The Road to Joe

Not that long ago America celebrated the Super Bowl, and one cannot think of these annual gridiron pageants without recalling its many heros. Among these is Joe Montana, the almost legendary quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, who took his team to four Super Bowl victories and who was thrice selected as its MVP. But I am not here to talk football. Not today. Instead, I want to reflect on a trip to find the other Joe, Montana. Not the football player, but a small town . . . no, a whistle-stop hamlet and later a virtual ghost town . . . on the edge of the Montana badlands.

Last week I wrote about the importance of the road trip in general terms. This time I want to focus on one of those special revelations which occur when you arrive at a junction or a fork in the road and decide to travel down that road less taken. The reasons for taking one road over another can be many or few . . . specific or resulting from pure serendipity. Traveling down the road to Joe was a little of both.

Before I start down that road, however, a brief note bene: I have created a companion blog featuring poetry from my book-in-progress, Epiphanies in the rue Sansregret: Poems, 1971-2009. If you are interested, you can check them out at http://www.ruesansregret.blogspot.com/.

And finally, I want to thank my wife Sally Ann for permission to use her wonderful photographs from our trip to Joe, Montana. She has a keen eye for content and composition . . . and my own eyes were on the lookout for cows in the road. You will know what I mean if you read on . . . .
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A few years ago I read Jonathan Raban’s fascinating book, Bad Land: An American Romance (1996), his thoughtful meditation on the settlement of southeastern Montana following the arrival of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railway during the opening decade of the 20th century. The construction crews often followed existing creek beds and coulees as they moved westward from the Dakotas into Montana and beyond. Eventually they arrived at O’Fallon Creek with cottonwoods standing sentinel along its banks. From there they followed the creek to its confluence with the Yellowstone River near Terry, Montana where it linked up to the Northern Pacific Railroad which had already been in existence for two decades.

I first came to these precincts back in the summer of 1970, on that first big road trip across Canada and the northern Great Plains. My friend and I were on a tight schedule on our return to Milwaukee, and the trip coffers, much like the landscapes we were traveling through, were a bit on the dry side, so we could not linger as long as we wanted. We had miles to go before we slept and so we quickly passed through eastern Montana on our way to the badlands of North Dakota where we would overnight. But there was something about this compelling topography of rocks, sagebrush, and overwhelming distances, and I pledged that one day I would return. Reading Raban’s book convinced me that I could wait no longer.

Joe, Montana is a recent phenomenon although the town itself had existed for almost a century when I finally arrived in the spring of 2007. If you look for it on the official highway map of Montana, you will not find it. In fact, were it not for Raban’s book, I would not have known of its existence. It was strange serendipity for my visit to Joe offered an interesting glimpse into an almost forgotten chapter of the settlement of the western United States.

The railroad’s route through the badlands of North Dakota and eastern Montana, and the establishment of towns at regular intervals along its route, were made on a map back in Chicago by men who had likely never ventured west of Minneapolis. “Nothing in the geography prepares one for the arbitrary suddenness of those railroad towns,” writes Raban. “For mile after mile, the sagebrush rolls and breaks.” Originally platted as a small grid in 1908, the town was first christened Ismay in honor of two young girls, Isabel and May, the daughters of the president of the Chicago, Milwaukee & Puget Sound Railroad. With the eventual arrival of settlers and homesteaders by rail, the town grew to include modest homes, a mercantile, a post office, a bank, a hotel, as well as the ubiquitous grain elevator and stockyard found in every railroad town. It even had its own newspaper. Farms were established near town and along O’Fallon Creek. As the railroad expanded westward, and as more settlers followed its path in search of land and a better life, Ismay grew and became prosperous. Nearby farms with fields of wheat and pastured cattle added to this prosperity.

The town’s name first became an issue in 1912 following the sinking of the Titantic almost a half a world away. J. Bruce Ismay, a managing director of the White Star Line, became synonymous with cowardliness when he pushed past women and children to take a seat in one of the lifeboats. The town’s name survived along with the town . . . for a few years, at least. A large cyclone struck in the summer of 1915 causing heavy damage in the town and the surrounding area, but once again Ismay persevered and by 1925 its population had grown to 420 souls.

People continued to flood into the area and more and more farms and ranches made greater demands on the water supplied by O’Fallon Creek and the subterranean aquifer. Crops began to wither and die as did the cattle, and many homesteaders abandoned their dreams to return home or to move farther westward, up to Terry or over to Miles City on the Yellowstone River. Native grasses and sagebrush returned but the land was much diminished from what it had been before the railroad came to the area. There was no reason to stay in or come to Ismay and the town began to die. Over the next six decades the population dwindled away and Ismay fell into disrepair. All that remained was the railroad, the grain elevator, some weather-beaten buildings, and a few hearty souls. There appeared to be no hope for Ismay.

All of this changed in 1993. Once again an event hundreds of miles away impacted on Ismay’s chance of survival. Joe Montana, the star quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, who had missed most of the two previous seasons due to an injury, was traded to the Kansas City Chiefs in April of that year and local Kansas City radio station KYSS began looking for a gimmick to commemorate this event. It contacted towns across Montana to see if any of them might be willing to change their name to Joe, Montana, at least for the duration of the football season. Many towns either ignored or refused the come-on, yet tiny Ismay, with a population hovering around 25 and the smallest town in Montana, grabbed at straws. Publicity stunt or not, the locals hoped this might bring new life to a town with more ghosts than people. Plans were put in motion to re-christen the town as Joe, Montana on July 3, 1993 while the radio station offered to fly the town’s people to Kansas City to watch Joe play. There was televison and newspaper coverage about Joe, Montana across the United States and there was even talk of bringing the townspeople to New York City to appear on David Letterman’s late night television show. There was so much attention that the town considered keeping the name after the football season was over. On July 3, a couple thousand people, for whatever reason, descended on Joe, Montana for the festivities. The local post office (yes, there was still a PO in Ismay) issued specially franked envelopes with the postmark “Joe, Montana.” There were T-shirts and coffee mugs emblazoned with the town’s new name. From all reports it was quite a day.

His own curiosity raised by these events, Jonathan Raban came to Ismay the following year while doing research for his new book on the coming of the railroad to the upper Great Plains. Despite all the ballyhoo from the previous year, the town was much in decay when he arrived, evidence that the earlier hopes of a renaissance for the town and its inhabitants never came to pass. Raban crossed the old wooden bridge over O’Fallon Creek and the single track of the Milwaukee Road, as it is now known. “I was in Ismay - or what had been Ismay but was Ismay no longer. The name on the sign had been painted out and replaced with Joe. Population 28. The only buildings of any substance were the old grain elevator and a new “cinderblock hangar . . . a white elephant” which was the recently constructed fire hall and community center for Joe, Montana. The inside of the unfinished hall was large enough to hold everyone living within a 30+ mile radius of town with plenty of room left over. The town’s people . . . the few who were still there . . . had hoped to repeat the “Joe Montana Day” festivities the following year, but no longer news, media interest in the town had evaporated. Also, David Letterman’s people allegedly reneged on the offer to bring the local folks to New York, a very sensitive subject Raban quickly discovered when he arrived in town. There was a parade, and fireworks that year, but only a few hundred people showed up, and they came mainly for the local rodeo.

So on a bright, sunny morning in mid-April 2007, my wife and I set off from Miles City and drove east on US Highway 12 into the Montana badlands. After driving some 60 miles through deep valleys, past colorfully striated mesas and hoodoos, and across vast expanses of clay gumbo terrain and sagebrush, we came to the junction with State Route 230, the Old Ismay Road. Here we found a small black on white sign listing the distance to various ranches, and to the towns of Ismay and Mildred. Looking at the mileages listed, it appeared that most of the inhabitants along this road resided between Ismay (6 miles) and Mildred some 16 miles beyond. Behind this sign was a much larger and substantial one with an arrow and bold red lettering: JOE MT.
We turned north and I was reminded of lyrics from Bruce Springsteen’s song “Cautious Man”:

He got dressed in the moonlight and
down to the highway he strode
When he got there he didn’t find
nothing but road.

The six miles between the main highway and Ismay/Joe is flat and almost featureless, save the rocks and the sagebrush, and when we arrived we found the town much as Raban did several years before us . . . “melting rapidly back into the earth.” There was no sign welcoming us, but there next to the railroad crossing at the edge of town, tied to a fencepost, was an old tire on which someone had painted an appropriate caveat COWS ON ROAD. Since leaving the highway, we saw not a single man, woman or child; just rocks and sagebrush and an occasional cow along the road to Joe.

If Ismay/Joe is not a ghost town, by all appearances it qualifies as one. There were no stores or other commercial ventures in town save the old grain elevator next to the railroad track and siding. A couple empty freight cars sat off to one side and there was a pick-up parked next to the elevator and occasionally I caught a glimpse of a man walking past an open door. Otherwise, we felt like we were the only ones around. There was no bank, and the post office had a sign on the door announcing it was closed. It looked like it had been that way for quite some time. The streets were still unpaved and some were deeply rutted. There had been traffic here at one time, but not that day. The only evidence attesting to the anticipated rebirth of the town back in the early 1990s was the large “community” center and fire hall. No longer the “cinderblock hangar” of Raban’s day, it was now cloaked in red siding with large lettering over the door: JOE MONTANA CENTER. The place was closed and locked. I peered though the window and it looked like it was used mostly
for storage. I saw no fire engines anywhere. I had a lot of questions about Joe, Montana, and so while Sally Ann took photographs - “it’s a sepia kind of town” she later told me - I wandered around town in search of a Joeite who might be able to answer them. There was no one to be found and that fact alone answered my most pressing question. “Whatever happened to Joe, Montana since 1993?” In simple terms, not much of anything at all.

The original Joe Montana, on the other hand, had a pretty good year after being traded to Kansas City in 1993. Despite some injuries he led the Chiefs to the play-offs and the AFC championship which it lost to the Buffalo Bills. He had one more season in Kansas City, and another trip to the play-offs before he retired in early 1995. Ismay/Joe had only one brief moment in the spotlight and that was it. There is not much to show for its century of hardscrabble life along O’Fallon Creek, and I suspect that when I return, if I ever return, there will be even less to look at. Probably more rocks and sagebrush . . . and a few more ghosts of the past. But I am glad we decided to drive down that road to Joe. Perhaps a cautious reminder of what can happen to the best of dreams.

NEXT WEEK: A Brutal Political Murder

Reflections on an Approach: The Importance of a Road Trip

Thomas McGuane writes about the "loss of cabin pressure" resulting from trying to get everything down on paper before you change your mind and don’t write at all. I guess this is the main motivation behind these weekly random thoughts which are turning out to be not that random at all. There is a definite pattern emerging here.

This week I consider the importance road trips have had on my life, on what I think and believe. What I have written in the earlier essays has often been the result of such a trip. Here I am not talking about a particular time or place, but the undertaking that led to those times and places . . . the trip itself and not the destination.
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"Approach is more than just the last phase before arrival," writes William Least Heat-Moon in his most recent book, The Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (2008). "[I]t’s at the heart of a true journey and one aspect separating real travelers from mere arrivalists whose highest wish is for destination." I have been on countless road trips over the past four decades; some touch a deeper meaning for me while others are seldom remembered except when some unexpected occurrence or encounter causes a momentary reflection on a place or an event. But all of these road trips, whether they are vivid in my memory or on the threshold of the forgotten, have contributed to who I am today, why I believe and what I do, and they help me to better understand those life experiences to which I constantly return for knowledge and self-reflection.

Growing up I can remember my folks taking my sister and me on occasional car trips into the country on Sunday afternoons. And there were the summer and holiday trips to my grandparents’ farm in southwestern Michigan. But these were "rides," a means of getting from one place to another as quickly as possible and with little if any consideration for the country we were passing through. I shared the back seat with my younger sister and I recall that both of us were often more intent on delineating and defending which half of the back seat was ours than giving any regard to scenery or our parents’ admonishments to sit still and behave. No, these were not what I would later come to cherish as road trips of discovery and renewal.

My first road trip of note came in the summer of 1970, between my freshman and sophomore years in college. I had returned home to Wisconsin after a rather tumultuous year in the academic trenches and spent the summer hard at work and salting way money for my return to Florida in the fall. Nevertheless, I left my job early so that a good buddy and I could take off on a car trip we had been planning all summer. Our dream was to travel all the way to Alaska and back, and in late July we packed up my red 1966 Ford Mustang, duct-taped a handmade "Alaska or Bust" sign to the rear bumper, and set off from Milwaukee on the long trip up through Minnesota and eastern North Dakota, to Winnipeg and the Trans-Canada Highway. From there we launched our westward journey across the Canadian prairie – Manitoba, Saskatchewan, to Alberta and the foothills of the Canadian Rockies. We were treated to 360-degrees vistas of wheat fields to the horizon interrupted only occasionally by farmsteads and grain elevators, and towns with magical names like Moosomin, Sintaluta, Qu’Apelle, Moose Jaw, Swift Current, Medicine Hat. Who could not pay attention and take it all in? This, was a road trip and we were not yet anywhere close to Alaska, our destination.

After numerous detours of discovery on our way across Canada, our time and our money ran out when we reached far western Alberta. We were obliged to turn eastward and to retreat across Montana and through North Dakota on our way home. But it was no retreat in failure. Perhaps we never really meant to go as far as Alaska, but we were gratified by the notion that we were headed toward Alaska and soaked in every bit of the experience along our westward journey. We were content to have left Milwaukee behind us and to be on the road to somewhere else. The "Alaska or Bust" sign affixed to our bumper was a cry of freedom, a symbol of fetters broken. We enjoyed every moment we were on the road, even when we encountered some unanticipated car troubles in the middle of nowhere in Montana. I am reminded of John Steinbeck’s encomium to his Model T. "The American restlessness took on new force. No one was satisfied with where he was; he was on his way someplace else; just as soon as he got that timer adjusted." For us it was a shot water pump. But I know what Steinbeck meant.

I can’t go into detail about every road trip I have been on since then. There have been many over the years and I have now been to all 48 of the contiguous United States and eight of ten Canadian provinces (road trips have omitted the two that are islands). I have been up and down the Eastern Seaboard more times than I can count on both hands and feet, ribs, vertebrae, and the times Elizabeth Taylor has been married. I have driven more than once from home in America’s heartland to both coasts and back, and I have traveled the Left Coast of America from Canada to Mexico. There have been umpteen ambles among the back roads and dirt two-tracks of northern New England. And there was the almost ill-fated trip across the southern tier of states, Florida to Arizona, back in the infant days of 1975, and I shudder almost every time I think about it. Pulling a rental trailer across wind-swept Texas was like driving with an open parachute behind me and I consumed an entire tank of gas traveling from east of Dallas to just west of Fort Worth. Fortunately that was when gas cost cents a gallon rather than dollars. There was the blizzard in west Texas when car and trailer came close to being demolished by a tractor-trailer in whiteout conditions followed by my new wife’s rather traumatic introduction to what can be the monotony of the southwestern desert and her new home in a foreign environment [shudder!]. This is the only one I might want to forget on purpose, but it was part of the learning process so it takes its rightful place in the pantheon of road trips [shudder!].

So what is it about a road trip that keeps me heading down the highways and byways? Part of it is just being underway, finding a path, taking an occasional left or a right at the fork in the road. Robert Frost, in "The Road Not Taken" writes:

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverge in a wood, and I –
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

The Spanish poet Antonio Machado cautions the traveler that there is no road; one makes the road as one wanders. The German poet Rainier Maria Rilke suggests something similar but in a different way in his Duino Elegies; the traveler should beware for the road is also wandering. Regardless, they all point to the trip itself - the route chosen to make one’s approach - taking priority over the eventual destination, if any. William Least Heat-Moon sums it up pretty well; "to go out not quite knowing why is the very reason for going out at all, out to discover the why is the most promising and potentially fulfilling of outcomes."

I do not want to simply travel through various landscape and sceneries. I seek out that road trip that will take me into the landscape in order to better understand it, and the people who call it home, those who praise or curse it for what it offers or takes away. Jim Harrison, in his 1987 essay "Going Places," writes about his affinity for special places "where I sensed a particular magic in the past" certain culverts in western Minnesota, nondescript gullies in Kansas . . . Everyone must find their own place." I have been writing about some of these places in past weeks, and I will be introducing more in the coming months. Steinbeck, writing in Travels With Charley, offers the axiom that a trip may continue "long after movement in time and space have ceased." I believe this to be true; road trips will always offer greater insight into the American land as I travel it from one edge to the other.

NEXT WEEK: The Road to Joe

Beyond Snow Hill - A Few More Parting Words

You will notice a few new additions to Looking Toward Portugal. First, I have included an appropriate photograph taken by my wife, Sally Ann. I am staring out a window of the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse, located in Bristol, Maine. What am I staring at, you ask? Portugal, of course. Actually my eyes are focused on Monhegan Island which is situated some fifteen miles off the coast. I am probably wishing I were out there and looking back toward shore. Other photographs will also appear from time to time. I have also added "What’s Happening on the Edge of America," a list of upcoming publications, readings, and other events I will be attending in some capacity. Finally, a list of links to other websites you might find of some interest.

Last week I paid brief tribute to Andrew Wyeth who passed away on January 16 at age 91. This week I want to share a few more parting words for this great American artist.
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The day after Andrew Wyeth’s death I found myself on the road in northern New England, planning to travel through western Maine on my way to some snow-trekking above the notches in northern New Hampshire. It was a frigid early morning as I flew from Baltimore to Manchester, New Hampshire, and it was a cold and clear day as I motored to the coast near Portsmouth where I crossed the Piscataqua River into Maine. I stopped in Portland for lunch and while I was eating I read the Portland Press Herald’s front-page tribute to Wyeth. Then and there I decided to change my plans and detour my route. Instead of driving immediately north to the headwaters of the Connecticut River, I headed up the coast of Maine to Cushing and Port Clyde, two locales long and intimately associated with the Wyeth family, particularly Andrew Wyeth who continued to live there during much of the year.

Leaving Portland I drove up US Route 1, winding through pleasant riparian coastal towns. Approaching Wiscasset I spied two signs along the highway that have been there since I first visited this area. One of them advertises "Maine Art" and "Wyeth Prints" for sale, while the other announced "New Wyeth Prints Here oday" [sic] just as it has every day for the past 20+ years. These signs have served as a constant reminder to all who travel up the coast of Maine of the long connection the Wyeth family has had with this area.

When I arrived at South Warren, I drove south along the western banks of the frozen St. George River, past the old saltwater farms of Cushing. Traveling these back roads it felt like I had directly entered into an Andrew Wyeth painting. I eventually arrived at the end of Hathorne Point Road as dusk began to settle on this quiet winter landscape. "I thrive on nothingness," Wyeth once said. "And Cushing is one of those things that almost isn’t." I have been coming here for awhile and I know what he means. For Wyeth, Cushing represented a transition from the bucolic rural farmlands of the Pennsylvania of his youth to the raw, wild and unknown coast of Maine. And there stands the ancient Olson House where Andrew Wyeth came to paint as a young man, and where he found inspiration for "Christina’s World" (1948), unquestionably his most famous painting.

Andrew Wyeth often rowed his boat down the river from his home at Bradford Point, on Broad Cove, and he would wander the rooms of the old house, always seeking new subjects to paint. It was from an upstairs room that he observed the badly crippled Christina Olson as she crawled across a wide field from the family cemetery back to her house. Wyeth would paint here on and off for the next two decades. "There’s a haunting feeling there of people coming back to a place," Wyeth admitted. "The whole history of New England was in that house - spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic - dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea . . . It’s a doorway of the sea to me." From there he could look down river to the Georges Islands and the Gulf of Maine beyond. He was looking directly into his future.

And so there it was. Its graying clapboard and shingles appear much as they did when Wyeth began painting here 60 years ago. I could almost imagine a revenant Wyeth having now returned to the darkened and lonely upstairs rooms shuttered against the cold winds blowing off Muscongus Bay. Down at the end of the point, across the field where Christina once crawled toward her home, is the small family cemetery where Christina now lies buried. I have gone down there on previous visits, but in the winter it is encased in a deep mantle of snow; very much like it was 41 years ago when Wyeth returned to this point to bury Christina. I would not go there this time; the sun was dipping below clouds on the southern horizon, a harbinger of a snow storm expected along the coast that evening. The skies were turning dark and the temperature was beginning to plunge.

I left the Olson House and eventually crossed the St. George River at Thomaston, and from there I drove south again along the eastern bank of the river, down through the villages of St. George and Tenants Harbor, where Andrew’s son, James Wyeth, now lives and paints, and finally, as dusk arrived, to Port Clyde and land’s end guarded by Marshall Point Light. It was here, at nearby Horses Point, in the 1920s, that N.C. Wyeth established a summer home and studio for his family - a converted sea captain’s home he christened "Eight Bells" after a painting by Winslow Homer. And family members, especially Andrew, having been coming back every summer since.

Andrew Wyeth loved this area as much as he did his native Chadds Ford, but for different reasons. Here in Maine he experienced new qualities of light. Rural Pennsylvania was static - ancient farms and fields which he came to paint at Kuerner’s Farm. His Pennsylvania paintings are often dark and ominous, painted in the autumn and winter when he was in residence there. In Maine there was the restless sea with constantly changing weather and tides. Wyeth wandered these shorelines and offshore islands for years, always looking to paint the harsh realities of life in these landscapes and seascapes. This was different even from the saltwater farms he found in nearby Cushing. There was always something new in Maine and Wyeth would continue to search for that moment of revelation.

At Port Clyde I found myself once again on the edge of America looking toward Portugal but seeing only the Georges Islands, including Brenner Island that has been Andrew Wyeth’s summer home for many years, and adjacent Allen Island, also owned by the Wyeth family. And farther out to sea, on the horizon, the headlands of Monhegan Island, it’s familiar lighthouse a solitary tick of quicksilver as the storm clouds gathered and moved closer to shore. The day was ending and it was time for me to turn inland where I hoped to find a good meal and a warm bed.

Before I went to sleep that evening I reflected on Andrew Wyeth’s long life and how he continued to paint at his father’s studio at "Eight Bells." There was a rather taciturn warning posted on the door. "Notice: If it is the second coming of Christ, call me out. Otherwise let me alone." And the folks around Port Clyde honored his wishes. After all, Wyeth was one of them. They will miss him like the rest of us, maybe more. But I guess we should not grieve too long or too loudly, for Andrew Wyeth is in a better place." When I die, don’t ever worry about me. I don’t believe in being there for the funeral. Remember that. I’ll be flying far away, off on a new tack. Something new that’s twice as good."

NEXT WEEK: Reflections on an Approach: The Importance of a Road Trip

Remembering Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most iconic American artist of the 20th Century, passed away in his sleep on the morning of Friday, January 16, surrounded by his family at Chadds Ford, in southeastern Pennsylvania, where he was born 91 years ago. I was saddened to learn of his death followed by the sudden realization that we will have to be satisfied with the many fine watercolor, drybrush, and egg tempera paintings executed over a long and distinguished career spanning seven decades. There will be no more.

Whether it is the paintings of his native Chadds Ford, often stark depictions of farms and fields painted during the autumn and winter, when he was in residence, or those capturing the quiet solitude of the Maine coast during the summer and early autumn, his art has always struck a deep chord in me that will continue to resonate for years to come. Wyeth will always be with us through his art and his passion for the land, the sea, and the common people tied to them. I am reminded of what Johann Winkelmann once wrote about classic Greek art . . . the important precept of "edle Einfalt und stille Grosse" (noble simplicity and quiet grandeur). There is really something very beautiful and striking about the simplicity evoked in Wyeth's paintings. "I feel that the simpler the thing, the more complex it is bound to be."

Upon learning of Andrew Wyeth’s death I immediately thought of his painting "Snow Hill" which he painted in the late 1980s, in part to commemorate his eightieth birthday. Here we find representations of a number of Wyeth’s favorite models whom he painted in Chadds Ford: Karl and Anna Kuerner to whose nearby farm Wyeth often retreated to paint; neighbors William Loper and Allan Lynch; and Helga Testorf, the subject of a secret series of paintings first revealed to his family and the public at large some twenty years ago. This assemblage has gathered at the top of the Kuerner Hill, itself frequently depicted in Wyeth’s paintings, to dance in the snow around a festively garlanded maypole topped by an evergreen. There are stories that Wyeth wanted to show his models celebrating at the news that the artist had died and would no longer infringe on their lives. There is also another person partially visible who is not readily identifiable, and there is the suggestion that there may be another person present . . . perhaps this is Wyeth himself joining his models to celebrate his own mortality. And why not? The artist felt strongly that it was best to be invisible whenever he was painting. What immediately strikes the viewer most is the stark whiteness of the painting. I know of no other artist who has made white such a vibrant and evocative hue. There is, after all, a lot of snow in Andrew Wyeth paintings. "I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape - the loneliness of it - the dead feeling of winter," Wyeth once confessed. "Something waits beneath it - the whole story doesn’t show."

Yesterday I found myself drawn to the Brandywine River Museum to surround myself once more by many of the paintings that have meant so much to me for so long. And there among them was "Snow Hill." It was a bright sunny day and the warming temperatures were quickly thawing the snow that had fallen the previous week. We drove down Ring Road, past the Kuerner Farm that looks very much like it has for the past decades when Wyeth painted there. There were still patches of snow lurking in the shadows on Kuerner Hill. Looking all around I saw nothing but Andrew Wyeth paintings in this magical landscape.

Andrew Wyeth always came home to Chadds Ford. He loved this area because he was born here. "I don’t think a country makes an artist. I think an artist makes the country," states Wyeth. "It’s what you bring to it - what’s inside you that’s really important." Chadds Ford was in Wyeth through and through. Just look at the paintings arising from his years there. It felt right to be there in Chadds Ford on a pleasant winter’s day. I kept going back to stand in front of "Snow Hill." It is a beautiful and haunting painting. But I can find no reason to dance or celebrate. Andrew Wyeth is gone and the likes of him will not pass this way again. Snow Hill has become a very sad place indeed.

NEXT WEEK: Beyond Snow Hill - A Few More Parting Words

Somewhere North of Boston

I had originally planned to post this column last week (January 19). Instead, I offered up the first of what will be an occasional "Entr’acte" when I am unable to post my regular weekly essay on its scheduled date. In this instance, I was on what has become an annual early winter escape to northern New England to enjoy certain activities best accomplished when there is plenty of snow on the ground. This trip also coincided with a desire to flee Washington to evade the security headaches surrounding the inauguration of President Obama. With this plan in mind, I set off to commune with the spruce and moose. An unexpected blizzard and a dearth of wi-fi connections in the Great North Woods necessitated the inclusion of this first "Entr’acte" as I did not want to leave you, my patient readers, up in the air. So here is the piece I originally planned to post last week.
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Traveling through northern New England during the winter I recalled some favorite lines from Robert Frost:

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

Of course, these lines are from "Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening," first published in 1923 and found in New Hampshire. The poem concludes with the now famous verse:

The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

During my travels I found myself driving many miles each day before I slept. I have been thinking and reading a lot about Frost lately. The catalyst of this rediscovery of a long-favorite poet was my reading of Brian Hall’s recent biographical novel, The Fall of Frost, a book recommended to me by Bruce Guernsey, the editor of the Spoon River Poetry Review and a Frost scholar who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the use of metaphor in Frost’s poetry, and more recently a fishing buddy on waters near his home in Bethel, Maine.

Another reason to think again on Robert Frost? Last week we witnessed the inauguration of a new American President and the excitement and expectation surrounding the new Obama presidency had several pundits, politicians, and poets drawing comparisons to the inauguration of John F. Kennedy 48 years ago. As I drove through New Hampshire and Vermont I listened to the festivities back in Washington on my car radio. It was a cold, sunny day, much like that day in January 1961.

I remember that day very well. It was a cold and snowy day in Asheville, North Carolina where I was living at the time. Schools were closed and so I was able to stay home and watch the Kennedy inauguration on television. It was my first memory of Robert Frost when the elderly poet stood at the East Portico of the U.S. Capitol, the first American poet ever invited to participate in this national political pageant. I’ll be honest; I don’t remember Kennedy’s stirring speech in which he asked all Americans to consider what they might do for their country. But I do remember Robert Frost, the poet with a large, square face and a thick crop of white hair, when he asked the same question in his own inimitable way.

Kennedy and Frost were both New Englanders - Kennedy by birth and Frost by choice. Frost had once intimated that new England was in decay - a "compost heap" which gave America its poets and politicians. And so the poet spoke highly of the Massachusetts senator when he ran for the Presidency. As early as 1959 Frost predicted that the next president would be from New England. When pressed for more details, Frost offered up Kennedy’s name, calling him the "Puritan from Boston." Kennedy was familiar with Frost and his poetry, and he wrote to the poet in April of that year, on the occasion of Frost’s 85th birthday, apologizing that by doing so he might in some way steal some of Frost’s thunder on that special day. So, when Kennedy won the election, it is not surprising that the most famous living poet of New England would be standing next to him when he took office. But it was an Arizonan (and my fellow University of Arizona alumnus), Stewart Udall, who was responsible for Frost’s presence on the rostrum that morning.

A couple weeks after the November 1960 election, Frost arrived in Tucson by train to read at the dedication of the new Poetry Center at the University of Arizona. As the Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress, and while meeting with various politicians in Washington, Frost let it be known that he was prepared to comment on affairs of state. Udall, a young Arizona Congressman and a close friend of Kennedy, used the occasion of Frost’s visit to Tucson to inquire whether the poet might consider reading something at Kennedy’s upcoming inauguration. A short time later, over dinner at Kennedy’s Georgetown home, Udall told the President-Elect of his idea to which he joked that Frost might now find a way to steal his thunder in January. Nevertheless, the invitation was extended and accepted. "If you can bear at your age the honor of being made President of the United States," Frost wrote in a December 14, 1960 letter to Kennedy, "I ought to be able at my age to bear the honor of taking some part in your inauguration." Despite his deference to the new President, Frost was fully cognizant of his place in history. "I may not be equal to it but I can accept it for my cause - the arts, poetry, now for the first time taken into the affairs of statesmen."

Kennedy asked Frost whether he might write a short poem especially for the inaugural festivities, but he seemed more than reluctant to do so. Frost did, however, agree to read one of his better known poems, "The Gift Outright," first published almost 20 years earlier, in The Witness Tree. He also acquiesced to Kennedy’s request that he alter a single but important word in the final line.

Frost would ultimately write a small poem - "Dedication" - for the inauguration and worked on it until late into the eve of the inaugural. His secretary then stayed up late to type it so it would be ready the following morning. When Udall retrieved Frost only a couple hours before he was scheduled to read at the inaugural Frost revealed this new poem to a surprised Stewart Udall, wondering if he might have time to read it as well. The new poem was twice as long as "The Gift Outright" and, unfortunately, the typescript prepared the night before was too difficult for Frost to read. Udall scurried about at the Capitol to have a more legible copy prepared in time for the ceremony.

The rest of the story is well-known. When it came time to read his poem, the bright glare of the sun on that cold, wintry day made it difficult for the elderly Frost to read the freshly minted and newly typed inaugural poem. Vice President Johnson stepped forward and tried to use his top hat to shade the text, but Frost brushed him aside and attempted to read the new poem. Finally, he put the pages aside and recited "The Gift Outright" in a strong and steady voice.

The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia,
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak
Until we found out that it was ourselves
We were withholding from our land of living,
And forthwith found salvation in surrender.
Such as we were we gave ourselves outright
(The deed of gift was many deeds of war)
To the land vaguely realizing westward,
But still unstoried, artless, unenhanced,
Such as she was, such as she would become.

As promised, Frost altered the last line of the poem: "Such as she was, such as she would become, and – and for this occasion let me change that to – what she will become." I think James Reston was correct when he wrote in The New York Times shortly after the inauguration that every time Frost came to the capital "the Washington Monument stands up a little straighter." Unfortunately, Robert Frost’s appearance at the Kennedy inauguration is one of the last public memories of this great American poet. He would die two years later, on January 29, 1963.

This is a lot to think about sitting in a car and listening to President Obama’s inaugural address on the radio. But then I thought back to my trip which was quickly coming to an end, and remembered how I always experience a great solace anytime I find myself somewhere north of Boston. Frost must have felt it to in his own time as he admits in his poem "Good Hours":

I had for my winter evening walk –
No one at all with whom to talk,
But I had the cottages in a row
Up to their shining eyes in snow.

NEXT WEEK: Remembering Andrew Wyeth

Entr'acte I - Way Up in the Great North Woods

I am on the road, escaping the inaugural hullabaloo back home in Washington by opting for a return to saner precincts in New England. I flew from Baltimore to Manchester, New Hampshire a couple of days ago and since then I have been wandering the wintry back roads of western Maine and New Hampshire. Unfortunately, I got caught in a real New England blizzard. The forecast had called for a few inches along the coast of Maine so I was not too worried, but I awoke yesterday morning in Waterville, Maine and there was already 2-3 inches on the car and it was coming down to beat the band. The Weather Channel was now talking of up to a foot of snow in Maine, and as much as 18 inches in some places. Unfortunately, some of those places were where I planned to be. I picked up my rental car in Manchester but it did not have snow tires (go figure) and so I could not use the better route through Canada where there was much less snow. The Canadian authorities will turn you around at the border if you do not have snow tires (a new Canadian law this year), and if you get caught in Canada without the requisite snowtires, they impound your car and there is a very hefty fine. So I headed west on US 2 through western Maine and across the northern thumb of New Hampshire, the same route John Steinbeck used to access and escape New England in the autumn of 1960, a trip he later documented in Travels With Charley (1962). Some sections of this route were better that others, but I ran through several white-out areas that were pretty scary! A big-ass snowmobile rig passed me on a long hill outside of Gorham, NH (just north of Mount Washington) and ran me into a monstrous snowbank. This could have been the end of my trip, in more ways than one, but within minutes I had several offers of assistance and I was quickly extricated and on my way. This is one of the reasons I love it up here. Neighbors taking care of neighbors. How often can you say something like that? As a result of these circumstances, the column I had planned on posting today - "Somewhere North of Boston" - will be posted when I return home to Maryland in a couple of days. So please accept this meager report from the road and pray for my safe return to Manchester, and eventually home to DC.

The Games Children Play

The country is gearing up with great anticipation for the inauguration of President Barack Obama after a long and grinding election campaign. This got me thinking back to the first election I can remember . . . one that pundits frequently compare with the one we just lived through . . . an election that gave rise to great expectations for a new direction for America and its people.
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The presidential election of 1960 is when I first became aware of politics. At age nine I knew who President Eisenhower was; he was the only President I could remember and I had even seen him up close a couple years earlier when my parents took me to the local airport in Toledo, Ohio to watch him arrive on the presidential plane "Columbine" – before it was simply referred to as "Air Force One." I guess I had just assumed he would always be President, but one day at school I noticed that some of my classmates were wearing small metallic pins on their shirts and jackets, each with the face and name of an unfamiliar man who was running for President to replace Eisenhower. One name was somewhat familiar – Nixon. I had heard that name before, but I was not really sure who he was or what he did.

At home that evening I asked my parents why President Eisenhower was quitting. They explained to me that a person could only be president for eight years after which he was required to step down so that the American people could select a new leader. I mentioned the pins I had seen at school that day and my parents told me that people often wore these to show support for a particular candidate; these were the men who hoped to become the new President in an election later that year. I asked my parents who they hoped would win the election. It turned out they were supporting Nixon just as they had supported Eisenhower in previous elections. Our family always voted Republican, they told me.

A couple days later my Dad presented me with two or three different pins with Nixon’s face and name on them. I pinned them to my jacket and proudly wore them to school the next day. Having proclaimed my allegiance to Nixon and the Republican party, I now found myself facing off with friends and classmates who were supporting someone named Kennedy . . . Humphrey . . . Rockefeller . . . people I had never heard of before, and they wore buttons with the unfamiliar faces of their candidates. But I was convinced that these people were wrong for the job. Nixon was my man even though I didn’t really know who he was . . . or even what he looked like until just a few days before.

That summer my friends and I spent our days riding our bicycles around the neighborhood, swimming at the local recreation park pool, and hanging out at the local drugstore where we combined our nickels, dimes, and quarters to purchase candy and comic books at the front counter and rounds of cherry cokes at the fountain in back. There was the occasional game of Cowboys and Indians, and War, and we continued to argue who would be on which side and who would kill or be killed. But that summer we also played a new game. This time, when we chose sides, we argued about who was going to be a Republican, who was going to be a Democrat, and it usually came down to the side for whom our parents planned to vote in the upcoming election. Instead of pointing pretend weapons at one another and making gun noises, we pointed fingers and mouthed what we had heard our parents say when they watched the candidates on TV as they campaigned and gave speeches. Thinking back on it even now I can still remember in rather vivid detail the venom with which we castigated the new enemy. Not Germans. Not Japanese. Not Commies. But people who looked and sounded just like us.

Nixon lost that November by one of the slimmest margins in the popular vote. I was disappointed . . . crestfallen even. My candidate had lost and there was nothing I could do about it. Everything had now changed. Life would never be the same again. But I got over it as most kids of nine do. Twelve years later, in 1972, I had a chance to set it all right. Nixon ran again and won the election in 1968 and now he was running for reelection. I was 21 and it was time to put away childish games. This time it was for real. I was finally able to cast that important vote. I pulled the lever for McGovern.

NEXT WEEK: Somewhere North of Boston

A Final Measure of Kindness

Jim Harrison once professed that "to publish is to rid ourselves of a burden and offer it to someone else, pleasant or not . . . to present experiences that were more fully realized in the writing." I like that! I guess this is what I am trying to do with these weekly offerings that are becoming less and less random. True, I jump around from topic to topic, but I find myself thinking long and hard about what I am writing. So far I have received a number of very nice comments from my readers who seem to look at these little memoirs as pleasant diversions and not at all as a burden. I can only hope this is true and I am pleased that you think so. So let me wish all of you a Happy New Year and offer you something just a little bit different this week.

I have long been interested in Arctic and Antarctic exploration. Just over a year ago I came upon a wonderful compendium of writings on the subject - The Ends of the Earth, edited by Elizabeth Kolbert. And this past June I attended a literary conference held at Bowdoin College, in Brunswick Maine, and I took the opportunity to visit the Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center on campus. Named in honor of Robert E. Peary (Class of 1877) and Donald B. MacMillan (Class of 1898), the museum includes interesting exhibits on Arctic exploration as well as on the Inuit cultures of Labrador and Greenland. The museum had recently opened an exhibit, "Northward Over the Great Ice: Robert E. Peary and the Quest for the North Pole," to celebrate the centennial of the 1908-1909 Peary expedition to reach the North Pole. I have read about Peary’s exploits, but neither the museum exhibit nor Peary’s writings tell the sad tale of a young Inuit boy Peary brought to the United States only to abandon him in a strange and foreign land.
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The quiet Indian Stream valley is situated hard against the Canadian border in far northern New Hampshire. It is another one of my favorite places on earth and I have been coming to this region regularly for several years now. Although it seems typical of many isolated New England backwoods, it has a strange history and is the source of some fascinating stories. I will be writing more about this beautiful valley, but today I want to focus on the story of Minik, an Inuit from Greenland whose strange fate is bound to this quiet valley. I first heard this story during one of my early visits to the Indian Stream and since then I have tried to ferret out more details . . . to separate the truth from the myth. There were several versions of the story, depending on what one reads or to whom one speaks. A local historian Ellsworth Bunnell from Colebrook, New Hampshire, wrote an interesting profile on Minik back in 1969, but he passed away before I had a chance to talk to him. The best source of information, therefore, surfaced with the 2000 publication of Give Me My Father’s Body: The Life of Minik, the New York Eskimo, by Kenn Harper, a noted Canadian Arctic historian and ethnologist.

At the southern end of Indian Stream valley, where the meandering stream flows into the upper Connecticut River, there are two roads which give limited access to the area. The main one, for the lack of a more imaginative name, is known as Indian Stream Road and it parallels the stream for much of its course toward the height of land defining the international boundary. The other is Tabor Road, named after a prominent valley family, which runs only a mile or two past a couple of the remaining dairy farms in this region and up to the cut through a forested ridge known as Tabor Notch. From the top of this ridge one can look out over the hills and farms of the Eastern Townships of Québec. Wedged between Tabor Road and the stream is the small but well-groomed Indian Stream Cemetery. It is encircled with a simple metal fence and there is one large monument in the center which marks the Tabor family plot. The rest of the gravestones are rather plain, belonging to families who have lived in this valley since the 18th century. Probably one of the simplest and nondescript of these markers, located near the back fence and with a nice view of the stream, is that of Mene (Minik) Wallace who was buried here in October 1918. The local folks did not know very much about this young man who came to live and work among them. In fact, there was no stone to mark the grave until some 60 years after Minik died. No one alive today remembers him.

Of course, Minik was not from the Indian Stream valley nor did he live there very long. Nevertheless, his life is bound to this quiet valley through a strange and rather tragic series of events leading to his death at the young age of twenty eight. Minik was born circa 1890 near Cape York, in northwestern Greenland. In 1897, in the wake of his extensive trips across Greenland during which he studied and documented Inuit culture and traditions while attempting to become the first person to reach the North Pole, noted Arctic explorer Robert Peary brought Minik and five other Inuit, including his father Quisuk, to the United States, along with the Cape York Meteorite which Peary had located three years earlier. Bringing living representatives of Inuit culture to New York should have been an anthropological coup for Franz Boas and the Museum of Natural History. Frequently arctic explorers used the indigenous people for logistical support for their expeditions, but Peary promised to bring Inuit back to the United States where they could be studied more completely. Unfortunately Boas and the museum were not prepared to assume responsibility for its new charges and they were unceremoniously quartered in a dimly lit room in the museum’s basement. Before departing Greenland, Peary promised the Inuit they would be returned home the following year, but within a few weeks most of them had become sick and were taken to Bellevue Hospital.

The museum asked Peary to help it deal with Inuit he had brought there unannounced, but Peary had moved on to other matters and he never replied. All but two of the Inuit eventually fell victim to diseases they had never known back in the Arctic. Quisuk, Minik’s father, was the first to die in early 1898, and his brain and internal organs were removed for study at Bellevue. His skeleton was stripped of its flesh and returned to the museum to join the other Inuit bones Peary had surreptitiously disinterred from the local burial grounds in Greenland. A mock funeral and burial of Quisuk were held at the museum for his young son’s benefit, but his father’s skeleton was eventually mounted and placed on public display.

William Wallace, the museum’s superintendent, took Minik and the other Inuit to his farm in Upstate New York hoping their health and circumstances might improve. Nevertheless, all but Minik and a single adult eventually died and their bones returned to the museum to join those of Quisuk. The surviving adult Inuit returned to Greenland on a subsequent expedition led by Peary, but Minik, orphaned in a strange land (his mother had died before he left Greenland), was eventually adopted by Wallace and raised as a member of his family. For a couple of years he lived the life of an average American youth. He attended school and did those things any boy his age might do. But his happiness was short-lived. Wallace was fired from the museum and his wife died shortly thereafter and Minik joined his stepfather living in dire straits in New York. To make matters worse, in 1907 he learned the true fate of his father’s remains. Wallace and others came to Minik’s aid, hoping to find support for the youngster while assisting him in his attempt to return to his native land along with his father’s bones. Wallace asked Peary to take Minik home on his next expedition to Greenland in the summer of 1908, but Peary refused, saying there was not enough room on his ship to accommodate him. His father’s bones would remain at the museum.

In 1909, Minik set off for Greenland on his own with hardly a dollar to his name; he had been in the United States for 12 years yet he had nothing to show for his life here. He made it as far as Labrador before he returned to New York where his plight and his desire to retrieve his father’s bones drew national media attention, often at Peary’s expense with allegations that he had not actually reached the North Pole in April of that year as he had claimed. Peary finally agreed to take Minik back to the isolation of northern Greenland in return for his promise never to return to the United States.

When he returned home Minik found himself a stranger in a strange land for a second time. He could no longer speak his native language and he was unaccustomed to the ways of his people. He eventually adjusted to his new life but it was hard and he missed the life he had come to know in New York despite its deprivations. Irrespective of the promise made to Peary, Minik returned to New York in late 1916, but it was a different country than the one he left behind seven years earlier. Few were interested in him or his efforts to reclaim his father’s bones. He worked a series of odd jobs and talked again of returning to Greenland. But he never did.

Tired of life in New York, Minik struck out for New England during the winter of 1917 and eventually found a job in a primitive logging camp on the Upper Connecticut River. Alton Hall, a local farmer and logger who worked with Minik, invited the young Inuit man to come live with his family near Indian Stream. Minik found a small measure of happiness in northern New Hampshire, but for a second time his happiness would be short lived. A Spanish Flu epidemic spread through northern New England and Minik and several members of the Hall family died in October 1918.

In 1993, the Museum of Natural History sent the bones of Quisuk and the other Inuit back to Greenland for a proper burial. Minik’s bones were not among them. To this day he lies buried and nearly forgotten in the quiet little cemetery on the banks of Indian Stream surrounded by those who showed him a final measure of kindness. Each time I return to that valley I spend a few minutes by the small stone marking Minik’s grave and I think back to something Minik once wrote in a letter to a friend: "I don't think both ends and the middle of the Earth are worth the price that has been paid to almost find one pole."

NEXT WEEK: The Games Children Play

You Really Can Go Home Again

This is my final random thought for 2008 and this time around it is not so random. I want to use this opportunity to pay tribute to a good friend who passed away earlier this month.

Ted Mitchell was originally from Oak Park, Michigan, but moved to Asheville, North Carolina in 1988. For two decades he worked as a historic site interpreter and volunteer at the Thomas Wolfe Memorial State Historic Site, and he was also the director of the long-running Thomas Wolfe Festival. I first met Ted on an early visit to the Wolfe Memorial and we later served together on the Board of Directors of the Thomas Wolfe Society.

Ted was quite a remarkable person. A researcher, scholar, and writer extra ordinaire, he authored numerous books, essays and articles on Wolfe, most recently, Windows of the Heart: The Correspondence of Thomas Wolfe and Margaret Roberts (2007). A tribute by Ted’s friend, Rob Neufeld, of the Asheville Citizen-Times, gives you an idea of the type of person he was.
"Ted’s devotion to and reverence for Thomas Wolfe and his contributions to American letters was second only to his devotion and love for those who were fortunate enough to be counted among his friends and colleagues. Ted’s kind words and thoughtful insights into life’s many challenges were a constant source of inspiration and comfort for those around him. His unique and humorous perspectives on life could bring a smile to even the most hardened of souls. Ted loved the natural world around him and . . . he enjoyed daily walks along the Blue Ridge Parkway. The beauty and grandeur of the mountains of North Carolina never seemed to lose their hold on Ted. A pair of binoculars was always by his living room window so that he could occasionally gaze upon the majesty of Mt. Pisgah in the distance."

So I am deeply saddened by Ted’s passing. He has given us so much over the years and would have certainly produced more fine Thomas Wolfe scholarship had his life not been cut tragically short. I will always remember his quiet nature and his true devotion to his friends and colleagues. He will be missed very much and the hole he has left in our lives will long be with us. That said, I dedicate this week’s not so random note to his memory.
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I first encountered Thomas Wolfe when I was ten years old. It was 1961 and I was living in Asheville at the time. One day I spied his name on a historical marker near downtown. It noted that Wolfe was the famous author of Look Homeward, Angel, that he grew up in Asheville and was buried in nearby Riverside Cemetery. I would see the sign each time my parents made the trek from our home in east Asheville, through the Beaucatcher Mountain tunnel and into downtown where I attended weekly swimming lessons at the YMCA, on Woodfin Street.

It was after one of those lessons that I convinced my mother to take me to the Riverside Cemetery so that we might try and find where Thomas Wolfe was buried. Perhaps an odd request from a 10 year old boy? All I knew was that he was a famous author from Asheville, but I knew nothing more about him and I had yet to read one of his books. But I liked the sound of the name . . . and the fact that a famous writer had grown up in the very same town where I lived. My mother humored me and we drove out Broadway Avenue through an old residential neighborhood until we came to the main gate of the cemetery. It is a fairly large cemetery and I recall looking around for quite awhile before we found Wolfe’s grave. There it was . . . a simple red marble marker . . . one of several in the Wolfe family plot. I was saddened to learn he had died a young man. Thirty-seven might seem old to a 10 year old boy, but he was the same age as my parents at the time when he died. His epitaph - "The last voyage, the longest, the best" (taken from the Look Homeward, Angel) - and the other inscription on the tombstone from The Web and the Rock - "Death bent to touch his chosen son with mercy, love and pity, and put the seal of honor on him when he died" - made me believe he was probably in a good place.

I began to learn more about Thomas Wolfe. The boarding house – The Old Kentucky Home – which was owned and operated by Wolfe’s mother and where he lived when he was a young boy, was still standing on Spruce Street, just a couple blocks away from the house where he was born, on Woodfin Street. That house was torn down to make way for the YMCA where I took swimming lessons. In the fall of 1963 I began attending David Millard Junior High School, located in downtown Asheville, on the corner of Oak and College streets. Each morning I would ride an old green and white city bus up Tunnel Road and through the Beaucatcher Mountain tunnel, dropping me off at school. In the afternoon, my friends and I walked up to nearby Pack Square to catch the bus taking us back through the tunnel and home. Many afternoons we would get ice cream at a shop on Spruce Street and walk over and sit on the front steps of the Old Kentucky Home to talk. The house was a memorial to Wolfe, but I no longer can recall whether it was open to the public at that time. I remember thinking about Wolfe growing up in that house and I was very curious what it looked like inside. You could look through the windows, but you could not see very much. I never did go inside - not then - and it all remained a great mystery to me. I do have strong memories of that porch and the times I spent there with my friends. It was there that I first learned that President Kennedy had been murdered in Texas. My friends and I rushed home to be with our families not realizing then that we had left our own childhoods and innocence on that porch on that beautiful autumn Friday afternoon.

My family moved from Asheville that following spring of 1964, and it would be over twenty years before I would return. I am sorry to admit it, but I did not think much about Thomas Wolfe or his books during those many years. In the summer of 1986, I took my wife and young son on vacation in the north Georgia mountains. Our route took us through Asheville, and while we were there I wanted to show them where I once lived and went to school. We walked around downtown and eventually over to Spruce Street where I saw the Old Kentucky Home again. It looked pretty much the way I remembered it even though downtown had grown up around it. Now the house was open for tours and soon we found ourselves snaking through the narrow hallways and up the long flight of stairs to explore every room, niche and cranny. The guide told us about the time Thomas Wolfe had lived there and he came alive for me for perhaps the first time.

It could have ended there. We could have walked out the door at the end of the tour and never gone back. And perhaps Wolfe was correct when he wrote that you can never go home again. Maybe we would have driven on to the Georgia mountains and I would have never thought about Asheville or Thomas Wolfe again. But it did not happen that way. At the end of the tour, I was looking around the small book store located in one of the downstair rooms. There I found postcard of Wolfe boarding a streetcar in Berlin in 1936 with the tower of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Gedächtniskirche clearly recognizable in the background. I had been to this very spot not long before and the now bombed-out ruins of the Gedächtniskirche tower is one of the more prominent and recognizable landmarks in Berlin. So, Thomas Wolfe and I shared more than I had thought. We both lived in Asheville when we were young and we had both gone to Berlin as young men. While perusing the books in the gift shop, I also came across a display of many earlier editions of Wolfe’s books, including a number of German translations. As an American student of German culture, I am often struck by the number of American writers who are popular in Germany, and by the number of German titles in that small display, I presumed that Wolfe had found an audience in Germany. I purchased a copy of Look Homeward, Angel and read it while I was on vacation. I was stirred by passages describing the old boarding house and I read references to Germany and Germans.

I decided then and there that I wanted to explore Wolfe’s affinity for Germany and I began reading everything he had written (no small task) as well as what others had written about him. I delved into Wolfe’s letters and notebooks and I was suddenly thrust into the small circle of Wolfe scholarship. I joined the Thomas Wolfe Society in 1989, figuring this would put me in touch with others who researched and wrote about Wolfe. I made a number of good and lasting friendships with some wonderful and generous people and to this day I look forward to annual Society meetings as one of the high points of the year. They never disappoint.

When I first saw the name of Thomas Wolfe on that small historic marker in Asheville over 40 years ago, I would have never dreamed that one day I would be involved in a scholarly effort to better define his life, his work, and ultimately, his own understanding of a culture so foreign from the one in which he and I grew up. From reading his name on a sign, to visiting his grave in Riverside Cemetery, to the delight of reading Look Homeward, Angel for the first time, to the rediscovery of this childhood interest some 20 years, to the beginning of a scholarly interest in Wolfe, I have come a long way with Thomas Wolfe.

I have grown up with Thomas Wolfe lurking in the shadows – sometime so close I feel like I can reach out and touch him, that we could sit down on those step of the old boarding house on Spruce Street and talk about a thousand topics. Other times he seems to be on the edge of the shadow. Close enough to know he is there, yet too far away for any meaningful connections. But Thomas Wolfe is always there. And his presence is always stronger when I am in Asheville visiting the Old Kentucky Home on Spruce Street. I find myself standing only a few yards from where I first saw that historical where I came to know who Thomas Wolfe was . . . only a few yards from where the house he was born in once stood on Woodfin Street. It has been a long and rather circuitous route over 47 years. Ironically, when I am in Asheville I realize that Thomas Wolfe had it all wrong. You really can go home again. Ted Mitchell knew that too and I can only hope that his long last voyage is the best.

NEXT WEEK: A Final Measure of Kindness

Acorn School - Part II: Gone But Not Forgotten

Last week’s first installment of "Acorn School" told how I came to attend a one-room schoolhouse in rural southwestern Michigan. This week I want to describe what it was like to attend such a school. In some ways not all that different from other schools, but certainly a throwback to bygone days. It opened this city boy’s eyes to a different way of life.

I have enjoyed and appreciated the comments I have received to date. Please feel free to let me know what you think. In the meantime, here is wishing everyone a Festive Holiday Season and a Prosperous New Year! Now to the rest of the story.
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Although it was over 50 years ago, I remember it like it was yesterday. A typical day at Acorn School would begin with the arrival of our teacher (unfortunately I can no longer recall her name) who, like so many teachers assigned to these small schools, was a young woman fresh out of a teachers college. Each day she would prepare the classroom for the arrival her charges; windows would be opened (in winter she would light the wood stove in the corner), and she would raise the flag on the pole outside the front door. At 9:00am she rang the school bell marking the beginning of the day’s lessons. Those of us who arrived early enough would be put to work helping our teacher get ready.

I and my fellow students were seated on benches or at individual desks. Our teacher took daily attendance and we began each day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, and usually also a short prayer (a new experience for me). Since there was only one teacher assigned to Acorn School, students ranging from kindergarten through eighth grade would be called to the front of the room in groups and there they would have the teacher’s undivided attention while the students from other grades were expected to work quietly and diligently at their benches and desks until it was their time to go to the front of the room and account for themselves.

The morning’s lessons would pause for a brief recess – just enough time to go outside, weather permitting, to stretch our legs and get a breath of fresh air. Back inside lessons would continue until it was time to break for lunch. The afternoon was spent much like the morning with more lessons and another short recess after which the younger students were dismissed for the day so that the teacher could concentrate her attention on the older ones. Once these students were dismissed, the teacher was expected to sweep the floors and straighten up the classroom, although sometime students could be prevailed upon to stay and help.

Instead of beginning my formal education at a large urban elementary school where I would have shared a classroom with Lithuanian, Polish, and Serbian immigrant children from my neighborhood at home, many of whom spoke little English, I had the chance to spend time on my grandparents' Michigan farmstead and attend classes at Acorn School with one teacher and a few other fellow students, all children from neighboring farms who probably thought that all schools were just like Acorn School. I would soon know differently.

Our teacher was counted upon to provide the means necessary to educate, and from time to time, discipline her students; to teach them the ways of the world. The younger students, including myself, were seated closest to the teacher's desk. I can still remember the blonde-haired farm boy who sat next to me – Billy Barkovic – who also became my best friend. He lived in the farm just up the road from my grandparents and, ironically enough, still spoke Serbo-Croatian at home. My other best friend was Jimmy Rowen. I have no idea what ever became of them, but back then we were inseparable. The oldest student in school, and the only one in the eight grade, was a tall, lanky girl who sat all by herself at a desk in the back of the room. Since the teacher spent much of her time with the younger students, the older ones were expected to work on their own with a minimum of supervision. I could not wait until I was older and away from the constant stare of our teacher, although I am quite certain these stares were often due to the extracurricular activities of Billy, Jimmy and myself during class.

Acorn School had few modern conveniences one comes to associate with a city school. Between the teacher's desk and the school's only door was a large, rather forbidding pot-belly wood stove which provided heat during the long and often bitterly cold Michigan winters. Those of us sitting close to the stove managed to stay comfortably warm during the day although I imagine the older kids in the back of the room were not quite so lucky and often had to put on a sweater or jacket while we were shedding our.

Each morning during the winter the first children to reach the school, after trudging through the snow and ice, were expected to carry a piece of firewood inside to feed the fire the teacher had started when she arrived that morning. Students would also take care of other routine chores before school started – cleaning the blackboard and pounding the erasers clean on the front stoop, spreading a fine yellow dusting across the snow.

As young and impressionable students, we labored with the three "Rs" and spelling, all taught through a long and somewhat tedious process of memorization and recitation (I still can name all of the state capitals and the U.S. presidents although I was not quite as talented when it came to multiplication tables). The only relief from this routine was the all too brief recesses in the morning and afternoon, when we would play in the small school yard or in the fields of the neighboring Curtis farm, and the half hour given to lunch when a truck from the local dairy in Paw Paw would stop in front of the school and for a nickel would dispense cups of fresh milk used to wash down the sandwiches we brought from home that morning. Once a week a mobile library would stop and each child would be permitted to check-out one book with the promise to return it the following week. The only other break from the monotony of our lessons was an occasional trip to the outhouse, but only after we were able to convince the teacher that death was imminent. When freed, one could spend a few minutes in solitude, away from the chanting of multiplication tables and the teacher's watchful gaze. During the winter, however, one was less inclined to such diversions, regardless of need, as the cold winter winds often shook the school to its very foundation. But it was more than these cruel winter winds that threatened these small schoolhouses and the rural culture they supported.

Today there is nothing left of Acorn School save the crumbling stone and mortar foundation and the stoop where we use to bang dusty erasers and sit to drink cups of cold milk with our sandwiches. The school yard where we once played is now overgrown with brambles and mature trees and one would never know that a building once stood on this site. Acorn School is gone, but it will never be forgotten.

NEXT WEEK: You Really Can Go Home Again

Acorn School - Part I: Life on a Michigan Farm

This is my third weekly installment of "random thoughts." I am very pleased with the responses and comments I have received so far and I am glad that the things I have written about Florida and Maine have resonated with others. This week my thoughts wander farther afield, to Michigan, where I spent a great deal of time when I was growing up and where I started school in a one-room schoolhouse some fifty years ago (am I giving away too much information here?). Anyway, to the story at hand.
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I am beginning to forget my grandparents. They have been gone for over 30 years, but for a quarter century I would know them yet never truly understand their lives on a small farm in southwestern Michigan. My grandfather gave his all to that hardscrabble enterprise, and made a life there for his family. He planted corn in the spring, picked asparagus in mid-summer, baled and gathered the hay and stacked the harvest corn in autumn. As winter’s snow blanketed his fields he would stare to the distant tree line, a rolled cigarette clenched between yellow teeth misshapen and cracked like crib corn as he awaited the thaw, the beginning of a new season that brought little more than the one that slipped away with the first frost of the autumn gone by. I seldom recall him smiling or laughing (my grandmother was the jolly one); his life on that Michigan farm was a difficult one. All their lives my grandparents tried hard to provide for their family. They had seven children. My mother is the oldest. The youngest would die before them. If my grandfather bounced me on his knee and made me laugh when I as a little boy, I no longer remember it. It was a long time ago.

But I do have a very strong memory of the time I came to spend on the family farmstead as I was growing up. It was the autumn of 1956 and I went to live with my grandparents while my parents were traveling for my dad’s job. I was entering kindergarten and so I had to be someplace where I could attend school. This is how I came to begin my academic career in a small one-room schoolhouse in rural Almena Township of Van Buren County.

That autumn I arose shortly after dawn to help my grandfather as he moved through his early morning chores. He stoked the ancient furnace with wood stored in the dark and shadowy basement then walked down the long hill to the barn where his five cows spent the night in the tie-up, giving each her morning ration of alfalfa onto which he drizzled a thick stream of black molasses before the morning milking. He would then feed and water the other animals followed by a trip to the henhouse to gather eggs, some of which would be served for breakfast along with bacon or sausage and a large bowl of oatmeal and milk straight from the cow. What a treat for a city kid like me!

After morning chores and breakfast, I struck off for school along the gravel county road, passing by neighboring farms with their similar fields and barns, each one a landmark I came to recognize on my morning and afternoon walks to and from school – a distance of perhaps a mile and a half although it seemed so much longer at the time. My favorite of these farms was old Bee Earl’s place. He did not keep cows or other livestock. Instead he had rows of whitewashed wooden hives and a small barn in which he would process and bottle his honey, each jar with a generous piece of honeycomb. Bee Earl’s honey was a regular staple on my grandparent’s table.

Along the way to and from school I would encounter or bid farewell to my fellow classmates at Acorn School. At the time I was an only child, but at school I was part of a bigger family. Unlike the city school I could be attending in Chicago or Detroit, I was not merely a face in the crowd. I had become a fundamental part of a real American community although I did not realize it at the time. An essential part of the Michigan landscape for over a century, one-room township schools were far from obsolete and served a vital purpose well into the 1950s. Several generations of Michigan children, including my own, received their education in these schools where teachers and students shared close quarters and often the responsibilities for keeping the school operating. Despite their many successes, one-room schools were ultimately doomed and dwindling rural populations and a new strategies to improve primary education gave rise to newer and larger consolidated schools thus making these smaller schools obsolete and expensive to maintain. It would be several more years before the last of these schools closed, but throughout the later half of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century the small one-room schoolhouse seemed almost as prevalent throughout the countryside as the ubiquitous barns and silos.

NEXT WEEK: "Acorn School - Part II: Gone But Not Forgotten"

Why "Looking Toward Portugal"?

I have returned to Maryland from more southern climes. Fortunately, the traffic headed north was far less than what we encountered on our southbound journey the previous week. It did not look like early December when we left Florida after the long Thanksgiving holiday, but it sure looks and feels like it back here in the Mid-Atlantic. We even had some snow over the weekend.

This new ‘blog" is barely a week old and I have already had a number of inquiries regarding the significance of its title. Why am I "Looking Toward Portugal"? I suppose this is a legitimate question and there is no big secret mystery. For the past two decades I have been gravitating to the coast of Maine. At first, it was only during our annual summer hiatus, but in recent years I have returned more frequently . . . every chance I get, to be honest. And each time I go back I find myself standing on that rocky shoreline, looking out to sea and pondering this and that. Well, if you gaze in a general easterly direction from the Maine coast, you will see nothing but the rolling swells of the Atlantic. Nova Scotia is out there somewhere, but if you continue across the Atlantic you will eventually arrive on the northern shores of Portugal somewhere near Oporto.

I have come to believe that my life today, and what I hope to accomplish in the years remaining to me, are in no small way tied to the pleasant days I have come to spend on the Maine coast over the past 20+ years. I am constantly reminded of Jack Kerouac’s observations when he stared out across the Atlantic from the shores of Long Island (he naturally gravitated to America’s two coasts) – "this last lip of American land." Writing in On The Road (1957): "Here I was at the end of America . . . no more land . . ., and now there was nowhere to go but back." It reminds us of our limitations, but it also offers a hint of what might be if we only choose to look beyond those far horizons.

So what lies beyond? When I first discovered Maine and its coast in the late 1980s, I often stood on a rugged finger extending into the surf below the Pemaquid Point Lighthouse (the one depicted on the Maine state quarter). I also favored Ocean Point, a few miles to the southwest of Pemaquid on the southern extremity of the Boothbay Peninsula. Later I ventured farther Down East to Quoddy Head, and the most eastern point of land in the continental United States (and like Kerouac I am also drawn to the America’s Pacific shore, visiting Quoddy Head’s western counterpoint at Cape Flattery on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula). About five or six years ago I discovered the eastern headlands of Monhegan, a small island located 15 miles off the Maine coast which has long been immortalized in the paintings of the Wyeths (James Wyeth still has a home on Lobster Cove on the island’s southern exposure), Rockwell Kent (who originally built the Wyeth cottage), George Bellows, and so many others. Even today one cannot visit Monhegan’s headlands, coves, and shores without encountering artists discovering and interpreting the island’s landscapes and seascapes for themselves. As I sit here in our dining room in Maryland writing this I am surrounded by several paintings depicting Monhegan Island scenes. The island remains close to my heart even when I am not able to be there.

In fact, it was an artist by the name of Bo Bartlett who gave a name to what I have been doing all these years. Bartlett divides his time between Matinicus Island, which can be seen from Monhegan Island on a clear day, and Vashon Island, near Seattle (yet another who is drawn to America’s two coasts). "Still Point," his summer home and studio are situated on Wheaton Island which forms the small village harbor on Matinicus. He refers to the seaward side of his island as "the Portugal side," and so I attribute "Looking Toward Portugal" to him.

In last week’s column I made reference to Marjorie Kinnan Rawling’s tenet that everyone needs "some small place of enchantment to turn to." Although I do enjoy my more and more infrequent sojourns in that swamp and hammock country of north central Florida, it is the coast of Maine that has become my true querencia, the place where I feel most grounded and where I long to return. It has become my place of solitude, solace, and inspiration. Looking out to sea from "the Portugal side" of my own life, and pondering what lies beyond that meeting of water and sky, I know that my grand search will never be over. Certainly not in my lifetime. I will always return to that "last lip of American land."

NEXT WEEK: "Acorn School - Part I" (Part II will appear the following week)

Down on the Creek -- Notes from Florida

“I do not know how anyone can live without some small place of enchantment to turn to.” Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings wrote that to describe her home and farm at Cross Creek, Florida back in the early 1940s. I understand what she meant for I am also drawn to that same swampy backwater with it hammocks of dark, rich soil populated by live oaks, a variety of palms, and the scions of orange trees planted by Miss Rawlings after she purchased the farm 80 years ago. The orange and grapefruit groves were long ago killed off by hard frosts but these legacies remain where the dense hammocks have regained their original foothold. “The hammocks were the same then as now,” Marjorie wrote in Cross Creek (1942), “and will be the same forever if men can be induced to leave them alone.” We can only hope. So each time I return to Florida I try to make time to go to that magical place. And this time is no different.
My son Ian and I drove a grueling 14 hours and 800 miles from Maryland to Gainesville, Florida the day before Thanksgiving. The wife/mom had already been down in Florida for two weeks and so we were anxious for a holiday reunion. We drove it straight through with a couple briefs stops for gas and coffee followed by the attendant pibroch. Luckily, the weather was on our side - sunny, blue skies of a late autumn day. The holiday traffic was pretty thick, as to be expected, and frequently we found ourselves knotted up behind long lines of 18-wheelers moving down along the Eastern Seaboard. There were a few bright spots during an otherwise monotonous drive. Gas at $1.59/gallon in Dillon, South Carolina, near South of the Border. The big decision of the day was where to take a lunch break. The ubiquitous Cracker Barrel restaurant at almost every exit along I-95, or Café Risque, the infamous topless truck stop in North Carolina? The former serves a tastier plate of grits, that’s for certain. Actually, we opted for a favorite pizzeria in Santee, South Carolina only to find that it had been transformed into a nice little Mexican joint with inexpensive but very tasty fare. Later in the evening we safely navigated the notorious speed trap towns of Lawtey and Waldo, on US 301 in north Florida. And it was unsually chilly when we arrived in Gainesville at 8pm
The following day was a big family Thanksgiving feast in Tallahassee which reminded me of the many family Thanksgivings of yore. In more recent years, however, it has just been the three of us eating at a favorite German restaurant in Washington, DC. I have missed the big gatherings and the family camaraderie. Lots of games before dinner with various family factions talking trash about who would win. The important thing is we were all together and we all had fun. Of course, everyone ate much too much. Isn’t that the point in the final analysis?
The weekend after the holiday was spent down in the Tampa Bay area visiting more family. A chance to sneak over to the Gulf of Mexico on a sunny but windy morning, watching the anglers heading off to fish the mangrove swamps along the shoreline, and the shoals and wrecks farther out to sea. There were a couple of afternoons spent on the Sponge Dock at Tarpon Springs, eating some good Greek food in sight of the fishing boats and shrimpers lining the banks of the Anclote River.
Which bring me back to my own “small place of enchantment” in rural Alachua County east of Gainesville. Today is our last day in Florida for this trip and we spend part of it roaming the back roads over by Cross Creek, Micanopy, Island Pond, and Hawthorne. The narrow country roads pass under canopies of live oak festooned with long gray beards of Spanish moss. There is water in Cross Creek and in the River Styx (not always the case), and we observe white herons and egrets wading the sedgy marsh shallows looking for their next meal. We wander around the Rawlings farm and surrounding hammock; we are lucky to have the entire place to ourselves. Again, I am reminded why I like to come back to this special part of Florida. Perhaps Miss Rawlings said it best. “It is necessary to leave the impersonal highway, to step inside the rusty gate and close it behind. One is now inside the orange grove, out of one world and in the mysterious heart of another. And after long years of spiritual homelessness, of nostalgia, here is that mystic loveliness of childhood again. Here is home.”
Tomorrow we arise before the sun and head northward toward our own home in Maryland. The time in my enchanted place has been far too short. But I will return again, and sooner rather than later. So stay tuned for more notes from Florida.

NEXT WEEK: Why “Looking Toward Portugal”?