Blue Highways: Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia

Unfolding the Map

The events of the past three weeks, particularly with gun violence in the US, stirred me to write this post as I did.  My intent is to add to the national thought surrounding the recent tragedies, not to stoke antipathy among any readers.  Of course, I have my opinions and I share them with you as a thoughts and reflections for myself.  William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) laments the loss of boys' ability to play war.  I lament the loss of boys and girls in Newtown, Connecticut and other places because we as a society can't seem to come to terms with the violence that permeates our culture.  At right is the Virginia state bird, the Northern cardinal.

Book Quote

"Three children raced from under the oaks out over the grass to reenact the battle with guttural gunshots from their boyish throats."

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 1

A memorial to Ohio soldiers killed in the Civil War battle at the Spotsylvania Court House. William Least Heat-Moon remarks on the names of some of these men in Blue Highways. Photo by "cowpie21" and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia

As I write this past, the day after Christmas in 2012, the holiday joy has been saddened by recent gun violence that have shaken the nation and could create a sea-change in how Americans perceive and regulate gun ownership in the United States.  Or not.  I will admit that I've only chosen part of LHM's passage to fit this post.  The full quote goes on to lament that in the age of the nuclear weapons, boys who want to play at war will have to find their inspiration elsewhere.

There has been a lot of carnage over the past few weeks: twenty schoolchildren and six school staff killed by a disturbed young person who then turned his gun upon himself, in Newtown, Connecticut; firefighters lured to a fire by a deranged man, who then shot four of them as they got out of their truck and whose note said that he was doing what he loved best - killing people.

It occurs to me that boys have found other ways to inspire themselves to play at war, sometimes with tragic results.  The United States, so prudish about sex, has glorified violence to the extreme.  Movies and television have pushed the extremes of violent depictions.  The cartoon violence that I grew up with has turned into graphic depictions of throats slit, bullet wounds, spurting blood and separated body parts.  A recent study of the James Bond films has determined that seriously violent acts in the long-running series have doubled.  My wife and I recently started watching an HBO series called Game of Thrones, and we see at least three or four extremely violent acts such as beheadings and bludgeonings per episode.

Video games provide kids with another access point to violence.  First-person shooter games such as Call of Duty and Halo are extremely popular.  I am not going to moralize on the games other than to note that there are some, perhaps with addictive personalities, who spend a lot of time on these games where death simply means that one can get back up again and continue shooting or start a new game.

When these cultural influences are mixed with our gun culture in the United States, it can become a very volatile mix.  There has been much written about the interpretation, or what "should" be the interpretation, of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution.  The actual text of the Second Amendment reads: "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."  Does the right to bear arms as spelled out in the Constitution simply apply to the time when the US did not have a standing army and therefore arming volunteers was key to keeping the fledgling Unites States secure?  Or, did it intend to help the citizens of the United States defend themselves against a potentially tyrannical federal government?  Did the amendment intend to allow people to keep and bear any arms, or can the federal government infringe on some rights and not others.  Unfortunately, the answers to these questions have not been clear and our inability to come to any meaningful answers has had a direct bearing on our culture and our public and contentious moral quandary comes front and center after every new tragedy that involves the procurement and use of weapons hits the media.

I think that at the root of our problem is America's addictive personality.  We may be addicted to violence, and addicted to the tools of violence.  People who are addicted to anything, whether the addiction be to drugs, alcohol, sex, or anything else, gradually increase their tolerance and also become numb to the effects of their addiction.  An addiction over time means that those who are addicted usually want more of what they are addicted to and at the same time, are unaware of the chaos that they bring to those around them.  Often loved ones, family, and friends wring their hands over what to do to help the addicted person, and yet are afraid to confront them, fearing their erratic behavior and possible rage.  It's easier to turn away than deal with the problem, especially if the problem is also partly enabled by the behavior of those who want to help.

As I watch the debate unfold over the latest tragedies, I see addiction.  We have enshrined the right of the purveyors of violence (video games, television, movies) to continue to provide their product in the name of Constitutional free speech.  Some propose that the solution to the problem is to provide more tools of violence, weapons, to everyone or at least well-trained individuals to protect us.  To me, this is similar to a an alcoholic arguing that he or she will be okay if they just get another drink to steady their nerves.  On the other hand, nobody in the United States seems to want to confront the hard problems of addiction and mental illness.  In the 1980s, the government cut funding for services to the mentally ill and since then those who would have previously been in treatment have had to get by on their own.  When our own failings as a society are brought to light, it's often easier to blame our "gun culture" than consider some of the deeper problems we have.

I am not blind with naivete.  I grew up with guns and saw the best and worst of them.  I also grew up with addiction and to this day I'm surprised that, when these two things mingled in my family, nobody got killed.  I still remember insisting to my father that he let me carry the gun when he demanded that we go on an evening deer hunt and stumbled out of our camp and into the hills.  When my father died, the Savage Model 99 rifle, along with a shotgun for hunting quail, stayed in a closet in my mom's house until she decided to give them to a cousin.  I have a twinge of regret that they are gone, but I don't really miss them.  I benefited from having guns in the form of venison meals and quail dinners, but I realized how dangerous they could be in the hands of individuals who, for whatever reason, should not be carrying them.

As we go through another round of debates, I would encourage us to not only debate the proper use and scope of the tools of violence, but also add the deeper roots of our cultural addiction to violence to the conversation.  And I encourage us to remember the martyrs of our societal moral quandary: the Newtown 26, the Rochester firemen, the Columbine dead and wounded, the Aurora dead and wounded, the Tucson dead and wounded and all the others who have been killed in our culture of violence.

Musical Interlude

Robert Earl Keen's version of the song Sonora's Death Row is a great illustration of the tragedy that comes with combining our various forms of addiction.  The rough and wild Old West was a gun culture, and full of all of the temptations of substance and sex money could buy, and it sometimes didn't end well.

If you want to know more about Spotsylvania Courthouse

National Park Service: Fredericksburg and Spotsylvania
Spotsylvania County: Spotsylvania Courthouse
Wikipedia: The Battle of Spotsylvania Court House
Wikipedia: Spotsylvania Courthouse

Next up: Cuckoo, Virginia

Blue Highways: Oxford, Maryland

Unfolding the Map

Traveling up the Chesapeake Bay with William Least Heat-Moon (LHM), we hit Oxford, Maryland.  A quiet waterfront town, his description of houses and fences gives me pause to reflect on my own current foray into looking for a house.  At right is the Maryland state bird, the Baltimore oriole as seen on Wikimedia Commons.  If you want to find Oxford, there's no better place than the map.

Book Quote

"On a peninsula between the Choptank and Tred Avon rivers, I came to Oxford, a seventeenth-century village of brick sidewalks and nineteenth-century houses.  Only a few small streets branched off the main trunk, Robert Morris Street, a way of aesthetically cohesive homes and yards fenced by the Oxford picket - a slat with a design at the top that looks like an ace of clubs with a hole shot in it.  The pickets were popular, even though painting the holes could take all spring."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 15

Downtown Oxford, Maryland. Photo by Wikipedian1234 and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Oxford, Maryland

My wife and I have stopped thinking about talking about buying a house, and we have moved to talking about and then thinking about buying a house.  If that seems confusing, well, that's just the way we operate.

The quote above, with its references to a picturesque village, nineteenth-century houses and picket fences, fits with my current thoughts toward finding and making a home for ourselves.  We have been starting to move our thoughts toward what kinds of houses we would like, what neighborhoods we would like to live in, and how much house we can afford.  Do we want two bedrooms or three, 1 or two bathrooms, perhaps a garage?  How big of a yard?  Most people do this sometime in their 20s or 30s, but not me and my wife.  We're waiting until I'm almost 50 to seriously consider buying our first house.

I suppose the type of house is also on the table.  It seems that in this particular area where LHM traveled in Blue Highways, "telescope" houses were plentiful.  I had never heard of these type of houses  until reading about them in the book.  They are houses that started as small units, and then larger units were built onto the smaller ones until the houses look like the components of a telescope.  In New Orleans, had we bought there, chances are that we would have found a "shotgun" house, so named because once you entered the door, each room followed the next in a straight line back to the kitchen.  The idea was you could have fired a shotgun from the front door and the pellets would travel out the back door without hitting anything (although that doesn't make much sense because shotgun pellets spread out as they travel - a rifle house would be a better name for these houses).  We rented a shotgun house for a year when we lived in New Orleans.  Actually, it was a double shotgun because it had two shotgun apartments on each side of the house, and it could be a bit of a pain when we guests because they had to walk through our bedroom to get to the bathroom.  People buying homes in New Orleans often would fix these houses up to live in and, if they were a double shotgun, to rent out one side to pay the mortgage.

Midwestern style brick houses never seem to be out of style anywhere - we'd see them wherever Midwesterners came to settle outside the Midwest.  In Milwaukee, smack dab in the Midwest, these houses were always wonders to me.  Even the ones that looked like they had the most age on the outside often had elaborate and beautiful woodwork inside.  They were always at least two stories, and sometimes three.  Many of our friends who bought houses had these style of houses, usually fixer-uppers that were bought cheap and became lifelong projects.

Out in Northern California, the ranch house reigned supreme, at least in the rural areas where I grew up.  These tended to sprawl out.  My mom's house, for example, has a large living room with two small bedrooms off one side and a kitchen off the other.  A long hallway travels laterally from the living room, past a multipurpose room and a bathroom to another medium-sized bedroom and another small bathroom adjacent to the first.  When I grew up, we added a room and therefore augmented the space in the house, though it is strange as the room is aesthetically separate from the rest of the house, even though it is connected by two doors, simply because it sits lower than the rest of the building.

In Albuquerque, the Southwestern style of house predominates.  Many houses, modeled after the dwellings in Native American pueblos, have a pueblo-style to them.  The most sought-after are adobe houses.  Built of bricks made of mud and straw, they are plastered with additional mud and are therefore reddish-brown, almost as if they have sprung from the earth itself.  They are perfect for desert living, as they tend to stay cool in the hot summers but trap heat from the sun in the winter.  From above they look rectangular, but from street level their corners are softened and rounded and they are often surrounded by adobe walls.  I find them very pleasant and relaxing, especially with a nice xeriscaped garden in front and in back.  Of course, other styles of housing are available, including faux-adobes which are made with modern materials but are fashioned to look like adobe houses.  That's the kind of house we rent currently.

So, there are a lot of things for us to consider, including price.  I was surprised to find that even with my salary alone, we could afford a lot more house than I had expected.  Now it's just up to us to decide, take a look at a few things, and eventually make a decision on one we like and for which we are willing to make an offer.

That's scarier than it sounds.  Doing so means that we will be responsible for repairs and upgrades.  We will have to make decisions about remodeling should any come up.  It will be the biggest investment of money we will ever make.  It will anchor us in a way that we've never been anchored before.

But, as I think about it, I really want to create and nurture a garden.  I want a place to display arts picked up around the world in the way I want to display them.  I want a room where I can put our beautiful Turkish carpet.  And I want to grow up, to be an adult, and feel a sense of belonging and home that I haven't felt for a long time.  And even though I probably won't have a picket fence, a low adobe wall would be a nice touch if we can find it.

Musical Interlude

I couldn't find a song that I knew that fit this post, so figured I put on my discovery of The Fall's My New Home.

If you want to know more about Oxford

Baydreaming.com: Oxford
The Oxford Museum
Town of Oxford
Wikipedia: Oxford

Next up:  Bellevue, Maryland

Blue Highways: Bay City, Michigan

Unfolding the Map

Bay City zips by and is in the rear view mirror, but houses have been on my mind recently.  I'm going to reflect on why I don't own a house, why I possibly should, and what has been stopping me.  You're free to ramble through the rooms and hallways of my thoughts if you would like.  You can get an idea of where the real estate that Bay City sits upon is located by looking at the map.

Book Quote

"...past the Victorian houses in Bay City."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 15

A Victorian house in Bay City, Michigan. Photo by Yfat Yossifor and hosted at MLive.com. Click on photo to go to host site.Bay City, Michigan

I don't own a house.  I've never owned a house.  And at 48, sometimes I think I should grow out of being a man-child and actually buy one.

After all, it is a good time to buy a house.  The real-estate market is really bad right now.  Houses are going up for sale all around my neighborhood as people try to unload overvalued houses that are rapidly losing value.  It seems like homes put on sale are on the market for a long time, even as their signs advertise another price drop of a few thousand dollars.

All my life I have rented.  My first rental as an adult was in Milwaukee after I left volunteer service.  I rented a Taiwanese woman's apartment along Holton Street near the East Side.  She still considered it her apartment, and would often come in with no warning.  Everything in the apartment belonged to her - I was a simply place holder.  One day I came home to find another person had moved in.  May, the landlord, didn't tell me he was coming.  She just moved him in.  At other times she would leave her dog, a little Shih Tzu named Winston, for me to take care of with little warning.

I moved from there to a community house on the near the west side on 21st Street.  I lived with five other people with as varied backgrounds as you could imagine.  The house was an old coop house that had housed conscientious objectors who made napalm in the basement to burn their draft cards in the late 60s.  It had kept that counter-culture flavor, though by the time I lived there it housed a nun who had fallen on hard times, an older gentleman who was a link to the house's earlier counterculture glory, an artist, a student, a volunteer with the Brethren Volunteer Service, and a woman librarian in her 50s who was trying to find her next calling.  (Aside: I recently heard from the librarian, who lives in Albuquerque where I now reside and who runs an elder care business and loves it.  She was just as surprised to find me in Albuquerque as I was to hear from her.)

After that experience, I moved in with a friend and lived a few years in an upstairs apartment Milwaukee's Sherman Park neighborhood.  It was a neighborhood on the cusp of the inner-city and was somewhat rough.  Gunshots were common, as were the glares of some of the people walking the street when I walked my dog.  Once a guy said as I walked past with Hannibal, whose fur was completely white, "...man, even your dog is white."  While walking in Washington Park one day, a few blocks over from my house, a little kid told me to hand over my dog.  I refused and as I walked away, he yelled out that he was going to shoot me.  I kept walking, and he disappeared.

After my wife and I married, we lived in an upstairs apartment in the Mahncke Park neighborhood of San Antonio.  When we moved to New Orleans, we paid rent to a couple who went to live in Guatemala and lived in Mid-City in a double shotgun, then after a year we moved to Fauborg St. John and lived in a downstairs apartment in what we considered the best neighborhood we've ever lived in.  Currently, we live in a faux adobe in a neighborhood we like, in the Southeast Heights of Albuquerque and close to a nice business district.

Why didn't we ever buy?  Our itinerant lifestyle kept us from buying.  We never knew if we were going to be in one place long enough to make it worth our while.  Perhaps if we'd been more savvy, we would have bought and then rented after we left.  But we didn't and therefore missed out on some great prices.  Now we are left hoping that perhaps the market will come back to us so that we can get a house in a good neighborhood that we like.

Now, I'm 48 and realize that I don't know the first thing about buying a house.  I don't know what to look for.  I grew up in a ranch-style house in California, which was laid out on one floor with a long hallway separating the master bedroom from the living room and kitchen.  In Albuquerque, houses range from Victorian-style houses to ranch houses, from faux adobes to actual adobes.  We know that we don't want to live in a suburban tract pre-fab style house, but would rather live within the city in a house that has some character.

And to tell you the truth, I have become somewhat lazy.  Owning a house means either being willing to pay for repairs oneself, or becoming handy enough to be a do-it-yourselfer.  One of the casualties of my dysfunctional childhood was that my father did not take time to teach me what he knew about carpentry and handyman-ness.  I would like to have those skills, and could probably learn, but having lived in rented places for pretty much all of my adult life, I like that I can call the landlord and get the plumbing fixed, or get a faulty electric outlet replaced.

Yet, there's some things that having a house would allow me to do.  It would allow my wife and I to define our own space in the way we want.  It would allow me to do projects.  I've always wanted a nice garden with all kinds of plants of both the edible and aesthetic variety.  The prospect of designing my own back yard to make it a place of refuge appeals to me very much.  I also feel that because I would be invested in my own house, I would spend more time there which might help me reach a goal of slowing my life down.

The exciting and scary thing about owning my own house, however, is the sense of rootedness I would gain.  My wife and I have been used to just packing up and leaving when the job gets tough or another opportunity presents itself.  However, for the first time in my life, I feel like I need a sense of being rooted to place, and a community to go with it.  It was Easter a couple of days ago, and as I watched homeowners in a local park have a neighborhood Easter egg hunt with their kids and then have a neighborhood soccer game, I realized I want something like that in my life.  However, I would sacrifice that sense of being able to move when and where I want.

Maybe it's time to buy a house.  I don't care if it's Victorian, adobe or whatever.  As long as I feel at home, happy and rooted, I think that at this point in my life, I will be satisfied.

Musical Interlude

Our House by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.  This is how I'd like to feel about having a house:

The Talking Heads with Once in a Lifetime.  This how I think I might feel after buying a house and being suddenly rooted to one place..."My God, how did I get here?!!!":

If you want to know more about Bay City

Bay Area Chamber of Commerce
Bay City Fireworks Festival
Bay City Times (newspaper)
Bay County Historical Society
City of Bay City
Wikipedia: Bay City

Next up: Quanicassee, Michigan