Orwell, George. The Road to Wigan Pier

even now, if coal could be produced without pregnant woman dragging it to and fro, I fancy we should let them do it rather than deprive ourselves of coal. But most of the time, of course, we should prefer to forget that they were doing it. It is so with all types of manual work; it keeps us alive, and we are oblivious of its existence.

Orwell lives his story. “[B]y no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner; the work would kill me in a few weeks,” he quickly realizes. He doesn’t just “tell,” though; Orwell is a master of the “show.”

It was not only the dirt, the smells and the vile food, but the feeling of stagnant meaningless decay, of having got down into some subterranean place where people go creeping round and round, just like blackbeetles, in an endless muddle of slovened jobs and mean grievances.

Particularly in the context of the hard lives of the working class, Orwell suggests that his own trade seems soft. “Words are such feeble things,” he says.

It’s hard to take him at his word about that, though, because Orwell writes description about as well as any writer could dream of. His opening sequence, set in a boarding house, rolls right into it: “Hanging from the ceiling here was a heavy glass chandelier on which the dust was so think that it was like fur.” Suspicious tripe, coal-black fingerprints on slices of bread, crumbs so long unbrushed from the kitchen tablecloth that “I used to get to know individual crumbs by sight and watch their progress up and down the table from day to day”—Orwell doesn’t miss a trick when it comes to setting scene.

The second half of the book grinds down into Orwell’s treatise on the pros and cons of socialism, although for this he can be forgiven. After all, Wigan Pier was written for the Left Book Club, and Orwell explicitly wrote his piece with the idea of social change in mind. “I would not do it if I did not think that I am sufficiently typical of my class, or rather sub-caste, to have a certain symptomatic importance,” he says. This portion of the book was, I admit, of less value to me as I look at the was creative nonfiction writers write about place, although I did go through it just for the sake of enjoying Orwell’s clarity of thought.

Orwell’s social consciousness and his sense of responsibility as a journalist went hand in hand—powered by incredibly literary skill. In Orwell’s hands, words are never such feeble things.

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.

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.

#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

#23

I’ve written before about my fascination with the Congo and Africa’s mythical “dark heart.” Conrad. Tarzan. Mkele-Mbembe. Stanley and Livingston and Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner. “Mistah Kurtz. He dead.” Oh, the horror, the horror.

Beyond all the myth is a country torn by war, wracked by poverty and tainted by the overexploitation of colonialism. It might hold allure as an exotic place to go for adventure, but really, it’s a place to die—or nearly so, as Jeffrey Tayler chronicled in his book Facing the Congo: A Modern-Day Journey in the Heart of Darkness.

“With its sonorous o’s, the word Congo resonated with the power of a village drum to conjure up visions of jungles and thrashing crocodiles along a great African river,” Tayler thought, falling for the romance of it much the way I always have. He was living in Moscow and, entering his thirties, facing an existential crisis. “I needed to know who I was and what I was good for. I did not,” he said.

Tayler decides to make a descent by pirogue—a kind of dugout canoe—from the upper reaches of the river to the capital of Kinshasa. The route would in part, recreate Henry Morton Stanley’s journey in the 1870s. “[O]ur days are numbered and our time runs out,” Tayler wrote. “I hoped that the expedition would settle once and for all my doubts about who I was and what I could accomplish.”

If the premise sounds vaguely familiar, it’s similar to (but more exciting than) Julian Smith’s Crossing the Heart of Africa. Smith traverses the continent south to north, following the route of explorer Ewart Grogan. Smith’s book, published in 2010, ties together his own adventures, written as a travelogue, with Grogan’s story, and he weaves in a whole bunch of the continent’s history and natural history, too.

Tayler’s book, published in 2000, is almost pure plot. Yes, he weaves in some of the Congo’s recent history—in fact, one of the themes of the book is that he cannot escape the recent history—and he uses Stanley’s experience as a sort of touchstone that he comes back to now and again (nothing like Smith does with Grogan’s story, though). But overall, Facing the Congo is gripping narrative, written like an adventure story. And what an adventure.

Tayler considers his plight as it unfolds—and “plight” is probably an understatement because, it turns out, his life is in almost constant danger from bullying soldiers, hostile tribes people, civil war, the weather, crocodiles and hippos, and the river itself. “It’s very dangerous,” one tribesman tells him, “We Bangala don’t care for life. If we see a mondele [a white foreigner] many of us think only to kill him and take his things.”

Even sleeping becomes an ordeal along the danger-fraught river. “The moon hung a giant pale orange orb,” he writes,

the forest echoed with hoots from monkeys, with the tumultuous splashings of hippos in the shallows somewhere behind us. We had bivouacked early in a malodorous and desolate bight of palm and rubber vines. Biting ants, fat and black, infested our camp, scuttling over our legs, chomping away before we could scrape them off….

Compounding his travails is his inability to understand his guide, Desi—not linguistically but, rather, psychologically. “For me, everything here was new and urgent and unique,” Tayler writes; “for Desi the Congo was a harsh and ancient waterway out of which to wrest a meager living while he battled constant fatigue from worms or fevers or whatever it was that was afflicting him. He would not hurry because, danger or no, this river was his home and he lived by rhythms that allowed him to conserve his strength, enjoy himself when he could, and go on.

Only later does he realize “that I had exploited [the Congo] as a playground on which to solve my own rich-boy existential dilemmas.” He adds that his “drama of self-actualization proved obscenely trivial beside the suffering of the [people] and the injustices of the past.” Ah, to follow in the well-worn footsteps created by a hundred years of European exploitation….

Tayler comes to nothing more profound—or less powerfully obvious—than “time will always be show, and there is always much to be learned from living.” Oh, and “value what I have and…strive to preserve it.” I’m not really giving away the ending because, honestly, his flashes of genius felt underwhelming and anticlimactic following his journey.

It’s an excellent book overall, though. It truly is an adventure through the dark heart of the continent—one I’m glad I can take on the page and not in the pirogue.

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.

#19

I never read The Perfect Storm until I saw the trailer for the 2000 movie. There, on the big screen, a fishing boat tried to bull its way straight up—literally straight up—a gigantic wall of water. “Did you see that?” I said to my wife, smacking her lightly on the shoulder. “Did you see that? Straight up a wall of water!”

That same image would appear on movie posters when the film finally came out a couple months later.

I had to get the book.

By then, The Perfect Storm had been released in paperback, and I was able to find a copy whose cover had not yet been co-opted by the movie studio. The edition did benefit from a new afterward by the author, Sebastian Junger, which has proven to be one of the most useful “case studies” on literary journalism that I’ve ever read.

When Junger chose to write about the loss of the swordboat Andrea Gail out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, he was, in effect, choosing to write about something unknowable. Andrea Gail, lost at sea in October 1991 during a storm of cataclysmic proportions, left no final trace. Junger had a few final radio conversations to draw on, but what happened to the boat and the five men aboard in its last hours was a mystery.

“I’ve written as complete an account as possible of something that can never be fully known,” Junger said in his afterward. “It is exactly that unknowable element, however, that has made it an interesting book to write and, I hope, to read.”

Along with the challenge of piecing together the story of the boat and crew, Junger had to explain the way of life aboard a swordboat. He had to recreate the way of life in a Massachusetts fishing village. He had to delve into the meteorological facts that explained “the perfect storm.”

“On one hand, I wanted to write a completely factual book that would stand on its own as a piece of journalism,” he said in his introduction. “On the other hand, I didn’t want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture.”

And here’s why I’ve come to admire the book so much: Junger immerses himself in the story (much the way Tony Horwitz did for Confederates in the Attic). He spent a lot of time hanging out in The Crow’s Nest, the Gloucester bar where the Andrea Gail’s crew hung out. “By and large it’s a bar of people who know each other; people who aren’t known are invited over for a drink,” Junger wrote. “It’s hard to buy your own beer at the Crow’s Nest, and it’s hard to leave after just one….”

While there, Junger spent time soaking up the atmosphere. His presence there over weeks allowed him to eventually earn the trust of locals so they’d open up to him and talk about their lives, their jobs, and their experiences at sea. “Look, I don’t know a thing about fishing,” he’d say. “So if you don’t tell me about it, I’m going to get it all wrong.”

Sometimes they’d talk to him; sometimes not. Sometimes he’d have his pen and notepad out; sometimes he’d have to excuse himself, run the men’s room, and scribble a few notes there in private. Some people, like Ricky Shatford, the older brother of crewmember Bobby Shatford, didn’t take kindly at all to what they saw as the intrusion. “I told people I was going to kill you,” Shatford eventually told Junger when they’d made piece with each other.

By that point, the book had come out and become a bestseller. Shatford had finally been able to see for himself that Junger treated the story—and his younger brother—with respect.

“Had they not lived the lives they did, and agreed to talk with me about them, the book would not exist,” Junger conceded in his afterword.

He constructed his narrative by gathering everything he could through interviews and research. In instances when he couldn’t answer a question directly—like, what must it have been like for guys on the boat to be caught in the storm—he interviewed people who’d been in similar situations. He never takes that information and projects it onto the crew of the Andrea Gail, but he does suggest parallels and lets readers draw their own conclusions.

In the end, Junger sticks to facts “in as wide-ranging a way as possible,” he said. As a result, there are “varying kinds of information in the book.”

For instance, he uses direct quotes for anything he recorded in a formal interview, but dialogue, based on people’s recollections, appear without quotation marks. “No dialogue was made up,” he emphasized. For radio conversations, he uses italics. He incorporates a lot of research from reading, although he typically doesn’t cite any of his sources, an attempt on his part to keep the narrative lean and readable. In fact, it reads much like a novel, and he uses present tense to keep the story immediate.

Except for the first-person introduction and afterward, Junger keeps himself entirely out of the book. By some definitions, that means The Perfect Storm doesn’t qualify as “creative nonfiction.” By other definitions, Junger’s style of “literary journalism” does qualify. (I realize that’s a question more germane to my own reading at present than it is for most readers, who probably don’t give a rat’s ass how to categorize it!)

In the context of “place,” which is the lens I’m using to look at these books, The Perfect Storm certainly captures a good sense of Gloucester and, even better, of the sea. However, it’s most useful to me now as a model of how a writer interacts within place as he attempts to capture it.

When I first read it, The Perfect Storm was a watershed book for me. It helped show me what else nonfiction could be. It showed me how to tackle some of the ethical questions that arise from being a writer in pursuit of a story. Those are lessons I still reflect on, and pass along to my students, to this day.

“Writers often don’t know much about the world they’re trying to describe, but they don’t necessarily need to,” Junger concluded. “They just need to ask a lot of questions. And then they need to step back and let the story speak for itself.”

#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.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

#17

If there’s one book I’ve wished I’d written, it’s Confederates in the Attic. Of course, Tony Horwitz already wrote it, nearly two decades ago (I can hardly believe it’s been that long). Here’s a guy who wandered around the South, talking to people about the legacy of the Civil War. He asked questions, had conversations, observed, listened, and explored the landscape for himself. He immersed himself in the story.

This, I tell my students, is what good feature writers do. They take the time to do the story justice—and a story as complex as this one requires a lot of time if you’re going to be thorough and fair. That’s what I respect most about Horwitz’s work on the book: he takes the time to make an honest attempt at trying to understanding that which, I suspect, can never fully be understood.

Horwitz had a lifelong interest in the war, but it had lain mostly dormant throughout most of his adult life. Then, one morning without warning, he awoke to the sound of gunshots in the street outside his home. A group of Civil War reenactors were filming a TV documentary on the battle of Fredericksburg, and during a break in the action, they collapsed in Horwitz’s yard. Horwitz brought them fresh coffee, and that’s when the questions began.

The “hardcore” reenactors “didn’t just dress up and shoot blanks,” Horwitz discovered. “They sought absolute fidelity to the 1860s: its homespun clothing, antique speech patterns, sparse diet and simple utensils. Adhered to properly, this fundamentalism produced a time-travel high….”

One reenactor brags about soaking his brass buttons overnight in a saucer filled with urine, which oxidized the brass to make it look like a button from the 1860s. “My wife woke up this morning, sniffed the air and said, ‘Tim, you’ve been peeing on your buttons again,’” the man told Horwitz. (Reenactor friends of mine have since told me urine doesn’t really work, but it sure makes a colorful story.)

What makes these men tick, Horwitz wondered. Why does the war hold such sway over them. In fact, he thought, why does the war hold such sway over so many people?

And thus begins one of the oddest of odysseys. Horwitz submerges himself in the South, since that’s where most of the war was fought, to find out for himself. The resulting exploration of place turns into a memorable cultural portrait of the South.

Horwitz decides to start in Charleston, South Carolina, at the site of Fort Sumter, where the war’s first shots were fired, but the War waylays him well before he gets there. On his way south, through North Carolina, he’s sidetracked into the world of the Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, some of whom attend Civil War-related meetings seven nights a week. To commemorate “Lee-Jackson Day,” a holiday once widely celebrated across the South that combined the birthdays of long-dead Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, the folks play Civil War trivia games.

At times, Horwitz acts as a fly on the wall as he takes in the things going on around him. But at his best, he is a full-blown participant, taking sides in the trivia games, dressing up for a reenactment, and offering his unique, submerged perspective on what he sees and experiences. Best of all, he strikes up conversations everywhere he goes, asking, asking, asking.

Horwitz tracks down the legend of Tara from Gone with the Wind. He meets the last living Confederate widow. He rushes through Virginia with a hard-core reenactor, Robert Lee Hodge, hitting as many Civil War sites as they can in a week, what Hodge calls a “Civil Wargasm.”

In one of my favorite encounters of the book, he talks with Shelby Foote, the Memphis writer who penned the sweeping three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, and who gained national exposure as a kindly grandfather-looking “Voice of the South” in Ken Burns’ Civil War documentary. “It’s the sort of experience we never forget,” Foote told him. “I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”

While Horwitz discovers that the Civil War is very much alive throughout the South, he also discovers that it’s a Cold War. The lines are no longer just geographic, either: they’re racial, social, and economic, too.

That’s what helps make Confederates in the Attic more than just a fascinating collection of eccentric people—although that is what makes it so captivating. Horwitz manages to write an intensely thought-provoking book. Every eccentric brings a new shade of meaning to the discussion. For every hardcore reenactor like Hodge, who can lay on the ground and “bloat” to look like the dead Confederates in wartime photos, there’s a Michael Westerman, the nineteen-year-old victim of a racially motivated murder, killed while flying a Confederate flag from the bed of his pickup truck. Citizens of Richmond who debate the placement of a statue to the late tennis great Arthur Ashe bring up incredibly nuanced arguments that transcend notions of mere “pro” and “con.”

Horwitz doesn’t shy away from any of it. Confederates in the Attic astutely explores racism, political correctness, national and regional identity, and the relevance of our own history as a way to understand ourselves. Like any good journalist, Horwitz doesn’t pretend to have any answers, but he lays out as many sides to the story as possible so readers can think for themselves.

Horwitz does get a few facts wrong, and sometimes his interpretation is shaky (I take particular exception to the way he tends to portray Stonewall Jackson as a total crackpot). He leaves a few things out, and he stirs up trouble, too. I know some of the people involved in some of the stories, so I have the inside scoop on a few things. Horwitz commits no unpardonable sins, though, and I can forgive much because of the earnestness with which he approaches his quest.

“The present is just a split second,” Hodge tells Horwitz. “The past lasts forever. You can keep going back to it.”

Indeed, Confederates in the Attic is much the same. This marked my fifth or sixth time through the book. It stands as a landmark piece of feature journalism and was  easily one of the best books of the 1990s. Although almost twenty years old, I can keep going back to it, over and over.

————

Cross-posted at Emerging Civil War.

#16

Walden is one of those books everyone’s heard of, but I frequently wonder how many people have actually read it.

It is, of course, the very stuff of high school English classes. I still remember by eleventh grade teacher, Mrs. Cummings, tell us that Thoreau lived what Emerson preached. Ralph Waldo Emerson was the great American philosopher of his day, advocating a simpler lifestyle and harmony with nature; Henry David Thoreau lived a simpler lifestyle in a small log cabin next to Walden Pond, outside Concord, Massachusetts, where both men live. Together, they made up the Janus of American Transcendentalism.

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately,” Thoreau wrote of his experience, “to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

His book, Walden, has since become part of the American literary canon, part of American myth, It’s a seminal work of nature writing.

But has anyone actually read it?

The first time I hit up Walden, I was studying for my comprehensive exams for my master’s in English at the University of Maine. On an early-autumn Saturday, I pilgrimaged to Walden, a four-hour drive, to read the book on the shores of the pond. I bought a copy at the bookstore there, read several chapters, then decided to hike around. Swimmers frolicked at the small beach near Walden’s east end. Canoeists drifted across the pond’s center. A train rumbled along the far ridge. This was hardly a natural setting of silence and solitude.

A hiking path rings Walden’s shores while another runs the crest of the ridgeline that circles the pond. Footpaths criss-cross between them like cobwebs. I always took the route that let me be as close to the water as possible. I wanted to see the pond’s nooks and crannies. People were tucked into almost every one. At least one couple, figuring it was “private enough,” were getting it on in the water a few feet offshore.

In later years, the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation would string barbed wire sans barbs along most of the footpaths as part of an erosion control project. So many feet trammeled the pathways that the hillsides themselves were getting packed and beaten. The fencing gave the woods a kind of concentration camp feel, if you can believe it. No one seemed to give the fencing any heed, anyway, though.

I spent so much time exploring on that first day that I didn’t have time to finish the book. Instead, I dipped it in the pond. I made sure it was sopping wet. Gingerly, I carried it, dripping, up the sloping paved walkway to the parking lot and tucked it into the truck of my car.

I’ve repeated the drenching only a few times since, giving away Walden-soaked copies of Walden as special gifts to a few dear friends over the years, people who’d “get it.” For such folks, the gift is a treasure.

I’ve returned to Walden several times over the years. On one early trip, my daughter talked me into swimming with her, although I’d not anticipated it at all. I waded into the pond with her and let her splash around, and I lifted her high into the air. My wife took pictures. Thereafter, my daughter always loved to return to “The Pond.”

I’ve returned to Walden, too, although I’ve never made it all the way through the book. I’ve read snippets. I suspect a lot of people can make that claim, at least. It helps that Thoreau virtually speaks in aphorisms—“to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely”…”a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone”… “If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them” … ”Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!”

When I graduated from high school, Mrs. Cummings gave me a dictionary as a gift. She inscribed it with what has become my favorite Thoreau-ism: “If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.” I post that quote on my office door every few weeks.

Thoreau’s aphorisms are as rich as the maples along Walden’s shores as they flush gold and red in autumn. He gives himself over to a (mostly) self-sufficient lifestyle in the woods, and he finds delight in it. “I have, as it were, my own sun and moon and stars, and a little world all to myself,” he says. He spends most of his days carrying out the daily business of living—building his cabin, tending to his beans, cutting firewood, fetching water—or exploring his surroundings. “[F]or I was rich,” he says, “if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days, and spent them lavishly.”

I love, love, love the way Thoreau revels in the world around himself. It is enough to just be: “It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.”

Thoreau spent two years in the woods along Walden Pond. During that time, he frequently walked into town, where he had his mother cook for him sometimes. He took the first of his trips to the Maine woods during that time, too. So, he wasn’t the reclusive hermit history has sometimes led us to believe—an image he himself cultivated. “I love to be alone,” he wrote. “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”

After his two-year sojourn, Thoreau returned to civilization. “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there,” he wrote. “Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time on this one.”

Yet, for the rest of his life, Thoreau seldom ventured too far away from his home in Concord. He went on trips—most notably to Cape Cod and back to Maine—but his tie to the lands around Concord bound him tight until his death in 1862.

Walden has never been out of print, so someone must be buying it—but I wonder if it’s one of those books that people have even if it’s one they haven’t necessarily read. Much of Thoreau’s mid-nineteenth-century style is cumbersome for modern readers, and parts of the book are downright preachy. Much of Thoreau’s prose is beautiful, too, though.

“[A]s the sun rose, I saw it throwing off its nightly clothing of mist, and here and there, by degrees, its soft ripples or its smooth reflecting surface was reveled, while the mists, like ghosts, were stealthily withdrawing in every direction into the woods, as at the breaking up of some nocturnal conventicle.”

To know such things exist in the world is reason to get up every day. That’s why I’ve come to believe that the idea of Thoreau, the idea of Walden, are what really matter most. “A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature,” Thoreau wrote. “It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature.”

My return to Walden this week—all the way through the book for the first time ever—has been a treasure. It’s not that the book awed me, even if Thoreau’s legacy certainly does. Rather, it was good to be reminded why Thoreau is worth knowing. I, like so many of the writers I’ve spent time with over the past two weeks, owe him a tremendous debt for leading the way, for showing us how, for walking to the beat of his own drum.

“I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go on before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains,” Thoreau said. “I do not with to go below now.”

#15: Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation by L. Maarten Troost (2008)

The first time I landed in Shanghai, I couldn’t believe how big everything was. The terminal stretched off to some Whovian vanishing point. It was like that driving through the city, too—mile after mile of skyscraper, each as interesting to look at as the last. This was a city that wanted to be Manhattan but bigger, richer, busier.

But the bus windows showed me something distressing, too, as we rumbled across the coastal plain from the airport to the city: muddy canals choked with floating garbage, heaps of garbage and rubble scattered in back lots and side yards, an armada of small blue flatbed trucks jockeying for first place in a race that wasn’t even happening.

China turned my brain into an Escher landscape, constantly challenging me at every turn. I found new things to be amazed about, new things to wonder about, and new things to worry about.

China, I suspect, feels Escher-esque itself, thrashing about in the throes of an identity crisis as it lumbers out on the world stage: ancient and modern, beauty and squalor, opulent wealth and crippling poverty. Everything you can imagine about China is true—and so is its opposite. And everything is go, go, go.

I blogged extensively about my trips to China both times I was there (in 2009 and 2010), so I was eager to see what fellow traveler J. Maarten Troost had to say about his adventures, just a couple years before me, in Lost on Planet China: One Man’s Attempt to Understand the World’s Most Mystifying Nation.

“I had been to dozens of Chinatowns. But this was the mother of all Chinatowns…” Troost said after arriving. “I understood nothing, a sensation that disturbed my psyche. I felt profoundly out of my element.”

In China, it doesn’t take long for a first-time visitor to realize just how very delusional he has been in terms of his assumptions about the country. If nothing else, traveling through China is a profoundly humbling experience, no more so than when you realize that nearly everything you thought you knew about the country, all your presumptions and book learning, your opinions, turn out to be utterly, completely wrong.

At times, I felt like Troost and I lived the same experience. People drive “as if to kill,” he says. He cringed at the unearthly haze that hung over the landscape and “swirled in gray and brown and yellow plumes.” He was trampled in the scrum-like surges that turned standing in queue into “a forum for physical sport.” Most of all, he was stunned by the number of people.

“From the outside, 1.3 billion people is simply a statistic,” he says. “Inside China, the enormity of the country’s population colors everything.”

For example, consider the limited number of names people can choose. “There are 88 million people in China named Zhang. There are more people called Chen in China than there are Canadians in Canada,” Troost writes. “It’s become so problematic that no one knows Hu’s Hu in China.”

Troost’s sense of humor drives much of the book. He is, quite honestly, hilarious. I’ve not laughed my way through a book like that in years. But his humor is witty and intelligent, often the result of his sharp observations. It’s also a way to make some of his insights go down a little smoother because, let’s face it, there’s much in China to worry about.

“[I]t’s difficult to spend a moment in China and not be utterly awed by the scale of the ongoing environmental catastrophe,” Troost observes. Together with India, he says, there are now 2.5 billion people in the global economy that just weren’t there fifteen years ago. “The consequences for the environment are alarming.”

The sky itself serves as a constant reminder. It’s “apocalyptic” in its smogginess. He has a buddy who lights up a cigarette so he get “clean smoke.” I, too, had heard of China’s legendarily bad pollution, although by the time I got there, I could see all the way into Beijing from the top of the Great Wall, some fifty miles distant. Apparently, in preparation for the Olympics, the Chinese government cleaned up the air—not by reducing pollution or instituting pollution control measures but by simply closing down thousands of factories and moving them elsewhere.

The water, too, usually seemed on the verge of bubbling into an open cesspool. “One third of all the freshwater in China—that is, all the rivers and lakes in this enormous country—is considered unsafe for industrial use,” Troost discovered. “When the water is so vile you can’t even use it in a lead paint factory because it’s too dirty, I’d say you have a water problem.”

Later, when he sees how sparse the once-snowy Himalayas have become, where much of China’s (and India’s) water comes from, he gets worried: ‎”and I tried to squelch that gnawing feeling that we are on the cusp of unsettling times.”

With 1.3 million people, who all need food and water and jobs and space, there aren’t a lot of options. “There is not vast empty hinterland in China capable of sustaining a huge population that isn’t already sustaining—barely—a huge population,” he says.

Add to that his “creeping awareness that there are no rules in China, that so much of life in China is essentially a flirtation with anarchy,” and you might understand Troost’s unease.

I always thought of China a little like the Wild West, but as Troost observes, China is getting impatient for the West to get the hell out of the way. “The general attitude among the Chinese toward Americans is similar to that of a young, hotshot quarterback waiting for the tired, banged-up veteran to step aside so he can lead the team,” he says.

My own experience with the Chinese was a bit different. I generally found them to be warm and friendly and intensely curious about us. I didn’t travel as freely or extensively among them as Troost did, so I didn’t get the breadth of exposure he did.

Impatience and disdain or not, part of the Chinese identity crisis stems from their fierce pride in being Chinese coupled with their hunger to embrace a Western standard of living. “Not everyone can have everything in China, not yet, but every day there are more who do,” Troost says. The future looks sunny (“okay, smoggy,) for China—“barring a complete societal collapse as environmental degradation undergoes devastating feedback loops.”

Alas, the burden of responsibility for China’s catastrophic environmental practices lies squarely on us.

In the United States, we squawk about shoddy goods, poisonous toothpaste, contaminated toys. We bemoan the lost jobs. We point to the slave labor in China, like the unfortunate people, kids even, snookered or kidnapped to work in the factories. Or we lament what China is doing to the environment…. But do we decide to buy domestically made, high-quality goods manufactured in a well-regulated environment that ensures humane working conditions? We do not.

My own travels over two years were limited to Shanghai, Nanjing, Xi’an, Beijing, and a couple smaller cities (although in China, “smaller” is relative). Troost goes far and wide, including a foray into occupied Tibet. By the end, at nearly 400 pages, the book feels long, although it doesn’t ever drag; I was just feeling travel fatigue, I suppose. Troost was, too, I think. For instance, he goes to Chengdu to see pandas but then hardly writes about what he sees. He starts to get a little perfunctory by the end, finally conceding, “What is here cannot all be seen by one man. Not in a lifetime.”

I’d agree. China is just too damn big, too larger-than-life. Too magnificent.

We need to pay attention. There’s more at stake than we could possibly imagine.

#14: The Living Great Lakes: In Search of the Heart of the Inland Seas by Jerry Dennis (2003)

Lake Erie taught me how important it is to watch the sun set. It was the summer of 2010, and I was in the middle of my divorce. The semester, my worst ever, had just ended, followed immediately by a whirlwind trip to China. I had a younger woman giving me the yo-yo treatment. I needed to figure out a way to calm the tumult in my life.

So for nearly a week, in early June, I found myself a spot along the breakwall that stretches out from Walnut Beach toward the lighthouse that guards the entrance to Ashtabula’s habor. I watched the sun, bright as a blood orange, dip to the horizon and vanish into the lake.

My son loved to come to this same beach when he came to my mother’s to visit. He’d play in the surf for hours, letting it bump and bat him around as he splashed against the waves and fought off sea monsters.

One day, as I watched him play, the lake chose to brand me. I was sitting in a lawnchair just above the waterline, my feet loosely tucked into my deck shoes. The sun, reflecting off the water, hit with extra intensity and burned the tops of my feet in an arc that matched the lip of my shoe. The near-blistery red eventually cooled to a walnut brown, but my toes, protected by my shoes, remained white. That tanline stayed with me for almost a full year. The lake didn’t want me to forget.

Another day, the sand itself burned by feet. Sand can get up to thirty degrees hotter than the air temperature, and on one 90-degree day, the sand got hot indeed. It didn’t sink in until I was already halfway to the restrooms—far enough along on my trip that I was committed.

But that June, I returned each cool evening to sit on the breakwall to watch a repeat performance of the sunset. I watched a lot of sunsets that summer. I learned a lot.

Other than sunsets, I’ve not had much connection with any of the Great Lakes. I’ve seen Lake Ontario a few times driving along its western horseshoe from Niagara Falls up to Toronto. As a mid-teen, I caught a glimpse of Lake Michigan during a trip to see a Cubs game back when Wrigley Field only had day games. And that’s it.

So when I saw Jerry Dennis’ The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas, I was quick to check it out. I know little about the lakes but wanted to know more; furthermore, they constituted a distinct geographic area not yet represented on my reading list. That the Outdoor Writers of America chose it as its “Best Book of 2003” seemed to suggest it would make a good addition.

Dennis lives along Lake Michigan and so has had a lifelong connection with—and passion for—that lake. It triggered in him a larger interest in all five of the lakes: Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario (from west to east, as the water flows, although as a kid I learned them by the acronym HOMES: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior). “All five shape the land and alter the weather and define the journeys of those who live nearby,” Dennis says.

Like a mariner called by the sea, Dennis heard a call from the lakes. For years, he’d been studying their stories and histories, their geologies and hydrologies, their people and places. “I had the love, I think, but not the perception,” he says. “I couldn’t see far enough. And I couldn’t unite what I saw with what I already knew.”

So Dennis secured himself a position on a 104-foot schooner sailing from Lake Michigan through the lakes and out to the sea, where it was eventually bound for Southwest Harbor, Maine (near the spot where, last week, I sat along the seawall with Rachel Carson’s books). Dennis uses the boat trip to frame the larger story of the lakes in what turns out to be a fascinating book—part natural history, part travelogue, part memoir. It’s exactly the kind of book I wish I could write.

Dennis is a great storyteller and a great researcher. His adventure, which lasts a month and takes him through Michigan, Huron, Erie, and Ontario, gives him the chance to unite all those things he knows about the lakes.

The only lake he doesn’t get to visit is Superior because it lies to the north, off-course. “Superior has always reminded me of charismatic people, the ones who dominate a room by their presence,” he says. “Superior is larger, deeper, cleaner, colder, less developed, and less traveled than the other Great Lakes. It is also more deadly. At 350 miles long, 160 miles wide, and with a surface area of 31,700 square miles, it is capable of swallowing oceangoing vessels with shocking ease.”

Yes, he does spend time talking about shipwrecks in the lakes—thousands and thousands of ships have met their doom there, it turns out—and yes, he gives appropriate space to the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. I suppose that’s another connection I have to the Great Lakes: Gordon Lightfoot’s famous inland-sea ballad about the 1975 shipwreck. I was seven when that song came out and have loved it, it seems, all my life. It’s so forlorn.

Dennis writes an amazing biography of the Great Lakes, and he’s full of surprising information. As an example: “For most of the twentieth century more tons of cargo were shipped every year on the Great Lakes than in all the American ports on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts combined.” As I think about it, that boggles my mind.

But I guess it shouldn’t. I have sat on that breakwall and watched cargo-sized lakeboats, as big as overturned skyscrapers, scudding back and forth along the horizon. Sometimes one drifts into the coal yards that flank Ashtabula’s harbor, where it unloads its cargo onto waiting train cars.

This is the Lake Erie I typically think of, one whose shoreline is bespotted with bubonic piles of coal and iron ore, where chemical factories churn out sour-smelling steam and pungency and blighted factories and warehouses crowd out trees.

Industrial abuse, which stretched back decades, made the lake a cesspool. “Until the early 1970s,” Dennis says, “it gave off a stench of human and industrial garbage that could be smelled many miles inland. Not much lived in the lake then except trash fish, algae, bacteria, and sludge worms.”

He explains that “[t]he ecological devastation that struck Erie in the 1960s was caused by an influx of nutrients from fertilizers, detergents, and municipal and industrial waste that essentially made the lake old before its time.” Scientists estimated that the lake had “aged” fifty thousand years.

But as Dennis and his crewmates discover as they sail into the lake from the Detroit River, Lake Erie today “is blue and clear and smells of clean water and beach sand, with a hint of approaching rain. It smells healthy.”

Stringent environmental regulations, prompted by a strong public outcry to protect the lakes, have had surprisingly effective results. “Erie’s return to health is now recognized as one of the greatest environmental victories in North America,” Dennis says. Erie in particular and all the Great Lakes in general still face several serious problems, though, including continued industrial pollution, invasive species that have impacted fisheries, fluctuating water levels that have impacted shipping, and the possible exploitation of oil, natural gas, and the water itself.

“What of their future?” he asks. “Will people a century from now see a motherlode of clean water or a wasteland?”

“One of the consequences of the degradation of the environment is a vague but undeniable cultural despair,” he says. By the end of his journey, he lays out a clear case for the need for stewardship.

He comes to other self-discoveries, too, which give the book a deeper resonance. Long nights under the stars and bright afternoons with the wind blowing his hair prove to be effective teachers. “People crave a quieter, slower life,” he realizes, “but have no idea how to achieve it.”

But what if it does damage? What if the pace wears insidiously? Maybe it beats us down. Maybe we don’t notice the damage until we step away from our normal life and experience a slower, quieter, less demanding one.

“Living on the boat made all that seem clear,” he says.

I understand what he means about the need for a “quieter, slower life.” These days, as I plow through this doctoral program while still teaching, too (not to mention parenting and writing), I constantly feel balls-to-the-wall—moreso than usual. It’s invigorating, but it’s also exhausting. I crave that quieter, slower life.

Because that’s a lesson Lake Erie taught me, too. As I sat along that breakwall and watched the sun set those evenings, I appreciated what it meant to take a time out from whatever I was doing so I could just take time to watch. A sunset is one of the most beautiful wonders on earth; just because it happens every night doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be deliberate about enjoying it.

“It’s our spirit that makes us encounter the wonders of the world and know that they are wonders,” Dennis says.

The Great Lakes, it seems, have been good teachers to us both.

#6: The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau (1864)

Katahdin, some twenty miles to my west, looks like a sketch done in chalk, set against the winter-gray sky. Its ever-present clouds hover today down where its knees might be if the great mountain had them. Katahdin always has clouds. Henry David Thoreau described Katahdin as “a cloud-factory.”

“I entered within the skirts of the cloud which seemed forever drifting over the summit, and yet would never be gone, but was generated out of that pure air as fast as it flowed away,” Thoreau wrote.

The great hermit of Walden is much on my mind today as I read his book The Maine Woods and, by happenstance, retrace part of his route.

My father and son and I have driven up to Oakfield to fetch a black-bear hide from a one-man tanning operation. I-95 North took us to the east of Mount Katahdin, the second-highest mountain in New England and the northernmost terminus of the Appalachian Trail. When I was my son’s age, my father took me and my brother to the roots of Katahdin on many moose-watching excursions.

Oddly, Thoreau saw no moose on his Katahdin expedition in 1846, although he saw plenty of sign. It wasn’t until his return in ’53 that he finally saw one (witnessing a moose hunt provides one of the most thoughtful passages in the second part of Thoreau’s book). He Made a final trip in ’57, drawn back by “the continuousness of the forest.” He combined the accounts he wrote about the three trips into The Maine Woods, published in 1864 two years after his death.

“[N]ot only for strength, but for beauty, the poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s trail, to drink at some new and bracing fountain of the Muses, far in the recesses of the wilderness,” Thoreau wrote.

He arrives each time in Bangor, easily accessible at the time—but it was the last metropolitan outpost on the edge of Maine’s vast hinterland. As he travels up the Penobscot River, he passes through “Oldtown” (today, Old Town), past the Sunkhaze Stream where my father’s farm sits, through Passadumkeg, Lincoln, Mattawamkeag, Molunkus. The road Thoreau followed eventually became modern-day Route 2. I am heading south along that very same road, Katahdin now behind me.

I’m intentionally reading The Maine Woods now, while I’m in Maine, not only in the hope that I’ll somehow draw some kind of spiritual inspiration from the land but also because I want to read the book in conversation with Bernd Heinrich’s A Year in the Maine Woods. Heinrich’s book rooted me in one small area for a year; Thoreau’s, it turns out, is less a meditation on place than it is a travelogue.

It is a travelogue that takes place over eleven years, though. The Thoreau who undertakes the incredibly arduous canoe trip down the Allegash River—some 325 miles—is a more mature and less idealistic Thoreau than the Walden resident who traveled to Mount Katahdin more than a decade earlier.

His trip to Katahdin takes on a spiritual cast:

The tops of mountains are among the unfinished parts of the globe, whither it is a slight insult to the gods to climb and pry into their secrets, and try their effect on our humanity. Only daring and insolent men, perchance, go there.

But Thoreau, known as a stylist for his wonderful sentences, “keeps it real,” too, so to speak. He balances his transcendentalism with real-world perspective:

The mountain seemed a vast aggregation of loose rocks, as if sometime it had rained rocks, and they lay as they fell on the mountain sides, nowhere fairly at rest, but leaning on each other, all rocking-stones, with cavities between, but scarcely any soil or smoother self. They were the raw materials of a planet dropped from an unseen quarry….

At times, Thoreau’s travel accounts deteriorate into dry recitation of where he went, who he met, and what he ate. Elsewhere, though, his descriptions shine. He describes moose as “great frightened rabbits” and Katahdin’s summit “veiled in clouds, like a dark isthmus in that quarter, connecting the heavens with the earth.” Elsewhere, he writes: “The spruce and cedar on [the lake’s] shores, hung with gray lichens, looked at a distance like the ghosts of trees.”

He also captures first-hand accounts of the lives of the Penobscot Indians through a sympathetic portrait of his Allegash guide, Joe Polis. It’s a valuable anthropological snapshot of their culture.

I love the country Thoreau writes about and have spent much time in those very same woods. I’ve lived on the Sunkhaze, “said to be some of the best deer ground in Maine on this stream,” as Thoreau recounts. My glimpses of Katahdin from the barren windswept hilltops outside Oakfield, along with my drive down Route 2, give me just the faintest connection to Thoreau on a day when I’m reading about his adventures, and even that’s enough to help me feel greater affinity for the writer’s work.

Why, just today I had an experience in the woods that Thoreau captured, exactly, nearly 150 years ago:

Who shall describe the inexpressible tenderness and immortal life of the grim forest, where Nature, though it be mid-winter, is ever in her spring, where the moss-grown and decaying trees are not old, but seem to enjoy a perpetual youth; and blissful, innocent Nature, like a serene infant, is too happy to make a noise, except by a few tinkling, lisping birds and trickling rills?

With woods still covering some 85% of the state, Maine remains the most forested state in the lower forty-eight. But it’s not the wilderness Thoreau experienced by any stretch. When Thoreau and his five companions paddled up the Penobscot past Millinocket, they entered a land where “[n]o face welcomed us but the fine, fantastic sprays of free and happy evergreen trees, waving one above another in their ancient home.”

Route 2 takes me today past a patchwork of farms and homesteads carved out of that once-vast wilderness.

To the east, the wilderness still sits in evergreen stillness; to the west, beyond the sketch of Katahdin rising out of the forest, the wilderness erupts again, stretching out toward the Canadian border.

My kids and my father and I will plunge back into that wilderness tomorrow. I know already—have known for decades—its power as a “bracing fountain of the Muses.” To see it with Thoreau’s eyes will nonetheless be a treat.

#3: Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure by Julian Smith (2010)

To prove himself to the woman he loved and her skeptical stepfather, Ewart Grogan traversed Africa, four-thousand miles from south to north. It took him two and a half years. The year was 1897.

One hundred and eight years later, Julian Smith retraced Grogan’s path in an effort to prove something to himself—although he was still trying to figure out what that “something” might actually be. In Crossing the Heart of Africa: An Odyssey of Love and Adventure, the heart Smith needs to cross is his own.

“Even though our personalities, our lives and times were vastly different, Grogan and I were really after the same thing: lifelong happiness with an incredible woman,” Smith writes. “Perhaps crossing Africa as he had would help me find peace with this radical new direction my life was about to take. Maybe some of Grogan’s mojo would rub off on me.”

Africa always seems ready-made for interior journeys. Heart of Darkness. Stanley and Livingston. You get the idea. “Africa has always been a concept as much as a place: an exotic backdrop for outsiders to have ennobling experiences, a land of theatric extremes of violence and beauty,” Smith says.

Crossing the Heart of Africa combines history, travelogue, and memoir, although Smith never seems to get any of them quite right. His own journey intertwines with Grogan’s; a third main thread about his relationship with his fiancée, Laura, braids into the mix.

The book’s travel segments usually turn into straight narrative, chronicling event after event after event without spending much time reflecting on those events. The book could’ve benefitted from more sensory description, at the very least, and perhaps a more literary style, at best. Travelogues are most effective when the writer puts the reader there—and Smith didn’t always do such a great job of that.

His memoir segments, meanwhile, often feel contrived. He undertakes his trek as his last hurrah to freedom before his pending marriage. Within the context of that knowledge, Smith still tries to build suspense in the retelling of his relationship with his fiancée: Will he ask her out? Will they get together? Will he ever be able to commit? He creates little cliffhangers to end those sections, but it’s melodramatic pabulum. There’s nothing extraordinary about their relationship to make me care, and I already know how it’s going to turn out. If he’s trying to make himself seem like a sympathetic, three-dimensional character by showing his inner conflict, all he’s really doing is making himself look like a tool.

His history sections work best. The early part of Grogan’s story get a little dry, but as he plunges into the heart of Africa, and life gets interesting for him, the narrative picks up. Smith doesn’t quote a lot of primary sources but, instead, paraphrases several biographies (including Grogran’s autobiography).

Smith’s book is at its best when it recounts the history and recent past of particular places he visits. In those segments, Smith’s history and travelogue components play off each other well. Readers get treated to background information on the work of naturalists like Jane Goodall and Diane Fossey, the horrors of the Rwandan genocide, the ongoing civil wars of the Congo, the exploitation of Africa’s big game, the environmental degradation of the snows of Kilimanjaro, the dark legacy of the Arabian slave trade on the rest of the continent, and so on.

I read Crossing the Heart of Africa because I wanted to get a sense of place. I got the history of the place, but I didn’t feel any kind of emotional connection to it, no sense of wonder about it.

It’s Smith’s movements through place, not place itself, that allow him to make his discoveries and decisions. I’m not convinced his tale couldn’t have happened elsewhere so long as he had time away from Laura in an environment that stressed him out a little. I don’t know that Africa, per se, was intrinsic to his self-discovery the way it was for Grogan.

Crossing the Heart of Africa is no jewel of the Nile. It has some worthwhile content, but overall, it’s the most pedestrian “big adventure” I’ve ever read.

Few characters are as recognizable as the patron saint of Christmas.

Santa, as well as his Canadian and British counterpart, Father Christmas, both derive from the legends surrounding Saint Nicholas, a former bishop who lived in the third century in the city of Myra, in a region that’s now part of Turkey. His feast day is celebrated December 6.

The Dutch abbreviated Saint Nicholas’s name as Sinterklaas, which is where the name Santa Clause comes from. The Dutch depict Sinterklaas much like a Catholic bishop with a tall hat, full white beard, and a staff.

Our own depictions of Santa Claus predate date back to images of “Father Christmas” from 17th century in England.

That depiction appears most famously in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, published in 1943, when Dickens describes the Ghost of Christmas Present:

clothed in one simple deep green robe…bordered with white fur. This garment hung so loosely on the figure that its capacious breast was bare…. It’s feet…were also bare; and on its head it wore no other covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining icicles.

In America, Santa has taken a much different shape. His transformation first began in 1823 with the publication of Clement Clark Moore’s poem “Twas the Night Before Christmas,” which appeared anonymously in the Troy, New York Sentinel. (The city of Troy was also the birthplace of another icon, Uncle Sam.)

“His eyes — how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! / His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!” reads the poem, which goes on to describe “the beard of his chin was as white as the snow.”

The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had a broad face and a little round belly,
That shook, when he laughed like a bowlful of jelly.

The poem also mentions Santa’s sleigh for the first time and gives names for all eight reindeer.

The first picture of Santa came in 1863, in a sketch by Thomas Nast for the cover of Harper’s Weekly. (Nast’s artwork, as it happened, helped make the aforementioned Uncle Sam so iconic; his depiction of Santa would have similar lasting impact.)

Nast’s drawing of Santa appeared on Saturday, January 3, 1863. As sketched by Nast, Santa wears what are described as red pants and a blue jacket with large white stars. It is also reputedly the first time Santa appears as fat and jolly rather than as a tall, slender man.

In the picture, he sits on the back of a sleigh packed with presents, visiting a somewhat dejected Union army, passing out gifts to soldiers. A sign in the background says “Welcome Santa Claus.”

After that, Santa made other appearances in other places, including a 1902 book by Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, called The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus.

But it was Santa’s appearances in advertisements for the Coca-Cola Company that made his appearance iconic. Prior to that, Santa still appeared in clothes of various colors, but the Coke campaign, designed by artist Haddon Sundblom, put Santa in red and white—and he has remained in that outfit to this day.

With any luck, he’ll slide down the chimney at your house tonight!

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Adapted from a piece cross-posted at Emerging Civil War. 

Wrong idea, eh?  Were I a talented black athlete, I wonder if all those Confederate flags that still fly along the road side would bother me. Or the fact  that UM has not been particularly successful in retiring  its mascot “Colonel Reb.”  In case you’ve never seen a UM football game, and they’re dreadful so there’s no reason you’d want to, Colonel Reb is a goateed plantation owner. I kid you not. Nah, I am sure as a young black man it wouldn’t bother me one bit to have a plantation owner standing on the sidelines yelling “Run, boy, run!” Nor would it probably bother me that the replacement mascot is named the “Rebel Black Bear” or that most students have refused to adopt the bear and instead have started using Ackbar (the rebel leader from Star Wars, get it?)

Of course, the local press has said that the coach is full of it.

No doubt. Despite being in a hotbed of football talent and playing in the most prestigious football conference in America, the University of Mississippi this year was 2 and 10, and the 107th best football team in America.

After the show, as we waited for a chance to congratulate the cast, my companions and I found ourselves discussing a topic that has come to intrigue me a great deal: the curious rehabilitation of Richard Nixon. It’s probably safe to say that Tricky Dick was one of the most reviled figures in American political history and on August 9, 1974 he became the only president in the nation’s history to resign the office.

There was much about Nixon to hate.

• The unforgivable  ”Southern Strategy” established the overtly racist blueprint for every major Republican electoral success of the past 40 years.
• His prosecution of the Vietnam War (and its incursions into Laos and Cambodia) sacrificed thousands of lives for military and political goals that were questionable, at best.
• Then of course, there was that whole Watergate thing.

Hunter Thompson, perhaps the most reliable voice of the American conscience during Nixon’s heyday, painted the man as an epically corrupt political fixer, famously writing that:

If the right people had been in charge of Nixon’s funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin.

I can’t help wondering what Hunter, who died in 2005, would make of the increasingly flattering light bathing Nixon’s memory in the last five years. Frost/Nixon, which debuted on the London stage in 2006 (with a successful film version following in 2008), didn’t let the disgraced former president off the hook by any  means, but its portrayal humanized the beast by looking deeply into the tribulations that shaped his soul. As he squared off with out-of-favor talk-show host David Frost, a man also waging a battle for his professional life and legacy, Nixon almost seemed to be inviting the dagger that would end his suffering. He wanted, he needed, Frost to be a worthy adversary and he promised to be relentless in return. Only one of them could survive, he explained in a booze-addled late-night call to Frost on the eve of the final showdown, and if he was consciously fantasizing about a return to the bright lights of Washington, DC, he seemed subconsciously desperate for the absolution that attended final defeat.

The Frost team finally uncovered the discrepancy in the official record that broke Nixon, forcing an admission of guilt and setting the stage for the apology that ultimately was as important to him as it was to the nation he betrayed. Neither the big-screen portrayal by Frank Langella or the small stage reprise by O’Steen argued for vindication, but both insisted on a measure of forgiveness.

The question, then, becomes why? Why the play? Why the movie adaptation? After all, playwright Peter Morgan could have written about anything. Once he did write the play, audiences could have rejected it. Other troupes, such as the Longmont Theatre Company, could have opted to mount a different show instead, something with more perceived social salience or more box office promise.

I’m a culturalist, and as a result I pay attention to the artifacts of the popular culture. If vampires are in vogue all of a sudden, then it’s probably meaningful. The broad social response to a theme, a trope, a meme suggests something about the collective psyche, and if you’re interested in understanding the society in question it’s a good idea to pay attention to its books, its plays, its music, its games and television and movies.

The answer, then, to why Nixon, why now, seems fairly obvious: His presidency, as twisted and corrupt and doomed as it was politically, was actually the last time we had a White House acting more or less in the best interests of the citizens of the United States. And we miss it. We know that power politics has always responded to wealth, but we long for the days when the sell-out wasn’t so comprehensive, so shameless, so arrogant and sneering. We wish those who control the political and economic direction of the nation would drop a crumb or two every now and then. We hate that corporations are citizens and that money is speech.

Three years ago, during the run-up to the 2008 election, I wrote an article recalling some of the high spots in the actual Nixon record and inviting readers to compare what they saw with the records and platforms of the candidates vying for the White House. The conclusion was unmistakeable, and for many perhaps a bit shocking: “If he were a candidate in the 2008 presidential election, Richard M. Nixon would be more progressive than either the Republican or Democratic nominees.” In truth, he’d have been more progressive than any of the even remotely viable Dems we’d heard from that year, with the possible exception of John Edwards (and the question there, of course, was how much of what he said you could actually set stock by).

Earlier this year I revisited the topic because all of a sudden I seemed to have company. From the wide right we had Bruce Bartlett, who used to work for Ron Paul, Jack Kemp and Bush the Elder, articulating Nixon’s liberalism and arguing that he was to the GOP what Obama is to the Democrats. From the other end of the spectrum we had Noam Chomsky, one of the most outspoken, unapologetically liberal voices in the country, telling a packed house at the University of Colorado that “Richard Nixon was America’s last liberal president.” I pointed to Nixon’s record in both of those posts, and it’s worth repeating the finer points here:

• He got us out of Vietnam.
• He was a keen foreign policy type whose diplomatic efforts strengthened our relationships with both established and emerging world powers.
• He implemented the first significant federal affirmative action program.
• He dramatically increased spending on federal employee salaries.
• He oversaw the first large-scale integration of public schools in the South (something the crackers where I grew up were none too happy about).
• He proposed a guaranteed annual wage (aka a “negative income tax”).
• He advocated comprehensive national health insurance (single payer) for all Americans.
• He imposed wage and price controls in times of economic crisis. This wasn’t a terribly good idea, but it was the furthest thing from a conservative idea. Truth is, it was positively socialist.
• Both the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities thrived under his administration in ways they have not since.
• He indexed Social Security for inflation and created Supplemental Security Income.
• He created the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Minority Business Enterprise.
• He promoted the Legacy of Parks program.
• Title IX became law on his watch.
• Social spending eclipsed defense spending for the first time in U.S. history.
• He appointed four Supreme Court Justices. Three of them voted with the majority in Roe v. Wade.

If you put Bartlett and Chomsky in a room, this might be the only subject in the world they’d find any degree of agreement on. That someone as intellectually contrary as I can be agrees with both of them, well, that may be the 7th Sign.

So who was right? Hunter Thompson or Noam Chomsky? The answer, of course, is both. In a sane, coherent political climate characterized by service to the well-being of its citizens a crook like Nixon could not be tolerated. We might view the above bulleted list as a minimal set of requirements for the office. There would be nothing special about them and we’d therefore be free to swing away at the character deficiencies of a pol as tricky as Dick. Thompson had a burr under his saddle where Nixon was concerned, no doubt, but his every rant was grounded in truth and his verdict on the amorality of Richard Milhous Nixon was more than justified.

We don’t live in a sane, coherent political climate, though, and from the perspective of the sociopathocracy of our day even a man as vile as Nixon begins to look pretty good. All you really need to consider is that “relativity” thing: we have, in the 37 years since he was chased from Washington with torches and pitchforks, slid so far to the right that the architect of the Southern Strategy, the man who expanded an already-unjust war across a couple more borders, the mastermind behind the highest felony in US political history and the reason why we attach “-gate” to everything that’s even remotely scandalous looks good by comparison. Chomsky certainly couldn’t have felt good about what he told that audience in Boulder, but only a fool walked away thinking the comment was about Nixon.

The odd case of Richard M. Nixon teaches us a valuable lesson about history. As Churchill once observed, history is written by the victors – and those who defeated Nixon wrote a good bit of history. But history books also get revised, don’t they? Unfortunately, we now know, with a vengeful certainty, that a couple generations of contemptible successors can transform a malevolent tyrant into a good and faithful custodian of the common weal.

It’s a lesson we’d be better off without.