We pass through Palmyra, New York and then past mobile homes.  William Leat Heat-Moon (LHM) remarks on the permanence and impermanence encapsulated in these uniquely American creations, and that gets me writing on a subject which seems to be very close to me right now.  Fortunately, Palmyra sits permanently for now on the map - though the ancient city in Syria from which it took its name evidently could be moved at a moment's notice to escape a Roman invasion sent by Mark Antony.  Talk about impermanence!

Book Quote

"Palmyra was a clean town of three-story brick buildings where I turned east on New York 31 and went down along the route of the Erie Canal, through villages, over fields of deep green, under blooming locust trees, and past barns collapsing next to mobile homes that looked depressingly immobile yet also impermanent."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 5

This photo of Main Street in Palmyra, New York is courtesy of TripAdvisor.

Palmyra, New York

Permanence and impermanence is on my mind this a lot as I write this post.  The image that LHM conjures up - the "mobile" homes that look "depressingly immobile" and also "impermanent" is a really wonderful metaphor.

I'm going to digress first on mobile homes.  I've always wondered why we call them mobile when usually they are just parked somewhere on a lot or in a trailer park.  Yes, they seem to serve as housing and some of them are quite nice inside.  Recently, my wife and I stayed in a mobile home at an affordable spa called Riverbend Hot Springs in Truth or Consequences.  The inside was quite nice and comfortable though, to be fair, it was housing just her, me and our dog for an overnight.  Fitting a family of four or more in there might be a different story.

However, most of these mobile homes sit, in their permanent impermanence, like fiberglass magnets for tornadoes during the spring and summer weather seasons.  (I joke, but it seems like every summer the media reports on a mobile home park that has been decimated by a tornado.  I realize that tornadoes aren't really attracted to mobile home parks.  Media tends to report on these instances because the damage is usually extensive and the casualties can be high.  Yet mobile homes, however stationary, are cheap alternative housing for those who cannot afford to buy a more substantial home.)

Once my father and I were leaving our property near Irmulco, California and heading back up the dirt logging road to the highway near the ridge of the mountain.  About a third of the way, we were delayed for two or three hours as a group of men tried to figure out how to maneuver a large mobile home around a sharp corner.  The bank of the roadway eventually had to be dug out in order to create enough clearance for the mobile home.  I was young at the time, but even then it occurred to me that this mobile home wasn't that mobile, and that by going down into the Irmulco Valley, it was heading to its final resting place.  And, because it is made of flimsier materials than a regular home, I wonder if it is still there, some 30 years or more later, or whether it has crumbled into a ruin.

We tend to get involved in things with the illusion that they are permanent and fixed.  Yet most of what we do takes action and attention to remain functional.  An amazing show on the history channel explores Life After People.  There isn't really much hope that what we build will last very long.  I seem to recall that within 50,000 years or so, a period of time that barely even registers in the entire history of the universe and only a blink of an eye in the evolution of the earth, all visible traces of humanity would be gone except to the most discerning eye.  Our bones would last 150 million years or so, but our buildings will crumble in less than 50 years years, though some of our bridges might last for 1000 years if extremely well built.  If you think that the thousand year civilization of the Romans has only left crumbling ruins, or that the Mayan civilization is buried under jungle, and that is only after 2000 years or less, there really isn't much permanence to what we create and erect.

But, that's not the only reason that permanence and impermanence is on my mind.  Even things that we don't physically construct, but build in other ways, are subject to forces of decay and change.  Take marriage, for instance.  Most couples say "I do" with thoughts of building a marriage that will last each partner's lifetime.  Yet in the United States, a large number of marriages end in divorce.  Even with care, cracks and strains can show in relationships.  These can be patched up, but the underlying weaknesses, unless addressed, will undermine the whole structure.  Or, perhaps one partner or the other is neglectful, and weeds will begin to grow.  My wife and I have been working on an essential element of relationships, communication, because we had neglected that aspect in the midst of all the hustle and bustle of our everyday lives and work and eventually, that neglect mushroomed into difficulties.  We are trying to address those issues now, and it's hard work to maintain not only the edifice of a marriage, but also its foundations.

Jobs, also, are fleeting.  One might take a new job that one likes very much, only to find in two years that everything about it has changed.  A supervisor leaves and another takes her place, and suddenly everything is affected.  Sometimes the change is for the better, a lot of times it can be for the worse.  Soon, that job that you thought you'd be at for 10 years or more, or even until you retire, becomes intolerable and your whole life is thrown into flux.  My wife is in the middle of this.  Her career landscape, once so full of opportunity and very clear paths, has become muddled and frightening.  Yet even in the midst of uncertainty, there is hope that she can open new pathways and build new bridges and roadways to a modified or even new career.

Civilization, as Life After People tells us, needs attention if its structures and institutions are to be maintained.  So do our own structures - those constructs of relationships and identities that we build. We put a lot of emphasis on the physical things - our mighty architecture and our creations in arts and sciences.  Ultimately, though, we are nothing if we cannot maintain our own internal constructs that define our identities - our sense of purpose, our knowledge of ourselves and our needs, and our self-esteem.  Collectively, each persons attention or lack of attention to our internal identities work on a micro and macro level to either fight or hasten .  We can give the illusion of permanence to those things we want and care about.   I write "illusion" because eventually, all things will fade and go but the illusion allows us to feel, to know, that in this time and place we matter.  Just like we build bridges, roads, skyscrapers, institutions, and countries with the expectation that they will last, we must constantly maintaining the structure and meaning of our lives.  Our lives are all we have and, if we, like all other things, are impermanent in an unforgiving universe, we can still construct our temporary mobile homes where we are and turn them into shelter and our own stationary place where we can feel safe and secure in time and space.

Musical Interlude

A double shot for this post.  I love the idea of Airstreams, and I'd love to own an Airstream - they seem to tap into the impermanence that is part and parcel of our lives, for those who are willing to accept it.  Miranda Lambert, in Airstream Song, wishes to be a gypsy moving from place to place and never putting down roots.  Fastball, in Airstream, wants to "leave the world behind."  Impermanence isn't a bad thing - one just needs to embrace it because ultimately, we're always fighting against it and it's a losing battle.  Sometimes it's good to just give into it.

If you want to know more about Palmyra

Historic Palmyra
History of Palmyra
Official Palmyra Home Page
Wikipedia: Town of Palmyra
Wikipedia: Village of Palmyra

Next up: Savannah, New York

This post is about some Mormons in my life.  I'm not concerned here with questions about Mormonism as a faith or religion.  I am writing about a friend, who happened to be Mormon, and the profound effect he and his family had on my life at a time when I needed a sense of normalcy and stability.  William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) visit to Hill Cumorah, where the Mormon faith began, is what occasions this recollection.  See where Joseph Smith found the golden plates on the map.

Book Quote

"Joseph Smith, an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and 'unlaughing' boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a litle road south of Palmyra in 1827.  The road is now New York 21 and the drumlin, a streamlined hump of glacially drifted soil, they call Hill Cumorah.  It is not a Mount Sinai or an Ararat, but rather a much humbler thing, yet apparently of sufficient majesty for angels and God to have chosen it as the place to speak to Smith.  There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon.  With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the 'revised' Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 5

Photo of Hill Cumorah, New York by Tabitha on her blog From Single to Married (to Baby). Click on photo to go to host page.Hill Cumorah, New York

In this presidential election season, where the nation's first black president will be squaring off against the nation's first Mormon presidential nominee, a lot of questions are being asked about Mormonism.  The questioning isn't as bad or as pointed, it seems to me, as the questioning that occurred when the Catholic John F. Kennedy ran for president in 1960.  But you occasionally see media reporting on attitudes toward a possible Mormon nominee and president, and more articles about the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter-Day Saints.  Some people will most likely always have an underlying fear of Mormonism and the Mormon Church.

My exposure to Mormons was much simpler and more profound than politics, and convinced me that a needless fear of Mormons is unjustified.  I'll put it out there - I disagree with Mitt Romney's politics and am quite sure I won't vote for him, but my choice will be based on his politics alone, and not his religious beliefs.

I went to a small-town's schools, where each year the class was small enough so that everyone knew each other.  Therefore I knew John, but I really didn't get close to him until high school.  We were both members of our school's storied cross-country team that dominated the north coast of California's small schools and a few larger schools throughout the 70s and 80s.  At the time we had similar builds, though he was a little more husky than I was, we were both smart enough to put us at the top of our class, and despite the fact that he was an extravert and I an introvert, we seemed to connect pretty well.  We quickly began spending a lot of time together.

At the time, the dysfunction in my family was becoming terrible.  At 15, I had stood up to my alcoholic father and ended my sexual abuse at his hands.  However, I kept silent about it, and his alcoholism degraded him further and further.  By then, my sister was well into her long and ongoing struggle with anorexia-bulimia.  My mother, desperately trying to keep control over an uncontrollable situation, was at the end of her rope and manifested an obsessiveness with order and cleanliness and trying to help my sister.  My youngest sister did as well as she could under such circumstances.  We all did.

It was at this time that John strode into my life.  He seemed confident, assured, and willing to have a lot of good, clean fun.  Of course, he was restricted by his religion in what he could or couldn't do, but in hindsight these restrictions on him were really good for me.  Because I hung out a lot with someone who was religiously barred from drinking, I really didn't get too involved with drinking myself - I did drink and got intoxicated a couple of times, but not to the extent that a lot of my fellow high school classmates did.  After all, I lived in a small town far from any metropolitan areas.  There wasn't a lot to do and, unfortunately as I have discovered after the fact, a lot of my fellow classmates were dealing with similar dynamics in their own households.

John drove an orange VW bug and I spent a lot of time with him in that thing, often listening to early 80s rock.  He became almost a part of my family.  My mother loved him, and his personality tended to drive my dad into the corners when he was at my house.  What John did best for me was serve as a reminder that there was a normal life out there.  His family was very gracious in welcoming me into their home.  His father was a biology teacher at our high school, and his mother was a sixth grade teacher at a local grammar school.  Their household modeled to me what a normal household looked like.  His mom always apologized for a messy house, but I relished the disorder in their house because my mom's control issues meant that I had the most spotless teenage room in town, perhaps in history.

John's religion rarely played any influence in our friendship other than superficial issues, like drinking. We talked about our churches once in awhile.  I was Catholic and enlightened him a little on my church, and I learned a little about his.  His church responsibilities occasionally got in the way of activities we wanted to do, but his church was also a source of fun.  It was built around a large multipurpose room which served as the community gathering and service area, but it also had an indoor basketball court on it, and John would often invite a group of us to come and play basketball there in the evenings.

John also had a way with the ladies, and I believe that it was his innate self-confidence that allowed him to date some very sought-after girls in our class and in the classes behind us in high school.  We often talked about dating and the mysteries associated with girls.  While I didn't have a lot of self-confidence and my dates tended to be disasters, John was always there to give me some gentle ribbing and then help me to move on.

Some things eventually happened that caused us to part ways, though I often think of him now.  We went away to different colleges, he to Utah State and I to Santa Clara, but we saw each other in the summers.  One summer, however, he seemed to grow distant.  He was planning to go on his mission, which he did in Brazil, and he seemed to draw apart from me and others.  I didn't understand at first, but now I think it had to do with the preparation he was undergoing for this combination of church duty and spiritual quest - this was a journey I couldn't do with him.  When he came back, we picked up our friendship again.  He soon found the woman he wanted to marry, a Mormon girl from northern Wyoming, and he settled there.  I was asked to be best man, but as a non-Mormon I could not attend the ceremony so someone served as my proxy when he was married at the LDS temple in Salt Lake City.  I lived in Milwaukee at the time, and took a long Greyhound trip to attend the reception.

We keep in touch via Facebook now.  John has a large family with children who are all in their teens or older.  I don't really know any of them.  I saw John a few years ago when he came to Albuquerque for a work trip and we relived some old times.  I was a little nervous because I had grown more liberal and I worried that we wouldn't agree on a lot of things.  As I danced around what I thought might be prickly issues, John, as forthright as ever, said "You know, Mike, I don't think we're as far apart as you might think we are."

As the debates go on about the impact of a Mormon candidate and possible president, I know that John and his Mormon family helped make my difficult teenage life a lot easier.  If religion had anything to do with their kindness to me, then I am grateful to them for acting out of their faith.  But I know that my friendship with John went beyond religion.  I was a troubled kid, and John was my friend, and he acted just as he would have acted regardless of his religious beliefs.

I'm not Mormon, nor do I plan to become one.  But I'm very thankful for a Mormon family who probably doesn't realize just how much they helped a young man's difficult teenage life.  Thank you, John.

Musical Interlude

Here's a non-musical clip from The Simpsons that I always laughed at:

John and I used to cruise Main Street in Fort Bragg in his VW during our senior year of high school.  We listened to this song by Aldo Nova a lot while we drove up and down the length of the town, talking and looking for something to do.  I doubt the Pope and the College of Cardinals or the LDS President and his Quorum of Twelve would have approved, and I don't really care.

If you want to know more about Hill Cumorah

Hill Cumorah and Historic Sites
JosephSmith.net: Hill Cumorah
Wikipedia: Cumorah
Wikipedia: Hill Cumorah Pageant

Next up: Palmyra, New York

We head into the Finger Lakes region - a beautiful region that I was lucky to visit in years past.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) makes a longer stop here to recharge with an old friend.  He feels like he needs it in order to continue onto the remainder of his trip.  I envy his ability to reconnect with his friend, as you'll read below.  Greg Brown provides a musical interlude.  To reconnect with where we are on the journey, get back in touch with the map.

Book Quote

"Chisholm rolled a fat round stone out of the trees.  I grabbed and pulled.  I was capable of lifting it, but it was so close to the limits of my strength, I didn't want to try.  Working with someone I knew less well, I would have picked it up, but with this old friend I could concede my limit and let the boulder take my measure.  Nothing showed our friendship better than that rock I walked away from."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 2

"We passed a foundation of a barn that had collapsed, a toppled chimney, and a weedy depression where an icehouse had stood.  'These are all dreams we're walking over,' I said.

"Chisholm looked at me strangely and went quiet for some time.  When he spoke again it was about the dogs.  Afterward, I thought I understood his silence:  I had undercut the stone wall we had built, our accomplishment.  The wall looked enduring, and it would serve for a while, but there would come a time when it would be a pile of rock to no end.  I had undercut the biggest dream of all - the one for permanence...."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 4

Hamlet of Cheshire sign in Cheshire, New York. Photo hosted at the Cheshire Canning blogsite. Click on photo to go to host page.

Cheshire, New York

Recently I have been examining my friendships.  I am a naturally introverted person, so making friendships in the usual places people make friends outside of institutional settings, such as school, churches, or other settings where one is forced to get to know people, is very difficult for me.  I can't just walk into a bar, approach someone and strike up a conversation.  That's not in my nature.  Nor do I like to draw attention to myself though I do like good attention when I get it.

Making friends, therefore, has been for me a painstaking process built over years, and I often wish that once the friendships are cemented they can remain static.  I sometimes wish time and distance didn't matter in friendships, and I used to think they wouldn't.  A friend for life is a friend for life, I believed.

But time and distance do matter, as does the effort and energy each friend puts into the friendship.  I was naive to think that all my friendships would remain the same.  Of course they've changed over the years.  I've made new friends, I've lost track of some friends.  I haven't put the energy into some friendships when I should, and they have drifted away.  I have put energy into other friendships where my level of commitment wasn't returned, and the friendships gradually became more superficial, shallow and in the case of some, eventually faded.

This is on my mind now because I am negotiating my way through what feels like immense personal change - change that will make me a better person.  My world feels like it is transforming around me and even people who I considered longtime and very close friends seem to be drifting away and new ones are starting to come in.  I have been very nervous about change throughout my life, and very hesitant to let it happen, so my instinct is to try to fight and hang on to what I had with dear life.  And I'm combating this instinct very hard.

For example, I have two friends, one on each coast.  One is a friend from my undergraduate institution.  I have always felt very attuned to this friend.  To me, it was as if we had a window into each other.  We are both introverted, thoughtful, curious about the world, willing to examine tough questions, and open to exploration.  Yet I found that to maintain the friendship, I had to make most of the effort.  Many phone calls I made would go unanswered.  His response to my annoyance was that he felt that at whatever time and whenever place we connected, we just always picked up comfortably.  To him it didn't matter when or where.  However for me, I wanted that connection and I wanted it more often, and I wanted him to show some commitment to our friendship.  I have given up complaining, given up making efforts, and I am letting that friendship drift.  It is sad to me.  I like him a lot, and have always felt more than friend with him, almost as if we were two spiritual mates seeking answers to similar questions.  But I can't wait any longer for him to share my commitment, and will let him seek me out if he wishes.  I just cannot put extra effort into the friendship any more because I just get too disappointed.

Another friend is very similar.  We are of different temperament.  He's a bit more extraverted than me.  We were thrown together in a community setting, and we became close.  We are both very competitive in our own ways, and occasionally clashed on that score.  I was best man at his wedding, and am godfather to his daughter.  I saw him often when I went to the East Coast for business.  However, since I've gotten farther from the East Coast, and my visits there far less frequent, I've seen him less.  I made efforts over the distance to maintain the friendship, and he has too though his family commitments made it more difficult for him.  In the past year, since I stopped being as proactive as I used to be in communicating, we have had only one exchange by e-mail.  Some actions, bad choices, in my personal life a couple of years ago, perhaps disappointed him in me but I don't know.  Part of my personal growth has been to try to rectify those personal issues that led me down paths that were destructive but I haven't been able to share that with him.  That friendship, one that was very important to me, seems adrift now and I don't know what to do about it except let it go where it will.

I'm not trying to make myself out as a good friend all the time.  I have two people that I was getting to know and that I like very much that moved away and I haven't been proactive in contacting them.  I have not kept up with some other people that are important to me.  Perhaps the disappointment I feel in my other friends are something that these other people feel with me.

I've also made some new friends who have become close.  I've learned that friendships are not static as much as I would like them to be.  They change, they grow, they fall apart.

But I'm struck by LHM's quotes, above, where he just enjoys a friend's company and the easy way they have with each other.  He makes it very clear that they have no need to impress each other, but are just fine being themselves in each other's company.  To me, those kinds of friendships have been inestimable gifts, and is at the root of why I'm sad they are changing.  LHM underscores change by using the metaphor of a wall to show the different perspectives that can be taken by each party in a friendship.  LHM marks the impermanence of what humans construct, include friendships that once seemed as solid as bedrock.  He acknowledges change, based on the changes in his own life.  His friend is troubled by that notion, rooted in the solidity of his lifestyle as it is now.  In the midst of my change, I am more willing to notice and acknowledge change around me.  I am at once filled with hope and terror at the same time.  I don't want to lose the friendships I have built over time, but my own growth might make it inevitable.  I love my friends, but I can't imprison them, nor myself, in my past if I am to move forward.  Maybe the love I have for them is the only thing that I can hold permanently, even as they slowly disappear into the distance.

Musical Interlude

One of my favorite songs, a bit melancholy, is Greg Brown's The Poet Game.  It is an acknowledgment of our own choices, life's changes and a reminiscence of people who made a mark on our lives and for whatever reason have moved on.  One lyric which right now is especially poignant to me is the following:

I had a friend who drank too much
and played too much guitar -
and we sure got along.
Reel-to-reels rolled across
the country near and far
with letters poems and songs..
but these days he don't talk to me
and he won't tell me why.
I miss him every time i say his name.
I don't know what he's doing
or why our friendship died
while we played the poet game.

And this:

Sirens wail above the fields -
another soul gone down -
another Sun about to rise.
I've lost track of my mistakes,
like birds they fly around
and darken half of my skies.
To all of those I've hurt -
I pray you'll forgive me.
I to you will freely do the same.
So many things I didn't see,
with my eyes turned inside,
playing the poet game.

Lyrics from Greg Brown's The Poet Game
off of his album of the same name

If you want to know more about Cheshire

This is about the only thing I could find remotely connected to Cheshire:

Cheshire Community Action Team

Next up: Hill Cumorah, New York

As we cross over into New York with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), Lewiston is his first stop in the state.  We are also returning to one of the original thirteen colonies for the first time since we left Georgia many posts ago.  It's hard to imagine a time when western New York was a frontier, and I'll reflect a little on what that meant and how it played out in literature, especially James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans.  If you are lost in New York, get your bearings on the map.

Book Quote

"I was in New York: land of Texas hots, beef-on-a-wick, and Jenny Cream ale, where hamburgers are hamburgs and frankfurters frankfurts.  I was also within minutes of running out of gasoline.  I took a guess that Lewiston would be a left turn; if not, I was in trouble again.  But it was there, looking a century older than the Michigan towns I'd come from.

In fact, Lewiston was two centuries older, although the oldest buildings now standing were ones built just after the British burned the town in 1813.  I filled up next to an old stone hotel where, the gas man told me, James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Spy.  'It's some book, they say.  Understand,' he added, 'our station wasn't here then.'"

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Village of Lewiston, New York waterfront. Photo by Ron Craft and hosted at the Village of Lewiston website. Click on photo to go to host page.Lewiston, New York

I've only read one book by James Fenimore Cooper - The Last of the Mohicans.   It's amazing how, once LHM (and us, as we read) travel over three-hundred miles of territory, we get into an area of the country that is significantly older than the rest of the United States.  While the Midwest, being a territory and relatively free of European settlement except for trappers and explorers, the state of New York was one of the original thirteen and had been fought over between British and French, British and Americans, and Americans and Natives already.

The book of Cooper's, which he wrote in Lewiston, to which LHM refers in his quote has been unknown to me.  The Spy is set during the Revolutionary War, a time period I have already admitted in a previous post that I know little about beyond what was taught to me in primary school.   The Last of the Mohicans is set in an even more dim historical setting for me, the pre-Revolutionary time of the French and Indian Wars when Britain fought an alliance between France and Natives for control of Canada and the northern colonies.  Cooper's writings fit into the Romantic genre, and The Last of the Mohicans creates a juxtaposition between the might of the armies of Britain and France and the fading and disappearing cultures of the Natives of upper New York.  If you read The Last of the Mohicans, after getting used to the writing you'll find beautiful descriptions of New York as the untamed wilderness it once was.  Of course, this fits into Cooper's Romantic view - the Mohicans are the untamed, noble savages and his main character hero, Natty Bumppo, also known as Hawkeye for his tremendous aim with a flintlock rifle, is a man who is prefers the company of his Mohican companions rather than the French and British settlers and soldiery with whom he has more genetically and culturally in common.  The Indians themselves are being corrupted by contact with the Europeans, dramatically in the person of Magua who, as chief of the Huron tribe has thrown his lot in with the French.  There are also descriptions of the various Native tribes of the area who either side with the French or the British or try to remain neutral.  At the end of the novel, Cooper's Romanticism is completely front and center with a Native Mohican, Uncas, accompanied by his love Cora, killed in battle and then buried together leaving Uncas' father Chingachgook the last Mohican.  A Native wise man then proclaims:

"The pale-faces are masters of the earth, and the time of the red-men has not yet come again...."

It's hard to envision New York state as it once was.  It's greatest city, then commanding only the southern part of Manhattan Island, now covers that entire island, Staten Island and the boroughs to its east.  The mighty forests and fearsome wilderness of the area, once full of Natives as well as beasts, ghosts, mysteries and terrors that fueled a generation of early American writers, have been brought to their knees under the axes and industry of the European settlers and have yielded to farmlands growing fruits, vegetables and grains.  In the New York state of 250-300 years ago, the frontier once began right outside the edge of the town or village, and sometimes right outside the front door.  In modern New York state, the frontier is something read about in books, seen on television or in movies, or defined as a different type of frontier - a non-tangible thing whose terrors, treasures and opportunities are more of a financial, business or electronic nature.

We occasionally catch wisps of the old frontier.  Jack Kerouac, in the guise of his avatar Sal Paradise at the Bear Mountain Bridge in On the Road, comes face to face with the loneliness and the fear of the remnants of the old frontier and quails, turning his back on his dream to hitchhike along Route 6.  He instead flees back to New York and catches a bus that takes him all the way to Illinois before he attempts hitchhiking again.  One can probably find echoes of the old frontier in the Adirondacks and perhaps get far enough away from civilization that a small twist of imagination will bring Hawkeye, Chingachgook and Uncas striding around the corner, rifles at the ready.

Yes, as we move into the original thirteen colonies one can find history.  One can also find titanic struggle as settlers fight against the elements, the Natives, other Europeans and their own fears and shortcomings.  When you step foot into New York, you can see this history and even feel the difference of this colonial and revolutionary past and, let's say, the Midwest, Old West, South and other areas that would eventually become the United States.  It's a history that, except for some limited exposure, I am not familiar with and therefore, when I read about it or have experienced it in my own travels through the region, it impresses itself upon me in a powerful way.

Musical Interlude

I'm putting up some music from the 1992 movie version of The Last of the Mohicans.  I guess that because they got a younger Daniel Day-Lewis to play Hawkeye, he had to have a love interest (Cora), so they switched things around a bit from the book.  While Uncas still dies at the end, in the movie Cora lives.  Instead in the movie, the younger blonde sister dies for love of Uncas.  In the book, the younger sister lives and marries the gallant American officer.  So, if you watch the movie, you should know that it is not completely the story that Cooper told in his novel.

That being written, it is good music and the theme was composed by Dougie MacLean.

If you want to know more about Lewiston

Historic Lewiston
Lewiston Art Festival
Lewiston Jazz Festival
Niagara County Peach Festival
Niagara River Region Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Lewiston

Next up: Cheshire, New York

We're ending our brief foreign excursion with William Least Heat-Moon and about to enter into the state of New York.  I've been thinking a bit lately about why and how I entered this world in the United States, instead of someplace else.  In this post, we'll ponder a variation of the question "why am I here?"  If you wonder not only why, but also where, consult the map.

Book Quote

"....By the time I reached U.S. Customs, the rain had stopped and, as I crossed the bridge over the Niagara River north of the falls, with quite unbelievable timing, the Canadian sun turned the eastern cliffs orange."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

The Queenston-Lewiston Bridge crossing the Niagara River between Canada and the United States. Photo at HighestBridges.com. Click on photo to go to host site.

Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, New York

The other day I had a thought run through my head.  This particular thought has happened before, but I was surprised by it again because I haven't given any serious consideration of it for a while.  It's kind of a chip off of the block the usual philosophical question "Why am I here?"  My question is "Why am I a U.S. citizen?"

One can only really examine this question truly when one steps outside of the U.S.  The more foreign the culture, the more perspective it gives upon one's place within their own.  Luckily, I've been able to travel and gain a little perspective.  I don't think LHM really was able to examine his U.S.-ness or his citizenship from a brief travel through lower Ontario and a cross over the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, but it gives me the opportunity to do so in this post.

I think it's important that all Americans consider why they were born an American citizen.  I feel this is critical especially now as we very noisily and politically debate what the true meaning of citizenship is.  After 9/11, very many people and politicians concluded that the outside world was a dangerous place.  Many advocated for the U.S. to retreat inward and disengage.  Others, particularly prominent politicians at the time, put in place a policy of unilateralism and preemption.  The U.S. would strike, unprovoked if need be, wherever it felt it must to ensure its security and its own interests.  In the process, we not only alienated many other countries, peoples and cultures, but internally we began to classify those who were us, and those who were not.

Yet, a vast majority of the American people have not stepped foot outside the borders of the U.S.  According to CNN, only 30% of the U.S. public has a passport.  They have never gotten that experience of seeing what it's like to be a "citizen of the world."  They have never had to confront that, in the absence of a happy accident, they might have been born in Africa, or North Korea.  They might have lived in squalor in a Calcutta slum, or been kidnapped and thrown out of an airplane over the ocean in an Argentine "disappearance."  They might have had to contend with hunger and poverty, sickness and disease, war, violence, famine, despotic governments and everything that a majority of the world's population has had to deal with.

So, why am I U.S. citizen?

I've been dabbling, a mere amateur really, into some classical philosophy.  I'm not sure that philosophy can answer my question, but I will try, though I'm not a philosopher and am probably completely off-base.  It is possible, in a Platonic sense, that we can accept the idea of the United States as a form of something deeper and more fundamental to our existence.  Therefore, I can accept the idea that I am a U.S. citizen, but that is only how I can understand a much more abstract concept - by making it part of the real world.

In an Aristotelian sense, the idea of being a U.S. citizen is associated in my mind with goodness and virtue through my political socialization.  Since I was young the importance of my citizenship has been reinforced.  Therefore, I strive to be a good citizen in the cause of attaining a most virtuous status of citizenship.

Virtue has long been associated in American history with hard work.  But here the American ideal strays from some of the classical philosophies such as Cynicism which reject the ideas of wealth, fame, power and possessions.  In fact, sometimes the U.S. has been associated with hedonism in the pursuit of gratification and pleasure.

Most of us, however, probably take a less gratuitous approach.  In an Epicurean sense, we would allow ourselves only moderate pleasures and we would wish for a freedom from fear.  In this sense, the promise of the U.S. is very important because our political system was created to give us freedoms from what the Founders believe was the biggest potential source of fear, the national government.  Classical liberalism advocates individual freedoms as the most important goal for us.   Indeed, we could take this farther into a Stoic view of citizenship, where the best life in the U.S. is one of reason, virtue and in line with the harmony inherent in the universal order.  Thus, being a good citizen would consist of the exercise of restraint, self-control, logic, reason and wisdom.

I could take these exercises even farther, but they don't bring me any closer to knowing why I am here in this country, and as I wrote earlier, I'm just an amateur at this.

What I keep coming back to is a sense of the meaninglessness of borders that we have demarcated.  If I were to look at the globe from space, I would not see large lines that would indicate where one country ends and the other begins.  What I would see is land masses with people on them.  Any barriers outside geological or natural ones are completely arbitrary.  There would be nothing separating me from Canadians or Mexicans.

Of course, there are borders, and they are reinforced by our acceptance of them.  And our acceptance of those borders leads us to believe that as Americans, we are different than Canadians and Mexicans.  We separate and classify but really, that's absurd.  Recounting looking back on Earth from the moon, astronaut Frank Borman writes:

The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me—a small disk, 240,000 miles away. It was hard to think that that little thing held so many problems, so many frustrations. Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance.

Life Magazine, January 17th, 1969

So why am I a U.S. citizen?  I was born in the U.S., and I attach meaning to it.  But I have been outside the U.S. and have been able to see and hear how others perceive us, and many times in a very unflattering light.  That has affected my view, as made me less U.S.-centric and has made me want to use the luck of being a U.S. citizen to promote good in the world.  I could not help but feel how privileged I've been in the presence of the poor of Bangladesh, prostitutes trying to survive in Thailand, the oppressed of Central America striving to gain political and social equality and that I owed it to myself and them to have a wider view of what my citizenship means and how I can use my influence to push my country toward actions that better the world.  The freedoms that I have allow me to think about such problems and potential solutions, where, as a citizen of someplace else, I might just be trying to survive.

So, I am a U.S. citizen because a random roll of the dice put me here.  But, I am also a U.S. citizen because from here, I can affect tremendous good if I so choose.  And I so choose.

Musical Interlude

Wow, I just discovered this song.  I like it!  The song was written by the American band Flying Machines and includes four other world musicians: Kailash Kher from India, King Sunny Ade from Nigeria, Cheng Lin from China, and Khaled from Algeria.

If you want to know more about the Queenston-Lewiston Bridge

Niagara Falls Bridge Commission
Wikipedia: Queenston-Lewiston Bridge

Next up: Lewiston, New York

Lost in Ontario sounds like it could be a movie.  But, it was William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) experience when he took his shortcut through Ontario to New York.  Getting lost can be fun, if you are open to the experience.  For most of us, though, it is a pain.  For men, it can even be painful and the cure, asking directions, can be like surgery.  To see where we are lost, locate us on the map.

Book Quote

"....The showers kept at it, the traffic ran heavy.  I got lost in London, and again in Brantford; finally I was just driving, seeing nothing, waiting to get off the road."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Downtown London, Ontario. Photo by xcommun and posted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

London and Brantford, Ontario

I think that I've written about getting lost before, but I'm going to revisit it in this post.  I think that when I wrote of it previously, I referred to the act of getting lost as a fine thing.  My logic was that as Americans, we tend to hurry from place to place and don't allow ourselves to, as my mom constantly reminds me, stop and smell the roses.

But getting lost isn't positive and fun if one is in a hurry or is feeling tired.  So you can sympathize a little with LHM when he says that he gets lost in both London and Brantford.  He wants to get out of the rain, he wants to get back into the US, and he wants to stop driving.  The way through Canada is longer than he thought. 

Men are often stereotyped as being unable or unwilling to ask directions.  We are seen as the ones that hold the maps, memorize them, and then promptly take wrong turns so that by the time that our wives or girlfriends or any othe female passenger has to be called in for assistance, the situation is completely hopeless.  Not only do we get in these scrapes, but we are often seen as stubborn to boot - we will happily lead our crews to the gates of Hell before we admit that we are wrong.

There is some truth to this.  I love maps, and read them all the time, and get pretty upset if my wife dares to suggest that I am wrong.  And I have been wrong.  It still sets my teeth on edge when I am, and there are times when I watch my wife read a map, turning it this way and that when I know, KNOW, the way to go.  But that is simply pride and hubris.  As Roseanne Barr once famously suggested about men and maps, "....Men can read maps better than women. 'Cause only the male mind could conceive of one inch equalling a hundred miles."

My theory is that men tend to appropriate directions and maps because they are socialized to do so.  After all, the things that men do involve making a series of logical steps from point A to point B.  We do this in many of the activities in which we participate in our daily lives.  Something needs to be fixed?  Simple, just follow certain steps and it will work.  Problem need to be solved?  Again, very simple.  Just do this, that and one last thing, and problem gone.  Need to get to a place?  No problem.  Just follow the lines.

However, sometimes the information flow comes too fast.  We might be flying down the freeway and have a moment where our attentions go elsewhere.  That causes us to miss the exit that we needed.  We had everything planned out from point A to point B - heck, we don't even need the map any more so we didn't bother to bring it.  This is where the cascade of failures begins.  We get off at an exit two or maybe three exits down the road.  However, instead of turning back on the freeway, we figure we'll be able to cut some time off by simply going over to the next road and doubling back.  We're pretty sure that's what the map indicated.  However, that road circles around into another entirely different direction, and ends up at a crossroads with signs pointing to two towns whose names we never even heard of. 

By now, our pride is involved.  We've probably been arguing with our wife or girlfriend, who has been suggesting the most logical choice of going back to the freeway and back to the next exit all along.  Going back is out of the question in our male mind because it would be a monumental failure and tantamount to a dereliction of duty.  So, taking our best guess, we head toward one of the towns, only to realize that it was farther than we thought and we are hopelessly lost.  At that point, usually we resort to sending our female companion into a gas station to ask for directions.  We sit in the car, embarrassed, because we can imagine the station attendant looking at her with pity, and glancing at us with a slight expression of disgust at how that man could have so failed in this important masculine duty.

Of course, I am generalizing a lot here.  There are plenty of women who do their own navigation and hate having to ask directions.  There are plenty of men who do not get locked up in this comedy of errors.  My wife, for instance, doesn't like asking for directions and I am usually the one who will get out and talk to the gas station attendant.  But, the stereotypes ring true to me because I see that tendency in myself.  I love maps, I love to read them and I love to use them in that logical point A to point B way.

One of the reasons I love writing the Littourati blog is that my logical, rational, straight ahead point A to point B brain gets its satisfaction out of the pure fun of mapping these trips that authors have taken.  My creative, not so logical or rational brain, gets its fun by allowing itself to take these points on the map and connect them to whatever is inside me and putting it down for me, and ultimately whoever comes to the Littourati page, to see.  It's a great way for me to meld these two sides of my mind and, if the side benefit is that I will avoid cascading direction failure because either I allow myself to just be lost for a while and explore what's out there or I at least allow myself to admit my failure, ask directions and move on, then so be it.

Getting lost CAN be fun.  But if you're going someplace where your choices are bounded by time and necessity, you don't want to be lost, you just want to be there.  As our GPS navigation devices get better and better, chances are less that people will get lost.  In some ways, particularly for our efficiency and or time-effectiveness, that's great news.  In other ways, and particularly in the case of those chance amazing discoveries we might make because of being lost, that's a shame.  But have no fear.  We'll always have places to go, and most of the time, we'll get there whether we get lost or not.

Musical Interlude

I typed in The Google a query about songs referencing being lost, and this song, Destination Unknown by the appropriately named Missing Persons, came up.  I liked Missing Persons back in the day, and had forgotten about this song.  It fits, and I'll share it.

If you want to know more about London and Brantford

Brantford Expositor (newspaper)
City of Brantford
City of London
Discover Brantford
Fanshawe College
London Community News (newspaper)
London Free Press (newspaper)
The Londoner (newspaper)
Scene (London newspaper)
Tourism London
University of Western Ontario
Wikipedia: Brantford
Wikipedia: London

Next up:  Queenston-Lewiston Bridge, New York

Oh Canada, once we get over the border with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), will you show us your secrets?  Well, not really.  LHM is just taking a shortcut to New York.  But, in our brief, and first ever on Littourati, sojourn into another country I'll reflect a little on how easy it used to be to get into Canada as a US citizen, and how difficult it's gotten since 9/11.  A driver's license just doesn't go as far as it used to.  Immigrate over to the map if you want to see where Sarnia, Ontario is located.

Book Quote

"I crossed the St. Clair River into Sarnia, Ontario, and stopped at Canadian customs to assure officials I carried none of this or that, had enough money for my stay, was unarmed, had no live animals, and would be in the country only a few hours."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Downtown Sarnia, Ontario in winter. Photo by Rob at Rob's Arena Tour website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Sarnia, Ontario

It used to be so easy to cross into Canada.  Then 9/11 changed it all.

The first time I went into Canada, I was fifteen and had never been outside of the state of California.  My family decided to take a real family trip, a type of trip that we were to never repeat.  Somehow, my parents had found a cheap cruise for us out of Vancouver, British Columbia.  It was cheap because the ship was a Soviet cruise ship with a big hammer and sickle on the smokestack.  The Soviets were trying to make inroads into U.S. and Canadian tourism, so we headed up to Vancouver, an overnight drive from my hometown, to board for what I think might have been their maiden voyage.  Unfortunately for us the timing was bad.  The Soviets invaded Afghanistan, the US took economic countermeasures and, in the middle of our cruise up to Alaska, shut off most US ports and scenic attractions to us.  Our cruise mostly became one of going in and out of Canadian fjords.

What little I remember of our border crossing at the time was a friendly Canadian border guard asking what we were going to be doing in Canada.  I remember my father handing over his and my mother's identification in the form of their drivers' licenses.  Because us kids were all younger than sixteen, we didn't have I.D.'s and so I guess my parents had to vouch for us.

I remember just how cool it felt to be in Canada.  It was my first foreign country and even though today I see how similar the two countries are, through my fifteen-year-old eyes everyone and everything had this strange foreign hue to it.  The money was different, the shops had different names for the most part.  People spoke with a slightly different accent.  The names in the countryside were a little English and charming.  I met a couple of kids on the ship who were from a place called Surrey, which I learned was east of Vancouver, and it sounded so exotic to me.

I was a few years older the next time I went into Canada, and it was for the same reason that LHM went into Canada though in reverse.  I had made a trip out to the East Coast and happened to be in western New York.  I also had a person from Detroit with me.  Rather than going the long way around Lake Erie, we decided to cross over into Canada at Niagara Falls and make for Detroit.  Again, all it took was a driver's license.

I learned that air travel was different when my girlfriend and a friend went to Vancouver by air and while changing planes she learned that she would need a passport to get into Canada once she landed.  She didn't have hers with her and flew to Vancouver full of dread that they'd send her back.  After telling her that ordinarily she'd need a passport, Canadian authorities let her in and she got to enjoy her trip.  Ahhh...the days before Al Qaida ruined it for all of us...

Now, in this time of heightened border security, it seems that we have to bring our passports almost everywhere we go to prove that we are who we say we are and that we have a right to be where we are.  However, this border security is selective.  While goods and services are able to cross many borders without any problems, people cannot.  For example, after the U.S., Canada and Mexico signed and ratified the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), barriers to trade and services were lowered and eliminated between those countries.  Goods traveled freely back and forth between those countries.  But barriers were kept up to inhibit the flow of people.  Even if NAFTA created jobs, most people from Mexico who might want those newly created and lucrative jobs in the US were discouraged from getting them.

Then 9/11 happened, and security went way up.  The US is now in the process of building a border fence to keep poor Mexicans from coming across the borders in search of better work.  The last time I went to Canada, I crossed at the same border crossing where LHM will recross back into New York.  I had to show a passport.  The Canadian border guards were less friendly than I remembered, and more efficient and businesslike.  When I came back through the border at Niagara Falls, bored US border guards barely said a word.  When I walked across for a look at the Falls from the Canadian side, I found to my amusement, and a little shame, that it was free to walk into Canada but 50 cents to walk back into the US.  I watched people fumbling, trying to find 50 cents to get their kids and themselves into the US, and I could only shrug as I realized that even the border had become a money-making opportunity - reducing our deficit 50 cents at a time.  Welcome to the US, now pay up.

Perhaps we had a wakeup call as to how the world really is dangerous when the terrorists slammed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.  But what I really hate about Al Qaida, and our response to it, is that I almost feel like the U.S. has become the loner barricaded in the house, constantly suspicious of everyone and everything.  And I hate that our response has created a similar response in our friendly neighbor, the neighbor with whom we share the longest unmilitarized border in the world.  I miss the good old days when a license and a smile were all I needed to be thrilled that I could cross into a country so like my own, and yet different enough to feel a little exotic and thrilling.

Musical Interlude

Immigration Man, by Graham Nash and David Crosby and released in 1972, stems from Graham Nash's unfortunate experience with a U.S. Immigration official as he was coming back into the US.  It's a great song.

Here's a wonderful live version by Crosby and Nash in 2010:

Or if you prefer the 1972 studio album version:

If you want to know more about Sarnia

City of Sarnia
Sarnia Bayfest
Sarnia Observer (newspaper)
Sarnia Ontario Heritage Blog (nothing published since 2010, but good information)
Tourism Sarnia-Lambton
Wikipedia: Sarnia

Next up: London and Brantford, Ontario

After traveling through Ubly and arriving at Port Huron, Michigan, we come to another crossroads where William Least Heat-Moon has to make a choice.  While fate isn't riding on his choice this time, the symbolism of the crossroads means that sometime, somewhere, we all reach an intersection and must make choices that do have real significance in our lives.  To find this intersection, take your soul to the map, and if someone is there with a contract for you to sign, you'd best resist the temptation.

Book Quote

"...so I headed east through Ubly, then down the edge of the Thumb, past more shoreline houses, to Port Huron....

"I had to decide. Either the eastward route through Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland, or it was a shorter northeast job through Canada...."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Port Huron bridges at night. Photo by Suzanne and hosted at City Data. Click on photo to go to host site.Ubly and Port Huron, Michigan

This is a difficult post.  It's hard when LHM just mentions a place without any kind of description.  Ubly and Port Huron, both possibly nice places (I've never been to either), are just glossed over as he tries to decide his next route.

One of life's little crossroads confronts LHM in this quote.  Crossroads are a very good symbol for all choices in life.  One can face literal crossroads, like LHM, in which he has to decide whether to take one route over another.  Or one can face a metaphorical crossroads, in which choices need to be made.  Either way, there are often unknowns that will be faced by taking one route over another.  Sometimes, if taking one way or the other leads to knowns, the choices might still not be clear.  One way may be better than another.  One way may be more difficult.  The supposedly easy way might have traps and snares we aren't aware of.

In LHM's case, it's a simple choice of moving through Canada or the US.  I've faced that choice before on driving trips from Milwaukee to the East Coast, depending on which way I've traveled.  Sometimes, I would take a route along Interstate 80 through Indiana, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  However, if I found myself in Detroit, I would have to make the same choice LHM did.  Do I head around Lake Erie to the south and go back to I-80 or go through Toledo and Cleveland?  Or do I just cross the river at Detroit into Canada and head across to western New York north of Lake Erie?  Often the shortest distance was through Canada.

If you're LHM, your choice might be based mostly on this factor.  You're writing a book about blue highways - those smaller, two-lane highways that are rarely traveled.  You're also trying to avoid big cities, and the southern route after Port Huron lies through Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland - all pretty major cities.  Canada would seem pretty attractive, and it would cut time off your trip.

Something that's pretty interesting, however is that by doing so LHM will completely avoid Ohio.  He missed Ohio the first time around, and if he chooses to go through Canada, he'll miss it again.  Ohio is known as "the heart of it all," but LHM's choices will cause him to miss the heart by traveling outside the "body" that is the U.S.

In reality, then, LHM's choices will have an effect on his trip.  He will either have to negotiate large cities or go out of his way to avoid them, or he will cut off a part of the United States in favor of speed and a little bit of a foreign country.

Physically then, a crossroads is a literal intersection.  Most of us don't really pay attention to them.  We pass intersections all the time.  On a city street, I never think about all the intersections I pass.  I usually have a place in mind to go to and a route mapped out in my head.  But think about it - if I have a hesitation, or I if I don't really know where I'm going, an intersection becomes much more interesting and much more dangerous.  My choice might lead to riches or ruin.

In a metaphorical sense, the crossroads has come to symbolize an intersection not only in the physical realm, but also a place between worlds.  This place can be natural, supernatural, paranormal, or anything we subscribe to.  I was just watching a Twilight Zone episode a couple of weeks prior, entitled Little Girl Lost, in which an intersection of dimensions causes a little girl who tumbles out of bed to disappear through a doorway into a different world.  That intersection is a crossroads.

There is some potential danger involved with the crossroads.  Some Christian superstitions have the Devil appearing to people at the crossroads at midnight.  Borrowing from West African and voodoo tradition, Papa Legba shows up at the crossroads.  The danger from these meetings is that a deal may be struck where one sells one's soul for something one wants.

A famous story is involves the bluesman Robert Johnson.  He supposedly was a mediocre bluesman until one night he met the Devil at the crossroads, and exchanged his soul for a better guitar.  From then on, the legend goes, he was the best blues player alive until his untimely death by poisoning at the age of 27.  Hear a wonderful radio show, called Radiolab, explore the legend of Robert Johnson:

Another famous story about crossroads involves Oedipus, whose tragic fate began at the intersection of three roads when killed his father.  This act, very symbolic in that he could have chosen another metaphorical life road, led to his marriage to his mother and eventually his downfall and blindness.  Contrast this with Heracles, who stood at the crossroads and had to choose between Pleasure and a life of ease, or Virtue and a life of hardship and immortality.  The ever-so-good Heracles chose Virtue.  How many of us would do the same?

From these stories, it can be see that danger can lurk at the crossroads, but also hope.  The Christian symbolism of the cross represents, of course, martyrdom but also hope and resurrection.  I've made choices at my own life's crossroads, and sometimes have chosen the wrong way and have paid dearly for my choice.  At other times, I've heeded my choices and chosen wisely, and have benefitted.  The next time you come to an intersection, treat it with some respect.  After all, it may not seem to be representative of anything, until you realize that every choice you've ever made, easy and difficult alike, as come at an intersection of paths.

Musical Interlude

As mentioned above, the legend of Robert Johnson is such that the crossroads, the devil and his amazing blues guitar playing is the stuff of legend.  Enjoy the Crossroads Blues by this master of the Delta blues.

If you want to know more about Ubly and Port Huron

City of Port Huron
Port Huron Museum
Port Huron Times Herald (newspaper)
Village of Ubly
Wikipedia: Port Huron
Wikipedia: Ubly

Next up:  Sarnia, Ontario

We're going to go Mediaeval and get Romantic in this post.  While William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) travels through Bad Axe and tries to locate Ivanhoe, Michigan but only finds a church, I will look a little more into the place's namesake and explore Romanticism in general.  It's going to be fun, really!  With a cartoon at the end.  Do an heroic quest for the map to locate Ivanhoe!

Book Quote

"....I was on state 142, just west of the farm town of Bad Axe, and looking for Ivanhoe.  Later when I was - apparently - in Ivanhoe, I had found only a church,..."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 1

Google Earth screen capture of St. Columbkille Church and Rectory in Ivanhoe, Michigan.Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan

After moving through Bad Axe, LHM really makes an effort to find Ivanhoe, Michigan.  I surmise that his interest is based on the novel by Sir Walter Scott.  I don't know if Ivanhoe is named for the novel but I will spend the post on this possibility since the novel touches on some themes that I've already covered in previous posts.

So, what is Ivanhoe?  It was written by Scott and published around 1820 or thereabouts.  I've never read the book, but the author was trashed by one of my favorite writers.  More about that later.

Ivanhoe is a novel based in Romanticism and Mediaevalism.  Romanticism was in many ways a reaction against the ideals and progress of its time.  In Europe, first the Enlightenment and then the Industrial Revolution led to many changes in society.  Rural lifestyles were supplanted by the growth of cities and the rise of new technology.  Social movements formed as well, upending the traditional class systems.  In the midst of this, Romantics looked inward, focused on emotion and feelings, believing in natural law (universal laws derived from nature rather than man-made law) and gazed longingly on a mediaeval past and a simpler, happier time.  In America, Romanticism helped birth some of our greatest literature - James Fenimore Cooper's Last of the Mohicans is an example - where Native Americans were noble savages helpless to preserve themselves against the industrial and military might, and intrigues, of France and Britain in their attempts to conquer North America.  It also led to the Transcendental Movement associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

Romanticism not only fueled literature but also art and music also and had a large effect on politics as well.  In Germany, its ideals not only inspired Richard Wagner's great operas, but also may have culminated in Nazi ideology which was based in large part on a hatred of industrialization and the idea that with enough "living room," Germans could be strong and mighty heroes that would return their country to its traditional pastoral and rural past.

Ivanhoe itself is a novel set in a time of change.  The Normans had conquered England, and the last remaining Saxon families are having to decide their allegiances.  Wilfred of Ivanhoe, son of a Saxon lord, pledges allegiance to the Norman king Richard I (the Lionhearted) and disrupts his father's plans to marry his ward, Lady Rowena, to another powerful Saxon lord and possible claimant to the throne.  In this backdrop of change the winners (Normans) are consolidating their claim to England and marching forward through history while the losers (Saxons) look back longingly and helplessly upon what they have lost.

I've never considered myself a Romantic, but I've struck similar tones at times throughout this blog, particularly about the potential harmful effects of technology.  I have wistfully looked back on times when people spent less time on their cell phones, IPods, IPads and Facebook and actually talked with each other.  I have fondly remembered when a busy signal meant that the person you were trying to reach would not be available for awhile.  I have recalled a time where cable television had only thirteen stations when I grew up.  At times, I have felt like a modern Ivanhoe, caught between a world of yesterday and today.  Like Ivanhoe, I have embraced the present (my Richard I is computers, media at my fingertips, music when and where I want) and yet yearned for the past I've lost (my Lady Rowena is the simpler life that I used to lead without all of these things).

I've already mentioned that one offshoot of the Romantic movement might be Nazism.  Mark Twain, one of my favorite authors, lays another fault at the feet of Romanticism, particularly that espoused by Sir Walter Scott.  Twain writes that Sir Walter Scott:

sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish
forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government;
with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds,
and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society.
He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any
other individual that ever wrote.  Most of the world has now
outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them;
but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still.  Not so
forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully.
There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth
century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter
Scott Middle-Age sham civilization; and so you have practical,
common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works; mixed up
with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an
absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried.
But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner--
or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it--
would be wholly modern, in place of modern and medieval mixed,
and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is.
It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a Major
or a Colonel, or a General or a Judge, before the war; and it
was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations.
For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also
reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them.
Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and
contributions of Sir Walter.

Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed
before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.
It seems a little harsh toward a dead man to say that we never should have had
any war but for Sir Walter; and yet something of a plausible argument might,
perhaps, be made in support of that wild proposition.  The Southerner of
the American Revolution owned slaves; so did the Southerner of the Civil War:
but the former resembles the latter as an Englishman resembles a Frenchman.
The change of character can be traced rather more easily to Sir Walter's
influence than to that of any other thing or person.

Mark Twain
Life on the Mississippi
http://www.online-literature.com/twain/life_mississippi/47/

I'm not sure if it's fair of Twain, as much as I like him, to blame not only the character of the South before the Civil War, slavery, and the Civil War itself on Sir Walter Scott.  Perhaps he was making him the figurehead of the Romantic movement.  In that case, the progressive forces of industrialism and modernity, moving in the Union, won the war.

In fact, LHM is sort of on a Romantic quest in his trip around America and he too laments some of the things that are changing and that are lost.  I believe each one of us will always wrestle with those two sides of our Janus.  The forward looking, modern and ultimately hopeful sides of our characters will always fight, even a little, with the side of our character that looks back and wonders what we've left behind, and whether our progress has really been worth it.

Musical Interlude

Possibly the apex of music of the Romantics, Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries is the beginning of the third act of Die Walküre, which is the second opera in his Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle.  You'll recognize the tune from Apocalypse Now.

Of course, Romanticism may have reached it's true apex a few years later, in Warner Brothers' short cartoon What's, Opera Doc!  "Kill the Wabbit, Kill the Wabbit!"

If you want to know more about Bad Axe and Ivanhoe

Bad Axe Chamber of Commerce
History of Bad Axe (YouTube Video)
Huron Daily Tribune (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Bad Axe
Wikipedia: Sheridan Township

Next up: Ubly and Port Huron, Michigan

We stop in at the Crow's Nest in Harbor Beach for a beer with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), and watch people dance.  While LHM is a little dismissive of the band and the dancers, it leads me to exhort my male Littourati friends to learn to dance and dance more.  To see where Harbor Beach sits, waltz on over to the map.

Book Quote

"At the Crow's Nest we drank 'America's Only Fire-Brewed Beer,' a brew remarkably interchangeable with any other American beer....

"Two young women drinking Scotch and Coke sat and waited to dance.  The one with deep, dark eye sockets relentlessly worked a stick of chewing gum.  The other, wearing snakeskin knee boots and golden slacks that fit as if gilded to her, was slender and had the eyes of a lynx.  Boys in yellowed shirts took her to the dance floor one after another.  They were stumps.  Dancing out of her pelvis, she swirled around them like smoke, moving across the floor, inching back, sliding away.  The siren went off, and the strobes flashed her into a wispy possibility.  The boys were dying for her, but they got drunk and sat down.  She danced on alone against the amplified drums and moved through the shadows of other dancers.  Six college boys from Ann Arbor came in to drink Heinekens, and one had a few turns with the lynx, but only his shoulders and hands danced.  No one else even tried."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 16

Downtown Harbor Beach, Michigan. Photo hosted at CityData. Click on picture to go to host page.

Harbor Beach, Michigan

Of all the lessons that I've learned in life, there is one that I try to pass on to my younger male friends.  Needless to say, they never listen to me.  So I will throw it out to the Littourati and others in the netiverse...

Men, if you are interested in meeting a lot of women, learn to dance.

As far as I can tell, there seems to be two general laws of human behavior.  The first and almost inviolate law is that American men love The Three Stooges, and American women think they are stupid.  I can count on one hand the number of women that I've met over the years that are Three Stooges fans.  I'm not sure why this law seems so prevalent, but my suspicion is that the Stooges take men down to their monkey brains, whereas women are much more advanced and rarely access that area of the brain.  They are more likely to like the refined and intelligent slapstick of Laurel and Hardy or The Marx Brothers.  Men like them too, but are easily able to just enjoy the pleasure of stupid noises, fingers poking eyes and hammers hitting heads.  Lest you think I'm too much off the mark, then here's some proof for you.  Women are more analytical in approaching jokes, whereas men are not.

The second almost inviolate law, it seems, is that American men don't like to dance, and women do.

This is not a universal law, at least not as universal as The Stooges.  There are men who love to dance, and women who don't.  However, men who love to dance are usually seen as different in some way.  Either they have made dance into a career because of an innate talent, or if they truly, truly love to dance they risk being labeled as "less than a man" or possibly "gay."  Of course, my gay friends embrace the label, but they are adults who've embraced their images, as are the straight men who dance who don't care what people think. 

However, in one's formative years in junior high school or high school, learning anything more than the rudiments of movement to music is perceived as "not cool."  Most men don't know how to dance properly, and dancing is a surefire way to make you look bad.  I remember, before going to my first school dance, my mother asking me if I knew how to dance.  I did a few steps that I thought were interesting, and she laughed at me.  It was not a kindly laugh.  It was a laugh that said I was going to look stupid on the dance floor.  I didn't have many dance moves, and like most men, I couldn't really move certain parts of my body, particularly my hips.  I was tall and gangly and kind of looked like a spastic stork on the dance floor.  In fact, most of the guys who danced in junior high or high school dances I attended moved as little as possible, in order to not look bad.

Girls, on the other hand, just knew, innately, how to move their bodies.  They seemed to be able to disconnect their midsections from the rest of their bodies and make those midsections do things that amazed and astounded me, as well as kindling in me the fires of teenage desire.  Anyone who has seen an attractive and good belly dancer will know what I'm writing about.  Even to this day, I am often struck about how good most women look while dancing AND what joy they take in it, even as the guys they are with look stiff and uncomfortable.

Eventually I learned formal dancing.  In my thirties my wife and I started taking dance lessons.  Waltz, foxtrot, two-step, polka and swing.  I found that in the confines of the rules of formal dancing, I was good.  I could keep time and rhythm, I could guide my wife around the dance floor and it was me, with the combination of moves that I led, that made her look good and because she looked good, I looked good too.  After that, I began to get compliments from women who were slightly envious of my wife about our dancing.  These women wanted to be on the dance floor, but their husbands/boyfriends didn't dance.

In the past couple of years, I learned that you don't even have to formally know how to dance to impress women.  Your willingness to dance will simply suffice.  Some former high school classmates told my wife that at the dances, I always danced with them.  They felt they didn't get much attention from other guys, but I always asked them to dance.  I had forgotten all this, but they remembered it twenty-five years later.

Are you getting the picture, guys?

All you have to do is dance or be willing, and you will be in a much better position to make women notice you.  All that whining about how you can't meet anybody will be past history.  You'll meet lots of women.  You will be in demand because you dance.  Knowing how to actually dance will help you even further.  You may even meet your true love on the dance floor.

Some years ago, after my wife and I learned some formal dancing, we went out to dinner at what used to be a speakeasy and dance club in San Antonio.  The tables were arranged around an oval dance floor, and at one side was a large dais where a big band was set up.  People could get up and dance before, during and after dinner.

One thing we noticed that puzzled us was that there were many couples of mismatched age there - older women in their 60s to 80s dancing with younger men in their 20s.  It seemed too far-fetched to surmise that so many grandsons were taking their grandmothers out dancing.  The men were good, too.  Later, we learned that there was a thriving business where young men who could dance offered their services to older women who wanted a night of dancing.  Either they were now alone, or their husbands didn't want to go dancing.  So they hired young men to accompany them for the evening.

Guys, I don't expect you to learn to dance so you can take older women out dancing for money.  But, I write that story because again, it demonstrates that no matter what age, women love dancing.  You are depriving yourselves if you continue to live in dance ignorance.  If there's one thing I could change about my youth, it would be simply this: I would have learned to dance.  I probably would have had a lot more fun.

Of course, if you are a jerk, no amount of dancing knowledge will help you, besides perhaps fooling some women until they really get to know you.  But, if you have a decent personality and self-awareness and esteem, dancing could be formidable addition to the range of qualities that will make you attractive.

Think about it, men!  I'm just sayin'...

Musical Interlude

Just in case, guys, you need any more proof, James Brown is here to exhort you to Get Up Offa That Thing.  A great dancer, I don't think James had any trouble getting the ladies.  (Here's a secret for you, Littourati.  I love funk music, and whether out or in the privacy of my own home, funk will get me up offa my thing and I WILL dance to it.  Parliament, Funkadelic, James Brown, Earth Wind and Fire, you name it.  It's just our little secret, though.)

If you want to know more about Harbor Beach

City of Harbor Beach
Harbor Beach Chamber of Commerce
Wikipedia: Harbor Beach

Next up: Bad Axe and Ivanhoe, Michigan