “Gettysburg” on something and people will snatch it up (says the guy who slaps “Stonewall” on things and has people snatch them up…).

McPherson plays to the general audienceship, too. He makes sure to tell as many quaint war stories as he can, such as that of Sallie the War Dog, a regimental mascot who appears in bronze, lying at the feet of her regiment’s monument. He talks about Chamberlain. He talks about Amos Humiston, a dead soldier who lay unidentified until except for a photo of his three kids clutched in his hand, eventually spotted by his wife months later when it was reproduced in a newspaper article. (Amos came from Portville, N.Y., a town literally seven miles down the road from my house, so I’m a fan of the story.)

McPherson debunks myths of Gettysburg and sometimes even explains why he’ll continue to perpetuate a myth supposedly debunked by other historians. It’s the kind of stuff a general reader would enjoy–one who maybe has that “I visited there once” level of knowledge of the battle.

I don’t get much about McPherson himself, but I do get a lot about the battle. His battle narratives are easily the strongest part of the book. He “walks” visitors place to place, and then uses what he sees and where he stops as his springboard into the history. Such narrative is always readable and excellent.

But overall, the book was clinical and not especially thought-provoking. I didn’t get to muse over much. I sensed McPherson’s respect for the place, but I didn’t get any sense of awe about it. For a guy who’s toured it so often, I expected to feel a little more love about the place. I expected it to feel hallowed.

It’s a short book, so a read-through isn’t going to be a waste of time, especially for people who like anything Gettysburg-related (slap that name on it!). It’s probably the best short account of the battle available. But Hallowed Ground still feels like a far battle cry from McPherson’s best work.

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Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.