A Voyage of Discovery: Betsy and Bubba on the Road

I drove into Little Rock after the van was released from the ICU, and went to see the Clinton Library. It’s an imposing building on the shores of the Arkansas River. Acres of lawn planted with trees surround the building. I thought the building looked a little like the frame of a drydocked air craft carrier; my friend, Deb Brayton, sent me an e-mail describing it as a doublewide. I’ve not been to a Presidential Library before so perhaps I was expecting too much. There wasn’t much in there: a replica of the cabinet room, a replica of the Oval Office, and a bunch of the gifts and memorabilia from the years in the White House, an orientation film…, what was important to see was the timeline of the Clinton Administration, and a cataloguing, in the exhibits around the timeline, of the focus and accomplishments of the administration. Certainly not as much was accomplished as many of us would have liked to see. There was, however, a focus on government doing the people’s business, and a recognition that the job of government is, at least in part, to make the lives of people better, in this country and abroad. Despite some of our disgraces (the failure to engage in the Rwanda genocide) the United States continued to be considered, at home and abroad, a government of democratic values, committed to protecting those core values. Today, from my seat, we do much lip service to democracy but our government has consistently undermined those values, at home and abroad.
The Clinton site includes the Clinton School of Public Service, a graduate program committed to the notion that public service is honorable and worthwhile. I salute that mission.
I wandered across the grounds next door, to visit the new headquarters for Heifer International. The building is widely touted as state of the art green architecture. Unfortunately, the receptionist was quite clear that visitors were not welcome except to walk around the building or to shop in the gift shop, and that included volunteers. Ah, well, perhaps another visit…I did drive out to Perryville, about 40 minutes out of the city, to visit the Heifer Ranch, a Learning Center like Overlook Farm. Joan, a local volunteer recently relocated from Florida to Hot Springs, toured me around the Ranch. It’s a beautiful farm, and has a busy educational program, including much more on-site housing for learners than at the farm.

Bubba and I left Little Rock early this morning, after a long night of violent thunderstorms. The bleak weather discouraged me from stopping to check out the subject of my next favorite road sign, Toad Suck. It was definitely an evocative image.

We got off the Interstate and drove north on a mostly two lane road, across the Ozarks. The countryside is quite beautiful. Up in the hills, the mega-plowed fields are no longer evident. There is a lot of cattle-ranching, primarily beef cattle, and a lot of horse country. The contours of the terrain reminded me a lot of the areas I love so much in Montana, the rolling country around the river valleys. Greener, more like New England in that regard, but not as densely forested as New England. Definitely worth a second visit when I can spend some time here and it’s not pouring. But the little towns in the hills seem to be dying, at least in their commercial life. Well-tended, and often large, churches, seem to be prosperous. But small local businesses are gone, unless they are catering to the tourists. Small grocery stores are closed, restaurants are boarded up. The Conoco Phillips 66, and Exxon franchises, with their branded canopies and homogenized mini-marts flourish. Larger population centers, one and all, have a Wal-Mart SuperStore. And farm stores are still here. But most other local shopping seems to be gone.

I paassed billboard after billboard, building after building, hyping Branson, MO. I finally stopped to see what was what in Branson. I guess it’s the local equivalent of Vegas, with lots of shows and glitz. I moved on.

Bubba and I are spending the evening outside of Kansas City, planning on a long day of driving tomorrow that will put us at least in the northeast corner of Iowa if not in Minnesota. We’ve crossed another significant meridian, the radio station call letters begin with K, not W.

I called Joe’s Garage, who declined to see my vehicle, said unequivocally, “We don’t take campers, ma’am.” They referred me to someone who declined to see us, who referred me to someone who said, “we can see you Thursday or Friday.” They referred me to a dealer who said,”You’ll never make it here without an engine fan,” and referred me to another dealer. At that point, as I was on the edge of tears, I spoke with a saint wearing the costume of a Dodge service manager. I brought the van in, and spent several hours waiting in the customer lounge with Bubba while they worked on Maybelline II. We apparently had a short in the ignition switch that blew out the electrical system, at least that’s what they told me, and who am I to argue. Anyway, it’s all working now including the air conditioning, and I was glad for that, it’s 87 degrees here on Monday afternoon. Although I’m mindful of my brother’s warning as the thunderclouds are building up. Dick believes that, just as lions will seek out and eat small prey, tornadoes actively seek out rv parks to prey on camper vans and trailers.

Interesting that I wrote yesterday about the large plowed farm fields, monarchs, and book I was reading by Gary Paul Nabhan. As I sat at the dealership, I continued my reading, and spent time with his experiences with the impact of genetically engineered bT corn on the monarchs, and the lethargy of the federal agencies in the face of powerful influence from agribusiness. He participated in a study rebutting the assertions by agribusiness that milkweed was not near their farms and that monarchs were therefore not affected by this genetically engineered product. He prepared documentation of the risk to a number of other, federally protected, moths and butterflies, and attended a series of meetings with fed agencies, found them to be defensive, unresponsive, and fully prepared to accept the studies funded by agribusiness. It’s a classic story of government approving business’ representations when the science isn’t there to support a decision, then saying,”Well, it’s too late now.” We’ve seen it with nuclear power, and a million other stories. He goes on to describe the monopoly that the major corporations have over the seed business, discontinuing the production of heritage species. I’ve read in other media about litigation by the corporations against farmers on seed. Take a look at Michael Pollan’s excellent book, The Botany of Desire. It’s another interesting, articulate and highly readable book, a lot of it on this topic.

I’ve been a member for a couple of years of the Manic Organic CSA, and have had wonderful quality produce at a good price, including things I’d never heard of before, was delighted by. I loved the idea of supporting a local farmer. I find that food politics is an area where I’m becoming radicalized, I guess, by my experience at Heifer, by my increased knowledge base, and by what I’m seeing on the road. I’ve just researched on-line a couple of CSAs and local farms in the Yellowstone area, and fired them off e-mails to see if they have shares available for the season. I may feel powerless in the face of international and domestic politics and my ability to influence them. But I can make my choices in where I spend my money. I can choose not to shop at the Wal-Marts of the world. I can choose to buy only fair trade products, including my cherished coffee (The van is stuffed with Green Mountain fair trade decaf, I recommend it). I can choose to buy produce in season from local farmers, and to dry it, can it, preserve it so that I can enjoy out of season what I can’t use in season. I knew I’d regret the taking of the mason jars to the Salvation Army before I left Newport. Well, no room in the van anyway, I’m sure the hardware store in Gardiner will have them.

Bubba and I had a lovely time at our campground on Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis. There was about a two-acre enclosed area for Bubs to run, and a nice laundry room for me. Best of all, a short stroll down Jailhouse Lane and across Blue Suede Dr. brought me to a gate to Graceland’s parking lot. Bubba spent the morning in the van while I went to visit with Elvis.

The whole operation belongs, apparently, to Lisa Marie, who has no qualms about exploiting Dad’s memory. This place is the ultimate in kitsch. As you walk across the parking lot, you see Elvis’ planes behind a fence; those are part of the higher priced tour; I went for the basic one. You follow a path under a maroon awning, after passing a reminder that Elvis lives.

Entering the ticket building, you see monitors on all sides with footage of Elvis, and signs in six languages cautioning you on proper behavior during the visit. After you purchase your ticket you exit to wait for the shuttle bus to take you across the street. You march through a line where you are exhorted to have your picture taken “no obligation, ma’am” in front of a painting of Graceland. So far as I could see, I was the only one on my bus or the bus ahead of me that declined this opportunity.

The bus deposits you in front of a stone colonial, built in the 1930s. No doubt this was once an imposing house, and it is sited on 13 acres including some magnificent old oak and ash trees. Times have changed, though, and today’s trophy houses would dwarf this structure. From the outside, it looks pretty conservative. You enter a testament to bad taste. Stained glass peacock door lights and a fifteen foot white satin couch in the living room, a perfectly intact 1970s kitchen, a steep stairway with mirrored ceiling and walls down to Elvis’ rec rooms, a stroll through the “Jungle Room”, with actual green textured carpeting on walls and ceiling as well as the floor, and a tour through an addition that includes baby Lisa Marie’s crib, the fur-covered mirrored bed, a red satin French Provincial sectional sofa, and Elvis’ tae kwon do outfit and saddle. A stroll outside to his father’s office, and down the path to the trophy room, with his gold and platinum records and grammys. On to the racquetball court, with a number of his costumes behind glass. And the tour winds up at the “Meditation Garden”, the site of the family graves.

It’s a terribly sad place: the monument to bad taste, and the evidence of a life destroyed by too much: too much fame, too much fortune, too much drugs and booze. The audio tour tape includes quotes from Lisa Marie that I found to be manipulative and devoid of any genuine emotion. I’m glad I stopped by to see this uniquely American monument as a reminder of the absurd excesses with which we live, but Elvis won’t be going west with us.

Bubba and I hopped back in the van on a hot afternoon, sunny with temperatures in the 80s (sorry, folks at home, I talked to a couple of you today and know that you’re enduring raw days). Fortunately it was drive with the windows open weather, since we have no air conditioning until we find a repair for our crippled electrical system. We crossed the Mississippi, a big step for a Rhode Island girl, and drove off into Arkansas farmland. Miles of utterly flat landscape and huge farms. Our eyes are so tuned to the New England scale, we expect the stone walls, hedgerows, and manageable scale of things. Bubba was in awe of the landscape unfolding out the window.

We’ve stopped in Litte Rock to see to car repairs, I’ll be calling Joe’s Garage in the morning to see if they can squeeze me in. We’re in a shady campground a mile or so off the highway, and virtually every camper here has a dog or three. I spent a relaxing end of the afternoon in a chair outside with my feet up reading Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan, a fascinating and laugh out loud funny touching and informative book about, as the subtitle says, the pleasures and politics of food. Much of our discussion at Heifer was about food systems, about agribusiness, about the need to grow locally, buy locally, about the incredible costs of our supermarket way of doing business, not as much to the consumer as to the farmer, to the energy system, to the global economy. Nabhan committed to a year in which he would eat foods grown or hunted within 250 miles of his home in the Arizona desert. His book is a wonderfully readable and thoughtful look at ecologically responsible eating and living.

One of the things I’m enjoying most about life on the road is that most of the distractions are stripped away. It doesn’t take long to clean house when the house is 6x15. You don’t get a lot of clothes dirty, and cook, most times, in a single pot. There’s no TV, at least not in my van, although I note most of the megacampers around me have satellite, big plasma screens, etc. Were it not for the internet, I wouldn’t even know how the Sox were doing. So I read, I write, I listen to the sounds of the night (barred owls calling in Memphis early Sunday morning), I take Bubba for walks, and I read some more. Fortunately I’ve packed books enough for a very long trip.

Notwithstanding my concerns about the van, the ride was uneventful. A weekend is a perfect time to be travelling without an engine fan, no traffic, easy driving. However, it’s getting warm, so the lack of air conditioning will push me to repair the situation at a garage somewhere around Little Rock.

The ride along the Interstate through western Tennessee was largely remarkable because of an extraordinary opportunity to witness the migration of the monarch butterflies. Some of you may have read Four Wings and a Prayer, an remarkable story of these beautiful creatures and their travel. On Saturday morning, I saw literally hundreds of them crossing I-40 between Nashville and Jackson. They fluttered across, caught in the draft of the tractor-trailers, and drifted into the wooded areas to the north of the highway. I could see hundreds more resting in the roadside trees.

I also saw my favorite road sign to date, such a wonderful name and so full of images: I’m trying to imagine what happens in a community named Bucksnort.

I pulled into Memphis and drove across the city to the National Civil Rights Museum. It is housed in the Lorraine Motel on Mulberry Street, the scene of Martin Luther King’s assassination. I don’t think there’s anyone of my age who doesn’t have an indelible image of that motel balcony seared into their brains. The motel sign out in front has a message exhorting us to wage peace. The museum is a bunker-like building attached to the motel, and the exhibits weave through the interior of the motel structure as well. We’re only weeks after the anniversary of his death, and there are flowers on the balcony at the motel.

Many of the exhibits did not strike me as all that effective, were you not a witness to these times. But, for those of us who lived through the period, each exhibit evoked a series of emotions and recollections. There was film footage from contemporary newscasts and documentaries of the March for Jobs and Justice in Washington, of the march across the Edmund Pettis Bridge. There were photos from Selma and Birmingham, photos of lynchings, and contemporary articles about the lynching of Emmet Till, of the murders of Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman. There was, for me, a flood of emotions about what justice and fairness should mean in this country.

I remember, when my kids were quite young, having discussions with them, or more likely lecturing them, about what would be the really important issues in our lives. I’ve often wondered what issues would move me to be able to put aside my comfort, to put my own life or safety at risk. More to the point, I struggle to understand what I can do that will make a difference. I’ve spent a lot of my life doing nothing more than tilting at windmills, to limited or no effect. I really do believe, at this point, that probably the only thing I’ve ever done that was effective was to have a hand in the raising of two exceptional young adults, of whom I’m very proud. They both give of their time and their hearts to their communities, Saah in her work with nature organizations and animal welfare causes, Benj with his work with Habitat for Humanity, and they see it as fun as well as fulfilling, going about it enthusiastically.

So here I am, late in my 50s, wanting to be an effective voice in my later years. There are matters about which I feel strongly, gender equity, health, hunger and poverty, peace. I seem to be in the doldrums, not clear about what I can do to make a difference. The job of raising the kids is done, I have to take responsibility for my own views and actions. Volunteering for Heifer International was something that I could do: small in scope, without limelight, a part of a large movement to make the world a better place. My desire to be of service in repairing my world is fortified by the visit to the museum. I need to reflect on where to find those opportunities. Certainly, if we believe in pursuing justice, and in waging peace, there is much to be done in this country, to change the direction in which we seem to be irrevocably headed.

As we drove through the Smokies, the skies got very dark, and the rains began as we emerged on the Tennessee side. They haven’t stopped yet; we had a night of positively violent thunderstorms and they continue this morning. Bubba’s never been a dog fearful of thunder, but the camper is perhaps just a little too exposed for him. He’s trying to find something to hide under, and every available space is stuffed with possessions: saddle blankets, coffee maker, boots…I’m anxious to adventure around Nashville, but don’t want to abandon him to terror so early in our life on the road.

We crossed the first milestone, and moved onto another time zone. Since I couldn’t sleep the night before leaving Sarah’s, that caused me to sink to a new low: bedtime at an unmentionably early hour!This is my first stay in an American institution, the KOA campground. I’ve always been one to sneer at other people’s idea of camping: staying in a manicured campground with convenience store, swimming pool, and all the frills. I’ve got to tell you, it’s not a bad life! They come by and pick up the trash in the morning. The showers are immaculate. Neighbors will help you with a problem. And there’s the endless entertainment of checking out the neighbors’ houses. I watched an elderly (read: very elderly) couple backing one of those huge rigs into a space two down from mine the evening of my arrival. He drove and she directed; she was so tiny that I was concerned he wouldn’t even be able to see her. This was all accompanied by the shrill barking of the little frou-frou dog in the enormous passenger side captain’s chair. There are folks here from all over Canada and the United States. The rains have kept down the visiting; most of my meetings have been in the ladies’ room (I intend to use my toilet, and thus my holding tanks, absolutely as little as possible, thus avoiding the need to empty them. I’ve developed a mental block I’ll eventually have to overcome. We resolved that problem many years ago on Sea Harmony by simply using a bucket. I think they’d frown on that here though). There’s an interesting kind of cone of silence that descends over the campers though; no one quite makes eye contact when they walk by you, seated outside your camper, unless you invite them to breach the cone. I’ll figure out the etiquette as I go along. In keeping with the locale, the roads through the campground have names like Charley Pride, Garth Brooks.

The rain let up and we took a trip to Andrew Jackson’s Hermitage on Friday. It’s within the city limits, accessed down miles of roads of strip malls, until you travel a short distance up Old Hickory Boulevard and find yourself in beautiful rolling farm country. The grounds are quite lovely, decorated with some of my favorites from the farm, Belted Galloway cattle. Jackson was fond of the Eastern Red Cedar and had planted lines of them on the approach to his house. Many were lost in tornadoes in the late 1890s and the late 1990s; they are now replanting and the surviving ones are huge. I spent some time in the little museum chatting with a docent originally from Pembroke, MA. She and her husband had moved to Nashville where he was to be on the editorial staff of a startup magazine with Americana themes. In the wake of 9/11, the owners decided that Americana meant NASCAR, and he moved on, found a head gardener position at the Hermitage, and has never been happier. He and his wife have moved onto the grounds. I love to hear stories about people finding bliss, if not 100% joy, at this stage in my travels, makes me feel a little more secure in the process of the challenge. It was interesting to see how the museum has tried to make peace with the slave history of the south generally and Andrew Jackson specifically. They have blown up photos and histories of a number of the household slaves as you walk into the museum, but haven’t done a very effective job of integrating that into the larger story. As I wandered around, I refrained from bursting into song with those immortal words of Jimmy Driftwood, which you remember of course:
In 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans

We fired our guns and the British kept a’comin’
There wasn’t nigh as many as there was a while ago
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico

The gardens include a greek revival pavilionwhich houses the tomb of Jackson and his wife, and a cemetery with one of the most unique tombstones I’ve ever seen: an elaborately carved tree trunk, bark, branch stubs and all, for the husband of Jackson’s granddaughter.

The grounds were beautiful and serene, and it was a pleasant walk on a warm if rainy afternoon. I am not, at the moment, missing the raw wet spring of New England.

Friday evening,I joined my neighbors for a bus ride over to Grand Ole Opry.I had gone 31 years ago when visiting Tennessee and was dying to see it again. It didn’t disappoint; it is a true piece of Americana. The bus ride over was punctuated by Cassie, the driver’s observations about the wonderful malls we could surely shop at whilst in Nashville. All of the passengers, with one exception, nodded enthusiastically and shared adventures at the malls.
I sat on the mezzanine and had an aerie view of the stage. Grand Ole Opry is actually a live radio show, and has been running since the 20s. The show runs from 7:30 to 9:30 on Fridays, Saturdays feature two shows, one at 7:30 and one at 9:30. Each segment of the show is sponsored by a different company. Three of them, Crackerbarrel Country Stores, Martha White’s Biscuits, and Vietti Chili, could have been unchanged since the 2os. The program was previewed by one of the evenings announcers (these guys are institutions as well, have been there for decades) who gave us our instructions, when to clap, when to cheer, etc. They were the announcers for the commercials, and actually said things like,”My goodness, they’re tasty!!” One station break featured a long segment on the upcoming National Cornbread Festival. In fact, the whole thing is incredibly corny, and I LOVED it. I spent too many years wasting my time with sneering sophistication about things I secretly enjoyed. No more! I clapped, cheered, and all the rest, at horribly bad jokes, hokey commentary, and shamelessly emotional songs. Much of the show is gospel music. The attitude toward religion is so different in the south (and perhaps the rest of the country) The only place I’v ever seen emotion in Newport has been at the Community Baptist Church. Most other places, like Trinity, are way too solemn and important; if the parishioners feel joy in their relationship with god, it’s well concealed. Here, there’s unabashed delight in what they’re singing about, and 99% of it is about being saved. It’s childlike, heartfelt, and enthusiastic, and the crowd is with them every inch of the way.

Little Jimmy Dickens was the host for a portion of the show. This sawed off guy in spangles told some of the worst jokes and the audience lapped him up.
My personal favorites of the evening were the Riders in the Sky, who, not surprisingly, specialize in western tunes. They were funny and fun.

By the way, my day was not without shopping. I stopped, as promised, at the Loveless Cafe for lunch. It had been enlarged and updated since my 1975 visit, but the barbecue, corn hoe cakes, slow cooked beans and grits were delicious. A couple or three of you loved ones should be on the lookout for UPS packages from Loveless. You know who you are.

My day started somewhat badly; I hit the road and seem to have developed an electrical problem. Of course the days of finding a service station that actually does service along the road are gone, and especially on weekends. I have no engine fan, no AC, and warning lights on for ABS and air bags. Interestingly, I also have no speedometer or odometer, that should improve the resale value of Maybelline. We’ll give it a few hundred miles and see how it goes.

I enjoyed an excellent dinner with Sarah last night at her favorite restaurant, Tupelo Honey, which offers a gourmet twist on classic southern cooking. She looks great and happy, continues to be pleased with her life at Warren Wilson College. . Whatever reservations I may have about the caliber of some of the academics, I am very impressed by the commitment of the students to building a community. They take great pride in their work on campus, learn diverse skills, show enormous tolerance of one another and respect for those in their community. Sarah believes that there are some weaknesses in other departments, but she’s very pleased with hers. She’s excited about her coyote research project for the summer, and has myriad other adventures and projects lined up for a couple of months in Rhode Island, but, at the same time, can’t wait to get back to Warren Wilson for her last year.
This morning, she took me for a tour of her work projects. On service day, she was the crew boss for the construction of a stone patio, organizing some twenty odd inexperienced volunteers and turning out what promises to be a great place for barbecues outside the dorms in spring and fall.
She built, with her crew, a bench for students waiting for the shuttle bus, and an interesting stone gutter along a campus road
She was most proud of a stone retaining wall she rebuilt on the side of a steep incline on campus. Her boss had recommended to her, and we picked up at a great bookstore, Malaprop’s, in Asheville, a beautiful book showng stonework by Lew French from Martha’s Vineyard. She’s tremendously excited by the work and inspired to do some creative stonework when she returns to Rhode Island this summer.

Leaving is a challenge. With all my bravado about adventure and strkining out, I feel a little like a scared child heading off to school for the first time. Fortunately, I have a bold and brave companion in Bubba. You’ve probably all seen the bumper sticker that says, “Dog is my Co-Pilot.” Well, here he is!

And so we set out for parts unknown, at least to us Well not altogether true, I still have visits planned with friends in Minnesota and Montana, but most of the familiar is behind us now and we have new horizons ahead.

The drive south from Gettysburg began around 7:30 Easter Sunday, a glorious sunny warm morning, unbelievably tee-shirt weather after all of those cold windblown mornings on the farm. I drove south on little by-ways and across Catoctin Mountain. Lesson #2 in Maybelline 2: the long downhills are a big strain on the brakes. New techniques will be required before I arrive in the Rockies. I spent a long day wending my way south. The pace of travel is different with a middle-aged bladder and a youngish dog. We stopped every two hours or so to stretch our legs. I walked Bubba and repaired to a restroom in Northern Virginia, cam out to find an elderly gentleman standing behind the van and studying the Red Sox-emblazoned tire cover, a going away gift from Carol. “Where y’all from?” I allowed as how I was from Rhode Island. ” Hmmm. We like the Yankees better down here.” I thought I’d covered my bases by not having left-wing bumper stickers on the van. Hopefully, through most small towns, the ultimate moral and actual victory of the Sox in 2004 will stand as some sort of inspirational message for the perennial underdog.

Even along the interstate, the drive down I-81 is quite beautiful. The dogwoods and redbuds were brilliant, particularly when the weather turned and rain began to fall; against that sodden gray sky, the colors were quite beautiful. Stretches of highway in North Carolina featured wildflower plantings, spectacular in their adornment of the road edge. I love the farmhouses along the road. As I get farther south, they are still simple stone or brick houses, but feature two story colonnaded porches along the front. I picture folks of another era spending a quiet Sunday “watching the pass” , as they refer to it in Nantucket.

I arrived in Asheville for a visit with Sarah on Sunday afternoon. Maybelline is parked in front of her house, and her roommates have been most gracious about welcoming me into their bathroom; I continue to be sparing in my use of the creature comforts aboard the van. The kitchen’s great, the head leaves much to be desired.

I have been going to classes with Sarah for the last couple of days. They’re a mixed lot. I really enjoyed the presentation of her mammalian physiology teacher, although he professed to be ill and off his game. I felt myself aging by the moment, though, as they discussed simple biology that involved mechanisms that hadn’t been discovered when I was a biology major. I went to her anthropology class, a study of Turkey that is to culminate in a three week trip next month. They are getting a basic grasp of Turkish, which has none of the roots I recognize. They will have a meeting on Thursday with the staff from the office that organizes these international study trips, to discuss State Department warnings and the safety hazards attendant to this planned trip. As a would-be adventurer, I want to encourage her to go and wish her all the adventure available. As a mother, I want to tell her, “no, you cannot go!!!” I visited her environmental politics class this morning, where a group of four students was making a presentation on an environmental topic. I was appalled by the level of work product. I imagine there’s some level of diversity in the expectations of college professors everywhere, but I felt this barely rose to High school standards. Fortunately, I know that she’s working hard and geting a lot out of most of her classes, or my tuition pocket would be copping a resentment!

She has proudly showed me the stone work her work crew has been producing, a flagstone patio, a stone retaining wall, an intricate stone gutter along one of the campus roads. She’s quite excited to hear that the Norman Bird Sanctuary is looking for stone wall crew volunteers for the summer, since she’ll be back there working on Numi Mitchell’s coyote research project. She has submitted her research design for her senior major project, and will be presenting her research at a forum in February. I’ll plan a trip back to North Carolina to hear it.

The last salute to familiar terrain was the taking in of a game at Fenway Park with Benj on the 12th. Cold, a wind blowing onto our faces in centerfield, and a dismal start, with the first three pitches resulting in the Sox being down 2-0. I decided it’s an omen, foreshadowing my need to live somewhere other than New England for a while.

I set off on a beautiful clear morning, although fog blocked my usual bridgetop view of Block Island. I enjoyed a last breakfast with Maggie at Slice of Heaven in Jamestown, looking forward to her joining me for breakfast at some local eatery in Montana or Wyoming this summer. There was no traffic and I had a pleasant ride through Connecticut.

I had one of those visions of vulnerability as I drove through eastern Pennsylvania, when a pickup passing me lost control of the trailer they were hauling. They jack-knifed, and ended up facing me about twenty feet ahead, while I jammed on the brakes and grabbed Bubba’s collar. (He always rides shotgun, wants to make sure I don’t get lost) The RoadTrek is not wonderfully manoeuvrable, and while serviceable enough, and a great way to carry my home on my back, requires a different approach to driving. It’s a gashog, and I am reminding myself that energy efficiency is improved at lower speeds, as are my abilities to observe along the way.

My destination for this weekend was Gettysburg. Many years ago, Lu had put me onto Michael Shaara’s book, The Killer Angels, a fascinating fictionalized history of the portion of the war including the battle of Gettysburg. Like legions of American children, I’d memorized Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and always found it a moving and passionate declaration of what America could be about. I’m not much about celebrating wars and find reenactments an odd obsession. But, when I was 15, I’d visited the cemeteries and beaches in Normandy and found them incredibly powerful and moving, so decided a trip to Gettysburg was a necessary first stop. Road construction and heavy traffic pulled me off the Interstate and I travelled through interesting little towns in Pennsylvania Dutch country. Beautiful farms, barns with interesting non-New England roof lines, and everything is very green. Spring may be coming slowly to New England but it’s in full bloom in Pennsylvania.

New England is forever the land of the wooden colonial era farmhouse. Here, in the Gettysburg area, the common building material for the older farms is stone. They seem to speak to age and history in a way that wooden structures don’t; the stones are weathered, covered with lichens, and feel like a very part of the terrain.

I pulled into my campground for the weekend, my first taste of a commercial campground. I admit to feeling a little apprehension as I saw the Confederate flag waving on a number of the campers in the park. While Revolutionary War memorabilia are pretty much a part of every little New England town, they are scenery, not even rising to the level of background noise. Here, I felt that the war is current and on everyone’s mind, and not just because it’s bringing in the tourist dollars. On that side, though, Gettysburg is a compleat tourist mecca. Souvenir shoppes, ghost tours, costume shops, everything for the Civil War reenactor. A charming little town that has managed poorly the balance between commercial, historic and livable.

I signed on for a horseback tour of the battlefield, led by a local historian guide. Of course, I imagined a thrilling emulation of Picketts Charge; in fact, most of my fellow riders hadn’t been on horses since they were kids and we had a sedate stroll on trails through the woods and across the fields. It was actually no less thrilling. At our slow pace, I watched turtles and snakes sunning themselves in a lovely 70+degree sun, Canada geese nesting by a creek, an albino fox hunting in an open field, redtail hawk circling over the meadows. The guide did an excellent presentation and answered lots of my questions. The numbers from this three day battle were staggering: 51,000 killed, injured or taken prisoner. The descriptions of the battles I’d read over the years took real shape as we rode through farms and woods. Again the stones, stone walls, boulders, rock-lined creeks. They looked like so many natural monuments to the tragedies unfolding here only two lifetimes ago.

The National Park Service is in the middle of a land management process trying to recreate the landscape as it looked during the war. They have planted ruit trees to recreate the orchards at some of the old farms. They are carefully removing invasive plants and trying to accurately reclaim the historic farms.

I was reflecting on Lincoln’s remarks about ensuring that the men dead at Gettysburg should not have died in vain. I wonder if it would behoove our current national leadership to take a trip to those rocky fields and consider their current emotional investment, and investment of our young men and women and our dollars, in a bloody debacle halfway around the world. It seems to be neither advancing the cause of democracy nor improving the quality of life in Iraq. We teeter on the brink of another disaster in Iran. We encourage “free democratic elections” and decline to honor the results. We are seeing the loss of life, American and Iraqi, day after day, with no clear sense of strategy, no apparent respect for the expertise of the career military. Our president promised to spend his political capital a few years back; instead, or in addition, he has spent the good will capital of this country with dubious results. I read a thoughtful article in the Atlantic in March suggesting 7 concrete steps the United States could take to improve outcomes in this dubious venture. I see no indication that our current administration will take any advice, even that from trusted and qualified experts of its own. I believe that the good sense of the American people will ultimately prevail over the silliness of their leaders. I remember many years ago wanting a bumper sticker I passed while riding my bike around Newport. “If the people lead, the leaders will follow” , it said. I’m a little tired of waiting for that to be true, but expect that I’ll uncover that good sense as I travel around the country.

I spent a few bittersweet days back in Newport, saying good bye and tending to last minute business, getting the car serviced before Carol, Roger and Jim head west in it in mid-May, and doing some housecleaning in the van. The streets of Newport were full of ghosts for me. I’d drive down the street and see the people who used to live there, the friends’ businesses now long gone, the buildings since torn down, the memories of living thirty plus years in a place. I got all of Ms. Maybelline’s gear packed up, some to go with me and some to be shipped when she is. The saddle now rides in the back seat, although I debated taking on the historic cowboy ways and using it as a pillow. I decided my neck is way too old for that, and the metal stirrups are way too cold; hey, it’s still practically winter in New England.

I got in a last ride with Richard and Mattie in Weetamoo Woods in Tiverton. Spring is beginning to arrive there. Skunk cabbage is coming up, so are the fiddleheads, and the buds are ready to burst open on many of the trees. The peepers were at full voice in wet areas of the woods.

I spent my last night at Maggie’s, planned to be in her driveway since she’s no great dog fancier, but, in the ultimate act of friendship, she invited Bubba and me to spend our last night in a comfortable bed, and enjoying a last luxurious bath. I’ll truly miss my baths, my hydrotherapy sessions as I’ve called them since the kids were young and I was a slightly crazed newly single parent. More than that, ‘ll truly miss my dear friends. I can’t imagine life without daily conversations with Maggie; we’ve had those conversations for more than thirty years now.

Many years ago, when the kids were babies, Daniel and I spent a winter cruising in the Bahamas on Sea Harmony. I loved the folks we met but really missed the relations with history to them. As Maggie so often reminds me, we have been present to witness major events in one another’s lives, and have shared so many joys and sorrows. Cell phones and the internet have made the keeping in touch easier, but it’s hard for me to imagine that they are an adequate substitute for face to face contact, coffee and hugs from dear old friends.

Maggie brought me coffee in the van early in the morning as I did my last minute organizing and packing.
Bubba had a last stroll on the streets of Newport and we set off across the bridges.

I tried to figure out why more than a month had elapsed since my last post. It wasn’t merely lethargy, or busyness, or any of the excuses I could drum up, although there was some validity to all of them. I think it was more an emotional reaction to the horror of the fire experience, and a need to absorb and process not only the events of the fires, but those that followed.

The month of March at the farm is dedicated to Saturday morning pancake breakfasts, a local institution. Hundreds come each Saturday to enjoy pancakes and Overlook Farm pork sausage, to visit the sugar house and watch syrup being made, to tour the farm and see the newborns and to enjoy a hayride. The first pancake breakfast was two days before the fire and was, as is usual, somewhat sparsely attended- early in the month, cold, a day for the diehards. Following the fire, the response was incredible. As people came to support the farm, each event was sold out and oversold. People came laden with donations to assist Heifer International in the fire recovery: not only cash donations, but donations of tools, bales of hay, offers to house livestock, everything they could think and more than we could imagine. An enterprising couple from a local church organized their members, with the blessing of the local police, to man a “toolbooth” in downtown Holden, and raised more than $1000 on a chilly Saturday, then brought us delicious baked goods for the ever hungry young volunteers.

And help came from farther away as well. Letters and e-mails poured in from around the world, Heifer staff and project partners in other countries, former volunteers and donors. The women who had attended the goat-birthing program the week before the fire got together and raised more than $4,000 toward the cost of heating a new birthing/nursery room in the barn to come. A nursery school at a local YMCA brought in pennies and more raised by their little ones, who did chores to raise money for the new barn.

Just as it was a privilege to spend this time at the farm learning, so it was a privilege to see how important this organization is to the heart of the community, and how people truly came together to help rebuild. Many of you readers were part of the campaign to save Third Beach from development, and we all saw how powerful a community working together can be. More recently, I’ve been critical of a public forum-chat group in Newport, my home community, that tends to spend a lot of time taking cheap pot shots from afar at those who dedicate their careers to public service; that’s so extremely the opposite of what I saw with the Third Beach effort and what I see with this organization. I am inspired by the willingness of people to put aside their own comfort and their private agendas for a greater good.

In the weeks following the fire, Dale, the farm manager, gathered staff, local and resident volunteers and brainstormed the elements of the replacement barn. With the blessing of Heifer Interational’s staff and board nationally, we will see a barn-raising in the fall. I look forward to seeing the progress.

My time at the farm ended on April 10. I learned a great deal about solutions to world hunger. I learned about sustainable development and agriculture. More importantly, I continued to learn about the power of ordinary people committed to a common goal, and determined to improve the lives of people around the world.

Here are a few vignettes of life on the farm:

Ellen Walsh, from Iowa, is milking Nicole, who gave birth to a calf on April 6.

Caleb Anderson, from Minnesota, is at home on the tractor skidding logs for the wood furnace.

Milky Way and Oreo, two of the new mothers, are tending to myriad kids. Oreo and two of her little ones were injured in the fire; all have recovered nicely.

Berta Wermer, from Vermont, is coaxing a reluctant patient out of the paddock for a little medecine.

And a view of the volunteers’ life:
an evening of relaxation in the volunteer house: Berta, Sarah, Rachel and Allie

Working with these young people has been a pleasure and an honor.I hope my path will cross again, with those pictured here and the others.